La segunda parte en la serie de diez ensayos de poeta Mike Mahoney presentados como contestaciones al libro La chispa azul por nuestro socio el filosofo J.P. Kruse. Cuadro realizado por pintora Gracia Salvaje.
Part two of poet Mike Mahoney's series of essays responding to The Blue Spark by J.P. Kruse. Painting by artist Wild Grace from her Ever Present Series.
Part two of poet Mike Mahoney's series of essays responding to The Blue Spark by J.P. Kruse. Painting by artist Wild Grace from her Ever Present Series.
Just as we are embedded in fields within fields of electromagnetic
frequencies carrying their own cosmic oceans of information nurturing, toxic,
and neutral to us, we are also embedded in many layers and strata of time:
energetic and vibrational time, biological and metabolic time, seasonal and
star time, evolutionary time, business time, etc.. We’ve built our entire
cultural model, however, on just one kind of time: human time, or more
specifically, the abstracted digital time of our techno-linguistic financial
economy; the frenetic, bordering-on-panic, rush-hustle time of trying to keep
up with perpetual distraction within the “rat-race” of working our life away to
buy simulations of our misdirected desire in order for a few to monopolize the
many and establish a global oligarchy of management within the homogenized
landscape of our illusory “freedom” and government granted right to the
“pursuit of happiness,” which can never actually be achieved from the inside
since the realization of deep happiness would signal the end of the pursuit on
which our entire cultural economy is based, and the population-wide realization
of true freedom and happiness would probably end historical time as we
know it altogether.
We are encapsulated, enwombed, interwoven and encompassed by many
fields and layers of time, of many cycles of rhythm, which we remain blind and
deaf to, remain unaware of within this cultural bubble of our historical
simulacra. The rhythms of Earth and Her seasons of growth, death and
transformation, slip & pass by unnoticed to most of us, which when we do
see them it’s mostly for the commodity and sale of Her fruits, or in the
clothes and fashions corresponding with snow or spring flowers, autumn leaves or
summer beaches. The rhythm time of the stars and constellations, the time and
special awareness of mountains, minerals, rivers and forests remain silent to
our ears, invisible to our eyes and, perhaps most importantly, absent from our
stories, and therefore appear lifeless, meaningless, here simply as our
resources. The sacred cycle and spiritual time-consciousness of
life-&-death as a single miracle of transformation, and as two sides of the
same Grace, seems to be the most difficult aspect of time for us to accept, to
perceive in its divine light with any clarity of understanding, and thus we
continually suffer, & in a million different ways, from our
collective-yet-unspoken cultural avoidance of this central mystery.
We live within the consensual hallucination of linear history,
where in the current century of cultural date-keeping, “time is money,” &
if you’re not making money or buying your own distraction, you’re wasting your
own time & the time of others. But by operating on just this one mode of
time, this digital-financial time of distraction and interruption, we’ve shut
ourselves out and cut ourselves off from any perception and relationship with
life that’s deeper than a surface-reflection, more subtle than an explosion, or
which lasts longer than the average commercial spot. We become ignorant of, (or
if aware, then spooked by), any experience of time not compatible with the
frenetic yet dull pattern-cell of work/consume/work, or slower than the
hyper-acceleration of our ever-spawning forms and variations of communication
and super-computing technologies. The human world of material capitalism now
spreads like a cancer sprawled out across & encompassing the globe,
recognizing neither day or night but one seamless and bland blend of time of “expansion
and profit,” or of “reduction and debt.”
As with layers and dimensions of different frequencies of time we
don‘t notice, we are embedded in thousands of different forms and variations of
unheard language, as well. The languages of frogs and birds, of trees, rivers
and stones which are slower, of the moon, forests and weather patterns, slower
still, of the days and nights, oceans and seasons, years, dreams, generations
and millenniums – all of these things have their own languages which we cannot
understand as long as we dwell only within the bubble of our own alphabet. And
just like those fields of time we move in & through, only seeing &
processing within one of the billions of different types and layers, & thus
labeling & ignoring as “not real” all of our experience of everything
outside of our thin slice of the time spectrum, we do the same with language.
We’ve packed all our belongings & moved into just one or a handful of
languages, completely oblivious to the voices of Earth crying, or worse, falling
silent.
