Curiosity Over Pride (FYI: To comment, send an e-mail to scifidink@gmail.com)

Monday, March 22, 2010

My lilies...

Dinky, you're going to have to put yourself on hold for this post, if you don't like the.. associative way that I write....
This post is a response to Hell's response to my response in the jungle.
Well, really, only partly, because I intended to write this post anyway, but Hell's response can be tied right into this post, and I am counting on HIM (at least...) to understand why.

This morning I went out into the garden and started poking around a little bit. (I am a dilettante gardener at the very best. Thank God (lol) that I don't have to feed my family with the garden because we just MIGHT starve to death if we had to depend on my gardening skills...)
Two days ago the earth smelled that humous smell of things waking up seriously. Mother Earth shaking off the winter definitely. The ball has stopped twitching. It has gained momentum. It is.. rolling well now.
And I took a close look at that flower bed when, on a cold day in November, I carefully dug 15 holes (hard work...) and lovingly placed 15 rather large sized lily bulbs in place, taking care to replace the soil above them so there would be no air bubbles, no useless space. And then I stuck dried leaves over the bed to protect my.. babies from the cold winter that was coming up, and watered them.
They stayed cosy warm (for bulbs) under there in the earth for more than four months, and... I didn't resort to sophisticated technology, or sonars to make sure that they were doing fine.
I just... TRUSTED that those little bulbs knew their stuff, and that whatever allowed those little bulbs to know their stuff (no names, now, please...) was looking out for them ok. (Some people would say that they KNEW those bulbs would come up, but... that is rather.. PRESUMPTIOUS in my book, saying that you KNOW, when really it is a question of FAITH.)
And guess what ? After 4 months now of cold, and quiet, the first shoots have broken the soil !!
Talk about a miracle.
Boy... am I ever a proud mother of those bulbs !! Isn't it great to see a miracle at work ??

In case you were wondering... That was a parable.
It is a parable for the metaphysical underpinnings of investment.
You know, that operation whereby OVER TIME, something that you have put into the ground, NOT KNOWING WHETHER IT WOULD PAN OUT OR NOT, but that you WORKED FOR, that you WATERED AND NURTURED, OVER TIME would PRODUCE.
Sounds pretty corny in our slick world, doesn't it ?
But...
Buyer beware. Those are just WORDS above. But THOSE WORDS are firmly anchored to ancestral processes that inscribe us in NATURE AND TIME, as LIVING BEINGS.
This, by the way, is what the Ancien Regime was founded on.
YOU may think that the Ancien Regime was a pile of shit that enslaved the citizens.
But... the Ancien Regime was ALSO a complex theological and metaphysical system that had carefully thought out man's place AND his RELATION to his environment, nature.
And this SYSTEM gave us... a particular idea of time, duration, (for Thai, the time that is modeled on the processes of pregnancy and digestion).
Something which the relative destruction of the Ancien Regime HAS NOT GIVEN US.
And that is why this CRISIS before us is a crisis, NOT JUST OF FIAT MONEY.
It is a METAPHYSICAL CRISIS, which interrogates our TIME, our PLACE, WHO WE ARE.
Don't get me wrong. There is no tragedy involved. Because we have become TOO BOURGEOIS for tragedy. (That may change rapidly, as the middle class disappears from the scene...)
Where are you, Joe ?
YOU should be reading me here. I think you understand this...

5 comments:

Hellasious said...

Well.. I am a HIM now, wow! I take it the capitals denote deification? Romans from the Empire's hinterlands (but not in Italy itself) were allowed to deify and pray to their current emperor! Likewise for the denizens of Sudden Debt's Spawn-Off, but not in Sudden Debt ITSELF?

Debra that was a lovely lilly parable. Tempus, however, always fugit. I just read a text from an Assyrian inscription dated some thousands of years ago bemoaning exactly the same passing of the old ways..

Plus ca change..

Debra said...

I'm very... PROUD that you deigned to descend from your pedestal, took off those laurel leaves for a minute, and took a stroll in our saloon.. ;-).
The door's open any time you want.
You can come... shopping at your leisure. ;-)
Take the hot milk tonight.
Cheers.

Dr John said...

Hi Debra. I am now following your blog after finding you on Carlat. After reading much of what you write I don't think you would like me much.Ha ha. I will always fall back to responsibility of the individual first. This high fructose corn syrup is a wonderful example. Even if you are correct we want to make this issue overly complicated as we do with being fat. How come it is ok to demand govt. stay out of a womans body when it comes to abortion but many of the same people demand they get involved when it comes to trans fats or my right to eat foie gras or smoke? Yes just eat less and do more. Oh sure collective bodies have some sort of collective responsibility but such bodies are made up of individuals and nothing more. I have watched people hand over their rights and responsibilities to others for 20 years and those bodies and an increasingly large govt. fail them every time. We want a perfect world and we want to be shielded from harm and responsibility. Well that desire and the collective wish fantasy for it is the enemy, not high fructose corn syrup. Thanks for your invite!

Debra said...

See my above post, Doctor John.
Suspension of disbelief is the name of the game, as dink would say...
My position on what you just wrote is VERY VERY complicated. You'll need to stick around for a while to catch on to it..

Thai said...

You just knew that the physicians would have to agree!

... But to be fair, while I agree that on some cosmic hierarchical ranking system, personal responsibility tops any list, to be fair to others like Okie, it really is both personal AND collective responsibility and a number of "additional factors".

I think this is one of the reasons that that the culture wars with social conservatives has been so nasty.
To the extent that economically costly behaviors (drug use, etc...) are controlled by a combination of personal and collective responsibility, the loosening of the collective chain has meant that the burden has been entirely on the individual. For some, the loss of this additional "safeguard" has been devastating.

No one (wo)man is truly an island.


And @Dr John, welcome. Deb has admired your comments on Carlat for some time.

re: Deb's "complicated position"- she isn't kidding. ;-)



@Hell

Welcome buddy. An unusual appearance. A pleasure to have you pop in.

Re: deification

Dream on ;-)

The Most Fabulous Objects In The World

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