Blogs
Blog Zero
17 February 2009 - 10:40pm — BCIt begins with a feeling, a direction.
Off planet.
Such a thought
posits a community
for eco-logic and eco-nomic
becoming (unfolding).
“Earth Birth,”
speaking poetically.
Or Gaian gastrulation,
to put it in biomechanical terms.
The inside-outing of a planetary ecosystem
as it sets forth hundreds, thousands of
centrifugally spinning colonies
in near-Earth space.
(Habitat rotation simulates
Earth life’s requisite Earth-like gravity,
at the interior wall of their tubular shells.)
DNA life settling space.
Building space habitats
from near-Earth asteroids.
Nearly 6,000 near-Earth asteroids
have been detected, you know. And 15%
are easier to reach than the moon.
Or if you didn’t know,
now you do.
There are, of course,
carrots and sticks.
Many asteroids are rich in metals
especially the platinum group metals.
Money to be made.
Near-Earth space: Everything
from energy to iron.
Stick-wise,
if our understanding of global eco-logical systems
is as poor as our recently demonstrated failure
to understand global eco-nomic systems,
who can deny the possibility of a
Children-of-Men or some such
similar demise of our
favorite species?
Carrots and sticks.
Sticks and carrots.
A Hero’s quest?
Watership Down?
Ah, stories.
Naught but
feelings and thoughts
in song.
The movement off, once felt,
precipitates stories, and actions.
Conversations, letters, perhaps a blog.
And, if we do it right, maybe even dialogue.
“Where are they?”
asked Enrico Fermi.
Maybe it’s not easy getting off.
Maybe they only engage
if and when we do.
Either way,
it’s up to us now.
Shall we “Make it so”?
The Day’s Frontiers?
20 February 2009 - 5:31pm — BC“He whose vision cannot cover
History’s three thousand years,
Must in outer darkness hover,
Live within the day’s frontiers.”
“Wer nicht von dreitausend Jahren
Sich weiß Rechenschaft zu geben,
Bleibt im Dunkeln unerfahren
Mag von Tag zu Tage leben.”
—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
West-östlicher Diwan (1819)
Erich Neumann used this quotation from Goethe’s 1819 collection of lyrical poems, West-östlicher Divan (which, according to Jeffrey Einboden, “constitutes a unique culmination of the 18th and 19th century European encounter with extra-biblical scripture and sacred verse”), as the epigraph to his seminal work, Origins and History of Consciousness (Princeton: Princeton University Press. 1954. R.F.C. Hull’s translation of Neumann’s Ursprungsgeschichte des Bewusstseins, Zurich: Rascher Verlag. 1949).
Every one of us can only ever act here and now, in the moment, “within the day’s frontiers.” The question is, what is the depth of our awareness of the trajectories that brought us to this very particular moment within which we make choices and engage the world? For Goethe, “History’s three thousand years,” constituted the full arc of known human events. In the 21st Century, our awareness of imagined pre-now time has expanded significantly.
Were he writing today, Goethe might refer to 14 billion years (or 18 billion years), the imagined age of our universe. Or to 4.5 billion years, the estimated age of planet Earth. Or, if he retained a human focus, he might speak of “History’s 1.4 million years,” which marks the known origins of fire-hardened pottery. That event may mark the beginning of the human experiment, for where there’s human-controlled fire, there are story telling primates weaving up patterns of neural behavior. And who can say how the trajectories of those ancient mental habits inform our lives still?
This blog, The Day’s Frontiers, reflects on contemporary events in hopes of revealing the trajectories of a planetary birth, now in progress. At best: One continuous mistake.
