Crystal Voyager

Gorgeous film.

True because it's hurt.

Circa 2013

By its cover

Fresh from the post, cover by Jean Christian Knaff. Reminds me a little bit of Walter Schnackenberg.

"Riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs."

To the beat of his own drum.

Energy on this is beautiful.

Golden eternal braids all over the shop. G money.

The Three Hermits (tolstoy)

 Tolstoy, 1908

an old legend current in the volga district

'And in praying use not vain repetitions, as the Gentiles do: for they think that they shall be heard for their much speaking. Be not therefore like unto them: for your Father knoweth what things ye have need of, before ye ask Him.'—Matt. vi. 7, 8.

A Bishop was sailing from Archangel to the Solovétsk Monastery; and on the same vessel were a number of pilgrims on their way to visit the shrines at that place. The voyage was a smooth one. The wind favourable, and the weather fair. The pilgrims lay on deck, eating, or sat in groups talking to one another. The Bishop, too, came on deck, and as he was pacing up and down, he noticed a group of men standing near the prow and listening to a fisherman, who was pointing to the sea and telling them something. The Bishop stopped, and looked in the direction in which the man was pointing. He could see nothing, however, but the sea glistening in the sunshine. He drew nearer to listen, but when the man saw him, he took off his cap and was silent. The rest of the people also took off their caps, and bowed.
'Do not let me disturb you, friends,' said the Bishop. 'I came to hear what this good man was saying.'
'The fisherman was telling us about the hermits,' replied one, a tradesman, rather bolder than the rest.
'What hermits?' asked the Bishop, going to the side of the vessel and seating himself on a box. 'Tell me about them. I should like to hear. What were you pointing at?'
'Why, that little island you can just see over there,' answered the man, pointing to a spot ahead and a little to the right. 'That is the island where the hermits live for the salvation of their souls.'
'Where is the island?' asked the Bishop. 'I see nothing.'
'There, in the distance, if you will please look along my hand. Do you see that little cloud? Below it, and a bit to the left, there is just a faint streak. That is the island.'
The Bishop looked carefully, but his unaccustomed eyes could make out nothing but the water shimmering in the sun.
'I cannot see it,' he said. 'But who are the hermits that live there?'
'They are holy men,' answered the fisherman. 'I had long heard tell of them, but never chanced to see them myself till the year before last.'
And the fisherman related how once, when he was out fishing, he had been stranded at night upon that island, not knowing where he was. In the morning, as he wandered about the island, he came across an earth hut, and met an old man standing near it. Presently two others came out, and after having fed him, and dried his things, they helped him mend his boat.
'And what are they like?' asked the Bishop.
'One is a small man and his back is bent. He wears a priest's cassock and is very old; he must be more than a hundred, I should say. He is so old that the white of his beard is taking a greenish tinge, but he is always smiling, and his face is as bright as an angel's from heaven. The second is taller, but he also is very old. He wears tattered, peasant coat. His beard is broad, and of a yellowish grey colour. He is a strong man. Before I had time to help him, he turned my boat over as if it were only a pail. He too, is kindly and cheerful. The third is tall, and has a beard as white as snow and reaching to his knees. He is stern, with over-hanging eyebrows; and he wears nothing but a mat tied round his waist.'
'And did they speak to you?' asked the Bishop.
'For the most part they did everything in silence, and spoke but little even to one another. One of them would just give a glance, and the others would understand him. I asked the tallest whether they had lived there long. He frowned, and muttered something as if he were angry; but the oldest one took his hand and smiled, and then the tall one was quiet. The oldest one only said: "Have mercy upon us," and smiled.'
While the fisherman was talking, the ship had drawn nearer to the island.
'There, now you can see it plainly, if your Grace will please to look,' said the tradesman, pointing with his hand.
The Bishop looked, and now he really saw a dark streak—which was the island. Having looked at it a while, he left the prow of the vessel, and going to the stern, asked the helmsman:
'What island is that?'
'That one,' replied the man, 'has no name. There are many such in this sea.'
'Is it true that there are hermits who live there for the salvation of their souls?'
'So it is said, your Grace, but I don't know if it's true. Fishermen say they have seen them; but of course they may only be spinning yarns.'
'I should like to land on the island and see these men,' said the Bishop. 'How could I manage it?'
'The ship cannot get close to the island,' replied the helmsman, 'but you might be rowed there in a boat. You had better speak to the captain.'
The captain was sent for and came.
'I should like to see these hermits,' said the Bishop. 'Could I not be rowed ashore?'
The captain tried to dissuade him.
'Of course it could be done,' said he, 'but we should lose much time. And if I might venture to say so to your Grace, the old men are not worth your pains. I have heard say that they are foolish old fellows, who understand nothing, and never speak a word, any more than the fish in the sea.'
'I wish to see them,' said the Bishop, 'and I will pay you for your trouble and loss of time. Please let me have a boat.'
There was no help for it; so the order was given. The sailors trimmed the sails, the steersman put up the helm, and the ship's course was set for the island. A chair was placed at the prow for the Bishop, and he sat there, looking ahead. The passengers all collected at the prow, and gazed at the island. Those who had the sharpest eyes could presently make out the rocks on it, and then a mud hut was seen. At last one man saw the hermits themselves. The captain brought a telescope and, after looking through it, handed it to the Bishop.
'It's right enough. There are three men standing on the shore. There, a little to the right of that big rock.'
The Bishop took the telescope, got it into position, and he saw the three men: a tall one, a shorter one, and one very small and bent, standing on the shore and holding each other by the hand.
The captain turned to the Bishop.
'The vessel can get no nearer in than this, your Grace. If you wish to go ashore, we must ask you to go in the boat, while we anchor here.'
The cable was quickly let out, the anchor cast, and the sails furled. There was a jerk, and the vessel shook. Then a boat having been lowered, the oarsmen jumped in, and the Bishop descended the ladder and took his seat. The men pulled at their oars, and the boat moved rapidly towards the island. When they came within a stone's throw, they saw three old men: a tall one with only a mat tied round his waist: a shorter one in a tattered peasant coat, and a very old one bent with age and wearing an old cassock—all three standing hand in hand.
