O Brave New World

Here we are, one month into the new year and Diana asks, Is time speeding up for you? Neil has always lived in the fast track of time, so it’s a rhetorical question at best. But new year, new world. Maybe our perception of time began to speed up when the continents opened, or were garroted, in most cases. A mere handful of Spaniards on that island. Jade beads and gold littered in their eyes, and all was lost. Arawak and Carrib Indians in their feathered cloaks kept their eyes on the birds of the sky while the Spaniards plundered the earth and sent all that New World cargo to resurrect the empty coffers of the Old World. Always broke. They broke continents. How anthropocentric. We referred to western civilization when we mean European civilization, not Chinese, not Mayan, or Arawak. A New Guinea islander once asked Jared Diamond: How come you white people got all the cargo and we got none? What’s wi' dat? It boils down to a slender golden shaft of wheat and the sheep grazing those hillsides before a thousand years of drought turned the land to a scriptural parchment of land and oil. Of all the animals of the world, only a handful or domesticatble and nearly all are from the Fertile Crescent which led to overabundant grain harvests and tillage, separating us from our brothers. It was an unequal harvest, an unequal advantage, creating unequal worlds. O brave new world that has such creatures in it. Caliban in his feathered cloak raising a human thighbone from that distant shore, gnashing his teeth on the rising sun, time speeding up.

1/27/2006 Writers' Group