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.

… 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.

FOUND

“… children guessed, but only a few
and down they forgot as up they grew”.
——e. e. cummings

This morning my friend, Nikki, posted just the right thought to trigger my return to this blog after a month of Scrooge-like stinginess in expressing the wealth of inspiration I’ve experienced.

The people and property adjacent to my stomping grounds within the Dawgranch have changed, and with these changes a more communal atmosphere seems to be brewing among folks who had seemed to be content minding their own business over the six years I’ve thrived here.

I had to comment on Nikki’s post, …”adulthood is a phase of forgetfulness, enhancing our appreciation of nature when we re-emerge into children’s guesses with such wisdom.”

Fences were torn down, abandoned gardens were weeded, the sounds of hammers’ banging home nails on Homer’s recording studio remodel of Donna’s bedroom and back porch rang out in random overlay of the bird song and dog bark spontaneous symphony of nature, all the dogs and cats and chickens and people mixing like never before. My inner child sees the realization of utopian dreams more possible in the offing than any time since the games I’d played with other pre-school children living along the deep, verdant ravine we made our world - away from adults and world war two. We’re back to gentle guessing, with the acquired wisdom of experiencing the fallacy in the certainty required to make of this same nature a soulless commodity for the machine that shaped us to be eager cogs from the first day of public education.

Who Knows? Time will tell and there’s more of that than anyone here seems to need to know what to do with. Maybe (RIP RAW).

SAME STAFF, NEW JOBS

I’ve had another of my hare brained (or is that hair brained) ideas that are born of two examples of the US government’s being run by dollars and sense is just small change. One of the biggest costs of health care, the bureaucratic staff who make the eligibility decisions, is unneeded in a single payer system, more than compensating for the increase in service given. One of the arguments against such sense, made by insurance’s congressional shill’s is that saving money by ending useless jobs is somehow cruel to the people hiding in them.

My suggestion is that rather than pink slipping these paper pushers we just start giving them new application forms to play little Caesar with. These would be applications for eligibility for continued future use in a petroleum independent economy. There is no necessary evil we must embrace, lest it be our need to be served we cannot face. Shedding the spoiled skin of what I’ve come to call wastern civilization (the happy accident of a typo) is the end of a dream become nightmare.

In youth we feel richer for every new illusion; in maturer years, for every one we lose. -Madame Anne Sophie Swetchine, mystic (1782-1857)

The entire government is elected by people living next to an oil refinery and breathing the toxic fumes emanating therefrom, saying “I know it’s terrible, but it’s the smell of money.” They're just an exaggeration of our own corruption. There is no anarchist meeting at which we all get better together — individual integrity revolts when it will.

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Relevant addendum: Something to emphasize the contribution individuals make to the problems for which we like to blame the corporation that we support with our money — The entire amount of oil spilled in the Gulf of Mexico this summer amounts to that required to produce just one day's worth of plastic in bottled water, as ubiquitous as cell phones.

FINALLY, FATHER'S DAY

It feels as though my life has always had a direction based on overcoming the friction opposing my curiosity’s free will. Like the tail orients a kite, my concentration has been on reconciling a rift between my daughter and me by both working on myself and attempting to communicate with her at different stages throughout the 38 years of separation. Each failure was like tying another bow on the tail threatening to drag the kite down unless the wind of my desire strengthened.

Sometimes physical metaphors don’t do justice to spiritual phenomena. For the past three days Heather has sat beside me as we hung out in my little Dawgranch haven as if the past was a figment of both our imaginations. Any idea of forgiveness or atonement or injury or righteousness dissolved upon our initial embrace and we were as we were when she was a child.

I’m not sure if there is anything left for me “to do” in this life. I have only the will, but not the capacity to move western civilization toward a more symbiotic relationship with nature. So I think I’ll just let experience wash over me without filtering it for clues to my imaginary discomforts for a while and see how that works out.

