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.

DRUM CIRCLE

The elusiveness of truth is the impossibility of describing the reality of the living universe no matter how vast ones realization and vocabulary may be.

The reason no one can “tell it like it is” is because “IT” is too infinitely large, complex and ephemeral to begin speaking about the truth before it’s different. To get around this, language separates “IT” into little “it”s: subjects of frozen specimens of instances, mini-truths like bugs plucked from nature, stuck with a pin, studied, named, added to the language and extrapolated back as a set of truths, or rules, comprising a fixed pixel in individual and cultural pictures of a nature yet to be realized.

Further diffusion of even these specifically defined word/mini-truths/rules comes with the infinitely varied evolution of each individual’s perception mechanism tinting meaning and blurring even the description of an event by many witnesses beyond recognition between one extreme and the other.

Great social change gathers around the most basic, least misunderstandible expression for the overwhelming rejection of the status quo being profited from and enforced by a word-controlling establishment. The strength and gathering momentum of the Occupy Wall Street movement is that it best expresses the solutions to the system against which it rails by General Assembly, evolving an entirely new model for social behavior among their many dissatisfied factions that, as separate causes, merely wanted to drive their version of the old model.

Together these volunteers, standing off millionaire’s minions sent to silence and erase them, make the sometimes loud dissatisfactions and as yet unexpressed, great expectations of this awakening giant resonate throughout the world in a visceral connection through the truth of the tune, no matter what language sings the lyrics.

A drum circle. A drum sphere.

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.

WHO ARE YOU?

I love the rain! ptl for the sweet sound. on way back from dropping kids @school I see a little boy in front of my house walking IN the street and not on the sidewalk high-stepping it in his rain boots thru the puddles unaware of much else. made me smile. Finally.

Its amazing how the down to earth, simple little things warms our hearts and brings us back to a reality check of our lives. How care free a child's life is when they don't have the weight of the world on their little shoulders. That's what our heavenly father wants us to be like, if we could just let him carry our worries and our cares. Easily say than done sometimes. Love you little sis......Have a Blessed day.

Pretty much all my relatives back in Mississippi, and places of refuge therefrom, sprinkle their Facebook communications with little “ptl”s and bible quotes. It is the only direct exposure to Xianity in my life. Realizing they are no different than the overwhelming majority of people who primarily identify themselves as non-hyphenated-Americans, I have been searching for the crossover between who I have come to know as an inner observer reporting the gestalt of my sensory perceptions to a consciousness for whom we all serve as eyes on the material manifestations of nature, just as our cells report to us, and the omniscience projected upon an external being that created the universe and is in control of every instant. My problem has always been with the established religions externalizing the genius with which individuals are born and on which they rely when selecting the particular character of their version of some god out there.

Being unaware of or ignoring the ultimate responsibility for what one chooses has allowed individuals to commit atrocities by merely going along in the anonymity of the dominant mob with only their inner observer to weigh the difference between reality and one’s version. The sweet exchange I quoted above between my  grand-niece and her friend seems almost like the crossover I seek when little children are said to be “what our heavenly father wants us to be like” as if aware that, having taken the entire culture based on gaining permission from others upon their little shoulders, people have unnecessarily complicated their lives with smoke and mirrors.

THIRD (IM)PERSON NATION

Being the being we were born to be

takes a far back seat to 

doing the being for others to see.  

The imbalance in the dynamic of nature’s dual cycle engine: eat or be eaten, is the result of having no awareness of the observer within who, from the first opening of each newborn’s eyes, silently watches civilization enacting a mythical script with antagonism towards the natural stage upon which it plays.

All beings display self-awareness by remaining alive. Remaining alive accumulates experience with kinds of food and kinds of predators. The consciousness of a being must make sense of this experience to supplement genetic memory with updates on the present to prolong its life. Making sense of it all could be seen as each being‘s personal narrative, the efficacy of which is attested to by its length.

