HELIOTROPE

“things have a way of doubling back”

There are zambole xylophones in this ancient cave -- but wait, got to look that up. Zambole? Where does that come from?

Just type the word from outer space into my Kindle Fire, and stand back!

Here comes a video from maybe rural Africa. There's a pair of dancers on a flat stage, packed earth in front of a one story house. She's in a long tan dress. He's wearing a pale blue shirt, shorts, and long white leggings that reach up almost to his knees. The skirt waves in billows. The leggings flash, seeming almost disembodied. A jungle ballet is taking shape that might be about Eve, even now enticing her man. The folds of her skirt collapse, leaving little doubt, and he approaches from behind in barefoot grace. The story unfolds in primitive ebb and flow, ending with a surprise as he gets symbolically kicked in the groin. They both fall down.

The cave might be Lascaux, perhaps the source of Jungian archetypes, evoking the Egyptian Book of the Dead without needing to pay for an interpreter. The African dance seems more at home here than in productions from Live at Lincoln Center. It outperforms recollections of magic mushroom days, mescaline now superseded.

I don't own this mind, just riding through the Bardo on the Metro with lives flashing past the windows. This life will end, slam dunk.

First it comes to The Climate Swerve. (For that to chime, get the book by Robert Jay Lipton.)

It popped out - zambole - out of a magician's hat, and we're not just whistling Dixie here. Strange things are prone to appear just before vanishing down the rabbit hole. It's not a mind by itself, not some separate thing. Our collective mind has antechambers and inner sanctums, to sort things out for preventive maintenance, forestalling cognitive dissonance.

Consider nuclear winter, for example. It's briefly imaginable, when not dwelt upon. Or try runaway climate change. These will get shooed through the antechamber on their way to the inner sanctum, to be quarantined there with other foreseeable but painful consequences. The antechamber is used for current programs, the new normal. It works like RAM memory in your computer. Life must go on, right? Recall the Clintons and Monica Lewinsky.

The climate of opinion tends to drift, as it is doing now. Plainly, the weather is getting more severe and destructive. More people are feeling the heat, and hurricanes and tornadoes, floods and droughts, yo-yo temperature swings, wild fires, polluted air, and worse than a groaning pun, it amuses no one. Loosened by this inconvenient truth, the cognitive barrier is now also letting through knowledge of the well known dangers of nuclear fission technology. Both dangers imperil the biosphere, which is now prey to a sudden catastrophe, a slower one, or maybe both at once. The damage extends into the distant future, for thousands of years. And contemplating the indestructibility of mountains and streams, the planet itself, is unrealistic. The elimination of our biosphere will be literally unthinkable. We humans are the brains of it.

We don't know of another planet inhabited like ours. So there are speculations about intelligent life elsewhere. And so? We'd better value who we are right here and now. Then we can consider changing course, while that's still possible.

To end a war, we mounted an intensive Manhattan Project. It worked, with grievous results that continue. More and bigger bombs can now eradicate every last human, tree and fish alive, just as certainly as the dinosaurs were wiped out.

A powerful tool got us where we are now. We can use it to evolve nuclear technology. We need to dismantle nuclear fission technology and all of its products. We need to leave fossil fuels in the ground.

This madness can end, if we want. Do we? Climate and nuclear threats can be reined in. Our most powerful tool can also conceive a World Wide Fusion Power Project.

And so,

What has any of this to do with zambole? A frog? Your neighbor? Your grandchildren? The collective consciousness so far known in this biosphere, on this planet? Will we . . .

Use it, or lose our life?