“It’s a riot!” – On the Use and Abuse of Energy

Recently I’ve been looking for cool new (juiced looking) desktop backgrounds and where better to turn than science? My foray into the world of ABC Science News has yielded significantly more than just intricate patterns and fluoro colours (though it certainly had that in spades); some really interesting articles also sprang up (unsurprisingly, perhaps). Amongst the scoops on the latest issues of ethics in genetics and microchip technology, there were some which related to more general news items – those which also get people worrying, funnily enough: in this case, the London riots and climate change.

Knee-jerk

The articleon the London riots caught my eye because of its headline: “Riots behave like bushfires, says expert”. I have had a fairly long-standing interest in chaos/complexity theory and the similarities in behaviour of dynamic systems that seem on the surface to be completely different (weather, economy, geography, animal populations and biology, etc.) so this title really grabbed my attention. Could riots, a distinctly human phenomenon, really act like naturally occurring bushfires? In spite of the heading, the article itself didn’t really delve into this much, quickly getting sidetracked in the “causes” debate (though it was from a refreshingly psychological – rather than political, social, or economic – perspective, suggesting that processes such as “deindividuation” allowed people to weaken their own morality and adopt that of a group... intriguingly Jungian). The little similarity that the article did highlight, however, was still quite thought-provoking. 

The article quotes Dr Kristian Skrede Gleditsch from the University of Essex: "There's some evidence suggesting that... the severity of riots is inversely proportional to their frequency... It's kind of like a forest fire. Most fires go out very quickly, but a few become catastrophic. Once they reach a certain magnitude, they can become self-sustaining and very hard to contain." As anyone living in bushfire-prone Australia would know, the severity of bushfires is also inversely proportional to their frequency. The longer an area goes without a bushfire, the more ideal the conditions become for one to occur. The imagery is quite analogous too: The police rush to areas where rioting breaks out, like fire-fighters rush to areas that are aflame; once they arrive it takes them a certain amount of time to get the situation under control, depending on its magnitude. If many crises appear simultaneously then the force gets overstretched and it becomes impossible to manage, allowing them to potentially grow uncontainable. The similarity appears to stop here, however; unlike bushfires, riots are seen as artificial events, more directly influenced by human actions and social policies, so blame (even though it is always dished up all-round) is more readily attributed to the prior conditions that led to the problem rather than the actual response to the event (the left blaming unemployment, systematic poverty, and discrimination and the right blaming liberal immigration policies and welfare dependency) , whereas bushfires are seen as largely naturally occurring, thus unavoidable, so that the vast majority of blame is given to the response of emergency personnel and residents (the left blaming inappropriate reporting techniques and the right blaming Christine Nixon).

Although the two phenomena should not be conflated, in both cases blame is always attributed after the fact (indeed, that’s why it appears in the media at all – something bad has happened). We only ever really react in a kneejerk fashion to these issues; even in a “best-case” scenario all we get is an “I told ya so” and persistent pointing to various omens from the past. [Where were you, oh seer, before the event? If you were actually trying to avoid the occurrence, why didn’t you successfully convince people? You can blame their ignorance but in fact the fault was in your incompetent communication of the problem; you were right yet still you couldn’t get people to see it your way... So take no self-righteous victory from the tragedy but rather in humility accept that you, you who knew better than others, failed to successfully avert the danger through effectively explaining the problem.] Our sense of responsibility (and, in some cases, culpability) is only enlivened by the catastrophe and never the mismanagement that we see leading up to it. The kneejerk reaction eclipses the prevention and preparation which are necessary beforehand; even strategies of prevention such as back burning are only really executed in response to an already raging fire. Responding only to the most direct of stimuli, like children we wander around pulling our hands away from painful prickles, instead of ceasing to play in the thistles altogether. We are a materialistic culture of concrete events before fluid time, of particles before waves, of stuff before space...  

Stoking the Fire, Burning up Energy

So far I have looked at the similarity of the reactive nature of approaches in the contexts of both riots and bushfires. To avoid hypocrisy by only blaming the response (to the response) for focussing too much on the original reaction to the crisis, I will explore other aspects of the original article’s comparison of riots and bushfires. The juxtaposition of these two brings into question the natural/artificial dichotomy which is so instrumental in defining our thoughts concerning these events, and the world generally; we’ll see the duality first get reversed, and then muddled to the extent that it no longer serves a useful purpose. This will emphasise the necessity of a progressive (in the grammatical sense – that is to say, ongoing), preventative, holistic strategy concerning both situations.    

As stated above, wildfires are seen to be natural occurrences while riots are deemed artificial, largely because of the human element involved. This leads to a focusing of the blame on response mechanisms for the inevitable in the case of fires and general social factors for the preventable in the case of riots. Obviously, this approach makes sense, but being too reliant on the idea of bushfires as natural and riots as artificial can cause problems. For example, the article suggests that the more often riots happen, the less severe they tend to be – as if there was an amount of excess anger, or energy, or some such value, which would need to be released in any case. Thus, though the form of the expulsion may vary, it would necessarily occur with a certain frequency resembling something like a natural cycle, perhaps. I have discovered similar sentiments in my recent reading about Confucian ethics: “In times of rich harvest, more young people are prone to laziness; in the time of poor harvest, more young people are prone to violence.” (Mencius, 6A7, trans. Chung-ying Cheng) That such a statement could seem applicable today when it was written two and a half millennia ago displays the accuracy more of a scientific statement concerning nature (indeed, its reference to harvests even hints at a particular form of natural cycle) than a musing from the “soft” humanities. So the artificial, man-made, aspects of the riots can be underplayed in favour of a view which considerers it more natural and inevitable insofar as it is a measure of energy which needs to be release one way or the other.      

