Pandemic Potpourri
The mass of lives lead men of quiet desperation,
Suffering the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.
Somehow it seems to fill my head with ideas--only I don't exactly know what they are.
Hello COVID my old friend. I've come to talk with you again.
On the turning away
From the pale and downtrodden,
And the words they say
Which we won't understand.
It's only water in a stranger's tears.
No, you're not one of us.
No one in the world ever gets what they want and that is beautiful
Everybody dies frustrated and sad and that is beautiful
They want what they're not and I wish they would stop saying,
Deputy dog dog a ding dang depadepa
Deputy dog dog a ding dang depadepa
Words, thoughts, ideas
Jumbled inside me
Floating around, overflowing
A confusing mess
Yesterday's horrors are today's normal.
If we're lucky,
Yesterday's normal can, sometimes,
Become today's horror.
Collective Consciousness
The set of shared beliefs, ideas, and moral attitudes which operate as a unifying force within society.
“Doesn’t matter what anyone else would call it, Len,” he says. “This is our story to tell.”This is our story to tell. He says it in his Ten Commandments way and it hits me that way: profoundly. You’d think for all the reading I do, I would have thought about this before, but I haven’t. I’ve never once thought about the interpretative, the storytelling aspect of life, of my life. I always felt like I was in a story, yes, but not like I was the author of it, or like I had any say in its telling whatsoever.You can tell your story any way you damn well please.---And it’s just dawned on me that I might be the author of my own story, but so is everyone else the author of their own stories, and sometimes, like now, there’s no overlap.---Life’s a freaking mess. In fact, I’m going to tell Sarah we need to start a new philosophical movement: messessentialism instead of existentialism: For those who revel in the essential mess that is life. Because Gram’s right, there’s not one truth ever, just a whole bunch of stories, all going on at once, in our heads, in our hearts, all getting in the way of each other. It’s all a beautiful calamitous mess.- Jandy Nelson, The Sky Is Everywhere
Three months ago the world shut down. Our world, I should say. My part of it. My state, my community, my workplace, some of my country. The Big Bad Virus was coming and we needed to hide. We hid. It worked. We slowed the spread. Then something changed. Not the virus. That was still out there; just slowed, not stopped. What changed is we got tired of hiding. So we decided to slowly sneak back out into the light and live with the fear. Now, more are getting sick than ever. The virus is winning. And that's okay. We've decided that's an acceptable normal. Let them die; they're not me. And if they are, well, sometimes that just happens and there's nothing we can do about it.
Collective Consciousness
Three months ago we--as a collective; the largest, controlling part of us--accepted racism as normal. Then something changed. Not racism. That is still out there. We--as a collective; the largest, controlling part of us--started changing the story. We're less accepting now. Maybe enough to make a difference.
Yesterday's horrors are today's normal.
If we're lucky,
Yesterday's normal can, sometimes,
Become today's horror.
This morning I was woken by a phone call in the wee hours of the darkness. I heard my wife's voice, shaky and yearning.
"I just had a disturbing experience. I was driving to work when someone walked over to my car. A Black teenager, wearing all black. He walked into the road to talk to me. I only rolled down my window a little. He asked if I would give him a ride to his house. The other direction than I was going. He was vague, 'over that way.' I didn't feel safe. But I'm worried I did the wrong thing. I told him he could go to the 24-hour convenience store; it's a safe place. I'm worried I did the wrong thing."
"I don't think I would have given him a ride either. He wasn't a person in distress. The weather was nice. It was dark. It didn't seem safe."
Again, voice shaky and yearning. "I'm just worried I did the wrong thing. . . . "
"Do you want to talk more?"
"I have to get working. Bye."
Silence. Groggy brain. Sink back into sleep.
What is the right thing?
Words, thoughts, ideas
Jumbled inside me
Floating around, overflowing
A confusing mess
 |
| From my five-year-old for Father's Day |
My favorite thing about my dad is he is mostly kind to me.
"Mostly kind."
Not a bad standard of expectation.
I hope I can achieve it always, with everyone.
My dad loves me because I was born.
"Because I was born."
The only thing required to be worthy of love.
Always, with everyone.
 |
| Hands |
At pickup from camp yesterday one of the adult supervisors let me know our six-year-old had been in a fight (his first that we know of). We had a conversation with him about it, of course. Aside from admonitions and similar, there was this less weighty part of the exchange:
"What were you fighting about?"
