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

and the book "CHESS: The Poetry of Human-Environmental Change."

"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.

402. Poem "Tipped Over Winnetka"

My green car tipped over Wittetka
and I looked to the fire-coated mountains
of southern California
in comfort with Fiona Apple,
"If you don't have a song to sing,
you're okay,
you know how to get along humming..."
And instead I shattered tears,
face red.
The bell was rung.
There was no going back.
I realized I lost my grandfather.

387. Poem / Song Called "Stepped off the Planet" (For My Grandfather Ray)

I stepped off the planet
W' my lungs full of fluids
Of my very own ocean
My petri of potion.

I stepped off the planet
My bones brittle broken
Of my very own mountain
Quite rigid of tendons.

I stepped off the planet
My wiring still firing
But my form just gave in
Yet circuits worth keeping--

So I stepped off the planet
With one more thing
On my to-do list--

But what's the point?
What's the point?

Life ran out of time
T'make all rhythms rhyme.


So I made a trip to hxll
To-meet Mark Twain o'er beer
Conversing, waiting for my son,
And my granddaughter.

So I made a trip to hxll
To-meet Mark Twain o'er beer
Conversing, waiting for my son,
And my granddaughter.

So my wiring kept firing
My wiring keeps firing
However do I please
Whatever my musings

My wiring kept firing
My wiring still firing
Is the very only thing
That was worth any-ah dxmn.

[For my grandfather, Ray]

357. The Elephant and the Oak Tree, Shifting of the Devotions Page

I have had a few extensive conversations with Dr. Osborne, a historian and philosopher of science, and I am now getting myself ready to continue writing The Elephant and the Oak Tree (EOT).

One thing for sure, several elements have shifted in my life since the begining of the quarter, like the dropping of a painful, confusing, in part inhumane relationship and the annexation and forging of new ones. These endeavors take time, and they totally rewire your mind. I suppose the goal is to associate yourself with those individuals who bring the best out of you, who want you to build and grow, like a juvenile oak tree going through intense growth spurts, not suppress you in futile sword-fighting combat of words.

I will have to change the "Devotions" part of EOT, in a very dramatic way. I will have to eliminate the last line of an individual whos name starts with "T." I had been living an Illusion of an Individual since April of 2008. Who people really are versus what they say they are. Massive discrepancy, not just in this individual, but in human beings overall.

I will have to add the lines below:

"To the essence of my grandfather
Who shifted my baseline
To great depths of space and time."

And to the Notion of Love.
Which comes in all mysterious shapes, sizes
Beautiful forms and processes.
This Love, which emerges
In the most unexpected of nooks and crannies
Of a dark Universe of seeming detachment and unrelatedness.
It is Love that allows one to drop Restrictions of Reality from one's brain
And inspires one to explore the Unbound Premises of the creative mind.
It is Love that grows branches, leaves, and flowers of Novel Trees of Non-linear Thought.
It is Love that has the capacity to consume and envelop all Darkness of Chaos
Into Hope. Into Design of Alternative Realities and Futures
That would not otherwise be perceived
By the constraints of physical reality....

To Face Death is to See Life.
Confrontation.
To Live Life is to Survive.
Desperation.
To Survive is to Seek Love.
Inspiration.
To Love is to Dream.
Reconstruction.
To Dream is to Heal Loss.
Fragmentation.
All broken pieces...
All open wounds...
Into a patchwork
Of Open Universes
For us all to share
And play
And dream....

For one day,
Through the Medium of Love
Our dreams shall Emerge
Metamorphose
Into Reality.

350. Sketch Notes from the Passing of My Grandfather, John Ray Minnich, Age 96. Part II

(I started writing this about an hour before my grandfather’s passing).

Today is a day of Loss. And through the medium of Loss, by pure accidental opportunity meeting a prepared mind, or perhaps two prepared minds meeting in somewhat random circumstance, I have gained a new Love.

