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archives: Map of America

 

archives: Notes from America

25 december 2006

notes from christmas in the desert

One of the things I am working on this week is rewriting the wikipedia entry for “commune.” I did a wine-soaked 2am edit on it, which hopefully improved it from the two lame sentences it contained before, but there’s a long way to go. The following piece of circular writing comes from my research into communes and community. If you scroll through it, here are the things you may read about: radicalism, anarchist salad, community, solitude, disappearing acts, the desert. If these things interest you, you can attempt to read it. If they do not interest you, there are also some pictures of cacti and rare footage of me wearing a Santa Claus hat.

*

TUCSON, ARIZONA seems to be haunted by the ghost of 1968.

Dear, gentle 1968. I used to wonder a lot about you, when I was younger, your enigma: how did all your energy for change, peace, and love, metamorphose into the 70s 80s 90s and today? I used to wonder; over the years it grows increasingly obvious.

You didn’t have this warrior edge, this discipline; you didn’t heed Kesey’s call to “graduate” from LSD; you were middle-class and so you could come back into the “fold” anytime; you were children. Precious and beautiful but children. You enrages in Paris, you saw that “the structure was rotten”, but you didn’t know what to replace it with. And finally, you didn’t know how to wash the dishes.

Are you grown up?

When is one “grown up”? What is being “grown up”?
It doesn’t have anything to do with working in an office or having your own health insurance.
It is washing the dishes, keeping your promises, taking responsibility for your own life, acting with integrity.

*

loving the children: and going beyond radicalism

Read yesterday in the newspaper
about a benefit / educational fundraiser to raise awareness about climate change
so I dropped by. It was at the dryriver collective / infoshop -- in an industrial kind of space
heated by a woodstove; everybody huddled around in their coats, talking about how cold it was:
yes. It seems some kids are trying to go down to Mexico before Jan. 1st, when they change the rules and you need a passport to get in... These migrations, always; the migration goes both ways. I didn’t hear so much about climate change, but there was anarchist salad... it had to be a food-not-bombs salad, the jalapeno and bananas and green onions and celery staging a protest in my stomach, that special nourishment of the anarchist salad. Everything goes together, no recipe needed; just be optimistic about it.

And it was great, a free library filled with interesting books to borrow, but... I didn’t hear anything about climate change; there were just a few disorganized kids milling around, the unspoken anxiety about the turnout creeping around the free store, the woodstove, the preparations for the punk-rock-show I didn’t stay around to see. Stepping out into the desert night, some crusty figures melting into the side of the warehouse asked me if I had a pipe to smoke marijuana out of. Leider nicht. “ Sorry, I don’t.” “But you got a pretty smile.” Sweet, these kids, and I love them, but...

This is supposed to be a resistance? We are so fragile against the forces that wield economic and military power in this system. More and more, I am convinced it is impossible to change the patterns of society from the fringes of it. You can live a more fun life for yourself, but you won’t change the course of things.


“...what, then, is the intrinsic value of cultural radicalism as a response to a world which is rushing in some other direction? At its best, what it offers is the possibility of a short season of rare exhilaration, a ‘magic moment’ of suspension from the ordinary claims of time and society.”

“In the US, unlike many other countries, radicalism is of little present value in healing the external forms of the social order to become more just or humane. The mainstream is simply too numerous, too powerful, and too self-assured in its pursuit of the time-honored goals of accumulation and prestige. Of course we can go on working within the system, no matter how heavy the odds, to try to change the tone of American life and to avoid word disaster. The main value of radicalism, on the other hand, is indeed ‘cultural’ rather than political. It lies in encouraging us, at the same time, to regain some degree of contact with mankind’s long-buried capacity for ecstasy and unguarded sharing.” -- Laurence Veysey, The Communal Experience

Radicalism is more about forming community in the act of creative protest than it is about actually changing things.

The radical movement, the communal trip, the protest -- the wonder-surprise-ecstacy that can go along with it, when you feel really connected, when another world truly seems possible-- the temporary autonomous zone has the same value as ritual psychedelic use, in that it can give you a taste for what is possible, an intimation of that other world-- and the inspiration to reach it.

Victor Turner: “Spontaneous communitas is a phase, a moment, not a permanent condition.”

The temporary autonomous zones: these free spaces rise up, and quickly dissipate, as the demands for Rent or the Police come crashing down on their heads. And of course in those moments, these free spaces are worthwhile: “Conviviality is both a tactic and a goal,” as Hakim Bey writes. Enjoy the moment. Permanence is not necessarily important... or is it? It’s clear that any opposition to the institutions would have to take a guerrilla approach-- constantly reappearing and disappearing targets-- impermanent-- unknowable.


So, with radicalism valued on that level-- vitally important for inspiration and imagination, but placed aside in the struggle to actually enact change, what do you do...? with America, with civilization?

I don’t think a guerrilla war is what’s called for. It could be, if we had skilled warriors instead of children. This works in other countries. It won’t work here.

What we need might not be a war at all.
What we need might not even be an opposition to all This.
Warning: dangerous territory ahead.
First: let’s consider what happens after bohemia.

*

after hobohemia

-------on the perils of making your own way-------

*
Back in 1968, it seemed there were two routes: us and them, hippies and squares, radicals and straights, etc. etc..

Even before 1968, we had this. “Bohemian is the subculture of the alienated. Unknown in previous societies, it grew up with capitalism itself. William Blake and William Godwin and their circles are roughly contemporary with the French Revolution and the onset of the industrial age. ... From the beginning capitalism secreted, as a kind of natural product, a small, slowly growing class of people who flatly rejected its alienation and lack of meaning. Even in the hard days of primitive accumulation of capital, the system was so inefficient that it was possible to live a different kind of life in its interstices, if one was luck, well, usually self-educated, and born above the level of dire poverty.” (Kenneth Rexroth, Communalism).


