_________ _______ ______ /___ ___\ / __ \ / ____\ / / / /__\ / / / / / / __ / / __\ / / / / \ / / / /__/ /__/ /__/ /__/ THE ANNIHILATION FOUNTAIN A JOURNAL OF CULTURE ON THE EDGE... TEXT ONLY - ISSUE #10 The Annihilation Fountain & TAF Copyright c 1997-99 Neil MacKay ISSN 1480-9206 http://www.capnasty.org/taf/ the_annihilation_fountain@iname.com CONTENTS: --------- *A REPORTER'S NOTEBOOK *MALLOWS FOR SELINE *FROM THE CAVE TO UPSILON ANDROMEDAE *POETRY BY RICHARD GROVE *IN ARMS WE TRUST *GUTTERVISION REVIEW *CONTRIBUTORS TO THIS ISSUE *********************************************************************** A REPORTER'S NOTEBOOK by TIM BULLARD *********************************************************************** Brown ribbon, its shiny metal spinning, neon crimson bead the size of an insect eye blinking as the sour smell of three-day-old noodles lingers from a slimey sink, rats scuddling, roaches doing the 40 and hurdling motels. You're crazy to go into journalism. Go to a shrink. Kill yourself. Go to a pastor. Get help. You're going to need it. "You're dead. You hear me? You're a dead man," the answering machine crackled. An editor used to always tell me that it's the threats you never get or hear about are the ones you should be frightened of. My reoccurring nightmare is that I'm working again as a reporter with a column at the Florence Morning News, and I get fired again - over, and over, and over. I still wake up in the middle of the night, twitching, then shaking in convulsions, cursing in gibberish and swinging at the wall. I lose sleep, tossing and turning, reviewing the circumstances of my firing in my head, and then when sleep drops its dark cloak over my consciousness, bringing stealth to my disconcerting thoughts, nightmares form like coal-black summer tornado clouds, the same ones about me being back at the paper getting fired all over again. There isn't a day that goes by that I don't think about the expose I wrote there on a famous S.C. bordello, an investigative piece killed by the managing editor, who told me not to ask any more questions about it. When FBI Agent Joe Younginer of Florence, the closest cop to Jim West I've ever met, busted a Trucker's Motel hooker in Marlboro County, S.C. on July 9, 1989, she was wanted for running a teen-age prostitution ring at a brothel where girls as young as 14 worked. She had allegedly fled San Francisco shortly before a March '88 police raid after a probe that began in May '87. After "America's Most Wanted" ran a 10-minute blip, 135 calls were received. "We got several calls from Washington," Younginer told me. "I went up to Bennettsville on a Sunday night. I didn't identify myself as an FBI agent." His only lead was the suspect was a blonde, short and was branded with a tattoo of a teddy bear. She was found off-work in a trailer at 2 a.m.When Younginer and another agent entered, he said there was a lineup and search, but nothing was uncovered. "When we got there, she had a housecoat on. She didn't like me," recalled Younginer. In the manufactured mobile home she wasn't alone -- there was a shotgun-- loaded. Seven years later: my managing editor's face was white and pink in splotches, his jowls flapping like the mast of a catamaran in a raging nor'easter. I had called in a talk show on WBTW TV-13 and asked the Democratic gubernatorial candidates what they thought about prostitution. The editor had been dragging his feet about running the story. I was almost fired for mentioning it all in a column, "Reporter's Notebook," and finally I was told not to ask any more questions about it. So when I got the threat, I reported it to the police, and I sent the state police a Freedom of Information Act request to see if they'd ever heard of the place. I mailed a story to an alternative rag, POINT, in Columbia, S.C. When the article "Pros & Cons" was published in February 1995, I was fired the next day for giving company property away. There was no pay for the story. After my follow-up in POINT, I sent the two stories to GOP Gov. David Beasley, a former Democrat born in Darlington County, and the next September the state police busted the joint, arresting four suspects. In Dovesville, just over the county line from Marlboro County in Darlington County, the state police busted Shady Pines on U.S. 52, barely mentioned in my POINT story, a place the Darlington Fire Chief characterized to me as "the only truck stop without gas pumps. " Arrested were two woman and a Florence dude. The second bust at Trucker's Motel netted the ex-mayor of McColl and four others. I found out when my mother called read the Charlotte Observer and asked, "Is this the story you got fired over?" The arrest made the USAToday briefs section. Most journalists are eunuch lifers, chained to their desks and IV'd to the Blue Cross. The voters removed the district solicitor in an election and replaced the Marlboro County white sheriff with its first black sheriff, a former Highway Patrolman. "Free Bird" is the state song in South Carolina, and the shag is the state dance. I finally got another job, and it's great interviewing Lynyrd Skynyrd backstage at the new House of Blues in North Myrtle beach, shaking hands with Sen. Strom Thurmond, getting a photo with Bush's VP and working in Myrtle Beach, the number-two tourist destination in the U.S., second only to Orlando. When Howard Finster visited Myrtle Beach, he told me, "Everything is so beautiful here. Ya'll have a lot to be proud of. You don't have to be called to do art. If you want to be an artist, you can be one. What you're going to do in this life is going to be you. You don't wait around to see if you're gifted to do art. If you love art and want to do art, get started on it." Beasley last year was at a GOP event on Kings Highway in Myrtle Beach, where George Washington rode once to what he wrote in his journals was what he suspected was a tavern in Little River. As two daily reporters finished doubleteaming the governor, I told him aside, "Thanks for helping me on the Trucker's Motel story. I appreciate it a lot." "I'm surprised somebody hasn't taken a shot at me yet," Beasley replied, "I know what you mean," I said. "Word up, G." He called the video poker industry a "cancer" in South Carolina, and in his State of the State Address, when he said the word prostitution, the audience started applauding. "And I hear it, and you hear it," he said, "the great refrain is that you can't legislate morality. So what do you call the body of law that forbids drug use and prostitution and a variety of human behaviors that you, the elected representatives of the people, do not deem appropriate for our state?" When I hear someone complain about journalists, I seethe with homicidal anger. Don't criticize us to my face. Do it behind my back, if you value your life. *********************************************************************** MALLOWS FOR SELINE by VASILIS AFXENTIOU *********************************************************************** Seline woke and said nothing, just lay there in the sheets, watching Dino carefully but not daring to make a sound for fear he would wake up. I am with you, he seemed to be saying, I will be with you from now on. I will be with you, Seline, forever. Seline turned over and closed her eyes. "You do not know how to give," he had said last night. "You try, but do not know how. And you must learn what you want in return." What was an artist doing in Athens without a job? What did she lose that she was searching for in a country only vaguely familiar to her? Memories. Ah yes. And endless stories: Parents who uprooted themselves and her from the island, many years back, to find a sure job and a decent life across the Atlantic. She had memories of running and playing by the water, memories of feeding herself and smelling the sea breeze, hearing it rustle through the pink and white flowers of the holyhock and the flat green leaves of the vine on the warm portch, and learning to swim and dress herself, even memories of learning to fish and sail. Seline Politou, once stuffer of fish, once assistant to her marine taxidermist father on a coastal village of the island, lowered her thorough-blue eyes, and overcome lifted the covers off herself and sat up on the edge of the bed. With effort she got up. Back then her father and she would turn dead, empty-eyed fish into handsome, live-looking, trophies that customers hung on their walls, for friends to admire, but eventually neglected. Seline now mulled over the many things she neglected, had not learned from the aberrant stares of the angled 'prizes'. The shower's warm water made her tingle. She closed her eyes, leaned back and opened her mouth. She spat out the refreshing stuff several times as the troubled night almost faded in lieu of what the day had to promise. But what did it promise? She slipped her jeans on, and went to the canvas. She didn't wake Dino up, but brought with her a mug of Nescafe' and settled in the chair. The pungency of the black brew briefly dispersed the persistent sleepiness in her head. She had seen the place again and again. She saw herself give a hefty shove to the deserted, wooden quay and row till she was well away. Then turn and look back. She savored the crisp, stretching splendor around their sea side home with the slumped, patched red roof, the airy porch, the flowers, the table. But for the vision inside her, she would never see the place that had first nurtured her again--a disco/restaurant now took its place. And she wanted to so much, more than anything else in the world. But her fingers today felt thick, clumsy, undisciplined. The tips were blistered with splotches of colors and the thumb cramped from fatigue. "How are your strokes proceeding?" Anastasi had asked her at the studio the other day, giving her a pat as she stretched the knotted muscles of her back. "Just fine." He had looked at her with those knowing eyes, weighing and regarding, as he stood in front of her, twice attempting to say something that he did not. She enjoyed watching his curiously delicate manner. He used his large hazel eyes to tell more than his tongue--but that morning she pretended to busy herself preparing, not looking at him for long, for she knew he was probing her. She had even evaded their usual patter. "You're not well?" he had finally said. "Not very. It'll pass." He put the stool and foot