The Collapse of Margaret McGillicuddy

I have been practicing law for almost 50 years now, or so I'm told by the little bar card I keep in my wallet.  For about 40 of those years I have known Margaret McGillicuddy, first as a colleague in the state service, and then as a friendly competitor in the world of state tax defense.  The niche is a narrow one and the community is small and tight knit.  Accordingly, I would see Margaret pretty often at conferences and in the courthouse.  We were friendly, as I say, but certainly not friends.  I have nothing at all bad to say about her, but the truth is that we never really clicked on a personal level.

In a dream that invaded my psyche 'round midnight last night, I had a meeting with Margaret in her office.  Her office was located in a stately old Boston building.  The decor was almost comically old-fashioned; it could have been the office of Perry Mason!  The other noteworthy environmental things about it were that she practiced alone, and that she did not maintain even a single administrative staffer.  So if you met with Margaret, you met with Margaret, alone.

When our meeting was done, I said so long to Margaret and left.  But as I was walking down the hall towards the elevator, I suddenly remembered that I had left my briefcase in her office, by the door.  It had many important papers in it, but more than that I had a sentimental attachment to it.  I certainly did not want to lose it!

When I came back to Margaret's office, her door was just ever slightly ajar.  I would not open it unannounced, of course; she might be indisposed.  I knocked twice, rather hard.  After a pause Margaret said "Just a moment!"  Her tone was very odd, odd enough to cause me some concern.  Clearly she was indisposed in some way.  My mind raced through a number of silly and highly "improbable causes."  Had she cut her leg on something, and was there blood running down her stocking?  Had she just washed off her make-up in the bathroom sink?  Was she, unbeknownst to me, wearing a wig, and had it fallen into the toilet?  Had she taken a couple of swigs from a whiskey bottle that she kept in a drawer?

Shaking off the nonsense scenarios, I said, through the door, "Sorry to disturb you, Margaret, it's just that I think I left my briefcase behind!"  There were a few footsteps.  "Just a second!" she replied again.  And then she opened her door about halfway with her left hand, and offered me my briefcase with her right.  But no sooner did we make sudden eye contact than she threw the door completely open, broke into heaving sobs, and collapsed into my chest.  (The briefcase had fallen to the floor.)  Instinctively I embraced her.

The situation on its face was awkward in the extreme.  But somehow I did not feel uncomfortable.  Rather, my higher moral instinct seemed to have risen to the occasion, and I did my best to comfort her, as a brother or a father might have, even though before this day I had never had any physical contact with her beyond a rather manly handshake.

After perhaps 90 seconds, her sobs began to subside.  I asked her what the matter was, "for goodness' sake!"  She answered me in short, staccato phrases, in many fewer words, in fact, than I need now to recount her tale to you.  It was as if she were speaking to me both in words and in a kind of stress-enabled telepathy!

"The matter" was that she was going blind, and going blind in the moment!  And she was losing her sight in a most peculiar way.  She said that if she concentrated intensely on her dilemma, her sight was fine, but as soon as she let her foot off the gas, as it were, she began to lose it.  So her sight was flickering on and off as she struggled to keep focus.  At the same time, she knew that this was a losing battle, because it was impossible to maintain the required level of concentration.  Like a drowning person who knows that she will soon have to concede defeat, open her mouth and swallow water, Margaret fought but without hope for a happy ending.

And it was worse even than that.  What she told me next was that she realized, for the first time, that her sensory input, taken in the aggregate, was her Self, her Being, her Everything.  Without them there simply was no Margaret.  And so, if her eyesight comprised, say, 30% of her sensory input, then when it flickered off she lost 30% of her Self; she quite literally died, in fact, precisely to that extent.

As I still held her in my embrace, her story told, I felt deep empathy for Margaret in her distress, but I also felt a terror I had never felt before for myself, for I knew that her awful struggle to stay in the light at all costs was a universal one.

 

A Skeletal Dream of No Lasting Import

It's a warm summer evening somewhere in the Midwest.  Bright lights illuminate the parking lot of a highway rest stop.  A white Ford pick-up, an F-150 of late 60's vintage, is squeezed into a spot close to the pumps.  It carries a pretty heavy patina of rust all around.

