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The Annihilation Fountain Issue 10
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THE ANNIHILATION FOUNTAIN
A JOURNAL OF CULTURE ON THE EDGE...
TEXT ONLY - ISSUE #10
The Annihilation Fountain & TAF Copyright c 1997-99 Neil MacKay
ISSN 1480-9206
http://www.capnasty.org/taf/
the_annihilation_fountain@iname.com
CONTENTS:
---------
*A REPORTER'S NOTEBOOK
*MALLOWS FOR SELINE
*FROM THE CAVE TO UPSILON ANDROMEDAE
*POETRY BY RICHARD GROVE
*IN ARMS WE TRUST
*GUTTERVISION REVIEW
*CONTRIBUTORS TO THIS ISSUE
***********************************************************************
A REPORTER'S NOTEBOOK
by TIM BULLARD
***********************************************************************
Brown ribbon, its shiny metal spinning, neon crimson bead the
size of an insect eye blinking as the sour smell of
three-day-old noodles lingers from a slimey sink, rats
scuddling, roaches doing the 40 and hurdling motels. You're
crazy to go into journalism. Go to a shrink. Kill yourself. Go
to a pastor. Get help. You're going to need it.
"You're dead. You hear me? You're a dead man," the answering
machine crackled.
An editor used to always tell me that it's the threats you never
get or hear about are the ones you should be frightened of. My
reoccurring nightmare is that I'm working again as a reporter
with a column at the Florence Morning News, and I get fired
again - over, and over, and over. I still wake up in the middle
of the night, twitching, then shaking in convulsions, cursing in
gibberish and swinging at the wall. I lose sleep, tossing and
turning, reviewing the circumstances of my firing in my head,
and then when sleep drops its dark cloak over my consciousness,
bringing stealth to my disconcerting thoughts, nightmares form
like coal-black summer tornado clouds, the same ones about me
being back at the paper getting fired all over again. There
isn't a day that goes by that I don't think about the expose I
wrote there on a famous S.C. bordello, an investigative piece
killed by the managing editor, who told me not to ask any more
questions about it.
When FBI Agent Joe Younginer of Florence, the closest cop to Jim
West I've ever met, busted a Trucker's Motel hooker in Marlboro
County, S.C. on July 9, 1989, she was wanted for running a
teen-age prostitution ring at a brothel where girls as young as
14 worked. She had allegedly fled San Francisco shortly before a
March '88 police raid after a probe that began in May '87. After
"America's Most Wanted" ran a 10-minute blip, 135 calls were
received.
"We got several calls from Washington," Younginer told me. "I
went up to Bennettsville on a Sunday night. I didn't identify
myself as an FBI agent." His only lead was the suspect was a
blonde, short and was branded with a tattoo of a teddy bear. She
was found off-work in a trailer at 2 a.m.When Younginer and
another agent entered, he said there was a lineup and search,
but nothing was uncovered.
"When we got there, she had a housecoat on. She didn't like me,"
recalled Younginer. In the manufactured mobile home she wasn't
alone -- there was a shotgun-- loaded.
Seven years later: my managing editor's face was white and pink
in splotches, his jowls flapping like the mast of a catamaran in
a raging nor'easter. I had called in a talk show on WBTW TV-13
and asked the Democratic gubernatorial candidates what they
thought about prostitution. The editor had been dragging his
feet about running the story. I was almost fired for mentioning
it all in a column, "Reporter's Notebook," and finally I was
told not to ask any more questions about it.
So when I got the threat, I reported it to the police, and I
sent the state police a Freedom of Information Act request to
see if they'd ever heard of the place. I mailed a story to an
alternative rag, POINT, in Columbia, S.C. When the article "Pros
& Cons" was published in February 1995, I was fired the next day
for giving company property away. There was no pay for the
story. After my follow-up in POINT, I sent the two stories to
GOP Gov. David Beasley, a former Democrat born in Darlington
County, and the next September the state police busted the
joint, arresting four suspects.
In Dovesville, just over the county line from Marlboro County in
Darlington County, the state police busted Shady Pines on U.S.
52, barely mentioned in my POINT story, a place the Darlington
Fire Chief characterized to me as "the only truck stop without
gas pumps. " Arrested were two woman and a Florence dude. The
second bust at Trucker's Motel netted the ex-mayor of McColl and
four others. I found out when my mother called read the
Charlotte Observer and asked, "Is this the story you got fired
over?" The arrest made the USAToday briefs section. Most
journalists are eunuch lifers, chained to their desks and IV'd
to the Blue Cross.
The voters removed the district solicitor in an election and
replaced the Marlboro County white sheriff with its first black
sheriff, a former Highway Patrolman.
"Free Bird" is the state song in South Carolina, and the shag is
the state dance. I finally got another job, and it's great
interviewing Lynyrd Skynyrd backstage at the new House of Blues
in North Myrtle beach, shaking hands with Sen. Strom Thurmond,
getting a photo with Bush's VP and working in Myrtle Beach, the
number-two tourist destination in the U.S., second only to
Orlando.
When Howard Finster visited Myrtle Beach, he told me,
"Everything is so beautiful here. Ya'll have a lot to be proud
of. You don't have to be called to do art. If you want to be an
artist, you can be one. What you're going to do in this life is
going to be you. You don't wait around to see if you're gifted
to do art. If you love art and want to do art, get started on
it."
Beasley last year was at a GOP event on Kings Highway in Myrtle
Beach, where George Washington rode once to what he wrote in his
journals was what he suspected was a tavern in Little River. As
two daily reporters finished doubleteaming the governor, I told
him aside, "Thanks for helping me on the Trucker's Motel story.
I appreciate it a lot."
"I'm surprised somebody hasn't taken a shot at me yet," Beasley
replied, "I know what you mean,"
I said. "Word up, G."
He called the video poker industry a "cancer" in South Carolina,
and in his State of the State Address, when he said the word
prostitution, the audience started applauding.
"And I hear it, and you hear it," he said, "the great refrain is
that you can't legislate morality. So what do you call the body
of law that forbids drug use and prostitution and a variety of
human behaviors that you, the elected representatives of the
people, do not deem appropriate for our state?"
When I hear someone complain about journalists, I seethe with
homicidal anger. Don't criticize us to my face. Do it behind my
back, if you value your life.
***********************************************************************
MALLOWS FOR SELINE
by VASILIS AFXENTIOU
***********************************************************************
Seline woke and said nothing, just lay there in the sheets, watching
Dino carefully but not daring to make a sound for fear he would wake
up. I am with you, he seemed to be saying, I will be with you from now
on. I will be with you, Seline, forever.
Seline turned over and closed her eyes.
"You do not know how to give," he had said last night. "You try,
but do not know how. And you must learn what you want in return."
What was an artist doing in Athens without a job? What did she lose
that she was searching for in a country only vaguely familiar to her?
Memories. Ah yes. And endless stories: Parents who uprooted
themselves and her from the island, many years back, to find a sure
job and a decent life across the Atlantic.
She had memories of running and playing by the water, memories of
feeding herself and smelling the sea breeze, hearing it rustle through
the pink and white flowers of the holyhock and the flat green leaves
of the vine on the warm portch, and learning to swim and dress herself,
even memories of learning to fish and sail.
Seline Politou, once stuffer of fish, once assistant to her marine
taxidermist father on a coastal village of the island, lowered her
thorough-blue eyes, and overcome lifted the covers off herself and sat
up on the edge of the bed.
With effort she got up.
Back then her father and she would turn dead, empty-eyed fish into
handsome, live-looking, trophies that customers hung on their walls, for
friends to admire, but eventually neglected. Seline now mulled over the
many things she neglected, had not learned from the aberrant stares of
the angled 'prizes'.
The shower's warm water made her tingle. She closed her eyes,
leaned back and opened her mouth. She spat out the refreshing stuff
several times as the troubled night almost faded in lieu of what the
day had to promise.
But what did it promise?
She slipped her jeans on, and went to the canvas. She didn't wake
Dino up, but brought with her a mug of Nescafe' and settled in the
chair. The pungency of the black brew briefly dispersed the persistent
sleepiness in her head.
She had seen the place again and again.
She saw herself give a hefty shove to the deserted, wooden quay and
row till she was well away. Then turn and look back. She savored the
crisp, stretching splendor around their sea side home with the slumped,
patched red roof, the airy porch, the flowers, the table. But for the
vision inside her, she would never see the place that had first
nurtured her again--a disco/restaurant now took its place. And she
wanted to so much, more than anything else in the world.
But her fingers today felt thick, clumsy, undisciplined. The tips
were blistered with splotches of colors and the thumb cramped from fatigue.
"How are your strokes proceeding?" Anastasi had asked her at the
studio the other day, giving her a pat as she stretched the knotted
muscles of her back.
"Just fine."
He had looked at her with those knowing eyes, weighing and
regarding, as he stood in front of her, twice attempting to say
something that he did not.
She enjoyed watching his curiously delicate manner. He used his
large hazel eyes to tell more than his tongue--but that morning she
pretended to busy herself preparing, not looking at him for long,
for she knew he was probing her. She had even evaded their usual
patter.
"You're not well?" he had finally said.
