Glorious Air Ringing With Mozart's Laughter World Wide

Got to Round Valley late, glorious 64-degree air ringing like Mozart's laughter superseding vocal chords. High transmission frequency and atmospheric pressure, molecules dancing like moves in Hesse's Glass Bead Game transporting the essence worldwide. Biplane dipped and rose, once yards over water, camera not handy. No one I spoke to caught any, but someone saw a rainbow trout of about 28 inches.

Thought how wonderful it is to be able to just step out of stress and breathe in the air. I love the stress of work. But if I didn't walk away from it, I might talk like Ernest Hemingway: "They get you in the end."

Insane old man with his compromise. The wife he took to replace the love he destroyed. And though they called Thomas Aquinas "the Dumb Ox," and Hemingway never endured such slander, perhaps lack of patience drew the suspicion. It is ironic what became of Aquinas. A failure at school, he went on to become one of the greatest Western minds. So if your mama don't dance and your daddy don't rock 'n roll, you have to educate by chaff.

Which Aquinas named written work one day, tossing his aside for posterity. Can't say my parents were shut outs, since my dad, a musician, directed a rock concert in a church and later worked with Paul McCartney and other popular greats. 

Apparently, McCartney does not only do huge, corporate-sponsored concerts as if he never practices or participates otherwise. I don't know the details, but the American Boychoir School--Dad was the Director--is a world-touring organization that does not only perform sacred music. They have a large repertoire. 

Mom couldn't resist the thrillers either; she used to sing lines from rock songs passing through her head.

I'm the eldest child in the family photo below. Dad can be much more handsome than he looks. That's why J.C. Pearce claimed photography's an art. A camera takes an impression, is deceiving if the photo is mistaken as a "copy."

Camera shutter opened and closed so fast, the way we appeared vanished faster than the blink of an eye. Besides, the photo's a standing arrangement and no amount of research could exhaust the influences on what made it. I like how I appear ready to face anything. That's how I really was and often am, but the notion that the photo represents me suggests that problem with mistaking concrete images, as if they contain a Shakespearian character essence without unlimited room for improvements and corruptions alike.

I believe in character essence, but I firmly do not believe in the tragic flaw--Shakespeare's idea--as something absolute and unchanging that others may know and understand, if, on the contrary, something absolute does guide an individual's endurance to positive achievement.

Shakespeare was good at dramatizing fools.

So much disappointment in people, and confusion, can be eliminated by patience and what poet John Keats called negative capability, the suspension of false self-assertion and of passing judgment too early. Tragic results of interventions range from unnecessary breakups of relationships to lethal consequences. 

When Josey comes home, we'll begin to learn Roman eyes mean many and all things. It's your move, but I got the news. We play more than chess. A flat board never could settle such a score. Hesse's books remain good, but don't forget Supertramp. The band is second hand information from George Bernard Shaw. Shaw took it from William Henry Davies, when he wrote the preface to Davies Autobiography of a Supertramp. 

The name of the road you're on may mean many things.

Salmon Egg Finesse: Tips for Rainbow Trout and Brook Trout (Getting a Jump on Springtime)

It's simple, yet I spent an entire trout season, aged 14, trying to catch trout as my angling mentor did. I caught 13 trout the entire season, which caused me great distress. He caught some 260 trout that spring, not that we always fished together. And that was a relatively low figure compared to successive accomplishments.

The next season, I caught on. I caught over a hundred trout, my fishing log from 1976 stacked away somewhere. (But the log I use today is consistently the same format I used from 1975 forward.)

Here's what you do:

1. Use the lightest, shortest (not under 3 1/2 feet) super-ultralight you can purchase or make. Mine is so light it's a wand. I can bend the tip back against the rod.

2. Smallest spinning reel possible.

3. No more than two-pound test low diameter.

4. Typically use no more than the smallest snap available for weight and attach either one or two 2-pound test leaders to it with size 14 hooks. (I've caught double headers, but can cast a single salmon egg more than halfway across the North Branch Raritan River.)

