An atom is made mostly of empty space, so we could consider being less busy.

All the different tones of grey in the sky--it's like summer.

It's like the blues inside our souls match, so the song finds itself, every other note.

In any direction I can point in, there are many galaxies.

Sometimes, I point, with my mind, to small things annoying me locally.

The man who fell to Earth, in the movie named after him, was asked by an Earth person, where he was from. He pointed downward and to the side. The planet he was from was in the sky on the other side of the Earth at that time. He pointed to the ground; he pointed through the ground.

Any direction I focus my attention in has many galaxies. Any breath I breathe in and out contains many air molecules.

If Hannah could start her own sequence, what would it be?

She and her husband couldn't have a kid. She promised to give the kid to God if she had one.

She had a kid, Samuel. Gave him to priest Eli to raise, thereby avoiding childcare. (The Bible doesn't say that about avoiding childcare.)

The kid was Samuel, who became an important wise leader. When his people wanted a king because all the peoples around had a king, he didn't like it, but went along.

The people chose Saul to be king because he was tallest. He was about the king a person chosen that way would be--mixed.

Seceded by civil war and by David.

Led to all the kings on and on in the Bible in Hebrew.

On and on.

What would Hannah's on and on be if she were free? If she and her imagination were free.

I read once a book based on interviews with women scientists with lots of quotes from the interviews.

Several of the scientists agreed that if women had been in on science from the beginning the questions asked would be partly different. Several agreed that if women were bigger in science now, the questions would be different.

It was clear they as individuals had no time to ask what the different questions would be. And of course, they were very trained in the old questions and the old way of arriving at questions.

Science can be beautiful, among other things. Hannah means "full of grace and beauty." There are missing practical, grounded graces and beauties that we may be at the mid-beginning of finding.

When he says the glass is half full, the first couple of times he mutter the "half." Later, the "half" goes away entirely.

The rainy season started, a bit early, on September 22, as I was half-way through, By the Lake, a well-written novel about Ireland, the land green because wet. I felt I had done my part.

This part of my life is about learning to be still. I'd like to explain how I feel about that. . . .

Don't look.

Eros the god made love with Psyche the women but she wasn't supposed to look at him.

Lot's wife wasn't supposed to look back as she left town, as per God's instructions.

They both lived in the Mediterrean region, a great place for looking. Great light, so land forms and human built objects glow with the promise of meaning. But they weren't supposed to look.

Psyche was in what is now Greece, and Lot's wife in what is now Israel.

The old saying is now old: "Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody ever does anything about it." We've done something about it.

The extra parts of women not useful for sex or raising kids or making the existent situation continue are atrophied. Could be developed into undreamed of kind of usefulness.

Everybody knows, but different everybodies know different things.

We're still drunk on energy, but we've started to feel the hangover,

Old, and sometimes sacred. Old and sometimes sleazy. The medicine we've always made for ourselves--show biz.

Sometimes I feel like I'm obliged not to be perky but to make believe convincingly that life is such that being perky would make sense.

That God is great and God is good is more obvious some times than others.

I like so much the title of the book of letters of Kurt Weill and Lotte Lenya that I spend a couple of days living with the title before I start the book.

"Speak Low (When You Speak of Love.)"

Then I start the book and find that the title of the book is from the title of a song with music by Kurt Weill and words by Ogden Nash.

Ogden Nash! That's the first time I contemplated over time words by Ogden Nash.

I thought did he write so many kind funny, feather light poems if he could write like that.

Money, probably, partly. It's hard to remember that in the golden age of magazines, thirties and forties with a bit of twenties and fifties on each end, it was possible to sell out to the extent of having a very cushy life by selling stuff to magazines.

Very competent words, words a little bit surprising but not too. Not basically surprising.

"Don't scare the horses." Part of a saying about what you can and can't do in public. You can do a lot if you don't scare the horses. Don't cause people to stop in the routine and think way below the routine.

In a free speech environment, you often can call for deeperness, but you usually can't do that and make big money right from the beginning. You may not make money in your lifetime. Sometimes, after you life the horses of routine desperately need to be awakened in just the way you offer, then there is big money.

"Speak low (when you speak of love)" looked kind of alternative to me as a book title, but of course it's a very standard way to present a song title, especially mid- and early twentieth century.

Kurt Weill, who wrote music, and Lotte Lenya, who sang, were on that edge between being able do work that lulled the horses along and being able to to work that woke people up more deeply. A powerful place to operate from.

They didn't have the perfect relationship, but they really helped each other a lot. He writes in the book about how when he wrote sometimes he heard every detail of her voice.

Their letters are not often mushy. They have lots of warmth and interest in what each other is doing, and fun cattiness.

"Speak low when you speak of love." Ogden Nash, from "One Touch of Venus," a musical


"There's a one l lama and that's a priest.
There's a two l llama and that's a beast.
But I will bet my silk pajama
There isn't any three l lllama."

