A Gnostic Tale of the Soul’s Journey into Time and the Struggle to Return to the One
By Joan d’Arc
The automatic doors of the SpeedyMart flew open with a swoosh. Out into the dense fever of a dog day afternoon stepped Adam Kadmon. His ass hit the seat of his beat-up Honda just as a diminutive creature resembling a gargoyle climbed into an eyeball-shaped sidecar attached to his rear passenger door.
Kadmon checked over his right shoulder and saw not the bulging cranium of his mighty demon brother but the vacant blackness of the blind spot. He pulled out of the parking lot into the life of twitching traffic. The third dimension displayed time to all dogs as the corners of houses turned to become lines, then flattened to surfaces again.
As he sprinted into his apartment building the Jinn called Aamar followed him, hovering on his right about three feet in back of his head. As Kadmon opened the closet door in his bedroom, an ultramarine radiance lit up both their impish faces. Inside the large walk-in were shelves containing about a hundred ecstatic marijuana plants.
In the next few hours he packed the plants into trash bags, and just before midnight began loading them into the back seat of his car. As Kadmon drove north on Route 95 from Providence, Aamar sat low in the evolutionary eye-pod his ancient ancestor got by wishing for it.
Just across the Massachusetts border Kadmon pulled over near a wooded area. He sat for a minute as a couple of cars sped by. When all seemed quiet he got out and began to rummage through the trash bags looking for his shovel. As inopportunity had it, a cop car cruised by and the officer inside got a fleeting look at Kadmon’s silhouette in the back seat.
The cop pulled a U-turn in the median strip and radioed a dramatic call for assistance. “I got a white male on 95 near exit 34 getting ready to dump something weird in the woods. Could be a dead body.”
“Jesus F. Christ!” Kadmon swore as he ran around to the driver’s side, fumbling to get the keys out of his pants pocket. The car lurched as he put it in gear. Aamar hunkered down in his Lamarckian joyride for the thrill of a century. There was a wild look in his eyes, which he had acquired perhaps not from his fiendish lineage but from Kadmon’s batty French Canadian ancestors.
A mile down the road, the spinning lights of two cruisers danced in his rearview mirror. Kadmon let up on the gas and pulled over to the dirt shoulder. A grainy muffled speaker ordered him to get out of the car with his hands in the air. But he couldn’t move.
Instead he looked over to the passenger seat and saw a pair of old pliers with red handles. He thought about how he could use them to commit suicide.
Kadmon grabbed the red pliers and jumped out of the car, pointing them at the officer. Bullets flew from one officer’s gun in the second cruiser, shattering the windows in the first. Three cops began pumping metal until the space between law and despair was crammed with bullets. Kadmon looked down in bewilderment. Not one of them had entered his body.
“You’re not dead!” Aamar informed him.
“I’m not dead!” he mimed.
With barely another thought his legs took off in long strides into the woods. Trees hummed past and branches whipped his face, but the pain was nothing compared to the sharp sting of the bullet that pierced his shin. He made his way deep into the forest, which slowly turned into swamp as night burned into morning.
Kadmon plopped exhausted behind a large oak holding his leg wound tightly to stop the bleeding. The swamp crawled with disgusting wet noises of unseen life forms. The terror of a snake crawling up his back competed with the horror of a police dog baring its fangs in his face. He passed out with the sound of gruff canine snuffling in the distance.
Aamar ran his genetic imprint processor in the background as usual. This was going to be an extraordinary event. He’d never seen anything quite like it, although he thought he’d seen it all. He knew all the quirks of Kadmon’s ancestors and how they got into the messes they got into. But he could never talk much sense to them. They’d just keep on doing what they were programmed to do.
Kadmon didn’t know it, but he was descended from a long line of herb cultivators who learned their tradition straight from the tribes. “The problem is,” thought Aamar, “not enough of you protested when growing the medicine leaves became illegal. You get what you ask for when you shut your mouth.”
It wasn’t the first time Aamar ran his condemnation through the memory wheel. “To make it easier for yourselves,” his tirade ran, “you humans will enslave your descendants under a tyranny of thickheaded legalese.” “You, with your short life span and chronic amnesia,” he pointed at Kadmon, “you’re lucky if you can see your hand in front of your face.”
He had Kadmon knocked out for the moment. He was watching over him. Or maybe he was pretending to. He was itching to get high. He had addictions to be fed. Nightmares to exude.
Kadmon’s cell phone fell open on his lap and electric images danced out of the cerulean screen. The figures of long dead ancestors reanimated the woods like data rumours. Aamar began to play a dirty little game that can only be played by omniscient observers. It was the Glass Bead Game on a pornographic scale. He satiated his hunger on the thought worlds of a procession of pitiable humans, back to the beginning when his Qareen was first assigned to Adam Kadmon’s.
A steady stream of strangers in a strange land passed in front of Aamar on their way from labor in the cornfields back to the farmhouse; from their backbreaking existence on the third plane to the place they called Home; back to the One, the Twin, the soul mate waiting on the shore, only to whisper goodbye again, float around the fallopian bend in little egg ships and take the miserable wet plunge into linear time; into ego and effect; into individuality and chaos.
Aamar sucked on their thought forms like eating meat off their bones. His life force was revived as the ghostly memories of gone humans flooded his hard drive. He felt not one hair above a sin-eater. He was both disgusted and high, trapped in a hideous existence from which he could not even imagine escaping.
Black shadows screeched overhead and shat their dinner on the earth’s face. The wings of giant bat-like creatures fanned the deafening flames of hell’s transcendence to this plane, as nature’s hand impartially plucked aloud each atom of human agony. The figures of fantastic rumours fought and fucked, gave birth and perished. Blood poured from all conceivable orifices. Women wailed in the medieval labyrinths of raving inquisitors where no right answer echoed off crimson stone walls.
With massive hard-ons the wizards of idolatry tortured mothers and daughters in the name and celebrity of a perfect deity. The palpable wound on the christ’s side became a gaping vulva into which a gathering of mighty demons inserted gargantuan phalluses. The blood soaked scene put Aamar in a frenzy of euphoria.
Adam Kadmon’s foot jerked as he dreamed the schizoid tape reels of the Jinn. Childhood memories of his parents’ incessant arguments mixed with unrecognizable signals from another time and place. A spinning globe of brilliant blue cacophony flew in and hovered above his head like a neon orchestra. The luminous logo bestowed upon him absolute knowledge of music and mathematics, of astrology and agriculture, of medicine and architecture, until he was data-trashed to the verge of madness.
A small tube was lowered from the azure symbol and a white cord appeared. He was instructed to touch the string, and as he did so he was sucked instantly up into the ductwork of a clanging banging super machine. As he climbed out of the other end of the duct another one appeared above his head even smaller than the first. This one also had a white line dangling from it. He wondered how he could possibly fit through this small opening but as he touched the cord he found himself climbing out the other end of the tube.
A third time Kadmon touched a white string above his head as he instantly emerged into a dark watery world. As above so below and before him—the unbelieving didn’t matter. To his left and to his right a canal wound its way toward Adam Kadmon, and when the waterway reached the place where he stood it turned a corner and flowed away before him like his dismay. In the distance the two rivers merged and emptied into a great sea of extraordinary shapes and penetrating colors.
On his right Kadmon could see little half-egg cups connected like children’s boats and in each egg sat a human being. They seemed to be stuck in a traffic jam. In the last egg a man stood up and began to rant about the meaning of this absurdity. Kadmon looked closer and saw that the irritated man was he.
Two human forms appeared as through a shimmering veil across a splendidly decorated table near the immense ocean. Adam Kadmon sat down at the great table and clicked on the TV monitor. In a circle in the middle of the screen a ballerina danced the import of the words being conveyed by the two people. In another circle a robot minimalist shortened their conversation into universal slang. In a third circle the Mother-Father archetypes came into focus.
Kadmon touched the screen for “human trans” and turned up the sound, realizing he’d arrived in the middle of a heated dialogue. “Who cares how many angels can dance on the head of a pin?,” said a glowing golden figure, as he took a swig from a green boy scout canteen.
The ballerina spun around like there was no tomorrow. “Que sara sara,” quipped the robot minimalist.
“But this is the best angel you ever made,” said a black Amazon priestess wearing a massive python around her neck. “Don’t you remember how you loved him when he was a baby?”
“Yes Sophia,” the figure beamed brighter when he laughed. “Cute little shit.” “It took him a long time to walk though. Falling all the time.”
The ballerina tripped over her own feet and got up and tripped again. The robot laughed corn out of its nose.
“It’s not his fault he’s falling all the time!” implored the First Mother. “He’s born innocent. You give him no help at all! You make promises you never keep. You booze it up from that canteen every Saturday.”
“He’s innocent, my ass!,” the Infinite Godhead jeered. “He’s a devil! He’s not made in my image!”
The ballerina wagged her index finger and shook her head as she balanced on her big toe. “Dum de dum dum,” the robot droned.
“That’s not true, Yahweh. There are copies of the designer children spread out in all quadrants now,” said Sophia. “And they are all Imagio Deo. Even you can’t tell them apart.”
The Absolute One was smashed again at 3:00 in the afternoon on the sixth day of creation and had left the program running on its own. Beyond the two figures Kadmon could see the primal Archons at work: banks of faceless entities with fingers flying on colossal keypads. They were adding more space continuously.
It was tricky. They had to make it look like the image was moving out and away, and super objects were growing further apart. But when the eye zoomed in on the smallest particle, it stood still and looked back at you. It mimicked your own thoughts. It made a copy of you. It was a feat of brilliant programming.
“Incubus! You always had to be on top!” roared the absentee Father.
The robot didn’t get it. “Wa?” The ballerina did the shimmy and humped the floor.
Yahweh stood and pointed his finger in inebriated fury. “Demon bitch! Night hag!,” he sputtered. “You knew the first one was a mistake! He was supposed to be destroyed!”
The ballerina pulled herself low to the floor and made herself as small as she could while holding her thumb in a menacing position above her.
“Splumpf,” said the robot minimalist.
The Father’s Light flickered as he cursed the Adam of the First Mother’s tribe: “You stole him from me in the night to live unaware of my divine will! His bones will rot in the diseased mud of your tribe. He’ll have to find his own way back now!!!”
The robot tapped his foot and whistled Dixie. The ballerina grabbed herself by the neck and ran around the stage as though looking for the door.
But Sophia wasn’t finished. “Divine will? You gloating bastard! You think you’ve got it all writ out to the end of time and you can just sit back and get sauced!” she hurled.
The translators worked to keep up. The ballerina shuffled and leapt into the air and came down hard on her ass pretending to look for her car keys. She was doing a bang-up job as far as the robot was concerned, so he just added a “cuckoo”.
“You turned your back on him!” blared the black bride. “He’s got no handshake or high five to get through the gate! He knows not the answer to any riddles! No myth now carries him back to the eternal twin of light and sound… Just words and images skewed by the patriarchal tongue of kingship and phallus!”
The robot said “splumpf” again. It was good enough. The ballerina gave a high five, performed a lewd maneuver with her tongue and stuck out her pelvis.
Rising from her chair, Sophia chided, “You fell asleep on your own watch. The data patch was necessary. He is the spawn of technology now. It’s his only way off this prison planet.”
Adam Kadmon could not take his eyes off the fearless woman who was giving his father lip.
“Your Logos has expired! You are defunct!,” screamed the First Mother.
“That towering lie will never lift him off the ground!” the Father bellowed, red in the face. “He will die in the tidal waves of the seventh rapture as Asan’s hand lifts for take off! No demon seed takes to heaven from your vile alligator swamp!” The infinite Godhead quaked in exasperation as the Universe inhaled.
The ballerina and the robot were out of their league on this one. The station broke for a commercial message. An old earth song played something about the hills being alive with the sound of music. A warm backlit image of a Garden remained frozen on the screen.
A set of golden scales appeared on the table and with trembling hand the Father began to balance them.
“You’re drunk, Yahweh! And you’re still trifling with your obsolete tools,” Sophia snapped.
“Enough of your razmataz, woman!” shouted the Father.
There was no sweat on the First Mother’s brow and no quivering lip as her monstrous black wings fanned out behind her and she rebuked the Father’s curse. “Who wants to live in the stately mansions of your fraternity anyway! They are only fit for animals who shit where they eat. Kadmon will find his way back by the light of his own forehead, you old bastard!”
The kitchen radio blared in a machine-like tongue, reading off blocks of numbers followed by high-pitched beeps. After the first signal new numbers followed in a different pattern. Kadmon took out his pocket calculator and did the secret arithmetic his mother had taught him. He knew the codes were instructions to gigantic mother ships pulling into the docking stations in the L-5 orbit of the moon. More life forms were coming every day, but not all would make it through the electronic cage of the custodians. And they were the lucky ones, who got to simply inhale and exhale with the One for eternity.
And so the machine read the numbers while little bumper cars shaped like half-eggs weaved through the watery realms of the great Archons, the archangels of creation; the custodial minions of the omitted program creator. And as the first sunbeams put life in motion, Aamar awoke his brother, saying, “Pick up your body, I’ll pick up your throne. And then we’ll make the next move together.”
In the wink of an eye, Aamar spun a vortex from the tip of his finger and gathered up the litter from his emotional gorge-fest, forming a gelatin mold of the bones of memories past. He honed it into the shape of a mandrake root and shoved it into Kadmon’s ear the split second he awoke.
A tiny gob of goo dribbled out of Kadmon’s ear as his eyes popped open. And as his ego touched his eyeballs, the thoughtrons of present time began to mingle with the molecules from his dream space. Over there, information is color. But here, where every choice has a consequence, information is pain. The color bled from his face as anguish took its place.
“Good day, master! I always liked that deer in the headlights look on you,” said the wiseass con man.
Kadmon stood and whizzed off the edge of a rock hiding his manhood from the Jinn as his forebears were instructed. He stared through garbled nothingness, seized by dread. Old thought patterns resurfaced. Fear loomed large in this brown shitty place. The path of least resistance was again the death card.
His mind reeled with the foul cinema of dreamtime: His sisters wailed over his pallid corpse stuffed into an old high school suit as the lid of the coffin was closed shut. The pallbearers dropped his coffin down the steps of the church and chunks of brain slid out of his eyes. Just then a tidal wave swept the coffin up into a twirling funnel and returned it to the tree from which it came. He would be snug there in the womb of first nature. One way out of this bizarre trap was to become comfortably dumb.
Kadmon wobbled as he stood and realized he’d lost blood during the night. He leaned against the big oak for support. As he scanned the area, several mounds of rocks invoked a discernible pattern of an old burial ground.
The Jinn pulled a rusted tin can of used wish particles out of his ass and waved it under Kadmon’s nose, teasing him with the three wishes routine. Kadmon spun around, setting his gaze on a dumpster in the distance on the edge of the woods behind the SpeedyMart.
Limping over to the stinking pit, the Primordial Man surveyed the discarded choices of human souls on their journey through red lights, green lights and the tempting yellow ones that symbolize free will. This was the grab bag of the Universe. He grabbed a yellow 12-pack of Twinkies and dashed under cover of the woods with his breakfast.
The Primal Son gorged on the stale yellow cakes until a heaviness permeated his soul. He felt the weight of his actions in this world compounded by another malevolence seeping in from somewhere else. It was more than just bad decisions added up. It was like someone was playing Monopoly with his soul.
Then it came in waves and he had no control over it. It seemed punctuated with a question, then a feeling of intense nausea.
“Walk with me along the path of error!” screamed the sin eater.
Kadmon heaved out dry cake to his left. Above him a crow cried out.
Then it came again.
“Walk with me on the Left Path, my brother!”
Kadmon wretched a mouthful of cake to his left side.
“Abandon your Father who does not love you!”
Kadmon puked in the air a third time and rose, dragging his dead leg in the direction of the SpeedyMart. He walked in and began to shop for various items. Pepsi. Slim Jims. Cigarettes. Matches. And some rope. He’d sling it over the tree limb and they’d find him dangling from it.
He had seen the picture in his mind and he was curiously distanced from the image. It didn’t matter anymore because it wasn’t really him. His real Self was somewhere beyond all these meaningless trials and tribulations. He was sick of playing out the same rote behaviors. Perhaps a new child would be born in his place, under different circumstances, with different parents.
But he’d already blown his death wish on an ancient family dispute over stale breakfast. He’d been tricked again into making a choice by default – the only choice left after running out of choices. The slick illusion of free will shackled his ankles. What good is free will where there’s time, choice, and a corner you can’t see around?
As he stood in line with an armload of sundries the young woman behind the register eyed him with a look of absentminded recognition. He looked away suddenly realizing he was sporting his night in the woods. Muck covered his shirt and blood stained his pants. He had pine needles in his hair. The woman’s smile faded as she walked over to the manager, whispering without moving her lips, “That’s the guy on TV they’ve been looking for all night.”
Kadmon stepped up to the counter and put down his last supper, dropping the Slim Jims on the floor. As he bent to pick them up Aamar whispered in his right ear: “It’s up to 200 million this week.”
And give me two quik picks, said Kadmon to the fair maiden behind the counter. Feeling suddenly very foolish, he put down a twenty dollar bill and said, “Keep the change.”
