Almost noon: Ex-Marshal, Will Kane, his new wife pleading with him for non-violence, must face four outlaws in the center of town, at high noon, as one by one, the townspeople excuse themselves from helping him. Thus, Gary Cooper plays the lone hero with no backup, in High Noon (1952).

his Singapore: P. Theroux, "Poetry Lessons." The New Yorker. June 26 & July 3, 1995.

a matter of time: When we trace our origins, we eventually arrive at the so-called Big Bang, and thus the question, If what we experience as time began with the Big Bang, what came before it? Which is a koan, and a koan can only be "answered" by realizing one's "true nature." What makes us the most extraordinary of beings is that we complete the circle of existence; we, alone, as far as we know to date, have a mind with the ability to realize its own nature.

white flowers: "He was nine when he first met Beatrice and she was eight. He saw her, during the next nine years, on a number of occasions, but it was not until he was eighteen that she spoke to him. She was then walking in the street with two other ladies, rather older than she was; she had on a white dress, and as they passed she looked at him and 'saluted' him. It was nine on a May morning of the year 1285, in a street in Florence." C. Williams, The Figure of Beatrice. New York, 1961.

David Rosen: Professor of Analytical Psychology at Texas A&M University, Dr. Rosen's books include, Transforming Depression and The Tao of Jung.

Even as oxidation: J. Weishaus, "Inside a Circle."

a true noun: E. Fenollosa,. In, L. Géfin, Ideogram: History of a Poetic Method. Austin, TX., 1982

as a series of images: P. Eisenman, "Architecture as a Second Language: The Texts of Between." In, Threshold. Spring, 1988.

arrogance of heavy metal: "On the Saturday of my sister's wedding, my mom, my nephew and I were out 'sightseeing' in southwestern Indiana and Eastern Illinois. On Highway 50, headed East from Lawrenceville before you get to Vincennes (not sure if it was in Illinois or in Indiana), we saw large sign on the highway for an off-ramp for a turn-off to 'Foreign Import Zone #146.' Thinking it was a shopping area (like duty free shopping places that are in some International airports), we took the off-ramp and drove about 2 miles into the countryside to an area where there were army trucks, a large area of light brown dirt that had been cleared by bulldozers, a number of metal buildings, and one metal warehouse marked 'Foreign Import Zone #146.' The dirt area looked like it was large enough to land big helicopters (or Harrier jumpjets), but not big enough to be a landing strip for other kinds of planes. But no one was around. We saw one pickup truck hauling a small size bulldozer coming out on our way in. It was so deserted that we made jokes about being watched and stopped by the CIA and disappearing into the federal jail system for being on some super-secret base." C. Kiefer. Private correspondence, 1996.

changes gears: "That man whose mind had been bound with acres lived with narrow concrete miles. And his thought and his worry were not any more with rainfall, with wind and dust, with the thrust of the crops. Eyes watched the tires, ears listened to the clattering motors, and minds struggled with oil, with gasoline, with the thinning rubber between air and road. Then a broken gear was tragedy." J. Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath. New York, 1939.