See, this kind of thing is why I'm glad I'm not on Facebook anymore. Kerri Sackville has just blogged about how she feels that the idea of gratitude has changed somewhat. How with the advent of social media it's become something not so much personal and sensory and private as it's now something that you share in your status update. Gratitude as your brand. How practising gratitude is fine and dandy and yet it's no cure-all. It doesn't make a jot of difference to the badness of the bad things that happen to us.
And neither should it.
I understand the frustration about commodification. Hell, I feel like we've been commodified to within an inch of our genitals, and so why wouldn't even sharing things that are beautiful start to feel rather forced, strained, constrained into boxes and memes, to be packed up, shared, as an alternative to community? Gratitude as social cachet. Gratitude as a way of me putting a unit of blip out there in order to gain from you a unit of blip in return. Everything turned into a bit of exchange.
You know, I think exchange is a great thing. It's just that in this current paradigm we live in, everything gets flattened down into the same size, for the spreadsheet. It's not meant to be like that.
Oh, I don't know. All of this - the ridiculous extent to which we live online, the commodification of everything, the refusal of so many to buck the system but instead to ride that status quo as hard as possible to the very end, frustrates the hell out of me. Because while it's frustrating, I understand that of course people are going to ride it for as long as it's there. They're after all legitimately scared of losing what they have, and the mortgage has to be paid and the kids schooled.
But that's just survival. It's not flourishing.
If I had to propel myself into the future and think about the one thing that I'm going to be most grateful for when we have (hopefully) come to a better place of doing things differently, it will be when we have finally and truly understood how completely infiltrated we are by the machinations of this global economic system. I mean, I hate money, really. I find it boring and constraining. It flies through my fingers like water, most likely because I don't have enough of it to meet my needs but also I like to think that I do that because I now understand that that is how money is meant to be. It's mean to be living, moving, a greasing of our parts so they move better together. Not something that people hoard.
The only thing I hate more than money is the system that has grown up around it. We are ruled truly by it. I don't even think a whole lot of us even realise the extent of it. Maybe we're starting to. But the GFC was seven years ago, and perhaps we're happy to settle back into complacency again, even while we notice that things are terribly wrong.
Last night I watched George Megalagenis's rather good two-parter on the ABC, called Making Australia Great. It talked a lot with politicians past about different facets of Australia and our history, covering such topics as Melbourne's glory years as the richest city in the world in the late 1800s, through to how we handled the global financial crisis in 2008.
The elephant remaining in the discussion room though was the same one that is in all mainstream media rooms when we discuss the future and how we're going to get there. It is that we cannot go on as we are, that the changes required to move forward will be far bigger than we can imagine ... but perhaps far easier once we gather our loins to make the changes. To do so will entail facing down the biggest powerbrokers in the world. That's all.
The room elephant is that a global debt-based monetary system is not only not going to be able to continue, but that the longer it does the more it is going to kill the earth you are living on and it's going to kill you too. A debt-based system means that it is a mug's game before the horse is even out of the box. For the system to keep upright, it has to keep growing, and growing, and growing. The same way cancer does. Which translates out into you being required to be a consumer. Keep consuming, keep buying stuff. Keep doing it, or we'll go under.
Consumption in itself isn't bad. It is when it is attached to a finite world of resources, where more and more humans are living, and more and more want the lifestyle you and I happen to be living right now. It's not sustainable. It's not possible. Not without change.
The Catholics have got a whole lot of things wrong with their particular system, but I'll say this about them - they cried out about interest from the rooftops for a long time. They called it usury, and they weren't the only ones to warn what could happen if such a concept was introduced. Well, it was, centuries before you were born. It infects your life in a way that you possibly cannot even begin to imagine. But it does. Look into it. Go delving into surely what is one of the most tedious and eye-glazing of subjects, economics. I can't bear to go too far into it because not only does it make my brain switch off, but it's not possible because it's too complex for any of us to really have our heads around. Looking into it, I have the sour taste of disgust in seeing how the complexity that surrounds our current global financial system has come about partly because the mugs, the workers who have been had from the start, who have jobs within this current economic system, are trying desperately to make ways and roads through something that is corrupt at its very heart. In order for them to do so, they must become corrupt themselves. And in the process they have destroyed the lives of people who were never going to be able to get their heads around the whole mass of worms to start off with.
And so when I think about gratitude (remember how I started this rave talking about gratitude? How did I get from there to here?) But when I think about gratitude, I can't think about a higher pinnacle that I would ever be able to stand upon than that of looking back over decades and seeing a gradual, growing golden onrush of people who understand that the way we do stuff now has its own built-in algorithm. That algorithm means that so much of what you do that is innocent is done at the expense of others. An understanding of that will switch us onto the idea that it actually doesn't need to be like this.