As I am writing these here words, it is the last moments of my grandfather’s life. Ray is currently in an intensive-care resting home in Long Beach, California, near by Saint Mary’s Memorial Hospital. My father and sister are there right now. I would be there right now, but it would be impractical for my 5-6-hour round trip drive when I am awaiting for a 10am class tomorrow morning. I refuse to miss any of Dr. Sam Sweet’s lectures. I know Ray would be pissed off if I did, had he been healthy and well right now. My grandfather is currently drowning in his own fluids within his lungs. He engorged in his own blood and phlegm, invaded with a soup of bacteria. I suppose an ephemeral woohoo for the bacteria, but a horrid road for my grandfather. He has low blood pressure: 70/40 (though stabilized). His pulse has been 140 beats per minute since last Saturday, when they started giving him a horrendous cocktail of antibiotics. My heart goes up that high after a long jog or intense bout of tennis or badminton. My sister, Jenny, inquired me in a dire, sarcastic tone: “How would you like to chronically jog nonstop for a week?” Uhhh, no. Ray, 96 years old, perhaps had run his body into 5 or 6 bouts of 26-mile marathons, given the pumping of his heart. As of now, either he drowns in his own fluids or his heart fails from a heart attack. He is obviously struggling to breathe. Two minutes without oxygen, you’re gone. I bet the mass accumulation of specialized and generalist cells in his body are all flipping out and gasping for existence. Does the entire body shut down right away, or are there still small islands of life remaining in the body for a little while? Is there some electrical charge that blew in the brain?

Dxmmit. No Darwin Award here for being killed by a hummingbird flying into your eye or a giant saw whamming into your car window while driving on the freeway. The small things get my grandfather in the end. As if a shifting baseline of gradual decay has mounted to some form of brutal extreme event of tragic dysfunction of parts of a once synchronistic and strong whole. All I can see with the weakening form of my grandfather is a Star Trek Spaceship calling out Mayday, Mayday, Mayday, awaiting it’s inevitable collision with a planet or another ship. Or as one graduate student described the modern human-environmental condition for Planet Earth as the Titanic about to crash into a massive iceberg.

And such is the condition of my grandfather. There is no way out of death. There is no way to cheat or bypass death. There is no Plan B. But then, the Plan B of evolution is living family: my grandfather’s brothers and their families, my father, my sister, my mother (in-law), my two cousins… and their kids…. Wow, my grandfather is a “great grandfather”…. It may be the passing of my grandfather, but in the end, he fulfilled the duty and “fitness” of evolution such that he was able to pass on a rehash of his genes into the next generation, with some pretty impressive results—at the moment. I know I inherited quite a bit from him, whether genetic or environmental. A high energy budget, the value of brains—whether intelligence took form of gee-wiz fun facts or abstract problem-solving. A stubbornness and meticulousness. A sticking to fundamental principles and values… no matter what. But heck, this is an essay on its own, I will touch upon later.

Knowing Death is Knowing Life. Knowing Life is Knowing Death.
Being trained by evolutionary biologists and geologists, I suppose we have rather strange, bizarre, yet “ultimate” views of life and death. We go from individual births and deaths, to births and deaths of societies, all the way expanded to mass extinctions and adaptive radiations. Talk about scale. But again, this is another essay to talk about.

For example, how do people define the “cause of death” when it ultimately ends up being a conditional chain reaction of events in space and time?

All I can say, whatever is happening now, represents about .05% of my grandfather’s existence in his long life. My grandfather is in fetal condition during two times of his life: (1) now, age 96 (2) when he was born, 1912. That’s it. The rest of the time, he was an extremely intelligent, strong, independent-minded individual who understood the landscapes, contributed to the community, and raised a strong family.

It seems like the Last Bout of Medical Care ends up being some form of Mind-numbing Protocol of Medieval Brutality. My grandfather Ray deteriorated from the use of heavy antibiotics, not from the early stages of pneumonia. They should have just given him amoxicillin. Apparently my grandmother Marion went out in a more “painful way.” My mother claims that she was “awake” and “convulsing” the entire time. I had a flashback to my good friend Lauri’s partner Claudia (who used to work in a nursing facility), who mentioned that people don’t croak instantly, but ultimately takes days for the different organs and parts to shut down. And they’re just kinda laying there, convulsing as their form starts to shut down. My grandmother had been largely a vegetable the last year or so before her passing, so claiming that she was awake, measured by here “eyes wide open” doesn’t mean much to me. I remain quite skeptic of her “level of consciousness.” Even though Ray right now may have his eyes closed—though he opened them once yesterday to acknowledge my presence—I have a notion that Ray is much more conscious of what is going on now than what Marion went through. After seeing what I saw yesterday, I honestly think that Going Out by Car Crash seems more glamorously painless than this.

My mother also explained to me in my grandmother Kiki’s Last Bout of Medical Care, she essentially did not pass from cancer, but her form stopped functioning due to the pain induced from the forced-in feeding tube. Mama said (pardon my lack of consistency) that Kiki’s skin around her face looked like fried meat. Mama claimed that Kiki died a painful death, and that people attempted to “put make up” all over her face, but you could see the remaining facial expression telling another more gruesome story otherwise. But then again, how do we define happy or a sad facial expression. Being worn on a body that is no longer moving? Come on, Mama! That’s a value judgment. Kiki had no control of that facial expression. I’m sorry.