"Well, you know, spiders are not bugs. Insects have eight legs and spiders have six legs so many people think spiders are bugs but they aren't."
"So your friend said spiders were bugs and you got mad at him for it?"
"No, no. He had two spiders and I didn't have any, and I thought to be fair he should have one and I should have one."
"So you fought because you wanted one of his spiders and he didn't want to give it to you?"
"Yeah."
"Okay. And this isn't really important, but I'm curious: were the spiders alive?"
"Yeah. And we didn't know what kind they were, if they were venomous or not, but we caught them and they were cool."
"So how were you keeping them? Did you have containers?"
"No, just our hands."
-----
Should I Kill Spiders in My Home? An Entomologist Explains Why Not To - Why? Because spiders are an important part of nature and our indoor ecosystem – as well as being fellow organisms in their own right.
As far as I knew then, Black girls like me didn’t exist in books. And as physics would have it, people who don’t exist can’t go on adventures or solve mysteries or fall in love or save the universe. Which meant that I, as a nonexistent entity, wasn’t capable of any of those things.And I wasn’t the only person getting this message. Anyone reading books without me in them was getting it too. Black kids don’t go on adventures. Solve mysteries. Save the universe. Fall in love. Black people’s stories aren’t important and shouldn’t be read if they don’t have to do with slavery, racism, oppression, or hardship. Black lives didn’t matter in books unless they were fighting their way out of abusive relationships or killing their children to keep them out of the bonds of slavery. Black people were sidekicks. Lesson bearers. Plot devices to teach the white son and daughter of the failed white lawyer that racism is real. . . .I can’t help but wonder how different the world would look if we’d all grown up seeing Black people do the stuff white people did in books. Going on adventures. Saving the day. Falling in love. Solving mysteries. Dealing with a broken heart. Getting caught up in a riveting love triangle. Taking down oppressive regimes. (I mean, HELLO, a bunch of farm animals took down a dictatorial pig in a book that’s been on middle school curriculum lists for decades. Yet Black people can’t survive the first book in a dystopia trilogy?)What if we’d seen Black people in books just being human? . . .Because the more we see Black people living—loving and doing and being and feeling and going on adventures and solving mysteries and being the heroes—the more we come to recognize our shared humanity.
More than conversation, white kids learn about race as a result of their own independent experiences and by their interactions with peers, coaches, strangers, and teachers – all of which is profoundly entrenched by where they grow up, Hagerman surmised."This is a crucially influential aspect of raising white kids in America that is often overlooked," Hagerman said. "The choices parents make about how to set up children's lives influence their kids' ideas about race and racism. The neighborhood they live in, the school they attend, and the activities they participate in — sports leagues, religious organization, clubs, summer camps — set the parameters for how kids understand race. And this is true whether parents are consciously aware that these choices matter or not, and regardless of what parents explicitly say about race."Shawnese Givens, a family therapist, concurred that a child's social environment – or, simply put, where they live – is perhaps the most crucial aspect of raising antiracist kids."It plays a huge role in the development of their understanding of race because having friends, teachers, and community members of color contributes to a diverse understanding of the human experience," Givens told POPSUGAR. "A white child who grows up knowing diverse people doesn't have to rely on the media or on stereotypes to shape their ideas about Black culture. They are more likely to see the humanity in the people they can name." . . ."They can enroll their children in programs where other children of color are present," she said. "That might mean leaving your neighborhood and, of course, if you're hesitant to that, I'd ask you to think critically about why that is."The reason for such hesitation, Hagerman noted following her study, is because parents' actions do not always line up with what they say they believe – that white parents often say they want diversity in their children's lives, but their actions "demonstrate their desire to protect practices of segregation within diverse schools that offer advantages to their kids."
