Heaven’s Maps

Sibusiso Mthembu, who lives near Durban, South Africa, has drawn a map of the way to heaven on the wall of his home. Pilgrims troop by to view this marvel and newspapers are reporting this as yet another weird event, something to chuckle over. But maps of heaven have been common throughout human existence and they are usually quite serious affairs.

Sibusiso Mthembu in front of his map to Heaven.

Heaven is not necessarilly Paradise; it may be simply the Land of the Dead, the place human beings go after death. Still, it is a place and places are located by maps. Sibusio Mthembu is unusual, though, in that he has managed to return from Heaven. Usually this is a place that people only glimpse in dreams.

“Journey of the Dead to Dhuwa”, Land of the Dead for the Jiridja Australians, by Binyinyuwuy, 1948.

Humans have made maps for thousands of years but one culture’s version may be unreadable by other humans from other cultures. Maps derive from concepts of the World and people’s place in it. Medieval European maps used to place Jerusalem in the center and the known continents were arranged around it. The medieval concept of Heaven has to do with concentric rings of spheres of existence. Heaven is in the outermost sphere.

A map of Existence according to Dante. [via Kinkanon]

As Western concepts have become more technical, so Heavenly maps have become more diagrammatic:

Chart of Heaven by Clarence Larkin, about 1895.

But ecstatic visions still occur and are recorded by those who do not fear social judgment.Brenda Davis paints what she dreams. “I can’t help it. God knows I can’t read or write, so he tells me the stories.” Here is her “Map to Heaven”:

The most exact maps to Heaven are possibly those made by Athapaskan tribes in northeastern British Columbia. Hugh Brody has written of this in his great Maps And Dreams. Hunters, some of them, would dream of the hunt they would have and the game they would take. This was a special gift of a few. Amongst these, some would also dream of Heaven and the way to get there. The maps that are made from dreams are very special and not to be seen except on special occasions, such as when the Beaver people were trying to convince certain bureaucrats that they did indeed understand their area in geographic terms and had mapped it. They brought a moosehide bundle into the meeting place:

…they untied the bundle’s thongs and began very carefully to pull back the cover. …the contents seemed to be a thick layer of hide, pressed tightly together. With great care, Aggan took this hide from its cover and began to open the layers. It was a magnificent dream map.
The dream map was as large as the table top, and had been folded tightly for many years. It was covered with thousands of short, firm, and variously colored markings. …Up here is heaven; this is the trail that must be followed; here is a wrong direction; this is where it would be worst of all to go; and over there are all the animals….all of this had been discovered in dreams.
…it was wrong to unpack a dream map except for very special reasons. But…the hearing was important. Everyone must look at the map now. …They should realize, however, that intricate routes and meanings of a dream map are not easy to follow. There was not time to explain them all. The visitors crowded around the table, amazed and confused.
A corner of the map was missing…someone had died who would not easilly find his way to heaven, so the owner of the map had cut a piece of it and buried it with the body. With the aid of even a fragment…the dead man would probably find the correct trail, and when the owner of the map died, it would all be buried with him. His dreams of the trail to heaven would then serve him well.

But the bureaucrats did not understand the map nor the Beaver people’s claim to the land. Their mindset was biased toward the geological survey maps being used by the companies who wanted to build a pipeline through Beaver territory. So it is: we are unable to understand the maps of others and we lose our way to heaven.

The End Is Nigh, Philosophize!

Mayan priests celebrating the beginning of new 5000 year cycle, December 19. [Moises Castillo/AP]

Well, somehow it seems like we escaped oblivion yet again. I say again, because this has occurred many times before and certainly will repeat. Now, recognizing that our existence will continue for a while longer, now is the time to sit back with a glass of something or other and ruminate on the notion of the End of the World. But if that’s too much work, then drain your glass while reading Brillat-Savarin’s meditation on the subject from The Physiology of Taste: or Meditations on Transcendental Gastronomy published in 1825:

Meditation 10

The End of the World

…Indubitable signs teach us that this globe has already undergone several complete changes, which have been in effect ends of the world; and I do not know what instinct it is that warns us that there will be still more of them.

Often before now we have believed these revolutions ready to happen, and there are many people still living who once hurried to confess their sins because of the watery comet predicted by the good Jerome Lalande.

According to what has been written on the subject, we seem only too eager to surround such a catastrophe with avenging fury, with destructive angels and the sound of trumpets, and other no less horrifying accompaniments.

Alas, we do not need such histrionics to be destroyed; we are not worth a funeral display, and if God wishes it he can change the whole surface of the globe without such exertion on his part.

Let us suppose, for instance, that one of those wandering stars, whose paths and purposes are unknown to any of us, and whose appearance is always accompanied by a legendary fear, let us suppose, I say, that such a comet flies near enough to the sun to be charged with a terrible excess of heat, and that it then comes near enough to us to cause a six-month period of a general temperature of about 170 degrees Fahrenheit (twice as hot as that of the comet of 1811).

At the end of this murderous period, all animal and vegetable life will have perished, and all sounds have died away, the earth will turn silently until other circumstances have developed other germs of creation on it; and still the cause of out disaster will lie lost in the vast halls of outer space, and we shall have passed no nearer to it than a few million leagues.

This happening is as possible as any other, and it has always been for me a tempting thing to dream upon, and one I have never shunned.

It is a strange experience to follow, in spirit, this unearthly heat, to try to predict the effects of it and its development and the way it acts and then to ask:

What happens during the first day of it, and the second, and so on until the last one?
What about the air, the earth, the waters on the earth, and the forming and mixing and exploding of all the gases?
What happens to mankind, according to age, sex,and strength or weakness?
What about man’s obedience to law, his submission to authority, his respect of other people and the property of his fellows?
What does he do about trying to escape from the situation?
What happens to the ties of love, of friendship and of kinship, of selfishness and devotion to others?
What about religious sentiments, faith, resignation, hope, et cetera, et cetera?

History can supply us with a few facts about the moral reactions; for the end of the world has already been predicted more than once, and even fixed on a certain date.

I really feel ashamed about not telling my readers how I myself have decided all these questions; but I do not wish to deprive them of the pleasure of doing it for themselves. It can eliminate a few insomniac hours for them, and even pave the way for some daytime siestas.

