This means something

Not sure if it's a piece of the spaceship that broke off and landed in the field behind the backyard, or if it's one of their incubating pods. Maybe I should keep it watered. But who knew they used such low grade technology? They clearly know something we don't.

Probably the greatest opera of the Twentieth Century

Being around five hours long there are many following acts along with the between the act knee plays to be found on youtube. Also, because of its length, the composer Philip Glass encouraged people in the audience to walk about if they wanted - say, to go to the bathroom or whatever. This aspect makes the opera have something of the spirit of ambient music: something that's there like a surrounding to which one is not supposed to give too intense a listening attention. Which is actually a different kind of attention - not inattentiveness.

This seems to me the future of music. I remember reading about the Era of Peace in which a kind of ambient music will permeate the very atmosphere, without speakers and electronics. And people will be able to compose it somehow and it will be sort of ongoing in the rhythm with people's day to day lives, but not at all in an enslaving way as though one wouldn't be able to "turn it off". Like a breaking free from the rigid constraints of written bars and so forth, it will be in union with the music of the spheres. Not papered away in a book until it gets performed. What's interesting is how this ambient-leaning way which encourages spontaneity, like jazz, brings music closer to what liturgical music does, whereas the classical notion of traditional forms gets stuffy and musty and falls into meaningless decadence.

Time is not money. And money is not time.

Money passes through time. So what. It is intrinsically connected with time because we ourselves operate in time. So what. We schedule all sorts of things according to time in addition to work hours. So what. The notion itself of a "work hour" is as much an abstract product of our minds as money, all the way down to our measurements of minutes and seconds and milliseconds. So what. We produce calendars of linear sequences and cycles which in themselves are not time, and which are not even us dividing time, or making sense of time, or categorizing time; rather, they are the representations of the projected stamp of our activities taking on the assumption of time as reflected in the rotation of the spheres. That's what the yearly calendar is: representing time within time. And this is perfectly natural, beautiful and not at all a fiction. Even Heaven itself respects it. It is vitally connected with the real. So what. When one says "money is time" or "time is money" one is not saying anything. But one is indeed compounding the fiction so desperately feared and consequently exacerbated by those trying to pop it. For just as we accrete a calendar as a human representation, of time as time receiving and being shaped by our respective activities going forward as a means of mirroring back to ourselves a stability to our activities (which because it has to do with real time is not at all fictional) so we accrete representation to wealth. So what.

All what any of this proves is that we were made for order and not chaos. Or more truthfully, that order was and is intrinsic in our creation, in our being made. And creation is hierarchical.

The difference between the two is this: whereas the formulation of a calendar is concerned with what is to come, being worked into our present, or our present going forward in anticipation of what is to come, after which we cast away our old calendars with their boxes all crossed off or our digital calendars are instantly replaced with the new one, and we say, "the best laid plans of mice and men", the formulation of money in its proper and most natural sense is concerned with what has already been completed, which then extends a stable proximity for the beginning of another activity going forward. The activities in the case of money are transactions.

Money only and ever comes into existence through a transaction of some kind. The way money circulates from party to party and from hand to hand is like to the way money comes into existence. The way money comes into existence can either be good or it can be evil. For the sound issuance of money, one can say it no simpler than this: the parties involved in a transaction must have completed the transaction both in terms of no one coming away from it deprived of what was agreed upon, but also nothing added on and extended from that transaction afterwards, which is projected onto the transaction beforehand. Which could generally be called speculation and derivatives, and for that matter, fractional reserve lending and government bonds (which are two sides of the same - ahem - coin). Nothing added on and nothing subtracted from: this is what constitutes the completion of a transaction - and thus the evidencing of wealth.

Money is not accreted to a commodity, or the production of a commodity, or the potential for the production of a commodity; rather, money is accreted to any number of future transactions as evidence of a prior transaction completed.

It is when we get away from this completion beforehand that we encounter economic woe. Derivatives, speculation, fractional reserve lending and government bonds (all of which are connected): these are at the heart of our economic problems.

In other words...usury. The making of money from money. But today it is specialized: usury is not today just a practice done by shady loan sharks. It lies at the very heart, or fountainhead if you will, of the issuance of money - the way money comes into existence. It has poisoned the well.

