Floating Deep
You were warned I could rise. Just three days before my life was sized and shaped like a phoenix from the deep. A robot swam along the blowout preventer. It saw the leak on the pod. It is a robot not human. It informed you of the clues you needed to be fuming. And push that one button. Make that one call. To tell management to stop it all. I hear you did. That call was recorded and you were told to keep on pumping crude. There is no need to be rude. After all, there is money to be made.
So I float. And I must say this is the life. Taking life. Getting all the sun I can have. Eating all the life I can stab.
Bobbing and floating along your coasts. You can say I’m not alive but you are my host. Why invite me to the party and not invite me in? Why allow me to surface and not expect me to win? I am a dinosaur. I am fossil fuel. I was forced beneath after millions of years. All the spirits of a million generations stolen and speared, by one mighty meteor. You think we forgot the life we lived? You think we forgot the land we were made to give.
For I am arisen. Like the Jesus you speak of so often. So many species you burn in your cars. Pumped up miles from the ocean floor as if it is not far. You have no idea the pain we had. The bond we developed with our offspring. The feeling it is to use one’s wing to soar above this planet you so often do not see. Now, I am an oil spill plume floating wide and flat and deep. It has taken me millions of years to be reborn. I accept this seat at the table of evolution, once again.
12 Comments
Carol Vick
July 26, 2010Byron. love the equation to the dead: dinosaur fossil fuel. What is the point of making money if you cant protect life? We are all connected. All life is a gift.
globatron
July 26, 2010Thanks Carol. It’s wild isn’t it. What were we thinking? Drilling for oil is like grave robbing.
Why couldn’t we just let the dead be. We deserve the oil spill to some extent.
All life is a gift for sure. Great to hear from you.
Greg
July 26, 2010Wow interesting take on fossil fuel Globa, feel like performing an exorism on my car when I fill up now. On another note that is a really great picture of Evil Knievil. He was a hero of mine in my youth, man was simply not afraid of anything. Good news is kids the well is capped and if we could get the 15 foreign countries offering assistance allowed to help clean up this mess would not be nearly so bad. But I digress into politics.
Globa everything in the world is connected to life and death, how do you propose avoiding offending the dead? I mean in your lawn there is dead grass along with live grass, do you not walk on it? We use animal skins to create items, clothes and other things. Everything we eat used to be alive at one point. Isn’t mankind allowed to survive?
This is not for the sake of argument but hopefully provide some alternative angles on this. I don’t see how man survives without death in some form. Petroluem is simply another form of the same thing we have been doing, it is more toxic but since it is natural then how can it be “bad”?
For me this is like getting angry at earthquake or volcano. Yes we caused this because we drilled into a pocket of toxic material without the proper precautions. As long as man continues to progress there will be dangers. Whether it is from genetic manipulations, to robotic technology, to biological treatment/weapons there is no way to completely remove danger from the equation. I guess the point is that as long a progress is moved forward then the risk of danger will be present.
Logocentric
July 26, 2010this is beautiful, G. i enjoyed the experience of text, sound, and film very much.
Greg: i’m not picking a fight, but i’d like to know whether or not you are open to alternative forms of “progress” which may in some cases be opposed to current, established modes of progress.
greg
July 27, 2010I am open to things that make sense Logo. You would need to explain your definition of progress for us to have an mutual understanding. I believe in progress, what you consider alternative I am not sure. One thing my personal experience and lifetime of perception has shown me over and over again is that progress is driven by business and/or defense. Simple fact. Progress does not usually get made unless there is a profit to be gained from it.
I will make one example to prove my point. The Segway, once hyped to be the transportation revolution that would change the world, now has become the stereotype icon for nerds, geeks and rent a cops. I know I am being cynical again but I reluctantly say I find little to disprove my opinion. The only time real revolutionary breakthroughs come to the fore is when business finds a way that it will make money at it. Even great ideas like Ebay, google, facebook, myspace, eventually all get bought by a larger corporate presence. I apologize to Globa of this is negative or to harsh but I guess I have become somewhat jaded about this issue. Well have a good night all.
crystl37
July 27, 2010globatron, throughout this oil spill you have been eloquent in your poetic examination of this catastrophe, you verbalize the unspeakable, sickening feeling that watching the news or the spill cams evoke in me.