The truck's owner/driver is tall and lanky, a real Sam Shepard type.  He wears a cowboy hat.  He is ready to begin a journey back home to Nebraska, more than 1000 miles west more or less.  Although we have only just met, he invites me to take the jump seat.  He must be more than a little starved for company.

Nebraska has no purchase for me; in fact, I've never been there.  But while I am not exactly on the lam, there are things here that I would just as well escape.  I find myself thinking of Kinky Friedman's best tune, and of its refrain -- "I hope to God she finds the good-bye letter that I wrote her, 'cuz the mail don't move too fast in Rapid City, South Dakota."

I hop aboard.  After a few coughs and stumbles, the big V-8 roars to life, and it sounds strong as my cowboy benefactor slips the truck into first gear.

A new chapter begins, as it often does in these parts, on the open road.

 

Retreating Back Into Plato's Cave

Maybe my late best friend was right.  Whenever I would lay out for him my latest enthusiasm for a topic more dark than light, he would say (in loose paraphrase) "I won't go there with you.  My prosaic demons, the demons of my childhood, are sufficient unto the day thank you very much."

And I myself have said elsewhere that once one goes down such a path, it is hard if not impossible to abandon it if it has perceived credibility.  In particular, the "Woo-Woo Choo-Choo" of what we now call "non-human intelligence" rolls on and on towards lands of high strangeness and of deep strangeness, with no gentle exit possible it seems.  Lately, intimations of:

• Bioengineering of the human race.
• "Hyperobjects" that are not only unknown to us, but essentially unknowable, fundamentally beyond our ken for the same reason that a spider, upon inspection, can't make out the scope and the function of a tennis shoe.
• "Other forms of life" in the words of one prominent former master of the US national security apparatus, hinting, I take it, at the reality of that very unknowability.
• An invasion of "sentient plasmoids," plasmoids that bring old myths to life, calling to mind as they do Moses and the burning bush, the tongues of fire that touched the heads of the apostles, the spinning sun of Fatima, and even the monster of the id that terrorized Leslie Nielsen and Anne Francis in the classic 1956 film "Forbidden Planet."  In raw description, maybe Jerry Lee Lewis, of all people, came closest to the mark, with his "Great Balls of Fire!"

More broadly, there is an overhang, a premonition, if not of Apocalypse, at least of a time of Great Tribulation, perhaps to be followed by a genuinely new age, but one from which everyone born before, say, 1980, is excluded as collateral damage.  Tant pis.

 

Can You Picture It?

You are just finishing up the dinner dishes, this coming Wednesday evening.  You hear voices in the street, a little muffled laughter.  You turn on the porch light to spy ten of your neighbors, flimsy red books in hand.  When you open the door, they serenade you with songs of the season that everyone knows -- "God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen," "Joy to the World," "O Holy Night," and "Silent Night," of course.  The voices congeal and rise in a single column of condensation.

You invite everyone in, briefly, for a cup of eggnog (a little heavy on the nutmeg) to brace them against the cold before they head further up the hill.

Can I picture it?  No, I can't.  I can sooner picture ten of my neighbors conspiring to throw toilet paper over the branches of my favorite front-yard tree, then scurrying like roaches when I turn on that porch light.

The Steve Jobs Cultural Revolution marches on.

 

Will You Beg for Absolution?

Or, like Saddam Hussein, will you die defiant and unrepentant?

What, if anything, will turn on the outcome?  And is it only cowards who are finally repentant?

 

 

August 1944

When, after about 25 hours of viewing, the first US Army jeep arrives on the outskirts of "Un Village Francais," alone, it comes as a shock, if a welcome one.  In the course of four years, we have seen many elegant French sedans and no-nonsense French trucks, open German staff cars and also the light German personnel carriers that inspired the Volkswagen "Thing" in the late 1960s.  But the always iconic little jeep seems to signal defiance of the Wehrmacht all by itself, to signal, in fact, that the Liberation is at hand.  But by now we know that chaos and death will only accelerate in the short window between the jeep's appearance and the Judgment Day that awaits.

The jeep has come with two men to Villeneuve to blow up a bridge, so that a Panzer corps will be trapped in a pocket from which it can do no harm to the advancing US 7th Army.  Things go awry; "Bob" has to return to divisional headquarters to secure a new detonator, leaving his comrade Chris behind.

