Intelligence

It is hysterical to me that conversations about intelligence can be had with a straight face. There is an abyss there, a place that exist beyond our own human-centric notions and needs, and somehow we are completely blind to it. We run around on a plateau with our eyes shut. One day we will drop over the edge and that will be that. That is what comes of running around blindfolded on a plateau, it’s like a game of Russian roulette, you can be okay for a maximum of five rounds before oblivion snakes its hand around your ankles and pulls you into the darkness. We are only just barely beginning to understand the workings of the human mind, and even in these studies, there is little hope of finding an objective truth. The assumptions that are made at the beginning of any undertaking have direct bearing on the results that such an undertaking will yield. The beginning is also the end.
Where we start determines where we will end. And we as human beings begin all undertakings from the point of view of a human being: can we eat it, can we wear it, can we fuck it, will it cause us to experience emotional well being, or a more comfortable material existence? Will it perpetuate the species, or advance our treasured ideals? We are only interested in ourselves. We assume that we are the crown of creation, the best direction that evolution could have taken.
And what if this is not the only world in which life thrives? What if this is just one direction that evolution may take when restrained within a certain set of conditions? Not the best, or the most unique, or the most special, just one of many?
So much of what we think is colored by the idea that there was a supreme maker and that we were the best that he could do. Let’s suppose that we accept that our ideas about a supreme maker are all egotistical fancies, stories that any schizophrenic would tell themselves, or any available listener, to justify that alluring suspicion that they are special. We want to be special. We have created a mythos or two to give credence to our specialness.
Each individual human wants to be the best, the most adored, and these desires that color our most personal impressions of the world around us also worm their way into the expressions of the collective. The village, the state, the nation, the race, the species….mine must be the best. My existence is justified by my righteousness, my righteousness is justified by the existence of a creator whose existence is implied by my own. Everything that I come up with that originates from my humanity ends with my humanity. It is an endless feedback loop.
It is hell.
It is life as a human animal.
We may ask: what is intelligence?
In the case of humans, Intelligence is a process of evaluating information based on currency and relevance to the human intelligence rather than on detail or accuracy. Our intelligence is self centered, self serving. Our intelligence is the ability to comprehend; to understand and profit from experience. We are all about profiting ourselves.
But suppose that we are just one direction that evolution may take under certain conditions. Suppose that different conditions dictate different forms of intelligent life. The values that arise from that other evolutionary process would be different from our own. What is important and useful in material, and intellectual and even emotional terms, to one system is not shared by all systems.
Sometimes the interaction between a pair of intelligent systems is profitable for both systems. Sometimes it can profit only one and not the other, and at other times it may be neither harmful nor beneficial to either system. Not in any obvious way. Given that situation, how then would we measure intelligence? How would we define it?

Grandfather

In the times before time had grown into a solid beast lurching blindly in a single direction, people began to be formed. The people were made out of music and, as soon as they danced and writhed and howled, they were expelled from the time before time because it is as natural to enter the time beast now and again as it is to sneeze after smelling pepper. Like a yawn which stops the heart, the people become locked in the time beast and they walked and hunted. They felt cold and hunger, desire and jealousy, strength and fatigue. Then, locked inside the time beast’s belly, they lit fires to warm themselves and they killed flying things and other walking things and ate their meat.
When their most immediate needs were met, they considered their situation and wondered how they might escape the time beast. Sitting by the fires, dreaming and cleaning bones with their teeth, they pondered their existence. They wanted to ask one another; what had happened? When did they become people who walked and hunted? How had they become so small that they could bleed and feel tired?
While they wondered, they worked the earth in their finger tips and made little figures. They traced pictures in the sand and on the walls of the time beast, wondering, imagining, trying to remember who and what they were. The wondering welled up in their hearts and they opened their mouths to let it fly out and it made a sound.
They found that they could make many sounds. They could scream and chant and murmur and whisper and hum. And when they did this together, they felt big again, together again. Sitting by the fires, humming and loving one another until a sing song of moans became silence and the silence became pained screams and the pained screams became the wailing of tiny new people, they carved the bones of the other ones who walked and the other ones who flew into whistles and flutes and pulled their skins taut to make drums. That was how the people began to make the music.
When they made the little music they could hear the big music; the ancient grandfather of the little music that they made. The grandfather came into the belly of the time beast and made bubbles of no time where the people danced and moved as they had before being swallowed. They wriggled and twisted and rolled and moved in the bubble until the time beast burped and set them back to growing older and weaker. For a while they might feel too tired and weak to call the grandfather back. For a while they would rest and practice with their bone flutes and skin drums and hum quietly as they dozed. Then, when the wonder welled up within them again, they would make the music again, invoking the big music with their little music, and when the grandfather was invoked, they were once again as they had always been; they were the music that made the people who made the music.
They were the father who was the son who was the father, the snake that had swallowed its own tail, a circle with no beginning and no end. They were the formed and the unformed, the made and the unmade, something and nothing locked together in a needful embrace. And then, before too long, they would fall out of eternity and find themselves in the belly of the time beast. Then they would toil again; walking and hunting. Then, when the bellies were filled and the flesh was warmed, they would rest. And as they rested, they could wonder again…

