Quitting Airs

Holding your breath doesn't teach you how to stop breathing.  It makes you want to breathe more.

To take up arms against a sea of troubles, and by opposing end them; why I began the revolution, as said written on a toilet stall wall in 2041.

Why?

I am tired everyday taking
refuge in
the Dream.

Watching and Reading

I WATCH Books and read Movies.

Seem to no longer be reading text, it operates independently of my eyes, it'll play its chords whether I'm looking or not.  It happens.

What's going on with movies?  They're cool, behaved.  I have a mastery over them.   The movie plays its speed how fast I am looking at it.  It happens as it occurs to me.

I wonder if the web knows this.  I'm not sure what to do about it.  The web is inescapable.  I look forward to the day when we finally meet the Queen, the Spider-Queen and she takes our minds from us.  What's left of them. And raises them to the sky and knowed us to us again. And refreshing returns bring us back again, into the fold.  The shepherd and the flock.  But that still doesn't answer the question.  Evasion.  So I want to say why the reading and why the watching, through what I know of McLuhan, but I can't say.  Heck, I can't even say why there is the current trend towards using rectangular (as opposed to square) TV's.  I'm missing something, clearly. I'll have to think about this. Rock on ?!??!?  til then...

the chimes of time are changing me...

I'm a dropout in the morning, and an acolyte all night.



(Hey it's better than that Joe Gould poem:
In the winter, I'm a Buddhist, and
In the summer I'm a nudist!)

ourglass

Our conscious minds are the only parts of us that don't know what the hell's going on.

he & He

They say the greatest victory Satan has had is in making us think he doesn't exist.  True...to an extent.  But I prefer to think his greatest victory to date has been not only in making us disbelieve in his existence, but more in gradually making him God; i.e. having him see and know us on virtually every street, in every building, every room, through every TV and computer.  In other words, Electronically Everywhere.  In other words, Omnipresent, omniscient! And Omnipotent - after all, Knowledge is Power!!?!...

Oh, to hell with it -- I'm in!!?!
 (Amen.)

Over the Long Haul

Over the long haul

it will less likely be the boulder
falling on your shoulder

than the pebble
in your shoe

that does you in.

Pickaninny Poo Bah

If one was to trip this electric station here in town, the poor saps cryogenically frozen would start to thaw.

"This isn't a bad thing to do, " thought Mickey, yanking the cryo cords, escaping, and taking his Walt back to the cave outside Disney World.

"I don't know if he'd make such a good President now, though, anymore..."

It's funny.  He wears this thing.  A little thing, like a contact lens.  When's he's 'doing his business' and 'conducting his affairs' (Don't shit where you screw!?) on-line, or on the john, he looks like he's entranced in REM sleep.  Maybe more of these things get around after the War (yeehaw(!)),  they'll  need  an even newer and bigger kind of power station, ironically; like a great lighthouse, like a sentinel to all the World, (and what's left of the world inside behind the lenses).  We'll be REM 'Lookers', so to speak. And with all the advances in cosmetic surgery & programmed morality, we'll probably ALL be 'Good Lookers', too.

Speculative Frag

The strange sky was like a moon might be coming us visiting living and dead.

Below the sun seemed lost.  We turned our eyes and dropped down into the gulf of earth came a baby on the tip. The earth. The earth was not used to new.  Irked the sight of the shadowy men there.  The sight of the inflamed them.  The men were of lost souls, any messiahs mess up the party.  Would keep the unwanted out.  Kill they wanted to.  Easy.

One over to the prong, glanced baby strongly, grabbed a leg and took it.  He carried it in this  over nearer to house turned off toward a pine tree.  Some of the others and he wished there were more.  He gathered up the baby a little, then swung it hard as he could into the pine tree bark.  Strangely that hard of a swing should have made it die.  Did it again time the crying blood on its face.  But wasn=t crying out of pain, man realized, tightening.  Was of some deeper place this time a bit, taking the leg up, swing harder.  Damned if he - yeah, was smirked at, laughed at little.  Enough.  Swung back, carried through, swung the child with all into the tree.  And a Awhack with the shock.  He - he looked at it.  Was crushed, everywhere, but this was Earth afterall, and nobody outside.  And he was a good man for doing his duty, slaps on his back coming through, and the thing from a living mess even though should dead, and couldn’t=t figure it why.  Wasn=t a thing in the flesh this was something else.  Real.  Thoughts came in, too fast to separate.  And then - what if everyone could see it.   Ooohh, wouldn’t that be for the good of the Damned?  Dangerous, then.  Dangerous for too much.  Have to see.  All have to see a little.  Didn’t know what we yet... 

