Update

Feets from Pinkuylluna mountain, Ollantaytambo, Peru. I live there now, for about a year. This day I'm in Hauraz, far to the north in the Andes, traveling by 250 cc motorbike. I like it here. Haven't felt so free since 1966, or so alive. 

A little record of that is posted at Tupac Yauri.

Space Junk

This title has run its course. It started as a way to put my brand on a phrase that didn't turn up on a web search, and went wandering off for a while under that banner. 

It's not a lot to say. Most people are lonely, some are angry, and two or three are afraid to die. It's, like, the human condition, isn't it? Or  am I wrong about you? To those who can deny it of themselves, bless you. Bless you who can't. And to those who came here looking for someone sharing their own hell and found a smug pontificator, sorry. Good luck.

As for the story arc, the girl and I took our shot, then subsided to our original positions. It's what we know. We're closer than before because we understand more now and like what we learned better than not. 

I have a little place here in the imaginary nation of Cascadia, wondering if I'll get bored with all the green, enjoying the true dark and absence of white noise.  

Still plotting a, what, escape? A more joyful word? A move to some other land with other ways of being, but it's so comfortable here, and what would I do with all my stuff? The big leap - to just dump it all and pare down to a carry-on and backpack, well, I'd miss my things too much. But I'll take a run at it in a while.

Once I had the clothes on my back and a bedroll. I made a note to myself then not to buy the line that I was "happy," but, yes, I was. Torn up and tormented and totally in bliss. Because I was not afraid. And times were promising. Not to be afraid, that is to be free. I'd like that back. 

So now let this thing become space junk, drifting in the cold and dark of the nebulae, a monument turning slowly end-over-end against the background of stars, until entropy comes for the google cloud. Ozymandias, the silicon monolith. Laying hands here won't evolve you.

Keep moving, don't let the bastards get you down. 

