God, Carla Bruni & Trilling Dinosaurs
Mar. 31st, 2008 07:15 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mallorys_cameraIt was a New York that existed in the shadow of enormous skyscrapers erected on steel stilts, a medina of strange storefronts selling wax flowers and poisons and candles from Peru. Lisa no-longer Tudisco was taking me on a tour. She was frowning. "Rent is cheap. Fifty cents a square yard. You should seriously consider moving the store here. Listen to this."
This was a recording of dinosaurs. Did you know that dinosaurs trill exactly like birds? Well, in my dreams at least. Their syrinxes are larger than a bird's, of course, so the noises they make are basso profundo, hovering in the infrasonic range and rather frightening. "This is why you're hyper-vigilant," said Lisa. "You're one of the few people who hears the dinosaurs."
And then I woke up.
It was three-thirty in the morning and I knew I wasn't going back to sleep.
I've made my peace with insomnia. More or less. In the middle of the night, I think thoughts I have no room for in the middle if the day.
Recently I've been thinking about God and Carla Bruni.
The two would seem to be irreconcilable opposites. The existence of one negates the other. Since we have photographic evidence that Carla Bruni does, in fact, exist, that means God doesn't.
Carla Bruni is possibly the most privileged human being ever to be born on this planet. Scion of rich Italian industrialists who pretended to be classical musicians much in the same way that Marie Antoinette occasionally pretended to herd sheep. Born with the face if not the proportions of Barbie, after Venus of Willendorf, the world's most iconic female. Ravager of rock stars and philosophers. Has never had a desire she could not instantly gratify. Surely she represents human evolution at some kind of apex, wouldn't you say?
A zero sum by any spiritual calculus. Selfish, self-absorbed, the embodiment of maya
And yet – undeservedly – she continues to get what she wants.
Which must mean spiritual calculus is an imaginary mathematic.
Of course, I don't believe in God per se, but I'm very superstitious which is de facto faith whether I cop to it or not.
I suppose my personal vision of God is of a man in a dilapidated brown suede coat – kind of like Hank Mallory's in Moving On – stolidly reading His way through billions of volumes in a celestial Library of Alexandria. God as the ultimate audience for stories.
The necessity for this kind of God is tied into the neurology of narrative itself. Consciousness can exist without storytelling, but apparently the self, the ego, cannot. There are three centers in the brain that work together on creating narrative: the frontal cortices (obviously), the region of the brain near the so-called sylvan fissure which separates the frontal, parietal, and temporal lobes and controls language, and the amygdalo-hippocampal system which encodes memory. Focal damage to any of these centers changes the self-narrative. People close to you will say, "He's not himself anymore," meaning – he's telling a different story now.
This was a recording of dinosaurs. Did you know that dinosaurs trill exactly like birds? Well, in my dreams at least. Their syrinxes are larger than a bird's, of course, so the noises they make are basso profundo, hovering in the infrasonic range and rather frightening. "This is why you're hyper-vigilant," said Lisa. "You're one of the few people who hears the dinosaurs."
And then I woke up.
It was three-thirty in the morning and I knew I wasn't going back to sleep.
I've made my peace with insomnia. More or less. In the middle of the night, I think thoughts I have no room for in the middle if the day.
Recently I've been thinking about God and Carla Bruni.The two would seem to be irreconcilable opposites. The existence of one negates the other. Since we have photographic evidence that Carla Bruni does, in fact, exist, that means God doesn't.
Carla Bruni is possibly the most privileged human being ever to be born on this planet. Scion of rich Italian industrialists who pretended to be classical musicians much in the same way that Marie Antoinette occasionally pretended to herd sheep. Born with the face if not the proportions of Barbie, after Venus of Willendorf, the world's most iconic female. Ravager of rock stars and philosophers. Has never had a desire she could not instantly gratify. Surely she represents human evolution at some kind of apex, wouldn't you say?
A zero sum by any spiritual calculus. Selfish, self-absorbed, the embodiment of maya
And yet – undeservedly – she continues to get what she wants.
Which must mean spiritual calculus is an imaginary mathematic.
Of course, I don't believe in God per se, but I'm very superstitious which is de facto faith whether I cop to it or not.
I suppose my personal vision of God is of a man in a dilapidated brown suede coat – kind of like Hank Mallory's in Moving On – stolidly reading His way through billions of volumes in a celestial Library of Alexandria. God as the ultimate audience for stories.
The necessity for this kind of God is tied into the neurology of narrative itself. Consciousness can exist without storytelling, but apparently the self, the ego, cannot. There are three centers in the brain that work together on creating narrative: the frontal cortices (obviously), the region of the brain near the so-called sylvan fissure which separates the frontal, parietal, and temporal lobes and controls language, and the amygdalo-hippocampal system which encodes memory. Focal damage to any of these centers changes the self-narrative. People close to you will say, "He's not himself anymore," meaning – he's telling a different story now.
