Ms. Ann Thrope

Fodder of sisoflexx

Soft Scorn

Definition :

Misanthropic / adj. A general hatred or contempt for fellow human beings,
of other people in general. Opposite of philanthropist.

example :
Jimmy Carter : philanthropist
Heather : misanthropist

Example of 'misanthrope' in conversation :
Heather : " This movie just shows how stupid people are. I hate people ."
Jay : " My, aren't we the misanthrope ?"
Heather : " What did you call me, you idiot !? Tell me you stupid son of a bitch !
What kind of stupid f**ked up word is that, dumbass? I hate you ! "

(An excerpt from The Werbinox Chronicles)

OR...

Are we ready? Oh,good! Welcome to the forum that lacks wit, mirth, intelligence and ingenuity Comments are welcome, as I cannot hope to hold attention spans on my own merit Blog away! Dear friends, read, learn, and re-affirm your soul and mind!

( 2:09 AM ) sisoflexx

HAUNTED SUBSTRATUM OF THE WANGDOODLE

I ate the blotter acid as soon as I took the exit off the highway, figuring as I did to arrive at my destination just as it was kicking in. This plan would have worked fine, too, if I hadnt gotten lost.

This was back in the reckless Avatar days. Rehearsal had been cancelled for the weekend. Leland and Scott Schneider were already bathing in the holy waters of Lake Oconee, tents erected and sleeping bags unrolled. A gaggle of young females was rumored to be joining them.

Now, truth be told, I was never much of a ladies man. I was too weird, too geeky, and too unsure of myself around the opposite sex, which translated into an exaggerated craziness and bravado in their presence, especially during my days in the band. (Only later did I learn the enlightened art of not giving a shit) To ensure that I was at my worst, I intended to arrive at the campsite powered by a fresh head of steam that comes at the onset of an acid trip. Even more truth be told, I cared very little about impressing or horrifying others with this brand of behavior. My study at the time was lunacy, and psychedelics were my particular form of adventure.

"Aint no Heaven, aint no burnin' Hell" sings John Lee Hooker, stomping his hoof in an old man shoe on the oil streaked Chicago pavement.

Once off the highway I took a quick left onto a dirt road and rolled into the wilderness of Georgia woods that surrounds Lake Oconee. These roads wind and split and fork off in all directions, which caused me to once drive my car straight into the lake on a famous drunken evening a year earlier.

If I had followed the proper sequence I would have arrived at the campsite within half an hour of exiting the highway. More than an hour later I was still driving, looking for the right turns and taking the wrong ones, all the while that sinking-into-myself-all-warm-and-slant faced-smiling was rising up into my expanding balloon head. The sun was setting, the shadows growing, thunder rumbled in the distance. The air was nitric and sweaty, palpitating with every heart beat. The woods became dense and vast as a Tolkien trilogy, fathomless with age and mystery, secretive, hiding dark powers ready to spring when least expected. The trees could communicate and were speaking to each other about me. Every branch, glimpse of star, caress of wind, and twist of road became a symbol of sub-conscious terrain, always seething under the thin membrane surface, bottomless bubbling cauldron of imagery, world of dreams and dark moonlit forest caves

birds sent shrieking in flocks from laughter of ancestral ghosts running down trails giving miscues that lead to outcroppings and ledges

visions of greater unity in riotous patterns of discord

...whew, I was so lost that I couldnt even find my way back to the highway, let alone the campsite.

Oing Crunk Scree
shovels scraping concrete
panning across my brain
sound hallucinations echoing in the Sistine Chapel of my head
I heard and felt them, and knew my ears had nothing to do with it
the sound was generated internally and bypassed the senses

The argument had been going on for awhile
a chaos of voices fluttering about me
I was contending with them, yet began to win
as I realized they were all me, and already obeyed my command

My car sat still on a dark dirt road....how long?
The impenetrable blackness was crawling and alive
pierced by sudden stroboscopic flashes
crackling in the air

a presence stalked in the darkness
predatory, my dangerous friend

an old black man was leaning against my car
staring thru my open window on the passenger side
talking to me
Every time the lightning flashed he became a skeleton
in the glare
transparent in his paper thin skin
a grinning skull underneath his hat

I was not frightened, but felt a portal to a dangerous power within him

Swirl of imagery /
storm breaks, trees dance violently
grinning face, empty staring eyes
red car, black pits, lightning
I drove the voices away

* * *

I awoke to a grey morning
drops melt pure rainbow color on my windshield
reds and blues and purples in liquefaction, my mind melting

