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Potters bake the molecules of earth together to reform as manmade rock. Any potter longs to deepen that connection with fire, and the energy of life.
Amateur making of ceramic ware has in the West almost universally been taken over by the electric kiln. It's a toaster, you switch it on. It controls the temperature. Exactly. The fire it gives is universal fire, ie. heat from it's 'elements'. But alas, the flame is gone. So is the smoke, and the crackle and roar. The electric kiln supplies heat, but alas the love is gone.
But it need not be the case. For the electric kiln is an invitation to potters everywhere to deepen their understanding of fire, of energy, and where it comes from and how it's made. We must know that to get that kiln to heat up, a fire is burning somewhere, in boiler supplying steam to a giant turbine, which turns the generators powering our city, or a nuclear reactor, or even our own sun producing the rainfall that turns water pressure into electricity.
Fire must be sought out, in a civilization that is afraid of flame.
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At the other side of the world,
where light is a different color,
the sound of a bell may be larger,
than a giant submarine
Don't doubt that beings watched as each of us died.
You fall without complaining
past the skirts of something new,
and leak a bit of it as love,
radiation to feed my soul.
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Technology, mathematics, and science functions as reins of a slower moving coach, that of our social organizations, and the state.
We have seen how the digital revolution has inverted notions of privacy. Today the average person is happy to share personal photographs and data, with any person on the globe using Instagram.
We've noticed how the digital revolution has affected our system of elections, exposing them to electronic hacking from across the globe.
We've observed the digitization of money, and how the true value of trusted stores of wealth, the dollar, the pound and others, have endured runaway inflation, interest accrued digitally.
We know the wealthy retreat into fearful isolation, into the counting house of their personal computers, where they measure wealth in shares of companies, with a very abstract total in dollars. Yet the dollar, and the stock in corporations are all fictitious wealth, less real than trees or fresh air, or a drink of cold water when it is hot.
Despite these drawbacks, it is also clear there is no turning back, no readmission to a pre-digital world, despite our laments for a rosy hued era of manual typewriters, of quill pens and ink.
Each of these changes to our media, towards pen and paper after impressing information on clay tablets, has brought about a own corresponding stress and change to our systems of government, to our cherished philosophies, and art. In short change is just that, change, and it disrupts everything. The disruptions are difficult, but we long for progress.
The pre-digital age took us to the frontiers of space, it saw the birth of the most terrible weapons of mass destruction, and World Wars without precedent in which the death tolls were in the many tens of millions.
We've seen governments unable to comprehend protests of it's people. When fairly elected officials, such as Macron of France, is the object of ridicule and is promised to be overthrown by the very voters that put him in power months after he's taken office, despite a record faithful to the campaign platform that elected him.
I've spent my life interested in how new forms of thinking are ushered in by new technologies, and newfound knowledge of nature, and am going to propose in this essay that a series of radical, perhaps violent, perhaps not, revolutions are about to take place, because of one simple fact. The machinery of the state, of systems of rule in Western Democracies and former Socialist republics both, is broken, and beyond repair.
I hope with the observations made here to be able to offer an understanding of the forces facing modern man on the face of a very crowded, very polluted and seemingly overpopulated planet.
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For quite some time I've felt that my attraction to ceramics, actually an attraction to clay itself, was due to something fundamental and physical, as if all the physical laws governing matter have conspired to make it impossible to invent beauty.
Or soul.
The soul of mankind may be independent of our bodies, and similarly, the beauty we perceive in the natural world, and sometimes in objects of our own design, may not actually be something we ourselves invent at all.
It may exist, not necessarily pre-made, not necessarily in a Platonic, other invisible world sense, but in the very plausible sense that if nothing cannot exist, then all existence and all existences must exist also, and with it all manifestations of soul, light and beauty included.
We and what we make are there as a natural expansion to our exponents of having soul. That which accompanies our material bodies through life must by virtue of that exponential power, create things which are beautiful and independent of matter themselves. Soul begets soul.
This postulate I wish to test against several aspects which usually accompany such accolades as beauty, perfection, and life. To do this we will need to perform a number of thought experiments
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I'll have to sweep up the ashes
Can't you see?
Ribbons are on tour,
You see, mine his everyone's
There isn't a place where I could show you what's really happening?
Al these questions, so futile,
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