07.19.08
Posted in Science, Society and Culture, Things on the Web at 9:03 am by Moody
How I wish I could claim to be surprised by the number of ignorant and stupid comments I see on “teh intarnets”–but I can’t. The ridiculously virulent form of foolishness that can reduce otherwise decent people to a manic and bellicose condition of trollishness is so widespread around here that I am more surprised when I run across an actually thoughtful, calm, intelligent (and intelligible) comment. It makes me frakkin’ sad and a wee bit pissed.
Lately, I have almost despaired over the miasma gathered about the issues of climate change and evolution. If it isn’t flat out ignorance of the facts of either subject (or both), it’s a pathetically malnourished capacity for understanding that conjures something very like it. Or it’s a pissy form of apathy. In any case, when it is not some form of apathy, there seems to be a rather fundamental dislike of genuine science on the one side, and an Ann Coulter-like support for the usual dissentient pundits on the other. Not suprisingly, those who automatically scoff at evolution or climate change typically accuse people like me of being the real fanatics, resorting to all manner of hyperbolic descriptions to describe us as, essentially, sickeningly insane and steeped in our own stratagems. They then go on, typically, to portray us as terrorists or amoral freaks whose agenda includes destroying the world that decent, moral, god-fearing, country-loving folks made or whatever. Or they simply say that we are obviously stupid. Not that both sides don’t have their low points; there’s plenty of pots and kettles, stones and glass houses, motes and planks, etc.; all the usual wanker stuff. But seriously, there are a number of strong distinctions between sides here, readily and accurately characterized by the presence of qualities such as insightfulness, integrity, honesty and forthrightness on the side of those who support the sciences, and an absence of one or more of these on the other. Take a look at the freepers and people like Michael Crichton if you’re not sure what I’m going on about. From one end of the spectrum to the other, their voices add up to a deafening, mind numbing wall of sound. It gets so that it’s very difficult for the lay person to get any idea at all of what’s simply true and what’s merely truthy.
This is a tactic of theirs, just so you know. If they can get you to stop before you start poking about, reading up, learning the facts, then they win. This is why their arguments usually devolve into ad hominem attacks or pulp fiction conspiracy theories. If they can get you to believe that what people like me are saying is equivalent to what people like them are saying–if they can so level the playing field–then they’ve all but won. They have the goal in sight once you stop looking for the truth beyond the post or comment. They have only a few steps to go in their endeavor if they can get you to think that in the end it’s all just arguments, smoke and mirrors, trivial or pointless. If you buy their shtick, you’ll walk away thinking that it’s all just a matter of opinion or, in some cases, that it’s a matter of shady politics or villainous social engineering that you should distrust out of hand.
It would appear that their shtick is potent. The sad thing is, I see a lot of people parroting the disinformation back like it’s a weaponized retort aimed at killing the bothersome dissidents who would overthrow a righteous America or patriotic “God” or some such thing.
But if you want the truth, here it is. Two issues (that are really kind of just one issue) here addressed in one rambling paragraph. OK? Listen…
First off, I don’t hate America or “God” (I am simply opposed to nationalism and theocracy as I am delusion and fanaticism). I am not a member of some occult cabal, and there is no camarilla speaking in Al Gore’s, Barack Obama’s or Henry Waxman’s ear. Richard Dawkins, PZ Myers, Sam Harris and the like do not want to eat your children or destroy morality. Secondly, that being said, a) please understand now that the world is in fact already beginning to feel the effects of global warming, a phenomenon that a great deal of evidence points to as having a man-made driver as its primary source, and know, too, that b) the theory of evolution is a robust, well-tested and open-ended attempt to explain the mechanisms of evolution–which is a real phenomenon in the world and not something that Darwin, Wallace, Huxley and many, many more esteemed scientists invented in order to supplant “God”. As for atheism (or secular humanism): it is not a religion, it is a philosophical viewpoint. Similarly, there is no “Church of Global Warming”. Finally, the scientific method is beautiful and trustworthy, and the dividends of scientific exploration are fruitful and exceedingly valuable to you, me, and everyone.
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03.02.08
Posted in Evolution, Religion/Spirituality, Science, Society and Culture at 9:55 pm by Moody
Let’s try to put it as simply as possible and see if everyone can understand it, shall we?
Science has nothing to do with “God”. Science deals solely with the empirical universe as it may be observed, recorded, studied, tested, etc., utilizing whatever tools may be created to do so, as well as our innate human abilities (though educated, certainly, honed and refined). Science does not deal with anything that lies outside its purview, nor does it make statements—let alone judgments—about any such thing. Scientists, whatever their personal feelings or beliefs, whatever they might choose to express as a personal opinion, do not interject religion or philosophy into their actual work because doing so would taint the science.
The theory of evolution says nothing about whether or not “God” exists, and therefore makes no claims regarding the qualities, characteristics, or modi operandi of “God”. Should a scientist express her or his opinion regarding “God”, her or his opinion is still incapable of reflecting on her or his actual scientific research. That is because science does not deal with unfalsifiable matters (matters which cannot be tested for empirical validity), and as the existence of “God” can neither be proved nor disproved then “God” must be considered an unfalsifiable matter. This is not a shortcoming of science or the scientific method; it is a remarkable strength. Whereas endless speculation and typically unresolvable arguments over hypotheticals belong to philosophy and theology, to the realm of science belongs only that which may bear the strictly vetted tools and critically maintained rules of science.
Naturally, the tools and rules of science may be brought to bear on any subject presented as empirical, falsifiable, and subject to tests of its veracity. Even when it is resistant to change, science does not turn away from a valid avenue of discovery because it may realize a fault in some long-standing theory. If one is capable of providing some real-world credentials and a compelling outline, and if one’s presentation includes a thorough grounding in current scientific understanding, then scientists will very likely pay attention to a new idea or theory. With a few sad exceptions, only the ignorant, the crackpots, the cranks and the trolls get short shrift from the community of scientists. And where the scientific community has originally failed to recognize a valid offering, time has—thanks to members of that same community—often vindicated the one who brought that offering. But never has science found something to be a fact or valid theory that at its base was unscientific, unfalsifiable. This is not because of some conspiracy against those who don’t know the secret handshake and password, it is simply and only because science has nothing to do with that which cannot bear the application of science’s tools and rules.
Science simply means “to know”, and knowledge is subject to revision as new, empirical, falsifiable data dictates it. Certainty is measured in percentages reaching ever closer to 100%—with ever-mounting evidence, the successful passing of tests after tests, more and more data, etc.—without ever attaining it. Science ends at 100%, for there is nothing to do after that, nothing more to know. So when someone asks a scientist trained in physics specific questions about this or that facet of, say, the theory of special relativity, she or he may shrug and say, “We just don’t know yet. Isn’t it exciting!”, exhibiting in the response the main trait found in scientists everywhere: undying curiosity yoked to the perpetual drive to discover, hindered only by the frailties of the human organism.