BUSTED

Printing was to the bible what the internet is to politics. When the infallible word of the creator was made manifest, to be devoured by candlelight in the hovels of the more common folk, the patchwork quilt of a story, originally told to keep the clergy on the same page as they paraphrased purity from the pulpits, became shredded like a pig in piranhas. And the miracle was that each variety of bite taken remained infallible when digested and shat, despite the contradictory odors of the piles. Ah, certainty, such a relief from thinking. Don’t like the infallible, fine. Make up your own version and call that the truth, “… so help you god”. Ever notice that, no matter how personally individual one’s variety of belief in the same brand may be, faith requires all others to be wrong and on the road to hell. Such an outlook has made hell of living on the natural heaven this Eden of a planet is within the environs of the Gomorrah of western civilization, just to put it in biblical terms.

There also occurred across the land a falling away from the entire guilt trip the church had been laying on the faithful for the past fifteen hundred years as the more perceptive recognized the book to be a sales guide/brochure cobbled together from selected legends and myths five hundred years after the “fact” of the hero’s existence. Among them there formed two camps, the atheists who rejected the existence of a controlling spirit in a curious, chaotic world and the exploiters who began using the mechanisms of faith in the myth to pose as earthly authority over the material portion of humans no matter what they believed about god. Along with being unable to enter heaven without god we’re now unable to enter life without papers from earthly authority.

The internet fact checked John McCain out of contention. The internet is fact checking Barack Obama’s campaign promises into lies, just like every other shill for the shadowy shilling that’s come down the pike.

The disaster of this oil spill exposes nature to a blow the entire world will suffer for generations. While helping set booms in the gulf individual volunteers were searched in a cull for illegal immigrants by ICE; such meticulous attention to irrelevant detail. While leaving the inevitable overreach of greedy technology being operated by bean counters to gush billions of gallons of suffocating, poisonous crude oil into the heart of a planetary life blossom endlessly cycling her contents out among the continents, the responsible, real criminals, their overseers and the government elected to oversee the overseers have all been found to be one not-so-clandestine corporation. The shock and dismay. Bad oil companies. Bad government. They made us spend half our income on prosthetics only aliens to earth would consider necessities for life — within the Borg ship as it rapes and shits on the planet.

My previous video post, If Cursing Makes You Feel Better …, featured the lack of any real concern about the cleanup of the oil spill, even with the antiquated inadequate boom technology to harness surface slicks. Rachel Maddow either saw the video or picked up on the same glaring lack of concern on her investigative journey to the barrier islands off Louisiana and has taken it national.

Without waiting for Obama or any other blameworthy irresponsibility to give the orders, responsible, fit individuals should charter buses, catch trains, head for the most imperiled part of the gulf coast, don hazmat gear and begin proper booming and skimming. Full disclosure: I am not going to the coast-my lack of strength and stamina would only be in the way. There are technologies of absorption (aerogel) and separation (Costner’s Centrifuge) finally being given the green light, but the oil is reaching the wetlands now. BP get out of our way, there’s a revolution going on.

Or ought to be.

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.”

LIVE LIKE THERE'S NO TOMORROW

Alone on Preikestolen

Whenever someone advises me to, “live like there’s no tomorrow,” they might as well say, “Walk like you were born unable to fly.” Both are true, neither are choices; there IS no tomorrow and I CAN'T fly

Though we may speak of making big plans for future events, and as often as the idea may occur to us in different states of change during its development, the event itself is merely another such state happening in the same here and now from which the plan arose and within which memories will recall its having occurred. Experience can be had only here now. Time is an invention by which we speak of things not now, mañana, but we can only speak of and experience thinking about the concept in the eternal here and now.

We all live within a culture that practices the creation of artifacts representing our perceptions and conceptions of reality, and promptly forgets such symbols aren’t what they represent; worshipping golden idols. The only reality to such creations are the experiences of conception and manifestation on the part of the maker and of perception and belief by witnesses. It is fairly simple to perceive that a painting of a flower is not the flower in the vase sitting next to it, while it is literally impossible for believers to distinguish between religious dogma and wishful thinking — especially tenacious where scriptures are full of contradictions to one’s actual experience of the natural environment and prohibitions of one’s own natural behavior. It is as if culture pushes the idea that the more one must deny reality to live in accordance with the conceived artifacts, the purer the merit for reward in a fantasy afterlife. “If you want to get ahead, you gotta stick it out. My country, right or wrong.”