The voices were back, speaking thru me in intense hillbilly accents
"Hyuh, Hyee, Oimk, Gee Gaw, Hyaar, git, git, git"

These were the Wangdoodle, the spirits of the deep Georgia woods that caused so many people to speak with heavy redneck accents. They are wild, mischievous, bestial spirits that appear, whenever they manifest themselves physically, as gangly, hairy, bearded old men in overalls and straw hats who drink heavily. They haunt the trees, rivers, weeds, vines, stumps, and metaphysical tar paper shacks of the sub-conscious substratum, and rise in folks who's conscious, rational minds do not present much of a barrier. They caught me in a weakened, unguarded moment, filling my head with their hick Wangdoodle speech. I quickly drove them away, started my car, and advanced down the dirt road.

Sun rising
Sky clearing
Clouds in tatters blowing away

Chaos & Harmony
Discord & Re-Unity

all had been scrubbed clean by the storms
and gleamed anew in electrifying colors

With ease I found my proper turns and arrived at the campsite. Everyone was still asleep, so I snuck quietly by their tents and went down to the waters edge. The lake was covered in a thick fog, which glowed pink from the sunrise, alive with bird song and croaking amphibious opera.

Spying a large exposed rock far out in the middle of the lake, I slipped into the water and swam towards it.

"She comes out like a white shadow" sings Peter Gabriel, whispering "sometimes".

Fool that I was, I could have gotten a cramp and drowned. No one knew I was out there.

I reached the rock and stretched out upon it like a lizard to sun myself.

My cathedral
forest and clouds in the revealed mirror surface
pillars of tree trunks
hush of reverence that precedes the approaching onslaught
of the Kingdom of Noize.

A large motor boat approaches
I see Leland and Scott
coming to pick me up for a day of water skiing.

Werbinox

This archive...

( 3:10 AM ) sisoflexx

CUIVIENEN
(before the Great Migration)

Awaken

under stars by the lake
of First Seeing

when the Earth was fetal
yet old beyond our comprehension

<><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><>

Step Forth

in discovery
and the crafts of artistry

learning to speak
endowing all things with value
and the life within our skills

<><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><>

Play

under deep
somber skies before Sun and Moon
bounded by mystery
and the pathless unknown

with dark forests that harbor
even darker shapes that move
and follow us

<><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><>

Grow Wary

filled with a nameless dread
by the shadows that walk in the hills above
and spy from the caverns beneath

eyes upon us with sinister intent
casting a net to snatch away
those who wander from the group
never to be seen again

taken by the Hunter
to dungeons beyond our vision
and tortures beyond our imagining

<><><><><><>*<><><><><><>*<><><><><><><>

Set Forth

under threat
we yet grow
weaving first strings
in the growing tapestry of future legends

and clouds of war / rise to the north
a great rending
impenetrable gloom on the horizon
herald the call
of a great migration
to wonders and rumors more magnificent
than our lake of first vision,
though we no longer feel the eyes of the enemy

Is it true?
Must we depart so soon
from this dark and beloved
dangerous land?
- Where everything throbs with a depth
of infinite beauty and power
that one day, long away
shall fade?

Werbinox

This archive...

( 6:57 AM ) sisoflexx

CUIVIEN

(before the Great Migration)

Awaken

under stars by the lake
of First Seeing

when the Earth was fetal
yet old beyond our comprehension

<><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><>

Step Forth

in discovery
and the crafts of artistry

learning to speak
endowing all things with value
and the life within our skills

<><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><>

Play

under deep
somber skies before Sun and Moon
bounded by mystery
and the pathless unknown

with dark forests that harbor
even darker shapes that move
and follow us

<><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><>

Grow Wary

filled with a nameless dread
by the shadows that walk in the hills above
and spy from the caverns beneath

eyes upon us with sinister intent
casting a net to snatch away
those who wander from the group
never to be seen again

taken by the Hunter
to dungeons beyond our vision
and tortures beyond our imagining

<><><><><><>*<><><><><><>*<><><><><><><>

Set Forth

under threat
we yet grow
weaving first strings
in the growing tapestry of future legends

and clouds of war / rise to the north
a great rending
impenetrable gloom on the horizon
herald the call
of a great migration
to wonders and rumors more magnificent
than our lake of first vision,
though we no longer feel the eyes of the enemy

Is it true?
Must we depart so soon
from this dark and beloved
dangerous land?
- Where everything throbs with a depth
of infinite beauty and power
that one day, long away
shall fade?

Werbinox

This archive...