Real danger tears down all social ties. For instance, in the epidemic of yellow fever which struck Philadelphia in 1792 or thereabouts, husbands closed doors against wives who shared their homes, children abandoned their fathers, and other such phenomena were common.

Quod a nobis Deus avertat! [God keep that from us!]

[translated by M.F.K. Fisher]

Thus Brillat-Savarin laid out the conflicts that we are all familiar with when confronted by the question, How do we deal with survival and other people during or after nuclear holocaust? Killer meteor strike? Total climate collapse? Flesh-eating zombie apocalypse? Actually, Brillat-Savarin might have a few more words to say about the last, since his book is about food. I can visualize a chapter on the preparation of brains for example.

A free download of The Physiology of Taste is here, but I recommend the M.F.K. Fisher translation, because Ms. Fisher, a pre-eminent writer about food, lards the book with her own observations on cuisine: The Physiology of Taste: or Meditations on Transcendental Gastronomy

Good Books: Tay John by Howard O’Hagan

“The time of this in its beginning, in men’s time, is 1880 in the summer, and its place is the Athabaska valley…” In this place live a group of Shuswap Indians, separated from their main group who live farther west. This is not a good place for them and they want to return to the good hunting grounds that they once knew. They possess a myth: that a man shall come to them who will be a great leader and guide the tribe to the place where they will be happy. Instead, a white trapper named Red Rorty descends on the Shuswap. Rorty has recently discovered Christianity and he means to convert the Shuswap but rapes one of them, a woman named Hanni. The angry women of the tribe tie Red Rorty to a tree. They set fire to his beard and hair:

With the fire his mouth opened to shout but no sound came from it. Yaada took a small round stone and shoved it between his jaws, and it stayed there, as a word he tried to utter, while the flames began to roar around him…
While the ground was yet hot and smouldered, Yaada and some others returned.
     They found the skull, fallen to the ground and caught in the black twisted roots of a tree. The stone was still between its jaws. Yaada took a stick and pointed.
     “See,” she said, “He was a great liar, and the word has choked him!”

That is the first chapter of Tay John, Howard O’Hagan’s great novel about myth and humanity. The place where it is set, near the headwaters of the Fraser River, is the western opening of the Tête Jaune or Yellowhead pass through the Rockies. That place name is one of the springs for O’Hagan’s fiction. His main character is Tay John, a corrupted form of Tête Jaune, so called because he is blonde.

Headwaters of the Fraser. Mt. Robson in the distance.

Hanni is pregnant with Red Rorty’s child. She becomes sick and dies before giving birth. A child is seen emerging from her grave. The child, a blonde boy, is captured and taken to the people but he is unhappy. A wise woman is brought from another tribe and she tells them the reason: “He wants the full, free life of a man — not the half-life he had in the grave.” Then people notice that the boy has no shadow. The wise woman leads him to the home of shadows and finds one for him. Still, people are afraid that if they step on the boy’s shadow, that he will lose it and when they are close to him they look down at the ground, careful where they put their feet. So Tay John grows up.

There is a dark river valley that the people fear and where hunters do not go. That is the place that Tay John chooses for his vision quest. He spends days in the fearsome place and returns with heavy black sand so that the people will know that he has truly been there. An owl, the spirit of a dead woman, speaks to him on his quest but the elders of the tribe have already  made up their minds that Tay John’s spirit animal is a bear and so they interpret his visions. White men come to the area; they ride horses which are a wonder to the tribe since they are not a horse people. Tay John guides them into the dark valley where the white men are delighted with the heavy black sand that they recognize as gold-bearing. They send Tay John back to his people with a rifle and ammunition and other valuable things.

Tay John guides his people west. It is a hard journey and some die but eventually they come to grassland at the edge of the forest that is full of game. The people are satisfied. Now Tay John wants a wife but the only available young woman is afraid of him because he is a leader and she cannot look into his face for fear of stepping on  his shadow. The people say that Tay John does not need a woman, the tribe is his wife. There is discord and Tay John leaves. The people build a new house for Tay John and every day line his bed with fresh green boughs. They hang a beautiful coat of marmot skins inside for him to wear. They wait for his return. So ends the first section of the book: “Legend”.

The second section is called “Hearsay” and it is the testimony of Jackie Denham who has a story to tell, the story of Tay John. Denham tells of seeing Tay John kill a grizzly bear with a knife. He tells of it so often that the story is known to everyone as “Jackie’s Tale”. But Denham also knows some other tales of Tay John, of a desperate card game where the man cuts off his own left hand and an encounter with a woman, one of the first tourists in the area, who accuses him of rape. Denham has these stories second-hand and retells them. By his telling, the woman is fascinated with Tay John who, according to her, lost his hand in a fight with a grizzly. When she withdraws her accusation the others involved, all men, assume that the woman was refused by Tay John and sought revenge through her accusation — anyway, she was asking for it.

By now the reader of O’Hagan’s book will understand that there are stories and there are facts and that the one does not necessarilly partake of the other. The story is the important thing. Stories exist independently of men:

All that is not seen is dark. Light lives only in man’s vision. Past our stars, we think, is darkness. But here we say, is light.
…
Men walk upon the earth in light, trailing their shadows that are the day’s memories of the night. For each man his shadow is his dark garment, formed to the image of his end, sombre and obscure as his own beginning. It is his shroud, awaiting by his mother’s womb lest he forget what, with his first breath of life, he no longer remembers.
…
[Tay John’s] story, such as it is, like himself, would have existed independently… Every story — the rough-edged chronicle of a personal destiny — having its source in a past we cannot see, and its reverberations in a future still unlived — man, the child of darkness, walking for a few short moments in unaccustomed light — every story only waits, like a mountain in an untravelled land, for someone to come close, to gaze upon its contours, to lay a name upon it, and relate it to the known world. …and when you have finished, the story remains, something… unfathomable like the heart of a mountain.

So begins the final section of Tay John, “Evidence — Without A Finding”. Tay John, who abandoned his role as mythic hero to the Shuswap, gives up on being a legend to whites, throwing away his stetson hat after the rape incident. But Story is stronger than men and binds them.

Lucerne, B.C., 1917.

