Leftovers
Any history is entirely reliant on storytellers who tell, and listeners who listen.
No history is ever completely accurate, and many, if not most, are never even close.
The campfires of imagination weave their way into every conceivable reckoning,
And it is left to the solitary few, to realize not even one, has ever been real.
* * * *
The past has only so much influence, so much control, over any given present.
Historians may or may not divine what is relevant to the future in their storytelling efforts.
History has proven many times that any given time will decipher its own take,
Based on the unfolding machinations the current world has in play.
And eventually, all will decline and fall into oblivion,
The abyss, where nothing ever happens.
* * * *
Is your dream motivated or indifferent? Driven or lackadaisical? Energetic or apathetic?
All fates find the same grave; will yours strike a note in history?
Or be resigned to an unmarked grave?
* * * *
Imagination, and all its memories, knowledge, history, metaphors … and drama,
Has a tendency to crash the party without notice, as often as inattention allows.
* * * *
What will history call it?
The Great Alignment
The Great Reckoning
The Great Adjustment
The Great Fall
The Great Devaluation
The Great Collapse
The Great Extinction
The Great Disintegration
The Great Annihilation
The Great Extermination
The Great Decline
The Great Termination
The Great Correction
The Great Cascade
The Great Avalanche
The Great Retrenching
The Great Meltdown
The Great Dissolution
The Great Downfall
The Great Demise
The Great Andropocene
The Great Difference
The Great Exodus
The Great Depression
The Great Retreat
The Great Articulation
The Great Descent
The Great Apology
The Great Reduction
The Great Plummet
The Great Repression
The Great Extinction
The Great Desolation
The Great Undoing
The Great Departure
The Great Awakening
Step right up, folks!
Time machines for sale!
Get ‘em while they’re hot!
* * * *
The one-percenters have, since the jungles of long ago, set the tone and tempo,
To which all the puppets below dance, however might-makes-right dictates and allows.
Any well-rewarded, ranking position, is determined by whatever they and the many minions value,
Which statistically boils down to avarice and power and vanity; to a pile of gold,
And whatever entitlements are at hand in the given time and place.
It is patterns, not history, that play out ever again.
* * * *
Do not believe your own narrative; that is for the dream.
You are playing the part that all the vanities will remember, until they do not.
All dreamtime histories are replete, unto their entireties, with forgotten everything, sooner or later.
Imagination is but a flickering candle in the quantum wind.
Its reality is highly suspect.
* * * *
Instinct was the baseline before imagination magnified it to heights and breadths beyond reckoning.
To be unaware of how it has shaped human history, is to submit to a power that embraces extinction.
* * * *
The problem-solving monkey-mind has evolved through natural selection since life’s beginning.
In its unassailable patterning, in its ceaseless hunter-gatherer quest for problems to solve,
It can, in some drama-laden lives, be prone to creating them out of little or nothing.
Oftentimes, of a perpetual nature; oftentimes, leap-frogging between many.
To employ the given mind as the as-needed tool nature intended, requires an attentive wit.
An intelligence, to which, as history has again and again shown, more than a few, have little or no access.
* * * *
Do the engineering.
Do the architecture.
Do the language.
Do the science.
Do the math.
Do the art.
Do the music.
Do the history.
Do the athletics.
Do the humanities.
Do the good, the bad.
Do whatever you please,
The same mystery is in all.
* * * *
What human beings have done for power and fame and fortune and revenge,
Throughout all its history, in every geography, is terrifying beyond all reckoning.
And the future every-moment streaming, very much the same, if not more so.
* * * *
How to dissolve the binds of post-traumatic stress,
That permeate any given mind-body like rings in a tree,
Requires a meditative attentiveness, challenging to maintain.
We are all captive in our biological cauldrons, prisoners of destiny,
Coded with whatever history has been written in the sands of imagination.
* * * *
Why would karma ever be inflicted upon a dream?
Why would a dreamer ever be punished, ever be rewarded,
For dreaming a dream, about which he or she or it, had no choice?
It is avaricious predators who create and use imaginary deities against you.
Depending on circumstances, you may, or may not, be free, to put them behind you.
It is not fun being shunned and/or tortured and/or executed for being a sceptic (a.k.a., heretic).
