Jack Slaggert 

"Are you going to Scarborough Fair?
Parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme"
                         – trad. Albione Archipelago
                                      (song predates term British Isles)

“I sing to you to this soft lute, and show you all alive
The World, when every particle of dust breaths forth its joy”

“Lo a shadow of horror is risen
In Eternity! Unknowen, unprolific'
Self-enclos'd all-repelling: what Demon
Hath formed this abominable void, This soul-shudd'rng vacuum?
Some said "It is Urizen"
                                   – William Blake (1757-1826)

So you run and you run to catch up with the sun, but it's sinking
racing around to come up behind you again.
The sun is the same in a relative way but your older
Shorter of breath and one day closer to death.”
                                                 – Pink Floyd, Dark Side of the Moon;
                                                              (Mason, Waters, Wright, Gilmour) 1973

No thing is ever fully formed. Not Stars, nor Rock, nor you, nor I, nor molecule, nor us. 
All is inter-woven process. 
Time’s Arrow spiraling into an emerging iteration yet to be. 

 

 ¡Prologue!  

“…Come mister tallyman,
 tally me banana…” 
                                                              (Belafonte, Burgess, Attaway) 1955

Once upon a Time, in mid 20th Century “Latin America,” there was a widespread movement to achieve literacy amongst the mass of humanity that existed as peasants. A model of widely accessible, self-directed, open education and inquiry was implemented. This was a world changing event. Historic in scope. 

Underlying this movement’s praxis; consientizacao. In consientizacao literacy is understood as a tool to perceive one’s reality within a broad social, cultural, economic and political context, yielding the ability to take action to improve one’s situation. An Educational model that aimed to develop actionable contextual understanding. 

Within the context of systemic poverty and exploitation, an opportunity to look up from one’s work, analyze one’s life situation, and take action. To make change. To be a creative agent within the world one inhabits and improve the quality of one’s life. 

A literate peasant stands more erect; eyes not downcast. This was perceived as threat by some and much tragedy ensued as Banana Republics’ death squad gangs, in conjunction with the Dulles Brothers and Company, attempted to “disappear” and silence all suspected carriers of consientizacao; organized crime, operating from behind a wall of lucre, faux patriotism, fabricated law and neo-colonial/market  ideology.  

As consientizacao traveled North, across a matrix of frontiers, borders and badlands it was translated as “consciousness.” Hence, and therefor the expression  “consciousness raising” that was heard at civil rights organizings, anti-war teach-ins, Black Panther mentorings, women’s  gatherings and environmental meetings. Attempts to increase awareness of a context and to take action to improve an unjust situation.

Concurrently, another usage of “consciousness” prevalent in the English-speaking world was as what Aldous Huxley explored in “The Doors of Perception.” Add some Soulful Rock-n-Roll Love songs to the mix;  base line, backbeat, 3,4 … North American Culture, the  “American experience” irrevocably altered.

TV upgraded to color. The winds of change were blowing.  Chuck Berry duck-walkin’ between the lines. The March to Montgomery. Allen Ginsberg chanting by the Bay and in the courts. Martin, Malcolm and Medgar. Baldwin, Carawac, Kesey. The Beatles. Birth control. Woodstock. Canton, Thomas Kuhn, Meldenbrant, Lasslo, Lynn Margulis, Shannon, Lovelock, Bill Mollison. Chicago economics and police riots. Fred Hampton, Kissinger, Pinochet and Milton Friedman. George Wallace. Nixon’s southern strategy play. Hard hat riots. AIM occupies Alcatraz. Stonewall, Networking, swingers, equity flipping, herbal tea, embroidered  bell-bottoms, Muhammad Ali. Some said the Pentagon was levitated, they said they saw it’s grim specter floating, a wrath untethered to the Land… Whatever. 