Ancient hobohemia, the artists versus the masses, the visionaries versus the bores... enough of this duality. It’s simplistic and tired. Is there a third way?

Sure there is. This is 2007. In a multicultural society, there is no counterculture-- nothing to counter. The game is cracked, broken; we have a multiplicity of narratives; there’s no main stream to rebel against, it is deconstructed; in 2007 we are free.
(Maybe, no? Vielliecht.)

You can always make your own way, your own path.
But there’s a kind of trajectory that the life of the detached free agent often takes, which Veysey has observed-- this trajectory from bohemian community to the detached loner:

“...Convictions form, about they way to live, the ideal society, the true nature of the universe. But then the everyday tone of community life begins to harden. Leaders seem overbearing, companions gossipy and shallow. Too often one’s hunger for an answering warmth goes unfulfilled. The sense of aloneness returns. The group had provided no more than a respite. If one is lucky, one emerges from it with a few deep friends. But these too tend to scatter over time, moving off in different directions. Except perhaps for one’s own family, one is again left searching and adrift.

Eventually, often after more than one trial, the sense fades of a possible substitute community life to replace the unwanted life of the mass civilization. In their middle years, the members of this generation retire as individuals just noticeably outside the American mainstream. Perhaps they locate where they have one or two old friends. Thereafter, invisible among their neighbors, they drive Buicks up the hills of Laguna Beach or run art galleries only a few miles form the new communes on the New Mexico desert, with which of course they have no contact. Wherever they live, they keep their distance from all the main scenes of human activity, old or new. Wisps of their own youthful nonconformist radicalism mingle with standoffish comments about hippies in their conversation. Depending upon inconspicuousness and deeply ingrained psychic isolation for the preservation of their identity, they neither merge with nor in any effective way challenge the larger social order. (In this they are rather like academics.) The survivors of the older anarchist movement often live in a similar vacuum, though as individuals they seem more fulfilled and life-affirming than the ordinary run of senior citizens.”

In William McCord’s book Voyages to Utopia, he observers this same tend towards privatism in the former socialist bloc, when confronted with the “gap between the ultimate vision and the present reality.” “By far the most common response [to the end of Marxist dreams] has been a retreat into an exaggerated privatism-- an attempt, as far as possible, to protect one’s family, to cultivate one’s friends, and to pursue one’s limited interests.” He quotes a Soviet intellectual:

”Then what is important?
It sounds banal. Self-improvement. Individual effort. Study and though for one’s own moral development. The classical liberal virtues. Being honest and loyal and kind to the ten people closest to me rather than professing my good intentions to world history of social movements ... In other worlds, pragmatism. And an end to Marxism and other ‘isms.’”

In Hungary, I heard the same refrain. ‘All that is really important is love and compassion for those close to you,’ a graduate student told me. ‘All the rest is mere ideology. You can’t change the world. Why try? Enjoy literature. Enjoy the classics. Enjoy poetry. Life is short.’

Privatism may be a natural, even noble reaction in a socialist society, but in too many cases it degenerates into total withdrawal and cynicism or into self-destructive behavior, as in the alcoholism rampant in Russia or the numerous suicides in Hungary.”

Silently Steppenwolfing your way alongside the system has its attractions and its perils. It seems like the most likely route (for me), after the idealism of hobohemia has worn thin... but I remember all the teachers I have known-- lovely people, good-hearted and smart people, who I never quite respected... all the way from middle-school to the University... because they knew. They knew how fucked up the system was and they were just kind of making their own way, carving out their own semicomfortable academic niche, trying to reach out to the smart kids ... but I saw them as never really realizing their dreams; as not having the courage to realize their dreams. They put their dreams into me, into every other student that they thought had potential to create a better world. I have a lot more compassion for these teachers of mine now, but I still don’t want to become them.

This wariness of becoming them is enough to make one want to run screaming now, before it’s too late...

*

disappearance, and re-evaluating playing within the system

*

Is disappearance a valid strategy? Can you just hop a train to Mexico, hop a jet to Europe, give up this civilization for lost and find a better one? (This is a very American idea).

No. Look at 1968. The kids in France, or the flower children, either one... They thought they were building a new world, inside Paris or on New Mexico communes; they really thought it was the New Aeon or the Revolution or something like that.

Guess what-- All this doesn’t just disappear. On the physical plane. This infrastructure, it doesn’t just disappear... it might rust over the centuries, sure, but it needs to be shaped and recycled.

We are water, gradually shaping it.
(Supposing we have time for this process.) (There’s the rub.)

Earlier on this site, I wrote about detaching myself from all this-- the quest to do that--

Gracefully detaching yourself requires strategy.

What do I mean by detaching yourself?
I mean detaching from the old ways of doing things, so that we have space to plant the new ones. Weeding a garden, or something. Detaching from driving, from high energy consumption, from processed foods, etc... Staying in the system, but creating space to move within it / creating undistracted space to see what’s going on.

I don’t mean “dropping out” in the sense of isolating yourself and building walls. Firstly, it’s counterproductive to change the mainstream by being hostile to the mainstream-- to alienating yourself from the people who are swimming in the main stream, through your dress and attitude.

But secondly: it may not be possible to drop out in 2007. You divide yourself into “us” and “them” and they will always be bigger than you; they will keep building subdivisions into oblivion. Yes, you can drop out mentally-- and should, to a degree, to free your mind... just don’t “escape” into a drug-daze; but make space, open it up. You can drop out physically, too, for awhile-- there’s still enough room on some of these continents-- but if the sprawl doesn’t catch up to you sooner, the global warming will catch up to you later. Unless you stay present with all this and try to change it. It will take every one of us to pull this off, this transformation, this survival act.

from an interview between New Age magazine and Margaret Mead, 1977:
NA: I’ve seen so many intentional communities start and then fall apart...
Mead: They fall apart because they have no sense of responsibility to the larger whole. The ones that do not fall apart are the ones that have a function in the larger society.
NA: This sounds true to me.
Mead: We need communities that care about the problems of the world.