Might makes right, and histories across the board, have times beyond counting,
Proven far less than egalitarian, towards those who question.
* * * *
Democracy is something of an experiment – a hypothesis, an inquiry, an audition – in history’s playbook.
A means of managing civilization; a modus operandi, in no way natural to the human paradigm.
If representative democracy is to succeed, if power is to attain some degree of balance,
All parties must walk away from any given table at least partially dissatisfied.
Everyone must explore a way to achieve some sort of compromise,
In which all parties can be at least somewhat satisfied.
Any by-the-people-for-the-people-of-the-people governance,
Requires an autonomous perception, to which relatively few are disposed.
Requires a sagacity steeped in resolute determination to ward off the despotic inclination.
* * * *
What if you could profoundly articulate and understand, every human language ever spoken, ever written.
That you were intimate with the histories from which they, in partnership with nature, evolved.
What an astounding thing it would have been, to have witnessed all creation, all genesis,
From beginning to end, from germination to fruition, from cradle to grave,
And what if that ‘what if’ included all life forms, from small to great,
All the other creatures this Darwinian-garden orb has in space and time devised.
You would have to be some sort of all-inclusive deity, to achieve such total awareness.
And surely that divine omniscience, and its omnipotence, can never manifest in the mortal field.
And though we are all, of this timeless awareness, we are but pawns in its mystery theater extraordinaire.
* * * *
You really believe more than a random few even notice you?
And so what, really, if even billions know of you,
And the history books laud your name.
Do you even know your Self?
* * * *
What a thing to witness such a cataclysmic unfolding in the history of this garden orb.
With or without life on board, it will spin along until, eventually,
The mystery sees fit to consume it entirely,
And then, presumably, speculatively, spit out something new,
Assuming, of course, that some form of imaginary perception is there to witness it.
* * * *
What choice has anyone ever had in anything, really?
Nature-nurture, the genetic lottery, coupled with the given backdrop –
History, culture, politics, religion, language, wealth, status, gender, and whatever else –
Fashion all, as surely, as deftly, as a mold does any lump of quantum terra-cotta.
Human consciousness may vainly, in so many ways, deem itself superior,
To the churning instinctual algorithms of all its fellow earthlings,
But primordial instinct is the underlying operating system,
That has been running this state of so-called existence,
Since long before the first hint, the first tethers, of imagination.
Destiny is, each and every timeless moment, choreographing your arrival.
* * * *
So many believing their window of history, their slice of geography, their groups of like-minded –
Their family, their tribe, their country, their school, their city, their church, their world – so important.
There is absolutely no reason to hope, even for a moment, that the human species will ever get over itself.
It would require a transformation, a revolution of consciousness, absurd to all but the most astute.
* * * *
History is nothing more than imaginary notion,
A pattern, a habit, to which the human paradigm, the human genome,
In some ago, some unheralded moment, succumbed.
* * * *
Everything – culture, language, history, status, gender – is imprinted long before it becomes absorbed.
To believe you are anything more than a quantum algorithm humming away your little part,
In this grand theatrical production, that encompasses all creation, best think again.
In your next decision, see if you can come up with an unexpected move,
Without thinking at about it.
And if you managed something, how unpredictable was it, really?
* * * *
All human history, since long before the migration, the exodus, from the African jungles,
Has been driven by a very Darwinian might-makes-right, and its certain sidekick, political correctness.
World history is how all these tribal mindsets, these clannish groupthinks, have blended together.
From on-high, it would appear like bacteria spreading every which way across a Petri Dish.
Creating-preserving-destroying, in every corner of this itty-bitty, whirling grain of dust,
Which serenely orbits a small star floating in a relatively unexceptional galaxy,
In a cosmos whose lifespan is considered brief by the deities in charge.
* * * *
Who can out-Wittgenstein Wittgenstein?
Who can out-Schopenhauer Schopenhauer?
Who can out-Aristotle Aristotle?
Who can out-Lao Tzu Lao Tzu?
Who can out-Heraclitus Heraclitus?
Who can out-Kafka Kafka?
Who can out-Buddha Buddha?
Who can out-Plato Plato?
Who can out-Yogananda Yogananda?
Who can out-Aristotle Aristotle?
