three states of being
1. personal
the excuse is, the things I write here are what I generally don't talk about in day-to-day conversation. consequently, when I have day-to-day conversations in which I can talk about the things that I would write here, they don't get written. ergo, silence; but in a blessed & happy kind of way.
2. civilizational
if there is one thing that history can teach, it's proper humility. we operate on a timescale of necessary myopia. our conscious present is lived in the narrow straits of the hourglass's trickle, and we feel every grain of sand -- every minute -- in its steady rush through and around us. but the networks & webs we weave around us, as a society -- as a civilization -- operate to another rhythm altogether. it's as if each of our individual hourglasses were themselves but grains of sand, rushing though the narrow straits of some tremendous hourglass, whose great trickle we can only hope to glimpse as we tumble haphazardly through time.
so history gives us an intimation of this smallness. it tells us of ancient sumer, babylon, the vikings, mayans, incans, romans -- all the peoples who thought their world was the only way the world could be, and that it would last forever -- as we, too, think. civilizations are the great States of Being: seemingly incontestable, seemingly ineradicable. but history also shows that civilizations do fall, that as much as the present seems a triumphant conclusion of the past, and stretches endlessly on into the future, we are anything but inevitable. let alone invincible.
also that when we fall, it might even will probably be our own fault.
and this leads to a strange feeling, on occasion, when I walk down a street and watch people yammering into their mobile phones, eating croissants in the english sunshine, bending to inspect the morning's marketplace produce, flicking open the newspaper to see that gordon brown is the new prime minister of England -- I'm assailed by a shudder of evanescence, and how strange it is to be anything at all ...
3. geographical
the next few months will be especially energetic. here is a map of places I might be from now until october.