aff.,

chip seward, aka adam seward

(for an account of further travels,) 
http://czypcamayoc.blogspot.com/ 

Manifesto in F Minor

fuck winning, fuck fad sex, fuck community standards, fuck girls gone wild, fuck pop-up ads, fuck lead-lined coffins, fuck the blood of the lamb, fuck eminent domain, fuck capital letters, fuck bailouts, fuck parking tickets, fuck starvation, fuck large families, fuck texas, fuck politically correct, fuck empires, fuck family values, fuck the categorical imperative, fuck cute dogs, fuck the council of nicea, fuck bad movie science, fuck a sense of entitlement, fuck her new shoes and the coffeepot, fuck drab colors, fuck reality shows, fuck ambition, fuck the great pacific trash patch, fuck proper names, fuck laws against suicide, fuck money, fuck hijacked revelations, fuck hijacked revolutions, copulate pedantry, fuck concrete, fuck muscle cars, fuck standards of beauty, fuck self-family-state-nation, fuck b-flat major, fuck harley davidson, fuck pierced tongues, fuck the war on drugs, fuck lèse majesté, fuck poetry in the new yorker, fuck positive thinking, fuck certainty, fuck weak will, fuck the electoral college, fuck cruelty, fuck obscenity, fuck group hugs, fuck haditha, fuck aristocracy, frack euphemisms, fuck feeling bad, fuck all forms of confirmation bias, fuck thongs, fuck paper cuts, fuck at&t, fuck high heels, fuck billboards, fuck laugh tracks, fuck repetition, fuck repetition, fuck sanctimony, fuck the rule against split infinitives, fuck looting, fuck sneakiness, fuck american exceptionalism, fuck boredom, fuck neoclassical beaux arts, fuck huitzilopochtli, fuck romanticism, fuck progress, fuck inappropriate language, fuck our lord who art in heaven, fuck scoobie doo, fuck friday, fuck me, fuck legally protected collectivist hierarchies, fuck cold wet feet, fuck in god we trust, fuck action movies, fuck bank of america, fuck lipstick, screw henry f. phillips, fuck iraneus, fuck you, fuck fuckity fuck fuck, fuck packaging, fuck zeus, fuck borders, fuck the ku klux klan, fuck the afl-cio, fuck me, fuck 1978, fuck trader joe’s, fuck tv sex, fuck gaia, fuck the number 2, fuck goatees, fuck mistaking fear for love, fuck droit de seigneur, fuck the top ten, fuck them, fuck pragmatism, fuck imperial measurement, fuck social darwinism, fuck psychomedication, bugger sodomy, fuck me, fuck moloch, fuck anarchy, fuck ontology, fuck military adventurism, fuck yhwh, fuck chastity, fuck prisons, fuck this, fuck low-carb diet, fuck dropping things, fuck tamurlane, fuck pinpoint pupils, fuck polarity, fuck the epilogue to war and peace part 2, fuck these cords everywhere, fuck allah, fuck paypal for selling out wikileaks, fuck drone attacks, fuck slimfast for fucking the quantity/price ratio, fuck golf, fuck atv’s suv’s and snowmobiles, fuck spanogyny, fuck fake orgasms, fuck attitudes, fuck preferring vinyl to cd, fuck flattening of the affect, fuck summer blockbusters, fuck corrupt bureaucrats, fuck rape is rape, fuck odin, fuck the police of every nation, fuck huáqueros, fuck it, fuck banning hemp paper, fuck criminalizing hallucinogens, fuck clearcutting, fuck all three tiglath pilesers, fuck badly spelled racist web comments, fuck mistaking greed for love, fuck cop shows, fuck not having my own space/timeship, fuck not loving everything, fuck homeland security, fuck inflation, fuck string theory, fuck deforestation, fuck using “fuck” to mean fuck things, fuck all eight henrys including V, fuck resentment, fuck seven billion homo sapiens sapiens and counting on 510 million km2, fuck curtis lemay, fuck contempt for solitude, fuck sharing backstabbing gossip only upon sworn silence, fuck extrajudicial arrest and execution, fuck the lesser of two weevils, fuck embarrassment, fuck the death of the oceans, fuck sushi, fuck osmophobia, fuck forgetting to breathe, fuck pantyhose, fuck making america as wicked as the rest, fuck that I walk on by, fuck fucking with the aurora borealis, fuck banning huckleberry finn, fuck mistaking the directive to pair for love, fuck being whole for a few minutes in a lifetime only, fuck hizbollah, fuck recycled air, fuck this hypnotic state, fuck the theory that war gives birth to civilization, fuck loneliness, fuck nudity laws, fuck the conquest of peru, ffuck diplasiasmus, fuck envy, fuck conspicuous consumption, fuck fedoras, fuck negativity, fuck powerpoint, fuck rote apologies, fuck smallpox blankets, fuck the death of the family farm, fuck nato, fuck twitter, fuck oppositional defiant disorder: the concept, fuck high-school football, fuck boob jobs, fuck quotation marks inside the period, fuck robert lowth, fuck logging on public land, fuck cowboy hats, fuck the vertical society, fuck psychological entropy, fuck cheap nose hair clippers, fuck books I forget I’ve already read, fuck wanting time to pass faster, fuck car alarms, fuck the nuclear family, fuck raping poor countries for resources, fuck love vs. freedom, fuck the two-party system, fuck water shortage, fuck fear, fuck change of venue, fuck coordinated universal time all night long, fuck everything we love and will lose, fuck the ardening of the hearteries, fuck parole boards, fuck inflation of tuition, fuck the american consumer farms, fuck income disparity, fuck arrogance, fuck false humility, fuck rage, fuck hypoxic oceans, fuck peremptory challenge, fuck that these sweatpants have no pockets, fuck ads on gmail, fuck vaguely uneasy dreams, fuck the fences along every road, fuck that my balding bothers me, fuck that you are hurting, fuck volunteerism, fuck that it’s 8:59, fuck forgetting what it felt like, fuck slyness, fuck lying to children, fuck manning up, fuck american idol, fuck canned green beans, fuck triumph, fuck industrial farming, fuck the patriot act, fuck organized sports, fuck strip mining, fuck cliques, fuck nostalgia, fuck victimless crimes, fuck self abasement, fuck misinformation, fuck plastic bags, fuck greed, fuck that freedom and liberty are political opposites, fuck bullies, fuck the nsa, fuck activism, fuck chronometry, fuck antiwar movies, fuck vanity, fuck tyranny, fuck raiding pensions, fuck support our troops, fuck judicial instruction, fuck parental ownership, fuck video surveillance, fuck predestination, fuck being a team player, fuck diminishing returns, fuck explosive reactive armor, fuck my country right or wrong, fuck naming generations, fuck mall rats, fuck theocracy, fuck the defeat of the impulse to freedom in america, fuck the shadow lords who killed it, fuck the boot stamping on a human face forever, fuck losing, fuck despair, unfuck now


From 12/17/11

Love versus Freedom

What did the zen monk say to the hotdog vendor?

"Make me one with everything."

If the mystics are right, there is a place you can (not being) be where all things are one and there is no opposition. Where we live, however, existence depends upon polarity. 

Here-there, this-that, on-off, us-them, light-dark, I-thou, up-down, pleasure-pain, angel-demon, yin-yang, pretty-ugly, true-false, zero-one, every form of duality. Without contrast, without comparison, there is no consciousness and without awareness there is no existence. 

So what? Got me there. It doesn't matter, because no matter what you do, it will all turn out that way anyway. Or so the Acid God informed me on my Alan Watts trip in '68. But thrashing through the underbrush of everyday life, figuring out what's at the other end of every stick we're pulling or pushing is how we get things done.

My life has generated its own particular opposite: freedom and love. 

The conventional utterance goes, "the opposite of love isn't hate, it is indifference." Maybe. I'm indifferent to that; in fact, I'd say overall that love's antipode is fear. To me, it's being free.

I started a post under this title a while back, but abandoned it because, A, it didn't really bother me at the time, and B, it struck me that it might not be true. For me, as I go, yes, but intrinsically? Isn't the world full of people for whom this conflict doesn't exist because all they want is to love and be loved?  For whom love is freedom from all the dark and chill lurking outside the fire circle of their intimacy? So I let it go.

