My favorite blogger, el-oso, David "Oso" Sasaki, travels the globe to attend conferences, summits, conclaves, and camp meetings in search of new friendships, renewed alliances, and the latest information about developing technologies and the power of citizen media to change the world.  He usually finds the time to report about his experiences and findings.  It's heady stuff, these finely crafted dispatches, filed from some of the most interesting places on Earth — and though we've never met him, we are convinced:  Oso is our kind of guy.

The Binding

Here at Crow's Cottage I am bound by pledge and obligation to stay doggedly close to the laboratory, the study, and the garden.  The binding may last for some seasons — as many as shall be necessary to accomplish the goals and satisfy the responsibilities presently at play in the household and family.

My travel in the physical realm is restricted by austere choice to neighborhood markets and shops, where daily necessities and an occasional treat can be purchased for a price; the rare outing to a restaurant, ever a risky venture given the delicate state of my constitution, a cranky thing no longer battle-hardened to the vagaries of the public table; and trips with our three young shepherds to the veterinarian’s clinic, where vaccinations and boosters are administered to help them settle safely into doghood.  I walk them, of course, these loyal little shepherds, but our outings are for exercise and meditation, and shouldn’t count as travel.

I travel nonetheless, journeying by mind and psyche to realms and locales of amazing and oft exotic character.  It’s the sensible solution to a physically limited existence.  Vicarious, imaginative, and remembered, my travels serve the purpose of leavening the days and nights of containment and burrowing.

Unlike Oso on Earth's highway, we aren't fomenting change from our fixed point at the hermitage.  We're content to open the windows and listen to the wind chimes play a soft melody on the early spring breezes.  The candles burn softly in their little cups.  Monitors burn hot on the near horizon. 

Whose Teeth Sow the Foot Soldiers?

After so many years of the struggle, we've become much too sensitive to withstand the inevitable rise of opponents and naysayers, who will assuredly stand against us should we go forth and promote change, and whose intent is to slash and torch in the glorious wipe-out.  Paranoid?  My eye!

A blood-sprinkled, cautious band of the loudly committed, they spring-up from the humus of cant like perennial angry warriors in urban public squares and rural farm fields across the angry land.  They are sown from Dagny Taggart's sack of dragon teeth, and harvested by dark sorcerers braying on the fringe and eager for the fray.  Something like that.  They hate change and the changers, and we'll admit it, the teeth could have belonged to someone else, maybe Goebbels, or McCarthy, or Limbaugh, or Beck.  But the foot troops are roaming, want to kill for the cause.  Meanwhile, I whisper, Who is John Galt?

Whoa!  How did we wander so far afoot?  Wasn't the original intent to tout el-oso and plan our next psychic journey?  It just happens in the darkening night.  If you listen and the winds are right, you can hear the shattering glass, smell the smoke of bonfires of the vanities.  Why go outside and look?  Better to accept the admonition, hunker down, and wait for the certain and just deliverance. 

Let us travel, then, you and I, into some distant woven shade, and hide there among the ashes and the oaks, sip pale green nectar from the limestone springs, eat our berries and our nuts, and wait, wait for the binding to be lifted and flung into hot stars, burning, burning.

Heartbreak, the slow movement of emotion, cold sorghum seeping from the shards of a broken vessel, covering the earth with useless sentiment.  What can you do to make them care?

Harsh voices, shrill tones, confusion tumbling from the surface of their exclamations.  A passionate chorus pours forth, rising like a vapor from elegantly appointed parlors and messy slop houses to enter into indifferent ether.  Is it any wonder they refuse to listen?

Relationships fragmented, The Others ignored and rejected, psyches falling into quicksand and sinking out of sight, out of mind, returning to the sog and the rubble, disappearing beneath the stomped surface — jagged pieces of glass, ruined oils and honeys, dead weeds and crushed petals of discarded flowers.  And you think they should feel your pain?

The doleful one lifts up his weary head, escapes self for an interlude in the city, watches the agents of angry dissent roil at the palace gates, ruefully open by prior consent.  The angry ones with their buckets and their spleen splash the blood of animals onto the cornerstones and door jambs, urge the priests to step forward and cast curses on the ruling elite.  Satiated, not eager to taste the splinters and musk of the club and the whip, the mob drifts away, dissipates into the hovels and haunts of a distressed city.  What can they hope to accomplish?

Soldiers arrive with water hoses and full bladders to wash away the blood.  They lock the palace gates and sharpen their knives.  In the council room the king and his ministers plot acts of vengeance and retribution.  A wise one, watching from the margin, his cloak and mantle seemingly sacred, ignores the conspiracy and prays for deliverance from the curse and the imprecation.

Wasn't it a broken heart that brought you here?  Or was it the urge to recover, to rebuild, to confirm your value and worth to a world grown persistently cold and cruel?  You decide to believe, to once again proclaim I won't give up Never give up Never ever give up the ghost of your fondest desires and most noble intentions.

You keep wondering:   Is it working? When it slows down, you ask yourself:  Is someone stealing the bandwidth?  You look around, see evidence of all these people going places, living the high life, and you ask, wistfully:  Why not me?  Why can't I be rich and famous, footloose and fancy free?  You realize that being the one, filthy rich, negates being the other, free and shorn of the ties that bind.  You are constantly caught in the middle of your willful abnegation.

There is slim market for philosophy, little tolerance for self pity.  Fools are everywhere, but how else can one begin the next journey unless she becomes The Fool?

You keep thinking:  I'm going to win the Mega Millions jackpot.  You'll deposit several millions of dolorous dollars in your bank account.  You'll hire lawyers and accountants to advise you how best to keep it.  Then it will begin to slip away.

What might be done with Mega Millions?  Build, distribute, do good works.  Buy a fast car and race wildly across the desert.  Hold court with the throngs of petitioners who shall arrive unannounced to plead for a share of it.  Go crazy with delight.  Realize after a while it's the same old you.

