L.J. Moore's Blog, page 8

digigoth: a spellbook for the new sorcerer (new work 9)

This narrative recently divided into two paths and the reader was given a choice:

1. To follow the Dangling Yarn

2. To follow the Sinking Lure.

This poem immediately follows the Dangling Yarn (part 7).

Read previous pieces here

This book is winging through the ethers in search of an illustrator and a publisher.  If you are interested, please drop me a line.

How to read the pieces from this book:

1. Click on the embedded link to the [music] in the title of the poem.

2. Listen on repeat while reading.

_____________________________________________________

Fig 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34. Remembering  [Playlist: Tool, Lateralus]

as in all transitions from light to dark

at first there seems nothing but dark

this is the moment when most turn back

and so the dark remains

a threshold

beyond which

every fear fattens on shadows

                                                            mind your step

he says, opening a hatch in the deck

taking my hand as we descend

down and left

down and down again and always left

until I am dizzy with twist

and my head folds forward into a dive

toward my left shoulder

nothing in any direction but

heavy air and each

solid step rising to meet

the foot reaching

faster   his voice distant, dim

down and left             though rough fingers

laced with mine drag

an arm that must be mine though it seems distinctly

down and

left

                                                            of me

this floating head

or headless knowing

sense not pulled down to an object but

everywhere at once           trying to condense

against a rising scent that’s growing loud

like sun heating asphalt

after  heavy rain                                                                      down and left of

a string of days being plucked

before now      soon and          never chord

a sting of yellow         pink and pinker           deeping down red of light through eyelids

together blinding line of bright

a level  spinning end over end

into a dive down and left toward

the strip of light beneath a door

 

whoa, steady 

he opens a door into a room lying on its side

pressing my head gently against his chest

as the walls distort and twist

though easing with each of his heart’s pulses

my body

seems not yet to have returned to feeling

and the sunlight makes no sense

we should be deep below decks

look there

he says

his voice muffled

strange and large

his finger pointing straight ahead                                                                              

against the light into

the gently swaying surface

of a mirror

the plucked and battered raven gazing back

from the folds of a coat          as his hand reaches to extract me

Are Zombies Attracted by Xmas Music? A Rigorous, Qualitative Assessment

It began two weeks ago when I slept through my alarm and was forced to take the shuttle to work. I usually enjoy a morning saunter through Golden Gate Park, enjoying the music of leafblowers and ravens, and the thwock-thwock of crazy people who wake up at the crack of dawn to play tennis, so it was with great chagrin that I boarded the shuttle, which always smells like hot airplane-seat fabric and drives like it has the hydraulic system of a Habitrail. Once we swung into traffic and got started up Stanyan I started to hear a sound like someone dragging their fingers across a party balloon.  I thought it was the usual squeaking of the various parts of the shuttle holding together as it drives, but it was way too melodic for that… and then I saw that the driver was wearing Santa hat, and then my brain did its pattern-recognition thing and the squeaking resolved itself into music: Alvin and the Chipmunks. Christmas music. I look around… everyone looks vaguely smiley. I feel… uncomfortable. I feel, not like a Scrooge… no way… I once described my ascent out of depression as a desire to become the fuzzy puppy of the universe… that is, if I appeared in someone’s dream, (or my own), it would be as a bounding, floppy, furry scatterer of sadness… a kind of patronus/patroness of exuberant joy, with feet four sizes too big, and a “knock-you-over-in-the-midst-of-your-depressive-thought-and-make-you-forget-all-about-it” kind of emotion ninja. So no, I’m not a Scrooge. But man, I hate sentimentality with a vengeance. Why? Because it is Hallmark-card emotion. It’s shorthand… it’s not going to the effort to have your own feelings and describe them, but to reach for the mass-produced feeling because it is quick, and convenient. These were my thoughts as I got off the shuttle.

So I have to stop and admit to something here… who was really missing the point? Me.At least one point… that everyone else on that shuttle was vaguely happy, soothed as the monster was in Young Frankenstein by the sweet sounds Frau Bleucher (cue horse’s whinny) playing the violin. I was the only one getting off the shuttle with a vague scowl and a sense of the heebie jeebies. But… was that good? Was that bad? Was I the Stupid who could not comprimise by internal Yeager-shot of snobbery for the delicious goo of Generic Label Xmas cheer? Was I just being a smarty-pants-intelligensia-party-pooper? Would liquor have improved the situation?

Or was I simply resisting zombiehood?

I have a friend who is also an incredible artist (by “incredible” i mean very credible, so much so his work seems impossibly amazing), who also lectures about zombies. His name is George Pfau, and he created this image of a zombie here on the left. If I had to be a zombie, I would want to be one of George’s images of one… in fact I think I already am. Not a zombie, but I am made up of structural memories… houses and mailboxes and trains and toilets and crossbeams and rebar and a ton of shingles and gimcrackery. I have been to one of George’s lectures on zombies, and I was quite taken by the history of zombies… in religion and movies and popular culture. I find the zombie flash mob idea, like SantaCon, joy-inducing. But it’s not because I want to be a zombie. I like these things because they are a bunch of people getting together to do something that is hysterically funny specifically because it is en masse.  One person dressed as a zombie shuffling around downtown San Francisco would probably draw, at best, a lopsided grin or two from the actual zombies (people glued to their cell phones, etc.) who managed to notice. But a whole streetful of people dressed as zombies… that will cause an effect! And several drunken 40-year-old Santas returning to their condos in Concord on BART after a night of cruising uninterested 20-somethings dressed as naughty elves? The best BART ride I ever had for sure!

