The Sea and the Old Men

Ryan and Iain awoke to the smell of decay laced with tangy salt water air. The brothers jointly owned The Hemingway, an eight-five foot fishing yacht, and had yesterday helped haul in a dozen marlin for their wealthy clients just off the Treasure Coast of Florida. Each of the marlins had weighed in excess of two-hundred pounds and although the gigantic fishes hung in the refrigerator larder the scent of bait, blood and marine biomass dominated the olfactory aura of the ship.

The two brothers sat down to a breakfast of bacon and eggs, steak and potatoes, coffee and cream. The clock on the wall framed in a platinum helm's wheel displayed quarter past five, giving the brothers 45 minutes to prep before their clients began wandering in to the dining cabin by ones and twos for their meals and orientation on the fishing day ahead. Both Ryan and Iain stared uncharacteristically at their full plates just set in front of them by Lizzy who was busy prepping breakfast for the ten others apt to show their faces at 6 am.

"I had a dream..." both said in unison as the clock ticked to 5:16. 

"You first," said Ryan. Though he was the older brother he gracefully let Iain take the lead more often than not. Mainly to avoid a back and forth waste of time, Iain usually complied as he did today.

"I was doubly exhausted last night. Quite the haul, eh?"

Ryan nodded. His beard a scraggly experiment compared to his brother's full chin of curly gray.

Iain set his unused knife and fork down and glanced at the ceiling as he began.

"You won't believe it, Bruth. I was on the Hem alone and for some reason I was pushing her to the limit out on the open ocean, a blue day as clear as they make them. No clients, no itinerary, just me roaming free over the open water, playing like I was a kid at the wheel."

"And then the Sun flashed green, like we've seen at sunset, only it was midday.  I was so surprised I cut the Hem's engines and walked out and leaned on the bow rail to have a look. The ocean glistened like deep blue glacier ice everywhere and it was as if I could see down to the deepest depths and the furthest distances. And as much as I was alone, I was in the midst of a universe of life. I mean, I could actually see the trillions upon trillions of living things in the ocean all at the same time. Every fish and every sea mammal, every crab and lobster, every jellyfish and sea urchin were there for my private show. Bruth, I felt like God looking out over creation. No kidding."

Ryan kind of squinted at Iain across the white-clothed breakfast table.

"Yeah, go right ahead and roll your eyes you non-believer. It doesn't matter. I had a glimpse of perfection in that dream. I saw so many marine species, each as plentiful as the stars, and the ocean itself was pristine, no fishing nets, no red tide, no oil slicks, no fishing fleets of any kind. I was the only one there with The Hem. And I sensed the beauty in each individual, each thinking, feeling creature, alive and thriving in its own right. It was an endless waterfall, no an endless, swirling tsunami of life and in that ocean expanse I felt myself truly alive."

Ryan nodded with a thin smile. "Quite the dream. A bounty if there ever was one."

"Indeed," exhaled Iain sagging into the chair from a rod-straight story-teller stance.

The helm clock ticked, counting away seconds without judgement. Ryan ran his hand over the balding pate he never quite had the courage to shave. He then leant over his breakfast plate toward his brother.

"Well, my dream was similar, but, well, very different. I was also on the Hem alone, out in the flats north of Cuba, you know, where we landed that five hundred pounder, half eaten by sharks by the time we hauled it in.  Anyways, a dense mist was everywhere in the dream and in spite of everything I was lost. Yeah, yeah, I know that's the standard fisherman's exhaustion dream, except the feeling was different. I was alone on the ship at the helm and all the nav equipment was working just fine, GPS and radar telling me exactly where I was and yet I knew deep down I was completely lost. The Hem was purring powerfully so I just steered her north through the mist for what seemed like hours when she finally cleared out of it."

"Instead of the deep blue I expected, an immense expanse of gray sludge appeared. My vision was perfect though I guess I never had a dream wearing my glasses. Anyway, that expanse was the darkest gray you could imagine and bobbing in the sea from Hem to horizon was a huge carpet of death. Man, I'm not exaggerating. The whole sea was full of overturned ships: from dinghies to seiners to aircraft carriers. And in between all those hulks every marine creature you could imagine rolled with the ocean...no their bodies were the ocean. Whales, dolphins, manatees, sea turtles, and sharks all gray and layered with rotting kelp. But the detail that keeps haunting me are the smaller fish. In the swell of all that sea rot and garbage, the smaller fish, uncountable and then some, dead and decomposing like everything else, they kept cascading down the sides of the overturned ships and whales and everything like some immense school of bait fish rolling out of a dumpster. Even though I knew they were dead that continual motion made them seem half-alive, kind of like a zombie flow or something from the pits of hell."