Hospitals are Mass Production Factories of Life and Death. Patients are part of the assembly line. Doctors and nurses don’t see you as a human. They don’t have the capacity to when they see a few hundred humans every single day. You’re a number. You’re a statistic. You’re a “next,” “next,” “next.” They mindlessly plunge oxygen tubes down your nose and shove feeding tubes in your stomach. I don’t know what My Fate shall be. It’s not a matter of “if” it’s more so “when and where and how.” The “how” part will most certainly not factor in the Mass Production Assembly Line of hospital treatment. But I have a long to-do list before that happens. The longer I live, the longer I see a value in keeping my genes in the gene pool. I might engage in an egg-donor situation. I can’t take care of kids. Dogs. Plants. Caterpillars. Nada. I can barely take care of myself. My very own mind!

It’s as if Ray’s form, skinny-stick form, a relict of my own anorexia, pale-white, as if he were some living ghost of a body of a Jew from the Holocaust. I suppose it’s a horrid analogy, for our family is not Jew-affiliated (though I have many Jewish friends), but my grandfather was a researcher for Shell Chemical during World War II, and I am sure he was indirectly involved in saving many people’s lives (at least from the Non-Nazi side).

I talked to my father on the phone today for quite a bit. I will have to call T-Mobile and ask them for a Grace Period this month due to the death of my grandfather. Besides my bxtching and griping about a challenging meeting with one of my advisors, which led to my elaborated encounters with two other very solid-minded professors… my father started making a long-to-do list in concern of “what shall happen.” He informed me that only the immediate family knows about what is going on, and apparently there was already a Game Plan in action in terms of “who will call who” as soon as the Event occurs. Uncle Dwight will inform his lineage of the family. My father will call Ray’s close friends: neighbor across the street and peanocle friends at the park. I suppose my father will also call Uncle Bob (retired Anthropologist in Norway) and Judy (in San Diego), and the other lines of the family, like Chuck’s side. Apparently two weeks ago Ray pointed out to my father (now Bub) the place where Marion was cremated, and that he should do the same with his form. I just found out today that my grandmother’s ashes were distributed into the ocean.

Wow, my grandmother is part of the chemical soup of the ocean. Maybe she’s incorporated proteins in some phytoplankton or zooplankton. Maybe some of her chemicals are now part of some shark or a Blue Whale. Marion’s diffuse components are circulating in this vast, global swimming pool. She liked the ocean much more than the mountains, though Ray and Bub would have preferred her placement under a pine tree at the Cabin of Manker Flats of Mount Baldy (same here), Ray did a private ceremony and released her ashes into the currents of the ocean breeze and water.

To resume my father’s to-do list, he made a decision to do a personal ceremony of placing my grandfather’s ashes underneath a sugar tree behind the Cabin. Uncle Ralph’s up there to, by a Ponderosa pine. I guess I’m going to have a lot of my family living up there, incorporated into Tree Biomass of the San Gabriel Mountains. Well, at least trees live for a long time. It’s a more concrete system than an ocean. Talk about some epic form of Ecological Reincarnation. Geodegradeable: it all recycles in the end. Who knows? Maybe some of my body used to be part of some T rex body a few million years ago. I suppose life recycles its chemistry parts through time. I think my dad and I want to be in part birds, but I know for sure we will both go to Visit Hxll and have an Epic Conversation with Mark Twain at a bar, over home-made beer.

I’m not even being religious. I’m being tangible about these thoughts. Kyle asked me if I were religious. I said no. Then I asked, “Are you?” Kyle said no. I said, “As a scientist, it’s best to say ‘I’m not religious, but I’m spiritual.’ That’s what Dr. Schneider from Stanford got away with saying and it was well received by an entire room of journalists at an international science conference.

The other thing that my father will do is hold a Memorial service (hopefully after all this Holiday-ing) and that he will inform the newspaper of Ray’s passing. At first Bub was hesitant, and I said, “No, it’s not right. Ray contributed a lot to the community of Long Beach. You have an obligation to inform the newspaper of his passing.”

For a moment today, I thought about the Illusion of Fame, and if I ever had a conversation with Dr. Sam Sweet, I would tell him that if I croaked right now, I bet there are only about five humans on this planet who would ever bat an eye or even alter their step from their pre-existing pathway.

