albionspeak: a draught of language

​Lesson 9:  Ma’at

1.  Last Words

            Let me offer my teachers’ final words to me from the ouija board—words I understood to be well-chosen (they all are), but particularly so once I gathered, only years later, that they were my teachers’ last.  I had no plans to part, no inkling at the time.  But I have not once spoken with Scribe or Advisor since that night.  
            Briefly hold these words, then, and consider them in light of what follows.  Did it really take me this long to understand?  

            [The 2005 ouija sessions took place on the East Coast, in Scribe’s & Advisor’s hometown, and these sessions coincided with my family’s cross-country road-trip (15,524 miles), during which, for a five-night stretch, my k-mates & I did ouija, while my wife & girls toured the nation’s capital.]  

SESSION 99:  5TH NIGHT, 7/31/05 (Excerpt)

                        We next turned to Don and asked him to consider our evening’s tarot card.

             [Beginning with Advisor’s joining us in 2004, drawing a random tarot card now

             served as our invocation.]

Nine Swords, Nine Men

22.        Q:       Thank you, Jane.  Don, would you comment on 9 SWORDS?
             A:      IT IS AFTER ALL A KIND OF LADDER WITH ALMOST    

                                    UNBEARABLY KEEN STEPS    IS IT [NO]T?

                        [Scribe] records in the originals our “bitter laughter” over this response.

23.        Q ([Scribe]):  I think we’ve all felt that sometime this year.
             A:       IT IS A NOTION NEAR [THE] CORE OF [THE] TEACHING 

                                    & HELPS US UNDERSTAND WHY SORCERY IN OUR

                                    SENSE IS NEVER COMMON

                        Nine is a magic number for us, its greatest touchstone being [Scribe]’s

             and my Nine Men, the 81 tasks that bring us to flight.  As I mention in the intro

             [of the transcripts], I had completely lost track of where on this sequence I could

             place myself.  I couldn’t for the life of me figure out what counted as a step. 

             Recall, the Nine Men are named from the final lines of [Don]’s own poem….

                                   Before you come, 
                                An old monk has to dream about an anchor,
                                A tiger in Sumatra has to die,
                                Nine men have to die in Borneo.

24.        Q:       Nine swords, nine men?
             A:       [YES]    AND [THE] NINE MEN WHO HAVE TO DIE

                                    ARE IMAGES OF WHAT [THE] FLYER IS TO LEAVE BEHIND

                        [Albion] HAS KILLED FOUR
                        [Scribe]  HAS KILLD THREE
                        ABOUT [Advisor] WE WILL SPEAK IN TIME TO COME

                        Four men down was good news, as I could only count 3+ for sure.  

             As for [Scribe], well, we didn’t understand.  After all, his nine men were long

             dead; he’d earned his wings years ago.

25.        Q:       Did [Scribe] not kill all nine, in order to become a flyer?
             A:       [YES]   YOU EVADED TWO AND ENLISTED [THE] AID

                                    OF FELLOW WARRIORS FOR [THE] FINAL FOUR

                        I  REALISE  I SPEAK AS A SPHYNX   BUT ITS QUITE TRUE   

                                    NONE[THE]LESS

                        A distinction not known to us previously:  to kill vs. to evade vs. to

             enlist help from others.  Clearly I’ve not tried any but the most direct approach.

26.        Q ([Scribe]):  It follows that there’s more than one way to defeat or “leave

                       behind” the 9 Swords.
             A:      EXACTLY   ONLY SOME NEED TO BE FACED EDGE TO EDGE /
                       OF FUR[THE]R STRATEGIES  I  LEAVE YOU TO ADVISE

                                   ONE ANO[THE]R

                       Thinking about Don’s poem (or rather that of the other [Don]),  I

             decided to bring up my dream The Tiger from January, in which I am clawed

             in the leg by a great white tiger, but I wind up dancing with this dangerous animal.

[Albion’s] Tiger Now Visible

27.        Q ([Albion]):  Don, I feel less frightened by my tiger.  Am I fooling myself?
             A:      [YES] & [NO]   A TIGER THAT IS TRULY EVADED OR       

                                   TRANSFORMED    AS INTO AN ALLY   IS NO LONGER

                                   A THREAT
                       [THE] RISK IS REALLY IGNORING [THE] TIGER

28.        Q ([Albion]):  Has my tiger died?
             A:      RA[THE]R IT IS NOW VISIBLE  & TANGIBLE /
                       THIS IS A MAJOR ADVANCE FOR YOU /
                       IT IS NOT [THE] END    IT IS A BELIEVABLE MIDDLE

                       Echoes of Winston Churchill here?  (Is this a war?)  For the record, I  

            was never asserting I was at an end; I was just using the language of Don’s    

            poem in an effort to understand.
                       While on the subject, I decided to turn to what might have been a trivial

            subject, even ridiculous, had it not so thoroughly screwed up my life:   my

            own leg injuries, particularly my calf muscles in both legs, which not only pull

            and/or tear when I sprint or exert myself (I’ve had to give up soccer ), but which

            have now started to rip without warning during slow jogs and even normal

            walking…
                       [These calf injuries—which had plagued me for at least five years, and

            took another five to heal—only became an “ouija issue” for me (i.e., one to raise

            at the board) during our epic road-trip:  Just before our departure my right calf

            “blew up” on me merely while walking to breakfast, a bad injury.  Even ten

            days later (or so) I found myself seriously hampered in New Orleans following

            Tropical Storm Cindy, limping for miles in pain, as the streetcars were without

            power.  That was bad enough, but the clincher came three days later on a

            day-trip to Cumberland Island, GA.[1]  Still limping, I rented four crappy bikes

            (they all were), and we spent hours riding through sego palms & getting

            sunburned on the beautiful Atlantic.  Then, when it came time to head back to

            the dock—to meet the ferry or be stranded for the weekend without our

            belongings—my bicycle chain twice fell off, rusted through.  Then Deirdre’s

            broke apart altogether.  And I had to run for 3? miles at top speed to hold the

            ferry.  I had no pain at all!  In fact, I was completely healed, at least for the

            duration of the trip.  WTF!?]

Pain as a Reminder

29.       Q ([Albion]):  Don, please comment.  The tiger of my dream clawed my leg;

                         [another Albion figure] is wounded in the leg; my own legs keep

                         “exploding” on me often for no apparent reason.
             A:       I  ALBION SPEAK

                         [THE] WOUND IS MY REMINDER TO YOU & MY SIGN FOR

                                     YOU TO REMEMBER TO TURN TOWARD ME
                         DO [NO]T SAY   I  CANNOT MEET YOU AT [THE] SACRED PLACE
                         SAY [THE] PAIN IS TO REMIND ME  I  AM IN A SACRED PLACE

                                     WHER I  AM  OR NOT AT ALL

                         THIS IS MY SIGN TO YOU   O  ALBION BELOW            

                         Shit.  I guess any explanation makes me grateful.  And I suppose it’s

             Albion’s only way to communicate with me at this time, as I’m so dense.  But

             what a bummer!

30.        Q ([Advisor]):   Greetings, Albion.  I have had similar occurrences with the

                         scarring on my arm.  Is there something I should know?
             A:        [YES]   AFTER [THE] SCARS CAME [THE] ADVISOR
                         [THE] RETURN OF PAIN TO [THE] LONG HEALD ARM IS

                                     [THE] ADVISORS REMINDER TO YOU AS WELL
                         [THE] SCARS ARE GIFTS / USE [THE]M WELL

                         I  ALBION  GREET YOU & BID YOU THRIVE

                         So [Advisor] too!  (There’s that word again, “thrive.”)

31.        Q ([Albion]):  Albion, while I’ve got you here is there anything more you’d

                         like to tell me?
             A:       IT IS WORK  &  IT IS WORK THAT YOU CAN DO
                         THAT IS ALL – ALBION

            [Josef our master then entered the conversation at A#32 with a few “normal,” though redactable Q & A exchanges until A#36,  when abruptly, in another signature, singular, over-the-top pronouncement, he closed the 2005 sessions.  (I’ve likened Josef’s final words to Bach’s final chord in the St. Matthew’s Passion.)  We never got to say our good-byes…
           […which I take for a clue (wink wink).  “If the shoe fits, fuck it.”]

​

2.  All Done

            It was never my intent to write a memoir; my focus has been on teaching only. The substance of my life, while more wonderful than any me could ever dream up, could hardly interest any reader. Yes, I’ve traveled a lot, seen much of the world, and my ouija life makes me unique; but outside of these experiences I’ve led a remarkably stable, boring life. My teaching & parenting careers proceeded smoothly, successfully, entirely without incident. Ouija, of course, is amazing, but it could never make a movie. I sometimes think of my daughters lying in bed upstairs while Scribe & I worked deep into the night. What did they hear? Very little actually, just our muted tones in discussions between questions, our official questions voiced aloud. I don’t think we even voiced our teachers’ responses. The planchette would exit the board stage-left toward me, and Scribe would then slide me the steno pad, which I’d absorb silently.
            I have led a remarkable inner life, yes, and feel that I’ve captured much of it here, though not by plan. Rather just as we need to incarnate somewhere to perceive existence—just as we often need words & language to think through certain ideas—my life was needed here to anchor the reader in a grounded example. I am, in fact, a rather perfect exemplar of my paradigm, precisely because my life has been so overtly normal & boring (by Hollywood standards). But importantly, because one example only could be turned into a prototype, then an archetype, and then, God forbid, into an idol, Scribe’s very different model path was needed here as well. And to be clear, while I am in most ways a very normal guy, Scribe is not. No one can expect to “be like Scribe.” That’s like expecting to be Mozart or Shakespeare (or, for that matter, Don or our “fourth living member”). And Advisor defies all these models completely. The point is, every aspiring flyer has to make their own model. And every soul, flyer or otherwise, must choose. I am so grateful, so humbled by my good fortune. I want everyone to have a chance.
            What follows in this section sums up my final step, the crown of my work, though hardly triumphant. I’m a flyer now; so what? It means I can work. I present my triumph as I found it then (minus the boring parts), because I want to emphasize what really counts. I think of Vilansit’s prosaic dismissal of auras as “like sweat or hair.” Yes, flight is a big deal. Maybe I still have something important to do; maybe my work can change the world. But as a flyer now, who feels every day he’s coming closer to eternal truths, who now regularly receives revelations—not as a Blake, not as a John the Divine—but rather in a form more resembling a Euclidean proof, as “joy, knowledge, and understanding”—let me stress the most beautiful truth on Earth I know: There is no task more sacred on this planet than parenting. This applies to everyone, and after all I’ve laid out, the reason should be quite clear: The fate of the world is an important task, something worth caring about, fighting for, and is vital to all we know & love, but it’s only a projection. To parent a child, however, is to be the caretaker of an immortal, infinite soul at its most vulnerable, to shape him or her into a beautiful independent Individual, without imposing or overly imprinting, without knots of codependency. My daughters are indeed special wonderful beings, but so are all daughters & sons. This is not for flyers only; and if you really understand the absolute commitment undertaken, then you know it means foregoing all other priorities & temptations for a quarter century. It is not generally fun, and it is absolutely not for everyone. Consider most carefully.…

            This email below to Audrey marks the moment of my own delayed self-conscious recognition, over a month after completing my Nine. Twenty years younger, Audrey is a fellow teacher/parent/thinker, who still leads the life I finally left behind. She also was the recipient of my email mentioned in Lesson 8, before I found myself typing “Gatherings.

from <albionspeaks@gmail.com>
to  audrey <…@…> 
9/25/2018 3:45 PM

<subject:  concert?>


Sorry, Audrey, that we didn't get together before your insanity restarted.  How's school?  I hope all is well for you & your family.  I'm glad you made it to the wedding.  I hope you had fun.  It seemed like a good wedding to me, although I remember very little, since I worked through most of the day & evening, late into the night & days that followed.  Recall, we had many campers on our property, and [my wife’s] mother & step-dad were staying with us (needing constant help).

I'm in recovery.  That is, post-wedding absence/withdrawal/exhaustion is coming to an end.  I really did kill myself for a year to get ready for the wedding, ruining my body (groin & butt) with all my gardening.  I'm trying to get back to running, but I can only walk a few miles before pain sets in. I push through the pain, but I also just can't lift my leg or extend my knee, pure mechanics I can't crack.  The only good thing is that the pain & dysfunction go away by the next day.  So post-wedding I just couldn't do any more gardening (emotionally)—all the way up until yesterday's lawn-mowing, which felt good….

…And finally everyone went home.  And Albion told me I was done, that my final 81st step on my Nine Men pyramid was finished with the wedding itself.  I certainly worked hard enough on it, and it came off (despite its being the only summer day with rain!).[2]  Now to be clear, Albion told me [this] in a not-so-reliable internal dialogue, which range [on a scale of credibility] from cricket-bullshit to certainty-confirmed-with-synchronicity.  In this case Albion told me to expect a confirming "artifact," which, if I actually was a flyer, I assumed would come in the form of a poem or an essay.  But I got something different:

I refer you to my website's Lesson 3 on four-leaf clovers.  I use them to innocuously introduce flight, as they have a long & bizarre history in my family, particularly among the women in my line.  They find shamrocks everywhere, all the time.  Rhiannon has literally found over 1000 four-leaf clovers.  [My wife] & I, however, looking over the same pastures—and spending serious time looking—had never found one.  Well, you guessed it:  It was halftime for Man City.​[3]  I went to clean the dog pee from the garage and noticed a new swath of tall clovers across the near-lawn, the patch that I most often stare at, since I'm there all the time.  I said aloud, "Friends," (namely, my circle) "this would be a nice time for a sign."  And boom!  There it was.  Wow!

