PART SEVEN
“The old gods are dead or
dying and people everywhere are searching, asking: What is
the new mythology to be,
the mythology of the
unified earth as of one harmonious being?” J. Campbell,
The Inner Reaches of Outer Space.
New York, 1986. p.17
7:1
I
fill the canteen, and climb to where the mountain
and I are hidden
in clouds
cloaking the ghost I’ve
become. The old
Taoist poets toasted their birthdays
with cups of wine.
It seems like ages ago that I visited the poet William
Witherup, then living
near Santa Fe. As we sat beneath a full moon blending
our shadows with
the chilly desert air, Bill drained a glass of wine and
said: “The
moon has
never understood wine.”(1)
7:2
Are
dreams a matter of consciousness, and we "slowly
sort of sleep
walking
into significant social, and political change.”?(2) Are
we only awake
from this
dream of consciousness in death, while in life there
is only reflection?
7:3
To Dante Alighieri Paradise was given: he arrived there
even before
entering the gloomy wood. “Do not move /
Let the wind speak / that
is paradise.” (Ezra Pound)
High
on a mountain a slight breeze. There was a time when I
could hear
the ear-whispered teachings; now a hungry
mosquito buzzes in my
ear.
I lean over the edge, and see a thousand
poets falling into obscurity.
Can
I fly, held aloft on pollution-thickened
air? Long ago, my wings had
become arms.
As
I walk down to the path, a bush slaps me in the face.
and whispers:
Could you not have lived differently?
7:4
In
a classroom, some students are sitting in chairs,
some are in other time-
zones, projected
on a flat screen. “When
you
go to lunch, I’ve
already had
mine; perhaps
yesterday," one student says.
There's a dissonance too in not sharing the
same hurricanes, earthquakes,
forest fires,
an overanxious robot breaking the arm of
an overachieving kid.
7:5
This
morning’s haze is smoke drifting west from a sweat
lodge in Arizona,
carrying the overcast god, a god who
doesn’t sermonize messianic hope,
but is born of dark matter
compassionately concealing
when the planet
has
become a tourist destination.
7:6
On
Air Force bases and missile ranges ground-penetrating
radar
plots where barefooted Homo sapiens left
behind
"ghost tracks"
haunted by the insteps of their next mutations.
7:7
Sunglasses
bridge my eyes dimming them to what needs to be
seen:
a council of rocks
assembled on the opposite mountain,
or
the
ruins
of an ancient pueblo.
Although
local knowledge remains intact,
social, religious, political,
or
racial circumscription is becoming
an
obstacle
to the survival
of
the species as a whole.
7:8
When
there are so many minds, artificial and otherwise,
that
causality
will
overwrite reality, the wings
of
a
hummingbird
will be
seen as beat-
ing faster
than the
speed of light.
7:9
“I
don’t believe the internet is an appropriate medium
for serious philo-
sophical
debate.”(3) To
this, S. Mallarmé may
have written:
“No
matter!
Others will
lead me towards happiness.”(4)
7:10
Is this mountain the
next site for excavating
rare
earth elements
to animate the
quest for a conscious
AI
machine, leaving
behind
the toxic tailings
we forget to remember?
Here
Be Dragons
again?
Master One-Eyed
Dragon of Ming-chao
raised
one finger
pointing
to pollutants
above, then he
pointed
to the fire-breathing
dragons
venting their
anger on the
scorched earth
of NASA's launchpads.
7:11
In
the smoking mirror, in
the mirror made
of stone, a
Philosopher’s
Stone
in which interpretation
and performance
are fused,
someone called
God
to fill the
void where
History
and Eternity
dissolve into “the
forsaken cry.”(5)
7:12
"Don’t
go that way!” a man warned me. “A bobcat’s
nursing
her young.”
In the
blue
air, where
REM
dreams, C.G.
Jung’s active
imagination
and
anxiety
over
finitude
are
conflated, some
cosmologists
conceive
of
the
Big
Bang
as
if
it
contained
the
seeds
of
human
gestation
and
evolution.
“The
harsh reality is that the universe was not made for us,”(6)
This rives technology’s neurotic ambitions, and drives
us
mad.
