Potential

The difference between a 3-month old human and ‘little apes’ is ‘potential’—what baby humans possess and what the little apes don’t. Leaving university vocabulary behind, I would say baby humans have a very advanced CPU, not simply ‘hardwired’ —- for the human brain isn’t hardwired, it is ‘fluid-wired’ with the potential to grow evermore complex, not only from generation to generation, but within the lifespan of each human brain. But that very advanced CPU has little potential without the software to drive it. As research on feral children have shown, the potential of the human brain is wasted, the ‘wild child’ advances very little beyond a very clever ‘little ape’ … alas, given a mother, that baby immediately begins to ‘download’ software to drive that CPU/brain. And a father and immediate family adds more software for the tiny brain to process and adapt to, and the neighborhood provides even more variety of ‘programming’ to the CPU to work with, yet the fledgling CPU in a baby's skull haven’t even begun to reach its potential. Ever more circles of community input more software into the tiny brain, software that becomes ‘fluidware’ that interacts with itself. Slowly from potential springs forth a mind, and even yet more potential is ever present and awaits that which will feed it. And what became of our dear ‘little apes’? I would say that they have not the ‘image of God’ as we humans have. It is we humans who are created in God’s image and thus have potential to reveal that image of God. But feel not sad for the little apes, for they are not offended by any of this that I write.

Truth

Truth (with a capital "T") is the elephant, and humanity the blind touching, sniffing, tasting, listening to this big "T" and of course we all rhapsodize a different tale (or tail?), yet in the end the big "T" is still the big "T" and all our various tales describe a tiny bit of that reality, the elephant.

1944

I was born under the screams of a mushroom filled sky
to the hiss of a thousand locomotives
to the reek of Buchenwald ovens
to the wild-eyed estacy of skeletons dancing in the streets
to the cooing girls gracing aluminum-nosed superfortresses
to the crackling radios and the comforting hum of white refrigerators
to the roar of hot rods and roadsters and coupes
to the ribboned crossbones with skulls donning pink Easter bonnets
to the raised stigmata hands before a heedless world
to the aspen glow of a bonfire in a cowering Berlin
to the fluttering flag on a volcanic isle caught by a gritty Speed Graflex
to the Kilroy that was here and there and everywhere
to the lightning punches of Graziano
and I awoke from the warm watery world to a cry
from lungs invaded by the gasps of a million years.

Beginnings

Starting now.