Adam Blatner
Words and Images from the Mind of Adam Blatner
Table of Contents:
My Favorite Things
“A World Too Wide For His Shrunk Shank”
This age-ist phrase was used by William Shakespeare in a little speech given by the character Jaques in the play, As You Like It (Act 2, Scene 7), to describe the 6th of the “Seven Ages of Man.” This sixth age is older than the “Justice” (the 5th age), and senility, the seventh, age. The […]
“BbbbL…”
This is the sound of a spluttered Bl… a “raspberry” as a term for the sound made of slightly sticking out your tongue and making an impudent noise. Bbbbl is a sound followed by a sort of soft or silent L. If you think about it, BbbbL is one phoneme. It often is a sound […]
“Contemplateur”
This is a term I just made up—one who enjoys contemplating. I confess I use the medium of the blog to go ahead and see what I’m contemplating —writing mini-essays. It’s a more prosaic type of poetry, articulated so as to explain. So it’s not just the suggestiveness of poetry, and I confess to being […]
A Christmas Tree Contemplation
I’m singing again, for the 16th or so year, in our community chorus, getting ready to perform our Christmas Holiday conference. It’s pretty Christian, but also some Hanukkah melodies sometimes, and some secular melodies about the contemporary Holiday season, “kids jingle-bell-ing” and that sort of thing. I really like this, even though I’m more an […]
A Contemplative Blog?
It occurred to me that this blog may (or may not) be one of my most lasting contributions. I should not assume that it’s just tossed-off nothings, whereas books and papers are real stuff. That may assume that paper-based stuff is intrinsically more valuable and meaningful than “just” a blog. Well it’s true that this […]
A Graceful Goodbye: A Book Review
We’re reading together or apart a number of books, as I browse the local library and check out those that appeal to me. One was titled, A Graceful Goodbye: a New Outlook on Death,” by Susan B. Mercer. I’ve written about weddings as rites of passage, and she wr0te enlighteningly about dying. She asks many […]
A Well-Rounded Life
Here’s a myth I heard: We sing and dance for the gods. This is our task. They don’t have hands and feet, so we need to do it, and they enjoy through us. I think it was about Australian Aborigine nature religions, but I’m not sure. It’s a deep idea, though. Dancing and singing has […]
A World Shorn of Meaning
I was reminded of my enjoyment of the picture books by Abner Dean when I was a teenager. These involved a mixture of surrealism, a bit of cartooning, and the presentation of world shorn of meaning. He was an illustrator whose books were more known in the late 1940s and 1950s. I was impressed by […]
About Me (Adam Blatner)
I play many roles. My more official role that is gradually fading, but not completely, is that of physician who specialized in psychiatry. Not that I was ever mainline, but neither was I very maverick—sort of in-between. I was enough mainline to serve on the faculty of a mainstream medical school in their departments of […]
Aesthetic Indulgence
My latest notion—I tend to have them fairly frequently—is that Freud was somewhat right but didn’t dig deep enough. He reduced the motivation system to sexuality because of its forbiddenness at the time, but I’ve been thinking as I’ve grown older about other deep motivations. For example, what about the small griefs I’ve had about […]
An Exercise of Interpersonal Power
Here’s a way to discover how powerful you can be: Think of someone you know; and then, having thus thought, call that person and say, “Hi, I was thinking about you.” For a little extra credit, when you do think of that person, focus on some little thing they did, or that you did together, […]
Biochemistry Enlivened
I’m sorry to have to use the trope of “little men,” elves and fairies that look like little people, but that’s where humanity is. It’s hard to realize that at the micro-level, subtle astral forces facilitate events as much as the fairies help flowers to blossom or birds to find their mates. (Oh, yeah, just […]
Born to Sing
A wonderful early evening walk in Springtime around the neighborhood, a nice opportunity to work out a bit with my hand-held dumbbells, chat with my dearest Allee, and delight in the “Shiva” thin crescent moon she pointed out. Then there was the song of my totem animal, the mockingbird (mimus polyglottos) in a passing tree. […]
Changing Computers!
I amth in the complex challenge of changing computers and hope to be in contact again in a few weeks. I’m going to get another windows, but I found out from my son, who is a big shot in desktop publishing, that my Wordperfect desktop publishing program has dropped back in the competition. He doesn’t […]
Circuses Without Animals
Reading the July/August 2017 Smithsonian, it has an article about changes in circuses: A century or so ago, through to when I was a lad in the 1940s, circuses exploited captured animals—bareback riders, lion- and tiger-tamers, tricks with elephants , but in the early 21st Century acts that featured animals were phased out. Acts that […]
Counting Mistakes
There are parts of life where mistakes really do count, they make a difference. Part of this then involve a ready willingness to get quick feedback about what the mistake was and be willing to correct it. For many people this is undercut by tests in which you only learn (much later) your score, implying […]
Creating Celebrations
Did you know you could create your own rituals, ceremonies, celebrations? I’ve written about this in a paper on my website, a chapter in my anthology, Interactive & Improvisational Drama, and also posted a supplement on my website for that book. They’ve got a national organization for training people who can serve as consultants for […]
Cyber-Nano-Angels
Contemporary nanotechnological research is also being conducted by trans-dimensional "scientists" (Try to wrap your mind around the idea that trans-dimensional science recognizes that creative thought-forms participate in the co-construction of reality, whereas your culture in its present paradigmatic worldview (redundant?) thinks reality is objective and not subjective. (Ho ho ho says one of our sprite-ual […]
Denouement 2
(Look it up for the meaning!). A French term used in drama to refer to the final scene. As Frank Sinatra sang, in his signature song, My Way, “And now, the end is near, and so I face the final curtain.” So I’m entering that phase, the denouement of my life: Tying up loose ends. […]
Dream!
Dare to dream new dreams! This is not in the sense of the night-dreams that come to you, but rather in the sense of daring to envision possibilities for your life, even if only fantasy. At the end of the Muppet Movie around 1979, Kermit sings, “Life’s like a movie, write your own ending! […]
Dynamic Tree of Life
Things are dynamically changing. A couple of days ago I noted this about one cosmic diagram, the Shree Yantra. (A yantra is sort of a map of the cosmos, allowing for the understanding that no such map could ever be made no matter how many dimensions we could conceivably represent. But for meditation purposes, some […]
Ego-Centricity
Have you noticed? Other people let you down, clearly because they don’t care for you enough to really try! But this is mistaken often because: (1) we believe they should try. (The idea that they don’t care is too far to be considered a possibility). Or maybe (2) they are trying but can’t (the idea […]
Expanded Identity (Beyond Reality)
One of my many facets is not entirely human; really more elfin. One might phrase it as Adam is coming out of the closet as an elf—or at least partly an elf. There’s another part of me that goes by the name of Herb, who is a bit slow and socially impaired. Most of me […]
Explaining “Dimensionality”
I call my theory of reality, my metaphysics, “dimensionality.” The word suggests that some things are better understood as operating at different dimensions. Thus, some truths are best understood as applying to certain dimensions, and there is “more-yet” that is so at a higher dimension. For example, consider solid geometry. In dealing with a sphere, […]