Hurray for Noah!

what’s this i hear about Noakh being only upstanding compared to a depraved generation? being a drunkard? This Noakh guy is getting a bad rap and i want that to end NOW.

Some people make comments on Noah's drunkenness after he gets off the ark. try to put yourself in his shoes! look what he’s been through! the creator himself becomes frightened of his own creation and decides to wipe it clean and Noah among all men manages to just barely convince him to save a REMNANT of it. or did he even convince yhvh? after all, Noah did ALL THE WORK HIMSELF! and for a year cramped up in that floating rudderless box, how often could he imagine his work FAILING? i would grant him an eternity of drunkenness for his courageous act. the rabbis can go to hell! the rabbis who think words of tora more holy than the cows who give their flayed skins for it. Look, they preserved this text for me, it wasn’t my choice…

look, the main frightening feature of this story is that yhvh like Dr. frankenstein, decides to create life (why? outpouring of love? curiosity? boredome? it’s yhvh’s very nature?) and then as in Mary Shelley’s story becomes repulsed by it, becomes repulsed by ALL FLESH, all the thriving serxingbirthingdyingeatingfighting living creatures. b’reishit 6:11 v’TISHAKHET ha’aretz lifnei ha’elohim. v’timaleh ha’aretz khamas. v’yar’ ‘elohim ‘et -ha’aretz, v’hineh nishkhata ki-HISHKHIT KOL-BASAR ‘et darkho ‘al -ha’aretz. I wish someone would explain to me this shakhat that ALL living earth was doing? And as with Abraham and Moshe, ONE MAN, Noah, calms the savage beast of yhvh and saves ALL LIFE.

that’s a HEAVY story. forget the petty rabbis’ concerns about Naoh’s perfection or drunkenness or whether he was better or worse than abraham or moshe, in fact of course he is MUCH greater than either. abraham wanted to save merely one human city. and couldn’t save his son. moshe was concerned with only his own people, let alone all of life, and certainly didn’t try to save his ‘godfamily’ the Egyptians.

i vote for Noah!

now, who’s got the guts to build an ark today?

dancing with the cows of tora

once i was dancing with the tora with some lubavitch group. while i was carrying the scroll, i noticed how heavy, how dense it was. I wondered, "how many cows was i holding up there?" So i asked the rabbi, "how many cows do you think it took to make this? how many cow's skins was i carrying here? how many cows were flayed, sacrificed for the betterment of humanity's foibles?" he looked at me like i was from mars! one gets the impression of course that what's written ON the cow skin is of infinitely more importance to the rabbi than the cow who donated her skin for it.

example of starting stupidly with god, and commentary

Here is a typical example: a book ostensibly, NOT about jewish theology, but about the jewish WAY of life. "The Ten Journeys of Life" by Michael Gold. (It's probably a dopey book) Here is how he starts:

"It was the dawn of time. God had created humanity with great hope and anticipation, but most people were evil and corrupt. People did not know the proper path of life. They were lost."

"this book is a guide to being human. As humans we share something with the animal kingdom. We live a material existence; we eat, drink, sleep, have sexual relations, reproduce our species, get sick, and eventually we die. However as humans we are profoundly different from the animal kingdom. As the psalmist taught regarding humans, "thou has made him but little lower than the angels and have crowned him with glory and honor" We carry within us the breath of God. A major theme of these ten journeys is how we can rise above our animal nature and find the breath of God that echoes within each of us."


so right away Rabbi Michael Gold has made a grave INSULT out of his IGNORANCE. I would ask him, "can you show me this so called 'material' eating business? What is so 'material' about it? Can you explain to me how you turn hamburger or oatmeal into eyebrows and sperm?" My guess is that he cannot. So because he is ignorant about even the 'basest' of our animal natures, how living beings transform into each other by way of being 'food', he has decided that this is base and is not worthy of his praise, and that we need to 'rise above it' to become angels.

