A few Quotes from PART ONE

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT I would like to express my deep gratitude to those individuals who mercilessly humiliated me during my writing, never believed in my ideas, accomplishments, my untraditional artist's research, jeered, or intentionally ignored my work and blamed me for not learning, working and thinking like normal people. I thank those who unpleasantly distracted my life in many ways, causing me illness and depression. I have had no other way but to learn how to get over that experience, and finish this book. THE ARTIST'S NOTES ON HUMANS AND THE UNIVERSE by Melissa Henry What is the world without our sensual perceptions? WHAT ARE WE WITHOUT OUR EYES, NOSES, EARS AND SKIN? Can we exist as we are and be able to imagine anything at all beyond our minds? "The Artist's Notes" is my desperate attempt to share some of the unique knowledge that I was lucky to obtain while practicing painting and comparing my artist's experience with all kind of mental processing as well as everyday mundane reality. PART ONE ABOUT THE CLASSICAL ARTIST'S RULES AND OUR OLD HUMAN MIND CHAPTER 1. Lessons beyond schools, or 1+1=1 Those first sharp impressions of reality enchanted me, yet they also bewildered me with endless questions that remain with me to this day. I did not know at the time that my desperately questioning mind of a little artist was trying to explain nothing less than the natural mechanics of our perceptions. "How come I can see my reality and how? How come I can be myself? How come I can communicate with others? How come I can calculate numbers?" I found that hidden nature's art studio of perceptions in my own mind long time ago as a struggling young student, when I was trying to set up my first mathematical scenario: 1+1=2. I have not realized that this primordial art studio of the mind is to build a whole reality without which no image, thought or idea are possible. Some years later I have had to face a crucial fact: having no clues about how our minds really perceive we have no possibility to really evolve our old recycling mentality, culture, sciences and ethics. My earliest childhood impressions remain incomparable. When these memories occasionally emerge in brilliant light from the past, I feel as though I am awakening from the deep dull sleep that we call our 'daily routine'. Many of us call this sleep 'reality'. The questions that children ask, come from the perspective of independent observers. While they are still outsiders, newcomers, they have not yet become seriously involved in pretensions of our society and its scenarios, in attempting to fit into their limited categories. As comical as those questions may seem to an adult, the essence of wonder itself remains the most precious quality of our nature and very often this wonder can lead us to the most mysterious corners of our psychology. Often narrowing its range and decreasing its points with age that natural wonder leaves a mind in quite stiff condition when we get older. Sometimes we call this stiffness a tradition, experience or even knowledge. As we grow up we hardly distinguish those habits of thinking, from our real circumstances. In a minute or two one will be able to discover a crucial mistake in exact sciences, without getting into almost any specific knowledge about mathematics. That mistake we put as a very foundation of mathematics that we use for millennia missing the very elementary knowledge about sensual perceptions that many of us can obtain in our early childhood. The first lessons about how we put visible reality together, so we would be able to know that our calculatations and the use of our language and concepts are not based on universal laws, are not available in schools. Therefore some little students might feel that human knowledge grows somewhere on trees. Well, I was in my first grade of the quite ordinary elementary school when my elderly teacher compelled us to memorize that 1+1=2, quite a common in our everyday life calculation. That created a conflict in my child's mind. If we take the very same, imaginatively perfect 1, twice, it remains absolutely the same 1. Therefore 1+1=1, the same unchanged 1. If I have to put things in a group, sum, composition, those "1s" must be somehow different, or my sight would not be able to "see" the difference between them and I will see only one "1". I was sitting in my class absolutely bewildered. My little body was trembling as I rose, daring to ask my teacher a very silly question in front of my classmates: "Can a 1 be a little bigger or smaller that the other 1s? Or are those 1s absolutely the same units?" "Certainly the same. This is math! Look, one apple plus another apple will be two apples. We deal with numbers here!" "I just do not understand how things can be turned into numbers," I mumbled. My classmates were at first quiet and then started giggling. However I was not the only child in the world bewildered by a "mathematical logic". I thought: "so many people are so serious about mathematics, they must know better what they do, or maybe they just have an extraordinary imagination, but I have not. Perhaps my teacher wants me to pretend that