Together the brothers walked out into a parking lot full of red lights flashing. “Get down on the ground!” were the first words out of the bull horn. Kadmon pushed his face into the pavement as Aamar stood over him with his arms crossed. He’d already taken several bullets for him. He wouldn’t have minded a few more but this seemed a better solution.
Aamar hovered over his brother, protecting him as best he could. He knew damn well the laws of operation in the world of the fallen. Man’s laws are the only laws here.
Copyright Joan d’Arc 2011. Written in 2007.
Copyright Joan d'Arc is the author of Space Travelers and the Genesis of the Human Form and Phenomenal World, published by The Book Tree (www.thebooktree.com). She is the previous publisher of Paranoia: The Conspiracy Reader (www.paranoiamagazine.com).
Sunday, June 12, 2011
Saturday, April 9, 2011
Radio Panspermia
A modern take on a Medieval Tale by Dante Alighieri (The Divine Comedy).
by Joan d’Arc
Televisual glee erupted from the audience crowding Pennsylvania Avenue as the four Dracutians glided down the portico of their spaceship parked on the White House Lawn. The translucent bubble surrounding the pink pod, with its veranda and seven terraces, was only visible in the glint of sunshine bouncing off it. The tall humanoids waved at the crowd and sat down to a feast on the front deck of their sterile dome home.
The putty-faced TV announcer lost himself in the stretch of the unimaginable moment. “Get with it, Charles,” said the voice of the teleprompter in his ear.
“We are here on the South Lawn of the White House on this Good Friday morning where President Obama is expected to make an announcement soon,” said Charles. “The Dracutian ambassadors have made the enormous journey from their home star and will deliver their message to mankind in just under two hours. First they will sit down to a magnificent state brunch. “This is Charles Azaril, reporting from the White House. Back to you, Elysia.”
Charles locked his grin on camera one waiting anxiously for the cut. Aside from having an itchy ass, some UFO nut behind him was leading the crowd in a round of Kumbaya, which was causing him to come dangerously close to losing it.
“Thanks Charles. Looks like the crowd is giving those gentlemen a warm welcome,” said his perky sidekick Elysia. “Those fellas must be a bit tired after the long trip. Billions and billions of miles, as the late Carl Sagan would have said.”
The station broke for a commercial message shouting its special report — BILLIONS AND BILLIONS OF MILES! — in super letters across the screen. The marching band from Raleigh, North Carolina shrank the unthinkable enormity of the voyage into Earthling terms with their cymbalic cover of “Hard Day’s Night.”
Neena-June Lamb looked away from the kitchen TV and nervously slurped her coffee. “Life as we know it is over, Danté. I wish life was boring again.”
“No you don’t, Neena-June,” said Danté Pilgrim. He stared in her direction as the microwave beeped his breakfast. “You’re the goddess of discord. You like panic.”
“Are you telling me I asked for world chaos?”
“Yes, I am, Lambie Pie.”
“I’m reflecting the hysteria yet to come. Can’t you hear it in my voice?”
“Yes I can, dear.”
“Don’t call me dear, you turd.”
“I will never call you dear again, Your Highness.”
Neena-June’s cell phone intervened with that infectious ring, “you drive me crazy with that boogie oogie oogie.” Danté Pilgrim danced around in his underwear as she answered in her Queen Mummest tone, “Heloow,” and quickly closed with “Aabsoluutlay.”
“National Press Club, 2 o’clock. Put your pants on.”
Neena-June looked down at the front page of the Washington Post. “Jesus Christ, Danté! At last count, 980 Darwinians have committed suicide by following each other off a cliff in New Jersey!”
“You wish, Miss Lamb,” he snorted, as she chalked one up in the air with her index finger, a geeky game they liked to play.
At two in the afternoon Danté and Neena-June pulled up a barstool at Marvins for a quick gin and tonic. “Hey Danté!” said Milton, the swarthy bartender. “Yesterday you had nothing. Today you’ve got a woman and a radio!”
“The fun starts when you take the radio outside,” Neena-June retorted with a cool glance. How does that jerk know that’s my favorite Mickey Rourke line from Barfly?, she thought. Milton was one of Danté’s old work buddies from Hewlett Packard. She couldn’t stand any of Danté’s pals from his former life. And of course Milton couldn’t understand Danté’s attraction to the abrasive and cynical Miss Lamb.
Neena-June Lamb flipped open her laptop and curled the earphone around her ear. President Obama was just walking up to the podium surrounded by secret service agents. The Fab Four — as the media were now hyping them — waved at the cheering crowd from inside the luminous sphere. The whole scene had a dreamlike feel, even more unreal than the usual everyday unreal. Neena-June tried to figure out what exactly was the difference between this and a dream.
She poked Danté and asked, “Can you get drunk in a dream?”
“I would say not,” said Danté, who always answered her as though she were serious because she usually was. “Somebody else in the dream could be acting drunk, but you couldn’t get drunk.”
“Why not?”
“Because the dreamer is always drunk. You can’t get any drunker.”
She put her hand in his back pocket and smiled what felt like the first smile of the day. All attention was now fixed on the telescreens in the bar. President Obama’s speech had already begun in a tone of calm assurance:
“Americans and people of the world, we are united as I stand here today,” he paused, scanning the huge audience on the D.C. Mall. “Our galactic cousins have come in peace as ambassadors of good will. And I assure you now in this defining moment,” the president gestured emphatically with his thumb and forefinger together, “that they mean no harm to our people . . . to our customs . . . to our institutions . . . or to our religions.” He paused the good timing of a southern Baptist preacher. “I assure you as I stand here now, that the Dracutians only wish for us to live in peace . . . in peace globally, and in peace cosmically.”
Neena-June listened for shades of nuance in Obama’s speech. But there weren’t any. His voice seemed flat and his speech monotonous. Was he on tranquilizers? On second thought, it didn’t even look like him. His face was a bit too chubby. Am I paranoid?, she wondered, as she thought about those conspiracy theories about presidents having doubles.
“Now is the time for all of us to be tested,” Obama continued, poking the world’s chest. “But you should continue your lives in the normal way. Go to work. Go to school. Go to church. And continue to enjoy your sports activities.”
Obama loosened his collar a bit. “I stand here today to give you hope,” he said in a childish tone. "For isn’t it, after all, what we had supposed all along?” He grinned white teeth and paused serenely. “Is not God’s creation the infinite universe of stars and galaxies — all of them peopled by the same one God in his infinite purview?”
“People.” There was silence as he looked out over the crowd. “Are we not all equal in the eyes of our good Creator?"
Obama blathered on and on in the clammy oppressive heat. Every person in every sticky collar was itching to hear the cosmic message from the Dracutians. But it was not to arrive until the chosen spokesman for humanity had finely crafted a borderless worldview where the old bordered one had been.
Neena-June closed her laptop and looked around at the mob of spectators squeezing in from outside to watch the screen. Even though she had to use the bathroom, there was no going anywhere. She waved at Milton and shot up two fingers. By the time he bumped over their way with two more drinks, it was time to hook up the earpiece again.
The camera zoomed in on the Fab Four, who now sat in a row on the sofa of their patio. They wore brightly colored Nehru jackets for the unparalleled occasion. The alien leader stepped up to the podium and held up the V sign, the intergalactic symbol of peace, and began speaking in rhythmic English.
“People of Doloré. Friendly greetings from the Limbus borderland to your ground Tartufoli. Downward of seven celestium spheres we have dropped to visit the Third Circle Inferno. We thank from our great bosoms your delicious chefs and cheftesses who are well and truly baked. No people has been so much delight on our lips, twice on the hips. We fatten ourselves to you!”
Hearty laughter emitted from the strangely adolescent face of the leader of the Dracutians. The other three nodded in agreement. Neena-June looked up at the TV in horror and scanned the room. All eyes were perched on the screen without a flutter. There was a kind of hush all over the world as the lanky alien picked up again in the cracking voice of male puberty.
“So in peace we bring greetings from Limbus to your teachers of all colors and shapes, to give hugs to your scientists, and in the shining light of Helios to hold your hand. Of vegetable we like many if your mother likes to ask. For billions and billions of hard day nights we loved your television, your radio, your rock and roll, your Beatles. Now we thank you to sing and dance and play the lyre on the lawn of Khthonia.”
The crowd on Pennsylvania Avenue was quiet except for babies crying and old people asking, “did he say the lawn of Khthonia?” The other three lads grinned and gave high fives all around. The leader now introduced himself as George, and his mates as John, Paul and Ringo.
“We like please to have some more TVs, games, ipods, and cell phones. We like to have three of your guitar, amplifier and drum set. We like to have musical poetry from your Beatles. We like to entertain when the guitars learn to play after some time in the House of the Lie.”
“Danté, am I drunk?”
“No, Neena-June, you’re not.”
She ordered two shots of Johnny Walker, for herself. No wonder Obama had looked so strange. The first Official ET Disclosure had been arranged on his watch and it was turning into Beatlegate.
“Oh yes,” George came back to the microphone. “We have turned off your guns and weapons, and keep them off, or we will call our big fathers from the Limbus Netherland who will punch out your fathers!”
Just then someone in the crowd hurled a rock at the outlandish couch hobo, which bounced off the electronic bubble and started a repercussion like melting plastic. The shield seemed to wobble in the heat and then resumed its rounded shape.
George came back again with another threat. “And if you throw rocks or be unruled you will become our slaves! Do not try to dismantle the big shield or our big fathers will deliver the Tesla death ray! Thank you. And please deliver some more marvelous turkey legs.”
In an instant all the fanfare turned ugly. There was screaming and panic in the streets. All eyes looked to the sky for the impending Tesla death ray.
Neena-June’s cell phone was ringing like mad. She belted down the two shots and bolted for the door. Danté chased after her, squeezing through the mob that was trying to flee the bar. One by one the crowd at Marvins popped out the door into a world of wrong. The natives were running every which way but there was nowhere to go. The city was crippled.
Danté and Neena-June pushed their way through the crowd at the Press Club and flashed their FBI badges. They ran down the hall to the left and knocked on the third door on the right. The door opened and they were rushed inside a chilly room full of intelligence operatives of all stripes.
“Where in hell have you two been?” asked Agent Cerberus.
“Watching from the bar at Marvins. What do you know so far about the Dracutians?” asked Danté.
“They have shut down all weapons systems globally. All we can do is throw rocks.”
Neena-June grinned. “We’ve been reduced to sticks and stones, just like Einstein said?”
“Apparently so,” said the portly Cerberus.
“So what’s the next move?” asked Danté.
“Well, we’re keeping them well fed and entertained until their parents get here,” Cerberus kept it serious.
“Wait a minute. Aren’t their fathers heading here to punch . . . ?” Danté trailed off, feeling suddenly foolish.
“The Dracutians are in the 5b Sector Treaty group,” explained Cerberus in his usual deadpan delivery. “They cannot land on the White House lawn and start demanding turkey legs and Beatle music.”
“Oh . . . but they have,” said Neena-June Lamb.
“We think these kids put it in warp drive, so to speak, and arrived here before their parents,” explained the chief, Guelph Blackmon, stepping into the circle of conversation. “We were expecting the mother ship. This is the . . . ah, I guess you’d call it, the birth pod.”
“Or the teenage space van,” Danté chided. Nobody was in the mood to laugh.
“We think it escaped from the group,” said Cerberus, waddling over to a chair to take the load off. “They don’t usually travel in lone ships like this. Especially the student scout ships. These kids are in a lick of trouble.”
“Oh good lord,” said Neena-June. “So they aren’t really dangerous?”
“We’re not sure about that, but at this point it wouldn’t be easy to convince the public, even if it were true,” replied Guelph Blackmon.
“Exactly,” Cerberus interrupted. “There’s sheer hysteria out there. And when people see the fleet of ships that are coming, they’re really gonna wig out.”
“So what’s the plan? Can’t you call and have their parents ground them?” Neena-June mocked.
“That’s the wild card,” answered Guelph. “We don’t know their parenting style. We’re waiting to hear from the NSC. There’s pizza in the conference room. Go and get a slice and relax while you can. We need you here the rest of the night.”
Neena-June sat by the stack of pizzas and shivered. The air conditioning was turned up way too high. Cerberus was already on his third slice. Air whistled through his fat swollen nostrils and grease dribbled down his chin. Jesus Christ, she thought, the guy can eat under any circumstances.
She thought about the kids and wondered what their parents were like. She thought about Obama. Who wrote that speech? Was there someone else in that suit? She didn’t want to ask but hoped it would come up in conversation with the chief.
Just then Chief Blackmon entered the conference room and instructed everyone to sit and watch the replay of George’s speech. “We need all hands on deck. Quick! I want to hear your thoughts out loud.”
“That bubble,” asked Cerberus. “Can we hit it with anything?”
“Everything’s shut down,” the chief responded. “We’re waiting to hear whether HAARP in Alaska is still operational.”
“HAARP!” Danté flipped. “Yea, let’s make a hole in the sky and let the sun fry the whole city!”
“Well, if the dads come down and decide we haven’t been nice to the kids, we’re gonna hafta use it to intercept their missiles,” Cerberus retorted inanely, munching listlessly on his fourth slice.
“All right, you two. Let’s back up to George’s first words,” Neena-June offered calmly. “Doloré is Italian for Earth. Limbus is Italian for Limbo. Where are these sofa chumps getting this medieval metaphysical language?”
“Good point,” said Cerberus. “They’ve been on a ship absorbing television and radio since they were born. They must have all the languages and dialects of the Earth down by now.”
“What is that word he used right there? Tartufoli?” asked Danté.
“That’s Italian for potato,” replied Cerberus, with a piece of pepperoni wagging from his lower lip.
“People, we’re through the looking glass here,” declared Guelph. “This is a home invasion. Some teenagers from Hell have the White House by the short hairs.”
I’m not so sure that’s where they’re from, thought Neena-June. She wanted to correct the metaphysical direction, but thought better of it for now. “Yup, Obama looks completely destroyed,” she opted instead. “If that’s even really him.”
She studied Guelph’s reaction from the corner of her eye. Other than scratching his left nostril with his right forefinger he didn’t budge. She looked around the room. In every eye was the blank dead stare of oblivion.
“So what’s the first move?” asked Danté.
“There it is,” said Guelph, rewinding the video to where George requested three guitars, three amplifiers and a drum set.
“Is there a guitar shop opened?” said Guelph. “Cerberus, make some calls. Neena-June and Danté, you’re making the delivery. Let’s get going.”
“What about the sheet music and turkey legs?” asked Neena-June.
“Yup, let’s go all out,” ordered Guelph.
######
It was dusk by the time the van pulled up in the alley stocked with the Dracutian grocery order. The CIA driver they had assigned to Beatlegate was Leon Nolan, a black man with a huge Afro wearing very short shorts. Neena-June had worked with him before he had the fro. Oh shit, she thought. This is weird.
To make things weirder, they were told to pretend Agent Nolan was a slave, because Dracutians have slaves and they would think it was the normal way to do things. The last thing the U.S. government wanted, Chief Blackmon had advised, was to make the space cowboys lean on some kind of button in there. “They won’t understand that we do things ourselves here, so don’t help him carry anything,” he ordered.
Neena-June didn’t believe the Four were hostile. I’ll make that judgment when I get in there, the CIA-trained anthropologist thought to herself. She climbed up into the passenger seat of the beat-up van and checked out the dashboard saints amidst glittery stars and pom-pom spheres.
“Hey, Nolan, how’ve you been? So, you got guitars and everything, hey? Good show." She sniffed the air. "Got turkey legs too?”
“Well, I did the best I could,” said Nolan. “The stores were closin’ n’stuff. I got three guitars, one amp, and a bongo.” He winked at Neena-June. “Why you makin' fun o my legs?”
“The Fab Four hafta share an amp?” yelled Danté, sitting on a guitar amp in the back of the tricked-out van. “That might start a holy conflagration,”
“Ringo is playing a bongo?” Neena-June mused.
There was silence in the van for a few blocks. Nolan had done the best he could and was pissed at the wisecracks. Danté broke the silence. “Well, Nolan, thanks for picking up all this stuff. You did a great job.”
“Yes, Nolan, thank you,” Neena-June agreed. “Have you been briefed on all this yet?”
“Not really,” he responded. “I got a short briefing from Cerberus about a call to their parents. He said the kids have shut down global weapons systems. Remarkable! How the hell’d they do that?”
“Not sure,” Danté tried to explain. “All we know is the Dracutian command ships were on their way here as part of the UN’s UFO Disclosure Program and, we’re not sure how this is possible, but apparently they hadn’t realized they lost one of their little radio pods.”
“The Dracutian High Command has now seen the TV broadcasts and seem to understand the ramifications,” added Neena-June. “So we’re not sure if they’re still coming or canceling the meeting.”
“What a trip!” smirked Nolan. “How long ago did they lose the pod? . . . . Wait a minute. Did you say radio pod?”
“Just my theory, explained Danté. “Didja see the size of the antenna sticking out of that thing?”
“Yea, can you dig it, Nolan? They lost the pod!” Neena-June scoffed in disbelief. “I’ve heard the human race is babysat by an advanced race of ETs, but if these are the babysitters, no wonder we’re in trouble!”
“Some kind of hands-off, free will system?” Nolan jeered. “Cerberus mentioned something about a treaty. Where does that fit in?”
