Tag: Books

Stretching

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I’ve in the last week picked up a copy of a book composed by Timothy Leary and associates back in 1994, two years before Leary’s death in 1996, and around the time when I was imbedded in the post-psychedelic New Age culture of art and speculation that nested in and around Santa Fe, New Mexico. I’d actually passed by Doctor Tim in person as he toured as guest speaker and celebrity for some sort of exploratory consciousness fair that took place at the city’s main Convention Center.

I am certainly no stranger to Leary’s thought and his writings. From the time when he was advocating from an eminent platform at Harvard for boundary breaking explorations of consciousness via LSD and Psylocibn, to the time when I spent days trying to process my own headlong perceptual journeys out to the boundaries of consciousness and beyond. I travelled along parallel paths while Leary made his way through prison and exile and paranoia and the trials that came along with pop stardom and self deification.

When I walked into my dormitory room at Case Western Reserve one night, getting off on some form of chemically induced revery I heard Leary’s voice come over the radio, telling me to, “Sit down Ralph.” He then took me on a guided verbal tour of my brain, the universe and the whole history of human DNA. It turns out that the ‘Ralph’ in the recording, played that night over the student station was of Leary at Harvard conducting an LSD session with one of his grad students, Ralph Metzner. I didn’t learn this until years later, and in the meanwhile carried it around with me like the inner knowledge of some secret synchronistic initiation, a mystery for which I sought no further solution.

The book I’m reading is one I wasn’t particularly familiar with, lent to me by a friend. It’s called “Chaos & Cyber Culture.” By 1994 Leary as visionary prophet had been largely discredited by both popular and serious academic culture. He had spent time in prison, in Europe and in North Africa, in flight from the American police, hobnobbing with revolutionary elites and movie stars and science fiction writers, hounded by governments and ideologues of the Left and the Right. The 60’s dream of storming the barricades of capitalist/consumer culture had long ago faded or been absorbed and replaced by the high octane quest for new meaning and new wealth accelerated by revolutions in technology and communication.

Society was itself going through the initial stages of the sort of destabilization one encounters on an acid trip. Timothy Leary, along with many former prophets and outlaws and explorers were now mere flotsam in massively circulating currents of change. He was gone before the currents would peak and then break into fading fragments after September of 2001.

The book is a collection of words and images splattered across pages designed in the mode of a psychedelic version of The Whole Earth Catalog. There are dozens of typefaces in all sizes floating in the form of giant quotes and poster graphics and images from the past and the future. There are interviews and conversations with the likes of William Gibson and William Burroughs and David Byrne and all sorts of artifacts assembled around a political documentary and summary of sorts of Leary’s broad visions of past, present and possible future.

Other than in worlds of extreme science fiction I haven’t read anything like this in years. Drawing on history, art, mysticism, biology, psychology, computer science and literature, framed with over-the-top optimism regarding the future of civilization and human consciousness, Leary’s vision has no boundaries, and in reading I grow increasingly aware of how much my vision and that of my culture has narrowed over these past four decades. As a nation and as a world we’ve become increasingly ruled by fear and apprehension, which by nature is a narrowing of consciousness to the primitive state of flight or fight that responds robotically to a wider and wider range of stimuli.

We sit in our cocoons of political power and economic anxiety and anticipate the worst. We are a shell-shocked population with eyes and ears open to more and more information but with less ability to integrate it into something that makes sense. We live in a world of chaos, awaiting signs of the next real ‘strange attractor’ that we hope can assemble all of this mess into meaning. We’ve entered a historic and geological period where the shocks come in accelerating waves of war, recession, natural disasters and forced migrations, and our response is to reach out to the person who promises to protect us and shield us and make it all right. Increasingly we realize that the future can’t be controlled by any power wielded by the few for the supposed welfare of the many. Individually we awake once again to the knowledge that the portraits we perceive of the world around us are painted mostly by ourselves.

At first this makes us all feel incredibly alone, until we make an effort to explore and find new ways to make contact with one another, not as crowds or constituents or mobs or armies, but as fully responsible human beings. Our challenge always, is to create entirely new realities for ourselves, through our storytelling and our imagining, that are fluid and adaptable enough to deal with the constant change that our world throws at us. We have the tools to do it, and our task is to awake to our possibilities and to summon the courage to face and dismiss those who would build walls out of our fear.

Inauguration Day Hunter Thompson

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“…my only regret is that I stomped too softly on the bastards.”  – Hunter S. Thompson

So, what did I do on Inauguration Day? Well, I  spent the day at work. My only link to what was going on was an occasional scan of Twitter on my iPhone during breaks and the sounds coming off a YouTube feed on the receiving guy’s computer.

The best moment was just as I was getting out of my car in the morning and the NPR reporter started talking about an “escalation” in the protests involving hordes of black clad demonstrators running down the street breaking windows with hammers and overwhelming the cops who they outnumbered at the time. It brought me back to my own younger days when we trashed the streets of Washington and outran the tear gas from the National Guard as they gathered to take back the city one traffic circle at a time. That was during the bombing of Cambodia. This one is about the inauguration of a human being to be president whom I find so repulsive that I can’t even bear to watch him on tv.

I understand that this sense of angst is more personal than political, harking back to the days of my youth when I had to deal with bullies in my neighborhood and at school. Still, the prospect that I’ll have to reckon with the fact that this abominable fool is pretending to be my ‘leader’ for the next four years is enough to allow me plenty of space to indulge.

Near the end of the day as I searched for more news of the demonstrators and their fates I got caught up instead in a long series of letters from Hunter S. Thompson printed in the Paris Review. This was exactly the therapy I needed in this bizarre space where more than half of America stumbles along in a mind numbing trance struggling to make sense of the insane turn the nation has taken and wondering, “What to do next?”

Ah Hunter, we could certainly use your unvarnished take on our failing dream these days. The closest we can get is Keith Olbermann, another former sports reporter like yourself, who comes from that parallel universe of hyperbole that only sports fans can comprehend, but that so keenly lends itself to political commentary. But Keith lacks your style of genius that rides the fine edge between the serious and the surreal.

But just to read your voice once again in these times we are in somehow reassures me that resistance is possible even in the worst of times. So, I think I’ll pass this on.

“Fuck the American Dream. It was always a lie and whoever still believes it deserves whatever they get – and they will. Bet on it.” 

