Symtop

a body expectant

possible thoughts fill my chest with unease,

high in the guts below my understanding

this warms and then sinks,

tickle and a closing off, it is, it is ‘palpable anticipation’

in joy the smile, grief the wail, mind

my always true imagination.

only the expectancy of despair has this central corporeal shift. Feel it.

recognized.

skull and conjecture

I had a bone from a skull my brother snapped up from the Parisian catacombs. He stole it in good faith. I had it in a little silver container from India, that and a bit of cotton on which the fragment of skull sat. I’m not sure what part of the head the bone came from, but it was shaped a little bit like Bulgaria or somewhere like that. The skull was sort of a light brown meets clay meets tinge of orange and purple, depending on what mood I was in, oh, and depending on what angle and light source I viewed it with/under/in. I should have taken a picture of it. It was about 1 and a half inches long, which is American, and 3.81 cm using the current metric unit of measurement--- most Canadians my age brag about metric measurements yet rarely use it, or even know how to. The skull piece was pretty thin, relative to what I conceive of contrasting ‘not-thinednesses’, so to speak.

I began to think about the human attached to the skull and about his brains, in particular the ideas in his brains, created by the time and lives that surrounded him. I thought it was probably not in his then best interests to have a missing chunk of his skull way over in the New Country, held as a memento of a trip never travelled by the bearer. I figured even in his death, his living wishes could probably be surmised in some degree to a more fitting end, that is to say, closer to what he would have wanted done with his skull. From that I concluded his head must return to the Earth as soon as I could. I leashed up Newton and went to Millcreek on a particularly calm, summer day and walked to a bed of rocks exposed on the ever-changing creek bed. I found a rock I liked, which is very easy for me to do, and placed the skull fragment into the emptiness of which the now uprooted rock created. The rock, it went into the silver tin atop the cotton. I closed the tin, and bent over the skull on the creek bed.

Momentarily, I felt pleased at the notion of doing a man from a different time and place a favour. Then my mind wandered and I imagined I did him a greater disservice because he probably believed in the Rapture and a big chunk of his head would be lost somewhere in Alberta come that glorious, sickening day in a place that never existed in his time and he wouldn’t get it back. “Whose got my Golden Arm,” ghost-stories would be replaced by sad Christian French men on a holy mission to be once again anatomically whole. Again another thought entered my mind, what if some kid finds a chunk of this skull and somehow, no matter how preposterous the notion is, he takes it to his dad who is an anthropologist-type and he instantly recognizes it as being human, well surely this scholar would bring it to the police and the police would start a full-blown investigation into what they would believe to be a murder, and they would keep the skull locked up in the stations evidence room even further removed from the cadaver’s once living wishes. Finally I decided to stop all further conjecture and continue my walk. Hopefully I did right in the scheme of burial rights and personal requests, even if the time separating the completion is massive and the fulfillment details only shoddily assumed. R.I.P. bone, yep, R.I.P., man.

Spring Walk 07

Newton, shot with my new camera, yeeee

Alberta man infected with rabies

A guy who lives fairly close to Edmonton was recently infected with the Rabies virus, and it's past the point of no return. So, he'll die a fairly nasty death. It would certainly be a frightening way to go. The picture on the right is of an unknown man with a bad case of full blown rabies, which is always lethal when the initial symptoms shown up. For more on the disease check this wikipedia link


Here's the sad story from the CAN west news wire:

EDMONTON - A man from east central Alberta is gravely ill with rabies after failing to seek treatment after a bat bit him last summer.

The man was sleeping in his rural home last August when a bat entered the house and bit him on the shoulder. The man, whom health officials have not identified, apparently realized he had been bitten but did not immediately seek medical help.

In January, he experienced pain in his shoulder where the bite occurred. He has since developed symptoms of rabies, including paralysis, difficulty swallowing and convulsions. He is in serious condition in hospital, but there is little doctors can do for him now.

"There's no specific treatment once the neurological symptoms occur," said Dr. Karen Grimsrud, deputy provincial health officer.

"We want to emphasize that if someone is exposed to a wild animal, they should seek medical treatment," she said. "That's the important message from this unfortunate case."

The treatment for people bitten by a potentially rabid animal consists of a series of shots given over a month. The injections, called post-exposure prophylaxis, are "close to 100percent effective if they are given close to the time of the bite," Grimsrud said.

The last time an Albertan died of rabies was in 1985 when a bat bit a 25-year-old Calgary man while he was working near Smith, 220 kilometres north of Edmonton. He died in Vancouver about five months after being infected.

In 2005, almost 130 people across Alberta received the post-exposure treatment. Most of those people had been bitten by dogs or cats that could not be located and observed for rabies symptoms, said Grimsrud.

