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.

COLLABORATIVE CREATIVITY PERSONIFIED

In reference to the previous post about what's wrong with public education, these guys are probably drop outs, just to find room for this fascinatingly beautiful invention of theirs. I don't care if it does have a genre name.

THINK TANK SANK SUNK

This is an explanation of the simple fact that 

children enter public education as question marks (?)

and graduate as periods (•):

EVER WONDERED?

(h/t Pisces Iscariot)

If you're talking to yourself, you exist. That you ask would indicate it's a curious skepticism of an existence. That you ask the world you perceive if it perceives you seems like a conflict of self-definition between the perceived and the perceiver.

Therein lies loneliness, loss of the thread of life that energizes us all, that reproduces our cells from the same cosmic dust and enables us to have at it as we mayhap.

Alone, I observe a world needless of my observations to carry on and I feel free as I can imagine being. 

In the company of men I am trapped by supposition that I exist only where I, who I know myself to be, impinges on their unique sensitivities and agendas, waiting for that wink to  acknowledge the unspoken link of being different eyes of the same cosmic observer. Without knowing oneself, one is held in thrall to rumor, reputation and gossip.

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

THE BLIZZARD OF '11

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

… from the asylum of my natural mind

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

I couldn’t help but reply, “Trust?”

“Any of them?”

“These days?”

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

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

I’ll go blog now.”

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

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

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

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

PEOPLE WATCHING

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

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

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

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

Let there be enlightenment.

UP IN YER FACEBOOK, BUDDY

On a thread that asked what can be done about nuts with guns I began”Each person lives in a different world, their version of reality if you will…” when I realized I had the makings of a blog post to express, so here we are.

Thirty years ago I was friends with a group of folks occupying three adjacent houses communally in a South Austin neighborhood. Two marriages, graduations and other things to do split us up until a 25^th anniversary gathering brought many of us back together for the first time. I realized then how extreme our different directions actually were despite our copacetic coexistence in the eighties.

I had dropped out of a nine year yuppie track at IBM and most of them, ten to fifteen years younger, were preparing to climb into it. There was only one out of forty among them who even wanted to share a joint. It was the starkest example of subverting individual potential into service of the American dream I’d ever experienced … a veritable who’s who of international nuvo riche…I was a fish out of water.

A year later I was searching for traces of the woman I never quite got over and tried Facebook out of last-ditch desperation. I haven’t found her, but I did find a plethora of people I’d known in the past who friended me when they saw I’d joined. One of them was part of that communal group who it appears has gone yet another route to the American dream. After several months of increasingly volatile Glenn Beck informed posts, my friend, “Codger”, peaked out by making his profile picture a gunsight and defying anyone to show evidence that Palin/Beck/Fox had anything to do with the Tucson massacre way before anyone had, just as Palin herself had removed gunsights from her web site.

By pointing out how inflammatory he was being, his cadre of tea party crones came down on me with personal attacks as incoherent as Loughner’s web postings. I unfriended Dodger this morning and will hopefully remain out of the line of their fire. This confrontation also found saner heads who’d known Codger from childhood and were worried about his sanity … thus the thread this post is an attempt to address.

The only solutions to gun violence is to cease manufacturing them … as clear and impossible as outlawing war in a civilization believing in ownership. Although I detest all reasons for guns with exception of subsistence hunting, I cannot help but share the sentiments of citizens who cannot trust a government who clearly does not trust its people, as demonstrated by the furor over wikileaks exposure of government duplicity.

The best fix I have heard of for gun violence is, like all law enforcement and medicine in western civilization, pathological, not preventative. It is to digitally code every bullet so that the anonymity of the shooter disappears. The effectiveness of such a change is bound to have a preventative aspect for crimes where detection is inevitable.

But if you’re around the bend enough to spray a group of anonymous people with automatic gunfire, getting caught is no consideration … in most cases the nuts have offed themselves … unless, of course, they are in the employ of a crime boss or a warring nation. These aberrations have plenty examples of killing being a justifiable solution to problems, no matter how loose the connection between three office buildings being imploded justifying two national wars of annihilation and being fired from your office job justifying going back to the office and putting everyone out of their miserable jobs with a machine gun.

I can imagine no solution to mass domestic murderers except better friends unafraid to intervene, a partial fix is coded ammo and less available firearm capacity.

… NOT MY OX, YOU DON'T …

There are fixes … and there are cures. 