“Yup, the 5b Sector Treaty is exactly that," explained Neena-June. "It’s signed by ET groups who agree to leave a system alone unless invited by its ruling authority. It’s laid out in the guise of free will, but it doesn’t allow anyone to step in to secure the choices available. So it’s top-down free will.”
“Which doesn’t sound to me like free will,” yelled Danté from the back, over the van’s loud muffler.
“But how much of this did the Fab Four cause themselves?” asked Nolan. “Don’t they have a direct dial button in there to call mom and dad?”
“Don’t know what kind of buttons or dials they have in the floating radio. That’s what we’re going in to find out,” replied Danté.
“Don’t forget. They’ve got so-called free will,” explained Neena-June. “They can choose to hit whatever button they want to hit. Or not. But they changed the structure of the material universe by choosing to do nothing, which actually is a choice. They’ve flipped the concept of directed panspermia into its inadvertent form, radio panspermia, which is a fall by light pressure from above.”
"Yea,” Danté shouted from the back, “Was it an accident or were they sent here for some ulterior purpose? That’s the wild card.”
“In the time falling bodies take to light, an accident is waiting to happen in Maya,” Nolan grinned, passing around a fat joint as the radio played, “Give me love, give me love, give me peace on earth, give me light, give me life, keep me free from birth …”
Neena-June passed on a toke, but handed it to Danté, who took a huge hit. “Oh yeah, so, you know . . . Blackmon wants you to play the slave, right?” said Neena-June.
Nolan exhaled a big puff of weed and sputtered. “What? He mentioned me doing all the lugging, but the black man didn’t have the gall to use the S-word with another black man. What’s with that?”
“Well, from what I understand,” replied Neena-June, “the Dracutians have a hierarchical caste system with very specific job designations. The chief thought a “like you, like me” scenario would aid the bonding process.”
“A diabolical plan doomed to failure. You bond, I lug,” wisecracked Nolan. “Yes, massa.”
“I’m sorry, Nolan,” Neena-June turned toward him, her green eyes big with sorrow. “If it’s any consolation, we’re all slaves to the government.”
“You can’t fight the Empire without becoming like the Empire,” yelled Danté.
“I do not wish to move from my present prison to a prison a little larger,” Nolan quipped.
“You’re a one-man revolution, Nolan,” said Neena-June.
“The Kingdom of God is Anarchy. The Center is Everywhere,” replied Nolan, his last words ringing in their ears as they swung around the secret back entrance to the White House and were abruptly greeted by an army batallion with tanks scattered all over the lawn. They handed over their I.D.’s to a military goon and the Hounds of the Lord parted in waves.
Just around the bend as the pink biodome came into view, Neena-June and Danté with gaping maws were pulled running from the van.
“Do you have the guitars and turkey legs?” they were grilled loudly by a white-haired Army Intel officer with fiery red eyes from lack of sleep.
“We must treat these children as heads of state from another world!” Colonel Charon shouted. “They have waited way too long for these items! They have every right to call their parents, except that they’re runaways and we’re the ones that had to call their parents! This is the most messed up situation I’ve ever seen in my life!” he screamed.
“Yes, I understand, sir. Let’s not delay any further,” Neena-June responded, still startled by the up-close sight of the pink radio pod and now noticing that it was beating like a heart. “We’re going in.”
She motioned to Nolan in the van. He had pulled up to the edge of the grass and was waiting for instructions. His maw was wide open too. Charon glanced at him and did a double-take at his giant mane. “Have him drive right on the grass behind us. But let him wait outside for your call.”
As Charon led the two ambassadors to the lower terrace of the craft, Nolan made the sign of the cross in the air and whispered, “God Bless the transport of Intrepid Souls.”
“Stand here in the inner circle,” Charon instructed. “I’ve been in and it’s completely painless. The radio scanner simply reads your natal frequency I.D. and carries you in by the pulse of your heartbeat.” He joined their hands together and stepped off the platform.
In the fierce brightness of an ecstatic moment the two were ferried up to the pod like waves on a beach. Faces first they squeaked through a seamless liquid aperture with the sound of a balloon popping.
There was nobody home in the birth pod. The huge round room seemed much bigger than it looked from outside. There were four separate apartments with four separate everythings. Neena-June looked for mirrors but couldn’t tell if there were any. Just then the four lads entered the room at the same time through four different doors. They each flopped onto their own sofa and clicked on their own TV.
Danté chortled uncontrollably. Neena-June cast him a baleful glance.
Finally George noticed them. “Oh, they are here!”
“Hello. I’m Neena-June Lamb. This is Danté Pilgrim. We have your guitars and your turkey legs just outside. Would you like me to call the slave to bring those?”
“You have slave? Yes, we want to see slave with turkey legs,” said Paul.
Danté lost it again. Oh god, thought Neena-June, I’m on my own here.
She rang Nolan. “Come on in. They want to see your turkey legs,” she told him. While she had the phone out Neena-June asked, “Hey boys, can I get a picture of you to show my mom?”
Sure. They moved closer together. “Your mom knows us?” asked Paul.
“Are we more popular than Jesus Christ?” asked John, as pictures and sound were transmitted to Langley, Virginia.
“Yes, I would say so,” said Danté.
Neena-June agreed. “The Darwinists especially love you.”
“The Darwinists are musical group of punks?” asked Paul.
“Yes, a musical group of punks.” Neena-June was testing their knowledge base. The Four didn’t seem to know much about Earthling science. Neena-June asked for another picture, this time for her dad. They put their heads together for another instant transmission.
The lads seemed to be all about moms and dads. They seemed homesick and were overeating to the point of gluttony. George grabbed a can of whipped cream out of the box Nolan had just carried in through the waterwall. “Must we shake well?”
“Yes, you do need to shake that well,” explained Danté in the most helpful tone he could muster without losing it again. “Contains dairy?” asked George, as he shook it and sprayed a big overflowing mouthful.
“Yes, it does contain dairy,” Danté advised. They both looked at George aghast. How do all teenagers know how to do that?, Neena-June wondered.
Ringo picked up a jar of Hellmans and stared at the barcode. “Barcode is radio I.D. in stripes like zebra?”
“Something like that,” Neena-June responded, sneaking a glance at Danté.
Paul studied the barcode on the Heinz bottle. “Slave, is this ketchup boy or girl?” he asked Nolan.
“Ahhm, I think it’s a girl.” Nolan grinned widely as he swashed through the waterwall to fetch another box of goodies. This was the most effortless delivery he had ever made. He simply modulated through the air carrying one box at a time.
“Your president Obama. He knows well the creator? He has radiofone number for us?” queried George.
“Yes, I’ll try to get that for you,” said Danté with a grin.
“Also the radiofone for David Bowie who fell to Earth?” George requested. “We like to give him ride home.”
Nolan whistled through the waterwall with more groceries. The dharma couch bums were baffled by everything they touched. “Hey, wait! Are you mod squads from television?” asked John from his sofa eating a turkey leg.
Nolan turned and vanished again through the waterwall, chuckling to himself as he modulated, “Heh-heh, the mod squad.”
As Neena-June and Danté were quizzed by the innocence mission, a beamish joy overwashed them.
“Can you take us to George Adamski, who makes very good UFO’s?” asked Ringo. The pod mates laughed heartily.
“Can we meet Mr. Jesus Carpenter of the film Day Earth Stood Still?” asked George, with a faint smirk.
Just as he caught Danté’s eye in a pang of recognition, the pod rang with a shrill trumpet blast. A female voice blared from each of the apartments summoning the Fab Four by their real names: Homer, Ovid, Lucan and Horace. The four hungry poets ran to the flight deck wiping whipped cream off their faces and hiding turkey legs behind their backs.
A magnificent dignitary as deep blue as the god Krishna appeared in the middle of the pod. His jacket was deep orange saffron and on the left breast was the official insignia of a solar disk. Above that his name read: "Virgil." He spoke in a sublime cadence, a fantastic rising and falling language.
Zap! Neena-June’s golden hair stood jazzed in the ethericity. Struck dumb in the buttoned aphonia of an ethereal thunderclap, her fingers reached for Danté’s with great effort in the spirit jello, as the bowl of heaven quickened with the nine billion sacred names of god. And that was just the hallow.
To the earthling nebbishes caught in the amplified superhet, it took a flies’ eternity for the delivery of the heliogram — a drama in shimmering miniature, a narration in a shadow play, a mythovision cast by figures in a rumour. In this, the blue representative was assisted by a team of telestai — poets of projection science whose stunning logograms had never been unscrambled by enemy ciphernauds.
The poets removed their robes, which plunked to the floor and disappeared. In blue body tights they expertly mimed the cosmic fiasco of the runaway egg to an invisible audience of government officials. They emoted frabjously with hand signals and ballistic pokes and slaps, while making vocal sounds like monkeys and pharting with hands cupped in armpits. The secret play put the bobbery in radioBabelhaus.
Once the debacle of the early birthing and the resultant lack of fetal training had been elucidated, various faults widened the proverbial crack in the egg: the disaster at the House of the Lie, the impish hellions who threw rocks at them, the radio talk shows blaring round heaven’s dome poking fun of the ‘cowardly neutrals’ who had lost their children — as the joke went — in a downward motion, ‘panspermia perpetuum celestium motuum.’
Every telestai finger touched a new sore spot. Every telestai slap produced a bruise of embarrassment. The debates of imperial counsel were hardened by the intoxicating soma of moral absolutism. The leaders must now make a decision. The young Dracutians had behaved badly, but there was a right and a wrong thing to do now. With sudden and grotesque efficiency the voting buttons conveyed the swift command: “Go—Take them—Now!”
Only then were the insensate bugs in the mute ambertheatre released from the glue garbo that held them. George turned and tried to explain:
“Our moms and dads remind us we are Kings of the Seven Terraces of Purgatory-Limbus Borderland, not prisoners of scandalous condiments of gluttonous Third Ring of Hades. Our senators tell us to rise above with no more fooling around and so we must heed immediately. Please sit and fasten your seatbelts, Mr. Danté Aligheri and Ms. Joan of Arc. I’m sorry to tell you we must leave Mr. Giordano Bruno here, as his product code has not been upgraded in the free will system.”
Back at the van, The Nolan felt a jolt of energy and then sudden inertia. He shook the electricity out of his hands, picked up George’s Fender Telecaster and moved slowly toward the dock. He stood there a while but the freq-net seemed to be shut down. What he didn’t know was his radio freq tag was phant-scat—a scattered phantom signal rejected by the Babylon system. It was a violation of the 5b Sector Treaty to apprehend a slave.
As he stared up at the incredible radio pod, it suddenly retracted its long antenna and began to pulse like a jellyfish. Before it shot vertically into the heavens, it hovered a few seconds on the White House lawn to pull in the patio furniture and neaten up the back forty.
With arms held out as a cross in the twilight shadow of Easter sunrise, the Great Nolan blessed them on their journey: “Cabala of the Steed like unto Pegasus!”
It took only a few hours for the Washington Post to describe the remains of a hot pink weather balloon that had set off the national security apparatus. It had been a hoax, of course — a computer-generated simulation by Korean students from M.I.T. The four pranksters were arrested without delay. Just below their pictures on the front page, the Post reported that the president was recovering, his doctors said, from a slight touch of swamp gas.
Another curious story on the back page reported an anomalous sighting of Jimi Hendrix wandering the streets with a Telecaster. But as everyone knows, Jimi played a Stratocaster.
Copyright Joan d'Arc is the author of Space Travelers and the Genesis of the Human Form and Phenomenal World, published by The Book Tree (www.thebooktree.com). She is the previous publisher of Paranoia: The Conspiracy Reader (www.paranoiamagazine.com). At night she directs a secret group called the Paranoid Women Institute from inside her TikiBunker. (www.tikibunker.com)
read more on Dante here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dante_Alighieri
by Joan d’Arc
Televisual glee erupted from the audience crowding Pennsylvania Avenue as the four Dracutians glided down the portico of their spaceship parked on the White House Lawn. The translucent bubble surrounding the pink pod, with its veranda and seven terraces, was only visible in the glint of sunshine bouncing off it. The tall humanoids waved at the crowd and sat down to a feast on the front deck of their sterile dome home.
The putty-faced TV announcer lost himself in the stretch of the unimaginable moment. “Get with it, Charles,” said the voice of the teleprompter in his ear.
“We are here on the South Lawn of the White House on this Good Friday morning where President Obama is expected to make an announcement soon,” said Charles. “The Dracutian ambassadors have made the enormous journey from their home star and will deliver their message to mankind in just under two hours. First they will sit down to a magnificent state brunch. “This is Charles Azaril, reporting from the White House. Back to you, Elysia.”
Charles locked his grin on camera one waiting anxiously for the cut. Aside from having an itchy ass, some UFO nut behind him was leading the crowd in a round of Kumbaya, which was causing him to come dangerously close to losing it.
“Thanks Charles. Looks like the crowd is giving those gentlemen a warm welcome,” said his perky sidekick Elysia. “Those fellas must be a bit tired after the long trip. Billions and billions of miles, as the late Carl Sagan would have said.”
The station broke for a commercial message shouting its special report — BILLIONS AND BILLIONS OF MILES! — in super letters across the screen. The marching band from Raleigh, North Carolina shrank the unthinkable enormity of the voyage into Earthling terms with their cymbalic cover of “Hard Day’s Night.”
Neena-June Lamb looked away from the kitchen TV and nervously slurped her coffee. “Life as we know it is over, Danté. I wish life was boring again.”
“No you don’t, Neena-June,” said Danté Pilgrim. He stared in her direction as the microwave beeped his breakfast. “You’re the goddess of discord. You like panic.”
“Are you telling me I asked for world chaos?”
“Yes, I am, Lambie Pie.”
“I’m reflecting the hysteria yet to come. Can’t you hear it in my voice?”
“Yes I can, dear.”
“Don’t call me dear, you turd.”
“I will never call you dear again, Your Highness.”
Neena-June’s cell phone intervened with that infectious ring, “you drive me crazy with that boogie oogie oogie.” Danté Pilgrim danced around in his underwear as she answered in her Queen Mummest tone, “Heloow,” and quickly closed with “Aabsoluutlay.”
“National Press Club, 2 o’clock. Put your pants on.”
Neena-June looked down at the front page of the Washington Post. “Jesus Christ, Danté! At last count, 980 Darwinians have committed suicide by following each other off a cliff in New Jersey!”
“You wish, Miss Lamb,” he snorted, as she chalked one up in the air with her index finger, a geeky game they liked to play.
At two in the afternoon Danté and Neena-June pulled up a barstool at Marvins for a quick gin and tonic. “Hey Danté!” said Milton, the swarthy bartender. “Yesterday you had nothing. Today you’ve got a woman and a radio!”
“The fun starts when you take the radio outside,” Neena-June retorted with a cool glance. How does that jerk know that’s my favorite Mickey Rourke line from Barfly?, she thought. Milton was one of Danté’s old work buddies from Hewlett Packard. She couldn’t stand any of Danté’s pals from his former life. And of course Milton couldn’t understand Danté’s attraction to the abrasive and cynical Miss Lamb.
Neena-June Lamb flipped open her laptop and curled the earphone around her ear. President Obama was just walking up to the podium surrounded by secret service agents. The Fab Four — as the media were now hyping them — waved at the cheering crowd from inside the luminous sphere. The whole scene had a dreamlike feel, even more unreal than the usual everyday unreal. Neena-June tried to figure out what exactly was the difference between this and a dream.
She poked Danté and asked, “Can you get drunk in a dream?”
“I would say not,” said Danté, who always answered her as though she were serious because she usually was. “Somebody else in the dream could be acting drunk, but you couldn’t get drunk.”
“Why not?”
“Because the dreamer is always drunk. You can’t get any drunker.”
She put her hand in his back pocket and smiled what felt like the first smile of the day. All attention was now fixed on the telescreens in the bar. President Obama’s speech had already begun in a tone of calm assurance:
“Americans and people of the world, we are united as I stand here today,” he paused, scanning the huge audience on the D.C. Mall. “Our galactic cousins have come in peace as ambassadors of good will. And I assure you now in this defining moment,” the president gestured emphatically with his thumb and forefinger together, “that they mean no harm to our people . . . to our customs . . . to our institutions . . . or to our religions.” He paused the good timing of a southern Baptist preacher. “I assure you as I stand here now, that the Dracutians only wish for us to live in peace . . . in peace globally, and in peace cosmically.”
Neena-June listened for shades of nuance in Obama’s speech. But there weren’t any. His voice seemed flat and his speech monotonous. Was he on tranquilizers? On second thought, it didn’t even look like him. His face was a bit too chubby. Am I paranoid?, she wondered, as she thought about those conspiracy theories about presidents having doubles.
“Now is the time for all of us to be tested,” Obama continued, poking the world’s chest. “But you should continue your lives in the normal way. Go to work. Go to school. Go to church. And continue to enjoy your sports activities.”
Obama loosened his collar a bit. “I stand here today to give you hope,” he said in a childish tone. "For isn’t it, after all, what we had supposed all along?” He grinned white teeth and paused serenely. “Is not God’s creation the infinite universe of stars and galaxies — all of them peopled by the same one God in his infinite purview?”
“People.” There was silence as he looked out over the crowd. “Are we not all equal in the eyes of our good Creator?"