*

an alternative to resistance?

*

Maybe instead of resisting the system, we need to become the system.

I don’t think I have to write on the dangers of playing within the system: they are obvious.
But there’s an important difference between playing or working within the system, and becoming the system. In the latter, you end up the one with the power. You don’t just move within the game, you own the game.

Neither of these approaches are fighting the system. A war requires an enemy. And I’ve always been unsure about this problem of enemy. Who is the enemy? Well, Them. “They” are poisoning the skies and bleeding the third world. There is no They there. I’ve met some people in my time that were infested by demons, but nobody that was really the enemy; nobody evil.

One of the books I checked out from the anarchist library is Endgame, by anti-civilization author Derrick Jensen. It’s a bit tedious and repetitive, with some valid points, but this whole bring-down-civilization-before-it-destroys-the-planet argument has a couple of major flaws, including that we are never told who they are. “Those in power” are filled with the death-urge, to destroy life, those CEOs, those capitalist journalists. Okay, show me one. Where exactly does this evil lie? in whose heart? I mean, Donald Rumsfeld always looked demonically possessed, but he got the ax for it (or for incompetence)-- I’m just not convinced that there is this evil enemy out there.

All we have is patterns that need to be changed; a complex network of patterns that need to be changed.

Fly over this globe at night. The patterns you’ll see over Europe are organic. The cities look like tentacled nerve cells. Things cluster, circle, connect. Over the United States, the patterns are grid-shaped, well-lit. Over Mexico, it is dark.

The US-pattern isn’t evil, but it has dire consequences for the entire planet; therefore it needs to be rewritten. You don’t need a war to rewrite this pattern; you don’t need a guerrilla struggle. What you need is to work yourself into a position where you are a pattern-writer.

Same goes for the food production and distribution system... the education system... all of the patterns that comprise our fucked-up society. The patterns are just information. (Viral information, sometimes, but...) Data is fundamentally neutral.

I want to disappear as much as anyone. It’s my neurosis, disappearance; my preferred modus operandi; my favourite aesthetic. Liminality, shadow, keeping on the fringes. Jump on a train and go. The disappearing act is my favourite act to pull. It’s what I learned how to do.

At the same time, the two traditions that inform my thought the most are aikido and what I’ll call the western esoteric tradition. And both these traditions counsel something other than indulgent disappearance.

Aikido speaks of irimi: entering. You enter the situation and become one with your opponent, so that you are your opponent-- then you control the movements / with love, you bring the situation to a point where it’s not a conflict anymore.

Alchemy, the esoteric science of change and transformation, says:
Separate that spirituous earth from the dense or crude by means of a gentle heat, with much attention.
In great measure it ascends from the earth up to heaven, and descends again, newborn, on the earth, and the superior and the inferior are increased in power.
By this wilt thou partake of the honours of the whole world. And Darkness will fly from thee.
This is the strength of all powers. With this thou wilt be able to overcome all things and transmute all what is fine and what is coarse.
In this manner the world was created;
the arrangements to follow this road are hidden.


Become the system; refine it, separate the crudeness out by means of a gentle heat with much attention... first, become a detached free agent.

In detaching, you and all the other free undercover agents become the majority, and then it’s your game.

Perhaps we can claim ownership of it; this complex system, this civilization. Which involves taking responsibility (another one of those grown-up characteristics).

Growing up. Change of consciousness. I see it in terms of growing up because I am at 25, that age.. . where finally growing up is a problem, a call... But as a society, it’s what we must do. Move out of self-centered adolescence. Just learn to clean up after ourselves and take care of each other.

*

convinced?

*

I’m not. I could be completely wrong about this becoming the system thing-- it could an elaborate justification for my continued existence in a lifestyle whose values I don’t share.

But I could be completely right. In any case, it’s the most radical idea I’ve allowed in my head in at least a decade. What they don’t tell you about radicalism, about bohemia: its conditioning can be just as rigid and inflexible as that of the “mainstream.” I can’t believe it took me 25 years to see that.

The main problem I have with this idea about becoming the system, about becoming a real part of this society, about taking up ownership in it and of it... is that the object is fundamentally softening its crash, or avoiding complete ecological disaster by shaping civilization so it can continue in a gentler form... and actually, I don’t believe that civilization is a good thing. In fact, I think it is the worst idea we’ve had in human history. I don’t know how much I have to elucidate this point for my readers-- look at the history of civilization and the history of slavery; environmental abuse; empire-- look where the forests used to be in North Africa or Greece or Italy-- look at the mess in the “cradle of civilization” now.

If we become the system and nurture it into a more benign state, we probably end up civilized like Europe, like some global Europe. I don’t want to live in Europe. I like it better than the States, I find its patterns have a better aesthetic-- but it’s still working in offices, swimming in old quarries by the nuclear power plants, riding around in the park with the knowledge that you are not in a real forest, but a tree farm... no, it’s not a real solution; it’s just better than where we’re heading, a lukewarm compromise.

Can we become the system in order to guide it more peacefully into nonexistence?

Realistically, I don’t see that happening. Not in the United States. Maybe in some country with a stronger indigenous movement, where people still remember other ways of living besides this. I’m not sure I’m aikidoka enough to enter the American system without losing my soul. I think I am, but that’s a gamble. This is why I don’t live in the U.S.. ...because things here seem so inflexible, so rigid, so absolute. Aikido works best when your partner is fluid, when she knows how to fall...