The wretched excesses of our source of wealth being a growth industry became an undeniable blight on the American dream when the cheap litter of the disposable economy settled like leaves in suburban trees and lawns and awoke comfy family’s sense of outrage enough to become a national disgrace. There was enough momentum; had we wanted to cure the problem by clamping down on products and packages to either be biodegradable or recycled through the manufacturers, we might have done so. Here fifty years later it has become apparent we should have done more than plant a tree, a shrub and a bush and don “Don’t Mess with Texas” bumper stickers.

What did happen? Eeewww, get it out of sight. The dumpster and bulldozer industry flourished and the ugly truth of our disregard for Gaia was swept under patches grafted over her skin or injected into her circulation system at sea ——anything to get and keep it out of sight. That was the fix.

I have been aware of most such faux fixes intended to keep down awareness of inherent skullduggery ever since, from the purpose of the NSA, the Warren and  the 9/11 Commissions to the excuses of the oil industry swallowed whole cloth by petroholic nations.

What prompted this post was an interview Rachel Maddow had with Paul Rieckhoff about the New GI bill and the influence his veteran’s group IAVA has had in its passage. In speaking of plans for next year, he mentioned addressing the alarming suicide rate of veterans. Wham, it hit me again.

Suicidal or otherwise mentally incapacitated war trauma victims are the canaries in a mine who are being treated as aberrations rather than the tip of an iceberg just so the mining industry can go on. Why would veterans want to cure the cause of the suicides’ problem, when they and so many that have gone before them have all been so thoroughly, obediently invested in its perpetuation. Our wars, food industry and gluttonous litter are to be kept out of the sight of polite society lest we glimpse the Ugly American.

I thank “God” for requiring the kind of faith that believes such cosmetics are both a necessary and an adequate cover — “He” makes them so obvious to we of little or none.

Often, what must be cured must have a fix on to survive.


The fix for Wikileaks' heroic exposure of national disgrace is to band together to criminalize the people's hero and perpetuate what he sought to cure.

NATURE IS NOT VICARIOUS

Civilization morphs human beings into human doings. This morphology has advanced to the stage where, to experience the feeling of “just being” in our daily lives requires the doing of, not only getting chores out of the way to make room for it, but scheduling the time merely to do the sitting and observing the world from such a relatively inactive proximity to being … with purpose.

Squeezed as our leisure is between the purposeful doings of maintaining and advancing ourselves within civilization, it cannot be considered a waste of time. An overwhelming portion of human doings are devoted to providing the world's doings to be watched during the leisure allotment. An overwhelming portion of human leisuring is spent observing these artificial doings rather than first hand accounts of natural existence. It makes them feel relatively good to not think about what they do otherwise but not enough to quit doing it for good. The victorious, vicarious fan switches off TV and schlubbs back to a life of quiet desperation.

Two separate human doings have crossed paths in my attention in such a way that it evoked this post. One is the demonstrations of solidarity displayed by both fans of “350” and protesters of the BP oil spill. The other is an attempt to get all human faces off facebook to protest child abuse. When I noticed the second doing it hit me … some actually believe nature is as vicarious as they are if they think demonstrations affect the nature of the environment or the nature of the humans against whom they rail.

No matter how many people participate, no matter from how far out in space it can be seen, not one particle of pollution per million or one bad parent per 7 billion was removed from the natural environment by flying and driving to however many solidarity demonstrations we may ever dream up or childhood cartoon animals we post as our portrait. Exercising individual integrity and responsibility for the smallest footprint by being symbiotic with Gaia is the only doing that matters.

I am reminded of times when a show of hands is requested of an audience in response to questions of morality from the podium are posed. 

AS ABOVE, SO BELOW … AND EVERYWHERE BETWEEN

Moths drawn to a light

Photo by Steve Irvine

Atomic Cloud Chamber

BIPARTISAN MY ASS

Crows seem to feel invulnerable to their natural predators when they are stalking each other, The electricity between all parties is amazing.

I FINALLY FIND A REASON FOR THE ACCORDION

After spending my lifetime considering the accordion somewhere between the bagpipe (officially declared an instrument of war) and the banjo (officially played in Defiance) for the title of least amusing musical instruments, I am delighted to have witnessed its use in this most amusing way. The downside is that all the other uses of the accordion, with the exception of cahunto music, seem that much less than before.

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.

