across the great divide: leave it behind

Early in the twentieth century Oswald Spengler, in The Decline of the West, wrote of the irreversible historical pattern of growth, flowering, withering, and decay that has marked the destiny of every known civilization and is, he said, now undoing our own. William Butler Yeats, in his awesome prohecy, “The Second Coming,” saw before us only a darkening sky clouded with unmastered forces. Picasso’s engraving Minotauromachy renders a like vision, as does, even more dismally, T.S. Eliot’s “The Wasteland.” Evidently, not all is well.

—Read More:http://faariscar.blogspot.ca/2011/12/art-knowledge-news-keeping-you-in-touch_04.html

In the light of what we know of the long career of this “spaceship Earth,” as Buckminster Fuller once termed it, we can be certain that the immediate future, whether of joy or of pain., will be only the beginning of a history hardly yet to be imagined. Mankind made its first appearance among the species of this earth, many have reason to believe, some two million years ago or more. Yet it was only six thousand years ago that the first high civilization arose: first in Sumer and Egypt, next in Crete and India, then in China, Greece, and Rome, and, across the oceans, in Peru and Mexico- each with its own environment, style, and special history.

—Wheel Of Fortune Painting – Wheel Of Fortune Fine Art Print – Valerio Ventura—Read More:http://fineartamerica.com/featured/wheel-of-fortune-valerio-ventura.html

Today they have been joined to a single destiny and future, the traditional placebound forms of civilization fading like the figments of a dream. A new environment has even arisen, an environment of mechanical forms, brought forth not from the earth, but from new insights of the mind. In itself, it represents a radical transformation of the ground conditions of human life and, thereby, a radical transformation of the future of our species.

In view of all of this, it is reasonable to conjecture by analogy: the animals of the primitive mythic hunt furnished the mythic models through which earliest man interpreted the mysteries of life and death, his world, and his place within it; the priests of those early temple towers took the mystic mathematics of their planetary sky to be a pattern of the exaltation and guidance of the human spirit; and perhaps the search of our own scientists into a world more wondrous than the merely visible one will awaken within us latent dreams of a new destiny-image- a myth equivalent to the hundreds of thousands of years, amybe millions of years that may lie ahead of this “Spaceship Earth” before the miracle of its star expires and the rapture of its cycling ends.