Unlike their fellow beings, humans have managed to inject a mythical story into the experience of its progeny that transforms the organic eat/eaten dynamic into a mechanistic pass/fail exam with no predators but one’s betters. Being given no credit for the innate intelligence of the observer much less time to become aware of and develop natural curiosities and capabilities as even human parents allow in the wild, the modern human infant is drafted into becoming a civilized adult upon its first inappropriate defecation, having eaten its first meal, the first step in its journey of isolation from nature as it occurs within and without.

When rewards for obedience to others’ nonsense have greater value than remembering it is a game we have a choice in playing, we are civilized; habituated to the game of conquering nature — one we cannot win. That we cannot win is being shouted from minarets and state houses by outraged throngs of people, from poisoned seas and polluted air by the planet. We must cease our antagonistic story of human superiority and become more symbiotic with the body from which we arose lest she shed us, like the diseased narrative we carry by telling our children how we’re supposed to live.

Having western civilization’s myth piped in from every experience involving people since I was born, it seems a bit arrogant to me that I can claim to now see through it to the way things are, to see what the myth is about after its wishful thinking and “facts” are gone. Either I fell for it, or my way was paved so long as I chose to go along and fill in the proper blanks, because I found myself on my own for the first time in an earnest, trouble-free, thirty-four year life; no one left to fail or be failed by. The combination of new experiences and perspectives I’ve had off the leash since make me unfit for leashes evermore.

In the mechanics of story telling there is the trilogy of first; (I), second; (you) and third; (him) person narrative. In the mechanics of Freudian psychology there is the trilogy of id (instinct), ego (actor) and super ego (conscience). Both fields deal with strictly human interaction because nature reads no books or enacts no moral purpose for a conscience to attend. But they are useful to demonstrate the manipulation of human instincts wrought by adherence to the myth by one’s own personal story.

Let’s let “I” be the first person narrative of the “id”: the point of view from the primal observer, the instinctual, genetic memory with which each being is equipped at birth. Then we can let “you” be the second person narrative of the “ego”: the point of view of the seen, being an observable object out there in the mix of nature and society. And lastly, we might let “him” be the third person narrative of the “super ego” judging the effectiveness of the ego’s act in attaining from others it’s personal purpose. Notice the hierarchy of transition from natural, as born ability to live in nature alone at one end to purposeful dedication to the authority of others in the mold of the myth at the other end.

In nature the id serves as a perfect guide to the ego's actions putting it in the way of food and out of the path of predators to attain the longer, harmonious life desired by the super ego. In civilization the id is a dissident silenced by the ego lest it spoil the performance of licking the boots of whoever plays the super ego to be pleased in its story.

Currying approval of the public has such a priority over knowing oneself in the reality of nature that, for many, solitude seems a death trap and in nature, filling the trap with tigers. In these days of wall-to-wall communication solitude must be sought out by painstakingly turning off every device in the house, not that there are that many who would. In nature, approval amounts to not being eaten and having what we eat nourish us. Among men, gaining approval and, ideally, authority, motivates every activity indulged beyond the daily bread — and it’s an arbitrary game — in which eating alone is pitied and not playing makes one the enemy.

Even the games played within civilization reflect its myth of overarching administration by gods or governments and the possibility of sainthood, president or celebrity for the most dedicated to making their version mean something to the most people, as if truth could be created by man, just as he attributes such abilities to gods and their books. Like gods, the pantheon of mini-stars of excruciatingly varied forms of vicarious entertainment have idolizers in virtually every smelly locker room, reeking pit stop, perfumed crotch pit, Oscar walk, radio talk, podium and pulpit — thereby sustainting their reason for living around betting on what happens next on their version of the soaps because it has more meaning than what they do between shows; their own existence.