rest in place, shifted ebulliently with brisk, spirited movement. And he paused a little. He did not sit immediately, but delayed this moment of focus. He relinquished himself to it as thoroughly as to his muse. He was never hurried at this particular stage; he never rushed at this point. It was, she thought, a kind of liturgy in him, just as if he was performing, he was undividedly surrendering. Yet Anastasi could be as utterly grave or severe. He taught as an evangelist man preached. It was for this thoroughness, she imagined, that she felt esteem for him. Seline now raised the brush... ...The pristine break of day was balmy and bright and promised good voyaging. She took a hefty whiff of iodine, and her boyish bust bulged. The sail fluttered a bit and she pushed the tiler out to trim it. The bag swelled with salty breeze. The skiff leaped forward hissing as it skimmed the gentle brew like a gull's wing through air. The boat cleaved the sleek bay in two, tacking into the draught. Bit-by-bit the cove receded and soon melded into the checkerboard of gold-brown fields in the backdrop. Ahead spanned kilometers of sparkling Aegean. The small boat pranced onward banging on the ripening crests, lifting a coruscating spray and dozens of little morning rainbows... ...the reverie then scattered into glimmering fragments. She laid the brush back down on a desk scattered with sketches and empty white sheets of paper, a copy of Chosen Country by J. dos Passos, and Mary Magdalene portrayed weeping. She had heard Dino get up. She shut her eyes. The tiny garret closed in on her. A sudden vortex made her slump to one side. She caught herself from falling just in time, and sprung her slight, lean torso up straight on the uncomfortable chair. Two years, Anastasi had said. Two hard years for the eye to break in. "Don't give up," was his favorite infamous statement, "you come to me with a perfect sense of proportion." She whiffed the heavy blue smoke meandering into her cubby-hole study from the Gauloises Dino was smoking in the kitchen. Her throat tightened and her nostrils pinched. He was making Greek coffee. Its rich fragrance mingled, somewhere along the way, with the silty wafts from his cigarette and made her head whirl. Oblivious to her discomfort she could hear him murmuring/singing, " Take my hand/Take my whole life too..." to himself--the King was The King for Dino. She sat there listening to him sing. His torso yielded slightly, his back bowing a little with the lyric. Tall and nimble. Crude and rasping, the timbre seesawed, and she pondered what it ment. What was going on inside him to make this harmony come out? She turned away and listlessly stared at the only two paintings in the apartment, one was an Andrew Wyeth and the other a Norton Simon. They represented her wealth and were sent by her father, who had bought them in Astoria six months after Seline had departed from her home. She had crossed an ocean and a sea and had been living since her arrival in the ancient neighborhood of Plaka in a house of post-classical architecture that vaunted better days right after the war. The family was moderately wealthy and an old Athenian family, endorsing the old ways, trying hard not to be assimilated by the onrush of world changes fostered by satellite television and her media-nurtured generation. From childhood Seline had known that her future was already planned out. She would be sent to college, earn her degree, and marry a man with a solid profession, perhaps even somebody like her father. But all that had changed when one morning she left her home with rucksack bearing down on her thin shoulders and trust in a calling. And I will love thee still, my dear, Till a' the seas gang dry: Till a' the seas gang dry, my dear, And the rocks melt wi' the sun; came the Burns' hyperbole in the form of a tv commercial for scotch whisky from the kitchen where Dino sat. They had been together for almost a year, then she was twenty-three and he twenty-five. He was like nobody she had ever met before. He didn't worry any more about the years ahead than did cattle in green pastures. There was a primal manner in his air and a puerile spontaneity that uninhibited her. He had a careering way about him, like a twentieth century gladiator, all was intense sport, love-making, drinking, prancing his shiny second-hand Harley as if he were Marlon Brando and she the counter waitress. His family had been killed in a train disaster when he was four. He had been on his own since he was twelve, when he had done away with the source of his obstacles by hurtling over a glass-strewn wall. The opportunity had come, just before Christmas dawn, another inmate and he had scaled the shard-sowed barrier to freedom, bloodied and frost-bitten. Nightmares of the orphanage shattered his sleep often. A garage owner had offered him a job and Dino had taken his courage in both hands. Though he was still a boy then, he grew up fast to become a man. Yet the strong arms transformed to comforting wings at night. She could have let her life surrender into his, and part with all that tortured her, walk away from her own honeyed trial, into the tangy freedom his world promised... Meanwhile the canvas stood waiting. Elegantly and emmaculently silent, skillfully tormenting, crafting her pain, like picks etching away in her heart. It ignored her and the fever in her hands. Two years had passed four months ago, and still the hues did not fit--clashed like cymbals. The colors dragged slowly, sluggishly, producing a cacophony-- rebellion in parody. There were days when she painted adeptly, but few. She could not account for it; if she could only do that. Dino's deep, black eyes--she could feel it--were upon her from where he sat, this minute. She could sense their moot, fixed look. It had been a bad night, last night. A bad night for love and dreams. There had been depression in the dark of the room, a tiredness she felt more often than not. He had finally left her and gone to the other end of the bed, and she had lain alone and silent, and sirocco-warm tears ebbed out of her, scouring the hours by. The night faded once more whence it came. She massaged the thumb muscle to lessen the stiffness. Veins stood out like winding blue worms on her forearm and on the back of her hand. She dipped the brush into the dish of solvent. A straight dark line like clotted blood scarred the once soft tissue behind the finger nails. Pigment from the repeated scraping at the palette--a vice, an exercise in maintaining the wounds fresh and visible. All credits of the craft. All the visible signs of hard, diligent work. Texture no. Dino brushed by her on his way out. She smelled the tobacco on his clothes. He halted and stood by the door not speaking, then closed it behind him. "The canvas is like a man," came Anastasi's first words that decisive March noon. Seline's first lesson about love had begun. "He will want and want some more. You will hate and love him. Give yourself to him and he will give everything to you. 'Love is, above all, the gift of oneself',' someone once said." Anastasi had then begun to paint. Seline's last minute doubts dissolved with certainty. Each undulating stroke charged a longing that had so long been left yearning for its mate. The colors mingled and blended, entwined and braided, melded and plexed and fused weaving a dulcet onomatopoeia plenishing her every pore, progressing so ever softly turning, spinning longingly sheer spring air into a depth that had no end. The dappling of the tints echoed on, ignoring, conquering time. "The moan of doves in immemorial elms/And murmuring of innumerable bees--do you see him, do you see Master Tennyson's sigh in the strokes? You are in love, no?" Anastasi had remarked, putting the brush down. Yes. But the canvas before her today seemed unconcerned, aloof, like Dino. Both promised ecstasy, both wanted her soul. But she had not the strength to serve two masters. When she had awaken that morning it was a comfort to know that the entire day would belong to her to be alone. But by the time she got through mixing the easels, even the light burden of the brush was too much for her. She had not slept much during the night, she realized, for her eyelids drooped more often than not. She had a drifty feeling that made her dreamlike and lose herself. "Rest if you must,/but don't you quit." came Cushing's words from the poem Anastasi had drilled into her memory two years before. Finally, she put the palette down. The morning sun rays dabbed the wall next to her with a craggy segment of column from the Parthenon beyond. She found herself glide into oblivion on the chair. She dozed. She was overwhelmed by her dreaming of her mother, and felt happiness. She was seldom like this, not ever since she had met Dino. But now, like a torrent, the cumulated snags in their relationship suddenly all deluged upon her, and she was surprised that she did nothing to stop the onset. She recollected afresh the quarrel the night before, recalled the options remaining--put to her; about the painting, she could not remember what had been said to be wrong with it; possibly it was not the painting; she did not know. She retained only the oppressive, mostly mute, suffocation of Dino's demands. Now, at this recollection she began to tremble for an instant, uncontrollably, and gasp for more air to enter her lungs. It had been a turbulent episode, the worst; like an Aegean August gale, with only a hint of warning, that drowns one unsuspectingly. She was sinking, she told herself. She was feeble against his wants--whatever these were. And perhaps the giving on her part would never quench the needing on his.... The fingers felt better. She dipped the brush once more and waited. And the vision came again, this time urging and stronger than before. She picked up the palette and gave, yielding herself to the strokes. There was a knock on the door that she did not hear. She was solely aware that the mellifluous strokes did not come from the brush but from her. Like heartbeats, they were as much hers as her heart's. A presence was there, completing a metamorphosis. Unlike before, she knew, the threshold now was scaled, the union of her and her dream realized. She painted, all of her, and did not stop her care because now she could not. Like the pulsing in her chest, her will no longer participated in its