The Evolution of the Quantum State

-:-

Potters bake the molecules of earth together to reform as manmade rock. Any potter longs to deepen that connection with fire, and the energy of life.

Amateur making of ceramic ware has in the West almost universally been taken over by the electric kiln. It's a toaster, you switch it on. It controls the temperature. Exactly. The fire it gives is universal fire, ie. heat from it's 'elements'. But alas, the flame is gone. So is the smoke, and the crackle and roar. The electric kiln supplies heat,  but alas the love is gone.

But it need not be the case. For the electric kiln is an invitation to potters everywhere to deepen their understanding of fire, of energy, and where it comes from and how it's made. We must know that to get that kiln to heat up, a fire is burning somewhere, in boiler supplying steam to a giant turbine, which turns the generators powering our city, or a nuclear reactor, or even our own sun producing the rainfall that turns water pressure into electricity.

Fire must be sought out, in a civilization that is afraid of flame.

-:-

At the other side of the world,
where light is a different color,
the sound of a bell may be larger,
than a giant submarine
Don't doubt that beings watched as each of us died.

You fall without complaining
past the skirts of something new,
and leak a bit of it as love,
radiation to feed my soul.

-:-

Technology, mathematics, and science functions as reins of a slower moving coach, that of our social organizations, and the state.

We have seen how the digital revolution has inverted notions of privacy. Today the average person is happy to share personal photographs and data, with any person on the globe using Instagram.

We've noticed how the digital revolution has affected our system of elections, exposing them to electronic hacking from across the globe.

We've observed the digitization of money, and how the true value of trusted stores of wealth, the dollar, the pound and others, have endured runaway inflation, interest accrued digitally.

We know the wealthy retreat into fearful isolation, into the counting house of their personal computers, where they measure wealth in shares of companies, with a very abstract total in dollars. Yet the dollar, and the stock in corporations are all fictitious wealth, less real than trees or fresh air, or a drink of cold water when it is hot.

Despite these drawbacks, it is also clear there is no turning back, no readmission to a pre-digital world, despite our laments for a rosy hued era of manual typewriters, of quill pens and ink.

Each of these changes to our media, towards pen and paper after impressing information on clay tablets, has brought about a own corresponding stress and change to our systems of government, to our cherished philosophies, and art. In short change is just that, change, and it disrupts everything. The disruptions are difficult, but we long for progress.

The pre-digital age took us to the frontiers of space, it saw the birth of the most terrible weapons of mass destruction, and World Wars without precedent in which the death tolls were in the many tens of millions.

We've seen governments unable to comprehend protests of it's people. When fairly elected officials, such as Macron of France, is the object of ridicule and is promised to be overthrown by the very voters that put him in power months after he's taken office, despite a record faithful to the campaign platform that elected him.

I've spent my life interested in how new forms of thinking are ushered in by new technologies, and newfound knowledge of nature, and am going to propose in this essay that a series of radical, perhaps violent, perhaps not, revolutions are about to take place, because of one simple fact. The machinery of the state, of systems of rule in Western Democracies and former Socialist republics both, is broken, and beyond repair.

I hope with the observations made here to be able to offer an understanding of the forces facing modern man on the face of a very crowded, very polluted and seemingly overpopulated planet.

-:-

For quite some time I've felt that my attraction to ceramics, actually an attraction to clay itself, was due to something fundamental and physical, as if all the physical laws governing matter have conspired to make it impossible to invent beauty.

Or soul.

The soul of mankind may be independent of our bodies, and similarly, the beauty we perceive in the natural world, and sometimes in objects of our own design, may not actually be something we ourselves invent at all.

It may exist, not necessarily pre-made, not necessarily in a Platonic, other invisible world sense, but in the very plausible sense that if nothing cannot exist, then all existence and all existences must exist also, and with it all manifestations of soul, light and beauty included.

We and what we make are there as a natural expansion to our exponents of having soul. That which accompanies our material bodies through life must by virtue of that exponential power, create things which are beautiful and independent of matter themselves. Soul begets soul.

This postulate I wish to test against several aspects which usually accompany such accolades as beauty, perfection, and life. To do this we will need to perform a number of thought experiments

-:-

I'll have to sweep up the ashes
Can't you see?

Ribbons are on tour,
You see, mine his everyone's
There isn't a place where I could show you what's really happening?

Al these questions, so futile,

-:-

Paul, Mark, and Luke - Scoby Notes

I named our first Self-Contained Organism of Bacteria and Yeast, Paul, in memory of the famous octopus  Paul, who lived a short time after predicting the outcomes of eight World Cup Soccer games.

Past feats aside, Paul seemed a good name.

So Paul begat Mark, and Mark begat Luke, and soon kambucha was exploding literally from every vessel at house Potter. I've concocted many superb tasting drinks in this manner, without keeping so much as a pencil scrap of a note about process.

Invention happens spontaneously, when one is not recording results. The recording of results inevitably mire any process in a protracted program of exhausting all possibilities.

One knows this when one follows one's genius around the house, and one's genius in this case is a flat rubbery slimy organism used to ferment tea.

A Kambucha SCOBY represents life, as unique as that of a cow that produces rich cream, or a tomato plant that yields exceptional fruit. This log shall transcribe that life. Here I write everything Paul is fed, everything taken from Paul in the way of harvest, and jot for posterity every note that I can think of to better understand the mysterious brewing process involving bacteria and yeast.

Paul sired a blessed two year lineage in this house, descended from a SCOBY mare supplied by Steven Rodriguez, he has since been divided into three vats.

I'll name his sons Mark or Luke. At times they have all been fed grape, rose liquor, pineapple, blueberry, pomegranate, acai berry, but always the base diet has been a tea and sugar mixture.

The flavors produced by Paul have been so extraordinary that I've reluctantly taken up a blog post to document what I'm doing here, because in reality I have no idea. Steve R. says I'm a mad scientist just mixing stuff together and never creating a record or a label.  We both dally in ceramics. He's very careful about glaze recipe, I'm not.  I contend in my defense that the greatest learning occurs when records have not been created.

So I'm now keeping records but skeptically, knowing myself, not for long.

Imitators will find that duplication of my results is nigh impossible. The SCOBY bacteria and yeast have a memory for everything that was done to them, and they retain genes to digest certain compounds in case they are encountered again. The digestive process then runs as a result of the SCOBY's experience with other fruits and nectars and teas which make up its diet.

It may be possible however to notice that a rose kambucha brewed with Rooibos tea after a diet of blueberry and pomegranate is especially flavorful. That may be the extent of the benefit of this note taking process.

Otherwise, just as I've said, it is a record of Paul's life.

-:-

What is a Mystic?

the lock
  a coat hanger,
    one of the pins from her hair

What is a mystic?

One that uses experience to distill truth from life, that seeks conjugal harmony with all existence? One that seeks to fly with the heart over every plain and hill, to stand with the soul in every stream, to lie in the rushes with every tiny insect that chirps at night, to be at piece with every man and woman in their very own beds, to gallop with the mind across the starry heavens, to fuse in spirit with every wild bird and every great creature that prowls in the forest, to be at one with all creation in one burst, acknowledging all.

I empty my mind when it is full, and when it is half full I also empty it.

Even when it is empty, clearing it out does no harm.

All else must be finished by the day, when all else I dreamed of will be thrown away.

Light by night, and light by day.

burnt sun
 murals

on the
    courtyard walls

History Fragment

An inch on a standard ruler is 'created' by the tiny mark engraved 'one inch away' from another like it.

Measurement is a conceptual process.

The mapping, of time, indeed history, incorporates void. A measurement refers to itself, omits detail. History must be imagined. An effort. Re-creation.

The flesh of history, involves all its viewpoints, consciousnesses, colors and molecules, thoughts and physical beings. These 'facts' themselves are dead, but may be brought back to life by a creative act.

What of soul-time? What of unanswered yearnings?

As soul-creators, inventors of fantasies so we are responsible for our present position. Doesn’t this give us the power to re-write history, and set ourselves in a different places and times?

History devours its own tail, or depending how you look at it, is forever shedding its skin. The past, that self renewing myth we carry with us, has but one use, and that is to supply useful context for actions in the present.

Wax sculptures melt, release their energy. Animal entrails give off an aura. There is such power in rotting guts.

