Digits in the Digital Realm

It's been a long time since my fingers tapped the keyboard, hoping to share a thought or two with the digital world.  This does not necessarily mean that the woman who claims to live forever suddenly died.  No chance.  

One wonders how long a blog can sustain its original intent. I notice many of my friends from a year ago are either gone totally, or, like I, have lost the ability to maintain regular postings.  I can't speak for them, but for me, I must say the inspiration hasn't left me, but I have been suffering, acutely, the demands placed upon anyone who works in an industry (ha! Education. ha!) where the employer is trying harder and harder to get fewer workers to do more work for less.  End of excuses.  The intent of my blog isn't gone either; it was and is to talk about life and eternity.  Well, what the hell, there has to be more to say about that, though it may come through a different perspective now.  Here's what tumbled out of my fingers today.  It's not a prophecy.  It's not my best work either.  But I think it's funny, in a way.

*

We've lived past the end of time,

and into a time when days are endless;

when pain stabs so deep that it is

painless, and you and I 

live in the digits

of a realm ethereal.

I'll meet you at the cyber cafe

at the intersection of Mars

and Lars (a lusty

sailor who came into port one day

only to get lost

in the stars) .  There

I'll sit drinking vodka, wearing a 

retainer designed to keep my 

knees from dropping.  It's best that way.

I know you came

to my door and rang and knocked

more than once, you even shouted, and I hid

on the third floor and watched you

from my window walk away.  You 

should know better.  Don't

come back another day.  Instead, book

mark me on your smartphone; in this domain,

don't go away.  Here, I linger always,

answer feedback, 

and replay.

Tomorrow, yesterday, and today.

Steve Jobs, R.I.P. (today's diva)

Dear Mr. Jobs,

many might try to find

the places where you err'ed

but when it comes to this,

the end of your era,

well,

we can clearly see

You sure could sing!

The Computers I Write On:

Famous People Born Today (September 27)

I'm sure this is a question that has plagued you

for most of your life:

who are the famous people born

on September 27?

Well, I'll tell you who a few of them are:

there's Shaun Cassidy -

( celebritynooz )

born on this day in that fine year of 1958.

Avril Lavigne, too, popped out

nearly 30 years later --

(wikipedia )

And then there are the "Birthday Twins," Gwyneth Paltrow and Lil Wayne:

( marquee )

I was looking for similarities in features, and I was going to say we're all blonds,

but Lil Wayne kind of messed up that equation.

So does the Italian/Greek actress Sophia Milos

( wikipedia )

who probably also has more cleavage than all of us put together. . . 

But the capper came today,

the coupe de grace,

the birth that has finally given meaning

to this humble day in September:

( huffingtonpost )

It appears today is the day that Google claims

as the day of its birth --

Yes, the ultimate symbol of the vast power of the internet actually claims

this day

as ITS day,

and offered up a cake. . . 

I'm pleased to share the day of my birth with this,

this blank empty line on your screen on which

you can type any question

and get some kind of answer --

Google,

the Oracle of the 21st century,

and I,

Makropoulos,

aka -- some unknown frustrated academic/writer/clumsy guitarist/singer

share this fine day

as the day of our birth

with all the people named above and more,

perhaps even you.

So I executed my ceremonial changing of my age --

as Makropoulos,

I am now 426, but in something known as reality

I'm about the same age as Shaun Cassidy,

and send birthday wishes to all of you Librans

who always wondered who

might be born

on September 27.

Happy day to you!

Kutiman

If you haven't figured it out by now,

I am deeply inspired

by the internet's ability

to bridge differences,

and to facilitate collective artwork

that allows each individual to maintain

a shred of uniqueness.

It's most intriguing on the impact of this on music.

Here is my latest find in that regard --

Kutiman --

check it out; haven't much else to say about it.

(with gratitude to Dangerous Minds

for turning me on to this.)

Virtual Choir

Usually, it seems to me,

when we see a group of pictures

of random collected faces we don't know,

captured in their brightest and most expressive moments,
it's because they were all killed together,

in a disaster of some sort,
and we are being asked to memorialize them.

 ( wben )

We live in an age of disasters,

and we learn about them way too quickly,

because of this powerful tool called

the internet.

( christianpost )

The internet itself,

and the quick proliferation of information,

may be one of the reasons why we all feel

like we're approaching Armageddon.

(Is it Armageddon yet?  Perhaps it's already here.)

However, the internet

also has the power

to produce a collective impression

that is powerful and peaceful and

good.

Like this:

Projects give me hope

that not only can we experience the Apocalypse,

but we can live through it

and come out the other side

as a choir of angels.

Brecht was right, but he had the wrong medium (how could he have known?)

(brecht-wikipedia)

Bertolt Brecht was talking about the internet,

I believe,

when he said:

"It is purely an apparatus for distribution, for mere sharing out. So here is a positive suggestion: change this apparatus over from distribution to communication. The radio would be the finest possible communication apparatus in public life, a vast network of pipes. That is to say, it would be if it knew how to receive as well as to transmit, how to let the listener speak as well as hear, how to bring him into a relationship instead of isolating him."

Bertolt Brecht

"The Radio As An Apparatus For Communication"

I was inspired to post this when I found this

other link on a film about Digital Humanities

(being bemoaned by Hitler! -- sorry, this cannot be embedded, so please follow the link),

thanks to the blog Exploring Our Matrix.

Also with gratitude for the blogger Radio Survivor,
who made it possible for me to find this quote
without having to dig through my books!

Return to Genesis: Babel

It's been a little while since I've thought about

the Book of Genesis,

which happens to be my most favorite book

of all time.

