To Home

This is a sort of return to the form I originally wanted this blog to take on: pure writing. In this case a bit of spontaneous surrealism. Let me know what you think .. . .

To home. With access to television, liquor, bed. And only the slight impediment of angled rain and the ink blackening at the edges of this narrow walk of clean, white light; surroundings stretching out to pupil dark antimatter spotted with feeble pokes of arc-sodium or traffic control. The walk is a quarter-mile or less of shortcut through former ghetto leveled for institutional purposes; one wonders if the hapless fled like squirrels under the terrifying boom of the crane. Each step one closer to rest, the redemption of a day spent in the trap, in analogy waiting for flies to rest in open jaws. The street up ahead signifies some colloquial comfort of proximity; a stone’s throw if there was one.

The foot trumpets out a little slap with every step on wet concrete, and at some point (BEFORE rest, television, the warm glow of something cooking) it’s echoed behind. The head turns to see another, all in black, piercing the fluorescence. He’s moving fast, with a purpose that betrays not peace but desperation, malice, greed. The first instinct, being civilized and unaccustomed to violence, is to move faster. Escaping on foot always seems to put the advantage to the prey, but this predator is above mere speed.

For a brief moment the front door seems close enough, just across this sometimes busy street, up another meager half-block and around the corner. Not time, quite yet, to start fumbling for keys.

The gap closes, but not through any compromise of fear or effort. Hunted down like a sickly antelope under the eyes of a city that never takes names; a look back reveal s the dark figure now looming large. Charcoal details emerge: the savage edge of a face, a rugged frame as tho built brick-by-brick, an obvious lack of weakness.

The futile effort to run, to steel oneself for anachronistic battle. Legs burn, but perhaps it will be the last time to savor something as pure as pain. A fatalistic sigh with each step, finally arriving at the street. End phase one, but the traffic is incredible. An orchestra of mingling music and purpose. Complementary car troubles dropping in synch with puffs of fog. Last breaths from borrowed lungs.

The turnaround is intended to meet fate, as no divine force shines on cowardice, and a memory streaked in long absent colors pulls fingers into a fist.

The dark figure now exposed in the light, a harmless derelict to be escaped before he’s pitied change out of pockets. The dimming memory of panic leaves only the faintest mark on one's conscious.

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"Still haven't lost my hunger, but only time will tell"

I'm currently less than one gestation period from making that leap from obedient apprentice of Newton, Hooke, et al to nameless device for the aims of the state, or worse yet a serf on the partition wall farm of opportunists or greedheads. There will be cups to piss in, addresses to change, crucial decisions regarding yet-to-be earned money, and a glance at the broad, homeworkless horizon. One general direction, most appealing to my contemporaries, holds a potential lifetime worth of important events like childbirth, new home purchase, tee-off times, and struggles with victory proclaimed merely at the gapstop.

The other, the preferred route, moves nowhere physically for some time. If that horizon bodes complacency, these pins and needles must be home. It was here that I promised myself indulgence for my muse if I could merely hold out . . .learn to shoulder grunt work, understand the fundamentals, prove your ethic to be unquestionable, try not to drink too much. Meanwhile, I learned the cold thrill of academics; the martial discipline that demands always some fraction of your focus, the all-or-nothing examinations that cannot tell a lie. If one has a skill, here is where to feed it. If a weakness, here it will be illuminated.

I want to write, and when I fail to earn my keep at that I should like to teach others what the desire to write has taught me. I'd like to be burrowed away in some back office, surrounded by text. Only to be brought out to lecture, denounce the government or give eulogies.

I plan nothing short of professional apostasy; certain suicide or at least whiplash from resistance to this career path potentia. A return to school, part-time at first, that will have me reading Voltaire or Tolstoy on lunch breaks between inspecting concrete pours and contemplating Omissions/Errors/Corrections. Eventually I'll attend a school I actually wanted to attend in the first place, whatever that may be a few years from now. I think I can only rest at a PhD.

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Why I'm Reading the Bible and What I Expect to Find

I've begun to read the Bible, along with a group of colleagues, with scheduled "Bible Study" meetings in which we will meet to discuss whatever dreck, miracle or incongruency we have found in the previous week.

I (and I'm not quite sure if I speak for the entire group) am an atheist. My lack of faith in a god is as powerful as the supposed faith that many claim. I believe in evolution, I do not believe in an afterlife as a event in which some individual essence retains it's individuality and lives on in some physical-law confounding eternity, I think clergy are either maliciously fooling others or ignorantly fooling themselves. I think that the spiritual tendency is an evolutionary left-over from the days in which the world was so inexplicable complex that needed something to keep our heads from exploding. (Serotonin and Spirituality , I don't agree that this needs "contextualization" {near the end of the article}, I would argue it's pretty straightforward) And yet I find it quite neccessary to read this manuscript cover to cover.

