Books
Beneath all this insidious bookworming is something dark and large, moving in the water's green murk at the old pond. The pond of ages. Boundless. What could it be? And who would fain dare to plumb its secret?Before books and the like there was oral delivery around the campfire, all under the stars. Before that was individual dialogue with strangeness in the natural round. They weren't like us moderns those ancient ones, our ancestors. The hunters and gatherers of no fixed abode. They lived in dreams quite different from our scripted modern visions. They talked with the animals and plants and things we regard as inanimate nowadays, as just physics.Direct concourse with an unkempt Eden, its overwhelming tsunami of unforgiving immediacy. Its clear and present danger. This was the source of our codified books. The same texts we read and dream into virtual reality as we recline in the mind's prefabricated boundaries of tenuous walls, roofs and floors. Our windowless and doorless refuge from eternity's perpetual storm. Where, by a different fire, we mistake our own flickering shadows for real creatures and floral wallpaper for the great outdoors.
old pond
a frog jumps in
water's sound
Basho
Take the plunge. No electricity (matches and candles only) for 30 days. Rise and set with the sunlight. Be like the birds do. No reading or writing. Spend your time in silence. Service only the basic calls of your nature. No feasting or other sensate solaces. No childish religious refugee tricks. No cosy memory lane meanders of easy comfort. No slotting into the routine and familiar. No, these are not allowed. Turn away from all spineless distractions and, with courage, face the unknown. Nowhere to run, nowhere to hide. Thus do you engage with this perennial challenge. The wilderness.
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That is where our today culture sprang from, you see, along with its scribbled oral tales and printed and digitalised strategies for profound self-deceit and suffocating existential insulation.
Our science has killed myth, whilst myth itself was only ever a strategic veil over an immediacy of direct commune with the forces that bind our precious lives -- and Life itself -- out of dust.
Such is what swims deep in the old pond, and there are further deeps which even that fearsome entity does not dare penetrate, way down in the indigo darkness, light years below.
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winter lake
only my eyes
disturb the view
jp
Stimulus source (also see April 18, here and FB). This is a theme well worth developing, albeit playing the devil's advocate.
18-04-12
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RESPONSE TO STIMULUS SOURCE
"Don't hide your light under a bushel, John. You're being seduced by romanticism and wishful thinking. For good or ill the future is exponentially becoming digital and the internet is dedicated to absorbing all the print that ever was and converting it into instant low-cost/free access. I used to run a bookshop, so this forecast is not coming out of a vacuum. Of course, there will be a market for the expensive old delivery media of flattened and dried dead tree pulp and its inky squiggles, thread and glue, possibly a lucrative one as collectibles and antiques, at least for those that can bookworm it. But, I wouldn't bank on that." - John Potts