PotHead Retoast Repast Request

Pot Head Last Repast

The fish are victims of one of the driest and warmest Sumers in the history of marijuana psychosis, smoked by the world's first mixed race-embryo monkey. Spates said. "When I heard about the testing, I thought, 'Oh my God. If they did that, there's no telling what else they're hiding:'" To decorate, radioactive zinc cadmium sulfide florescent powder was sprayed in St. Louis.

"Super Pot...[Drone war] drugs take you away from enlightenment and consign absolute reality to epiphenomena, which increasingly entrance you, rather that losing their already too strong [a] hold over you; thus we call this intoxication: a deluded state, not enlightenment. Acid and super pot are like the Monsanto exhibit in Disneyland where you get smaller and smaller and the world gets bigger."Marijuana Shrinks. your perspective shrinks. In enlightenment your perspective grows and spreads out to fill vast spaces." Philip K. Dick, The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick, 534.

The blood of 50,000 victims consumed by the pot smoker prevalent psychology of expansion-blaming-nature, is not even man as he was called, not weather either, no more than "lone" gunmen stalking towns where a Kentucky Fried Kidney looks just like a brain!

This Tilt-a-Whirl is a flat ride waltzer. Many riders experience nausea. Centrifugal and gravitational forces spin cars in different directions at variable speeds while they are spraying each night to complete the negative optical transfer to the rest of the world. Did you fasten your belt? Japan contemplates this demise and gets out the mask. America, realizing Hiroshima’s pop art reflects revenge on the airplane that dropped its humikiation, said Japan was a criminal enterprise.  Biden said it was Afghanistan. They all said it was some body, anybody it was not. Nations as criminals, heroes as terrorists increase the helium to sustain the bubble. Each night trucks spray down alleys to decease the Schumann Resonance to get people back to sleep.

You wonder why it's necessary if the helium works. Just another program from fail safe weather, local coal frack. Everyone knows down deep the weather cracking, Yakusa coming down in hurricane. Yakusa and old KGB drying up leaves, driving the blue stem jet stream. Some sight, Dr. Strangelove driving the storm like Roman horses with fog breath and HAARP cloud electrosmog. Disinformation has hi and lo pressure systems. So Yakusa caused the N. O. flood but lost the ball on downs--from the American earthquake at Yakushima. We score this, submarine lost against the nuke plants one, the suitcase scalar earthquake tsunami kits two. But in the second half, blows up Yellowstone. Maybe Bill Apocalypse, or Bill Gas, should jump up admission to the Exploding Museum. 

Saguaros open the mouth of Danes. Not really Danes. Cold mouths unnerving, not letting go, Spirit Heart pumping. "A pile of cans," murmurs the stream." Where are you going, where are you now." World-flushed radioactive xylene on mirror mountain. Life flowed in the vast mule sky, a mule deer saguaro for sure, but  ears of a prickly pear. Why is it looking? It never says a word. Do not deny science, so careful to rule out as a cultural construct, thought perfectly permanently anthropomorphically centric a bug. Collaborations of grasshoppers, semantics of earth, terra obligata, terrestrial imperativita, I tell you the bones are made of subway tubes. Wilderness is crowded beneath a bear. The tail is cedar. Glistening wakes underside in mud.

Pot Head Request
 Civilization against fish, consumption against Fox, saguaros shot and hung. rooster tail conscience cleaves to mouth
EU traditional seed ban
Obama basketball
Tiger Rendition
Tiger Bone Wine
Corexit dispersant
Beyond marijuana: Plastic sea gulls Midway Island
Kompetenz Initiative PDF electromagnetic death of bees
Robot Snake
Holder Orders /  Obama Kill

*A Mouse that can speak
*The Red Market
*Bear bile  
*lost lady bugs
 *Radioactive Mushroom Boars
 *Common dioxin in poultry and pork
*Hexavalent chromium in water
 Kudzu bug

   Zombie gun

$200 each for dead Snakehead Fish in Maryland

 Five mind control interruptus speech, pain function new weapons

 microwaves against Canada 

American soldiers draped with Afgan body parts like they were deer

they changed from dogs to goats here
Cutting off the legs of goats with hedge trimmers- 

standard Vietnam War practice on dogs,
see Kent Anderson's Night Dogs 217f, Special Forces medical,
 Fort Bragg dog labs here  Run by Tier One Group and Steve Reichart-

 Cane toads "humanely" gassed
The Drone Awakening: war hits San Diego, Black Hornet,
Quadroters
Pot Head:
Retoast

 Pot Had
zoophilia 

cannibal shrimp

machine rights 

eye in the gut of a frog

polymers-molecular giants

jewelry found from Megiddo, at the Apocalypse 

engineering light trapped rainbows

gigapix

fasciated dandelions 

Survivor Scars 

Max Mehlman, Transhumanism and the Future of Democracy, ASU April 2009
Transhuman ASU Podcasts
Transhuman ASU Links 
Gambian Rats 
 Transcendence and the Killing of Animals-
 [zoocidal scientific experimentation]
Animal Person blog- the best advice a vet ever gave,
 "stop going to the vet because that's what was killing Violet Rays. She needed to know that I was committed to her life and the way I would demonstrate that was to keep her by my side."

Speciesism: Cavalieri's Death of the Animal

Monarch butterflies:

"The Monarch butterfly learns where it was born (its roots) 

and passes this knowledge via genetics to its offspring. 

One of the key animals that tipped scientists off, that knowledge

 [Identity!] can be passed genetically:"

sturgeon May 30, 2011

dinotefuran vs. Chinese stink bug  
 new elements Livermorium and flerovium

Tier-Sprechschule (Animal Talking School)
Exploding melons, forchlorfenuron
Vladimir Mironov-lab meat Firstcowsthenus
Unseen Species
Butterflies North
Mice with human brains

Endowed by Their [Human!] Creator?: The Future of Constitutional Personhood The $100 Genome: Implications for the Department of Defense (JASONs)  
Protecting the Endangered Human  

Pot Heead

MK Monarch Digest

Pot Heap

Schultes' Iconography

Micro DronesAfghanistan
Bill Apocalypse Bill Gas Gates Wereweather NASA Admission
 Entheogens-exploration of the god: Substitute the Real
Thought Not Bot Report 
The Book of Light
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fictional_medicines_and_drugs
 Once there was a genetical singing mouse whose future of godlike intelligence was not yet out...
 Here's one for human morality,to protect against them and us, nobody gets to go into space until none of these things * have happened for a thousand years:
Before the Revival
Pot Repast Repost
See a Mutantician in your area

Remixing McCarthy

Each technological device is a prosthesis, says Tom McCarthy, “every point of contact between a body and its media extension marks the site of some secret burial.” Watchman Lee used to call versions of this Adam's residual soul power loss. If you take Watchman Lee as a gloss of oracles who lost their armors which were reduced to writing, McCarthy's radio transmissions set up in words, novels, poems restore communication with the dead, or the lost powers, to mix transmissions between tech, med and word. 