While there is no known case of rabies being transmitted between humans, health officials are investigating whether anyone had direct contact with the bodily fluids or saliva of the man after he was infected with the disease. The general public is not at risk, Grimsrud said.

multi-exposure of lusty things

Gamesmanship

(all photographic information is unknown)

All games are governed by rules. I think of games in relationships and cringe. But I guess that games must exist like anything that's generally known to exist. Like any law of nature, gravity or instinct, or reflex; like snow piles in parking lots resembling mountains for the same forces that shape mountains shape them; or the blood-cell shape of new, moving, river-ice, pouring past the banks and bridges, pushed and pulled. Big horn sheep butting heads-- Whyte Avenue yob culture. The forces on everything are the same, and somewhere we're all shaped by these forces, and are, well, forced to act accordingly.

Patience is finite. Love is often interrupted and dissuaded by the lack of practical, relational progress. The same punched-in-the-gut feeling is known by all jilted lovers, across lovers.

Prophesy is real, but it''s by no means supernatural, nor is it a proclamation of genuine inevitability, it's merely a case of perceiving the slight, met with innate anticipation of outcome. You can feel the end, and by each acknowledgment, and each contemplation thereof, the end slides closer. Feeling the end is natural for most; if you focus on it too much though it cheats you and becomes a self-mutilating/self-fulfilling prophesy. You can see too much, you're perception becomes skewed and your motives jealous. Select insecurities further provide a basis for more gamesmanship, which in turn creates the reaction of increasing suspicions, and decreasing acceptance. Unconditional love is at last very conditional. If romantic, the truth stings you, and yet again you ponder the inconsequential, the fantastical, the very fountain of youth: a world without responsibility, a world without end.

In moments like these you falsely praise the possibility of such loss and like a fool you prematurely congratulate yourself for future conquests not yet attempted. But the pain you've known twice before will actually floor you, even killing you a little bit. And then, as before, you will stand up and walk away--- hopefully more prepared for your next endeavour, but hopefully not too acclimatized by the trauma of relationships, for that is pure bitterness.

Jung on Instinct and Consciousness

If psychic life consisted only of self-evident matters of fact – which on a primitive level is still the case – we could content ourselves with a sturdy empiricism. The psychic life of civilized man, however, is full of problems; we cannot even think of it except in terms of problems. Our psychic processes are made up to a large extent of reflections, doubts, experiments, all of which are almost completely foreign to the unconscious, instinctive mind of primitive man. It is the growth of consciousness which we must thank for the existence of problems; they are the Danaan gift of civilization. It is just man’s turning away from instinct – his opposing himself to instinct – that creates consciousness. Instinct is nature and seeks to perpetuate nature, whereas consciousness can only seek culture or its denial. Even when we turn back to nature, inspired by a Rousseauesque longing, we “cultivate” nature. As long as we are still submerged in nature we are unconscious, and we live in the security of instinct which knows no problems. Everything in us that still belongs to nature shrinks away from a problem, for its name is doubt, and wherever doubt holds sway there is uncertainty and the possibility of divergent ways. And where several ways seem possible, there we have turned away from the certain guidance of instinct and are handed over to fear. For consciousness is now called upon to do that which nature has always done for her children – namely, to give a certain, unquestionable, and unequivocal decision. And here we are beset by an all-too-human fear that consciousness – our Promethean conquest – may in the end not be able to serve us as well as nature.

Problems thus draw us into an orphaned and isolated state where we are abandoned by nature and are driven to consciousness. There is no other way to open us; we are forced to resort to conscious decisions and solutions where formerly we trusted ourselves to natural happenings. Every problem, therefore, brings the possibility of a widening of consciousness, but also the necessity of saying goodbye to childlike unconsciousness and trust in nature. This necessity is a psychic fact of such importance that it constitutes one of the most essential symbolic teachings of the Christian religion. It is the sacrifice of the merely natural man, of the unconscious, ingenious being whose tragic career began with the eating of the apple in Paradise. The biblical fall of man presents the dawn of consciousness as a curse. And as a matter if fact it is in this light that we first look upon every problem that forces us to greater consciousness and separates us even further from the paradise of unconscious childhood. Every one of us gladly turns away from his problems; if possible, they must not be mentioned, or, better still, their existence is denied. We wish to make our lives simple, certain, and smooth, and for that reason problems are taboo. We want to have certainties and no doubts—results and no experiments—without even seeing that certainties can arise only through experiment. The artful denial of a problem will not produce conviction; on the contrary, a wider and higher consciousness is required to give us the certainty and clarity we need.

-Carl Jung, The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche, The Stages of Life