It’s The End Of The World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine)

Apocalypse, Crisis, Endgame, the Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight, the Long Emergency, the Party’s Over…

It’s pretty certain that you’ll know some of these recent book titles or phrases du jour, even if you haven’t read the books or use the turn of words yourself. It’s hard to ignore the fact that some pretty big chickens are coming home to roost. And it’s easy to look to the horizon, catch the dark clouds amassing and see only bad times ahead.


But there’s another way of looking at this, and in many of the books using these phrases you can find it. To call on another title - Is this the “Great Turning”?

Al Gore reminds us in “An Inconvenient Truth” that in Chinese the word for crisis (wēijī) is formed of two characters – those for danger (wēi) and opportunity (jī).

An Apocalypse is an “unveiling” – in an Emergency – something is emerging…

I could focus here on the problems we face, as a species, as a planet, as Gaia – the very particular shits that are hitting our particular fan: global warming; fossil fuel depletion and energy peak; poisoning of the biosphere; destruction of the soil; deforestation; a great extinction of flora and fauna; extirpation of indigenous peoples and their ways of life; war after war inna Babylon; soul death of millions… - if you don’t see these things already, then it’s time to open your eyes.

But perhaps it’s better to focus here on the opportunity not the crisis. The mantle has fallen on us. May you live in interesting times goes the fabled curse – well so be it, what is life without purpose? You want to make a difference? You want to do good? You want to be part of the movement to save the world? Well, you are in luck – you were born at exactly the right time.

Recently Victor H. Mair, Professor of Chinese Language and Literature at the University of Pennsylvania has pointed out that in the Chinese character for Crisis the jī of wēijī should not be considered to mean “opportunity” exactly but, in fact, means “something like "incipient moment; crucial point (when something begins or changes)." Thus, a wēijī is indeed a genuine crisis, a dangerous moment, a time when things start to go awry”.
Your Planet needs YOU!

Change is Now; Things that seem to be solid are Not. “Be the change you want to see in the world”, Gandhi told us. Buckminster Fuller said we should ask ourselves: "If success or failure of this planet and of human beings depended on how I am and what I do...How would I be? What would I do?"

So get informed and get active. There was never a better time for you to act than NOW.


Get Informed:

Ask around – what’s going on?

Find out where your food comes from.

Find out where your water comes from.

Find out where your energy comes from.

Name 5 plants indigenous to where you live, now name 5 more.

BOOKS

Hartman, Thom – The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight

Heinberg, Richard – The Party’s Over, Powerdown

Jensen, Derrick - Endgame

Kunstler, James Howard – The Long Emergency

Lovelock, James – The Revenge of Gaia

FILMS

The End of Suburbia

An Inconvenient Truth

WEBSITES:

Global Public Media

Energy Bulletin

Post Carbon Institute

Get Active:

Speak to your neighbours


BOOKS

Berry, Thomas – The Great Work: Our Way into the Future

Hillman, Mayer - How We Can Save the Planet

Korten, David - The Great Turning

Macy, Joanna - World as Lover, World as Self

FILMS

How Cuba Survived Peak Oil

WEBSITES:

Permaculture

Bioneers

The Community Solution

Transition Culture


James Piers Taylor, 26th September 2006, Essex/London


IMAGE: Gaia's Garden (2006) by Saiaii (Jennifer Reagles).

Three Men in a Boat

“Tradition indicates that three levels of consciousness are available to us: simple consciousness, not often seen in our modern technological world; complex consciousness, the usual state of educated Western man; and an enlightened state of consciousness, known only to a very few individuals, which is the culmination of human evolution and can be attained only by highly motivated people after much work and training.”

So says Robert Johnson in the first words of his book Transformations and he goes on to explore Don Quixote (literally Sir Codpiece) as an example of simple consciousness and Hamlet (a text penned within a few years of the Cervantes marvel) as the entrance into the dilemma of modern consciousness. The possibility of an enlightened view is represented for him in Goethe’s Faust. Don Quixote literalizes his own perception and imagination and his resultant magical thinking is his joy and his exuberant downfall. Hamlet receives the message from the unconscious, from the archetype, the ghost speaks to him of hidden truth and yet this information sends him into the crisis of how to act to return the natural and correct order of things. He is crippled by the terror of the rotten state being also his family, the lingering smell of death on the family bedspread, the trauma of the primal scene conceived of by the sensitive and absurd youthful Freud.