 Comes the short list in all those interviews with poets, who do you read, who influences you, the answer truly is every word spoken, heard, unheard, every cry, every vision. But who needs to hear the same thing twice, worse, so if the broadcast is a remix, then let it transfix, thinking the one primal cry, ooooo, out of which all the others flow in the river of sound-light as the great hymn of being to the lost.

I think it's all the same, but McCarthy thinks novels and poems differ,  "a novel is not selves, but networks; that what we hear in poems is (to use the language of communications technology) not signal but noise. Rilke had a word for it: Geräusch, the crackle of the universe, angels dancing in the static.”

The essence of these communications being hearing not speaking, nice as the view in McCarthy’s Remix is, it is right but wrong, a phase we all love since we all are. To be wrong but right, that is remixing McCarthy is something like in A Shout, "a set of signals that have been repeating, pulsing, modulating in the airspace of the novel, poem, play—in their lines, between them and around them—since each of these forms began...attune your ear to the very pitch and frequency of its own activity—in other words, enable you to listen in on listening itself..." Remixing that here, the poet-fictionist Romance of Tom's Geräusch Rilke’s word static angel dance,  here  and here, is not the same as (either is the motor nor the angel dance):

"boring a hole in the lobe of the ear and pinning it to the door. This has everything to do with hearing as one born of the spirit, or as said in another place, he wakens me morning by morning, wakens my ear to listen as one being taught. So it says further, I have more insight than all my teachers, an insight that no more transfers by words than life is known by the dead. My ear you have opened."

More McCarthy here.

Milton Erikson Overwrites the Brain

 The unconscious mind responds to openings, opportunities, metaphors, symbols, and contradictions.

 NLP boasts it can get get rid of phobias in ten minutes, but that psychiatric pros can't do any of this, see Bandler below (you can watch Tony Robbins for this if you keep your feet wet). But first compare the NLP derived from Erikson to Erikson himself to see what a one note Johnny proof text NLP is.

The unconscious and the manipulation of the Unconscious for good or bad is the biggest subject we contend with in our humanity. That Bandler and Grinder took Erikson's thought and art and boiled it down to something the CIA and presidents could use every day to control minds and turn into mass investment for dollars is another of the contradictions of the unconscious. You might say it is entirely appropriate that the unconscious  be mass marketed, but I don't know how a betrayal of truth for profit lives with itself. A touchdown for truth they will claim. It happens in the darker corners of Esalen.

If you take the notion that the unconscious should not be influenced you put  all the self help gurus from the tarot to Tony Robbins out of work. The untainted unworked imagination, the unhypnotized mind would out itself in those conditions. What inexactly the unconscious is must then be left to Joyce. The Psycho profession in its hurry to supply therapy because people are afflicted has no time for the pristine rolling waters of the sea. Yea the whales and the sharks must die if Bandler has a Neptune dominant. Neptune dominants, the sea and all that in them is, work out to deception, the major deception of the Neptune War. Sanctification of the unconscious and its cleansing is at odds with its exploitation and manipulation. You will be able to take classes in the cleansing, for there is an instructor. Erikson is important because he founded the cottage industry of NLP and funded the whole CIA nat'l intelligence mind control networks, lacking a good publicist however he profited nothing for providing the means that enslaved the race. Of course if not him who?

The way I came to examine these matters began from a prayer to understand what it means to be human that uttered itself when I asked to be shown. That day, reading Browart, and seeing his affection for NLP, I  took a view toward further acquaintance. But NLP was superficial on youtube tapes. The two main practiques, Bandler and Grinder, said they had come to Phoenix in the early days to visit and would drive back to LA puzzling the profoundities they'd been exposed to. In Phoenix! I backtracked then and found they meant their continual visits with Erikson, from which they derived their ideas. Being that Erikson was in the neighborhood, as it turned out, literally across the street in a manner of speaking, which is one way of describing the technique of work in recent years that others have called unconscious, I began to explore Erikson. I took a trip to Phoenix. The day I went to the Erikson Foundation however it was in early stages of demolition. In the parking lot at the back were old fence, beams from the porch, dry wall, brick. The sign was still on the front. Not knowing what I was seeing, unless you take it that a person's real estate speaks symbolically of him as a person, I went to the Erikson Bldg. It was after hours. Signs everywhere proclaimed my picture taken. It was more like a fortress. The next day I went to their Thrift store and to the Erikson Museum, Milton's old home. Phoenix is a little tawdry in May. People with lined faces from alcohol and drug abuse are the only ones left in majority. But I looked in the faces of the staff in their pictures and heard their video tapes and the frightening heart fire of the eyes and continual beaming lips. The classes are not low class though, about 200 a day to learn to manipulate the unconscious. From what I could see of it from these signs on that day the unconscious was in the same disrepair as the Foundation. That next day I went back for pics. but the sign was down by then except the letters left a shadow. The agent said they couldn't sell it so it was being redone for rental. The new bldg had been open less than a year.

Why all this reminded me of a disastrous side trip to Luckenbach once taken from a dream may be only because the night before my return for pics I dreamed I buried my old hash pipe in three pieces while I was in a private high school somewhere. On the way in to class I was late. I drove the pipe stem into the ground with my foot. Hopefully this will not grow a vision of Coleridge. The bowl I stamped down too. The mouthpiece threw. Jerry Jeff Walker, Luckenbach, Willie Nelson, the hash, the lined faces, the cheerful lips. I vomited by the side of the road. The night before that I'd had that dream. That's why we went to Luckenbach at all. The place was filled with guitars, but the vomit was profound.

As said, the day before the Phoenix trip I had asked to know what it meant to be human. Who doesn't like neuro linguistics? Psycho linguistics? Winifred Lehman? I had studied with Edgar Polemé, Cairns, Lehman and Harms who studied with Chomsky. I read Whorf! In surveying the possibilities the founders of NLP had come to Phoenix and marveled how to piece together on their return to LA the unconscious of Dr. Milton. So what is  the nature of the human? The unconscious is a mix from this. Training Hege came out that day I prayed, and then, unbeknownst, the next day came The Banquet of God.

Memory, Overwriting, Language

In the same space comes the continuing work of memory that says we remember only the previous memory of the event, not the event itself. So all these echoes and remixes coming down the ages, personal and historical, of what once occurred in childhood and beyond. Write it down was told to them all, and since they did there is a record of a much earlier take than can be had at the present. Hundreds of memories built upon each other, but not only so, for consider that the endorphins released in first trials of cocaine, heroin et al are no longer released in the addict. The attraction then is not the high but the memory of the high encoded in the social situation, the friends, situations, associations that preceded the fix, the event, which thereafter cause it. These palimpsests happen to people when they hear or see a message. It is thought "certain messages" or images cause a change in the brain to accommodate new ideas.  The government wants to know who is vulnerable to its new messaging, to overwrite the original message with their own. 