It doesn't need to be like this.
It doesn't need to be like this.
It doesn't.
That would really be the heights of gratitude for me, if that's how history panned out looking back in 40 years' time. It would mean that the kind of forward-thinking positivity required would have stemmed from a growing up, a refusal to hide from what scares us in a fluffy New Age insistence on everything being hunky dorey. It would mean that the people would have insisted on a rewrite of a badly decomposed story.
And that would mean that the real determinant that makes a country and a people great would have been achieved ~ that the people knew that they were worthy of being far more than consumers and mugs. That's empowerment. That's vision. That's flourishing.
Showing posts with label history. Show all posts
Showing posts with label history. Show all posts
The ratio of landline callers who I know versus callers who want something while telling me they don't is approximately 1:9 at this stage.
~
Whilst I haven't yet read Hannah Kent's Burial Rites, I plan to. Reading her piece about how she came to write it was like smoking crack for any "I can just about write short stories but a novel would kill me" writer.
I don't agree with those writers who say that reading writers write about writing is a useless enterprise. Of course it's procrastination - an extremely valid, 99% sugar-free guiltless form of it. It's also encouraging, enlightening and entertaining.
~
I have been reading up a little on my Great Great Grandmother, Jane. She was born in Tasmania and moved to Victoria at some point in time where she married Jean Brehaut, who had also moved to Victoria from his homeland of St Peter Port in Guernsey in the Channel Islands. Jane cuts a bit of a tragic figure in my family tree, dying at the age of 43 after a life where she lost a child in infancy, then her five year old daughter and husband in the same year, and then finally herself to the bottle if the rumours are true.
I can hear that voice in my head. Hmm, why don't you research this? You could do her justice by writing her story, help her bones settle. Why don't you just explore a little bit - say, for example, trying to find out a little of what Hobart was like in the 1840s when she was born?
~
I finished a short story the other day. Honestly, my days are very strange. But I confess I do like their irregularity, when it's not stressing me off my dial. I dislike being beholden to a clock that always runs too fast when I want it to run slow and too slow when I want it to speed. I like working odd hours here and there. The lack of work part isn't so great in terms of stress, but it has given me time to keep on with researching Liminal, and it has given me time to write. And I simply can't explain in words how much better typing my own words are compared to transcribing someone else's. A world of difference. A very vast one.
I struggle to know how to end my stories. They always start off with a bang - that lovely feeling of a lens shifting into view that comes sometimes from bunches thoughts and ideas and impressions and pictures rolling around in my head - often from in the shower. One takes hold and, "Ooh, that'd be a good idea for a story." And so off I roll. But then, as is evidenced by the files on my computer and the pieces of paper floating around in my life, often they fizzle out.
And so this time with a stab of nervousness I decided to stick with writing this one. The fact that it was 10.30pm when I started felt rather impractical and could have been an excuse to not do it if I was less clued into the wiliness of procrastination, but what can you do?
And so I wrote it for a couple of hours and then finished it and went to bed and then I slept and then I got up and wrote some more and I actually truly ruly think that it is finished. It feels finished.
~
I told my mum when she came to visit yesterday that I have written a short story that I hope to send to The Big Issue for its annual fiction edition, and that she needs to be forewarned that if they publish it it contains the words "fuck" and "cunt".
She didn't bat an eye. I guess she's had a bit of time to get used to me.
I take so much delight in being able to legitimately say the words "fuck" and "cunt" to my mother that it's really a wonder that I am not 14, but 43. I have come to the conclusion that there is a part of me that will always be 14. Perhaps we contain within us all of the people that we have been in all of the years that we have lived, like complicated trees.
~
Whilst I haven't yet read Hannah Kent's Burial Rites, I plan to. Reading her piece about how she came to write it was like smoking crack for any "I can just about write short stories but a novel would kill me" writer.
I don't agree with those writers who say that reading writers write about writing is a useless enterprise. Of course it's procrastination - an extremely valid, 99% sugar-free guiltless form of it. It's also encouraging, enlightening and entertaining.
~
I have been reading up a little on my Great Great Grandmother, Jane. She was born in Tasmania and moved to Victoria at some point in time where she married Jean Brehaut, who had also moved to Victoria from his homeland of St Peter Port in Guernsey in the Channel Islands. Jane cuts a bit of a tragic figure in my family tree, dying at the age of 43 after a life where she lost a child in infancy, then her five year old daughter and husband in the same year, and then finally herself to the bottle if the rumours are true.