  

The very similar sentiment of civil disobedience as energy dispersion can be gleaned from a 1996 Harper's article where economic and political analyst Edward Luttwak compared Japanese and American employment policies:

When I go to my gas station in Japan, five young men wearing uniforms jump on my car. They not only check the oil but also wash the tires and wash the lights. Why is that? Because government doesn't allow oil companies to compete by price, and therefore, they have to compete by service. They're still trying to maximize shareholder value, but they hire the young men. I pay a lot of money for the gas.

Then I come to Washington, and in Washington gas is much cheaper. Nobody washes the tires, nobody does anything for me, but here, too, there are five young men. The five young men, who in Japan are employed to wash my car, are here standing around, unemployed, waiting to rob my car. I still have to pay them through my taxes, through imprisonment, through a failed welfare system.

But in Japan, at least they clean my car.

Both societies have young men who won't make the grade as computer programmers, who cannot enter into the brave new world of Bill Gates and George Gilder. In Japan, they arrange matters so that these people are employed. Are they efficiently employed? Goodness, no. Of course they're inefficiently employed. But they're no longer a threat to society.

While I would be cautious to consider participation in the labour force as the best means of neutralising the threat to society posed by an otherwise unemployed individual [indeed, the working classes have historically been much more volatile than the unemployed and, in fact, classical Marxism detests the completely destitute class (the lumpenproletariat) precisely because they do not pose enough of a threat to the existing order], the quote still hints at a more “naturalistic” and less artificial understanding of social problems; they are inevitable to an extent and should be treated as such and mitigated. Stationary potential energy, if not harnessed by society, can turn (or be directed) against it, or will need to be released in some way.  

This perspective on riots as natural can also, conversely, inform an understanding of bushfires as artificial rather than natural. The idea that there is a latent potential energy that may be released with destructive consequences if not harnessed seems to inform the Australian Aboriginal practice of fire-stick farming or “burning off” where forest or grassland is regularly and systematically burned to reduce the fuel-load for a potential major bush fire and fertilise the ground, increasing the number of young plants, providing additional food for kangaroos and other fauna hunted for meat. The instigation of these fires is, perhaps counter intuitively, seen as a way to look after the land. A symbiotic evolution of many thousands of years has made immolation a central part of the reproductive cycle and life cycle of native plants and trees, to the extent that their eucalyptus sap is highly flammable (it seems kind of counter-intuitive for trees to have flammable blood but there you go...). After a burning off, the ash fertilises the ground while the new green sprouts and charred remaining trunks serve as a fire retardant barrier (imagine trying to burn a matchstick twice over). While from our perspective bushfires look like an unavoidable natural disaster where the human element enters in the response phase, once an emergency has already arisen, from an Indigenous perspective negligent mismanagement of the land for many years prior to the event makes hazardous bushfires a uniquely manmade, and thus artificial, problem. We can see how we have an active duty which, if spurned, constitutes a significant portion of the cause of the crisis and, in a very real sense, engenders the catastrophe – the human element in the bushfire situation can now be seen to go far beyond simply the response effort.        

Another consideration which makes bushfires look somewhat more artificial, at least in the danger they pose, is that the hazard only exists because we humans put ourselves, our houses and our communities, in the way. A fire engulfing an almost perfect rectangular prism doesn’t seem like the most natural image. “Perfect” geometrical forms such as spheres, prisms, and the like rarely occur in nature. The stable, static, edifice is out of place; clearly an artificial addition to the otherwise homogenous surrounds. It is a dwelling, created and inhabited by humans. In this sense its construction in that place was also that of an artificial, manmade, danger: the hazard of the bushfire. When you build a structure, you simultaneously erect the conditions – and necessity! – of its collapse; though these conditions and the mode through which they arise are modified based on the surrounds of the monolith. A similar point – the interdependence of place and placement, of site and project, and their mutual creation – is made by Heidegger in “Building Dwelling Thinking” in his Poetry, Language, Thought:

 

“The bridge swings over the stream with ease and power. It does not just connect banks that are already there. The banks emerge as banks only as the bridge crosses the stream. The bridge designedly causes them to lie across from each other. One side is set off against the other by the bridge. Nor do the banks stretch along the stream as indifferent border strips of the dry land. With the banks, the bridge brings to the stream the one and the other expanse of the landscape lying behind them. It brings stream and bank and land into each other's neighbourhood. The bridge gathers the earth as landscape around the stream. Thus it guides and attends the stream through the meadows. Resting upright in the stream's bed, the bridge-piers bear the swing of the arches that leave the stream's waters to run their course. The waters may wander on quiet and gay, the sky's floods from storm or thaw may shoot past the piers in torrential waves-the bridge is ready for the sky's weather and its fickle nature. Even where the bridge covers the stream, it holds its flow up to the sky by taking it for a moment under the vaulted gateway and then setting it free once more.”