To me this is like the following story. A man and wife concieve a child. while the man is busy doing important things like consorting with his fellows to construct this wonderful human civilization, the woman is slaving away for nine months churning within herself (doing base animal things) to transform her own flesh into a new living being (while men have barely learned how to build the crudest of robots, and of course while the civilization the man is building is only 10,000 years old out of 3.6billion years of life on Earth, and it's not quite certain how well the civilization is built.), risking her very life to split herself into two separate beings! finally the day has come and for 9 hours she is in her time of peril in labor a great risk of life and gives birth to a child, and her husband sees this and immediately gets on his knees and praises God for this miracle.

How should she respond to this insult? How has Earth been responding to our past millenia of insults we have been perpetrating on her in our prideful ignorance? luckily, Earth is not as 'base' as we are and has not yet decided to respond to our insults as would another 'angelic' human being, or even as a vengeful god! If there is any entity around with great mercy (rakhaman), it is the greatest womb (rekhem) of them all...

so obviously i think the husband ought to spend at least as long as his longest wailing and moaning that he spends with God in a high holy day service, praising and being in awe of his wife. and then when the two have settled down abit, and his wife has taken a breather, i suppose if they are so inclined they could comtemplate the finer mysteries of why the miracle of life is possible at all.

otherwise, i fear this. If we continue in our ignorance about how Earth churns round and round to be womb of us because we are MESMERISED by the glorious acts of an imagined father who brought us out of Egypt (of all the rampant nonsense!) it is very likely she may eventually abort us. she has PLENTY more where we came from. the merciful thing about this abortion is that there would be no conscious anger about it, as we are not separate from Earth, we in essence would be doing it ourselves. The pity though would be the number of glorious species we would bring down with us including each other, as we ARE glorious too. but THAT is not even a cosmic disaster, Earth is such a fertile and creative womb that she would bloom back forth with an even more glorious ecosystem as she has done many times in the past.

It is very clear to me though, why humanity has imagined its God, its creator to be a MAN: men don't generaly abort their sons, don't generaly risk their lives to give them birth, don't have a somewhat ambivalent relationship with childbirth as women have, men don't have to fear childbirith. Men value sons as laborors in this grand 10,000 year old agricultural project to rule (in their clumsy way) the Earth.

what image for the ground of being? king or ecosystem?

so what image did i grow up with as the rallying point for civilization, creativity and order?

I grew up in the 60s! i DIDN'T see order in the human world! i saw chaos! i saw a history of nations, kings, ceos, police, millitary leaders, assassins.. producing chaos. to me, human government lead to Hiroshima and Silent Spring.

where did i see order? In self sustaining fishtanks, if i scooped up enough of an ecosystem from a pond and dumped it into a fishtank, it would sustain itself, feed itself in sunlight, clean itself! order by the subtle interactions of dozens of critters!

random musings one morning on complexity and cosmology: is it turtles all the way down?

i was reading through my molecular biology of the cell book the other day about signal transduction and p53, a protein that is involved in DNA repair, and cell death and cancer.

what i was struck by was HOW MUCH information processing happened at ONE protein. if the cell was irradiated, the protein is phosphorylated at sites x, y, z. if the cell was.. it was phosphorylated at sites q, r, s. one part of the protein recognizes damaged DNA and binds to it. another part of the protein binds to certain genes on the DNA to ... the protein senses if the cell is damaged during a certain part of the cell cycle, and arrests the cell there waiting for the DNA damage to be repaired. if the cell is damaged during a critical part of the cell cycle, no time for DNA repair, the protein signalls the cell to start cell death.

if the protein suffers mutation, this leads to cancers...

(i wonder if these processes are especially robust in the germ line?)

SO MUCH info processing at ONE LITTLE protein!

so i started reading about protein phosphorylation as signalling mechanism and signalling in general. so much is happening in the cell. so many places in the cell where information is being amplified, modulated, compared, sent abroad... at proteins on the cell surface, at proteins all over the place, at enzymes, at gene regulatory sites... It's so crowded and insane. like a 100 dimensional chess game with 100 players!


but even without cells and evolution, molecules, atoms can already information process. simple molecules can detecte each other's presence, can detect pH, can detect temperature, can detect wavelengths of light. can re-emit light, can act as catalysts... sets of simple molecules can set up oscillations... so much complexity as far in as we look. why is chemistry here?

lets compare chemistry to gravity: under gravity matter merely coalesces, compacts, without charge without quantum mechanics, matter would compact easily into black holes, end of story.

but add chemistry. add charge and the other 2 forces and quantum mechanics: protons and electrons DON'T merely coalesce into infinitely large networks of +/- they engage in nuclear fusion and become a distinct set of distinct nuclei. these nuclei with electrons again don't just coalesce into infintely large crystals of +/-. some, like Na, Cl, DO. but there are other elements around. and you get Chlorate, and you get ... H2O I think it's an amazing invention that some atoms join in discrete small groupings so that we get FLUIDS at certain ranges of temperatures.

