THE EARLY DAZE

Demorest Gazelle Delk
and Darius Frank Finton

My grandfather was always an old man to me. He was nearly seventy when I was born, thirty five years older than my father. Grandpa smoked a pipe and cigars and always smelled of strong tobacco.

We would spend many hours on the back porch cracking hickory nuts and walnuts with a hammer. He and I ate raw hamburger on crackers together followed by thick slices of limburger cheese.

Grandpa played the fiddle well at one time, but arthritis slowed his movements in his later years. The fiddle sounded pretty squeaky to me, but the tunes he played stayed with me forever.

Grandpa told me tales about his turbulent school days. He related these stories with a crooked smile that exposed his tobacco-stained teeth below his bushy white mustache.

In those days, school ended for most rural folk in the eighth grade. With an eight-year education, students could take a teacher’s examination and become a teacher themselves. Some of the students were as old as the teacher.

One of his male teachers had a bad habit of tossing a knife at his students for any infraction of his rules. One day Grandpa turned around to say something to a classmate seated behind him and that teacher threw the knife at him. It stuck in his desk. Grandpa got out of his seat and attacked the teacher.

The pot belly stove was red hot and blazing. Over it went, stove pipe and all, along with the teacher’s desk and several stools.The fight boiled over to the outdoors and ended with the knife-tossing teacher being taught a lesson by one of his older pupils.

Grandpa told me a story about one lady teacher about his age who was “soft” on him. Evidently, this crush was a one-way street, as Grandpa didn’t give a whit. He had made a sled which consisted of a thick plank with a bevel on the front end. That day there was a heavy snow on the ground with a thick crust. Grandpa and some of his friends went out to slide down the hill. The teacher wanted a ride, so Grandpa agreed to let her take a ride. He headed her in the direction of a small stump that barely showed above the thick crust. When she hit the stump, the teacher rolled head over heels. Her skirt billowed up over her head and showed more than she wanted her students to see. When Grandpa sheepishly helped her back up she told him: “I’ve seen enough of you to know that you’re no gentleman.”

Grandpa replied, “And I’ve seen enough of you to know that you’re no gentleman either.”

He told me these stories with a crooked smile that exposed his tobacco stained teeth below his large white mustache.

* * *

In October of 1960, I saw Grandpa alive for the last time. I had graduated from high school and spent the summer remodeling the house. Dad never seemed to have enough time of energy to work on the house. He was busy with his historical research and tracing genealogies. Gradually, I learned some basic skills and did all the handiwork at home.

Grandpa had been in a sanitarium for several years after suffering a series of strokes. In his late eighties, he was a dimmed shadow of the man he used to be. He was unable to speak. His eyes were barely visible through slits in his fleshy eyelids. His abdomen seemed puffed. He tried to speak, but only a squeaky whimper came forth. His hands twitched like the paws of a dreaming dog. He tried to move from one side to another, but he was like a car stuck in the mud. His mouth looked like it was bound with wire. Death, I realized, would be a blessing to him. Finally, he passed on and we buried him in the family plot in early November of 1960. He looked peaceful and at rest, more like the man I had known most of my life.

William Kenneth Finton

My father was somewhat of a mystery to me. He was bright and literate. He supported me in most everything I wanted to do. He played his vast collection of sound recordings often, so I became well versed in music from the time that recorded music was invented. Dad has a booming bass baritone voice and often sang along, or showed me songs of his own making. Everything he did made lasting impressions on me.

My father had missed his calling somehow. He was the type that needed to love his work, but he had settled for working for others in a factory setting for a wage. He had tried self employment often, but he could not make enough money for the family in an independent workplace. Some might say it was his own fault for not trying hard enough, but I knew better. He loved his family first and foremost. The all-consuming drive that is necessary for great success eluded him by personal choice. It was his lot to put home and family before personal satisfaction and work.

I think I summed everything up in a poem I wrote about Dad twenty years after he died.

Holding A Mirror to the Sun

© 1993 Kenneth Harper Finton

Is it the ghost of him I see

in the restless dreamscapes of a hollow night?

The ghost of him … or my own flawed impressions?

Twenty years ago my world quaked violently

when he passed so suddenly

from our lives, so quickly there was barely time for tears.

A sudden shock … a stunning loss …

and life moved on without him.

With childhood’s end, the world could never be the same.

Twenty years … so long ago I barely recognize

that younger, wandering self.

Yet, in those silent dreamscapes of the night

he comes to visit still.

A near sighted old neighbor said

he saw him walking through the tall grasses

of the abandoned yard years after we left

the old Ohio homestead.

“Bunk,” I said, not prone to thoughts of spirits,

yet encounters of a kind have occurred

in the darkness of many a restless night since.

I remember those long evenings in the family home,

the easy chair whose arms

held up a crude wood shelf,

flowing over with papers and notes,

my father seated behind this rude table

in his oily green work suit,

lost from the present in the remote past of other peoples lives.

The black and white TV that connected us

with the world blared endlessly,

while mother ironed the clothes

and I shook my head in wonder.

How bored I liked to be on those

hot and muggy summer days when Dad’s idea

of a good time was to walk through silent graveyards,

writing the names from time-worn stones on yellow legal pads.

Yet, caught up in his enthusiasm,

I learned to hold a mirror to the sun,

reflecting shadows upon those faded letters.

Quite often we were rewarded

with a touch of heartfelt sentiment

inscribed upon the crumbling stone.

Often Saturday would find us in

some distant library, digging through

piles of dry old books of facts that smelled of yesteryear,

but all was not studious and dull escape.

All was not the dark, outmoded past,

as I feared in the leafy green and anxious days of youth…

the family trips brought new, inviting places we ran to once a year,

croquet with friends in the evening breezes of the green Ohio grass.

Is it the ghost of him I see

in the restless dreamscapes of a hollow night?

The ghost of him … or my own flawed impressions?

His choice in music bubbles through my mind.

His choice in pastime rumbles

through my mature years like the distant drone of a passing freight.

Through the years I’ve come to know him

more than yesterday, when I was but his child.

And most of all, I learned to hold a mirror to the sun.

© 1993 Kenneth Harper Finton

© 1993 Kenneth Harper Finton

We lived in the country about two miles from town. Dad had purchased an old brick one-room schoolhouse in 1948 from the county when they built a new school for the country folk consolidated all the one-room schools. He and Grandpa immediately went about the business of ruining it as an historic landmark. They broke up the large one room into four square rooms 15×15 with a ten foot hall between the sections. Two of the squares served as bedrooms, one served as the kitchen and one the living room.

They took out the lovely front door and cut a hole for a back door, bricked up a few of the long church style windows and lowered the ceilings from sixteen feet to eight feet. Dad wanted it to look like a normal home with a columned porch and a horseshoe drive, but this never happened. After he put the wiring in and ran the water from the false well, he drywalled everything and taped it. He ran out of steam very quickly. The rooms did not get paint for seven to eight years. By this time the drywall was brown with age and nicotine. The taped joints and the spackled nail holes stood in tasteless contrast to the tanned gypsum board.

Dad smoked unfiltered Old Gold cigarettes until they came out with Winston filters, then he switched. Sometimes he would smoke a pipe. I loved the smell of a pipe and could not wait until I had my own pipe and tobacco. Dad smoked Carter Hall tobacco when he smoked the pipe.

Mom always hated the schoolhouse. She had been used to a more traditional housing and thought that camping out in a unfinished home was not dignified enough. She has a dour attitude all the time she lived there and moved out as soon as Dad died.

A quarter mile north of our place was the Children’s Home. When I was a small boy, I often went there to play with the kids. They has a stout playground with a tall steel slide, that burned your skin in the hot summer sun, swings made with thick chains and seats of steel, and a small old carousel that always squeaked. The older boys did farm work and were called “barn boys”. I was not really old enough to play with them, but they let me hang out with them anyway. I first learned to ride a horse in the pasture between our house and the Children’s Home

REMEMBERING MAXINE

DORIS MAXINE HARPER FINTON SACK

born October 18, 1919, died January 20, 2009

It occurs to me that when you are talking about the life of a person and the meaning of the time they spend on earth, you are entering a gray area—a scary place that not many people like to go. You are talking about the evolution of a spirit—the changes that a lifetime makes in a soul. At the same time, you are being judgmental, revealing your own values, beliefs and patterns of thought in your words and praises— judging how the other person stood up to your own peculiar beliefs and evaluations.

Maxine was one of those rare species of human beings that took pleasure from being in the service of others. Not that she was totally selfless, as few of us are. Not that she was a saint, as none of us have perfect love, perfect lives or perfect morals. Only the long dead folks are made saints—and even then, it is only after the life they really lived has been selectively forgotten.

Born in Salem, Oregon, October 1919 and living into January 2009 mathematically made Maxine 89 years old when she died, but the view outside the window of her person was truly remarkable. She never knew her father, Clinton Byron Harper. He died of Spanish Influenza before she saw the first light of day. She was raised by her mother, Cora Mae Gilmour, a descendant of European royal families that never had the slightest taste or knowledge of the diluted bluish blood that flowed in her veins. Cora took in washing and did people’s laundry during the Great Depression. She struggled hard to raise her three daughters, Florence, Ruth, and Maxine. Cora left Oregon shortly after Maxine’s birth to live in the middle of the Kansas prairie with her father, Hedron Walker Gilmour, a short, thin and dapper man who loved the arts and entertainment. Hedron was an amateur magician and painter who became another big influence in Maxine’s early years.

After Maxine graduated from the Minneapolis Kansas High School, she moved to Denver, Colorado to live with her older sister Florence. She went to beauty school, though she rarely practiced the trade, just as her mother had gone through optometry school and never practiced that trade. Instead, Maxine waited tables on roller skates and went dancing with her friends as much as she could. It was at one of these dances that she met Ken Finton, an indisputably handsome man with Titian gold hair and a baritone voice to match those golden locks. He would become her husband of over 30 years and the father of her children: Kenny, Billy, and Jean Marie.

Ken would move her to Ohio where they would spend their life together near his family. They were married November 15, 1941. Just a few short weeks later, Japan bombed Pearl Harbor. This act changed the lives of every American forever.

Maxine did not follow in the footsteps of Rosy the Riveter and go out into the workplace to replace the missing men in the American factories during the war. Instead, she had a baby —namely me—and sat out the war on the sidelines, staying sometimes in small apartments in Cleveland and Greenville, Ohio and sometimes with Ken’s parents. For a while in 1944 and 1945, she lived in Gainesville, Florida while Ken was stationed in Fort Blanding. They returned to Greenville where Ken first found work delivering fuel oil for the space heaters of Darke County’s many farm houses. Afterward, Ken opened a small gas station with his Flying Red Horse Mobil Oil Company contacts.

Ken’s attempt at the independent life did not last very long. He was forced to take refuge in factory work when a new baby decided to come into the family. The money was not great, but the job was steady and not overly demanding. He worked in quality control inspecting taps and dies for a branch of the Detroit Tap and Tool company called Sater Products. This work lasted he until he retired at 64.

