Showing posts with label myth. Show all posts
Showing posts with label myth. Show all posts

Monday, June 6, 2016

The Dead Can Speak


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_quantum_laws

For most European Americans, the idea that the dead can speak from beyond their actual time on Earthin other time-frames than our ownis a story told to them solely though pop culture, in cheesy Hollywood movies about evil Ouija boards or haunted houses rife with demonic possession. But, if you delve just a little deeper into better content than the kind offered on generic prime-time t.v., you'll find a lot more varied factual accounts of our relationships with our ancestors, as told in our very blood and bones.

Forensic science, in the duel branches of forensic pathology and forensic archaeology, can uncover the brutally violent truths behind the deaths and oppression writ upon our ancestors bodies (http://www.pbs.org/wnet/secrets/), ones that that were denied life in the history books and textbooks of our mutual pasts, as white America sought to exploit their often weaker economic poverty through a cultural dominance that's extremely one-sided, because cultural assimilation often goes hand-in-hand with bloody wars for land and other precious resources, which means your kind of reminiscently Asiatic eyes are a most inconvenient feature to be dealt with evenhandedly. You are that which they wanted to destroy.

And so, with the now-modern inconvenience of genetic testing and cultural databases, it doesn't really matter what an opportunistic liar or an immoral cheat says or does, because the truth will come out in your blood work, whether you like it or not (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3122205/White-NAACP-leader-pretended-black-pictured-time-scandal-broke-responds-atatcks-saying-don-t-two-sh-ts-gusy-think.html). There's no hairstyle or skin tone that a wack-job looking to exploit white America's guilt about race can play, because science has made gaming the system obsolete. If you are just 25% Native American, you can get money from the state for college, just like a person of partial African-American descent can score pricey contacts and seed money for businesses from the NAACP, making your genuine ethnicity a very lucrative thing of the past. 


With your latest genetic test in hand, your reality changes, or, as the case with me, it becomes the history of your name (as my name) as it is written on the features of most modern Americans, now as your factually-verified claim laid to rest. It simply is so. But, it's way more than ancestral land rights or fishing claims, important as those are to indigenous people. Enter into the scene every carnival barker of yore who proclaimed their psychic ability to contact the dead, looking to take advantage of that ever-grieving parent who lost a teenager too early to a drunk driver, or a car accident of any type, or perhaps a grisly murder/suicide. So many questions to ask them...are they happy? What actually happened?

Then, the mystical arts of speaking to the dead become the fodder of anyone with an open question or hard emotional case that needs solving, especially if it involves child rape and/or murder, in our bids to relieve the extreme pain of a parent lost to grief. It's hard not to imagine what avenues we would not explore for them as a culture, in an attempt to alleviate such anguish. So what if she's a crazy housewife from "Lawguyland" (that's "Long Island" for the uninitiated) with a harsh accent and a phonily exaggerated appearance who "reads" people in an audience really well through their "tells"? We want to believe. I was no stranger to the allures of a good ghost story as a kid, buying book after book about poltergeists, only to be disappointed by a complete lack of supernaturally spooky life experiences. So, where the heck are they anyway?

And then the people I loved the most in this world died, my beloved grandparents, and with them, my tether to their pasts, as our ethnic stories and personalities that we had so lovingly clung to in each other, now together again in this new land of hope, faith, and promise. I started visiting my grandfather's grave alone, just to see what I would feel. At first, it was small but beautiful experiences, like a young stag grazing alone in the cemetery's grass with new moss on his antlers, looking up at me at the exact same time I reached my grandfather's grave stone, or hearing his distinctive old New York voice so clearly that I knew I had connected with him in my mind's eye with a searingly accurate recollection.

After that, it was game on. It was no longer a process driven internally by me and my strong memories, however great they were at alleviating my profound sense of loss. No, I could hear my grandmother laughingly explain to my maiden aunt living with her that now I was splashing around like a little girl in my bathtub, and then she would say the date and time in a future that held a middle-aged me alone in an old Hudson Valley home without her actual physical presence. It was so cheerfully normal, that I knew our sound waves were actually reaching each other in a way other people could hear, too, which is a discovery that's not without a rather extensive scientific past. 