 "Rapacious usury has increased the evil which, more than once condemned by the Church, is nevertheless, under a different form but in the same way, practiced by avaricious and grasping men." --Pope Leo XIII, Rerum Novarum

And it is an argument about what constitutes the well that people are actually arguing about.

People are obsessed with the attempt to make money into something so full proof and so permanently real, so obsessed with making it de facto before it is de jure (when it is the other way around) that they are willing to render the priceless things of man into commodities in order to support this historically novel hysteria of theirs - this obnoxious hammering upon some absolute qualified conception of money, like it will part the Red Sea.

It never occurs to any of these people, these blind objectivists, that when they are talking about what money is - and then conceptualizing a healthy economy from the definition - that what they are actually talking about is governance. It would not occur to them in a thousand years.


Time-stamped:

The wind blows where it will

The line is often hard to discern - perhaps especially along most of the west coast (for health pathologies do not by any means end at the Californian border) - between an ordered care for bodily health, subsumed in the recognition that all good things are given from above, and a terror-inducing fixation on bodily health as a means by which one is supposed to live forever, subsumed in the delusion that living forever is entirely at the behest of one's efforts: the idolatrous conception of one's own body.

The latter shows itself not so much in the larger things, but the smaller things. People do not consciously think they are going to live forever (though I would not be surprised to find it otherwise among a large number) but the monomania that "health" seems to inspire in them makes it fair to say that they act, and talk, as though they will.

So it is that I fail to be interested in healthy eating; but I am interested in real food. Just as I am not interested in "sustainable living" (a term that annoys me for some reason); but I am interested in living in a way that is more and more radically subordinate to the fact that God sustains all life. As Michael O'Brien has said, to paraphrase: "Our foundations are from above."

I think it's very true that if one were to live forever on this earth, one would not enjoy it. One of the undeniable things about life as a gift from God, a gift which is on loan to be given back as freely as it was given, is that the weight, the prerogative, the ex nihilo contingency of the blessing is out of one's own hands, away from them - and that is awesome freedom.

Someone who is diagnosed with terminal cancer finds the incomprehensible grace to live, even with thanks to God, in the moments of one's life; and someone who lives without any major pains and is in good health does not enjoy or recognize the blessing of the fact, but rather gets into a tizzy about anything and everything, like those on the west coast who a few days after the Fukushima news came out, started freaking about the credible speculation of radiation sailing over the pacific from Japan, and flooded the pharmacies for iodine pills, or whatever it is one takes to strengthen the immune system against radiation. This world is absolutely hilarious.

You have weird doctors writing insane articles on the web about how people need to now grow their gardens strictly in greenhouses because of radiation coming from Japan in the rain. (That's about the, what, second sentence now that has the words, "coming over from Japan"? What about those in Japan? As long as the radiation doesn't come over here, it's all dandy - is that it?)

That is not a flippant dismissal of the danger of radiation sailing over the pacific nor a criticism of peoples' fear of it, per se; but a picture begins to resolve when attempting to weigh things in a larger whole: how fears, no matter how connected to real scenarios, are inherently and wildly disproportionate to our real priorities and place in life, which is why one reads in scripture that it would be better to fly sin than to be afraid of death. Fear is pride under fire: one commits the sin of disproportion.

Even if actual dangerous amounts of radiation started coming over from Japan (there it is again!) - the point is that this world is not only temporal, but highly imperfect, even when it seems at its most perfect: this realization is for the Christian a consolation. Our joy seems to be subsumed in sadness, but it is really the other way around. At some point, one must arrive at the old cliche, "Life is too short", or that well-worn smoker's disclaimer (which actually has a well of wisdom behind it), "Everyone dies of something," and throw up one's hands, and go to confession - and there discover the eternal kernel of joy that is in fact greater than all this world has to offer. What horrid, sopping weight of tragedy must be felt by those who win the lottery.

Some might guffaw at that last sentence. So much for it: eternity may be having a big guffaw at our ideas of the good life. A Salesian priest that I know once spoke in a homily about an old lady in Italy who was dying. Having lived for nearly a century, and now on her deathbed, she said her whole life up to that point was like a bird flitting past her window.

In the scope of eternity, that image is no exaggeration.