How many years now have I been thinking over the Problem / the problem of, basically, averting a dystopian future of extreme rich-poor separation and ecological collapse / and getting nowhere with it? Lots of years. Here’s to 2007, another year of mulling over what to do and how to live a good life in the face of it. At least I’m having fun in the meantime.

 

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year from the hotel between the strip club and the Burger King, United States of America * and love from the desert, stretching beyond

29 september 2006

Re-Evaluating My Position on the Turn
After Some Travels Abroad.

Once upon a time, I wanted to escape the United States of America. The name of the nation became symbolic for everything that was wrong with the world: gregarious waste, video games about killing people, neon lights, large people yelling at each other in gas stations, strip mall parking lots spinning out in space, America.

“America when will you be angelic?” The answer was clearly, Never.

So I traveled abroad a bit. I traveled just enough to see that America is not actually the problem, though it’s easy to see why it can be (and is) mistaken as such. America is the most obvious perpetuator of the problem, but it’s just as much a sucker for the problem as it is the cause of the problem. The problem is complex, but it can be stuffed into the phrase "global capitalism." Everyone around the world, at this point, is participating in this problem (though most of us are getting screwed by it rather than growing larger from it).

Traveling does not allow you to escape it, but it allows you to see it from a different angle. You are careening in a crammed-crazed taxi-trufi down a dusty street in South America where people have been paid to paint their houses with bright yellow flowery murals advertising NIDO baby formula-- made by Nestle. NIDO ...es crecer.You are riding the noiseless tram through Mountreux-Vevey, Switzerland, where the streets are landscaped with living flowers paid for by the Nestle corporation, which owns half the town. You will find people all over the world drinking Nescafe, in third-world corner-cafes and first-world airports: the same game, ever-present, but some of us ride bicycles or burros past this shit and and others of us cruise by it in our Lexus. Variations on a theme.


The crux of the matter is this: the physical map is closed. While we are playing the game... we are playing in a system that has become the only system. “The only game in town.” The only narrative in town. At this moment -- “September 25 2006” -- do most people see the game as working? Is it a fair game? Is it a narrative with a happy ending? Is anybody still optimistic about a globalized world?

Well, no. Everybody I’ve talked to across the world this year, from Bolivian intellectuals to tea-drinking Turks on Istanbul streets to Swiss bankers, sees decline in the future. Not just for one part of the world, but for all of us.

Why? (Because we as a collective species like unhappy endings?) Because the game is built on flawed premises.

These include:

-- The system is built upon structures that are largely unplanned. Or, the system was planned for short-term returns rather than long-term beauty and stability. This can be seen most easily in America, where short-sightedness and the manipulation of the auto/petrol industries led people to build a society based upon automobiles. Then, we add short-term fixes like building more roads, rather than realizing that automobiles are an inefficient way to travel and revising the entire structure. It’s the same with cheap buildings designed for quick profit rather than endurance and aesthetic pleasure. (For another example of the flaws in the structure, see Jason Godesky's discussion of the power grid.)

-- The system mandates growth in a world that is finite. An economy collapses if it doesn’t grow, if it remains stable (stagnant) -- a corporation collapses if it doesn’t turn increasing profits, so it is forced to compete. This ignores natural limits: forests are cleared without time to recover, lakes are drunk dry.

-- The system is based on the concept of “borrowing on credit” -- incredible debt on the personal and national levels. We borrow from our future, from our children’s future; we borrow from the past with subsidy fossil fuels give us-- borrowing from thousands of years of sunlight and decaying matter.

There are probably other reasons why the game will break, but these three-- it wasn’t built to last, it ignores natural limits, it borrows on credit that doesn’t exist-- are the most glaring.

So what does this mean?

It means the collapse of this flawed system and the transformation into something Entirely Different.

Collapse... is such a loaded word; Rome and Babylon and Mesoamerican empires lurking in our collecive memory... We think we know collapse because we looked at too many arc-shaped graphs as children; too many times we were asked to draw the plot of a story: here is the beginning, the rising action, the climax, and the falling action.

From this point in the story, the turn humanity takes looks like a fall. In the future, people will be thinking nonlinearly, and it will not look like a fall at all. For this reason I prefer to speak of the Turn, the metamorphosis, the transformation, the change. Because I’m already moving, see, to that point past it. “How far will we fall? Back to early agricultural colonial America, back to the Dark Ages, back to the Stone Age?” Well, it’s not “we” anymore, I release my identification with the game, already I move past it, there is no “back”, if you are moving “back” you are still stuck in... that narrative...


The short-term.


I don’t see us with feudal states, or hunting and gathering, or caught in some terrible riot killing thing, at least not anytime soon. People talk about a die-off: sure, but what do you think that looks like? how do 5 billion people magically disappear? who’s cleaning up the bodies? A die-off is great in theory, messy in reality; it will probably happen over some generations, and probably in the “third world” where a lot of the people who are reading this won’t have to see it, if they choose not to watch TV. The ecocrises will hit the “third world” disproportionately: desertification, flooding in Bangladesh, etc. For the dying class, a painful tragedy; for humanity as a species in the long-term, a necessary adjustment.

In the short term,
it all falls apart, everywhere. It hits the “third world” worse; it’s different in different places; but no-one is “safe” from it, and the harder you strive for safety the less safe you are. Build a wall; you become a target. Try to fight terror, breed terrorists. Et Cetera. Now that we’re all caught together in one globalized game, we all experience the changes, for better or for worse.

We will see a depression in the US in the super-short term-- the next decade.
People will be forced to economize and Live With Less. The inner cities will continue to be hell; energy costs will hit the suburbs; a lot of people will be poor. From an impersonal, distant point of view, this will be a good thing, though a hard adjustment for some; we will prove ourselves adaptable. Either we will find some better leadership and muddle along, or continue becoming a police state under inept neocons.