Lots of audiophiles have sworn that they connected with their loved ones through a radio tuned to a particular frequency, like a son hearing his father (now deceased) talking to his grown son in the future using the same old device, ham radio aficionados both. Lucille Ball famously told the story of her dental work transmitting radio broadcasts through her mouth on live television back in the day (http://altereddimensions.net/2014/lucille-ball-picks-up-morse-code-radio-through-dental-work-fillings)! Hollywood made a sensationalist version of it (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frequency_%28film%29) by skirting around the real physics behind radio frequencies and audio signals that bounce around the earth's atmosphere, coming back around again and again after the earth's rotation is complete. 

What was once wacky science fiction becomes our reality with time, backed by real hard science (http://www.nasa.gov/audience/foreducators/k-4/features/F_Hearing_Voices_From_Space.html). Your grandparents and mine would no more have believed that you could hear voices from space anymore than my grandmother thought she would live to see the day we bought water from plastic bottles, free as it was for her in the city, the source of some of the best water on earth. It would have been unthinkable that such a vast resource as readily available clean water would be sold back to us through superficial hacks like "beverage companies", but such is the case as it is now. Why would anyone drink from harmful plastic bottles when the minerals of city water have amazing health benefits that come straight outta the tap? And my grandparents were right.

The same goes with our digital imaging advances and microscopic investigations. What was completely unbelievable a few short years ago is now our day-to-day reality. Computers and the Internet? When was the last time you went a full day without your smartphone or tablet? When was the last time you didn't have Internet access? Contemplate that, and you're already more than halfway there. The far-out astrophysicist who launched the best photographic lens we developed at the time weren't just looking for space dust out there. They were looking for the Eye of G-d and His Creation of the Universe we live in, beyond time and space, in this here-and-now for all times, because our real natural phenomenons come from the source of all life itself. Welcome to the space age, kids. It's a groovy place where we're one, even you there, that curmudgeonly old guy afraid of average machines like the common PC. This galloping mechanized horse engine now as wings to fly. See you out there! Now I can hear it.





Monday, December 7, 2015

The Winchester House

The doors to the bathrooms were solid wood; they were replaced with glass so that tourists would not mistake them for functioning bathrooms, which they are not. The only functioning bathroom was outside Sarah Winchester's bedroom, which had a small window for a nurse to check in on her, later in her life: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winchester_Mystery_House

I loved ghost stories as a kid. Whenever a new catalog from a particular children's book club came around the classroom, I always circled a few key titles for my perusal: ghost stories, vampire tales, paperbacks from the horror genre, and the "Guinness Book of World Records". Anything about the supernatural or fantastical immediately captured my imagination, like faked spirit photographs from the early 19th century, or those infamously blurry and deliberately ambiguous images of the Loch Ness monster. How could anyone prove or disprove such vague claims?

It was in this quest for the truth that my first tentative paranormal investigations began, heightened by my natural curiosity about the big, unanswered questions behind common cultural mysteries. I never really believed in space aliens or crop circles, but I was fascinated by the gullible people who did, usually fringe characters who never really fit into the world, seeking phantom societies they felt more comfortable with. 

Eventually, every huge hoax has been exposed to reveal the more interesting truths behind them, like: why would a group of British artists spend their evenings developing mathematically-accurate concentric circles in flattened fields of wheat? Well, because they're beautiful, and because mass hysteria is a prevalent human phenomenon, so much so, that for many years, major universities in England devoted departmental funds to their art, mislabeled as surreal, nocturnal alien encounters (http://www.circlemakers.org/). The art is actually much better than some invisible ghouls that go "bump" in the night, but the stories and untruths inspired by creative acts are part of the culture that surrounds each myth-making legend attached to them.


