here be monsters
December 11th, 2008
For some reason lately I’ve been thinking about the future and all the things that must be going on now that they will find utterly ridiculous. When I think about this, I start with the easy ones: can you believe that stuff about gay marriage?! Unregulated financial markets? That having a black president was a big deal?!
But then I’ve been reading things that put it in perspective, that there are bound to be countless other cultural assumptions we’re making that they won’t in the future. I read about how it was a big deal that JFK was the first Catholic president. Really? People cared about that? I can barely imagine. I read an account of Columbus setting sail on his historic journey, and how he had to bribe and assuage his sailors because they actually believed that they were going to sail off the map, and that there were monsters there waiting to destroy them. They actually believed in monsters! It’s hard to fit that in my brain, that perfectly ordinary, rational humans believed in the physical actuality of fantastical monsters.
When I worked on Random 1, one of the Executive Producers was David Riordan, the guy who wrote the 70’s hit "Green Eyed Lady". Sometimes we shared an office, and he was a pretty extraordinary person. He would often wax on about these far-out notions of time — some of the stuff I had come across at Burning Man — and gave me a great calendar from the law of time folks who believe that humanity’s sense of time is fundamentally flawed, and that by making 12 months out of what is clearly a 13 month year (due to lunar cycles), we are at odds with a primal part of our nature. I love this stuff.
One of the greatest things he told me was he firmly believed that in the future, society would look back at us now at marvel at the fact that we truly believed that time was money. that we would equate time with money. that we had the phrase "well, time is money." That this would seem so crazy to them, the same way we look back at "colored only" water fountains and can’t quite believe it now. I love this notion, because there does seem to be something wrong with the idea that time can somehow yield money. One is so fundamental and life-connected, the other so base and illusory.
Thinking about it now, equating it with Columbus and the fear that some folks have about gay marriage, I’m realizing this: that the very notion of time = money is a monster itself, as fantastical and unreal as the monsters of 1492 mapmakers.
The Only way for this not to be a true equation, or shall i say, an equation that drives your world, is for you to somehow liberate yourself from the chains/needs of money. Until you can do that, time is money will always hold “true”
SO the ? then becomes, how do we do that? Live off the land I think is the answer, totally self sufficient, grow crops, hunt deer, fish, etc
I’m in
I’m reading 2012 by Daniel Pinchbeck and he talks about all of this as well. Time is only there for us to beat it. Why are we constantly trying to break records in sports or beat the clock and always say “time is running out.” It’s there only because we put it there. Until we are time-free we are bound to it. Good reading.
It’s hard to fit that in my brain, that perfectly ordinary, rational humans believed in the physical actuality of fantastical monsters.
God? The Devil? That shit still goes on, in a major way and the faith in these very human inventions is why gays can’t get married or share the same rights as a “normal” couple. I agree with Odin’s Daddy, living off the land is a great idea…but that’s all it is…maybe after we blow up the world we can go back to “zero”.
That’s why baseball is the best sport. No clock.