I can hear that voice in my head. Hmm, why don't you research this? You could do her justice by writing her story, help her bones settle. Why don't you just explore a little bit - say, for example, trying to find out a little of what Hobart was like in the 1840s when she was born?
~
I finished a short story the other day. Honestly, my days are very strange. But I confess I do like their irregularity, when it's not stressing me off my dial. I dislike being beholden to a clock that always runs too fast when I want it to run slow and too slow when I want it to speed. I like working odd hours here and there. The lack of work part isn't so great in terms of stress, but it has given me time to keep on with researching Liminal, and it has given me time to write. And I simply can't explain in words how much better typing my own words are compared to transcribing someone else's. A world of difference. A very vast one.
I struggle to know how to end my stories. They always start off with a bang - that lovely feeling of a lens shifting into view that comes sometimes from bunches thoughts and ideas and impressions and pictures rolling around in my head - often from in the shower. One takes hold and, "Ooh, that'd be a good idea for a story." And so off I roll. But then, as is evidenced by the files on my computer and the pieces of paper floating around in my life, often they fizzle out.
And so this time with a stab of nervousness I decided to stick with writing this one. The fact that it was 10.30pm when I started felt rather impractical and could have been an excuse to not do it if I was less clued into the wiliness of procrastination, but what can you do?
And so I wrote it for a couple of hours and then finished it and went to bed and then I slept and then I got up and wrote some more and I actually truly ruly think that it is finished. It feels finished.
~
I told my mum when she came to visit yesterday that I have written a short story that I hope to send to The Big Issue for its annual fiction edition, and that she needs to be forewarned that if they publish it it contains the words "fuck" and "cunt".
She didn't bat an eye. I guess she's had a bit of time to get used to me.
I take so much delight in being able to legitimately say the words "fuck" and "cunt" to my mother that it's really a wonder that I am not 14, but 43. I have come to the conclusion that there is a part of me that will always be 14. Perhaps we contain within us all of the people that we have been in all of the years that we have lived, like complicated trees.
I forgot all about this ad. My partner reminded me of it this morning at 6 am :) What I want to know is, what's going down a waterslide got to do with anything? Apparently people who are keeping up with the Commodore like watersliding. Of all females who are watersliding at any given moment, going by advertisements an enormous proportion of them will also have their periods at the same time. This will be demonstrated to you later via safe blue chalk and a glass and a piece of chalk and Mrs Marsh.
I will, for the term of my future menstrual history, forever buy the feminine hygiene products from the company that dares to show its product demonstrated with something red and a bit clotty.
But I digress.
Sixty-four kilobytes of memory the Commodore 64 had. Woohoo!!! Not really too hard to keep up with, I guess. I remember playing "Worms" on the computer in my Grade 6 class at lunchtime. Sort of like Pong ; lots of black screen with green graphics that consisted of ... well, lines, really, that grew like worms. Your goal if you chose to accept it was to keep moving that growing worm all round the screen without running into any other part of yourself. High-tech stuff, indeed. Or at least it felt like it at the time :)
I will, for the term of my future menstrual history, forever buy the feminine hygiene products from the company that dares to show its product demonstrated with something red and a bit clotty.
But I digress.
Sixty-four kilobytes of memory the Commodore 64 had. Woohoo!!! Not really too hard to keep up with, I guess. I remember playing "Worms" on the computer in my Grade 6 class at lunchtime. Sort of like Pong ; lots of black screen with green graphics that consisted of ... well, lines, really, that grew like worms. Your goal if you chose to accept it was to keep moving that growing worm all round the screen without running into any other part of yourself. High-tech stuff, indeed. Or at least it felt like it at the time :)
Susie's place is a bombsite. I have begun the anxious and tedious process of removing any trace of my existence from my previous-but-sorta-still-current abode (with a little help from some Sugar Soap and Freecycle and my boyfriend).
I think photography has a lot to answer for. The stuff I'm putting on Freecycle, like the old rocking chair, and the pine kitchen hutch, look so much better in the photos than they do in real life that I am tempted to keep them. At the same time, I am paranoid that the people coming to get the stuff will change their minds once they get here, because this happens to me on eBay all the time. The lovely looking top or the cool-looking boots just look like more junk when they get here.
So someone is coming to pick up the old DVD player (to be sure, it's a reasonable one I suppose, a 5-stacker 5-speaker deal. But it's rather scuffed and seen better days on the top of it). More surprisingly, someone else is coming to pick up the wonky old rocking chair, and another person is coming for the grey, soulless, three-drawer filing cabinet that is the perfect and fitting place to fit your capitalistic accoutrements.
