earthling Archives

Complementarities

Corresponding data suggests.

Here’s the tearing sky again; hold it close. See if you can stand a minute inside the detonating histories of the next flyover. I read this morning that the spider relies on the wind to spin fibers of a web between trees and still they go one loop at a time and my faith, by comparison, is weak. If light can be particle and wave, then knowing must be mind and universe at least, and maybe also body, in its necessary histories, these visions of the past, dreamed and remembered fresh with each new vision of the days ahead. Now what.

Embers

A meeting at the water’s edge.

We knelt at the water, holding our urns, one from the depths and another from the surface. We tipped them both behind us, five streams to water the land, and each returned to us in its smells, its touch, the offered visions, songs. We tasted, too. We each had one foot in the stream and listened. Shhh, came the next breath. There was no cover. Only the stars, and we held them, too.

The New Science

On signs, symbols, and the origins of meaning.

Trace it with me: age of gods, age of heroes, age of men.

Our first language was born of knowing its poverty.

We relied on signs and symbols. Then came metaphor,

and then our measly letters, where we pretended

to be saying precisely what we meant.

Hieroglyphs suffice when observance

is more important than discussion,

as with religions and the like.

Which came first, I wonder? Letters or language,

chickens or their eggs?

Attempting to separate one from the other is folly.

The first speakers, by necessity of nature, were poets.

Here is the key to any meaningful science worth following:

the source of all poetry is poverty of language,

catalyzed by a need to express.

The point? To learn the language

spoken by some eternal history,

across time. Another: to name

the beginnings of learning.

To our unseen source, knowledge

and creation are one

and the same. We

are mind and spirit;

intellect and will, but

it’s the function of wisdom

to fulfill both.

Children of nascent mankind

created things according to their ideas,

which are not to be confused with God.

But usually are.

The role of fear

should not be discounted here,

in stoking robust ignorance,

corporeal imagination.

Frightened men,

in their infinite vanity,

no sooner imagine than they believe.

Natural curiosity, the daughter

of ignorance and mother

of knowledge, gives birth:

to wonder.

By Jove, the thundering sky.

***

Adapted from The New Science of Giambattista Vico, translated by Thomas Goddard Bergin and Max Harold Fisch.

First Breaths

Learning to look from here.

Why study the stars except to enact the living wonder and proximity to countless possibilities for those infinite lives beyond the next inevitable end?

Why look at all, why make a telescope, except to measure the passage of time and a body’s position, except to measure by extension, the depth by which it might be penetrated by some unknown, swollen with original mystery?

In the beginning was the word, but the telescope came later.

This sequence depends on a certain view of time, doesn’t it, as a length of collected experience and not a renewable fountain of recycled water, and not as a looping circle, with every end the next beginning and every fresh possibility the natural conclusion to the most recent fall?

***

I read somewhere that Gallileo Gallilei unveiled his telescope on this day in a former century, which probably has something to do with why I landed here.

From Rubble

An invocation for healing.

After we’ve read and re-read the last bomb-shelter bedtime story, enough that we no longer need the books; after the skins of our backs have collectively dulled the barbs at our borders, after children no longer know the difference between fire and sky, what will we know for certain, except the common ghosts floating among us like pigeon feathers? When the rags of our bodies are strewn across the singed lands of our erased ancestors, and we’ve burned the last of our vengeances in the name of the justices we stood before rights, when the mute children no longer need to be hushed, will we remember to offer a beginning in our next word?

Sickbed at Sunset

A cautionary tale.

Are you ill?

Yes. Can’t you tell?

Of course. You sound like hell. And yet––

What do you mean?

You look and sound about the same as usual.

What do you mean?

I mean, what good is health if you are only going to complain about it when you have it?

Do you need something?

I have needed many things.

Anything! Name it!

Really? From there?

You are very cold.

Not always. I had a fever and it almost killed me. But you were too distracted by various ailments of your perfect health, to notice.

I would do anything, I swear, I am about to––

Now I have quite a bit to do.

Of what?

The living.

Oh. But give me something better, something grand!

Sorry to disappoint you. This is it, only daily stuff. Tasks, food, lists, cleaning, and then cleaning up what others can’t bear to look at.

But anyone can do that. I have a purpose! Well, I wish I could––

Even the mock-purpose driven discount runs out at some point. Why not for you?

Well, the sun rises every morning––

The sun, yes. But for the rest of us, there’s no guarantee.

That’s terrifying.

It should be. Enough to move a body to living, anyway. Still, many evade this––successfully, at least for a time.

But you need to understand––

A person can decide, consciously or unconsciously, that they are the living sun, endlessly rising and setting, emboldened with the powers of illumination and darkness, for all the world to see or wait to recover from. It’s very gratifying, apparently.

Well–––

And who can blame you? It works until it doesn’t anymore.

One day––

One day you will wait for the light that is coming, and you will know it isn’t you. And then you will be ready to begin. And if, when that day comes, you are alone, you will know that you will be okay. Not because you feel that you are, but because the power that made you what you were never is or was of you.

And?

Then you stand up.

And?

Then you walk.

What now?

Visiting hours are over. Now get to listening. Your shoes are under the bed.

Alpha Omega

On the architecture of hope.

