My younger brother doesn’t remember much of our older brother Mike. Michael is autistic, low functioning and nonverbal. He went away to Willowbrook when I was about 10 years old, which means younger brother (YB) was about 6. My parents told me that they tried to shield us from Michael. It didn’t work for me, […]
I have heard that good artwork requires some amount of distance from the subject. For example, I know that I have a hard time singing a song that packs an emotional punch. My throat tightens up and I can’t sing any more. Do opera singers feel the same way as their emotional audiences? I imagine that the hard […]
Today’s experiment: I am reviewing photographs I took of my older brother, Michael, during my last visit. My mother, younger brother and I visited him in his group home the day before his 64th birthday. Mike is autistic, low functioning and nonverbal. For the past couple of days I have concentrated on sketching his portrait […]
I have been reading Plato at the Googleplex by Rebecca Newberger Goldstein. For me, its like taking a sip from a firehose. I have a keen interest in philosophy, but no training and only passing acquaintance with the highlights of the field. As an engineer by training, I am used to getting down to basics. This […]
I have been thinking about the little doodles I’ve been drawing during the past few weeks. They are not terribly satisfying. Don’t get me wrong, it is a challenge to have an idea and conjure up some way to express it visually. However, it is like coming up with one-liners. I’m pretty good with puns and […]
What does does a person do when the structure supporting one’s life starts to erode? Is the feeling like a phantom limb? Hard to say, since I have all my physical limbs. I can imagine it being like a psychic limb amputation, however. When my father was alive, we didn’t talk very much. But I visited him when […]
My wife’s aunt (AM) is no longer gravely ill. She died this morning, just a couple of days past her 90th birthday. Joy took it pretty hard, since they were very close. I met AM more than 10 years ago, but got to know her better since we moved out here to the west coast […]
Today’s experiment: Today, it seems I’m working backwards. I started, as I normally do, writing down some notes about my reading, hoping for insights that may clarify my own thoughts. But there are lots of things happening in real life that are interfering with my cerebral life. My wife’s aunt is gravely ill; a friend of […]
One of the rewards of being interested in a number of different topics is the satisfaction of noting similarities and connections in seemingly disparate areas. For instance, after I re-read The Stranger, by Albert Camus, it struck me that the main character had some traits displayed by some autistic individuals. Perhaps the similarity is a trivial coincidence; perhaps by making […]
In addition to the books I mentioned yesterday, I am reading The Book of Dead Philosophers by Simon Critchley. I enjoy philosophy. It is thought provoking, and after all, what’s better than thinking? Philosophizing On the first page of the introduction to The Book of Dead Philosophers, Critchley gets right to the point, quoting Cicero: […]