The oarsmen pulled in to the shore, and held on with the boathook while the Bishop got out.
The old men bowed to him, and he gave them his benediction, at which they bowed still lower. Then the Bishop began to speak to them.
'I have heard,' he said, 'that you, godly men, live here saving your own souls, and praying to our Lord Christ for your fellow men. I, an unworthy servant of Christ, am called, by God's mercy, to keep and teach His flock. I wished to see you, servants of God, and to do what I can to teach you, also.'
The old men looked at each other smiling, but remained silent.
'Tell me,' said the Bishop, 'what you are doing to save your souls, and how you serve God on this island.'
The second hermit sighed, and looked at the oldest, the very ancient one. The latter smiled, and said:
'We do not know how to serve God. We only serve and support ourselves, servant of God.'
'But how do you pray to God?' asked the Bishop.
'We pray in this way,' replied the hermit. 'Three are ye, three are we, have mercy upon us.'
And when the old man said this, all three raised their eyes to heaven, and repeated:
'Three are ye, three are we, have mercy upon us!'
The Bishop smiled.
'You have evidently heard something about the Holy Trinity,' said he. 'But you do not pray aright. You have won my affection, godly men. I see you wish to please the Lord, but you do not know how to serve Him. That is not the way to pray; but listen to me, and I will teach you. I will teach you, not a way of my own, but the way in which God in the Holy Scriptures has commanded all men to pray to Him.'
And the Bishop began explaining to the hermits how God had revealed Himself to men; telling them of God the Father, and God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost.
'God the Son came down on earth,' said he, 'to save men, and this is how He taught us all to pray. Listen, and repeat after me: "Our Father."'
And the first old man repeated after him, 'Our Father,' and the second said, 'Our Father,' and the third said, 'Our Father.'
'Which art in heaven,' continued the Bishop.
The first hermit repeated, 'Which art in heaven,' but the second blundered over the words, and the tall hermit could not say them properly. His hair had grown over his mouth so that he could not speak plainly. The very old hermit, having no teeth, also mumbled indistinctly.
The Bishop repeated the words again, and the old men repeated them after him. The Bishop sat down on a stone, and the old men stood before him, watching his mouth, and repeating the words as he uttered them. And all day long the Bishop laboured, saying a word twenty, thirty, a hundred times over, and the old men repeated it after him. They blundered, and he corrected them, and made them begin again.
The Bishop did not leave off till he had taught them the whole of the Lord's prayer so that they could not only repeat it after him, but could say it by themselves. The middle one was the first to know it, and to repeat the whole of it alone. The Bishop made him say it again and again, and at last the others could say it too.
It was getting dark, and the moon was appearing over the water, before the Bishop rose to return to the vessel. When he took leave of the old men, they all bowed down to the ground before him. He raised them, and kissed each of them, telling them to pray as he had taught them. Then he got into the boat and returned to the ship.
And as he sat in the boat and was rowed to the ship he could hear the three voices of the hermits loudly repeating the Lord's prayer. As the boat drew near the vessel their voices could no longer be heard, but they could still be seen in the moonlight, standing as he had left them on the shore, the shortest in the middle, the tallest on the right, the middle one on the left. As soon as the Bishop had reached the vessel and got on board, the anchor was weighed and the sails unfurled. The wind filled them, and the ship sailed away, and the Bishop took a seat in the stern and watched the island they had left. For a time he could still see the hermits, but presently they disappeared from sight, though the island was still visible. At last it too vanished, and only the sea was to be seen, rippling in the moonlight.
The pilgrims lay down to sleep, and all was quiet on deck. The Bishop did not wish to sleep, but sat alone at the stern, gazing at the sea where the island was no longer visible, and thinking of the good old men. He thought how pleased they had been to learn the Lord's prayer; and he thanked God for having sent him to teach and help such godly men.
So the Bishop sat, thinking, and gazing at the sea where the island had disappeared. And the moonlight flickered before his eyes, sparkling, now here, now there, upon the waves. Suddenly he saw something white and shining, on the bright path which the moon cast across the sea. Was it a seagull, or the little gleaming sail of some small boat? The Bishop fixed his eyes on it, wondering.
'It must be a boat sailing after us,' thought he, 'but it is overtaking us very rapidly. It was far, far away a minute ago, but now it is much nearer. It cannot be a boat, for I can see no sail; but whatever it may be, it is following us, and catching us up.'
And he could not make out what it was. Not a boat, nor a bird, nor a fish! It was too large for a man, and besides a man could not be out there in the midst of the sea. The Bishop rose, and said to the helmsman:
'Look there, what is that, my friend? What is it?' the Bishop repeated, though he could now see plainly what it was—the three hermits running upon the water, all gleaming white, their grey beards shining, and approaching the ship as quickly as though it were not moving.
The steersman looked and let go the helm in terror.
'Oh Lord! The hermits are running after us on the water as though it were dry land!'
The passengers hearing him, jumped up, and crowded to the stern. They saw the hermits coming along hand in hand, and the two outer ones beckoning the ship to stop. All three were gliding along upon the water without moving their feet. Before the ship could be stopped, the hermits had reached it, and raising their heads, all three as with one voice, began to say:
'We have forgotten your teaching, servant of God. As long as we kept repeating it we remembered, but when we stopped saying it for a time, a word dropped out, and now it has all gone to pieces. We can remember nothing of it. Teach us again.'
The Bishop crossed himself, and leaning over the ship's side, said:
'Your own prayer will reach the Lord, men of God. It is not for me to teach you. Pray for us sinners.'
And the Bishop bowed low before the old men; and they turned and went back across the sea. And a light shone until daybreak on the spot where they were lost to sight.