"Not very. It'll pass."
He put the stool and foot rest in place, shifted ebulliently with
brisk, spirited movement. And he paused a little. He did not sit
immediately, but delayed this moment of focus. He relinquished himself
to it as thoroughly as to his muse. He was never hurried at this
particular stage; he never rushed at this point. It was, she thought,
a kind of liturgy in him, just as if he was performing, he was
undividedly surrendering.
Yet Anastasi could be as utterly grave or severe. He taught as an
evangelist man preached. It was for this thoroughness, she imagined,
that she felt esteem for him.
Seline now raised the brush...
...The pristine break of day was balmy and bright and promised good
voyaging. She took a hefty whiff of iodine, and her boyish bust bulged.
The sail fluttered a bit and she pushed the tiler out to trim it. The
bag swelled with salty breeze. The skiff leaped forward hissing as it
skimmed the gentle brew like a gull's wing through air. The boat
cleaved the sleek bay in two, tacking into the draught. Bit-by-bit the
cove receded and soon melded into the checkerboard of gold-brown fields
in the backdrop. Ahead spanned kilometers of sparkling Aegean. The
small boat pranced onward banging on the ripening crests, lifting a
coruscating spray and dozens of little morning rainbows...
...the reverie then scattered into glimmering fragments. She laid
the brush back down on a desk scattered with sketches and empty white
sheets of paper, a copy of Chosen Country by J. dos Passos, and Mary
Magdalene portrayed weeping.
She had heard Dino get up.
She shut her eyes. The tiny garret closed in on her. A sudden
vortex made her slump to one side. She caught herself from falling just
in time, and sprung her slight, lean torso up straight on the
uncomfortable chair.
Two years, Anastasi had said. Two hard years for the eye to break
in. "Don't give up," was his favorite infamous statement, "you come to
me with a perfect sense of proportion."
She whiffed the heavy blue smoke meandering into her cubby-hole
study from the Gauloises Dino was smoking in the kitchen. Her throat
tightened and her nostrils pinched. He was making Greek coffee. Its rich
fragrance mingled, somewhere along the way, with the silty wafts from his
cigarette and made her head whirl. Oblivious to her discomfort she could
hear him murmuring/singing, " Take my hand/Take my whole life too..." to
himself--the King was The King for Dino.
She sat there listening to him sing. His torso yielded slightly,
his back bowing a little with the lyric. Tall and nimble. Crude and
rasping, the timbre seesawed, and she pondered what it ment. What was going
on inside him to make this harmony come out?
She turned away and listlessly stared at the only two paintings in
the apartment, one was an Andrew Wyeth and the other a Norton Simon. They
represented her wealth and were sent by her father, who had bought them in
Astoria six months after Seline had departed from her home.
She had crossed an ocean and a sea and had been living since her
arrival in the ancient neighborhood of Plaka in a house of post-classical
architecture that vaunted better days right after the war. The family was
moderately wealthy and an old Athenian family, endorsing the old ways,
trying hard not to be assimilated by the onrush of world changes fostered
by satellite television and her media-nurtured generation. From childhood
Seline had known that her future was already planned out. She would be sent
to college, earn her degree, and marry a man with a solid profession,
perhaps even somebody like her father. But all that had changed when one
morning she left her home with rucksack bearing down on her thin shoulders
and trust in a calling.
And I will love thee still, my dear,
Till a' the seas gang dry:
Till a' the seas gang dry, my dear,
And the rocks melt wi' the sun;
came the Burns' hyperbole in the form of a tv commercial for scotch whisky
from the kitchen where Dino sat.
They had been together for almost a year, then she was twenty-three
and he twenty-five. He was like nobody she had ever met before. He didn't
worry any more about the years ahead than did cattle in green pastures.
There was a primal manner in his air and a puerile spontaneity that
uninhibited her. He had a careering way about him, like a twentieth century
gladiator, all was intense sport, love-making, drinking, prancing his shiny
second-hand Harley as if he were Marlon Brando and she the counter
waitress.
His family had been killed in a train disaster when he was four. He
had been on his own since he was twelve, when he had done away with the
source of his obstacles by hurtling over a glass-strewn wall. The
opportunity had come, just before Christmas dawn, another inmate and he had
scaled the shard-sowed barrier to freedom, bloodied and frost-bitten.
Nightmares of the orphanage shattered his sleep often.
A garage owner had offered him a job and Dino had taken his courage
in both hands. Though he was still a boy then, he grew up fast to become a
man. Yet the strong arms transformed to comforting wings at night. She
could have let her life surrender into his, and part with all that tortured
her, walk away from her own honeyed trial, into the tangy freedom his world
promised...
Meanwhile the canvas stood waiting. Elegantly and emmaculently
silent, skillfully tormenting, crafting her pain, like picks etching away
in her heart. It ignored her and the fever in her hands. Two years had
passed four months ago, and still the hues did not fit--clashed like
cymbals. The colors dragged slowly, sluggishly, producing a cacophony--
rebellion in parody. There were days when she painted adeptly, but few. She
could not account for it; if she could only do that.
Dino's deep, black eyes--she could feel it--were upon her from
where he sat, this minute. She could sense their moot, fixed look. It had
been a bad night, last night. A bad night for love and dreams. There had
been depression in the dark of the room, a tiredness she felt more often
than not. He had finally left her and gone to the other end of the bed, and
she had lain alone and silent, and sirocco-warm tears ebbed out of her,
scouring the hours by.
The night faded once more whence it came.
She massaged the thumb muscle to lessen the stiffness. Veins stood
out like winding blue worms on her forearm and on the back of her hand. She
dipped the brush into the dish of solvent.
A straight dark line like clotted blood scarred the once soft
tissue behind the finger nails. Pigment from the repeated scraping at the
palette--a vice, an exercise in maintaining the wounds fresh and visible.
All credits of the craft. All the visible signs of hard, diligent work.
Texture no.
Dino brushed by her on his way out. She smelled the tobacco on his
clothes. He halted and stood by the door not speaking, then closed it
behind him.
"The canvas is like a man," came Anastasi's first words that
decisive March noon. Seline's first lesson about love had begun. "He will
want and want some more. You will hate and love him. Give yourself to him
and he will give everything to you. 'Love is, above all, the gift of
oneself',' someone once said."
Anastasi had then begun to paint. Seline's last minute doubts
dissolved with certainty. Each undulating stroke charged a longing that had
so long been left yearning for its mate. The colors mingled and blended,
entwined and braided, melded and plexed and fused weaving a dulcet
onomatopoeia plenishing her every pore, progressing so ever softly turning,
spinning longingly sheer spring air into a depth that had no end. The
dappling of the tints echoed on, ignoring, conquering time.
"The moan of doves in immemorial elms/And murmuring of innumerable
bees--do you see him, do you see Master Tennyson's sigh in the strokes? You
are in love, no?" Anastasi had remarked, putting the brush down.
Yes.
But the canvas before her today seemed unconcerned, aloof, like
Dino. Both promised ecstasy, both wanted her soul. But she had not the
strength to serve two masters.
When she had awaken that morning it was a comfort to know that the
entire day would belong to her to be alone. But by the time she got through
mixing the easels, even the light burden of the brush was too much for her.
She had not slept much during the night, she realized, for her eyelids
drooped more often than not. She had a drifty feeling that made her
dreamlike and lose herself.
"Rest if you must,/but don't you quit." came Cushing's words from
the poem Anastasi had drilled into her memory two years before.
Finally, she put the palette down. The morning sun rays dabbed the
wall next to her with a craggy segment of column from the Parthenon beyond.
She found herself glide into oblivion on the chair. She dozed. She was
overwhelmed by her dreaming of her mother, and felt happiness.
She was seldom like this, not ever since she had met Dino. But now,
like a torrent, the cumulated snags in their relationship suddenly all
deluged upon her, and she was surprised that she did nothing to stop the
onset. She recollected afresh the quarrel the night before, recalled the
options remaining--put to her; about the painting, she could not remember
what had been said to be wrong with it; possibly it was not the painting;
she did not know. She retained only the oppressive, mostly mute,
suffocation of Dino's demands.
Now, at this recollection she began to tremble for an instant,
uncontrollably, and gasp for more air to enter her lungs. It had been a
turbulent episode, the worst; like an Aegean August gale, with only a hint
of warning, that drowns one unsuspectingly. She was sinking, she told
herself. She was feeble against his wants--whatever these were. And perhaps
the giving on her part would never quench the needing on his....
The fingers felt better. She dipped the brush once more and waited.
And the vision came again, this time urging and stronger than before. She
picked up the palette and gave, yielding herself to the strokes. There was
a knock on the door that she did not hear.
She was solely aware that the mellifluous strokes did not come from
the brush but from her. Like heartbeats, they were as much hers as her
heart's. A presence was there, completing a metamorphosis. Unlike before,
she knew, the threshold now was scaled, the union of her and her dream
realized. She painted, all of her, and did not stop her care because now
she could not. Like the pulsing in her chest, her will no longer
participated in its existence. A being had been freed, and free it reigned
over a kingdom of two. The knocking stopped, the footsteps died softly away
behind the closed door, and the room glowed in the autumn morning with
Seline and her island home, her very own place in the spring, to look at
and be close to wherever forever.