And there is something paradoxical and strange about the idea of mob mentality. I mean, that’s what zombies are, yes? They are a mob… not even an insectile mass mind… they are a non-mind. They are “walkers” or “biters”, but they don’t think. They eat. They are. So the power of a group of people deliberately dressing up as zombies is a kind of reversal of zombie-ness, or a tongue-bitten-off-in-cheek comment on the idea of a directed mob.

If you’ve ever been to church, or a sports event, the same thing happens when a group of more than say, 30 people, sings together, or cheers together. It’s like standing on the beach watching a thunderstorm come in, or a tsunami– the sheer bigness of it, the power of many people doing the same thing at the same time is both emotionally, and physically overwhelming in a transformative way. If the human tsunami is up to something wonderful… it’s a heart-swelling experince that makes you want to go out and help old ladies across the street and pay strangers’ bridge tolls and catch spiders and put them outside instead of smashing them with a shoe. But if the mob is say… holding molotov cocktails and guns… waiting for the doors to WalMart to open on Black Friday…. or standing in a malevolent clump by your school locker… that’s when every part of your being concentrates in the lower part of your belly, and all the hairs on your neck stand up. The tsunami… it will either lift you up and set you down somewhere else and give you a breathtaking ride… or it will drown the life out of you in two seconds without even noticing.

These of course are two ways of thinking of zombies… but there is a third, and for me, it’s the most frightening. It’s what I’ll call the milk and cheese zombie. Have you ever seen this advertisement?

“Happy Cows Come from California. Real California Cheese.”

Real cheese is right, and by cheese, I mean melt-in-your-mouth jar full O easy cheez. Come on. No one being sucked dry all the day long is going to be happy. I’m not saying you shouldn’t drink milk or eat cheese, ok? I do! I just think that it adds deep insult to injury and a bit self-serving to re-brand humanely treated animals as “happy”. I mean this is like being in a relationship with a person who locks you in a room and uses you, and then tells you must like it since you haven’t run away yet.

The milk and cheese zombie is the one who believes his or her own bullshit, or the bullshit presented by others as truth. Or, in it’s seemingly more innocuous interation: this zombie likes things because other people do. Does things because other people do. Listens to things because other people do. Buys stuff because other people do. And the more I have to do every day to exist, the more I give in to this milk-and-cheese zombie mind. I just do it because it’s expected. I nod my head and I no longer wear sweatshirts as skirts or put makeup on statues. Is it because being an adult forces you to become a zombie? Don’t get me wrong here, I’m not equating youthful knee-jerk rebellion against the status quo is any better. I’m saying… do we have to lose our individuality to celebrate as a group?

But these are my subjective thoughts about zombies and zombiedom. I decided, once I had reached my desk, (yes, all of this really did go through my head in the two blocks between the shuttle stop and my desk. It was morning, I had just had coffee. This is the best and most productive thinking time of my day… that caffeine-and-angst-fueled golden five minutes when I ponder the really big and important questions of society and self- like “am i a simulation, and would i notice if i were?.) So, as in all things, when I can’t figure out if the problem is me or the rest of the world, or if there is actually a problem at all, I turned to my beloved experts on gchat: one is a former Mole at the Cornell High Energy Sychrontron, now in quasi-retirement in a desk job provided by the atomic witness protection program. Here’s how our conversation went:

me: can i just say that I am no scrooge, but I despise christmas music?why does it all gotta be so SAPPY and MEDIOCRE? notable exceptions: bruce springsteen

this is a recording: unfortunately for me, the sappier the better for xmas music!

me: oh god. you would torture me, wouldn’t you? LOL

this is a recording: i happen to have Santa’s Marching Band SET UP next to my bed … I play dean martin and alvin and the chipmunks out loud ALL DAY at my desk at work. along with MANY other sappy xmas hits.

me: okay… but no barbara streisand. that’s where i draw the line. dean martin is totally cool. alvin and the C’s…. are pushing it tho.

this is a recording: inexplicably…since I’ve begun playing these…more and more zombies shamble in the immediate vicinity.

me: !!!!!!

this is a recording: now playing Gene Autry & the Cas “Frosty the Snowman”

me: that’s like the guy in the piano store at the mall who sits there playing electic organ music all day.

this is a recording:  I hate organ mushik.

me: the only organ music that doesn’t suck is the kind I play with my nose.

this is a recording: rotfl!!!!

me: oh, and parliament funkadelic.

this is a recording: I just received a small gift bag from ♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦. We exchange bs gifts every year, she’s the one who conned me into working in this hell-hole department.  I usually make her a lovely scarf/earring set.

me: what did she give you?

this is a recording: POO-Pourri.

by Royal Flush

me: wait, you’re serious? Poo-pourri. is that ReAL?

this is a recording: sending you a pic. check your email.

me:WTF?!?!

this is a recording: gotta go. zombies are storming the bastille.

me: l8tr.

I decided to try another friend. He works for a large gaming corporation answering fan mail and explaining to European branches that Christmas is in fact a religious holiday and that just because the Church of England has issues does not mean Hannukah and Ramadan don’t exist for other parts o’ the world. I thought maybe he’d have some insight on the zombie question.

me:  hey, this is a recording says that the more xmas music she plays at her desk, the more zombies come shambling by…

redacted: well duh.

me: elaborate please.

