reading a book on american utopias. i'm dog tired not like a dog but like an angsty human who undersleeps. oh, to be a dog well loved would be my private utopia. i like to read about these utopias and about monastic life and i often have a wish image of being in a monk's cell of my own, or a pastoral community of loving and caring souls, unlike this place in which i struggle to exist. but it appears that utopias are fraught with people who want their own idea of utopia and require control of other utopians to achieve it. yet many thrived and did amazing things before the industrial engineers virtually crushed any possibility of independent community. i think now it's in the mind, a vestige, with perhaps a vestigial utopian community based on non-locality. the word utopia has roots in the greek words outopia, or "no place", and eutopia, or "good place". maybe it's both and, maybe it's a place of no place, being subject to human foibles in practice, maybe utopia begins and ends in the mind, with some noble experiments in the world. but these experiments in the world seem to be precluded by the crushing economy of today. in the present the wish image of utopia is a nostalgia for nostalgia. with some perks that survive, like libraries. yet the idea of utopia is timeless; we will always want to escape the war,the devouring economy, we will always want to love.

i can almost envision a utopia for one dog, and i can almost envision creating such a good place. i may be too humanized.