Nice Show - Brand China?

Well, there were at least a couple of scintillating and opposed levels for watching the opening ceremonies. I'll have to go back to Hero for an understanding of the wired flights, but as with the title of that movie, they certainly signal individual and personal transcendance. Do they celebrate the individual or the collective? Are they invocations of the Western hero as star, as personal best, as consumer? Are they invocations of the Chinese hero as hao-han, self denying in service to the people and the leadership they deserve if perhaps don't have. Or can these be made into the same thing, or even have they always been? What might these games signify, and what are they meant to signify? Who is the champion, who the Olympian? Will it be the team count, racking up medals by collective will, or the summing of individual bests? Where are the true loyalties of the flag-bearers? Who do they represent? Whose show is it?

I didn't see any tears, although there may have been a few more than mine at home.

The cultural celebrations were practically in our face with shades of Maoist scary-to-the-West collectivism. Hints of Leni Riefenstahl for cinematic buffs. According to the sardonic American commentators, last-minute smiles were pasted on. So, is the individual's flight for personal salvation, personality transcendance toward genuine authenticity, representation of the masses behind him, or even the good of the people abstractly, as stewarded by the central walled-in authorities?

The smiles looked genuine, though, and didn't have that strained North Korea look. It was easy enough to imagine the army of performers having a home life and a shot at those transcendant flights. Overall, the TV viewer felt bad for the people on the ground, as it were, since much of the spectacle seemed designed for the aerial shots, with much of the stage set seemingly outside the Bird's Nest stadium. Of course the fireworks would be spectacular from anywhere on the ground, but they were coordinated with the display "inside", leaving only the TV viewer privileged. The commentators talked about the walls of China, including the one between the people and the powerful. Should the Nest be viewed in contrast to the Forbidden City, or is it more an echo?

I have to confess that I couldn't stay awake beyond the American showing during the march of nations, though happily I woke up this morning to a (second) rerun of the fantastic torch lighting. I confess to projected feelings of triumph, and remembered them from the days of shock and awe when we brought down Saddam's statue and I was happy to believe, because I wanted to believe, that GWB had been right all along. There would be roses stuck into the gun barrels and American flags waved in gratitude.

Not so much.

So, swept along as I was with happiness for China's triumphant great show, I did remind myself that I was rooting more for their flop, not wanting their triumphant re-entry onto the so-called world stage to overshadow their shovelling around of people to make it possible.

If this was cinema, it was flawed by the audience's compulsive looking beyond it, guided and a little bit goaded by the announcers, who rather did America proud for the moment with their unwillingness to just buy the whole show; even as they effused about its production values. Not so much that we wanted to know how the effects were being accomplished (the wires couldn't be airbrushed out for this live performance) instead of being taken in. More that we actually wanted to know what it might mean.

Surely American (or Euro) commercialism would never be up to this level of showmanship. This was not a branded and sponsored display. The garishness was beyond the superbowl sort. The pride was beyond technical polish, where the superstars trail their entire role of fame onto the stage and off, and the spectacles are perfected only, Star-Wars style, to transcend the previous ones and keep the illusion alive. The cutting edge in evidence.

This was beyond cutting edge. There were no flaws to either the technical or people-corps movements, except possibly a tiny one when the flying torch bearer was dropped more than eased to his side to run the scrim, and it looked for a split second as though he might have stumbled. But the people moved like machines, and the techno-effects were perfectly de-tuned to seem almost as though there weren't a computer behind them. This was surely meant to signal a triumph of the human over the machine and not the other way around, right?

That flying runner's stumble could be and was glossed over. What couldn't quite be glossed over was the actual death by maniac-stabbing of an American guest; one closely related to the Olympic delegation. The Olympic TV historian sheepishly offered an attribution, blame-the-media-style, to the nationalistic ramp-up of us vs. them competitiveness apparently sweeping the Chinese airwaves. So, this is like the killing of an abortion doctor, where one of the faithful takes the angry message a little too seriously, and you're not sure the message maker should be quite off the hook. Is this a sports competition, or is there something more ominous in the offing? No people are perfectly behaved. What hidden meaning is betrayed, and where?

The commentators quickly swept that suggestion aside, as being clearly too incendiary to follow. But it is, in essence, the ba question. The eight 888 as hegemony question. China has certainly out-performed Western corporatism. There is no way that the West, as Bob Costas kept reminding us, could ever match this display. "The opening ceremony trophy should be retired," I think he said. There is no way that even the distorted might of global corporations, our post-modern brand of uber-capitalism, can ever match the Chinese version of single-party ability not just to muster the several hundred million dollars required to put on the show (who knows what accounting standards were used to come up with that number?), but also to direct the military incarnations which China allows for its version of corporate power with global reach.

Surely, our own national accounting standards, which force private subscriptions even for the most sacred of national monuments, would never dare this level of shock and awe on the public ticket?

This was a display both of technological accomplishment and the power of collectives organized with military precision to orchestrate a display beyond the capacity of any other branded entity on the globe. Here in the West we also owe our technological accomplishements to military necessity. But we have generally, until Bush trumped up the excuse, geared up after the fact, and channeled our developments where possible through the universities, whose loyalties could be assumed by the justness of our government's aim. As much because of as despite the debates and differing opinions among the people about the governement's direction.

Is this the tipping point of our time? Not so much the question of where lies China's heart, but at least equally much what will be the nature of our response. Not just, have the Chinese been overwhelmed by nationalistic pride so much to ignore the ongoing exercise of power to quiet even loyal opposition (legalistically in Chinese terms - relating back to interpretations of the First Emperor ) but have we also been cowed by fear in this American context, so much to allow our university scientists to swap loyalties from "science" in its abstract best to the various national and corporate entities to whom they've sworn oaths and with whom they've signed pacts.

The question then is to whom or to what is loyalty rightly owed. Who is betrayed when fealty is granted to something less or other? "Go World" says the Visa ad ("the only card accepted at the Games"). Go self? Go People? Go Games? Go Abstraction (God? Science?)? Certainly it can't be go USA or go China, right? Well, I guess I hope it is just Go USA! and Go China! in the spirit of good sport.