5. Feel the current. That's the thing you really have to learn. Eventually, it's second nature to control drift. But perfect drifts don't always prove possible; you have to settle for the best monofilament or flourocarbon can perform with such variables as wind and stream current.

6. Life is not art; art is applied to life. This means that imperfection will happen, but persistent application overcomes slight disorder, which shouldn't be resented, but allowed. If current doesn't seem to run through your own body, so that you feel it subtly, and are in touch with it, you're not in the natural flow of experience you want to achieve and control.


That's basically it. Take along some tiny split shots (tin) for deep, strong currents. Forget salmon eggs for brown trout, although we have caught some this way, back when browns and rainbows got stocked together.

Burnham Park, Jockey Hollow Morristown National Historic Park, General Henry Knox, and Adventure

Skim ice covered most of the lower Burnham Park Pond yesterday. I drove up listening to "I Got the News," by Steely Dan, thinking of Fred Matero's telling me about catching the bass photographed here about a week ago. We both worried that these two ponds got decimated by fisherman taking fish to table, but his catching a bass in cold water is good to hear about.

 

If I were 17, I would have fished that open water the photograph indicates (below). Possibility gleamed, but I no longer take every opportunity I piece out. Just maybe I will fish Burnham after it thaws and before solid ice locks in.

 

Approaching a pond, rather than a reservoir like Round Valley, I always seem to revisit younger years, the quality of energy intimately vital, my sensibility freshened and original for touching upon youth: helpful for a writer who, rather than shunning conformity, can simply step aside and step back in to deal with what he needs in society.  

 

Fishing's no escape, although it can seem to be, as I recently noted Izaac Walton's notion. Centrally, Walton's idea was to get away from the social chaos of the British Civil War. Social inhibitions are freed when blazoned by a bluefish blitz or fully immersed in the wonder of a stream, and the freedom achieved stays with you for life. To get back out and fish involves awareness of freedom. If I didn't fish I would become more as what many intellectuals believe modern man is: self-divided. Some scholars claim Izaak Walton used the word angler as code for Anglican Christianity. My notion of an angler is Aristotelian. Angling is a form of activity, even if Arthur C. Clarke might chide in and say it is indistinguishable from magic. There are those moments. 

 

Catching fish under unusual conditions a limited specialty of my teens, I remember the open water yesterday. Trying new techniques, new waters, different weather and water conditions, these practices keep me fit in a world that is, after all, natural. Fred accomplished a feat last week catching that bass on a blade lure in cold, shallow water. With the mind applied, fishing is an exercise of practicality with results, and wider contemplation connects to the enormously varied and complex physical world. Health and energy fundamentally natural, the more civilized and developed aspects of life infuse with substance, insight, and motivation. Go and get these necessities to a good life, outdoors. 

 

13 years' working in bays year round as a shellfisherman--100 degree heat and 10 degree wind, wind chills near 30 below--I studied independently of academic programs, and nature threatened me in the end with enormous overkill. Philosopher Ayn Rand noted that a man can't live in a state of nature indefinitely. My life came perilously close to death because I was obsessed with learning what I called the secret of nature. I wanted to know directly the internal truth of matter. My return to normal arduous, gratitude for others' belief in me is greater than my resentments towards misunderstandings. I went to the very limit and survived because I'm like anyone else determined to live, yet always have believed some things are worth dying for if necessary.

 

That adventure in the wildernesses of the Jersey Shore with bays behind the islands extensive and solitary especially in January and February, was an adventure of the mind and spirit that continues to serve as a source for life, continuing normal and regular with excellent prospects for the future.

 

Anyone who immerses deeply enough in nature reaps lifetime reward. My wife jokes that I could drink from the Ganges. I have not been sick, besides a few ordinary colds, since I was 17, and the thought of a flu shot is anathema to me. Creativity is not limited to art. Create health and life's response is beautiful. And if severe conditions threaten, as they did against me at the end of my bay adventure, holdfast to consciousness within.

 

Burnham Park is a memorial to men who faced severity.