Here we see, just as the banks emerge only with the bridge on the stream (or, as is clearly implied, its imagining), the fire danger (and bush as environ, for that matter) only emerges as the houses and communities are constructed in its midst (in the clearings in the forest, perhaps?). This thought can lead to a reformulation of the oft-mistaken-to-be Buddhist question “If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?” While broader questions about perception and existence are beyond my purview here, this is an interesting link to be drawn: If a bushfire rages and no one is near, does it pose a threat? Can it burn flesh? Does it even cause heat? It takes two to tango (what is the sound of one-hand clapping?) and this is the case too when one dances with danger. The hazard is caused as much by the victim’s placement in a precarious position (but let us never forget who is the victim and who the perpetrator, nor confuse where the responsibility lies) as by the manifestation of certain situations, such as a bushfire.     

Thus both riots and bushfires can be seen as either artificial or natural occurrences, or a mixture of both. They are artificial insofar as humans play an active role in their coming about, yet they are natural to the extent that they appear cyclical and obey similar principles to what might be deemed “purely” natural phenomena; likewise, they represent the movement of energy according to certain identifiable patterns which resemble those of what is considered the conventionally natural world. The fundamental point to takes from all this, however, is that it is in reality an interplay between movement and stillness and how to be in either state, or both. The store of energy (or perhaps more accurately the current, or flow) must be burned at times, released elsewhere, and the big question is how we use it and harness it...

Arse ‘n’ Arson

To further confound the natural/artificial dichotomy, bushfires are sometimes stared by certain individuals with the conscious objective of causing fire-based mayhem and so too did the London riots have a distinct quality of conscious organisation about them, besides their apparently spontaneous occurrence (as do others generally... the Cronulla riots are another good example). An arsonist cannot do it alone, however; in a tropical rainforest even the most ardent firebug equipped with the most flammable of artificial fuels could not hope to start a campfire. The scene needs to be set, so to speak, before someone or some few can tip it over the edge. This is the significance of the expulsion of energy – this energy is the latent fuel for arson; it is the combustible material of our social relations and must be disposed of through healthy means. Personally, I find the most effective form is dance, because of the vigorous amount of physical movement required and the personal affinity I have with it, but any freely expressed cultural activity will do. Individual expression is paramount here as any even slightly coerced motion returns the activity to the level of energy blockage rather than energy release or mediation.    

One serious impediment to energy expression is over-focus on survival. Almost all organisms, when they feel threatened and single-mindedly pursue the goals of survival, close up – going into a high energy conserving state – and await the abatement of the threat. This is not conducive to the healthy release of energy if it is the state of the organism most of the time; life must feel comfortable to open up and reproduce itself in any meaningful way, to change and grow. Fear and anxiety about survival preclude growth as a healthy expression of excess energy; in fact, survival will automatically occur and does not need to be laboured, hurried, or forced...

It is here where the articles I found about climate change really became relevant. I discovered that, against my expectation, there were many articles about the self-stabilizing factors surrounding climate change, suggesting that it wasn’t such a huge thing to be worried about. The depths of the ocean has been found to soak up some of the warming occurring and could offset it for decades (http://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2011/09/19/3319695.htm). Likewise, regions of the ocean uncovered by the melting of ice in the Antarctic can now be inhabited by phytoplankton, which consume CO₂ through photosynthesis (http://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2009/11/11/2739420.htm) – in fact, the melting of these ice shelves fertilizes the ocean, making it a good breeding ground for these various carbon-dioxide gobbling organisms (http://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2011/08/04/3284610.htm). This natural process of self-regulation is much more successful than human attempts at similar ventures (http://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2009/01/29/2477264.htm). Plants in otherwise arid grasslands may now, because of higher levels of CO₂ in the atmosphere, open their stomata for shorter periods to achieve the same amount of CO₂ intake for photosynthesis. This is important because while the stomata are open the plant loses high amounts of water – the shorter open period offsets the dryer climate (http://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2011/08/04/3284610.htm). Animals are also responding faster the climate change than was previously supposed through methods such as migration (http://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2011/08/19/3297635.htm) and even the particularly vulnerable shelled sea creatures are responding better than first thought (http://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2011/08/22/3297891.htm).       

  

That I’d never heard of these feel-good, Earth actually kicks ass news stories doesn’t really surprise me – because when the arsonist is also the one who manages the national parks, it’s no wonder that conditions are being artificially altered to be naturally conducive to fire. The worrying we see around us is worrisome, the anxiety is the noxious pollutant – it retards the natural flow of energy, which is all it was ever really about: Finding new, good, fun ways to express the excess, to be in synergy with the energy. We need to have more faith in the things around us, so that we can get on with the job of fixing ourselves... the only thing that was ever broken in the first place.  