For the moment, I'm going to credit Zhang Yimou with having rendered excellent entertainment, in the same way that he has in his cinematic productions (I suppose including the banned ones). Gratefully, I have neither the power or the knowledge to expose any double-meaning. In any case, it will always be up to the people at large to learn how to read, to watch, to exercise choice when it's available, and to demand it when it's taken away.

I cheer for the Chinese people. Great Show!

Happy Olympics - Eight THIS China!

For quite a while now, I've been waiting for someone (else) to point out that a classical Chinese pun uses the number 8 to stand in for "hegemon", that hugely popular word among the post-posts. As I recall (and I'm not reliable on this or any other topic), the way it works is that poets are inherently feal to the empire since the route to office is knowledge of classics, and mastery of poetry is evidence of a rectified heart and therefore suitedness for ministerial advancement. Poetic mastery, in Confucian China, implied an arduous path toward the imperial center, meant to be at the heart of civilization.

Of course, nothing's perfect, and sometimes top scholars at the imperial exams become corrupt mandarins later on. And sometimes the imperial offices themselves earn the critical attention of literati who feel that the center is more endangered than embodied by the imperial person, or his various impostors.

So poets distant from the center, who feel the need to criticize without at the same time feeling the need to risk their eventual return toward the center, often indulge in a kind of double meaning in their poetry. The emperor is often the assumed object of seduction in a love poem, (that one's practically transparent, and so criticism had better be more veiled than the love object) lending an interesting twist to many poems.

For real criticism, the trick is to write a poem perfectly capable of standing on its own, but offering to the more subtle reader a sharp critique of the powers as exercised. A really fine such poem would offer a kind of confluence of sentiment, where the heartfelt validity of the one level reinforces the critical validity of the other and vice versa. Fun stuff. Ideally, the loyally oppositional poet will be read and recognized in the fullness of history, and perhaps even credited with steadying its course.

So hegemon, generally punned, was the cue to think of classical tyrants, Cao-cao most typically, but more generally those who veered toward exercising the machinery of power more toward consolidating and perpetuating that power than toward perfecting the civilization at the center of which the humane, rather than merely powerful, were meant to reside.

A swinging target in China's past has always been its original tyrant, Qin-shi Huang-di, or "The First Emperor", whose tomb is so celebrated by all those terra-cotta warriors. Variously a hegemon (pejorative sense) and the great unifier, his iconic definition has most recently been buffed up in the movie called in English "Hero" by that great Chinese cinematographer Zhang YiMou.

So, guess who's choreographing the opening ceremonies in Beijing?

I uncharacteristically turned on my TV at precisely 8.8.8 8:08 Beijing time to see what might be popping. Of course, the US networks redirected me to their canned coverage in American prime time, so I'll have to wait and see.

But I do have to say that silence in China, in Chinese, and certainly in English commentary on the various supposed meanings of all the eights, has been resounding. This has got to be a taboo of colossal proportions. To even suggest this particular pun must be dangerous beyond any imaginable social faux-pas.

Hero was and remains a tremendous success inside China. It can certainly be viewed as vindication of the nationalistic triumph of whatever quelled the Tian-an Men tiltings toward chaos. (Beyond the dangers of tyranny is that more than entropic force against civilization - chaos) So, is this filmmaker literate, in the Classical sense? How clever did he have to be, if indeed there is anything of youthfully loyal opposition remaining beyond wild mature success?

Did anyone else watch Hero?

Thrive or fail, people. What do we wish for China? What do we wish for this great choreographer of history. What will be the message that washes through?

Stay tuned.

A Rescue at Sea

This is a true story (I think that (dis)claimer should be a red flag that this is a narrative embellishment of something that actually happened, filtered through the lense of many retellings such that it has begun to follow the logic of narrative construction as much as the logic of, so called, reality). In it will be revealed the reason for my sitting on my glorious (pseudo-is it?)scientific discovery for so long. Unconscionably long, you might say.

That reason is simply that I lack the talents as writer which are part and parcel of demonstrating the validity of what it is that I, supposedly, discovered. I wish it were simply a matter of mathematical demonstration. Alas, what I require is close to that misconstruct - talent. And even if I were to display a kind of talent, I still more clearly lack - call it - diligence? Whatever is the opposite to dilettantishness. Discipline! That's it. I am a hacker.

The first problem is that "sea" is a misconstruing of the actual body of water, the very very prosaic Lake Erie. And "rescue" stretches the case for what might have actually been more humorous than dramatic. But the basic outlines are, I swear it, true, by the ordinary usage of that term. (I take the radical definition, which would have truth a measure of conformity to some standard, the iconic demonstration of which would be straightness or level against a carpenter's tool).

As background, you should understand that I still own a somewhat nondescript and very old wooden sailboat. This is not the boat which would grace the pages of dreamy publications for the wooden sailboating cognoscenti. For me, though, it does have that certain Tim Russert kind of love core, which trumps the airbrushed eye-candy attention-grabbing of objects beyond my means. (I am here clearly boasting of my moral superiority to "you" who lusts only after the chimerical product of godlike talent - well except that the outpouring for Russert, witnessed only the other day at the 4th of July festivities in Buffalo, betray a more pure core than I grant you . . . )

My sailboat, P'eng Lai (more on that elsewhere), now languishes beside my outback hermitage, largely because its 1939 gasoline engine has gone beyond the rusty pale, cooled and saturated by raw sea water most of its life. More accurately, because my own internal gumption has long gone the way of all flesh.

But, in the event - I cannot tell nor recall the date, but it must have been around 8 years ago - the engine was already being quite problematical. Still shy of complete diagnosis, I'd simply assumed, based on plenty of evidence from having the engine apart, that the basic issue was water in the combustion chamber. The head bolt seats were rotted away, and multiply heli-coiled. The cylinder walls were approximately paper-thin. The symptom was a kind of epoxy-like black ooze which cemented the valves stuck open after putting out of the harbor into open water. Kerosene, I'd foolishly discovered, would dissolve the ooze enough to start back in, but I didn't always have the opportunity to attempt the fix, which made the re-docking part of outings a kind-of comical exercise.

