RACE-MEMORY (By a dazed Darwinian)
I remember, I remember
Long before I was born,
The tree-tops where my racial self
Went dancing around at morn.
Green wavering archipelagos,
Great gusty bursts of blue,
In my race-memory I recall
(Or I am told I do).
In that green-turreted Monkeyville
(So I have often heard)
It seemed as if a Blue Baboon
Might soar like a Blue Bird.
Low crawling Fundamentalists
Glared up through the green mists,
I hung upon my tail in heaven
A Firmamentalist.
***
I am too fat to climb a tree,
There are no trees to climb;
Instead, the factory chimneys rise,
Unscaleable, sublime.
The past was bestial ignorance:
But I feel a little funky,
To think I’m further off from heaven
Than when I was a monkey.
~GKC
I therefore pray thee, Renny dear,
That thou will give to me,
With cream and sugar soften’d well
Another dish of tea.
Nor fear that I, my gentle maid,
Shall long detain the cup.
When once unto the bottom I
Have drunk the liquor up.
Yet hear, alas! this mournful truth
Nor hear it with a frown—
Thou canst not make the tea so fast
As I can gulp it down.
These modern people mean by mental activity simply an express train going faster and faster along the same rails to the same station; or having more and more railway carriages hooked on to it to be taken to the same place. The one notion that has vanished from their minds is the notion of voluntary movement even to the same end. They have fixed not only the ends, but the means. They have imposed not only the doctrines, but the words. They are bound not merely in religion, which is avowedly binding, but in everything else as well. There are formal praises of free thought; but even the praises are in a fixed form.
– “The Thing”, GK ChestertonEmerson certainly had distinction; but just that dry sort of distinction to which I should always be afraid of being unfair. A Puritan tried to be a Pagan; and succeeded in being a Pagan who hesitated about whether he ought to go and see a girl dancing.
– “The Thing”, G.K. ChestertonSometimes you wake up. Sometimes the fall kills you. And sometimes, when you fall, you fly.
– Neil GaimanAll Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace by Richard Brautigan
I’d like to think (and
the sooner the better!)
of a cybernetic meadow
where mammals and computers
live together in mutually
programming harmony
like pure water
touching clear sky.
I like to think
(right now, please!)
of a cybernetic forest
filled with pines and electronics
where deer stroll peacefully
past computers
as if they were flowers
with spinning blossoms.
I like to think
(it has to be!)
of a cybernetic ecology
where we are free of our labors
and joined back to nature,
returned to our mammal brothers and sisters,
and all watched over
by machines of loving grace.
If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.
– Carl SaganAbout me
Look around. We have this.
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Tonight, at the South Berwick Live-In!
The Noise That Keeps Me Awake
