NATURE IS NOT A MACHINE

I’ve become quite divorced from the printed word since I moved to the woods, what with the internet, to keep me appraised of the alert level back in the intensive care units commonly referred to as cities, and Netflix, to show me the latest paintings rendering the ongoing saga on the cave walls. I’ve even backed away from the written word, sparsely maintaining this blog and barely reading others out of a sense of futility in dealing with western civilization’s mechanization of nature.

I mention this hiatus to emphasize the inertia being overcome by my growing fascination with a book I’ve been circling since it was published: Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan. His investigation, into the evolution of human eating habits, and mine, into the evolution of human culture from symbiotic hunter-gatherers to fast food fed corporate nations exploiting citizens like so many feed lot cattle, find the same truth at every turn.

I was struck by the metaphor for the corporatization of all phases of daily life Pollan creates with this eloquent indictment of agribusiness’s expedient substitution of synthetic chemicals for nature’s time evolved cycle of soil:

To reduce such a vast biological complexity to NPK represented the scientific method at its reductionist worst. Complex qualities are reduced to simple quantities; biology gives way to chemistry. As (Sir Albert) Howard was not the first to point out, that method can only deal with one or two variables at a time. The problem is that once science has reduced a complex phenomenon to a couple of variables, however important they may be, the natural tendency is to overlook everything else, to assume that what you can measure is all there is, or at least all that really matters. When we mistake all we can know for all there is to know, a healthy appreciation for a mystery like soil fertility gives way to the hubris that we can treat nature as a machine. Once that leap has been made, one input follows another, so that when the synthetic nitrogen fed to the plants makes them more attractive to insects and vulnerable to disease, as we have discovered, the farmer turns to pesticides to fix his broken machine.

When I first read the foregoing I entertained an overlapping image of public schools’ expediently injecting the establishment’s code of behavior into each crop of children whose obedience leaves no time for independent symbiotic experience of the nature they are being systematically taught to impatiently exploit. Once the children become educated cogs in the machinery of western civilization, one step follows another, so that when the synthetic laws containing them make them rage against their fellow man and more vulnerable to psychotic meltdown, the establishment turns to prisons, insane asylums and the death penalty to fix its broken machine.

The living universe is too complex to be reduced to any lesser metaphor without its quality giving way to simple quantity; a good story giving way to dogmatic, evangelistic truth whose deniers become punishable. Nature’s one ball of wax.

TO BE A CHILD …

That first gasp of air … what did I feel? Was it the sudden chill on my damp naked body no longer sheltered by the womb? Was it a startled flash bulb consciousness of everything at once and therefore aware of no thing?

I have looked into the just-opened eyes of a newborn and recognized the ancient observer behind them calmly unwrapping this new instrument to begin sampling the experiment of life this time around.

With all functions set at default, sensitive components begin reporting changes registered as pixels in the hologram it forms of where it is. As reports accumulate, similarities adjust settings to better collate them to estimate the probability of permanence in this constantly changing time and space; the framework of reality upon which existence learns to gamble its future.

These are automatic, involuntarily unfolding functions evolved genetically into increasingly more varied, complex beings with no other detectible purpose than to continue, nor limit but infinity. This body, this instrument, in terms of the individual psyche, is what I think of as the Id: the genetic memory of instincts to eat and not be eaten for survival of the individual, instincts to mate and co-create for thrival of the species, intuition of the purest sense of right and wrong.

It’s all hunky-dory, suckling and pooping along, until it’s just not enough to satisfy the sated survival instinct; no lack of food or fear of predators, but … what’s that over there? The emergence of curiosity, the instinct to grow beyond the givens, discovers a difference between reports of changes within (hunger, heartbeat, breathing) and of finding limits to careless freedom without (bumping into crib, mother’s weaning and scolding for pooping off limits).

My most vivid recollection of self/other awareness was of the change the echoes of my crying returned from the walls when someone came to check on me. This primitive echolocation gave quality to my depth perception as my eyes learned to focus at different distances before it dawned on me they might be approached. Such preverbal understandings form the avatar, the ego, a hologram the instrument builds of itself in relationship to the now exterior reality within which it appears to act.

Early on I recall imagining a game being played between myself and the world where I had a cardboard replica of what I wanted to be perceived as being (the ego), which I held before me as I walked about. In turn the world erected cardboard facades like movie sets ahead of me and struck them when I passed, ala The Truman Show. This personal myth was reified whenever adults tested the validity of my mask with their questions and obviously invented most of their answers to mine when they couldn’t remember what they were told back when they still had questions. Observing my parents perpetuate the Santa Claus myth long after I’d observed the reality taught me to be a life long skeptic.

Ego develops when curiosity is called on to explain the avatar’s place in the causal myth of whatever culture is asking. There aren’t enough whys, wheres, whens, hows or whos to conclude a purpose to the living universe without first inventing a timeline whose direction is determined by assigning cause and effect to the constant change life always is, no matter what we think of it. As the child seeks to achieve validity within its sphere of activity, the responsibility for being able to account for itself to a perceived social environment often takes priority over the id by claiming and basking in praise it does receive, and denying by masking from scorn it might, from an audience that rarely cares as much as it does about itself.

In seeking validity from ones culture the ego can actually lose consciousness of the unique, natural gifts of the id leading to fear of being left alone bereft of anyone to obey and unable to entertain oneself with creative, original thinking since abandoning it somewhere in childhood in the process of converting curiosity’s question marks into culture’s periods.

In this Freudian drama, the superego would be the unifying curve between them attempting to maintain the yang of the ego-avatar’s artificial doing in beneficial, dynamic harmony with the id-body’s instinctual being throughout a life of cultural training to exploit the difference for advantage over others in a competitive ethic.

