"Some were looking for spiritual happiness or for some form of unknown power, but I had a practical object. I wished for a system of thought that would leave my imagination free to create as it chose and yet make all that it created, or could create, part of the one history and that the soul’s."
-Yeats, on why he got involved with the occult
Showing posts with label Yeats. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Yeats. Show all posts
8.07.2008
3.17.2008
On Being Green: St. Paddy's Day and the Degradation of Irish Culture
One year ago I found myself in one of the city's most active bar districts on Saint Patrick's Day, and was quite disgusted to see so many drunk college kids wandering around in large green lucky charms hats and shamrock beaded necklaces like it was Mardi Gras in the Emerald City. It is somewhat disheartening to think of how commercialized modern holidays have become, what I call the trinketization of celebration; there isn't one major American holiday where you can't find enormous amounts of junk decorations for sale, as if that was the only way to show one's enthusiasm for whatever given time of year, and Saint Patrick's Day certainly falls under that kitschy subset. Of course, and especially in an alcoholic town like Pittsburgh, that might be rephrased as drinketization, for Saint Patrick's Day is perhaps even more infamous for its green food-colored toll on people's livers. Certainly there is the notion that drinking is a national pastime for the Irish, but this may be due to the extreme cultural deprivations that Ireland has suffered throughout its history.
As this Cracked.com article points out, the fabled luck of the Irish may indeed be only a fable. The Irish have been routinely trounced by the vikings, British, and famine, and they have a running tally of all the political saviors who have unfortuitously died before liberating the country. Perhaps the greatest irony is Saint Patrick's Day itself. A British Roman Catholic missionary, Saint Patrick was kidnapped by Irish pirates at a young age and later returned to convert the Irish to Catholicism, perhaps as an effort at revenge. Those snakes he drove out of Ireland in legend? Those were the celtic druids and the traditional Irish culture and religion. There seems to be something highly dubious in celebrating Irish culture by those who are not Irish themselves worshipping the first person to prominently suppress it, through an excess of hangovers. If one wants to actually pay homage to Irish culture, they should probably read James Joyce's "Dubliners," which paints a fairly depressing portrait of the cultural decline suffered in Ireland at the turn of the last century. Or better yet, go visit Ireland itself and actively support their culture. When I was over there several years ago many people were bitterly complaining about how the switch to the new EU monetary system had all but wrecked their economy. I'm sure that buying a shamrock necklace that was probably made in China helps.
As someone who is actually proud of my Irish heritage, I want nothing to do with this holiday, and the closest I've come to celebrating Irish culture is in immersing myself in Beckett's fiction. Like Joyce, Beckett was an Irish native by birth who expatriated in order to help the older writer edit "Finnegan's Wake." Forsaking what Joyce has mainly described as the provincial perspective of their homeland, Beckett lived in Paris, writing his stories first in French and then translating them into English in order to avoid any Irish or English colloquialisms. Of course, unlike Joyce who still wanted to describe his native land, Beckett seems much more content to avoid describing any reality altogether, which itself is not an un-Irish pastime, as much of the Irish mythology collected by Lady Gregory and Yeats describe heroes who almost always want to get off of the island or out of their everyday lives.
As this Cracked.com article points out, the fabled luck of the Irish may indeed be only a fable. The Irish have been routinely trounced by the vikings, British, and famine, and they have a running tally of all the political saviors who have unfortuitously died before liberating the country. Perhaps the greatest irony is Saint Patrick's Day itself. A British Roman Catholic missionary, Saint Patrick was kidnapped by Irish pirates at a young age and later returned to convert the Irish to Catholicism, perhaps as an effort at revenge. Those snakes he drove out of Ireland in legend? Those were the celtic druids and the traditional Irish culture and religion. There seems to be something highly dubious in celebrating Irish culture by those who are not Irish themselves worshipping the first person to prominently suppress it, through an excess of hangovers. If one wants to actually pay homage to Irish culture, they should probably read James Joyce's "Dubliners," which paints a fairly depressing portrait of the cultural decline suffered in Ireland at the turn of the last century. Or better yet, go visit Ireland itself and actively support their culture. When I was over there several years ago many people were bitterly complaining about how the switch to the new EU monetary system had all but wrecked their economy. I'm sure that buying a shamrock necklace that was probably made in China helps.