The Dreams of Monsters

What could I tell you if I could remember no dreams? I’d have no tongue to wiggity wag because I’d not remember this here fantasy where I dream of dreams forged from words. They say that it is most restful to sleep beneath three feet of ice nestled within two down sleeping bags with a wool cap clapped over your head and a little air hole dug through the snow, just snoozing away in the ice mother’s belly. They say that all the action of sleep happens during the REM cycle, all the Freudian fun that allows you to wake up and say,
“ I dreamed I drank a chocolate shake through a straw.”
But the psychologists and dream analysts know that what you were really dreaming about was fucking your father. You only remember it as drinking a chocolate shake because the brain makes things right for us when we wake up, makes it so that we can feel like a healthy drone and not some deranged maniac. There is however another cycle where the very deepest of sleep occurs and to catch these elusive z’s, they say that the best place is beneath snow or in a Turkish cave or on a whaling ship with no heat and just a thin blanket between you and the North Atlantic chill. So they say. They say that the dreamless sleep is the most restful, and who am I to disagree?
I have seen the light that burns in the darkness, the light from nowhere that burns behind closed eyelids and comes with the hum and buzz of the eternal. If you listen to it deeply you will evaporate completely, so you resist as often as you can, being identified with this dream of mortality, this dream of ATM machines and airplanes and dish washers and pop stars. But if you were to give in, to let go, then what would you be? Nothing you could talk about here, where if you told them that you saw great monsters of light shifting and changing shape in an electric light parade jungle to a music that needs no ears to pander to, well then, they would just say that you had been dreaming about fucking your mother. (And maybe that’s exactly what you would be doing.)
Or if you could tell of the time that you were a giant with purple gray tendrils rising from your crown and your body was interlocked with that mysterious other and you sang songs with the voice of a pipe organ, songs that turned purple and black and neon green and glowed through the infinite darkness, then wouldn’t they just say that it was a dream about replacing your mother so that you could be with your father?
But what, what if that was not the dream. What if that pipe organ song is the reality, the dream weaving machine, the stone dropped into a pond that makes all the little ripples that we think are the real world. What if having a mother and a father is only the dream of a mushroom headed God that comes from many and none and returns to many and none.
How could you remember this truth in the middle of dreaming that you must make it to work on time and your children must be picked up from school on time but a woman in the train station won’t help you with your ticket and you are stuck there for much longer than you would like? Is there any way to describe the translucent limb extending through space time that suddenly got crimped and caused this nightmare to be my life?
Me, a tiny pin drop of light. A partial opening in the eyelid of a titan who gently sleeps, twitching tortured through the rapid eye movement cycle of slumber, invisible limbs quaking, metropolises plunging into the sea, planets melting, civilizations crumbling, and new stars bursting into brightness to warm little clay marbles on a black tablecloth under which a wild black dog sits snarling, insisting you stay on the table spinning and rolling, for the truth of what you are is too monstrous, too mammoth to be explained to a little pin head of dream stuff like you. Your story, your life, your play on the stage of the Goliath mind will come to a close, and you cannot begin to understand what you are or what moves you, you can only be shoved across the board like a chess piece moved by a sparkling effervescent tentacle that wants to forget what it is and rest for a minute in your strange strife.
The grass is always greener on the other side.
The grass is always greener on the other side.
The grass is always greener on the other side…
So monsters dream of being human, and humans dream of fleeing or being monsters. If I were not a dream thing I could not speak these words, for the thing that sleeps has no tongue, no eyes, no ears, and wrestles with an eternity of stillness. I am made to do the things that it cannot do for itself. I am made to do the things it can only dream of.

