What are the 5 words that best describe your life right now?
Submitted by mojito.
optimistic
driven
satisfied
reunited
liberated
08/05/2007
12/02/2006
11/13/2006
Creative outlet: painting digitally
I cannot say enough wonderful things about ArtRage2 for importing photos toward digital paint work. It's the digital version of screening photography onto canvas and then working it with paints. Here is a photo I took in my bathroom, imported into ArtRage, followed by my "art work" to make it into a painting. It's a great alternative to climbing walls. cheers. ~tg
11/12/2006
Republic of Conscience
I decided what I will do with this writing space on Vox. Among possible other uses for the music, book, and audio features, I will be using it primarily to finally post my poetry, which I am trying to assemble for self-publication. Before I actually reach the point of syndicating it here, though, I have to organize a bit more. In the mean time, Seamus Heaney will do nicely.
From the Republic of Conscience
I
When I landed in the republic of conscience
it was so noiseless when the engines stopped
I could hear a curlew high bove the runway.
At immigratioin, the clerk was an old man
who produced a wallet from is homespun coat
and showed me a photopraph of my grandfather.
The woman in customs asked me to declare
the words of our traditional cures and charms
to heal dumbness and avert the evil eye.
No porters. No interpreter. No taxi.
You carried your own burden and very soon
your symptoms of creeping privilege disappeared.
II
Fog is a dreaded omen there but lightning
spells universal good and parents hang
swaddled infants in trees during thunderstorms.
Salt is their precious mineral. And seashells
are held to the ear during births and funerals.
The base of all inks and pigments is seawater.
Their sacred symbol is a stylized boat.
The sail is an ear, the masta sloping pen,
the hull a mouth-shape, the keel and open eye.
At their inauguration, public leaders
must swear to uphold unwritten law and weep
to atone for their presumption to hold office --
and to affirm their faith that all life sprang
from salt in tears which the sky-god wept
after he dreamt his solitude was endless.
III
I came back from that frugal republic
with my two arms the one length, the customs woman
having insisted my allowance was myself.
The old man rose and gazed into my face
and said that was official recognition
that I was now a dual citizen.
He therefore desired me when I got home
to consider myself a representative
and to speak on their behalf in my own tongue.
Their embassies, he said, were everywhere
but operated independentlly
and no ambassador would ever be relieved.
I
When I landed in the republic of conscience
it was so noiseless when the engines stopped
I could hear a curlew high bove the runway.
At immigratioin, the clerk was an old man
who produced a wallet from is homespun coat
and showed me a photopraph of my grandfather.
The woman in customs asked me to declare
the words of our traditional cures and charms
to heal dumbness and avert the evil eye.
No porters. No interpreter. No taxi.
You carried your own burden and very soon
your symptoms of creeping privilege disappeared.
II
Fog is a dreaded omen there but lightning
spells universal good and parents hang
swaddled infants in trees during thunderstorms.
Salt is their precious mineral. And seashells
are held to the ear during births and funerals.
The base of all inks and pigments is seawater.
Their sacred symbol is a stylized boat.
The sail is an ear, the masta sloping pen,
the hull a mouth-shape, the keel and open eye.
At their inauguration, public leaders
must swear to uphold unwritten law and weep
to atone for their presumption to hold office --
and to affirm their faith that all life sprang
from salt in tears which the sky-god wept
after he dreamt his solitude was endless.
III
I came back from that frugal republic
with my two arms the one length, the customs woman
having insisted my allowance was myself.
The old man rose and gazed into my face
and said that was official recognition
that I was now a dual citizen.
He therefore desired me when I got home
to consider myself a representative
and to speak on their behalf in my own tongue.
Their embassies, he said, were everywhere
but operated independentlly
and no ambassador would ever be relieved.
11/10/2006
11/09/2006
wordless poetry
I'm experimenting with Vox's audio feature, and so far I'm very impressed. One thing I still don't know, though, is how to display a specific image with each audio entry. In any case, please enjoy my original piano music within the limits of its Creative Commons license (Attribution, Share Alike). Cheers.
11/07/2006
11/06/2006
Inaugural post
Orwell is on my mind today. Tomorrow is midterm election day, and my brain is saturated with society, war and politics. Here's a snippet, courtesy of George Orwell, 1984:
The Party said that Oceania had never been in alliance with Eurasia. He, Winston Smith, knew that Oceania had been in alliance with Eurasia as short a time as four years ago. But where did that knowledge exist? Only in his own consciousness, which in any case must soon be annihilated. And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed -- if all records told the same tale -- then the lie passed into history and became truth. "Who controls the past," ran the Party slogan, "controls the future: who controls the present controls the past." And yet the past, though of its nature alterable never had been altered. Whatever was true now was true from everlasting to everlasting. It was quite simple. All that was needed was an unending series of victories over your own memory. "Reality control," they called it; in Newspeak, "doublethink."
...He wondered, as he had many times wondered before, whether he himself was a lunatic. Perhaps a lunatic was simply a minority of one. At one time it had been a sign of madness to believe that the earth goes round the sun: today, to believe that the past is unalterable. He might be alone in holding that belief, and if alone, then a lunatic. But the thought of being a lunatic did not greatly trouble him; the horror was that he might also be wrong.
...The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command. His heart sank as he thought of the enorous power arrayed against him, the ease with which any Party intellectual would overthrow him in debate, the subtle arguments which he would not be able to understand, much less answer. And yet he was in the right! They were wrong and he was right. The obvious, the silly, and the true had got to be defended. Truisms are true, hold on to that! The solid world exists, its laws do not change. Stones are hard, water is wet, objects unsupported fall toward the earth's center. With the feeling that he was setting forth an important axiom, he wrote:
"Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows."
I love this guy. I know he was using satire; I know it was about his own time and not necessarily about now. I just don't cease to be amazed -- to my horror -- at how applicable his satire becomes about my world today when applied to such topics as the so-called justification of military presence in Iraq. How it has morphed with each new present-tense! I must keep recording the present. And saving it as specimen of the past. For the sake of those who come next.