Mexico City Notes

Mexico City Tuesday February 23, 1993

Lodgings: the cheapest without risking life. Each morning an ancient woman enters my room without knocking, empties my trash basket, beats the floor with a wicker spanker, pulls covers up on my bed, and leaves four bars of soap behind on the pillow as compensation for all she leaves undone.

I'm alone on the fifth floor of a hulking wreck of a building. The structure was shattered by the earthquake, and most of the property is taped off with barely legible signs "Peligrosa".

A block away in Plaza de la Constitution, the capitol of Tenochtitlan, indigena protesters wave painted signs and shout. Police in plainclothes watch behind sunglasses, murmur into radios, take notes, inform the generals of their actions. Troops wait on the side streets, cordoned in dark green buses, rifles and tear gas ready. 

Mexico knows the bread of paganism embalmed by a yeasty spirit. Corporate industrialism, Catholicism, and native gods vie for control, amidst pretenses of free enterprise, and a myth of democracy.

The clay earth took Spanish seed. Jesus, Mary, the Father and his saints, a receptacle for myths of the vanquished to quench the thirst of conquerors.

Cultural artifacts are exhibited with miniscule captions, stripped of context. Why haven't they been destroyed also? Perhaps one day one relic will answer the question "Who were we?"

Morning sun glints at Rivera murals on the courtyard walls. Officers in dark gateways disappear into a matrix of ancient stones. Order is catechism to a pagan mind. Vanquished by teachers will the pupils one day take over?

The Spanish created castes, crillio, mestizo, and indigena, but these boundaries cemented the people together, but isolated Mexico herself from the world. The conquerors would not ignore the the natives since they were fearful.

Torn temples, carvings stolen, glyphs battered, manuscripts burned. Mexico, a violent assimilation of a European fragment into a native American perfect storm of myth. Europe was trapped as if by quicksand. The army and priests were swallowed by a dark native force. Militant Catholicism, hip deep in a Mexican swamp, was destined to die very slowly.

This does not assuage anger on either side. In Mexico, rooted in the being and history of blood, anger becomes the progenitor of a new myth cycle. Expect riots, expect massacres, expect executions, and more revolutions, but also expect a powerful continuance of native American culture.

Is Mexico really one battle? Does Mexico mean 'battleground'?

Whitlock

My grandfather, as a young man rode a horse each September one hundred miles to his school in Watertown Connecticut, spending the night at two inns along the way. After a long life, he died the year men walked on the moon.

I remember with crystal clarity, him telling me that there was no greater joy than daydreaming, and letting the mind wander while sitting back and listening to the sound of of his horse's hooves on the dirt road.

Mason Whitlock, himself younger than my grandfather, was approaching a hundred when I took my little Olivetti in for a tune-up and new ribbon. The irony was that during my years at college, I never once needed a new typewriter. I changed ribbons myself, and cleaned the type with an old stiff brush.

When I returned Elm City to live, caught in that confused space brought on by the digital age, I found myself longing for the music and dance of typewriter keys.

Yes I miss the sentences that come to my brain when working on a typewriter. A percussive beats out one's commitment to a sentence. There's a jazzy rhythm, a machine beat, a machine gun beat. There's the slow clop clop, of an old work horse.

The typewriter was a percussive instrument, the melody and base instruments are the swim of ideas at the tip of one's brain. There's a beat for every mood, and feeling, every bit of description or dint of discipline. The beat kept thoughts in train, since it was not easy to drop back in and restructure one's ideas. The first draft required discipline and focus.

The mind raced, pounding on the dendritic telegraph keys of cerebral neurons, surveying the terrain of the rail-bed ahead, laying ties, driving spikes, keeping clear sight of the benchmark period in the distance, open to a diversion in root phrase or clause. When a line end was reached, the locomotive let out a release of steam, and brought the train to terminus with a 'bang' to the period key. The trill moment was the end of a musical phrase. The traveller, with scheduled music in mind for all connecting trains, got soon clattering away across the sonorous landscape with nary a care in the world.

It was a form of acrobatics. Yes it was writing, but also a workout. Posture mattered. At some point a particular piece of paper stayed behind as a fossil track, a recording. A skull. First drafts were akin to fresh rushes of a film. Modifications seemed beautiful, ugly, or impossible.

Language leapt into the air as a drumbeat accompaniment to the writer's deepest love. The ear became attuned to the truth of the rhythm. Sounding good? Or did it lack commitment?

Mr. Whitlock kept hours, in a second floor shop overlooking York Street, across from the Hall of Graduate Studies. Here are my notes from the day I visited him, in early 1993.

-:-

Why bother repairing the old? What sort of allegiance is owed to a non-functioning hunk of steel?

Of what significance is my stepping out of time to track this down old man, who repairs machines for a generation caught in their ways, bound to clunky precursors of another age? What bother, what cost? Why hold myself back against progress? I felt a tug of regret. Was I wasting time, indulging in flattery?

Whitlock rambled on. 'Classic little thing. No different than pen or pencil. Taken a lot of pounding. Hasn’t got the weight of say that Royal over there.' He gestured toward a heart sinking heap of ancient machines, elegant, but forgotten.

'What else is broken besides the shaft?'

'Margin release needs a clean. Some tender loving care. I’ll take it apart, clean it. Your carriage lock is broken. Can’t let you strip the escapement gears."


-:-

Are Alien life forms here? If not how soon?

October 9, 2010

Have you ever looked down at a sparkling city from a nearby mountain, and wondered, 'What alien landed here?'

How briefly has Earth hosted human life. We're such a rapid force of change on this planet that anyone intelligent viewing Earth from a distance would think an alien life form had taken over.

The alien invasion has begun. Human aliens have landed on the moon!

Semantic similarities between humans and non-resident aliens aside, there is no chance that there is not an alien life form already out and about, exploring our galactic neighborhood, Moreover it is highly probable that they will contact this planet fairly soon, as the ever increasing sphere of our radio signature races away from Earth - the edge of it is now some 100 light years away. Our transmissions have already reached a huge possible number of planetary systems. The earth is no longer quiet . . . our electromagnetic communications could easily have given us away to an interested race of extraterrestrials.

Aliens will come here, and we will most likely go elsewhere. Either advanced life forms like ourselves, or spores from fungi that we've liberated through a convenient set of thermonuclear explosions, will float about the galaxy, as representatives of Earth, little time capsules of highly adaptable DNA, that can survive extreme environments.

It matters not whether a spore, or a human being is the vector that carries the message. The key evolution of life on this planet is DNA. The main text of what we have to offer is in DNA, and it matters not whether it moves abroad as a plant, a person, or a mushroom.

Human evolution may only serve to carry a Noah's ark of DNA to another world. Once transported, our mission might be finished.

The spores could do it alone with just a single strand of DNA in a hardy protein coat, humans might do it in complex engineered environment similar to the International Space Station, only much larger, and self-sustainable.

What spores lack in technology they make up for with sophistication and numbers. In fact if the earth were to explode, or we humans were to cause it to explode, or if a massive comet or another planetary body collided with the earth, the only surviving life might be fungal spores (cf. Terrence McKenna on this). And indeed they would survive by the quadrillions, floating about deep space, impervious to vacuum, high heat, and near absolute zero temperatures.

A snippet of DNA is all that is necessary to populate a receptive medium, or change the genes of an already existing species. Modern agricultural 'gene therapy' snips and adds genes almost at will. Commercially grown roses, for years interbred for their color, size and appearance, have lost their sense of smell. Why? Well they no longer needed to produce an odor to attract insects to move their pollen around - they had humans doing the job for them. But now science has found an easy way to restore the scent of a rose to domesticated roses.

Now that I've gotten you to admit that Earthlings, whether human sized or spore sized, will possibly pollinate, colonize, infect, other planets, how can we know when this has happened to us?

A spore, of sorts, from another galaxy, could easily have landed here on earth, changing the fate of its inhabitants. You and I might already be infected!

Alien means 'strange' and once we get over our view of ourselves as 'normal' we will then admit that we are strange, not as highly evolved as we think we are, and probably overdue for a lesson on the existence of  more advanced galactic brothers and sisters!

