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[pct-l] Resouled...



----- Original Message ----- 
From: "David O"

> Concerning Esbits and the much cheaper Coghlans fuel tablets...
>
> -  Both are more efficient than alcohol.  Only 0.5 oz is needed to boil 16
oz of water.
>

This is very powerful.  I tend to want to hear stories of angst and learning
and transformation.  Every once in a while I see a post that grabs me and
won't let go.

David's statement above prepared me to see the other side.  If you have 45
items measured and add them all up, you have a basic weight of some sort.

Then you think about the relation between weight and burn and effect.  I
suppose if you put 45 different items together you could define a standard
that you could write an article about and send to Backpacker, and have .1%
chance of getting published.  Better, you could integrate all 45 to serve as
platform upon which to move to the next level.  This is no longer about
David's quoted statement/claim.

45 items that each took a bit of time to understand.  How did I put them
together?"?

This is not science.  This is fun.  I suppose someone could put together the
45 items with science behind each of them.  But it wouldn't ever be part of
a whole or synthesis or a larger feeling....

Maybe because I'm single and enjoy my time alone, I go to online journals
every couple of months and spend a saturday morning listening to NPR and
walking the PCT through someone else's eyes.  I can spend three hours
immersing myself in worlds really not even close to my own.  The only
connection is that I walk the same trail, sometimes years or decades
apart...  This is more foundational than the differences...

This is what we all have in common - the trail.

Functioning socially when you're driven to it, like most persons who write
about walking the PCT are,  involves the constant buffering of the presence
of the void, chaos, the unknown, what is feared - each of us would use
different words that expressed the identical, very same meaning and
feeling...  Read the journals.  Many of them express the few huddling around
the social fire to ward off the cold, emotional, night.  This is not
abstract.  The powerful emotion emanates...

All these words express is the awe filled awareness of being responsible for
living in the absolute present.  Emanates?

My philosopher buddies would wonder what I meant by "absolute present."
I've only sectioned hiked, my longest trip being 35 days alone, 30 days with
my life's love on another.  I've written of both experiences over the six or
seven years I've hung on this list.  See the archives...

Experience...  It don't mean shit to a tree...  Most people hang out in
relatively isolated perspectives driven by their life's experience.  As they
get older, the aging process is most notable in the hardening of opinion
about more and more subjects.

I believe the preventive antidote to this calcification that addresses
important questions can be found in "Resouled."  This is a powerful
documentary.

If you've gotten this far that probably means you';re not in maintenance
mode.  I'dv'e deleted this long ago.  When  I am in an office or workhome,
this is the sort of e-mail that I delete without reading.  You haven't,
yet...

If you haven't seen Resouled you've missed out on a powerful insight into
what it means to be human in the first part of the 21st century.  It's not
that cosmic.  Don't misunderstand me.

However, on the other hand, the characters - and there are the same
characters mugging through the movie - exhibit an energy, or better a sense
of self older than their years.  This is what it means to get up every day
and hike.  This is hollow and cold and empty, this feeling.  The mugging
expresses what being healthy is.  Living moment to moment in the face of
incredible emotional pain...

My guess these are young folk making this part of their landscape in the
face of a world, three dimensional, that doesn't lend itself to belief in or
opening too.  The world we adults have given our children will hurt them if
they give voice to what they feel.

What is still missing as I find myself in my 50s, is the shared
self-consciousness that reveals adults' inability to solve the probems we
are faced with.  In Resouled, the naive innocence and dormant power
exhibited in the subtle plays in emotion really came to a head when
Oldford's persona talked to us in the dark about hiking alone.  The red eyes
and green/black context led us to a brink he didn't seem ready to address.
This is the (perhaps unintended) power of the film.  Here is a documented
expression of self-consciousness...

The unstated patten Oldford can be seen to develop is the young man looking
for frontiers, finding them only in the moment and only in the moment in
community.  He captured, and choreographed, playful moments in which his
characters were buffoons in a joyful manner.  The "joyful manner" formed the
base for meaning the audience left with.

But what the audience was actually  left with is the haunting feeling of
being alone in the wilderness.  All else is surface and biding...  The
buffonery of the slacker generation is a gauntlet laid down by those who see
most clearly where we need to go.  The powerful sense of community was new,
dormant, momentary.  The aloneness was the emotional center of the film.
The "joyful manner" was the concrete vision of being able to be alone.
These are our wise children pointing a healthier way!

This is "youth's message." This is the message the post - WWII generations
don't hear.  When quantum and relativity physics were being created - the
early 20th century really, and earlier - the humanist counterpoint was
existentialism, not the existialism of german philsoopher's - nietsche or
heidegger - but the existentialism that said when you die that's it.

Young people express an understanding of what it means to be alive we boomer
folk will never intrinsically experience.  It's not our world.

"Resouled's" naievity (sp) is the warp and woof of tommorrow.  Look into the
eyes of the young men in their funny hats when they act the buffoon.  They
are playing, and their game is far more textured and rich than the games my
generation was taught to play.

Oldford's characters  hope and burden is that they are always on stage -
their own.  White boy rap was the tender moment.  Green and black background
and raw emotion was the scenic angst.  What we walked away with was a sense
that if we listen to these fellows - ??????????

Jeffrey Olson
Laramie, Wyoming (I wore long pants for the first time in three months last
night.)  Where weather is.