Trains, rivers and stones
wince and weep
I have a major dental surgery in 4 sessions at the dentist this week until the next so I take a few days off the internet. Developments in AI are so fast its impossible for a single person to keep up anyways, so that doesn't matter much. It will be good to just read some stuff on paper for a week and just let it go while I drink soup and wince and weep.
I just finnished reading J.A. Bakers “The Peregrine” (“Der Wanderfalke”) and Eugen Herrigels “Zen in the art of archery” (“Zen in der Kunst des Bogenschießens”) and I’m now 200 pages into Dan Simmons “Hyperion”-Omnibus, which is 1400 pages and I wonder if I should’ve read Teilhard DeChardins “The Phenomenon of Man” before, but I think I prefer reading a book about spaceships and weird evolutions and cosmic consciousness when I’m not suffering at the dentist, so…
Here's three items I enjoyed a lot over the weekend. All of these have a meditative, poetic quality going for them in a very unpretentious, basic way and I love all of them.
The first is the 2019 documentary “This Train I Ride”, freshly uploaded to Youtube by ArteTV and available until October 24th. It’s about a bunch of train hoppers in the US and it’s pure a dreamy meditation told with cargo trains.
The adventures of three female wanderers on their journeys thorough the United States of America, who hop on freight trains to travel free. The particular reasons of each one of them for living this life of perpetual motion are unique, a life that gains sense in the wide open empty space of an immense country, historically marked by the mythical rail roads.
Then here’s a Guardian piece about “europe’s largest river restoration”-project that restores the dutch Meuse-river to its medieval state. I grew up in an area where we regulary went on biking trips to the old Rhine which was a protected nature reservation (and europes largest breeding ground for mosquito, which makes for a funny story when we went for a night swim in a closed bath nearby), so this hits home for me.
Driving the length of the restored river – which runs from Maastricht to Roosteren – is like being in a time capsule. Some of the older sections of the project, further upstream, are already thronging with life. Borgharen, an area which has been farmed since at least Roman times, was one of the first sites to be let go. Dozens of sand martens are speeding into the cliff by the river to feed their chicks; there are blackcaps, stonechats, skylarks and swallows in the sky.
Finally, here’s a piece about Kurt Steiner, who “has dedicated his entire adult life to stone skipping, sacrificing everything to produce world-record throws that defy the laws of physics.” I spend a good chunk of my life in the outdoors when I was young and I camped hundreds of weekends at the river Rhine. I don’t know how many stones I threw in that river and while I didn’t throw world records, I was pretty good at stone skipping and I remember one shot over 10. Haven’t done stone skipping in ages now, but alas, here’s Steiner:
Steiner stared across the creek and raised his right arm into an L, clasping a coaster-size sliver of shale the way a guitarist might hold a plectrum during a showstopping solo. But rather than fold his torso horizontally, as you might expect somebody skipping a rock to do, he stretched his five-foot-nine-inch body vertically, and then squeezed down like an accordion and planted his left leg to crack his throwing arm, placing the rock under so much gyroscopic force that it sputtered loudly as it left his hand, like a playing card in a bicycle wheel.
The rock appeared for a brief moment to fly. Then it dipped and plunged, kicked up a wave, rode it like a surfboard, and became airborne again. Standing behind Steiner, I counted at least 20 skips before the rock slowed, scrolled gently right, and sank in the calm water some 50 yards away.
Alles Beste hinsichtlich Zahnklempnerangelegenheit.
Ich lese gerade "Russland - Ukrainekrieg und Weltmachtträume" von Manfred Quiring. Durchaus erhellend und hey auch noch günstig beim bpb.