Around 1950, the schools in Darke County consolidated and left quite a few one-room brick school houses vacant. Ken was able to buy one of these abandoned schools and had the idea that he could remodel it into an ideal two story home with the help of his father and family. However, Ken was not a talented builder. The schoolhouse was divided into four 15×15 rooms with a bath and a hallway, but that is about as far as it went. This was much to Maxine’s dismay. She never liked the dwelling. It remains a schoolhouse on the exterior and a two bedroom home on the interior to this very day.

Maxine spent the 50’s raising her two boys. There were plenty of instruction manuals on how to do this. Dr. Benjamin Spock had written his famous book that took the world by storm. In 1946, Spock was given the chance to publish his iconoclastic views in The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care. Along with everyone else, Maxine and Ken read it, of course.

In the 50’s strange new gadgets appeared on the roofs of American houses as television became a household necessity. Leave it to Beaver, Father Knows Best, and The Nelson family’s The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet did not hesitate to show how child rearing in the 50’s ought to be.

None of these shows were much like our own personal lives, but that did not matter much. With TV in most homes, everyone had a living model of the way things should be. A woman’s place was definitely in the home for everyone but school teachers and nurses. Thus, Maxine stayed home to raise the kids most of the fifties, though she secretly would have preferred to be out in the workplace. Despite the social norm, Maxine did take temporary work as a cashier at some grocery stores and the five and ten cent store now and then. But in 1956, a new daughter that we named Jean Marie came as complete surprise to the everyone—fifteen years after the first baby—and once again life was changed for all.

As to religious views, the family was for the most part not serious about churches and religions. This changed a bit in the late fifties when Ken and Maxine started studying the Bible with John Timmons and his wife who were Jehovah’s Witnesses. I am not sure what swept them up into this strange, cultish group. It was probably the strong personality of John Timmons more than anything else, but I was young and impressionable and was swept up into this myself at the time. By the time I graduated high school, I had moved well beyond fundamentalist viewpoints, and developed interests in sciences, as well as philosophy, eastern religions, archeology, history, and music.

Ken died suddenly of a severe stroke in 1972. A few years later, Maxine sold off many of her Ohio possessions and moved to 1289 Clayton Street in Denver where she lived in a house that originally belonged to the Muckle family. Maxine’s sister Florence had married Paul Muckle. His parents had both passed away and the big old turn-of-the-century home sat empty at the time. Once again, like the time after Maxine’s’ graduation, her older sister Florence was there for her in her time of need and confusion.

Florence had come to Ohio when my brother Billy was born and we had visited her several times in Colorado—once by train when I was around six and several times by auto when Ken took his vacation.

The Mind of Pilot Andreas Lubitz

Tired of living, spurned in loving, deficit in compassion, Andreas Lubitz and his crippled amygdala donned his smart uniform and climbed aboard the plane.

A pretty stewardess smiled at him, bid him a good morning as he passed. She smelled of a musky perfume. That reminded him of the sex he often craved with her.

He found sex to be an animalistic and ludicrous practice. Love had always been a dream that faded away to sorrow. He returned to her a faceless smile without meaning.

He took his place in the cockpit beside Patrick, his pilot. It was less that two hours to Dusseldorf from Barcelona. Patrick was loquacious, almost collegiate in manner.

As they bantered back and forth, Patrick’s banal conversation bored Andreas to death. He could only fake a smile for reply.

Andreas thought about how he hated God for giving him life. An aching desire for release from the prison of time had overcome him. A dull ache of depression swept over him as he remembered all the hideous assaults he had endured.

It was as though he wore glasses that saw only the evil of time and hid away the pleasant moments.

When Patrick left the cabin, Andreas pushed the button to lock the door so that he would not have to bear him any longer.

Alone in the cabin, with only the sky in his eyes and the engine noise in his ears, Andreas was at last alone with himself. He hated his aloneness. “Everyone is suffering in their meaningless lives just like I am,” he thought. The future brings nothing but more disappointment, times filled with melancholy, nights filled with helpless thoughts, days filled with foolish actions that try to mitigate the absurdity of living a desperately miserable existence. Dog eats dog, life eats life, panicked schools of fish swirling in circles as the sharks attack the outer layers of their being.

The images consumed him. The irrelevance of his very being and all those around him felt like the beating drum of a hated heartbeat Mushroom clouds raining death, pits with decapitated bodies killed by fools who thought themselves righteous appeared in the gray sky when he adjusted the course of the plane to fly at one hundred feet.

“It will soon be over,” he thought to himself. “I am finally on control.”

He heard a frantic knocking on the door as Patrick tried to gain the cabin. His gut tensed, his breath came hard and fast. He could hear the hysterical screams of the passengers behind him.

No sympathy for their plight crossed Andreas mind. “They are all going to die anyway,” he thought. “Today is as good a day to die as any other. Today is better. It will save them from through suffering their ignorant lives.”

Adrenaline rushed through Andreas veins as the mountain loomed before him and the nose of the aircraft. He felt like a soldier entering battle.

“It is a good day to die,” the voices around him exclaimed.

He remembered the stewardess with the sexy perfume who greeted him when he stepped onto the plane. Her voice was among those screaming behind him. “I will not fuck her,” he told himself. “She will not tempt anyone to fuck her now. I can make sure of that.”

There was power in the thought; power had always escaped him.

The remembered scent of her perfume hung in his nostrils. His own breath came hard and deep as he thought about having sex with her. Death, he thought, would be like conception, a  one timeless contracting orgasm would begin the journey to another useless, meaningless and painful life. Another contraction would snap the miserable body away from experience and into the vast nothingness of the universe.

He could picture himself letting go after the shock of impact. It would be his final orgasm, his final statement, his final action.

 

 

THE THEORY OF COSMIC ORIGINS

By Kenneth Harper Finton

—————————-ABSTRACT—————————-

For much of my life, I have been trying to understand cosmic origins. I have tried to relay by words, music, and verse concepts of the many visions have come to me over the years. It is a most difficult task to bring together––atheists and theists, true believers and deists. We are a divided people in more that our politics and religions. We are segregated by custom, sex, national borders, local borders, economics, levels of education, genetic makeups, intellectual levels, personality types and race. Hope, essential as it is in social interactions, seems to be sinking when it needs to rise. Our world needs a release from the web of existential anxiety the modern world has created.

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PREFACE

Scientists tell us that the universe was born about 13.8 billion years ago. Through the aeons that passed, our modern lives evolved from nothing into the complex situations that we find ourselves immersed in and call the present time. Everyone seems to have a theory of why this is so. Some ideas seem much better than others, yet all lead that same demise that our emotional states want desperately to reject, the cessation of being itself. 

We try to contemplate the nature of the world—develop ideas about the building blocks of nature that create this world around us—by looking into the atoms that make our physical universe searching for the smallest particles.

Is there such thing as the smallest particles? How could there be? Something would always be smaller than the smallest until it disappeared into infinity—which is exactly what matter seems to do. 

Matter seems to be made of vibrating wave frequencies. Electrons have different states of energy. We see solidity in our immediate world, but the micro world seems to be a sea of informational energy that creates the appearance of solidity, while most of the manifest universe is a vacuum in space. We do not live in the micro world. We know that if we crash into these solid mountains of elemental rocks, it will injure or destroy us. 

Donald Hoffman—professor of cognitive science at the University of California, Irvine—wrote: “On the other side are quantum physicists, marveling at the strange fact that quantum systems don’t seem to be definite objects localized in space until we come along to observe them—whether we are conscious humans or inanimate measuring devices. Experiment after experiment has shown—defying common sense—that if we assume that the particles that make up ordinary objects have an objective, observer-independent existence, we get the wrong answers. The central lesson of quantum physics is clear: There are no public objects sitting out there in some preexisting space. As the physicist John Wheeler put it, “Useful as it is under ordinary circumstances to say that the world exists ‘out there’ independent of us, that view can no longer be upheld.”

Hoffman continues: “Not only are they ignoring the progress in fundamental physics, they are often explicit about it. They’ll say openly that quantum physics is not relevant to the aspects of brain function that are causally involved in consciousness. They are certain that it’s got to be classical properties of neural activity, which exist independent of any observers—spiking rates, connection strengths at synapses, perhaps dynamical properties as well. These are all very classical notions under Newtonian physics, where time is absolute and objects exist absolutely. And then [neuroscientists] are mystified as to why they don’t make progress. They don’t avail themselves of the incredible insights and breakthroughs that physics has made. Those insights are out there for us to use, and yet my field says, “We’ll stick with Newton, thank you. We’ll stay 300 years behind in our physics.”

In other words, Hoffman thinks that the universe itself if a mental conception composed of independent conscious agents with varying degrees of complexity, all of which are but informational viewpoints that communicate with one another. From the smallest to the largest, all is composed of the same non-material—awareness and consciousness. Communicating conscious agents can merge to form other conscious agents.

DOES IT MATTER?

Does it matter much if the universe is a mental conception or a physical reality? Are the results not the same? Both lead to the same questions and dilemmas either way. Saying that nothing really exists does not change anything, because it still exists. Notions that awareness can sleep, wake, be unaware and dream again through infinity is a most interesting mythos. 

Can understanding of the cosmos as a mental conception be an emotional solace to existential anxiety?

Life becomes one riddle after another for the thinking person. Solving one riddle creates many more to take their place. Debunking one myth leads to another, as the world is both mystic and mythic.

We peer into the universe with our telescopes and our probes and find awe-inspiring beauty of all kinds. Who can object to the beauty of Saturn’s rings set in the blackness of the sky or the wonderful things that nature provides for our eyes and ears to hear and see? At the same time, we wonder why these things even exist for us to see. Why should the beauty of the world go unseen and unappreciated for billions of years while life on Earth evolves enough to care about it? Who or what experienced these wonders before the dawn of time or the emergence of living things? What was the observer that brought our universe into view?

This is where the idea of a mental conception of the world is most convincing. In order for there to have been an evolutionary past through the birthing of elements in stars, there had to be an observer.

Many believe that God is the creator of the universe and experienced the void of the universe alone long before the world came into being, but everyone has their own conception of what this God might be. The Abrahamic religions give God a male gender, a father figure—though giving birth to the universe seems to be a female attribute. Cultures create their own myths to explain their existence.

In the long run, does it matter whether God created the universe (as some religions claim) or physicality came into being and evolved into the present (as some scientists believe). Either point of view is obsolete with quantum mechanics. Yet, both views point to an event from an undefinable zero dimension. Whether we call it creation or the Big Bang, we refer to the same event that came from beyond time and space. 

Some assume our universe came from the remnants of a previous universe. Some think it came from nothing at all, and some say something cannot come from nothing. 

I, for one, find it much easier to visualize timelessness than to envision the beginnings and endings of time. I also find it easy to visualize timelessness as having no concept of duration, but focused on experience instead. The timelessness of the dimensions above our own experience seems to perfectly balance our mortal experiences with the immortal potential of our existence. Duration is a concept stamped upon experience by intellectual branders. Someone dreamed up the idea of measuring time, but did not really comprehend the nature of timelessness and pure experience. How long the experience is felt is not nearly as important as the experience itself.