Overwriting Hard Drive

Ovewriting also concerns programing. The application from programming is not metaphor. At issue in programming is whether overwritten under data can be recovered, or reverse engineered with another kind of overwriting  that eliminates the prime entirely, or modifies it to some interest. This bending in word choice, syntax and phonetics in overwriting, subtexting, embedding is exactly what writers do. Call it palimpsest, but  DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) more or less invented hypertext and graphic interface. Its solicitations want to hire writers to figure out how “narratives,” oral stories, speeches, propaganda, books, can interdict, supplant and counter with “better” messages ideas Defense deems useless. Guns? Grants are offered toward this end. Too late to sign up Philip K. Dick, but presumably his Ubik is a text they would preempt. Overwriting has to do with human receptivity. It combines the techniques of passive hypnotism of Milton Erickson (link explores The Denver Speech in this way) with aural and visual confusion, a "rectagon" or a picture uniting numerous rectangular principles of photo optic representation, wither  fractals, to induce a receptive state (that's why the absolute first principle of covert hypnotism is Rapport!) produce alpha brain waves to open the onlooker for programming to allow the overwrite. Is that Dickean or what? That's why we call it The Severed Head.

Algorithms

When the genome is corrupted language is next, if not first. DARPA uses control minds, manipulates emotions by phone--image, phoneme, syntax and rhetoric, or wants to, aided by the notion that grammar can be built statistically by AI: “computational methods to automatically acquire models of human languages. Examples include large–scale systems for language understanding, information extraction, and machine translation, as well as computational linguistics projects, such as the reconstruction of ancient languages. One of his best–known results was to show that human grammars can be learned by statistical methods.” Dan Klein, Online Artificial Intelligence. The effort at predictability, scientific method if you will, smacks of Faulkner generated on demand, or whoever you like, but not of course those who do not yet exist. How do we know the purpose of science is not to prevent any new existence in the interest of control of the experiment and predictability? Cannot prove a negative.

The new chair of the Joint Chiefs, Martin Dempsey, worries that a lack of redundancy (in the internet) puts  social-technical systems at risk. Redundancy means books, but even writing, set aside by the virtual invention. These incapacitate society, for there is an app where typing is superseded and speech is automatically translated to text. The loss of clarity and depth with the loss of syntactic relations reduces new pathways in the brain that establish cognitive grasp, such as reading Faulkner's sentences. This impoverished mental state is what DARPA overwrites, but the old  produces great mental strength in those who read it. Close on the heels of virtual app is another where speech is superseded and thought is made text. This caveat however should be added, you don't know what you think until you speak or write, meaning that the mind is essentially inchoate in communicating and must make simple its instructions to communicate with the physical--that is the purpose of speech and writing. Pains are taken to examine how there is no language of thought in Language In Voices Out and The Alien Voice.
 NEWS FLASH-

 "(PhysOrg.com) -- Sometimes you just don’t know whether to laugh, cry or be alarmed when hearing about what the boys in secretive back rooms are doing in the name of anti-terrorism, or homeland security, or whatever else they wish to call it. This time it seems, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the semi-secret agency charged with coming up with new and cool ways to protect the citizens of the United States from foreign bad guys, wants to hire someone to figure out how vulnerable some people are to “narratives” (oral stories, speeches, propaganda, books, etc. that cause people to think) and then, supplant such messages with “better” messages to head off the path that for such people might lead them to becoming a terrorist.

Called the “Narrative Networks” project, DARPA has released a solicitation for research proposals by those that have both the know-how and the technology to implement such a program, which is divided into two parts. The first part would involve analyzing what happens to people when they hear or see a message. It’s thought that certain messages or images actually cause a change in the brain to accommodate the new ideas.
The second part of the study, quite naturally, would involve developing a means for taking advantage of what is learned in the first part. Or, in other words, to come up with a way to find out who is vulnerable to messaging, and then to blast them with a message that would overwrite any undesirable brain changes that occurred as the result of that person being subjected to “bad” messages, so that they would behave themselves.

At first blush, such a program would appear to be scary as all get out; after all, if our government gets its hands on technology that could reprogram people who have come to feel things the government doesn’t like, it seems like a really good way to control them, including its own population. On second thought though, as reality starts to kick in, it appears that while some research in this area might bear some fruit, it’s highly doubtful that any such program would meet with much success. After all, governments (and other entities) have been trying to figure out how to brainwash people for thousands of years with very little to show for their efforts.
 
On the other hand, the folks at DARPA seem to think that new advances in technology might have changed the game a little bit. New types of brain scans can, for example, can actually show a brain being changed due to a received message. And new highly sophisticated electronic sensing devices are able to pick up even the slightest nuances in facial expressions. If the two technologies could be brought together, the thinking goes, perhaps people could be scanned without their knowledge and found to be either vulnerable to messaging or already changed in some way by messaging from a suspect source. In such case, they could be targeted for specialized messaging that has been shown through research to be effective in overriding what has occurred in their unknowing noggins.
Each phase is supposed to go for 18 months though there doesn’t appear to be any component of the project that calls for publicly publishing results found or describing product deliveries after completion.
© 2011 PhysOrg.com"

We are playing with a lot of names to designate these states: Severed Head, A Secret History of History, Cartoon at the End of the Worlds, The Party of the Lamb.  Or call it Faerie history that begins about WWII. PhsyOrg.com is a way to get up on the wave, Technology for news of DARPA - Narrative Networks and Human Language Technology, Physics and Nanotech for  a basis of inference. Do not click to have your brain removed.

Gettin' Closer?
Welcome to the Party of the Lamb
Everybody Welcome
DINNER SERVED
COME AS YOU ARE

The Elder

New World Below the Dome

This piece has migrated here.

Alien Knowing and Unknown

The alien and the unknown are in the feet of your old age and death.

A Man Without Fantasy

That's the difference between being a bear and wearing a Jordan t-shirt with Hanes underwear. Nobody is Jordaned or Meadow Lark Lemoned from a laying on of their hands. Identity grows from within, social and individual.

Dress in any of these masks or be naked as yourself as Who Wears Only A Name. Either you stand naked in The Name or you hide in a mask. Groups function as masks to prevent nakedness. The group will not go with you to death, but if there were something other than The Name to stand in it might be the landscape and the racial memory of landscape that "my parents and grandparents knew" (Momaday, 46). "I feel deeply about the landscape and I mean that literally. I think it is important for a person to come to terms with landscape. I think that's important; it is a means to knowing oneself" (45). But for the human there isn't identity in the landscape any more there is in being a god. How you know you're not a god is a fantasy question like looking at a plate of doughnuts.We can talk about these two identities, the family/tribe/ nation and the self in its skin. What has no arms, no legs, no skin, no teeth. If you answer it you turn to joy from grief.