I fly with ease in my dreams. It is so enjoyable that I am a bit fearful of heights without a handhold when I’m awake. The concept of my flying is so temptingly real I can envision feeling that special organic intuition that signals my ability to levitate in my dreams, walking off into space to finally break through my own shreds of disbelief and fly away. I know the difference between reality and dream fantasy, I fell thirty feet from a trapeze when I was thirteen — straight down, no gliding. I am just as acutely aware of the difference between experiencing reality directly and experiencing the mere second hand information, at best, to be found in symbols created by other’s perceptions.

I have always walked like I couldn’t fly. I’m in the process of learning the benefits of living like there’s no tomorrow, in the here and now, and discovering the debilitation of living like there is some other when or where experience can be had by sacrificing awareness of being here now.

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Tangential to the forgoing essay is the matter of gaining enough life experience of the conflicts between one’s direct experience of nature and civilization’s antagonistic exploitation of it to begin questioning the authority under whose aegis one’s own nature is trained to obey and whose favor one’s reputation is designed to curry. Without such doubt in external authority’s righteousness in defining proprietary behavior, one must abandon any reliance on the intrinsic value of oneself to consider one’s own existence valid. Such people can never be alone because they cease to exist.

A real horror story would be to be unable to love myself unless I felt loved by another; as scary as meeting city folk who have never walked on the grass or were unaware Big Macs come from cows. Civilization breeds such zombies more or less successfully.

FOOD FOR THOUGHT: PICKLED BRAIN

"Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd."

—Volaire

Someone challenged my perception of the invisible prison within which western civilization lives by saying, “The whole thing is in your mind.”

I could only reply, "That’s the difference between you and me: it’s in my mind, so I can think about it while it is your mind and you can’t.”

Recipe for Pickled Brain — or — Thinking About What We Think With

Test for Ripeness:

1) Can answer all questions likely to be asked within 40 miles of home.

2) Hasn’t asked a question arising from curiosity for the last five years.

3) Takes authority to represent truth from pulpit, podium or plutocrat.

4) Never read a book voluntarily.

Preparation for Pickling:

1) Sever nerve paths capable of reporting unique experiences to conserve the energy normally required to ignore such messages for use in healing injuries caused by the same mistakes endlessly repeated.

2) Surround organ with an environment about which certainty is impenetrably dense.

3) Fill container with a fluid mixture of faith, trust, hope, belief and wishful thinking as a cushion against any latent instinctual resistance to the container.

4) Put on a shelf to ferment for the rest of life in isolation, within warehouses full of mindless millions pickling in their juices in the invisible prison.

Serving Instructions:

1) After aging long enough for all the heresy and doubt to be leeched, the once clear cushioning fluid will gel and turn as opaque as a proven fact. It is nowready to serve reliably.

2) Care must be taken to release the gas pressure of desiccated curiosity extracted in the fermentation process before handling individual brains.

3) Served individually they are digestible as paper pushers, bean counters, assembly lines and lifetime retail clerks. Not recommended for dealing with the vagaries of nature.

4) Served in mindless masses they delight the palate of the democratic process, tax base, demographic retail, preemptive war fodder, righteousness of the mostest and other forms of mob rule by deception of the willingly ignorant.

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I always wondered how the active verb, “ignore,” lost all sense of personal responsibilitly when the adverb form “ignorant” was applied while “unaware” serves a more precise definition of the condition of not knowing. Ignorant always carries the major context of having willingly and knowingly ignored that of which they are ignorant and their situation is self induced.

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A sure sign one is outside the invisible prison is inquiries begin searching for something truer than the answers that form the prison walls. Certainty is the border patrol around comfort zone zapping any illegal curiosity. Labels conclude the curiosity of the taught and are springboards into the unknown for those actually learning.

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The most difficult subjects can be explained to the most slow-witted man if he has not formed any idea of them already; but the simplest thing cannot be made clear to the most intelligent man if he is firmly persuaded that he knows already, without a shadow of doubt, what is laid before him.
—Leo Tolstoy

SLOSH

If my cells didn’t have walls to contain and separate their 60% water content, I would slosh to the detriment of any precision dexterity my clumsiness now enjoys. Humans are cells in the living body of Earth, the civilized of whom are being continually convinced that solidarity of belief in the myth of our stewardly ownership of Earth’s material property granted us by its creator serves us better than we can serve ourselves as separate, self-responsible entities free to behave spontaneously as the variety of our experience and instincts contribute to evolving wisdom.