(actually as an aside, even under gravity, why didn't the universe coalesce into ONE BIG SUN? why did it break up into many small suns of different sizes so that there are hot cauldrons of fusion at the center and cooler space between them for planets to form? i suppose this comes from properties of the VERY EARLY universe, or mathematics of contracting gasses.. I tried looking in Shu's "The Physical Universe" 1982, i don't see a definitive answer yet. either we aint got any good hypotheses or i don't undertand Jeans scale for initial graviational collapse. in fact all through taking that course i did not understand any of the details of why homogenous gas clouds begin graviational collapse to discrete stars. Of course within the past few billion years the clouds are NOT homogenous. how about at the beginning when stars and galaxies first formed? i suppose that's a current topic of research.)

so explain to me again the reason why protons and electrons don't just form an infinite metalic crystal? even if so, no need to think it static, if the temperature is high enough it will be a fluid... and then math can set in to produce eddies etc... but the universe DOES eventually cool... As much as we try to simplify, physics seems to resist.

i suppose a basic question is why do we get ONLY H2 and not H3, H7 or metallic Hydrogen? why do we get metalic lithium? because the next shell wants an octet! the crazy quantum geometry sets in... the first shell wants only a pair of electrons.

still, BETWEEN the stars the atoms and molecules are rather dispersed, for instance all the carbon atoms are not ONE SINGLE extent of graphite say...

what was the explanation for the fact that the initial universe isn't all iron? and would expansion have been able to tear apart the initial... well it was hot, so the bonding not strong enough to resist the heat... it's a combination of cooling AND expanding. how are the rates related? if it cooled faster than expanded... i think they are coupled. by what?

so i am still ultimately struck by the basic complexity of the universe, by physics. why four forces at all? why wasn't it merely point masses and gravity? as far deep as we go, it's complex, and messy. many physicists and thinkers in general through the ages have assumed they would find some rock bottom level of explanation, of simplicity... Why? i guess they FEAR the concept of turtles ALL THE WAY down.

But really, the historical evidence in fact points to the opposite conclusion, that as far IN we look it keeps getting messy, new pandora's boxes open up. suppose for as long as we look we keep finding new levels, new messinesses, at what point will we stop and say, "ok, maybe there IS no rockbottom level, lets stop looking!"

then what? what does that do to the question of WHAT ON EARTH is the univers anyway? was it designed, does it have a purpose, why is it at all?

Do any of these NEED to be answered? It's a crazy drama. So why not just accept it? Ah... that's the root of the problem, humans for the past 30,000 years, say, have come to NOT be able to accept being an ephemeral act in this grand drama. We do not seem to be able to let go of individual desires, not to be able to let go of our own lifetimes, nor maybe the lifetime of our species. thus we have two alternative projects:

1) find the rock bottom of the universe and hope it explains that which we are attached to. many religions come to the conclusion that the rock bottom has a plan for us and that that which we are attached to (spirit) will never die.

the physicists? what do they expect? some seem to think they have a discovered a universe exquisitely designed for our existence so at least our birth was not contingent, but what about our death? have physicists given up on attachment to eternal life? early astronomers wanted to prove the solar system stable! I suppose this was before the idea of species exitinction was common, did we think Homo sapiens would exist forever? between darwin and poincare is 1850 to 1900. by poincare the solar system's stability is in doubt. then cosmology. einstein tried initially a STEADY STATE model! that didn't work. now the battle is between forever expanding and cyclic models for the universe as a whole. does it dissapate into a slowly cooling cloud of brown dwarfs or does it contract and start up again?

by WWII the continuuing existence of Homo sapiens is in doubt to the nonreligious!