(the following comments are taken out of of order and out of context but it’s a lot funnier this way, and this is what journalist zombies do all the time.)

redacted: this just happened (paraphrasing): “hey redacted here’s a bunch of stuff we didn’t give you til the last minute, and some last minute changes, and instead of specific assets you need an entire unsorted zip to search through. make sure this is all updated before you leave. hey why aren’t you coming to the white elephant party?”

me: so do you feel that the whole idea of holidays/xmas is what’s causing a zombie outbreak, or does it just hold a mirror up to what’s already there? or are we all zombies in our own way?

redacted: my wife and I meow at each other as a primary form of communication, so i mean….

me: I LOVE THAT. hahahaha!!!!

redacted: it’s the kind of thing where it is so second nature… some day someone here at work is gonna ask me something and i’ll go “Mrrrow?”

It was really time for me to stop creatively thinking and get to work, but I had to ask one more person before I felt I could move on, or that I had really attempted to find a sort of quorum on the whole idea of the relationship (or lack therof) of the embrace of the generic leading to an overall lack of taste and discrimination… which eventually leads to being a walking corpse.

me: Mr. Chips? this is a recording says that the more christmas music she plays, the more zombies come shambling around her desk.

Mr. Chips: i’m not sure what that means. real zombies?

me: she means coworkers i think.

Mr. Chips: do her coworkers eat brains? Oh hey, remember that song Zombie, by the Cranberries?

Alvin and the Chipmunks do a cover version:

Pushcart Prize Nomination

Wow… I am ecstatic to announce that Wrecked, a piece from a digital gothic, my book in progress, was nominated for a Pushcart Prize by the folks at Quiet Lightning.

This is a huge honor, particularly coming from Evan Karp and the crew at Quiet Lightning, who have championed writing and public readings tirelessly, enthusiastically, and with punk-rock flair for the last three years. Please check out the announcement of the Pushcart Nominees, their current submission guidelines, and their recent and upcoming shows here.

 

digigoth: a spellbook for the new sorcerer (new work 8)

When we left off two months ago, the reader was given a choice:

1. To follow the Dangling Yarn

2. To follow the Sinking Lure.

This poem is the path of the Sinking Lure…

Read previous pieces here

This book is winging through the ethers in search of an illustrator and a publisher.  If you are interested, please drop me a line.

How to read the pieces from this book:

1. Click on the embedded link to the [music] in the title of the poem.

2. Listen on repeat while reading.

_____________________________________________________

The Sinking Lure: (Playlist: The Glitch Mob: Palace of the Innocents)

the anglerfish sinks

her lure            winks off                     on

 

 

a lightning bug

wil o wisp

yellow sea star

shrinks

to a pinhole flash

and nothings-out

quiet floods

into the would-be time

for mercy to wink

and leap for sidelong dreams              a near-escape:

 

but form is skin-tight want

insisting thought

clench down to bread and blood:

so slow and painful to be things

given arms or legs or wings

worse still

re   membered

as a burnt out light might

toss a phantom flare

around the shoulders of dusk

though no measurable beam erupts

 

 

absence is thing-shaped

and the more disfigured

the more distinctly felt

another (other) self (ves) which is/are exempt

from 3 dimensions:

 the body thing                      2. the mind to know it

3.     the stranger to both

so the plummet into darkness

depth-sick and pressure-bent

no light needed to hear

the tremble of final air

squeezed out in a thread of bubbles

rupturing                a music**:

 

“my body which my dungeon is                      my mind to me a kingdom is

the body grows outside                                   

what you are pleased to call your mind

is its own place                                    the body s guest

and in itself Can make             HIGH walls and huge             when all my body sleeps

the mind                                  great lever of all things                        THE BODY

not bounded by its skin            even the mind              the body’s end

between its body throes                       enshines a darkness                  a presence

In my flame of living

O Reader! I had you in my mind

to share The life of the dark earth                    and lose my own                    

Such stores      within a little body lodg’d

all right things             ALL thoughts,

all passions,                 all delights

That in a boundless universe               the body may confine

the common mind

and sound mind                and the mind that can embrace          The radiant body

an inseparable union of field and particle                   flames THROUGH my heart s palace

I shall remember yet                            I know there is something left

words burn in the body’s lamp!           mind, that very fiery particle

sleeps contained                                 

years have we still to smoulder”

wingless          featherless

still: a bird

that emptiness and cold

ignites between doorway and threshold

         into a black, bird-shaped light

burning above a dark new country

 

 

** music composed of fragments of lines by the following poets:

Sir Edward Dyer, John Milton, John Bartlett. Daniel Webster, Marcus Aurelius,

Edmund Spenser, William Cowper, Charles Lamb. George Gordon Lord Byron,

Epictetus, Samuel Johnson, William Wordsworth, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Robert Louis

Stevenson, Emily Dickinson, William Shakespeare, John Charles Earle, Sir Walter Raleigh,

Oscar Wilde, Louis Ginsberg, Carl Sandberg, William Lloyd Garrison, James Chapman Woods,

Alexander Pope, Sara Teasdale, DH Lawrence, AE Colum, John Hall Wheelock, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Siegfried Sassoon, Edward Thomas, Karle Wilson Baker Rupert Brooke, James Bohm

 

Read more of this work

a meandering and eccentric history of arctic exploration: part 3

San Francisco, California

November 30, 2012

196 days until the Arctic Circle journey

“According to a widely-held concept the discoverer is considered the first person to have kept a record of his discovery. While moving about in the polar regions I have come to the opposite conclusion: the discoverer is he who does it last.” – Lennart Meri, from the foreword to A History of Arctic Exploration, by Matti Lainema and Juha Nurminen.

