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.

WHO AM I?

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Am I the imaginer of these thoughts expressed by the master of the minions flexing their laryngeal caverns to shape intelligent howls of the exhausted wind rushing for refreshing out there as meaningful bumps in the air?

Am I the imaginer of intelligent meaning to such vibrations as impinge upon and are reported by the sensate cilia of separate surface cells containing me and the beating of two drums deep in their separate caverns of my ears?

Am I the imaginer of my self as a biologically symbiotic body of cells that serves as one of myriad portals through which the infinite curiosity of the living universe observes and ponders itself?

As I do me.

Imagine that.

Is my name Mobius?

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.

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.

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

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.

HELPING

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

THE CAVE

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

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

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

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

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

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.

WORK

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

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

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

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

“I don’t know.” replies the lad.

“Where’s the County Courthouse?”

"I don’t know.”

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

"I don’t know.”

“You don’t know shit, do you, boy.”

“I know I ain’t lost.”

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

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

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

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

It is a wry chuckle, I’ll admit.

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

DOES NOT WORK WELL WITH OTHERS

It was the verdict of a two-day battery of psychological tests given him to judge his fitness to work for the earth moving machinery manufacturer known as Caterpillar. In his last semester, with nothing but liberal arts electives on his class schedule, Russ indulged himself in the perks being showered upon graduating electromechanical engineers in the age of the punch card Fortran computer industry’s embryonic stirrings before Silicon Valley was a sparkle in Douglas Englebart’s eye. Trip to Pratt & Whitney in Florida, to Boeing in Seattle, ah yes, this was what it was all about.

He had snorted at the verdict with the understanding that his four-year stint in the Marines before college were experiential evidence that he could work well with others under the direst of circumstances. He’d hated the whole enlistment for the blatant bullying psychology boot camp employed in shaping the minds of killing machines and so spent the rest of his stint observing the culture maintained within the indoctrinated mindset of such unquestioning patriotism. He took the best offer from the best company and entered the private sector as an acquisitive yuppie apolitically against the Viet Nam War.

Several years later, when his eldest entered school he began to recognize a parallel indoctrination in public education as he watched her, and recalled himself, dumbing down her beautiful natural curiosity to satisfy the demands of obedience to the certitude of authority in their idea of what constitutes correct answers to twelve years of probationary examination. The difference between the purpose of the simple military, “my country right or wrong” ethic and the “my truth right or wrong” being pushed by the public education system was one of magnitude not only in scope, but in inscrutability.

The military shouldn’t question orders or they might hesitate fatally and become wasted fodder — at least that’s the modern justification for the withdrawal of direct human participation in the slaughter of humans by the use of drones as we, the “legal combatants,” methodically rub out beings we deem “illegal combatants,” along with the smudge of acceptable collateral annihilation of the civilian population amongst whom they live cravenly hide.

Citizens shouldn’t question authority or they might — what — think for themselves — become an enemy of the state — become unexploitable — invulnerable to usery? The National Security Agency protects the authority of the government by hiding its ways, means and purposes from the very people being manipulated into sycophantic obedience while claiming the secrets are kept from the always potentially envious enemy jealous of our superior standard of living. He could only conclude that they consider citizens to be a likely enemy; if they knew. He never liked secrets.

The correlation of these two parallel Pavlovian processes piqued his curiosity about the human vulnerability to considering information transmitted by words as more valid in describing experience than one’s own information transmitted by bodily sensations. To vanquish all foes was the purpose of the military’s mindless obedience, but what was the purpose the military enforces and protects so mindlessly — against what?

Such ponderings lead him to a conversation with a gorilla named Ishmael who asked him to find the myth of his culture. How had man felt justified in departing from the relatively symbiotic ways of the hunter-gatherer to begin disrespectfully wiping out all local lifeforms to establish agriculture and the ensuing urban aggregation around the food getting places?

He felt like a cicada molting in the spring as he slowly detected the cicatrix of a shell within which he’d lived his entire life. The discovery reawakened observations of the natural world he’d long denied for their stark contrast to the cultural norm of going along to get along. The expansion of his vision formed cracks in the wall of the invisible prison the myth of western civilization is. The husk hangs clinging to his memory of civilization while he carefully extracts his natural genetic memory from the muffled existence it had survived.