To digress a bit more, because it's fun, and because I find metaphor in just about everything, I'd sail homeward around the old and vaguely proud lee of grain elevators, subject, variously, to proposals for conversions to condos or restaurants or museums because Buffalo just can't let go. No. I lie. It was the lee of the trees covering the spit on which the Coast Guard station sits. But there's truth to the grain elevator story.

Anyhow, there would be an impossible lull every time. Since the reason for my engine not being resuscitated in the first place was generally that there was too much wind, there would be a kind of depositing from the storm, followed by a forcefull back draft pushing me straight into the dock. I never did develop the kind of sailing skill exhibited by comperes better looking than me. But I always did manage to get back to the dock.

On the day in question, I was out, typically, alone. I remember sailing over my familiar initial nervousness - somewhere closer to panic - since the exit from the harbor is always dead upwind through a narrow channel, and as the swells build the engine's continued running becomes less likely. My mind is often full of images of blowing smash up against the Coast Guard wall, anchor hopelessly tangled below, sails fouled in partial way along their tracks, with consequences worse than death. At least as bad as dirty underwear in the ambulance.

Getting underway is always a panic with the tiller lashed over in estimation of how the sail will catch, for a dash forward to hoist the main, generally first, without losing the trailer-trashy winch handle. Then back to release some ties so that the heel won't overreach the carburetor's likelihood of keeping in the gas, then again forward for trim, and back and below to shut off the gascock, and then the engine, and so forth.

Once underway, as on this particular day, I find first a sort of calm up against the peculiarly daunting Lake Erie swells (the bottom is so close it reflects their energy, and causes them to run so close together that "bounding" is a perfect description). If, as I think was the case this day, I have to follow the escape from the harbor with the challenge of hand tying all the furling lines (about a million), my calm is also a physical breath catching.

And then somehow I find an unwarranted though perfect confidence in the integrity of hull and rig and make my inward passage to a kind of euphoria, always measured though it is against the time when I have to brave the way back to the dock.

I remember being spooked by what seemed the hallucination of children screaming after sailing quite a ways out and away from any other boating fools this really really windy day. As in the car with the windows open and the radio blaring the sounds of trouble still make their way through, I was alerted. I craned all around while inwardly imagining a foolish family, out perhaps for their first trip in a new outboard, now turned turtle, terrified in the water.

This was not purely the conjuring of my overactive imagination, since most of the boating mishaps I've seen have been just such come-uppances to pride and joy. My imagination did probably add the bathos of relative poverty and reach for something a little beyond one's station, though this too is a common enough tragedy in the environs of Buffalo.

In any case, my thoughts immediately went to the state of my engine along with my single-handed incapacity to rescue an entire family, and I felt the adrenaline rush while repeatedly scanning my surroundings.

Eventually I decided that I'd heard some stray seagulls (so called - I think they're almost always Lake Terns) and settled back in to my by now somewhat disturbed bounding joy.

Until I heard it again, and more certainly not a seagull. I lashed over the tiller, which doesn't give me a lot of time against the sharpness of these waves, and clambered (the perfect word in this usage) as far up the mast as I could get until, standing atop the primitive halyard winch I scoured the water as efficiently as I could and still came up with nothing to explain the now ghostlike cries.

Finally, in reflex response to an especially clear shout, I catapulted myself atop the cabin house while topping a wave and did actually see a man, seeming half out of the water, with arms outstretched and yelling to save his life. He must have seen my sail before I could have seen him and performed a minor miracle of aquatics to pull himself so high above the waves.

Ordinarily, in such situations, the skipper (me) stations a pointer to keep tabs on the overboard victim, so I knew to keep my eyes and head focused on the exact spot while I maneuvered awkwardly about for an interception.

I remember scampering below while dead upwind to open the gas, switch on the battery and crank the engine, since still in my adrenalin saturated brain that seemed the most likely way to effect a rescue. There was a small chance, quickly abandoned, and so above again I rehearsed in my head the precise maneuver I would need to come about directly on top of the swimmer, to drift into rather than away from him without too much pressure of wind and put him on the low side in position to be hauled aboard.

In the event, I maneuvered perfectly (never when the dock sirens are around) and found the same superhuman strength he'd used to hoist himself above the waves to clasp his arm and yank him onto the normally too high deck, one hand on the hauled in boom. It was a good thing, since he was spent and only managed the absurd formality of "thank you sir" over and over and over.

I did have a small handheld marine radio, by which I hailed my imagined nemesi (??) the Coast Guard, since I knew I was in rather over my head with this one, and then heard his simple story about how he'd been out jumping the waves with his buddy on the back of his jet-ski. Innocent in the telling, clearly, of the contempt such stories might raise among the likes of real salts (my only claim to being considered among that group is the contempt seemingly ingrained in me for jet-skis).

He'd hurt his back on one of the more spectacular jumps, and when he landed in the water on another, he needed a short break. The eager friend asked him to wait right there while he solo'd a few more, in my mind clearly frustrated by the dead weight which was limiting his spectacular flights.

My contempt confirmed (you can't relocate a spot in the water, certainly in proportion to the wave action) we headed back in toward the breakwater which defines the outer limits of the Buffalo harbor, and there patrolling its seaward side was the distraught buddy, skimming back and forth (looking for bodies!!???).

We had a rendezvous scheduled with the Coast Guard, and sailed about the leeward southernmost entry into the calm water within the wall. The Coast Guard inflatable soon pulled alongside and sternly claimed jurisdiction of my pirate's find. I was inwardly more than a little relieved that, in apparent deference to my salty appearance if not fact, they never trumpeted any request to lower my sail and start the engine. I was moving steadily and it was easy for them to match my speed to effect the transfer.

By now it was dark, and the water was calm enough that I could go below to fire up the engine. I was taken aback to find the (ancient 6 volt) battery terminals entirely melted away amid the smell of spilled gasoline. And, to cap off the day, just as I was coming up against the back wind swirl which always made docking such a treat, along came the same orange inflatable, in time to catch me without running lights in the now pitch dark, and then, so I feared, to board me to the smell of spilled gasoline to boot.

But instead, they saluted, or so I imagined, with a loud signal from their air horn as they flew past up the Buffalo River, perhaps in pursuit of some other waterborne renegade. And I docked and lived to tell the story, certain that another life was also saved by my ill advised venture out where, that day for sure, there was not a single other boat. And I was far from shore. Of that I'm almost certain.

