(the strange attendants)

You know, this ship has only known the slow flow of sand for too long.  It yearns for the swell, to feel the slice of keel-knife swift and purposive through that meniscus between worlds which is one of its trinity of homes.  This is not a feeling her self-named commander is familiar with, not anymore.  It has leaned against the larger leeward piling of this other sea which is that of smashed rock suspended in air, which loosens its hold as it folds and curls against this charred body.

It is not for no reason that our black carapaces are adorned with eyes.  This is not some expression of savage and ignoble anthropomorphism, no.  We need the eyes for with to do the seeing, the light collects there as the wind fills those sooty sails.

As one of my eyes is pressed hard against the driest dunes, so too the right eye, though unscarred, is fixed on that makeshift surrounding it, all fences and leather-hung enclosures, which has traveled through the breakers of strange ages between temporary shelter to become the very palace of this Prince of Nothing, this dark sulk of a thing which so often sits out the evening's eviscerations staring at the edges of its drinking-cup instead of the horizon which is where the dark water grows light and lifts its volleys of pearls against the car of Hesperus, delaying the blind times if only a while.   

(unseen in the desert of the sea)

I admit to having issued the order to scupper the fleet.

Orders can always be rescinded.

(numbering the ships)

Like coleopterid carapaces, these coracles, near numberless.  

. . . And at high tide turning they scurry and swarm the sand, hauling the hulls from Ocean, as ants carry leaves larger than they into the subterranean farm-factories.  There the leaves will be inoculated with mould which will decompose the cellulose and nourish the numerous populace of the Hill.  And all this, and hospitals too, and true community care which continues even for those who care not nor can.

We haven't quite got there yet, let's hope we do.

After the landings, the beachcrawl, the dark aspect of eyes gazing seaward from under furrowed brow.  Sharply the nostrils open, inhaling the spume, savoring its saltiness, breathing in deeply and hoping no-one hears the sigh let slip . . .

(beached on the south shore)

One of my favorite sections of the Iliad.

(fleet)

The ships are wayward and hard to herd.  The structure of command is vague and not easy to implement, sometimes the rowers rout and it is then that ships sink.  For those that do sink, little can be done, though sometimes those who were on board can be pulled out of the water.

The fleet is like people.

3.2

String, dust and matches.  (Thanks MSL)

3.1

The state of no-mind when no conscious cognition occurs.

3

These are the fragments from which the world is assembled.

2.1

(Yet, yes, the evanescence of text within social networks concerns me.)

Whenever I use the term 'technology' I try to use it precisely, as distinct from 'science,' as distinct from 'marketing' (which itself is, by my definition, a technology). The human species has been producing food by technological means for thousands of years: a plough is as much a technological thing as a DNA sequence artificially inserted into another organism.

The USA has traveled further down the GM track than we have and the impression one gets is of pretty large-scale use and less public concern than here. (Perhaps this is because farming is more 'industrialised' there, and more mono-cultural; that is, mono-cultural in the ecological sense of the word.

I agree that there has perhaps been too much of a rush to produce 'economically beneficial' spin offs from genetics. I certainly agree that our behaviour is the problem, not as individuals but as large groups (yesterday's election result demonstrated that quite adequately enough). I also agree that the marketing and monetising of technology is, by and large, questionable verging on the reprehensible.

We have quite possibly passed the once-avoidable point of no return regarding the damage we have done, as a species, to this world.  (Or, at least, to the propitiousness of this world for human use.)  We can't choose not to factor that in and, given that the stakes are so high, we should be looking at any and all means of, at least partially, patching up what we and our consumerist civilisation has done.  If we do not do this we choose to continue, through inaction, to harm the ecosystems of this world. We fail in our collective responsibilities, badly. And if we continue to drive species to extinction so inhumanely, then the only hope of undoing what we've done lies with technology derived from the science of genetics: that is, with the storage of physical DNA or the information it encodes, in the hope that our ever-developing understanding of the way in which genetic information scripts life might allow the preservation or restoration of otherwise-doomed species.

I see no moral argument against self-engineering when that becomes a real possibility. We have many instincts and impulses which have become counterproductive outside of a hunter/gatherer lifestyle, and it is no longer arguable that these need not be modified in order that we survive, if we wish to survive, that is. The science of the gods is not safe in the hands of individuals who share identical brain wiring with our memory-bound predecessors of a hundred thousand or so years ago: something needs to be done about these tendencies, and it needs to be done urgently.  Unrestricted, they lead us inescapably to war, greed, possessiveness, imperialism, bigotry: you name it.  [Needs expansion.]

