"I of my own knowledge…"

In the midst of revising Babe in the Woods I came across a quote from Emerson that might almost be a commentary on our political season, and certainly is a commentary on our times. Written in August 1847, if you can believe it.

The Superstitions of our Age:

The fear of Catholicism;

The fear of pauperism;

The fear of immigration;

The fear of manufacturing interests;

The fear of radicalism or democracy;

And faith in the steam engine.

Antarctic ice loss between 1996 and 2006, overlaid on a Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) mosaic image of Antarctica. The colors indicate the speed of the ice loss. Purple/red is fast. Green is slow. Image credit: NASA

Antarctica looks to us, on our maps, as one roughly circular continent. Ground-penetrating radar, however, shows it as two parts — to the East, the largest part, an elliptical-shaped mass. To the West, the Palmer peninsula and adjacent territories, actually an archipelago. Between the two, land that is actually below sea level. In other words, the ice conceals the fact that what seems to be one land mass is actually a land mass and adjacent islands.

I’m no scientist, but the map above seems to say that the ocean is reclaiming its own, melting the ice that does not sit on land. What does it say to you?

The other day, I sat down and sketched out the books I have written and those I have yet to write, and came up with the following list. This ought to keep me busy.

Titles of books not yet written are in [brackets]

Messenger George Chiari in Tibet learns about inner worlds

Babe in the Woods Angelo Chiari in Virginia does an Open Door

[Conspiracies of Men and God] George and Angelo fight to defend the C.T. Merriman Institute from a conspiracy to destroy it (more…)

First draft finished yesterday morning at about 111,000 words.

Now I need to let it sit for a few days, then re-read it making notes of what it needs to be a finished product. But I’m really happy with how it came out.

What really happens inside a mystey school? Or, to put it into contemporary terms, what happens when two dozen people spend a week together intending to learn how to access altered states at will? (more…)

Getting there. Into the home stretch, now. In the past few weeks, I have written 105,000 words, and have only a dozen sections more to write.

This is by far the best writing I’ve done. Where Messenger was a pretty straightforward tale with only a few major characters, Babe in the Woods is intricate and far-ranging, with more than two dozen characters. It’s the fictionalized story of my Gateway at The Monroe Institute, the week that I often describe as the beginning of my conscious life. (more…)

A friend draws my attention to this column in the blog The Archdruid Report that I was touting recently. Since I know that sometimes it can be just too much trouble even to follow a hypertext link – such as http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2007/08/twelfth-hour.html — I copied it below as a sort of free sample of important thinking that may appeal to you and – if you just read it! – ought to persuade you, as it does me, that here is a man who knows how to think and write and has wisdom to impart.

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Immersed as I am in finishing my novel, I have been neglecting this blog (not that there isn’t plenty here if you just go rummaging through the archives!). As a sort of space-holder until I can return, here’s a very nice piece my brother forwarded on to me. From http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/06/travel/06Personal.html?ex=1200546000&en=3254cd6c0d644770&ei=5070&emc=eta1

To Walk a Landscape Is to Know It

By HENRY SHUKMAN

Published: January 6, 2008

“COMES over one an absolute necessity to move. And what is more, to move in some particular direction. A double necessity then: to get on the move, and to know whither.” The unforgettable opening of D. H. Lawrence’s “Sea and Sardinia,” a work written in six weeks flat. “Why can’t one sit still?” he asks.

Why can’t one? For a million years we stalked elk, monkey, crab; we gathered nut, grub and leaf. We had to move to live. Then half a minute ago we stooped to sow seeds and the rest is history. Here we are, with the stock exchange, the Internet and the Hummer. Who wouldn’t want to bust out, to taste the air of the open range, to “swagger the nut-strewn roads,” as Philip Larkin put it, to be out in the weather, to feel the lay of the land vital beneath your boots? Travel is deep in the blood.

But we can still pull on pack and boot and head to the hills. Tread the coastal paths of Wales or Cornwall, say, where the day is one long rainbow of mist, crying gulls and sour heather, and evening brings a fishing harbor clustered in a cove, and a pub with a slate roof gleaming with sea spray, where pints may have been pouring for half a millennium and more. Or hike the Appalachian Trail, the Continental Divide — anyway travel with our own locomotion, and see close up what this planet has in it. Nothing brings satisfaction like that.

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