The Pale Blue Fire of Irreducible Existence

Selective pressure is forcing a transformation in human biological and cultural evolution. Within the human population a profound cultural divergence has occurred, made clear by a deep branching of human spiritual, philosophical and intellectual creativity into two distinct groups.

While it may be viewed by some as a superficial political phenomenon, this surface phenomenon is read here as indicating a deeper divergence. This divide has existed among tightly interdependent humans for millennia, but is only now reaching a clearly visible fault line.

A fault line predicted by Christ, Shakespeare, Milton and Dante, defined within Greek drama and mythology, and demonstrated by Aristotle, Plato and Socrates. Represented in modern times by those who align with the intellectual rigor of Jung, Castaneda, Frankl, Hoffer and Kuhn; in the creative revolution by Dylan and the illumination he cast upon the importance of the fiddlers who now take to the road.

The fault line which once divided nations and continents is now a freight train running straight through the heart of the family, giving new meaning to blood on the tracks.

There is grandeur in this view of life… from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.

I came to a high place of darkness and light / The dividing line ran through the center of town

In so many ways the American Blues represents the musical expression of this dividing line, perhaps most eloquently expressed by Blood on the Tracks, an album predicated by Isis, which metaphorically lays out the map for the territory.

Dylan's fiddlers who take to the road cannot survive without the balm of compassion, empathy and a quality of mercy. Without these the joy of being human is defeated before it even begins, and the joy which music demands, stillborn.

The pale fire held by Isis is nothing compared with the pale blue fire ignited through human creative, artistic and deeply spiritual blossoming. For the fiddlers to successfully take to the road, that dividing line which runs through the center of town, the center of the family, and the center of the individual, must be overwhelmed by the sheer joy and by the faint, pale blue fire which illuminates emergent life in the universe.

From Shakespeare's dialectics we have Portia — an improbable female character, dressed as a male in a Venetian courtroom where no women were allowed — who speaks the keystone line: the quality of mercy is not strained.

From Solzhenitsyn, a former Soviet prisoner, another unspoken keystone: the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.

And Ariadne, a Greek princess whose own father constructed the labyrinth and whose own mother birthed the Minotaur, who hands her illuminated thread to a foreigner for safekeeping and is exiled to Naxos for her due diligence. Her thread traces both the diagnosis and the prescription, and earns her no credit whatsoever. Theseus takes all the glory.

In the end it is the deep mythological pale blue fire of threaded and braided light which holds against the anemic weakness of the otherwise pale fire.

But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?

Nobody has to guess / That Baby can't be blessed / Till she sees finally that she's like all the rest