I hate stuff. I am inspired and motivated by my friend Jane who had a big cleanup recently and got rid of heaps of stuff and feels so much lighter for it.
Ahhh ... stuff. Bloody stuff. I hate stuff, and I don't even have that much compared to some other people. But still, I feel weighed down even by what I do have. The stuff that I run my eye over and it feels like the dead zone 'cause it's stuff I don't use and I don't want. But I hold on to it out of guilt. Throwing stuff out into the rubbish makes me feel so bloody guilty.
Yet there is gonna be a tip run here. It's gonna contain the stuff that's so dead zone that it's in cardboard boxes in the cupboard, along with an old HP printer/scanner/copier that even Freecycle don't want. Oh, the guilt of making a tip run, of contributing to the Plastic Island in the middle of the ocean. The tip run will at this stage contain a cardboard box filled wiht the following items: old 33 records; a glass bong; a bunch of tapes I sent away for in my fundy Xtian days, awful things with titles like "Last Days Chronicles - Part 8: Rome" and tapes from Presbyterian churches in the States, and things from places called Grace to You and Firefighters for Christ and now, lo, though I do be a sinner hellbound I feel lighter already that that stuff is in the box marked "Tip".
So I am here surrounded by bits and pieces. Because we all know that moving house means it's gonna get w-a-a-a-y worse before it gets better. That's why the bench top has an old teapot and a lampshade and bits of paper and just STUFF all over it.. And I'm on my old laptop that hasn't seen any action for 9 months, and I've opened up Outlook, and now there's old reminders in there as well about things I need to delete. And I hesitate to delete, even though I have no remembrance of what is on there anyway.
But this is what I've got wondering about. It strikes me how our technological footprints are just as great as our carbon ones. But while the latter has its effects on the earth, the former has its effects on our sense of history. Has there ever been any group of people in the history of the world who have so much history documented right there in their inboxes and on the interwebs, on social networking sites? Does it make you cringe, to think of how much of you is out there online? And how much it doesn't reflect the you that you may be now?
How much of the past is best kept there? But it's emails from people I lurve that stump me when I'm going to hit the delete button. I find it very hard to delete them because they're like mementoes, reminders, snapshots of 2008 or 1995. I like reminders because my memory is like a brain-damaged fish and I can't believe how much stuff I forget.
And yet, perhaps a certain amount of forgetfullness is bliss. I like how someone somewhere said at some point that if you're not ashamed about certain things in your past that you once liked, then you haven't been growing enough. But does that mean we want to be reminded? Like, I forget how, for example, apparently going to bingo was something I did regularly enough back in 1990 that I put it in my address book. I'm so embarrassed. And yet here I am writing about it online. So that address book is in the rubbish bin. And yet I liked being reminded of how my friend moved house on four different occasioins in the time I had that address book. That's something I like remembering.
But is it something I need to? And I wonder this too: do those people whose emails I want to keep even want me to keep them? So much documentation in paragraph form and sometimes I wonder if leaving stuff in the deep misty ether isn't an entirely sexier way to look at history.
Gotta fly. Someone has agreed to take the filing cabinet wth the Hawthorn stickers all over it. I need to empty it before they do.
I think photography has a lot to answer for. The stuff I'm putting on Freecycle, like the old rocking chair, and the pine kitchen hutch, look so much better in the photos than they do in real life that I am tempted to keep them. At the same time, I am paranoid that the people coming to get the stuff will change their minds once they get here, because this happens to me on eBay all the time. The lovely looking top or the cool-looking boots just look like more junk when they get here.
So someone is coming to pick up the old DVD player (to be sure, it's a reasonable one I suppose, a 5-stacker 5-speaker deal. But it's rather scuffed and seen better days on the top of it). More surprisingly, someone else is coming to pick up the wonky old rocking chair, and another person is coming for the grey, soulless, three-drawer filing cabinet that is the perfect and fitting place to fit your capitalistic accoutrements.
I hate stuff. I am inspired and motivated by my friend Jane who had a big cleanup recently and got rid of heaps of stuff and feels so much lighter for it.
Ahhh ... stuff. Bloody stuff. I hate stuff, and I don't even have that much compared to some other people. But still, I feel weighed down even by what I do have. The stuff that I run my eye over and it feels like the dead zone 'cause it's stuff I don't use and I don't want. But I hold on to it out of guilt. Throwing stuff out into the rubbish makes me feel so bloody guilty.