Are you impressed?  Well, I was pleased, but hardly in awe.  The fact that I had never found a four-leaf clover until then was itself more of a statistical miracle than my having found my first.  So after the game I tested my miracle.  I went back to the same spot and challenged lightning to strike twice.  Immediately I found another!  Then a third!  The entire search for both took maybe fifteen seconds  Okay, I gasped.  This counts.

I wrote an email to my girls, finished, went outside, and found a fourth.  I talked to [my wife] on the phone and found a fifth.  Holy Shit.  No more than two minutes of total search time.  Then I remembered, or rather connected something:  My mom just died.  Nine days earlier, a welcome event without drama.  All my family agree, this event was Nana's doing.  I see her laughing.[4]

So the wedding was indeed the biggest event of my life, the event I have most aspired to for my entire life.  Young girls often dream of their wedding.  My great dream was never romantic, but, yes, it was indeed of marrying off my eldest daughter.  How weird is that!  But it's not weird at all when you understand who I am, a father first, but also a psychic being, who knew all along that [Deirdre’s wedding] would be his biggest day.  After all, three of the biggest measures of my life, each over 20 years in the project-making, all came to fruition at the same moment, only one of which I anticipated:

            1)  In marrying off my eldest I completed my life's primary task.  

                  I am free, especially since I find Deirdre's & Ben's union to be

                  an act of true good.  (Sorry, Rhiannon.  Second kids don't count.)  

                  28 years in the making.

            2)  I completed my Nine Men pyramid, 81 fucking steps, a totally

                  different life track, but essential to my core.  

                   22.5 years of the hardest work.

            3)  My search for Jane ended (I believe).  Literally at the wedding site,

                  right then.  This has not been confirmed and won't be for some time,

                  but, yes, I think so.  I spilled my Cup, and she drank it up—amazing!

                  25 years of waiting.  I await confirmation before I say more.

So here I'm writing you this tome, much as I summarized my life in an email to you which began Lesson [8].  Apparently, Audrey, I need you as my outside-observer friend, the objective voice of reasonableness, when I'm caught in absence.  This is a perfect illustration:  Here I'm listing the "greatest events of my life," including the possible fact that I'm now a flyer, and yet I'm feeling basically shitty, listless, just now coming off my post-wedding collapse.  Without your face I've not before so laid out these facts like this; I've just been "depressed" (i.e., empty, feeling like a loser).  That's what absence is, even for flyers.[5]

The bottom line is I still don't know if I'm a flyer.  I don't feel different; I'm not dreaming; I can't see trees, at least not yet.  But I don't really doubt my writing anymore, which has one element of scariness to it.  To fly is to believe in flying and vice-versa.  Which is great, and now when I write, I have good reason to believe in my flying.  My only worry:  That I confuse flight with truth.  Flight is a kind of truth, much as great fiction holds great truth.  But I want to keep clean & separate fact & fiction, at least in life.  This is not easy, because the line between fact & fiction can & does change.

Here's the big surprise so far, partly why I'm depressed:  Flight is ability, means, method, measure…  That's all.  Consider what that means for me:  I've worked my entire adult life toward achieving flight, focused on that end, and now it's ended.  Now what?  Flight has no answer.  Flight is means only.  I am grateful to Albion for giving me my website's final Lesson [9] as a clear & immediate project.  I have something still to do, something important.  I also have immersed myself in researching our Indonesia trip, flying until I'm literally dizzy & need to get up & move around.  But these are immediate tasks and tell me nothing of my future life.

I have no idea what I am supposed to do.  I've worked my way through (at a minimum) 81 assigned tasks, each delivered from on High like a fucking Commandment.  And now that's over.  Albion says I'm free.  I get to do what I want.  It'll take work, of course, always work, always learning.  Will I have the self-discipline without my task-master?

I do know what I want to do, of course.  I want to teach the mystical reality of eternity that I finally understand so well.  I feel without it—without an understanding of our existence in eternity—the world has no chance to transform itself in time to save itself from the catastrophic environmental tipping point [nigh].  But how do I do this?  Only two people have acknowledged to me that they've even read my website.  That could change, but it's not reasonable to think it will.  I am, btw, not disappointed, as I am completely used to being anonymous.  I remain regardless extremely proud of my website and believe it's my greatest achievement, outside of having a good family.  So, bottom line, I have no idea how to teach what I know.…



…Speaking of music:  
October 27, Saturday night, of course.  Same series; same schedule.  Is it Handel?

I hope you can make it.  Let me know.  You'll need the break.  Good luck with your heavy load.

[Albion]

            So I became a flyer and have proved it to myself enough now I have no doubt. Cool. But again, so what? The world is falling apart, and my part so far in saving it has amounted to very little. I accept that I might die tomorrow from coronavirus, from a car wreck or random shooting, as many flyers have vanished without trace. Anand in particular achieved not only flight, but “arrival”—meaning “enlightenment”—only to die soon thereafter. But I’m an albion who trained as a teacher for 32 years. Surely this reservoir of experience can be put to good use. I see the future—not as an oracle, but as necessity—because I see the past and I have grasped the straight-line silk of history. This is not a random timeline we’re on. We are not all here by accident. There’s work to be done, a matter of both survival & wondrous beauty; and I invite you, dear Reader, to join me in this task.

​
​

[25] I am forever amused that most Christian conservatives, who view gun ownership as a divine right, don’t seem to acknowledge Jesus’s clear endorsement of taxation.

​[15] No one I would know personally, though, as the Jewel Net specifically includes no oracles—also no warriors and no builders.  I will reveal that among the few members I know, there are several writers.  But it would be wrong to assume that writer constitutes a “role” of any kind.  Writer might be a role, or it might constitute a measure chosen by a person when playing a role. 

For the record, this is not the actual likeness of Josef, as Blake's Albion is of me.  We were informed the face is actually that of Blake's beloved younger brother, Robert.

[28] And for the record, papyrus waste in the Nile delta (not the arid desert) would leave no archeology.

[5]​ Both Scribe & Advisor had to be told by their teachers to  take a moment to feel good  about their accomplishments.  I accept that this is good practice, but why?  Celebrating is more than mere reflection & memorializing.  Celebration often serves a vital social function.  But I have no one with whom to celebrate, and I memorialize through my writing, which is not a celebration.  I need an excuse to celebrate, but when I have the best excuse, I don’t see the point.

[20] Historians estimate Egypt’s Middle Kingdom population as roughly 2 million, reaching perhaps 3-5 million during the New Kingdom and 5-7 million during Ptolemaic period.

​§10/26/18

​

[26] To nip any speculation in the bud, while the Jewel Net is indeed “special” because it is composed strictly of flyers and indeed includes some of the world’s great souls, Josef foremost, we have no monopoly on genius; and undoubtedly most great souls belong to other karasses. Of the flyers I rattle off above, Josef is the only soul I know personally in time, and I just assume, in the absence of knowledge, the rest belong to other groups. Early in our sessions Scribe & I asked at the board if Beethoven were in our karass. “JEWEL NET IS SMALLER” came our Guide’s reply. “Smaller than what?” we had to ask. “THAN NINETEENTH CENTURY” (That’s a daimonic joke, btw…)

4. Cat's Cradle

           Before moving on, let’s review the assigned homework from Lesson [8], returning to the author & novel who gave us our original k-word, karass.  From the time I first read it in high school, Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle has occupied a place in my mind like no other book—including, I note, Slaughterhouse Five, Vonnegut’s acclaimed anti-war masterpiece.  Cat’s Cradle is a short & wild thrill-ride of pinprick chapters—aleph dots all over a map—with the weirdest sci-fi plot to tie it all together, naturally or not, in the end of the world.  But what is Cat’s Cradle about?  I can’t believe most readers have a clue (do I?).  It feels & plays out like Disneyland on acid, but it clings to the soul like Shakespeare, like ice-nine.  Vonnegut is no mere entertainer.
            
            Here’s a clue or hint inviting the reader to think ahead:  Among many subjects, I also taught writing for five years & more, pure language composition, mostly expository—which can be deeply rewarding for both student & teacher, but is so demanding on teacher time (versus time with family), that I jumped to math to survive my career.  (English classes should be limited to 15 students.)  I found among my young writers a particular threshold was critical to becoming a real writer, a threshold only a few middle schoolers could get to; but if they could reach it, their door was open wide.  It concerns theme, and it arose most regularly in class, as a topic & intended target, while working through my assigned book reports, a many-stepped process involving several drafts:  Can a child summarize a novel without retelling its plot?  That is, what is a book about?  Girls, who mature physically earlier, were more likely to make this leap, from the concrete to abstract, whereas my “little” boys not only had to recount blow-by-blow each concrete fact, they’d often get so worked up in the retelling they’d fall into first-person singular, becoming their protagonist.  As much as we’d work on this, I knew many kids were simply not physiologically, neurologically ready to make this cognitive leap.  It might come later, in high school for many—through an unsung English teacher who has no life—though I know also many adults personally who never cross this threshold boundary.  And you do too, dear Reader, close to you…  (And these adults vote.)

            The idea of a karass, of course, is not original.  Weren’t the Freemasons & Shriners & thus half the Founding Fathers of our nation, in truth, mystics of a secret order?[13]  They followed rites & rules traced to a sacred, ancient origin—the founding of the Second Temple[14]—that is, if we can trust the provenance, complete with initiation ceremonies & secret handshakes.  Look at the back of a greenback dollar, with its pyramid & Horus eye, and consider these were the symbols chosen for our modern nation.  Really?  (My own great-grandfather, I recount with naive pride, was a 32nd degree Knights Templar—which sounds almost as silly as requiring an apprentice to ascend an 81-step pyramid.)  I’m not making conspiracy theories here, btw.  I’m just saying the idea of a sacred order is almost a cliché; suicide bombers also believe in their connections & righteous purpose.  But Vonnegut provides details about karasses that you won’t find elsewhere, many that our teachings confirm as clues or signs or fact.  And I find it significant that Vonnegut continued to speak & expand his karass vision & lexicon for decades after completing Cat’s Cradle.  Which means he didn’t regard it as pure crap.  I doubt the Shriners spoke like this.
            So what’s with cat’s cradles themselves?  What about checkers?

                        … in The Books of Bokonon he tells us, “Man created the

            checkerboard; God created the karass.’  By that he means that a karass

            ignores national, institutional, occupational, familial, and class boundaries.

            Let’s again acknowledge the surface, “high school” message here:  Vonnegut tells us, yes, that people clump in tribal associations, which are circumstantial and generally stupid.  (Such pointless human clumps—from harmless Hoosiers to nation states—Vonnegut would later call granfalloons; i.e., "false karasses.”)  People are really Individuals (those who aren’t robots), and they have eternal bonds to other Individuals.  These eternal bonds may or may not also be stupid—Vonnegut keeps mum on this point—but at least they have a common purpose.  Karass connections, therefore, are the real connections (wink wink), which link disparate people across space & time, unaware of their web.  If you draw the lines that link these people—like a criminal detective who pins points of evidence all over his office wall, and then strings yarn among his pins—you get a network or nexus, one picture of a karass. Vonnegut composed his novels (some of them) in just such a manner, with lines of connection all over his wall.  Stare at these patterns long enough, add genius & schizophrenia to the mix, and you might just recall a strange game from childhood, involving string & lines & fingers and a whole universe you could hold in your hands, changing the webs in form & appearance, but never actually changing anything.  What was the object again?  Is cat’s cradle even a game?

            Checkers isn’t hard either, though it’s not just for kids.  Vonnegut gifts us this simplest image of the human journey:  Life, he says, is a game of few rules.  Picture yourself (your inserted avatar or figure) as an individual checker.  If you can, you’ll find your options in life are pretty limited.  Your  place is your cosmic checkerboard, which includes more than 64 squares or even 81 ranks, but is finite, as all games must be.  You can only move forward (as in time), and at most you will have but two squares to choose from.  The early game, then, seems pretty open—you have options—but then things quickly bog down:  There’s a scrum in the middle, or you find yourself sidelined by an immovable object, a foe or an ally you trail in support.  Perhaps in a magic moment—a prepared opportunity or one crafted from forethought—you jump, physically disconnect from the board and fly briefly o’er your blocking opponent (and thus score points by making him absent).  But what is the goal?
            Vonnegut again spells out nothing about the purpose of a karass, whether or not it’s stupid.  (The Jewel serves the Good.)  He just says it’s organized around a common hub or axis.  Does a cat’s cradle even have a center?  Though string symmetries may crisscross at a central visual point, this marks only & exactly what’s between one’s hands, what you’ve bracketed off for measure.  That’s not the full net, just as the visible stars afford us but a fraction of our galaxy.  A piece of infinity cannot be extrapolated to the whole.  Thus, even those of us who can name our center still cannot truly know its Good (or dare claim its will).  But we do have clear direction, focused work at hand as means to an end:in life to press forward to the final rank.  For at the end of the board you’re crowned a King, and strict forward motion ends.  The rules then change, or they fail to apply.  Kings are flyers.

            Kings can go anywhere, will fly where they will, though the game is far from over.  A flyer himself, Vonnegut marveled at his own free will and couldn't conceive of flight without it.  Does flying reveal free will, or is it the reverse?  
            A novel experiment:  In Breakfast of Champions Vonnegut writes himself into his book’s wild climax, entering the long-anticipated apocalypse as a cool witness behind sunglasses.  The apocalypse occurs in a sleazy restaurant lounge for third-rate mobsters (a world where Trump could wallow).  Vonnegut casually sips his drink while the scene he’s created ex nihilo plays out like a train wreck in slo-mo.  All seems inevitable; everyone’s a robot, all except its author off his meds, who seems both smug & mystified by his free-will creation. 

