Print v. Digital

The following is intended for the particular as predominately observed by one himself trammeled with the recognition of his insignificance and potential, and the endurance of a great book:

Root driver for environmentalism available in the contrasting perception between the primacy of print media over digital media as artifact. 

            When confronted with the instinctual reflection on someone that says they’ve written a published or self-published physical book, versus someone that has a voluminous blog—the tendency is to afford primacy to the tangible form. This instinctual response is seen in the corresponding and mediating perspective of reason to begin searching after the particulars for its judgment making. Before reasoned judgment has at its feet the decision between how many users have read or follow the blog, versus if a book is published or just printed and homebound; before we even ask if the content is of any substance, instinct affords primacy to the tangible product. This may shift in later years, however this potential transition in perspective is the heart of this thought process—namely, if we cannot instinctually begin affording primacy to the digital form, there exists inside us still the need to become accustomed to it. We’ve had written records long before wired networks, and in that adjustment lies the question of the permanence available in either media, for those who create wish some little of eternity even if they are simple and joyful, freely expressing.

            Though we have seen books burned and lost at the dismay of anyone with curiosity and respect; it has taken other books to help contextualize the burning and destroying of books—wide products of thought which lit fires of insight and experience after Gutenberg. It is the Church’s actions played out in different cultures; it is humans contending with their own supremacy and infancy. Still, with these destructions, water damage, fading, tearing, etc. the form of the physical written record seems to endure—we do not yet have the same trust built with digital forms, though our tactile engagement with them continues to advance. The more commonplace taking photographs becomes, the more the ones made physical seem to take on a greater importance—perhaps because we still see art and statues, but as a species we’ve not had time enough to build the trust with our new digital expressions. Our oldest history with them is still less than a full century and we’re already seeing instability in our thirst for fossil fuels which act as foundation for our digital space.

            At the heart of this is permanence and the always looming, potentially edifying, recognition of our own mortality—and we are yet unsure of our ability as a species to keep alive forever the digital records. The systems of digital record depend on more than themselves—there are more complications and so a greater potentiality for error—also the growing need for electrical currents make a hard-drive packed with data preserved for a far future date necessarily yoked with instructions on how to craft the intermediary for its interpretation. By contrast, with books, it’s just up to translation, but the object itself is the artifact; and maybe in holding an artifact, we also realize that perhaps there is some potential in us to leave behind artifacts of our existence when we are dusty lost bones in a hidden future. So we seek to save the planet with alternate energies if we also want to forget any respect for the full experience of engaging with an artifact instead of just drinking up its contents through a digital intermediary; best case scenario, we do both—and we can write books, blogs, and articles about it—enjoying the fruit of thoughtfulness in our action and maturing from our infancy as a species.

Potatoes

There is somewhere along the way it seems I've found myself lost again but because I'm found elsewhere.

It's like coming out on the other side of a magical cupboard; I'm still me, but more curious, in a strange new world; maybe one I'd known before I'd known any. 

The cities of history tug, and the present says pull historical significance here. The swarming masses everyone sees and only few truly see. 

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There is a great divide, I'm not sure what side of the fence I'll drop - it's amazing to be so happy with a balancing act; it only makes sense when I consider that before I wasn't even able to stand. 

It's the hustle that keeps me alive. Nietzsche again, "The formula for my happiness: A Yes, a No, a straight line, a goal..." - Twilight of the idols, Arrows & Maxims, [paraphrasing from memory]. 

Life is neat when you can start forecasting certain behaviors in oneself and the society around. I see commercials that call to save clean water. 100% of the beef patties in fast food contain meat from over 100 cows on average. The run off directly impacts water. Yet we promote bacon and beef as the hallmark of high society and freedom. 

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Art. Oh sweet art. There is truly nothing more lovely to me. I can see why Nietzsche writes against the poets (in his poetic way) - the arts pull me to the ideal; the, 'what's possible.' They pull me away from here, but they also make here more beautiful. Philosophically I can see why that revolts him, but I'm still lost in a sea of artistic beauty everywhere around me. 

The arts are there in deepest loses, and they serve simultaneously as the expression of greatest achievements. This, I suppose, is the great joy of all human life. 