Aside from the archaic insistence on the male pronoun in the above quote, I find a great deal of truth in this statement. This is something I was trying to get at in Parts 1 and 2 of our meandering history: that to talk about exploration at all, it’s important to consider the idea of discovery.

To “discover” something carries the connotation that you are the first to observe a thing or process, identify a new substance, point out a new idea, reach a new shore or conclusion, solve an unsolved problem, or draw attention to something which, supposedly, no one else has. The trouble with this idea is that human societies, until recently, were separated by mountains, seas, deserts, and languages. A few individuals may have traveled to these new places and made contact with others, but most of the population stayed home, hearing stories filtered through ear and after ear and mouth after mouth. The accuracy of information is always dependent on the person who reports it. As much as we like to think that fact is fact, there is always the reliability of the person doing the perceiving. There’s a story that illustrates this idea, which I will now mangle for you:

Two blind guys are standing next to an elephant: one is at the head, where he can feel large ears, tusks, and a trunk. The other is standing at the rear, where he feels thick, pillar-like legs and a long tail. They argue on and on, each insisting that the part they are observing is real and valid and factual. Though both are correct, neither can see the whole elephant, so they argue until they die– each insisting their perspective is the truth. (I looked up the myth later- it’s six blind men, but each can only feel one small part of the elephant. So I remembered the “gist” of it… but not the details, illustrating my own point.)

six blind men… and an elephant

To say that one individual “discovered” North America, or the Anglerfish, or the rings of Saturn is similarly misleading: this land mass, this benthic creature, these bands of space dust, they already existed long before a human being came along and stepped on, harpooned, photographed, charted, netted, studied, guessed about, measured, pickled, or planted a flag on/in them. Even with things invented, like ligers, religion, and twinkies, there is a certain amount of gray area to keep in mind. We tell ourselves that we “own” or “claim” these things because we “created” them, which is sort of like a bad parent yelling at a child, “I brought you into this world, I can take you out of it!”

Curiosity and innovation are natural drives, not just for people, but for lots of animals… but the important thing to keep in mind is that the map of what we know is always expanding, always changing, yet our lifespans (and therefore our collective short-term memory cache) stays about the same. This means that if you grew up in the 1980′s, your first “discovery” of Leonardo, Donatello, Michelangelo, and Raphael were as Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, not as renaissance painters, and your first exposure to the song I Fought the Law could have been when you bought Give ‘Em Enough Rope by The Clash in 1980, though later you might have “discovered” it again at Poo-Bah Record shop on a 1960 album, In Style with the Crickets, which itself contained a remake of Jerry Lee Lewis’ Great Balls of Fire, originally written in 1957 by Otis Blackwell. If none of these songs rings a bell, children of the 80′s, try Tainted Love, the 1981 angst-anthem by Soft Cell (it was originally recorded by Gloria Jones in 1965). But wait, 90′s kids will know it as a Marilyn Manson song. Millenials, you might prefer the 2006 Pussycat Dolls version. My personal remake favorite? Shock Treatment’s version of Madonna’s Material Girl. Seriously… I love human beings and their constant remixing of DNA and music.

As Lennart Meri pointed out above, the way we learn about history is the reverse of how it happens: first we learn the immediate, then, if we are curious, we may trace it back to it’s origin… though the further back you go, the more fragile, the more thumb-smudged, the more hearsay, the more interpreted and re-interpreted our knowledge becomes. Within a few generations we reach the shimmery wall where history begins to become legend. Add a few more centuries, and you move into the territory of myth.

Paul Revere’s midnight ride… legend? Myth?

All of this is not to say we should not value our collective maps, or the adventurous people who saw an “uncharted” place (at least uncharted to his or her communal memory), and decided to go there. And by “uncharted” territory I mean the physical, the intellectual, the mystical, the scientific- all the realms of discovery. People spend their finite lives figuring out how to make each other happier, more healthy, more comfortable, (a lot more often, I would argue, than they try to make each other miserable) through the act of exploration and discovery. And each new person is a new map and a new adventurer. My best friend’s child, at three or four years old, was scolded at pre-school for coloring a rainbow with red, orange, yellow, green, blue, violet… and black. The teacher said, “there is no black in a rainbow.” The child said, “MY rainbow has black.”

a rainbow in a storm has black. so there.

So now that I’ve gotten all this qualifying out of the way… I promise our next installment will be all about our first arctic “discoverer” Pytheas the Greek, and his magical mystery tour of 325 BC, to a land called “Thule.” (That’s Iceland, for you 21st century video boys and girls). Or maybe he only made it to Norway or Shetland and was off the charts? We’ll see….

England, Scotland… and Thule.

a meandering and eccentric history of arctic exploration: part 2

San Francisco, California

November 10, 2012

216 days until the Arctic Circle journey

A person I love very much asked me the other day, “Why do you care so much about ships? About sailing? About a history you have no direct relationship to?” And I answered… “I don’t know. But when I was a kid, my mother used to say she thought I was the reincarnation of JMW Turner, an 18th century Romantic painter known for his depictions of shipwrecks, storms, fog, and light. Reputedly, he went so far as to tie himself to the mast of a ship in order to experience the elements of a storm at sea.”

