Tools Of The Trade

Along with the image of a cavorting chess board, disorienting poor existing creatures like ourselves come a few other images in the same category. The chess board, as seen earlier, divides the plane into white and black tiles, each colour representing one of two possible perspectives. Then they come together and form a lattice they hint at grey, the third path. This chessboard, when seen through the fish eye lens of dream, cannot help but tilt and quiver. The strategy game men play in the park is a far cry from this cosmic farce. This playing board speaks of unknown and ever changing rules. One quickly forgets what side one is on. Which are my playing pieces? which my opponents ? My opponent looks a lot like me. Why are there Monopoly playing pieces on a chessboard ?
    Some situations in life call for drastic measures. Sometimes, on the battle field, when faced with non-stop absurdity of the highest order the options for response are limited. Either on slumps to the floor, starts drooling and thrubbing ones lips with a forefinger or one takes action. The action in this case is to quickly make a Napoleon hat from scratch. If one is adept at shaping aether, all the better ! Fashion yourself a hat, this token will bestow power. If all you have is cardboard and tape, get cracking but I will say, your imagination is quicker and doesn't lead you into the dead ends craft time can land you. The hat, often seen in the loony bins of funny pages, is a shamanic item that will lead you through chaos mostly intact. It will allow you to stand up tall, take charge of the situation irregardless of whether or not you are a natural born leader of men.
    The next things you'll need are a clipboard to take down notes and a pointing stick. The stick will allow you to isolate details that strike you as absurd. Aha! you shout, that thing is melting and/or dancing. Take a note of it. These tools will help you analyze your environment thus gaining control over it. Remember, the battle field, the game board, the mean streets, the drawing room….all these places are stand ins for the fun house, that shape shifting ground that can topple you as soon as set you on your way.
    The last image that will help the weary traveler in these rolling lands in a clear understanding of the origins of language. It is imperative that the black and white of the chess board are understood to also represent the twin parents of spoken tongues - the laugh and the cry. These two primal modes of expression twist together tightly and within that nexus is the fruit that ripens into all spoken communication. Heed this. You can switch easily from one to the other if you understand this key. As you take things too lightly you can add a dash of gravity. If you're sobbing through the jungles you can add a sprinkle of levity. What's funnier than a monkey lost in the forest, especially if that monkey thinks it's a man ?
    I offer these dream images to you, dear reader, in the hopes that you see what a silly place this is. It is of course heart rending and at times joyous. It can be both, damnably so. One must be equipped to tramp through these wilds. A hat to cover your head and lend you authority, a notepad to document the madness, a stick to notice things with, an expansive understanding that the roots of language can change your moods. Onwards !

Guess What ?

Certainty is a crutch. Knowledge is false comfort. Being informed is one of the biggest wastes of energy one can participate in. Go ahead, read the news, see if I care. Oh damn it, I do care. I care about our collective search for meaning, I care that you think keeping up on the press releases from our owners is a good and important pursuit. I care because I have compassion. The news junkie is akin to the Moonie, hanging on the every last word from his master. Of course, I'm not in the deprogramming business, so every man for himself.
    I've been in a cult already. I know that sweet flavour of group mind. It's real. It's also short lasting and in the long run no one can say if the pros outweigh the cons. Having done my short tour of duty in a group project, a group intent on worshiping the elementals and celebrating feast day after feast day, I am better equipped to realize that I partake of belief systems. I know that I just may believe certain things. Knowledge of what my faith may be, mind you, is false comfort. It is also widely inaccurate in that everything constantly shifts. Some pet opinion of mine is dashed to bits with a new article read. Just like changing shirts as some old bastard said of belief. Switch it up.
    The sorriest fools I've encountered are the one's with faith unrecognized. They puff and preen regarding the latest finding, doled out to them from sanctioned sources of course. Sceptical about any questionable thing except their own news sources. This happens time and again. If you are going to be sceptical, go for the whole thing, old friend. Question everything, not only the straw men your favourite podcasts have already selected. Question what and who you are, why you eat what you eat, why you feel how you feel, always and often. Question your brand loyalty, even if their reputation is based on quality and low low prices both. There is a catch somewhere.
    How is it that one can recoil from pundits and authors and honoured guests of Oprah yet swallow whole lines fed by governmental agencies. The mind boggles.
    It's not that I side with the legendary Hashishin and the wry motto hijacked by video-gamed slaves, 'nothing is true, everything is permitted'. No, not so. Lots of things are true. Even some contradictory things. Permissiveness I leave to the society at hand, without having any inclination to agree. We are, to a one, searching for meaning in our lives. Even the cynics and the materialists, even the ones who dismiss meaning and it's search as wastes of time. Even them. They too search. They may search for it in endless fouled up relationships, in extended grudges with best selling authors, in the collecting of immaterial details surrounding television serials. You do it, you think it, you feel it, chalk it up to your humanity. No one can shake that search. Cold grave or waving dead relatives welcoming you into the light, same thing. God, no god, moot point, same thing. Paradox all, paradox always. There is no escape. The thing is the thing. We are one, we are splintered fragments. There is no difference. Pull out all the logic stops, draw charts proving my words empty and I'll laugh if I have the time to honour how you have wasted yours.
    What do I believe ? Who's asking ? And why would you care ? Follow me around and gauge my deeds. Crunch the numbers and conduct severe meta-analysis. There is a creature out there who tricks. There are liars and there are storytellers. There are magicians and wizards. There are cobblers who hoard diamonds under the floorboards, still others who heal the poor souls who come to get some shoes repaired. The cosmos is made of a warp and woof, a black and white tiled checkerboard floor like the stodgy Masons dance on. This fabric wobbles and careens. Upon, within and through it exist all manner of realities, enjoying all grades of existence. That there monster is only sixty-four percent real, that table closer to ninety-eight. Of course, it all depends on where you are standing and who you really are. Stop it, my head hurts. Now, it's yours, is it ? We'll see about that.
    The trickster lives in a place between places. The world axis may determine the land that is ours but others still creep about the borderland. Two is not the biggest number around. Who among you relish ambiguity ? Come then, we'll sit at the same table and tell jokes at the expense of those who think they know what's going on.

