For Mac on His Birthday...

***

Ah well, so much for the best laid plans... the overlords have taken away our "window on the Webb" - a web-cam video via the Webb Space Telescope - and I haven't the patience to deal with it. (Sorry, Dana, it was a GREAT idea!)

But, actually, BG Dodson - contributor to our last (Corvid) birthday card - has come to our rescue with these new additions to his extensive and wonderful menagerie... and they happen to make a mighty good greeting card, too! Don't ya think? :-)

Thanks, BG!

As the Cosmic Yule Turns...

 

 

 

 

 ... expect a brighter tomorrow... no matter what the Overlords decree.  Happy Holidays to all!

(Note: for more Lisa Gerrard, visit Trans-D's holiday post.)

 

 

 

Cheers(!) to another imaginary year...

 

Once In A Lifetime

"And you may find yourself living in a shotgun shack
And you may find yourself in another part of the world
And you may find yourself behind the wheel of a large automobile
And you may find yourself in a beautiful house, with a beautiful wife
And you may ask yourself, "Well... how did I get here?"

Letting the days go by, let the water hold me down
Letting the days go by, water flowing underground
Into the blue again after the money's gone
Once in a lifetime, water flowing underground

And you may ask yourself, "How do I work this?"
And you may ask yourself, "Where is that large automobile?"
And you may tell yourself, "This is not my beautiful house"
And you may tell yourself, "This is not my beautiful wife"

Letting the days go by, let the water hold me down
Letting the days go by, water flowing underground
Into the blue again after the money's gone
Once in a lifetime, water flowing underground

Same as it ever was, same as it ever was
Same as it ever was, same as it ever was
Same as it ever was, same as it ever was
Same as it ever was, same as it ever was

Water dissolving and water removing
There is water at the bottom of the ocean
Under the water, carry the water
Remove the water at the bottom of the ocean

Letting the days go by, let the water hold me down
Letting the days go by, water flowing underground
Into the blue again, into the silent water
Under the rocks and stones, there is water underground
Letting the days go by, let the water hold me down
Letting the days go by, water flowing underground
Into the blue again after the money's gone
Once in a lifetime, water flowing underground

And you may ask yourself, "What is that beautiful house?"
And you may ask yourself, "Where does that highway go to?"
And you may ask yourself, "Am I right? Am I wrong?"
And you may say to yourself, "My God! What have I done?"

Letting the days go by, let the water hold me down
Letting the days go by, water flowing underground
Into the blue again, into the silent water
Under the rocks and stones, there is water underground
Letting the days go by, let the water hold me down
Letting the days go by, water flowing underground
Into the blue again after the money's gone
Once in a lifetime, water flowing underground

Same as it ever was, same as it ever was
Same as it ever was and look where my hand was
Time isn't holding up, time isn't after us
Same as it ever was, same as it ever was
Same as it ever was, same as it ever was
Same as it ever was, same as it ever was
Letting the days go by, same as it ever was

Here a twister comes, here comes the twister
Same as it ever was, same as it ever was
Same as it ever was, same as it ever was
Once in a lifetime, let the water hold me down
Letting the days go by"

- Lyrics to Once In a Lifetime (1980) by the Talking Heads.

***

It's all in our heads, my friends, all in our heads...

Heads in a Net of Pearls - DS 2020

Once again, this goes out to Mac in the multiverse: Happy Birthday, baby!

PS   Mac's Blip.fm link on the sidebar has been repaired.

 

 

The Little Prince Returns

"The loveliest and saddest landscape in the world..."

 "Here, then, is a great mystery. For you who love the little prince, and for me, nothing in the universe can be the same if somewhere, we do not know where, a sheep that we never saw has - yes or no? - eaten a rose...

Look up at the sky. Ask yourselves: Is it yes or no? Has the sheep eaten the flower? And you will see how everything changes...

And no grown-up will ever understand that this is a matter of so much importance."

***

"This is, to me, the loveliest and saddest landscape in the world. it is the same as that on the proceeding page, but I have drawn it again to impress it on your memory that the little prince appeared on earth, and disappeared.

Look at it carefully so that you will be sure to recognize it in case you travel someday to the African desert. And, if you should come upon this spot, please do not hurry on. Wait for a time, exactly under the star. Then, if a little man appears who laughs, who has golden hair and refuses to answer questions, you will know who he is. If this should happen, please comfort me. Send me word that he has come back."