I think the decoding of the syllabary of life is one step towards decoding life's language.  I am also hopeful enough to imagine how, once we have decoded it, we might learn to write using it. It is this property of codification of information which intrigues me most about DNA and other self-replicators, because the underlying technology for all other technologies is the most transparent, writing. Writing is something we invented, over a period of time, and is thus a technology (language, of course, is most likely hung on a genetic skeleton and is not an invented thing). Without writing, none of our other technologies would have been possible; as we would be entirely unable to store information and, reliably, retrieve it.

Although we probably had lived without it for around 40 - 100 thousand years, any reversion to that scriptless state is not an option -- as technologies cannot be unlearned -- and, more personally, it's not a state in which I'd like to live for any length of time. There would be no possibility of thinking of the sort I am attempting here, for one thing.

I think it's highly significant that, just when our mastery of the fruits of our own invented codification systems has presented us with seemingly intractable problems, we have been able, and perhaps just in time, to discover that all life is coded by a mechanism, albeit an evolved one, which is so very similar to writing. And we have begun to learn the alphabet, the phonemes, of that script, and have just begun to be able to modify it. To cast further exploration of this serendipitous synchronicity aside now would be like torching the Library at Alexandria before the first parchment had even been stored there. And, I am sure, there were those who would have contemplated such a thing, when the first libraries were built and the first books written, just as there are those now who would contemplate erasure of what is perhaps our most significant achievement before its significance has even been understood.

We need tools to effect change in the self. We had one method, writing, and now there are two, and, surprise surprise, they're related.  [--- continuation and extension ---]

Writing should not be abandoned just because Mein Kampf was a written text, or because the Bible, or a whole host of wrong-headed texts have been written: it is not a good idea from a mental health perspective to lobotomise the neurologists and psychologists just because they have, historically, made mistakes which have caused a great deal of individual suffering.

Of course, we could have done something differently in the past and avoided all this.  Indeed, we might have done something with the lost opportunities of the past which would have avoided even worse problems than those we presently face, who knows?  But, we didn't, and that is all that matters. Despite all the technology and erudition in the world we failed, abysmally, and the time's gone. (One of my many issues with time is that its rapid passing makes us short-sighted.)

I'm worryingly close to being forty nine now, and I've been warning about what we've been doing to the systems of the planet that we arrogantly refer to as 'ours' -- and which are somewhat akin to the systems of the body -- since I was around five years old.  Every time someone responded to these warnings with the usual accusations of doomsaying and scaremongering was a personal affront; I take no pleasure in the possibility of being right on this one, and hope I'm wrong.

Long ago I decided I should never have children, but many whom I care about have made other decisions, which is one I admire and envy, as my decision is a cause of continual regret for me. I have no wish to see anyone's kids die in a desert, or hear of such deaths, either. That would be too much for me, so maybe I'm just being selfish.

I hope that makes some kind of sense.   I am kind of glad my detachment from human traits is noticeable. I have become somewhat peeved with our traits of late.

I assume that there is some basis for what some call the "survival instinct," and that we hope to survive, or at least leave some form of legacy. I categorically do not think human survival is at all 'important' at an evolutionary level, except when viewed as an extinction event, and I refuse to resort to the proposition that the world requires human control: that kind of control is quite beyond us.

I'm not sure I fathom what you mean about any living thing being able to do without understanding. This seems to be the norm for the bahaviour of most organisms and for most organisms I don't see how it can be called 'foolish' at all. It's just the way things are. I see how it can be called foolish when it's us who are the actors, but 'foolish' is a human term which doesn't readily translate to organisms who do not have the kind of conceptualised, abstracted language we have developed.

Life is a system which runs constrained by strict limits, and human control is neither necessary nor 'desirable' for anyone but humans. The parameters of the Hilbert space which defines the limits of carbon-based life are realities: I fear we have pushed them too far and too fast.  And, as the ones who did this and, being possessed of both a moral sense combined with at least a certain level of understanding of the biological and chemical 'whys' which other species seem, so far, to lack, so, I feel it is our responsibility to try to minimise the harm.

There are many different levels of distancing which can be used when evaluating things. At the most abstract, one can take the view that, given enough time, everything dies and is forgotten and nothing actually matters in the scheme of things because there is no "scheme of things." The only certainty is entropy's grey decay: everything that evolves is superceded or extinguished eventually. I can't bear staring down that abyss for any length of time, though.  Partly because it hurts and partly because I'd like to think that there may be some worth in our type of intelligence. This determination to avoid the completely nihilistic viewpoint is very human and I can't prevent it, and I don't want to. I would like to believe that 'achievements' such as music and art and literature and yes, science, have some intrinsic worth, although I know that nothing we have ever achieved has benefited any species besides our own. I would like to believe that Asimov was mistaken in his greatest fear, and that a technological society, such as the ones we have created, is not always doomed to destroy itself before it has matured enough to surpass its members' individual  limitations. Asimov was smarter than I am, though, and he may well have been right.

Problem is, if that's the case, what's the point in caring at all?