A hint about what I'm trying to accomplish . . .

Some 25 years ago, when I was at the canonical age of discovery (27 or so), I experienced a moment of extreme clarity about the very thing that Einstein had pounded his head against during the latter part of his life. It was a clever shift, along the very lines of the shift Einstein made when he posited the speed of life as a universal constant, not relative to other physical factors. And later when he described the universe in a way to equate gravitational and inertial mass.

I spent a certain amount of time, which I now have to confess would have looked pretty manic, trying to get someone - literally anyone - to come on board with a meaningful conversation about the implications of my discovery. My former physics teacher. Brilliant scientists I knew. Literary types. They all sort-of agreed that what I'd written was interesting (these are the "chapters" I post), but there was no traction to the cosmic implications.

Eventually I retired from that scene, confident that since the validity of what I'd proposed was so self-evident, eventually someone else would say it better. I think along with the mania came a little paranoia - I wasn't very confident about how I could or would handle the attention which I was certain this discovery deserved. I felt entirely unequal to the task of being thought an expert at anything, as well as pretty intuitively certain that my seeking for grandiosity was fundamentally diseased.

So, I retired to a fairly busy life. I've had lots of jobs, many of them involving considerable responsibility, but through each of which I've been bedevilled by a sense of my essential fraudulence.

I never could decide if that descended from betrayal of my root cause (so to speak) or if it was an extension of the very thing which led to the presumption that I had anything at all to contribute. Mostly, the conviction of fraud was grounded in my certain knowledge that I had never been more than a dilettante at any pursuit.

Now, on the downside of life, I find that no-one, apparently, has hit on this simple reconstitution of the basic features of our understanding of the physical, moral, and psychical (is that a word?) world. While I fundamentally resist the notion that there is anything special about me in hitting upon this - I insist that it is simply a feature of reality, and like all such features would be discovered eventually. Inevitably.

But I'm growing desperate. Such a simple shift in basic human understanding could so easily correct the profound impacts of such immense misunderstandings as govern most human behavior as I now observe it.

So, here it is is broad simple outlines: If one simply construes "mind" as part of the fundament of reality (OK, the language necessarily gets muddy), and "concepts" as part of that "reality" out there, then the necessity for the Grand Unifying Theorem which, among others I think, Einstein was chasing after, disappears.

It goes like this. A concept - something held "in mind" -- is, analogously anyhow, what the probability equations of quantum physics refer to. They are not a physical reality, except in the sense that there is a conspiracy of minds to limit the possible realizations of the concept as (what I called them 25 years ago) "percepts". This transformation is indelible and complete upon the act of perception, or what the quantum guys call "measurement".

So, mind in this case is simply something capable of both conception and perception (I don't begin to drag God or humans into the equation, so to speak, having in mind, so to speak, a mind at least as comparatively reductive as is an elementary particle in physics. (I said the language would of necessity get muddy, and I think "so-to-speak" is funny and less gross than "in terms of."

So, there might be a limiting case of one mind, one percept and one concept, (I rather think the limiting case is always two, but more on that later) which can be interesting for thought experiments. But most of the time we're dealing with a reality which is the literal conspiracy of perhaps as many minds as we now conceive [sic] there are particles. Or it might be more proper to talk about the complexity of minds having some kind of equivalency to the complexity of otherwise physical matter.

As with physics, the difference between this description of reality and the more classical [sic] one of General Relativity combined with Quantum Mechanics, String theory and whatever else is out there, will only manifest itself at the margins.

For me, again we're talking 25 years ago now, one of those margins was the somewhat famous Twin Paradox, which to my knowledge always gets brushed away before it's effectively dealt with. The idea is that since according to Einsteins relativity theory time slows for a person in (relative) motion, then two twins in motion would perceive one another aging slowly relative to themselves (I use the modern gender-neutral corruption of grammar), thus creating a paradox.

The paradox is always explained away in terms of (there I go!) General Relativity and the idea that only one twin is accelerating relative to the other. But it seems simple enough to construct at least a thought experiment where perfect parity in acceleration as well as velocity is maintained for each of the twins, perfecting the paradox, and swiping away the solution.

But for me, there's no paradox, since the twins, of necessity, escape the conspiracy of minds which is all that ties them once physical, light-speed, contact is lost. Or you could say mind. In any case, there is simply no probability of their ever meeting again, and thus no paradox.

Once while sailing, I experienced a rather vivid realization of this principle. I'll tell the story in a moment, but fatherly duties call . . .

June 4, come and gone, Tibet alas, the earth quakes

I sent something like this to the local paper several months back, and received only silence in return. Well, OK, the writing's a mess, but it could have been pounded into something readable.

The politics are a convoluted stretch. But I still find plenty of irony in the constant and continuous pass made by any media for any real thoughtful attention to what's going on with the big picture. For archival purposes, then, here's what I thought might get published, if only because I was the news maker concerned (a small teapot tempest), and was offering a personal remembrance, which is the style of one of their columns:

* * *

I remember very clearly where I was on June 4, 1989, because everyone was calling me for guidance about what was going on in China that day. I was some years into a gig as a Chinese language teacher; in the fitful throes of an abortive career as an academic and Chinese scholar.

I was painting the ceiling at the actual moment, making a bedroom for my daughter who was born a short while before, 2 months early, 2 pounds – she just made Phi Beta Kappa in her Junior year in college by the way - and not thinking much about China, or about current events in general.

I had studied classical Chinese poetry in college, which wasn't much use in the event (we're talking 2000 years old), and I was focused hard on learning the modern language. Travelling to China, hanging with my cohort of Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation funded young teachers, mastering my pronunciation -- I put things in a classical perspective. I was shocked.

The next year, a small group of concerned citizens were brought together by some Chinese students in Buffalo who needed our help to arrange for a commemoration of the tragedy in their homeland. We were holding some funds spontaneously generated in horror and sympathy, and mayor Jimmy Griffin (R.I.P) stood in the way of our using the Rose Garden in Delaware Park, which had been the site of a spontaneous gathering the year before.