“Do unto others as you would have them do unto you,” is usually understood to mean giving others treatment you want, precluding the reality that two unique beings rarely want the same treatment. The benefit of the dynamic the superego maintains depends on the ego’s symbiotic attitude towards perceived otherness by realizing that beneath the cultural, exterior doing lies the common guidance system of the id’s instinctual being.

It is impossible to come to a conclusion about an infinite, living universe without completely extinguishing curiosity — customarily associated with death or belief.

FULL CYCLE

The theory that the entire evolution of life on earth to the present is reenacted by all beings during their gestation from the first cell division after conception to the emergence of their modern form from womb or shell I’ve heard bandied about in many contexts. I have to admit such comparisons are quite plausible throughout the wide variety and scale of life forms covering the surface of this being of which we are all cells, Gaia, Pachamama, Mother Earth.

Like any theory that keeps kicking around in my ponderings it has given rise to tangential extensions into nearly as many contexts. The earliest of which concerns the idea that, given that extremely abbreviated experience of earthly evolution to the present in gestation, the period of a modern human’s life from the first perception of sunlight to the last appears to be a reenactment of the continuing social evolution of mankind from the first opposable thumbs to finding fulfillment living out their lives in cubic, air-conditioned isolation chambers viewing the natural world from which they arose as an enemy to be conquered and exploited by pushing buttons with stubby little fingers to make that now alien, civilized world better, more heedlessness of the harm done to the planetary health none can survive without.

No matter where you go, there you are.

Lest I get carried away into my old crackpot notions and forget the latest idea that made me abandon my sunrise vigil and drove my stubby little fingers here to the keyboard once more; it occurs to me that, having come to an understanding of the paragraph above, I have been slowly but surely returning to the preverbal existence of early man by my age alone. Over years of abuse, from screaming jet engines to southern sheriff’s saps, my ears now seem only to hear vowels and tunes, with consonants and lyrics quite indistinguishable. My eyes seem only to see landscapes and geometric shapes in the foreground, with leaves and letters on those shapes quite indistinguishable. I may not pick out your train of words, but through the dance of your body English and tune of your voice I can follow your train of thought as a metaphor with interchangeable variables. I may not be able to see your facial features at a hundred yards, but if I know you, I will recognize your walk and mood.

When I couldn’t read the blackboard from the back of the 6^th grade classroom my vision was suddenly made more particularly articulate by being fit for glasses. I slowly began to rely on the written signs all around me and ignore the reality going on all around them. The authority of the written word, from “Keep off the Grass” to “Top Secret”, became sacrosanct; immune to any experience in the contrary. I became an avid reader in search of ethical heroes and scientific discoveries to challenge and/or enlarge my own heroic theories and burgeoning desire for the reward of fame and fortune in those books or imagined of their authors.

When I moved out of the city to the Dawgranch, I stopped wearing my glasses because there seems to be nothing so specific needing to be seen as is found in the traffic of speeding cars and urgent signs of the city. At the pace of nature everything is as articulate as their proximity requires my attention without fear of damage or delay. The once hawkeyed sharp particulars in the distance have returned to being part of the natural landscape I‘d learned to ignore.

When the cubical dwellers visit me I know when to celebrate, sympathize with or object to anything they say by how they dance and sing, no matter what the song and dance may be about.

WHO ARE YOU? Part II

In response to the curiosity expressed in her comment on the previous post, this post is for my maverick Grand-niece Racheal Kellie Cooley, the only of my kinfolk other than L'ilwave to respond to this blog. 

"Faith is being sure of what we hope for 

and certain of what we do not see."

I couldn’t agree more with the quote, it describes exactly what I take each of those words to mean and the meaning of their being next to one another as they are arranged.

But I sense there’s a world of difference between what you feel about those words and how I read them. The fulcrum of faith in each phrase: “sure of” and “certain of”, are like tombstones marking the death of curiosity, just like the quote several posts back about, “children begin school as question marks and graduate as periods”.

Using “question mark” for newborns is as close to spirituality as I ever get when I examine my own motivations, the rest is just logical metaphors as a way of making sense of all my curiosity has revealed to me for myself. When I say we are all eyes on the same potato, the potato is as close as I get to describing what I hear others refer to as god.

It all begins with the definition of THE universe as being all there is. Imagining an intelligent being made of all there is leads me to realize it has nothing to observe but itself — talk about self-aware! But who is the universe gonna ask, you might ask? What do I ask when I want to know what’s going on? My primary source of information is the perception of my individual cells keeping data about the physical world hologram I call my mind updated every instant. I can ask the world what’s going on if I want the opinion of others to supplement my perceptions, but by the time they begin to answer they are no longer talking about what’s going on, but what is no longer going on, and since now is the only time existence ever occurs it takes all my attention to my perceptions just to keep up observing reality.

My metaphor is that the entire universe is alive and every part of it is reporting what it sees just as my every cell reports to me, I pass it on to the silent observer I know sees through my eyes, the potato, god.

There’s a whole other part of my cosmology about scale & mobius loops and the evaporation cycle of ideas, but I want to get back to my view of faith, hope, and certainty just to narrow a conversation about the universe down to the unarguable truth that each religion in history has claimed it alone possesses access to (all lebentybillion of ‘em).

In my cosmology, certainty is like what civilization does to our awareness of nature. It puts on shades, sticks in earplugs, turns up the air conditioner, steps on the gas and in every way possible makes the natural occurrences of the day helpless to update the mind of the hopefully, faithfully certain that certainty lets us be sure that whatever we want we’ll get no matter what shitstorms such hopeful certainty plows up in the natural world it contradicts at every turn.

The reason peace on earth exist at all is that from the core of every being the observer looks out, curious about itself. Although the world it observes is the immensity of itself it has become so absorbed in the observing, it must be reminded that the world is not out there by pairs of pairs of eyes recognizing who it is that’s looking out of both — cosmic love and the reason we are conscious of and curious about existence, if there must be a reason.