Life will continue to be hard in the “Third World.” Western aid projects may get smarter-- microfinancing and drip irrigation rather than large grain shipments-- and resistance movements in developing countries will continue, but I don’t see major change for the truly desperate parts.

Europe will be a bit more resilient to energy crisis, etc., because it was founded on more organic patterns (compare the layouts of European human-scale towns and villages to the U.S. car-based patterns). There will continue to be problems with unemployment as globalization continues; the anti-immigration backlash and racism will grow as we come to the realization that Europe is a crowded continent and we can’t all be Europeans. Still, it is easier to live with less in Europe, where you can bike many places and live in a small flat and find healthy vegetables all over the place.

Faced with short-term hardships, what do you do? Get ready for your reality to change. You become “collapse-proof” by reducing your personal investment in the economy, in society, in the game. Self-sufficiency... at the household level, at the community level...

This brings me back to my vision of two years ago, expounded in my photoessay, America Before the Turn. I still think moving to a small town with your friends would be the way to transition yourself to the future while increasing your quality of life in the present, assuming you’re the type of person whose quality of life would be increased by more time outdoors, fresh vegetables, and making friends. It would also be neat to pool funds and get an urban space with an infoshop and a rooftop garden, or plant things in a vacant lot, etc., people all over are already doing this.

In the long term?


Either we will have a transformation of consciousness or die out completely.
“Transformation of consciousness.” How to talk about this?
I could talk about how anthropologically humans used to live in shamanic cultures, but the language of anthropology is too steeped in the game, and I’m more interested in the future than the past.
I could talk about learning to perceive energies and clearing our energy bodies, Awakening, etc. -- but the language of the New Age has largely been co-opted by annoying people and I risk losing credibility if I use it.
I could talk about rhizome and constructing a body without organs, but the language of the intellectuals and theorists is too far removed from the general public and I risk alienating readers if I use it.
I could talk about Buddha-mind and becoming a compassionate being, but I don’t know enough about Buddhism to use their language.


Really, the transformation of consciousness that’s needed isn’t completely unfamiliar or radical, though it might include all of the above: living in the now, living animistically, perceiving the all-embracing essence...

At the simplest level, it’s just about growing up. We learn how to clean up after ourselves. We learn how to think for long-term benefits rather than short-term gratification. We stop killing each other and holding onto grudges and start treating each other with respect and compassion. Simple things like that, things that every adolescent should learn when stepping into adulthood. We let go of the hostility of adolescence and mature, reawakening the wonder and intrigue of children while cleaning up our room and our planet.
We mature, evolve... or die. // We choose to mature and evolve, or die.
In the long-term, the collapse of the game makes way for this shift. Opening the field. My suggestion is still to gracefully detach yourself from the game before it crudely breaks apart; approach transformation and alchemy as an art; the hand that clutches develops muscle cramp... “Enjoy your day,” for tomorrow it will be different. As far as gracefully detaching yourself from the game, well, I will continue to post reports on how I am or am not achieving this, you can send me reports as well from your adventures; we will figure this out. (I suspect that it will actually be easier to detach ourselves on the physical plane; it's those mental chains that are the tricky ones to break... Freiheit, freedom, is fundamentally a condition of the mind--)

13 march 2007

3 nights of dreams

Dream: There were just a few hours before the nuclear missiles hit. I was coordinating for many people to take shelter in a school building. We would have to stay inside for two weeks while the worst of the fallout rained down. My concerns were many: how to seal the building from radioactive dust, where to find enough food to ration, water... There was a girl helping me; I asked her how much water she thought each person would need for drinking and sanitation for two weeks. "Ten gallons?" she guessed. "No. More," I told her, instructing her to fill every available container now, in these few precious hours while water still ran from the taps... I instructed another girl to return to the looted supermarket to scan the shelves for remnants; asking her to look for hand sanitizer... I was concerned about arranging people to sleep in the classrooms the farthest from the bathrooms; I knew we would have to use them and I knew the stench would be unbearable after a few days. I was concerned about the darkness, about the mental health of the people, about them starting to fight under the duress... I got someone to find all the paper and crayons from the art room; we would spend the dark hours drawing what was on our minds, having support groups and sharing-sessions, sure, some organized spaces to work through this...

*

Then I woke up and my first thought was, that's a silly dream, there's no way I'd want to live through a nuclear war, I'd just kill myself first.

My second thought was, I'm so exhausted from preparing for all the details of this nuclear war, and now I have to get up and work for twelve hours?

*

Dream: A schizophrenic man I loved once had finally loosed the last dam in his mind; fell over into violence. He waved a pistol; fired bullets in a wild circle... When the police came I didn't want to tell them that he'd tried to kill me; I knew that would be the end of him-- he would certainly die in jail. So I said, it's okay, nothing happened... waved the cops off... agonized over whether or not it was the right thing to do-- since he had finally lost it completely, who knows who he might go kill now / a murder preventable ... Yet somewhere in my mind was the boy who had been kind, before Pakistan, before the chemicals, before the madness writhed

*

Then I woke up and wondered what ever happened to him, if he is dead yet, if he is in yet another hospital, or maybe he is well, drawing somewhere, cutting with his mind

*

Dream: an underground tunnel led to a secret silent train - which took one straight to a sparkling pool - This all in Oklahoma City, the secret Oklahoma City, the Oklahoma City of enchanted subterranean gardens

*

Then I woke up and it was still the Holiday Inn with the expressway outside and Target on the horizon beyond (it is always Target or Walmart on the horizon) and the sky was grey and I went downstairs to put my Holiday Inn hardboiled egg on a piece of toast but the egg was old and it had that gray layer around the yolk and it was the beginning of another day in paradise

5 march 2007

America again, again, again
/ signs and symbols from her byways

 

 

 

 

supposedly, the largest cross in the western hemisphere

 

 

They want you to believe this is the real America.
If there's anything I learned from walking back and forth along this sidewalk of a country,
it's that this isn't the real America, the whole America.
It just looks that way from here,
where you can't see much else / because of the vast space surrounding you...