The mayor explained patiently to me over the phone that he didn't want people bashing heads in his parks. I patiently explained that this would be a peaceful commemoration, and that (unlike in China, I thought to myself) Americans had the right to gather and speak out. There was an excuse about a wedding being planned for the same time. That didn't check out, so we initiated a lawsuit and went ahead with planning.

The Police were helpful (I think they had labor differences with Hizzoner). The Shakespeare in Delaware Park folks were helpful. County Executive Dennis Gorski got us a band shell. I snuck in late at night to steal the electric from Shakespeare, purloined key in exchange for dressing room privileges at my nearby school – I was now headmaster. I got the city indemnified on the schools' insurance, and we hired the great David Jay to sue on constitutional grounds. Tom Toles depicted that we had a good cause – 'no democracy protests in Delaware Park either??'

An untimely divorce squelched my academic career – you can't go through those rigors with child support. So, I'm the other side of the single mom saga, and Buffalo doesn't understand dreams because as Obama knows, there's too much pain. My kids are great, thanks to their Mom, and I'm sliding out from under the IT world which keeps the kids fed if not Dad in his element.

Here's what I wake up to find: The powers that be clearly think that American Capitalism has got to take over in the face of all forms of ignorance afoot in the world. We apparently think this while simultaneously believing that life begins scientifically at conception while evolution is false.

I remember where I was -- fixing a computer in a Catholic church in Rochester -- on 9/11. I watched in horror with people who knew how to pray. I remember the coincidental smoke over Buffalo on the way home, and wondering if it was all over. I've since learned that the perpetrators deserve only my pity, but I'm really worried about China.

They too seem to feel that the world has to be one way. They always have, and they've always been right, for a lot longer than we've been a twinkle in some Chinese guy's eye. They seem to have turned the tragedy of Tian-an Men into a nationalist cause, keeping chaos at bay goes the argument, and are high on beating us at our own game, as we flaccidly fall prey to deregulationist creationism. We don't know the difference among commodities and competition and where the government's role is. We don't know who we are or what we want, and they only know that whatever happened back then made their life a lot better.

I was once inside the Communist party headquarters and watched with some fascination as my host wrote a message on a white board which simultaneously displayed on every board in every location of the "world's largest University," where all 300,000 cadre get educated upon "election" to local and regional office. There's still only one party there.

Remember those loudspeakers playing the same tune all over China? I woke up to them every day while studying in China, back in the day before they had cars and before the world had Internet.

We need to become friends with China. We share rich and liberal traditions of poetry, scholarship, culture, discovery, science, commerce, entrepreneurship. We both need to stop selling arms, and sucking oil. We can do better than this. Let's free Tibet, but not bash heads doing it.

I'm in love with the Pope these days, having spent my entire life immersed in Catholicism, but never able to buy anything about the medieval organization. Beyond that particular church, I always look for the gun and decide that isn't Jesus. I always look for the anger and hatred and fear.

I didn't see anger in the Pope, and I don't see it in the Dalai Lama and I don't see it in Barack Obama either for that matter.

Remember when the walls came down all over the world, following on the example of the young Chinese? Remember when we let deregulationist claptrap take hold because Reagan sounded so good? (I think Stockman's in jail, trying to do good, but hoist, as they say, by his own whatever) Remember when Hillary believed that universal health care was a no brainer beyond the pale of competitive economics, as should be electric, oil, college, education and the rest of mistaken "Goods"??

I'm afraid I love China more than the Chinese, and it makes me very very sad.

Chapter 3, from 1983

The heartbeat of footsteps,
Drawn soft through the shimmering night.
Heaven forget, be heedless of his plight.
Young ones come o'er half the oceans wide,
Bringing forth in girth the breeming tide.

I'm torn between two worlds, and always will be, I suppose. The world of literature with all its rich rewards might be the highest. Where visions are set by interactive construings of the only truly human language. There is only one reality, and it is most real in books.

But all it takes is a tale of far off life in the flesh. Sailing around the world in a gaudy yacht. Captain of a virile life. Then I spill my ashes all over my lap and am set into a deep funk. There would be experience gained there that would set my knowledge in the scramble of a little boy away from the billy-club of authority. I would have nothing to say. And it wouldn't be worth saying anything in the face of those lives I'd rather lead.

The burden of life is to be happy where one is -- and the joy. There is no-place else. When the soul takes up residence in far-off places, it loses its right to speak. Struck dumb by the voice of authority that already lives there. I learned something once by my stupid embarrassment in the presence of a wealthy scion from my hometown. I had nothing to say, and knew then my own smallness.

Why not me? I have the intelligence, the skills. I should be there. I should. There is a way, though, to convince oneself that it is ade­quate that somebody is there -- and not on a movie screen. There is a way to partake of greater lives without jealousy. There is a way to possess with­out owning, and experience without the sure thrill that makes history. I can almost believe it with my being. I believe it easily with my head. There is nothing on the other side that isn't already here. And if you need to get there you will -- or die in the crossing.

* * * *

Howie's shock came in part from a profound innocence of books, but mostly from a world which tried in so many ways to sterilize its security. To lop off the groping and clinging tendrils which reach out from the muck of the earth and embrace even the crystalline pinnacles. His world was buffered by an intervention of invention. An imposition of will where only the most sinuous of those shoots could reach. It was a tower of plastic, the malleable stuff so far from its organic roots of carbon rings and chains that it must be considered the purest product of will.

That same buffer would -- might -- have served him better in the form of words. The plastic (in the other sense?) world of imagery where all the web of existence is intensified. Or are they two sides of the same coin? Surely a crenellated tower is a product of will. Why, then, am I so certain that on its ramparts the breathing earth must still condense her breath, and not on those other ramparts of gleaming alloy. There are some works of literature -- most of those that endure -- whose earth-born stoniness vibrates in its roots. There are cruder and crueler words, though, whose mirror held up to nature reveals only ghoulish death behind the mask of Cinderella. You have to look hard, but it's there.

