...on my way here i passed pond 2 in which an underwater pump is circulating the water via a gushing fountain (several metres offshore) powered by an unattended generator that is chained to the railings... I guess its purpose is to enliven the water which has been covered by duckweed for months and which has not been replenished since the drought when the water level fell below that of the outlet...
...before that, i passed a chestnut tree that was flowering strongly in the spring but today has diseased leaves from top to bottom... and i wonder how ill or healthy is this city forest... does it need different treatment than it's getting from its paid or self-appointed guardians and experts?...
...are they trained to perceive the whole, and to see and to trust the adaptiveness of what we call nature if left to itself... i doubt it... i doubt if any specialists are fully aware of this, or can be... that is our limitation, perhaps fatal...
...the man and the woman are now using swords... without the intention of killing, or even of fighting, i suppose...
...i wonder if, in the future, people will pretend to fight with guns, and helicopters, and suicide bombs, and nuclear weapons... yes, i suppose there is nothing too strange for people - think of ballet, or football, or science, or torture, or prison, or speaking, or writing, or psychoanalysis, or education, or going to the moon, or religion... the list can be endless... and it's surely good to remember (at least occasionally) how crazy is human culture, in all its forms and manifestations... yet there is a wisdom in each......the two or four crows (who are usually walking near this seat) are not here today... i wonder what they are doing?
...in the Wikipedia there are two photographs of that surviving building (now called Genbuku Dome, or Peace Memorial) image 1, image 2 with some trees and new buildings but without the panoramic view of the rebuilt city (as part of a tourist advertisement) that provoked me to write this... (the photographs were taken by Dan Smith on Hiroshima Day, 6 August 2004)
...the amazing recovery of this piece of earth and city... both natural and cultural elements... and the apparent decay of radiation to safe levels... what does it mean?......i fear especially that this poster invitation to come and visit Hiroshima as a tourist sight means that the dropping of atomic weapons is now normalised, and that more of them will be used in the future - unless we all act in some way to take control of our own culture, not as destiny but as conscious choice to outlaw the kind of politics that is capable such disasters... and may be incapable of stopping them...
...what does this entail?... my first guess is 'ceasing to obey tutelage' as Immanuel Kant put it - ceasing to rely on specialists and experts to deal with big questions (and to distrust the paid and obedient expert in each of us) and instead to rely on the (re) education of everyone as i call it, not yet knowing what it could turn out to be - but feeling that it is a necessity if global problems are to be solved, not multiplied or worsened...(these pages are designed to be read with the window set to two-thirds of the screen width)
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