Superficial Existence in the Modern World

 Bear, landscape and ancestry have been substituted with fantasies annihilating the traditional in tribal societies and every assimilated subgroup. Assimilation is never good, although to say it that bald is offensive. This is  the point in that First Convocation of Indian Scholars (Ed. by Rupert Costo, 1970). In answering Hopi Charles Loloma about how to assume the traditional identity Momaday says, "I think that each of us who realizes that the native traditional values are important has a great obligation to convince the young of that, who may be wavering with alternatives...[of] the dominant society which is destroying the world in which it lives" (9). "It's really up to the older people"(10) to identify "the danger of superficial existence in the modern world" (10). To counter superficial existence he says "they have a primary obligation to tell their children and grandchildren about the traditional world, and try to show them by example and tell them explicitly that there is an option available to them, and that they're damn fools if they don't avail themselves of it" (10). Unless You Live It the Words Mean Nothing.

Acculturation

Thus acculturation is "a kind of one-way process in which the Indian ceases to be an Indian and becomes white man" (10). It is broader than that too, the PA German ceased to be himself and became an English-American. Acculturation to the modern translated means to steal the birth rite identity of the traditional, its language and customs and make the native a mascot of the modern. There is a continual excavation of the Caucasoid in every subgroup that assimilates, whether Pennsylvania German, Hispanic, black, Indian. The anthropologists should excavate themselves  to give them something to do, since they otherwise are the inventors and stalking horse for the modern against the traditional, looking for power by stealing it. Modern here is not the pejorative it seems if the native takes his tradition into it to return what is stolen, or as Momaday says, that "it is good to go into the enemy's camp" (12). Steal his horses! But he has stolen the children!

Pull Out the Light Poles

That said, it remains to learn tradition from the elder. In the face of radical destruction this takes more than effort, it takes surrender. Without surrender the traditional dies. Take your pick, you can think like Katie Couric and all the like spokespersons for the modern on Charlie Rose, or like grandfather. Momaday says it is a duty to teach the young. He addresses the elder's reluctance: "I wonder if you have any idea of why they shut up at a certain point like that, why they won't talk to you" (15)? Charles Loloma, the Hopi, had said that when the power company installed electric poles by force "the people came out and pulled the poles all back out. These people didn't want the electricity'"(15). This is symbolic of the whole transmission of culture of the modern against the traditional. When the enemy enters the native camp it is called deliverance, but is really theft of the child. It is destruction of the tradition, which is obvious when white missionaries go to New Guinea but apparently not when the Internet sells social network.

You have to live it, not be curious of it.
Fight Against Electricity!

Ben Barney, a Navajo, says he had a grandfather who taught him until the age of eight, but when he died he couldn't find a replacement. Another says, "my grandfather died, and he was one of the last men in the village who knew the whole ritual cycle of songs. He died without letting me or my father, or any of us record any of it. I think he felt that this thing that he had was too precious to just give out, and have it exposed to someone whom he never knew well. And he'd rather die with it than have that happen to it. It seems to me he was saying, you're not going to to live it. You're one of these people that's fighting for the electricity. (I am not, in fact)" (17). So the ticket to the traditional, the universal (!) is that you have to live it, not be curious of it. Surrender to the traditional! If you will not surrender, and the elders have any pride, they take it to the grave in sorrow. But it is not to be studied by post docs. It is to be lived. How many young think their elders outweigh the modern?

Lifeway

That you have to live it goes a long way toward knowing both wilderness and identity. Living is not an intellectual function. "But he was saying, you're one of these people who are fighting for this. My people never had electricity. We never lived that way. And if I give you my lifeway, if I tell you my lifeway, you're going to sit and laugh at me, because you're laughing anyhow just by your behavior" (17).

Only among the remnants of American tribes does anyone dare thus to challenge the modern. Other subgroups embrace it like a drug. The life way is an iPhone. The elders won't speak to this, "naturally they are not going to tell you. I mean, they can't. I can see why he felt there is no way to communicate experience; the essence of it, the reality of it. I believe he was saying: I could give you words, and you could put them down, but that wouldn't mean the same thing" (17). Is this reality versus the virtual? The track of a bear versus a video game? These things are important if you want to have anything left on the earth that isn't homogeneous and interchangeable. Like babies.

Everything said here of the American tribes transfers to every family and subculture.

2.

Momaday avoids the satiric in his work, but it is a satiric haunt like a ghost river in every meadow, grove and stream the summer nights after the predators came. Then a foam appeared at the exit pipes of plants along the upper Allegheny. It is hard enough to name Bear and Wilderness when those subsequent masks upon masks cover up naked being. Surrender. Stand up and strip, confess, then kneel! Wilderness trees, canyons, streams and things under and in them, screeches in the night, wheat, bear, porcupine are symbols to show what they are standing for, something else, life mirrors that open doors and close the way we live. Only the sun has escaped our dominion. The sun escaped the nano tales that seine the atmosphere in a net, to take earth away.

How To Know and Recognize the Alien

These image masks are the ultimate reality that deny we are predators or aliens. If you want to know the alien go and be one. Sit in the Mogollon. Do you belong? Find a bear. Is he your friend? People wander out all the time, light fires to be found, but the ones that aren't found bone up. Coyote Wound Dresser had a talk with Walt Whitman, Wound Dresser, but things did not turn out well for Whitman. The alien cannot be modeled, but it is knowable if Unknown. I'm going to tell you what it is.

Talking to the Unknown we  try to understand synergies of it in the anthropology of Edward Dorn. He says the alien is a crucifying self-consciousness of doubt at the root of his own being when he sees the Shoshone. Does he, Dorn, belong?

His doubts serve against the Unknown. They are a mirror of loss and lack. The filth on the chair that gets on his pants is an image of it..."I had a great desire to be off, to not take any more, or give any more...for I will say it, at the risk of blunder: It is impossible for myself and my people to offer themselves in any but the standard senses" (14).

At least he knows of the surrender, that you have to live it.  In some freak of Methodism he wants to wash this old man's feet to tame him, this 102 year old who stands for all of Idaho, Utah, Nevada and the Great Basin before electricity, " a volume of Yaa-Aaa-Aaa" (14). "I was aware of the presumption of my thinking he would be relieved or made happy by having his feet washed" (13).

Now Here is the Alien: If you want to confront the Unknown you must to do it in the feet of your old age and death.

If we want to confront the Unknown we must to do it in the feet of our old age and death. "The place was intensely neglected, I gradually saw, and not just filthy as it looked to be at first glance. It was simply the remains of a life" (12).

The comfort of the Unknown in Dorn's account is that there are two that serve each other in it, but we don't know why. One Unknown is the wife,  ust like all our mothers and wives, who "should have died, by the rules of our biology, thirty years ago. But it was evident that she would stay on, the weaker of the two, until he smelled the summary message in his nostrils, then she would be free" (12).

Is death that freedom? The alien doesn't think in known terms, but makes Dorn harbor such thoughts as, "this man and woman were the most profoundly beautiful ancestors I've witnessed go before me' (12,13). "He is the spirit that lies at the bottom, where we have our feet. The feet which step between the domains, the visible sign, the real evidence of the coming event...where this man's low, incantatory verbs spill down across the plateau and basin" (13)... not more Indian than man, still as much the flower as the fruit."