The notion that “might makes right” guiding imperialism throughout history has been translated to “quantity dictates quality,” by modern society’s attempt to appear more reasonable than those other barbarians when getting one’s way. Thus we have worldwide recruitment, drafting, colonization and occupation of adherents of this religious faith or that political certainty to amass the quantity required to dictate the quality of life for all.

Such aggregations slosh rather than function with any detailed concern for local precision. Breaking up such groups, so large no one knows everyone, into tribal communities of kindred spirits capable of survival alone would be like trading in a waterbed for one with a million innersprings keeping local disruptions local; each lending stability with its independent flexibility rather than the destructive momentum of closed minds in solidarity unable to stop the slosh of obvious corruption.

My favorite wishful thinking is about the day in each person’s life when it occurs to him/her that the billion dollars for wars on other countries and bonuses on wall street are the candy spun by corrupt leveraging, hedging and theft of the essential value in his/her own labor being paid too poorly, spent too dearly, and decides to go to work for themselves, grow their own food, consume no products of exploitive corporations, form internetworks of kindred spirits living off the map and out of the system without a revolution — the paradigm shift of a good idea independently recognized and enacted without disruption of the bad idea — just withdrawal of a hope fiend from the habit of the hope filled. Sisyphus Shrugged.

PACHAMAMA

The other day a friend showed me a source of my frustration with the lack of response to my rants about civilization's rape of the planet and the complicity by indifference of consumers fueling such deadly aggression.

"I give you a ride to town and have to listen to your hatred of cars."

Snap. I all too rarely spotlight heroes on the positive side of ending the corporate globalization of capitalism and its commodification of everything. Well this morning Amy Goodman, my clearest information about current events, is in Tiquipaya for the World Peoples’ Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth hosted by Evo Morales, the original leader of the indigenous population's oust of Bechtel's claim on the water of Bolivia and now its President, who said in yesterday's opening ceremony,

We are here because in Copenhagen the so-called developed countries failed in their obligation to provide substantial commitments to reduce greenhouse gases. We have two paths: either Pachamama or death. We have two paths: either capitalism dies or Mother Earth dies. Either capitalism lives or Mother Earth lives. Of course, brothers and sisters, we are here for life, for humanity and for the rights of Mother Earth. Long live the rights of Mother Earth! Death to capitalism!

The clip I have embedded is an interview with an attendee who articulates the spirit of the gathering and speaks of an entirely new form of culture whose respect for Pachamama (a Quechua word, not derived from any colonial language or myth), Gaia, Mother Earth is restored to the fore as it has been preserved by the indigenous peoples despite colonization by western civilization. I intuit this gathering may well be that ground swell of good examples required to effect a true paradigm shift for the very reason that it comes from nature, the nature of people, and not the lifeless priorities of corporate states juggling the bottom line. Maybe.

IMAGINE THAT …

There is a land that thrives on the profit from production and celebrates the convenient use of real, verifiable weapons of mass destruction that constantly kill three times more of its own citizens every month than were victimized in the world trade center on 9/11/01 and exploited as justification for an, as yet ongoing, vengeful genocide of over a million residents of two countries not at war with it. In this land twenty-seven thousand individuals kill themselves using these weapons every year, taking fifteen thousand collaterally damaged innocent bystanders with them every year, and knowingly release a chemically poisonous gas as an afterthought killing an additional sixty-three thousand by respiratory failure every year, year after year like clockwork, give or take a couple thousand rounded off and rubbed out statistics. The lands being reduced to rubble in retribution just so happen to be rich in the energy required to maintain the suicide/murder pact agreed to in the land that loves cars. Imagine that…

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My friend Rita began losing her eyesight and muscle strength as she grew older to the point that when she plowed into a curb one day I had to tell her she should stop driving, to which she replied, “Don’t worry, I won’t get hurt, I have this big old Cadillac to protect me!” I’m so fed up with the leaf-blower version of responsibility so rampant within my culture I feel like publishing an angry post about the hundred and eighty pounds of rich, black, fertile leaf mold I just harvested for the spring garden from the pile I raked last fall — with the rake I walked three miles to Callahan’s to purchase — but I can’t. Just thinking about learning to live the alternative to cultural crises calms me down.