As someone who is actually proud of my Irish heritage, I want nothing to do with this holiday, and the closest I've come to celebrating Irish culture is in immersing myself in Beckett's fiction. Like Joyce, Beckett was an Irish native by birth who expatriated in order to help the older writer edit "Finnegan's Wake." Forsaking what Joyce has mainly described as the provincial perspective of their homeland, Beckett lived in Paris, writing his stories first in French and then translating them into English in order to avoid any Irish or English colloquialisms. Of course, unlike Joyce who still wanted to describe his native land, Beckett seems much more content to avoid describing any reality altogether, which itself is not an un-Irish pastime, as much of the Irish mythology collected by Lady Gregory and Yeats describe heroes who almost always want to get off of the island or out of their everyday lives.
8.08.2006
landscapes as large as insomnia
A couple weeks ago several of us started a writer's group so we could get feedback on work in progress and talk about our craft. also including furious rounds of exquisite corpse and writing exercises as homework between meetings. this last week we decided to each write a poem of sixteen lines, edit it down to eight, then four then two lines, a process of, as i see it, learning to refine the essential or necessary metaphors of the piece.
the problem being that for days i have been feeling unable to write. not writer's block, there are still too many themes and images welling up to be written, but just sort of a dauntingness of knowing how. not to mention working way too much and sleeping way too little and the always frustrations of figuring out the logistics of living, and the full moon and in the trough of my bimonthly manic cycles. and spending whatever free time and energy i have writing long letters and doing way too much research on Yeats' complex and strange symbol system (which is another story entirely and too close to home for casual thought).
finally last night i went to armand's, where i go after work occasionally to get a drink and write, and just started in on a piece about my grandmother's funeral that i hadn't been able to touch yet and probably needs a lot more work if not the rest of my life to consider in full. but much too long to be the 16 line homework assignment. but relieving, and like turning on the tap again.
so tonight after reading octavio paz's magnificent piece "sun stone" i just figured, it didn't matter what i wrote, as long as i went at it, and came up with the following bit of train of thought that while much much too short (it is a theme of all themes i could expand indefinitely in any direction), the process of culling it down was highly highly illuminating as far as seeing how metaphors are constructed from disparate images.
16.
i call on the names of all:
candle light, tabletop, train tunnel,
terror touched in a stranger’s face
and turned to smile (we’re really not so strange)
call on sublime sunsets
over rose petaled oceans
and lightning storms, days of travel,
the crumbling chessboard of roads and fences
this third smoke, that man’s beret,
the glare and howl of the television,
every drink shared between friends
and every toast thrown at the wall in rage
i call on you the names of all:
histories and communiqués and fading,
every memory lost and rewritten
on the silent stone of this world
8.
i call on the names of all:
the light that turns the stranger
from a tunnel of terror to smile,
across the storms of road and rose
i call on you the names of all:
the everyday glare shared like toast
with the memories of history smoking
on the silent stone of this world
4.
i call on the names of all:
daylight shared with strangers’ smiles
to toast the tunnel of memory smoking
on the silent rose of this world
2.
i call on shared sunlight smiles
to toast the tunneled rose of time
the problem being that for days i have been feeling unable to write. not writer's block, there are still too many themes and images welling up to be written, but just sort of a dauntingness of knowing how. not to mention working way too much and sleeping way too little and the always frustrations of figuring out the logistics of living, and the full moon and in the trough of my bimonthly manic cycles. and spending whatever free time and energy i have writing long letters and doing way too much research on Yeats' complex and strange symbol system (which is another story entirely and too close to home for casual thought).