existence. A being had been freed, and free it reigned over a kingdom of two. The knocking stopped, the footsteps died softly away behind the closed door, and the room glowed in the autumn morning with Seline and her island home, her very own place in the spring, to look at and be close to wherever forever. *********************************************************************** FROM THE CAVE TO UPSILON ANDROMEDAE by RON CALLARI *********************************************************************** Two recent thought-provoking scientific discoveries have recently come to light. The fact that they occurred the last year of the 20th century and moments before the dawn of the new millennium may be purely happenstance. It is curious, however, that these revelations have uncovered new evidence about missing links in mankind’s past lineage and his future heritage. The former relates to the findings of a Portuguese anthropological dig that unearthed a hybrid skeleton suggesting interbreeding between the Neanderthal and the Cro-Magnon species. And the latter is based on the discovery by NASA astronomers in Hawaii who have clear evidence that a budding solar system is in formation around a nearby star. Could these divergent events be synchronistic in nature? Might they provide us with some auspicious message that has only taken 10 million years to reach us? And if so, what is the portent of this long-awaited dispatch? When you think about the juxtaposition of these two monumental findings, the opening scene of Stanley Kubrick’s classic movie 2001 comes to mind; i.e. [close-up, center stage]: Joe Caveman heaves his primitive tool to the heavens and it transforms itself [wide shot] into tomorrow’s spacecraft. Evolutionists and Creationists could have a field day with both these events, but I would venture a guess that the greater concern lies in that Portuguese ditch. Neanderthals are the ancestors that nobody wanted. Believed up to now to be a separate species from modern man, they were physically and mentally deficient. They were stooped shouldered and arthritic. They never developed a larynx , so they never had anything to say. The Cro-Magnon model on the other hand was equipped with voice boxes, which led eventually to speech and the formation of brain patterns that became constructive (or destructive, dependent on your point of view) thought. If non-consensual interbreeding (as I am sure, rape and pillage was the sport of the day) occurred between the two– does this put us one step closer to fraternizing with the ape? Even without this discovery, scientific fact has modern man sharing 98% of our DNA with chimpanzees. I wonder if Barry Scheck is onto this case. Flash back some 10 million years and a star is born. Upsilon Andromedae (code name: HR4796) first came on the scene as a result of a cloud of interstellar gas collapsing. Flash forward to 1999 and we are now witness to this young star moving into adulthood and actually starting its own family of planets. According to astronomers, this finding represents the missing link in the study of how planetary systems are born and evolve. Up to now we’ve seen baby pictures of new stars and we are knowledgeable of middle age stars because we circle one. It was not until the discovery of HR4796, that we were able to capture our first glimpse of a new solar system in progress. To put this in perspective, our Sun is a couple of billion years old, and it also took about 10 million years after its creation before Earth and its sister planets evolved. With these epiphanies comes reflection. Are we as some believe the blink-of-an-eye inhabitants of one of several specks of dust circling an ordinary star at the edge of an average galaxy among 125 billion others in the universe? After all we could fit 1000 Earths inside Jupiter and 1000 Jupiters inside the Sun. And if our beginnings share common ground with lower forms of life does that reduce our stature in the cosmos even more? Maybe, maybe not! What these two mind-boggling events may be telling us is that we haven’t lived yet. That’s right- what is 2000 years when you think of it , 5000 – 40,000 for that matter? It is not that we pale in size, but that we lack time. Think of it this way. In the Middle Ages we lived in a spiritual realm that was governed by religious leaders and other-worldly dogma. We were told that mankind was at the center of the universe, surrounded by the entire cosmos, for one solitary purpose, to win or lose salvation. And while this world view was adhered to for hundreds of years it began to erode when the interpreters of God were found fallible and non-trustworthy. What followed was a movement from spiritualism to individualism – a dependence on one’s own ability. We shed our spiritual cloak by taking matters into our own hands, by focusing and controlling Earth’s resources to create a economic security to take the place of the one that we lost. We gradually became preoccupied. We have become a culture of work- obsessed individuals who have left very little time for the evolution of spirit . The question of why we were alive and what was going on here spiritually was pushed aside and repressed. James Redfield in The Celestine Prophesy sums it up by saying, "Working to establish a more comfortable style of survival has grown to feel complete in and of itself as a reason to live, and we’ve gradually, methodically, forgotten our original question…We’ve forgotten that we still don’t know what we’re surviving for." And now as we approach the dawn of a new millennium, you can actually see a yearning to return to the ethereal realm. Our fixation with economic security is not enough and there are numerous movements afoot that are focusing once again on spiritual evolvement. And this entire process only took 500 years of this most current millennium to transpire. It took 500 years to discard what we didn’t like, try something new and then gravitate back to the center again; this time, in hopes of making it better. Seems like we could have done all that during the course of a good meal and the right mix of dinner guests; i.e., historians, philosophers, economists, religious leaders and a couple of good comedians. But in the grand scheme of things, this all did occur within the blink of an eye. Because it is time that is the great leveler, not size. So what the Neanderthals and Upsilon Adromedae might be telling us is that we are just on the cusp of understanding our link to the cosmos. They have helped us locate a couple of more pieces to mankind’s jigsaw puzzle. And like all good puzzles, with each added part, the big picture begins to unfold. So even though we may perceive ourselves as drifting far in stature from the center of the universe, their 10 million year message (talk about snail mail) might be that it is not the size that counts, it has more to do with the fact that we’ve got a long way to go baby! *********************************************************************** POETRY by RICHARD GROVE *********************************************************************** DEEP IN THE DRAMA OF WINTER DAWN WAS ATTEMPTING TO BREAK Some twenty miles or so straight ahead the road leapt the muddy river and passed through its sheltering fringe of bush to strike out over the sheer waste of heath-like country side covered with low, creeping trees - p. 15 The wind which had been gently soughing through tree tops had free sweep there and was building into a fury. An exceedingly fine dust of powdery ice-crystals began to fly. One could hardly see the snow - p. 15 but it was there and growing. The wind came in fits and starts, out of the hollow of the north-west with the engulfing dark and ever thickening granular shower of blinding snow. - p 16 The darkness was inky-black but a faint luminosity in the clouds above revealed the canyon and the swaying trees. - p.19 The crystalline snow was falling in ever denser waves. A relentless wind threw it sideways into one’s face. The ground was covered now - p.16 deep in the drama of winter. The sun was nearing the horizon - p.32 A dog struck up a dismal howl - p 19 from the invisible dawn. Morning was attempting to break through the illusion of, forever black. A found poem from pages 15, 16, 19 and 32 of “Settlers of the Marsh” by Frederick Philip Grove a long lost adopted great uncle. sough?ing (suffing) - To make a soft murmuring or rustling sound. By Richard Grove %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% Accidental Collocations Of Randomly Scattered Atoms Man, are you the result of an accident of the fate of a few atoms? Are you the product of causes which had no prevision for the ends that atoms would achieve? Is man’s origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs nothing more than the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms? Are all the labours of the ages, are all the devotion, all the inspiration, are all the noonday brightness of human genius, destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system as it comes tomorrow, in how many billions of years to the theoretical inevitability of implosion? Is the human enterprise an accidental collocation of randomly scattered atoms that will come to an inevitable end as the reverse of the big bang collapses in on all? Must the whole of man’s achievement inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins? All these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are nearly certain. Is man’s life brief and powerless? Will sure doom fall pitiless and dark on him and all his race blind to good and evil, reckless with destruction, as matter rolls on its relentless way? No for nothing can thwart God’s purpose, man. Nothing can interrupt the inevitability of good as reflected and expressed in love through man. All matter based theories will though collapse in on them selves as predicted as truth comes to light and spiritual man comes to bare. By Richard Grove col?lo?cate ( k¼l“…-k³t”) v. tr. col?lo?cat?ed col?lo?cat?ing col?lo?cates 1. To place together or in proper order; arrange side by side. [Latin colloc³re colloc³t- com- com- loc³re to place; See locate ] %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% CEREUS IN FIRST ORANGE LIGHT OF MORNING With a powerful force the cereus blossoms spewed heavy perfume into the first orange light of morning, luring the thousands of moths and flies as they whizzed