Wash his feet! Wash his hands, heart and head! Lay in the dust like a penitent Barry Lopez, close to the flagellate, and weep for the human lost. This Shoshone's name is Willie Dorsey. We don't get his real name, Alien. "I saw, the heat, the vociferous mosquitoes in the building's shade, the slightly moist filth at the back door."

Alien old age and death look like "very old animals [that] have such coats over the eyes, a privacy impenetrable from the outside" (11).

Cataracts, the blind, the lame, the sick, the living I know treated by some Doctor of the Alien. She operates her office practically as a charity, complete with science, intuition and healing to the "grim weight of bad condition, not especially outlined, more heavy with despair than one could possibly arrange with rubble" (11). This is not Ed Dorn. He is a spectator. This Doctor holds the hand, cuts the hair, absorbs the breast, the tear, weeping and praying within, but praising and thanking for the chance that comes out of the "wooden clapboard structures" (10) of lives that they could be so treated and revived. So that's the alien, it's human and knowable even if Unknown.

The Revelation of Language

Research to uncover  secrets is not needed. Language is a lie detector itself. You are already broadcasting truth, even if you don't know it or like it, "the truth of language is that it unveils the Nothing of all things...Nothing is the final veil, the final name of language" (Giorgio Agamben. Leland De la Durantaye. A Critical Introduction 179).

Not to misunderstand, nothing is not what is thought. Literature masks it, the something points of history. Dress ups. The sage Chuang Po said  the reduction of all things to our opinion of them (Legge I, 184) is like Agamben, to strip the  "nothing to reveal" means "human history is [not] unfolding with a progressive purpose in view." Chuang Tzu says, "Men bustle about and toil; the sagely man seems stupid and to know nothing. He blends ten thousand years together.... (Legge, I, 195f), ending in the butterfly dreaming it is Kuang Kau (197). The combatants argue yes and no in their arguments about nothing. What is it out of which they argue? Language about nothing. The truth is in their words like soda in a bottle. Take the substitution of the word LORD for the real word it stands for in those texts. Is it better pure,  a certain name unpolluted by its subversion if the use itself prevents more of the truth than the polluted would? Truth in words or in the thing? We hesitate to call what is behind the words anything except an attitude. Attitude is the truth to judge, the soda in the words. Internet sales and cold calls are successful because the words are empty cans.It is no surprise to us when words are used empty, when justice is spoken to hide injustice, beauty ugliness, so we're not surprised when language fails in this sense, but we are when it succeeds, when justice, beauty, love come out of the words themselves. So the can is important, but we can feel the attitude without the words.

Human ethos is "human speech itself" in social connection,  a function of one anothers'  language who  "become transparent to themselves." We therefore attempt "to become conscious of the meaning of the fact that human beings speak" (Agamben,180). The joy of this  experience is "language itself." I call it joy because  you have heard it done in your children and know intuitively the language universals that exist in the child's acquisition, the ma ma and da da of its being, fundamental identities that overwhelm  philosophy. Language is sound and meaning, the cells connect tissue and the fabric is sewn, tailored with age to become the marvel of  being to no purpose other than to be language. That is language itself, "being conscious of the fact that human beings speak." So language is the fact itself of speaking. 

Everything dishonest and hidden is already revealed in the event of language. I have not met the hypothetical person who exists who can hide language and prevent its ultimate revelation of themselves.  Language is the revelation of everything.  So it must be obvious that Agamben  concerns "the very matter-- or the potentiality-- of thought (la materia stressa o la potenza del pensiero"). Language is thought, not thought language.  I don't know how to write that large enough. Actually thought is mental speech overheard. Language itself is social connection, "the rendering common of what one thought of as one's own" (Agamben,181).  I can see into it and know it itself, what it really is and not some other you may pretend it to be. 

Unmasking language in common expands the "expropriation of language"  to the communication of everything. Agamben sees this as a problem for media speech and entertainment  as we all do. Unmasking is not just of the masked media, but of all society that media language has drained of meaning, of words become nonsense, untruth, falsities. The expropriation  that "free usage" of  language brings to communication is this, that like some state dispossessing a foreign corporation from its natural resources, deceit is expropriated from its trappings, hence comes the possibility of change.

"To liberate [the means] of communication so that they do not again fall prey to this isolation and separation" (182), language is already liberated-literate in itself. Deceit is shorn. Something deeper than language is at play if language  manipulated against itself reveals itself, reveals deceit in all speakers in common. 

"So thought finds itself for the first time, today, confronted by its task without any illusion and without any possible alibi" (182)...forfeiting every imaginary integrity...of home, race, class." Agamben says there is "no biological destiny that humans must enact or realize (Coming Community, 43). De la Durantaye says what everyone thinks anyway, that "the impoverishment of political discourse, and the increasing reliance on spectacular situations, sound bites" (182) is a crisis. Wasn't Crises Antigone's father?

Agamben says it's too soon to get off the bus. The destruction by the global that "empties traditions and beliefs, ideologies and religions, identities and communities" (Coming Community, 83) must be carried through to its unclothing, "not remaining unveiled in its nothingness... bringing language itself to language" (183). Whatever mess this makes in the telling, I can't learn much about you if your speech is honest, only if it is deceitful, so the one to whom language is no revelation is honest. Pleased to meet you. "Your word O LORD is eternal. To all perfection I see a limit, but your commands are boundless."

Native Texans

Hedeoma was the way I wanted to memorialize Carroll Abbott, who died in 1984, the year Native Texans appeared. The whole thing was due to him,  Henry Burlage and Alta Niebuhr and many others. Saint Coop printed a review of it here.

"If you were to take one plant with your immortal soul into the afterlife, then Hedeoma (Hedeoma Drummondii) would meet Amaranth. Medina County is starting a Hedeoma Dude Ranch. Aristophanes wanted thyme planted on his grave, but if you can get yourself planted in some Hill Country field you can have the superior Hedeoma. Albertus Magus claims drowned bees can be revived by the fragrance of the inferior pennyroyal, M. Pulegium, and that if you rub it on the "belly of any beast it shall be with birth." The use of Hedeoma in this way would shortly make so many beekeepers and mothers of us all that we would soon be drowned in milk and honey."

Alta said it should have been called A Philosopher Looks at Plants. She provided copies to her herbalists. That's when Brother Lynch of St. Edward's wrote to her and said it humanized botany more than he could have dreamed. Dr. Blackstock said it read like a novel. An editor at TCU press said she had hoped it would have had more philosophy. These folks could subscribe to Human Botany.

It was perilous. The day the ms was typed a stranger appeared at the door who had read one in the Newsletter. She had a book contract with Texas Monthly Press to write about herbs. Knowing nothing of Native Texans she wanted me to read her manuscript and tell her everything I knew about native plants! Native Texans was then enthusiastically greeted by two different regional Texas presses, Eakin and Corona, and canceled.


