Chicxulub Crater

If the story of evolution is really written in our cells there must be a trace of the dinosaur saga, the dragons tossed into the lake of fire, I’m guessing.

What are you babbling about, old man?

For those who read the logos of Gaia, Earth tells a story of violence and trauma and I wonder if that story is also written in our molecular being?

The tiny brains in hairy heads of primates huddled in caves evolved to resist dinosaur tyranny. Our ancestors fought and competed with each other but also learned to cooperate, communicate, make plans and change plans, strategize, and don’t mourn, organize, and be more or less better prepared for the next catastrophe, the next stone thrown by God at our home planet.

Does the impact of that collision continue to send shockwaves through time? 

The story of the asteroid that assaulted the planet 66 million years ago and killed nearly everything and all the big reptiles and only the small survived and the memory of that disaster of disasters, the impact of impacts, is encoded in our codes as at least a foreboding that one day the sun will not rise, maybe, and cosmic disaster happens in our cosmos — asteroids and planets and even galaxies collide and where can you hide, in this mess?

Well, I don’t worry about it. Asteroids are in the category of things I pray to accept because I can’t change. I worry about my own fossil record. Maybe I don’t even worry about that. Leave it to others to deal with the disposal of my life’s work after I’ve left. Leave it to the Lawrence Swan scholars of the future. If there are any scholars in the future, or any minds that read and think.

Haven’t you heard? They figured out how to make an asteroid change course, so it’s not hopeless for the mammals of Earth, if another one comes our way. We can make an asteroid change course, changing human minds is trickier.

Did you know that the big nations, the dinosaurs of our day, the UN Security Counsel, got together a year ago and formally agreed that nuclear war is un-winnable and absolutely a no-no, and then immediately began waving their missiles at each other and threatening to — what?

No, the human dinosaurs didn’t agree to never use their nuclear weapons, in fact, they agreed that nuclear weapons could be used “defensively:” 

“We affirm that a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought,” the statement reads. “We also affirm that nuclear weapons – for as long as they continue to exist – should serve defensive purposes, deter aggression and prevent war,” they said.

This is the “only a good guy with a nuclear weapon can stop a bad guy with a nuclear weapon” theory of peace.

They say a heap of matter organized itself and began to dream and so the universe was born and here we are. I don’t know. I wake up anxious about whether I am doing my part for the universal restoration.

What are you babbling about now, old man?

“You know Tyrannosaurus Rex was destroyed before by a furry little ball that crawled along the primeval jungle floor and stole the eggs of the dinosaur.”

That ain’t science.

No, it’s from Blows Against the Empire, Paul Kantner.

Omigod, your hippie music again.

Yeah, so here I am, an elder primate who has managed to survive this long in my shelter, and I’m taking notes. I would like it if even a fragment of what I wrote would be worth reading 66 million years from now, or even 66 minutes from now, or right now, as I read this to you, on a winter night, primate siblings huddled in the electronic space of our Zoom room learning to listen to each other.

Jonah

transpersonal visitation

OK, you’ve got thirty minutes

Thanks

What do you want?

What do I want — what don’t I want — I don’t know what I want — I want to know what YOU want. I want to know how to get over this unease.

Describe this unease.

I don’t know — anxiety, guilt, a fear of falling short, of being a bullshitter, of being unholy

Unholy?

Yes, unclean. Not dirty, but ritually unclean and not allowed to enter the temple.

I remember that dream you had about breaking into a church every night and being afraid you’d get caught.

You remember that? I forgot all about it.

Why were you locked out in the first place? Why are churches locked up?

They lock it up at night because vandals will come in and shit on the altar.

Really? 

They must be angry with God or angry with anyone claiming to represent God. If you are going to claim to speak for God you should expect to be crucified by someone. Likewise, if you shit on an altar.

Claiming to be God’s representative seems to be profitable for some of them, for the ones whose followers are willing to surrender their brains, and worse, their hearts, to have no compassion for the unholy.

Thanks for bringing the dialogue back to that, to unholiness.

You are afraid that God is holier than you?

Yes, I hate God’s holier than thou attitude. 

