Seventy-four and Counting …

The first day of my seventy-fifth year was distinguished by this conversation over daybreak ganjava with my neighbor, Homer, who, in response to my observation that all the lessons anyone claims to have learned from hurricane Sandy were about needs to reinforce and improve infrastructure against now obviously worsening climate extremes due to global warming, with no mention of how it is just such attempts to isolate ourselves so defensively from nature that are polluting and heating the planet upon whose health we all depend, said, "Todd, you don't live in reality. There's nothing we can do about it."

"Homer, my reality observes your reality being formed by excluding the parts of it that hold our artificial, addictive conveniences responsible for our natural, karmic discomforts."*

*This is a paraphrase of the meaning intended by some less articulate arrangement of words I garbled at the time, noted for where three-quarters of a century living in the US of A has led my understanding of it.

RIP Russel Means 1939-2012

Homeland Security Vesus Mother Earth

We are far more concerned about the desecration of the flag than we are about the desecration of our land. -Wendell Berry, farmer and author (b. 1934)

Though Berry’s quote limits planetary concern to “our land,” the poignancy of his statement about Western Civilization’s misplaced patriotic priorities trumping any concern for biological symbiosis with nature, from which we arise and on which our healthy life depends, is little diminished.

Understanding is a process of letting the unknown draw one’s instinctive curiosity into deeper consideration of the nature of an entity and its relationhip to the natural universe of which it is a part.

Overstanding is the process Western Civilization bases on the premise that all of nature is in thrall to a “stewardship” exclusively granted to mankind by an external monolithic creator. That such a premise is considered a conclusive fact accounts for the energy man devotes to exploiting the environment for gains that only profits one within a machine held together by faith in wishful thinking. This faith pervades even the supposedly more secular activities of science limiting any remedy for our obvious abuse to keeping the economy afloat no matter how much land must accommodate the new water from melted ice caps and glaciers.

Just the Facts

A discussion about a media star uncovered the microcosmic key to how the macrocosm of people, a whole civilization can be described by the “facts” it assumes are indisputable in dealing among themselves and with the rest of the world.

She said, “He’s an asshole.”

I said, “That’s just your opinion.”

“No, he really is.”

“Based on what?”

“He’s mean to people.”

“Because he says what he thinks instead of kissing ass?”

“He’s an asshole, it’s a fact. End of discussion.”

Sounds like conversations my daughter cuts short with, “It’s in the Bible.”

Twenty-six lanes of facts

The “facts” of any person or culture are the practical consensus derived from desire to solidify the eternal change nature is by endlessly naming new phenomena to patch holes in the neat capsule built of forgone conclusions. The unknown lies impenetrable, just beyond one’s final conclusion. Christianity, Judaism, and Islam all agree to the “fact” that there is only one god. This agreement has bound them in an ancient, bloody war to settle the correct, factual name of this consensus superhero.

I live in an ostensibly Christian nation by declaration of its government and the professions of faith among 80% of its citizens. All other nations gaining my country's recognition as developed have less than a majority who say religion is important to them at all. I am well aware of the steamroller Christ’s followers interpret his inspiration commanded them to become. Christianity wants the Bible to be the facts of the world, but with as many versions as opinions, they just can’t settle on the one correct, factual name and required behavior.

Knowing the facts of one’s culture can aid the climb up the factual framework with  answers of correct names, dates and obedience to the authorities sitting atop the pyramid of consensus. For one aware of the process of fact fabrication, the difference between the direct experience of nature and the structure of the myth-cum-fact becomes as obvious as scaffolding one must skirt to keep from banging one’s head on the closed minds with which they are constructed. The business of Western Civilization is to bend nature to the facts about itself.

 

The momentum of nature's fluidly inevitable experience washes away more mere facts

The Zen masters know how to deal with conclusions:

Let go or be dragged.

Really?

Of course “art imitates nature” — until the first artist, that’s all there was. From then on there was nature and art to imitate. Lest we forget, nature is the original and art is imitation.

Imitation of Priest

imitating a 

"dead cat in the middle of the road"

When an artist is satisfied with an imitation of perceived reality it is shown to others out of the genetic instinct to communicate. Civilization is the exclusive evolution of the human species and its food; a spur off the main line of the hunter-gatherers’ eat or be eaten caution in dealing with hunger to the more sophisticated risk/reward of the winner-take-all profit motive predation among one’s own species.

Creating a spear, while obviously an imitation of nature’s array of puncturers, until decorated or carved to imitate a fang or talon, is less a work of art than a tool of predation, as are all weapons. Of the plethora of man’s artifice strewn about in nature, more is used to establish man’s exclusively superior “stewardship” over nature than to communicate with it; shutting out nature as caves, huts and tents give way to houses living in permanent crowds around markets for equally domesticated foods.

Art used to imitate nature, and still does for the few artists that can still recognize it and want to communicate it into the cities’ individual isolation chamber dwellers. Art used to imitate nature, but now the imitations are mostly guises to gain access to and exploit natural resources in support of our increased desire for increased isolation from and ignorance of the pollution of such increased abuse of nature.

I call this plot of land on the wooded banks of the Colorado River “going back to the garden” due to its remove from the city and relatively open spaces to grow my own food. It was an auto graveyard before being crudely sculpted to be an eight acre imitation of nature. What gardens succeed here were raised above the oil soaked, auto part incrusted soil like any city dweller would on a roof. I have also begun to realize, after last summer’s drought killed many young trees along the borders, that I am in the middle of an imminent, geologically predictable desert stretching from Texas’ Big Thicket to the Pacific Ocean, making my return to nature not only an admitted imitation but a foolish one as well.

