This statement is critically me. Existentially and bottom line — me! This blurb-post is a brief introduction to what I’ll write later in more detail. But it needs to be said now for anyone seriously reading my site.
We are humans because we create structure. Perhaps the first structuring was time as past-present-future. As presented in AUGURIES — once the sense of a future (and family) was a reality — then the three formed. We have been building ever since. A story a poem a building a hope. All are poetries in that they are put together to hold together and carry us into the future. All structures are bridges. All have proportions of purpose, need, and beauty. A well-structured fire-pit is such a poetry. A child born is of our structure. Music forms and sounds due to a structure we give it. Lutes and hammers are poetries with a structure that carries us — bridges us — from past through present to future…to senses of success, reveries, belonging, and being at home. For these poetries are to be used. Inhabited, consumed, protected, extended, etc. And, as always, that something that structures and poetries a bridge between us and the world we inhabit: what we see, wish&hope for– where death is inevitable and life is commanding.
Now, if you’ve read this far — you might be saying — DUH! Obvious Stuff! What’s the Point? Or, you might recall this site’s theme of POETRIES OF A NEW SPIRITUALITY…..and read poetries as structures. So, as a poem or a house has structure — so does our quest for a new spirituality….and spirituality itself. In the past — religions gave the structure to spirituality and the sacred. But today’s world is not the world of the past. Spirituality has gone beyond the confines of the institutionalized altar. The family altar in my home — any home– is as sacred as any other, which reveres the past, present, and future.
Just as the realization of a future — a quest — energized the human mind&presence to construct&evolve to where we are now, so does that need-fulfillment cry out ever-so-loudly, again. Our highly educated species of today is facing unknowns as did our primitive forebears — and the future is commanding us to build new structures-bridges out of past and present for tomorrow’s humanity. Here’s a working-list of structures&poetries that are questing a fusion&bridging&structuring of minds and societies today: AI, robotics, augmented reality, virtual reality, wearables, autonomous vehicles, the internet, the internet of things, machine to machine creativity, drones, sexual substitutes, almost daily new insights, images, hypotheses of the universe we are seeing as never before, vast improvements in health and longevity —- and in the midst of all this the pervasive drama of climate change and our responsibility for this planetary home — plus the ongoing creation of nuclear weaponry and prowess by the power nations on this globe as we try to conceive — structure — a global economy. Add what you will to the list — this is a time in a struggle to find what holds, nourishes, sustains, and promotes the best that we are and hope to be. — As I write this, I recall a book in my library — Rollo May’s “The Cry for Myth.” I pause to go find it; there is surely a salient say from him to close this. Hold On!! — OK! Got it! Published by W. W. Norton in 1991, this book should be required reading for all. There is so much in this book that runs in the veins and strains of today. First will be a selection from pages 93-94 and the second from 301-302.
“America was to become for the West a myth of the rebirth of humanity, without the sin or evil or poverty or injustice or persecution which had characterized the Old World. Our Statue of Liberty is emblazoned with an inscription, erected in the nineteenth century but expressive of those earlier centuries as well, ‘Give me your tired your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore, Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed, to me: I lift my lamp beside the golden door.’ – This myth of the New World has continued down to present day. In his orations during World War II, Churchill proclaimed that ‘England will hold on until the New World comes to rescue the Old.’ “
“We cannot turn the clock back. . . .When thousands of tons of lettuce and green vegetables had to be burned in Italy after the Chernobyl accident and tens of thousands of reindeer—almost the whole economy of the Laplanders in northern Sweden—had to be slaughtered because of radiation contagion, we knew in our hearts we could never live separately again. — When headlines appeared in the New York Times after the accident, ‘Russia Asks Help of the Scientists of the West,’ many of us were overtaken with a strange conviction: this marks the beginning of the world in which the nations will no longer be border-ridden. The new myth of the stars and trips to the planets will have taken effect. . . . We awake after a sleep of many centuries to find ourselves in a new and irrefutable sense in the myth of humankind. We find ourselves in a new world community; we cannot destroy the parts without destroying the whole. In this bright loveliness we know now that we are truly sisters and brothers, at last in the same family.’ “
That was 28 years ago. And, O MY! What has happened to our family since then. . . . to live up to and deny-defy that “new world community.” So many are trying to say these same things today. I need not relate these quotes to the news headlines of today. That is truly another version of DUH! – So, it is not beyond daily comprehension that we are developing a new consciousness of this earth family. Structures&Poetries are shaping and popping-up –globally-randomly– all over: even as many people have lost structure&poetries that work and are in search of the new – and many others are still living-acting-out old structures in violent rebellion. Some would build walls at borders. Some kill and relive old hates. Some just refuse the challenge of a new “mythic meaning”( May’s phrase).We are a species in search of new Structures &Poetries that hold, home, and sustain our hope. . . our backyards connected globally. I see our world questing for Poetries of a New Spirituality. Such will build the bridges of a newly self-conscious humanity that May has talked about. But still we are faltering at the gate—and all-a-fumble with our new technologies. Computers and smartphones and Amazon and Netflix and Facebook and TV and Hollywood and and and……..are the “social media” providing most of today’s structured bridging of human connectivity. In the tensions of turmoil and terror, there is that Cry for Myth that will hold-heal-home and HALLEJUAH us as One. . . us laboring consciously with what it takes to be as One with a species future of promise and prosperity . . . .This, as we swirl on a miracle piece of round rock in a randomness of infinite rocks and rockings in an incomprehensive unknown of universes incomprehensibly stacked and packed with unknowns — as we Stonehenge our rocks, buttress our bridges, and hand carve our rocking chairs from the Tree of Life.
Here are two items, of multitudes in both categories, that seek their voice in the cry for Structures&Poetries that work-hold-home WE-US-ALL-AS-ONE today. Both are in the news as I write this day. They are CHIME & KIND. One telescopes the actions of the intergalactic universe(s) and powerful astrophysical objects — and the other telescopes/focuses monies/programs for KIDS IN NEED OF DEFENSE: a crying need now at Mexico-USA border crises. CHIME ( Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment ) is a new ( not yet at full power ) telescope ( some three hockey fields long ) that has found a source of repeating short FRB’s ( fast radio bursts ) some 1.5 Billion Light Years away. It’s new — so more data to come. So, given the nature of our species-time-now, any Structures&Poetries (as myths, hypotheses, and working metaphors of reality) must bridge such as these two so that CHIME & KIND really rhyme and sing true love songs in OUR TIME. Yes, singing-love-songs are each and together, Structues&Poetries of our existence. In my book SYMPATHIES I made the mythic cry for more world choirs with multitudes of singers with boots on the ground and voices filling the turbulent air to ease/erase the cries of wars and terrors. . . . with our “new spirituality” sounding from the S&P of a World Choir in tune. (On page 119 in AUGURIES is my poem ONCE UPON A TIME that relates here.)
mdok