YODOODLES 4

Music: Baka Beyond — Ngombi

THE BIOLOGICAL WE

I've adjusted my primary perspective on daily events to such a myopic focus that what I have always called my “self” appears to be no more substantial than a gestaltic hologram. I am an etherial awareness observing and interpreting what the body’s cells’ billion qubits of sensory information about the world outside and amongst them might be telling me is going on beyond which I can do no more than be aware. What I have previously claimed as knowing what I am doing seems now to be a life-long familiarity with the players on the team for which I am merely the play-by-play announcer. I have become fooled by my adroitness at instantaneous calls and the occasional prediction into thinking I‘ve been in control all this while.

The only influence I seem to have in the behavior of my body’s cells, tissues and organisms is that hologram. The body compares my interpretation to its original message and flavors the actions it is already in the process of with the attitude the difference makes. The exchange of feedback is not like telling stories about a time dwindling off into the imaginary past while the story drones on drowning the present — it is instantaneous and constant — almost as if I was in control.

Of all theoretical lens and knob adjustments I have observed experience through, this seems to be closest to giving the instrument its proper due. I’m their biggest fan; I travel with the team.

This is just a jot evoked by Grossinger’s book.

GO TO YOUR ROOM

Something keeps civilized people from being in the natural world.

It might be the infant’s initial response to her/his parent’s attempt to present their offspring in a light most meritorious to the same culture from which they constantly seek approval and reward. My Dad’s technique of curbing my adventures into forbidden behavior was to angrily whip off his belt, send me to my room with instructions to pull my pants down, lay across the bed and wait for him to come in to whack me. I really don’t remember that much physical pain because he rarely got angry enough to whack me after we both thought about it long enough. I certainly remember the frantic mental recapitulation of the offending events and feeling either remorse for my selfishness which I pled when he came in, or resentment for it’s interruption which I stoically grudged down into my someday-I’ll-be-big-and-do-anything-I-want box. I’m pretty sure my parents left me fairly feral by the time I entered the world of public education; I walked to school with a stick to ward off alligators.

It could very well be the heavy mental blacksmith shop, euphemistically yclept public education, pounding heaping assumptions of "fact" into their molten curiosity to gird the budding scholars with pat explanations for things and events of which they have yet to and may never directly need or even directly experience outside some room, office, cubicle. One might just as well memorize every line from every episode and movie of Babylon 5. If you do not swallow and regurgitate the same thing, you fail. Innovation is spurned as pseudoscience or cradled by Black Ops. The myth becomes reality when you no longer see the walls.

It may be that dual headed enforcement agency keeping everyone’s head inside the window and legal limits, the ChurchState. In a poor attempt to disguise their guise, the identical twins claim to be of separate, different purpose, much like the illusion of a two party system, by employing different incentives (heaven/more stuff), surveillance (God/camera), enforcement (priests/cops) and punishment (living hell/locked room). Until religious certitude ended my marriage the church could have been cricket on my horizon of concern. Thirty-five years later my daughter denied my admittance to her heavenly afterlife party for not knowing the host personally. With no need for, belief in or revolt against the state or the church they both remain thorns in the side of one living outside them in the nature they’ve vowed to conquer.

It’s possible that the childlike fascination with bright shiny objects for which the Manhattan tribe traded away their island to become the world’s heaviest concentration of bright shiny artificiality was a sterling example to the entrepreneurially bent to exploit such human curiosities until they never want to leave the mall, monitor, steering wheel or storage locker — and they’ve succeeded.

Maybe it’s just getting too damned hot out there. We must be practicing living on Mars by turning Earth into a replica. Cool. I knew there was a purpose to it all. Not!

“DON’T WORRY, BE HAPPY”

Meher Baba 1894-1969

Meher Baba’s quotation is understood in two distinctly opposed ways.

