the kings-felt year

transulcent meanderings light the fire in a thousand red carriages. Underneath them, pebbles melt into pods of fish and gallop through streams of artificial strands of dreams left untold. Woe-begotten, incensenced, and frail. Incandescent nightmares fill up an already boiling trashcan full of mixed chords and fleeting metaphors. But it's the seventh child that always bites the nail. And it's the steeping honey pan that never gets to pray. One knee folded, one eye closed. One step forward, one glance upward. A thousand strands of DNA couldn't fix this effervescent longing. Knock, knock, twitch, fall. On time and off the wall. Hitting puberty before my mother can make amends with the giant pinecone smell that envelops the sporadic jungle of my sprawled out face. Just play the kings-felt year. And hope for macabre hauntings to melt into spring. It's truly, but not rationally, jinxed, if it were to never be told it weren't unrealized. Tick, tock, mechanical garages toiling with each other in fistfights of retention. "Remember, remember," the free-grazing, but widespread shadows say. It's not the table on which the game is played that determines it's effect; it's whether or not there is any iota of doubt that the effect is determined by the game or table.

good and bad and is

What makes something good or bad? 

Fire in the Hole - Hazel

everything has a context in which it fits just perfectly. 

Gorgons and Hydras and Chimaeras, dire

 Gorgons and Hydras and Chimaeras, dire.

The myths that we make...... the heroes, villians, monsters, and Gods that we worship and despise…. the vast unknown 

I remember the sound of dial-up AOL connecting me to the internet. I even remember the picture on the screen; a picture of the world. I remember how BIG it felt to be connected to things outside my living room from within my living room. 

What was life like when we had only nature to reconcile with?

… in the earliest Greek poets a new point of view dawned, never dreamed of in the world before them, but never to leave the world after them. With the coming forward of Greece, mankind became the center of the universe, the most important thing in it. This was a revolution in thought. The Greeks made their Gods in their own image. In Greece, man first realized what mankind was. Until then, Gods had no semblance of reality. 

Before the Greeks, Gods were inhuman. 

Think the Egyptian Sphinx or other ridiculous inhuman manifestations of the divine. 

In ancient Greece, Gods were created according to the needs of society.  Sort of like comic book heros today….

     The many heroes, heroines, Gods, and demons, that have been brought to life in our comic books and our video games are simply reflections of what society needs at any given point in history. In ancient Greece, Zeus was the God of the strong, but the poor needed a God, too, so they created his companion, Justice – protector of the poor.

     Batman didn’t need society; society needed a Batman.

    We’ve been helio-centric and ego-centric. We’ve come up with formulas to describe a reality that the formulas themselves have created. We think that life operates linearly. 

      From cradle to grave; isn’t it long a stay? What is with our fascination with time functioning in an unwavering, linear way; we’re born and need to be coddled  -we’re young and living it up careless and free -we get older, get educated, and get realistic, -we get married, start a family, and breed offspring – we create some good memories and some bad memories, convince ourselves that we’re stressed and come up with different ways to deal with it, have a midlife crisis or two, maybe a second honeymoon or seven -  we get old, we watch as the world turns, we die. Along the way we create memories, try and instill ethics in our offspring and others, find solace in expression and in different people, things, and places that make us feel not insignificant. Really, though, we are very insignificant. Beginning to end. Child’s pose to Savasana. People have developed many allegories that simulate the idea of punctuated time. The reality is that no one knows what happens after we die. Even an Alex Grey painting whose lines suggest abstract things like infinity and interconnectedness, is punctuated by the borders of the canvas on which it rests. 
     Life only progresses accordingly, predictably, conventionally, and inevitably if we think that it does. No one knows what happens after we die and timelessness is both a reality and an illusion depending on the scope of your magnifying glass. The “reality” of time; the illusion that existence is something other than ad infinitum. Ironically, the breaking down of a workday, a workweek, a human life, the history of the world etc. etc. into increments punctuated by the hand of time is both rational and irrational, necessary and completely absurd. 

