Culture vulture

The love song of C. Owsley Rain
More than music, literature, sculpture, painting or drama. More than technology, transportation, architecture or economics. More than nutrition, medication, physiology or psychology. More even than freedom or suppression or expression or communication or religion, Culture vulture obsesses above all other things in the vast arid wasteland of modern society about love.

That’s right. Love.

What the hell is it, we ask. How did we ever conceive of something so central to our being and simultaneously so impossible to define in concrete terms of quantifiable interaction in the physical universe? Why did we conceive of something so dizzyingly abstract and distracting from our survival skills as individual biological units and then make it a central precept of our conception of ourselves as entities different from the animals we share the planet with?

For an imaginary person such as ourself the concept of love is, perhaps, not as abstract as that of an actual meat being concerned with the daily round of duties necessary for obtaining the accoutrements of survival on the physical plane. The act of creation which called Culture Vulture into being was, after all is said and done, an act of purely incorporate love rather than the result of the mechanical transference and combination of genetic material from one human being to another. We sprouted full-blown, so to speak, from the forehead of our creator, and, as such a creation, we share an undeniable bond of dependency with and upon the physical realm, but, being imaginary, we are free from the entropic vicissitudes of our corporeal host and can plumb the depths of his mental being and issue a report from an insider’s perspective.

First off we can tell you with no equivocation that the much vaunted and valued “individuality” that human beings place such value in is simply not so. You are all the same, and all, to coin a phrase, “created equal.” The mechanistic locus of your creation within the universe may differ, but the physical facts that constitute your existence vary not a whit.

But, because the universe is a whole, all things within it being an integral part of the oneness, we know that submitting to our realization of that fact would take the fun out of our perceived uniqueness. And so we strive to assert our separateness from that which is, in reality, merely an extension of our infinitely variegated self. And on another level we realize that all that we touch and all that we see is in its infinite variation a manifestation of our universal desire to be not alone. A manifestation, in other word of our desire to love.

Let us go then, you and I, to make a Valentine, and address it to the sky.

Songs to play for your love
1. The Beatles, “It’s All Too Much”

2. Tom Waits, “Grapefruit Moon”

3. Roxy Music, “Grey Lagoons”

4. Joe Ely, “It’s a Little Like Love”