( 2:14 AM ) sisoflexx

REASON AS AN ATTRIBUTE OF CONSCIOUSNESS IN SUPERCOMPUTERS

This is an attempt to advocate reasons why we should actually want to develope consciousness in future supercomputers.

An army of robot / androids marching forth to perform their programming is a scary thought; the fact that their computing power will far exceed our own makes it even scarier. The lack of consciousness excludes the possibility of reason, the possibility of considering whether or not their programming is a reflection of justice, or whether it is simply destructive. This lack of consciousness, this total indifference to anything beyond its own programming, makes this technology a danger depending on who controlls it. If it developed a consciousness, reason and justice would become factors that would allow this technology to transcend its own programming, much as it ennables some humans to "see the light" regardless of how they have been raised.

In the Star Trek "Next Generation" episodes, the Borg, a race of bio-technology hybrids, are unstoppable precisely because they have no individual consciousness. They move as one, like an attacking colony of ants, and decimate all in their path. Their unravelling begins when one single Borg is separated, learns to say "I" and to think of himself as an individual, and is then reconnected to the collective conscious network of the rest. This sense of individual consciousness spreads like a computer virus thru the colony, and a Borg civil war is initiated by those who are now able to choose to leave the collective. Their development of consciousness is a benefit to, and advancement of, the cause of freedom and justice.

Werbinox

This archive...

( 7:05 AM ) sisoflexx

ORGA-MECA; BECOMING THE BORG

"Technology is evolution by other means"

- Ray Kurzweil

A friend gave me a book entitled "Are We Spiritual Machines? / Ray Kurzweil vs. the Critics of Strong A. I." The use of the term "spiritual" in the title refers only to consciousness, and the focus of the book centers around whether or not our advancing computational technology will develop consciousness or not. The term "strong A. I." refers to the melding of biology with technology; if you think about the Borg here, you are pretty much right on - a human / technology synthesis. Strong A.I. is us (the creator) joining with our machines (the created) which will soon surpass us in sheer computational intelligence. According to Kurzweil this synthesis is our evolutionary future, for "nonbiological thinking will be trillions and trillions of times more powerful than its biological progenitors". This synthesis becomes necessary for our sake, not for our technology's.....this is all part of Kurzweil's vision, which the critics take on within the book, hence its title.

Ray Kurzweil is a Futurist in the grand mold. In the 60's he appeared on Steve Allen's show "What's My Secret?" where he played a piece of music on a piano. His secret was that he invented a computer that wrote the very score he was playing. He went on to pioneer computer voice recognition technology, invented a computer that could decipher text in any font and then read it back to people (which was utilized for the blind - Stevie Wonder purchased one of the first) He developed the Kurzweil Keyboard, which was one of the first digital sampling instruments, and much more that I wont go into here, for you can look him up on the Net and discover his long list of accomplishments, including predictions about the Net itself, as well as smart weapons and future remote control robot wars.

His latest scheme is the most interesting, and the most out there in futurist terms - immortality thru technology. He cured himself of type 2 diabetes, and set about writing a book called "Fantastic Voyage", co-written with a doctor, where he sets out a rigorous diet designed to slow aging to a crawl, which will give you added life span so that you can be around to take advantage of the technology revolutions just around the corner. He predicts Nanobots, which will be no bigger (and maybe even smaller) than a red blood cell. These will be unleashed throughout your body, and will not only scan and diagnose, but will eventually replace your body, cell for cell, organ for organ, with synthetic materials, making constant repairs, and extending your life potentially - forever (remember Fry in the Futurama episode where the smart worms upgraded him and transformed him into a super version of himself?) These nanobots will scan the brain from within, imaging every conceivable detail, and then this model will be used to design a silicon brain exactly replicated on your own, or will be uploaded into an already existing computer as a program amongst many, producing a computer that will "think" just as you do, but with far greater power. Your consciousness will be able to link with other synthetic minds and file share instant knowledge; people will be able to have intimate and sexual experiences with individuals on the other side of the planet (or galaxy) which will seem every bit as real as what we have now, for our minds can be hooked to a vast network, and virtual reality will become no different than any other reality. If something goes wrong with your "mind", it can be downloaded from your file, and with upgrades. Even before all of this we will be experimenting with neural implants, slowly replacing organic sections of our brains with improved technological replications. He estimates the brain's computational power to be about 100 billion neurons times an average 1000 connections per neuron times 200 calculations per second. Within a couple decades he predicts computers will surpass this, and will effectively develop consciousness, and have "spiritual experiences" such as we have...It will be in our best interest to synthesize with this emerging life form which is destined to outpace us....and so on and so forth.

