The science of sleepwalking
How not to make sense of my weird ass life.
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Tales from the Amazon, Peru, Venezuela and the Dominican Republic, New York City, Paris, the Yukon, Botswana, and finally, Vermont. Photo (c) David Sherman
By David Rosane
Ceci n'est pas une pipe
Consider this blog a thing of the past. It's a collection of short stories about events that took place between 1996 and 2007; I liken it to a skewer, plump with choice anecdotes about ghost sightings, collisions with animals, arguments with strangers on airplanes and other extemporaneous morsels of space-time retrieved from one decade of neocolonial wanderings in which I tried to affect social and environmental change in the world – and probably failed. My purpose here is twofold. First, I get to poke fun at the ‘conscience of the conqueror', at the do-gooder corporate brat and high-entropy westerner (that I am). Second, and more importantly perhaps, I can finally explain to my closest friends and to my family and hopefully even to myself, how little of this was actually planned. See, some twelve years ago I had a scripted and sedentary life. I was married, had a real job (as feature editor), and an ambitious career plan. I would control my destiny within the rat race - and win. Machiavelli style. Then bang! It all blew up in my face, backfired, for reasons of contingency. My wife went sick in the head. I lost my mind, then my job. Whoa. Might as well get hit by an asteroid. I decided, in a flash, to haul ass, cut loose, and let go (especially the latter). My vocation would remain the same (to work for the environment and for people) except this time, zero strategy, zero game plan, time to unleash my inner Zorba (no compass, zero instrumentation), make shit up as I went along, relax and let fate decide -- it would anyway. I sold my soul to life in the moment, to happenstance, to accident and spontaneity, to my own irrational subconscience especially, relying mostly on intuition and improvisation, on contradiction even, on gut instinct (not to mention self-doubt - and alcohol); anything that would keep me outside the box, erratic, blown about the globe, like a leaf - to see what would happen. Life did. Anything could have. But this one did. And man, what a ride. My point is, no present can predict the future, let alone control it. Not surprisingly, the sequence of stories posted here on a quasi-daily basis follows absolutely no chronological nor rational order. When I wake up in the morning, my brain Googles itself for some random episode, and then I type it out in haste, before I lose it, regardless of how and when it fits into the bigger picture (granted there even is one). So consider this “blog” a self-indulgent non memoir, dripping with deconstruction, a true commitment to anarchism. No effort at transcendence here, no linear progression towards some higher meaning, no unfolding doctrine nor meta-narrative nor unifying theory of the universe. Imminence only. The whispered stuff within. The marrow, not the bone. Open endings, too, of course, and plenty of them. We all strive for closure, neat and tidy (perfectionism, I’ve been told, is the new morality); yet our self-organizing world breeds multiple perspectives, contradicting viewpoints, things like statistical noise and circular causation and nonlinear dynamics, and cognitive dissonance. Order, out of chaos. To paraphrase Ilya Prigogine (who’s dead), welcome to “the end of certainty”. I like that. Out with scientific determinism, out with God as governor of the universe, screw the founding fathers of Empire; out with so-called progress and the cult of success (and let’s totally demolish the Hero myth, while we’re at it - no more plots about nights in shining armor and damsels in distress and happy endings). In with earth community, context and global goo, nested creativity, the breathe of life within. A world that invites us to take off. And let go. In much fewer words, this is NOT A BLOG. At all. No opinions here about current affairs, zero punditry, no hot-off-the-press issues, nothing cutting edge, nothing new - although you could argue, of course, that the way we humans talk about the past has little to do with history - and everything to do with now.
Other stuff
Nose-pickah!
Today’s certitude
“Eat food, not too much, mostly plants (…) The best decisions for your health turn out to be the best decisions for the farmer and the best decisions for the environment."
- Michael Pollan