Yeah, I don’t have a certain bone in my body but I have accumulated enough experience to understand I have been up to any now in which I find myself without steeling myself against contradiction, in fact I welcome it. New varieties of contradiction only tend to broaden my cosmological theory. I don’t consider religion to be a part of or a contradiction to my theory because it is based on the very non-existence of wishful thinking that requires faith in the unarguable certainty “about what we do not know” for hopeful wannbes to declare the only permissible truth is theirs, end of story, period. Signed, sealed, delivered zombie ant.

That’s why I loved your exchange recognizing how mankind could be as our heavenly father intended, curious about the world they still consider to be themselves and are not yet aware of the otherness civilization makes of nature.

Nature reminds civilization of the stage upon which it plays at being God.

CHOICE

The most obvious trait of the natural world is the eating. From atoms swapping electrons to black holes swallowing galaxies there is a constant transformation occurring throughout the known physical world. Once you’re born, you’re game to be eaten upon until you no longer exist. Being food for itself, it would seem the prime purpose of the universe is to perpetuate its life. One may extrapolate that the universe is expanding, another that it’s only inhaling in the prime cycle of respiration and yet another that what we observe is merely the growing body of one of the many beings of its size.

One thing for sure is that down here at human metabolism staying alive requires adaptation to the area in which we must eat so long as we can avoid being eaten. Being eaten can be resisted only when the entity is aware of and able to avoid or defend against other life forms, from saber-toothed tigers to cancer cells, munching on its vitality. Realizing how many eggs a woman is capable of hatching, it would seem we have a lot to learn about adapting to our habitat in order to live up to our genetic potential.

So here we are, smack in the middle of a good/bad for us world feeling like we must perpetually choose to either eat, befriend, avoid, defend against, attack, or surrender to events in our conscious life. At birth our motivation is to respond to and learn from the enormous physical growth still going on by stoking those fires with food and our consciousness with experience to better adapt to obtaining the next meal.

The genetic mini-factories pumping out replications of their Dna imbue each with what has been biologically called, epigenesis, and in my lexicon referred to as genetic memory, intuition, instinct, or the inner voice with which newborns are equipped to operate as individuals as soon as physically capable. This evolved memory is of primal truths such as eat or be eaten, fight/flight, fear of falling or caution around fire, like an organic I Ching into which the daily events of one’s life may be inserted like variables plugged into infallible, evolutionary time tested formulas. Human cultures attempting to part from nature have all been too fleeting to register in such a timeless, cyclic history of evolution.

As the infant is introduced to the culture within which is born, its adaptive behavior in obtaining food is influenced by a louder, more insistent memory in the form of tradition. Some cultures traditionally consider nature to be an evil to be conquered and begin educating their young as soon as the results of their eating makes a mess on the traditional couch. In such cultures the young quickly adapt, not to their habitat, but to the rules for conquering nature within themselves by ignoring those “Satan’s whispers” from our genetic memory and without by helping harvest and sell the entirety of our habitat to one another in a race to own the most at the inevitable finish line of planetary poisoning and starvation.

Being so buried beneath the immediate demands of one’s culture so early, individuals rarely get to experience themselves beyond their skills at eliciting favorable response from others, first for food, then for favors. Any reference to self-reliance is in terms of having money to pay others to provide all the necessities of life, which are far in excess of mere food in most cultures considering themselves civilizations. Indigenous cultures still send their youth on walkabouts and vision quests to ensure they are aware of their prime reliance on and responsibility to their habitat in a most symbiotic way. Western civilization’s version of a walkabout is joining the Marine Corps to travel to remote corners of the world and threaten to blow up that porcelain toilet (that another vision quest, the Peace Corps, convinced once indigenous peoples they couldn’t live without) if they didn’t quit fighting the leash and biting the hand that now feeds them.

With no experience of living symbiotically with nature since the presumption of totalitarian agriculture, western civilization relies on faith in authority over the inherent potential of that unbound curiosity with which we are all born:

“I’m hungry.”

“That’ll be five dollars.”

The instincts that could not be sublimated in the civilizing of newborns have been bent to the service of authority. Competitiveness among beings for food in the wild improves the survival abilities of both prey and predator and doesn’t include incapacitating the competition except among civilized people in search of authority. With no natural prey but their own egoistic shortsightedness, civilized humans confuse fellow competitors with the prey — still hungry after all these eons. Herding instinct, once for safety among prey and efficacy among predators, has been warped into might makes right and the inability to live alone in the wild … or the city. Which brings us to the biggest, most painful warp of all. This post was generated by a quote my dear, Lilwave, posted in Facebook the other day,

“The hunger for love is much more difficult to remove than the hunger for bread." ~Mother Teresa

I hardly know where to begin. The inarguability of such a metaphor mixed between physical reality and presumed spiritual necessity leaves me only the “hunger for love” part to address my response to the quote. Part of becoming acquainted with oneself prior to and beyond being the stylist adapting to one’s culture is discovering the being who exists when one is alone with the natural world so that one cannot be swayed by condemnation or flattery in representing one’s self honestly.

Now here’s where I make the humangoose assumption that I am not alone in experiencing the following — if I am, I’d like to hear from you.  There is a term, agape, which I take to mean the feeling of love for the entire universe, including the misdirected malice of western civilization toward the womb that births it and horrible individual injustices wreaked upon one another trying to make the system work against our nature. This feeling resembles total harmony of every part of my body and it with all other entities in a dynamic generated by learning to choose to be symbiotic with nature by learning from our mistakes if we survive them. Humans are learning by trial and error what their genetic memory could tell them if they could hear it over the traditional memory’s public address speakers.

It may be evoked by solitary meditation, seeing events harmonize all the entities involved such as what just occurred in Tahrir Square, at an outdoor rock concert on a psychedelic, turning the compost and seeing microbes make plant food out of plants, in the fearless eyes of another looking from the same place, or in watching the world turn green at spring sunrise after every miserable winter of my life.

