"The work of the world is common as mud."

"To Be Of Use," by Marge Piercy. is a poem about, among other things, the way that a human person is made for work in the same way as any artefact is made in order to fulfill its purpose. Aristotle called this the entelechy. This vital insight led pre-Darwinian thinkers to the argument from design. Now all of us are struggling to integrate Piercy's entelechy with Darwin's universal acid. Thanks to Naomi Schalit for calling "To Be Of Use" to my attention. Thanks to Changing Hands Bookstore in Tempe, Arizona for helping me find the full text of "To Be Of Use" on a page of html to which I might point you in this blog.

Today it is a beautiful day in Scottsdale, Arizona --- except that today is the de facto first day of summer here in the Valley of the Sun; our first day in which the temperature can be measured (in Fahrenheit) in numbers that can be named with decimal numerals in three digits.

I feel drowsy as I am writing this. No one except me seems to be reading this blog anyway, so I'll start getting a little more personal. I feel drowsy.

Do you know that all the beautiful palm trees you see here in the Valley of the Sun are non-native? See, first you rip out the painfully thin topsoil of the Sonoran desert ecosystem. Then you put down layers of gravel. Then every day you waste potable water to make the palm tree live --- oh, yes, of course you must feed it, too.

See the tuna fleets stripping the oceans (and killing off Tursiops truncatus and her kin); see the cyanide (no, it's not Zyklon B) mining the earth mother.

See us doing what we do best, work, to make the world in our image.

But our image is no longer ours; we take it from a video screen.

That's as much as I can conduct right now.