Mac in the Meme-field and a Dream from the Vault (Updated 6/14)

(click to enlarge)

It's a rainy day in CT but, happily, no funnel clouds are emerging nearby as they were the other day. The perfect day to muse and dream... and remember. In my web travels, I note that two others have "memories" in mind and, in both cases, they regard Mac Tonnies.

The first is found on Paul Kimball's The Other Side of Truth, in which he has a clip of the Radio Misterioso show in which he and the other Cabal members discuss Mac's loss and their friendship.

Over at Intangible Materiality, Bruce Duensing has posted an article, A Theory Of Cetacean Aliens - In Memory of Mac Tonnies and Ivan Sanderson's Work, which gives a different, and most intriguing spin on the indigenous "alien" thought experiment, especially in regards to ultrasound and its effect on the brain.

What particularly struck me is Bruce's correlations of bird song to dolphin communication and psi. He specifically mentions an enigmatic "clicking sound" and I quote:

"Originally I had assumed what I heard outside my window (Summer of 2002) in the first instance (which I was to frightened to confront) was a strange form of bird call, which also incorporated a clicking sound which further disassociated me as to identifying it, however these rather weird "calls" resembled no bird I could possibly think of. When you hear these ultrasonic dolphin calls as recorded below, you will have probably the same reaction as I did when exposed to them, in that many of them sound, oddly enough like birds."

Now, this immediately rang a bell for me, so back to the "vault" I went, and I dug up this old Shadowbride article I'd posted in 2001 - the record of 1996 journal entry of mine - and one I had posted privately for Mac on Araqinta's Gallery of Transmutations under the title of "Timothy Leary Lives" - Altered States: A Holovision:

"Writing to report a weird experience I had early this morning. It was around dawn and I'd just woken up from some odd dream starring a Timothy Leary sort of older man... In it, he and I were driving at night down some long "lonesome" road on some featureless, midwestern landscape... thing is, we were driving the wrong way on a one-way highway and we were doing so deliberately.

Scene switches and I am visiting some strange man and his wife who own a nightclub, but are giving me a tour of the house which the man had built. In any event, the man began discussing my health... apparently I was not feeling well. He asked me if I had ever "fallen"... I admitted I had due to "loss of balance". I was wondering in a lucid way about the significance of this when I awoke.

It was dawn and as I lay there listening to the birds w/ my eyes shut I began to see a weird pattern emerging from the darkness... an almost graphic pattern similar to computer graphics... It looked like chopped meat being criss-crossed by a rapidly moving concentric ring pattern... similar to my cyclocentric* patterns but more intricate. From this emerged what seemed like another darker dimension - again filled with cyclocentric patterns but these were made of various colors of light... and some were large and whirlpooling while smaller brighter patterns emerged... all of them moving and vibrant and living and all of them revolving and forming harmonics by which even tinier glowing patterns emerged. It was as if I was delving into a series of many dimensions... but I could only glance at certain aspects (of the patterns) for milliseconds at a time (as they were) far too complex and enmeshed for human resolution...

...In the beginning I found myself entranced, but it finally became frightening because I was awake, and when I opened my eyes I continued to see the patterns. I thought I might be going mad...that my work with the cyclocentric patterns had triggered some variety of psychedelic experience... Just then, a thrush began to sing outside my window, I willed myself to concentrate on its song which, incidentally, is my favorite birdsong. When listened to closely, however, it is very much like a broken symmetrical pattern... unfinished in some way... as if some of it was beyond the human range of hearing. I hadn't noticed it before but there's this series of clicks at the end of some notes that sound like static - as if, had you slowed them down - they might sound quite different. So, in a sense, I traded one pattern experience for another and was thereby able to stop the visual patterns from firing..."

(Note: Later that day, May 31, 1996, I was to discover Timothy Leary had, in fact, died at 12 am, on the west coast... a matter of several hours before my dream. I hadn't  given Leary much thought up till then. As it was, he was a fascinating man who led an extraordinary life. He also corresponded with Arthur Koestler, author of The Ghost in the Machine, which was a source of inspiration to me at the time I wrote the cyclocentric material. Go to www.leary.com)

Okay, I'm not saying that all this means anything. It's Friday. Just a thought experiment...

P.S. I think I'm going to dig up one of my old dolphin drawings and scan it in for this post. Actually, speaking of dolphins, and maybe it's just my artist's imagination, but, didn't Mac kind of look like one, in a way?

You'll recognize the end of this video as being related to the Robert Anton Wilson video I posted not too long ago, but Wilson's thoughts on Leary are relevant to my other recent posts, so I felt this video's inclusion here was necessary.

* "Cyclocentric" is a word I used to describe geometrical work of mine relating to the polyhedra (and/or cyclohedra) described here.)

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Update (June, 2014): The cyber-trolls pulled the video that was originally posted here, but, I've replaced it. In the event the video is pulled again, allow me to redirect you to related YouTube offerings located here and here.

One last note... for those of you unfamiliar with a wood thrush's song, hear several variations here.