Who can out-James James?
Who can out-Ram Dass Ram Dass?
Who can out-Ashtavakra Ashtavakra?
Who can out-Watts Watts?
Who can out-Marx Marx?
Who can out-Descartes Descartes?
Who can out-Patanjali Patanjali?
Who can out-Arendt Arendt?
Who can out-Nietzsche Nietzsche?
Who can out-Sartre Sartre?
Who can out-Locke Locke?
Who can out-Thoreau Thoreau?
Who can out-Emerson Emerson?
Who can out-Bacon Bacon?
Who can out-Descartes Descartes?
Who can out-Vonnegut Vonnegut?
Who can out-Krishna Krishna?
Who can out-Hume Hume?
Who can out-Machiavelli Machiavelli?
Who can out-Comte Comte?
Who can out-Whitman Whitman?
Who can out-Rousseau Rousseau?
Who can out-Russell Russell?
Who can out-Hobbes Hobbes?
Who can out-Foucault Foucault?
Who can out-Kierkegaard Kierkegaard?
Who can out-Mill Mill?
Who can out-Confucius Confucius?
Who can out-Osho Osho?
Who can out-de Beauvoir de Beauvoir?
Who can out-Aquinas Aquinas?
Who can out-Carneades Carneades?
Who can out-Hess Hess?
Who can out-Diogenes Diogenes?
Who can out-Smith Smith?
Who can out-Parmenides Parmenides?
Who can out-Pascal Pascal?
Who can out-Chomsky Chomsky?
Who can out-Thales Thales?
Who can out-Wollstonecraft Wollstonecraft?
Who can out-Muhammad Muhammad?
Who can out-Shankara Shankara?
Who can out-Sina Sina?
Who can out-Derrida Derrida?
Who can out-Epicurus Epicurus?
Who can out-Kant Kant?
Who can out-Aurelius Aurelius?
Who can out-Socrates Socrates?
Who can out-Dewey Dewey?
Who can out-Aristotle Aristotle?
Who can out-Voltaire Voltaire?
Who can out-Hegel Hegel?
Who can out-Holshouser Holshouser?
Who can out-Plate Plato?
Who can out-Socrates Socrates?
Who can out-Heidegger Heidegger?
Who can out-Arendt Arendt?
Who can out-Zoroaster Zoroaster?
Who can out-Jesus Jesus?
Who can out-Camus Camus?
Who can out-Spinoza Spinoza?
Who can out-Krishnamurti Krishnamurti?
Who can out-philosophize the weight of history?
Hemmed in by the sages of the ages, we are, we are.
* * * *
Was Saul of Tarsus truly a Jewish pharisee turned Christian apostle,
Or merely the first grifter in a 2,000-plus-year labyrinth of scam artists,
To contrive a fantastical protagonist named Jesus as a pawn to his own ends?
History is but a mishmash of facts and lies melded into the ends and means in play.
* * * *
Reality is only as real as you imagine it.
Space is only as real as you imagine it.
Time is only as real as you imagine it.
History is only as real as you imagine it.
Science is only as real as you imagine it.
Mathematics is only as real as you imagine it.
Music is only as real as you imagine it.
Art is only as real as you imagine it.
Philosophy is only as real as you imagine it.
Industry is only as real as you imagine it.
Technology is only as real as you imagine it.
Architecture is only as real as you imagine it.
Existence is only as real as you imagine it.
Stuff is only as real as you imagine it.
Other is only as real as you imagine it.
Nature is only as real as you imagine it.
Gaia is only as real as you imagine it.
Genesis is only as real as you imagine it.
Dreamtime is only as real as you imagine it.
Everything is only as real as you imagine it.
God is only as real as you imagine it.
Awareness is only as real as you imagine it.
Self is only as real as you imagine it.
You are only as real as you imagine it.
* * * *
In the prehistoric times when Darwin ruled,
No creature could assume it would survive any given day.
That is still true, but with seatbelts and air conditioning and insurance.
* * * *
How long will you allow history to influence your future?
How long will you allow it to meddle in your thoughts?
How long will you allow it to constrain your actions?
How long will you allow it to inflict your world?
How long will you allow it to permeate your mind?