Sometimes I hate being a human. As if we were some form of accidental hyper-creative byproduct of evolution, and sometimes I think it does no good for anything for me to think about my thinking—though I have a notorious tendency to do so. It can be self-defeating sometimes.

Depending on how optimistic or pessimistic people are, I think humans will remember “the last good day” rather than the last bad. Last bad days are inevitable to happen, but you can frame your mind to hierarchize your memories and recall the disproportional number of good days.

So, in strange, twisted ways, a Day of Loss has led to a Day of Found… of Love. Yes, “love.” The word that I rarely use. I witnessed Ray Bradbury speak of how his relationships of love ultimately fostered and was the foundation of his writing. “The key to writing is love,” if only they could sell that as a bumper sticker, *sigh.*

Love takes various mysterious forms, sizes and shapes and colors and textures. The Hollywood standard definition of Love for a tall female in her twenties predictably takes the form of an even taller, young, athletic, handsome male. But Love is more so a state of Reality, a Beautiful Bower of the mind that can be constructed independent from True Reality. Love is an Adventure of Magnanimous Proportions that has no creative and intellectual and physical boundaries. And given this definition that is far beyond the housing of a physical body, I do indeed state amidst the Chaos of Loss, I have found Love.

You will never know when you will find Love, but you will know you will have found it within a few minutes, within an hour—within a lengthy two hour conversation—sealed by the warmth and firmness of a handshake that embodied Trust and Growth, but so firm that it could potentially symbolize a helping hand to (Academic) Survival in times of falling. I don’t mean to sound superstitious or endorse “smoking gun reasoning” or anything, but Claudia Carbonell, an instructor at Barbizon in Los Angeles, once told me that you can tell the condition of Love by the mere first shake of a hand. All I can say is that meeting Love and a Penetration and Syncing and Aligning of Cognitive Maps of souls yesterday—this finding of connection, communication, meaning, in all spectrums—made all the worth of the pain of meeting 200 people the last three months, in which only each person would give me a piece, a fragment of the larger puzzle of my mind.

A sour meeting with one professor led to the discovery of two different professors (my grandfather Ray wants me to resume my academic life!), to which one—seemed to be the beginning of an Academic Adventure I would have never dreamt of otherwise. A mind can be another world, an epic, beautiful journey—all contained within one brain?

It’s funny to think that sometimes asking REALLY STUPID QUESTIONS can actually get you somewhere. Like, why do humans artificially select the cute fuzz-balls to conserve rather than the slime molds? Why do I have fear of velociraptors? Like, why do I need to eat? Back in the days of physical manifestation of anorexia, this stupid question was no laughing matter. Somehow in this day of age, the really stupid questions seem to have become really profound.

348. THE QUARTER SYSTEM IS ONE LONG DISTRACTION FROM TRAIN OF THOUGHT. Case study day with a Fictitious Dialogue with an Advisor

A Sample Fictitious Case Study of Intellectual Combat: I am Recommended to Take it Lightly

A typical dense conversation of intellectual combat. I described it very well to a friend of mine today, so I decided to write it out.

Case studies are NOT science!!!

So, only replicable studies are considered science. So, a case study is not science. But my other co-advisor uses case-studies for his research?! Don't you guys talk to each other at all?

Case studies are only for business plans. That's not science.

But isn't there this case study called "Planet Earth." What do you do when N = 1?

Oh, don't go there. Don't go there on me--

And you can't do cognitive maps / cognitive analysis of stakeholders. That's not a scale question.

Yet it is. It's a scale-dependent "perception of the resources and the environment" issue.

But your background is in biology, ecology, and evolution. Why don't you use it?

I am using it! My understanding of biology allows me to construct metaphors between biological and human-environmental systems! My biology background ALLOWS me to cognitively/spatially analyze stakeholders.

You can't connect Psychology and the Environment. A psychology degree is 4 years. You don't have the credentials to study psychology.

You allow me to play on the playground and I can only play on the swings and the sandbox, and you won't let me play on the monkey bars? Why not?

Our school cannot support playing on monkey bars. Sure, our school is interdisciplinary, but you're just being spread out way too thin. There are no psychology professors on campus who will take on an environmental science/environmental media students. The other grad student had to resort to getting a Film-and-Media Studies professor. She has no psychology background.

My sister is a psychologist. I talk to her every day. She received a degree at UCSB. She's getting a physical therapy Ph.D. We are practicing psychology as we speak. I have lived 27 years and you would think that I have observed and manipulated human behavior, to some degree?

