Voices

We all have them. Do we fear to use them?

Abracadabra - I recall that this has something to do with speaking something into reality. The speech act we all engage in as we move from dawn to dusk and back again is probably one of the things that really sets us apart from the rest of our family of similar simians. We are the chatteriest of primates, I’d warrant.

We have voices. We are admonished to use them and become active in helping to shape a better world than the one in which we live. We have generated incredibly complex issues which will require us to use the tools we have developed to untangle them. There is a path.

So this is a common theme on “Harrowings” - I’m certain we are capable of doing far more than we have up to this point. I’ve been writing a bit about it here over the past several months. I’m nothing if not consistently inconsistent in my steadiness on this task, however. I probably need to get the whole thing to come into better focus.

Eris, the Goddess of Chaos, refining the focus of the complex instruments in the Bunker that serve to drive humanity toward a brighter future.

This morning, I was not well focused as I attempted to pull something out of the pleroma worthy of publishing:

In it, I am exploring the “Brownian motion” of my mind as it jostles around bits of memory to try to make a coherent whole out of something that has grown incoherently since the beginning. Heidegger’s notion of “Gewurfenheit” - “thrownness” as it would appear in English - this is what I believe we all experience from the point of being born into time and space for the brief space of our lives.

A bit ago, I posted this:

I’d picked it up from Twitter. Listening to the performance there was a line where Astrud suggests that she’d want to remain with the person to whom she is singing “until the last flickerings of the embers of this life” expire - or words to that effect.

I don’t know how brief my own life may be - all I know is that death will arrive at some particular point in the future and I try to keep that awareness front and center as I move through my days. This leads to a breathless excitement just to be here now.

Exuberance ought to be the response - but, as the word “ought” turns the statement into one contrary to fact - I marvel had how little I or my favorite humans tend to think about the sheer odds against any of us being here at all. I was walking and taking in the “Passing Show” a bit ago:

Live with Hal Gill

As I went back to work from an impromptu drop-in on my wife as she worked from home today, I started thinking about the innumerable things that had to happen on the cosmic time scale for any of us to be where now. It’s nearly (but not quite) inconceivable that so many elements forged in the catastrophic ends of stars innumerable over the eons have led to the elements that have accumulated here in this very small bit of real estate (planet Earth) out here in the cosmos to give rise to us…eukaryotic life of all sorts. As I walked by the people, places, and things, I saw all life here and now as an absolute miracle.

This reminded me of Jim Holt’s book which is distilled into this TED talk above.

What is clear to me is that I seem to exist. I seem to be breathing in and out and maintaining homeostasis for now. Learning about the death of Marjane Satrapi today, I can say that I am saddened by her loss, described by her family as a death from “sadness” after her husband died at a young age last year. It is a constant reminder that this life is a temp job. We are not guaranteed another day so ought, ideally, to live this day as if it were to be our last. I cannot say that I do this well.

Well, what of it?

Nothing really to say in answer to that. It’s an observation and a reminder to mySelf to get on with the adventure of living. Tomorrow, I’ll again be rising early to go into Daily Provisions and put in a full day’s work between 6:30 AM and 2:30 PM. I’m grateful for the opportunity. It’s a great deal of fun for me. It’s something I felt that I wanted to experience and now that I have, I’m just genuinely excited to know that I can continue doing it so long as it seems expedient. Onward, I say!

However, there is the acceleration of knowledge to also observe….and as I was looking up the article about Marjand Satrapi, I stumbled onto “Denny” - a remnant of a hybrid Denisovan-Neanderthal girl who lived and died about 90,000 years ago. Seems she had about thirteen spins around the sun as a living, breathing girl in the earth of that time. I’m not sure how many of us share her DNA in our own systems. The species has endured many bottlenecks to our population growth over time. It may yet be heading for extinction even as we surge in numbers.

What’s striking to me in all of this is that it’s only been in the past few decades that we’ve even understood that DNA is the molecule responsible for all the species the world over. It’s like an infection that has caused the planet surface to generate incredible numbers of life-forms over time. I’m thinking back into the Cambrian explosion in which the oxygen-rich seas generated a profusion of different forms - some of which led to us, apparently.

All of this brought me back to my childhood when I’d spend as much time as I could digging in the dirt - trying to get to the bottom of things. I’m still there but my excavations are turned inward and I don’t feel the need to disturb the earth with my probings any longer.

D-Day 2026

This reminds me of how fascinated I was with dinosaurs when I was young:

“Oh, when I look back on the past, it’s a wonder I’m not yet extinct…” and so it goes.
I’ve shot a couple of episodes of “The Passing Show” this morning. My narration is just fragmentary rambling but what was really on my mind was geological time as I regarded the moon in its orbit. I think about it’s long influence over the planet. I think about how recently our consciousness emerged and how long it took for us to cooperate to create the conditions that we have now established which allow for over 8 billion of us to inhabit the planet at once. I think about the suffering that must come from such huge numbers of us and also the various geniuses that are being brought up into a world that is transforming rapidly. I think of the geometric curve and Moore’s law.

Ponderous thoughts to ponder, no?

Well, I don’t know much more than this. Our attention is demanded as we navigate into the future. We need to be smart about the choices we make. Every decision that I’ve ever made has put me here now. We have little to lose by getting ourselves into gear and staying awake as the world rotates through another diurnal cycle. It’s important! Think of how we can be good ancestors.

Of course, I’m also thinking of D-Day in 1945 - 81 years ago today. The lives lost in that campaign…what might have happened had other decisions been made over the course of the years preceding. Historians go over this material regularly. I just think to myself, what else was happening? What other threads were woven to bring about those events? What was happening simultaneously? It’s easier now than ever to find answers to these questions. It’s important to do our own research. What I experience is that there are many people who form opinions based on fragmentary knowledge. I try to remain in a state in which I know that I could be wrong. “Maybe Logic” applies.

People are the mainspring:

…and so it goes.

Onward!

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