CONVERSATION ACROSS TIME

It seems it’s that part of a cycle that seems to swing my way every six or seven years which, after at least ten such occurrences, I’ve come to call the Big Sad. The phrase “sadder, but wiser” describes the accumulation of experience for one dedicated to understanding the condition of the civilized human that seems to rob individuals of their genetic potential. In such a funk, I cannot seem to articulate my thoughts with the intention of “selling yeast” when I feel like a rolling pin flattening the most pneumatic of wishful thinking, so I here construct a conversation across the history of western thought with a dash of eastern insight for flavor to describe my thoughts in the words of others who have influenced me:

“Sometimes I wonder whether the world is being run by smart people who are putting us on or by imbeciles who really mean it.”

“A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against its government.”

“The man who strikes first admits that his ideas have given out,” replied the proverbial zen master.

“If moral behavior were simply following rules, we could program a computer to be moral.” Samual P. Ginder, Capt. USN

“As the State is a soulless machine, it can never be weaned from violence to which God is a comedian playing to an audience too afraid to laugh.”

“Man has, as it were, become a kind of prosthetic God. When he puts on all his auxiliary organs, he is truly magnificent; but those organs have not grown on him and they still give him much trouble at times.“

“If you torture data sufficiently, it will confess to almost anything.”

“Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities."

“It is lamentable, that to be a good patriot one must become the enemy of the rest of mankind.”

“Whoever imagines himself a favorite with God holds others in contempt.”

“Permit me to issue and control the money of a nation, and I care not who makes its laws.”

“One has to be a lowbrow, a bit of a murderer, to be a politician, ready and willing to see people sacrificed, slaughtered, for the sake of an idea, whether a good one or a bad one.”

“It would indeed be ironic if, in the name of national defense, we would sanction the subversion of one of those liberties which make the defense of our nation worthwhile.”

‘Secrecy, being an instrument of conspiracy, ought never to be the system of a regular government.”

“Rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others. I do not add 'within the limits of the law' because law is often but the tyrant's will, and always so when it violates the rights of the individual.”

“If government knew how, I should like to see it check, not multiply, the population. When it reaches its true law of action, every man that is born will be hailed as essential.”

“What constitutes a real, live human being is more of a mystery than ever these days, and men — each one of whom is a valuable, unique experiment on the part of nature — are shot down wholesale.”

“None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.”

“A city that outdistances man's walking powers is a trap for man.”

“For men tied fast to the absolute, bled of their differences, drained of their dreams by authoritarian leeches until nothing but pulp is left, become a massive, sick Thing whose sheer weight is used ruthlessly by ambitious men. Here is the real enemy of the people: our own selves dehumanized into "the masses." And where is the David who can slay this giant?”

“Once you hear the details of victory, it is hard to distinguish it from a defeat.”

“When will our consciences grow so tender that we will act to prevent human misery rather than avenge it?“

“Nothing produces such odd results as trying to get even.”

“If you devote your life to seeking revenge, first dig two graves.”

“The dissenter is every human being at those moments of his life
when he resigns momentarily from the herd and thinks for himself.”

“I am now quite cured of seeking pleasure in society, be it country or town.
A sensible man ought to find sufficient company in himself.”

“Too many people spend money they haven't earned, to buy things they don't want, to impress people they don't like.“

“Future generations may regard the people of the First World nations as bona fide idiots—blithely driving SUVs and watering golf courses—and regard the people of Third World nations as aspiring idiots. I doubt future generations would understand. It is not that we are idiots; we understand. However, in the end we seem to have as much control over the current social trends as lemmings do over their fate.”

“Follow the money.”

“Imagine a world in which generations of human beings come to believe that certain films were made by God or that specific software was coded by him. Imagine a future in which millions of our descendants murder each other over rival interpretations of Star Wars or Windows 98. Could anything -- anything -- be more ridiculous? And yet, this would be no more ridiculous than the world we are living in.”