2) the alternative project is buddhist practice of giving up our attachments, and accepting our roles in the drama while we are engaged in it. are there buddhist traditions who honestly come to grips with modern cosmological history of a finite lifespan for Homo sapiens in a very grand drama? I have never discerned what the buddhist traditions have to say on the question of why we are here at all and why WE CAME TO NEED buddhist practice to cure our attachments in the first place.

what is blackskimmerblog?

what is blackskimmerblog?

it is asking: what is this human experience? what does it feel like now? what has been our past journey? where are we headed?

two main features are:
our large size, abstracts us from the swirling squaredances of molecules that earth is.
and our sudden awakening to the intricacies and depths of experience that our tangled 20billion neuron brains are capable of has thrown us into fear and confusion.

these two drove us to imagine that we are ultimately unearthly spirits wrongly or at least incomprehensibly shackled to cracked corrupt bodies. we are enthralled by our ideas of mind, spirit, and we are repelled, bored by flesh.

[read notes towards mythology of the human journey and science]

but certainly the EVIDENCE plainly before our eyes is that spirits cannot live without eating other plants and animals. The EVIDENCE plainly is that we are polluting flesh on Earth.

and a curious development happened in European culture over the past 400 years. a group of men began the concerted effort to wrench themselves from intoxication with their inner experience and begin REALLY LOOKING, really being INTERESTED in the living presences outside of themselves.

and BOY, WHAT WE'VE FOUND!

roughly, in the past 150 years, what we've found are: 2000 different minerals, and hints at their modes of formation. We've catalogued so far, 2 million different kinds of plants animals mushrooms microorganisms. We've found that organisms are immense hierarchies of complexity from organism to organ systems to tissues to cells to organelles to macromolecular assemblies, to macromolecules to molecules to atoms to protons and electrons to the very equations of the universe.

We've begun to learn the creative abilities of atoms and molecules, basically, mud! we've begun to learn how simple energy flow through collections of molecules with simple rules causes dynamic order to occur. We've begun to learn the mathematics that gives us complex subtle behavior from finite simple rules iterated over trials of molecular bombardments...

We've learned that our own brains are an immense tangle of 20BILLION interconnected neurons. we've begun to explore what it's like to connect that many parts with simple rules and see what it's capable of.

we've learned the reality of chance, random input, which the ancients refused to accept, believeing all came from conscious purposeful mind.

we've begun to explore CAREFULLY just how our minds work, are they monolithic purposeful consciousnesses? or are they communities of interacting processes feeding on random input?

we've explored possibilities of creation of the wealth of 2million different critters by a processes of iteration of actions, choices, trials and errors, feedback loops among populations of simple organisms over generations. we've counted the layers carefully all over the Earth and have uncovered 3.8 billion years of living Earth history.

We've begun to learn to put aside our chauvanism and anthropomorphizing and respectfully ask the other 2million critters we share this life with: what IS your life like? what is YOUR experience of it?

[read complexity]

no longer can we put the creativity and love that has been the realm of God and human spirit in one box, and put dumb mud and flesh in another.

no longer must spirit be alien to this muddyfleshybirthingdyingsexing Earth.

God is a stupid place to start! (warning totally unfinished thoughts here but i needed a place to post them)

open letter to the rabbi's

God is a stupid place to start.

I recently went to Shabat services and partook in the usual chanting away of ancient prayers about god. I'm going to go out on a limb and assume that most of the people chanting with me find this as puzzling as i do. I think God is a stupid place to start in such an endevour.

tell me, do you know what's going on inside a place as mundane as your thumb? pick up a rock, do you know its history? Do you meditate daily on what this intense journey is that your band of apes has been going on? And i don't mean some fantasy out of ancient egypt.

wake up in the morning and you may feel in awe at being alive so you want to sing a praise or give thanks; and to what is your first thought? the billions of cells that are gyrating away with whorlwinds of complexity that ARE your life? take your first conscious breath and is your first awareness the immense river of breath planet that you are, swirling over the surface of the Earth? folding in and out of it? that you are a dance of breath molecules, a dance? not a THING at all?

