Cell biology radioactivity and Wu Ji

a supermassive black hole

Poring through the articles from this class, and thinking back on our last discussion.. what keeps coming to me is - we just don't know what is dangerous. there's radioactivity which is a natural thing, if you go to higher altitude like Denver you get more of it flowing into you. And then there's bananas, which are radioactive, but it moves through our body because of potassium balance (hmmm I have more questions about this...) and then there's airport scanners which are just a completely ridiculous needless thing to put our bodies through.. and there's us flinging ourselves up through the sky in places where our bodies could never survive without masses of technology wrapped around us every moment.

we keep writing checks we don't know if we can cash, we keep breathing life into frankenstein... GMOs, all of it. different kinds of radioactivity, and different "safe" levels for Japanese workers from year to year, and how on earth could we ever trust any human institutional recommendation of anything given the track record of men being Wrong - wrong about what drugs are safe for pregnant women, wrong about agent orange, wrong about the glory of processed convenience foods, wrong about clear cutting forests, recklessly wrong wrong wrong.

ohhh but the idea that we are being hit by a "drizzle of cosmic rays from supernovas, black holes and other galactic places" ... i love the poetry of that... what is coming into us with these rays, some kind of intelligence of the cosmos, along with a higher rate of cell madness in our bodies? why did those daoists drink mercury, anyway?

the science seems complicated, i don't feel like I have a grasp on much, and then how can we really say what affects us how, when we have all these mysterious chronic illnesses - cancer, leaky gut, ADHD and schizophrenia and the disease of boundless greed... how much can we really get in there on a molecular level and still understand the macro view of what's happening to all of us?

I did note that Fukushima is still leaking and a mess. I did notice that bananas and sleeping next to my sweetie seems less dangerous than frequently flying. It looks like there are some things we can agree on, rest on, as we try to navigate our choices in this post-modern techno world we're all wound up in. so much of it seems so needless. you should see the incredible watertight baskets that the Pomo people wove from roots and branches. why can't we be satisfied to survive in this world creating beautiful things of the earth?

all that said, I'm a total luddite who ended up in multimedia art for 5 years and a back-to-the-land primitive skills devoteé who cannot poetically get enough of staring out the plane window at the magnificent earth below... which makes me feel much more at home in the classical chinese style of philosophy - its not one thing VS another and Somebody has got to be right dammit! Its all of it. We all have all of it.