Blind: part 2

The Blind became the dominant culture on Euterpe, for they were the only civilized culture. Others they called Lightstruck. For hundreds of years the Blind controlled the resources of the world, except for the untamed equatorial regions, too rampant with plant life to be civilized, those areas were still controlled by various feuding groups of Lightstruck.

By this time the Blind have, as a culture, forgotten about the sensation of vision. Children who, through some grievous error, grow up without having their eyes removed universally become quite insane, and even if their eyes are removed at a later point rarely recover to being fully functional members of society. Yet some among The Blind do find it interesting how the Lightstruck are able to survive, in such brutal environments, with their debilitating vision intact.

Let's call him Dr. Strings, a figurative translation of his native name with we would find quite unpronounceable; if you want an idea of it though it sounds not completely different from the sound you would get if you compressed to a fraction of a second a yodeler covering the opening 24 notes of 'War Pigs' where each note has an internal substructure of the guitar riff from 'Bohemian Rhapsody' played backwards over either 'Moonlight Sonata' or 'Smoke on the Water'; depending on the declension. Though if we created such an abomination is a sound lab in an attempt to communicate, it's even odds whether he would be able to figure out that you were addressing him or would think that you were inviting an ivy plant to a funeral for your goldsmith's second favorite pet, conditional on the acceptance of an earlier made wedding proposal by your twin cousin. Needless to say there are elements his native language's grammar that we don't yet fully grasp.

Dr. Strings studied the Lightstruck and their superstitions, they for example claimed they could know when Thunder would sound several seconds before it did, a claim that Dr. Strings was surprised to find verified on several occasions. Though the statistical majority of their 'predictions' could be discounted as good guesses, based on hearing, through sounds distortions, an incoming low pressure system. The Lightstruck though claimed they could, use their eyes to see an aura that predicted the thunder. Even if this were true, it could hardly be of use, Dr. Strings etched in his record.

Most of the day the Light struck slept, and most of the night the Lightstruck sat around facing out from their settlement into the tall thick plants, only at dawn did they go out and gather food, and then at dusk, when they awake, they set the settlement in order before they began their night of forest facing. The temperature swings between night and day were mild because of the thick atmosphere, but most life was nocturnal, and cooler temperatures are better suited for activity. Dr. Strings knew enough about eyes to know that they respond to energy from the daysky, he postulated that for the Lightstruck living strickly nocturnally was a way of protecting themselves from the dangers of eyes.

Blind.

On the other side of the Galaxy there is a planet, Euterpe, not all too different from the Earth. Similar temperature, similar age, water on its surface, and life of comparable diversity. But its mass is greater by three fold, and its surface gravity is twice the Earths. This holds down a very heavy atmosphere, which makes life on its surface quite different from the Earth. First, the stars light is dim and often often obscured by clouds, and second sound travels with superb clarity. It should be of no shock that creatures fit for comparison to human came to live on the planet. There shape I do not know, but I envision them as stocky men with beady eyes, large bat like ears, and stony flesh. Their eyes are only developed enough to see fields of colored light, but not shape specifically. But their ears are amazing, nothing on Earth, save maybe MAYBE the great whales have hearing that approaches theirs. They hear the shapes of their surroundings and they live in a world of pure sound.


When they emerged as a species on this planet they were a quick success, they were clever like humans. It a short few myriads of years they came to cover the land mass of the planet. One group small group sought to understand the world. So they blinded themselves. At birth a child's eyes would be cut out. To us this sounds drastic, but it was perfectly rational. You see their eyes weren't useful, they were only good for watching the bioluminescent displays of lower lifeforms; and this was a diversion that the youth would easily lose themselves in for days at a time if not cut. Their eyes were their weakness it seems, they were vulnerable to hypnosis by flashes of light that other creatures could produce. By blinding themselves they were free from this ancestral vulnerability, free to listen to things to learn their structure and their properties. And this group did learn, and did become powerful from their knowledge. And they spread over Euterpe teaching their ways to the 'lightstruck' those still afflicted with sight.

Timeship

The earth is a time machine; a machine that converts motion into space into recurrence by bringing it back around on itself as in an ellipse. It returns to its past place; it beholds it in its future. Back around to its future it goes, and the heavens do watch and wonder with eyes of faraway suns. It is a machine that makes days, seasons, and years, and just because we have discovered other time machines that we use to keep our time, hidden deep inside the smallness of things, does not mean that it, too, is not a time machine and one with whom human have sojourned in light of for much longer than the atoms in our clocks.

