“Why you doing this Doc?”

“Because Wyatt Earp is my friend.”

“Friend? Hell, I got lot’s of friends.”

“I don’t.”

Doc’s all messed up but he knows the value of friendship.  All the best stories for me are the ones where friends stick by each other through thick and thin.  Simple humanity shining through the darkness that surrounds us.

And so I take a moment to mourn the loss of friends…living and dead.

“We are made of all the things we have lost.”  -Tom Waits

We didn’t have time to traverse the missile range and see the fossils. It was late afternoon and damned if we were going to drive the first day in England after dark.

This coast beyond ancient and an arch with a name whose meaning is mostly lost.

If you look back far enough in the cultural meanings and stories of an area, if that area retains it’s humans, if the humans have been there unexterminated for long enough, then the land takes on meaning. The land itself becomes a part of the cultural text. You travel through a series of stories with landmarks as not only the illustrations, but memory aides.  They could even be considered part of the cultural mind.  Your house is an extension of you and your family.  The landscape is an extension of your culture.

Once nature was a series of connections, theological, literary, full of emotional depth and purpose. A reminder. An extension of ourselves. I feel that at a place like Durdle Door. What stories were once told here?

]]> http://archtypevolution.net/?feed=rss2&p=122 0 http://archtypevolution.net/?p=107 http://archtypevolution.net/?p=107#comments Tue, 09 Jun 2009 15:29:07 +0000 Mirrorneuron http://archtypevolution.net/?p=107 This is what you see as you look across the Tuckaseegee River when you drive south on 19 towards Bryson City, North Carolina:

My first thought was that some locals had been using the river as a junk yard, but this is not the case.

The southern Appalachians around the Smokies can basically be considered a temperate rainforest. Not as much rain as the Amazon, but, still, quite a lot. Anytime you start removing the vegetation around a river in a rainforest, you are going to have a problem. Without vegetation the banks will wash away at an impressive rate. So…what to do?

About 50 years ago or so someone had a bright idea. Erosion was a serious problem on the Tuckaseegee River, and there were  an awful lot of old cars lying around. Two birds, one stone. Lets take the old cars and use them to shore up the banks of the river. Houses and businesses won’t wash away, and you get rid of the cars. Kind of.

It’s sort of hard to spin rusting hulks with the tourist trade, even if some of the cars are classics. And there’s the chemicals leaking directly into the river as the cars decompose. Devil’s in the details.

The world is strewn with bright ideas. In the 70’s someone thought old tires would make good artificial reefs. The creatures that were supposed to homestead on the tires didn’t, and the tires ended up drifting onto nearby beaches or damaging real reefs. Dang it.

And there’s always the old classics…tapeworms as a diet aid or cocaine as a cure-all. On a personal level I could contribute my entire love life to this list.

Every morning as I drive to work I see this rock formation in the nearby mountains that looks like a breast. I have named it in honor of one of my paramedic partners for whom every cold day or dead patient was “colder than a witches tit.” Like the face on Mars it wouldn’t look like a tit from another angle, or closer, or farther away. It is my personal icon of morning. Hello tit, good morning tit, looking perky as usual. Are there others who have noted it’s breast-like contours? Do rock climbers scale the giant mammary gland-like formation? Canals on Mars and the man in the moon…we find meaning and connection where none inherently exists. One person’s tit is another’s nothing.

Can we find meaning when there is no interaction? I’m thinking of the ascetics. They remove themselves from contact with other people in an attempt to access some greater meaning. Ascending the mountaintop and jacking into God. Christian, Buddhist, vision quest…culture after culture has similar stories. Humans who have removed themselves from other humans in an attempt to find something more profound. But where is the font of profundity save in ourselves? We make meaning amongst ourselves. There would be no meaning without other people. Would there? Give a baby food, water and shelter but no interaction with other humans and it suffers. No language, no culture, no connection.  We need each other. We carry meaning only within ourselves, though I would dearly like to believe some higher power is pouring insight into us from somewhere else, a more profound and eternal place.