If I were important,  the importance would exist in my own image of things, but I'm not, and the image is a shimmer in the bathroom mirror.

If I mean anything to the world, and I do, then I am a collection of living numbers, stored and sorted by The Machine.  Or, I am a remembered sharer from a former situation, someone who once cared and encouraged you.

If I think the world is against me, cold and cruel, then I am too much enamored of the conflict; the embrace of death becomes an inelegant dance on the oaken planks of the parlor.  I twist and leap.  My knees become sore and brittle.

Counting Crosses, Counting Stars.

I am one of billions, but you can't prove it.  No one can count that far.  The numbers are clever lies.  You see tens of thousands gathered in plazas and bowls, and from that vision you extrapolate a grand count of three hundred million, then four billion — as if you could count a sum greater than the total of your fingers and your thumbs.

I've seen the many and the few, seen the gravestones, the little wooden crosses without names.  They are too many to remember.  I could count them as stars and never reach the end.  The infinite line is without number, the spirits without discernable form.  I shall imagine them in my dreams.

She is a friend.  She wrote in her honest manner that she didn't understand a word of it.   He could see why.   Something fundamental and lasting was changing, chaos over order, despair over the preciousness of hope, all the good things cultivated through years of study and meditation beginning to crumble into a pile of fragments on the cluttered ganglion floor.

The Cages

He couldn't write the truth here and get away with it.  Not if he wanted to avoid further rejection and deeper banishment.  Just this morning, when he pulled the truth off a shelf and looked inside its bindings, thinking he would graft some of it here, he was pleased for a fleeting moment to find passages of life and life only, and he dreamed they were crafted like the artist he longed to be, and he thought:

— Yes, this is way to go, the pattern to follow,

but then he saw the raw and primal nature of the imagery, the danger embedded in the words should they escape the cages and find judgment, words that kicked against the pricks of convention, words bearing passions that fell on the other side of the shadows, beyond the pale of safe sharing.

So, he would play it safe today, put the truth back into its binder, be the self censor.  He was already clinging to the cliff face by the tips of his fingers.  The slightest nudge from The Others might send him irretrievably into the abyss.

That is how it is with him, how it shall be, unless, and if, and when, if ever he passes into a place of total insulation behind the shield where arrows can't strike.  The life he knew and lived and wrote about on his private pages, the life he can remember and access and transform into Art with the capital A, becomes in the light of circumstance and necessity a subject best left hidden from the audience he clings to,

salt-encrusted hands on a floating life vest,

shipwrecked creature with a glimmer of rescue in the cold, vast Sea of the Lost Cause.

The imagined Others keep him under check.  It has to be that way.  He fears rejection more than he loathes failure.  It is a bitter beatin' stick, hard and hot on his back.

He is struck by the madness of things. There is no better word to encapsulate it: things.   They are everywhere, ripped from moorings and racing out of control.   It's best not to look, but he canna keep his hands over his eyes long enough to blot out the madness.

It slips away, this life, one undone thing by one undone thing, falling away into an indeterminate past.   You wake up enough times, twenty-one thousand nine hundred and forty-eight times, and then, one wake up later, when the sun is shining after a long spell of gloom, you become old.

a matter of concern ... affair ... state of affairs in general or within a specified or implied sphere ... a particular state of affairs ... situation ... event, circumstance ... *that shooting was a terrible thing* ... deed, act, accomplishment ... *do great things* ... a product of work or activity ... a separate and distinct individual quality, fact, idea, or entity ... the concrete entity as distinguished from its appearances ... an inanimate object distinguished from a living being ... possessions, effects ... equipment or utensils especially for a particular purpose ... a material or substance of a specified kind ... *avoid fatty things* ... a spoken or written observation or point ... idea, notion ... a piece of news or information ... individual ... *not a living thing in sight* ... the proper or fashionable way of behaving, talking, or dressing ... a mild obsession or phobia ... the object of such an obsession or phobia ... something (as an activity) that makes a strong appeal to the individual ... forte, specialty

Same old song plays in same old ears, a divisive tune of discordance and impromptu riffs, but he's pretty sure he can discern what is real as opposed to the unreal, identify something when (it is) stood against nothing — as if nothing exists.  You reach a point where you think, nothing matters, but it does it all matters in a universe of life the clinging to it the desire for good, and less one o = god.

Martha Anne on the Cumberland

> > > 11,442 days ago in a land of fictional realities

Popeye the Hungry, nightwatchman of the sand and gravel yard, the official pistol, once tell Bosko as he stand on idling Barge Ellen's gray hull, tossing foraminifera into the Cumberland:  'Stay here and you'll be Captain of the Martha Anne one day.'   Yes, and sports editor of the Times-Picayune , and captain of United States Army Company E, and state editor of the Tulsa World, and captain of the Martha Anne, back again to the start of a lonesome soliloquy — he, the drifter with promise and a bag of promises, the raiser of verbal hell, the tightener of thirty-five pound ratchets, the fatherless son, the lust man too far removed from his changeling American harem, the writer of original words, the self-believer, the protestant novelist in the stream of Cary, the old soldier with his remembered war.

Oksob the Opposite from his perch in the Opposite Loft mentions Bosko's psychological scars, intimating pathologies and regressions and pain, but someone casts a rejoinder onto the surface of the river:  as if only one of us held the scars, each and all to self.  Then outta nowhere She appears with the counterpoint:  My abortion.  My emerging baby.  My death.  She mentions attending the meeting of public feminists, to a woman each wearing pants.  'I was the only one there with a long dress,' sez She.  'I felt a great anxiety in that room, and carried it home with me.'  He say:  They are striving to emulate masculine values, chasing masculine goals 'n masculine powers — the pants are a symbol.  If only they would realize that men are more fu**ed-up 'n repressed 'n strangled than the gynous on the other side.  They chase false goals, blind themselves to the power inherent in the fullest development of a feminine nature.

