Saturday, May 31, 2014

Yellow Bird -- Ti Zwazo (harmonica by Paul). 3-D capable (see instructi...





my first freestyle type video experiment on you tube back in Two Thousand and Eight ...



A song by Hatian-US-American composer of the 19th century, Michel Mauleart Monton.

--  [3-D instructions]  --

Now!  This video is 3-D capable.  You can watch in 3-D, a whole new experience.  Just click the "change quality" feature at the bottom of the video frame (the "gear" icon), and then click the 3D icon when it appears to get the setting that matches your glasses.  No glasses?  No problem.  Click on the "no glasses" link and then look at the 2 images in the video cross-eyed until a 3rd appears in the center and line up the white dot at the top till it becomes a single dot.  Happy viewing!



"Yellow Bird" was originally called "Choucone" after a famous poem written by Oswald Durand in a jail cell.   A cute little yellow bird appeared in the window of that cell and inspired the poet.  But there's more to it.  I'm realizing more and more the possibility that such birds help protect human beings from "evil".  The little bird being the paradox of small is big and that humility vanquishes.  Good to know when times get tough.



The mystery of "Choucone" is that the woman tends to react towards the survival of the progeny.  In similarity to the bower bird, she gravitates instinctively towards the mate that can give valuables and supply domicile and entertainment.  This seems to be the case.  It is overridden only in the minds of extraordinary women, but not in the tragic outcome of the lady the poet had written about.  Walk carefully through this mysterious world.



The song is played on harmonica by me on my cheap little Blues Band.  I've been playing since 1957 when Dad bought me my first Honer Marine Band in Charleston, South Carolina.  The harmonica's a humble instrument, but just one thing: you can give each note special attention, something that can't be done so effectively on any other instrument.



The feeble translation of the song is about a guy who had a pretty girlfriend that jilted him.  Good riddance, kid.  You should've been glad.  Beauty is a handicap; not a virtue.  It's as Bob Dylan Zimmerman wrote: "The princess and all the pretty people drinkin' thinkin' that they've got it made.  Exchanging all precious gifts, but you better take your diamond ring, you better pawn it, babe." (Like a Roalin' Stone, 1965).



I lost a beautiful girl back in the eighties and that's when I really started to sing. That broken heart was the best thing to really put the heart into the song; It's as I wrote: "'Cause you can't do nothin' with a heart of stone; you'll only be cruel, be cruel and then be all alone with a heart of stone".  (With Your Heart of Stone, 1982, Paul Hall)



So in the more shallow English version "Yellow Bird" (not the original by the poet and the composer) the guy  lost the girl and oddly enough, the gossipy less intellectual version may have helped promote this beautiful melody.



The scenes are of Old San Juan here in Puerto Rico.  In these shots, I get a chance to examine some of the character of the buildings and the architecture as well as the ornamentation.



Paul A. L. Hall

paulhallart.com

youtube.com/paulhallart

Inside Alaska Ferry Boat. (Harmonica, Guitar by Paul.)





This system serves as a valuable transport mechanism in the panhandle region of Alaska known as "The Inside Passage" and "The Marine Highway", and is a vital element in the economic engine of Alaska to this day.

The Bridge to NOWHERE! (except prosperity...)





They wanted to build a bridge between two islands in Alaska and it was nipped in the bud by many factions, acting in total ignorance, including the usual inept watchdog groups.  The real Bridge to Nowhere is the Golden Gate Bridge, connecting a little hole in the wall, San Francisco, with a wealthy burb to the north.  Nobody stopped that one.  The Ketchikan bridge could save the 48's ungrateful butts from economic disaster.  The Gravina Access Project.  The Gravina Island Highway, or so I'm tolled, would have connected to the island where some of a former Alaska governor's relatives live.  But it's as they say, everything's relative.  And then another governor, Palin, simply re-directed the money for the bridge to other projects.



Ever wonder how your tax dollars are being invested?   Or NOT invested.  You have to spend money to make money.  Between the Liberals who are throwing bones to the poor to keep them from revolting, to the Conservatives who are actually pro anarchy, removing all vestages of governmental scrutiny it's a circus of political amateurs who never want the other side to get credit for anything and so do nothing.



The only way to do anything is to do it in spite of Government, not because of it.  Two bridges are needed, the Gravina bridge and another connecting Ketchikan to Hyder and Canada.  Then a railroad is needed to connect Ketchikan and Gravina Island industrial and commerce city (yet to be built) with Toronto and New York City and therefore to Europe and all Atlantic commerce.  I think the money community with 40 trillion dollars doing very little at the moment would jump to finance such a project.  Then the voters should tell the Democants and the Repugnantkins to go home and elect an independent governor and senator.

Thursday, May 29, 2014

For Dreamers. Original song by Paul Hall (paulhallart) ...





For Dreamers. Original song by Paul Hall (paulhallart) ...



Velvet in a petal in a blossom rare and fair will, for dreamers of another world, be willing to "declare"...  Only "dreamers" can see the brightest color among the flowers: the ultra violet of the "white" blossom.  And with this they share the joy of the universe with their sisters, the bees.  The mall with it's emphasis on apparel, has lost the lessons of the flower.  No robes of opulence are like the blossom which all see.



People are speeding to lifelessness in a wholesale manor.  The very flowers speak but preoccupation with the mundane has  deafened the ears of those who have become heedless.



The poetry was written in an old hotel in Brisbane, Australia, in 1986,  and was put to music a year later in Auckland, New Zealand.  I call it "Velvet in a Petal", but it was called "For Dreamers,  not the Deafened Ear" and for this video, let's just call it "For Dreamers".



The visual for this video is from the first of my digital work, done in Claremont, New Hampshire in 2002. The series, in ten parts, is called "Flowers by a New Hampshire Forrest".  This is part one.



---------the words-----------------



Velvet in a petal on a blossom rare and fair will, for dreamers of another world, be willing to declare that youth will never die someday, when timeless doeth reign; and when beginnings never end and gone is all disdain.



-------------  But now, the petal's crying plea no solaced ear will lend to those who, by excessive speeds, destructive paths do wend to any place of lifelessness, where nevermore they'll hear the petal's softly crying plea upon their deafened ear.

Lion's Teeth (Dent des Lions - "dandelions") -- Growing Strong in Alaska





They have an explosive growth after a very hard winter and it makes a very robust plant if the plant is cold-resistant.



A look at the robust plant growth in early spring in Skagway, Alaska, as they come into their brief summer growing season with 18 hours of direct sunlight.

Moon River, Leavin' of Liverpool, Farewell to Tarwathie (harmonica by Paul A. L. Hall or paulhallart) ...





In this 2nd half of a half hour of harmonica playing, I cover: 3 songs, plus part of Stranger on the Shore and a short original.  I think, therefore A.M.  second 1/2 of 1/2 hour of me on the harp before the dawn.



words to the songs:

---- "Moon River"

music by Henry Mancini, lyrics by Johnny Mercer



Moon River, wider than a mile, I'm crossing you in style some day.

Oh, dream maker, you heart breaker, wherever you're going I'm going your way.

Two drifters off to see the world. There's such a lot of world to see.

We're after the same rainbow's end-- waiting 'round the bend,

my huckleberry friend, Moon River and me.



---- The Leaving of Liverpool



Farewell to Prince's Landing Stage, River Mersey - Fare thee well.

I am bound for California, A place that I know right well.



Chorus:  So fare thee well my own true love; When I return united we shall be.

It's not the leaving of Liverpool that's grieving me,But darling when I think of thee.



I am bound for Calafornia By way of stormy Cape Horn, And I'm bound to write you a letter love, When I am homeward bound.



I have signed on a yankee clipper ship, Davy Crockett is her name, And Burgess he is the captain of her, And they say she is a floating hell.



 I have shipped with Burgess once before  And I think I know him well: If a man's a sailor he can get along, If not, then he's sure in hell.



Farewell to Lower Frederick's Street, Ensign Terrace and Park Lane; For I think it will be a long, long time Before I see you again.



 Oh the sun is on the harbour love  And I wish I could remain, For I know it will be a long, long time Before I see you again.





---- Farewell to Tarwathie

  By George Scroggie



Farewell to Tarwathie, adieu Mormond Hill And the dear land o' Crimond, I'll bid you fareweel I'm bound out for Greenland and ready to sail In hopes to find riches in hunting the whale



Adieu to my comrades, for awhile we must part And likewise the dear lass that fair won my heart The cold ice of Greenland, my love will not chill

And the longer my absence, more loving she'll feel



Our ship is well rigged and she's ready to sail Our crew, they are anxious to follow the whale  Where the icebergs do float and the stormy winds blow

Where the land and the ocean are covered with show



The cold coast of Greenland is barren and bare No seed time nor harvest is ever known there And the birds here sing sweetly on mountain and dale

But there isn't a birdie to sing tae the whale



There is no habitation for a man to live there  And the king of that country is the fierce Greenland bear  And there will be no temptation to tarry long there

Wi' our ship bumper full, we will homeward repair

The Aural Gin of the Species.

   





They used to think "the Mao the merrier" but now they're shipping so much it's a ship of the old block.  Garbage mountains&ntl.debt.ect. They're able to overlook the transgressions of the deputies. The batteries of intelligentsia, subsidized in the backrooms somewhere began to churn out the adaptation.  And it ended up in the refuse piles of the West.



Yes folks, just ship them their garbage mountains.  They don't care as long as they get their cash flow from the shipping container of the unitized freight



Yes, folks, what brought you the garbage mountains in the Western world hails back to Emperor Chin and the United States of Asia.  But the West doesn't care as long as they're making money.  Do they? /:(

Saturday, May 24, 2014

Mall Rats


Mall Rats


Evidence of mutation in the human genetic code in the commercial shopping arena. 


by Paul A. L. Hall.

The mall is nothing new. It really got going back in the days of ancient Rome. It is the epitomy of the self-destructiveness of human nature. But I'm not here to criticize the mall in this entry at least, though I could come up with a few choice words. Not to mention the fact that they don't work. They have the mere illusion of viability but it's only the strength of such things as brand-name association and so on that keeps them barely hanging on.

What is serious is that the shopping and working environment is beginning to write itself in the vulnerable and sensitive genetic makeup of those who frequent such dives. The resultant mutations are on a crash-course with extinction. They will have no relation with real surroundings and eventually their line will perish.

Such mutations are causing people to be born with human brains but not to be able to use them. Eventually the successful humanoid that survives the test of time will be the villager who is fairly rustic and has a relationship of lifestyle with natural things. Eventually, people will walk places, commerce will cease, nobility will go no faster than horseback, and a functioning relationship of stewardship with plants and animals will bring a non-technological prosperity unimaginable in our time.

I mean mankind is so stupid now they don't even know how to use squirrels to sow crops. The grotesque figures that have become a mere excuse for humanity will just fade away and cease to exist. It may be profitable for a few individuals for the time being, but they are the guilty ones, prospering at the expense of others, deliberately causing everyone else to fail and perish that they may abound.


The Golden Invectee

The Golden Invectee


by Paul A. L. Hall

An invectee is a double arch in heraldry. But here is the nobility of a certain aspect not yet considered noble.

The rounding of the m in McDonald's Restaurants symbolizing the nobless oblige of feeding the out-going public.

To wit, the contest between the legitimate owners of the McDonald's name, princely McDonald himself, the present heir to the name itself, native of Scotland of the McDonald clan, not too recently at odds with the economic nobility of the restaurant chain over who should have the right to call their restaurant by said name.

The result was that with amusement, McDonald himself has but tolerated the restaurant's usurpation of the name to which it had no observable right nor claim until the point said chain sought litigation against him for those rights, claiming McDonald could not so name his own restaurant, in the family for generations by the same name used by the food chain. How the outcome was determined, I am not privy to know.

But suffice it to presume that combat was had on the field of the courts of a new realm in our litigant age, and the black night of the golden invectee did wield formidable clout.

Developing Nations Discover America's Secret Plastic World

Developing Nations Discover America's Secret Plastic World


by Paul A. L. Hall.