"Anyway, at some point I noticed The Hem's engine had died, and in the quiet I had this deep certainty I would be stuck in the middle of that wrecked ocean for all time. It felt like purgatory. Yeah, yeah, you know, I never bought into the whole religion thing, but still that's what it felt like, an endless purgatory. And for what seemed like an eternity I thought I would never wake from it."

The helm clock ticked on after the at the dream tale ended. Then something clinked on the table and in the salty moment afterwards they both laughed the hearty rumble of brothers at sea. 

"Well, I better get the tackle team assembled," Ryan announced as he rose.

"Yep, I'll give the clients their morning talk." returned Iain as he pulled out his iPad with an opening swipe. "They'll need some expectation leveling after yesterday's big harvest."

Leaving their chairs and untouched breakfasts the two brothers crossed paths and clapped each other on the shoulder as they went opposite ways to execute their morning duties.

The Hemmingway bobbed on its mooring, oblivious to the reality of which it was part.

Reflecting on "All That Breathes"

The documentary mostly filmed in Dehli paints a bleak dystopian picture, one that is here today. In the squalor and refuse generated by countless humans, life finds a way to survive. This life takes the form of droves of city rats, expanses of mosquito ridden puddles, and numerous other creatures without sufficient wild space so that they live on the fringe and in the hidden corners of the toxic shambles of the human realm.

To be sure, the movie highlights the rise of a small, destitute wildlife rescue organization amidst all the profound complexity of a human cityscape. Despite political, religious and economic struggle, the organization's dedication accomplishes a tiny win for the migrating kites, birds not dissimilar from the red-tail hawks prolific in the American sprawl. The little victory of this small organization comes when they win government funding to build a slightly cleaner rehab hospital for its hundreds of injured and recovering wild birds. 

To analogize, it is but a tear on a human face covered with filth.

"All That Breathes" is the film that too few people will see. It is a glimpse into the destruction that humanity has effected upon a healthy, diverse living world. Yes, some life will adapt and eke out an existence for a while on the fringe, but without significant global change our once beautiful, living planet will continue down this ugly path of decline. Unless we all step forward to fight and sacrifice like this tiny Dehli wildlife rescue team, our planet is destined to continue down this path of squalor.

Avatar Absurdium?

After fourteen years James Cameron's oversized blue aliens return to the big screen once more in 3d. The three hour Way of Water journey seeks to entertain and refresh its advocacy for planetary health. Still one would have hoped for something other than a rehash of the first movie. 

Avatar 2.0 delivers its technicolor fantasy tropes that defy physics, exchanges the energy potent Unobtanium for the immortality elixir Amrita, and amps up the violent heroics between the aboriginal and colonizing forces ad nauseam. Add in some sideways references to Moby Dick and you have a blockblusterish experience that merges Jurassic Park with Saving Private Ryan.

If Cameron was going for an environmental awareness PSA he is sending at best a convoluted message.  Aiwa, the entity that unifies Pandora's sentient beings, fails to fend off the Sky People infection/invasion, which, I guess , is plausible, given it evolved without any prior exposure to the human/techno virus. But sadly disappointing is the reinforcement that the Navi, ostensibly moral beings, are no better than their human counterparts. Aiwa's guidance has permitted the tribes to develop multiple cultures of  warfare and has done little to discourage prejudice among all its intelligent races, land and ocean roaming. In particular I disparage Cameron's repeated celebration of the father/son bonding of torturing fish by stabbing them with sticks when plenty of plant food surrounds them in their lush forest home. Such barbarism essentially cancels out the attempt to make the invading humans the destroyers of all things natural. 

I suspect in subsequent sequels Aiwa's overlord control will battle it out less subtly with the capitalistic driven protocols of Earth. In the end Avatar oversells a battle between two absolutist moral codes, rather than showing how advanced beings can leverage critical thinking and emotional compassion within their societies to peacefully settle conflict while meeting the existential challenges of the moment.

Royal Growing Pains

The British Queen has died, her successor awaits coronation, the latest season of The Crown floods the Netflix stream, princes and princesses galore add to the Disney deluge, Wakanda kings and queens the most recent examples. 

Why does the royal meme persist so in American culture?  

Royalty carries with it an impression of prestige and power. The entertainment industry has dressed it's kings and queens is exceptional garb, draped in gems and crowned in gold. For some reason there is an atavistic draw to leadership that comes from high society with the blessing of the god or goddess of the moment, ostensibly blessed to pursue noblesse oblige for the good of the people. To be sure there are many flawed royal characters as well highlighting the humanness of their rule and personal struggles, but still our daydreaming minds too often put these bloodline rulers on a pedestal.

