I don’t write in a journal everyday, but I have accumulated many entries over the past 50+ years beginning in 1966. Some items evolved into longer works. Among the leftovers little pieces survived. I thought a collection of these with a piece culled from the same date in a past year would make an interesting yearbook. The consistencies and inconsistencies of mind, skipping back and forth across time, provide varied perspectives. It is difficult to remember the context of the past we’ve lived; we also make suppositions about times that predate ourselves.

The few alterations from original drafts were to improve clarity. The worst of my work is not included. There remains enough mediocrity and immaturity to make me feel humble and you feel smart. There are also moments of accidental insight and incidental humor.

Author Stephen Crane referred to his little pieces as pills…apparently they were small and somewhat hard to swallow, but good for you.


Comments Welcome!

Wednesday, March 10, 2021

William Saroyan wrote of fractals

 

March 10, 2018   (I was 73)

 

William Saroyan wrote of fractals

fractal Assyrians the whole race of them

present in one young Assyrian barber

in San Francisco in 1932 the whole of them

compressed not condensed in the barber

He went on to fractalize the Japanese

from the particular farm workers he knew

growing up in Fresno one at a time

perfect representations of their race

The human race extrapolated in each person

and in his Armenian uncle his own troubled people

troubled by nature and the un-named enemy

that slaughtered so many in fractalic wars

that man by man were all mankind

The infinitely complex pattern self-similar

across divisional and multitudinous scales

driven by the recursion of each of us

He explained the human geometric

forty-some years before the concept was

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