From the Guardian:
We can't reverse global warming by triggering another catastrophe
Sulphate pollution killed hundreds of thousands of Africans. A plan to use sulphur to fight climate change risks the same
George Monbiot
Tuesday August 29, 2006
The Guardian
Challenging a Nobel laureate over a matter of science is not something you do lightly. I have hesitated and backed off, read and reread his paper, but now I believe I can state with confidence that Paul Crutzen, winner of the 1995 prize for chemistry, has overlooked a critical scientific issue.
Crutzen is, as you would expect, a brilliant man. He was one of the atmospheric chemists who worked out how high-level ozone is formed and destroyed. He knows more than almost anyone about the impacts of pollutants in the atmosphere. This is what makes his omission so odd.
This month, he published an essay in the journal Climatic Change. He argues that the world's response to climate change has so far been "grossly disappointing". Stabilising carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere, he asserts, requires a global reduction in emissions of between 60% and 80%. But at the moment "this looks like a pious wish". So, he proposes, we must start considering the alternatives, by which he means re-engineering the atmosphere in order to cool the earth.
He suggests we use either giant guns or balloons to inject sulphur into the stratosphere, 10km or more above the surface of the earth. Sulphur dioxide at that height turns into tiny particles - or aerosols - of sulphate. These reflect sunlight back into space, counteracting the warming caused by manmade climate change.
One of the crueller paradoxes of climate change is that it is being accelerated by reducing certain kinds of pollution. Filthy factories cause acid rain and ill health, but they also help to shield us from the sun, by filling the air with particles. As we have started to clean some of them up, we have exposed ourselves to more solar radiation. One model suggests that a complete removal of these pollutants from the atmosphere could increase the world's temperature by 0.8C.
The virtue of Crutzen's scheme is that sulphate particles released so far above the surface of the earth stay airborne for much longer than they do at lower altitudes. In order to compensate for a doubling of carbon dioxide concentrations (which could happen this century), he calculates that we would need to fire some 5m tonnes of sulphur into the stratosphere every year. This corresponds to roughly 10% of the sulphate currently entering the atmosphere.
Crutzen recognises that there are problems. The sulphate particles would slightly reduce the thickness of the ozone layer. They would cause some whitening of the sky. Most dangerously, his scheme could be used by governments to help justify their failure to cut carbon emissions: if the atmosphere could one day be fixed by some heavy artillery and a few technicians, why bother to impose unpopular policies?
His paper has already caused plenty of controversy. Other scientists have pointed out that even if rising carbon dioxide levels did not cause global warming, they would still be an ecological disaster. For example, one study shows that as the gas dissolves in seawater, by 2050 the oceans could become too acid for shells to form, obliterating much of the plankton on which the marine ecosystem depends. In Crutzen's scheme, the carbon dioxide levels are not diminished.
It would also be necessary to keep firing sulphur into the sky for hundreds of years. The scheme would be extremely expensive, so it is hard to imagine that governments would sustain it through all the economic and political crises likely to take place in that time. But what I find puzzling is this: that by far the most damaging impact of sulphate pollution hasn't even been mentioned - by him or, as far as I can discover, any of his critics.
In 2002 the Journal of Climate published an astonishing proposition: that the great droughts which had devastated the Sahel region of Africa had been caused in part by sulphate pollution in Europe and North America. Our smoke, the paper suggested, was partly responsible for the famines that killed hundreds of thousands of people in the 1970s and 1980s.
By reducing the size of the droplets in clouds, thereby making them more reflective, the sulphate particles lowered the temperature of the sea's surface in the northern hemisphere. The result was to shift the intertropical convergence zone southwards. This zone is an area close to the equator in which moist air rises and condenses into rain. The Sahel, which covers countries such as Ethiopia, Sudan, Chad, Niger, Burkina Faso and Senegal, is at the northern limits of the zone. As the rain belt was pushed south, those countries dried up. As a result of the clean air acts, between 1970 and 1996 sulphur emissions in the US fell by 39%. This appears to have helped the North Atlantic to warm, allowing the rains to return to the Sahel in the 1990s.
Since then, several studies - published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Geophysical Research Letters and the Journal of Geophysical Research - have confirmed these findings. They show that the 40% reduction in rainfall in the Sahel, which has "few if any parallels in the 20th-century record anywhere on Earth", is explicable only when natural variations are assisted by sulphate aerosols. We killed those people.