I was reminded by such a cultural creation walking uphill from town with one of my friends from the "basic yoga for disabled seniors" class that's held every Monday at our community center. She told me a great story about an older man who owned several trade magazines (they published journals for electricians, boat builders, etc), who disappeared on a yachting trip. She didn't think much of it at the time, because the younger son immediately took up his vacant post to evade lingering questions among the staff and authorities working the case. She attached her memory of the event not to his untimely death, but to the area called "The Bermuda Triangle". She cited all the typically kooky stories we've all read in the same pulp fiction outlets, like those Big Foot photos that never seem to be in clear focus. Isn't that odd?

Much like ruining a younger sibling's belief in the tooth fairy, I felt bad for letting her know that there are no unknown, uncharted giant invisible whirlpools that suck in boats from the ocean, much like there aren't invisible air-shafts over Bermuda that pull down planes into the sea without mechanical or pilot error. Stories like that are great cover-ups for nefarious deeds, though, which is the more likely part of the scenario behind the disappearance of her publisher way back then: that he didn't know how to captain his own ship, thus was lost to the rough currents and sudden squalls that any good sailor knows how to combat effectively (and here in the conversation I cited Robert Redford's movie "All is Lost", as a recent example of one man's battle against the sea), or that he absconded with company funds and staged a fake death so that he could make off with all the money. 

Even worse (and this I didn't share with her because she has a fragile psyche), may be that his own son murdered him so he could take over the family business, which happens a lot more than we think. My friend said she looked up the old company online, and they are no longer in business, which didn't surprise me at all. Well-constructed edifices do not topple easily. The name of the building she worked in has changed, too, but she didn't want to hear the truth. She wanted to believe in comfortable fairy tales that remain mysteries forever, because she disassociates from reality. I asked her a few quick, sharp questions designed to assess her ability to observe her surroundings while in yoga class, and she failed every assessment test I gave her, not that I'm trying to ruin my friend's peace of mind.

Far from it. I want to build her up so that she tells me her really good stories, like the one she mentioned about the mysteriously absent pater familias, because I told her the truth: those are the stories publishers actually want. She walked away from me full of new information that she will almost certainly struggle to assimilate effectively, which is also point of the point. If she can learn to build her stories around real structures that hold, then she won't be tempted to lapse into unproductive patterns of thought that go nowhere, like her mythical Bermuda Triangle, the worst kind of cultural deception there is, because it's not real. In fact, there's nothing magical there at all.


It reminded me of the old story about Sarah Winchester, the wacky eccentric heir to the Winchester family fortune (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winchester_Repeating_Arms_Company), who said she built staircases to nowhere to accommodate the dead people murdered by the rifles her family's company made, a story told to me in grainy black-and-white photos from an old paperback I ordered many years ago, through my elementary school's book-buying program. I felt sorry for Sarah, even as I understood the power of her penance. She lived through the profit from a culture of death we are still living in now (http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/money/industries/manufacturing/2010-10-20-remington-700-trigger-cnbc_N.htm), as evil a stain as any human could ever hope to bear, and no wonder she couldn't stand the weight of it.

Would you be able to live in a fancy mansion, knowing that your family murdered millions of average people, just like you? If you can't (and you know you can't), then how can you ask your peers to bear up under the sin of killing that's behind every mass murder? We can't go on like this. Let's tackle gun reform laws revised for mandatory licensing, certification, and permits for legal gun ownership, with psychological background checks cleared before we issue permits to the
ill and infirm. It's why you're seeing more frequently open manifestations of extremely violent events. We're shining a light on the darkness that hides within. We're winning.


Tuesday, July 21, 2015

Queen of Denial (A River in Egypt)


Life in tha 'hood can be fun, challenging, scary, tense, and totally inaccurate, all at once. In a quest for self-determination and a carefully calculated cutting of ties with the past (to create a false new one), folks often made up versions of their selves, in lieu of access to any real information. Enter into downtown Brooklyn me and my friend from school daze, an actual African-born woman from Ghana, which created a weird dynamic around her wherever she went, fueled by Spike Lee's wildly exaggerated and often misguided tales of Brooklyn, designed to shock and amaze his exotic-seeking (and rich) white audiences.

