POSTCIVILATEUM

The 12:15 Out Of Mordor

2011-07-10T01:27:00.000-07:00

Eerie. Not exactly the word. Close enough.

First just a dim howl, growing in the distance, soon loud enough to wake me from my self-medicated sleep; induced by one and a half times the safe dosage of someone else’s pain prescription along with illicit drugs that are not recreational tonight. It’s the third night of this regimen and last night was the first success. I was able to sleep a few hours, then. This night I was asleep until the eerie howl woke me. I got up and walked out into the grass.

I’m two hundred yards from the main train tracks for the Pacific Coast north-south line over the mountains. The eerie howl increases in decibels as I identify it. Some malfunctioned brake locked on a freight car, just now at its hottest point after the long descent down the grade from the Cascades. Or a disintegrating bearing in a labored diesel engine the size of a small house. Plaintive, incessant, whining. It’s the 12:15 freight run. Tonight it’s the 12:15 out of Mordor.

I am not angry. You’d expect me to be, me who lives on anger nurtured for such a long time that it’s always part of who I try to hide that I am. Sadness, only. Only sadness. The howl gets loud enough to mirror the sound in my heart, … the sound my heart wants me to make. Perfect resonance of what the heart wants to express for three nights now. The 12:15 out of Mordor has awakened me so that I can finally hear it. I would smile my grim anger smile out into the darkness toward the tracks if I was angry, wasn’t so sad. If I was just my normal angry self.

I’m a little dizzy and a little uncoordinated, but I rambled back onto the porch and let the howl take what sadness away from me that it could. There’s a tennis ball out there in the grass.

Darwin would have awakened only momentarily, lifted his head off the foot of the bed enough to hear that the sound came from the train tracks and was just another infernal human thing ranting in the distance. Nothing to worry about. I want to smile at the memory-thought; but the eerie sad howl still echoes. His head would have nestled back down and he’d immediately return to sleep.

Maybe if I quit typing and put my head down, the Vicoden cocktail will let me do that too.

Darwinyarwin. Such a good boy.

Bev Bivens Redux

2010-11-06T13:01:00.000-07:00

A friend just alerted me to Bev Biven's quick little reappearance in the spotlight last year at the San Francisco "Something's Happening Here" Art Expo. If I had only known ....

Here she is back in the day.

Anyway, just wanted to update my post earlier in the blog for all of the rest of you who love her.

Wouldn't a comeback be, as she says, awesome?

If Grace was our generation's Siren, Bev was the Helen who launched our thousand ships ...

Verily.

reduce, reuse, recycle, reload

2010-06-20T04:51:00.000-07:00

Hola, Dear Blog Reader

On the off-chance that you just got here by searching for the word, if you are one of the few who “get it” about the one word title of this tiny little blog, lemme re-direct you to a site that will do you some good --- in enlightenment if nothing else:

http://www.collapsenet.com/

It’s Michael C. Ruppert’s new website. He’s been saying a whole lot of the stuff we’ve been thinking about, ranting about, witnessing, and participating in regarding The Crash.

If you haven’t seen the movie Collapse, you can find your way to it from here.

There’s a really sobering little lecture up on his site right now that dovetails in with the Crash mantras:

http://www.cctv.org/watch-tv/programs/author-and-peak-oil-activist-michael-ruppert

His lecture title is all about the secessionist movement and the Lifeboat Philosophy (see Garrett Hardin for the roots), but it’s basically Ruppert laying out the near future for a sympathetic audience.

If you need even stronger stuff, you’ll have to log in to his website (10 bux a month). It’s prolly worth that just for the rant about the Gulf Oil Catastrophe.

I’ll put up no more review than that here in this post. Ruppert has his flaws and his blind spots just like the rest of us; but you know, the time for requiring perfect clarity from our prophets is over.

This’ll help.

What's Real

2009-09-17T02:38:00.000-07:00

Ya know what I like? The big kid is waving at the engineer, but the little kid is waving at the locomotive.

WHY BEES?

2009-04-11T16:32:00.000-07:00

It’s kind of a Postcivilateum idea.

After you’ve come through the several stages of Earth Crisis Awareness (denial, despair, my x equals world saving, ... yadda x3) you arrive at this perceptual clarity where the actual possibilities of doing some actual good – rather than sending a check and singing Kumbaya – are actually apparent. By y’self … can’t save the whales, nor the amphibians, nor the coral reefs by acting locally, even if you think globally.

But …

You can save the bees. Locally. All you need is a back yard and some scrap lumber. It’s a whole movement, ya know? Organic, sustainable, hands-on beekeeping. One voice says that beehives should be more plentiful than televisions. The respected queen goddess of beekeeping says we need hundreds and hundreds of new beekeepers to get involved.

We H. Saps made Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD), weakened the honeybee to susceptibility to varroa mites, and umpty other diseases that are killing them off. We should take some responsibility to fix this. Imean, do you like having the plants that provide your food supply pollinated or not?

Yeah. So I’ve already started. Gotta whole ‘nother blog started to rant all about it. C’mon over and see if ya wanna save some bees too. [ED Note, Aug, 09 - This post was a while back. I've since dismantled that blog. The bees wanted me to shut up about it.]

And, besides, the Goddess wants you to save them.

Termites and Telescopes

2008-10-25T19:18:00.000-07:00

Philip Morrison’s Bronowski Memorial Lecture was broadcast on BBC2 Television on Monday, 20 August 1979

Termites and Telescopes

Recall the days of World War II when a loosely-knit but intense community of science and technology spanned the Atlantic, the British on the one and the Americans on the other shore. Thousands of thoughtful persons were earnestly engaged in waging that terrible war, all anxious for the best ideas and the best criticism on how the weapons of war, mostly new weapons, the radar, the aircraft, all those things which arose at that time, could be used in the search for precious victory. Curiously enough this community was nourished by a flow of secret information, papers and periodicals that were whole secret magazines, which circulated marked 'secret, handle with care', to be read only by the specific addressee who was given the magazine. Yet the community was so large, so varied, so concerned for learning that in fact this became a form of periodical literature not dissimilar to that of science in peacetime. Of course, its aims were narrow and grim. But within that human qualities still appeared. We had the usual flow of articles from magazines, we had the occasional striking reports, we had scintillating critiques, which Wired everyone to see that something new had to be done, some change had to be made, some new hope or some new danger was about to appear. And that was the first time I encountered the mind of Jacob Bronowski. From a little English village halfway between Oxford and London, a series of penetrating and iconoclastic papers appeared which caused a helpful buzz of concern and interest throughout that entire community.

The shuttle of war entwined our experiences even more closely. Just at the end of the war I, for my part, was sent by our government to walk the rusty ruin of Hiroshima, to reflect upon what had happened there, to measure and report. Quite independently Bronowski was sent by the UK government on a similar errand. We didn't encounter each other, neither knew of the other visitor until later on, many months later, when we read mutually our reports on that galvanising tragedy.

A few years later, again by chance, we each arrived at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to spend a visiting year. I remember, most fondly, hearing a brilliant course of lectures which he then gave us, celebrating and analysing that city of Florence, the home both of Giotto and of Galileo. From that time on, though our paths were distinct, separated often by continents or by oceans, we were yet together in the sense that we were communicative friends who from time to time enjoyed each other's company. It is with more than an ordinary sense of responsibility then that I try to address something in his memory, by pursuing a theme which was his own in that rich legacy of idea and image which he called 'The Ascent of Man'. The following quotation by Bronowski sums this up:

`It is reported that when the Spaniards arrived overland at the Pacific Ocean, the Californian Indians used to say that at full moon the fish came and danced on these beaches. And it's true that there is a local variety of fish, the grunion, that comes up out of the water and lays its eggs above the high tide mark. The full moon is important, because it gives nine or ten days between these very high tides and the next ones that will wash the hatched fish out to sea again. Every landscape in the world is full of these exact and beautiful adaptations by which an animal fits into its environment like one cogwheel into another. Millions of years of evolution have shaped the grunion to fit and sit exactly with the tide. But nature, that is, evolution, has not fitted man to any specific environment. On the contrary, by comparison with the grunion, he has a rather crude survival kit. And yet, this is the paradox of the human condition, one that fits him to all environments: his imagination, his reason, his emotional subtlety and toughness, make it possible for him not to accept the environment, but to change it. And that series of inventions by which man from age to age has remade his environment is a different kind of evolution, not biological but cultural evolution. I call that brilliant sequence of cultural peaks the "ascent of man".'

Let us take up the challenge of that paradox. For we are not in fact the only creatures who change the environment. Most large species do something of the sort. But how we do it, the degree to which we do it, and above all, the rate at which change occurs are the significant features that I think I can tease out to characterise our own condition.

Now the somewhat odd title which I have chosen for these remarks, Termites and Telescopes, is based on the idea just put forward. But it is added to a schooldays' experience of my own, when somehow I encountered in a forgotten book the strange remark that the criterion of true civilisation was the ability to construct the true arch.

Now I don't know what awkward architectural critic, what thoughtless student of cultures made that remark, which I regard as absurd, a way primarily to exclude the Mayans from a discussion by an author who probably recognised Greek and Latin, but was ignorant of the older languages across the world. That remark stuck in my mind, as some chance remarks do. A couple of years ago I was astonished to encounter a clear demonstration, explicit evidence that there are social insects, in fact certain species of termites which construct the true arch. If we are to understand the nature of man, or the nature of termite, we must at least absolve ourselves from a requirement to admit the termites to the class of the true civilisations! Or possibly they belong?

It turns out that when you examine not merely this criterion — of course it's often these simple gates which are dear to examination setters but poor for real science — if you look to see how they make their true arches, as they do, to compare with how we make the true arches, as from time to time we do, the how opens a world of significance in the small distinction. That is what I want to talk about; I think I'll have to say some rather strange things in the course of drawing conclusions from this deep difference.

The Australian landscape may in places be dominated by termites; each termite nest is a city of the creatures. Blind for the most part, one hundred or two hundred thousand living in a single nest. These nests endure for decades; the busy termites build and maintain them and live out their lives in such communities. They are governed, it is fairly plain, by complex rules of social behaviour. The role of the queen mother is crucial. She is literally the queen mother. All the members of the nest are not merely a city but one family. Some hundreds of thousands of the queen's offspring people the nest of the termites. The royal ancestor is tended by specialists, fed, cared for, groomed, guarded in every way.

Their communication is tactile, and of course chemical. Precise chemical signals, a few of which are now known, are transferred between individuals. The white translucent form is the larva. The specialised workers and the even more specialised soldier forms look alike in the first stages. The fierce soldier has great jaws —mandibles fitting him to guard the nest entrance. In the first stages he appears as a little tame white larva like any other worker. Whether it is all from subsequent treatment or whether there is some initial genetic difference to produce the distinct caste is not certain for all species. They derive most of their energy from wood, the source of cellulose, by the use of symbiotic micro-organisms. There are thousands of species of termites, and the differences are not unimportant. I can talk only in the most generalised and approximate way. But I do not think I will mislead when I talk about what seems to be among the most advanced of all termite species, the principal member of a genus of African termites which carries everything to an extreme. These termites are larger, their nests are larger still, than the Australian. The population of a city may well run to two million individuals. The queen is the mother of all; she lives ten or fifteen times the average life of a worker. During her lifetime she gives rise to tens of millions of offspring, a million or two of which may be occupying the nest at a given time.