Paris Review – Fear and Loathing in America from The Paris Review’s Tweet

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Chronicle of Discontent

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“There is great disorder under heaven, the situation is excellent.” – Mao Zedong

I found myself the other day for the first time in a long while listening to an installment of Amy Goodman’s “Democracy Now” without having to wince at every other word or finally turn it off in disgust or aversion. For the past several years the critical rhetoric on the Left had come to sound like a mirror image of that on the Right and I’d come to wonder how I’d arrived at this point, after supporting revolutionary causes and goals my entire life. How could the prominent voices of the progressive Left put me off as much as the Right wing voices of Fox News? And how exactly did the election of Donald Trump, which I consider to be the third greatest blow against American Democracy (after the Civil War and the attacks on 9/11) bring me back?

During the first part of my recent year in Colorado, before my Denver burnout and during the primaries I found myself deeply involved and participating in a room full of Democrats, mostly Bernie supporters, mostly young, during the county caucuses. I was on the ‘other’ side of the room with a handful of Hillary advocates, mostly middle aged, mostly women, the chosen spokesperson addressing the two undecided voters in the middle, trying to persuade them to join our side. This was months before the convention and the Bernie people were in the midst of a groundswell that brought up reminiscences of the year leading up to the Obama presidency and the summer of Occupy Wall Street. A year earlier the young Colorado Democrats had risen up and organized an overthrow of a Jefferson County School Board that had attempted to radically ‘adjust’ their curriculum to accommodate the agendas of the Christian Right. Colorado was a state that hovered on the edge between red and blue, with the eastern and western rural counties heavily Republican and the exploding urban centers north of Colorado Springs Denver becoming increasingly young and increasingly Democrat. These young people were really inspiring.

Recently I’d moved to Denver from Santa Fe, partly for business reasons and partly to escape what I’d come to perceive as bing caught in a somewhat stifling middle class upscale ghetto where the elderly and connected came to die. I’d become quite disillusioned in regards to my own generation, mostly well past middle age and having left behind the creative drive of our youth. We still carried the vestigial and nostalgic remnants of an activist past which we trotted out reliably whenever a wave of progressive group-think came sweeping through. Perhaps my disillusionment was the result of having packed up my idealism into packages of new age revelation, from gurus to Harmonic Convergence to mushrooms to Zen Buddhism while never having satisfactorily resolved the tensions between seeking inner revelation and coming to grips with the terrible situations haunting the outside world.

When I’d first left Denver, Ronald Reagan was still the president and we faced the weird surrealistic constructs of a fanciful conservative dreamworld. Reagan was then followed by the first George Bush for a total of sixteen years of Conservative reaction against the perceived ‘excesses’ of the years in which I’d come of age. In those anarchistic acid fueled ‘revolutionary’ days after failing with McGovern and having to deal with Nixon, we’d finally elected our homeboy Jimmy Carter, only to see his administration thoroughly trashed by both circumstance and trickery in the face of inexperience. The first acts of political resistance I got involved in when I came south were demonstrations against the storage of nuclear waste in southern New Mexico. After all the noise and protest they went ahead and built it anyway. After that there was the first Iraq war, which ended ambiguously and partly led a weary population to finally shift their allegiance from ‘trickle down’ everything to giving a young and idealistic couple who were the first of our generation the chance to lead. The Clinton years gave rise to the Christian Right and the migration of the southern white middle classes to the Republican Party and all this erupted into a vicious no holds barred cultural insurrection led by Newt Gingrich. Having elected Clinton the new coalition of the educated urban young and rising black middle classes failed to turn up for the midterms. They lost congress to the opposing party (a hard lesson that obviously wasn’t learned as it was repeated in 2011). This led to more years of frustrating culture clashes, even as a new economy arose based on information management through computer technologies. This brought enormous prosperity to members of a new elite, many of whom had been in the vanguard of those who had once dreamed of social revolution. At the same time the industrial economy began to relocate to other countries in order to compete in a newly expanded global market. While the elites got rich the middle class began to fall behind.

Having overstepped their perceived ‘mandate’ to turn America into a Right Wing theocracy the forces of conservative reaction failed to overthrow Clinton but succeeded in dragging the country through years of humiliation and embarrassment. This, along with redistricting by a Republican congress and a conservative balance on the Supreme Court prepared the ground for the narrow and to many, unfair, victory of a second George Bush. He came in with a promise to end the scandals and bring in the dawn of a “compassionate conservatism” that would temper the supply side philosophy that’s part of Republican Gospel.

Then an enormous and in the long term possibly fatal blow to American Democracy took place with the attacks on 911. This was the most outrageously successful terrorist event since the sinking of the Lusitania led to the start of World War One. The event led on one hand to a rise in solidarity among citizens of the western nations. On the flip side it fed a burgeoning sense of paranoia and fear which elevated the fortunes of conspiracy theorists, white supremacist militias and extremist fanatics and lead to a rapid rise in anti-immigration and nationalist sentiment.

The long and the short of all this is that the last forty years have been a rollercoaster ride of hope and disappointment felt on all sides of the political spectrum. The extreme polarities that characterized the clashes in the sixties between the young and the old have been passed on through two generations driven. A mind-numbing acceleration in technology offered hopeful, even utopian possibilities while on the other hand driving us into increasingly isolated camps and echo chambers where perception was processed through more and more exclusive filters.

I grew up in the lower rungs of the middle class in Cleveland, Ohio in the fifties and sixties. My father did not own a business, he worked for one. He held a white collar position as a salesman, selling hardware to construction companies. We lived in what was then called the inner city, a neighborhood that was formerly rural but had been some decades gone absorbed by the growing industrial port city on the Great Lakes. Cleveland had been founded as an extension of Connecticut in the eighteenth century and as America moved west it became connected to the Ohio and Mississippi rivers via the Ohio and Erie Canals and the Atlantic Ocean through the Great Lakes and the St. Lawrence Seaway. It was a center of the oil industry run by John D. Rockefeller and others and its prosperity attracted waves of European immigrants and black refugees from the south through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. When I came on the scene the city’s economy had peaked just after World War Two, with every major industry having a presence, from cars to oil to steel, aluminum and even salt.