There's a problem with being the fustest with the mostest. Eventually the real players pass you and you get, as the track-and-field term goes, lapped.

America the land of the flim-flam, the illusionist, the prestidigitator and the Yankee peddler. Well, your little plastic world had 'em fooled for the better part of a century and now it's their turn. For decades you've been unwisely using the originators of gunpowder and producers of some of the world's greatest antiquities for cheap labor.  Well, they caught on, in case you haven't been keeping up on your current events.  But those guys have potential.  When they go to space they're the type to be mining the asteroid belt while you're still tripped off on saga movies.

Now, what's the better thing to be? What's the opposite of the cheap, shallow, meaningless existence. Among other things, a bit of real civilization would be nice. A world in which whole forests remain intact instead of becoming peddler's mediocrity stuffing your mail box. A pet peeve? Maybe. Let's look at something more pertinent:

We now have a sort of throw-away society. This implies a temporary existence in which one camps out, as it were to get something more substantial under way. But it has become permanent in contemporary society. A sort of picnic lifestyle generating garbage mountains.

The point is, if you want to continue to live that way, don't expect to be a world class power. Because that's a life-style anyone can emulate and eventually others will catch on and not only equal you but, and justifiably I might add, best you. I mean, you want to be a world power with nothing more than a pathetic pop culture and a few trinkets? Listen, there's only one place for a cheap shot like that: oblivion. They will not just "bury you", as Khrushchev warned, they'll simply forget you. You'll be recorded in history as an also-ran. A "what-not-to-be".

The problem with this lifestyle of plastics and cheap housing made of press-board stuck together like a Hollywood prop is that it's not unique. It's not creative. There's no real personality to it, no innovation, no greatness. Anyone in the world can imitate it. There's nothing to it. No substance.

Bingo, Ball and Booze -- The Three "B's" ...


Bingo, Ball and Booze

-- The Three "B's" ...

by Paul A. L. Hall.


I can almost remember the town in England, somewhere in the suburbs of London.  Almost remember, but not quite.  I should have kept a diary, but that's the problem with traveling light, at least in those days.  Maybe now I could just leave it in the blogosphere as I go.  
I was on the street selling underground newspapers.  As I used to say, "underground and coffee ground".  The best thing about being on the street is you can, as Woody Guthrie used to put it, "touch the people", meaning you could get out there and meet folks.  I used to think I must have spoken with a million people in my twenty years of travel, but perhaps a more conservative estimate would be three hundred thousand.  But as far as personally contacting people, for example, everyone that heard me sing on the street and that I got to say hi to, well that's over one million.
So one evening, I remember an elderly English gentleman stopped to talk with me about what he called the three B's.  He kept insisting that I remember the method the government (in England) controlled the masses with was the three "B's", bingo, ball and booze.  I mean, you never know.  I might have been talking with someone who simply enjoyed bantering conspiracy theories about, or he might have been the equivalent of a retired James Bond or something.  He asked me to repeat it a few times.  So that's how he was able, in a way, to make sure it got at least as far as this blog I'm writing now, thirty years later.
At the time I imagined it unlikely that the governance of any nation would have to go to such lengths to install such a crowd control safeguard.  I mean, the industries themselves were big enough, why should any political entity want a finger in the pie?  But as I started to visit other parts of England, I began to see some evidence that the three b's might actually be in effect.
Once, I remember looking for a bathroom in a city somewhere up north.  I was given permission at the door of a large motion picture theatre, the kind with the huge screens that they used to have everywhere back in the fifties.  As I was going through the deserted lobby on the way to the facilities, I heard this bizarre, chanting sound echoing throughout the actual theater and a more bizarre high-pitched sound that seemed to come from everywhere.  Thinking it to be some strange ritualistic event going on, and since there was no one around, I resolved to scamper up the carpeted steps a bit to take a little peek.  I had a bird's eye view.
The auditorium, arranged in the typical amphitheater sort of  setting with loge, orchestra, and balcony seating in front of a stage, was absolutely filled with people, or, to be more precise, ladies, all more or less in their later years.  The high-pitched sound came from televisions, hundreds of them, very large ones, positioned at regular intervals throughout the entire seating arrangement.  The whole place was very dimly lit, except for a spotlight trained on center stage, where there was this enormous ping-pong ball style randomizer of clear glass or plastic, and even from my vantage point, one could see the balls whirling around inside under the power of an internal blower of some sort.  
I mean it's not uncommon any more.  You see them all the time in those lottery drawings on television and such a devise was used to randomize the sequence of names appearing on ballots throughout California during the impromptu election that recalled governor Gray Davis this September of 2003 in which proceeding I voted just down the street.  Each electoral district, I believe it is, had to have the names of the hundreds of people that anteed-up for the privilege of running for governor if Davis was recalled, printed in different random order so that no name would continually come first.  In my district, the first two names on the ballot were both Schwarzenegger.  Until then I thought there to be only one in that race.
Anyway, there they were a whole theater full of people, mostly ladies, it seemed, transfixed by the gleaming ping pong randomizer on stage.  Regularly, a well-dressed gentleman would take the most recent ball as it slid down the transparent tube and out into a sort of trough.  And then announce the letter and number imprinted on it to the waiting crowd in a low, droning voice that echoed throughout the auditorium on loud speakers in front, in back and on the sides.  I just stared and then remembered about the three b's.  Even if it weren't on purpose, this was big.  It is conceivable that something that enormous could happen by itself, I mean, with something that popular, it had to be a big business.
But if someone wanted to control the segment of the population that didn't go for sports and might be absolute teetotalers, this was it.  I stared at the crowd of attentive ladies.  Not an empty seat in the house.  With a pastime like this there wouldn't be time for social protestation or any other project.  The government was safe.  At least for the time being.  They just would sit there for hours and hours waiting for the next ping pong ball to emerge.  One at a time.  Wow.  These would be the hardest to control.  They would have to have the most powerful of all the big three, the bingo "b", the first in the triptych!
And don't think it was confined to just England.  What is it with this game?  I remember once in Eastern Samoa, the other side of the planet, on a beautiful weekend day, I think it was a Saturday, I had to find someone at the public market.  Now, the public market was in the capitol, Pango Pango.  
You may think this is some exotic, off-the-wall place out in the middle of the ocean or something but think again.  Pango Pango is the location of the deepest natural harbor in the world.  It is the crossroads of the Pacific, at least when I was there back in 1978.  It's a big stop-off place for container ships who use it's facilities as a sort of transfer point, causing a great container skyscraper to cut into the tropical skyline.  Even though it may not look like much at first glance, it is.  It's just that it's dwarfed by the volcanic mountains around it.
A fairly modern cable car spans the entire bay.  At the time, I don't know if it still is, it was home base or at least one of the home bases for the American tuna fishing fleet and several Korean tuna fleets.  They have a modern airport that accommodates international jumbo jets from continents and oceans away.   
So when I went to find that person, I expected to see a huge market place bustling with activity.  But they had shut the place down and what appeared to be thousands of people were sitting on the pavement -- you guessed it.  Playing bingo.  Lane after lane of the normally busy market, the entire area the equivalent of five or six city streets, loudspeakers blaring at regular intervals, people were attentively playing bingo.  
Now, if people want to play that all day long, that's their choice.  It is kind of fun.  I thought it might be more interesting to try different words like "existentialist" or "antidisestablishmentarianism", but maybe that wouldn't work.  Someone got the winning formula when they came up with the name "bingo".  They started us out early in life singing about the old man who owned bingo the dog.  Best damn advertising jingle they ever came up with.  If they did, whoever they are.  Probably it was just a cute song.
But have you ever noticed how seriously those guys take it?  It's a kid's game, for crying out loud. Why bingo?  What about slinky, or silly putty or old maids or snakes and ladders?  Maybe even a more grown up game like checkers.  No.  It had to be bingo.  That was the winner.  And man, did it catch on.  Whether the man with the three "b's" was spot on or not, it sure looked like there was something more going on than meets the eye.  But even if not, "bingo" could go it alone.  It could take over the world all by itself.  
But the players take it so seriously.  When I found the person in the market the only comment was that my clothes were unkempt.  I mean, come on.  Here I was at this miscarriage of human potential and they were worrying about my P.R. presentation.  That's where I had to draw the line.  It had to be institutionalized.  Nobody was having any fun.
Well, after that I sort of forgot to check in an area if bingo had spread to their land or if these other countries had something else going on or what.  But something really powerful is going on to prevent the section of the population that isn't neutralized by the other two b's (and those guys -- they're hopeless; if once they walk down the dark side of the farce, the twisted paths of ball or booze, just write them off as goners! -- easy shots, piece of cake).   I'm not talking about the poor closet drinkers here, at least they have an excuse.  Something else wiped their slate.
But what about those who really pose a problem to the sort of institution that would prefer the remnant, the most serious segment that could really do something if left to their devises, under the proverbial thumb of state control?  Then you've gotta have the ultimate weapon to get the other statue-quo-threatening one tenth of the population who escaped unscathed.  Who ever thought it?  A gambling devise from a kid's game.  But it worked, and that's all she wrote.  Curtains.  It must be the end of the world for sure.  There was an old man who had an old dog and bingo was his name.  
Forget trying to find out if Hussein tried to buy uranium in Africa.  Forget the nukes.  There's something far more sinister afoot here and there's only one solution.  Regime Change.  B-ten, I-nine, N-eight, G-seven, O-six, -- fivefourthreetwoone.  apocalypse. 
Okay.  You could probably tell I was kidding.  But the bingo thing was sort of incredible, I have to admit.  So let's get serious for a minute, here.
In all our stories and works of fiction we look for the bad guys.  In fact, I notice the terminology creeping into the military vernacular as well.  It may be a public relations ploy or just an unconscious reaction.  They're the bad guys.  Get them.  They may be or not, or partially or completely.  When you make blanket statements, you can loose some of the effect if you have to go defining terms.
In the real world, it's the good guys who cause even more problems than the villains.  Something just happened in the human condition to make us that way.  But the bad guy thing is compounded by willful ignorance.  So what is the greatest cause of global poverty, wars, political unrest, even catastrophic plagues and all sorts of other extreme failings in society?  The disinterest of the common person.  The everyday person in pursuit of disconnecting amusements such as gamboling, social drinking, and the worst of all, professional sports.
That's right, buddy, it was guys like you that caused world war two.  That's a good one.  Blame it on Hitler.  Meanwhile there's the president throwing out the first baseball of the season.  Tell me about it.  The bottom line is if the three b's come into play in your world then you're a part of the cause.  Because you couldn't give a damn.  Oh, you claim you can indulge yourself and still get on with doing a good job, but you're kidding yourself.  It's a front.  All just a good show.  No substance, no professionalism.  Just enough to squeak by.  A waste of a life, a waste of a contribution.
You want baseball?  Go out and play some softball with the neighbors.  So somebody can throw a ball, you want to make him a millionaire?  No wonder so much money is tied up and going nowhere.  Just so those guys can sit around and feel rich.  It's the cheapest mind control there is and you're the stooge.  So go ahead, waste a life.  Just so you know.  It's irresponsible.  And not just that, it's the cause of the problem.  Yet nobody dares look at it, no one dares bring the cancer into the light.  You know why?  They're scared to.  They're scared of you.  Does that make you feel good?  Yeah, I'll bet it does.
Hey, whatever happened to Enron Stadium?  There's a real one for you.  What a bunch of creeps.  Well, guess what, wise guy.  This is the planet of death.  You people made it that way with your little games.  Just one of the crowd.  Too many wars.  A lot of people died and for what.  They died so you could have the freedom to act responsibly and do your part.  So what are you doing with it?  Sitting around blowing paycheck after paycheck on the slots?  Wasting your time off watching someone else play a game?  Hanging out at the watering hole staring at a swizzle stick all night?  Yeah, go ahead.  You don't care.  Okay.   So you're the bad guys.  You always were and you always will be till the inevitable world dictator shuts you down.  Someday.  And he won't need uranium from Africa to do it.  All he'll have to do is help out the global poor and the starving and they'll do anything for him.  They already know you don't care.

