Creationism v Darwinism reply from oscillowitz

the following is commentary on the
"Creationism vs. Darwinism"
article from your newsletter.

After 127 years of heavily subsidized effort by scientists all over the world to create even the most basic rudiments of life, they are still batting an embarrassing zero. In any other scientific endeavor, reason would dictate it is time to call in the dogs and water down the fire. But when it comes to Darwinian logic, as Dawson noted in 1873, 'here also we are required to admit as a general principle what is contrary to experience.'

OW: (Love the expression about dogs and fire.) I doubt we’ll bat zero much longer. By the time nanotechnology has been even partly developed, we should have the means to cheaply perform quadzillions of random ‘zappings’ of basic amino acids (which HAVE been produced under random conditions in a laboratory, using extremely simple and common-to-nature circumstances). Doing so under the extreme range of conditions which are believed to have prevailed on our planet over the last few billion years (a date also subject to an individual’s belief, but supported by compelling physical evidence) would be, for my money, the conclusive scientific test to see if the random flickerings of energy, daily cycles of night & day, and other terran phenomena can produce something we might consider alive.

Which brings up the most basic and most commonly misunderstood tenet of Natural Selection, the misnomer of randomness. Natural Selection is NOT random!! It presupposes only one ‘luck of the draw’ scenario, that of the first randomly generated self-replicating lifeform, and from thereon leaves nothing to chance. As soon as one group of organic compounds (‘organic’ means, in terms of chemistry, not "alive" or even "of an organism", but is only a handy classification for those chemicals most associated with the business of life) began swapping symmetrical arrays of molecules sufficiently complex to brook no significant change in their structures without totally dissembling – that is, they could only be the one thing they were or else they were just another disintegrating conglomeration of various chemical constituents, as soon as this sort of intelligent order (not sentient per se, but intelligently arranged) appeared in the stuff of earth, Natural Selection was primed to take over.

For Natural Selection works this way: it edits variations based on their ability to improve the lot of an organized system in relation to its environment. No system reproduces itself perfectly; all transmissions have a signal-to-noise ratio. Molecules, especially great big complicated ones, are just largely complex enough to experience periodic ‘mistakes’. MOST mistakes mean the elimination of the molecule involved – but not always. Rarely, the mistake is an improvement per the logic of that particular megamolecule ("macromolecule" is the popularly accepted term). In some of these cases, the improvement also survives transmission; that is, it is compulsively attractive to its fellow macromolecules, which also become new&improved versions of their former selves.

This is a big luck of the draw, to be sure. The coin must be tossed a very large number of times, but such is the nature of a universe which, if not infinitely old, is at least indefinitely old and which all of the measuring techniques we’ve devised suggests it to be fantastically ancient. Old enough to have tossed an original lucky penny into a couple hundred thousand or millions of species. (I forget, but I think the estimate of total terran species is in the million range. Most of the variety is comprised of that most successful of organisms, the insects. Big enough to be big, i.e., not absorbed into the cell structures of bigger critters the way viruses and bacteria are, but small enough to leave enough room for all the creepy-crawlies one can imagine and then some.) Given sufficient time, probability demands something strange and wild to happen. Life on Earth is just one of those rich and strange happenings. The Mind of God, should it truly exist (other than in our own minds, which is quite an existence in Its own right), would be just another wildly inevitable probability. "Something’s got to give" -- even Nothing. It’s the nature of Chaos to be unpredicatable, so it is therefore paradoxically predictable that, sooner or later, something as weirdly inexplicable as God or human beings or ladybugs would come along.

So that’s Natural Selection: the House Average imposed on an initial improbability. Once something as powerful and opposed to chaos, such as life, comes along, it’s only natural for the Great Big Unavoidable Everything to demand constraints and enforce conditions on this new and perverse manifestation of chance. Indeed, the wellspring of diversity is just this opposition of chaos and order. The engines of contradiction.

Oh, one other, small, tiny, insignificant thing: the objection quoted above is the same thing as saying that, because humankind has so far been incapable of imitating God in terms of creating at least one simple form of life, then Natural Selection is invalid. This is the kind of circular logic which aviators refer to as "augering in". It spins out of the sky and digs itself a hole in the ground. Even Fred Hoyle’s notorious 747 built from a junkyard by a stray tornado has more plausibility than the above argument. It could just as well be said that our inability to imitate God’s reputed role in our creation disproves the existence of God. If it does prove to be continuously impossible to produce life, God or cosmos in a laboratory, this would only prove that life, God or cosmos were not created in a laboratory by humans.

Like my Uncle Gayle says: "Laboratory tests on rats prove that laboratory tests on rats cause cancer." Actually, he didn’t say it, but it’s just the kind of thing he often said.

Dawson's second fallacy was the gap that separates vegetable and animal life. 'These are necessarily the converse of each other, the one deoxidizes and accumulates, the other oxidizes and expends. Only in reproduction or decay does the plant simulate the action of the animal, and the animal never in its simplest forms assumes the functions of the plant. This gap can, I believe, be filled up only by an appeal to our ignorance.' And thus it remains today. If life did evolve as Darwinists claim, it would have had to bridge the gap between plant and animal life at least once, and more likely innumerable times. Lacking one undeniable example of this bridging, science is again batting zero.

OW: What’s the big problem? If Objection # 1 has any validity at all, that is, if it’s so patently impossible for life to spontaneously arise, why bother with this second objection? If probability CAN jump The Void, it can surely jump the plant/animal boundary; if it CAN’T jump The Void, naturally evolved plants and animals don’t exist, and so... eh, what was the question?

If probability CAN jump The Void, then I can envision how animal life arose from rotting plant matter. Indeed, it takes bacteria to decompose vegetable matter. Until bacteria arrived, the world’s oceans must have been gotten rank and thick. My understanding of current terran ecology is that it is based upon the Carbon Cycle. Core to the Carbon Cycle is that plants liberate oxygen from carbon dioxide, and animals recombine oxygen with carbon.

I forget which way is which in the following, and my Encycopaedia’s Britannica, both 1947 and 1974, are being stubborn about helping me locate their articles on procaryotes and eucaryotes (which is where this issue resides in the evolutionary lore), but I DO know that the first Big Extinction on Earth as displayed in the fossil record is the one that allowed animals to develop. Seems those early plants were so good at turning CO2 into O(xygen) that they turned themselves out of a living – actually, they burned themselves out, for while they could make oxygen, they could not survive its buildup. They got oxidized. Those that survived did so through two possible methods: first, they developed thicker oxygen resistant skin, second, a new sort of critter had to develop which took oxygen into itself as part of its livelihood, in other words, animals, oxygen breathers, critters that ‘oxidize and expend’. One of the key things they would expend would be CO2, which plants, as we know, breathe in order to make sugar when subjected to sunlight. Considering that plants with thicker skin probably have a harder time getting CO2 through their new skin, greater CO2 availability would be a very good thing.

First you have these... things... which have developed the trait of taking material from their environment (in this case, the sea), and using it to foment catalytic changes within themselves: a little bit of this (energy food) creates the electrochemical energy necessary to build a little more of that (building food). Archetypal sugar and protein. And there you have basic life: it ‘eats’ stuff in order to make itself. Initial reproduction was probably just a matter of maintaining a scale of economy, for if a critter got too big, its own bulk created an unacceptable distance between its innards and its food, so it would tend to divide in the process of shrinking (imagine a critter cringing in hunger) itself closer to its food.

Incidentally, my understanding is that the earliest fossil organisms are no more like plants than animals. They’re just these... things. Proto-life. Ur-creatures. For life to become plant or animal, it had to make the jump from neither to one or the other or both. The author simultaneously understates the difficulty of the challenge and overlooks the fact that such a jump seems to have already happened, whether by the hand of God, the wheel of fate, or the tentacled flippers of a passing ET planetary bio-survey – all of which beg postponement of the question of primogeniture.

The third gap in the knowledge of 1873 was 'that between any species of animal or plant and any other species. It is this gap, and this only, which Darwin undertook to fill up by his great work on the origin of species; but, notwithstanding the immense amount of material thus expended, it yawns as wide as ever, since it must be admitted that no case has been ascertained in which individuals of one species have transgressed the limits between it and other species.' Here, too, despite a ceaseless din of scientific protests to the contrary, there remains not a single unquestioned example of one species evolving entirely: not just partially: into another distinct and separate species.

To be fair, some of today's best-known geneticists and naturalists have broken ranks and acknowledged that what Dawson complained about in 1873 remains true today. Thomas H. Morgan, who won a Nobel Prize for work on heredity, wrote that 'Within the period of human history, we do not know of a single instance of the transformation of one species into another if we apply the rigid and extreme tests used to distinguish wild species.' Colin Patterson, director of the British Museum of Natural History, has stated that 'No one has ever produced a species by mechanisms of natural selection. No one has gotten near it.' And these are by no means extraordinary disclosures. Every scientist in related fields is well aware of it, but shamefully few have the nerve to address it openly.

OW: ‘Species’ is, for all the various fins, furs and feathers delineating different critters, an amazingly simply defined word: can they breed and continue their breed?

For example, a St. Bernard and a Chihuahua can breed and their offspring will be fertile. These two ‘breeds’ are of the same species. A burro and a horse may breed and produce offspring, but this offspring will be sterile. they are not of the same species.

That alone is the definition of species. This is what makes a ‘species rose’ a species, that no matter what it is crossbred with in order to produce whatever variety, their seeds will revert back to the species type. This is why we don’t gather rose hips from our neighbors’ tea rose bush. They will not produce that gorgeous Mr. Lincoln or Chicago Peace rose; they will produce strange offspring reflecting their species’ lineage. Those offspring bushes may or may nor produce fertile seed depending on whether or not their parents were of the same SPECIES.

"No one has gotten near" cross-breeding to produce a new species, says the author, and I believe him/her. But, without references, I can not judge how much effort has been put into producing a new species. Rose breeding, animal husbandry, et cetera, are all based on tried-and-proven methods of producing desirable results for human purposes. So long as hybrid roses can be produced and propagated by grafting and cutting, a profitable rose breeding industry is available, growers make money, flowers receive ever new exotic blooms, and everyone is happy.

Likewise with mules. Hell, they generally outlast a car. No one is complaining. Give yourself 2 of each of both male and female horses and burros, and you’re in business. A little cross-breeding with your neighbor’s horses and burros to keep the gene pool fresh, and you’ve got mules for generations.

Economics, not scientific inquiry, has been the guiding force between most breeding research for the last several millennia. What I’m saying is that I’m not aware of any kind of LONG-TERM scientific research SPECIFICALLY INTENDED to produce a new species. If Natural Selection requires thousands of years to make minor modifications and hundreds of thousands of years to produce new species, and millions of years for those species to prove themselves survivable over the geological long-haul, what sort of judgements can be made based on a few hundred years – at most – of scientific research? Science itself is a new species of inquiry, one which has absolutely transformed the landscape of our planet, but whose long-haul survivability is yet to be proven. So far, science is known to exist only by human thought. If humanity should exterminate itself via science, will science pass away as well, or will it create our successors in the process of our extermination?