Mammals were probably viewed as alien by intelligent dinosaurs. Cro magnon was certainly seen as alien by Neanderthal (and vice-versa). Homo erectus in Europe and Asia, (the oldest skeletons are only tens of thousands of years old)  were called elves, fairies, demons by our ancestors - these 'people' must have been thought of as alien indeed!

The most probable source of alien life on this planet will probably be ourselves. A giant shift in human DNA, will lead to the evolution of a new species, more advanced than we are, and one that the rest of us may view as alien.

By the time that population is recognized, described, and feared, it will be too late to stop it. Homo sapiens will go the way of the dinosaurs, eventually. Yet we may leave 'children'. Evolution continues!

Oh the planet will most likely last long enough . . . and we will most definitely experience a collapse in population at some point or another - that will historically be perceived as dramatic, but which might even take dozens of lifetimes. Out of that crippling environment might come our successor(s). Genetics favors it. We have the numbers to create a new species. The only scenario I think that would make this impossible would be all out nuclear war, or an extra-terrestrial body colliding with and destroying our planet, not likely but possible.

And it is always possible that the species that takes us out never came from here at all. This is the one scary scenario, but one we have to consider particularly if we live on, peaceably increasing our technological abilities, and, our ability to refine raw materials, as well as our ability to live amongst ourselves.

I should refine these points . . that is if  a species does evolve from us, and survive, it is likely that many different variants will spring from us as well. We've populated the planet unlike any other large mammal. Looking back at evolutionary history, there are many other species that became numerous at different points in time. This is true of human ancestry as well. Many of those were not evolutionary dead-ends, but some like Homo erectus, were. (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Humanevolutionchart.png )

A classic adaptive situation might be as follows: a nuclear winter descends on the planet, but one not so fierce as to eliminate all life. This creates a number of possible pathways to survival. Being able to live with less food is one, able to survive radioactive food is another (that might mean being able to procreate more rapidly and at a younger age), yet a third might involve being able to manipulate technology in a world of spare parts left by broken economies, and technological waste.

Similarly if no major crisis event hits us, we are certainly likely to continue to evolve physically, emotionally, and intellectually.

a) towards vegetarianism,
b) we'll become smaller physically, and use less energy.
c) we will continue to learn to exploit the sun's energy more efficiently and
d) we will probably learn to self-govern as a planet.

The alternative to 'c' is that we don't, and we already know the outcome of not learning to get along!

Assuming we do these things well, our lease on Planet Earth could be extended on for quite a long time! But in that event our piles of refined metals, may become too attractive for alien life forms to pass up.

Big towers when they fall, fall hardest. Same with stars. The big ones explode like flashbulbs in middles of their galaxies. . lighting everything around them. A star 27% larger than the sun can perish in a few weeks through a supernova collapse, and explosion. Little stars, such as our own, and smaller. . . live on, shriveling as they grow old. . . giving off less and less energy. White dwarfs are the old folk of galactic time, rocking away for billions of years, while the young hotshots grow big, wealthy, and then self destruct.

If a major crisis occurs, caused by man, or an outside force, cannibalism and vampires may indeed become a norm of survival for certain groups.

But think for a moment - vampirism has already started! Many of us give blood to others to restore their strength! Some of us fertilize 'in vitro' in to  order to bear young. Our hospitals are labs for extracting bodily fluids and moving them along to those that need them more. These mechanisms might prove key to our future survival! Fluids and body parts are very share-able these days!

Paranoia's aside, if the cataclysmic scenario does play out what might an individual life witness of such a catastrophe?

Let's put it in perspective by asking how many people today remember Hiroshima? Not many.

How many are alive today that lived through the event? Even less. Most were elsewhere and barely noticed the clouds move. Those that were having their tea in Hiroshima's center went to their maker in a blinding translation of light and energy. Others suffered terribly no doubt, as they have from every war, and every catastrophe. No matter what the crisis, or how large the conflagration it might cause, an individual's trauma is limited in scope, and is essentially similar to living through an airplane crash or getting hit while crossing the street, or losing a close relation through a freak accident.

We spend a lot of time writing stories and worrying about future frightening events, but fail to realize that we are very limited in our individual abilities to experience them once and when they occur.

We have mythologized negative change, decrease, catastrophe and collapse, by envisaging these things as a rapid events, when in reality most are not, Environments, populations, systems, economies, and governments often take as long to come apart as they did to come together originally.

The decline of the Roman empire was not immediate. Czarist Russia is still at work through Putin! England still has a Queen and future heir, Communism lives on (in China and North Korea. The Catholic Church is losing its grip but is still very potent.

Myths, those bedrocks of beliefs that we hold to our chest like the fabric of creation itself, die very slowly.We hold projections of the future before ourselves like prayers, that we don't have to shift or change our myths, come what may.

We pray that love remains a potent force. We hope that democracy lives. We hope that good triumphs over evil.

Crisis on large social scale, is much slower than on an individual one, inexorably slow, just as the death of a star takes longer than the death of a tree. This means we often fail to notice the crises that are already well in progress.

Fall Chaga

Autumn comes, the leaves fall off the hardwoods, the forest opens up. One can see distant hills and mountains, and the rays of the setting sun penetrate the bare branches near sunset and scour the back of the eyes with a deep orange.

Perfect time to gather Chaga. I say 'gather' but it's more involved than that. The Chaga polypore fungus is actually a very sturdy mushroom growing like a lump of black sclerotic cork out of the side of a birch tree. It seems to take hold where the tree has been injured, bruised, or lost a branch. The Chaga fills up the void. Sometimes a Chaga mushroom can get very large. I've cut some down that weigh nearly forty pounds.

Doing this is not always easy. Most of the time, it will be within reach of my pruning saw, but not always. I've seen them a full thirty feet up. To get these monsters, I have to construct a ladder of saplings in the forest, lashing together small pieces of beech with clothesline, and lean it securely against the trunk of the birch. Hopefully this extends the reach of my saw just enough so that I can, on tiptoe, reach the sacred mushroom.

And then establishing a sawing action by activating the calves, and feet, . . . up, down, up down.

Soon I'm dusted with a fine Chaga rain. I've worked on some that have taken three sessions to get down, the first to establish a platform to cut from, and the second to do the cutting. It's an incredible strain on the neck, looking up and working the arms or feet up and down.

Eventually the big mushroom comes off, and if it is over a few pounds, you want to be well out of the way.

Boom!

Usually it takes me two or three hours of looking to find the first Chaga, then, as if they were in touch with each other, I find seven or eight in a row. Even a random walk into a new section of woods five minutes before sunset leads me right to a monster Chaga.

I always wonder about this. My cousin Wyeth spent all summer searching a section of state forest for Chaga, and had no luck. Then one morning he leaned his bicycle against a healthy birch with no Chaga growing out of it, and went for a long hike.

When he returned, the largest Chaga mushroom he had ever seen was growing right out of the tree above his bicycle. He swears to this.

Perhaps Chaga is a master of camouflage, and can trigger neuronal activity in the brain, thus hiding itself. The Siberians consider Chaga a god, hence the capitalization. Chaga is a King, who marries the princess Birch tree. Like Raven, another deity of the north, Chaga seems to control what you see and hear.

Done right, both the Chaga, and the birch tree, will take no notice of the harvesting. The sclerotium will continue to grow in size provided the base is left intact.

Chaga culture has spread through our little community in the Adirondacks like wildfire. Everyone's drinking it, brewing it in different ways, making alcohol extractions, serving it hot and nutty flavored with maple syrup and raw milk, or cold and thin like ice coffee in the summertime.

I have some cousins that are roaming the woods marking the location of every Chaga they see on their GPS.

I never seem to remember my camera when I go Chaga hunting, perhaps because the added weight makes carrying the Chagas, and the pruning saw out of the woods that much more difficult. But a harvest of Chaga is a thing of beauty, like a bucket full of blueberries, or a creel full of trout. I'll wrap them all up in an old sheet and carry them out like Santa's sack, over one shoulder.

More hard work comes after I get them home. They have to be cut into small pieces, though lately I've been keeping one or two larger chunks to use directly in the kitchen with a wood rasp to make a quick expresso-like infusion.

Busting it up into chunks is hard. It doesn't respond well to sawing unless bolted down or held in a vise. Some chop it up with an axe, but that sends pieces flying everywhere. The best way is to get to it quickly with a butcher's cleaver or a chisel. This year I used a pile of boards set on a thick carpet covered with a sheet to catch the dust and smaller bits, and a heavy mallet and old broad wood chisel to do the breaking. It took about two hours to chop up the load pictured here into one inch chunks.

