The Timelessness of the Temporal

Culture writ large is a Rorschach blot. We see the face of the new in the timeless splotches of the human psyche. Many years ago when my children were in grammar school they would recount to me some "naughty" joke they had heard, and I realized that some sexual material lives in the fourth grade. A continual parade of young people move through the period of life that represents "the fourth grade". Young people enter this period and they leave it behind, but the joke lives in the fourth grade, and without the fourth grade it would cease to exist. These "jokes" are an expression of the sexual quickening inevitable in the human animal. There is no new way to be.

Positions of power, celebrity, opprobrium, continually reinvent themselves. It is a practical exercise in the principle of reincarnation, and if one were to wish for machine of perpetual motion one need look no further. At the moment of birth we are swallowed by the cultural anaconda, and though we evolve in place in our moment of being the anaconda keeps moving. Eventually it will leave us behind. Which begs the question, does the Ouroboris really ever leave anything behind.

History

History is a new thing. My grandparents were born in the horse-and-buggy days, and their grandparents were born in the age of kings. It hasn't been that long since wars were fought by sticking each other with sharp things, and by banging each other with cudgels. We've come a long way in a very short time when it comes to manipulating the world to our material whim. It is unfortunate when an emotionally and spiritually un-evolved creature is so clever.

The tribal structure that emerged from the prehistoric family bond seamlessly morphed into hierarchical tyranny; and it seems that hierarchical tyranny is the best we can do, because the modern tribalism which is democracy appears to immediately devolve into some primordial soup of spheres of influence worthy of the most sophisticated medieval fiefdom.

For all its occasional glitter, the history of humanity is the tale of the darkness of the human soul devouring its self and the world.

Conscious awareness: awareness that is aware that it is aware: awareness that is the seat of its own identity: awareness that is not in thrall of the creature that engendered it, has an existence like that of a butterfly to a caterpillar. If there is an ultimate history for mankind it will be that enlightenment supplanted our glorious savagery, and like a being awakened from some destructive seizure we put our shattered house in order.