Player Piano

I sit at my player piano

watching the keys fall

one by one.

Ghost fingers playing a grim tune.

It follows me into the kitchen.

I open the refrigerator door.

The light comes on over a barren scene.

An old can of beans. A rotten quart of milk.

Snow piles up against the garage.

The car won’t start.

She left two months ago.

My heart won’t start,

until she returns

The mailman in his parka face

says there’s not a letter for me.

The Wooden Indian dances

when we’re not looking.

The woman at the end of the bar

smokes another cigarette.

The door opens. The ash blows off.

There’re so many things I hate

I can’t separate,

I can’t break.

Vanishing Nostalgia.

Four-cent stamps, an old picture of a barn.

Antiques, family trees, the howl of coyotes

in these canyons, in these streams.

Oh, Woody Guthrie,

where have you been?

American dream,

what have you done to me?

The world has gone white,

all thought and action is absent.

Still…I sit at my player piano,

waiting for a postcard

from you.

A Rational Call for Paganism

For a perspective on how radically lucky we are to be a life form in this universe one only needs a telescope to look up at a clear night sky and observe the immensity of the stars and ponder the utter lack of life on them. I’m not saying there’s not life out there in the universe, some of it may even be as intelligent as some of the life here on earth, including some humans; but the fact of the matter is for many, many, many light-years in all directions we are the only show in town. Earth, our little blue planet, the Goldilocks planet – not too hot, not too cold – is really an exceptionally blessed rock floating around in the cosmos.

I would like to hold on to it for a little while longer. To do that, I think we need a giant change of conciousness. We need to leave behind the religions of monotheism, of entitlement. We need to become pagans again.

Take it as seriously or as snarkily as you want underneath this little speedbump.

We’re quite fortunate that things played out the way they did for earth. An asteroid hit the planet at just the right time for the moon to be formed, but before our own appearance here, which the asteroid would have wiped out forever. We have an atmosphere which is perfect, allowing the right amount of sunlight and radiation in for life to happen, but not too much to extinguish it. The whole thing with water, the fact that we have so much of it, was really helpful too. You see, all the variables have to be right for life to happen. It’s an incredible stroke of luck that we were born on this planet. Hell, it’s the only place one can, ostensibly, be born.

And we’re fucking it up. Royally. I don’t need to list all the ways we’re destroying our planet, we all know and understand global warming is real and terribly frightening. (Well, most logical human beings with a little ganglia happening upstairs get it – which excludes Inohofee and Bush) But… what can we do about it?

Become a Pagan!!!

No seriously. 2007 is the year I’m going to get in touch with my pagan roots. Being Norwegian, I have some pretty infamous Pagans in my heritage, the Vikings. Pagans have received a bad rap ever since, I don’t know, the Romans adopted Christianity to control the masses and consolidate the empire. Pagans really just refer to local, rural people. In Roman times, paradoxically, Christianity was mostly an urban thing and the rural folks were pagans, or rather non-monotheistic. We all know the story: Christianity spread across Europe and then to the new world, Christians replaced the pagans, and thanks to wonderful Christianity the world was civilized.

For aninteresting map of religions’ spread, click here.
Today we think of pagans in similar terms to the way we think of cavemen and Neanderthals: barbarians, immoral, primitive. Probably some were. I don’t doubt that. Then again the Inquisition, the Crusades, and Colonization was some pretty primitive, immoral shit too.

Why Paganism?

I believe that the descent to our modern climate crisis started with corralling the gods under one name, whether that’s Allah, God, Yahweh, or whoever. Mankind lost itself when it adopted Abrahamic Monotheistic ways, it seperated itself from the natural world that it had spent thousands of years learning about and respecting.

This is why I believe paganism to be preferable. Here are some ways I think Paganism could help us out of this mess.

Interconnectedness.

The more you learn about the way the world works, you discover that nothing happens in a vacuum. Deforestation on top of a mountain leads to soil erosion downhill, which leads to more sediment in the rivers, which leads to destruction of coral off the coast, which leads to loss of fish that live off the coral, which puts larger mammals in the ocean that feed off those fish in danger. Consequentially, chopping down a tree in the middle of Australia could lead to the death, rather extinction, of a whale species in the middle of the Pacific. Thus, everything is connected and important and should be valued. The streams. The mountains. The deserts. Paganism, by sharing deities, allows room for the worshipping of streams, mountains, and deserts. Christianity says you worship God and He gave us all the plants and animals for our benefit. This self-centered way of looking at nature’s gifts opens the door for crass exploitation and destruction.

Personal Responsibility.

It’s ours. God gave it to us for our benefit. Cut down that forest. Dump the toxic waste in this stream here. Forget MPG requirements, GM has some SUVs for sale. There’s no such thing as climate change because God is infinite and if the earth gets too hot, He’ll simply blow so more cool air down here. This is very dangerous thinking. Christians have some sort of supreme faith that no matter how much they fuck the earth, God will look at for them, even if that means yanking their souls out of their clothes and pulling them up through the sky to heaven.

