Wednesday, July 13, 2005

What It Is

teleos is the intelligence of nature

logos is the program or logic by which teleos manifests itself

I've been studying the interaction between DNA and the environment for some time. There are some things that happen which I feel Darwinnian Evolution is too simplistic to explain.

For instance: the bait crab and the bait fish, both of which grow baitfishes which allow them to catch prey which attack their bait. The Caddis Fly Larvae which spins a net underwater, a net whose size & holes & weave vary according to their environment. These nets catch algae and bacteria and extremely small fish, chameleons, George Bush & Tony Blair....how could natural selection, intelligent design, or creationism explain this weirdness....none of these theories really suit my perception of an intelligent interface between organism and environment.

Why do I care? I feel the intelligence that moves thru the conversation between organism & environment must also inform our lives in the moment. To catch that moment is the goal.

There's a zen koan about a man running from a tiger who falls over a cliff, grabs a tree, looks down at the gorge below, looks up at the tiger above, sees a flower by the tree, grabs it, looks at it and says, "AH!"

A friend said he still hasn't found that flower.

I said it's the moment of consciousness

there's a connection there

which we shall get to know better

7/12/05
Today I took a shower and put on some clean clothes so some doctor I’ve never seen before could stick his finger up my ass....does that make any god damned sense? Turns out he looked kind of gay, and maybe a little too friendly. He said he wanted to do a biopsy. I said no. He said why. I said my friend got one and it hurt like hell and bled for a long time. My PSAs weren’t that high, and I just wanted to play it by ear and eat foods a naturopath MD recommended for that condition. Get another blood test in 6 months. He said, OK, I wasn’t doing anything too terrible. As I was finishing up with the receptionist, some woman walked by, spraying so called air freshener everywhere, making everybody choke, making it a double or triple pleasure to leave

o well, I guess I would have had to take a shower sometime anyhow.

and go to the bank & have the manager give me a hard time trying to deposit the check I got after a year of legal wrangling for a third of my back wages. Seems the lawyer’s assistant on the other side had stamped it "Deposit Only" to his trust account. Went to his office, got another check, noticed a Jasper Johns flag painting behind his desk, started to say something & then thought, "Naah, guess I never did like those paintings, it was kind of like the constitution, just a real good idea....that never envisioned touch screen voting machines, Downing St. Memos, Karl Rove and a public that doesn’t even care anymore..."

they had cable news on the big TV in the bank, with pictures of ocean swells from hurricane Dennis, one of those moments where they seemed to go right through my body, reminded me of the lines on these huge shells I found at a yard sale, echoing the movement of the waves...certain moments in nature like suddenly seeing the mountains, or an animal, or whatever, where there’s no distance, or me, anymore....

and went to my appointment with an apartment owner, who wanted to know what was wrong with his cooler. I said he had his filters in on the wrong side. He said the instructions said to put them on the inside. I said, the inside of what? He said he saw my point. What did I owe him? Nothing I said. He also had his ladder assembled backwards. If that was just his style, he forgot to put his pants on backwards

and went to wild oats to get this juicer drink that has been making me feel great and about as uncancerous as a person could be:
2 carrots
lots of celery
small handful spinach
½ cucumber
small slice beet
1 lime
shots: orange
apple
wheatgrass
½ cup soymilk

coming out I saw a guy going down the street on a BMW motorcycle, decked out with panniers and camping gear, and there was a big, bright green parrot riding kind of sideways and frontways at the same time on his shoulder

there are some things that save your life that you can’t explain to a doctor