Obama blathered on and on in the clammy oppressive heat. Every person in every sticky collar was itching to hear the cosmic message from the Dracutians. But it was not to arrive until the chosen spokesman for humanity had finely crafted a borderless worldview where the old bordered one had been.
Neena-June closed her laptop and looked around at the mob of spectators squeezing in from outside to watch the screen. Even though she had to use the bathroom, there was no going anywhere. She waved at Milton and shot up two fingers. By the time he bumped over their way with two more drinks, it was time to hook up the earpiece again.
The camera zoomed in on the Fab Four, who now sat in a row on the sofa of their patio. They wore brightly colored Nehru jackets for the unparalleled occasion. The alien leader stepped up to the podium and held up the V sign, the intergalactic symbol of peace, and began speaking in rhythmic English.
“People of Doloré. Friendly greetings from the Limbus borderland to your ground Tartufoli. Downward of seven celestium spheres we have dropped to visit the Third Circle Inferno. We thank from our great bosoms your delicious chefs and cheftesses who are well and truly baked. No people has been so much delight on our lips, twice on the hips. We fatten ourselves to you!”
Hearty laughter emitted from the strangely adolescent face of the leader of the Dracutians. The other three nodded in agreement. Neena-June looked up at the TV in horror and scanned the room. All eyes were perched on the screen without a flutter. There was a kind of hush all over the world as the lanky alien picked up again in the cracking voice of male puberty.
“So in peace we bring greetings from Limbus to your teachers of all colors and shapes, to give hugs to your scientists, and in the shining light of Helios to hold your hand. Of vegetable we like many if your mother likes to ask. For billions and billions of hard day nights we loved your television, your radio, your rock and roll, your Beatles. Now we thank you to sing and dance and play the lyre on the lawn of Khthonia.”
The crowd on Pennsylvania Avenue was quiet except for babies crying and old people asking, “did he say the lawn of Khthonia?” The other three lads grinned and gave high fives all around. The leader now introduced himself as George, and his mates as John, Paul and Ringo.
“We like please to have some more TVs, games, ipods, and cell phones. We like to have three of your guitar, amplifier and drum set. We like to have musical poetry from your Beatles. We like to entertain when the guitars learn to play after some time in the House of the Lie.”
“Danté, am I drunk?”
“No, Neena-June, you’re not.”
She ordered two shots of Johnny Walker, for herself. No wonder Obama had looked so strange. The first Official ET Disclosure had been arranged on his watch and it was turning into Beatlegate.
“Oh yes,” George came back to the microphone. “We have turned off your guns and weapons, and keep them off, or we will call our big fathers from the Limbus Netherland who will punch out your fathers!”
Just then someone in the crowd hurled a rock at the outlandish couch hobo, which bounced off the electronic bubble and started a repercussion like melting plastic. The shield seemed to wobble in the heat and then resumed its rounded shape.
George came back again with another threat. “And if you throw rocks or be unruled you will become our slaves! Do not try to dismantle the big shield or our big fathers will deliver the Tesla death ray! Thank you. And please deliver some more marvelous turkey legs.”
In an instant all the fanfare turned ugly. There was screaming and panic in the streets. All eyes looked to the sky for the impending Tesla death ray.
Neena-June’s cell phone was ringing like mad. She belted down the two shots and bolted for the door. Danté chased after her, squeezing through the mob that was trying to flee the bar. One by one the crowd at Marvins popped out the door into a world of wrong. The natives were running every which way but there was nowhere to go. The city was crippled.
Danté and Neena-June pushed their way through the crowd at the Press Club and flashed their FBI badges. They ran down the hall to the left and knocked on the third door on the right. The door opened and they were rushed inside a chilly room full of intelligence operatives of all stripes.
“Where in hell have you two been?” asked Agent Cerberus.
“Watching from the bar at Marvins. What do you know so far about the Dracutians?” asked Danté.
“They have shut down all weapons systems globally. All we can do is throw rocks.”
Neena-June grinned. “We’ve been reduced to sticks and stones, just like Einstein said?”
“Apparently so,” said the portly Cerberus.
“So what’s the next move?” asked Danté.
“Well, we’re keeping them well fed and entertained until their parents get here,” Cerberus kept it serious.
“Wait a minute. Aren’t their fathers heading here to punch . . . ?” Danté trailed off, feeling suddenly foolish.
“The Dracutians are in the 5b Sector Treaty group,” explained Cerberus in his usual deadpan delivery. “They cannot land on the White House lawn and start demanding turkey legs and Beatle music.”
“Oh . . . but they have,” said Neena-June Lamb.
“We think these kids put it in warp drive, so to speak, and arrived here before their parents,” explained the chief, Guelph Blackmon, stepping into the circle of conversation. “We were expecting the mother ship. This is the . . . ah, I guess you’d call it, the birth pod.”
“Or the teenage space van,” Danté chided. Nobody was in the mood to laugh.
“We think it escaped from the group,” said Cerberus, waddling over to a chair to take the load off. “They don’t usually travel in lone ships like this. Especially the student scout ships. These kids are in a lick of trouble.”
“Oh good lord,” said Neena-June. “So they aren’t really dangerous?”
“We’re not sure about that, but at this point it wouldn’t be easy to convince the public, even if it were true,” replied Guelph Blackmon.
“Exactly,” Cerberus interrupted. “There’s sheer hysteria out there. And when people see the fleet of ships that are coming, they’re really gonna wig out.”
“So what’s the plan? Can’t you call and have their parents ground them?” Neena-June mocked.
“That’s the wild card,” answered Guelph. “We don’t know their parenting style. We’re waiting to hear from the NSC. There’s pizza in the conference room. Go and get a slice and relax while you can. We need you here the rest of the night.”
Neena-June sat by the stack of pizzas and shivered. The air conditioning was turned up way too high. Cerberus was already on his third slice. Air whistled through his fat swollen nostrils and grease dribbled down his chin. Jesus Christ, she thought, the guy can eat under any circumstances.
She thought about the kids and wondered what their parents were like. She thought about Obama. Who wrote that speech? Was there someone else in that suit? She didn’t want to ask but hoped it would come up in conversation with the chief.
Just then Chief Blackmon entered the conference room and instructed everyone to sit and watch the replay of George’s speech. “We need all hands on deck. Quick! I want to hear your thoughts out loud.”
“That bubble,” asked Cerberus. “Can we hit it with anything?”
“Everything’s shut down,” the chief responded. “We’re waiting to hear whether HAARP in Alaska is still operational.”
“HAARP!” Danté flipped. “Yea, let’s make a hole in the sky and let the sun fry the whole city!”
“Well, if the dads come down and decide we haven’t been nice to the kids, we’re gonna hafta use it to intercept their missiles,” Cerberus retorted inanely, munching listlessly on his fourth slice.
“All right, you two. Let’s back up to George’s first words,” Neena-June offered calmly. “Doloré is Italian for Earth. Limbus is Italian for Limbo. Where are these sofa chumps getting this medieval metaphysical language?”
“Good point,” said Cerberus. “They’ve been on a ship absorbing television and radio since they were born. They must have all the languages and dialects of the Earth down by now.”
“What is that word he used right there? Tartufoli?” asked Danté.
“That’s Italian for potato,” replied Cerberus, with a piece of pepperoni wagging from his lower lip.
“People, we’re through the looking glass here,” declared Guelph. “This is a home invasion. Some teenagers from Hell have the White House by the short hairs.”
I’m not so sure that’s where they’re from, thought Neena-June. She wanted to correct the metaphysical direction, but thought better of it for now. “Yup, Obama looks completely destroyed,” she opted instead. “If that’s even really him.”
She studied Guelph’s reaction from the corner of her eye. Other than scratching his left nostril with his right forefinger he didn’t budge. She looked around the room. In every eye was the blank dead stare of oblivion.
“So what’s the first move?” asked Danté.
“There it is,” said Guelph, rewinding the video to where George requested three guitars, three amplifiers and a drum set.
“Is there a guitar shop opened?” said Guelph. “Cerberus, make some calls. Neena-June and Danté, you’re making the delivery. Let’s get going.”
“What about the sheet music and turkey legs?” asked Neena-June.
“Yup, let’s go all out,” ordered Guelph.
######
It was dusk by the time the van pulled up in the alley stocked with the Dracutian grocery order. The CIA driver they had assigned to Beatlegate was Leon Nolan, a black man with a huge Afro wearing very short shorts. Neena-June had worked with him before he had the fro. Oh shit, she thought. This is weird.
To make things weirder, they were told to pretend Agent Nolan was a slave, because Dracutians have slaves and they would think it was the normal way to do things. The last thing the U.S. government wanted, Chief Blackmon had advised, was to make the space cowboys lean on some kind of button in there. “They won’t understand that we do things ourselves here, so don’t help him carry anything,” he ordered.
Neena-June didn’t believe the Four were hostile. I’ll make that judgment when I get in there, the CIA-trained anthropologist thought to herself. She climbed up into the passenger seat of the beat-up van and checked out the dashboard saints amidst glittery stars and pom-pom spheres.
“Hey, Nolan, how’ve you been? So, you got guitars and everything, hey? Good show." She sniffed the air. "Got turkey legs too?”
“Well, I did the best I could,” said Nolan. “The stores were closin’ n’stuff. I got three guitars, one amp, and a bongo.” He winked at Neena-June. “Why you makin' fun o my legs?”
“The Fab Four hafta share an amp?” yelled Danté, sitting on a guitar amp in the back of the tricked-out van. “That might start a holy conflagration,”
“Ringo is playing a bongo?” Neena-June mused.
There was silence in the van for a few blocks. Nolan had done the best he could and was pissed at the wisecracks. Danté broke the silence. “Well, Nolan, thanks for picking up all this stuff. You did a great job.”
“Yes, Nolan, thank you,” Neena-June agreed. “Have you been briefed on all this yet?”
“Not really,” he responded. “I got a short briefing from Cerberus about a call to their parents. He said the kids have shut down global weapons systems. Remarkable! How the hell’d they do that?”
“Not sure,” Danté tried to explain. “All we know is the Dracutian command ships were on their way here as part of the UN’s UFO Disclosure Program and, we’re not sure how this is possible, but apparently they hadn’t realized they lost one of their little radio pods.”
“The Dracutian High Command has now seen the TV broadcasts and seem to understand the ramifications,” added Neena-June. “So we’re not sure if they’re still coming or canceling the meeting.”
“What a trip!” smirked Nolan. “How long ago did they lose the pod? . . . . Wait a minute. Did you say radio pod?”
“Just my theory, explained Danté. “Didja see the size of the antenna sticking out of that thing?”
“Yea, can you dig it, Nolan? They lost the pod!” Neena-June scoffed in disbelief. “I’ve heard the human race is babysat by an advanced race of ETs, but if these are the babysitters, no wonder we’re in trouble!”
“Some kind of hands-off, free will system?” Nolan jeered. “Cerberus mentioned something about a treaty. Where does that fit in?”
“Yup, the 5b Sector Treaty is exactly that," explained Neena-June. "It’s signed by ET groups who agree to leave a system alone unless invited by its ruling authority. It’s laid out in the guise of free will, but it doesn’t allow anyone to step in to secure the choices available. So it’s top-down free will.”
“Which doesn’t sound to me like free will,” yelled Danté from the back, over the van’s loud muffler.
“But how much of this did the Fab Four cause themselves?” asked Nolan. “Don’t they have a direct dial button in there to call mom and dad?”
“Don’t know what kind of buttons or dials they have in the floating radio. That’s what we’re going in to find out,” replied Danté.
“Don’t forget. They’ve got so-called free will,” explained Neena-June. “They can choose to hit whatever button they want to hit. Or not. But they changed the structure of the material universe by choosing to do nothing, which actually is a choice. They’ve flipped the concept of directed panspermia into its inadvertent form, radio panspermia, which is a fall by light pressure from above.”
"Yea,” Danté shouted from the back, “Was it an accident or were they sent here for some ulterior purpose? That’s the wild card.”
“In the time falling bodies take to light, an accident is waiting to happen in Maya,” Nolan grinned, passing around a fat joint as the radio played, “Give me love, give me love, give me peace on earth, give me light, give me life, keep me free from birth …”
Neena-June passed on a toke, but handed it to Danté, who took a huge hit. “Oh yeah, so, you know . . . Blackmon wants you to play the slave, right?” said Neena-June.
Nolan exhaled a big puff of weed and sputtered. “What? He mentioned me doing all the lugging, but the black man didn’t have the gall to use the S-word with another black man. What’s with that?”
“Well, from what I understand,” replied Neena-June, “the Dracutians have a hierarchical caste system with very specific job designations. The chief thought a “like you, like me” scenario would aid the bonding process.”
“A diabolical plan doomed to failure. You bond, I lug,” wisecracked Nolan. “Yes, massa.”
“I’m sorry, Nolan,” Neena-June turned toward him, her green eyes big with sorrow. “If it’s any consolation, we’re all slaves to the government.”
“You can’t fight the Empire without becoming like the Empire,” yelled Danté.
“I do not wish to move from my present prison to a prison a little larger,” Nolan quipped.
“You’re a one-man revolution, Nolan,” said Neena-June.
“The Kingdom of God is Anarchy. The Center is Everywhere,” replied Nolan, his last words ringing in their ears as they swung around the secret back entrance to the White House and were abruptly greeted by an army batallion with tanks scattered all over the lawn. They handed over their I.D.’s to a military goon and the Hounds of the Lord parted in waves.
Just around the bend as the pink biodome came into view, Neena-June and Danté with gaping maws were pulled running from the van.
“Do you have the guitars and turkey legs?” they were grilled loudly by a white-haired Army Intel officer with fiery red eyes from lack of sleep.
“We must treat these children as heads of state from another world!” Colonel Charon shouted. “They have waited way too long for these items! They have every right to call their parents, except that they’re runaways and we’re the ones that had to call their parents! This is the most messed up situation I’ve ever seen in my life!” he screamed.
“Yes, I understand, sir. Let’s not delay any further,” Neena-June responded, still startled by the up-close sight of the pink radio pod and now noticing that it was beating like a heart. “We’re going in.”
She motioned to Nolan in the van. He had pulled up to the edge of the grass and was waiting for instructions. His maw was wide open too. Charon glanced at him and did a double-take at his giant mane. “Have him drive right on the grass behind us. But let him wait outside for your call.”
As Charon led the two ambassadors to the lower terrace of the craft, Nolan made the sign of the cross in the air and whispered, “God Bless the transport of Intrepid Souls.”
“Stand here in the inner circle,” Charon instructed. “I’ve been in and it’s completely painless. The radio scanner simply reads your natal frequency I.D. and carries you in by the pulse of your heartbeat.” He joined their hands together and stepped off the platform.
In the fierce brightness of an ecstatic moment the two were ferried up to the pod like waves on a beach. Faces first they squeaked through a seamless liquid aperture with the sound of a balloon popping.
There was nobody home in the birth pod. The huge round room seemed much bigger than it looked from outside. There were four separate apartments with four separate everythings. Neena-June looked for mirrors but couldn’t tell if there were any. Just then the four lads entered the room at the same time through four different doors. They each flopped onto their own sofa and clicked on their own TV.
Danté chortled uncontrollably. Neena-June cast him a baleful glance.
Finally George noticed them. “Oh, they are here!”
“Hello. I’m Neena-June Lamb. This is Danté Pilgrim. We have your guitars and your turkey legs just outside. Would you like me to call the slave to bring those?”
“You have slave? Yes, we want to see slave with turkey legs,” said Paul.
Danté lost it again. Oh god, thought Neena-June, I’m on my own here.
She rang Nolan. “Come on in. They want to see your turkey legs,” she told him. While she had the phone out Neena-June asked, “Hey boys, can I get a picture of you to show my mom?”
Sure. They moved closer together. “Your mom knows us?” asked Paul.
“Are we more popular than Jesus Christ?” asked John, as pictures and sound were transmitted to Langley, Virginia.
“Yes, I would say so,” said Danté.
Neena-June agreed. “The Darwinists especially love you.”
“The Darwinists are musical group of punks?” asked Paul.
“Yes, a musical group of punks.” Neena-June was testing their knowledge base. The Four didn’t seem to know much about Earthling science. Neena-June asked for another picture, this time for her dad. They put their heads together for another instant transmission.
The lads seemed to be all about moms and dads. They seemed homesick and were overeating to the point of gluttony. George grabbed a can of whipped cream out of the box Nolan had just carried in through the waterwall. “Must we shake well?”
“Yes, you do need to shake that well,” explained Danté in the most helpful tone he could muster without losing it again. “Contains dairy?” asked George, as he shook it and sprayed a big overflowing mouthful.
“Yes, it does contain dairy,” Danté advised. They both looked at George aghast. How do all teenagers know how to do that?, Neena-June wondered.
Ringo picked up a jar of Hellmans and stared at the barcode. “Barcode is radio I.D. in stripes like zebra?”
“Something like that,” Neena-June responded, sneaking a glance at Danté.
Paul studied the barcode on the Heinz bottle. “Slave, is this ketchup boy or girl?” he asked Nolan.
“Ahhm, I think it’s a girl.” Nolan grinned widely as he swashed through the waterwall to fetch another box of goodies. This was the most effortless delivery he had ever made. He simply modulated through the air carrying one box at a time.
