Volunteer Reptile Care, Aristotle Implies the Good of Environmentalism

Volunteer reptile care for N.J. Audubon was my idea--and a naturalist's--for my son. The notion coincided. If you've read earlier posts, you may know that Matt has been interested in and endeavoring with reptiles and amphibians from the age of four. Sigmund Freud famously wrote that children live in the unconscious of their parents. When I was a boy, I went into the local wilds alone and actually collected reptiles, amphibians, fish, and a variety of anthropods. Today in New Jersey, it's illegal to collect reptiles and amphibians. My son and I are on the side of the law. Our field trips involve observation and photography. But in 1970, I had at least 20 terrariums and aquariums in my parents' basement. Intensely interested in zoology and reading constantly at the age of nine--Aristotle most significantly--I aspired to study animals in captivity, as I phrased my idea, and attempted to produce a complex methodology of study. At that young age I did learn that I was not ready for that level of abstraction and procedure.

 

Originally, Matt spent time with the naturalist and the reptiles while I hiked the sanctuary or read as I waited. But for the past three years or so, Matt and I have been a team, taking weekend escapes for a half hour, sometimes an hour. This time has at least the value of all the week in between. Sometimes I go alone and it's just the same. Matt's busy with many activities in his teens now.

After Taking Photos, I Turned and Breathed, Alone at Round Valley Reservoir

Alone again at Round Valley, I could have been a thousand miles from civilization, hadn't I the notion lurking in the background of my mind about the reservoir's nature as an impoundment. But wonderful nature this is and I felt no subtraction at all. Surface calm like a sheet of ice, my steel weight penetrated surface tension with a simple plunk, dropped 20 feet or so by the inevitability of physical law, and I set the rod between stone upright to attend to photos and writing while I waited.

After taking photos, I turned and breathed as though the intake of my chest had a subtle equivalence to the distance of those hills, feeling the space between to be a presence.

 

 

Talking Heads, Eternal Love, Music of all Kinds and The Rainbow of Rock Music at Round Valley Reservoir

Couple of weeks ago, I pulled into my neighborhood to hear "This Must be the Place (Naive Melody)" by The Talking Heads as it played on the radio. Appreciating the artfulness, the melody reminded me of a girl I knew in high school. I walked inside my house and ordered from Amazon Speaking in Tongues by the Heads. For the past week on the road, I've been absorbed in the music, especially "Pull up the Roots."

Poet, statesman, and scientist, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe wrote that he was God enough to descend to the daughters of men. Such apparently pompous language doesn't do well today, so the Heads seem to express the same notion in an oblique way. Baby likes the people playing suggests it. Women put the checks on men's God possession, which, without the community implied by children, would alienate a man from the earthly mortal he is, or move him to commit unjust acts. Adolph Hitler believed his mission was ordained by Jesus Christ.

That may be a strange way to interpret Goethe and the Heads. But what I really mean is Goethe wasn't being ironic, as if what he really felt was contempt for women, while being one with God was what mattered instead. He meant the whole of life, sex and divinity alike, are valuable. God allows rather than denies. But it can be taken another way and that's the twist I played with. The religious righteousness motivating some has led to the likes of the Nazis who wanted the people killing for a thousand years' glory of their Fuhrer. If any worshiped Hitler it was sick indeed. If a similar fate befalls the United States, it won't last a thousand years here, either. I think of Albert Camus's participation in the French Resistance, and like anything bred of the streets, it speaks in tongues, which I'll do for the rest of the post as if in prayer.

I have to hear the Head's instrumentation as the vocals slur, partially producing novel lingual patterns, and certainly challenging rational faculty by interesting twists, rather than my getting much of anything by reading the lyrics on the web. The Heads are masters of driven beat and subtle percussion. Both techniques accompany youthful zest, impulse itself not being something to repress, but master by allowance. I have seen sophisticated dance in this music. "Pull up the Roots" features rising and falling tones--the crescendo of the refrain may be transcendent--that give the impression of wise, knowing restraint.

Whatever happens is fine with me if I do my best, which isn't to say I wouldn't like to see people do better. Whatever is finer than the place we live in is simply its imagined abstraction, implying the possibility of achievement. I breathe Round Valley air as I fish while otherwise reading Camus, and my lungs expand while I know that no division exists between this atmospheric dome and outer space. I feel astonished, as if I have taken my first breath of life. The dark side of the moon is a return because it is embraced by the planet I stand upon. I like dipping bait in this water of window pane clarity. I "still" fish like I did as a young boy.

I spend hours all week on the road absorbed in music. My first semester of college, I took a classical music class, and naturally felt interested intensely. Music had always been in my life, my father a musician. The professor was a wonderful man who told the class that a college education is necessary to understand how the world we live in works and has come to be. And then he looked directly into my eyes and said, "Unless you are a genius." This wasn't really news to me. I had been thinking very hard on what to do as my alternative to the conventional route of professionalism. In his notebooks, Camus remarks that a bookshelf is a university.

Musical appreciation, the professor explained, is itself at least a talent. I add that it is an interaction between form, energy, information; an activity which, of course, partakes in reality, since music heard is the fact, although music is not only received but enacted. I pointed out in a recent post that existence is eternal. But the orchestration of reality that a fine appreciation of music implies is limited as an event, a situation like any other. Pink Floyd is famous for pointing out in Dark Side of the Moon the senses are all life can be. This is not to depress, not in my experience, but to remind the listener that everything does come down to the ordinary.

Otherwise, I might as well be the Voyager Space Probe, taking in information as well as letting it go, revolving observations and ideations like a wheel inside a wheel, which is absurd. I had a friend in the choir my father directed who absolutely loved the B-52's "Rock Lobster," similar to the Talking Heads, which he may have also appreciated. Euphony happens with another or others; it never really happens entirely alone. Love--whatever and whomever it's for--is a cosmic power felt, but is not in essence an emotion. Evaluations, emotions about things, people, situations are bodily, while love moves the spirit beyond, before it must come back. Love is the unifying  power of existence, which human beings enact as if they are gods, whatever or whomever loved absolute, a yes to something eternal, which cannot be negated. 

Values certainly may seem to get negated because affirmations must always slip away as time overtakes the past. But the return, at least of the essence of people and things we love, is inevitable.   

I was not the greatest vocalist in my father's Episcopal choir, although I sang with passion and by rigorous criticism. My father had favorite performers. His artistic standards stood at the highest level in his profession, the choir world class. A boy two years my senior expressed artistic excellence as a soloist, which I didn't envy, but admired greatly. I always understood that my true asset as a chorister (for 13 years) was my head. If I used it primarily to sing, I certainly did also to understand my situation.

A woman with bows in her hair has no comparison: violin tones of a bow on strings tie indelible knots, just as physics theory suggests that the universe is a string vibration like music. Nothing is better than this.

To consider value, it's important to remember no known entity in the universe is as complex and powerful as the individual human brain. All the computers in the world are like Thomas Aquinas's naming his own work chaff by comparison to the brain: certainly computers prove worthwhile, but not better than man himself.

Round Valley all to myself today. I caught the 24-inch rainbow photographed.  

The Idea of America and the Possibility of the Mind

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."