Rudderless

Imagine that we are always and only contextual.

It's easy enough to talk about ourselves as beings who often have good and bad things happen to us as organic creatures. An illness that may kill us is bad; apparent health is good. Certain bacteria promote healthy operations within the system that is our body; others promote disease, death, decay. This seems "bad".

However, these are simply natural processes and only the mind that speaks and considers itself a discrete, unique entity that values life (continued living) AS a discrete, unique entity (mind) will be wont to assign a valuation to a measure of health or well-being. Sick is bad; not-sick is good.

Life happens (but is not necessary); death happens and is necessary. I find this statement endlessly fascinating.

However, once we start thinking along these lines we must try to reduce this unique being that has a self-obsessed mind to something more common and natural. After all we are only another form of mammal.

So, like all other organic life, our discrete, unique self as a body/mind must expire. This is not a unique occurrence and in fact is so commonplace that it must be one of the oddities (weaknesses?) of the human that the contemplation of it unhinges so many of us.

Still, if we think of ourselves as "like" all other beings we can also consider ourselves as "like" all other planetary "metabolisms". If the planet is our primary organic being (this is Gaia, yes?) then perhaps we are only a species of metabolic action. If so, the planet, if it has a "mind", might label us "good" or "bad"?

The point, moreover, is that humans measure all things by human standards--and these, sadly, tellingly, are short-sighted (just like the duration of our lives, so our common interest) and have only self-preservation as a consideration.

The real error as regards how the human fits in with the planetary comes in the form of the mind itself--or the self-regarding mechanism that creates the discrete idea of unique human being. Mind sees "me" as highly valuable and my selfish desire for my continuing existence is necessary to me. However, as regards planetary systems, wherein species come and go (and lovely is the rose) a billion times over, this is a gross error in understanding "one's place".

As philosophy is simply a backwards attempt to assign meaning to the meaningless so do we attempt to create meaning in our ecological and environmental organic "uniqueness" among our planetary brethren.

And as long as we exist (in our minds) "outside" of the natural planetary parameters of "duration" we will continue to simply create master-narratives that allow us to continue the mass delusion of our unique species.

Until we are no more.

World Enough...and Time?

Two from A.R. Ammons that might work to focus our thinking after yesterday's post: the first "World", seems a thumbnail ecology (yet inclusive of all); the second, "Peak", diagnoses our dilemma as human mind within that ecology of "actual trees" and "high tides"--humans desire a place/time "beyond" the world in the poem "World" and the result...well, the final two lines could not be a more ruthless truth.

World

Breakers at high tide shoot
spray over the jetty boulders
that collects in shallow chips, depressions,

evening the surface to run-off level:
of these possible worlds of held water,
most can't outlast the interim tideless

drought, so are clear, sterile, encased with
salt: one in particular, though, a hole,
providing depth with little surface,

keeps water through the hottest day:
a slime of green algae extends into that
tiny sea, and animals tiny enough to be in a

world there breed and dart and breathe and
die: so we are here in this plant-created oxygen,
drinking this sweet rain, consuming this green.


Peak

Everything begins at the tip-end, the dying-out,
of mind:
the dazed eyes set and light
dissolves actual trees:

the world beyond: tongueless,
unexampled
burns dimension out of shape,
opacity out of stone:

come: though the world ends and cannot
end,
the apple falls sharp
to the heart starved with time.


["Peak" should have indents at the 2nd line, 5th line, and 11th.]