The Eye of God and the A.I.G. Bonuses

Iz ow sum peepl cyaan si wat clock a straik?

Choosing at random: the bee colonies are breaking down and (so?) the food supplies are dwindling; the polar ice is melting; the permafrost is damaged beyond mending; the weather has turned wild and unpredictable, so we have impossibly powerful hurricanes and tornadoes creating unprecedented devastation; the jet streams from aircraft and sundry other carbon exhalations have over-heated the atmosphere; and, to top it all, the world economy has been plunged into ruin by a very small group of enormously greedy people, so that individuals have lost their spouses, families, homes, jobs, businesses, savings, indeed, their lives, in some cases. Meanwhile, the folks at AIG are proceeding as if it’s business as usual, paying out, and accepting, large bonuses, and that from public monies?

To repeat: how is it that some people can’t see [or hear] what [hour the] clock is striking, can’t wake up and smell the excrement, can’t grasp that we are inter Scylla Charibdysque, or, in English, between the Devil and the deep blue sea? (We are way, way out of rock and hard place territory, here! The high frights of myth and the base horrors of slavery can probably, however, serve our purposes.)

There have been some pictures, recently circulating on the internet, of God’s Eye. Go here: http://urbanlegends.about.com/library/bl_eye_of_god.htm
According to Urban Legends, the photo, or composite of photos, taken by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope and at the Kitt Peak National Observatory in Arizona, actually depicts the so-called Helix Nebula. Astronomers describe the Nebula as "a trillion-mile-long tunnel of glowing gases." At its center is a dying star that has ejected masses of dust and gas to form tentacle-like filaments stretching toward an outer rim composed of the same material. Our own sun may look like this in several billion years. (It matters not to me that it’s a blue eye. The colour may well change in due course. It’s just a pretty amazing image floating out there.)

Also, interestingly enough, in a book called The World’s Eye (University of Kentucky Press, 1982), Albert Potts informs us that the Huichol Indians in a remote spot in the southern Sierra Madre Occidental of Mexico have for centuries been making sikuli or eyes, ritual objects made of thread. It was believed that the eyes of the gods looked out through the middle of the woven ‘cross’ of an eye. You make sikuli by winding a web of ever expanding threads around two crossed sticks. The objects express a prayer that the eye of god or the gods would rest, benignly, one supposes, upon the supplicant. Anthropologist Carl Lumholz encountered these artifacts on a visit between 1895 and 1898. In time, the sikuli, as ojo de dios, spread throughout Latin America and into North America and the Caribbean. The Aymara in Bolivia and the Hopi and Dineh (Navajo) in North America, among others, now share the tradition. Craftspeople create elaborate ojos de dios. Kids make them in art class. I can remember making ojos de dios myself, ages ago.

Potts tells us, though, that the sikuli phenomenon is not limited to Latin America; rather, it is a worldwide one. Anthropologists elsewhere know the eye as a thread cross or Fadenkreuz. There are also variations known as Fadenstern or thread stars. And they have been around for a long time. There is evidence that they existed in Latin America before A.D. 500; eyes of a similar rhomboid shape appear on pottery in Troy and the Middle East thousands of years before Christ.

So what do the ojo de dios, the Fadenkreuz and the God’s Eye image as depicted in the Hubble polyglot photo have to do with big bonuses being paid out by AIG to already super rich people? Probably nothing at all. Or maybe, just maybe, in the spirit of re-associating sensibilities, or, as Lauryn Hill put it, because “everything is everything,” if primitive peoples have known for millennia that the Eye of God is watching them, wouldn’t you think that these super-technocrats who rule in the cyberage ought to have got the message?

As everybody and him granny have a way to say, “God is not bedridden and him not asleep.” (Note: ojos de dios do not depict closed eyes.)

Iz jus dat fe Im taim langa dan roup.