in some wonder world of math the very same identical units could really exist, survive as the same units next to each other, absolutely fixed and nchanged. In that wonder world they can be devoured by monsters like 2, 3, 4, 5 and so on, in such a way that they can appear again, pop up back to their old places, perfectly unchanged". Natural science did not seem to me natural. In my child's experience in dealing with reality things changed mercilessly, never staying fixed or absolutely the same. However, people call them the same names, like the sun, a house, a face, a thought, even when they drastically change their colors, sizes, shapes, movements. How do they recognize those subjects as the same things? I was still bewildered and then easily accepted the great Greek Heraclitus' conclusion: "One cannot step into the same river twice". I was pretty much convinced that not only the river but my own self cannot be exactly the same even for a moment. My feelings, thoughts and whims were constantly slightly, or even drastically changed. Mathematics is a play where things and numbers have artificially fixed qualities. Things and numbers in there are fixed in every position and combination. Numbers can present the same labels glued on different things, and they can also turn different things into just labels, nothing else. Things in wonder mathematics can very conveniently stay unchanged while one thinks about what to do with them. Why? How can I apply it to my reality? If I take one apple once, and it will be 1 time. If I take it twice, it will be 2 times. But what is 2 times then? Are they ideal repetitions? In that case no matter how many times ideals will be ideally repeated neither values nor situations will be changed. How would repetitions work in reality? On a little break after that class I made my first scientific experiment. I wanted to see if I could calculate motions. I went downstairs to the back entrance door, when no one was around. I opened a very heavy door with great effort and let it shut itself. I tried to repeat this procedure a few times in the same way. The door squeakily shut every time, but never in exactly the same way. I imagined that that huge door after many movements, finally had to fall apart. That door like any human machine could only make movements in similar ways. But can even a very special machine make absolutely exact movements? Is there any clock for instance, that ticks so perfectly that it does not need to be rewinded? CHAPTER 2 Still Life created by an artist and a Still Life created by a scientist One day my art teacher introduced me to a simple method, a common technic, that should help me to imitate visual images. A display for our Still Life was adjusted on a top of a small table, right in front of me. My teacher showed me a pencil that could be used as an instrument to measure those objects and their details in a distance from them. Looking at those things from the place where I was sitting, I had to hold a pencil as still as possible, in a parallel way to the subject I wanted to measure. In that manner I was able to see how much the length of each thing can take off the pencil's length. Then I had to do it over and over again looking at all different subjects, but using the same length of a pencil, comparing all measurements in the distance, and realizing how much one side of a vase would seem longer than another, or shorter, or more round, or ovalish. How much shorter the length of a pear height compared to a vase's height, and so on. That measuring process amused me as soon as I compared that process to imaginable measuring in math. A pencil in art worked in the same way as a unite in math. In both cases our measurements and calculations have to depend on the angle from where we observe our subjects, missing millions of other circumstances that we might never notice, or even presume. I came to realize that we skip lots of real details and changes when we deal with math or with art, so we would be able to compare not real changing and fluctuating events, that are so difficult to catch and impossible to stop for our observations, but instead we can sum some abstract images as a collective impression. In art we call it "A Still Life"; in math we call this impression "a task", "a formula". In mundane life we call it a house, or an apple, or a car, or a star, without being aware that those images are not solid, fixed and independent from the rest of the mysterious world. The conclusions must satisfy our sense of experience which is forever limited. Our observing process is like walking on crutches from one point to another missing events in between. However we could get somewhere without overwhelming our limited minds with all natural processes. Our experience in our life that we call arts, science, technology, and many other activities in our today society are based on that amazing ability of selecting impressions and skipping the rest. How do we select, what kind of power moves our sensations that helps us to choose what we think is "right" or "truthful"? Perhaps the very process of selection must be quite tiring; it requests some amount of esponsibilities for the results. Human minds