Thursday, November 20, 2003
"Mega Bottle Ride" by Joe Strummer
"I took a tram into the fourth dimension,
Cos I had the blues,
The blues of throwing it all away,
Just give me a tequila
-I'll slam it the 4-D way,
And when I got there you know,
It had certain similarities...
Like no smoking anywhere,
And hiding in the khazi to avoid paying the fare,
4-D tequila anyone?
And don't think we didn't dance
To records by the fifth dimension,
In the discosphere, like Kublai Khan,
And it was pretty goddamn hazardous...
Out on the Illminster by-pass,
Aqua-planing to the theme park,
We took a ride called...
The Banchoff-Klein Mega Bottle Ride,
How we spewed inside, back and forth,
In time, mathematics, and pride, inside,
We've gone Balkan, we've gone Balkan anyway,
It absolutely had to happen to someone today,
Yeah, there's no smoking anywhere,
Throw it all away,
Yeah, we've gone Balkan anyway,
You can get rid of the blues this way,
Yeah, that's how we fix the blues today,
It absolutely had to happen to someone today...
And it's time to be doing something good."
"I took a tram into the fourth dimension,
Cos I had the blues,
The blues of throwing it all away,
Just give me a tequila
-I'll slam it the 4-D way,
And when I got there you know,
It had certain similarities...
Like no smoking anywhere,
And hiding in the khazi to avoid paying the fare,
4-D tequila anyone?
And don't think we didn't dance
To records by the fifth dimension,
In the discosphere, like Kublai Khan,
And it was pretty goddamn hazardous...
Out on the Illminster by-pass,
Aqua-planing to the theme park,
We took a ride called...
The Banchoff-Klein Mega Bottle Ride,
How we spewed inside, back and forth,
In time, mathematics, and pride, inside,
We've gone Balkan, we've gone Balkan anyway,
It absolutely had to happen to someone today,
Yeah, there's no smoking anywhere,
Throw it all away,
Yeah, we've gone Balkan anyway,
You can get rid of the blues this way,
Yeah, that's how we fix the blues today,
It absolutely had to happen to someone today...
And it's time to be doing something good."
ontogengy recapitulates phylogeny:
"The millions of years of brain development from lizard to leopard to learner are repeated in each human embryo during the nine months in the womb. Thus, the development of an individual embryo (ontogeny) retraces (recapitulates) the evolutionary path of its ancestors (phylogeny)."
- Pierce Howard, Ph.D., The Owner's Manual for the Brain p. 38
"The millions of years of brain development from lizard to leopard to learner are repeated in each human embryo during the nine months in the womb. Thus, the development of an individual embryo (ontogeny) retraces (recapitulates) the evolutionary path of its ancestors (phylogeny)."
- Pierce Howard, Ph.D., The Owner's Manual for the Brain p. 38
Sunday, November 09, 2003
from William Blake, in "Proverbs of Hell":
21. Prisons are built with stones of Law, Brothels with bricks of Religion.
26. Excess of sorrow laughs. Excess of joy weeps.
38. Everything possible to be believ'd is an image of truth.
66. Improvement makes straight roads, but the crooked roads without Improvement are roads of Genius.
21. Prisons are built with stones of Law, Brothels with bricks of Religion.
26. Excess of sorrow laughs. Excess of joy weeps.
38. Everything possible to be believ'd is an image of truth.
66. Improvement makes straight roads, but the crooked roads without Improvement are roads of Genius.
By Allama Prabhu, a Hindu poet
Some time around the tenth century AD
When the honey-bee came
I saw the smell of flowers run.
O What miracles!
Where the heart went
I saw the brain run.
When the god came
I saw the temple run.
Some time around the tenth century AD
When the honey-bee came
I saw the smell of flowers run.
O What miracles!
Where the heart went
I saw the brain run.
When the god came
I saw the temple run.
words for thought:
According to the NTC Pocket References Dictionary of Chemistry:
Free radical- an atom or molecule that has an unpaired electron and is therefore highly reactive. Free radicals are often produced by high temperatures and are found in flames and explosions. A very simple free radical is the methyl radical CH3 produced by the splitting of the covalent carbon-to-carbon bond in ethane. Most free radicals are very short-lived. If free radicals are produced in living organisms they can be very damaging.