Just with these two drawn into being so closely we can identify something perhaps of the modern dilemma. For every Bush denying Kyoto (a Quixotic stance of a far less charming kind that the venerable knight of la Mancha) there is a friend of mine agonizing over the global crisis, the threat of mass extinction, the emerging energy crisis and our incapacity to stop killing each other… "what can we do?" - we angst over together in our shared communities, our fragile temporary autonomous zones (thank you Hakim Bey!). For every china man caught in the big dam pot of gold there is an environmentalist grappling over whether it can be ethical to blow up dams or whether peaceful action can prevail. Is it Martin or Malcolm folks? Gandhi was a beautiful man who changed his world, his probably beautiful letter to Hitler to stop what he was doing did not do the deed, the fat man with the cigar was needed there… (a product of the very system Gandhi was bringing down around him…). Are we Hamlet or Quixote when we buy our dream catcher from its mass production line and sit in waiting for the wisdom of an ancient lineage to speak to us, whilst the blood of said lineage backs up in the drains of our cities?

I could go on… but instead to move onto the third man in the life boat – Faust, as realised by Goethe - is a man who makes a pact with the devil to experience his every desire but ultimately, and receptively (Johnson argues) rejects this pact for a more hard won truth. The subtleties of this text are worthy of a post in themselves and maybe that is what they will get on my return from the USA (where I will have added to my carbon footprint considerably to raise certain issues about the world crisis/transformation that it feels like to me, and let it be said, many others, we are entering deeply into). We can say though, that the Faustian pact is in thinking we can have it all: we simply cannot sell this lifestyle to everyone, there is not enough planet and resources to go around. Somewhere we have to get off the rollercoaster, press stop on the holo-deck and stop thinking we can download Helen of Troy in a cheerleader outfit… We will be forced to reconsider: our holidays; our commute; the whole nature of the 'burbs; not to mention our endless warmongering and state sponsored terrorisms. In this way we are like Faust…we have experimented with the highest level of human decadence and comfort and we have realized that we are still not satisfied, that the ultimate goal – real happiness - has still alluded us. For real happiness takes work and worth and honour, as the toltec teacher Miguel Ruiz teaches - it takes impeccability of word – not lying to ourselves or others, not lying to ourselves folks… so much harder than it sounds – to stop the inner voice, to stop the I am great/I am crap dialogue… wow the relief would create near atomic energy levels in this confused entity! Is this part of the new energy resource we are seeking – not a techno saviour to lead us into ever more fecund consumerism but an inner shift into a more direct awareness of ourselves as dwelling, as participating in this world?


Our self-consciousness can cripple us (like Hamlet) or through genuine awareness, honesty and effort to stay with our own integrity it can liberate us(as in the end of Faust). Which is it to be? For no amount of yearning is going to see us go back to a romantic idyll and whatever kind of world the generations that follow us end up living with this is no simple return to Eden… nor will it be the Hell of the End timers… What it will be is what we make it… hand in hand with the Soul of the World.

Mark Jones


IMAGES: Don Quichote (1970) , Hamlet Stabs Polonius (1973) (from the Hamlet Suite), Le Vieux Faust (1969) (from the series Faust - La Nuit de Walpurgis) all by Salvador Dali.

An Eleventh of September

Flybitten swelling hand
I think I missed a class
Or more
Perhaps an entire semester
Or decade
In which they
Built a digital story
The preparation
And preface
To a dream

In a crack
Some shadows built a college
Where they spoke of the deity
And his requirements
For the greater pavement
And shed a slice
Of umbra
Across the road
To darken
Distant furniture.

Winter will crush
The insect
This week will
Deflate the palm
Analogue answers
Will whisper tech
In Chinese version
The fallen furniture:
Analytic monument
To the inefficiency and waste
Of the Halogen.

James Piers Taylor, 20th September 2006, Birmingham



IMAGE: 2000 year old mummy(2005) CT Scan image made at Stanford University

El Bosco

‘Master, cut the stone out – my name is Lubbert Das’

Wire, ‘Madman’s Honey’

Dawn is wrenched by a donkey, braying at the sun
a burro coughing at the stalled haywain on the
feral mountain, shades are roaming unbridled
a flower in a cup will be the cure of folly -
but he refuses to pull; his master, throatless, croaks
a Davros command at the star-blind mammal
sets a scurrying fidget of impossible feet, lizard
kitten, cloven hoofed and snorting, the pursuit
of night, time unboundaried and shiftless, spinning
on a ceiling fan with a million lurid takes on the crime,
the mind a squeezed scintilla, giving good strappado
by the sainted ounce, sleeplessly cured like mountain ham
in smoky bars and melted fats, bleeding from the
right ear, still up for a Palestinian hanging
as infantile footsteps echo the bald dry halls of a once
unimaginable Alhambra; exquisite the pinch
of the red torturer, a garden of delights brought low -
in whose hell is this adoration set?
Behind what vaulted screens and perfect abstract
Patterns, is atomic melancholy to be wrought?
Like Dali I am swept through the enigma without end
And washed up in fistfuls of rag on the tongue of
El Gran Masturbador
and so I glean the pocked canvas for clues
all focus and attention bent to the knee in the balls