Where did our consciousness reside before we came to be born? Is it possibly the same non-place in which we dwell when we die? We have all experienced the place where our awareness of ourselves was blank and united with everything. Before we began to exist in this time and space, we all experienced a blank infinity of time and memory. On a personal level, eternity is that which your consciousness was before this life experience. Eternity can be pictured as a sleeping form of awareness that—when  awakened—develops sensory experience such as  touch and perceptions. In time, the subconscious and the self-conscious carry out the business of life and survival. As the universe is born from infinity, we are as well. Infinity is that which was before this life experience. The world about us is similar to a continuous dream that is made real by our consciousness awareness.

Because the zero dimension is static and unchanging, the first and second dimensional structures are also timeless in that they are everywhere at once. That there is structure in the lower dimensions has some experimental evidence. 

“So far, there may already be one piece of experimental evidence for the existence of a lower-dimensional structure at a higher energy scale. When observing families of cosmic ray particles in space, scientists found that, at energies higher than 1 TeV, the main energy fluxes appear to align in a two-dimensional plane. This means that, above a certain energy level, particles propagate in two dimensions rather than three dimensions.” (https://phys.org/news/2011-03-physicists-dimensions-universe.html#jCp)

The emergence of first and second dimensions begin the structure of our physical universe. Time is of no concern in these dimensions. The second dimension creates space where energies can move and react, physical fields can form universally in this dimension. The third dimension ads depth and height and the fourth expands space by creating the duration that we know as time.

Everything in the universe is projected in three dimensions from its zero dimensional source. It has been called the Void, God, Infinity, First Cause, The Great Spirit, Universal Mind, or many other such name devised to express the idea of an unknowable non-thing that is beyond existence, being and conception.

Infinity, since it contains all things and all events began from within it, must be the source of the physical laws that we discover in nature. The finite is contained within infinity. 

INFINITY AND THE UNIVERSE

There are those who cannot accept that there is such a thing as infinity. They consider infinity a simple conception or a mathematical symbol. For some people, the dogmatic religious world hurt them emotionally when they  came realize that that the dogma the world fed them is false. 

But it is not that easy to dismiss infinity. If something is finite, then there must be something that is not finite. That would be the infinite. 

Infinity | Definition of Infinity by Merriam-Webster

1 a: the quality of being infinite. b: unlimited extent of time, space, or quantity: boundlessness. 2: an indefinitely great number or amount such as an infinity of stars.

When we think about how the world about us came to be, we have only two choices. It has a beginning or it is endless and has no beginning. Having no beginning leaves us in a quandary, as the universe should have run out of energy and depleted itself long, long ago. There would have to be a continual creation of new energy to replace that which was lost to the entropy of dissipation for a universe to be eternal. 

If no universe existed before the Big Bang, then what was there? What was in its place when there was no place? Nothing? But nothing cannot exist because it has no being. The ‘it’ we seek cannot be anything but infinite and boundless nothingness which cannot have existence. 

The world, it is said, cannot come from nothing. ‘Nothingness’ may not operate under the same laws of physics by which ‘somethingness’ operates. We cannot assume anything about the physics within nothingness. We cannot really say anything about what nothing is.

However, there are potentially satisfactory answers to the puzzle of eternity, infinity and first causes. These answers are simple to understand by any person that is able to shed his or her preconceptions that have been fostered by the cultural experience.

That answer is that physical reality is built in dimensional layers. The first dimension is infinite and eternal—no beginning nor endings—no particular spot in space nor place in time.

The first dimension is an infinite point that contains all that is possible to exist within it because it is all that exists. It is much like the singularity that the Big Bang theorists posit as the infinity dense point from which all came. The universe always exists within this eternal first-dimension, but not in physical form. 

The second dimension is a flat plane which spreads in all directions from the infinite point. Being infinite as well, this dimension has no beginnings and endings. This second-dimension is without the perception of time, but originates all further dimensional experience. It is the foundation for the concept of space. 

Ultimately, dimensions are viewpoints. Viewpoints are mental constructions. Each dimension contains all the information from the previous dimension while adding important new perceptions.

The two-dimensional line, for example, is the point replicating itself over and over, appearing to travel in a straight line, a vector from the original infinite point. The universal lines that form the universal field is the repetition of the infinite point throughout space. The point is endless and timelessly recurrent. By the expansion of its being, the point fuses with those primal copies of itself to form space and a second dimension. That fusion releases vast amounts of virtual energy that radiates from the original point to form myriads of universal fields. As this radiation spreads there is an expansion of space in the second-dimension.

It is the second dimension that contains the blueprint for the three-dimensional world we see with height, length and width. The two-dimensional universe is flat, like a blueprint. The beginning of the universe is easily comprehended if we hold the view that the physical laws which determine the mathematics, probabilities and shapes essential to universal existence exists in the second dimension. We do not create these laws and principles. We discover them.

As a picture of the natural world can be recorded on flat surfaces like paper and film from the artists perspective, the second dimension can hold our three-dimensional viewpoint in an encoded series of digital bits. 

The third and fourth dimensions limit the space of the second, changing its physicality to a closed, temporal space where duration, height, volume, and depth become apparent. The process can be visualized as similar to the Japanese art of origami  where three dimensional space is unfolded from the two dimensional patterns. By the folding of space, volume, height, and width emerge in a three-dimensional universe, but some space is lost in the process, the same way that some paper is lost on origamic folds. The three-dimensional universe is finite.

The step to physical reality comes through events in four-dimensional space.

Four-dimensional space combines time and duration with three dimensional space. It is the basis for the theory of relativity. Time and space are fused and effect one another as the fourth-dimension emerges and posits another aspect to the third dimensional viewpoint.

In this simple explanation of dimensions, there is a missing ingredient of vital importance to the universe—the mental component of the observation. 

THE MENTAL UNIVERSE

Awareness precedes physical existence in quantum mechanics. Awareness is invisible. It cannot be touched or measured, yet it is ever present even when we are not conscious of it. Awareness builds consciousness through the fusion of random information into organized information. 

The cosmos is projected into being from a non-dimensional and timeless zero dimension. Even if the remains of previous universes should form the present incarnation, those first universes have to start somewhere. That somewhere is beyond time. It has to come from the non-dimensional.

What we experience comes from our personal consciousness—our awareness of being in the  moment. What is this awareness? Is it a sense that arises from our human brains and nervous systems? If so, then awareness dies when we die. Are plants are aware? Are microbes aware? If you think they are not, perhaps you have the wrong conception of what awareness is.

Many people think that awareness emerges late in evolutionary history. To some, it is unthinkable that awareness should precede evolutionary development. Consider an unthinking rock or an ignorant chemical reaction. Where is this awareness in primal nature? What causes awareness to rise in the first place? Is it inherent in the natural order? Are reactions awareness, or are we mincing words? Are interactions aware?

In quantum physics an observer and an interaction is the same thing. Only objects interact. Even a particle colliding with another particle is an interaction and therefore an observation as well. Observations and interactions do not need to have to have concepts to produce effects and events. They are the events.

Our awareness uses the tools of perception to identity itself and the outer world. Were dinosaurs unaware? Are single-celled life forms unaware? A better question is to ask if they have any form of perception. Obviously, if they react to stimuli they  have some form of perception. If they have perception, they have awareness—not on the grand scale that mammals have developed, but their reaction to observation and touch shows that they have awareness built into their systems.  

Quantum mechanics posits that the universe is a connected unit, each part having an effect upon another. Everything in space and time has a cause and an effect. If it has no cause and effect, it is not in space and time. Quantum mechanics also posits that events must have an observer/interaction to be an event. The event itself would not happen unless and until it is observed. The interaction itself is an observation.

This is another clue that the world might be a mental system with a physical component. Observers are generally thought of as being people, but they can also be a system. An observer is person or a system that observes. In other words, before we can have a world, we need events. To have events we need an observer. To have an observation we need awareness of an object or an event.  

The essential quality for an observation or an interaction is to have awareness of an object. Mental awareness, then, is essential for the existence of time and space. All things are not only produced by mental awareness in its myriads of localized forms, but all things are formed from the eternal and non-material awareness which has always been present in the eternal now.

Something has to be a first cause for the parade of time and space to exist. This first cause cannot be material, yet the material world was produced from it. Our dreams are not material nor real, but the fields involved in neural synapses produce what appear as images in our minds. This is similar to the construction of the universe as well. 

Awareness is invisible. It is not something that we can touch or measure, yet it is ever present even when we are not consciously aware of anything.

Awareness is the observer that is awakened by reactions to objects from within and outside ourselves. These reactions to our inner and outer worlds create information that eventually organizes itself and becomes experience.

Awareness does not need the concept of time and space. It creates time and space when it awakens to stimulus from another. 

Awareness is essential for the building of a universe. 

Eternal awareness may be the proper name for the concept of the mind of God. 

Nature is the child of awareness.

Science does not know precisely what a mind is or from whence intelligence springs. Physical theories surmise that it emerged from physical-chemical reactions deep in the remote past. However, we cannot deny the intelligence manifested by nature that experiments with form after form and drives evolutionary change. We cannot deny the subconscious that regulates not only our personal physical systems but the intelligent patterns found in nature. If the mind were made only of nerves and synaptic systems alone, evolution would not have produced our unique world. Plants and chemical bondings have no nervous systems at all, but come up with intelligent and elegant solutions to problems and events. The mind is not a material thing. It is a primal force.

The universe is eternally present even though it may not always be manifest as it appears to be in our three-dimensional reality. Reality takes shape in all dimensions, but we are primarily concerned with the third and fourth-dimensions where our experiences are realized.

Our experience is also recorded in the second dimension in an eternal and timeless form. One unique property of awareness is that it does not have to be aware of anything at all. It can be empty—void of content of any kind—and still be awareness. Awareness needs no physical objects of which to be aware. It does not even need to be aware of itself.

Even our personal awareness rests and ceases to be aware temporarily. It happens daily. Why cannot these lapses of awareness last for eons or epochs, perhaps billions and billions of years. In these empty spaces, universes cease to be. When they exist, the blueprint for reality exists infinitely in the second dimension which holds all time and events, potential or actual.

Then how does the world come to be?

Consider the dimensional foundation of the universe. Assuming that awareness is non-material, massless and infinite, then a universe without dimension is the zero dimension, an immaterial zone beyond time and space where primal awareness sleeps and dreams. Only when awareness awakens does the first dimension come into being. That first dimension is a point that exists everywhere and contains everything that is possible to contain. It is much like the singularity envisioned in the original big bang theory. This point is infinite. Quadrillions of copies of itself exist at this point. All are infinite and massless as they take up no time and inhabit no space.

