... i can still see the squirrel high up in a tall tree... but it is silhouetted against white cloud so i can't see its colour...
...no, no, it's not a squirrel its a bird, half hidden by a branch... there are 5 birds in the tree, close together... and now 2 have flown to a nearby tree... and the seemingly unremarkable movement of nature continues...
...remembering my thoughts of and about the writings of Martin Heidegger (that i began to transcribe into this digital diary yesterday) i realise again that, if these seemingly insignificant events in a city forest (and in this writing) are seen as poetical, then the new path which Heidegger perceives or induces comes into existence... what he calls Being (something more than 'being' without an initial capital)... a way of perceiving and acting that is more than what is possible in the life industrial (as bounded by materialistic logic and purpose)... it becomes instead the evidence or presence of a greater reality, that which we can, if we choose, keep alive in our human thoughts and actions...
...while i was writing that, several pairs of crows, magpies and ducks walked over the grass as they pecked at the ground, presumably seeking 'food' in the form of live worms or insects etc... a rabbit was walking and eating there also... but if (on the eater's behalf) we label the eaten creatures as 'food' we are surely undoing or concealing a greater reality that (in Heidegger's way of thinking) it is our duty or purpose or privilege to 'shepherd'...
17:27 ...that took me an hour... now to walk on...
18:02
...i'm sitting near a bridge in the park... a bridge is i suppose one of the best (and least questionable) products of civil engineering... (the design and construction of bridges, roads, docks, airports, large buildings etc)... but this bridge is particularly pacific, being built in a park to enable walkers and runners and park workers to cross the several ornamental canals which are inhabited by ducks, geese and other water birds... Heidegger criticises technology for reducing nature and people to 'standing reserve' (for instance a large dam turns the Rhine from its otherwise unbounded purposes into a standing reserve or source of electricity)... but here, in this bridge in a park, the result of engineering seems less specific, more open to subsequent choice as to what to do with it...
...just now what looked like a team of athletes walked over it... and before that a man who was speaking continuously to a woman walking about 10 paces behind him came over the bridge... they sat together on a bench for a minute or two... and then they went back the way they came, and again she walked behind him...
...but this is too peaceful and pleasant a scene to treat only as a subject for a theory of human reality (however much it may be needed)...
...runners keep passing... as do people with dogs... and now i cross the bridge myself, pausing to look at the water...
...what was he saying that so impressed me?...
...that the humanism we inherit, from the Renaissance and earlier, is too limiting... it leads us to see ourselves only as physical objects, thinking imaginary thoughts, and denying the existence of minds that discovered scientific discovery, and much else...
...yes, it is time to perceive life as more than a purely physical or rational process, and human beings as people, not objects... but the greater reality that Heidegger is trying to describe is forever beyond words, in the new, and the nameless...
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