conveniently invented patterns to follow, offering a preconcluded limited choice. I must confess that imitating other people's behavior and actions was not an easy to me. I had to face even more difficulties when in my art class I had to create an impression of real images on canvas. I noticed that people in general were pretending as hard as I tried in their many activities. To help our slow minds and bodies to follow patterns things that we have to deal with were expected to be fixed - still life, relationships, systems, names, numbers, opinions and ideas. People conveniently trusted that they went to work in the very same place, at the very same time, expecting to repeat "the same" movements and words, then came to "the same" house and repeat their action that try to commit every day. They were very frustrated because things did not want to stay fixed, they were breaking down, went wrong directions, blew up and hurt. Accordingly to our human mentality life must be safer if we repeat our actions. In that case how will we keep up with the world? CHAPTER 3. How our crude perceptions create SAMENESS for our observation? I remember that a couple of years ago my friend who is a microbiologist has told me a story about an experiment involving cloning a sheep, and about practicing of creating the very same species in laboratory from a single cell. "No matter what we do for imitation - copies cannot be absolute copies", I said. "Why not?" wondered my friend. "If we want to create an absolutely identical copy, we must create another whole identical world with the identical history for it, first." "Why does it need another whole copy of the world to be just a copy of something in it?" "So it could exist identically with all identical functions and timing in it. The actual world could not exactly repeat anything, because it is interconnected with its instant unique changes. If it will repeat anything, a copy will be devoured by its original, because that copy has to have the same absolute qualities, the very same place to have those qualities and of course, absolutely the same timing. Our nature could not tolerate any ideally identical copy, it would instantly change it into different things by putting them in different connections and circumstances. However our mentality believes in the imaginative identical copies, repetitions, such as time machines." We can put in categories only collective ghost-images, not actually functioning things. That is how we developed our human language and exact sciences. In the meanwhile we could not exist in our reality if we are not unique, absolutely unique in all our functions. The law of nature concerning uniqueness reveals in its every singular change - absolutely exact repetitions would not allow anything to exist any farther, even for a moment. One apple will ignore human "plus" and exist uniquely compared to another apple, no matter how I would calculate them. Apples will change their qualities, if we would grind them together. In math everything can be turned into equal units, and even "eaten" by numbers, so we would not notice the difference. A symbolic number in math just tells me how many single units it swallowed. Every town or a country has its inhabitants but they cannot become the same units for calculations, economic and social manipulations. How is it that a very sloppy mistake in mathematics, that even a relatively perceptive child can sense, still remains the very foundation of "exact science", our education or our economy? How can one trust that we can calculate the world? There is something amazing hidden beyond that crudeness of our perceptions. They are not only just crude, but naturally crude for a very important reason. Ironically, exact sciences are based on that crudeness of our vision, but at the same time that crudeness creates a genius of generalization in the world of momentary nature's change. We can see some relations and similarities, therefore we are able to put images in groups and categories. Mathematics is a splendid example of how we manage to put different things in the same groups, symbols, and even equations, by mentally and artificially "isolating" those compositions from the rest of the world and creating a human dream about a perfect balance, that is not really possible in reality. Mathematics is also one of the most artistically daring human achievement in generalizing images and symbols in groups. Nature has no machines and structures as we see them. Machines are human Still Life compositions that are inspired by our crude vision engaged to mathematical thinking. So that people could predict, calculate using approximately repetitive movements, and deal with seemly the same things. Through those limited compositions they can conveniently expect planned results, avoiding nature's surprising turns. However, only for a while. CHAPTER 4. The perceptions and human intelligence That childish thought about a perfect wonder world of mathematics was paradoxically the dawning of my imagination and somehow it helped me to find one of my first explanations about people's strange behavior. They try to build a wonder world of the "right results" and "right turns", and call that "civilization". When the results do not match our calculated expectations we get very frustrated. Human artificial creations seem to provide more comfort to our mentality than to our actual existence. People create their systems and machines not to get along with nature, but to fix and adjust it to their still very limited perception and experience. Human constructions still have to fight nature's conditions, sometimes even violently to retain their repetitive, predicable functions - we must rewind our clocks, add fuel to and lubricate our cars, adjust our calendars, and wash and change our clothes. The bigger our artificial system grows, the more confusion and problems, caused by nature's unavoidable turns, we must face. Nowadays we are overwhelmed dealing with our systems that become uncontrollable, like food, machinery, art, sex, music, medicine, transportation, or chemical industries. The more so called comfort we create around us, the more energy, lubrication, fixing tools and services we need to use. Often our systems not only slip out of our control very quickly but paradoxically limit, retard and tame our mentality. Our modern mass production systems even terrify our everyday life with their monotonous demands, or unexpected break downs. Millions of human toys that we build and play substituting real situations in nature, started developing unnatural manmade crises that we do yet really not know how to solve. For instance, today we have to deal with bottomless buckets of computerized connections and information. Our "internet" system works in the same way as if we all put our laundry in one global washing machine, and no one could manage to guard a personal sock from being lost, stolen or used by a stranger. Or another example: our minds have to deal with the disturbing, unneeded information, and like our stomachs when we eat too much artificially produced, "fast food" have constant indigestion. A mind's obesity shall be a more alarming subject for discussions than an overweight body. Often human undigested knowledge is getting turned into an outrageous ignorance. Our intelligence cannot evolve if we drive our cars, and manipulate our computers skillfully. CHAPTER 5. Why do we need approximations? The important knowledge that we miss today is - we can play with nature but never escape its power. Can we survive still stubbornly fantasizing that we can objectively calculate and picture a world that presumably exists outside our mind's chamber, but do all the work inside its chamber without ever peering out? How our physical bodies and brains can be seen without a mind that actually sees? Have any scientist, surgeon or a butcher seen an actual real sensation, image or a thought owned by somebody's brain? I would like to go back to my unfortunate formal education once more and show how I came to realize that no actual stable image can exist anywhere but in one's imagination. A couple of my teachers in my elementary school told my mother that I was very slow, somewhat retarded, and that she should consider putting me in a special school for abnormal children. I thought that perhaps I had been born sick, with more unstable sensations than others. I could not adopt "elementary" knowledge like others because I could not believe that things can be that easily predicted. Human knowledge is built upon predictions. My life was hardly predictable for me. However, I did not want my mother to stay tragic about my abnormality and decided to do my best to become normal, like others. I had found myself as a little human captured in the society where a mathematical play was a major choice of a communication. Everything had to be calculated: houses, buses, money, my fingers, people, no matter how different they seem to me. I had to put all my effort for pretending that the obvious crudity of "exact" numbers have nothing to do with my personal fluctuating and instantly changing reality, colorfully painted by my unpredictable sensations. To communicate with other people I had to learn how to see things only in crude approximations, crudely enough thus I can say that they look absolutely the same, yesterday and today and other different days would be "a week", myself and others would "people". I felt that my life was very uncomfortable because my approximations and generalizations often did not match my reality or someone else's opinions. I came to realize that I did not want to play silly games with nature - it is much smarter than humans and I had to find a better way to communicate with it. I did not know how. First I tried to find out why and how I can feel nature's constant change. In spite of that merciless change, or trying to escape it, our whole human intelligence created rules rooted in crude approximations. Nevertheless, Hegel was able to notice that the volume, when grows substantially, leads to quality changes, and break downs after all - a small damage in our systems, cracks, explosions, revolutions, bloody wars. When crudeness gets too crude our generalization can lead to a disaster when we confuse dangerous things with harmless things, or treat many different things as the same thing. Many different people cannot obey the same structures