Or perhaps the difference is always and only in the man. If we deter our secretly cherished holocaust and Armageddon, these plastic moldings may one day too be looked upon with awe for the life they contain. There is no escape or release from the tendrils of being but the final one. There is now, even when man intervenes his will too strongly -- yes plastic, celluloid, indoctrinary fictions -- these too vibrate with the pulse of life. It is the attempt at escape that may be dangerous. In the foolish way that a drowning untrained swimmer grasps for the air only to drive himself under.

Howie could be shocked, but he was not innocent. His shock was never moral outrage, and he had made forays beyond the false security of the fortress impregnable that was home. He'd felt the infusion of mother's milk pouring through rents in mountain's mammary sides; the caress of rain which pulls away a gentle blanket of snow; and even, in the crashing thunder of colliding clouds making their electrical discharge of energy that was only latent because they had not touched -- even the ejaculation of nature's orgasm in her darkest moments. He knew he was connected, but it was a lost knowledge.

His shock came from the discovery of the power words could have for keeping that knowledge lost. No one had told him. The untutored contact he'd made with words was never enough to find his groping way beyond the dams of conventional truths. He took them at their face -- because of their beauty in which he had deep faith, never once suspecting that each uttered truth might be a lie that covered the eternal attempt at escape. Truths are secure and, like plastic, cannot deteriorate. Howie found them beautiful on their face. He cried at the truth of romantic love when he found it. He built steamy anger at the truth of greed and pettiness. Mostly, he was inconsolably impatient before the truth of lies.

He felt these truths with those same senses that deliv­ered nature's sounds, smells, tastes, touches and broad coherence. And so he was shocked at each little breach. The world of words was beginning its dissolution and it was as upsetting as if he were watching a mountain crumble before his eyes at the behest of nothing more than a whim. When the mountains crumble, there is no life. The daisy whose life reaches out toward a million worlds and across a million eons would become a piece in a museum -- disconnected from its integral soil whose nourishment is now replaced by words. Not the literal nourishment which is easy enough to provide, but the kind that would bridge the gulf that is unbridgeable between the explanation to the side of the display and the actual meaning of the homely little daisy which may be encountered for its truth perhaps by only the very youngest and most innocent -- or the most accomplished.

A mountain of words which had held together for him only by the tight restraint of a net of truths, was being under­mined at each new glimpse of the reality behind. And so as the days passed in a mist between his subsequent incarnation there in the woods near her, he began to carry an image from a dream of his hand in hers --held over the top of a tall filing cabinet. The bliss of the dream was not to be dis­appointed when actually their hands met.

That was a shock of revelation -- that the actual could be as real as the truth he had known. It was a bliss that wore thin for her more rapidly than for him who still took that hand with infinite wonder. It had become artificial, though -- almost an obligation, and the kiss was sure to follow. The kiss that would assure him of the solidity of the ground by its involvement of many more senses than just touch.

He'd tasted his sister's tongue when they were still young enough to bathe together. It was a game more innocent than "doctor" yet initiate enough to leave anyone without a sister deprived. It was a final extension of the curiosity that compels all tikes to taste the grime of a bus's window, and know the different qualities of metals; dirt, weeds, brick -- all those qualities that are still there, though forgotten.

Still, he was shocked by Jackie's insistent tongue which parted that which in him was ever content to remain closed. He hadn't known. It was a tumultuous collapse that left them writhing on the ground squeezing the other toward oneself for hours without ever admitting that any other barriers could exist. It was an afternoon made so permanent and stationary that he was to scrawl the only diary he ever kept on a tiny square of paper that said simply "This has been the best day of my life." There were no other possible words.

That moment of collapse -- it was a moment for what went afterwards didn't matter -- gave him the one pure impulse he would ever have to invoke the mysterious power of words to enshrine what all history conjoins to produce and then throws away with the next moment. The mind which is universe iden­tical to the one outside is forever stupefied that trans­formation should go on unabated in the face of its own crystallization. A word. Not in the beginning, but to be an end.

The knowledge would later rack him with silly jealousy. This person whom he has possessed so fully must have passed that way before. But where? How can such sordid knowledge exist beyond the sanctified trust of lovers who told and gave all? He couldn't conceive that she could have ever been frivolous, nor that she could ever have loved any other. Ridiculous as it seems, it was in no way different than the battle already begun in his soul between his instinct that knew that all truths must be overturned, and his knowledge that they cannot be. He hated by now the hypocrisy that would denounce impurity at the same time that it was man­ufactured constantly. O, he wanted to see lewd magazines published and sex made free, but his own anchor was slipping over the ground made slimy.

But she rode horses and not bicycles, and didn't have to understand what wasn't given in a moment. She was a true admirer of daisies, and made them beautiful simply by her attention. Yet she assuaged his jealousy out of the same obligation that made her listen to his mechanical explan­ations. She didn't need to know whom she loved and whom she didn't. It was for his sake that she invented the mistake of her past and swore to its frivolous circumstances. It was for his sake that she uttered the word love, though only in the negative and in regard to her past. He made oathes to her from the deepest reaches of his available heart, and she was truly obligated.

He knew what he knew and hated the slow passage of time that made them too ridiculously young for that knowledge to be sealed forever by marriage. Why? It would have been that way in the past. He was willing to forget all the hypocrisy of what had been sanctified only by convention just to stop the onward rush with the acceptance of this one truth. He was throttled by an image formed early wherein he was stand­ing at the altar next to a fulsome beauty from TV. That was the promise of life, and now he was willing to overlook the inconsistencies. He'd taken the face value and made it whole in his heart. Brush away the stupid image -- this is real!

"Can you believe it? This is puerile. Where in the world could anyone find more romance and less truth? Howie, you've got to stop this."

I can't help it. It is the truth. It's tangled and overburdened, but there is the actual thing. It's actually much more difficult than revealing the inner recesses of other forbidden paths I've trod. This is the most forbidden; the absolutely shameless admission of the transgression of the ultimate sin of ...Of what? Stupidity? Innocence? No, not these. They have some charm. But this is the ultimate sin of being so foolish that you tell the reader you don't know what you're talking about. You make a claim for know­ledge, and then you reveal this? Better let a monkey type Shakespeare. Not that I haven't since learned. But to have been so gullible. Anything I try and portray through my writing might as well be taken for the ecstatic claim of an idiot to have found the answer to all questions in a moral tract by Jerry Fallwell.