I cannot say whether or not Crutzen's scheme would have a similar outcome. It is true that he proposes to use less sulphur than the industrialised nations pumped into the atmosphere, but does this matter if the reflective effect is just as great? Another paper I have read lists seven indirect impacts of aerosols on the climate system. Which, if any, will be dominant? What will their effects on rainfall be?
Crutzen suggests that in order to keep the particles airborne for as long as possible they should be released "near the tropical upward branch of the stratospheric circulation system". Does this mean that they will not be evenly distributed around the world? If so, will they shift weather systems around as our uneven patterns of pollution have done? I don't know the answers, but I am staggered by the fact that the questions are not even being asked.
I am not suggesting that they have been deliberately overlooked. It seems more likely that they have been forgotten for a familiar reason: that this disaster took place in Africa. Would we have neglected them if the famines had happened in Europe? The story of industrialisation is like The Picture of Dorian Gray. While the rich nations have enjoyed perennial youth, the cost of their debaucheries - slavery, theft, colonialism, sulphur pollution, climate change - is visited on another continent, where the forgotten picture becomes ever uglier.
(omitted plug for new book)
Satyagraha!
Tuesday, August 29, 2006
Monday, August 28, 2006
Popish Arrogance
From the Guardian:
Pope prepares to embrace theory of intelligent design
John Hooper in Rome
Monday August 28, 2006
Guardian
Philosophers, scientists and other intellectuals close to Pope Benedict will gather at his summer palace outside Rome this week for intensive discussions that could herald a fundamental shift in the Vatican's view of evolution.
There have been growing signs the Pope is considering aligning his church more closely with the theory of "intelligent design" taught in some US states. Advocates of the theory argue that some features of the universe and nature are so complex that they must have been designed by a higher intelligence. Critics say it is a disguise for creationism.
A prominent anti-evolutionist and Roman Catholic scientist, Dominique Tassot, told the US National Catholic Reporter that this week's meeting was "to give a broader extension to the debate. Even if [the Pope] knows where he wants to go, and I believe he does, it will take time. Most Catholic intellectuals today are convinced that evolution is obviously true because most scientists say so." In 1996, in what was seen as a capitulation to scientific orthodoxy, John Paul II said Darwin's theories were "more than a hypothesis".
Last week, at a conference in Rimini, Cardinal Christoph Schönborn of Austria revealed that evolution and creation had been chosen as the subjects for this year's meeting of the Pope's Schülerkreis - a group consisting mainly of his former doctoral students that has been gathering annually since the late 1970s. Apart from Cardinal Schönborn, participants at the closed-door meeting will include the president of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, Peter Schuster; the conservative ethical philosopher Robert Spaemann; and Paul Elbrich, professor of philosophy at Munich University.
Last December, a US court sparked controversy when it ruled that intelligent design should not be taught alongside evolution theory. Cardinal Schönborn said: "The debate of recent months has undoubtedly motivated the Holy Father's choice." But he added that in the 1960s the then Joseph Ratzinger had "underlined emphatically the need to return to the topic of creation".
The Pope also raised the issue in the inaugural sermon of his pontificate, saying: "We are not the accidental product, without meaning, of evolution."
A few months later, Cardinal Schönborn, who is regarded as being close to Benedict, wrote an article for the New York Times backing moves to teach ID. He was attacked by Father George Coyne, director of the Vatican Observatory. On August 19, Fr Coyne was replaced without explanation. Vatican sources said the Pope's former astronomer, who has cancer, had asked to be replaced.
Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2006
Satyagraha!
Pope prepares to embrace theory of intelligent design
John Hooper in Rome
Monday August 28, 2006
Guardian
Philosophers, scientists and other intellectuals close to Pope Benedict will gather at his summer palace outside Rome this week for intensive discussions that could herald a fundamental shift in the Vatican's view of evolution.
There have been growing signs the Pope is considering aligning his church more closely with the theory of "intelligent design" taught in some US states. Advocates of the theory argue that some features of the universe and nature are so complex that they must have been designed by a higher intelligence. Critics say it is a disguise for creationism.
A prominent anti-evolutionist and Roman Catholic scientist, Dominique Tassot, told the US National Catholic Reporter that this week's meeting was "to give a broader extension to the debate. Even if [the Pope] knows where he wants to go, and I believe he does, it will take time. Most Catholic intellectuals today are convinced that evolution is obviously true because most scientists say so." In 1996, in what was seen as a capitulation to scientific orthodoxy, John Paul II said Darwin's theories were "more than a hypothesis".