            Kilgore Trout is there, of course, the author’s longtime alter-ego, also a writer, and there’s some doubt as to his robot status.  Could a crafted character, of a certain critical mass of words & memes & wisdom, say, acquire free will?  If a writer gives life, can that life give life in turn?  After all, all projections—all worlds & books & games & dreams—are shams, incomplete, teasing us with mere implication.  In Trout’s own prolific, though fictional & dubious writing career (publishing sci-fi novellas in porn magazines), surely some of his bullshit held up as eternal truth. Could even his yarns & strings of words seed new worlds?  Who fed Shakespeare all his lines?  For what sticks post-melee to the restaurant ceiling, could one day become the Word of God, if God so chose to ply his pen—and if nothing hits the ceiling fan. 
            Lots of Vonnegut books include the end of world.  It’s his endpoint,  Point B, which pins us to A.  Vonnegut wants us to remember that every thing ends:  Get used to the fact; it comes with the paradigm.  Maybe then you’ll find it easier then to see past Trump-gold & glitter & granfalloons to know what really matters is eternal (though he rarely lists specifically):  love, beauty, “truth,” reason, compassion… (nudge nudge).  These are what permeate Vonnegut’s sardonic pleading voice:  “Wake up, for you’re going to die!”  Social satire is Vonnegut’s vehicle, his dark glasses disguise.  Karasses are the eyes behind.  
            Thus Vonnegut calls out the end of the world not at the end of his novels, but closer to the middle, “halftime for Man City,” so we can be ready when it comes.  

             And here I am at last a King inserted in this game.  I come prepared now, I think to prepare others.  But I’m not wearing any glasses; and I’m not wearing clothes.  For I don’t plan to die in my sleep.  I want to be there  when it happens, knowing the end of the world really means very little.  And where & when is there exactly?  Not the final whimper of extinction, when the shower lights go out & fathers crush their children for air—prior to that, when there was still a chance to avoid catastrophe.  Pain is certain.
            Here’s how another book begins:  “Listen:  Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time.”  Billy was a King. 

§10/24/18

[2] To be exact, beyond pulling blackberry for months I also elevated a large section of lawn and designed & built from scratch a raised-bed garden for vegetable growing, something permanent & nice to look at. While many raised gardens are far better, this was a new & different challenge for me, worthy of a task. (So, dear Reader, you don’t have to write Hamlet or Don Quixote to test yourself. You just have to challenge yourself to do your very best.)

[23] eg., Inanna in Ur = Isis in Memphis = Ishtar in Akkad = Astarte in Biblos = Aphrodite in Athens = Venus in Rome

[8] I learned to scuba dive on Bunaken, but in so doing unlocked my tiger in its most terrifying form. Before each dive I was an utter wreck, hyperventilating in fear as I never have before. Each time I’d have to wait five or ten minutes to gather myself, making sure I was past my panic. The moment I hit the water, however, I was fine and able to immerse in the unparalleled beauty.

[16] The archeological evidence coincides with another geologic event, the Younger Dryas, when a giant meltwater lake in Canada suddenly emptied and blocked the thermohaline oceanic conveyer belt (the Gulf Stream), which distributes cold & warm water, as well as salt, evenly around the globe. The result of this: an instant ice age in the north, warmth in the south, and no doubt pressure on any humans at the time.

[12] Yes, long-distance Vietnamese buses often come with seats reclined to the floor, seats which never approach vertical.

An image of ma'at: This represents the moment in the immediate afterlife when one's heart is weighed against a feather, where the feather itself represents ma'at and is sometimes depicted as the goddess Ma'at herself seated on the scale. Vilansit told us, however, that the feather actually represents flight.

[13] Washington, Franklin, Revere, Hancock, Marshall…

 [24] at least 98% of Homo sapiens’ existence on Earth…

 [21] In the iconographic “weighing of the heart against the feather” (shown above), which was the pivotal afterlife event for each Egyptian soul & depicted in most tombs, the nomes were painted as 42 gods who served as jury witnesses.

[18]  Thus, I conclude that Josef’s pharaoh was Amenemhat III, also known as Moersis after his construction of the Mer-Wer, placing Josef in the latter half of the 19th century BCE. I insist with extreme caution, however: These are my suspicions & intuitions only, entirely unconfirmed. I call this fiction.

[4]  I am not trying to parody Camus’s The Stranger here. I am not indifferent. My mom had been lost to Alzheimer’s senility for 4-5 years, not recognizing anyone & unable to communicate.

from a million miles away (literally)

9. The Word

            What is the point? Does it matter how we abstractly view time & civilization, especially when confronted with the endless in-your-face violence of history, such as my present tense pestilence (11/1/20)? Historians today—including those seeking overview, not just the specialists immersed in one period or culture—are viewed by most people as edified masturbators, eggheads divorced from modern needs & reality, useless. How can history help us, whatever its geometry—whether point, circle, or line—at a time when Donald Trump, our soulless exemplar, flames our moral democratic norms—so mortally ashamed Barack Obama is a better man? Get real.
            Let’s highlight the existential division of content & context. Jesus said it best:

                       Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s. And unto

           to ​God the things that are God’s.[25] (Matthew 20:21)

             Jesus reminds us that living souls always dwell in two distinct places: finite physical reality—constrained by bodies & brains & death & taxes—versus infinite eternity as souls. It is vital that these two domains not be conflated. It is also vital to know it’s the soul who has eternal value, while the world is mere projection, where we play & act out our roles. 
             And this (Cartesian) dualism, I emphasize, in no way diminishes life; it should only enhance it with meaning & purpose. If our life roles & knotted taxes aren’t real, then what else is? Where else might we find meaning, except through some different life? (Again, it’s your choice). Here in spacetime we give ourselves the chance to gather & arrange & become our identities—not to establish some set soul figure once-and-for-all—but rather to work through an ever-evolving process of creation & higher-order functions, a template that incorporates change into itself: as flotsam is to locomotion, as velocity is to acceleration. To what end? No end at all, but direction, “whither we must travel”: I call this the Good.

            I must acknowledge too late in albionspeak that I have no room in this volume for human history (duh), which I frame around the rise of individuality, Promethean flame, & climactic climate change. Nor, dear Reader, can I offer here a full course on dreaming or sorcery—which are huge in terms of ability & discipline & powers—but have proved largely trivial in the mind of a ma’at master like me. Abilities can be used or abused, like any technology, but wise thinking lies outside all these powers & “stuff.” Let me finish this course, then, by presenting Josef’s personal legacy, the profound start of everything, and let the reader play out the simulations themself, so that by the time I finish writing Volume Two, dear Reader, you’ll be ready for the scripted, brutal necessity: History has purpose; we need to pass through this. Volume Two will surely take me years to finish, as I will have to research extensively to travel & tie Josef’s Genesis thread to Homer & Plato, Jesus & Augustine, right down to Gutenberg, Luther, and Shakespeare.[26] And while I include the names of famous Western super-flyers who each contributed enormously, I insist that the history playing out over the last 3800 years is not of, by, or for these flyers themselves, who live & fly in every epoch regardless. What’s happening now is for everyone, for the greater Good—our biggest leap forward, from fallen Cro-Magnon toward a more-perfect union—though in immediate terms, it’s abject global survival.

            Josef was a man, an amazing flyer who rose to the zenith as few have in the annals, but nonetheless was someone who suffered deeply in life, who had doubts and made mistakes. Knotted to his time like everyone, Josef gathered his primal metaphors & identity initially from his broad but limited life experience, which came, of course, pre-filtered through the Bronze Age paradigm. No surprise, nearly everyone Josef encountered—all except strange Abraham’s line—worshipped idols, from peasant slaves all the way to Pharaoh himself. Such literal, concrete beliefs, as I’ve tried to show, cut people off from eternity, from their own souls, which are abstract. 
            Now consider the fully-weighted scale: It’s one thing to praise the cosmic order as cycles of life & death & flood & harvest; it’s much harder to reconcile that these same ma’at cycles turned the cogwheels on the very worst of humanity: unending brutality, superstitious madness, slavery, sacrifice,… Far worse, of course, idol worship led people to give up their identity & free will in submission, thus complacency, suffocating their souls to sleep, whether in devotion to pharaohs, one’s family gods, or the many million genii loci who geographically dotted the fertile Nile (think Cartesian) plain. Individual souls, Josef saw clearly, must move themselves. All the while for years & dark decades he was forced to witness, even serve up firsthand, the worst manifestations of false worship—senseless waste & cruelty, lessons lived & suffered but never learned, forgotten instantly—and for much of his life Josef quietly despaired.
            We speak of “perfect storms.” I think of Josef, among just a few others, as “perfect forms,” ideal figures who arrived at exactly the right place in spacetime, whose soul played out a perfect life: Jesus, Lincoln, Solon, Shakespeare, Jiddu Krishnamurti, whom I personally saw & heard speak three times—once with Scribe, once with my wife—“great men,” we might say, but surely Vilansit represents for me a perfect woman, too, though neither I nor the world know of her achievements. Notice, I do not insist that these people lived saintly lives or that they’re omniscient & godlike. Everyone “earthly,” Josef told us explicitly, comes knotted with ego, as each perfect human has undoubtedly sinned & suffered & fucked up in life, but each one learned and moved on. I just think they played their cards as well as they can be played. Sometimes you’re dealt a shitty hand. It is your soul who deals your cards, every card a gift. Don’t accept your shit & suffering as immutable or deserved, as untouchables in India, for example, were taught to bow down. Take what you’re given and play beautifully.
            But some people, indeed, do have special cards to play, fantastic hands, and we all benefit from their beautiful lives. Josef was such a master. Of course he suffered plenty in his well, cast there by his cruel & stupid brothers. (And Josef pulls few punches when it comes to Simeon, son of a lesser mother.) And yes, Josef knew comfort in his darkest hours, so Scribe & I were explicitly reminded, as he was born to flight and thus was never alone. But as a child he couldn’t grasp the necessity of his trials. Nor was Josef ever in life capable of seeing history laid out like cards on a table—no human can, not Jesus, not the Buddha, because there is no ob past or future. We see what we need to, on a need-to-know basis, and even then few fathom what they’re shown. 
            Just remember, dear Reader, free will must be honed, cared for, nurtured: For what fun is a game if you know all the outcomes? What new lessons could be learned? Nor can freedom derive from any algorithm, even one that employs large random numbers, like a slot machine or karmic roulette wheel; these simulations roll in filaments only. We live via our fibers—which means we exist by actively participating in our discontinuous living choices, being present to each other to share & collide. Otherwise we’re just absent, and the story rolls on without us. Dear Reader, how would like your life to count? How do you count your life?