The realisation (and accompanying obligation) that the younger forms of yourself, once wishing they knew what you now know (and more, if you have it), are out there.

Weren't you at the Coke convention back on nineteen sixty-five
You're the misbred, grey executive I've seen heavily advertised.
You're the great, gray man whose daughter licks policemen's buttons clean.
You're the man who squats behind the man who works the soft machine.

-Memo From Turner

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FGMfrmVgbbI

Shimanchu Nu Takara

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latah
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Echopraxia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jumping_Frenchmen_of_Maine

“There is a Hand to turn the time,
Though thy Glass today be run,
Till the Light hath brought the Towers low
Find the last poor Preterite one . . .
Till the Riders sleep by ev'ry road,
All through our crippl'd Zone,
With a face in ev'ry Mountainside
And a Soul in ev'ry stone

Now Everybody -” 

 -Thomas Pynchon (Gravity's Rainbow)

EDIT

1.Neon primaries. Ivory inlays. The mat, candles and objects are inarguably the jewelled axis of the universe. Centering. Thickening of the air as if we suddenly have audience expectation. Black-lodge grazing past. I've got idea, man. Why so voodoo? Faceless entities abound. Colour scheme illuminated.
2. Hello blues. Fools rush in, and I'd have been glad to be counted among them. Perhaps they're my transdimensional brethren. Perhaps they're the drawing I did of the world personified. No expression, calmness emanates, palms out hands up because nothing can be held.
3. Humming, such humming. BOC 5D, Twin Peaks antenna sound, Radigue, potentials of all possible noise. Sounds like DNA.
4. Ladies and gentlemen, gasp in wonder. Ontology never felt so far away. So lucid, so very very perplexed by the biblical torrent of hyperdimensional codices. Ladies and gentlemen, here comes everybody. Jesus fucking christ. Sat upright feeling my socks, mouth agape and smiling, head shaking in disbelief and rhythm.
5. Enter the semi-mythical significance of L as image-smith and quiet purveyor of symbol. Dose that man up. If Solaris has a TV channel this would be it.
6. Coming close to the sense of death, feeling myself disintegrate. Raised a few questions and a few hopes, one being that I could speak to R before leaving the coil. Why R? Because he's a gardener of mind and if that flower blooms it'd be good to give it back. A solace vault. True communication is a rarity, and that channel seems to be open, however garbled the content I send down it. Didn't want to die without telling him how far out and peaceful it seemed.
7. Ladies and gentlemen, the snake eateth his tail. There is a coming and there is a going. Oxygen up, water down. Thought down, feeling up. The turning of the hourglass. A midnight bargain on some quiet street corner. Who profits? Dealer, client or city? This is the one from Touba who came just to see you leave. I can't describe the node and the sense of translation that this feeling has. It is perhaps the 'religious' sense of life after death, or the idea that we leave through transposition, which is never really leaving. Euphoric and transient at the memory of it. Thumbs are a misleading adaptation, you can't grab anything for too long. Probably just made for hitching. Drifting the fuck out of that net. Sitting on the fulcrums all at once.

Will I die? Y/N
Do I believe I might? Y/N
Does that matter? Y/N
Is this a good story? Y/N
I felt myself being coaxed closer and closer to peace as if it were the olive-branched tongue of an angler fish, only to discover it was my own tail. Odd feeling.
8. Following on from the realisation that I wasn't dying came an hour of calm followed by 4 hours of sleep. I had a dream that broke my concept of dream. A memory so tangible I saw why people described them as time travel. Just standing in my parent's bedroom waiting to leave the house. Three years old, a domestic platitude, nothing much to it.
Blake saying 'Nothing is lost' is how I describe that one to myself.
9.Following sleep, awaking to a revived and fresh body, and a singular headspace. Rather than help me decide anything, all the experience had done was tattoo the fulcrum on my retinas like the viewfinder of a camera. Choice is always there, you can't avoid it, or at least not forever. Whack up an umbrella of tradition, belief, confidence, gnosis, but don't pretend the rain will never get you.
Choices, doubts and questions are all coming down, and if they didn't how would anything grow.

Once upon a mission

It's Mikey Dread's world and we just live in it.

Archive:The joy of hitching

Yakushima 2012.

Ming the merciless. And an eel.

Reading Ernest Becker's 'The Denial Of Death' at the moment and have become interested in life spans as a result.

Romantics write "as though they were ill, and the whole world were their hospital."- Goethe

"This is real life. Full of antinomies and bigger than logic."- E.F Schumacher

"Intellectual confusion exacts its price. We preach the virtues of hard work and restraint while painting utopian pictures of unlimited consumption without either work or restraint."

"Language is only necessary when communication is endangered."- Arthur Miller/Irwin Corey/Thomas Pynchon

"Nothing I do is ironic...irony is the last refuge of a scoundrel."-Julian Cope

"We're too busy to give a shit."-Boards of Canada

"My favourite definition of an intellectual: someone who has been educated beyond their intelligence."- Arthur C. Clarke

"Spoon-feeding in the long run teaches us nothing but the shape of the spoon."-E.M Forster

"Nothing is more sad than the death of an illusion."- Koestler

"Scientists are peeping toms at the keyhole of eternity."- Koestler

Carl Rogers- 19 Propositions (1951)

His theory (as of 1951) was based on 19 propositions:^[12]

1. All individuals (organisms) exist in a continually changing world of experience (phenomenal field) of which they are the center.
2. The organism reacts to the field as it is experienced and perceived. This perceptual field is "reality" for the individual.
3. The organism reacts as an organized whole to this phenomenal field.
4. A portion of the total perceptual field gradually becomes differentiated as the self.
5. As a result of interaction with the environment, and particularly as a result of evaluational interaction with others, the structure of the self is formed - an organized, fluid but consistent conceptual pattern of perceptions of characteristics and relationships of the "I" or the "me", together with values attached to these concepts.
6. The organism has one basic tendency and striving - to actualize, maintain and enhance the experiencing organism.
7. The best vantage point for understanding behavior is from the internal frame of reference of the individual.
8. Behavior is basically the goal-directed attempt of the organism to satisfy its needs as experienced, in the field as perceived.
9. Emotion accompanies, and in general facilitates, such goal directed behavior, the kind of emotion being related to the perceived significance of the behavior for the maintenance and enhancement of the organism.
10. The values attached to experiences, and the values that are a part of the self-structure, in some instances, are values experienced directly by the organism, and in some instances are values introjected or taken over from others, but perceived in distorted fashion, as if they had been experienced directly.
11. As experiences occur in the life of the individual, they are either, a) symbolized, perceived and organized into some relation to the self, b) ignored because there is no perceived relationship to the self structure, c) denied symbolization or given distorted symbolization because the experience is inconsistent with the structure of the self.
12. Most of the ways of behaving that are adopted by the organism are those that are consistent with the concept of self.
13. In some instances, behavior may be brought about by organic experiences and needs which have not been symbolized. Such behavior may be inconsistent with the structure of the self but in such instances the behavior is not "owned" by the individual.
14. Psychological adjustment exists when the concept of the self is such that all the sensory and visceral experiences of the organism are, or may be, assimilated on a symbolic level into a consistent relationship with the concept of self.
15. Psychological maladjustment exists when the organism denies awareness of significant sensory and visceral experiences, which consequently are not symbolized and organized into the gestalt of the self structure. When this situation exists, there is a basic or potential psychological tension.
16. Any experience which is inconsistent with the organization of the structure of the self may be perceived as a threat, and the more of these perceptions there are, the more rigidly the self structure is organized to maintain itself.
17. Under certain conditions, involving primarily complete absence of threat to the self structure, experiences which are inconsistent with it may be perceived and examined, and the structure of self revised to assimilate and include such experiences.
18. When the individual perceives and accepts into one consistent and integrated system all his sensory and visceral experiences, then he is necessarily more understanding of others and is more accepting of others as separate individuals.
19. As the individual perceives and accepts into his self structure more of his organic experiences, he finds that he is replacing his present value system - based extensively on introjections which have been distortedly symbolized - with a continuing organismic valuing process.
    
