A gray, cool Sunday morning after a warm Spring day yesterday. I’ve gone through and read the 30 tango blogs I keep Bookmarked. I use Mozilla Firefox and keep them arranged in five different files and open each file with the <em>Open All in Tabs</em> direction. Then I zip along to find who has posted something new. I haven’t got around to doing Feeds or whatever they are called except for one blog. I know it would be more efficient but I like reading the product inside the design of the web site. This method does make me impatient with blogs whose header is so large that you have to scroll down to see if they have posted something new.
How pleasant of you all to provide this look into the world for a fellow sitting in his shed in the woods.
But I am here to play Cassandra. From <em>Findings</em> on the back page of the February 2008 <em>Harpers Magazine</em>:
<blockquote>A new climate change model, which takes into account other models’ failures to anticipate the rapidity of sea-ice disappearance, predicted that the Arctic Ocean will have ice-free summers within five years;
</blockquote>
Even if we pivot our reality pretty damn fast we are going to face plagues and famines in the future. When I lived in Holland I was very impressed by the solidarity of the population, their sense of sharing. I theorized that it grew out of a culture that has organized to live behind dikes that keep out the sea. They MUST work together in order to survive. It’s a model for me.
I greatly fear that our U.S. American Lone Ranger/Puritan ethos will lead us to choose a military model of control as a way to counter environmental threats. We have ignored Eisenhower’s warning about the rise of the military/industrial complex so far and just continue to believe in coercion as the road to management. Barack Obama’s run for the presidency is one of the few encouraging signs I see.
I read a lot of Science Fiction when I was growing up and one of the classic story lines deals with a generational Star Ship sent of to colonize another planet. The inhabitants forget they are on a ship with constraints and the ship systems begin to break down. How do you convince people to live within limits?
<blockquote>
If I adopt it, [relativity], neither I nor the other can be the center of the universe. As in the heliocentric system, there must be a third that is the central reference. It is the relation between Thou and I, and this relation is identity: reality=community.
What are the consequences of all this in ethics and aesthetics?
The ethical imperative: Act always so as to increase the number of choices.
The aesthetical imperative: If you desire to see, learn how to act.
</blockquote>
…….<em>On Constructing a Reality</em> by Heinz von Foerster from <em>The Invented Reality</em>, p.60
Recently I read the book, <em>Breakfast with Buddha</em> by Roland Merullo. It refreshed certain parts of Buddhist philosophy for me. I am totally not religious; I regard Buddhism as a philosophy. This take on Buddhism embraced reincarnation — which is not a necessary tenet. I’m an agnostic. It has never seemed important. But this time I had a little shudder of dismay. WHAT IF there is reincarnation? I am going to be reborn into this stupid world as it slides into chaos. Pissed me right off. And I realized there is a practical aspect to teaching reincarnation. If you believe in it, you don’t just get to slope off into the dark and go to sleep, you have to return and endure the consequences of your stupid behavior and all your fellow citizens. Phooey.
So, OK, I’m going to continue pushing a lifestyle of Voluntary Simplicity.
Thinking over my last post I realized that the lesson I learned from the Tag game was not just that you could provoke a response through the internet medium and blogging but that the result was amplified as each person tagged new people. It is like a chain letter or pyramid scheme but I tend to think of it as feedback or recursion.
I’ve had the word recursion going around in my head lately. I’m pretty vague about the actual definition but for me it has meant that after I taught tango I would would see how to apply an idea in a new way to my own dancing and then I would see that I could apply it to living generally and then a way to apply it to writing blog posts.
For me consistency has meant drudgery and boredom. Now I’m thinking that consistent even pressure, a necessity and a pleasure in tango, should be reexamined.
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