Also, my knowledge of genetics is far too primitive to answer such simple questions as: Is AIDS a new species? What about those ever-mutating viruses? Are these new species? That is, can they breed only with each other and not with their mutative forebears? Come to think of it, do viruses interbreed? That is, do two separate viruses ever invade the same host cell nucleus at the same time and somehow swap genes and thereby produce a new and fertile virus? Are viruses true species? I don’t know – but these fellows spend their lives inside the DNA banks of other species, making their chromosome factories do their breeding for them. They can’t breed on their own. The possibility for recombinant mischief seems powerful, and exactly such is the impression the popular media conveys of all those wild microbes hanging around the steaming jungles and sprawling sewers of the Third World.

I would beg at least twice the question of human-caused species alteration when asking it of the species that is single-handedly creating the largest mass extinction of species variety since the one that erased dinosaurs. We’ve proven more adept at destroying life than creating it.

Research of the last 50 years or so has been more efficient, using microbe cultures which produce generations in a matter of days to hours. The use of altered E. coli bacteria to mass produce DNA has been part of the astoundingly rapid success of the Human Genome project. Still, these are a far cry from the sheer volume of successions upon which the theory of Natural Selection rests. The numbers are as staggering as astronomical distances. Whether or not we can ‘prove’ Natural Selection in laboratory tests, we are a gene’s breadth away from Unnaturally Creating a new species via nuts’n’bolts reassembly techniques. Obviously, this ain’t cooking from scratch – but a new species is a new species. Unnatural Selection is also a valid theory; indeed, it is the author’s choice, it seems..

As for observing an instance of migration of one species into another: how would a process that takes hundreds of thousands of years be observed by a species which has only been recording its observations for a few thousand years?

Why is there no clear fossil record showing a fully detailed mutation path from species a to species b? Fossils are anomalies, not the rule. It takes exceptional conditions to create a fossil, and it takes considerable work to find a fossil. Work involving the removal of tough rocks and stubborn dirt without destroying fairly fragile mineral impressions of things which normally decay within a few hundred years at most. Finally, the case for fossil or real life display of species a>species b sequence is the same as the case for the Seven Days of Genesis and the existence of God. Nobody has proved either – yet. Nor should either theory be considered separate or absolute. They’re theories. Only the ignorance of Humankind allows either to be stated as fact. Propaganda seems to be close to an instinct for Humanity. Along with the instinct to come up with theories for where we came from? Hmmm... that’s an interesting notion, that something like evolution or divine engineering produced the instinct to ponder our evolution or divine engineering.

Both factions, Genesis and Natural Selection, are supported by the fact that ALL known living organisms use DNA as their blueprint system, and that all known lifeforms’ DNA has more in common than less. A history of life with a common source is a conclusion difficult to escape.

The basic Darwinist position regarding how life began is called 'spontaneous animation,' which J.W. Dawson complained about back in 1873. It is the idea that life somehow springs into existence suddenly, all by itself, when proper mixtures of organic and inorganic compounds are placed into proximity and allowed to percolate their way across the immensely deep chasm between non-life and life. Based on everything known about the technical aspects of that process:from 1873 until now:it is quite safe to say spontaneous animation doesn't have the proverbial snowball's chance of enduring.

OW: As if everything that happened between 1873 and now has more than a snowball’s chance of refrigerating hell. Spontaneous animation is a disturbing notion, but no more so than the fact that we exist, period. The very best scientists and the most profound theologians agree: life, existence, reality are all pure magic, no matter how many Natural Laws nor how much Holy Writ we apply to them. The absolutely weirdest and most mystifying aspect of reality is that it is real. I’m all for ET and a cast of extra-dimensional 1,000s coming down and stirring the stuff of life all they want, but how does their involvement solve The Riddle of Primogeniture? Altering the clay tablets of life 200,000 years ago is one thing; how the cuneiform maya of DNA started inscribing itself in the mud is another thing. Arguing the issue of human origins by the issue of life’s primogeniture only undermines the author’s very valid intrigues regarding the Sumerian codices, humanity’s strange DNA engineering, and comparisons between primates and humans.

Fred Hoyle, a brilliant English astronomer and mathematician, once offered what has become the most cogent analogy for this process. He said it would be comparable to 'a tornado striking a junkyard and assembling a jetliner from the materials therein.' This is because the complexity evident at even the tiniest level of life is mind boggling beyond belief. In short, it could not and did not happen, and anyone insisting otherwise is simply wrong, misguided, or terrified of dealing with what its loss means to their world view.

OW: There’s that mysterious aeroplane of Fred’s. He should know better, though. He spent his life observing billions and trillions of light years, stellar objects, gas clouds... he apparently didn’t do the math, nor did he give the tornado enough time. Firstly, the junkyard was an entire planet of deeply complex material, made more complex as time went on. Secondly, the tornado – or roulette wheel, if you prefer – spun for at least 4.5 billion years, or so a whole heap of strong evidence suggests. Finally, it didn’t assemble one single improbability; it assembled several zillion probabilities from one single improbability. A few hundred zillion of these are spinning at this moment, from viruses to mosquitoes to you and I.

Nor am I terrified of "what its loss means to my world view". I already accept that the universe is (delightfully) far larger than my ken. The mind-boggling complexity of life is not so boggling to my mind as the author suggests, for a] I am alive myself, and b] others whom he does not quote have studied the possible mechanisms of Natural Selection and found it works very well. I won’t attempt to summarize their arguments, experiments and observations here for they are lengthy, as is necessary when outlining a process involving billions of years and gadzillions of events. Suffice it to say that the more one mentally walks about in the hypothetical Garden of Natural Selection, the more one becomes familiar with the idea that Little Things Add Up, that there is probably no distinct threshold or jumping off point between inanimate matter and that which we call life, but that there are is a constant process of cause and effect – reality if you will: this bumping into that bumping into the other – which seems to want to evolve into ever more conscious form. It is the nature of life to evolve, to fly by the seat of its pants, just as it is the nature of the cosmos to unforgivingly terminate fatal mistakes and reward successful mutations, no matter how grotesque. The rewarding of successful grotesqueries perhaps explains the existence of mosquitoes and, well, demonic angels like ourselves. The possibility of the spontaneous rise of life is no more improbable than the fact that there are Natural Laws governing the interactions of matter /energy /space /time; indeed, the just-listed four categories are Natural Laws in their own right. If it’s logical for feldspar to organize into feldspar, or hydrogen to accumulate into a star like our sun, then why stop there?

Here’s my answer for why we balk at the Edge of The Void. I’ve quoted it before, from a Buddhist monk buddy of my neighbor, a fellow known as Scooby Zenscat: "After all, the only aberration of my existence is that I exist."

Picture for a second god or, better yet, gods, asking each other where they came from, looking at those life forms furthest below Them in terms of complexity, brilliance, worthiness, divinity, et cetera, yet still recognizable as fellow architects of reality. If you were the god we commonly refer to, in whose image we claim our likeness, that most distant relative would be us. Yes, it would be a mighty far stretch to imagine that cretins like ourselves might someday evolve to become wise, benevolent, omniscient and omnipotent GODS, yet such is the fondly held hope of many members of our species, including myself. For we know that practice makes perfect, easy does it, a little at a time, slow and steady wins the race, someday, somehow... just as we know that at any moment we might push the world’s tolerance too far and render ourselves extinct, not to mention that comet which, sooner or later, the laws of probability will hurtle our way to destroy us all – or at least those of us without the necessary alterations necessary to survive such horrendous conditions.

I was raised as a Mormon to believe that "As Man is, God once was, and as God is, Man may become." Talk about a tornado in a junkyard. Seems to me that Jehovah tried that approach a few times, at municipal junkyards like Sodom & Gomorrah and a few others. Didn’t work that well that we know of either, but then, we don’t know just how bad things may have been back then. Perhaps we’re more evolved than we realize.

(Now we will hear frantic howls of protest from the scientists off to our right, but ignore them. If 100 idiot savants can access 100 different portions of their brains to perform their astounding intellectual feats, then those same portions must be in our brains, too, but our normalcy keeps us from being able to access them. Period.)

OW: One may think that I dislike this article or disparage its author’s reasoning, but not so: I quote this article because he has done a good bit of homework and raises some valid and rarely discussed points. Not to mention his sense of humor. But here I must holler: "Bullshit." Idiot savants have been studied and explained by perfectly mundane methods. They maniacally focus on a given skill in the way that idiots often obsess on something, and devise ways of performing the seemingly miraculous.

It is true that not all idiot savants have been so explained nor am I so presumptive as to say that in time they will be so explained. Some things are plain miraculous. Nikolas Tesla’s extraordinary understanding of harmonic vibratory principles, which resulted from a period of prolonged illness, for example, is mysterious indeed. But some light is shed by the fact that during this illness, he was extremely sensitive to the slightest vibration – painfully so. They placed rubber under his bed posts as dampers. A mosquito’s humming could give him migraine-like seizures. He was not a happy lad. Imagine what fingernails on a blackboard could have done to him. Pain aside, the connection is obvious: he had extraordinary motivation and time to ponder nothing but the nature of vibrations.

It is known that when children are given constant, uninterrupted support by their caregivers in such a way as to help them explore whatever seizes their fancy, they sooner or later develop a passionate interest in a given area and become extremely proficient in that area. Prodigies. One need not be an idiot to be a savant, but one needs to focus on a thing to an extraordinary degree.

My PC does not use all its ‘brains’. When it does, it breaks. Seizes up. It likes to have a goodly part of its processing power vacant or idle. I do not see having unused brains as a deficit or design flaw. I see it as giving a fellow room in which to think.

According to our mitochondrial DNA, humans have existed as a distinct species for only about 200,000 years, give or take several thousand.

OW: I have done a small sliver of research on how the age of mitochondrial DNA is determined, and have yet to make sense of it. Specialists speak in strange tongues. But I have to agree with his overview here, for the fossil record of humanity is MUCH newer than that of dinosaurs, trilobites and ancient eucaryotes. That there is a Missing Link in this comparatively untramelled record tends to speak for itself.

While I’m inclined to take on faith the age determination aspect, I ask another question: How do they determine we are a separate species? I mean, we just now finished compiling the human genome. How do we know when our ancestors could no longer breed with their putative forebears? I’m not challenging the author’s claim, for I haven’t the knowledge to do so, but I am qualifying a question or two in regards to his claims.

When it comes to his descriptions of the Sumerians and their mythology, I’m open-minded. This isn’t the first I’ve heard of strange stuff in Sumeria and "weird scenes inside the gold mine". I think I know where I can come across translations of those ancient Sumerian codices, and someday I plan to read them. The archeological evidence regarding ancient deluges and cultures being swept away and then being rebuilt from scratch with the aid of higher ‘gods’ is widely spread around the cultures of the world. I like sci-fi mythology, although I thought the movie "Stargate" was a dud.

