OUTSTANDING IN THE FIELD — LOST

The Pharmacist of Ampurdan in Search of Absolutely Nothing - Dali

Or

YOU CAN’T MOVE A SAILBOAT BY BLOWING FROM ON BOARD

We are born owning nothing but our body. We experience our body’s hunger reaching out and sensing an environment that may feed us. This appetite requires the body to get stuff, distinguish its benefit as food, and eat the good parts to quell its overwhelming motivation. In the process of searching for food an intellectual process, slightly more abstract than sensing the taste and satisfaction of hunger afforded by every bit of stuff come across and stuffed in the mouth, begins to develop. I call it curiosity, the mental companion to physical hunger and the assumer of total responsibility for the survival of any living being.

Curiosity involves recognizing other beings in the stuff and patterns amongst them, attributing a value system based on their value as food. One needs not put too much stuff in ones mouth before realizing that some of it not only tastes bad but objects to the point of trying to stuff oneself in their mouth! Curiosity is very useful for making these determinations ahead of their recurrence for those who survived the first time. “Everything that doesn’t kill us makes us stronger.”

Hunger reminds us we must interact with the world to exist. Curiosity is the means by which we sort our sensations of the environment and direct our responses to them. When hunger is satisfied curiosity continues to probe the environment in the play of happy solitude or with others of our kind. The combination of food and play so tests the capacities of beings, a periodic return to the dream world of metaphorically encoded clouds which, as our genetic memory of evolution, formed in the womb and daily thereafter birth serves as the universal formula into which the variables of current events may be plugged as a guide to natural solutions.

So much for our individual motivation and capacity to survive in nature.

Curiosity is intrigued by possibilities of the unknown and imagination is whistling in the dark to help it guess at the shapes by the echoes returned from the concert hall of nature. Bad guesses can survive only so long as the tune whistled keeps everybody dancing without regard to the nature they trample to dust. The culture evolved by western civilization is based on such a bad guess and stuck to the same tune for so long that, of all the beings on Earth upon finding themselves in an unfamiliar environment, only humans would look for work to make money to pay someone else to feed them and willingly pay the establisment’s usury fee on the privilege of being allowed to earn and buy the same things the rest eat raw directly from nature. The only idea offered to rectify the bad guess is warring over who gets to whistle their version of the same tune.

So much for the motivation of the marathon dance, the perpetuation of the whistler’s fee and the willing surrender of personal survival responsibility to culture’s daycare/nightbleed vampire farm.

It’s not rocket science. It’s a heavy metal lullabye.