            The Word came slowly to Josef, starting from the moment he first found his brothers begging in Egypt. Why had they come? Yes, they needed food, and that’s one kind of necessity—like following suit, the rules of the game. But Josef saw further that the game itself might be bended and that he had the rarest chance to alter everything, indeed the world itself. Not knowing his course at first, he sent his brothers back for Benjamin—with a silver cup, so the story tells us, and then he waited: The Jewel would point which dream to open.
            And the rest is history, literally, the line I will trace in Volume Two. It began in the Nile delta, in Goshen, where good land (freshly cleansed) was granted to one good man’s family and where by decree his blessed, lucky kin were kept apart to grow & multiply & keep the Word, which was written. Josef alone couldn’t change the world, but he could start a process which would build exponentially over time. He was not concerned with mere bloodline or numbers of progeny, though many would be needed. What he envisioned was a quantum of souls, the seed kernel for someday’s critical critical mass, flying literate thinkers gathered as individuals—scribes, intellectuals, philosopher-warriors all—who could each independently weigh events and make wise choices. 
            Thus Josef wrote down what he needed all to study, not just recite, for Josef’s project foremost was to bring cognition to his family via literacy, to create his necessary nucleus for the distant post-history future: I call this seeding ice-nine. To enable his project, the Israelites would remain self-identified hyksos in a strange land—but not as backwards bumpkins, nor ritually stagnant like eternal Egypt itself, which resisted Asian innovation. Josef insisted on public schooling for all Israel’s children, bringing with him into Goshen many of Egypt’s best-trained courtesans & scribes & musicians & astrologers to become teachers, wives, and mothers to his extended vision. Josef’s Genesis dream inspired everyone.
            Is it coincidence then, that not far from Goshen and dating to this exact time (the late 19th century BCE) the first known alphabet was discovered? Archeologists uncovered a trove of written inscriptions of early Semitic origin, carved in the stones of an ancient turquoise mine high in the western Sinai—Proto-Sinaitic script we call it today, a clear progenitor of written Phoenician & thus all the world’s alphabets. I do not claim Josef himself invented this script, but I suspect he sparked a renaissance that reveled in written language development, a novel form that worked well in his bilingual experiment. (“The shoe fits…”) 
            Native delta Egyptians probably found their Asian immigrant neighbors a noisy nosey people, always asking curious questions, godless of images in their sequestered ghetto, averse even to the ghosts who sing in wind & wheat—though surely Israel’s kin loved to sing and joke and laugh. Meanwhile, Josef foresaw segregation & gathered wealth over time would breed resentment, jealous idols, seeds of diaspora & dissemination. History would need many stirring chapters…
            Thus Josef, I imagine, also had a major hand in the dissolution of the centralized, autocratic Middle Kingdom, once his “bad” pharaoh died and the subsequent, final two pharaohs were firmly wedded to Josef’s scheme. What historians view today as a loss of dynastic dominance, the divided Second Intermediate Period—because fewer monuments were carved to idols & fewer god-kings brought Egypt pain—might also be seen as a period of relative nome autonomy & freedom, maybe even harmony for a time, time enough to multiply.
            Josef’s genius lay in knowing the limits of his plan, as well as its pain. He saw that literacy alone did not guarantee whether a person was a thinker or had a soul. Most scribes were good copyists only; they actually counted among the worst of Egypt’s idolaters. Literacy was therefore necessary, but not sufficient to cognitive function. An independent voice balanced by empathy, curiosity & inner courage, abstraction & free association, and deep self-questioning also were needed, undoubtedly other qualities too. Love. And in his life Josef had encountered only a very few such individuals who embodied most of these qualities: thinking souls, each one unique & irreplaceable. Was it coincidence then, that each was also fluently literate—not just a copyist scrivener who could mouth out words—but someone like Josef who reveled in language’s multiform applications & implications, who identified personally with careful speech but also loved to play frivolously, nay heretically, for pure fun or vulgar aesthetic? Most of these cherished individuals, in fact, could read faster than they spoke, so they reported—meaning, they didn’t even hear the words sounded in their minds. All were writers. 
            Thus first & foremost Josef wrote down his Genesis to model for his immediate family what he preached, teaching by example. That is, Genesis was intended much more to demonstrate a living existential process, writing as self-revelation & eternal mirror, than to lay down idle content for scrivening or blind recitation—after all, doesn’t Genesis just trace yet another founding-father myth, plus all the usual suspect cosmology? Egypt already had several scribal colleges that taught writing but punished thought. Josef was intent on founding truly a culture of active thinkers, structured around its wise rabbis & rabid scholars, keepers of the living Word—though more important to the mission was the role of women, who must also drink deeply from the Cup, activating that inescapable thirst for greater knowledge & deeper draughts. For women were mothers, and mothers made children’s minds. Written language needed to become part of the nuclear social fabric and include uncoached, unstructured free play to foster creativity, starting with the very young. Children must have wide access to papyrus for their own purposes.
            And this application of writing as a process would restructure both individuals and society in profound, strange new directions Josef could scarcely guess at or gather in time (as overview conflagrations all tend to look the same). Though my own 2020 POV suffers from massive temporal distance, it’s generally easier to trace/derive most trees & branches backwards to their source tree trunk than to dream forward into the twigs & extended leaf-tips eclipsing the sun. My speculations—I interrupt here to repeat for emphasis—are historical fiction at best, though I respect & employ causality as my narrative thread, seeking to fit existing scientific evidence: 
            I might further infer then, that Goshen, soon Egypt’s greatest consumer of papyrus, might become the Nile’s primary grower & producer as well. Papyrus exports would bring goods & wealth to Goshen. Innovations in production & distribution—the result of careful analysis & constant discourse—would spark advances in business & accounting. After cornering the world’s papyrus supply (we’ll say), the Israelites would increase demand throughout Egypt via careful marketing, quietly spreading ice-nine to all walks of life: Writing could advertise itself for profit. (Consider how English is exploited today worldwide to market consumer crap to non-English speakers.) This would not transform Egypt overnight; but it would mark the quiet birth of a middle class, wealth & expertise & thinking outside the fixed social order. 
            And yes, to be clear, literacy & middle class occupations did exist in prior centuries, as well as people neither rich nor penniless, but these skilled laborers lacked independent identities. Even as professional family guilds living in their own villages, scribes & artisans & their whole family lines served pharaohs & patriarchs; they had no existence otherwise. The Israelites, on the other hand, would be players in their own lives & right of domain. They’d pay their taxes of course—as Josef explicitly lays out in Genesis—giving Pharaoh his tithe, but by covenant leaving Israel’s twelve tribes in stable peace, not perpetually subject to royal whim or manic injustice or tribal temple wrath. And thus Josef’s kin as Hebrews would be reduced to slavery in another book & chapter.
            Now remember further, in Goshen it would be important that pyramid mounds of papyrus waste not pile up, at least not publicly, for Egyptians who worshipped the written word often regarded the mere discarding of scraps & scroll fragments as sacrilege. Josef would ponder the irony: Because he valued so highly writing as a spiritual & cognitive process, he cleaved the written word from its sacred function, a heretical act in the eyes of Egyptians.[27] They, in turn, worshipping the written word itself and anchoring each sacred phrase to a famous-past-act ritually practiced ad nauseam, deprived their words of meaning & living function—or in albionspeak, the fiber turns to filament—where “sacred” is just another word for “dead.” Perhaps the piled papyrus waste might be recycled then, in lieu of straw for making bricks…[28]

            And what to write then—that is, in terms of form & content, the necessary nouns & bones & skeletal sequence? Josef understood sadly that whatever he wrote, in just a few generations—namely, absent living witnesses—surely would turn to idolatry, ironically by the very family he was trying to awaken & save. Gilgamesh & Sargon & countless worthy others began & ended once as men, but quickly then became graven superheroes scattered as relics, their carved monuments melting in the rain. While the flesh decays and even bones dissolve to dust, ineffable words turn to stone the moment attention drifts away; meanwhile, the cricket keeps babbling. How could Josef leave a surviving worthy lesson that avoids idolatry, or, if inevitable, lay down an idol Word that at least inspires thinking & dialogue—careful argument & questions, not complacent agreement? There is no ob Word. 
            So Josef composed his own founding-father myth following (at first) the prescribed literary form of the time required of all named families: the litany descent from gods & kings present at the Beginning, serving up his (largely Mesopotamian) cosmology & Fall of Man, along with a few morsel morals. But then Josef fucks with the narrative focus completely, obviously so, when viewed along the silken line of history and not through the lens of religion per se. Minding ma’at & seeking balance over time, Josef juxtaposed the existing idols-paradigm with his own anti-founding-father myth, his “modest proposal” to set the founding model on its head, which, as he hoped, would mess with scholars’ minds with meanings & interpretations for centuries (and I am no scholar).
            First, following Gilgamesh, Josef would establish a strong narrative thread, a moving story good enough to supersede & transcend any bloodline. No tribe can long endure caring for a list of names, and someday, Josef knew, his Jewish kin could be anyone—that is, anyone who learned. 
            Next, Josef adopted from Enheduanna (Sargon’s daughter, installed high priestess of Ur) her realtime POV & literary voice, both in present praise to God, but also to uphold the sanctity of human doubt & earthly trials. After introducing the world to flying, original, & modern sacred hymns—which celebrated her goddess Inanna as a global ideal, not just the old family mumbo-jumbo—Enheduanna revealed her own true voice, perhaps the first on record, only upon being violently deposed, then struggling for years to return from exile. Her suffering & eventual restoration unfolds in her letters always as immediate & self-aware, living with faith in doubt. Josef knew from his own trials that life’s such chosen moments gift us with self-discipline & patience, ideals to be cultivated through spacetime living only. What sense is patience outside of time?
            But rather than focus narrowly on the single founding Hero-figure—the first name deified in every family tree & from whom all branching fathers derived authority—Josef would offer several protagonists. Namely, Josef was following his own policy never to hold up as a model but a single image—of the Jewel in particular, but likewise the cricket, or any chosen character in an epic story, even one that models a true path—lest that image be turned to an idol. He would employ multiple heroes then, all following one line—his own blood, of course, superficially—but more important, the line that beheld God directly in the mind as spoken words, a draught of language.
            What’s interesting to us today is that the sons of Israel, Canaanites from Ur, were immigrant strangers to Mesopotamia already, which is why Josef in Genesis takes Abraham to be the family patriarch. Consider Abraham’s paradigm heresy: Son of Terah, an idols maker, Abram rose against his father and destroyed his idols. Few acts in the Bronze Age could be counted more heinous. Who, if not the son, would speak the fathers’ names in perpetuity? Abraham’s father, depicted as wicked, was probably respected in his city of Ur, a maker of sacred objects, while Abraham himself not only was crazy, he did something inconceivable: He left his father, his father-gods, and the full-family altar behind. For most ancients this was physically impossible. How can you detach from the land of your blood essence? (Remember, Abraham’s Ur-line were already immigrants.) How dare you leave behind the family bones? How do you even carry a large stone altar & hearth? No wonder this family had to wander Canaan for a time (i.e., all living memory) to eke out existence and add a few base numbers. No native tribe there could tolerate long such sacrilege among its neighbors.
            Finally, Josef would intentionally undermine his several family protagonists by making them fully human, not godlike nor even possessing superpowers; in fact, he goes way overboard by highlighting what assholes his forefathers often were: Each generation seems bent on cheating its closest kin—out of blessings, out of flocks of sheep, by marrying off the wrong person, drunken incest, etc.—it is amazing how awful these hero-fathers are portrayed! Josef’s own father Jacob even beats up an angel; and when Simeon & Levi kill all the males in a neighboring tribe, this massacre is not justified as might-makes-righteous, but as a stupid & dangerous act. 
            And what, by the way, of the Founding Father’s required awesome claims, our Hero’s personal resumé of over-the-top achievements & triumphs—that is, those of Josef himself, the real founder? Warrior, builder, oracle: Josef says absolutely nothing, which is amazing, unprecedented—even by modern standards beyond credible humility. For how could any Asian slave boy ever rise to such heights without a long list of accomplishments? In fact, Josef’s total omission of his acts in Egypt is a clear clue he himself must be the author of Genesis; it’s his smiling absent signature (wink wink). Any other writer, of all his proteges & admirers, would surely have felt compelled to list some factual evidence of Josef’s skills & stature. Consider further, no Israelite for hundreds of years would need any verbal reminder of Josef’s work; they were living it; it was all around them. All would be amused then by Josef’s obvious record omissions, and no family history in the ancient world could possibly read stranger.… (nudge nudge)

            Of course Josef is the protagonist of his story, who spake proudly as a boy and thus learned humility the fucking  hard way. When then grown to manhood and given the chance to wreak vengeance on these same assholes who did him violence—namely, his brothers—he tells us plainly that he’s happy to see them again. “How beautiful, how Christian,” we might sigh, to forgive one’s trespassers. But that’s not Bronze Age justice, and Josef isn’t Christian. He understands. He says it plainly: God put him through such shit so as to save all his family. And while most readers might think Josef was speaking of famine & blood survival only, Josef dreamed far more. He saw ice-nine.
            The Jews, indeed, are the world’s chosen race, chosen for the hardest story they themselves but rarely mind. As a (circumcised) gentile, I’ve asked my Jewish friends what they believe of the afterlife or of God’s mission, and my question mystifies them. Afterlife? Being a Jew is about living with traditions, belonging to a chosen history, Josef’s thread, transmitting the Word from generation to generation wherever you are in the world, whatever your nation or skin color or language. Four hundred years in Egypt under Josef’s tight-ass prescribed system grew this ice-nine crystal, needed for gestation. But then it had to spread, globally, virally even, which seemed antithetical to its initial Goshen isolation. How could a segregated ghetto tribe disseminate throughout the world and yet still keep its Word pure? There is no ob Word.
            I return to Vonnegut’s perfect metaphor of ice-nine: Think of a chemical solution, he says, like sugar water on a stove. To grow rock candy the sugar needs to be supersaturated & stirred constantly, heated & cooled, then heated & stirred again, dispersed evenly as a diaspora all around the stove pot. The Jews themselves were God’s seeded mind to history, the first culture of mostly-domesticated Homo sapiens; Rome, Christianity, and Western Europe comprised the sequenced essential-soups that followed, eventually the whole world. History traces this collective cognitive launch, while the solution itself remains fluid & invisible right up until its total & near-instantaneous phase change, ice-nine—relatively soon, relatively speaking. 
            Because just look, the world is on fire, and now all must play wild cards just to follow suit: For surely if, as a people or a nation, you don’t possess math or tech or finance or cognitively-complex socio-economic & political infrastructures or costly modern weapons to meet the demands of Western competition flaming, you will soon go extinct. In fact, today you absolutely need English, and most “indigenous” cultures & languages are already targeted for “selection.” (I’m just a messenger.) These filaments have been visible since the Point A Beginning, and they all flame out similarly down the line, precisely when knowledge leaps over wisdom. All the simulations just cancel.
            We have a choice, a fiber. For the history Josef offered us—our last-chance escape from Charybdis as Promethean flame—is not about religion or an invisible monotheistic God, nor the physical Son of an abstract Universal Being, which just brings more idolatry. There is no formula for salvation. The only door out of this Promethean filament is to think our way out—which means, especially in a modern capitalist democracy of citizen individuals, everyone. 

            And yet it’s sadly so certain—(11/14/20) having just personally witnessed seventy million fools in the world’s foremost democracy double-down on Donald Trump (who, as I write, refuses to concede the election)—we are so not ready for what’s coming. Half my countrymen won’t wear masks amidst a deadly airborne virus, and, no better or worse, half the Democrats are just as dumb & tribal, dancing in the streets in masks but packed densely in viral victory, happy they picked the lucky winner of the election lottery—and now that it’s all over, they can return to their hard but simple herd-lives and go right back to sheep sleep. There is no cure for stupidity.
            But I have Josef’s vaccine, and we can reach herd immunity from cognitive ignorance in two generations or less, if we choose. In Volume Two I will trace this history in much greater overview detail, other points of inflection, where Josef’s recruits outside of time, as well as many others, stepped in to keep the flaming Word alive. For the goal was never to extinguish our burning cognition, but to push through our childish, ignorant-animal baggage and become responsible beings, thinkers of language. No thinker wants to backtrack to Eden. And yes, it is rocket science, for it will take absolutely our very best minds to survive this crisis—we will surely lose much & many—so we better start improving ourselves asap.
            To be certain we are already past any tipping point in the environmental apocalypse, hopelessly ill-equipped. Even if we wake up tomorrow and dirty all-hands-on-deck cleaning up our mess, centuries in the making, we are in no position to save ourselves. So much damage is already done; we are beyond all undoing—because we lack the knowledge and because any new, “saving” technology we invent to counter our greenhouse gases will undoubtedly foment unseen cascading repercussions, collateral annihilations. We can’t fathom what might happen next. 
            Noah built his ark. That Genesis myth looks backward, but Josef foresaw also our future test. What of ourselves ought we to save? Species extinction is but the visible tip of our ongoing iceberg crash, the physical analogue to culture & language loss. Science, we see, is out of control, but what about music & art? Who calls the canons of world culture? Who calls the cannon shots? In short, the whole of my curriculum comes down to one single, sharpened question: If we demand cognition to be every child’s human right, must every kid read Shakespeare?