> > > 31 years, 3 months, and 28 days pass by

He searches (is searching) for a pattern that will work, anything sensible and malleable to the application of style and voice, an implement to allow the breaking free from a destructive illusion of failure and inconsequentiality.  Have you seen one of these implements?  If so, and if you don't want it, or if you have an extra, then please send it my way.  Address it to X Haven in the neighborhood of Desolation Row.

NOTE: Indented text is from Merriam-Webster's 11th Collegiate Dictionary, a convenient tool accessed by software on a laptop named Ulysses.  Both overflow with words.

From one ear, a scream! The famous crime detective Marlowe rushes to a stricken dame's rescue, man of action at work in a black-and-white universe of imagined dramatic events and ardent relationships.  From the other ear, a piano, Brahms, the more subtle passions of chamber music.  In the motley whirl of a temporal material reality, the mob of the senses gathers to participate in a deepening delusion.  And the open eyes, sight! an oval mirror to spy what might be sneaking-up, the hourglass with its tumbling white sand, one realm reaching down into another, and a leaf-shorn maple on the other side of the window, with trump six The Lovers propped against four golden-colored volumes of The Zohar.  Delicious, the taste of sliced lime.  It lingers long after the sip, juicy pulp dangling like strands of silk in chilled sparkling water, drawn from hot springs and bottled in green-tinted glass at the national park a few hundred miles to the south, first down from the Ozarks into the river valley, then back up again to another range of rocky peaks with an entirely different and much more mysterious name.  The pliant hardness and concave texture of black plastic keys, servants of expression with their painted symbols and imposed order, giving way to pressure at the tips of my fingers, tempo!, flinging out symbols into an uncertain ether, and my left calf threatening to seize-up and cramp, and the early morning headache vanquished by hot Columbian coffee and aspirin.  Incense from far away Bangalore, burning oils intended to convey the scent of ocean spray, and sour dough bread in the imagined oven.  Sensual, sensuous, alive.

Eyes and fingers speak in its favor, visual evidence and palpableness do, too:  this strikes an age with fundamentally plebian tastes as fascinating, persuasive, and convincing — after all, it follows instinctively the canon of truth of eternally popular sensualism.  What is clear, what is 'explained'?  Only what can be seen and felt — every problem has to be pursued to that point.

The Coincidentia Oppositorum

The purveyor of paranoia on the radio says the drugs are intended to make us all soft and pliant like baby men and docile dolls, that they sneak it into the vaccines and water supplies to alter our natural aggressiveness and blunt our innate tendency toward rugged individualism.  Bahhh!  We are the dancing sheep in a waking nightmare.

Wiki Answers tells us:
Q:  What sound do sheep make?
A:  the sound that sheep make is bah
 

I'm not believing it.  Ghost malls haint come to our town, no burning of dining room chairs in the fireplace to keep warm 'cause the natural gas lines broke and the trees all got cut down, no barricades on the avenues with jackboots crunch crunch at the ready.  Not yet.  At X Haven the trash is carried away weekly, the bags of leaves gone from the curb as if by magic, the street sweeper rolling like a grazing bison, gas pumps full and grocery shelves fuller.  Guess I could jump in the El Camino and motor north to Detroit, where (I'm told) the canyons of abandoned factories are the wasteland, and they can't bury the dead just leave them in refrigerators for years on end, with the jobs flown south to non-union assembly lines or to China on the cheap we'll buy it at Wal-Mart come Black Friday be done with it.

In this overcoming of the world, and interpreting of the world in the manner of Plato, there was an enjoyment different from that which the physicists of today offer us — and also the Darwinists and anti-teleologists among the workers in physiology, with their principle of the 'smallest possible force' and the greatest possible stupidity.  'Where man cannot find anything to see or to grasp, he has no further business' — that is certainly an imperative different from the Platonic one, but it may be the right imperative for a tough, industrious race of machinists and bridge-builders of the future, who have nothing but rough work to do.

The rough work is done, or farmed out to a hardier clan, or left undone in the gloomy decline.  The people of the land spend the accumulated wealth of generations like true believers caught-up in the hoped-for frenzy of an impending Rapture, but Jesus don't come, he's been here and gone.  We the People are left with the dredges, with ascending fear and receding empire, with a decadent culture and a burgeoning police state, so we implode, quietly, worrying about what we might be losing to antichrists and thieves, to broken slackers and monied giants, when we'd all be better off putting on a pair of comfortable boots and taking a walk among the fallen leaves. 

NOTE: Indented text is from Article 14, Part One, "On the Prejudices of Philosophers," in the major work, "Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future," by Friedrich Nietzsche, 1886.  The text is translated from the German by Walter Kaufmann in "Basic Writings of Nietzsche," 1992 Modern Library Edition.

We 'real Americans' — let us permit ourselves some hearty episodes of victimhood and demonization.  Let us shout to the cameras about the cash and freedoms we are losing to taxes and The Man, while pointing fingers at The Others, who are the unwashed cause of our vast and unwarranted losses.  Let us act the role of put-upon victim, be the middle class hero of a melodrama, unique and special to selfhood, dedicated to individualism and objectivist egoism, forever free and unfettered by responsibility to a greater group.  We've earned the right to our privilege.  Everyone knows They and The Government are the demons.  Let us gather as a like-minded group in a neatly ordered parking lot at the local office of a prominent congressional politician, hoist our signs and banners like the crucifix and the torch, march in mass to the portico, vent our bourgeois anger over all that is wrong with our life under guise of a protest movement.

“We worried whether our food would run out before we got money to buy more.”