(cont'd at a later date)

Lux Aeternae (?)

Yeah, it's been a while since the last bender, errr, I mean posting, but who cares, I'm back in the balcony, watchin' the Show...

Science fiction's worth is found in the way it explains our times to us in a different light.  At its best, it can be  magical, at it's worst painful; and either way, the quality of the writing is always adolescent.  Seriously - one hears about the great Philip K. Dick - and as fas as writing goes , the dick stops there.  He's an awful writer.  Asimov, the most prolific science fiction writer should perhaps have been more concerned about his thinning skin than his fecundity- I mean, really, what science fiction writer in their own right mind writes a big book about Shakespeare?  Shakespeare??  It's as ridiculous to me as if some mechanical engineer proficient in CAD decided he would just go up one day and illustrate the local Church's ceiling, like a latter day Michelangelo, thinking it would be just as good as the Sistine Chapel.  (It stinks of astronomical vanity, Mr Asimov!)

But there are transcendent experiences in sci fi - one of my favorites is, in fact, in a story by Mr. Asimov and it is called "Nightfall".  A world with a few suns, so it never knows darkness.  And, since it has been darkness-free, there should be no reasons to head the warnings of the world's Prophet, who warns of a coming darkness, as he has read in the ancient scriptures - a total darkness, where all the suns will turn away and leave the planet lost - again.  Anyways  - no one believes the Prophet.  The darkness falls.  The world goes into panic, hysterically afraid of the darkness, and they do  what they can only do to regain the light. They burn everything - set everything wildly ablaze!?.  And the Prophet watches this all from his balcony, kicked back, munching on popcorn, chuckling to himself warmly. Heehee. (Just kidding).

But to play the part of Asimov's Prophet I do think we live in "the Light" of electricity a little much, and our reliance grows.  Where would we be without electricity?  I mean, full out all out loss of electricity lasting weeks or months or more. Pioneer time, but a hell of a lot more people.  The  riots and  lawlessness would flood the world.  What to do? I've thought - buy a gun.  But how could I ever have enough bullets, esp. if confronted by a mob?  It would be like "Lord of the Flies".

Cell phones might mitigate things until their batteries ran out.  Generators could help to an extent, if they haven't blown in the first place when the electricity was lost.  What about we have mini generators connected to stationary bikes that store energy in batteries which we can then plug in for a few minutes of telephone or computer usage.  But what about heat?  Especially if this happens during the winter?  Burn!! I say, BURN everything!  We'll start over tomorrow!?  Yee haw hallejuhah!??!  Let's all go down tonight!  Outta sight!?

Sci---Fromage...

Hey,

I've been listening to men and women now for about 10 minutes, internationally-speaking, and I've come to the conclusion, in my room, here in this city that nothing is going to happen for Mayan Cosmogenisis.

And, then, maybe, something will happen.   Technology precedes us - we are, in our orbital ken, seers only as far as our technology permits us.  Nothing is real until it is verified through our technology. Einstein's Theory of Relativity was a great work of the mind, of theory, that had to wait til  after WWI, after verifying his predictions during a solar eclipse,  before everyone knew he was right.  Fascinating.  Do you know, if you travelled at the speed of light, things would seem normal inside your space capsule, but you would actually be frozen, living with no time, so that at that speed you could travel indefinitely, forever, never dying,visiting corners of the universe, visiting anywhere, eventually.

