I Am Lately Learning What Has Been Obvious To Some For Quite Awhile

Elaine once told me, “you cannot just leave a bit of beauty for what it is, appreciate it and move on”. I still cannot. I think I know why now. In that wild twilight time between sleep and consciousness, that which has been burred sometimes for years in one's amygula momentarily flows unencumbered into the consciousness before being snuffed back into oblivion. Fortunately for me yesterday, that which was recovered by my consciousness was a snippet of a pleasurable emotion. Being a recovered emotion rather than a recovered memory it is experienced in maximum intensity, such as the beatific vision is said to be. The memory of the event which stays in the consciousness is recalled as sublime, because the amygula speaks the language of emotion and not of reason. And this is mostly good for humans but occasionally bad. This is what the genius Freud devoted his early career delving into.

Why is this so?
When the emotion being experienced is terror rather than joy, the state is being translated into basic absolute terms which is all this primitive organelle can deal with. The consciousness mind, the higher mind, finds itself hard put to give back which the brain put so much effort in hiding in the first place, e.g., the trauma and stress.

David Evans 

Look carefully at this picture and you see that it is not a painting or drawing but a photograph. 
The Marvelous Floating Stage of the Bregenz Festival In Austria -
The festival has become renowned for its unconventional staging of shows.


Verdi' s opera "A Masked Ball" in 1999 featured a giant book being read by a skeleton.
From Skeptic Shahrukh Qureshi 's page.

Faint Memories of a Childhood Long Ago

I stayed home from work today because I had been a bit under the weather.
I had laid myself across the bed and fell asleep along with my cat.  I am a man of seventy-six years of age now and have been living alone since the death of my wife about five years ago. I still feel and love and wish and dream as always.  However, something occurred to me while in this shallow slumber that pushed me to an experience which I have not fully enjoyed for the past seventy ears. I would describe what I felt as a pure strong profound emotion almost visceral. What awakened me were the sounds of little boys and girls gleefully screaming and shouting outside like only children can. In my slumber as I was coming to I momentarily believed that I too was in my childhood and was one of the little boys who I could hear. I again experienced this pure joy of childhood of anticipating the fun and joy I was about to experience with my best pals. A jolt of adrenalin shot into my body propelling me into a sitting position, ready to jump up and run out to play again on this best of all days with my best of all friends in the whole world. Then I woke up and that special feeling was again just a memory.

THE TEMPTEST

THE TEMPTEST

A palimpsest memory

so effecting the whole.

Words now forgotten 

once forming a whole,

Evoke an inner quality

evokes inherent distrust. 

The  thoughtless, 

reactionary citizen,

polarized within the day. 

Quickset impulse,

oblivious to precious 

enduring time. 

Thin sheeted ghosts

stomp on by,

gaining nothing 

from Whitman, 

or Longfellow. 

Nothing farsighted

evoking the sublime.

"I think I could turn and live with animals

they are so placid and self-contained,

I stand and look at them long and long,

They do not sweat and whine about their condition;

They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins;

They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God.

Not one is dissatisfied--not one is demented with the mania of owning things. 

Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind

that lived thousands of years ago;

Not one is respectable or industrious over the whole earth" (With Animals by Whitman).

Dim sheeted ghosts,

turning away from earth. 

Indignant, malignant, viperidae,

Slither up amongst your swooning

group and see past your narrow palisades

to a deeper, steeper condition.  

The sides of the machine a cold nothingness, 

far harder to reach the sun. 

Wthin closed mind -

A rout from our closed-off enclaves.

We grow farther from the sun,

but my feet still kiss the earth, heeding

a song not yet sung. I the outsider,

still green, following the sun.

"Tell me not, in mournful numbers,

Life is but an empty dream!—

For the soul is dead that slumbers,

And things are not what they seem.

Life is real! Life is earnest!

And the grave is not its goal;

Dust thou art, to dust returnest,

Was not spoken of the soul." - ( A Psalm of Life byLongfellow).

D. Cardew Evans 01/10/11