***********************************************************************
FROM THE CAVE TO UPSILON ANDROMEDAE
by RON CALLARI
***********************************************************************
Two recent thought-provoking scientific discoveries have recently come to
light. The fact that they occurred the last year of the 20th century and
moments before the dawn of the new millennium may be purely happenstance.
It is curious, however, that these revelations have uncovered new evidence
about missing links in mankinds past lineage and his future heritage. The
former relates to the findings of a Portuguese anthropological dig that
unearthed a hybrid skeleton suggesting interbreeding between the
Neanderthal and the Cro-Magnon species. And the latter is based on the
discovery by NASA astronomers in Hawaii who have clear evidence that a
budding solar system is in formation around a nearby star. Could these
divergent events be synchronistic in nature? Might they provide us with
some auspicious message that has only taken 10 million years to reach us?
And if so, what is the portent of this long-awaited dispatch?
When you think about the juxtaposition of these two monumental findings,
the opening scene of Stanley Kubricks classic movie 2001 comes to mind;
i.e. [close-up, center stage]: Joe Caveman heaves his primitive tool to
the heavens and it transforms itself [wide shot] into tomorrows
spacecraft.
Evolutionists and Creationists could have a field day with both these
events, but I would venture a guess that the greater concern lies in that
Portuguese ditch. Neanderthals are the ancestors that nobody wanted.
Believed up to now to be a separate species from modern man, they were
physically and mentally deficient. They were stooped shouldered and
arthritic. They never developed a larynx , so they never had anything to
say. The Cro-Magnon model on the other hand was equipped with voice boxes,
which led eventually to speech and the formation of brain patterns that
became constructive (or destructive, dependent on your point of view)
thought. If non-consensual interbreeding (as I am sure, rape and pillage
was the sport of the day) occurred between the two does this put us one
step closer to fraternizing with the ape? Even without this discovery,
scientific fact has modern man sharing 98% of our DNA with chimpanzees. I
wonder if Barry Scheck is onto this case.
Flash back some 10 million years and a star is born. Upsilon Andromedae
(code name: HR4796) first came on the scene as a result of a cloud of
interstellar gas collapsing. Flash forward to 1999 and we are now witness
to this young star moving into adulthood and actually starting its own
family of planets. According to astronomers, this finding represents the
missing link in the study of how planetary systems are born and evolve. Up
to now weve seen baby pictures of new stars and we are knowledgeable of
middle age stars because we circle one. It was not until the discovery of
HR4796, that we were able to capture our first glimpse of a new solar
system in progress. To put this in perspective, our Sun is a couple of
billion years old, and it also took about 10 million years after its
creation before Earth and its sister planets evolved.
With these epiphanies comes reflection. Are we as some believe the
blink-of-an-eye inhabitants of one of several specks of dust circling an
ordinary star at the edge of an average galaxy among 125 billion others in
the universe? After all we could fit 1000 Earths inside Jupiter and 1000
Jupiters inside the Sun. And if our beginnings share common ground with
lower forms of life does that reduce our stature in the cosmos even more?
Maybe, maybe not!
What these two mind-boggling events may be telling us is that we havent
lived yet. Thats right- what is 2000 years when you think of it , 5000
40,000 for that matter? It is not that we pale in size, but that we lack
time. Think of it this way. In the Middle Ages we lived in a spiritual
realm that was governed by religious leaders and other-worldly dogma. We
were told that mankind was at the center of the universe, surrounded by
the entire cosmos, for one solitary purpose, to win or lose salvation. And
while this world view was adhered to for hundreds of years it began to
erode when the interpreters of God were found fallible and
non-trustworthy.
What followed was a movement from spiritualism to individualism a
dependence on ones own ability. We shed our spiritual cloak by taking
matters into our own hands, by focusing and controlling Earths resources
to create a economic security to take the place of the one that we lost.
We gradually became preoccupied. We have become a culture of work-
obsessed individuals who have left very little time for the evolution of
spirit . The question of why we were alive and what was going on here
spiritually was pushed aside and repressed. James Redfield in The
Celestine Prophesy sums it up by saying, "Working to establish a more
comfortable style of survival has grown to feel complete in and of itself
as a reason to live, and weve gradually, methodically, forgotten our
original question
Weve forgotten that we still dont know what were
surviving for."
And now as we approach the dawn of a new millennium, you can actually see
a yearning to return to the ethereal realm. Our fixation with economic
security is not enough and there are numerous movements afoot that are
focusing once again on spiritual evolvement. And this entire process only
took 500 years of this most current millennium to transpire.
It took 500 years to discard what we didnt like, try something new and
then gravitate back to the center again; this time, in hopes of making it
better. Seems like we could have done all that during the course of a good
meal and the right mix of dinner guests; i.e., historians, philosophers,
economists, religious leaders and a couple of good comedians. But in the
grand scheme of things, this all did occur within the blink of an eye.
Because it is time that is the great leveler, not size. So what the
Neanderthals and Upsilon Adromedae might be telling us is that we are just
on the cusp of understanding our link to the cosmos. They have helped us
locate a couple of more pieces to mankinds jigsaw puzzle. And like all
good puzzles, with each added part, the big picture begins to unfold. So
even though we may perceive ourselves as drifting far in stature from the
center of the universe, their 10 million year message (talk about snail
mail) might be that it is not the size that counts, it has more to do with
the fact that weve got a long way to go baby!
***********************************************************************
POETRY
by RICHARD GROVE
***********************************************************************
DEEP IN THE DRAMA OF WINTER
DAWN WAS ATTEMPTING TO BREAK
Some twenty miles or so straight ahead
the road leapt the muddy river
and passed through
its sheltering fringe of bush
to strike out
over
the sheer waste of heath-like country side
covered with low, creeping trees - p. 15
The wind
which had been gently soughing through tree tops
had free sweep there
and was building into a fury.
An exceedingly fine dust of
powdery ice-crystals
began to fly.
One could hardly see the snow - p. 15
but it was there and growing.
The wind came in fits and starts,
out of the hollow of the north-west
with the engulfing dark
and ever thickening
granular shower of blinding snow. - p 16
The darkness was inky-black
but a faint luminosity in the clouds above
revealed the canyon and the swaying trees. - p.19
The crystalline snow
was falling
in ever denser waves.
A relentless wind
threw it sideways into ones face.
The ground was covered now - p.16
deep in the drama of winter.
The sun was nearing the horizon - p.32
A dog struck up a dismal howl - p 19
from the invisible dawn.
Morning was attempting to break through
the illusion of, forever black.
A found poem from pages 15, 16, 19 and 32 of Settlers of
the Marsh
by Frederick Philip Grove a long lost adopted great uncle.
sough?ing (suffing) - To make a soft murmuring or rustling
sound.
By Richard Grove
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
Accidental Collocations
Of Randomly Scattered Atoms
Man,
are you the result of an accident of the fate of a few
atoms?
Are you the product of causes which had no prevision
for the ends that atoms would achieve?
Is mans origin, his growth, his hopes and fears,
his loves and his beliefs
nothing more than the outcome of accidental collocations of
atoms?
Are all the labours of the ages,
are all the devotion, all the inspiration,
are all the noonday brightness of human genius,
destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system
as it comes tomorrow,
in how many billions of years
to the theoretical inevitability of implosion?
Is the human enterprise an accidental collocation
of randomly scattered atoms that will come to an inevitable
end
as the reverse of the big bang collapses in on all?
Must the whole of mans achievement inevitably be buried
beneath the debris of a universe in ruins?
All these things, if not quite beyond dispute,
are nearly certain.
Is mans life brief and powerless?
Will sure doom fall pitiless and dark
on him and all his race
blind to good and evil,
reckless with destruction, as matter rolls
on its relentless way?
No
for nothing can thwart Gods purpose, man.
Nothing can interrupt the inevitability of good
as reflected and expressed in love through man.
All matter based theories will
though collapse in on them selves as predicted
as truth comes to light
and spiritual man comes to bare.
By Richard Grove
col?lo?cate ( k¼l
-k³t) v. tr. col?lo?cat?ed
col?lo?cat?ing col?lo?cates 1. To place together or
in proper order; arrange side by side. [Latin colloc³re
colloc³t- com- com- loc³re to place; See
locate ]
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
CEREUS
IN FIRST ORANGE LIGHT
OF MORNING
With a powerful force
the cereus blossoms
spewed heavy perfume
into the first orange light of morning,
luring the thousands of moths and flies
as they whizzed by.
The scent of the cereus
with its two edges
one a vanilla-like sweetness,
the other a curdling
so permeated the air
that it could be tasted on the tongue
as though it were lapped from a bowl. - p. 152
On this side of morning,
the world seemed quieter,
as though time had slowed down.
The soil smelled damp and rich.
There was the buzzing of insects,
the flutter of wings
and the sounds of a breeze circulating
earthly odours. - p. 150
The grapefruit tree trembled.