finally last night i went to armand's, where i go after work occasionally to get a drink and write, and just started in on a piece about my grandmother's funeral that i hadn't been able to touch yet and probably needs a lot more work if not the rest of my life to consider in full. but much too long to be the 16 line homework assignment. but relieving, and like turning on the tap again.
so tonight after reading octavio paz's magnificent piece "sun stone" i just figured, it didn't matter what i wrote, as long as i went at it, and came up with the following bit of train of thought that while much much too short (it is a theme of all themes i could expand indefinitely in any direction), the process of culling it down was highly highly illuminating as far as seeing how metaphors are constructed from disparate images.
16.
i call on the names of all:
candle light, tabletop, train tunnel,
terror touched in a stranger’s face
and turned to smile (we’re really not so strange)
call on sublime sunsets
over rose petaled oceans
and lightning storms, days of travel,
the crumbling chessboard of roads and fences
this third smoke, that man’s beret,
the glare and howl of the television,
every drink shared between friends
and every toast thrown at the wall in rage
i call on you the names of all:
histories and communiqués and fading,
every memory lost and rewritten
on the silent stone of this world
8.
i call on the names of all:
the light that turns the stranger
from a tunnel of terror to smile,
across the storms of road and rose
i call on you the names of all:
the everyday glare shared like toast
with the memories of history smoking
on the silent stone of this world
4.
i call on the names of all:
daylight shared with strangers’ smiles
to toast the tunnel of memory smoking
on the silent rose of this world
2.
i call on shared sunlight smiles
to toast the tunneled rose of time
7.16.2006
hunting text
Current research on schools of poetry, tracing back technique and themes through all outsider literature, from the beats back to the surrealists, the modernists, etc etc... curious to find the strain of occult/ spiritual practices that underlies most of these groups. was blown away reading a biographical sketch on Yeats, too many parallels to my basic belief systems, he even created a whole system of personality types based off the phases of the moon, and recorded in his poetry.
also this, from Jean Baudrillard's "Simulations" (semiotext(e) publications):
"This would be the successive phases of the image:
-it is the reflection of a basic reality
-it masks and perverts a basic reality
-it masks the absence of a basic reality
-it bears no relation to any reality
whatever: it is its own pure simulacrum. in the first case, the image is a good appearance- the representation is of the order of sacrament. in the second, it is an evil appearance- of the order of malefice. in the third, it plays at being an appearance- it is of the order of sorcery. in the fourth, it is no longer in the order of appearance at all, but of simulation."
this last being about where our culture is right now. the question being how to take it to the next step, to reclaim the image by positing there is no difference between the image and reality (at least as far as we are able to percieve it), in that to say there is a difference between images and reality creates a false dichotomy. everything is real, even those things resigned only to the imagination. to give something a name, a function, a relation to other things, is to give it life. this applies equally to poetry/ art as it does to sensory perception. for example, when i write moon, beggar, glass of water, i am talking about these things (even if they are not specific moons, beggars, or glasses of water in front of me). when i see these things i am seeing a moon, a beggar, a glass of water (even if it could be argued i am perceiving merely lightwaves and assigned mental labels and not objects at all). the image of something is what it is. what it means however, is a whole other issue, and dependent on both cultural and subjective reference to these things. when i say or see "moon" it brings up a host of connotations and allusions from anything as ancient greek mythology to my own life, etc... which i imply in my use of the image, but are not extant in the image itself, and this is the key point, if someone else reads my word moon or is pointed out the moon in the sky, their interpretation of moon may be vastly different from their own experiences of moon (unless of course i give proper context for my own interpretation). but this does not change the fact that the moon is still the moon. even to create an artificial moon (orbiting an artificial planet in an artificial galaxy) is dependent on that it is still a moon.
