![]() It cost too much, staying human.
– Bruce Sterling Osamaís time machine: President Gore concerned. Overall, this was the wrong group to ask. After all, these are the writers who bring you trilogies — they take up the whole first volume just to introduce you to the characters. Much better to ask poets, or cartoonists, the masters of brevity. TS Eliot, for example, could have proffered the following, converting brilliant epigrams to short stories merely by changing tenses from present to past: Humankind couldn’t bear very much reality.
The only wisdom was wisdom of humility. The whole world was our hospital. In our end was our beginning. Where was the unimaginable Zero summer? Or the words of Charles Barsotti, cartoonist non-pareil, brief and witty even without the accompanying drawings: I sure didn’t hire the consultant.
“Introspection”, he roared, “is for losers“. Here’s a few I came up with on the spur of the moment (OK, in the shower, this is harder than it looks): 2027: Civilization crashed. Fire, then ice.
He loved. Lost. Grieved. Carried on. Black ice. Ten seconds. Skid. Crash. Hemingway’s opus brevis probably can’t be topped. It’s the personal that gets to us, stirs our imagination more than the funny, or the fantastic. The point of every good story is to engage the reader to make it her/his own, and to fill in the ambiguities and blanks with her/his own rich details and imaginings. And six words leaves a lot of blanks. Also, parsing the six words into several one, two, or three-word thoughts lets you say more, I think, than even the cleverestsix-word sentence. OK. Your turn. Give us yours. Six words, no more, no less. |
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Radical Non-Duality
Essential Reading
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My Bio, Contact Info, Signature Posts
About the Author (2023)
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--- My Best 200 Posts, 2003-22 by category, from newest to oldest ---
Collapse Watch:
Hope — On the Balance of Probabilities
The Caste War for the Dregs
Recuperation, Accommodation, Resilience
How Do We Teach the Critical Skills
Collapse Not Apocalypse
Effective Activism
'Making Sense of the World' Reading List
Notes From the Rising Dark
What is Exponential Decay
Collapse: Slowly Then Suddenly
Slouching Towards Bethlehem
Making Sense of Who We Are
What Would Net-Zero Emissions Look Like?
Post Collapse with Michael Dowd (video)
Why Economic Collapse Will Precede Climate Collapse
Being Adaptable: A Reminder List
A Culture of Fear
What Will It Take?
A Future Without Us
Dean Walker Interview (video)
The Mushroom at the End of the World
What Would It Take To Live Sustainably?
The New Political Map (Poster)
Beyond Belief
Complexity and Collapse
Requiem for a Species
Civilization Disease
What a Desolated Earth Looks Like
If We Had a Better Story...
Giving Up on Environmentalism
The Hard Part is Finding People Who Care
Going Vegan
The Dark & Gathering Sameness of the World
The End of Philosophy
A Short History of Progress
The Boiling Frog
Our Culture / Ourselves:
A CoVid-19 Recap
What It Means to be Human
A Culture Built on Wrong Models
Understanding Conservatives
Our Unique Capacity for Hatred
Not Meant to Govern Each Other
The Humanist Trap
Credulous
Amazing What People Get Used To
My Reluctant Misanthropy
The Dawn of Everything
Species Shame
Why Misinformation Doesn't Work
The Lab-Leak Hypothesis
The Right to Die
CoVid-19: Go for Zero
Pollard's Laws
On Caste
The Process of Self-Organization
The Tragic Spread of Misinformation
A Better Way to Work
The Needs of the Moment
Ask Yourself This
What to Believe Now?
Rogue Primate
Conversation & Silence
The Language of Our Eyes
True Story
May I Ask a Question?
Cultural Acedia: When We Can No Longer Care
Useless Advice
Several Short Sentences About Learning
Why I Don't Want to Hear Your Story
A Harvest of Myths
The Qualities of a Great Story
The Trouble With Stories
A Model of Identity & Community
Not Ready to Do What's Needed
A Culture of Dependence
So What's Next
Ten Things to Do When You're Feeling Hopeless
No Use to the World Broken
Living in Another World
Does Language Restrict What We Can Think?
The Value of Conversation Manifesto Nobody Knows Anything
If I Only Had 37 Days
The Only Life We Know
A Long Way Down
No Noble Savages
Figments of Reality
Too Far Ahead
Learning From Nature
The Rogue Animal
How the World Really Works:
Making Sense of Scents
An Age of Wonder
The Truth About Ukraine
Navigating Complexity
The Supply Chain Problem
The Promise of Dialogue
Too Dumb to Take Care of Ourselves
Extinction Capitalism
Homeless
Republicans Slide Into Fascism
All the Things I Was Wrong About
Several Short Sentences About Sharks
How Change Happens
What's the Best Possible Outcome?