This book has been the fundamental (only?) document to contain the essence of so-called "Christianity" (we won't be making it to the Christ portions for some time). A precept that many people think this nation was founded on (although there are convincing arguements against this: here, here). It holds together a variety of schools of thought (many who claim to be seperate and distinct for no discernible reason) that I think are damaging overall to us as a people. The rules of this religion, themselves, may have a positive impact in many areas. The problem often occurs within religious hypocrites: those who "go to church" and yet participate in acts of greed, lust, envy, slot .. . . etc. I strive to understand the full scope of right and wrong as the Bible tells it so I can fully understand and appreciate this hypocrisy I feel I am drowning in.

Conservativism, in 2005, is a force to be reckoned with. The social aspects of conservativism claim to have roots in x-ianity and the bible. I intend to find the broad swipes at homosexuality and compare the perception of a homosexual in the Bible to the perception of a woman. I suspect that the Bible fosters little respect for women (we find this evident in the first few pages with Eve being an accidental villian, and the descendants of Adam rightfully taking numerous wives). To fully understand the bullshit that is neo-conservativism I want to understand their document, and I expect to find that scarcely few proponents have even read it.

Creationism is the foolishness that will not die. The Bible supposedly has some profound, meaningful explanation for how life started. I am midway through genesis and have not found it, in it's place however is one of the driest, most vapid explanations of a phenomenon one could imagine. I knew I would disagree, but I didn't think I would find it so boring. In a time when the truth is under attack, it seems important to know one's enemy.

And, for me, that is the reason to read this. To further understand the ignorance (and no, it's not all the Bible's fault) that plagues mankind, and to be able to actively refute the talking points of true believers who have never taken the time to read the book that is supposedly so important. If you'd like to join in our Bible Study Group, please let me know.

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The Selfish Gene vs. The Demiurge:Part 2, Mankind

So, with raw "uninterpreted" science we arrive at uselessness, or at the very least the ungratifying condition of being tools of our genes. A painful conclusion, perhaps, but one that acknowledges the facts and thus one that puts us in a position to honestly examine this world and develop a plan.

This theory of life makes no case for man in his present state being the "goal" of evolution or the universe. We are not created in the image of some sourceless deity, nor does our particular configuration represent a model for the dominant species in other circumstances. We are survival machines. That being said, no amount of bias will discount the fact that we are special. In intelligence (a broad characteristic with a finger in every pie) we reign supreme, in physical dexterity we are capable enough to survive, in language we are sophisticated nearly to a fault, in curiousity we exceed the feline by accomplishment as opposed to death.

We are, as joe said, a small part of something larger. There is no shame in this, no part of the whole is truly small enough to be insignificant. Our intelligence, and specifically our extragenetic, collective intelligence is astounding. In a few short generations we have confounded the snail's pace of evolution, outran the "accomplishments" (genes accomplish nothing but survival I know, but let's for the moment consider this a competition) of our genes, and in fact, as a species, are nearly parallel in importance to ourselves as our natural environment. We create change at such a speed that evolution virtually doesn't exist on a timescale we can comprehend.

I am of the belief that we are preparing, or should be preparing, to abandon life all together. At some point, and one can't predict the formula for change as a function of time, we will be ready to leave these bodies (our genes surely overstepped their bounds, or rather, created a monster they could no longer control), or at the very least this "system" behind. Why suffer the whims of nature when we were never the priority to begin with? Why trap ourselves in a body that was created merely to proliferate and as a suicidial misstep was capable of genius?

What does this mean? What it means is we should have no fidelity to tradition, and yet learn from it. We should have no attachment to our viscera and yet use it's template to escape. Our genes have no regard for us? Well then, we shall have no regard for them. This is nothing short of the slave (us, the survival machine) becoming the master.

The Demiurge is defined as a powerful creative force, Plato uses it as the force that created the material world out of chaos. We are this powerful force. We have the capacity to take this chaotic world (oh yes, there are "rules", but there is no purpose) and put our order on it. Not an order that succumbs to our genetic failures, our tendencies towards distraction, our myriad fears and weaknesses; but an order that stretches our fingers to every corner of the universe, defines the world as that which suits us, and relieves us from the whims of a nature that has tried to crush us since our inception.

So, as part of this sweeping, all-powerful force I will continue in part 3 to state where I (the small, almost insignificant piece of this force) think we've gone right, where I think we've gone very wrong, and see if we can't understand what we should do as individuals.

Please comment.

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