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it's really difficult to say anything about "human nature" because everyone is born into a particular social situation; they're trained to be functional by internalizing aspects of that situation; their capacity to ask questions about human beings in general is entirely conditioned by a particular set of parameters that define being-human in a particular range of ways. human being in general is usually an abstraction based on (possibilities of /variations on) a particular construction of being human.
sometimes i think people invented god so they could pretend there was a some way to escape themselves. you know, if i am conditioned (this in the sense of being shaped in a particular way, not so much in the pavlov sense) then it'd be nice were there something unconditioned....i am specific, so maybe that something should be general....i am going to die, so maybe not going to die....on and on, a series of inversions, a way of daydreaming.
where i live the native american population was already largely dead from smallpox or hepatitis a few years before whitey arrived. whitey of course thought this providential. thank you jesus for the smallpox that took out all those natives. go figure.
the group that would hang out here in the summer spent alot of their time on an island i can see from my deck. they were apparently part of the algonquin somehow. from what i've read of algonquin mythology/history from 19th century maine mostly, they were folk who lived with a basically different sensory arrangement, one much more oriented to sound and other shifting things. they didn't think about geographies in terms of abstract shapes---more networks of sites.
the figures they thought about as parallel to god-types shifted shape all the time.
lately when i've daydreamed about human beings in general i've wondered about basically different sensory arrangements opening onto basically different worlds, like things are always multiple really but we see them through a general frame of reference that assumes reality (whatever that means) is single and that human beings are a type like rocks are or chaise lounges are, all variants on a single core.
maybe the problem is that we, collectively, have no way of thinking about multiplicity.
this started out being about one thing and ended up somewhere else i think.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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