Eventually, should you choose to endure the psychic pollution and engage them long enough, probe their audacious defenses for weaknesses, goad them into reactionary retribution, these "real Americans" will show you a truth they've found in the haunts of their wilderness, that "this president" is the antichrist, the narcissist socialist antagonist come to rob us of jobs, medicine, and ammunition.  Steal our future right from under us.

“The food that we bought just didn’t last and we didn’t have money to get more.”

The sky above them is falling, falling, falling.  Stunned by the string of reversals that rock the world bequeathed to them, the "real Americans" fall to their knees before the throne of The Founding Fathers and worship an ossified holy scroll they call The Constitution, but it is a frozen thing, this constitution they champion in the intoxication of a shared delusion, harkening back to an age when the only citizens with the vote were white men of property, their wealth raised on slavery and indenture, their status an issue of membership in an exclusive group.

“We couldn’t afford to eat balanced meals.”

But, you say to them, these bristlers, these rousters running roughshod:  The Constitution is a living document, amended by the legal acts of successive generations to adapt its protections and guarantees to meet societal changes wrought by the march of time.  Tell me how you are not pathetic in your greed, rapaciousness, intolerance, bigotry, and fear?  Why is your public mind so narrow and small?

In the last 12 months, did you or other adults in the household ever cut the size of your meals or skip meals because there wasn’t enough money for food?

The "real Americans" among us have bought a lie and now attempt to sell it on a closed market.  The lie is that they are poor.  The lie is that they are poor because of a tax on their wealth.  The lie is that they owe nothing to the government that sets the table for their prosperity.  The lie is that they want to take full advantage of the protections to their livelihood afforded by secure borders, a determined military, a capitalist economy stacked fully in their favor, and a stable society raised on the foundation of government, but don't want to pay a cent for any of it.  They desire to take everything and give nothing.   They are not as rich as they think they deserve to be.

In the last 12 months did you or other adults in your household ever not eat for a whole day because there wasn’t enough money for food?

Fearful men and fearful women accomplish nothing of positive value, but their fears set the stage for fascism, totalitarianism, and the ultimate destruction of the system they claim to love and support.  When they return to power.  When they return....

“The children were not eating enough because we just couldn’t afford enough food.”

NOTE: Indented text is from "Household Food Security in the United States, 2008," released today by the United States Department of Agriculture (Economic Research Report Number 83 of November 2009).  Wanna read it?  Click the burger.

Though the concept continues to intrigue me, the XHTML Friends Network mentioned in my previous post led to a dead end.  I waited for the all of the leaves to fall from the maple outside the north window of my study — it's a grand tree with four thick branches emanating from the trunk, which is 92 inches in circumference — before coming to the conclusion that I didn't connect.  So be it.

XHTML Friends was merely one part of my plan — always, a plan — to enter into a sustained exploration of the blossoming field of flowers known by the name social networking.  I've done it, too, beginning at Facebook, the prime meridian of a great and widening circle.  I signed up some time ago as a way to stay in contact with my former students, who are among the most important humans on my planet, but I did nothing other than employ the connection as a place to gather addresses for e-mail, my preferred form of communication.  Now that I've spent a few days attempting to develop a presence on Facebook, I understand Ashley's admonition fourteen months ago:  "hey mr. bowles you need to put a picture on here so we can see you but anyways how are you doing now a days."

Creating a Facebook page without photos is like eating an ear of corn without butter.  You can, but why would you? And thanks, Ashley.   Your new baby is beautiful!

my Facebook page  NOT (see below)

ADDENDUM posted on 17 Feb 2010:
Actually, the link is suspect.  Although it was created precisely according to Facebook's "Create a Profile Badge" standards, the link doesn't deliver.  Here's why.

Unless you have a Facebook account and are logged-in to your password-protected user profile, the link opens to an error page with the message:  "The page you requested was not found."  Highlighted in green and white above the error message is a Sign Up link urging the visitor to "connect and share with the people in your life."

The message is a typical corporate lie perpetrated for two purposes:

1.  Facebook is a closed community.  The link is not intended to direct your browser to my personal Facebook profile, but rather to promote the Facebook concept to outsiders, defined as those "users" who do not have a Facebook profile.  The Profile Badge link is little more than a promotional hook.

2.  If, however, you choose to purchase a Facebook commercial page, the link will bypass the page-not-found error message and go directly to the appropriate Facebook page.  No password or Facebook profile is required. 

Very little in life comes for free.  Why should it?  We in the USA are ensnared by a profit-driven corporate culture where money rules and where acts of deception in service to money are standard practice.  Why should Facebook be any different?  Why should we expect any more than deception and lies?  We have made this shared bed and must lie in it, cold and creepy as it may be. 

But, however, after all is said and done . . . .  Facebook as a social network serves a good purpose — if one is interested in the moment at hand and curious about the engines that drive it, if one is keen on staying in contact with individuals whose presence in your life is defined by the vast subset of Internet sharers, individuals who once ago crossed your path and came to mean something to you, and who now possess a Facebook profile and elect to become a name on your list of Facebook friends. 

Time is getting the best of me, even if it is an illusion.  But I won't admit to failure.  Eventually, I'll get the best of time — once I figure out how to extract it from reality and put it in its proper place beside the other symbols dangling from the droopy rod above the bedroom window.  I watch them sway on thin chains and frayed twine in the changing light behind a pane of glass.

The Cloud

I like to think....  I am standing on a cliché place called the leading edge, where I can peer into the horizon and detect significant developing trends, see the things that are likely to come.  As I've indicated, I am prone to illusion.  What I'm doing, truth be told, is searching for a starting point.  Once I get the dots down, I should be able to follow the emanating lines to create a meaningful circle.  Lord willin' and the creeks don't rise.

