Wednesday, June 01, 2005

WHAT'S THAT Sucking Sound?


GODDESS WORLD (Minoan) of your peace-loving ancestors. Demolished by god peoples ca 1450 B.P. (click on pic to enlarge, & get a good look at what was stolen from you). Posted by Hello

Now, I'm doing this blog because the present sucks. Not only that, we're so used to the muck (yawn), we can't even hear it sucking. But -- Glory Be! -- I can see a non-sucky future! It centers on love and courage (Goddess) versus war and cowardice (god). I can SEE this so clearly. But until we who see this in our mind's eye, throw it on a canvas where others can see it, I'm afraid our beautiful picture will die.

So I found this thought-needling article to help us paint. It says, first, that we can never totally describe the future. "Anything we can speak of must by definition fall short of the otherness we desire.... To portray the future in the language of the present is inevitably to betray it...."

It says, second, that most descriptions of utopia are BORING. "Most utopias ... are odorless, antiseptic places, intolerably streamlined and sensible, in which the natives chat for hours about the splendid efficiency of their sanitary arrangements...."

It says, third, 'Wait a minute! Do we even have to describe the future?' Russell Jacoby (the author of the book this article's about) "...wants a utopian thought that 'pines for the future but does not map it out....' We must strike a balance between saying too much and saying too little, between the future as a mere projection of the present and as a cryptic silence."

And fourth, it says, There's one thing we DO hafta do: We hafta somehow link our rosy Goddess future with the mucky present. "If there is simply an abyss between the present and the future, then we cannot logically speak of how the future takes shape in the present. Jacoby ... ends by stressing the need to link present and future."

Go here to read the entire article in the latest edition of The Nation >>>

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Thanx to casenhis at the UIUC Classics Dept. for the picture of the Minoan palace-temple of Knossos.

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