 - Two excerpts (and two illustrations) from the final pages of Le Petit Prince (The Little Prince) by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. (See previous October 18th post,)

 

A Virtual Birthday Card

"Happy Birthday to Mac in the Multiverse"
Corvid-20 sculptures and photo - 2020, BG Dodson
(Click to enlarge)

Mac,

From All of Us

To all of You -

OX

Putting Things in Perspective

 

A Contaminated Culture (2)

A live version of Peter Gabriel's tribute/lament to Bantu Stephen Biko, a South-African anti-apartheid activist who was arrested and beaten to death by Port Elizabeth state security officers in 1977.


"You can blow out a candle
But you can't blow out a fire
Once the flames begin to catch
The wind will blow it higher."

- The last stanza of "Biko", 1980 Peter Gabriel.

A Contaminated Culture

Maybe it's just me, but, from Mac's expression in this 2008 self-portrait
(shot from a cell-phone), he seems to be peering into the future...
and that future is now.  

"SARS is an unknown disease. We don't know where it came from; the possibility exists that it came from space or was cooked up by a terrestrial lab. Already, the virus is mutating. Just beneath the calm surface of newspaper headlines, a viral storm is brewing. We'll probably weather this one out. But what about the next one? And the one after that? 

A barrage of mutations, new vectors, failed quarantines. A choking silence engulfs the planet..."

- Mac Tonnies via this April 17, 2003, blog post. (Note: the initial strain of the 2020 Corona virus was referred to as SARS-Cov-2.)

"Up early. New short-story idea: "The Other Room" (based on a futuristic version of the 'looking glass' technology described in the previous post). In the story, venturing outdoors is rendered virtually impossible due to genetically contrived airborne diseases and pollution. Interpersonal contact is limited to communing with 'neighbors' via high-rez wallscreens. The screens are so advanced that they're easily mistakable for actual separate rooms, fostering a sense of enhanced personal space.

The main character has lived his adult life 'sharing' his germicidally insulated apartment with a female love interest. But all they can do is look at each other and talk; it's as if they're on opposite sides of an invisible glass barrier (which, in a very real sense, they are).

Anyway, toward the end of his life something goes wrong with the programming of his homeostatic apartment building and he realizes that the woman in the 'other room' is a computer program designed to keep him from going crazy -- she never existed; he's wasted his life pining away over a simulacrum. And the World Outside is worse than he's imagined.

. . . And they all lived happily ever after."

- Mac Tonnies via this March 15, 2004 blog post. (Note: From the Life Imitates Art files, here's a couple of recent articles about proposed legislation in England: Sex is now illegal in the UK between people from different households, and the BBC article, Coronavirus: New laws come into force as England lockdown eases. I'm not sure if said legislation passed, but I certainly hope not!)

"Although I harbor serious reservations about humanity's ability to make the evolutionary cut, I'm not without hope. I sense great things in the making. I enjoy experiencing this dire, ever-accelerating point in our species' history; our potential as genuine cosmic citizens challenges the imagination and stretches conceptual boundaries to dizzy extremes.

I'm willing to embrace transcendence or endure extinction. I must perpetually concede either possibility, no matter how dramatically different, regardless of how exciting or dismal. I walk a fine existential edge, fearing and cherishing, enlivened by a vertiginous sense of astonishment and horror."

- Mac Tonnies via this April 19, 2006 Posthuman Blues blog post.


"The New Totalitarians come forward smiling obsequiously like head waiters in third-rate Indian restaurants, and assuring us that everything is for our benefit." 

- A quote from British author J. G. Ballard (1930-2009) posted on Posthuman Blues December 09, 2004.

***

Originally this post was meant to present a number of blog quotes from Mac's Posthuman Blues posts tagged "disease," with the notion that, while it's not possible to determine Mac's view on our current world crisis, reading bits of his output regarding past epidemics might be somewhat illuminating... although the fall-out from past disasters wasn't as severe as that which we are currently experiencing.

That was my intention anyway. But, after spending a great deal of time gathering together Posthuman Blues material, I found some of it disturbing but much more of it consisting of quotes pulled directly from news-pages with merely a sentence or two ad libbed by Mac  it seemed almost  pointless. Well, pointless except to remind us of certain historical information that many of us may have forgotten, although the last of the disease posts was written in 2007, merely over a decade ago.