Yeats rued the fact that most poets of his time (and this has only gotten worse) did not draw their images (and meanings) from systems of correspondence, large cultural drifts of symbol/ interpretation bordering on the archetypal, whereby the poet showing a particular image is sure to be understood. nowadays the trend is towards reiterating portions of their life without any regard to symbolism at all, turning poetry into a journalistic or biographical medium that when read the audience has very little subconscious imagery to connect to, unless they have had a similar experience in their own life. and even then, how poetic is it, in relation to the epic imagistic poems that have withstood the axe of time? Granted, all one can draw on is their own experiences, otherwise the words do not ring true, but to draw these disparate events into the vast host of cultural, and human, meaning... to say "i saw the moon" and have that imply not only this occurrence of the moon but centuries worth of moons. imagine the force then behind that word, that could send shivers down your spine and impart the physical affect of the moon's gravity on the blood, a language of reckoning where saying "moon" creates Moon. the image not just as reality, but containing the full reality of that image.
also this, from Jean Baudrillard's "Simulations" (semiotext(e) publications):
"This would be the successive phases of the image:
-it is the reflection of a basic reality
-it masks and perverts a basic reality
-it masks the absence of a basic reality
-it bears no relation to any reality
whatever: it is its own pure simulacrum. in the first case, the image is a good appearance- the representation is of the order of sacrament. in the second, it is an evil appearance- of the order of malefice. in the third, it plays at being an appearance- it is of the order of sorcery. in the fourth, it is no longer in the order of appearance at all, but of simulation."
this last being about where our culture is right now. the question being how to take it to the next step, to reclaim the image by positing there is no difference between the image and reality (at least as far as we are able to percieve it), in that to say there is a difference between images and reality creates a false dichotomy. everything is real, even those things resigned only to the imagination. to give something a name, a function, a relation to other things, is to give it life. this applies equally to poetry/ art as it does to sensory perception. for example, when i write moon, beggar, glass of water, i am talking about these things (even if they are not specific moons, beggars, or glasses of water in front of me). when i see these things i am seeing a moon, a beggar, a glass of water (even if it could be argued i am perceiving merely lightwaves and assigned mental labels and not objects at all). the image of something is what it is. what it means however, is a whole other issue, and dependent on both cultural and subjective reference to these things. when i say or see "moon" it brings up a host of connotations and allusions from anything as ancient greek mythology to my own life, etc... which i imply in my use of the image, but are not extant in the image itself, and this is the key point, if someone else reads my word moon or is pointed out the moon in the sky, their interpretation of moon may be vastly different from their own experiences of moon (unless of course i give proper context for my own interpretation). but this does not change the fact that the moon is still the moon. even to create an artificial moon (orbiting an artificial planet in an artificial galaxy) is dependent on that it is still a moon.
Yeats rued the fact that most poets of his time (and this has only gotten worse) did not draw their images (and meanings) from systems of correspondence, large cultural drifts of symbol/ interpretation bordering on the archetypal, whereby the poet showing a particular image is sure to be understood. nowadays the trend is towards reiterating portions of their life without any regard to symbolism at all, turning poetry into a journalistic or biographical medium that when read the audience has very little subconscious imagery to connect to, unless they have had a similar experience in their own life. and even then, how poetic is it, in relation to the epic imagistic poems that have withstood the axe of time? Granted, all one can draw on is their own experiences, otherwise the words do not ring true, but to draw these disparate events into the vast host of cultural, and human, meaning... to say "i saw the moon" and have that imply not only this occurrence of the moon but centuries worth of moons. imagine the force then behind that word, that could send shivers down your spine and impart the physical affect of the moon's gravity on the blood, a language of reckoning where saying "moon" creates Moon. the image not just as reality, but containing the full reality of that image.
