The influence of gaslight or electric light on the growth of paraheliotropic trees

In this poor body, composed of one hundred bones and nine openings, is something called spirit, a flimsy curtain swept this way and that by the slightest breeze. It is spirit, such as it is, which led me to poetry, at first little more than a pastime, then the full business of my life. There have been times when spirit, so dejected, almost gave up the quest, other times when it was proud, triumphant.  So it has been from the very start, never finding peace with itself, always doubting the worth of what it makes  . . . All who achieve greatness in art — Saigyo in traditional poetry, Sogi in linked verse, Sesshu in painting, Rikyu in tea ceremony — possess one thing in common: they are one with nature.

— Basho, Records of a Travel-Worn Satchel

When I was a child, the protagonist of Sesame Street was Big Bird. Given that viewers enter a world through the person of the protagonist, it was both clever, profound, and powerful that we children were told that what we really were was a nice, large, awkward bird with bright yellow feathers. Echoing somewhat our own  fierce brightness of soul and alienation from the Adult World.

Though I have not watched Sesame Street lately, it seems that the role of protagonist has at least partially shifted to the character of Elmo, who is more outwardly congruent with the notion of being a child, wanting to have fun, and being taught such. While this shift can only be explained because of the deep fascination real children had with that character, an alienation effect is lost where our strange uncanniness was shown to us through the strangeness that was Big Bird.

What’s lost is the celebration of diversity. What we get instead is the continuing conforming effect of our society that tells us that kids are kids, adults are adults, and we are all expected, foreseen, and fully predictable.

– life is full of wins and losses. when winning, feel and love winning;

– watch the Wire again in its entirety, writing along side it about how the story develops;

– circles of magic, based on true love for the next person in the chain; love magic; blood magic;

– it all follows from love your neighbor; one suggestion passed down from higher realm before the connection closed (i.e., if God had only one chance to send a message to humanity that did not naturally follow from existence, the message would be to ‘love your neighbor’)

– Magic: the speech that makes things real – wizards singing called singing, singing creation, singing creation

Two years ago I lay in your bed after you left for work and watched a documentary about a girl who lived in a Redwood Tree named Luna for 738 days. I remember listening to her describe listening to the tree — even while the camera filmed her.

“Listen,” she said, with the forested hills behind her, the branches of Luna rising up around her.

“Listen,” she said. “Listen.”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julia_Butterfly_Hill

While it is certainly natural that someone resorting to Internet Dating Services will have to, as it were, cast their net wide, one wonders how many successful JDates in Manhattan in the summer and fall of 2009 involved a “picnic on the High Line” with a bottle of “three buck chuck,” name-dropping Chelsea, Trader Joe’s, and possibly the New Yorker in one ad.

And that said, she’s one of the more compelling ones —

the problem with Manhattan is that smart, ambitious, half-thoughful people all gravitate here, like salmon upriver, only to find themselves on the last page of the Great Waldo Search, surrounded by a sea of red and white stripes. Hard to find the one-socked soulmate, and frankly, starts to grate at the significance of your own poor miserable existence.

The Black Queen sits at the center of the board – time spins around her. Different men, strong souls, court and love her, through different times and different ages, faster, now slower — she remains — everything around her shifts and changes, but she remains still, motionless, untouched.

Alice and Michael were quite the co-dependents back in 2005 and 2006, having gotten together after several Disco Biscuit shows where the combination of Alice’s cute blond hair, Mike’s worldy ways, and several different chemical concoctions conspired to fill the role left vacant when Western Europeans and their Colonists ceased believing in Cupid and his arrows. Firing of neurons and all that. Corresponding intake of breath. Iron filings all lining up in one direction and all that.

What began as a simple attraction, and then a simple engagement with each other’s bodies and minds, what began with each of them carefully walling off their faculties of judgment, not so hard, considering the chemical fog they were generally living under, a delay of judgment, maybe, a procrastination, and of course, that everpresent need of Other that will always privilege the present over any number of uncertain tomorrows, in short, a simple relationship without much investment, revolving around music and drugs, six months later had became a relationship of almost unending importance to them —

In short, they had fallen in love. Accidentally? Sure. It does not make it less important.

Six months after that, they had moved in together. Deeper and deeper. I saw them every now and again, at shows, or at Genie’s apartment — they were very attached to each other, co-dependent — still smoking plenty of pot sure, still half addled, but liking the same things and loving each other.

I moved away, but the 21st century uberwelt presses on. Three years later, Alice is in Rhode Island with somebody else. I do not know what happened to Michael.

I have lived 10,007 days. I will have lived 20,000 days on March 25, 2037. That is my mother’s birthday. She will be 80 years old. I will be 54, 9 months, and 16 days. Between now and then, everything in my life must happen.

I wander, newborn through the world. Until – her, my true companion, my best friend, my one and only. And then we walk the world together, her hand in my mine, looking up now and again to notice we’re getting older, rising with the dawn and sleeping with the dusk, again and again and again, for ten thousand, twenty thousand, thirty thousand days, watching hair thin, skin lose its strength, bones their vigor —

the fire of our love will not fade but will continue burning —

and then she dies. And then I sit by her grave a time. And then I die.

And that life is sad, but the best one can hope for.

And it has not yet happened. I have found hers, but lost them too early. Were they not the one, neither, or was I not the one, or are we Digital Nomads too thrifty with our hearts. Where is the one? The great fear of the single man at 27. Absurd and irrational. One third of my life is gone. Memento Mori. I don’t want to be alone when I go.

The Saddest Game in the Whole Wide World

If evil involves (at its Kantian basic) the failure to recognize individuals as ends worthy of dignity, instead using them as only means, then a Collective Identity which de-emphasizes individuality may make us far more likely to make this cognitive choice.

Then, the fact that humans are social creatures capable of being partially or wholly subsumed into a Collective Identity (which function relies on our Rich Imaginative Construction of Identity, where our Minds Adrift and Strange have a large say in constructing our conception of who and what we are) will naturally lead to the great possibility of evil.

However, a militant rejection of Collective Identity may also lead one to evil, in that we begin to focus on the difference between our self and everyone else instead of the commonality of consciousness.

(Musings inspired by Wikipedia’s discussion of Philip Zimbardo’s book The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil.)