Global Emperor to Use Religious Conservatives

Global Emperor to Use Religious Conservatives


by Paul A. L. Hall.


And that -- might be whom? I had a dream about that back in London in 1971, and in my dream I saw four things above the podium of a global Emperor or dictator or something like that. Now , you might think, "Huh, big deal. After all dreams really are not all that serious, are they?"

Well, maybe there's nothing to it. It's only that this dream was so jarring and so realistic, and the same time symbolic -- really symbolic, that I remember it to this day. OK, for what it's worth, here are some of the main things I saw -- by the way, it was one of those color dreams: They were religious objects, hung over the podium of this dictator as a form of symbolic, obvious religious, huge symbols on a banner. There was a cross, a six pointed star, a crescent, and a beast or animal with two horns, it appeared to me to be something like a bulls head.

Now, what I would tend to read into this, if there was anything to it, and maybe there is, who knows? -- But what I would read into it at this point is those symbols represent religious symbologies. There was a cross, a six-pointed star, a crescent and what appeared to be a bulls head. It's fairly obvious, perhaps, that these would tend to represent the majority-style conservative-type fundamentalism in all the world's major religions. There were the three monotheistic religions, and the fourth might've been a kind of union of all the world's polytheistic religions. You have to realize that polytheism comprises quite a few believers out there.

Now I know, here we seem to be getting into the hazy grounds of what is termed "theology". But I consider theology to be a science, just like the relatively unknown scientific discipline of the study of miracles, "thomotology" (I hope that's the way that word is properly written). Now the common concept of theology is what clergy study before they can be ordained and blah blah blah and on and on they go, losing it all in somebody's misconception of religious ritualism. But actually theology is supposed to be a scientific discipline, like biology, chemistry, physics and so on. It's just that apparently it has never been treated as such a discipline.

In other words, as a scientific discipline, theology would be, in a way, the science of humankind's functional relationship with the unexplainable realities and human interaction with probable superior intelligence. You may be one of those who jump to the convenient, self-comforting conclusion that the concept of superior intelligence is simply a superstition, or at best, the type of fiction relegated to the UFO crazes, but my conclusion is that it's safe to say that the jury is still out on that one.

But whatever theology is, and however many impostors and charlatans there might be imposing themselves in the discipline of theology, it must necessarily depart from humankind's concept of religion. Religion is the opposite of theology. Religion becomes the historic tool in the hand of politics, especially the type of politics involving authoritarian rule and dictatorship.

Religion is the historic device politicians use to get the will of the people on their side. And that certainly has to be true with imperial rule and dictatorship: There is no empire without an indigenous religion to assign authority to that Emperor and his or her empire. Well, check it out. History is rife with these patterns. Therefore, you can extend the postulation to involve the ultimate empire, a global empire. A global Emperor uses all global religions.

The founding fathers of the United States seemed to have tried to avoid this inevitability -- apparently they recognized it as a part of dictatorship. They may have recognized that any human attempt at theocracy would only end up in some abuse that would lead to a dictator. And isn't that the inevitability of the pattern of history involving any theocracy, and also, by the way, just about every dictatorship?

So, the United States is supposed to have a separation of religion from the body politic. All I can say is, nice try. It seems to be ingrained in human behavior, and on a deeper level, there is another sort of devious human behavior that seems to be able to manipulate it. The one characteristic of religion is the use of formality and symbolism and ritual to achieve comfort and a false sense of security. Now, to cover it up, a lot of the church-state-separationists who are really protagonists of global dictatorship are pretending to be watchdogs, and are barking away at the slightest infringement of so-called religious artifacts and objects being proffered or displayed on state property or federal property -- or prayers in governmental functions, and so on.

Check it out for yourself, but I think you'll find that their real objective is also to, in the interim, keep ethics, often paralleled in monotheistic religions, from impairing personal interests, particularly those of the establishment of global empire -- whose establishers and tenants must needs use deceit and subterfuge to get into power.

People are so easily fooled. Religious institutions are easily infiltrated; ritual can be expertly imitated by any impostor, tricking an average parishioner into imagining such an impostor to be extremely devout. But still in all, they're not going to willingly forfeit their democracy and their freedom and just let somebody walk right in and take over and boss them around.

But as I said before, the pattern of history is a period of relative freedom or liberty followed by a subsequent abuse of mercantilism, which we are seeing now on a global scale, inevitably followed by a dictatorship; those that abuse liberty get busted by a dictator. But this time, as you can see, democracy in the world is very well-organized, and it is going to take subterfuge and deceit on the part of the unscrupulous who apparently at this point seem to be within striking distance of pulling this off, as well as the use of religions -- all religions, whose people will apparently be manipulated by infiltrators in their midst, to put the will of the people on the side of a global dictator.

U. S. A., King of the Banana Republics

U. S. A., King of the Banana Republics

by Paul A. L. Hall.


Now, that's a serious thing to say. So let's back that up with some facts, shall we? It's not over till the fact Lady sings.

Let's look deeply at the basic tenet of human nature. And then the differences in various aspects of human society that have managed to come to the surface in our globe of the 21st-century -- the beginning thereof.

What is Banana Republicanism? The cliché serves us well, but we have to go beyond that. Actually , I worked in a banana plantation for a while, about half a year in Western Samoa, Tutuila island. The banana has gotten a bum rap, here. It's the only vegetable with complete protein. For almost a whole summer, in France -- outside Paris, I lived on bananas. Fortunately for me, it worked.

No, what we're looking at here is the type of republic often found in a wealthy landowner situation, typically a plantation-style monocultural cash-crop situation, where the landowners are quite wealthy and have quite a weight and influence with the leader of the country, often a type of figure who is either elected for life, a dictator with the presidential title, or who mysteriously always manages to win elections.

Now , what we're looking at here is your run-of-the-mill type of Banana Republicanism. Now, once you get into the higher types, you're looking at wealthy land-owner scenarios, only they tend more to be industrialists, getting away from cash crops and into more lucrative forms of operations. These have a way of buying off the representatives, so while there is always a rotation of persons and personages, the influence is still nonrepresentational of the actual people.

Should the people be represented? Yes, of course they should. That's really what it's all about. It's about stewardship, although people tend to roll their eyes at that term, so a better term might be "repair". However, in the two high schools I attended, and so it seems in all the others, we were taught that that was not the real goal of the founding fathers. It seems they imagined the common man to be incompetent. Those that framed the Constitution actually intended that only those that could handle responsibilities, such as landowners and business persons, etc., would have a say in governmental processes and representation thereof.

So this for-the-people stuff was all a lot of hooey, as in hooey you think you are? And it does seem to be so, that when the average guy or gal gets to the polling booth, they really don't know who they're voting for. I don't blame them for that. In the kind of rat race that contemporary America has become, no one has time to be informed of the actuality of the candidacies or candidates. They probably don't even know from candied dates. But basically, the mechanisms are in place, that if they should get disgruntled enough, they, the people, could actually fire the incumbent.

During my tenure in Washington, I was able to conduct my own private investigation -- of what? Buddy, I investigated everything I could in the three years I was there, and I found a bunch of stuff. One thing I discovered was that it wasn't the representatives that were running the joint, it was their assistants, who remained in place often 30 years or more. And it didn't even matter which party, or who, was in the office, the assistants remained, almost like part of the furniture. Oh, but it gets better.

It's the very echelons of "persuasion" -- the levels from the obvious persuasions, such as lobby-ism, down through the deep dank lower levels, that you get to the reason why the USA could be considered a banana-style republic. In other words, one that eventually will get to the point where they can't pay their debts. It's like primitive leadership contests in barbaric societies, if we may be permitted the luxury of that term barbaric. Shall we just say King-of-the-Hill scenarios.

The real pros in the game, let me tell you, have it figured out so that no matter who gets into offices or positions of authority, they will have some modus operandi to accomplish a certain acceptable degree of guaranteed arm-twisting. One doesn't need a Chubby Checker to twist again. This is becoming a science -- no, rather, it is becoming a virtual technology, complete with computerization, databases, and sciences you've never heard of before, shades of gray coming under the vague heading of "psychology". We never see true psychology in action. It has been usurped by the persuasion industry.

All hail the King of the banana republics, where the people it represents are reduced to the impulse buyers that enable it to survive recessions. Remember, Caesar, thou art but a man -- whoops! Let me rephrase that. Wow, Caesar, it looks more like you've got to remember you're but a Frankenstein's monster. Frankenstein saves nine.

OK , enough of vagaries. A little humor may hit the spot, but I don't see any Dalmatian here. Doggone. It reminds me of the one about the two Dalmatians having a fight, and they were invisible until you turned on a spotlight. But they didn't have one, so they had to settle for a spat light instead. I mean, the election of 2004 was a textbook case, although it may not have been the case in actuality, a real classic: using religion to put the will of the people on the side of the leader.

My best motto has always been to stay away from headquarters, but I always manage to be ending up in one headquarters or another from time to time. The use of psychology, hypnotism, subliminal suggestion, and on and on, even so much as using technology that can cause brain degeneration at a distance (commonly practiced these days) comprise the next few layers down, still obvious enough. In my investigation back in the sixties, I found evidence of a layer of blackmail as well, typically sexual blackmail, most effective of which was homosexual blackmail. In Washington, a normal man could be made to believe he was a homosexual, it's just that easy.

The rest of the stuff I found out, I don't think I'll be discussing much of that. There's an element of futility in all of this. My advice to you, kid, is to get along in spite of the political situation. Besides, in a fluid reality such as contemporary USA is, even if the government does help you out, that could be all gone tomorrow. It's a banana republic. Get real.
I tell you what, save up that vacation money, mortgage the house, head off to the District of Columbia, and run your own little investigation for a couple of years and see what you come up with.

It's just that, the next time you wanna whip out that plastic flag, made in some outsourced cheap labor country, stick a big yellow banana on it. I mean, you the people, the common average walking around scratchin human being out there -- you're so concerned about how hip you are. Forget the underwear show, and the occasional p.c., or more bluntly put, "plumbers crack", emerging from your grungy pants hanging halfway down your hips.
Quit trying to be so cool. You're just a bunch of plastic hippies getting nowhere fast. So that dates this text, early 2005. Get a banana broach and pin it next to your American flag on your lapel and put on a suit and act the part properly.

The Hamlet and Cheese Omelet

The Hamlet and Cheese Omelet

by Paul A. L. Hall.


The key to the great British navy of yesteryear was the Danes.  They were all British from the Stone of Scone, upon which the Kings were crowned. The stone brought from ancient Israel, to escape the Babylonians.

British is a word actually sometimes construed as meaning: "they live together in peace and peacefully". And said Brith is a key to prosperity from the coming together of the disparate cultures. The Danes having become Viking or seafaring, brought the contribution of the Ship Wright to the Brith of the Britons. But only after they stopped belligerence and settled down usually in Thorpes.

It's as the famous Dane in Shakespeare's play said. "To be or not to be". Well, I suppose two bes are better than one. But as you can tell from history, apparently the Danes and the Vikings of all Scandinavia were anything but indecisive. And while they could be thought of as huggers of the coastlines like the early Mediterranean sailors were, history also proves they were anything but, setting out not only into the deep open sees, but also into Arctic waters and in open longboats and what they were able to do eventually with Brits of England they were not able to do with the Native Americans of North America, and perhaps that was unfortunate.

It's interesting to note that my ancestors were among the English colonists that first populated North America's shores so many hundreds of years ago. And they were most probably descendents from the stock of England's early Scandinavian invaders that had eventually settled in. All the European colonists had great problems settling in North America, but standing out from them all in ultimate success were the hearty English, who seemed to have been just the right stuff for the job.
An interesting point to make. It's like the contrast between a work horse and a thoroughbred. When it comes down to the real nitty-gritty, the thoroughbred is almost useless for anything but a beautiful horse race.

