Wednesday, August 31, 2016

Waterworld

   It's a feeling I love.
I like to let it happen.
Sometimes I do it on purpose.
I go to a pool, walk into the surf, swim out into a river, flip myself upside down and ....breathe. 
I long for it. I miss it.
The burn. The stuff ripping up into your sinus and out your ears and back into your mouth. Death searching for life, or is it life searching out death?
When water challenges the air for the same space in your body, tugging at it, wrestling it, the combustion is almost erotic.  The body remembers -and I almost feel anger at the memory- that at one time I could breathe both. 
I've tried. How I've tried. 
It's the strangest thing. To know this in your bones. In your blood. 
The High Schools I swam at, the clubs, the parks, the camps, walking past people's pools I breathe in the beautiful poisons. Chlorine. Soda ash. Both should kill you, both can. Both send me into a reverie. I whipsnap into a different time a different age. Suddenly I'm ten again, I'm 14, I'm 20 and this water is my ticket, my pathway, my canvas, my proving ground. The ring wherein the damage done never shows. Eternal water. Eternal movement. The feline element. The only one you can throw yourself into that will bouy you up.
I'm a fire sign and I've been told by acupuncturists and doctors and seers and astrologists and girls Ive dated that I should get the fuck in the water every day and cool the fuck off.
I shrug. And then when I do get in the water, the ocean especially, I feel transformed, like a mole who's been activated by his handlers to admit his true purpose, to shake off the act and be that which one was meant to be. I feel like a weapon that's been disarmed at the last second in a Bond film or a villain who's happy he got caught and now wants to do his time.
Somewhere in the salt water is my covalent bond. The element that takes me from reactive to inert.
My point break. Go easy bro. Who knew?
I think it comes from this: one day I realized that most of the world doesn't, most of what we call the living, don't breathe air. Something stuck in my mind- that there's what we think, and there's what is. There are the theories of the few and the thinking of the mass, and I thought to myself I am not in that mass. That mass breathes water, it swims and breeds and swarms about the rim and expanse of the globe and we sit up on our odd rocky outposts and theorize about intelligence and fate and destiny.
We on the surface are an abstraction. And our beliefs, our reasons to be: God, transcendence, art, work, labor, gender, race, war..they're all bumper stickers on the ass of the music of the water world.  Prosaically we're a bacteria on the skin of the earth.
I had no philosophy to support my thoughts but I began to think my thoughts must be incomplete, must be crippled somehow, or stunted because I lived in the air and not below it.
If the earth is an organism, if it is a unified ecology then that ecology is fed by water, it's oxygen is liquid.
The land is an exception and the land dwellers but workers on the surface, trained to keep the canopy clean.
I have a theory.
And it's this.....one day we will realize as best we can, or maybe we will only catch a glimmer of this truth as we denude the seas of their creatures, or we will, just before incinerating ourselves in a holy war, hear spoken the concept that everything we do and want and build and fight for is motivated and mediated by our need for tools. To use our hands and language as transmitting poles for what goes on in our minds and body. To embody the nature of tools. To diefy them.
So imagine if we didn't need to. Use tools. If we didn't need hands or the extensions thereof. If we didn't need that most amazing of human constructions; If we didn't need language.
What if whatever we were, or needed, or were thinking, or felt could be felt in kind by our siblings our loved ones and our neighbors thru the medium in which we lived? If we and the medium were one?
What would fall away?
Clothing. Speech. Tools. Architecture. Science.....Deception....?
Imagine, you live in the same fluid that makes up the majority of your body. Your "self" extends, after a brief epidermal pause, into the immensity of the world about you. You and the nerve endings of creation are one. When your heart skips a beat, your brother knows it. When you are sick, your sister feels it. When you want a thing, they know you do, or want it too at the same instant. Communication becomes a kind of sung common truth. History is what you need to preserve in song to stay alive. Imagine something, anything, any of your deepest darkest secrets, and 3 thousand miles away, a day or two later, your distant cousins conceive the same.
Whales. Dolphins. Cetaceans.
Carl Sagan describes what must happen when a creature in a two dimensional world comes into contact with a three dimensional creature. The two D being sees a two dimensional line. It's the world he/she knows. It's how their eyes work.
That line may be, to the two dimensional being's apprehension, fairly simple or even rudimentary because to the three dimensional creature the particular aesthetics and needs of the two dimensional mind must seem primitive.
Now imagine you had no need for clothing. For a wrench or a fire or a backhoe or housing or the telegraph or the internet. All of it. The whole built terranean world was extraneous to you. Go beyond that. Imagine that the fundamental conundrum of individual consciousness, of being, of existential human conflict, of incomprehension or translation or even distance and the nature of the "self" was not only unimaginable to you, it was irrelevant, unnecessary.
You are a whale.
You are a dolphin.
You're brain is larger than a humans.
These odd small boney beings make sounds at you and then throw you fish if you imitate them, surely the snack is worth the amusement.
The three dimensional dolphin gazes at the ridiculous two dimensional human as the human laments that the dolphin doesn't know subject from object.
Only because in the dolphin's world the two were never separate. There was never a language in the water that needed them.
If for nothing else we should incline our genius to theirs.
But here's the kicker.
We've slaughtered them for hundreds of years. Exercised a virtual holocaust on their population and still instinctively....they do not run from us. They surface and look us in the eye. They lift their children up out of their living element to see these strange calling apparitions in the sky.
If for no other reason, if say we decide they do not communicate in a simpler and superior manner that one day millennia from now we may share, than if only for the fact that they forgive us our sins, we should step into their world and cherish both them and it, and suffer the consequences.