This language we live in seems to be dictated by whatever the
predominant “portal” of the cultural era is, itself usually directed by the
latest technological inventions, and though it’s safe to say that money and
financial value are still the main doorways to our sense of meaning and truth,
with the passing of the 20th century those doorways transformed
from a million different physical shapes, forms, services and materials, into
the singular, world-wide & hyper-compatible, digitally-connected doorway of
our techno-culture’s economy, while its binary-shaped & homogenized
algorithms gobble up the diversity of species and ecosystems, ideas and even
other cultures in its globalizing spread, like a cancer.
A couple thousand years now into the process of cultural
abstraction and the symbolic games of our linear and linguistic march through a
collective dream we call History, our ears have fallen deaf to the crying world
we’ve half-destroyed, (& totally de-story-ed), while we look away to
anything that will distract us for a little while, reminding ourselves that the
Earth, (that mute lump of dead rock and ocean), doesn’t speak, let alone sing
or sob.
The language we choose to live and play out our games in, to think
and express ourselves with, adds to & strengthens another field, the field
of ideas. The Earth as mute lump of dead rock and ocean is a virus of an idea
that propagated itself through a few thousand years of human agriculture and
patriarchal religion, of male-dominated cultures filled with Taboo & the
Myth of Separation, Law, Ritual & Class Structure, Technology and Abuse of
Resources.
In present times, we walk and dance, (or mope and trudge), through
a million-plus year-old morphogenic dream-world of all the ideas and currents
of awareness every person of our species who ever walked the earth ever had.
“We stand on ground that is the whole human adventure,” (Pearce), and whether
we’re ever taught it or not, made aware of it or not, it seems to be one of our
powers as human beings to tune in to these currents like a radio to all the
different stations beamed across the epigenetic sky of our historical trip, and
in fact, if we widen our lens of attention through sacred silence & other
forms of magic, it seems we can tune in not only to every station in the human
spectrum, but to all the different stations beamed across all of the Earth and
even the Universe, from protozoa to pulsar, from plants to planets.
We seem to live, however, only within the slim band of attention
of our own cultural field & heritage of human ideas. (Are we noticing a
pattern yet?) Each day we wake up inside of our culture, inside of the
awareness expressed and sustained by our culture. We open eyes inside the
thousands of ideas it takes to build a house or apartment building, get out of
the idea of bed, go through ritualistic performances of ideas about hygiene and
dress, and decorate ourselves in ideas called clothes, jewelry, shoes &
identity, drive to the idea of work in the millions of ideas collectively
called a car, and generally spend our days moving from one collection of ideas
into another – ideas infused into material objects & structures,
architectures & automobiles – rarely touching the Earth or experiencing it
beneath our layers and layers of virtual realities.
Not only is each object and reified thing of human design we see
and use a fossilized fusion of probably thousands if not millions of ideas –
some going all the way back to our primate ancestors and before, blobbed
together over time and solidified into existence by our use and expression of
them, by our inheriting and carrying them over from previous generations
through our individual thoughts and behaviors – but even the singing forms and
diverse beings of the natural world we share this living planet with are
contorted & distorted into the images of our ideas about them; are barely
seen or heard through the thicket of stimulus and noise, of concepts and
beliefs we lay over top of them as a massive brickwork topology of words and
symbols. Of facts, categories, beliefs and assumptions. Of nouns and verbs,
hallucination and delusion. Of separateness and fear.
Often times, the longer and deeper the chasms of time and history
these ideas span, the more solid they become as a field-effect of culture, they
more they take root, grow and expand, and simultaneously the more they evolve
and transform, (or further stiffen and harden, fossilized into lifeless
artifacts at best, truths at worst.)