“Your president Obama. He knows well the creator? He has radiofone number for us?” queried George.
“Yes, I’ll try to get that for you,” said Danté with a grin.
“Also the radiofone for David Bowie who fell to Earth?” George requested. “We like to give him ride home.”
Nolan whistled through the waterwall with more groceries. The dharma couch bums were baffled by everything they touched. “Hey, wait! Are you mod squads from television?” asked John from his sofa eating a turkey leg.
Nolan turned and vanished again through the waterwall, chuckling to himself as he modulated, “Heh-heh, the mod squad.”
As Neena-June and Danté were quizzed by the innocence mission, a beamish joy overwashed them.
“Can you take us to George Adamski, who makes very good UFO’s?” asked Ringo. The pod mates laughed heartily.
“Can we meet Mr. Jesus Carpenter of the film Day Earth Stood Still?” asked George, with a faint smirk.
Just as he caught Danté’s eye in a pang of recognition, the pod rang with a shrill trumpet blast. A female voice blared from each of the apartments summoning the Fab Four by their real names: Homer, Ovid, Lucan and Horace. The four hungry poets ran to the flight deck wiping whipped cream off their faces and hiding turkey legs behind their backs.
A magnificent dignitary as deep blue as the god Krishna appeared in the middle of the pod. His jacket was deep orange saffron and on the left breast was the official insignia of a solar disk. Above that his name read: "Virgil." He spoke in a sublime cadence, a fantastic rising and falling language.
Zap! Neena-June’s golden hair stood jazzed in the ethericity. Struck dumb in the buttoned aphonia of an ethereal thunderclap, her fingers reached for Danté’s with great effort in the spirit jello, as the bowl of heaven quickened with the nine billion sacred names of god. And that was just the hallow.
To the earthling nebbishes caught in the amplified superhet, it took a flies’ eternity for the delivery of the heliogram — a drama in shimmering miniature, a narration in a shadow play, a mythovision cast by figures in a rumour. In this, the blue representative was assisted by a team of telestai — poets of projection science whose stunning logograms had never been unscrambled by enemy ciphernauds.
The poets removed their robes, which plunked to the floor and disappeared. In blue body tights they expertly mimed the cosmic fiasco of the runaway egg to an invisible audience of government officials. They emoted frabjously with hand signals and ballistic pokes and slaps, while making vocal sounds like monkeys and pharting with hands cupped in armpits. The secret play put the bobbery in radioBabelhaus.
Once the debacle of the early birthing and the resultant lack of fetal training had been elucidated, various faults widened the proverbial crack in the egg: the disaster at the House of the Lie, the impish hellions who threw rocks at them, the radio talk shows blaring round heaven’s dome poking fun of the ‘cowardly neutrals’ who had lost their children — as the joke went — in a downward motion, ‘panspermia perpetuum celestium motuum.’
Every telestai finger touched a new sore spot. Every telestai slap produced a bruise of embarrassment. The debates of imperial counsel were hardened by the intoxicating soma of moral absolutism. The leaders must now make a decision. The young Dracutians had behaved badly, but there was a right and a wrong thing to do now. With sudden and grotesque efficiency the voting buttons conveyed the swift command: “Go—Take them—Now!”
Only then were the insensate bugs in the mute ambertheatre released from the glue garbo that held them. George turned and tried to explain:
“Our moms and dads remind us we are Kings of the Seven Terraces of Purgatory-Limbus Borderland, not prisoners of scandalous condiments of gluttonous Third Ring of Hades. Our senators tell us to rise above with no more fooling around and so we must heed immediately. Please sit and fasten your seatbelts, Mr. Danté Aligheri and Ms. Joan of Arc. I’m sorry to tell you we must leave Mr. Giordano Bruno here, as his product code has not been upgraded in the free will system.”
Back at the van, The Nolan felt a jolt of energy and then sudden inertia. He shook the electricity out of his hands, picked up George’s Fender Telecaster and moved slowly toward the dock. He stood there a while but the freq-net seemed to be shut down. What he didn’t know was his radio freq tag was phant-scat—a scattered phantom signal rejected by the Babylon system. It was a violation of the 5b Sector Treaty to apprehend a slave.
As he stared up at the incredible radio pod, it suddenly retracted its long antenna and began to pulse like a jellyfish. Before it shot vertically into the heavens, it hovered a few seconds on the White House lawn to pull in the patio furniture and neaten up the back forty.
With arms held out as a cross in the twilight shadow of Easter sunrise, the Great Nolan blessed them on their journey: “Cabala of the Steed like unto Pegasus!”
It took only a few hours for the Washington Post to describe the remains of a hot pink weather balloon that had set off the national security apparatus. It had been a hoax, of course — a computer-generated simulation by Korean students from M.I.T. The four pranksters were arrested without delay. Just below their pictures on the front page, the Post reported that the president was recovering, his doctors said, from a slight touch of swamp gas.
Another curious story on the back page reported an anomalous sighting of Jimi Hendrix wandering the streets with a Telecaster. But as everyone knows, Jimi played a Stratocaster.
Copyright Joan d'Arc is the author of Space Travelers and the Genesis of the Human Form and Phenomenal World, published by The Book Tree (www.thebooktree.com). She is the previous publisher of Paranoia: The Conspiracy Reader (www.paranoiamagazine.com). At night she directs a secret group called the Paranoid Women Institute from inside her TikiBunker. (www.tikibunker.com)
read more on Dante here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dante_Alighieri
Friday, January 21, 2011
I Was a Wino for the California Wine Institute
by Joan d’Arc
I’d been hearing reports for years that a glass of red wine a day would keep the doctor away, so I was drinking up as fast as I could. It had to be true. I had seen it on TV. Heard it on the radio. Read it online. But one day the truth hit me.
Who is it that’s telling me to drink alcohol? How could this be good advice? That was when I discovered the truth about the Wine Institute’s publicity campaign to turn me into a Wino! Yes, there is such a thing as a "Wine Institute" and they're lying to you about the positive health aspects of drinking wine.
According to a report published in 1997 by the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI), the California Wine Institute has mounted a decade long publicity campaign to erroneously promote the health benefits of wine consumption. The report, titled Vintage Deception, alleges that, “the Institute’s propaganda spreads the deceptive and potentially dangerous message that moderate drinking - especially moderate wine consumption - is an important factor in maintaining all-around good health for the general public.”
The bogus health studies claim that the antioxidant resveratrol, prevalent in the skin of red grapes, may inhibit tumor development in some cancers, may aid in the formation of nerve cells, and may even be helpful in the treatment of Alzheimers and Parkinsons!
Wow! Why don’t you just eat red grapes then?
The authors of the report, Laura Steinhardt and George Hacker, assert that, “the wine industry’s pronouncements about scientific findings of the benefits of moderate alcohol consumption have saturated the media and entered the public consciousness.” Although some studies have associated moderate alcohol consumption with a reduced risk for heart disease for some people, “alcohol does not benefit all people and certain individuals should avoid it altogether.”
I appeared to be one of those people because every time I drank this health beverage I swore like a sailor and got into fist fights!
The Vintage Deception report alleges that the California Wine Institute has: “made exaggerated claims about the health benefits of alcohol and wine; suggested human health benefits from wine on the basis of an unpublished laboratory study; regularly omitted the cautions and qualifications made by researchers whose studies it cites; and failed completely to mention the health risks of alcohol consumption.”
One chart on the Wine Institute’s website (www.wineinstitute.org) lists benefits of moderate alcohol consumption on, among other things: the common cold, kidney stones, Parkinson’s disease, Alzheimer’s disease, cognition and memory and pancreatic cancer! While touting wine as a “virtual panacea,” the California Crack Institute does not mention the most obvious reason why wine is not good for you: There’s a demon in the bottle!
Among its bogus studies, in January 1997 the Wine Institute published a report saying that resveratrol in wine acts as an anti-cancer agent; yet, the mice in the study had consumed the resveratrol equal to five gallons of wine a day. I apparently wasn’t drinking enough of it! But wait, there was no evidence that the resveratrol could be absorbed into the human bloodstream through food or wine consumption. The quacks at the Institute hadn’t informed me I had to mainline it!
“There is no health magic in wine,” says Sheila B. Blume, M.D. “I would never recommend that anyone begin drinking because alcohol has many destructive health effects.” Yes, indeed. Many women head straight home from work to cook, clean and drink wine. The truth is, wine is not a health beverage; it’s bad for your liver, your brain, your gut ph balance, and, for women, alcohol consumption correlates with an increase in breast cancer.
In May 1997, the same month that the journal Epidemiology suggested avoidance of alcohol to reduce breast cancer risk, the Wine Institute’s report suggested that moderate wine consumption is not associated with increased risk of breast cancer. While the American Cancer Society has cautioned women to limit their alcohol consumption, the Wine Institute excluded the actual opinions of authors of these studies!
The U.S. is soon to catch up with France in its annual consumption of wine. Is this an accident or are we controlled? In France, high wine consumption translates into severe alcohol problems. Says the Vintage Deception report, “the rate of coronary heart disease may be relatively low, but deaths from alcohol-related digestive diseases and cancers, as well as unintentional injuries, are excessive, recently estimated at nearly 25% of all premature mortality.”
In the U.S., “alcohol is the third-leading cause of premature death; its use and abuse result in more than 100,000 deaths annually and impose more than $100 billion in economic damage on society.” If you’re going to drink wine, don’t do it because it’s “good for you.”
After all, who needs an excuse to be a Wino?
References
Nutrition Advisor, “A glass of red wine a day keeps the doctor away.” www.ynhh.org/online/nutrition/advisor/red_wine.html. (But what does a bottle do? Who is stopping at one glass?)
Vintage Deception: The Wine Institute’s Manipulation of Scientific Research to Promote Wine Consumption. Available for $5.00 plus $3.50 s/h: Center for Science in the Public Interest, Alcohol Policies Project, 1875 Connecticut Ave. N.W. Suite 300, Washington, DC 20009. www.cspinet.org/booze/vintage.htm
Wine Institute: www.wineinstitute.org
Copyright Joan d'Arc is the author of Space Travelers and the Genesis of the Human Form and Phenomenal World, published by The Book Tree (www.thebooktree.com). She is the previous publisher of Paranoia: The Conspiracy Reader (www.paranoiamagazine.com).
I’d been hearing reports for years that a glass of red wine a day would keep the doctor away, so I was drinking up as fast as I could. It had to be true. I had seen it on TV. Heard it on the radio. Read it online. But one day the truth hit me.
Who is it that’s telling me to drink alcohol? How could this be good advice? That was when I discovered the truth about the Wine Institute’s publicity campaign to turn me into a Wino! Yes, there is such a thing as a "Wine Institute" and they're lying to you about the positive health aspects of drinking wine.
According to a report published in 1997 by the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI), the California Wine Institute has mounted a decade long publicity campaign to erroneously promote the health benefits of wine consumption. The report, titled Vintage Deception, alleges that, “the Institute’s propaganda spreads the deceptive and potentially dangerous message that moderate drinking - especially moderate wine consumption - is an important factor in maintaining all-around good health for the general public.”
The bogus health studies claim that the antioxidant resveratrol, prevalent in the skin of red grapes, may inhibit tumor development in some cancers, may aid in the formation of nerve cells, and may even be helpful in the treatment of Alzheimers and Parkinsons!
Wow! Why don’t you just eat red grapes then?
The authors of the report, Laura Steinhardt and George Hacker, assert that, “the wine industry’s pronouncements about scientific findings of the benefits of moderate alcohol consumption have saturated the media and entered the public consciousness.” Although some studies have associated moderate alcohol consumption with a reduced risk for heart disease for some people, “alcohol does not benefit all people and certain individuals should avoid it altogether.”
I appeared to be one of those people because every time I drank this health beverage I swore like a sailor and got into fist fights!
The Vintage Deception report alleges that the California Wine Institute has: “made exaggerated claims about the health benefits of alcohol and wine; suggested human health benefits from wine on the basis of an unpublished laboratory study; regularly omitted the cautions and qualifications made by researchers whose studies it cites; and failed completely to mention the health risks of alcohol consumption.”
One chart on the Wine Institute’s website (www.wineinstitute.org) lists benefits of moderate alcohol consumption on, among other things: the common cold, kidney stones, Parkinson’s disease, Alzheimer’s disease, cognition and memory and pancreatic cancer! While touting wine as a “virtual panacea,” the California Crack Institute does not mention the most obvious reason why wine is not good for you: There’s a demon in the bottle!
Among its bogus studies, in January 1997 the Wine Institute published a report saying that resveratrol in wine acts as an anti-cancer agent; yet, the mice in the study had consumed the resveratrol equal to five gallons of wine a day. I apparently wasn’t drinking enough of it! But wait, there was no evidence that the resveratrol could be absorbed into the human bloodstream through food or wine consumption. The quacks at the Institute hadn’t informed me I had to mainline it!
“There is no health magic in wine,” says Sheila B. Blume, M.D. “I would never recommend that anyone begin drinking because alcohol has many destructive health effects.” Yes, indeed. Many women head straight home from work to cook, clean and drink wine. The truth is, wine is not a health beverage; it’s bad for your liver, your brain, your gut ph balance, and, for women, alcohol consumption correlates with an increase in breast cancer.
In May 1997, the same month that the journal Epidemiology suggested avoidance of alcohol to reduce breast cancer risk, the Wine Institute’s report suggested that moderate wine consumption is not associated with increased risk of breast cancer. While the American Cancer Society has cautioned women to limit their alcohol consumption, the Wine Institute excluded the actual opinions of authors of these studies!
The U.S. is soon to catch up with France in its annual consumption of wine. Is this an accident or are we controlled? In France, high wine consumption translates into severe alcohol problems. Says the Vintage Deception report, “the rate of coronary heart disease may be relatively low, but deaths from alcohol-related digestive diseases and cancers, as well as unintentional injuries, are excessive, recently estimated at nearly 25% of all premature mortality.”
In the U.S., “alcohol is the third-leading cause of premature death; its use and abuse result in more than 100,000 deaths annually and impose more than $100 billion in economic damage on society.” If you’re going to drink wine, don’t do it because it’s “good for you.”
After all, who needs an excuse to be a Wino?
References
Nutrition Advisor, “A glass of red wine a day keeps the doctor away.” www.ynhh.org/online/nutrition/advisor/red_wine.html. (But what does a bottle do? Who is stopping at one glass?)
Vintage Deception: The Wine Institute’s Manipulation of Scientific Research to Promote Wine Consumption. Available for $5.00 plus $3.50 s/h: Center for Science in the Public Interest, Alcohol Policies Project, 1875 Connecticut Ave. N.W. Suite 300, Washington, DC 20009. www.cspinet.org/booze/vintage.htm
Wine Institute: www.wineinstitute.org
Copyright Joan d'Arc is the author of Space Travelers and the Genesis of the Human Form and Phenomenal World, published by The Book Tree (www.thebooktree.com). She is the previous publisher of Paranoia: The Conspiracy Reader (www.paranoiamagazine.com).
Sunday, December 12, 2010
Beings in NothingDrive: An Existential Analysis of the Travis Walton UFO Abduction
By Joan d’Arc copyright, permission to post only with clear link to this article at http://conspiracygeek.blogspot.com/2010/12/beings-in-nothingdrive-existential.html.
(This article was written in 2005 and originally published with illustrations in PARANOIA, Issue 39, www.paranoiamagazine.com) Note: Joan d’Arc coined the term "Beings in NothingDrive" in this 2005 article; it is not quoted from any other source. It is a reference to the existentialist manifesto, Being and Nothingness, by Jean Paul Satre.)
On the thirty-year anniversary of one of the most compelling UFO contact experiences, I present my interpretation of the Travis Walton abduction case of 1975. This admittedly kitsch interpretation is unlike any other, either of the skeptic or non-skeptic variety, and its intent is not to prove or disprove the facts of the case. Rather, the intent is to marvel at the sense of wonder that embellishes the human condition and to convey the idea that we have a choice about how we look at the world. I hope it will add to our understanding of this profound human experience as we subconsciously try to become more comfortable in the skin we find ourselves in.
On the evening of November 5, 1975, a crew of men working in the forests at Turkey Springs, Arizona jumped into their pick-up truck and headed home to Snowflake for dinner. All at once, a brilliant yellow light blared through the trees. Upon coming to a clearing that afforded them a better view, the men realized the source was a flying saucer.
Travis Walton got out of the truck for a better look at the "golden machine," which hovered silently about 15 feet above the ground only 90 feet away. As he later described it in The Walton Experience (1978), the object was estimated to have an overall diameter of 15 to 20 feet and was shaped like two deep pie pans, one inverted on top of the other, with a "small round bowl upside down" on top of that. The dome on top was luminous white with darker strips of dull silver outlining the glowing panels. The surface of the ship had a "luster of hot metal." There were no seams, protrusions, antennae, windows, ports or hatches on the silent craft.
Walton approached the craft as the other men called out to him to come back. About six feet from the craft he got into a half-crouched position, staring up at its smooth surface. Suddenly the ship began to vibrate and wobble, giving off low- and high-pitched mechanical tones. A blue-green beam of light about a foot wide shot out of the bottom of the craft, with a sharp, cracking sound, striking him in the head and chest with a force he later described as "a high voltage electrocution."