And here we see the robustness of the combination the scrambling of the ingredients of our Hamlet and cheese omelet. It reminds me of the joke about the country that needed a stronger Air Force: The Presidentee just had the air controller scramble the jets.
Here comes to play a word known as "disparity", meaning the "difference between", such as the disparity in binocular vision: When you look at something with both your eyes, each eye sees a slightly different picture. Your mind combines the two pictures and what you really see is actual perspective, known as "depth perception". It's a matter of life and depth. So what you are really seeing is what is known in visual physiology as "binocular disparity", or the difference between two pictures. Two pictures or not two pictures, that is the question.

The key to success is not always, in fact hardly ever, and maybe even never, the flawed human idea of "purity". With a good look at the hindsight of history, noting the parts where all the successes took place, we can plainly see that it is the mixture, different peoples working together in a blend of peace and prosperity, that really make a functional and prosperous society. Yet it is not always as simple as it seems.

In many societies, disparate cultures where different sorts of peoples are living together in the same nation still do not blend. I've seen examples of this in almost every place I have visited. I mean, people can do as they want. Far be it from me to criticize. What I'm doing here, though, is observing a phenomenon and pointing it out in this article.
When I lived in New York City, I resided in the West Village back in the sixties. The neighborhood I was in on Bedford Street was also a part of a section of New York City known as "Little Italy". It was a neat little place with lots of great cultural value, fantastic food, really interesting. But it was an enclave and in most places, you will also find such sorts of enclaves where newly arrived citizens from other parts of the world settle into tight-knit and exclusive micro communities that serve to, it seems, retard, as it were, the blending of disparate societies into the prosperous combination they could be.

Whatever the motive, security, purity, maybe even in some cases common sense, the outcome is usually the same: the area assumes a sense of rigidity, in which the denizens acquire an air of polarity and fragility, where the situation becomes territorial and stilted, all the while camouflaged by the color and liveliness of the culture brought in from the old country and clung to tenaciously.
If that's you I'm describing, what can I say. Real life has its insecurities were a person has to step out, front up, take a few chances, learn the new language. True strength comes from the blending of different factions, not from the misconceptions of purity where fallible human nature tries desperately to filter out anything it imagines to be impure.

In fact , we find out with some of these races, and peoples or even families that are given to inbreeding and shutting out the external world, what they imagine to be pure is really nothing more than stagnation. It's curious to note that a malfunction of the human mind is to cause, or to tend to cause it's local society around it to develop no further, but rather, in false visions of purity, cause it to implode upon itself.

What we have actually in the world today, almost 6000 years after we emerged from a stone age, is a mere shell, a fragment, of what humanity could be and should've been. We see a weakened and debilitated species that is intent on its own extinction; it's extreme intelligence being its own undoing. In other words becoming the opposite of what it had intended itself to be. But then, I suppose, two bes are better than one.

The Lost Instincts of Man Return

The Lost Instincts of Man Return.

Treason or Trees in the Ground?

by Paul A. L. Hall.

Did you ever get a slice of the green pizza?  The human being, they maintain, has got to be excluded from nature for nature to be natural.  They forget that the human being is also a part of nature itself.  
The alternative to human beings involved in nature is fire and lots of it.  That's what happened to San Diego county in 2003.  But naturalism, the product of stilted minds suckered into herding everyone into deadly crowded cities are really helping the very people who are the enemies of nature, the exploitationaists.  So the naturalists have become the self-righteous mantra-chanters of "leave nature alone" neglectionism.  The human being is a part of nature.  The city is the worst place for people to end up.
The great power blackout of Summer of '03 was attributed to three incidents of tree branches touching power lines. Was the Ohio power company negligent in not pruning the branches back as required?  They claim that they do trim the trees away from power lines on a five-year cycle.
This is another little hint, and I say so often, while conclusive proof of an overkill, unaffordable, beyond-shadow-of-doubt nature (which for most people is nearly impossible) is preferable, buddy, a hint is all you get.  History is replete with dead bodies all over the landscape of nations, people and organizations that just couldn't take a hint.  The tree limbs hitting the wires wasn't a wake-up call.  Sorry.  You don't get wake-up calls.  You're in the cheap motel.  This was a tap on the back.
So do I detect a hint?  Yeah.  Yup.  Uh huh.  Looks like it's the instinct of man to dig up the buried carbon and put it back into the biosphere.  And we do have some evidence, here, after all.  Just look at who is trying to stop it.  The people who want to neglect nature and not be a part of it.  They have the best p.r. and everyone gullible enough, which is the majority of peoples on the earth, believes them.  It looks like the increase of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is causing an increase in the growth rate of trees.  Could it be that nature is actually slowly coming to benefit from all of this?
Unwittingly, and that's how instinct works, by the way, the human being is irresistibly oxidizing all sorts of fossil fuel and the exhausts are going into the atmosphere.  Now, those wealthy scientists out there could actually go to the trouble of measuring to see if any increase in biomass has resulted from the increase of carbon dioxide in the air.  Perhaps the reason why so many scientists have neglected to do so may be because the present education system has taken away their ability to reason in order to give them knowledge.  
So here is a tiny tap on the back.  A huge black-out caused by a couple of trees that may have been growing faster than they were a decade ago.  Look at the growth rings in a new-sawn stump.  You'll see that the growth is faster in warmer years.  But it also must be more than warmth, which is supposed to happen when the incidence of carbon dioxide is higher, but also, it could be the food it's getting, which is related to the abundance of carbon.
So what is mankind starting to do now?  The instinct, you'll notice, shifts from carbon to water.  After re-carbonation comes re-hydration.  See, the next thing the neglectionists will be screaming about is all that desert wasteland being polluted by that bad nasty hydrogen hydroxide (water), causing the baron earth to become prolific with woodlands.  It appears the neglectionists want to have a private world of a perpetual glacial ice age in which they survive at the expense of the demise of everyone else.  What would you call that?  How about exclusivism? 
Well, it doesn't work.  If you stop progressing you die.  There is no standing still except in the minds of the patrons of the institutionalism that has robbed them of reason.  What good is knowledge if you can't use it?  All the exclusivists want to do is keep the natural human being out of the natural world the natural human beings are a part of. 
I for one am not impressed with the green pizza.  The only thing they're good at is litigation.  They epitomize the social phenomenon of death, just like their peace symbol.  In ancient Germany it was the symbol of death.  But they won't pull it off.  Just when it looks like they've got the world under their litigant jack boots, they'll be crushed by nature itself.

The Predators of Man

The Predators of Man

[PREDAN]

by Paul A. L. Hall. 

CHAPTER ONE:

WANTED, DEAD OR ALIVE:
THE HUMAN BEING.

(YES, THAT MEANS YOU.)  

(But in your case, it also means "Wanted, indebted or alive.")



What’s out there is not the question. 

How indeed does one distinguish between the paranormal and paranoia?  For the most part, let’s face it.  People just don’t want to know.  And so very few really do, and most of them who are in the know are taken with a grain of salt.  But, in fact, if you’re going to take an honest look at the actual phenomenon of the fact that mankind itself has predators—then, in many if not most cases, you’re going to have to look farther than a normal perceivable environment in which mankind presently finds itself.
You then will also have to take into account the fact that some of your observations will only be paranoia, as the examination of one’s predators can often be extremely terrifying, especially considering that many of the real predators that are not fantasies of paranoia cannot be perceived by the senses and can only be observed by the effects of their actions or the “traces” or clues left behind.
Add to all that the simple reality that a lot that pertains to the unknown quantities of the predators of man is virtually beyond the human being’s grasp of understanding as well as the fact that almost all biological beings on the face of the Earth are controlled in one way or another so that no human can be assured protection from predators—add all that to the equation and you might not be surprised that the average person quite honestly just doesn’t want to know.
In fact, compared to the dilemma of man, the lemmings have got it made.  It’s too psychologically excruciating, and so, the mind refuses to tackle it.
What then can be tackled?  Well, what dilemma can and should be tackled by all is the prevention rather than the cure.  In a sense, the predator is the bitter cure.  But human beings are endowed with the wherewithal to prevent the diseases or circumstances in the first place which bring about the predators of man.
So here in this book, the intention is not to enter into an exercise of futility.  Bemoaning realities which we humans aren’t even psychologically equipped to handle.  Much more rather, it is perhaps the beginning of an effort to take reliable measures that will assure that the predators of man nevermore emerge in the first place.