So why is it of late that some scientists are seen to be attacking religion, and why is it that some religious people are calling the theory of evolution inherently atheistic? What’s going on? If science has nothing to say about matters outside its purview (and religion is demonstrably outside its purview), and the theories of science cannot in themselves address religion due to the unfalsifiable nature of x religion’s primary assertions (its metaphysical tropes), then how is it we are in the middle of a culture war with a sampling of scientists on one side and a bunch of very religious people on the other? Who threw the first stone?
I do not have enough time or energy to devote to writing such a history. However, A.D. White, the founder and first president of Cornell, a professor of history, did have the wherewithal to write about the subject in the last decade of the 1800s. His work, A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom, is relevant today. By simply recounting history, White explodes the idea that somehow it was Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution that initiated the charge for some sort of godless revolution hitherto unimaginable. After discussing the early concepts of evolution “among the Chaldeans, the Hebrews, the Greeks, the Romans”, White notes some of the theological issues that arose in the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries, and concludes the second part of Chapter 1 by saying that
By the middle of the nineteenth century the whole theological theory of creation - though still preached everywhere as a matter of form - was clearly seen by all thinking men to be hopelessly lost: such strong men as Cardinal Wiseman in the Roman Church, Dean Buckland in the Anglican, and Hugh Miller in the Scottish Church, made heroic efforts to save something from it, but all to no purpose. That sturdy Teutonic and Anglo-Saxon honesty, which is the best legacy of the Middle Ages to Christendom, asserted itself in the old strongholds of theological thought, the universities. Neither the powerful logic of Bishop Butler nor the nimble reasoning of Archdeacon Paley availed. Just as the line of astronomical thinkers from Copernicus to Newton had destroyed the old astronomy, in which the earth was the centre, and the Almighty sitting above the firmament the agent in moving the heavenly bodies about it with his own hands, so now a race of biological thinkers had destroyed the old idea of a Creator minutely contriving and fashioning all animals to suit the needs and purposes of man. They had developed a system of a very different sort….
But A.D. White also believed that
In welding together into noble form, whether in the book of Genesis, or in the Psalms, or in the book of Job, or elsewhere, the great conceptions of men acting under earlier inspiration, whether in Egypt, or Chaldea, or India, or Persia, the compilers of our sacred books have given to humanity a possession ever becoming more and more precious; and modern science, in substituting a new heaven and a new earth for the old - the reign of law for the reign of caprice, and the idea of evolution for that of creation - has added and is steadily adding a new revelation divinely inspired.
As an educated and science-minded person, White believed that theology and science could be, and should be, reconciled. But he knew, too, that there could be no turning back from what science was learning of the world, that to turn back would be to turn against the flow of our better nature. To interpret scripture literally could never be more than a failure, both of the mind and—should you be so inclined—the spirit.
Those who would turn back (think of those in Florida and Kansas and elsewhere) are always the ones to throw the first stone. Scientists would rather not have to muck about in the fantasy world of creationists, but creationists won’t leave science alone. Theologians and religious leaders, religious adherents who shudder when fundamentalists cry out in public, have not truly risen to the challenge, doubtless because they fear that to do so would make their own faith look bad or sully it by proximity. This is a shame. Science, having nothing to do with religion by nature, has been made a religious issue that apparently only scientists, atheists, and a very few religious people see fit to deal with. Naturally, the scientists are accused of having an ungodly agenda, the atheists are used as proof of science’s ungodliness, and the religious people who side with science are seen as damnable liberals who are, themselves, lacking in genuine faith.
But it is in fact the creationists (and the promoters of so-called “intelligent design”) who are the problem, who create the problem, who sustain and add fuel to the problem. They do not seem to grasp that to teach someone the facts is not to indoctrinate her or him into godlessness or evil, whereas to indoctrinate someone into a religion that denies the facts is certainly a bad thing. Fundamentalism and other nonsense is not righteously religious, it’s thoroughly foolish. It may seem unfortunate to some religious people, but the onus is in fact on them to adapt to the facts or perish. The world is not the fantasy land that our ancestors often believed it was, it is something much greater and more amazing. You do not have to be godless or satanic in order to accept the facts of the world. (Cherished psalms, for instance, are not made less poetically beautiful or meaningful.) But what you have to do is give up on absurd literal interpretations of so-called sacred texts, you have to give up on certain naïve conceptions of “God”. If there is a “God”, she/he/it (or they) is much further from our oversimplified understanding than we’ve realized, and those who came before us were misled by their (understandable) ignorance. Even a hundred years ago (and, actually, quite a great many more years than that) there were people who understood that much. Science continues, in its non-theistic fashion, to prove the point. So the question is, why are so many people afraid to embrace that fact today? What is really so terrifying about an even greater universe than religions have made?
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01.21.08
Posted in Mine, Personal, Short Stories/Oddities at 12:22 am by Moody
It should be easier to explain than this.
To touch someone’s hand as you walk together through grass that reaches up past your calves to tickle that spot behind your knees. The smile that’s shared then. Not at all tentative, although you might think that’s what it is you see; boldness, actually, beneath the warm, translucent blue iris sky with its streamers of cloud like the Milky Way.
It should be easier to explain why this matters.
Not merely that, in later hours, alone, holding between both hands a hot mug of Folgers with a splash of milk and three teaspoons of sugar and one of chocolate mix — the mug sitting on your chest, on top of the blanket — you will smile up at the ceiling where the glow of the television brightens and fades across the grain. And that it will be just like the time you placed your hand over your niece’s hand as she petted the big black Lab named Chick, the first dog she’d ever touched, ever petted, in your backyard and she said “Doggy soft!” and nearly squealed with delight in that high little voice of hers, and her hand was soft and warm and animate, and her bright, clear, hazel eyes were wide as the ones you see in all those Japanese cartoons nowadays. And that it will be just like the time you brushed back your mother’s soft, gray-brown hair from her high, smooth brow and she sighed contentedly in her sleep, just before you headed off to bed with the holiday lights twinkling in reds and blues, yellows and greens, behind you, casting a warm glow from the front room and chasing your vague shadow before you toward the dimly inferred door of the room you still think of as yours even now that you’ve not been there for years. If only it was easy to explain this.
Those moments strung together like decorative lights or maybe like a cluster of tea lights on a table or china cabinet or…. Those moments blurring into minutes when there arose this sense of something eternal happening, bleeding through from some other dimension, from some unknown compass point, spilling into the now and uplifting it like an icon of joy. It’s not a matter of returning to innocence or finding love or being remade whole at last. It’s not just some confirmation of life or seal of approval from on high or anything like that. In some ways it’s achingly, stupidly sentimental.
But it’s also not that at all, because it’s like freedom and release. To briefly touch another and know, like a leaping spark of electricity, that you are both alive and there and real. To know that it’s really happening, and that all that came before is something that really happened, and that it will all go on because — look at the starlight! Look. How long did it take for it to get here? And it will be just like that, and like the time you took your first road trip all by yourself and realized that you were this autonomous agent in the world but it only mattered if you devoured as much of it as you could. And now there are all these pictures you have in various yellow and white envelopes, and all the ones in those two big photo books that you took the time to label and occasionally take out to share with someone who will try but never quite get how much the journey meant to who you are today. And it’s all such a jumble because how on earth could you ever say what it is you know it means… you know it means. How could you ever explain?