Psychologists like me describe those who are willing to defend their principles in the face of potentially negative social consequences such as disapproval, ostracism and career setbacks as “moral rebels.”Moral rebels speak up in all types of situations – to tell a bully to cut it out, to confront a friend who uses a racist slur, to report a colleague who engages in corporate fraud. What enables someone to call out potentially bad behavior, even if doing so may have costs?First, moral rebels generally feel good about themselves. They tend to have high self-esteem and to feel confident about their own judgment, values and ability. They also believe their own views are superior to those of others, and thus that they have a social responsibility to share those beliefs.Moral rebels are also less socially inhibited than others. They aren’t worried about feeling embarrassed or having an awkward interaction. Perhaps most importantly, they are far less concerned about conforming to the crowd. . . .What does it take to create a moral rebel?It helps to have seen moral courage in action. . . .A budding moral rebel also needs to feel empathy, imagining the world from someone else’s perspective. . . .Finally, moral rebels need particular skills and practice using them. One study found that teenagers who held their own in an argument with their mother, using reasoned arguments instead of whining, pressure or insults, were the most resistant to peer pressure to use drugs or drink alcohol later on. Why? People who have practiced making effective arguments and sticking with them under pressure are better able to use these same techniques with their peers.
In a recent experiment, we showed it is possible to trick people into changing their political views. In fact, we could get some people to adopt opinions that were directly opposite of their original ones. Our findings imply that we should rethink some of the ways we think about our own attitudes, and how they relate to the currently polarized political climate. When it comes to the actual political attitudes we hold, we are considerably more flexible than we think.A powerful shaping factor about our social and political worlds is how they are structured by group belonging and identities. . . .The trick, as strange as it may sound, is to make people believe the opposite opinion was their own to begin with. . . .In our experiment, we first gave false-feedback about their choices, but this time concerning actual political questions (e.g., climate taxes on consumer goods). . . .Why do attitudes shift in our experiment? The difference is that when faced with the false-feedback people are free from the motives that normally lead them to defend themselves or their ideas from external criticism. Instead they can consider the benefits of the alternative position.To understand this, imagine that you have picked out a pair of pants to wear later in the evening. Your partner comes in and criticizes your choice, saying you should have picked the blue ones rather than the red ones. You will likely become defensive about your choice and defend it—maybe even becoming more entrenched in your choice of hot red pants.Now imagine instead that your partner switches the pants while you are distracted, instead of arguing with you. You turn around and discover that you had picked the blue pants. In this case, you need to reconcile the physical evidence of your preference (the pants on your bed) with whatever inside your brain normally makes you choose the red pants. Perhaps you made a mistake or had a shift in opinion that slipped you mind. But now that the pants were placed in front of you, it would be easy to slip them on and continue getting ready for the party. As you catch yourself in the mirror, you decide that these pants are quite flattering after all.The very same thing happens in our experiment, which suggests that people have a pretty high degree of flexibility about their political views once you strip away the things that normally make them defensive. Their results suggest that we need rethink what it means to hold an attitude. If we become aware that our political attitudes are not set in stone, it might become easier for us to seek out information that might change them.
Some societies center on social control, others on social investment.Social-control societies put substantial resources into police, prisons, surveillance, immigration enforcement and the military. Their purpose is to utilize fear, punishment and violence, to maintain what they consider order.Social-investment societies put more resources into healthcare, education, affordable housing, jobless benefits and children. Their purpose is to free people from the risks and anxieties of daily life and give everyone a fair shot at making it.Donald Trump epitomizes the former. He calls himself the “law and order” president. He even wants to sic the military on Americans protesting against police brutality.Trump is really the culmination of 40 years of increasing social control in the US and decreasing social investment.Spending on policing in the US has almost tripled, from $42.3bn in 1977 to $114.5bn in 2017.America now locks away 2.2 million people. That’s a 500% increase from 40 years ago. The US has the largest incarcerated population in the world.Immigration and Customs Enforcement has exploded. More people are now in Ice detention than ever in its history.Total military spending has soared from $437bn in 2003 to $935.8bn this fiscal year.The more societies spend on social controls, the less they have left for social investment. More police mean fewer social services. This year, American