Red Rorty’s younger brother, a priest, has come into the region as has Alf Dobble, man determined to build a fantasy resort named Lucerne near the railroad that now steams through the Yellowhead Pass. These two are determined to be the heroes of their own story in imitation of the myths and legends that feed their beliefs and imagination. There also comes into the area a woman, Ardith, mistress to a wealthy and powerful man in the East and a central figure in a great scandal — a banker is shot in her apartment — that she is trying to escape. Ardith (based, I think, on Evelyn Nesbit), like Tay John, seeks to leave her story, to cease being a figure of legend.

Father Rorty is entranced by Ardith. She rejects him and Rorty is reminded of his own need for chastity. He lashes himself to a tree to share the experience of Jesus on the cross. There is rain and Rorty’s wet bindings shrink so that he cannot free himself and dies in agony, crucified. Or so people hypothesize. Perhaps he meant to die on that tree, perhaps he meant his imitation of Christ to proceed to its end.

Dobble, too, is smitten by Ardith. He sees her as a damsel in distress, one that he may rescue. But Dobble is a man who cannot see the reality, that he is a small, foolish creature whose vast dream of a resort town will lie rotting in the wilderness a few years hence — at least so Jackie Denham tells us.

Ardith and Tay John find each other and together seek to escape their mythic destinies. But how can one escape his or her own story? The story comes first, the people inhabit it and name it. The last we see of Tay John he is driving a dog team through driving snow. Ardith is pregnant and sits in the toboggan, her hand trailing, her mouth full of snow, dead, as Tay John furiously drives his team on. After the storm ends, no one can find any trace of them. It was as though they had gone down into the earth, thus returning the story to its beginning when Tay John emerges from his mother’s grave.

Howard O'Hagan (copyright Tom Gore)

Tay John was published in England in 1939. It got a good review in the Times Literary Supplement. Canadian critics didn’t like it. In 1960 an American edition was published that got a good review in the New York Times but poor reviews in Canada. The book did not sell well — the American edition of 4000 was remaindered. Still, some found the book and read it and passed the few extant copies around. It began to be an underground classic. People like Michael Ondaatje discovered O’Hagan’s book — he used the part quoted above about Red Rorty’s skull as an epigraph in his 1973 collection Rat Jelly and published a major article, “Howard O’Hagan and the ‘Rough-Edged Chronicle'”, in 1974. That year, McClelland and Stewart brought out a paperback edition for their New Canadian Library series that is still in print.

O’Hagan liked to present himself as a mountain man. Born in Lethbridge, Alberta, he had worked with wilderness survey teams and as a tour guide, but he also attended McGill University, got a law degree, and worked a little while as a lawyer before throwing it all over and beginning a wandering life as an impecunious writer. He was in Berkeley, California, married to an American painter, when he wrote Tay John. Howard O’Hagan understood, perhaps, the difficulty of escaping one’s own story.

Notes:
Tay John by Howard O’Hagan. The New Canadian Library edition. With an afterword by Michael Ondaatje adapted from his 1974 essay.
Silence Made Visible: Howard O’Hagan and Tay John edited by Margery Fee. Essays and criticism plus some interviews and reminisces.
The Canadian Novel in the Twentieth Century edited by George Woodcock, (out of print) contains Ondaatje’s essay: “Howard O’Hagan and the ‘Rough-Edged Chronicle'”

Various essays written about Tay John may be found on line. For instance (not an exhaustive list):
“Howard O’Hagan’s Tay John: Making New World Myth” by Margery Fee
“The Declension of a Story: Narrative Structure in Howard O’Hagan’s Tay John” by Kylee-Anne Hingston 
“Myths of Dominance versus Myths of Creation in O’Hagan’s Tay John“ by Jack Robinson

John Titor, Time-Traveller

In November of the year 200o someone calling themself Timetravel_0 began posting to internet forums. This person soon announced that his name was John Titor and he was from the future, the year 2036. John belonged to the Temporal Corps, a unit formed in his day to travel into the past and return with much-needed technology. You see, in 2036 the United States has been ravaged by disease and civil war and society lies in ruins.

Titor's time machine mounted in his car. (photobasement.com)

John readilly answered all the questions put to him in the forums: his time machine involved a micro-black hole, a “microsingularity”, mounted in an automobile chassis (a Chevy Corvette); there is no “grandfather paradox” about altering the past, since time travel involves visiting a paralell universe in which John Titor’s grandfather is the ancestor of a different John Titor; nevertheless the future as John describes it is the future of this time line, he is certain of it since time-lines diverge very little over a period of a few years; the technology he is trying to fetch back is an IBM 5100 computer because this ancient piece of cyber-tech has the capacity to debug a flaw in Linux code that will crash Linux computers in 2038, also John wants to visit family; the United States has collapsed into small rural units, John lives in Florida; a world war in 2015 will kill 3 billion people; Mad Cow disease, latent in the population, erupts in most meat-eaters; and lots lots more.

Questions designed to attack John’s veracity were answered in several ways: it would be immoral to tell you the winner of the Stanley Cup so that you could bet on it; the technology of time travel is only known in a very general to John as are other scientific fields, “If you went into the past, could you explain electricity?”; some questions were answered with a shrug, “I don’t know”.

IBM 5100 in action, 1975. Apparently, John did not take back a dot matrix printer. (ibm.com)

In March, 2001, John Titor announced that he was returning to the future. A book, A Time Traveler’s Tale, written by John (or his mother) was published and a number of websites discussed the episode. Of course many thought the whole thing was a hoax and an amazing amount of research went into discovering that, in 1997 – 1998, someone claiming to be a time-traveller who seemed very much like the later John Titor, called in to Art Bell’s talk show. The 1997 time-traveller warned of the collapse of civilization on January 1, 2000. (Y2K, remember?) Other people noted the resemblance of John’s world to that of Pat Frank’s novel, Alas Babylon, also about the collapse of the United States. And, there seemed to be a convergence of Titor stuff around a Florida entertainment lawyer named Larry Haber.

Haber owns the various operations that control John Titor’s legacy — the JohnTitor Foundation, for instance, and he holds the trademark for Titor’s time travel insignia. He is the number one candidate for originator of the Titor hoax, if it was a hoax.

Now many things that John Titor predicted have failed to occur. He said that the 2004 Olympics would be the last one. He said that civil war, defined as an escalating series of Waco-type events, would begin in the US in 2004. He predicted great outbreaks of Mad Cow disease and so forth. The further we get from 2001, the less accurate are John Titor’s predictions.