Satan’s Synchronatron

Reading an anthology of texts on shamanism recently (Shamanism through Time: 500 years on the Path to Knowledge) I stumbled upon an extract from Michael Harner’s book The Way of the Shaman (the following quotes are from the third edition, 1990, paperback – all emphasis is added by me) which I had read and considered deeply a few years ago but had allowed to slowly slip out of my mind. The most striking part of Harner’s book was, fittingly enough, also the extract quoted in Shamanism through Time: a description of his experience of Ayahuasca as an anthropologist in 1961. This section struck me at the time of my first reading simply because of its radically novel and vivid images, yet the fact that – despite its otherworldly nature– it appeared to be congruous with various cosmologies and mythologies of the world (not simply that of Ayahuasca using tribes, as might be expected). Having re-read it recently, I find that some of its features remind me of various other texts I have read recently. It is also astounding that this collection of remarkable images could apparently flow simply from one man’s mind. [While I have reproduced most of the report below, there are some parts which I have excluded for the sake of (relative) brevity. I urge readers to seek it out in its entirety and read it for themselves.]

His experience begins with ‘a gigantic, grinning crocodilian head, from whose cavernous jaws gushed a torrential flood of water.’ (p. 3) It is here that the first coincidences begin. Soon after having the experience, Harner feels he needs to take a break from tribal living to digest what he’s been through. He goes downriver to stay at a Christian mission with ‘Bob and Millie, [who] were a cut above the average evangelists sent from the United States: hospitable, humorous, and compassionate. I told them my story. When I described the reptile with water gushing out of his mouth, they exchanged glances, reached for their bible, and read to me the following line from Chapter 12 in the Book of Revelation:

            And the serpent cast out of his mouth water as a flood...

They explained that the word “serpent” was synonymous in the Bible with the words “dragon” and “Satan.”’ (p. 6)

His experience continues as he feels his “brain” splits into four parts, the lowest of which begin communicating with him ‘the givers of these thoughts: giant reptilian creatures reposing sluggishly at the lowermost depths of the back of my brain, where it met at the top of the spinal column.’ (p. 4) When first reading this passage years ago, only the reptilian nature of these creatures struck me. However, the very specific location from which they communicate with him is also extremely interesting. The place where the brain meets the spine (comprised of the brain stem, basal ganglia, cerebellum, thalamus, and other parts) has been posited by some as “the Reptilian complex” or “R-complex” where we derive many of our survival instincts and drives for aggression, dominance, territoriality, and ritual displays.

Mainzer explains it this way: ‘Some scientists assume that basic feelings like lust and pain and all the servomechanisms which were necessary to survive in a reptile’s life are essentially realized in these early structures of the brain. This centre would give the impulses for all kinds of activities, using the cortex only as huge and effective associative store. Thus, in this interpretation, the ‘self’ is replaced by a little crocodile in the brain operating with some highly complex instruments like the cortex, in order to survive in a more and more complex environment.’ (Klaus Mainzer, Thinking in Complexity: The Complex Dynamics of Matter, Mind, and Mankind, 1994 1^st ed, Springer-Verlag: Heidelberg – Ch. 4.4 Intentionality and the Crocodile in the Brain, p. 153, p. 162). How could Harner, an anthropologist without any background whatsoever in neuroscience, have known about something like the R-complex, which hadn’t even been devised yet, let alone popularised (as it would come to be first by Sagan in the late 70s and then again more generally in the 90s and beyond)? More baffling still is that this knowledge manifested itself through a psychedelic experience in a very direct way, through communication with reptilian entities which resided specifically in (what turned out to be) the most primitive parts of his brain. This situation almost constitutes evidence for the Reptilian brain before the hypothesis was even suggested (important to note that the report of the Ayahuasca experience was not published until the early 70s, after the Triune brain/R-complex theory had been imagined by MacLean – so it could not have inspired him to pursue that possibility)! Whatever the explanation might be, if there even is one, the point remains that the resonance between these varied authors and texts is truly fascinating...  

Mainzer’s discussion of the “crocodile in the brain”  continues with an interesting observation that conceptualising ourselves as ‘crocodiles with highly effective neural instruments of survival seems to injure our vanity more than the popular Darwinistic motto of the last century that the ape is the ancestor of man. From a scientific point of view, of course, it should not be injured vanity which makes us criticize the concept of the ‘neural crocodile’. The main objection is that our feelings have not rested at the level of a crocodile, but have developed during biological and cultural evolution, too.’ (p. 163) This last notion is important. The vast majority of our brain is devoted to higher-level thought, conceptualisation, art, culture, basic and complex emotions, and other such uniquely human behaviours. When we allow ourselves to be controlled by fear, anger, drives to aggression or dominance, and territoriality, we are only using those ancient parts of our brain which, while serving some purpose, stifle the remainder – our humanity. We have to overcome those reptilian aspects of ourselves which – ironically, considering that they are remnants of successful survival mechanisms – threaten our continued survival on this planet. Amazingly enough, this very difference manifests itself to Harner towards the end of his experience: ‘I suddenly felt my distinctive humanness, the contrast between my species and the ancient reptilian ancestors. I began to struggle against returning to the ancient ones, who were beginning to feel increasingly alien and possibly evil.’ (p. 5) [His struggle causes a particularly fearful reaction to these entities: ‘I needed a guardian who could defeat dragons, and I frantically tried to conjure up a powerful being to protect me against the alien reptilian creatures.’ (p. 5) Our interrelationship with seemingly hostile extraterrestrial/dimensional entities is much the same – if we seek guardians (St. George), that just what we will manifest (the cross of St. George). This point can be further explored through the work of individuals such as David Icke.]