They are agriculturists and there seems little doubt that the fungus species found inside the nest of these termites, which is known to be indispensable to their welfare, is, in fact, their crop. It is found nowhere else save in contact with these animals. It is tended, sown, cropped, reaped, propagated and resown by the termites, season after season, one particular fungus. In the cross-section of the nest of Macrotermes one sees a deep central region of many warm, damp chambers, where the fungus garden is kept and tended by the devoted horticulturists, blindly in the dark.

Notice the support structure of the nest, how open the structure is. That is indispensable. These organisms must maintain humidity and temperature conditions in a flow of air adequate for their own welfare, for that of the larvae, and for that of the fungus garden upon which they depend. Of course there are many species that build much cruder nests with no such architectural niceties. But these advanced termites could not thrive without some means of making a structure airy as well as strong, which was as large as it has to be and yet could allow the interior passage of air, mainly by natural convection.

What has been learned in the past decade or two by remarkable studies of these animals in the field, is the mechanism by which the termites can build the true arch. Consider what the task is. It begins in a hollow lens-shaped chamber in the ground, first excavated by many termite workers, blindly scurrying around in the dark. Apparently at random, though there may be some less than completely random cause, they start to build. We know only some of their inner drives. We can infer only some of the rules of construction which these animals must bear within themselves. But some we can see. They begin, hundreds of them working in the dark, to assemble the material from which the architecture will be built. This is called carton; it is the excreted chewed-up wood fibre mixed with a cement they secrete, to form little pellets which then can be glued together to build up a structure as you see it, metres high, and decades of endurance in the weather.

To begin with there are simply the scurrying insects in the dark, each one individually making a little pile of pellets. At some moment apparently each comes to obey an internal programmatic rule, which in effect says: you have built a pile for a certain amount of time, up to a certain degree of success, abandon your pile if and only if there is within your purview, within your sensory reach (we don't know at all how the sensing is done — by odour? by moisture?) — a larger pile. If there is, drop your work and go to work on the larger pile. Now among a thousand small piles, of course by chance some are a little larger than the others. Suppose now there are perhaps a hundred piles, each two or three times larger than their neighbours, scattered over the floor of the cell. The small ones are abandoned, and now the large ones start to grow, many insects working on each one.

A third important signal arises in the system. If you had a column at a certain height, and there is no column nearby of an adequate height, abandon the column you're working on, and join one which by chance belongs to a pair. There you see in the sketch insects who have found a pair of columns and then obey the fourth instruction. It says, whenever the pair stand close enough, a few among many columns as chosen by random events, close enough so they might practically be bridged together, work at the tops until you bridge them across with cemented wood fibres to make the true arch. There you have true termite civilisation and its architecture.

Here is an extraordinary if not an awesome outcome. Notice that the affair is without symmetry, without plan or blueprint, without fixed outcome. The only likely outcome is purely functional. There will be, on average, enough arches, enough of them sufficiently spaced to support the airy structure. No two nests will have the same plan, the same numbers, save by chance. There will be no Palladian school. The situation has about it a disturbingly effective and yet to human eyes and minds a curiously random pattern. A blueprint exists nowhere. The complexity arises out of the interaction of the insects, using cues which admittedly we don't know, and some inbuilt instructions that we also don't know, but with several important cues that come from the structure itself upon which they're working. That is enough to put together a vaulted crypt which will, on the average, function well. Truly an extraordinary outcome, the outcome we are constrained to believe, of the processes of natural selection on the complex genetic structure these insects bear.

Insects like this, termites, can learn little individually. Most of what they know is already coded deep within. They have, individually, very few tricks; it is hard to distinguish the actions of one worker from another's. You can measure the probabilities of each action: it looks quite random what, for example, that one does who has succeeded in the work. There are no outstanding craftsmen, no talented pellet pilers among the termites.

I would like to extend our topic so as not to leave you with an unexamined empathy toward termite civilisation. It is certainly not any civilisation, though it is an organic whole we are looking at. Termites have rather soft skin which is damaged without much difficulty. Occasionally a slightly injured termite with a scratch or little nick in the skin will be walking down the access tubes, where they enter. There the tactile interaction is very strong. Almost every nest mate that termite encounters will feel and groom it a little bit. If that tiny tear should appear to be at all tangible it is likely to bear very solicitous examinations indeed, until after a while the insect may be surrounded by a dozen active kin, all anxious to stroke and to feel and to assess the state of health of their fellow citizen. During this worrisome press very often one of the grooming insects will chance to tear the skin a little bit more, enough to cause the exudation of a tiny drop of fluid. Once this happens the outcome is swift. That imperfect termite is rapidly consumed by his neighbours. Among termites protein is always short. There is no chance to waste it. Individuality is minimal; one termite is after all like another. This moral justification may be seen to support a fearful helot democracy within the termite workers' world.

Now, how different is human architecture? It rests plainly on human societies. We are social as they are; we are little without our collectivities, from the earliest bands that wandered the African Rift to the great nation-states and the world community we look forward to. Still, there are distinct individual human minds communicating, and a rich store of experience in every individual. The internal model each individual can make of what is going to happen in the future is the raw material for that steady selection of ideas, of activities, of content, which comprises the growth of human society, let us say of human architecture. We offer in evidence an architectural drawing of about 1600, by the Turin architect, Domenico Paganelli. There is his drawing; no building of that sort existed when his beautiful rendering was made. That was a project which would come into existence, it may be, if the patrons were pleased, the circumstances were correct, and the artist was satisfied himself with that version. To eliminate that papery building — we may be sure that there were many pieces of paper before that one — to discard those earlier pieces of paper did not always require the expiration of the lifetime of Paganelli or the failure of his building by structural collapse, and the starting out of another ten or a hundred variant Paganelli to see how their buildings would turn out. Purely on that basis, human architecture would proceed with an extraordinary slowness. We have instead a culture which evolves in a wholly different domain, by interchanges of language and selection of artefact, far more rapidly than could ever be imagined for the long exchange of genetic material which lies behind the selection, in their myriads, of whole epochs of termite nests.

The Sanctuary of La Madonna di Mondovi by Domenico Paganelli.

I offer therefore a conjecture which may be a little startling. It is more than I could prove, yet I find it very attractive to consider. Is there in fact any limit in kind to the operations of evolution in natural selection of the genetic material? Have the termites reached some clear limit? Is our obvious extraordinary complexity, our wealth of culture, our dominance of much of the world, different in kind from that which the termites could obtain by blind selection? In my opinion the answer is No. I conceive that if they can make the true arch, as they do, I have no reason to doubt that sooner or later — I shall point out a strong difference in a moment — sooner or later the termites could evolve any structure, for example, if it were valuable to their survival, even manage the manufacture of telescopes. Yes, and radio telescopes as well. I think you can see how it would work. It would begin with termites who had collected rocks a little heavier than the sand around. Their samples would have a lot of ores. Then some nests would have found how to collect the heaviest ones, which would be copper, and not merely the iron that was lying around — and so it goes. Finally fire they would take from
nature. Now it's plain that if I were to list the rules that make an arch, even in our half-understanding way, you would agree some tens of programmatic rules, like listing for a programming computer, could do the job. But to list the rules in that same way, without blueprint, without final goal, without an internal model, just letting events feed upon events in response to a few simple programmatic demands. Like, 'Now is the time to turn off the fire'. It's plain to me that it would take a million listings! Would you doubt that? I don't think so. It might be ten million; I've not tried to calculate it. A crude estimate of this sort suggests that's what you would need. That's the content of the books I'd expect to have to read, knowing a great deal already, to be able to build a telescope starting from scratch. Is it not plainly at least in the order of millions of listings? But the listings have accumulated for the termites over tens of millions of years. Our ancestors, a different species but of the hominid strain, were still arboreal in the African rift, while Macrotermes were already building, we are pretty sure, excellent arches. Their progress is painfully slow. For me that is the chief difference. That is what we represent, against the blindness of the disindividuated termites, almost unable to learn. They can probably achieve anything that is in the interest of their survival; they have at least a chance to do that, though they're not certain, just as indeed we are not certain, to fulfil their destinies. But whatever grandiose goals you set they can attain, provided you allow the depths of time, the caverns of time that they require. But the universe is not built to allow that time. Powerful termites evolving to build telescopes would long outlive the sun's heat. In the demise of the sun even their cleverest fire-making would not long permit them to exist. No, the reason we are distinct is not simply the kind of thing that we do; of course we do things greatly different in kind from the work of any other species. We can do so because we have inbuilt a new means of change, so swift that it enables evolution on an entirely different time scale. That time scale, not the limits set by the intricacy of the outcome, but the limit set by the time alone, is the distinction between what I have called the blind paths of genetic selection and the half-knowing paths of the selection of internal models by which we change.

We are swift changers over the land; only by swiftness in this inconstant universe is it possible to attain large change. That's all. What is given to us is the time set by the inexorable rules of the galaxy and the stars. That time is all the time that the play of evolution can have on the field. To evolve such remarkable things as the cultural structures of which we are a part requires a time scale quite unreached by the processes of natural selection and mutation and meiosis and chromosome exchange and whatever shufflings you imagine in the genetic material. That is the principal conclusion that I would like to draw.

Let me try to tease out more of the differences between ourselves and these social animals, our predecessors. Indeed they may be our first models, but models from which we have much diverged. I want now to make a very simple arithmetical discussion, which is a naive effort to show you one point you might well believe, but to show it in numerical terms, so powerfully that it astonished me when I first made the same simple calculation. The idea is this: we manipulate internal symbols; such is our nature. That makes us fast to change. You can utter words, draw papers, exchange ideas, or dance in a much shorter time than it takes to live a life, undergo selection, and breed true. You thus bear an internal structure of your own; you do not, like the termites, have one structure built in, to last all of life without much change. They learn little, we much. We continually manipulate symbols. I shall use letters, but that is only the most naive example. Think of this in a general way standing for any kind of manipulation of symbols, images, forms, acts, gestures. I want to ask a simple arithmetical question. Therefore this is not meant to be a model in any detail of the real world, but is meant only to suggest how the real world might work.

Suppose you had but three symbols, which a chimpanzee could master, or even a mammal less related to our intelligent stem. If I seek three symbols, there are three that come at once to mind: MIT. I will simply use these symbols, I'll try to exhaust for you simply all the possible permutations of the three symbols. If you are able to arrange only three items you can, of course, form quite a number of combinations. Let us do it in a systematic way. Take the symbols MIT. First choose M. After it only I T and T I:
MIT
MTI
Then start with I:
ITM
IMT
Finally, begin with T:
TMI
TIM
Six arrangements, no more.

Now I've exhausted the canon of the orderings of three symbols. It took us maybe half a minute or so. But now what is perhaps one of the most important of all arithmetical facts, is the following conclusion, which I shall only state, though many will be able to check my calculation. (I don't think it's wrong. I was so astonished by it I checked it three or four times!) Suppose I were to try the next word that I could think of, a good long word, TECHNOLOGY. Well, I might bravely set out to play the same arrangement game on TECHNOLOGY. How many ways can I rearrange it? TEC ... TCE ... I'm sure you all agree it would be very tedious to go through the whole operation.

