I turned the fan on and lay down against my pillow to smell the years that had drifted into my past. Scent of wood and boxes of Christmas things that would come out when the voices, raised in happy camaraderie, titted and tatted over who was coming and what was to be made for the dinners. A warm musty smell, an indoor garden smell of another year...not of one having passed but one fully alive in a mind filled with only a few, or a dozen or so at most. These were 'now' years, and 'here' years. They were my years.
This was family. Also among the times that were mine there were the places of independence, the spaces where I felt all of myself, after school, hiking behind the complex of apartments to the end of the pine needle-lined trail with Arthur C. Clark in my back pocket. How it amazed me then that back pockets of jeans were made just this size. The world, I imagined, should be just this way...everyone with a pocket, carrying a secret key that opened up a world far away, in space, or in time. A book. In everyone's pocket. This was the spice of life.
At the end of the trail was the clearing where we -- my other book pocketing friends and I -- had dragged discarded slices of carpet from apartment renovations above, at the top of the hill. These made our magic reading room; especially pleasant in Fall and Winter when the slow rain of deciduous leaves had left light passages and sound isles throughout the woods and trailed a clear sight over the ridge down toward the yet uncounted trees and such which marked stream channel runoffs that all led to the bigger creek half a mile away.
Afternoons were bliss. The high sound of the world in the tops of the remaining green pines made our journey of imagination all the more sublime. This was our time and our space.
It's gone now, replaced with more well-manicured apartment citadels, the wild of the clear rocky creek sectioned, purchased and patrolled by so many new back yard owners. But that is six hundred miles and thirty-four years away, yet I still smell the dirt ash, the tree resin, the old carpets. I still carry my book, but in an appliance bag now as I must write also. And I must draw.
How do things come to begin? What innocent and naive joys become an endless drive that refuses to back down and, like the color of one's skin, is carried with him everywhere, always, in a pocket made just large enough in the back of his patched and worn mind?
August, 2007
The Order of FREE THOUGHT
We think scientifically about this, accepting certain foregone conclusions in order to base argumentation on certain premises. Only, when we reach a contradiction in our argument we are then free to reconsider our premises. We can move to a second set of conjectures to reopen the case. We argue this case on the basis of this new set of premises. In any case when we reach a contradiction in our argument we are then always free to reconsider our then-implied true premises. Any set of premises deemed false does not preclude our resupposition of a previous premise, nor any unforseen new premises,in light of new evidence.
In this way all evidence is balanced against all other evidence in order to arrive
at a reasonable conclusion. Reason must consider all of the evidence and by only
doing this is all of the evidence considered. Diligence in time demands that whatever
span of time is required for study, investigation, divination, and free thought aforewith,
it is freely given under any demand. We may call this the constitution of free thought.
“cogito ergo sum”
“I think, therefore I am”
...Descartes started his line of reasoning by doubting everything, so as to assess the world from a fresh perspective, clear of any preconceived notions.
– on Descartes, wikipedia