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?

 

The French Language Is Bangin' Round Me Head

Thanks to three seasons of "Un Village Francais," binge watched with sub-titles.  (Four more seasons yet to be watched.)

Indelible characters.  Gorgeous period automobiles.  Gorgeous period women as well, but each captivating in her own, subtle way.  The farmer's ill-dressed wife perhaps the most beautiful of all.

The plight of the Jews portrayed unflinchingly, and not en masse; we have come to know each before a twist of fate or a betrayal places them onto cattle cars that the "sub-prefect" assures them are destined for a suburb of Paris, and not for Poland.

The factionalism.  The moral compromises.  The intense love affairs that the French simply can't seem to sublimate to the circumstances!

I understand for the first time what it really meant to join the Resistance -- often abandoning every semblance of normal life to live like a hunted animal, for a time indeterminate.

After three seasons, from the perspective of 1942, one can't help but see it through to the turning of the tide.  What will become, for example, of the SD Gruppenfuehrer Muller, who delights in extracting confessions by snipping strategic and most sensitive spots with the little wire cutters that he keeps in the drawer of his elegant desk?

Meanwhile, resonating at the Hour of the Wolf:

Ecoute-moi bien!

Pas de tout.

Les Americains sont sur les plages d'Afrique du Nord.  Personne ne sait ce que cela signifie.

(and lastly)

Ma cherie, je regrette completement de te connaitre, tu sais.