Even allowing for the fact that this is no honest ten-letter word, but has two letters repeated, if I were simply to write down at the same speed all the orderings of ten symbols (with one repeat) taken all ten at a time, as we saw above done for three at a time, the increase from three basic symbols to ten symbols makes an inordinate difference. Instead of under a minute to write all those based on MIT I would succeed in writing all the possibilities generated from TECHNOLOGY only by lecturing eight hours a day, five days a week for three academic years! That is a consequence, of course, of elementary combinatorics. We get too used to it, the people who deal with mathematics get used to such remarkable functional growth, as in this case of a change from three to ten (determining an increase from six to more than 1.5 million). But in fact it remains remarkable; for me it stands as a sign that it is critical to possess an internal model-making scheme of some strength. I can't say where critical strength comes. I know only that as you develop an internal model which grows stronger and stronger, able to handle more and more complex orderings and reorderings of its internal content, then at some point the organism — the society acquires inordinate power, even though shortly before that point its power would be quite ordinary. That is the formal root of the distinction we see between ourselves and our cousins, the friendly chimpanzees and the quiet gorillas. Of course it is the same sort of change, of exponentiation, which we see so markedly in the rise of human culture itself through history.

It is important for us to examine the proposition that our essence lies in the internal model-building property. It is up to us to try to understand what kind of models we form and how we build them. That system will influence our every thought; indeed it is our every thought.

Now I see, and I think it is apparent to all, that there are two polar opposites in the world of model building, two descriptions of models, both of which we know and use well which are quite different in their nature. They can be described in several different ways and I shall do that. The simplest one is the foundation stone of our culture, at least it has been let us say for half a million or a million years, language itself. Language, you see, has a curious property. I recall to the computer enthusiasts that language is familiar —indeed they speak of 'machine language' — a combination of a few symbols, repeated over and over and over again, interchanged and arranged, lacking all representative quality, with no necessary iconic connection between the word and the world. Brass is not a yellow metal, nor grass a green plant. The two words sound similar, but their meanings are entirely different. This arbitrary mapping is the essence of the digital, the essence of language, the essence of algebra. The X can stand for anything. So language, algebra, and digital calculation I can regard as three prototypes of the one kind of model.

The other kind of model includes vision, geometry, and physical analogues. Those are very different in nature. They tend to have continuity, with much closer connection to the three-dimensional nature of the spatial world and to evolution in time. They tend to be more immediate than the powerful but strangely abstract models we call language or algebra or digital calculation. Now, it is a popular thought these days (I've read it in numerous books) that indeed there is a logical difference between these two branches of mind-model. The stern, the calculating, the objective mind deals in the digital, the symbolic, the algebraic; while the light-hearted, emotional, unreflective, spontaneous mind deals in vision, geometry, motion. I'm sure you have heard the generalisation. I believe it is far from true, probably wholly wrong. All that I know from what the logicians say is that for every geometrical proposition in Euclid, or even in much more complex kinds of geometry, an equivalent algebraic expression can be formed. Conversely, for any of a very large class of algebraic expressions, some geometrical analogue or logical diagram can be produced. For every digital calculation, I can to some degree substitute an analogue model, and the reverse. In my opinion there is no strong logical difference between these two model poles. I agree they represent two attributes of the human mind or human minds; they are both widely used, they are both indispensable. They both allow fully logical and indeed fully artistic or emotional consequences, either way. The medium in this case does not fix the quality of the message. What happens is that people who write books and articles know a lot about putting strings of symbols together, but very little about drawing and painting. They think the art of the painter is spontaneous and carefree. Perhaps the painter feels on his part, well, putting all those symbols together is much what you did in childhood, spelling and story-telling, but that struggle to get exactly the right visual form on the canvas, that's a different matter, adult and serious. I suspect they're both right: I mean that the true situation is really more complex.

I 'want now to say a little about how people make their models and why. In the West of England, right across the country from the famous cathedral of Canterbury, there is another cathedral, the Cathedral of Wells, set in verdant countryside. What do we find at Wells Cathedral?

This beautiful structure was begun about eight hundred years ago or a little more. Its facade is magnificently sculptured. If we enter the cathedral we find the cathedral clock. The knightly automata joust up above the dial as the hour is struck. This clock was built in Chaucer's day. As you go towards it you will see the great sunburst which is its principal hand. That hand travels daily once around the dial. Another dial is set within, marking the phases of the moon, and bearing a beautiful inscription which I shall cite later. As the day wears on from noon the sun-burst is at the top. The sun will go right to the bottom of the dial and back up again to the top, turning one full turn in twenty-four hours, a model of our turning earth. It is not like our unfortunately degenerate modern watches which, when they have turning hands at all, go round the dial twice in a day, so willing were we to attenuate the great world model on which the clock was based.

Do not think that this clock was primarily a practical matter. It was not open to the public at all for the first couple of hundred years after its installation. It was undoubtedly of use to the clerics of the cathedral, who had free access to it and could watch it; perhaps they could time their comings and goings, and their prayers as they chose. But it would be a mistake to think that that magnificent clock was built mainly to assist the scheduling of a devoted and expert society that knew perfectly well what to do each hour of the year. No, the inscription tells us otherwise. It says (and I construe the Latin very freely) 'this circular dial presents the universe in microcosm.' That's what it was for. The men who caused this clock to be built and the brilliant artisans, probably Flemish and Belgian, who helped build it were celebrating that universal order which they saw as their Creator's, exactly as those artisans were who made the sculptures on the facade. They were not doing any lesser, any more secular task. It was not a practical timekeeper alone they were building in that cathedral. Every human inference leads to that conclusion; and they told us so on the face of the clock.

In this case we see an explicit analogue, a model which contains some measure of the truth of the day: namely the earth turning on its axis, or, as they saw it, the heavens turning about the earth once every twenty-four hours. The hand which bore the moon was ingeniously contrived to fall behind the sun by about that one hour per day, so that in the course of a month the disc which exposed the crescent moon would gradually slide as well, to picture the moon's phase as you watched. (It turns out they had to intervene a little bit; the moon had to be adjusted by hand at the end. Gears were new in the fourteenth century in Europe; you couldn't burden the pioneer clockwork too heavily.)

Now of course most clocks have acquired a rather different quality. A contemporary digital clock has quite a handsome face, there displaying that time for us all; while it may have a hidden rotator which still remembers, very faintly, that great rotation which it follows, all rotation is well concealed. What we see are only numerals that come one after another to the face of the clock. I venture to say that quite a few of you wear on the wrist a little clock which has given up all semblance of rotation (except in the abstract space of complex variables, where there is a rotating vector whose electrical projection follows a quartz crystal). How far we abstract from the earth-spin! That is the story of the rise of scientific precision, scientific strength, scientific growth, a chronicle of power.

But that steady abstraction ought not to be maintained as the only element of an appropriate structure of models, a scheme of all models for the human mind. It is too attenuated, too narrow, too thin. We cannot be fully nourished on such a diet, however precise, however numerous the bits which it can handle. There is a wonderful book — The Ephemeris and Nautical Almanac — an Anglo-American production by the way, jointly computed by the authoritative staffs of the US Naval Observatory and the Royal Greenwich Observatory, which, when I open it, taps more than two hundred years of tradition. If I turn to today's date and seek the table in which the moon is entered, I will find a precise and beautiful table of figures. I could report to you nine figures and some interpolation numbers too many to count. They tell you hour by hour the position of the moon, just as the dial in Wells Cathedral has been doing for these six hundred years, but not so beautifully, not so richly. Each to its own purpose. I do not undervalue that table for a moment. I would defend intensely the energy, the strength of human spirit, the long co-operation which has given rise to the digital tables of the Nautical Almanac. That work has freed us, for example, from the fear of the eclipse; every eclipse is catalogued. Such an event remains marvellous, but something we recognise as part of that order of nature that we still only partially perceive.

At the same time, admittedly the tables require some little connection with the outside world. You can't use these tables alone to find the moon. Somebody must tell you at least which direction is south, and where the meridian is, or something equivalent. But once you're given one or two geometrical items of data, then the number-crunchers, the table-makers can do everything, in enough time. Indeed, Alan Turing once proved that for us, as far as we're likely to be interested for a very long time to come. But the digital method, symbolic abstraction, absolutely indispensable to science, never to be done away, impossible to overpraise, is nevertheless not enough. It is not the whole story, it has never been the entire story, it cannot become the whole story. At our peril do we celebrate the tables of the digits, to forget the simpler, the analogical, the visual, the sensory, which lies at the other pole of the internal representations of the world that we human beings must live by. Richness must complement that powerful austerity.

Now I have come to the place where I must speak of that other domain of our internal modelling, of our representations, which is not science nor exposition at all. That place is art. You will at once admit that the complex sensory order, if not absolutely indispensable, at least conveys the greatest part of all the arts in our history. We must appeal not to a string of digits, however elegantly assembled, however meaningful, but to a real, material system, whether it be of metal or canvas, or even beams of light or sound, whatever it might be, which we can perceive by the senses, celebrate in the mind, sometimes subjective and expressive, sometimes quite objective and representational. Often it is rich with metaphor. It can itself be logically austere, or as spontaneously free from logical constraint as it chooses, provided only it embodies itself in a material base of some kind that we can apprehend through the senses. Their logic it must obey.

A splendid example of such a piece of matter is a beautiful ritual cooking vessel of the Shang culture of China, in the valley of the Yellow River; it was made by its artisans, designed by its artists, celebrated by its priests some three thousand years ago. It is fair to examine this masterpiece of art and craftsmanship, and to ask ourselves this question: could its eloquent symmetry, its fitness to the material, a subtly-cast bronze, be in any way exhausted by describing it carefully, a geometrical position for every point, and a code number for the material at each point, air, alloy, or patina? That long, long string of numbers is logically equivalent. Indeed the digits can generate and do generate to a television audience just the picture that we see. But nevertheless that is not the same as the object itself. Its effect must be transmitted to us through a sensory channel, or the beauty has gone. That is the lesson I think art brings to us, richly brought out in this particular example.

I am moved to comment on the form itself. The strange animal mask, the symmetrical face, much distorted, much abstracted, which nevertheless resides in the careful design. Even more striking is the artful use of these cast flanges as a piece of the design, where it is pretty clear that they are indispensable as well to the manufacture, to the piece-moulding technique which enabled the artisans three thousand years ago to put it together. So much were they imbued with the understanding that the object was material, a real material, not simply an abstract model in the mind, that they fused ideas together, to make material and form co-operate in presenting to us a work of art which even across a gulf of time and of society we can hardly cross, still speaks to us with extraordinary eloquence of what we call beauty. Any masterpiece of any period could have carried much the same message.