I want things to mean something. Why? It helps me feel connected. Banishment is a punishment, paramount with death. To be fired, to be banished, to be divorced, to be sentenced and locked away in jail. These are blows for us because we need each other. We need the feeling of connection. Even monks don’t live in isolation from each other, although there are people who chose to live solitary lives. Are we allowed to be alone without hardship? Not in most societies. What is the functional difference between the religious hermit and the shut in with 30 cats and a garbage dump worth of crap spilling out of every corner of their home? Intent…choice…self-discipline. What do you find in isolation…a greater connection with the divine? A cleansing of mind clutter? Or merely a kind of insanity with senseless anatomical associations?

]]> http://archtypevolution.net/?feed=rss2&p=94 1 http://archtypevolution.net/?p=64 http://archtypevolution.net/?p=64#comments Thu, 01 Jan 2009 19:23:41 +0000 Mirrorneuron http://archtypevolution.net/?p=64 Part 1: Arrival, and the economy Ford stick shift to Corfe Castle.

Heathrow and the Tube

It was only a nine hour flight from Houston, not space flight, just cruising over the curve of the earth going the right way because the winds are in your favor and the friendly skies boost you along the jet stream.  You are not really aware of this, however, because most of the time you are asleep. You stumble into this bus-like cabin nine seats wide and go on faith that the noises and illusion of g-force means you are actually being taken somewhere. You refuse dinner because someone told you that fasting could negate the effects of jet lag. The flight attendant looks at you like you grew a new head. No one refuses free food on a plane you foolish bastard. Even if you don’t want the food you take it anyway on principle. The food molecules must be processed through your system. This must happen. Make a token effort.

They tell you that you landed in Heathrow. You take it on faith. I am in Heathrow. I am walking from the arrivals to another terminal to meet my friend, but it looks like I am walking the wrong way. People look at me like there is another stupid tourist who doesn’t know how to read signs. I am sure that somehow I look American even though I was careful not to wear white tennis shoes or any kind of shorts. I must exude Americaness and all will judge me because of other Americans that I have no control over and a president with the IQ of a potato. I didn’t vote for him, I want to say, he didn’t even really win the election. It was rigged with chads and crooked voting machines. It’s not that the American public are manipulated with stupid lies. No really.

So anyway, I’m in Heathrow and it doesn’t really seem that bad although I’ve been warned so maybe I’m here on a good day, in a good moment. I change money and cringe as my dollars shrink into half their size. We hop on trains which at the moment seem deceptively efficient, we are in search of an oyster card. The fact that we are tired and on the other side of the earth does not really excuse the fact that we don’t read the sign that says stand on the left as we ride the escalator. Londoners look askance at us, we are standing on the wrong side. Already I have walked the wrong way in the terminal and stood on the wrong side of the escalator. The CCTV has taken our picture multiple times. BE ON THE ALERT FOR STUPID AMERICAN TOURISTS WHO STAND ON THE WRONG SIDE. We also ask the wrong person where we can buy an oyster card and with scathing contempt he tells us that we have to go downstairs. The bloody idiots is implied. Be on the alert.

We ride on the Tube because I did my research and it’s not subway or metro. A tube a series of tubes that deliver goods and services but not the one Ted Stevens was talking about.

The train carts us along to Salisbury.

Salisbury has thatched roofs. A cathedral which was demoted to a church through no fault of it’s own. A mound with ruins upon ruins and if you started digging pieces of time would just start popping out at you. I had this notion that I could dig down somehow in the past by coming here and see the origin of things, words, notions. That the beginnings of rituals and words like salacious and junket would take on new life simply because I was returning to the font of our tongue. Salisbury had a very old pub with a couple of old gentlemen who were willing to talk to the American women, American women who were early enough in their journey not to realize that this was an exception, not a rule.