Take a 3-D big, square block of cheese.  Randomly carve out spherical Swiss-cheese-like lumps of various sizes from all over and inside the block (saying you could do this without destroying the block of cheese), and you'd have a model of pi- dimensional space.  In other words, a fractal area, slightly more than 3 dimensions, but less than 4.  What's the point?  I think the Universe has 3.1459 etc. dimensions.  I think there are three Euclidean dimensions - Length, Height and Depth - and one fractal dimension, Time.  I've seen images of fractals, and I think what I've seen of models with between 3 and 4 dimensions, is that, it seems to me anyway, that things have a sense about them with the Swiss-cheese picture of the Universe.  (Those spherical areas  are, I think, little round regions where planets and their orbital girth exist. What about the cheese itself? ->  The so-called "Dark Matter", taking up so much of the universe, but no one knowing what it actually is.  I would say, yes, that Dark Matter is the cheese.)  As I am the cheese.

Bad movie, that.  "I am the Cheese".  The script-writer worked for Disney. Not for long.  Nibble here a nibble there.  The meetings were killer - people getting hungry, mice getting roused - nothing for  hours, but a large man made of cheese, willing his co-workers to look away and stop drooling over his holes.

Do you know, we, today, almost have enough technology to measure acutely small vibrations in materials to the degree that we can identify words that were said somewhere hundreds of years ago?  Which is to say - our friend Cheese-boy - let's suppose he can't take the pressure of being Food to his co-workers,  - - Cheese-boy is now leaving the boardroom, sweating and worried -- a subject for conjecture along the lines of wondering why he left EXACTLY-> what was said to  him, who said it, etc  Nowadays, or soon anyways, forensic scientists would be able to analyse the body of Cheese-boy, and detect in it vibrations left by human speech, and actually go further to the point of determining what actually was said, and by who (by dint of pitch and volume).

For instance, "Heil Mickey!?" spoken by the CEO of Disney, during a meeting.  The surfaces of any solid object in this board room would vibrate, however microscopically, with the sound waves of that phrase travelling through the air and be left with a physical trace of that.  We can read these things today because the instruments are that delicate.  How long before they can map our thoughts out, across our lives, and charge us, fine-wise, everytime we have a negative thought/think things that are a little sinful or mildly criminal.  Passive thought control.  We'll be paying out of our noses.  In the future, I'm afraid to say - it seems so  anyway - that everything , including thought, will be Regulated...

...what I wouldn't give, at times, to be on a spaceship, heading out across the heavens at light speed heading on to where the Mayans live happily ever after...feeling One with the Universe...somewhere feeling one with the cheese...and so many passing planets...I am the Cheese!? I am Pi-Cheese!?!??!

I lik Jolie...

When she was younger, Angelia Jolie seemed like a dangerous person to know.  Brave. Yes. Rebellious.  Yes.  Tattooed to smithereens.  Yes.  Maybe gothic?  (A goth?  Yes. Maybe.  (A goth seems to me to be a hippy gone a little askew; a hippy of the underworld; a “survival of the fittest”, evolved, Morlock-like hippy. )   When she played Lisa Rowe, in “Girl, Interrupted”,  it was in some ways prescient, since the role served as almost an exorcism of the goth-ness in her , (a transformation which would take place over  the next few years); a symbolic exorcism culminating finally with her award and acceptance speech at the 1999 Oscars for Best Supporting Actress for her role in “Girl“ (incidentally, giving a strong and fair speech, extending a solid compliment to her father, Jon Voigt, with whom there had been palpable tension over an affair he had had at some point in the past).  Mrs. Jolie is  decidedly more normal now, in some ways, after becoming a mother, but I think a lot of the kick-ass attitude is still there under the surface.    One must only watch her movies over the last decade, chronicling an evolution from “goth girl”, up through the years, to our present, ”grounded –Goddess” stage, to realize that that kick-ass spark of her youth has not dimmed with age; Angelina Jolie has matured, yes, and is protective of that flame, which she must be as it guides her, O, yes! come Hell or high water, down her path less travelled by.

The Kingdoms of All!?!

Well, disregarding the preposterously pretentious title of this posting, I do have something to say, really worth saying.