The Perpetual Growth Machine
We Make Zero
How Long We've Been Around (graphic)
If You Wanted to Sabotage the Elections
Collective Intelligence & Complexity
Ten Things I Wish I'd Learned Earlier
The Problem With Systems
Against Hope (Video)
The Admission of Necessary Ignorance
Several Short Sentences About Jellyfish
Loren Eiseley, in Verse
A Synopsis of 'Finding the Sweet Spot'
Learning from Indigenous Cultures
The Gift Economy
The Job of the Media
The Wal-Mart Dilemma
The Illusion of the Separate Self, and Free Will:
No Free Will, No Freedom
The Other Side of 'No Me'
This Body Takes Me For a Walk
The Only One Who Really Knew Me
No Free Will — Fightin' Words
The Paradox of the Self
A Radical Non-Duality FAQ
What We Think We Know
Bark Bark Bark Bark Bark Bark Bark
Healing From Ourselves
The Entanglement Hypothesis
Nothing Needs to Happen
Nothing to Say About This
What I Wanted to Believe
A Continuous Reassemblage of Meaning
No Choice But to Misbehave
What's Apparently Happening
A Different Kind of Animal
Happy Now?
This Creature
Did Early Humans Have Selves?
Nothing On Offer Here
Even Simpler and More Hopeless Than That
Glimpses
How Our Bodies Sense the World
Fragments
What Happens in Vagus
We Have No Choice
Never Comfortable in the Skin of Self
Letting Go of the Story of Me
All There Is, Is This
A Theory of No Mind
Creative Works:
Mindful Wanderings (Reflections) (Archive)
A Prayer to No One
Frogs' Hollow (Short Story)
We Do What We Do (Poem)
Negative Assertions (Poem)
Reminder (Short Story)
A Canadian Sorry (Satire)
Under No Illusions (Short Story)
The Ever-Stranger (Poem)
The Fortune Teller (Short Story)
Non-Duality Dude (Play)
Your Self: An Owner's Manual (Satire)
All the Things I Thought I Knew (Short Story)
On the Shoulders of Giants (Short Story)
Improv (Poem)
Calling the Cage Freedom (Short Story)
Rune (Poem)
Only This (Poem)
The Other Extinction (Short Story)
Invisible (Poem)
Disruption (Short Story)
A Thought-Less Experiment (Poem)
Speaking Grosbeak (Short Story)
The Only Way There (Short Story)
The Wild Man (Short Story)
Flywheel (Short Story)
The Opposite of Presence (Satire)
How to Make Love Last (Poem)
The Horses' Bodies (Poem)
Enough (Lament)
Distracted (Short Story)
Worse, Still (Poem)
Conjurer (Satire)
A Conversation (Short Story)
Farewell to Albion (Poem)
My Other Sites
I am mad; you are mad.
To paraphrase The Famous:”Mother died today, or yesterday?””Mother passed away. Picnic. Lightning”
forgotten shoebox, old photograph, tear falls
quick glance – flashes smile, she melts
bones, belly, empty eyes, you ignore
Little party puff. Need more, please !Red dot floating. Love, life, flushed.
kill, die. kill, die. no more.
Looks up, big hug. Hi Daddy!
He looks. She looks. Fate tried.
Zomg!! N00b Leroy’s? Chuck Norris FTW!!
For Sale: Walker, Wheelchair, Wedding Dress.
That’s the news for today, again.I killed her: I loved her.Watch. My. Brain. In. Slow. Motion.Hate for sale. Love sold out.OR:Love for sale. Hate sold out.
eight legs, hot shower, down drain
Juggle dead kittens? Only on fire!
I just thought of another, adapted from a “noir” joke:Sarah passed away. Selling Honda 97.
after stormy night, dawn without her
no mind no matter no more
God: you should have forgotten Me.
Save the world. Get well soon.
There’s always Milton (slightly tweaked):Together, they took their solitary way.
Still Here. Why? Why Not?!
Tell me, does art live in Syriana?
Raised brow, red face, shuffle papers.Neck, chest, eyes up. Award. Applause.Exchanged look. Separate exits to stairs.Cottage dawn. Countdown until mailman. Impatience.
Italy! Free! All summer! Why…no?”Don’t go.” I left. For nothing.Choose. Maybe regret. But always alive.
Hemingway started out as a journalist, so I imagine that’s where he learned brevity.
Bell tower. Noon. We rise today.
Brilliant, everyone. It’s interesting that each of these conjures up an image first, and then the story that wraps itself around that image.
Seconds taught what 100 years couldn’t.A treadmill trackstar until the end.
Feeling creative going blank writing anyway.
“I cannot do everything”. Did nothing.
Surgery can