[Bar, it's like saying the life of an amazing computer program is the millions of transisters clicking away... no, not really, it's the subroutines all interacting.. the transisters... that's the protons and electrons! yeah, that's the better analogy! besides, the transistors did not partake in the evolution of the programs. life however... Bar, our human experience is so many levels removed from the molecular biology, no? except that our ability to experience, the styles of our thought, the basic tool box of our behavior, some of it was already invented by that molecular biology. the distributed processing, the feedback loops, the trial and error, the ability to pick up random flux from the abyss, the way that neurons interact to build a brain is based on how cells in general interact in their communities... in some sense, the molecular biology took part interactively in creating our software in a way that transisters did NOT take any part in creating software.

so what WAS the design process? well, that's the point that's what our story of 3.8 BILLION years of evolution of interacting critters is all a about, it's NOT like the story of humans designing transisters and software to meet THEIR needs. it's a story of hardware bits and software bits interacting in a long creative history. and THAT'S what we should be giving thanks to. 3.8 BILLION years of history of a creative community, not 6 days of magic, not 2 piddling couple dozen generations of yhvh meddling with some human history.]


pick up a rock, do you ask it its story? its 4.5billion year journey gyrating through this Earth's cycles? and the journey before that in the belly of a life giving suicidal sun?

sit down to breakfast and you say b'rokh ata...ata, HELLO to a LIVING BEING! The bread before you? sensuous texture and taste? B'rokh ata... a living being, the baker who wrought the right alchemy that brought it to rise before hot ovens at 6am in the morning before you even woke up? B'rokh ata... a living being, the wheat plants that grew and sacrificed a whole season of their life to bring breath and minerals out of the Earth to consent to be eaten by you?

does the slaughterer even, say thank you to the cow or a chicken he holds in his hands before he quietly slits its throat for us? We who are too cowardly to face a real living being and do it ourselves? or does he make a blessing to his narcissistic dream lord (pimp?) for sending, owning that living being and handing him over to him, like a slave?

B'rokh ata...a living being, this whole4.5 billion year old swirling breathing Earth dance of molecules that you ARE? NO! you thank a lifeless abstraction of a LORD! what lord did you have in mind? Darth Vader? George W. Bush? King Arthur? who are you imagining conqured? rules? manages? sculpted? designed? this Earth? We are talking IMAGINATION here, when actual LIVING BEINGS right BEFORE you are maintaining your planet for you and desiring your attention.

Instead of face to face awareness, thanksgiving with the obvious source of life in front of you, you jump to an abstraction! While calvin benson cycles by the trillions are slaving away in plants to bring the breath you exhale back to your body, while trillions of local chemical interactions are coordinating to make us who we are, you are ignoring them chasing after a dream father...

oh, i know you say that WE WERE at sinai... bullshit. Oh, i know, you say that you FEEL God's presence when you pray... That is a dangerous route to take to trust in a drug induced fantasy before you trust in the living presences right before you. I'm sure the kids tripping on LSD are saying the same thing!

Oh, i know, you say that God is not a lifeless abstraction but is the totality, the largest most inclusive totality of all that i've described... What gives you the gall to think that you are ready for that most inclusive totality if you aren't even ready to confront the miracle that is a fruit fly buzzing softly around your kitchen? you study argument after argument of talmud, yet won't even learn that your body is a dance of arguments that makes the talmud look like a comic book in comparison!

what I'm saying is that God is a stupid place to start! practice being present to the obvious presences before you, and THEN slowly go in deeper, wider, more abstract even, if that's your trip. Though to tell you the truth, it's not all that clear that this life we amazingly are is a result of abstraction at all. It may be the result of a confluence of very PARTICULAR coincidences. Life might NOT have happened at all! Does that SCARE THE SHIT out of you? so you'd rather put your trust in a fantasy because reality scares you, 'eh? Rather desire, DEMAND even, like an infant throwing a temper tantrum, that we humans, that you and your loved ones were an INEVITABLE outcome of existence? That doesn't sound like a very mature religion to me.

but you say you KNOW in your HEART that God is real. how can you claim to know such a mysterious thing when you won't even make the effort to learn the craft of knowing simpler things like springs, levers, pulleys.. animals, cells, molecules. You say you know in your HEART. What is this heart you speak of? Surely not the beating muscle in your chest? But even here, have you looked inside, closely? do you even know how a congealed bag of the food you ate can go on beating for your life every second every minute every day for decades of your life without quitting? No, the knowing you speak of is not a property of the beating heart. Then what can KNOW? A rock? a bug? a muscle? a brain? You haven't even taken the effort to know how connections come together to make a heart beat steadily, flexibly, responsively for your life. But a KNOWING organ? have you taken the time to attempt to craft the number of interacting switching gates required for a being to KNOW something?