So these ‘dragon-like denizens of the depths’ (p. 5) who reside in the lowest parts of the brain tell Harber a story: ‘First they showed me the planet Earth as it was eons ago, before there was any life on it. I saw an ocean, barren land, and a bright blue sky. Then black specks dropped from the sky by the hundreds and landed in front of me on the barren landscape. I could see that the “specks” were actually large, shiny, black creatures with stubby pterodactyl-like wings and huge whale-like bodies. Their heads were not visible to me. They flopped down, utterly exhausted from their trip, resting for eons. They explained to me in a kind of language that they were fleeing from something out in space. They had come to the planet Earth to escape their enemy.’

It was the first of the emboldened passages above that really drew my attention years ago when I read this piece for the first time. This was for no reason greater than what I felt was a ridiculously synchronicity: I discovery a remarkably similar animal on National Geographic’s TV show Extraterrestrial, the “Skywhale.” This show was about the possibilities of life on other planets and what it might look like. The fact that one such envisaged creature resembled Harner’s description so closely enthralled me at the time. Here, in the new millennium, we have fairly legitimate speculation by scientists as to what life elsewhere in the universe might resemble and they come up with something that is very similar to the extraterrestrials in Harner’s early 60’s Ayahuascan vision! This was, for me at the time, very engaging; in retrospect, it seems to be the least interesting or important of all the various titbits contained in the report. Here’s a picture:

The Skywhale – More info here (click Blue Moon and mouse over the various life forms to find it)

[Having re-googled the skywhale just now (for the purposes of checking the links for this blog), I find some other interesting artefacts. The first is this very juiced short animated film. Up to now, we might note, all the “Skywhales” have been explicitly extraterrestrial (one might say that this makes sense, insofar as they are “alien” and unusual yet there is no dearth of “terrestrial” examples of imaginary creatures: unicorns, dragons, trolls, jabberwocks – why wouldn’t one of these occurrences of flying whales have been an Earth-based imagining?). The second occurrence is significantly more startling than the first and, indeed, gives me a great sense of synchronicity in a very profound way. Upon image-searching “Skywhale” I happened across this: 

Available here

What this picture clearly depicts is a reptilian creature of roughly human stature standing on its hind legs and drinking a goblet of what can only be assumed to be human blood, not only that, but blood drawn from a young woman. That this drawing should crop up randomly in my search for skywhales, yet have such resonance with my above discussion of aspects of reptilian theory, is very remarkable indeed (you are currently seeing someone lose their shit while in the process of developing a blog entry – enjoy!). This surprise outcropping emphatically forces me to return to David Icke. He explains in some detail in many of his works of how the extradimentional reptilian entities require the consumption of blood – preferably that of virgin children or young women – in Satanic rituals to manifest within vessels in this dimension. I am still honestly shocked that this should (re)emerge in a completely unrelated context in my web searching just now... but I digress...] 

The second passage in bold from my last quoting of Harner again interests the missionaries he visits after his experience: ‘When I came to the part about the dragon-like creatures fleeing an enemy somewhere beyond the Earth and landing here to hide from their pursuers, Bob and Millie became exited and again read me more from the same passage in the Book of Revelation:

            And there was a war in heaven: Michael and his angels fought against the dragon; and the dragon fought and his angels. And prevailed not; neither was their place found any more in heaven. And the great dragon was cast out, that old serpent, called the Devil, and Satan, which deceiveth the whole world: he was cast out into the earth, and his angel with him.

I listened with surprise and wonder. The missionaries, in turn, seemed to be awed by the fact that an atheistic anthropologist, by taking the drink of the “witch doctors,” could apparently have revealed to him some of the same holy material in the Book of Revelation.’ (p. 6 – 7)

Before discussing the above in-depth, I’ll let this flow naturally on to the continuation of his vision and my last citation of the experience itself: ‘The creatures then showed me how they had created life on the planet in order to hide within the multitudinous forms and thus disguise their presence. Before me, the magnificence of plant and animal creation and speculation – hundreds of millions of years of activity – took place on a scale and with a vividness impossible to describe. I learned that the dragon-like creatures were thus inside all forms of life, including man. (Footnote: In retrospect one could say they were almost like DNA, although at that time, 1961, I knew nothing of DNA.) They were the true masters of humanity and the entire planet, they told me. We humans were but receptacles and servants of these creatures. For this reason they could speak to me from within myself.’ (p. 4 – 5)

What we have in the first fragment is the bizarre, yet strangely fitting, juxtaposition of interstellar conflict and the Book of Revelations in the Bible. “Heaven” refers to space (or perhaps another dimension, wherever Harner’s reptilian entities came from) and the casting down to earth is the end of the reptilian creatures’ flight from their nemesis. This second biblical allusion is significantly stronger than the first, and yields considerably more for discussion; especially when coupled with the second fragment from Harner’s report, which effectively claims that these entities created us to conceal themselves. Interestingly, when seen through the biblical interpretation, the enemies of these entities from whom they seek refuge on earth are in fact the good guys: God and His angels. Yet it is the ones who were cast down from heaven that “created” us and inhabit the world with us. This doesn’t seem to hold in a “normal” Christian understanding of the Bible and genesis generally, which suggest that the Being which created us was the One True God, the good guy par excellence... the One who triumphs in heaven, no less, casting the Serpent down! I was mulling over some of these ideas in my head when a good friend of mine mentioned the Cathars, a heretical medieval Christian sect best known for the heavy persecution they suffered at the hands of the Roman Catholic Church. He mentioned that in their thought Satan was seen as having been given dominion over Earth/material existence by God and that, therefore, our world was tainted and presented a kind of test to us (when I mentioned them to my girlfriend she said they were “something like Christian Buddhists” – a characterisation that, in light of their renunciatory relationship to the physical world around us, seems quite apt!). In my own dalliances with the Jehovah’s Witnesses (another group who have suffered significant persecution) who turn up at my door occasionally I have found a similar doctrine: that Satan is the true ruler of this world and its various governments and political institutions (this certainly doesn’t extend as far as Cathar beliefs did). [Again, both of these are similar to David Icke’s writings concerning how the reptilian entities almost always are proximate to power, to certain political, cultural, social, religious leaders.]