taxpayers will spend $107.5bn more on police than on public housing.More prisons mean fewer dollars for education. In fact, America is now spending more money on prisons than on public schools. Fifteen states now spend $27,000 more per prisoner than they do per student.As spending on controls has increased, spending on public assistance has shrunk. Fewer people are receiving food stamps. Outlays for public health have declined.America can’t even seem to find money to extend unemployment benefits during this pandemic.Such cause-and-effect works the other way, too. As societies skimp on social investment, they turn to social controls to contain the anger and desperation of people who are marginalized and excluded.The United States began as a control society. Slavery – America’s original sin – depended on the harshest conceivable controls. Jim Crow wasn’t much better.But in the decades following the second world war, the nation began inching toward social investment.In 1954, the supreme court barred segregated schools and began investing in better education for all children. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Fair Housing Act of 1968 advanced equal opportunity. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 moved America toward more equal political rights.Throughout these years, spending on healthcare and public assistance expanded and poverty diminished. The middle class burgeoned and inequality declined.Then a backlash set in. America swung backward from social investment to social control.Richard Nixon declared a “war on drugs” that criminalized possession of illicit drugs for personal use. Since then, four times as many people have been arrested for possessing drugs as for selling them, and half of those arrested for possession have been charged with possessing marijuana for their own use.Bill Clinton’s Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994 put 88,000 additional police on the streets and mandated life sentences for criminals convicted of a felony after two or more prior convictions, including drug crimes. This so-called “three strikes, you’re out” law was replicated by many states. Clinton also abolished welfare.Why did America swing so sharply backward toward social control?Part of the answer has to do with widening inequality. As the middle class collapsed and the ranks of the poor grew, those in power viewed social controls as cheaper than social investment, which would require additional taxes and massive redistribution.Meanwhile, politicians used racism – from Nixon’s “law and order” and Ronald Reagan’s “welfare queens” to Donald Trump’s more overt racist memes – to deflect the anxieties of an increasingly overwhelmed white working class.But as we’ve witnessed over the last weeks of protests and demonstrations, social controls are not sustainable. They require more and more oppressive means of containing people who stand up against oppression.In any event, the core of America’s identity is not the whiteness of our skin or the uniformity of our ethnicity. It is the ideals we share, however imperfectly achieved.Moving toward those ideals requires that we relinquish social control and renew our commitment to social investment. For starters, defund the police and invest in our communities.
þetta reddast (pronounced thet-ta red-ust) doesn’t mean ‘sorry, I’m not paid enough to care about your troubles’, or ‘try not to get stranded in the middle of nowhere’. It means ‘it’ll all work out in the end’ – and if Iceland had an official slogan, this would be it. The phrase near-perfectly sums up the way Icelanders seem to approach life: with a laid-back, easy-going attitude and a great sense of humour.“It’s just one of those ubiquitous phrases that is around you all the time, a life philosophy wafting through the air,” said Alda Sigmundsdóttir, author of several books about Iceland's history and culture. “It’s generally used in a fairly flippant, upbeat manner. It can also be used to offer comfort, especially if the person doing the comforting doesn’t quite know what to say. It’s sort of a catch-all phrase that way.” . . .Maybe it makes sense, then, that in a place where people were – and still are – so often at the mercy of the weather, the land and the island’s unique geological forces, they’ve learned to give up control, leave things to fate and hope for the best. For these stoic and even-tempered Icelanders, þetta reddast is less a starry-eyed refusal to deal with problems and more an admission that sometimes you must make the best of the hand you’ve been dealt. . . .“We couldn’t live in this environment without a certain level of conviction that things will work out somehow, hard as they seem in the moment,” Ösp said. “Þedda redast represents a certain optimism that Icelanders have and this carefree attitude that borders on recklessness. Sometimes it works out, sometimes it doesn’t, but we don’t let that stop us from trying.”“It’s not that we’re impulsive or stupid,” Ösp continued. “We just believe in our abilities to fix things. With the conditions we live under, we’re often forced to make the impossible possible.”
Words, thoughts, ideas
Jumbled inside me
Floating around, overflowing
A confusing mess
Messessentialism
Pour into a brain and shake until jumbled . . .
The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation. From the desperate city you go into the desperate country, and have to console yourself with the bravery of minks and muskrats. A stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of mankind. There is no play in them, for this comes after work. But it is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things.
