What Is the Sound of One Peacock Knocking?

Lori came forth with a splendid photo featuring wooden spools large enough to have at one time had thousands of feet of cable wound about them. Completely took over from the tempting title of her previous day's post, and sent me out of the house to a place I hadn't realized I'd noticed. Sort of like being hyperlinked. Click and then bingo (not the dog in the song), you're there. Accordingly then, there was here, and here is in a tiny mall in what we denizens call the Von's of the Stars (because Von's is a market frequented by a particular segment of our carpetbagger residents. If you will take the time to click on the image, it will show the various threads in even more dramatic display.

My noticing the display reinforces my theory that too much thought in the act of creating will preclude such associative circuitry, a term I like so much I will take credit for having invented it.
A tiny detail we believe is representative (emblematic, if you like) is often all it takes to convince the witness (reader, viewer) of the authenticity of a person, place, or thing (I might just as well have said noun, mightn't I?). So long as a thing seems authentic to us, our vision remains clear; it records things we didn't think we say, notes details that affirm the whole transaction.

Thanks to a feature called bracketing on cameras, we can get multiple images, selecting the one we like best, the one that seems most authentic to the impulse that got us to store the image on the sensor in the first place. Thanks to most world processing system, we can revise without having to go through the mechanical hell of retyping a text and then stying to construe a single document. This freedom advances us toward the lovely pair of opposites of anarchy and structure, on the cusp of which many of us have opted to live our life.

John Eaton had a quote from a Zen guitarist that brought the matter into a lovely symmetry for me.

In Zen Guitar, Phil Sudo writes, "The best way to make decisions about playing in the moment is to have already made them. That is, do your thinking ahead of time. Think before the time comes to act, think before the time comes to speak, think before the time comes to play a note. Then when the moment arrives, do not think. Just play."


He goes on to say that "what you play should come out as natural as the call of a bird in the wild. There is no thought, not even so much as a word in your head--only the song of the heart."

(This is also John's comment:)I think a lot, myself, about a lot of things, but when I'm playing and singing, I don't think that much. Once the music calls, I just play.

(Back to me again) Another way to look at that: with thought out of the way, the right details appear, framing the work, whether a photo, a tune, a story, a watercolor, a dance, in its own vibrant reality, which we are invited to enter.



Don't think.