We need to distance ourselves from ourselves in order that we can see ourselves more clearly: it is very difficult to sift the innate in us from the enculturated, precisely because we are so immersed and enmeshed in language, and a writing-based way of seeing.

I actually think that control of pretty much anything important, if vested in human hands, becomes a liability: we are too stupid and we are too corruptible. Those people who desire power should never be entrusted with it, and those who should have power would never want it.

I see one of our biggest problems as being the complete absence of anything against which to compare ourselves and our ways of looking. This is vastly problematic as we cannot curently ask any other intelligent, communicative entity, where we've got it wrong and where we haven't. Instead we have to rely on our assumptions, observations and imaginations, which are an integral part of being human.

If Asimov was wrong then any extraterrestrial intelligences are either beyond our technical ability to detect, or are wisely keeping a discreet distance: this would seem quite understandable. Whatever the case,at present they are conspicuous only by their absence. Assuming this situation persists, we are left with the possibility of 'AI,' which I suspect we'll crack eventually. Problem with that is the fear that such a development could usher in the worst period of moral abuse of other sentient beings by members of our species that world would ever have seen.

Thing about wisdom is that it can usually only be identified through the lenses of hindsight and of humanity: prediction is always problematic

1.3

How many years has it been now?  This island; this place.  Every evening, her face, her face which I cannot forsake though forsaking is expected in such circumstances.  Kairos: not yet.  Not yet.

1.2

I prefer Selene to the other moon-deities.  Something about the sound.

1.1

He appears to, well, not laugh, - though one wonders about what He might have got up to during the thirty years which pass undocumented; perhaps he sinned once or twice when He was young, you and I don't know, do we?

He does appear to have grown into a bit of a radical peacenik, and convivial with it, so it's said, isn't it?  From pretty much all accounts, He seemed to be fond of company. Although He unfortunately didn't write much down, and exceptions can of course be found, He does appear to have been a pious Jew, and His real problem appears to have been with the intrusion of the commercial into the pious life, and in general with the constant trope of oppression which had become all too evident by virtue of the Roman Legionaries marching around crucifying tens or hundreds of pious Jews every day, speaking in a tongue which few, even the rabbis like Jesus and the Apostles, would have understood as the lingua Franca was Greek not Latin, and the mother tongue would have been Aramaic or Hebrew, at the time of Jesus's death / (whatever one chooses instead).

In a way, Judas had the worse role: he appears to have had to betray Jesus. If he had not then He would not have been crucified, martyred, resurrected, and there would probably be no Christianity as there would have been no crucifixion and Jesus would have continued to be a Jewish rabbi as He had been to date.

(Parenthetically, which is why it's in parentheses, if you look to whichever Bible you choose and read Acts 2:1 - 14, and compare it with the Jewish version here. I do not understand much of the language, still it is obviously the same story. There is an equivalent in the Q'ran too though it is narrated in a different manner. It seems to suggest, perhaps, that the New Testament is a Jewish text, or at least that part of it is: if it were not then surely the Judaic version could never have been written, could it? It is interesting to note that the Jewish version refers to Zeus rather than Jupiter. This also shows that the Apostles considered themselves to be Jewish rabbis, even after the Passion.

An additional aside: I do not consider myself to be a Christian, my familiarity with the different flavors of Judaism and the fewer flavors of Islam is as limited as my knowledge of Scripture or my understanding of the various arcane points of theology which led to the idea of Christianity being so fragmented today, so I am most definitely not speaking from a position of any authority. From this layman's point of view though, it would seem likely that Christianity (as it is practiced by most sects outside of Africa, is a quite different thing now than it was then). It also appears that many of the changes began when Constantine declared Christianity to be the official Religion of Rome. If you mosey around the Apocrypha and other such abominable texts, or just read the New Testament with an open mind, imagining yourself into the period when its events occurred, you will find accounts which are altered less.))

I sometimes wonder what Jesus would have to say about the things that have been done in His name. Would He be comfortable with our actions, both individual and collective, do you think?

"Love thy enemy as thy friend, forgo the passing of judgments, love thy neighbor, it is harder for a rich man, etc...," what would He think of the bombing, the hunger, the inequality, the looking-away, the executions, the despoilments, the carrying of money into His temple, the greed, the desire?  What would He make of those who do not help the sick not because they cannot but because of politics, because a box carrying a simulacrum of movement by means of a sequence of moving idols tells them what to think and do?  The materialism, the gluttony, the covetousness and cruelty: what would He have to say about these things? Can anyone tell me? Seriously, I would love to know.

I think He loved to know, too, though I fear that He too - were He living as we live -, might be seduced by the bright lights and the shopping, or be too busy with the day job, or have a show to watch on the television, or be otherwise too busy to give it much thought; if not, though, I wonder what He'd say.