It should be easier to explain. Explain why you must weep into your pillow when it hits you just how significant it is that you were so fortunate to know that embrace, that kiss, that casual brush of a hand. How you burst! How you break into dust and scatter away like seeds to grow anew in a thousand other ways! And maybe it is that it’s simply not meant to be explained. Maybe there are some things — like rain falling on the window when you’re resting your chin on the chill, damp-feeling sill and watching the leaves just beyond the pane bounce and drip-drop the raindrops from each to each until the water is lost among the roots — that bear only silence as they happen and refuse to be captured when recounted later. Maybe it is that this sweet pain is a reward, a pointer that indicates without numbers or letters or art that you have done all right, and that you should be grateful for it, grateful to it, because it came to you for no reason other than you brought it, sui generis, to you.
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01.18.08
Posted in Atheism, Evolution, Personal, Religion/Spirituality, Science at 10:34 pm by Moody
“You can’t be a rational person six days a week … and on one day of the week, go to a building, and think you’re drinking the blood of a two thousand year old space god.”—Bill Maher
Let’s make one thing clear from the outset: Whatever I might prefer, I shall have no say in whether our boy chooses of his own free will to be an atheist, a monotheist, a polytheist, a pantheist, an animist or a panpsychist. He shall become what he will. What I care about is that he is well-educated and is able to understand the difference between a scientific theory and an unscientific or non-scientific belief. That said, it follows that I want for him, regardless of his chosen belief system or lack thereof, to understand that life evolved and continues to evolve on this little blue-green planet. I want for him to understand that the theory of evolution—as set forth by Charles Darwin and others, and thence, with the gleaning of ever more data, modified by countless scientists over the next hundred-plus years—represents the ongoing efforts of a great many scientists to explain, elucidate, explicate, clarify and interpret how evolution works, and that the theory is not “just an idea” or “belief” maintained by a few dogmatic scientists as they stew in a fancifully conjured but non-existent hotbed of righteous controversy. Put another way, I do not want our boy’s developing mind to be waylaid by the twaddle, bunkum, poppycock, bullshit and ultimate drivel espoused by some very vocal ignorant twits who believe literally, like half-witted naïfs, in what the Bible (or any other so-called sacred text) says. I want the boy to have uncommon sense, the kind that comes with much education taken to heart.
When a child, not yet 10 years old, attempts to tell an “anti-evolutionist” joke but is confused when you state that the theory of evolution does not say that we “came from monkeys”, one can be fairly positive that some irresponsible adult is behind the effort. When that same child then states that “evolution isn’t real” and claims to know this because he is “a Christian”, there can be no doubt whatsoever that some ignorant and twittish adult is behind it. In the case of our boy, it is his ham-fisted biological father who is attempting, with the guidance of a domineering white trash wife, to warp his mind. It’s the sort of thing that can make you throw up a little in your mouth. I mean, his bio-dad and step-mom are the kind who have a giant “Jesus Freak” sticker (in scratchy ‘agitpop’ lettering) on the rear window of their car.
I stand firmly with Dawkins and others who state simply that the religious indoctrination of a child is child abuse. A child, however precocious, is highly unlikely to understand that there is a significant difference between what is called a scientific theory and what is called “God’s revealed [or 'living'] truth”. When a parent says that something is true, a child is likely to believe it, especially when the parent attributes that truth to an even greater parental figure in the sky who the parent worships. Children are naturally gullible and credulous. They must rely on the experienced comprehension, the seasoned understanding, of their parents. This is not a bad thing, because trust in what a parent tells you may save your life or will at least make your life easier. But for a parent to selfishly mislead a child in the name of a highly questionable fantasy is… wrong, abusive, sick. I expect, of course, to be told that raising a child as a de facto member of this or that religion is normal, natural and good; that it introduces morality, otherwise presumed absent or somehow immanently inferior without it; that it may very well save the child from eternal damnation at the hands of an all-merciful, all-forgiving, all-loving “God”. Personally, I call that supreme, unadulterated, 100% bullshit. I say that that’s exactly the kind of drivel that makes a person puke even through the angry laughter of disbelief.
You may call the process of brainwashing indoctrination normal, but you should remember that it was once considered quite “normal” to beat children (–which, I know, you “spare the rod and spoil the child” types still think it should be so considered), and to keep slaves, and to treat women like chattel and indigenous peoples like plague (often while violently forcing their religious conversion, no less). “Natural and good” are, taken together or apart, suspect from the get-go. When you define nature in creationist terms, positing a supernatural agent as the author of all nature’s laws (which said agent may break on a whim), then I must look askance at anything you might call “natural”. The same goes for your idea of what’s “good” when, according to your beliefs, “good” is whatever “God” says it is. When you can read about “God” ordering the slaughter of men, women, children, babies (born and unborn), and say that it’s “good”, for whatever reason, then I must hold your concept of “good” in contempt.
As for morality, “God” is neither required nor suggested; the word’s Latin root, mor-, simply means ‘custom’. The morality of the Bible is preserved as an historic religious record of a relatively small number of people who lived over 2000 years ago. As a book it is biased toward promoting the view of certain sects of the time while denigrating others, and has a subtle pro-Roman stance. The historicity of many of its books is dubious (where the book in question is not already utterly beyond such consideration; e.g. Genesis), and the preposterous claims liberally sprinkled throughout the pages of the books it comprises are completely undermining of any respectable assertion of Biblical authority a reasonable person might make. I would dare go so far as to say that this is true of most so-called “Holy Books” the world over.
It is, frankly, horrifically despicable to inflict upon a child the notion of damnation, to fill his or her head with images of an all-powerful “God” condemning unbelievers and failed persons to eternal torment. When you consider that one of the people threatened with this endless wailing and gnashing of teeth is one of the child’s parents…. Well, it’s sickening. How could that not be damaging to a child’s developing mind? What a din of cognitive dissonance! How could that not create an unbearable helplessness and thus necessitate a split from the parent ostracized by “God”? How could that not succeed at being isolating in terms of the child’s sense of place in the greater world? A scarring shame should be visited upon any adult so selfishly motivated (by delusion or stratagem) as to poison the healthy development of a mind. And yet it is that a great many people around this country would consider me to be in the wrong.