Okay. Then things happen. First, I get free. And it feels good. God almighty, free at last. No one to answer to, nothing to stop me, I've got the gas and the cash, places to go and plans I can change on a whim.  

Then...here's a 90-second love story.

1967, New York City, I see a Canadian girl coming across Washington Square. This is love. A few years on, she gets distracted by shiny things - like a career - and drifts off. I remain constant, in my center, thinking that some day we will die in each other's arms. A life goes by. At last, I give up. I accept that it will never be. I make plans to leave it all behind and ramble. I go north one last time to say goodbye. With the pressure gone, we are at peace. Then, on the last hour of the last day, she discovers she loves me. She has always loved me. I carry her to bed. Just a slight twinge in my lower back, thanks. 

Is that 90 seconds? 

Now there is a dilemma. On one end of the stick, my plans to go free. On the other, my life's love. 

Can't I have both? I want both. Maybe I can have both.

I go for a road trip with Tom, one of my three friends, to camp on the beach at Point Reyes, and he has a sharp eye for the essence. His questions bring me up short, wipe the Vaseline off the lens. 

Can't have both. Sorry. If you leave her behind, you lose her. She knows what she's costing you, what she's done to you, and she won't lay down any ultimatums. Go ahead, South America, adios, I'll be here when you come back. 

But free means you don't have to come back. Free means there's no one left behind. Free means there's only you and whoever you meet on the trail. Free means love is left behind.

It feels fine to feel free. But you know what? I'll take the love. I've stood on high ground stunned by the radiance of the world around, feet on the earth head in the sky and all open before me, and only one worm in the apple. No one there to share. No one to say, "look at that." 

The message from the black planet: I don't want to be alone.  Given a choice, I choose communion. 

Maybe it won't work. Of course. Given my history, and for that matter, hers - neither of us ever married - that's understood. Sunt lacrimae rerum, old son. 

So I checked out of Hotel California, set up a household in northern Washington - the World's Longest Unguarded Border rations me six months out of a year in Canada - according to my criteria: in the wild, by living water, with stars, dark, silence - on Beaver Pond Trail - and then came north to this homestead up Vancouver Island to see what we can do.

As for the validity of that dichotomy, love v. freedom, well yeah, you're always free if what you want is what they give you. Arbeit macht frei. So if all you want is to snuggle with your honey bunny you won't feel the shackles. But if you wake up one morning with an urge to step out onto the road and never come back, you will understand.

I have that urge. Always have, always will. But I know how to choose. And sometimes we can step out onto that road kinda together.

Oh wow Oh wow Oh wow

Said Steven Jobs, and died.

I like those Last Words. They kind of equilibrate "The Horror! The Horror!" And, plant a flag for the long-hair hippie freaks driven from history by orchestrated mockery. Nous vivons, connards. At a small remove, I like the Occupy 99%ers too; no leaders, no lists, and though the Syrians make us look pampered, the 99%s show some grit.

While I'm all sunny side up here, the elections swung our...when I'm feeling summery there's an "us"...way a little; the Mississippi ovum bill lost, a virulent anti-union move got quashed in Ohio…the cracker bully governor of Arizona got booted…

And that’s how the waltz dips and whirls, that’s what keeps us playing the game, “Ooo! Ooo! Ooo! It’s our turn now!” But there is no Us and it’s not a turn.

These are times to remember that we're living in history. To read Ecclesiastes. It is always the Dark Ages. We're always in Uruk, or Chavin de Huantar, and the sparks fly upward. And if sometimes a beam of meta-light comes through the crack in Everything from the Total Other and lights up you and the few around you, if for a moment there's eternity and love without object or ownership, if gravity recedes and vision expands...I don't know what to say...dig it, daddy-o.

originally 11/10/11

Under Different Skies

This is great country for old men. That's why I've got to get out. There's not much time left. How long before entropy sucks out the last of the supernova of youth? How long before swagger turns to hobble?

Ten to fifteen years.

I did my time in the boredom mines, I got my kick in the butt seven months before vesting for a pension. I staggered blindly into a hundred and some $k in a 401k and a marginal income from Social Security and a little stipend from an old job.

Now I want to ramble. I bitch about what's happened to the spirit of the land, it's time to put my feet where my mouth is. Wait, did I say that right? It's time to live up to it. 

I'm free. All that solitary living just paid off: I owe nobody what I do next. I answer to no one but myself. 

I'm bored here. I don't approve of this place any more. 

Most of all, I want to live again; to step into space, to walk barefoot out onto the road. I want to walk under different skies. To take risks. To be free. To travel with an eye to my next place to be. Not as tourist, as somebody there. To ask: "What's here? What if I stay?"

To not waste the rest of my time in comfortable oblivion.

And, well, to make that yankee dollar work. 

South America.There's not so much to buy down there. Out of the consumer culture. A different way to live. Being poor isn't a social crime. And there are my old friends the Incas.

Two concepts:

Psychological entropy is the process where each change leaves less energy for the next. 

I've been lucky; I still have the juice to turn the engine over, if I'm willing to hit the ignition.

