The Way of Bubbles

It used to annoy me that we “greedy bastards” have won throughout history, write our own accounts hiding the perfidy of our ways, and instruct our progeny in the righteousness of moral superiority. Now, I recognize that that’s life for big-brained apes who have had little choice in the matter given our elemental anxieties but to inflate a most delusional projection of ourselves as nature’s conquistadors; I see now, too, that our biological bubble as a species is as prone to bursting as is any bubble of personal fancy.

“Foreclosure” (a possible title for a new ‘nut’)

[a poetic "nut" I wrote down on the morning of 11 October 2010]

The bank’s boarding up my body.
God knows, I never owned it.
Don’t know where I’ll go.
Been living all this time,
Thinking it was mine.
It wasn’t, isn’t.
My stuff’s doorless at last,
Pickovers for the penniless passersby.

“the obvious,” maybe?

When I read Hugh MacLeod’s review of Seth Godin’s latest business book Linchpin, I was struck by the following paragraph in which MacLeod may have revealed more than he had intended about Godin’s career as a writer.

In his best-known book, Purple Cow, Seth’s message was, “Everyone’s a marketer now.” In All Marketers Are Liars, his message was, “Everyone’s a storyteller now.” In Tribes, his message was, “Everyone’s a leader now.” And from Linchpin? “Everyone’s an artist now.” By Seth’s definition, an artist is somebody who does (and I LOVE this term) “emotional work.”

It occurred to me one might observe that Mr. Godin has been growing more insightful as his writing career progressed. But frankly, that wasn’t what struck me. What seemed obvious about the progression was the need to have a new product to sell every few years on which to grow one’s punditry and consulting business.

untitled “nut” started earlier this morning:

Don’t do dishes anymore.
Just throw them out the window
to dogs sidewalked a story below
licking off what’s left on shards
piling the ground I live on.

Bones of dead dogs unfed
fill moldy spaces in the mount.
Soon I’ll be thinking about
climbing out the window
and down the slope of
common hunger.

Made shelfspace beside “Ulysses” and

Made shelfspace beside “Ulysses” and “In Search of Lost Time” for Robert Musil’s “The Man Without Qualities” rec’vd today. #Summerreading

Trying out Hootsuite to post tweets to T

Trying out Hootsuite to post tweets to T, FB, & Wp blog. Test: http://ow.ly/1zL2d is link to FB profile. Did it work?

“metaphysics” and smart apes

Just before I turned out the light last night, I read page one of Dorothy L Cheney and Robert M. Seyfarth’s Baboon Metaphysics: The Evolution of a Social Mind. I want to pass on the text to give you an example of what delights me and stirs me on to continue learning actively.

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(epigraph)
Origin of man now proved.–Metaphysic must flourish.–He who understands baboon would do more towards metaphysics than Locke.
Charles Darwin, 1838: Notebook M

What goes through a baboon’s mind when she contemplates the 80 or so other individuals that make up her group? Does she understand their social relations? Does she search for rules that would allow her to classify them more easily? Does she impute motives and beliefs to them in order to better predict their behavior? Does she impute motives and beliefs to herself when planning a course of action? In what ways are her thoughts and behavior like ours, and in what ways–other than the obvious lack of language and tools–are they different? These are questions that also vexed Charles Darwin.

We have taken our title from one of Darwin’s most memorable remarks. He wrote it on August 16, 1838, almost two years after returning from his voyage on the Beagle and 21 years before the publication of The Origin of Species. It was a time of vigorous intellectual activity, when Darwin read voraciously on many subjects, both within and beyond the sciences, and met and talked with many different people, from family friends to prominent literary and political figures (Hodge 2003). Despite this active intellectual life, however, it seems unlikely that he or anyone else had ever combined the words “baboon” and “metaphysics” in the same sentence. What was Darwin thinking?

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That last question “What was Darwin thinking?” is one I ask of humans I learn about throughout history, even of those from pre-history who haven’t written a word of their thoughts, but who have left only artifacts and art. I’m enthused (and awed) by what can be learned about the behaviors and minds of “accidental” humans and their cultures which while timeless in many respects, enlighten our understanding of specific and diverse times and places and people(s). Historicizing what happened (and might happen as a result) is the oldest and most universal of human activities. Amazingly, our narratives are largely in our minds–kinds of fictions–and largely subliminal! Most of the time, if we were asked to elaborate on them, we’d have a difficult time with the “metaphysics” we live by!

Connecting the past with the present

I had underlined these sentences in Robert Graves’ introduction to The Greek Myths, when I was a freshman at Columbia College in 1964-65. Graves’ book was a secondary resource for making sense of ancient stories studied in the Humanities course that was required to be taken by every College student. I’m not sure Graves’ narrative has stood the test of time among anthropologists, even mythologists–it may be, in itself, myth not science. But for an eighteen year old (boy) from a small town in mid-America, this speculation certainly opened my mind to wondering about gender and culture in a way I never imagined. Here I am today wondering whether or not an epochal transformation is once again going to happen in the cultural/social relations of the sexes. Fortunately for me, too, I had enjoyed a wondrous summer of sexual play with the first woman I ever loved before I encountered university studies about the matter. I recalled, when I read these sentences, the power of the female over me, the male.

“Ancient Europe had no gods. The Great Goddess was regarded as immortal, changeless and omnipotent; and the concept of fatherhood had not been introduced into religious thought. She took lovers, but for pleasure, not to provide her children with a father. Men feared, adored and obeyed the matriarch: the hearth which she tended in a cave or hut being their earliest social centre, and motherhood their prime mystery…. There is however, no evidence that, even when women were sovereign in religious matters, men were denied fields in which they might act without female supervision, though it may well be thought that they adopted many of the ‘weaker-sex’ characteristics hitherto thought to be entrusted to man. They could be trusted to hunt, fish, gather certain foods, mind flocks and herds, and help defend the tribal territory against intruders, so long as they did not transgress matriarchal law.”

My intention is to live the remainder of my life as a loving man who wants nothing more than to witness the world become more sustainable and justly inclusive because wonderful, powerful, and loving women lead in transforming it.