John Titor's temporal unit insignia.

Nevertheless, many people are still convinced that John Titor was a genuine time-traveller. In fact some claim that there was a John 1 and a John 2 which explain the Art Bell phone-ins. They explain the inaccuracies in a number of ways, including the notion that John was speaking in code or riddles. And some of these believers talk about the divergence between timelines being greater than John Titor imagined.

Which brings up the question of why? Why do these people want to believe? One answer is political: many believers are American patriots who think their nation in a state of collapse. For them John Titor is a prophet of the American apocalypse. But there are other kinds of believers, too, those for who the coming apocalypse is religious rather than political. And there are those who see John Titor as a messenger of hope, a sign that the world will continue after all even in the face of disaster. And there are those who see Titor as a prophet of warning, rather than doom, telling us of a future that can yet be avoided.

None of us should feel superior to the Titor-believers. No matter how rational we think we are, our worldviews are tissues fabricated from faiths and beliefs that we accept as Truths. A hoaxer who saw his own hoax become a religion said, “There is nothing wrong with paranoia as long as it is pursued with vigor and humor… The problem is that people are not paranoid enough. Be paranoid about your paranoia.”

Good Movies: Barbarosa

Australian director Fred Schiepisi had a hit with his movie The Chant of Jimmy Blacksmith in 1978 and got an opportunity to try his luck in the United States. In 1980 he made Barbarosa which was released 1981 or 1982 depending on how you define “release” since, after a brief showing in a few theaters it was sent to the drive-ins — there were still a few of those around then. Fortunately for Schiepisi, most folks thought he got a bad deal and he was given a few more projects. Pretty soon he had some good movies to his credit, but Barbarosa never got a fair shake. Roger Ebert mentioned it as a great unknown movie and it had a bit of underground recognition but it wasn’t until its release on videotape that Barbarosa began to receive the recognition that it deserved.

The stars are Willie Nelson and Gary Busey and they, both of them, turn in fine performances. The story is about a legendary outlaw, Barbarosa, played by Nelson who operates in northern Mexico and into Texas. Gary Busey plays Karl, whose German immigrant family has moved to Texas. Karl kills his brother-in-law and goes on the run. He is in the desert, without food or water, when he runs into Barbarosa who is introduced in a fine shot that travels up his boots and leather chaps to his sombreroed head silhouetted against the sun. An eagle screams as the camera reaches his face, invisible for a moment against the backlight — oh yeah, this is the way to introduce a legend!

Barbarosa takes Karl under his wing and teaches him the outlaw trade. He steals anything —  “Cattle, horses…Anything except sheep. You couldn’t give me one of those wooly bastards.” But the reality is, he lives in caves and eats armadilloes while looking for something to steal. Meanwhile, the brothers of the man Karl killed track him down. Karl disarms them and sends them home but they are unable to countermand their father’s order to seek revenge and come back after Karl. Another outlaw kills them both.

Barbarosa is captured by that same outlaw and shot. Karl is given the task of burying him. But Barbarosa is still alive. Karl fills in an empty grave and he and Barbarosa escape to listen to people singing songs about the famous man, how he was killed and came back from the grave, aided by a gringo child. Barbarosa translates for Karl as they listen. “All you men of courage, grease up your guns and your knives…” Then Barbarosa breaks off, “This part is about how they kill Barbarosa.” He doesn’t want to hear more. He understands very well that his legend will end in his death, that it is the only possible end.

Karl discovers that Barbarosa has a relationship with a Mexican family called Zavala. He was engaged to a young woman of the family but there was some kind of brawl, Zavalas were killed, Barbarosa was maimed, and now the family and the outlaw are locked in a deadly relationship. Periodically, the Zavalas send out young men to hunt the outlaw and Barbarosa kills them. Periodically, Barbarosa sneaks into the Zavala ranch to visit the woman he loves and give her the gold he has stolen. The patriarch of the Zavala clan (played by Gilbert Roland) uses Barbarosa as a goad to make the family live up to an ideal — they must be great because their enemy is the legendary Barbarosa.

On one of Barbarosa’s visits to the Zavalas, Karl meets with Barbarosa’s daughter and the two are becoming romantically involved when Barbarosa bursts in to defend her honor and castigate Karl. The two escape the Zavala ranch in a hail of gunfire and, later, Karl discovers that Barbarosa isn’t all that upset with him.

C.P.Vaughan drawing from a still -- a treatment befitting a legend.(http://www.cpvaughn.com/orig_barbarosa2.html)

Karl goes back to his family and tries to make peace with the father of the man he killed, whose other sons died trying to find Karl. It is no use and there are more deaths. The family disintegrates entirely. One day Barbarosa rides in to the ranch where Karl is now living alone. Karl abandons the place and accompanies Barbarosa back into outlawry.

One of the Zavalas finally manages to give Barbarosa a mortal wound. He runs away to tell the family. Karl attends the dying outlaw who tells him that it was a pretty good thing he had with the Zavalas, “A man couldn’t ask for better.” Karl tries to head off Barbarosa’s killer but he manages to evade Karl and return to the Zavala ranch. A great celebration to honor the killer is underway when a man rides in, firing his weapons. “Barbarosa!” chants the crowd and we are allowed to see that it is Karl, become the new manifestation of the legend.

There are so many great things about this movie — the theme, first of all, of myths and men who become heroes because they couldn’t ask for better; of families and the need to belong somewhere; then the representation of the terrible lonely frontier and how easilly people and their arrangements could fall apart there; then there is some fine photography; and also the wonderful dialogue that sounds too true to be really authentic but is funny and piercing and excellent.

Barbarosa made it onto Turner Classic Movies recently so I suppose that, somewhere, there is a good wide-screen DVD. I sure hope so.

Good Books: The Circus of Dr. Lao by Charles G. Finney

Circus tents appear overnight near the town of Abalone,  Arizona. These are not ordinary canvas tents, they are black and smooth and egg-shaped. A parade makes its way down Abalone’s main street; there are only three wagons in the parade. Afterwards, people try to figure out what they saw in the parade — a golden donkey? a sphinx? a sea serpent? was that a green dog? and what was in the middle wagon, was that a man or a bear or a Russian?