We rent a car, and to save money I go with the economy Ford stick shift. The foolishness of this plan becomes clear to me as I choke the car out for the third time in our parking spot outside of the rental office and I am suddenly unsure if I will even be able to leave the parking lot, car park whatever dammit. You’re on the other side of the car, the wrong hand is shifting, there’s no shoulder, clearance is measured in millimeters. It’s the alternate universe where everything is flipped only the characters aren’t evil its just your friend yelling here and there for you to look right, slow down and holy shit there’s really not enough room for you and that tractor on this road. Its precision driving, only you’re not feeling in the least bit precise. And where in gods name are the signs? But it’s a thrill, a thrill you keep mainly to yourself because your driving companion who pretty much refuses to drive is letting out little yelps and clutching the sides of the car on just this side of hysteria.

Corfe Castle

We go to a ruined castle. My original plan had been a ruined abbey but it didn’t work out in the driving radius. England is very green. As green as North Carolina, perhaps more so which pleases me. Green and yet cool, even cold. A chilly green place. This ruined castle is almost more than I care to describe not because it was unpleasant, but because it was ridiculously, precisely pleasant. Ruined and yet intact enough that you can wander it’s pieces like a child giant had destroyed it for fun. Only it was the Civil War and quite a lot of powder that did this one in. Flowers grow from the walls, goats wander around, cream tea is served in plain sight. Its picturesque, Romantic overkill with Hobbiton in the distance. People fought and fucked and defecated here just like anywhere else but with time its all buried under an avalanche of quaint. In the course of this journey I encounter many castles, but this is one of my favorites because it is in pieces, not reconstructed, the lord and lady are not in residence. It’s a broken off piece of time with no connection to now, aside from rubes like me stumbling over the pieces and snapping images.

Next: The Durdle in the Door

]]> http://archtypevolution.net/?feed=rss2&p=64 1 http://archtypevolution.net/?p=63 http://archtypevolution.net/?p=63#comments Tue, 30 Dec 2008 16:43:56 +0000 Mirrorneuron http://archtypevolution.net/?p=63

Memories of being a candy striper. Not stripper.  Shut up.  Sitting in the hospital basement,  watching over the hospital library, writing a science fiction story about a spaceship captain, female of course, to pass the time.   The captain and her hapless crew encounter a planet run by a murderously insane computer who decides it likes her.  Been done before, but I was fifteen, what can I say? Yes, I wore the candy cane stripes and wandered the hospital delivering flowers and books.   I don’t remember much else except I had to deliver flowers to a room where a patient had died.  Awkward. All elbows moment.

There I was, delivering things and returning to our tiny library base in the bowels of County General, planning the fear and danger of a woman on a planet light years away.  This was during my Carl Sagan/Cosmos phase so I had a habit of looking at the stars every night, trying to imagine worlds circling, cue dramatic music.  Thinking… I might be looking at a black hole-why not? It’s black and a hole.

I spent a great deal of time in my early teens wishing myself somewhere else. The method of transport varied greatly.  Various fictional escape vehicles to choose from: magic rings, hidden doorways, pesky destinies catching up with you.  My favorite for a while was John Carter’s: you just sort of stare at Mars and next thing you know you’re there.  Why can’t things be simple like that?  The world and beyond was much more mysterious for me back then, and I miss that.   I know that Mars is a barren world where the closest signs of life are nodules in rocks that may have been bacteria, and scientists chase evidence of liquid water as elusive as that word right on the tip of your tongue. Venus would bake the flesh right off your bones.   The real solar system is so…absolute. Uninviting.  Devoid of hidden kingdoms and plucky heroic leads.

So after the homicidal computer had eliminated most of the crew, I’d get flower duty again, rolling my cart down the sterile hallway (not really sterile, but that wouldn’t come out for years).  Carnations were a favorite, not much in the way of roses.  Roses I guess are for romance, not pain and death.   It wouldn’t really become clear to me for many more years how much suffering and desperation is hidden inside the rooms of your average hospital.  Covered in a sheen of caring, flowers, magazines.  And there I was, passing the time in the hospital, a summer lark.   Smiling, delivering, not feeling particularly useful, planning my getaway to the stars, to somewhere else.