THINK TANK SANK SUNK

This is an explanation of the simple fact that 

children enter public education as question marks (?)

and graduate as periods (•):

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

SHUN THE HAND

Storm against

The bars and stars

You pledged allegiance to

In the molding of your schooling

You are not

Fodder for the warring steel

If you can grow your own next meal

The unfolding of your schooling

Powerless

Against the razor steel

Peeling whiskers from your chin revealing

That Windsor tether to your schooling

Rise up

Dilate the cage of your crumpled form

When you face the truth you’ve long ignored

Since the scolding of your schooling

You are

The key to the cage

Not in rage but the will to disengage

From the emboldening of your schooling

Free

To walk away from your servers

Costing more than that tie could ever earn

No longer tethered to your schooling

This is what my asylum echoed while I was reading Bite the Hand, by my friend Pisces Iscariot at the Far Queue. We're saying the same thing from our own unique reality tunnel. Vive l'varietie

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.

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).

NO THEFT

Thank you for reminding me, dear thief

If I have, it’s only to share — you knew that

Of things, there’s always too many

As I learn to own up to my self

HERE

It's coming from the sorrow in the street,
the holy places where the races meet;
from the homicidal bitchin'
that goes down in every kitchen
to determine who will serve and who will eat.
—Democracy, by Leonard Cohen

I arrived here when nature rained me out of my home in the heart of the city.

I’d only one reason to leave my comfortable cave after sixteen years of settling in and it didn’t stand a chance of my acting on it, what with my proximity to the headquarters of Whole Foods a block away.

When my wife left, I realized I had never fed myself — from mother’s mammon to military mess to campus cafeteria to married meals I’d always been served. Since rejoining the single way of life thirty-three years ago I’ve evolved an organic understanding of my body’s urge for and reaction to what I feed it. I learned to enjoy preparing healthy food from its life reaffirming spirit to the very physical benefits of satisfying my urges in the most beneficial way.

I began cooking for my friends out of a kitchen in our favorite hangout, the Hole in the Wall. The bean counter practicality of quantity over quality eventually reined me in and drove me out by requiring that I serve industrial food. I left with valuable experience of life in the service lane from both the server and the served perspectives as a metaphor for what keeps mankind on the treadmill of this ruinously ravenous experiment that is western civilization.

An unusual spate of rain softened soil around the roots and soaked the leaves of the hackberry that had grown out from under my house beyond the tipping point of its angled trunk. The roots popped the wall and floor beams next door as it crept to final rest across the street over several cars of patrons dining at the restaurant up the block. When the city came out to clear the road they also noticed how out of code the turn of the century building was and notified the owner to comply. The business from patron parking outweighed the rent the restaurant collected on the space, and once again, the bean counters disrupted a groovy gig.

Here is where I have learned to complete that cycle of feeding myself by inserting myself into the natural chain of life as a planter and feeder of the food I eat and pass on. My broccoli is built of the compost of last year’s garden and leaf fall and my eggs are built of the insect protein literally littering this eight-acre spot on the bank of the Colorado. I have yet to do well enough to avoid trips to the grocery store but I have learned enough to know I could with more incentive. My carbon footprint is a bus trip to town and back, pollution of processing and transporting what products I buy and my electricity bill. I have worked out plans for a solar driven tipi and will be working on that for the rest of the foreseeable future.

The only other axe I was grinding, my disastrous relationship with the daughter who’d not been in any of my homes since she was four, disappeared like a bad dream when we hugged each other standing by Ella Falls and Piddle Pond last month.

Here I am, as vulnerable as I have ever been. Hit me if you can find an opening.

Turns out that this is my 500th post.

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.

ATTITUDES OF OWNERSHIP

Synapses stretched like piano wire between nodes of knowing nature as free as it is and points of perceiving the suffering man’s usury has wrought upon it all, I strain to speak the simple truth about the origins of atrocious war but words mean far too many things to be so clear.

There is nothing I have learned that can spare anyone the experience required to learn it for oneself. The closest I can imagine anyone coming is through metaphor poignant enough to remind one of the already known in genetic or experiential memory.

The history of the biological evolution of homo sapiens sapiens is replayed in the gestation of the quickening egg. The history of the western civilization’s evolution is replayed by enforced education in the local culture like molten matter injected into molds spewing multiple, invulnerable action figures varying around the theme of entitlement to all-you-can-eat-and-take-home-for-later.