Dust jacket for the first edition (Wikipedia)

This is the circus of Doctor Lao, a collection of wonders that will be viewed by the citizens of Abalone who may not always show a proper regard for the wonderful. That is one part of the story. On the other hand, the citizens themselves are also wonders, as are human beings generally, but some more so. Take Larry Tull:

A man of many artificial parts was Lawyer Frank Tull. His teeth had been fashioned for him and fitted to his jaws by a doctor of dental surgery. His eyes, weak and wretched, saw the world through bifocal lenses…He had a silver plate in his skull to guard a hole from which a brain tumor had been removed. One of his lrgs was made of metal and fiber…Around his belly was an apparatus that fitted mouth-like over his double hernia and prevented his guts from falling out. A suspensory kept his scrotum from dangling unduly. In his left arm a platinum wire took the place of the humerus…On one ear was strapped an arrangement designed to make ordinary sound more audible. In the shoe of his good foot an arch supporter kept that foot from splaying out. A wig covered the silver plate in his skull. His tonsils had been taken from him, and so had his appendix and his adenoids. Stones had been carved from his gall…He carried his head in a steel brace, for his neck was broken…One hundred years after he died they opened up his coffin. All they found were strings and wires.

 

"A lecture on lusus naturae" by Boris Artzybasheff

 

Frank Tull, mixture of man and metal, now studies a chimera, mixture of bird, beast, and serpent. Which is more wonderful? Tull asks if the chimera will breed in captivity.

“Oh, certainly,” said the doctor.”They breed any time. This fellow here is always trying to get at the sphinx.”
“Well, that isn’t exactly what I mean, though of course, it’s interesting to know. I meant will they reproduce?”
“How can they, when they are all males?”
“What? Are there no female chimeras?”
“Not a single one, and very few males either, for that matter. You are looking at a rare animal, mister.”
“Well if there are no females, then where do they come from?”
“This one came from Asia Minor…”

One by one the citizens of Abalone view the beasts of legend. The hound of the hedges, whose blood is chlorophyll; his fur, grass; his teeth, thorns. An hermaphroditic sphinx. A roc’s egg. A beautiful mermaid. But some wonders disappoint: A werewolf transforms into a woman who upsets viewers by being old and ugly rather than young and beautiful. The miracle-worker Appolonius of Tyana tells fortunes but can only tell the truth. Mr. Etaoin, a proofreader, encounters the sea serpent. They talk about food. The serpent relates how he went ashore to shed his skin and then became hungry. He came across a town of mud shacks. The people run in fear:

I watched them and looked them over and picked out the one I wanted for a meal. I chose a little coffee-colored fat boy. Ah, I’ll wager his mother had fed him on duck eggs and roast bananas, he was so fat. Why, his belly rolled out so far he couldn’t see his own knees.

The little boy climbs a tree but the sea serpent can climb, too, and slowly eases up the tree trunk. He grabs the boy by a leg:

I swallowed him much as you would swallow an oyster and with every bit as much right, if you will pardon an ethical intrusion.

The boy’s father runs out and the sea serpent eats him, too, and “the first vahine I come acrost. But the little fat boy was the best.”

Now it is the proofreader’s turn to tell a story:

There was a pig. A Duroc Jersey pig. It scampered about in its sty, eating slop and entertaining no spiritual conflicts. Fat it grew and fatter. Then one day its master loaded it into a wagon, took it to the depot, put it on a freight train, and sent it to a packing company. There it was slain, gralloched, and quartered after the manner of slaughterhouses. Some months later I went into a restaurant and ordered pork chops. And the chops they served me — may I die this instant if I lie — were from that very pig of which I have been talking.

Having spoken of food, now the two speak of love:

The Snake: I still remember my first affair. It must have been eleven centuries ago. Ah, but she was lovely! Some twenty feet longer than I she must have been, for I was a yearling then; and her great fangs were like the blades of pickaxes…
She was cold and coy. She slithered up on top of the rocks and hissed at me. I slithered after her; my passion warmed her; my ardor allayed her coyness. Tell me, do men bite women on the neck when they woo them?
Etaoin: Sometimes.
The Snake: So do we. I bit her in the neck, and she hooked onto my lower jaw, and I could feel her poison circulate into me. But it didn’t hurt me any; nor did mine hurt her. Then I dragged her off that rocky island, threw a loop or two about her, and so we wrestled in the bouncing, nervous waves…Tell me, do men tire of women after they have lain with them?
Etaoin: Sometimes.
The Snake: So do we. I tired and left her and returned to the west… But tell me, after the period of surfeit wears off, do men again lust after women?
Etaoin: Sometimes.
The Snake: So do we.

Decoration by Boris Artzybasheff

Doctor Lao wanders in and out, sometimes speaking like a carnival barker, sometimes uttering poetry or long scientific discourses on his creatures, sometimes speaking in pidgin English, “No savvee…” Possibly he uses the language he expects his listener to understand. At one point he runs into Larry Kamper, an ex-soldier, just returned from a stint in Tientsin with the 15th Infantry Regiment. Doctor Lao speaks to him in Chinese and Larry, the beer-swilling, skirt-chasing dogface, replies:

 …in the vowel-fluid music of High Mandarin. He sang the four-tone monosyllables as shrilly as did the doctor, and they talked as talk two strangers finding themselves in a foreign land with the bridge of a common language between them.

Perhaps this is the place to mention that Charles G, Finney, great-grandson of the famous American theologian of the same name, served with the 15th Infantry Regiment in Tientsin (now Tianjan) from 1927 – 1929. On returning to the States, he became an editor at the Tucson  Arizona Daily Star. While in China, Finney picked up “a fund of esoteric inforantion” that he incorporated into his book:

Part of the story he dreamed, part of it he picked up from a Chinese magician, and the flash of inspiration that kindled the book came on a sightseeing tour. In the course of this trip they viewed the famous dragon screen ‘a huge wall-like affair made of colored tile with nine dragons worked into it, you round a little hill, and there the screen is: so marvelously beautiful it knocks you over. ‘ But the members of the party were not all knocked over; one of the ladies remarked, ‘Good Lord, ain’t these Chinese got the awfulest imaginations!’ At that instant The Circus of Dr. Lao was born.  (from the forward to the first edition)

Detail from a Nine Dragon Wall or Screen

Finney wrote other books but none was as successful as this first novel, published in 1935.