Oh, don't go there on me.

Don't economists of this department derive their economic models based on research done in psychology?

Oh, don't go there. That's not true.

If you look at the list of Nobel Laureates the last ten years, did you notice that 2 or 3 of them actually come from the Psychology background?

[No comment.]

When a geologist and a biologist go out to Goleta Beach, aren't their fundamental perceptions and value systems of Goleta Beach different? And why? And how do their values influence their foreseen acceptable and potential management plans of this beach?

Sure, there is some degree of relativism in environmental science, but I believe that there are universal principles in science. We woudn't have cars and airplanes and buildings if it weren't for science.

Don't you wish all the OTHER stakeholders KNEW that?

Well, I see your point. One time I went out on a trip with a European philosopher. There were two groups of scientists: one group from France and one group from the United States. We went to make commentaries on natural and human-built structures, and we all had fundamentally different world views and perceptions of the same systems--

Okay, I see your point.

If we all had some level of common conceptual vision of the same system--some baseline of common perceptual understanding, values, and assumptions--wouldn't we be communicating better? Wouldn't this global environment be managed better?

Okay, I see your point. --- I hope your grandfather is doing okay.

[He passed away last night, November 12, 2008, as I was writing].

I suppose the best way to disprove a stubborn intellect is to acquire the approval of everyone else. It's fun to document Conversations that Venture into the Absurd. Another piece of writing I will have to do is document the Dialogue between me and a former friend of mine, who provided the illusion of orphanage, which played heavily on my sympathy, when essentially he pushed all his family away. And then he pushed away me. So much for being a thoughtful, considerate little Buddhist in the forsest. Save the world, and push away all your family. Uh, the practice of contradictory value systems, eh?

Aside thought: if a system is known very well, in terms of all forms of aspects, then we would have the capacity to manipulate its components to design new systems. So, essentially, in every very-well understood discipline, there is an "engineering" equivalent to the discipline. Humans hardly know and understand non-linear (multi-variable) systems, so, we only have Climate Scientists, not necessarily Climate Engineers. Though Dr. Mary Droser wants my dad to be a Climate Engineer, not just a climate scientist. Essentially, humans are so manipulated, most of this planet is now Engineered Earth.

Case studies require narratives. History of Life on Earth is a Narrative. And all science does is figure out the parts to sync up with the narrative? Relationship between scientific writing and narrative.

Another intellectual bulldoze day: Writing about Ray and family. Then Packed Lecture (4 in 1) on Macroevolution. Dr. Sam Sweet is brilliant. It was these lectures that shifted my perception of Reality. Changed my life, back as an undergrad. Transformed my reasoning abilities from absolutist to relativistic. From deterministic to probablistic. It's a way of living, a way of thinking. Not just some model of macro-evolution. It's a way of perceiving reality. Adaptive Radiation and Mass Extinction. Adaptive Grid Model. Adaptive zone. Key innovation. Island Biogeography extrapolated to a Continental and Global Scale. It was amazing everything Sam Sweet was saying, I had visions in my head. I could conceptualize what he was talking about. How come Valentine could create a Measles World thought experiment? How come I can't? Why not? Okay. Rehash. I look back at that lecture and every single thought in that lecture was profound. It has taken me a few years just to fully realize and conceptualize a small set of lectures of Sam Sweet. Adaptive Radiations and Extinctions? I think I got the "Pigeonhole" term from Sam Sweet and Professor Ackmann in the math department. Seems like physical and intellectual niche space has been divorced. Random stuff in my head.

Wasted two hours doing nothing of graduate school significance. Told Dr. Freudenberg yesterday: "THE QUARTER SYSTEM IS ONE LONG DISTRACTION FROM TRAIN OF THOUGHT." Ha ha ha. Talked with Jaime. He gave me a hug. My grandfather is gone. I love everyone. I give everyone hugs. Everyone is beautiful. UCSB is my academic family. Everyone means so much to me. Maria came by. I think I will be fine. I told Maria I am here because my grandfather would be pissed off if I missed class. She asked whether I was very attached to him. Obviously, yes, she could see. I was crying. Lost a big chunk of history, eh? Not only ourselves within the family, but humanity and human attachment to landscapes in general. A huge symbol for my existence. A baseline symbol for who I am and why I do what I do.

