streaming consciousness…

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  hardie karges 9:25 am on June 18, 2009 Permalink | Reply  

  The categorical imperative is to create meaning in a world 

  that doesn’t necessarily have any. If that requires a god or two, then so be it, the more the merrier. I create new gods to offer myself up to in order that they might save my mortal soul. At least I did that night in Hanoi. The old quarter of Hanoi is pretty intense, or it least it was. It’s a classic shop-house district traditionally divided into streets devoted to a particular craft. The bottom level is the showroom, upper level are workrooms, then living quarters, going four or five stories up. This is the pattern now all over northern Vietnam, even in villages. It allows more efficient use of land in a country of some eighty million, a third more than Thailand, in a land area a third less then Thailand. It’s no wonder that people see under-populated and loyal disciple Laos as an escape valve. Anyway, the old quarter of Hanoi is dense, and of course, the old systems break down as backpackers move in to prepare the fields for the real tourists to come later. Many buildings are now ‘mini-hotels’.

  I get claustrophobic sometimes. Out of the window in my room I could probably have shook the hand of somebody across the street if there had been somebody there. Earlier that day I’d eaten local food in a local market, always a risky venture anywhere, but probably especially in 1996 Hanoi. Later I’d drunk some local hooch with some of the homies out on the street taking tobacco bong hits. Bad idea. To top it all off, my bed had bugs. I think. This is not the thing for a sensitive guy. I’ve got insomnia even on a good day, but that was easily the longest night of my life. I really did not expect to see the morning. My skin was crawling, my insides were crawling; my brain was crawling; the streets were crawling. Or at least that’s what it felt like. I just knew I’d die right there alone in some God-forsaken room in some God-forsaken hotel in some God-forsaken corner of the universe, unable to even get out of my bed and call for help. In reality I just had a minor case of Ho Chi Minh’s revenge and probably some bed bugs, though I never saw any. I moved to a different hotel the next day and everything was fine. But I made some promises to some gods that I’ve struggled to keep. I even created some new ones that I’d never worked with before. They’ll be around for awhile. That’s what guilt trips are for.

   

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  hardie karges 9:21 pm on June 10, 2009 Permalink | Reply  

  To be alone in a sea of strange faces is not only natural, not only not dreadful, 

  it’s heavenly, relying on the basic goodness of mankind, unlearning the violence inherent from our fathers’ mistakes. Still the best part of travel is coming home to the nest, complete with mother and son, and shitting in it. Sometimes I don’t need to travel; I just need to BE without direction or schedule, an extra in the movie with no lines to read. I need no extra lines on my face to show my age, like a giant redwood lying shattered on the forest floor cut full girth across the grain of resistance, with no quarter-sawed comfy little beds and all their fibers lying smoothly between their teeth. Fibers one and all had their lives cut short, perpendicularly open-ended ready for anything, large or small, objets d’art or mansions in the sky. I need contrast, the constant zigzag between poles, both north and south. The World’s Oldest Backpacker (WOB) hit 50 (countries, years old, states of mind) with no regrets and unrepentant. Someone asked, “How long you been travelling?” Thirty years and counting…. Turning fifty was just like old times, alone and lonely, abandoned by my friends, walking the streets of London without an umbrella or a prayer. The rain hovers around me like weak soup, reminding me of why my ancestors left so long ago. I find solace in a pasty pie and a pint, and I’m glad for it. All that’s behind me now, older but wiser.
   
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  hardie karges 12:37 am on June 10, 2009 Permalink | Reply  

  Tourism is the great modern gold rush, 

  linking past and present, rich and poor, traditional and modern, in a gradual melting pot of cult and culture. The modern rich get their entertainment by viewing the past as expressed by poor traditional peoples. The only problem is that it puts itself out of business. If successful it changes the very thing that drew tourists in the first place. This is the new colonialism, tourist colonies and sunny beaches, Interzone girls and forty inch screens. The brave new world is a chicken shit travesty, a burlesque of the real world, dancing girls included. Entertainment is everything now, the real thing itself, not just what ‘holds us’ between the real things.