A Wish In Five Minutes

With five minutes what can I do? I do what? Five minutes? I do five minutes. What? I can. What I can do: five minutes. Five minutes of my time which will eventually become five minutes of your time. Your time. If you were born in 1981 then this is our time. OUR TIME. I am not a Goonie and I want to go home, you say. But there is no going home. I know that. Home will be different, home will be gone. Home will be a golf course or a desert. We are here, in the underworld with the slimy skeletons of dead pirates and the shiny coins thrown down a well by many starry eyed wishers. We are swimming with the wishes and the fishes down below the feet of the walking dead, the ones above ground. And I tell you that this is OUR TIME! We can do something now. In our time. Our moment. Our adventure. A chance to live for a moment, like a moth drawn in to peril by the exciting glowing filaments of a light bulb. It is the electricity that draws us into this peril. You wish to escape peril. You wish to go home. But home is gone and this wish that you made, it’s right here, with my wish and all the other wishes that sleep with the fishes now that they are dead dull copper dreams with the face of Abe Lincoln stamped on one side. Now I can hold it in my hand. I take mine back, because it didn’t come true, and now that I have it again, I will be the one to carry out my wish. I’m my own coin now, you see. I am the currency with which dreams are bought and lost and stolen and smashed. I am a coin that keeps turning up. Lucky for some, unlucky for others. Now I won’t get tossed. No heads no tails. No tales to tells. I am that I am. This is what I do with five. With five alive I sing and strive and dive and dive deeper into cavern sweeter where pale fishes swim with tails of silver and gold, swish swishing in dark pools. This my proof that I do yet live, for dead men tell no tales, and I more than tell them, I sprout them from my rear side and watch them wiggle and squiggle and slip and slide. The trick with a tail is not to let it fall off, which it wants to do, but send it back up and around on the figure eight for snakes merry go round. But you must not let snakes get stuck in your head. Then your looks can kill doll, turning all your company to stone with fright. Then they wont call you doll, doll, they won’t call you at all and behind your back they’ll say “beastie”. Then what can you do? You call it, Heads or Tails? But I say I wont get tossed. Naw Naw. I’ll hold it this time, cause this time is my time. OUR TIME. No time like the right time. Left or right. Up or down. In or out. I wont get tossed. I am not this I am not that. That’s what I can do. There is what a man can do and what he can’t. I can do it all, being from no man born. I’m a creature of the NOW. The mammas and the papas wave their fingers at me and say, "Now, now!" I let their fingers wag. They wag since I’m getting out of hand. I’m slipping out of hand since those finger won’t quit wagging. Wagon at the Dwagon. But the dwagon pulls the wagon. Pulls the wagon in five. In five minutes my time, Earth time. Earth, Air, Fire, and Water time. This is my wish. This one right here. And you know what? I’m taking it back, because it didn’t come true. Because now it’s our time. And with our time we can make wishes real.

