informant38
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...But of these sophisms and elenchs of merchandise I skill not...
Milton, Areopagitica

Except he had found the
standing sea-rock that even this last
Temptation breaks on; quieter than death but lovelier; peace
that quiets the desire even of praising it.

Jeffers, Meditation On Saviors


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6.2.09

Well here why not, I can't move without the jangle and thud of some kind of metaphysical whatever anyway. So here.
The World Trade Center collapses into itself, and eight years later world trade itself collapses.
Amazing continuity, really, when you think about it.
Bad news coming in like that tsunami back when.
Out around the edges of all that disaster from the sea narrative did leak the fact that those jumbo prawns everbody was munching were coming out of leveled and gone mangrove swamps at the edge of the sea there where the tsunami hit, which used to buffer the force of rogue waves, diffuse it, spread it out. But they got cut down so cheap shrimp could get to market cheaper.
Damage control evolving over time, so that things came through, things made it through. Creatures and trees and all, learning how to cope with the periodically predictable unexpected.
Something will come through this, something like a small fish, small fishes, or crabs, or anemones, barnacles, that's the idea. Evolution gnaws and gnarls and grunts and groans and then every once in a while the slate's wiped almost clean and there's so much room it's scary and for a long time no competition but the void and oblivion.
It's not going to be all right. Not for a while, maybe not for a long while, maybe not ever if your imagination can't get past something that has to be enough like you that you could slip into its shoes or inhabit its feet and go on.
Sad, pretty much, and here we were almost right there, scurrying around out on the brink of the verge of just about inventing the techniques and technologies that would have given us the possibility of living so long it might as well have been forever.
Coming into it through the tradesmen's entrance, as it were.
Still possible of course.
The other direction's got nicer views. Would you sacrifice your place on that long train of selfish gratification to get something else lifted up higher? Your grandchildren maybe.
Maybe birds, or little frogs that take off in the absence of birds and become, after a few million years of rough evolution, sentient and then some, and travel - see them with vivid green space suits and deep booming radios and pods full of the cutest little tadpoles you ever saw - travel like we keep telling ourselves we're going to, we were going to, we still might, travel - to the stars, with hope.
Can you get to the ledge where "we" are that? Is your heart that big?
It's hard for most of us - once we start toward it, it seems to recede as we advance, or we have to fall back on the local affinity group, which at the moment is awfully fractious, contentious, so nasty to each other it's to the point the "we" of simply being human is shredding apart - and maybe it's supposed to?
Can you do that one?
Because it may be all we have now.
That something will come through this, and we may affect that, cause it, aid it, care for it - that we may shape it, hold it up, let it go.

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