Some would suggest that they would only teach “God’s love”, charity and kindness, honesty and good will. They would say that those other people are simply misled. But I say bollocks to that! It’s a cop out. Unless you’ve revised your own Bible (or Koran or whatever) or otherwise bowdlerized it–which, so far as I am aware, would make you a heretic or blasphemer–then you are copping out when it comes to a) the truth of what’s in your so-called “Holy Book” and b) dealing with what it is your fellow adherents believe that book to mean. If those other people are wrong, then isn’t it up to you to prove it to them, to enlighten them, to shun them if they will not see reason? If you allow fanatics to scream their misunderstanding as if it represented your religion, as if it were the “gospel truth”, then are you not tacitly allowing that they are merely more vociferous members of your congregation who say what you will not? Are you afraid of schism? Are you afraid of drawing attention? Are you afraid… or just indolent or cowardly? If your “Holy Book” says some rotten things, shouldn’t you deal with that? If the banner of your religion stretches over twisted trolls whose sickness you deplore, shouldn’t you expel them rather than accept the degradation of your fine beliefs? Shouldn’t you be most vocal about it?
As for me, I see no saving grace in religion. I don’t care what goodness it supposedly inspires, because goodness does not come from it; from what I’ve seen, real goodness comes despite it. Real goodness may sometimes ride on the back of religion, as one might ride a mule, but it is more honorable when it walks on its own two feet, under its own power. In the case of our boy’s bio-dad and step-mom, they’d let the mule of religion trample him while they waved to “God” and whispered surreptitiously to each other about how pleasing it would be to watch their enemies burn forever. Sick delusions often have real consequences.
In the boy’s name I will fight their influence, and I will do so with my love for him.
Listening to: Leonard Bernstein & London Symphony Orchestra - The Rite of Spring: V. Games of the Rival Tribes
via FoxyTunes
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01.07.08
Posted in Out in the World, Personal at 7:35 pm by Moody
And the sky tonight as the sun went down was breathtaking. Deeper and lighter purples shading into ruby and blood orange, gold spending itself in smudged powder coral, cerulean steeped in lilac and bruised rose, iron out of focus behind a damp and gossamer veil of baby’s breath. Naturally, I spent an inordinate amount of time looking into my rear view mirror, trying to take as much in as possible, as I traveled northeastward home, sometimes, surreptitiously, craning my head around to glance at the sky. Dangerous, I don’t doubt, but I didn’t really care too much if it was. The sky seemed to respond, becoming more blood and fire, more lead and ocean depth, more cruel in its beauty. I wondered if there was a volcano spewing ash somewhere, lofting ash into the sky. (In fact, Tungurahua, in Ecuador, recently erupted, but I still have no idea if that’s why the sky was so spectacular.) The light seemed to capture a still life fraught with kinetic portent.
Ahead of me the mountains lay like monstrous blue-black waves, foam capped, with fairy lights irregularly spangling their flanks. The distant view of home. I flew along in my little cockpit, the car a machine toned by its inertia, an inhabited bubble with thoughts like psychological bacteria swimming in that living space curved upon itself. The sunlight faded steadily, unstoppable in its gradual disappearance, silent as silence itself, superimposed upon by the constant whoosh-rush of my heartbeat pushing past my inner ear, upon which, superimposed, the drone of the seemingly endless conversation on NPR, to which I no longer had any attention to pay.
Imagine me, you reader, if you care to. This falling night, here in my particular hemisphere, alone in my car, fairly floating along the inmost lane of the freeway like a blood cell caring not whither I would go, yet arriving almost certainly there. Imagine that within me there is that sunset exploding and diffusing itself across the vast plain of my heartland. And in that place are no freeways nor destinations, and light itself is called breath and wind emotion. And if you can so imagine this, then you may catch a glimpse of history unfolded like the night across the bed of the unfathomable sea of being. Nor does it matter aught, save insofar as you know it in yourself and prise the meaning from the nonce.
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10.28.07
Posted in Personal at 11:10 pm by Moody
In my life there have been a few things — outside the arena of the most intimate of interpersonal relationships — that I’ve enjoyed so deeply that they have, over time, come to be ingrained, have come to be mythologically archetypal, in my brain’s comprehensive sense of “pleasure”. Of late I have been thinking a lot about hiking and all that surrounds that activity. I owe a huge debt of gratitude to my father, who managed to get his listless, moody, youngest son out of the city and into the High Sierras and other places far removed from the concrete and tar of suburbia’s everyday world. Were it not for his insistence, I might well have never learned what it’s like to climb steep mountain trails for mile after mile to reach, at last, some forest bounded lake; to sit beneath the whispering, creaking pine trees at night, warming hands and feet beside a crackling fire as crickets sing and night-birds call from near and far; to wake up in a tent, nestled into a warm sleeping bag, with the bright morning sunlight highlighting the nylon wall and spangling it with the silhouettes of branches and pine needles; to breathe the chilly, seemingly pristine air while eating re-hydrated scrambled eggs (made from a mix purchased at the backpacker’s supply store) and drinking hot cocoa — both made using fresh mountain water; to munch on gorp (”good ol’ raisins and peanuts”) while exploring the wilderness.
Time has softened the complaints I levied against those trips. No mosquito or freezing night, no switchback or strained climb, no lack of TV or shortage of electronic entertainments ever annoyed me so much that I would forget, in the end, that I had the opportunity to see this primevally beautiful side of the world that most people, I’d guess, will never see in person if at all. Time has given me an ache for those vacations spent hiking and camping. I miss the dust on my heavy boots and the smudges of trail dirt on my face. I miss seeing the myriad, crystalline stars through the boughs of the trees — trees whose heady, living scent seemed a balm to succor the fatigued traveler — as the silent, immovable, sentinel mountains, guarding nature’s sense of eternity from the invasive light of so-called civilization, cut imposing blue-black swathes into the clear night sky.
To watch the trout plucking insects from the surface of a lake early in the morning, while the mist yet lay upon its far bank with its flowered meadow, as I washed my face with the lake’s cold, cold water: — this was joy unbridled and larger than me. From time to time in years to come I would ascribe this sense of joy to what is usually called Providence, saying to myself that “God” was surely revealed among the rivers, lakes, trees, mountains and creatures of such distant places as I then stood. Although I have long since abandoned the idea of such Providence as achingly sentimental at its root and needy in a childlike way, I nonetheless feel a very real atheistic reverence in me for such places and the journeys that lead to them. I am grateful for my ability to appreciate the beauty and power of nature without superimposing some sort of story or motive upon it. Nature provides to any open-minded person a seat in the front row of its ceaseless chautauqua.
And I know that someday I must return to hear it again… or else always know some extra burden, however small or easily repressed, of genuine loneliness in my existence.
……………………
The above portion of this entry has been sitting in draft limbo for a couple of days. Fact is, I’ve been thinking about more than just my experiences, and I feel I should confess that my dreams go well beyond simple hiking and camping.