When I was in junior high school John F. Kennedy was assassinated. When I was sixteen the first urban race riots broke out in the black communities on the east side of Cleveland and in other cities. The new president Lyndon Johnson got the Civil Rights Bill passed and started his “War On Poverty,” to address the underlying causes of civil unrest. I was recruited in high school into a program for students from relatively lower income families who had excelled on intelligence tests but were struggling in academics. We were congregated on the campus of a very prestigious college on the ‘other’ side of town and exposed to a concentrated summertime program of intellectual and cultural education. It was intended to jump start us into college careers, and we were given admission and scholarships to the elite institutions that hosted the experiment. Most of the participants in the program were people of color, mostly drawn from the black and Puerto Rican populations of urban centers like Cleveland.

I came into the university and out of my neighborhood with a different view than most of my peers in the then highly segregated community of Cleveland, divided down the middle by the Cuyahoga River into West Side and East Side. Rarely did the two mingle. Where I had always felt a bit like an outsider I now felt fully accepted and embraced by all of my cohorts in this social experiment and when I returned to the almost exclusively ‘white’ West Side during the regular school year I felt even more like an outsider. My friends were the the ‘exceptional’ students, the ones who were curious and who questioned and explored. We were also the ‘troublemakers’ who questioned authority while we were at the same time being groomed for success.

In the summer I would go back to the east side where I watched the city burn after the assassination of Martin Luther King. The university, being surrounded on three sides by ghetto was the National Guard staging area. I watched from my room as nightly convoys went out to establish Marshall Law. I played board games with black nationalists. I participated in the election of the nation’s first black big city mayor, Carl Stokes. My counselors told me stories of voting rights drives in the deep south. My life was surrounded in cultural dialogue.

I was precipitated fully into the college scene in the midst of the cultural upheavals of the late sixties and early seventies. My black friends were caught up in struggles with white privilege and the social establishment of ‘higher’ education. I took part, but after a while I felt myself excluded by the obvious fact of racial advantage. My new friends were mostly East Coast Jews from upper middle class families who could afford to send their kids to the “Harvard of the Midwest.” There were lots of drugs, and sexual liberation, and parties and revolution in the streets. Everything that was going on around the world of academics made that world seem to me less and less relevant. I stuck it out for three and a half years until my draft number was missed in the Vietnam draft lottery and being no longer personally threatened by the possibilities of being sent to the War I dropped out and started searching in earnest for an alternative to the culture in which I’d been born.

At first the search was all about politics and alternative communities and avoiding the impending doom of civilization. I spent a summer hitchhiking across the West and a year living on the Florida Gulf. Then my father died and I found myself back in Cleveland working as a dishwasher and protesting what would be the final dregs of the Vietnam conflict. Then I hitched another ride West to Colorado where I met my guru and my future wife and became intensely involved in a large intentional community that had taken on the task of reforming the whole world, starting with Denver. Being part of a very large intentional community I experienced first hand the amazing power of focused, collective will. That community briefly prospered and then dissolved, but not before becoming a focal point of what would become a revolution in consciousness about food and agriculture. (We were mostly vegetarians and inspired by necessity to seek alternatives to the traditional American diet.)

The dissolution of the community and of my marriage along with an ongoing feeling of disconnect and discomfort with the world around me led me to retreat south to New Mexico and what I felt were new opportunities. I came to Santa Fe with high hopes for the future and saw many hopes realized and many more dissipate. All along there persisted that feeling of malaise, that something is far from right in a world that appears full of contradictions and hypocrisies and to which I could never fully pledge allegiance.

Which brings me back to that room in Colorado during the Denver caucus. I remember clearly that my message to the large group gathered on the other side of the room was that, “I don’t think you are ready yet.” That is, for the revolution that most everyone wishes were here right now.

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I remember attending a lecture by Noam Chomsky in Albuquerque sometime in the mid nineties. It seemed like everyone who considered themselves part of what was being called the ‘progressive’ community, from Santa Fe to Taos was there. I sat and listened to Noam rattling off his inventory of the recent crimes of the American Imperialist Empire for an hour or more, and then I remember coming away feeling completely demoralized. The talk had not inspired in me any impulse toward action. Instead it felt like I’d been bludgeoned with history.

That talk was a turning point for me. In the years since I have became more and more sensitized toward what seemed like inflexible dogma and an almost universal cynicism on the Left toward anything remotely connected to the American government’s actions at home or abroad. I felt more and more like we were moving along like a thoughtless mob, responding automatically to forms of group think masquerading as political critique but in actuality manifesting predictability and conformity.

All of this came to a head after Barack Obama was elected to his first term as president. Here was a young, educated and eloquent black man who had the power with his words to raise the hopes of those who were willing to challenge the future. These qualities I couldn’t fail to admire but I was very doubtful that this country would overcome its’ inherent racism enough to elect someone who wasn’t white. I sincerely thought that a white woman whom I also admired and respected as a fighter might offer a less daunting and more probable step forward. My biggest reservations were not with Obama, but with the movement that propelled his candidacy. Along with the giddy hope that this one man would be able to change the course of history was the kind of blind and unquestioning devotion devoted to a rock star.

I was no longer a young man, but I remembered well the groundswells of my youth that propelled the candidacies of George McGovern, Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, and I remember the fierce opposition that those candidacies engendered. I remembered how our expectations were crushed by the reaction and relentless opposition and how our own support collapsed when it came to electing the kind of congress that would be at the president’s back. The first of these administrations ended in political disaster, the second ended in embarrassment, and the third in humiliation. Like Many an old codger, I was skeptical of the enthusiasms of youth.

By the time Obama clinched the nomination I realized that here was a fighter and a strategist with not only the words but the will to win and to get things done. I became an avid supporter, although I still held reservations regarding the unrealistic expectations loudly voiced by so many of his followers.

After Obama’s victory and short honeymoon with congress my apprehensions were fully realized. Almost from the beginning the ideological rigidity of the Left joined with the rabid and racist resistance of the Right to challenge any progress toward achieving any realistic reforms that old be made without either compromising or inflaming the passions of either side. By the time the midterms came around in 2011 the Left had retreated into its usual cynicism and the Right had organized itself behind the passionate rhetoric and resistance of extremists and, just as in the Clinton years, a Democrat administration was then faced with a Republican Congress. Over the next six years my admiration for Obama only increased as he faced the uphill fight against criticism and condemnation from both the Left and the Right. More and more the criticisms from both camps became more and more like a single chorus.