For example, I don't know if many of us ever knew about this event (via this April 13, 2005 post), one for which Mac reserved comment:

"Labs scramble to destroy pandemic flu strain. Nearly 5,000 labs in 18 countries, mostly in the United States, were urged by the World Health Organization to destroy samples of the dangerous virus because of the slight risk it could trigger a global outbreak. The labs received the virus from a U.S. company that supplies kits used for quality control tests."

And, then again, there were those three bubonic plague-infested lab mice which went missing from a biocontainment lab in New Jersey posted on September 25th of that same year. Mac's comment?

"So far no one has been reported dead from bubonic plague, so it looks like we lucked out. Emphasis on "luck."

Lest we forget, also from 2005 (apparently a banner year for medical lab disasters) and posted on October 8th we have a report of a deadly Spanish-flu virus reconstructed by alumni at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine and stock-piled in Georgia... supposedly under "strict safety conditions" and (allegedly) to "predict future pandemics and develop new vaccines and treatments." Interestingly, its DNA sequence was made available on the internet. Understandably, Mac compares those "strict safety conditions" with the earlier story about the rodents at large.

One of his final disease posts - Plague of bioweapons accidents afflicts the US - from July 25th, 2007, begins with the sentence: "Deadly germs may be more likely to be spread due to a biodefence lab accident than a biological attack by terrorists."

Ah, yes, as if "biodefense" wasn't potentially a form of terrorism. In any case, regarding the present pandemic, despite media efforts to bring global-warming into the fray and/or blame it on animal contact, etc., if recent history tells us anything it seems equally as likely (if not more) that the Corona virus strains originated and/or were contained in some medical lab or bio-weapons lab as was initially reported.* The worst-case aspect of this possibility is that a new pandemic cannot be very far behind. After all, not only can accidents happen, accidents will surely happen. This is a given. It's a Murphy's Law kind of thing... and I've heard Murphy was an optimist.**

The Wisdom of Cockroaches

Archy the cockroach - a character created by Don Marquis -  in the throes of poetic passion; drawn by Creole artist, George Herriman, known for his surreal comic strip Krazy Kat (1913-1944) - Herriman articles here and here.

"i was once a vers libre bard
but i died and my soul went into the body of a cockroach
it has given me a new outlook upon life
i see things from the under side now
thank you for the apple peelings in the wastepaper basket
but your paste is getting so stale i cant eat it
there is a cat here called mehitabel i wish you would have removed
she nearly ate me the other night
why dont she catch rats that is what she is supposed to be for
there is a rat here she should get without delay"

***

And, so begins the saga of Archy the cockroach - a reincarnated free-verse poet - and his female sidekick, an alley cat named Mehitabel, who was the reincarnation of the Egyptian queen, Cleopatra (!). Both were the creations of Don Marquis (1878-1937), a columnist for the New York newspaper, The Evening Sun, in the early half of the 20th century. Originally written as a daily column, Marquis eventually published compilations of Archy's poems - illustrated by George Herriman - in three books during his lifetime: archy & mehitabel (1927), archy's life of mehitabel (1933) and archy does his part (1935).

I just discovered Archy and Metitabel quite recently. As for Mac Tonnies - a huge fan of Kafka's Metamorphosis - it seems that he'd have caught on to the cockroach poet with the feline companion a long time ago. But, I don't think he ever did... or he would definitely named one of his own cats Mehitabel!

As it is, I'm missing Mac more than ever these days. Wouldn't you give anything to hear his thoughts on the recent Pandemic Pandemonium, possibly the most surreal "current event" that any of us have dealt with in our lifetimes? Well, that is, apart from those few existing survivors of WWII. Not that this is a war exactly, although the Big Boys in Charge would have us believe just that (see here). And, really, cats and kitties, I'd put my 2 cents in if I had the slightest clue as to what's really going on. Sadly, there are so many holes in this pandemic narrative, we'd be better off knocking some golf balls around.

Well, that is if we were able to... and not confined to our indoor habitats like so many rats in their individual cages. Which kind of reminds me of this man I met in California years and years ago. He had a whole high-rise apartment complex in his backyard composed of cages stacked on top of each other. Each cage contained a well-fed white rat... live food for his pet boa constrictors which he kept housed indoors in glass terrariums. I'd like to think this was not a metaphor for our present situation.