"If a path to the better there be, it begins with a full look at the worst."

“Life cannot be classified in terms of a simple neurological ladder, with human beings at the top; it is more accurate to talk of different forms of intelligence, each with its strengths and weaknesses. This point was well demonstrated in the minutes before last December's tsunami, when tourists grabbed their digital cameras and ran after the ebbing surf, and all the 'dumb' animals made for the hills.”

“Television's perfect. You turn a few knobs, a few of those mechanical adjustments at which the higher apes are so proficient, and lean back and drain your mind of all thought. And there you are watching the bubbles in the primeval ooze. You don't have to concentrate. You don't have to react. You don't have to remember. You don't miss your brain because you don't need it. Your heart and liver and lungs continue to function normally. Apart from that, all is peace and quiet. You are in the man's nirvana. And if some poor nasty minded person comes along and says you look like a fly on a can of garbage, pay him no mind. He probably hasn't got the price of a television set.”

“…the television, that insidious beast, that Medusa which freezes a billion people to stone every night, staring fixedly, that Siren which called and sang and promised so much and gave, after all, so little.”

“I am so convinced of the advantages of looking at mankind instead of reading about them, and of the bitter effects of staying at home with all the narrow prejudices of an Islander, that I think there should be a law amongst us to set our young men abroad for a term among the few allies our wars have left us.”

“War is God’s way of teaching American’s geography.”

“I believe in God, only I spell it Nature.”

“It is horrifying that we have to fight our own government to save the environment.”

“Nature's laws affirm instead of prohibit. If you violate her laws, you are your own prosecuting attorney, judge, jury, and hangman.”

“How strange that nature does not knock, and yet does not intrude!

“The plastic virtues: purity, unity, and truth, keep nature in subjection.”

“Nature can provide for the needs of people; [she] can't provide for the greed of people.

“The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing that stands in the way. Some see nature all ridicule and deformity... and some scarce see nature at all. But to the eyes of the man of imagination, nature is imagination itself.”

“Humans -- who enslave, castrate, experiment on, and fillet other animals -- have had an understandable penchant for pretending animals do not feel pain. A sharp distinction between humans and "animals" is essential if we are to bend them to our will, wear them, eat them -- without any disquieting tinges of guilt or regret.”

“Anyone who has accustomed himself to regard the life of any living creature as worthless is in danger of arriving also at the idea of worthless human lives.”

“A human being is part of the whole, called by us "universe," limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest - a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a prison, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons close to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from our prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all humanity and the whole of nature in its beauty.”

“An idea is not responsible for the people who believe in it.”

“The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently.”

“It is not human nature we should accuse but the despicable conventions that pervert it.”

“The mass never comes up to the standard of its best member,
but on the contrary degrades itself to a level with the lowest.

“Great bodies of people are never responsible for what they do.”

“What's done to children, they will do to society.”

“Children enter school as question marks and leave as periods.”

“The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule”

“Am I not destroying my enemies when I make friends of them?"

“To see ourselves as others see us is a most salutary gift. Hardly less
important is the capacity to see others as they see themselves.”

“It might be a good idea if the various countries of the world would

occasionally swap history books, just to see what other people are doing with the same set of facts.”

“You can safely assume that you've created God in your own image
when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.”

“It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.”

“Success is not the key to happiness. Happiness is the key to success.”

“In a time of drastic change it is the learners who inherit the future. The learned usually find themselves equipped to live in a world that no longer exists.”

“By the time a man realizes that maybe his father was right, he usually has a son who thinks he's wrong.”

“If you don't find God in the next person you meet,
it is a waste of time looking for him further.”

“My aim is to agitate and disturb people. I'm not selling bread, I'm selling yeast.”

“The most difficult subjects can be explained to the most slow-witted man if he has not formed any idea of them already; but the simplest thing cannot be made clear to the most intelligent man if he is firmly persuaded that he knows already, without a shadow of doubt, what is laid before him.”