by. The scent of the cereus with its two edges – one a vanilla-like sweetness, the other a curdling – so permeated the air that it could be tasted on the tongue as though it were lapped from a bowl. - p. 152 On this side of morning, the world seemed quieter, as though time had slowed down. The soil smelled damp and rich. There was the buzzing of insects, the flutter of wings and the sounds of a breeze circulating earthly odours. - p. 150 The grapefruit tree trembled. Cold dewdrops flew with the breeze like a sudden rain shower in the dim morning light of dampness. - p. 173 by Richard Grove Found poem from “Cereus Blooms at Night” by Shani Mootoo %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%5 5:20 PM TORONTO An endless stream of people poured off the eastbound King Street car at University Ave. Everyone flushed down the subway stairs as if into a gutter. A current of undulating bodies created an undertow that no individual could resist. Bodies coursed to the subway through underground tributaries the arteries of the city bobbing bodies innocently drawn to their predetermined destinations. Captured trout in a can throbbing, not speaking hardly acknowledging each other’s body-pressed existence mute to the trauma of vulnerability numb to pure unquestioned anonymity. Faces refusing to smile, stared into the confines of close trying hard to ignore their self denial buried as deep as humanly possible in their private knowledge that they will sooner or later spill from the urban river into the comfort of their own pond. By Richard Grove %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% TREE FELLED: All is well that lands well. Two men, Tai and Bill, shall I call them, with confidence chopped down a tall, grey, dead tree in the country. Damn, it fell and hung on the hydro lines that foolishly planted themselves in the way. Calculations were poor. Execution was worse. Egos were only minorly bruised, until woman friend stumbled on blunder, and a passerby stopped in dusty black pickup, to see what the city slickers had done. A bit more, this time red-faced, swift chopping with the same, perhaps foolish, confident strikes. Branches were freed. Lines stayed up. Egos renewed. Male bonding strutting resumed. All is well that lands well. By Richard Grove *********************************************************************** (FRAGMENT OF THE NOVEL) IN ARMS WE TRUST by VASILIS AFXENTIOU *********************************************************************** Part 1: The Marathon Gene: The Undying Flame in The Quality of Grace It is not because other people are dead that our affection for them grows faint, it is because we ourself are dying. --Marcel Proust Chapter 1 [Partial information was given to me by the people themselves. The rest was acquired from the archives of the hedron, the damaged facet of what remains of the second Hexahedron, of Starseed, as it calls itself. The montage of what follows is mine. P.P.] A cozy new world. Unite to obliterate identity. The irony made Chickbrow quiver in his e-car seat. The mockery charred and chipped away at his innermost tenets. But the promoters of all that went wrong with the world had not the vision. They had not the heart and virtue freedom needs to breathe and be. So, they choked freedom. Smothered it under the guise of 'planetary civism'. Their brave new children attempted what wise men dread: Utopia through unilateral information dominance promoted by dogma and arms, drugs and computer bondage. The new order of things to come was to be a supranational, an incorporate Earth, run not by communism or capitalism, but by the I-Soldier. The by-product? A form of totalitarianism that would have stunned Orwell. Chickbrow had mastered well the crumbling volume on his shelves. Given to him by his grandfather Cleon. Chickbrow had not neglected any of the other's words. "There must be an antipode ... " the old man had told him, back then in the thirties. Chickbrow was still in his teens then. "It's the pivotal point of any kind of Democracy. There have to be either bona fide opposing political parties, or nations -- at least a bilateral model. Communism may have posed a threat to us after the second great war, but as well had been a check and balance on our Democratic system: what Democracy needs in order to be healthy and workable. "When the Soviet Union collapsed, and China adopted the Chart of Provisional Free Enterprise, the West fell in the very selfsame rut a score of others had fallen throughout history. "No threat. "No contention. "No controversy or opposition. "Presumption. "Smugness, conceit, coquetry and self adoration. "I just call it being spoiled stupid. Democracy, David Chickbrow, has to have tough and durable debate to survive. None of that patronizing and humoring, superciliously cute and 'darling' stuff between Republicans and Democrats -- two sides of the same dollar. "No variance. "No ability, or margin, breathing space, to adapt to. "Zero evolution. "Extinction. "A lot of agreeing and splendoring in profusions of endearments may be fine for erotic escapades, sweethearts, heartthrobs and sweet old ladies -- but for Democracy ... they decay it. Spoil it. "It happens to countries just as easily as it does to people. To young or old nations. Particularly to ones that have never felt the stomp of a conqueror's boot on their native soil. Have not endured defeat. Not suffered humility in a long, long time. So, forgot what it's like. Vanity, like that in a Congress of aristocracy and a Senate of gentry, or an Executive branch of an unchecked and self-appointed oligarchy, is a flaw easy to detect, but ornery as hell to rectify. Because it suits the handful who governs. Sweetens their palate. And they’ll fight with rabid fury any and all change threatening their post. "Power is never easy to step down from, David. But in the history of mankind there has never, never, been enlightenment in power. Never has -- a smidgen even of -- good come out of it. Except a dominion's own degeneration. Its fall from within itself -- like the dominion of dinosaurs." The Sachem, what they used to call grandpa -- a Ph.D. in Social Science and an Assistant Professorship at Harvard Government School seemed as good testimonial as any -- taught one thing and lived another. He had done this to survive the anachronistic despotism that somehow crept in and managed to rule unchallenged over half of the world for nearly half a century. The wealthy half. "Before it had become through-and-through ripe," the old man had told him, "and impose itself by force in 2020, tyranny had been noiselessly but resolutely slithering like a pit viper closing in. Oppression had been smoldering like smokeless coal before the flash of kindling for more than a full twenty years. "And when the tinder burst to flame, the utopia of a 'new world order of things' turned into a world incubus. Abreast of the rise of the three camps: internationalism, nationalism and fundamentalism came the threat of international gray zones where law had no effect, nationally or otherwise. Here, David, globallized organized crime burgeoned in the form of economical, defense-hysteria, mass-media, Mafia, drug-digital, nuclear, biochemical terrorism." Chickbrow's grandfather in all modesty was set on besetting his damage over the greatest number of top honchos over the longest period. He was part Hammurabi, part Confucius and Alexander, a Che and a Nathan Hale. But most of all he was true American. To the marrow, a Brave. "Babylon, Persia, Rome were not brought to their knees by conquerors from outside. They were vanquished, devastated, from within their own stockades. First by narcissism and self-induced conspiracy, then by biting off more than they could chew. By sheer snow-balling. Through an avalanche of their own over-confidence. Soviet communism lasted a little over seventy years, Yankee capitalism almost two-hundred-and-fifty... " The third millennium, Chickbrow reflected, was going to be full of surprises. His own removal from the space team had been one. And racism had everything to do with it. Contempt for minorities had been another. It seemed there are cycles in history in which some form of intolerance prevails speechlessly under a benign guise. The circumstances, in this century as well as the previous one, were favoring the stooped-head, the post-Hi-Tech informer, the corporate yes-man, the company infiltrator. Definitely not the redman. The few of his kind that were left. *** "Where am I?" she asked. She could not suppress a shiver. Her heart fluttered wildly. She was not present, yet she was not elsewhere or totally unaware. Reaching out with a tendril of thought she merely perceived eruptions and flashes of what seemed to be a tunnel of beaten gold. It shone intermittently in alternation with deep expulsions. Prismatic needles of tincture emanated from the labyrinthine cavern and from a carved, melanite-embroidered, crystalline fissure up ahead. An enormity of space was ahead and beyond. It swirled in buffed-sable and russet-scarlet. A vortex generated of dancing lusters ... of wizardry, was swallowing her. Her stomach lurched. She took a quick glimpse behind her, down the tunnel. She felt her chest constrict. I must survive, she thought. She had to learn a great deal about light, strength and wisdom. About Godly things, too. She purled along. She surveyed for the mode of her displacement. The principle behind it. No bearing. No point of reference. No air stirred by. No resistance or drift, only a silent disengagement, then a discharge, a release through a milieu she could not relate to or identify. The tunnel was uninterrupted and invariant, slanting every-which-way ... and there was this smell. She sniffed, acrid and sweet, stale too ... the smell of old suns and mutated nebulas, all in vast, spanning reaches. Her nostrils felt dry, her muscles taut; she thought her forehead burned with hot sweat; and her brain cringed in strokes of insane conjectures. Although her senses worked, her being did not possess form, but was part of one -- no, two, and more -- of many, many tinklings drifting towards and encircling her, hues wandering and opening like blooming buds, scintillating softly-singing glimmers right at the edge of this fracturing night. They were as one and difficult to separate. One of her eyebrows she imagined rose as if in response, a