"Or in a daisy?"

Hardly the same thing. The daisy speaks for itself. So does Jerry Fallwell in that sense. No? No, gullibility is a sin. I don't know how I missed that teaching for so long. You just don't go around believing in Santa Claus after it's not cute. If you're prone to, then you'll always be a fool and hardly worth a chuckle when you want to be taken ser­iously.

"Did you believe in Santa Claus?"

Sure, when I was a kid. But wait a minute. I remember the cruel transition now. Oh, I didn't believe in Santa Claus any longer than any other kids. I wasn't that gull­ible. But like the kiss that leads instantly to collapse if it is meant too sincerely the first time, I instantly doubted God after Santa's fall. I remember that.

"You mean like the kiss that leads to blind and innocent groping on the ground. Be honest now."

Yes and no. I haven't finished that story yet. No, I'm talking about a fear of gullibility that went to the quick. How was I to know that God -- the God I knew had a white beard and was the strict antecedent to all human attributes -- how was I to know he wasn't a put-on. I tried desperately to convince myself. I wanted that gullibility. But it poked at me.

"How can you see a bird flying," I asked Jackie, "And not believe in God? All the beauty of the world is too perfect. Did you ever look at a snowflake, or even think about your own existence. The perfection of your body; the hands, the eyes, the way it all works. I mean why are we here? There has to be a reason."

I desperately -- really desperately -- wanted to believe in God. And I did believe. I prayed, and I felt my prayers were answered. I entrusted my soul to the wisdom of the ages, for at least I knew that God hadn't been invented in anyone's knowledge. There must be a God. I wanted these things that I asked Jackie to be enough, and was perplexed that they didn't move her that way.

In the end, it may have been her own family tradition of atheism. My family was atheistic too, though I couldn't have known it, nor could they. But if you have a home, then that is enough.

"Nobody had to make them beautiful. They just are beautiful. I think we evolved from something like them and that's why they're beautiful."

"Yeah, but in the beginning. I mean WHY? I can't believe that birds and bees just happen. There has to be a reason."

My love for her was growing pagan. Oh, there were no longer any scruples. The dogma had long since eroded. But there was that one last threshold beyond which a truer damn­ation than the one I'd been brought up on seemed to lie. It wasn't the threshold of the flesh. As soon as I'd learned through Jackie of the power of the moment when all is made perfect -- when all of one's life; its accidents, mistakes, and marvels, are proved beyond any doubt, reasonable or unreasonable, to have been designed to create you -- oneself at the moment of your perfection -- just then another and identical power was made manifest.

That power is the darker one which causes all items in your touch to turn dusty. The bad luck. The rain come to quench a sunny heart, and the demon sent to pull the crucial timber from the construction of one's plans. When all the world turns staring on its one worst accident -- mistake.
These moments provided no impulse in me to check them with a word in a simple diary. Perhaps they should have, but that is not what we wish to hold on to.

That might have been a way out. A balance to the egotism which held on to that one greatest moment and got mixed up in jealousy to hold me poised on a razor's edge. There can be no more stale existence. By the light she had lit in me and by her subtle but insistent refusal to be possessed, she held me poised on my unwillingness to forsake my personal God whose reason had to be for me; and my desire for confirmation in her ungodded truth.

I managed somehow to trap her for long hours at the other end of a phone line, by a brooding need for an answer that she knew I didn't want given. I don't know how. I can't remember what words could have kept anyone tied to that childish melancholy that managed to make its cause the object of its release. Listen, won't you? Understand that I am alone in the world, and that if you leave me now, you will have forsaken your only claim to humanity. It was pre­posterous.

Before this time, there was no aura of depression around me, and no hidden ecstasy as its cause. I was a child in every way fulfilling the ancient pattern of guarded growth into an adult world that still made sense. I'm convinced that there has been no age before nor could there be one hence, when it is possible to have such guarded growth. I wasn't a particularly good kid all the time. There were many wicked deeds done at a secret remove from the realm of authority. But there was never any need for contact in the wider world.

The community provided only that aspect of life that was wanted. Playing, sleeping, eating and all the other activ­ities that are considered desirable in a world where work is at the remove of gray business suits, gray long rides, and gray greetings that need a ritual transformation before they re-enter the truer and more colorful home life. The wicked deeds of youth were all the natural ones, but they never brought me into contact with that other world that would cause such shock when the plunge of adolescence has so sud­denly to be made. Filth was restricted to the city. Wicked­ness was kept innocent by the boundary of the playground which screened for attitude as well as activity.

Thus the outward breach of authority never touched the more central authority which kept all truly wicked urges under moral lock and key. But this is all a wrongful attempt at explanation. I can't know why I would so easily set off bombs and never touched a bottle of beer. Why I would tres­pass wantonly over all the laws that would restrict my plea­sure and my curiosity, yet never steal a candy-bar. It wasn't that I had the money to buy them, or that they were provided at home -- they weren't. But that was for my own good, and there managed to be instilled a fierce pride in the deprivation.

It was a selfish childhood geared specially toward proving my own specialness. The only rule that could not be broken was that I would not become like everyone else. They were beneath the promise of my clan. Ultimately, they were beneath the promise of an ordered world where other people made horrible mistakes, got involved in car accidents, had dreadful diseases and more dreadful problems. Where my own immunity was based on no sufferance but on simple belonging to a stable and comfortable center. Even as I cringe for the exposure of its selfishness, I am intensely grateful for that family.

But what is the value in being sheltered from the more real side of life? Can it do anything more than compress disappointment that would be released in one explosive anger and hatred of the world. That only slowly but inexorably would be turned inward to hatred of oneself? Yes, because where there is life and love there is the possibility of growth. And there is truth in the vision of eyes that have been kept unnaturally blind only to be opened at the last moment -- after all the other changes had already taken place. Equipped for a bright world and borne into a dark one, if he is not defeated, the weakling innocent may recover some of the brightness that was promised. Or even by lending it in his defeat, may cause some odd remembrance in those who have long since learned that you have to play dirty.

"Are you really this innocent, Howie, or are you trying again for sympathy? Sympathy for your persistent child­ishness.''