Let's just get to it right off:

I've always thought Reincarnation sounded like an interesting idea, despite the fact that we live in a non-hierarchical culture these days, and some of the examplars of this 'new age' in thinking would have a hard time saying a dog is 'greater' than a bird, or a bird 'greater' than a worm, etc.  I however, do think there is a hierarchy, but a hierarchy that extends at least above, if not below, the animal kingdom as we know it on Earth.  Thus, depending how goof - I mean 'good' - of a person I am when I die, I will either go up or down - in other words, I will move up into the spiritual realm (Heaven), or I will be reincarnated as a rodent or something (reincarnation's 'Purgatory') or head straight-on down. I don't believe the spiritual realm is aswim with soft, equivalent figures living, in a murk of love, however 'nice' that sounds to some.  No, I believe that in the heavenly realms there is a hierarchy of angels that leads up to being very close to God:

GOD

Seraphim
Cherubim
Thrones
Dominions
Virtues
Powers
Principalities
Archangels
Angels

Humans

Mammals
Birds
Reptiles
Amphibians
Fishes
Echinoderms
Molluscs
Anthropods
Worms
Coelenterates
Sponges

Demons

SATAN


I'm not filling in the demon hierarchy because that would just be too cruel and too depressing (and I believe too few to mention are headed that far South).  But the list above gives the gist of it.  I  firmly believe the vast, vast majority of humans living today will be animals of the middle or lower classifications in their next lives.  It's just so easy and it just feels so darn good -  being cruel, cynical, and unconscionable, and lying (not just verbal lies, either - but behavioral lies, socioeconomic lies and just plain pretending you're something you're not for whatever reasons). A small handful will descend into Hell, but this sort of talk is too cruel and too depressing.

As Christ said, "Many are called, but few are chosen."  Those "few chosen", a statistical blip, will move on up the ladder to become Angels, most likely.  Doubtfully, but just maybe, there may be an Archangel in our midst - Kierkegaard's "Knight of Faith", so to speak, who will rub elbows with Gabriel  and Michael on a higher plane someday.


I don't know. Hehe.  It's FUN to be self-righteous and judgemental and really condemnatory once in a while, isn't it?

Cat's Breath

I have a small urn in my bedroom that contains the ashes of my 15 year old cat, Basho.

He seemed fine weeks before his death, but the end came suddenly and swooped in; after a couple nights at the vet hospital, well, during the second night, he died from kidney failure.  Nothing could be done.   It was a renal inevitability - the veterinarians can't currently do any thing about it.

It's 2 1/2 weeks since his passing, and the house doesn't feel as eerie or as empty as it supposedly should.  I don't know if he was ever very comfortable here.  He certainly was aloof, as cats should be, and feigned any sort of 'need' for us.  Though I loved him, I feel like he was just making do with the current arrangements, a best as he could.  I find prolonged emotions difficult to summon up now.  I take medication, maybe that's the 'difficulty', as I put it.  Maybe they block emotions, a common complaint amongst my fellow pill-poppers.  Maybe it's just me.

I'm left here.  But I plan on burying Basho soon.  There's a tree in the woods with a marker on it, oddly enough - a metal cut-out of a running cat, nailed maybe 10 ft. up a maple.  It looks like the fleeing ghost of a cat.  I think it will suit him, and I'll bury him at the tree's base.  I'll miss him. Hope his little white marker stays nailed where it is.  I'd hate it to be taken away, and lose him out there.

Blood from the Stars?

In the future, we may go to the store or shop online for a blood sample from a star; a movie star, music star, sports star.  A little taste of what it is like to be that person.  They boost up athletes all the time with samples of  blood that’s been doped with some or other drug, taken and stored, and then transfused later (i.e. the timely Mr. Armstrong).  But I think the idea's a little icky now – maybe hormones or some brain chemical might be used instead, something less messy.  Something from someone like Jim Carrey might be a blast – imagine if you could feel his manic energy for an hour or two?!  Now there’s a quadrillion dollar idea right there!?!?!

(p.s. Hey, I'm behind the times, if anything.  Deacades ago, Hunter S. Thompson would get serious kicks by tapping the adrenal glands of schizophrenics.)

