RUDIMENTS, pt. 1,108
(entire ruminations, heed that call!)
I maybe basked in the Finger Lakes.
I recall Seneca and Cayuga too.
Montour Falls and Taughannock,
and Watkins Glen. Rocks and
trails and little pooled canyons
and things I'll never tell. Some
of them are dead now; my old,
belabored friends who were
numbed by the lives and loves
they led. Sadness is a scarf
we wear around our head.
-
My favorite place, by far, to see
was the Glenn Curtiss Museum.
Back then it was pretty meek, in
an old schoolhouse. The exhibits
were cranky and cramped, but so
filled with interest and lore to me
that I could have slept there and
just stayed on. There was a sort
of 'invitation' to a world unseen.
It's different now, 45 years later
or so - big, institutional money
has stepped in, the exhibits are
clear now and organized, and the
building itself, along with the
location, are proper, modern and
entire. That's the way things go,
it seems, always. It gets me to
thinking about infinity (more on
that later).
-
Anyhow, Glenn Curtiss was the
sort of American madman we do
not get anymore - the sort who
would ride 'aeroplane' wings,
strap himself to speeding propulsion
vehicles, tinkers and wrench to
his heart's content to steer the
wind and the clouds his way :
flight, speed, race cars, motorcycles,
all of the most primitive and
mind-bent quality. The far-more
'plastic' quality of today's world
would not fit his formula at all;
with all fabrications pre-existing
and nothing more to be made by
hand. An auto-parts store would
most certainly have him befuddled.
A man like that, I'd say, deserves a
primitive museum - not so much
an organized, well-lit, place.
-
I spoke of Infinity earlier here. It's
a human perspective comment that
in some respects can even cover,
in my estimation, the expansion of
the world Glenn Curtis knew, and
which was, right then, on another,
'his' cusp of conceptual growth. In
fact, to use a funny word, the 'future'
is not yet imaginable. In the same
way it was not imaginable for him
either. The constant expansion of
growth and consciousness - and
everything to which that leads us
- is a new story every day. At any
one point all of the existing theories
by which we live always are fairly
close to the 'limit' of what we know.
Of what is unknowable? Are we
that close? I have to say no, I guess,
because that open-end of Infinity
is always receding before us - that
receding being actually an advancing
AWAY from us - and we are, as
human minds, I guess, seen in our
constant pursuit of an 'ever-expanding'
frontier. Like the old spread of America
seeking a continental reach (which
at least remained fixed and in place),
we strive instead for an ever-moving
end (of an 'Infinite' nature?), all the
while as we ourselves are the ones
creating it - that is why Science,
Reality, etc., have no end. Glenn
Curtiss, in that auto-parts store again!
-
Funny, how I read once that 'most
people believe that an income of about
twice their own should be sufficient to
satisfy and reasonable person, and that
no reasonable benefit can be derived
from amounts above that.' It goes the
same for science and knowledge too,
I'd bet; it being hard to imagine, now,
what it would be like to know twice
as much as we do.
-
I close this chapter with this thought:
Most all of the scientific knowledge
that we know now, the most sensitive
scientific instruments, tools and
processes, ALL depend on fundamental
discoveries made after 1894 - when
people already thought the limits of
knowledge and the realms of discovery,
had already been reached! That growing
constant of 'Infinity' is always calling.
Remember, heed that call!
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