To the materialistic, profit oriented, world changing, acquisitive achievers marching in lock step with western civilization (is there any other one, any more?) his words would represent the disincentive to making a mark in the world characterized by the baby-making, slacker, druggies that are only too happy to live in the squalor afforded them by the generosity of national welfare being torn from the anal fists of the always worried ambitious. “They only think they’re happy, I’d be miserable without all my stuff I’m worried they might steal.”

To the less than anxious to change a world yet to be comprehended, quiet observation of human behavior and their own experience of inner feelings being reflected in the larger world has lead them to see that true happiness emanates from within enhancing us and our witnesses with the pleasure of getting to live in nature as it has always been rather than having to make changes to and stuff out of it to feel satisfied. “They only think they’re happy, I’d be miserable if I buried my natural happiness under worry about obtaining and keeping sufficient tokens out of a belief that happiness must be earned.”

This isn’t really about materialism so much as about our seeking out the source of our own happiness, about living life simply enough to recognize the natural pleasure that abides in symbiosis with the other cells in the body of which we are all a part, Gaia, the Milky Way, the universe. Worry is the stick ladder purpose climbs for the promise of an orgasmic heaven at the end of the retirement carrot qualification the ambitious make of their life. Merely being born is all the reward required to be happy with getting to have the experience of living — being born into a culture to whom birth carries an original sin to be driven out by having life be an experience of atonement, earned approval and achievement to reach the merit badge of heaven is apparently all the punishment most folks need to forsake the reward of being born. Nature is the background within and without us, like it or not. I am happy to grok and grow with the way it most impermanently is. I worry only that attempting to control it without comprehending it will fail the great natural experiment Gaia is.

YODOODLES 3

"Life did not take over the globe by combat, but by networking"
Lynn Margulis. —— Symbiosis in Cell Evolution

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She does, however, hold a negative view of certain interpretations of Neo-Darwinism, excessively focused on inter-organismic competition, as she believes that history will ultimately judge them as comprising "a minor twentieth-century religious sect within the sprawling religious persuasion of Anglo-Saxon Biology." She also believes that proponents of the standard theory "wallow in their zoological, capitalistic, competitive, cost-benefit interpretation of Darwin - having mistaken him... "

ENGROSSINGERED

Gonna be gone for a while. Just received Embryos, Galaxies and Sentient Beings, by Richard Grossinger in the mail. It appears to be one of those totally engrossing tomes about the reality it makes disappear everywhere but upon the pages of the book. As a hint of where I've gone, a paragraph from the introduction:

We must be present with our lives, these things that we somehow have and thus hold dear, in fact dearest, and that scientists tell us don't exist, not really. We have to salvage it all: love, the taste of mango, the blueness of sky, sparkling crystals of winter, salmon swimming upstream, the hop in a reggae song, the wonder of intuition inside us, because we live in a civilization that would give it all away, that everday trades our birthright for a bit more intrumentation and capital toward the sterile molecularization and commoditization of everything that is or could ever be. This relentless, nihilistic march now threatens to give back everything that nature gave us once by some unknown magic. And to what end? To serve what better cause?

See you on the flip side.

MEAT SPACE

It’s my favorite new term. I found it in a chat between programmers speaking about the effects of virtual reality’s influence on “meat space”. I like it for a number of reasons, the primary of which is its delineation of the threshold between being absorbed in ideating the potential of infinite possibilities in the mental, meditative, cyber space of the mind, and the singular, final realization resulting from action taken in material, “real” reality, meat space. You need only type “threshold” or “golden rule” into the blog search text block at the top of the page to find my previous posts to see how many times the concept comes up for me and what I feel about the existence of such a separation between thought and action; the interim where golden rule contemplation of ethical intent is required for harmony among humans.