Of course, this admission, spoken to said loved one while riding public transportation late at night, was met with a facial expression which prompted me to go on to mention, somewhat defensively, Twenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation, the work of psychiatrist Ian Stevenson, who spent many years in India meticulously documenting cases of spontaneous recall of former lives by children. The continued facial expression of my loved one prompted me then to admit… “Look… truthfully? The jury’s out. I have a hard time believing anything that I don’t experience directly… but my mind is open.. and I have definitely experienced some thingsthat lead me to believe these things are possible, even make sense. But I’ve learned to keep them to myself unless I want people to stare at me with that same look you are giving me right now.”

Of course, then he leaned over and said, “Sorry… I missed everything you just said. I can’t hear anything because of the people yelling behind me on the bus.”

Which is sort of how things work, right? We are all trying to figure shit out, trying to let each other know what we see, what we feel… lobbing these little gifts of hope at each other, pointing out the window to say, hey, look at that magic thing!! Only to have our best efforts at grasping the meaning of it all be drowned out by drunk people on the bus. And  to be fair, we each take our turn at being the loud drunk.

So why do I feel this incredible affinity toward the sea, toward exploration, and this deep, curious undertow toward navigating the oceans?  The truth is, I don’t know. I just know that when I dream… in my deepest dreams… I dream of ships.

So I was going to continue from where we left off in (Part 1), wherein I started to tack my way toward who it was who first started to explore the arctic, with the various tools of nautical navigation that were developed to allow people to cross the open ocean. I mean, it’s hard enough to hug the coastline and hope that the fog does not come in, or that a wind doesn’t blow you out to sea.  In fact, one year my family rented a boat to go out on Lake Shasta to watch the total eclipse of the moon. Everything was great until… well… there was a total eclipse of the moon! No lights on the shore, no moon to illuminate the shoreline. Total darkness stretched in every direction, except for the stars. That’s the last time anyone laughed at the amateur astronomer among us!

Imagine then, what it took to outfit a seagoing canoe with provisions, and head deliberately toward the open ocean, where the only reference points are the sun and moon and stars, the flight paths of birds, the wind, currents, and clouds? This is exactly what the Polynesians did over nearly six million square miles of the central Pacific Ocean.

I realized as I began to write this second post, that I am taking a lot of knowledge for granted– actually, starting the story in the middle. I’m assuming we all know how to navigate, that we all understand the basics behind how we get from one place to another, how we “find our way.”

But as I put forth in part one, not everyone does navigate the same way. Some go by street names, some orient by cardinal directions, others know landmarks- a diner, a gas station, a firehouse, a silo- the 21st century default navigation tool is a map– but more specifically, a map that depicts roads. Modern maps are not for ships, or people on horseback… they are for cars. Bikes and pedestrians can half-ass their way using a modern map, but anyone who has accidentally started up a freeway ramp on your bike will know that the king of labeled reality nowadays is still the combustion engine.

And labeled reality is the key word here. Before we can follow the wake of those who first explored the arctic, we’ve got to talk about how we label reality. Making maps is probably one of the earliest and most universal forms of communication we have… and we are taught to think of maps as tools that are objective depictions of how to get from here to there, and what you might see along the way, or find once you arrive.  But we do not all see the same way. We have been taught to “read” road maps or globes or atlases, and in that learning, we come to take them as a full depiction of what truly exists, when they are really a specific version of it, influenced by the maker, and what he or she thinks the user wants to know.

Take this map of Paris (circa 2012), hand-drawn by a young New Yorker, for a young New Yorker, and showing, coincidentally, where to find Chinese food:

This map reveals a little bit about where to find Chinese food in Paris, but it reveals a lot more about the world view, aesthetics, desires, and biases of the map creator.

Similarly, take the Hunt-Lenox map from about 1510, one of the oldest known globes, which shows a bunch of islands and galleons the size of New Hampshire floating around where we now understand North America to be… oh, and on the far right, just below the equator: hic sunt dracones, Latin for “here be dragons.”

It’s arguable that the map from 1510 could be considered deeply inaccurate if what you are after is Chinese food… or North America. But it does illustrate a point about the nature of history that I wanted to bring up before I start blundering my way through names and dates about who was first to find Iceland or who planted their ice pick furthest North.

All maps- and history is nothing more than a verbal map- depend upon the biases, knowledge, integrity, intent, and desires of the mapmaker, or the recorder of the history. That said, we can agree on general facts, and even better, we can revel in the breathtakingly different experiences that come out of the pursuit of that understanding.

Also, remember… the new does not replace the old… it just builds a nest amongst the ruins. Take this map of where not to look for Chinese food in Paris:

You should really check out the cartography history of the catacombs. Click this image to explore!

a meandering and eccentric history of arctic exploration: part 1

San Francisco, California

October 31, 2012

224 days until the Arctic Circle journey

A note before we dive headfirst into this fascinating subject, particularly fascinating because at the moment I type these words, I know as much about arctic exploration as would fit in a bat’s teacup.  I come from a long line of storytellers, all of whom favor the Melvillian style. If you haven’t read Moby Dick, you’ll have no idea what that means, but I bet you have an uncle or an aunt who, when you were a child, told stories in that frustratingly meandering fashion where, just as you thought you might find out what was going to happen to the guy hanging by a nosehair off the 250-story buliding, they were suddenly reminded of a rooster that used to attack them every time they were sent out to collect eggs in the chicken coop, and of course that story led to another, and on and on. I would hazard to suggest that this is, though infinitely frustrating when you are young, the best sort of storytelling, as it connects all experience together, and eventually, like stoned people listening to Pink Floyd, lets us discover that far-flung conversations that seem to lead away and away and away from each other eventually find their orbits, and come back to us to close their loops.