A day or two ago I finished John Krakauer’s Eiger Dreams. Today I watched the MacGillivray Freeman film, Everest (originally shown in IMAX theaters, now available on DVD), which was filmed during the notorious 1996 climbing season — a season when eight people (unrelated to the IMAX expedition) died tragically during a horrendous, surprise storm high on the formidable peak. Krakauer was caught in that storm and found himself in the midst of the unfolding tragedy. Four members of the expedition Krakauer was with were killed. His expedition’s leader, Rob Hall, died from the intense cold and lack of oxygen. Hall spoke to his wife, Jan, via satellite phone in his final hours. She was seven months pregnant, and he helped name their child, Sarah — a daughter who would never get to know her father. According to Wikipedia:
During this last communication, he reassured her that he was reasonably comfortable and told her, “Sleep well my sweetheart. Please don’t worry too much.” Shortly thereafter, he died, and his body was found on May 23 by mountaineers from the IMAX expedition.
Krakauer, devastated and changed by the experience, wrote one of the most compelling books I’ve ever read, Into Thin Air. It was that book that touched something in me that had lain dormant since my childhood visits to the High Sierras. Eiger Dreams has only served to exacerbate that something within me.
Well into my 41st year of life, I know that it is unreasonable for me to think that — all things considered — I will ever test my mettle on some high mountain climb. Even were the monetary costs not completely prohibitive, my lack of experience and merely average health would serve as dire warnings against indulging any foolish ideas I might have. But of course that means next to nothing where my yearnings are concerned, and I know that it is a true desire I feel, one not done in by the practical world with its humdrum typical concerns.
If I am to be totally honest with you — whoever you are, reading this — what I know in my heart of hearts is that I will never belong to the daily mucking about, the fucking around, the much ado about nothing, the rat race, the game. What I know in my heart of hearts is that I belong only to me, — yet, to myself I am the greatest unknown in the end. And I think that it might always be so, if I don’t actually do something beyond what I perceive to be the norm. And I don’t want to die like that; I don’t want to ebb into nothingness, borne along in the boat of “What if…?” on the tide of self-ignorance, realizing that death won’t be so very different in the end than what I had all along.
I know that it is unreasonable for me to think that I will ever test my mettle on some high mountain climb. But mountains like Everest and K2 are to me no less symbols of my inner hunger, my internal yearning, for that, and I must somehow, some way, sometime come to approach them, humbly, earnestly, and with the understanding that of necessity I shall make the ascent. And perhaps it is, that in the years to come I will find my way to some real peak — my mountain, as it were — and find myself with goggles, crampons, ice picks, ropes, cams, carabiners, and all the rest, climbing for my life up some improbable face of granite and ice, wondering how it is such great fortune came to me. Or, looking further ahead, perhaps I’ll be stunned silent for a moment by the memory of this or some similar blog entry of mine, as I sit beside a campfire far off in the distant wilderness, younger eyes trained upon me as I recount my first real climb in light of my first hiking experiences in the High Sierras.
You never know until you know. What I know now is that we have to have dreams to get us to that next, mightily significant, wakeful knowing. We have to have dreams, have to have the yearning to see them come true, have to have the chutzpa and focus to find the way to realize them, have to know in ourselves that those dreams fulfill us like nothing else could, so that when we stand atop whatever kind of peak it is we ultimately climb — we know ourselves (to be) there, where nature’s ceaseless chautauqua names us.
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10.23.07
Posted in Personal at 2:01 am by Moody
“The theater of noise is proof of our potential.”
We welcome entropy, inertia, the maintenance of routine and its dissolution in thoughtless reveries, sex, new products, bright lights and big noises, war; the pursuit of happiness. In our glorious social hives we countenance no deviation from the de facto parameters indicated/sanctified by skilled interpreters/priests of market index matrices in n dimensions. We make up the amoeba-like consumer conglomerates, worshiping as with one mind the great and holy cartel in the Inc. sky: every mega-store is a church; every mall a cathedral; every swap meet a revival tent; every strip mall a roadside collection of shrines. “GOD” is merely an acronym for the “Gross Optimizer of Decisions”.
Can you see your TV as — “Happy Buddha”… {Call now! Operators are standing by!} … “Dancing Krishna”… {Don't wait until this offer expires! Time is limited!} … “Benevolent Jesus”… {Act now and we'll send you this bonus gift completely free of charge!} … “Wise Mohamed”… {But wait! -- there's more!} …? Were your eyes designed for capture? your ears for jingles? your tongue for McHunger? your nose for good buys? your touch for self-stimulation? Were your senses created for denial and/or satisfaction? Could it be true, that there is no truth so strong that commercialized, well-marketed delusion cannot filter it out for the masses? Could it be done in such a way that failing to accept the end product would result in a sense of alienation, a weight of depression, a twitch of anxiety, a pall of disassociation, der Geruch des Außenseiters, Sie niemand — ?
We need no more than the simulacra sold by hucksters at the cost of some undisclosed percentage of our mind’s freedom. While on the other side of the fence millions of animals are sacrificed to the beat of nihilism’s drum — slaughtered and stripped of flesh, ground up and processed, sold in sterile pornographic display cases — on our side of the fence we masticate the plasticized remains of their kindred, heedless of consequences, as images of death-sex penetrate our eyes and fuck our brains out.
While you pray or meditate or rant or otherwise occupy yourself, a portion of your (and my) tax dollars continue to help fund the oppression and death of countless living beings even as a portion of your tax dollars ia allocated to the furtherance of other “Good Social Causes”™ you have only maybe heard about. You (– like me, of course) will not stop paying taxes, and even if a few of us do it is unlikely that our protest will affect any perceptible change in life as we know it. If no taxes were collected, it would certainly have a deleterious effect on society. Perhaps it should not weigh on us so heavily (assuming it does) as it is so far out of our practical control. Maybe it is better not to pay attention to upsetting things… people, places, events, etc. It might be a good idea to sing “Que sera, sera…” with Doris Day and opine with wistful sincerity that a good deal of life is simply not in our control.
Should I not be bitter? I know the value of love in my life, and good people with whom to share it. Most days, I do fairly well at being a good person, a mensch even. What good is it to berate those who run afoul of my unreasonable standards? Who am I to judge? — But isn’t that the crux of the problem? Who am I not to judge? Who am I not to point out that someone is as guilty as I am? So what if they are misdemeanors and not felonies? What is the collective weight of all our misdemeanors? Alone in the depths of the steely night’s bowels, am I alone in such nightmares of self-recrimination and ubiquitous doubt? Of course I’m not! Are monsters no more than a deadly deduction of the children we drown in this societal wasteland? Is struggling with the inept personal management of a species-wide responsibility a perennial one?
How does one human animal contend against the seething abyss of injustice without suffocating in the contemned reality of it? I don’t know… any more than I know why I love so freely the artful folly of our incessant perambulation beneath a sky filled with more mass-produced Sword of Damocles replicas than there are stars to light our darkling way.
Ahhch — tho’, y’know… don’t listen to me.
Listening to: Ryoji Ikeda - What’s Wrong
via FoxyTunes
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10.22.07
Posted in Personal at 12:42 pm by Moody
Home on short-term medical leave (I had my gall bladder removed after a couple trips to the ER for gallstones), I’ve had some time to reacquaint myself with something that used to be called “leisure time” but what is now called “unhoped for and needed respite”. Below is a list of items I’ve either read/viewed recently, am regularly reading/viewing, or wish were on at present (TV programs with an asterisk are currently showing or are available “on demand”).
