MODERNITY stole it from the Beatles - we're stealing it back

Before MODERNITY stole the term 'commensal' and tortured it out of shape , the concept had been used for thousands of years, to describe the particularly unique aspect of Jesus's physical ministry:

his willingness to share his table with just about anybody.

At a time when sharing the salt was only done with one's friends and family, Jesus was eager to be a 'diner at the common table' with just about anyone.

Including - or should I say particularly - those viewed with disdain by the general society.

Like it or not, we must all get along, share and share alike, if we are to survive Jesus told his followers.

MODERNITY Science, a sort of  Stephen Harper clone with a PhD in Biology, turns a stone cold eye to the very idea that commensality actually exists for very long out in the natural world.

But this is to take a normative view of something in which we actually have no choice.

All Life on Planet Earth, willy nilly, is a 'diner at a common table' .

Equally some Life - the human sort - could take all the food on the table and leave the rest of Life to starve to death.

But since humans don't actually produce food but are only parasites on those beings that do, we will soon quickly starve to death ourselves.

MODERNITY hates the thought of being dependent on non-humans but the facts are that we must.

If MODERNITY can't adjust to that fact, then it must go.....

Skyscraper Genetics;Sidewalker Genetics

The age old story of the world , the insiders trying to keep the outsiders out, is brought to a permanent boil in New York City.


The verticality of the skyscraper is a truly fitting and 'deep' metaphor for Modernity : it represents Modernity's need to categorize everyone and everything into a vertical hierarchy of increasing (imagined) 'fitness' and worth.


The assumption is that your worth depends on your inherited genetics which are fixed and change only at the place of glaciers - genetics you inherit strictly from your parents - no miscegenation between species or races here !


By contrast the H in HGT (Horizontal Genetic Transfer), is a fitting symbol for this new, Quantum-Postmodern- Commensal Age.


It merely institutionalizes the reality of global commensality that since we have to exist together cheek to jowl on this Planet,diners at a common table, we might as well resolve to make the best of it and make use of the best of each other's ideas.


In fact, our lives probably depend on us doing so.


So the horizontality of a modern library with its branches stocks of books shared all over the city and all of it part of a continent or world wide system of inter-library loans best represents in human terms what HGT is to the microbe world.

Once named by very early explorers as a natural Arcadia, New York under Dewitt Clinton became the ultimate Synthetic Arcadia, with his rigid and orderly grid system of streets and avenues and buildings demanding that Nature yield to the Will of Man.


But the dirty, noisy,vibrant,disorderly, messy immigrant-burdened sidewalks -where two strangers' eyes can meet and romance bloom; those sidewalks,and those unruly sidewalkers, they,they are Nature's Revenge !