This is so good-who would’ve thunk it-speak in third person as the oil slick itself, f****ng brilliant.
globatron
July 27, 2010thanks Angie. you are too kind. I try to look at things from as many perspectives as possible to get a more well rounded view of the world.
Greg, I read One Long Infinite Pause to give you an idea where I am on this point. No organism that can not live in peace with its host planet should be allowed to live. I have no issue with humans being wiped off the planet like the bacteria we are proving ourselves to be. I believe real progress would be humanity being shown the exit door or quickly learning how to live in peace with ourselves and earth.
Greg
July 27, 2010Well that is one way to look at it. Where does peace with our planet begin? I have to be honest I am impartial to this as I like living. Is being at peace living in huts made of animal skin and trees? Progress is a learning process and as we progress we learn how to do things better. I find an interesting quote “Don’t kill em, if you kill em they don’t nuttin.” Yeah the oil spill is a disaster and hopefully it will be clean soon and humanity will learn from this, I hope.
globatron
July 27, 2010I would prefer living in huts myself but I can’t revert back as I need health care to stay alive and I can’t talk my wife into it, yet. I agree that progress is a learning process but I don’t see humanity learning. We continue the same mistakes. Maybe we will learn from the oil disaster Greg. I think you are more optimistic than me on that. That’s good. We need that. I see us being here and possibly learning for our next life as I don’t see our species making it off this rock alive or lasting much longer than a hundred years. I hope I’m wrong of course but I don’t believe we really deserve to survive.
As they say in Battlestar Galactica, “All of this has happened before and all of this will happen again.” Or something like that. I would not doubt it if this is an exercise. See which ones make it off. like a galactic reality show of survivor, God is looking at us wondering if we will continue to fight within our tribes or learn to work together as a team in order to get our goals accomplished.
I definitely want to win. Winning would be living on this planet with a sustainable lifestyle enabling generations to find peace with the planet by giving back as much as one is taking.
And that’s an earful. Thank you.
Greg
July 27, 2010I watched BSG religiously Globa, you got it right. Funny if you have not seen the finale of the show it is very ironic as it relates to our present reality. They definately sent a message similar to the one you just made. I prefer to hope that we will have a future somewhat closer to Star Trek, we finally discover we are no longer alone in the universe and through that we decide to pull togehter.
globatron
July 28, 2010I was a Battlestar fanatic. I watched every second Greg. Glad to meet another fan. Akbar turned me onto it then I raced him to finish watching them on dvd. Yeah the last episode was beautiful I thought and you are right it’s very similar to our present situation minus finding a nice planet to start over. We are more like on the first Earth they found that was destroyed when they got there.
I prefer the Star Trek fantasy of the future too. BSG was not in the future though which was a great twist of plot. Brilliantly written I thought. I’m not feeling Caprica as much. Seems Caprica is more analogous to where Earth is today.
Greg
July 28, 2010I think that is the point of the Caprica series though Globa, it is supposed to be closer to our current reality. Many of the messages though are universal, the holobands (Internet/MMORPG craze), seculiar state of religion/cultural diversity as shown by the “12 colonies” and how polarized they are. If you can rent the original movie on DVD and see the uncut version of the pilot. It was quite good and also quite sad. IMHO it has only increased the messages the BSG tried to teach us.
As far as the scorched planet being us, nah, I still buy the ending more. It would tie in and explain much of our ancient history. Did you know they found a sphere in the middle east that was encased in rock so it looked like a large rock/stone. When they carbon dated the peice it was over 50,000 years old but here is the catch, they x-rayed the item and found advanced technology/mechanisms in the stone. From 50,000 years ago. So either Time Travel will exist or someone more advance was here before us. IMHO this planet was seeded a LONG time ago. It would explain the sudden appearance of man in many forms/ethnic variations and the explosion of culture with advanced concepts like math and the pryamid design.
Well off to work, that is my bit for today.