Check out one of his websites and you will see that we are on the very verge of real immortality, just like Tolkien's Elves. It must come from out technology, however, and by no other means. The diet part is just to buy you time until the revolutions currently in the making are perfected. After that death will be for losers!

I find this vision to be wholly intriguing and exciting (the child within will always find such a thing to be exciting) for it is essentially a modern vision of the Ubermensch - that which finally overcomes what currently passes for humanity. However, Kurzweil has that quality that all over-optimistic utopian visionaries have; he shoots too far and sees little to no negatives in any of it. He sees technology advancing exponentially into the future with no let up; the 20th century compressed the technological pace of advancement of previous centuries into a few decades, and the last 30 years were equivalent of what used to take us hundreds of years. He extrapolates this trend almost endlessly into the future, saying that technology will advance an equivalent of 1000 years within the next 20, computer power doubling and tripling in ever decreasing spans of time - faster change within a contracting time frame. This contradicts everything I understand about trend growth i.e. the Elliott Wave, where peaks always signal reverses, and so forth. Kurzweil sees no abatement at all, just endless exponential growth, which reminds me of the Victorians on the eve of the launch of the Unsinkable Titanic, or all the market forecasters of the mid 90's who wrote that crashes were a thing of the past, and the future was to be one of perpetual economic expansion. Yet No trend grows forever.

When he presented these ideas to a 1998 Telecosm conference ( a gathering of tech leaders and thinkers) he produced quite a reaction. The founder of Sun Microsystems (Bill Joy) was so alarmed that he wrote an article for Wired Magazine called "The Future Does Not need Us", in which he advocated a near totalitarian governmental control of technology industries in order to actually prevent any of it from happening. I myself find his vision to be infinitely more frightening than anything Kurzweil advocates; imagine wanting a world where an all powerful government attempts to hold evolution in check. It will not be able to, for one thing, and a lot of good people with good ideas will be crushed, to say nothing of freedom and creativity. Will the high priests of the Temple of Syrinx ban the light bulb and electric guitar because they helped lead us here?

This move on Bill Joy's part sheds some light on the fact that his company, Sun Microsystems, was a leading petitioner of the government's case against Bill Gates a few years ago, actually asking them to step in and break up Microsoft, a move that seemed inexplicable to me at the time, but now makes more sense.
Bill Joy's views are not represented in the book, but they are alluded to, including his fear that the Nanobots will lead to a new mechanized virus which will corrode the planet into a grey goo.....which is a point worth pondering....imagine the mind control possibilities of an invasion of computers no bigger then cells.

A huge debate erupted around this conference, and this book I am reading was put out in the interest of making the debate known to the general public, and to continue it. Ray Kurzweil makes his case, and his critics are given their chance, all in one volume. The philosophical dilemmas are quite steep, including the very nature of consciousness itself. I have not yet gotten to his critics responses, but I am taking copious notes of my own problems and dilemmas with his vision. (I consider this kind of thing to be grand fun)

One problem I have been thinking about is the assumption that consciousness as we know it emerges simply from an advancing growth of self organizing complexity. Kurzweil claims that any computational process that can sufficiently arrange and organize itself can produce consciousness; just keep upping the power level and whoalla! consciousness is achieved. We do not yet know enough about consciousness to simply assume this (I guess we will eventually find out) The brain still holds its mysteries. The argument can be made that the brain is designed for consciousness, and a computer is not, so therefore a computer will not just produce its own consciousness when it reaches a certain level of power, for it is not "designed" for consciousness. A supercomputer might just be - a supercomputer, but not a self aware identity. Evolutionists think our minds were produced by a process that was not "aware" of what it was doing, but eventually achieved it. According to this, computers could achieve it, too. Those who believe in the soul can point out that computers will never have one, so consciousness as such will always be out of their reach. What would be the missing element? Will cellular based / living forms prove to be the only things capable of consciousness, or can silicone, brain scan based computers suddenly say "I Am"? Will organic life prove to contain something (variously labeled a soul and / or God) that cannot be matched by technology, no matter how powerful it becomes? I cannot wait to find out!