He found that, ultimately, he did not work well with others and Caterpillar’s psychological testing was spot on; he would have eventually ceased cooperating with the purpose of an earth moving equipment manufacturer, just as he has the purpose of the earth owning corporation known as western civilization, US branch office.

EVER WONDER…

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

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

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

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

THE ENSLEEPENING

They called her Pearliña, for her lustrous grey eyes. They had no idea of her mission in life. It had been theirs too. Both of her parents had a long forgotten memory of their own birth when she opened her eyes and looked out at them as if entering a familiar dream, a slight smile of recognition at the corners of her lips.

His first awareness was of looking back from his location in the cornea through the vitreous fluid at the panorama reflected in the rods and cones at the bottom of the pool. It grew dark just as he felt hugged by his immediate family when the lid closed and their world rubbed her eye.

The super nova was seen by the naked eye from five hundred light years away. Bright enough to irritate the predator into stopping his stalk long enough to gnash after it under the scales around his tentacle pit with his scissor-tooth lined tongue.

It wonders what it is with every fiber of its being. We fibers wonder, “what is this world we are in?” We rely on our bodies to give us answers by reporting their sensations. Sound familiar? We are the infinite questions posed by one with no one else to ask; the ultimate psychotic who might not exist at all without imagining us imagining it.

Pearlña loved to dive for pearls. It reminded her of a mission, forgotten when distracted by her toys. She never found a pearl but she learned a lot about life in the sea. She opened an art gallery of machine parts discovered. after the deep had its way with them. She did so well she even forgot she was diving for pearls.

ARE WE THE DROIDS WE'VE BEEN LOOKING FOR?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

TOURIST PLANET

Something cracked in my tidy little world view some decades ago when I saw a TV show about a member of the British nobility having his family board at a tavern in town on weekends so he could open his castle and charge gawkers enough to support his royal lifestyle on weekdays of the year round. In a way it was like finding that I was on the Truman Show, and I was Truman.

Supposing the nobility to be noble, above the petty groveling of the peasants at the hooves of their passing, is the very myth that perpetuates any awe in the breeding of subordinates, so necessary in supplying the abundant obedient servitude that lives demanding expedient convenience with their leisure require. Being an allegiance pledging fledgling to the nobility of “… in God we trust” without doubting the high minded patriotism of others for most of my early life, seeing this pitiful display of effete inbreeding solely dependent on inheritance of the noble acquisition of such high position turned out to be a major turning point in my life about assuming authority, that of others and for myself.

I was yet to question the nobility of the acquisitions themselves; it takes a long time to awaken to the complete delusion of wishful thinking. No, this post is about the inherently effete artificiality at the root of any form of tourism, from my example of Lord Cantdoit’s pawning acquisitions from ancestors’ exploits abroad in the name of the noble empire, to international corporations’ embodying the essence of pimps by marketing the value created by a home grown community business for the profit of slave wages by moving it to an area where labor is still recruited by beating the bushes in the wilderness.

It seems like in every instance when I see someone cede the noble integrity of a vital, independent self-reliance to borrow the money to afford others to promise them a guaranteed future, I see a reenactment of the noble savage tempted from his/her relatively symbiotic, hunter-gatherer coexistence with the environment to join culture’s exploitation of it and each other to advance status in a culture based on eminent domain granted by faith in an artificial authority. Newborns today don’t have to make the two hundred thousand year acculturation from emerging homo sapiens sapiens to the pop stars of today. Culture has devised a way to capture the emerging mind before it can figure anything out for itself and snap it up to date on the latest craze without it even suspecting there might be choices or that something might be missing among the plethora of transient facts they must engorge for regurgitation upon demand. Evolution is such that infants have always been equipped to deal with daily life in nature at any stage along the way; the cultural myth being so artificially, arbitrarily imposed on nature as it is, is never consistent enough to influence genetic memory.