When I can look Life in the eyes,
Grown calm and very coldly wise,
Life will have given me the Truth,
And taken in exchange---my youth.
-Sara Teasdale, poet (1884-1933

The first several quotes are linked to their authors through the terminal punctuation. I will be linking the rest as the will permits but that's it for the month of February. I invite your comments as always and will reply to those I get. See you in March?

… all out of bubblegum

"I came here to chew bubblegum and kick ass … and I'm all out of bubblegum!"

Just followed Crooks and Liars' video of the 100 cheeziest movie lines on their open thread to John Carpenter's They Live and was slammed in the face with a mirror. Made, ostensibly in reaction to Reganomics trickle-down economics amidst the disco era of '86, I think I missed it protecting one prejudice or another. This morning I watched it and realized that if I had seen it, this blog would be named the title of this post rather than more subtle cheezy line, "…it must be the vapors," from Vivien Leigh in Street Car Named Desire.

In typical, in your face moviemaking, Carpenter pierced the mythos of western civilization by creating an alien race of the shepherds of the sheeple against whom I attempt to refrain from railing quite so directly. With just those pair of glasses, our hero sees the subliminal messages behind the media in helvetica extra bold; obey, buy, work, like generic packaging, and the aliens appear to be skeletons. That may be why I didn't catch it the first time.

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.

COLD

Shivering is the low frequency end of what excruciating pain is the high frequency end.

Lower frequencies than that begin to sauté our butter melding with the wherever as frigid names crackle and flake away like melting ashes. If ever I pick up what remains of wherewithal again, it will not only have to be life threatening, it will have to get me closer to the equator, just so I retain some smidgen of choice in how I stroll and pedal my way to the inevitable compost pile of life’s omniped multicylcle.

Yeah, I don’t like cold. It’s never been a friend of mine. A carton of cigarettes a day are better for my lungs than 10 minutes of non-stop shivering. Not sure what the term for the respiratory equivalent to a heart attack would be, but I suffered one so arrhythmic the only way I survived the night was by passing out so I could breath in … over and over … until a guardian nerf eld discovered me turning blue in the morning in my hammock and fetched an asthema inhaler, melting the problem like butter. I'm still not back to my vigor before it happened three years ago.

Constant, excruciating pain is the white noise that is never gray, anywhere; each cell contributing the bayonetto (an extremely sharp bayonet, sharp even for a stiletto) extremes of its individual displeasure with the less than artichoke dipping temperature to which it is being so unjustly subjected making it move its own butter just to get warm, what a fucking wasteful indignity! My cells hate it when that happens and curse me long after they get their wind back and hit the showers. I am sort of obligated to go along to get along. I depend on a happy body. No body says, “Yo dood,” when me bod’s not with th’ haps.

What bothers me almost as much as this inability to adapt to natural temperature conditions in an otherwise pleasant environment is the findings that wild children (called feral only because of some inbred taboo against admitting we humans could be related to those over which we claim to hold mythically endowed stewardship, like the catholic church seeks sees after wayward little alter boys) have an almost infinite tolerance for temperature variation, implying that if my sensitivity to cold is not some genetic inheritance, civilization can make us incapable of returning to the wild in more ways than by our actions and our thoughts. Obviously we spoil easy … else we’d all still be laying back under the star lit skies out on the old homestead land instead of standing in long lines in neon lit concrete boxes of cities of a mythical homeland to see movies about laying back under the …

If only knowing that could make me warmer. Rub two thoughts together. Throw in some sapling theories for kindling. Watch out for sparks. Turn up the ignorant bliss to eleven … just a short blast from the furnace of insensitivity …

Oops, Mr. Buttersworth, cheap at twice the price, meet Aintyo Mimer, the original copier — snap — blowing by like the wind up toy skirts of — crackle — non-prophet hedges against — pop — faith in all-profit possibilities. Getting’ warmer. Pheuzzzzzzzzzzzz…

TOP OF THE SEASONING TO ALL

CREATIVITY: THE COSMIC WHODUNIT

The one thing common to all forms of creativity is the assumption of intention aforethought. From world creating gods to tide creating gravity, a purpose to manifestation of artifacts and effects is assigned as a tag with which to most expediently catalogue our ongoing experience of the present framed in concern for the cumulative sense of comfort about coming events. Believing that everything has a purpose is rarely tested beyond its ability to find a niche within one’s faith in a world and life as something being done by some super geek accomplishing a goal with us as the means.

