IT WOULDN'T ALL BE GONE

i was out on the south deck just now doing my first morning stretches, looking around at the grass, sky, mountains, sea, the cap cloud resting lightly on mount baker in the morning sun, trying to imagine it all gone, everything, the result of my mortality. 

i realized i was smiling, quite benignly. of course it wouldn't all be gone. why should mount baker disappear just because i can't see it anymore? why should the grass? the soft autumn air? the drone of a passing plane far off? it would all still be here. the other creatures around me, my family and friends not far off — all still here. 

how proper. how correct. how wonderful!

this mortality is only an imaginary calamity. we just bump up against the wall of our cranial capacity, like any creature of this earth; we cannot imagine nothing.  

but we don't have to. there is no nothing to choke our benign serenity. there is a vast continuum. this story is a chain reaction. nothing may be a long time coming for the cosmos. and even after that...

it wouldn't all be gone.

BRUCE

what is it with the universe and endless repetition? why this endless duplication, of people, fruit flies, of stars, black holes and galaxies? i can’t get my head around it.

i remember bruce bacon, a kid i went to junior high school with who wound up at RISD in the same class as me. he was a terrible painter, a terrible drawer that everyone kept rooting for anyway. something about him made us all yearn for him to succeed. and when he did, finally, with an oil portrait that was really great, we were beside ourselves with excitement and relief. ‘so now you know you can do it!’ i said with great enthusiasm. he looked at me with a combination of flatness and an expression of philosophical ennui. ‘isn’t that great?’ i said, my forehead furrowing slightly. 'your reward is that you can keep going, brucey; this is just the first one.’ ‘why would i do that?’ he said. ‘i’ll never do that again. i proved i can do it. i’m done.’ ‘you’re not serious’ i said, slightly astonished. but looking at him i saw that he seemed to be.

he committed suicide soon after. 

so maybe you think he was crazy. maybe he was, by the usual definition. but maybe there is just a way of seeing things different than the way we seem to be collectively seeing things.

AMERICA VS REALITY

one of the more depressing aspects of american foreign and military policy is that, as it has been for most of a century, it is still based entirely around energy hegemony, and that means, to the americans, oil; this at a time when anyone with a brain larger than his wallet understands that oil is done, that it is toxic to the planet, the world economy and all the inhabitants of the biosphere.

who is going to fight this world view? not the brits, not the soviets. i can think of a couple of candidates: the european union and china. 

i am naive enough not to be prejudiced toward any future saviors of this little orb, though i have a very clear favorite; the european model is the wounded beginning, along with the undermined united nations, of the only possible future of a civilized mankind.