The reason we never attack the source of our myriad problems is because it lies within the pointing finger. Governments and gods were invented as proxy straw men on whom to project the justification for our abdication of personal responsibility for our relationship to the nature of the world around us, preferring to amuse ourselves with the tricks we can make it do for us with this cattle prod, this dollar, this gun.

Vanishing Game was the best flint knapper still living. His work decorated display cases in museums and dens of eminent historians and amateur nativists around the world. He did it all, from finding the flint out in the lifeless wasteland reserved for his people, carefully pushing delicate slivers of geology away from the rest of the stone-cum-spearhead along its fault line as thousands of generations of accumulated hunter's skills became perfected in his strong hands, donning the war dress he inherited from his great grandfather and sitting by the Res Road on a blanket all day – not a deer in sight – just customers.

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Taking where one is to be home

More dear than junkets to Rome

That leads one thinking what one sees

Are facts learned

Not faux culture one's fees

Paid acts earned.

5 CHICKS & A TOMCAT

I realized the hits I may invoke only after I finished typing the post title and am loath to change it just because it may disappoint the voyeur in us all. As my role model in reverse, Chance the Gardener (Chauncy Gardner {Peter Sellers}) likes to say, "I like to watch." These days it's these chicks.

Be that as it may I am hereby updating the breathless world on the news of the crew's cruise 'oer the land of the free and the home of a knave. Watching Priest's predatory instincts wax and wane with his feline curiosity is quite intriguing. He can sit obviously enamored amidst all five scratching, pecking and chatting about the smorgasbug offerings as sedately as I could hope for and I've watched him stalk low all the way across the yard as if they were his last chance to eat or maybe his long gone sister, Vera, prone to play like kids' cowboys and indians. No matter how many times I catch and scold him he manages to carry out his faux fear mongering as often as not — enough to evoke a squawk and a flutter, no more serious than their own pecking order arguments over food — and, having grown up with him every day of their life, they come right back to what was so playfully, rudely interrupted, while I still mother hen them two weeks into their free range adventures.

As the video demonstrates, if I can spot one I know within the hypoteneuse of a 6'x12' triangle where the others are.

I panicked when I touch the soft shelled egg in the nest until consulting goog ole goodle and found it to be common among hens' first eggs after moulting among on line eggery folk like me. Now I've made it more common, just because it calmed me down. Robin is the name of the hen I inherited in a mixup when my buddy, Chuck, retrieved his three chickens I baby sat over a week of his vacation. She was moulting because she is about eleven months older than her new coop mates. When the the mess her feathers were calmed down into smooth new plumage the turned out to have mousey brown feathers with pin stripes of their quills shining on her wings and back and her breast turned as red as a robin.

You may have noticed the markings on the radiant blond I've been calling Whynot, evolved from Wynona out of "Y" for the markings on her infant forhead, which have prompted me to now call her Dax, for the Star Trek symbiot and my buddy Babyldorkgalactinerd. The shot below is of Nameless One who watched me move that chair, my sieto, to get her food at every dawn of her life, so has stationed herself there and pooped in it to show her appreciation. I'm waiting for eggs.

If course, being the Simon Legree of all I feed and feed off of, I have devised a task for them to do when they're not busy laying those eggs they're always in process of making: I pile several shovels full of compost into the sifting screen and a token sprinkling of feed which they jump up to eat and remain to sift through the whole pile of juicy bugs therein, pooping all the while … the benefits of symbiosis never end. I like to win-win.

THE LOG OF THE GOOD SHIP, CURIOSITY

She shoves off from the safe harbor of Certainty, enticed by the perfumed air blowing in on the breeze from the Sea of Everything Else to explore its many secret charms her crew intuits inland while absently gazing out windows whenever inside. They are all avid volunteers whose focus long ago dissolved the slats of the bamboo curtains while reaching for the larger picture so far beyond the glass barrier. They sail in defiance of threats like, “there be dragons,” from frightened keepers of the faith in the prophecy that, if order could possibly be indisputably established anywhere, the wilderness outside won’t really matter and will go away.