When these points move to form a second dimension, as awareness awakens from its slumber, infinite fields and lines are formed and space is born. This space has no place in time, as time has not yet emerged. It simply expands from the first dimension, pushed in all directions by the radiating energy from the point. This virtual energy radiated from the 1st-dimension is not vibratory because there is no vibrational dimension until time emerges in the third dimension. Instead, this radiation is a homogeneous mass of timeless energy. Vibrations have duration. Radiating lines only have motion. They are not in time because they have no duration.

These radiating lines create two-dimensional quantum fields throughout the universe, fields which trace patterns for the actualization of that which comes to be physical in the third-dimension. These fields include electromagnetic fields, weak gauge fields, strong gauge fields, and gravitational fields—all flat two-dimensional fields that occur everywhere in the universe and regulates how matter is born from infinite virtual energy.

As vibrations emerge in these waveforms the saga of time begins. Duration differentiates one form from another through vibrational frequency (duration).

Mass is added from passing through the second-dimensional fields (the Higgs field) which is a filter that further limits the virtual energy. Mass emerges as particles that eventually form elemental hydrogen, and helium—the basic elemental building blocks of our three-dimensional physical reality.

Eventually, a primal soup of extremely dense gases is built up. As the elements interact, they form pockets of different densities—material lumps that are no longer homogenous. The inequality of the mass in their combined states react to the second-dimensional gravitational fields that regulate the influence of unequal masses upon one another.

As the material lumps grow larger they revolve about one another before fusing themselves with the larger mass. These gravitational fields attract even more elemental gas and the first massive stars appear in the universe, using the principle of fusion to form heavier elements and radiant energy.

Fusion is the process or result of joining two or more things together to form a single entity. The entity formed is greater than the sum of its parts and the extra energy is released as radiation from stars.

Fusion is even more than a factory for heavier elements and radiated energy. It is a process of assimilation of two lesser parts into one which is greater than the parts themselves. It is the abstract process that fuels change and ignites evolution. Even reproduction uses an abstraction of the fusion process to propagate.

Definition\: fu’sion: the process or result of joining two or more things together to form a single entity.” 2) a fusion of an idea from anthropology and an idea from psychology”

4	1.blend, blending, combination, amalgamation, joining, union, marrying, bonding, merging, melding, mingling, integration, intermixture, intermingling, synthesis; coalescence”the fusion of cells”

• EXTRA READING LIST

HOFFMAN NOTES: “Over the years, we have written extensively about why QM seems to imply that the world is essentially mental (e.g. 1990, 1993, 1999, 2001, 2007, 2017a, 2017b). We are often misinterpreted—and misrepresented—as espousing solipsism or some form of “quantum mysticism,” so let us be clear: our argument for a mental world does not entail or imply that the world is merely one’s own personal hallucination or act of imagination. Our view is entirely naturalistic: the mind that underlies the world is a transpersonal mind behaving according to natural laws. It comprises but far transcends any individual psyche.”

Recall Max Planck’s position: “I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness.” (Emphasis added.

Our consciousness is formed from our awareness. Awareness is invisible. It is not something that we can touch or measure, yet it is ever present even when we are not consciously aware of anything. Awareness is the observer that is awakened by reactions to objects from within and outside ourselves. These reactions to our inner and outer worlds create information that eventually organizes itself and becomes experience.

Awareness does not need the concept of time and space. It creates time and space when it awakens to stimulus from another. That awareness precedes existence is essential for physical reality.

For more information see:

https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/coming-to-grips-with-the-implications-of-quantum-mechanics

PRE-EXISTENCE

By Kenneth Harper Finton

Before existence took place, there was pre-existence without time and without space, where no dimensions at all exist. Science can tell us nothing of this era. We are left to our own experiences to decipher our personal realities about from whence we came.

There is a point before time and space. Within that point is the property of physical awareness.  That which is aware–call it the thinker, the cosmic dreamer, or if you prefer, the pre-universe–it is surely the precursor of information, as thought and ideas were all held in one timeless, yet geometric, point. The mental universe of pre-existence was one of potential. Potential does not possess a physical entity. Potentials are mental images.

“A” is present whether or not “B” is present. “A” then, is like potential energy that does exist without material content and without motion. The creation of motion is brought about by the existence of “B”. “A” can exist without time and space because or its property of being potential. In order for this potentiality of energy to be released, it must have a precise co-ordinate in space and a sense of awareness to duration in order to experience time. This is the data and it is provided by “B”. In other words, “B” is the informational content that co-creates the physical.

We know that physical awareness exists in the universe because we are ourselves aware. We do not doubt our own existence. It is one of the properties of human experience. I propose that it is also one of the properties of the universe. We can easily see these properties in life. Many living things are obvious to us, but we find it harder to conclude that there is an awareness in inanimate objects as well. Since all objects are made from an atomic structure, does physical awareness exists in atomic structure as well? 

Pre-atomic structures experience some of the first events. Wherever events occur, physical awareness must record the change in the objects and codify the information. Before we can have a universe, we need objects and events. An event is an interaction between objects. To have an interaction we need awareness to identify an object or an event.  Without awareness, there is literally no event, no data to record. All change contains information. Awareness is the left hand that interprets the information on the right hand. The essential quality for observation or interaction is having an awareness of an object. Objects consist primarily of information. This information is physically coded and eventually it is recognized by our senses. Physical awareness is the first cause for the existence of time and space.  All things are objects that are formed by the non-material awareness which has always been present. 

A Dream Dreamt by a Distant Dreamer

Living is not an illusion, nor is it real.
It is more like a dream dreamt by a distant dreamer.
Eternity is the time measure of space
and space the place where time resides.

Temporal means temporary.
This is not a curse nor a reason for despair
because it is a dream dreamt by the dreamer
that is neither real nor an illusion, certainty, or chimera.

This is a dream dreamt by a distant dreamer.
We live it now, we lived it then, 
as we will live it on the morrow.

We call it truth, though it is not,
as time and space are one––
once contracted into a point––
presently expanded and stretched toward infinity.

Truth cannot be found in one place
for it is the combined knowledge of the sum of its parts.
In order to be a truth, all known perspectives must agree.
In order to be false, the charged point must disagree with known facts,

Reality is certainty, palpable, 
perceivable and solid,
designed by a mind, for a mind. 
Reality is the evolution of a mind 
through space and time.

This is a dream dreamt by a distant dreamer.

A TRIP TO FIRE ISLAND

Friday, May 30, 1969 

I think I can now understand more about what feels wrong in my life. It is a fairly simple thing. Writing is not a full-time job for me. For me to be creative requires a certain mood. I can never sit down and schedule my work unless something has already started. Even then, if I’m not inspired by that small spark of something, that germinal idea of what to say, nothing comes of it. 

Yesterday, I did not go to the Manhattan office to pick up my paycheck. That money feels more like a chain that keeps me tied to New York City. Zita and I decided to try hiking on Fire Island. I asked my brother Billy if he wanted to go. That led me to ask my partner Gary if he wanted to go. Everybody jumped at the idea of doing something different, though it was really the idyllic dream of getting back to nature that we jumped at. We forgot, for a time, the realities of hiking through the sand, the constant sunshine, no respite or shade. Fire Island is simply a sandbar by the sea –– a primary dune of sand and secondary dunes covered with brush, reeds, and wild, low growth. It is on Long Island’s south shore.

It took us all day to get organized to leave, patiently waiting for everyone to get their gear and arrive. We got to the island at about four PM. It was the hottest day of the year. The temperature was in the high nineties and the sun hotly burned our backs. 

We stripped to the waist, donned our packs, and began the long sandy trek. Zita struck out in the lead followed by me, then Gary, then Billy, and his wife, Bonnie. As time passed, the line became very thin and strung out. I dawdled a bit to wait for the others to catch up, but Billy and Bonnie were way behind and Zita kept forging ahead. Gary caught up momentarily but then lagged again while I hurried to catch up with Zita. 

We stopped at the bloated carcass of a headless seal, stared for a brief moment, then passed it by. When Gary finally caught up with us, Billy and Bonnie were nowhere to be seen.

A fine mist hung over the sea and the sun busily melted it away. We speculated about where Billy was. Gary thought he was upset because we were so far ahead. I thought that was probably true, but I guessed his bedroll was too heavy and this was too much work for his taste.

Two lonely figures popped up on the horizon, then faded away again. Guessing that it was Billy and Bonnie, I finally turned back to get them only to find that he had returned to the car to drop off his bedroll, intending to hitch back to the city. “It was an ugly thing to do,” he said, because his bedroll kept falling apart and it was really work to hike in the sand. Besides, he felt that the day had started with hassles. He knew more were coming and would rather retreat back to the city. There had been too many arguments about delays and the “hurry-up-we’ll-never-get-there’s” had put an uptight bag around the sunshine. 

I felt disappointed that everyone was not in the best of spirits. A feeling of time washed over me and hung heavy in my heart. The changes in my life were splitting both Billy and I apart. Billy became a symbol of the yesterday that never returns and the desolate beach a symbol of the future that we always trudge towards. 

There truly was nothing there but sand and sea. 

Suddenly two ideas sprang into my head. Two different visions of life were becoming apparent: Billy’s idea that this trip was all a gross absurdity and hard work and his desire to return to the comfort of lying about clashed with my idea that only through constant effort and movement could I find anything worthy of being the focus of my attention. There was nothing but sand and sea, yet there surely was something to be wrought from it. Optimism has always been my goal.

When I returned, Zita came walking down the beach to meet me. We met up with Gary and went back to the dune to smoke where there was no wind. 

The heavy packs soon became stones on our backs. Raised in and accustomed to a subjective opulence, we had no real idea about what is superfluous to carry when every ounce counts. We had no mental conception of the bare minimum necessary for survival. The result was a heavy pack filled with too much food and heavy-weight versions of supplies that could and should have been lighter if we had known anything about hiking at all. However, no matter what one does or does not carry, walking in the sun and through the sand is never effortless. It was as if the earth would not hold my weight. As we crossed the spongy sand bars, I sank in up to my ankles.

The sea was forming a brand-new sand bar. A fledgling bay about a foot deep lay behind the waves, a refugee from yesterday’s tide. The village lay ahead of us. Fire Island villages have no roads to speak of, but rely on paths and concrete walkways that constantly are covered over with drifting sand. Only four-wheel drive vehicles can navigate, so the villagers use either Jeeps or boats to get around. It is an odd colony of summer homes and a few rugged naturalists who live in the windswept ravages of an Atlantic winter. Gary talked in his double-thought manner about how the villagers would react to our trudging through with packs on our backs. He speculated as to whether we would be stared at, asked to leave, or perhaps boiled in hot oil and eaten by a pre-pork generation. 

Zita and I attempted to quell his fancy with realism, but to no avail. His double-think was contagious. Soon, I found myself feeling like an intruder in a private domain. 

A Jeep pulled out onto the sand and entered the concrete path where we were now walking. Four men jumped out, as though on a signal, bent toward each of the four wheels, and then hopped back in the Jeep. They were disconnecting the four-wheel drive. They seemed to stare at us rather disturbingly as they passed. 