Chaga has an interesting structure. The inside is laced with whitish veins that connect to the tubules in the birch tree bark. From this it gets the sap. The very base is circled usually with a few spirals of birch bark, the result of the Chaga growing and expanding inside the hole made by the downed branch. Most of the polypore structure is orange-brown and cork-like. The outside is covered by a thick black very porous layer rich in melanin. I believe this layer evaporates water constantly, acting like the leaves of the branch that fell off. This preserves the roots assigned to that branch, keeping the anchorage for the birch, and at the same time, ensuring the Chaga's supply of sap.

While cutting it apart I notice more Chaga rain all over my clothes, dust that flies off with each blow of the mallet. The powder makes an excellent super strong drink, great for brewing right away.

The Box of Formulas

Stephen's been hanging out at the house and not doing much pottery.

His shoulder and left arm are tied up into a huge contraption of black foam that he calls 'the couch'. . . designed to immobilize his forearm, arm, hand and shoulder all at once, till his torn ligaments, which were just operated on, recover.

Meanwhile he's thinking of just about every possible thing he can do to move his art along without actually sitting down at the wheel or lifting heavy bags of ground rock to make glazes.

"I'm under doctor's orders. I can't touch anything that weighs more than ten pounds. I think we can probably fire around the 16th, when I get back from Maine. I'm working out some ways to hold some big platters and glaze them."

The air outside his house, situated on a bluff in Fairhaven CT, was sweet from the smell of a walnut tree that grows over his driveway.

"Unless you want your car hood redecorated I'd move your vehicle"

The nuts were falling fast, big and heavy and round like hailstones. If you have never smelled a fresh walnut, they have an intense scent, like lavender or camphor. 

"I keep four or five in the truck to keep it smelling nice."

I brought over a small bin that we scrounged together yesterday. And Steve had promised to hunt up some recipes for overglaze washes and slips.

Stephen Rodriguez is one of the best potters working anywhere, someone I have a huge respect for. More than anyone he educated me in this art.

I was in my late 30's when I took it up, and started attending Steve's class at CAW on Audobon St. in downtown New Haven. He demonstrated wedging clay, huge rounds that spiraled like the petals of a flower. We built a kiln together, his design and supervision, he's guided me in glazes, clays and working through all the problems that hit potters at some point or another. He's fired kilns from New York to Maine, built and rebuilt more kilns than he can count. He's been my master, and inspiration to dozens of local potters who got their start in his classes. Yes, I have learned enormously, from others too, a workshop with Malcolm Davis, firings with Tony Moore at his wood kiln in Cold Spring NY, and all the many other potters who comes with their work. But Stephen's the one who has been around all my potting life.

He's seen me languish, diverting energies into construction, poetry, and painting, but he calls me back regularly with the handle, "Hey you making pots?"

Steve throws big, with eyes practically closed, arms deep in the center of a wet wobbling jar, a Beethoven struggling to hear notes from the clay.

Years later I have my own studio and am starting to make more work. Lately his bad shoulder has been the impetus for a series of firings we've done together at my place. I lift the shelves into place.

"Let's light this baby.". . . . "Potter wipe the bottom of that pot!!"  . . .  "All the girls at CAW spend time VACUUMING the kiln!"

But particularly whenever I'm glazing or firing alone, I just have to begin work to hear Steve's voice, echoing between my ears.

"Put it on thick. Be generous. If you put it thin it will break up . . ."

or . .  

"This one wants to be thin . . . thick and it will craze and fall off the pot . . . Be careful."

or . . .

"Have a good look in the spy. Do you see atmosphere? Is heat building? The flame should be visible."

or . . .

"Aw hell, we're not even hot yet!"

We went into Steven's kitchen.

"Here are three SCOBYs for your new Kambucha. You need some horsepower. Two gallons is a lot!" Steve was referring to a large glass container we purchased together yesterday at Walmart, sized to keep my family in endless Kambucha.

"Now taste this!" He poured out some of his home brew. "It's got George Cleveland's wild cherry juice in it. Hey, reach on up and grab that box for me would you? It has all my glaze recipes."

The box was quite large, and packed with folded, creased and torn pieces of paper, old copies, magazine reprints, hand-written glaze formulas transcribed from index cards, from word of mouth, from everywhere. A lifetime of chemistry on the surface of pots.

The names are magic . . . Chuck's Shino . . . Virginia Wirt's Shino . . . . Bill Murphy's Green . . . 

"Here's a wash that will stay black. Copy this one."

We made a huge stack for me to take home and copy. Practically every glaze in the mammoth pile Stephen had mixed or tested at one time.

"Most are terrible. Not worth the time. This yellow was great, but something's changed. I've mixed up five buckets and never been able to get it right again."

"You can help me . . " he added. "I'm looking for 'Judith's Ochre Celadon' 

Sure enough we found it. . . . the only way to know was the scraps of paper it was on, barely, held the last two letters of her name . . ."____th's Ochre Celadon". It was bent and creased and stained and smirched with bits of glaze chemicals.

What are glaze formulas but mixtures of the various rocks of the world, ground up?

Liked recipes for baked bread, they have the same ingredients again and again, flour, sugar, yeast . . . or rather Kona F4 Feldspar, Nephelene Synenite, Red Iron Oxide . . . Each holds a mystery, the promise of a color, a texture, a feeling, a behavior much as different parts of the earth 'behave' under pressure and time, and turn magnificent in the glint of the sun.

That is the potter's foray into terrestrial alchemy. Unity formulas, batches, test tiles, but never the same result exactly. We're not about industry. We're about nearly, and often, and sometimes. The blessings of a kiln God. The luck of the fire. 

Water Rituals - Chaga and Kambucha

Time to make drink for the studio.

Fill the Brita filter pitchers, two of them, wait till it goes through. Boil water.

Water for tea. Tea for kambucha.

Doing overtime that electric kettle. Just bought a 2 gallon glass flask yesterday with Steven, for serious kambucha production. How are my little SCOBY's doing?

Tea water. full boil. Four spoons of black tea and eight of white sugar into my wife's big teapot.

Fill up the kettle again. An uncomplaining machine of the twenty-first century. Somewhere in Bridgeport a giant GE turbine takes notice of the load.

Snowflake on a blazing stove . . . .

-:-

I read somewhere that there's a gal who makes dresses from big rectangular Kambucha SCOBYs. And purses!

   Her SCOBY dress was soft and fine,
   Alas rain fell - she turned to slime!

Old Adirondackers know Chaga as a tinder polypore, a dependable source of fire and flame in the coldest wettest weather. In days of yore, Siberian shamans prognosticated the future by lighting two lines of Chaga. The stuff burns like gunpowder, even when wet. The line that burns fastest, that's the prophecy.

In Sweden, Chaga is known as the 'Cancer Polypore' for no reason other than it cures cancer. I will relate some true tales of its powers at a later time. I give the stuff away to people with serious afflictions of the awful disease.

Descriptions of Chaga taste? "Nutty coffee", "Tastes like dirt!", "Tastes like really good water!" . . . "Tastes like tea!"

Chaga is a god in Siberia, so the name is capitalized.

     Who knows? The Chaga knows! 

The young princess birch is injured, Chaga saves her. He binds her wounds. He lives with her. Marries her. Together they prosper. But eventually he devours her young limber flesh.

I mix Chaga and kambucha and they seem to love each other, so I think I'll start capitalizing Kambucha too. Stephen swears by Kambucha. Mexican rural mothers use the old SCOBYs for curing rashes. It gives the skin a tonic.

Best darn thing for the male prostate!

I mix up my two Gods the night before a day at the studio. By the time I'm thirsty my cold thermos has a black beard at the bottom that looks like tea-leaves . . . I drink it up.

Stephen my firing partner, drinks Chaga and Kambucha also; we share lore on the two drinks. He found Chaga on a big white birch on Mt. Desert Island in Maine, and another on a grey birch in Lyme CT. He makes his Chaga by using a Sureform plane to grind a small expresso load of powder and does a Chaga extraction, like a custom coffee.