Last week, at a conference in Rimini, Cardinal Christoph Schönborn of Austria revealed that evolution and creation had been chosen as the subjects for this year's meeting of the Pope's Schülerkreis - a group consisting mainly of his former doctoral students that has been gathering annually since the late 1970s. Apart from Cardinal Schönborn, participants at the closed-door meeting will include the president of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, Peter Schuster; the conservative ethical philosopher Robert Spaemann; and Paul Elbrich, professor of philosophy at Munich University.
Last December, a US court sparked controversy when it ruled that intelligent design should not be taught alongside evolution theory. Cardinal Schönborn said: "The debate of recent months has undoubtedly motivated the Holy Father's choice." But he added that in the 1960s the then Joseph Ratzinger had "underlined emphatically the need to return to the topic of creation".
The Pope also raised the issue in the inaugural sermon of his pontificate, saying: "We are not the accidental product, without meaning, of evolution."
A few months later, Cardinal Schönborn, who is regarded as being close to Benedict, wrote an article for the New York Times backing moves to teach ID. He was attacked by Father George Coyne, director of the Vatican Observatory. On August 19, Fr Coyne was replaced without explanation. Vatican sources said the Pope's former astronomer, who has cancer, had asked to be replaced.
Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2006
Satyagraha!
Pompous Arrogance
From Talk To Action:
A Kenyan bishop who helped spread Satanic panic in the 1990s wants Kenya's national museum to move hominoid fossils from pride of place, on grounds that they conflict with Christian doctrine.
The Daily Telegraph reports from Kenya on a new religiously-inspired attack on science:
Powerful evangelical churches are pressing Kenya's national museum to sideline its world-famous collection of hominid bones pointing to man's evolution from ape to human.
Leaders of the country's six-million-strong Pentecostal congregation want Dr Richard Leakey's ground-breaking finds relegated to a back room instead of being given their usual prime billing.
"...The Christian community here is very uncomfortable that Leakey and his group want their theories presented as fact," said Bishop Bonifes Adoyo, the head of Christ is the Answer Ministries, the largest Pentecostal church in Kenya.
"Our doctrine is not that we evolved from apes, and we have grave concerns that the museum wants to enhance the prominence of something presented as fact which is just one theory."
Bishop Adoyo said all the country's churches would unite to force the museum to change its focus when it reopens after 18 months of renovations in June next year.
This is just the latest campaign from Bishop Adoyo, who in 1999 demanded that Kenya change its national motto. Charisma magazine reported at the time:
A Pentecostal pastor in Nairobi, Kenya, is challenging the use of the country's long-held national motto, saying the word is having a negative spiritual effect on the East African nation because it translates as an invocation to a Hindu goddess.
...The word harambee is the most distinctive expression of the Kenyan idiom, and it serves as the national rallying cry. Its origins as a commonly used term are with Hindu laborers who constructed the country's trans-national railway, yet the word has spiritual roots as well.
According to Ram Krishan Sharma, the pandit--or "preacher"--at the Arya Samaj temple, harambee is an invocation. "When one says harambee, they are saying, 'O god mother, take our pains and sorrows away.'"
...Adoyo believes that Kenyan Christians and Muslims should not be forced to pay homage to a deity acknowledged by less than 1 percent of the population. "A national motto should be neutral," he says.
Adoyo went on to explain the spiritual side of economics:
Adoyo is convinced that the reason why Asians control 20 percent of the Kenyan economy is that they worship what they know, while the rest of Kenya commits unwitting idolatry.
...Adoyo ruefully compares "Harambee" with "In God We Trust," the motto on the U.S. dollar, saying: "[Americans] started on the right footing, and now the dollar rules the world. Not so us!"
Critics, meanwhile, complained that "harambee" was simply an African word meaning "let us all pull together".
Back in the 1990s, Adoyo was also active in spreading Satanic panic, for the benefit of President Daniel Arap Moi. The Mail and Guardian reported:
Two years ago [1994], amid a flourish of press reports of children kidnapped for ritual sacrifice, Arap Moi appointed Kenya's archbishop to head an official commission into devil worship.
...The commission says devil worshippers have brought a plague of human sacrifice, cannibalism, "incantations in unintelligible language" and rape of children - and gives hints on how to spot Lucifer's agents at work. Citizens should look out for the "magic horns of witchcraft", the numbers 666, images of witches on broomsticks, nudity and snakes. Other giveaways are an "obsession with sex, especially lesbianism or homosexuality".
