Monday, January 31, 2005

Juggle

Once again, I am going to juggle a few balls, several balls, as many as I can: so long as I can see that they belong together, and that that combination has never been seen tossing among each other before. I may drop one, I may drop all of them; but perhaps you'll see that they could have been juggled: should be juggled.
First though, I'll have to make the balls.
Balls
Balls: right there, there's a start. The ovaries make the egg. The ovaries are hidden well within the lower body of the female: as the center of the visual cortex is centered in the skull. The female is the default setting for humans. Extra information is needed to make a male. The female is like the nucleus of the atom; males buzz around like electrons.
It's the testes that define the male. If it's got balls, it's male; if it don't, it's female. If the testes don't develop normally, it IS male; it LOOKS female. The male begins life with the testes protected deep within the lower body. As it matures, the testes descend: and display themselves.
Male bats hang from the cave ceiling balls uppermost. Male humans walk around with their balls out in front like their nose: until they're civilized. Civilized males cover their balls: but only to stick metaphors further in front: football stadia, all of Detroit, the Manhattan skyline, the Pentagon: balls out front. Females show their femaleness from all angles. Males are more two-sided. Kenneth Branagh's Much Ado About Nothing strips its females within the opening minutes. We see prime bottom (holding still), bosoms about to be unveiled. Then all the males jump naked into the pool. They're all shown from the rear (moving), and there isn't a one whose balls don't show between his legs.
OK: that's enough for the moment. You see that ball, you see how it can be made further. Here's where I really want to "start":
Sleeves
"See?" the magician says, "I have nothing up my sleeve." No one from the audience inspects the magician's sleeve. No one from the audience inspects the magician's socks, his coat: the magician's back stage, side stage ... ceiling rigging, trap doors, below stage machinery ... Anyone from the audience who might have wanted to hold the magician upside down and shake him was thrown into the alleyway before the show started, with a bump on his head.
"Half" of what the magician says will be a lie. The magician has a grab-bag full of lies: and truths. The magician cat fetch any of them to his purpose from moment to changing moment.
Compression
The citizens of Babel piled their tower from the ground toward heaven. A ziggurat: brick on brick. Bridges also used to be built compressively: stick something up on one bank, stick something up on the other, stick something up in the middle, stick bricks between, hope it doesn't all fall down. Now civilization has hurled a brick or two beyond earth's escape velocity. What we really need is a non-human brick to come from some other direction. If they got our brick, and we got theirs, and we both could hold both lassoed, then maybe we could build something that wouldn't just fall down.
Tension
Human institutions display bricks that they claim are from heaven. "God" says "Don't do this, don't do that." "Give to Caesar ..." I don't see any of those bricks as ever having exceeded earth's escape velocity. Superman can jump back into the space he comes from at will.
If only there were a bridge, a bridge built by tension as well as compression, a bridge with god holding one end while we held the other, we might begin to get someplace.

Iona Arc is now three weeks old. To date pk has finished at least draft one before posting; unlike pk's other domains where things sometimes get mounted before the oven has even begun to brown them. I think this one's going to be good, important, core across the domains. Thus I let the public watch the construction.

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