 Chapter One:
The Only Truly Fair Election

Alright.  Let me toss out a phrase for you.  "Abuse of mercantile freedom".  Sound familiar?  No?  Here's another one: "Inordinate success attracts predation".
Look in the lessons of recorded history and you will find the phenomenon of the secular trend of it's upheavals, often occurring as violent and massive carnage.  You may think the next round won't get you; that you're out of the loop as it were.  But think again.  We are dealing with something so bizarre and unimaginable that only an abstract expressionist could envision it.  Or perhaps the not so abstract expressionist, such as the artists of the orient that envisioned dragons, or the peoples of some wilderness whose collective sub-conscious depicted horrific creatures.  They would know, as they are the only ones with time and silence to ponder the true dilemma of so successful a creature as man.
But let me answer the title of this chapter right away.  I don't need it's suspense, the realities I might be able to divulge in this attempt are sufficient to keep the attention of my readers if successful.  The people are really never going to have elections that will select the proper leadership over them.  First of all it's well established the very poor track record that majorities have had throughout mankind's tenure.  Next, most elections are Banana Republic style, probably rigged or maybe even won by default like the last presidential one in this country that was decided by the Supreme Court.
So the only truly fair election is that which inevitably is decided by default but of the higher order far beyond any court of man's law.  The flow is almost as regular as the tide: freedom, abuse, dictatorship, empire.  And that is the only true election.  The majority votes by it's behavior.  The crime gets committed and the criminal gets busted by an empire.  That is the pattern of history.  
But I don't see it as human beings controlling other human beings.  Mankind was perhaps fortunate in that the Third Reich happened at a time when the predators of man could only find Adolph when they were looking for some fresh meat to personify their actions.  What if they had found another Alexander?  What if they had found a professional soldier capable of swaying masses to commit acts of suicide as well as commanding a war on two fronts?
Now lets bring it up to the present.  Yes, I'm afraid my analogy fits.  There has been a massive abuse of mercantile freedom on a global scale this time.  And that calls for a global emperor and his predatory masters, real or not.  The predation need not be even so much as a reality.  That's the shocking part.  The saber toothed tiger fifty miles tall or the fire breathing napalm spitting flying dragon need only be the reality of collective thought patterns in massive numbers of human minds fulfilling some sort of terminal pattern.  
Bear with me here.  We are trying to do something extraordinary.  We are trying to attempt to comprehend something we don't have the intelligence to realize exists, whatever form it may take.  I'm trying to get to some point, like the narrator in H.G. Well's "War of the Worlds", where you and I, hopefully won't become just another statistic for which any who temporarily survive will have run out of body bags to handle.  And even if we should go, at least it would be with some comprehension of what it is evoking such massive carnage.
Do you know how easy it will be for the puppet of the monsters to walk in and take over?  All he has to do is aid the victims of the mercantile abuse.  And there are masses and masses of them right now in Asia, Africa, the Middle East, South America, The Former Soviet Union, and what may soon, if we don't take greater care, be The Former United States of America the land of the million millionaires.  
Like a troop of lions after the weakest of the successful massive herd, the predators of man stalk the weakest among us.  Not whom man imagines to be weak, but the truly weak: those who imagine themselves to be strong.  
Let's be realistic.  You thought yourselves strong in a land of the best protection money could buy.  Hey, what happens if that money can't buy so well any more?  Will your prison guards work for free?  How many public servants would be like monks with vows of poverty and continue their vigil without another pay check?  The country's infrastructure is crumbling anyway and it was also built on trust that the only way the nation could pay for it all was if it was able to conduct business as usual and go on about it's so-called everyday life.  One disturbing abundance in America (North U.S. America) is the fact that it is a "target-rich environment".
You might think the money supply is sound right now.  What backs it up?  Gold or even silver?  No, the dollar isn't even a cheap silver certificate any more.  It's based on the GDP.  Back in World War Two, they could afford blackouts.  Not any more.  Too much GDP, gross domestic product, depends on a third shift that has to light up the night to operate.  And that's just one little example.
Scientists are baffled over the ease of anthrax to spread.  Well, it's now in a circumstance where germs grow the best: extreme and shifting masses of moist enzyme-prepared protein in the form of licked glue on millions and millions of envelopes.
There may be the advent of equipment to irradiate the mail, but the point remains that extreme and anti-human intelligence is at work here.  The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars but in ourselves that we are underlings.  Real or not, imaginary or not, the predators of man are in the final proof real enough to take the toll.  And their hallmark is always the killing of people, from one gunman on the Texas Tower, to one leader using nerve gas on an entire village. A wanton disregard for human life, or for that matter, any life whatsoever.  
I've looked long and hard, I've carefully considered the subject.  The predators of man cause either those they use or those that form them to have pleasure in killing their fellow man.  Homicide to them is merely pesticide.  Regardless of the motivation or the ideals. I've often considered the outcome of the worst scenario.  A hermetic existence in which even all matter itself is completely destroyed.  That is "their" ideal.  The last to go would be the ones who helped them or were them, whatever.  For some it's suicide, for others circumstance.  All in all, it's really nothing more than a tragic lack of will.  The human puppets of the predators of man.
Now, how does one avoid them?  There are ways.  Curiously, they don't seem to like mountains.  Look at cities like New York and Los Angeles, and you will see a type of place where masses and masses of citizens are crowded together in the low lands.  Such predatory elements also despise if not fear the self-sufficient, so it's not a good idea to be one of those until the last minute.  
They don't like it when people are spread out.  A lot of the coercion used against humanity that can either be blamed or simply put as extraordinary coincidence has been to force people from agricultural land to urban concentrations.  Most of the nations of the world are now only about five percent farm population and most of the rest live in inordinately large cities.
I went over some reasonable advise in my song "How Do You Start With Nothing?".    It may seem simpler than it is, but decentralize and then gather others.  Depend as little as possible on infrastructure.  Organize a community in the normal way so as not to stand out.  If things have already degraded to a fallen stage, you'll have to start your own spurious currency, and other social norms associated with a functioning community.  If we still enjoy a business-as-usual situation, so much the better.  Link your community with major ones with as many kinds of communication means and transport mechanisms possible, such as wireless and optic fiber communication, as well as motor, rail and air transport (and water, if possible, even if you have to build and use canals.  They're not so bad if you have hydrofoils.).
I may point out at this juncture that if the social situation at large has decayed to a fallen stage, in which there is no longer any credible law enforcement, this phenomenon I'm attempting to discuss which I call "the predators of man", will take on different forms.  You can't stereotype something beyond your intelligence but at your own peril.  The phenomenon could take the form of mass dementia as easily as it could a solitary emperor.  
One scenario would be an L.A. riot the size of an entire continent.  The desire to kill is had by a significant quotient of society at any given time of history.  That may have been the problem with the snipers of former Yugoslavia. The pattern of those  peppered among the belligerents who used idealism as a mask to enjoy killing people was all too prevalent in that situation to be denied.  
In the mass dementia scenario that every other low-life packing anything that can shoot will be leaving the video games for the real thing, going out on the streets and enjoying murder in their favorite climate, anarchy.  You may think I'm painting a black picture, here.  Oh on the contrary.  My picture is ROSY compared to the midnight black reality you yourselves have created by your oblivion and your willful ignorance.  Now, let's do something about it and maybe it will be the incredible:  in other words, maybe it won't be too late to do anything but die bravely.
As I suggest in my song "The Flatland", so what if it turns out that nothing significant ever comes of the September Eleven upheaval of world history?  That would be a reprieve.
We all know that life will never be the same, but what if?  Well, even in that case, were you to decentralize, you would gain enrichment if nothing else, by being in a place where the existence is far more natural and peaceful.  I imagine that everyone from time to time experiences forms of mental illness much like the common cold or the flue.  It's in the presence of the natural world that one regains sanity.

A Tale of Too City

How dark is the human mind! How pale in thought, how diminished in potential; cringing in hovels of doubt and self pity; as unsure of itself as the basest of beasts in the wildest wood; surrendering it's brilliance to the quagmire of economic uncertainty; a pallid gray-green mass hidden in the shadow of the calcified skull awash in the red blackness of human blood waging dementia with the cacophony of it's negative emotions.  Taking it's place after death in the dusty record of the morass of could-have-beens.

A Tale of Too City

by Paul A. L. Hall


Let's Begin with the inevitable Dickens quote: "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times."  But that was from his classic "Tale of Two Cities".  This, however, is a tale of one city that I call "Too City".   In the sixties it was labeled "Megalopolis".  It is stationed on a piece of the planet in the East Coast of the lower forty contiguous states to the USA, but it has more in common with Paris or London, two cities made famous by the story by Charles Dickens about the French Revolution in which he depicts those graphic events which we now know were also aggravated by a failure of agriculture due to extremes in weather phenomena among other things smacking of intrigue and subterfuge involving the practically simultaneous emergence of  Napoleon, Bolivar and others.  Ever since Nimrod, there have been elements whose preoccupation is to rule the world and they always had to have towers.
The best and worst of times quotation may well apply here as well, but I present this not for literary stimulation, but rather to submit careful observations that I gathered at great difficulty and personal privation, which were not easily accrued but rather were painstakingly gleaned over the years, among other things, after and during an arduous fifty-thousand-mile journey in the United States alone (a part of my twenty-year more-than two hundred thousand mile travels.  
The USA voyage I financed only by selling my own home-made underground newspaper as I traveled.  I started with eleven dollars I used to print the first edition warning about a coming depression, which, thankfully, turned out later to be merely a triple-dip recession.  With a back pack full of one hundred copies, I stuck out my thumb to hitch-hike south from Washington, D.C., went around the USA, and returned to Washington D.C. a month later (after having hitched across the northern part of the country in three and one-half days), with enough money saved from my enterprise to purchase a month-long Greyhound buss pass, which the hobos call "riding the dog".  I traveled at night, sleeping on the bus using a piece of black foam rubber I found in a trash can at Honolulu airport to immobilize my head as I slept sitting up in the bus seats and this was fastened by an expensive neck tie I found tied around a fire hydrant in Mobile.  I wore silver dark glasses so that those looking at me couldn't tell if my eyes were closed or not.  
Not to digress, the Megalopolis I refer to in the first paragraph is a blend of several cities into one huge massive one, which stretches from Virginia to Massachusetts along the East Coast.
So our "Too City" also is made up of many cities.  And here I concentrate on two of them, having also, by the way, lived in both.  One city has the largest office building in the world the other arguably the largest business establishment in the world.  Both were attacked on September eleventh (911), 2001 by hijacked airliners.  I'm writing, of course, of Arlington, Virginia and New York, New York.  The largest office building is the Pentagon, where I worked as a spec 5 Signal Corps information specialist couriering documents back and forth between there and building T-7 near what was then called "Friendship Airport" in those days that housed my outfit, The Army Materiel Command back in the 60's.
In New York, after I hitched across the country my first time (that took six days) in 1970, I got a job driving a cab and I could remember the ominous feeling I had as I watched the framework of the World Trade Center go up.  I drove nights and would get up town and work my way to Chinatown and Canal Street.  There was one restaurant there where I would eat which had great food at a very low price.  I ate with chop sticks and sipped the free unsweetened green tea from large duralex glasses while white bearded Chinese elders in the back played dominos around huge dimly-lit round tables.  Most nights I never made it when business was good.  But when it was not so good, and I got all the way down town without picking up a fare, then the good meal would kind of make up for it.
Coming towards lower Manhattan especially, and from a distance, you could see the naked light bulbs gleaming miles away in the framework as it went up, each day higher and higher.  The tiny yellow pinpoints twinkled in the atmosphere between like stars you never saw in the city.  I used to look up, but usually all you could see were the visible planets whose reflected light was much stronger than stars and could penetrate the smog and the millions of bright lights of the city that never sleeps.  I knew New York would not be the same with those things up.  It was doing just fine with it's ethnic villages, it's great restaurants, it's art and music and literature, especially theatre, it's now modest sky scrapers in mid town.  I saw that era out as cold economics slowly crept in and took hold.
Of course like everyone else I was horrified when they came down, snuffing out in an instant so many lives.  I tried so very hard for the last twenty years to warn people about this.  It was worth everything I had to make the effort because that's what it took.  Isn't that what they say, "Give it everything you've got"?  Well, that's what I did.  I don't know.  Maybe it did some good.  
It's wrong to mass people together like that in one place at one time.  How do you explain it away?  It can't be anything more than greed and arrogance.   In my fifty thousand mile trip I saw an empty country.  Look at the satellite pictures of the USA from outer space.  What do you see in the night over the country?  Where are the most lights?  On the coasts.  Just pack them in along the coastlines, crammed into cities because maybe they're scared to be pioneers and decentralize.  They are "kick me" signs just waiting for any of scores of organized entities with destructive agendas to walk right in and do their worst.  
Why didn't they build the Pentagon as towers?  Well, of course, arguably there are tactical reasons.  I used to have to run down the hallways in order to make my appointed rounds and get back to T-7 on time.  Once I even saw Linden Johnson and Clark Clifford walk down the shopping mall corridor along the bare bayoneted honor guard pathway, rifles at present arms acting as a boundary for the crowds on both sides and heard the office worker say to herself how it was just like "1984" (even though it was still the late '60's).  The president said, after the strains of "Hail To the Chief" had abated, "My fellow Americans, during ... [and he said things I don't remember, but ended with:] ... "many have fallen by the wayside, but the Department of Defense has remained faithful".
Now, in the attack on the eleventh, each building was hit by one aircraft.  The Pentagon being one, and each of the Twin Towers being the other two of the three buildings I'm talking about.  Two fell from one hundred stories tall and one, the Pentagon didn't.  It was only a few stories tall, but it's expanse was flat on the ground.  It may have been because of tactical foresight of the architects, but I put forward another argument.  In economic terms, the people in the Pentagon had more invested in their training as a whole, than the average human being in the towers that died that day.  When I was there, a person with no more than a buck sergeant, a spec five, in rank, my training alone in terms of late 60's monetary inflation adjustment was then valued at more than one hundred thousand dollars, and a lot of that was my basic training alone.  Now it may be coincidental that the loss of lives was hundreds in the Pentagon disaster and thousands in the Twin Towers collapse, but the fact still remains, there was some thought involved in the Pentagon production as to what kind of a target it might be, so they built it low to the ground.
But, you see, ever since man started building things, they made towers.  Ever since the pyramids, it's an ego thing, trying to outdo each other to see who can build the tallest building and it's always just for the time being.
I designed a tower back in the days when I was trying to write to then Mayor Lindsay about free subways more than paying for themselves in boosted prosperity in Manhattan (and of course getting nothing more than the polite form letter in reply, though someone did include a personal line for the Mayor).  In my design the elevators were going laterally instead of vertically, because this tower was miles long instead of high; it was on it's side and would have been even safer than the Pentagon, because had the terrorists been a bit more resourceful and hit the Pentagon with ten jets they would have knocked it out along with the Twin Towers.
If I had any advise for those who are wondering what to do now, I'd say, don't renew your lease.  Get your office out of that sky scraper.  Head out of town where you can use your communication devises to better advantage.  Go west, young man, woman, old man, old woman, whomever.   Decentralize.

Friday, May 23, 2014

THE LABYRINTH OF CEMENTIA. (C) by Paul A. L. Hall. CHAPTER ONE: HARDLY A DRUDGERY.



THE LABYRINTH OF CEMENTIA.

(C) by Paul A. L. Hall.

CHAPTER ONE:

HARDLY A DRUDGERY.


