blog take two

Why hello there!

It's been a while since I've posted, mostly because I've been busy with work and other work and working on other things. But it's good to be back. This is the first post of the rest of my life, and I'm thankful for that. But I'm also confused...

Did you ever have a moment where you were struck by the enormity of how utterly strange the world seems? I mean, it's gotta be some sort of joke, right? Maybe you've had this gestalt while waiting in line at a public restroom. Or perhaps as you stood in an elevator and watched several others stare at the little Captivate screen. You may have even had the moment staring at your likeness in the mirror - you know that it's human, and yet this being in the reflection appears so alien to something inside of you.

We've been around as human beings for a couple of million years! And we've evolved to what? We've risen above what?

Start with the physical plane on which we exist, which to my best guess is a ghetto in space-time where we believe that there are three dimensions when in actuality there are closer to ten or maybe two, depending on who you ask. Other dimensions weave in and out of our limited existence in the form of bridges both subatomic and infinite. Add to that the notion that embedded within this slop is some sort of consciousness, allowing physicists to account for the uncertainty principle. And don't forget the 99% of it that we can't see or classify and to which we've attached the label "dark." Time in this ghetto only appears to advance in one direction, and yet we are housed in shells that decay over the years (one of my favorite professors, Roger Fisher, once told me that "getting old ain't for sissies"). The mind is infinite, but at any moment it can be snuffed out by a blood clot. We have many emotional states, situated intelligences, and personalities, but this gradually (and then not-so-gradually) decaying frame of ours gives us a semblance of oneness. We rely mostly on information embedded in our surroundings, scaffolds that are essentially energy in a form we can interacted with and could just as soon be something completely incomprehensible to our limited conception of reality. We exist as vast heaps of trillions of cells working in relative harmony, allowing us to interact with these surroundings, and through our actions, we create information, or entropy, which is proof that we existed and some physicists believe will be replayed for all of eternity when the universe collapses. We never think about any of this. We live by a few routines (movies, work/physical exertion, eating, gossip, and sexual politics) and close out the rest from conscious consideration.

Ever feel that there's something strange about all this? Just think! Millions of years and yet the best most people can do after a movie is leap to their cell phones and exclaim, "it was amazing, you gotta see it, the ending was incredible," or "that was strange, I didn't get it, it was too slow"? Millions of years and we find our mates through either algorithm-assisted screening or randomized false pretense performed in privately-provided public spaces (such as barnes and noble)? Millions of years and the average person at least in our neck of the woods spends 10-14 hours a day staring at one kind of screen and then another and holds out hope that meaning can be found in the arrangement of the pixels? Millions of years and yet when some of us find ourselves with some time on our hands that has not already been claimed by toil and trudging things about, we have absolutely no idea how to use it? There are a billion things that we could be doing, if only we could maneuver through the infinite possibilities and potentials with some sort of perseverance.

The human condition seems so limited at times, and yet our circumstance is so profound. Why the disconnect? Even in Manhattan, where anything can happen from the mundane to the terrific to the terrifying, most of what goes on seems scripted. Those who ask for money on the subways even have prepared speeches. So I tend to my own rituals, in which there must be an answer, some clue as to what this is all about. It is true that what we do not know approaches infinity, and the more that we are aware of this, the more paralyzed we feel. We use rituals as veritable landcruisers to take us across the multiformed abyss of a thought, a field, a teaming mass of life in a drop of water, a city, an ocean, a fold in spacetime. And through those rituals, like heating a pot of water and forming a mini-cyclone in a glass as we pour our tea in the morning, or standing in line for some sugar, water, and fatty cells and watching time grind to a halt amidst the swell of the morning rush, we can contemplate infinity and eternity from a vantage point that is infused with some sense of security. But why have these rituals not led us as a collective to higher states of consciousness after all of this time? Is the relatively recent phenomenon of drawing artificial boundaries between "nature" and "society," by which we claim some semblance of mastery over the cosmos, just no match for what evolution has imprinted on our minds, the text splattered across our cognitive maps of most of the known universe that reads, "here there be monsters"?

It seems that the limited physical plane in which we act out our daily routines offers us faint hints or whispers of the infinite, of that which really matters. What does it mean that after millions of years, the bridges are so hesitantly lain and most care not to tread on them?

Vaya con Dios - brooding presence