Wednesday, November 03, 2010

The bigger picture

Bruce reminds us the mutiny ends when the rest of the crew remembers that we live on a fucking starship.



If you're still not sure what I mean, lay on your back in a field on a clear night. Stare up at the sky and consider that there is nothing solid between you and that great infinite beyond. It's just gas and vacuum interspersed light and the occassional massive orb. Gaze, eyes wide open, and consider that very atoms of your being are mere arrangements of the stuff of stars and may at one point again be stars. You might once have been a fucking star. Might be again. Wrap your noodle around that. When your mind has its own supernova - you'll know it when it happens - you become a whole other universe of free. And then life really begins.

8 comments:

terraderma said...

Timely; just reading Bill Hicks

thwap said...

Methinks ye are blogging whilst high.

Though aye agree with every word.

Say! Does that mean I'm ... ?


wv: couswins ... as in: "my couswins an i er eh bewncha wh-himps!"

Boris said...

thwap, I've never had much use fer bein' stoned (Doesn't abide my constitution well). I was sitting in my grey cubicle plugged into some postrock when I wrote that, which can have a similar effect.

Anonymous said...

Hugs & Kisses Boris.

Alison said...

On clear moonless nights when looking up is just too much, looking down will have the same effect. There it is on the ground - your faint shadow, projected there by the light of stars that were gone before there was you.

Mark Richard Francis said...

I swear, if some corporation thought knowledge that the universe existed would cost it a dime, we'd have universe denialists everywhere.

Dana said...

You and I and everyone else are almost certainly partly composed of atoms that once were part of Shakespeare or Beethoven or Genghis Khan or Boudicca and everyone else who ever lived.

And those same atomic parts of us will one day compose atomic part of everyone else who will ever live.

And some of them may even think about the people who came before them and once used the atoms of which they are now composed.

And on and on...

Anonymous said...

I remember reading a few years ago that during the power crisis in California,when there were blackouts in Los Angeles, people called 911 in terror because of the strange lights in the sky --- the stars and the Milky Way of course. I suspect this is true for most urbanites, unless they have regular access to some piece of dark sky out in the country.

I wonder if when people lose that elemental connection with, really, the universe, they lose sight of the fact we are on a very fragile starship, with finite resources, unique,and irreplaceable. I wonder too, because no one really sees the stars any more, if there isn't a relationship between that particular blindness,and the increase in quasi-science and superstition, lke astrology, belief in angels, UFOs or other supernatural manifestations.