L.I.U.'s downtown campus was exactly what Fulton Street was at the time: an almost totally black neighborhood, with a few Hispanic girls thrown into the mix for "diversity". I was given a free ride to Howard University back in the day, because black campuses struggled to right a segregation not of our generation's creation, but it was a hard way to go. Many of the kids we met in the late 80s had never spoken to a "white" girl before, so me and my suburban friend felt as adrift and lost at sea as my ancestors were in their boat rides over.

It made for some comic times that were colored darkly, like a group of earnest but completely unrealistic young men who sought freedom of expression through their public exposition on their collective hatred of "the white man", but not literally, of course (just in case I was the "PoPo" undercover and at work in their college dorm room environment, at the tender age of 18). They mocked my friend's "white" accent, which is actually a fairly standard New York one, as she ripped into them for their phony Ebonics (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ebonics).


Kleopatra-VII.-Altes-Museum-Berlin1.jpg
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleopatra

In the glow of Junior's cheesecake and fried chicken joint, we were forced to improvise identities for the sake of our protection while we walked the streets, and with my ethnicities, it was pretty easy for me to do. I slicked back my hair into a "fly" ponytail and painted my lips bright red, swinging my head 'round with big ghetto-sized silver hoops. It gave me room to breathe and "pass", but I still looked at Dr. Zizmor's* ads for ripped earlobe surgery with trepidation. It was the violent girl gang thang to do back in the day; sneak up on a 'ho, and rip the earring right the fuck off her ear. 
Don't even think about wearing gold or fancy sneaks on the train, which I didn't. I couldn't have afforded the gear anyway. *(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Zizmor)

And so I was privy to conversations most average white people have never heard, like how "The Man" keeps us down: "Right, sista?" said one Latino girl (no, not the ancient Latin kind of Holy Roman) to me, as she turned to me listening in, on the edge of a group in front of campus, for support. It was a shock, and I hitched in a tiny breath no one noticed without skipping a brief beat: "Yeah, girl!", and I was in.

Little did we know the depths of American ignorance about the lands they'd been ripped out of, because most of them did not know that my girl from school was actually Ghanaian from the real west coast of Africa. They'd flown over on a plane though, and had an above-ground swimming pool that I certainly didn't have. None of them could really know us, because the truth would put our lives in real danger, but we laughed about it in private and behind closed doors. Oh, shit! That girl really believes she's descended from some Egyptian Pharaoh? Is that where she think she from, girl?! Fuuuuck!

Because, you see, me and my friend from school knew one very pretty and very real first generation Egyptian-American girl named Dahlia growing up: a perfectly lovely name for a ringleted girl of olive complexion from a Christian family in Egypt, and someone who is most definitely NOT Kush or Nubian, but that's a story for another day. 

For now, let's look to the blood for our real genetic history, because the blood doesn't lie. The truth will out! See you 'round the way, some day or another, mes amis. 

Your homework for today, 'hood rats:


Tuesday, June 4, 2013

What's your favorite cover?

So the very next question I get after "What do you do for a living?" is: "What's your favorite book cover?" The answer is blessedly, and somewhat surprisingly simple, given my expert and professional familiarity with all things book-related:


It's the first story we know of in Old English (along with The Canterbury Tales), and it remains the defining, classically mythic tale of a warrior, a monster, and a quest. Along the way, Beowulf encounters every pitfall an epic hero must face: the trials, the tribulations, the doubts, the tests of character, the feats of strengths, and then the one flaw in his character leading to failure that, while momentary, results in an enormous fall from grace, and finally his battle and ultimate triumph of good over evil, which is the life every great person leads. It's the story of humanity, the stuff of legends, and it is the very nature of life itself. You don't get better than that.

Incidentally, while I'm here at home in the country, amongst the places I was raised, it seems fitting for me to thank my senior year H.S. English Lit teacher Mr. Bennett, for making us read aloud in class the original fable in Old English before we read the translation. It was hard, it was painful, and it was a lot of work, but in the end, I wouldn't be the publisher I am without that rock solid foundation. It formed the basis for my deep love and appreciation of the English language that has never abated, much maligned as it is worldwide as the blunt, simplistic business language of Capitalism, commerce, and money. To those of us who know this tongue well on a very deep and intimate level, it is every bit as mysterious, seductive, romantic, powerful, poetic, strong, lyrical and beautiful as the Indo-European, Norman, and Anglo-Saxon roots it sprung from, remaining an anomaly amongst the Romance and Latin-based languages of Western Europe. Rock on to Kublai Khan, Mr. Bennett. You are one cool dude. 