queer gesture in a study of rapture and despair. Among the bursts of movement, of star-glow, she glimpsed something enormous and motionless. A deep stupendousness of no edges. A volume. Glowing patterns circuited to and from it. She drew herself together obediently and became still as a helplessly poised animal. She then shrunk into a distilled point. "Who am I?" she asked. And knew that instant. *** He raised the Vessel over his head whispering prayers. When he opened his eyes he saw the ball of brightness. A fist of radiance that seeped through the domed ceiling of his church as though it were absent and streamed down to the gold Hallow Chalice he held. His hands trembled as the Vessel commenced to glow from within. It flooded his church with thick silver light. "My Lord -- " He shuddered, let go, and recoiled. The Chalice remained. The light changed to molten gold, welled over the Vessel's lip, and trickled onto the Altar below, to the floor. And the light rose from its knees. "A message," it said. "Come. The Bond of the Covenant is Opened!" Then in a more distant but clear voice, "'For sin shall not have dominion over you: for ye are not under the law, but under Grace.'" The Vessel hovered in clear, empty air. "Miracle! A Miracle!" the congregation echoed and ... ... awoke Lukas with a start. The sheets were wet and salty from his sweat. In retrospect to Father Lukas Mettropoulos's dream that night, more than a quarter of a century before -- and a quarter of the way around the world -- a similar lamentous Holly Mass and thrum of chanting were just reaching an apotheosis. *** [As recorded from the opening of the archives of Starseed. P.P.] The Book of Peace Pandect of Concord, Proviso of Intendments. Intendment 1: Faith, Love and Virtue are chaotic pockets. They pose paradoxes, of counter- or non-entropic, direction-giving configurations common to civilization-forming processes as are Dreams, Hopes, and Visions. Whosoever directly or indirectly conduces, or in any mode, plan, or method, endorses the uninstituted and impending encroachment upon these six pinnacles, as well as the eminence of Grace, shall be expelled and ostracized, in the isolation rendered by temporal tributaries, for the period commensurate to the degree of the abuse. Furthermore, the above Distinctions of Trust shall be shielded by the prudent Ward of Reason we call Olympion [The Head Chair on the Primary Planet, Olympus, in the Sirius group colonized by Orion migrants. P.P.], and not be ranked second in priority to that of opportunism or any aspect thereof -- no matter the encumbrance. Intendment 2: It is further intended, to encourage peace in our Galaxy, that we now acknowledge the existence, but control as well, of the Intrinsic Power-Calling from within us for actions of armed antagonism, behavior of lethal aggression, and other varied manner of injurious and harmful hostility. These wanton but inevasible and primordial reserves of entropic assertion shall not be allowed to trample on our or on others' rights and liberties, but be given vent by the re-establishment of the archaic, but noble and incorrupt, competitions of the Olympus planetary system: The source-cell of enlightenment throughout our Galaxy, and further. This Calling of Primitive Ambition and Dare shall be thus re-directed and shall abide by the Regulations of The Games, leading to zero-claim and non-destruction of opponent's/competitor's persona, world, or planetary system. Contrarily, it shall be conducted in such a way as to honor, above all, the value, dignity and the inalienable benefits of peace for all of Life. The Games of The Power Triad, Business-Politics-Religion, referred simply as The Civil Games, in contrast to The Athletic Games, shall be molded and modeled after the contests of the Archaic Olympiads, the original twelve civilization-bearing, civilization-casting worlds (Zeus, Athena, Hera, Aphrodite, Apollo...) had attained to consummate under the fountainhead guidance of the Olympion of Olympus. These Games shall have the Golden Spiral of The Galaxy, in contrast to The Golden Wreath of Laurel for sports events, as the highest distinction of honor. Fair play shall prevail -- as all two hundred million worlds have partaken to uphold and respect -- and this shall be regarded as the summit for, and of: survival through variance, cooperation through growth, and coexistence through communication, all instituted peaceably in good will and faith and in efforts to encompassing all Galactic civilizations. *** [Thirty years before, 2022. P.P.] ... Steamy incense, burning candles, and the scent of olive oil wafted viscously in the chapel's atmosphere, billowing like blue gossamer over bowed heads. The baritone voice of the leading chanter attained a crescendo. Three measures later the bowed heads cut into the somber solo in compressed resonance and the twilight of dusk trembled on the stained window-panes. Through an old, rusty grate under the chapel's Alter, the subsonics of the hymn spilled into the hollow earth. Several among the innumerable cavitous spaces below and nearest the reciting source acted as resound chambers interfering constructively to effectively amplify the flurry of the voices into a swelling booming tumult. Like thunder, it roared, racing at the speed of sound through kilometer upon kilometer of passages within the bowels of empty mountain-core ... Above, the thick smells hung vaporously in the air and permeated throughout. The solemn counterpoint rose from antiquity's end to console, like a clement blanket of faith, the Mount of Holiness: A grand city of twenty monasteries spread upon a peninsula all of its own. Compliant to time, it propagated life and faith of a thousand years tranquilly and traditionally into the twenty-first century. The Holly Mountain ran its length amidst the most fertile and green of the three Hellenic peninsulas of Macedonia like the backbone of a supplicating Titan. As the chorus of celibates to the right of the iconostasis faded, that to the left strengthened. A somber and imposing requiem reverberated throughout this Fidei Defensor of Orthodoxy. A forte of hallelujahs thundered amidst isolated, towering monasteries echoing over and covering this untresspassed, autonomous territory of northern Hellas. Thirty square miles of holy land resounded in psalms. No human or domestic animal of feminine gender had stepped upon the sacred soil. Here, the Holly Mary and a handful of saintesses were the only depictions of, and references to, the female sex. On these premises male monks did all chores, from mending to cooking, cobbling and cleaning house to washing clothes and conveying to new generations the Divine Ceremonials and Arts of the Church. No one was simply a monk; everyone contributed a functional and necessary allotment of work each day. And when the daily tasks and jobs were complete, praying and services commenced. Hard, rigorous, exhausting dedication. Enough to suffice and atone for the sins of man. The treasures of this Holiest of Mountains came in many forms: wood-carvings of intricate and delicate designs, ornate prayer stands, liturgical crosses, Episcopal thrones, lecterns and chests. Along with the paintings, carvings and the libraries of parchment, silk and paper manuscripts of the Holly City, precious reliquaries were kept in the sanctuaries. Also, numerous liturgical vestments of exquisite hand-woven and gold-embroidered craftsmanship were preserved. Amidst this wealth of arts and sanctity one could not help but wonder what more had been watched over? The oldest among the monasteries, Xenophontos and Lavra, over a millennium in age, were ones endued with gravest respect and most reverend cognizance. They were the heart of the Faith. Beneath their grandeur of buildings and halls of old wealth and immaculate decor existed a maze of catacombs and vaults. They hid and protected the fortunes of the vanquished Byzantium. Within the Earth's crust lived still the legacy and mythical treasures of an empire, maintained by secrecy and observance. Only few knew of its whereabouts, of its incredible presence. Fewer still experienced themselves its revelation. Yet, while the Services inundated above, treachery preponderated below. The confidant of the bishop's council froze in his tracks at the din. Then dismissed it with the waving of a hand. The maverick look in the red-rimmed brown eyes now shifted into a waxing skittishness. His gait quickened while the storm-lamp in his right hand threw a tottering giant's shadow on the dank dirt walls after him. "Down there. Go!" he urged himself. His hawkish nose almost ensnared the frayed piece of marked cloth he had been grasping in his left hand. His eyes darted back and forth from it to the forking of the tunnel not far ahead. "To the right, monk -- the Lord is always to the right, muddled monk," he hissed, and broke out into a braying, raw laughter. The renegade confidant took it upon himself to abscond with a mere speck of the subterranean acres of gold, silver, precious stones, icons; with a mere drop from a venerated sea of preserve of the richest dynasty in the history of mankind. But when he confronted cavern upon cavern of innumerable kingly ransoms of the purest, biggest, rarest jewels; a legacy of the finest etched and embellished cutlery and crockery, artifacts and weaponry; the regal treasure troves of forty-five generations of emperors, royal courts and their heirlooms -- the covetous monk was simply overwhelmed. As madness saturated and delirious by the opulence surrounding him the raw-boned driven man now ventured into a far cavern, uncharted as many were not, and seeking refuge within its bowels confronted a vista no man everbefore beheld. Into a thicket of monumental abnormalities and agonizing irregularities, of violating symetrical perfections and aberrations commiserate to a starting pupil of Chinese, who must disentangle ideograms by the handfuls. In a frenzy to escape Nemesis he had encroached upon what paranoia must have construed to him to be the very kingdom of Heaven -- or Hell. Tears of terror and anguish swelled in his red-rimmed eyes, mouth drooled and nostrils flared, and his throat pained from uncontrollable contractions brought on by excruciating efforts to let out a scream. When his sight grew fully accustomed to the thin pink light and delicate beams that dimly emanated