A Grin without a Cat

I hope you're not totally unfamiliar with the story of "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland".  You may know it was written by a thirty-something  Victorian mathematician by the name of  Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, (who used the pseudonym 'Lewis Carroll', as we all know).  There is a scene which sticks out to me in "Alice", that I'd like to share.  The Cheshire cat.  Alice runs into this character en route on her adventures.  He presents himself to her initially as simply a very wide grin, hovering in the air.  The rest of the cat's body arrives a little bit later.

Around the time of Lewis Carroll and Alice Liddell and the Cheshire cat, a philosopher was cooking up a rather revolutionary idea.  Simply put, and just as it was with the Cheshire cat, the grin comes first - - then  everything else.  This philosopher's name was William James and he believed precisely that - that when we smile, the grin comes first and the happiness second.  Now this sounds a little like nonsense, probably.  Victorian, Carroll-esque nonsense.  But James was convinced that when we're talking about emotions and their physical expression, we smile first and our smiling face tells our brain that we are smiling, and as it knows smiling means happiness, our brain makes us happy.  Common sensically, it's always the other way around.  Namely, we feel happiness and then we smile because we are happy.  The emotion precedes the physical response.  James thought the opposite.  I don't know, unfortunately, which side won out.  In the historical scheme of things, William James isn't too well known, so we might assume that at least in a popular sense, common sense prevailed.

Nevertheless, I don't quite buy that James was wrong.  Why? I remember reading something written quite some time after James, something  by C.S. Lewis (of "The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe" fame) --  a book called "Mere Christianity".  (Now, don't get scared off because some religion is entering the fray.  It isn't.)  Mr. Lewis states at one point that if you're feeling down, turn the frown upside down literally, and keep it there for several minutes and you'll become happy!  This sounds maudlin, but it's true.  I've tried it.  And it works.  Curiouser and curiouser!

James was right, only his theory takes longer to manifest itself.  I would agree that when one is happy, we smile as a response to that.  But I also believe if we are to put a smile on our face - and it needn't be a Cheshire-cat-sized super-grin, even a slight smile will work - within several minutes we will start to feel better and even get a little happy.

I like outsiders like William James because he, like Lewis Carroll, were rebels and chose to look at things differently.  I also like C.S. Lewis for saying something, years and years after James, that is still basic biological truth.

So, if it moves thee, flip a frown around and get a little happier, however nonsensical that may sound.

:) Cheers!

In the Spirit of Things

The definition of ANIMISM:

 

1

: a doctrine that the vital principle of organic development is immaterial spirit

2

: attribution of conscious life to objects in and phenomena of nature or to inanimate objects

3

: belief in the existence of spirits separable from bodies 

                                                   - according to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary 

(As animism has been around for a while, well predating the time of Jesus Christ, it may vex the blog-reader to find this blog-entry to start things off on such a familiar and ancient note.  But I think it needs a reiteration.)

There may be a time in our lifetimes when apologizing to a tea-kettle after absent-mindedly complaining about its boiling too slowly, will be a norm.  Why, pray tell would we be animistically apologizing to inanimate objects someday?  For one, practice.  It will be a big pile of hooey, but some people will justify such behavior by saying 'we are just practicing to be good and loving with everything, including our kitchen appliances'.  These objects might even be imagined to possess some rudimentary level of consciousness.  Subjectivity will reign.  The idea of the metaphor will probably squeezed out of existence, as every object viewed will be an extension of oneself.  We will see ourselves in everything.  Much the same way we identify with heroes (or villains) in the movies.  They are someone we want to be, they are someone we could possibly be - they are us!!  The act of looking at a movie and making these kinds of assumptions will similarly be held in daily life.  Just as movies also animate objects  - such as in an animated feature like "Beauty and the Beast" or some such - so too will we see our daily objects as quiet, stunned animals.  Some mystic taxidermy summoning porcelain from a vulcanic pit to preserve the pre-being; now, 'object'-ified.  Animals preserved in formaldehyde bottles, as much as live animals, would be tantamount to a cup of tea with your favorite friend, your tea cup.

I'm reminded also of Buddhism.  I once had the chance to see Buddhist monks in action on the news, gingerly removing the worms from a newly dug hole, preserving them and keeping them from some sort of misplaced and cruel death.  They believe in reincarnation of course.  But oddly, they have nothing against self-immolation, such as was practiced to demonstrate against the Vietnam War.  So a worm's life is more valuable than one's own.  And, so too, I think objects will come to mean and carry more 'life', more 'spirit' in them than some of us, so that a car, a diamond ring, a gun, and so on will be treated and held in popular and major esteem higher than the spirit of a man or woman.   

