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Sunday 21 August 2011

Report from the Front

I think space is a void: like my mind, devoid of knowledge if it isn't already imparted by beings from beyond. I take these creatures for gods, or simply the guy next door who works for a company with a registered name including the word "Dynamics" in the title - which you can see on the sign out front.

I suppose my neighbor might be from outer space. Or maybe all these ideas are from inner space, or, more likely, are just space. A void. A blind spot.

I do know that he can't take the bus to work unless he wants to walk the mile of space that his building's removed from the entry gate to "Something-or-another Dynamics". That's why he drives a truck. Or so he told me once.

Or maybe the Gestalt that is my neighbor is the science I trust, yet still don't understand. For I used to have faith in "the word" received from God; later I became a skeptic believing what I was told by, yet, someone else. Someone of a less ecclesiastical nature. Someone who seems more reliable because they base their theory of space on that which can be observed now.

Well, "now" relative to Revelations anyway.

Aristotle found the concept of a vacuum in space so horrifying that he imposed this abhorrence as unnatural - or more specifically, he projected his dis-ease upon nature itself, positing his fear of space as scientific fact. This had a profound influence upon the Cartesian way of thinking, which might be said to include the dictum: There is no space I can't conceive.

So it is with science and religion.

The Chinese knew all along that the heavens were boundless and void of substance - at least as long ago as Zhang Heng, who in the second century told them so. In modern times they've gone about proving it by buying up worthless American credit. Of course, it is just a concept they are buying into, so the actual value of those assets is open to speculation.

And what about my neighbor who works for "Something-of-another Dynamics"? Is he, like Jack Parsons, indispensable to both rocket science, as it relates to the exploration of worlds beyond planet earth, AND obsessed with the sex magick proposed by the likes of Aleister Crowley? Is he capable of conjuring aliens from beyond an ancient region in northern Africa from the secrecy of his basement next door by night, while by day inventing a better projectile, the explosive of which propels the locals from the north Africa of here and now back into that ancient state?

And is what I know about outer space any more or less reliable than the story that the Libyan Rebels are worth killing for because of the always morphing Gestalt in the meat-space known as Colonel Muammar el-Qaddafi?

I mean, is this so because everyone from The Berliner Zeitung and TAZ all the way to Arianne OnLine and the priNtin’t’fYT global federation of most valuable media tells me so?

Does our being bombarded with the latest information from the front justify the bombardment of those within it?

Is one world really enough for all of us? Or is someone out there in space testing our resolve?

No. I think that the term "outer space" is misused. Not because I can't conceive of its contents or lack thereof, but because it was proved long ago that the earth is not the center of the universe. Therefore, to my way of thinking, Planet Earth is outer space.

I am an alien, perhaps from here, perhaps with origins on or in a world far from wherever my inner-space will ever be able to take me. But my being is thinking; my mere existence is proof of the existence of extraterrestrial life.

And if I had to guess, I'd say that the final frontier is a parking space not worth fighting for.