Cold dewdrops flew with the breeze
like a sudden rain shower
in the dim morning light of dampness. - p. 173
by Richard Grove
Found poem from Cereus Blooms at Night by Shani Mootoo
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%5
5:20 PM TORONTO
An endless stream of people poured
off the eastbound King Street car
at University Ave.
Everyone flushed down the subway stairs
as if into a gutter.
A current of undulating bodies
created an undertow
that no individual could resist.
Bodies coursed to the subway
through underground tributaries
the arteries of the city
bobbing bodies innocently drawn
to their predetermined destinations.
Captured trout in a can
throbbing, not speaking
hardly acknowledging
each others body-pressed existence
mute to the trauma of vulnerability
numb to pure unquestioned anonymity.
Faces refusing to smile,
stared into the confines of close
trying hard to ignore their self denial
buried as deep as humanly possible
in their private knowledge that they
will sooner or later spill
from the urban river
into the comfort of their own pond.
By Richard Grove
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
TREE FELLED: All is well that lands well.
Two men,
Tai and Bill, shall I call them,
with confidence chopped down
a tall, grey, dead tree in the country.
Damn,
it fell and hung on the hydro lines
that foolishly planted themselves in the way.
Calculations were poor.
Execution was worse.
Egos were only minorly bruised,
until woman friend stumbled on blunder,
and a passerby stopped in dusty black pickup,
to see what the city slickers had done.
A bit more,
this time red-faced, swift chopping
with the same, perhaps foolish, confident strikes.
Branches were freed.
Lines stayed up.
Egos renewed.
Male bonding strutting resumed.
All is well that lands well.
By Richard Grove
***********************************************************************
(FRAGMENT OF THE NOVEL) IN ARMS WE TRUST
by VASILIS AFXENTIOU
***********************************************************************
Part 1:
The Marathon Gene: The Undying Flame in The Quality of Grace
It is not because other people are dead
that our affection for them grows faint,
it is because we ourself are dying.
--Marcel Proust
Chapter 1
[Partial information was given to me by the people themselves.
The rest was acquired from the archives of the hedron, the
damaged facet of what remains of the second Hexahedron, of
Starseed, as it calls itself. The montage of what follows is
mine. P.P.]
A cozy new world.
Unite to obliterate identity.
The irony made Chickbrow quiver in his e-car seat.
The mockery charred and chipped away at his innermost tenets. But
the promoters of all that went wrong with the world had not the
vision. They had not the heart and virtue freedom needs to
breathe and be. So, they choked freedom. Smothered it under the
guise of 'planetary civism'. Their brave new children attempted
what wise men dread:
Utopia through unilateral information dominance promoted by dogma
and arms, drugs and computer bondage.
The new order of things to come was to be a supranational, an
incorporate Earth, run not by communism or capitalism, but by the
I-Soldier.
The by-product? A form of totalitarianism that would have stunned
Orwell. Chickbrow had mastered well the crumbling volume on his
shelves. Given to him by his grandfather Cleon.
Chickbrow had not neglected any of the other's words.
"There must be an antipode ... " the old man had told him, back
then in the thirties.
Chickbrow was still in his teens then.
"It's the pivotal point of any kind of Democracy. There have to
be either bona fide opposing political parties, or nations -- at
least a bilateral model. Communism may have posed a threat to us
after the second great war, but as well had been a check and
balance on our Democratic system: what Democracy needs in order
to be healthy and workable.
"When the Soviet Union collapsed, and China adopted the Chart of
Provisional Free Enterprise, the West fell in the very selfsame
rut a score of others had fallen throughout history.
"No threat.
"No contention.
"No controversy or opposition.
"Presumption.
"Smugness, conceit, coquetry and self adoration.
"I just call it being spoiled stupid. Democracy, David Chickbrow,
has to have tough and durable debate to survive. None of that
patronizing and humoring, superciliously cute and 'darling' stuff
between Republicans and Democrats -- two sides of the same
dollar.
"No variance.
"No ability, or margin, breathing space, to adapt to.
"Zero evolution.
"Extinction.
"A lot of agreeing and splendoring in profusions of endearments
may be fine for erotic escapades, sweethearts, heartthrobs and
sweet old ladies -- but for Democracy ... they decay it. Spoil
it.
"It happens to countries just as easily as it does to people. To
young or old nations. Particularly to ones that have never felt
the stomp of a conqueror's boot on their native soil. Have not
endured defeat. Not suffered humility in a long, long time. So,
forgot what it's like. Vanity, like that in a Congress of
aristocracy and a Senate of gentry, or an Executive branch of an
unchecked and self-appointed oligarchy, is a flaw easy to detect,
but ornery as hell to rectify. Because it suits the handful who
governs. Sweetens their palate. And theyll fight with rabid fury
any and all change threatening their post.
"Power is never easy to step down from, David. But in the history
of mankind there has never, never, been enlightenment in power.
Never has -- a smidgen even of -- good come out of it. Except a
dominion's own degeneration. Its fall from within itself -- like
the dominion of dinosaurs."
The Sachem, what they used to call grandpa -- a Ph.D. in Social
Science and an Assistant Professorship at Harvard Government
School seemed as good testimonial as any -- taught one thing and
lived another. He had done this to survive the anachronistic
despotism that somehow crept in and managed to rule unchallenged
over half of the world for nearly half a century.
The wealthy half.
"Before it had become through-and-through ripe," the old man had
told him, "and impose itself by force in 2020, tyranny had been
noiselessly but resolutely slithering like a pit viper closing
in. Oppression had been smoldering like smokeless coal before the
flash of kindling for more than a full twenty years.
"And when the tinder burst to flame, the utopia of a 'new world
order of things' turned into a world incubus. Abreast of the rise
of the three camps: internationalism, nationalism and
fundamentalism came the threat of international gray zones where
law had no effect, nationally or otherwise. Here, David,
globallized organized crime burgeoned in the form of economical,
defense-hysteria, mass-media, Mafia, drug-digital, nuclear,
biochemical terrorism."
Chickbrow's grandfather in all modesty was set on besetting his
damage over the greatest number of top honchos over the longest
period. He was part Hammurabi, part Confucius and Alexander, a
Che and a Nathan Hale. But most of all he was true American. To
the marrow, a Brave.
"Babylon, Persia, Rome were not brought to their knees by
conquerors from outside. They were vanquished, devastated, from
within their own stockades. First by narcissism and self-induced
conspiracy, then by biting off more than they could chew. By
sheer snow-balling. Through an avalanche of their own
over-confidence. Soviet communism lasted a little over seventy
years, Yankee capitalism almost two-hundred-and-fifty... "
The third millennium, Chickbrow reflected, was going to be full
of surprises. His own removal from the space team had been one.
And racism had everything to do with it. Contempt for minorities
had been another. It seemed there are cycles in history in which
some form of intolerance prevails speechlessly under a benign
guise. The circumstances, in this century as well as the previous
one, were favoring the stooped-head, the post-Hi-Tech informer,
the corporate yes-man, the company infiltrator.
Definitely not the redman. The few of his kind that were left.
***
"Where am I?" she asked. She could not suppress a shiver. Her
heart fluttered wildly.
She was not present, yet she was not elsewhere or totally
unaware. Reaching out with a tendril of thought she merely
perceived eruptions and flashes of what seemed to be a tunnel of
beaten gold. It shone intermittently in alternation with deep
expulsions. Prismatic needles of tincture emanated from the
labyrinthine cavern and from a carved, melanite-embroidered,
crystalline fissure up ahead. An enormity of space was ahead and
beyond. It swirled in buffed-sable and russet-scarlet. A vortex
generated of dancing lusters ... of wizardry, was swallowing her.
Her stomach lurched.
She took a quick glimpse behind her, down the tunnel. She felt
her chest constrict. I must survive, she thought. She had to
learn a great deal about light, strength and wisdom. About Godly
things, too.
She purled along.
She surveyed for the mode of her displacement. The principle
behind it. No bearing. No point of reference. No air stirred by.
No resistance or drift, only a silent disengagement, then a
discharge, a release through a milieu she could not relate to or
identify. The tunnel was uninterrupted and invariant, slanting
every-which-way ... and there was this smell. She sniffed, acrid
and sweet, stale too ... the smell of old suns and mutated
nebulas, all in vast, spanning reaches.
Her nostrils felt dry, her muscles taut; she thought her forehead
burned with hot sweat; and her brain cringed in strokes of insane
conjectures.
Although her senses worked, her being did not possess form, but
was part of one -- no, two, and more -- of many, many tinklings
drifting towards and encircling her, hues wandering and opening
like blooming buds, scintillating softly-singing glimmers right
at the edge of this fracturing night. They were as one and
difficult to separate. One of her eyebrows she imagined rose as
if in response, a queer gesture in a study of rapture and
despair.
Among the bursts of movement, of star-glow, she glimpsed
something enormous and motionless. A deep stupendousness of no
edges. A volume. Glowing patterns circuited to and from it.
She drew herself together obediently and became still as a
helplessly poised animal. She then shrunk into a distilled point.
"Who am I?" she asked. And knew that instant.
***
He raised the Vessel over his head whispering prayers. When he
opened his eyes he saw the ball of brightness. A fist of radiance
that seeped through the domed ceiling of his church as though it
were absent and streamed down to the gold Hallow Chalice he held.
