The Historical Beast

( bucultureshock.com )

Change – we’re in it –

It is interesting to me how this blog, and my relationship with it, has changed.  It began as a performance, a persona who is probably closer to who I was, am, or will be,  than any face I could ever offer the world in my physical body.  And indeed, it is still that.  In my current life, I have a name, a face, a physical being that probably does not look like the woman you imagine could write these words.  I struggle, in essence, because the being inside of me is not the face my body presents to the world.  (I suspect that is true of most of us right now, and it is our challenge, on this earth, to come to terms with the contradictions between what we appear to be and what we really are.) 

I am, in essence, a very old soul who is troubled about the state of the world we live in.  I see us going through monumental change, and yet not acknowledging how profound that change is, and how important it is for humans to accept their role within it. 

( daviddeen )

We are historical beasts, we humans.  I would argue that is one of the things that makes us different from every other animal on the Animal Planet.  My cats, for instance, are not historical, though they each have a history.  They, however, are oblivious to that; they live in the Now.  Right now, all my cats know is that I am not with them.  

I am traveling right now.

Traveling and thinking.  Asking very hard questions, and contemplating their answers, and the hardest question I like to think about is the nature of the change we, as a race, are currently going through –

I have long felt that we are in a paradigmatic shift, and right now, I am participating in a conference where that language is being very readily used.  It is a conference on education, on the changes needed in education to make it a viable industry for our children to participate in.  And our children are not us, in the most dramatic of ways.

Those of us who made their earthly entrance in the late 1950's, early 1960's, can be labeled in any number of ways: in the United States, we are the end of the Baby Boomers, the end of an age of prosperity that was born out of a victorious war. We were born at the peak of a wave that felt our culture is fundamentally right and good, and we were born right before that wave crested and broke against the rocky shoals of the 1960’s.  We were one of the last ages to trust our parents and others in positions of authority. 

We were one of the last ages to be nursed on Great Books, to be led to believe in the Rightness of the Book, and to love Great Authors.  Our age produced an abundance of English majors, because being an English major allowed us to analyze the by-products of Great Human Minds.  Yet we were also the age that was influenced by the questioning of our immediate predecessors, those who asked why all our Great Books were written only by White Men, thus causing a reassignment of Authority to Women and “Minorities.” 

We were also the first age to be raised solely on television. 

( nogreenbananas )

We were a cusp age in that regard, because we have lived our lives in a world where we appreciated and understood the values of the last few centuries, and yet we are the first age that can say that there was never a time in our memory when television did not exist: one might say, we were the first Human Age raised and influenced by a virtual, visual imitation of ourselves.

I hope, dear friends, you can follow this logic, because that’s what it is: logic.  This entry is the painful burden of an unencumbered human mind unraveling the cues that the world provides.  My mind is still an Enlightenment Mind, a Mind that believes that Humans can and do know without technological assistance, and that knowledge can come to us through rigorous study, careful examination of the artifacts of the world around, creative risk, and a good sprinkling of intuition. 

An Enlightenment Mind is profoundly grounded in the Written, Published Text – the Linear  Book, and in language that has been produced for that media.  That’s right: books are a Media, and for a few hundred years, they were the most radical media for disseminating knowledge and provoking creativity.

But the Age of the Book is over. 

Books are now antiquity, and

text

laces through space in a delicate filigree of complexity.

My words,

The words of this blog,

Are part of an increasing cacophony of other words,

A multilingual, unilingual digital embrace which,

Combined

Embodies the workings of the Human Mind.

And we, we lucky Historical Humans alive today

Have been born to witness the rapid transition

From the Age of the Book to

The Age of the Cyborg.

Our children, the current children

Who sit so complacently in our classrooms,

Repugnant

Indulgent

illiterate

Have been born into a New Literacy,

Just as we

Were.

The children of today are “digital natives” and

As such

They are wired to think digitally –

Digital literacy is not Textual literacy

Though Textual literacy is a part of the Digital.

But the Digital Text is not solid –

It practices a New Linearity

                         It is fleeting and acknowledges

The rapidity

With which

It can and will be challenged,

And the children

- if they can survive the education system we still have, an education system that was made to serve the Enlightenment Mind -

Major in Psychology

Because the most provocative fiction they can read

Is the working of Human Mind itself,

And the altered worlds it is capable of producing

At any given moment.

( zapatopi )

Living through a Major Turning Point in Human History,

Which is what we are doing right now,

Is not without trauma.  It is, in essence,

A Birth,

And in our case right now,

Because of the role our own Technology is playing in it,

It is a New Birth into a Different

Physical Form –

The form of the Cyborg,

And any given Cyborg has an absolutely different relationship with the collective human mind (ie: this internet) than we have had with our own minds for

Centuries.

Indeed, the Cyborg accepts unequivocally

Its own participation

In the collectivity;

It relies

On this wealth

Of Knowledge Production and Reproduction

And laughs fondly,

With warm sentimentality,

Over the antiquity of the notion

Of Originality.

Nothing is Original on this earth, in this realm of reproduction and imitation.  From the moment when the Creative Force (aka God) sought to reproduce an entity in His Own Likeness, we (aka: the likeness) have been doomed to Not Be Original.  And now we have finally figured that out, and accepted it, and at some time, perhaps in the not to distant future, we will come to terms with the fact that once we stop trying to be Original, Once we stop trying to be Authentic and Right and True, we will actually Be

That.

But as I was saying, that will be the future,

Perhaps tomorrow,

Or this evening

When that will happen,

But right now we are Trapped in a Moment of Historical Change,

And we will be that Moment’s By Products.

Our delicate all-to-animal human entities will indeed die

In time

And we will be replaced by a generation that will recognize

That time is inconsequential because

The body is inconsequential

And yet,

The body is sweet –

Perhaps the Human Animal will live on through stubbornness (stubbornness is one of our more endearing qualities).  There will be some of us who will refuse to participate in the Rise of the Cyborg, sort of like Apes refused to participate in the Rise of Man, and we will live and toil on this earthly domain,

Sweetly,

Admiring its beauty,

Nurturing it lovingly,

Accepting our mortality

As a fact of life,

And that too

Will be beautiful –

The sustenance of that type of animal life,
of the Human Beast life,

if the Cyborg allows it,

Will be Eden

All over again.

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.