The fires in the Catalinas are better contained now, no new flare-ups that I can see. Smoke channels upwards here and there, but not the darkened clouds of a week or so ago. Containment, then break-out, then containment again. People began to be disappointed in the language chosen to convey the situation to Tusconans. Fire is feral — and amoral. The first great blaze to my mind was in Disney’s Bambi. The forest was in flight itself as fire swept through the woods. The sizzling, the crackling, the virulent hissing of this animated fire brought fear. We don’t know what fire is, like the bush in the Hebrew Bible that is aflame but not consumed, it is a mystery in how it works. Here I am as close to our ancestors in the caves who somehow tamed this beast without understanding what it is; I still don’t get it. Man’s mastery over things, machines and objects in this world is an eely one, for we really do not understand what it is that we have mastered.
No slave owner understands his slave, no lord understands his self. We run, control and operate machines technically, but we are as ignorant of them as early man was of fire. What do you call this way, this process, this happenstance in which human beings run their world in a way very removed from what they do? Driving a complex machine as a car can be done with little if any knowledge of the physics and chemistry involved. As a metaphor it bespeaks the way we live our individal lives, for we are often removed from them as well.
In short, we don’t know, we don’t own, we don’t grasp, we don’t understand who we are, much less the objects in our environment. What a concept to grasp, what a concept to internalize, and what are the consequences of it all? When I reach out to butter toast, so much is involved in this “simple” act that it befuddles the mind. Yes, I will butter the toast. I know toast, butter, knife, how to spread butter and how much to spread to satisfy my eyes and taste. All this I know and can do. In reality, I am a technician, a hit man in a way. I practice and live in programmable ways. I am rote. I believe the real meaning of things and our relationships to them is as mysterious as our connections to the concept of a god, or our relationship to our psychological selves as well as our relationship to our bodies. Even if there were no mind-body split, even if we believe both are a harmonius integral oneness, we still have no idea of what it is all about.
We live in a body that rules us, that masters us, that we really cannot alter — blood pressure, sight, panic attacks. We do not inhabit the reality of who we are because who we really are — bodily, emotionally, psychologically, and so on — runs by itself, without much conscious help by us. We lease our bodies for a lifetime. All that we are and all that we do is randomized and run by no one. Turn a rock over. See a worm there. Prod it with a twig. No meaning, no why, no reason — just life of a kind. The difference between a worm and man is that the worm has no self-pretensions. The worm has no awareness, but this does not make it less. Man lives his life pretending that his awareness makes him significant. It is a self-lie — magisterial in its narcissism. Awareness makes you aware that everything is an evolutionary wink in time, a mere wrinkle. No great shakes. To be aware is to know on some levels that the difference between worm and man is miniscule. Man has pretensions, the worm does not. Perhaps evolution, in fantasy, might run backward, from awareness to no awareness like the worm. Perhaps a state of unawareness is preferable, for it is much like death, and we all return to that.
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