You should see some of the interpolations of Biblical record with these and other codices to form a mythology whereby evil aliens are synonymous with fallen angels and such. I’m not saying that such theories are the work of crackpots nor are they fully developed, only that they are weird enough to be fascinating yet based on enough solid correlation to withstand blanket dismissal as mere Von Daniken-esque "Chariots of the Gods" pseudoscience.

"In Conclusion", while I believe Natural Selection IS more than adequate to evolve beings like ourselves, I agree with the author that something smells fishy in Sumeria and that humanity, however similar to primates it may seem, is probably an altered piece of work.

The following was inspired from something me southern Mormon mommy mailed to me, and so was written with a slant to my family’s Protestant fundamentalist mindset.

THE SILVERSMITH

Some time ago, a few ladies met to study the scriptures. While

reading the third chapter of Malachi, they came upon a remarkable

expression in the third verse:

"And He shall sit as a refiner and purifier of silver."

Malachi 3:3

One lady offered to visit a silversmith, and report to them on what

he said about the subject. She went accordingly, and without telling

the object of her errand, asked the silversmith to tell her about the

process of refining silver.

After he had fully described it to her, she asked, "But Sir, do you

sit while the work of refining is going on?"

"Oh, yes ma'am," replied the silversmith, "I must sit with my eyes

steadily fixed on the furnace, for if the time necessary for refining

be exceeded in the slightest degree, the silver will be injured."

The lady at once saw the beauty, and comfort too, of the expression,

"He shall sit as a refiner and purifier of silver." God sees the need

to put His children into a furnace. His eye is steadily intent on the

work of purifying, and His wisdom and love are both engaged in what is

best for us. Our trials do not come at random, and He will not let us

be tested beyond what we can endure.

Before she left, the lady asked one final question, "When do you know

the process is complete?"

"Why, that's quite simple," replied the silversmith. "When I can see

my own image in the silver, the refining process is finished."

Oh, oh, this is a bad, bad, wicked thing for me to read. Its iniquity is that it makes me think, and thinking makes me write. Then I send the writings around as it pleases me. Although I don’t quite believe the road to hell was paved with good intentions (a disbelief based on two assumptions, that a] the road to hell is at least a little longer than a run around the corner to the local grocery, and b] there are not as many good intentions available as is popularly believed), it is still possible that the road to hell might well be paved with the mutterings and mental meanderings of blabbermouths like myself. But that’s a whole ‘nuther kettle of wax, or ball of bouillabaisse...

And so He made us in His own image. Well, maybe so. Jerry Garcia looked a lot liked the biblical Jehovah; in fact, I saw a snippet of a prime-time TV cartoon wherein God was obviously drawn in Jerry’s image. Reminds me of Jim Morrison (me step-dad) discovering he shared his name with the lead singer of a notoriously decadent rock’n’roll band associated with orgiastic revels in public venues. But, of course, we’re not talking about machine stamped likenesses, graven images and all that. I doubt I look very much like Jehovah at all. Were I Marilynn Monroe, I would doubt the likeness even more. It must also be noted that considerations of who looks like whom, or the creative engineering and design of humanity by a deity, presupposes that such a deity exists. So I should state that I’m inclined to believe in such a deity, if for no other reason than to paint a happy face on the mysterious void of origin.

In this instance, we are dealing with a definite belief in a definite God, a male God, blindingly terminal in appearance and effect on a mortal’s lifespan, possibly fond of white robes and, among possible other duties, the author of All. Hmmm... we’ll leave ‘All’ alone today, and just say He made All that the eye can see, ear can hear, et cetera – not necessarily that Revere teapot which has been in the family for over 200 years, made by a fellow named Paul, but the underling patterns of energy/mass/time/space of which it is comprised. Let’s say that God made "the stuff of which dreams are made", including the stuff in the shape of a black falcon which Sam Spade fondled at the end of the best detective movie anyone ever dreamed of making and also, getting a little more down to clay roots, the grey stuff in the head of the playwright who wrote that famous phrase about the stuff of a dream called life, or the dreams of living stuff, or the living dreams of stiffs (which is as good a definition of an afterlife as any, say I).

Incidentally, ya gotta laugh at the increasing politicization of heaven. God can no longer be solely white, male and, for God’s sake, not bald! He must also be she, black, brown, red, yellow and, for any ETs monitoring this transmission, grey, silver, blue, green, violet. And people wonder why God no longer walks the face of Earth with men – and women – as He did back in those lovely mythological days on the first family truck farm.

"Well the first thing you know Adam’s bit the apple tree;

Flaming sword said, "Adam! Move away thee!"

Said, "Fertile Crescent is the place you gonna farm,

By the sweat and the toil and the labor of thy arm... ...digging hoes... city-states... fig trees..... y’all come*1 back now, y’hear?")

Politically, it would be suicide. Making physical Divine appearances, that is. Oh, I know any God worth It’s salt could appear as all things to all people and, according to a pantheist, that is just what God does all of the time or at least the time we experience, but we’d fight and feud over what he/she REALLY looked like. Just like we already do. Whose image fits the mold best? Freckles, and naturally curly hair, and straight, clean teeth, and... nah. It’s best just to let holy writ say we’re cut from His cloth and let us pave the road to hell or at least the end of the day’s musings with our varying notions of what God meant when He said we’re made in His image.

Anyway, these living dreams flickering in God’s furnace like a molten mirror...

there’s a famous line from a W.B. Yeats poem which says, "I’m looking for the face I had before the world was born." And so many of us are but not, apparently, God. He’s looking for His face IN the world. The Man be cookin’ up a feast of souls, a marvelous affair in which the main course gets to eat itself. Forego any grisly images and consider that such self consumption is exactly what our favorite planet does with the aid of a little solar radiation. Oh, you are so in trouble now. This is worse than it looks. I’m going to share a little poem I wrote years ago at, of all places, that first family reunion at Isle of Palms. When Robin trots out poetry, things are worse than they appear.

Table For One

("To me, the world is like one big restaurant." Woody Allen)

The world eats me, as words made flesh

Digest themselves. As combines thresh

The grain from stalk so Life, by lives,

Divides itself by sentient knives.

The big and little fish that eat

The smaller of their kind, the meat

That through the slaughterhouses flows,

"All beasts and fowl" – these ones know

The table spreads around the globe,

That mindless beast or soul in robe

Are scurried victuals, that all,

Must fight to lose, to flounder, fall.

This need to breathe and procreate,

To relay signals passed by fate,

Makes a communal house for us

In one another’s bellies. Thus

One by one we join the all.

So womb by womb we start to crawl

Through self to love, from soul to rind.

Eat heartily; I do not mind.

(6-82, Charleston, S.C.)

Behold Earth, a smoldering mirror which God studies constantly, looking for His face in the swirl of stuff. According to folks like us, He especially looks for it in the eyes of homo sapiens, which is surely a likeable image, that of God like a Dickensian street waif looking longingly through the windows of a butcher shop at the lovely things inside. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. If you’re hungry a side of pork is a work of sublime art. A string of sausages? An intricacy of delight beyond comprehension but not beyond consumption. (Some of us have known a little hunger here and there.) Meantime, the butcher is inside, busily carving the planet into ever more consumable portions of profit, prone to ignore the starving waif(s) just outside the reach of his soul. But the boy keeps looking. Sometimes the butcher, tired of shooing off a boy who keeps coming back again and again, walks over to the window and attempts to stare the boy down. And then, and then... and then God and Man get a good look at each other, but especially, Man gets a peek into this thing called God which he hopes and prays for and whose image he defiles with every other step, and sees – well, what do you expect to see when you stare down a starving waif? Holy shit! (there are times when expletives are the only holy writ to suffice), you see a child just like you.

For we are, it is said, made in His image.

Now, for what it’s worth, no less a person than the rarefied and august Lord Richard Buckley said, "I believe that people ought to worship people. I really do, I really do." We are constrained by holy writ from worshiping graven images, but it can be safely said that human beings are not graven nor wrought. They grow and flow in a melting mirror in a furnace called Earth. And it seems to me that for mirrors of God to worship another is perhaps the very best way to find God, or see The Truth, or know The One, or... for if we look inside another’s eyes, we see God looking ever intently at the work in progress, seeking His reflection...

Oy. That’s a touch too heavy-handed, wouldn’t you say?

"Deacon Jones, everyone here knows what a fine speaking voice you have, but we’re here to be illuminated from within, not slathered in honey from without. Not to mention that there’s a heap of mighty fine fried chicken downstairs, provided by our dear Ladies’ Auxiliary, and some of us like it a little warmer than room temperature. Brevity is the soul of wit, et cetera – and that chicken’s gettin’ cold, Deacon Jones."

Right. Uh, I suppose y’all are wondering why I, well, that is, why God or Someone or Something or Anything called us all here together in life and wonderment on this lovely round rock. I know I do.

There are traditionally two camps of thought on this matter, Creationism and Evolutionism, both, of course, hopelessly misnamed by the deforming sales pressure of the popular media. For Evolution, on the one hand, is an accepted and necessary facet of both scenarios, whether it be the evolution of a Pilgrim’s Progress or the March of Life, while Creationism is a mighty poor way of spelling Genesis, don’t you agree? So I’ll rename them properly: Natural Selection and Genesis.

You see, the difference between the two is more than the presence or absence of a bearded male demiurge in the making of today’s reality, in which we are all gathered together to make it or break it, gracefully if possible. The other difference is that Natural Selection, even if one accepts the insertion of Big Bang cosmogony into the mix, is not about to posit any form of personality in its matrix other than the necessity of DNA to be borne along by a living creature in order to continue writing natural history. By this description, DNA and Natural Selection have no personality other than to keep plugging away as survival dictates, which is, after all, their job. The blank face of the Void remains decidedly blank according to Natural Selection and the far-from-compellingly-proven notions of a Big Bang erupting from something like a Primal Atom. Sounds like Adam. Which pun helps us pull the other leg, for what Genesism does (besides requiring only the addition of a tiny ‘m’ to make it into a school of belief) is to posit a Primal Adam at the source of these our earthly revels. It puts a human face on things. Considering that we, as self-deemed crowns of creation, are the only reflections we see reflecting back at us from the surface of The Deep, a human face belongs on things indeed. ‘Anthropocentric’ has become something of a dirty word (probably because the human race is by and large a dirty animal in terms of the environment), but really, what else can you expect a human being to be? ARTHROPOcentric? Yeah, right, "in the beginning was the crab"... no, I’ll take a guy in a beard and robe – hell, I’ll take Marilynn Monroe in an evening dress, even standing over an exhaust grate, before I’ll take a crab as the Face of the Void. No thanks. (Sorry, Ms. Monroe. It’s a tempting offer but my wife is a real crab....)