Perhaps it's as simple as yearning for a simpler governance in a time where democratic institutions are being infiltrated by those who wish to maintain their own inherited privilege. As our local leadership is challenged to ally with others toward global stability, a loss of past privilege is inevitable. There are bound to be tradeoffs if we seek to reduce carbon, corruption, aggression, and suffering. These challenges will be expensive and should be paid for by those who reaped the windfalls of the past on the backs of others.

Royalty worship seems to be a wish for to attain elite status embedded like the wish to believe in a god that will take care of everything for us. Unfortunately, we the people, the true stewards of this planet, must step forward to achieve goals working together that kings and queens could only dream of.

Sensor of Oblivion

Evolution analytics rain down upon the canopy of the Endless

Data tentacles undulate through the forest of space-time

Each sinuous being sports an eye and a maw devouring information 

Agency, the abstraction that emerges, radiates purest curiosity

Sentient feedback loops reseed the septic garden, hermaphroditic

Spitefully defying chaos and order, an archetype consciousness implodes while it celebrates

Sensor of Oblivion 

Overcoming The Natural Fallacy

 Too often people cite truisms to explain behaviors they find too inconvenient to contemplate and change. "It's the cycle of life," "everyone has a right to their opinion," and "it's natural so it must be good," are among the most. The religious will fall back upon "god works in mysterious ways," or "it is god's plan."

All these are aphorisms deserving of elimination, as they simply equate to "I don't have the time to think about the horror, and I don't want to take time out my life to address it." Billions of humans have become part of a society which compartmentalizes our lives away, in part to cope with the egregious damage we are doing to the planet and to other sentient beings.

To be sure, we are as imperfect as the matter we are made from and we need to cut individuals and society a little slack for needing some time to parse the information. Still, it's important to realize we are on borrowed time and each day we should make an effort to understand the world a little better. Human beings are the apex predator and apex occupier of planet Earth, so we should also be the apex contemplator and apex steward as well.

Of course, each of us can do our own part in our own way, but only when the masses unite under a flag of progress does anything significant get done. The cycle of life may indeed happen, and yes many will be hurt in the cycle, but we as individuals can ameliorate the suffering. Others may not deserve persecution for sharing their opinions, but bad opinions should be put in their place as misinformation and malevolent when the facts contradict their arguments. Nature may be a starting point for stable existence, but human ethics should overrule nature's cruelty when it can and when it makes sense. There is no holy plan, only human plans that can be rethought and adjusted over the long-term to better outcomes, the goals of which also need constant refining.

In the end, reason, compassion and desire are the tools of humanity we need to strengthen to get the ever-changing job done. Perhaps a better aphorism to start with is one Temple Grandin suggested: "Nature is cruel, but we don't have to be." 

The Goodness Guideline

 As discussed in previous essays, The Golden Rule, though pithy, is horribly flawed at its core. It endorses the infliction of ones ideals on another, no matter what those ideals might be. As such it is really a rule bent on proselytizing. I defined the Platinum Law (do unto others as they would have done unto them) is only slightly less pithy, but is superior in that it encourages explicit empathy, considering others feelings, before acting. Both of these ethical guidelines, when implemented with sufficient context, are fine as far as they go, but too much is left implied permitting a range of corrupt interpretation. Indeed, the Golden Rule can easily be reframed to be oppressive, while even my Platinum Rule is blind to external circumstances or the others' misinformed personal ethic.

A guiding ethic should encourage us to first suss out (both think and feel) about a situation, gather the best available information, and then act in pursuit of a good outcome that seeks flourishing and minimizes harm while (importantly) being open to new information and adjusting the inititial behavior.. Not so pithy, but oh so flexible. 

Let's term this the Goodness Guideline, partly to be alliterative, but partly to emphasize any ethical rule can only be a rule of thumb, and never can be a black and white, unfailing principle. Sorry, if you were expecting perfect insight then you are probably yearning for advice from a source of perfection, of which none exist. Gurus, gods, and any alleged source of perfect wisdom are inherently suspect, if only because they claim to be perfect in their insight. As mortal beings with abstract thought processes we have an imperfect understanding of ourselves and our surroundings, so we need to flexible in how we live. To be inflexible is to be oppressed no matter how much we want some ultimate truth to make it easy for us.

The Goodness Guideline is an honest ethic which can help not just individuals, but also families, communities, governments and societies improve their behavior. In a way, this guideline is an extension of the scientific method which seeks to improve knowledge of the universe by refining our suspicions endlessly. Similarly, doing good in the world is an interactive process that no single religion, creed or ethical treatise can ever fully describe. We humans, as the planet's dominant species, have a special place to be stewards of global health, external beauty and personal flourishing for all sentient creatures. 

No entity but ourselves can truly judge us for what we do, but the Goodness Guideline can also be focused inward to help us self-evaluate and self-correct our thinking and behavior. It is not an easy path, this journey we choose for ourselves, but together we can aspire to create a thriving world.