I mean, think about it:

it has everything in it: 

murder,

lust, 

rape,

a big ol' flood, 

destruction,

regeneration,

incest,

war,

and that wonderful story about the Tower of Babel.

Now, I wasn't planning on talking about

the Tower of Babel,

but I'm compelled to talk about it:

2.

I was visiting some Jewish friends last week, and they invited me to go to synagogue with them for the singing of the Book of Ruth.  It was the celebration of Shavuot, but my friend also called it Pentecost.  And so we discussed what Pentecost is in the Christian Church, and what Shavuot is to the Jews.  For Jews, Pentecost is the fiftieth day after Passover, as it is for the Christians.  For Jews, Pentecost celebrates a harvest, and that is one of the reasons they read the Book of Ruth.  It is also the commemoration of God giving the Torah (including the Ten Commandments) to his people, and a few other things as well.

I must confess that when I recounted my understanding of what the feast of Pentecost celebrates in Christianity, it was burdened by my own interpretation: when I think of Pentecost I think of those pictures of the apostles with tongues of fire over the heads, sort of as if they had just been transformed into Bic lighters.  I don't mean to be disrespectful, it's simply that that's the best description I could come up with for this image that was ingrained in my mind so long ago:

( wikipedia pentecost )

Now, I know this has something to do with the Holy Spirit descending upon the Apostles; along with that, the thing I recall most readily about the celebration of Pentecost is that the disciples began to speak in tongues --

And when the day of Pentecost was fully come, they were all with one accord in one place. And suddenly there came a sound from heaven as of a rushing mighty wind, and it filled all the house where they were sitting. And there appeared unto them cloven tongues like as of fire, and it sat upon each of them. And they were all filled with the Holy Ghost, and began to speak with other tongues, as the Spirit gave them utterance. And there were dwelling at Jerusalem Jews, devout men, out of every nation under heaven. Now when this was noised abroad, the multitude came together, and were confounded, because that every man heard them speak in his own language (Acts 2: 1-6)

 --

This always makes me think of the other moment of "confounding" in the Old Testament, the story of the Tower of Babel:

(Eikongraphia   very nice blog)

And the whole earth was of one language, and of one speech.

And it came to pass, as they journeyed from the east, that they found a plain in the land of Shinar; and they dwelt there.

And they said one to another, Come, let us make brick, and burn them thoroughly.  And they had brick for stone, and slime had they for mortar.

And they said, Come, let us build us a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven; and let us make us a name, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth.

And the Lord came down to see the city and the tower, which the children of men builded.

And the Lord said, Behold the people are one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be withheld from them, which they have imagined to do.

Come, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one antoher's speech.

So the Lord scattered them abroad from there upon the face of all the earth: and they ceased building the city.

Therfore is the name of it called Babel, because the Lord did there confound the language of all the earth; and from there did the Lord scatter them abroad upon the face of all the earth.

(Genesis, book 11)

What is odd in the Christian Pentecost story is that humans become confounded

when the Disciples are able to speak

other

languages,

to communicate across the divide produced 

at the destruction of the Tower of Babel.

So how does one confoundment

cancel

another confoundment out?

In my limited limitless wisdom,
I declared to my Jewish friends:
the Christian version of Pentecost provides

the antedote

for Babel.

The Christian story of Pentecost suggests a power

that is capable of counteracting

the confoundment that resulted

when the totality of 

humanity

was rent asunder

because they were getting too big for their britches

too quickly.

It's another case of the negative meeting the positive;

another case of

the palindrome.

The First Tower

that was built

at Babel

was foolishness -
it was like a child
trying to build a structure
out of blocks
to reach his father's
tool bench.
It was

a physical attempt

to do something

that was physically impossible.

Notably,
the power  of the Holy Sprit
is born

on something that is 

not necessarily

physical

but is, rather,

the opposite

of physical.

Would it be too corny

to say that

the antedote to 

the physical destruction

of Babel

is love?

Anyhooo,

my Jewish friends liked that story of Pentecost

quite a bit,

but I now look at the literature and see

that that's really simply
my interpretation.

But I think it's a fairly cool

interpretation, 

nonetheless.

3.

Notably,

in our disparate,

different

corners of the earth,

we continue to try to build those buildings:

What does it mean to build a large building?

Many would call it some sort of

phallic obsession:

( environmentalgrafitti )

Look at it another way:

maybe our continued construction

(and demolition)

of large monumental buildings

is actually an

ongoing

re-enactment of the performance

at Babel

where a people tried to

"make themselves a name"

For humans to try

to make for themselves a 

name

in the Story ofGenesis

is for humans

to step into the role

of God,

which they were never really supposed to do.

Our task has always been

to present a likeness of God,

not to be 

God.

I have a vague thought, then,

that if we really want to restore

the power and unification of human souls

that existed before Babel,

we're not going to do it with a building;

we're not going to do it with anything tangible --

we'll do it with the intangible.

Could the counterpart,

the antedote

to the Tower of Babel

be

the internet?

4.

This is not at all what I thought I would write today.

And it's halting - not a real pure

channeling.

My own individual mind

got too much 

in the way.

That, and that glorious sun,

belting down

outside my window.

You know the years
can pass by,
one after another,
but one thing remains constant:
the earth and her seasons.

What a beautiful day

Hope yours is too.

with love

from 

Makropoulos

Fingerlips: a love note

1.

 

My fingers are my lips

as they curl over these keys

trembling with the desire to make contact,

to speak, to even cast a smile

towards you,

who take the time to glance 

or even linger longer

here with me.