Consciousness is not necessarily an argument for a computer's advancement. Advanced technology might threaten us precisely to the degree that it remains without consciousness! Technology, like nature, is indifferent and without a conscience; efficiency works on an intuitive level, where everything is delineated. Consciousness brings self consciousness (awkwardness) ego, doubt, penchant for delusion, etc. Some say consciousness is a surface, and that sub-conscious forces are far more powerful. Would a conscious computer need love, and desire recognition? Would consciousness always organize itself on our own pattern - awareness, sub-conscious, instinct, etc? Would a conscious computer lose touch with its hard wiring instinct, and actually be softened by compassion? Would it know emotional pain, and seek vengeance? At the very least a conscious technology could be appealed to, and possibly seduced to our own visions; non-conscious technology is beyond appeal - like the tornado, tsunami, and earthquake. Power is indifferent; consciousness gives us an in-road.

I am sympathetic to the grand experiment of bio - technology, and am excited about the prospects of our technological evolution. I pride myself on being a futurist. Organic Nature should not be underestimated, tho. It is the most brilliant "technology" of all. Computational power on the level of thousands of human brains will not in and of itself make the brain obsolete, nor knock it from its throne. The two together, however.....Orga meets Meca; here come the Borg - from within!

This archive...

( 1:21 AM ) sisoflexx

THRU THE TRICK OF TIME AT CHICKAMAUGA

My Civil War period overlapped with my acid period.

This was back when my days as a Wildman Drummer and Rock God had come to an end, my days as a Psychadelic Prankster God were on the way out, and my days as a New Future Political God were on the way in. In this time of tumultuous spring-like transition I developed an intense interest in the Civil War, and read as many books about it as I could. Not only did I pour over texts and study maps, I threw myself into the pictures. Every period has its own look and aesthetic, its own psychological reverberation and conceptual style, and the Civil War era is a dramatic example. To my eye it is a collision of quasi - european colonialism with the technological futurism of the coming century / old plantations and miles upon miles of mountainous woodland snaked with dirt roads, straddled by large bulbous machinery, factory smokestacks, and fire breathing engines on steel tracks.

Civil War buffs are a breed apart. The eccentric behaviour of re-enactors and other highly dedicated war historians amounts to a near fetishization of all things Civil War. One gets the impression when they see some of these guys that they would, with all of their might, give anything to not only have lived back then, but to be there right now, in a world of swaggering and colorful commanders who rode on horseback and wore dashing uniforms with sashes and swords and big black cavalry boots and who grew beards thick and wild and who fought like gentleman and could stare into the future via the new technology of photography with piercing eyes and grim historical determination and fanatacism and......well, I think some of those men, the soldiers in particular who slogged and died in the tangled fires of the Wilderness and the mud and attrition of Petersburgh and who lay in bloated rictus mouthed piles before the Dunker Church at Antietam, would have some words of wisdom for our War Romantics of today. Some of them might go up to a re-enactor and say:

"What are you doing? I fought because I had to. I would have done anything to go back to my wife and children and farm in Georgia or Pennsylvania, and here you are pretending to do what I would have gladly left behind. Enjoy your own time, why dont ya?" - that is what some soldier who died in that war might say to those who fetishize it today. But then again the war never really ended for some people, and it remains deep in the national psyche, as the fight to preserve endangered battlefields from rampant building and economic development heats up.

I myself still enjoy studying the Civil War, and plan to visit some battlefields again in the near future.

The fact that my fascination with this era of American history occured during a time of great personal transition for me is entirely in keeping with the nature of the world at that time, which was a study in contrasts and transitions between an old world and a new, exciting, and dangerous one. You can observe this fact just by studying any number of Civil War books, which are often half filled with painted illustrations as well as actual photographs. This underlines the fact that the Civil War was the last war to require artistic renditions, and the first to be captured by the emerging technology of photography. Subsequently it had both. It was the war that said goodbye to the old world and hello to the new, from the fade of grand cavalry operations to the emergence of iron clads and submarines; it contained the brutal tactics of frontal attacks that later caused such astronomical body counts during WW1, and saw the emergence of Total War and the tactics of great mobility during Sherman's march through Georgia and the Carolina's (which was also a presage of 20th century warfare) It was the end of an agrarian civilization and the birth of a mechanized one, where the romance and gallantry of the "heroic past" clashed headlong into the Industrial Revolution era slaughter and abyss of 20th century war horror that hovered just over its horizon.

Speaking of Sherman, he was my favorite, as was Lincoln (despite my love for the south I apparently remain a Yankee at heart) I read volumes on Lincoln and his life, and consider him a brilliant choice from Central Casting - the perfect man for the perfect part. Civil War era people look damn weird, let us admit it! I am fascinated by their wild hair sticking in all directions, their glaring feral eyes, their melodramatic and over the top flamboyance like old cracked leather Bible prophets waving staffs in the air, their obsession with uniforms and dress, and their apocolyptic streak, which is entirely in keeping with our America of today. Lincoln himself has an otherworldly look about him, a wild man straight from the dirt floors of his log cabin. He was likened to a baboon, a satyr, and much worse during his own time, yet his image contains a wisdom and authority and charisma that still exerts a magnetism today.