His hands trembled as the Vessel commenced to glow from within.
It flooded his church with thick silver light.
"My Lord -- "
He shuddered, let go, and recoiled. The Chalice remained. The
light changed to molten gold, welled over the Vessel's lip, and
trickled onto the Altar below, to the floor. And the light rose
from its knees.
"A message," it said. "Come. The Bond of the Covenant is Opened!"
Then in a more distant but clear voice, "'For sin shall not have
dominion over you: for ye are not under the law, but under
Grace.'"
The Vessel hovered in clear, empty air.
"Miracle! A Miracle!" the congregation echoed and ...
... awoke Lukas with a start.
The sheets were wet and salty from his sweat.
In retrospect to Father Lukas Mettropoulos's dream that night,
more than a quarter of a century before -- and a quarter of the
way around the world -- a similar lamentous Holly Mass and thrum
of chanting were just reaching an apotheosis.
***
[As recorded from the opening of the archives of Starseed. P.P.]
The Book of Peace
Pandect of Concord, Proviso of Intendments.
Intendment 1: Faith, Love and Virtue are chaotic pockets. They
pose paradoxes, of counter- or non-entropic, direction-giving
configurations common to civilization-forming processes as are
Dreams, Hopes, and Visions. Whosoever directly or indirectly
conduces, or in any mode, plan, or method, endorses the
uninstituted and impending encroachment upon these six pinnacles,
as well as the eminence of Grace, shall be expelled and
ostracized, in the isolation rendered by temporal tributaries,
for the period commensurate to the degree of the abuse.
Furthermore, the above Distinctions of Trust shall be shielded by
the prudent Ward of Reason we call Olympion [The Head Chair on
the Primary Planet, Olympus, in the Sirius group colonized by
Orion migrants. P.P.], and not be ranked second in priority to
that of opportunism or any aspect thereof -- no matter the
encumbrance.
Intendment 2: It is further intended, to encourage peace in our
Galaxy, that we now acknowledge the existence, but control as
well, of the Intrinsic Power-Calling from within us for actions
of armed antagonism, behavior of lethal aggression, and other
varied manner of injurious and harmful hostility. These wanton
but inevasible and primordial reserves of entropic assertion
shall not be allowed to trample on our or on others' rights and
liberties, but be given vent by the re-establishment of the
archaic, but noble and incorrupt, competitions of the Olympus
planetary system: The source-cell of enlightenment throughout our
Galaxy, and further. This Calling of Primitive Ambition and Dare
shall be thus re-directed and shall abide by the Regulations of
The Games, leading to zero-claim and non-destruction of
opponent's/competitor's persona, world, or planetary system.
Contrarily, it shall be conducted in such a way as to honor,
above all, the value, dignity and the inalienable benefits of
peace for all of Life. The Games of The Power Triad,
Business-Politics-Religion, referred simply as The Civil Games,
in contrast to The Athletic Games, shall be molded and modeled
after the contests of the Archaic Olympiads, the original twelve
civilization-bearing, civilization-casting worlds (Zeus, Athena,
Hera, Aphrodite, Apollo...) had attained to consummate under the
fountainhead guidance of the Olympion of Olympus. These Games
shall have the Golden Spiral of The Galaxy, in contrast to The
Golden Wreath of Laurel for sports events, as the highest
distinction of honor. Fair play shall prevail -- as all two
hundred million worlds have partaken to uphold and respect -- and
this shall be regarded as the summit for, and of: survival
through variance, cooperation through growth, and coexistence
through communication, all instituted peaceably in good will and
faith and in efforts to encompassing all Galactic civilizations.
***
[Thirty years before, 2022. P.P.]
... Steamy incense, burning candles, and the scent of olive oil
wafted viscously in the chapel's atmosphere, billowing like blue
gossamer over bowed heads. The baritone voice of the leading
chanter attained a crescendo. Three measures later the bowed
heads cut into the somber solo in compressed resonance and the
twilight of dusk trembled on the stained window-panes.
Through an old, rusty grate under the chapel's Alter, the
subsonics of the hymn spilled into the hollow earth. Several
among the innumerable cavitous spaces below and nearest the
reciting source acted as resound chambers interfering
constructively to effectively amplify the flurry of the voices
into a swelling booming tumult. Like thunder, it roared, racing
at the speed of sound through kilometer upon kilometer of
passages within the bowels of empty mountain-core ...
Above, the thick smells hung vaporously in the air and permeated
throughout. The solemn counterpoint rose from antiquity's end to
console, like a clement blanket of faith, the Mount of Holiness:
A grand city of twenty monasteries spread upon a peninsula all of
its own.
Compliant to time, it propagated life and faith of a thousand
years tranquilly and traditionally into the twenty-first century.
The Holly Mountain ran its length amidst the most fertile and
green of the three Hellenic peninsulas of Macedonia like the
backbone of a supplicating Titan.
As the chorus of celibates to the right of the iconostasis faded,
that to the left strengthened. A somber and imposing requiem
reverberated throughout this Fidei Defensor of Orthodoxy. A forte
of hallelujahs thundered amidst isolated, towering monasteries
echoing over and covering this untresspassed, autonomous
territory of northern Hellas. Thirty square miles of holy land
resounded in psalms.
No human or domestic animal of feminine gender had stepped upon
the sacred soil. Here, the Holly Mary and a handful of saintesses
were the only depictions of, and references to, the female sex.
On these premises male monks did all chores, from mending to
cooking, cobbling and cleaning house to washing clothes and
conveying to new generations the Divine Ceremonials and Arts of
the Church. No one was simply a monk; everyone contributed a
functional and necessary allotment of work each day. And when the
daily tasks and jobs were complete, praying and services
commenced. Hard, rigorous, exhausting dedication. Enough to
suffice and atone for the sins of man.
The treasures of this Holiest of Mountains came in many forms:
wood-carvings of intricate and delicate designs, ornate prayer
stands, liturgical crosses, Episcopal thrones, lecterns and
chests. Along with the paintings, carvings and the libraries of
parchment, silk and paper manuscripts of the Holly City, precious
reliquaries were kept in the sanctuaries. Also, numerous
liturgical vestments of exquisite hand-woven and gold-embroidered
craftsmanship were preserved. Amidst this wealth of arts and
sanctity one could not help but wonder what more had been watched
over?
The oldest among the monasteries, Xenophontos and Lavra, over a
millennium in age, were ones endued with gravest respect and most
reverend cognizance. They were the heart of the Faith. Beneath
their grandeur of buildings and halls of old wealth and
immaculate decor existed a maze of catacombs and vaults. They hid
and protected the fortunes of the vanquished Byzantium. Within
the Earth's crust lived still the legacy and mythical treasures
of an empire, maintained by secrecy and observance. Only few knew
of its whereabouts, of its incredible presence. Fewer still
experienced themselves its revelation.
Yet, while the Services inundated above, treachery preponderated
below.
The confidant of the bishop's council froze in his tracks at the
din. Then dismissed it with the waving of a hand. The maverick
look in the red-rimmed brown eyes now shifted into a waxing
skittishness. His gait quickened while the storm-lamp in his
right hand threw a tottering giant's shadow on the dank dirt
walls after him.
"Down there. Go!" he urged himself.
His hawkish nose almost ensnared the frayed piece of marked cloth
he had been grasping in his left hand. His eyes darted back and
forth from it to the forking of the tunnel not far ahead.
"To the right, monk -- the Lord is always to the right, muddled
monk," he hissed, and broke out into a braying, raw laughter.
The renegade confidant took it upon himself to abscond with a
mere speck of the subterranean acres of gold, silver, precious
stones, icons; with a mere drop from a venerated sea of preserve
of the richest dynasty in the history of mankind. But when he
confronted cavern upon cavern of innumerable kingly ransoms of
the purest, biggest, rarest jewels; a legacy of the finest etched
and embellished cutlery and crockery, artifacts and weaponry; the
regal treasure troves of forty-five generations of emperors,
royal courts and their heirlooms -- the covetous monk was simply
overwhelmed.
As madness saturated and delirious by the opulence surrounding
him the raw-boned driven man now ventured into a far cavern,
uncharted as many were not, and seeking refuge within its bowels
confronted a vista no man everbefore beheld. Into a thicket of
monumental abnormalities and agonizing irregularities, of
violating symetrical perfections and aberrations commiserate to a
starting pupil of Chinese, who must disentangle ideograms by the
handfuls.
In a frenzy to escape Nemesis he had encroached upon what
paranoia must have construed to him to be the very kingdom of
Heaven -- or Hell.
Tears of terror and anguish swelled in his red-rimmed eyes, mouth
drooled and nostrils flared, and his throat pained from
uncontrollable contractions brought on by excruciating efforts to
let out a scream.
When his sight grew fully accustomed to the thin pink light and
delicate beams that dimly emanated from everywhere and nowhere --
augmented by giant fountains and geysers of pulsing violet -- the
deep yellow glows and intermittent flashes of diamond-burst
brilliance before him, he finally reckoned that he no longer
stood in man-made tunnels.
