“All right, Pooh, what can you tell us about the Uncarved Block?”

“The what?” asked Pooh, sitting up suddenly and opening his eyes.

“The Uncarved Block. You know . . .”

“Oh, the . . . Oh.”

“What do you have to say about it?”

“I didn’t do it,” said Pooh.

“You —”

“It must have been Piglet,” he said.

“I did not!” squeaked Piglet.

“Oh, Piglet. Where did you —”

“I didn’t,” Piglet said.

“Well, then, it was probably Rabbit,” said Pooh.

“It wasn’t me!” Piglet insisted.

“Did someone call?” said Rabbit, popping up from behind a chair.

“Oh — Rabbit,” I said. “We’re talking about the Uncarved Block.”

“Haven’t seen it,” said Rabbit, “but I’ll go ask Owl.”

“That won’t be nec —” I began.

“Too late now,” said Pooh. “He’s gone.”

“I never even heard of the Uncarved Block,” said Piglet.

“Neither did I,” said Pooh, rubbing his ear.

“It’s just a figure of speech,” I said.

“A what of a who?” asked Pooh.

“A figure of speech. It means that, well, the Uncarved Block is a way of saying, ‘like Pooh.’”

“Oh, is that all?” said Piglet.

“I wondered,” said Pooh.

Pooh can’t describe the Uncarved Block to us in words; he just is it. That’s the nature of the Uncarved Block.

“A perfect description. Thank you, Pooh.”

“Not at all,” said Pooh.

When you discard arrogance, complexity, and a few other things that get in the way, sooner or later you will discover that simple, childlike, and mysterious secret known to those of the Uncarved Block.

“Let’s go and see everybody,” said Pooh.

“Because when you’ve been walking in the wind for miles, and you suddenly go into somebody’s house, and he says, ‘Hola Pooh, you’re just in time for a little smackerel of something,’ and you are, then it’s what I call a Friendly Day.”

Profesiones Preparadas Para Prof Pooh

Still trying to get the crowd’s attention and complete his introduction of the next act, he threw back his head, raised both hairy paws to his muzzle and began to howl like a wolf.

He started low and deep in his chest, rising in slow crescendo toward an apogee of animal liberation, the blood-cry of the eternal untamed, the true and original call of the wild.

That did it. That caught their interest.

The mob echoed his howl in antiphonic recapitulation, male and female, adult and child, human and canine, myriad voices soaring through the cathedral of the trees, into the listening sky, over the yawning abyss of the world’s one and one only Grand Canyon.

Even the cops and rangers were impressed by this mass outburst of angelic demonology. Not frightened, not disturbed — hard for them to imagine so anarchic and jolly a multitude becoming dangerous — but impressed.

They listened, they stared, their hearts beat faster with the power of the primitive — be primordial or die! — and they remembered something older, deeper, richer, warmer, lovelier, and finer than anything osmotically absorbed from TV, radio, newspapers, billboards, politicians, evangelists, priests, experts, MDs or PhDs.

What? What was it?

It was that sense of life that cannot be expressed — or depressed — through mere words.

It was the message of the wolf’s cry, the bear’s roar.

The whispering of the forest, the thunder of a storm, the silence of the canyon, the wail of wind, the meaning of the moon.

The fire of the blood.
The drumming of the heart.
The beating of the drums.

All present heard the coming music,
the procession of dancers.

Ed Abbey, Hayduke Lives!

Long range correlations appear.

Particles separated by macroscopic distances become linked.

Local events have repercussions throughout the whole system.

Such long-range correlations appear at the precise point of transition from equilibrium to nonequilibrium.

At equilibrium molecules behave as essentially independent entities; they ignore one another.

We would like to call them “hypnons,” “sleepwalkers.”

Though each of them may be as complex as we like, they ignore one another.

However, nonequilibrium wakes them up and introduces a coherence quite foreign to equilibrium.

Matter’s activity is related to the nonequilibrium conditions that it itself may generate.

Ilya Prigogine & Isabelle Stengers,
Order Out Of Chaos

“Exactly. Take that woman, for instance, she’s a natural. Can’t help herself, just naturally has to hurl her body into the forefront of the battle. Why?

Brains, beauty, physical energy, ideas, emotions, idealism?

Those help but there’s something more in a case like that.”

“She’s not a case.”

“Forgive me. In a woman like that. In a person, a personage, a human being, a human becoming like that. What is that extra quality?

I would call it spiritual vitality. Élan vital. A great soul.

There’s no such thing, they told us in medical school.

Show me this spirit, Doctor Zeitkopf used to say, and I’ll show you a diseased pituitary gland. The brain secretes soul, he’d say, as the liver secretes bile.