According to the NTC Pocket References Dictionary of Chemistry:
Free radical- an atom or molecule that has an unpaired electron and is therefore highly reactive. Free radicals are often produced by high temperatures and are found in flames and explosions. A very simple free radical is the methyl radical CH3 produced by the splitting of the covalent carbon-to-carbon bond in ethane. Most free radicals are very short-lived. If free radicals are produced in living organisms they can be very damaging.
I am obsessed with language, among other things. I am forever finding myself at a loss for words, forever frustrated at the limitations imposed on thought, memory, and experience that arise whenever one person tries to express an idea in a way so that another person can share the same impression. And we always fail. An approximation of the concept is all we ever convey, even when talking to those who are closest to us. In essence, our tragedy and our greatest blessing, freedom, arises from the simple fact that you will never, in entirety, know exactly what it is to be me, nor I you. That fact carries with it a deep and perhaps universal suffering, although of course, some feel this more than others, and I suppose for some, that knowledge of isolation comes as a joy. I don’t really know what the hell I’m talking about, by the way, all this is just crap coming from my own limited point of view, so when I try to talk in universals, please keep in mind the fact that I do realize that I’m probably wrong a good deal of the time. But I have thoughts, and ideas and memories. And for some ungodly reason I feel compelled at this point in my life to record and express these in some way, so I figure, what the hell. My best friend in the world, a guy who has been living a long long way from where I live for way too long now, suggested this blogging thing to me. And as you’ve probably figured out from the beginning of this, well, to put it bluntly, I’m damn lonely lately. I don’t know what the hell to write in this thing. I have so so much and absolutely nothing to say. So I’m just going to write what comes to mind and leave it at that. Anyway, like I was saying before, I’ve been thinking about language a lot for the last few years. I’ve studied linguistics in college and I speak Japanese and German passingly well. But it’s the idea of language that I’ve been thinking about mainly. Go back really far, so far you can’t even conceive of the time span, back to when humans were first evolving. In the beginning was the word, so the myth goes, and I’ve learned to put some faith in myths, and the myth says here, now think about it—in the beginning was the word. What’s a word? A word is a symbol, a construction developed to represent some tangible or intangible concept or thing. It takes the continuous time line and makes it discrete. It takes infinity and divides. It says there is nothing. And when that nothing is named, not by our simple phonetic combination of sounds and syllables, but what we think of when we think of the word name, then that nothing becomes a thing. think back farther, what is the idea of a name? A designation. This and that. When the first conscious thought arose, infinity became one, and immediately after that followed the concept of the other. If there was one, then there was the possibility of that which was not one. Then there were two. Stop. For now.
rambles, pt. 2
To go back, consciousness developed with the initial idea that was a name. What’s in a name? A rose by any other name…. No, a name, the act of naming is the beginning of self awareness. And with it comes the distinction of self and object, self and other. Animals have this consciousness to a point- they recognize forms and react. They eat, they flee that which is dangerous, they recognize their own species and reproduce. What do humans have that animals generally lack? Human consciousness sees into the fourth dimension, time. We remember far back, and equally important, we can plan into the distant future. Animals plan their actions as the situation arises and they remember only that which has repetitively been impressed on them. With the ability to work within the fourth dimension consciously comes something so basic to humans that we often take it for granted. Our ability to dream. To imagine. For it is that faculty that give us the ability to grow, to evolve, to develop and create. And the ability to destroy. And Shiva knows, destruction ain’t all bad. By the by, it has been theorized that ancient Neanderthals, based on their skull structure and other factors, thought in a way very different than homo sapiens does. The ideas are quite interesting. Apparently, Neanderthals, unlike us, were unable to change, adapt, or have many innovative ideas. They could do so, but it simply took longer. Instead, they relied on memories. Based on their apparent brain structure, they seem to have very large areas related to memory. It has been theorized that they had racial memories, and were able to know how to live and work in their lives and societies without having to really be taught anything. They remembered the things their ancestors knew. Modern humans’ occasional abilities for intuition and instinct probably result from similar brain functioning. To get back to something of a point, the distinction of human consciousness comes from that awareness of self, and more exactly, self in time. In an attempt to express concepts and ideas beyond the limitations of language, human have been compelled to create art- visual pictures and paintings, from the first sketches done in red ochre on cave walls lit by firelight to a masterpiece in a museum to a scribble done in lipstick on a napkin by a crazy woman. Or music, that audible expression that moves us to dance or to tears. And music holds rhythm. Waves of rhythm flow in our heartbeat, in our synaptic flashes of thought. Music carried on sound waves that began so long ago with that simple beat, with the pattern of the rhythm of a stick against a drum bringing messages through the jungle, fast forward and I’m sitting on a stiff wooden chair, my elaborate dress constricting my breath, which catches as I listen for the first time to Mozart’s piano concerto 19 in old Vienna, fast forward and I’m myself, standing on stage in front of over a hundred Japanese young people, and I’m screaming words in my own language into the microphone, and they don’t understand a single word, but it doesn’t matter- the kids in the mosh pit know exactly what I’m saying, and oh, how they danced, and during the last song, I jumped in with them, still grasping the microphone in my sweaty hand.
