Day of the Whales
(From the slopes of California's Tamalpais about 30 years ago)

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An incidental opinion is offered here that the still influential Michelson-Morley Experiment, which rejected the physical fabric of a cosmic "ether," was based on the dubious premise that light would be slowed down by ether if it existed. Einstein began demonstrating soon thereafter, in effect, that illumination is much more magical than that. Thus the very medium through which it is propagated might still be characterized as ethereal.

Show Me

The preceding section was drafted in Stone and Greene counties—Missouri, the "show-me" state—and finished around New Year. On the first Sunday of 2004, "Sixty Minutes" featured a Harvard professor teaching students how to sharpen their visual—and thus more holistic—thinking. His technique amounts to observing the obvious all around—as empirical alertness—within the magnificently Aesthetic Continuum of Nature.

Totems
(Brookline Cemetery west of Springfield)

Note (rewritten from "Catalogue"): The heavy impasto was "sculpted" to develop a principal theme herein: every tree becomes a natural "totem pole" when one's visual focus is reversed from the outward design of leaves and branches--to the spaces between them--where anthropomorphic "faces" lurk (in the shadows, as it were. This idea was suggested about 30 years ago among the books of anthropologist Carlos Castaneda.) It thus seems no trick of imagination when uncanny resemblances do appear at some distance from a tree. If one walks closer to touch them though, they vanish. This magic probably prompted our ancestors to regard the images as fleeting "masks" for spiritual presences: departed ancestors and/or "gods." I tend to agree.