    
    Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Rogers

Pantograph

The ever stalking pantograph. Somewhere these thoughts are being decided by the movement of an ant's jaws through a leaf edge.

Diagnosis by Marcia Lee Anderson

We multiply diseases for delight,
invent a shameful want, a horrid doubt,
luxuriate in license, feed on night,
make inward bedlam — and will not come out

Why should we? Stripped of subtle complication,
who could regard the sun except with fear?
This is our shelter against contemplation,
our only refuge from the plain and clear.

Who would crawl out from under the obscure
to stand defenseless in the sunny air?
No terror of obliquity so sure
as the most shining terror of despair
to know how simple is our deepest need,
how sharp, and how impossible to feed.

Ваше Благородие

"I am your original autodidact."

"Man, who is he? Too bad, to be the work of God: Too good for the work of chance!"

 

"What's terrible is to pretend that second-rate is first-rate. To pretend that you don't need love when you do; or you like your work when you know quite well you're capable of better."

 

"God knows why nobody ever learns from the preceding generation - but they don't."

"It's very interesting what you don't care about."

"When there's a war, people get married."

"I'll be pleased when I'm dead. That will let me off worrying about all these wars." 

 

 

Doris Lessing

 

 

The Samian Letter

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Upsilon

"For they say that the course of human life resembles the letter Y, because every one of men, when he has reached the threshold of early youth, and has arrived at the place "where the way divides itself into two parts," is in doubt, and hesitates, and does not know to which side he should rather turn himself."- Lactantius

"Life is fired upon us point-blank."

"When shall we open our minds to the conviction that the ultimate reality of the world is neither matter nor spirit, is no definite thing, but a perspective?"

"The metaphor is perhaps one of man's most fruitful potentialities. Its efficacy verges on magic, and it seems a tool for creation which God forgot inside one of His creatures when He made him. All our other faculties keep us within the realm of the real, of what is already there. The most we can do is to combine things or to break them up. The metaphor alone furnishes an escape; between the real things, it lets emerge imaginary reefs, a crop of floating islands. A strange thing, indeed, the existence in man of this mental activity which substitutes one thing for another — from an urge not so much to get at the first as to get rid of the second."

"Being an artist means ceasing to take seriously that very serious person we are when we are not an artist."

"An 'unemployed' existence is a worse negation of life than death itself."

"Tell me to what you pay attention and I will tell you who you are."

"Law is born from despair of human nature."

"In order to master the unruly torrent of life the learned man meditates, the poet quivers, and the political hero erects the fortress of his will."

"To live is to feel oneself lost."

"Hatred is a feeling which leads to the extinction of values."

"We cannot put off living until we are ready."

"The difficulties which I meet with in order to realize my existence are precisely what awaken and mobilize my activities, my capacities."

"Effort is only effort when it begins to hurt."

"The poet begins where the man ends. The man's lot is to live his human life, the poet's to invent what is nonexistent."

"Biography - a system in which the contradictions of a human life are unified."

"Living is a constant process of deciding what we are going to do."

"Poetry is adolescence fermented, and thus preserved."

José Ortega y Gasset

"I don't think anyone is thinking long-term now."

"Time has no divisions to mark its passage, there is never a thunder-storm or blare of trumpets to announce the beginning of a new month or year. Even when a new century begins it is only we mortals who ring bells and fire off pistols."

"It is a strange fact that freedom and equality, the two basic ideas of democracy, are to some extent contradictory. Logically considered, freedom and equality are mutually exclusive, just as society and the individual are mutually exclusive."

 

"It is love, not reason, that is stronger than death."

 

"Speech is civilisation itself."

"An art whose medium is language will always show a high degree of critical creativeness, for speech is itself a critique of life: it names, it characterizes, it passes judgment, in that it creates."

"Literature... is the union of suffering with the instinct for form."

"Only he who desires is amiable and not he who is satiated."


Thomas Mann

 

Too Becker

"And here we are in the closing decades of the 20th century, choking on truth..."

Disnial

Great article.

"First we feel. Then we fall."

“Over the bowls of memory where every hollow holds a hallow...”

Ayer Ask Her

Speared the rod and spoiled the lightning.

"Conceived by a fasting monk run delirious..."

Audio Trove

British Library sound archive. Beyond.

Ana Na Ming (Salif Keita)

Ewan MacColl

"My function is not to reassure people. I want to make them uncomfortable. To send them out of the place arguing and talking^."

"If one worried about backing a loser one would not take part in politics. Anybody who has ever been involved in political struggle, particularly in working class struggle, must accept the fact, for the major part of their life, they're going to be involved in losing battles, on the losing side in battles. If I'd have been afraid of that I'd have packed it up after I joined the YCL in 1929 and spent my time, with a lot of other people, trying to alert people to the dangers of Japanese imperialism when they entered Manchukuo, I'd have given up in 1932 when we were trying to alert people to the dangers of Hitler coming to power, I'd have given up during the Abyssinian War when Mussolini's bombers were bombing Ethiopians, I'd have given it up at every single stage of the struggle ever since. One goes on fighting because not to go on fighting is to prove that you're no longer alive. - "Daddy, What Did You Do in the Strike?" Granada TV Documentary 1985

A good teacher as a guide to ambiguity, not certainty.
"How to keep sane in spiral types of space."- Nabokov, Pale Fire

“One of the painful things about our time is that those who feel certainty are stupid, and those with any imagination and understanding are filled with doubt and indecision.” 

“To teach how to live without certainty, and yet without being paralyzed by hesitation, is perhaps the chief thing that philosophy, in our age, can still do for those who study it.”- Bertrand Russell

Dime Ethel

"The world has kept sentimentalities because they are the most practical things in the world. They alone make men do things. The world does not encourage a perfectly rational lover, simply because a perfectly rational lover would never get married. The world does not encourage a perfectly rational army, because a perfectly rational army would run away."-G.K. Chesterton

Do They Even Know How Far I Live

Affirmative Happenings

If that chord progression leaves you hoping for more...