On Scale

The theme that returns to me often when considering human life and the cosmos is scale. I have always felt an affinity to the very very small, often attempting to visualize my point of view wading through molecules. The vast empty space said to make up most of the atom, too, is inspiring to me. And one can't just isolate one atom with it's empty space. One needs to consider the whole array of atoms around us for starters. The very small isn't something 'over there'. It's simultaneous with here. It's everywhere.
    My fascination with the very small stems from being a kid and looking at things up close. We don't really do that much as adults. As kids we lay on the floor, our faces close to the tile, the wood grain, the rug. We look at things. We shrink ourselves down and push through the stalks making up the carpet pile, wondering what creatures we may meet. Those marvelous microscopes have shown us that dust mites do indeed live at the micro level along side a variety of creatures whose scale keeps them from freaking us out. The same goes for most things. Sparrows the size of dogs and there wouldn't be human civilization. Squirrels the size of houses, ditto.
    Once upon a time the earth was populated by giants. I don't know what accounted for the great size of the prehistoric beasts, but such things make children marvel. The very small, conversely, is made up of worlds within worlds. There are creatures negotiating our eye-lashes and our pores. There are creatures feeding off the flakes of dead skin we shed. The world has a very good resolution. If your eyes were good enough, you would just keep on seeing. The breakdown might occur at the atomic scale where abstraction may ensue.
    Moving on up, we scurry about the surface of this planet. Solar systems make up galaxies, Galaxy clusters make up super clusters. There is no telling what the final bird's eye view will yield. Too much science fiction has zoomed out to reveal the entire universe is a speck on the rim of some incalculably vast martini glass. And so on. Of course cosmologists have their own ideas and rightfully so. It's delicious, the thought of how the cosmos continues or doesn't, how it swings around and meets itself or how it doesn't. All I know is that considering the human situation without considering our minuscule aspect in relation to the greater world is as short sighted as considering our situation without looking at our relationship to the tiny.
    We flail in some middle. Our notion of middle is predicated on being able to perceive the smaller than us and the greater than us. We fail when we think we can raze the smaller, dismissing something as inconsequential because of it's small stature. Bacteria can bite us in the ass, wipe us out. Our superiority complex is selective. Again with the large, we think we rule the roost, that we are meant to suck dry the planetary resources we can scavenge. Some think that our industrial activities will render this planet lifeless, that we have the power to make a dent. We have a lot of power indeed and we are ravaging this world. Let us hope that our earth doesn't shrug or shiver, sending us back to the stone age way before we figure out how to reduce our carbon footprint.
    We are small, we are big, we are medium. We move up and down the scale depending on our instruments of perception and our imaginations. Our vision of the worlds 'next door' informs our stance. The more we encourage the view of life on other scales the sooner we'll dump our hubris. We'll see the continuum and our place sliding along it.
    Children are small. They see the world of the big as foreign. We've all been children. We've all had big folks push us around. Some of us can't wait to grow up and do our own pushing. Others grow up and swear they'll do no such thing. There is always someone smaller and someone bigger than us. Time to tip the scales.