If I have to draw conclusions from what I have said, I must hold it true that we operate primarily on a different time scale from all other species. Since we have a different time scale, we have a different scale of complexity of performance and of error as well from those strange, powerful beings, the creatures in the termite nest who modify their environment across the savannah. We are indeed different. But our difference does not lie in the fact of evolution. It does not lie even in the limits which life might attain. It lies in the remarkable speed we have acquired from an inborn evolutionary choice, in our swift model-building possibilities. They arose a million years ago, perhaps reaching the present biological state some forty or fifty thousand years ago. There seems to be no important biological change in our species since then. The compelling argument for that is the artefacts of the Upper and Middle Paleolithic, the paintings in the caves, the mobiliary art, the possible symbols inscribed on the walls. Those who made them were persons like ourselves. The absence of a longer cultural legacy, the smallness of their bands against the forces of nature around them, made their accomplishments modest in aggregate, but intense in themselves and magnificent in potential. We are trying to realise that potential in our time, now that we are four billion people, not four hundred thousand, on the face of the earth.

This release from the pace of natural selection is the key point that I have tried to stress. But it is a release which is possible, only if we remember that we have such rich model-building propensities, that every human life builds models, the unlettered no less than the professional are constantly foreseeing the future, modelling the consequences of every event, looking at the fall of the easel or the rain outside, to seek some understanding of what will happen. By experience, by feedback mechanisms, we learn from our own and from social experience. We construct an internal model which is the only way any of us can manage our individual lives and our social and cultural exchanges. Dominant there is language, in which we are embedded from earliest youth.

Our model building cannot and should not be restricted to any single form of model. We need to cherish, to stimulate, as well the visual as the digital, as well the algebraic as the geometrical. Otherwise we will abandon a long tradition in which what was prized was not a long austere string of bits, but a carefully-made object from a flint knife to a Shang bronze, to a Wells clock, to the great cathedral itself, to the plainsong within. This is, I think, our nature; I do not believe we are in any serious danger of losing it. I speak only to emphasise the importance of a catholicity of model building, the importance of the refreshing multiple possibilities, the importance, above all, of fusing even the most logical, the most rigorous of our procedures, which go by careful symbolic steps through some algebraic argument, with those objects of three or four dimensions in the real world, to which the logic bears some relation. That fusion cannot remain only in the final step. Precision can be attained far beyond what the senses grasp by pursuing chains of thought very far. But we must seek unity in the beginnings because dividing the model-making of our world, dividing those persons who make models into classes depending on which mode of model they choose belies our evolutionary history, the structures of eye and hand, mind and heart.

I admit to a deficiency in the beautiful set of objects we have admired. What I have talked about is only the sunniest of the landscapes which the human mind has illuminated, and human society constructed in its long span of overturn and continuity. I would be dishonest were I not to admit that, besides the sunny landscapes, I could have shown, and I will mention, most dark and ugly ones. You can add to the tragic roll for yourself; I will list only a few. There are the bomb craters still marring the rice paddies of the Indo-China peninsula. There is the wreckage of the houses in New York, say in the South Bronx, and the oppressed travesty of a city, say in Soweto far away in the tip of Africa. Add your own; you will not be surprised. Those, too, arise from the power of human society to envision within limits, the consequences of its acts. Our society built them too, even in the realm of idea alone, for they certainly extend beyond the material into the domain of ideas. Our power to shape is a power for good and for evil, and so always has it been. There is no more obvious comment I could add. When I have said that I will not close despairingly, for I think we have very good reasons not to despair. What our power for shaping means is dual. But it enforces responsibility on us for the forms we make. And since we can shape the world, and we can sometimes shape it well, I most firmly hope we will yet make wiser and lovelier forms in the landscape.

And now I would like my old friend, Jacob Bronowski, to have the last word.

`Man is a singular creature. He has a set of gifts which make him unique among the animals, so that unlike them he is not a figure in the landscape; he is the shaper of the landscape.'

The text printed here is a slightly expanded version of Professor Morrison's lecture, a version of which appeared in the issue of The Listener for 23 August 1979.

**************

Here's the rest of the publication information I have:
Philip Morrison
The Bronowski Memorial Lecture: August 1979
Termites and Telescopes
Published by the British Broadcasting Corporation
35 Marylebone High Street
London W1M 4AA
ISBN 0 563 17775 6
Copyright by Philip Morrison 1979
Illustrtions are from A Natural History of Termites By Frances L Behnke, Scribners's Sons, NY Illustrated by Turid Holldobler. The drawing by Domenico Paganelli is from the collection of Alessandro Tesauro in Biblioteca Natzionale, Turin, Italy

First printed in England by Yale Press Limited, London SE25

It's just about disappeared from our knowledge, I can't find any text of it anywhere on the internet, and only a couple of references to it. Print copies are rare collector's items. I figure it's profound enough it should be kept in circulation, don't you? There seems to be no one to contact regarding the copyright -- all inquiries go unanswered - so I'm putting it up here for awhile. (Of course if someone comes along who objects, I'll pull it down.) If you catch any typos or suchlike they are due to my scanning, and I'd appreciate you pointing them out. I guess the comments section would be good for that.

I DO NOT ACCEPT

2007-05-16T23:13:00.000-07:00

by Harry Tuttle
(used w/o permission)

I do not accept the death of my republic.
I do not accept that innocent children in distant lands must be murdered for gasoline.
I do not accept that people decide for me to know about what my country is doing.
I do not accept the need for mor parking lots and less trees.
I do not accept continuous warfare.
I do not accept that my government thinks it can lie to me every day and get away with it.
I do not accept that we can’t get along with every single last living creature on this planet.
I do not accept a unitary executive.
I do not accept that we can’t find better sources of energy.
I do not accept the No Child Left Behind Act.
I do not accept that tax money is spent on campaign conventions.
I do not accept that 9/11 was anything but an inside job.
I do not accept doublethink.
I do not accept wars of conquest, based on lies, started in my name.
I do not accept the lack of a paper trail in my country’s elections.
I do not accept the wholesale destruction of my environment.
I do not accept the suspensions of habeas corpus.
I do not accept a president who is less articulate than my 12 year old video game-fanatic son.
I do not accept torture. Fucking period.
I do not accept pedophiles in government paid to protect children from pedophiles.
I do not accept that women need to get married to combat poverty.
I do not accept corporate welfare.
I do not accept free speech zones.
I do not accept fear as a primary political tool.
I do not accept that all of my communications can be monitored.
I do not accept aspartame.
I do not accept signing statements.
I do not accept nuclear weapons as a reasonable alternative.
I do not accept the teaching of the religion of intelligent design instead of the science of evolution.
I do not accept an American aristocracy.
I do not accept that there are black and white answers to everything.
I do not accept that religious organizations can receive money from the government.
I do not accept the Military Commissions Act.
I do not accept the categorization of my people by skin tone, gender or sexual orientation.
I do not accept the criminalization of free thought.
I do not accept that we are hated because we are free. (we are NOT free...jr)
I do not accept a rubber stamp legislature.
I do not accept that New Orleans has been forgotten and left to rot.
I do not accept the lack of universal health care.
I do not accept that the Iraq War is a comma.
I do not accept the lack of a living wage.
I do not accept the reversal of the separation of church and state.
I do not accept that Al Gore was not my President.
I do not accept that women can’t make choices about their own bodies.
I do not accept the trickle down theory.
I do not accept that people who love each other can’t get married.
I do not accept the cultivation of a slave labor force in the guise of immigration.
I do not accept that our way is the best for everyone.
I do not accept that Kerry wasn’t in on it.
I do not accept that the people making the rules usually are the ones not following them.
I do not accept that we can’t buy medicine from Canada.
I do not accept that Condi didn’t get the memo.
I do not accept that this is a Christian nation.
I do not accept color-coded terror alerts.
I do not accept a President who is on vacation almost as much as he is not.
I do not accept more meat and fewer grains.
I do not accept that military service is becoming the only option for our young people.
I do not accept that women are penalized for having children.
I do not accept that the United States has a permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council.
I do not accept that education is not free.
I do not accept fascism as a form of government.
I do not accept the lack of basic supplies in our schools.
I do not accept a President who thinks the internet is plural.
I do not accept that Israel always seems to get away with it.
I do not accept monosodium glutamate.
I do not accept a complacent and subservient press corps.
I do not accept war as a business.
I do not accept that only one side gets a say.
I do not accept that a plant is illegal.
I do not accept that I am only a consumer.
I do not accept that the levees just blew.
I do not accept that it’s everyone for themselves.
I do not accept that you are so different from me, that we can’t understand each other, that we have nothing in common, or that we can’t see eye to eye.

"Harry Tuttle" was the character played by Robert De Niro in the cult classic, Brazil.<http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0088846/>. "Harry Tuttle" was the monkey wrencher in the government works. The 'real' Harry Tuttle, the friend of a friend, lives off the grid, on cash alone, and under assumed names.

LIVING PRETTY HIGH ON THE THIRD WORLD HOG

2007-05-02T03:21:00.000-07:00

So I was standing in my kitchen this weekend, moving stuff around. I picked up a 15# burlap bag of basmati rice from where it was leaning against the stove and put it on a shelf by the sink. I got that li'l deja vu thing, because it was so much like a memory I had of standing in a kitchen area in a Tunisian house, watching my hostess put a burlap bag full of couscous on a shelf. Here in Momma Culture's West, we're supposed to have fancy canisters for that stuff.

"Hmmm," I thought, "a little bit o' the 3rd world right in my own house," although it demonstrated my commitment to vegan-ness and my commitment to voluntary simplicity at the same time.

Well that thought stuck with me off and on over the weekend. By Monday I had a long list of sorta 3rd world stuff that is a daily part of my life. Molly started teasing me about how I could walk to the doctor, and I had money in my pocket, and I really wasn't living that far into the 3rd world. We laughed and took up the position that, while we are not exactly living in luxury, we're "living pretty high on the 3rd world hog."

Anyway, here's the list:

2 humans and 11 animals in a 900 sq foot dwelling. The dwelling is sheathed in lethal asbestos on 2 sides. The roof is coated with petroleum products.

No clear delineation between the floors in my house and dirt. (Those of you who have been in my house know how this looks.) All the dogs find it hard to clearly figure out whether it's okay to pee by the crack in the floor inside the back door; or whether they can pee on the slightly rougher planks of the back porch, or need to go the additional 48 inches out the back door onto the grass and dirt. Hell, there are recycle bottles in all those places, how's a dog to know? When it rains and the water is pouring off the back porch roof, the dogs find it very easy to make the decision.

Front porch is worse, off the concrete steps it's straight to a kind of mulchy dirt the exact same color as the living room floorboards. Now the reason my floors are so crude is because they've had no finish on them since the house was built in 1947, and we're only in our 5th year of remodeling the house, starting from its derelict, abandoned status. I assume you can find nicer floors in Soweto.

I have livestock in my house. A rescued bunny who lives in a big cage near the living room. There's always a layer of hay and bunny food on the floors. Since my computer is next to him, I'm getting used to the barnyard smell of bunny poop pellets and day-old veggies in his dish. Not much different from folks in the near east who have a rabbit or a goat or chickens who sleep in the house at night …. I s'pose there's a guy in Indonesia who has his computer in a similar setup.

I'm personally responsible for the sewage system and the water supply. I own them, I do maintenance on them. Nobody to call when they break down, just me.

We have 3 gas lanterns and a cardboard box full of candles and several paraffin lamps close at hand for when the power goes out.

Propane. When friends --Sarah and then Terry -- lived with us, just like any 3rd world head of household I was always hauling 5 gallon propane cylinders to get them filled, and then hooking them up to supply cooking heat and hot water to our little RV "guest house". Those cylinders and that activity are ubiquitous in the 3rd world.

