Quick jotting of stuff-on-my-mind this morn

I clipped a bunch of images out of junk-ads, for raw material to use in future collages, but I didn't have time to make an actual picture to accompany today's entry; therefore please accept this photo of the inside of the folder where I keep these findings:

Dear diary,

My first thots on waking today were as follows. Paul’s stance on rutting. The apostle Paul wrote that it’s forgivable to rut as long as you’re married — it’s better to rut than to “burn” — yet it’s best if everyone were to follow him, Paul, and go rutless; that is, to abstain from performing sexual intercourse. (See the 1st epistle to the Corinthians, chapter 7, which begins: “Now concerning the things whereof ye wrote unto me: It is good for a man not to touch a woman.”) And the modern church follows Paul’s gospel, but when my old pastor read Paul’s anti-rutting passage in church one time, he joked “Well obviously Paul didn’t intend for us all to follow that particular teaching to a tee, otherwise how would there ever be more than a single generation of Christians to survive Saint Paul!?” And the congregation laughed. But my own point would be that Paul DID intend for all his followers to imitate him; and it would indeed have caused Paul’s line of Christians to die out in the 1st or 2nd century; and the reason for this is that Paul was wrong — so it bugs me that the church does not allow this passage to prove Paul’s wrongness but instead they all laugh as a defense mechanism and then keep following Paul’s version of the gospel. Paul says that the important thing about Jesus is not Jesus’ teachings but that he died, and his blood will blind the Cosmic Judge to our faults, so that he’ll (God’ll) welcome us into heaven in a literal afterlife. This is hogwash. Jesus himself believed the same thing that Walt Whitman believed: that there was never any more heaven or hell than there is right now, and that heaven or hell are aspects of this present existence. So this second thot of mine led me to imagine a churchgoer questioning my stance and saying “Did not Jesus also believe in a literal afterlife in heaven?” And I say: for me, the proof that he did not is in that passage where Jesus says “if thine eye offend thee, pluck it out: it is better for thee to enter into the kingdom of God with one eye, than having two eyes to go into hell” (Matt. 9:43-47). If Jesus believed in a literal afterlife, then a maimed person would not be still maimed when entering heaven. But if heaven and hell are within us as states of mind, then one might pluck out one’s eyes and enjoy heaven here on earth, whereas leaving one’s eyes intact would cast one into a hellish inheritance of spacetime.

I know I’m not convincing anyone — I’m only noting these whims for the record: this is just stuff that I thot about when I woke up. I don’t believe in plucking out one’s own eyes, anyway. I think that’s a bad move, unless you’re an old whale who’s lived a good, long life, and you’re being chased by two separate teams of whale-hunting ships, one of which is really desperate because they just ran out of whale oil to light their lamps. THEN maybe pluck out your remaining eye, becuz it’s all encrusted with layers of “strange misgrown masses” anyway. But it’ll be difficult even now, to perform a self-operation, cuz you’re a whale and thus you lack human hands & digits; moreover, your prized fin got amputated in an ancient battle.

That last textblob stems from the fact that we’re still reading Moby-Dick, me and my sweetheart (we’ve read it aloud before, over & over, and we continue re-reading it) so the memory of this whale chase that happens near the middle of the epic was fresh on my mind, cuz we just enjoyed it yesterday.

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Also I watched a short film about the birth of language in humans. I love this topic, but I always find myself wanting to argue with almost everything that’s asserted about it...

& yet, what do I know? — nothing. Am I an expert? No, I just follow my intuition; so I’m probably not trustworthy.

But that’s a pleasant state to be in: watching a film that presents the ideas of self-styled experts while one harbors strong intuitions in the opposing direction.

Scientists say that animals have no language. And I say “Yes they do, only it’s different from what humans think of as language.” So then the scientists say “Well the language of man is so much higher than the language of animals that it’s worth giving it its very own name, so we call the noises that man makes ‘actual language’ and we call the articulate phrasings from other animals ‘squeaks and gibbers’.”

So I say, “OK, you win.” I accept their definition and acquiesce to the fact that all animals are stupid fools: that’s why humankind was granted dominion over them, and we can slaughter them with impunity; cuz Science sez that God gave us the green light to torment the world — that’s why he created things this way.

Then I take a walk around the block and pass many glass buildings, and I look inside each one, and I see scientists sitting at dinner tables in white lab coats, and their dinner guest is always a member of the primate class; and each scientist keeps speaking in sign language to her tablemate, and the primates keep answering “Please stop teasing us with your clever games and trickery; all we want is food to eat — that is what we like: the pleasurable continuance of existence. Are we wrong to think this way?”

It seems to me that all creatures have some way of getting their basic thots across to their fellows and perhaps even to others who are less like them. Animals say, “If a grunt or a bleat works, or just a simple gesture, then why fuss with it? If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Eat, live, & be merry.” (cf. Ecclesiastes 8:15)

But, somewhere along the evolutionary flux-line, humans acquired a taste for the state of suspense between the speaking and the getting. Humans reasoned, “If we intermix a little pain with our pleasure, then perhaps we can gain even more complex sublimities.” And nobody knows what this means, “more complex sublimities,” except the scientists & philosophers. The poets sorta side with the animals.

So here were are today, in the post-postmodern world of the twenty-first century: we have achieved advancements in poisons, and we can destroy the whole earth more than twenty times over, and we have homeless people everywhere, and people starving, and rampant poverty, and we’ve discovered how to profit monetarily from disease and disaster. So I’d call that a pretty decent accomplishment.

If aliens were to land on earth in their space pods, they’d say “Wow! How’d you find so much crude oil? That’s the BEST way to get from place to place. We aliens developed these space pods that run on starlight, cuz we figured that there are so many stars in the sky that if we could harness their power, we might be able to slingshoot our crafts from star to star, like leapfrog, or like tracing thru a connect-the-dots work of art; but what we neglected to calculate into our space-travel theories is that sometimes there are not enough stars around to supply the requisite light: for it turns out that there’s vast swathes of emptiness in the abyss, known as ‘outer darknesses’ — that’s where there’s not enough stars twinkling to power our light-dependent vehicles, and we get stalled, sometimes for eons. When we arrived here on your planet, about twenty moments ago, we had just broke free of one such impediment. Right outside of your solar system, we’d got mired in a tar pit (that’s our technical name for these interstellar pot-holes) for what seems like an eternity. It’s like when you’re driving a horse and buggy, and the contraption gets stuck in the mud, or in the snow. Or when your father forces your family to take a vacation at his lousy cabin in Wisconsin; and, once there, he corrals everyone onto his cheap orange boat, and brings ye on a trip around the swamp, as if it’s a sightseeing cruise; but then he bottoms out on a sandbar, and the outboard motor gets damaged — the skeg breaks off; the propeller gets bent; and the water intake is all clogged up with seaweed — in short, you have to replace the entire gearbox and repair the bulk of the lower unit.”