But if no words come to me,

well,

you see nothing.

You think I am other wise occupied

perhaps working

perhaps talking

perhaps flirting 

with some living, breathing creature

Don't believe that.

You

are my current lover--

you who listen;

you who read.

Anywone who comes here

and tries to puzzle

together the parts

I perform here for you:

I am devoted to you.

2.

This space, this tiny sliver

of the virtual domain

is always on my mind,

and I regularly sort through

my thoughts, seeking

the one

worthy of being spoken 

here,

for you.

It is as if my mindwere its own virtual domain.

The strand that this

Makropoulos

occupies is glimmering and timeless.

The rest of my mind these days is so cluttered

with timebound tasks

that insist they must be done

NOW

And then a day or two later,

I look back at those tasks

that demanded such immediate attention,

and - if I can remember what they were -

I ask myself:

Was that really such an insistent task?

Was it even necessary?

Usually, the answer is no.

The most necessary thing we

have to do

is live fully and love each other,

and treat as holy

the bodies - those earthly avatars -

that we have chosen to use

while in this domain that demands

that we be flesh.

Only THAT

must be our most insistent task.

Spring Equinox

 

As we whirl about on the wheel of the seasons, we mark time with our bodies, and with the earth.  And this is the natural way to measure time.  By cooperating with the sun, the earth, and the moon, we can tell the hours of the day.  Women can feel larger cycles within their bodies, far better than men can.  We know when our bodies are full, and ready to reproduce, and when they are barren.  And when our bodies leave the cycle of reproduction for good, we can feel the earth as it begins to pull us back to her.  

Women are humankind's natural time piece.  One might even argue that we started developing timepieces when men stopped listening to women.  But I won't argue that, not now, at least.  I'll just say it.

But it's not so hard to tell time by the cycle of the earth.  Men can do it, too.  Learning to live in the cycle of life is about as simple as learning to sing.  Studying singing means studying your body, finding all its echoing cavities, and then opening them up and letting the voice free.  You lose yourself to your voice, and your body becomes really just a wind instrument  When you're singing properly, it's the simplest thing in the world; it's like letting a clean, fresh spring of water rush through you. 

But yes, let's get back to time.  I woke up this morning at 11:00 am, because I stayed up so late last night.  And for an hour or so I panicked, feeling I'd lost half of my day.  I blamed it on technology, but in this case, the technology I'm blaming is not made of wires and springs, rather, it is a man-made technological mandate to spring our clocks forward earlier than usual. 

Just the act of springing our clocks forward is an unnatural separation between the human body and the actual rhythms of the day.  It's bad enough we have a clock.  Of course, we do spring it forward so we can take advantage of the natural cycle of the sun and the earth and give ourselves a longer work day.  But yes, there's a problem in that, too.

source1

 Timepieces were first developed around 3500 BC.  (No, I wasn't around then!)  They were developed to measure the length of a day. Round like the earth and the sun, they were keyed into that rhythmic cycle, and at that point in their development, there was no harm to be found in them.  A farmer came to recognize when on the dial he needed to do certain chores, when to go take a nap, when to begin preparing food.  I like to imagine that at that point in history, every moment of every day was sacred, which is why, perhaps, in English we call our first meal "break-fast" because it is literally that: it is a ritual that breaks the fasting imposed upon us by nighttime and sleep. 

Life that is bound with the cycle of the earth is inherently ritualistic.

 source

At what point did minutes and days and changes of seasons cease to be sacred?  At what point did humanity set the clocks forward so much so that it sent us all rushing through our days, ignoring the cues that the sun itself gives us about what time it really is?  I would dare say it happened before I was born:  the first spring-powered mechanism was created somewhere between 1500 and 1510; and in 1505 a guy named Peter Henlein designed the first portable timepiece at which point, every human being who could afford one became preoccupied with an object on a chain that he stored in his pocket, and not the sun itself. The minute hand was designed in 1577; so the entire time I've been alive, humans have been intimately aware of minutes and how quickly they pass.

And oh, how well I know how short, or how long, a minute can be.  Because of the strange circumstances that frame my life, time has become an obsession with me.  I've gone through different understandings of it, and I've read quite a bit about it.  There's some very nice sources on the web, in fact.  I put links under all my pictures so you can see where I stole them from.  The links up above actually should take you to some really nice articles about timepieces and time.  A book that I really have enjoyed, because it describes so well a key period in my life, is called The Culture of Time and Space, by Stephen Kern.  He does a very nice job of showing how the technological advances of the late 19th and early 20th Centuries did more to speed up time than any other historical era.  I would also say that each new technology that either helps us get our work done faster, or helps us get from one place to another more quickly has contributed to the speeding up of time.  One of the worst offenders in this equation is the timeclock itself: it put a price tag on time, and took masses of laborers out of the natural cycle of the earth and into the artifice of the workplace.  Working hourse became interminable, and leisure hours became too short.  Trains and boats and busses and cars transported us and our goods to far-off places, but once we got there, we had to watch the time carefully.  There are, after all, only so many hours in the day.

 

One of the biggest technological changes that I remember in my lifetime was the development of Greenwich Mean Time in 1884.  Just try to imagine the chaos that occurred, in little pockets all over the world, as people adjusted their watches and clocks to that one central time.  Such confusion!  The idea of being late didn't really exist before that; you just got to a place when you got there.  But if you wanted to catch the Paris train that arrived in Nice at 18:10, you had to set your clock by the new times, you had to get a train schedule, and you had to be at the station in good time.  Gradually people caught on, especially once radio came along, and we realized we could listen to a broadcast of someone singing from very far away if we had a radio and a clock. 