No, I'm not innocent. I might want sympathy, but I want to deserve it. I want to show that the bright world promised in my youth was cruel not only to those excluded, but even to those whose citizenship has been confirmed. I want to say nothing for myself, except as I may be judged fairly.

"By what standards? You can't set up your own and expect people to abide them."

The standards aren't my own. I'm not important. I want to know if anyone can ever believe that I believe that. If they can, then I might be able to believe it myself.

"Hunh?"

There is nothing right or good about my life except as caring people made it so. They couldn't care if I refused them. That’s a bond more strong than any I know. And yet, if I believe that I am the person these caring people tell me I am, then I am lost. My caring in return has to touch others who don't care. The comfort that love gives is a responsibility to use it -- not just in return -- but to impose the fantasy on the world.

"Sounds to me like you think you're pretty important."

No! I don't want to believe that. I'm no more impor­tant than a grain of sand. But there are no obstinate, brooding grains of sand. They don't refuse their place. If I refuse mine, then I blink out of existence like a grain of sand that refuses to move. There are no such grains of sand. And that is the lure of egotism. To believe that it is possible to deserve a birth on the crest of a ripple, and thus refuse the wind that would bury you again. Or to be­lieve that you are just there and that there is nothing you need do. Humans are not grains of sand. But I am not impor­tant.

"Then why do you go to such lengths to reveal your life?"

I need to be believed.

"You need people to listen to you?"

Maybe through me. Look. It doesn't matter. I have to do this. I'm sitting in front of my block of wood, for whatever reason, and I have to make it into some shape that stirs my soul. There are other ways. You could even leave the block as it is. But that wouldn't mean anything to me. I've already gotten out my knives and chisels. Stop it! You're killing me.

"Am I now? Well, I'm sorry. You were saying?"

I was saying. I don't know why I've always been such a damn fool. I don't know why I've always taken for revelation what is and should be commonplace. I don't have the be­ginner's mind of the Buddhist. I haven't worked for my gullibility. And yet now I want someone to listen to the way things look to me, and furthermore I want them to find there a revelation. I'm trying to be sure that I haven't just planted my revelation as it appears to me. It's important, because that's the position I occupy. Because I can't help myself. Because it's only by doing this that I gain the right to go on.

"What a justification! I was hoping you'd get back to the story. Now you worry me. Don't you know that you are mocking every adolescent writer who ever tried to write? They have always failed."

"Shut up! No. I don't know that. I don't want to know. I'm not sophisticated. I haven't even read Shake­speare. And it's too late now. I am what I am.

"OK Popeye. I just couldn't help myself."

Contemporary Chapter 1, to be honest

There are silly and, well, crazy notions afoot about parallel universes, time travel (same thing) and in general the idea that in some other – I’m telling you it’s fictional – place there is a chance for propositional reality. But in fact, I mean in actual fact as the definition goes, there is only ever one reality, and if you don’t live it as if it were fictional, then you waste it.

We wasted the gift of oil, largely because it came at the same time as the still as yet unresolved struggles we will now never finish to come to terms with the Jesus literality, and its corollary which became the inevitability of scientifically technological advance.

Like Time’s Arrow, we supposed, there was only ever one way toward advance, and the other way toward the cave of the Hemlock drinker’s apologist.That led to a kind of confusion among technology as comfort, technology as health, technology as improvements toward insight as through a glass to find things not available apart from it. Through but not in. Through but not by means of. Through but not finished, ever.

So, this, naturally becomes Chapter 1 of a story which could go any number of different ways, but which happened to go this way. This particular way and no possible other.Lubricious as the oil was, it at least and inevitably led to a kind of clarity upon awakening from the hangover. That there had in actual fact been other ways to use the gift. That we could have first set up the sustainable camp, with latrine far from water draw, acceptable over infinite time, before we took to the water slide and screaming fun. But, in plain fact the greed of the easy fuck took over from the slow and sidling making out from blush to actual love even if the far side was still a disappointment almost every time.

In the "big" cities, there was a new magic, not anticipated by anyone except the unsung artists, who'd previously been paretoized by the Big Apple (no longer so called, even way back when), and said lubricosity, non-sexual, but with something of the same effect, Dr. Ruth. Because virtual was never going to be facetoface, and because these city centers were so well populated, artists, as they say, came out of the woodwork. And because the downloads, so called commoditized virtuosity, there came again some reality and realization of the power of live. As in LIVE!

Performance art of all sorts took over almost completely from technically mediated virtuosity, laying down of tracks, pixilating, pixaring, Andy Warholing, and Motherwellian distortions of what you could do faced with media, or faced or listened to directly. (Well, Motherwell was always immune) The time travellers were still obsessed with unmedicated pullout from the crowd, so called, not ever about to admit that the pain of the starving artists was just simply real pain, from being misread, misunderstood, mislead, and, well, starving.

Performance necessarily favored the mind and a kind of post blue jeans authenticity, which had to understand the power of prayer, not so much to Jesus anymore but to the collective whatever that absolutely prevents time travel from all but the bozons, muons, bozos, mutants, and other subparticles not worthy of mention once catalogued. The rest of us are eternally subject to the literatti, our friends, and whomever, ahem, Whomever, it is that the rest of us pray to.

These literatti, in the new big cities, were expansive and never limited or limiting to those serious contractions of reality: religion, ethnic identity, nation-statehood, but were rather defined by same in such a way that the beauty from other - from outside the particular what would be vanity toward narcissism from inside - becomes almost excruciating.

Toward the end of the oil glut, there were two - three if you consider the various containers - so-called superpowers. Super Nation States, and each was as ignorant of their own history as the other. Of their own cosmopolitanizing traditions as mediation against ethnic strife which always in those days meant ethnic cleansing. Murderousness, rapacity, so very near the surface of unschooled hearts. Speaking of which, schooling too had become a time's arrow kind of idiocy, where even culture itself and certainly long-since Jesus had become a technocratic pursuit.

So Howie entered the city, famously with a hard-on (sorry Schuchat), as always, and plied the backalleys of unfamiliarity, wearing blue jeans for familiarity and a kind of free pass outsider indication - he only saw one other all day - which were actually safer than home, considering the bears, hyenas and really really big cats.