Love Notes notes

The separation of of form from it's environment is a unique function of the human mind. We can take the fish out of water, so to speak, and hold it in our minds, turn it round and round, examine it, understand it's parts, how they relate to each other, what their functions may be, how they arose, then put it back into the environment and have a deeper understanding of our observations of it's behavior because of our understanding of it's form.

The canopy structure of trees, under my observation, seems the most egalitarian system in nature, strikes a strange consonance with the Communist maxim "From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs". (This never really seemed that different than free-market ideological slogan "self regulating market", except that, ironically, the rhetorical emphasis is on the individual in the commie saying, and on the super-structure in the 'merican one.) So, the growth pattern of branches is this incredible display of co-operation and balance, each shoot moves into it's light, avoids other's shadows, and contributes to the strength of the organism, and if they are injured and die, they fall off and rot and feed the roots...the perfect economics of nature...love that...

In a way, the entire project of civilization, and the evolution of the human species into a super-social organism, is an attempt to create a complete system out of a collection of individual consciousness'...this is what I meant when I wrote "Man is a monkey, trying to be a tree."

And the fundamental unit of human society is that ubiquitous miracle, the holy defilement, that swirling vortex of phenomena that is the romantically involved couple...what comedian, what actor, what painter, what politician, what human's material ever strays far from thoughts of this? Their sex, their love, their crucible of identity, their longing for absorption, it is the organisms Ur impulse...unique, to become undone by love's desire and sacrifice the self for the cycle, the questioning for the thing in itself-this may be, indeed, the center of consciousness.