This is my brother, Aimo

 Aimo Paniloo - YouTube

despite our different last names, he and I are brothers according to our genetics.

so proud of you. You are totally amazing.

RIP Philip, my brother

I was devastated to learn of your passing, my excellent friend. And, then, a thought occurred to me: you were always curious and wondered about all things that came across your awareness (significant and interesting things to discuss during our hours-long sit-down sessions), maybe you were intrigued by what was on the other side and you went searching.

That is how I want to remember you, brother Philip. A kindred spirit. Rest in peace, my love.

my impressions of gesture

for my love

some works I've done lately. initial forays into gesture.

I had forgotten...

 ...how much I love Glenn Gould (1955): J.S.Bach "The Goldberg Variations" [ Glenn Gould ] (1955) - YouTube

the girl of my dreams was my girl. and, yet, only in looking back now do I realize who I truly was with.

aging is not fun but it has its little shards of paradise, moments snapped in time, moments that seize and stretch like shadows falling into a blackhole.

movie is art

One of the most beautiful movies I've seen in a while is The Harder They Fall. Movie is art, the soul, the heart. I see a time when I felt normal, that distant past, unreachable. This movie does that. I want to be Nat Love.

nat love - Google Search

Here there be monsters

I have monsters inside of me. These are not schisms of the psyche; they are potentialities that should never come out again:

There is the enraged me, there is the belligerent me, there is the arrogant me, the self-righteous me, the overbearing me, the creepy me, the creepier me. Grating, embarrassing, undignified, humiliating, disgusting, vulgar, all. I have much to apologize for, to so many people, for so much destructive behaviour I enacted that hurt them. Upon reflection, I'm surprised I haven't self-executed.

One of the hardest things about trying to heal is the obligatory self-examination.

I said that these behaviours are "potentialities"; what I mean here is that my always excessive, overly-excessive drinking allows these monsters to come out when I've achieved oblivion and all filters fall away  - I'm not excusing myself, I am truly at fault here.

I do not want to be remembered as the monsters I've let out. This is the hardest realization: we cannot redo the past. Some things cannot be repaired. Perhaps just as hard: we are responsible for what happens next.

I ever hold out hope...

Sometimes the path to healing and sobriety is like walking on an endless, featureless plain

After many years of unchecked self-indulgence, reframing the alcoholic mindset to total abstinence can be like walking in a featureless landscape where, if one is not mindful, there seems to be little progress and ruminating on the past aimlessly becomes a vicious cycle. To me, 'folk religion' (whether Christian, Buddhist, Taoist, etc.), though are themselves comprised of solid principles for living, provide little if any comfort otherwise because they do not really provide realistic psychology insights.

So I turn to tarot card and I Ching readings not because I believe in them (I try and avoid magical thinking if at all possible) but because they encapsulate certain archetypes and commentary that I'm familiar with and are excellent tools for a more insightful self-reflection. Here is my I Ching reading today:

Your reading resulted in the following hexagrams:

Hexagram 40, Release (no changing lines)

Key Questions

If nothing could bind you, where would you go?
Do you 'have to'? Who says?
Which path leads to where you want to be?

Oracle

'Release. Fruitful in the southwest.
With no place to go,
To turn round and come back is good fortune.
With a direction to go,
Daybreak, good fortune.'

To 'release' is to liberate, to solve problems, to untie knots. The first step towards release is a move 'southwest': no longer battling on to pursue the mission, but going back to your roots and reconnecting with home and allies. When you know where you're coming from, it becomes a lot easier to be clear about where you're going.

If your path has no real destination, turn back; if it has purpose, start your journey as early as you can. If you have no good reason to continue on as before, come back to your starting point and let that cycle reach its end; if you have a goal in mind, why not start exploring ways to attain it right away?

This would be such simple advice, if only we didn't spend our lives being 'pulled' down paths that lead nowhere, as if by invisible strings.