The men in the truck watched in terror as Walton's body arched backward and was hurled about ten feet in the air. His body landed motionless on the ground. The driver sped off quickly, crashing over bushes and small trees until, through a clearing, the men watched the ship rise above the trees and take off at incredible speed. The men returned to the scene to pick up Walton, but he was nowhere to be found. Police authorities interrogated the men, thinking they had concocted this fantastic tale to cover up Walton's accidental death or murder.
Only in Hollywood?
The Travis Walton story is one of the most well known UFO contact reports since it was brought to the silver screen in the film Fire in the Sky. Problematically, Hollywood did a bad job of explaining what Walton actually remembered about the incident aboard the spacecraft where he purportedly spent the next five days. As a result of the film, most people know only of the drama surrounding the ordeal his co-workers were put through concerning his absence. In order to fill in the void left by Hollywood, more pieces of the bizarre tale recounted by Walton follow.
As consciousness returned, Walton discovered he was lying on his back on a table. He initially had no recollection of the spacecraft. He had a burning, "crushed" feeling in his chest and a splitting headache. He was remarkably weak. He recalls a bitter, metallic taste on his tongue, as well as intense thirst. His eyesight was blurred. He had no idea where he was but could hear a quiet shuffling. An odd light fixture hung down from a "triangular" shaped ceiling. He suddenly recalled being in the woods looking up at the glowing saucer. He reasoned that "maybe that thing had hit me with something" and he had been rushed to the hospital. He tried to move but he couldn't. He tried to call out, but no sound came.
Walton became aware that he was still wearing his shirt and jacket, which were pushed up under his arms. He reasoned that he must have been injured so badly there was no time to remove his clothing. He then looked down and noticed an unfamiliar technological artifact lying across his bare chest:
A strange device curved across my body. It felt cool and smooth. It was about four or five inches thick... [and] ...it extended from my armpits to a few inches above my belt. It curved down to the middle of each side of my rib cage. It looked like it was made of shiny, dark gray metal or plastic.
Walton then tried to focus on the "blurry figures of the doctors" he suddenly realized were standing over him. Once his vision returned:
"The sudden horror of what I saw rocked me with the realization that I was definitely not in the hospital. I was looking squarely into the face of a horrible creature! My senses were instantly electrified into a new keenness. Everything clicked. The weird-shaped room, the strange device, the odd clothing, all added up to just one thing. 'Good God!! I must be inside the craft!!" [Emphasis his!!]
Emotion and the Horrible
The double exclamations Walton uses in his chronicle might perhaps represent his profound horror upon realizing the world has just shapeshifted beyond the predictable reality fixed squarely between the edges of his comfort zone. It has been noted by researchers that fear is the most common human reaction to meetings with extraterrestrials. In his writings on the supernatural in Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Skies, Carl Jung wrote that mankind "feels an almost instinctive aversion to this kind of knowledge, for he fears its paralyzing effect." As Jung noted, humankind may admit that unknown powers exist no matter what they are called, but one "turns away from them as speedily as possible, as from a threatening obstacle."
Why is fear so automatic when one is confronted with the supernatural? From a purely phenomenological point of view, why does this constitute a threat? We might consider Martin Heidegger's suggestion that our first sensory assessment produces a logical comparison or correspondence between subject and object—an assessment of facts devoid of meaning. He proposed that perceptions are logically distinguished when an object is isolated out of the stream of experience and held up to that which it is not. However, the second assessment will move beyond this correspondence to the "meaning of the ground of the investigated beings," revealing the nature of the relationship between them. If no meaning is revealed, if there is no melding of subject with "brute object," we could surmise, as Jean Paul Sartre might, that an instance of existential nausea might follow.
A Science of Experience
Phenomenologist Edmund Husserl believed that in order to maintain its meaningfulness and integrity, the quantitative sciences developed by man should acknowledge that its roots are in the same sensory world which it studies and measures. He hoped that a new Science of Experience would someday re-establish "lived experience" as a basis of scientific method. Husserl spoke of the "phenomenal world," the world of subjective experience, as being pure transcendental consciousness.
As David Abram writes in Spell of the Sensuous, each of the human senses lends its own unique mode of perception, which diverges, intercommunicates and overlaps with the others. In order to comprehend a particularly novel sensory experience, you must use all your senses in "dynamic participation." These are the tools of a different type of science; one that we all know instinctively. Your tools in the Science of Experience are your naked humanness. Abram explains:
"The relative divergence of my bodily senses (eyes in the front of the head, ears toward the back, etc.) and their curious bifurcation (two eyes, one on each side, and two ears, two nostrils, etc.), indicates that this body is a form destined to the world; it ensures that my body is a sort of open circuit that completes itself only in things, in others, in the encompassing Earth."
In this novel situation, as Walton has noted, your senses are "instantly electrified into a new keenness." Everything begins to click, and it all adds up to "one thing." You have no trouble isolating this object out of your stream of experience, since it's in your face and you cannot move. You feel like an animal being hunted and you begin to think like one. You attempt to categorize the nature of the beast exhibiting predatory behavior toward you. You deduce that it is like me, in that it has the same basic morphology, locomotive stride, number of limbs, body symmetry and other features; but it is not like me in a most disturbing way.
Walton has the existential creeps upon coming face to face with an outwardly humanoid entity whose mode of perception is completely alien to the Earth environment. He knows instinctively that these beings do not belong to this world. As he looks for some human qualities or even a counterpart to mammalian forms, his first assessment is that these beings gather information in a novel manner. These entities make no use of the five senses taken for granted on this planet, the senses which define us as human, the very senses we are using in the moment to comprehend this situation.
A World That Speaks
The conventional view of language is that it is a set of mutually agreed-upon signs, or representations for things, linked by a formal system of rules. Phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty disagreed with this assessment, believing that human language is rooted in our sensory experience of the "life-world." He believed that meaning is spontaneously gestured with the body. We learn our native language, Merleau-Ponty pointed out, not mentally but bodily. He suggested that the conceptual meaning of words "must be formed by a kind of subtraction from a gestural meaning, which is immanent in speech."
A gesture is not arbitrary or meaningless behavior accompanying language, but is linked with the particular words being used. In essence, gesture is the "bodying-forth" of emotion ("a motion emanating") into the world; the tangible, visible aspect of a particular feeling. Speech is vocal gesture that communicates meaning, and is rooted in the sensual dimension of experience. It is born, writes David Abram in Spell of the Sensuous, of "the body's native capacity to resonate with other bodies and with the landscape as a whole," and is "a particular way of singing the world." Further, Merleau-Ponty proposed that no phenomenon presented itself to humans as passive, but as dynamic and engaging. He believed that humans are part of "a gesturing landscape" — in essence, "a world that speaks."
Yet, if human perception is an open circuit that completes itself via its environment, what type of environment does this entity come from? What type of being does not require food? What type of being does not need to hear? Clearly, its home environment is highly technological. As Sartre indicates, it is the things to which I cannot give meaning which cause the phenomenological experience of what he has termed nausea. Human beings can only place this experience in the realm of the supernatural.
As Walton later wrote, the creatures were under five feet tall with the normal arrangement of features. They had five fingers on their small hands. Other than that, he recalls, "their similarity to humanness quickly became terrifyingly obscure." The skin was pale, chalky and slightly translucent, and had a tight doll-like fit. They had "bulging, oversized craniums" and an infantile appearance. They had huge eyes with irises nearly an inch in diameter. Not a sound came from their tiny narrow mouths. They wore soft orange-brown overall suits and pinkish-tan footwear.
It doesn't take Walton long to conclude that these beings are not from around here. They are visitors from a landscape that does not gesture, a world that does not speak. They are techno-wizards who somehow project thoughts into the mind from a distance. They exhibit no emotion as they go about their work. The physical qualities possessed by this novel entity seem to incorporate that of reptile, insect and machine. Although they are overtly humanoid, in no sense are they mammalian. In some sense we feel that these are not "free will" entities: the lights are on but there's somebody else at the wheel. They are "Beings-in-NothingDrive."
As H.V. Ditfurth wrote in The Origins of Life, "a living being that does not engage in a continual exchange of energy with its environment is simply unthinkable." What sort of being is this? Writing in The Day After Roswell, Col. Philip J. Corso suggested the grays are the biological robots of a highly advanced visitor race. Psychologist John Mack further wondered if the traveling biochemists are on a mission to relocate a doomed human race to new homes in other planetary systems. Mack suggested we are but tagged animals in a cosmic trail of tears…
Magic: The Mind Dragging Among Things
Important to this assessment is the idea that magic, and its relationship to reality, may be a wholly different phenomenon than we understand it to be. Merleau-Ponty suggests a preconceptual relationship between the body and the sensible realm when he writes: "I give ear, or look, in the expectation of a sensation, and suddenly the sensible takes possession of my ear or my gaze, and I surrender a part of my body, even my whole body, to this particular manner of vibrating and filling space known as blue or red."
In Being and Nothingness, Sartre proposed that the world is in effect "a world of emotion," and the various human emotions have something in common, that is, "they make a same world appear, a world which is cruel, terrible, gloomy, joyful ... but one in which the relationship of things to consciousness is always and exclusively magical." He provides an example. Let's say a grinning face appeared in the window, sending a reaction of horror throughout your entire body. Phenomenologically speaking, your body is invaded by terror. Sartre explains that in this emotional moment, "consciousness is degraded and abruptly transforms the determined world in which we live into a magical world." Think about that. You haven't changed; the world has! As P.D. Ouspensky notes in Tertium Organum, "the mystery of thought creates everything." He writes:
"As soon as we understand that thought is not a 'function of motion' and that motion itself is a function of thought; as soon as we begin to feel the depth of this mystery, we shall see that the whole world is a kind of vast hallucination which does not frighten us and does not make us think we are mad only because we are accustomed to it."
Sartre proposes that the world sometimes reveals itself to consciousness as magical (open-ended, subjective) instead of determined (solid, objective). Your survival response is to bring the world back to the confines of your safety nest: consensus-reality. But sometimes there is a lag in doing this, during which your heart feels like it could have jumped out of your skin. When the gag is over we can laugh, but while we're suspended in Magical Existentia we have seemingly entered an aspect of the world that contains possibilities we would normally not entertain. As Sartre clarifies, we need not believe that "the magical is an ephemeral quality which we impose upon the world as our moods dictate. Here is an existential structure of the world which is magical..." (Essays, 243)
"The category "magical," in effect, governs our interpsychic relations and our perception of others; the magical is "the mind dragging among things." Sartre sees magic as consciousness rendered passive. In this posture, "man is always a wizard to man, and the social world is at first magical." The rational superstructures which make up our consensus-reality are actually "ephemeral and without equilibrium." They "cave in when the magical aspect of faces, of gestures, and of human situations, is too strong." (Essays, 244)
Indeed, this may explain why nobody is a true believer until they have experienced strange phenomena first hand. Perhaps imagination is not a separate mental faculty, but is the way the senses have of throwing themselves beyond in order to make tentative contact with the other sides of things that we do not sense directly. P.D. Ouspensky has suggested these may be the manifestations of the fourth dimension into the phenomenal world.
David Abram writes in Spell of the Sensuous that debunkers of magic, putting a premium on detached objectivity, attempt to "halt the participation of their senses in the phenomenon" by imagining other phenomena (wires, threads, mirrors), or by simply looking away. We always retain the option to suspend any instance of participation, he writes. There will always be people who "simply will not see any magic, either at a performance or in the world at large."
What happens when, without sufficient notice to halt sensory participation, we are plunged into the irrational alternate universe lying on the other side of our rational superstructure? Sartre guesses: "consciousness seizes upon the magical as magical; and forcibly lives it as such." Let's see how Walton deals with his existentially horrible situation:
"A creature was looking steadily back at me with huge, luminous brown eyes that were the size of quarters! I recoiled at the sight. I looked frantically around me. There were three of them! Hysteria overcame me instantly. I struck out at the two on my right, hitting one with the back of my arm and knocking it into the other one. … The one I touched felt soft through the cloth of its garment. The muscles of its puny physique yielded with a sponginess that felt more like fat than sinew. The creature was light and had fallen back easily.
I heaved myself to a sitting position. The exertion caused beads of sweat to pop out on my forehead. I lunged unsteadily to my feet and staggered back. I fell against a utensil-arrayed bench that followed the curve of one wall. My arm sent some of the instruments clattering against the back of the shelf. I leaned heavily there, keeping my eyes riveted on those horrid entities!"
Human emotion is a "quality which penetrates us" and "exceeds us on every side," explains Sartre. He writes, "the emotion ceases to be itself; it transcends itself; it is not a trivial episode of our daily life; it is intuition of the absolute." With regard to the specific emotion of horror, Sartre suggests, it is not only the present state of the thing that is transcended, but it is "threatened for the future; it spreads itself over the whole future and darkens it; it is a revelation of the meaning of the world."
Future Shock
Walton's terrific fear quite possibly stems from something we might call future shock. If culture shock is the result of an unprepared confrontation between two entirely different Earth cultures causing "bewilderment and disorientation, a misreading of reality, and the inability to cope," it may be relatively mild, suggests Alvin Toffler, in Future Shock, compared to the ravages of future shock, "the dizzying disorientation brought on by the premature arrival of the future."
Existentialists tend to see the essence of human existence as a journey; as being "between that from which the journey comes and that to which it proceeds." The German word dasein (human existence) describes life as a project in which human existence projects itself toward the future. As Heidegger says, man is always "engaged in projects to realize himself in the future"; care for self means "care for the future." Yet, while we are always preparing for the future, we glide toward it slowly, marking it with various anniversaries and rites of passage. We do not expect it to arrive overnight.
Walton's fear may arise from the sudden realization that we are not alone in the world as we've always been taught; that our plane of existence might be shared with an ultra-life form we had not known about, if only due to our perceptual limitations or an enormous reality hoax. It would seem that this realization effectively transformed the world as he thought he knew it; and did, in fact, spread itself over the future as "a revelation of the meaning of the world" — a world which we as technological beings thought we owned and managed. But as that surety slips away, the horrible begins to hold a "substantial quality," which spreads itself over perceptual space-time as "horrible in the world."
Walton has seen various unknown technological devices, including the flying saucer itself, which must surely have his mind reeling with fright. For, although the humanoids are short, spongy and slight of build, he is technologically overpowered by the Goliath contraptions of a futuristic society. He has entered a magical realm without his slingshot! Physically unarmed and mentally disarmed, he tries to overcome this existential situation using caveman ingenuity:
"My action caused the device on my chest to crash to the floor. No wires or tubes connected it to me... Greenish rays came from underneath the overturned machine. … My legs felt too weak to hold me up. I leaned heavily on the counter. The monstrous trio of humanoids started towards me. … With the superhuman effort of a cornered animal, I ground out the strength to defend myself. ... I grabbed for something from the bench to fend them off. My hand seized upon a thin transparent cylinder about 18 inches long. It was too light to be an effective club. I needed something sharp and tried to break the tip off the tube. I smashed the end of the glass-like wand down on the waist-high metal slab. It would not break."
There seems to be trouble in Magical Existentia. How might Sartre explain Walton's reaction? Sartre distinguishes the concept of anguish from the concept of fear in that "fear is fear of beings in the world whereas anguish is anguish before my self." He further distinguishes the concept of vertigo as "anguish to the extent that I am afraid not of falling over a precipice, but of throwing myself over." He clarifies: "A situation provokes fear if there is a possibility of my life being changed from without; my being provokes anguish to the extent that I distrust myself and my own reactions in that situation." (Essays 120-124) Sartre gives an example:
"Vertigo announces itself through fear; I am on a narrow path—without a guard rail—which goes along a precipice. The precipice ... represents a danger of death. At the same time I conceive of a number of causes, originating in universal determinism, which can transform that threat of death into a reality; I can slip on a stone and fall into the abyss ... If nothing compels me to save my life, nothing prevents me from precipitating myself into the abyss ... the decisive conduct will emanate from a self which I am not yet."
This is an important facet of phenomenology. A human being is essentially a changeling. Although we remain outwardly the same person throughout our lifetime, our interactions with people and with the world cause us to change inwardly. We do not react in exactly the same manner to each situation, unless it's required, nor do we get the same results each time we do react in similar manner. Each situation constitutes a different set of possibilities. Our actions and engagements must be constantly adjusted to a world that is constantly changing as well, making each interaction and experience a novel one.
In The Spell of the Sensuous, Abram writes that from a sensory perspective there is no thing that "appears as a completely determinate or finished object." Every thing I see "presents some facet of itself to my gaze while withholding other aspects from view." Figuring out what constitutes this unknown factor is part of problem solving. If a particular situation is exemplary in its novelty, we become excited and ask others for their opinion. Our lives are largely spent as intersubjective problem-solvers.
Second, because we are temporal beings, the self is a flowing entity existing over time. If you concentrate on your inner monologues you will have to agree that you are suspended in a built-in past, present and future. We all create mental pictures of ourselves in possible future scenarios. We project ourselves into the future in order to define ourselves in it. We know from experience not to depend too much on the pictures because life tosses banana peels in our path.