I definitely need to get out into the world.  I’m not exactly agoraphobic.  I don’t break out in a sweat or anything at the prospect of walking out the door.  More like agoravoidic.  Agorapathy.  I don’t get out enough.  The walls of my tiny apartment close in on me sometimes in a most unpleasant way.  It’s just that I can’t think of anywhere to go.  Everything seems so product oriented.

This paucity of destinations brings the word discombobulated to mind.  I’ve always assumed that discombomulate was a perfectly respectable, ancient, learned word.  But this is not the case.  Discombobulate originated in the early 1800’s in America.  Something along the lines of discomfit or discompose thrown into the frontier verbal meat-grinder of young America.  Discombobulate sounds like what it is.  It is also what I am.  Discombobulated, confused, lost, detached, reassembled from places disparate.  When one is feeling like this one wants roots, feelers to stick into the ground and soak up nutrients.  Some ground of being.

Which brings me back to walking.  I’ve always thought about my mind as a series of inner landscapes…mountains and oceansides that I visit in memories and dreams.  Solnit reasons that the “mind is also a landscape of sorts and that walking is one way to traverse it.”  So walking is a way to visit your mind.  A way to ground yourself by literally moving over the ground.  My mind and my sense of self is not separate from my surroundings.

The flavors in chicken and dumplings come from all over the world. Developed by many different people. Anonymous people from cultures distant in both time and place. Chickens originally came from Malaysia, domesticated in India. The Romans were known to divine the future by observing chicken pecking patterns. I’m sure with a little research I could get a more complete picture of this. Guys in togas watching a chicken peck at food. No more bizarre I suppose than observing entrails or tea leaves or lines on a palm. What did it mean when the chickens pecked each other. Or your hand?

When I get my chicken it’s already dead. Packaged. I don’t have to wring it’s neck or pluck it’s feathers. I needn’t concern myself with pecking. The pecking order was set long before the chickens or I were born. The lives of chickens, by and large, have been subsumed under human necessity and desire. We want to taste chicken. We want things that taste like chicken, so we control every aspect of chicken lives to feed our protein needs. I don’t want to know what it’s life was like before I put it in the pot.

The color of chicken flesh and the color of my fingers is not so very different. Once, I prepared food for a catering function involving roughly forty stuffed cornish hens where I had to cut them just so, shove things inside their empty carcasses, and tie their little legs together with string. After a while my fingers were quite numb. There was a very real danger of slicing my cold, numb fingers with the sharp catering knives. It started to freak me out that I couldn’t feel my fingers, that chicken flesh and fingers had begun to blend.

Anyway, you cut the chicken into pieces, separating at the joint. Put the pieces in a large pot, and add enough water to cover. Next come the onions. One or two. A friend of mine once compared a girl she was in love with (or at least lust) to an onion. You peel away the layers, one after another, until there is nothing left. All facade, no heart. The ancient Egyptians, on the other hand, admired the onion for it’s combination of layers and spherical shape. A reflection of the structure of the universe.

Prepare the garlic at the same time as the onion. I learned in my twenties to lay a wide knife on top of a garlic clove and smack it to release it’s outer layers. Unfortunately, using the same technique on people is somewhat problematic. You have to find other ways to see if they have a heart, or are empty inside. Chop the garlic into small pieces. Cut the onion into large chunks. Add.

Slice a few stalks of celery and toss them in. Not too much, because celery can overwhelm the flavor. Two or three carrots in large pieces. Some basil. Salt. Bay leaves. Mom used to tell me that getting the bay leaf in your bowl was lucky, make a wish and all that. Was it lucky because you noticed it was there before you choked on it? Did she get this knowledge of luck from the misty mists of time, mom to mom over the ages back to England, to Rome? Or did she read it in Betty Crocker? She doesn’t remember.

After you boil, you allow it to cool and pick the meat off the bones. Remove all the unwanted carcass parts. I also remove the carrot and celery. They have fulfilled their role and deserve a dignified burial in the trash. Otherwise they just get in the way. You can’t allow them to get in the way of proper texture. It’s just that kind of world.

