Plucking the Stone

The deep mind underlies the superficial mind. Much as the stones on the bottom of a clear, swiftly flowing stream are blurred by the rushing water above, the deep mind can be detected, but not directly experienced except by tactile sensation. It forms the substrate over which the everyday mind blithely and blindly courses. When the irregularities of younger, less polished rocks–perhaps recently kicked into the stream by a startled deer or careless hiker–produce increased friction with the water, creating a minute disturbance of flow almost too small to detect and perhaps bloodying the plantar surface of your wading feet, you take more notice, but the visual input is no more clear than before. Mind you, the water is extremely clean, but the current obscures detail.

Imagine now that you could halt the downstream flow, just for a second or two. What would you see? That’s the deep mind. You can find it by carefully moderating your relentless speed-surfing of neural circuits. Slow, or even stop the current, and pluck one smooth stone from the bottom.

•  •  •

Note: None of this applies to Petaluma. 

© Pseudocognitive

State of the Unfocused Blog: Random Spew No. 222

A motorcycle rider on a road near Rio Vista, March 2009

On this, the arbitrary first day of a cyclical series of phenomena, I make (for a legion of imaginary subscribers) my 3rd Annual State of the Unfocused Blog address. Bear with me, please. It’s brief.

Trying to constrain myself to topics and styles of expression that might provoke the interest of large numbers of people has produced no tangible results. Instead, I’ve spent several months posting stuff I’ve already written, much of it nothing more than episodic thought convulsions that sound much better inside my head than on a page. For some reason, my need to have others read the stuff  I spew randomly on this blog continues unabated, which should probably tell me something about myself I don’t really want to know.

Cobra slash-cuts on my old bike

My  ex-fish Bob, eaten by a heron

Locke, California

I could go pseudo-scientific and try to apply some kind of ridiculous Freudian model to this perplexing need, but to what end? I’d just end up making excuses for myself. No, the simplest model is generally the best place to start.
I can write and take photographs just well enough to know how deficient I am in both skill sets. I can look at a photo and describe the characteristics of technical proficiency, compositional artistry, and subject matter context that make it work (or not work) for me as a viewer, and I can occasionally produce something better than a snapshot myself, but there’s a wall separating me from excellence that is every bit as robust as the one that divides decent little league players from Hall of Fame big leaguers. I’m generally able to write a sentence that’s more grammatically correct than not, and I can occasionally turn a phrase that describes or expresses something in a unique, effective, or meaningful way, but that’s it. No cohesive whole has ever emerged and it never will. My need for public approval is probably a result of finally realizing that truth. 

That way

Read this stuff if you want – it’s a good experience to have others pay attention to what I say (and I do appreciate those who have done so already). But if there’s just too much chaff to sift through for the two or three tiny seeds you might find, feel free to skip it. From now on, I post for the audience of me, which is probably the way it’s supposed to be anyway.

Hood, California.   38.368302, -121.519232

Leaving Hood

Click for larger images.

©Pseudocognitive

A lightly guarded interface

I have no answer for whatever question I should be thoughtfully considering at this time. Until I can think of one, here's another of the several documented entrances to Hell in my area. I snapped this shot while coming out of the pharmacy a few days ago. I can't recall ever seeing a manhole cover quite like it before, a fact that is germane to nothing.

© Pseudocognitive

ATTENTION! ATTENTION!

Down at the Cross Road

There is nothing new to report. Endocranial circuitry continues to experience technical difficulties. No matter--I think that I and three or eight other individuals are the only people who look at this collection of ill-advised ramblings anyway.


That is all.


Post and photos © Pseudocognitive

Meatball Photography

Valuable self-awareness, or a boatload of philosophical crap: An examination of why I actually like a few of my pictures...

I like this picture. I selected it from thousands of others I have that range from very ordinary to downright bad (with the occasional exception). I used to shoot these pictures during brief stops on motorcycle rides within a 150 mile radius of home. The geographical limit was not imposed by an ankle monitor and  parole officer, although my 99 year old grandmother was a parole officer for the State of California until her retirement in about 1975. It was and is a self-regulatory boundary that makes no sense to most observers.

In "M*A*S*H" (the Robert Altman film, not the TV series, which was okay for the first few seasons but went downhill fast when Trapper John left, Henry was killed en-route back to the States, and Hawkeye devolved into a sanctimonious caricature of Phil Donahue phony liberalism), they referred to their brand of intervention as "meatball surgery," a term that's been stuck in my head for decades. They operated on soldiers with horrific injuries under primitive conditions and did the best they could and then sent the survivors to a rear area for better treatment. I have used this as a metaphor for all kinds of completely unrelated processes throughout my life, mainly because once something gets into my head I can never, ever get it out of there. I call my style of picture-taking "meatball photography" because I do it with very basic gear under extreme time constraints. Once in a while, this method produces something that seems to be enhanced, rather than compromised, by my peculiar procedure. The gritty, contrasty qualities of the above photo were influenced by this method. It's a state of mind, I think. I want to really go off the deep end and make some connection to Steinbeck's peepholes and the perspective they provide on "...whores, pimps, gamblers and sons of bitches," in other words, "Saints and angels and martyrs and holy men." I'll avoid that particular exercise in grandiosity right now, though, and simply say that once in a while my fractious mental processes work to my benefit. I count myself lucky if that happens for maybe one shot in every thousand. That's why I like this particular picture - its imperfections mirror my own.

© Pseudocognitive