Sunday, May 01, 2011

Myths are not in books

The tip of something need not be remotely like what is there below the surface. We will continue to go thru enormous change as to what we are like. But we seem not to notice the speed because we are in it. Or rather it has us. And we swim like fish in a new sea, always already the case, moment to moment. Until such time as we began to notice the weirdness. A lake will form in the middle of LA. No one came cap it. A small building in Japan cannot be stopped. Not ever. No one knows how. A river will change direction finding the path of least resistance. It contains us. And so it becomes so, very quickly. The mythic is no longer lofty. It is here in the swath of jumble left by an EF5 in Bama, the smooth takeaway of our stuff by the sudden near supersonic intrusion of seawater, the pulling back of the sheets in southern Spain to reveal the lost continent, the loss of Quaddafi's children to dread falling from the sky, launched upon blue waters. Behind a metal curtain an entire way of living vanishes overnight and we can't even remember it. Systems overtake systems until we are with the last one. The universe is folding things as it takes them from the dryer and then they are tossed. So it goes as we wear our clothes. In fashion.

3 comments:

Kathleen said...

This makes perfect sense to me.

Also I just spent the weekend looking at creation myths from all over the world.

Kim said...

A quote from the DVD series "Living the Questions" in class yesterday: "Myths are not true or false, they are either alive or they are dead" (I think it was Crossan who said that.)
Now this one is alive.

ron hardy said...

I like that quote Kim. And Kathleen, I recently saw a documentary where an Indonesian man who had lost his entire family in that big tsunami talked about the unhappiness of the waters and that the relationship between the land and the sea was way out of wack.And thus this made sense.