I whisper the name of the One Who Can Help
Jeroen Van Aken; of course he ignores me being
dead almost five hundred years, but that doesn’t
mean he can’t hear me -
a knowing look is all I need, St Anthony provides
the eyes, and trials of purification commence
flowing with the wildest pang, the fullest wrench
of orbit, a moon sized scar on the flank of my earth
swung in the soulful weight of a donkey’s lust.
Life mirrored, sensitivity melted in curves
bastardised and mutilated, ruined in gorgeous
feathers of despair, like the arse that breeds pelicans
and the finger with a mouth bent to fellate your dream,
loose and lost in the grip of such cost
nothing can bear the same fruit ever again
the apple is rotten but still you must eat
I squeezed the black oranges myself
and then they squeezed me, pip-smashed
peeled and condemned to love, movements
in nauseous gyroscopic arrays, burnt by
the sun that didn’t die, howling in dust in the lay-by
of longing, choked, holy, deified Beatle
in whom the river finds promises of tomorrow
I cleave the triptych of misery with a sob
And am escorted from the scene


Kh
21.9.06



IMAGE: detail from 'Hell' panel of The Garden of Earthly Delights (c.1504) by Hieronymous Bosch

Pulsing the Pastures

Pulsing the pastures
the spring rod I hold
all mental and yet still
bowing and straightening
to some rhythm 'neath the tilth
feet treading to the senescence of grass
each step a sonar signal
to the earthworm and her burrowing kind
root twist and earth crumble
a fungus drifts through the soil
and I had seen only dirt before
dead cake and the murder of loam
the parched remains of a chemistry experiment
this ruined laboratory of a field.

James Piers Taylor 17th September 2006, Essex


IMAGE: Lucketts (2005) by Jo March available from Tabretts.

Sonnet for Helen

I break your ocean surface with my breath
Rippling white manes, the horses of the sea ride out
To meet my longing, to witness a drowning swimmer
Suddenly restored, unsunk from dark stone depths

And the sea-floor pirouette; breathing out and in, the
Presence of soul, green flash of the scouting eel
In the reef around your heart, now a coral flowered
Garden where once the ships of war ran aground.

Tender of the Shallows and the Deep, Tide Keeper,
Your Moon shed her red tear across my briny heart
Calling her thousand crabs to the shore,

Applauding this ancient lifeboat,
O Open your wild heart wide
At the launching of our love-craft


kh 14.9.06



IMAGE: 'Byzantium' (1988), Bronze Statue by Erte available from Fine Art Site

Today I Weigh

Today I weigh the mass of my flesh and experience
Standing on a scale, sucking numbers from the dial
Calibrating abstractions for the seal in my belly
Who barks and delights in a fish-clap display.
Here are the numbers of my fat, of my bone
Of my gristle and hair, of my skin, marrow and juices -
So today I weigh:

164.6 Pounds
74.6 Kilograms
11.7 Stone
149 Artels
7.4 Yoctagrams
4.49 Dalton
1.751 Bags of Portland Cement
2736 Roman Uncias
23.5 Clove
0.164 Kip
80.6 Machnd
2.9 Truss
0.007 Vagon
80 Seer
2.9 Firkin
2 Indian Maund
7.61 Hyl
0.07 Fother
0.293 Candy
57,510 Scruples of Troy
746.6 Etto
4.496209739e-28 1998 Atomic Mass Units
0.0277 Chalder
0.15 Packen
48,008.3 Pennyweight
0.5 Tovar
149,322.6 Obolos
26151 Rebah
1.5 Zentner
1152200 Grain
4.18 Gigaelectronvolts
3.93161159e-26 Jupiters
288050 UK Carats
149.6 Hebrew Mina
0.42 Slinch
5.11 Slugs

Or One Keith


Kh
15.9.06

Image: Albert Einstein at the Blackboard modified via Hetemeel.com

Renal Colic

We must gently obey and endure the lawes of our condition
(Michel de Montaigne, Essais (1580))


In the lee of the autumn equinoctial
Some curtained lunacy hath inspired inner tides
Which have rolled a pebble from minerals
Sifted through the skin of my organs.

I am journeying with the stone
Chamber lye makes its course about it
Nerves take its messages, acute
Yellow is intention
Now I void much gravel
And wonder what it ask of me?

The seventh house and Mars
Observe restraint

I am the hourglass to my own sand
A thwarted clepsydra
Marble in the cervix

Shadows on the CT
A tomography of the innermore
Sectioned, spliced
An image of der schatten
The ghost of gold elusive

In opposition, calling
The descendant,
Cytherean gravity
Nulligravida
A new vessel.