To hunger for love means to me that one has never discovered that fountain within them selves and are convinced love must be acquired from externals like food. Relationships are cannibalistic without agape, to further mismix the metaphor.

“Hey, boy! Whachu doin’ pullin’ that there chain?”

“You ever tried to push one?”

            AGAPE

… from the asylum of my natural mind

Commenting on the end of Countdown a friend lamented, “I don’t trust CNN these days.”

I couldn’t help but reply, “Trust?”

“Any of them?”

“These days?”

“Read Peoples History of the United States, check out Democracy Now! But don't lay trust on anyone but yourself, and don't do anything until you can.

Sorry Steve, those weren't really orders from me to you, just a brain fart about how trusting externals is the source of all misery and the company it keeps. It was the things that helped me realize why love is a source of pain when gratitude for feeling it at all is not enough reward and requital is demanded, like a whore taking payment — burdening loved ones with trust breaks better bonds.

I’ll go blog now.”

I guess I get a bit worked up around words like trust, faith, hope, prayer, wishes because I have seen through Maya’s veil to behold her natural beauty and realize it was all a vale of tears over such illusions woven so finely the world appears against us when we don’t get our way, as if it’s supposed to care because we wish it. The veil covers up the beauty of the present with the clothing of the past tailored to ellicit obedience from the future. What a fine tuned grinder the innocence of now is put through to accomplish tomorrow’s menu. We never see life as it is as we focus on the parts that fit our purpose and get blindsided by hopes become wishes become faith become trust become assumption become expectation become fact until — wham, a contradiction become powerful on the momentum of a life of denial.

All these ephemeral illusions to the power of just wanting something, from a dolly to a place in heaven when one’s done with making Hell of Eden, weave the world within which civilization believes nature is chaos to be conquered and put to work. Being warm and dry with food on the table is never enough for people believing in gods who create worlds by merely willing it so.

I am learning to love life more by freeing it from the fragmenting duality of expectation and let the story unfold as it will, despite my running narrative. I’ve learned the truth about trust is that the external object of our faith is not the determiner of our satisfaction, but the scapegoat for our own judgment of how reality can be made to work for us as opposed to learning how it behaves with or without us to better work with it.

The confusion introduced by my education delayed a realization of how the idea that existence has a master plan, a preexisting purpose, limits the comprehension of the universe and behavior by a far larger population than merely the creationists who swear by it, as mankind destroys the only specimen we’ll ever have on the assumption of knowing why it exists before having a clue as to how it exists. Getting clues from purposeless observation seems to lead me into endless fascination. Purpose observes through a pinhole in a cell wall gleaning anything that might be construed to be fact in the ongoing fairytale of mankind’s godlike “conquering” of nature.

PEOPLE WATCHING

Legend has it that the Native Americans first photographed by white men believed the camera was stealing their souls just as their lands were being usurped in the westward expansion. The clairvoyance of these early inhabitants was matched by their ability to dance among the girders to construct the nation's first skyscrapers without fear of falling.

In the early 21st century the development of the cell phone made photographers of everyone. An internet application called Photosynthe allowed a global collation of uploaded photos to form a virtual world as solid as the density of photographs taken. Governments, always afraid of the citizenry’s learning of their duplicity, developed surveillance techniques enabling records of public events to be seamlessly complete both visually and historically.

By 2052 the only reason to leave one’s house would be to take pictures of reality. All social interactivity was conducted over the internet by organic computers ingested by the users as symbiots. Reproduction decreased to the point that the birth rate was a matter of concern for the survival of the specie who’d abandoned their bodies, volunteered their souls and integrated into the matrix of vicarious prosthetics once only found so complete among rabid sports fans.

In 2114 there were two distinguishable species of human, the dormant and the awake. The awake lived and played in the reality the dormants only dared to dream about. The lack of reproduction among the cybernetically isolated dormants resulted in a world view shrinking with fewer and fewer picture takers going less and less far from home. The awake kept track of the dormants’ limited world of interest to inhabit the places they’d abandoned and return to natures ways undetected.

Let there be enlightenment.

DOING SOMETHING…

…about the way it is. The way it, reality, is has two categories: natural and artificial. The natural state of existential reality includes the genetic evolution that gave rise to the human urge to interpret the environment beyond the fight/flight response guiding the daily adventure of finding food for all natural beings.

Creative representations of the environment arose from a sense of appreciation for the beauty and bounty of the natural world as a gesture of belonging.

Creative alterations of the environment arose when the sense of belonging led to the feelings of entitlement to enact preferential elimination of fight/flight instances within familiar habitats. Such measures of comfort require ignoring the increased frequency of fight/flight encounters along its borders. It is this denial of free birth sharing of existence that creates, of joyous being, a dismal doing … something … about altering yet another one of the human doings to better eliminate the less preferred. Eliminating doing is a return to natural being. The balance can be beneficial. I do not consider whatever it takes to scratch an itch a doing.

If a body may be said to own its cells, Gaia owns us. The mind fuck of creationism is that believers think a god made her especially for us to steward in Sunday principle and rape in weekday practice. The mere idea of ownership is the lie poisoning the heart of every distracting conflict along its borders, whether it be faith, nation, gang or friend. Ownership is isolation severing the chain of life. Eliminating owning is a return to natural sharing. The balance can be benevolent. I watch Priest calmly watch the neighbor cat, Willie, and the hen, Nameless One, as they share his bowl in turn this morning, here beside me as I type. I'm reminded of the thorough variation of species in the wild coexisting and evolving side by side by  developing diets different enough to turn the cycle of natural life over so thoroughly while matching the population of each to that of its food in response to changing climate.

