Walking Commentary
Thoughts while waiting to walk from Manchester to Rome in 2022
MOMENTS
Reading Caspar Henderson’s 21st Century Bestiary, reminded me that the Czech poet and immunologist Miroslav Holub defined the ‘dimension of the present moment’ as a little less than three seconds.
‘Societies becoming software civilisation’ is the string of words that I got from a spreadsheet I made this morning. I took ten sentences from a book and typed them into a spreadsheet. I devised a formula to randomly select one word from each sentence. With the resulting ten words, I used a random number generator to select the number of sequential words that I should grab from the arbitrary, nonsensical list. Four was the magic number, four contiguous words from ten. I purposely biased the experiment by choosing the sequential four that made some sense to me. ‘Societies becoming software civilisation’ was my reward for creating the word list in the first place.
‘I want a poem
I can grow old in.’ ¹
Poet and Professor Eavan Boland died a year ago yesterday.
‘Follow the cartouche!’ is not what you’d expect native American trackers to say but it’s one trick that The Shadow Wolves can use to find people who have crossed into Arizona from Mexico. It seems that our shoe brands in soft soils or sands are as useful as a wall for immigration control.
‘It was in a cave near there that De Selby encountered St Augustine and surrealistic visions of eternity.’ or so I wrote last October of a cave in a cove where naturists liked to hang out. I’m not contending that De Selby or St Augustine were advocates let alone dedicated to meeting au naturel but far stranger things happened in The Dalkey Archive. By the way, the naturists I often encountered while walking the dog have recently moved around the head to the Vico Bathing place. In case you were curious.
We turned on the TV this morning to hear that the Suez Canal backlog was cleared. After paying the normal $500,000 transit fee per ship, the 400 or so delayed vessels are all plying their trade again. And there, to illustrate the news story, was an aircraft carrier. The USS Dwight D. Eisenhower had also passed through the canal. And typing 400 reminds me that this is journal 400.