Historical resonances – The yellow cross Cathars were made to stitch into their clothing during persecution and the yellow star the Jews were forced to wear during their persecution under Nazism.  

Another piece of evidence for this kind of view from the Bible is Jesus’s temptation in the dessert (Luke 4:1-13, Matt 4:1-11). Amongst other enticements, Satan offers Him absolute political power on earth if He worships him – suggesting that he has direct control over the various kingdoms and other political entities (it is even stated explicitly at Luke 4:6). Insofar as the earth (or material realm) is the dominion of Satan or these reptilian entities, it isn’t necessarily going to be the nicest place to live a lot of the time and here we reach a typical problem with spirituality – if the Source of everything is the Good (in, say, Platonism), or a good God (in, say, Christianity), why do bad things happen? It seems that the fall of Satan to earth gives some potential directions in thinking about this “conundrum.” Since we inhabit the same territory as him, it doesn’t seem surprising that we will suffer various tribulations and not always enjoy our time, being mired in the illusion of seperateness from God. There is still another way of looking at this whole thing: To make the world perfect – that is, to remove the bad that occurs and make empirical existence commensurable with a good God – it would be necessary to postulate that God is with us, on our level... which would mean that He had been driven down, expelled from the heavens by Satan... which would mean that Satan would be the lord of the heavens and God the lord of material existence. While we might enjoy this for now, what would happen in the afterlife, or in the dimensions and spheres greater than this one? They would all be the domain of the Devil (and thus contain the various unpleasant occurrences that are sometimes used to deny a good God’s existence). Well may we then say *whiny voice* “everthiiiiiiiiiiiing, everythiiiiiiiiiiiiiing in its riiight plaaaaaaaaace...”

To say that Satan is the lord of Earth, however, is still a little less than claiming that we were created by him, which clearly isn’t overtly suggested in the Bible. What we do have, however, is the story of Genesis, the very place where God is said to create the earth and us too. In this book the Fall from Paradise is a central feature and involves Satan intimately. Perhaps we weren’t created by Satan in an absolute sense, but only made to fall to earth by him. Perhaps he took us with him so that he could hide all the better from God. Or maybe he put us here first. This raises an interesting question concerning the chronological relationship between Genesis and Revelations. Obviously, Genesis is meant to come first, insofar as it contains the Creation, and Revelations last, insofar as it contains the Apocalypse – the eschaton of the Abrahamic religions. However, the weird synergy between Harner’s experience, in which the events described are told as if they have already happen, and Revelations does raise some interesting issues here, especially when coupled with beliefs such as the Cathars (for the Jehovah’s Witnesses this is not as contentious – they understand us to be living in the End Times themselves and as such Satan fell to earth somewhat recently... perhaps the Cathars held similar millenarian beliefs, though no record of them remains). More generally, this whole discussion raises interesting questions of the dichotomy of beginning and end – where closing certain doors opens others and where beginnings might signal ends elsewhere...

Harner’s own closure on the whole episode (although this experience is the one that leads him to continue researching and practicing shamanism for the remainder of his life – so this closure is perhaps more of an opening) comes with his approaching a wise old shaman who surprises him with the level of corroboration he gives his story: ‘I was now eager to solicit a professional opinion from the most supernaturally knowledgeable of the Indians, a blind shaman who had made many excursions into the spirit world with the aid of the ayahuasca drink. It seemed only proper that a blind man might be able to be my guide to the world of darkness.

I went to his hut, taking my notebook with me, and described my visions to him segment by segment. At first I told him only the highlights; thus, when I came to the dragon-like creatures, I skipped their arrival from space and only said, “There were these giant black animals, something like great bats, longer than the length of this house, who said that they were the true masters of this world.” There is no word for dragon in Conibo, so “giant bat” was the closest I could come to describing what I had seen.

He stared up toward me with his sightless eyes, and said with a grin, “Oh, they’re always saying that. But they are only the Masters of Outer Darkness.”

