Monthly Archives: July 2010

The world has spent 50 billion dollars on a Big Bang machine — the Large Hadron Collider — to find a Higgs particle supposedly at the root of all matter. The theory of an ether force that acts on all nature, creating the parts of the atom by tugging some bits differently than others like flotsam in a stream of currents and eddies, seems no less fantastic and far less satisfying than the Native American creation legend of all of nature living on the back of a giant turtle.
If we are limited by our ability to conceive, as mathematics is equally a human and limiting a construct as the Torah, why do our modern constructs seem so dull and prosaic and lacking in soul? I would rather be savage with poetry than a savant with a witless cosmology. How many future Poes and Melvilles might we have ignited and nurtured with 50 billion dollars?

“The only thing a skinny legged woman is good for is to run get a big legged woman.”

–bluesman Sonny Terry