In another way of saying, the sun shining on herbs in jars on a window ledge in Chicago, at the home of a friend of Jack Dodds, caused this out of nothing. Within a year of migration to the Texas hill country that fragrance produced a desire to grow herbs, which compassed the hills in their seasons, at that time well outside Austin, and affected with rock walls, pumpkins, retama, red bud, limestone, sheep, pot studios and screened porches, reading Edith Sitwell in robin migrations and the click of the equinox in hammocks under oleanders, under chinaberries, on roofs, and in childhood from the hills of western Pennsylvania. I wrote the poem that became The Way into the Flowering Heart on that sheep ranch. The influence of eastern Pennsylvania was in the blood.

Out of these herb jars came A Calendar of Poems and its counterpart, Restorations of the Golden Age in New World Discoveries, but the peaks of roofs were coming over hill tops, so I moved into town. If you call it destiny it is inescapable, so after moving closer to the city, living in Hyde Park, I came one day upon the Experimental Drug and Herb Garden, four acres of herbs and medicinal plants fallen out of favor and cultivation with its proprietor, the College of Pharmacy. Amazed to discover this vestige of pharmacy's past by accident, and after much nay saying about the possibility, for the place was all but closed, Henry Burlage, Dean Emeritus, concocted an encounter with that present Dean to the effect that the place would remain open with himself as the Director, I the horticulturalist. The joy of this venture lasted three years and involved all sorts of trials and encounters, but when friend Henry took his last trip to the ER the end was in sight. The property was deeded back to the UT in trade for a new pharmacy building on campus. All these matters engaged the herb and native plant people, Carroll Abbott among them, who more or less founded the native plant movement in Texas, being an ex-politico, but who subsisted on sales of native plant seeds and bluebonnets with his Texas Wildflower Newsletter. These were days when Ladybird Johnson was active.

Further access to hill country land, explorations over the Edwards Plateau, visits with Carroll, walking up and down rivers and always growing plants, my wife and botanist had written for the Newsletter. Hungry editor that he was Carroll often solicited articles. But who ever does what's in their best interest? These invitations fell fallow, but even after moving to Dallas to pursue something that would pave the way for a medical career invitations kept coming. Carroll by then had contracted cancer, which he movingly wrote of in the Newsletter that I still read. One night I dreamed of him in such a woebegone state, depressed, in the dark, ashen, that I couldn't stand it, and instantly started writing that first piece, Equisitum, followed by Croton and Prickly Poppy and a whole flood. He printed the first two in the last  Newsletters. My whole  purpose was to make him laugh. From what he said it worked. So I finished writing this, called it Native Texans as a joke since these plants are universal. Croton, equisitum, milkweed, mullein, hedeoma, horehound first appeared in native plant newsletters.

Taking Down the Elder

Decay exists. The past disappears of itself. My first termites, in a house with a cracked concrete slab, came up in a box of books stored in a closet on top of a crack. This was good to know, otherwise they'd have eaten the house. Among many chances of water damage, one house on pier and beams allowed runoff from the street to pass underneath it in a torrent, warping the sub floor. Forces speed annihilation. Earth, water, fire, air, the older you are the more you get to know, to have more of it. More recently little wings were flying around the house and did so for weeks until by accident a chest with Navajo rugs was found infested. Closets, cashmere, wool, alpaca. Moths eat wool, termites wood, floods spoil books, thieves steal, accidents occur, hips break from inattention, feet stumble, forgetfulness, bone loss, anger, sleight, malice, forgetfulness and more the past records. Save these memories. To annihilate them endangers the whole. Knowledge of the past as the knowledge of disaster prevents it.

Leo Delgado, said " (FB, 9/4/10) "Negativity is totally unnatural. It is a psychic pollutant, and there is a deep link between the poisoning of nature and the vast negativity that has accumulated in the collective human psyche. No other life form on the planet knows negativity, only humans, just as no other life form violates and poisons the Earth that sustains it." Not actually true any more than Arthur Cristian's notion that language reduced to alphabet, 140 to 26 sounds has occurred. He has never heard of co-articulation. There are many more human sounds in the writing. Negativity also builds fences. Negativity is earth, air, water, fire. These elements go together to discuss also human rights and the nature of the good. Annihilation of the elder in whatever form, magnified when the virtual seeks this imagined reverence from the natural, annihilates the past. Such false reverence  isolates from the real: supporting a family, working a job, maintaining a home in the first decades of  life.

When the denominations edited their hymns of all gendered language and anachronism, even if it spoiled  the metric, they did this with their scriptures too, as any secularist does with history. The Elder Assimilated was made over, Chuang Tzu issued forth in digestible bites without the rigor of a cultural past. Tyndale's English no more showed the glory of its language. All were replaced with a commercial world that had no guise but commerce. Consumption was its product and design. The myriad names and place of  community were edited  to none, the Psalms established in their classic order over millennia were reordered to 19th century taste, ditto Chaung Tzu from 52 to 33 sections and then to the mere inner chapters. PBS specials provided in performed logic that Torah was a story fabricated by an exotic Canaanite revolution. These think they divide the poet from the scribbler, but they make creation unfit to understand. What the sea lamprey and quagga mussel have done to the Great Lakes ravaged by exotic species and the black carp, sucking up the plankton like a vacuum cleaner, starving the perch, walleye, bass, trout, salmon, whitefish, smelt, the native species equivalent of law, culture and tradition, ravaged by the exotic disestablishment of authority, they

Take Down the Elder.

The pundit scientists and entertainers want you to look only one way, outside at them or their agendas. The elder prevents this for the elder is within. So science comes up with the space alien, entertainers come up with fashion, food, adventure all viewed from the outside. Look at me, look at me.

Spiritual Herbs Artemesia, Yarrow, Aloe

Artemisia

What makes a life herb desirable has to be the same for a great ceramic or painting, color, odor, form, universality,  good and the cure it brings. To abstract these in the botanese of materia medica is impossible. Take artemisia, the generic name, while species have difference, they still share the traits. Only call it mugwort as a convenience. So first the blue grey color, then the scent of thujone, then the delicate fernlike stems and leaves, then the fact that it is everywhere, along every highway, in every fence row, and finally the cure.

The most dramatic cure was when  glass artist Jim Bowman presented one day at the door on Avenue D with his knee swollen all out of form. He said he'd been to an urgent care and it was in its third day. He was just visiting, not seeking a cure, but I went out in the alley, since it is everywhere, cut a bundle and cooked it in water till it was real strong. Then we sat him down and put the leaves on the knee covered by towels over and under and for the next hours poured the water over and over the knee. Maybe he drank some of it too, I forget. So after that he took the rest home and did it some more. It was the next day maybe, or the day after when he showed up and the swelling was completely gone.

I have done this operation since with less dramatic occasions. Nowadays tennis players have so many swollen knees, but they all ice. This is not very effective. Somebody try artemisia on a tennis player and get back to us. In that time I decided to find out why this worked and researched it. The results were published, or not, in Native Texans, but there is a physical principle. As a birthday present this year, having breakfast on the Rim, artemisia was growing everywhere. A few little sprouts stuck to wet paper towel we dropped and came back into town. These were potted up, which coincided with the monsoon rains all week. Now it seems the shoots have already rooted. Great present!