Chewing The Moral Fibers

What if my father had not despised chewing gum so? He said to me when I was a child that chewing gum was despicable and that all chewers of gum should be executed. I liked gum. Perhaps if he had not said this, then maybe I would have agreed with him that Niggers and Jews should also be lined up against the wall. I might have swallowed hook line and sinker the notion that there was a world wide conspiracy in progress being orchestrated by sixty rich families that would stop at nothing short of a bloody revolution resulting in the destruction of their lineages. I may have accepted without question that the human race was created by a more advanced civilization of beings to provide a work force that would mine the gold which they needed to power their space craft. But he pushed me over the edge with the chewing gum issue. This was the first matter on which I was willing to disagree with my father, the first thing which made me feel that it was okay to defy him. I wanted to chew gum. I did chew gum. I did this despicable thing and nothing happened. The righteousness of the world did not come slamming down upon me like a dump truck full of text books. My father did not shoot me in the back of the head. He did not even ground me. He only shook his finger at me and said,
"I better not find that on the floor or anywhere else but in the trash can."
Maybe once or twice he did find it on the floor, but as it was not clear whether it had been my error or my sister’s (not clear to even my sister and I, or, at least on my end, I truly believed I was innocent and believed her when she said that she was) nobody could be punished and life went right on ticking. I chewed it and I REACHED INTO MY MOUTH WITH MY FINGERS AND PULLED ON IT TO WATCH IT STRETCH FROM MY TEETH FAR OUT BEFORE MY EYES, THEN STUFFED IT BACK IN MY MOUTH AND CHEWED SOME MORE. I was told not to do this, but I wanted to, so I continued to chomp and smack away and even learned to blow bubbles that would burst and cling to my face as a sticky pink film and sometimes it even made its way into my hair and had to be cut out.
But I was not executed, nor were the scores of other children I was aquatinted with who were as despicable as me in their gum chewing habits. We continued to exist. And because my father had been so extreme and severe in the way he spoke about chewing gum, it seemed likely that anything else that he said might be equally ludicrous. I could probably marry or even just fuck a black man today (even though I was passionately warned against it), and send our smiling photo to my parents in an email headed, “Me and My man Jamal at Golden Gate Park”, and still suffer no consequence. My Dad probably would not disown or kill me or Jamal (though he promised that he would when I was seven). He would probably even let him into the house on Thanksgiving. He might even play computer games with him, Jamal could be an Orc and my Dad an Elf and they would go on missions together and play for hours and life would go on. We couldn’t listen to rap music while we visited without my fathers head exploding and sending his crunchy brain matter flying through the room as if a bag of pork rinds or Funions had burst, in which case there would at last be a tragic fatality and we’d have to sweep up the mess. But the criminal (me) would go on listening to devil music with Jews and Negroes while chewing gum and buying the things that keep the rich getting richer behind those imposing locked doors in tall dark towers far from sight. Being as extreme as they were, my father’s words burned a hole right through my psyche, a hole through which all manner of things is capable of passing without causing me to shout,
"Off with their fucking heads!"
A hole deeper and darker than Alice’s, with tunnels which branch off into Wonderlands of every kind and color, where every wrong lives with every right and they exchange hats like teenage girls trading bangles. An infinite network of possibilities that would be closed to me if my father had bought me chewing gum at the Nickel And Dime and patted by blonde pig tails.