Yet there is gonna be a tip run here. It's gonna contain the stuff that's so dead zone that it's in cardboard boxes in the cupboard, along with an old HP printer/scanner/copier that even Freecycle don't want. Oh, the guilt of making a tip run, of contributing to the Plastic Island in the middle of the ocean. The tip run will at this stage contain a cardboard box filled wiht the following items: old 33 records; a glass bong; a bunch of tapes I sent away for in my fundy Xtian days, awful things with titles like "Last Days Chronicles - Part 8: Rome" and tapes from Presbyterian churches in the States, and things from places called Grace to You and Firefighters for Christ and now, lo, though I do be a sinner hellbound I feel lighter already that that stuff is in the box marked "Tip".
So I am here surrounded by bits and pieces. Because we all know that moving house means it's gonna get w-a-a-a-y worse before it gets better. That's why the bench top has an old teapot and a lampshade and bits of paper and just STUFF all over it.. And I'm on my old laptop that hasn't seen any action for 9 months, and I've opened up Outlook, and now there's old reminders in there as well about things I need to delete. And I hesitate to delete, even though I have no remembrance of what is on there anyway.
But this is what I've got wondering about. It strikes me how our technological footprints are just as great as our carbon ones. But while the latter has its effects on the earth, the former has its effects on our sense of history. Has there ever been any group of people in the history of the world who have so much history documented right there in their inboxes and on the interwebs, on social networking sites? Does it make you cringe, to think of how much of you is out there online? And how much it doesn't reflect the you that you may be now?
How much of the past is best kept there? But it's emails from people I lurve that stump me when I'm going to hit the delete button. I find it very hard to delete them because they're like mementoes, reminders, snapshots of 2008 or 1995. I like reminders because my memory is like a brain-damaged fish and I can't believe how much stuff I forget.
And yet, perhaps a certain amount of forgetfullness is bliss. I like how someone somewhere said at some point that if you're not ashamed about certain things in your past that you once liked, then you haven't been growing enough. But does that mean we want to be reminded? Like, I forget how, for example, apparently going to bingo was something I did regularly enough back in 1990 that I put it in my address book. I'm so embarrassed. And yet here I am writing about it online. So that address book is in the rubbish bin. And yet I liked being reminded of how my friend moved house on four different occasioins in the time I had that address book. That's something I like remembering.
But is it something I need to? And I wonder this too: do those people whose emails I want to keep even want me to keep them? So much documentation in paragraph form and sometimes I wonder if leaving stuff in the deep misty ether isn't an entirely sexier way to look at history.
Gotta fly. Someone has agreed to take the filing cabinet wth the Hawthorn stickers all over it. I need to empty it before they do.
We can stuff them full of botox and stick them full of collagen. We can mummify them at the other end. But in the end, human bodies are still gonna biodegrade, aren't they? Like wood. In certain conditions, however, wood can outlast a human body; carbonised under extreme heat, it can last for millennia.
But still, everything dies. And so even if your life had been different, even if you'd died in your own bed of old age, you still wouldn't have escaped death in the end, even if you'd outrum the volcano. None of us gets to escape death, unfortunately. There are whispers from some that it's lost its sting. There are some who seem positively in denial about it (hence the whole botox thing).
I wonder how long it takes for things of stone and things of bronze to disappear? Those things stand strong across the centuries, across millennia even. In 1709, an Italian farmer sank a well and in the process hit upon a marble sculpture that existed in the town next to yours, at the time that you lived. Buried 1630 years before and forgotten. That farmer was sinking for that well exactly 300 years before me. We sure do have a lot of space between us, you and me, don't we?
I saw some marbled things from your town today, stone things and bronzed things. The space between you and me is green patina on bronze objects. The things were owned by the rich people who lived in your town. They sat today in glassed-in display cabinets in my hometown across the world. It was interesting seeing how your people lived. They were pretty cashed up by the looks, if they were the lucky ones. Not like you. I saw spoons and measuring devices and beds and frescoes. I saw busts and cooking ovens and plaster casts of a bread loaf carbonised within one of those ovens.
Those things were all interesting. But they were just stuff, in the end. What pricked my heart most of all was seeing you. But not even you. The outline of you. How strange it is that even with just an outline of your body, I know what you were trying to do on 24 August 79AD. You were trying to escape.
Some of us die without leaving behind any sort of imprint. I don't know what the imprint of your life was on the people you knew. Did you have enemies? Did someone love you? Did you yearn for someone? I bet in a million years you never would have thought you'd leave behind the kind of imprint you actually did, though, huh? This life is sure weird, especially when you view it through millennial lenses.