So, how will this nightmare play out? Will there be a tomorrow? Who can say? Meanwhile, I've posted more cockroach wisdom after the jump. Enjoy!

"What is essential is invisible to the eye"

"The Little Prince on Asteroid B-612" - illustration and caption from the timeless tale
 Le Petit Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, a story about an extraterrestrial child
who fell to earth; first published in 1943.
"L’essentiel est invisible pour les yeux." ("What is essential is invisible to the eye")

"All men have the stars," he answered, "but they are not the same things for different people. For some, who are travelers, the stars are guides. For others they are no more than little lights in the sky. For others, who are scholars, they are problems . For my businessman they were wealth. But all these stars are silent. You - you alone -will have the stars as no one else has them-"

"What are you trying to say?"

"In one of the stars I shall be living. In one of them I shall be laughing. And so it will be as if all the stars were laughing, when you look at the sky at night... you − only you − will have stars that can laugh!"

And he laughed again.

"And when your sorrow is comforted (time soothes all sorrows) you will be content that you have known me. You will always be my friend. You will want to laugh with me. And you will sometimes open your window, so, for that pleasure... and your friends will be properly astonished to see you laughing as you look up at the sky! Then you will say to them, 'Yes, the stars always make me laugh!' And they will think you are crazy..."

- An excerpt from Le Petit Prince (The Little Prince) by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.* Full text in English can be found here; in French try here or here.


__________________________________

*Note on the life of Saint-Exupéry (sourced here):

"By the time his work was available in France, Saint-Exupéry had already been presumed dead for a year, and his death was every bit as mysterious and fascinating as his life. After making his way to Algiers and talking his way into the Free French Air Force, he was once more able to fly even though both his physical and mental health were questionable. On a 1944 reconnaissance mission, his plane disappeared, and he was never seen again. Whether he was shot down by an enemy or perhaps crashed the plane in a suicidal maneuver remains unclear. The author’s body was never recovered, and it wasn’t until 1998 that a clue to his fate was found in the form of his silver identity bracelet, which was discovered by a fisherman off the coast of Marseille in the Mediterranean. The remains of his plane were found there by a diver in 2000."

Shadows of Ancient Galaxies

Dark Cosmic Nest, 2019, DS; a re-imaging of a graphic found here.

Click images to enlarge.

Astronomers uncover 'invisible' massive ancient galaxies

"Although once invisible to us in the vast reaches of the universe, 39 massive ancient galaxies have been discovered by astronomers using multiple space and ground-based observatories. This is the first discovery of its kind, the researchers said.

'This is the first time that such a large population of massive galaxies was confirmed during the first 2 billion years of the 13.7-billion-year life of the universe. These were previously invisible to us,' said Tao Wang, study author and researcher at the University of Tokyo, French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission, and the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan. 'This finding contravenes current models for that period of cosmic evolution and will help to add some details, which have been missing until now.'

The new prevalence of these galaxies, which are connected with supermassive black holes and dark matter, contradicts the current known models of the universe.

Given their age and distance, the massive galaxies were hidden from our view because their light is weak and stretched. The universe is also expanding, which makes the distance greater. Over that distance, visible light becomes infrared, according to the study."

***

Happy Birthday to Mac in the Multiverse.

Dangling Conversations & Trifurcated Views

"Time needn't be relevant in the cosmic screening room. Whether a particular pattern emerged in the past or future is irrelevant. Information from the 'past' and 'future' (mere cognitive constructs) freely integrate. This is a realm without spatial or temporal boundaries. It's something like the 'implicate order' suggested by physicist David Bohm. The 'explicate order,' of course, is the intricate sensory illusion that we inhabit. Or think we do.

The ever-changing patterns in the protean cloud dictate the nature of whatever universe happens to be illuminated by our imaginary laser. Since our perceived reality is constantly modeled by the myriad ones and zeroes in the timeless cloud, we find ourselves diced into informational slivers. From this perspective, "continuity" is meaningless. The 'I' writing this sentence could be hundreds of billions of 'I's removed from the one that wrote the last sentence. More disturbingly, 'I' might not have existed at all until right . . . now." 

"The newly formed 'I' happens to have 'memories' of composing this essay, but memories, like everything else, are simply advantageous fluctuations in the filmic cloud, subject to constant revision. And since I'm ostensibly a component in day-to-day reality, it's inevitable that the randomly constructed parameters that define my world -- all of it, from my living room to the coffeeshop down the street to the structure of galaxies -- is every bit as flimsy and malleable. Reincarnation is quite real. It's happening all the time -- invisibly. 