I believe that allowing for the worshipping of various deities, the sun, the moon, the seas, the wind, etc. reminds us, the worshipper, of their importance. If a stream is believed to be sacred, we might just be less inclined to dump toxic waste into it, to divert it to make a dam, or otherwise tamper with it’s purity. I am not Jewish, but the fact that someone believes Kosher food is blessed makes me feel that they prepared it with a little bit more care and respect, and probably didn’t spit in it.

Efficiency

Also, when all the Christians pray to just one God, that makes Him very busy, to busy to truly pay attention to all the prayers coming His way. It’s about organization, customer service, manpower. If you split that God up into several other deities, well, He has a little help with all of us needy persons begging Him for things now. To me, it’s about specialization. Expertise. If I’m drowning, I’m asking Poseidon for Help. He’s more experience with that sort of thing anyway. That’s what Poseidon does.

Perhaps from now on there could be a God of Pigskin, so when football players score a touchdown they don’t have to waste His time with thanks when He should be busy with other things like hunger, oppression, and disease.

We could create a God of finance so when we need help with the heating bill or some extra cash for a plasma TV we can burn some sage and pray to the giant Greenback in the sky.

Maybe, I’m old fashion. Real old-fashion. I just think paganism makes more sense than the other religions these days. It was more suited to earth and nature, while monotheistic deities were more suited to organizing societies and keeping them in line. In the end, Christianity might have been a necessary experiment to get us to where we are today, out of the fields and into the cities. Now we have wars between nations and not tribes. Much better.

Anyway, you can continue to pray to one lonely God if you want, and continue to take a number and wait. I’m not here to bash you for your backwards ways, I’m just offering a way forward. My Gods are on speed dial and they have all the time in the world to answer my prayers.

So I ask, Great Gods of the Internets, please help this poor diary get some comments and a maybe a few recommends and I promise to upgrade my firewall protection in the coming harvest and perhaps sacrifice an old hard drive in your honor.

The Highest Hill Around

They took refuge atop the highest hill around. Trees all around were snapped in half so the climb took twice as long. The wind had died down but the water was still rising. It was only a matter of time before they would be standing not on a hill but an island. As if in a dream you can’t wake from, the more they trudged forward the more the earth melted at their feet. Courtney, the youngest of the three, was the first to dig her feet into the ground and wail. Her sister and brother snapped her up and carried her the rest of the way.

“Where’s Mommy?” She said over and over while bouncing on her brother’s shoulders, the view of the swamped valley bobbing up and down in front of her.

“She’s going to meet us here,” he lied.

Courtney repeated the question until she grew tired of it and fell asleep in her brother’s lap. They took cover under the limb of a leafless tree that was beaten but still standing, like a boxer in the last round, swinging his final punches. Rain continued to fall and the water rose on either side of them. Courtney whimpered in her sleep and they discussed their course of action and bleakly realized they had none. So they waited.

Hundreds of miles away Tom removed his glasses and set them on the nightstand next to his bed; gently peeling away the covers, then delicately slid into bed next to his wife who lay there pretending to be asleep. The green glow from the digital alarm clock lit the room in fluorescent guilt. Birds one by one began to announce the morning.

“Tom?” She asked. His body twitched.

The seconds before he answered felt to her like acupuncture pins, painfully soothing, cathartic, a long awaited release.

“Yes.”

She stirred, her feet curled into balls. “Where have you been, Tom?”

Outside the newspaper landed against the front door, the headlines screamed: Giant Flood Kills Thousands. The neighbors’ sprinklers went on, the one closest to thier house was broken and a huge puddle formed on their side of the driveway in the shape of a hat. Inside, his wife waited with her head in the guillotine, her stomach chewed up from Scotch and Percodan, the answer coming in the shape of a blade.

By noon the rain let up and the water reached its top. Every bird for miles was perched in the tree above them. The kids took comfort in their presence. Squirrels and rabbits and lizards had made it to safety too. More and more birds were flying in from all direction. The sky was full of wings. Way off in the distance the kids watched flares bursting with light, thought they were fireworks — it still being the Fourth of July somewhere. The sun carved holes in the clouds and shined through with circles of golden light; the water, so real with death possessed an unreal beauty, the kids had thought that in fact they did die, and that this was heaven.

When Courtney woke up she saw a gray bunny hoping towards her, its ears long and dirty and dragging through the mud. She giggled with pleasure, unable to tell reality from a dream, unable to remember the horrors of that morning. She languidly reached her arm out to touch the rabbit’s nose like God touching Adam’s finger upside on the ceiling.

Welcome

This is the new manifestation of artofstarving; cheaper, leaner, and meaner. I hope everyone enjoys the new layout and design and checks in often to see what’s going on. That’s all for now. I have a new website to design. Yay me!