Current Book:
Regular Blogs:
Recently Read:
Must-See TV:
Movies:
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10.20.07
Posted in Music at 9:46 pm by Moody
The following four albums — however different from each other they may be — should be considered indispensable for your music library. Each proves itself on its own terms, building on the merits of those that preceded it. While any one of them might not be your cup of tea, there is not any doubt that all of them are top shelf in terms of quality. All are worth at least sampling, regardless of your usual tastes; who knows when a new favorite might emerge? Goûtez la différence. Apprenez la différence. Vive la différence!
(Just click the album covers to go to the band/album page.)
Radiohead, In Rainbows
![[image]](http://verywide.net/blog/wp-content/images/misc_others/radiohead-inrainbows.jpg "Radiohead: In Rainbows")
Longtime fans of Radiohead have, over the years since Pablo Honey, come to expect surprises, innovation, and the surpassing of all previous efforts with each new release. Although Hail to the Thief felt, to some extent, like a subtle return to elements found in OK Computer and The Bends, it was still different, still another animal. But while In Rainbows builds on the sound of previous albums, it seems to finally realize a true and full synthesis (not distillation) of and balance between all that preceded it. It seems the title suggests as much; all the colors of the band’s music are represented in one overarching work.
If synthesizing and finding the balance point of the band’s distinctive sound on a new album was what they sought to do, the members of Radiohead succeeded admirably. In committing songs to an album that were previously reserved for live audiences (the best test subjects for new material, I’d think), and then reworking them for the sake of the whole, Radiohead have produced an album at least as solid as The Bends and perhaps more accessible than any previous album. It is a work spangled with the sort of highlights and great moments that fans of Radiohead long ago came to expect, but it never brings about the kind of nostalgia one gets — the kind that sends you back to old favorites — when a band is passing their prime. Radiohead have the kind of staying power one hopes for, like a promise delivered in rainbows.
For a longer, more in-depth review, see Pitchfork.
Listening to: Radiohead - Nude
via FoxyTunes
Meshell Ndegeocello, The World Has Made Me the Man of My Dreams
![[image]](http://verywide.net/blog/wp-content/images/misc_others/meshell-twhmmtmomd.jpg "Meshell Ndegeocello: The world has made me the man of my dreams")
On her seventh full-length recording, Meshell has brought the inebriating subtleties of Comfort Woman and the algebraic jazz complexities of The Spirit Music Jamia: Dance of the Infidel together with the fierce incisiveness of Cookie: The Anthropological Mixtape to produce a truly innovative, hard-hitting, world challenging work of art that speaks with a blunt, poetic elegance to the life we have been given, the life we have made, the life we wish we had, the life we continue to fool ourselves about. If you are not confronted by the fearless questions Meshell is asking, then you simply have not heard her.
The world has made me the man of my dreams is consistently brilliant. It is a hard brilliance, like that of a diamond, polished by Meshell’s wide range of vocal emotions and amazing lyrical prowess, not to mention her astonishing (one could arguably call it “unsurpassed”) bass guitar work. Musically (by which I mean to include what is sung and how it is sung), the album reaches for and attains a level of pristine artistry; its complex constructions come off as mathematical simplicity, its simplicity unfolds into a rich tapestry of poetry as worthy as Rumi’s and Audre Lorde’s. Her themes are as diverse as ever, yet this album has seen their potency and temperament strengthened still further, as if she has somehow managed to squeeze into them the understanding of even more life lessons.
Listening to: Me’Shell Ndegéocello - Michelle Johnson
via FoxyTunes
Iron & Wine, Shepherd’s Dog
![[image]](http://verywide.net/blog/wp-content/images/misc_others/ironandwine-shepherdsdog.jpg "Iron & Wine: Shepherd's Dog")
“Southern gothic indie folk” would be one label you could stamp Sam Beam’s (Iron & Wine’s) work with, … with a side of Tex-Mex. However, it would be easier instead to say that Shepherd’s Dog is a singularly haunting album buoyed up by a smiling spirit and love of life (despite or because of the odds). To be sure, there is something so easy-going about Beam’s stoner vocals that you may, in fact, overlook what he singing:
Here’s a prayer for the body buried by the interstate /
Murder of a soldier, a tree in a forest up in flames /
Black valley, peace beneath the city /
Where the women hear the washboard rhythm in their bosom when they say, /
“Give me good legs and a Japanese car and show me a road” \
(from “Peace Beneath the City”)
With guests musicians from the band Calexico (with whom Beam did an EP called In the Reins in 2005), Shepherd’s Dog varies between southern and south-western regions of Americana in terms of style, but this only lends to the strength of the album because they mix so well in Beam’s hands. The fact is, the music is beautiful as farewell kisses, the lyrics are poetry as pretty as autumn’s favorite dresses, and together they create songs that it would be awfully hard to tire of in one long, worthwhile lifetime. Shepherd’s Dog plays to the part of me that yet hopes for a good ending without having to look the other way from what’s sad or hurtful in life.
Listening to: Iron & Wine - Peace Beneath The City
via FoxyTunes
Angels of Light, We Are Him
![[image]](http://verywide.net/blog/wp-content/images/misc_others/angelsoflight-wearehim.jpg "Angels of Light: We Are Him")
This release by Angels of Light (with Akron/Family and the assistance of several great musicians) should be considered a music library necessity in the same way Modest Mouse’s The Moon & Antarctica and Wilco’s Yankee Hotel Foxtrot are, with the understanding that We Are Him hails from ultimate Thule in comparison. Featuring guests like Christoph Hahn (electric guitar; open-tuned lap steel), Bill Rieflin (”Hammond B3 organ, Moog synthesizer, electric guitar, bass guitar, drums/percussion, piano, casio, and backing vocals and probably 3 or 4 things I can’t remember at the moment…”, according to Gira), Eszter Balint (fiddle and violin), and several other really talented musicians, We Are Him sounds full, rich, and otherwise instrumentally resplendent; it sounds, in short, like nothing you’ve heard before.
By turns hypnotic, dark, intricate, touching, creepy; We Are Him does not let up, even in its quieter moments, for its 55.7 minute duration. In his fifties now, Michael Gira — creator/frontman of the seminal avant-rock band, Swans — has spent his career honing a particularly sharp style of music nearly unparalleled in the (generally) non-commercial music industry. On this new album, Los Angeles native Gira sometimes recalls Johnny Cash and sometimes Nick Cave, but throughout the album’s length he maintains his signature style, a style tempered in the same fires — set by New York’s “no wave” scene — that gave us Sonic Youth and Glenn Branca. But, lest this be misinterpreted, let it be said that Angels of Light are the heirs of a certain attitude born in the late ’70s - early ’80s, but the music is contemporary; previous decades are not here revised or revisited. We Are Him is truly a work of this era. While others try to revive or recreate their heydays, Gira proves beyond doubt that his education has not stopped and that his development has been true.