What must the world be so that man may know it?

Are math formulas descriptive of actual reality or do math formulas create reality?

In quantum mechanics, wave function collapse is the phenomenon in which a wave function appears to reduce to a single state after interaction with an observer. In simplified terms, it is the reduction of the physical possibilities into a single possibility as seen by an observer.

      Upon interaction with an observer, the object is reduced from many possibilities to a single possibility. This is how we process, how we make sense of a world of infinite possibilities. What are the infinite possibilities? What are the opportunity costs? What are the trade offs? There really are an infinite number of possibilities and saying yes to one thing means saying no to many, many others. That's really scary if you're not disciplined. But it can be really blissful if you are. 

I imagine that this is a lot like paradigm shifts in science….

Scientific development depends in part on a process of non-incremental or revolutionary change. Some revolutions are large, like those associated with the names of Copernicus, Newton, or Darwin, but most are much smaller, like the discovery of oxygen or the planet Uranus. The usual prelude to changes of this sort is, I believed, the awareness of anomaly, of an occurrence or set of occurrences that does not fit existing ways of ordering phenomena. The changes that result therefore require 'putting on a different kind of thinking-cap', one that renders the anomalous lawlike but that, in the process, also transforms the order exhibited by some other phenomena, previously unproblematic.

We need stability, but we long to be free. We need truth and create Gods and superheroes who epitomize ethics and honesty, but really we have no clue what those things are.

It’s worth reminding ourselves that we’re not the center of the world…

The planet will be here for a long, long, LONG time after we’re gone, and it will heal itself, it will cleanse itself, ’cause that’s what it does. It’s a self-correcting system. The air and the water will recover, the earth will be renewed. And if it’s true that plastic is not degradable, well, the planet will simply incorporate plastic into a new paradigm: the earth plus plastic. The earth doesn’t share our prejudice toward plastic. Plastic came out of the earth. The earth probably sees plastic as just another one of its children. Could be the only reason the earth allowed us to be spawned from it in the first place. It wanted plastic for itself. Didn’t know how to make it. Needed us. Could be the answer to our age-old egocentric philosophical question, “Why are we here?:  Plastic…asshole." 
- George Carlin 
      Really, what’s the point of pondering such things? Well, as we get older and as we begin to accept punctuated time within the scope of a reality ad infinitum, we’ll inevitably have to make some big decisions based on the reality that our time is limited..... like whether or not and whom to get married to, whether or not we believe in such things as love, where to live, where to work, whether to explore or settle down, which ethics we believe in, and what we want to teach our children. 
     Much of our happiness appears to be dependent on other people. People say "you have to make yourself happy before you make others happy." Or "no one can make you feel something you don't want to feel." Or "if you can be alone with yourself then you'll never be alone." These things are true, but it is also an act of bravery, a courageous act of love to let yourself be effected by another person. And there's an hourglass sitting on all of our tables. Scarlet O'hara realized she loved Rhett after he had already expended a lifetime loving and waiting for her, but by that time his exasperated response was "Frankly my Dear, I don't give a damn." 


Is it better to have loved and lost then never to have loved at all?


      Thinking about science, about mythology, about the Gods, Heroes, and Villians who animate our history as things that we - humans - have created in response to our needs, wants, wishes, and desires, is pretty liberating. What it means is that if society can have such a huge imagination then so can I - I can imagine a way of life that is beautiful and wonderful and not full of "shoulds." If even logical, rational, concrete domains like scientific truth and math formulations are the products of paradigms, then I can create my own way of being.    


       I hope that at the end of the day, I remember that life is not necessarily linear and that just because I’ve become comfortable with a given situation doesn’t mean that it is my only option.  Fear is the opposite of love. I hope that no big decision I make is made out of fear, with eyes and ears closed to the beatings of my own heart.