Subjective Time is the formula by which each objective unit of time is measured against the number of those units lived. They calculate that it seems to increase at the square root of your age. To a baby two minutes old  a minute is half his life and seems that way. Remember when an hour in school seemed never to end? Now I live on fast forward.

Now or never. But it takes preparation, to organize and offload a lifetime. What to leave behind? When you're never coming back? 

And do you really want to give it up, all the comfort, the familiarity, the life you've built out what you earned and desired, to go tilting windmills in some alien place?

It would be so easy to stay. Such a relief.

Such a betrayal, such a cowardice, such a question never answered.

Look. I have this rent controlled place, been there nigh unto seventeen years. First time I saw it I said, "I'm staying here until I die. Or leave California." Go, you can't come back.

Ecuador. That's what I'm thinking. To start out. I've been there, I liked it. I liked the people, the land. Then try Peru, where all the ruins are. A little edgier. Maybe when I get too old to fuck with fate, France; if my money's still good. 

Those are different skies. Different people. Different mountains, jungles, coasts. Different sense of time. When I look into their eyes I won't be able to see the back of their skull. 

To leave behind all of this money. This Babylonian opulence. The freeways, the new, big cars; the clean restrooms. This Best Western south of Portland with two double beds, an HDTV, immaculate porcelain, fresh paint. 

Remember that hotel room in Pillaro, in the Andes? No heat? Just a stack of thick woolen blankets. No electricity; a candle. You bed down when the sun sets. Which place brings better sleep?

Remember getting back to the states, sick, open sores festering from a bull's horn and bug bites? The relief of clean streets and rich people who think they are poor. 

Well, that was an adventure. This is life. Fuck J. Alfred Prufrock. Fuck the peach. I'm getting out of here.

...and maybe - at the very end - if anyone's left - maybe come back to die. 

And maybe bloody not.



"Under different skies" - the phrase seems to trace back to James George Frazer, in The Golden Bough, 1922.

Checking Out of Hotel California

You can check out anytime you like, the song goes, but you can never leave.

That's what scares me. 

I've promised myself I'll walk under different skies. I've promised myself another walkabout - with no end in sight - before the end of sight. 

Now that I've been RIF'd (Requiescat in Fuck off) I'm both at liberty and required to answer to that. 

Free at last, god almighty, free at last. After all that long gray corridor. Free, and with, against all justice, enough for food, shelter, and broadband. 

And places to go.

But it would be so easy just to stay; the faintly magical little penthouse apartment, the familiar streets, and play Civ V, then VI, then XIX, until it's time to walk on three legs to meet the sphinx.

Been here in Hotel California - standing in that shaft of light - but for the occasional year or so - since before Mario Savio publicly underestimated the gears of the machine.

Heard that tune for the first time waiting for a train out of Aguas Calientes, Peru.

You can check out anytime you like, but you can never leave.

So easy to stay. Sip that wine.

But the night man says:

We haven't had that spirit here since nineteen sixty-nine.

The Rock

In all the shifting values and judgments, the reasons to respect or reject: the Stand-up Guy, the Friendly Zionist, the Economic Cannibal, the Unreconstructed Rebel, the Heart of Gold, all the angels and anathemas, there is one first thing I require of people: you do what you say you're going to do. That's the rock upon which I build a friend. It is what I ask and what I offer. Where I fail I make no excuse, where you fail it is marked. Everyone falls. You get up and learn to walk. It is an old judgment, an old rock, tagged with graffiti, ringed with dog shit and latte cups, clambered over and pissed upon, mocked and disregarded: there.

originally 1/15/12

Patch me through to the Real You

Some joker quipped that water invented man to move it uphill.*  Was that the glimmer of some larger comprehension? Science now tells us that there are ten times more bacteria in the human body than there are human cells. Ten times.

One tenth of what we are is human cells - eukaryota; nine tenths is microorganisms - prokaryota. This - thing - inside our body also has a hundred times more genes than there are in the human genome. They form a complex bacteria colony that biology calls a microbiome.

"We" are ten trillion cells hosting a hundred trillion bacteria. The hundred trillion headquarter in our gastrointestinal tract but colonize the whole body with specialized strains. They swarm over our skin, mouth, eyes, small intestine. If you wore goggles that picked up only bacteria, you would see a human form entire in its eerie microbiotic glow.

Most of these bacteria have no known beneficial or harmful effect - they don't do anything to or for us, apart from providing fuel and maintenance, as you would for any vehicle.  They help in breaking down carbs for digestion and fighting off invaders. 

But for them, we - our body, mind, and spirit - are wholly functional. Everything we do for ourselves we do for them. We get them where they want to go and do what they need done so that they can survive and flourish. We feed them, house them, transport them, provide them with information - everything we get for ourselves is at their service. 

They don't work for our benefit; we work for theirs. So who's boss?

We walk the world doing, seeing, thinking, creating - feeling - and all of that serves the hundred trillion; keeps them warm, safe, fed, and carries them across the land, over the sea, through the air; they have flown us to the moon.

But the big idea here – the vertigo paradigm shift – is that the bacterial organism inside us - is not a "they;” it is a “me.” As our cells compose us, those ten-to-the-13th bacteria are the components of a single living self, as real, more real, than your you and my me.