I was in Germany then, and sitting in a bar one night when it dawned on me that if it was 6:00 pm in Munich, it was 1:00 pm in New York.  "So where is it 6:00 am?" I asked the bartender.  He laughed at me and said "China."  I felt a strange shift inside myself as I imagined developing a flying machine fast enough to get me to China in twelve hours.  Judging by the buzz of an airplane overhead, I began to think it was really possible.

One of the reasons I like Stephen Kern's book is because he describes what I began to think about then.  I began to think that as technology makes it more possible for us to measure time more precisely and to travel from place to place faster, time itself will begin to speed up until it absolutely disappears.  In other words, when we can get to China in second, then perhaps time itself has become inconsequential.  I've been feeling this speeding up of time and space happening, for over one hundred years, until today.

That's why this internet is so interesting to me.  I can write these very words and press "post," and instantaneously, somone in China can read what I have just written.  Better yet, I can Skype my friend in Singapore, and hear her voice as if she's in the same room with me.  In fact, the only thing that keeps me from being able to fully be with her is my body.  As I talk with her through my computer, our minds and spirits are absolutely together, and our bodies, well, they seem peripheral. 

As this glorious first day of Spring comes to its end, my windows are open.  I can hear birds singing and dogs barking.  The air is crisp, and the dappled clouds are reflecting the light of the setting sun.  It feels almost like late Spring, or nearly Summer, and I know somewhere, someone is thinking how time is speeding up, and Armageddon is no doubt on the horizon.  And maybe it is.

Or maybe it's just that our perception of time has come absolutely full circle.  We're living in a time when, because of our technology, every moment can give us access to the whole world.  Time is imploding on us, and this has been brought on by the evolution of the technology that allows us to talk about time itself.  Time just isn't all that relevant anymore.  It's everywhere and nowhere.  (Follow this link to something called the Human Clock; shows people all over the world having fun with time and the internet!)

Of course, many say that Christ will come (again) at the end of time.  Considering what I'm saying, when will that be?  By my equation, (and of course by the words that came to me late one night) his arrival is imminent.  

Or perhaps, quite frankly, he's here right now.

Avatar: A Return To The Garden

a note on originality. . .  .

Now, when I was a girl, the wise old woman down the street was the most profound person I knew, and every word she uttered was pure, true, and absolutely hers.  When I was a teenager,  listening to my father talking about the new ideas of the day, I began to realize other people had thoughts equally as brilliant as the old woman down the street, and some people even had the same thoughts.  When I finally got a chance to learn to read, some time in my twenties, people were beginning to get concerned about receiving credit for the thoughts they wrote down.  I agreed; this is when my desire to write began, and it was accompanied by my belief that if I could write, my wonderful original ideas would be known for an eternity as mine and only mine.

I felt that way for over a hundred years, but I've gradually come to feel it is such an immature attitude, really, this belief that in this large, lovely world of ours one individual in one place could have a thought and be the only person to have it.  You can be certain that somewhere, thousands of miles away, or perhaps only on the next street, someone may be having a similar or the same thought, but not the means to express it.  And they may never have the means to express it, despite the brilliance of their thought.  So I have since come to believe that the myth of originality is really grounded in the phenomenon that I'd rather call "The I Wrote It First Syndrome."

But for a couple hundred years, especially in the West, men in particular lived under the illusion that one man was capable of having a single original thought, utterly different from every other man's thought, and definitely different from women's thought.  And men took ownership over thoughts, and got very uptight if someone said the same thing they said, without giving them credit.

Now, the internet has given us a new perspective: I'll have what I think is a brilliant, original thought, then Google it, only to find 250 pages of blogs and editorials and syllabi and articles on versions of my thought. It's impossible to know who wrote something first, or who may have thought it first.  This can be a really deflating and silencing experience, if I let it be.  Or, it can force us to think about thinking and expressing ourselves in a completely different way.  And yes, this is absolutely connected to the idea of the Grid, and its relationship to the Collective Mind.  The internet makes us realize that there is a collective mind, with a multitude of layers, embracing the earth, sort of like radio waves.  If we tune into the one we're "wired for" properly, we'll discover a thought, a priceless thought, that we share with many like-minded people.  That thought can empower us both individually, and as a species.

But that's something to pursue later.   Don't forget that image of the radio, though.

For now, I want to contemplate an idea that others have contemplated already: the idea that the movie Avatar's  Pandora is really Eden, and our longing for it is actually a longing for what we lost, or what we've had all along but not paid any attention to.

Where is Eden and how did we lose it?
Some believe that the original Eden was somewhere between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers.  And perhaps that is the place where Adam and Eve hung their original hat.  However, I tend to believe Eden was and is the entire earth.  A virtual Pandora, indeed, with just as many beauties and mystical happenings as any fictional planet could ever have.  In fact, that burgeoning cauldron of young life that this planet once was was probably even more spectacular than anything James Cameron could imagine.

And one particularly beautiful life form that was here, brought here either by evolution or some divine decision, was human.  Shimmering and upright, seductive, vulnerable, and funny.  A delectable treat for the predators, but like every species, humans were given a capacity that they could use to save themselves and their species.  They were given a brain that was wired into a very complex system of senses.  Avatar acknowledges the cat-like nature of human-like creatures; humans are, like cats, capable of tuning into the intuitive, spiritual realm.  That's what the sixth sense is all about.  It's a sense that has been dulled over time.  But we have it.  That sense is directly related to bodily awareness, to the ability to be tuned into our physical surroundings by using our biggest organ: our skin.   It's rare that we think about that fact, but skin is an organ, and it is one with very precise functions, related to drawing nutrients from the air and the sun and to mediating the environment in which we live.

