Musing on Medusa, Reflections on the Gorgon’s Head

Those of us who fear chaos, through our efforts to control chaos, bring about more chaos, a more virulent chaos, a more violent chaos.

Must Communities Be Manageable?

Probing along the edges of what is commonly accepted we make forays into uncharted territory and then we blunder, confusing new ground for, well for forms of conceptualizing them like calling them “uncharted territories!” One step out of old assumptions and then another step, a trip, maybe even a bad fall, back into the world

The World, or the world…

I’ve attempted to carve out distinctions and definitions on a regular basis here. Then I’ve backslid and muddied the waters again and again by letting ambiguity and habit blur these distinctions. Maintaining a vocabulary requires the patience of an archeologist, wiping away the dust of the millennia as a current erupting volcano sifts down a

Berger’s “Moment of Cubism,” part III

Berger’s essay explodes with the import of rediscovery of what had been lost in a stratification of layers sedimented over as the years passed. When I look at where I now stand, I see this essay and its insights as essential elements of my foundations. Berger shows us that there is a curious parallel here to our moment in the close synchrony between their moment of realization and the latent consequences of mounting conditions that made it too late to avoid their tragedy.

It’s not fair! It’s too everything!

In this case these are geneticists and they are reacting to findings that inheritance isn’t as simple as they’d wished it to be. The genome isn’t a set of instructions, a simple algorithm that leads to a predestined result, that can be predicted and manipulated at will if you own the shiny equipment paid for by people made ill with the diseases brought on by a culture that puts everything in the world into making shiny equipment.

“Success to the Successful”

A long, protracted, distracted, and haphazard conversation begins within us with this realization. We return to our deepest core instinct, the one that asks us to listen to the quietest voice, the weakest signals, because they are most likely to point out the greatest danger. That same voice of the little child who first had to navigate a dangerous world unaided. This voice tells us in its annoying, insistently feeble whisper to listen to this objection to the validity of capturing control, wresting it from the incompetents, and “making some progress for a change!” The loud voices, spurred on by the grand emotions – if not simply out of fear – beginning with the ones inside us, the ones tired of seeing us off-kilter and under expressed, insist that efficacy is still the standard. Control should go to the ones who have the insight. Our frustration grows, willing us to cut this knot and get on with it!