10.11.2005
poet as shaman
A friend has started working on an essay for her school about the thread of divinity in poetry, the ways it has been approached and how its expression still has very similar elements over the centuries, whether you're talking the ecstatic love of Rumi's entire cannon or the beat worship of Ginsburg's postscript to "Howl." She asked me for some examples of poets who express divinity, and besides those two, and the classic examples of Blake, Yeats, and the other romantic poets, I suggested my personal favorite, Rainer Maria Rilke, who was influenced heavily by Rumi's style of personally addressing the divine as a Beloved.
During her research my friend stumbled upon this fascinating article analyzing Rilke's poetry in the context of how the poem and poet metamorphose in relation to each other and the experience of the world.
"Each poem can be seen as a birth canal, a metaphysical tunnel, an entrance into reality which effects a distinct change in the man who travels through it. Although it is, in some sense, the poet who writes the poem, there is another sense in Hass of the poem changing the poet-writing him, as it were. "
This idea of poetry makes it very similar to the shamanic rebirth experience, but one in which the poet is constantly being reborn in new perceptions of the world. As my friend, the redneck poet Johnny "Squibb" Menesini, put it, "everytime I write a pome I think I'm dying."
The article goes on to paint Rilke as a man who would go running out into the street clutching a white iris to his chest in order to escape the torment of the images in his head, which brings up one of my favorite past times and role of both poets and shamans, solitary walks, when alone with the world (whether country or city) the divinity and clarity imminent in all things starts to break out and become real. When the mundane transcends itself, and crystallizes in an image that can be passed on which, as Blake put it, shows the whole world in a grain of sand. Very much like the chaos magician's use of a simple sigil image to encode much deeper levels of information within the psyche.
and as I told my friend, this is something that fascinated me greatly too, and it looks like we may have a bit of friendly competition trying to tie all this together. look for an essay about magic poetry on key23 soon.
During her research my friend stumbled upon this fascinating article analyzing Rilke's poetry in the context of how the poem and poet metamorphose in relation to each other and the experience of the world.
"Each poem can be seen as a birth canal, a metaphysical tunnel, an entrance into reality which effects a distinct change in the man who travels through it. Although it is, in some sense, the poet who writes the poem, there is another sense in Hass of the poem changing the poet-writing him, as it were. "
This idea of poetry makes it very similar to the shamanic rebirth experience, but one in which the poet is constantly being reborn in new perceptions of the world. As my friend, the redneck poet Johnny "Squibb" Menesini, put it, "everytime I write a pome I think I'm dying."
The article goes on to paint Rilke as a man who would go running out into the street clutching a white iris to his chest in order to escape the torment of the images in his head, which brings up one of my favorite past times and role of both poets and shamans, solitary walks, when alone with the world (whether country or city) the divinity and clarity imminent in all things starts to break out and become real. When the mundane transcends itself, and crystallizes in an image that can be passed on which, as Blake put it, shows the whole world in a grain of sand. Very much like the chaos magician's use of a simple sigil image to encode much deeper levels of information within the psyche.
and as I told my friend, this is something that fascinated me greatly too, and it looks like we may have a bit of friendly competition trying to tie all this together. look for an essay about magic poetry on key23 soon.
6.02.2005
the almost unbearable lightness of being in time
Everything still feels really intense right now, as if I had been walking around in my sleep, and suddenly woke up and opened my eyes for the first time. Everything still feels fragile, but in this really beautiful way where I can take each moment for what it is and then let it slip through my fingers like grains of sand. Yesterday when I was walking home from work I was looking at the sunlight breaking around the passing clouds and falling through the leaves of the trees, and the joy I felt at being alive and witnessing this was indescribable. It was filled with sorrow too, in not being able to hold onto it, but for perhaps the first time I was able to look at that first hand and be able to bear it. To paraphrase Castaneda in Journey to Ixtlan, the art of being a warrior is to balance the terror of being alive with the wonder of being alive. To be able to look at all the things we have lost along the way, and all the things we can not control now and in our futures, and to smile at this though tears threaten to break in every moment. Because that's all we can do.
