14 August 2011

Notes - Crunch Crunch Pear / an OverView for Merlyn

        You want a fresh start, a fresh attitude adjustment today. The “self-defecating” got to you as well it should.

         A half hour from noon. Self-depreciating is much more polite. Up late because of poor sleeping during the night. Late breakfast and the reading of the Sunday paper. I did experience something new for breakfast. Paul had given me a couple of cans of Korean “Crunch Crunch Pear” and the pear juice was really, really good. Carol also had a sip and commented on how the pears (when they lived in Korea) had been really fresh and tasty. Kim sent new photos of Owen last night, which are a delight to grandma and grandpa. Also, late last night I finally signed up for Twitter, but I don’t see much sense in it so far. I signed up to follow ten subjects, all science oriented. I’m not really interested in following anyone a present and I guess that is what I am supposed to do. I thought about gathering a following by pretending to be a soul driving down an ancient road (thinking a Twilight Zone and On the Road combination) and somehow having the blog as a continual roadside stop (Twilight Zone). The problem is that I would feel I would have to come up with something clever to be entertaining – too much work and not enough wit to carry it through. Dreaming up stuff is fun though, and that is what I was doing, also the reason I didn’t sleep well. It reminded me of being a kid and knowing I was going to get a new bike the next day and then dreaming about how and where I was going to ride it to show off my new bike. Childhood silliness.

         It is silliness because you don’t really have your heart into it. Soul and half a mind maybe, but no heart. I like your Twitter name though, “rhodster”.

         Yeah, that was my best effort, but I don’t know how and when to use it. Besides, what can you say in only so many letters? It was fun while it lasted.

         Post, Amorella.


        Frozen veggie pizza for supper. You are both caught up on your TV shows from before and after the recent wedding in Tennessee. In another two weeks you will be ready to go on your ‘four couples’ annual trip. Last year Upper Michigan and this year Bar Harbor, Maine. The planning is setting stacked and ready to go on the coffee table in the living room. This morning while browsing BBC you caught an example of little known destinations in the United States under BBC Travel. This is their example from Maine, Cape Neddick.


Cape Neddick, Maine (BBC – Travel)

         We are excited to see our friends and take an adventure much further up the East Coast than we have been before. One of my former colleagues, Nancy, who taught AP Calculus, biked from Ohio up through the area and even further east. She has since retired and teaches at a small college up in Minnesota. Her photo albums are full of beautiful shots of the natural wilderness all across the United States and Canada. It is almost always fun to explore new places and we are going short of the fall season when there are sure to be more crowds of vacationers.

         You feel like exploring inwardly also, orndorff. Difficult in some ways but it doesn’t cost much and the planning is mostly through sitting down and thinking about how it all might be within. You have discovered a bit more about what humans generally call their hearts and souls and minds but to you these are general term names of mysterious regions of a human spiritual existence. – Amorella.

         I can’t help but think of Freud and the Id, Ego and Superego. I had several formal courses in psychology while at college and the university, the best class was by BGSU’s visiting summer professor from Vienna, Dr. Helmut Pellichek-Wilsdorf while gaining my masters in curriculum/education at Bowling Green in 1969-70. His recent doctoral focus was on Freud and thus he gave us a clearer background on the subject. . . . I just googled his name but nothing comes up. I don’t remember the spelling. He was a very good fellow. I always looked forward to his classes. 

         My hypotheses are based on an experimental base also (though strictly personal). As such the esoteric concepts of how-things-might-work are not scholarly by any means. I just want the fiction to have a strong plausibility base as far as intuitive imagination goes.

         In some ways there is more reality to heart, soul and mind than to id, ego and superego. The reality is stronger because heart, soul and mind are older, ancient based words in many languages. Many different views/definitions of ‘soul’ for instance. Aristotle’s concept as shown in Wikipedia is that the soul is the essence of what a thing is, for instance the soul of a knife is to cut. The human soul dies with the death of a human being. Herorhis essence no longer exists when sheorhe no longer exists. I lean more towards Plato in my sense of the word.

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“Plato, drawing on the words of his teacher Socrates, considered the soul the essence of a person, being that which decides how we behave. He considered this essence to be an incorporeal, eternal occupant of our being. As bodies die the soul is continually reborn in subsequent bodies. The Platonic soul comprises three parts:
                the logos (mind, nous, or reason)
                the thymos (emotion, or spiritedness, or masculine)
                the eros (appetitive, or desire, or feminine)
Each of these has a function in a balanced, level and peaceful soul.”
From: Wikipedia: soul
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         In the Merlyn books it is natural to separate the mind from the soul and the heart rests with the balancing of emotion and desire. Here I am finding myself focusing mostly on the soul, which in these books and blog, is a tough nut to crack. In a way the ‘how-things-work’ department I have to create a mythology to work with it. I mean, that is what I seem to be doing, both consciously and unconsciously.

         This, the heartansoulanmind, is the battlefield of the rebellion, both in the common cause and in the individual. You may think, if you will of a parallel with ‘the island’ in Lord of the Flies. The individual, the small group, and the greater community of Dead must find a way to work together to overcome the foe, one’s own worst enemy, herorhimself. We have to return to the posting on 3 November 09.

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The humor of this in the Merlyn books, from my perspective anyway, is that the just desserts are that no one in their right mind can say after deep thought, that sheorhe ‘knows’ who sheorhe is. The humor is that after death, when an angel, let’s say, comes up to anyone and says: “Who Are You?”

In my deepest inner self, under those circumstances, I would have to say before an angel or G---D, “I really do not know.” As such, under these conditions, I can honestly say, “I think I am mostly fiction. In fact, the more I think into it the more unsure I am of my total conscious/unconscious reality, therefore I feel I may be even more fiction than not.”

You think you would say this to G---D or to an Angel of G---D?

I do.  I’m POed enough to say it now.

Perhaps we can use this in book four, The Rebellion. A lead character rebels not against G---D but against what sheorhe considers a false truth about herorhis sense of self. The character has no place to go except to others of the Dead who feel and understand that their predicament or circumstance is that it is seemingly impossible to define one’s sense of self accurately.


It is impossible in life, and impossible in death also. Therefore, says this new leader of the Dead, let us go back into the world of the living so that we the Dead may better find the truth of our circumstances so that we might share this with our children, the Living. What do you think, orndorff?


In my present anger it sounds reasonable. I will have to give the concept more thought.

Good enough. Keep in mind that the fictional "rebellion" (ironically) would be an authentic part of your own seemingly deeper nature.

From blog posting: 3 November 09
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         The point. What is the false truth about self that the individual feels strongly enough to blame a group of rebellious angels or G---D for it? Now, I have put the battleground in the heartansoulanmind and while others are about their business in Elysium and elsewhere it is Merlyn that makes the observation on the false truth hypothesis and struggles with his concepts in a wish to interfere with a battle that has long sense been lost. He will discover that his only real response has to be to the second rebellion not the first. – Amorella.

         Wow, Amorella. I need to have a better understanding of how this can come about in the next chapters and book five. This is another psychological layer to add on.

          It is like building the first hills for Rome, boy, one step at a time. Merlyn has been on the Board but he also must be above it to see its potential. It is like flying over the Andes, Rockies and Alps. You have to see what all this is by climbing on top and flying above the mountains and crevasses. Passes and tunnels won’t work in here if you are going to attach your name to it, old man. Post. – Amorella.

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