About him spanned a space not unlike the outside. And this
vastness had above it a sky -- studded with the heavenly bodies
of night -- but alive and stirring, flecks and speckles that left
in their course rainbows and motion and soft scintillating
tinkling sing-song echoes. He looked upon this expanse, and
before his mind went into utter shock, he glimpsed upon towering
solid contours: of pyramids and spheres, upon an inner city of
polygons and polyhedrons -- and in front of him a glow that was a
woman.
A distant almost familiar drone thrummed on as he lingered there
dazed.
Catatonic, the intruder, lumberingly, turned about and exited. As
he did, behind him materialized a solid rock wall, eradicating
any indication of an entry way ever being present.
***
[From the archives of Starseed supported by the decoding of
Linear A, the Disk of Phaestos and the Great Pyramid of Gizeh.
P.P.]
... On a bizarre vast edge between two voids, one of the Universe
the other of the indefinable Erebus beyond, Residua of Essence
spin in felicity, counter-spin in enchantment and unfold
progressively more pronounced. They intently and enthusiastically
shift back and forth -- among their supplementary domiciles and
rivulets of edifice-plasma -- uniquanta of knowledge, insight and
lore.
It took them only a small fraction of a hyposec to assimilate the
new and utterly unexpected bit of data of information inflowing
through the elliptical space-time curvatures that furrow the
vacuum of the eleven dimensions available to them.
But they greet and accept with loving eagerness the embrace of
the extraordinary and magnificent experience of the joining of
life -- a new and most integral 'being' -- to them once more.
They and the flowing edge complete the vortex, the revolving
sphere-shell, Front of Creation which, along with its angular
motion, has been traveling radially outward at the speed of light
since its inception. It would have taken the Front of Creation,
at its current curvature of largeness and speed of rotation,
thirty-seven billion years to achieve a single circuit about the
blue glowing hub, the core that is the sweeping blister of the
Universe.
The multitudes Residua of Essence would have in effect been
termed souls, till of this late happening, this instillment of
joyous hearkening, when a passage of a ripple of force imbued
itself within them bridging the domain of spirit- and
faith-essence to that of energy, form and matter of the Universe
Proper, entelecheia your Aristotle calls it. And that which had
once been invisible and immaterial, but aware, aethereal ambiance
began slowly to acquire the prominence and salience of its kind
and shape, that is, its former nature ...
... In the very start, the first color shifts had been detected
by our equatorial astronomers at a distance a hundred-fold beyond
that of your Virgo constellation and that of Vereniki. They had
been in the form of a traveling peripheral ripple heading toward
neighboring galaxies omni-directionally -- a vast sphere
shrinking back onto its source. Back to the very asymptotic,
geometricalless and temporal source of Creation. The color of the
stars this ruffling undulation had been leaving in its wake was
an almost stand-still pinkish-white brilliance in the spectrum
shift. It not only showed that the Universe had completely and
unexpectedly begun to slow its expanding, but, by further
observation and straight forward calculation, it was discovered
that it had begun doing so for an extensive time. The steady rate
of expansion, which for thousands of millennia had served as a
heat sink, had ceased long-long ago ...
[What analysis did not show, however, until later, was that the
edge of the Universe, the Front of Creation, had initiated the
awesome operation of braking four billion years back. P.P.]
... Unthinkable quantities of trapped force [Starseed goes on]
were been introverted; reconciled and re-conducted in a
spontaneous manner counter to the original path of their impetus.
Against the grain of their nascent momentum. Instead of turning
order into less order, the internal pressures had reversed,
compoundingly, releasing free magnetic monopoles.
The preserving mechanisms innate to the Front of Creation had at
this point collapsed; already several rents were being torn in
the fabric of the void and were now made accessible to Residua of
Essence.
Elsewhere, within this fringe, the Vanguard of Creation,
point-pockets of internal pressures were mounting to those
experienced in the Boundary, turning upon their fountainhead to
cause a rip in the Plank wall. They induced a laceration into
chaos ... and spawned small split cells, bifurcations, of
fractalian repercussions in place of anomalies, but with
asymmetries: ports of forthwith temporal bonds for the
reconstituting Residua of Essence. Beyond this point our space,
time and matter fundamentally broke down. What the Residua of
Essence peeked into, over this limit, on the outlying extreme
side of Creation, was the birthing of a new Universe of the
furthest completeness ...
... Meanwhile, the wealth of might, at once loosened in the
braking Universe Proper, sought instantaneous and new direction.
And not only by revivifying the Residua or violating
accessibility across Plank time.
Sentient life scattered all over the Cosmos, along with being
sapient entities of identity, of thinking, feeling and ken, were,
as well, entities of direction. Entities that could use up
further this excess energy. Coolly fuse it into action,
assimilate it into motion and mold it into fractals of organized
and functioning matter. These organic assemblages, sapient
transducers, manipulated raw force -- even of unrestrained
pressures -- to give it vector of focus, adjustment and design.
Once, the Residua of Essence too had been such.
Corporeal beings that could forge from concepts by their acumen,
spirit and will-strength alone: could steer their realizations
and translate them into palpable action through their physical
bodies and could aim their course tangibly as well as
immaterially. This initiating of the direction-giving process was
referred to by them as reflection and insight, expectation and
sagacity, prudence and wisdom, verity and belief.
And now, they jubilated in its reacquirement, rejoiced in the
regeneration of their corporeality in the tenfold.
But often, as well, the outcome, or, the prime consummate and
culminator of a portion of this pent-up and undirected loose
energy, had invariably been the fury of malcontent, the
insobriety and overindulgence the sweet brew of power excites and
then goads within us, the surge and rage of raw violence, the
vehemence of dissension, and the hand-released arrow that swiftly
and pointedly darts for the unsuspecting heart of peace ....
***
[The teachers obituary for his killed in action, older son,
Kyrillos, during the last invasion attempt against his homeland
in 2002 by descending, starving and banded Caucasus tribes,
Turanian hordes and Tartar-Mongol legions armed by Glixxons
rising World Confederation. Arms in exchange for Black and
Caspian Sea oil. From my journal, 15 August 2052. P.P.]
"These were our children who died for our/lands.../ But who
shall return us the children? -- Rudyard Kipling, THE CHILDREN
....
" ... this is my promise and pledge," the teacher writes, "my
covenant of testimony and grief for my own lost and unreturned
child, Mr. Kipling. To the bringer of holocausts, to the shamer
and exterminator of dignity and kindness in man and upon planet
Earth, to the trespasser of the limits, to the non-citizen of
humanity I vow my non-alliance and my non-affiliation. I commit
my disunion with and divorce from him. More. I firmly establish
my dissension with and division from him. This, I promise to the
breaker of the covenant between man and peace. Further ...
" ... Past oppression and ignorance, indigence and beggary sired
violence, passed it down to the present and strive to keep it
bustling into the far-deep future ...
" ... Violence wroughts up anarchy. Or welts dictators," the text
I have unearthed goes on to say. "The stipend of either is
misery, the rack of the mind and soul, isolation, exile and death
to those who side with enlightenment and freedom, roots and
balance ... "
I read these pages the teacher had written one half century
before, again and again, and in my search I see yesterday's
questions become today's, today's questions the future's, and the
future's become a distressing way of life.
More questions come:
" ... On one hand there is this suffusion of talk on amity and
labels about peace, accord upon all Earth. On the other all this
High Definition and Dolby Surround Sound of blood-surfing.
"Why this worshipping of weaponry?
"Why this eliciting of respect by instilling fear, by ingraining
death-and-rage? Why this flair for mass-expiration in 'best
sellers', this propaganda in praise of a state of perpetual war
and siege -- in the warring hero -- capitalized in animations on
the monitor, motion pictures on the big screen?
"Why this thrust of thirst for Inquisition- and Nazi-like
tortures that daunt, instruct and institute terror and minister
mistrust, paranoia and neurosis, epilepsy and murder into the
innocent, sensitive and impressionable souls of our children
today with each such book read and each such film seen around the
world, children that are brainwashed and are destined to grow up
to become the hard-hearted, senseless barbarians of a boot-camp
world tomorrow?
"Why this paean to hate?
"Why this trundling paradox?
"Is it only the paradox of naiveté?
"Where is the source of this child molester?
"Who and what generates the oxymoron?
"How is this
condition licensed to propagate and reach our
children -- throughout the globe?
"When did it begin to perforate as part of their reality?
"Why children?
"In place of marbles and dolls, rector sets and chemistry sets,
microscopes and telescopes -- an endless variety of new and civil
toys -- we give them Winchesters and Star Wars, Colt 45s, Desert
Storms and Desert Foxes to play with. In place of books and
tutoring, art and music -- boundless new horizons of worthy
literature, creative and humanizing recreation, means of civic
scholarship, harmony and philanthropy -- we give our children
Magnums, tanks, Stealth fighters, Harriers, Eurofighters, a
licensed NATO on the stand-by to indiscriminately incinerate,
butcher and mangle infants, the old, the helpless (not to mention
innocent animals and plants. Dont these as well have the birth
given right to life? Dont these give sustenance to all of the
biosphere, Homo Sapiens included?).