Never throw away Chaga powder. It keeps making. . . . Add it to 100 proof vodka and make an alcohol extraction. Serve with Kahlúa and creme. Or drunk hot and strong at night with maple syrup and a touch of cream, or iced and downed in the heat of midday to quench a thirst.

-:-

The Chaga schlerotium feels woody, like cork. But there is no relation at all between the structure of cork, which is a wood, and a polypore fungus, which is a mushroom.

Around 1500 Million years ago funghi evolved from other life . . . A planetary emergency . . . there was a shortage of soil, and too many dead plants that weren't rotting. The funghi came to the rescue . . . dedicating a species of fungus, at least, to rot every single species of plant.

The mushroom returned the power of the sun to the soil. Funghi made their cells of scarab tough chitin. Beatle-back tough, strong as a dragonfly's gossamer wings . . .

They evolved neurotransmitters to signal through long cells in the ground, just what species is rotting where. The nervous system of all animals is something inherited from early funghi.

There's no thirst-quencher like Kambucha! Stephen speaks of a 100 year old woman who lives in the Mexican jungle. She looks sixty, and wrote a book on the stuff.

Water for plants, tea for the Kambucha, water for tea . . . it all flows, one container to the next. Pour pour. Stainless into glass, glass into ceramic. Try not to waste a drop. Either I drink it or the plants do. . . . Ahhhh . . .

"Ohm swaha . . . " I'm a priest, pouring Ganga water liberally about my temple. I slosh some into my matted locks. I wonder if my kids will remember to push a glass of Chaga to my lips just as I leave this world.

Today's studio fuel is half-Kambucha, half Chaga, with a splash of wild cherry juice from a Guilford wild cherry tree. Gratis Stephen, from one of his many friends. It's so sharp it'll make your teeth fall out. So purple, you become regal by looking at it.

-:-

Stephen's convinced that without Chaga we'd have both died of mesothelioma from inhaling ceramic fiber. Nasty stuff. Keep that Chaga flowing.

He's a paragon of health but working through a bad shoulder. The VA hospital did surgery on his left wing last week. He has to stay away from the wheel, from pretty much all pottery until the thing recovers.

"Use the time to read your poetry! Research new glazes. Quiet time for the first time in your life."

"It's a damn pain. This couch is heavy and hot." The 'couch' he speaks of is the brace the doctors affixed to his arm so he can't move it, at all. Stephen's bummed, as any man of action would be when stopped cold by fate.

So he's hitting the St. John's Wort and mixing with Chaga. At least he knows. "We're hunter gatherers." We gather and hunt and eat and drink what is right.


My last Chaga harvest came from a yellow birch on the Salmon Lake trail. She was a princess alright, who had taken too many Chaga lovers. A city of Chaga horns sprouted from her giant trunk. It took me all morning to cut down her royal excesses.

Surprisingly as a tree, she was still quite strong and limber. They would live together for many years, sprouting seed and spore . . .

I just cut off the growth, not too tight to the trunk. Unlike a burl Chaga grows back.

I rinsed the dishes.

What are we, but Chaga starships, . . . of water and tea.

The Big Questions

Pots . . . are a way of thinking about  bodies, the figure, space, and architecture. These are the essential questions of form.

Each workday when I go to assemble slabs of clay I've cut out the night before, I discover in the haphazard conditions of temperature and humidity, the possible forms from a pattern, depending on the wetness of the clay. Sometimes the clay sags, and the pot has a wet sloped slippery look, other days I arrive just in time to assemble shoe leather hard slabs into rigid rectilinear boxes.

This idea of perfect form, and proportion, halves, thirds, quarters, fifths, fibonacci ratios . .  makes me wonder about Johannes Kepler who saw in the design of the stars, and the relation of the stars to the design of individual mens lives, a much greater design . . . . 

Were the thinkers of old asking larger questions than we do today?

Snowfall and Oysters

Things held together by 'roundness'.
Characters met in dreams, stand,
toy soldiers, alert, but cold to the touch.

My access to the room, where fragile things,
from memory are laid one upon the other,
in danger of being broken.

-:-

Lacking the words! Down the corridor for an orange. Pad, pad, pad on the black nylon floor. Moments of darkness as I turn on and off the lights.  An orange vanishes.

-:-

Late night is a time for poets. Peace after a long day under attack, the daytime throb to think and survive, to premeditate, to earn, is finished. Night comes, and brings peace. Solace, for full or empty stomachs, for breathing, for bleeding, for the wounded who wait. Night comes, bringing peace for poets.

-:-

Here waits the cool olive solace of my typewriter. Olivetti green, my hospital walls.

Jeff and the others cross the lawn, carrying guns. I see them, and want to run the film back, but I cannot. It is a dream, broken by the sound of a glazier's knife on glass, or a mason's trowel upon bricks and cement, or a teacher's chalk on the blackboard, or the painter's scraper abrading cracked and peeled paint from the clapboards.

Knives on whetted stone.

Time to sleep again.

-:-

I leave the apartment with my bag, umbrella, and my portable typewriter and walk outside.

Snow is falling, heavy wet flakes. The concierge's cat plays against the window trying to grab the pieces of snow as they float past. Mr. Rabelais, the concierge, is inside watching too. We laugh, through we can only see, not hear each other.

The snow falls fast. It accumulates on the outside of my clothing, the brims of hats, and on the grass in the park along Avenue Foch. The streets are still wet, the pavements melt the flakes as soon as they touch.

I take the metro, then get out, and cross Place de la Concorde. It is thicker now, and I'm leaving footprints. Gradually the snow is turning the world into shades of white and grey. I look into the Tuileries. All the gravel surfaces there are white.

I enjoy for a moment, the unsteady, slippery pavement.

-:-

I stayed, long enough to watch autumn prepare the trees for winter.

After the first frost, the maples, the beech and oaks made a display, a final dance. The reds trembled, the yellows and scarlets shimmered. Then they fell, threw themselves to the earth, and the branches they left were gray and black and brittle. The sap ran out of them, to the roots in the ground.

This somehow brought to my mind a woman I thought I knew, or wanted to know. When the icy frost dealt the leaves a fatal blow, her wound poured out the colors of her life. At night the sound of them dropping lightly on each other was her faint voice, whispering. In the damp leaves that emerge beneath the snow in the spring, I saw fragments of her face. In the green buds that are held dormant all winter I saw her smiling.

-:-

Ideas are bubbles, that will eventually find their way
out of any sunken ship.
The force of thought is weak,
but the force of will too strong to find its way.
Ours is a patient receptive mind,
that is spoiled by what it knows, but saved
by what it feels.

-:-

The moon is ringed by an icy halo, frosted lines of yellow etched in the sky.

The boulangerie and patisseries put their moist smells of Christmas banking out into the street.

I admit sweethearts to my rooms, to the warm halls of memory and experience, where echoes and laughter brighten this chapter of my life. A petite blond girl, I divide her little fruit, with my tongue.

It's a quiet morning in the rear courtyard of Avenue Foche. A refrigerator is humming somewhere.

I ate Christmas dinner in the kitchen with Marie Rose, Madeleine and Jeannette. Their faces are exaggerated, comic in their simple routines, replays of Molière.

Roast chicken, baked apples with jam, boudin blanc, boudin noir, creme de marrons, and huitres. I ate the oysters hoping I'm not allergic to the shellfish on this side of the Atlantic.

In the middle of the night I awoke, and vomited for ten minutes into a white plastic bag. My stomach processed everything except for one tiny part of each oyster. I count them. Some footy mantled part. Exactly eight. What a clever organ, the stomach. I gargled, flushed the poison down the sink, and feeling much relieved, fell fast asleep.

-:-

Sickness, feeling the nearness of death -
A comforting thought to me now, shivering.
How to replace the vacuum left inside me.
Her going may break my will.
Did I know how deeply I was falling in love with her?

-:-

I navigate in the dark with my cat's sense of the walls.
I know the doors that are open, I know the doors that are closed. I know where their handles are.
What is to explain this?
And all the many senses we have within us?

I'm losing my days,
to silly problems that could have been foreseen.
I could have steered away,
But now I must bear the consequences.

I wish I had used my cat's sense in time.

-:-

I found a place for a month. It is quiet, it has a table and light.
But it is a boat, and it jerks all day at its moorings.
How can I write when I am ill?