This new slant on the threshold also suggests another pair of halves in my oft returned to theme of a species split. This time it’s between the entertained and the entertainers. Our culture is becoming defined by the amount of energy exerted by a service industry to supplant the energy required for the direct experience of nature so shunned by the served. There was a level of cultural depth not delved by the sifi blockbuster, Matrix: all the humans being milked for their energy were supposedly entrapped into such an existence. The tangent it suggested to me was the quite possible result of humans existing within western culture readily volunteering for the milking in return for being permanently entertained by electronic feed from only the most adrenalin soaked experiences continually being culled from wired sensory systems of humans (entertainers) being rewarded most for experiencing the most sensually entertaining activities in meat space. What a deal all around; meat space life as manna of porn heating cyber space up to room temperature.

The humans not wired at either end in such a future will be those who aren’t now — the indigenous cultures, to which many may repair by merely getting real about life on earth.

Jose Phillip Farmer’s series, Dayworld, described a world whose artificially boosted rate of reproduction was solved just as artificially as western culture seems destined always to try, by keeping dormant 6/7ths of the population 6/7ths of the time so that 1/7th of the population enjoys the world and its facilities one day per week in rotating occupation of meat space with, one supposes, no consciousness of the other six except how the day before left your house, did your job, etc. I imagine such people living seven times longer in a cultural world changing seven times faster would eventually dissolve like anything held too close to the heat.

No matter how we stack ‘em, the planet cannot sustain the population resulting from our insisting on artificially increasing food production and refusing to artificially limit the birth rate with contraception and incentives for smaller families. These are those interesting times the ancients supposedly cursed us with by telling fairy tales we had to close our eyes to believe. Meat space has more going on than any tale can nail. Just trimming off the fat is a lifetime activity.

STRENGTH TO LET GO

When you find things are more enjoyable, not because of anything you’ve done to change them, but because you got over annoyance with the way it has and will always be, one may find a depth of fulfilling pleasure that seems out of reach from any other direction.

After the requisite quantity of lifetime and quality of experience I felt qualified to declare myself among the masters of the earth. I had graduated as a mechanical engineer and been snapped up by the premier technology leader in ‘64, IBM. I had learned to program computers based on the physical requirements of the mechanisms they were to control. Now I worked for the company that made the computers themselves; designed and manufactured the mechanisms that handled the keyboard inputs, the magnetic card/tape recording and printing the perfect text messages extruded from composers’ platens.

Oh, yeah. I had it all. A wife, two kids and an income in such excess of my needs that half went straight to stock that split every six-months. The American dreamer ensconced in the pillow growing softer every paycheck. Nothing could get to me.

Sixteen year-old Robin Graham pushed his 24 foot sloop, Dove, away from the dock in Southern California in’65. Like the proverbial butterfly effect, the breeze that filled his sails blew between the lines of whatever our marriage certificate meant to my wife until it became clear to us both it did not include our cashing in our stash for a boat capable of circumnavigation and a world class education for the girls. When I learned of Robin’s voyage through the syndication of his adventure in National Geographic a couple of years into his five year circumnavigation, that security blanket began to feel like a padded cell and my wife became the warden every time I’d suggest our escape. It’s scary out there.

I settled for the sop of a Cal20 bumping around in landlocked Lake Travis until the fateful day I smoked the straw that broke the camel’s back, and she pushed off to the safer harbor of mama’s wing leaving me to “listen to the grass grow.”

Well, here 38 years later, as it has and always will, the grass growing sounds much more pleasant than me mowing. I have a long way to go in learning to detect and relax wishes to control the course of the inevitables in nature. This is inextricably intertwined with detecting and shedding culturally inculcated “truths” by which I am still tethered to the shore of the myth of western civilization’s destiny to reshape the earth in order to see nature as it is.

I sewed my canvas sail and stretched it out in the breeze across tipi poles taking me as far afield from the American dream as any circumnavigation of a globe being slathered in it could ever take me. Curious as to what one would do for an encore after such an accomplishment by the age of twenty-one I looked Robin up and find that he attended Stanford studying architecture. After two years, both he and Patti, the girl he met in Australia, became disenchanted with a society based on youth swallowing civilization’s myth whole with no experience outside high school (reminds me of me, even after four years of military) and built a log cabin in a Montana forest to raise their daughter, Quimby. We sail the same sea, different tacks.

