My daughter went surfing for the first time today. I myself, amazingly, managed to stand upright on a moving surfboard for several seconds.
Towards the end of our stay in Maui, I'm starting to relax slightly. Blogging is a pretty uptight thing to do, really -- it requires a functional Internet connection and a decision not to just go to the beach and watch the clouds move instead. Although perhaps Twitter is starting to make blogging seem like a monastic, contemplative activity...
Years ago, I saw a driving map to Maui that included the instruction to ignore stones piled by the roadside, because they were done by "visitors who imagine there is some significance. THERE IS NONE." This is the same tone the literati take when telling people not to be interested in the "wrong" forms of culture -- it's an injunction I thought of while walking the trail to the blowhole, near Napili, a hike I love to make with my daughter. The piles of stones that indicate the trail are very inviting in a modern primitive, DIY religion sort of way. A holiday is a holy day, meant for spiritual recreation -- traveling and tourism recreate the world in a way that is destructive the same way democracy is destructive.
We also met up with Jack Boulware and visited the Surfing Goat Dairy, an excellent source of cheese -- “Da' Feta Mo' Betta!” is their slogan. JB told me there were at least six hundred thousand Polynesian gods.
Oh James! You can't just say something like, "democracy is destructive" and leave it like that!
I'm allowed to say things like that when I'm on vacation…
If we allowed a caste of philosopher-kings to determine what has significance and what has none, a lot of bad things would be prevented, but the long-term outcome would be the death of culture.