PS-Me and Karen totally spotted you riding your old car with the windows down on Main Street in Nyack back in the day (1987), shirtless and smiling. We waved to you and you waved back. What a great model you are for a purpose driven life. Kudos!

Monday, October 15, 2012

Once Upon a Midnight Dreary...

 
Today's post is inspired by the ever-darkening gloom of Autumn that we have in the Northeast. It is a time when the day wanes early, the nights turn stormy, and those among us who are not of our stock turn to their various "Club Meds" seeking solace.

Because here in the Land of the North, winter is always coming, a time that separates the boys from the men. We celebrate the holidays from The Old World in the same climate from whence they sprang.

In the swirling mists of our nights, there is a sense of spirits lurking around dark corners, casting long shadows. No one narrates those tales better than the voice of The Dark Lord, James Earl Jones. 

I once read aloud tales by Edgar Allen Poe on Hallow's Eve at midnight on a graveyards' hillside that overlooks the same vistas in Providence that inspired him. The night was so thick it coated every surface in the same ebon hues that tinted his very vision hundreds of years prior.

While the mists danced on the cobblestone streets, we lost a sense of time between then and now. I didn't see any ghostly white specters like in the movies, but I felt his heartbeat and heard his footsteps as we trod the very same streets he wrote about, our footsteps echoing in the night, our hearts hammering in our chests.

Halloween is almost here.

Thursday, April 5, 2012

Greatest Hits

Globe Trekker has some of the coolest music ever made for T.V. It's one of those opening themes that immediately gets you pumped up for armchair travel. There's the awesome Native Trekker creating a circle around him that morphs into a spinning globe lit from within—a great sequence that encapsulates the change in perspective that composes the mindset of those who travel well. Ian is my favorite!



You must absorb the best lessons from your culture first, placing yourself firmly within your immediate surroundings with your feet flat on the ground, so that when you do extend yourself outward, you bring home with you wherever you go, never losing who you are because you carry it with you. The seasoned Trekker has simply set aside some time to explore and discover the world. It's the great Aboriginal concept of a "Walkabout", and it is a crucial piece of development for any one who is learning to spread their wings to fly. It's the nature of A Quest, that mythic transformation from a child (still afraid of the dark) to a young adult ready to see the world. Let's go! Each program's theme is tailored to that episode, taking native instrumental elements and weaving it into the overall background music. As we progress towards a World Culture, reaching for that shared, shining Star Trek vision, we will never lose our local selves as we step forward into a united future. We are this world. See you out and about, be it here or there, near or far. Happy travels! 

Wednesday, November 2, 2011

Greatest Hits

I submit to you, dear readers, that the best orchestral accompaniment to any movie is that of Star Wars. It builds emotional tension, animates battle sequences, and becomes the backdrop to every major storyline, including the romance between Princess Leia and Hans Solo. 

Who could forget the opening credits, with the scrolling storyline as the main theme plays?

Listen to the menace behind Darth Vader's theme, "The Imperial March" by George Lucas, John Williams, and the London Symphony Orchestra:


This sad tribute plays after Luke discovers that his family has been murdered by Imperial troops while he was away from the compound. He realizes that he is now alone, and so his journey begins. It's called "Binary Sunset":


How much fun is the Catina scene? Ever walked into a strange place in a strange land, and never felt more like a stranger that you had in your entire life?  Luke's quest begins with this introduction to the universe at large. The adventure starts:


I got chills at the end of the movie when Luke and Hans receive medals for their service to The Federation. It's kind of reminiscent of a graduation ceremony. Go Chewie! At the end of the scene, the music seamlessly rolls with the final credits. Masterful.