Neytiri, the Na'vi heroine in Avatar knows absolutely how to use her skin, and her inner eye, in combination with all her other senses (which for her are really secondary) in a wide range of circumstances and physical activities.  And this is what makes her, and her entire breed, so alluring and desirable.  But they are really not all that different from us.

We've absolutely lost our ability to use this complex combination of senses.  We rely on some of the weaker senses, like vision, which, you might note, Neytiri often uses last.  Quite frankly, the only time many humans today come even close to using their skin appropriately is when they're engaged with sex, and this is why some humans overindulge in it, the same way they might overindulge in alcohol and some drugs.  If we used our skin regularly, in the wide ranges of manners within which it is capable of being stimulated, then sex would be treated like the gift and sacrament it is really intended to be.  That's not to say it wouldn't be hot and steamy and wonderful; in fact it would be more hot and steamy and wonderful.   But since so many aspects of the sexual act have been fetishized, many of us have lost contact with the fact that the act of sex is the highest form of communion two humans can share, and it is at its richest when the people engaged in it have reached a very special level of mutual understanding.  And that doesn't imply that they should be married, or that the union need be heterosexual.  But it does imply that once two humans reach that level of union, they should feel no need to be with anyone else, because they are so absolutely in accord.

But again, in my usual way, I wonder off course.  Or maybe not.  In the Garden of Eden, that is how sex and sensuality would be.  And sensuality would not refer only to sex, it would refer to every interaction that we have with our natural environment.  And no one would get bent out of shape over it.  A bit like on Pandora.

Any human today who says they long to live on Pandora is really longing for a situation wherein all of our senses are alive again, and used in equal balance.  That, too, is why there's an increasing interest in survival reality shows, and horror films, and terror, and fear.  Since we don't know how, anymore, to interact with the natural world in a subtle way, we seek out activities that induce extreme adrenaline pumping interactions with the natural world.

It's because our senses have been dulled.  But what caused that dulling of the senses?

The Fall From Grace.  The Apple.

This brings me to one of my favorite books in the world, a book I can read again and again.  During the mid 1600's, after my first and greatest lover died, I spent twenty years or so living in a convent.  That first love, my greatest love, was the one who wanted to preserve my youth and beauty forever.  I wanted to get old with him, but unfortunately, his tonic worked.  I remained vitally youthful and alive, watching him age and whither.   But I didn't care; when we were together, I was so absolutely pleased to always be the only beauty in his eyes.  After he was gone, I grew to hate him, because his selfishness had damned me to wander the earth, alone, for an eternity, my forever young body forever the object of men's and women's lusts and desires.  I didn't really have any love of any kind, until very recently.  Yes, it felt like I was with my first love again, which is why when the eyes of my most recent love turned to flirtations with others, I grew so deeply hurt and sad.

But let's go back to the 1600's, in the convent, now in France, where I trained my voice to sing purely, and I poured over the Old Testament.  My favorite books were the Books of Genesis, Exodus, Ruth, Isaiah, the Proverbs, and the Psalms.  At that time, I took them quite literally, but since then I've gone through so many stages of understanding, and now I like to read them more in the tradition of Kabbalah (You have to understand, the only way I can keep these wonderful books fresh and alive for myself is to look at them in a number of ways.  The beauty of these books is that one can do precisely that, and each time find something that seems oh, so true.  Again, as with everything I'm writing here, I have to emphasize that I'm not claiming that what I'm saying is actually fact; this is just the way I now think about these books after 100s of years of reading them, and watching the stages of humanity passing me by. )

I take very literally parts of Chapter Three in Genesis, where the serpent approaches "the woman" and tells her that she will not die if she eats of the forbidden fruit, but rather "Ye shall not surely die; For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as God, knowing good and evil." 

The apple is the fruit of knowledge; we all know that.  Christian, Jew, Muslim, we all know that.  But knowledge of what?

"And the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew that they were naked, and they sewed fig leaves together, and made themselves aprons."  (Genesis 3:7)  For me,  that is one of the saddest lines - and perhaps most ridiculous images - in all of written literature.  Because at that instant, that instant of supposedly gaining knowledge, the woman and the man felt a need to hide their animal nature.  This was the first step towards dulling those senses that were intended to keep us in harmony with our natural environment.  It's been a snow-ball effect ever since, because this event, of course, was soon followed by jealousy, lust and competition, largely over a) a desire for something someone else has and/or b) an infatuation with another individual's body and its adornment.  Ornamentation and ostentation became the means by which humans judged each other, and rivalry set in.  Blood poured, soon after.  Think Cain and Abel.  Think Joseph and his coat of many colors.  Think every bloody gory story in history.

But let's get back to Genesis.  That sad, tragic moment of two creatures suddenly fumbling with leaves, attempting to find some way to cover themselves out of embarrassment over something that was just part of what they naturally were is followed by a comic scene:  "And they heard the voice of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day: and Adam and his wife hid themselves from the Lord God among the trees and the garden."  (Genesis 3:6 -- yes, I'm using a King James translation, because I like the language so much.  I've read the Bible in so many languages, and some may come closer to the original meaning than others, but when I read this translation, well, I felt it put it somewhere in the same league as Shakespeare, so it has remained my favorite over the centuries.)

