The sketch I did sometime back about how to build
such a structure, of boards, iron bracing and fieldstones.

November 2004 Cabin Diary
     
  1. 14 November 2004 -- A question of completeness

14 November 2004 -- A question of completeness

Yes, it's pretty icy out now; I've "let the season get that way", it would seem.  There was light snow a few days back, but enough of the previous warmth was about in the hemisphere to melt it off.  The sky is generally overcast tonight, and if it snowed now, it would be the harsh, blowing kind, that wants to get into your clothes and into the door when it's open.  I've got the fire built nicely within the hearth, and am often so lazy in cooking that I'll suspend assorted pots over the flames directly, like in the tableaux from the Colonial American museums.  I should think I'd find a greater comfort in what chow I can actually implement out here, and at this altitude, only it's still chow and it still has its weight.  I understand well the motive of the fasting man, but only to a point, after which all generally goes blank. 

I'm hearing a bit of wind out there on the structure tonight, as I sit under the kitchen and living room kerosene lanterns.  I should rightfully shiver, and have some sort of great and ongoing gratitude for the many things bestowed upon me, even in the virtual vacuum of these woods.  "There is always a way out," I remind myself, "but we as creatures of the hysteresis will usually not recognize their vast difference from the way we came in".  I would so like to quell the enormous load of bad "vibration", "karma", "tendency", "bent", or whatever you'd call this kind of possession, and I am well aware that time itself will eventually step in.  Oh, there is no "forever" for the living, just as time is indeed their own mortal enemy.

It occurs to me that there are folks so entirely separate from anything this "ordinary" and "low",  when its comes to considering what is one's self and what is one's surroundings, as though there were some sort of dualism that even divides them.  I've written at length about the two kinds of soul there seem to be, the more excellent of which I do not see myself as having the capacity to co-opt.  Yes, yes, I hear you, O anabaptismal fountaineers; you'd dunk me again, and poof!, there I'd be.  But the depth of this displacement is not so simple; there is no ceremony made of men that gets to this depth.  I have to wonder about the line of bull we've been pitched by St. Paul for all these years, anyway.  Didn't he have mortal possession of the kind that would make me look free?  Surely, the way of love is for "other people"; even the Apostle had to wonder about what it meant, though he could describe it well.

So then, maybe I'm in the same camp as all the rest, but the others are simply not overwhelmed by the starkness of what is in fact the divide.  There is the temporal and the eternal, yes, but then the temporal is a subset of the eternal, so being part of it is being part of the eternal.  There are many arguments to the kind of self-persuasion that allows the whole crack to be paved over with extreme precision and lasting strength.  If that is foolish, well, then count me in with the fools.  Are the ones who claim true transcendence living a lie?  Are they suffused in the Marxist sense with potent opiate pharmacopeia?  Perhaps every being is by definition a creation worthy of such balm, upon what would otherwise be a needless world of pain.  They know the pain, just like I do, but also that they're relieved.

"Bo"

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