Many indeed are the fine -- and sometimes even splendid --
contributions to mankind, if not to civilization itself, that are
all too quickly, in their infancy, stricken down. With what
Shakespeare referred to as "the pale cast of thought", or, more
often than not, second thoughts, great enterprises are brought
down as well as many great contributions which could have been,
and we see such potential breakthroughs no more, even, in fact,
if we -- or anyone, for that matter -- even so much as once saw
their glimmer as one might get away and see the sparkling of the
wind-borne sand glittering in the sunshine mystically as it
hovers above the black beaches of New Zealand.
I've been there as well as to the beaches of scores of
coasts on this cherished blue planet. The contrasts speak
blatantly. You've got to be there to hear it -- to be anywhere
where the speech whispers of things beyond the disease of doubts
and second thoughts of humankind. The human being, after all,
consists of the same dust as the universe and the finest
contributions arguably echo what the human being receives from
the reality of the universe. Such realities bring humankind to
the potential of leaving behind stilted ways and methods to
portray a greater role on the stage of life.
It's the old axiom: you've got to play by the rules. The
imitation cannot snuff out the real thing without serious
repercussions. Worst of all, eventually the imitations and the
un-real either fades away or dies abruptly, also taking everyone
with it who went along for the ride. But each perpetrator each
time thinks he or she can get away with it. The unfortunate
thing is that reality itself is the first victim because the
proponents of fabrications are relentlessly trying to snuff it
out and the best of humankind with it.
And when the sparkle of the best of humankind is so quickly
snuffed out, it affects the whole. Some, maybe most, would argue
that what's gone is gone and that life goes on. How wrong. The
death and absence of any positive contribution diminishes us all,
and the lingering void of the absence continues as a detriment
whether anyone notices it or not. You might choose to disagree.
So what? You can find out the hard way, that's up to you.
You're entitled to your opinion, but that doesn't change reality.
Yet even in the realms of nature the absence can be felt and
missed. It's an abhorrent sensation. It's a grief shared by all
the realms of dust, perhaps even to the uttermost reaches of the
nether galaxies to where perhaps quite disparate zones of altered
physics have elements which might function quite differently to
ours.
However, here, my account must needs be of a more local
color and scope, for few indeed would ever dare to entertain any
reality beyond the immediate. In fact, most often the opposite
is true where no reality at all is thought of by the masses
except contrived ones in which there is that ultimate horror of
the absence of anything real and of the universe.
If anywhere on the face of the Earth as well as in the
lexicon of history the sensation of such a ghastly absence on
such a scale is felt, it is in the collective lands of Cementia,
the almost exclusive environs of the being that labels itself
"man the wise".
What wisdom they may own in Cementia is most often
self-defeating. For it is a cryptic world of bland mystery.
Where is it's culture -- it's momentous achievement -- it's
monumental break-throughs into realms of beauty and philosophy
that will truly enrich that unknown quantity that permeates the
creature's very essence of it's being, sometimes referred to as
the soul?
Certain types of feel-good people who value their own false
sense of security more than a good long stare into the face of
what's really there, might point out a few concessions to culture
made here or there. It may be evident to some limited degree
trying to emerge unobtrusively by some few brave souls struggling
against incredible odds.
It may even be evident, to some minimal degree, as
economically viable and seem to be flourishing, but only in the
form of the "top ten" of it's day or those gone before. But there
is the ulterior motive of certain patrons where it is used for a
ruse or cover-up to attain ulterior ends.
But step out of the clubhouse and where are you? A place --
Cementia itself -- where wealth destroys the pioneer -- the land
of house arrest where to be without a house is to be untouchable
consigned to the horror of namelessness. Yes, Cementia itself --
where you stick with the winner until crisis unravels all and a
loaf of bread is bought with a basket of faded paper magic.
It is enshrouded in secret. And for you young who do not yet
know, I may point out it's collective hush, prompted by fear. No
one dare object, but rather all is crusted over with the consent
breathed by silence itself. It is a pallid silence, in the
realms of concrete where only at best, the rudest of facades may
succeed. Where all the rest is buried in a cryptic profusion of
mediocrity.
These are the cowards of conscience, where resolution is
suppressed and enterprise rendered victim to thoughts of fear,
their momentum undone and their action unlaced as the boot from a
corpse. What else will they do? There are no pioneers to follow
at least not any they choose to recognize.
Yet there is a glimmer of hope. For now and then there are a
few frontier-sharp-shooters armed only with what for a loss of
words could perhaps be best described as cultural phenomenon by
the scientist who indeed names the baby today amongst the crowds
of adoring well-wishers awaiting the band-wagons along the
vulnerable streets of the attritted environments.
There is the commando; the ground-pounder of culture still
out there in the crowd, though these trend-buckers be all too few
indeed. Among these few is the street performer. He or she
walks, however briefly, on the stage of life in the footsteps
those troupes once known as troubadours or minstrels, who,
throughout the recent centuries past, whilest the monstrous
sections of the global Cementia were yet in their embryonic
stages, let nothing stop them and, for want of the occasional
courts of nobility or kings to perform before, sang and acted in
the streets.
In Cementia they're called buskers. The word came from the
theatres of London of this century and the latter, who, to
publicize their indoor shows, would perform segments of them in
the streets and either referred to it as "busking", or were
labeled by others as "buskers".
Anyhow, the name stuck, as so many do because perhaps it's
critics helped it to do so. That was, what seems to us, so long
ago, before human tampering with market and market-places and
before controlled monetary systems and before plastic money and
cheap petroleum power and computers -- before sky-scrapers and
indoor garages and horseless carriages and yet other sorts of
bizarre things.
But the streets have changed since then. For below them in
many directions, if not in every direction, there stretches the
subway line: given many different names by the nations from
which these labyrinths emerge, such as the Metropolitan Line, The
Underground line, the Subterranean Way, and so on.
It is there, into the Great Downstairs, that some of the
more desperate of that radical troupe venture. Into the
Labyrinth of Cementia. And it is there where anyone liable to
spend any more time than necessary, begins to confront dozens and
dozens of double-takes. Of dejavu's-'s. Of what-if's and
could-very-well-be's -- of ah-ha's and of oh-no's. Yes, at
least a dozen -- at least twelve each day.
Just so, there are equally twelve questions one must ask
one's self if one is to sing in the labyrinth at any given time.
It must be first of all realized that today is today regardless
of what one would like to think. It isn't any number of
yesterdays, neither is it any one of however many tomorrows there
might be in the impoverished environs of the great downstairs.
It's just today or forget it. It won't work.
But for as many times as today is Today, those twelve
questions vary. Nevertheless the answers are always as
fascinating as they are deep for they are never so much as for
mastery as they are to teach. For even there, beyond the rumble
and distraction, the gravitons of the extreme reaches of the
galaxy still penetrate with their whispers of eternity.
With each today comes a slew of questions -- each of them
almost rhetorical but not quite. They don't give their answers
away, you know. Otherwise so many would not have given up. They
would not have so easily betrayed their place among the stars had
the multitudes of commuters taken enough time to ponder. -- Or
at the very least, to even partially defeat their own fears.
But that's the catch. The slightest pause is terrifying to
the victims of time. For today's dozen questions menace them
all. For those dozen threaten to reverberate within the forests
and hedgerows of each individual's thought reproducing
exponentially into a vast reservoir of lessons to be reinforced
by the lessons of the next today e're they fade out into erased
memories far too difficult to recall in this muddled world where
recollection is exhausted by the viscous colloids of confusion.
The same sort of themes run through them, but then, much if
not most of the nature of the interrogative is unknown. To be
inquisitive, to wonder, to ponder and more yet -- all just some
of the small parts that make up that vast whole of this power of
humankind and other species known or unknown to question and to
inquire. To some it is a sign of weakness, to some it is
pointless or insane, some believe this largely untapped ability
to be a quality or even a virtue. Yet the awful truth is still
there, regardless of what is thought by billions: most of what's
out there is unknown and certainly not understood.
Of the themes of the dozen or so daily questions, some come
under a "why" heading and others are "what if" while some are "if
only" -- but the most curious is "what's that?" -- all these and
more. It's hard to write about them, for the verbal powers of
people these days have disintegrated badly. Also, there's a bit
of a problem with the fact that people think they're "advanced".
Oh, no. At the best, we're still very much all too primitive.
So language was still very primitive even at it's best.
You can't beat experience. But I must describe somewhat, so
let me try. Some answers are free, but for most, you have to
ask. One of the themes is: "Why can't I figure out what's going
on, here?" Another: "Why can't I get through these barriers?"
And so-on.
But the most important ones hover around the question,
"What's that?" Those who begin to ask that gender of question
are getting answers. They are beginning to develop the greatest
power going -- the power of the interrogative. And they are
learning something more. You have to do it the way it's set up
to run in the universe, even if others are not and that's why you
don't get quick-fix results and why others who try will
ultimately fail. So, one runs into the need for patience.
Still, it's hardly a drudgery. For those lessons are made of
bizarre and fascinating stuff. The kind of stuff that makes a
person sit quietly pondering the last slew of them for hours,
delaying his or her departure into the dawn. Full well this is
noted here, for some never depart or ever they can, for the