Comedy is glorious. It's one of the most enjoyable artistic affections to share with an audience. My music takes another turn; it comes yolked with hopes--my music is emotional; it's good for those moments when you're really into music, otherwise only some of the songs serve as good noise. 

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What matters, is the ability to mobilize; and that exists in such focus, that the ability to be reflective is both necessary, and remarkably hard to conjoin in execution. 

I'm not sure what I'm typing often, I just feel this compulsion. I need it. I need to write. There is so much garbage that I produce it's amazing (literary and artistic garbage along with literal garbage) - but I cherish my fail folder; a great file with the catalogue of my attempts; because if we never try and fail, I question if I'm even living. 

2.

I suppose I once shared because I loved so much I had to. I burned intensely and it transformed my rigidity into a more pliable material; even if only artisan hands are allowed near, whether they be on rich or poor alike. 

My family's warnings and common sense ring true, but still I have an appetite for self-destruction. It’s the two polarities and the pull between them that seem to electrify me. I flit back and forth between the two. The reductionist calls it, ‘love,’ and, ‘fear,’ and nothing more – the two seeds that twist around to make the tree of life; both must be respected. Fear is not bad, and love is often scary. In fact, I think sometimes the most terrifying thing is love – it transforms you; it generates a heat that melts you and makes you pliable; and if it is ripped away and not continually heated in a vat of fresh tears that dry naturally with time, its absence can calcify one into a monster or a shell. For me there is nothing more threatening than love—but it’s only scary, and fright is a choice, a reaction, and a choice to the persistent reaction.

I can choose to be courageous; as in, trigger courage when faced with fear—this is the recipe in building confidence—equal parts fear and courage. The Madman is still laughing at everything. Other times something jumps out and impels a reaction; sometimes many things sequentially—and related or unrelated they correlate with an equal reaction; like a droning depression or stress post trauma. Physics applied to emotional states is all this is. Action, reaction, our action, new reaction.

Participation in humanity and the travesties and majesties we build and destroy make us implicit in madness. As children one soaks in and is born from the very madness we must worthily profess and so often violently deny or distort. The whole point of my anything is essentially, one cannot deny their own madness by any stretch of any imagination and the varying degrees are only relevant to those mad to different degrees.

To be worthy of madness is to be able to be transparent and authentic; to have courage as the response when fear is the seductress and to be overt and explicit about our intention and in doing so call out any ugly pride we may protect by any obfuscation we justify. This is not to say one must reveal all mystery, but more that one must actually be able to craft it authentically while engaged in the social and private experience of humanity—nature come alive, dancing and destroying. 

If we start with a basic agreement on our collective madness, then perhaps we can begin slowing down the troubles of eons our species has accepted so deeply as to acceptingly presume war and famine though created, are a reflection of what is ‘natural,’ –because those are byproducts of our aggressive activity to prove and justify our sanity and righteousness; and that’s both understandable and nuts. In a wider context, as should often be taken at first pass, even the foundations for conflicting ideology are resting on the giants of hunger and greed and lust for unrelenting, unchecked, supreme command—the kind that doesn’t need to contend with its consequences; these tendencies come from fear and dress in strength and nationalism; fundamentalism and degrees of aggression from violent and overt to passive and subtle—what we often refer to as, ‘politics as usual.’

The lust for command is strongest in the weak, and perverted into dominance for the strongest of the strong. In one conception the weak are the drag and they force a heavier burden on those trying to accelerate; on the other side of the coin is the perspective that the strong have no consideration for the weak and simply charge ahead claiming to be charitable, but only to the point that charity is still required, and solutions that matter to the wider populous are not prioritized. In fact, the strong often spend resources to retrain and retain the mind of the weak, and the weakest of the weak are taken in as if being abducted in an old sci-fi film; they come out spouting nothing from nothing and become the harbingers of their own destruction. The coin looks suspended, but its only spinning. All society has seen this happen until enough live in enough poverty and then revolt is attempted. 

These divides and categories cannot of course be spoken about without the banal but critical point of economics. The promise of resources through a fiat economy has long been the driver of turmoil and innovation for human kind; but resources are only scare when the conception we take to their distribution and usage are limited to the justification that we are given reign to subdue them in our image, which just so happens to reflect the image of the all supreme creator of the universe; it is as if our own consciousness may be the universes addiction to self-destruction.