* * * *
Hope for the best, plan for the worst.
Hope has an ofttimes irrational, delusional, unprepared fan base,
But those of a more rational bent, those who know the difference between caution and fear,
Know it is never ever a good idea not to be ready for the worst,
For the worst can happen any moment, any place, any time,
As history again and again proves, every way imaginable.
* * * *
Assuming he really existed, anyone who actually knew Jesus, is as long gone as he.
Rest assured, the version you have gleaned from what little is written,
Is likely not even close to whatever really happened,
Likely not even close to whoever, whatever, if ever he really was.
History is often a lie that weaves on and on, bending minds of all those giving it ear.
* * * *
All that is imagined is only real in imagination.
To be that awareness, to be that witness, prior to imagination,
Is to be free of history, free of all that is known, free of all that limits the spirit;
* * * *
Your genome morphs many faces, many bodies, in your window of time.
As Shakespeare so eloquently penned,
Through the melancholy Jaques,
In a previous moment:
All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances,
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages. At first, the infant,
Mewling and puking in the nurse's arms.
Then the whining schoolboy, with his satchel
And shining morning face, creeping like snail
Unwillingly to school. And then the lover,
Sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad
Made to his mistress' eyebrow. Then a soldier,
Full of strange oaths and bearded like the pard,
Jealous in honour, sudden and quick in quarrel,
Seeking the bubble reputation
Even in the cannon's mouth. And then the justice,
In fair round belly with good capon lined,
With eyes severe and beard of formal cut,
Full of wise saws and modern instances;
And so he plays his part. The sixth age shifts
Into the lean and slippered pantaloon,
With spectacles on nose and pouch on side;
His youthful hose, well saved, a world too wide
For his shrunk shank, and his big manly voice,
Turning again toward childish treble, pipes
And whistles in his sound. Last scene of all,
That ends this strange eventful history,
Is second childishness and mere oblivion,
Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.
* * * *
The precedents of history, of tradition, of culture, of any imaginary brew,
Are binding only to those whose minds have been molded to believe them.
* * * *
What is the state of mind free of all history, worldly or personal?
Very still, pure awareness, untrammeled by the presence of the other.
* * * *
The Bible and Koran are not the only books on the shelf of history.
All are the mystery, but no one owns it; beware the people of one book.
* * * *
It took a few millennium, but the one-percenters eventually figured out that wages and salaries
Would keep them from having to bother about food, clothing, housing, medical, shackles,
And whatever else they had to pay out for slaves in history’s ignoble playground.
* * * *
Is there even one cockroach that has ever once given a tinker’s damn of a rat’s ass
That its ancestors have been crawling about for 350 million-ish years?
History is a whimsical concoction of human consciousness,
Nothing more, nothing less, nothing but.
* * * *
You have read the books, seen the movies, know the tales of so many histories,
And the oh-so-many-ways people can die, in both fiction and nonfiction,
And how would it be, if you could experience them all, each and every one?
Imagine dying … every … imaginable … death … for all eternity … Ooh-la-la.
* * * *
History, history, history … science, science, science … inventors, inventors, inventors …
That’s all we need: more researchers, more scientists, more engineers, more of everything,
Ceaselessly smothering us with more of what got us into this fine mess in the first place.
* * * *
History is chock-full of revolutionaries who courageously followed their inner vision.
Feel free to decline, to reject, to discard, the human paradigm, if you are so inclined.
There may well be many challenging consequences, but do you really have a choice?
* * * *
To interpret anything clearly, accurately,
The translator must possess a wide-ranging frame of reference,
Including language, history, culture, art, philosophy, folktales, myths, metaphors, symbols,
And whatever else intersects, intertwines, the present context,
With that of the original source.
* * * *
History is a rolodex of story after story.
All born of imagination’s usurpation of the moment.
So many pretending they know so much, pretending to be so much.
An absurd little dream of countless forays into every inanity imagination can devise;
All to be forgotten in natural selection’s unintended consequences file.
Soundbites
To live every moment fully, is the end of history.
* * * *
Few histories withstand the test of time; and even the most resilient, only a while longer.
* * * *
Time is a weight, historians happily bear.
* * * *
History evaporates as surely as any body of water in the hot-cold of dreamtime.