If our perception of the world may be said to be a fairly high resolution hologram formed by our physically sensitive cell’s input, photoshopped by our propensity to see only what we want to see when we have a question in mind … when we agree on that, I’ll go on. It becomes fairly obvious to the evolving infant consciousness that natural functions draw disapproval requiring altered performance to regain affection. The connection between satisfying authority to maintain good graces buries many wonderful, creative ideas and people waiting for approval to do something for themselves. In extreme cases the artificial self created and maintained to elicit approval is the only image abused children grow up being aware of with no sense of independent capabilities beyond the one who must fool others. They disappear in solitary confinement until the feedback of feeding time reflects their existence once again.

Doing something about how one is perceived is often ironically revealing about the arranger as in the case of the acquaintance I can smell a block away and whose embrace I avoid for the obnoxious cloud that engulfs my senses and leaves me with the taste of talcum on my tongue for hours. I can see no positives in such a doing aimed at impressing people for whom she obviously has no respect and who can only wonder what sort of horrible odor deserves such a douche. The doings about public perception require long memories or protection. Only ventriloquists can talk behind their own back where reputation is ultimately decided. Eliminating the façade is a return to the natural self, motivated by genetic urges and fuck all the too, too proper if they can’t live with it.

The forgoing is a scratched itch.

A MOUNTAIN OF DIFFERENCE

QUALITY/QUANTITY : ECOLOGY/ECONOMY

Here is a duality opposed across a mysterious point. Quality depends on benefit to the arbitrary purpose of individuals or the general welfare of a group and quantity is the account of an amount, verifiable by each and all. The confusion between good/bad with large/small seems to be a major disruptor in human’s ability to find peace on earth.

The appealing quality of quantity is the safe anonymity sought by the herding instinct found in all animal life. No longer a regular on any predator’s menu, humans had only to fear natural disasters — and each other when compelled to crowd into too tight herds around too little food. Totalitarian agriculture spawned artificial population growth around the silos of surplus. The quantity of days in the future one had food for in the present became a prime quality of life once the ability to hunt and gather nature’s seasonal offering was lost. Tokens relieved the necessity to store one’s share of the crops and soon became the medium of trade for more than mere food — so much so that in developed nations food is less than a quarter of their all consuming budget.

This brings us to the juncture of two seemingly opposed concerns around the same mysterious point; two words with the prefix, eco, from Greek oikos=house.

Add nemein=manage and you get economy, managing the affairs of a household. For centuries mankind was so busy trying to maintain his invented civilization that, until as recently as the sixties, household was the place from which nature was kept at bay. As the term, household, expanded with the growing dependence of individuals on economy of burgeoning civilizations, its relationship to nature has remained one of a manger of goods for human consumption to the rest of the world as his god granted infinite resource.

Western civilization’s attitude about the health of the planet reminds me of a story tellingly told me back in ’62 by the son of the mayor of Greenville, Mississippi about share croppers living on his family land, “They’re so ignernt, they tear siding off their shack to stoke their stove in the winter.”

When the conversation is about money no one but the personhood of corporations, from nations to fledgling factories, have the vocabulary required to express the logic of the bottom line, the bigger the number the greater the quality to minds bent on either owning the most of the last usable chunk of earth or, having shit this nest, traveling to the stars.

Well, sir, along came the scientists who, like Galileo, Copernicus and Darwin further dismantled the human homocentric myth of god granted exceptionality and expanded the household built of civilization’s commodities to the biological interdependence of the entire planet, spaceship earth.

Add logos=study and you get ecology. Science revives the indigenous understanding of Pachamama, Gaia, the living planet, the organism of which we have always been a part throughout our cultural path as self-evolved aliens requiring more and more isolation from our own individually failed responsibility for the usury and mindless waste we work every day to perpetuate. Land fills and oceans collect the charcoal left from burning the siding civilization tears off Pachamama to exact the ideal conditions for separately evolving neohumans.

Nature, considered as our household, cannot be managed without the purpose of making it into something other than it is. Considering nature a wondrous, evolving habitat event to be studied undisturbed until mutually beneficial interaction is understood, is a genetic quality every child is born supremely equipped to do. These tools are useless for managing civilization’s invisible big house and buried beneath the little red schoolhouse with the metal detector at the door.

Quality varies between extremes of ecstasy and suckage. Quantity varies between having everything and owing everything. Economy varies from complete control to complete submission. Ecology varies from healthy to dead.

HOW DARE I?

How dare I not only desire to maintain my life but to enjoy it? Maintaining life entails protecting it against predators, diseases, competitors and fatal acts of nature; those things that would end it. Enjoying life entails consciously evolving the experiential wisdom to better assess events as they exist, irrelevant to any purpose with which one might intend to access them.

When I first began my graphics business I gave it the slogan “dare to be happy” when I realized what a challenge it was to remain happy in the public face of gloom painted in pixels of individual faces drained of brighter possibilities as they wrestled with the daily demands of a past traded in for a promise.

This “happy” I dare to be can be thought of as the intrinsic energy of the being I always am, from birth to my inevitable death. Daring the happy being to manifest itself in events is a matter of realizing benefit results only from the generosity of a happy being — all else entails new debt.

The challenge is in remaining aware of this ample energy while daily dealing within a society constantly being conditioned to atone for multiple inadequacies from original sin to acne by authorities damning the naturally happy individual variation of the human genome we cannot help but be at our deepest core, no matter how buried under guilt and almost forgotten our own energy may be.

The belief that happiness is a carrot on a stick, to be earned to be deserved, is the western civilization version of the middle-eastern, “Man is riding a camel in search of a camel.”

Photos by Heather Knight, my daughter

HELPING

We couldn’t help but know. We were looking in all the holes in their pods and even had mobile agents inside. It was a brilliant plan.

We’d known about them since before the bristle cone pine was a seedling. Like all the rootless ones, they had to actually touch each other to reproduce. Like all the rooted ones, we appreciated their proliferation of our reproduction through postprandial perambulations across the entire intersphere.