   
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  hardie karges 5:58 am on June 9, 2009 Permalink | Reply  

  This is the Blue Planet, bathed in oxygen, a fire smoldering under control, 

  not explosive enough to self-destruct, just oxidize and slowly turn to rust in the solid parts, slowly turn to life in the warm wet zones along rivers between thighs. This is it. Don’t look for more of us ‘out there’. It’s a pipe dream. However many planets there are out there, there’s one in that many chances of finding civilized life like ours. We’re it. Blue-green algae, yeah sure, there’s probably more somewhere. There’s probably no reason to stock up on cyanobacteria for that cryogenic tour. ‘Intelligent life’, though, that’s a different trip. First of all, you’ve got to realize that if humans go extinct here on Earth, then they probably wouldn’t come back again. Ever. Okay, I don’t really know that, infinity being a bit unpredictable, but I suspect it’s true. Platonic Forms are wishful thinking, anthropomorphism in its idealistic form. Think dinosaurs might make a comeback some day? Don’t bet on it. Second, intelligent life in any other circumstance, whether time or space, would not necessarily look like us. Is an ape really any smarter than a bear? Isn’t the possibility equally great that they might produce some mutant offspring with grossly oversized head that might one day outsmart all the others and rule the world? They themselves are an evolutionary improvement over their dog-like ancestors and can already walk on their hind legs to boot. Their trained dancing numbers even show those psychotic qualities so intrinsic to the master race.

   
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  hardie karges 11:07 am on May 29, 2009 Permalink | Reply  

  The suspense is killing me, hanging by my suspenders, 

  by the thread of my own imagination, the interminable distance between two points waiting to be traversed, knowing that if I’m lucky, I’ll still only get half-way there. The waiting is almost the hardest part, time being the minor dimension in the human portion of the space-time continuum.  At least time is a dimension reconciled by mind, modern and digital, while space still insists on doing everything the old-fashioned analog way, moving points and lines and Euclidean surfaces around turn-tables and time-tables and hoping for the best.  Maybe anticipation is the true middle path, moving perpetually along multiple paths of fulfillment but never totally arriving, always striving for the next goal.  Boredom is the most insidious enemy of modern society, dissatisfaction with the status quo no matter how high the status.  Demand has a curious way of always staying one step ahead of supply.  Only art can stop the insipid dialog, cease the endless dialectic.  High culture is the oxygen that sets minds burning with thoughts and answers to questions that haven’t even been asked yet.  If causality is a casualty of the negotiations for a cease-fire on the domestic front, then so be it.

   
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  hardie karges 9:19 pm on May 28, 2009 Permalink | Reply  

  Music might have a better chance at transcending boundaries, 

  if there could ever truly be styles that not only were pleasing to the ear and the butt, but that carried a message that could be translated to other languages effectively.  If business is the only art left, then entertainment is the only business left.  Back in the 60’s we had the idea that maybe rock-and-roll could save the world, one of the nicer hallucinations of the period, but ultimately doomed to failure with the rest.  Books can cross borders, and do, but how many people read books in the age of Internet?  And who really has a universal message to convey?  The music is primary in music, not the words, usually.  It’s possible to like a song whether you know the words or not.  As always, getting the words and music to fit is the challenge.  In translation, the fact that the creative spurt has already been done limits creative options in re-composition, true, but also limits the size of the task.  A song can’t simply be translated; it has to be re-worked.  If the lyrics are good, then it’s worth it.  This might open new avenues for music video, now not much more than a pathetic lapdog of the lyrics and melody, and a back-door path to and from Hollywood and its infamous bottom line.  There’s another bottom line, also, and it can’t be faked, bought, or sold.  It’s called “the boogie factor”.  Let’s rock.

   
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  hardie karges 3:47 am on May 28, 2009 Permalink | Reply  

  Culture is contagious, its strength inversely proportional to the square of the distance from the source. 