-:-

I am living in the womb of a city
On the twisted confluences of a river
Filled with bottles, cans, choked with mud
It flows anyway.
I float on it.

Everything around makes this city famous
Everything and nothing
I have to walk far to find the life I love
The country is far, trees are far, birds are far.
I am surrounded by works of man.
But I live on a river
That is not the work of man.
Through the center of the city it flows,
alive.

-:-

Visit to a Master Dyer

January 23, 1987

I expected to see more colors - more pots of orange and yellow and blue. I expected to see colors externalized.

"No," Ami said. "He does not externalize his thoughts. He thinks of color, and colors, like you with your writings. They are not on the wall for everyone to see! That is why he keeps them in a small pile of samples, on silk. His life's work is in that small package of silk scraps."

. . . .

"A chemical color pinches the eye."

"The greatest problem is yellow. The chemical yellows are all very dangerous. Cancer, birth defects, very, very dangerous."

"Now I have been making yellow from pomegranate skins. This is a substance nobody wants. Even the cows won't eat it. But it makes the most beautiful yellow color."

"My paintings are all made with dyed bits of paper, glued together. They are all dyed by myself."

"Now you take the cow, you feed it nothing but mango leaves for two or three days. After this time you collect the cow's urine. You boil and boil this urine. You add alum, and reduce it to a paste. It produces the most lovely yellow color."

"Turmeric yellow is most beneficial to the skin. It cleanses the pores of dangerous bacteria. Chemical dyes, red and yellow particularly, attract bacteria. Turmeric is a purifying substance. Now which color would you rather wear, the natural or the chemical?"

"Now these are from the onion skin. Now look at this. This is the pomegranate. And this is banana."

"Indigo, when moist, gives off a pleasant perfume. For this reason it is preferred by peoples who live in areas where water is scarce. Their perspiration draws out the stronger perfume of the natural dye. Furthermore, such areas are usually very hot. The blue colors, and particularly indigo, repels the sunlight! So Indigo Blue is the favorite color of desert peoples."

"The Indigo leaves are put into a pot, with water. This ferments for three or four days. The leaves are then pounded for four or five hours. This releases the color, a dark green. Alum is added and the color s

ettles to the bottom. The surface water is skimmed off. The residue paste is filtered in cloth bags, all excess water allowed to slowly drip away. Then we spread it in pans, and allow it to dry in cakes."

"The color fasteners, the fixatives, the preparations, the sizings, all may be natural. The plant world is abundant in such natural chemicals."

"Now this is a mold. It grows on the tree."

"This is a germ, . . .  a bacteria."

"Dye from Jaggery, natural sugar cane, has a tendency of being very odorous. For this reason we must boil it with rusted iron for two or three hours. Even this may not remove the smell.

"Black is a very difficult color . . . we make it with Jaggary, and iron."

"Everything that has a color in the natural world has the potential to become a color we can use."

Arrival in India

Monday December 8, 1986                                                                         Ahmedabad

I've been here before.

Low screech over the city, white roofs pristine and glittering in rosy dawn air.

The Moghul Gardens, its famous hexagonal pool filled with crocodiles, the railway station, Victoria Bridge, and Sabarmati river, shriveled to a trickle in a vast sandy dried-up bed, all visible from the air. An unimaginable intimacy with the earth, height is a dimension not understood by earthly beings.

Wings pressed flat, as if to remove creases from a fabric loose against the crust of the earth, we touch, a howl of brakes, engine reverse.

There a dollhouse scale to a giant modern airplane at a small airport beside a tiny cinder block building. Near the terminal, waits a single fuel truck and tank. It also looks like a toy.

I'm reminded of cruise ships towering over Renaissance buildings in Venice, when they pull up to disgorge armies of tourists, or simplified paintings of gas stations by Edward Hopper. The figure in the field was a gas pump, instead of a farmer. The development of the automobile seen in a sentimental light, modernity looked at through the succor of a warm lens.

The Ahmedabad tarmac strip is short for now - bulldozers are already excavating a long extension to prepare for even bigger planes, and more of them.

A mustached man in khaki and sandals waved two signal bars of orange-painted wood, magic wands that conceived our flight from the heavens. The Boeing jet compliantly pulled broadside, and parked. The pilot shut off his engines. Through my window I saw a small crowd inside the building, faces pressed against scratched plexiglass. I waved tentatively at one of them. The wave was returned. Could it be Ami?

Down those narrow steps, bag at shoulder. The air is cool, with a promise of intense heat. There is a slight figure, with a black shawl thrown about her shoulders. Too far to tell for sure, but somehow I know it must be Ami. I wave excitedly. It is. My wife to be.

'Your shawl, your shawl', I whisper, meaning, my God you really are Indian, what a different life you've had. How is it possible we share so much?

"I was cold," she said. "Sorry to wear black." She is smiling shyly. In almost a week I've forgotten how beautiful she is.


Tuesday December 9, 1986          Toy House, Panchshil Society, Ahmedabad, Gujerat

Morning. Bathed, ladlefuls of hot steamy water from the cauldron, stooping in green tile frog-like with green neem soap frothed around my ears.

I look outside through mosquito curtains, a lacy feather filter of fine dust towards mammoth trees and piles of bricks.

"Dollars ninety," So says Indu-ben. She's the family cook and she meant rupees, the cost of the bricks. I'm supposed to build a terrace with them. A wedding terrace.

-:-

It's warm here during the day but at night it cools off. Perfect for wax sculpture, if I can just find the right material. Haku-bai, a friend of the family who is an expert in local crafts and sculpture, has some ideas. He says there is a village in Maharashtra where the men make bronzes, as a seasonal occupation. In the winter they make wax originals, in the spring they invest them in a mixture of cow-dung and clay. In the summer they melt the bronze and pour, and in the autumn, which in India is early winter, they chip out, finish and patina their year's work.

-:-

Yesterday Ami and I went out and bought two bolts of heavy khadi, or hand-loom cloth, to make kurta pyjamas, or shirt and trousers. We also bought a pair of sandals.

There's a tall Mali working outside in the garden. He wets the earth and pounds it with a steel disk fastened to a bamboo pole. He works at an extremely slow pace, accomplishing in a day what I imagine could be done in an hour. That vanity only explains the reason for my bad back, and irritability. He works hard, and paces his duties evenly from the beginning of the day around ten until evening when he departs carrying a small packet of sticks rescued from the earth beneath the trees - firewood. It looks no bigger than a dozen pencils - with these he'll cook his evening meal. He's good humored, reads the Gujarati newspaper, and writes during his break hour in the middle of the day. He also washes his clothes. At present he lives in a squalid slum outside of town with twelve other men from his district in Rajasthan. They are victims of the expanding desert and failure of crops, and must come to the cities for work.

-:-

Dear All at Home:

You probably imagine the problems of writing a first letter to anyone from a place as complex as India. That task, flatly put, is knowing where to start. Compounding this is that I haven't much time, even though writing you a note has been a pleasure I've looked forward to.

So I'll take the time I have, and give you the details I can:

Paris is probably appropriate for the beginning of this story, as I set off from there two nights ago, to come here. As expected it provided a welcome rest. I slept for four days. The combined effects of a physically and mentally demanding job kept me up late until the last minute, with the toils of moving our of our late hellhole on Mott Street, salted by the anxiety and fuss over trip preparations. It had, to no surprise depleted me. The rounds of alcoholic salutations on the eve of my exodus accelerated my fall into Stygian dark. Ami's and my drive with Pop to the airport was the last blip of an extreme heart-race. Our plan was simple, put both Ami and myself on the plane to Paris, I would stay there and recoup for a few weeks, while Ami flew on directly to India. The trip began with a rocky start. Ami's delay in packing almost caused us missing our prepaid flight. We got stuck in terrible traffic. Dad risked driving on the shoulder, as well as getting lost in the Bronx to get around the snarl ups, but without such innovation from Dad we definitely would have lost our flight. Moments after hopping out of the car it seemed we were at our seats in the airplane, as both our names were being paged the moment we entered the terminal. The jet roar and acceleration as we pushed back into our seats ended a frenetic chapter of our lives, and began another. In the calm cold night over the dark Atlantic we began our new lives together, filled with uncertainty, but also promise.

