Sing Singing the Blues

The world is always moving. We become so used to planetary rotation and revolution that only rarely do we become aware of our personal world moving within the perpetual motion without. This unawareness is a product of the dizzying assimilation of sense and intuition.

One of my top five paradoxes is that all things physical as well as all actions historical are in fact metaphors waiting to happen. The more accurate the description of the physical "thing" or the historical action, the more valid is the metaphor that emerges when sense and intuition assimilate.

Here's a fact waiting to become a metaphor.

In 1826, a work crew of convicts quarried marble for the first cell block in Sing Sing. The men had been sent from Auburn, New York state's second b prison to consturct Sing Sing its third. Many of gthese same men became the original inmates of Sing Sing.

How would that feel to perform backbreaking labor to build your own prison?

Ready? Here we go.

Look around. See the "prisons" we have built for ourselves. See other people around us working their asses off to build their own prison, presumably better that the one they left...newer if not better.

Here's another fact.

Same process, less instruction.

Inmates in Sing Sing complain about their six by nine cells.

Back in 1830, two men shared a three and a half by seven cell. The tiny cells had no centrai heating nor plumbing, open sewer channels inside and very little light. Tuberculosis became rampant.

After we build our "prisons" we become claustrophobic, bouncing off walls that we ourselves or others uncomfortably like us, designed. Each of us come up with increasingly arcane and insane rules that we think we need to maintain, defend, protect and preserve the microscopic space we occupy within our tiny cells Our claustrophobia is only slightly diminished when we observe other folks further away who have built or are in the process of building even tinier, darker, more infectious, ranker and more suffocating "prisons" for themselves with even more internal governance under the supervision of ivory tower leaders oblivious to the pandemic lurking and waiting to possess every space possible

Forgive the gloomy imagery. They are merely a conglomeration of facts floating around in my working memory. I grabbed them, spiced them up with the hint of assimilation ,added a whiff of the always piopular doomsday dystopia and gilded them with superfluous quotation marks to illustrate both the obvious and the subtle.

The world is moving and the moon is upside down.