Friday Philosophy: Docudharma, Day 360

Dear Diary,

One way or another, I’ve managed to survive here just short of one year.

For one reason or another, someone invited me to publish here.  If nothing else, I’ve done that nearly religiously.

[Agenda:  Write enough words so that pics of pandas and wild felines can be interspersed, so that those who don’t want to read the words might be entertained and those who usually read the words aren’t disappointed.

As I wrote this morning, my brain is mostly fried.  Left to my own devices, I might have written about Diane Schroer, but I overruled myself.  Maybe someone else should do that, I thought.]

The pandas, from the top, are Su Lin (A little bit of something very cute, in Chinese), a sub-adult (she turned 3 on August 2), who was a baby when I wrote a poem on her naming day; Zhen Zhen (Precious), the baby, who had her first bithday on August 3; and Bai Yun (White Cloud), the mother, who will be 17 on September 7.  Bai Yun was the first successful birth of a giant panda at the Wolong Giant Panda Research Center in China.  Gao Gao, the father, was not available for viewing while we were there.  Gao Gao was a wild panda who was found injured and taken to the Fengtongzhai Nature Reserve in 1993.  He is presumed to be about 16.

Some people remember that I used to publish my poetry as Poem du Jour in Bill in Portland Maine‘s Cheers and Jeers.  Muse in the Morning was meant to be nothing more than a continuation of that, a simple morning comment on life.  I made an effort to spiff it up a bit with the story about the muses, but I’m too lazy to produce anything more than a comment in the morning, so the story got old.  Now I just publish the poem and that makes me sometimes feel a little jaded.

The muses are ancient.  The inspirations for our stories were said to be born from them.  Muses of song and dance, or poetry and prose, of comedy and tragedy, of the inward and the outward.  In one version they are Calliope, Euterpe and Terpsichore, Erato and Clio, Thalia and Melpomene, Polyhymnia and Urania.

It has also been traditional to name a tenth muse.  Plato declared Sappho to be the tenth muse, the muse of women poets.  Others have been suggested throughout the centuries.  I don’t have a name for one, but I do think there should be a muse for the graphical arts.  And maybe there should be many more.

I’m extremely pleased when other people display their own talents.  That was the intention from the start.  The Muse is, after all, nothing more than the morning’s first pony party, a place to park oneself before the news appears, if you happen to be looking for one.

Turning it inside out was something I first did only on occasion and then was encouraged to continue.  The downside to that is that sometimes I put some words inside and they have gotten missed.  I was disappointed, for instance, that there were no comments when I mentioned my daughter’s birthday and the concept of being supportive of GLBT children everywhere.  But stuff happens.

Gosh, with school starting again next week, I’ll be having to get up earlier once again…and won’t be as late as I was for much of the summer.

Anyway, this morning’s Muse was the 250^th, for what it is worth.  Regular visitors know that I have published several series (one could almost call them chapbooks) of poetry:  A Transition through Poetry, An Opened Mind, State of the Onion.  The latest, Phenomena, which consists of poems written exclusively for this audience, is approaching conclusion.  If I were to follow a rotation, A Transition through Poetry would be up next, but I’m leery of anyone thinking that would be unnecessarily provocative.  Thoughts on that are welcome.

Friday Philosophy is a stupid name.  But it’s a name.  Deadlines force me to write something.  I made the assumption that I wasn’t invited to be part of this venue just for the poems.  I committed to the Friday at 6pm spot, thereby making sure that I would be posting at the same time as BiPM once again, at least initially.  Besides, nobody was jumping at the chance to take that time slot.  And I came up with a stupid name to keep me going.

This will be the 49th issue of the column, which is what I like to think it is.  When, like today, my brain refuses to divulge a topic to address, I write about process or the like.  The first one was about Non-violence and is a fairly aged essay I wrote way back when.  Others have been about Death and Love, Hatred and Altruism. Torture and Economics.  A goodly number of them have been about GLBT issues since I thought that just might be part of why I was invited to participate here.  To make any progress whatsoever on advancing those issues requires convincing people to change their perspective.  I’ve written about that at length, so very many times.  That sort of thing has raised problems though…especially since I also chose to comment in other people’s essays…and usually have a different perspective.

C’est la vie.

Assorted cats:  A false-color image of a mountain lion, a jaguar, and a lynx and a bobcat (note:  all bobcats are lynxes, but not all lynxes are bobcats).  I have a couple of others to share in the comments, if there are any. 🙂  Note that it is not easy to get good photos of cats, since they were always in metal cages of one sort or another.

There have only been sixteen issues of Café Discovery, which I have intended to be nothing more than community discussion:  a place where people could hang out and share stuff they had learned on Sundays.  In some sense it was meant to be a replacement for Teacher’s Lounge (which, I’m astonished as well as pleased to discover has been restarted by biscuit at Politicook 8-0).

A couple of of very hot vacationers:

Sunday music retrospective is possibly wearing thin.  My intention was mostly to provide some of the music I consider the soundtrack of my life.  If someone wanted to take that over, it wouldn’t displease me.  🙂

School starts on Wednesday.  I am old.  The truth is that I would rather be writing full time, but one needs an income in this society.  So school starts on Wednesday.

And I am old.