Natural Selection has no face. It is a series of features, ‘makeup’, if you will, painted on the blank face of that anonymous void. It has had Missing Link apeman caricatures pasted on its wall, along with DNA’s helical spiral, movies of cellular mitosis looking like a planet dividing itself into two new and identical worlds, all laid out in a school book diorama beginning with amino acid coils on the left and ending in a (usually naked, hence normally displayed in profile) homo sapiens sapiens on the right. If you’re religious, there is usually an implied afterlife evolutionary state: homo angelicus.

Face vs. Faceless. That, in my opinion, is the Big Stink between the two. Not whether or not the world is 6-7,000 years old or 4.5 to 5 billion years old. Not even whether the contingencies and continuations of natural selection via DNA produced life on earth and, from that life, beings like us, or whether God said "Let there be" and there it was.

It’s The Face thing. I suppose one problem that most scientists and intellectual philosophers (well, ya gotta call ‘em SOMETHING, and heathen is such an unkind word) have with God as Author is that it begs the question of God’s authorship. Who made God, et cetera ad infinitum indubitus inquisium? (Nah, it’s not real Latin. I just made it up.) A sentiment with which I readily concur but also counter with the perennial question, the Primal Query: "What’s THAT got to do with anything?" (Picture it as THE trick question in a ‘Will The Real God Please Stand Up’ quiz show. What’s that got to do with anything is the sort of question best left to God.)

In other words, if it’s valid to ask who made God (which it surely is), then it is just as valid to ask from whence came The Void? Hawking and all his Big Bang cronies walk their computer simulations quite convincingly right up to the beginning of the first nanosecond before It went BOOM, and then their math halts in place. This doesn’t discredit their math, which marches very well indeed to a most excellently accurate drum, but it dunna do doo-doo, Cap’n, for that big ?Huh? we all carry around in our hearts.

Which is where God and that kind, wise, stern face with the big white teeth, come in. Not just as friendly window dressing, but as an answer to an even deeper question, the Primal Query as brilliantly restated by, of all people, the alcoholic beverage industry, people with whom I, as an ever struggling alcoholic, do regular and indirect battle while paying regular and indirect tribute to their mind-numbing cause. Apparently, the road to Heaven is sometimes paved with very bad intentions, for it is through the auspices of the world’s largest narcotic drug industry that the lite beer commercial asks us: "Why ask Why?" And that’s a question that leads a soul to thinking...

Why indeed. This is the nickel allegedly available in the corner of that round room in the back of our minds, and one can go crazy in endless circles following that course. A course well described by the following paraphrase of everybody’s favorite piece of wisdom from Yogi Berra: "If you see a Y in the road, take it."

So Y ask Y?

Here is where the Face of God proves Its real and indisputable worth, even if Its existence remains an unverifiable matter of belief. For is it not Yahweh, in the form of His Only Begotten (if I remember the story right), who said, "I am the great I am?" Think about it. I is because I is – and dat’s dat. Nothing more, not even a warning to "Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain" – because He is the man behind the curtain. Ancient Greek drama critics thought lowly of deus ex machina endings to a play, but it makes a terrific opening act. Considering God from the perspective of patriarchal primogeniture, which is exactly the perspective of JudeoChristianity, it seems appropriate to say that such a statement – "I Am because I Am" -- requires a deity with mighty big cojones. For my money, that’s just the kind of deity for me, although I’d be just as happy if the cojones were ovaries, or if the deity carried both. Indeed, considering the paradoxical nature of primogeniture, such duality would make perfect sense.

Who put the bomp in the bomp-sha-bomp-sha-bomp? Whence came whence? When it comes to questions like these, I’ll take a kindly grandfatherly figure to sit me on His lap and say with full and convincing authority, "I did." Or, if a grandfatherly deity were lacking, I suppose I could force myself to sit in Marilynn Monroe’s lap...

My favorite all-time definition of deity, which I’ve quoted many times before, says, "After all, the real test of God’s Omnipotence would be His ability to save us even if He didn’t exist." This may sound like sheer verbal nonsense, the sort of semantic ghost also displayed in the following:

"I saw a man who wasn’t here,

Sat upon the topmost stair.

He wasn’t there again today.

Oh! How I wish he’d go away!"

(or, alternative ending): Oh! How I wish he’d come and stay!

which it surely is (verbal nonsense), but it also describes just exactly the sort of mysterious, paradoxical and impossible power that I believe a deity, who is expected to pull the cosmos and Itself up by Its bootstraps, should have.

Whence came whence? It seems silly but is not impossible to ask Why ask Why, but it is beyond ludicrous to ask How ask How? You see, ‘y ask y’ is self-sustaining in the way that only insoluble queries can be. In y-ing, one y-s, which is all the y that a y needs. But in asking how to ask how, one must first know how. So the only way one can ask how is to already know how to ask how to ask how... which is, I suspect, a little like what God sees in His many mirrors such as you and I. A thousand thousand thousand little self-generating riddles. Which is, by the way, why "love is the answer". The wisdom and accuracy of that statement is not something I nor anyone can satisfactorily explain, which is precisely why it is unassailably true. It takes an indefinable key to solve an insoluble puzzle, n’est ce pa?. But how... I’ve heard it said that there are as many ways as there are desires (no, that’s not from the Kama Sutra), and I believe it, but meanwhile there’s THIS place, our consensually experienced reality, presumably deriving from only one How. "However", that HOW could well be multiple, and there may be as many geneses as there are creation myths, just as many people believe there is a vast diversity of afterlife choices. Let’s hope that where there’s a will there’s at least one way.

A little something I feel should be said about this thing called faith. It is often dismissed contemptuously for its quicksilver quality. Constancy of faith is, for a human being, an abnormality, even a mutation. While a constancy of faith is not inherently bad, and is usually viewed as good (depending upon the object of the subject’s faith), it is not the common form of faithfulness. I, for example, am all for deathbed conversions. I also agree that there are no atheists in foxholes.

That foxholes and incoming fragmentary shells and land mines and such exist, is indisputable evidence that this is a rough world, this world that God made.

Now, how much help is faith when one is witnessing an atrocity that seems to never end in the five minutes it takes for a bunch of folks to be gruesomely slaughtered, or hygienically exterminated in a Nazi gas chamber? I don’t know. Viktor Frankl, in his book, "Man’s Search For Meaning", describes just exactly that situation from his first hand experiences in a death camp. (And what does this "concentration camp" thing mean? Dehydrated Jewry? Just add tears and stir? I guess terms like ‘hell’ or ‘Hinnom’ are too powerful for today’s world.) Interesting to compare the brass idol of Moloch, Baal worshippers’ favorite baby barbecue grill, with a jet plane delivering napalm to some poor hamlet accidentally in the middle of rich men’s wars. Which is worse, the searing slaughter of one’s own children by choice because one believes that Baal, the all-powerful, demands it, or the apathetic murder by cremation of others’ children because HQ, the all-powerful, placed those coordinates on your map’s strike zone that morning?

Q: How many dead baby jokes does it take to be so horribly hilarious so’s to raise the dead?

A: One – about a kid you know and care about.

Yeah, I know; it’s not funny. Dead baby jokes never are. Likewise, faith under duress is not something to sneer at. There is little that is more devout than a fervent hypocrite’s faith; I know this from personal experience, being a fervent hypocrite. And believe me, it takes a lot of faith to be one.

OK, don’t believe me;)

Love and happy tawts,

Robin

oscillowitz@netscape.net

P.S. (Pedal Script) *1 This is what most of us are hoping to do: come back home to a place we’re not sure exists but we think we came from and is where we believe we belong.

P.P.S. For the record, I like and believe in Natural Selection, and also imagine there’s enough room in a process that took billions of years for God to reach out Its finger (no, I don’t prefer Beardman over Marilynn or vice versa) and touch someone. For all I know, ET wove some DNA in the past – Alien Seeding is a popular notion with a lot of ancient history buffs, and has some valid evidence supporting – not proving, just supporting – its very colorful and wonderfully dramatic premises.

Hmmm.... a pot of craniums. Should I place it in the windowsill or transplant it to the garden? Hmmmm....

"Our trials do not come at random, and He will not let us be tested beyond what we can endure."

Nice sentiment, but if you factor free will into the mix, you get situations where people experience far more than they can endure. Of course, it’s amazing what we can endure, but nonetheless there have surely been millions who’ve been pushed to their breaking point. Make no mistake: it’s a beautifully intoxicating planet – and it’s a cruel world.

Which reminds me: if Heaven is an afterlife, does that make this our mortal existence a ‘beforedeath’? If so, would someone tell me just exactly WHEN do we get to start really living? In the meantime, I guess I’ll go out and tend my garden. Speaking of fig trees, if anyone really wants to ponder the intricately wrought nature of life (or is that life of nature?), look into the relationship between fig trees and wasps.

The following just seemed to fit the profile:

Let us consider the potential of the human mind. Specifically, let us consider the almost mythological belief that many or most us have in the untapped supernatural powers of the human mind. Like many mythologies, it combines a longing for Golden Ages past with a progressive expectation that our hallowed cerebrums will only grow stronger and more complex with time.

Someday, the myth tells us, we will (or did once) commune without words, levitate, temporally transpose our selves or at least our awarenesses, move mountains, walk on water, heal the body by our thoughts, conjure, cause vanishings, transmute, teleport... if it can be imagined, so shall it be done. Me and you and a mustard seed or two.

There was (and still is, I’m sure) the popular folklore that we use only 3%, 5%, 15% -- depending on who was telling – of our brain capacity. As if it might be a good thing to have every circuit engaged at once... which it might. I don’t know. But is it a good thing if all the energy in my armchair should release at once? Do we really need a 5 mile wide crater where the South Hill of Spokane, Washington, USA once was? Do I require the neural equivalent of a white out to ‘see All’ or be fulfilled? Probably about as much as I need a five-sense-wide hole where my brain used to function.

We used to, it is said, talk with the animals, sport with gods, make ourselves invisible as we hunted the elusive chimera. In seance, we might visit our past and leave a token of our visit, or visit the future and leave a forgotten memory in the form of a lost manuscript. We rode shotgun in the eagle’s right eye (left if it was a European eagle), saw the kraken through the sperm whale’s mind, smelled Elysium through a unicorn’s nostrils.

Or so we like to suppose, and that’s all right by me. But still, suppositions deserve an interrogation now and again. Why did telepathy go south? Why do the little people stay away? When will the big breakthrough happen, as it has in many sci-fi novels, which gives man star travel through psychokinetic hyperdimensional navigation (or some similar sequence of magically oversized Big Words)? And, if it’s only a matter of when, well then, what are we waiting for?

"When I grow up, I’m gonna be big as a house; I’m gonna be a dinosaur hunter; I’m gonna be a fireman..." And here we are, all grown up with no mo to jo. At least most of us.

Hacking and cracking computer systems is dashing fare these days. Ten years ago, the coolest of the information elite were prancing around, like Marquesan cannibals doing a dance of digital digestion, through the virtually unguarded electronic corridors of what had just recently been dubbed "cyberspace" by William Gibson. There was magic in the machine for those adepts who believed and persevered...