By enacting such god granted stewardship with our attitudes of ownership we have abandoned hunting and gathering to take up assembly lines of crops and crappy crutches for crippled capacities to do anything but serve or be served wherever we sit, consuming and disposing in front of the silvery screen spectacle of the “real world” produced for our protection, our mental prophylactic against direct contact with the natural world.

It’s not like we’re living like there’s no tomorrow. Western civilization believes in tomorrow so much it ignores the present, right at our feet; the only place anything ever happens. While death to an entire ecosystem pours out of a gaping wound in the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico, the criminals and the police piss away the emergency of the still ongoing crime arguing the specific ownership of guilt and reparations to be settled sometime in the theoretical, non existent future. Had he been a CEO of US or BP, the Dutchman that saved the dike would have failed miserably, having no fingers not pointed at everyone but himself.

Efforts to stop the flow are stragedies of the worst humor and the antiquated cleanup technologies are inadequately deployed in a toxic atmosphere being underestimated by the same department who sent first responders to respiratory hell during the 9/11 cleanup. My grandson missed a trip to visit me with his mother today so he could stay home and captain one of the cleanup boats off the Mississippi coast. Heather, my dear Lilwave, says they haven’t noticed any peculiar odors there in Pascagoula, but, I gotta say, anyone who can live in the already toxic atmosphere of that little burg has foregone any claim to olfactory discrimination. They sarcastically refer to it as the smell of money. Oh, yeah. The real world where everything is ours to have.

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.

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.

•

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.

LITTLE THEFTS OF NOTHING OWNED

There’s a second part to the advice given young men contemplating marriage that is never given. Its omission could be responsible for the other half the divorces, the first half being the advice given prospective brides, but this is my experience, and I am male, born and trained.

Dads tell their sons, “Look at her mother. How would you like to grow old with that?” Despite its emphasis of a woman’s looks being a poor basis for projected lovability in a relationship, omitting it’s corollary can make it all the worse.

Prospective grooms should be told, “Look at her father, that’s who you’ll be expected to become.”

I was nothing like my father-in-law. We had nothing but loving his daughter in common. I never had a conversation with him that wasn’t in front of his TV. He’d come home from his welding job at the shipyard at four in the afternoon, unbutton the top couple of buttons on his pants, sink into his chair where he’d eat dinner on a TV tray and be trundled off to bed when his snoring sent his adoring wife onto action. At Christmas he gave all the men the same aftershave and the women the same cologne, every year. I’m still using the last of mine to clean my keyboad, vintage circa 1970. His slide show of a two week rent-a-trailer, touring vacation we shared consisted of nothing but crystal clear, sharp focus photos of all the historical plaques filling the frame — not one picture of the scenes commemorated.

None of that was me. I was an engineer who put 10-12 hours daily into my yuppie career with IBM going for the unlimited future. I played golf and sailed on weekends, neither of which she cared to share. She said I abandoned her

I married her to relieve the discomfort between us after we’d visit and endure her parent’s scorn at our unwed cohabitation. Ten years and two daughters later, she gave up trying to make me her father, took our girls home to him, sued for divorce claiming ridiculous exaggerations of how unlike him I was and won sole custody of the children. The marriage was to make her happy, I treated the divorce in kind and never contested any of it.

In my first test on what was to become my lifelong research into the ultimate duality of nature versus nurture I failed miserably. After repeated visits to see the girls resulted in the fireworks of her defensive isolation skirmishes, I realized they would always remember me as a disruption of their nest, so I backed off in the belief that relations could resume when they could write and read my letters. I never imagined, as she confessed many years later to me and the surviving daughter, that she would throw my mail in the trash, including a fairy tale I spent two years writing and illustrating.

When it seemed letters had not helped establish a better connection I consoled myself with the hopes that genetics would win out and her curiosity would exceed her mother’s old ex-wife’s tales — another case of naive wishful thinking.