Image

'Thunder and rain do their work: Release.
A noble one pardons transgressions and forgives crimes.'

Sequence

Release follows from Hexagram 39, Limping:
'Things cannot end with hardship, and so Release follows. Release means letting things take their time.'

one of the saddest, most beautiful songs

Chris Cornell - "Nothing Compares 2 U" (Prince Cover) [Live @ SiriusXM] | Lithium - YouTube

How many faces or images do you see?

One of the ways I avoid human contact (eye contact) is to look at things that capture my eye. I took this picture of the sky in a city park in Rankin Inlet when too many people came. I call it, "Howmanyfacesorimagesdoyousee?"

Lighten thou mine eyes; and I shall behold the marvels of thy [works].

Don't quite know how I managed this

 This is a view from the bedroom of the first apartment I moved into in Rankin Inlet.

there is no touch-up, no trickery.

The Pandemic: I did not buy more than usual toilet paper

At the start of the pandemic, I didn't horde any toilet paper, I did not make any sundry sourdough baked goods, I had no memes to share.

What I started was what I had continued from before.

this is my study of the archangel, Michael.

this is 'found material' that I put together

-a 5pm.

Here is the face of Chronos

and, here is Medusa

-where is Chronos here?

Inuktitut Syntax (part i: the use of 'negation' in Inuktitut)

There was, at the beginning of the latest European Union ban on seal products, an ad campaign in Nunavut that featured a young Inuit couple and, to me, a very interesting phraseology:

Nattit Piunngittuunngittut.

An English translation would not really suffice so I'll try and break the second part down to its morphemes:

           piu   +   nngit   +   tut   +   u   +   nngit   +   tut

          good        not        they        is         not         they

Literally, it means "they are not a bad thing" (see, I said that it didn't translate well).

There are a few features in Inuktitut syntax that do not express the same way that English (or any other language) does.

The pronoun (with an embedded verb mood - statement, question, or command) occurs at the end of the phrase, but you'll also notice that it can be in the middle of a phrase as in [good not they are not they]. This fact, though, is less important than the fact that the pronouns seem to have a strong affinity for the 'negative' affix, -nngit-.

This 'tiering' of valiancy ('negative' to pronoun, for example) is systemic - ie, it serves a syntactic purpose. Positive statements/states of being can be made into their antonyms:

pisuktunga                    'I am walking'

pisunngittunga             'I am not walking'

quviasuktunga              'I am happy'

quviasunngittunga       'I am sad'

The most used exchange in Inuktitut today must be:

qanuippit?                     'how are you?'

qanuinngittunga            'I am fine'

-the last two examples actually have a root qanuit- that means 'not physically well' such that its antonym indeed means 'well'; the question asks: 'are you unwell?' so the response is 'I am not unwell'.

The use of antonymy in Inuktitut is different from English in that binary treatment of 'states of being', such as emotions and current conditions, are easily understood and accepted as syntactically well-formed:

quviasuktunga               'I am happy'

quviasunngittunga         'I am sad'

numaasuktunga              'I am sad'

numaasunngittunga       'I am not sad (ie, happy)'

uirngaqtunga                 'I am sleepy'

uirnganngittunga           'I am wide awake'

The rule of thumb to remember is that the 'negative' morpheme is a relatively productive element in Inuktitut syntax and is normally inserted between the stem (everything before, but excluding the pronoun) and the pronoun to affect an "opposite" effect.

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Most Inuktitut dictionaries are in the present tense, '3rd person, singular' [-juq/-tuq] pronoun, as in:

aanniajuq                        'sick;in pain (he is...)'

aitsiqtuq                          'get [it]/someone (he goes to...)'

(taken from: Inuktut Glossary | Inuktut Tusaalanga)

and are usually in the positive/affirmative sense.

Using the pattern described above, I may express the antonyms of the two phrases as:

aannianngittuq               'sick;in pain (he is not...)', and

aitsinngittuq                   'get [it]/someone (he does not go and...)'.

