Everything is Permitted

For the cost of forcing one's will on another is a kind of neglect - the beginning of CRIME.

Outside of the 10 Commandments

Nothing is illegal in adult behaviour.

Once you remove the State's function

as Arbiter of morals, once the State is excised, youve swept the stage clean.

The State cannot pick and choose

between what sexual behaviours

are acceptable, what drugs are acceptable, which religions. One could say let the market decide. It's against the laws of Democracy to allow the State to tell the people what to eat, wear, or think. In fact the people themselves cannot decide for the people as a whole. Each individual has the sovereign right to decide for themselves. Would this return to individualism stem the growing rise of violence in America?

The Western World has been literary for at least 4500 years. Replacing such an ancient tradition and overnight, is bound to take its toll. Maybe we are shedding our literary roots, as Marshall McCluhan sugggested, for a grander, deeper vision. The image of "noumena" - the thing in itself. Painting and sculpture are the finest examples of the image. Their meanings can be historic, iconographic, representational or projective (as in abstract painting), but the word does more than resonate across the star-studded mountains of time. Through language we can see, feel and become engaged with every type of mind from cultures long dead. No other human expression can give us this glimpse into the complexity of human life. Up until now our history has been kept alive by the word.

Does the pervasiveness 

of the image erode the power

of the word or has the word

run its course? Is the 

power of the image

an evolutionary force?

One has the urge to create paintings,

music, or write stories, poems, movies, etc..

One studies the various crafts and disciplines and yet without the time to experience life, as one knows it, and then to have the time to analyze and explore feelings, memories, and ongoing observations of that life, one - or you -probably won't come up with anything worth a damn.

Decline and Liberation

In the not so distant future actors, painters, writers, sculptors, musicians and directors will experience the world first before creating a world of their own!

It makes no sense to get personal. Each of us is a piece on a chessboard called history. 

If you want to create something new or expand an unmined field

expect to spend most of your life known to only a few.

There's a kind of woman and man the government and the corporations want. We all know what he or she is. As Barbara Tuchman alluded to "when the gap between the real and the ideal becomes too great, the human mind snaps."

Sometimes when I'm watching T.V. I feel the American people are being portrayed as a lost tribe of nit wits. Without sports American men would go insane; they would have nothing to talk about.

Look at the depth of the individual the Western World generated 

from 1880 to 1980, those who were propelled into the main arenas and compare them to the people who now command the stage.

At aga noe en shadow

Crystalized in the present

the past is never far from here

but to live in the past is a kind

of insanity.

We must be like the mad parents

of the children who dove

off cliffs rather than starve to death:

Parents who were amazed

at their children's exuberance.

Except for the young, most of us

are sustained by the past.

Sculpted by time

to be a living embodiment

of the past.

This ranting about courage,

Don't give up the faith; 

Persistence through struggle 

masks this sorry feeling of incompentence

and destructiveness.

If politics is the art of patronage

and the skillful dissemination of power, 

then we are screwed. 

As in the arts, there are brief moments in politics when sanity and light prevail 

but those golden years are quickly replaced by contracting reactions. 

The beauty of an effective political structure 

is its astonishing ability to absorb and neutralize what it is tormented by.

The Sea Mount

"High on a mountain far away ... " The mountain sings to itself. The cockatoo preens and keeps an eye out for a mate. In the great Ocean, two-thirds of our world's surface, all living things sing to themselves and to others.

The great Oceans ofthe Earth teem with life - from the top to the bottom from the bottom to the top. The Methusalii, massive whales, broadcast the news ofthe aquasphere - what is happening in the Indian, Atlantic, Pacific, and Antarctic Oceans. The Nobbli, the crabs, are the keepers, the librarians of the seas. The news, including the truth, is kept by them and when broadcast is heard by all those who can listen.

Now, the news courses with a sense of urgency. Nobbliss, the largest oldest and wisest crab in the Deep assembles his counselors and speaks "brewing in the Oceans there are chemical changes that threaten our world. We feel it in our claws each and everyday. In parts, our numbers are shrinking. So we have heard from the Methusalii who travel the Globe. They say it is the work of those who, ions ago, walked away; those who now sail the tops and suck us up. It is time to persuade those above to cease the warring within themselves and give us love. We must persuade them to become once again our friends as we were many seas ago. Therefore, I am calling a sea-mount. Let

the music go out." Nobbliss had spoken.

In the beginning the music drifted slowly. Each creature making its own sound:

the plankton whispered. The blowfish hissed. The octopi hummed. The dolphins

clicked. The whales sang their high pitched mournful songs until an orchestra of sound

was heard in every port and by every vessel sailing the seas. A miracle: a sound no

humans had ever heard - mellifluous and alien.

For three days the humans crowded the beaches and hugged the coastlines. In the

interior they listened on their radios and I-Pods. There were great debates about the

meaning of the sounds, but soon those who had walked away, so many ions ago, grew

bored. After all Life is for living and working not just sitting around listening to songs.

Nobbliss sat in his cave. He spoke to one of his counselors, a young sea urchin.

"If only they weren't so busy," Nobbliss sighed. The young sea urchin asked, "Did they

listen?"

"Only time will tell," wise, old Nobbliss said. "Only time will tell."