She needs no recruiting posters. In the beginning so many felt wanted by the vast unknown the founding elders realized they must act to prevent an ldeaspora‘s dissolution of all they were trying to nail down. They relocated the population further inland to a territory they dubbed the United States of Absolutica, away from the temptation of doubt lapping at the entire fractalized coastline, not just their original landing site, Curiosity’s point of departure from Certainty. In recent generations Curiosity’s fleet has begun sailing other ships out of other ports; the happy ship, the Wrong, sails out of the well defended port of Fort Righteousness; the super streamlined yet slow boat, Our Desire, out of Sinisabad; the weird ship, the Anomaly, out of Normalcy; the intuitive ship, Yearning out of Comfort Corners; Question out of Patanser; Beginning out of Land’s End … you get the idea.

Moving to the heartland of the new homeland, clearing the area of wild ideas and building the great isolating wall of definition worked very well during the lifetimes of those who’d remained involved in the passionate debates about the righteousness of every rule laid into the wall and who’d invested energy in the labor of leaving it alone once put in place. It wasn’t too many generations along when the sacred wall, referred to by all as the DICTATIONARY, began revealing leaks spied by inattentive students’ wandering attention during the endlessly boring process of doubt erasure their public schools were.

The process of patching the DICTATIONARY with a new rule for every inventive infraction became a distraction from considering the impossibility of enforcing them, much less the loss to the vitality of the community of its most creative criminals by diagramming their sentences to jail. The prophecy became as threadbare as the emperor’s new clothes when the more imaginative among them recognized the similarity of their culture to the process by which innovative farmers surrounded each budding pumpkin blossom with a mold of the head of the head founding elder to harvest a lucrative commodity just in time to save everyone from the mess of having to carve them themselves and the shame of probably getting them wrong at Halloween.

The experience of being surrounded by so many mirrors reflecting one’s proper image packed so close together, sealed within the fortress walls as they were, stirred the embryo of an irritation within even the most indoctrinated among the orthodox.

Tentative attempts to escape constant reminders of such mindless conformity with forays into the wilderness were always accompanied by a gigantic vacuum/snail device that extruded an asphalt trail wherever it went to transform the land wherever it stopped by sucking it up into the mold of a road crossing with options at each corner from an approved list of necessities including bank, gas station, fast food, car wash, bar, car dealership, church, parking lot and personal technology retailer as a support for the relatively isolated, practically identical rows of individual sets of walls of personal fortress sprawl they named homes.

These adventuresome heretics were slowly granted permission to decorate their indistinguishable homes, built on the design principles of exactitude laid down so long ago, with the blasphemy of modifiers. A dab of green letters and numbers spelling the name and registration of the homeowners on the mailbox in front of one of the standard black and/or white houses was open defiance of tradition. The first person to hang an adjective on the wall in their nouning room caused a stir of controversy throughout the colony.

These outlying boxes remained connected to the fort within fortified capsules whizzing these rebels back and forth along the slime trail or virtually through the series of Ted Tubes from their homes to the trough that sustains them from within the bowels of the fort, the fountain of truth, the reward of a promise, permission to exist. Being natural entities these strangers to a stranger land gradually enacted an innate curiosity as unconsciously as the depth to which their education had buried it, but just as surely — as if "curiosity" or "why" were actual words, much less symbols for concepts they recognized and could discuss.

Ayn ran away from her stifling nest within the ironic curtain because there were no words to express to her parents’ and teachers’ satisfaction the questions she couldn’t ask about a world greater than the DICTATIONARY could behold much less cared to contain. As chance or the salt air would have it, her parents’ home was in the closest proximity to the coast of any of the fort’s outposts so that her flight away from the prosthetics and the walls and the asphalt through this garden of unexplainable phenomena was the first time any of her people had breathed unconditioned air or witnessed the environment without glass protection for three hundred generations … and it led her to a beach.

Ever since stifled reports of her survival in the wilderness without definitions began leaking into the fort, wakened curiosities have leaked out and trickled down to the coast to build this outlaw community of sea farers sailing the Sea of Everything Else and re-porting their ships to share novel words about novel experiences of larger samples of the infinitely big picture of the universe.

She’s sailing under the full moon tonight. Come on along for the endlessly interesting voyage of the good ship Curiosity. Your life will be its logbook, its entries, your direct experience; no hearsay. You won’t need words until you choose to re port.