Foundation of a Shadow

Give me your hand and let me take you into the tangled jungle of flesh, blood, and bone. Let me take you into those caverns where chest cavities gap wide open, making the walls that hold you and tangled indiscriminate masses of fleshiness make an uneven carpet of malformed shapes. The colors here are peachy and dripping crimson and veiny royal blue. Shredded muscle tissues hang like scarlet drapes, windows look into the hive-like interior of bone where the marrow rests maroon in its pockets. You will find that everything drips here, like melting wax. You needn’t move at all to journey through these chambers, they do the moving for you. Morphing, they collapse in on themselves as a new interior design emerges on the back of the old. We can walk through the catacombs of gore in their bright colors until deformed skulls emerge in the landscape, stark and white, being swallowed by blackness that eats itself until a new bright white set of bones bleeds into the forefront and strange vines of darkness reach like tentacles from every corner, weaving their way through the forest of ivory skeletal structures.
Vaguely, you think that this must be a bad trip, except nothing about it particularly bothers you and even that doesn’t bother you anymore, not the way that it used to when you wore little golden crosses on delicate chains around your neck and imagined that God dwelt in a palace of crystal surrounded by English gardens. Now you can tumble within the swirling black vapors like a sky diver through clouds, without fear of Gods or Devils that struggle over pure souls like Counts and Dukes over the young virgins of adventure stories. Now they are just these two things that give you the benefit of travel; shadow and light, and neither one loves you more than the other and neither one will hurt you more than the other. They are not your parents. They are your children, your toys, your tools. They are the tricks that make something out of nothing, motion out of stillness, form out of void, and whatever you are, wherever you go, you’re just passing through, crawling through sticky bloody hells as tantalizing to the senses as any heavenly field of lavender under a bright blue sky.
Crawl out into an office of clean white walls and blue Berber carpet and white laminate counter tops stocked with jars of tongue depressors. Slip up onto a cushy rainbow colored bean bag and make yourself comfortable, because you are a body now, a human that knows the words for “bean bag” and “laminate” but not the words that describe the other places where you have just been. The therapist arranges herself on another beanbag. Her coat is white, her hospital pants are powder blue. There are pens in her pocket and glasses on her clean friendly face, framed by straight auburn hair, fashionably layered to balance against the spectacles and make her seem perfectly ordinary, not too much of anything, nor to little.
“I like bean bags,” you tell her.
“Yes,” she says, “they do the job.”
“I’ve always meant to get one/ wanted to have one/ am meaning to get one soon/ saw some when I was little.” You say all of these things at once but it is organized into one concise sentence such as,
“I’ve always liked them.”
There are some juggling balls out on the floor. You pick them up because they seem to be out of place and you think that you are preparing the room and making her comfortable while she waits for the person she is going to help, so you tell her,
“I can juggle.”
“Really?” she is sincerely interested, but not overly excited, just right, like warm water.
You try to juggle but you don’t catch the balls. Apologizing, you try again. When you throw them into the air, you experience a temporary blindness. This shouldn’t hinder you because you know you don’t need to see the balls to catch them. You try not to look at them and focus on the woman’s face the way you were taught, but it seems that you are also throwing them out of pattern so that they spill onto the floor far from reach. Collecting and examining them, you notice that one is smaller than the other two. You explain that this may be the reason you are having trouble and trade the odd ball out for another that seems to be of the same size as the other two. Then you notice that all three are of slightly different sizes and decide not to throw them all over the room again.
You tell the analyst:
“I’m out of practice. I used to have a friend that I practiced with. He taught me how to juggle. I could juggle three when I met him…”
A vision of when you first saw a jester with jingle bells on his cap standing under a canopy within a circle of hay bails. You looked at the straw on the ground as he shows you how to throw the ball so that you catch it again. And you bought three little sacks, like tiny firm bean bags that were delicately furred and took them home with you.
“…but he taught me how to pass with a partner…”
You picture the different ways that you passed, sometimes facing each other and standing perhaps three feet apart, sometimes side by side with one arm each wrapped around the others waist, locked together like Siamese twins, your left hand passing to his right.
You describe the different methods to her and continue, “And he taught me to juggle four balls, and two in one hand so that I could juggle four that way.”
While you are speaking, you begin to suspect that she is here to listen to you. She is not waiting for anyone else. And you wonder what you will discover. You wonder what it means. And you decide not to finish the story because you are afraid of what it reveals. That is how the blackness eats itself here, how the scene falls away so that another will emerge built on the foundation of a shadow.

