From Up On Frederick's Stone

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So… it dawned on me that although the modern interpretations of the ancient Storm vs Sea myth tend toward psychoanalysis, the story is literally about the seasons, with potential additional layers. Reread the Marduk myth with this in mind.

…then you would not have been you.

It was the nature of things for the cloud to dissolve
and the lightning to crack.
The hummingbird was too fast for the whale
and the whale too deep for the hummingbird.
It’s not fair for a dipper to love a waterfall
even though a waterfall wants to fly with her.

If you had not run away from me,
I would not have blown my thermostat
careening like mad over Nacimiento-Fergusson
to see you, leaving.

And when I drove back over that road,
My hands held open, because
I loved the spring breeze
even though it was not mine to keep.

I’ve been hesitant to say anything to you for many reasons,
even though I really want to,
to say what should be said would take a hundred-and-fifty pages
or a lifetime. It seems easier
to let the tides of time say
the words for me.

When we saw each other down the highway
a few weeks ago, I wondered what you were thinking
or if you saw me. I was looking down
when something told me to look up
and into the rearview.
I wondered if you knew I was moving,
I wondered if you saw a demon or if you remembered,
I wondered if you knew how my friends in town
have treated me differently since you left me.
But I’m going to a new town anyway,
with older friends, who see both sides.
I wondered if you wondered.

If you had not run away from me,
maybe we could have said sorry
but then you would not have cut the rope,
even though I was just as close.

Although we can moralize each other, in the end
we felt unmatched and too much love to leave.
You wanted someone more lighthearted
who would play with you,
I wanted someone more determined
who would hike with me.
We were burdened and needed relief.
You saw me as a vortex, it’s true
but you were a vortex for me too.
Hardness and recklessness were our sins,
we were driving each other crazy,
but although we can moralize each other
in the end we felt unmatched
and too much love to leave.

I wish we had talked afterward,
but you pushed me away hard and fast
I didn’t know what to do.
Maybe you never really opened to me.
Or maybe you didn’t want to be open anymore.
I didn’t want to get back,
I just wanted to heal, hug, say sorry, goodbye, thanks
because I loved you and you loved me.
For all we shared, why did you run?
You ran because you needed to be yourself.
I wanted you to be different
and so did you. You ran because
you had to be yourself. If you hadn’t run
you would be someone else. If I hadn’t fought
I would be someone else. I fought because
I had to be myself.

I wish I could say what should be said,
but this is not the way. I just want you to know
where I am. You were so special to me,
and I hope you’re happier now.
I hope you find the space to be yourself.
I’m not coming to get you.
I’m happy for you.
I hope you’re doing okay.

I wish what should be said could be,
but it seems easier to let the tides of time
say the words. I just want you to know
I’m drinking from the headwaters
and dancing over the west
because of you.




Escondido, California
November 25, 2023

Boy, has the last month been a wild ride. I am in a more stable position now.
What is an archetype? Years ago, when I was immersed in biblical exegesis, one of the more profound personal discoveries I made was that Eden could not be a literal, physical place. In wanting to see the Bible as literal, historical truth, I was at odds with my own interpretive scheme. In the Book of Genesis, Eden exists at the headwaters of four major rivers: the Tigris (Hiddekel), the Euphrates (Perat), the Blue Nile (Gihon, which flows from the Ethiopian highlands, the origin of coffee), and a mysterious fourth river named Pihon (which some commentators have alternatively interpreted as the White Nile for etymological relationships between “Pihon” and the concepts of “seasonal overflowing” and “flax,” both of which ancient Egypt was known for, or as the Indus or Ganges Rivers in India; the ancient scholar Josephus believed that Pihon referred to the Indus River, in the west of the Indian subcontinent, which is very telling, since he was much more contemporary with the actual writing of the Bible and the surrounding cultures.) If Eden is at the headwaters of the Tigris, the Euphrates, the Nile, and the Indus rivers, then either the Bible was referring to a time in the geologically recent past when the Earth’s topography was ridiculously different, or the Bible was saying something else.

Once again, I am in a hurry to work. I resent this 12-hour workday schedule. Just a quick thought. I was reading in a book called Eye of the Whale that some tribes in the PNW have a story about how the Thunderbird created the world, and was the only creature who could feast on the whale, thunder coming from the interaction between them. This is the parallel I have been looking for. Condors are the only major bird or animal to eat dead whale meat routinely, are the closest representation of thunderbird, and are widely known in lore across North America. During the Pleistocene, condors were more widespread across North America, eating dead megafauna like mammoths, bison, and ground sloths. The receding of the ice age left them in the southwest and west coast, where the high cliffs, big game, and marine mammal carcasses provided a sweetspot for their survival. Thunderbird is widespread in native american myths. Thunderbird and whale are the American Western analog of the storm god and sea dragon. Coincidentally, the condor and humpback whale are the animals with the most significance in my imagination. Condor is the bird of eber, of over, of transcendence, of ubermensch, of hebrews, of Yahweh, vultures eating the dead atop ziggurats. Whale is the creature of immanence, of being, of complexity and convolution. Birds have a pattern psychology—they act on patterns. Whales have an ontological psychology, they ruminate and reverberate, they are not thrown into patterns, they throw out patterns, generating them, genesis. Condor and humpback whale are not enemies, per se, but a story is lying latent inside the gorges of Cone Peak, above and below the water. The two sages of Big Sur: Condor and Whale, Thunderbird and Leviathan.

