February 2007

"Is the voyage worth making that does not enhance awareness of our shared humanity?"

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Staff Biographies

"Giving well is the best revenge."
  --Douglas Milburn.

S  P  E  C  I  A  L    I  S  S   U  E

See below for explanation.

Landscapes 1	Landscapes 2	Landscapes 3
Clouds	Micro	Life
Art	Cosmic

                                                        Draw from the well of unchanging.
                                                        Its union nourishes on
                                                        in the right re-arranging
                                                        till the last confusion is gone.
                                                                 —Thirteenth Floor Elevators, "Slip Inside This House."

"Pseudo-religious pictures always refer to something else, something beyond the things they represent—some piece of metaphysical nonsense, some absurd dogma from the local theology. A genuinely religious image is always intrinsically meaningful. So that's why we hang this kind of painting in our meditation room."
"Always landscapes?"
"Almost always. Landscapes can really remind people of who they are."
"Better than scenes from the life of a saint or savior?"
"It’s the difference, to begin with, between objective and subjective. A picture of Christ or Buddha is merely the record of something observed by a behaviorist and interpreted by a theologian. But when you’re confronted with a landscape like this, it’s psychologically impossible for you to look at it with the eyes of a J.B. Watson or the mind of a Thomas Aquinas. You’re almost forced to submit to your immediate experience; you’re practically compelled to perform an act of self-knowing."
                                                                                  —Aldous Huxley, Island.

We are almost as good at remembering as we are at forgetting.

The difference, however small, may account for the constant impetuses which daily, hourly, minutely, secondly determine the path of our lives.

Whatever his faults and shortcomings, Freud—whom we’ve now thrown out, baby, bath water, and all—tried in his way to set us on a path of remembering, from the micro (personal) to the macro (social, cultrual, historical). His insights now, if acknowledged at all, are mostly dismissed in the grim, fake-funny mode of all-knowing irony.

What, in this millennium off already to such a shaky start, are we forgetting to remember?

Careerists of every stripe must, to survive, much less to get ahead, constantly remember the particular idols of the age which their trade, their ideology, their system of beliefs, requires of them and which they forget at their own peril. Religion, science, government, commerce, education, militarism, technology, engineering all have their structures, their rules, their right paths and wrong paths. Success comes to those who remember best.

What, on their death bed, will those expert rememberers wish they hadn’t forgotten? Why, nothing, of course. Because they succeeded. Q.E.D. So deep is our ignorance, so nearly perfect our amnesia.

Even those who, dying, try to remember, know no better than to grasp at other idols of other amnesiacs, hoping that primitive ritual will in the end carry the day or, as the case may be, the night..

What are we forgetting to remember?

I can’t say. It can’t be said.

Not because it’s a secret (it isn’t), but because what we are forgetting to remember is absolutely and perfectly beyond words. Magnum mysterium? It is beyond greater or lesser, beyond mysteriousness or obviousness, beyond labels, beyond numbers, beyond words, beyond symbols.

This much can be said: Symptoms of the ultimate inadequacy of what we remember abound. Together, they are what we experience as the small and large tregadies of daily life. On a large scale, they form the tragedies of history.

So effective is our amnesia that we either ignore the symptoms or try more of the same behavior that produced the symptoms in the first place. Eternal recurrence, indeed.

Surrounded by, immersed in the symptoms of failure though we are, we are also surrounded by and immersed in palliatives, as Huxley points out in the quotation from Island above. Not instant "cures" but a constant, unfailing source of help, of clearer vision, of better remebering.

Though the goal cannot be seen or stated, the way forward is clear: the simple (!) contemplation of nature. Not for purposes of exploitation, nor for purposes of "understanding," not for the purposes of making art, not for the purposes of finding or praising "God", but only for the single purpose of simple contemplation.

So. Don thee a hair shirt and get thee to a desert? No.

Rather, keep with thee wee pictorial reminders to look at when a moment of freedom appears. A couple of square inches of landscape, of forest, of flowers, of ocean, of sky, of space. Tiny pictures of whence we came, where we dwell (though we pretend otherwise), and whither we shall return. Though, remember(!), "coming," "dwelling,", and "returning" are pretty much beside the point.

To that end, the staff of Magellan’s Log has assembled several pages of such pictures.

Each picture is 2 inches by 3.5 inches. The commercially hip will immediately note that those are the standard dimensions of the American business card (what the rest of the world calls a "name card").

We have further formatted these images, ten to a page, such that you—should you be moved to set out on the path of remembering—can print them on a standard business card template, purchasable in easy-to-use packets at your local office supply store.

Click on any of the pages of pictures above and the page will open in Word. Insert a blank sheet of business card paper in your printer. You print the page, separate the cards, and voila, you’ve got ten lovely little reminders, remembrances of things past-present-and-future.

If you want to get a little fancier, you can even run the sheet back through the printer reversed so that you wind up with two-sided reminders for carrying about and sneaking a look at now and then during all the forgetful days of your life.

                                                        May God us keep
                                                        from single vision
                                                        and Newton’s sleep.
                                                                    —William Blake.

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