Friday, April 29, 2011
6 AM. All right. I’ve sort of lost track as to where we are, so I hope you kept your notes.
We’ll check the web and get back to you.
Tweet me.
You’d better make coffee.
Going to be that detailed, or complicated?
Maybe it just requires that you remember to settle in, and approach it in a collected fashion.
Thursday, April 28, 2011
7 AM. There are so many compartments in our minds; one moves from one to the next and we can’t see through doors and so it is as if the other compartments have ceased to exist.
Okay –
Copy states of mind 1 through 4 when you transcribe this.
All right.
(1) he is an indivisible unit
(2) mixture of masculine and feminine psychological elements
(3) not a unitary mind, at all, but a community
(4) a ringmaster holding together multiple strands
Now that I am settled into my new place in Charlottesville, I am hoping for a new series of conversations such as I enjoyed last year. This came yesterday.
Wednesday, March 9, 2011
4:20 AM. All right, gentlemen, I hereby call this meeting to order, after a good long time. I haven’t sat down to chat on a regular basis since — when? December? November, maybe? First came getting the book into shape, then came a genuine hiatus in Florida with Charles, then a fast search for a new place in town, a month spent preparing to move, and a week and a little unpacking and arranging. But since yesterday Nancy brought me most of the houseplants she had protected from the move by keeping at her house, and since she helped me put up more pictures, I’m about ready to declare myself more or less resettled. And now it’s time to begin new habits, I think. So –?
Saturday, January 29, 2011
5 AM, and for the first time in a long time I feel like really communicating. For whatever reason or combination of reasons I am up and seemingly am back in business.
So –?
Welcome back. It isn’t as if we went anywhere.
Actually, it is exactly “as if” — that is, that’s what it felt like.
I know it’s been a while since I posted here. (Bless you, Suzanne, for reminding me how long!)
I am writing a book based on the TGU material, and it tends to focus my attention on it rather than on any other form of writing. No excuse, but it’s the closest thing to an excuse that I have, so I might as well use it.
The book? I have been thinking of calling it “So You Think Your Life Was Wasted,” but I have had second thoughts, so am referring to it for the moment as “he 2010 book.” After I finish, then I’ll find the right title, a la Hemingway.
Bob Friedman, my friend and former co-conspirator at Hampton Roads, has been an appreciative follower of the TGU conversations, and although we don’t yet have a contract, it looks like he will publish my book as part of a line of books he edits for Square One, a New York house.
Hopefully the neglect this blog has suffered will turn out to have been worthwhile.
Thursday, September 23, 2010
4 AM. Welcome to autumn. Awake at about 3:45, slight wheezing, a very acceptable night’s sleep. As I lay down I felt some wheezing and said, “no, I’m not going to do anything about it anyway at this time of night” [meaning, if you’re trying to get my attention, stop] — and the wheezing stopped and I had my night’s sleep. I could probably get more, but I’m anxious to try the way of making notes that came to me in the middle of the night. Once again, file cards, but organized by topic instead of date of session. A simple change, but should yield significant results. The simple apparatus of scholarship. And I’m going to work on that first, before conversing, and see how that works.
5 AM. I am starting to get crowded out of this table, despite all leaves entered and thus the surface extended. Notes, a book for questions, binders, a place for this journal –. But anyway a pretty good idea, finally, of how to proceed with notes.
Tuesday, September 21, 2010
5 AM. Yesterday my friend Jim lent me The Lost Book Of Enki by Zechariah Sitchin, and I spent much of the rest of the day reading it. A few dozen pages yet to go, but I was surprised to get into it as easily as I did, having read a couple of the other books of his and having found him not entirely believable. That is, I believe him to be a sincere thoughtful man, but I had thought him to be taking at too literal a level a description that might not have been meant to be read that way. This book, though, assuming it is an accurate translation, is clearly not an allegory or a description of psychological process, but a straightforward narrative.
I have been reluctant to commit myself on this, as on so many ground-shaking re-castings of our human history, because it is so easy to get carried away and so hard to get carried back! There is a long list of such influences in my life, starting perhaps with Immanuel Velikovsky’s Worlds In Collision.
My friend Chris e-mailed me yesterday that our discussion of how we can know what’s true struck a chord with him. Well, I felt it was said as much for someone else — more than one, probably — as for me.
What a lot of influences in a life! At the same time I read Sitchin, I am still reading Cabot’s life of Emerson, and Thomas Hart Benton’s Thirty Years’ View, and Max Freedom Long’s The Secret Science Behind Miracles, with excursions for the fun of it to Raymond Chandler’s essay “The Simple Art Of Murder,” and then there were all those Star Trek TV episodes. Like Emerson, I’m still “sinfully strolling from book to book,” and, like Emerson, quite happily.