pondering of the lessons of hundreds if not thousands of todays
in the labyrinth.
And what of them, the ponderers? Travelers or commuters from
the surface may see them sitting there on a piece of cardboard or
perhaps a plastic crate, seemingly in a blank gaze, staring at
some wall or peering into the distance. Of course those of the
surface will never know. Those who remain are oft peering into
dimensions no one else could have ever conceived of. For
dimensions themselves are not always perceived by those too busy
to discover them. There are many more than four or five.
But then, alas, no true lesson can stand on it's own for
very long without being forgotten by all learners in this world.
They are but fragile and brief and fleeting things; an all too
brief marriage between the surroundings and the mind. We try to
capture them in books, but, well -- who can capture an idea? The
mind itself will not permit it.
No, these delicate strands must be woven together with
others or they will soon melt away with the approaching dusk.
And it is almost always a chance discovery, except perhaps among
the very wise, that those delicate strands must be spun together
with many others in order to have even the remotest semblance of
-- let alone the reality of -- any endurance of such lessons to
remain in the mind at all.
Those who have discovered that mental shuttle-beam, that
weaver's tool of the memory, and who sport the robust fabric of
the lessons well-learned, are fewer still. For even chance
discoveries fade away if they are not pursued.
If all that weren't enough, there is a further complication.
In Cementia, often the questions are even less noticeable than
the faintest of hints. And though I may not be as apt at
describing all this as one would like, still and all, I suppose
it's better than nothing. Therefore, considering the difficulties
involved in ever perceiving any more than what the mind tries to
portray as the norm in the vast regions of the labyrinth, I will
nevertheless at least attempt to amplify some of these things for
you here in this work.
They often appear as incidents or experiences or some sort of
extraordinary ingredient in a seemingly everyday occurrence. One
must consider them before weighing their significance, for that
which seems to be an everyday occurrence may very well not be.
It may even be a sort of warning that would shatter a false sense
of security that the psyche would be loath to surrender yet must
to be truly as safe as possible.
The way these things emerge from the norm can be deceptive,
causing the mind to normally ignore them. Attention! For one's
own psyche is by far more often more deceptive than those very
appearances it would prefer to ignore.
One example being the day after New Years Eve of nineteen
ninety-one, when I surfaced from the labyrinth briefly from
busking on one end of the shuttle. It was a quiet new-year's
day. The upstairs is a different world.
Upstairs you can get a feeling of the future. There are
several. The one that could be, provided several million
micro-futures don't mess it up too bad, the one that probably
will be because several million micro futures do mess it up --
plus of course, the hundreds if not thousands of others that will
mess it up by their absence because of some untimely end -- and
there are other futures or varieties or combinations thereof. I
don't have time to get into that now. Anyhow as anyone from the
lab can tell you, if you can get them to say anything, which can
be quite a chore -- upstairs, the sense of future is a sense of
futility.
No one talks about it. What's the use? It's too
unbelievable and most would just -- well, just blow it off. It's
the same. The same as not telling them, or even talking about
it. Even though I try now and then as I am here. I handed this
text to someone who read it and liked it, but thought I was
writing fiction. It's non-fiction.
Most just don't say a thing. Some guys scream it out
finally and what happens? They just get more and more
frustrated and finally incoherent. In a sense they're trying to
warn the passers-by -- or maybe rebuke them in an effort to get
them to snap out of it or something.
They know what they're talking about, and a few others
maybe, but that's all. One guy in the Labyrinth of the Cementia
of Paris summed it all up with his never-ending scream: "Mamma!
Mamma!" You could hear him and his woeful cry echo down the
tunnels of the Mayorie D'Ivry line. The one I used to call the
"Ivory Tower". Who can deal with it? It comes to a point when
even the psychologist must -- even if the person were loath to do
so -- admit to the futility of being human, of "say no more, ask
no more".
I mean, there are just too many things going on in the
microcosms of Cementia for the human mind to handle, many of
which are mere fabrications anyway. Can you blame the commuter
for just wanting to get home? I don't, even though I know a
little bit more now of the incredible dangers he or she is in the
midst of. A vole facing the owls of a Nordic winter has more
awareness than the victims, potential or already done-in, of the
silent softened feather-wings of time.
No. Most, all too human, dash to their synthetic homes
while back in the Labyrinth, the ponderers just sit there
quietly and ponder the immensity of the unseen. Most of it is
out there, the rest of it is, of course, imagined. "Not my cup
of tea" you say? Oh yes it is. Whoever you are. And your cup,
as it were, is getting fuller and fuller by the moment.
Sooner or later, you too will face it. Taken in small
doses, it's both an elixir and a purgative, but put it off and
it's lethal. To all intents and purposes, it's invisible.
Imperceptibility does not diminish the reality of the hidden.
Most of it is real, some of it is imaginary. Just what is mere
imagination is the problem.
For out there above the population explosion, hiding behind
the concealment of time, lurk the actual predators of man -- and
whether they are entities or mere thoughts past the creases of
the brow, they are as unperceivable as the whisper of a Nordic
owl's wings in the dark winter air.
Anyway, the first survival factor is courage. Because if
you're too scared to look, you'll never be able to observe. The
next factor is, never be too busy to take a hint. And quite
often in Cementia, a hint is all you get. But then, oblivion is a
very intoxicating thing. Some tell me so is cyanide in small
doses. With oblivion, the dose is never controlled.
If you get drunk on oblivion, you won't know what hit you.
And neither will anyone else. Here in the very text of this
book I can at least be permitted the liberty of attempting to
warn my own species of the vicious cycle of futility. If one can
sense futility, one should pay attention and heed the warnings
and escape it. Of course the critics will emerge. Everyone
wants some sort of every-day life that isn't brought to an abrupt
end.  
But only the plunderers and their trolls would try to
criticize me if I even so much as expressed the least bit of a
sense of futility upon surfacing amidst the high decibel ratings
of the tar-and-recycled-glass floors of the concrete canyons of
Cementia.
Looking for a toilet in Cementia on New Year's day is like
many other perplexities on the top. The library on 42nd street
is closed on New Years. They take a holiday just like everyone
else. Only it may be on such holidays that everyone else has a
chance to visit the library.
As I walked along, there on the street beside the broken
bottles and the litter of the previous night's revelings, was a
torn square of newspaper that had been used as a makeshift
bandage for a bad cut. And there on the paper beside the blots
of blood, and written in all-caps and bold type -- two words:
"SOBER UP". The words were printed on the newsprint before the
fact. There you are.
Is it a hint? Is it just happenstance or are there no
accidents? When taken seriously, even at the risk of being a bit
too extreme, it warns of the intoxication of oblivion,
punctuated in human blood. Of course, you could just blow it off
as an accident.
I took it as a warning -- choosing to walk a bit more
circumspectly, as it were. Sometimes it pays to just perk up and
pay attention. Some say that if one looks for trouble it will
come one's way. I say that if you keep your eye open for a way
out of trouble it will come your way instead of the trouble and
hopefully before you run into that trouble.
Once again, I reiterate, it is courage rather than cowardice
that dares to see. Trouble almost always visits the oblivious
first. Especially man-made trouble. You might think it paranoid,
but there's nothing sick about honest vigilance. The disease is
not in looking wisely, the disease is in not seeing what is right
there in front of you.
So continuing on, being vigilant as best I could, I also
observed a connecting warning a bit later when I surfaced in
front of the museum of Natural History. There, on a billboard on
the picture of some movie actor, I could notice a small triangle
in one of his eyes.
I walked up to take a closer look at it. Someone had stuck
it there. You get a lot of those in the Labyrinth. The
sign-makers. It's like a game of tag between the renegade
sign-makers and the law as to just who gets away with writing
what where.
Some people are into information. But sign-making is more
like the art of reminding. Everyone who can read is reminded,
whether they want to be or not, about available stuff whether
they need it or not. No one bothers to take notes for future
reference. The adds are there for that, like it or not. One
person told me it was as if the walls not only spoke to you but
it was also as if they reached out and grabbed you and screamed
at you. And it is even there amongst those legal reminders one
also gets a sense of futility.
But the other sign-makers such as the graffiti artists are a
different breed. Much of it is the handwriting on the wall of
pre-set codes or ancient anagrams saying something only their own
minority can perceive. Some are advertisements of contraband.
Some are like remora, using available advertising to make their
statement without detracting from the host's message.
This guy was a sticker person, but with a novel approach.
The tiny sticker spoke so softly that only the proximate or the
curious would get the message. It was the opposite of the
blatant "sober up" message of Times Square, the one that was
all-caps bold and spattered with blood. Of course, that message
was not sent through any agency. It spoke loudly enough. This
sticker message was the silent type, nevertheless it spoke with a
loud enough impact gleaming there in the eye of that actor. There
in lower-case letters read the caption: "science = death". It was 
a gleam in the movie star's eye, the real death from not science,
but from the fantasy it was all too often used to create.  They
couldn't have all this unless countless numbers were induced 
to contribute their labor and their lives.  Partakers of oblivion.
As I said before, it pays to perk up, because none of these
hints or lessons stand alone. Each one weaves together with the
other strands -- the other shreds of evidence -- a hint here, a
clue there, a trace of what's left behind. The finger-prints of
the invisible. Twelve questions of today. Hardly a drudgery.
But then, quite often, a hint is all you get.