 

But we also have camels walking the Texas plains.

 

 

German bakeries along Texas highways: roggenbrot, pumpernickel...

 

 

 

Signs of life from the small-town yards of Childress, Texas

 

It is varied, this country. I didn't capture the Mexicans of DeQueen, Arkansas; the meth-heads of Hugo, Oklahoma; the chicken barns, the rivers, the forests... I no longer really want to say anything about this land. I've been here before. Just want to bear witness... like the buffalo bears witness, with these eyes...

 

 

...bear witness to, and document, the buffalo and his reflection in the window of the Ford Escape....

 

17 februrary 2007

notes from the rainforest / parte dos

I VENTURED DOWN THE HILL from my tent towards the house in order to boil up some morning chai. Sitting on the ramshackle porch, listening to the racket of the chickens, the rainforest canopy soaked in the pink of sunrise... and this spry white-haired man comes sliding down a pole from the second story. "Have you ever had a sprouted coconut?" he begins, by way of greeting. No, I hadn't. Well, it has a spongy texture inside, you scoop it out with a spoon...

Then he brings me a grapefruit fresh from the tree. An orange-shaped fruit he calls "pumpkin cheesecake." Another spiky, white-fleshed fruit I had seen lurking in the refrigerator (I am very wary this one will taste of the crammed decay of the refrigerator, and wonder if I can get around trying it). And a tiny red "miracle berry." "Try this one," he urges. "It will block the sour taste of the grapefruit. It creates a molecule that coats your tongue." (The science of that sounded a bit dubious to me...) But the "pumpkin cheesecake" fruit turned out to be the best fruit I have ever experienced.

OTHER NOTES. Quickly, now, before the images fade. Kayaking through the channels of a mangrove swamp by starlight, glimpsing an iguana sedate on the dark branches, to a bioluminescent bay where the plankton sparkle... "Dip your arm in and let the water roll down it," my companion says. I do so, the water glittering brilliantly as it slides down my arm... Yes, and I am in straight-up tourist land here; there is a group of German and Italian tourists my companion must keep track of. Many of them have never kayaked before and they bump around in the darkness.. They have all stepped off a cruise ship and have paid a lot of money to come to this bay. A lot of them have been promised by the ship that they will be allowed to swim during this excursion: the trouble of course being that humans swimming in the water disturbs the fragile chemical balance of the bay. In fact, many of Puerto Rico's bioluminescent bays have lost their luminescence (albeit more from boating and pollution than swimmers)... "Should I let them swim?" he whispers to me. He goes through this every night. If he walks onto the bus that the tourists arrive on and they don't smell too much of perfumes or deodorants, he compromises, he lets them take a dip... "They're Europeans, they probably understand about the ecology thing," I whisper back. We don't go swimming. But I am captivated by this problem-- this problem of having a job that may help destroy that which you love; this problem of how to earn a moral living.

THE PLAZA IN THE TOWN OF NAGUABO. We are in a small town; Valentine's day and the teenage girls walk around in short-shorts and red halter tops, carrying roses and other gifts-- they are allowed to trade in the blue school uniforms for red shirts on Valentine's day... It is a small, provinicial town. We go to one of these hole-in-the-wall restaurants-- like restaurants all over the world, where you point at whatever's behind the glass case, whatever they have that day... unidentifiable white root vegetables and some bony fish, delicious... Outisde is the town plaza. "How it used to be," he explains, "is that the women would walk around the outside of that plaza. And the men would be there. And if a girl liked a guy, she would drop her hankerchief, and he would pick it up... And then they'd walk around arm in ar, and that's how they'd hook up. My grandma used to tell me, 'I had some good times in that plaza...' And I would be like, Abuela, no! I don't want to hear that!" He laughs....

THE FERRY TERMINAL TO VIEQUES AND CULEBRA. A dingy building with hard plastic waiting-room chairs; all the Americans are standing in line to board the ferry, which is an hour late. Pale sunburned skin like premature meat-- they come in pairs, aging, with skin hanging off them, they walk around like grazing animals, the Westin-hotel-breakfast walk. They way people walk when their bodies are sated, grazing, not-quite-thinking. They cross their arms across their chests and frown. Sandals, tan baseball caps from Nantucket, gold rings and watches, hands in pockets of khaki shorts. The ferry is not there to please them; nothing can please them. Why does the system seem set up to benefit these people? Why do they appear to rest on top of it? They are not the quickest or the smartest or the fittest. Perhaps it benefits whomever is really on top to have these people strolling the marinas of the world... Perhaps they are not really on top.

4 little white pills in each baggie, head sunken into a giant body, the hunched black man is selling seasickness pills, Tengo la remedia he calls to the unlistening Americans who never see him, he moves from that hard plastic bench to this one, the Americans stand, shift their weight, stand...

After an hour I can't be in the same space with these people. It has been a long time since I have had this American distaste; I was getting along with America before this scene. I step out into the brilliant morning. Better. Eventually, the boat will leave without me, I stay on this island, maybe the next island is better, but maybe it's good to sometimes stay on the island you're already on--

EL MAR.

do I take a photo of the stereotypical leaning palm tree, bending at an impossible angle to kiss the ocean-- "My Caribbean Vacation"--?

or do I go to the beach where the locals go... do I take a photo of the pipe running down the dirt road, between the shacks, which pours a trickle of water out into the open sea as it rests on a bed of trash -- el tercer mundo-- There is that. But the water coming from the pipe looks clear. I am with a Ukranian woman and her husband from Estes Park, Colorado. The couple and I look at each other. Finally the woman speaks: "In the Ukraine we would swim in water worse than this."