  Why one village has people carrying around pictures of the virgin of Guadalupe and another half a world away has villagers lined up behind images of the Buddha while still another could give a bloody shit (British people or hemorrhoid sufferers) about any of it is beyond me.  Why one has stupas pointed to the sky while another has steeples (same root word?) while the other points his finger, likewise.  I can identify with all three, and do.  I can’t help but think that the village people (no, not THOSE Village People) would get along with each other just fine if given the opportunity, and the religious background.  Unfortunately most village people don’t have money to travel, except as wetbacks, and even when they do, would not likely mingle with other village people.  They’d go to Las Vegas or Disneyland or Mount Rushmore (hurry up!) or the regional equivalents.  It’s up to anthropologists and a few devoted travelers like myself to spread the gospel mouth to mouth of universal sisterhood and the end to futile feudal racism.  Maybe I’m so anti-racist because I’m from Mississippi and have seen its psychological destructiveness from so close-up.  That would please the determinists who otherwise might insist I be just the opposite.  Don’t expect corporations and their executives and their salesmen and their products to truly transcend racism, though they can leap some buildings in a single bound.  Religion has certainly proven itself incapable of creating a world suitable for all, but consumerism is superficial by definition and doesn’t exactly satisfy the hungry soul searching for universal truths.

   
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  hardie karges 7:19 am on May 27, 2009 Permalink | Reply  

  71% of the earth’s surface is covered in alcohol, drug of choice, creature of fate. 

  Did some early hominid win the Nobel Prize for his discovery of alcohol?  Is this what separates us from our gorilla and chimp cousins?  We’ve been shit-faced at most of the great moments of history and many of the lesser ones.  Is alcohol the agent of mutation that gave us the DNA that makes us human?  At the very least natural selection seems to have given the drunken apes a better chance of survival than the others.  You don’t argue with Mother Nature.  I don’t see too many Amish elders in the ranks of dot.com movers and shakers.  I see a lot of semi-reformed slackers raised on reefer and bathed in beer.  I doubt that the ranks of science and intellectuals are all that much different, just a bit more bookish and near-sighted.  I know the ranks of artists aren’t.  Imagination seeks its own catalysts in its quest for freedom and creativity.  Talk is cheap, but a little buzz doesn’t cost much more.  We humans are capable of more than just turning carbohydrates into hydrocarbons in the short span of individual and collective existence.  Somehow somewhere a consciousness was born and the world changed, for better or worse.

   
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  hardie karges 7:42 pm on May 24, 2009 Permalink | Reply  

  The long loving arms of entertainment conquer all. 

  Who would’ve thought that a computer would become little more than an Internet machine in the space of ten years?  Who realizes that neither will be much more than mass entertainment in another ten?  Many kids don’t even realize that computers had a previous life as number crunchers and word processors.  Entertainment is the only business left in a world where food production is a foregone conclusion and consumption has reached the point of saturation.

   
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  hardie karges 10:39 am on May 24, 2009 Permalink | Reply  

  Plato, Jesus, and Einstein are my big three thinkers of all time. 

  They transcended the ordinary.  Plato’s myths, Jesus’ parables, and Einstein’s thought experiments all come from the same place, played the same role, and accomplished very nearly the same things in society.  They all make you see the world in a way that maybe you didn’t see it before, in a way maybe you COULDN’T see it before.  They all teach by analogy, operating in that not-so-gray area of your brain where the precise logic of language becomes the precise logic of mathematics and the phenomena of existence all of a sudden look different.  Plato’s myth of the cave shook me to my socks thirty years ago, illustrating just how easy it is to get trapped in the fallacy of common sense, which prevents you from seeing the forest because of all the trees in the way.  Einstein does something similar, only more modern and mathematical, with his thought experiments on acceleration and inertia relative to frames of reference.  Both allude to a dimension of light, which by modern definition includes magnetism and electricity.  A dimension of gravity might be inferred also, given its apparent irreconcilability as a force.  Jesus took things more to heart and stomach, but still the logic was impeccable, and the idea that brotherly love can transform the world, makes it capable of just that.  He only made one mistake that I can see.  I’m quite sure that birds do ask where they will sleep and what they will eat, albeit in some mental language.  I doubt they do much else, but this is minor quibbling.  All had a glimpse of that larger world of which this slow cool world is a part, and they articulated it in a way that breathes spirit into the dead letter file.