TheBanyanTree: Res Ipsa Loquitur

[Roger Pye]

How we describe what we see has a lot to do with perspective whether the 
description is in words, imagery or visualisation. In 1995 when I sat 
down seriously to put together the stories which had been pouring out of 
me a sentence popped into my mind from nowhere and I wrote it down - 
'Sylvia and Manny first met on a ski slope in Switzerland'. S & M were 
my two central characters and I thought I knew them pretty well 
considering they had been in most of the stories - but there was no snow 
or skiing anywhere in the collection! So I thought about the sentence 
and gradually built up the imagery in my mind then set out to describe 
it in words. The story collection was about 200 pages but the novel 
which grew out of it as a result of that sentence was well over 400!

In 2000 something similar happened again. I had been to an organic soil 
& health conference in New Zealand where I heard, quite accidentally, of 
biodynamic agriculture and became interested in it enough to do some 
research. Along the way I read one of (Sir) James Lovelock's Gaia books 
and came across this sentence 'Things like eddies and whirlpools develop 
spontaneously when there is a sufficient flux of free energy'. I had no 
idea what this meant because I didn't know what 'flux' meant and I 
wasn't much wiser after looking it up in a dictionary. Further down the 
same page in Lovelock's book (The Ages of Gaia, p26) he says 'the onset 
of eddies in a stream or in a flow of gas takes place only when the flow 
exceeds a critical value'. This value wasn't defined because it wasn't 
known; still isn't, scientifically. It took me some time to realise the 
connection between the two statements and I did so not by thinking in 
terms of words and language but by visualising a stream of water running 
down a hill and noting what happened when it reached calmer waters. For 
some reason my mind played around with the image and I found myself 
'seeing' and thinking of traffic streams in the same context.

This imagery led me to a path I'm still following, one which has quite 
literally changed my life and the lives of everybody I have treated in 
the last three years who live in suburbia. For streams of water (which 
travel on waves of natural [earth] energy) and traffic (which collects 
and carries earth energies)  have one thing in common - they often 
travel faster than natural energy flows. In fact, traffic streams do so 
nearly all the time and they 'accelerate' the collected energies beyond 
'the critical value'; when these energies are thrown off (like when a 
car brakes) they form whirlpools which exert spiral pressures on objects 
all around them. Including people and the places they live, work and 
play; trees and power poles along the sides of highways and so on. The 
first thing I do when I visit someone in suburbia to treat them is to 
change the natural energy flows around and through their environment so 
they are harmless. This reduces stress, tension, depression, headaches 
and insomnia amongst other things.

One sentence has led to this. Truly, none of us can possibly know or 
foresee all the consequences flowing from the spoken or written word or 
the imagery it presents.

roger

Tom Smith wrote:
> 
> Images call on prior experience when they speak.  A wagging
> tail says to me "Yippie, let's go!"  A ski mask without cold
> says "I want to get away with this."  What's really scary to
> me is a whole parade of summertime ski-mask-wearers, rifles
> held high, marching and chanting.  To others, that same
> parade communicates "Yippie, let's go!"   
> 
> I can see a star and get all fuddled up with what I know
> about it, or have been told.  I can see an integral of
> infinite truths or a mysterious twinkling spot of light. It
> is what it is.  A moment.
> 
> Tom
> 
> 
> 
>  
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