Yarrow

With milfoil the case is more complicated, it being such an ancient herb of use in function. Not that the I Ching is all that specific, and it's like reading Chuang Tzu, but no divination is useful in itself, despite the huge trade in fortune telling. It's harmful to know the future except in the case where it is a prediction of hope or deliverance from trouble such as Isaiah gave in the siege of Hezekiah by Sennacherib, something about the king will hear some news, which he did. He heard the angel killed a hundred eight five thousand Assyrians that night and Sennacherib was on his way home to Niveveh:. So Byron said:

the might of the Gentile, unsmote by the sword,

Hath melted like snow in the glance of the Lord!

So it helps to have deliverance predicted. You will be a cured of cancer. So that aside, and maybe to revisit, to apply the color, odor, form, universality, good, the color is an exquisite yellow green, the odor is astringent and vaguely menthol, the form is a thousand leaves, milfoil, more finely divided ferns, the universality is everywhere (that sound redundant?). I put some once along a Creek decades ago and it flourished with the horsetail reeds. I took some from Texas and put it in a Sonoran desert border. It did good, but the seeds took wing and it is in other borders now. It is all over the Mogollon Rim. One is in the garden. Welcome, my friend! As to the good, I used to have weak lungs subject to bronchitis and chest colds. I took to yarrow teas, drinking and inhaling the aromas. It made me its friend. I like a friend with whom I can take a walk. There is again more to this. Is that in Native Texans too? I don't remember.

Aloe
I came to Phoenix for the aloe, saw pictures of the Boyce Thompson Arboretum outside Globe where they were all weather, knew in that instant I had to have aloes year round.

One time on the MoPac outside Austin a cyclist went down, helmet all dented, shirt ripped off, skin like a red rug. I approached him for the time,asked, how's it goin, but he wanted to go home. He bled all over the front seat. When we got to his house his wife burst into tears.

It must be the influence of the plants but I was feeling good that day so suggested he get in the bathtub! A little weird come to think of it.

So his wife and I washed off the gravel and dirt from the road burn and he took a percocet and lay down all red. My wife had gone to cut some aloes and brought a pile which I cut and put on the clean wounds. They should have been antiseptic and aloes are not proper treatment either, but we are in the field here, imagine third world, where the doc's hand is his MRI, or in the 19th century where maybe we put a leech on it, but anyway the guy fell asleep! All the shock wore off. His wife relaxed. The aloe sealed the wounds and he woke up in half an hour and called all his friends who then called the para medics who came in the midst of what was by then one cookin' party when we eased out and went on. Aloe! It's like a French greeting.

Color, odor, form, universality, good. Green of a certain sort is the loveliest color. Whether that's the yellow green of milfoil or the slight blue green of aloe is a nice question. With its yellow flowers though we're in the presence of majesty. The spikes don't smell, but the mucilage does, just slightly astringent. The spikes can get so large you can't pick them up, three feet and fat, and they will nick. When my friend Blessing was so sick after her MRI's and brain operations that could not cure the infection we put aloe on her wounds every day and she liked to eat it. It's not everywhere though, except you can take it with you. Dried aloe could be a new industry in the outback. Or go to the health food store and drink it, or smooth it on. Have you smoked it? Please call about that. As to the good hardly enough can be said. We have giant aloes in big clay pots, use one each Christmas as a Tree.

Yesterday I put a coffee mug in the microwave but it had some oil on the inside of the handle. When I took it out the inside of my middle finger felt funny, then began to burn. I iced it, but it really began to burn. Then three big white blisters appeared. Still burning I did what I'd not done in years, went out back and cut some aloe, macerated it in the skin and taped it on the finger. It stopped hurting in half an hour and never did again, but it looked like it did.

I realize aloe should be in the top of this list. I've surrounded my house with it, front, back and sides. This is the yellow flowered one, but I've got reds. Sally Parsons used to give her giant red aloes of Canyon Lake coffee grounds.

Insect Politics

 Foreign Insects To call insects foreign  is an illusion of the state useful in covering up its own mistakes.  To subject insects to political boundaries is a parody of government. If this is so of insects what does it mean of people? The same. Immigrants were recruited by the state. "Beetles have been found hitchhiking on the bottom of tiles from Italy," "species have been sneaking into North America." The natural protection of indigenous species had already been eradicated with pesticides when the invaders arrived. America is subject to more than just arriving bugs, unless you think foreign ideas that erode human boundaries are like bugs, but again, before they arrived the indigenous had been exterminated to prepare for the new. What you read therefore in the news is the exact opposite of the truth. They aren't invaders they are guests. The only question left is why, what did the state gain from the introduction of these destructions? The facts call to The Resistance. It's on The Calendar.

Nano quadcopter bot swarms however are insect politics (The General Robotics, Automation, Sensing, and Perception (GRASP) lab at UPenn). The argument of its inventors is that had they not done someone would. The Chinese justify everything.

Building Transhuman Immortals

To be mortal Chuang-tzu says, "though seventy years of age, I am still making wheels," or as Andrew S. Mack found as he traveled to Kansas, Nebraska, South Dakota and Minnesota at the age of 71 in 1908, two years after his last letter, and Amasa Clark who fathered four children after the age of 70, though he lived to 101, the chance of survival is best when there is no anxiety to survive, but there is no greater anxiety than the effort to be immortal, to "exhale and inhale, to puff out old breath and draw new, stretch and crane to live long, it is an induced tao." Do not let the thoughts keep working anxiously (James Legge, Chuang Tzu, II, 77).  Van de Wetering called it Afterzen, when he saw through the sham. Do you want nose, ear, eye and mind to wander like Chaung Tzu who invented Zen? Live.

Who knew they cared that much about immortality. I remember among Catholics it was the sin of presumption to say with St John, “that you may know that you have eternal life,” the point of the objection being this is not something one should know. Sin of presumption. That suggests that you may without impunity know that you will die, although a young man would scarcely accept that even as a theory. What this leads to is that immortality is an idea like many others, but if you ask where it is most common and what are the kinds, among the Greeks, gaining speed with the Romans and free floating down the years, it comes to us with nuance.