Oh no, you tell me this is COLD, MECHANISTIC thinking, not the knowlege of the HEART, of the SPIRIT. yet when it comes to life and death you take your loved one who is sick to the cold and mechanistic hospital... When you want to get to work on time you trust to the craftsmanship of the mechanic to construct your automobile for! you don't just pray your way flying through the sky to get to work as a spirit! Come on now, you know deep down you trust the years of labor that craftsmen take to perfect their craft. That is what i'm talking about. Before you can say you know God, you must work away the years in the craft of knowing. beginning with the concrete, the simple, the obvious, and work your way up to the subtle... to this God you imagine you know.

and then, ONLY then after we've learned to master knowing these concrete mechanical things, then we can ask about what it means to be human. surely it's the paradox of our humanity, seemingly-infinitely-able-to-seek beings trapped in finite bodies prone to horrific decay to death that impells us to create the abstraction of God. Instead of starting off with the answer, why not start off with the question? the quest? And what is the question?

What IS this life i find myself experiencing? Usually it is asked when we find ourselves in an intense moment of experience, a death, a broken relationship, a birth, a great joy... This is actually another dangerous place to start. In moments like these, our experience of our experiencing is overpowering, back to the LSD trip again. In fact it is the accumulated history of humaity's tripping on its own experiencing that has produced the abstraction that spirit is more basic, surely more powerful than mere flesh and mud. but any sensible person would realize they must doubt a drug trip. yes, i know, that under the influence of communal ecstacy hoards of humans have been capable of immense undertakings. and so we've come to think of human spirit as the ultimate power, or at least the model for the even more ultimate power we abstracted from it: God. And we know that life can act as a powerful catalyst to the immense flow of energy from the sun out past this Earth.

And so in a mere 10,000 years, 40,000 years Homo sapiens has swept accross the face of Earth and is in the process of stripping her of her forests, in the process of draining the oceans of life, in the process of pouring trillions of tons of chemicals into the waters, in the process of transforming the concentration of elements in her atmosphere. a powerful catalyst indeed is the human spirit.

But is it wise? do we even know where creativity comes from? we made the assumption a long time ago that ours comes from that fuzzy good POWERFUL feeling of a drug trip rather than the iterated processes of interconnected parts. and we abstracted that into our idea of god, even that that same brand of creativity created the multitude of animals and plants we didn't even have the respect to count...

it's that creativity that gets us into trouble that labyrinth of thought passages and the ecstacy that can keep us going back into it, make it feel more real than reality. The labyrinth is so intricate that we think it is complex enough to hold the cosmos itself (and indeed the human mind is capable of knowing the cosmos in intricate detail, some of us can catalogue 10,000 diferent living creatures, some of us can create the plays of shakespeare creating worlds, some of us can learn the craft to know the rockbottom of this universe down to 10 decimal places of accuracy...) So with a cosmos in the mind, it seems a cosmic catastrophe that human life is so cheap, dying in battle over trivial state boundaries, dying in famine of chaotic ecosystem, dying as 50% of all conceptions die because... they are the mistakes that evolutionary creativity thrives on.

we are horrified because creativity is NOTHING like we imagine it to be. we rebell against the fact that creativity on this earth works by trial and error. that we are the trials and errors of a questing creativity of evolving life, that life so intricate in detail is also food, is also throwaway trials of creativity. The maple tree sends 10s of thousands of infant tree beings fluttering down to the ground higgledy piggledy. each infant a different random combination, trial, of genes... each possibly containing a random mutation from cosmic rays, molecular accidents... 99.9% of them won't even come to birth. all but a few will grow to maturity... we back off in horror from this way of life! the exhuberant cheapness of it growing itself in such subtle complex craftsmanship and at the same time THROWING itself AWAY in the trial and error of its craft! and we are doomed to be bound to this seeming madness by our flesh.

so in our horror over the seemingly wasteful cosmic sinfulness of the wastefulness of flesh we dream of leaving it behind and flying off to a more serene spiritland...


