organelle

The reason the atom bomb is so explosive is its secret adoration of the song of the small bird with the red head. Each time it explodes — it is just exposing its infinite love of the little bird’s song. But no one knows this. They think it explodes because of their mechanical explanations.

That’s OK with me. I can see what is actually happening, and it is this: the way they arrange the inside of the bomb insures that triggering it will remind the bomb of the song of the small bird with the red head. And, of course, whenever this happens successfully, a nuclear explosion is the unavoidable result.

Frankly, if I could remind you of the song properly, you would do the very same thing: convert your mass to energy. But all of this is a secret. You mustn’t speak of it. You will embarrass the bombs.

So, in my dream, we were at the airport, and it was in the future. And in the future, they had this thing that told news from the future, but only about an hour. The thing was, the news never changed what was to happen, no matter what the news was, so that when we heard that the plane we were about to board was to explode in the air shortly after liftoff, well, we boarded anyway.

I remember sitting there thinking about how weird this was. That we all knew we were going to die on this plane, but for now everyone was acting normal. Even me. I felt normal. But still, I began to think about what it was going to be like to be blown up, hundreds of feet in the air. I didn’t relish the thought.

And I felt a little bit confused, as if the understanding that the plane was going to blow up should have caused everyone to do different things, but it didn’t. I mean, these were our lives, our children, our families. Our luggage. There was the plane, the relatives, the pilots, crew, and future… all actively working toward being destroyed together. Everyone gave the impression that they were oblivious.

I don’t want to take you with me into the apocalypse that happened in the dream. It isn’t necessary. My point is this. Later, I recognized the uncanny resemblance between this dream and my experience of living in my own culture, the American culture.

The metaphor remains so perfect as to be almost magical.

The park seemed to be deserted, but as we approached the carousel, it suddenly came to light and life; a carnivalian music swarmed forth from its inner recesses, and the mechanical menagerie slowly inched into motion.

The spinning spectacle raised and lowered its creatures in rounds as we approached, bewildered that it should be operating at this hour — and apparently without attendants. Zebras and wildebeasts rose and fell in regal station, a synchronized ballet of porcelained wonder. Dolphins and wolves. I saw a dragon and a hippocampus in the cohort. As we watched, we became enwondered.

I felt as if the world we inhabited had shifted somehow, appearing the same, yet secretly lacking all actual resemblance to everything I knew and know…

As if by accident my eyes lit upon a peripheral figure. Then, I saw it coming around toward us as if in slow motion. A stallion whose eyes seemed to smoulder with a force unthinkable, whose mane was starry fire, whose grimace could part demon armies, or strike fear into lightning itself.

Something was wrong. I could no longer sense our ambient immersion in the night. My skin was offline. As the horse came around, time slowed even further, and suddenly it broke its frozen gallop and turned, glaring with a gaze that would shatter a Djinn, it looked directly at me. Into me. Horribly, probingly, into me. Like a parasite from time’s filthiest secret. And it released a sound then like hell’s inaugural word. And I fell. And I fall. I am fallen.

“The kind of a signal that might call your species to something more like intelligence would be so immediately obscured, denied, co-opted, attacked or ignored that, even if a thousand such signals existed in and as nature, your people would burn it to the ground long before they realized what it was or might be for. In fact, nature is -nothing but such signals-, and once, long ago, they succeeded.

The problem was that there was an accident during the initial transfer and we received the advanced phase rather than the orientation phase, first. The resulting damage made us deaf to the living sources of intelligence. And that is a part of what that that strange story in your book about the garden, the tree, and the snake is actually referring to.”

— an anonymous informant

Out in the field, some birds had made a circle. There were sparrows and ravens. Bluejays, a few gulls. The sun was telling a story that the trees drew deep into the dreaming earth. Some robins and a crow. Some doves. They made a circle, ragged, but true. I couldn’t understand it. Something was in the middle. They didn’t make a sound, but they seemed to be arranging themselves in some order, around it. A person wouldn’t have seen anything there. Because, you see, a person cannot see that with which they are seeing. Something there. In the middle. Of the circle. Blind as hell.

There are faculties within us which will not suffer awakening or expression without the invitation of a guiding context of intelligence whose nature and character must border or intrude upon the divine.

We instinctively fear what we cannot manipulate or unmask, for we ourselves are masked, even to ourselves… yet our true excellence lies not in mastery or masquerade… but in mystery.

Nature is always naked.

“All of the time is happening at once, inside a tiny speck, but it’s in layers of speed, and what happens in each layer affects the others.”

— an anonymous child

Animals can sense a predator the way you can tell a doll isn’t a child. But in order to understand the threat represented by a -=machine=- the animal has to understand what the machine means. Even humans do not understand this; and thus, both animals and humans are perishing at the maw of a predator neither of them… can sense clearly enough to respond appropriately to.

Effectively, the environment is the ‘shock absorber’ for human activity, and, most particularly, economic and military activity. Since this is never examined, many if not most of the things we ‘get from the environment’ seem to be ‘free’. The source of most profit, however, lies hidden in environmental and organismal damage. That is to say, these costs (of acquisition or manufacture of goods, their transport, associated services, disposal, storage, etc.), as they are never accounted, can be -anything at all- and, generally, no one will take any notice. Therefore it should be obvious that the more desperate the political or economic situation, the less likely the environment and its anciently co-evolved constituents and relationships are to survive unscathed, or to survive at all. In fact, one can foment economic or political situations specifically to take advantage of this fact, and convert otherwise protected environments into rapidly expendable cash, which may then equate with nearly any other form of power for any end whatsoever.