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Carrion Luggage
Carrion Luggage
 
Native to the Americas, the turkey vulture (Cathartes aura) travels widely in search of sustenance. While usually foraging alone, it relies on other individuals of its species for companionship and mutual protection. Sometimes misunderstood, sometimes feared, sometimes shunned, it nevertheless performs an important role in the ecosystem.
This scavenger bird is a marvel of efficiency. Rather than expend energy flapping its wings, it instead locates uplifting columns of air, and spirals within them in order to glide to greater heights. This behavior has been mistaken for opportunism, interpreted as if it is circling doomed terrestrial animals destined to be its next meal. In truth, the vulture takes advantage of these thermals to gain the altitude needed glide longer distances, flying not out of necessity, but for the joy of it.
It also avoids the exertion necessary to capture live prey, preferring instead to feast upon that which is already dead. In this behavior, it resembles many humans.
It is not what most of us would consider to be a pretty bird. While its habits are often off-putting, or even disgusting, to members of more fastidious species, the turkey vulture helps to keep the environment from being clogged with detritus. Hence its Latin binomial, which translates to English as "golden purifier."
I rarely know where the winds will take me next, or what I might find there. The journey is the destination.
September 14, 2025 at 10:47am September 14, 2025 at 10:47am
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Phun with philosophy today, from aeon:
Reality is evil 
Everything eats and is eaten. Everything destroys and is destroyed. It is our moral duty to strike back at the Universe
You know, every so often, Gnosticism pops up with different clothing and a fake nose. One of its basic beliefs is that the world is evil and one must work to find whatever "real" reality there is.
So, just based on the headlines, I figured here was another Gnostic in disguise.
Reality is not what you think it is.
One way to control you is to convince you that what is obviously reality is not reality, but the real reality is hidden away. This is, I believe, a form of gaslighting.
Like everything else that exists – stars, microbes, oil, dolphins, shadows, dust and cities – we are nothing more than cups destined to shatter endlessly through time until there is nothing left to break. This, according to the conclusions of scientists over the past two centuries, is the quiet horror that structures existence itself.
I suppose, from some point of view, it's horror. From another point of view, perhaps there's some comfort to be had in knowing that everything faces the same fate. No one is privileged.
Reality, as we now understand, does not tend towards existential flourishing and eternal becoming. Instead, systems collapse, things break down, and time tends irreversibly towards disorder and eventual annihilation.
And? it's not going to happen for billions of years. As I've always said: there's no such thing as a happy ending; there's only stories that end too soon.
We must start by admitting that the Universe is finite and will eventually end. Moreover, we must accept that the function of the Universe is to hasten this extinction.
I've said before that it very well may be that if life has a purpose, it's to accelerate entropy, so I've already done that admitting and accepting.
A metaphysics that responds to the full scope of the thermodynamic revolution needs to acknowledge the dissipative and destructive function lying behind the ‘generative’ force seemingly at work within reality. To do so requires moving from the classical optimistic metaphysics of becoming to a much more pessimistic metaphysics of absolute finitude and inescapable unbecoming: a metaphysics that reconceives of beings as nothing more than dissipative cogs in an annihilative machine.
Wow, I bet this guy's fun at parties. I should know; I'm fun at parties.
There's a lot more, of course. And just to summarize my own thoughts: I start with the same facts this author does, but I come to a somewhat different conclusion. My conclusion is this: Sure, the universe is trying to kill us. All the more reason to laugh in its face. |
© Copyright 2025 Robert Waltz (UN: cathartes02 at Writing.Com). All rights reserved.
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No comments yet? Well, let's see if I can take advantage of my Darwinian evolution and find something intelligent to say.
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