skurvivors3

When I spear the pig -- the Homeys can hang with that. Everybody�s gotta eat. When I gloat rather than fall to my knees in thanks -- the Homeys can even hang with that. But when I wipe the pig�s blood across my face in utter conceit, in base unconsciousness, in mockery of every hero slain on this vampiric world of snoozing ingrates -- well, the Homeys grumble a little, and stir.

The most tolerant among them gets up. When her own children reached a year in age, she held their hands briefly to the fire, singeing them enough so she wouldn't have to watch them every instant, and they would always have respect for elemental power.

She walks slowly over to Michael. She pushes him just enough, and no more. Then she lets him go.

In the Cartesian West, where science reigns, nobody bothered to teach Michael basic spiritual table manners. Few know them. Nobody bothered to tell Michael, for example, that across cultures and eons, the boar is sacred to the Goddess. (Dragon and bull are later literary variants.) Solar heroes from Odysseus and Adonis in Hellenism, to Meleager in Ovid�s Metamorphoses, to the Celtic hero Diarmait, have battled the boar, whose tusk is the weapon of the Goddess -- the Great Mother. With it she tests and torments the sons of heaven. The classic wound of the boar is the agony of the Grail King � injury to the �thigh,� that is, to the genitals, to the generative heart of manhood. The Goddess' boar delivers the Ur-wound of masculinity, and for the inferior male to seek it out is not mere folly, but madness afoot.

Of course, in a practical, bottom-line, data-point-hugging society like ours, this is a worthless morsel of non-knowledge, if not outright mumbo-jumbo buffoonery.

Still, it's information that would have saved some of
Michael's flesh. Who knows, maybe he might even have
won the game, instead of riding out on his back,
moaning like an infant in a travois. Too bad that
neither Michael's history professor, shop class
teacher, mother, father, nor linebacker coach knew
jack-shit about anything that lasts.

What somebody should have told Michael, way back
when he was a tyke, is this: You have landed in a
world that is far more alive, in far more ways, than
you are capable of imagining, much less handling.
The best attitude to adopt in a foreign country is
courtesy, humility and wary respect. Pay intense
attention to the world around you, and less to yourself.
There are consequences for every breach of manners
or spirit.

Let Michael's burned hands initiate a new curricula.
Call it Moleeds 101, a primer for the new Millennium,
for a revised relationship with each other and the
planet. Better late than never.

Fellow Foozlers, hark to your old pal Obi. Tread lightly in strange lands. This planet is as mondo as it gets, just chock-full of power that -- Aristotle and Newton, Copernicus and Lacan be damned -- we don�t begin to understand. Don�t think so? Ask brother Michael, who got a little tongue lashing from the Holy Spirit.

It is comfortable � and profitable � to construct an ontology positing that the planet is dead, that you and your buds are the only sentience upon it, and that science has slain god, singular and plural. But unconsciousness of elemental powers will not shield roasting skin. Intellects of the West will learn this.

Half-time score: Homeys 1, Descartes 0.

Wherever Michael is today, he is now a graduate of Moleeds 101. He knows, too, with cellular certainty, just how cheaply he got off. For all their power, he was amongst the gentlest of folk, nursing the little boy from the fever of his ego, guiding his tiny soul through the badlands of fire.



	You need Java to see this applet.