Kunstler's 2008 Predictions

As a kinder, gentler, more compassionate version of myself now managing Wuz Zappnin, I will let others, here, better informed and more eloquent, weigh in on the coming year. There's nothing like a little, "There's a hell of a depression coming." to start the New Year off on the right foot. But then again, in fairness to the opposition, "Don't worry, be happy, every little thing is gonna be all right."
But sincerely, and truly, I do wish all of you, and myself too, happiness in the coming year.
Z

Imperial Sunset

The Archdruid Report: Politics: Imperial Sunset
Another astoundingly insightful essay by John Michael Greer.

You, Andrew Marvell

And here face down beneath the sun
And here upon earth's noonward height
To feel the always coming on
The always rising of the night

To feel creep up the curving east
The earthy chill of dusk and slow
Upon those under lands the vast
And ever climbing shadow grow

And strange at Ecbatan the trees
Take leaf by leaf the evening strange
The flooding dark about their knees
The mountains over Persia change

And now at Kermanshah the gate
Dark empty and the withered grass
And through the twilight now the late
Few travelers in the westward pass

And Baghdad darken and the bridge
Across the silent river gone
And through Arabia the edge
Of evening widen and steal on

And deepen on Palmyra's street
The wheel rut in the ruined stone
And Lebanon fade out and Crete
High through the clouds and overblown

And over Sicily the air
Still flashing with the landward gulls
And loom and slowly disappear
The sails above the shadowy hulls

And Spain go under the the shore
Of Africa the gilded sand
And evening vanish and no more
The low pale light across that land

Nor now the long light on the sea

And here face downward in the sun
To feel how swift how secretly
The shadow of the night comes on...

By Archibald MacLeish

Problems and Predicaments

I have written elsewhere about John Michael Greer's writings on our culture, civilization and the predicament we are in in this, the beginning of the 21st Century. I am rereading Greer's commentary from his earliest posts in 2006. I recommend them to all. If I were a college dean, I would have Greer's writings as part of the undergraduate core curriculum. While each of his essays stands on its own, reading them in chronological order is immensely helpful.
Click on the title to this post for a link to Greer's August 31, 2006, essay Problems and Predicaments.

EVEN THIS WILL PASS AWAY

Once in Persia reigned a king,
Who upon a signet ring
Carved a maxim strange and wise,
When held before his eyes,
Gave him counsel at a glance,
Fit for every change and chance:
Solemn words, and these were they:
'EVEN THIS WILL PASS AWAY."

Trains, of camel through the sand
Brought him gems from Samarcand;
Fleets of galleys over the seas
Brought him pearls to rival these,
But he counted little gain,
Treasures of the mine or main;
'What is wealth?' the king would say
"EVEN THIS WILL PASS AWAY."

'Mid the pleasures of his court
At the zenith of their sport,
When the palms of all his guests
Burned with clapping at his jests,
Seated midst the figs and wine,
Said the king: 'Ah, friends of mine,'
Pleasure comes but not to stay,
"EVEN THIS WILL PASS AWAY."

Woman, fairest ever seen
Was the bride he crowned as queen,
Pillowed on the marriage-bed
Whispering to his soul, he said
"Though no monarch ever pressed
Fairer bosom to his breast,
Mortal flesh is only clay!
'EVEN THIS WILL PASS AWAY."

Fighting on the furious field,
Once a javelin pierced his shield,
Soldiers with a loud lament
Bore him bleeding to his tortured side,
'Pain is hard to bear," he cried,
But with patience, day by day,
"EVEN THIS WILL PASS AWAY.'

Towering in a public square
Forty cubits in the air,
And the king disguised, unknown,
Gazed upon his sculptured name,
And he pondered, "What is fame?'
Fame is but a slow decay!
"EVEN THIS WILL PASS AWAY."

Struck with palsy, sore and old,
Waiting at the gates of gold,
Said he with his dying breath
'Life is done, but what is Death?"
Then as answer to the king
Fell a sunbeam on his ring;
Showing by a heavenly ray,
"EVEN THIS WILL PASS AWAY."

Theodore Tilten

OZYMANDIAS

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shatter'd visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamp'd on these lifeless things,
The hand that mock'd them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains: round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
Percy Bysshe Shelley, 1818

The Second Coming

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

William Butler Yeats

My Legacy

December 22, 2007

Irvine, CA

What with global warming and peak oil, peak water, peak everything, overpopulation, etc., not to mention the fact that species, like individuals, have a lifespan, I am concerned. Our human species will one day die out if only from old age. Even if we should plug along for a few billion years there is the scientific certainty that one day our sun will balloon into a red giant, its fiery atmosphere extending out beyond the orbit of Mars, first blowing away Earth's atmosphere, then its oceans, and finally rendering it nothing more than a dead burnt cinder, all traces of that proud and haughty race of primates that once strutted its hour upon the stage utterly lost, vanquished and vanished. With that scenario in mind, I have arranged to have my writings, a photograph, and a swab of DNA from inside my cheek blasted into space on the next intergalactic spacecraft. I don't know about the rest of you guys, but I am going to survive this thing.

[Postscript, circa 10 billion years hence, found in the records of an extinct alien race on the planet Xorthrop, circling the star Exeter in the Lesser Magellanic Cloud: ". . . . thus the pestilence Homo Sapien started its inexorable spread across the Milky Way galaxy, rendering planet by planet, each in turn, ruined and uninhabitable."] This from Christopher Cokinos in Orion Magazine, "The consolations of extinction are the comforts of deep time, an acceptance of passage. “Take your place with grace,” Bruce Cockburn sings, “and then be on your way.” The consolations of extinction are an acceptance of death, of all deaths, always, in all places. My lover, myself, my parents, my sister and niece, my grandnephew, my friends, my two sweet cats. The orioles this season sipping nectar from a feeder. The American dipper that makes sounds like clacking pebbles as it flies upriver, downriver, and back again. The river itself. The foothills I glimpse from my hammock are the shorelines of ancient Lake Bonneville, whose remnant Great Salt Lake will dry up too. Families die. Genera die. Whole ecosystems die. The solar system’s planets—nine, no, eight, or, okay, maybe twelve, count ‘em how you will—they’re goners too. Stars, including all 400 billion in the Milky Way: doomed. Galaxies, all of them, all 100-plus billion of them: doomed. Even protons will decay someday, the ages of the atom finally closed. This universe—one, perhaps, in an infinite multiverse—will die in a darkness and cold beyond our imaginings." Put that in your pipe and smoke it.