I shouldn't have any sugar in my diet but drinking unsugared cranberry juice would be a challenge. It is bitter, not something one thinks of as part of a human diet. But cranberries are reportedly good for the kidneys, cleansing them out as Hercules washed the Augean stables of ages of accumulated horse manure in one day by diverting the Alpheus and Peneus Rivers! Alpheus is the same river in one of my favorite English poems, Samuel Taylor Coleridge's Kubla Khan; or a Vision in a Dream: a Fragment:
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.
Pure evocation!
For me art is the evocation of some primal experience we no longer have access to. All that remain of these deeply forgotten experiences are dreams and the unexplainable reactions we have to objects we see or taste or smell. Strange, even eerie objects sometimes elicit powerful emotions that themselves don't fall into definable categories. We think we live in ordered spaces, universes for which we have names, whereas reality is infinitely vast, infinitely varied, inconceivable by our limited scope of knowing. Some days I feel myself on the edge of the known universe and hover close to the Unknown, feel its primordial energy pulling at me and I am torn between my allegiance to the familiar and this strange, compelling interest in worlds beyond my everyday experience.
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