Fair and balanced. I came to this island expecting to find a shadow side as dark as the beaches are bright-- with intentions to record this too, and the dynamic in between the two sides and the two worlds that may exist here-- but I didn't see the shadow. Of course, I didn't go visit the slums in San Juan or the pharmaceutical factories on the west side of the island... still, I found nothing ghastly, no catch... Paradise seems to always have a price, but what is the price here? People here seem to be pretty positive about their position and future; comfortable with their relationship with the U.S. Yeah, there's urbanization, talk of a water shortage, headlines about the fishermen protesting new beach resorts: same as anywhere. There's sprawl, Walgreens and Home Depot and Kmart to infinity, taken to a more dire degree than in the U.S. because this is an island... a shame that these patterns were imposed, the car-addicion, because with light rail and walkable communities this really could be paradise. Instead, you get this kind of a beach: looking left, looking right...

 

NIGHTTIME. The firelight reflects on the undersides of the banana leaves above, the stars bright; I have been baking plantains in the fire, warm & gooey under their blistered skins, and reading Mountolive -- the salsa music in the distance starts up again, the coqui frogs sing, a dog barks; yet it is all far away from the hilltop on which I feed this fire...

lovely, but...

Slowly I have a sinking feeling that the price of visiting paradise

is measured in parts-per-million

the carbon problem, yes. It was a cavalier act to come here, to take this jet across the sea, just because I got exasperated by the suburbs of the East Coast. The trick would be, of course, to situate yourself in a life that you don't need to vacate to feel sane... to situate yourself in a place where you can reach vibrance and beauty by rail, if not by bicycle or foot. This will be my next task, because I have the growing sensation that the universe is going to cut me off pretty soon from whimsical jet travel; cut off like a teenager at the bar who keeps going back for more... I've got to kick or at least transform my motion addiction before I lose all self-respect and integrity. I am just one more person helping to kill that which I love most, the varied and beautiful species on Planet Earth. The good news is, if I can come to terms with this and change my lifestyle accordingly, so can you: we shall all figure this out together, I hope.

 

17 februrary 2007

notes from the rainforest / parte uno

 

 

 

The steep driveway was piled with tires, aging plastic tricycles, the debris of several dead vehicles-- the house loomed on stilts, and there was a rusted metal disc--once the gear of something-- suspended from it. The sign read, Hit Gong For Service. So I found a piece of rebar and struck the disc...

I wasn't sure about this place at first, this "organic fruit farm" that supposedly let people pitch their tents in the jungle here; I have been to enough falling-apart hippie shacks with their crazed roosters and their debris of ages to know... how it can be... So I figured I'd walk around the place and the universe would give a sign of whether it would be fun or wretched to stay here.

The sign was actually right by the door. If you know where my mind has been lately, or have read this website, you'll know why I took it as a strange sign that spoke to me:

The sign was right beside a snowman and underneath a plaque that read, "La Villa Del Ojo" and "Perspective." ... Three people sat on the porch. There was a Filipino woman (who lived there), a man with a straw hat and a thin moustache that looked like he washed up from some African safari, and a gentle-looking woman with an accent I couldn't place. They offered me a fresh-picked baby banana. Chickens screeched below the porch.

"If you catch one, you can kill it. The tenters here the last ten days, they killed it. They go scratching at everything, the chickens. They will scratch and when the hurricane comes, the whole house will fall down." The house was perched on a steep hill. The Filipino woman was agitated about the chickens, while at the same time maintaining this complete state of languor.

There was a blue styrofoam carton of eggs on the table. "We went to your neighbor because he had so many chickens. We thought maybe he would sell us some fresh eggs. Then he gave us the eggs out of his refrigerator. From the supermarket." The man opened the carton to show the stamp on the eggs. "Eggland's Best. We had a miscommunication. I didn't want to tell him to keep the eggs, though, in case that would be rude."

"Oh," the Filipino woman waved her hand, "those chickens are only for cockfight. No eggs. He only raises those for cockfight. You know, Eduardo, who lives next door... he went to cockfight, with his best cock. His best cock. And then the gangsters came. Boom-boom-boom. He was sitting next to the wrong person. They owned the Bamboo Bar next door. They had to close it. Nobody left to run the bar."

"Sounds like being at the wrong place at the wrong time," the man said.

"It was because of his best cock that he went."

"Well, it was about the drugs, right? That the gangsters came?"

"Yes, always about the drugs."

... I decided that I had observed enough of the porch action and climbed the steep hill to set up my tent...

to be continued...

11 februrary 2007

my final comment on suburbia:

suburban maryland, february 2007: something about this environment
seems to neutralize life. It chills. With this, I go in search of an environment
where life is thriving; lush, verdant, diverse, brimming with energy...

1 februrary 2007

conversation overheard on bus, portland, maine:

...Yeah, I've got a date on the thirteenth. Got to get that vasectomy. I'm not having another kid, no way -- Yeah, Christie's got one of those too, IUD's -- But are you supposed to feel intrauterine devices? I don't like it when I feel it up in there -- She needs to get that thing moved -- You know you can't have sex for six weeks? Hell, I've gone three already, I can go three more. I could join the reborn-virgins club. Seven years. My uncle's on his way there. Just a year and a half more and I'll be a reborn virgin, he says. I mean ask any guy on this bus. -- Yeah, but if you did ask any guy on this bus, they'd say the same thing. Every man loves sex. It's just that when you start having strokes and heart attacks it makes you think twice. I mean I'm only twenty-nine and I've had two heart attacks, you know? Ever since the brain tumor. They let me take it home and keep it -- but I broke the jar -- yeah, that was a mess --

 

 

this is the magic mirror of my friend jason rawn.