Yes, this life is an amazing drama way bigger than any of us or any of us can imagine, so lets wake up to it, be thankful for it, not some narcissistic abstraction a puny band of apes thought up before they even begun to comprehend what life was.




TOPIC B)
so lets add in here: do we want to make a whole ritual and story some goddam fairy tale of a shizophrenic mountain god who likes guys, coming down and doing a bunch of pyrotechnics and pulling a slithering mass of breeding slaves out of bondage and handing them a ready made way of freedom? Or do we want to HONOR the reality? The reality of a bunch of grassroots efforts of towns of canaanites living in the crossroads of centralized empires and creatively between each other coming to the realization of a way of freedom? Creating it themselves! Not being a sleeping mass of slithering crawling slaves, but being a people waking up and seeing for themselves the reality of the evils of centralized hierarchies, worshiping objects as opposed to experiences, calls, working out amongst themselves the HARD WAY, the way, the tora of jewish community?

If we honor this community effort, we then know that we ourselves in each generation in each new milleu is capable of this effort again and again. We don't have to wait for god to solve things for us, our community is capable of this task.



TOPIC C)
so Bar, where does the miraculous fit in? M., speaking like a stoned man speaks of his experience that there is something COHESIVE out there, it's all so cohesive. Not just my fractal dust of miraculous random fluctuations. that all of physics is cohesive. yeah? the gravitational force and the strong force are carefully crafted with each other? well, Davies thinks so: that the ratios are all just right for galaxies to form communities of suns, that suns CAN form, to cook elements, that the resonances are JUST RIGHT to cook carbon, that the ratios are just right so that supernovas happen and spew the elements back out for other suns to use, that planets form...

It's all just right to form US. but you know, we don't know diddly squat! if the ratios were slightly different, they certainly wont make THIS universe, but we don't know diddly about the art of universe making in GENERAL, so how do we know they cant make ANOTHER totally different but equally interesting universe? look at all the different kinds of cellular automata that can basically simulate each other. INNEFFICIENTLY, but that's NOT an issue! because what's the difference if human experience is software played on the level of the equivelent of protons, or the equivelent of molecules, or cells or neuron nets or stars or galaxies? what's the diff if human lives take nanoseconds or millenia?



TOPIC D)
Fine, not cohesive, but still what good do these miracles do us? it aint subject object, right? i've meant two different things by miracles.

A) presence/miracles when i'm just HERE experienceing it WHAM like concrete.

B) fractal dust of random input that physical systems get. The counterpart to the laws of physics, to the stability of dissapative systems.

i guess those are two different things, eh? are they at all related?

Why this desire for one final theory one final god? why not chill out and enjoy the pied beauty of it all?

GLORY be the life of dappled things—
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plough; And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.

All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
Father-Mothering forth whose beauty is
all change.


with thanks to G. M. Hopkins

just what IS swirls of sexvines?

swirls of sexvines
intoxicating night perfume
flowers calling moths
enticing em to mix pollen
imagine new forms
invite danger
burst
potent species into the forest

a memory of aroma of a night
when i feared being only a moth
my death was death of the universe locked in my skull
infested with vines sinews of thoughts and longings

bible verses came to attack
the jungle rotted them to ant food

longing for something to read i picked out stars with my tongue
but they stung
i burrowed under leaves
seeped into roots

the stars called me up through veins in the night
i became many and the rain washed me into puddles
i birthed a multitude of minute beings
eating each other living in each others bellies
stitching earth together
in laughter
and it keeps growing



what sexvines really means:
i got sick of the mired in piss degeneracy of bible thumping name calling argueing on refo and thought a fresh burst of dream vines swirling through with sensuality color would be apropriate.

swirls because this earth we are born into is a swirling through of convective currents under sunflow it's swirling through us and in fact we ourselves (not selves) are the same swirling rivers of Earth flow only slower

why the sex? because it's sensous and the fertility, the creativity, the lush detail of this life on earth is not from a logical mind of god but the sexingbirthingdying trial and error game of life.