Back to the story: after seeing all the wonderous creatures assembled by the doctor, the citizens crowd into the big tent to witness various acts and spectacles. Some they find boring but the grand finale cannot be dismissed. The scene is Woldercan, a place currently suffering from drought. The people call upon their god, Yottle, for succor. Doctor Lao:

Piety such as theirs exists no more. Such simple, trusting faith is lost to the world. …I want to recall to you that they sacrifice a virgin to their god. Piety. That was real piety. When you people here of Abalone pray to your god for a drought’s end, do you go to such extremes in your protestations of faith? Would you sacrifice Abalone’s fairest virgin? Ah, well…

So the Woldercanese gather beneath the huge idol they have built of their god, Yottle. Their priest tells them that they must placate Yottle. There are murmurs of discord and disbelief. A “passionate rush of words” answer them. “The words came from everywhere at once, as the hurricane comes…” This is the voice of Yottle. The Woldercanese prostrate themselves. The priest calls them to order. A beautiful young virgin is chosen to sacrifice but, as the priest lifts the sacred axe, a young man who loves the girl leaps forward from the crowd and tries to stop him. There is a struggle beneath the idol that suddenly tips forward and falls on the girl, the young man, and the priest, crushing all three. Manna falls from the heavens “and for their crops a thin wispy rain came weeping into the wind, drizzling and dripping.”

The tent opens up and the people of Abalone stumble out into the dust and the sunshine and go “homewards or wherever else they were going.” Thus ends the narrative.

But that is not the end of the book, for now we read the Catalogue, a series of lists with notes. There is a list of the male characters:

Doctor Lao: A Chinese.
Mr.Etaoin: A corrector of errors.
Appolonius of Tyana: A legend.
An Old-like Party in Golf Pants: A bore.

And so on. There are lists of female characters, children, animals, gods and goddesses. We learn what happens to some of the people after the show. We discover who it was that dug up Larry Tull a hundred years after his death and the identity of the werewolf woman and where Larry Kamper went next. There is a list of foodstuffs that includes: “Pork chops. Duck eggs. Little fat brown boy. Beer. Vahine. Bananas. Oysters. Brown boy’s old pappy. Slop.” just to mention the items in the quotes above. I don’t know why the list doesn’t include “Manna” but then the the Catalogue also has a list of “Questions and Contradictions and Obscurities”, such as “Inasmuch as legend tells us that chimeras were invariably females, how did it happen that Doctor Lao’s was a male?” And “Was it a bear or a Russian or what?” (Not to sound like the old party in golf pants, but I think it was a sasquatch. Or a yeti. Doctor Lao says that science is nothing but classification, so we are asking for a little science here.) The Catalogue is, as they say nowadays, Meta. And it delights me to discover that Meta existed in 1935, long before David Foster Wallace’s footnotes.

Delight is one of the book’s purposes. The publisher’s forward to the first edition:

The Circus of Dr. Lao is a strange book; no one will say what it means, or if it means anything at all; the author himself professes ignorance and washes his hands of the whole business. We publish the book because it made us laugh, and because a little hilarity is needed in the world.

“The world is my idea.” says Doctor Lao. “The world is my idea; as such I present it to you. I have my own set of weights and  measures and my own table for computing values. You are privileged to have yours.” Yes, and we are privileged to have this wonderful book.

The Circus of Dr. Lao has gone through numerous editions since 1935 (one reviewer remarked that he had only ever seen the book in used-book stores and thought that perhaps that was the only place it had ever been found), many of these editions had small press runs and some are illustrated. The original edition was illustrated by Boris Artzybasheff and the current edition linked here reproduces his drawings.

The Daughters of Ummo

In 1965 Spanish journalists, scientists, and media figures began receiving letters that claimed to be from alien visitors to Earth. These visitors came from the planet Ummo and were studying Earth culture. The Ummites said they had researchers in many countries and, in fact, many of the letters were mailed from outside of Spain. Ummites readilly answered questions about themselves and their technology, even diagramming the workings of an Umman space ship — a flying saucer! Further, in 1967, the Ummites announced that they would be landing a ship near Madrid and that spectators were welcome to watch. Many people came to witness the event. Several people  took pictures of the ship and the prints left by its landing gear. On the bottom of the ship the Ummo symbol (curiously like that for Uranus) could be seen. Earth had visitors from fourteen light years away!

Diagram of an Ummite saucer. Now you can build one!

Ummo had become interested in Earth after picking up a morse code signal from a Norwegian ship experimenting with high frequency communication in the 1930s. After some debate among themselves over the desirability of contacting Earth, they finally sent a probe that landed in France in 1950. Since that time, Ummites had communicated with many Earthlings, though their communications were hedged with rules about publishing them. Those who broke the rules received no further letters.

Photograph of an Ummite ship over Spain. Ummo's symbol is quite clear.

There were many skeptics in the media and, outside of Spain, the Ummo phenomenon was pretty much ignored. A few who examined the Ummo documents proclaimed them to be scientific claptrap and a ufologist who attended the Madrid landing said that it was a fake. No one really read the Ummo documents in the correct spirit, however. For instance: the first Terran artifacts retrieved and studied by the Ummites were sheets of paper inscribed with ink and smeared with fecal matter — a copy of le Figaro used as toilet paper by a Basque peasant! No one laughed. Nor did people pay much attention to the words, “Do not believe me”, that were part of every Umman letter.

Jordan Peña

One person who may have chuckled a bit was Madrid psychologist Jordan Peña. It was Peña who dreamed up the Ummo hoax in order to test his theories about belief systems and paranoia:

There is nothing wrong with paranoia as long as it’s pursued with vigor and a sense of humor.  The problem with most people is that they are not paranoid enough: they are naive enough to believe they are on their own side.  Be paranoid about your paranoia…

 He enlisted others — mainly artists and political dissidents — who used the hoax as a platform for their own ideas. Franco was still in power and it was dangerous to openly espouse anti-capitalist, anti-militarist views, unless you lived on a far away planet beyond the police powers of the Spanish state. A police agent, suspecting that they were spies for a foreign power, did infiltrate the Ummo group. In time, he became a docile adherent of the organization. There were no further problems with the government.