 

27 january 2007

notes from the rails

...back to the edge
of the continent

 

 

The first inoculation was a tablet of light.
Tempest raspberry vanilla cream.
Dangerberry pie topped with whipped dream
There goes Nebraska, submissive under an unsurveyable field of stars.

"We're in the twilight zone now," the old man in the University of Delaware sweatshirt announces when we finally enter the warmth of Chicago's Union Station, the temple of confusion... // An upset blonde woman, indignant about the lateness of all trains, announces she will write the president of Amtrak; everybody with their proclamations and announcements about things that have no relevance to me, ladies and gentlemen, you are going somewhere, at some time, ladies and gentlemen, we hope it is a good place, filled with love or at least bratwurst pizza and soda pop, ladies and gentlemen, we're sorry for the delay... the blonde woman will write a letter every day for a year, she announces, to every Amtrak employeee, to every human being who has ever wronged her, to her ex-husband and her cruel uncle Bill and her second-grade teacher, to all the blank faces in the crowd who never cared, to America itself; she spills her six bottles of pills, fumbles with her suitcase; the man in the seat in front of her helps her with her things... says he might just snuggle up in the seat with her... she giggles, a giggle she doubtless learned long ago (and has not tailored for the ages)... I roll over, turn to the window, look for my old friend the half-moon sentient over the fields... lapse into deep contentment.

 

eventually in the small morning hours i end up trying to be still -- sleepless at not quite the edge of the continent but a drab square Motel 6 in Portland, Maine -- Well, but I was cheered by the cab driver who brought me here. "Just cruising by the bus station, making sure anybody wasn't stranded," he greeted me. I mentioned during the evolution of our conversation that I am involved with maps. "Dave DeLorme, he's a good friend of mine," the cabbie remarks.
"I didn't know DeLorme was local to here."
"Yep. Lives in Freeport. Self-made millionare. Must be worth, oh, 35 or 40 million. On the billionaire list."
"Oh yeah?"
"Yeah. You know he went out and mapped the coast of South America personally? In a sailboat. With his GPS. He wanted to make sure it was done accurately."
"Oh yeah?"
"Yeah. He's that eccentric. ...Now one day, Dave asks me what I want for my birthday. I said, how bout a vacation? I was just kidding. Then Dave calls me and tells me he got me a peach orchard. Out in Colorado. He remembered I was from Paonia and he calls and says I got a peach orchard a county over. In Hodgekiss... I said, that's the next town over. Forty acres of peaches. He remembered I liked peaches and so he got me a peach orchard. So I flew over there, checked it out. It's a self-maintained business. I just let the people who run it keep on running it. Puts a little money in my account. Some day maybe I'll check that account and find out I'm a millionaire too... My other friend, he said something about a boat, and Dave bought him a yacht. He says, I just wanted to take my kids fishing! ... Hey, you know Eartha? Biggest globe on earth, over there at DeLorme. Forty feet wide and completely accurate. Revolves around just like the earth does. You'd have to be eccentric to build something like that."
"It's on display?"
"Yeah."
"I think I might go check it out." ...What else to do? Watch a digital terrain model of the globe spinning, distract myself from the actual terrain I am walking... Yes, but that is for dawn. Dark is for the budget motel alienation, for regarding one's face in the mirror, for typing up these notes on the never-ending journey, for indulging in reflection or pushing it to the borders of your mind.

in other news, the Guardian obtained a copy of the U.S.'s response to the forthcoming IPCC report on climate change, which proposes research into pumping reflective dust into space as a last-ditch effort against climate change. ... I might not have been a good publicist for the train today, but really, it's a lovely way of travel that lets time and space and landscape and everything else unfold-- and it causes much less carbon emissions than airlines-- so if you can, think about taking trains; we may yet subvert a potential future filled with space mirrors and reflective dust.

19 january 2007

winter in the rocky mountains

culture aftershock:

in the Customer Lounge of a car dealership, suburban Denver, beneath blaring CNBC, and a teaser came on: "Signs show the climate is changing due to human-induced warming... ice caps melting, storms getting stronger. We'll show how you can cash in on climate change-- coming up next."

I was completely floored. In what kind of society is this acceptable? Can people really watch this and not get upset? I was so shocked I just kept on knitting (that awful response to the incredulous, just-continuing-as-normal, pretending that nothing happened...) What I should have done is begun a dialogue with the other three Americans sitting on the hard plastic chairs in that lounge waiting for their cars. From now on, whenever I see something like that, I'll have to open a conversation. I need to know if people are really okay with news teasers like that, or if it's the strange newsmedia that's out of touch with what the rest of us are thinking (though I'm a bit afraid of the answer...)

Europe's not perfect, but I can't envision a newschannel coming up with a headline like that in Europe. The footage of those storms was pretty incredible-- yeah, storms are ancient, they happen everywhere, but here was a relatively unprecedented storm in an area that's not known for heavy weather like that. The video of the airplane landing somewhere in Europe, swaying while trying to descend in the heavy wind, was particularly striking: not for the drama of a difficult landing (this is mundane), but for the sense of a whole planet wobbling-off-track, business-as-usual quivering, the normal order shaken... trains toppled, Deutsche Bahn out of sync... The task is not to be simply scared by these video recordings, but to look at the footage of the storms and say, yes, we have done this-- and now what? Perhaps the footage, the evidence, the documentation and then confrontation of what's going on will happen just in time for us to ameliorate it. What we need is more dramatic media coverage of heavy weather and global warming-- but intelligent coverage, not fearmongering and how-you-can-cash-in coverage. I am really moved to respond to this kind of warped CNBC coverage in some way; I just haven't figured out quite how yet. Besides by starting small conversations in the real-world; that will have to be my start.