and laws, be treated physically, psychologically or medically in the same ways. I was wondering, while we calculate and manipulate numbers or imagines of "perfectly" duplicated copies of them, how in the world we recognize, and differentiate them one from another? Is anybody can look at mathematical calculation and equations without any sensation at all? Could anyone see their slightly different images, without using slightly different visual memory, or could anyone calculate without seeing or feeling anything, ignoring the funny figures and sounds of those symbols and numbers? Change is to help us to sense the difference. Our whole life continues through its change compelling us to compare our sensations and feelings in every moment of our existence. When the motor of comparison is very weak we could not sense almost anything at all. If we loose that ability to instinctively compare different sensations and events in our existence we will loose our entire sensitivity, memory, physical and mental life. The sharpness of our sensory perceptions is based on that motor of comparison as well. A mind gets also augmented through comparison. The more we compare the greater and richer our experience becomes. Even while manipulating "the same" subjects in our minds, we still must compare them for a differentiation. Ideally, 1+1 must be the very same, unchanged 1. However our imaginative conscious minds do not notice the sensation of comparison while calculating our imaginatively "identical" units. That is why we can imagine that 1+1=2, AND NOT THE SAME 1. The very crucial human mistake in logic became a foundation in mathematics and therefore all "exact" sciences. In the meanwhile a thousand people cannot be a thousand unless they are different people. If they are not different at all, we will see only one person, they will merge as one image. This means that without being able to perceive a difference, whether we admit it or not, we would not be able to sense or see anything at all. Therefore, as a child, as I was, can notice, "identical objects" must be somehow always different. After discovering that 1+1=1, and 1+1=2 is absolutely impossible beyond a conscious mind's imagination, I came to realize that perhaps that sense of comparison was prevailing in my childhood experience. Any kind of monotonous procedure was painful, and therefore I did not appreciate usual routines and systems. I did not understand why I had to get up at "the same time" so early in the morning and go to "the same" boring school. I hated to follow any schedule, or any restricted plan. My actual sensory perceptions gave up, I did not see or hear, and I felt depressed when I had to be repetitive for more than a couple of times. I felt depressed just by watching and seeing other people struggling to repeat the same acts, wear the same clothes, expressions, use the same numbers, worlds, formulas, ideas so many times, for so many years, even for centuries! CHAPTER 6 Art for life - comparison, generalization and composition Today I have to say that it took a long time for me to comprehend WHY a human genius usually impresses us so much is rooted in a contradiction, the paradox of all paradoxes that we ever experience. One kind of a human genius can play rich, different melodies using only one "string" like a legendary musician Nicolo Paganini. The other genius, would play the same "note" on many different "strings", like we all do it in mathematics using supposedly "the same" units for all occasions in our life; or when we use the same rules and systems for different people. The latter is a common genius that characterizes our human behavior in general. Both geniuses are a must in everyone in various combinations, and one could not function without the other. In my previous chapter I tried to illustrate our abilities to create crude approximations but at the same time continue to compare. In 1990 I wrote my first Essay on our two very basic artistic abilities. The first is to imitate and repeat, and the latter is to break the rules discovering something different. However as I mentioned before these two abilities are a must in every living creature for the sake of life itself. Constant comparison helps us to see the difference in what we sense, feel and perceive, and generalization helps us to sense, feel or see similar things in groups, or things in whole. When we talk about memory in general I may surprise many professionals saying that without those two abilities our conscious mind could not identify our past and present experience and therefore, restore and recall anything in a form of an image or a thought, or a story. We could not do any experiments on our memory, neither psychologically nor neurologically. The mechanics that run our memory are built upon comparison or sensations. No actual brain can create this process on its own without its master - a living mind. We loose our memory when the "link" - the ability to compare is broken for any reason. We loose our life when the sensations cannot change. There is no absolute continuity of pain, or an absolute continuity of joy. Our sensations must somehow fluctuate in different degree while we are alive no matter what