You didn't escape the volcano, nor your own death. I don't know if any volcanic eruptions will feature in my demise, but I guess I'm not going to survive my own life without dying either. But you know what? It seems impossible to me in some ways that I am going to die. Even though I can see it happening before my eyes in slow slow motion. I don't believe my body is going to die. But at the same time, spiritually I do not feel like death is going to be the end. Has it been the end for you?
Part 2
But still, everything dies. And so even if your life had been different, even if you'd died in your own bed of old age, you still wouldn't have escaped death in the end, even if you'd outrum the volcano. None of us gets to escape death, unfortunately. There are whispers from some that it's lost its sting. There are some who seem positively in denial about it (hence the whole botox thing).
I wonder how long it takes for things of stone and things of bronze to disappear? Those things stand strong across the centuries, across millennia even. In 1709, an Italian farmer sank a well and in the process hit upon a marble sculpture that existed in the town next to yours, at the time that you lived. Buried 1630 years before and forgotten. That farmer was sinking for that well exactly 300 years before me. We sure do have a lot of space between us, you and me, don't we?
I saw some marbled things from your town today, stone things and bronzed things. The space between you and me is green patina on bronze objects. The things were owned by the rich people who lived in your town. They sat today in glassed-in display cabinets in my hometown across the world. It was interesting seeing how your people lived. They were pretty cashed up by the looks, if they were the lucky ones. Not like you. I saw spoons and measuring devices and beds and frescoes. I saw busts and cooking ovens and plaster casts of a bread loaf carbonised within one of those ovens.
Those things were all interesting. But they were just stuff, in the end. What pricked my heart most of all was seeing you. But not even you. The outline of you. How strange it is that even with just an outline of your body, I know what you were trying to do on 24 August 79AD. You were trying to escape.
Some of us die without leaving behind any sort of imprint. I don't know what the imprint of your life was on the people you knew. Did you have enemies? Did someone love you? Did you yearn for someone? I bet in a million years you never would have thought you'd leave behind the kind of imprint you actually did, though, huh? This life is sure weird, especially when you view it through millennial lenses.
You didn't escape the volcano, nor your own death. I don't know if any volcanic eruptions will feature in my demise, but I guess I'm not going to survive my own life without dying either. But you know what? It seems impossible to me in some ways that I am going to die. Even though I can see it happening before my eyes in slow slow motion. I don't believe my body is going to die. But at the same time, spiritually I do not feel like death is going to be the end. Has it been the end for you?
Part 2
Won't Make Sense Unless You Read Part 1
I wonder, was it easier to come to terms with your own death at the time you lived? All of those gods you guys had. Did they help? Bacchus and his ilk. Victory and hers. Plastered all over the joint they were, in your time. We have different sorts of gods these days. We were invited to indulge in the worship of one of our favourites out in the gift shop after the exhibit.
There's another god we've got. A real doozie if you look at the story but the patina that's been left behind is a rather sickly sort of a green. Claimed he was a man and god at the same time, or from god. He was killed for that, amongst other things. Stories abounded at the time that he beat death, rose from the dead. That the kingdom of heaven was near to all. He was around in your era actually. Funny that.
And yet it doesn't seem to have done all that much to change the whole god concept, from where we stand here in our time. For all of his claims, two thousand years after he trod the earth the god most often represented out of the dead dry bones that have sprung up around him is still one who has about as much personality as a Bacchus marble bust. But still the whispers go on amongst people, even now.
I do wonder if it's much more difficult for us in my time to understand we are going to die. So many more baubles and trinkets to keep us living in la-la land. Things you would not believe. It would seriously boggle your mind. I watched a plane fly overhead as I drove in a car last night and either of those things would probably scare the shit out of you if you saw them out of context. So much has changed since your time. And yet, as they say, I bet so much has most likely remained the same. Human nature is still the same but sometimes it is more difficult to access what the hell we are. We are made dumb by our masses of information you see. I was able to watch today exactly what happened when the volcano erupted, you know? Your people didn't even have a word for "volcano".
It could be easy for us perhaps to presume that we are so much more enlightened than you, that you were a bit dimmer than we. Forgive us that. Our era blinds us. I suppose from your viewpoint we must seem like a bunch of informed dullwits in some ways. But you guys had running water and inside toilets and so what if you didn't have Wii or Facebook or encyclopedias or bachelor degrees? So what if you believed in a panoply of gods? We believe in a global economy. And the stuff we have made is dismantling us from each other and so how far have we really come? And in the end it's all still about the same old shit ~ power and privilege and blindness and the corrupted human nature.
