Fred Zackel
Silly Monkey!
(Author's note: No True Believers of any Faith were actually harmed in the writing of this essay. On the reading of it, well, we can only trust that a few more True Believers come to their senses and discover tolerance for others not of Their Faith. The odds, of course, do not favor this outcome. The historical record is clear: True Believers are notoriously intolerant. Their imaginations are faulty.)
Students starting off don't know enough to ask the right questions. A study guide gives an aerial view of a subject and gives a different perspective than their preconceptions, their assumptions can afford. When we are inside it, we think a maze, for instance, is three-dimensional. But an aerial view would show us that the maze is two-dimensional. The aerial view, however, is three-dimensional; it shows us the way in and the way out of the maze. A truly three-dimensional maze would add an up and down labyrinth atop the length and width maze. Imagine a sphere or a cube, a pyramid or a rectangle. All is a maze in three directions. Is out up? Is out sideways?
The aerial view, that is, seen from high above, ah, is the Eye of God.
Until the aerial view became de rigueur, humans thought weather was local, something that popped up here and faded away here, that a storm arose here, threatened here, and then dissipated from here. Nobody knew that "weather" traveled an evolved from location to location. Many Caribbean hurricanes, for instance, begin the Sudan of Africa, south of Egypt. Before these storms dissipate, they can cross the Atlantic, devastate the Caribbean, travel up the Atlantic Seaboard, cause "tropical storm warnings in Newfoundland, and end up in the North Sea or Siberia. Only an aerial view can give us the Big Picture.I pledge allegiance to the Herd….
One morning, exactly one year before I was born, the physicist Enrico Fermi was brokering bets among a bunch of American scientists on whether the world's first atomic blast would cause the entire atmosphere of our planet Earth to burst into flames. I still wonder how the pessimists were planning on collecting.)
James Joyce said that every story begins Once upon a time. Every story begins by yearning for an Eden we never experienced.
Gnosis implies (implicates) epiphanies. Can't have gnosis without an epiphany.
An epiphany is a Cosmic Pie in the Face. An epiphany teaches us the Scale of Things. Beware, though, when an epiphany tells us that We Are Special and that the Divine wants us to start a Crusade. Whew. Danger, danger, danger, Will Robinson.
"Who made you, monkey?"
That's a great joke from "The Sarah Silverman Program."Being alive is being busy within a labyrinth. The Afterlife will give us that aerial view which makes coherent sense of what we did here and now.
I too have "intimations of immortality." I suspect them. I cannot trust them; they are chimeras. I ain't long for this world.
As a single person, I can be silenced faster than a firefly's flash. Let's nip him in the bud, goes the Authorities. Don't want the Herd to hear his nonsense, let alone ruminate over anything intelligent he might have inadvertently mentioned.
When I power down my MP3 player, the screen says Goodbye. I hope I have time for that, too, when I get powered down.
A poster at my gym mentions how great is the camaraderie I feel with my teammates in the locker room. Yet I do not feel that way. Somehow bonding with naked men changing clothes in a locker room is not my special time to bond. I blame myself for that, obviously.
I think of what I write as sending paper airplanes into the abyss.
Watch how I get attacked. I must be trespassing on somebody's vegetable garden. I heard their voices; Go tend to your own garden! Soon enough, I suspect, I shall.
If there is no purpose in life, then what did you lose acting like there was?
The ancient city of Ubar was the victim of a sinkhole. Its citizens needed water; they sucked it out from beneath the city. The city vanished.
What does it mean to be a human being?
'Bout fifty thousand years ago we went walking. Time was on our side, and nobody expected us to be in any specific place. After fifteen thousand years (mostly) we were everywhere inhabitable that we could be. So we walked back and forth some more. We went everywhere geography and/or climate let us. When we got somewhere, like spilled water, we sought our own level.
Animals which cannot move simply die.
We might be the ones who most delay their own extinction.Religion is the juice in the orange of Being Human. Can't squeeze it all out.
Religions can make us act irrationality.
In an essay published in "The Future Dictionary of America," Kurt Vonnegut wrote, "Only a nut case would want to be a human being, if he or she had a choice,"
Humans will not be confined to this planet. On the other hand, there is no rush. Country bumpkins will not be able to keep the genie in the bottle.
Hunter-gatherers have a single ethos: you take only what you need.
I once saw a silver llama I would steal. Some indigenous artist made it before Columbus set sail westward. I still see it in my mind's eye. I still covet it.