I promise you that this little history I’m about to embark upon will be the same- like the whaling journeys that inspired Melville to write his stories, we will cast about together for clues of our quarry- in this case, not just exploration of the arctic, but exploration in general. How do we do it? What drives us to do it? How do we keep from getting lost, what side-stories and adventures happen along the way, and how do these discoveries relate back to what we already know about ourselves? Storytelling is how we watch ourselves change.

All right, here we go.

I have a very good sense of direction, and navigate both by maps and by landmarks. But I also possess this other sense I would describe as an internal wayfinder: there is some magnetic, peripheral pull inside me that is telling me where I am in relationship to my surroundings at all times.  I have experienced losing this internal mechanism twice: the first time I was ascending from a deep SCUBA dive on a wreck off Catalina Island. I was coming up from about 95-100 feet down, and when I reached about 35 feet, my air bubbles suddenly bent to the left and began to travel sideways. It was one of the most disorienting experiences I’ve ever had, because all of the visual cues- bubbles, light penetrating the surface- appeared to be turned 90 degrees from where they “should” be. I was experiencing vertigo, something I had read about when studying for my diving license, along with nitrogen narcosis and the bends.  The description of vertigo was very little like the actual experience of it. Nothing can prepare you for your sense of up/down/left/right to suddenly change places 90 degrees. I imagine this might be what a flounder feels like when its eyes begin to roll sideways and migrate toward the same side of its body.

All I knew to do was trust the laws of physics, and follow those bubbles to the surface, though I could have sworn I was twisted sideways and swimming horizontally. As I passed through 20 feet and reached my decompression stop, I could actually see the surface, which appeared to me like a vertical wall on my left side. When I started the final ascent, my up/down/left/right lurched, then fell back into place, and I was clearly headed up.

The second instance of losing my internal wayfinding sense happens almost every time I go South of Market Street in San Francisco, where all the roads suddenly shift 45 degrees. Market Street cuts diagonally across all of the streets on its way East toward the bay. The result is that the streets, which in their higher numbers run West-East, begin to swing North at 13th. By the time Market reaches the Embarcadero, the streets are running North-South, paralleling the avenues to the West. Did I lose you? That’s what the city does to me every freaking time I venture into SoMA. Here’s a map, so you can see what I mean. (And just note that 3rd street and Columbus Avenue are a total outliers… they do what they want.)

Anyway, all of this is to say that the internal mechanism that keeps me righted in space can, at times, utterly break down. Then I have to rely on landmarks. I know that a certain street or lane or boulevard ends up in a certain place, so if I walk to a corner and find a cross-street, I can visualize myself on the the map of SF to the left, and know where I am, even if my wayfinder is telling me something different.

I’ve even been able to use this combination of wayfinding and an internal map in a place I once worked that had no visibly named roads, and only one settlement for miles in every direction. That summer I worked as a beefinder (yes, a beefinder) on Santa Cruz Island. I used pig trails to find my way through gullies and narrow canyons. At first, this was terrifying, but it took only a few days for this new style of orienting to settle into place. I had rocks I recognized, certain trees, geologic formations, forks in roads, even sounds: if I could hear water running I knew I had to be near a certain stream. If I could hear waves breaking I not only knew I was near a beach, but depending on whether the waves were crashing against rocks, pebbles, or sand, I knew exactly what beach.

Every couple of weeks, to get on and off Santa Cruz Island, I took a Navy boat that ran from Port Hueneme. It was about a 90 minute ride between the California Coast and Santa Cruz, one of the channel islands. If it was a clear day, I could spot the mainland (or the island, depeding which way I was headed), about halfway into the trip. On a foggy or hazy day? I could see nothing. No directions.  In enough fog, all the light became ambient so there was no way to track it to judge East and West. That Navy boat had a compass, and radar, and sonar, and radio communication, so of course the skipper knew where we were at all times.

But, and now I begin to loop back to my original thread– when exploration of the Arctic began,which goes back at least to the 3rd century BCE, there was no radio, no sonar, and no magnetic compasses. So how in the heck, when you are sailing in open sea in uncharted waters, do you know where you are?

Next time, we go into methods and tools of navigation by sea, some invented 1700 years before Pytheas navigated the amniotic sea.

playing chess with Schadenfreudians

San Francisco, California

October 30, 2012

227 days until the Arctic Circle journey

Schadenfreude: pleasure derived from the misfortunes of others.

There’s an expression about futility that says “one shouldn’t play chess with pigeons”. The idea is that it’s an exercise in folly to attempt a refined, strategic interaction with an opponent who will simply scatter the pieces and shit on the board. But what about when you’re not attempting chess, but just reading the news, or looking for a used couch on Craigslist, or watching cute animal videos on Youtube?

Lately, the internet makes me feel like I am playing Halo with a bunch of 12-year-olds (which I’ve been actually doing lately). Only the random 12-year-olds I end up playing video games with are in general, kinder, gentler folk than those who seem to be posting relentlessly, fervently, and with greater and greater overt nastiness, disguised as “comments” on the internetz. And not just on sites where it might be expected.

