File spoon-archives/lyotard.archive/lyotard_1997/lyotard.9711, message 12


Date: Fri, 14 Nov 1997 12:14:16 -0800
From: hugh bone <hughbone-AT-worldnet.att.net>
Subject: Who We Are


To:  List

Some of these thoughts were provoked by "Le Differend".


^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&& 

~~~~~~WHO WE ARE~~~~~~~


 I. GOD AND GODS AND MEN AND MYTHS

 God truly came alive
 when wily priests

 pointed to the heavens:

 "up there!"
 they said,
 "beyond the stars"

 "invincible, omniscient,
 almighty"

 (how conveniently invisible ...)
 
 earthbound gods
 of stone or clay,
 failing worshipers,
 got smashed to bits,
 priests too

 believers shelter God
 in their personal
 interior universe

 when death comes wholesale
 ...fires floods and plagues...

 priests bow down
 get new readings
 from on high
 preserve the values
 of their flocks
 with words

 one day the world
 thought God had died
 and Nietzsche said:
 "yes, oh yes, God's dead", he said.

 and "man, the measure of all things"
 sought out a new divinity
 to be a god himself......

 Yet he was Nature's child

 a Being different
 from Nature's other children...
 or so he claimed.

 the tribes of Men
 make myths and gods...
 mould their own Masters
 in myriad forms
 down all the ages

 now civilized -  
 we: Homo Sapiens
 King of species
 rain Death upon
 our kind

 our fragile selves
 a tiny mote
 in cosmic space
 and time


 II. WORDS

 infants first
 use body language

 thrashing limbs
 smiles and screams
 then words

 mothers and fathers
 talk to infants
 infants talk to themselves

 language informs
 consciousness and memory
 creates a self...

 situated

 in the flux of humanity
 the biological world
 the inanimate cosmos

 language is strange
 invades our brains
 enables thought

 does my cat talk to himself?

 language precedes
 each generation

 contains rules
 and rules for
 making rules,
 and valuating

 we come to language
 as we come to food
 an institution
 already here
 language is...

 awaiting newborns

 they arrive.....


 III. OBLIGATION

 language conveys
 ancestral obligation...
 sleeping in genes?

 one day a voice says:
 "you ought"
 binds us to duty

 knowing right
 knowing wrong
 conscious and aware...

 Our personal universe
 not wholly private,
 being obliged...


 IV. BEING HUMAN

 what happens?
 what just arrived?
 what goes on inside
 our conscious being?

 the only being we KNOW!

 ask language;
 ask all the languages
 of the body, of the arts...

 I could not talk to myself
 had others not talked to me

 children raised by animals
 have human form,
 human senses, human perception
 not "human" being


 V. OBJECTIVE TRUTH

 Science discovers,
 Employs instruments
 disciplines
 technologies
 to find,
 define,
 objects.

 Science
 states,
 asserts
 describes
 theories and facts,
 
 the "truth",
 the "being real"
 of  objects.

 the Brain,
 all about the Brain
 tissue, cells,
 currents of electricity
 neurons, synapses....

 but,
 inside consciousness
 the content of a word?
 two hundred fifty nine definitions
 of "self"

 simple four-letter words:
 love, hate, and fear,
 science can't penetrate
 doesn't know...

 (the spoon within the soup
   knows not its flavor)


 VI. RELIGION AND ART

 Religion, art, aesthetics,
 provide first-hand reports
 describe the singular contents
 of consciousness and memory
 of lived experience

 Artists are ever
 trying to express
 the reality of being human
 'midst people and things

 the score is not the music,
 the canvas not the painting,
 the performance not the play

 music, paintings, drama
 we, one-by-one
 in heart
 and mind
 make real,

 souls of the living
 souls of the dead
 
 poetry and dreams
 
 we one by one
 make real.

 Other species,
 other brains,
 know other realities

 we think...

 what really happens
 talking to ourselves,
 talking to others?


   

Driftline Main Page

 

Display software: ArchTracker © Malgosia Askanas, 2000-2005