--Ogden Nash

To be able to talk and sing to people and be open to being the unlabled priest who wakes up the innter holiness of people with laughs and beauty and reachable wisdome

Things that can distinguish people who became women as adults through medical processes and people who were born women are wrists, ankles and sense of entitlement.

When Simone de Beauvoir was three years old, she had her own calling cards which she carried in her own black velvet calling card bag.

When she was old enough to go to school, she was not allowed to talk to other girls at the school unless their mothers had exchanged formal calls at their homes.

When Simone de Beauvoir was an adult, there were periods of years when she went to the same cafe every day and worked writing for hours. People knew she was there and could come in and talk to her.

She sometimes, if she was on deadline, made an appointment to see the people who showed up later that day, or the next day.

*[added word depression] She was frequently available in the shared there. One of the rules of the societies where women formally called on each other was that they say little when the called. Many words, no meaning to upset the calm, or the depression. Simone de Beauvoir grew up to write big thick books filled with ideas backed with facts--for example, "The Second Sex" which was published in 1949 and helped a lot of women through the twenty-five years until ideas of women's value and oppression became noised about.

She got her facts from spending much time in Paris' libraries and from her willingness to talk to lots of kinds of people. She learned from the shared there and then taught the shared there something new.

Long before feminism became openly alive again in the nineteen seventies, "The Second Sex" was a way for women to talk about their lives. If a woman found another women who had read "The Second Sex" in the nineteen fifties, they had a lot to talk about to upset the calm, or the depression.

***
Simone De Beauvoir thought that the best thing to be was a philosopher. She thought that she wasn't smart enough to be a philosopher. Her lifelong partner, Jean Sartre, was a philosopher, and therefore, she thought better.

That seems sad that she thought that, but it's better for me as a reader. She wrote non-fiction that combined facts and ideas. I can read the fact/idea combination much better than straight ideas, or philosophy. She made herself more available to me by making a maybe wrong judgement about her smarts.
--information from "Simone de Beauvoir," the biograpy by Deidre Bair

They met at the auto-de-fe. People who weren't with the program in a way that he people who ran things didn't like a lot, were, depending on how much the scared the authorities, burned, hanged, or flogged and sent into exile.

He was at the auto-de-fe because he was a returned soldier released from duty because he lost his had, and the auto-de-fe is what was happening in town.

She was at the auto-de-fe because he mother was being sent into exile.

Her mother was wrapped around the mouth so she couldn't speak. As the mother passed by the daughter in the crowd, the daughter heard her asking, silently, "What is his name?"

The daughter knew she meant the man standing next to her, and she knew that that meant the man was the man she was going to marry. And take care of her, with her mother gone.

She turned to him, the first time she's noticed him, and asked him his name.

He said his name was Baltasar. They said nothing else as they went to her house together.

Every morning,until she ate, she could see into people souls.

Therefore, she put bread under her pillow when she went to bed, and ate it before she opened her eyes.

Her mother was sent into exile, to Angola, because she thought her visions of how the world worked were as good as anyone else's, as good as the king's, as good as the churches. She thought she was saint as good as the other saints, maybe better. For her, those visions were better.

Her mother was flogged at the public auto-de-fe before being sent into exile. Others were flogged. Two people were burned. One recanted before being burned and so was garroted and killed before being burned. The other wouldn't recant and therefore was burned alive.

Three of the four main characters in "Baltasar and Blimunda" were at the auto-de-fe, which is about two couple. Baltasar and Blimunda were there. The king was there, above it all. The queen wasn't there because she was pregant.

The auto-de-fe happens near the beginning of "Baltasar and Blimunda," Right at the beginning, the king is building a model, like the adolescent he is. In keeping with the time and place, it's a model of St. Peter's in Rome. It is not a model he is building from scratch. He is not that smart.

It's a pre-existing model, and he is way into it.

She valued her own model.


When a king with kingly power has a model, he gets much help. His servants stood by to hand him pieces of the model.

When someone with less power has a different model, they often get the opposite of help.

How hard it is to have a different model at any given time and place is kind of a roll of the dice. Sometimes you can know what you know wasy. Sometimes it is tough.

Havel, the playwright and later leader of the Czech Republic, talked about a man he knew in the time of oppression who never, under most circumstances, would have been what is called a dissident. But he cared a lot about making beer the right way, the best way. The regime didn't want it made that way. The beer wise man didn't give in, and, hey, presto, he was a dissicent and in a lot of trouble.

*

Fe and faith are two words for the same thing. But what is that thing?

If I've really got faith in this and that, surely I don't need all around me to think the same about this and that as I do? Needing human agreement seems like a lack of faith.

It is possible to get close to the trunk of a tree and look straight up and see through the branches and leaves the sky. Therefore, life is worth living.

There are other things like that.

The hunger of people like me for convenience is melting the glaciers, which is inconvenient. What will we do with the water? What will the water do with us?

Time to clean up my act.