My own cynicism and sense of discomfort increased over these years. I live in a community of people who are near the top of the economic and educational food chain. When I hear their protests on behalf of the poor and the disadvantaged I am simultaneously aware that the very system we protest is what makes our lifestyles as consumers possible. I became deeply suspect of the attitudes of privilege and actively distanced myself from movements like “Occupy Wall Street” as I saw it as being without a direction or real vision that would connect it with people’s lives or last longer than a summer vacation. (I was both right and wrong: the movement as such did indeed fold, but its critique of class struggle went on to fuel the rise of the Bernie Sanders candidacy that has forced the Democratic Party to move in a more progressive direction.)

I began to sympathize with the likes of the brilliant playwright David Mamet, who became so disgusted with the repetitive dogmas and political correctness of the Left that he began to see it as the biggest threat to American Democracy. He reacted by writing a book long screed (“The Secret Knowledge: On the Dismantling of American Culture”) declaring his revulsion and newfound allegiance to the voices of conservative reaction (I hope that this is a temporary fever.). I never went that far, but I certainly began to see his point. I found that whenever I listened to or read the words of intellectuals on the Left I began to feel a familiar sense of discomfort and even resistance. It began to feel like the preachings of a religion that assumed everyone shared its point of view but was incredibly predictable and empty of useful critical thought. An exception to this was encountering the Yugoslavian philosopher and activist, Slavoj Zizek, whose critiques of the Left in both Europe and the United States struck me as being both fully engaged in a revolutionary sense and absolutely resistant to the rigidities of ideology. Zizak’s critique of the positivist anarchism of Noam Chomsky helped me to understand my own discomfort. It’s not enough to analyze and catalogue the crimes of a culture and then to expect that the people will see the light and rise up. One must arrive at a clear vision of the future before the people will respond. To quote him in the introduction to the book, “Living In The End Times,” (which has been a very therapeutic read for me in the wake of this election):

“…mere description of the state of things, no matter how accurate, fail to generate emancipatory effects – ultimately, they only render the burden of the lie more oppressive, or, to quote Mao…, “lift up a rock only to drop it on their own feet.”

When Bernie Sanders decided to run for the nomination I supported him financially, although I never seriously entertained the notion that a socialist Jew from Vermont could win the presidency. My emotional allegiance was to the possibility of the first woman president, which would at least advance the underlying cultural agenda even in the face of political opposition. Also, I didn’t trust in the ‘rock star’ nature of his young followers which too much resembled the fickle support that had first elevated and then abandoned Barack Obama. This younger generation had not yet gained my trust to wage the bloody battle that I knew was coming. By the time I reached that classroom in Denver I had fully declared my support for the campaign of Hillary Clinton.

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With the disaster of the Trump victory the fingers are now pointing in all directions. Personally I don’t regret either my allegiance or my support, although I regret being pulled at times into the often rude and nasty infighting. I don’t think in hindsight that whoever was the nominee would have changed significantly the outcome. We will never know this. The salient fact is that an enormous shock has now been thrown into the political system, one at least as significant as the repercussions from 911, and which threatens our Democracy and our very sense of ourselves as a nation. I believe however that in every disaster there lies opportunity. For the first time in years I feel like the basic contradictions that have characterized both the Left and the Right in this country have been fully exposed. Too many have assumed that we can change the system without changing the way that we live as well as the fundamental assumptions and expectations with which we surround ourselves. What we’ve discovered is that many of those assumptions are not only false but intensely hypocritical when viewed by people who do not share them. The revolution cannot only be a revolution of the privileged, who assume that their way of seeing the world is essentially the ‘correct’ way. The failure of the Left has been threefold. It’s a failure to articulate in ways that are understood the concerns of those whose lives exist outside of the confederation of the privileged. It has failed to provide a clear vision that goes beyond the contradictions of the present to outline a coherent vision of the future. Most of all we are resistant to making meaningful changes in the ways we live our own lives.

Once again, when I listen to the voices of the Left I’ve begun to tune in to the indications of real soul searching and perhaps an abandonment of too familiar dogmas inhibiting our approach to creative possibilities. We are faced with a daunting task, one made more critical and urgent by the ascendency of forces in reaction. We can no longer afford to indulge ourselves in cynicism and arrogance. We must be clever. We must question all that we think we know to discover the authentic moments and the ways we must proceed. Enormous changes are upon us whether we act responsibly or not. The outcome for ourselves and for the world will be decided by the choices we make in the face of disaster. Our task is nothing less than the re-imagination of the world, and it is urgent.

R.E.M.

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“If you want to find pure gold, you must see it through fire.” – Mumonkan

“You’re part of my crew. Why are we still talking about this?” – M.R.

To receive Arclist mailings reply to melcher@nets.com with the word SUBSCRIBE in the Subject.

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http://www.gabrielmelcher.com

Winter Is Coming – Part One

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More than a decade ago I published the following article on the Arclist and in the magazine “Annals of the Earth” that compared the fantasy narratives of Tolkien’s “Lord of the Rings” and George Martin’s “Song of Ice and Fire” which had just published it’s fourth volume and which I was advocating to my friends and associates at the time. This was long before anything was said about the series being made into a film. Martin’s imaginary world is dark and complex, without the clear definitions of good and evil presented in the worlds of Harry Potter and Frodo Baggins. It was in fact a pioneering work in the emerging genre of what was being called “adult fantasy” which meant that it has an uncomfortable resemblance to the actual world we inhabit.

Before television’s recent so-called ‘golden age’ and the rise of the cable series franchise a work that did justice to Martin’s expansive vision would have indeed been impossible. The success and emerging dominance of the extended narrative form has bridged the gap between the literary form of the novel and the realm of visual storytelling.

As much as I regarded George R. R. Martin’s work as the best in it’s genre I could not have anticipated the phenomenal success of the HBO series “Game of Thrones” based on, and now actually extending the cycle of narratives taking place in the Imaginary world of Westeros and lands to East. Not only has the series succeeded as the most ambitious cinematic production ever attempted for television, it has become a cultural meme that dominates whole sections of bookstores, is referred to in political and cultural commentaries and taken over vast sectors of Internet culture.

In the piece I wrote in 2005 my argument was that, as “Lord of the Rings” represented the ‘climactic’ work of an age dominated by literature and the rise of industrial technology. As a cinematic production it made more extensive use of digital technology than anything that came before and thus it marks the transition from a primarily mechanical/chemical/industrial process of filmmaking into an almost entirely electronic medium. “The Song of Ice and Fire” is a ‘formative’ work that announces the birth of a new ecology of consciousness and communication. It is produced entirely within the digital medium of television and not for theaters, so it represents a further step into a more intimate form of storytelling. I believe that my argument is supported by the immense popularity of this cultural artifact that crosses the generations from those of us raised by television onto the new denizens of a ‘digital’ age.