The earth is a time machine, not a spaceship. This spaceship earth would be a crummy spaceship--it only goes back to where its already been around the sun; and it might as well not go at all if there is some destination planned, because all we're going to meet again out there, other than empty space, is some disastrous asteroid--and if that all that awaits our spaceship we might not want to go at all. The earth, rather, crafts times out of this same space, and who would know time without this?

But like any time traveler, we of the earth, together, change ourselves and all things in our travels; going back from winter to summer again yields changes in the summer before us, and events are always metaphorically "killing their own grandfather." The earth, our native home from which we embark on the adventure of time, is now constantly betrayed in its origin by its loops, and time is always as going back to the causes of one essence and changing them. The present moment always erases what was needed for it to born, and what survives in essence is what finds in the future that same place from which it came; but which changes its birth into something different fitting it into new surrounds and, in becoming, to become as that same something else.

We come to spring, but not the same spring. Summer, but not to the same summer. The sun, an engine of this time machine,sends us around in motion and stirs the skies with heat and pull. Weather itself has been wound up over thousands of years with scant heat, but held close. Life lives in this time, being excited to motion with change and season, finding power from the sun to multiply our times. Making time frames that interpenetrate.

In stories, a time machine is that which changes at a rate out of step with its surroundings. The time traveler reaches down to light his pipe, and empires crumble. He travels in a way that is impervious to this stream of phenomena in which humans live and see--but there are many other speeds, and if we do not own all feeling for ourselves, these speeds can watch us at their own pace, and with a seeing their own, coming out of their own time. Dwelling in empires lasting days and within the size of a petri dish; or the fungal networks with a rhythm of ice ages. Or the time of genes, of neuron networks.

There is no one time here, but times that enter into and exit one another. The engine of life and its whole history must move with the smallest of parts, and it opens up all levels, including our phenomenal, by which it can even be moved. And life, breath of life, both lives and does not live in this current moment. The time of times on this earth, the earth itself, does not stretch out in many times which we could access if only in fiction; but it is at a moment, bearing all the time frames not as its own frame, but as the moment of the earth which gives to the enframing.

The divinities watch and know out of many times, humans keep watch for the traces, and all is given out of the light.

Another Definition of Man:

Man is a monkey who has been overclocked.

Dewey: Education and Ecology are one art.

That a man may grow in efficiency as a burglar, as a gangster, or as a corrupt politician, cannot be doubted. But from the standpoint of growth as education and education as growth the question is whether growth in this direction promotes or retards growth in general. Does this form of growth create conditions for further growth, or does it set up conditions that shut off the person who has grown in this particular direction from the occasions, stimuli, and opportunities for continuing growth in new directions? What is the effect of growth in a special direction upon the attitudes and habits which alone open up avenues for development in other lines? (Ex & Ed 20)

Shamanpunk 2020 part two

S: Now we live hear, we spinners of yarns, forever beautifying the tapestry of our lives.

I: So you work to improve yourselves?

S: That is so, but not with any ideal or fixed goal, with out a standard. Each of us seeking our own fulfillment of the story, and collectively weaving those stories into a shared mutually supportive tapestry. Even the ducks and the goats and the olive trees have their own genius to contribute to the tapestry.

I: And what is your position in all of this, as a shaman?

S: On no two days would I respond the same way to such a question. Today I am 'The Weaver of the Yarns of the Indefinite Tapestry' yesterday I was 'The One Who Sings with Goats'. But on all days I am called the Blue Shaman here, because of the role I play as the spinner of blue yarns. In the name of clarity, I make explicit that these yarns are stories.

I: I think that much was clear enough, though everything else is quite hazy.

S: The Tapestry of this place is the stories told amongst the life here. But not all stories are instantly compatible. The Blue Yarns are the stories that look for harmony and agreement between the most dissonant of notes.

I: Like that mixed metaphor.

S: Yet it works. To mix the metaphor still further, I am a translator, but never going so far as to strip each thread of its own uniqueness (lest I tempt the anger of the red sage). Translating the stories of the many spinners of this land into a form that can be interwoven. This not not imply that all stories are one story, and more then to suggest that all ways of life are one way. To search for such universals would strip so much of the uniqueness from each that nothing of worth could be preserved.

Everything acts out its role in the quest of its life, but also serves as secondary characters in the yarn of another. Every yarn in the rhizome can be connected to any other, and must be.

I: Wait, so you tie all the yarns together?

S: No, they are all always already connected, I simply make storys out of how they are connected.

My guidance counselor said I could be anything I wanted to be. So I decided to become a god. - The Old Master.