The influence of gaslight or electric light on the growth of paraheliotropic trees

with apologies, as always, to Bob Dylan

Every now and again, when warm May evenings sneak in like a beneficient thief, those long bright twilights, I sit and I think about that fictional child Huckleberry Finn, and what might have happened to him, years later, after he left Hannibal and headed West, carrying with him the secret scars of his adventure, memories of the river, laughing with Jim, and the slave’s final confession about what he had seen but Huck had not in a floating half-drowned house that had drifted by their raft. Jim — closest to a father he had ever had, a true friend, and the slow birth of responsibility and tragedy.

Clemens never knew how to end it, and I don’t either, and Huck didn’t either — but he knew, in the virgin lawless west, uncivilized, unconstrained, he might find the river again. The river was freedom — the anonymity of the river, the hidden identities of the road, everyone a Dauphin, everyone a Duke, donning and doffing their various histories like mummers’ costumes, the blessed lie that free’s, that forgives — the delayed limbo of youth that postpones the reckoning of adulthood — before the hard edge of Sawyer’s jokes sets in –

The object of this book is to present a general view of the
Common Law. To accomplish the task, other tools are needed
besides logic. It is something to show that the consistency of a
system requires a particular result, but it is not all. The life
of the law has not been logic: it has been experience. The felt
necessities of the time, the prevalent moral and political
theories, intuitions of public policy, avowed or unconscious,
even the prejudices which judges share with their fellow-men,
have had a good deal more to do than the syllogism in determining
the rules by which men should be governed. The law embodies the
story of a nation’s development through many centuries, and it
cannot be dealt with as if it contained only the axioms and
corollaries of a book of mathematics. In order to know what it
is, we must know what it has been, and what it tends to become.
We must alternately consult history and existing theories of
legislation. But the most difficult labor will be to understand
the combination of the two into new products at every stage. The
substance of the law at any given time pretty nearly [2]
corresponds, so far as it goes, with what is then understood to
be convenient; but its form and machinery, and the degree to
which it is able to work out desired results, depend very much
upon its past.

another name for this blog — what strange tongues blow across my throat-harp, that strange instrument. Do you talk with your mouth, or your brain, or your stomach? whistle whistle twist and thwistle — language is a great an unknown rube-goldberg machine, too complicated to read the skein of connections (“world means man-old, answer right there”) this journal could be called the Glosso, the Glossoalia, the tongues

I am a gunsmith, forging the gun and the bullet of my own destruction — we are all flower-gunsmiths, hiding our bullets beneath our petals, always containing our own ends, always becoming, always becoming something else. I am a gunsmith, and I am crafting my gun

— (The Greeks called it entelechy – I am my own cause, I am my own cause, I am the infinite becoming, Naraja Shiva dancing, tapping my foot against the gnome of ignorance.)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleantech

Still alive still kicking against the great round belly of the Mother World – what’s that there light poking out from the bottom of drain-spot? What little lights will lead me onto other rooms?? I sit in a dark pink warm room, kicking at the walls.

Madonna, Truth or Dare (1990) = Dylan, Dont Look Back 1967

There are two powers in the world, ever-warring, all-entwined, Law and Money, each trying to subvert and penetrate the other, biting back at each other like great winged serpents with gnashing teeth.

… which forbids the rich as well as the poor from sleeping under bridges.”
Anatole French.

(Said by my proctor before taking the LSAT, in October 2005) (Day 8502)

The secret latter heart of the U.S. Constitution.