We grow a significant amount of our veggies, and our medicinal herbs. Not everything, not as much as, oh, say the folks I knew in rural Greece who lived on an island and relied upon their gardens for half their pharmacopeia. We harvest the wild chamomile in our back yard all during summer. We make salads with the borage. We have apricots, we have grapevines, we have apples. Ed and Nancy supply us with organic veggies from their garden and the occasional happy chicken eggs. All without benefit of an "economy".

We cook with a set of Mexican blue enamel pots for everyday meals, just like they do in Oxaca. (We have some very nice LeCreuset stuff I've acquired, but don't seem to use it much.) My favorite pan is a $4 blue enamel omelette pan I acquired in Tunisia -- I've been cooking with it since 1977. I have a 12" cast iron skillet my mom gave me in 1967, part of the family legacy. I figure somebody in Uganda is whomping up dinner in its twin.

Our Cascades Foothills library is a precious, hard-fought-over facility that we as a little community had to build, stock and run on our own without any assistance from any government, non-profit organization, etc etc. – just like many 3rd world towns all of us know about. (We were allowed to "join" the local county library system, but they're getting the better end of the deal.)

I engage in non-christian ceremonies that give cohesion to our little community. Stuff like Winter Solstice bonfires, Summer Celebrations. Personally, I engage in an elaborate primitive technological ritual -- I am still measuring sunrise on the solstices and equinoxes and other times, ala Uriel's Machine. This, despite the fact that I have on my shelf a book that provides me with the times of all the sunsets, sunrises, moonrises and phases, transits of venus, etc., for every day and any place on earth for more years into the future than I expect to survive. But there are elders in South American villages keeping the same knowledge, more or less the same way. I dunno why. 3rd world, pagan ritual?

I can walk to the doctor, a block away down the rural road; she's not an M.D., but a "Nurse Practitioner" with a bit more of a skill set than an experienced Chinese "Barefoot Doctor". I guess this says more about the positive nature of the Chinese medical system than negative re the US system. My Nurse Practitioner is really very good.

I go to "town" (Eugene) about once or twice a month and acquire the necessities. Sort of like they do in the 3rd world, waiting for `market day' in the nearest city.

It took several weeks for me to diagnose and then fix the problem with my old pickup to get it running again, not having the money or a local repair place, or the wherewithal to get it towed to a mechanic. I can remember a similar logistics problem with the village truck in Korea. -- Of course it's my own personal truck, not exactly the only one for the `village', (and IF I HAD LISTENED TO MOLLY, I could have fixed it in the first few days.)

Now, we also use a ton of electricity; we have a very nice Ford Taurus station wagon; and I can -- so far – pay $3.20 for a gallon of Peak Oil gasoline. (3rd world prices, if you think about it ). We have the choice to avail ourselves of all the consumer products we desire. I communicate with my ISP via a highspeed DSL fiber-optic connection; I get my news via a satellite dish focused on a geosynchronous orbiting electronic miracle. In those Mexican pots, any time I choose to I can cook exotic fruits and vegetables brought to me from every corner of the 3rd world. I am very definitely NOT living a 3rd world existence.

In my life back when, and I was living in Taker, Capitalist Heaven (Vegas), none of those 3rd world echoes would have been present, except for the 2 cooking implements.

I guess the point (if any) is that little 3rd world variables are insinuating themselves into the edges of Mollita's and my life.

Howabout Y'all?

TELLING NEW STORIES

2007-04-21T20:44:00.000-07:00

.
"We can come up with a million ways of becoming a collective pain in the ass.
"Our strategy should be not only to confront empire, but to lay siege to it. To deprive it of oxygen. To shame it. To mock it. With our art, our music, our literature, our stubbornness, our joy, our brilliance, our sheer relentlessness — and our ability to tell our own stories. Stories that are different from the ones we’re being brainwashed to believe.
"The corporate revolution will collapse if we refuse to buy what they are selling — their ideas, their version of history, their wars, their weapons, their notion of inevitability.
"Remember this: We be many and they be few. They need us more than we need them.
"Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing."

—Arundhati Roy

Speech to the World Social Forum, Porto Alegre, Brazil, January 27, 2003

ABDUCTEE

2007-04-20T18:50:00.000-07:00

(a complete story with just 55 words)

I know why their spaceships are falling. Aliens with blasters came into the bar and did their abduction thing. They carried away old Larry Talbot, whose biography's in a hundred werewolf movies. Took him up to the mother ship (they didn't know). Now their ships are falling. In space there's always a full moon.

ABDUCTEE originally appeared in Comic News, #275

WISDOM FROM OZ

2007-04-03T18:43:00.000-07:00

Oh, shit, Sherlock. You always were [lost]. Hang some wind
chimes from your compass and let it tingle in the
pissing wind. We're supposed to be lost. Motherless
chillun. God likes it when we cry, same way we like it
when puppies whimper. We pick 'em up and snuggle 'em.
Beats bashing your head into a tree like you're gonna
knock some sense into something somewhere. Uh-uh.

We're here to fall in love with the world, as Rumi
would say, even if it's unrequited. Gotta do what
you're designed for. You can kill God in the
afterlife.

From Robin Morrison

TERRY'S RANT ABOUT MAGIC

2007-03-04T13:50:00.000-08:00

Steven Kayser wrote me about magic this week, and so I went and dug up Terry's old rant:

Terry used to laugh at the New-Age. All those witches and vegetarians, PC solstice lovers looking for the singular power of magic to fill up their lives.

"They know there's magic out there, they feel it," he said. "They just don't know where to look."

Patting the white plastic case of the burping Mr. Coffee, he smiled mischievously at the big joke, "Or, maybe, afraid to look in the right places; more like they'd be OH SO offended if they actually knew where the magic went."

" 'S in the machines, kiddo," he whispered, grabbing a mug from the rack. "The big boys, the robber barons, all them industrial multinational czars, that's whose got the magic. Those poor second-generation hippies would weep if they figured it out.
`
"Think about it," he said, pouring sloppily. "These proto-humans, waking up to the world a hundred, hundred and fifty thousand years ago, the magic was all around 'em, they could feel it, too. They were more in touch with it from the gitgo. It was just a question of finding out how it went together, what the rules are. They knew they had something, just had to work with it.

"They had the time, too." he called over his shoulder, knowing I'd follow him back to the cubbyhole faculty office he's conned out of some department head. "You think they just sat around those caves, painting walls and hunting and gathering? Hell no! Experiment with the magic. Every dig I've ever been on has some place in it, a proving ground, testing area, see how the magic works. You think they poured all that hard-earned knowledge into mumbo jumbo chants, god worship? Hell no! That came later, when they needed control of the feeble-minded masses (the same folks these new age types are descended from, no doubt.) The real magic went just where you and I would put it, too. In every day stuff, the tools and artifacts of life that insure survival."

"Surely, that's just discovering the laws of physics, chemistry, stuff like that," I suggested, sipping the nasty coffee.

"Nah, that's a chicken-egg thing, that viewpoint." he said, expecting me to follow the logic. Terry pointed up at the heavy wood and glass shadow box hanging on the wall. There was a series of flint points lined up on the foam rubber under the glass. A series, I knew, depicting the development of those weapons, from the earliest known arrow heads down to the last beautiful, artistic late-Neolithic points. Terry had dug up every one.

"Y' want proof? Do a wind tunnel test on the arrow-dynamics of those suckers.

"No, " he said, waving me into a corrupt naugahyde chair by the desk. "DON'T. I already have, 'n they come up unstable as hell. But they'll still kill a goddamn rhinoceros deader'n hell! The shape has to do with the magic, not the goddamn in-flight characteristics. Trust me.

"Bows, spears, knives, all the basic technology of your basic cave man, filled with magic. Oh yeah, the drums, rattles, all that shaman stuff, it's in there too. But don't miss the point, bubba, the witch doctor ain't hustling up some spell to throw on some lizard, or driving away some evil spirit with mandrake root. He's putting the magic into an atlatl so that he knows when he's got it exactly this long," he said, holding his hands a little more than two feet apart. "he knows the sonofabitch will work."

"You do leverage tests or some kind of calculus on those too?" I teased.

Terry just smiled and tossed a monograph toward me from the pile resting on the floor below the bookcase behind him. "In there somewhere..."

"OK, OK, but..."

"No buts! Today, ask any engineer, he'll tell you a dozen things in his field that work and he doesn't know why. Say, sequences of assembly that must be done one way only or the machine won't run.

"Proof? What are the mathematical probabilities of all the systems and subsystems on a Cadillac Coupe deVille taking you a hundred thousand miles, ...no ....TEN thousand miles?"

"Entropy, engineering ..."

"Bullshit! It's magic! Most everybody has a goddamn NAME for their car! Why? Just so when you pat ol' Bessie on the dashboard, and say ;'c'mon' baby', nine times out of eleven she'll start, just one more time. 'N' Ever notice how a car runs better after you wash it?"

"So what?"

" 'S where the magic went, my man, exactly where it went. Your hoogy moogy friends'll never find it out there at Stonehenge, waiting for the goddam sun to pop up."

I tired of it about then and we sat sipping coffee and staring out of the narrow steel and glass window, looking across the campus.

"How is Anne, anyway?" he said after awhile. I remember that.

Terry's rant is from Blue Corvette Betrayal

REVISION #9 OF AN OPEN WINDOW

2007-02-24T19:46:00.000-08:00

So when Van Helsing found your castanets tangled in my sheets the other night I told him about you.

"You know," I said, "I think that Gypsy Dancer down at the Dreamland is a vampire."

"How do you know?" he asked me.

"Well when I said I almost died, she just got that hungry look."

"Hmmm, if I were you I'd quit falling asleep by that open window," the Prof. said.

"But I love the fresh air," was all I could think of to say.

"It's all that dying," I told you later, the next time you came in the window. "It makes me depressed, but wise."

"Oh how sad," you'd said and "I will pray for you," then without missing a breath you told me the story of your latest meal or maybe it was your last heartbreak; I am too weak to remember.

"I asked you once if you could love," I cried, "and even though you said 'Yes' I still think you haven't learned to speak my language."

You just smiled and took another bite. I love the way your thighs do that thing they do.

"Now I don't want to complain," I sighed, "but the next time you take a jug of my blood down to your jaded friends, the ones who don't even know me, couldn't you at least tell them who it came from?"

You smiled that reddish smile and promised to but you never remember what you said to me or lied to me or didn't say to me the way you impale yourself on my wooden stake, I expect you to die!

But "So why shouldn't I close that window?" was all I could think of to hurt you with.

"It's sad," I said later. "and I am tired of people saying 'you've been dying long enough, why don't you get it over with? borrrring!'"

And you whispered in my ear 'That's nice dear' while your music dulled the rhythm of my slowing heart. I always know you're in the mood by how your wings spread.

Van Helsing called again last night and asked me how the salve is doing on those little holes in my neck.

"I think it's working a little," I told him, "That and the fresh air."

An Open Window first appeared in Dream International Quarterly.