we imagine or feel. I will come back to that subject about a breathtaking talent of every mind to memorize its experience based upon changing sensations very shortly. First I would like to invite a reader to my old art class ones more, for watching how I was compelled to collect impressions on purpose, using my memory. That time I was instructed to paint a still life, and because art teachers were not much interested in philosophy or the psychology of perceptions, I was asked to create not the exact copy of a display of a vase and a pear, but only my "impression". Every time I looked at that live composition, I had a new, slightly changed impression of it. To my amusement there were many impressions I had to deal with. At first, this absolutely confused me. I came to realize for the first time that without the natural mechanics of comparison my memory cannot exist. To collect one impression I had to look at the display many times. However, I liked the process of collecting and selecting impressions in one whole impression, comparing not only things, one by one, but even the groups of things, finding characterizing their relationships connections. That was a basic thinking process. However at first I thought that I must be artistically inexperienced, because I have to constantly compare my sensations and impressions one to the other, totally confused. I discovered then that without the routine work of a constant comparison through my sensory perceptions I could not think or imagine at all. It works as we see not just somebody's nose, or recognize a whole face, with a nose and a mouth, and ears as a composition. There are usually too many things that can easily overwhelm our minds, therefore the ability to create a composition such as a thought, view, body, reality or a mind itself is a blessing help. Our crudeness of perception limits our scenarios of seeing and comprehending essentially for a good reason. We are not getting absolutely lost in the endless ocean of all events. Comparison, selecting and generalization or composing are impossible without our limited perceptions. They cannot exist one without the other as well. Our life is impossible without this instinctive combination. That combination of our natural and very basic abilities reveal a motor that constantly "reconstructs", "recomposes" our whole existence for our survival in the entire world¹s changeable conditions. However when we manipulate these instinctive abilities without a clue about how and where they derive from, we must face many unexpected problems. The productions of exact science and inventions are far from their ideal purposes. Our systems cannot survive unexpected change, including our ideal perpetual mechanism, an easy, can function only in forever fixed systematically repetitive existence - that existence is not possible in our real world. Nature's constant changes ruin all our compositions sooner or later. And again - Nature has a superb reason. The most kind reason of all we know - by changing us our nature continues our existence. CHAPTER 7 The hidden motor of perception - the motor of human existence As I described before mathematics and my childhood just had to coexist parallel to each other. I came to realize that I cannot escape my communications with other people, who wanted "right", means the planned results. The conditions that they build is not to get along but to prevent changes. In spite my private sense of my own reality I had to pretend that I was like others. I tried so hard and was sometimes so pretentious that one day I amazed my new math teacher creating new solutions for a few geometrical and mathematical tasks that were not mentioned in a textbook. I usually looked very slow and even sleepy. My new teacher was so amused as well as impressed that compelled me to stand in front of my class and she said: "I have to confess that I have never had a student like this one before. Here is an example of a great talent and a greater laziness that may kill any great talent - she never does her home work, and uselessly hopes to recreate math, written by many geniuses throughout centuries, and she hopes to do it in a hurry in our class room." I was still too young to formulate my overwhelming emotions in words. I was so deeply grateful to that teacher to find something in me that she called "a talent". However my gladness could not dominate another, much stronger felling - a mathematical logic was growing out of the most terrible mistake, it had no natural foundation. I had no doubts anymore that my perceptions had a hidden secret motor creating the events that I could see and understand. I also had no more doubts that my perceptions were quite similar to anyone's perceptions, anyone who had eyes, ears, noses or skin. I found myself adjusting to basic science when I was introduced to geometry. Something was so lively and easy about it as if it was already built into my mind. When I was about fourteen, I found and had read a whole text book of geometry, a few years high school program, and it took me about four hours. The concept of geometry is so beautifully harmonies with our sight , that it feels that it organically grows from our eyes