10 Shots in Happenstance

There is little I can say about these photographs. They belong in a series of just something I discovered.

The image of the Broke Down Engine is something that would be considered elegant and tasteful enough to place on the weblog of "Waking Dream" I will talk about philosophy here for the most part, and I will hint at obscenity, but in large this is a selection that reflects predominantly a desire to speak about an aesthetic religious condition that is not held in the ken of dirty, smutty life in the city. The image is clean in many respects, much as it refers to patina: which is to say to the deformation of the image in time.

A simple reflection: we mortals particularly in extending beyond the arcadian innocence of youth have one aspect of experience that transcends all insight of eternal truth that young and old alike may know with equality. We have gotten older. We have learned what it is like for the freshness of youth to be taken away, litttle bit by bit each day. It is not entirely pleasant, but the alternative of death is not to be wished unless one wishes to remain like a Jim Morrison or a Maralyn Monroe, and that to me seems to be a person solely interested in the eternal. They are like half-persons, unable to really deal with becoming decrepit and having life take a little more from them. We all eventually take a final catastrophic leap into the volcano, but it is better mostly that it is reluctant.

There are notable exceptions: death by bears (Tim Treadwell as presented by Herzog), and strange accidents will happen, but even these become tedious after a while, part of the Jim Morrison crew, part of the "puer aeternis" and his giant ten foot wings, and that is all well and good, but what about getting a little older? What about being gnawed at a little bit more day-by-day? What about taking a tiny step toward infirmity?

Dylan manages to have this to say about the decay of the broke down engine:

1. Feel like a broke-down engine, ain't got no drivin' wheel,

Feel like a broke-down engine, ain't got no drivin' wheel.

You all been down and lonesome, you know just how a poor man feels.

2. Been shooting craps and gambling, momma, and I done got broke,

Been shooting craps and gambling, momma, and I done got broke,

I done pawned my pistol, baby, my best clothes been sold.

Lordy, Lord, Lordy, Lord, Lordy, Lord, Lordy, Lord,Lordy, Lord.

His take on the Broke-Down-Engine is one that rhymes with the gangsters and cut-throats of the street. A man carrying a pistola is one who learns the first lesson about walking the meanest of the mean streets: "carry a gun." Now sometimes the gun can be metaphorical, something like a "gun-pen;" but a metaphor means nothing unless it hangs on an edge like this fine line of violence and textuality. We don't know what textuality means. We do not know what a text yet means, which is a defense against ignorance: the fundamental ignorance: we forget that we do not know.

Likewise in Heidegger do we "not yet know what is meant by 'Being.'" Such a phrase is uttered as a matter of defense against ignorance.

When Hedegger "Ontologizes the Ontic" in discussing a pair of Patina'd Peasant's shoes, he is discussing a circumstance that has outgrown it's being related to as an "object." It is not an object, it is a poem, and for a moment a worn out pair of shoes or a broke down engine becomes a poem and a piece of life that is as sacred as any other thing in the world.

Perhaps I forget that there are those reading this who have not either discovered "the sacred," or regard it as anathema. One can either ignore these people or make a simple plea. The simple plea is to care about your world, and the piece of your life that stands in front of you with an almost unbearable ammount of care: care in a way that you, in cowardly intellectual pretensions, were unable to imagine. Care... that's all: care.

maybe that is all this broken-down engine is asking us to do. It is beyond all use, still it exists. Some of the figures carry rocks placed or tossed carelessly into their figure. The careless placement of the engine on the rocks by the ocean is matched by our potential for amazement as we pick out the engines, here the engines of San Pedro among the rocks. I wonder if people shoved automobiles off the cliffs to achieve the correct effect? How else would they get here. One of the figures still has shiny spark plug heads, even if the rest is marvelously corroded.

I have felt sufficiently akin to these broken and useless engines to recognize their pattern and their "use" in expressing a feeling in this web-log. There is always more. I am simply tired right now and felt it was important after an exasperating day to at least begin to lay out the images in some way in connection to thoughts I have had recently, and yet rarely and reluctantly only because there is the weight of many thoughts pulling at me these days. And these are generally good thoughts, but they are not necessarily my own thoughts. I spoke in a manner that expressed my exasperation to my spouse when she asked me to stop writing: "I just need to be my own man with my own thoughts!" Sometimes a web-log is just like that. Sometimes broken engines are just like that.