Of course, animism might never take hold of people as I'm guessing it will.  And it shouldn't be too harmful if we attribute human characteristics to inanimate objects, especially if this is helping people be kinder and more humane to each other, as I suggested above.  The real worry comes when the opposite comes true in tandem with the animism - the accompanying belief that we humans don't actually possess souls; that souls don't exist.  Especially when the self-assured smugness of a tea-kettle that boils too slowly seems to focus on you regularly --  its inferior now, in many ways, -- and makes one see in the void of its spout, as Auden put it, "a lane to the land of the dead".

Zen of the Day

First things first - "The Flower Sermon"

 The beginning of Zen can be traced to a brief but important incident, when the Buddha had gathered his monks together for a “Dharma talk”.  The Buddha sat in front of the monks, not saying a word.  The monks were worried. At length, he reached down and plucked a small flower, possibly a daisy,  and twirled it in his fingers --

... — Hold you here, root and all,
in my hand, Little flower—
but if I could understand
What you are, root and all,
and all in all,        5
I should know what God and man is.


(From "FLOWER in the crannied wall" by Alfred, Lord Tennyson)

The monks offered several interpretations of what the flower meant, but were all wrong. One monk, Mahākāśyapa, understood, however, and laughed.  The Buddha knew then that this monk had achieved enlightenment. How did he know?  Because Buddhism until then had been about words and writing and speaking.  When the Buddha twirled the flower, he was demonstrating the religion become experiential, free from verbal explanations.  The flower was the flower itself. How can one explain or interpret a flower.  It simply “is”.  Buddhism was itself, as well.  It should need no explanation or interpretation. It is as free as the flower -- “Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin” (Matthew 6:28):

 "ZenOfTheDay"

2500 years later, I came across a wonderful app -  "ZenOfTheDay" - on ITunes.

Essentially, each day you get a quote.  There is Japanese music in the background.  Also, nicely, there is a brief animation at the beginning which plays like "The Flower Sermon", appropriately enough. In the animation, the Buddha glides along but trips -- a lotus flower tucked behind his ear plops into a bowl of water he is holding.  This gives the Buddha great joy, for he realizes that one can stumble accidentally into Enlightenment.  A Zen nun seated in the background, perhaps here meant to represent Mahākāśyapa, also smiles broadly, and then offers to us her wisdom, offering her bowl as a symbol of the Buddha’s bowl.  

 The bowl is empty but from the emptiness arises wise words much the way Zen monks pass onto their students “koans” (sayings which are meant to be contemplated and meditated on, before the answer is finally found and there is enlightenment).  This is one of the ways Zen Buddhism goes - each patriarch (enlightened monk in the line of monks extending from Buddha to the present day) passes his/her wisdom along.  "In the beginning, there was the Word," much as there is in the early stages of Buddhism, when one begins to travel the path from initiate to enlightened person.  In "ZenOfTheDay" We are offered quotes which, like koans, serve to introduce us to wisdom and the road to enlightenment. 

And there is fun in trying to figure out what the koans/quotes mean, as well.  There is happiness when koans/quotes strike a chord of familiarity, crystallizing something known but never fully defined in the mind of the reader. A spark goes off; the other quotes, less familiar, can be savored  over, can be thought about, til one finds the truth in them.  Each morning, another flower of wisdom appears for one to consider throughout the day.  It’s a nice touch. A nice app.  Happy as a big, ponderous Buddha, I happily recommend "ZenOfTheDay". 

All the World's a Stage

New Year's Eve 2011 is but a day away.  There were a lot of political things that happened this year, things which set the drummer's drumming in their paper spinning rooms.  Inklings of tomorrow's work already staining their hands, and yet always new and different, even to them.  Industry, ho!!

I wanted to touch a little on a phenomenon which has been going on for a long while and will continue to happen in an unexpected way into the future.