COLLECTIVE NOUNS

Just as we call the biological cooperative activated by our cells our body, we erroneously consider the random collection of bodies, arising from and activated within the confines of the North American continent between Canada and Mexico, the “Americans”. Considering how this flock has represented itself to the rest of the planetary population since the end of World War Two, like crows, we might well be called a murder of humans.

Every commercial use of the word “Americans”, from political podium propaganda to snake-oil sales pitches to puritanical pulpit posturing is, in reality, like a blade dividing the ones who buy the particular use of the collective noun from the hyphenated and “un” American versions while ostensibly, ideally including everyone. And doesn’t everyone just love ideals?

The American Dream, conjured futures of wall to wall prosthetics and three hour work week for everyone, was the ideal prophesied upon the United States’ victorious emergence from WWII through the might of our industrial war machine being bigger than Hitler’s. Automation, yahoo.!

The American reality sixty years later is wall to wall prosthetics in the homes of the owners of the war machine’s corporations (those heroes) being powered by wannabes (US troops beta testing combat gear and inner city control techniques for swat teams back home) and wage slaves working sixty hours a week just to put food on the table and afford to buy the latest version of the greatest ever. As John Brunner so sagely observed, “It’s supposed to be automatic, but actually, someone must push the button.” The US is annexing button pushers world wide to keep the ideal alive for the prophecy profiteers and the employment up for “Americans.” If you can’t get work, I guess you know where your job’s gone and what subset you’re in.

Somewhere in the history of man someone declared they knew a purpose to existence that was so attractive to the human ego that it caught on despite overwhelming empirical evidence to the contrary. Imagine one’s self as being the purpose of all existence, created for you by your omnipotent father and given you to steward forevermore with his behavior as a model of administration. Whooee, I’ll take som’o’ that, and som’o’ this here and get away from that, it’s mine and it’ll cost ya or I’ll turn ya t’ salt. Even scientific atheists cling to the privileged superiority of man as they twist and commodify nature just as money fueled purpose has done to them. It is no coincidence that money accrues to the heads of religions and corporations in a culture where the reality of the individual existence is subverted to the ideal of a corporate heaven, or else!

Shedding our collective nouns until we get to the always fresh reality of every instant of our life is a cure for the confusion they cause: American, Idahoan, Married, Accountant, Baptist, Black, Female, Animal, earthling ……… genetically guided response to existence by observing a sensory hologram.

This rant courtesy of Pisces Iscariot’s email rattling the cage from both sides of which we write and sometimes rage. I have found a period in my life where, with no oxen being gored directly, I have been satified with watching annoyances dissolve without feeling the necessity of expressing them to others anecdotally or tiraditionally. I have formed more words in scrabble with my pal in Chicago than I’ve devoted to philosophical revelations and to which I will return with the letters E-T-C-S-R-R-I to fit somewhere into Bert's first word, B-O-O-T-I-E.

EVIL BASTARDS

SEEDED

The lust for comfort murders the passions of the soul.

 -Khalil Gibran, mystic, poet, and artist (1883-1931)

I am an event, part of an eternally changing instant. I trace patterns of similarity in events and feel the comfort of snuggling into labeling such likenesses with words used by some of the events similar to me. I am curious about my relationship to other events and ours to the ever changing here now of the present.

I perceive that the pattern of events events labeled human, by learning words to define similarities out of the variety of the whole, tend to become habitually dependent on the relatively inertial stability of confining curiosity to traditional labels as some form of impeccable logic by infallible authority in the tautological world of language.

I perceive that the most devoted to precision in this word world can no longer think without words or hear the less articulate. With language as prime stimulus for response these events most resemble sound activated voice recorders, silent unless spoken to or button pushed. Much like editors, their worldview is a collage of clippings of reports of hearsay from authorities outstanding in their field. Ideas no longer arise from the preverbal depths of their genetic memory. They can no longer sit still, alone, away from all signs of man’s existence without it being a test of endurance until they can find events they know the name of or someone to listen once more. Instinct and intuition have been demonized as the work of Satan, or worse, anarchy.

Without words, such hopeless addicts might never be led back out of their invisible prison by inspirational crumbs left by earlier departures in sublime poetry, song and tale about their very struggle to return to the clarity of our predefined nature, that focal point from which all perceptions, interpretations, patterns and words, emerge and remerge — precisely, here now.

It's the path I'm on…

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).