When we consider what, to use the words of the catechism, is the chief end of man, and what are the true necessaries and means of life, it appears as if men had deliberately chosen the common mode of living because they preferred it to any other. Yet they honestly think there is no choice left. But alert and healthy natures remember that the sun rose clear. It is never too late to give up our prejudices. No way of thinking or doing, however ancient, can be trusted without proof. What everybody echoes or in silence passes by as true to-day may turn out to be falsehood to-morrow, mere smoke of opinion, which some had trusted for a cloud that would sprinkle fertilizing rain on their fields. What old people say you cannot do you try and find that you can. Old deeds for old people, and new deeds for new. Old people did not know enough once, perchance, to fetch fresh fuel to keep the fire a-going; new people put a little dry wood under a pot, and are whirled round the globe with the speed of birds, in a way to kill old people, as the phrase is. Age is no better, hardly so well, qualified for an instructor as youth, for it has not profited so much as it has lost. One may almost doubt if the wisest man has learned any thing of absolute value by living. Practically, the old have no very important advice to give the young, their own experience has been so partial, and their lives have been such miserable failures, for private reasons, as they must believe; and it may be that they have some faith left which belies that experience, and they are only less young than they were. I have lived some thirty years on this planet, and I have yet to hear the first syllable of valuable or even earnest advice from my seniors. They have told me nothing, and probably cannot tell me any thing to the purpose. Here is life, an experiment to a great extent untried by me; but it does not avail me that they have tried it. If I have any experience which I think valuable, I am sure to reflect that this my Mentors said nothing about.
- Henry David Thoreau, Walden
To be, or not to be: that is the question:
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them? To die: to sleep;
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to, 'tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish'd. To die, to sleep;
To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there's the rub;
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause: there's the respect
That makes calamity of so long life;
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
The oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely,
The pangs of despised love, the law's delay,
The insolence of office and the spurns
That patient merit of the unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin? who would fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscover'd country from whose bourn
No traveller returns, puzzles the will
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?
Thus conscience does make cowards of us all;
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought,
And enterprises of great pith and moment
With this regard their currents turn awry,
And lose the name of action.—Soft you now!
The fair Ophelia! Nymph, in thy orisons
Be all my sins remember'd.
- William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act III, Scene I
This was the poem that Alice read.
JABBERWOCKYTwas brillig, and the slithy tovesDid gyre and gimble in the wabe;All mimsy were the borogoves,And the mome raths outgrabe.‘Beware the Jabberwock, my son!The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!Beware the Jubjub bird, and shunThe frumious Bandersnatch!’He took his vorpal sword in hand:Long time the manxome foe he sought—So rested he by the Tumtum tree,And stood awhile in thought.And as in uffish thought he stood,The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame,Came whiffling through the tulgey wood,And burbled as it came!One, two! One, two! And through and throughThe vorpal blade went snicker-snack!He left it dead, and with its headHe went galumphing back.‘And hast thou slain the Jabberwock?Come to my arms, my beamish boy!O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!’He chortled in his joy.‘Twas brillig, and the slithy tovesDid gyre and gimble in the wabe;All mimsy were the borogoves,And the mome raths outgrabe.
‘It seems very pretty,’ she said when she had finished it, ‘but it’s rather hard to understand!’ (You see she didn’t like to confess, ever to herself, that she couldn’t make it out at all.) ‘Somehow it seems to fill my head with ideas—only I don’t exactly know what they are!
- Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass
Hello darkness, my old friend
I've come to talk with you again
Because a vision softly creeping
Left its seeds while I was sleeping
And the vision that was planted in my brain
Still remains
Within the sound of silence
In restless dreams I walked alone
Narrow streets of cobblestone
'Neath the halo of a street lamp
I turned my collar to the cold and damp
When my eyes were stabbed by the flash of a neon light
That split the night
And touched the sound of silence
And in the naked light I saw
Ten thousand people, maybe more
People talking without speaking
People hearing without listening
People writing songs that voices never share
And no one dare
Disturb the sound of silence
"Fools" said I, "You do not know
Silence like a cancer grows
Hear my words that I might teach you
Take my arms that I might reach you"
But my words like silent raindrops fell
And echoed
In the wells of silence
And the people bowed and prayed
To the neon god they made
And the sign flashed out its warning
In the words that it was forming
And the sign said, "The words of the prophets
Are written on the subway walls
And tenement halls"
And whisper'd in the sounds of silence
- Simon & Garfunkel, The Sounds of Silence
On the turning away
From the pale and downtrodden
And the words they say
Which we won't understand
"Don't accept that what's happening
Is just a case of others' suffering
Or you'll find that you're joining in
The turning away"
It's a sin that somehow
Light is changing to shadow
And casting it's shroud
Over all we have known
Unaware how the ranks have grown
Driven on by a heart of stone
We could find that we're all alone
In the dream of the proud
On the wings of the night
As the daytime is stirring
Where the speechless unite
In a silent accord
Using words you will find are strange
And mesmerized as they light the flame
Feel the new wind of change
On the wings of the night
No more turning away
From the weak and the weary
No more turning away
From the coldness inside
Just a world that we all must share
It's not enough just to stand and stare
Is it only a dream that there'll be
No more turning away?