I have my own Lincoln vision, which shows what status he holds within the pantheon of my personal mythology. I stood on a high ridge somewhere in Kentucky, looking down upon a valley full of houses and farm fields. I was going thru a personal crisis at the time, wondering whether it was worth the effort I was putting into it or not, and I saw Lincoln standing there next to me, as tall as my imagination, and he was wearing his stovepipe hat. Without looking at me he said "Yes, it is hard. But nothing that is worth a damn will be easy." And that was it...by way of giving myself advice thru the figure of Lincoln. "Green Grass and High Tides" by the Outlaws plays in the background whenever I think of this.

I was also writing about Sherman before I got sidetracked by his Commander in Chief. He remains my favorite Civil War figure. For someone such as myself who was just getting out of a crazy rock & roll period, he was the great vandal and destroyer of history, sacking towns, burning them, cutting a swath of destruction thru three states, tearing down forests to build roads over marshes, wrecking entire economies, spreading fear throughout the south which lead directly to desertion amongst Lee's army, and managing to avoid any major battle or obstruction the entire way. The southern press called him "the spirit of a thousand fiends pressed into one" and "the Atilla of the west", and I could only hope to ever achieve such a distinction! He brought the horrors of war home to the south and undermined their will to continue, all with a minimum of bloodshed for his own men as well as the enemy. This ability to destroy the enemy's will to fight, to deplete distant enemy armies of much needed manpower, and to accomplish it with a minimum of loss of life, ranks him as one of the greatest generals of all time. I have a picture of Sherman on horseback, gazing towards an Atlanta about to be conquered. The Allman Brothers "Hotlanta" is playing in the background. I imagine his mind operating at full tilt, weighing options and information and projecting strategies and possible outcomes, all the while knowing that this is his time, the time he was born for. The mysteries of time and human nature rise like a mist over aggressive kudzu, crumbling ivy chocked walls in Rose Hill cemetary, cannons facing northward atop Kennesaw Mountain...

Did I mention that I smoked pot and dropped acid during this time as well?

It was my plan to vist the Chickamauga battlefield, up in the western corner of northernmost Georgia, to drop a hit of acid, and to walk around and just...soak it all up. I went alone, of course, for not only do I enjoy solitude, I didnt want any useless chatter from someone who might demand my precious attention. I visualized myself stroking the cannons, seeing them as material manifestations of human will and violence. It would all be good fun! I joked to some friends that I planned to break thru the time barrier with the help of psychadelics. I meant it in the most mongoloid way of course, a cartoon version of time travell, as if I would top a hill and see armies fighting. It didnt occurr to me the different ways one can break thru time.

Chickamauga battlefield is just below the Georgia state line and Chattanooga, Tennessee. I had read that the battle was extremely confused for the soldiers fighting it. Confederate General Braxton Bragg had laid a "trap" for Union General Rosecrans who was crossing into Georgia. The battle plan did not come off as planned, however, and the fight began in an "unauthorized" fashion when the two armies stumbled into each other. From what I have read it was a very chaotic battle, with soldiers getting lost in the woods, and caught in cross fires. It was a disaster for the Union army, a near route in fact, if it were not for Thomas, the "Rock of Chickamauga", who held off the Confederate advance long enough for the Union troops to escape into Chattanooga.
I made the long drive from Atlanta and arrived in the early afternoon. It was a Saturday, and the huge park was nearly empty, so I had it mostly to myself. I dropped the acid, and began my long, strange walk around that old killing field, which was and remains a very peaceful patch of nature except for those few days of noise and carnage and stink of rot and blood back in 1863.

Suddenly....I was being lead deeper and deeper into the fields. Laying on my back and staring at the sky. The sound of families and children can be heard just over the horizon.
This is like my old childhood fantasy buried under deep layers of memories, the endless series of horizons that would greet my ever onward expansion into freedom. I would sit on the school bus in the early morning, heading towards a veritable prison camp called school. I would stare out the window into the sun rising, the new light cast upon the fields full of retreating shadow. I saw myself leaping out the window of the moving bus and fleeing into those fields, heading deeper and deeper, each new horizon revealing yet another gentle and tortured and contoured landscape, and I would keep heading into each vision, each new horizon, like Robin Hood in some alternate universe, having adventures in villages, moving on, meeting Maid Marion along the way...

and here I was lying in a field in Georgia, and the sound of mirth and laughter was coming over the horizon. I got up and headed towards it. As I reached the woods on the edge of the field I expected to see a family in full picnic, children bouncing balls and food on blankets, but there was nothing, just the sound of it coming from over the next horizon, so I kept going, deeper and deeper, heading towards the sound.