I can imagine us running back up the trees when predators come too close. I see us holding onto branches and wondering, can that Beastie climb trees? I see us biting our nails, wishing we found a skinnier, taller tree.
I love the stick figure with the erection in the Lascaux caves. He is helpless before the attack of the wounded bison. As I see it, the human was thinking with his willie when he attacked the bison. Then he paid for not using his brains.
But that's the way I look at things.You're 10 times more likely to be bitten by a human than a rat.
It doesn't matter whether God is "real" so long it works for you. So God is what we make it. We should enjoy our faith in God, and be kind to our fellow man. We will be dead soon. Sorry.
I am no Utopian. I figure we are stuck here.
"All right, then, I'll go to hell."
At times I am more terrified of going one-on-one against Random Chance than I am of facing God. Reason is not a satisfactory tool or weapon for coping with Chance, let alone finding any solace or comfort.
With God, I know what I am up against. My faith, admittedly shaky and haphazard, fragile and faltering, will help sustain me. My reason, on the other hand, is riven with fear and doubt. Random Chance is purposeless, and thus consequences are never a factor. One thing I know about God is, by definition, He is intelligent and purposeful. Or she is. Or It is. Whatever the Divine may be, the Divine is Conscious and aware of consequences.God may be an illusion created by our brains to keep us from losing our minds in a universe we cannot grasp, let alone comprehend. Without a god, we would lose hope, too.We cannot afford those losses. Thank you, Lord, for all that I have.
God can divide one by zero. Being human, we can't.
"Deus absconditus" is also "die Abwesenheit Gottes." The absence of God is noticed in every developing culture. The Absent God is knowable by His Displacement. We feel His absence. We miss Him. We wish He would come back.
Monkeys hold hands after arguing.
When Charles Darwin, then a pastor in training, stepped onto the Beagle in 1831, he was a firm believer in the biblical account of the Creation.
In Naples spilling wine on people is said to bring good fortune.
Predicting your fortune from wine is called oenomancy, which has a nice rhythmic ring to me. Thank you, Lord, for this glass of wine.
Wine was a luxury drink in ancient Egypt, and bottles were labeled with the wine's name, year of harvest, source and even vine grower.
In the 14th century, young princesses in Europe traveled long distances with their own troubadours. Yes, they were part of her entourage. (I like to sit at the bar at Ebbitts Grill in Washington, D.C., and watch the Secret Service motorcade roll by in their black SUVs, encircled by DC police solo on their Harley choppers, carrying dignitaries hither and thro.) Yes, in the days before Ipods and MP3 players, a young woman could schlep her own music wherever she went by having a real musician on her payroll. Hey, high tech, we love it!
One of my favorite stories concerned the sociologist and philosopher Theodore Holm Nelson. He is a controversial contrarian and thus my kind of people. He coined the word "hypertext," by the way. In 1976 he gave a 90 minute slide presentation at IBM headquarters in Atlanta, Georgia, about what the computer might do to change the World As We Know It. Totally shocked, the IBM executives three years later brought out the IBM PC. In 90 minutes of slide show, Nelson blew the suits away. They saw a vision of the future they could never have imagined in all their years at Big Blue.
One more item about Theodore Holm Nelson. He wants to change our lives and so he has these four maxims that he pushes out at us. His four maxims are "most people are fools, most authority is malignant, God does not exist, and everything is wrong." A couple I have bought into already; a couple I am still ruminating over.
We find peace only when we know we can escape.
Consider the unpredictability of volcanoes, hurricanes, lightning strikes, wild animals … Close your eyes. Now, what's sneaking up on you now? Really, it's there. No, don't turn around. Maybe it'll go away. How unpredictable is unpredictability?
A full moon can affect volcanic activity. Whereas, volcanoes never pay much attention to the virgins that get thrown inside them. Being Human, we gots to pick our battles better.In mid-November 2007, in the Maralal safari area north-east of Nairobi, Moses Lekalau, a thirty-five year old Kenyan herdsman, was jumped by a lion. He fought off the beast and killed it with a spear in a grueling half-hour long battle. But then, the poor man exhausted from his efforts, died after being attacked by a pack of hyenas. Wildlife experts point out that it is very rare for hyenas to attack people; hyenas eat leftovers from other predators. Mister Lekala was one such leftover.
Hyenas signal each other with what most observers say sounds like an asthma attack.
When a lion attacks, stick both fingers up his nostrils, a la The Three Stooges. Keep pressing the attack. Big cats hate having human fingers up their noses. Oh, and it works for muggers, thuggers, and thieves in our big cities at night, too.
