A dome of many-coloured glass
Summer ended with a game of tennis in Rockport. Here's the new chapter from my novel:
Her serve is good; she discourses upon her backhand. Covered in soap as I held her, she claimed she was having an orgasm in the shower.
Oddly, and there had been a gully, or lull, in the courses I was taking on line, when we got to Rockport the schedule of classes opened up three new courses, all of which are of interest to me- the only draw back is that I was in the middle of an intensive course from Brown that requires ten novels, five that you would want to finish even if you were to leave an incomplete. But, importantly, Poetry from Penn and Harvard began the week we went on vacation with a course from the University of Edinburgh on Philosophy. I have passed the one week of philosophy, played catch-up with Penn Poetry after having joined the course a week late and have began a study of the fascinating poetry of Massachusetts-Puritan poet Ann Bradstreet offerred by Harvard. A poet named Charles Olson was being studied by a student for the U Penn Mooc- he wrote an ode to Gloucester, Massachusetts, so I had to explain that I met his contemporary, poet Vincent Ferrini, the day before I left the Gloucester-Rockport area. (I new another poet that read in Boston and thought that I would give it a try). This week's philosophy lecture is about Epistemology and having written an essay on Emily Dickinson, the lectures in U Penn poetry begin with the poet William Carlos Williams as an heir to Dickinson. Harvard Poetry included lectures last night which compared the blood of Jesus to God's seminal flow, so my essay was titled, Man's Divine Ejaculation and other Lightening Bolts. Learn the word Conceit, which is a way to pattern, or develop, metaphor throughout the stanzas by the contrast of images. the word poetic ambiguity ended up in my notes as well. While Donna was working in the church library this week, which is adjacent to the Boston Antheneum, what I came across was that the Puritan poets are religious, but not ordained, so we have to look at the concepts of the church of that period, including Predestination- I couldn't find Cotton Mather, or Increase Mather in her library, only alot written by Johnathan Edwards, which reminded me that the contemporary of the poet Anne Bradstreet was Anne Hutchinson, the preacher.
So I went on our vacation with the study of poetry- not specifically just to walk by the ocean's wrackline and find the nude statue in the courtyard of Rockport Art Association, but the courses happened to be there in the middle of all that quietude.
The first day of autumn this year we walked passed the Mount Auburn Cemetary, with all its history. He's not my favorite writer, but the book written by Nathaniel Bowdwitch on sailing was on sale in one of the jewelry shops on Bareskin Neck, Rockport, and he is among one of the people who are buried in Mount Auburn.
By the way, while looking a the Puritan, I like having Hume in the other course; Berkeley's theory that "objects exist only in the perciever's mind", the radical skepticism that it is not possible to have knowledge at all, and my new theory to spin around with Perceptual Transparency: perception, agency and understanding are essentially and mutually interdependent, that is in part to say reality/experience/interpretation.
Scott Lord
Scott Lord