You get this finite span of years; we have the bodies to prove it, and yet. There’s this persistent dream of forevers just beyond our knowing, held aloft as constant possibilities, and it is into these dreams that we forever pour devotions, as if there were no way to avoid a strong sense of something adjacent to these bodies, some transferable essence moving through us, across time and geography, language and species, a vastness that is in and not of us. How wildly clumsy we are in our attempts to name it, our dance the balletic gestures over cliffs of possibilities we can’t unsee, these reaching poses straining to catch what will not be grasped, washing over us most vividly as we leap towards our beginning and our ends, from rupture to renewal, and it’s hard not to wonder, which came first, creation or memory, or were these always entwined, in the dawns born of this substance ever stretching toward the ripe possibility in the amniotic bubble of the first word?

Carry Dirt

No justice comes from ignorance.

Inspired by Christine DePizan’s The Book of the City of Ladies (1405), as translated by Earl Jeffrey Richards.

***

How is it that so many of them––learned, too––seem to speak from the same mouth, painting us with every vice they wish to wash from themselves, and why? This was my question.

Then came three women and the first among them said, Daughter, build a city. Make it of lasting beauty, and you will draw forth waters from the heavens.

I considered the births of other divinely inspired cities: Troy, Thebes. I recalled their ruin and said so. But the women insisted: This one would not be taken or conquered. Lay a strong foundation, they insisted. Set it deep. Get up, daughter. Go where earth abounds. We will help you carry it.

I asked, why do they revile us? She told me only, carry dirt. Then she added, no justice can come from their ignorance.

They explained that some derive pleasure from slander of what mystifies them. Others are moved by awareness of their own defects, and others by jealousy of anything they cannot own. Leave them, they told me, and avoid attachment to their tools.

Look closely, they insisted. They explained: these opinions only pretend to be based in reason. By claiming to own reason, they deny its essence with the same breath by which they mean to deny you access to their ill-begotten power.

The path to what is true may be narrow, but it leads to such abundance that no one who follows it to its natural end could ever consider keeping it to themselves, since such innate greed of purpose would naturally bar them from their destination.

No one can take away what nature has given, but many will deny what she is, attempting to hoard her abundance for themselves, by creating the dragon’s lairs that are their own demise.

I had more questions, but they became impatient with my need to know. Don’t be as they are, they insisted. Get up. Carry dirt. Go.

***

The above meditation was inspired by this morning’s reading of DePizan’s excellent theological critique of misogyny. I borrow some phrases from the original (translation), but rely more heavily on impressions, blurring the lines slightly to create a more encompassing critique (to include not only overt misogynists but anyone attempting to hoard access to truth and power by demeaning any other living group, including the non-human species of the earth), and to heighten the call to recognition of the vital flaw at the heart of this life-killing move while attempting to magnify the resonance of its answer, a call to return to a holistic, generous sense of logic, justice, and development rooted in a sense of abundance (rooted in an understanding of life) rather than scarcity (which has its roots in fear of the unknown/ death).

Vigil

Protection begins with attention.

Remember the bridled white eye, with his tiny spectacles, who seemed always to be offering an arch look to punctuate a well-placed question. As in, what are you doing?

Or Bachman’s warbler, who once knew the damp floors of the dense forest? Remember the Kauai akialoa, with his flourish of long bill, hooked like the edge of the reaper’s scythe, and the honeycreeper that once set her eggs in cup-shape nests. Remember the little Mariana fruit bat, the flying fox slowly poisoned by DDT in cycad seeds.

Careful! A mother calls after a child, ever reckless with living and ignorant of possibilities for being snuffed out. Watch! Watch out!

The Scioto madtom once fed on the bottoms of graveled streams in central Ohio. The upland combshell mussel could only produce with enough space in the clean waters of an undisturbed riverbed, with fish enough for hosting the young. The blade horned chameleon of Tanzania’s old growth forest darkens its skin under stress. It wraps its tail around a tree branch and hangs on.

Hold tight! she calls.

The Pacific bluefin tuna are often caught before they can breed.

Hurry, hurry!

The North American bumblebee made its home in the eastern grasslands now plowed for corn and its attendant poisons.

Watch out!

How easy it is to lose what isn’t watched. Among the African elephants, the matriarchs will slow their pace so a calf can keep stride. A cheetah will move her litter every few days to keep predators off the scent. An alligator will hold her babies in her mouth to protect them from being eaten by another.

She is watching out a window, through a screen. She is watching the sky, the temperature, the poisons, the electrical outlets, the latest reports. What do you know? She will ask, sometimes. Waking to check that her young are still breathing, waking to number the threats, count the fires, track the melting ice and the coming war, to calculate the timing of her next move, and wonder, how? Her song is silent like the watch she keeps over the lives of the living, so easily and recklessly lost.

***

This post was inspired by a sobering look at the report, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Services Proposes Delisting 23 Species from Endangered Species Act Due to Extinction. This on the morning after an American holiday in which it is fashionable to offer thanks for what is solidly in hand. The juxtaposition of the report and this moment have me imagining how the notion of gratitude might be expanded to include grief over what was once had, but then lost, and vigilance over what remains, teetering precariously and often invisibly between here and gone.

Opposite the Eternal

On fleeting wonders.

An abundance of parachutes glow nightly in the dark waters

before the volcano. Open, close, open. Like the petals of a cherry blossom,

someone says, an invitation to remember

what is fleeting, the blooming magnificence of wild renewal,

before breeze fells them like blankets of snow.

***

Inspired by this article about the recent influx of luminescent jellyfish in Japan’s Yojirougahama waterway.