            And I nod reluctantly, after serious thought, hell yes—Sophocles, Ibsen, & August Wilson too—that is, my own kids at least, goddam it. Why not? Deirdre & Rhiannon—to name two girls of a special million—weren’t required by me, their father, to like Shakespeare; but, of course, they did. And if my own kids were expected from infancy to learn math & Shakespeare & science and see the world and speak its languages, then, practicing the Golden Rule, I must extend my demanding love & discipline to all human souls. We cannot save our children—they alone must save themselves—but we can prepare them, if not to meet the unknown challenges ahead, then to better prepare the generation after…. We can give them writing—serious language play & learning & practice early in life, with all the loving laser-focus of a NASA liftoff or an off-world landing. 
            Literacy alone has not saved the world—indeed, it’s pure accelerant, for reading alone is not sufficient to cognition. Other thinking cards must be turned & played in time, as many are the cognitive systems still waiting for discovery. But real writing might be enough—that is, not merely writing for information or social needs, but with the dire understanding that writing is the abstract Promethean key to both individual freedom (the real kind) & our collective global salvation (via new fiber technologies). Short of that, at least teaching careful writing makes for smarter dumbshits—infant people less susceptible to stupid lies & impulse ads—a phase we need desperately as a species to get past. Point B, ice-nine, is now within our grasp as it never was in Egypt, but we have to choose.

            So we must begin with the very young, our most cherished treasures, archive-seed of the future itself. Obviously our children must direct our greatest investment, the focus of our best thinking & our very best teachers. These children, in turn, must study & train hard to become the best possible parents, role models of this soon-self-aware self-domestication process—which, I hope & suspect, may ultimately mark a Point C arrival worthy of the wild millennia. Spaceship Earth needs well-trained, independent astronauts = everyone. Again, this is not utopian; it’s desperate & necessary & inevitable, or we fall. In a spiking global population explosion, children will soon become as scarce as air. Everyone needs to learn this math.
            As much as can be written, much more omitted can be inferred.

§ Hail aliah

11/20/20

​​7. History, its Genesis

            Josef was no oracle. Oracles indeed exist, but the Jewel Net has none. This is because the Jewel is “tiny” first, a point of directed intelligence so focused that even a small amount of energy, one pure thought, can cut like a laser. Oracles, when they view the future, must divide their focus, generally by means of a daimon. Not only is this contrary as a process to the Jewel & its function, it sends a fiber toward that future point and ties a knot, intending history in that direction. It doesn’t merely see the future; it creates it. I do not imply, by the way, that oracles are necessarily evil. Sometimes such joining is undoubtedly good, and it is quite possible for Jewel Net members to step outside their roles. Blake, after all, saw my body, out of all possible futures: Here I am, though I assume other timelines exist following his century where I was never born. Thus Josef witnessed the necessity and shaped his present timeline accordingly, not as an Atlas or a superman, but merely as one possible thread to trace, the choice thread we call history. Josef is the author of Genesis.
            As Scribe & I were explicitly told, the Jewel Net has no oracles, builders, or warriors, all of whom impose their will on others.​[17] Not until finally, upon writing this very paragraph, did I solve this ouija clue & odd puzzle: It lists precisely the roles Josef himself took on, albeit reluctantly, as we all must play parts at times unnatural to us. Potiphar, Josef’s Egyptian master, himself was a warrior. Thus Josef rose through the ranks and witnessed firsthand the flame of his pharaoh, who was never identified by name or time, but whom Josef called a “bad man.” I believe Josef as eventual vizier managed to tame his pharaoh’s worst vices. I believe, in fact—though haven’t confirmed—that he built the Mer-Wer in pharaoh’s name, the “Great Canal” linking the Nile with the Faiyum depression: An oasis & occasional lake in wet years thus became the reliable breadbasket of Egypt.​[18] With so many ransacked pyramids (& their hacked up mummies) already dotting the landscape—whose omnipotent pharaohs no one recalled—what better way to refocus & redirect a foolish megalomaniac (Trump!) than to glorify him while best serving all people? Of course the irony is that this ancient engineering marvel today is called the Bahr Yussef (“Joseph” in Arabic), following its direct attribution in the holy Qur’an.

            What makes the Jews so special? The chosen race—so individually amazing, yet so often targeted for pogrom… Good & bad luck only? A vainglorious accident? Jesus was a Jew, of course; yet the independent Jewish identity persists despite Christianity, much as it has from its Egyptian origin. No other people has accomplished so much so long with so few.
            Josef was a man & born flyer, but no god, and never in our ouija sessions does he claim more. Genesis has it errors of later embellishment—I won’t cherrypick the details—but in essence it’s just the story of one man’s family from Abraham on. The question then arises: How did such a history stick? To understand better we must now consider the Bronze Age paradigm most carefully, as we have forgotten it today and can’t begin to fathom its overwhelming weight & obligation on people’s lives, the knots each ancient was born with:

            Egyptians, as well as most ancient peoples, believed their forefathers were gods—not distant, not global, not omnipresent, not even smart, as Westerners later would be conditioned—but personal benefactors only, present & petty & jealous, strictly family gods, who lived literally under the ground where their bones lay buried. The land, the tomb, the hearth & altar were utterly inseparable; and these gods still lived with their male family line, governing virtually all events in their descendants’ illiterate lives. These kin, in turn & in covenant, gave life to their gods via speaking the memorized names aloud & praying to their graven idols daily, hourly when needed, especially at the midday repast, where food was apportioned to keep these gods alive.
            Regular festivals marked each clan’s biggest gatherings, recounting the holiest moments from the family’s past, and each family kept its own busy calendar. City priests, then, functioned in large part to keep civil order by coordinating these festivals to avoid interfamily conflicts, for indeed, many celebrated the massacre of one family over its neighbor, as well as the reverse. Blood feuds, though chronic, were less about honor & emotions than obligatory religious service—enacting ancient memories exactly as recited—and it often took armies of scribes calculating the solar & lunar cycles, the Nile floods & the return of swallows, just to anticipate the civil unrest, as many such holy-days would coincide at the same location—a temple, a desert battlefield, even the shared city marketplace. Central power thus arose both to keep families separated or, if possible, to join them through marriage, only later to mete out peace, for bygones could never be bygones. Consider thus: Not to celebrate your founding massacre would be at best to anger your foremost father deity—for which there would be scary consequences, sickness or famine—at worst it would forget him, deprive him of his name & memory; and the family gods would be lost to all future generations. How many ritual prayers might priests have concocted to balance said histories? How many mock passions played out simply to assuage & mute such feuding clans, most of whom carved out their homelands & farmlands in some neighbor’s blood?
            And writing was invented to enhance all of this, not to end it. By the Bronze Age, culture had been established long enough that families constantly lost track of their names, which came, of course, as long lists of intermingled “begats,” but also involved lengthy epithets & attributions & ritual songs & prayers for every conceivable occasion. Your child, let’s say, gets stung by a scorpion. That would involve a precise prayer to some great-grandmother goddess who was similarly stung. She in her day survived her particular suffering by bathing with a strangled cat in a certain sacred spring (while menstruating) and chanting a prescribed song 42 times to Isis, mother of all women, after which a modest gift to Isis’s temple would be donated, where the priests, thankfully, had recorded the prayer & penance (or made one up), for who otherwise could keep track? If Pharaoh, on the other hand, suffered a bowel inflammation, oracles from temples near & far would empty to divine both the cure & source of the problem, for no illness to the divine embodiment could arise without cause. Something was rotten in Karnak; and if nothing be done, darkness must cover all Egypt. So quick! Open the archives & consult the scrolls & texts, for surely there’s precedent from some dynastic epoch. Time is a circle, and every event is recorded somewhere.

​
8. Ma’at

           As a strange boy in a strange land, Josef first trained as a scribe and mastered several languages: his mother-tongue Canaanite & Egyptian, of course, but also Akkadian—the lingua franca of Mesopotamia, known to Abraham & his maternal line—as well as extinct Sumerian, the classical language of Gilgamesh and Enheduanna, which, in the early second millennium BCE, was regarded much as Latin or Sanskrit today. He loved reading & writing, both hieroglyphics & cuneiform, even though the vast majority of scrolls—beyond tax records & commerce—simply detailed the family histories.
            As he had full access to most temple libraries, Josef liked to lose himself in the centuries-old archives, where he’d often join the cloistered priests whose sole function was to follow the aisles of the oldest scrolls, haul each one out in turn, pronounce the names & syllables, and then return it to its shelf, thus keeping these long-dead ghosts alive, albeit hungry.​[19] While he could read these glyphs himself, Josef quickly realized that no one in his time generally knew how to pronounce the ancient names—just as no one today can say with certainty how Latin once sounded. And yet, he was often amused, if name were enough, then to mispronounce a name couldn’t possibly bring the right god back to life—would another ghost return instead? And since no one alive recalled the actual person depicted, this essential ritual seemed silly & futile, if not dangerous.
            Josef also excelled at math, not just the reckoning of big numbers for engineering and tax purposes, but as a fair-balanced scale for weighing ideas, ma’at, especially when measuring distant generations. Trained as a soldier who excelled less in combat than in the careful planning & preparations for war—logistics & strategy—Josef read up on the ancient battles, which indeed gave him insights into terrain & tactics, potential pitfalls & traps, but he discovered something more. First, he noticed in his research, the army strengths of ancient battles, despite the routine rounding-up of troop numbers, was consistently smaller in the oldest scrolls than those of his present day. And when able, he’d compare the large battles of Egypt from both sides of an engagement, adjust for inflation, and found over time that battles just got bigger. Once upon a time, it seemed, professional armies were tiny & poorly supplied.
            And this insight led Josef to examine further the dark archives where no one cared tread, the ancient tax scrolls themselves, which often provided neither known names nor narratives, but proved far more accurate in the raw numbers. Yes, the Nile brought forth good years of harvest as well as bad; indeed, a few periods were marked by enduring leanness or plenty, often accompanied by civil unrest. Nevertheless, the records were clear: Over the centuries nearly everywhere there was a slow, steady increase in both the census & harvest.​[20]How could an eternal Egypt always get bigger? While the Nilometer proved the river volume stable over time, the land itself did not multiply at all, for there were the same 42 nomes (districts) since the very first records.[21] And what was one to make of an Egypt before writing existed? If time was a circle, how big was its arc? To return the cosmic wheel to a time before Pyramids, before the double-crown of Egypt had been conjoined, how many people would have to die? How many cities torn down?
            A stranger from Asia, Josef was fascinated by Mesopotamia—Abraham’s Ur, of course; but also ancient Uruk; Akkad, Sargon’s capital; ascendent Babylon; and perhaps especially legendary Babel & Eridu (Eden?), as the mud-old myths always held more variety & verbal invention. Egypt’s scribal colleges housed clay tablets dating back to Gilgamesh & the hero gods, where for centuries advanced scribes copied the god-king’s Uruk epic, also translating favorite passages into hieroglyphics (and Josef was honored to see his own careful work archived alongside the originals). Like most scribes, he found the exaggerated narrative wonderfully free & entertaining, thus more revealing and memorable than Egyptian texts, which frowned on elaboration as deviance. Yes, Egypt had its own tales, above all the travails of Isis & Osiris. But Gilgamesh, despite his super-strength, seemed far more human than any pharaoh, ultimately embracing his own death. Pharaohs were depicted in eternal form only, as idols by inviolate code, for every portrayal had to uphold the permanence of the Egyptian throne. Thus every scribe forever traced in worship the prescribed lines—even though, most secretly learned, there had been many royal dynasties—especially during the century of nome kings following Pepi the Senile. And while Egypt would later reunite and turn to glory once more, outside a few temples it was punishable even to speak of such amok chronicles.[22]
            But then there was Sargon. All scribes knew his name, and every pharaoh shuddered at his aberration, abomination in Egypt’s eyes. Not a god despite all claims, Sargon’s crown derived not from one divine line, but from all the city gods, whom his priests contended were actually the same deities shared, but with different names in different lands.[23] All gods, therefore, could be adopted, coopted with gifts & favors, and worshipped in a centralized empire, provided temple ties ultimately were sworn to Sargon. Importantly—and still strange to the age—new gods could be added. Old Gilgamesh, to contrast, knew too well the blood of his enemies, large family clans whose legacies committed them to regular carnage & murder, followed by seasons of farming, marriage, & prayer. But Sargon broke with these cycles, conquered peoples his gods never met, conscripted farmers of many tongues & altars to build upon his conquests, taking nation upon nation. No king in the annals could compete or compare, though—as Josef observed late in his life—Hammurabi of Babylon would embellish his own empire image after Sargon’s model, with immodest success. Would there be others? And what might happen to Egypt if such a god-king cross the Sinai—as Josef’s father Jacob loved to fancy by fireside—not on foot, he’d insist, the stricken desert being impassable to large armies; but perhaps on horseback someday, was it possible? Jacob had himself witnessed men riding horses at such speeds one might conceivably just race through the thirst. And if Egypt could fall, how could its eternal pharaohs & farmers then circle back to innocence?