It will be enlightening to further explore the particular qualities that have elevated George R. R. Martin’s tale far beyond the boundaries of fantastic literature. To start with I’ll republish here, slightly edited for clarity, the original article entitled “Winter Is Coming.”

Meanwhile, there are weekly “Game of Thrones” parties everywhere.

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Begin forwarded message:

From: Ralph Melcher <melcher@nets.com>
Subject: [Arclist] Winter Is Coming
Date: November 1, 2005 at 8:35:09 PM MST
To: Arclist <Arclist@cybermesa.com>

I look forward this fall to the release of “A Feast For Crows,” the fourth book by George R. R. Martin in his cycle of medieval modern fantasy epics collectively titled “A Song of Ice and Fire.” Martin, perhaps immodestly, displays the same middle initials as J.R.R.Tolkien, while departing radically from Tolkien in his construction of a world based as much on history as on myth. (England’s “War of the Roses” provided inspiration for a tale of two battling royal families) Where Tolkien weaves an apocalyptic tale of a Manichaean clash between ultimate good and evil in which most of his characters appear more as classical archetypes than familiar people, Martin’s narrative proceeds through revelation of the evolving perceptions of a cast of very recognizable human characters. In Tolkien’s world every character’s move is the culmination of larger forces with origins deep in the mythical history to which he dedicated his creative life. As massive and ambitious as his popular masterpiece “The Lord of the Rings,” it was a small piece in a much larger and more ambitious tapestry that traced the mythical prehistory of humanity all the way back to the time of creation. George Martin’s intentions are modest in comparison, that is to tell a good yarn with engaging characters recognizable by modern readers. As different as these works appear, they each represent significant milestones in the evolution of a literary genre, as well as exposing the underlying foundations of the cultures out of which they emerge.

The cultural historian William Irwin Thompson, in his many explorations into cultural ecology, presents a critique of literature as cultural artifacts, in which there are three stages of that correspond to the unfolding of consciousness. The kinds of text that define particular stages in this model are the formative, dominant and climactic. “The formative work enters into a new ecological niche of consciousness through the work of solitary and shamanistic pioneers; the dominant work stabilizes the mentality through the work of an institutional elite; and the climactic work consummates and finishes the mentality for all time through the work of an individualistic genius.” (2)

Although Thompson cites James Joyce’s “Finnegan’s Wake” as most clearly epitomizing the climactic work of the (last) age, I would argue that Tolkien’s epic more clearly and definitively fills that niche for a number of reasons, not least of which is it’s spectacular success as a genuine artifact of mass culture. Tolkien lived and wrote his myth while witnessing the titanic struggles of a century defined by the rising power of technology and industrialization. In opposition to the dominance of machine culture he identified with attempts to maintain some vestige of traditional memory and culture. The author was clearly conscious of the scope of the intent to summarize an age. He states in a quote, cited by David Day, “I was from early days grieved by the poverty of my own beloved country (England): it had no stories of its own, not of the quality that I sought, and found in legends of other lands. There was Greek, and Celtic, and Romance, Germanic, Scandinavian, and Finnish; but nothing English, save impoverished chapbook stuff…I had in mind to make a body of more or less connected legend, ranging from the large and cosmogonic, to the level of romantic fairy-story…which I would dedicate simply to England; to my country.”(3)

David Day goes on to compare Tolkien’s undertaking as the equivalent of Homer first inventing Greek mythology single handedly before embarking on the “Illiad” and “Odyssey”. His argument is founded in a rather culture centric idea that England was the fount and seed carrier for much that reflected the transition from the medieval European world of moral absolutism to a transatlantic culture that worshiped progress and modernity. Tolkien’s work is reflected in it’s ambition by that of Richard Wagner’s “Ring Cycle,” which was a similar attempt to both crown and transcend the operative form. “The Lord of the Rings” is a text that depicts in markedly Christian terms the final battle between good and evil, in which an agrarian civilization faces down the rising power of the machine. After many heroic struggles humanity emerges forever transformed, while the ancient powers and principalities of an older time are either defeated or simply fade away. Tolkien both sums up the moral landscape of a pre-modern civilization while proclaiming its ultimate replacement by a new world order in which the heroic tribal quest ultimately leads to a new bourgeois world of trade and acquisition governed by new rules and individual initiative. At the end of the tale, the heroes disappear in the west while Merry and Sam and Pippin take up the settled life of the Shire.

What better characterization of the historical nature of the twentieth century, where ancient tribal mythologies mingled with the ascending powers of technocracy and fueled the rise of new orders and empires that clashed in climactic conflagrations that involved the entire civilized world? Ultimately, at the end of two massive wars the nation state was subdued by a new order embodied in globalized commerce and transnational communication, where the centers of power were continually challenged and then overtaken by explosive evolutionary forces generated near the boundaries of the known. At the the century’s transition a reaction has set in as people seek retreat in familiar rules and in texts of a world that is rapidly passing away. Tolkien’s fantasy wistfully recounts the passing of a time when the simple desire for comfort, family and the hearth, represented by the hobbits of the shire, was sufficient. The ‘War of the Ring’ represents nothing less than our collective passage into a new age and a new order where values must be forged anew with little assistance from the guardians of the past.

Tolkien’s work portrays in many ways the rise and final conflagration put forth in the Judeo-Christian paradigm of creation and apocalypse. His work that invents cultures, races and language echoes the birth and rise of nation states. As in the Christian mythos, all things proceed toward a final apocalypse that results in the ascension of the savior-king as ruler of a new order and at least a temporary peace governed by principals of honor, charity and love.

If, as Thompson proposes, the solitary and shamanistic explorations of Shakespeare’s “King Lear” and “The Tempest,” Cervantes’s “Don Quixote,” and Descartes’s “Discourse on Method,”(4) created the formative texts of the new mentality that replaced the medieval Mediterranean with the modern Atlantic cultural ecologies, then Tolkien’s “Lord of the Rings” surely fills the bill for “the work of an individualistic genius” which characterizes a climactic work that “consummates and finishes the mentality for all time.”  Interesting as well is the fact that Tolkien’s tale truly came into its’ own as a work that achieved mass popularity when it was turned into a movie; and not just any movie, but one that marked the transition from film as primarily an optical/mechanical artifact at the pinnacle of the industrial process, to the fully realized digital creation of total worlds out of the imagination.