Of course, nothing happened in the village. There was no mad ghoul in the lighthouse. In a way, it seemed a shame, but living nightmares are never pleasant. We bought some cold drinks at the village store. I got some tobacco for my pipe and dropped the burden of the packs for a moment. 

We could not make it very far before darkness fell. Two villages come together and the area is inhabited for a two-mile strip, so we had to curve around a dune in an area that seemed more deserted than the others. After darkness fell, it was silent except for Jeeps running up and down the beach now and then. The moon was full and hung over the sea.  

I found myself wondering if my conception of the Moon had changed now that man had circled it. Only a week ago, a ship had descended to within nine miles of the surface. I remembered the intense excitement of the Christmas Eve broadcast a few months ago when the first live television pictures of the Moon’s surface were broadcast to Earth. One in four of our Earth’s inhabitants sat mentally suspended before their television sets, their breath held short, commonly involved in the moment. Yet, with all we have learned of the Moon, my conception of it remains the same as I have always had. It is the most romantic light in the night sky. The mountains were darker than the valleys. The craters I saw on television were like science-fiction movies that had no bearing on the living luxury of the night sky. 

I tried to imagine how Earth looked from the Moon. The pictures they beamed back to the planet lacked depth and comparison to the familiar sky. I tried to picture the Earth as large as a Sunday dinner dish hanging in space, colored with the now familiar blue and swaddled in unbelievably thick swirls of abstract cloud formations. 

Though it was still light, the moon still hung like a distant quarter over the rolling liquid matter of the sea. I had Zita open her mouth so I could peer at the moon like a large chunk of Gouda cheese about to be devoured. I got my camera and shot a picture of her mouth attempting to devour the cheese moon.

Zita was tired. She wanted to return to the car and leave before the sun went down, but we decided to spend at least the night on the dunes and think about it in the morning.  

In the morning, I saw things her way. We returned to the car.

FROM WHENCE COMETH THE SONG: 1963

Wednesday – Sept. 11, 1963 

Two weeks ago I bought some new tires for my car. The old tires were worn so smooth that the cord was showing, yet and I had not had the first flat. The garage man at Firestone said that if he’d have tried to drive on those tires he would have never made it home. But somehow I had been driving just like normal and I was only a hair away from a blowout. Two days after I bought the tires, I had two flats, both at once. Nails! 

Today I looked out of the window upon a beautiful September morning––and another flat tire. I pulled on the emergency brake to keep the car from moving and the brake handle popped off.

The rest is a situation comedy. I went to the trunk to get the spare and the car began to move. I stood there pondering the next action. I decided to go ahead and fix the flat, so I silently cursing as the car crashed to the ground, the wheel thudding sickly on the hard graveled mud. I managed to get the car back up back up and put the tire on, only the spare is a whitewall and flat as well. The spare had a nail sticking in it, but it was still up and full of air. Back to the jack again, and after three tries I finally got the tire changed.

Monday – Oct. 7,1963 

This weekend my life has been under water with no contact with the outside world. I have basked in laziness, accomplishing little, singing for my own enjoyment, and watching television. I read a few books, rewrote the ending to “The Fantasy of Fowler’s Hill” and Friday I finally started the story that began with Shannon. I hope it turns out to be a spellbinder. 

Over the weekend Billy and I went to Columbus to practice with Sheri. We left Saturday afternoon, found Sheri’s dorm, practiced until suppertime, then Billy and I went over to find Fred L. He lives in a fine frat house at the top of a giant hill that falls off to the street. Fred went with us to pick up Sheri. He has a great big, gigantic, block-busting guitar that he uses as a prop when he hoots. 

It’s handmade as a prop and unique in all the world. We loaded this in the trunk, picked up a drummer and some Congo drums, then headed for the Hoot at the Sacred Mushroom. We did two sets. The first was mediocre, but the second was the greatest we’ve ever done. The showmanship was fine, the songs perfect, and the audience appreciated it thoroughly. Sheri introduced  me to a black-eyed, black haired Spanish girl named Maria Louisa Francisca Cervantes just before we went on for the second set. Being preoccupied and thinking about what I was going to use for showmanship, I barely spoke and she left. 

When I tried to find the rest of my trio Sheri gave me a scalding for not being polite, because the girl wanted to meet me. She came back, thank God, and I looked again. What I saw, I liked––saucy, hot-blooded, typically Spanish-American. I’ll bet she had a temper like forged steel. I acted a bit more civil to her then we did our set and I was left free for the night. The girls both had taken a two-o’clock leave. They are entitled to two per month. Any other weekend they must be in by one. We got them in at the appointed hour, then went back to Fred’s frat house and into the music room. About four musicians with guitars and a piano player played until 4:00 A .M., then went all went to bed. At ten, I got up. We ate and at 1:00 we went over to pick up Sheri. She wanted to practice, but I was all practiced out and wanted no part of it. 

Sheri, Bill, Maria, Fred, and a girl that we fixed Fred up with named Gloria, went out  for a ride. We went downtown where Maria had to return a key to an apartment to a fellow. Hmmmm.We picked up some beer and went out to find a place in the country. We ended up in a quarry along a railroad track with woods on both sides. We sat on the rails while Maria sketched Sheri’s face, drank the beer and walked along the tracks. It was a pleasant, but not a very eventful afternoon. 

Monday – Oct. 15, 1963 

Billy got a part in the school play (Junior class) last week, the male lead, and lost it today. The director dismissed him for some debatable reason. Billy said it was because he was sick Friday and missed play practice. I rather doubt it. He got two letter saying that he was failing both English and Algebra II. The play director is his English teacher. But if’ she knew he was failing, why would she give him the part in the first place? 

We practiced with Sheri over the weekend. Billy and Dad got into fight and Billy called Dad and I trash. He was forbidden to go to Dayton to practice, so I had to bring Sheri down here. She added trio a bass player in Columbus. 

I went to Dayton to drop off’ the matte of’ the group f’or paper publication, The big hoot is Saturday at Wayne High School, while I was on Dayton I decided to look up Shannon. Last week her story, which has been playing in my mind for some time, finally took shape and became “Yellow is the Color of’ Love” It is very good, I think, but also very weird. I thought it only fitting that she should read it. I went out to her old house and asked the neighbors where they had moved. A blonde woman across the street on Timberline gave me the forwarding address. Shannon was there with her mother. I talked with her and took her to the grocery store. Here’s what happened. She had an argument with her father and took another overdose of sleeping pills. The ambulance could not find their house for forty minutes, and by this time her lungs had collapsed and she was nearly dead. They rushed her to the hospital where she lay on the brink of’ death for several days. It was also a psychiatric ward. When she recovered, she still had after-effects like a kidney ailment and heart spasms. They said that the only way they would release her was that she must get married. That sounded quite phony to me, but she said that was so. It was sort of a straight-jacket marriage instead of a shotgun wedding, as usual. So, she married Tom, the guy from Oregon. He’s working at NCR and they’re moving from place to place. I sent the story in the mail today with a cover-letter telling her about the character and how she inspired it. Anyhow, I’m happy that I know her situation, but very unhappy to see it. She’s a good kid and
really deserves much more than that, but doesn’t know how to harvest love and happiness. 

Wednesday – Oct 23,1963 

Friday was Mother’s birthday. I got her a pair of fleece lined slippers and they went down to the Stein’s Saturday afternoon for dinner.We had another concert Saturday night––one that brought $200. We had practiced all day. We spent the night over in Dayton and practiced Sunday. Billy and I are working out intricate guitar accompaniments and our harmony is getting very good. We have improved vastly and the hope that we will go big time does not seem so vast and reaching now. 

Today Shannon mailed back my story. The morning is generally a happy time for me. I wait in bed until I’m sure the mailman has come, then rush out immediately to reap the harvesting from the galvanized box. Today I found my story with the postmark from Dayton. There was no return address, and no name. I knew it was from Shannon. 

I rather hated to open it. I was afraid that she would not like the story and I would find some cutting, harsh comments inside. Instead, the letter read like this: 

“Ken, I’m really quite surprised at your amazing story. So many things are reconstructed with such total perceptiveness. I don’t know whether this was meant be a tribute or a disarmament, so I say––with great caution––well, done. If, by this, you feel you have found me out, as I feel you have––again––well done. I’m older now, Ken, and much wiser than I sometimes appear. I’ve lost the part of me that would do such things as in yesteryear. I am sad, but on the same hand quite relieved of the burden.”

I read the letter over several times. What was she talking about? Finally, it struck me. I had written a bit of fiction into the story. I said that if a yellow balloon walked the aisle of matrimony it walked it by itself. I hinted that the character in the story had not been married but had the baby illegitimately. Unknowingly, I hit upon the truth. That is her burden. Her sadness is her marriage and the suicide attempts. 

The knowledge came gradually and I was lost in thought. How much more of a story is there behind the part that I know? I should imagine that the story is not yet complete. She had lied about her first marriage. Who can blame her. But one lie leads to another, and to make her stories believable she twisted one lie around the another to protect what reputation she had left. And probably to protect the baby. 

“I too wish you well, my friend,” she wrote. “Your life will be good as the daughter of Thane predicted.”

She doesn’t love her husband and her baby needs a father. I will probably never see her again, but I will remember her forever. 

Oct 1963 – Sunday 

Billy and I went to Columbus Friday (he was off school). Sheri was just getting ready to go home. I thought we’d probably be spending the night there, but instead we headed for Dayton after running out to the TV station and setting up an audition. Sheri seemed to be in a better mood this week, or perhaps it was me. Maybe I’ve finally come to the realization that she’s indispensable to the outfit and I’m trying to get along a little better. We went to the Lemon Tree and did a terrible set. It was absolutely a stinker. We had not practiced for a week and it showed up in the performance.

Joe D., Mike, Sheri, Bill and I went down to Charlie’s where the Osborne Brothers play often play, but they had a rock and roll band that night and five drunk girls running around with provocatively sexual glances and actions. “C’mon in, we’re gonna have a party,” the one blonde had said just before we entered. She showed us in and made certain that we had a seat, then danced around, twisting her pelvis, shimmering to the pulsating wham of the rotten music. A couple of girls got up on the stage and sang with the lead singer. They fingered his guitar and shook their hips at him. I nearly f’ell off the chair with laughter. 

Saturday we practiced all day, worked out several new songs and listened to ourselves on the tape recorder. For the first time we are beginning to sound well on tape. Everything is coming out so much better. Actually, the three of us had a ball just being together over the weekend. We talked of our future and the sound are putting out, joked, and laughed continually. We are going to New York by next summer, we hope. That’s not a definite hope, but if everything goes right, maybe we can make it. I am putting my future at stake. Saturday night before coming home went to the Art Institute and walked around the shaded lawns looking out over the city. We descended the spiral steps to the river and walked along the banks, talking and feeling very good. We drove around the city here and there circling and looking for the finer views, content with just watching the lights and the people, drinking the atmosphere of happiness that can quickly be lost in the turmoil of living. We are living fast, but we are enjoying it. Before everything grinds to a shattering halt or we enjoy the :j!!D fruits of the promise that now shows, I have a. feeling that things will move much faster. The main message is that we must not forget that we must
enjoy life and take the time out to have a little fun. 