* * * *
History is more weed patch than garden.
* * * *
Historians will sort it out.
* * * *
What would human history be, if there truly was such a thing as love?
* * * *
You never know what banner history will take up next.
* * * *
Rotsa ruck with all the history bearing down upon you and your world.
* * * *
History is both chronicle and propaganda, to those for whom it is written.
* * * *
It is patterns, not history, that play out ever again.
* * * *
Human history is full of horror; why would anyone believe the future exempt?
* * * *
So quickly forgotten; history is like that.
* * * *
How do we allow history to dictate our now?
* * * *
History is indifferent to all the actors it has killed.
* * * *
History only carries weight as long as imagination deigns it so.
* * * *
History is a long play chock-full of everything impromptu, often in need of editing.
* * * *
Death is the end of history, and all its future-pasts.
* * * *
Imagine all the history you will never know.
* * * *
History does not care what is written in its sandy pages.
* * * *
History is a perpetual fountain of curiosity.
* * * *
History is chock-full of idolatry.
* * * *
History is an orphan, history has no children.
* * * *
History stokes itself into every variety of mayhem.
* * * *
Another layer of sediment in the dustbin of history.
* * * *
History is the crockpot of imagination.
* * * *
Newspapers and magazines sketch history long before it reaches the Ivory Tower.
* * * *
All history boils down to vanity and greed, and the sea of desire and fear in which they tirelessly swim.
* * * *
Human beings so love history, so love tradition, that little or none is required to make them up.
* * * *
History is but a muddle of facts and lies melded into the means and ends in play.
* * * *
The right side of history beckons those who submit.
* * * *
History is a lie that weaves on and on, bending the minds of whoever gives it ear.
* * * *
History is tethered to imagination, and imagination is only as real as you imagine.
* * * *
History proves again and again how much, how little, blood ties can mean.
* * * *
Fate’s alliance with death is in every history.
* * * *
The ghosts of philosophers haunt history with every concoction known to mind.
* * * *
History’s remedy is to sooner or later forget everything.
* * * *
History is a poker player bluffing high stakes to all forced to sit at its table.
* * * *
History does not exist; why would it care about anything?
* * * *
History, history, and more mystery.
* * * *
History has managed to eventually forget everybody, so far, and no, you will be the exception.
* * * *
Human history is the albatross around the world’s neck.
* * * *
You are the first and last historian in your dream.
* * * *
Is any history really more than propaganda to herd the tribe?
* * * *
History is the juggernaut of mind.
* * * *
History is an ever-morphing free-for-all locked in the whims of imagination.
* * * *
History’s point and purpose is the continuity of imagination, and all the drama it entertains.
* * * *
Every death is the end of a piece of history.
* * * *
Some historians even become stories unto themselves.
* * * *
To which version of history were you referring?
* * * *
Parochial historian, worldly historian, way different.
Breadcrumbs
Could probably jot down just about anything I please,
In this, for-all-historical-impact-practical-purpose, largely unread manifesto.
Confess to every form of murder and mayhem, violation and pillage, I may, or may not, have done.
And more than likely, few, if any, would ever read or hear, much less imagine it.
And perchance they did, how many would not shrug their shoulders,
And quickly move on to the next scandalous headline,
In this absurd world full of horror galore.
* * * *
This soliloquy is as whole a metaphorical elephant, as this lingual frame of reference can muster.
I being but one of who-knows-how-many scribes expounding the greatest revelation.
Whose handiworks will persevere in the ever-shifting dunes of dreamtime,
Will perhaps be referenced as some future historian’s footnote,
Or perhaps, stacked with other esoteric works, on some obscure bookshelf.
Assuming humankind even survives long enough for history to be available for viewing.
* * * *
A time history could never have anticipated.
* * * *
What a thing to witness such a cataclysmic unfolding in the history of this garden orb.
With or without life on board, it will spin along until, eventually,
The mystery sees fit to consume it entirely,
And then, presumably, speculatively, spit out something new,
Assuming, of course, that some form of imaginary perception is there to witness it.
* * * *
We have an independent streak in this slice of the world,
That does not go well with being as bound to tradition and custom,
As the parts of the world that have thousands of years of history.