George Martin’s novels can be seen in this light as a preliminary shamanic exploration into a new level of culture. Its’ structure owes more to television than to the classic film or novel. Martin began his career writing television scripts for popular shows like “The Twilight Zone” and “Outer Limits.” The importance of his background in television perhaps can be found in the quality of the epic feature film, where background is as much a character as the actors within the frame. Television, due to its intimacy as a virtual presence in the modern household as well as the size and shape of the screen (a limitation growing obsolete), has evolved around the close-up, or talking head. Television narratives are generally driven by a succession of character portraits which emphasize individual points-of-view, and which change rapidly from one to another in a sequence of abrupt cuts.

Martin similarly unfolds his epic tale in a sequence of intimate character sketches functioning like a sequence of various camera positions. Every chapter is named for a single character, and as the narrative proceeds our feeling for each character deepens with each mention of their name. The books could actually be read as a score of separate tales, each about separate characters, all woven together through a tapestry in time. In a sense, Martin’s story begins where Tolkien’s leaves off, in an age dominated by men, where evil and virtue are no longer the province of externalized forces embodied by magical beings, but carried in the heart and mind of every individual. One could say that “The Song of Ice and Fire” is a postmodern fantasy, where the battle between good and evil is played out in the choices each person makes in a moment of crisis based on their own unique perception of right and wrong. Yet, underlying the human drama and giving it ultimate shape is a much larger unfolding, determined not by good and evil, darkness and light, but by the immense and irrevocable powers of the natural world. The destinies of men are less a factor of their own moral virtue than the result of the ultimate relationship between society and the complex and inevitable cycles of summer and winter.

In the world of Westeros the timing of the seasons is unpredictable, every summer lasting more than a decade followed by an equally long cold winter. In a sense the summer fosters the powers of the day while winter brings forth the demons of the night. These cycles are long enough that generations forget the fact that all that is will inevitably change. The ultimate lesson to be learned is that the castles and kingdoms built by men are only as strong as their memories for, although the precise timing is unpredictable there are plenty of signs and warnings for those who can remember. It’s on this stage of the inevitable cycles of the natural world that the dramas and struggles of human society are waged, and we are made conscious that the quest for temporal power meets final judgment in the face of what is to come. If there is ultimate virtue it’s in the value people place on wisdom and long term vision over short term ambition and greed.

Two families epitomize the poles of this very human struggle. In the north are the Starks of Winterfell, whose family motto is “Winter is Coming.” Their demeanor is conservative, their colors white and grey, their values shaped by necessity and tradition. In the south, near the colorful fountains of trade and culture and civilization is the ‘Iron Throne.’ There dwells the Lannisters, hungry for wealth and power and jealous of all those who would challenge their rule over the lands of men. Within this tale the common order of classical heroic fantasy is followed more or less faithfully, as the outsiders in both families emerge as heroic figures in the story which unfolds. When the seasons begin to change, awakening long forgotten dangers out of the northern wastes, and as another force driven by fire and signaled by the rebirth of dragons rises in the south, one gets a sense that the synthesis of human aspirations with the seemingly implacable forces of transition can only be found by those less invested in things as they are.

As I look on at the absurd struggles raging across our lands in a time when a future filled with the present and looming crisis of war, pandemics, climate change, water shortage, overpopulation and the rest, I find the Stark motto, “Winter Is Coming,” to be a succinct characterization of the realities we collectively face in our world, as a species and a civilization. Many of us are outsiders with little at stake in the petty power struggles of politicians and our so-called leadership. We find ourselves in a shamanic role, as observers on the periphery of social events, living in a reality that challenges the assumptions of powers-that-be, transcending the narrow limits of an obsolete world-view. Tolkien’s magnificent epic leaves us with a challenge, to face the future as moral and responsible human beings, without the crutch of certainty provided by ancient texts and ancient prophecy. We are in a new world after all. George R. R. Martin offers a rather dire tale of the consequences of short sightedness while giving us hope that we may find a way, as we always have, through new leadership and pragmatic vision. Our constant temptation is to dwell on what we lack, and to be trapped in a struggle that keeps us bound to a world that is passing away. Our salvation lies not in belief but in clarity, and our faith must be found not in the past but in the future.

___________

1. Martin, George R. R. Martin’s cycle: A Song of Ice and Fire, includes: A Game of Thrones (1996), A Clash of Kings (1999), A Storm of Swords (2000) and A Feast for Crows (2005).

2. Thompson, William Irwin, Coming Into Being: Artifacts and Texts in the Evolution of Consciousness, St. Martin’s Press, 1996 (p. 233).