The masters of war had to fallback, entrench and re-group. And re-group they did. What the Reverend Doctor King called out as “the giant triplets,” racism, militarism, and materialism glorified, marketed and denied. Fleeting smiles, dog whistles, and double-bind sticks, making it hard to Dream. Hard, but not impossible. Imagine… emergent backbeat resounding…cracking alienation’s spell… 

We suffer from a well marketed and maintained manufactured perception of division and powerlessness; orchestrated disinformation, mis-definitions, interminable obtrusion, data mined enhanced scientific propaganda, advertising and news spinning, manipulative overt and subliminal sound bite branding, pecuniary duress occupying our time (like stressed rats in a behavioral modification maze, spin the treadmill for a piece of cheese paycheck), gerrymandered brains droning on and on, run-on crises and endless distractions, protests absorbed and neutralized, rents, war, habitat destruction and sea levels raised; compounding…

The historical vestiges of colonialism dividing and indenturing us all.  On a corporate ride to nowhere. John Barleycorn’s mutant weed; poser cowboys round-upping the corn. 

Yet all across the hemisphere

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and beyond, America’s Great Manifest Destiny fracking; fissures cracking alienation’s mortgaged stranglehold on Dreamscape…

… Through the window… sunlight prisms refracting with the snow, weaving Colors of Light… Kaleidoscopic Blanket… John Henry at the dentist, root canal, steam shovel extraction…. Smoke Cloud rising… hypodermic media for the pain… bare feet in the sand… surf’s waves rolling… car crash… metal shards… bones in the shifting sands… a wounded animal blindly striking out in all directions, Beware the flailing claws! Eyes of Stone… Clock hands spinning spirals. Tick tock fades to heartbeat rising…Mysterious hand, unseen, moves soundboard slider up…Syncopated heartbeats echo, resounding off the landscape….   

Human life is a mystery, a pulsing heart beat establishing the rhythm. We work, love, create, and explore the myriad avenues of Mind, Heart and Universe. We make Art, Song, we Pray. We Dance. We Dream and do mathematics… wonder about the stars. We cook with fire, farm, hunt, and fish. We live in Community. We raise children, bury parents at their time and hold  grandchildren. The fortunate ones have a clear sparkle in their eyes; the unfortunate; ice. We live in shelters we build. We remember… we forget… we remember. We hold family dear. We love to mate. We laugh, we cry. We want our descendants to thrive. It’s been this way since before memory fades into the fog of time past. Potentially… far, far into the future…

Humanity weaves. While we developed culture beside the fire, we began weaving. This technology brought vast improvements in quality of life and opened up avenues of Artistic expression. Patterns in the weave became recorded language. In the warp and waft tactile expressions of mathematics are found. It is possible that the epigenetic changes in neural expression that contemporary Humanity’s mathematical abilities express were facilitated by the Art of weaving. The abacus is an adapted loom. The decimal, a point in the warp. Zero an elusive thread. 

The industrial/enclosure/colonial/corporate/scientific/market revolution (IECCSMR, [Ikxˊmür]), and the global cultural upheavals that it wrought, began with a giant leap in the mechanization of weaving. Industrial looms; coal sooty steam drive, tended by hungry, knackered cogs. Watch out for your fingers. Dust out your lungs.

The Jacquard automatic loom, with its punch card programming, was computing tech 1.0. The Turing machine can be viewed as a virtual loom spinning logarithms on a single strand.                

             Humanity’s rapid technological development has in many ways outpaced our individual and collective cultural ability to understand and incorporate so much new, so fast. 

The technological, economic, political, social and environmental changes of the 20th Century were so rapid and extensive we find ourselves awash in data in an incomprehensible world, poised on disaster. Our cultural tapestries unable to make sense of the new dystopic 21st Century world.

We suffer a global future shock pandemic. Whether a rug weaver in Tehran, an IT worker in Dublin, a phone basher in Deli, a street vendor in Rio de Janeiro, a bartender in Tel Aviv, a line worker in Shenyang, a taxi driver in Beirut, a tea vendor in Kashmir, a punk rocker in Moscow, a Detroit pensioner, a young student in oversized shoes walking a dusty Ethiopian road, a dispossessed, paperless worker in Arizona, or a farmer anywhere: our world in incomprehensible upheaval.