This idea emerges, this Galileo moment; that you - your "you" - are a transportation system for a microbiological superorganism, a life form whole and aware.There is more of it than there is of you. There is this enigmatic microbial presence within and throughout your body and brain that is your possessor and your reason for being. Your flesh and bone, your nervous system, senses, cognitive and emotional responses, language, motivation, your ego, your self...are all inventions for the convenience and well-being of a dark presence so cryptic and alien we don't recognize it as an entity. It is the real You.

These things in us; we have no idea what they want. Beyond survival and reproduction. We don't know what they feel. You want to say, "Not much. They don't think, they don't feel, they're prokaryotes, for god's sake, they don't even have nuclei!" 

Increasingly, the scientific community is coming recognize superorganisms - ant colonies for instance - as unities; as intelligences. An ant don't know nothin', he just drives to Walmart and comes home with the Cheetos. But something larger is giving him specific, sophisticated, instructions. The collective community shows that it knows what it's doing; it is aware. 

Gradually, we humans begin to recognize that we're not so special; other creatures see, feel, know more than we credit them. Parrots know what they're saying; they make jokes. They are us too.

How sentient is it, that shadowy self we live to serve? How awake? Generations coming will re-define what "conscious" means - the process has begun in earnest these last two hundred years. 

"Wait!" you erupt, "there may be more bacteria in us than  nucleus cells, but we have the weight, the mass, the volume! 

Let's say you get in your SUV and drive to Best Buy for an HDTV. A squirrel, a dog, a crow, and a paleolithic human watch us coming. What are they going to think they're seeing? The massive growling beast bearing down on them, or the little round thing dimly visible behind its plexiglass forehead? Let's say you stop and get out to see if you killed that squirrel; which are they going to perceive as the real beast; the squishy little forked thing that squeaks or the hulking hard thing that growls? 

The SUV has the weight, mass and volume, but we know it is only the transport; we are the driver. Same with the microbiome within. It is behind the wheel.

Human thought, communication - our language, our mind - are appliances to the Biota; our body their tools. We are their high-speed data connection, their full-spectrum prosthesis and their pimped-out ride. We are their environmental control mechanism. 

You look for a purpose in life? A reason to be? The gurus are right. Look within yourself.

No wonder we missed it. No wonder we search in vain. They're everywhere in all of us and we didn't even know they exist. Until now.

I'm thinking there will be a little resistance around town to the concept of humanity as a clueless bionic omnibot for escherichia coli. 

"Free will? You telling me we don’t choose to choose what we want to choose?"

Yes? Based on what? Those gut decisions? That warm sense of rightness down in there, that fire in your belly? Orders. Straight from HQ; that's where they live. That's Rome, Moscow, Babylon, Beijing, is the belly. And the mind? That's binary code, a set of sub-routines controlling the autopilot. Only contingently aware.

Hell, we can't help being eukaryote supremacists. We were brought up that way.  It was engineered into us to maintain system integrity. But don't worry, you can still see yourself as your own reason for being. That's what they want you to think.

Do I really believe any of this wild speculation? Yes, I don't know how much, but I think I'm onto something. The "Galileo moment" is about simplicity - the planets around the sun makes a much cleaner design than the solar system around the earth. Same thing here. Better math.

Does the biome within us have a soul? Probably not, not what we mean by that. The concept of the soul is an anthropic artifact. Their ideation, if they have one, is entirely incomprehensible to us, the Total Other. 

As I understand it, hologenome theory has us evolving together with our bacteria, as a single organism - but they were there first; prokaryotes preceded eukaryotes, so we evolved under their care.

Are we talking about a non-mutualistic extracellular endosymbiotic comensalism? Yes. Maybe. 

I wonder if they worry that their human technology may become sentient. Eventually.  

 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_microbiome


*“Human beings were invented by water as a device for transporting itself from one place to another.”
Tom Robbins, Another Roadside Attraction

**The technical definition of a superorganism is "a collection of agents which can act in concert to produce phenomena governed by the collective,"

Some scientists have suggested that individual human beings can be thought of as "superorganisms"; as a typical human digestive system contains 1013 to 1014 microorganisms whose collective genome ("microbiome") contains at least 100 times as many genes as our own [12] (see also Human microbiome project)

Wikipedia, Superorganism

Penthesilea Stripped Down

By zeitguest poster Clavdia

The ancient Greeks were like everyone else, but more so. Other cultures around the Mediterranean, of equal or even greater antiquity, had their own stories – fantastic explanatory tales of how it all began; biographies of gods and goddesses; legends of conflict and heroism; and prescriptive fables & parables meant to guide human behavior.

The Greeks went further. They let loose their wildest and most eccentric imaginings – they sang (and later wrote) of nightmarish horrors and peculiar ecstasies and all combinations between. Hesiod's cross-kingdom transformations (a sylvan example being girls morphing into trees) and Homer's grand monstrosities along his hero's voyage – these form the early generation of a vast body of mythology that accumulated over many decades, from the 8th or 9th centuries (before the common era) up to the age of the great philosophers and dramatists of the 5th century. What were the Greeks doing – just telling a good yarn, and then another and another, and then tying some of them together?