Listening to: Angels of Light - The Visitor
via FoxyTunes
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10.19.07
Posted in Personal at 8:34 pm by Moody
You have not loved until love has stayed, unbidden, and over the course of myriad minor eternities and multitudinous brevities has recreated you, poisoned you, saved you, possessed you, freed you, ignored you, inspired you, exhausted you, succored and wounded you, maddened you and given you sanity. You have not loved until you have utterly and irrevocably forgotten what came before it, how you survived without it, how anything meant anything at all before it arrived, like a thief in the night, to lay abed with you and partake (sometimes in the preparation, sometimes in the eating, sometimes both) of your fulsome repasts, midnight and midday snacks, and meager breakfasts, with never a promise that it would do the dishes — though sometimes, with seeming randomness, it does.
Love is both the systemic/holistic grande apparence of a single member of the clade Homo sapiens in all her or his psyche’s glory and folly and the spirit of Hermes loosed in a miner’s chapeau as that a-priori-juggernaut ipso-facto-spelunker sings “This Little Light of Mine”. Love is a mysterious, compelling, fascinating, larger-than-life guest who may be mistaken for an angel or devil or god or schizophrenic — but almost never for a golem — when first it arrives at one’s door; it is none of these. Love may stay. It will probably bring gifts made of Tiffany wrapped in burning magnesium and/or carnival glass wrapped in tiffany on the Twelfth Night, just because. Love might move in on a whim, or after great deliberation. In any case, know beforehand that love will use your shampoo and toothbrush, but you will not care — because love’s hair will smell more wonderful than a recent shampooing warrants and its teeth will be whiter than the Pearly Gates of Marilyn Monroe’s haunted laughter. Love will ask you to do things which, if you do them, will seem totally unreasonable in retrospect, and if you do not, will seem like they were entirely sensible and leave you to wallow in self-recrimination. Love will bite you and kiss you. Love will screw you over, on, and under the table. Love will ask for chastity as it shows you naked pictures of its soul drawn in invisible ink. Love will ask you to buy it fine wine and tampons… on your day off… after waking you from a nap. Love will make it up to you.
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08.25.07
Posted in Personal at 8:19 pm by Moody
Enough of the heat, the clinging clothes damp and as effective for baking and retaining juices as foil in the oven. Enough of the thick, wheezing humidity of yet another breath. Enough of capitalist saints and all the other unoriginal sinners clambering up from the pit of because, clamoring for an angel dusted slice of the rancid old pie in the sky. Enough of the quasi-mystical bullshit and the crap monkeys. Enough of the warm soda that was cold only five minutes ago. Enough of the dog days and the catcalls and the birdbrains. Enough of the short tempers of long days. Enough of ennui, apathy, and bored stupidity. Enough of baseless religion and debased politics. Enough of hunger and uncertainty. Enough of debt. Enough driving back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, … fack and borth…. Fucking hell. Enough. Enough! ENOUGH! Enough of the dreamless silence, the suffering through thin hours of anemic disillusionment as the big hand and the little slowly wrap around the heart, choking it with relentless anxiety. Enough missing what never came to be; enough missing what did. Enough wishing that wishing mattered. Enough feeling faint beneath the weight of all the beauty “out there” — out of reach, among and amongst the stars, in the abyss of infinity. Enough of the sore throat and the repressed tears, the sublimated anger, the diverted stress, the deferred break down. Enough of bad stars and goat songs.
Time will never give up its triumph over the ephemeral. Nothing good or bad can stay. Everything passes, and in this way the universe goes. So it goes. Gonzo.
Listening to: Porcupine Tree - Sentimental
via FoxyTunes
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08.06.07
Posted in Personal at 5:02 am by Moody
A series of television channels flicks by at the usual pace of an artificial heart. But what is displayed is not the usual series of images one comes to expect from television. It’s not children, cleaning products, food, news, graphics, models, cars. The channels are from a mind. There is a significant degree of apparent randomness and apparently non-sensical juxtaposition that even the most aggressive channel surfing cannot match. There is, it would seem, an inscrutable symbolic theme, akin to an artistic vision, avidly attempting to reveal and realize itself. This vision, this theme, is totally unconcerned with points of reference such as hope or despair. Indeed, emotions irrupt into the totality of the moving pictures only as an effect generated by the alien act of an erstwhile objective observation, whose root source is a disease of time and space, a Möbius strip calling itself “I”.
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08.05.07
Posted in Personal at 5:16 pm by Moody
Reading Italo Calvino’s Mr. Palomar. The pendulum swings. The weekend draws to a close. I’ve decided to write an entry, though I’ve little I feel like saying. Call this a housekeeping entry, or a vague nod that says I still know the world’s there and here I am — now I’m down in it. The pendulum swings, but so slowly. Letters pile up in the in-box from people I really want to talk with, people I’ve effectively ignored for all these months gone by, hoping (vainly) that they understand why. How is it I feel so guilty for being in such a bad place? Bills pile up in the mail box, blood letters from the green machine. The pendulum swings, but so slowly that it feels like suffocation.
Advice to would-be bloggers: The saying, “Nothing is True. Everything is permitted”, is misleading. The days left to this blog are numbered. I do not know how I’ll pay to renew my lease with my host. Right now, even after having worked some 50+ hours last week, I’m not sure how to afford much of anything. Little things, like going out for a movie or going to dinner, buying an album or a book, leave me fearful. Yet, we cannot go without the occasional niceties; we’d go crazy without a break. So, we went to the most recent Harry Potter movie and waited in line at Midnight to buy the final book of the series (which I read in a few days). So, I got a new album: Opeth’s Blackwater Park. So, we now have some quality coffee. So, we’re planning on going to dinner somewhere nice, some Japanese restaurant. And so, we’re going to go to the New Pornographers concert at the Music Box at the Fonda.
But will I ever write to my friends? Will I ever answer a letter? I hope to do so before I die.
Listening to: Opeth - The Funeral Portrait
via FoxyTunes
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06.24.07
Posted in Personal at 3:02 pm by Moody
The words, the motions, the ideas, the constancy, persistence, enigma, ambivalence, frustration. These days. The attempt at working through them like a bookworm, devouring the book of my life but not reading even a single word of it. Surviving it. Pushing on it and pulling it. Climate forcing introduced by industrial dreams of success. The news is about what’s happening, but what’s happening is only the news. The television is not a teleological agent, tireless self-promoter though it be. Orange soda. Iraq. Cigarettes. France. Politics. Certified Organic. Hypermiling. The Sudan. Sex. Celebrity. Debt. The I.S.S. Distress and soma. Mission to Mars. Love. Lessig. Light. Sicko. Laughter. It’s the economy, stupid. Things that get better. Things that exist as things in the world. Palpable as architecture. Mnemonic like the mere mentioning. Breathless. Taxed. The taxonomic epidural taxidermy of the pachyderm in the corner. Diaries and logorrhea; talkin’ shit to no one. Punitive endeavors of minutes. Seconds as informants, rats and snitches. Every hour a trial. Endless testimony. Boredom. Ennui. The sickness unto death. Cancerous outbreaks of wistfulness attacking the brain, the throat, the liver, the heart. Clinical diagnosticians of the unconscious mind paid per diem sine die under the black sun. Protons do not decay. I repeat: protons do not decay.