Pictures of Ummite devices. Superior technology that Ummo would make available to Earthlings.

The Ummo story percolated for a few years, finally losing most of its steam after Franco died. But the Ummite message was spread by some who continued to believe and, in South America, it came to the attention of Juana Pordiavel and her husband, Carlos Opanova. Juana, a Peruvian, was fresh out of a mental hospital when she met Opanova, leader of a cult called The Deer of the Sixth Christ. He had his own mental problems but the couple married and managed to get along until 1963, when they moved the cult to Bolivia. They squatted in an abandoned bulding in Oruro that was tagged New Heavenly Jerusalem. Juana was taken back into custodial care, then released. Meanwhile, the authorities had become suspicious of the Deer and concerned about reports that children had disappeared around New Heavenly Jerusalem. In 1967, the group was forced out of their squat and scattered around Bolivia.

Juana and her husband took most of the Deer treasury and moved to La Paz. There, Opanova heard about Ummo. Very quickly the Deer of the Sixth Christ became the Daughters of Ummo. Juana changed her name to Florencia Dinovi Gutiérrez and Opanova announced that he was an Ummite and his name was Yiewaka. Their cult began drawing members from the poor quarters of La Paz. The Church was a little upset about this new cult but Guitiérrez took it on directly: she renounced Catholicism and had some of her members steal a chalice and some wafers from a church; in a public ceremony, she urinated on them. She was committed to an institution for a while in 1984 but otherwise has been the spiritual leader of the Daughters of Ummo for more than forty years.

Florencia Dinovi Gutiérrez with cult members. (photo by Enzo Daedro)

Once again, in La Paz, there were rumors about missing children. The Daughters claim to bring in children as new members without the parents’ knowledge. They pledge to bring in a certain number each year but, so far as I can tell, there is no evidence of their kidnapping anyone. Even so, the cult is a frightening outfit that threatens those who disparage or debunk it. Generally the threats have to do with some kind of hell. An alien hell is something to exercise the imagination but I suppose every hell ever conceived is alien, yet familiar, to the humans threatened with it. Anyway, there were so many negative reports about the Daughters that, in 2000, Yiewaka announced that the prophesied translation of true believers to the planet Ummo in the year 2033 had been postponed indefinitely. Take that, Earthlings!

Ummites study the Owwa, a bible created by Carlos Opanova/Yiewaka that is a meld of his earlier writings from the Deer of the Sixth Christ and stuff gleaned from the Spanish Ummo documents. They work hard, follow an ascetic regimen, and are fed and clothed. The cult sells food and clothing on the street and replenishes its membership in an annual event that is supposed to bring in thirty new members a time. It is hard to say if the Daughters of Ummo are guilty of the crimes that they are supposed to have committed, ranging from theft to kidnapping. And it is even difficult to determine the present status of the group — if she is still active (and I can no longer find her web site) Gutiérrez will be a hundred next year.

Cult member seeking recruits. Note the Ummo symbol on her blouse. (photo by Enzo Daedro)

In 1995, Jordan Peña finally admitted to the hoax that he had perpetrated. In 2006 he gave a lengthy interview explaining that he did so because a European Ummo group had begun mistreating children by branding them with the Ummo symbol. He was not happy about his confession; a skeptic himself, he believes that people are entitled to the beliefs that they need and that outing his hoax was like telling children that there was no Santa Claus. He says that his hoax was aimed at middle-class professionals and semi-professionals, people who suppose themselves to be rational, he kept telling them, “Don’t believe me”, but they did. He admitted that his grand scheme had done some harm, not much, but a little. On the other hand, he said, many had benefitted from the wisdom of the Ummites.

Ummo documents.
Information on the Daughters of Ummo is from the Report by Enzo Daedro in Fortean Times and his raw article with photos.

Pictures I Like: Marilyn on a Park Bench, 1957

 

"The Proposal" Sam Shaw, 1957

My Story: A couple sits on a New York park bench — not a young couple — look at them, these two have had some hard years. It’s been twelve years since the war ended and some guys just never get a break, but listen (he says), everything will be different if you come into my life, I will work so hard, I only want You. And she listens, here on lunch hour from the cafeteria where she earns a small wage dealing out ice cream scoops of mashed potatoes onto the plates of other working people, grabbing lunch before they return to their dreary underpaid jobs. But now she doesn’t even notice that she still wears her hair net, she wears it like a crown because in this moment she is taken away from mundane details, in this moment she is courted, she is a star. Of course she will say Yes, she just wants the moment to last a little longer, but she will say Yes because, at the other end of the bench, Aphrodite herself watches these little humans and Aphrodite is all powerful in matters of Love, which is to say that the goddess can always command the word “Yes”.

The Facts: Marilyn Monroe and her photographer, Sam Shaw, are walking in Central Park looking for locations. Marilyn tells Shaw that she has been studying improvisation in her acting classes. All right, says Shaw, sit on that bench and improvise something. So Marilyn sits down with her newspaper and overhears the guy proposing to the woman at the other end of the bench. After the shoot: Version A, she congratulates the couple and gives them a wedding gift of a hundred bucks, not being very rich herself at the time; Version B, according to Shaw he paid the couple for the right to use their picture. Shaw said the woman agreed to marry the man but only if he would give up being a bookie.

So far as I am concerned, all of these stories work.

The Ford Falcon: Death-mobile

 

“It was a death-mobile, the embodiment of terror. Whenever a Falcon drove by we knew there would be kidnappings, disappearance, torture, murder.”

Eduardo Pavlovsky

The Ford Falcon design team was led by Robert McNamara who wanted a new Model-T — a car that was inexpensive and reliable. In 1960, before he left for the Kennedy White House, McNamara saw his car in production. Two of the new cars were shipped to Argentina in 1961 as exemplars for local manufacture.

A Green Ford Falcon

A new middle class was forming in Argentina, people with reasonably good jobs who could afford a new car. The Ford plant at La Boca began turning out Falcons in 1962. This was a popular car, a reliable, affordable vehicle that was much appreciated by Argentineans. Alejandro Hernandez, member of the Friends of the Falcon Club: “In Argentina we have classics like the tango, mate (tea), soccer and the Falcon. It’s a national lifestyle. It’s as Argentine as the gaucho… I was born at home and my father always had a Falcon, he took it to work and it went through the mud taking the whole family out to the countryside.”

