ON WHAT MEAT
Things Best Left Unread
Thursday, October 31, 2024
Tuesday, October 18, 2022
The Dog of the Car That Caught You
A new myth if it is to be grand enough to be the myth of the time and place must take in all the pieces and put them in place.
The universe, all that is, ever was, and ever and never will be, started and remained a singularity. There was a question that triggered infinite questions, a sound, a word, a note, a chord, etc.
In the parlance of our times, the Big Bang, let us humor the science, and, skipping over the distraction of opening credits, let's get to our entrance.
Why matter? Okay, then why life?
Things were clean without organic stuff all over them. From what we know now it is but a little spill. We keep looking for other possible patches but haven't found much yet.
All the energy was together. Then it spread and the energy levels went down in places to allow for our messiness. The early creeping gave rise to a more peripatetic process, an intentional tension of then and now, here and there, back and forth.
Now we look back to see the beginning, but why? The answer is here, in what we do.
It occurs to me even as it occurred in the first place.
Let us make a mirror of our minds and reflect back, from the beginning to now, and in so doing, we reverse engineer the processes which begat us (and everything else) here.
But now is also yet forever and never (is, was, will be). To do what we do we have to recreate the universe in our thoughts and in our little chatter. We even talk back to our beginning, in our thoughts and prayers.
In this sense, what we make of everything by our processes out of universal processes is the second coming.
Saturday, July 30, 2022
You Had to Have Been There
Saturday, August 29, 2020
Not Letting This One Get Away
Saturday, August 22, 2020
El Gato Negro
Young crows appear invalid, even mangy,
Strutting their stuff into the street,
Just like a couple of cowpokes, rangy
With stilted steps, as they gawk for tidbits to eat.
Around the corner on a slab of concrete lies
A form epitomizing night
Until it unfolds itself gazing with a guise
That shows surprising poise and light.
But it is all a ruse arousing only passing
Attendance from pedestrian
Neighbors whose ignorant ways
Miss the details of what is too familiar in
The furniture of their perambulant daze.
Yet these set pieces failed escape of glassing,
Although contorted by the lens of borrowed stays.
KLK
8/22/20
Saturday, July 18, 2020
Star Trek Reflections, Warp One
But that was less apparent to me as a child and less questionable than this: How could Spock be half human and half Vulcan, the progeny of an Earth woman and a Vulcan male if these two groups were not the same biological species? Even as a child I understood the fundamentals of evolutionary biology. Apparently the writers on the show did not. Leaving out the expressed differences in actual biology - organ placement and blood composition - the idea that different creatures could breed together is something out of a previous time, but not surprising, really, that it was there, like a sore thumb, on this innovative, sci-fi show. Science fiction is always actually about the present. How could it be otherwise? It is a projection of now onto an imaginary future which is really just the present revealed, stripped of illusions and apologies for its failure to live up to potential. Technology and other changes, whether utopian or dystopian, are comment on the present state of things. Why don't we have cars that fly and women who are still sexy to a 14-year-old boy but also nerdy smart and lethal?
But getting back to poor Mr. Spock, consider his character and unscientific origin. Is it not just a transfiguration of the dominant human attitude toward the familiar other? Spock isn't an Asian. He's not a Jew or a black fellow. He is like and unlike us. We like him because he's our Vulcan, almost like a pet. We can unleash his amazing capabilities, the nerve pinch, the mind meld, his savant-like abilities to calculate and draw conclusions and also build things on the spot from flotsam and jetsam and wee bit of otherly magic. It's just amazing what those folks can do with stuff!
All of that occurred to me as a child but it did not broach my sense of indignity until later. My incredulity that the creators of the show could miss the specifics of biological accuracy, and also could have technological vision without concomitant social change, dominated my childish impressions. I was just stuck on the fact that hierarchy is portrayed as immutable. Antagonism of groups based on physical and cultural difference, as well as rival power structures seeking to be the top dog, remains inevitable. Well, perhaps you have to address the audience where it is first in order to get them to move somewhere further along. Sure, and shucks, let's all be morons, which, of course, apparently when it comes to this stuff, we are. And yet the examples also remain, the great works that almost by magic flash insight about human nature in the way the characters in full human dimension leap off the page or screen. How can we be blind to those stark contrasts, or do we just set aside the memory of better fare because we are so hungry for anything at all, something novel, that we settle for a quick fix after the indignities of our day?
I don't have an explanation for why most of us, if not all of us, do not see the obvious and make constant leaps of innovation in our own lives, let alone why we watch these horrible and depressing shadow plays, the food for our own hypotheses and frames, our lenses on ourselves, others, and the universe. These obvious distortions in fictional characterization and narratives are in a sense mirrors for our own idiocy. Like the ideas we embrace and reject in our actual lives and choices, in our attitudes and behaviors, what piques our interest and tickles our fancy in entertainment reveals what's genuinely going on in our minds and helps delineate our active psychology.
Finally, I think of Spock making a radio out of junk and being able with the touch of a hand on the face and head to get into the mind of another. That's a metaphor, a magic moment of imagination, for this whole meditation. Why can't we be more like Spock not only in the choices we make for entertainment, but also in our lives and the way we go about understanding the actual world in our own creation of reality that serves as our vision of now and what we can be? I still prefer Jane Austen. Pride and Prejudice remains the greatest miracle of human character presented on the page, with all its limitations. Too bad perhaps the author did not have a more fantastical inclination. But we have to meet our authors and the audience at the place they are, even if we might imagine further along where they, and we, could be.