18 comments:

  1. continues to write on vour blog thankyou

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  2. Honestly I hope you're following NOAA on Twitter and sadly the human condition of which we all suffer means as a whole we will never seek forgiveness for our sins and since Adam and Eve or Adam and Steve, which ever I don't care clothing will never fall away without shame...which is a shame, honestly.

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  3. One way or another we will be suffering the consequences, but by then it’ll be too late for our sins to be forgiven. It's human nature.
    Thank you for putting it into words.

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  4. If only more humans had your sensitivity. Thank you.

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  5. Your such a good writer, always enjoy reading ur blogs

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  6. This comment has been removed by the author.

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  7. Interesting. Thought provoking..I love how your mind works! I suspect they (dolphins) may know more about our 'higher selves' than we know, hence their ability to "forgive us our sins", as so many have saved humans from sharks, drownings, etc. Makes me wonder. Sadly, too many humans don't take the time to ponder such things.

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  8. Wow. I really admire people who can swim!!. I am so afraid of water. Almost drowned twice, so this story intrigues me!. I wish I was a dolphin go swim so freely in the ocean. Huggs

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  9. Wow. I really admire people who can swim!!. I am so afraid of water. Almost drowned twice, so this story intrigues me!. I wish I was a dolphin go swim so freely in the ocean. Huggs

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  10. Nager apporte une telle sensation de liberté, ouvre l'humain à tout ses sens. L'eau, un élément indispensable à la vie, qui nous accompagne depuis le ventre maternel (il existe une expression en français "retour aux sources" qui veut dire retour aux origines),certains scientifiques en étudient même sa mémoire..Un sujet fascinant!

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  11. Great post, for too many reasons to list here, but I had to share something I learned in an Oceans: The Blue World documentary: dolphins have trained humans to assist them fishing in Laguna, Brazil. The dolphins herd schools of fish to shore where waiting fisherman net them. Then the fish turn back where the dolphins are waiting. Without the dolphins, the fishing is a waste of time. I thought that was cool.

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  12. This takes me back to visits to my grandparents. Their small house is located on the Mobile Bay in Alabama. My grandfather was a local shrimper. Cherished memories on his boat. I am blessed to have shared this life with them. I have lived on the Gulf Coast almost my entire life. Now I have to live here. I need to live here. Heartbreaking how I have seen my Gulf Coast change through the years.
    Love your blog :)

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  13. Very interesting blog. I have always felt that all of God's creatures are connected. Wouldn't it be wonderful if that lovely link would keep mankind from harming our link mates? Enjoy your writing. Very thought-provoking.

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  14. This is a blog that I like to come back to and reread a lot. Very analytical thinking and well done for throwing some deep theories out there for me to ponder. I like your style. Hope you're having some soulful inspirations for your next blog. Cheers from St. Augustine🍻

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  15. Beautiful Piece.
    I hate to leave this here, but I will.
    Wow, who knew? So I just found this and I’m reading your blog post. A writer? Again, who knew? Yes, you should have written the series. I looked in the comments before I had the feeling to comment; do these people know whom they are talking to? I mean, do they know who wrote these?
    I think it’s marvelous. My favorite one so far is Rhinebeck NY. I write a lot, unpublished, of course, blogging is new to me.
    So, I had never watched or desired to watch the TV series. Then three years ago, I found an episode I guess it was on Netflix or something, for whatever reason I watched it. It is not within what I consider “my normal viewing preference”.
    I loved it. Every fall, since then, I watch all episodes straight through. There is something about it, and with almost every one, I find myself teary eyed at least once. I think it actually tells a good story, a good moral.
    I’m sure you can’t imagine that for us, non-actors, the characters are exactly the people we see on screen. It’s quite funny to watch us believe that you are JC. We believe that you all have the same personalities, same mannerisms, same ideals, etc.… as the character you portray. No wander you are so loved. Every woman I know wants a husband like JC. Is sad to think it’s not like that for everybody.
    Anyway, while watching this year, (I just finished episode 82), I was really able to appreciate your acting talent, playing Sam who’s really Jim, who is now Jim again… The actual chemistry between the two main characters is so perfect; one would never believe all this was acting. My hat is off to you.
    Reading your bio from other sources, a long time ago. I wasn’t surprised to find you prefer theater. I would love to see you on stage. Your stage presence comes through on screen.
    So now I will have to go find your repertoire of films and watch them.
    I was surprised at your interview and comments about not really believing in the very subject matter the show is based on. I found it amusing. I do think as a whole it always portrays good decent positive life message.
    So, on another note, how does an accomplished “Hollywood actor, “star”, manage to continue live a normal life in Pittsburg?
    How in addition to your great look, seemingly great personality and attitude, great theatrical skill, can you also be a great writer ?!
    Why is it that your friends cant read your writing anymore? Seriously?
    Congratulations on your great life, and when you start giving writing lessons, sign me up.

    P.S. What’s in your hair?

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  16. To (David Condad) the man with the deepest sight of this world and all of its exists as well as its inhabitors, I must say rare is the eye that sees the true heart of real life and complete living and existence in harmony. Beautiful and too rare are you

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