Greed. Music. War. Love. And many others. We are swept away by their terrors, transported by their glorious vistas. They are the coin of every culture, they are spoken everywhere from the cave of Lascaux to the farthest reaches of space that we can imagine. They are instinctively relearned every generation born, and compulsively and futilely cataloged as they pass and fade into memory. They permeate our our libraries and video stores, but after earnestly searching the many mirrors we’ve held up to our human experience we know nothing more except that their dialect changes from century to century. They seem so much a part of us that we cannot find their source. Their cycle - from speaking to consequence to recorded history to forgetfulness to speaking - is a circle so complete we cannot find their beginning or end. They are elusive, slipping out of our most ingeniously designed rhetorical and religious frameworks only to reappear fully realized and potent and true in our most mute and primitive centers of intuitive, collective understanding.

They are our most defining human trait, but we seem collectively powerless to act upon them. They act upon us. They ARE us. What would we be without them? What could we be without them?

PS. If you haven’t seen Children of Men (clip 2), go immediately and rent it. I watched it two nights in a row, back to back, astounded.

PPS. In case you’re wondering, this was all brought on by watching this tonight: