POST-MAC BLUES: Be Still My Martian Heart

As an artist, my "nom de plume" seems to change as time goes by, and I suspect it always will.. I previously signed my earlier graphic images as "Dia" with the year the image was completed, that is, when Mac was still alive, and I was contributing images to his blog, Posthuman Blues. At the same time, I referred to my digital "workshop" as Araqinta... after a fictional planet I invented for an unfinished sci-fi novel of mine: A Matter of Increments. (The image above was an attempt at "branding"...) My online name during this period was "Zindra", also harkening back to a fictional planet I invented for yet another sci-fi story... also unfinished. (Do we see a pattern here?)

That being said, Mac Tonnies was a real inspiration to me in those days - a type of muse, if you will... and many of the images I created from 2006-2009 probably wouldn't have existed without his influence. Needless to say, many of them wound up on PHB... some of which appear in the body of this blog, and on the sidebar, linked to the PHB pages on which they can be found.

I was an artist for many years before approaching the digital medium; I don't know if I would have ever really fully taken that plunge without Mac's encouragement. And, in some strange sense - and I know I'm not alone in this - Mac continues to be the presiding spirit over much of my work. So, this blog was created for Mac and in his memory, but it also serves as a monument to our friendship - that magical series of synchronistic events that enables two individual psyches to cross the barriers of time, space, and sociological conditioning, and inevitably create a unique bond... a safe haven unaltered by any circumstance, including the illusion of death.

"Flocks of teenagers materializing like thought-forms borne on the cool night air. An edge of autumn -- brisk but not cold. The Cancer Survivors' Park like an apocalyptic oracle, its touch-activated television screen locked against the encroaching chill, its statues frozen copper silhouettes.

A couple making out in the passenger side of a new Porsche; I glide by clutching my coffee, libido twitching sullenly somewhere in my skull. I find myself rediscovering a close-knit labyrinth of fountains and staircases and charming apartment buildings named after long-dead writers. The lights of Saturday traffic and gaudy horse-drawn carriages are mercifully eclipsed. The world is all shadowed architecture, suddenly shattered as I reenter the realm of the living, coffee cooling steadily. The usual anonymous hordes and casual lovers refracted through caffeinated synapses.

I buy a smoothie at a coffeeshop (Depeche Mode playing in the background) and gradually lose myself in John Brunner's "The Shockwave Rider." The immaculate sidewalks, sparkling as if pregnant with diamond, steer me home, past hotels, across the dark scabrous flow of Brush Creek. My apartment building has a new entry keypad, sans telephone handset. Made of reinforced stainless steel, it has the worrying appearance of something designed to survive an imminent nuclear attack.

Through the abandoned lobby with its fading pink carpet and neatly arranged couches.

Into the elevator.

I punch 9."

- Mac Tonnies, PHB post 10/5/03

LINKS TO MAC'S INTERVIEWS (Mixed Media)

VIDEOS

Blogging the Singularity - 9/6/07

(YouTube)

Red Star Films with Paul Kimball - 5/06

Mac Tonnies... the Crytpoterrestrials

PODCASTS

Coast to Coast with George Noory - 9/28/09

Alien Hypothesis

(for subscribers only - for others, try Mac's YouTube video link)

Radio Misterioso 7/27/09

The Cryptoterrestrials

Eerie Radio 9/10/07

The Cryptoterrestrial theory vs. the ETH

(Note: Long Introduction)

Binnall of America - 3/17/07

Mac Tonnies (Part 1)

Mac Tonnies (Part 2)

The Book of Thoth - 2006

Interview with Mac Tonnies

Virtually Strange - 10/7/06

# 413, New Frontiers Symposium

Speaking of Strange - 6/3/06

Mac on Mars

(link no longer available)

The Paracast Interviews

w/ Gene Steinberg and David Biedny:

The Paracast - 11/25/06
Mac on Mars (Mac is the 2nd guest)

The Paracast - 5/6/2007
More Crypto-chat with Gene and Dave

The Paracast - 12/3/2007
Mac's Cryptoterrestrial Proposal

The Paracast - 12/16/07

Regarding the reformation of Ufology, with Jeff Ritzman

The Paracast - 10/26/08

On Mars, Aliens, UFO's... and Sarah Palin

The Paracast - 2/1/2009
Mac on Terraforming Mars w/ Robert Zubrin

The Paracast - 11/1/2009
A Mac memorial by the remaining members of "The Cabal"

TEXT

Universe Today

If ET Calls, Would We be Told?

Room 101 w/ Richard Thomas 12/26/08

An Interview with a Transhumanist

FutureBlogger - 2/29/08

Fearless Futurist Mac Tonnies Goes Off on Mars

FutureBlogger - 1/10/08

Interview with Mac Tonnies

Upsidedownbackwards - 5/8/08

Little Boy Blue and the Man on the Moon

Ballardian - 7/3/07

Mac Tonnies' Strange Blue World

The Book of Thoth - 2006

Interview with Mac Tonnies

Alterati with Joseph Matheny - 3/7/07

They Came From Earth...?

Never-used Email Interview

- 9/15/2005

Mac Interviews Mac

My October 31st, 2009 Post:

There will never be another Mac Tonnies. Never. His was the class act that can't be followed. Though he had what some lesser minds viewed as outlandish, even preposterous ideas, one sensed that these ideas came from an effortlessly concise, essentially logical, and ultimately sane mind, so that even if one wasn't entirely convinced as to their validity, it was utterly impossible to completely dismiss them.

The world needed a mind like Mac's. Desperately.