 

Last photograph of today's post features the copper plaque designation for important history right here at Burnham Park, many, many years before the impoundment of the ponds, when General Henry Knox of the Continental Forces of the American Revolution grazed horses where I catch pickerel and bass. I remember history associated with the Jockey Hollow Encampment constantly and used to take lunches in the Hollow itself, especially appreciating winters. An advantage of being on the road for work is history. Friedrich Nietzsche wrote a great a book on the subject: The Uses and Advantages of History for Life.

 

That plaque honors the American Revolution: completed, accomplished, achieved, and forever inscribed upon existence. I recall a certain poem by Robert Frost to describe my life as I feel about it at the moment. It's not that deeds do not really count; it's that no one wants to be left out.   

 

  

Mount Hope Historical Park Hike, The Roadhouse, The Birdhouse, and North Jersey History: Tubes of Salvador Dali, Carl Jung, Jim Morrison, and Others

Mount Hope Historical Park one of 38 total Morris County Parks not to be confused with pretty lawns and facilities for families who want only an easy stroll, plenty of the parks do have facilities and some even lawns, but they have wild spaces and some of them, like the land behind the community of Mount Hope, have only open, undeveloped space. But the defininig feature of this historical park was once a busy magnetite iron mining operation. The Mount Hope Tract developed in 1772 by John Jacob Faesch, the property had been in use since about 1725, but Faesch speculated on the productivity of the land--deep underneath it, to be exact; one of the mine shafts penetrates 2700 feet straight down. The genius of the early settlers of New Jersey to locate iron and copper is something I would want to learn more about, and about how a 2700 foot deep shaft got dug. That's stone beneath the topsoil for a large part. Mining still goes on today worldwide but not here, the many shafts and processing sites all finished in 1958. I'm most fascinated in learning about how minimal technology engineered the process. Today, all I have to do is Google to get some information on that, although online information sources tend to be sketchy.

I know what they did 200 years ago is analogous to what some writers and artists--Salvador Dali, Carl Jung, Jim Morrison are names that come instantly to mind--do from inside their own heads deep into the stuff of existence too fine and subtle to have outward stability like rock, yet objective and real no less. Tough to penetrate also. The ordinary mind is resistant and wards off the imps that offer clues to otherwise. And the artist who chooses to go his way has to overcome barriers, on occasion has to fight for his life against influences that would in fact kill him. For all three men I mentioned and many others, the stuff had very high monetary value in return. No one travels deep within for nothing, unless they lose themselves in the process once and for all. If ultimate loss is not possible, I do know some pains intensify to excruciating levels no human being wants.

I consider myself fortunate not because I haven't felt any. Everyone who tries to do this tunneling within does get lost sometimes and the thrill of feeling death near assures that the intrepid pursuit of success has value, guarded as well as the primitives in Indiana Jones armed their tunnel to kill anyone who would take the gold artifact. If you get through, the situation reverses and you find influences first opposing you, now on your side as if character is transformed, just as all friendships are seductions at first.

Those successful keep healthy ties to the outer world just as healthy miners do. My family greatly enjoys these many outings we take. Especially while driving, the conversation goes even more places than we do in fact, particularly involving many historical sights as springboards. Most of the history in North Jersey is not registered as official. I am notorious for forgetting where I am driving as I talk, whether in North Jersey or elsewhere. We stumble onto the likes of the gas station preserved from the 1950's or 60's in Stillwater, NJ, by following directions not found on maps or GPS. 

The Mount Hope hike short, maybe a mile-and-a-half ensued. My wife wants to return to walk elsewhere on the many trails and see more yet. The only moderately strenuous section of trail did get me into a bind of comparing my lack of strength to how easily I climbed this past summer, but only for a few minutes today. I stopped, got out my camera and began to shoot. This gave me a specific motivation and walking became much more energetic. To have thought of another time only sapped energy. I needed to be right there and with my camera I was there. I asked Patricia how she managed, and she had no answer, not in any distress at all, however. Matt, of course, is an old mountain goat.