IT MUTHT BE THE VAPORTH BECAUTH THE MYTHED ARE SO THICK

The threshold was virtually tangible
As the aura of the action
A beacon beckoning attraction
Spiced the night air so frangible
Drawing awe from all those who saw
What they were told/wanted to see saw
A martyr speaking words quite hangible
About love and the greedy to those who have not
Promising a hybrid car in every lot
Band-aid on harm to nature grown gangible
Dopes the gap in the myth for now
But Monsanto has new fields to plow
Helping civilized gangs be more fangible
Chewing up earth like they’re fighting
Offering up their necks for the biting
For the masters, bending over, ever so bangible

They shan’t have my ass

I grow my own food
In an ancient car hood
And a barrel that used to hold oil
A tangerine tree
And six chickens for me
And a hammock treating me royal
A babbling brook
The cat naps in my nook
I seem active minus the toil
Sir David’s camera speeds up the plants
As in my slowed down garden gazing trance
When they too do seem to so actively dance

As in its time this myth too shall pass
While all its dupes remain quite harangible
Mister Natural - R. Crumb

WISDOM: THE SPHERICAL PERSPECTIVE

Ever since I grokked Colin Wilson’s description of viewing a galaxy from the perspective of a being whose entire scale and metabolism has increased to be as much greater than that galaxy as we are greater than a sperm, that the galaxy would appear to be a sperm with a tail wiggling out its trail in our new persistence of vision where light years are our minimum perceptible flashes and solar systems are as atoms in the chemistry of it all, I have been infected with the notion that the universe is not only an endless mobius loop of fractalized holograms, it is perceivable as generally the same, above and below, from any point in the scale of perspective we may assume.

The same humongous entity Wilson proposed in his fascinating book, Music of the Spheres, could look up from that sperm and see stars and galaxies yet larger without end. We could also go to an exponentially smaller perspective where our molecules are as galaxies to us, our normal 30th of a second minimum perception window becomes a thousand lifetimes and we can look down and perceive the sperm that Wilson’s dilated being saw as galaxies having come through the loop Mobius has shown us is possible.

This all goes to say that whether one specializes in astronomy or nuclear physics, unless some sort of scientific reach around to the seemingly least related field of investigation through honest sharing of perspectives for an all inclusive spherical view of where we are as earth dwellers, it won’t matter what we learn about any niche or nebula if the picture only changes the viewpoint but doesn’t grow more inclusive of things sidelined as irrelevant to the cherry picking of purposeful research paid to fill in a prewritten story. Fresh discoveries await the unprogrammed curiosity in plain sight.

STATE OF THE COOP POOP

The six, over four month old Auracana chickens have continued to grow in size and beauty as their plumage varies day to day through a spectrum of from never-quite-black deep russet red through a palomino butt (or psilocybin button) golden orange to the palest of cadmium yellow, all flecked with graceful long dark ovals on each thin, otherwise pale neck and back feathers running down and draping over the sides of the rump at the base of the tail. They remind me of the spots Dax’s hosts wore. They grace Erica as well. The colors catch fire when first ignited by the direct beams of the lighter that smokes us all. They will look like plump old hens someday, but for now they resemble nothing more than wild game birds, slim and quick and flapping four feet into the air doing the chest bump. No sexual determinations here in their 18th week, but Nameless One has sprouted some extra long tail feathers!


She/he has also developed a milder case of the cross beak mismatch that devastates Fucluck’s ability to grasp leaves, or seeds on hard surfaces. Although slight at first, use has forced the lower half further out of contact with the upper tip, which itself seems to becoming hooked like Fucluck’s or a predator from lack of mutual support during the incessant pecking at everything. In the long run I think the hook may come to serve as a scoop as they all learn to deal with their environment.