To go back, consciousness developed with the initial idea that was a name. What’s in a name? A rose by any other name…. No, a name, the act of naming is the beginning of self awareness. And with it comes the distinction of self and object, self and other. Animals have this consciousness to a point- they recognize forms and react. They eat, they flee that which is dangerous, they recognize their own species and reproduce. What do humans have that animals generally lack? Human consciousness sees into the fourth dimension, time. We remember far back, and equally important, we can plan into the distant future. Animals plan their actions as the situation arises and they remember only that which has repetitively been impressed on them. With the ability to work within the fourth dimension consciously comes something so basic to humans that we often take it for granted. Our ability to dream. To imagine. For it is that faculty that give us the ability to grow, to evolve, to develop and create. And the ability to destroy. And Shiva knows, destruction ain’t all bad. By the by, it has been theorized that ancient Neanderthals, based on their skull structure and other factors, thought in a way very different than homo sapiens does. The ideas are quite interesting. Apparently, Neanderthals, unlike us, were unable to change, adapt, or have many innovative ideas. They could do so, but it simply took longer. Instead, they relied on memories. Based on their apparent brain structure, they seem to have very large areas related to memory. It has been theorized that they had racial memories, and were able to know how to live and work in their lives and societies without having to really be taught anything. They remembered the things their ancestors knew. Modern humans’ occasional abilities for intuition and instinct probably result from similar brain functioning. To get back to something of a point, the distinction of human consciousness comes from that awareness of self, and more exactly, self in time. In an attempt to express concepts and ideas beyond the limitations of language, human have been compelled to create art- visual pictures and paintings, from the first sketches done in red ochre on cave walls lit by firelight to a masterpiece in a museum to a scribble done in lipstick on a napkin by a crazy woman. Or music, that audible expression that moves us to dance or to tears. And music holds rhythm. Waves of rhythm flow in our heartbeat, in our synaptic flashes of thought. Music carried on sound waves that began so long ago with that simple beat, with the pattern of the rhythm of a stick against a drum bringing messages through the jungle, fast forward and I’m sitting on a stiff wooden chair, my elaborate dress constricting my breath, which catches as I listen for the first time to Mozart’s piano concerto 19 in old Vienna, fast forward and I’m myself, standing on stage in front of over a hundred Japanese young people, and I’m screaming words in my own language into the microphone, and they don’t understand a single word, but it doesn’t matter- the kids in the mosh pit know exactly what I’m saying, and oh, how they danced, and during the last song, I jumped in with them, still grasping the microphone in my sweaty hand.