I thought that Shannon was out of my life. Perhaps she is, but that haunting damn girl isn’t out of my memories. I dreamed of her last night, just as I used to dream of Russene and ached with the feeling that she was gone, like I dreamed of Shirley that one night in Cleveland and awoke wanting her so badly. I remember the dreams because the wanting is so hard afterwards, and it seems as though I never dream of a girl with such intensity until it is too late for us. 

In the dream, Shannon was still married and lived in Greenville. I remember that she lived behind a row of buildings without faces that stretched endlessly, like an ancient, musty arcade. I entered down a road at first from the back and came to a place that I’d never seen and never thought existed around Greenville. It was dusty and there was a little lake with some not-too-shady-trees, and a row of little white cottages where Shannon and her husband lived. 

She was sitting on a white bench in her swimming suit next to the lake. I got out of the car and walked over to her. She was sad and lonely and confided her loneliness to me. It was a long dream. I remember waking and thinking that it was practically a story complete in itself, but the details have now escaped me. Somehow we loved one another, not physically, just spiritually. I remember her driving away in her little red Volvo and I returned from the front.

 I entered the wrong door in the faceless building. The lettering on the front said, “The Explorer’s Club”. Inside, the arcade was colored with a strange orange light and there were little rooms full hunting debris and trophies. The smell of cigars and liquor were warm in my nostrils. In one of the unseen rooms in the forbidden interior, men laughed and the sounds of their laughing were strange, like the laugh of a lost old man who once a day finds a little happiness at a card game in the local pool hall. The entire place has the atmosphere of a pool hall. 

I remember passing one little room where the door was open. A toilet with rough-hewn wooden urinals were standing in a row like tree trunks. Then, I went back outside and entered the next door where Shannon’s little corner of paradise laid before me in a blurry vision. I don’t know what happened to her husband. She and I lived together in a strange way. It was very fine though. I thought it best that she not be strained in her happiness. I did my best to make, her life pleasant, restore her happiness, and dispel those sorrows carried in her life. It was a dream, but somehow I awoke wanting the dream to be truth. I was almost ready to run to Dayton, find her and whisk her away. Funny, she really might be happy by now, but I doubt it. 

Life with her would be life on a bed of nails. It would sap of my strength and that would be hard to take, but subconsciously I wanted to help her like I’ve haver wanted to help another. 

Then I woke up.

Speaking of dreams… twice now I’ve dreamed about the trio. No, three times, and all were sex dreams. Sheri, to me, is not femme fatale that some of the other girls are. In fact, she is almost
sexless to me. I admit she has her charms, but somehow, I don ‘t see her as a sexual stimulus. Yet that is the way it popped up in my dreams. Once I dreamed that she was running around naked
at a party. Another time I dreamed of Billy, she and I driving along the streets, bare from the waist down. A few nights ago the dream took on story form, but now again the details and continuity are forgotten. It’s surprising how many of my dreams are truly short stories and absolutely complete (though usually with several flaws). I dreamed that Sheri, Billy and I were living together. I don’t know whether we were spending the night at her house or we had an apartment of our own, but it was decided that to save on expanses and to bring compatibility to the trio, Sheri would double as mistress for both Billy and I. The first night together was a night of wonder. Evidently I had already lost my virginity, because after the night was over and day had broken over the city, a little box lay on a footstool for Billy. It was a reward for losing his virginity, much like pennies under the pillow from the good fairy for losing your first tooth.

Sheri’s father came in and picked up the box. I had not looked at it and ‘I remained hidden behind the couch because the box was blue and white and looked similar to a prophylactic box that is  on the market. (I worked at a drug store and even remember the brand name, as I sold them often enough.) Her father opened the box and a slew of gumballs rolled out on the floor. It was queer. 

I laughed and remember thinking, “What sort of an oaf is that stupid fairy, leaving gum balls for losing your maidenhead. 

The dream ended. Now it seems almost funny when I remember it. It really wasn’t sexy at all, more like a delicately made movie. 

Monday – Nov. 4, 1963 

Last Tuesday I drove to Columbus to dig up some jobs. I found one advertised in the student paper at CSU and Sheri and I looked into it. I found that Hootenanny, the ABC Saturday night show, probably isn’t coming to Ohio State after all. Also, I looked in the phone directory f’or entertainment management agencies and found one that looked promising. I went over to the agent, who had the unlikely name of Howdy Gorman. He said he’d set up an audition at a TV station f’or us. The audition was tonight. We got the job f’or Saturday at the Fort Hayes Hotel, Presidential Suite, entertaining some drunken foot doctors and made another sixty bucks. This evening Dad drove Billy to Columbus, picked up Sheri, and then went to Howdy Gorman’s office. We followed him over to the TV station (Columbus Channel 10). 

Gorman had brought two groups for the audition. The show is called “Gather Round,” leans rather heavily toward folk. It is being aired once a month. Starting, in December they expect to air it weekly on Friday night.We went through a f’ew songs. They had told us that it was an informal audition without a mike, etc. They then wanted me to introduce a song, so I introduced Darlin’ Corey. They thought we were very good. There was another entertainment manager f’rom a nightclub called “The Gloria” there to hear the audition. Gorman said he was killing several birds with one shot by auditioning us f’or several jobs at once. Anyhow, our audition was successful and they thought that we did a an excellent job.

Then came the other group. They brought along their manager and a public address system and they let them use it. The result was that they seemed more professional than we had seemed, because they introduced their numbers and didn’t adhere to the informal setup.

Live and learn. I don ‘t know the result of’ the audition yet. We had some fine comments, but it seemed as though the talk .liraS about the other group rather than ours. Even Gorman gathered around the other group’s manager. The TV man said that he wants to pit us on the air and he will be getting ahold of Gorman. I don’t know anything about the nightclub. What’ll come of it,  I don’t know. I’ve got to talk with Gorman again Saturday and see what’s cooking.  Anyhow, this Gorman says he has recording contacts and can do us up right. He’s a very short little man, probably f’ive-f’oot one or two with sandy hair and mustache. Things will either stand still or move fast now that we are pushing ourselves. 

Nov. 11, 1963 – Sunday

Dick T. is home on furlough. Friday night we went to Dayton so that he could hear the Osborne Brothers. Clark Crites, the Lemon Tree’s new manager, had called on Thursday and wanted us to see him. He had a job lined up and wants to, act as a sort of’ agent f’or jobs that come through the Lemon Tree, getting the usual ten per cent. 

We went to Dayton to tell Sheri’s folks, then went over to the Lemon Tree to see Clark. He was tied up with another man in the office and couldn’t see us right then. We sat through a set of the Canadian folksinger, Cedric Smith, then scooted down to the Bitter End––which is the new name for Charlie’s Bar––to hear the Osborne Brothers. After their set was over it was back to the Lemon Tree to see Clark. I found that Clark had just gone down to the Bitter End to see us. After that came a comedy of errors. We went back down to see Clark and found that he had just gone back to the Lemon Tree to meet us. We went Back to the Lemon Tree and found that he had just left to meet us at the Bitter End.

There we sat at the Lemon Tree waiting for him to come. There he sat at the Bitter End waiting for us to come back. Half an hour later, the phone rang: “Are they still there?” he asked. When told yes he said, “Keep them there, I’ll be right up.” 

Finally we get together and talked over business matters, then went back down to hear the Osborne Brothers finish up another set. Both Sonny and Benny Birchfield were in great moods tonight and we talked with them for a long time. 

Saturday, Billy and I took Dick to Columbus with us. It was the first time he got to hear the trio perform. It was nothing special, really, just an afternoon practice session in a cemetery, then Sheri’s dorm room, and an evening practice. Sheri got me a date for tonight and one for Dick too. Gayle O. was Dick’s date, the same girl who dated Fred the other week. 

Sheri’s been feeding me a lot of information about a roommate of hers that wants but a tall, good looking, rich man. She sounded rather like a snob from the conversation about her. Once, when I called Sheri, she answered the phone. From her voice I could tell she was overly sophisticated and perhaps a bit oily. Well, suddenly, it seems, she turned an about face. She had heard us practice, though I’ve never met her, and she read my story “The Fantasy of Fowler’s Hill” last week. Sheri was shocked when she started questioning her about me and even more shocked when she asked her to set up a date with me. In fact, she was flabbergasted. The girl’s name is Joan. I was sure she was in for a boring evening and I was certain she was not my type. Finally, in the afternoon, we met. She’s a very pretty girl and looks much like I pictured her as looking––tall, well-groomed and collegiate. In the evening we drove around town and stopped at a bar which was crowded to capacity. We had tried several other places offering entertainment, but we ended up back up near the campus. The bars are filled with students on Saturday night.We bought a pizza next door and then got some beer to go from the bar and headed out in the country to eat. 

I found a nice little spot of a not-to-traveled road where we had a beer, ate. and talked. Joan and I got along surprisingly well. Conversation seemed strained at times and things did not flow naturally, but all in all it was a fairly well-matched date. I didn’t go out of my way to impress her, I just joked along and acted the hick that I really am––dropping the “g”on “goin'” and speaking in the normal Darke County dialect that sometimes makes me feel out of place in collegiate crowds. It’s not that my speech is a real dialect or that I do not express myself well. I really, I do. But the folks around Greenville do have a distinct midwestern twang in their speech. 

We were sitting at a deserted barnyard eating our pizza and almost ready to leave when a cop pulled up. He asked to see my driver’s license and asked what I was doing there, then told us that we were on private property and had to move on. 

Back in Columbus heading to the dorm we found a little park that looked rather inviting in the night. Everyone hopped out of the car and walked over to a lagoon that spouted water from a fountain in the center. When we got back in the car another cop saw us coming out of the park and the same damned procedure started all over again. It was against the law to be in the park that time of night. I was not happy about the interference. Why, then, have the fountain running? I thought, but I said nothing. I have learned that being overly civil near people who are armed is more often the best choice.

We all slept in a moth-eaten hotel on High Street––not the girls, just the fellows––and Sunday afternoon we met again and went off for another drive. We went to the art museum and walked through the halls into the velvet draped rooms viewing both trash and some masterpieces like Renoir and Monet. We took a drive through the city and went to the park that we had seen in last night’s moonlight––only this time it was lawful. I took them for a beautiful country drive by the Columbus Zoo, tried to get into the closed Olentangy Caverns, then drove for miles along a scenic little road that followed the stark autumn banks of the Olentangy. We passed an old stone mill that looked like it belonged in a page from European history, made of stone, now deserted with a little damn up creek and finally the observatory.

The time was spent talking and joking and taking in the autumn beauty. Dick had the time of his life and said that he would remember that afternoon for years to come. I don’t believe I will forget it either. Joan became very congenial and looked very pretty. 

