Dishwashing Thought

Go back to 8000 BCE. Agriculture is just beginning to come together. There are are maybe 5 million human beings. Sumeria, Egypt, Harappa, the Olmecs, the Xia dynasty–all these belong to the distant future. 10000 years ago. The utter beginnings of human civilization.

Now take that and multiply–everything, from the most distant reaches of what we might call history to our own day-ONE HUNDRED TIMES OVER

And you get a million years. 1/65th of the way to the end of the Age of Dinosaurs. Which lasted 186 million years.

We are less than a blip. We are a blip on a blip. And anything you or I might recognize as something we were accustomed to is a blip on that blip, a microblip.

From “The Tales of Ise”

I would still see more

Yet the shy coquettish moon

does absent itself?

How I wish the mountainside

could draw across its curtain!

-“Tales of Ise,” Dan LXXXII

Dream: The River

Had a dream. Little hard to describe since the dream had not a plot, but a place: The River.

From the air, I could see the River, curving fat and slow across a great plain, the sun glinting off the turbid water. At every curve you found a town, centers of the surrounding farmland. In between the towns swam the boats choogly.

Choog-choog-choog.

I saw the steamboats, not like sidepaddlers of our own history. I saw a line of them: barges with boilers on them, looked like furnaces, with great bronze screws, choog-choog-choog, half-in and half-out of the water. Which makes for massive cavitation and poor performance (hence the choogly sound), but that was not a problem. They were slow, but they connected the towns. No one was in a hurry.

Between the towns the steam-boats carried goods and passengers, choog-choog-choog, and the boat-men got a little change in their pockets, singing in the sun.

On the river ran the boats, town to town, and I saw the River, the people of the River. They were happy. It was a lovely dream, because they all were happy.

Blogging Problem

All things are connected.

Therefore, I can blog about everything at once, or I can not blog at all.

The latter takes less time.