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Karl Constantine FOLKES 1935 (Portland)
The past, present and future of our zeitgeist culture is gleaned in our carbon footprints as free-will thinking evolutionary Homo sapiens.
As the world turns, globally and geologically, so does all humanity likewise turn. We live in an ever-turning turbulent transitory world. Made of flesh and blood, we are transitory beings. Never stationary, we are ever in transition. The ‘permanence’ of this transition takes us in a cycle from the ‘old’ to the ‘new’ and back again to the old.
Our zeitgeist culture, described as the prevailing trends, moods, attitudes, political and religious posturing, and the social and cultural climate of a particular era or moment in the life of a nation or its people, whether the past, the present or the future; whether locally, nationally or internationally situated, is seemingly guided or driven by some metaphysical collective unconscious energy or force. It can be regarded to be evolutionary in nature. That is to say that it is manifested innately as a principle of evolution.
This zeitgeist manifestation, functioning as an invisible force, agent or daemon, as an archetypal energy, is pervasive and is exhibited in all fields and interests of human behaviors, including expressions of the human imagination in poetry, painting, the arts, literature, photography, the fashion designing industry, the theatre and the cinema.
Our zeitgeist culture is of a dynamic nature and is ever in constant motion; ever transitioning from a Victorian type of zeitgeist to a Darwinian type of zeitgeist; and portraying outwardly in the interim intermediate forms of zeitgeist paradigms that demonstrate characteristics of alternating rigidity and adaptability, as our paradigms of experience and expressions shift backwards and forwards in time and in space.
To our human experience, our zeitgeist culture is punctuated systemically both by natural disasters and by what can only be described by human societies as a fraudulent Götterdämmerungen Zeitgeist of warfare; by a trajectory of strategically designed warfare, manipulated by humans and perceived as an evolutionary ‘fault-line’ that thrives on chaos, both for the purpose of human conquest and survival. World War I and World War II are classical examples.
In this regard, our political, economic, social, cultural and intellectual expressions are ever shifting, ever adjusting, ever being repeated; ever turning into themselves; and being transmogrified in the making; like the ancient alchemical Greco-Egyptian ouroboros, ever reaching outwardly in the environment in the perhaps deliberately conscious attempt for humankind to experiment with itself outwardly, but with the unconscious attempt for humankind to discover and to ‘know’ itself more intimately inwardly.
Oh, what irony! The more we turn outwardly to explore the world we inhabit and, as a species, to delve further outwardly to the galaxies, the greater we recognize in ourselves the need to turn inwardly within our innermost beings in order to find our destiny; in order to know more rationally — and intimately so — the purpose for our existence, psychologically and spiritually.
At any moment in time our zeitgeist culture is actively ingesting, digesting and regurgitating what it has heretofore consumed intellectually, morally and culturally as its core ‘Self.’ Upon reflection, there is no absolute hard grained uniqueness to the spirit of our modern era.
That is to say, surprisingly enough, that there is no absolute uniqueness to us as Homo sapiens. Our uniqueness as primate Homo sapiens, upon reflection, must therefore be considered to be relative to that of other primates.
Our relative uniqueness is that we are genetically and historically creatures of habit, modulating our environment; yet ever repeating the past; preserving yet ‘renewing’ our lifestyle in our present lifetimes. Should we then say that Darwinian evolution is a ‘closed case’ in our human societies?
Consider thus a related question: Are we today heading towards a utopian world, or perhaps towards one that is Orwellian? Having previously experienced both, we historically return again and again to both.
That, with indelible emphasis, is our predisposed evolutionary legacy.
We are indeed creatures of habit. The paradox of the paradigm shifts we engage in always enables us to maintain residual aspects of the ‘old’ and the ‘new.’
So, with this admission, in our 21st century Age of Information, what then does the future hold for our present-day Millennials; defined as a Generation Y cohort following Generation X and preceding Generation Z?
This is a savvy generation of international millennials actively engaged and invested in such technologies as robotics and Artificial Intelligence, in covert communications of the World Wide Web, and in such message applications and social media platforms as Messenger, Telegram, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, Tik Tok, Reddit, Pinterest, WhatsApp and Twitter.
Twitter has since been rebranded as ‘X,‘ an innovative sociocultural symbol that targets primarily the new generations of America; and the rest of the world along with it as well; including, as example, the outermost jungle regions of the world, like the Manakieaway Village of the indigenous Marubo peoples of the Brazilian rainforest, employing Space X Internet satellite service, logged on with Starlink for satellite Internet service. This is zeitgeist culture maximized at its fullest potential to engage the world in its global web socially, culturally, politically.
At a yet deeper psychological level of reality representation or reality formulation, logo X invites its consumers subliminally to ‘tune-in-and-drop-out’ of all social conventions that may appear to be restrictively binding; suggesting instead, or offering a counter argument for a culture consensus that human identity is not genetically fixed, but instead is ever transitioning, ever shifting; ever challenged globally by technological, social media, economic, environmental and political challenges that humans encounter as decision makers.
This argument of course begs the question of what is morally or ethically; or even legally sound. Should the concept of ethics and morality responsibilities be legally relativized in accordance with a culture’s zeitgeist?
We must therefore conclude that the past, present and future of our zeitgeist culture is gleaned in our carbon footprints as free-will thinking evolutionary Homo sapiens. We are ultimately the creators and designers of our environment, of who we are and what we become as a species socially, culturally, morally, and intellectually.
About this poem
Theme: No man is an Island entire unto itself. We are in it together, individually and collectively as members of a global zeitgeist. Collectively we are all members of a word community, participating, willingly or unwillingly, consciously or unconsciously, in what the 18th century philosopher, Johann Gottfried von Herder (1744-1803), once characterized as a Volksgeist, a national spirit, empowered by a Zeitgeist or a spirit of the era. That is to say that at the microscopic level of our existence, we all appear to be separate entities, defined and enforced by self-imposed cultural ethnic, racial backgrounds and divisions. Nevertheless, at the macroscopic level of human society, all of us function socially as intersections of each other and, consciously or unconsciously, must recognize that at some deeper level, we participate more effectively, and humanely and ethically so, when we acknowledge that, as human beings, we are all members locally, of a nation’s zeitgeist, and universally, of a collective world zeitgeist. With this recognition, this poem invites us individually, collectively and globally as thinking beings, to reflect philosophically, morally and culturally on who we are as a people self-identified as Homo sapiens. Whether our individual acts are conducted rationally or irrationally, we are, in the final analysis, the creators and designers of who we are and of what we become ultimately as a species socially, culturally, morally, and intellectually. Indeed, we are our brothers keepers. more »
Written on May 22, 2024
Submitted by karlcfolkes on May 22, 2024
Modified by karlcfolkes on June 08, 2024
- 5:14 min read
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"Poetry.com" Poetry.com. STANDS4 LLC, 2024. Web. 10 Jun 2024. <https://www.poetry.com/>.
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