from everywhere and nowhere -- augmented by giant fountains and geysers of pulsing violet -- the deep yellow glows and intermittent flashes of diamond-burst brilliance before him, he finally reckoned that he no longer stood in man-made tunnels. About him spanned a space not unlike the outside. And this vastness had above it a sky -- studded with the heavenly bodies of night -- but alive and stirring, flecks and speckles that left in their course rainbows and motion and soft scintillating tinkling sing-song echoes. He looked upon this expanse, and before his mind went into utter shock, he glimpsed upon towering solid contours: of pyramids and spheres, upon an inner city of polygons and polyhedrons -- and in front of him a glow that was a woman. A distant almost familiar drone thrummed on as he lingered there dazed. Catatonic, the intruder, lumberingly, turned about and exited. As he did, behind him materialized a solid rock wall, eradicating any indication of an entry way ever being present. *** [From the archives of Starseed supported by the decoding of Linear A, the Disk of Phaestos and the Great Pyramid of Gizeh. P.P.] ... On a bizarre vast edge between two voids, one of the Universe the other of the indefinable Erebus beyond, Residua of Essence spin in felicity, counter-spin in enchantment and unfold progressively more pronounced. They intently and enthusiastically shift back and forth -- among their supplementary domiciles and rivulets of edifice-plasma -- uniquanta of knowledge, insight and lore. It took them only a small fraction of a hyposec to assimilate the new and utterly unexpected bit of data of information inflowing through the elliptical space-time curvatures that furrow the vacuum of the eleven dimensions available to them. But they greet and accept with loving eagerness the embrace of the extraordinary and magnificent experience of the joining of life -- a new and most integral 'being' -- to them once more. They and the flowing edge complete the vortex, the revolving sphere-shell, Front of Creation which, along with its angular motion, has been traveling radially outward at the speed of light since its inception. It would have taken the Front of Creation, at its current curvature of largeness and speed of rotation, thirty-seven billion years to achieve a single circuit about the blue glowing hub, the core that is the sweeping blister of the Universe. The multitudes Residua of Essence would have in effect been termed souls, till of this late happening, this instillment of joyous hearkening, when a passage of a ripple of force imbued itself within them bridging the domain of spirit- and faith-essence to that of energy, form and matter of the Universe Proper, entelecheia your Aristotle calls it. And that which had once been invisible and immaterial, but aware, aethereal ambiance began slowly to acquire the prominence and salience of its kind and shape, that is, its former nature ... ... In the very start, the first color shifts had been detected by our equatorial astronomers at a distance a hundred-fold beyond that of your Virgo constellation and that of Vereniki. They had been in the form of a traveling peripheral ripple heading toward neighboring galaxies omni-directionally -- a vast sphere shrinking back onto its source. Back to the very asymptotic, geometricalless and temporal source of Creation. The color of the stars this ruffling undulation had been leaving in its wake was an almost stand-still pinkish-white brilliance in the spectrum shift. It not only showed that the Universe had completely and unexpectedly begun to slow its expanding, but, by further observation and straight forward calculation, it was discovered that it had begun doing so for an extensive time. The steady rate of expansion, which for thousands of millennia had served as a heat sink, had ceased long-long ago ... [What analysis did not show, however, until later, was that the edge of the Universe, the Front of Creation, had initiated the awesome operation of braking four billion years back. P.P.] ... Unthinkable quantities of trapped force [Starseed goes on] were been introverted; reconciled and re-conducted in a spontaneous manner counter to the original path of their impetus. Against the grain of their nascent momentum. Instead of turning order into less order, the internal pressures had reversed, compoundingly, releasing free magnetic monopoles. The preserving mechanisms innate to the Front of Creation had at this point collapsed; already several rents were being torn in the fabric of the void and were now made accessible to Residua of Essence. Elsewhere, within this fringe, the Vanguard of Creation, point-pockets of internal pressures were mounting to those experienced in the Boundary, turning upon their fountainhead to cause a rip in the Plank wall. They induced a laceration into chaos ... and spawned small split cells, bifurcations, of fractalian repercussions in place of anomalies, but with asymmetries: ports of forthwith temporal bonds for the reconstituting Residua of Essence. Beyond this point our space, time and matter fundamentally broke down. What the Residua of Essence peeked into, over this limit, on the outlying extreme side of Creation, was the birthing of a new Universe of the furthest completeness ... ... Meanwhile, the wealth of might, at once loosened in the braking Universe Proper, sought instantaneous and new direction. And not only by revivifying the Residua or violating accessibility across Plank time. Sentient life scattered all over the Cosmos, along with being sapient entities of identity, of thinking, feeling and ken, were, as well, entities of direction. Entities that could use up further this excess energy. Coolly fuse it into action, assimilate it into motion and mold it into fractals of organized and functioning matter. These organic assemblages, sapient transducers, manipulated raw force -- even of unrestrained pressures -- to give it vector of focus, adjustment and design. Once, the Residua of Essence too had been such. Corporeal beings that could forge from concepts by their acumen, spirit and will-strength alone: could steer their realizations and translate them into palpable action through their physical bodies and could aim their course tangibly as well as immaterially. This initiating of the direction-giving process was referred to by them as reflection and insight, expectation and sagacity, prudence and wisdom, verity and belief. And now, they jubilated in its reacquirement, rejoiced in the regeneration of their corporeality in the tenfold. But often, as well, the outcome, or, the prime consummate and culminator of a portion of this pent-up and undirected loose energy, had invariably been the fury of malcontent, the insobriety and overindulgence the sweet brew of power excites and then goads within us, the surge and rage of raw violence, the vehemence of dissension, and the hand-released arrow that swiftly and pointedly darts for the unsuspecting heart of peace .... *** [The teacher’s obituary for his killed in action, older son, Kyrillos, during the last invasion attempt against his homeland in 2002 by descending, starving and banded Caucasus tribes, Turanian hordes and Tartar-Mongol legions armed by Glixxon’s rising World Confederation. Arms in exchange for Black and Caspian Sea oil. From my journal, 15 August 2052. P.P.] "‘These were our children who died for our/lands.../ But who shall return us the children? -- Rudyard Kipling, THE CHILDREN .... ’ " ... this is my promise and pledge," the teacher writes, "my covenant of testimony and grief for my own lost and unreturned child, Mr. Kipling. To the bringer of holocausts, to the shamer and exterminator of dignity and kindness in man and upon planet Earth, to the trespasser of the limits, to the non-citizen of humanity I vow my non-alliance and my non-affiliation. I commit my disunion with and divorce from him. More. I firmly establish my dissension with and division from him. This, I promise to the breaker of the covenant between man and peace. Further ... " ... Past oppression and ignorance, indigence and beggary sired violence, passed it down to the present and strive to keep it bustling into the far-deep future ... " ... Violence wroughts up anarchy. Or welts dictators," the text I have unearthed goes on to say. "The stipend of either is misery, the rack of the mind and soul, isolation, exile and death to those who side with enlightenment and freedom, roots and balance ... " I read these pages the teacher had written one half century before, again and again, and in my search I see yesterday's questions become today's, today's questions the future's, and the future's become a distressing way of life. More questions come: " ... On one hand there is this suffusion of talk on amity and labels about peace, accord upon all Earth. On the other all this High Definition and Dolby Surround Sound of blood-surfing. "Why this worshipping of weaponry? "Why this eliciting of respect by instilling fear, by ingraining death-and-rage? Why this flair for mass-expiration in 'best sellers', this propaganda in praise of a state of perpetual war and siege -- in the warring hero -- capitalized in animations on the monitor, motion pictures on the big screen? "Why this thrust of thirst for Inquisition- and Nazi-like tortures that daunt, instruct and institute terror and minister mistrust, paranoia and neurosis, epilepsy and murder into the innocent, sensitive and impressionable souls of our children today with each such book read and each such film seen around the world, children that are brainwashed and are destined to grow up to become the hard-hearted, senseless barbarians of a boot-camp world tomorrow? "Why this paean to hate? "Why this trundling paradox? "Is it only the paradox of naiveté? "Where is the source of this child molester? "Who and what generates the oxymoron? "How is this condition licensed to propagate and reach our children -- throughout the globe? "When did it begin to perforate as part of their reality? "Why children? "In place of marbles and dolls, rector sets and chemistry sets, microscopes and telescopes -- an endless variety of new and civil toys -- we give them Winchesters and Star Wars, Colt 45s, Desert Storms and Desert Foxes to play with. In place of books and tutoring, art and music -- boundless new horizons of worthy literature, creative and humanizing