Straight dope from the flamenco warriors.

The Act Of Creation

"Every face is a palimpsest."

Just finished reading this book by Koestler. It is an inspiring, fine toothed examination of a slippery subject, and humorous throughout. Strikes me as a forerunner of McKenna in terms of novelty/habit balance and idea of a historical attractor somewhere in time. Brilliant critique of dry academic writing (in all fields) and 'science as a bore' as inflating the artificial margins between science, art and religion.

Notes
"The mystic believes in an unknown God, the thinker and scientist in an unknown order; it is hard to say which surpasses the other in nonrational devotion."- L.L Whyte

“I must, before I die, find some way to say the essential thing that is in me, that I have never said yet -- a thing that is not love or hate or pity or scorn, but the very breath of life, fierce and coming from far away, bringing into human life the vastness and the fearful passionless force of non-human things.”- Bertrand Russell

"The aesthetic satisfaction derived from an elegant mathematical demonstration, a cosmological theory, a map of the human brain, or an ingenious chess problem, may equal that of any artistic ex- perience — given a certain connoisseurship. But connoisseurship is equally required for the true appreciation of any but the most vulgar forms of art; and particularly for ancient, alien, and 'modern' art. 

However, the absurd division of our society into 'two cultures' pro- duced the paradoxical phenomenon that the average educated person will be reluctant to admit that a work of art is beyond the level of his comprehension; but he will in the same breath and with a certain pride confess his complete ignorance of the principles which make his radio work, the forces which make the stars go round, the factors which determine the heredity of his children, and the location of his own viscera and glands."

"By being  entirely dependent on science, yet closing his mind to it, he leads the life of an urban barbarian."


Levy Bruhl: "The need of participation remains something more imperious and intense, even among people like ourselves, than the thirst for knowledge and the desire for conformity with the claims of reason."

"Disorder is the condition of the mind's fertility."


(On Victorian novels..) "Here, as a pre-Raphaelite painting, we find emphasis sans economy at work- a safe criterion of bad art."

"Art originates in sympathetic magic."

"There is no permanent place in the world for ugly mathematics."- G.H. Hardy

"The artist values, or overvalues, the theoretical discipline which controls his intuition."
"The history of art could be written in terms of the artist's struggle against the deadening cumulative effect of saturation."

The blending of the tragic and trivial planes in art and religion. Jonah and the crisis/awakening model.

"If I had my life to live over again, I'd be a plumber."- Albert Einstein

Just finished The Birth And Death Of Meaning by Ernest Becker. One of those manuals for de- and re- construction that is both liberating and damning. Reads like Joseph Campbell's comedown.

Notes
-"Mind culminates in the organism's ability to choose what it will react to."
-'Me' before 'I'. Kant, child development and identity as an object of others, before an executive subject. The child's first identity is a social product.
-"He doesn't unfold into the world, the world unfolds into him."
-On the separating nature of inner worlds- "We have become victims of our own art."
-Adler and the need for affection as the lever of a child's education.
-From polymorphous perverse to polymorphous pervertible.
-A traffic in images of self worth.
- "The child's need to be somebody in the symbolic world, since physically, nature had put him into an impossible position."
-Idea of sibling rivalry like bored knights dueling for the best adventures/primacy of the stage
-"Culture is a structure of rules, customs and ideas, which serve as a vehicle for heroism." (Links a lot to Campbell's hero ideas.)
-'How are others supposed to feel about me?' As an insightful question, apparently.
-Reminded of this: Culture is activity of thought, and receptiveness to beauty and humane feeling. Scraps of information have nothing to do with it.- Alfred North Whitehead.
- Goethe on social awareness as ' a courtesy of the heart akin to love'. The love is the control of one's self so that social life may go on. Also recommending acting as essential preparation for adult life.
-Idea of the need of autonomy in a world of manifold options.
- It matters not what you mean, but what you say. (Carnegie said something like this.)
-"Our alertness to the performance of others, therefore, is an expression of our concern over sustaining the underlying meaning of the plot." "Continual, keen scrutiny of the performance of others is the life preoccupation of an animal trained to be on stage."
- Illegitimacy implies above all that legitimacy exists.
-Forming of joking relationships at tension points in the social system (e.g. with in-laws). Carries the encounter along automatically and breaks tension.
-Paraphrased idea of marriage losing its stimulating colour as it becomes a refuge from the creative challenge of ego mastery.
-Silent musing as tacit communication of the idea that meaningful silence exists.
-On Goethe: "He provided that conviction of life's meaning that man needs."
- "A person's whole sustenance comes to be based in a power source unknown or unacknowledged to himself..."
-"..one's spouse, his Gurus or his guns."
-If one is a servant of divine powers everything one does is heroic. Religious unity as a powerful source of self esteem.
-"Our drop-out youths are the newly de-tribalised."

-"One of the most terrifying things about living in the late decades of the twentieth century is that the margin that nature has been giving to cultural fantasy is suddenly being narrowed down drastically. The consequence is that for the first time in history man, if he is to survive, has to bring down to near zero the large fictional element in his hero-systems."-"With standardisation of industrial culture, and with standardisation of medical-psychiatric perceptions we are narrowing and bureaucratising the spectrum of normality."
-"An individual who fails to put forth a self that others can value, by an oversensitivity to the performance, testifies to a primary failure in socialisation." "He has nothing to give to society, because he has nothing to put forth." "There must be actors in our play if we are to feel its meaning and not simply a stage propped with non-entities.""We want others to claim a share so that we can feel there is something worth claiming."
-Depression as a massive threat to ceremony. All playthings tired players on the bench, and idea of a guide to occasionally sitting on the bench of the cultural fiction (if not leaving the ballpark once in a while).
-Erving Goffman's definition of the mentally ill as those "least ready to project a sustainable self."
-When man evolved into consciousness he could no longer take creation for granted. "We are just not constructed to function practically in the everyday world and at the same time to be overawed at the miraculous." Idea of shamans once being able to do this with the support of the community (and a bed of self-fictions too perhaps). 
-Children abdicate their ecstasy because they have to. Individuality within finitude.
-Fromm: "The real problem of mental life is not why some people become insane, but rather why most avoid insanity." The pathology of normalcy.
-"The neurotic bungles small quotas of reality, the psychotic, large quotas."
-"Anger for most people is an alternative to fading away."
-Notion of illness and disease breaking the aesthetic of our cultural play, and upsetting our sense of justice. Resulting marginalisation of the chronically ill.
- "The necrophile takes revenge on life for what it did to him. He allies with death over life."
-Man's fate "is to live in the teeth of paradoxes."
-"Power for man, as the genius Hegel saw, is the ability to support contradictions, nothing less."
- We can't know what is real but we can see what is false to our own lives (or at least what halts our forward momentum/unfolding).
- Frantic daily life as a defence against self-consciousness (see Jung: “People will do anything, no matter how absurd, to avoid facing their own souls.”)
 - "...the undermining power of the miraculous." 
 