Gold

Some say love is a burning thing
That it makes a fiery ring
Oh but I know love as a fading thing
Just as fickle as a feather in a stream
See, honey, I saw love,
You see it came to me
It puts its face up to my face so I could see
Yeah then I saw love disfigure me
Into something I am not recognizing

See the cage, it called. I said, come on in
I will not open myself up this way again
Nor lay my face to the soil, nor my teeth to the sand
I will not lay like this for days now upon end
You will not see me fall, nor see me struggle to stand
To be acknowledged by some touch from his gnarled hands
You see the cage it called. I said, come on in
I will not open myself this way again.

You see the moon is bright in that treetop night
I see the shadows that we cast in the cold clean light
I might fear I go and my heart is white
And we race right out on the desert plains all night
So honey I am now, some broken thing
I do not lay in the dark waiting for day here
Now my heart is gold, my feet are right
And I'm racing out on the desert plains all night

So some say love is a burning thing
That it makes a fiery ring
All that I know love as a caging thing
Just a killer come to call from some awful dream
And all you folks, you come to see
You just to stand there in the glass looking at me
But my heart is wild, and my bones are steel
And I could kill you with my bare hands if I was free

God & Poet

"Poetry defeats the curse which binds us to be subjected to the accident of surrounding impressions. And whether it spreads its own figured curtain, or withdraws life’s dark veil from before the scene of things, it equally creates for us a being within our being. It makes us the inhabitants of a world to which the familiar world is a chaos. It reproduces the common universe of which we are portions and percipients, and it purges from our inward sight the film of familiarity which obscures from us the wonder of our being. It compels us to feel that which we perceive, and to imagine that which we know. It creates anew the universe, after it has been annihilated in our minds by the recurrence of impressions blunted by reiteration. It justifies the bold and true words of Tasso—“Non merita nome di creatore, se non Iddio ed il Poeta.*” 

[*“No one merits the name of creator except God and the Poet.”]

 -Percy Bysshe Shelley at age 27. 

Moonlight

Get a haircut you hippie. 

'The Smiling Moon' from 'Rosebush & The Pursuit of Dreams' © 2012

The Absolutely True Diary of a Full-Time Indian

"There is another world, and it is in this one"  

                                                             -W.B. Yeats 

Volcanoes Erupt

Man of Steel

The presentation of a grounded ethic surrounding the archetypes represented in the Superman epic is what matters most. Superman represents the power of charity, and as pointed out in Mark Waide’s “Superman: Birthright,” the power of hope. Superman's strength finds it’s power in its active expressions, and equally in it’s active suppressions. Most critically, when power learns to control itself, it focuses into a dynamic strength, and Superman embodies this ideal in our shared popular culture.

Like Hercules, or Odysseus, major characters like this hold within them the best of humanity; what we as a culture and a people most like seeing reflected back about ourselves—specifically, our strength and the propensity for good. Recognized overtly or not, this foundation is what makes these characters so important to us. They are vessels for what we hold most dear about ourselves, or at least what we’d like to believe about ourselves.

Nietzsche, the proverbial father of the übermensch says it best in his title, “Human all-too-human.” Superman is so beyond the ranges of our species abilities, and yet participates with us in the challenges of becoming and how to adapt continually to who we are, where we are, what we are capable of, and what we are actually delivering to humanity. The repeated and authentic expression of the answers to these questions, grounded in a focused charity and hope, is the ideal Superman triangulates us against.

Humans need to know that at our core we are good. As children we’re as prone to fits as to affection; learning to be malicious comes much later, while our ability for charity must be constantly nourished, and hope is a daily exercise. We must know that we fight powers we wield against ourselves. Superman reflects our struggle, and we’ve always eaten our values embedded in our entertainment.

We instinctively recognize the importance these values are for our humanity and take this part of ourselves pretty seriously—for losing it would be losing the most differentiating parts of ourselves; Superman reminds us why that matters, why power without charity and hope is just cruelty that hides behind good intentions. This communicating of values is an important function of mythos, and why these stories find a home in our hearts after being reintroduced constantly. It’s been happening since the paintings on cave walls and probably before that.

At a time when the scale of our footfalls thunder down more than ever before, we need to remember how to fly again.

PS. The movie is even better the second time.