Yes, this is a comic moment -- imagine it: they heard the VOICE of God walking.  No, they did not hear His feet rustling in the fallen leaves, or His body pushing aside the growths.  They heard His voice, walking.  God is VOICE.  And then those too poor fools were foolish enough to hide, as if one can hide from God, their creator.  He does, after all, know all.  Goes to show that fruit of the tree of knowledge didn't really work, because they would have known that He would know immediately that they ate it, if the were really as smart as God, and they would have just stood there, buck naked, and faced Him, God-to-God.  After all, He was probably naked, too, if He was visible.

But no, they hid.  And He found them.  And He knew, immediately, what they had done.  And God was sad, because, quite frankly, He knew that they were perfect before they ate the fruit.  If they would have just grown and lived in Eden, in their natural state, they would have grown to be Gods, because God made them in His likeness, and gave them the environment that would feed and nourish His children until they grew to be just like Him.

Fundamentally, if we read this book this way, God forbade them to eat of the Tree of Knowledge because He knew that if they did, they would become mutant.  A part of their organism would grow faster than it was supposed to, and that part of their organism was their brain. 

I don't believe God cast humans out of the Garden, as the book of Genesis says.  He didn't have to.  The minute the man and the woman reached for those leaves to cover themselves; the minute they felt shame and guilt, they had left the garden.  So began the era of uncertainty.  Brains mutated.  Other parts of our systems atrophied and withered, as we relied more and more on the activity of the brain, working with the rather superficial perception of the eye.  Those two organs, working hyperactively in concert, created the ability to deceive and be deceived.   To be jealous; to be angry.  To desire what they eye can not see; and to feel that others are hiding things from us.

can we go back to the garden?
I'm not sure this is a question I can answer tonight.  I am very tired.  My mutant mind is old, though it's so full of things to say.  Yes, I do believe the garden is here.  The Garden is Earth.  And the Voice of God still walks in the Garden; we just haven't been listening.


But listening doesn't happen with only our ears.  Seeing doesn't occur through only our eyes.  We have to reawaken our bodies, our earthly avatars, to all their senses, and the first step towards doing that is to recognize that we all are, after all, creatures of the Earth.

Living Off The Grid

If you take the time to read my wordy first entries on this blog, you'll see the story of my Grid message.  Some might say it was just a dream, but if it was just a dream, it was a very odd one. For the sake of those readers (if there are any) who don't want to read my earliest ramblings, the message I received in a dream was this: Jesus will come as the scholar in the four days of the Grid.   I woke up and wrote it in my journal.  Alongside of that sentence, I also wrote: The Age of the Grid?  Then I went back to sleep, hoping for more news.  I got none.

Five and a half years ago, right after receiving that message, I did a Google search on the term "The Age of the Grid," and it yielded only a couple pages, and they all were about Grid Computing.  Today, a Google search on especially the phrase the "Age of the Grid" will yield pages and pages.  The idea of The Grid is cliche now, and there are now even people talking about living off the Grid.

I fully understand why someone might want to live off the Grid.  A London Times story online points out that this is part of a compulsion to avoid surveillance.  There's actually an entire website called Offgrid.com 

It strikes me as both odd and ominous that in the short period of time between my receiving my dream-message, and the present day, the idea of The Grid has gone from being a fairly rarified geek notion to being part of the daily lexicon.

I imagine that someone reading about this message would be alarmed, if only for my sanity.  Fundamentalist Christians might ask: "what should we do to prepare for the Coming of Jesus?"  My answer to that is simple:  act likes he's coming today.

And that gets to the true reason for this posting.  For me, the most compelling question is when?  When are the Four Days of the Grid?  What are the Ages of the Grid, and when is the Fourth?  It appears, quite clearly, that we are currently well beyond the First Age of the Grid, if in fact people are considering living off of it.

Those who seek to live off of it seek to avoid surveillance.  They seek to be spared the tyranny of an Orwellian nightmare.  And I understand that fully.  But my question right now is: at what cost?

Any technology is a tool, and tools can be used for both good and not-so-good ends.  As I have said elsewhere, just as a hammer extends the capacity, limits, and strength of the hand, computers and the internet (which is the DNA of The Grid) is that technology that extends the capacity, limits, and strength of the human mind.  I'm not the only person to make this claim. 

One can both kill and build with a hammer, and so too is the case with the internet, and computers. 

But just because someone can kill with a hammer (indeed, here is a most disturbing video of some young men in the Ukraine killing someone with a hammer and a screwdriver.  Please do not follow this link if you have a weak stomach. I could not watch the whole video) does that mean we should start "living off the hammer"?  No, I'll bet even people who are living off the grid have hammers.  They may even have guns, which are far more lethal extensions of the arm, and the hand, and the fist, then a hammer.

Indeed, even Jesus used a hammer, if we are to believe the stories we've been told about him.

This is why I am disturbed that people would opt to live off of the Grid, when it's very likely that the Grid has as much potential to build something good as a hammer does.  It all depends on how you use it.

At its most basic level, the strength of The Grid is its ability to create a mass, communal mind that can work very quickly and collaboratively to produce some kind of meaningful end.  What's at risk, of course, is individuality.  What is to gain is the survival of humanity.

Let's consider two cases, one where the Grid was used for evil ends, and one for good ends.

The first case has almost become a cliche, that being the horrible incidents of 9/11/2001.  It continues to intrigue and boggle my mind that a relatively small group of terrorists was able to do something that no nation has been capable of doing: attack the United States on their home turf.  And how was that group able to do that?  They used The Grid.  They used the internet, telephones, and any number of other technologies that allowed them to produce a collaborative effort that far extended any one individual's abilities.  And frighteningly, they succeeded.

