Past and future


Original article at http://www.postandcourier.com/news/2011/dec/18/exhibit-highlights-hemingway-prose/

Exhibit highlights Hemingway prose

BY BRIAN HICKS

bhicks@postandcourier.com

Sunday, December 18, 2011

In the spring of 1935, Ernest Hemingway was lamenting the placement of his home on a list of Key West tourist attractions.

His regular Esquire magazine column was devoted to his tongue-in-cheek protest that he had no desire to compete with the Turtle Crawls (No. 3 on the map), the open-air aquarium (No. 9) or the Sponge Lofts (No. 13).

“Yet there your correspondent is at number 18 between Johnson’s Tropical Grove (number 17) and the Lighthouse and Aviaries (number 19),” Hemingway wrote. “This is all very flattering to the easily bloated ego of your correspondent but very hard on production.”

The idea of Hemingway actually writing must have seemed a curious concept to readers of the day.

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My friend Larry Giannou sent me this link to Graham Hancock’s presentation given to the 2012 Tipping Point Prophets Conference with the comment, “Thought you might enjoy this” — He was so right!

I had the pleasure of listening to Hancock, Robert Bauval, Colin Wilson, John Anthony West, Rand Flem-Ath and others in 1995, at a conference called Return to the Source. And I have for years been an interested and indeed impatient observer of the process of trying to get what has been called Forbidden Archaeology into the mainstream.

Watch this one and a half hour presentation and two things will likely happen. 1) You’ll be fascinated, and 2) you’ll start looking for more on the subject, which these days (courtesy of the Internet) is easier than ever to find.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X4k8pdJ2so4&feature=player_embedded#at=199

Reader Dave Stephens posted a long reply to my “Tapping Into the Cosmic Internet” entry, and  asked questions that were sufficiently interesting that I asked, and got, his permission to post them here as a separate post, since not everybody reads the comments people send.

I started to reply, then realized that I didn’t know what to say. Of course, the obvious answer was to let the guys speak for themselves, so that’s what I will do, with my initial comments inserted within brackets [like this], and theirs at the end.

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More of the kind of theory that is interesting to consider, regardless whether it can have practical consequences in your life. As it happens, this one can, once you tease out its implications. From http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-lanza/does-the-past-exist-yet-e_b_683103.html

Does the Past Exist Yet?

Evidence Suggests Your Past Isn’t Set in Stone

by Robert Lanza, M.D.

Recent discoveries require us to rethink our understanding of history. “The histories of the universe,” said renowned physicist Stephen Hawking “depend on what is being measured, contrary to the usual idea that the universe has an objective observer-independent history.”

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My May column for The Meta Arts magazine, entitled “This Change May Now Be Close At Hand,” may be found at  http://www.themetaarts.com/pages/frankdemarco.html

This story, courtesy of the Weekly Science Report put together by Steve Detwiler, makes me laugh, it is so naïve. “To me at least, finding these great paintings from so far back in time is a bit like finding an iPad with no previous evidence of the development of electronics. How does humanity plunge so suddenly into this great sea of creativity? Unless there is a whole history of extremely old and not-very-good cave paintings still to be discovered, we are left with the sudden birth of a fully formed pictorial art.”

At least the writer is thinking, but his assumptions are so ridiculous. They are worth noticing only because he shares those assumptions with what is called “science” – which, in context, means “currently popular opinions among mainstream scientists,” which sounds, and is, a lot less authoritative!

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So You Think Your Life Was Wasted — Part Three (8)

This is a continuation of the very productive sessions I had one day in March, four years ago. This particular conversation took place at first with Claude Bowers, whose book The Tragic Era dealt with Reconstruction from a position of total sympathy with the white South of the day, then with Joseph Smallwood, perhaps a past life, who was one of the Union soldiers who counted the destruction of slavery among the results that mitigated the terrible suffering and dislocation that war caused.

Thursday March 9, 2006

(6:30 p.m.) I don’t mean to quarrel, Mr. Bowers, but the final taste your book leaves in my mouth is one of partisanship. All the nobility on one side, rascality the only motive on the other side. It is overdone, and ultimately doesn’t wash. This book looks to have been written at least in part for partisan purposes, not as a testimonial. It is somewhere between history, journalism, and propaganda.

Say that is so, it will not find itself alone on the shelf! As I said, books are written to be tools or weapons, not as monuments.

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Henry Thoreau’s words and example deeply influenced  my life since I first read Walden at age 24 and wound up writing my M.A. thesis on his early social views in the light of his personal religion. This is a man! And his stalwart, straightforward life is such an example of virtues lived that an earlier age would have named him as a saint. (That is, as a person whose life displayed virtues worthy of emulation.) I never thought, in that long ago, that  I’d be able to talk to him.

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Given the interest readers showed in Paul Blakey’s post on how he uses the Mayan calendar in his daily life, I thought it worthwhile to post this comment on the movie 2012. Dr. Carl Johan Calleman is author of several serious books about the Mayan Calendar, among them The Mayan Calendar and the Transformation of Consciousness, a study of the processes measured by the Mayan sacred calendar. Naturally, he takes a dim view of the latest cynical Hollywood fantasy  exploiting a theme it knows nothing about and cares nothing about. (So what else is new?) This blog entry appeared in The Mayan Calendar Portal http://www.maya-portal.net/blog

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rita-1dscn3666

Thursday March 19, 2009

 Miss Rita, anything you’d care to say on this anniversary of your escape? You see, you weren’t left here because they’d forgotten to pull the plug!

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