No, I suspect you are projecting a shadow of a god to talk to so you don’t listen to what is being said.  

Or I don’t hear what I’m not saying because I’m talking to myself, having a silent pretend conversation with some transpersonal wisdom figure perhaps and not sure that this shadow, I mean I know it’s a shadow, I think, on my studio wall —

or an angelic entity generated by my own brain?

Let me tell you a parable:

A man is swallowed by a sea monster and in the guts of the fish, in his distress, because he is a poet given to ecstatic prophecy, he sings an aria, a psalm of thanksgiving, in which  

he refers to the fish guts that enclose him as

the belly of Sheol

the deep,

the flood,

the heart of the seas,

and weeds are wrapped around his head at the roots of the mountains

in a land whose bars are closed upon him forever,

the Pit. 

His prayer is a pastiche, they say, of images from several psalms, a plagiarized prayer, or a collage poem, maybe?

Inadequate as it was, the song is heard in the holy temple, the sacred unconscious, and was effective enough, I guess, because the monster puked the poet onto a beach where he was rescued by surfers. 

Nice. Birth trauma leading to violent ejection from the womb? Kind of a second birth maybe? Help me with the hermeneutics.

So, the human being spends three days and nights in the heart of the earth, buried like a seed, the shell cracks, and the soul bursts into an eternal flower of psychedelic flames. 

Really?

Is that what you want to hear?

I don’t know what I want to hear and I don’t know what I’m afraid to hear. I’m afraid I’m the monster that swallowed myself and I think I’m going to throw up.

We weave a veil, a screen upon which we project, or a tapestry on which we embroider, a heiroglyphic pattern out our immediate concerns and our familiar desires, a web of perceptual habits and reified concepts from a  lifetime of wants, beliefs, fears, and all that. Vain idols clutter your headspace. Sometimes something happens, something catastrophic or something ecstatic, that blows away the veil, an apocalypse that leaves you unhoused and stark naked, if you will, in blazing Light, and that can be unpleasant.

That’s what I’m afraid to hear.

I’m sorry but these things happen, and now our half hour is up. We will continue next week. 

Go Condition

You are old, Uncle Lars, I say to myself.

I am a child dreaming I am an old man. I am Mr. Magoo. I can’t see my own time but I can see backwards sixty years to the past. I see JFK and Khrushchev, John Glenn and Castro, on YouTube. I study the timeline for 1962 in Wikipedia and listen to Dexter Gordon’s Go and Jackie Maclean’s Bluesnik. I want to go back there to 1962,*not a child, but a young man,

knowing what I know now, so I can be smarter than everyone else, and tell them they are afraid of the wrong things and not be afraid of anything, even though I know everything that will happen in the next six decades. I don’t know, I don’t know. We are still afraid of the wrong things.

(Cue Telstar by the Tornadoes)

the word was beamed to me from outer space

it looks like this — OFF ON OFF ON OFF ON OFF ON —

the word was beamed to me from TV

— there is a man of extraterrestrial origin who assumes a secret identity every day when he goes to work for the planet — for truth and justice, whether they are the American Way or not

there was a man sent from Earth, to orbit the Earth in a capsule.

A man in a capsule.

The astronaut’s condition is Go, says the TV.

When I was three years old my mother took me on my first airplane ride and I watched West Palm Beach shrink so all the houses and cars looked like toys. We went to New York, where Papa, my mother’s father, was dying.

I stood next to the hospital bed. 

“All of my bones are broken,” he said.

Sputnik was launched the same day Papa died, on October 4, 1957, The family gathered in the backyard of my other Grandpa’s house. We were looking for Sputnik, which we were told would be visible as it passed overhead. I saw a minuscule blinking light within the celestial array. 

I see it, I said. 

What does it look like, Chip? they asked.

It looks like this, I said, blinking my eyes, repeating the extraterrestrial signal I had received.

That is adorable.

That is so cute.

Mom worked at Pratt & Whitney Aircraft, which built the engines for the rockets launched at Cape Canaveral. She started work as a file clerk back when P&W was still located in a former bakery on Old Dixie — now Barack Obama — Highway. The company built its new plant west of town, out on the Beeline Highway, in the Florida wilderness.

