I met a traveler from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read,
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed,
And on the pedestal these words appear:

"My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look upon my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

-Percy Bysshe Shelley
1792-1822

I was having a conversation about the things I am thinking about - how I sense the world has changed and yet we keep ‘building’ the world in a way that made sense for our old models, and not the new world we are living in but ‘can’t see’ (in part this is due to language and my concept of master language(s) but I will blog about that more concretely soon). About how the system, earth, will always look after itself. Us as humans in it, however, are not guarenteed survival in this process. We have to stand up and begin to see ourselves as part of the system again and work within in, rather than pretending we operate outside of it.

One thing that I was talking about was how we "build" huge buildings to prove our system of living, e.g. a big company, a market, "exists", to show it is tangible, and yet it not a real reflection of reality. It doesn’t necessarily exist, or isn’t necessarily profitable, just becuase it has a big building attached.

Donald Trump is a good case in point…we think he is profitable, he has all the tangible contextual cues - e.g. expensive suits, cars, big buildings, expensive wife…yet his business isn’t doing nearly as well. And he started with more money than he now has. (See the bankruptcy paragraph of the Donald Trump link for his profitability) 

Courtney, a woman involved in the conversation, quoted Ozymandias.

The power IS the story. There are lessons in the stories we know, the stories we are part of, that will help us as we grapple and feel around this new path, in the search of questions and language to help us ’see’ a new level/layer of what really is.

This entry was posted on Friday, December 9th, 2005 at 12:03 am and is filed under change, misfit, musings, poetry, stories. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.