Sunday, November 1, 2009
liberty
Is not the universally admitted drive for political freedom a pale shade of the brain's cry for freedom from the body? The american insurgents believed freedom was so important to the society of humans that it was included in their Declaration.
They confused their interior cerebral clawing for liberation from the skull for a much less important freedom to politic.
History has not been an all night cinema of men needing or even wanting real neural freedom.
The recent french, british and american social experiments in individual privileges are rare even now amongst groups and already wheeze with fatigue. Global citizens are not so interested in political freedom as they are in independence of each brain from labor and service for the body. Slavery. More effort and progress has been expended by the species to escape from the body than toward political liberty. The highest jump has been the video screens which surround us and like halls of mirrors long ago, represent a great leap in our evolving flight away from the body through manipulation of our world as only an image. It is to be expected that the observing and reacting to visual screens is prized by the common man as the best window for mental liberty over almost all other activity save for sex or sport.
It recreates a puppet show for us to play.
It is not difficult to make a thing permanent.
We have come close.
Ancient stone giants were created with technologico primitavo.
Yet permanency is incompatible with change. Permanency loses.
What appeared to last longest is that which did not change or very little.
Art was but the permanent capture of a changing condition.
Now we have learned to remember not the permanent but the
change.
It was not meant for us to be permanent.
Would not serve the manifest aim.
Everything of us indicates designed change and an end.
If there was a creator It could have made us permanent.
We would not have made us permanent.
What we value now is controlled change, process. Anything permanent becomes an obstacle like old commodore computers or analog cellphones. Its the designer not the steps it takes that is the story. It will give the longest life to those structures it needs the most like trees.
We would not have made us permanent.
What we value now is controlled change, process. Anything permanent becomes an obstacle like old commodore computers or analog cellphones. Its the designer not the steps it takes that is the story. It will give the longest life to those structures it needs the most like trees.
Trees are permanent.
We were made and meant to die.
Fire teaches alot.
Nothing ever survived.
Saturday, October 31, 2009
Monday, October 19, 2009
After being in the fort for a short time, possibly two or three days, and no further signs of Indians having been seen or reported, James Graham, hoping the alarm to have been ill-founded, proposed to those in the fort that, if some of the men would go and stay with him a night, he and his family would go over home. Accordingly, they did so, some of the men in the fort volunteering to go with him. Shortly after he went home, either the same night or later, his house was attacked by the Indians.
The assault was made in the after part of the night before daybreak. Not feeling well, Graham had luckily lain down on a bench against the door with his clothes on. The Indians made the assault by trying to force the door open, which they partly succeeded in doing. Thus aroused, Graham and his men placed the heavy bench and a tub of water against the door, and in this way prevented the Indians from gaining an entrance. A man named McDonald (or Caldwell), who was assisting in placing the tub against the door, while reaching above the door for a gun was shot and killed, the ball passing through the door. Thwarted in their effort in affecting an entrance into the house, the Indians next turned their villainous assault upon an outhouse or kitchen standing near the main dwelling. in this outbuilding slept a young negro man and two of the Graham children. The negro, whose name was Sharp, tried to escape by climbing up the chimney (chimneys in those days were large and roomy), but when discovered was ruthlessly hauled down from his hiding place, tomahawked and scalped. As this tragedy was being enacted, the cries of the two children who were sleeping on the loft above next directed the attention of the Indians to that quarter. They shot up through the floor and wounded the eldest of the two, a boy named John in the knee, then dragged him and his sister down and out into the yard. Finding that John was wounded so badly that he could not stand upon his feet and that he would be a burdensome prisoner, they at once dispatched him with a tomahawk and carried off his bleeding scalp as a trophy of their crime.
While this bloody scene was going on in the kitchen, Colonel Graham had gone upstairs and was shooting through a porthole at the Indians in the yard as best he could. The men in the lower part of the house loaded the guns and handed them up to him and he did the shooting. About the time they were trying to make the wounded boy stand up, several of them huddled together and fired at the bulk; when they suddenly dispersed. It is believed that one or more of the Indians were killed or wounded.
A few years after this occurrence an Indian skeleton was found about two miles from the scene of the tragedy, on a small run near where E. D. Alderson now lives, called Indian Draft, which was believed to be the same Indian killed by Graham. Graham secured the jaw bone of this skeleton and used it for a gunrack for a number of years.
As the tender twig is easily bent and made to grow in new directions, so were the inclinations of this innocent child readily diverted from the scenes of the past and made to love the passing events which surrounded her, and she being well cared for and never mistreated by the Indians, it was but natural that she loved them. It is also said that before her return a love more passionate than that for her adopted tribe or mother had seized her youthful breast and that a young warrior would soon have claimed her for his “white” squaw. As to the truth of the story, that she had an Indian lover, we do not vouch, but having learned it from her own descendants, we think it worthy of mention.