Bonifes Adoyo, a member of the commission and senior pastor of the Nairobi Pentecostal Church, says it found devil worship at every level of society but mostly among the elite.
"The elites entice people into it with money," Adoyo said. "Materialism and affluence do not answer spiritual longings ... they want mystical powers to control people." He said those who have "joined the bandwagon of economic and political freedoms" played into the hands of devil worshippers.
By "elites", it seems, Adoyo meant Arap Moi's political opponents. This 1994 "Inquiry into Devil Worship" was published in 1999:
In August 1999, the Government presented to Parliament and thereby effectively published the 1994 report of the Presidential Commission of Inquiry into Devil Worship...It also reported that "Satanists" had infiltrated nonindigenous religious groups including Jehovah's Witnesses, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (Mormons), and the Church of Christ Scientist (Christian Scientists), as well as other organizations, including the Masonic Order (Freemasons) and the Theosophical Society, making them "doorways" to Satanism. Most members of the Commission were senior members of mainline Christian churches; a deputy director of the Criminal Investigations Department (CID) also served on the Commission.
A second report adds "the golfing society" to the list of "channels that could lead to the occult". Apparently this was because of the existence of a "Lucifer Golfing Society", whose patron is the Duke of Edinburgh. A Nation critique of the report can be seen here. Tragedy followed: in 2000, two women were burned to death as witches in the village of Gachami, and in 2004 the panic led to colonial-era church imagery coming under threat of destruction.
The bishop also takes a firm line against Islam; a 2004 source reports from a conference, where
Bishop Bonifes Adoyo (Kenya) exposed the hideous strategies of Muslims to Islamize all African nations and those plans are incubated in Abuja of Nigeria. They gather everyday, make use of their youths, burn churches, buy over institutions, occupy territories, go on suicide bombing, practice terrorism and call all these exploits. Exploits that breed evil. They must be stopped, and Christians, the church in Africa must arise against this destructive monster. A word of prophecy came that God desire men who will not only give him their hearts but their heads also. He said he would not find pleasure with those who draw back.
More recently, Adoyo was part of a campaign to have the Da Vinci Code film banned in Kenya.
Adoyo's "Christ is the Answer" ministry is based at the Nairobi Pentecostal Church, Valley Road, which was founded by Canadian Pentecostals in the 1960s. A Christian radio station based at the church was the scene of a violent attack in May which left a guard dead; Islamic militants are thought to have been to blame, although a sinister comment from Security Minister John Michuki (and a previous attack on a newspaper office) about teaching a lesson to media that "harm" the government have raised other suspicions.
Satyagraha!
A Kenyan bishop who helped spread Satanic panic in the 1990s wants Kenya's national museum to move hominoid fossils from pride of place, on grounds that they conflict with Christian doctrine.
The Daily Telegraph reports from Kenya on a new religiously-inspired attack on science:
Powerful evangelical churches are pressing Kenya's national museum to sideline its world-famous collection of hominid bones pointing to man's evolution from ape to human.
Leaders of the country's six-million-strong Pentecostal congregation want Dr Richard Leakey's ground-breaking finds relegated to a back room instead of being given their usual prime billing.
"...The Christian community here is very uncomfortable that Leakey and his group want their theories presented as fact," said Bishop Bonifes Adoyo, the head of Christ is the Answer Ministries, the largest Pentecostal church in Kenya.
"Our doctrine is not that we evolved from apes, and we have grave concerns that the museum wants to enhance the prominence of something presented as fact which is just one theory."
Bishop Adoyo said all the country's churches would unite to force the museum to change its focus when it reopens after 18 months of renovations in June next year.
This is just the latest campaign from Bishop Adoyo, who in 1999 demanded that Kenya change its national motto. Charisma magazine reported at the time:
A Pentecostal pastor in Nairobi, Kenya, is challenging the use of the country's long-held national motto, saying the word is having a negative spiritual effect on the East African nation because it translates as an invocation to a Hindu goddess.
...The word harambee is the most distinctive expression of the Kenyan idiom, and it serves as the national rallying cry. Its origins as a commonly used term are with Hindu laborers who constructed the country's trans-national railway, yet the word has spiritual roots as well.
According to Ram Krishan Sharma, the pandit--or "preacher"--at the Arya Samaj temple, harambee is an invocation. "When one says harambee, they are saying, 'O god mother, take our pains and sorrows away.'"
