ON THE LIST FOR THE CT

sometimes I lean back and see the good and bad sides inside me fighting it out ... I don't mean good and bad ideas ... I mean whole populations inside me ... some fighting for me and some against ... I know there's a sense I'm an important part of history ... and of the struggle between civilization and barbarity ... yes it's not an exclusive set ... it can almost be said of a blade of grass if you're speaking materially ... but I'm not ... nor do I have any personal standing in the world of ideas ... my citizenship there is very probationary ... I might be a digit in a long statistic in some book no one reads any more ... but none of this is so in the spiritual sense ... we can't all be heroes or rulers of state ... but every single one of us despite all the training we've received will not shake the nagging sense in which we are great and worthy of the struggle between good and evil itself ... a sense in which we too like truth are eternal ... not because of the clever things we've said or understood much too late ... nor for heroism ... but for the company we keep

THE SEMI-MEME'S LAMENT

the inner circle and the outer ... holding the true steady and looking for something new ... life begins within molecular change ... combination birth and decay ... and sometimes ... almost it seems ... that all this movement and becoming is all that counts and I'm what they call an epiphenomenon ... I'm real ... in a sense ... just as real as the molecules are and certainly as real as their movement ... but the point is epiphenomena have no effect ... and neither do I ... epiphenomena are beside the point ... the point being phenomena ... so we really don't count ... but we do cohere with other epiphenomena ... but none of us counts ... it's true ... but our coherence can be a thing of beauty nonetheless ... oh sometimes we get flashes of real correspondence ... cause and effect ... but they pass ... and it's all we can do to get someone who at least pretends to understand ... and that's real coherence ... this pretense ... they don't have to be there ... but our thoughts entwine ... they call them memes or the third world and say they have an effect ... I don't know ... I don't know ... but they do furnish a room

AS THE WORLD TURNS

modernity is like tapdancing on a rubber ball ... you have no firm ground beneath you ... thing is modernity has been tapping on that ball for 2500 years ... even as humanity indulged her ... but with only one foot ... the other foot ... to modernity ... is nothing but a ball and chain to its flight ... Heraclitus taps his toe always round Parmenides ... and Plato is brought to ground by Aristotle ... someone talks about change ... the other mentions eternity ... someone says I've got all these forms you can fill out to stop this insane motion ... someone else answers get real ... modernity isn't so much wrong as it's going round in circles ... not so much flat as losing its dimension ... like an ember dying out ... please she says listen to my song ... and taps a melody to some arcane code