We live in a time of turbulence. Bifurcation time. These are times of indeterminate non-linearity refracting. A time of phase change. Even the parameters in flux. The 21st Century is butterfly chaos. The potential for disintegration and destruction. The potential for healing and integration of a greater magnitude. Time’s iterations stop not. Humanity is more than a set of exploiting isolates objectifying All. 

The dominant social construct of the early 21st. Century is a global economic system, modern commerce, a colonial era artifact. The model, based on its 18th. Century dominant European ethic, views man above and beyond Nature, and some men above and beyond other people. Therefor Nature and fellow Humans are exploitable, expendable resources from which to extract “wealth.” Wealth is defined as the accumulation and control of trade bits.

The perpetuation of history’s dysfunctional patterns of thought, action and ways of being, is contraindicated; The trends of global decay (biological and social) are accelerating, headed round the bend, on compounding exponential curves. Global deforestation, rising seas, dying oceans, soil loss, expanding poverty, hunger, Haiti, toxic food, homeless people working at mcmansions, oil field’s genocide in the North, South and inbetween, children in cages and bombed out buildings, orchestrated refugees and backlash, gentrification’s urban decay, hate and fear brazenly marketed, bump clips, nukes and nut jobs, the 6th. great extinctions, big money for war profiteers, the last white rhino, canary in a coal mine, Haiti, depleted uranium’s deformed children, the poisoned children of Flint, willful disregard, people who just don’t care, ad nauseam…

We all live in Flint, Michigan. Drink the Water. WATER’S acute-on-chronic maladies infect all neighborhoods, globally. Ground-water is gifted toxic seeps, poison percolates in

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the snow, predictable random pipeline blowouts flowing downstream, toxic fish swimming in toxic water. Where ever one looks tainted water. Even in your plastic bottle …

Water, land, song, time, everything, even the space between your ears, become commodified, discardable objects to be commercially exploited. Commerce claims jurisdiction over all. Commerce is, functions by, and breeds alienation. Its main products are fractured human relationships, and randomizing destructive noise dissipating Life’s complex Geo-metabolic networks.

The culture of commerce is so alien that want and war are promulgated, greed glorified, and the biosphere destroyed while space tourism and the hubris of exploring and colonizing space from a dying planet is pursued. This is some serious wack alienation for Earthlings to be under the spell of.

“A deepened consciousness of their situation leads people to apprehend that situation as an historical reality susceptible of transformation. Resignation gives way to the drive for transformation and inquiry…(A) movement of inquiry must be directed towards humanization – the people’s historical vocation. The pursuit of full humanity, however, cannot be carried out in isolation or individualism, but only in fellowship and solidarity; therefore it cannot unfold in the antagonistic relations between oppressors and oppressed. No one can be authentically human while he prevents others from being so… The means used are not important; to alienate human beings from their own decision-making is to change them into objects.” ¹

“One Love.”²

One Humanity.
One Living Planetary Biosphere. Common domain. A priori. 

21st. Century science reveals one Humanity enmeshed. Soil microorganisms, fungi, plants, animals, water, air and people form a complexly integrated living solar powered network. Humanity’s very blood is humus and water through-puts. We are an embedded, potentially evolving, culture making product of the Biosphere. We are fully dependent on other life-forms for our existence.

Homo Sapiens Sapiens’ viability is contingent. Contingent on the vitality of the complex Networks of Life and the quality of our Biospheric interfaces. Lex spectat naturae ordinem. (The law regards Nature’s order.)

Photonic powered Greenery
sequestering carbon, feeding Humanity
Soil's Fecund Richness (SFR)
Plant a Tree. Turn a Tide...

The following series of poetic essays are presented in a spirit of pursuing real dialog in an embracive planetary event space.

1) Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, First published 1968, 1997 edition, p. 66 ibid.
2) Bob Marley “One Love” The Wailing Wailers, 1966

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