To Dream
Christian Science Monitor reports that 548-million years ago, ancient coral-like creatures living in the sea constructed a vast network of reefs in what is today Namibia. The coral-like creatures, dubbed Cloudina, may have built the superstructures to protect themselves from predators or to soak up the nutrients from ocean currents. Smart cookies, but were they working with instinct or intellect?
Instinct is what moves the birds chirping in predawn darkness as I strolled out the north front door and down the block to get Linda’s PCNH. Intellect is what stirs imagination and memory as, walking down Calhoun Avenue in the same darkness, green navigation lights flash at me from across the Bay. Thinking.
ZOT
The CSM article surprises me as I thought CS more into Genesis, but it does add credibility to the C.S. Lewis scenario in The Chronicles of Narnia when Jill, Eustace and the MarshWiggle were led through the underworld by humanoid creatures who seemed made of stone. That was the subterranean realm where Old Father Time slept in a niche of the caverns, not to wake until the eschaton. 548-million years ago would have been before my family’s time, we came along after the Garden of Eden, descendants of Seth not Cain, but the Cloudina could have been Linda’s ancestors the Noble family who liked to build stuff. Immigrating from England to Georgia and Alabama, they had an iron foundry during our Civil War that provided munitions to the Confederacy. They founded Anniston, Alabama and had iron works there too, building St. Michael and All Angels Episcopal Church in Anniston for their workers. So these Cloudina definitely could have been Noble forebears.
What’s the singular of Cloudina? I’m thinking, Cloudinum. Thinking?
ZOT
Here’s the thing according to RealClearScience. If you traced your family tree back 185 million generations, you wouldn't be looking at a human, a primate, or even a mammal. You'd be looking at a fish. So where along that line does the first human show up? RCS says the answer may surprise you. http://www.realclearscience.com/video/2014/03/25/there_was_no_first_human.html Very little may be more entertaining than rattling the religiously certitudinous, but I avoid it because we are legion.
Why this eccentric Saturday digression? Largely because I’ve already spoilt my day by beginning with the morning’s news online. Israeli security police beat up an American teenager, a high school sophomore from Tampa who with his parents is visiting Palestinian relatives in Jerusalem for the first time in ten years. Beat up an American boy? Now and suddenly I understand the murderous rage and drive to vengeance, because I have become it. Exporting hatred. Instead of reading the news, better I sit and think quietly as I loved doing before the iPhone. Think?
ZOT
The RCS piece says we'd rather give ourselves an electric shock than spend a few minutes thinking. No entertaining pastime or amusing diversion from the world, nor simply daydreaming, thinking is hazardous to one’s being. To think, perchance to daydream: not boredom but the stuff of insanity. ZOT.
ZOT
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