Dot No. 1, the origin of today's argument, signifies my attempt to educe meaning from the metaphor of The Cloud, an emerging expression of the domain of computers and computing, a thing unto itself, asexual and distended, endowed with the quantum Will to propagate and driven by a cold, emotion-shorn intelligence attuned to requirements of survival.

The Cloud exists beyond and outside any one of us, or any group of us, as an electric silicone-based collective of constantly changing computing intelligences.  I could claim that it becomes a transcendent entity, but I'm not eager for so much drama — and anyway, I'm racing ahead of the argument.  First, we should attempt to define it.

The Cloud, then, is the place where our individual computers go when they connect to the network.  It is the land beyond our local machine.

Were it only so simple.  The place where our pcs go becomes a universe of extreme complexity, difficult to chart and challenging to navigate even after the proper direction is determined.  The Cloud can be the carnival or the hydra, depending on one's inclination — either toward a positive region of ephemeral delights and productive benefits, where friends and family are available to share a moment of friendly communication, where amusements and diversions are activated in an instant with a familiar click of the little mouse, and where data and information are ready to be crafted into useful products for profit and smartly sifted knowledge for edification or enlightenment; or toward a negative space of conspiracy and paranoia, where something is sure to go awry, where nothing is as it appears to be, and where robbers lurk 'round every corner to steal one's identity or plunder one's bank accounts.

Computing astounds my sense of certitude.  Among the old saws that keep their sharp edge on the worktable here at Crow's Cottage is this one:  Nothing stays the same.  My teacher Lothar Schafer the theoretical chemist said in a lecture delivered four decades ago that The only constant is change.  I confirm through experience the elemental truth of the professor's statement, even as I wonder if everything also remains the same, as if it were only yesterday when I was twelve and puzzling over what I might do with my life after playtime and dinner.

Now that I'm done with most of the stages of life, the dark night upon me, I claim the right to change, and by doing so, to spite the gray that intrudes from all sides, threatening to drown me in infirmities.

Embrace, Run, Ossify, Dissolve

Computing and the Internet are insistent agents of change.  To attempt mastery of any aspect of the machine and the network — the systems and software that run them, the cyber streams that connect them, and The Cloud that calculates, informs, and amplifies the sum of them — demands the tossing aside of ossifying notions.  Given that personal computers and the Net are essential to the effective functioning of Crow's Cottage and its parent CornDancer, it figures that I must embrace the only constant, stay abreast of developments, and run to the beat of an unrelenting cadence — or else be swallowed up by yesterday's dissolution.

We arrive at the next node of the argument.  Here The Cloud of silicone crystals, quantum and cosmic, becomes a mysterious collective, a new manifestation of an ancient reality, the next great step forward in the liberation of consciousness.  Have I lost you?  If so, nothing beyond this point shall matter.  If not, we remain connected in the ether, able imaginatively to enter again into The Cloud and navigate to a region known by the term Cloud Intelligence.

OK, we won't take this too seriously.  Distracted by the amber and scarlet flashes from the leaves of oak and maple that fall and tumble — just now — outside the open window next to my writing slab, and by the gathering storm with its swift clouds and thunder, and by imaginings of a god in the heavens hurling his electric bolts at discrete expressions of destiny, we wander into speculative cosmology.  Get back!  Liberation is a sterling prospect for those of us bound to something or the other.  What binds you?  In the context of the present discourse, the binding is the necessity of communication, primal and evolving, and the limits imposed upon it by the imprecise symbols of languages, the physical distance between individuals and groups, and the inability of so many members of the human family to focus and remember.

Speech is the elemental, the prerequisite.  If so, then step one of the evolving drama of liberation is written language.  Step two is the mechanical printing press.  Step three is the electric domain of computers.... Meaning that we, you and I, are living through the dawn of the third act in the trans-millennial liberation of consciousness.

Some thinkers contend that the emergence of The Cloud, and specifically the ramifications and potential of Cloud Intelligence, represent a fundamental change in personal and corporate computing.  As individuals and groups move away from the primacy of local machines and closed local networks, as they step fully into The Cloud, they relinquish exclusive ownership of the data they generate with the keyboard and mouse, giving it up to a vast and perhaps unfathomable array of data centers, server farms, and other distant manifestations of information collection and management.  The ramifications for identity, personality, and intellectual capital are profound.  The opportunities for innovation, synthesis, and collective accomplishment are equally profound.

The Bear

In The Cloud we face a centralization of power.  In The Cloud we face an architecture of participation.  So said cyber visionary David “Oso” Sasaki in a presentation at the ARS Electronica Symposium 2009 in early September at Linz, Austria.  By pointing to polar opposites, David reminds us that the only constant wields a double edge when it springs, or lumbers into action.

By connecting to The Cloud, each of us participates in the creation of a Cloud Intelligence, which is the twenty first century's unique expression of an ancient concept known to some as the Universal Mind.  "What do we mean by Cloud Intelligence?" David asks.  "What is collective intelligence in the era of cloud computing?  I think we get the basis of it.  It's that we're smart, and that we're smarter together.  And that if you can just get all of our information together in one spot, it can be used in ways that it's never been used before."

Thanks, David "Oso" Sasaki.  Your El Oso web astounds and inspires me.  Here at the Crow's Cottage laboratory, it becomes a model for the only constant.

To Be Social

Seldom do I venture forth into the cold cruel world the warm welcoming world without a sense of purpose, and today's text for the Journal for the Corvus can harbor no exception.  It represents a decision to move ahead into regions not well known to me.  From the far reaches of obscurity, on a wing and a prayer, I choose to enter XFN, the XHTML Friends Network, as an expression of a commitment to change, and more specifically as a motor to propel entry into the social media aspects of The Cloud.  It is necessary to avoid further dissolution. It is one step of what I pray shall be many.