Our principal heroine, "Marie," a farmer who has risen to local leadership of the Resistance, convinces Bob to allow her to come along for the ride, for the purpose of convincing his commanding officer to rescue Villeneuve, with the Germans and the French militia threatening to slaughter the villagers on their way out of town.

At the headquarters, in the open air, Bob and Marie have a brief conversation as they wait for their audience with the CO.  As always in the series, Marie wears shabby clothes and appears to be without make-up, but the camera virtually caresses her beautiful and expressive face.  

Bob first asks Marie in his shaky French if she wants a cigarette.  (She does not smoke.)  Then he offers her a stick of gum.  "What is gum?" she says.  And then "I am not a cow!"  Finally he offers chocolate, and she lights up.  When he conjures a Hershey bar from a supply tent, here in the midst of battle, and more or less at the snap of his fingers, she smiles and says "Now I know that you will win this war!"

 

It's a Story More Strange Than Any Episode of "Twilight Zone" or "The Outer Limits"

But I beg your indulgence, to hear me tell it.

More than 300,000 years ago, a proto-Chinese man "married" a proto-Southeast Asian woman.  Let us call the tribe they engendered "Asia Man" ("AM").  Somehow, AM found his way, or was transported, to what is now Central Africa, below the Sahara.  The evidence for this includes the fact that the descendants of AM carry remnants of a disease that can only be contracted via the bite of the tsetse fly, whose range is narrow and concentrated in that part of the world.

Still about 300,000 years ago, Someone or SomeThing ("SoS") experimented with the DNA of AM, mixing it in with the DNA of chimpanzees or their close relations the bonobos, as well as other strains.  The result was the creation of an entirely new species of intelligent, bipedal creatures whom we shall call "Tridactyl Man" ("TM"), because its most striking features are its three-fingered hands and three-toed feet, both with more phalanges than are found in human fingers and toes.

There are other remarkable differences between TM and homo sapiens.  They are only about 60 centimeters tall, but their craniums are relatively large.  Their rib cages are structured much differently than our own.  Because they had no molars, we assume that they lived on a liquid, or at least very soft, diet.  The joints of their hips, and the structure of their feet, suggest that they must have walked in a way that would strike us as awkward and eccentric.

Some of the TM have metal plates, made from sophisticated alloys, embedded within their chests, perhaps implanted to overcome a genetic weakness in that part of the body.

And now something most difficult to explain.  By roughly the time of Christ, TM somehow had been transplanted across the Atlantic to the Nazca region of Peru, a coastal desert land that they shared with the Nazca tribe of homo sapiens.  There, some of the bodies of TM (the "Nazca Mummies") were buried in caves or tunnels, in what is called diatomaceous earth.  This is a powerful natural desiccant that is used even today to kill insects without poison.  It is assumed that it was used deliberately in the case of the Nazca Mummies to preserve their bodies -- not just skin and bones but internal organs and connective tissues as well -- because we find them now in a remarkable state of preservation after 2000 years or so.  Hence, the Nazca Mummies are not really mummies at all, not having been "mummified!"

The first of the mummies came to light, quite literally, about ten years ago.  Since then, a number have been subjected to intensive investigation by scientists in Peru and Mexico, but also in Petersburg, Russia and in the United States, the last under the auspices of one John McDowell who is, we are told, the eminence grise of forensic sciences in the States.  The research has included carbon dating, state-of-the-art medical scanning, and DNA sequencing that compares the specimens with all known terrestrial species that themselves have been sequenced.  Already, two peer-reviewed papers discussing preliminary results of investigations into their nature and origin have been published in mainstream journals.  Much much more will reach the scientific community and the public (if there is any interest in the public) in the next year or two.

Perhaps the best known of the mummies that have been studied is one called "Maria."  Her DNA analysis is so dense with information that scientists can conjecture as to the cause of her death -- a massive infection that was triggered by the eating of raw shellfish that are native to coastal Peru.

So far as we know, there are no elephants in Peru, but the elephant in this particular room is, of course, the implication that TM was made neither by natural evolution alone nor by the Hand of God, at least if God is conceived to be as portrayed in the Bible.  Who was this Someone or SomeThing that intervened in our world?  What was its purpose in doing so?  Is it still among us, or does it lie perhaps just beyond The Veil?

And a more disturbing question still.  Could we ourselves also have arisen, metaphorically speaking, from Someone's petri dish?