COLD BLOW ZE WINDSAMARS

2007-02-21T08:23:00.000-08:00

Ze tommydawgs lay passed out behind Ed's bar, having half-drained ze barrel o' rum in zere quest to drown sorrow. Over ze tappity-tap o' Cap'ns Booty and Proto's resculpturing of ze figgerhead, zere was ze sharp hisssss of unsquelched whitenoise coming outta ze speakers in ze radio shack.

At first, Long Tom had merely repeated ze call sign over and over and over and over, "Tommy can ye hear me?" first in binary, zen spitting into ze open mike, and finally tapping it wid ze empty Dutch gin bottle against ze bare wires o' ze\code key. Zen he fiddled wid da receiver controls and ze hyper-spacdirectional antennae arrays, lissenin' for ze Pyrate Radio signal just off ze coast of French eternity.

"I heard it," muttered Long Tom to hisself (although Foo was cooped up on ze couch and OD-sleepy from ze drogs). "I swear to gawd I head it.

"T'was a signal. The Tommykins*is already spinning celestial vinyl and interviewing Keith Moon and Jimmy Hendrix on Ze Pyrate Radio, 50 billion watts. He's gonna have Lou Rawls on after the break," he said, to no one. "I heard it."

Ze empty bottle now jus' rolled acrost ze deck as ze Pearl swayed
back and forth in ze sandswells.

Ed tippy-hoofed carefully over ze tommydawgs, pounding ze last few
hammer-blows into ze rum cask lid which set it on wid just ze right amount of wedged crookedness.

"I can't taste `im." This Be said, catching a few drippy-drops from ze bung-spout drippin' on ze tommydawgs' snouts.

"Ye couldn't taste Admiral Nelson neither, they say, fer the first month," Ed said.

This Be shrugged and turned back to painting ze poem over ze barback,
sippin' ze Tommyrum from one o' ze silver booty cups she had fetched from ze treasure hold.

Ed stood back and squinted while he read ze poem to hisself.

Easy, after all

-I-
There's no surety in this flight,
Tumbling as we do
Without wings,
But to spread arms against
The brutal wind which,
Perhaps, will carry us.

-II-
When the sun swings low
And leaves beat against
Electric air with
The furious joy of those
Soon mulch, then
Mysteries are revealed

Here's a secret, let it lie;
The form is clear enough,
Betrayed by somber hollows
Light cannot reach.
Place your hand here; your foot
Finds purchase there.

A pass may be found
Through every divide.
No stratagem succeeds against
Resolute tenderness,
The endgame played by those who
Know there is no end.

Copyright 2003 Lisa Wilcox

Long Tom staggered in from ze radio shack and tried to focus on the gold lettering, "Who's Wilcox?"

"Who the fuck cares?" said This Be, sippin' some more. She tossed a brush at Foo, who woke, stretched, and wandered over to ze bar.

"Can ye taste `im?" asked Foo.

"Not yet," said Ed. "Too soon."

"What ye gonna do when the rum runs out?" asked Long Tom.

"Fill `im up again!" said Ed.

He fetched the crystal jar down from ze back bar shelf where This be had almost dripped paint on it. He turned it aroun' until ze eye was focused on ze barrel. He gently nudged the tommydawgs over onto a blanket near ze rail so ze eye could see `em too.

Then Ed slid silver cups down the bar toward Long Tom and RedFoo.

Cap'ns Booty and Proto came in from ze bow and quickly found silver cups in front o' them, too.

"Have some," Ed rasped.

T'was not a request.

------------------- ^ --------------------

*We lost Tommy at Valentine's. He was our soul, and a pyrate. The funniest man, the deepest. Cold blow the winds of Mars.

TRUTH ABOUT THE LIFEBOAT

2007-02-19T23:33:00.000-08:00

A parable about the ubiquitous "Life Boat" scenario every philosopher scribbles in his first manuscript:

The normal inhabitants of the lifeboat are a diversity of humans, ... and a dog.

As the water runs out, and the food is gone, the castaways begin to make survival decisions based upon the philosopher's vision of correct behavior. Some heavy occupants must go overboard, inadequate supplies must be rationed. How these problems are solved illustrates the utility of the ethics recommended by each philosopher's system.

Obviously the dog is eaten first, every philosopher agrees upon that. Then either the old person is eaten or tossed overboard, or the mentally deficient human, then the less 'valuable' person, etc. etc. until a few souls are left to arrive safely ashore.

But we now have a broader understanding of the universe in which these choices occur; and that while nearly all philosophers posit that there are no rules from the natural world that place restrictions on the *ethical* behavior of the inhabitants of the lifeboat, this is indeed not the case in reality.

As the thirsty survivors wash ashore in the nearly empty lifeboat, the beautiful goddess Mother Nature is there to greet them with open arms, celebrating their successful triumph over the ordeal at sea.

She has but one question, "Where's the dog?"

Unable to give a satisfactory answer, the lifeboat's remaining occupants are tossed back into the sea to drown in Mother Nature's cruel surf ....

THE RADAGAST CONSPIRACY

2005-04-05T18:31:00.000-07:00

THE 9 QUESTIONS OF THE RADAGAST CONSPIRACY
Who is the last Wizard standing, at the beginning of the Fourth Age?
Answer: RADAGAST!

Who never exposes himself to danger or discovery during the whole War of the Ring? Who’s nowhere to be found when things get out of hand in the battles with Sauron?
Answer: RADAGAST!

Who, by virtue of being the Wizard who dwells the most easterly, is the logical connection to the West for the so-called “lost” Istari, Allatar and Pallandro?
Answer: RADAGAST!

Note: there are those who believe that the beautiful sorceress Allatar is indeed the power behind Radagast, and that the proof of this is in her reappearance later in the Fourth Age as the goddess Ishtar. (Istari = Ishtar, not by coincidence!).

Which Wizard did the Nazgul continually avoid confronting?
Answer: RADAGAST!

Which Istari’s skillfull manipulation sets the two powerful wizards Gandalf and Saruman at each other’s throats just at the time when their collaboration might prematurely defeat Sauron?
Answer: RADAGAST!

Who taught the dark elf seductress Arwen all she knew about talking to birds and animals, and used her as his link into the Council of Elrond?
Answer: RADAGAST!

Who craftily spies upon—and manipulates the transportation of—the remnant of the Fellowship (Aragorn, Gimli, and Legolas) as he springs his plan to defeat Saruman and distract Gandalf?
Answer: RADAGAST!

Who sends in air support at the last minute, thereby sealing the doom of Sauron and earning the gratitude of the Hobbits Frodo and Samwise? Who may have sent the Eagles to assist Bilbo in returning the ring to the control of the five Wizards?
Answer: The only Wizard who speaks ‘Eagle’: RADAGAST! RADAGAST!

Who played the “long game”? Who never bothered pursuing the doomed One Ring and its cheap trickery, understanding that in the end the real power lay in a cunning manipulation of all the players?
Answer: RADAGAST!

Unanswered questions: What’s the REAL meaning of “Merlyn” in Sindarin? Did not Merlin wear a brown cloak? Who’s the only wizard we know of who survived into medieval times to control Camelot—at the time the most powerful realm in the West? I think you know the answer.

Tolkien fans, open your eyes!!!!

HANG TIME

2004-10-25T19:44:00.000-07:00

I was telling somebody (Robin) just the other day, sometimes you get this focused moment that files away an indelible memory you can readily summon up anywhere anytime. Maybe it’s a jock thing, maybe it’s a guy thing, but I don’ think it’s exclusively that. At any rate, the memory serves to explain and to comfort those of us who’ve been experiencing this vague sea-change, cast-adrift kind of emotional hole we had been nibbling around the edges of. That depression, out-of-sorts thing you might be feeling these days.

Picture yourself on the baseball team, any team. Maybe you were the last kid chosen in a heartbreaker, or maybe you were so confident that you just walked out and took your position on the field, knowing the captain would see it as fine and dandy.

You’re just standing there, maybe it’s even as the lowliest of the low “roving fielder” position they send the inept kids to. But here comes that moment—the sharp smack of the ball and bat as your opponent tags a high hard one and it lofts into the air. S/he’s already tossed the bat down the first base line and is running like hell to squeeze out a triple off the fly ball, which has a good chance of going out into the parking lot. But you look up, calculate the trajectory of the ball, take two steps to the left, and voila you know you are right under it.

Your glove is oiled and flexes just right, the sun is over your shoulder, illuminating the ball so you can see it perfectly up there high in the air, and you know you are gonna catch the fly ball, NO QUESTION. Everything is prepared, everything is just right. You are the right person in the right place at the right time. All that remains before you feel that totally satisfying ‘pop’ in your glove is for the three or four or five seconds the ball is in the air to elapse. It’s called ‘hang time’. If it was football, it would be the time while you were standing at the 5 yard line waiting for the kicked-off ball to settle down into your arms.

That’s the core of the memory, that 3, 4, or 5 seconds. What do you do? You stand there, maybe pound your glove a time or two in anticipation. But you have all this time to think. Everything is already set in motion, there is nothing else required but waiting ... and thinking is irrelevant. But you think anyway—nothing else to do, -- you got all this hang time as the ball arcs and then starts to drop.

Maybe the game seems desperate and the outcome too bleak to contemplate. You could have negative thoughts: “What if I miss the ball? What if I drop it? What if that cute blond with the ponytail doesn’t see me catch it? What if the exact split second the ball hits my glove a turtle falls out of the sky and deflects the ball? What if it hurts my hand? What’s for dinner? What if I don’t know what base to throw it to, after I catch it? What if ....”

Maybe you’re having a moment of sanity and the game is just a game. You could have positive thoughts: “The ball is gonna look so cool sailing straight into my glove. I’m gonna win the game! The cute blond is gonna ask me to go for pizza! I will even catch the turtle too! It will feel GOOD in my glove, my hand will feel heroic! I can make the throw to third base easy to get the other runner! Wewon wewon we won!!!”

You could think about anything. If it were any longer than three, four, five seconds, you could go CRAZY with all the things you could think about.

And that’s what’s going on here with us. The mess Bush has made, the elections, the war, the world, global warming, school inoculations, the low battery on the pickup, that unfortunate rip in the last condom, the price of energy ... all of it floods in to fill up our thoughts while we wait with our glove for history to get over its maddening hang time and get on with happening.

Whattabout Global Warming, whatabout the war, whaa the fuck happened to the democrats’ spine fer chrissakes,????? It just seems to be getting weirder and weirder and weirder!!!

.... and so we fill up this hang time with sea changes: I will be so damned introspective, I hate the way my tummy bulges, she might be pregnant, I gotta change, I gotta stop being the way I am, I gotta quit spending all my time writing meaningless posts to the blog, I gotta quit proving to the world just how crazy I am, I gotta start working out, I can’t stand this waiting, I’m gonna kill something, I gotta take a trip to mars, I have to change my life, I have to make my family change, I needa new car, I need more pizza ..... hang time hang time hang time hang time. It is driving us CRAZY, goddammit!!!!!!!!!!!

But
wait for it ...

wait a bit more ... (focus on standing just right for the setup to throw the about-to-be-caught ball, to fix the truck battery, to exercise that tummy fat away, to be ready for the news when it comes) ...

it’s all because catching the ball seems to be the most important thing in the world and there’s nothing you can do until November 2008 and until the ball comes down out of that long arc.

You hear the crowd in the bleachers starting to yell, you hear the beginnings of the cheers ....