            Thus Josef came to history, the first of our net to see time as a line. Where was it going? Key to his awareness was his additional observation that the Bronze Age paradigm was itself but a recent phenomenon, a consequence of civilization. That is, he saw that the circular, “eternal” stability of Egypt derived largely from its natural geography & government, not particularly from cosmic fact. The Nile, for example, was long enough and thus flat enough over hundreds of miles that Egyptians never knew its sudden ferocity—unlike Mesopotamian farmers who lived forever in flash-flood fear—and in Josef’s day Egypt still had never seen an outside invader. This understanding alone, however, proved nothing, or rather it just seemed to confirm the circular paradigm in the minds of Egyptian priests, who dismissed their distant city neighbors as living outside Heaven’s reach & radius, east in chaos.
            The clinching insight came to Josef as a young man serving in Nubia, during Potiphar’s long military exile above the Second Cataract, where Josef’s exceptional language skills & empathy allowed Potiphar to engage directly with the highland villagers & herders, thus mostly in friendship & trade. There they encountered also a vestige-few small hunting tribes who still wandered a harmless pre-civilized existence—not just lacking both writing & clothes, but the very idea of script altogether, having no means to extend their memories nor external measures for making plans. While these odd people could become quite animated and converse fluently within a narrow range of at-hand subjects, they seemed most content to sit for hours on end in silence.
            Josef personally attended a few of these peoples’ sacred dances and was mind-blown to witness what was rarely glimpsed among even the biggest nome festivals at home: When these “primitive” nomads dressed in the skull crowns & garb of their ancestors—which had to be physically carried wherever the tribe wandered, even before food—and then danced & chanted the key events of their forefathers’ lives, they became their fathers literally, in person. The souls of these deceased fathers descended & took possession of their descendants’ living flesh. They’d open their eyes & blink in the firelight, as if coming to (often comic) terms with their physical body & parts, jumping, laughing, peeing, parading an erection, even shitting on the spot to mark their brief existence. Was there a message? What was the point? While Potiphar & others would laugh at the spectacle in mocking disbelief, especially as it always seemed to go off-script & devolve into antics, Josef spotted something absent from Egyptian culture, as well as all Mesopotamia, something eternal & essential, but forgotten. What happened?

            For of course, such transformations were precisely what Egypt’s festivals also purported to perform, but Egyptian priests & patriarchs, as well as half the village children, always knew they were pretending: It wasn’t real; it was required. Masked celebrants spoke the sacred words & babel, slaughtered their best cattle, & burned in laughter their neighbor’s effigies as prescribed, reenacting past lives & events & righteous massacres, but always from the after side of absence, a POV wherefrom the past had been refashioned to an object—a lesson perhaps for the listening wise; hollow echoes otherwise, an excuse for drunkenness.
            These nomadic hunters, in contrast, knew no past at all; for them time was a point. They dwelt in the dreamtime present only, always, where their forefathers lived right alongside them on a parallel line, complete with teleporter access across time into a willing temporal vessel, a blood relative—albeit in Josef’s day from an ever-shrinking gene pool. Josef grasped that such family gatherings could only be enacted through the flying-focused present, never by looking back. What Potiphar’s aides perceived as “dumbshit” reenactments gone awry were actually the carefully coded dance steps that called on particular ancestors of strong character, who, once upon their time, encoded these selfsame steps & sounds and then imprinted them onto their children’s very limited living memory—each hunter’s unique eternal phone number. 
            So while nearly every naked child & adult performed their practiced awkward steps—individually dialing through repetitions, finishing even to respectful Egyptian applause—these marked the failures, the missed connections. Rather it was the broken dances, interrupted by electric possession even unto shit, which enabled & enacted the cherished soul collisions, fully affirming the continuing covenant of a most ancient family—far older, Josef gasped, than any pharaoh’s claim, long before Gilgamesh and Narmer. (Josef beheld this insight and briefly spaghettified before the Loom, returning breathless.) Such ritual eternal moments, he guessed, surely looked & played out identical to most other dances over ten thousand father-gods & further, but with one big difference: These tribesmen called on only their dead gods & forebears, never on their unborn kin, sons & granddaughters—as Josef himself, privately, regularly did. (He noted further their tongues had no word for “future,” nor past or future tense.) 
            And thus Josef knew at once, no sons of these tribes would ever walk this Earth, for sadly such hunter families—the real hunters among human men—had come to end. Once upon the longest stretch of human time,​[24] fathers, their great-grandsons, grandmothers, & crazy incest uncles, all popped in on this ancient dreamtime-game to poop & play with family friends following practical ritual gathering rules, like taking turns among the active ghosts and forming powerful cross-generational (karass-like) loving bonds—as Athena some centuries later so overtly favored Odysseus. Such gatherings opened a crack in the universe capable of divine access & exchange & intervention, which—despite lacking pageantry or deriving any immediate “use” or “benefit” therefrom—still marked, yes, real “magic,” “sorcery,” a “miracle” in fact; but only because modern (Bronze Age) civilizations had lost the “technology.” If time is a point, how does one forget the vital center of one’s being?

[11] Printed maps call it Ho Chi Minh City, but no one else does, including public transport.

Point A:  Egypt,

    c. 1820 BCE

[19] Not surprisingly, the longer a soul had been dead, the less food it needed. If a great god, however, was needed for a special cure or favor, whole herds might be sacrificed.

[3] Manchester City​, English Premier League soccer

[9] Such improbable chains are offered as proof for the controversial “argument for design,” an alternative hypothesis to Darwinian natural selection. The human eye and the flagellum of a bacterium are the standard exemplars, which are shown to be so utterly complex that no random, natural sequence of events could possibly have created them: Ergo, God.

[6] Dear Reader, I hear you protest. True, I don’t give my name here, but not because I’m shy or embarrassed. Very simply, if this material ever gets famous, I don’t want any confusion. It’s not about me. It’s about you and humanity. Besides, I’m happy in retirement; I have all I need.

Joseph Making Himself Known to His Brethren 

​William Blake, 1785 

​[14] In Jerusalem c. 521 BCE, destroyed except its Wailing Wall by the Romans in 70 AD.

The Weighing of the Heart against the Feather

[7] To be precise, I tried printing my itinerary, and it wouldn’t print. It wasn’t just a virus; a live person was blocking the connection, maneuvering to get at my vitals. That’s what I was told, at least, by someone in India, who, for a price, took over my computer remotely, patched me up, and restored my printer connection. My tiger, therefore, exploited my utter helplessness, which is antithetical to my “competent” identity. You, dear Reader, probably have a different point of weakness. My tiger is not yours.

6. The Fire of Prometheus

            The Fall did not come first. It didn’t have to happen, and it was not good.
            For hundreds of thousands of years Homo sapiens roamed Africa before fanning out, probably several times, into Asia, Australia, and Europe, hunting & gathering & scavenging in small family groups. I laugh at modern macho hunters toting their high-powered rifles, long-range riflescopes, and explosive bullets, all blessed by Jesus for slaughtering endangered species. You call yourself a hunter? Try bringing down a mastodon with a hand axe. If you fail, you die. Then butcher it with your teeth and figure out how you’re going to save all the parts you can’t eat immediately and carry them back to your cramped temporary cave for your freezing starving children, meanwhile trying to fend off all the scavengers & predators hunting you. Bows & arrows, atlatls, fishing nets & hooks, even basic spears all arrived late in human existence. So after your eternal soul rejects your aimless, brainless modern origin (i.e., you), perhaps you’d prefer a real struggle. Souls choose.
            Most people don’t think about the Lower Paleolithic, where the hand axe—our first surviving tool, which dates back to Homo erectus or even Homo habilus roughly two million years ago—saw no marked improvements until only about 80,000 years ago. (I grossly oversimplify, but this is us in a clamshell.) I try to think like a caveman; I try to think like most Republicans, too, and, of course, it’s a futile exercise, a contradiction of process: How do you think like a non-thinker? Now I’m not just being nasty or brutish or partisan. It’s a fundamental philosophical question that now, burning through the 21st century, must be solved, or we won’t make it through the next. What happened?
            Hand axes probably preceded the first use of fire—almost certainly how to build one from scratch—but there were probably earlier crude technologies crafted from materials that can’t take the centuries. Wood, hair, plant fibers, & even bones don’t last very long; and the one technology that may have preceded all the others endures less than seconds, language. When did hominids first start to speak? Anthropologists debate this but really can’t guess, while archeologists remain mute. Noam Chomsky argued that we are biologically wired for language. Grammatical structures arise in our ape brains ripe for the picking, just as we are bipedal creatures, though walking still takes years to learn. No one invented language; we evolved nearly half a brain to make use of it. Shakespeare, it would follow, must be derivative then, an accident of nature.
            —Still, to balance the argument, I consider skiing, one favorite pastime among counterexamples, and question its genesis following these modern assumptions: Language, we say, helped hominids hunt, so there’s selective pressure to grow the brain in its favor, even at the cost of human choking, as our ape larynx had to drop in the throat to enable speech. (Other mammals rarely choke.) What pressure in nature, then, allows us to fly down a snow-covered mountain with speed & grace? Desmond Morris asserts that most sports involve targeted throwing and/or active chasing, which are both essential hunting skills. What chunk of brain or hunting acuity, then, revels in sinuous, continuous sliding, if we so choose, with leisure & pleasure? (Ski racing is not essential skiing.) That is, as much as I’m a scientist, evolution is just theory; and this world, a present port projected for present human collisions, actually has no set past, no ob history. Every universe is finite, incomplete, & immediate; thus every stab at a precise backstory is ever more full of holes.
            Less than 80,000 years ago, so our DNA tells us, there was a global bottleneck in megafauna evolution, of which we are part. Yes, prior to that Homo sapiens (et al.) had spread out among three or four continents, but every modern human, as well as most other big animals, descends from a much smaller clan. One theory holds that 75,000 years ago the eruption of Mount Toba, a super volcano located on Sumatra—the largest eruption known to geology—put the world in darkness for six to ten years and amplified the ice age by another thousand or so. So the story goes…  Is it coincidence only, then, that roughly at this time tool-making takes off, albeit slowly, with more precise stone-chipping, better blades? Archeological evidence indicates the possibility, lacking fossil language.
            Fast forward to the Great Leap Forward, roughly 13,000 years past, though varying widely from region to region—including a few Stone Age cultures still thriving into the 20th century.​[16] This marks the time when agriculture & the domestication of livestock first took off, along with advances in tool-making, permanent housing, & defined social structures (though still long before urban “culture” as we know it took root, particularly in certain famed river valleys). Something important got started then—following the Fall, I believe, through shrouded in silence—because by this time language was firmly entrenched. Consider by analogy a branch off a tree: Hit an animal or rival over the head with it, and now it’s a weapon. Sharpen it to a spear or an arrow or build a longhouse. Make a canoe; carve it as art; fashion its pulp into paper. What’s the difference among these applications? The difference, superficially, is usage, but each new use starts with a fiber, not a filament—an unnatural event—the introduction of something entirely new into the universe, which, once played in its sequence, marks a change that is irreversible. The key is that the template had changed, from a fixed pattern of existence to one that incorporated change itself within the template.
            And I blame language for pretty much all it, a simplistic accusation surely. And there’s no way to confirm this as hypothesis (outside an ouija board), so it’s hardly scientific. But on this one knot all others gathered. Math, music, science, government, banking, history, literature, and philosophy could not have arisen without language, particularly in its written form, which allows us to exchange our metaphors, apply them with new values & consequence, and most of all to ask questions. Often the questions seem thrust upon us, necessity being the mother of invention.  Nowadays power & profit do all the talking.
            The fire of Prometheus is indeed a profound metaphor, on multiple levels, for we understand fire is both useful & dangerous, not for children to play with, and that it’s absolutely transformative. Physical fire allowed us to escape our environment, Africa at first, as it provided warmth, security from predators, but most importantly protection from the microbes that pervaded our diet. Cooked food won’t often kill you, and mutations in digestion followed. Fire also allows quartz, chert (flint), & obsidian to be shaped more precisely into scrapers & arrow heads, into microblade technology, sometime between 30,000 and 18,000 years ago. Fire eventually led to ceramics & metallurgy. Does fire cause pottery? Surely that’s a stretch, but fire is necessary to its development. Does language cause poetry? So too does language enable thinking.

            It is, as I’ve mentioned, a simple physical fact: If you never have language, you can’t otherwise think—not as we think of thinking. You can’t even start. Now recently, thanks to Fox News & the COVID pandemic, I’ve had a new big thought, a sad one, but necessary: What we call education, including grad school (perhaps law school especially), is not real thinking, just as a calculator does not offer thought. In fact, I would argue that stuffing your brain with lots of knowledge just fills up the absent spaces needed for questions & doubt, and the result is false thinking—that is, the cricket. Most people, perhaps the rich & powerful especially, can’t face uncertainty. To them it looms like the abyss (and for them it probably is). So vested are they in the given power paradigm, they’d rather grasp at straws & lies—including miracle cures & disease projections which “disappear like magic”—than to give up their fixed misconceptions, no matter how discredited. Fox News, the voice & tool of an evil confederacy, has long proven that non-thinkers want to forfeit their free will, in consumer buying & tribal voting, and that they’ll play to any anger, any excuse to avoid facing themselves honestly—namely, to care for their eternal souls. My new revelation, then, is that the puppet masters themselves—at Fox, the White House, Senate Republicans most cowardly—have fallen victims of their own propaganda & idol ideologies—which were never more than talking points shouted—all now abandoned to a moronic personality cult. Meanwhile, Trump’s enablers flail absent policy, absent will & talent, their snake oil miracles instantly exposed in this pandemic epic, with no whiff of governance nor pretense at competence. The emperor has no superpowers. They have nothing but corruption, and you can’t lie your way out of a plague. Over time the raw numbers, by any common measure, keep piling up, the body-bags & ICU beds. I would like to think myself big enough to extend my sympathy to these frightened soulless assholes, to love them in their deluded moral infancy, as I gave all to my many-minded “dumbshits” who needed fractions; but I can’t get past my temple rage. Planet Earth is my temple.