He waved his hand casually toward the sky. I felt a chill along the lower part of my spine, for I had not yet told him that I had seen them, in my trance, coming from outer space.’ (p. 7)

We see here, in conclusion, that the entities were just saying that and that in fact they are not the true masters of the world, but merely “the Masters of Outer Darkness” (perhaps the place they reside in the brain). In this sense, they were lying, being deceptive, and if there’s one thing Satan is, it’s the great deceiver. As always, he is taking God’s works as his own, trying to usurp Him, and generally make people worship and fear him. Deception is the name of the game – distortion of the Platonic Good – and behind every label you will find another, and then another behind that one again. The material world is a place of transience and impermanence. Perhaps the best way to face these dishonest creatures and the devilish things that happen around us is with a grin, like the wise old blind master shaman; treating them as cosmic jokers or clowns who pull multicoloured ribbons of matter and light out of metaphysical pockets, conjuring up in front of us all the various wonders (and horrors) of the natural and material world. After all, the jester’s coxcomb has horns too... 

An Interesting Resemblance - The "Mushroom Runners" of Tassili

[A last little conjuring trick using google image search: Searching for “jester” yields this image (interestingly enough, like the reptilian/skywhale, this one is also from a designers website)...

...which, especially considering the juxtaposition between jesters and devils that I have just offered, brings to mind Satan’s first temptation of Jesus – where he brings Him a stone to turn into bread to feed himself. Crazy stuff!]

Analogue Asylum

The recent re-emergence of violent protest at the Christmas Island detention centre and of self-harm generally within the detained refugee population threatens Carbon Tax’s monolithic presence in the domain of Australian political discourse and allows a certain archetypical feature of the local landscape to rear its head yet again, one much closer to our traditional history: the issue, not of how we treat our environment, but of who we are willing to share it with. The popularity that could be (re)gained (by whom, I wonder...) through using this opportunity to change the focus of the public’s attention is not of interest to me here. Rather, this issue draws upon how humanity can be changed into a resource; the ramifications extend well beyond the immediate political sphere. These things are happening on the coast, the limit, the margin.

In Dark Writing Paul Carter explores the notion of coastline as ‘a form of reasoning that, in principle, applie[s] to the conception of any place defined in terms of the accumulation of resources and the regulation of access to them.’ (p. 65) The very nature of the coastline is to delineate the land to be possessed. However, this barrier also affects a kind of transmutation of the things crossing it; the change can be subtle, however. The critique begins with him ridiculing ‘[t]he strange rituals associated with quarantine stations’ (p. 65) of the past:

‘[I]n Malta, letters from infected zones were “dropped in vinegar, and then put into a case, and laid for about a quarter of an hour on wire grates, under which straw and perfumes had been burnt.” There were different methods of “expurgation” for different classes of goods. In Venice, wool, flax, feathers, and similar materials were aired for forty days by removing them from their containers and mixing and turning over the heaps twice a day by porters working with hands and arms bared. Woollen and linen clothes were periodically unfolded and refolded and sometimes hung on a cord for better exposure to the air. Furs, considered especially dangerous, were, we learn, “very often waved and shaken.” Articles like beeswax, sponges, and candles were purged by immersion in salt water for forty-eight hours. Salted hides, salts, and minerals, however, were considered non-infectable.’ (p. 67)

That these bizarre customs which enjoyed, I’m sure, the full fruits of scientific sanction (indeed, the scientific discovery of the bacterium legitimated and authorised, in many ways, quarantine) were performed and thought efficacious is not really problematic. It does, however, betray the sometimes arbitrary nature of quarantine and indeed of the border itself. While various goods mightn’t’ve noticed their ordeals, humans were much more prone to. ‘Temporary inmates of these places suffered, as a Parisian architect confined for sixteen days at the quarantine station of Malta in 1833 wrote, “un ennui mortel.”’ (p. 67) They were stuck playing musical instruments, chatting, sketching, hiring chefs to enjoy their food and drink, and playing cards; anything just ‘to temper as far as possible the feeling of depression and boredom.’ (p. 67) Obviously, the luxury of travel (and the not-so-luxurious necessity of quarantine) was only afforded to the very rich who could expend wealth to ensure that they were not overly bored by these temporary sojourns. This is in stark contrast to the people who are detained in our modern iteration of this quarantine. More often than not completely destitute, their lot is not that of fine food and enforced leisure but of appalling immobility and existential frustration. Even if today’s mandatory detainees did have means to entertain themselves, while the harm would seem to be minimised, the fundamental issue here would not be done away with. The riots of the refugees express how it feels to go digital...          

The sea forms waves. It persists as an archetypical symbol of the unconscious: mysterious, unobtainable, powerful. Nothing comes from the ocean divorced from that ambiguity; nothing goes to the ocean without paying its dues: ancient sailors offering up sacrifices to avoid shipwreck. Is it from this that mandatory detention protects us? The coastline ‘digitizes the analog [sic] turbulence of the sea, progressively sampling its wave forms until nothing is left of their movement power. And the same applies to the human movement; filtered through this maze of posts, it loses its power to produce change.’ (p. 66) An entity changed to a changeless thing. It is interesting to note the changes that occur, in any case. These coastlines were established in older times to protect ‘coastal visitors [who] were vulnerable to all kinds of fall – intellectual, spiritual, moral... [I]n the interests of public well-being and civil order, passage across that debatable land needed to be stabilized. Unreliable waves, shifting sands, unpredictable natives, and enigmatic interiors needed to be policed. This was the function of the coastline, to cordon off an in-between zone and to bring its labyrinth of possibilities within the prisonhouse of reason.’ (p. 71) We see that the rationalisation of the land that was enforced through quarantine, the stabilisation of passage/entry, protected those incoming from on otherwise savage and unpredictable place. Now, however, the place is civilised but those incoming are not. The land has been transformed – it is now logical and rationalised – and those who come need not be protected from a fall but are already fallen (queue-jumpers, smuggled, trafficked). We are protected from them. Those who come seeking asylum are faced only with the “prisonhouse of reason” and, let us be very clear, this is not the detention centre, but the society in which we live. The citizenry they wish to join are the prisoners; we are those who are willing to treat other humans – and ourselves no less – as digitalised bits of information/material. We are now fallen; the original quarantine failed.