The next job is to make the dumplings. Two cups of flour, two teaspoons of baking soda, a few smidgens of salt, and some ground clove. Not too much clove, not too little. Cloves are powerful, enticing. A man named Albuquerque, successor to Vasco de Gama, discovered that cloves came from the Spice Islands (the Molaccas). One of Albuquerque’s officers, named Magellan, set off on a voyage around the world to find a new route to this seductive siren of a spice. He never returned. Be careful with the cloves. I don’t think grandmom would approve of my fiddling around with cloves in the dumplings.

Anyway, you take this mixture of dry things and add in one third cup vegetable shortening. Good old fashioned artery clogging fun. You thoroughly mix it in. I like to just mash it together with my hands, but you can use a biscuit cutter or a fork. Start adding milk until you’ve got a nice doughy thing, roll it thinner than you want to bother with and cut it into squares. Dump the dumplings into the boiling chicken broth. Let the broth boil over the dumplings, let it envelope the dumplings in it’s bubbly embrace. They will soak up the chickeny goodness in less than fifteen minutes.

After a respectful amount of bubbling and cooling time, you are ready to sit down to a bowl of my childhood. Not only that, but you are ready to have a bowl of something that I like to cook for friends, a bowl of comfort, a bowl of memory.

And so I contemplate a hunk of banded iron formation. Glimpsing a world before conscious thought, before much of anything. A too large moon and a mass of algae. Pre-Eden. A world full of so much possibility that it is empty of almost everything. Recorded in bands of alternating hematite and chert. Red and black, formed because the oxygen released by these primeval algae was bonding with iron dissolved in the oceans and forming layers of hematite all over the world. Oscillations of rock, billions of years old.

I’ve had the same digital clock for maybe twenty years. I wake up in the middle of the night and see this red blur, numbers indiscernible without my glasses. When there’s an electrical glitch, a black out of some kind, it starts blinking on and off, like any respectable clock. On and off, letting me know that something is not quite right. I obsess sometimes when setting the alarm, worried that I put it on pm instead of am, or that I forgot to set it at all.

Of course I don’t really seem to need the clock. I wake up right before the alarm goes off and wait for it to ring. Sometimes I wonder if I could do away with it altogether like I did with watches. Just trust myself to wake at the right time. I’ve had it so long I think it’s bloody red numbers are permanently part of my psyche. My inner digital readout.

We’ve come a long way since Stonehenge and sundials. Wearing amazing devices strapped to our wrists, accurate to the micromillisecond. We study oscillations at the atomic level to ensure that the tick tock is pure.

So many ways to measure time. The turning of the heavens. Fluctuations in the atoms. The Egyptians measured time by poking a hole in a bowl of water and watching as the water flowed out. Drip, drip, drip. And once I measured time by the breaths my best friend had left as I looked into his eyes, and held his hand, and the leukemia took him. Breathe in. Breathe out. Times up.

At the end of the dark and scary hallway of wax figure death was one of those revolving gates with interlacing bars.  I was more afraid of the gate than of the displays that preceeded them.  What if my foot got caught and then Vincent Price turned on a machine and bluntly mangled me to pieces?  It happens.

I always went through the gate quickly, emerging unharmed from my encounter with mortality and the darkest impulses of mankind into the omnipresent gift shop filled with small plastic bears, everlasting dipping birds and pet rocks.

What did Vlad do to distract himself?  I can’t imagine it was always impaling and screaming…he must have had something in lieu of Monday Night Football.  Hunting, eating, storytelling.  Would he have enjoyed Monday Night Football?  Would it have been too tame, too incomprehensible?  Could the right enthusiast have talked him into touchdowns instead of carnage?

The original Gatlinburg Ripley’s museum burned down in 1992.  Vlad, the maiden, the two headed goat…all destroyed.  Fire was probably hot enough to melt even the 50,000 pennies.  I was sad when I read that.  It was my original wonderoom.  My original cabinet of curiosities, filled with objects, real or not, that existed right on the edge of belief and reason.