Quotable: What Keeps you Going

Quoting blogger-friend Gretzky quoting Barbara Kingsolver's book Animal Dreams (which I guess I need to read now):

"I'm thinking about Falstaff today, about Hal, and Shakespeare's vision of death and what it means. And how our culture views death, its finality. I'm thinking a lot about how to live in light of our imminent departures, and I'm again reminded of Barbara Kingsolver's words from Animal Dreams, about what she wants - well, about what Hallie wants, in her letters to Codi:

'I don't expect to see perfection before I die. Lord, if I did, I would have stuck my head in the oven back in Tucson, after hearing the stories of some of those refugees...What keeps you going isn't some fine destination but just the road you're on, and the fact that you know how to drive...You keep your eyes open, you see this damned to hell world you got born into, and you ask yourself, "What life can I live that will let me breath in and out and love somebody or something and not run off screaming into the woods?"'(224)

'...You ask why I'm not afraid of loving and losing, and that's my answer. Wars and elections are both too big and too small to matter in the long run. The daily work - that goes on, it adds up. It goes into the ground, into crops, into children's bellies and their bright eyes. Good things don't get lost. Codi, here's what I decided: the very least you can do in your life is to figure out what you hope for. And the most you can do is live inside that hope. Not admire it from a distance but live right under its roof. What I want is so simple I almost can't say it: elementary kindness. Enough to eat, enough to go around. The possibility that kids might grow up to be neither the destroyers nor the destroyed. That's about it...Right now I'm living in that hope, running down its hallway and touching the walls on both sides. I can't tell you how good it feels. I wish you knew. ' (299)"

Keep the faith, hope, and, love, y'all. Carry on.

Song: Somethin' More

by Andi & I on the album Days Like This:

you can keep your parking tickets
hey, keep your letters and your law
well, wipe your tight little bureaucracy
and flush your paperwork and all, flush it all

hold on to your diamonds
and your hard earned cash
you can still fill the tip jar if you like, but hey,
don’t dig up your buried stash
‘cause there’s something more . . .

hang onto your fabulous prizes, Ed
keep your home out in the ‘burbs
i might even give up this guitar
for the mystery that i’m finding in these words

somewhere deep inside this cynic’s heart
miracles and wonders abound
and all desires and irritations lose focus
they fade into the background – they fade
‘cause i know there’s something more . . .

there’s nothing like it in the finest stores
or behind any of Monty Hall’s doors
for winners, losers, beggars, choosers,
lovers, sinners and whores
i know, i know there’s something more . . .

i’ve been looking down dark alleys
i’ve been hanging out in bars
i’ve been uptown and downtown and all around,
all around, following the sound of
slow beating, crap eating, poor treated tired hearts
and I’ve moved with the masses on Michigan
marking miles in melancholy stares straight ahead or
sternly at the sidewalk concrete
careful can’t cause contact ‘cause there’s too many too many
too many damn people, people
wanting, begging, needing, dying for something, for something
and there’s nothing to give
as we feel the weight of our monuments of consumption,
our Towers of Babel
boxes built on the bones of the bodies we’ve buried
trying to reach the top,
to leave this planet, but there’s nowhere, there’s nowhere,
nowhere, no there’s nothing there
but the hearts we’ve emptied trying to make room
for the garbage we’ve picked up along the way

but somewhere deep inside this cynic’s heart
miracles and wonders abound and
how can I be expected to sit by quietly and
watch them drown, watch them
when I know there’s something more . . .

there’s something more

Blood Cell Phone

Sierra Leone is hardly the only place where lead and steel in the bodies of the poor are 'traded' for minerals in the shiny accessories of the rich. Ever wondered how many people in the Congo were killed or driven from their homes and deprived of food and shelter to make way for the mining of the coltan* in your pocket? Don't you just get a warm fuzzy feeling from being connected to the rest of the world through the wonders of modern technology?

*Coltan is short for columbite-tantalite, eerily fitting names for particles so implicated in violent hegemony and covetousness.

Little Mysteries of Life

Why is the sky blue?

Who insures the FDIC? (And what happens when they go bankrupt?)

If the love of money is the root of all kinds of evil, and power corrupts, and the road to hell is paved with good intentions, why are many of us so eager to trust people with money and power who claim to be well-intentioned?

If playing the stock market involves guesswork, risk, and putting down money in hope of a payout sooner or later (if you play enough rounds, something is likely to work for you), and you collect money for which you did nothing but have money already while many of the people who actually worked to make your investment profitable were not compensated fairly for their labor, how is that different from stealing and gambling?

If through the use of military or economic force you cause someone to lose their land so they cannot provide for themselves and must work for you (on your terms) and buy things from you (also on your terms) in order to survive, how is that different from slavery?

Quotable: By the Stars

by Soren Kierkegaard in Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses, "The Expectancy of Faith" (1843):

"How, then, should we face the future? When the sailor is out on the ocean, when everything is changing all around him, when the waves are born and die, he does not stare down into the waves, because they are changing. He looks up at the stars. Why? Because they are faithful; they have the same location now that they had for our ancestors and will have for generations to come. By what means does he conquer the changeable? By the eternal. By the eternal, one can conquer the future, because the eternal is the ground of the future, and therefore through it the future can be fathomed.

. . . The believer, therefore, is finished with the future before he begins with the present, because what has been conquered can no longer disturb, and this victory can only make someone stronger for the present work."

'Homo sapiens'

'Survival of the fittest'* is often touted as justifying proof of the naturalness and inevitability of capitalism's machinations. But are no-holds-barred competition and 'enlightened self-interest' really as compatible as we would like to believe? Is either morally sound or even sane? Where is the better world we were promised would arrive if we would just follow our primordial instincts and accumulate for ourselves?

Lest we forget that Someone Else is the author of creation and its rules (and there is only so far we can bend things before something breaks . . .), I beg us to remember other laws of the jungle less economically stimulating but equally applicable:

1. Don't foul your watering hole.
2. Never expect your dinner to come to you.
3. Live within your means; you can't live without them.
4. There is no independence; everyone is contingent (and the higher up on the food chain you are the more true this is).
5. What constitutes competitive advantage is liable to change on occasion, sometimes gradually and sometimes abruptly.
6. If your habitat changes faster than you can and there's nowhere to migrate, guess what?

*The vital if fairly haphazard process of natural selection by which adaptive genes are passed on in greater proportion to the next generation within the population of a given species while maladaptive genes are edited out. Interpreted by some to mean that competition is the fundamental organizing principle of life.