Take the following examples of “commentary” from a very popular tabloid in the United Kingdom, on an article about recent devastation from hurricane Sandy.

“Of course nobody will correlate this storm with the recent antichristian blaspheming ‘art shows’ held in New York City.”

- Wulfrano Ruiz Sainz, Tijuana, 30/10/2012

and

“GOD decides it’s time for a wake up call to New Yorkers….”

- Beachboy, Penang, 29/10/2012 21:27

Now consider another “response” posted by Richard Dawkins, considered by many to be a champion of rationality, and whose website, Foundation for Reason and Science, says its mission is to “support scientific education, critical thinking and evidence-based understanding of the natural world in the quest to overcome religious fundamentalism, superstition, intolerance and suffering”:

“Stop whining, will you. Yes, yes, I know you had your genitals mutilated with a razor blade, and … yawn … don’t tell me yet again, I know you aren’t allowed to drive a car, and you can’t leave the house without a male relative, and your husband is allowed to beat you, and you’ll be stoned to death if you commit adultery. But stop whining, will you. Think of the suffering your poor American sisters have to put up with.”

Sadly, Dawkins’ response is as intolerant as the commentary he would deem superstitious in the first two quotes. Mudslinging is not new, but it does feel as if participating in it has lost its context of shame. “Stooping low,” seems to have become status quo. When I was growing up, there was a common idea(l) that showing tolerance was a measure of good character, and that there was more shame in being egged on to retaliation than in a reflexive act of self-defense, as exercising self-control and tact takes both a certain level of discipline, and encourages the growth of empathy.

Of course, being a “cycle-minded” person, I always hold in suspicion the idea that any human behavior is “new.” But also being “cycle-minded,” I wonder if people do really seem to be delighting in one another’s pain more than they did, say 50 years ago, and if it has become more culturally acceptable, even amusing, to spew vitriol at strangers?

I want to believe, that like all behavior, there is some influence from nature, and some influence from nurture. I don’t think that there is less native empathy in the world, but I do think that there is less reinforcement out there to learn and model it. Why has this changed? I don’t think there is a simple answer, but I can point to some contributing factors:

-A growing loss of the idea of boundaries, and shared space: for example, I regularly enter the women’s bathroom at the university where I work, and hear a person talking on the phone while taking a dump in the stall next to me. Judging by the conversation (to which I am forced to listen), it is not an emergency being discussed.

-When I was in sixth grade, the bullies had a territory– school. Sometimes, they would lay in wait after school, which was a whole other barrel of joy, but at least when I went home, they weren’t waiting for me on my facebook page, or texting me, or taking videos of me without my knowledge and sending them around school.

-Work used to be where you worked. Home was where you homed. Now the bus is work and vacation is work and home is also work.

-Answering the phone was not an obligation. You could even take it off the hook. Turning the phone off was, until the last decade or so, not an exercise in self-control.

These are all issues of boundaries. Personal boundaries, and social boundaries. Not all boundaries are bad: take levies for example, or the earth’s atmosphere, or skin. Without them, there would a not-so-fun result.

We seem to be living the consequences of too much loss of social boundaries. But why is it that the nastiness emerges, the unthinkingness? Partly because it’s easy to be mean. It takes very little effort to destroy. Lashing out is rudimentary.

Another reason? I think because in our online interactions, we are are less “real” to one another. I once had a person cut me off in their car and then flip me the bird, just to let me know that not only did they not care they almost caused an accident, but they reveled in it. It turned out that this same driver was on their way to the grocery store where I was headed. Having forgotten me completely, they didn’t notice that I parked nearby and was not far behind them in the store. Later, standing in line at the checkout, this same person (still not recognizing me), saw that I had only a few items to buy, while they had a cart full, so she offered to let me go ahead of her in line. Not all people who give in to their lowest urges are like that all the time: it’s behavior of opportunity and context. When you are out driving, a person in another car is not really another person– they are another car. Another person on the internet, behind a blog, or on a message board, is not really a person– they are a blogger, or “some jerk.” They are not a person, but an idea we “interact” with. At least, this is the way we are teaching ourselves to think.

In a strange sense, the loss of boundaries that wireless, bodiless communication creates, also tends to blur what makes us real to one another: facial expressions, context, tone, body language– the deeper emotions that arise from physical cues that drive our behavior, like affection, protectiveness, patience, courtesy, and sympathy.

I’m hoping that we’re in an awkward stage in adapting to our breathtaking new inventions. I’m hoping that eventually, an equilibrium will be reached, where we keep the perks and break the bad habits. The only problem I see is that someone needs to model this behavior. Who is going to raise the new people with the idea that stooping to someone else’s inconsiderate level is, in fact, stooping? Who is going to teach all these brand new people that the game of becoming a better human is worth playing well and fairly, rather than scattering the pieces with our gorgeous wings and unthinkingly shitting on each other?

HMS Bounty lost at sea

San Francisco, California

October 29, 2012

228 days until Arctic Circle journey

I would like to devote today’s post to HMS Bounty, lost at sea today off the North Carolina coastline when it encountered hurricane Sandy en route from Connecticut to Florida. As of the time of this post, 14 of sixteen crew members have been rescued by the coast guard, and two are still missing.

UPDATE: Another survivor was found, unresponsive. Bounty’s Captain is still missing. Please send your hopes/prayers/thoughts for his safe rescue.