Facebook, Twitter, Google, Flicker, Picasa, Brightkite, Ning, Dopplr....  Are these viable channels to community?  My friend Ron Fritze wrote last week that Facebook appears as ephemera to him, but allows long-lost contacts to reignite.  Students who sat in my classes several years ago announce they have "added you as a friend on Facebook...."  Just tonight Jenny sent my first Twitter invitation.  My friend Joseph Dempsey marched into the Facebook universe some time ago as a way to extend his already sizeable personal network.

For me, XFN appeared as a nugget of esoterica, akin to a particle in the nucleus, or a pointer to a seldom explored hollow in the karst.  I found the nugget embedded in XHTML code during deep study of the design principles offered by the cascading style sheet, a tool I adopted some years ago, but one I'd never sought to master until this autumnal season.  The nugget was attached to a link.  Curious, I followed it.

Having decided to break free of deprecated principles and outmoded approaches, I discovered an unexpected bonus at the end of a minimalist line of code:
profile="http://gmpg.org/xfn/11"

A model of simplicity and precision, XFN enters The Cloud beneath the surface of what one sees on first glance.  Experimental and sparse, XFN makes good sense in its context, but like a principle taught by an adept from a mystery school, it offers the aspirant only a clue.  How might we draw sensible conclusions about reality from archetypal symbols, which are tossed like I Ching sticks on the hardwood floor of the study, or onto the unseen pathways of the electric ether?  XFN's fundamental approach to defining human relationships of the kind engendered by links in The Cloud may be another spark of a ruling passion, a new dot on the axis where science and art cross paths, merge, synthesize. 

So I joined.  Just now.  And we shall see.

Broken up by creations as upon a prism, the Mind-Light of Deity becomes manifest as an infinite order of separate and specialized intelligences.  Thus upon the surface of the sea of Universal Mind appear numberless foci, each controlling a definite phase of cosmic activity.  The gods are such foci; so are men, but to a more limited degree.  The sum of all these individual minds is the one Universal Mind, so that in the last analysis gods, men, and worlds are each fragments of the whole.  The philosophers of all ages have realized that the achievement of perfect wisdom lies in the elevation of the power of comprehension to that state where it is able to grasp the relations of the parts of existence to the sum of existence, which the Buddhists designate the Self.

— Manley P. Hall, 1929
 
Lectures on Ancient Philosophy
(New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher/Penguin, 2005), 28.

Liberty is squeezed by widespread fear of material loss, by the perception that one man's deviation from sameness will somehow steal another man's personal treasure.  Ever needful of pliant and serviceable minions to preserve and defend their wealth, the elites convince the masses of the primacy of the personal balance sheet and the need to defend the bottom line from assaults on all sides.  As the earth movers and sky cranes snarl and grind through the psyche, the nation crawls toward a carved-out plateau of clonish uniformity.

Fat Tax and Deadly Sin

In North Carolina, health insurance administrators in charge of policies for state employees are floating the idea of a "fat tax," a premium surcharge for workers who are deemed to be obese by weights, measurements, and calculations defined under standards of the Body Mass Index.  The physical unfortunates who cross the threshold into fatness are branded as social miscreants — and for their Deadly Sin, they must pay a higher cost to retain the benefits of a health care plan.

Here at Crow's Cottage, where the inhabitants are as lean or as husky as we are wont to be, and where the issues of health care are solved by either the socialized medicine of the Veterans Administration or the group policies of a great university, we ask:  Why?  Why a fat tax?

On surface the surcharge is justified by perceived burdens that the fat among us bring to bear on the limited resources and rising costs of health care.  The managers of insurance plans will show us statistics to prove their allegations against "workers who are obese."  These fat workers — and we are workers, each and all, bound to the system that sustains us — get sick or suffer debilitating injuries solely on basis of their obesity.  Why should those of us who possess the discipline and Will to manage our body weight have to pay higher premiums because of the sloth and gluttony of our fat fellows?

"We need a healthy workforce in our state," a health care program director in Charlotte said in favor of the fat tax.

One implication:  The pain of higher premiums will impose self-discipline, driving the fat folk away from the banquet table and the fast-food carryout window.  They will turn dutifully toward the diet platter and the walking trail, embracing spartan, sensible home cooking and purposeful exercise for all.

Another implication:  By forcing the obese to pay a surcharge, insurance managers will rightfully bestow financial rewards upon the more worthy thin women and men, whose lean frames demonstrate their superior suitability as productive members of the worker legions, in recognition of their acceptable social behavior, which surely contributes more to the Common Good than any fat person could manage to contribute on their best day.

In this scenario, those fortunates who overcome their obesity to earn the better rate will owe their success to greed, which the capitalists proclaim is a worthy sin.  My O My.  How shrewdly do these masters of the purse parse the traditions of our Western Civilization to justify their hunger for more and more accumulation.  They purport that greed fuels their long drive to success, and that without it, they would be little more than paupers, banished from the counting house to beg for morsels on the public square.

The Supposed Utility of Greed

Saint Thomas Aquinas gave the world a list of 7 Deadly Sins about 750 years ago, although he attributed the list to earlier sources in the Holy See.  The list has become a source of popular allusion, with one or more of its members likely to surface when the conversation, or the debate, turns to vices and the morals designed to govern them.  The 7 are:

• pride
• envy
• anger
• sloth
• greed
• gluttony
• lust

We arrive at a paradox, a possible source of a revealed truth, the kind of shifty perception that underpins sound spiritual systems and confounds dogma.  If obesity is a deadly sin caused by sloth and gluttony, then how can greed based on anger and pride be put forth as the appropriate governor?  How can the prospect of losing or saving money become the acceptable antidote to body fat?  How can an insurance fund manager in a moral universe justify punishing the fund's members because of a perceived moral failure?

