Showing posts with label artificial life. Show all posts
Showing posts with label artificial life. Show all posts

Thursday, June 25, 2009

442. "Mindful of the Mountain" Song/Poem [Fragment?] of My Grandfather Ray HUB BLOG FOR RAY-MARION

Mindful of the Mountain Song/Poem. The PDF can be found here: http://stokastika2.googlepages.com/mindfulofthemountain.pdf.

I've written a few poems that have immense personal meaning in concern of my grandfather. It mainly started with "Two Generations Removed from the Land," which I frantically wrote in the middle of September, essentially during a panic attack session in the car, when I found out the Ray had a horrible "transfer" session from a Physical Therapy Center to the nursing center where Marion used to be--then he exclaimed over the phone to me "These centers just want to milk your money! They don't care about you!" and then my panic attack ended because though Ray had a bad day--slump--he was rebounding rapidly. Two other heavy poems I wrote were after Ray's passing, in which one was "Stepped off the Planet," and the other one was "Mindful of the Mountain," in which I have a ditty above, but I made a much lengthier song back in October of 2009, and I haven't had a chance to revisit the audio.
"Two Generations Removed from the Land" can be found in Blog 296
"Stepped off the Planet" can be found in Blog 387.
And of course, "Mindful of the Mountain" can be found right on this Blog 442!
Descriptions of a turbulent time during the passing of Ray are found in Blogs 349 and 350, as well as the Question Reality GoogleGroup.
It seems that each poem that I wrote for Ray had become more and more simple... and somewhat more emotionally profound in messaging (at least to me, personally). I am sure I have other unfinished fragments and ideas of poems and stories layng around. The poems showed that I was greatly attached to my grandfathr, in the best ways that I knew now.
During 2004-2007, I had written a few poems about my grandmother Marion, but they were along the lines of "Artificial Life," (I tried writing this poem twice, but rendered unsuccessful, something that needs to be done) or my level of disgust on how modern medicine was extending life to a point of visceral absurdity. If you rewind the clock two hundred years to a few thousand, my grandmother would have been first in the line of saber tooth catnip, flat out. She could barely function on her own. I told Jules last night that I cried at age 15 when I discovered Marion had Alzheimer's and I wrote a long report in my English class about Alzheimer's Disease (which seemed to make sense), but after that, I was emotionally flat and even cynical, as the whole family, especially Ray, went for a very long ride of ten-year decay. Other than that, my father told me that Marion was very instinctively caring and nurturing--housewife type--and Ray was more of a dominant fatherfigure of the household, but those were the times, and my father treated me and my sister as two kids who deserved the best of the best, whether we were a female, male, or or "it," whether we had four, six, or the magic number of 5 fingers.
I also happened to write a little bit about Marion when I sketched out a short story called "The Immensely Minor Passing of Cat-Kat," which is found in Blog 334.

Wednesday, April 30, 2008

176. Living in a State of Paradox of Space and Time


"What I have come to realize in the passing of my grandmother from Alzheimer's disease is that there is a level of artificiality in how we live and what kind of meaning exists to live a few functionless years longer. In more cases than not, the elderly are kept alive through immense medical-technological crutches, not that these individuals have significant contribution to the human system, but more so a psychological one: to keep their children in denial a little bit longer of the inevitable: death. As if the elderly were merely pieces of living jewerly who would keep their children's memories still projected onto them and in one piece, rather than dispersed, muttled, and buried in the ground and the scattered in the sky of their own minds.

In the end it does not really matter how long we live. Whether you live 30 years or 70 years or 100 years or only 10, if you found a way to wake up every single day with a sense of purpose and passion and curiosity and productivity--whether these mechanisms of living have been worked out subliminally or consciously--and in the end of every single day you have someone meaningful to share your experiences with, and in the happiness of mental and physical exhaustion, you have found a way to sleep in peace, feeling okay with yourself...

... and that every single day of your life, you have lived with meaning and fulfillment derived from your self and surroundings...

And though the 'future' is an arbitrary vision of any particular human mind, you have come to exist in a paradoxical state such that you live for the day to create a new tomorrow, yet you live for the day as if it were your last."