...Adoyo believes that Kenyan Christians and Muslims should not be forced to pay homage to a deity acknowledged by less than 1 percent of the population. "A national motto should be neutral," he says.
Adoyo went on to explain the spiritual side of economics:
Adoyo is convinced that the reason why Asians control 20 percent of the Kenyan economy is that they worship what they know, while the rest of Kenya commits unwitting idolatry.
...Adoyo ruefully compares "Harambee" with "In God We Trust," the motto on the U.S. dollar, saying: "[Americans] started on the right footing, and now the dollar rules the world. Not so us!"
Critics, meanwhile, complained that "harambee" was simply an African word meaning "let us all pull together".
Back in the 1990s, Adoyo was also active in spreading Satanic panic, for the benefit of President Daniel Arap Moi. The Mail and Guardian reported:
Two years ago [1994], amid a flourish of press reports of children kidnapped for ritual sacrifice, Arap Moi appointed Kenya's archbishop to head an official commission into devil worship.
...The commission says devil worshippers have brought a plague of human sacrifice, cannibalism, "incantations in unintelligible language" and rape of children - and gives hints on how to spot Lucifer's agents at work. Citizens should look out for the "magic horns of witchcraft", the numbers 666, images of witches on broomsticks, nudity and snakes. Other giveaways are an "obsession with sex, especially lesbianism or homosexuality".
Bonifes Adoyo, a member of the commission and senior pastor of the Nairobi Pentecostal Church, says it found devil worship at every level of society but mostly among the elite.
"The elites entice people into it with money," Adoyo said. "Materialism and affluence do not answer spiritual longings ... they want mystical powers to control people." He said those who have "joined the bandwagon of economic and political freedoms" played into the hands of devil worshippers.
By "elites", it seems, Adoyo meant Arap Moi's political opponents. This 1994 "Inquiry into Devil Worship" was published in 1999:
In August 1999, the Government presented to Parliament and thereby effectively published the 1994 report of the Presidential Commission of Inquiry into Devil Worship...It also reported that "Satanists" had infiltrated nonindigenous religious groups including Jehovah's Witnesses, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (Mormons), and the Church of Christ Scientist (Christian Scientists), as well as other organizations, including the Masonic Order (Freemasons) and the Theosophical Society, making them "doorways" to Satanism. Most members of the Commission were senior members of mainline Christian churches; a deputy director of the Criminal Investigations Department (CID) also served on the Commission.
A second report adds "the golfing society" to the list of "channels that could lead to the occult". Apparently this was because of the existence of a "Lucifer Golfing Society", whose patron is the Duke of Edinburgh. A Nation critique of the report can be seen here. Tragedy followed: in 2000, two women were burned to death as witches in the village of Gachami, and in 2004 the panic led to colonial-era church imagery coming under threat of destruction.
The bishop also takes a firm line against Islam; a 2004 source reports from a conference, where
Bishop Bonifes Adoyo (Kenya) exposed the hideous strategies of Muslims to Islamize all African nations and those plans are incubated in Abuja of Nigeria. They gather everyday, make use of their youths, burn churches, buy over institutions, occupy territories, go on suicide bombing, practice terrorism and call all these exploits. Exploits that breed evil. They must be stopped, and Christians, the church in Africa must arise against this destructive monster. A word of prophecy came that God desire men who will not only give him their hearts but their heads also. He said he would not find pleasure with those who draw back.
More recently, Adoyo was part of a campaign to have the Da Vinci Code film banned in Kenya.
Adoyo's "Christ is the Answer" ministry is based at the Nairobi Pentecostal Church, Valley Road, which was founded by Canadian Pentecostals in the 1960s. A Christian radio station based at the church was the scene of a violent attack in May which left a guard dead; Islamic militants are thought to have been to blame, although a sinister comment from Security Minister John Michuki (and a previous attack on a newspaper office) about teaching a lesson to media that "harm" the government have raised other suspicions.
Satyagraha!
Saturday, August 19, 2006
In Memory of Shamsur
Mask
Shower me with petals and heap bouquets around me,
I won't complain.
Unable to move, I won't ask you to stop
And if butterflies or swarms of flies
settle on my nose I will not brush them away.
Indifferent to the scent of jasmine and benjamin,
to rose-water and loud lamenting,
I lie supine with sightless eyes
while the man who will wash me
scratches his ample behind.