Although I have moved the coop four times since the run was completed ten weeks ago, I have yet to let them leave the run, they have great excitement in keeping up by running with the run as it rolls to new grass and bugs. I don’t plan to let them out to free range until they have gotten used to using the laying boxes for a couple of months so they’ll know where to take that urge, and then let them out only a few hours before roostlight when I can be sure Donna’s dogs are locked up and I can know they’re all aroost when I lock them up before the dogs again are free.


If the title of this post were literal I'd spend it talking about the wonderful addition to the compost the poop laden alfalfa hay I add when I clean up the leavings at the old spot and the floor of the hen's pent house, but I am so discouraged with the garden devastation in the drought this summer there's nothing more good I can say about that. But … how 'bout them chickens!



Although daily contact has made us familiar with one another such that they will all now, in their new maturity, let me pet them, Black Jack remains the most gregarious one by far. Nameless One likes to jump up behind me and peck at the back pocket button. It reminds me of an old cartoon, Smilin' Jack, whose fat friend was always accompanied by a hen that ate the buttons he popped off his shirts. The familiarity has spread to their constant companion and keeper-away-of-all-dogs-but-Ella, Priest, who now, instead of reaching an entire arm in through the chicken wire holes to reach the naive younger, peeping, cuddly chicks to … ahem … pet them, now is greeted at the wire by several who peck gently at the paw he raises for them, careful to keep it on his side. It’s affection on both sides. They are further beyond being predator/prey than one of my neighbor is with rest of the world, fer sher!

THE RESULTS OF PURPOSE

Having discussed that nature, although vulnerable to infinite dissections as to what is happening, in a variety of personal accounts of a single event, and how the cause and effect interact in our most sterilely isolated investigation of natural events taken as far from the context in which they arose as possible, still cannot be logically accused of even having a care for the all too common human attempt to impose purpose on it with the question, why …

Having discussed the purpose being served by such imposition of human’s exceptional purpose on Earth …

I’d like to get into the results of assigning and believing in a purpose to a universe so void of purpose the words neutral and benign have relatively passionate stakes in results. Without purpose there would be no value systems to violate or by which to divide the variety of phenomenon into the smaller and smaller, less relevant dualities it gives us such pleasure to take sides on. We couldn’t imbue our stories about nature with the purposefully manufactured security of morality and planned community of common belief in the same bedtime fairy tale. The results of such fundamental assumptions of purpose range from world wars over whose purpose will god reward by annihilation of the enemy to being unable to forgive a friend for an innocent offense. Purpose plows a defined furrow across a fertile field gone fallow from active ignorance.

If purpose may be detected in nature, examination of the assumptions being made may always be traced back to finding a conclusion for which a theory was mistaken — at least so far in my life. In the special case of those prone to belief, finding a conclusion for which a belief was mistaken. Should one run across irrefutable evidence of nature having a purpose other than wreaking god’s blessings on man or proving some scientific theory logical, this one would appreciate the opening of my eyes by having such an other one add it to the comments.

THE NEW MATURITY

The term, new maturity, was first coined at his farewell roast, when James “Big Boy” Medlin characterized his departure from the Hole in the Wall and the Austin scene for the bright lights and big city barely visible through the dim air of Lala land lo these many seasons gone by. I have applied it to many instances in my own life and my friends’ when the accumulation of bad experiences begins to suggest a major overhaul of attitude toward those affected by it. Sandy, over at Kulture Critic, just posted A Stricken Empire expanding the meaning of this term for me to new dimensions.

Such a change may be characterized by two primary approaches. One way is to retain ones basic plan and ultimate objective while adjusting one’s act in order to reach the goal without any consideration of the way things are, like a robot truck ramming a wall, backing up and ramming the wall again an inch further along the wall with the unflinching dream of driving through the hole it's convinced exists somewhere. Another approach is to back further from the wall than that one track minded truck so the structure of which the wall is a part may be viewed as to where possible doors might be spotted or that the water ewer on the wall shelf has been shaken to its edge and will spill its contents onto the wiring system of the robot if it persists in banging its head on the wall — or that the wall is endless and invulnerable and a whole new, more realistic outlook must be taken.