3. Day, David, Tolkien: The Illustrated Encyclopedia, Simon & Schuster, 1993.

4. Thompson, William Irwin, Coming Into Being. St. Martin’s Press, 1996 (p. 143).

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Batman v Superman

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I don’t usually give much credence to film reviews, particularly bad ones, and so far reviews of the new Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice movie have been atrocious. The movie might be awesome and I’m sure I’ll see it eventually, as I’m totally addicted to the genre. The reviews I’ve read indicate that in its attitude of ponderous self absorption and gloom it’s the diametric opposite of a movie like Deadpool. That film continually cracks jokes at itself, reminding us that it’s just a movie and we are an audience entertained by a story about a regular guy who has some real problems along with his unasked for super powers. The most successful superhero movies thus far have rarely dispensed with a liberal dose of humor amid the action and the power punches and all the nefarious scheming. In fact, a key to the enormous success of Marvel Studios (and the long running success of the comic book brand) is that it’s never abandoned a sense of fun, even in its darkest moments. No matter their extraordinary powers, Marvel characters tend to act like actual, regular people, just as screwed up and petty as the rest of us. Their ‘gifts’ always have the double edge of being both an isolating burden as much as a potential benefit to humanity. They are never an embodiment of perfect virtue or perfect evil. Even a character like Thor (who is actually a God) is subject to the foibles and misperceptions of humanity. Iron Man protects himself with a solid armor of egotism. Daredevil and the Hulk struggle with deep wells of  repressed anger. Jennifer Jones is full of self-recrimination and doubt.
There are many who simply don’t get the point of these characters or this genre. For me they express one of the best uses of the spectacular nature of the screen. Like the oldest narratives that we know of, they offer us exaggerated embodiments of the qualities that make us human. By use of the mask and the costume they create enough distance so that we are able to contemplate our own natures objectively, evaluating the core values at the center of our moral and ethical universe. To a large extent this is what all movies and plays and operas and fictions do, by the very act of creating a simulated universe existing outside of our own. In the case of the superhero genre character hugs the edges of caricature thus bringing sharp emphasis to particular qualities and tendencies. In the growing pantheon of a comic book universe we begin to see realms that have more than a little relationship to the archetypal edifices of Olympus or a Valhalla, and are at least as rich and nuanced as anything that the Greeks or Norsemen came up with. By bringing the archetypes down to the level of our familiar world and merging them with familiar characters and situations we’ve expanded the potential of drama to reach into the collective psyches of whole cultures where we can expose the inner fears and hopes that unite and divide us.
These are moral dramas and passion plays. They harken back to the medieval pageants and morality plays of the 15th and 16th centuries that are at the origins of our modern secular dramas. In an age in which so much of what has held our civilizations together is being challenged we’ve contrived to discover new ways to ask the important questions about what binds us to one another. The trick to doing this without crossing a line into the ridiculous, is a proper mix of passion and humor, reflection and action that both draws us into the drama and allows us to experience it’s separate elements as distinct embodiments that we can feel. When we watch a superhero on the screen we actually, in effect, put on that costume and carry it away with us.
Personally I’ve preferred the Marvel approach to this archetypal realm. The DC universe has always appeared a little too sharply divided between good and evil, it’s characters taking themselves a little too seriously for my taste. As for Batman and Superman, I enjoyed the somewhat parodic nature of the early Batman revivals on screen, and considered the sheer dramatic energy of the Christopher Nolan/Frank Miller Batman movies to be exceptional. The key to the Batman character’s appeal is that he exists half in shadow. Superman I find a bit problematic. The original mold created in the late 30s and 40’s during an enormous worldwide struggle between totalitarianism and democracy presented him appropriately as the perfect embodiment of “Truth, Justice, and the American Way.” The character emerged out of the heroic fantasies of a couple of young jewish guys who longed to identify and assimilate into the dream of the red, white and blue. In my own perceptions as a young man feeling like an outsider in a post war world of unquestioned conformity Superman came off to me a little too saintly, a little too ’straight.’ As for Batman, Green Arrow and Green Hornet they were all rich guys who helped humanity out of some sense of charity or guilt. They had big cars and influence and certainly never had to worry about holding a job.
The genius of Stan Lee and his legacy lies in his assistance that his heroes never get too big for their own britches. The ones that do pretty much are guaranteed to end up as villains. Thor doesn’t help us because he’s a god, but just because he likes us. Spiderman is an awkward teenager growing into an awkward adult. Doctor Strange is an arrogant greed head who is led by difficult circumstances into a spiritual conversion. Black Widow is haunted by crimes she was compelled to commit in a former life. Most importantly, the effect of their actions as heroes is rarely without unforeseen consequences, making their lives and the lives of those around them even more complicated. I could relate to all of these guys.
Of course, in the years since my childhood, the approach of both the Marvel and the DC universe has become more and more similar. But, as a person who is used to Apple computers, using Windows always feels somewhat constricting, even though it looks and acts more and more like what we’re used to. Another analogy perhaps is the difference between the Democratic and Republican mindsets, where one sees the world through progressive glasses and the other through conservative ones. With “Dawn of Justice” DC and Warner Brothers hopes to achieve the kind of success that Marvel and Disney have attained in the past decade. Perhaps these gigantic struggles between corporate entities, political philosophies, and comic book universes is like an endless set of mirrors for the struggles taking place within each of us. Perhaps ‘Batman and Superman,’ both who are after all supposed to be the ‘good guys,’ is an apt echo of the battle we are now waging within cultures, political parties, religions and within ourselves.

National Treasure

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Listening to a podcast from Poetry Magazine I was turned on to the reproduction of a remarkable artifact. It brings me, in a way that no single book or essay or even film can do, to an encounter with the cultural habitat in which my own particular view (in time and place) of this world was shaped. Like something one would encounter in a book by Ray Bradbury or Lewis Carroll, on turns a corner in an obscure section of the city and happens upon a museum of wonders.

UBUWEB PRESENTS

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Reflections on ‘Blue Jasmine’

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Amid all of the vampire flicks and light comedies in the popular sphere a rising vogue in the blockbuster circuit is for movies about class division and conflicts writ large portrayed in mostly epic terms (Hunger Games, Elysium, Les Miserables). Most of these create a comfortable distance from an admittedly uncomfortable subject by placing the narrative in a fanciful past or a speculative future. By contrast one exceptional film that’s totally apart from the realm of high tech spectacle manages to address the subject by painting a sensitive and tragic portrait of a single individual’s descent from the heights of the social register to the depths of alienation and despair. The film is Blue Jasmine, a brilliant collaboration between one of America’s greatest living storytellers and one of the world’s best actresses. All through his career as writer and director, Woody Allen’s subjects have revolved around the delusional nature of middle class life. His main characters wander through their days in bewilderment, somewhat aware of their disconnect from the reality of their situations, trying valiantly to maintain an appearance of normality. Their general failure in this regard is, in a majority of his films the source for comedy. Like Charlie Chaplin’s Tramp these characters navigate a very fine line that divides farce from tragedy. As the Tramp in The Gold Rush is forced to eat his shoes and acts as if he is dining on fine cuisine, Allen’s creatures stumble through their lives amusing us with a seeming obliviousness to the true nature of their condition.
 
In Blue Jasmine Allen teases us repeatedly with the expectations of farce, setting up situations that are ripe for expression as conventional comedy. His character Jasmine, married to a wealthy investment banker (think Bernard Madoff) who has been prosecuted and jailed for fraud, has fallen from the highest levels of New York Society and is now penniless. She moves in with her adopted sister Ginger in San Francisco to find a way to make an honest living. She finds herself in a world that’s entirely foreign to her, one in which people have to struggle with paying the bills and one in which the skills that served her in high society are totally useless and even counter productive. Along the way she’s forced to confront not only the consequences of her own actions on other people’s lives but the ordinary situations faced by working women every day (like sexual harassment and having to learn computer skills). The narrative is interjected with a series of flashbacks that reveal in successive stages, like the peeling of an onion, the depths and the consequences of her self-deception. 
 
