Sunday, December 5, 2010

Flames of Hell

Yesterday's vote in the U.S. Senate to reject cloture on the Middle Class Tax Relief bill provided more evidence of the unrelenting greed manifest in the Party of No.  In Senator McConnell's panegyric retelling of events during Meet the Press today, no effort was made to conceal the flickering flames of Hell dancing behind his pupils as he explained to his uncritical host how unfair it would have been to continue to tax the ultra-rich while providing tax relief for those households struggling to eke out a living on a quarter of a million dollars or less each year. In his moment of unguarded jubilation, he explained that those "quarter-millionaires", numbering maybe 700,000 industrious Americans, were the mainstay of small business, generating jobs for millions of others.  This tragic slip of the lip revealed that the "small businesses" in question may frequently be those little law firms and other small professional associations that undergird the employment statistics that we've all been watching so carefully over the past year. It behooves us to have a closer look at these statistics.

Thursday, December 2, 2010

Keeping the Fire Lit

My last post, "Fire Keeper" was hastily titled and needs some clarification (disambiguation in Wikipedia terms). My intent was to introduce myself, rather than to accept a sacred trust. The most common usage of this term, spelled "Firekeeper" and, synonymously, "flametender", in some cultures, signified an individual entrusted with the sacred role of keeping the central hearth fire burning. In ancient Greece, royalty or the chieftain of a city-state might execute this duty. Romans assigned this to the Vestal Virgins and other cultures frequently delegated this important function to individuals with high religiosity. Modern usage in North America includes the responsibility for heating sweat lodges to appropriate temperatures. How did fire keeping attain such status? Could the answer to this question help us to understand the very origins of mysticism?

Let's start by asking which arose first in human culture, the cooking fire, or, the sacred fire? The smart money is on the cooking fire. Certainly the radiation of humans beyond the tropics was attended by fire-keeping and the knowledge of how to find fire. Spontaneous combustion, smoldering coal seams, lightning strikes and lava flows are sufficiently infrequent in most neighborhoods to engender some thoughts such as "oooh, lucky strike, eh?" (Ed. note: must have hit a tobacco plant) when fire was encountered.   Having found fire, what did our ancestors do about it?  It seems likely that such a discovery may have occurred whilst it was raining, and the proto-human may have found warmth and comfort in the vicinity of the flames, thus stimulating an interest in maintaining the fire for some time.  So, the very site of the fire may have gained some privilege, or, at a minimum, may have caused a wandering band of humanoids to tarry a bit longer than usual.  This non-genetic change in behavior, if repeated across generations, constitutes at least one definition of "culture", and it implies an underlying mechanism for transmitting the essential memory, which must initially have been gestures, or oral-aural conveyance, and, subsequently, written or symbolic signposts.

Clearly, it is easier to carry fuel to the fire than to carry the fire itself, and, in the absence of a tool or mechanism for regenerating an extinguished flame, it makes sense to attach importance to the fire site, or hearth.  It is no accident that the hearth would soon metaphorically devolve to a sense of 'home'. Serendipity would strike the site too, in that careful observers would find ceramic bases under fires on clay, glass bases under fires on sand,  lime under fires on limestone, hardened wooden points on green stems supporting marshmallows (Ed. note:  the latter a common experience among modern scout troops), and so forth, until a multitude of uses for fire would ultimately be understood and perfected. In a mere moment of geological time, humans would come to revere, idolize and worship fire because of its intrinsic properties.

The step evolving from maintenance of the fire is likely to have been born of a desire to take the fire along when the attending hominids moved. This immediately suggests the notion that fire-carrying must have been a primeval occupation that pre-dated the invention of methods for generating fire.  So fire-carriers were very important people in primitive cultures, and may have guarded their knowledge very carefully in their own self-interest. It is conceivable that an utterance of "Oops..." emanating from a fire-carrier in midstream at a river crossing might well have marked a capital crime in some societies, with a swift and commensurate penalty bestowed upon the hapless carrier. Anything so important as fire to the well-being of the humanoids surely engendered social devices to protect it at all costs. Here the genesis of gods is almost mandatory. Who else could carry fire across the heavens, or belch fire from the bowels of the earth? The Greeks and Romans codified all this with Hephaistos and Vulcan, respectively, giving Zeus discretionary allocation privileges that were finally usurped when Prometheus stole the golden flame. And so, the gods provided a vehicle to defer reason even as Plato and  Aristotle  began to codify the foundations of logic and learning for the Western cultures that would follow.

The point of The Prytaneum, of course, is to facilitate the process by which reason will supplant existing mysticism. The eternal flame that must be sustained issues the light of knowledge. If this small hearth in cyberspace can provide an opportunity to sustain that light through open discourse, then it will have served a humane purpose.