One Planet, One Problem

Ozone depletion, resource depletion, pollution, rising oceans, the rise of the mean temperature of the earth, the incident of civil disorder: these and their ilk are not separate problems. All civilization-threatening inconveniences are merely spoor of the true specter that is stalking the earth. Many young people are, while in high school, introduced to the classic fruit fly experiment: a single female and a single male fruit fly are put in a five-gallon bottle with about ten pounds of sugar. The population rise is swift and dramatic, as is the precipitous crash to zero. There is still plenty of sugar left.

Property ownership is a necessary element to civil order, but mankind is a guest on planet earth. We've seen photos of earth taken by night satellite. Mankind’s electrical success blazing in all its glory looks to me, for all the world, like a patient with an advanced case of smallpox. The planet is running a fever and the prognosis is not good. Like some virulent disease we have overcome nature’s checks against our proliferation, and like some virulent disease, our unchecked numbers will eventually and inevitably destroy our host. Nature will set about exploiting the new opportunity created by the collapse of the present natural order, but for those of us dependent upon civil order it is not going to be pretty.

There exist what seem to be insurmountable obstacles to any efforts other than treating symptoms. Corporate greed, insensate territorial imperatives, innocent insouciance, and the urge to fuck, are not going away any time soon. The sky is falling, but it falls very slowly in human terms. The roar of the falls can be heard quite distinctly, but we may already be in the inescapable suck of the gorge.

And as our good ship “Humanity” slowly sinks beneath the waves of time we shall hear a lot of officious talk about how the deck chairs should be arranged.

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Lord Kelvin’s Birthday


At a gathering not long ago
Speaking with a friend
We conversed thusly


“Lord Kelvin calculated

(you know how those physicist dudes
have always been fascinated with building mathematical models
of things that are real?)

That if you tagged every molecule in a pint of water
And then stirred that pint evenly into all the seas of all the world
And if you then took up one pint from any part of any sea on earth
There would be found therein
One hundred of your tagged molecules

Plus or minus ten"


What the good Lord Kelvin wished to demonstrate
Is the inconceivable minuteness of the molecule

But it made me think of some mere million gallons
Of industrial vomit



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Time and Space Revisited

There is a lot of loose talk these days about time and space. Which is interesting since no one knows what space is, and time is apparently an intellectual construct. Energy has the same problem. If you look at the physics guy’s talk about “energy” (you know, E=MC2 and all that) you will find that there is no description of what energy is: we must content ourselves with an account of what it does. Space, it seems, does nothing; and time is the mathematical trajectory of energy.

Insofar as I am capable of understanding it, the latest theoretical model has matter as wiggles of space. Well I’m down with that, and I can picture a photon departing a distant star (no acceleration mind you) as a rift in space that has no discrete reality other than the event that is its existence. And I can picture a point in supposedly empty space that is crossed by the rifts of rippling space from every light-emitting object that does not have something blocking its way. Hardly empty, I’d say. In fact it seems to me we have here a gelatinous fabric of wiggles of space that will sometimes coalesce by an inherent affinity in the nature of wiggles into what is known as matter. So wiggling space is the fact of quarks; quarks are the fact of sub-atomic particles; and atoms are the stuff of which we are woven. Consciousness (whatever that may be), insofar as we know, arises only from certain very specific stacks of matter, which is in fact merely space with an attitude: indicating that consciousness is a spatial event engendered by temporal energy fields (whatever that means).

I consider this self-evident. It has far reaching implications with regard to individuality and territorial imperatives; and this holds interesting portents with regard to the limits of conscious awareness and our supposed aloneness.