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30 July 2010: Having Stopped the World . . .
Where have I been? Don't ask. I stopped the world and got off, because I needed a break from the weighted realization that soon it was going to stop us--from totally demolishing it. Witness all the bizarre weather phenomena--tornadoes, hurricanes, flash floods, earthquakes, much too much compared to the days when we knew better than to pollute, or didn't know enough to overpollute, or Bill Buckley was still alive.
So when I say, "Relax, the world isn't coming to an end," I have to think twice. First of all, we've all known since at least the twentieth century that there would be a scientific Doomsday somewhere down the line, which we would never witness. If humanity continues to evolve upward, they will know what to do when that happens.
But so far we don't, though Al Gore does.
We are just stuck in a chronosynclastic infundibulum (pace Kurt Vonnegut, r.i.p.) of polluting, polluting, polluting: smoking, driving, overeating, littering, patronizing BP, allowing all those drills to keep drilling while supposedly their labs are working toward more effective defenses against gushers, spills, and other destructiveness that characterizes hypercompulsive greed.
These terrorists share this with their al Qaeda counterparts: they do not value human life as much as other goals. In the domestic case, however, they value their own lives and those of their peers. The rest of us can drink petrol, which we're probably doing already.
Remember that the president took the cap off the gusher and allowed more offshore drilling after the healthcare legislation was passed? Then he tried to halt it again after the latest U.S. gusher, to no avail.
They are the thieves, but our hands are black. We suffer while they fly somewhere else in their private planes to clean water--to swim in and drink. Why not drill for that instead, if there's any left?
*****
I wish I could come up with something more creative than the usual grousing, like my 9/30/08 blog on Lincoln's editor, my forebear?
Well, how did I come upon that blog and enjoy it because of its benign harmlessness, its "malice toward none"?
I've been archiving this blog, Words, UnLtd. I started at mid 2007 (obviously where I'd last left off) and have progressed to late 2008. One more year and a half to go of unlimited words. As of that "Edith Eleutheria Steele" blog, I had written 423 of them. Aren't statistics great? Say that my posts average about one thousand words each? 423,000 words then? Enough for a lengthy book.
But it gets better. At the end of 2008, I had posted 437 times; by the end of 2009, 488, and as of today, not counting this blog, 520. I was born on 5/20, uh, a long time ago. My 500th blog I consider of vital importance in that it directed Judy Collins toward my Valentine's Day posting--material right up her alley, my 499th blog.
Actually she's probably been there, done that, just as she's looked at life from both sides now, and love.
I'll let you know if otherwise when her next album comes out. It will not contain a song called "Marta, Your Wisdom and Innovative Thinking Are Beyond Belief," or "Marta, You've Looked at Love and Life Not Only from Both Sides but from Every Side."
That's because every one of us has a long time to go before being able to boast that.
Let's say instead that I am living an examined life, so that Socrates might approve. I don't even need to go to the Delphic Oracle to realize what little I know. I'll tell it that and then ask what I should do about it, whether it matters, whether knowledge is worthwhile, and what wisdom really is, some 2500 years after Socrates lived.
It will probably have a good, well-deserved laugh. The gypsy on the Top Forties chart back in the fifties or sixties may have cried, but have you ever heard of an oracle laughing? Apollo, yes, but his steamy, sunless Sibyl, no.
What should we do, Sibyl? What are we here for? To destroy the Earth?
More laughter.
After 2500 years, she could really say that not only am I wise enough to know that I know nothing, but that we're all ignoramus idiots and air pollution has reached even the pristine, clear airs of Delphi. Don't breathe it in too deeply.
Another great kingdom will be destroyed, she might chuckle, aware that I've read a bit of Herodotus. Which one? I might ask. And then, "Give my regards to whatever comes next."
I'd leave to the sounds of hysterical, bizarre laughter, sort of like that wheezing geezer in Walt Disney's film Mary Poppins, who laughs for the first time in extreme old age and then dies. Only Sibylla would neither wheeze nor die.
*****
And so, as I end this 521st posting without laughter but with some crumbly-dry humor, sort of like that hot, dry soil one finds at an archaeological site in Greece, I am reborn into the same gloom, the same preoccupation with all the damage our "civilization" has wrought on exquisite Nature, knowing that she came first and then Culture followed and did itself in rather than her, though not without leaving behind some fine accomplishments that will amount to less than a row of beans in "whatever comes after."
Laughter?