rambles, pt. 3
Dancing alone in my room, I feel so close, I slip back in seconds accomplishing for a moment what those Hindi yogis focus and strive, build up and break down to achieve, because they remember, and others do too, but to take them as one example, they sure kept at it. They knew it could be done, and they knew, eventually, which is so true, they knew that there were many paths to reach that same end. They called it samadhi, and what is it? They push themselves so far and reach it and they can stay there for the rest of their lives, so they say. But I don’t want to stay there, cause I can’t rest. Not yet. Push yourself until you can’t hold on any longer. Take all the extremes, go to the edge hold on with your fingertips to the ledge, know with full certainty that you can stop breathing at any moment you choose and know that it won’t hurt at all to let go. Go back, because you remember how. Once you’ve been there you never forget. And humans, not just Neanderthals, but humans, too, we carry with us the memories of our ancestors, and not just the ones that walk on two feet or any feet at all for that matter. The hindis call it samadhi, the state wherein you see no distinction between self and other, and where thought is not confined to the restrictions of whatever language you happened to be born into. There is no god because everything is god. In my room when nobody is home, I close my eyes and I dance. And my body moves to the music, and I become for that moment a physical expression of the same feeling that the music attempts to convey an audible interpretation of. And sometimes, when the mood hits me, I dance the dance without moving a muscle, and there is no music playing at all. And when I feel like this, I let my mind go, and I know with every cell and wave of my body exactly how wrong I am. I realize with a slow creeping bang that I am never alone. I understand every human being alive on this planet, and they all have the ability to understand me. And it doesn’t matter if they don’t yet. They will. And I let myself remember, when I don’t go getting all self-pitying and melancholy, I let myself remember all the voices I’ve ever come across, all those voices calling out in so many different languages and so many different art forms and stories and songs, I remember that same song underlying every last one of them. And you know, life is art. The way you live and breathe and every damn thing you do is a brush stroke on the canvas, a grace note in the melody. A woman working the drive-thru of a fast food restaurant, she’s black and has two kids waiting alone for her to come home to their apartment, she’s working alone because two coworkers called in sick and she has a cold, too, but needs the hours, this woman, she juggles the work, taking orders over the headset, taking money, giving change, dropping the fries, making the drinks, putting the burgers in the bags, handing out the food, smiling at the customers, making small talk with them as time allows, and as she works, she flows with it. It’s a dance she does, and probably she doesn’t know it, but she is beautiful. With her hair mussed, her lipstick wiped away, sweat rolling down her temple, she is perfectly beautiful.
Dancing alone in my room, I feel so close, I slip back in seconds accomplishing for a moment what those Hindi yogis focus and strive, build up and break down to achieve, because they remember, and others do too, but to take them as one example, they sure kept at it. They knew it could be done, and they knew, eventually, which is so true, they knew that there were many paths to reach that same end. They called it samadhi, and what is it? They push themselves so far and reach it and they can stay there for the rest of their lives, so they say. But I don’t want to stay there, cause I can’t rest. Not yet. Push yourself until you can’t hold on any longer. Take all the extremes, go to the edge hold on with your fingertips to the ledge, know with full certainty that you can stop breathing at any moment you choose and know that it won’t hurt at all to let go. Go back, because you remember how. Once you’ve been there you never forget. And humans, not just Neanderthals, but humans, too, we carry with us the memories of our ancestors, and not just the ones that walk on two feet or any feet at all for that matter. The hindis call it samadhi, the state wherein you see no distinction between self and other, and where thought is not confined to the restrictions of whatever language you happened to be born into. There is no god because everything is god. In my room when nobody is home, I close my eyes and I dance. And my body moves to the music, and I become for that moment a physical expression of the same feeling that the music attempts to convey an audible interpretation of. And sometimes, when the mood hits me, I dance the dance without moving a muscle, and there is no music playing at all. And when I feel like this, I let my mind go, and I know with every cell and wave of my body exactly how wrong I am. I realize with a slow creeping bang that I am never alone. I understand every human being alive on this planet, and they all have the ability to understand me. And it doesn’t matter if they don’t yet. They will. And I let myself remember, when I don’t go getting all self-pitying and melancholy, I let myself remember all the voices I’ve ever come across, all those voices calling out in so many different languages and so many different art forms and stories and songs, I remember that same song underlying every last one of them. And you know, life is art. The way you live and breathe and every damn thing you do is a brush stroke on the canvas, a grace note in the melody. A woman working the drive-thru of a fast food restaurant, she’s black and has two kids waiting alone for her to come home to their apartment, she’s working alone because two coworkers called in sick and she has a cold, too, but needs the hours, this woman, she juggles the work, taking orders over the headset, taking money, giving change, dropping the fries, making the drinks, putting the burgers in the bags, handing out the food, smiling at the customers, making small talk with them as time allows, and as she works, she flows with it. It’s a dance she does, and probably she doesn’t know it, but she is beautiful. With her hair mussed, her lipstick wiped away, sweat rolling down her temple, she is perfectly beautiful.