The sun nearing horizon, we got back on Interstate 80 and off at State Highway 15 exit. Having crossed the border into Sussex, I put on my George Winston (pianist), The Music of the Doors c.d. That's all we listened to as we explored; the music diaphanous and exquisite, we felt wonderful to be away from all the chincy commercial sounds. I get away from those each day, but rolling with the hills as light diminished today felt especially unique. We came upon the Homestead Rest restaurant serendipitously, none of us recognizing the place from any previous travels, checked the menu, and had headed back out to see Grinnel Lake and drive into Franklin, intending to return so long as we didn't lose our way back. I use no GPS. I can't stand those devices and insist on using my head. I never refer much to maps either. I like to tabulate county road numbers and the like in my head and project maps from my mental screen, view the way from a range over the miles and make my choices. I did the likes of this when I was seven, directing my mother successfully back to the way home when she got lost in Trenton. I felt like a little airplane looking down, like one of those Hummingbird spy drones our government is turning loose on the citizenry now. 

Having pulled back into the Homestead Rest lot, I felt proud of myself just a little for having returned a half hour later, just as I had told the hostess we would. Whether she would have remembered at all unlikely, we arrived perfectly on time even though we did have to sort out the route numbers we drove and make a diversion, no distress in that.

We discovered that a scene from the movie In and Out got shot at this restaurant; the scene presents the restaurant as the Roadhouse Bar. Tom Sellick, Kevin Kline and Matt Damon star. We had happened on the restaurant never having traveled that section of Route 94 before, we reckoned, besides that--maybe--my son and I rode past the previous summer, driving between Little Swartswood Lake and the Paulinskill River at Blairstown. If we did, we never noticed this steakhouse with the largest onion rings I have ever seen and eaten.

Good thing I shot the birdhouse. Certainly not the bird, not with a gun, that is, although who knows what Jim Morrison meant by that on An American Prayer, except to take the clue from his interest in film, "Someone shot the bird," might very well mean with a camera. Tell you this, that little owl could mean many things as a timeless symbol of philosophy, but it only happened at a place named "The Roadhouse Bar" for a movie. If you're privy to Morrison's interests, you know film was big for him, and "Roadhouse Blues" one of The Doors biggest hits. When I unlocked the car doors I had noticed this screech owl on the fence in front of the hood of our car, just staring at us and refusing to budge. I went straight to the trunk, opened it and got out my camera. Darkness had fallen after quite an afternoon of here and there on more levels than the physical. The photograph is below.

The Birdhouse photographed long before going to "The Roadhouse."

"Someone shot the bird in the afternoon dance show."

Religion and Angling, Daydreaming in Class, Making Dreams Real, and Making the Real Dream

As a tournament bass fisherman in my teens with a B.A.S.S. local chapter and New Jersey State Federation, I was totally naive to the influence of religion on angling. Not that tournaments would have anything to do with it, but that it now seems as if the whole game is a Christian crusade. I grew up Episcopal, had heard the fishers of men phrase, was granted permission to fish the ponds owned by the Princeton Day School eight miles from home by the Headmaster who sang in one of the choirs my father directed, but I never associated religion and fishing and didn't consider myself religious, although I loved to perform music. I associated science and fishing, never confusing fishing with science, but keeping a relationship to my passionate interest in science developed between the ages of four and 11. I put the image of Christ up for this post not becauase I worship it, but because it symbolizes taking everything in life within and embracing it all as a complete, happy abundance right here in this world. That's what the outstretched arms symbolize rather than wavering over a worshipping herd of sheep. And if you read the Bible, Jesus says as much himself about abundance.

I went to Lynchburg College in Virginia because bass fishing is better in the south, although by the time I selected the school, I had already abandoned ambitions to continue with my outdoor writing and also abandoned ambitions to hit the national tournament circuit and reap those rewards. I had won plenty of trophies on the local scene against men mostly twice my age and certainly had more energy than required to fish at the national level. I gave it all up to pursue a literary career. Just turned 17, I had a strange experience motivating me to write a short story entitled The Dead. I had not yet heard of James Joyce. I wrote the story entire without getting out of my chair, then regarded it with profound curiosity. It took nearly another year to be convinced that novel writing was what I wanted to guide my life towards, early in my senior year.