I don't know why I have always been obssesed with change, with the finality of endings and the unexpected unknowns of beginnings. Maybe because that's really all we can percieve in this world, the small differences from one moment to the next, and how our own actions are inextricably tied in with the world around us. As Octavia Butler put it in The Parable of the Sower "All that you touch you change. All that you change changes you. The only lasting truth is change." Permanance is an illusion, our experience is one of coming togethers and falling aparts. And admittedly that can be a frightening thing to try and recognize head on. Maybe it's because I grew up in a dysfunctional family near the dysfunctional city of Washington DC, reading too many myths about the apocalypse and noticing too many of the tragic endings that accompany living near the country's psychotic center of government. Certainly things have only gotten worse there as time goes by. It looks the same on the outside, but it is falling apart day by day. Hell, even our bodies are falling apart on a daily basis, the skin cells shluffing off and collecting in the corners of our rooms as dust. Thankfully our bodies regenerate, at least until they don't anymore. Our society doesn't seem to be blessed with that ability, and has been rotting away since they wrote up the Constitution.
"Things fall apart, the centre can not hold." (Yeats)
I used to lie awake at nights as a child and imagine what it would feel like to be dead. The utter horror of it was that I realized I couldn't imagine not being able to feel anything. So I put it away somewhere and tried to forget that one day I too will end.
In the one year I attended college I took an honors class called "thanatos: the many meanings of death", which looked at how death is one of the biggest taboos of our culture, utterly played down and yet we are desensitized to its overexposure in the media. There is no mourning and no learning process for our dead and how to face it in our own lives. And if we were to learn to face it for what it is we might be able to take our own lives head on and live them literally as if the next moment might be our last. Because it just might. Beyond asking us to keep a journal of our emotional content, which was the point when I started writing regularly, our teacher also said that if we are doing something in our lives that doesn't make us happy then we shouldn't be doing it. Even if being in class right then was boring, and we felt we had much more exciting and worthwhile things to do at that moment, then we should get up and walk out of class and go do them.
To paraphrase Castaneda again:` I insisted that to be bored or at odds with the world was the human condition. "So change it." he said "if you do not respond to that challenge you are as good as dead."
And so I did, and walked out of going to school and living in Dead City as well. I can't say I've spent every day of the five years since then living my life fully, and there have been some major periods where I was most certainly not happy and didn't try to walk out of it because of some illusion of stability, but looking back now I can't say that a single moment has really been boring. I think I made a pact with myself that day when I stood up from the table and said I'd be much happier going down to the river with my guitar than sitting in class that I would try and never be bored again. That life is too short and too sweet to not live it passionately and intentionally. Why else do I believe in magic and hopeless romance, and play music without ever recording it, and write so many stories and poems, and wander aimlessly at night watching the stars, and do all the things that are there to be done and give my life meaning and fulfillment? Even walking down the street from work has to be packed full of the utmost feeling, because I am there feeling it, and may not be again. The wind on my cheeks and rustle of leaves in my ears could be just that, but it can also be the sighs of the world knowing that it too is falling apart and moving on, and my acknowledgement that this transience is almost too beautiful to bear. But just enough that I can blink back the tears from the corners of my eyes and laugh.
I don't know why I have always been obssesed with change, with the finality of endings and the unexpected unknowns of beginnings. Maybe because that's really all we can percieve in this world, the small differences from one moment to the next, and how our own actions are inextricably tied in with the world around us. As Octavia Butler put it in The Parable of the Sower "All that you touch you change. All that you change changes you. The only lasting truth is change." Permanance is an illusion, our experience is one of coming togethers and falling aparts. And admittedly that can be a frightening thing to try and recognize head on. Maybe it's because I grew up in a dysfunctional family near the dysfunctional city of Washington DC, reading too many myths about the apocalypse and noticing too many of the tragic endings that accompany living near the country's psychotic center of government. Certainly things have only gotten worse there as time goes by. It looks the same on the outside, but it is falling apart day by day. Hell, even our bodies are falling apart on a daily basis, the skin cells shluffing off and collecting in the corners of our rooms as dust. Thankfully our bodies regenerate, at least until they don't anymore. Our society doesn't seem to be blessed with that ability, and has been rotting away since they wrote up the Constitution.