About 3.5 degrees ago, there appeared among the rootless ones an upright, relatively hairless kind of nursing being, totally unique in the 15 orbits since the birth of the intersphere. For the first time a kind of being began manipulating other beings for more than life sustaining food. They mutated large areas of the intersphere without considering the well being of the lives they sacrificed for their own greedy convenience.

Such convenience snowballed exponentially until the increase in population around such nodes could no longer sustain life. They devised isolation pods, both permanent and mobile, within which to survive their own poisonous excesses spewed into the atmosphere. It appeared this latest world leading civilization had become sufficiently advanced technologically and narrow minded enough in their greedy purpose to set the life of the intersphere back at least 11 orbits.

Having spawned from the same matter as the rest of the intersphere, they eventually manifested their genetic tendency towards symbiotic balance by creating a hardwire system of transmitters and receivers of airborne signals just to mediate their isolated loneliness. Since it was so like the organic intersphere from which they’d isolated themselves, it was no surprise they called it the internet.

For the first twenty orbits of the intersphere around its food the internet served to expand technological and sociological exchanges at a phenomenal rate until it just couldn't keep up with the growing demand. We also noticed the dwindling ratio of rootless beings touching each other for reproduction to those touching them selves unreproductively and thereby the birthrate among them fell as well.

It was too slow to avoid the obvious environmental crises their still overpopulated indulgences made inevitable unless the internet improved. We helped it along with free uninterrupted, high speed, hi res, instant reception by connecting it to the intersphere. It's been five hundred solar orbits now and today we’re are going to sever our connection, having successfully eliminated the genetic flaw that once caused beings to value the spectacle over direct experience with the nature from which they arose. The upright survivors are the progeny of those who were never fooled by the spectacle to begin with.

They sleep in our limbs and on our leaves … and are fully aware of the intersphere.

THE CAVE

It was inspired by the wisdom of the I Ching’s ability to phrase sixty-four examples of the natural curve of events throughout evolution in such open ended metaphors that any particular variation of daily vicissitudes brought to the collection as a meditation can find wise council by the chance of casting yarrows to choose which particular example to consult in each case. This symbolic tying of timeless wisdom to the immediacy of the moment serves to intensify greater consequences in a bigger picture than the meaner, more personal concerns brought to the ceremony for solution.

Prote noted that the written word was disappearing from public culture as the biggest show on earth made every expressible thought so realistic no one knew where or when they actually were in the reality of the natural universe. Only conscious purveyors of the spectacle’s endless memes used the written word to communicate preshat ideas for scripts, business agendae and subliminally recognizable symbols for ads. It became like a programming language that only geeks who loved to lie knew how to use even though everyone perpetuated its purpose by speaking. Government documents no longer required redacting no matter how damning the words. The Bible wasn’t read but from the pulpit. Like General Motors, Standard Oil and Goodyear bought up all the trolleys to kill competition for their industries, the spectacle bought up all the books as material to no longer be read but to be more artfully reified. Libraries became as abandoned as auto plants in Detroit eighty years after the trolleys were destroyed. Scripts for the spectacle became the only form of literature, like Latin for priests, lawyers and doctors. The last person outside the spectacle industry that still knew how to read succumbed to Shakespeare, Hunter Thompson and Charles Bukowski on audiobooks played on her maxi-pad before she died.

He knew that if people were ever to recover their direct contact with the living body of which they, in the reality of the nature of the living universe, are dependent symbiotic cells, it must occur as individual realizations rather than yet another following the latest leader or copying the guy next over as they learned to herd within the spectacle.

His idea began with noticing the variations of pitch in the speaking voice that could be generalized into categories of emotional states. He collected data on individual’s normal speaking voice to establish a baseline for the variations in vibration frequency recorded when stating various problems being posed and when speaking of the understanding gained by the consultation.

With much cross referencing and codification he managed to devise a large chamber, the interior walls of which were composed of areas of varying reflection and absorption of sound waves such that anyone, asking any question within the blackened cave it appeared to be, would hear an echo in their own voice replying with words they were genetically predisposed to interpret as “Follow your own light, just as you did when you first chose to follow another.”

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.

CURIOSITY KILLED THE CAT BOX

So vast no where or when is without
No being too small to enlighten from within
Signs of life; cycles of blood and breath
Signs of consciousness; hunger and curiosity
Signs of intelligence; finding theme in variety
Signs of love; celebrating theme with variety

Water seeks the lowest places on its way to the center
Turned back at the bottom by hot farts from the core
Boiled off at the surface by hot farts from the sun
Oceans are the dressing in a spherical heat sandwich
Sloshing to and fro keeping up with Sol’s sway as the Earth turns away
Streaming steam into cool shadow’s shaping of it clouds
To rain upon parched land, gathering again and giggling in puddles
Running off in rivulets to creeks and culverts, cascades and canyons
Rills and rivers, chilly spray from spring shower shivers
On water’s way to the center.

Curiosity urges observation to get to the bottom of the question
Foiled by language turned speechless too close to the truth
Crushed by granite authority demanding jackhammer proof
Observation is the white filling in the consciousness cookie
Reflecting on one’s perceptions of seeing and being seen
Dissolves hard edged objects into fuzz-fringed fur balls
Nodes in the energy field of now’s network stretching to connect
With other dimensions and frequencies, traditions and heresies
Crossing other variations melded in meditations
On wisdom’s way to the theme.

Born to seek the longest path of least resistance on our way to dying
The observer we’re born is rewarded for causing smiles
And tamed with shame and blame for causing frowns
Newborn mind is molten mettle minted between god and country
A coin tossed between the certainty of faith and the logic of law
Lands sometimes on a cutting edge exposing where lies lie
Duplicity exposes the mendacity of sanctity and legality
Debilitation of leaning so hard none can walk alone
Shucking the prosthetic environment of culture’s crutch
On our observer’s way to enlightenment.