The answer rushes in with Penthesilea, queen of the Amazons. Her existence in the canonic mythology of these "irrational" Greeks needs an explanation. A compelling reason for Penthesilea's existence – this is the quest of the present essay. And if successful, the quest will reveal not only Penthesilea's place in the imaginative universe of Greek civilization, but the implicit rationale for all those curiosities and "unthinkables" that inhabit the peripheries of this otherwise well-ordered, normal society.

Before stripping her down – that is, clearing Penthesilea of events and adventures about which a number of writers, contemporary and across the centuries, are not unanimous – before proceeding to the bare essentials of this imagined character, we must first consider the main outline of her drama – the course of her brief life – since much of her identity rests on these actions and encounters.

Famously, Penthesilea was killed in battle, during the Trojan War, by the great Achilles. The most common account of her presence at Troy – why she was there at all – tells of a kind of journey for penance, for expiation, after a tragic accident in which Penthesilea killed her own sister while both were on a hunt in forested terrain. (There is, it should be noted, an alternative version of the death of this sister, Hippolyte, in which Penthesilea had no part.) Once at Troy, Penthesilea fought bravely for the Trojans, in full battle attire, until a fatal encounter with Achilles. The story splits into two or three versions at this point, the most popular being a brief episode in which Achilles raises the visor of his victim and discovers a beautiful female face, now quite dead, and thereupon experiences the remorse appropriate to the occasion: a manly hero realizing he has just slain a desirable woman. (There are, it should be noted, alternative versions of events that follow.)

If we return to Penthesilea, alive and well, at the commencement of her myth, we see an anomalous figure in the society of her time: an unusually large woman, taller than most, very well formed – voluptuous in some representations – with a beautiful face, and dressed for battle (=helmet, armor plate, protective coverings). She was – what? – a woman warrior! – a startling figure in the gender-role arrangements of this period – a real outlier. Why should such an un-female female exist in the Greek consciousness?

Consider for a moment that Greek mythology in all its expanse was not generally a didactic phenomenon. It differed from the books of wisdom and instruction being assembled by peoples elsewhere in the region, and it stands in special contrast to the Hebraic "mythology" accumulating across the Mediterranean and east of the Peloponnese. Indeed, the Greek-Hebrew contrast is among the sharpest of the ancient period – the Hebrews thoroughly engaged in an inspired journey toward moral development and an obedience to the laws of YHWH, and the Greeks with no deliberately didactic purpose to their dramatic narratives, nor intentions of training a population in the capricious workings of Zeus or his minions. A lesson might be drawn by interpretation from certain of the Greek endgame predicaments; but constructing "behavior lessons" was not the first impulse of their myth-making.

They were, however, contributing to the world a kind of lesson, that might be understood as a meta-lesson, encompassing all expressions of the Greek imagination. They were saying – and it was a momentous humanistic announcement still not fully appreciated 2500 years later – that every configuration of human life is a possibility recognized by the human intellect, a possibility that may be explored and expressed and given an energetic form. The Greeks, implicitly, grant all strange and wonderful and terrible beings a permission to exist – free of moral judgment. Penthesilea simply is – a woman both comely and fierce. One of a seemingly limitless combination of human characteristics. 

And so, the Greek mentality-given-form (a hyphenated description that fairly expresses this dynamic) taught something after all, by virtue of its rich incongruities: diversity is a potential of the human world as well as an essential strength of the natural, botanical world. What if strict gender roles are disregarded to create a woman warrior, and what if a girl's lovely tresses are turned to snakes (to cite yet another story), and what if a lusty god becomes a shower of gold coins (to cite another) – all creatures are welcome, all have value, all are examples of a diversity that—if you think about it—guarantees each of us our unique individuality.

Part of a consciousness of a people 2500 years ago in the eastern Mediterranean – how does it sound to a 21st century reader and listener? Ideally, he would assent to the proposition – social diversity is valuable – and then he would probably be obliged to add that the modern world -- as he looks around at it -- must guard against a drift away from Penthesilea – a drift away from the unconventional, and toward a sameness, a conformity, a neat & tidy set of attitudes that would gradually diminish the imaginative powers of our species.

                                                 

Note:  In Greek studies, the word "irrational" (used in the third paragraph of this text) is strongly associated with the historian E. R. Dodds, whose collection of seminal lectures appeared in 1950 as the book, The Greeks and the Irrational.  In the forward, Dodds cautions the reader that the subject of his book, which seems so broad and deep, is only "an aspect of the mental world of ancient Greece."  And he continues, "But an aspect must not be mistaken for the whole."  Dodds's cautionary description applies to the essay above.

The Inca Imperium, 2013

I know. You woke up in the night again, wondering how less than two hundred Spaniards led by an illiterate pig farmer took out a veteran army of two or three hundred thousand Imperial Inca troops, destroyed the greatest empire in the western hemisphere, and took all their gold. It gnaws at you. Who can set your mind at ease? None of the standard answers serve.

Relax. You've come to the right place. Close your eyes, take a breath. Have a cup of adenosine triphosphate blocker, there's a fresh pot.

