Rod and Ring
words and music Elaine Diane Taylor
© 2012 Intelligentsia Media Inc.
SOCAN/ASCAP
from the album Coins and Crowns
single and album available on iTunes
The changing of the tide. The changing of the time.
For us it’s not a matter of standing on the shoulders of giants who went just before us.
The shoulders we stand on are the ones who were exploring and standing on a cliff at the beginning of the last revolution in thought – the beginning of the Mechanical Age. The Renaissance.
We are currently at the end of the Mechanical Age, and the end of the beginning of the Electric Age. A move from the assembly line that the phonetic alphabet began, as Marshall McCluhan believed, to the field of electricity that moves ideas and has changed the way we think and live and produce.
What is to be done with the many citizens who create a whole industry of production where quantity and a breakdown into defined steps makes everything exactly the same — the assembly line of a Mechanical Age?
The Electric Age is the end of the factory as we’ve known it, because we’ve been introduced to the idea of having everything at once — a field instead of a line.
We no longer believe that hard work and hours of effort are what produces success, because it doesn’t.
The assembly line way of viewing a society, social structure and status are being replaced. It’s not quality of work that represents status anymore, because the Mechanical Age made everything the same. There is no quality for the masses, so there is now only quantity.
The aim has become to have more because there is no way to differentiate the unique for the average person.
The artists and art minded have moved beyond this view, and see the next stage, but the average person has not. For the citizen who works in a traditional job they are presented the same media, products and views no matter where they look. They are consumers and their status comes from consuming.
If the ability to discern quality is gone then the only way to achieve a place in the hierarchy of social status is to have more. Social media becomes a way of showing off the ‘more’.
That’s where we’ve been and that has contributed greatly to the empire’s demise.
Instead of facing this economic Depression realistically, and all saying, “Let’s find new ways of showing social status by things we make and produce ourselves”, people have been led to believe this is a temporary recession and they can ride it out with debt.
People will do extreme things, and put themselves into jeopardy, for status. The fear of rejection is extremely powerful and a problem with debt can come from the ability to relieve this fear without sacrifice.
We have not only been in the lovely economic summer phase that comes after a war or major social upheaval — we have created a false summer. A fake summer with winners and losers based on nothing more than status by association. The perceived winners have more toys in a declining empire.
The fear of being seen as a loser causes debt in order to gain status. Social rejection is one of the most powerful forces there is.
On a nation level, those with association to those who create fiat currency that chugged, chugged, chugged along the economic summer with no preparation for winter, are the only winners.
The bankers and big businesses with bonuses and connections see the ship sinking and look after themselves.
Being smarter, or more unique or hardworking does not matter in this last phase of the decline and fall of an empire.
Once the bread and circus shows start and the looting from within has begun, it doesn’t much matter. The ship is sinking and whether you’re sitting up straight and finishing your veggies is of zero consequence.
Your options near the end become how to preserve what you have or how to make an exit plan. Or both.
With the printing of fiat currency by the central banks around the world , the winners are those connected to the creators, who received the funds and spent it quickly before it had a chance to create the inflation that is now here and growing.
We are on the losing side.
Storms have happened before, and if we watch for one approaching then we can prepare best.
It’s becoming dog eat dog. It’s becoming a case of the captain of the ship telling the passengers in steerage that all is well, so they don’t cause a panic while the first class passengers are making their exit.
The mainstream media of TV and newspapers are owned by a very small group of people who are among those collecting this fiat currency first.
Their obligation is to their shareholders. It is not publicly owned journalism and they are not the fifth estate as much as we desperately want to believe it.
The stages of mourning are universal: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, then acceptance.
The way of life we of the mechanical age have been used to is gone. Denial is the first step, and one that those on the winning side will exploit to their advantage. Unless a Carrington Event happens, naturally or otherwise, it is nearly impossible to return to how it was before electricity.
After denial comes anger. Who will it be aimed at?