James Piers Taylor, 13th September - London



IMAGE: Ame und Psychor (1962) by Wolfgang Lettl

Leafmelt

The forests will melt away with the snow
This new morning
puddles of leaves

James Piers Taylor, 11/9/2006 London


"It's going too fast. We will burn. Our global furnace is out of control. By 2020, 2025, you will be able to sail a sailboat to the North Pole. The Amazon will become a desert, and the forests of Siberia will burn and release more methane and plagues will return."
- James Lovelock interviewed in the article "The End of Eden", The Washington Post (September 2nd 2006)


IMAGE: Small Bodies of Water Set Mosaic (2005) by Chris Darling

Urus

We had forgotten ourselves
slipped under the spilled ice-melt in
a quarter of a million year old fug
neglecting the limes of desire for
the leather straps of domestication

it took a cave and a nightmare
to summon the bull from his hole, to
lure his red-ragged eyeballs to stare
hot-slobbered and fire-maddened right
back through our souls

sol y sombra, so Lorca said, our
Duende roasted alive in the fire song
of Al-Andalus, the sun of blood, sun
of death, the midnight sun of flayed flesh
on such a night as this

Urus, you are us
Taurus, the two of us
Your stink of tauromachy,
I leap you blind, Picasso as my picador,
no sword for the meritless

in Ronda’s ring on the razor of shade
on bloodied sand, theatrically
smoothed, I hurled my horns at your smile
and met you eye to eye
my minotauromachia


kh
12.9.06


Image: The Bull (1945) by Pablo Picasso.

The Cross I Bear

I came to my computer tonight to write something else…a piece that gave multiple points of reflection on the environmental, political and moral crisis I feel that we face upon this planet. Maybe I will still write this piece…but before I do I am struck by the Cross I bear…

Whilst I have never attended a church service as an adult other than in the Abbey on the island of Iona (in which I took part in the ceremony of feet washing, physically washing my mother’s feet…) Whilst I never loved the Sunday school which I was encouraged to leave (after becoming engaged in a heated debate with the Vicar that centred on whether a loving God could wish hell upon his creation…) Whilst I would hesitate profoundly before answering the question am I a Christian?...

I believe in Christ

There I said it. I believe in everything the man stood for, for every word he taught for every step he took in his brief and potent life. I would die for the message he brought, that there is real love that the kingdom is here now and we could live in it together…more importantly than dying for this – I would live for that truth. I would live for him as my king; I would live for the message of real, grounded, unabashed love here and now in this world, that miraculously in its multifaceted brilliance, like the skin of a salmon in the sun, could lead me home…

So here we are. I have said where I am coming from. I say this even though millions have been tortured, burned, put to the sword or ‘converted’ into shame, disease and slavery in his name. O you witches, O you natives of continents and islands rich in natural beauty and edenic self-expression, O you Arab wanderers and warriors, O you children beaten, abused, shown the doorway to hell because you never managed to stay here long enough for the priest to mark you up. O my soul who has twisted inside me like an embarrassed child at the way truth and goodness has been co-opted for the power agenda, twisted inside like a child in agony at the death of shared meaning. O for the feminine, for the death of sex, for the earth, O mother earth I am so sorry I am choking…

I believe in Christ. He let his feet be washed by her (not unclean, never dirty), he walked on the earth and left trails of glory in her subtle bodies as he walked, he pathways of light even as he died…I will walks those pathways my master, my teacher and my brother. I will follow you even as others have painted other paths in blood and called them your own. I will follow you even as your so-called priests scream their curses at me for my guiltless steps, I will follow you even as they mock me for the guilt I feel for our shameful husbandry of this land and its bounty. I will follow and I will never stop until following is simply being with you, until being with you is simply being in you, until being in you is simply being in me, until there is no being but the all…

I will follow you inside you forever. Forgive me my delays. Forgive me my obsessions with my meaning and my meaninglessness. I will follow you forever. This is the Cross that I bear.

Mark Jones


IMAGE: Christ Carrying the Cross (c.1490) by Hieronymous Bosch

Dominion over Desert

Off Afrique
From the Levant
After midnight
These djinn
Whisper through the barrio
Carrying roses

For the lady
One euro
For the lady
One euro

Are we still
So distant
From the point
Where the two seas meet?

I dance
around
your sifr
and build a tower
of numbers upon it

but when we sit,
what colour will the ground
beneath us turn?

The wrong battle
is waged
there is no victory
in dominion over desert

place your Rosa Damascena
in the sand
for the lady

James Piers Taylor, 8/9/2006 London

IMAGE: Zul-Quarnain and Al-Khadir from illustrations to the Sikandar Nâma.