Some things never change. Your doctors had instruments remarkably alike the ones we have now. They performed skull operations. They knew to boil their instruments in water afterwards and they extracted morphine from opium.
The time we live in now is strange; it's like trying to get hold of shadows and outlines in some ways. Our culture is rather a baby sort of a culture. I think yours was too, from the looks. The empire seems to do that to people. I wonder how close hope was to your life? It evades us here but many of us still hope, even if only to ourselves, that death does not have the last word.
My death looms up ahead but it's more like an outline, even though I have seen my fair share of it. I have more family members dead than alive these days. Perhaps it can never seem anything more to us than an outline. Perhaps that is partly what was so poignant about seeing yours today.
Part 3
I wonder, was it easier to come to terms with your own death at the time you lived? All of those gods you guys had. Did they help? Bacchus and his ilk. Victory and hers. Plastered all over the joint they were, in your time. We have different sorts of gods these days. We were invited to indulge in the worship of one of our favourites out in the gift shop after the exhibit.
There's another god we've got. A real doozie if you look at the story but the patina that's been left behind is a rather sickly sort of a green. Claimed he was a man and god at the same time, or from god. He was killed for that, amongst other things. Stories abounded at the time that he beat death, rose from the dead. That the kingdom of heaven was near to all. He was around in your era actually. Funny that.
And yet it doesn't seem to have done all that much to change the whole god concept, from where we stand here in our time. For all of his claims, two thousand years after he trod the earth the god most often represented out of the dead dry bones that have sprung up around him is still one who has about as much personality as a Bacchus marble bust. But still the whispers go on amongst people, even now.
I do wonder if it's much more difficult for us in my time to understand we are going to die. So many more baubles and trinkets to keep us living in la-la land. Things you would not believe. It would seriously boggle your mind. I watched a plane fly overhead as I drove in a car last night and either of those things would probably scare the shit out of you if you saw them out of context. So much has changed since your time. And yet, as they say, I bet so much has most likely remained the same. Human nature is still the same but sometimes it is more difficult to access what the hell we are. We are made dumb by our masses of information you see. I was able to watch today exactly what happened when the volcano erupted, you know? Your people didn't even have a word for "volcano".
It could be easy for us perhaps to presume that we are so much more enlightened than you, that you were a bit dimmer than we. Forgive us that. Our era blinds us. I suppose from your viewpoint we must seem like a bunch of informed dullwits in some ways. But you guys had running water and inside toilets and so what if you didn't have Wii or Facebook or encyclopedias or bachelor degrees? So what if you believed in a panoply of gods? We believe in a global economy. And the stuff we have made is dismantling us from each other and so how far have we really come? And in the end it's all still about the same old shit ~ power and privilege and blindness and the corrupted human nature.
Some things never change. Your doctors had instruments remarkably alike the ones we have now. They performed skull operations. They knew to boil their instruments in water afterwards and they extracted morphine from opium.
The time we live in now is strange; it's like trying to get hold of shadows and outlines in some ways. Our culture is rather a baby sort of a culture. I think yours was too, from the looks. The empire seems to do that to people. I wonder how close hope was to your life? It evades us here but many of us still hope, even if only to ourselves, that death does not have the last word.
My death looms up ahead but it's more like an outline, even though I have seen my fair share of it. I have more family members dead than alive these days. Perhaps it can never seem anything more to us than an outline. Perhaps that is partly what was so poignant about seeing yours today.
Part 3
Won't Make Sense Unless You Read Part 1
Part 2
The crevice that once contained your now-decomposed body had plaster poured into it by an archaologist called Guiseppe Fiorelli. This was 151 years after that farmer first sank a well and hit upon the theatre at Herculateum. The discovery of that town led to the discovery of yours. The archeologist poured in plaster and out came you and the others in all your horror. The agony on your poor faces.
I saw the woman whose tunic had ridden up her back because she was stuffing it in her mouth trying to escape the ash and the fumes. And I saw you, the outline of you. Were you a prisoner, or were you a slave? What sort of a life did you lead before you tried to escape after your owners had fled, the ones without fetters on their ankles?
That volcano, old Mount Vesuvius, has done a lot of damage over the centuries that exist between you and me, hasn't it? Did you know there are three million people living within its vicinity now? Just in the most recent hundred years, it erupted massively in 1906 and killed 100 people and buried nearby towns. The most recent one was 1944. There was a war going on then. It destroyed a few more towns (will they ever learn?) and a bunch of bomber planes to boot.