Sartre explains: "At this moment, fear appears, which in terms of the situation is the apprehension of myself as a destructible transcendent in the midst of transcendents, as an object which does not contain in itself the origin of its future disappearance." In other words, I don't know when I will no longer experience this self as subject, nor do I know the circumstances by which my death will occur. Sartre continues:
I realize myself as pushing away the threatening situation with all my strength, and I project before myself a certain number of future conducts destined to keep the threats of the world at a distance. These conducts are my possibilities. I am in anguish precisely because any conduct on my part is only possible … while constituting a totality of motives for pushing away that situation, I at the same moment apprehend these motives as not sufficiently effective. (Essays 123)
This leads to the third point, that we do not know what decision we will make with respect to the next banana peel thrown in our path, and we do not always trust ourselves to make the right decision. Humankind is always in a posture of questioning, of expectation, of not knowing what comes next or why. This is what Sartre called contingency. Thus, he suggests, "my decisive conduct will emanate from a self which I am not yet." Therefore, while my momentary self and my past self contain known qualities, my future self—that which I am not yet—is suspended in limbo. It is, in quantum physics terms, a possibility wave.
So we see that man's subjective world deals with potential threats, and survival tactics are at all times part of a repertoire of possible responses to the threat of bodily harm or death. We can try to "push away" this threat, but there is no promise as to the effectiveness of that action. According to Sartre, this risk constitutes mankind's absolute freedom in a free will universe.
Freedom: The Brute Resistance of the World
Back in his magically transformed world, Travis Walton is apparently lodged between fear and anguish, the proverbial rock and the hard place. He has just awoken from a long nap, like Rip van Winkle, and this magical place doesn't have any familiar tools at his disposal. There are no hammers, buzz-saws, and unfortunately no "two-by-fours." There is no Sartrean 'toolness' about this reality, which is a situation that would surely cause any Earth man considerable angst.
On the face of it there aren't a lot of possibilities, but Walton is profoundly free to come up with some. As Sartre says, an obstacle is neutral; one is free to "go around it, or climb it, or to ignore it." The "brute resistance of the world" is worked into the overall pattern of solutions afforded to us by our existential freedom. Important to Sartre's position on the matter, freedom is a given which constitutes the framework of possibilities.
Walton's dilemma can be seen as an exercise in free will. What are his options in this novel situation? As always, when the going gets rough, a human being is free to wing it. With amazing suicidal grace, Walton chooses vertigo. He tries to throw himself over the edge. He manages to scare the pants off the perplexed gang by trying an alternate possible historical configuration; that of a screaming wild banshee:
"I lashed out with the weapon at the advancing creatures, screaming desperate, hysterical threats at them... 'Get away from me!!! What are you?' Then I shrank away in revulsion. The creatures continued towards me, their hands outstretched. 'Keep back, damn you!!' I shrieked. They halted. In a snarling crouch I held the tube threateningly behind my head. [. . . ] Their sharp gaze alternately darted about and then fixed me with an intense stare ... I felt naked and exposed under their scrutiny... Their mouths never made any kind of sound... Just as I girded myself to spring at them, they abruptly turned and scurried from the room! They went out the open door, turned right and disappeared... I collapsed back against the bench and struggled to slow my racing heart."
The Beings in NothingDrive backed off for a pow-wow and Walton won the first round, but all that humankind is ever required to do is to win one round at a time. "I need only," Sartre says, to "make an appointment with myself on the other side of that hour, of that day, or of that month... [for] ... anguish is the fear of not finding myself at that appointment, of no longer even wishing to bring myself there."
To Sartre choice and intention are both acts; it is not the result that constitutes freedom, for all possibility is the consequence of existing, and all of my choices and acts are free. Even choosing to do nothing is an act. But, Sartre explains, "it is for the sake of that being which I will be there at the turning of the path that I now exert all my strength, and in this sense there is already a relation between my future being and my present being."
Through that last-ditch effort, posits Sartre, that last ounce of strength which constitutes the threat of my final annihilation, I am saved. He states, "It is through my horror that I am carried toward the future, and the horror nihilates itself in that it constitutes the future as possible. Anguish is precisely my consciousness of being my own future, in the mode of not-being." (Essays 141)
Strangely, Walton was left to wander the craft unescorted. He came upon a chair that had controls on its arms and tried it out for size. From across the room he saw a muscular human being about 6 feet, 2 inches tall, wearing a tight blue suit, and was relieved to see one of his own kind. The tall blonde man wore a transparent helmet that opened to a wide rim over the shoulders. Walton chatted animatedly with the man, asking him questions, but the man gave him the silent treatment. He led Walton down a narrow hallway to a door that slid open, and they disembarked from the ship down a steep ramp.
Walton was dismayed to discover they were inside an even larger mother ship that contained flying disks of various sizes and shapes. Entering a room where there were other humans, who looked alike in a "family sort of way," a man and a woman lifted Walton onto a table. The attractive blonde woman held an object that contained a "golfball-sized sphere." She pressed it over his mouth and he lost consciousness.
Travis Walton awoke on the side of the highway outside of Heber, Arizona, five days after he had been abducted by the craft. He had kept an appointment with a future self that was radically changed. He later wrote, "When I made that fateful choice to leave the truck … I was leaving behind forever all semblance of a normal life, running headlong toward an experience so overwhelmingly mind-rending in its effects, so devastating in its aftermath, that my life would never — could never — be the same again."
Walton looked up in time to see the yellow center-line of the highway reflected in the bottom of the spaceship's "gleaming hull" before it shot vertically into the sky.
"The most striking thing about its departure," he wrote, "was its quietness."
References
Abram,David. Spell of the Sensuous.
Corso, Philip. The Day After Roswell.
Ouspensky, P.D. Tertium Organum: A Key to the Enigmas of the World, 1920, 1982, Vintage.
Sartre, J. P. Essays in Existentialism, 1965, 1993, Citadel.
Walton, Travis, Fire in the Sky, Marlowe & Co., 1997.
Walton, Travis, "The Walton Experience – An Ordinary Day," relays much of the abduction experience itself. www.travis-walton.com
Notes:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Being_and_Nothingness
Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology (French: L'Être et le néant : Essai d'ontologie phénoménologique), sometimes subtitled A Phenomenological Essay on Ontology, is a 1943 philosophical treatise by Jean-Paul Sartre. Its main purpose was to assert the individual's existence as prior to the individual's essence. “ Sartre's overriding concern in writing Being and Nothingness was to vindicate the fundamental freedom of the human being, against determinists of all stripes. It was for the sake of this freedom that he asserted the impotence of physical causality over human beings, that he analysed the place of nothingness within consciousness and showed how it intervened between the forces that act upon us and our actions.
While a prisoner of war in 1940/1941 Sartre read Martin Heidegger's Being and Time, an ontological investigation through the lens and method of Husserlian phenomenology (Husserl was Heidegger's teacher). Reading Being and Time initiated Sartre's own enquiry leading to the publication in 1943 of Being and Nothingness whose subtitle is 'A Phenomenological Essay on Ontology'. Sartre's essay is clearly influenced by Heidegger though Sartre was profoundly skeptical of any measure by which humanity could achieve a kind of personal state of fulfillment comparable to the hypothetical Heideggerian re-encounter with Being. In his much gloomier account in Being and Nothingness, man is a creature haunted by a vision of "completion," what Sartre calls the ens causa sui, and which religions identify as God. Born into the material reality of one's body, in an all-too-material universe, one finds oneself inserted into being (with a lower case "b"). Consciousness is in a state of cohabitation with its material body, but has no objective reality; it is nothing ("no thing"). Consciousness has the ability to conceptualize possibilities, and to make them appear, or to annihilate them.
Joan d'Arc is the author of Space Travelers and the Genesis of the Human Form, and Phenomenal World, both published by The Book Tree (www.thebooktree.com). She is also the publisher of the infrequently transmitted HunterGatheress Journal.
(This article was written in 2005 and originally published with illustrations in PARANOIA, Issue 39, www.paranoiamagazine.com) Note: Joan d’Arc coined the term "Beings in NothingDrive" in this 2005 article; it is not quoted from any other source. It is a reference to the existentialist manifesto, Being and Nothingness, by Jean Paul Satre.)
On the thirty-year anniversary of one of the most compelling UFO contact experiences, I present my interpretation of the Travis Walton abduction case of 1975. This admittedly kitsch interpretation is unlike any other, either of the skeptic or non-skeptic variety, and its intent is not to prove or disprove the facts of the case. Rather, the intent is to marvel at the sense of wonder that embellishes the human condition and to convey the idea that we have a choice about how we look at the world. I hope it will add to our understanding of this profound human experience as we subconsciously try to become more comfortable in the skin we find ourselves in.
On the evening of November 5, 1975, a crew of men working in the forests at Turkey Springs, Arizona jumped into their pick-up truck and headed home to Snowflake for dinner. All at once, a brilliant yellow light blared through the trees. Upon coming to a clearing that afforded them a better view, the men realized the source was a flying saucer.
Travis Walton got out of the truck for a better look at the "golden machine," which hovered silently about 15 feet above the ground only 90 feet away. As he later described it in The Walton Experience (1978), the object was estimated to have an overall diameter of 15 to 20 feet and was shaped like two deep pie pans, one inverted on top of the other, with a "small round bowl upside down" on top of that. The dome on top was luminous white with darker strips of dull silver outlining the glowing panels. The surface of the ship had a "luster of hot metal." There were no seams, protrusions, antennae, windows, ports or hatches on the silent craft.
Walton approached the craft as the other men called out to him to come back. About six feet from the craft he got into a half-crouched position, staring up at its smooth surface. Suddenly the ship began to vibrate and wobble, giving off low- and high-pitched mechanical tones. A blue-green beam of light about a foot wide shot out of the bottom of the craft, with a sharp, cracking sound, striking him in the head and chest with a force he later described as "a high voltage electrocution."
The men in the truck watched in terror as Walton's body arched backward and was hurled about ten feet in the air. His body landed motionless on the ground. The driver sped off quickly, crashing over bushes and small trees until, through a clearing, the men watched the ship rise above the trees and take off at incredible speed. The men returned to the scene to pick up Walton, but he was nowhere to be found. Police authorities interrogated the men, thinking they had concocted this fantastic tale to cover up Walton's accidental death or murder.
Only in Hollywood?
The Travis Walton story is one of the most well known UFO contact reports since it was brought to the silver screen in the film Fire in the Sky. Problematically, Hollywood did a bad job of explaining what Walton actually remembered about the incident aboard the spacecraft where he purportedly spent the next five days. As a result of the film, most people know only of the drama surrounding the ordeal his co-workers were put through concerning his absence. In order to fill in the void left by Hollywood, more pieces of the bizarre tale recounted by Walton follow.
As consciousness returned, Walton discovered he was lying on his back on a table. He initially had no recollection of the spacecraft. He had a burning, "crushed" feeling in his chest and a splitting headache. He was remarkably weak. He recalls a bitter, metallic taste on his tongue, as well as intense thirst. His eyesight was blurred. He had no idea where he was but could hear a quiet shuffling. An odd light fixture hung down from a "triangular" shaped ceiling. He suddenly recalled being in the woods looking up at the glowing saucer. He reasoned that "maybe that thing had hit me with something" and he had been rushed to the hospital. He tried to move but he couldn't. He tried to call out, but no sound came.
Walton became aware that he was still wearing his shirt and jacket, which were pushed up under his arms. He reasoned that he must have been injured so badly there was no time to remove his clothing. He then looked down and noticed an unfamiliar technological artifact lying across his bare chest:
A strange device curved across my body. It felt cool and smooth. It was about four or five inches thick... [and] ...it extended from my armpits to a few inches above my belt. It curved down to the middle of each side of my rib cage. It looked like it was made of shiny, dark gray metal or plastic.
Walton then tried to focus on the "blurry figures of the doctors" he suddenly realized were standing over him. Once his vision returned:
"The sudden horror of what I saw rocked me with the realization that I was definitely not in the hospital. I was looking squarely into the face of a horrible creature! My senses were instantly electrified into a new keenness. Everything clicked. The weird-shaped room, the strange device, the odd clothing, all added up to just one thing. 'Good God!! I must be inside the craft!!" [Emphasis his!!]
Emotion and the Horrible
The double exclamations Walton uses in his chronicle might perhaps represent his profound horror upon realizing the world has just shapeshifted beyond the predictable reality fixed squarely between the edges of his comfort zone. It has been noted by researchers that fear is the most common human reaction to meetings with extraterrestrials. In his writings on the supernatural in Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Skies, Carl Jung wrote that mankind "feels an almost instinctive aversion to this kind of knowledge, for he fears its paralyzing effect." As Jung noted, humankind may admit that unknown powers exist no matter what they are called, but one "turns away from them as speedily as possible, as from a threatening obstacle."
Why is fear so automatic when one is confronted with the supernatural? From a purely phenomenological point of view, why does this constitute a threat? We might consider Martin Heidegger's suggestion that our first sensory assessment produces a logical comparison or correspondence between subject and object—an assessment of facts devoid of meaning. He proposed that perceptions are logically distinguished when an object is isolated out of the stream of experience and held up to that which it is not. However, the second assessment will move beyond this correspondence to the "meaning of the ground of the investigated beings," revealing the nature of the relationship between them. If no meaning is revealed, if there is no melding of subject with "brute object," we could surmise, as Jean Paul Sartre might, that an instance of existential nausea might follow.
A Science of Experience
Phenomenologist Edmund Husserl believed that in order to maintain its meaningfulness and integrity, the quantitative sciences developed by man should acknowledge that its roots are in the same sensory world which it studies and measures. He hoped that a new Science of Experience would someday re-establish "lived experience" as a basis of scientific method. Husserl spoke of the "phenomenal world," the world of subjective experience, as being pure transcendental consciousness.
As David Abram writes in Spell of the Sensuous, each of the human senses lends its own unique mode of perception, which diverges, intercommunicates and overlaps with the others. In order to comprehend a particularly novel sensory experience, you must use all your senses in "dynamic participation." These are the tools of a different type of science; one that we all know instinctively. Your tools in the Science of Experience are your naked humanness. Abram explains:
"The relative divergence of my bodily senses (eyes in the front of the head, ears toward the back, etc.) and their curious bifurcation (two eyes, one on each side, and two ears, two nostrils, etc.), indicates that this body is a form destined to the world; it ensures that my body is a sort of open circuit that completes itself only in things, in others, in the encompassing Earth."
In this novel situation, as Walton has noted, your senses are "instantly electrified into a new keenness." Everything begins to click, and it all adds up to "one thing." You have no trouble isolating this object out of your stream of experience, since it's in your face and you cannot move. You feel like an animal being hunted and you begin to think like one. You attempt to categorize the nature of the beast exhibiting predatory behavior toward you. You deduce that it is like me, in that it has the same basic morphology, locomotive stride, number of limbs, body symmetry and other features; but it is not like me in a most disturbing way.
Walton has the existential creeps upon coming face to face with an outwardly humanoid entity whose mode of perception is completely alien to the Earth environment. He knows instinctively that these beings do not belong to this world. As he looks for some human qualities or even a counterpart to mammalian forms, his first assessment is that these beings gather information in a novel manner. These entities make no use of the five senses taken for granted on this planet, the senses which define us as human, the very senses we are using in the moment to comprehend this situation.
A World That Speaks
The conventional view of language is that it is a set of mutually agreed-upon signs, or representations for things, linked by a formal system of rules. Phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty disagreed with this assessment, believing that human language is rooted in our sensory experience of the "life-world." He believed that meaning is spontaneously gestured with the body. We learn our native language, Merleau-Ponty pointed out, not mentally but bodily. He suggested that the conceptual meaning of words "must be formed by a kind of subtraction from a gestural meaning, which is immanent in speech."
A gesture is not arbitrary or meaningless behavior accompanying language, but is linked with the particular words being used. In essence, gesture is the "bodying-forth" of emotion ("a motion emanating") into the world; the tangible, visible aspect of a particular feeling. Speech is vocal gesture that communicates meaning, and is rooted in the sensual dimension of experience. It is born, writes David Abram in Spell of the Sensuous, of "the body's native capacity to resonate with other bodies and with the landscape as a whole," and is "a particular way of singing the world." Further, Merleau-Ponty proposed that no phenomenon presented itself to humans as passive, but as dynamic and engaging. He believed that humans are part of "a gesturing landscape" — in essence, "a world that speaks."
Yet, if human perception is an open circuit that completes itself via its environment, what type of environment does this entity come from? What type of being does not require food? What type of being does not need to hear? Clearly, its home environment is highly technological. As Sartre indicates, it is the things to which I cannot give meaning which cause the phenomenological experience of what he has termed nausea. Human beings can only place this experience in the realm of the supernatural.
As Walton later wrote, the creatures were under five feet tall with the normal arrangement of features. They had five fingers on their small hands. Other than that, he recalls, "their similarity to humanness quickly became terrifyingly obscure." The skin was pale, chalky and slightly translucent, and had a tight doll-like fit. They had "bulging, oversized craniums" and an infantile appearance. They had huge eyes with irises nearly an inch in diameter. Not a sound came from their tiny narrow mouths. They wore soft orange-brown overall suits and pinkish-tan footwear.