1532, Cajamarca; a hundred and sixty-eight Castillian adventurers come before the Sapa Inca Atahualpa ("Lucky Chicken," half wrong) and his army of 80,000, fresh from dethroning his brother in a bloody power struggle, talk him into meeting them unarmed, abduct him, kill him, march on the Capital, Cuzco. 1536: Manco Inca, puppet emperor put in place by the Spanish conquerors, rebels against the humiliations of the mailed fist, surrounds Cuzco with one or two hundred thousand angry soldiers; the Spaniards are 190 strong, backed by some Cañari and Chachapoya allies who, to their everlasting regret, thought the new guys would be better rulers than the Incas. Manco lost. Peru is now a backward nation of beaten, impoverished peasants, ruled by the descendants of the conquistadors, despised and rejected, deprived of their heritage, pride, and prosperity.

How? You ask yourself again. How did they lose? 

The usual explanations are: technology - the Spanish had guns, steel, and horses. Plague - European diseases, possibly smallpox, had filtered south from Mexico to ravage South America, killing the old Emperor and his heir. Civil War - without a clear line of succession, two brothers fought over the crown (Borla), killing hundreds of thousands, disrupting and exhausting the empire. Culture shock - are these guys gods, or what? 

Okay. Everything counts. But you're unconvinced. The plague left enough alive to slaughter each other over the throne. The civil war left enough to bring two hundred thousand against Cuzco. Technology - Really? Two hundred thousand against 190 armored and horsed alien invaders plus a couple K local dupes? You could have just smothered them with your corpses. And by then you knew they were just men and animals.

There's another factor - cultural exchange. The Old World had been swapping secrets since the Pleistocene - tips and tricks passed back forth from China to Africa, Ireland to Iran, for millennia. In the New World information oozed slowly north and south, choked off at the Darien Gap in the Isthmus of Panama, bogged down in the swamps of Columbia - as far as we know, there was no traffic between the polities of South and Central America. No silk route, no sea trade; the Aztecs and Incas had never heard of one another. Northward, the march of civilization tapered off in the Sonora desert and trickled out along the Gulf coast, died in the Mojave, barely touched the forests of the north.

The Spanish had thousands of years of tactical expertise to draw upon; from before the phalanx to beyond the hollow square; from Xenophon to Sun Tzu. Did the Inca armies even know how to stand at attention? Did they march in step? Probably not. As soon as battle lines clashed, it was man on man; pure chaos, no order. 

And cultural sophistication; the Spaniards made deals with the disaffected, recently subdued Inca protectorates, using terms, concepts, promises, unknown over here. The ideology of alliance, of diplomacy, was more primitive among the Amerinds.

Kim McQuarrie's book, The Last Days of the Incas, drawing on John Hemmings' The Conquest of the Incas, is good; it lays out a convincing autopsy. One Inca general, Quizo, took the measure of the invaders and learned how to outfight them. But too late, and he was wasted by a bad command decision, ordered to confront Pizarro's forces on the open plain around Lima, where the Inca forces didn't stand a chance, and there he died.

The Incas were beaten by surprise. They didn't have time to adjust to any of it. They were too backward and their enemies moved too fast. They learned; the rebel Manco wore armor and rode a horse. But they didn't learn fast enough.

If they had only known...

If you could go back to warn them...what would you say? 

It could have happened. Say an Arab sailor washed ashore in 1501 and married into Inca nobility. Say he saw it coming, the End of Times, and decided to deflect it.

Here's what he'd say: 

Don't let them land. When the ships show up, look innocent, offer them gold and women and take them alive. Keep the ones who know anything and can be reasoned with, kill the rest. Let no word leak north. Juice them for knowledge: engineering, steel working, ship building, writing, geography, chemistry, economy, diplomacy, carpentry, strategy, tactics. Languages! The keystone arch. Even the wheel might be useful along the coast. Breed the horses (kill the rats). 

Fortify the coast. Don't trust their promises. And, most important,

Learn to trade. You have something everybody back there wants to the point of dementia: gold. Send envoys everywhere - England, China, Holland, Japan, Mali, Russia, the Ottoman Empire, Portugal, Korea...Spain. Offer them gold in exchange for goods and services; for armor, gunpowder, paper, most of all: science. Import experts and pay them in shiny metal. Play them one against the other. You have other commodities - your textiles are at their best, cumbi cloth, as fine as silk. You have maize, many species of potato, peppers, silver, cochineal, quinine. Coca (cocaine), San Pedro Cactus (mescaline) and ayahuasca.  

Make it clear that there is more profit in trading with you than in trying to invade you. Deal honestly and sharply. Get the best exchange possible for your gold. You have a lot of it and they want it so badly they're pissing their pants.

If you move fast enough you might be able to get north to the Aztecs in time to warn them, to make some deals. 

Peruvian farmlands produce far less now than they did in 1531. Under Inca rule, there was no poverty; everyone was clothed, fed, sheltered, and given 100 or more days paid vacation a year with free drink and entertainment; free medical care until death for everyone of whatever condition. There was always a surplus of goods.