7:13
A compass
turning
around
a circumference
points
to
far-seeing
Odysseus
who
sailed
ten
years
on
god-driven
seas,
navigating
home
with
tales
still
to
be told.
Now,
drifting
dust
clings
to
legs
slowly
walking
home,
and
stories
drawn
from
the
poetic
unknown
don’t
point
to
transcendence
but
to
every
direction
at
once.
7:14
The
shaman who
once lived
alone on
the village’s
verge,
now
gives
TED
talks on “the hard problem” of
consciousness. Yet
he
still
dreams of
trotting through
a forest
expiring the
rancid
breath
of an
old wolf…though tagged
and tracked.
7:15
Three
years after
the last
wildfire the
sun rises
on the
wings of
vultures
gliding
off a
tree’s skeletal limbs, rising on warm
air currents, scanning
for
roadkill…while
our GPS is guiding us to where?
We are not lost.
We are
only
refusing to
see.
7:16
Australian
Aboriginal "ancient traditional art consisted
of geometric
patterns,
purely geometrical
patterns.”(7)
An
abandoned
glove evokes
a hand
pressed
against
rough
knobs
of rock. “The 'language,’ the
'knowledge'
or
'wisdom'
of the
hand,"(8)
trace
time’s
gyrating geometries.
7:17
A
few of
us became
famous while
others worked
anonymously.
Walking
the path
I usually
take, one
day I
suddenly felt
natural
in
the natural
world. And
the route
I’d walked untold
times was
no
longer a
path but
a way
of being alive.
7:18
Marcel
Duchamp declared
himself an
artist, so everything
he signed
(a
urinal, a
snow shovel.)
was "art".
After this
buyers only wanted to
know
if
the signature
is authentic.
Banksy
is an
artist who is
known for
being unknown. One
work
had
his
signature;
but
some said it
wasn't real
because
the paint ran,”(9)
like
a watercourse
flowing to someone else.
7:19
Machines
can mimic
Shakespeare
or
paint like
Picasso, but
175 billion
machine
learning
parameters
still obscure
the Muses’ radiant
domain.
What
makes us
want to
fool our
perception,
enslave
our mind,
licking
the
luster
off
the latest
machines, is driven
by
the
same motivation
as
climbing
Mt.
Everest,
leaving
garbage
and
bodies
behind?
7:20
A
storm
of
environmental,
political,
economic,
and
social
change
no
philosophy
has
foreseen,
will
reform
every
foundational
belief,
unmasking
our
human-faced
gods. “The most stable forms
begin
to
change
their
shape
as
soon as
they are
imagined
to
be alive.”(10)
7:21
What we call disaster, such as fierce wildfires,
trees burned and
fallen, rock- and mudslides, swollen rivers running down streets…
is just another day in the life of the Natural World.
A
small plant leaned over and touched me, so gently that
just
for
a moment, all the violence in the world suddenly
stopped.
NOTES
1. Li Po. From, “Drinking Alone Beneath the Moon.” D.
Hinton, trans.
2. K. Crawford, “A Conversation with Kate Crawford, author
of ‘Atlas of AI.’” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pRpSW6T_Wuo3
3. R, Brassier. “An Interview with Marcin Rychter.
Kronos 4, March 2011.
4. S. Mallarmé. From, “The Faun” A.S.
Klein, trans.
5. W.H. Auden. From, “Musee des Beaux Arts.”
6. J. Tallinn, “Dissident Messages.” In, Possible
Minds. J. Brockman, ed., New York, 2019. p. 97.
7. R. Lawlor, “Dreaming the Beginning: An Interview with
Robert Lawlor.” Parabola, Summer 1993.
8. Y. Haft-Promrock, Hands: Aspects of Opposition and Complementarity
in Archetypal Chirology. Einsiedeln,1992. p.19. Also, https://weishaus.unm.edu/Writing/hands.htm
9. T. Geoghegan, “How To Spot a Banksy.” BBC
New Magazine, 16 Jan 2008. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/7190137.stm
10. G. Bachelard, Earth and Reveries of Will. Dallas, 2002.
p.212.