Please excuse this blather. I have for the past few days been surrounded by doting females, all speaking tongues and dialects of which I not the slightest knowledge. How far from Rome one longs to hear Latin. Alas.

Ami's home in Ahmedabad is a small but beautifully sited building beneath large trees in a delightful neighborhood. One awakes to raucous crows and chirrup of squirrels, which sometimes venture into the house. The place has that friendly and comfortable sense of neglect that one finds for instance in an old library, or study. Books are everywhere. A kindly old woman, called Induben by the family, presides over the house and kitchen. She has a strong face and immaculate teeth, and also a very pretty granddaughter who comes to help her in the mornings. That poor little urchin has suffered though, according to Ami's mother. Induben's son in law is a bit of a wastrel, and it is evident in the child who apparently was malnourished when she was young. The grandmother has taken over rearing the child.

Ami's father, is very studious and works long hours with two secretaries both wearing long saris, who assist him in his study at Ashish, another house owned by the family located in a not too distant neighborhood. Since Toy House, Ami's family home, is so small, I have since moved to Ashish. The place is noisy at present with father and future son in law both typing and team of ten or eleven painters scraping and whitewashing the walls in preparation for the wedding.

Mr. Bhatt, who I know as 'Ramesh-bai', does not concern himself with much else besides his work. This is typical and admirable of everyone in this family. They hew to their tasks and once placing a matter of household practicality into the hand of servant or contractor, scarcely give it another thought or word, or glance . . . "

-:-

" . . . Nearly all of India it seems has servants, except the poorest of the poor. Even the servants of the people who work as servants, have servants at home to help them with the task of getting on. In India, you do not, cannot, do anything alone, or by oneself. For me to dream of bringing over my bachelor life and cooking for myself is unthinkable. Every single task requires the help of a staff of others.

For instance, there is today no way to look up who supplies any basic materials or supplies. Yellow Pages? They do not exist. Even a proper map of the city center does not exist. Yes one may journey into the crowded souks and markets to try and locate a single stall where a man may arrange for instance, for the delivery of sand or bricks to a construction site, but if one were to attempt such a purchase without introductions, without knowledge, one would lose on the trade, and lose big . . . "

The western life of the individual, the self-sufficient human being, is a fiction, undreamed of by Indians.

Everything here, relies on people.

That simple fact is built into the language. For instance, I would never think of calling my future father-in-law 'Ramesh', without adding the respectful suffix 'bhai', which literally means brother, and must be added to show humility, and gratitude. Similarly Indu-ben is shown respect with the suffix 'ben' which means 'sister'. In Gujerat, if someone's name is not known, one may simply address them, "Bhai" or "Ben", . . . brother, or sister.

Flowers of respect are in the syntax, and also the script. Gujarati, which is amongst the Indo-European rooted languages of Central Asia, was heavily influenced by Arabic, and the centuries of Islamic rule. The language of the Moguls, Urdu, an ultra-polite form of Hindi, is embellished by so many flowery tokens of respect and decoration so much as to be a bit extreme. Urdu, spoken by elder Muslims of the area, and by most of Pakistan, is extremely difficult to speak well for this very reason. Knowing when to add this politesse, or that bit of softening . . . "

I'll mention that Ami always said that Madhur Jaffrey, whom Ismail has starred in quite a number of his films, speaks Urdu 'perfectly". I remember Madhur coming into the cutting room on "Heat and Dust" to coach the scripting of additional recordings we were to make of Urdu speakers, at one of the Nawab's lavish dinner parties. Of course almost every Urdu voice was Madhur, or one of her close friends.

The Urdu influence enormously influenced Gujarat. It fascinated me to watch Ramesh-bhai in his morning ritual reading the Gujarati newspapers, They were much more pleasant to look at than the Hindi papers with their heavy Sanskritized typefaces.

Very few photographs. Quite a number of columns, some of them very funny. Ramesh-bhai had worked as the paper's publisher for a brief tour.

All this, over biscuits and tea.

So it is no surprise that Mahatma Gandhi, when he travelled back from South Africa with the creed of racial repression burning as a bitter memory in his mind, he returned to his native Gujarat with the thought of ending discrimination against the Muslim minority, and against the lowest castes, the Harijans, by renouncing the entire system.

Gandhi symbolically transformed the entire social order so by renaming Harijans, "Children of God".

Caste it was said, would take a thousand lifetimes to try and understand, without profit. There is no single mythos pervading a society that ever was quite so complex. Perhaps that which cannot be easily understood is just another way of spelling cruelty, or injustice. In India, caste is steeped in the Hindu concept of reincarnation, birth, rebirth, and karma. It's older than apartheid or slavery American-style. But slavery it remains, to many, though it is many other things as well. Caste is part of the social order, the cycles of births and deaths.

I thought of our American South, and the literary apologists for the racism prevalent there. "It's so complex." William Styron and his drunken rants through justifications for the old South.

India's geography is, quite simply designed like an old fashioned fish-trap made of wire mesh. There is a funnel, a small opening, let's call that for the moment the Khyber Pass, and a spacious interior. Immigrants navigate the funnel, swim through the opening, but once on the inside cannot escape.

India is complex because peoples that migrate to India by land, tend to stay there. It has been historically and geographically, difficult or impossible to leave. The funnels that lead to India were the Arabian peninsula, if by sea, and a few passes over the Hindu Kush.

One does not forsake a fertile land such as India's western coast for the dry dunes of East Africa or Saudi Arabia. One will starve without farms ready to harvest. So that route of migration was essentially, for millennia on end in early human history, one-way.

Another funnel, and one that dated even further back in time, were the highlands that lead through the Khyber Pass, Afghanistan, and the deserts of what is now Pakistan, and Iran.

Again, once having crossed a desert one does not forsake fertile land that one has found at the end of a journey, to return to arid beginnings. These are the openings, to fertile India. Once gaining a toehold in a new land, one stays. As one would stay on an island.

The subcontinent gathered people like a furious storm. They were forced to get along, and subdivide its resources.

The result, over many millennia was that India received wave after wave of immigrants, wave after wave of settlers, each bringing something new, a language, a religion, an expertise. Each wave took something left over, something unwanted, or fought their way to the top. So generations of settlers each, found a way to fit themselves into India's enormous productivity as a land.

And in this model and metaphor for what India is and has become, so I began to understand England.

That island was populated also, by successive waves of peoples. The Celts, followed by the Saxons, and the Danes. The English have it all organized into a similar system of caste, a ranking a "Who's Who" according to who came when, except that the first occupants, the Celts were treated much like the Dravidian natives were treated by the Aryan invaders.

They were subjugated.

Caste is an invention of the first conquerors, not the first settlers.

But the caste 'system' is the outgrowth of those waves. Populations of farmers isolated themselves from waves of invading metalworkers, for instance. They shared commerce, but the initial mistrust became institutionalized. Caste entered India's entire system, including laws, rights of property, marital customs. The history of coming to India, became caste. Caste was history, and history ruled, instead of laws.

Gandhi and his followers, as I read it, wanted to escape those terrifying clutches of history. He and Nehru wanted a new democracy, a new nationalism of the spirit to replace the grip of history. Ami's mother and father, who had accompanied Gandhi on his famous salt-march - could not have thrown themselves against a greater pillar of Indian culture.

Yet he did, and because he did, they did, and so the limitations of caste even today, are breaking down. This unleashed a new set of laws. Capitalism has tried to replace caste, and the new social order is to be re-scrambled by the profit motive.

So it seems. Yet in India, anything that seems to be true and self-evident, any wise Indian will tell you, is an illusion.

-:-

The Woman who Could Not Swallow

Daniel introduced his wife as 'Baroness Cathleen de Varennes'.

"Where do we go?" she demanded.

I led her, with Daniel, down the hall. "Do you want breakfast? You must be starved. Perhaps you are tired and want to see your bedroom."

I had been told she was a young woman, but she looked ancient. The bones of her skull loomed beneath a sickly parchment.

Daniel threw her bag at the foot of the bed, then headed back to the drawing room to use the phone.  The Baroness kept talking.

"I can't swallow. The last time I actually swallowed a piece of food was in 1979. Solid food doesn't go down. My esophagus is almost closed shut."

I stood there.

