Wouldn't it be cool if humans evolved into flower hybrids? Imagine if we didn't have to eat, because we had developed the capacity to survive via photosynthesis. But Marc, you ask, what about talking? How would we do that? Sign Language, I say--we'd still have hands. As for seeing, well, maybe the pistil (is that what it's called--the center of the flower--help me out, Hunky Gardener!), maybe the pistil can evolve into eyes.
I love the power of art to propose all kinds of improbability. I took a Gauguin Still Life, matched it with a portrait from Giorgione, and come up with an entirely new species, appropriate for a planet encountered in the next Star Trek. (You may rightly point out that the Wizard of Oz came up with live trees first, but they were mean. My creatures are beautiful, and nice.)
I'm watching Joe Biden, just introduced by Barack Obama. I love the choice. I always thought he offered up the sharpest commentary during the Democratic debates, and might well have voted for him in the caucuses had I lived in Iowa. I also think he's really goodlooking and I love the suits he wears. I just pray he stays out of the button-down collars, which, loyal readers know, I have a strange and and powerful aversion to.
I am one of those people dancing with glee about the McCain gaffe concerning how many houses he has. I am horrified by extreme concentrations of wealth, I think it is directly related to extreme concentrations of poverty. I think it's morally wrong. If you can afford more than 3 houses, you're not giving enough money away. When did the American dream become about having more things? Howabout a new American dream, based on sharing more things? How can anyone consume so much when so many have so little? Doesn't it bother them? I just don't get it.
I'm not against minor concentrations of wealth--the rest of us need something to aspire to. But too few have too damn much. Stay out of the White House. Don't you have enough?
MCO 2008
I like your gorgeous hybrid. Somme days I would give anything to sprout flowers for a head.
Marc, surely you aren't serious in asking when Americans decided life was all about having more. Arguably, our society has always been cemented by a common vision to obtain more. Westward expansion defined us a people, and today technology represents the next frontier by which we accumulate more.
Certainly, from the day the soldiers came home from WWI, our national mission has been to accumulate everything that comprises the "good life." And we have had the brainpower and the muscle to create the things that tantgalize the world, to the point where we are lost in our dream of materialism, so deep one wonders if it's possible to awaken.
i had to laugh when i read the phrase "strange aversion" and i don't know why. i do know that if anyone can wear that phrase well, i believe it would be you.
you make me smile (from my heart)
There's a line in Eliot's poem, Love Song of J. Alfred Prufock, that reads, "I have measured out my life with coffee spoons." I think that perhaps Americans have measured out our lives in acquisitions. Even those who don't have, spend their lives in pursuit of having, dreaming of oversized houses, luxury cars,and backyard swimming pools (in-ground, of course). Perhaps even more disturbingly, those that have to excess, continue to desire more, never reaching a point of saying quite simply, "I have enough."
A friend passsed along some reading material on Buddhism and one of the concepts that caght my eye was a discussion of the realms of existence. My understanding is that there are six Buddhist realms of existence and that all people are born and reborn into the differing realms. (I'm no expert on Buddhism, and I dare not try to explain milleniums of thought in a blog comment.) It's just that one of the realms is known as the Preta realm or the Hungry Ghost realm, where the inhabitans have a hunger that can never be satisfied. No matter how much they have they always want more. I fear that America as a nation is a hungry ghost.