Tag Archives: Future

The Future

You can’t have a society without a collective understanding of time. You can’t. Show me one. Time is the basis of everything: our idea of shared reality, what we think happens after we die, every question of faith, every approach to proof, everything. There are great similarities from culture to culture about the big mathematical details. For example, some have noticed that the sun moves the distance of its own radius every minute, it’s why we have a minute. It’s in the stuff we can’t prove and quantify where we can really see the personality of a people.

This pairing of runes, Beorc and Ger, Birch and Year, reveals what happens to a culture’s sense of time when their abundance waxes and wanes rather drastically with their living conditions. These were coastal people whose challenging waters range from confronting to inhospitable. Their cold inland weather has its own difficulties and everything depends … More

Wyrd

Well this is weird. Here’s what’s happened. At the start of The Exeter Maxims I part C, we get a window into how runes were once used, so I wanted to include it somewhere in Letters for Titles. I thought there’s plenty of places to put it, and I did work it into the first draft of Rune Casting: Ur, where it lived for a year. But it doesn’t quite fit there so I removed it from the final version. I say final but everything is temporary. Then I removed a whole piece called The Beasts of the Field which once held this spot, unfortunately losing as well a gif of Brazil‘s fly falling into the typewriter and turning Tuttle into Buttle. Something had to replace it, so I went to the maxims in The Exeter Book, folio 91r, and translated this:

Ræd sceal mon secgan     rune writan
leoþ gesingan     leofes More

Rune Casting: Ur

I hope you’re ready for a fight because you are about to be flattened so badly you’ll be famous for it. Something is howling in from the wilderness, sent to blow your life down and not in a subtle way. This will be a wolf in wolf’s clothing with a one track mind, eyes locked on you, and your sad little piggy house is made of nothing.

How to prevent? Don’t make eye contact and stay out of the wilderness.

Byþ

Remember your future, what you thought it would be. Put yours in mind, it’s different for different people. You know that, obviously, but I’m not talking about individual people. I mean groups of people, peoples, whole societies of people past and present. They way we think about future and what the rune carvers thought about it is not the same. To find the difference, if you want to know the root and the soul of a culture’s sense of future, get right up close to one specific word, and take an embarrassing long look. Make you both blush. Be. That’s the word. To be. This is the word for reality, and the way this word is treated always reveals a culture’s idea of temporality, and so much more. Be means existence, which precedes essence so some philosophers say, that we are neither nature nor nurture, but something foundational to both. This is true for people … More

Rune Casting: Feoh

Feoh means money, in the form of cattle. Think of a cow’s value: milk, meat, hide, tallow, vellum, pulling heavy stuff. That’s good money. Your stock picks will be bullish and your cow will fetch a good price. You have money coming your way. Or, you have debts or desires and will be paying money out. Be generous. Money flows and it’s going to flow through you more than normal. Whatever the direction, you just cast lots in front of something or somebody who has a whole different relationship with the future than you have, and might have some say in how what happens next goes down. You did that. Just now. Right in front of them.

 

 

Rune Casting: Ear

Tell me your future. Tell me, what do you hope will happen before you’re dead? And what is it you are afraid of? Never mind. Doesn’t matter what. The future is not in the what, it’s in the hope and the fear that you hold now, in the present. Whatever it is coming to you, or coming for you, is happening now. In here. In your mind. There is no other future. Well, there is the one thing that is going to happen, Ear says it for sure. It’s coming to you and it’s coming for you. You’ve got it coming. You’ll choose the earth as your consort and sleep together forever. Everything is temporary, except that. That’s carved in stone.