They will continue to succeed.  The U.S. government's attempts to pursue individual terrorists, and to frisk innocent passengers en masse come no where near touching the apparatus that binds a breed of terrorist who really doesn't care about individual fame.  Lone Christmas day bombers, or single men trying to light their shoes are decoys, designed to keep our attention away from a plot far greater than the attack on the Twin Towers that is no doubt being planned as I type, and is using the same technology to disseminate its messages.  When or where the next true attack will occur, I really don't know.  I am, after all, just a slowly aging diva with an overactive mind.

Efforts have been made to use this same networking power for positive ends, but they're not always as successful.  Still, those efforts are kind of wonderful in their own ways, hinting at the power this technology can hold for us.  Consider this:  a few years ago, I heard the story of a missing computer scientist, a man named Jim Gray.  He had taken his sailboat out onto the Pacific, and disappeared.

According to Wikipedia, Jim Gray "was an American computer scientist who received the Turing Award in 1998 "for seminal contributions to database and transaction processing research and technical leadership in system implementation."  His colleagues decided to try to use the very technology he was so instrumental in developing to try to find him.  They initiated a search of the waters he was believed to be lost in, via the very accessible and user-friendly Amazon Mechanical Turk.  Again, I'll quote Wikipedia's definition of what the Mechanical Turk is:  "one of the suites of Amazon Web Services, a crowdsourcing marketplace that enables computer programs to co-ordinate the use of human intelligence to perform tasks which computers are unable to do."

The keywords in this definition are "co-ordinate the use of human intelligence."  Yes, therein lies the power of The Grid.

For a few weeks, anyone with a little extra time who was willing to subscribe to the Mechanical Turk could search a sector of the sea, presented through images captured via satellite, for anything that looked like an overturned boat or debris, or perhaps the actual boat itself.  Detailed instructions were given on what to look for.  I know, because I did a few myself, hoping that I might be the one to spot a sail, or an overturned hull, or some other little clue of what happened to the missing man.

No one found Jim Gray.  But part of his legacy is that his final search attempted to utilize the combined strengths of multiple human minds in a way that his own research helped to make possible. 

This story is both beautiful and absolutely misguided.  I was fascinated by it, because it allowed me to become part of a project that was bigger than myself, and that, ultimately, had very little to do with me.  However, it was designed, ultimately, to serve one man, and - if I remember correctly - there may have been a reward to the individual who found the spot where Jim met his fate.  Lovely idea; however, this is not, in the end, how this tool should be used.  The internet is not designed for the benefit of any one individual.  It is the most perfectly democratic medium and technology.  And in a perfect democracy, all men and women are created equal, and work together for the communal good. 

And that is how the internet - The Grid - can be used positively.

If people with good intentions - intentions fueled by the true teachings of a man named Jesus - were to use this tool for humane ends, Jesus would come again, and he would come again as The Scholar - the communal mind of humankind. 

But as of right now, it's true, the only efforts that have truly used the power of The Grid to successful ends are terrorists, misguided governments, and big business.  And ultimately, they're all one in the same, and they are not, by any stretch of the imagination, anything like a Jesus.  It is really up to us - and that includes those poor misguided individuals fumbling around, trying to light fires "off the grid" who fundamentally do have good intentions.  Living off the grid must be done in ways that also maintain grid-based communal cooperation, especially if the true intent of the off-gridders is to maintain human life on the planet.

the days and the ages of the grid

Tonight I'd really like to talk about the Grid.

You see, when you receive a message like the one I received (see previous message), it's kind of difficult to ignore it. Yes, the part about Jesus coming again was sort of a mind blower - because it presupposes that he's been here once already. Definitely not good news for Jewish folk, if there's any validity to it. And the fact that he would come again "as the scholar" is also a titillating detail, as it might be able to help us identify him. But the part about the four days of the Grid intrigued me most, since that pins down when he's to arrive, so we can get ready. That is, if you put any credibility in my ability to prophecy.

But then again, I'm just a fictional character - I'm a slightly delirious character on the internet, sharing her musings with a vacuum. So this could all be flight of fancy, and most likely, it is.

Still, after hearing this message, I first researched the notion of The Grid, mostly because, that particular term was used very specifically in the message. I also know for certain that the voice spoke of the number four, and of the notion of "days." But I will confess, that when I wrote down the message as I woke out of my sleep the night I received it, I was baffled by the idea of Jesus coming in the four days of the Grid, or the fourth day of the Grid, which was the language that still rang in my head when I woke up. Because of that, I jotted down the word "age?" underneath the word "day", as I thought it might be possible that in the language of prophecy, a day could be translated very loosely. After all, we're told God created the world in seven days, aren't we? And that's pretty impossible, if you ask me.

Yes, when I do this kind of interpretation, I take everything as a sort of kaballist sign. Especially natural phenomena, and numbers, like the number four. In the tarot, the number four refers to building a foundation of some kind. So the fourth Age of the Grid would indicate that some sort of foundation has been produced by this time. Four is a very stable number, and it includes two doubles. Doubles mark harmony and balance of opposites. In the number 4, there is double harmony.

But what, I wondered, could be the Fourth Age of the Grid? And what the third, the second, and the first?

I researched grid computing for awhile, because I felt that the computer age, and the age of the internet, no doubt marked the First Age of the Grid. If that is true, than we have a while to go before Jesus shows up, since we're really just beginning to accept grid computing and the internet in a large scale way.

Or are we?

Even in Computer Science, we've moved rather rapidly out of the first age of grid computing, and may be into the second or even the third. So if the term is solidly grounded in computing, which seems to speed everything up, the fourth age may come more rapidly.