The mythtake of human exceptionality underlying the creation of civilization first manifested in the killing, not merely to eat, but to eliminate competitors for their food; from trees and weeds that took up space they were learning to plant to local varmints and fellow humans who wanted a share of the new bounty. The abuse such a belief system wreaks on the symbiotic relationship any entity must achieve to maintain the flexibility an enduring survival requires, fuses joints with irretrievable actions, atrophies muscles with automated responses and locks minds with indisputable conclusions. Such exceptionality has lead western civilization to require filtering systems for vital supplies like air, water and food in order to feel comfortable on the planet from which it has declared itself alien owner by inheritance from the maker Himself.

The new maturity of which I speak is the chance for the being we might call the collective human consciousness to recalibrate the myth to better represent a broader vision of the reality, objective or subjective, we have spent sixteen thousand years beating our heads against trying to change what we don’t like about the way it is. Like children throwing tantrums by locking themselves behind their toy filled bedroom doors to protest being made to go to nature camp instead of computer or band camp, western civilization must grow beyond the protective walls of the prison without bars, take responsibility for all the dirty diapers thrown out the window and rejoin the natural evolution with a clear memory of the fallacies of childhood before the paradigm shift took the mere skip step needed to resync with the fascinating chaos that is nature.

THE MACHINE THAT RUNS ON MONEY

Civilization has undergone some horrendous modifications since the saw about “…old men plant trees they’ll never live to sit in the shade of” applied, particularly here in the forefront of progress, modernity and god’s will we represent in the western version as the “United Stetsons” (sounds so much more appropriate than “American” which has been reserved for the white folk of the USA by hyphenating everyone else). The corollary to that old saying is now “…old men cutting down trees to pile up money only their heirs will become feckless lolling in the shade of while the rest toil at some level of the mountain in envious worship.” Nothing’s new but the degree of idolatrous saturation among the wannabes. One must become a fugitive from charges of trespassing to just walk away from civilization into the land, every inch of which is owned by someone else.

After a couple of hiccoughs from air in the fuel line the good ship USS USA is again under way with a quick stoke of elephant patties to make up for the depletion caused by a vacuum in the structure of the gas tank. As the bull elephant shit begins to run thin the siphoners will have to realize that there’s a point of no return when the cost they charge for staying healthy and educated enough to be able to scrabble after the change left over when their paychecks return from the IRS branch of the vacuum tube is a losing proposition. The cost of health and education runs the risk of making the rocky paths its pilgrims prostrate themselves along trying to earn enough to pay for the right to climb the mountain too fucking steep to return a tidy profit.

Free health care could be afforded by using the billions it would no longer cost to pay for needless government and insurance bureaucracies to pass judgment on health issues — more than enough. Free education would put everyone in the competitive field of sound advice, where anyone satisfied with being a mentor or being mentored in a particular area of interest would form the essence of how subjects can expand organically due to freely evolving curiosity rather than a stuffing into commercially facile molds. The suddenly retired government and insurance company paper shufflers can finally scratch that itch reminding them how much more than a cubicle dweller they’ve always been by availing themselves of the DIY curriculum being offered in the diversity of curiosity and ideas unleashed from musty ivory powers and the booty full, snidely covered hauls of academia. The only retirees in the education field would need be those that are bureaucratic paper shufflers and the teachers barely doing that much. The students and the dedicated teachers that interest them could form classes on their way to new understandings of the natural world's influence on and parallel to our social interactivity.

The new fields of endeavor and the number of enthusiastic, well educated contributors to them is the benefit we would all receive when the real wealth of human ingenuity freely volunteered replaces the synthetic promissory notes backed by depleted uranium think tanks proclaiming warps of mass deception trickled down the mountain to a fearful, suspicious, avaricious world of wannabes.