Groove on that.

EDIT:...Well inevitable as it was I slipped into Toubaka mode again. Breaks me every time.

"What you call personality, I call metabolism."
"What you call art, I call solace."

All Teams With Symbol

Sensibilities hardened in a visual mould.

"Joyce was not only the greatest behavioral engineer who ever lived, he was one of
the funniest men, rearranging the most common items to produce hilarity and insight:
"Where the hand of man never set foot."- Marshall McLuhan

McLuhan had it really bad for Joyce. As you may expect from an academic who took so many structural ideas from Finnegan's Wake, he is again forever within reach and forever beyond grasping.





Notes
A powerful preference for goods over leisure.
Rear view mirrorism.
"The consequences of the images will be the images of the consequences."
Pain as a form of 'macroscopic gesticulation'.
Internet as a global thermostat.
"The computer abolishes the human past by making it entirely present."
"When our identity is in danger, we feel certain that we have a mandate for war."
"Who gave you that numb?"- Finnegan's Wake
"Every new technology necessitates a new war."
"I may lose a battle, but I shall never lose a minute..."
"Time is the greatest element between weight and force."
"A good joke is worth a thousand words."
"Readiness for war characterizes contemporary social systems more broadly than their economic and political structures, which it subsumes."
The handshake as ancient ritual of war.
Le moi est haïssable.
"But wrath's the higher where those wreathe charity."- Finnegan's Wake
"War, as it were, has become the little red schoolhouse of the global village. It's a gory little schoolhouse at that."
"Radio was a disaster for goal-oriented America."
"...speared the rod and spared the lightning."- Finnegan's Wake
"In the information age, it is obviously possible to decimate populations by the dissemination of information and gimmickry."
The total field approach.
"War has always been a form of compulsory education for the other guy."
"A baser meaning has been read into these letters, the literal sense of which decency can dare but touch."- Finnegan's Wake
""The battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton."
"Love my label like myself."- Finnegan's Wake
"The audience as participants is indispensable to most games."
"When asked what music did he like, Mozart answered: "No music." Mozart was not a consumer. No artist likes art. He makes it."
"The species with eyes appears suddenly, capriciously as it were, and it is this species which changes the environment by creating its visible aspect. The eye does not come into being because it is needed. Just the contrary; because the eye appears it can henceforth be applied as a serviceable instrument. Each species builds up its stock of useful habits by selecting among, and taking advantage of, the innumerable useless actions which a living being performs out of sheer exuberance. " History As A System by Jose Ortega y Gassett.
"The first satellite ended nature in the old sense."


Lawnmower adapted from LDV's scythes to precede horse-drawn vehicles into enemy ranks.

"Methinks there be not impossibilities enough in Religion for an active faith."- Sir Thomas Browne

You'll bury me alive?
You're not alive, Thomas said, remember?
It's a hard thing to remember, said the Dead Father. I
don't want to lie down in the hole.
Few do.

The Dead Father- Roland Barthelme

Cosme Tura- St John In Patmos (Thyssen museum)

Blue Monday Repost

Just to celebrate one of the most beautiful downers around.

David

Pierian spring of solace in the dark, and a pure reminder of creative courage in the face of change. Thank you for never forgetting (to adapt) the mission.

Feel it in your heart and soul.



EDIT: Old McLuhanism: "Without a technology tending to process experience homogenously, a society cannot go far toward the control of natural forces nor even the organisation of human effort."

Leaving Omelas

Sherylee

Archive: Summer Hitching 2014

Realise this never went online so here it is as a link for any hitchwikiers. As ever, unpolished and written in haste as an email to my drivers and hosts.



Footnotes to Sunlight

“Western philosophy is a series of footnotes to Plato.”- Alfred North Whitehead

I like the idea of shrinking swathes of history into a few footnotes, and I like to adjust that quote to say that natural history is a series of footnotes to sunlight. The archetypal human obsession with the sun is good fun if you’re ever at a loose end, and spending innumerable hours by the road under the midnight sun managed to pull me through this obsession and out the other side (for now).


The road has taken me back to the UK for a week to see my family and meet my new niece. It was surreal going from 4 hours sleeping in a ditch in Reading to holding a new family member in the same day, but the last 8 weeks has been a catalogue of surreal goodness. I’ve been wanting to write some sort of summary for a while, specifically since talking about it with Lars after he picked me up ill and sleep deprived between two big storms around Toten in Norway.
Thank you again for that Lars, and thank you to everyone I’ve met, been helped by or been able to help, and before I forget- one thing I’ve learnt on this trip is mobile numbers are very useful to have when you turn up in a friend’s city by accident (emailing people at 11pm is a bit subtle) here’s mine: +34 600 70 10 39 )

I came to Oslo in June to see a close friend, meet her (solid and lovely) family and get some head space, and she said that if I was in Norway with no plan I should go to Karlsoy festival near Tromso.

So the next day, after using hitchwiki to get out of Oslo, I got a lift from a man named Hans who took me to Trondheim and told me basically everything he knew about shipping phosphorus, sailing to Japan, breeding and racing horses, running discos and destroying cold war bunkers (he was off to catch a plane to Tromso to meet his demolition team).

As soon as he dropped me I stuck my thumb out and two climbers picked me up, told me to go to a place called Paradise (in Lofoten) and then dropped me off in a town called Hell where I was stuck for a few hours. Made it to Steinkjer with a  bookseller and started the next day hopping around avoiding shitting seagulls as I tried to pack the tent up.