"Why do we hustle into our childrens hands raw fury and spite to
build upon; rush into our flesh and bloods lives animosity and
malice -- these cruel tools of war and slaughter -- to settle
differences with? ... "
The text I have unburied proceeds to ask more:
" ... What manner -- brand -- of peoples have the propensity to
lavish in, to glory in, crime of wrath, molestation,
mistreatment, to splendor in intimidation and harassment,
bigotry, in the harnessing of revenge and rancor having as prime
premise difference? Difference, as that of the privilege and
right to come from another source of parameters, to come from,
believe in, stand by, a different process and system of values,
concepts and interpretations of Life, Love and Liberty? ... "
Next to this outraged man and educator, I too dare pluck up my
courage. I stand by this begrieved fathers loss of his boy to
those reverent and worshipful in the implements of war and wars
themselves and I boldly ask:
Who are, on our globe today, the modern Hannibals, the new
Genghis Khans and Tamerlanes that triumph and tradition in arms
and armament? Who today thrive on a way of life based on that of
the invading Goths and the raiding Vikings, the plundering
Visigoths and the butchering Huns, on retribution and raw
conflict, on the proliferation of accouterments of bloodbaths,
hatred and wholesale killing?
Who prey on the incitement of doubt and insecurity?
Who mock precepts that have passed unscathed the test of time as
human reason and moderation, the wisdom found in tolerance and
restraint -- simple and plain horse sense in a nut shell?
Who privilege only those who unquestioningly put in with them,
but spur their SIA, intelli-bombs, seek-and-sack missiles, spy
and laser-bearing satellites and Citizen Protectors in cold
candor to devastate and pilferage, pillage and terminate all who
do not?
From the text I have undug:
" ... What nations live by the fire arm? The sword? Bolster and
brace soldiering from cradle to coffin? Have to dodge bullets in
their own city streets, hospitals and schools? What peoples
subsist by -- get their kicks from -- the drawing of blood, and
silence eternally the irreconcilable?
"What peoples browbeat and mute those opposed to their
'custodian-like' arrangement of things? Hush those who are of a
different history or stock of roots, of a contrary trust of
values, and those who believe in an alternate form of Democracy?
"What manner peoples thrive on war and sub-war, insurgence,
coercion and scuffle -- on the code of the Universal Barbarian?
And ... let the rest cry their beloved country? ...
" ... What manner peoples foment internally and internationally
the strife of greed as a National Product -- as a way of life --
and with a straight face proclaim this attitude to be 'a
marshaling of the competitive spirit'? ... "
I gnaw and pick at parched lips at this mans dare, his pain of
loss ... as these numbing questions of his -- this bizarre
manifesto-of-a-manuscript I stoop over -- reel into and through
my amazed mind to ask in writing that which most of our world
citizens cannot utter in resounding protest or even whisper, in
principle or document, or indeed in loud thought in 2052, at fear
of their lives and the lives of the ones they love.
" ... Who are those that gain profit by candying the act of
rapacity? Honey a coexistence that is based on mutual suspicion,
so as to bolster their arms sales and fatten themselves from it
-- arms sales to my divided island's oppressor, to the fresh
primate hordes of a modern roused Attila -- and do so with velvet
language and a silver tongue? Who wear the mask of the 'verist',
a domino of dismay, 'mince' words and didactically admonish
-- or use some such philippic poise and prose -- that which they
covertly and by example provoke, grossly, in bulk and en mass?
War games no less.
" ... Who do away with esteem and self-respect and instead bring
discredit to non-war, and cynicism to peace-first, and
proscription to entente for peace, at the peace table,
prosecuting and abolishing by this attitude and these actions
world-wide fidelity, world-wide union?
"Who persist in their own opinion of deontology? Are almost
convincingly engrossed in their own efforts at rediscovering,
revivifying and resurrecting what a comprehensive yet practical
interpretation of ethics is, that is, at rediscovering the wheel
of virtue; while these same peoples are shystering and
pettifogging, trickstering and hoodwinking world economies?
"Who are immuned to pangs of conscience? Self-righteously
consider themselves the new Rome Imperium?
"Who reckon themselves absolved from the transparency of
pretentiousness and presumptuousness in their usage of words like
globalization, democracy and communism, coherence, Universal
Declaration of Human Rights, Amnesty International and
egalitarianism, partnership for peace, socialism and suchlike
fiats and caveats as if the globe were a joint-game-board of
Scrabble and Chess to have fun with and get rich from; to
ridicule and sport from the torture and anguish of wearied
refugees, the 35,000 children who die daily from poor peoples
disease; sport with toppled economies and indebtedness, famine,
with ruthless and unchecked bombings so their brood of Generals
can try out their new arms on living flesh, the afflictions and
fears of the powerless, the helpless? ... "
The manuscript then alludes to the 1946 writings of George
Orwell. Apparently 106 years later nothing improves ... nothing
emends ... nothing encourages:
"In our time, political speech and writings are largely the
defense of the indefensible. Political language has to consist
largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy
vagueness. Defenseless villages are bombarded from the air, the
inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle
machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets:
this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of
their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than
they can carry: this is called transfer of population or
rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned for years
without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of
scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of
unreliable elements. Such phraseology is needed if one wants to
name things without calling up mental pictures of them. Consider
for instance some comfortable English professor defending
totalitarianism. He cannot say outright, 'I believe in killing
off your opponents when you can get good results by doing so.'
Probably, therefore, he will say something like this:
'While freely conceding that such regimes exhibit certain
features which the humanitarian may be inclined to deplore, we
must, I think agree that a certain curtailment of the right to
political opposition is an unavoidable concomitant of
transitional periods, and that the rigors which certain people
have been called upon to undergo have been amply justified in the
sphere of concrete achievement ... '"
The text of the manuscript goes on:
" ... I now think of the tragedy of my beloved son and land, my
beautiful brilliant isle torn in two, and of that other fair and
green island, Ireland, and its many sons, the same of fate; and
of the sons of the Scots and Welsh, the same of fate; the fate
all weakened minorities evidently must face and endure; of the
sons of the trampled and smothered Balkans, of the sons of a
starved Sudan, an emaciated Africa, the un-unified Koreas, the
sons of the calamities of a Vietnam, a Laos, a Thailand and a
Cambodia, the toll of sons of an Afghanistan and a Chechenia, the
genocide of a Curdistan and the million-and-a-half dead sons of
an Armenia, the twenty million Russian sons and daughters a
political experiment murdered, of an Iran, of a Lebanon and a
smashed and famished Iraq, the sons lost in the fifty-year strife
of an Israel and a Palestine, the sons of the worlds downtrodden
... and I wonder when this sacrifice of our children will
suffice? When will it all end ... as Popes and Presidents, Muftis
and neoteric Sultans, Patriarchs and Planetarchs, Rabbis and
Prime Ministers promise us it will before, or in, their term of
office? As universal treaties and alliances, as Human Rights and
International Criminal Courts are there -- are paid billions by
us, the World Citizens, each year -- to arrest, deactivate and
abrogate ... since 1946?
"When is that 'Universal Soldier of Mercy' sung so much by us --
that long-awaited neutral but civilized NATO and that
long-anticipated impartial but humane UN, that modern but just
'Nuremberg Trial' -- spoken of so often by so many coming to
judge the handful of overly zealous, dallying, arrogant
politicians and gung ho soldiers, the war-gaming power-anxious
oligarchy, responsible for the consequence of a Pearl Harbor, a
Hiroshima and a Nagasaki and their 210,000 innocent sons and
daughters dead, the ten million killed in a First World War that
man should have had the manly decency and sense to avoid, a
Second World War that extracted fifty million more mostly young
innocent lives, the slaying of two million innocent Vietnamese
and fifty-three thousand innocent Americans, the carnage of a Mai
Lai and a Kent State and a Tiananmen Square, a Baghdad, and a
Kosovo, and the bestiality upon innocence as that scaring the
naked napalm-burned tiny torso of a Kim Fok; and wipe out
soldiering and bullying once and for all!
"Then this is the violator.
" ... I bring visions of Rwandan, Somali, Sudanese, Bosnian,
Serbian, Albanian, Romanian, Bulgarian, Armenian, Vietnamese,
Chinese and Iraqi, Central and South American, Cuban war- famine-
and drought- and disease-vanquished victims to my mind," the
teacher says, "and ask how many children's and infants swelled,
empty bellies, napalm-scarred bodies, sexually-exploited lives,
AIDS-ridden days have these Christian, Moslem, Hebrew, Hindu,
Buddhist ... promises filled or comforted!
"Then this is the coveror of Truth.
" ... Whose history and philosophy of living is based on the
business of death-dealing? On the industriousness of warring and
fortification? Proliferation of a way of life founded and based
on armament and expansion? On a leveling machine of intervention
upon, and occupation of, sovereign Lands? The hammers and the
sickles? The Apocalypse of the thunderbolts, the pretext of the
NATOs, the pretense of the UNs, on a defunct Security Council and
the Armageddon of the blazing mushrooms? Whose ambition and
'Manifest Destiny' is rooted in the use of the scimitar and
embedded in the horror of the swastikas -- in genocide? The
unjustness of, and wastes in, terrorism and murder? In the symbol
of the phoenix bird afire? In the Cross aflame? On the word not
kept!