I awoke in the warm morning light after having gotten a decent night’s sleep, on a weekend with two days off. Our family is safe for now, however broke we may be right now. Life goes on, and because of who we are we persist in learning from it all. We talk, we struggle, we tussle in the sheets on a night like any other and in the end we know we’ll be all right. We want to be all right. Just life. Just what you have when it’s all said and done, like everybody else. And the recent documentaries and pages turned linger in me. The Web pages perused and sites stumbled line the blood vessels of my brain. And I love harder, like flapping my arms in the harnessed makeshift wings I yoked myself with the day I committed to learning to fly. I run faster down that long slope toward the shore of the morrow. Age is gravity, you know, and I am Mercury. I am Prometheus. I refuse to be Sisyphus. I fucking refuse.
Time will run out, I know. Eventually, the earthquake will come, or the disease or tragedy. Life is unpredictable. Chaos is the result of there being so many rules, so many systems independently operating, that the unpredictable predictably follows. Human life is the ongoing attempt to circumvent the worst, circumnavigate the accident prone world by land, sea, sky and mind. Some do it for love, some for money, some for the love of money, some for discovery, some for thrills, some for the thrill of discovery, some for pleasure, some for pain, some for….
Some just want to know why.
I’m fighting to come to an understanding that I can’t even name. And if there’s a hope to be had it’s found in seeing that beautiful smile, in hearing the open-mouthed laughter, in seeing the tears dry and their stains fade, in feeling a live breath close by and soft with peace, in smelling the invisible glow of healthy skin in the dark of night, in trusting that vulnerability will be answered with kindness and not being disappointed… not again. And all the words can fall away like flakes of dead skin until I’m wholly new again, standing wordless beneath the blaze of the sun and moon and all the stars that drift across my hemisphere singing out the light of their universal story. I will stand there, silent. I will appreciate it silently. I will lay me down again by her side and sleep without dreams, the most vulnerable animal, heartbeat pulsing in my neck for any satellite to spy on, and know that I have all I ever needed in what was there before ever I started looking, knowing I found it only when I was ready.
This is how I learn. This is how I understand. It’s an imperfect process. Nothing guarantees its success. Life goes on for some and not others. Hopes come and go like patients at an E.R. while doubts dispense drugs and gloves to the nurses and surgeons. Who knows if in the morning of the following day the doctor will discharge the patient? And if I am wheeled outside through those sliding glass doors into the parking lot where someone waits with the car door held open, who can say how the world will have been transformed for me? How long will it take for me to realize what happened along the way while I lay in state? Will it even matter then?
What matters is what’s happening now. I see clearly enough where it will wind up. Life is a slow spiral from form built to form destroyed. We sparkle like stars across the endless screen — fathomless black and never backlit — of this tangled, conglomerate history we create out of radiant contrails, silk strands and piano wire.
There is dirt under my nails and a couple cameras in the closet. Mountains rise and hills roll to the restless sea. Clouds form and glow and cast shadows, dissipate and fade away. Trees slowly bend and wave in the breeze. The sun shines through the window of this room. Numbers pile up against me. My bare feet sweat on the carpet of the warm floor. My brow glistens. People move about. People I knew and loved are still out there somewhere, living their lives. Cars race by on the freeway, each with at least one story. Birds sing. Children scream and laugh. Chores wait. Water runs. Music flows. She loves me. I write. I wonder about it all. I marvel at it all. I know where it ends. The understanding is there. Life is here. Protons do not decay. Here in this tidal pool, there is space and time to understand. Life goes on. Right now.
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04.22.07
Posted in Mine at 10:53 am by Moody
ONCE UPON A TIME, right here and not far away at all, there was a little blue-green-brown world orbiting a common - but no less glorious for that - yellow star. Under the bright golden-white light of their star, even on cloudy days, many living things lived and died on this planet. The really dominant species was bacteria, and the second was insects, but the third, the self-congratulatory Homo-sapiens-sapiens, were total wisenheimers in the world-o-dominance and so called themselves the supremely most dominant dominaters of all what can be dominated. In other words: “W00t! wE pwn j00!!!1 1337!@”, they cried like frat boys.
Anyway, today is the day they called Earth Day, a day made in honor of themselves and their effort to make a good show of cleaning up after themselves even as large numbers of them still ran roughshod all over the face of the planet doing unspeakably vile things to it in the name of their god, “Free Market”. Now, some people really did do their darnedest and damnedest and whatsits to make the world a better place, and I’m not here to cast aspersions on them; the well-meaning are hard to find, and those who act on their well-meaningness are scarcer than hens’ teeth in the old chickens’ home (not that many chickens were ever allowed to grow old), so kudos to them (requiescant in pace and all that rot). But the truth is that in the end there were a lot of good intentions paving the road to that universal Lagos, and folks just didn’t get that there needed to be a massive revolution and not just a switch from regular bulbs to longer-lasting ones with mercury in them.
Because the revolution never came, and because they insisted still on driving massively wasteful vehicles on inefficient highways while gobbling up the planet’s resources as tens of millions of others starved or died from war or diseases, etc., and because they continued to allow an insane passivity to control them and their children, - well, things went from OK to not-so-great to should-we-worry? to what-shall-we-do-now? to oh-god-make-it-stop!!! to a death rattle. And then the bugs took over, although certain small mammals would disagree and nobody is quite sure if there are cetaceans left or what they’d say anyway. Probably just sing at you about fish.
Not to worry, though. It took quite a long while for humans to do themselves and scads more species in. Many of them lived and died thinking that - get this - the earth would be OK and nothing bad would happen. They thought they had insurance from the sky. You’ll just have to imagine me rolling my compound eyes. Even the kids of kids of kids of their kids managed to survive all right, I guess, all things considered. But once the religio-political infrastructures fell and the weather turned downright nasty on a regular basis and the waters rose and droughts came and viruses figured out new and unique ways of killing their hosts and famine swept the lands like clouds of locusts…. Well, it wasn’t pretty. It blows my wee little mind that humans ‘prophesied’ about it and then made it happen. They always were a species pro self-fulfillment.
And yeah, sure, all right, some humans survived. They don’t freaking look like much now, though. I’m sitting on the back of the neck of one right now. I’m not being swatted, so I imagine that this one’s not got much fight left, not much time to contemplate what happened. Then again, that doesn’t much matter to me, a gadfly on the neck of a dying human who probably doesn’t know death’s coming. Poor sod. Looks like it might have been pregnant, too… or, well, it probably just starved to death. They often look like that when they do.
Anyway, happy Earth Day! I’ll be seeing you.
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