When she did reach out to me it wasn’t out of curiosity — it was to express her regret that I couldn’t be at the afterlife party in heaven with the rest of the family because I couldn’t accept Jesus as my lord and savior! I realized how much she had irretrievably become her mother.

The other day I heard my self telling my friend Crystal’s grown son how small he was the last time I saw him and it took on the reverberations of echoing down a long hall built of the many other times I’d expressed my fondness for loved ones whose childhood was not my experience and my knees buckled.

The grief I’d stoically borne of years with only child support checks getting through uncensored, my daughter’s insistence to this day that I’d abandoned her, her refusal to invite me to visit her family, her eldest son’s graduation from high school came crashing down with all the weight of the cruelty manifested in the world by the unshakable belief in ownership — granted humans by the mythical creator of it all. What a crock of pain.

Roger says it all —
in civilization
"WHAT GOD WANTS, GOD GETS"

HOUNDED

When I was very young I thought I went on forever. Bumping my head on the crib seemed no different than sticking my finger in my eye; it was all me. The same part of me that offered a breast to suck later shoveled spoonfuls of prechewed food into my sucker. Having learned where my sucker was I became very adept at tasting every part of me I could manage to bring to it.

It was long about then that I became aware of a mischievous part of me that would make various other parts angry with me. I became very uncomfortable because I didn’t know how to make all of me feel good again. The more I seemed to disturb those parts the more they seemed to withdraw from me and I came to see that the misbehaver and those he ruffled were not really me. He became my naughty companion, Drill, and the parts he annoyed turned out to be my parents. The only reason I even recall having what they called my imaginary friend is my parents recalling my bringing him home to share it when I was called to lunch.

Drill was my favorite playmate for adventures in the deep ravine behind our house and might have continued to be if he hadn’t talked me into eating that strange smelling skunk cabbage we found one spring. My stern grandfather who always wore a vest was visiting when I came in with some leaves for everyone to enjoy. He made me drink several glasses of soapy water to make me expel that evil poison and when I puked he said it was the cure working. The combination of the traumatic physical sensation of transiting from groovy found flavor to soapy induced vomit and the mental confusion of such skewed logic from such an authority figure made Drill disappear forever. He didn’t go far, just out of sight.

His cantankerous mischief would show up whenever I began to wonder why the big people like my parents always got their way whether I liked it or not. Like talking me into eating poison, Drill would make me stomp my feet, slam doors, throw things and find a place to hide to get away from such tyranny. Instead of such behavior helping me feel good again it always brought the wrath of the big people down on me all the more. Just like my breath after eating skunk cabbage had offended them they said my bad behavior was due to my “unruly instinks”, so I figured we all knew it must have been Drill making me do it.

For many years Drill hounded me from behind the scenes whenever I would bump into authority imposing corrections to or limits on whatever I happened to be doing. School seemed like a gauntlet determined to rid me of Drill’s disruptive influence with discipline so counterproductive it only got his back up to the degree that I dropped out of high school with several hundred detention hours remaining to be served. Determined to shake my nemesis and become a good boy who could pass any test authority could put me to, I volunteered for membership in the institution I was convinced offered the most effective discipline available in the process of making one a real man.

Four years later, when my enlistment was up and he felt it was safe to come out of hiding, Drill’s persnickety ways prevented my remaining by dangling an opportunity to go to college where people got their own authority to run things. Somewhere during the course of my courses in college and promotions in the lucrative job it landed me I began to understand that Drill was far from being my antagonistic nemesis; he is the instinctual being I had been taught all my life was a nature to be dominated; he is the me as I was born and cannot help but be.

The person Drill hounded throughout his life was the person culture convinced must obediently seek its approval to be valid; the person for whom instincts were counterproductive to the purpose of becoming civilized. My experience of attempting to create and maintain that exemplary personality at the expense of the rich council of my genetic memory has stood me well in recovering my early intuition that my connection to the world goes on forever.

Now feral, it is culture by which I feel hounded, but only when I let it in through the doggy door of the intertubes.