The idea of shelter and lodging is a very old idea, hundreds of
thousands of years old, hundreds of thousands of years of man’s full attention
and ingenuity, although the variation of this idea I pay rent to live alone in,
the "studio apartment," is quite a recent style of living in human
history. (Note how, as a recent or newer variation on the idea, it’s resonant
with an ancient form – the cave.) The chair I sit in is an old composition of
who knows how many individual’s ideas based around carpentry, mathematics,
upholstery, comfort, zippers, cushions, physics, body mechanics, aesthetic and
design, symbolism and myth, fatigue, necessity, etc., all expressing a field or
cluster of attentions revolving around the human activity of sitting. The
personal computer i will type this poetic essayling into – itself a
cannabis-catalyzed litany of ideas being spun out of a web of countless others'
ideas, culled and gleaned from a rather wide stretch of time and reading – is a
technology of tremendous depth and breadth of ideas; a massive nexus point of
millions of ideas, themselves made up of millions of ideas, big and small,
brilliant and obvious, psychedelic and synchronistic and profound at every
level and scale from every twig, root, bud, leaf and branch of human knowledge
and study; a magical machine condensated out of the human imagination (with a
chemical dash of help here and there), which took all of human history and the
millions of years of stirrings of our creativity & intellect beforehand to
come to, and in fact much longer than that, as the rare earth metals and
elements used for its construction were initially cooked up who knows how many
stars ago?
Perhaps it’s helpful to see ideas as a type of mental technology,
and, in some sense, as the cognitive offspring of all of our languages, whether
they’re expressed in “a linguistic, pictorial, architectural, mathematical or
musical guise,” (Kruse). (Note: I’m entirely avoiding here the type of ideas
which are nonverbal, not language-based, even though upon further examination
this type of wordless thinking and feeling may buttress, if not underlie and to
some degree spark, every language-based idea we entertain.) Just as our
technologies, (material objects embedded with ideas), have shown ideas can be
as life-affirming and heart-opening as they can be dangerous and deadly. They
can destroy empires as well as build them up; can manifest complex labyrinths
around us in which we get lost, or they can safely lead us out of them. They
can make gods & healers, saints & mystics of men and women as easily as
devils and tyrants, savages & worms. They can perform miracles like saving
the Earth or illuminating some of Her mysteries just as easily as they can
infect and infiltrate our organism, culture and planet with toxicity &
disease. (For the past few human generations, at least, it seems this planet
has been choking & sputtering on a few of the undigested ideas of
humanity’s western materialist culture – undigested by both the planet and by
humanity. Similarly, most of our human cultures have an awful time trying to
swallow a few of the planet’s ideas, specifically those of her sacred,
psychedelic plants – strange, brilliant, poetic and funny though they may be.)
Sometimes an idea, or cluster of ideas, (ideology, belief,
technology), becomes so powerful, its basin of
attraction so deep, that it nudges the entire trajectory of
the human adventure. It releases a charge or “current capable of carrying away
generations in its slipstream.” (Kruse). When the true depth of power ideas
contain to influence, destroy, create and transform realities is understood in
this light, it seems appropriate, perhaps, to consider ideas as mediums which
both extend and amputate elements of our reality, and to ask of them the four
fundamental questions put forward by McLuhan in his Laws of Media: What is
gained? What is lost? What is brought back from an ancient time? And what will
come of this if we let it go too far?
Erected and sustained by which ideas they let in and which they
aggressively stamp out, ideas are the glue of culture. In looking at the
various cultures of Earth throughout history and our present day, we can catch
a pretty clear glimpse of what happens when ideas are allowed to go too far –
usually through initial success – and what becomes of the cultures built upon
such mutations. We see this by the exaggerations of what was gained by those
ideas being preserved and distorted, generation after generation; of what was
lost by this junkie-like addicting to possession of specific culturally
inherited ideas, inherited modes of behavior and attention; and what behaviors
or ideas are brought back from previous times, dressed up and redesigned to fit
the culture, of course. This is easier to see in cultures than in their
individuals simply because of the large scale it takes place on. When ideas are
inherited on a cultural scale, below the level of our personal awareness, they
are expressed, animated, and reinforced by the unconscious behavior of the
entire tribe or community, and folded over again into yet another layer of
reinforcement by the compulsive need everyone feels to comply and fit in to
their group. These ideas become so deeply ingrained that we often only
experience them in our unawareness. As a field of our reality we
never question. They become the water we swim in, so to speak, the air we
breathe, and the epigenetic field we grow and live within. They become the eyes
we see with, and as a result they’re ideas which people barely even notice
anymore, let alone consciously engage and play with, or participate in, but
rather submit to as pillars of reality, as basic facts and tenets of the fabric
of life. As the condition of human nature. ‘The way it’s always been.’