- Pink Floyd, On the Turning Away
It's only water
In a stranger's tear
Looks are deceptive
But distinctions are clear
A foreign body
And a foreign mind
Never welcome
In the land of the blind
You may look like we do
Talk like we do
But you know how it is
You're not one of us
Not one of us
No you're not one of us
Not one of us
Not one of us
No you're not one of us
There's safety in numbers
When you learn to divide
How can we be in
If there is no outside
All shades of opinion
Feed an open mind
But your values are twisted
Let us help you unwind
You may look like we do
Talk like we do
But you know how it is
You're not one of us
Not one of us
No you're not one of us
You're not one of us
Not one of us
No you're not one of us
- Peter Gabriel, Not One of Us
Don't don't don't let's start
This is the worst part
Could believe for all the world
That you're my precious little girl
But don't don't don't let's start
I've got a weak heart
And I don't get around how you get around
When you are alone you are the cat, you are the phone
You are an animal
The words I'm singing now
Mean nothing more than meow to an animal
Wake up and smell the cat food in your bank account
But don't try to stop the tail that wags the hound
D, world destruction
Over and overture
N, do I need
Apostrophe T, need this torture?
Don't don't don't let's start
This is the worst part
Could believe for all the world
That you're my precious little girl
But don't don't don't let's start
I've got a weak heart
And I don't get around how you get around
No one in the world ever gets what they want and that is beautiful
Everybody dies frustrated and sad and that is beautiful
They want what they're not and I wish they would stop saying,
Deputy dog dog a ding dang depadepa
Deputy dog dog a ding dang depadepa
D, world destruction
Over and overture
N, do I need
Apostrophe T, need this torture?
Don't don't don't let's start
This is the worst part
Could believe for all the world
That you're my precious little girl
But don't don't don't let's start
I've got a weak heart
And I don't get around how you get around
I don't want to live in this world anymore
I don't want to live in this world
Don't don't don't let's start
This is the worst part
Could believe for all the world
That you're my precious little girl
But don't don't don't let's start
I've got a weak heart
And I don't get around how you get around
- They Might Be Giants, Don't Let's Start
Few phenomena gave me more delight than to observe the forms which thawing sand and clay assume in flowing down the sides of a deep cut on the railroad through which I passed on my way to the village, a phenomenon not very common on so large a scale, though the number of freshly exposed banks of the right material must have been greatly multiplied since railroads were invented. The material was sand of every degree of fineness and of various rich colors, commonly mixed with a little clay. When the frost comes out in the spring, and even in a thawing day in the winter, the sand begins to flow down the slopes like lava, sometimes bursting out through the snow and overflowing it where no sand was to be seen before. Innumerable little streams overlap and interlace one with another, exhibiting a sort of hybrid product, which obeys half way the law of currents, and half way that of vegetation. As it flows it takes the forms of sappy leaves or vines, making heaps of pulpy sprays a foot or more in depth, and resembling, as you look down on them, the laciniated, lobed, and imbricated thalluses of some lichens; or you are reminded of coral, of leopard’s paws or birds’ feet, of brains or lungs or bowels, and excrements of all kinds. It is a truly grotesque vegetation, whose forms and color we see imitated in bronze, a sort of architectural foliage more ancient and typical than acanthus, chiccory, ivy, vine, or any vegetable leaves; destined perhaps, under some circumstances, to become a puzzle to future geologists. The whole cut impressed me as if it were a cave with its stalactites laid open to the light. The various shades of the sand are singularly rich and agreeable, embracing the different iron colors, brown, gray, yellowish, and reddish. When the flowing mass reaches the drain at the foot of the bank it spreads out flatter into strands, the separate streams losing their semi-cylindrical form and gradually becoming more flat and broad, running together as they are more moist, till they form an almost flat sand, still variously and beautifully shaded, but in which you can trace the original forms of vegetation; till at length, in the water itself, they are converted into banks, like those formed off the mouths of rivers, and the forms of vegetation are lost in the ripple marks on the bottom.
posted by Degolar @ 1:05 PM
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