Today marks the high point of summer, exactly halfway between Jun 21 and Sep 21, for us northerners. Have you ever noticed that the hottest time of year does not correspond to the day of longest sunshine? Theoretically, the maximum amount of sunlight comes to us in the twelve weeks surrounding the summer solstice: six weeks prior, May 7, six weeks after, Aug 7. But the summer season is from the longest day to the autumnal equinox. Why isn’t summer from May 7 to Aug 7? Also, have you ever noticed that we celebrate the first day of a season rather than the peak of a season? Isn’t that strange? You would think that the height of a season is when that season is best represented with a holiday, rather than the first day.

I’m in a rush off to work, but I want to get on paper some thoughts I had while driving up to SF for an art exhibit the other day.

In 2014, the Navy upgraded their radar sensors on their fighter aircraft fleet, and they started finding all sorts of radar contacts whenever they went on training flights. Moving radar contacts. Contacts that could go from the ocean to space, from zero mph to Mach 5+ almost instantaneously, then turn on a dime, like a sharp corner. Then stop. These contacts could be alone or fly in tandem with other contacts. Some of them emit light radiation, heat, some of them are cold. They have no propulsion exhaust. Some of them are round, some of them are tic-tac shaped, some of them are discs, some of them are pure black cubes with a concentric transparent sphere on the corners. Navy pilots were dismissing some of these observations as error, some of them were dismissing these observations so as to not seem crazy. Some of them however, obtained direct footage or personal eyewitnessing. These phenomena would ordinarily be classified as Unidentified Aerial Objects (UFOs), but the technical community has tried to move beyond the conspirational rhetoric of UFO-hunters by referring to them as Unidentified All-domain Phenomena (UAPs), which is honestly an even better descriptor. These things might not be objects, they don’t simply fly in the air but also travel through the ocean and outer space. Congressional hearings and Department of Defense (DoD) have been taking place to try to develop a response strategy to these things. Of course most people would assume one of two explanations: secret government technology or alien intelligence. I think this is still too limiting.

I have extreme doubt this is secret government technology. As an aerospace engineering graduate at one of the top aerospace engineering programs in the world, and as someone who was uncommonly imaginative in my class, I can wager that we do not have the innovation to pull off something like this. Technical prowess, maybe, if we had developed anti-gravitational propulsion in secret, but I don’t think so. Moreover, accounts of these UAPs extend very far back into recorded history, with oral traditions and, notably, the 1561 celestial battle over Nuremberg, Germany. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1561_celestial_phenomenon_over_Nuremberg)
Stories of heavenly beings travelling in light-emitting craft goes back thousands of years. I think the Ancient Alien people have something absolutely correct, even if they are mostly wacky. It is that whatever these things are, they aren’t human and they go back toward the dawn of human history.

I even question if these things are alien technology. I question if in the absence of a viable, near-to-hand explanation, we jump to imagining something like us except very different. What if that’s not even the right framework to begin with? Let’s ask some even harder questions about the limitations of perception.

The laws of physics as described today are: (1) NOT FINAL WHATSOEVER; (2) localized at least to human perception. We could be a blind cave fish unaware of light and the outside world or an amoeba in a petri slide. “There is more to heaven and earth than contained in your philosophy, Horatio.”

What if these things are living shapes? What if these things evolved in the deep earth, they are neither alive nor not-alive? Inorganic activities. What if these things are but the fingertips of something bigger dipped into our celestial pondwater, the only thing we can perceive are their geometric shapes and movement? What if these things are ancient highly evolved dinosaurs? What about indegenous oral traditions—all of north american tribes acknowledge the existence of sasquatch as a multidimensional ape/spirit being, and some of whom claim they travel through the sky in light craft? What if there is a multiverse, for godssake? What if we have no way of ever understanding what these things are?