themselves. Euclid's geometry was based on the experience of human sight, any sight, my sight! I did not need to have an extraordinary memory of a genius, but I just had a sensitivity and the experience of an artist who was somehow trained to observe and extrapolate elementary shapes and forms. That helped me to easily be able to manage with all illustrated tasks in that textbook without memorizing all equations and formulas. "Our thoughts are not deriving from formulas, concepts and dogmas, they are all causality of our sensations and perceptions in the first place. Our human thoughts, formulas and concepts obey our internal laws, not the external laws of the world!" I was absolutely struck - I finally had a prove that all the matters and materials for my thoughts were created from the materials that cannot exist "out there" but have to be produced and controlled inside myself - through my own perceptions. They are in charge to manufacture and "cook" my reality. My whole existence is protected by the boundaries of my own limitations. My perceptions is one kind of those limitations. The whole purpose of that unique system of protection is to allow myself to be in contact with the entire world's change and at the same time allow me to exist as my own self creating and continue my reality, mind and body from my own unique changes. How come no teacher did tell me about that obvious fact? The real laws of our nature that entirely based on unavoidable constant change were so much cocooned, camouflaged inside manmade ideas, beliefs, pretentious plays buried under mountains of high technology toys, created by our today's society that I had to live for years uncovering and decoding them. Human intelligence did not really evolve for millennia - people were too busy fighting change - correcting and fixing its own nature, missing the very elementary and fundamental knowledge about themselves. A mentioned above story about a stubborn little student as I was in my first grade, who could not give up on seeing apples and units as different things, may slightly relate to all readers. I had to put away my doubts away for a number of years supposing that adults have their hidden reasons to believe in what they were doing and why they were teaching me to follow the rules leading to so many obvious to me mistakes. I thought that some day I would discover the reasons why I have to make the same mistakes and this reason would be highly intelligent. The lack of knowledge about other people minds and their routine of thinking kept me to believe in this illusion of an absolute scientific intelligence for a very long time. Since I was discovering a sense of comparison, that is doing a crucial work in every living creature's mind and body, I felt that through understanding nature of our perceptions and some unusual extrapolating I could find something out about the mystery of people's minds and perhaps a little about the external to my own mind world. The basic knowledge that I somehow obtained through practicing in understanding mind's creations was that in the first place and for many great reasons the external world was not "designed" for our eyes, ears and imagination. =================================================== From the Poem ON BLESSED BLINDNESS by Melissa Henry ......... but if blindness disappeared and everyone could see Every mind's Kingdom, Feel every feeling and know every thought as one, Misunderstandings could melt down forever. Seeds of doubts and blame about the others could stop growing. No fights, no wars, intrigues or hate, no players or pretending. Alas, no illusions of beauty, seductive unknowns and guesses. No wonder and No wisdom - - all truths are clear for each mind and for all. No thrill to admire, no one to thank, No need to explain, to talk, to act, to scream. No artist to paint. No poet to sing. If my humanly peculiar senses cannot give me the world God bless my blindness, the soil for my garden of dreams. How little I can see with my eyes! How much I can see and create without them! God bless my lonely mind in its sacred solitude, and my only way To know your world, By building my own. =================================================== THE IS NO TIME WITHOUT A MIND Clocks are churches to venerate Time. They are built for minds bewitched by the illusion of its power. Humans hurry their existence, they know more about hours and minutes than what they do, facing New Years as new world to count. Time measures stars to fit them in space of minds. Clocks tick away the rest and labor, love and hatred, horror and joy in the same way because they come and go as the same units. They give the same minutes to be born and die. It was no time before I opened my eyes to see the world. My heart started my clock and my time began My days are as long as I move. Thoughts are years. Minutes of hate are shorter than seconds. Minutes of love and thanks longer than my existence. I cannot be late for myself -- I am always on time. My mind is the only time machine which takes me everywhere ignoring millions of years. I could see my life as one day but I need centuries to understand a minute. When my heart stops my time no one will be there to rewind it.