To contend that the fat tax didn't emerge from the court of moral judgment is the first fallacy.  We have to ask:  Why are these people fat?  When we demand a surcharge from the obese members of the group, the answer must be:  They are fat because of personal fault.  By implication, they can overcome their fault by choosing to be thin.  We as a group are better off if our fat members become thin.  Therefore, we shall motivate them to change their costly ways by enforcing a financial penalty and branding them as insurance premium losers.

Following the logic of the fat tax, we can identify other personal behaviors that may warrant a surcharge to protect group health care premiums from loss.  It is detrimental to the healthy maintenance of the work force if its members become too thin — anorexia, bulimia — or if its members imbibe too heartily of intoxicating spirits — liver disease, dementia, violent car crashes — or if its members produce too many children — maternity care, birth defects, post partum depression — or if its members engage in loose and wanton sex — crabs, herpes, hepatitis — yuck! — or if in any measurable way its members stray from the emerging, narrowing definition of the ideal worker minion.

How, then, does a fat tax squeeze liberty?  Are we not free to eat to our heart's content as long as we are willing to pay the price?  Doesn't liberty come to us at a cost?  Why should I, the thin man, pay for the excesses of the fat man?

Liberty in the USA is a constitutional right, a blood relative of freedom.  It confers the right to enjoy on equal and positive footing the fundamental social, political, and economic benefits afforded to every citizen. To have liberty, one must be free of arbitrary control.

A fat tax on health care benefits is arbitrary.  It is designed to control personal behavior.  It discriminates against law abiding citizens by employing a pseudo-scientific standard, the Body Mass Index, as the determining factor in whether or not to impose a financial burden on a specific class of citizens.

On the same day we learned of North Carolina's plans to dun the obese, we noticed another public squabble related to body weight.  "Image of ultra-thin Ralph Lauren model sparks outrage," the headline shouted.  In the context of this battle, too thin is way worse than too fat.  "The focus on women's appearance has got out of hand," a spokeswoman committed to the truth said.  "No one really has perfect skin, perfect hair and a perfect figure, but women and young girls increasingly feel that nothing less than thin and perfect will do."

Cut adrift in a sea of restriction where fear of loss rules the night, we as a people are awash in mixed messages and contradictory standards.  Anything goes over there and nothing but corporate rule is permissible in here.  If you don't like it, then quit.  A hundred others are waiting in the wings for their chance at your wages.

In politics, personality matters as much as policy. But personality and image are useful merely for the surface. The policies initiated, propagated, and enforced by the vast system erected to prop-up the personalities are more lasting and reach deeper, more broadly than the persons who draft and implement them. So?

Austere and Accountable

What policies matter here in the study of Crow's Cottage?   The management and distribution of health care. The wages, working conditions, and benefits afforded to labor. The imposition of laws and regulations — but that one, the unnecessary third, is an appendage, a vague statement, useless.

I meant to address justice and balance, the blind woman and her scales, but familiar things suddenly become strange. You look at something you've seen ten thousand times, but this time it doesn't make sense, and you've got to ponder it for a moment before you can rediscover the context, the relationship, the familiar meaning. You thought it was ten when the clock showed midnight, almost, in the mystery of the twenty-third hour. Curious.

As for politics, it would be useful to compile and critique the pieces of jargon that clutter dialogue and debate, the rhetoric and the rant. Like rockets, hot chunks of phosphorous, smoky dry ice. Austerity and accountability.

The crumbling of capitalism from conspicuous abuse of its potential for personal wealth is something you can see through, like the view through holes in a wall, like the dark other side of wretched gaps in a coat of battered armor. The distance between wealth and poverty extends to points on a chart so distant from one another as to be untraversable. What a mouthful. They're so rich they're able to banish the revolutionary from contact with the moveable masses.  They put him in jail 'till the opportunity passes.

Health care and labor. Those are the essentials.  The disaffected elites — fat cats in the dust of old saws — will fight fiercely to hold their advantage, the one they've wrangled from government, otherwise identified as the corporate state.

A Chicken in Every Pot

How can we honestly contend that the wealth they've accumulated is not rightly theirs to keep? The contention, ok, we can make it, even under the naked sun — as long as we don't try to retroactively seize the riches won under law, no matter how unfair or skewed be the system that allowed it. Let the elites and their wannabes gather up their piles of gold, the keys to their multiple swollen accounts, and carry them securely to their warm and vested hidey holes.  Let them count their riches, be self satisfied and justified.

Instead of retribution, we ought to realign the grid, but how? How to change the way opportunity and the ability to accumulate are apportioned? How to take away the greed-fed hoard before it is claimed by the egoist and the miser? And, in the taking away, how best to ensure that the hoard is fairly distributed?

The bourgeois are replaced by the nomenklatura are replaced by the million millionaires. The manager supersedes the commissar. The wretched of the earth become the citizens, the peasant the consumer.  Balance appears to be unattainable.

What is the least acceptable standard to establish and secure minimums and maximums? At what definable point does personal and corporate wealth transcend the ability of society to ensure the bottom line? One individual's excess accumulation can account for the impoverishment of hundreds, thousands. Why can we pretend that the excess is acceptable in the sacrosanct name of capitalism? Can we say with conviction, Enough is enough! — and then agree on a measurable definition of how much is enough?

In the answers will be found the formula for an equitable distribution of the means of production and its surplus.

Judgment, scarlet apples, golden honey.... They will tell us what we have done to deserve our fate. Because I live under and in accordance with both divine and temporal law, I should not fear Justice, but fear only the off-chance of encountering mis-justice. My prayers and incantations, my application of the rules of natural law, shall protect me from that cruel fate.

By existing on the surface, by reacting moment-by-moment to the randomness of the path, by striving for the carrot at eye level— thus do the mass of The Others bring guilt and punishment to bear on us all.  I wish for their welfare, but the wishes are tempered by knowledge of the oft desperate Human Condition. 

ep writes:  "The interpretative function is the highest honour of the arts, and because it is so we find that a sort of hyper-scientific precision is the touch-stone and assay of the artist's power, of his honour, his authenticity.  Constantly he must distinguish between the shades and the degrees of the ineffable."