Major Toms

"Our only chance of long-term survival is not to remain inward looking on planet Earth, but to spread out into space." --Stephen Hawking

"We must move into the universe. Mankind must save itself. We must escape the danger of war and politics. We must become astronauts and go out into the universe and discover the God in ourselves." --Ray Bradbury


So speak two men - one of whom the world has placed among the ranks of its "greatest thinkers", the other a "Sci-fi legend" - who both, as far as the ideas expressed in the above quotes go, toss emergent jerry cans of new age gasoline onto the world's bonfire of metaphysical despair. (My apologies for the mixed metaphors.)

The pairing of extreme utopian illusion with extreme catastrophic despair makes a combination that is, one might be surprised to learn, very enticing to many people. The very ludicrousness of their propositions tingles the nerves of those whose boredom with life, due to sin, is literal dull hell.

It is also, as with all new age bunkum, a plagiarism of the fullness of truth found in the Catholic Church. We have our Euchatastrophe: namely, among other points, that, when you see these things begin to happen, stand erect and hold your heads high, for your deliverance is near at hand. This being based on and being a continuation of, that first ultimate Euchatastrophe, the Resurrection.

In light of their words (or lack of light of their words), one must necessarily question what is the end, then, of all culture? What is the true outcome of their statements, but barbarism; a final satanic spurring of the earth? Take the artist who transferred his heart, entire, to a work of art, made with the materials of the earth -- was the end purpose of his work to provide fodder for our self-proclaimed ascendency, regarding the earth as defunct, as something to be hurdled over and left behind?

What the ideas expressed by Hawking and Bradbury hinge on, is a redefinition of Man through a redefinition of the Cosmos. The first touching point of this occurs in the Culture. Their ideas depend on a faulty definition of man. Or perhaps the actual purpose of their ideas is the forwarding of a faulty definition of man.

Man is not a survivalist. Survivalist Man is not only the most famished definition of man; it is man defined in the very process of committing suicide. He perishes precisely when he defines himself in terms of survival; the height of irony, of course, but it makes perfect sense: in his bid to "survive", man pares himself down to those terms of survival, and in the process has pared himself away. So he dies, along with all his demographics, like the pathetic sociologist he is.

Man creates; thus what man is does not remain solely within man, but also in the culture he has created and which has its being and continuation on earth. Man is fundamentally relational; he cannot be defined like a piece of luggage. This relational aspect of man is proven at its most essential, its most imperative to who we are, in that man can only be finally and fully defined in the heart of his Creator: one of the outcomes and unfolding of our true salvation as completed, without our merit, by Jesus Christ, Son of the Living God.

Taking first the proposition that man could actually travel through space without vast and precarious amounts of expensive technology and for extensive amounts of time without his bones becoming brittle as dried-up paper, what kind of man would man be without earth?

If there is one thing in which we today are so impoverished, it is in this: we do not know how our very physical being on this earth is a sacrament. You really have no idea of the magnificence of ritual that goes into a single breath you take.

Our relationship with earth is more than circumstantial. Our relationship with earth is indeed more than merely "purposeful". The being we have within earth is so deeply and profoundly set, so ingrained from out of infinity, that just to say we are placed here as stewards is, at best, insufficient lip service.

For the sake of argument, it would be safer to say that earth is a deiti to be worshipped than it would be to say that earth is the mere material object of our stewardship.

The implication of this is that to everything, everything, there is an a priori submission. Our notion of stewardship is itself stewarded in the culture we create; the "gift of sex", for instance, is not "a gift to be properly used", as though everything in and about our existence were just facts to be stored away in the information banks of our brains, and then to be used according to our knowledge. Everything requires an a priori submission that takes place in the midst of the sacrament of life on earth.

"If God can produce all natural effects through himself, it is yet not superfluous for him to produce them through certain causes, inasmuch as this is not owing to the insufficiency of his power but to the immensity of his goodness, which made him will to communicate his likeness to things not only in respect to their being but also in respect to their being causes of other things; for in these two ways all creatures have in common the divine likeness given to them...Likewise in this way the beauty of order appears in creatures." --St. Thomas Aquinas

"We must respect the interior laws of creation, of this Earth, to learn these laws and obey them if we want to survive.

This obedience to the voice of the Earth is more important for our future happiness...than the desires of the moment. Our Earth is talking to us and we must listen to it and decipher its message if we want to survive." --Pope Benedict XVI