Which is how I happened to find Mac. I had come across an interview with him on an online article (2005) in which he was arguing the case for past life on Mars. Being somewhat of a Martian freak myself, I was really impressed by the way he managed to discuss what was (and is) a "fringe" topic in such eloquent, perfectly respectable terms. I remember thinking that i wished everyone in the paranormal field was like Mac Tonnies.

I didn't begin communicating with him in earnest till January, 2006, when I won what was actually a masthead design contest he held on his blog. From that point on we held a steady communication, sharing ideas, artwork, prose, poetry, links, etc. He became my cyberspace touchstone during a rather sad patch in my life, displaying a sensitivity, a sense of humor, and an openness i have never found in any man before nor to this day.

Mac Tonnies was a brave man. Far more than he was aware of, because his was type of bravery not of the garden "macho-man" variety of which modern society applauds... nor, for that matter, even recognizes. He was a man brave enough to be true to himself and his ideals... brave enough to think way outside of the proverbial box. Brave enough to wrestle with his personal demons, and to do so alone - "out here on the perimeter (where) there are no stars" - so, that he might extract that truth. And lastly, brave enough to put that truth on the line in no uncertain terms.

And, now, like the heroes of old, he has wandered off into the "otherworld".

I just wish he'd come back someday and tell us what he found.

"Mac Tonnies, he got sonnetized a bit

While dwelling on our plane. He was a great 

Good natured subject while among us.

He was among those who first told me "Kate, 

You know that there's a book here, right?" Since then,

Well, I just miss him often, in iambs

As in the rest of life. It's truly been 

A strange and wondrous way to kick the jams 

And share ideas. Thanks, Dia, for the bump. 

I'm thrilled to be included here, you know

(And yes seeing this here did put a lump

In my poor throat, but that's how these things go).

And folks, you know that you can do this, too. 

Pick up a pen and scribble one or two!"

Kate Sherrod, via a comment on this post

"She might have had an identity once. Or at least the synthetic equivalent. But years have passed; entropy haunts the labored rhythm of her stride, the flow of her thoughts. All the sidewalks look the same, an endless montage that recedes to eggshell anonymity in the summer glow.

Some houses have fallen apart; others hover on the brink of dissolution, weather-beaten and faded. She walks past them, bare legs registering fatigue, but only dimly. Past lawns overtaken by hard-packed dirt and brackish weeds. The carcasses of cars litter long-abandoned driveways like rusted sentinels. She experiences a fleeting urge to join them in their slumber and examines their doors with ill-conceived longing.

The sun weighs on her slim shoulders. Her T-shirt, discolored and torn, flutters in the hot breeze; she rubs coal-black hair from dark, searching eyes and mops imaginary sweat from her brow. She looks new, or almost new. She wonders if others of her generation have lasted as long; after all, wasn't heat the enemy of electronics, the bane of overworked laptops? Of course, she isn't electronic in the archaic sense... but the word had seeped into her lexicon. She enjoys the heft of the obsolete syllables, cryptic and full of wasted portent.

She invokes diagnostic systems she'd almost forgotten. As her sensorium comes to life she stumbles under the sudden deluge of discomfort, the sun's blade shoved deeper into her flesh, threatening to rend the slender fiber-optics that run through her spinal column. Animal fear grips her; she marshals the discipline to remain hunkered on the hot pavement while her brain severs the barrage of input. As she waits, she scans the street for evidence of shade. Not all the trees have burned; sometimes she takes comfort esconced in their branches.

She regains equilibrium; the world recedes to its usual cautious distance. Flies orbit her head as she passes a mound of mummified garbage. A stack of tires stands vigil on the corner of a ruined yard, the treads gelled and bleeding from long exposure to the heat. Two blocks later she turns left. Then right. Then right again, trying to dispel the sense of having retraced her steps in some heedless suburban ouroboros.

Her feet chafe on the pitted concrete. She almost welcomes the snarl of cars she finds left in the intersection; she climbs, enjoying the feel of curling paint on her splayed palms, savoring the small avalanches of rust she displaces with her knees and shins.

From the top of a heat-blistered convertible, she surveys the crumbling rooftops. To the west, something is burning, sending a stalk of blue smoke coiling into the cloudless sky. On the horizon, the remains of the city skyline hover like a sickly mirage, sunlight glancing cruelly from intact windows. She's never seen the city so clearly before, and studies it with sudden fascination as memories surface:

Her own skin lifted from a frothing vat like a pinkish wetsuit, hands like empty gloves, facial features deflated into a thoroughly demeaning caricature. The techs had installed her sense of body-identity before adding the actual body; her abrupt adolescence had been spent in a grueling immersive dialogue with Turing auditors.

Her first vision of the world - the real world, as opposed to the auditors' cybernetic fictions - had come when her body had achieved a semblance of womanhood. She remembers awakening in a scalding foam of nanomachines, gloved hands drawing her up into a haze of disembodied eyes and fluorescent strips that left rungs of purple light on her newborn retinas.

That night, as the sky turns a gauzy red and the first rain of the summer begins, steaming on contact with the sun-soaked asphalt, she finds herself in the brittle haven of a dead tree.

She lets her sensorium expand to encompass the lifeless suburbs:

Derelict strip-malls... Streets arranged in inadvertent mazes merge with vistas of smoke and cauterized weeds... The tombs of houses, roofless, now filling with water... The distant city like some monstrous glass whimsy.

Her jaw opens slightly; she licks hot rain with a metal tongue."

- Mac Tonnies, story fragment found here

POST-MAC BLUES

Wednesday, July 27, 2011

Be Still My Martian Heart

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