recreation, means of civic scholarship, harmony and philanthropy -- we give our children Magnums, tanks, Stealth fighters, Harriers, Eurofighters, a licensed NATO on the stand-by to indiscriminately incinerate, butcher and mangle infants, the old, the helpless (not to mention innocent animals and plants. Don’t these as well have the birth given right to life? Don’t these give sustenance to all of the biosphere, Homo Sapiens included?). "Why do we hustle into our children’s hands raw fury and spite to build upon; rush into our flesh and blood’s lives animosity and malice -- these cruel tools of war and slaughter -- to settle differences with? ... " The text I have unburied proceeds to ask more: " ... What manner -- brand -- of peoples have the propensity to lavish in, to glory in, crime of wrath, molestation, mistreatment, to splendor in intimidation and harassment, bigotry, in the harnessing of revenge and rancor having as prime premise difference? Difference, as that of the privilege and right to come from another source of parameters, to come from, believe in, stand by, a different process and system of values, concepts and interpretations of Life, Love and Liberty? ... " Next to this outraged man and educator, I too dare pluck up my courage. I stand by this begrieved father’s loss of his boy to those reverent and worshipful in the implements of war and wars themselves and I boldly ask: Who are, on our globe today, the modern Hannibals, the new Genghis Khans and Tamerlanes that triumph and tradition in arms and armament? Who today thrive on a way of life based on that of the invading Goths and the raiding Vikings, the plundering Visigoths and the butchering Huns, on retribution and raw conflict, on the proliferation of accouterments of bloodbaths, hatred and wholesale killing? Who prey on the incitement of doubt and insecurity? Who mock precepts that have passed unscathed the test of time as human reason and moderation, the wisdom found in tolerance and restraint -- simple and plain horse sense in a nut shell? Who privilege only those who unquestioningly put in with them, but spur their SIA, intelli-bombs, seek-and-sack missiles, spy and laser-bearing satellites and Citizen Protectors in cold candor to devastate and pilferage, pillage and terminate all who do not? From the text I have undug: " ... What nations live by the fire arm? The sword? Bolster and brace soldiering from cradle to coffin? Have to dodge bullets in their own city streets, hospitals and schools? What peoples subsist by -- get their kicks from -- the drawing of blood, and silence eternally the irreconcilable? "What peoples browbeat and mute those opposed to their 'custodian-like' arrangement of things? Hush those who are of a different history or stock of roots, of a contrary trust of values, and those who believe in an alternate form of Democracy? "What manner peoples thrive on war and sub-war, insurgence, coercion and scuffle -- on the code of the Universal Barbarian? And ... let the rest cry their beloved country? ... " ... What manner peoples foment internally and internationally the strife of greed as a National Product -- as a way of life -- and with a straight face proclaim this attitude to be 'a marshaling of the competitive spirit'? ... " I gnaw and pick at parched lips at this man’s dare, his pain of loss ... as these numbing questions of his -- this bizarre manifesto-of-a-manuscript I stoop over -- reel into and through my amazed mind to ask in writing that which most of our world citizens cannot utter in resounding protest or even whisper, in principle or document, or indeed in loud thought in 2052, at fear of their lives and the lives of the ones they love. " ... Who are those that gain profit by candying the act of rapacity? Honey a coexistence that is based on mutual suspicion, so as to bolster their arms sales and fatten themselves from it -- arms sales to my divided island's oppressor, to the fresh primate hordes of a modern roused Attila -- and do so with velvet language and a silver tongue? Who wear the mask of the 'verist', a domino of ‘dismay’, 'mince' words and didactically ‘admonish’ -- or use some such philippic poise and prose -- that which they covertly and by example provoke, grossly, in bulk and en mass? War games no less. " ... Who do away with esteem and self-respect and instead bring discredit to non-war, and cynicism to peace-first, and proscription to entente for peace, at the peace table, prosecuting and abolishing by this attitude and these actions world-wide fidelity, world-wide union? "Who persist in their own opinion of deontology? Are almost convincingly engrossed in their own efforts at rediscovering, revivifying and resurrecting ‘what a comprehensive yet practical interpretation of ethics is’, that is, at rediscovering the wheel of virtue; while these same peoples are shystering and pettifogging, trickstering and hoodwinking world economies? "Who are immuned to pangs of conscience? Self-righteously consider themselves the new Rome Imperium? "Who reckon themselves absolved from the transparency of pretentiousness and presumptuousness in their usage of words like globalization, democracy and communism, coherence, Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Amnesty International and egalitarianism, partnership for peace, socialism and suchlike fiats and caveats as if the globe were a joint-game-board of Scrabble and Chess to have fun with and get rich from; to ridicule and sport from the torture and anguish of wearied refugees, the 35,000 children who die daily from poor peoples’ disease; sport with toppled economies and indebtedness, famine, with ruthless and unchecked bombings so their brood of Generals can try out their new arms on living flesh, the afflictions and fears of the powerless, the helpless? ... " The manuscript then alludes to the 1946 writings of George Orwell. Apparently 106 years later nothing improves ... nothing emends ... nothing encourages: "In our time, political speech and writings are largely the defense of the indefensible. Political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenseless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements. Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them. Consider for instance some comfortable English professor defending totalitarianism. He cannot say outright, 'I believe in killing off your opponents when you can get good results by doing so.' Probably, therefore, he will say something like this: 'While freely conceding that such regimes exhibit certain features which the humanitarian may be inclined to deplore, we must, I think agree that a certain curtailment of the right to political opposition is an unavoidable concomitant of transitional periods, and that the rigors which certain people have been called upon to undergo have been amply justified in the sphere of concrete achievement ... '" The text of the manuscript goes on: " ... I now think of the tragedy of my beloved son and land, my beautiful brilliant isle torn in two, and of that other fair and green island, Ireland, and its many sons, the same of fate; and of the sons of the Scots and Welsh, the same of fate; the fate all weakened minorities evidently must face and endure; of the sons of the trampled and smothered Balkans, of the sons of a starved Sudan, an emaciated Africa, the un-unified Koreas, the sons of the calamities of a Vietnam, a Laos, a Thailand and a Cambodia, the toll of sons of an Afghanistan and a Chechenia, the genocide of a Curdistan and the million-and-a-half dead sons of an Armenia, the twenty million Russian sons and daughters a political experiment murdered, of an Iran, of a Lebanon and a smashed and famished Iraq, the sons lost in the fifty-year strife of an Israel and a Palestine, the sons of the world’s downtrodden ... and I wonder when this sacrifice of our children will suffice? When will it all end ... as Popes and Presidents, Muftis and neoteric Sultans, Patriarchs and Planetarchs, Rabbis and Prime Ministers promise us it will before, or in, their term of office? As universal treaties and alliances, as Human Rights and International Criminal Courts are there -- are paid billions by us, the World Citizens, each year -- to arrest, deactivate and abrogate ... since 1946? "When is that 'Universal Soldier of Mercy' sung so much by us -- that long-awaited neutral but civilized NATO and that long-anticipated impartial but humane UN, that modern but just 'Nuremberg Trial' -- spoken of so often by so many coming to judge the handful of overly zealous, dallying, arrogant politicians and gung ho soldiers, the war-gaming power-anxious oligarchy, responsible for the consequence of a Pearl Harbor, a Hiroshima and a Nagasaki and their 210,000 innocent sons and daughters dead, the ten million killed in a First World War that man should have had the manly decency and sense to avoid, a Second World War that extracted fifty million more mostly young innocent lives, the slaying of two million innocent Vietnamese and fifty-three thousand innocent Americans, the carnage of a Mai Lai and a Kent State and a Tiananmen Square, a Baghdad, and a Kosovo, and the bestiality upon innocence as that scaring the naked napalm-burned tiny torso of a Kim Fok; and wipe out soldiering and bullying once and for all! "Then this is the violator. " ... I bring visions of Rwandan, Somali, Sudanese, Bosnian, Serbian, Albanian, Romanian, Bulgarian, Armenian, Vietnamese, Chinese and Iraqi, Central and South American, Cuban war- famine- and drought- and disease-vanquished victims to my mind," the teacher says, "and ask how many children's and infants’ swelled, empty bellies, napalm-scarred bodies, sexually-exploited lives, AIDS-ridden days have these Christian, Moslem, Hebrew, Hindu, Buddhist ... promises filled or comforted! "Then this is the coveror of Truth. " ... Whose history and philosophy of living is based on the business of death-dealing? On the industriousness of warring and fortification? Proliferation of a way of life founded and based on armament and expansion? On a leveling machine of intervention upon, and occupation of, sovereign Lands? The hammers and the sickles? The Apocalypse of the thunderbolts, the pretext of the NATOs, the pretense of the UNs, on a defunct Security Council and the Armageddon of the blazing mushrooms? Whose ambition and 'Manifest Destiny' is rooted in the use