Although the situation is ripe for comedy, here Woody Allen chooses to bring us face to face with the ramifications of our own social blindness. Through these characters he shows us the deep gulf between a world of arrogant wealth and the hard edged realities faced by the working class. Along the way he tempts us with the fairytale promise of unrealistic expectations and then he brings us home to the realities of both love and betrayal. With deep familiarity and sensitivity he shows us both sides of the world, and this places Blue Jasmine in a class with some of the most penetrating literature of class and culture. I’m thinking of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth, and even F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. Woody Allen’s films are essentially novels and in Blue Jasmine I think he’s achieved the maturity of an enduring classic that fully represents the anxieties and polarities of the time in which we presently live.   
 
Cate Blanchett is cast in the role of Jasmine and displays an extraordinary range of tone and expression as she veers from one state to another in her journey from riches to rags. This is perhaps the most deeply realized and complex characters in a Woody Allen film and few could have carried it off as convincingly and even sympathetically as Ms. Blanchett. In terms of understanding the class and culture divide at the center of the narrative I was reminded of the segment ‘Cousins’ she performs in Jim Jarmusch’s Coffee and Cigarettes, where she plays two characters in an uncomfortable conversation, one a successful actress and socialite, the other an envious underachiever. It could have been an audition for the role either of Jasmine or Ginger. The cast includes Sally Hawkins as Ginger, Alec Baldwin as Jasmine’s conman husband, Andrew Dice Clay as Ginger’s first husband and Bobby Cannavale as her current boyfriend Chili. All are excellent foils for the emotional gyrations of Cate Blanchett’s Jasmine which deserves recognition as one of cinema’s great performances. 

The Train – An Introduction

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So, I’m reading Pynchon again. That’s Thomas Pynchon’s Against The Day, one of his most recent novels. I always go back to Pynchon, the person that made me fall in love with writing. I remember the day and the moment of impending revelation. I remember, in fact the precise angle from which I looked up and above the racks of Fiction and Fine Arts saw that book standing open, beckoning like a monument for me to enter.  One huge letter on the cover, V with a period following, standing like a surrealistic sculpture on a plain of lines with the outlines of a woman, face hidden, standing off to the side. I remember the streets where Benny Profane wandered and those merchant sailors at the Sailors Grave brawling over the barmaids and singing strange sea shanties and perched upon the rigging of that old World War Two ‘Tin Can’ that carried them over to bizarre foreign adventure. I remember and am now reminded of the pleasure of those sentences written with such a sense of oceanic rolling beauty that it almost didn’t matter what story they told. I was too young to really understand the stories anyway.Therein were the streets that Benny Profane wandered toward that tin can tavern, The Sailors Grave where merchant sailors roiled the Sailors Grave, brawling over barmaids and singing sea shanties and later climbing the rigging of the old World War Two freighter that carried them across the oceans into foreign adventures. This was a world just after the Great War that I was too young to really understand, but I remember the pleasure of those sentences written with a sense of rolling comic beauty that made it almost irrelevant what story they told.

Later, after The Crying of Lot Forty-Nine and Gravity’s Rainbow, Vineland and Mason Dixon I started to see a theme in all these narratives about characters wandering in a dislocated world all following clues to the pattern that held it all together, never really arriving at the source but learning that the search itself was the key to the journey. In the book I’m reading the  Archduke Ferdinand of Austria near the end of the nineteenth century is found in a negro bar on the south side of Chicago. He stiffs the bartender before leaving thus establishing his character as a precursor to the century to come. Strangely, the locations in this story are places that I’ve lived or spent time in: Cleveland, location of the famous experiment by Michelson and Morley at my old college first measured the speed of light, and the library founded by Andrew Carnegie, where I actually discovered the author, one of the first public libraries in the United States; Colorado with all of it’s mining towns filled with the relics of failed westward dreaming.  

Maybe that’s where this story begins, a flow of subversive narrative hinting at a mystery always just out of reach. Pynchon’s characters circling around the mystery, getting ever closer only to see the puzzle endlessly unravel leading to  ever greater mystery, the mystery that can never be finally solved or decoded. The key is always in these sentences, even more than the wider narrative. It’s like watching a movie where, if you know the language of movies and how to look beneath the plot a whole story is told in the structure of a single shot or in the arrangement of lines and planes, the composition of light and dark. 

The world follows a narratives based on our assumptions. Preconceived ideas  determine not only what we see but how exactly we see it. Sometimes things come at us from out of the mystery that make us suddenly drop one set of assumptions for another, and the whole world changes in an instant. Sometimes we change because we decide to, sometimes the change is forced upon us, and maybe most often the changes just seem to happen underneath at the level of chemistry, or like the slow process of erosion. We wake up one day and notice that we’ve become a different person altogether than the one we were the day before.

One of the oldest stories, and one of my favorites is at the center of The Mahabharata, one of the oldest scriptures in the world. The story is called the Baghavad Gita and it’s unique among all of the scriptures I know about as it   takes place in an instant when time itself pauses in the middle of a battlefield where two enormous armies are about to clash. Prince Arjuna  is in despair because he knows that he will have to fight and kill friends and relations in the fight that’s coming. In the ensuing conversation between Arjuna and his charioteer, who is Lord Krishna and a manifestation of the Godhead. Krishna demonstrates the inevitability of the laws of cause and effect and outlines the path of wisdom, devotion and selfless action in a world where we are ultimately responsible for our own choices.  

These teachings are the well from which the essential kernels of eastern religion pour. Krishna’s ultimate revelation is that our particular personality is merely a vehicle through which one of the myriad forms of the Supreme Being manifests. Our journeys in this life are always in relation to this single truth.  Whatever we see before us, shaped as it is by our travels through cause and effect, we respond to according to our true nature and the key to revelation is to act with clarity and commitment and  without attachment to results.   

As I move from one passionate encounter to another these lessons come back to me. It may be that the metaphor of life as a battlefield suits my particular nature.  I engage in daily struggle with my own inner demons and alien armies, and the quality of my actions proceed from the clarity of my mind. In the end, all of the angels and demons I meet are images seen in a mirror.   

The train is moving very slowly today. Some sort of ‘signal’ issue. We’re crawling toward Albuquerque at about ten miles an hour, rather than the normal eighty. It’s okay with me. This is my weekly study hall, my time for contemplation and reflection up here on the second level of the Rail Runner, looking out over the New Mexico landscape with few  interruptions, out of contact, quietly weaving across the high desert and plain, between the mesas, through the river valleys.