Some months into that last of high school, I had another experience, which did not impress me as strange. Our Western Civilization class was assigned to write a paper on Napolean Bonaparte, mine finished in about 15 minutes as if I took it straight from dictation, except that I was conscious of making subtle adjustments to arrange its ideation congruently with my own. But despite my ability to turn out astonishing papers in other classes also, which won special distinction from teachers all through high school, I graduated in the center of my class, ranked 143 of 286, my problem holding attention and doing homework held grades down all along. I daydreamed all day long while sitting in classrooms with distracting artificial lighting. Since I never figured out how to pay attention and conceptually integrate class material to an A standard, I fused experience by imagination while thinking over myself and over the whole academic program. On occasion, during almost any class period, I knew just when to snap out of my distance and attend an issue. And of course a B minus grade overall isn't bad, but I endured school very conscious of the state attendance mandate and feeling in disagreement with it; overwhelmingly most of what I learned was from outside the state funded academic program. I did very well at disciplining myself to pay attention in class my first semester of college--because we paid money for this. And I made sure to quit college as soon as I became certain I would not do as well there, as to go away and study great books alone. 

And what's the use of all that religion if it doesn't bind together your whole life as a seamless completion, reality and dreams together, dreams becoming reality and reality becoming dreams? A happy life, in other words. A happy life in spite of all the persuasions to the contrary, in spite of the "common unhappiness" Sigmund Freud suggested people should experience, for example, and other dissuasions against the human experience, happy and free of worshiping anything that asks you to sacrifice for it, or offers to be a sacrifice for you.

Besides, Jesus stood before Pontius Pilate and refused. He never offered himself; he did just the opposite by keeping his word. True to his own logic, he died just as would any hero who knows that some things are worth dying for. It could be said that this is a most profound paradox because his death on the cross proved to be his central contribution. But the essence of the matter is that Jesus challenged authority and refused to back down.

Banks of Green Willow George Butterworth Complete Living in a Beauracratic Age

Some anglers experience fishing as a get away. Isaak Walton, author of The Compleat Angler in 17th century Britain, wrote "Let us go a fishing," as it was a way to exit the turmoil of his times between Protestant and Anglican Christianity, an all out civil war. I live my life as seamlessly as possible rather than compartmentalize it as if my mind were a beurocrat in charge. Modern people typically fragment themselves into conflicting interests as confused as Congress. Rather than separate fishing from the rest of my life, I consider the crisis of civilization we all live through now and simply recognize that nature is not and never has been a place apart from what we produce. Even Neolithic man a hundred thousand years ago impacted the environment deeply by use of fire to aid in hunting. When I was very young, ten years old, I had an obsessive desire to experience pristine wilderness. The way I worded this: Nature completely untouched by the man made. I spent plenty of time in wild places, but in this respect I seemed to spend more time very deep in my own mind attempting to imagine a perfectly pristine place, but actually discovering the purest reality that exists: the untrammeled human spirit. No better purity exists than within the being responsible for spoiling the environment. The dull theme of so much environmentalism--that man is an evil, destructive being--is not true.

George Butterworth is another British figure associated wtih war, having died fighting in World War One. His best known musical composition, Banks of Green Willow, expresses what it is to be an eternally youthful angler better than any other music I know. I hear no longing or yearning in the music; it is entirely present as if a goal inherant in all eternity is reached. The clarinet is subtly distant, as if a slow breeze is heard around a stream bend. The flute solo, following, is the very soul standing in open air sunlit on banks of green willow.

Existence cannot come from nothing; present time always implies past and future. So existence is eternal. The flute solo in Banks of Green Willow sounds like something that can happen not once, but over and over again, eternally possible. The earth is sometimes referred to mysteriously as this earth, as if planets like it can happen again and again forever, even if separated by whole, recurrent universes, trillions of years. What is a trillion years to eternity? The important value is your own life. If you don't live it now, will you live it a trillion years in the future?

