BONSAI!!!!

I told Johnny that if he didn't blog about this, I was going to. Since tonight is the last night and I see he still hasn't blogged about it, its fair game. It's probably dead right by now, but he was explaining the concept of his new bonsai tree to me around the same time we were discussing nature. What makes it fascinating, he was telling me, is that you try and keep a mature coniferous tree in an immature state. This is a lot like Mozart being a miniature grown up and it is what we do to children through our literature. We bring them up to be morally responsible and civically minded individuals when what they should be doing is getting into trouble and being curious. There is also a certain amount of respect, in that when you photograph or show a bonsai, it must be properly potted and presented. It is like nature itself is a daemon. Our own personal nature can be our daemon as well. Like Ryan's paper, it is a way of taking advantage of nature, a way of not letting it become what it will on its own terms, but shaping and pruning it to fit our own metamold.