I do want to say that if you restart physics on a different foundation, rather than representing physical phenomena with accurate mathematics, you look for mathematical structures that share in the essential behaviors of the physical phenomena, and then represent physical phenomena using those commensurate symbols. If you do that, you tap into the quasi-subjectivity, the causal relativity of the objective world, and can enact processes in a way that is more direct, like the deltaic branching of water through treebranches and neurons. Insofar as minds are physical, physical objects can travel like minds, moving through the cosmos like how poetry flies through associative webs rather than necessarily plowing linearly through space like logic. The intersection of the rocket and poetry is the way that you get UAP transportation. I call it transvolution. Objective movement that is mindlike, mental movement that is objective, is transvolving through mind-space, the same mind-space as recognized in mahayana philosophy. This is mahamudra, the holy spirit’s plane of reality. Tibetan/Vajrayana buddhists have long ascribed divine beings with representations of near pure tones/colors/themata much like those observed by jet fighters. These things are not greedy, hostile aliens at all. These are poetry-craft, free-spirits, objective manifestations of enlightenment. That’s why people called them angels or demons. These UAP are nothing but imprints of a more fundamental aspect of reality. They are portals of mesophysical perception.


August 2, 2023 – Blue moon
Gorda

There is a profound double negativity to life, to complexity. I struggle what to call it, because life implies something positive, in contrast to death, but we often also mean by “life” the cycle of life and death, nature, existence, reality. English is lacking, in this regard.

Where was I? Oh yes, I was mentioning how last year in June I had come up against the lack of a word for the quality of resilience that does not abate during the destabilization process. It was like something out of a catechism, a Westminster Confession for the 21st century. What is that which outlives mortal strife? It is unde-______. I felt strongly that an English word existed, but I could not put my finger on it. I searched the dictionary for a few days, fervently. My effort for the word exhibited the word itself. Then, all of a sudden, an image, almost clear as day—definitely clear as moonlight—came to mind. It was an image of the high Sierra, with a lake in the foreground, a pointed peak in the background, rolling glacial terrain all around. Islands in the lake, dotted round with pine trees. I drew what it looked like and showed my friend who knew the Sierra decently well from growing up in the Boy Scouts and backpacking with his dad. Immediately, he said, “That’s Thousand Island Lake.” The resemblance was striking. The moon was in the distance, it was a gibbous moon. My search for a word for a concept had become a search for a place.

My affection for the Sierras began in the summer between the fourth and fifth grade, when my papa took us to Yosemite. We stayed in Oakhurst, and purchased a giant sub sandwich from Vons for lunch. As most family vacations go, it took us until past noon to get into Yosemite, the Mariposa sequoia grove. I remember being in awe of seeing a deer amble casually past the row of cars, and how casually my dad commented that they are used to people. The giant trees really caught my imagination, and I later wrote a little piece about them for fifth grade, in which I used the word gargantuan for the first time and perhaps the most fittingly in my life, and drew a picture that got an award with the library of some kind. I remember feeling the effects of altitude at 7000 ft, of marvelling at the water bottle becoming tense with the relative air pressure difference inside and outside. I remember the shorts and shirt I was wearing that day at Glacier point, and how much I wanted to run around the rocks and see all the vistas, but time was ebbing. The winding forest road, the tunnel view, the valley meadows, looking down on the clear and broad Merced river—I had never seen a real river before. I begged to drive up the Tioga Road, and we went as far as overlooking the Tenaya Canyon. The slanting, glinting light, the amber glow on almost purple granitic gray, the clear wind, the sparsity of trees up there. I remember my papa frantically trying to use an old camp stove to make a pot of soup to satiate my mother and me. But the high country had sunk its lovely venom into me. Yosemite transported me. I begged to go back for a few years.

Fast forwarding, I had visited the Sierras a few more times through middle/high school, Yosemite once again with my parents and family dog, the east Sierra twice with my aunt and uncle, but it had not yet become an independent love. Neither was hiking. I would go on long rambling walks once I became a Christian. Once I walked nine miles from my house to the summit of a local mountain (Stanley Peak) barefoot and without water, only donning my flip flops to get across broken glass. I would meander the hills of San Luis Obispo like a 19th century romantic poet of the Lake Country, melancholically searching for the dreamy ideal. People portrayed me as a mountain man, a hobbit. Perhaps the sheer whimsy for the hillsides and woods made me out to be a John Muir category. It was an aesthetic pursuit, one brimming with glory in the beginning and then rotting with disappointment and disillusionment in the pursuit for the lost Edenic aesthetic purity, the fresh eyes of the heart. I am still searching for those fresh eyes, yet I keep approaching. The fog is thin, I can see the coastline rocks and shrubs and trees from this vast ocean of longing.

One of my biggest regrets is not taking up backpacking in college. I was consumed with inward matters of faith. I had all this time and all this opportunity to meet people, and it didn’t even cross my mind. All I could do was envy the Front Porch church/coffee house community and their annual trips to Limekiln—which is now essentially my backyard. My love of nature was existentialized, internalized, scholastified. The touch of nature, the immanence of the body was something marketed to me in books about spirituality and phenomenology. Being outside was not a lifestyle. Hiking as a hobby was thrust upon me as a label. I never thought of myself as a hiker. I was simply going for long walks in the countryside, searching for self, for pleasure, for divinity, for truth. Albeit, nature existed for me almost as a representational tool, a symbolic medium.

Again, off to work I must go.


July 21, 2023
Gorda