[100 Challenge] Ocean_26

Music: so much practice and set up, for so little. It seems almost the nonsensical expenditure of effort, until you ask what such performances might be an echo of: Rites whose duties were to the perpetuation of the cosmos. What elicits one sequence of dreams to emerge and not another?

Whatever we attend to, we animate. Words, phones, etc. Animism is alive and well. Even the deconstructionists, attending to all those living thoughts…

Fire has moved from its place at the center of the hut off to the side, framed by the mantle--still housed in the place of high respect in the household. In many modern homes the television now holds that spot, but the television too is a form of fire. We gather around to watch its flickering lights and witness the stories. The cellular phone flickers in palms like a match.

“Mythologists rarely ask if there is an actual living referent to the myths they study. It’s as though they see the phenomena, which they describe, as the product of sheer, creative imagination. This paper proposes a natural provenance for major features of bear myth and ceremonialism…The logic of these “metaphoric enactments” or rites and stories that personify bears depends on what might be called primal epistemology. At its heart is the belief that the natural world is rich in signs, which are significant to humans—models of exemplary events. As such, they are keys to the meaning of a complex world that arose with the evolution of human self-consciousness and the mental capacity to create a worldview.” – Paul Shepard, The Biological Bases of Bear Mythology and Ceremonialism, The Trumpeter Volume 23, Number 2 (2007)