Sunday, September 14, 2008

Why Didn't the World End - Yet?

They turned on the big supercollider, and it worked!! It seems there was only one frightened scientist, who certainly looked the part, from my glimpse of him on TV. I'd thought I wrote something here about my thoughts on the machine, but it must have been an email, or just in my mind. Just as well . . .

But in a personal sense, the world did end. This supercollider (is that what it's called? Hadron something?) is constructed after the crossroads, when the scientific enterprise should have recognized that it's all about words and labels. That new particles can be proliferated ad-infinitum provided we have the will and the money, and that there are no essential new secrets to be revealed, other than that, by omission, the actual world of words and human beings is slipping into oblivion, for neglect.

Of course, duh, I'm in the midst of reading Naomi Klein on Disaster Capitalism, so I'm in a frame of mind to identify and debunk grand narratives. I want to know what agenda the supercollider really serves, since it seems at best unlikely that it actually serves some quest for knowledge and understanding (At worst, does it represent some instrument for mass destruction, or has it moved on to the meta-level of mass control, which was the whole point of mass destruction, or is it just what it seems to be - an engine to perpetuate excitement toward something that will never be; the discovery of unambiguous reality, and by that the instrumentation of trueing?).

I suspect it's just a happy diversion to keep the techies sharp while the economy retools for its next grand project. It doesn't seem likely to lead to cold fusion or some other apocalyptic energy solution. Just a new footnote. A really really expensive one. Well, unless that self-aggrandizing black hole theory turns out to be true, but really now, can you imagine something as definitionally opposed to the prospect as a black hole, aggrandizing!?

That's the other part. Me. This typing on a billboard visible in principle to everyone and anyone on the planet, while remaining calm in my certainty that no one will ever notice. It's not like geo-caching, where there is something remotely hidden. But it's also not quite like dressing outrageously in public. More like the couple making love in the Skydome hotel suite during the Big Game (is it the Rogers Center or something like that now?) who forgot about the TV cameras? (or did they?) Like a Bush gesture when he thinks the recording machines aren't rolling?

Anyhow, it's just weird. I don't even have any interest in what I myself have written. It's too boring to review - too dense to get back into. It doesn't progress and doesn't move toward anything like a conclusion.

Meanwhile, my little sister, raised by the example of a helpless mother, trained as a southern belle without the southern motherly training in the wielding of the southern belle's secret power - raised, in other words, as a southern belle by a southern father, but with a northern mother. And the mother delivered into the arms of a northern patriarch. Both mother and father insecure about the gender roles defined for them, and therefore playing them in caricature. That little sister has just awoken to the fact that her ignorant and manipulative husband has been sexually involved with her newly 18 year old daughter, who thus found the strength to expose the fact.

This is how the world ends, I'm certain. This is how the world is ending. Much though I would like to push this away, as something separate from myself, I know that her innocent vulnerability - my sister's - is my own. I know that I am, internally, the whole entire structure of second-guessing and self doubt which failed, until now, to crystallize the warning signs into what I've always known they were. Predation. Manipulation. Raising self-justification to religion. Perfected paranoia about everything public, and so moving to what's left of the outback, and into a society which is further caricature, truly, than that depicted in the Handmaiden's Tale. (A Boy and his Dog?).

I could have known but chose not to. I could have stopped it, but lacked the clear insight to do so.

At least I now know what born-again really means (need I say the offender professes himself so, as does my for-the-moment still deluded and supportive of his redemption sister). Self-election to a club of similarly ashamed hiders away from judgement and responsibility for their inner tendencies and hidden actions. Is it sort-of like blogging away so that only Jesus will or need ever know? But in the fullness of time and revelation, open to anyone and everyone to see?

Surely, it is an escape from human judgement. Let's hope the moment has not truly passed, when human judgement, soundly exercised, can turn the tide away from shameful acts committed in secret and having the public face of righteousness (or is it the public face of clinical neutrality that's worse?). Help us Jesus to be born-again more truly to our human responsibilities, and not simply to the relief the many panderers of your Name profer.

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