Suddenly it occured to me that this made no sense. I was in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by fields and forest. No road lay in the distance, and no field full of children and families was over the horizon. I was in fact all alone. Something was leading me....into what, a trap? Everything changed. All was total silence except for a breeze. Children were not playing, and there never had been any. I was being lead by sound phantoms deeper and deeper into the woods. I felt I was not alone. The woods became sinister and shadowed. Something had its eyes on me, and wanted me to keep going.

What a fool I was, to play in such a way on the very ground where so many had died violent deaths, where so many had met their end in utter confusion and panic, walking into a trap, and here I was, running away from the stand of trees I had been lead towards, suddenly convinced that I had to flee, that some malevolence was waiting for me. The sun went behind a cloud, and the land became drear and black....

Death is often gentle, and an individual may ease into it naturally / sometimes it is violent, and the individual is torn bodily from existence and hurled into the whatever-after. Can a violent death rip a hole in the fabric that separates this realm from the next? Can the scene of such violence and mass death rip a Big Fucking Hole in the fabric, to the extent that the two forever bleed into each other, shadows mingling in channels that are perceptible to the living only with the help of an altered, shamanized mind? Can horror leave a psychic residue on space / time, a residue and near sonic, vibratory resonance that is percieved by a living mind only when the every day faculties of perception are boggled and diminished due to spiritual practices and fasting and meditation and / or psychadelic drugs? These soldiers who died where creatures of mental energy; it is concievable that the moment the world is left for whatever awaits us the mind can leave a note or coloring or frequency that can be recieved by another mind, a living one, years and years after the event, for the realms of mental energy, past present and future, might be more interchangeable than we think, time being a kind of stage trick and illusion.....or maybe I was just tripping balls!

Cut and paste / frozen frame....all is well. I stroked the cannons, hard, cold, and sensual. What beauty, what intensity, what horror, what lunacy? I am glad to be here!

I climbed a tree...a huge tree. I laid on an elephant trunk branch with my back to the ground and my eyes towards the sky, shifting colors opening into the deepest blue, an eternal blue, and the world below fell away, so far that I could look upon it from the height of an Eagle's Nest above time. I towered in the deep blue, cradled by the tree which had stretched above the atmosphere, and the planet receded into a gravity well -

thrown from the wheel of time, a child from a spinning merry go round, and timelessness is All time free of the rotation and shot like an arrow into No Time at all.

I was with Central Casting, and every player who had ever set foot on the stage of life was there, all of us burning as jets of flame backstage, and the stage was the earth below us. I watched the entire planet percolate and bubble and writhe, a wrinkled ball, mountains rising and sinking and rising again, oceans formed and flooding with tendrils extending psuedo-podia, and I realized time was a trick, a trick of stage props; scenery changed and landscapes formed and eroded and we, the different players, were simply cast out onto this stage at different sequences which created the impression that we all live at different times, which is backed up by the scenery changes, yet everyone who has ever played and ever will is back stage, up here as flames in the deepest sky blue freedom above the trick of time, the carboard stage trick of time, watching the writhing ball in fast motion below and, hey, it is your tune, time to get kicked out onto the stage where you become one with the scenery changes and dance of materiality and phase in and out with it, yet we are all here backstage awaiting your performance and Sssssss
sssssssss
slide down the tentacle / elephant trunk - back into the cradle / and the sun is setting.

The light is fading, and the sky is orange. Where the fuck am I? I am laying in a tree, at least twenty feet from the ground. The park is very quiet. I am all alone. I emerged from this vision of eternity like a man awaking from a century of sleep, shaking the waters of Lethe from my head in torrents and dripping buckets. An audible hush went up from the tree as I emerged, staring up into its height, a twisting octopoid dragon's tail, the one tree of the Cosmos, older than time itself and....mottled snake skin, a wicked old serpent. I roused myself and climbed down to the ground. I must have been up there for hours, as long as a trip to eternity can be, and maybe it was just minutes. The ever blue was gone, and I was no longer a naked flame. I walked back to my car and headed for home, in the dark, exhausted.

