From Faith, Madness, and Spontaneous Combustion

Our immune systems, and only our immune systems, prevent us from becoming everyone else all at once.  We are who we are only because we defend ourselves every moment of every day.  And who we are is everything.  We are pieces of others.  Portraits painted somewhere between our brains and thymuses.  We are the dirt we've eaten and the songs we've sung.  We are the light of stars and darknesses old beyond imagining.  We are at once spontaneous fires and sacred water.  We are faith and forgiveness.  We are our own deaths and we are the eternal thoughts of others.

-- Gerald Callahan, Faith, Madness, and Spontaneous Combustion:  What Immunology Can Teach Us About Self-Perception (New York:  St. Martin's, 2002), p. 227

From 'Blessed Unrest'

     Technologically, Western culture dances to preeminence with an iPod plugged into both ears.  When it comes to innovation, literature, and creativity, it is dazzling.  The ability to go deep into the ocean or as far as the moon is spectacular, but as Robert Oppenheimer reminded us, being blessed with technological insight does not confer self-insight.  If we measure Western culture by how it has treated people of different ethnicity and race, it is anathema.  If we judge it by the treatment of its own people, including children, the elderly, and the poor, it is an embarrassment.  And if we try to calibrate American superiority by its treatment of the environment, the United States is one of the least intelligent civilizations in the history of the planet.  English, when scientific and technical terms are taken into account, has more than 3 million words.  "Brilliant" is hardly sufficient to describe such an achievement.  But how do you describe an American administration that will spend $1 trillion, on winning a war for  Iraqi oil while refusing to allocate any funds to reduce dependency on oil?  For $1 trillion, the United States could have catalyzed the replacement of its entire automobile fleet with plug-in hybrid-electrics getting 500 mpg (cars running on batteries 90 percent of the time), powered by renewable energy and biodiesel.  To invert Trevor-Roper's logic, indigenous cultures may show us an image of a future by which we can escape our present.  If a culture does not become like us, it may be not a failure but a gift to what is now an uncertain future.

From: Blessed Unrest
          Paul Hawken, 2007
          Page 99

The Agnostic

To say, I don’t know, about covers it all in my book
To say, it is or it ain’t so, makes for wars and endless fighting
Makes for martyrs and murder and all kinds of frightening righteousness

I aspire to not knowing but usually descend to righteousness
Dragging my noisy chains around shouting:  Liberation and Freedom and Cause
That room, my friends, is always full

Else I could sit with the others in that garden off to the side
There with none but the brute, the base, the low
There with the four-legged and the two
There with the winged, the horned, and the finned
There with the snouts, the cold, wet noses and the hard and pointy beaks
There, always feasting and there always being feasted on

We may not know anything, there
In that beautiful and terrible dwelling
But there, oh there, we do know our place

- Adam Hall, March 4, 2011

John Vanderslice - The Minaret

It’s the end of spring and light hangs on
Dripping over geraniums and humming bird wings
In the blaze of summer we’ll tap our weapons out to the cadence of a melody they sang at Normandy
It won’t be the same again and we’ll just walk away it’s the end
We crossed on the ridge and cut their women down
I climbed up on the minaret and occupied the town
They scattered in the woods to gather up their strength
Dripping blood on the road and oh how the animals looked on
They all see how we’ve changed all the rules of the game
I can see both sides and it paralyzed me
An eye for an eye was a way to limit revenge
We’ve done away with all of that
Read how it all begins
It was written years before, same name, same war
I can see both sides and it paralyzed me inside

Hear the song.