To live long be useless is the counsel. Or get eaten. The invitation to usefulness, perfection, immortality  is an invitation to consumption. The Mystic quest is  tainted with the furtherment of personal ambitions and political purposes. Science and art are marketed as business. If you are a  migrant you may be kidnapped, but if you are rich you might be too. Hunchbacks are not conscripted for war, the straight and strong are, therefore hunchbacks live. The straight tree is the first cut; the well of sweet water is the first exhausted (Legge, Chuang Tzu, II, 33). But if a man can empty himself of himself during his time in the world  who can harm him (II, 31)?  We sure see a lot of that! The close-furred fox and the elegantly-spotted leopard...it is their skins which occasion their calamity (II, 29). Chuang Tzu was asked whether he would rather drag up the useless tree that was spared or the unsinging goose that was not (Legge, II, 27).  'There is a man over there with a long body and short legs, round shoulders and drooping ears. He looks as though he were sorrowing over mankind. I know not who he can be.' 'It is Confucius!' 'Bid him come hither.' #26

  Immortal but at what price, as if we thought it free. We have Swift to thank, it’s not immortality we want, but youth, which means the same headless flinging enthusiasm unfettered with experience we already know. Who are these old men who wander in as proctors in the golden age? Well they are not fun guys, wild and crazy. They attained immorality but without having any fun with it. But that’s the point, immortality is serious business because it is unnatural and has to be worked at to sustain. Worth killing for. You need to go in for your checkups, updates like Internet Explorer whose program is never complete. Just a few more nanobots say the engineers of life. Truly it sounds more like the end than the beginning of life to be immortal. If you don’t have any follies what is the point of life at all, that is unless you go back to St. John or somebody who says life is for praise. Let everything that has breath praise Him.

In time however our immortals, as avarice is the necessary consequence of their old age, become proprietors of the whole nation, gross civil power, which, for want of their ability to manage, end in public ruin. Chinese Taoism placed their Island of the Immortals eastward from China, while Swift places the struldbrugs near Japan.The immortal seeks power like a sports event. Both Taoism and Christianity represent  its poles, the Way of Powers (siddhi) vs. the Philosophical Way of Wisdom. Among the Christians Boehme and Beissel and Swedenborg, but Alan Watts says among the Taoists: [Hsien Taoism is] "a quest for immortality and supernormal powers through the gymnosophic and "yogic" practices which seem to have arisen among Taoists in the -2nd and -1st centuries. A hsien is an immortal--one who has purified his flesh from decay by special forms of breathing, diet, drugs, and exrcises for preserving the semen comparable to those of Tantric Yoga" (The Watercourse Way, xxv).

As opposed to this H. G. Creel says that the Huai Nan Tzu Contemplative Taoism (which became Zen), "insists repeatedly that death and life are just the same, and neither should be sought or feared. It ridicules breath control and gymnastics, which are designed to perpetuate the body but in fact confuse the mind" (xxvi). Watts says, "the indefinite enlargement of our powers and techniques seems in the end to be the pursuit of a mirage." 

It is important not to miss the wit of this response which is more gentle than its condemnation by Lieh Tzŭ, who called it "not merely foolish and futile, but even immoral" (Creel, 22). Facetiously assuming the mirage, these "immortals" live in the desert of their own making. They deny themselves. Watts teases "one who is immortal and who has control of everything that happens to him strikes me as self-condemned to eternal boredom, since he lives in a world without mystery or surprise."

But people are highly vested in immortality.  Russell Kirkland calls Creel's nicely reasoned What is Taoism? a "diatribe". The diatribe is the critic's.

Beyond aspersions Creel believes, as opposed to Watts, that Lao Tzu is not the work of one author, that the unity of voice however proves how good the editor is: "the editor was excellent and gives, on the whole, a remarkable appearance of homogeneity." Ancient texts differ from the modern in this. It is only fiction if I demythologize Borges, which in essence argues that he was never born, but it is called fact if I find that of Homer, Sappho, Moses, David, Plato, Moses, Beowulf. We have the odd companions of fiction that read like journalism and criticism which read like fantasy. Lao Tzu, Chuang Tzu editors and scholars believe in themselves and the editorial class more than in authors. The qualities Creel cites, repetitions in the text, terse and aphoristic style, are primary facets of writers, along with contradiction and fine expression. To imagine these qualities from the hand of editors is a nineteenth century fantasy. A greater myth than Borges!  As Watts says and Wouk agrees these "interpretatio europeica moderna" (European desk scholar)  demo primary sources as their livelihood because it buys promotion and tenure. Wendell Berry calls them the luxury politics of an academic islander.This is true about the Pennsylvania Dutch as well as Taoists.

Watts feels that if you do certain things to live forever, that tends toward the Confucian. Before the age of resveratrol and HA, Taoist alchemy said all you had to do was sublimate energy up the spine. Breathe right, eat right, sit right, stop the wandering mind. Now the transmortal says either wait for artilect, new genes or hybridize yourself. Who knows how old you can be? It brings into question  life itself if to be immortal you have to not live at all. Cut down to perfection, life free of mistake loses the thing Taoists seek most, spontaneity.

Stopped Minds

Smoothing the ocean by hitting it with a board is like stopping the mind. The mind anxious for its own anxiety feels the same with this compulsion as the body hit by the same flat board in zazen. Stopped minders can be petty. Immortality is a pinched nerve. Beauty conflicts with immortality. It wants to be exploited and used. The gnarled pine, thorn and crag, hellebore bushes up the path of weasels (Legge, II, 93) get to be immortal. Nobody wants them. Imperfection outlasts the straight and strong. Only the singing goose that is spared is the exception.

It is the difference between supermarket foods we call immortal, because enhanced, and natural foods, unimproved, or if you like, the life and death herbs. The improved "immortals" are desiccate, ragged, empty of nutrition when dried. The unimproved are full, well formed, nutritious. This analogy between two corns resembles people who cut their own lawns, do their own dishes, repair themselves by themselves, weed their gardens, do their own books, clean their  house, teach their children. Those who hire maintenance so they can seek pleasure and  fortune are immortal.

Unimproved roads! Narrow is the way! What are improved roads for but more traffic? Why traffic, but development? Why development, but  trade? Travel as easy as you can. Thoroughfare, freeway, inflation, consumption for its own sake pave a way to the empty fritterless corn. Immortal, happily there is a cure. A cure for immortality: here

We hardly know what immorality is. Is it physical  living forever in the body? Impossible, nothing physical is immortal. OK then is it spiritual,  a kind of struldbrug in Jonathan Swift's novel Gulliver's Travels, the name  given to those humans in the nation of Luggnagg who are born seemingly normal, but are in fact immortal? However, although struldbrugs do not die, they do nonetheless continue aging. Swift's work depicts the evil of immortality without eternal youth. They are easily recognized by a red dot.

Note: 
By all this we meant to say that Singularity already exists in the most profound manner. A first primer of it, published on Scribd, 1 Sept 11 emerged from work at the Human Botany Review and other sites, which links and others are also live. Day 4+. Here

This is ongoing work to be revised and reposted at Scribd. The full, whole unwieldy version however is here.

C. S. Lewis and the Transhuman
 Prometheus Unbound: Transhumanist Arguments The Transhuman organ James J. Hughes.  (Trans)humanism & Biopolitics Transhuman Transformation Humanism and Transhumanism C. S. Lewis as Philosopher Transhumanism's SolipsisticUtopianism The First Transhumanist

Teilhard de Chardin and Transhumanism

Wikipedia 

*Kurzweil Quaddafi is more than just a pretty phrase. Transmortals do not brook opposition. They were able to burn down one of their opponents when name calling didn't work.