Ahhh, that war. I wonder how you would see it from your perspective? Would it have horrified you, you who lived in an era that admitted its penchant for violence more openly than ours? The people of your era watched gladiators maul unarmed men, or men attack beasts for sport. That war is probably one of the biggest things to arouse cynicism about the future of the human race in recent times. The whole Hitler thing. The atomic bomb that killed more people in a couple of drops than your volcano has done in its history.
Maybe that's the biggest difference between you and me. Our toys are so much bigger now; it would terrify you. It ups the level of mistrust. And it's not just the destructive stuff like bombs and planes and ICBMs. It's the stuff too like Facebook and computers and mobile phones and all that innocuous stuff that keeps us away from each other in the other direction. But the ICBMs add that nice little touch of paranoia to everything, don't they. A bit more big-time than your shields and bayonets. I really wish the peace message of the man-god had caught on a bit more instead of what has transpired in-between us. Perhaps next millennia.
But you know, apart from all of those things and maybe even overarching it all is this: I find it easier to talk to you as an outline than I would if you were standing in front of me. I felt the tears well up seeing your outline, but would I cry so hard at your death in person? If you stood before me with all the stupid little fucked up bits that go into making up a human, I would be tempted to fear you, dislike you, distance you in my mind and my heart. The annoying things about you. The evil things that scare me. The propensity you would have to steal and kill regardless of whether you were a prisoner or a slave or a rich free man. The ability to demonise that we all indulge in (the deeper, the less aware we are of it) to feel okay about ourselves.
Maybe because of all the bad stuff, we need the distance, it helps us see the good clearer. We can love him as the King of Pop again when he's Wacko Jacko no more. Maybe it's so painful, all this iron rubbing up against iron that in some ways we don't really see the colour of the heart of the other until it's in outline.
Part 2
The crevice that once contained your now-decomposed body had plaster poured into it by an archaologist called Guiseppe Fiorelli. This was 151 years after that farmer first sank a well and hit upon the theatre at Herculateum. The discovery of that town led to the discovery of yours. The archeologist poured in plaster and out came you and the others in all your horror. The agony on your poor faces.
I saw the woman whose tunic had ridden up her back because she was stuffing it in her mouth trying to escape the ash and the fumes. And I saw you, the outline of you. Were you a prisoner, or were you a slave? What sort of a life did you lead before you tried to escape after your owners had fled, the ones without fetters on their ankles?
That volcano, old Mount Vesuvius, has done a lot of damage over the centuries that exist between you and me, hasn't it? Did you know there are three million people living within its vicinity now? Just in the most recent hundred years, it erupted massively in 1906 and killed 100 people and buried nearby towns. The most recent one was 1944. There was a war going on then. It destroyed a few more towns (will they ever learn?) and a bunch of bomber planes to boot.
Ahhh, that war. I wonder how you would see it from your perspective? Would it have horrified you, you who lived in an era that admitted its penchant for violence more openly than ours? The people of your era watched gladiators maul unarmed men, or men attack beasts for sport. That war is probably one of the biggest things to arouse cynicism about the future of the human race in recent times. The whole Hitler thing. The atomic bomb that killed more people in a couple of drops than your volcano has done in its history.
Maybe that's the biggest difference between you and me. Our toys are so much bigger now; it would terrify you. It ups the level of mistrust. And it's not just the destructive stuff like bombs and planes and ICBMs. It's the stuff too like Facebook and computers and mobile phones and all that innocuous stuff that keeps us away from each other in the other direction. But the ICBMs add that nice little touch of paranoia to everything, don't they. A bit more big-time than your shields and bayonets. I really wish the peace message of the man-god had caught on a bit more instead of what has transpired in-between us. Perhaps next millennia.
But you know, apart from all of those things and maybe even overarching it all is this: I find it easier to talk to you as an outline than I would if you were standing in front of me. I felt the tears well up seeing your outline, but would I cry so hard at your death in person? If you stood before me with all the stupid little fucked up bits that go into making up a human, I would be tempted to fear you, dislike you, distance you in my mind and my heart. The annoying things about you. The evil things that scare me. The propensity you would have to steal and kill regardless of whether you were a prisoner or a slave or a rich free man. The ability to demonise that we all indulge in (the deeper, the less aware we are of it) to feel okay about ourselves.
Maybe because of all the bad stuff, we need the distance, it helps us see the good clearer. We can love him as the King of Pop again when he's Wacko Jacko no more. Maybe it's so painful, all this iron rubbing up against iron that in some ways we don't really see the colour of the heart of the other until it's in outline.
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