            So, dear Reader, have you grasped the necessity? Why Donald Trump & his coattail lice? Why, in addition, this natural virus—indeed, a predicted, expected filament—but doused with gasoline lies & toxic reactions, the fibers of flame? Today, May 20, 2020, still so early in this pan-paradigm pain, with both so much natural death and, I fear, violence ahead, I give you ice-nine, the seed crystal sown nearly four thousand years past, and multiplying so quietly ever since, inexorably, along its long, flat exponential path, building the right soup & conditions & critical mass for spiking realignment. I give you a fact: Game over.
            Let’s face it: COVID is nothing; people are the problem. Mass extinction falls on us with a vengeance, while we fiddle in distraction—in poverty, in Disneyland, masturbating all over the internet. No, we can’t expect the Christian right suddenly to abandon their guns & fossil fundamentals. Their brains are too far ossified to make the cognitive leap. But they can be repudiated—they and all the common autocrats & oligarchs & plutocrats & dictators, who’ve shown all their cards and have nothing. Vladimir Putin, to name a smarter phantasm (unlike Trump), could have made a positive difference, could have helped the planet, since autocracy, we must acknowledge, can coerce large masses to action. But nyet. As Plato overtly omitted but clearly implied, the cave masters themselves dwell among shadows only. Only through mass death, followed by promises & lies, followed by more cycles of pain & death, will the world finally wake up to science & begin our next task, to save precious Gaia. Starting with climate change, this will be humanity’s sacred work & identity for centuries. This current awful filament of death is necessary then, our last, best hope. May we learn this lesson fast.

            So these are the facts, the objects along our collective path, but the shrine is but a gathering. Even if we build a beautiful altar and celebrate Temple Earth in all its majesty, it’s still just projection. And I will have failed in this curriculum. Nor should my prognosis above prove earth-shattering to any thinking reader; it’s what any good atheist-scientist might wish for. Scientists & I all want the same thing, that we come to our senses and save ourselves & all future children. My outlined path puts us on the same team, and we will actually work together for generations. But the paradigm has to change regardless. Science would have us become more “responsible” with cleaner, safer technologies, free energy. Humanity will then quickly end hunger & disease & war, and leaving all labor to robots, each person will be able to self-actualize individually, contributing to the greater, planetary good, because, well, that’s what humans do. Then at some happy point forward we’ll invent warp-drive and form the United Federation of Planets, keeping the galaxy safe from Klingons & Romulan immigrants (who actually much more resemble us than, say, the Maya). The End.
            What’s wrong with this picture? It ignores the root problem, people. Language created science, which gave us technologies. Language is itself technology that we’re trapped in, just as when I drive, my car is an extension of my body—except I can step out of my car. We possess the ability to do amazing things, including, I believe, save the planet. But technology is precisely what fucked up the planet in the first place—that and simple over-population, more spiking exponential math. For every double-edged tech that might potentially save us comes an application which will make things far worse. We’ve long been able to blow up the good Earth with nuclear weapons, where the good news is that nukes are hard to make. What happens when we find a way to create unlimited power—which we need to offset fossil fuels—and make it cheap & easy & ubiquitous? We simply put power in the hands of everyone, so that even if 99% of humanity behaves in a benign & enlightened manner, roughly 76 million psychopaths (1% by today’s count) thus have it within their grasps to destroy the world. Already we’re on the verge of genetic manipulations that could, for example, create a super-lethal COVID or super Spanish flu, ending our world as we know it overnight. Bioethicists from their ivory-tower conventions caution us not to mess with the human genome itself, and they’re right to so warn us. They’re also smart enough to know that their warnings will surely go unheeded. That race to the abyss has already started.
            So history must end, as has long been intended. Progress for its own sake, without ma’at, without wise, balanced choosing, must end. What does this mean? Who gets to choose? Wisdom—again, by definition—moves us toward the Good, while progress just marches blindly forward. Both paths do go somewhere; indeed, they are not circular. But one just follows a filament, a leafless branch of the Tree of Knowledge, while the other unmapped looms fraught with risk and calls for our finest fibers (“better angels”) to bridge the chasm ahead. Josef, first servant of the Jewel, was the first among us to plot this convergence—these numerous filaments all coming to a dire point, where knowledge travels faster than wisdom, putting us at grave risk. He saw acutely that simply to institute a new set of policies & practices & sacred, meaningful rituals would accomplish nothing, that these practices themselves would soon be turned into idols. The world doesn’t need more rules & rulers; the world needs people who can think.

​

1963

A Quick Timeline for Comparison:

Narmer unites Egypt (c. 3100 BCE?)

Gilgamesh of Uruk (c. 2800 BCE??);

Khufu - Giza’s Great Pyramid (c. 2580 BCE)

Sargon of Akkad (c. 2334-2279 BCE), thus

        also Enheduanna

Josef (c.1850-1770 BCE??)

Hammurabi of Babylon (c. 1810-1750 BCE) 

the Hyksos conquer Egypt (c. 1640 BCE)

Ramses II (1304-1214 BCE), and thus

        also Moses?

Achilles & Odysseus (c. 1200 BCE??)

Homer (c. 700 BCE?)

Plato, et al. (c. 428-c. 328 BCE)

Virgil (70-19 BCE)

Caesar Augustus (63 BCE-14 CE); Jesus

Augustine of Hippo (354-430 CE)

Albion in Canyonlands National Park, UT, 2004

[10] a college president there (who holds up in a goddam palace, but swears she’s no “expat”)—Thanks, L.!

[27] Yes, the earliest records are mostly taxes, which proves my point: Pharaoh’s taxes, namely one’s apportioned tithing to the god-king, counted among Egypt’s most sacred works, and boring as shit to most people, especially peasant farmers, just like most of the sacred babel prayers they recited dutifully at the daily meal, often in mangled language no one remembered. 

​​[17] Which thus could prove a violation of our prime directive, to preserve each soul’s free will. However, there is a countervailing balance: Teachers & parents must discipline children, even though they don’t like it. The key, which is always subtle sketchy, is not to violate the free will of the soul of another, the infant “dumbshit” self in life notwithstanding. It is, of course, dangerous hubris to presume one knows better…

[1] This stop was not on my itinerary, which had to be altered as the Florida Panhandle was shutting down for Hurricane Dennis. We skirted the path of destruction and resumed our itinerary in the Everglades. A few weeks later in the hurricane alphabet Katrina would devastate New Orleans.

[22] The First Intermediate Period (c. 2181-2055 BCE) followed the 94-year reign of Pepi II, whose longevity, it is assumed, contributed to the collapse of the Old Kingdom dynasties. Mentuhotep II (c. 2061-2010 BCE) marks the start of the reunified Middle Kingdom, which itself ended, I speculate, when Josef slowly granted the nomes more autonomy, having seen the abuses of pharaonic absolute power.

​3. The Tiger

            My first contact with my tiger came, as I’ve written, on November 9, 2016, when I confirmed Trump had been elected. I’d turned off the TV early the night before, when the first returns had scared me silly and all my favorite pundits’ speculating & hand-wringing wouldn’t alter the results. My God I was dismayed, destroyed. How could so many Americans be so hateful & stupid! I’d faced horror before; I try my best to stare it in the face (though not as so many people suffer daily). How could this feel so much worse than 9-11?! Again, what scared me most were my physical symptoms. For several days I wondered if I was verging toward a heart attack. My brain was thinking rationally; I wasn’t impaired. It made no difference. It made no sense.
            My daughters were sympathetic but berated me nonetheless. Duh, Dad. My wife was even worse, glad I finally felt firsthand what she had suffered forever, so many pills. You can’t reason with a panic attack. Is that what it was? Anxiety? Angst? If I have a medical name to give it, a language for emotional pain, can that make it go away? Scribe, were he present, would have been equally callous. Albion, paragon of overview stability, had been reduced to mortal human. Must I learn such humility in person? Couldn’t I just pass a written test?
            Days passed. I recovered, and I found my voice, finally, and began writing these lessons. What really happened is that I owned up to my mysticism publicly, personally.​[6] For decades I knew I’d have to present my teachers’ lessons, the amazing sessions and all they offered—these couldn’t just be for two or three people only. But how to share them? And so once I started my introduction with my most blatant & outrageous artifact, Blake’s Glad Day portrait of Albion, well, there was no looking back. So while Donald Trump was completely fucking up the planet—Putin’s puppet, a pathological fool who somehow cowed his entire party into treason & unreason—I devoted myself to work and moved step by focused step toward flight, finally confident I could make it. 
            And I did, and I thought that somehow I must have swallowed my tiger along the way. It was supposed to be a slow process. Wasn’t 22.5 years slow enough? I wasn’t in denial; I just had no idea.

            The next panic attack came in December 2018, three days before departing for Indonesia. I was on my computer doing last minute prep when I got hacked.[7] Someone outside was inside my cyber-cloud & software system precisely when I was most vulnerable, utterly dependent on the internet for hotel & plane reservations, with credit cards & tickets & passport numbers splattered all over cyberspace. I melted to a puddle. My heart symptoms immediately came back, and I was unable to think rationally, though I was wise enough to recognize this fact and not think or act in haste. I recall sitting out in my pasture acreage for about an hour, petting my sheep (who are lawn mowers, not pets)—exactly how my wife regularly deals with her own pain. I could see very clearly then my tiger had gotten free, escaped, that he’d found the gap of my greatest weakness and leapt into my waking life. I knew beyond doubt he wasn’t going away this time and that I’d have to find a way to swallow him fast—no slow dance would do—or I could physically die. My heart, which has always been healthy otherwise, could not survive a prolonged assault. I returned to my computer, got expert help, and saved my files & credit cards, knowing full well that my battle had just started. Oh God, please help me!
            Indonesia was hard. We’d gone to visit Rhiannon who was in her final year of a multiyear stint, and, of course, while there, we planned to see much of the country’s incredible diversity with lots of island hopping—Java, of course, also Bali, Sulawesi, Bunaken, Ambon, and New Guinea—but not, to be clear, Sumatra or Borneo (as in Don’s Nine Men poem).[8]  The logistics, however, proved routinely nightmarish. December is the rainy season, and every flight from island to island was delayed by big storms, then delayed again, connections missed. Leaving the work to me, my wife & Rhiannon could relax in most airports, while I had to strain through the half-audible Indonesian announcements, listening for gate changes & postponements, which were many & often contradicted posted changes. Chaos. I couldn’t read or let down, and the tiger took full advantage. 
            I did discover a defensive strategy though, a castle stronghold for when I suffered worst: I would picture Albion’s sun as drawn on my mandala and pull toward it with all my intent, which, though weak, grew stronger with repeated attacks. Thus, in five minutes or less, sitting in an airport or taxi or hotel room, I could move through my deep chest pain, clouded thinking, total weakness, and despair—into mere exhaustion. The pronounced physical symptoms could literally be willed away, but it would take my hardest effort, exactly as I’d practiced pulling with my teachers at the ouija board year after year. “Normal” panic attacks, I would insist when my family was dismissive, can’t be turned off.
            That seven-week trip took an abrupt turn on its 30th day, when my wife & I went to renew our tourist visas. The visa office, as anticipated, counted our arrival day as Day 1, so, according to them, we’d overstayed our visa by one day. I knew there’d be a small fine and was ready to pay. What I did not expect, despite exhaustive research—every guidebook, all of Rhiannon’s connections, and indeed the government’s own website—was that we were required to surrender our passports for two weeks, stuck in Bandung (urban nowhere) for the entire period, the rest of our trip! Fuck that. Game over. 
            So in a matter of hours, after tiger-tangoing yet again, I managed on my laptop to book two weeks on Hawaii’s Big Island & Kauai, as we couldn’t return straight home and evict our house sitters. Even our escape, then, from Java was fraught with red tape, but we managed—legally, after paying more fines—and found ourselves in an island paradise we knew & understood, America!, where we could finally let down. That is, my wife did, snorkeling every morning in bliss, but I could not.
            My tiger withdrew in Hawaii, absent logistical stress, but I was a zombie nonetheless. Our biggest question each day concerned merely dinner: barbecued ahi or maybe mahimahi? Or which beach would we hit, which volcano trail? I enjoyed all the scenery & food, of course, but largely from intellect, a cerebral experience, not as pleasure or fun. Each evening I’d tell my wife, yes, I’d snorkel with her the next morning, but I didn’t swim once. I called it “necessary recovery” or “convalescing,” but it turned out to be something quite different.
            Each morning I’d wake up quite early, around 4 AM, and find myself immersed in, of all things, the goddam Bronze Age, working in Wikipedia & weird websites, researching Egypt’s Old & Middle Kingdoms (not the New), early Mesopotamia, and the dawn of human history. I had no idea why. I’d studied ancient history many times, much preferring it to puffed up puny U.S. History, which I taught for years. But now I found myself learning every fucking pharaoh, all the archeology, particularly where the gaps in history were papered over with theory & guesses. My wife would depart with her snorkel & fins, return four hours later, and I wouldn’t have budged in my chair. What-the-hell was I doing? I felt guilty, for I knew I was missing a golden opportunity, spectacular Hawaii, but I seemed utterly compelled, unable to put off my obsession for even a few weeks. And soon I began framing, then writing a poem despite myself, a really long one. Really? It started with simply a title, one I’d tripped over humorously when composing my email to Audrey above some four months earlier, "Halftime for Man City."
            And when I got home, I remained immersed and resoundingly “happy” (no better word). It was exciting, clear flight & discovery; I was learning things I’d never considered before, about history & purpose, completely from nowhere. I could never confirm my “facts” or content, suspicions that just kept coming. So I accepted my story as fiction and still do, but consider: History versus fiction—does it matter in the present? Both give us function, a story to move by, and this story kept coming & coming. Where was I going? I finished Part 1, over 200 lines, and then began something that surprised & surpassed me, Part 2, beyond any leap of faith I could imagine—what audacity! Dear Josef, how dare I! But dare I did, because, well, I was flying and I had to keep going wherever it took me. Please don’t drop me till I finish…

​
            April 2019: I stopped, abruptly; the tap just turned off. In the past, working on much lesser projects, I’d interrupted flight and known the despair of failing, of never being able to resume my work—not for a lack of trying, but pure inability to reconnect. That did not happen here. A year later now, I still plan to return, not with certainty, but yes, with confidence & trust. Nothing is certain—there is no ob story. Why the interruption then? Albion didn’t announce it overtly; I could infer from events. For one thing, a simple fact of life, I needed to do my taxes, which is more than just paperwork for me. April is that cruelest month when I reacquaint myself with my finances. I hate it, but it’s necessary. So there was that, but it was also finally time for me to consider, yes, a second trip to Indonesia. Oh God. Was I ready so soon to revisit that psychic jungle?
            To be clear, I was just following my long-term plan. Rhiannon’s service was now ending. She planned to travel Southeast Asia before coming home, before grad school. Would I join her? (My wife was a definite no and would watch the house & animals.) I was in no way ready for more Asia, not yet, but if I was going, I might as well start where I left off in Java and pick up my itinerary abandoned on the first trip, namely, central & east Java—Borobudur & Gunung Bromo especially. How could I pass up such an opportunity? Would I ever get to Southeast Asia otherwise? And if I was planning to go, I needed to get planning, yet another seven-week itinerary—this time four countries and most of them without a translator (Rhiannon being fluent in Indonesian only). And I knew well, of course, my tiger lay waiting.