By 1973, the Argentinean Falcon was almost entirely made in that country, only 26 of more than 3000 parts had to be imported, and the car had undergone several design makeovers, distinguishing it from the US model. It is the best-selling car in Argentina’s history.  But internal tensions were building in Argentina and, in 1976, military forces seized power.

Police checking their weapons outside their Falcon, circa 1978

“It’s not the Falcon’s fault. The police probably just needed a car that didn’t break down, so they got Falcons,” says Alejandro Hernandez. The regular police got Falcons painted in regular police black and white, but the secret police and the paramilitary organizations tended to prefer dark green vehicles. Soon, the sight of a green falcon was enough to frighten every Argentinean who saw it.

The paramilitary units had been operating for several years before the 1976 coup. They kidnapped, tortured, and murdered labor leaders, journalists, and anyone else deemed a subversive. Most active opposition to the junta was murdered at the beginning of the coup, then the police went after anyone they wished. Thirty thousand people simply disappeared during the period of The Dirty War, 1976 -1983.

In 1976, a group of high school students protested high bus fares and the secret police disappeared them. One of these children was the sixteen-year-old daughter of state senator Mendes de Falcone (yes) and his wife Nelva. Their son went into hiding and the parents took him food and supplies when they could in their (yes) green falcon. One night they were stopped by the secret police and driven away in an official green falcon. Nelva was tortured with a cattle prod and her husband forced to watch. A month later, they were released but the senator died soon after of a heart attack. Their green Falcon was located and Nelva drove it home. Then she  banded with others who had loved ones among the disappeared. Soon they organized the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo, an organization that demonstrated and demanded answers from the Argentine government for years even as some of its members were themselves disappeared. Nelva’s daughter has never been accounted for.

Nelva and her Falcon (from the documentary, "Falcon: Can A Car Be Guilty of Murder?)

One of the government’s first targets was the Ford plant itself. The auto-workers union, SMATA, was largely compliant with official demands, but a growing contingent of young workers wanted something more than wage-slavery to an oppressive regime; they became increasingly important and began to show some real power. In 1976, the Ford workers had just won a new contract that emphasized safety issues and working conditions. The morning that the new contract was to take effect, workers, especially union delegates, began disappearing.

Actually troops had been patrolling the Ford factory for a year, invited in by the company under the pretext of defending against violent Marxists. The relationship between the Army and corporations was already developed before the coup. Now the workplace became a place of terror. One worker was told by his foreman that he would be taken away that day. “Don’t leave your place on the line,” he was told, “they’re watching.” Twenty-five workers were taken away from the plant; their wives were given pink slips saying that their husbands were fired for failure to report for work even though most of them had been abducted from the factory.

Fifteen of the many disappeared workers survived and they have undertaken a lawsuit against the Ford Motor Company (others are suing Chrysler-Daimler for more or less the same crimes). They say the company was complicit in the kidnappings, torture, and murder. Ford says that this was all the work of government forces and that such crimes are strictly against company policy.

"Falcon", a sculpture by Daniel Acosta who was kidnapped and imprisoned for five years.

 

After the junta’s collapse, Argentina officially adopted a policy of forgive-and-forget. The Mothers of the Plaza Mayo refused to do either and the official policy has lost its force. So far there have been a few trials and convictions of junta members for their crimes. Attempts have been made to bring criminal charges against Ford.

Meanwhile, the Falcon is still a well-known Argentine car. Some refuse to have anything to do with the vehicle; the very sight of a Falcon, especially a green Falcon, upsets them:

“They are a symbol of repression,” said Miriam Lewin, a 49-year-old journalist who was kidnapped in a Falcon in the 1970s and forced into the trunk of another Falcon when she was moved from one political detention center to another.

But at least one Falcon owner has added a sign in his car’s window: “My car is not to blame” and nunca mas, “Never Again”, the current slogan of those trying to put Argentina back together.

Then there is this: After Argentina’s 2001 debt crisis, a number of worker-controlled factories and workshops were set up by people unwilling to go under with the wealthy elites that had bankrupted the country. Ever since, the usual suspects have been trying to shut these enterprises down. In 2005, somebody abducted the wife of a Ceramica Zanon employee — Zanon being one of the most successful of the worker-run factories. The woman was tortured and mutilated and given a warning that Zanon’s union would “run red with blood”, then she was driven away and dumped by the road. The car that was used was (yes) a green Falcon.

Much of this article comes from a feature documentary, Falcon: Can A Car be Guilty of Murder? So far as I know, it is not in general release.

Information about the Ford plant and the government comes from “The Falcon Remembered”, a NACLA Report on the Americas paper.

Penguin Sweaters

Another oil spill, another request for penguin sweaters. This time it’s a spill off New Zealand, usually cited as the Tauranga spill. People have been rescuing penguins and a number of sites have begun publishing penguin sweater patterns and asking that they be sent to a yarn store in New Zealand. Suspicious people (like myself) wonder if this whole thing is a hoax. Short answer: it isn’t.

Penguin sweater from 2000 spill off Phillip Island, Tasmania. (via factmonster.com)

When oil-soaked penguins are taken from the water they tend to try to groom themselves. That’s why they get the sweaters, primarilly to keep the birds from poisoning themselves, but also to keep them warm. Once the birds have been washed, the oily sweaters are thrown away and fresh sweaters are put on the penguins until they regain their natural oils, then they are de-sweatered and released into the wild. The pattern for the sweater (which you can download from a link below) was developed by Marg Healy for the Tasmanian Conservation Trust after an oil spill there more than a decade ago.

So far so good, but (and you knew there had to be a but) should you knit a sweater for a bird you don’t even know? Short answer: maybe.

That Tasmania appeal worked but left the Conservation Trust with more than 15000 unused sweaters! Tasmania is good for penguin oil spills for a long time to come. New Zealand could just ask for some, but apparently think having their own appeal is better. Or at least the yarn store that’s publicizing the sweater appeal thought it was better, but now has plenty of sweaters. Takeaway: they don’t need any more sweaters right now but if you’re a slow knitter or late to the party, don’t worry, knit a few in time for the next spill (and you know this will happen again).

Marg Healy’s pattern on Ravelry.