The youthfulness of the lissome maiden,
her firm breasts untouched by grief,
no longer inspires me to chant
nonsensical rhymes in praise of life.
You can cover me head to foot with flowers,
my finger won't rise in admonishment.
I will shortly board a truck for a visit to Banani.
A light breeze will touch my lifeless bones.
I am the broken nest of a weaver-bird,
dreamless and lonely on the long verandah.
If you wish to deck me up like a bridegroom
go ahead, I won't say no
Do as you please, only don't
alter my face too much with collyrium
or enbalming cosmetics.
See that I am just as I am - don't let another face
emerge through the ruins of my own.
Look! The old mask under whose pressure I passed my life,
that weary handmaiden of anxiety,
has peeled off at last -
for God's sake don't fix on me another.
From: Selected Poems of Shamsur Rahman.
Originally translated by Kaiser Haq.
Shower me with petals and heap bouquets around me,
I won't complain.
Unable to move, I won't ask you to stop
And if butterflies or swarms of flies
settle on my nose I will not brush them away.
Indifferent to the scent of jasmine and benjamin,
to rose-water and loud lamenting,
I lie supine with sightless eyes
while the man who will wash me
scratches his ample behind.
The youthfulness of the lissome maiden,
her firm breasts untouched by grief,
no longer inspires me to chant
nonsensical rhymes in praise of life.
You can cover me head to foot with flowers,
my finger won't rise in admonishment.
I will shortly board a truck for a visit to Banani.
A light breeze will touch my lifeless bones.
I am the broken nest of a weaver-bird,
dreamless and lonely on the long verandah.
If you wish to deck me up like a bridegroom
go ahead, I won't say no
Do as you please, only don't
alter my face too much with collyrium
or enbalming cosmetics.
See that I am just as I am - don't let another face
emerge through the ruins of my own.
Look! The old mask under whose pressure I passed my life,
that weary handmaiden of anxiety,
has peeled off at last -
for God's sake don't fix on me another.
From: Selected Poems of Shamsur Rahman.
Originally translated by Kaiser Haq.
Friday, August 11, 2006
Lessons of the Morning Moon
Walk past houses, many of them homes;
Walk down a path that serves many as a road;
Pass the mouth of a sacerdotal cave where liturgies are mumbled in the time-worn manner to spirits long gone to dust;
Move through the clouding incense of modest sacrifice and the savoury mist of morning meals – leave behind the faces and places of the homely world and seek the moon lingering on the fringe of a brightening dawn.
Beneath lies a city, but the lesson isn’t there – it lies by the river;
No, the lesson is the river, which flows even frozen and unlit.
That simple insistence defies the length of eternity and the breadth of an instant to encompass it - a failure that makes futile our illusions of ourselves as faces with places, things with things, tethered demons, lost angels, or bags of wind to be contemplated rushing in and out.
What moon and river offer is the opportunity to witness;
To witness a story that fails with the first forgotten word,
And runs hopelessly awry whenever ignorant voices try to sieze it.
Yet no matter what cacophonies obscure it, and no matter how hard we try to forget it as we seek to rewrite our world, the story the of the morning moon and river waits to be taken up.
It begins at the shore like this: it is the nature of sand to slip through fingers, and the nature of fingers to slip through sand.
Copyright © 2006 F.G. Pluthero
Walk down a path that serves many as a road;
Pass the mouth of a sacerdotal cave where liturgies are mumbled in the time-worn manner to spirits long gone to dust;
Move through the clouding incense of modest sacrifice and the savoury mist of morning meals – leave behind the faces and places of the homely world and seek the moon lingering on the fringe of a brightening dawn.
Beneath lies a city, but the lesson isn’t there – it lies by the river;
No, the lesson is the river, which flows even frozen and unlit.
That simple insistence defies the length of eternity and the breadth of an instant to encompass it - a failure that makes futile our illusions of ourselves as faces with places, things with things, tethered demons, lost angels, or bags of wind to be contemplated rushing in and out.
What moon and river offer is the opportunity to witness;
To witness a story that fails with the first forgotten word,
And runs hopelessly awry whenever ignorant voices try to sieze it.
Yet no matter what cacophonies obscure it, and no matter how hard we try to forget it as we seek to rewrite our world, the story the of the morning moon and river waits to be taken up.
It begins at the shore like this: it is the nature of sand to slip through fingers, and the nature of fingers to slip through sand.
Copyright © 2006 F.G. Pluthero
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