So we’d cut these bodies open, the living, the dead, humans, dogs, monkeys, rats, and what did we find?

Glands. Nerves. Organs. Tissue.

Ah hah! said Doctor Time-Head, you see? Iss nossing here but us chickens!”

“And what did you say to Doctor Time-Head, Doc?”

“I said nothing. I was intimidated and overawed.

But I suspected, even then, that he was overlooking something. Something vital . . . like life.

He knew everything about the parts but didn’t consider the whole. A whole animal is a healthy animal.

But Doctor Zeitkopf never saw a healthy animal. Even the dogs and rats and monkeys in the research lab, though healthy when brought in, were half dead from fear when the men in the white coats came around.

Anyway, a healthy woman like whatshername is a whole, a being complete, intact and compact, with a personality — no, wrong word, trivialized word — is a vital spirit.

In a way that no analysis, psychoanalysis, chemical analysis, vivisectional analysis, tomographic analysis, computerized analysis could ever have predicted.

A healthy active lively woman like that is not a mere clever assembly of intricate parts, like say a computer, but something more like a . . .

Like a composition: a poem; a symphony; a dance.

No amount of robot could ever manufacture a human being like that.

Or make any other vital, happy, healthy, defiant animal.”

They stared at him in wonder. Such words. Such talk. Such wild and wonderful imagination.

“You said a mouthful, Doc,” said Seldom. “Took the words right outa my mouth.”

Ed Abbey, Hayduke Lives!

In many cases, it is difficult to disentangle the meaning of words such as “order” and “chaos.”

Is a tropical forest an ordered or a chaotic system?

The history of any particular animal species will appear very contingent, dependent on other species and on environmental accidents.

Still, the feeling persists that the overall pattern of a tropical forest — as represented, for instance, by the diversity of species — corresponds to the very archetype of order.

Ilya Prigogine & Isabelle Stengers,
Order Out Of Chaos

“Work? These eco-freaks work?”

“There’s a workshop on wolves and endangered species.

There’s one on what they call deep ecology and another on the Rites of Spring and —”

“Rights of spring?”

“That’s what they call it. Some woman teaching people how to chant and dance and braid flowers in their hair and attain deep spiritual intimacy with the organic rhythms of Mother Nature.”

Boyle began to choke. Tears streamed from his eyes. Hoyle slapped his back, harder than necessary. Boyle’s bridge fell out, his hat fell off, his toupee slid forward over his eyes.

“Oral, you better take it easy,” said Hoyle, “skip the organic rhythms, Boyle can’t take it.”

“Well . . . there’s the Redneck Women’s Caucus. Somebody called Georgia Hayduchess and the Feminist Eco-Warriors organized that one.

There’s Art Goodtimes and the Seminar for World Re-enchantment Through Pure Earth Poetry.”

Hoyle raised a warning hand. “Careful.”

Oral nodded. “Somebody who calls himself Art Goodwrench is giving a course in diesel mechanics. I think I’d better check that one. Sounds significant.”

“Does indeed.”

Dear Abby Edna, Hayduchess Lives!

Chaos
Is God’s most dangerous face —
Amorphous, roiling, hungry.

Shape Chaos —
Shape God.
Act.

Alter the speed
Or the direction of Change.
Vary the scope of Change.

Recombine the seeds of Change.
Transmute the impact of Change.

Seize Change. Use it. Adapt and grow.

From EARTHSEED: BOOKS OF LIVING

In general, when the same thing (process) appears in one aspect as simple and in another as infinitely complex, the two aspects have by no means the same importance, or rather the same degree of reality.

In such cases, the simplicity belongs to the thing (process) itself.

And the infinite complexity, to the views we take in turning around it, to the symbols by which our senses or intellect represent it to us.

Or, more generally, to elements of a different order, with which we try to imitate it artificially.

But with which it remains incommensurable,
being (becoming) of a different nature.

Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution

How can you get very far,
If you don’t know Who You Are?

How can you do what you ought,
If you don’t know What You’ve Got?

And if you don’t know Which To Do
Of all the things in front of you,

Then what you’ll have when you are through
Is just a mess without a clue

Of all the best that can come true
If you know What and Which and Who.

True Blue Guru Pooh,
Who Blew Goo To You, Boo Roo,
Who Grew Through You Too

The great affair, the love affair with life, is to live as variously as possible, to groom one’s curiosity like a high-spirited thoroughbred, climb aboard, and gallop over the thick, sun-struck hills every day.

Where there is no risk, the emotional terrain is flat and unyielding, and, despite all its dimensions, valleys, pinnacles, and detours, life will seem to have none of its magnificent geography, only a length.

It began in mystery, and it will end in mystery, but what a savage and beautiful country lies in between.

Diane Ackerman, Natural History Of Senses