If civilization is a lemon
Let learning from our mistakes be the lemonade we make of it.

WORK

It begins at childbirth. Labor pains. It will always be a laborious process, but whether it is painful has much to do with the variety of creature giving birth. In all of nature, one species has evolved a physical characteristic that pretty much ensures its birth will involve the excruciating pain of passing its cranium through its mothers birth canal.

The surest sign that civilization has become part of human evolution is the unusually large brain to body ratio and its effect on our pain to pleasure ratio. Civilization is so counter to the natural course of life on earth that humans have evolved an over sized organ to keep track of the arbitrary vagaries of civilization’s regulations imposed on the behavior of otherwise natural creatures.

My favorite metaphor for this phenomenon is that of a morbidly obese businessman on vacation, mounted upon a scrawny, wise burro assigned him at the Rubber Rose Dude Ranch, reading from his traveler’s guide he pontificates upon the beauties and developmental possibilities of wherever the steed takes him. When he returns from his ride he must refer to the travel guide to recall his adventure to others, while the burro knows every evolving inch of the same territory by heart.

The Cajun comedian, Justin Wilson, tells a similar tale of a young barefoot boy walking along a two rut road in the swampland of Louisiana overtaken by a Cadillac driving, ten gallon hat wearing, cigar smoking, diamond ring wearing big shot who demands, “Hey, boy. Where’s the Post Office?”

“I don’t know.” replies the lad.

“Where’s the County Courthouse?”

"I don’t know.”

“Where’s the highway to get me out of this God forsaken hell hole?”

"I don’t know.”

“You don’t know shit, do you, boy.”

“I know I ain’t lost.”

In both instances the appropriately named, over-sized modern brain assigns its own values and priorities to an environment that the lean, essential primitive brain understands with the genetically evolved, intuitive understanding of millions of years hanging out on the planet.

Only humans make a job of getting from womb to tomb. The rest of the natural world follows the path of least resistance. Engineers know that work is measured in units of energy spent in overcoming resistance by the nature of the universe. Conquering, containing, exploiting and mutating the nature of individual humans and the environment in general is the proud purpose of civilization’s mission, ostensibly assigned it by the creator of it all. With the exception of the minuscule portion of mankind that remains naturally indigenous, the natural evolution of man has been arrested by belief that he is an exception to the laws of nature granted by an imaginary inventor of it all. Authorities, pushing man’s laws on every newborn, promise that living outside its protection is to risk annihilation by a wilderness whose savagery can only be described in terms of the atrocities man has perpetually perpetrated in the name of his self righteous exceptionality.

The foregoing is to give some depth to my chuckle at the comment on my previous post, Does Not Work Well with Others, offered by one whose life is dedicated to making man’s laws to his own liking, to wit, “… opting out. SELF sufficient, the privilege of distance, so that one may critique free from risk or consequence.” And later on his blog, "…kindly fuck off and crawl back into your hole...or get off the fucking fence you fucking pussy and get into the fight!"

Such a staunch upholder of civilization knows intuitively that the real danger in life is found within the fight to make civilization as convenient to human exceptionality as nature is to the rest of life on Earth.

It is a wry chuckle, I’ll admit.

•

I realize that this post is in violation of my vow to post only fiction on this blog, but I figure that since civilization is the epitome of an ongoing revision of a fiction, perpetuated by those with faith in it and by the faithless unable to envision doing more than going along to get along in the anonymity of mobs relying on quantity over quality, it was within fiction’s purview.

IN PRAISE OF "AVATAR"

While the status quotients take pot shots from specialized perches, an entire generation of still absorbent intellects “get” the big picture being painted in glorious praise of symbiosis with that without which we cannot live. In making his latest, greatest attempt to effect the paradigm of man’s meaning in the scheme of things, John Cameron has synthesized so many disparate fields into this movie, Avatar, that it represents the epitome of the term gestalt: the total that is greater than the sum of its parts.

Like the beautifully depicted symbiosis of the Na'vi with the other beings native to Pandora by the twining of opened nerve endings in a gesture of surrendering individuality for the benefit of both, the fields of technical expertise brought together for this production and the very real problems caused by civilization’s attitude toward the body from which it arises encompassed by the story is an entwining resulting in the benefit of all.

The grumblers remind me of the railroad fireman’s lament, diesel putting their stoking shovel out of work, as each of their fields are being drug kicking and screaming into the next generation. Another reenactment of Robert Persig’s Metaphysics of Quality explaining the mechanistic ratcheting effect civilization’s artificial establishmentarianism puts on the otherwise natural evolution of man’s understanding of the living universe in which we are a dependent part.

My love for movies is of a piece with my love of all expressions intended to be of benefit. I am interested in expressions of what I perceive to be intended harm as an opportunity to examine my desire to protect the oxen I’ve made so sacred I fear their goring in the alternative light of as yet considered viewpoints. Movies are a way to put a subject on the table.

When asked his take on Avatar, an author whose book I praised for his insight into the ecstasy of symbiosis with nature replied, exemplifying the blindness of pride in his initialed authority, “I have no answer, because I do not watch movies of this ilk.”

I called him on it with, “Wow, Kultur, you really are a snob aren't you? Or do all of your ilk go around calling out others' ilk just to fit in? How do you maintain ecstasy so far removed from its source — the oneness of us all? “

Confirming his condescending hubris he answered, “BTW. Ilk means type, sort, kind. Sorry about your hypersensitivity.”

An acquaintance asked with whom I’d gone to the movie I mentioned just having seen. When I said I’d gone alone, he replied. “That’s the saddest thing I ever heard.” Hyperbole aside, was this guy implying friendlessness being the only reason for solitude? Or perhaps movies were, for him, just part and parcel of the more tedious dining, dancing, drinking ploy for which rohypnol is the latest keystroke shortcut means to an end? Who knows? In this day when dating means fucking and fucking means something being destroyed, who knows?