Our ideas of space and time, words, communication, power, manufacturing, ideas, nations, families, are all different in the electric age, and our ability to spread news and opinions through channels that are no longer mainstream is the way we will trust information.
The answer to bad information is not censorship of information, it is more information from more unrelated sources. Only then can we see which facts are not supported and are being used for someone’s gain.
The bad news and the good news is that change happens.
Whatever you’re experiencing now will change.
If it’s good then put something aside for the winter. As George R. R. Martin says, “Winter is Coming”. If it’s bad right now then find small things with the tiniest piece of happiness while learning skills and waiting for the larger things that are out of your control to change. If you’re in a winter then conserve your energy and lay low while things move, and prepare for a new spring. Spring will always come.
And things will change.
Learn from the stories of those who have gone before.
We become what we read and see. We become like those we spend time with.
In terms of electricity, a closed relationship will pour its energy from the stronger to the weaker until there is equilibrium.
Be sure to spend time with those who have things to add, while creating things to pour into others who are coming up. Do not spend a lot of time with any party that drains you. It is not good to drain yourself to nothing, and no one has the right to demand it from you. If you’re associated with a person like this, then they need a group of people to help, not just you.
Art is money is music is life. It’s media, a medium or exchange we use to transfer ideas and build or take down and rebuild – whether we know it or not.
Artists and writers capture the audience with words or sounds or images, and then lull them into a state of mind where they can accept an idea from all sides at once. An inspiration as opposed to an assembly line of teaching one concept, and then building to another, and another, like an assembly line of cause and affect.
Looking at a thing from all sides at once — like Picasso was painting using cubism, and Gertrude Stein was doing the same with poetry and words using cubism.
With electric light we can see a thing from all sides at once. Any time. Day or night.
Time and space changed.
Time changed because we could do anything we wanted, in a large group, day or night. Space changed because our connection to others, our communication, was instant. We see and communicate with someone in Antartica, and Rome, and in a remote village in India, all at once.
Our lives become a field of activity, happening all at once, instead of an assembly line.
We can become both more powerful and overpowered without seeing it coming if we don’t understand the concept of a field instead of a line.
It’s here all at once. And it’s fractal.
When our news began to arrive in print in a mosaic of articles and photos, as Marshall McCluhan says, we began to see from many perspectives at once instead of from one point of view, as we had in the printed book.
Each closed system, a relationship, a nation, a company, goes through the cycles of what I call the Rod and Ring. The rod is yang, the male principle of going out to obtain and explore and then coming back. The ring is yin, the female principle of going around in a cycle, maintaining. When the two of them are combined it creates, in electric terms, electromagnetic energy. Far more powerful than just electricity.
When combined then a nation is sustainable.
This is the field we are entering as humankind.
The Rod and the Ring. It’s love and it’s money and we are all a part of it.
Rod and Ring
words and music Elaine Diane Taylor
© 2012 Intelligentsia Media Inc.
SOCAN/ASCAP
from the album Coins and Crowns
single and album available on iTunes
Rod and ring
a rod and ring
ebb and flow on a pendulum swing
A rod of iron and a coil of gold
From wooden wheels, to steel to oil,
time moves to the rod and the ring
Pendulum swing
It’s light dark, up down, yang yin, on off, out and in
Swing
Rise and fall
Boom and bust
Every empire and marketplace must
move to the rod and the ring
Pendulum swing
And our love,
our love is an electromagnetic thing
Swing
Down the highway smooth and wide
Or if I choose a path that’s less traveled by
we all move to the rod and the ring
Pendulum swing
Ya it’s up down, light dark, yang yin, on off, out and in
Swing
Down my wagon goes
down that road
with my baggage in tow I go
On the shoulders of great men and women I go
Pendulum swings
I go home
Take me home
Ya our love,
our love is an electromagnetic thing
yang and yin
A rod and ring
It’s all a rod and ring
It’s all an electromagnetic thing
Pendulum swing
Elaine Diane Taylor 