Harvest is sort of over, finally. Really, it's just fizzling out. There are a few more acres to be cut yet, but my obligations to devote all my time to this activity are at an end. This morning I'll be starting work at Tabor doing computer stuff--we'll see how that goes after three years of not doing anything with computers and computer networks.

Last Monday I went to Kansas City to visit some friends--it had rained the evening before, so, too wet to cut wheat. We went to a couple of bar type places. One was more of a pub with out-door tables on a deck type thing underneath trees with dim lights hanging around. There were some noisy types there but the beer was pretty good--some sort of Kansas City home brew. When they set out the glasses they had a slice of lemon on the edge of the glass, like we were going to be drinking iced tea or something. I'm not too sold on drinking beer with a lemon taste, especially the cloudy wheat beer they're brewing up in KC.

A sort of realization: Each generation has this big idea that it's going to "save" the next generation by preaching all their "wisdom" gained in their "long" experience. Unfortunately this won't do. Why? Because people don't learn by being told what's what, but people learn by their own experience. If some old fart tells you not to live a certain way or such and such will happen, what're you going to do, just take it on faith that he's right or are you going to figure it out for your self? Which option is true life? In my opinion, the latter. I don't like this idea that somehow the previous generations pass on some sort of gained wisdom. Why? Is it because I'm a disgruntled 21 year old (I'm not a disgruntled teenager anymore, I suppose)? No, rather I think there's a wealth of evidence to show that this world is pretty messed up and has been ever since there were people grabbing for power and wealth over and more than others. Just look at it! I don't have to point it out to you. Living in this world shows that that is true. Of course, if you're good at playing this game of grabbing then you'll protest to my saying this. But I'm particularly bad at playing this game: it sickens me. As long as people are playing this "game" then the world will remain as it is and the cycle of birth, life, and death will continue and the cycle of the generational conflicts will continue on and on repeating itself. I guess if everybody just quits trying to steal what everybody else has, then this world might make a turnaround, but I don't think that will ever happen. If some generation were to successfully pass on this as gained wisdom to a following generation, then perhaps I could say that it was worth the effort of an older generation preaching to a younger one, but untill that happens, I will remain skeptical.

Please note that these are not intended to be rational thoughts. Don't try to trip me up by finding "contradictions." If you think you've found one then that's wonderful for you, you're pretty good at playing language games. But as for me and myself, I will not serve the god of the law of non-contradiction.

In random snatches I've been reading The Faith of a Writer: Life, Craft, Art by Joyce Carol Oates. I've also been reading (haven't for a few days now though) John Updike's In the Beauty of the Lilies. And I have been reading Boccaccio's Decameron in a sort of King James English translation. Oh...and finally...I think...I have begun reading Joyce's Ulysses, but I think I might quit that for now and read some of his earlier work first.

As it turns out I haven't read any philosophy (the subject I'm supposedly interested in) for a good week now. But I have done some writing on my other blog--about the whole business of truth; it is more of a business than one might like to admit--but that ultimately leaves me wondering about my ability to really come up with something to say that is somehow interesting. I'm not even thinking about novel ideas, but at least novel ways of explaining old ones. Honestly, all that I have said leaves me feeling empty. All the philosophy I've ever read (most of it anyway) leaves me feeling empty. Especially the very analytical stuff that one has to read like a math text: not really getting at the issues of life, just beating around the bush perpetually, never coming to grips with the real question of existence. All of that stuff really sets my stomach to churning, because of it's elegance but utter futility.

Perhaps this is why I have taken to reading more literary matter: each time I have done so, I feel like the writer is actually getting somewhere trying to see something of value in the existential quagmire, whereas the analytical philosophers are just making some crude line drawings, which are like so much dried excrement on the walls of Dante's bolgia.

How, or when, does one know? I am not posing a philosophical question here, because the lack of an answer is the horror of not knowing, of fragmentation, of being left to drift in this world of clocks and dollars, not the mere lack of a theory. Philosophy cannot even begin to detect this result of not answering the question. You can build some theoretical framework in order to write some book on epistemology, but will you really live in that system? You cannot live in a theoretical framework. "Oh, but there is the application of the system!" cries the obstinate professor as if life were like so much science that yields to a mathematical treatment--so much applied mathematics! so much delusion.

There is beauty in the cryptic statements of Confucius et al and even in those of Wittgenstein; never really putting into a formula just what they are saying (if they do it's just as cryptic as what they've said already). There is a sort of character in never quoting a thesis, like a notebook whose pages are comfortably worn, and whose words are all written in fits of inspiration, instead of dogged persistence in worship of some god--efficiency, completeness, clarity, application, production.

Harvest is still on hold. This is the first harvest in a long time that has been different from routine. Today I was in the Tabor library looking at their collection of DVDs and CDs, and somehow I felt like I was delinquent in my duties, I felt somehow that I should be out in a field contemplating how long I should wait before I needed to unload the combine onto the grain-cart so as to have just the right amount of wheat on the truck (not over-full and not under-full) and not in the air conditioning of the library considering whether to check out Casablanca or Citizen Kane or both--I chose the latter, along with a 1926 making of Göthe's Faust.

It's about 60 degrees right now (in the evening), and there are low hanging clouds, almost like a fog. It's hard to see how the wheat could do much drying tomorrow if this sort of damp weather holds, which will be the case according to the forecasts.

Harvest was at one point well under way, but now has been severely stalled due to rain. There was a very windy storm on Tuesday morning with a couple inches of rain. This morning there is a large band of storms moving in from western Kansas--inching slowly eastward as one looks at the radar screens.

I remember so many nights as a child glued to TV screens watching the radar loops and listening to the voices of weathermen (sometimes women) tell about where a particular storm was moving, and who should be taking cover at that particular time. All the while I imagined that suddenly, unexpectedly, our house would be blown off its foundations in some thundering kick of wind and thunder and lightning. I've had dreams about this, even just as recently as a couple of weeks ago, when I was still in Budapest. I had a dream where I was standing out in an open field of grass--short but stout clumps of green grass, like an imense lawn that had not been mowed--and I remember looking back and seeing a large dark cloud with fingers clutching at the ground moving towards me. I remember ducking to let it pass over me, as if that would work, and suddenly there was such a large thump, like a large shoe being stomped on a wood floor, but the noise was so powerful that it almost knocked the wind out of me; the large force of a tremendous amount of air being flung against some resistent barrier. This is all that I recall.

Now it is cloudy; harvest is being delayed, and will not end within this week unless the atmosphere dries out very soon.