If this moment is all we have.... If this moment is the meaning of be here now....  Then enough of the moment is right with the universe to make it bearable on the white cliffs overlooking the vale of tears. I can go there, to the high land of the metaphor, at will, and stand on the edge of the cliff in a balmy breeze, escaping for awhile the fray in the vale below. I can call upon comforting memories to soothe the dull pain of the mundane.

In the Eye Is the Lie.

Oft it's what you don't record with these dots and strokes that gives flavor to the thoughts and impressions you push across the page.  It's a fine day.  The wind chimes are singing loud, the air is cool, the sky bright and blue.  You pay what you must to survive.

Can I rely on the Spirit of the Flame to ward off persistent evil, so furtive in the shadows?  I look up to the TV screen, see the smiling, self-assured boy-man, his paycheck fattened by success in the ratings game, and I realize he cannot offer an ingredient to strengthen the formula.  I don't need him.  He is another cutie pie in a niche on the chattering midway.  Like the others of his ilk and kin, he is eager to be seen.  How long can we look at him before perceiving the inevitable fallacy of the argument?  How quickly doth the director cut away.  He fades, disappears.  But a cut is not a fade, and the abrupt is not the subtle.  Each passing season brings more of the imprecision.  Even if I can't nail down the definition, even if the words become a babble, I can tell you:  Don't look the demon in the eye.  Don't sing praises to the truth.  They lie.  They lie.  They lie.

Are we as a nation in an economic crisis the likes of which we haven't seen since the Great Depression of the nineteen thirties? "We are flirting with the largest one-day decline in the history of Wall Street," the television commentator proclaims.  So?  Will there be bread lines, hoboes, the rise of neofascism? Thus saith the Lesson of the Past.  Shall the inner-city minions, the dispossessed believers, the economically hopeless raise the riot and destroy their ghetto?  Thus saith the Moment at Hand.&

Minus 777.68

If the negative numbers flashing on the screen mean anything, the New York Stock Exchange is crashing before our eyes.  The prophets of doom are shouting:  "Be afraid."  The numbers fall, they rise — minus seven hundred eleven, minus six hundred ninety one.  Will I not have my bread and butter?  Will my true love not be paid?  Will the Automated Teller Machine reject my request for one hundred fifty dollars?

The newly wealthy, strivers for success and power, purveyors of paper wealth, of gain without labor — they are the ones sweating bullets, and the urgent voices of the handsomely paid chattering class do their bidding with rat-a-tat reports of economic meltdown, rampaging prices, the loss of lines of credit.  The MasterCard, dead and rejected.  The ones doing the work, women and men without names, the great American workers, are exalted by the chatterers with a fragmented and hollow paean, but THEY are too busy in their chains on the factory floors, the assembly lines, the boiler rooms and repair shops, the check-out stands and warehouse docks, and on the highways behind the wheel of a big rig, in locks and dams and antechambers, in fiery kitchens and chilled meat lockers, in motel room beds and casino cages, in high-rise cubicles and manic slaughterhouses, slapping down the asphalt and the fertilizers and the soap— THEY are too consumed by acts of survival to pay attention to the arcane movements of the stock tote board.  THEY watch the spinning wheels at the gas pump, and count a wad of cash, and calculate the sum of the hourly wage.  The profit margin and the interest rate are somebody else's babies.

The congresspersons and senators wring their hands in the blood of their losses, rue the dwindling status of their imagined riches, their power, and devise a cagey plan to rescue their greed.  On the compound and in the station-house, the stockpile of bullets and bludgeons is sufficient and ripe.  The riot squad are restless, fattened, and assured of their jobs.  It is minus 777.68 at fifteen past the bell.  The final number is recorded as three lucky sevens all in a row.

Already I lost the word. It was there, but I looked up, saw a piece of chocolate, let the word slip away. I was thinking about being intentionally outrageous, provocative — thinking about the value of self-promotion, standing it against the risk of cruel judgment from those who have no right to judge, but name them. Don't we, each of us, hold the right to judge any other fellow traveler we choose? I come up against a wall. How strong is the shield?

Squeezed between politics and poetry, athletic contests and the literary arts, a good movie and a passage from a finely crafted novel....  At the core is the contest for attention between the electronic universe and the limitless frontier of the printed page.  How much can be gained by navigating a sea of distraction?

Young men roll on the muddy ground, joyous o'er the goal just scored. In Olympia, the body is majesty, movement, strength. But I cannot alter the form for the masses, the possibility of their visits here, now that I've decided to share. The potential for harsh judgment must not be allowed to alter the voice I presume to assume. Chicken for breakfast.

I enhance the space in the sanctuary with images, symbols, icons.  They remind me of the richness of experience, of changes in mores and fashion, of the interplay of tragedy and comedy, work and leisure, seriousness and frivolity — the list of dualities could span hundreds of lines in the attempt to encapsulate life and life only.

This is the way is should be, the way it should be on the course of rehabilitation and restoration.

If you know the story, why read, or listen, or watch? For the pleasure and edification of the Spirit and the Mind, the exercise of the Imagination. Electronic bubbles, natural Salamander. The Spirit of the Flame and eye candy. The gran' dawg, Sergeant Buck, juicy fruit. Denuded magazines, thin and cramped. The band plays. Bang the drums. Flash the logo. (the meltdown) I see the languid gull over the boardwalk. They sure can sell the chicken. Present it to you like edible hand puppets.

They want us to make sense. They guy said these women walking on the green grass found hope, purpose, and direction for their lives. They found it here, he said, pointing to a web address on the TV screen.