Well dang I was hoping to hear if Beagle-eyed Beagle could spot a
hickory or an oak (or whatever) from afar. I will assume he can because, well
because he hangs out in the woods all day, and because he periodically hews them
down with his mighty axe.
Could have had a better description of the actual act of bringing
the tree down. I think you do some eyeballing to see which way it is going to
fall, and I expect where you start chopping on it has some effect also. To me
the big moment would be the timberrrrrrrrrr moment, and after that I have lost
all interest.
The way I had no interest in those stoopid tree books we had to do
in school, where you had to have the leaves of ten different trees in it, and
you had some book where you could tell from the leaf what kind of tree it was so
you wrote down the name of the tree and you fastened the leaf to the page and
who gives a fuck? So there are different kinds of trees so what? They are all
tall and they have leaves and they provide shade, but beyond that one was pretty
much the same as the other. Well the catalpa had those Indian cigars, and those
trees of heaven had those branches where you could strip off the leaves and make
a whip.
But in general it didn’t make any difference. I suppose of we were
in the firewood business or the business of building ships to sail the seven
seas it would make a difference, but as it was we weren’t, and after making that
tree book we never had to notice which tree was which.
It’s like music I suppose, if you’re not interested in bluegrass or
blues and you just hear a snatch of it here and there, it’s all going to sound
alike, and you might wonder why they have so many songs when they might just as
well have just one and play it over and over again. But if you decide maybe I
like this music and you start paying attention to it, the songs begin to sound
very different to you.
Before I became a famous artist I used to walk around in the Art
Institute with somebody who knew about art, and we would come across a picture
of an apple and they would say, oh that’s oils, or that’s pastels, and I would
wonder how the hell they could tell, and then they would say, oh that’s Monet,
or that’s Cezanne, and again I was like how the hell do they know
that?
I think you know we humans got the straight line, just perzackly
the way you did by measuring out fields. We could have used sticks, and maybe
we did at first, measuring them by placing sticks from end to end, but all
sticks are different sizes and none of them are straight so that everytime you
measured something it came out different. When we figured out string, some kind
of vine I assume, while the results weren’t perfect, they were good enough for
our purposes, and then we needed numbers to measure the string and a bit of
arithmetic to find the areas, and one day the Greeks, lazing around while the
slaves did all the work, discovered or invented math and geometry, and figured
out the straight line connecting two points and neither the point or the line
could exist in nature because the lines had no width and the points had neither
width nor length.
That parking lot problem of yours occurs again and again. We do
all our figuring and something comes out wrong and then we figure again and it
still comes out wrong, and finally we realize that our initial assumption is
wrong.
No comments:
Post a Comment