Upon the return of Elizabeth to her home, the customs she met there were new and strange to her. On one occasion when her mother asked her to “soak the bread” and afterwards asked her how it was getting on, she replied, “very well” that she had taken two loaves and “thrown them in the river and put a rock on them”. To this new mode of life she could not easily be reconciled and ever and anon would clamor for the wild life of the wigwam. At one time when she threatened to return to the Indians, her mother told her sister, Jane, to pretend as if she would go with her to see whether or not she would actually make the attempt. She readily accepted Jane’s proposal to accompany her to the Shawnee towns and the two sisters crossed the river in a canoe and proceeded but a short distance, when Jane inquired of her what they would eat on their journey, to which she replied by pulling up some bulb root herbs from the ground and eating them saying they could find plenty of the same kind along the way to keep them from starving. Jane remonstrated with her, saying that she had not been accustomed to eating herbs and would starve and finally succeeded in persuading her to return home.
She had to be carefully watched and even at times confined to prevent her wild, wandering nature from reasserting itself, but as the years passed by, her love for Indian habits and customs decreased in the same proportion that her love for civilization increased.
--David Graham(1899)
The assault was made in the after part of the night before daybreak. Not feeling well, Graham had luckily lain down on a bench against the door with his clothes on. The Indians made the assault by trying to force the door open, which they partly succeeded in doing. Thus aroused, Graham and his men placed the heavy bench and a tub of water against the door, and in this way prevented the Indians from gaining an entrance. A man named McDonald (or Caldwell), who was assisting in placing the tub against the door, while reaching above the door for a gun was shot and killed, the ball passing through the door. Thwarted in their effort in affecting an entrance into the house, the Indians next turned their villainous assault upon an outhouse or kitchen standing near the main dwelling. in this outbuilding slept a young negro man and two of the Graham children. The negro, whose name was Sharp, tried to escape by climbing up the chimney (chimneys in those days were large and roomy), but when discovered was ruthlessly hauled down from his hiding place, tomahawked and scalped. As this tragedy was being enacted, the cries of the two children who were sleeping on the loft above next directed the attention of the Indians to that quarter. They shot up through the floor and wounded the eldest of the two, a boy named John in the knee, then dragged him and his sister down and out into the yard. Finding that John was wounded so badly that he could not stand upon his feet and that he would be a burdensome prisoner, they at once dispatched him with a tomahawk and carried off his bleeding scalp as a trophy of their crime.
While this bloody scene was going on in the kitchen, Colonel Graham had gone upstairs and was shooting through a porthole at the Indians in the yard as best he could. The men in the lower part of the house loaded the guns and handed them up to him and he did the shooting. About the time they were trying to make the wounded boy stand up, several of them huddled together and fired at the bulk; when they suddenly dispersed. It is believed that one or more of the Indians were killed or wounded.
A few years after this occurrence an Indian skeleton was found about two miles from the scene of the tragedy, on a small run near where E. D. Alderson now lives, called Indian Draft, which was believed to be the same Indian killed by Graham. Graham secured the jaw bone of this skeleton and used it for a gunrack for a number of years.
As the tender twig is easily bent and made to grow in new directions, so were the inclinations of this innocent child readily diverted from the scenes of the past and made to love the passing events which surrounded her, and she being well cared for and never mistreated by the Indians, it was but natural that she loved them. It is also said that before her return a love more passionate than that for her adopted tribe or mother had seized her youthful breast and that a young warrior would soon have claimed her for his “white” squaw. As to the truth of the story, that she had an Indian lover, we do not vouch, but having learned it from her own descendants, we think it worthy of mention.
Upon the return of Elizabeth to her home, the customs she met there were new and strange to her. On one occasion when her mother asked her to “soak the bread” and afterwards asked her how it was getting on, she replied, “very well” that she had taken two loaves and “thrown them in the river and put a rock on them”. To this new mode of life she could not easily be reconciled and ever and anon would clamor for the wild life of the wigwam. At one time when she threatened to return to the Indians, her mother told her sister, Jane, to pretend as if she would go with her to see whether or not she would actually make the attempt. She readily accepted Jane’s proposal to accompany her to the Shawnee towns and the two sisters crossed the river in a canoe and proceeded but a short distance, when Jane inquired of her what they would eat on their journey, to which she replied by pulling up some bulb root herbs from the ground and eating them saying they could find plenty of the same kind along the way to keep them from starving. Jane remonstrated with her, saying that she had not been accustomed to eating herbs and would starve and finally succeeded in persuading her to return home.
She had to be carefully watched and even at times confined to prevent her wild, wandering nature from reasserting itself, but as the years passed by, her love for Indian habits and customs decreased in the same proportion that her love for civilization increased.
--David Graham(1899)
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