Long Beach Island, North Carolina Outer Banks, California, Santa Fe, Comparisons, Northeast Corridor Why Planet and Industry are United

You can tell by the pictures I loaded--all from the Outer Banks, North Carolina--where my heart is. (Two are Chesapeake Bay/Bridge/Tunnel, Virginia.) When I shellfished for 13 years off Long Beach Island, New Jersey, I had a camera only for the last six years, and used it little. I was focused on studies and writing and wanted distraction neither from my photography hobby or fishing. Shellfishing about four hours a day, sometimes two for months running, was enough. Otherwise, I kept active at all sorts of enjoyments with my girlfriend. It's worth putting this stuff online. Robert Plant's line comes to mind from "Oh, Rosie Girl," or "How Many More Times?" That there's no need to hide or run.

First vacationed on the Outer Banks 1969. More and less ever since.

My quandary began in 1982 when I really got serious about clamming as the way to earn a living while I studied. I wasn't sure if I should clam on LBI or on the Outer Banks. Communication back then was not like today. I really didn't know if clamming existed on the Banks until I visited there in 1996. But I had suspected.

Outer Banks pure, more solitary, aesthetically superior for natural form, have deep, deep memories of mine embedded.

But I imagined society on the Banks would be lacking.

Long Beach Island clammers not only associated with one another by respectful distance. The year round hard core who worked in, not on, the water even in January--all 20 somethings besides one or two early 30's--more and less shared a free spirit philosophy.

I was the only one intensely intellectual, although one of us saved enough of his earnings to earn a Psy. D. in psychology from Rutgers. I didn't speak like an "intellectual," nor was I only "one of the guys." The purpose of my studies involved eventually making money. Writing is all I can really do. I do a million things besides, but not one of the things I do isn't in the service of my purpose as writer.

Hurricane Sandy virtually left all the boardwalks behind us, just as if Bruce Springsteen foresaw this decades before. But like any society, New Jersey rebounds. Twentieth century Jewish Prophet, philosopher, and anthropologist, Martin Buber, wrote that resistance sustains until God crashes the very roof over the head. But fortunately, no tree fell on our house, though climate change deniers could get a rude awakening. Buber spoke hyperbole at not very far remove from reality. First thing out of my mouth when my brother Rick phoned the morning after 90 mph winds had raked his house a mile from the beach: "Jobs are created." Why not be upbeat? That's how things get done.

I like New Jersey more than North Carolina, even though I have a deep, deep sentimental attachment to that southern state where I played the radio on stations and found songs I loved before Starbuck's song, "Moonlight, Feels Right," came out, as if in answer. I always felt I could do without scattered doses of potion, and have done without this form of vernacular sunshine, but at least the song had an association to a girl way, way back in 9th grade. Opens with an electronic sound wave like the modification of a steeple bell.

I wouldn't live in this state if I didn't feel its industrial challenge is worthwhile, at least by the fundamental principle of the free mind, which applies to art and business alike. I know about Superfund projects and lesser environmental disasters, just as I am wholly optimistic about the open space revolution in this state. 

Philadelphia was just 60 or so miles away when I lived on LBI. My girlfriend Maureen lived on the city's outskirts. We traveled back and forth constantly, sometimes listening to the rock DJ with "the Animal," on WMMR. From Philadelphia, we traveled north and west in Pennsylvania. We always got around to various places. I always noted in my accounts that I was "at Lawrence," rather than "at my parents'" when I visited my hometown township of that name. I had thought of leaving it all for a new start in California, then I considered Santa Fe, flew out there, and found the place a bore. LBI is a resort fantasy in a way, but I thought of it better than Santa Fe. 

The wilderness of bays sustained me, and having the Boulevard to drive, usually just minutes or so a day connected me with any and all venues. With Maureen, the Island's attractions always became charming. But towards the end I called the whole place a backwater. Not the bays. The bays are a part of the planet inseparable from the whole. I found my life in them. Even more than I had found my life on Stony Brook of Princeton Township and the ponds of Princeton Day School. 

But I had to go. And now I drive 150 mile weekdays through some of the busiest of the Northeast Corridor. No backwater. It's the most important place in the world.

12/1/12 Put a picture of Maureen and I up at the bottom of the post. Why not? Don't think she'll try to sue me. :-)

Check out the tan! December bronze. January, February, and March too--year round sun!