Got up to Mo I Rana the next evening, and on the third day the first people to stop were a couple of Swedish climbers on their way to Lofoten, so next moment (or four hours later after crossing the snowy arctic circle listening to ‘walk the line’)  I’m on a boat with them going across the sea to distant snowy peaks replete with about fifty rainbows…I began to wonder if ‘Paradise’ was some phenomenally well-funded gay club at this point but it turned out to be a climber’s paradise with great camping spots.  Climbed cliffs at midnight on the solstice and then spent a very long time in my coffin-sized tent as the weather went down to 4 degrees with sleet. Came out without knowing what day or time it was (turned out it’d been two days). In fact I rarely knew what time it was for the whole trip- no watch or phone and the sun didn’t go down.

After some cold weather indecision I hitched to Tromso where a fresh bout of snow (and indecision) had fallen, so I tried to go into Finland out of curiosity.
Wiggo the mechanics teacher took me to Kilpisjarvi, pointed out that I was unlikely to get a lift that day and said come to Lakselv so you can hitch to Nordkapp (northernmost point in mainland Europe, some claim).
Well, nothing like a long car journey so we hopped some borders to pick up cheap Snuss (tobacco you put under your top lip) in Sweden and drove back through Finland into Norway. Next day a lovely Estonian couple took me up to Nordkapp where I saw snow, tundra, reindeer, a surprising number of houses, a big edge and then nothing but sea till Svalbard. Sent a postcard and did a U turn. After standing an hour in the snow I was picked up by the same Estonian couple on their way back down. I then took the scenic route back to Tromso and when I got stuck and bought warm clothes in Alta the temperature then shot up to 24 celsius.
Ended up on Karlsoy a week before the festival and spent the days building the main stage and the evenings walking back to my tent on the beach in complete disbelief at the beauty of the place. Words won’t do it. Also let it be said that the happiest seagulls I have ever seen are those on Karlsoy. After a brilliant festival and helping take the stage down I was given a goatskin by Svein Eigil (really felt like I was in an RPG) and hitched out for Finland curiosity part 2.

So, back in Kilpisjarvi in 30 degree heat- when you come over from Tromso the scenery changes suddenly from mountains to flatland with small birches and occasional lakes. I was standing there with my thumb out at noon, glaring sun, empty road, shimmering heatwaves, tundra getting embarrassingly dry- three reindeer trot past me calmly, turn right and walk onto the porch of the house behind, where they beat their antlers on the door and then sit down. At that moment I vowed to make ‘Acid Lapland’ a music genre. Marlena from Finnmark picked me up on her way back home for a festival (lot of Norwegians ride through these roads to avoid the slightly slower coastal route on their way back to Norway). She dropped me 50km of Muonio where I finally met the famous Finnish mosquitoes. People tell you about having to clean their windscreens several times in a journey to get the dead ones off, or tell you that they thought they saw smoke from a forest fire but it was clouds of the winged bastards. I hadn’t taken this on board so ended up waiting around having to constantly fan myself with my hitching sign because repellent (strong stuff, mind) doesn’t work. In order to think straight I dropped the sign, put up my tent (eyes practically closed to keep them out and bitten every step of the way), crawled inside and passed out from the relief.


Here’s a diary excerpt:

“Finland can only get better. I’m sleep deprived, sweaty, cowering in my mosquito frame noting the ones that get through and cursing how. It’s 9pmish, sun is high. No lifts. Many men turning to stare at me through mirrored glass as they drive German automobiles past, accelerating as a gesture of ill will. Bad vibe from couple I tried to ask about camping. Doubt I’ll sleep long if at all.”

..the next morning..

“No water. No cars. Plan is to save strength then walk back, beg borrow or steal to Kilpis and back into Norway I think.

...shortly after...

"Saved by missionaries. In Kilpis now.”

Long conversation with Helsinki missionaries about working in Uganda and the meaning of life and then they dropped me in Nordkjosbotn, near Tromso.

Don’t worry, Finland round 3 is on its way when I start again. My curiosity continues to go up and lessons have been learned about mosquito repellent and listening to people’s warnings, as well as knowing about how the population of a country is dispersed (184,000 of Finland’s 5.4million people are in Lapland). Will probably start in the south next time. I still smile fondly at the thought of those cheery mosquitoes because it’s a hell of a good memory for the “I’ve waited longer in worse” mantra I occasionally play in my head whilst at the roadside. Nothing like hindsight to describe a plague of mosquitoes as a host of much-maligned and misunderstood midwives to your future patience…

So to celebrate mosquito free good weather I headed towards Helgeland on Norway’s west coast for a scenic route south, the idea being to go to Oslo a  few days after. Great times on the way down, met jazz students, marksmen, zookeepers, locksmiths, accountants- all in a great mood with weekend plans- it was hotter than Palma (in Majorca), someone said.

Got stuck around Bognes but sat about beaming for 3 hours before thinking about putting a tent up. Something said ‘5 more cars then find a place to camp’. The third car stopped, green ford estate with back windows covered by towels, far back windscreen broken, car full of stuff. A young man gets out, hurries me to the boot, jams my bag in the back and says “get in, we have to get the ferry!”.
I get in to find two children sitting in the back laughing and playing with toy pirates, and after a rushed ten minutes along the coast we find the port and sit in the queue. At this point I said I was amazed he’d picked me up given the crammed car, two children to look after and a boat to catch and his answer was that he used to hitch and I’d help him stay awake.  Drove 5 hours through the coast, windows open, hot air coming through, midnight sun glowing, listening to Pink Floyd. Passed the original maelstrom (it really spins!) and at one lake the odd sight of a gaggle of male bikers in a semi-circle getting undressed to take a dip in the fjord whilst their leader (?) who was already naked stood in the water, nodding in approval.  Scenic is scenic.

Put my tent in Marcus’s garden and continued in the morning. Small roads and long waits but I got picked up by a fishing instructor and her daughter and taken to see a glacier before being dropped at the ferry port. I asked two women the time and got talking to five friends from the south of Norway who told me they’d come up to go to Traena festival.
I’d heard of Traena from a locksmith in Tromso, and from Marcus on the way through Helgeland. In brief- it’s a festival across two islands in some of the best fishing grounds in Norway- if I really let loose about Traena here I wouldn’t stop, but basically the girls gave me a lift some of the way down and invited me to have a barbecue and a swim by the ferry port for Traena.
We sat around joking about me jumping on the ferry with them, before realising that actually had to happen. Ended up as a volunteer wrapping whale meat burritos and serving drinks in exchange for a ticket, and the rest of the festival I was free to hang out with Hanne, Marianne, Lynn, Veyni and Gina.
Brilliant coincidence. It is an astonishingly beautiful place, and the festival culminated with an impromptu rave by a chapel and an afterparty that was 8 people dancing to Herbie Hancock and Jerry Lee Lewis on a table on a boat in the harbour.There I met a great dancer and friendly hitcher from Germany called Florian. Leaving Traena the day after clean-up I met him again on the ferry back where he’d already organised a lift to Sweden and decided to give me all the Norwegian money he no longer needed. I was stunned by this.