We watched the launch of the first American in orbit on TV. John Glenn was suited up after breakfast. Breakfast was two eggs and a filet.

 “As you can see Mr. Glenn is in good condition, a happy condition, a “go condition” is the way they describe the crew.”

Did he take “Go pills?”  That’s what those military pilots called amphetamine in World War II. I watch the astronaut board the rocket. 

“T minus 82 minutes.” 

T stands for Time, as D stands for Day in D Day. “John Glenn is in the cockpit of the Friendship 7 spacecraft. As of this time all systems in the Mercury Atlas 6 are in a Go condition.” After we saw it lift off on TV we went outside and saw the vapor trail in the sky. 

Go, man, go!

I watched all the space launches and their trails of vapor in the sky. Glenn, Scott Carpenter, Walter Schirra, Project Mercury in 1962. 

Jesus ascended into Heaven without Pratt and Whitney engines, Dad said from the pulpit.

 

Dad started several Southern Baptist churches in South Florida in the early sixties. I often accompanied him on the long drive down US 1 to Plantation, Hollywood, Fort Lauderdale, while he did whatever it is he did to create a congregation that would raise funds to build a church.

We lived in Lake Park first, where Dad preached at a mission started by First Baptist of Palm Beach. Then we moved up A1A to Jupiter, and had tent meetings until we built a church there. That was the first church construction site I hung out in. A bulldozer was clearing away the palmettos and slash pines and uncovered a 25 caliber rifle that my sister now has.

I liked Jupiter. I turned 5 there. I started elementary the same year as Ruby Bridges. Do you know who that was? Norman Rockwell painted her? But I went to first and second grade at the still segregated Jupiter Elementary, and then we moved because Dad started another church, this one right on A!A, near a new housing development, a cluster of concrete shelters called “Cabana Colony”. We moved to another new concrete cluster named Palm Beach Gardens in a house next to the railroad track for the Florida East Coast Railroad.

Mr. Brown would sing, ”I found my million dollar baby at the five and ten cent store” while he worked. I watched him build the church. This was the second church construction site I hung out in. He sang to himself as he measured the pieces of wood that became the steps to the baptistry and it was amazing to see it all fit together. I watched them lay the concrete blocks and create spaces that weren’t there before.

I knew every hiding place in the church.

There was a stack of pamphlets from The Department of Defense that had plans for building fallout shelters in the space next to the baptistry where you change out of your wet clothes after the ritual. 

I was very cold

I was shaking

Everyone could see I was shaking and they think I’m shaking because I’m scared, but I’m shaking because I’m cold.

The baptistry is made of steel plates welded together and painted with Rust-o-leum.

Dad had me lean back and he lowered me into the water.

Buried with Christ.

Raised to walk

in union of life

with him

 

That was on October 4, eight years to the day after Papa died and Sputnik was launched. Later that month, JFK gave a press conference and announced that Russia had installed strategic nuclear missiles in Cuba. Troops were sent to the Florida Keys. I watched the trains carrying troops and military vehicles and weapons out my bedroom window. 

Dad preached about the End Times. Nuclear war would be global cremation, he preached from the pulpit.

It was my decision to be baptized. When the new church opened we had a weeklong revival with a visiting preacher. Every service ended with an altar call and one night I felt I was supposed to go to the altar. My parents weren’t telling me this, I felt the call inside my chest, but I chickened out and decided to wait one more day and hope Christ wouldn’t return in the meantime and send me to Hell. No one told me to get baptized then and no one told me not to. 

Maybe Sputnik had transmitted a message to me, or Papa did, with satellite love,  Go to the altar, Chip, said some extraterrestrial intelligence. I’m still trying to interpret this message.

I know my father didn’t like it that I read comic books with more interest than the Bible, and I watched the old Superman TV episodes after school. I hated it when JFK gave a press conference and they pre-empted Superman. It was unfair to kids. Why don’t they pre-empt Huntley-Brinkley?

You are old Uncle Lars, the young man says,

and your stories have no point,

yet you tell them over and over and over and,

are you finished with that joint?