I can go a step further in this exercise by varying the pronoun endings using this verb table for "to be":

1	2	3+
-junga/tunga ‘I am’	-juguk/-tuguk ‘we (2) are’	-jugut/tugut ‘we (3+) are’
-jutit/-tutit ‘you are’	-jusik/-tusik ‘you (2) are’	-jusi/-tusi ‘you (3+) are’
-juq/-tuq ‘s/he, it is’	-juuk/-tuuk ‘they (2) are’	-jut/-tut ‘they (3+) are’

and the basic verb phrases from the online resource (I believe it was developed by Pirurvik) into something like this:

aanniajuguk                          'sick;in pain (we (2) are...)'

aannianngittuguk                  'sick;in pain (we (2) are not...)'

kaapituqtut                            '[drinking] coffee (they (3+) are...)'

kaapitunngittut                      '[drinking] coffee (they (3+) are not...)'

Panniqtuumiitutit                  'you are in Pangnirtung'

Panniqtuummiinngittutit       'you are not in Pangnirtung'.

Go through a few "...(he, she, it...)" verb entries from the online dictionary as we just did and vary the pronouns and then express their antonyms.

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In the next installment, we will go through tenses, antonymy, the "to be" pronouns and introduce the pronoun forms that denote questions/queries.

Meditations on the serenity prayer

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change

Trying to make amends wherever possible is hard enough, but not being able to make amends is harder still. There is much that I've done to try and drive people whom I love and who in turn cared deeply about me away from my life. Angry, drunk emails; angry, drunk blog postings; angry words - these are things I cannot change, cannot take away.

When I was drinking, I used to wake up with a start. I wouldn't remember most of the night before, but I could be assured that I had done something terribly wrong. I used to fear opening my email to find evidence of my acting out and the devastation I wrought upon myself and others around me while I was drunk. I have done much, too much.

I'm not normally a "hateful" person when I'm sober but all the garbage that I've accumulated growing up and in the course of my life did eventually came out when my dark, angry side came out. Sometimes I let it take over especially when I was upset and in pain. Nothing good ever came out of it. I was a bad drunk. I hurt people, and no wonder, they don't want anything to do with me; I don't want anything to do with my drunken self.

the courage to change the things I can

I'm totally committed to my sobriety now as I've never been before. I've lost too much. The road to oblivion is wide and easy, but at great cost. It is the getting back up and turning away that is so very hard. I expect that I will be psychologically raw for a good while. Bad memories will always, I expect, well up to try and defeat and oppress me (things I cannot change). My broken sexuality, my fragile sense of self, I need no longer suffer these unnecessarily.

From this time onwards, I must try and muster the courage to change the things I can. That I'm a write-off to many people is what I deserve. It is a consequence of my drunken and angry, thoughtless natures. I'm trying to break away from this sorry state of being. I might have destroyed  much in my life but I still have much to live for:

I'm a grandfather and still have loving family, children and grandchildren who are willing to give me the chance to change, simply because of who they are and who they hold me to be, simply. For this I have much to be grateful for. I'll start from here and try to work my way outwards.

and the wisdom to know the difference

I have my good days and my bad days. But I think, I mean I know, trying to avoid the bad days, the hurt-filled days is what got me to where I ended up. It is high time I grew up and took responsibility for myself. Though I'm still uncertain, still very hesitant (maybe even still resistant), I take great solace and inspiration and hope from the Gospels, and some of the passages have taken on new meaning for me, especially:

When I was a child, I spoke like a child, thought like a child, argued like a child; now that I have become a man, I have finished with childish ways.

For now we see obscurely in a mirror, but then it will be face to face. Now I know partly; then I will know fully, just as God has fully known me.

But for now, three things last—trust, hope, love; and the greatest of these is love. 1 Corinthians 13:11-13

I highly doubt that I'll ever become a "Christian" let alone a good one. I can only try and be a mensch.

Jay