            Today, May 14, 2020, as Donald Trump insists on reopening the country to COVID-19, despite CDC recommendations & his own published guidelines—pure evil, suicidal folly—calling MAGA idiots “warriors” for rushing unmasked into “battle”—namely restaurants, barber shops, and massage parlors—I know no such heroic fantasy. I know the math, simple exponential functions & their trajectories, which even the toxic anchors on Fox News once graphed in high school, but whose denial overwhelms all sanity. Tribalism trumps reason, but the virus knows no party. Science will triumph—ultimately, inevitably, after the lethal lesson & because of it—but my certain “knowledge” and “understanding” do not bring me “joy.”
            I try not to paint myself in glory, though I knew the terror I surely would face. On my first trip to Java, between tiger attacks, I dwelt dizzied in a paradox of knowledge, stemming from my focused point of stress. While no Rick Steves or Paul Theroux (who’s a flying madman), I am, by most accounts, a master traveler, someone who’s tested myself in the near & distant world and learned from each test. You’d think traveling would get easier, but it doesn’t. These twin Asia trips were among my hardest yet. The problem I found lies with knowledge itself: If you’re an ignorant fool, who doesn’t know the ropes, who jumps on a plane without a thought to land in a different & indifferent culture, you can survive; you can get lucky. You can sleep in a train station and might not get mugged. I’ve seen so many clueless travelers have a wonderful time, drinking the water & fucking the natives speaking nothing but English, and it all works out fine. The more you know, however, the more you know how precarious travel is, how quickly logistics can collapse and how so many touts & tour guides & taxi drivers will sell you to the nearest gangster crime boss if you haven’t scouted every detail first. The more you know, the harder it gets. And I applied this thinking to science & metaphysics & to my tiger-tangling in particular, and I gathered no answer.
            Consider for a moment a simple chain of events, say the birth of a child: At some point in the past, be it Homo sapiens or Homo erectus, humans recognized that babies came from sex. Okay, that’s simple cause & effect, though it’s hardly 100%; sex, therefore, is a necessary, but not a sufficient condition for pregnancy. Bronze Age peoples then, among everyone, knew in addition that you need both a man & a woman of a certain age, neither too old nor young, who abides in good health. Duh. But it would take modern science to show the true complexity of birth, and thus the fragility of this humdrum miracle. Sperm cells must be motile; egg walls need many sperm to be penetrated by one. And the timing of this union is especially critical, ideally when the ovum descends the fallopian tube, for so much depends on its proper attachment to the uterine walls. You could say that once all these steps have followed their filament, the rest is just gravity; but you’d be wrong. As a teacher, I learned to recognize the cracks in crack-babies and the visible effects of FAS (fetal alcohol syndrome), particularly from the first trimester, when mothers often don’t realize they’re pregnant—the horror of permanent brain damage; and I can go on & on with so many ways a fetus might spontaneously abort. In other words, the more details you know, the more improbable any chain of events appears.​[9] Or, to apply a different metaphor, between any two points lie an infinite number, each one a trial, each a hurdle to account for and leap through. Contemplating such a sequence in time, far beyond 81 simple increments, dominated my mind then, while simultaneously negotiating logistics. How, with my tiger, would I ever navigate from A to B?

            So in late May 2019 I returned to Indonesia, my tiger exploding already. A few days before leaving I began feeling stress and other physical symptoms, and I grew so focused on my terrible tiger, in fact, that not until the day before—my last day of prep & packing—did I realize I was sick with influenza. I got so ill I couldn’t even manage the public transport to the airport; my wife had to drive me. I didn’t eat for a week, and I was so grateful my first stop in Jakarta was a stay with my cousin.[10]  Then quite sick, I met up with Rhiannon in Yogyakarta, whereupon—I still kick myself—I just fucked up royally and got my dates off, missing a critical six-hour train to Malang. Then my back went out, and all the hotels were booked because Ramadan was ending, and we had nowhere to stay during a record heat wave, etcetera. Oh God. In short, we survived, and I was so physically miserable that my tiger actually took a back seat, albeit briefly. Hmm… I mused. That’s one way to deal with tiger infinity; just put your projection through such hell that you can’t even feel psychic pain or panic. It’s like burning off your foot to escape a headache. (Rhiannon saved my ass.)
            Cambodia proved a great, but brief respite, the calm before the final exam, which I’d seen coming for months and had worked so hard to avoid. It concerned entering Vietnam, which requires obtaining a tourist visa in advance. I applied online from home for both me & Rhiannon and had no problem with mine, but a simple computer error messed up Rhiannon’s. I tried every correction multiple times: resubmitting, submitting anew, contacting the visa company & the Vietnamese government directly. I even had clear proof of all my efforts, documents showing I’d paid, etc. But to no avail. Finally, our day of reckoning: We arrived at the border, where the Vietnamese guards, vested Communists who spoke not a word of English, couldn’t give a flying fuck at our predicament. Rhiannon couldn’t cross, but would have to apply from scratch from Sihanoukville three hours back, a pure shit-hole of Chinese casinos, where she couldn’t even start the process until after the weekend. Maybe it would take days, maybe weeks; maybe she couldn’t cross at all. So I continued on to the Mekong Delta without her and felt terrible, responsible, even though I knew well she could handle herself.
            The climax came three days later on my four-hour bus ride to Saigon.​[11] I’d awakened that morning way too early to my worst tiger panic yet, Rhiannon’s fate still unsettled and uncertain logistics ahead. My best pulling exercises only barely kept me functional, though once en route I relaxed a bit and strained awkwardly from my reclined bus seat to gawk:[12] The Mekong, as big as the Mississippi both in length & volume, ran absolutely everywhere, dripping from every pore; and people like busy nests of ants soaked up every drop, every artery & capillary bustling with industry, with agriculture, with animals & ancient culture & wealth & poverty & insanity all intermixed. Every inch of the delta consumed this mighty river, in usage & reusage, transforming it over & over forever into oozing toxic sewage. This world has no fucking chance!
            My tiger’s final assault thus arrived with clear content—though nothing I hadn’t wallowed in before—in fact, a fact of the world that brought me routine despair. But there came then as well a Blakean “last judgment”—his personal term. Blake viewed last judgments not as Jesus waving flurries of souls this way or that, to Heaven or to Hell, but when an individual moves toward a certain path once-and-for-all and never looks back, a final choice with no regrets. I thought of my “dumbshits,” the kids I had to browbeat for years into fractions for their own goddam good. Yes, I was fully aware of their baggage & difficulties, the disabilities & dysfunctions & fragile psyches & horrible home lives of each struggling student, most of whom were genuinely nice kids; I had true empathy. But it didn’t matter. Now we’re going to learn fractions, because without them high school will be awful; and I’m going to do my very best to make sure that doesn’t happen to you. Thus I transferred & applied my classroom conviction to future, global action with extreme prejudice: Fuck nuance; save the planet. I had a last judgment. Everything else, especially the stress of travel and separation from Rhiannon, just melted clear. And beyond this conviction I had one more sure thought: I saw my daughters, along with a few special girls I’d taught over the years—no males. I knew these future women were our future. The next generation of feminine wisdom embody our one earthly hope. Millennia of males & their mindless testosterone had destroyed our planet; wise thinking women would bring us back from the brink. I was positively happy.
            The rest of that day was logistical nightmare; I didn’t care. It took me hours to locate my homestay, a rented room hidden in an apartment block hollow, squeezed between addresses, carrying two backpacks in wet heat, inquiring everywhere. No one spoke English. I rode a motorcycle for the first time in my life, racing down blind alleys, a necessary risk I swore I never would take. None of this affected my well-being, which was neither “glowing” nor “blissful” nor in any way naive, till finally, with a bit of luck, I reached the spot. I dropped my bags, rinsed off my sweat, and immediately set out to explore the city and lose myself some more. I’d swallowed my tiger and have never looked back.

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​​The Table of Contents below is too long to display fully. If you click to the right of these Lessons, you'll see the primary source documents displayed under each. These original sessions are a world treasure.

5.  From A to B  

            Let me make transparent a bold assumption, one that social & physical scientists alike should find electric (though it’s pretty obvious from this curriculum):  I assume that human history is directed, for eternity is actively participating in the world.  It always has been so, even if such activity is cloaked & discrete.  A few cards are played & melded & taken openly, while most tricks are scored unseen.  I still insist that each individual soul makes his own bed & dwells there himself, free will being sacred, but there is certainly an overall global plan, a planet-sized project long underway—where the one-&-only outcome remains to be determined (like an election or electron), but now is reduced in number to but a few contending filaments, like the winnowing brackets of March Madness or rivers coming to a confluence.  Further, I assume that over the centuries (as over the rainbow) many seers & overseers & daimones have glimpsed the future.[15]  But so many predictions…  Which future?  Whose projection?  
            Why do I assume this?  Because eternity cares, and eternity ma’atters.  Eternity will have its way.  If two strangers can meet in a random city, to marry, to bear & rear children, whose children in time triangulate with other children, who multiply & cross-pollenate & populate the planet—and this story in time is repeated many billions of times without complete chaos—well, the guiding minds above us really do know better.  Do the math: They see it all, all the time.  Besides, I’ve talked to them:  They care.
            Before I go on, however, a vital proviso:  Just because our teachers care, doesn’t mean our planet is saved.  It could well prove the opposite.  After all, if “all the world’s a stage,” then many caring souls are bound to cast their own lives & lots in with the end of the world, Act V being inevitable.  How many beautiful souls, we cannot forget, chose Auschwitz?  —Not to end in abject suffering, but to pass through terror to shred all illusion & be born again, to live eternally, and perhaps in those final moments wake up a few others as well.  Souls happen everywhere & in all times, and who knows?  The end of the world could well prove spectacular.  (Ask Donald Trump!)
            I don’t think our world is going to end just yet.  I hope not.  Despite everything I read or see on TV, I’m an optimist.  I think we’re going to make it, one way or another.  We’ll wake up.  But time is of the essence.  My job, then, is to push along this transition as smoothly, as quickly, and as quietly as possible, to minimize the inevitable real-world pain, pain that will surely define the post-historical epoch.  Centuries will be needed to repair & return to health our damaged ecosystems & indigenous cultures; many won’t come back.  Our newest normal may well be climate-instability, hostile to life, where we must simply accept in life what we face from Infinity:  death & chaos.  I’m scared, and many other educated people struggle with these awful facts.  

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            Let me now employ my soul-vector geometry and begin our story’s trajectory at Point A, our true origin in history—not the Big Bang, which marks the start merely of physical time & “reality”—but rather of the emerging modern mind, infinite, the Individual.  It’s a story that necessarily unwinds in history (not myth or legend) with the beginning of history itself, Genesis, which, by its very definition & station in the world, embodies four cardinal facets we must now absorb:  

                        1)  it must be old 
                        2)  it must be written 
                        3)  it must be told
                        4)  it cannot be forgotten  

            Point B, we should know, is Today, Earth 2020, with all the beauty & chaos that pertain, our bullet train to mass extinction.  Thus the arc I span is all of human history, indeed exactly such; and I aim to trace a single line, the line of fire that ignites our minds but has placed us on this precipice.  Great rivers start from modest sources.  Over time & distance their many blended tributaries can overwhelm & dissipate the mountain sweetness.  The Ganges & Mekong, among many, are holy sewers.  But this history pulls through, even as it pollutes all others, for there is purpose to its painful passage & knowledge & message, intended all along, guided intimately by eternal minds.  All along the river this history, this continuous mind, carved its identity ever deeper into our distinctly human mindscape, in time writing its name deeper than all others, drawing all down into its caverns & veins.  Whence pulls this gravity?  Many are the minds & cultures that compose Civilization, but Point B without doubt marks a violent convergence, the many-minded world coming to a point, a blind obstruction & bottleneck in our course, a narrow passage.  When all is revealed, I believe we’ll feel relief.  Meanwhile, as we fret & transfix over cataracts ahead, we deny the flood all around us.  Do I smell the sea, or does my mouth taste blood?

                        Josef is our father & foremost master, first servant to the Jewel. 

            I am humbled in his presence, which is near.  He cares.  First for us, he was

            also first in history, the founder of his line, which now, indeed, is the founding

            mind of our time, the central thread of world history, around which all others

            gather & wind.  
                        At the first founding—as with all formal foundings in all civil lands—

            Josef broke bread and recited from earliest memory the names of his forefathers,

            the secrets of his kin, there & then revealing himself to his astonished brethren,

            gathered once again at the hearth of Abraham in a strange land.