Invoking the name of the queue-jumper is not to be done light-heartedly; this term carries heavy baggage around with it. Yet why is jumping the queue seen in such a negative way? In our post-Enlightenment era of reason and rationality it seems to go against the very notion of equality (even if it is itself fundamentally unequal – favouring the “first in” and the “best dressed”) which is such a central tenet of our liberal world. Think of the lines at banks, cinemas, nightclubs; everywhere the queue snakes its way, turning at acute angles, folding back over itself. This form of place making has a distinct effect: ‘Every step was taken to defer arrival, to keep the stranger walking backwards and forwards more or less on the spot. It is no accident that check-in counters of every kind use the same barrier system today. The object is the same: to transform the crowd into a linear queue, and to substitute for the protocols of meeting the discipline of waiting.’ (p. 67) So a ritual procession of subjects (in the sense of those subjection to the sovereign – that is to say, an object) is engendered over the notion of a “communion of subjects” (in the sense opposite sense of self-creation and inter-subjectivity). Here we are reminded of, amongst many other things, uBuntu and the trace leads on to ethics and elsewhere. ‘The coastline digitized and froze movement.’ (p. 68) This was done for Reason – and Carter makes the architectural connection here: one can ‘classify the make-believe charades of the lazaretto – and the no less arcane and cruel diversions of the border post, the immigration hall, and the customs house – as failed forms of sociability. But there is no doubt that these zones in which the ordinary ebb and flow of everyday life is artificially cut up and frozen are congenial to reason. Their proliferation of walls, doors, and barred prospects, and the new class of janitors appointed to look after them, find their counterpart in the philosopher’s desire to see every step of a logical argument.’ (p. 68) These doors are two faced, just as the patron god of the janitors who maintain them is. The mindless walking back and forth in the line, when coupled with this image of enclosed spaces and “barred prospects” reminds me immediately of a tiger or other zoo-held animal, pacing its cage nervously – the failed forms of sociability overflowing from the rational, reasonable, logical world of the West into other spheres: the natural, the irrational, the fluid, the alien. All around us is a victim of our help.

Seeing the queue for asylum in this way, we can now perhaps better understand the dissatisfaction ad outright rage expressed by the detainees; here is a tiger who can set fire to his or her enclosure. The human impact of policies of rationalisation/digitalization must again be emphasised. But this is exactly the point; we deal with the human. To treat the human as animal/material would simply be to repeat the reductionist error of the agents of incarceration; to say that the human, like the tiger, yearns for some kind of freedom (and this must surely be traced back to the natural/authentic state) and will do damage (to others, to themselves, to their environment, etc.) until this is achieved would miss the point. The human, unlike the tiger, does not need freedom. Not only this, but he or she does not need freedom to be free. Humans live in cells of their own construction, often built by virtue of the very freedom they have which they dare not face. We can do better than the tiger; we can do better than slinking from corner to corner of our little box because we had the unfortunate fate of meeting someone with bigger claws and louder roars. Great freedom can be found inside a very limited space indeed. ‘Here in the solitude of the cell, the author of Le Contrat Social could see the origin of society.’ (p. 69) Just as Jean-Jacques Rousseau saw detention as an opportunity to refine his ideas; so too did Byron’s Prisoner of Chillon, Mikhail Bakunin, and even Hitler use their times of confinement and solitude as opportunities for intellectual elucidation and empowerment. Yet we can do even better than this, for it is exactly this kind of clarification which is problematic. While in this case being applied to ideas rather than individuals, the damage done is the same in kind, the slow (inevitable?) digitalization of the analogue.

What, then, can we do? Well, we can not know what to do. This is the place to which you must (re?)turn before you can honestly start in any particular direction. How can you honestly evaluate the options if you already know what to do or, even worse, have already invested yourself in a particular path? When one is not alone but with some grouping, this approach can make ‘“not knowing what you are doing” a source of solidarity rather than weakness.’ (p. 113) A great example of this is displayed by Carter through this sketch:

L. R. Fitzmaurice, "Messrs Fitzmaurice & Keys Dancing for their Lives"

It is a drawing of two individuals who are forced to recognise that they do not know what to do and, in some final act of desperation and communion, they dance. It is at this juncture, then, that the waves of sound, the whole digital/analogue dichotomy, can finally be seen in relation to music and the dance. The human form is one that is constituted by and in vibration, rhythm, change. We’re stuck on the coastline, in quarantine, and we don’t really know what to do... so we (think we) can dance. We’re a step above simply walking to and fro in our cages, we dance and song [sic?] our way around.

So I pirouette away leaving this (mis?)quote from proto-feminist (amongst other things) Emma Goldman unravelling in the wake of my departure:

If I can't dance, I don't want to be part of your revolution.