Imitation of Priest 

imitating a playmate

 to get pip to play

I never dreamt of returning to the undomesticated state of nature we call the wild. I still have an urge to become more feral in the sense of understanding which of man’s imitations to which I am still attached are true gestures of symbiotic respect and which are merest, sincerest flattery to get usury in the door.

As above, so …

Love all, trust a few, do wrong to none.

 -William Shakespeare, playwright and poet (1564-1616)

I just got the above quote as part of today's issue of Anu Garg's A Word A Day newsletter and, after basking in the warm glow of its sentiment combined with the definition of today's word: bucolic, the word trust burned through the sweetness of Shakespeare's intent with personal experiences leading to my sadder but wiser realization that trusting anyone, especially that "few" loved ones Bill mentions, is an essential wrong we do each other every day. It may be the crux of the essential difference between eastern and western cultures.

Trusting anything is betting on our own judgement; jaywalking in heavy traffic. Projecting our wishful thinking upon the world, whether through rose colored glasses or surveillance cameras, obligates nothing of the world to satisfy us. The core lesson in the golden rule is bridging separate skins and cultural differences to realize it is not enough just to treat others as we would be treated, but to care enough to understand what it is to treat them as they would be treated.

We all serve as sensory input for an invisible observer, an entity of which we are a part, just as our cells inform who and wherever it is we imagine we are. The street name for this silent observer is "the world", being that of which we are conscious — which informs the image the world has of itself in what can truly be called another dimension, at least in scale — its "world".

Love asks nothing; it arises in recognition of happy happenstance. Trust asks everything but permission; a terrible way to treat one who evokes love within us. It's no treat knowing that you can disappoint someone who's love comes with required behavior. The trust avowed is a roadside bomb guiding newlyweds down each other's straight and narrow … or else; the best way yet invented to suffer from a blessing from which no one gains but indifferent lawyers.

It has been said that man rides a camel in search of a camel in the land where men ride camels. Man never realizes he is a wellspring of his own happiness and love in the land where men search elsewhere for love — yet dismiss it for failing the qualified requital.


Just as life would have less meaning if we were deathless, love would be less drenched in drama if trust weren't wagered against it as a claim. If the love is lost, it was only love from others the loveless self sought. If it was actually love to begin with, only the bet is lost, never the love.

The realization of the being, whose consciousness is greater than the sum of the parts we earthlings are, is the evolutionary leap that will cure the cancer the exploitive intent of western civilization's military-industrial complex has become on the body of the planet. 

Map Maker Me

My latest self-generated project is an extension of the graphics work I have been doing for a geologist/anthropologist client doing follow-up research of Eugene Dubois’ 1891 discovery of “Java Man.”

I have been interested in the myriad islands scattered across the vast Pacific Ocean from early childhood through sailing experiences with my Dad in the Gulf of Mexico and following the adventures of Thor Heyerdahl on the Kon Tiki and the Ra. Much later I came to realize that island cultures evolved by dealing with the daily reality of limited resources as opposed to the naïveté of wishful thinking that led to the wasteful continental assumption that a creator endowed man with stewardship of an infinite bounty. The contrast sparked my own evolution from an IBM engineering yuppie to free-lance artist tipi dweller in the woods learning to grow my own food over the past forty years.

The work involves studying the geology of islands born of volcanic activity and their subsequent erosion to the present to estimate locations of high fossil concentration probability for future excavation. Beginning with the area of Dibois’ discovery along the Solo River in East Java, our work has expanded to Sumatra as I draw the maps and multiple overlays of previous research into rainfall, volcanic activity, geological stratification and location and kinds of fossils uncovered to date.

The most detailed map so far is of the runoff and control of rainwater for irrigation of the ubiquitous rice paddies in the area of the original discovery lifted from previously drawn Indonesian quad maps. 

This map is clearer than the enlargement at 25 feet wide

From detailed topographic data I was able to develop a 3D representation of the original excavation sites around Ngandong.

The small section of the Solo River shown in the upper left
is the river shown in the enlargement of the large map above

It wasn’t until the research expanded into the ocean to determine ancient sea levels and bathyspheric contours off the coast that I needed to draw a better representation of the present-day coastline than was available anywhere upon which to overlay all the various relevant data. My method was to go into the wonderful Google Earth program and hover 100 kilometers above sea level, copy and paste each screen in a mosaic of the white beaches and lagoons lining the Java coastline into the Adobe Illustrator application and trace the visible waterline and major rivers emptying the plentiful watershed from the many volcanic peaks.

I so enjoy seeing and tracing the sinuous curves of the rivers, lakes and coastlines that I have been preoccupied with drawing beyond the area of the work and have detailed the Malay Peninsula up to Thailand, Burma, Cambodia and Vietnam, the chain of islands east of Java and Borneo and Sulawesi to the North. I can see myself doing this for the entire coastline of every landmass protruding above the Pacific Ocean for both the sheer enjoyment of perusing Pachamama and the bittersweet realization that those lines could well be several feet under water in what little is left of my lifetime.

This map is 47 feet wide at the detail level
obtained 100 kilometers above the earth.