I finally met with Julie Standish, currently at MRL. I thought she would be in the Bren building. I will be presenting the rock crab film (which will be difficult for me), and some images of Scale. What I can do is show an image of a Rock Crab and ask people to give 60-second commentary. Or actually just map ideas on the crab. Then show the film. Then show a few images. The main point of the presentation is to say that in history of science, the university has focused on "the very small." But right now we are at a time where we need to zoom out and look at "the very large." We need to ask big questions and have interdisciplinary, broad-scale problem solvers. You guys are it. This is the next generation. This is our planet, it's our generation, you know. So, when the time comes for you to ask your question in science or whatever discipline for your senior thesis or your masters--I ask you to reconsider at what scale you will be operating at? And it's very important to undersand the big picture before you can zoom in and focus on the very small. Consider what scale of operation you are pursuing. Everyone has a role in their research, from the very small to the very large, from deep time to the present--but please, search and explore the big picture before you go venturing off into some specialized discipline. If you want a coordinated existence of humans on this planet--please consider the big picture. And that's it. The only goal of the lecture is to teach people to teach themselves.

Then I just came home. I want to return to more crucial places.

Such is the day in a life of a graduate student and any scholar on campus: a chronic stream of interruption of train of thought.

296. Poem / Song for My Grandfather Ray: Two Generations Removed from the Land, and Extra Poem "Story to Tell"

My grandfather, John Ray Minnich, 96th birthday, in Corona, California.
Black and white photograph of the same.
Two Generations Removed from the Land. Shifting Baselines in my personal life. Page 1.
Two Generations Removed from the Land. Shifting Baselines in my personal life. Page 2.

PDF file of the poem is here...

http://stokastika2.googlepages.com/twogenerationsremovedfromland.pdf.

Two or three nights ago, I was bawling and crying because three of my family members portrayed that my grandfather "lost a will for life" and was content with where and what he was, even though he was weak and had a urinary catheter in him. That night, the piano was my best friend. And so was my sister. I had come to realize that tragic and chaotic emotional conditions can render very beautiful music and very beautiful art. And it is completely chaotic and spontaneous. So, whenever I am in an unstable emotional condition, I should harness these emotions into productive pieces of art--created out of context.

I visited Ray yesterday and he told me this, with a twinkle in my eye: "You know what, Victoria? Let me tell you how bad it is in this resthome. They did the same with your grandma Marion. All they care is that they put the client in a position such that they can milk as much money off of you as possible until you croak. They don't care about your happiness. So, I gotta get the hxll out of here and back to Long Beach, with a live-in caretaker." This is condensed and paraphrased, but the apparent "loss of will to live" was replaced with enormous willpower. Ray was also disturbed that the caretakers let him sleep in till 4pm, and he had things to do and needed to be productive during the day. Otherwise, Ray was very happy to see me, and I was very happy to see him. I wrote out the final version of the poem in his room.

I had constructed the chorus of the poem "Two Generations Removed from the Land" back in Fall of 2006, during my Medieval Dark Periods. Thankfully the Dark Age only lasted one year, but ended up being two, from 2005-2007. I created a beautiful melody, but had absolutely no clue how to finish or elaborate the poem/song. Then, a few nights ago, when I was collapsing emotionally, the song came back full-fledged, and I realized that this song was about the slipping connection with the land, from my grandfather's deep-rootedness, to my father, and back to myself. It was a personal Shifting Baseline within three generations of the family. When I create a documentary about my grandfather, my father, and I, and the concept of shifting baselines with memory of the landscapes, this song will be within the movie, as well as this poem:

Story to Tell

If you-got, a story to tell

Say it once, and say it well

Then allow the "technology"

To go repeating. Repeating. Repeating.

If you got, a story to tell

Say it once, and say it swell.

Then the nuts-and-bolts of the system

Go on tweaking. And shifting. And tweaking.

Then the methods, of the madness

Add layering. Of order. To some degree.

To some degree.

I am happy that I included in the "Two Generations" poem about how I was born and raised in "Disney's Cloud" and I had to rationalize my ways "to come on down," which is ultimately a satire on a Disney/Pixar song played at the end of the Wall-e film. I do say Wall-e is a Pixar film, not a Disney film. The values and implications of the film are so tremendous, I ended up walking from the film, telling Tariel: "I think this means that Disney is going to bulldoze all its theme parks and turn it into artificial ecosystems of 'wild' lands."

Bonus Set of Family Images from Photobucket Compiled for my sister Jenny:

http://s202.photobucket.com/albums/aa109/stokastika/familycollectbubcentricforjenny121907/?start=all