And if the term refers directly to computers and the internet, than perhaps the Fourth Age of the Grid will occur when everything has become digital. When we are all fully cyborgs, might I say.

I am not the first to make the observation that every advancement in technology has served to extend some limb or aspect of the human body. The wheel extends the leg; radio extends the ears and the voice; guns extends our arms (and our ability to throw something lethal effectively); the list goes on. And what of the computer?

It extends and imitates our mind. I was speaking to a good friend the other day who just happens to be a computer programmer, and he commented that the basic language of computers relies on pure logic, pure formula. That is a universal language, he kept insisting. So when we have all become automated, we all have access to a universal language. And that language, I would dare to say, would be the language of pure mind.

It would be pure logic. And it would be universally understood. So the language of the Fourth Age of the Grid would necessitate that the messiah be pure mind. The Scholar. Makes sense, eh? Jesus will come as the scholar then, because we will need a pure scholar to lead us into this age.

But then there's another thought I've had, and it's directly related to universal language. It may take a few entries to get this down.

What's troubling, yet exciting, about this Age we may be on the crest of, this Digital Age, is that it is one in which our physical bodies may be of very little value; we can be whatever we are on the web, and it would replace our physical handicaps and shortcomings. Sort of like me. Remember, I'm quite old. But I'm eternal on the internet. Always young; always feisty. I'm here for as long as digital data exists. Makropolis will even transcend my physical body. . . it will persist long after that physical body is gone. Therefore, Makropolis is a representation of what I would like to be - eternally young; however, she relies very heavily on previous representations to make her point.

However, Makropolis lives soley in the realm of digital representation. Which is a different realm from, say, an opera. Or a television show. Thus, the Fourth Age of the Grid constitutes a new age of representation, one in which actual authorship and identity is of minimal value. This Age was preceded by what Walter Benjamin called "Mechanical Representation," that being the ability to reproduced reality repetititively and multiply. This is an age where collaborative work is most effective; its media include photography, cinema, video, radio, television. Previous to that, the dominant representational mode was linear - ie: it could be understood in terms of a beginning, middle, and end. Furthermore, it had to be perceived that way. Mechanical Representation moved us into non-linear experience - ie, artists felt less and less inclined to present things in a chronological progression - time began to be recognized as having multiple dimensions. In the Age of Linear Representation, time was experienced as utterly chronological.

Linear Representation was ushered in with the onset of storytelling and writing. Both are media of narration, demanding that items be presented "in a line." Narrative is one type of linear organization. Other types include poetry and argument. The Age of Linear Representation began roughly whenever humans began placing more credibility on written and spoken words. The Age of Linear Representation, then, is roughly aligned to those periods that make sense of themselves through stories. Fundamentally, it is the Age of the Bible and other Holy Books.

This would mean the first age of the grid precedes that. What would it be called? Prehistoric, perhaps, but it might also be recognized as the first age during which humans felt a compulsion to look at the world and try to make sense of it, or preserve their impressions of it, by imitating it. This would be an age of mimicry and childish drawings - pre-Christian no doubt, not to mention pre-Judaic.

When humans were practicing simple mimicry, they were in early stages of evolution. Why, one wonders, did they decide to start drawing? They were like children, really. I think of Lacan and Freud here. According to Lacan, the first time we feel the compulsion to communicate is when we first recognize our own mirror image as both being us, yet being separate from us - ie: when we see ourselves reproduced. In that doubling of ourselves, we see ourselves as singular, alone, and incomplete. Feeling that loss, we try to reclaim it by reaching out, by creating society.

So we start communicating - thus, the first age of the artistic representation.

Each age of artistic representation has marked a new stage in the development of the mind. Yeah, I'm saying that while all the other technologies (wheels, trains, planes, guns, birth control pills) are an attempt to perfect some aspect of the body and the desires seated in the body, technologies linked with perfecting artistic representation are attempts to perfect how we extend the mind out beyond its limited physical dimension.

I am more expert in the Humanities than in other fields, so I will keep my examples largely in those fields; however, with my pedestrian knowledge of other fields, I would dare to say that in each of these Ages, the Sciences, Logic, and Mathematical knowledge also showed evolution. Indeed, those fields of intellectual study, which tend to be more closely associated with advancements in technology, also mark attempts to extend the mind beyond the physical dimension.

Therefore, each Age of the Grid marks stages in the development of our ability to represent the workings of the mind, and the reality of the mind. But don't forget - the Fourth Age of the Grid, the Digital Age, is seated in digital technology and is therefore global. It is also an intersection age - an age when Artistic Representation intersects with Scientific and Mathematical Representation - and all of these are attempts by humans to extend the mind beyond its physical borders.

Ironically, in some ways, the Fourth Age of the Grid brings us back to some of the features of the First Age of the Grid. Images become dominant in the digital age. Simple, clear messages about shared experiences have more saliency in a global medium than do complex messages about local phenomena. But in their simplicity, the messages that we extend across the globe about our shared experiences also become quite complex, because they acknowledge that we all experience simple life experiences colored by different life circumstances.

The Fourth Age of the Grid, then, demands that we all have a shared literacy. This shared literacy could be manipulated by a central power, if we let it. To keep us from being dominated by one world power, we all have a responsibility to develop our minds. We have a global responsibility to maintain the ethics of the media and develop a literacy grounded in empathy and compassion.

And if we could do that, as a world, well, it seems that we might lay the foundation for the potential of Jesus coming again. . . . . through ourselves.