Evolutionary stages.  Big, boggy words there.  Going back to the "Big Bang", forward through time towards us, there are a string of ever-shrinking evolutionary stages.  The first stage, way, way back, was several billion years long. The next, very long as well, but shorter.

Follow the stages along up to the appearance of earliest humans, 2 million years ago.  After this appeared the various stages of man.  Off this diagram, then, are the stages closer to our own time.  Anyone in anyway familiar with anthropology and human history will know modern, "civilized" humans have only been around for the last several thousand years.  There have been evolutionary stages as well since the beginning of civilization, not only at geological and biological levels, but also socially/culturally -- a clock melting and waning sweetly away.  In the last several hundred years have been increasingly smaller  and smaller evolutionary periods.  In the last half century evolutionary stages are short enough in duration to happen within an individual's lifetime.  These stages continue shrinking.  Where does this lead?

Mayan Cosmogenesis.  December, 2012.  The increasingly shrinking evolutionary periods will reach a point - a point at which shrinkage will no longer be possible, and then "flip".  Evolutionary periods will start to slowly - slowly, but Shirley - start growing in size.  It will be as if a higher being held a mirror to our history and reflected in that mirror our future. Slowly, our evolutionary stages will take longer and longer.  I imagine some of us who live long enough will eventually find evolutionary periods extending past a lifetime's length.

Most noticeably, this change will influence the speed of progress, the incessant hammering away of technology with its insistent, feverish pitch of capitalistic innovation. I think the harried pace of life in general will slow. We may look back on our lives of this past century, and wonder how we handled the frenzied buzz of everyday life.

No doubt, I could be wrong. I have nothing to prove anything I have to say.  It is just a hunch, a hunch which I am loathe to admit I have not entirely a total faith in.  So, it can come across as dinner table banter, or some such, and will have to go that way:

"Oh, look, we've said our part -- How time flies!"

One Dark Second

Watch any movie nowadays and you’re likely to see somewhere along the line a zoom.  The zooming technique in movies nowadays is as ubiquitous as any other camera trick, such as pans, fades or editing cuts.  Zooms weren’t always so prevalent, though.  In the annals of experimental cinema (that almost mythical species of film that the average cinema goers will have as much a shot of seeing in their lifetime as spotting a Sasquatch), a film made in 1967 by Canadian Michael Snow called “Wavelength” was the first overt and most single-minded zoom to date (i.e. "Wavelength" is a movie composed entirely of one long zoom).

A zoom is made by changing, smoothly, the focal length of the camera lenses while the film is running. The camera's subject appears to grow, or shrink, continuously in the frame.  Though the zoom was around for decades before “Wavelength” it had never been used as the focus of a film.  “Wavelength”, being an experimental film, has not much in the way of a story.  The setting is an apartment, empty for the most part.  The movie starts with the camera, which one might infer is on the one side of the apartment facing the other.  Over the 43 minutes of the film, the camera slowly zooms into a photograph on the other side of the wall until it fills the frame.  The photo is of rolling waves on a lake or sea.  Initially, Snow had wanted to use a picture of the room itself, a kind of repeating, fractal effect.  He didn’t, however, and the film stands as it is (with the exception of some tinting of the film stock, and the entry of a few people – some being other experimental filmmakers who play a snippet of the Beatles’ “Strawberry Fields Forever”). Overall, however, it is excruciatingly boring to watch.

That very boringness –prompts me to guess at the meaning of the film, and I feel considering the ‘openness’ of the text, that any reading is legitimate.  The time the film was made in was an era fixated on space travel.  The trip in this apartment from one side to another is akin -- to me -- of a spaceship traveling to, and landing, on the moon.  A wavelength is a measure of distance not a measure of time. Because the moon is one light second from our planet (or 300,000 m), I'm tempted to say it suggests a kind of base unit (since the speed of light is 300,000 m/s).  The moon's  presence is also referred to most obviously by the waves and tides (i.e. the photo at the end of the zoom) on our planet.

  

"Wavelength" is about sight, about the moon, but also about space travel  - that is, travel across one room or between two heavenly bodies.  While it may be  too conceptual to be enjoyed by the average person, the film does make for some interesting readings, nonetheless.