HMS Bounty was built in 1960 at at Smith and Ruhland Shipyard in Lunenburg, Nova Scotia, as a replica of the original HMS Armed Vessel Bounty (originally the coal ship Bethia, built in 1787) commanded by Lieutenant William Bligh. Fletcher Christian, Bligh’s sailing master, led a mutiny on board, taking control of the ship on April 28, 1789. Bligh and those loyal to him were cast off in the ship’s boat and after 47 days and more than 3,500 nautical miles, made it to the Dutch port, Coupang. The mutineers, in fear of being apprehended by the Royal Navy, dropped several men in Tahiti, and then, (according to a crewman’s diary) sailed without warning with several Tahitian women and men still on board, to Pitcairn Island, where they burned Bounty to erase any trace of her.

The replica ship, HMS Bounty, was originally built for the movie Mutiny on the Bounty, starring Marlon Brando, Trevor Howard, and Richard Harris. It was built from the original Royal Navy plans, but sized up 30% to hold camera equipment and the movie crew, in addition to the regular crew. After filming, and a tour with MGM, Bounty became a tourist attraction in St. Petersburg, Florida until 1986. She was then purchased by Ted Turner and used to film Treasure Island, starring Charleton Heston, donated, and finally purchased in 2001 by HMS Bounty Organization, and was refitted and refurbished for a voyage around the world. Since then she has been used to teach square rigged sailing and seamanship.

It is difficult to describe what the loss of this vessel means. She was a physical, real, connection to our not-so-distant history, and to understanding innovations and knowledge of craftsmanship that are still very much at the heart of everything we engineer. We build vehicles to take us places, to explore, to look at a horizon and then to find out what’s beyond it. A ship is literally a traveling reflection of our attitude toward the environment and ourselves. If we build ourselves as individuals and as a community with foresight and attention, as works of art that are also shelter and home, we can last a long time, contained by something we are proud of. The forces that power us- wind and time- will also eventually sink us, but while we are alive and sailing, it should be in our best form.

when all directions are South

San Francisco, California

October 26th, 2012

231 days until the Arctic Circle journey

It occurred to me that most of my life has been lived on a grid. A grid has four cardinal directions: North, South, East, and West. And each of the directions has a character, informed by associations and affiliations.

If you hail from North America, in general, the word “North” reflects somewhat blue and tastes like snow. It is the place from which the monster storms descend. Even though we live on a sphere, North is undeniably, uphill.

If you scrape away that layer, North will give off a bloody, metallic scent with an edge of gunpowder wrapped up in a carpet bag. This is the civil war layer and it is still fresh. North has hard edges, and is, as far as humans go, moving at speed and doesn’t have time for you to catch up. North is a merry-go-round being pushed by the big kids.

Beneath and uphill of that North is a very still, very deep wilderness. People North gives way to Creature North, and creature is not necessarily animal. This North is where big mystery has a big house with a big door. Big enough for redwood trees to be potted plants. In the North, the unnameable still covers more ground than the named.

South, at first glance, is warm and welcoming. But it is ruled by water: either too much or too little. The deserts are so quiet that the wings of ravens passing overhead sound like laundry drying in the wind. And the wind is an ear that places itself against the ground and listens to everywhere. The South, and it is always referred to in that way: the South, is balmy and temperate at its shores, but is mostly vast, dry ocean bottoms veined with lava floes inhabited by kangaroo mice, and horned toads, and scorpions, and small, nimble owls. In this South, when it rains there is a glorious, momentary springtime of two-inch-high flowers, and plants that bloom once a decade. Tortoises climb the gullies with their transparent neck-skin stretched taut, letting the raindrops fall into their eyes.

There is also the South of hollows, of dry flies and potato bugs. This south has a green sky and stinks of wet horses and ozone. It is full of chiggers, and tastes like orange soda. This South is full of old, old rivers, with old, old catfish singing in the mud. No amount of weather sealing will keep the crickets out of your garage here. In this South, dirt devils wander the back roads, and gypsy moths shroud the willows, and when it rains the sky and the water swell into one another, forgetting that things that need to breathe air live between.

Beneath that layer of South is a throat full of story. Every creature there knows the story and sings the story at the top of its lungs: during the day the bumblebees fly the story from rose to weed, and the parking lots are jammed full of orderly stories, and the traffic lights keep the flow of stories moving. But in the evening, the story glides back out into the dusk. Then the cicadas pass it from tree to tree like a cigarette, and the fish take deep gulps of it from the surface of the rivers.

There is still the East, and the West. The Occident and the Orient. The traditional and the edgy.  The uptight and the flaky. The barbarous and the enlightened. Rivals (seemingly) in attitude and approach. These are the stereotypes of East and West. (The implication being East versus West.) Maybe this is because of that invaderly tide over the past 200 years, against the counterclockwise spin of the earth, to push West, to push to the new and far edge. Westward movement is deliberately hopeful, while Eastward movement is to return. West tastes like dust and is piercingly bright. East is the smell of thunderstorms and asphalt.

None of these descriptions will ever be enough. My directions are not everybody’s directions. My directions are my directions, but these sensory maps do have overlap.

When I take my journey to the Arctic Circle, there will only be one direction: South. And all that I have described will be contained within the place that I am not. I don’t think I ever understood the idea of exploration the way I understand it now: it’s not so much about going where you haven’t been, but about seeing where you were.