"Things fall apart, the centre can not hold." (Yeats)
I used to lie awake at nights as a child and imagine what it would feel like to be dead. The utter horror of it was that I realized I couldn't imagine not being able to feel anything. So I put it away somewhere and tried to forget that one day I too will end.
In the one year I attended college I took an honors class called "thanatos: the many meanings of death", which looked at how death is one of the biggest taboos of our culture, utterly played down and yet we are desensitized to its overexposure in the media. There is no mourning and no learning process for our dead and how to face it in our own lives. And if we were to learn to face it for what it is we might be able to take our own lives head on and live them literally as if the next moment might be our last. Because it just might. Beyond asking us to keep a journal of our emotional content, which was the point when I started writing regularly, our teacher also said that if we are doing something in our lives that doesn't make us happy then we shouldn't be doing it. Even if being in class right then was boring, and we felt we had much more exciting and worthwhile things to do at that moment, then we should get up and walk out of class and go do them.
To paraphrase Castaneda again:` I insisted that to be bored or at odds with the world was the human condition. "So change it." he said "if you do not respond to that challenge you are as good as dead."
And so I did, and walked out of going to school and living in Dead City as well. I can't say I've spent every day of the five years since then living my life fully, and there have been some major periods where I was most certainly not happy and didn't try to walk out of it because of some illusion of stability, but looking back now I can't say that a single moment has really been boring. I think I made a pact with myself that day when I stood up from the table and said I'd be much happier going down to the river with my guitar than sitting in class that I would try and never be bored again. That life is too short and too sweet to not live it passionately and intentionally. Why else do I believe in magic and hopeless romance, and play music without ever recording it, and write so many stories and poems, and wander aimlessly at night watching the stars, and do all the things that are there to be done and give my life meaning and fulfillment? Even walking down the street from work has to be packed full of the utmost feeling, because I am there feeling it, and may not be again. The wind on my cheeks and rustle of leaves in my ears could be just that, but it can also be the sighs of the world knowing that it too is falling apart and moving on, and my acknowledgement that this transience is almost too beautiful to bear. But just enough that I can blink back the tears from the corners of my eyes and laugh.
2.20.2005
loose ends
I wanted to post a link to the articles on the black box that reads the future, and the global consciousness project (thanks lvx23 for sticking them in one place) not because they're "news" at this point, but because this may just be a very exciting time to be alive, and I don't want to misplace them in all the confusion.
It is possible - in theory - that time may not just move forwards but backwards, too. And if time ebbs and flows like the tides in the sea, it might just be possible to foretell major world events. We would, in effect, be 'remembering' things that had taken place in our future.
If you've been paying attention, it sure feels like we've been doing this all along, but subconsciouly at best; or perhaps we only thought we were telling ourselves stories. Either way, we're riding the ripples into the biggest stone of all, a confluence unparalleled in being so bloody obvious but utterly undefinable until it happens.
I wonder how apt Yeats's prediction will be: "Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold..."
I've still got a couple tricks up my sleeve... just in case.
It is possible - in theory - that time may not just move forwards but backwards, too. And if time ebbs and flows like the tides in the sea, it might just be possible to foretell major world events. We would, in effect, be 'remembering' things that had taken place in our future.
If you've been paying attention, it sure feels like we've been doing this all along, but subconsciouly at best; or perhaps we only thought we were telling ourselves stories. Either way, we're riding the ripples into the biggest stone of all, a confluence unparalleled in being so bloody obvious but utterly undefinable until it happens.
I wonder how apt Yeats's prediction will be: "Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold..."
I've still got a couple tricks up my sleeve... just in case.
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