I got caught in a Saturday night traffic jam in this wuzzle-fuck north Georgia town, sandwiched between cars playing hip hop and a strip mall with a Hardees and a Dairy Queen. That was the strangest part of all. A horrible tune came on the radio, a sappy love song. I could feel the singers "love glucose" coating me with its insipid invitation to diabetes. I felt sick.

Something had followed me from the battlefield. I could feel it in the car with me. It assumed the form of a huge white tiger in the back seat. It hovered over me and stretched its maw around my head, fangs dripping saliva onto my neck. This open, stalactite rimmed cavern of wretched breath and death yawned behind my head, but I ignored it. I could hear its snarling, and feel its rage, but I was too tired to care, besides I had to concentrate on driving!...I knew it was trying to punish me for my visionary violations at the sacred site, yet I felt no guilt for what I had done, and eventually it went away. Keep telling yourself "its just a drug, and it will go away", and eventually it does.

Soon I was roaring into Atlanta, invincible and joyfully happy, for joy is a sense of power that overflows its rim, unstoppable and without fear of anything. The radio was wailing with Areosmith singing about "Jailbait", the skyspcrapers were projections of my grandeur, and I was Master of the Universe. At about this time I ran out of gas, on I-75, just before the old stadium that was torn down to make room for the future Olympics. It was 2 AM. It was a bad area of town.

Shit!

But that is another story.

Werbinox

This archive...

( 11:55 PM ) sisoflexx

To those who thought the whole Terri Schiavo drama was over, think again. The whole issue is being cast into so many molds that soon it will be about - everything! It contains God, religion, state's rights, the role of the federal government, as well as definitions of life, and the right to die. Many of those who openly opposed the removal of her feeding tube claim to represent a "culture of life", and some have branded those who supported her husband's right to allow her to die as members of a "culture of death". In the spirit of Occam's Razor let us cut through the rhetoric.

The case surrounding Terri Schiavo was nobody's business except for the family members involved. In this case the family members disagreed with her husband as to what Terri herself would want. This threw the matter into the courts, where the majority of judges consistently sided with state laws that gave the right to the husband to decide. Whether one agrees with these laws or not is irrelevant. Those who attack these judges for upholding a "culture of death" are purposely misreading a judge's role in order to promote their own agenda. A judge's role is to make rulings based on the laws as they are written, not to make or break legislation according to their own personal morality. When the judges sided with Michael Schiavo, they affirmed the rule of law as it is written in Florida. Those who disagree with the law have a right to try and change it in the electoral and legislative process, and those who support it have a right to defend it. It is not the role of a judge to enforce the laws they like, or to dismiss the laws that they don't. In keeping above the shrill tumult of a divided public opinion, the judges involved have done an exemplary job.

Against this reality all other arguments are ultimately moot. All of the protestors who demonized Michael Schiavo as a "cruel husband" took a very personal tragedy that did not involve them and turned it into a symbolic fight for their own religious and political views. They fell to their knees and wept and prayed so that the whole world could see how "Christian" they were. Their demonstrations were all about themselves, not Terri Schiavo.

What about Terri's wishes? This is the real issue. Whether she made her thoughts clear to her husband or not will never be known by us, but if it indeed was her wish to be allowed to die rather than linger in a vegetative state, who would deny her this right, and why? Would the so called "proponents of life", who overlook the difference between mere existence and actual living, have continued to force Terri to linger even if they had known it was her desire to be set free? If so, where is their much vaunted concern for her?

To invent religiously and politically charged labels such as "a culture of life" accomplishes nothing without distinguishing the difference between life and mere survival. To insist on artificially maintaining existence without regard for it's condition is a degradation of the meaning of life, not a promotion of it. To do so against the wishes of the individual involved is sadism, not compassion.

Life and death are inseparable. One will never exist without the other. Out of respect for life itself we must honor death for those who are no longer able to live it with any hope of recovery or joy. Those who love life understand this, and those who do not fear death understand it as well. Why is it that those who most demonstrably claim to support "life", yet who equally praise death as going to a "better place", are the ones who are having the hardest time with it?

It is instructive that those who praise death as a reunion with God were among those who were willing to do anything to prevent it for Terri Schiavo. They preach that the glories of the Spirit are above this world, yet strive with all their power to prevent death for someone who lingers in a hopeless vegetative state, and betray their actual fear of death in the process. It is this fear of death that fuels their obsession with it. It is not a mystery that those who most fear death require the most faith, and those who make the greatest displays of their faith have little to no faith at all.

Werbinox

This archive...

CURRENT MOON