The account for the third of January, 1991
I entered the Labyrinth this morning on fifty-first street.
"Good" I thought as I approached the token booth. "No one in
line." There are two sorts when it comes to situations like a
token booth: people who need pockets and people who don't need
pockets.
The ones who don't need any really keep pockets somewhere
else. Big "pockets" like an office or a home. For the rest of
us, those kind of luxuries ended when they discontinued
coin-operated private lockers in public places.
You can tell who's who. One of the ways is by the bulges in
the clothing denoting pockets. These bulges are really file
cabinets of references on matchbook covers, partially used
napkins, and assorted memorabilia of little value except maybe to
the owner, and some bits of pocket change.
Often the bulges come from years of bits of information the
bearer hasn't had time yet to figure out whether or not he or she
should keep or throw away (or even, if the decision has been
reached to throw it away, where to throw it away, for that
matter). They're too busy. Yes, of course, they may be pretty
occupied with just staying alive and things like that, but
there's more.
They're too busy pondering the twelve questions. Some of
them with pockets even get to the point of no return, as it were.
The pockets bulge and overflow into bags. Sometimes it starts as
a plastic shopping bag or a colorful back-pack -- the type of
pack intended to give the splash of color to a hiker or climber
or maybe even that unusual breed of bargain-basement vacationer,
the youth-hosteller.
But the colorful pack soon becomes encrusted with the
telltale umbers and blackened grime of age which Cementia gives
to anything, buildings or clothing -- and the shopping bags
multiply, and sometimes the vehicles emerge. By that I mean
nothing big, but rather perhaps a shopping cart or baby carriage
or perhaps a bicycle with a small trailer.
In the Cementia of Sydney, each day as I sang beside the
huge cement tree-pots in front of the crown on the wall of the
O.T.C. building on Pitt Street, I would witness such a case. His
head was steadily -- perpetually -- in a deep bowed position. It
was as if he were hanging his head in sorrow and never -- not
once -- looking up. Some old digger in a red antique
crash-helmet, pushing his red pram.
Some call them bag-people. But it could be anyone. Anyone
who begins to take notice and tries to take notes. Whose pockets
bulge to the point of no return. In the labyrinth of Cementia.
Hey! Here I am trying to write it down! Yes, my pockets,
too, might bulge from time to time. But then, I've learned the
trick. I can keep my notes elsewhere. For 25 dollars a book,
they'll keep them in the Library of Congress.
Anyway, most keep their pockets in trim -- maybe during a
coffee break or something. And sometimes, quite often actually,
those coffee breaks last a couple of hours. Even so, when you
don't have an office or a lock-up file, or, on the other side of
a commute, a garage or attic or something back home with
relatives or whomever, then all you've got, in most cases, is the
old pocket and pouch. And those do tend to bulge more and more
if you don't stay on top of it.
The point is, that when you get to a place like the token
booth, and there is a line, especially a line behind you, the bad
vibes begin to fly when you fumble through your pocket for the
change to buy a token. You see, the speedy people associate time
with survival. They panic when they get delayed in the slightest
way.
But I wonder. You know, it just might also be that they're
scared stiff when they are forced to pause anywhere along the lab
without some kind of distraction. They may fear the stillness
least they should even so much as begin to reflect at any time
upon the twelve questions of today -- especially when in The
Great Downstairs.
That was good: no line today at this time at this booth.
I propped my guitar case against the wall and began to
fumble for change once I got my keys out of the way. There was
that two-dollar coin I still had from singing on the Hornsby
bridge in Australia. What else? Mostly dimes. Good there wasn't
a line of speedy people back of me. Anything smaller than
quarters takes too long for them.
I got the token and crossed the barriers. There. I was,
once again, in. It was the number six subway line. I started walking
down the platform. Presently, I came to the connection signs for
the E and the F trains. Great. That meant TUNNELS. As I walked
down the steps, I came to a brightly lit corridor recently done
in tiles. There were a couple of leaks in the ceiling. The
tile-work was rather peculiar. It was a solid wall, but at
regular intervals, the tile radically changed in color.
They were put up in such a way as to suggest to the
passers-by that gaping holes had been blasted in the walls
revealing an unusual scene behind those walls. Where the gaps
were, the tile was laid in such a way as to suggest a thickness
of wall of about two or perhaps three inches or so. Then the
colored tiles arranged in these jagged frames -- all just a flat
wall, mind you -- suggested a seascape.
It was as if, through holes blasted in this implied sea-side
wall, one could peek out at a virtual ocean scene. Each jagged
frame consisted of bottom tiles of swirling blue-green and the
top ones a simple bluish-gray suggesting a cloudy sky above a
horizon at sea.
I continued on past this point, this particular chamber in
the vast Labyrinth of The Great Downstairs, and subsequently came
to some steps.
"Perfect." I thought. "A stream of people from three
directions."
But just as I got to the top, there was a homeless man
selling the daily news. He was yelling "PAPER" like clockwork,
just about every five seconds. You see, they do that for a
variety of reasons. Plus it helps take away the pain.
Not an Ideal place to sing. I had been in that situation
before. Paper-screamers. I went through that at the famous
"Entrance to Nowhere" at the corner of the Town Hall stop in
downtown Sydney. There was the perfect spot just above a long
and quiet escalator leading to a corner of a part of a city block
with no buildings on it. The huge department store where I once
was able to buy the cheapest audio cassettes in town had been
demolished.
That in itself is a bizarre feeling -- to have been browsing
in the top-floor audio section of a department store that was no
more. No wonder the man in the red helmet bowed his head. It's
not like the mountains or the sea. So much of his world was no
more. But then, that's not the only reason why someone wears a
red helmet. My mother couldn't understand my dismay when she
gave me one just like it last year for my birthday!
The Entrance to Nowhere had a plywood enclosure over it
painted gray, which went from the escalator entrance right round
to the street on all sides, looking much like some sort of
impromptu band shell. And there, off to the side, was some
ex-third-world new Australian newspaper-shouter shouting his
clockwork-style chant. What it was I've forgotten but it would
regularly burst in upon some phrase of my song as if to protest
my very being there. He figured he had a right to be there but I
didn't.
No. Not ideal at all. Too bad. This wasn't going to be
easy. That would have been a good spot. The flow of people, the
"good population-adjusted frequency", was from three ways: from
the right, from the left and from the large cementine staircase.
Well, alright. He's got to make a living.
I walked to the left (to the right if you were coming up the
stairs). There, the Labyrinth emptied into one of the
skyscrapers. It was private property. In the realm of Cementia,
private property assassinates all cultural phenomena.
It's a realm that must needs gravitate toward the hermetic.
The more sterile the environ the more the merchants can profit
from mediocrity and imitation -- the two elements most prevalent
in Cementia merchandise. Were it otherwise, the people would be
more aware of the intrinsic values and would be less inclined to
buy what they didn't need. Yes, Cementia fears inspiration.
And that was private property, like the brass lines beneath
elevated corners of certain buildings which protrude above ground
level on the streets upstairs, where pamphleteers try to escape
the rain. One cannot. It's private property. The sterility is
maintained at all costs.
Would I try it? No. Not there. I could try it, but most
probably, all too soon, someone, one of the property watchdogs,
would be sure to remind me of that -- that it was private
property -- and move me on somewhere in the middle of my third
song, often treating me as from the lowest caste in this very
class-oriented society.
The results of all of this isn't very impressive. None of
the citizens of Cementia is really very safe at any time. I
suppose they value the illusion of security more. Anyway, the
guardians of illusion are not far away from attacking cultural
things that are not carefully controlled by their own order.
Their tenacity is like the prairie dog weeding out unwanted
herbs. They could keep their worlds of pretend. I was in no
mood to play move-along. The day before had been bad enough, and
this day would have to be different. This was today.
So I returned to "The Cavern of Illusions" where the
blue-green and blue-gray tiles glistened in their bizarre jagged
settings. After briefly pausing to study this chamber, I placed
my open guitar-case in an angular manner and I leaned against one
of the walls and began to sing, accompanying myself with the
twelve-string I had taken with me around the world.
The people flowed past as an ambulant river. The chamber was
rectangular, but the entrances were at opposite corners, so this
"human river" flowed diagonally through the rectangular Chamber
of Illusions with it's maritime horizons beyond the punctured
tile walls which were not punctured at all. Each "puncture"
looked like a window -- except one. That one, more mysterious
yet, was an actual door around which the oceanic-looking tiles
and the accompanying sky tiles stretched the entire length of the
wall.
Here, one of the twelve questions of today came into focus.
Where does a river of feet walk? The river walks between the
walls of "The Illusive Sea". La Mere Des Illusions -- La Mere
terrible. Cementia itself is a virtual sea of people each of
which does that which that person believes he or she has to do.
A place where the instincts of man are shattered rendering
it's victims captive to the unreal; a place with an escalator to
nowhere; the rabbit-hole of the speeding hare which leads to a
deadly wonderland from which Alice might never awake.
I sang there for an hour. Very few coins bounced into the
case in the Cavern of Illusions that morning. Passers-by walked
through each in a daze. It was as if most of them never noticed
me. At least most pretended that I wasn't there. I had become
the man who wasn't there.
Perhaps the problem was that I was no illusion. There was no
imitation to catch their eye. Even my guitar, once referred to
as a Japanese imitation of a Martin, had by then become far too
unique, I suppose, what with it's holes kicked in by drunks and
controllers ten years earlier in the Paris Metro and the R.E.R.
It's wash-board effect on the wood next to the strings from the
impact of the plectrum -- the pick -- and from playing in the
steamy climate of Fiji -- could perhaps no longer qualify it as
an imitation.
In an imitation world originality doesn't exist, except,
perhaps destructive things. Concerning that cleverness abounds.
But then, such is the nature of the Labyrinth of Cementia that
very few escape it's desolation to ever become a living part of
the actual universe. And this is a characteristic which is most
upsetting. For it is there, gleaming in the eyes of one's fellow
human beings on some mad dash to anywhere, that one can perceive
the worst portents of that deadly intoxicant, oblivion.
The ambulant river of souls moved past as if I never
existed. It was like a tributary of Styx itself. It is a sea of
humanity upon which still sail the rotting ships of the empires
of old and from which sea rise the coral reefs of cement and
steel.
Next to me was a spot where the ceiling was leaking as if a
stalactite was trying to emerge from above. Regularly in
deafening crescendos, the sound of steel wheels on steel tracks
reverberated from everywhere and then would die away in the
distance. At the other end of the chamber, two men were trying
to repair an elevator. The other way up! That chamber of
illusions was a chamber of four doors: the door to the steel
wheels, the door to the sky scrapers, the door to the street and
the door to nowhere.
One door was to the distance, one door to the immediate, one
door to the height and one door to the darkness. I found myself
between them and this sea of living persons as if I were a
spokesman between two walls on a gray beach at dawn who seemed
destined to be of no effect and to be ignored. Fine.
I decided to move on. I had sung for an hour and it was
getting cold. I packed-up the twelve-string. Time to continue
the quest. I went back up the cementine stairs past the
"NEWSPAPER" shouter at the top and this time went to the other
left -- which is the right facing the stairs.
Just some Downstairs talk. In other words, I went the other
direction from the passage I had taken earlier. Now I know why
sailors use the compass. East is East and West is West,
regardless of whether you are in the North or the South.
This was The Cavern of Glass. It was of incredible size. It
would have been a good place to sing. There beside the towering
multiple doors glass doors at the end was a subway exit and also
an escalator entrance going deeper into the Labyrinth. Another
ideal place for singing, but for another homeless
newspaper-shouter beside the escalator.
OK. That was it for a while. I needed a break. It was
time for some coffee and another visit to the hard-to-find
bathrooms of Cementia. I took the middle exit between the
multiple doors of glass and the two-way escalator whose
mechanical steps churned away like some kind of industrial
conveyor-belt for people, some factory belt moving the material
above to the places below or vice-versa, which I could see as I
walked by and peered down, led to the lower reaches of the Great
Downstairs and faded in the distance out of view.
Here is something of value to Cementia. In fact, it's the
greatest commodity. The greatest ingredient in this industrial
process -- this factory mass production of mediocrity -- is the
semi-educated citizen. They must have enough education to buy,
but not enough to find their way out. To many, in fact, to most,
there is no way out.
I took the subway exit. There at the exit were some doors
and a couple of turnstiles. One of the turnstiles didn't work.
A homeless girl was standing there raising some spare change. I
walked up to her while I was still inside, before I used those
there-goes-your-dollar doors to leave the Labyrinth, and, putting
that eventful move off for a second, gave her a quarter. I
consider it union dues. I used to give to the Metro Gypsies in
Paris when they were asking. Same reason.
I was not really so surprised to find she was quite a lady.
She thanked me and then turned to greet one of the commuters on
his way into the Labyrinth.
"Sir" she said, "this turnstile doesn't work. You'll have to
use the door." The person, upon discovering her to be quite
correct, having used the token already, then proceeded to use the
door after thanking her politely.
I met her on the other side and we started to talk for a
little while. Then she reached down into a large cardboard box
and gave me a bag of potato chips. I said that she should hang
on to them but she insisted.
"Besides", she said, with the air of an accomplished
businesswoman, "they're mine".
I put the potato chips in my side bag and thanked her. After
traveling a little farther, I came to an immense chamber under
another one of the Cementia sky scrapers. This was a sort of
eating place with scores of empty chairs everywhere. I assumed
they would be filled by what the citizens call "lunch-time", but
now was the time they call "rush hour". I don't blame them.
I approached someone who obviously worked there and asked him
if he could direct me to a bathroom somewhere. He kindly
said, "This way." And walked straight to a
huge mirror wall. It was immense. He produced a key and
proceeded to unlock a part of the mirror which actually turned
out to be a door. It was my first trip through a mirror. I've
heard of Alice through the looking-glass, but this was the
bathroom beyond the looking-glass.
And it was a small bathroom at that. There were already
three in there. "Standing room only." I muttered. It was
curious going through the mirror like that, but I was out of
there just as quickly as I could, the guitar case making it even
more crowded. 
came from the section of the sociology introductions on the 
Paul Hall art home page, click here to return there.)
I got a cup of coffee out in the eating room on the other
side of the mirrors. Then I opened the bag of potato chips. I
didn't realize how hungry I was. As soon as I was finished, the
daily dozen question began to come to mind. I snapped out of it
and headed back down the rabbit hole. I had to get back to work.
When I got back to the turnstiles, the girl was still there.
A very disgruntled commuter was walking past her trying very hard
to pretend she didn't exist.
"Sir!" She said, "Sir! -- Sir!" The man walked right past
her, put his token in the turnstile and, tried to quickly walk
through. When the wooden arms didn't turn, he almost did a flip
as he doubled over them. She walked up behind him as he was
trying to recover his balance.
"Sir!" She said once again, "This one doesn't work. I was
trying to tell you. But don't worry. You can use the door over
there because you lost your token." He glared at her as he
walked over to the door and went through.
There was another homeless person standing beside me as I
watched. He, too, was selling the Daily News. "Why don't you
sing here?" He asked. "Lots of people
come through here."
That was a switch. Here was someone selling papers who
actually wanted to share the spot with me. It was kind of him,
but I politely declined. This was much too busy a spot for me.
When you're busking, one thing you've got to get the basics on is
the science of demography. Proxemics is another one. Population
placement and circulation is critical, as well as how small a
place is. You'd be surprised what goes into finding a good
pitch.
I walked up to the one turnstile that was still working. The
girl greeted me again with some encouraging words. Then she asked
me the obvious.
"You goin' back down?" Then she brought her hand up to her
head and I could hear the jingle of bracelets on her wrist. She
reached -- so it seemed -- behind her ear and produced a token.
She gave it to me and told me not to worry, that she had plenty
more. "Besides," she said, "You doin' a good thing and this town
is so glum, it needs cheering up!"
I smiled and thanked her and was on my way back down into the
Labyrinth of Cementia. But I was all the more encouraged by that
cheerful person who had nothing but a carton full of potato chip
packets and a token behind the ear. I've heard of the widow's
mite but this time it was a token and some potato chips. Same
thing.
What do broken turnstiles produce? Alternatives and the
need to use them. There will come a day when the "turnstile"
will be broken. Someone will be there to help you only if you
can see them. But if you keep your eyes on obsessions you will
see no one.
What can be on the other side of your reflection? A crowd.
Sometimes what you need may be hidden by your view of yourself or
your self-esteem. 
It never hurts to ask; you may be talking to the person 
who has the key.
I went to the same escalator I had passed on the way out. It
seemed endless -- more so than when I had first looked. I have
been on long escalators before in The Cementia of London, and
there are some dillies in the Labyrinth of the Parisian Cementia,
but this was more like the old chutes of the Labyrinth of the
salt mines of Salzburg, the ones you needed leather pads for,
because and as you slid down, for two hundred and fifty feet or
more, they would get hot.
A multitude of people were rising out of the abyss on the
opposite escalator coming up. "This place is entirely too
crowded." I said, affording
myself the luxury of trying to address the crowd. "We're going
to all have to go back to the farm -- under pain of law."
Someone on the other side snickered faintly in agreement.
Amazing. The escalator did have a bottom after all. I waited
there for the E train, hoping to explore the 42nd street tunnel.
But then I changed my mind and decided to search the caverns of
Lexington a bit more.
Another day in the labyrinth -- and it had just begun.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NfpvpupaE6I