... and twenty years from now you won’t be able to remember a damned thing about what you were thinking during that awful hang time, you will just remember that waiting and the fact that you totally reorganized your life in those 3, four, or 5 seconds. You won’t remember whether your friend told you she was pregnant or had her period, you won’t remember anything but the core of that memory.

And exactly the way that ball felt when it smacked into the pocket of your glove, the way you spun and pegged a perfect throw to third base, the way the blond looked at you, the way the runner who got tagged out looked at you, and most especially the way the batter who hit the ball stood there in the base path looked at you, mouth agape, amazed that you caught it.

There’s a lot of hang time left. Remember to breathe, don’t hold your breath, remember to enjoy the pizza, remember to think about how wonderful that sex was; don’t be in a hurry, enjoy life. All ya have to do is vote, the hardest decision will be whether the scent of that freshly oiled glove, or the magic scent of the nape of her neck is the greatest smell you ever smelled.

Soon enough, this particular fly ball will all be in your glove ... a memory.

It’s just Hang Time.

LLAMA DREAMS

2003-11-21T09:33:00.000-08:00

He arrived in early fall. I missed his birth, which was out in the hillside meadow sometime in the night. My first glimpse of him was after dawn, as he wobbled after his mom, all spindly-legged, seeking her nourishment and her protection. He thought it was spring, but then he would have, not knowing what had been changed from the DNA program of coming attractions he'd been swimming in until that first tumble into the world, and the first rush of warm milk .

I watched for a few days before going over to the fence wire and introducing myself. (I'm his neighbor, diagonally.) He began life in joyful pronking, sliding in the mud too near the tractor shed; and puffing smoky dragon-breath snorts in the cool morning air. Mom showed him where the good grass grew. Only ... the air kept getting cooler instead of warmer, and the grasses were slowing down for winter hibernation, not billowing up to feed his hunger. And this was his first comprehension that something was not right. I saw it in his expression when he realized the DNA program was not accurate in its forecasts. Mom didn't have the heart, yet, to tell him. But his pronking diminished into a too-early-in-childhood mature grace as he grazed. I knew he was figuring it out.

"You thought it was Spring!" I yelled the accusation at him over the fence one day in October.

"I did!," he admitted, "I did! That's when we're born!!"

Except for my dog, Darwin, the llama kid would have come a lot closer, grinned a bit harder, and perhaps taken the apple I held out over the fence wire. Not that the apple was very exotic, it came from the tree that grew along our shared fence line. He'd had plenty already.

"Where YOU come from, the days would be getting longer." I said.

"Where I come from it would be getting warmer! September IS Spring!" he replied, eyeing the dog. "Dogs aren't so big there, neither."

"He's a Lab mix, maybe some Dane in him." I replied, "I guess in the Andes, they're all those little brown throwbacks."

"I guess," he mused. "Mommy won't say. But she says it's a lot higher there. Mountains are taller, too."

"Air's thinner there," I guessed. "But September is Spring, that's for sure."

"Yes," he said. "Air's cleaner, I think. And ... and .. somehow I know that there's a cross in the sky and just the point of Orion's sword, which shines on Summer nights."

"Turned you upside down, I guess?" I said.

"Something like that, too early to tell," he turned away, following Mom back to the canvas-covered frame that served as their barn. "We might go back ... she says we do in her dreams."

In the rest of the days of October, we'd spend a few moments in the crisp morning air, when it wasn't raining, when Darwin wasn't racing about like a madman, searching for The Ball.

Since they grow up fast, it wasn't long before he knew how the world was different than DNA advertised. The smells, the sounds, all different, all strangely out of place, and .. not making lots of sense. The human children weren't serious enough, animals -- especially llamas -- were mostly a temporary passing fancy, not valued as they would be in some Andean valley where their worth was all or most of a family's wealth. Where their lives and their utility was respected, where they were not "toys". We talked about it. There weren't any llama totems among our tribes up here. Nobody dreamed in "Keeshwah".

Soon there was not much I could explain to him of the Northern Hemisphere. He did have a bit of a false start when he began to get caught up in some kind of mirror-image thinking that his mom couldn't talk him out of for a few days. You know -- black is white and left is right, that kind of bipolar stuff. Maybe it was the bass-ackwardness of the magnetic resonance betraying him. Wasn't where it was supposed to be. But he got over it and learned the northern stars.

I'd begun by teasing him, but in the end I taught him we weren't so different. We both were just born to a world that had somehow gone alien, foreign; covertly violating all the laws of nature. Well, ... violating a bunch of them anyway.

"I was a teenager when my world-change happened," I told him one day. "A bit older in human years than you got llama years." By now he would butt up against Darwin, and munch the apples and the sage branches we'd slip through the fence wire.

I convinced him I really could understand how disorienting it was to be a llama up here, I supposed; waking up -- your spirit being born and expecting to find the world tilted in one direction, only to feel it slipping in orbit, veering around to a totally different angle. Expecting Chile or Peru and finding you're living in muddy Oregon. No Incas, not even any tribes, nor even Conquistadors. Just pickups and beer cans tossed into the grass beside asphalt roads, not quartz-strewn mountain paths. And the spirits so far away that you can't even hear the echo of their singing, or remember the songs of your ancestors, their hopes, their ghosts.

"I expected to find different spirits too," I said. "Cleverness and cynicism are here where there should of been hope; tortured despotism where once was leadership; families, tribes, ... whole cities that "got it" about life ... and a future so bright you hadda wear shades. Now ... phantom wars."

"Shades?" he asked.

I shrugged, "Forget it."

Darwin shot off across the pasture, chasing something.

"And I'm not even half a world away, like you are," I reminded him. "But I grew up just the same, wrong world, wrong dimension, like a llama in the wrong hemisphere. There was something in those three bullets that must of changed the physics of the world."

"Parallel universes?"

"Wouldn't go that far," I told him.

"Goblin spirits cursing the land?" he ventured. "Maybe it's just that you northerners don't have the sacred music of the flutes playing in your blood."

I shrugged, again "Blood ...."

And I quit, staring off down the fence line toward forty years ago.

"Yes, I dream a different world, too," he said, "Nothing like this. Mom says in dreams the grass tastes sweeter. All I know is that in my dreams the grass is growing ...."

We both agreed it was still a long time until Spring.

I watched him as he grazed back toward the treeline. Darwin returned, and dropped The Ball at my feet.

BEFORE BEV

2002-10-14T20:29:00.000-07:00

Cast Your Fate to the Winds -- I vowed to do that the day I got my army discharge, this was after Vince won a grammy for it in 1962, (Before Bev) and Mel Torme did a great version (Before Bev) and even now there is a wonderful Etta James of it (after Bev) and I think you can imagine Etta in front of Killer Joe doin' it? There are words to it and the best singer of those words is one Bev Bivens in a recording from the We Five.

Bev is the unremembered, overlooked vocal power of them days, the best unknown girl rock singer. There was always some rumor floating around that she died in an accident or a suicide, but she just went on to another life as Bev Marshall and had kids and lives up by Joanbear. No one knows it these days, the ignorant music historian bastards, but Bev was the first rock and roll girl singer to make it on the charts (You Were On My Mind) as part of a co-ed rock group. <http://www.geocities.com/officialwefive/beverlybio.htm> You have to go back to Irene Goodnight to find a hit with a girl singing with boys Before Bev.

Before Bev it was all boys (from Bill Haley to Herman's Hermits to Buffalo Springfield) or all girls (Chiffons to Supremes to Pointers, etc)

Before Bev there was a law that you din't have girl lead singers in rock bands with boys in them.

Before Bev there was a "No entrance" sign on the highway, holding back Grace Slick, Janis, Stone Ponys, and the avalanche that followed, all the way to Abba.

[ Dissemble: Abba has a soft sweet place in my heart for being there on tape one night in a disco in Tunis where at closing time I whirled and whirled 'Becca Nicholwitz in a tight embrace in the middle of a candlelit dance floor while 50 muslim girls were scandalized when 'Becca and I kissed and danced away the last half of Dancing Queen and 50 muslim guys didn't know how to get from the mosque to that kiss, and have been resenting it an' blowing up Americans before and since. Abba ain't Beethoven, but Robin, there is a part in one of the Charlie Brown specials where Schroeder plays Beethoven as the little ribbon of notes scrolls out of his toy piano, and that ribbon of notes is played by Vince Guaraldi so you can hear Vince do Beethoven if you can search out the right VHS tape in the kiddie section of the video store.]

[Furthermore: You can also rent Muppet Movies there, including a musical tape featuring the greatest hits of Dr. Teeth and the Electric Mayhem, which is tommy's "that band below in the orchestra pit" featuring Animal on drums. I once filled in an application line where it asks you to list foreign languages you speak with Mock Swedish, bork bork, and got enough points to move on to the next level 'cause you needed more than one language on the application. Both my sons speak fluent Mock Swedish, and I always get a double take when I mention that my sons are Bill and Ted respectively, as if I was putting somebody on in Mock Swedish.

Keanu Reeves is not my son, but has good lines in THAT movie, quotes Axel Rose to a princess after Bill Preston gives him the most useful piece of romantic advice that has ever been uttered in Movieland: "Quote her some lyrics, Dude." I promise it works. It is the best way to make romantic order out of the chaos of love, except they outlaw love in Belgium, home of the worlds largest supercomputer dedicated solely to solving stochastic chaos theorems.

I wouldn't leave just yet, there is still fun to be had. Hershkeee dooo!]

The We Five featured Mike Stewart, as well, who was the brother of John Stewart of the Kingston Trio who was the mentor of Lindsay Buckingham; so there would be NO Stevie, and no Fleetwood Mac, without Bev having been there first.

The founder of the Kingston Trio was Dave Guard, replaced later by John Stewart. Dave lived up on Whiskey Hill Road which you can see from the trail behind Joanbear's house. I betcha you can see Bev's house from there too, as Joany lives at one of the best view areas they have to offer in all of Unitestan. I'm playin' a little Nanci Griffith right now, and I think I'll go have a bit o' Bacardi and coke and think some more about Ruth and how we all cast our fates.

"A Month of Nights
A Year of Days
Octobers drifting into Mays ..."

thassa nice piano, Mister

PS 6/23/07 My friend Robin sent me some very interesting links to add to Bev-ology: She has a Wikipedia article. And there's a nice Google video clip. And this great performance clip. Yum.

WALTZING COWBOYS

2002-08-09T21:06:00.000-07:00

It's a big sky. Even though Montana is known as "Big Sky Country", there is more sky in New Mexico. It starts lower on the horizon here, and goes higher, and you see more of it more often. The clouds are puffy-er, the stars are brighter, clearer, and the sun is a magical Zuni/Navaho/Hopi symbol, and it's right there on the state flag. Land o' Enchantment, I guarantee. What sunsets!

We are in the Llano Estacado, the "staked plains". And it's God's country, (not Allah's ... GOD's!). It's God's country because it is land that requires you to face metaphysical questions, just like those deserts the Prophets (and Jee-zus) struggled in. There is some disagreement whether the Staked Plains are staked because the Conquistadors drove stakes into the ground to mark their way across the perfectly flat plain, landmark-less; or whether it's just that the yuccas, bayonet plants and agave all send up these stalks that look like flag poles. I don't care, I always have oriented myself to a description of the land based upon Marty Robbins' lyric, where our hero rides away from El Paso out into the "badlands of Newww-mexxx-eee-cooooh!" These are them badlands, really, the Llano. Baked dirt from the original recipe. But at night you can see every whisp of the Milky Way.