The day I left Traena I slept in Oppdal (664km away), helped by an ice analyst debating the pros and cons of moving to Antarctica for 13 months, a retired civil engineer who used to build tunnels through mountains (they begin digging from both sides, and he said he never slept the night before the tunnels had to meet) and a late night lift at 11pm from two German wwoofers in a big VW van on their way to their next host. I went to sleep in a field enjoying the first darkness I’d seen in weeks. Woke up just before sunrise with a cold and began a very intense day down to Oslo.
First lift with another retired engineer who was on his way to meet friends for a week of walking/staying in cabins. He dropped me at a pretty difficult spot by a hairpin bend. Two hours later (after inscribing the crash barrier with some Mase lyrics) a caravan stopped and I was ushered in by a couple on holiday and invited to talk with nine year old Kevin so he could practice his English.

I was going down the E6 alongside the river, rain falling, mountains behind, sat across from a boy who bore an uncanny resemblance to Macaulay Culkin (his dad pointed this out), eating spring rolls and listening to him divulge his victorious tales of trolling people on minecraft and recording their reactions before putting them on youtube. Occasionally I tried to steer the conversation into hobbies that don’t involve the internet and made the point of ripping a drawing out of my book and giving it to him. Got dropped off and picked up again in 5 seconds by a guy I felt uncomfortable about for some reason (in brief: very lonely and very hyper), so as soon as he stopped to buy something a minute later I told him I was leaving the car and not to take it too personally. Tried to hitch for 3 hours from a gas station then turned around to find a much better spot. First lift was Magne the undertaker and by this point I was so tired and getting more ill and just fell asleep for twenty minutes, waking up as the car swerved during rain so heavy we couldn’t see a damned thing.

Magne: Ok so I can drop you at the bus stop here?
Me: We can’t see anything. Is it ok if you drop me closer to where you’re going? I don’t mind going off the E6 (but I want to live.)

So that’s the point where I end up at the bus stop just when the first storm has stopped and part two is following quickly behind. Still sleep deprived, pessimistic about any lifts on this road at this time in this weather, when a car coming from the opposite direction turns around and Lars gets out and tells me he’s going to Oslo.

On the way he said he’d driven past me and decided to turn around and pick me up. We talked a lot about music, psychedelics, agriculture and the unparalleled joy of family dynamics. After being taken to his sister’s flat in Oslo and wanting to stay a bit longer with them all, I gave into exhaustion and the desire to see my friend Ellen. Turned up practically cross-eyed from lack of sleep and recovered during the next few days of great company.

After that I decided to go into Germany and that trip began with rescued from hitching in the middle of the Norwegian motorway, picked up by two Polish evangelists and given an English bible to read aloud to them for a few km. With more phenomenal luck I made it to Bremen from outer Oslo in two lifts, one was Zwav moving his furniture back to Poland and the next was Johannes the rowing coach on his way to southern Germany via Bremen. He said he could drop me in Cologne the next day if I wanted, so the following morning we continued our conversation/setting the world to rights with regard to travel, marriage, Norwegian employment and education. In Cologne I saw Florian again, and spent three days with him and his girlfriend Lena learning about physics, containering and saunas.

The last morning in Cologne I had an email to say my sister had given birth to a girl, and with a smile on my face I took two hours (some of it getting lost as usual) to get out of town to a good garage, and stood under the shelter watching hail bounce off the roof and thinking about children. Soon picked up by a car-dealing massive techno fan on his way to train mechanics near Karlsruhe, and got lost in a sunny southern German town listening to Somewhere Over The Rainbow (ukulele version) on the radio, and then got picked up by a friend named Lea I’d made in Oslo.

She took me to a friend’s party, arranged for me to go with some friends to Freiburg two days later and then drove us home in her fire engine. Spent the next day and a half swimming in the lake, eating tempeh, washing up and all too soon I was in a car on the way to Freiburg to stay at a Wagonplatz. One of the 3 wagonplatz’s in Freiburg had been evicted several times, most recently with many of the caravans being impounded. The weekend I spent there I mostly stayed around the camp helping with chores and meeting people, but the focus of the weekend were a rally and a protest in town.

After Freiburg I had a decisional change and decided to come back early to see my niece and then go to Ireland. I’m going to shorten this story a bit or I’ll never send it but essentially I hitched back to Karlsruhe and saw Lea again, as well as two friends I’d made in Freiburg who were staying with her.
Spent a good evening laughing our heads off and avoiding the massive storm outside and the next day Kafi drove me to a great hitching spot outside Karlsruhe.
She must be good luck because that evening I was in Rotterdam following a lift from a german delivery driver named Moritz who'd recently returned from Australia, and then two dutch laser salesmen (not a joke) who drove like the wind (177km/h on the autobahn in the rain, clouds flying out the back and the driver turns round and says “I feel like….HARRY POTTER!”) and took me to a coffee shop in Arnhem the minute we crossed the border into the Netherlands.
In Rotterdam I realised I was too high to hitch so I walked until I found a campsite before starting the next day at 6am. Fits and starts to Belgium but made it and got picked up by a trucker called Stefan who took me on the Eurotunnel to Dover. In England the first thing I really noticed was the unabashed relish with which people shunned hitchhiking. People making wanking gestures out the window, swearing, screaming, putting their middle fingers up. Really surprised by it, havenn’t had anything like that anywhere else so far. Waited 5 hours in a busy garage until a Polish software engineer on his way to Newbury came by with a Jimi Hendrix blues CD (basically 12 different versions of hear my train a coming, red house and voodoo chile) and floored it to Reading. Slept in a ditch for 4 hours dreaming that I had a German sidekick named Anna who kept making brilliant jokes, then woke up and met a taxi driver heading to Bristol, and spent that afternoon changing nappies. Very weird to be back just like that, managed to surprise my brother who did the textbook eye rub of disbelief.
Heading to Ireland tomorrow and back into Germany around the middle of August- no real plans on trajectory but hope to see you all on the road.

Throwing this in here too- first heard on the radio whilst power-steering around big steep snowy roads in Tromso, learning about Sami congress from my driver and wondering where the fuck I was going to camp.