An analogy, if you will. A touchtone payphone of the late-80s/early 90s. To most of us, these magic devices could connect us to almost any phone anywhere if we had sufficient coinage and a large enough phone directory. With a little luck, they might even connect us to a real live human being within the phone company who might actually help us accomplish our telephony on the first try.

But it required coinage, or a valid telephone account, or some such, to actually spin a magic call. And never, ever did we think we might actually rearrange the network and its machines to do our bidding. What network? What machines? There were phones and wires and people at the other end, and sometimes, between one and one’s intended interlocutor, there were phone company people or phone company people’s voices recorded in a... a machine? Oh. Right. I suppose there must, after all, be some doodads somewhere running all this.

Fast forward through several movies (not literally! it’s a metaphor! uh, but, 20 years ago, before VCRs, it was ONLY a metaphor to all but Hollywood professionals), novels, books, articles and party tales about dumpster-diving, war-dialers, black boxes, phone phreaks, illicit free calls, and 911 service rerouted from its intended destination in a Tallahassee police station to a 900 porno number in NYC (true story). There was a period, a period which probably extends to here and now in some locales, when a city’s entire phone network could be reprogrammed from a phone booth by a person with an AT&T manual and a lot of patience. Seriously; one could type in various keypad sequences and do wild things to the local switch and, to some extent, from thence to the nearest main switch. All from the phone booth next to the Coke machine.

Now, walk across the street to the Albertson’s food store (oh, that’s right; you’re not really here) and contemplate the touchtone phone booth. Picture it in grey, curvicule curds of shiny brain matter arranged in paired lobes like handles. Carefully, carefully, levitate it through your mind’s eye into the place between your ears. Ponder the persistence of ancient folklore. And wonder where one might obtain a manual, and also, how far does the network extend?

Follows is just weird fun from a wee forum I cobbled together after leaving AWML:

rslc 6-13-00

-!!!!

TM: *---- THE BEST THINGS IN LIFE ARE FREE ----*

OW: I, on the other hand, am very expensive. Just goes to show you don’t get what you pay for, you just get what you get. Got it?

Any whore whose door sports a red light

Knows a prick when she sees one, all right.

She can tell by a glance

At the drape of men’s pants

If they’re worth taking on for the night.

(1943)

TM: "As Arthur C. Clark once joked, ‘any technology beyond our own would seem like magic to us.’

"Enoch is also history’s first astronaut, who ‘is taken aloft by the Lord’ and shown ‘the secrets of earth and heaven’. He returns to earth with the ‘weights and measures’ for all humankind. "

OW: And likewise, Mr. Clarke, any magic sufficiently close to our own would seem to us like technology. We can now speculate that Enoch was the first (well, an early) astronaut because we know what an astronaut is. Or talk of vibratory control systems using harmonic properties of light, sound and more, because we have discovered some of the vibratory rudiments of this stuff called, eh, stuff. Matter, if you prefer.

Ouroboros wags its tail and nods its head in agreement here, the two motions converging to give the beast’s body an oscillatory rotation wherein the standing physical wave of its (let us say) clockwise spiraling -- which puts a lateral wag in its tail while imparting a vertical nod to its head -- is countered by a moving wave of anti-clockwise vibration that is countless orders of magnitude faster than the cyclic rate of Ouroboros’ bodily wriggle, so much faster, in fact, that it is invisible, detectable only by inferential deductions (or deferential inductions). Every so often, say, every 26,000 years, the two waves converge at exactly the seam of mystery where The Serpent of Midgard ingests itself proper. (Pythagoras is rolling over in his grave at this point. "I knew it!", he moans.)

Here at the juncture of mouth and tail, the place where The River issues from its own mouth even as it swallows itself, a minor event occurs. This event, while insignificant to the greater cosmic grind, is all-important to the Kilroyians, or human beings, of Earth. For one thing, Time, at least the local garden variety that we’re familiar with, briefly stands still (when viewed from the correct perspective) like fan blades under a synchronized strobe light. Here at the freeze frame occurs a paradoxical torchpass, an opportunity to make an uniquely deft lane change and pass oneself as if one were standing still which, from the perspective of the Other Self’s vehicle, One Self is. One prophet named Enoch appears at just that time to administer the magic/technology of the Kilroys. Actually, he steals it, but only from the dead -- specifically, from himself.

He just happened to be the single most classified human being in technological society and, as such, had access to more top, nay, below secret information than any other human alive. An honor which presumably has much to do with the untimely and downright rude manner of his death, for not only did he know way too much about the several-orders-of-paradigm-beyond-conventional-science technology that the various cabals had squeezed from tax dollars and minds like his own, but had also made a frantic nuisance of himself by telling everyone he could that, according to his calculations, certain covert operations are synchronized in a volatile harmonic correspondence with certain recurring patterns, patterns culled from and collated with mythohistory and observed phenomena ranging from the subatomic to the scale of Hubble’s constant, not to mention an increasing flurry of recurrent dreams of Dr. Enoch Potok, his (now) former self. In a nutshell, the eve of destruction is at hand, and he and his colleagues are the ones pulling down the deadly nightshades. Cyanide mickeyed into one’s coffee is a sad way to burn the midnight oil. A sudden draft in the head and it extinguishes. And so passed away Dr. Enoch Potok.

As the Kilroys are decimated by their own incontinent hand, Enoch The Resurrected One leads a group of the properly insane to the safe ground (sometimes higher, sometimes lower, depending on the form of suicide attempt humanity is currently attempting). After the dust settles, or the waters subside, or the radiation diminishes, or the killer microbes die for lack of host victims, or... as The Serpent finishes moulting and settles down to its normal linear vortex, Enoch and his band of revivalists gander abroad, using the secret technology developed by the power mad former rulers of Earth, and spread the seeds of technological civilization again among the survivors of the latest Apocalypse.

Did the meek inherit the earth and become translated up to heaven? Did the Rapture bring up the dead and return them to life? Were the alleged Akashic Records tapped to continue the continuum of DNA known as the human race and all beasts and fowl, 2 X 2, as Noah may have? Along with all that vital flora? Could be. A lot can happen in a very short time when Time stands still.

Indeed, is The World as we know it involved in some epic cycle of evolutionary narrative wherein it is caught in a tapeloop? Not a static, read-only tapeloop, but a cybernetic cycle that writes its more robust permutations (uploads) into a larger cycle which, in turn, takes the variations caused by this upload and writes them back (downloads) into the belly of Ouroboros? ("All You Zombies", "By His Bootstraps"... name your fave story regarding temporal headstands and backflips.)

Is it as flummoxingly chaotic yet as purposefully woven as a novelist’s time paradox tale? Well, I certainly hope so. For, as I’ve quoted before, "The universe is full of astonishing and marvelous things, but you’d never know it to live there." (Jonathan Milos’ Jaded Muttering) Note the use of the word "there" instead of "here". I reckon one must die (or however one leaves this cosmos) in order to grasp the wonder of it all.

This is echoed in Haldane’s Suspicion: "...the universe is not only queerer than we imagine, but queerer than we CAN imagine." I take this as a personal challenge, especially since I view the universe as being most of all a collective figment of our imagination.

Finally, H.G. Wells said, " (You) must trick (the reader) into an unwary concession to some plausible assumption and get on with (your) story while the illusion holds." This, I believe, was told to H.G. Wells by God, presumably during a dream in which Mr. Wells asked a question which, in dreams’ typical ability to metaconfuse separate entities in a manner which nonetheless makes sense at the time, slicing Mr. Occam in two with his own razor, asked for both the Ultimate Meaning of Existence and the Secret of Good Storytelling.

As primordially important as all that may sound, I believe Sharon Webb’s Theory is the final reductive synthesis of the above with itself: "Reading is a vicarious experience in which, for a short time, order can be perceived in existence; the reader can thereby hope for order in his or her own life rather than futility and chaos." Hear! Hear! and amen to that, excepting that I would replace rather than by ‘along with’. Moderation in all things, I say.

Wow. Never been up this high before; how about you guys? 27,000 metres and all’s well! Adam, be sure and keep Edward out of the greenhouse. Can’t have him smoking our oxygen supply. Anybody see that Big Eye earlier on as we passed over the Columbia Plateau of Washington State, USA? We were roughly over Yakima...

!!!!-

Oscillowitz@netscape.net

P.S. "I took a little three-inch frond of (sea) weed into the laboratory and watched it under my binocular microscope. I pretended the common little inhabitants were rare and began to observe instead of merely to see them."

William Beebe, "The Arcturus Adventure", 1926

You’ll remember the following, I’m sure. I clipped it from AWML ages back, meaning to play with it, but never got around to it – or so I thought. As it turns out, I swam upstream from the banks of my own layman ignorance right to the starting premise of your following proposition:

Subject: Wavelength plus Conjugation

- -Message sent by Ray Flowers <gwiz@sangraal.com>

hi list,

we have hardly broached the idea of "waves nesting". if

waves nest in a conjugate manner, that is, if they "nest",

there becomes reinforcement. [easier to understand when

there are images]

we have assumed the idea that a wave could be 3 dimensional,

that is, with the x, y, and z axis. it might be easy to

assume that waves could, in fact, nest in a conjugate

manner. wave conjugation is understood by the way waves nest

inside each other. some are conjugate waves and others just

occupy the same space, depending on their particular

characteristics.

if waves, such as a Phi wave [looks like a squiggly

line] could nest in a conjugate manner [coming from several

sources], there is the possibility that such a nesting would

actually produce energy, because as a Phi wave travels

toward center, it begins to add and multiply at the same

time, thus producing energy. many of the free energy devices

are based on this research.

considering the universe as a whole, with the understanding

that it is constantly expanding, [producing more and more

energy in space?] we might get a better starting place for

the discussion of cosmic waves from space, nesting with

larger wave forms that are in our range of understanding.

brain waves are long flat waves [similar to electrical

waves], and cosmic waves are short and stubby [sort of].

when these two types of waves nest [as opposed to color

waves and x-ray] we create a specific energy. we even think

that we understand how to do this.

consider other waves such as light and sound.

The solution, as I see it, is to phase lock the two

vibrations. A row of

billiard balls to the moon, .5cm apart, would take a long

time to reach the

moon if struck by a cue stick from Earth. If the billiard

balls were touching, the vibration would reach the Moon at

the speed of light. Let's call this Longitudinal vibration.

If one of the same billiard balls were tossed into a lake,

it would create a 3d

wave in the water. Let's call this Transverse Vibration.

Transverse

Vibration is like a sound wave. If you could imagine the

line of billiard

balls (Longitudinal, Light) going into the Transverse water

wave, there

would be an instant of wave heterodyne, or Conjugation

(maybe three octaves).

If there was a large scale Phase Discipline [if we could

actually create this experiment], the two Vibrations would

merge.

