The Once and Future Thing
Greg Urban
Excerpt Below:
The answer is culture, but the riddle continues to vex, as if we have not yet gotten it, not seen quite clearly. What moves through space and time, yet has no Newtonian mass? What is communicated from individual to individual, group to group, yet is not a disease? Our sphinx, in vaporous apparition, peers down. Yes, this is the right word, but have we penetrated the veil of mystery? For there is more. The ghost-like journey of our thing (or is it things?) takes place along pathways, social pathways, that it itself lays down. It creates the space that makes its movement possible. how can it accomplish this social world-building task? The paradoxical anser is that it must look like what has come before it, like what has already been down that way. Its secret is in the mixture of oldness and newness that makes the journey possible. The king is dead, long lives the kings.