"Then this is the breaker of the covenant between Peace and Man,
Harmony and Grace, the usurper of our kin and children, Mr.
Kipling, the children that will be returned to us when hell
freezes over," the teacher writes.
End
***********************************************************************
GUTTERVISION REVIEW
by TAF
***********************************************************************
The
guerilla Resurrection
tv of Reality
is
Now
"ABC, NBC, and CBS
are the real anarchists,
subverting the public's
intelligence with Hallelujah!
their
version of reality."
-Frank Czajka
GutterVision -
tv the way it was meant to be -
but isn't.
So I got this note in my email that expoused the dark wonders of
GutterVision. I checked out the site and was intrigued. I contacted the main
guy there Frank Czajka and a little while later a video tape appeared in my
mail -
GutterVision - High Defiance Television.
Insert. Click. Play.
WARNING
This Program
may be offensive
or dangerous
if taken internally
for children
or
Politically correct
morally challenged
racially motivated
monitarily advanced
upscale oriented
sewer sucker
prayer spewing
religiously right
poodle owning
busted out the butt
of another pair of
slacks because you're
just too damn fat
in the head
Bastards
This is reality
This is GutterVision
I liked it. I liked the whole tape. Some truely disturbing scenes, great
graphics but beyond the shock, beyond the in-yer-faceness, beyond the
darkness, it was mainly one thing; REAL. This wasn't Disneyland's version of
contemporary America, full of sugar and spice and everyone nice pursuing
their own individual American dream, no, this was much more than that (or
much less if you are monitarily advanced and upscale oriented). This was a
tearing off of the facade, exposing the wizard, for all to see. This is
GutterVision. Post apocalyptic television. If all the shit were to hit the
fan come January 1, 2000, GutterVision is what we would experience. Brutally
honest, stark yet compassionate, harsh fucking reality. This is what we are
made of - and it ain't always pretty.
GutterVision reminds me of the works of Emergency Broadcast Network,
Throbbing Gristle, Psychick TV, NIN and the like. Cutting edge slices of
social pie that the mainstream goes out of their way to avoid/ignore/pretend
doesn't really exist. Everything from weird videos that eMpTytV would never
dare play to Robert Tilton - The Farting Preacher (this is a truely
hilarious bit that I recommend anyone with a sense of humour watch).
Distorted images fly by so quick at times that there is no way you can catch
everything. Suicides and cesarian sections intersperced with skulls and
crosses and decaying rodents.
Inner City Television.
Apocalypse Culture Television.
Like tantalizing, forbidden secrets that promise to reveal themselves if you
watch just a little closer, just a little longer... The rapid fire editing
suggests subliminal messages just beyond our grasp... An electronic carrot
dangled before our viewing cart. Television that challenges the viewers to
think for themselves. The only downside, in this reviewer's opinion, is that
GutterVision is not available in my area...
Available NOW on local cable in New York City, L.A. and Chicago.
g U T T E R v I S I O N
***********************************************************************
CONTRIBUTORS TO THIS ISSUE
***********************************************************************
Ron Callari is a freelance writer, publisher and self-proclaimed futurist
who has an office overlooking the Hudson River, the Big Apple and the
Statue of Liberty. When he isn't daydreaming about palm trees and
hammocks, he spends the bulk of his time writing articles pertaining to
business, the Internet, trends, travel and humour. His online credits
include articles in Career Magazine, iAgora, WebCentral and FolksOnline.
Ron has also been a consultant to the travel industry for the past 20
years. He has held marketing posts with Marriott International, Adam's
Mark Hotels and MeriStar Hotels and Resorts. In 1987, he founded
innovations, a sales and marketing firm. He feels that his corporate
upbringing has prepared him for being able to debate on any issue: pro,
con and/or vice-versa; sometimes, simultaneously.
He has been interviewed by print and electronic media, nation-wide
and appeared on network television (CBS This Morning Show) in a 1991
feature detailing the growing popularity of B&Bs for business travel.
This 15 minutes of fame amounted to a couple free lunches and one
autograph seeker (thanks Mom).
Ron received his B.A. from Kent State University and his Masters
degree from Cornell University (go Big Red!). He lives with his
significant-other, has two sons and resides in Jersey City, NJ (for no
other apparent reason than to have an office overlooking the Hudson
River, the Big Apple and the Statue of Liberty, allowing him to daydream
about palm trees and hammocks).
Ron is currently the publisher and editor of his own online webzine,
entitled: y-two-k.com, which features articles pertaining to Y2K and the
changes in our lifestyles as we approach the millennium. Ron also
partners with Chris Moujaes to produce the comic strip kidd millennium,
spotlighting the life and times of a narcissistic rugrat who thinks he is
a spokesperson for the next generation. "While kidd is currently in the
womb and won't be visible until January 1, 2000, his voice is heard
regularly in a recurring zany comic strip, online."
Ron appreciates the fact that the Big Guy put him on the planet at
this point in time, and enjoys communicating with anyone who will answer
his e-mails.
* * * *
Richard M. Grove - born in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada - 1953 is
now a Toronto artist and writer. Father of two teenage daughters
is Editor / Publisher of a paper based and internet based
Canadian poetry magazine called SEEDS. He edits and publishes
poetry books through his company Hidden Brook Press. Richard is
on the Board of the Canadian Poetry Association and holds the
title of National Coordinator and Co-Chair of the Anthology
Committee.
He has had almost 100 poems published in many different
periodicals around the world as well as having been published in
11 anthologies. His first book of poetry titled Beyond Fear and
Anger was released in March of 1997. His second book titled
Poems For Jack was launched in the fall of 1998. Send him a
line at writers@pathcom.com. or visit him at -
www.pathcom.com/~writers/kim-tai.htm
Richard is also the founder of the Canadian Poet Registry. An
archival information website that lists Canadian poets including
biographical information, their book titles and awards. One can
view this website at -
www.pathcom.com/~writers/registry.htm
Aside from Richards poetic and artistic interests he also is a
writer of spiritual / metaphysical articles. Some of his work can
be read at a website, that he maintains, called The Science of
being. It can be viewed at -
www.pathcom.com/~writers/science.htm
* * * *
Vasilis Afxentiou is an ESL (English as a Second Language)
teacher. He has been teaching English full-time for the last
fourteen years. Prior to that he worked as a Technical
Specifications Writer for seven years and as an Engineer for five
years.
Vasilis was born in Thessaloniki, Greece, went to university in
the United States where he received his degrees.
Vasilis' writing credits include published fiction and
non-fiction appearing both in Greece and in the USA. Stateside
publications he has written for are Greek Accent, National Herald
(Proini), and Crosscurrents. In Greece he's been published in
30-Days, Key Travel News, Greece's Weekly, Athena Magazine and
had a weekend travel column in The Athens Star newspaper.
Some e-zines that have puplished Vasilis' stories are The Domain,
Ibn Quirtaiba, Cosmic Visions, ThinkB, Aphelion, Dark Planet,
Basket Case, BORNmagazine, Aspiring Writer, ThinkB, Appalachians,
Newwords, Zine in Time and now TAF.
* * * *
Timothy Shannon Bullard has worked with various newspapers
including the Myrtle Beach Herald, Florence Morning News and the
Marion Star & Mullins Enterprise among others. He has published
numerous articles in publications ranging from The New Catholic
Miscellany to The Dead Mule to Pee Dee Magazine.
He has received several awards including; Certificate of
Commendation from The House of Representatives of South Carolina
(June 98); Recognition of Contributions from The House of
Representatives of South Carolina (March 98); Volunteer
Recognition from the City of Myrtle Beach (1997); First Place
Photography Award - Community Newspapers (1992).
His objective is "to secure a challenging position which utilizes
[his] professional training, personal skills and [his] commitment
to excellence."
* * * *
Frank Czajka in the man behind GutterVision which is described by
himself as follows: GUTTERVISION is an alternative high-culture
program geared for the Generation X audience. With its emphasis
on music, performance, art and artist interviews, GUTTERVISION
provides exposure to new acts in a format that reflects the true
world of each artist and the experience and expectations of the
fans. GUTTERVISION is the next step in America's underground
scene.
GUTTERVISION patrols the art trenches across the United States,
bringing to life the sights and sounds of alternative art, humor,
and drama. GUTTERVISION has an artistic freedom unavailable to
other so-called "cutting edge" programs and features
never-seen-before, never-to-be-seen-again music videos by The
Cramps, NIN, My Life With The Thrill Kill Cult, Danzig, Dead Can
Dance, and many others.
For those who are prepared, GUTTERVISION offers the opportunity
to be devoured by the night in the privacy of ones own home. for
further information GUTTERVISION "High Defiance Television" P.O.
BOX 16343 N. Hollywood, CA 91615 (818) 753-6668 Voice Mail
WWW.GUTTERVISION.COM WEBSITE
***********************************************************************
As always, Thanks Gary 03/09/96 RIP
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The Annihilation Fountain & TAF Copyright 1997-99 Neil MacKay
http://www.capnasty.org/taf/
the_annihilation_fountain@iname.com