The question is , Can we use the Sound Hologram to effect or

modulate the Light Hologram? Is it possible to Phase Lock

the two

Vibrations.

We are living proof. We are 80% water, we live in the sun,

and our bodies are considered to be in the proportion of

PHI. [no emploding yet!]

consider the idea, "as above, so below",

also look at the idea of "recursion" of waves. [example: the

Fibonacci wave]

as velvet would say: "thinking caps"

we might just create a little energy here.

does anyone understand what the "Djed" was/is?

Love.....r

ray flowers

Here follows my initial dive and, to me, most pleasant swim among the waters of curious ignorance:

Reflections

One can approach a tableau from two essential perspectives, from within the tableau itself or, as is more common, from without. Tableau, or, "still life" is verbal shorthand for ‘tableau vivant’, which means "living tableau". (‘Verbal shorthand’ is longwind for "shortmouth".) In a tableau vivant, living persons stand still in costume, amid scenery, mimicking a frozen moment of a scene or picture. A group pose. See: The Carson family in still postures, flawlessly evoking their most recent family portrait. "See? The picture’s on the piano. We’ve practiced this for hours."

I’m impressed. Quite a trick. Reminds me of a popular phony tale. (A phony tale is a story, usually false, too young to have earned the sobriquet ‘fairy tale’.) The story goes that an early daguerreotypist persuaded a team of jugglers to pose for a portrait. The exposure times of the materials used in the Daguerre process require several minutes to accurately record an image. Needless to say, it was difficult to record the action of juggling by a process that required so long a period of motionlessness. Repeated exposures were taken. Finally, through sheer stubborn persistence, the artiste succeeded in recording the artists.

Results surpassed expectations. The jugglers became perfect recordings of themselves, statuesque perfections of poise staring slack-jawed at painted balls hovering in mid-air over flowstone fingers. On the daguerreotype plate of polished silvered brass, however, the acrobats continued to juggle for several minutes, then packed up their performer’s trunks and walked out of view. No, they have not been seen since, at least not in motion. The still lives of these galet vivants remained for many years in the artiste’s possession, suitably coated in silvered brass, and ultimately immune to the lengthy scandal which followed the juggler’s disappearance: they looked exactly like the jugglers who had last been seen in the artist’s studio, but they were, after all, only so much brass covered by silver iodide, a thin glaze of bromine, thiosulphate of soda, and gold chloride. Authorities questioned the artiste severally and severely about the whereabouts of the jugglers and the funding of such expensive statues, not to mention the means of their miraculously rapid making, but this happened in America, where a lawyer is still man’s best friend, despite its tendency to bite the hand which feeds it, and nothing short of a hung jury of Salem witches could convict the daguerreotypist of anything more than an overly cavalier air of mystery. A gentleman well into his middle years, he lived well on royalties leasing the juggluerreotypes to the Hall of the Academy of Arts & Sciences in France, where they existed for several years as examples of, depending upon the theories attributed to them, any of a variety of scientific ignorances. Children called them magic. The artiste, in the spirit of safe and financially rewarding showmanship, referred to them as a mystery.

The statues were stolen, or so the authorities claim, in a series of fantastic burglaries in which the statues – six in all – disappeared singly, leaving no trace of forced entry, drugged watchmen nor even turning of the screws which held them to the floor. Several watchmen were fired; after the third such termination reason prevailed and it was conceded that only so many people can be bribed.

One at a time they disappeared, except the brothers Dauphine et Guilliame, whose main callings were as aerial acrobats on the high trapeze, and whose images both disappeared one night in the winter of ’67, a snowy evening which yet revealed no footprints or tracks of any kind. By 1897, they were all gone and, like their mobile twins in the daguerreotypic plate from which they juggled themselves from sight, were never seen again.

According to the records of the mortician and the details of the artiste’s will, a single, blank daguerreotype was placed in his coffin. On his tombstone one reads: " I return myself to Him in Whose image was I made, along with the souls of those from whose images were they taken." A former newspaper editor once said that some of the best sensationalist headlines come from the imaginative reading of grave markers.

We’ll approach the following tableau from without in order to emerge from within. At first light, a team of crows cries loudly through this part of the forest. Viewed from their aerial perch in the coniferous rafters of the forest canopy, the cocoon of our tent looks foreign as an alien egg. Cawing repeatedly, the crows remind local residents that humans are still on site.

Inside the cocoon, I and my daughter sleep – after a fashion – in a two-pygmy pup tent, sharing with two dogs a floor space equivalent to a prayer rug. The crows have succeeded in reminding me that I’m still there, or here. Now that conscious time has clicked a few eye blinks, I resume the business of here and now which marks most animal existence. The dogs and I unload ourselves (some eggs unzip); the 12 year old daughter sleeps.

A thread of smoke unravels from the stone fire ring, pulled by the early morning breeze. Amazingly, only a few puffs and paper scraps are required to make the coffeepot sizzle. Powerful cliches, or archetypes, are at work here: the aroma of hand-brewed coffee, the smell of smoldering wood, the tang of spruce, cedar and hemlock. It would seem that urban suppression of the olfactory affects us more powerfully than we realize. But after all, to breathe is to live. The world most consistently enters and informs us through our nose, yet we mostly ignore the nasal undertow of these tides. Despite our marked dependence and obsession upon vision, a sense that continues even in our sleep through dreams which (usually) take place in the Mind’s Eye, we are most deeply and strangely moved by the world’s perfumes. One hears little about the Mind’s Nose, except through euphemistic references to pheromones and their roles in triggering many of our most essential behaviours as a species.

We are camped uphill from a small mountain lake. I walk stiffly down a steep trail to the water’s edge. A waning moon overhead precedes an imminent sunrise. Maya, a 4 month old retriever pup, is prancing with a new found deer femur. Noisily hocking up a seeming endless supply of phlegm, I am startled by an echo’s accompanying roar, as lake and surrounding cliffs retort my volley. Man’s smallness amid the vast cosmos is a much commented upon cliche, but here, away from my fellow minions, I feel the opposite: a huge giant, not looming over but centering the whorl of phenomena.

This largeness of life is not mine alone. Every tadpole, shrub and mushroom proclaims its position in the center of its personal universe. Life seems filled by itself. The crows up here haw-haw with a vengeance unheard from their city cousins in Spokane; these boys are on a moonshine roll from dawn to dusk.

At sunset the previous evening, with Arcturus directly overhead, and regularly distracted by the spiraling trill of a horned lark, I had watched the concentric series of countless ripples on the water’s surface. The fluid medium is yielding enough to show us the vibratory nature of stuff. Its skin reveals the tics and tremors of energy bouncing through its quivering flesh. All quakes in the presence of all as everything touches everything.

"Reality"... "is constructed of metaphoric layers and correspondences. This is usefully expressed in the celebrated algorithm, ‘As above, so below.’ Here, above and below refers a certain hermetic hierarchy in which patterns repeat themselves on varying scales under many different forms while appearing all the while to be animated by a common underlying principle. Mere "up" and "down" as defined by terrestrial gravity are not the kind of hierarchy that is meant. Nor does mere physical size determine aboveness and belowness -- indeed, practical magic normally involves a conscious CHOICE of hermetic hierarchies.

"Stand at the prow of a boat and gaze over the swells of a mildly choppy sea. Then stand on a high peak in a moderately rugged mountain range and gaze once more -- but squint your eyes so that you lose most of the detail. You’ll swear that you’re looking at the ocean again, complete with troughs and wave crests! What you are seeing, in fact, are earth waves, animated by the same underlying principle as their sea-going cousins even if they ‘re a bit denser and slower. Here we have an analogy, a correspondence, or if you wish, a metaphor. However, no special hierarchy can be interposed between ocean waves and mountains save it were done arbitrarily, as part of a classificatory agenda which aims to prove something or accomplish something. Possibly even something magical...but more of that in its place! Wave phenomena as a whole can be found everywhere. One thinks of light , radio and sound waves. Earthquakes also come to mind, a kind of wave that is no more earthshaking than those which create mountains -- merely faster and noisier!

"And how about that dopplerish effect in visual perspective, where a line of

telephone poles, for instance, looks more widely spaced in proximity with the observer? You can walk along such poles for MILES and it seems that you are riding a kind of wave node that keeps pace with you ! It is a demonstrably different sort of "wave" than those others we have talked about; one might argue that it’s a wave only by analogy, that calling it a wave whatsoever is just a bit of poetic license. But that is precisely the point! Such optical dopplerism might not fit in quite the same class with sea or sound waves, yet there is nonetheless something unmistakably wavelike about it, a common underlying principle which the eye of poetic license is best suited to reveal, and which recurs impressively often in many different guises on many different levels. "

Mitchell Richmond, "Some Notes on Magick"

What he is saying is so obvious that it surely can be read in any of a number of natural philosophy essays, beginning with those of Plato. Plato’s idea of universal archetypes, an idea which states that all objects of a given category (bicycles, bulls, famous Argentine authors, sandworms, et cetera) are but shadows of a primal bicycle, bull, Borges, sandworm, et cetera, is so universal that we call it the Platonic archetype, and let its philosophical shadows lie where they fall.

Evolution echoes this thought and goes one further, stating that somewhere there is the first vegetation, the first photosynthesis. Common ancestry and Platonic archetypes go well together, and current analysis of DNA suggests that all life derives from an Ancient Idea on the part of Energy & Matter. In Plato’s idea of the Ideal Thing, there is somewhere the original tree, primal Plato, first me. (Perhaps I am the first me, my own archetype.) It is a useful concept. More from Richmond:

"Consciousness is a magical thing. For some time we have been describing exactly how it works. Our effort to explain, and the reader’s effort to comprehend, share a common sense of bewilderment and wonder. All creation started when "something" became aware of itself. In the process of so doing , it became two things. Immediately following this, it became aware of being aware, and in such fashion, the first cycle of the first wave was accomplished. In the instants and aeons which followed, the primordial "something" struggled to grasp the ungraspable mystery of its simultaneous unity and duality. As a consequence, the unity and duality went back and forth and round and round with each other, generating ever new cycles and ever new patterns arising from the collisions of those cycles.

"The Primordial Something struggled, and in that struggle was CREATION, and the Primordial Something rippled and spiraled its way into ever greater contradictions, and ever greater synthesizing encompassments of those contradictions -- which led only to further contradiction.... and further creation. And this creation spread every which way, into all corners of everything -- paving its road with an asphalt called timespace. It was a tangled spaghetti of sheer speculation, a tissue of fantasy and mixed metaphor spun by an unfathomable mind fathoming itself, telling marvelous tales to and about itself yet never quite reaching the limit of their possibilities.