Several months ago I was in an automobile crash. My memories contain the adrenalized moment of impact, the literally breathless aftermath as I pondered the crushed metal and broken glass, and a trip to a hospital inside an ambulance. It would appear I survived, albeit bruised and aching. But who am I to tell the story of what 'really' happened? Perhaps the arc of my life, as defined by the fluctuating patterns (and bits of would-be pattern) in the cosmic screening room bifurcated shortly before I collided with the other car. In one variation I came to a bloody end. In yet another there was never an accident at all."

"I pick the crash incident not because of any intrinsic importance -- at the most fundamental level, the blind dance of possibilities doesn't care if I live or die -- but because it illustrates how flawlessly one or two frames can be altered (or randomly inserted or deleted) to potentially catastrophic effect in the observable world. So long as a pattern remains intact -- and it will, since it has infinite space and time to organize itself -- so will some permutation of 'I.'

Which begs the question: What happens when someone dies? It's possible that informational death is impossible and that the person who "dies" in the "explicate order" is expediently recycled, living his or her life again and again in a state of total amnesia. Or maybe something like my crash incident applies and that observers who die -- in the directly perceivable world -- are shuffled into a future in which they "miraculously" survive their own crashes (or cancer treatments or heart transplants).

There's nothing concrete or absolute about our so-called universe. It is an alluring, insidiously clever simulation. The Many Worlds Interpretation of quantum physics implies that the universe is constant "branching" into parallel, exclusive states. A better term, in light of the scenario described above, might be 'flowing.'"

- Mac Tonnies from this November 8, 2003 Posthuman Blues post.

***

"Yes, we speak of things that matter
With words that must be said
'Can analysis be worthwhile?'
'Is the theater really dead?'
And how the room is softly faded
And I only kiss your shadow
I cannot feel your hand
You're a stranger now unto me
Lost in the dangling conversation
And the superficial sighs
In the borders of our lives"

- Lyrics from The Dangling Conversation (video), 1966, Paul Simon.

I guess the anniversary of Mac's birthday, i.e., the beginning of his last, known, brief journey through our "directly perceivable world," is becoming sort of a extravaganza this year on Post-Mac Blues. Not since the very early days of this blog have I posted so frequently... well, apart from the series which inspired this one. And, there's one more birthday-related post yet to come: a sort of Araqinta greeting card.

Mac's quote above is actually a fuller version of a quote appearing in this post, one of a series on PMB appearing in October of 2012. I even find myself using the same graphics, pulled from M.C. Escher's Another world. I guess Escher's odd little avian/human hybrid resonates with me still. Inset left is Still Life With a Spherical Mirror  found in the last entry of that series.

I didn't particularly want death to be a theme of any of the birthday posts, but, for the past 2 weeks I have had one song going through my head... over an over again like an endless soundtrack: an old, wistful Simon & Garfunkel tune: The Dangling Conversation. I don't know where it came from and I don't know why, but, in an effort to finally relieve myself of it, I thought I'd better work it out.

As it was, Mac was a fan of the 60s folk/rock duo Simon & Garfunkel despite the fact that they parted ways before he was born, and, with Mac in mind, I finally had an epiphany: unexpected death is somewhat like a dangling conversation. Your relationship with the departed person is left hanging in the air with no visible means of support as if someone cut the telephone wires mid-conversation... or your cell phone's battery hit 0 at that same crucial moment.

But is a dangling conversation necessarily a narrative cut short?

This reminds me of a photo of Mac I mentioned recently: the one in the tattoo parlor. As it was, I wasn't the only person who had never seen it before. Mac's mom, Dana, confirmed that  she hadn't seen it either. And Dana knows Mac's Flickr pages like the back of her own hand. She did remember the other photos (I'd forgotten), but not that one.

So, what are the chances of a new photograph appearing in a departed man's online Flickr album 9 years after his death? I suppose anything is possible in cyberspace and one shouldn't take a minor glitch too seriously. It might just be the results of Flickr's constantly changing formats... or, really, it could be that Dana and I are mistaken and it was hidden there all along.

Then again, theoretically, it might just be that the borderlines between the Universe's "parallel, exclusive states" are weakening - the veils are growing thin - and all sorts of phenomena are beginning to bleed through.