Well, I certainly got off on a tangent there, but it may emphasize how deeply I feel the movie, Avatar, can and may effect our possibilities of becoming symbiotic with the body upon which we now act like cancer cells. As all cures for rigid resistance to change in the aged, the natural regeneration of new know-nothing cells keep the possibilities for such a return perpetually open.

EVER WONDER…

Did you ever wonder, when you find something unique in your experience, whether it is something unique in the universe or that you are just the most recent observer of something that practically everyone else has known forever and takes for granted so never mentions — intrepid explorer on the curious forefront of inquiry or the slowest wit on the planet? Here’s one of those pragmatic moments of western thought when inadvertently stumbling into a zen understanding.

The theory of universal Darwinism allows as how, despite the exactitude with which genes copy themselves, the endless variation of life forms we perceive is a result and proof of the effect of their earthly environment’s inability to kill the survivors before they could replicate their information. What appears as design to imaginers of some master designer/creator is the natural result of information (DNA) being copied most by those variations that work. What works best produces copies that are that much more able to survive the dangers of living that kill all less able copies. Changes in the environment are always new challenges to and determiners of increasing hereditary complexity.

There can be little doubt whether whatever natural event one observes is unique in its occurrence. Even if it was the same event, the uniqueness of the observers’ reality tunnels at the moment of observation make the chances two people have ever been conscious of the same experience something like ∞ X ∞.

In this way it also leaves little doubt that what is never mentioned is either so indescribable as to be unconsciously filtered out of one’s reality tunnel or, if noticed, so extraordinary as to evoke fear of appearing insane to a culture whose existence defines sanity … or comfortably, civilly pigeonholed into the language of the myth with the facile subconscious mental collator creating reasons to increase the complexity of the language to more precisely separate events into things for expert specialization — denying annoying contradictions rather than expanding the inclusiveness of the categories.

OH

ohohohoh,

ititiit

is

so vast —

we see it all

words blow away

like leaves in the fall

mouldering in our memory

experience unexpressed feeds

seeds of metabolic metaphors

magnets align forgotten files

connecting all the labels

drawing all the tables

adding up to one

inexpressible

vastness

only

seennees

tootototo

beebebebebeb

beebebebebebeb

lived,devildevil

oh hohoho

SIR DAVID SINGS OF LIFE

ARE WE THE DROIDS WE'VE BEEN LOOKING FOR?

Ever since sitting in the hot sun outside the theater in the middle of the Highland Mall parking lot waiting to get into see the movie that coined the term blockbuster, I have been confused about whether I should let the farce be with me or go over to the dork side. Since we ate a lot of popcorn and I sat next to my buddy, Doug Cugini, his farts were with me although we’d gone over to the dark inside to see and be inspired for the theme to the Hole in the Wall’s Halloween party that year, Bar Wars. Even golf was never the same; when shooting par the fours was with us and when hitting a wild shot it was on the duck side.

I am still referred to as Yoda by a few who were around in those days. In fact, it wasn’t ‘til I reread that last sentence just now that I realized where I came up with Yodood as my replacement for the more forgettable blog name of gregraetgar (Green Graphics and (et) Gardens). Troutsky still calls me Greg, he’s so yesterday.

I never made it beyond the introduction of Jar Jar Binks before Lucas’ farce became too much and my DVD player went over to the dark side for that franchise. I have younger friends who revile George Lucas for so reneging on the promise of the series beginngs. We were all influenced.

Whether it was Sir Alec’s suave dismissal of the storm troopers searching for R2D2 and 3PO or Yoda’s convoluted language wisdom, there were sensations much more sublime than mere ears pricked up in this society already aware of the alternate meanings of the counter culture’s lyrics and their startling gestures like putting flowers in riot police gun barrels.

If language evolved in the same way species do, and records since language was first translated into stone and metal symbols testify to that being the case, observing the changing meaning of words to certain groups in the same culture in reaction to oppressive authority and relating that to a match in the variation of race to language, probable religion and national turf we can see that the expansion of the human race from one set of parents involved the oppression of crowding at least as much as much as from the natural curiosity of the individual being followed by the flock if the new ground works out for her.

Observing day old chicks evolve to egg bearing matrons, expanding from a cardboard box to a six by twelve foot coop for their first seven months to tentatively separating further while roaming this eight acre area in the woods by the Colorado River free range for the past three months, I feel like I am observing the expansion of humanity without the trappings of civilization establishing marks of permanent ownership though proximity sometimes raises squabbles with the other species and the years older hens whereever they occur. Squabble is a perfect word for confrontation with a chicken by the way, just like gobble is for turkeys.

These girls of mine, with no training other than copying each other, evolved a language that both sounds identical in words and personal in inflection when they are announcing the arrival of the latest egg or voicing their desire for a corn tortilla treat at the porch door. The egg announcement happens to be identical to every other chicken I’ve heard upon such an event.

So, are our words similar to the words in disparate languages through genetics or through evolving from one language. Are there phrases whose utterance in the right volume and frequency will be recognized by the genetic memory of the primitive brain triggering an override to anything learned since birth? Who is the hypnotist talking to?

I dabbled in hypnotism in my teens and decided it was one of those extremely powerful realizations that lead to my just-because-you-can/should-you choice to leave it as background evidence for my curiosity’s other tangential interests as a more oblique approach to this vast unknown. Justin, over at Memetika has just posted on the Millennium in the Shadow of Freud with links to the excellent videos aired on the BBC several years ago about the use of mass hypnosis through propaganda (bad mind control by our enemies) and public relations (good mind control by our leaders).

If we have buttons that have been programmed and someone knows how to push them, are we not the droids we are inventing?