Monday, April 28, 2003

One of the other areas of exploration left on earth, that would be reason enough to become a many world government, a many worlds movement, is the interaction of different cuisines, music, traditions. Southern style biscuits, for example, go wonderfully well with a sharp, farmyard cheddar from England. And there's so much more. 11:04:11 AM

I wonder if, the same way we possibly have a residual ancestral memory of snakes eating early hominids that makes certain people fearful of snakes, if the inexplicable fear that some of us have for clowns and realistic dolls and marionettes and that horror of horror a realistic looking clown marionette, which provides so much latitude for interpretation, and hence, ubiquitous, unmitigated terror, is a residual future perception, of a world where clown marionettes eat our progeny. 1:57:08 AM

I'm always a little distrusting of recipes. Especially award winning, "this is the best peach pie you'll ever make" recipes. Do they really, really want you to figure out how to cook as well as they do? I tried a new biscuit recipe today. And I think I like my old one better, but I'm not sure whether the author has mislead me or not. It just dawned on me that the first batch I made, when I forget the shortening, I could use as a sourdough starter. I'm glad I'm Scottish, so brilliantly cheap. 1:38:13 AM

I'm driving home tonight listening to BBC World Radio reporting on arms inspections and nuclear arms capabilities and the docking of the Russian Soyez rocket with the international space station, and it strikes me, no pun intended, as incredibly ironic that my politics are called liberal. I'm liberal because I want to conserve the human race, and the planet we live on. I'm liberal because I'm curious. I want my genes to know what this is all about, and keep engaging in the search until the next question comes up, knowing the answer all ready, and loving the life of pursuing the riddle even more as a result of the riddle's end. As a species, I feel we are the poets of the universe. The earth our little studio home. And it would be horribly embarrassing to miss our stage call, as we fuss over who rules the skies, spiritual or land. I think the point of being here is to essentially figure stuff out. Take those space stations higher. Expand travel into regions of the universe and regions of dimensions unknown, just to sing about how extraordinary it all is. Whatever your religion, wouldn't you want to show your God what wonderful little marveling marvelous creatures he or she or it made? If you're a Christian, wouldn't you be awfully careful to do so, having fucked up majorly not once but twice and be forgive, the last time for killing the big boss's son? Milleniallist Christians freak me out the most - as if they're working towards Armageddon, just to prove how sinful we've become, and how much our salvation lies only in God's hands? What if God is the type of compassionate convervative who follows the "three strikes you're out" rule? I'd sure opt for plan A, making sweet sacrifice through our songs, careening through the multiverse. After all, if we're damned, we're damned anyway - why not give a good show, why not be good Christian/Muslim/Jewish/Zorastrian/Buddhist/Benist Sisyphus, or Sisyphi? Push the rock up with a little flourish, learning all you can about the blades of grass, the oxygen you breathe, as you go? And if you're atheist, what the hell, might as well do something with your life, your genetic code. But exploring that path, that path of eternal light, the search, the exploration, demands equality, demands diversity, demands divorcing ourselves entirely from ideas of scarcity and embracing the notion of abundance completely. Which will require understanding the scarcity, the sanctity of the potentially short time we have in this little protective biosphere. It doesn't mean homogenizing, become worshippers of the same ideology or god, but appreciating diversity, encouraging it, helping one another question politics and religion and all the disciplines, from all different perspectives, hoping to make a stronger sense for all of us, how we can be better poets, better singers, better archaelogists of matter. I wonder if feudalism worked humanely. I think of what society must have been like back then. I would imagine the most effective feudal lords were the ones who garnered cooperation of their protected serfs, made them invested in protecting their land. Even fending off, or invading others to secure their lands and lives, occasionally. Feudal lords would only be able to control as much land as they could managed - limited naturally by outside threats. In some ways, it a macro free-market economy, of people and lands and basic productivity. The problem with reentering that mode of government, or imposting feudalistic values in an industrialized age, is that there are not checks and balances. At some point, the technology or human resources or resources period either fail you, or you become a threat to some equally formidable feudal lord. In this industrial nuclear age, you have the problem of imbalance. That's what makes truly democratic institutions so vital. The discourse serves as an automatic checks and balances, with the feudal lords obeying the will of the people, who just generally want to survive and prosper. The limiting of discourse and democratic institutions puts the world at grave risk of extinction. I see the failure of democracy in the United States as the biggest threat to survival of the world, as we dictatorially press onward, to impose freedom on other nations through force, while we reduce basic rights of our own citizens, in some bizarre nihilistic spiral. Without a fully informed and engaged electorate, invested in the big ideas, such as survival of species over more than a millenium more, we risk the tyranny of abosulute power, as I fear we may begin to see with George W. Bush. He is not an evil human being, nor are his party leaders, but I tremble when I see absolute power emerge, and not because I've read Tolkien, but because I see absolute power at work every day in the tiniest of interactions, spent years dealing with the tyranny of absolutes in the family unit during my volunteer time with RAVEN, and taken to the extreme, with ultimate power and authority, I see cataclysm and doom for all of us. And still, I feel, beyond the immediacy of electoral politics in the U.S., there is a chance to heal, to recover, and where I understand, on some level, what harmonic convergence is all about, trying to achieve peace within, ahisma, prayer - what is, to me, trying to tap into, cull out of the collective conciousness that will to survive and prosper, the way that stories, the great fictions of the world, and, especially holy texts, teach us what being good is, and help us visualize, in so many ways, how good, how life force, can prosper, not over, but with thanatos, with the death wish, evil, which has important roles in creating a life cycle, but prevails at peril of all turning into nothingness. And then, there would be no bodies to sing, and the universe would spin on, dying in the silent stillness. 1:23:05 AM