We started off with an empty slate, a tabula rasa, of sorts,
After we killed off or imprisoned the indigenous folk.
* * * *
The eternal philosopher, historian, anthropologist, scientist, mathematician,
And any other academic arenas this mind was drawn to reconnoiter,
All together, pervade the ever-expanding frame of reference.
So full, so empty, an imaginary destiny plays out.
* * * *
With so little audience to mold my ways and means,
I can dam-the-torpedoes. say and do. whatever I friggin’ please,
As often as I may choose, and in as many ways as I can darned-well imagine.
Whoever might wish to stop or contain me, is pretty much way too late.
Like it or no, history has me in its talons, to what end, I know not.
Nor do I care to do more than pipedream any and all ripples,
From complete and utter obscurity, to unending acclaim.
“Vanity of vanities. All is vanity.” saith the Preacher.
* * * *
How fondly I remember those younger, much more innocent moments,
When it did not even occur to me to give a hoot of a rat’s ass
What was happening in this dustball of a world,
When the headlines of historic events
Had yet to draw this wanderer’s attention.
There is indeed an undeniable bliss in ignorance.
* * * *
These many thoughts
Will one day suffer the fate of all such works.
Such is the dustbin of history.
The Corollaries of Yaj Ekim
Merrit Hulst:
Without history, we are nothing.
Yaj Ekim’s Corollary:
Even with history, we are nothing.
* * * *
Kurt Vonnegut:
History, read it and weep.
Yaj Ekim’s Corollary:
Weep? Bawl and whimper, is more like it.
Possible Last Words & Epitaphs
No Witness, No History
Michael’s Rabbit Hole
Space is only as real as you imagine it.
Time is only as real as you imagine it.
History is only as real as you imagine it.
Science is only as real as you imagine it.
Mathematics is only as real as you imagine it.
Music is only as real as you imagine it.
Art is only as real as you imagine it.
Philosophy is only as real as you imagine it.
Industry is only as real as you imagine it.
Technology is only as real as you imagine it.
Architecture is only as real as you imagine it.
Existence is only as real as you imagine it.
Stuff is only as real as you imagine it.
Other is only as real as you imagine it.
Nature is only as real as you imagine it.
Gaia is only as real as you imagine it.
Genesis is only as real as you imagine it.
Dreamtime is only as real as you imagine it.
Everything is only as real as you imagine it.
God is only as real as you imagine it.
Awareness is only as real as you imagine it.
Self is only as real as you imagine it.
You are only as real as you imagine it.
What Choice?
What choice has anyone ever had in anything, really?
Nature-nurture, the genetic lottery, coupled with the given backdrop –
History, culture, politics, religion, language, wealth, status, gender, and whatever else –
Fashion all, as surely, as deftly, as a mold does any lump of quantum terra-cotta.
Human consciousness may vainly, in so many ways, deem itself superior,
To the churning instinctual algorithms of all its fellow earthlings,
But primordial instinct is the underlying operating system,
That has been running this state of so-called existence,
Since long before the first hint, the first tethers, of imagination.
Destiny is, each and every timeless moment, choreographing your arrival.
The Same Mystery in All
Do the engineering.
Do the architecture.
Do the language.
Do the science.
Do the math.
Do the art.
Do the music.
Do the history.
Do the athletics.
Do the humanities.
Do the good, the bad.
Do whatever you please,
The same mystery is in all.
What Will History Call It?
What will history call it?
The Great Reckoning
The Great Alignment
The Great Adjustment
The Great Fall
The Great Devaluation
The Great Collapse
The Great Extinction
The Great Disintegration
The Great Annihilation
The Great Extermination
The Great Decline
The Great Termination
The Great Correction
The Great Cascade
The Great Avalanche
The Great Retrenching
The Great Meltdown
The Great Dissolution
The Great Downfall
The Great Demise
The Great Andropocene
The Great Difference
The Great Exodus
The Great Depression
The Great Retreat
The Great Articulation
The Great Descent
The Great Apology
The Great Reduction
The Great Plummet
The Great Repression
The Great Extinction
The Great Desolation
The Great Undoing
The Great Departure
The Great Awakening
Step right up, folks!
Time machines for sale!
Get ‘em while they’re hot!