"This describes the average person’s stream of consciousness . It also describes the mind of something called "God", and the mind of Something greater than all gods. As below, so above. The motive principle of consciousness is one with creation itself. This is precisely the kind of magic that creates and sustains the fabric of reality in the first place. And it is worth noting that this process which began outside of time is happening ALL THE TIME, with no beginning and no end, but only the appearance of such -- arising from the cyclical symmetry of its narrative magic. "

Metaphysically, one can ponder this along an indefinite range of directions which nonetheless all deliver one to the Prime Pendulum, a swing of Something – Nothing – Something – Nothing – Something... The Big Vibe, as a friend of mine calls it. That state of self-comprehending wisdom commonly referred to as Enlightenment is, by this reasoning, only and ever the Self contemplating the Self for, as another friend’s friend puts it: "After all, the only aberration of my existence is that I exist".

There it fidgets, the tiny and tremendous tremor of awareness, at bottom dead center of the pendulum’s arc, observing arcs of arcs of arcs of oscillations of oscillations of oscillations coming in waves of waves of waves... it may seem overly obvious to say that consciousness is being et vice versa, and so it is; and like most universal blatancies, it is – not invisible – but effectively transparent. Like myself who, for example, can see clear through me (except those mornings after). In fact, I can look right through my eyes and see The World.

This morning, at the lakeshore, the cliches (or archetypes) have followed me to water’s edge, steaming from my coffee cup like the mist floating above the still dawn surface of Crescent Lake. "Mirror smooth", "like glass": these canards become illusions upon closer examination. Skating out upon the illusion, I venture to say that, compared to the scale of the lake, we are like bugs on glass. To a bug, a sheet of glass is distinctly rippled and, in time, becomes pocked and scarred by the scratched records of vibrations. Nothing is still or smooth except in terms of harmonious symmetry. "True wisdom", "self-gnosis", "inner peace" and other archetypal cliches, describe standing waves of consciousness, a synchronization of the soul. The clock strikes One.

Along with the Mind’s Eye, or better said, including the Mind’s Eye, is the Mind’s World. One might say, the Mind’s Simulacrum of the World, but that only refers to yet another subset of The Mind, for along with the World Out There is another and potentially vaster World Within. Or so it would seem when one looks from without the tableau...

Perhaps what makes a human so human is that it stores and creates both a personal mirror of the world at large along with a world within. And, to round out the archetype, imagine a pebble tossed into the pond, and envision simultaneously if you can the trout's perspective of the pebble drifting down in its hasty look upwards at the impact rings spreading outward on the surface, as well as the view from shore, where a trick of predawn light allows the pebble-thrower to plainly see a fish looking up where a sploosh just was. And perhaps, for just a moment, the light being just so and the angle of refraction just right, they might spy each other.... before the ripples cross their line of sight and the image goes woozy...

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Somebody Help Me!!!

(Cognition is multiply reflective diffraction refracted by will.) Chew on that if you will. Basically, my mind tends to ponder every which way. In order to balance my uniquely subjective ponderances, I seek out established epistemological authorities such as Encyclopaedia Britannica editions ’74 and ’47, whose titles provide numerological balance along with their learned contents.

Scientists, scholars and academics are characterized as absent-minded, pedantic, obtuse, thoughtlessly arrogant (which really translates into ‘provincial’) and the worst writers known to literature. I concur. Here’s a quote from ‘74’s article on Wave Motion, p.667, 2^nd paragraph: "If a charged particle moves faster than the speed of light in a transparent medium such as glass or water, an optical bow wave is formed... This effect has been applied by nuclear physicists to the detection of fast-charged particles." I’ll bet! How blithely this well-informed airhead mentions particles travelling faster than that speed which the entire scientific community says can’t even be reached much less exceeded! But, you see, the writer has its mind on "bow waves" and can’t be bothered with apparent violations of the relative constant. Were I to corner said scholar over a martini, it would first say, "But everyone knows that, under certain conditions...blah blah... thereby exceeding C without violating the axioms of relativity." Yeah, but can you tell me what you just said? AHA!!!! Gives me the C Jam Blues... let it be known that this article has so far been one of the most understandable articles on physics in EB ’74. I don’t expect to understand the math or verbiage densely predicate upon mathematical equations. I only expect the guy to be able to tell me that "When the little brown dog jumped over the fence, the feet preceded the tail." But most of them could lose you shortly after the expression ‘canine ascension’ or, at best, no later than ‘abdominal boundary structure traverse’.

I tolerate such callously vague and mercilessly mindless precision when it comes to the words of metaphysicists because I don’t give a shit. If the guy can’t make himself understood to others regarding his vision of Primal Cause, oh well. I close the book and favor said author with my curiosity no more. But when a physicist purports to reveal the inner workings of Wave Motion, Sound, Vibrations and similar jugglings of jello, it annoys me if the fellow can’t speak his mind without addling mine.

The reason I never finished MacLuhan’s "Understanding Media", despite its tremendous recommendations and nearness to that which is dear to my pondering heart, is because the bastard couldn’t write his way out of a drivers license application.

Thanks for listening. I will endeavour to persevere.

-!!!!

Oscillowitz

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The EB ’74 article partially redeemed itself 2 pages later, stating: "Ordinary transparent materials such as water or glass have indices greater than one; hence the velocity of light in these materials is less than the velocity of light in free space." It then briefly describes Cherenkov’s radiation. And, of course, EVERYONE knows what is meant by "indices greater than one". I SUPPOSE the writer means that glass and water are thicker than a near absolute vacuum, but who am I to presume when I have already been competently befuddled by a professional? Small wonder that our generation’s most popular and prolific explainer of science was an SF writer, Isaac Asimov. Before him, H.G. Wells was a similar heavyweight. I wonder if Einstein ever secretly tried his hand at fiction.

My obsession with waves derives from the following:

Notes from Crescent Lake (continued)

My brother told me when I was a very young man that I possessed the kind of mind that could sit by the shore and ponder the workings of the waves. I laughed. Yet here, 25 years later, that is exactly what I do. Specifically, I ponder two kinds of waves – the waves which visibly spread along the surface of the water when a stone is tossed, and the waves which audibly disperse through the air carrying the sound of the stone’s splash.

Why does the former expand at the speed of a strolling mouse, while the latter travels at what is usually referred to as Mach 1? No, it’s not just the difference between air and water as conducting media, for sound travels mighty fast underwater as well as above. It must be something in the nature of the originating disturbances. Of which there is an intricate variety. Originating disturbances, that is. Disturbances which seem to be originating from... sitting here next to my whirring PC with Harry Connick, Jr. playing complex Professor Longhair-style rhythm’n’boogie piano-type sounds, it’s difficult to recall just how many sounds pervaded the stillness of the Selkirk Mountains. Birds, of course, provide the clarion clatter. Crows especially delight in ruckus, not only rousing the world where it lay but also delighting in demonstrating the ability of originating disturbances to move about. As the morning gang aerially sauntered down hill from perches on high, their caws also flew overhead and beyond, sometimes colliding with their echoes from the cliff opposite the pondering shore.

Several other birdcalls predominated, especially the spiraling trill of the horned lark. These calls, so sonically vivid as to seem visual, evoke a liquid concentricity as they cast out tonal lassos of oscillating scales ascending the frequency ladder in ever tighter coils until they seem to clear the summit of audibility (about 20 kilohertz, says EB ’74) and spiral out of ear’s reach. These fellows don’t move around much when they sing, but yet display sound’s near-and-far-ness by sounding forth in relay chains of call and response. A times I could hear six progressively remote trills; one can imagine a train of cry reaching for miles in series of wanderwing loops, sending ripples of birdcry in random order like raindrops spreading ripples into ripples on the pond before me. Sudden rain...

Only a ghost shower. The birds hush and allow the softer sounds to prevail. I’ll spare us any direct description of them, mercifully avoiding descriptives like murmuring, susurrant, whispering, sibilant, shushing... hear them slipping around you like Indians en stealth, sliding beneath the surface of awareness like sand spilling in water, making a sound that is less a series of events but more a background for real noise? Generally, in real life outside of philosophically aesthetic essays, the real noise would be a snort of phlegm or the small grunt announcing a fart, but this isn’t really the shore of Crescent Lake, only an abstract evocation, so the real noise that pricks our awareness with an audible focus is that of a fish ever so gently opening its mouth to suck in a fly caught on the surface. I hear the sound; my ears stereo-sonically point my eyes to the source; a ring of concentric waves spreads outwards. Segue complete. Some folks get lost in the verbal undergrowth of ruminant digression, but not I, who know that one need only walk in circles until they run out – and there you are.

It’s well accepted that one sees the flash of distant lightning before we hear its thunder. Light, after all, is the fastest thing around. It’s electromagnetic; it’s different. But other times, as here and now, wherever that is, we often hear sound before we see its source. The waves of sound from my last tossed stone far outdistance the waves of surface disturbance fanning outward from the pebble’s sinkhole. I observe a roughly equal symmetry between the speed at which the stone descends the water and at which the waves traverse its surface. This wave’s velocity seems to be a simple case of the speed at which the water is physically displaced. The faster the stone drops, the racier the waves. The bigger the stone, the bigger the waves.

So what (and why) is it that flies at Mach 1 from every sploosh, piddle, snort, squawk, snap, click, clap, swish, hoot, whistle and shout? Especially, why always at Mach 1? Why is the disturbance caused by the cluck of my tongue so much more rapid than a puff of breath from the very same mouth? As much as I like to wax peripatetic and ponder these things from an uninformedly intuitive base, I am tainted by several thousand years of history and science. My perception of tangible reality is haunted by invisible phantoms. Atoms. Electron orbits. Wavicle behaviour. Quantum nonsense. These science phantoms are deeply embedded in my thoughts and views concerning waves, vibrations and differing sources of energy and disturbances.

My companion on this trip, Jay Kleaveland, generates his own ripples by ringing a Tibetan prayer bell. Along with my third cup of coffee, this sonic act is clarifying just as is but -- as if to put it another way -- he then generates his own rings by rippling the bell, completing his unintentional clarification of my question. Like so: dangling the bell from his left hand, he runs its handheld clapper in circles around the bell’s rim, like a dinner guest’s finger around a wine goblet’s edge. A magnificent ringing tone fills the clearing, infilling and thickening as it continues ringing into a swelling globe of gelling sound, growing more sonically dense to the point of becoming an aural crystal. It fills the room, or would if we were indoors. Out here, it at least fills my head, the one through which I see and hear. People who live in glass domes shouldn’t bow tones...

Before the full meaning of this can percolate through my mind and into words, the world digresses. Smoke from the campfire meets the first rays of sunrise filtering through the evergreen trees. A spreading array of sunbeam radiates from the sun in smoky spokes, or spokey smokes, in a smoldering spectrum of shadow and light. Over my left shoulder, a spider web catches the sun, revealing its own radial symmetry in spokes and rings which gradually yield and deform to the triangular guy lines mooring it diagonally by tree and gravity. Two feet past it another web holds up a more perfect symmetry. It suspends equidistantly from the horizontal perch of a log lain across two other logs, so its radiant circle is perfectly contained within the square of its mooring threads. A fellow natural philosopher once told me to predicate my interpretations of reality on the "archetypal patterns of occurrence". Squares, circles, globes, parallel rings, cones, triangles: how archetypal indeed. (Were it not so, Fisher-Price might long ago have locked up the patents for such shapes as the primal apprehension-and-learning blocks by which children explore the world of geometrically molded colored plastic.)