Everything has been at a standstill for quite some time in my romantic existence. I believe I could be ready to fall in love myself. We parted company at 7:00. Joan made me promise to write her and send me some other stories and I promised that I would. Dick will probably never see Gayle again, but he will remember her. All in all it was a very pleasant, well-remembered weekend. I didn’t fall in love, but I feel as though I somehow made happiness possible somewhere––and it’s a good feeling. 

Friday – Nov. 15, 1963 

Mom and Dad’s twenty-second anniversary was today. In celebration, they did something that they would not usually think of doing––they went to the Bitter End to hear the Osborne Brothers. The boys were very friendly this evening and talked quite a bit. Sheri was there and while Billy, Mel, Dick, Sheri and I went down to the Tree, Mom and Dad sat and talked with Sonny and Benny Birchfield. It was a pleasant evening. Sonny said that if we wold give him a tape he would take it with him and try to get us some jobs so we decided to get a very good tape made on professional equipment. 

Sunday – Nov. 17, 1963

Yesterday it was practice. Dick went down to Dayton with us. We spent the night at Stein’s then came back to Greenville to make a tape at WDRK . 

We wrestled in the lawn and practiced in the park, then at 3:15 went out to WDRK to make the tape. The tape turned out very, very well. We have never heard ourselves on professional equipment, except perhaps on TV that one time. Then TV show qualitywas bad and the songs were not our best at that time, but we’ve improved so much since then. We were very pleased with the sound and patted one another’s backs for an hour. Sheri gave me a letter from Joan that she wrote to me just after receiving mine. Sheri said that Joan would be up next weekend. I also got called back from layoff at Corning for one week.

Thursday – Nov. 21, 1963 

I’ve been dumping cullet and hating every moment at Corning all this week. The job was only temporary. It gripes my soul to think that they can take or leave me at their discretion and I have to abide by their goddamn whims. I wrote a little letter to Joan this week expressing my views about this factory system of ours. Sometimes I think that it is a detriment to progress, rather then an aid as it is usually considered. How many men––like me––are pushed and pulled by forces greater than they can fight, placed in degrading jobs, their potential wasted, their lives and happiness decaying around them. How many men have committed mental suicide while working the grind day in and day out, having no escape without the risk of losing everything––their family, their income, and the little joy they manage to reap out of their barren existence? 

Automation is taking over at Corning. Automation is taking over everywhere. They will be laying practically everyone off within the next few years. The bastards are getting by with it. They keep a man in chains economically, then turn him loose and knock him on the ground without breath, without fight, without hope. 

November 22,1963 

Some days you wish had never been,

That time be whisked away like dust

And a day that drips with grief be taken back, 

The hourglass started once again anew.    

This gloomy, drizzling day was such a day. 

The rain’s no longer rain, but falling tears. 

My heart is aching and my soul is sick.

I’ve cried out, cursed, and sorrow shudders in me.

There is no room for eloquence inside, only grief.

Today, a hand I’ve never shaken,

A face I’ve never touched,

A friend I’ve never met

Was cut down on the streets of Dallas, Texas.

A bullet through the brain that ruled the nation

And stilled the heart that loved

An undeserving world. 

Words do not tell the story well.

I shuddered when just three short years ago

The nomination turned from Stevenson to him.

And then with magic and determination

He fought his way through prejudice

To win and saddle greatness.

I longed for his success

And when it came,

His triumph was mine.

He caught a nation’s fancy 

With his mellow voice and new ideas.

He brought youth and life and color   

When things were rather stale and needed spice

Now his youthful smile will never age

His thick, brown hair will never thin.

A hundred years ago another man was shot

And another man named Johnson took his place.

There must have been an emptiness then as now

As fires dimmed and died in human hearts.

Words fail me.

I could not feel more desolate and grieved.

I could not feel more shocked or numbed with sorrow.

You and I, he never knew by name,

But yet he cleared a way through tangled webs

That we might see the clouds with silver lining 

And watch tomorrow’s light shine even brighter.

Friday – Nov 22, 1963

This is how I feel and how I will always remember feeling this tragic, horrible weekend. It is completely unbelievable. I will wake up tomorrow and find that it has been a bad dream. I was working when I heard the news, sitting in the cafeteria on my two o’clock break. A couple of fellows were talking about a ten thousand dollar reward. One said to the other, “I’d even turn you in if you had a ten thousand dollars reward on your head.” The other said, “I’d wait till it was twenty-thousand.” 

There was more talk about a reward. “Who the hell’s got a tag on his head?” I asked. “What’s this reward talk about?” 

“Somebody shot President Kennedy this afternoon,” someone said. 

They told me more about it, more or less jokingly. Some took it seriously. Some wouldn’t believe it. News trickled in. Actually, he was dead when I had first heard that he had been shot. I went back to work. After thinking about it, I finally decided that I must go home. I could not work any longer.

I asked the foreman to take the rest of the day off, but he refused to give me leave. Hurt and angry, I decided to quit the job and vowed never to work in another factory as long as I lived.

The car radio warmed tip just as I was leaving the parking lot. The first words I heard were “The late President Kennedy, who died in Parkland Hospital.” 

I drove on home, numbed, glassy-eyed, full of hate for a man who could do such a despicable, twisted thing.

Joan and Sheri were coming up from Columbus. Billy and I went on to Dayton, even though I knew I would be very poor company this evening. Together we got away from the tragedy the best we could. I called to make certain the concert was cancelled for tomorrow night. I could not entertain and do a good job. I have no feeling for it now. It is as though my father had died, for Kennedy was so personal a president to me. His youth and good looks made me like him from the start, then his speeches full of glowing phrases and ideas took possession of me. I became a staunch supporter, even though I really didn’t want him to win the nomination three years ago. He became a symbol to the American youth, that age was not a barrier and the world was ready for a young man’s ideas. He and his family captivated the news media and publicity poured into print and photographs. 

Life came to the country with Jack and Jackie––their touch football, the clannishness, their youth, their vigor, the rocking chair and stories that the press delighted in printing. 

When I think back about leaving the church where I used to be active and fanatically associated, I find that many of the clashes that came between me and the other members was my supporting of Kennedy and their assurance that he was going to be the devil’s instrument and would tool the way to the world’s end. Then I realized how little their minds were and my mind expanded. I fully comprehended the fanaticism that I really thought was mere zealousness. It was logical to an extent, but things crumbled at the base and I realized that it was not for me. I learned a bit about reasoning and I’m not sorry for my experience, but somehow, even though Kennedy himself, was enshrouded in the darkness of the Roman Catholic Church, I think he made me think and perhaps because of him I have turned away from them. People used to call me Kennedy at work because my hair is so much like his. I looked and read of him. There was an identification there that I suppose will never be felt with any other president. This free-style poem that I wrote is the only way I can think of even beginning to express my emotions.

Joan and I talked in the evening. We kissed and she gave me a letter she had written about how she thought that we were so much alike. I read it thoroughly and agreed, but knew through her actions that she feared me and there was something more unsaid.

Saturday – November 23, 1963

I awoke this morning and it was still true. Yesterday was reality after all. It was not a bad dream. President Kennedy is as dead as Caesar or Alexander the Great. All I can see is his cheerful grin and the way his hair blew as he stood before the television cameras speaking in some windy place.

I went to Dayton this afternoon. Billy and I got in late and Dad refused to let Billy go out of the house. I went alone. Mo was there with Joan and Sheri. We played our tapes and I made a tape with Mo, backing him with my guitar while he played the banjo.

We went down to the bus station to get Billy around 6:00. I had told him to catch the bus.

He was not there and Sheri was disappointed. She gave me a letter to read that she has written last night about her being in love with Billy. Sheri has a scheming mind. She’s been introducing me to girls and trying to get my attention hooked by someone else. 

Joan fell in love with me without any pushing on Sheri’s part. Now Sheri thinks she’s ready for bolder steps with my younger brother, 

Frankly, I don’t give a damn about it. I’m afraid that the trio just won’t make it because of other things. Billy is doing so poorly in school and he’s so young that Dad won’t let him have any of the freedoms, that I’m accustomed to having. Rightly so. There would be travel, travel and more travel if we should ever make it big, and I don’t think it would work out at all with Billy. 

I’m sure that Sheri would fly away too if it weren’t for him. Besides, he is necessary to the existence of the trio. He makes it sound rounded and full, we harmonize extremely well, and his guitar playing goes hand in hand with mine since we grew musical in the same atmosphere. I’m so uncertain of the future right now. There’s little reason to be optimistic despite out great sound.

We did do a set later at the Lemon Tree coffee house. Dad brought Billy down to the Lemon Tree later in the evening. It was the best set we ever did there, and everyone was very impressed with the strides we’d taken since they last heard us.

Sunday – November 24, 1963

Lee Oswald, the assassin of President Kennedy, was shot to death over nationwide television today as they were transferring him to the county jail. The secrets of the assassination probably went to the grave with him. The murderer is being held in custody. Had anyone foretold correctly the events of this weekend one week, even three days ago, he would have been laughed off the face of the earth. It’s still feels impossible and feels as though it couldn’t really be happening.

Today the President’s body lies in state and mourners pass by. I had wanted to go to Washington so badly, but my money from the last week of work hasn’t come in yet. Yesterday Kennedy lay in state at the East room of White House. After a moving, beautiful transfer by caisson to the Capitol (shown very poignantly on TV) he was placed in the rotunda for the nation. TV has suspended all commercial announcements and entertainment programs and have been giving minute by minute, hour by hour coverage since the news that the shot was fired on Saturday.

Once again I was in Dayton. Joan told me something today that made me understand her so much better. She and I can talk and be frank with one another. When she seemed to shy away from my kisses I told her that she was going to have to delve into her subconscious to find out about her ‘kissing complex’. Her letter that was delivered a few day’s before has mentioned a date that she had had a week before she met me. She was with a boy who wanted to touch her before she had been able to know or like him. After our first kisses she said that she was trying to make up her mind whether or not her image of me had been broken down. She (in the letter) had referred to that part in my short story “The Fantasy of Fowler’s Hill” where I wrote: “I thought about the movie I had seen the night before, a tale of simpler days… when romance bloomed slowly and a simple kiss was almost a proposal. Sometimes I would long to go back in those days.”

I knew something was bothering her. She wanted to let herself go and enjoy herself, but could not for some reason. She is a very shy, quiet sort of person, very unusual for a very attractive girl. And then the answer came. She told me that when she was young her uncle had taken advantage of her, and that this had gone on for years. Finally, possibly in her early teens, she realized what was happening, and now the heartbreak and the remembrance of him is with her whenever she is around men. 

I can really feel for her plight, I can really understand her feelings when we kiss. After she told me as much as she wished to tell at the time she relaxed and we kissed again while she responded more warmly. She is a lonely person. If it be in my power to ease that loneliness… so be it.

Monday – Nov. 25, 1963

 Now he belongs to the earth.