It takes a village in India to kill a tiger.
I will be an arriviste at death. Saying it in French almost makes dying, well, chic.
All is forgiven when all is forgotten.
We buy products so our friends won't laugh at us.
Who wants yesterday's toys?
The universe is not benign. The universe is indifferent; it has no sentient intelligence. If it is benign, it is coincidental. I once watched a chameleon feast on the juicy pickings from a spider's web. Free lunch from somebody else's hard work, eh.
On the other hand, when we shuffle the cards, skill and luck combine. There is more than Random Chance. There is Intent. Now who gets to define that, ah, well, that varies according to individuals and institutions.We do not deserve justice. We only imagine that we deserve justice.
I feel I have frittered away my life.
Did I do it wrong?
Did I miss out on everything?Well as well him as another …
I lie in bed and I have all these unresolved issues. So I grab a notepad and write furiously, trusting that I got down a simple majority of these ideas before I go blank. Once these ideas are written down, I can trust myself to write more at other times. Maybe, goes the illusion, I can express myself better.
A pattern is an aerial view. Unobstructed is best.
Imagination goes antique over time. Innovation needs imagination. Streetlights and traffic lights should be blue-green. The human eye at night see those wave-lengths best.
"My lover is mine and I am his. He browses among the lilies."
Most of us think we deserve happiness. What a conceit! Most of us even get jealous when we think someone has more happiness than we have. Silly monkeys!
More Buddhists go to temple on New Year's Day than on any other day of the year.
Buddhists celebrate the New Year's with herring wrapped in seaweed, "kobu maki."
Buddhists believe there are 108 impediments to enlightenment. They also have the 108 Names of Holy Perfect Wisdom, but that's another story. I think. I do know if you can say them, then you have reached a remarkable state of enlightenment. I KNOW I am not there yet. By the way, the Hindu God Ganesh has 108 names.
Buddha may have died from eating mushrooms. Hmmm.
"Drunken gods playing chess," Arturo Pérez-Reverte suggests.
Let us not get cocky. The total weight of insects on this planet outweighs the total weight of us humans on this planet. I would say bugs got it better than us. That they belong here better than we do. This world may well be the best possible one for houseflies, for instance. They survive everything we throw at them. They thrive!
God may be Schroeder's cat. (Go google it.)
The truth is like raindrops on a bald head.
God is like Sears. He has everything.
Ennui is not irrational.
To end on a more cheery note, think of all those Pulpit Bullies and their lunatic zealots. Now imagine we, Being Humans, make First Contact with Intergalactic Sentients … who are Missionaries. No Strange Gods before Me should scare the crap out of us. Consider this a wake-up call. E.T. brings more than his cell phone. He brings his Divine and his Religion. You know, the One True Religion.
Nobody cheats death. Death is indeed a Cosmic Force. Its exact relationship to the Divine varies though from culture to culture, depending on how queasy we get thinking about Our Favorite Deity (or Deities) chopping off our existence.
Every two minutes someone is told they have cancer.
The activity in his brain ceased. And that's death in New York State.
Do you believe that the Divine established government? If you do, then rebelling against the government is rebelling against the Divine. Thus the Divine Right of Kings becomes a license to kill. To imagine the king dead is a capital crime. Well, saying that aloud is. Speaking what he imagined sealed the fate of one Francis Dereham back in the reign of King Henry VIII. We all remember King Henry. Six foot tall, a natural athlete when he was younger, by middle age he was the impotent cuckold with the fifty-two inch waistline, whose fifth wife, Queen Catherine Howard, got deflowered by the teenage Dereham when she was fifteen and unbetrothed. See, years later he's squatting in prison, a suspect in her adultery, when he opens his yap. Maybe he thought he was doomed already. Either way, he blabbed, "I imagine the king dead" to his best friend, who immediately betrayed him. Not surprisingly, Henry said, off with his head. Actually Dereham was hung, drawn, and quartered.
But don't let's quibble, 'k?Note to self: when planning your next ad hominem attack, choose your weapon more carefully. I recommend a gun or a knife. Sticks and stones are okay, but might only hurt the dude. Words are out; words can never harm them. After all, the last one lived.
Think about this:
Chimpanzees make their own spears for hunting.
Watch your backs, folks. Be careful out there.We revert in the forest of the night.
Inuit dogs have souls.
The dead are cold. I have touched them.
I am not ready for the Long Cold Time.
On the freeway of my life, I will get pulled into this rest area and never get back on the road.
We have this one lifetime to accomplish.Radio waves don't die. They cross the universe.
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