Picture that starfield from Twilight Zone and remember how the camera pans downward to the surface, and you'd see my Momma under the stars, dancing in the street. Yeah, despite the recent family tragedy, tonight she is dancing to the Texas Playboys. It's the "Hot August Nights" celebration; and she and her compadres from the line-dancer class and the local Eastern Star widows club always have a dozen old men sniffing around -- all of 'em can do the Texas two-step.

The town has blocked off the streets for two-three blocks in all directions from the intersection of Broadway and Turner in Hobbs, NM. Tonight we're taking a break from the grief and the long list of chores to kick up our heels with the whole town. Bonnie Taylor has finished up a set of country wailing just now.

The prettiest sight? Take your pick: start with an MGM movie where the ballroom is filled with waltzing couples, and costume them in jeans n' custom Tony Llamas. Beautiful, a hundred summer-straw cowboy hats, whirlin' and bobbin' under the stars to the waltzes. Waltz Across Texas, amen. Or ... a four-year-old dancing on the empty outdoor stage during a break; her long, wild, honey-blond hair flashing under the spots as she tosses it to the recorded beat of "Whiskey for my men, ... beer for my horses."

Oh yeah, Texas Playboys, the last remnants of the famous 'Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys': silverhaired cowpokes playing pedal steel and singing the classics of Western Swing. "My Confession", "Dixie Blues", the Mill's Brothers classic Jazz/Western Swing crossover "Cab Driver", and of course "San Antonio Rose". Mom and Dad used to dance to them all through the 40's and 50's at the Maurice Club out on the highway. I have danced with my Momma this evening and "made points" for it, says her best friend. Then I slipped off with best friend's drugstore cowboy retire-ee of the moment for a long pull from a bottle of Sunnybrook out from under the seat of the pickup, washing down the last of a 'la parilla samwich straight out of the taco stand behind the stage. Real Mexican food cooked by real Mexican women who -- while they chop tomatoes and fresh cilantro together -- out of the corner of their eye watch their teenaged daughters flirting around the tables, (yum x2 ... for the salsa and for their dark eyes).

The Mexican men sit upright in macho pose on city park benches as they watch the greenngoes lord it over the asphalt, remembering that Cortez had it first. The names here are older than anything anybody reading this has for a name imported into the Americas: Baca, de la Vega, Domingues, ... Tellez.

The greenngoes are your basic oilfield trash (me too, really, I admit it, it's in my blood and I come by it honestly), going back 3-4 generations to when Bob Wills played at barn dances to cowboy drillers who fought Comanches all the way into the 1920's. Nowadays they drive new dually pickups with those big Ford diesel engines and red white and blue slogans painted across the back window so you can't see the rifle racks well. But they'd fight any "raghead sonofabitch" in a New York minute, I gare-on-tee.

The slogan they've settled on here in the Llano is ... United we Stand. With the U in blue and the S in red, stars and stripes lettering all along the back glass, sometimes on the fender panel, sometimes even on the tailgate. Just a little notice that they are available to "kick a sand nigger's ass all the way back to Mecca", as if you needed to ask. (Toby Keith even has an anthem about that, too. )

No question. Here is a fundamentalism to counter the arab fundamentalist, and then some. Ever been to Cowboy Church?

You thought that pistol-waving Steel Magnolia in "Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil" was made up???? My Momma is dancin' amongst a whole orchard full of Steel Magnolias, and if they don't all have pistols in their purses, they only have to say sweetly - batting those wrinkled old eye-shadowed lids - "Honey, let me borra that gun o' yours" in any direction ... hand outstretched. Momma's got two guns, a .38 Colt and a nickel S&W .357 Highway Patrol model with a 6-inch barrel and ribbed-vent sights. Both are home tonight, one in the nightstand, the other in the cupboard next to the china. (Don't worry, there's a loaded 20 gauge Remington semi-auto hidden behind in the curtain next to the front door, too. And at 79, she knows how, believe me.) When 9-11 happened, she could of taken the rat-shot out of the first chamber in the S&W and reloaded everything with wadcutters instead of hollow points.

So it's kind of ludicrous when Ridge and Asscroft exhort more "Homeland Security", now ... isn't it? You kind of hope Saddam or Osama or any of those terr-ists find their way to the Llano. You could sell tickets. Lordy.

I put a new roof on the well house. I cut her trees back away from the house so when the wind blows it doesn't bash branches against the shingles over the porch or the garage. I signed her up for McAfee virus protection online, and taught her how to use the CD writer. (I got a copy of the Texas Playboys CD for that). I made sure the pickup would start, and I put a new clamp on the tractor exhaust. She gets the Taurus serviced in town.

We ate barba-que at Wallace's, had the Sunday brunch buffet at the Western Sizzler with my cousins and all the after-church Baptists. We shopped at the Walmart Supercenter out at the new place on the Lovington Highway. My cousin Carolyn was in town from Dallas. We stood on the back porch while she smoked generic filters and talked about everyone who died in the last year.

I put new blades on the old bedroom ceiling fan and put a new one up over the kitchen island. Mom wanted to give me my dad's gold watch, which he carried all the time I was growing up, and he got it from his daddy; but I left it where it is, behind the glass in the china cabinet, near the Smith&Wesson. I'll get it when the time comes.

After a week of this, she drove me 100 miles to Midland and tossed me out onto the airport sidewalk (they don't let you wait at the gate to watch the plane leave, anymore). And then I took a succession of flying greyhounds, winging through that big sky back to the People's Republic of Eugene.

It's Friday now. I'm back.

Aaaah- haa!

62 Airstream Trade Wind

2001-01-02T01:07:00.000-08:00

DREAMING OF MELINDA, 1964

1995-01-01T18:08:00.000-08:00

It is an old dream. I've had it before. Mere reportage from years ago. Times were so different. I guess it came to me at two ay em because I saw a girl on the six o'clock news that looked like Melinda did back then.

There I am, driving that old Chevy with the wings on the trunk. Pulling up to her hastily-rented motel room.

She called me crying, not twenty four hours back from Hawaii, where she had been hidden from me no letters, no words.

"Please, I need you." was all she had to say.

I borrowed two bucks from my dad for gas and drove along the coast from Long Beach as fast as a 283 with a four-barrel can push itself up PCH.

She's wrapped in a dirty green silk camisole and half slip. Her face is red-puffy and her hair knotted and greasy. There is a wild, dark glitter in her eyes. And her kiss tastes better than I remember, better than anything.

I wipe her nose, and fluff up the pillows on the damp bed. She is compliant as I push her down into them. I sit on the edge of the bed and rock her softly in my arms, feeling the heat radiate out of her.

"My god, you're burning up."

"Umm hmm," she nods, trying to snuggle close, yet trying to fight off the old memories that are rushing back at her. Trying also not to let the fever win. Trying that the hardest.

I see the bottle of prescription pills on the night stand, the general first-aid look of the drugstore stuff scattered around the room. When I go in the bathroom, the pads lying in the wastebasket remind me of bloody field dressings straight from the battlefield. They are.

She looks across the room at me with a programmed guilt all the girls had to display back then, and said some words probably originally written for Sandra Dee.

"I couldn't have the baby. You know I couldn't." As if I had any say in it.

She has no one. "The guy" was some sailor out at Diamond Head. Probably took my baby blue Webber surfboard from her, too. I don't ask, don't need to ask whether her parents kicked her out or if she just ran away and hid it from them. It would have worked out the same, either way. There was such an inevitability about it all, back then. There was yelling, there was harsh judgment. And God forsook her in about five minutes.

She has no money. The last hundred and a half for the back alley was borrowed from Ellen, who wouldn't help in person, Melinda sobs. (Can't get too close to the "bad" girl.) But a hundred and a half is a lot of money, anyway. In my dream, I get to remember that Ellen hasn't had her own abortion yet, it is still in the future. I will pay for that one myself, and never remind her of ....

The present me, watching this dream, knows what I paid for all of them in karma. So much smaller a part of the tab than Melinda, or Ellen or Lynnette .... It is an ironic, rueful laugh echoing down out of a darkened heaven as I watch myself pick Melinda up and carry her to the back seat of the Impala.

On the way to the hospital I wonder just how far down on the list of phone calls I was. Never mind. I'm the one here for her now.

In the waiting room I call Allan with a borrowed dime. "How much money you got? . . . No, I'm serious! ...Well, take my guitar down there and hock it, ... yeah, the amp too."

The doctor comes in. An old, tired guy. He and the nurse stand there, both with that you-little-son-of-a-bitch look. "She's a very sick young lady. You waited an awful long time to get her here!"

He is into his "young man you ought to be shot" lecture, filled with his own frustration. He must see a lot of these, I guess. The lecture sounds rehearsed. Some look in my eyes makes him stop somewhere between marriage, abstinence and condoms, and there is a silence while the nurse shuffles the chart papers beside him.

I think about explaining that I touched her down there but never fucked her. I was just her first boyfriend .... But I don't.

He might even have believed me when I told him she was in Hawaii for the last year, and, "She just flew here yesterday to get it done."

They don't even ask me if I know who the bastard was that did the abortion. Could have been somebody they know ....

Al brings the money while I sit outside Melinda's room. He found his way without any hassle. He was like that in those days. He gave me a big wad of cash without a word and sat next to me smoking Winstons until I let him off the hook. There was all his paycheck, all my guitar and amp, and some more. He didn't even need the word I said to his back as he headed for the elevator. "Thanks."

She is pale and almost always asleep, the big glass bottle dripping stuff into her arm. In my dream, I live on cigarettes and coffee for those three days and remember to call my mom and tell her where I am. In my memory, I think I just wanted to, but didn't.

Now, waking up, I remember how the bill was so much money that somebody in her family was finally called and, despite her dad's angry threats, somebody somewhere paid it off. I gave most of Al's money to her anyway.

And I lay here in the dawn and think about her. Her sleepy smile and her cracked-lip kisses there in the hospital ward. Where is she now, I wonder?

As she lay there recovering, I really did ask her to marry me and fuck up both our lives; but there was this part of a plane ticket left and she had an aunt in Boston. Whatever didn't work out between us the first time was still there for her to still make it "not be possible."

"If the baby had been yours, it would have been so different." I think Sandra Dee said that, too. And she smiled like Melinda did then. And she almost meant it when she said, "I still love you."

Was that supposed to be a reward?

Over early morning coffee now. I think about those times. How I never, ever get involved in those political discussions about abortion. And about those fanatics that want to bring back those days; want to make sure Melinda's daughters pay the same kind of penalty for the sin of illicit sex. God knows nobody should escape that justice. I wonder if any of them had to stand there not knowing if the antibiotics would work or if she would die, and if they really want to have it done by coat hangers again. Is that part of the grand design?

For a moment I wish they could find themselves alone and pregnant, in that time, in 1964.

No. What human would wish that upon another?

Wincing through a cloud of cigarette smoke, I discover instead that I believe all those fanatics should, in the fullness of time, rot in hell.