of the scimitar and embedded in the horror of the swastikas -- in genocide? The unjustness of, and wastes in, terrorism and murder? In the symbol of the phoenix bird afire? In the Cross aflame? On the word not kept! "Then this is the breaker of the covenant between Peace and Man, Harmony and Grace, the usurper of our kin and children, Mr. Kipling, the children that will be returned to us when hell freezes over," the teacher writes. End *********************************************************************** GUTTERVISION REVIEW by TAF *********************************************************************** The guerilla Resurrection tv of Reality is Now "ABC, NBC, and CBS are the real anarchists, subverting the public's intelligence with Hallelujah! their version of reality." -Frank Czajka GutterVision - tv the way it was meant to be - but isn't. So I got this note in my email that expoused the dark wonders of GutterVision. I checked out the site and was intrigued. I contacted the main guy there Frank Czajka and a little while later a video tape appeared in my mail - GutterVision - High Defiance Television. Insert. Click. Play. WARNING This Program may be offensive or dangerous if taken internally for children or Politically correct morally challenged racially motivated monitarily advanced upscale oriented sewer sucker prayer spewing religiously right poodle owning busted out the butt of another pair of slacks because you're just too damn fat in the head Bastards This is reality This is GutterVision I liked it. I liked the whole tape. Some truely disturbing scenes, great graphics but beyond the shock, beyond the in-yer-faceness, beyond the darkness, it was mainly one thing; REAL. This wasn't Disneyland's version of contemporary America, full of sugar and spice and everyone nice pursuing their own individual American dream, no, this was much more than that (or much less if you are monitarily advanced and upscale oriented). This was a tearing off of the facade, exposing the wizard, for all to see. This is GutterVision. Post apocalyptic television. If all the shit were to hit the fan come January 1, 2000, GutterVision is what we would experience. Brutally honest, stark yet compassionate, harsh fucking reality. This is what we are made of - and it ain't always pretty. GutterVision reminds me of the works of Emergency Broadcast Network, Throbbing Gristle, Psychick TV, NIN and the like. Cutting edge slices of social pie that the mainstream goes out of their way to avoid/ignore/pretend doesn't really exist. Everything from weird videos that eMpTytV would never dare play to Robert Tilton - The Farting Preacher (this is a truely hilarious bit that I recommend anyone with a sense of humour watch). Distorted images fly by so quick at times that there is no way you can catch everything. Suicides and cesarian sections intersperced with skulls and crosses and decaying rodents. Inner City Television. Apocalypse Culture Television. Like tantalizing, forbidden secrets that promise to reveal themselves if you watch just a little closer, just a little longer... The rapid fire editing suggests subliminal messages just beyond our grasp... An electronic carrot dangled before our viewing cart. Television that challenges the viewers to think for themselves. The only downside, in this reviewer's opinion, is that GutterVision is not available in my area... Available NOW on local cable in New York City, L.A. and Chicago. g U T T E R v I S I O N *********************************************************************** CONTRIBUTORS TO THIS ISSUE *********************************************************************** Ron Callari is a freelance writer, publisher and self-proclaimed futurist who has an office overlooking the Hudson River, the Big Apple and the Statue of Liberty. When he isn't daydreaming about palm trees and hammocks, he spends the bulk of his time writing articles pertaining to business, the Internet, trends, travel and humour. His online credits include articles in Career Magazine, iAgora, WebCentral and FolksOnline. Ron has also been a consultant to the travel industry for the past 20 years. He has held marketing posts with Marriott International, Adam's Mark Hotels and MeriStar Hotels and Resorts. In 1987, he founded innovations, a sales and marketing firm. He feels that his corporate upbringing has prepared him for being able to debate on any issue: pro, con and/or vice-versa; sometimes, simultaneously. He has been interviewed by print and electronic media, nation-wide and appeared on network television (CBS This Morning Show) in a 1991 feature detailing the growing popularity of B&Bs for business travel. This 15 minutes of fame amounted to a couple free lunches and one autograph seeker (thanks Mom). Ron received his B.A. from Kent State University and his Masters degree from Cornell University (go Big Red!). He lives with his significant-other, has two sons and resides in Jersey City, NJ (for no other apparent reason than to have an office overlooking the Hudson River, the Big Apple and the Statue of Liberty, allowing him to daydream about palm trees and hammocks). Ron is currently the publisher and editor of his own online webzine, entitled: y-two-k.com, which features articles pertaining to Y2K and the changes in our lifestyles as we approach the millennium. Ron also partners with Chris Moujaes to produce the comic strip kidd millennium, spotlighting the life and times of a narcissistic rugrat who thinks he is a spokesperson for the next generation. "While kidd is currently in the womb and won't be visible until January 1, 2000, his voice is heard regularly in a recurring zany comic strip, online." Ron appreciates the fact that the Big Guy put him on the planet at this point in time, and enjoys communicating with anyone who will answer his e-mails. * * * * Richard M. Grove - born in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada - 1953 is now a Toronto artist and writer. Father of two teenage daughters is Editor / Publisher of a paper based and internet based Canadian poetry magazine called SEEDS. He edits and publishes poetry books through his company Hidden Brook Press. Richard is on the Board of the Canadian Poetry Association and holds the title of National Coordinator and Co-Chair of the Anthology Committee. He has had almost 100 poems published in many different periodicals around the world as well as having been published in 11 anthologies. His first book of poetry titled “Beyond Fear and Anger” was released in March of 1997. His second book titled “Poems For Jack” was launched in the fall of 1998. Send him a line at writers@pathcom.com. or visit him at - www.pathcom.com/~writers/kim-tai.htm Richard is also the founder of the Canadian Poet Registry. An archival information website that lists Canadian poets including biographical information, their book titles and awards. One can view this website at - www.pathcom.com/~writers/registry.htm Aside from Richard’s poetic and artistic interests he also is a writer of spiritual / metaphysical articles. Some of his work can be read at a website, that he maintains, called “The Science of being”. It can be viewed at - www.pathcom.com/~writers/science.htm * * * * Vasilis Afxentiou is an ESL (English as a Second Language) teacher. He has been teaching English full-time for the last fourteen years. Prior to that he worked as a Technical Specifications Writer for seven years and as an Engineer for five years. Vasilis was born in Thessaloniki, Greece, went to university in the United States where he received his degrees. Vasilis' writing credits include published fiction and non-fiction appearing both in Greece and in the USA. Stateside publications he has written for are Greek Accent, National Herald (Proini), and Crosscurrents. In Greece he's been published in 30-Days, Key Travel News, Greece's Weekly, Athena Magazine and had a weekend travel column in The Athens Star newspaper. Some e-zines that have puplished Vasilis' stories are The Domain, Ibn Quirtaiba, Cosmic Visions, ThinkB, Aphelion, Dark Planet, Basket Case, BORNmagazine, Aspiring Writer, ThinkB, Appalachians, Newwords, Zine in Time and now TAF. * * * * Timothy Shannon Bullard has worked with various newspapers including the Myrtle Beach Herald, Florence Morning News and the Marion Star & Mullins Enterprise among others. He has published numerous articles in publications ranging from The New Catholic Miscellany to The Dead Mule to Pee Dee Magazine. He has received several awards including; Certificate of Commendation from The House of Representatives of South Carolina (June 98); Recognition of Contributions from The House of Representatives of South Carolina (March 98); Volunteer Recognition from the City of Myrtle Beach (1997); First Place Photography Award - Community Newspapers (1992). His objective is "to secure a challenging position which utilizes [his] professional training, personal skills and [his] commitment to excellence." * * * * Frank Czajka in the man behind GutterVision which is described by himself as follows: GUTTERVISION is an alternative high-culture program geared for the Generation X audience. With its emphasis on music, performance, art and artist interviews, GUTTERVISION provides exposure to new acts in a format that reflects the true world of each artist and the experience and expectations of the fans. GUTTERVISION is the next step in America's underground scene. GUTTERVISION patrols the art trenches across the United States, bringing to life the sights and sounds of alternative art, humor, and drama. GUTTERVISION has an artistic freedom unavailable to other so-called "cutting edge" programs and features never-seen-before, never-to-be-seen-again music videos by The Cramps, NIN, My Life With The Thrill Kill Cult, Danzig, Dead Can Dance, and many others. For those who are prepared, GUTTERVISION offers the opportunity to be devoured by the night in the privacy of ones own home. for further information GUTTERVISION "High Defiance Television" P.O. BOX 16343 N. Hollywood, CA 91615 (818) 753-6668 Voice Mail WWW.GUTTERVISION.COM WEBSITE *********************************************************************** As always, Thanks Gary 03/09/96 RIP {}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{} The Annihilation Fountain & TAF Copyright 1997-99 Neil MacKay http://www.capnasty.org/taf/ the_annihilation_fountain@iname.com