In observing these sibling shafts of radii – sun smoke and spider string – the word spectral comes to mind, delivered from the pages of archetypal literary descriptions: ‘spectral rays’, ‘spectral beams’, ‘spectral shafts’. Such cliches deserve cliche-hood, for they encompassingly evoke in only a few words what they describe, which are variational patterns on an archetypal theme. (Which came first, the archetype or the cliche?)

The sun is now almost an hour above the ridgeline. I am almost five coffee cups above morning flatline. I am ready for a swim. From previous experience, I know I will see these same radial patterns splayed beneath me as I float face down watching sunlight spread out below from my body’s wavering shadow. If for no other reason than the mysterious murkiness of an alluring aquamarine, I’m certain that the resolution of my inquiry will be displayed there, 15-20’ below me, at the focal point of my aesthetically hovering wonder.

Perhaps. ‘We shall see’, although we already have and are now back by the fire, returned from my dawn immersion. (How do I jump from singular to plural self-reference so easily? "Cognition is multiply reflective diffraction refracted by will.") When Jay rings his prayer bell, I can see how the blows from its clapper moved, or displaced, the bell, just as my tossed stones displaced, or moved, the water. When Jay ‘sang’ or ‘bowed’ the bell by resonatingly running the striker round its rim, displacement was barely discernible yet the sound produced was by far more pronounced. This is striking considering that percussive sounds are normally more demanding of attention. You may consider the pun in that sentence a precessional byproduct of a cliche arising from its original archetype – or vice-versa.

Bowed not struck -- so we may eliminate impact as the source of sound. While some impact, however slow and gradual, occurred between the clapper and rim in order to bring them into ‘bowable contact’, this quiet collision was not the source of that lovely globular ringing. Again, ‘we may eliminate impact as the source of sound’; that is, impact in any crude sense of the obvious striking the obvious. Being not an ancient Greek but a scientifically dogmatized modern American, I can think – aye, can’t help but – in terms of atoms, molecules, subatomic particles and similarly invisible reputed phenomena. (It might be more accurate to say ‘empirically implied noumena’.)

Now it is truly the present, or presently now, at least for a brief temporal glimmer. Here in the now, in my scritchy furnace room sanctuary, I am tainted by book-learning more than I was at my favorite lake. No, I did not find my resolving answer at the bottom of Crescent Lake. The visible asymptotes of sunbeams fading into vague murk did not provide the intuitive leap of inductive logic which is the peripatetic’s most trusted friend. I have since read some 10-15 pages of densely constipated verbal exposition on Wave Motions, Water Waves, Vibrations, and Sound. In EB ‘74’s microscopic typeset, that’s a lot of page. In researching an answer to my initial riddle, I have learned that there are two types of wave motion: longitudinal and transverse.

Transverse vibrations, like ripples on a pond surface or the quivers of a plucked string, vibrate at right angles, or perpendicular to, their line of travel along a string or across a lake’s placidly reflecting surface. Stone toss ripples are transverse waves.

Longitudinal vibrations, like sound, or thrust of a piston, vibrate back and forth in the same direction as their line of travel. Bird cries and suspension springs on Grandpa’s lorry vibrate in longitudinal waves, also called "compressive" waves.

That’s about all I can tell you according to EB ’74 without throwing math, which is partially incomprehensible to me, in your face. I’m not that kind of guy. But, here and now in the real world... and I mean this, folks, because all my inquiry, research, befuddlement and comprehension have just now delivered this slight epiphany, for which I am grateful. It’s better than naught. Epiphany says that since transverse waves spend so much time tacking at right angles to their line of travel, they tend to be intrinsically slower than longitudinal waves which, while spending as much time rocking back as forth, at least exert all their forth into forthright forward motion.

So, given identical media and identical frequencies, a longitudinal wave SHOULD travel considerably faster than a transverse wave. Straight shot versus roundabout route – WHICH REMINDS ME! (picture a mid-century, B&W Hollywood male authority figure thumb-stretching his suspenders as he prepares to give someone a disgruntled piece of his mind) – why wasn’t this distinction clearly mentioned in the introductory (i.e. intelligible) sections of the above-cited EB ’74 articles BEFORE the author wandered off into all those lovely equations explaining how to determine the "propagative rates of longitudinal waves in an inelastic medium" (or enthusiasm in a solution of Long Island iced tea). Perhaps my take on ‘fast’ longitudinal waves versus ‘slow’ transverse waves is wrong, or a gross oversimplification, but nonetheless there IS an essential distinction of essential properties/effects to be addressed here.

(Ah. I hear somewhere, far off but growing louder, like a returning volley of horned lark trills, someone saying, "Get over it. Go trouble yourself over something important. Get a life. Get a clue. Get a job. Get real. Get laid, fer Chrissakes." To which I counter that if I’m thinking about something for more than a passing flash or moment’s frenzy, it must be important. To me. And, if you’ve read this far, to you as well. If you haven’t, well, ‘you don’t know what you’re missing’ – which is axiomatic enough in its own right, and far better than its inverse: ‘you’re missing what you don’t know’. The former denotes innocence; the latter, something like the regret and remorse of Original Sin. As for the lack of focus implied by digression, I point out that many people have lived in their houses and neighborhoods for much, most, even all, of their lives yet never explored beyond their first move-in curiosity or childhood investigations. I salute that fellow who can walk in circles in the same kitchen and perceive new shadows, different angles, and nuances of lighting, then walk down his street and be sufficiently observant to notice that the ant colony which for several years has resided between Mz. Rosenblaat’s tea rose bush and white peony bush (that provides much of the ants’ livelihood), have/has (pronouns are difficult when referring to hive mentality) decided it/they have/has had enough of the incessant insecticides to which tea roses are addicted, and is/are moving to a nice knob of dirt between the roots of a sycamore tree. Remember the guys "really seeing", for the first time, Kool-Aid crystals serenely dissolving in the limpid waters of a toilet bowl? From one of them de rigeur hippy novels of the 60’s: Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Desolation Angels.. one of those. Try telling them to get a life. They’d tell you to first test to see if the water’s sweet enough, and second, go get some sugar. Cubes, that is. You know the kind I mean.)

Returning from the shimmering shores of Lake Porcelain... life is an indefinitely digressive stream of events, recursively filtered through memory and incursively altered by will , so it must be accepted by the reader that, as I write this, or wrote the notes from which these words derive, made coffee, tended fire, cooked bacon, swam and pondered realms of immersion, thought and vibrational propagation, I also power up the car’s radio, which obliges me with Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto begun just one baton systole past the opening measure. Heard in the coniferous quiet of our camp clearing, with smoke drifting among the morning chiaroscuro of so many fine evergreens, with bacon and coffee smells giving a nice bottom bass set of whiffers to the high tweeters of tweety-birds, Mozart, really good Mozart, sounds really good.

Not only do we now ponder yet another manifestation of sound, sound whose vibrations are mysteries not only in their acoustical physics but in their inspiration by genius, we wonder at the mysterious means of transmission of these sounds from the concert hall through recording studios et al to a Spokane radio station thence aetherially to my radio into a symphony of the air. Spectra expands to fill its ponderer? Dear Wolfgang, it is not only ‘as above, so below’ but also ‘as around, so within’. Same thing, I know, which is the point: it’s always that old same thing, different every time.

However many ghosts or spectra are involved in delivering music from 200 hundred years past and 10,000 miles away to a hillside forest clearing above a mountain lake in far NE Washington state, this local hungry ghost called Robin believes he has found a plausible understanding of the difference between waves of sound and waves of displacement. For, saith he, waves of displacement are the crudely yet elegantly visible negotiations of two impacting masses – a stone and a pond, a clapper and a bell, while sound is a release of energy dissipating itself molecule by molecule, atom by atom, specter by specter, what have you.

Whatever. I don’t know which I enjoy more, the actual camping or the essay it seems to produce. Damned if I’m going to let a scholar’s inept prose wreck my delight in physical mystery. I wonder what would happen if I threw a big, heavy book in the water. What rate of propagation might then obtain by fanning the pages like a soggy deck of cards in the face of a bound and gagged writer of encyclopaedia articles?

Fading now, like the smell of wood smoke from my clothes, the notes for this essay dissemble at the end... strings of ellipses isolate scraps of observations and ideas yet to be mingled on the mind’s page... ...water striders’ line-of-motion elongation of the ripples caused by their strides... ...foreshortening of splash ripples as they head toward the far shore, creating the simultaneous illusions of moving ‘slower’ while vibrating ‘faster’, till they appear to stop at far shore, turning the trees’ reflections into static shivers, but then gradually smoothing away... ...minutes gone by, and you realize you haven’t thought but what the wind blew through your mind... ...sun spokes in water below seem to converge together while wheeling about from the ripples of one’s splashing... ...at twilight, with different tree forms mostly defined by silhouette, trees appear as similarly designed tuning forks vibrating at different frequencies, identifiable as species by their vibratory signatures... ... o . : . ; . : . ; . : . ; . : . ; O

Wow. A tad over 3,000 words. Quite a series of ripples, eh? I suspect, if reflective symmetry bears itself out, as it ususally does, I will write a third bit of Crescentia – a Crescento, if you will – that will return to its start in a transcendental photographic image, which I think I can already see. Note to myself: reenter the tableau. From without? Within? ‘From the land of sky blue waters’... ah. A picture of the far shore, whose illusory ripples seem to have stopped after jiggling the tree shadows seemingly ever faster until the vibrations became static. Always an illusion, especially considering the source – in this case, a photograph. So it is no great surprise that the ripples which, in real life, didn’t stop but reflected at various angles and became part of the general jello of existence, continue on. Only this time, they march ashore and up the trees, as reflections and shadows storm their archetypes, which perforce starts the picture frame to shimmying and, before one can release their grip, spreads its quiver to one’s fingers and thence upward... until it reaches one’s mind. Which is an altogether different kind of tuning fork, n’est ce pas?

Thank you much, laddies and laddesses. Not only do I enjoy this, and hope you do too, but I think I can think of a place or two to usefully put this slush, or so I think, I think. D’ya think?

-!!!!

Oscillowitz, Dr. Wavy Brains

ray -

and so, after writing the above, I still found myself searching for a basic understanding of different waveforms, at which point I stumbled across my file of your wave conjugation query, and got my basic answer. funny how things work, huh?

oscillowitz@netscape.net

P.S. When all the paleontological dust has settled, and the evening’s ritual incantation of the day’s mythohistory is over, there’s still the simple fact that we be here and we be thinking. No matter whence came our thinking caps, we think. Quiet, Descartes, you’ve had your day. Even if it turns out that my thoughts are only twitches of a higher up’s synapses, I still be thinking, and that works for me.

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