why the sex? because of a woman i once met there.

then the dreamworld of intoxicating night perfumes why do i want intoxication? i wanted to loosen everyone up, i wanted to scramble, warp the logical lines of sophistry. dream world: what do we come out of? can we delineate our history or is it a misty past, hard to track down which mutation did this, which populations merged, which protein or genetic circuit was on the cusp of bifurcation...

intoxicated dreamworld 'cause i was alwasy up late looking looking for my beloved.... like the song of solomon, like magical tikkun ley'l one night, the heady perfume of play of the garden of pardes that torah can be.

the play. of course the outrageousness of insects and flowers having sex wth each other. the perfume of the flowers intoxicate the insects, the creativity of evolution to craft flowers that can trick wasps to have sex with them thus engaging in the flowers' sex acts with each other, all to mix genes to invent, invent, invent. to trust your mate choice to the whimsy of moth flight in the night.

new forms, danger, bursts of new speceis opening a new realm in the rainforest so much god's plan on the refo, so tightly held that there is a plan. but it's so contingent, so much play. [standing under the eternal nightvault of stars identifying ourselves with the eternal unchanging dance of the planets we are horrified by any suggestion of contingency, that WE might have been a contingent dream of the forest. We demand that we are the inevitable outcome of a father love]

what does it mean to me this mix of species, spices? that there is such a mix and the stories they make with each other. Each level of creation sets the stage for the next round of creation. that species interact creatively at all is the message. we puffed up with our own importance baby Gautamas think that we in the image of a michaelangelo god thought everything up, that WE domesticated wheat and cows and dogs and women.... We refuse to see that it's a give and take out there and critters have always been chasing each other 'round and 'round the evolutionary spiral, enticing each other into creative relationship.

so i revel in this Earthful of squaredance/swirldance. It is my source of life. This ecology of critters living inside each other eating each other in hypersea. It's a world of interfaces out there not of individuals trapped inside each one's own impenetrable boundary. the boundary of the ego. ecosystems, this earth is a swirl, we are rivers and the riverbanks are slow rivers of cycles of elements morphing round and round from breath to flesh to river to mud to breath again.

and the coordination? do the stars the planets, the cold simple mathematics of planetary orbits mind of an eternal ruler rule and coordinate it all? does a royal mind manage this splendrous Earth that supports our flesh and the history of our creativity? NO. It's managed by that multitude of tiny critters in the muds in the leaves living in each other's bellies birthing and dying in give and take stitching it all together.


and the stars stinging? does that mean anything? sitting numb with nothing to read on the muddy forest floor human mind yearns to stretch. the stars have always called to the human imagination. their perfection, their aloofness, their suggestion of eternal unchangingness. and the planet's simple dances in time called us to learn to count. called us to get lost in the crystal clarity of mathematics another way to enter eternity. such mathematical sharpness stings, clashes with the muddy messy day to day human drama.

don't forget the starvault as skullvault and the night when only a moth awakens to the brilliance and depth of human mind that can imagine the whole universe that can contain an image of the complex drama of life as if on a stage. that becomes at times more detailed and more intense than the stage out there and hence the idea develops in humanity that the more intense stage of reality the more real stage of reality is the one contemplated in human meditation and ecstacy. and it's something like the eternal starvault. it's up there. crystal clear heaven unsullied by sex passion abortion disease old age and death random boom and bust of species and extinction.

and if a single human in his skullvault can hold that whole image within him, then that single human is an image of the eternal cosmos and thus the death of an individual human is a cosmic sin. so why on Earth was that eternal cosmic image placed in finite flesh that can rot in horror or be tiger food?

so now the swirling horrifying night begins


And if the stars sting too much, if the mathematics becomes too crystal clear i want to burrow into the glorious messy textured aromatic details of bugs and mushrooms under the leaves the chemistry in the mud.



and the stars calling me into the veins in the night? that's the spriral of evolution i suppose. the creativity of time.. but it's not the right image. nothing is calling us to evolve into more... just the play of poetry. imprecise.


and all the while the sexswirl of flesh keeps laughing and growing