Business is stopped. The nation mourns and watched the funeral. I watched fully attentive at Sheri’s house until the actual funeral ceremonies were being performed in the cathedral. The Catholic ritual with it’s mumbo jumbo of Latin and changing of vestments was too much for my anti-ritualistic soul to bear. 

I took the girls and Mo back to Columbus where we stopped while I went in to see our agent, Howdy Gorman. I gave him one of the tapes we made and he’s going to talk with some record companies during the week. Maybe something will come of it, maybe nothing. 

We took a country drive and then I took the girls back to the campus. The folks want to go to Nashville to visit my great Aunt over the Thanksgiving holidays. Joan has invited me to supper Saturday night at her home in Cincinnati. I probably will go with the folks, although I would like to see Joan’s family. I think that they must be pretty well-to-do, as her father is a construction engineer and travels extensively in Latin and South America. Her mother teaches Home Economics in a Cincinnati High School.

RECENT ONTOLOGICAL MUSINGS

Ontology is the branch of philosophy that studies concepts such as existence, being, becoming, and reality.It includes the questions of how entities are grouped into basic categories and which of these entities exist on the most fundamental level. Ontology is sometimes referred to as the science of being and belongs to the major branch of philosophy known as metaphysics.

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What does the mind look like? What are its physical characteristics? We see the medical imaging of the brain at work, but we never see the mind itself. Senses like smells, tastes, and touch have no visible physical characteristics. We see them only by their effects, as we see the wind. It should come as no surprise that awareness is invisible.

What about the information that awareness presents to the mind? Information is also invisible. This information becomes physical to us only after being perceived and registered by the mind. Our awareness perceives a constant flow of information, too much to process at once. We select parts of this information, then fill in the rest with recollection and imagination. At that point, information becomes tangible, recorded chemically and electrically bonded. The mind can evaluate it and react. The invisible awareness that perceives this invisible physical presence is the first step toward interaction and reaction. 

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We all have but two things at all times, our awareness and the now. Awareness takes place in the Now. Awareness builds our mental images of our world and our place in the universe or a universe. Our awareness is constantly experiencing our journey through the now. Lucky for us, most of this information is subconscious and does not require conscious attention. To be self aware, one has to be aware of another, something not contained in the self. Can self awareness exist all the way down to compounds to atoms and elementary quantum? Or is awareness held within that elementary quantum?

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I have had a hard time coming to terms with infinity. The idea that space is infinite means that infinitely huge sections of space could never be seen. The same hold true of the universe. All things in space and time have beginnings and ends. They are finite. Yet, because the finite exists, then there must be that which is not finite––the infinite. 

The same is true of nothing. Nothing does not exist. It is the opposite of existence in its non-existence. Yet, nothing exists. It also does not exist. It is in a superposition where it is both. The reason infinity can go on forever is that there is nothing there at all. Without time and space there are no things… nothing. 

I think it is imperative to come to terms with infinity. We need to understand that which is beyond time and space. It is the obvious source of existence and the physical universe. 

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If the infinite does not exist in time and space, does it exist at all? Is there a geometric plane above time and space where awareness can experience no time and no space and still be aware?

One possibility is a universal point––the invisible center of every circle in the universe. That point is infinite because it is all there is. No matter how large or small this point is thought to be, it is still all there is and it is the center of everything everywhere. 

If we accept that as a possibility, we can only speculate about the original point, since the physical world emerges from this super-positioned point that is every place and at the center of everything. This point, remember, is infinite––which means that it includes the finite and all that all exists along with the information contained within this finite record. 

We cannot get away from a first cause that came from nothing. An eternal universe cannot be a reasonable assumption in a temporal world of beginnings and endings. Even if energy is fundamental, the question remains: “From what did it spring?”  Is energy eternal? Did it come from nothing?  Or did it come from an invisible and unrealized potential in the non-dimensional?

See https://kennethharperfinton.me/2021/03/04/potentiality/

LOVE IS FOREVER

-lyrics by Kenneth Harper Finton

Love is forever

That’s why it hurts

I try to forget her. [him] [it]

But it doesn’t work.

Love is forever

buried inside

Much like a seed

That’s waiting to thrive.

burned in the mind

burned in the mind

love is forever

burned in the mind

An Image of time, gal [boy].

An Image of time.

Memories are always

Sleeping inside.

Awaiting conditions 

for love to survive

Love is forever

Waiting inside.

WHO KILLED TECUMSEH?

by Kenneth Harper Finton

“Rumpsey Dumpsey, Rumpsey Dumpsey, Colonel Johnson killed Tecumseh.” – Richard M. Johnson Campaign Slogan 

 Richard M. Johnson rode to political fame on the claim that he was the slayer of the great Indian leader. Historians are uncertain, and the deed will be forever muddied in the waters of time. In his 1929 autobiography, Single Handed, James A Drain, Sr. gives a detailed account by Col. Whitley’s granddaughter in which Whitley and Tecumseh killed each other simultaneously.

Who killed Tecumseh is a matter of debate. Many accounts claim that the badly-wounded Colonel Richard Johnson shot Tecumseh just before he lost consciousness although, until much later in his political career, Johnson only claimed to have shot an Indian.

Some evidence points to Colonel Whitley as the man who killed Tecumseh. Whitley’s body was found very close to Tecumseh. Still another report came from the badly-wounded Colonel James Davidson who claimed that a man in his company, Private David King, shot Tecumseh with Whitley’s rifle.

“Initial published accounts identified Richard Mentor Johnson as having killed Tecumseh. In 1816, another account claimed a different soldier had fired the fatal shot. [Sugden 1985, p. 138.] The matter became controversial in the 1830s when Johnson was a candidate for Vice President of the United States to Martin Van Buren. Johnson’s supporters promoted him as Tecumseh’s killer, employing slogans such as “Rumpsey dumpsey, rumpsey dumpsey, Colonel Johnson killed Tecumseh.” Johnson’s opponents collected testimony contradicting this claim; numerous other possibilities were named. Sugden (1985) presented the evidence and argued that Johnson’s claim was the strongest, though not conclusive. Johnson became Vice President in 1837, his fame largely based on his claim to have killed Tecumseh.” -Tecumseh. (2023, July 22). In Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tecumseh

Some primary accounts suggest that Col. William Whitley was likely the person who killed Tecumseh. James A Drain, Sr. published an autobiography, Single Handed (1927), in which he recounts Whitley’s granddaughter telling their family tradition that Whitley and Tecumseh killed each other simultaneously.

“After the battle, American soldiers stripped and scalped Tecumseh’s body. The next day, when Tecumseh’s body had been positively identified, others peeled off some skin as souvenirs. The location of his remains are unknown. The earliest account stated that his body had been taken by Canadians and buried at Sandwich. Later stories said he was buried at the battlefield, or that his body was secretly removed and buried elsewhere.^[162] According to another tradition, an Ojibwe named Oshahwahnoo, who had fought at Moraviantown, exhumed Tecumseh’s body in the 1860s and buried him on St. Anne Island on the St. Clair River. In 1931, these bones were examined. Tecumseh had broken a thighbone in a riding accident as a youth and thereafter walked with a limp, but neither thigh of this skeleton had been broken. Nevertheless, in 1941 the remains were buried on nearby Walpole Island in a ceremony honoring Tecumseh. St-Denis (2005), in a book-length investigation of the topic, concluded that Tecumseh was likely buried on the battlefield and his remains have been lost.” -https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tecumseh#Citations

Tecumseh was widely admired in his lifetime, even by the Americans who had fought against him. Canadians consider him a folk hero and credit him with helping to save Canada from an American invasion in 1822. His primary American foe was William Henry Harrison. He described Tecumseh as “one of those uncommon geniuses, which spring up occasionally to produce revolutions and overturn the established order of things.”

William Whitley is one of my 4th Great Grandfathers. Everyone has 16 of those. Descendants of William Whitley have been trying to prove that he killed the great chieftain for decades. It may have been inevitable that white men from Europe and the East would spread like a disease. Tecumseh was one who built a federation to prevent the loss of his homeland. I wrote about him in https://kennethharperfinton.me/2016/12/20/william-whitley-and-me/

I have always secretly hoped that grandfather Whitley was not the killer of Tecumseh. I was in no mood to take pride in that. Whitley was primarily an Indian fighter from slave-holding Virginia, so I think we can safely assume that he was what we would call a “redneck” today. Whitley avoided the Revolutionary War by moving to Kentucky. He was the first to build a brick home and estate in Kentucky and an early pioneer in Kentucky whiskey and horse racing. However, he was adamantly anti-British enough to build and run the first clay circular race track in the United States. He ran them counter-clockwise instead of the British clockwise race, a custom that persists to this day. 

New possibilities about Tecumseh’s death were recorded in THE HISTORY OF DARKE COUNTY, by FrazIer Wilson.

 Tecumseh lived in Greenville, Ohio of several years between 1806 and 1808. There is a place near Water Street on Greenville Creek called Tecumseh Point. This is where Tecumseh and his brother lived for several years. They would have traded at Azor Scribner’s trading post on the present corner of Elm and Main. It was the only place to trade. 

“At the outbreak of the War of 1812, Scribner enlisted in Captain Joseph Ewing’s company, Lanier’s Independent Bat­talion of Ohio militia. His service began Aug. 9th, 1812 and expired Feb. 8th, 1814. He participated in the important bat­tle of the Thames in the fall of 1813, in which Tecumseh was killed and the British General Proctor, signally defeated by the Americans under Gen. Wm. H. Harrison. To General John­ston, of Kentucky was given the credit of shooting the great Shawnee chief. However, it has been handed down in Azor Scribner’s family that he himself [Azor] shot Tecumseh from  ambush and refused to reveal the fact to anybody during his lifetime,  except  to his wife. whom  he straitly  charged  with secrecy.” – THE HISTORY OF DARKE COUNTY, 1914, Wilson, Frazer.

To me, this would make sense, Scribner would have known Tecumseh from trading with him. He was at the Battle of the Thames. If he killed the chieftain, he would not want to admit it lest he lose his lucrative business. If he killed him from ambush, he would have known it was Tecumseh when he lined his sight on him.

” He knew  Tecumseh  personally,  having  traded  with him  many  times at Greenville, no doubt, and  feared the con­ sequences  should  it  be  revealed  to  his  old  dusky  customers that  he  had  done  the  awful  deed. His  wife, who  survived him  several  years,  revealed  the  secret  after  his  death  to her second  daughter,  Elizabeth,  who  in  turn revealed it  to  her daughter,  Mrs.  Marcella Avery,  now  living  at  an  advanced age with  her  son Ira  and  daughter  Prudence on  North Main street (Minatown)  near the site of  Scribner’s first trading post. Scribner seems to have made money in his traffic with the Indians, but after he opened his tavern competition arose and he  had  to be  satisfied  with  his  share of  the trade.  He  died in 1822 in the prime of life, leaving a wife and several daugh­ters.” – THE HISTORY OF DARKE COUNTY, Wilson (1914)

 

 

Tecumseh negotiating with William Henry Harrison.

Relief of Johnson shooting Tecumseh, National Gallery