The most rational among western civilization’s more curious minds are just lately beginning to question the demythologized, essential requirement of the concept of creativity: cause and effect — and how the admission of any form of simultaneity belies the necessity for assigning a direction to causality for change to occur. We impose restrictions on our possibilities of realization by our inability to describe our experience to ourselves in terms that can do no other than imprison our minds. Part of thinking outside the box is our willingness to understand our fluid, preverbal thoughts, unhampered by concern for whether or how they may be manifested, arising from the nowhere sea of the invisibly, infinitesimally small, instantaneous, spontaneous eternity of the present as they do.

The requirements of cause and effect take effect when preverbal inspiration sparks a desire to manifest itself in relation to a consensus reality, even if it is only an ironic smile crossing one’s face at realizing the twist such an admission may put on one’s own ongoing reality tunnel. Like those atomic physicists’ probes into the enigma of where, when and how who did what to whom in the otherworldly world of quarks, I have come to suspect there is an entire, underlying behavior pattern to my life which never consults consensus reality or my own reality tunnel as my body bops along relaying to me the world as it is and whether it cares to respond to any assumption of purpose that may evoke in me. This could mean that all I manifest, from language to action, is essentially a happening; an event my body was only too happy to be part of being. This way, the only doing involved would be to modify the synchronistic spontaneity of being in the moment to plan to serve some expectation, some purpose for mañana; just not now. It is very interesting that the finer science is able to slice time the less obvious the assumption of causality becomes.

It’s been a long, strange trip to get wherever it is I am, but now that I’m here I’m beginning to think nothing I could have done would have prevented arriving, no alternate reality tunnel could avoid including this empirical realization of the difference between being and doing. One of my dad’s aphorisms about the creativity of painting was to, “leave in the happy mistakes.” I’m beginning to wonder if my entire life isn’t just one big happy off-color daub of paint left on a world canvass painted by a soulless civilization with unlimited assumptions about correctness of its purpose.

All I know is that I can stand up from my seat in the shed with no purpose in mind, gaze around the garden, chicken coop, pond, compost pile, state of fall leaves in the yard and feel either an attraction to action or the consideration of procrastination in response to my avowed primary directive to maintain some sense of symbiotic benefit with my environment. I either go with it or sit back down. Most of the pleasure my life is to me is the realization that, while this environment of “my place” may not appear to be what it is if I hadn’t moved here, I have never actually “done” any of the changes; I just agreed with a good idea amidst whatever now simultaneously happened to be.

Without having been bombarded everyday of my life with culture’s idea that the world was created and is still controlled for the unquestionably holy purpose of having we humans to love and/or punish by the great transformer in the sky, I doubt it would ever have occurred to me. Without having to deal with a culture whose assumption of ownership and superior righteousness of purpose granted by their creator, my dedication to understanding it in a more profound way than can be expressed, and through such inadequate expressions as I may manifest perhaps resonate within still muddled minds, might not have needed to become an avowed a purpose for my life.

Maybe.

GRADUATION DAY

Yesterday afternoon found me with unusual optimism for the future of my class of '09 debutantes when I opened the coop door and tore down the mesh barrier to their just walking out. It took no time at all for them to escape their seven month home schooling and test their training on the real world. I am quite gratified that, with only one warnining, Priest was satisfied to observe them rather than attempt to eat the chicks he watched grow more constantly than I.

They have yet to encounter the dags, which were in Donna's house for the three hours they were out before returning to roost at their usual shade of evening, but seeing them keeping to the the 12' x 8' area of proximity to one another within which they spent their previous life even while they roamed all over the garden area, I imagine they will hold their own en masse.

The setting sun catches their exotic feather colors and patterns to perfection, if only my camera did.

•

I swear, I must be psychic. Watching this a couple of times after I slapped it together by equating giving the chicks the right to roam the same ground I do with Democracy, loving Leonard Chohen's song by that name and quickly publishing it I noticed the music sounds just like a bunch of chickens to me. Then again, maybe I'm not psychic at all, merely psychotic.