Monday - Friday, January 21 - 25 2013 (diary)

The water lilies on the Durack Golf course lagoons, so profuse during Springtime, have died. Back in a while of course, but there are still colourful flowers around here on the mango farm, reds, yellows and whites, everywhere.
An almost cyclone monsoonal trough in the Arafura Sea to the North of us, has been moving away from us taking all the rain from previous weeks with it. So we have had a couple of dry days, good to put the washing on the line.

In Queensland it is another matter. There cyclone Oswald (or what is left of it), traveling Southward over the Pacific Ocean and parallel to the Queensland coast, is releasing torrents of rain (500 mm a day) over land. So while the Southern states still fighting the bush fires, parts of Queensland are flooded again.

While flicking through the various TV channels during an advertising break (which in Australia always appear to be longer than the actual programs) I watched part of an interview of an Australian artist.
He said that he agreed with Albert Einstein that "Imagination is more important than knowledge", but I had the strong impression that the artist did not really understand what Einstein meant by it.

Imagination and knowledge can simply not be compared with one another, preferring one over the other. Stating indiscriminately that one is better than the other is nonsense : is a fish better than water, a bird better than air ?

Instead imagination and knowledge are complementary and to a degree interdependent. They need one another : Without knowledge (using the term in its broadest sense), imagination has nothing to imagine about. And without imagination knowledge lacks meaning, can not grow and will not generate new discoveries. This is what Einstein meant and every scientist understands.

The same applies to many different fields like music for example. Without a deep knowledge and understanding of music principles, Bach, Mozart, Beethoven would not have imagined the music they wrote.

The more knowledge you have of music the wider your imaginary field of improvisation will stretch. The more visual "knowledge" you have of the intricacies of a flower, the muscle system of a human body, the geometry of a landscape, the better you can let your imagination roam to paint it.
Knowledge therefore is the environment in which imagination can be creative, productive and grow.

Saturday - Thursday, January 26 - 31 2013 (diary)

During the 1950s I always used to visit my Grandmother, who lived in the resort town of Scheveningen, during the summer holidays. I was therefore very familiar with the resort's main square, the Gevaers Deynootplein, shown on the adjacent photograph, and I have several fond memories of that square. The Kurhaus is the building on the right, with the promenade and North Sea beach right behind that.

So perhaps no wonder that I often find myself on this square in my dreams, like this week again for example. I usually arrive by tram at the main tram station which is just outside the photo on this near side. However strangely enough after my arrival there I never turn south to where my Grandmother used to live, but I walk Northward instead.
I finally realised why this is. There is a clear over print of my memories from Glenelg, the coastal suburb of Adelaide (South Australia) , where I lived through much of the 1980s.
Descending from the tram on Moseley Square in Glenelg I had to turn right (and North) to go to my seafront unit on Glenelg's North Esplanade. Clearly these two distant memories, 30 years apart in experience, have merged into one.
Last week was not the only time this happened. It occurs consistently whenever my dreams involve overseas travel.
Mind you, I always enjoy being there again.

Total rainfall for January here on the farm : 401 mm