It doesn't take Walton long to conclude that these beings are not from around here. They are visitors from a landscape that does not gesture, a world that does not speak. They are techno-wizards who somehow project thoughts into the mind from a distance. They exhibit no emotion as they go about their work. The physical qualities possessed by this novel entity seem to incorporate that of reptile, insect and machine. Although they are overtly humanoid, in no sense are they mammalian. In some sense we feel that these are not "free will" entities: the lights are on but there's somebody else at the wheel. They are "Beings-in-NothingDrive."
As H.V. Ditfurth wrote in The Origins of Life, "a living being that does not engage in a continual exchange of energy with its environment is simply unthinkable." What sort of being is this? Writing in The Day After Roswell, Col. Philip J. Corso suggested the grays are the biological robots of a highly advanced visitor race. Psychologist John Mack further wondered if the traveling biochemists are on a mission to relocate a doomed human race to new homes in other planetary systems. Mack suggested we are but tagged animals in a cosmic trail of tears…
Magic: The Mind Dragging Among Things
Important to this assessment is the idea that magic, and its relationship to reality, may be a wholly different phenomenon than we understand it to be. Merleau-Ponty suggests a preconceptual relationship between the body and the sensible realm when he writes: "I give ear, or look, in the expectation of a sensation, and suddenly the sensible takes possession of my ear or my gaze, and I surrender a part of my body, even my whole body, to this particular manner of vibrating and filling space known as blue or red."
In Being and Nothingness, Sartre proposed that the world is in effect "a world of emotion," and the various human emotions have something in common, that is, "they make a same world appear, a world which is cruel, terrible, gloomy, joyful ... but one in which the relationship of things to consciousness is always and exclusively magical." He provides an example. Let's say a grinning face appeared in the window, sending a reaction of horror throughout your entire body. Phenomenologically speaking, your body is invaded by terror. Sartre explains that in this emotional moment, "consciousness is degraded and abruptly transforms the determined world in which we live into a magical world." Think about that. You haven't changed; the world has! As P.D. Ouspensky notes in Tertium Organum, "the mystery of thought creates everything." He writes:
"As soon as we understand that thought is not a 'function of motion' and that motion itself is a function of thought; as soon as we begin to feel the depth of this mystery, we shall see that the whole world is a kind of vast hallucination which does not frighten us and does not make us think we are mad only because we are accustomed to it."
Sartre proposes that the world sometimes reveals itself to consciousness as magical (open-ended, subjective) instead of determined (solid, objective). Your survival response is to bring the world back to the confines of your safety nest: consensus-reality. But sometimes there is a lag in doing this, during which your heart feels like it could have jumped out of your skin. When the gag is over we can laugh, but while we're suspended in Magical Existentia we have seemingly entered an aspect of the world that contains possibilities we would normally not entertain. As Sartre clarifies, we need not believe that "the magical is an ephemeral quality which we impose upon the world as our moods dictate. Here is an existential structure of the world which is magical..." (Essays, 243)
"The category "magical," in effect, governs our interpsychic relations and our perception of others; the magical is "the mind dragging among things." Sartre sees magic as consciousness rendered passive. In this posture, "man is always a wizard to man, and the social world is at first magical." The rational superstructures which make up our consensus-reality are actually "ephemeral and without equilibrium." They "cave in when the magical aspect of faces, of gestures, and of human situations, is too strong." (Essays, 244)
Indeed, this may explain why nobody is a true believer until they have experienced strange phenomena first hand. Perhaps imagination is not a separate mental faculty, but is the way the senses have of throwing themselves beyond in order to make tentative contact with the other sides of things that we do not sense directly. P.D. Ouspensky has suggested these may be the manifestations of the fourth dimension into the phenomenal world.
David Abram writes in Spell of the Sensuous that debunkers of magic, putting a premium on detached objectivity, attempt to "halt the participation of their senses in the phenomenon" by imagining other phenomena (wires, threads, mirrors), or by simply looking away. We always retain the option to suspend any instance of participation, he writes. There will always be people who "simply will not see any magic, either at a performance or in the world at large."
What happens when, without sufficient notice to halt sensory participation, we are plunged into the irrational alternate universe lying on the other side of our rational superstructure? Sartre guesses: "consciousness seizes upon the magical as magical; and forcibly lives it as such." Let's see how Walton deals with his existentially horrible situation:
"A creature was looking steadily back at me with huge, luminous brown eyes that were the size of quarters! I recoiled at the sight. I looked frantically around me. There were three of them! Hysteria overcame me instantly. I struck out at the two on my right, hitting one with the back of my arm and knocking it into the other one. … The one I touched felt soft through the cloth of its garment. The muscles of its puny physique yielded with a sponginess that felt more like fat than sinew. The creature was light and had fallen back easily.
I heaved myself to a sitting position. The exertion caused beads of sweat to pop out on my forehead. I lunged unsteadily to my feet and staggered back. I fell against a utensil-arrayed bench that followed the curve of one wall. My arm sent some of the instruments clattering against the back of the shelf. I leaned heavily there, keeping my eyes riveted on those horrid entities!"
Human emotion is a "quality which penetrates us" and "exceeds us on every side," explains Sartre. He writes, "the emotion ceases to be itself; it transcends itself; it is not a trivial episode of our daily life; it is intuition of the absolute." With regard to the specific emotion of horror, Sartre suggests, it is not only the present state of the thing that is transcended, but it is "threatened for the future; it spreads itself over the whole future and darkens it; it is a revelation of the meaning of the world."
Future Shock
Walton's terrific fear quite possibly stems from something we might call future shock. If culture shock is the result of an unprepared confrontation between two entirely different Earth cultures causing "bewilderment and disorientation, a misreading of reality, and the inability to cope," it may be relatively mild, suggests Alvin Toffler, in Future Shock, compared to the ravages of future shock, "the dizzying disorientation brought on by the premature arrival of the future."
Existentialists tend to see the essence of human existence as a journey; as being "between that from which the journey comes and that to which it proceeds." The German word dasein (human existence) describes life as a project in which human existence projects itself toward the future. As Heidegger says, man is always "engaged in projects to realize himself in the future"; care for self means "care for the future." Yet, while we are always preparing for the future, we glide toward it slowly, marking it with various anniversaries and rites of passage. We do not expect it to arrive overnight.
Walton's fear may arise from the sudden realization that we are not alone in the world as we've always been taught; that our plane of existence might be shared with an ultra-life form we had not known about, if only due to our perceptual limitations or an enormous reality hoax. It would seem that this realization effectively transformed the world as he thought he knew it; and did, in fact, spread itself over the future as "a revelation of the meaning of the world" — a world which we as technological beings thought we owned and managed. But as that surety slips away, the horrible begins to hold a "substantial quality," which spreads itself over perceptual space-time as "horrible in the world."
Walton has seen various unknown technological devices, including the flying saucer itself, which must surely have his mind reeling with fright. For, although the humanoids are short, spongy and slight of build, he is technologically overpowered by the Goliath contraptions of a futuristic society. He has entered a magical realm without his slingshot! Physically unarmed and mentally disarmed, he tries to overcome this existential situation using caveman ingenuity:
"My action caused the device on my chest to crash to the floor. No wires or tubes connected it to me... Greenish rays came from underneath the overturned machine. … My legs felt too weak to hold me up. I leaned heavily on the counter. The monstrous trio of humanoids started towards me. … With the superhuman effort of a cornered animal, I ground out the strength to defend myself. ... I grabbed for something from the bench to fend them off. My hand seized upon a thin transparent cylinder about 18 inches long. It was too light to be an effective club. I needed something sharp and tried to break the tip off the tube. I smashed the end of the glass-like wand down on the waist-high metal slab. It would not break."
There seems to be trouble in Magical Existentia. How might Sartre explain Walton's reaction? Sartre distinguishes the concept of anguish from the concept of fear in that "fear is fear of beings in the world whereas anguish is anguish before my self." He further distinguishes the concept of vertigo as "anguish to the extent that I am afraid not of falling over a precipice, but of throwing myself over." He clarifies: "A situation provokes fear if there is a possibility of my life being changed from without; my being provokes anguish to the extent that I distrust myself and my own reactions in that situation." (Essays 120-124) Sartre gives an example:
"Vertigo announces itself through fear; I am on a narrow path—without a guard rail—which goes along a precipice. The precipice ... represents a danger of death. At the same time I conceive of a number of causes, originating in universal determinism, which can transform that threat of death into a reality; I can slip on a stone and fall into the abyss ... If nothing compels me to save my life, nothing prevents me from precipitating myself into the abyss ... the decisive conduct will emanate from a self which I am not yet."
This is an important facet of phenomenology. A human being is essentially a changeling. Although we remain outwardly the same person throughout our lifetime, our interactions with people and with the world cause us to change inwardly. We do not react in exactly the same manner to each situation, unless it's required, nor do we get the same results each time we do react in similar manner. Each situation constitutes a different set of possibilities. Our actions and engagements must be constantly adjusted to a world that is constantly changing as well, making each interaction and experience a novel one.
In The Spell of the Sensuous, Abram writes that from a sensory perspective there is no thing that "appears as a completely determinate or finished object." Every thing I see "presents some facet of itself to my gaze while withholding other aspects from view." Figuring out what constitutes this unknown factor is part of problem solving. If a particular situation is exemplary in its novelty, we become excited and ask others for their opinion. Our lives are largely spent as intersubjective problem-solvers.
Second, because we are temporal beings, the self is a flowing entity existing over time. If you concentrate on your inner monologues you will have to agree that you are suspended in a built-in past, present and future. We all create mental pictures of ourselves in possible future scenarios. We project ourselves into the future in order to define ourselves in it. We know from experience not to depend too much on the pictures because life tosses banana peels in our path.
Sartre explains: "At this moment, fear appears, which in terms of the situation is the apprehension of myself as a destructible transcendent in the midst of transcendents, as an object which does not contain in itself the origin of its future disappearance." In other words, I don't know when I will no longer experience this self as subject, nor do I know the circumstances by which my death will occur. Sartre continues:
I realize myself as pushing away the threatening situation with all my strength, and I project before myself a certain number of future conducts destined to keep the threats of the world at a distance. These conducts are my possibilities. I am in anguish precisely because any conduct on my part is only possible … while constituting a totality of motives for pushing away that situation, I at the same moment apprehend these motives as not sufficiently effective. (Essays 123)
This leads to the third point, that we do not know what decision we will make with respect to the next banana peel thrown in our path, and we do not always trust ourselves to make the right decision. Humankind is always in a posture of questioning, of expectation, of not knowing what comes next or why. This is what Sartre called contingency. Thus, he suggests, "my decisive conduct will emanate from a self which I am not yet." Therefore, while my momentary self and my past self contain known qualities, my future self—that which I am not yet—is suspended in limbo. It is, in quantum physics terms, a possibility wave.
So we see that man's subjective world deals with potential threats, and survival tactics are at all times part of a repertoire of possible responses to the threat of bodily harm or death. We can try to "push away" this threat, but there is no promise as to the effectiveness of that action. According to Sartre, this risk constitutes mankind's absolute freedom in a free will universe.
Freedom: The Brute Resistance of the World
Back in his magically transformed world, Travis Walton is apparently lodged between fear and anguish, the proverbial rock and the hard place. He has just awoken from a long nap, like Rip van Winkle, and this magical place doesn't have any familiar tools at his disposal. There are no hammers, buzz-saws, and unfortunately no "two-by-fours." There is no Sartrean 'toolness' about this reality, which is a situation that would surely cause any Earth man considerable angst.
On the face of it there aren't a lot of possibilities, but Walton is profoundly free to come up with some. As Sartre says, an obstacle is neutral; one is free to "go around it, or climb it, or to ignore it." The "brute resistance of the world" is worked into the overall pattern of solutions afforded to us by our existential freedom. Important to Sartre's position on the matter, freedom is a given which constitutes the framework of possibilities.
Walton's dilemma can be seen as an exercise in free will. What are his options in this novel situation? As always, when the going gets rough, a human being is free to wing it. With amazing suicidal grace, Walton chooses vertigo. He tries to throw himself over the edge. He manages to scare the pants off the perplexed gang by trying an alternate possible historical configuration; that of a screaming wild banshee:
"I lashed out with the weapon at the advancing creatures, screaming desperate, hysterical threats at them... 'Get away from me!!! What are you?' Then I shrank away in revulsion. The creatures continued towards me, their hands outstretched. 'Keep back, damn you!!' I shrieked. They halted. In a snarling crouch I held the tube threateningly behind my head. [. . . ] Their sharp gaze alternately darted about and then fixed me with an intense stare ... I felt naked and exposed under their scrutiny... Their mouths never made any kind of sound... Just as I girded myself to spring at them, they abruptly turned and scurried from the room! They went out the open door, turned right and disappeared... I collapsed back against the bench and struggled to slow my racing heart."
The Beings in NothingDrive backed off for a pow-wow and Walton won the first round, but all that humankind is ever required to do is to win one round at a time. "I need only," Sartre says, to "make an appointment with myself on the other side of that hour, of that day, or of that month... [for] ... anguish is the fear of not finding myself at that appointment, of no longer even wishing to bring myself there."
To Sartre choice and intention are both acts; it is not the result that constitutes freedom, for all possibility is the consequence of existing, and all of my choices and acts are free. Even choosing to do nothing is an act. But, Sartre explains, "it is for the sake of that being which I will be there at the turning of the path that I now exert all my strength, and in this sense there is already a relation between my future being and my present being."
Through that last-ditch effort, posits Sartre, that last ounce of strength which constitutes the threat of my final annihilation, I am saved. He states, "It is through my horror that I am carried toward the future, and the horror nihilates itself in that it constitutes the future as possible. Anguish is precisely my consciousness of being my own future, in the mode of not-being." (Essays 141)
Strangely, Walton was left to wander the craft unescorted. He came upon a chair that had controls on its arms and tried it out for size. From across the room he saw a muscular human being about 6 feet, 2 inches tall, wearing a tight blue suit, and was relieved to see one of his own kind. The tall blonde man wore a transparent helmet that opened to a wide rim over the shoulders. Walton chatted animatedly with the man, asking him questions, but the man gave him the silent treatment. He led Walton down a narrow hallway to a door that slid open, and they disembarked from the ship down a steep ramp.
Walton was dismayed to discover they were inside an even larger mother ship that contained flying disks of various sizes and shapes. Entering a room where there were other humans, who looked alike in a "family sort of way," a man and a woman lifted Walton onto a table. The attractive blonde woman held an object that contained a "golfball-sized sphere." She pressed it over his mouth and he lost consciousness.
Travis Walton awoke on the side of the highway outside of Heber, Arizona, five days after he had been abducted by the craft. He had kept an appointment with a future self that was radically changed. He later wrote, "When I made that fateful choice to leave the truck … I was leaving behind forever all semblance of a normal life, running headlong toward an experience so overwhelmingly mind-rending in its effects, so devastating in its aftermath, that my life would never — could never — be the same again."
Walton looked up in time to see the yellow center-line of the highway reflected in the bottom of the spaceship's "gleaming hull" before it shot vertically into the sky.
"The most striking thing about its departure," he wrote, "was its quietness."
References
Abram,David. Spell of the Sensuous.
Corso, Philip. The Day After Roswell.
Ouspensky, P.D. Tertium Organum: A Key to the Enigmas of the World, 1920, 1982, Vintage.
Sartre, J. P. Essays in Existentialism, 1965, 1993, Citadel.
Walton, Travis, Fire in the Sky, Marlowe & Co., 1997.
Walton, Travis, "The Walton Experience – An Ordinary Day," relays much of the abduction experience itself. www.travis-walton.com
Notes:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Being_and_Nothingness
Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology (French: L'Être et le néant : Essai d'ontologie phénoménologique), sometimes subtitled A Phenomenological Essay on Ontology, is a 1943 philosophical treatise by Jean-Paul Sartre. Its main purpose was to assert the individual's existence as prior to the individual's essence. “ Sartre's overriding concern in writing Being and Nothingness was to vindicate the fundamental freedom of the human being, against determinists of all stripes. It was for the sake of this freedom that he asserted the impotence of physical causality over human beings, that he analysed the place of nothingness within consciousness and showed how it intervened between the forces that act upon us and our actions.
While a prisoner of war in 1940/1941 Sartre read Martin Heidegger's Being and Time, an ontological investigation through the lens and method of Husserlian phenomenology (Husserl was Heidegger's teacher). Reading Being and Time initiated Sartre's own enquiry leading to the publication in 1943 of Being and Nothingness whose subtitle is 'A Phenomenological Essay on Ontology'. Sartre's essay is clearly influenced by Heidegger though Sartre was profoundly skeptical of any measure by which humanity could achieve a kind of personal state of fulfillment comparable to the hypothetical Heideggerian re-encounter with Being. In his much gloomier account in Being and Nothingness, man is a creature haunted by a vision of "completion," what Sartre calls the ens causa sui, and which religions identify as God. Born into the material reality of one's body, in an all-too-material universe, one finds oneself inserted into being (with a lower case "b"). Consciousness is in a state of cohabitation with its material body, but has no objective reality; it is nothing ("no thing"). Consciousness has the ability to conceptualize possibilities, and to make them appear, or to annihilate them.
Joan d'Arc is the author of Space Travelers and the Genesis of the Human Form, and Phenomenal World, both published by The Book Tree (www.thebooktree.com). She is also the publisher of the infrequently transmitted HunterGatheress Journal.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)