There was no merchant class, no useless middle-men; there was, in fact, no money. Everyone worked from maturity to retirement. Even the aristocracy performed real functions. The concept of reciprocity between ruler and ruled was deeply instilled in the Andes; these weren't Asian potentates or medieval dukes; you didn't work your laborers to death or starve them or slaughter them in war. Their contribution to the state was strictly defined. The concept of "democracy" would come slowly to the Tawantinsuyu but when it did there would be no beggars on the street, no old women starving alone in their apartments; no piss-smelling projects, no unemployment, no one dying of liver failure because their insurance denied the procedure. 

Information technology would come quickly to the Inca - they were good at numbers; the quipu, their knotted-string accounting technology, is seen to have used a binary system. 

They were smart, hard-working, prosperous, constantly learning - if they had held their own against the European incursion - as did Japan - they could have emerged as a solid player in global economics. A strong partner.

Had they not been taken so much by surprise.

Damn shame, too.

All right. That's the how and why of it. Tonight you'll sleep.

Postscript:
Another little element in the equation - the Conquistadors had a leader with much guts, Francisco Pizarro. The Incas had Lucky Chicken, who ransomed the empire for his life and lost it anyway; who sold out his gods for a less painful death. If one of his generals had been in his place - QuizQuiz who fought until his own troops killed him so that they could go home; Challcuchima who burned to death looking his killers in the eye, or Ruminahui, "Stone Eye," who, tortured for the secret of hidden treasure, likewise went to the stake in silence - there would have been a different outcome. For a while.

Inauguration Night

So Obama steps down off the inaugural platform in a crescendo of applause, full of big ideas about "change," and the next morning and the following four years it's la la la la la nothing.

You see some of that in every Democrat president since JFK. The Republicans are already in line with the corporations, military, and "intelligence community," so it's harder to see any change in style.

I would really like to know what they told Barack on inauguration night. Somewhere back there in the White House he gets briefed. In your fifth grade textbook illustration he'd be The Man in Charge and his staff is loyally reporting to him. But really, though, they sit him down in some lamp-lit room deep in the leather chairs and they tell him how it's going to be. They tell him those secrets that we will never know. What are they? On what level?

You get the feeling the news isn't good for the new Commander in Chief. You get the impression that he walks out of there shaken and deflated.

Is it something as simple and obvious as, "That's right. We killed Kennedy. You know why? Pour encourage les autres, bub. So the next hundred presidents will know where they stand." And you can see where that is in what he did instead of what he said he would do.

Is it something really spooky, like, "The Area 51 nuts don't know the half of it. The Aliens are here and we exist at their pleasure. Every move we make depends on what we think they want. One wrong move and they harvest this planet for its pelt."

Somewhere between - is there a threat out there that requires that the military and corporate interests take command and the people stay the fuck out of the way?

Most likely the threat is the military and corporate interests, and the threat has already been carried out. But I would like to see videotapes and the transcript of Barack Obama's day from walking back inside to sunrise. Wikileaks, Anonymous, can you get on that for me? While you're still alive? If you still are?

So what do you think? Conspiracy theory? There are no "dark secrets?" Nothing an incoming senator-now-president wouldn't already know?  Just a few tactical details?

That would be worse. That would mean nobody is on our side.

To be Free

When you hear the words "freedom isn't free" someone is usually being sent overseas to kill for profits. The phrase has a deeper intent.

What is the price of freedom?

Now, I don't want ramble on about this - it gets political, existential, philosophical, sociological, anecdotal, all that stuff, freeness does. I'm going to try to keep this to a couple skeletal notes on the political. 

What the price to society, and what the essence of political freedom, are.

Freedom is a threat to order and security; to government and society. Always. Intrinsically. For all the froth spewing out of the mouths of politicians, pundits, papers, and the people you know, that's rarely expressed. You don't badmouth freedom around here; but. Freedom is dangerous. And uncomfortable. Mostly, you don't like it when you see it.

Why not walk naked in the street? Why not shoot heroin? Why not trade sexual access for goods? Why not live without money?

What's the difference between shorts-and-a-tank-top, and a burqa?

I leave you to those arguments. Do you hear yourself?

Freedom of speech - the anchor of American liberty. Forty-five words:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

"No law." None. Forget the government, who are sure as shit not going to let that mandate - that promise - go unchecked. On how much of that will you sign off? Anybody can say anything about anything anywhere at any time, under the law. No exceptions?

Again, I leave you to identify what you would not allow said, where, when, and by whom.

That's one. Now:

Who owns you? The first law of human autonomy is the right to suicide. You belong to yourself; you are not the property of the government or the community.

If you want to throw your life away, to waste it, to go to hell in any kind of basket, to be a basket case, who has the right to stop you? It's your life.

The “social contract.” You are free until you injure, or take freedom from, another. A hard line to define. I'm not going to argue this one either. If you kill yourself, who has the most stake in that act? Society, or you?

The cost of freedom is security and comfort.

Have you ever wondered how it would feel to be really free? Where the only block is real, direct, injury to another human? It's a heady exercise.

Or, further, forget all governance, go to the Darien Gap. To live - for as long as you can - by no law but your own. Free