"It is equally very difficult for me to swallow liquids. That's why I like them hot. Very, very hot. And sweet. You can put the entire box of sugar in my coffee if you like. It helps it to go down. Of course if I have liquids too hot, too often, that's not good either. It cooks my throat, or can start a cancer.

"The muscle to my stomach is, how do you say, lame? It can't close. The juices from my stomach come up and starts all sorts of problems.

"If I had a lame leg I would knock on it and comment on how well it is carved. It is no problem for me. Yes, I lost quite a bit of weight. I was eating ice cream and sugar and butter in an effort to keep my weight up but eventually my stomach wouldn't process it anymore and my heartbeat became slow with all the cholesterol."

The Baroness' hair lies in patchy strands on a bald scalp. The long strands are so carefully curled over her temples. There are no curves to her, though it is possible to see that she was once attractive. Her front teeth seem at first so perfect, until one notices they are exactly alike, the same color and shape, gums all of a piece. All are false.

Daniel is a young man. I know him to be the same age as Bailey, though he has put on a lot of weight. I asked him about work.

"Well, I haven't been indicted," he said, referring to the recent crackdowns on investment bankers for insider trading.

"Those SEC boys are damn clever. The crooks get away by spilling  beans on the others. The accomplices, those that provide information, have the book thrown at them. It's awful."

I wondered if Daniel saw himself as an accomplice or a crook. He's a survivor, he married the Baroness. How long before he was alone with her title, and family land back in Hungary.

"We have a party this evening we have to go to," Daniel lamented.

Something they had to do to keep up appearances, to please the Baroness. Possibly it was a gathering he anticipated, but made seem like a kind of duty..

"That little party", Bailey said, was a do, at Maxim's. Bailey was miffed. He hadn't been invited.

I agreed, it is poor form not to invite one's host.

I didn't need to see the inside of Maxim's. I had visited once, paid for by a lavish Arab who was entertaining Miss India. I got bored, ate, drank too much, then walked home.

The Baroness foraged in her bag, then brought out a bottle of Pálinka, a distilled liqour from the steppes of Hungary. "This is for Monsieur Bailey."

It had a peculiar royal crest on it, one with a bent cross at the tip. Maybe she called the bottle Slivovitz, no matter. She'll give it to Bailey. Then he'll put it on his silver tray next to the Gran Marnier and Cherry Herring.

School of Hard Knocks

January 1, 1984

The New Year ushered in with a restless sleep - bombs and firecrackers exploding all night.

Dreams of white rats loose in my apartment, pursued by furry white weasels which eventually caught and killed them. In my dream, the pursuit happened slowly, a time-lapse chase up the side of my bedroom door. I noticed the weasel's fur was tattered and falling out, as if they had been stuffed, then I came to the conclusion that they were stuffed, from Uncle Freddie's collection at Trophy Lodge. Somehow during my sleep they had come off their mounts and begun to run around the house.

Yesterday I worked five hours alone in the cutting room, then took the subway to Soho and bought a Japanese print for P____ and M____ as their wedding present, in the process seeing a lot of other prints which I've decided that I want for myself. The gallery I visited is called Azuma. Mr. Azuma himself is an intelligent little Japanese man who speaks hardly any English but somehow understands perfectly just what you mean. He makes very good prices, and has, besides many floating world prints, fine swords, and ceramics.

Web Keene came over for a brief chat, and gave me a list of some good books to read. We talked about the traveller's life. Soon he'll be leaving the University of Chicago to do field work in Indonesia. After that he wants to teach and write. "Isn't it awfully hot down there?" I asked him. "Yes," he said. "Thats why I'm trying to pick an island with high mountains."

"That sounds like the same kind of decision as finding an apartment," I quipped. "Not too hot, language easy to master, natives friendly, not too spoilt by the white man." We laughed about this.

"It really doesn't matter where I do my field work," he said. "Everywhere there are people living, and that is good material for a study. But I have to make use of the people at Chicago, and Indonesia is their specialty. It would be foolish to ignore that!"

Choices. What are the reasons we think we obey when we make choices? They may not be the real cause, or even lead to the desired effect. Reason's a bridge to somewhere uncertain from a place that's already abandoned. The bridge therefor is one of style, and thus, a vanity.

Chris told me of a dream he had, seeing a deer under water, in the surf by an ocean beach. Even its antlers were submerged. It was running along just as if it were on dry land. This made me think of what it would be like to see a humpbacked whale in the woods. You would come upon it, resting, in a grove of pines, then it would swim slowly away, giant flukes brushing away the limbs, belly gliding over the ferns.

New Year's Poetry reading at St. Marks. Allan Ginsberg was there, presiding. The School of Hard Knocks did a marvelous dance. A few good poets read, though it was generally impossible to concentrate. R_____ was there looking very pretty.

Godard

Tuesday December 20, 1983

Talks with PA on the phone about Jean-Luc Godard, and his recent film "Passion". Godard refuses to let any thought, character, location, even synchronization of soundtrack with picture, become certitude, as if anything established or accepted in conventional film language were death itself. Instead his language evolves into a new kind of 'anti-fabric', of film syntax. He enjoys flirting with norms and conventions, then disrupting, corrupting, overwhelming in obsessive and destructive bouts.

It's a film about activities, about a filmset, about fornications in a nearby hotel, about the hirings and firings at a local manufacturer, all mishmashed together, with all the connecting tissue somehow implied, never explained, always glimpsed with pieces missing, so much missing that the story ultimately, if one could say there was a story, has to be imagined.

It's a film about flux, flux as in solder, flowing hot sputtering always at the verge of congealing and becoming hard, but by constantly applying the hot iron Godard keeps the flows of energy moving forward, abandoning the present for something more present, more of the 'now' never quite getting behind enough to call it 'past', a film whose dialogue can never quite be annealed together into anything that could be labelled a logical statement. The film makes no statement, it is anti-statement, and insists that over and over again by leading the viewer to expect some sort of logical clue or tidbit of storyline logic ala the normal expository manner of directing and writing, instead Godard revels in disappointment of this faculty. What is left over but film itself, the images, and the soundtrack which do nothing to explain each other, yet somehow dance. He has taken the rucksack of modern cinema and emptied it out onto the table, cut it up, added perturbed visions, macerations, and dislocutions and dislocations. This becomes then a dizzying ride, an emptying out of the barrel, an expurgation of the clotted nonsense and all that linear time-flow exposition has become.

"Here is what I don't mean!" he shouts at his viewer, or, "It means nothing here either!" . . ."What you are seeing is imaginary!", . . . "This happened on a set!" . . . "I contrived this".

His vignettes, are insets of bit of drama which pretend to be his actor/models 'true' orientations or preferences . .  and then once viewed, we realize these too have been contrived.

What Godard has cut OUT of "Passion", are all the elements around which all other feature films seem to be constructed. He's abandoned the very elements which most filmmakers deem essential, story, consistency of character, logic, cause and effect. He introduces no characters, establishes nothing, neither time-line, space or character. The order of events, the normal dramatic 'glue' is not to be found. Not the tiniest element fastened to anything else. And by so defeating the natural lignin holding the film corpus together, he defeats memory itself. The whole structure collapses into the bowels of the subconscious, split seconds after viewing each shot.

Meaning derives from association, not connection or direction. He fears we'll know or learn too much about his formula, which after all is anti-formula, or his characters which are anti-character, or his locations which are anti-location. It seems to be Godard's task as director to prevent us from sating our curious minds to finish whatever he starts in ways that we are used to, conscious that those leaps of imagination are the real film, and that bits of celluloid are merely the inconsequential head and tail of the mind-shot, the identifying slates to a never recorded mental-work, a black spot or abyss whose mystery would disappear if ever a light were made to shine upon it. So we constantly circle and touch with our eyes closed but never invade with the film medium, only with the film possibility. That possibility is of the thing we imagine, an assembly of starts and stops with the centers missing, the center he knows lies fully crafted within our psyche.

-:-

Talks with Michael at Cafe Dante over cafe amarettos. Mike's full of thoughts, responses to my updates on Merchant-Ivory developments. Mostly we spoke about Ismail, the need to see scripts developed, a little like the tending of a good seed bed, a nursery of ideas. This Ismail does not see the value of. I think I said something like the direction of Merchant Ivory is being decided by what Ismail reads before going to bed.