Impermanence

How many days have passed that I have said nothing at all and let the opportunity slip away? Today I had the vision of snow melting on the branch of a conifer tree, the perfect visualization of impermanence, ice transforming slowly to water as it drips away. I thought of it in conjunction with falling, with forgetting, with taking two steps down one trail then loosing consciousness and taking up another and, with it, two steps in a new direction, over and over, so that I, like all my kindred, do nothing more than stomp in a confused circle.
I see it right now. I am a machine, a clockwork doll rotating around and around like one of those darling little wind up chicks that can manage to hop to the end of the table. The voyager is not like a passenger in a car, not like the cream filling inside of the Twinkie. The voyager at first is an observer. A person watching a movie, watching a little puppet show and becoming absorbed in the plot. Upon developing particular sympathy with a particular character, it soon finds that it has fallen into the play. It drips into the story like snow slipping off a branch, little, by little. The voyager forgets itself, becoming the puppet without noticing that a transference has occurred.
Etanna is nothing at all. She is a flea circus. A trap for an unsuspecting cosmic observer to become entangled in. It could be a good show if the observer remembers themselves and suddenly takes hold of the puppets strings and moves her around in accordance with the story line and in sympathy with the character while also remembering its true nature.
I can see a little withered old woman talking to me, the kind that makes me think of apples and gnarled forests and hand sewn dresses and curly hair. She was talking just now in the back of my mind and I could almost hear her voice although I could make out nothing of what she said, and when I noticed her, she evaporated. She was kindly. But that of course is how I remember her now. She was a dream I almost dreamt, except my pillow was missing and I was in the middle of saying something else.
Everything in me is rattling loose. Good things and bad things are welling up from within me within a matter of minutes. Forget what has gone unsaid for a day. There are things arising every minute to be lost again in the next and I am not quick enough yet to make anything of them.
While laying in bed or standing over the kitchen sink I experience Satori. During “enlightening time”, while I sit poised to type away and share whatever great vision makes me visionary, I go schizophrenic more than sage. I see shadows out of the corner of my eyes moving around. They move more than ever and without startling me in the least. They continue to move for a while after I’ve noticed and turned to look at them. That strange something that I saw out of the corner of my eye is still a strange something for a few moments while I regard it. I see it, but it fits into no category at all. I see this thing which is not anything as far as my brain is concerned and so, after regarding it and drawing a blank, it turns back into the shadow of a plant or even the plant itself. It doesn’t really have to be a shadow. It can be an actual object such as a stone or a shoe or a box or a chair which begins to crawl across the floor or otherwise move around and, when I look at it, it keeps going for a minute or two and doesn’t seem to be anything I know any name for, and then it goes back to being a stone or a shoe or a box or a chair or some thing which has a name and could plausibly be occupying the space that has arrested my attention.
I know. If you’re feeling friendly, you’re thinking. “Brain tumor.” And if you aren’t, you’re just thinking, “Cuckoo”. What if I did have a brain tumor though? Could you really say that it was the cause of the anomaly or couldn’t it equally be that the anomaly was the cause of the tumor? But that’s not what I really hoped to say. I think though, that telling you something was better than telling you nothing. How many days have passed that I have said nothing at all and let the opportunity slip away like melting snow? Lost days ripe with lost worlds diminished to fine vapor.
Today I did not have a vision.
Today the visions had me.

Binary Man

Here we go loop de loo, here we go loop de lie. Around and around like the waters spinning down a toilet bowl, spin, spin, spin. We will be back where we started again. One step forward, two steps back. Oh you pudgy balding little binary man. My hero, Binary Man, coming to slash through reality with his machete made of ones and zeros. Give him a yes or a no. That is your only choice. This was my hero? I have to confess that I also like Rorschach. I side with the deviant losers. *Sigh* . We are all going to get our hearts broken over and over in this sticky bubble gum web. Why did I make my baby wait every day after school? Just a little baby waiting for her mamma who’s off crying and fighting and sometimes running down the street alone to rescue her baby when the bus is late, and arriving disheveled and puffy eyed. And baby asks, “How did you get here so early?” But I’m a half hour late. I don’t know why baby, I thought I had friends, but then I had none. How did this all get rolling? I was standing in line behind a pleasant black man at the DMV. He was getting his motorcycle license. I was sixteen. This was the last day before my driver’s permit would expire, my last chance to take the driving exam and get my license. Sink or swim time. In line for hours. The gentleman explained to me, “People are either for you or against you. Sometimes it’s people you love, people who love you who are against you. But you have look past it all and see that they are either for you or against you.” The first incarnation of binary man. I thought he was right. My parents for example were against me, although they’d swear they were for me. But they were really for themselves and for their version of me which was not the actual me, but a me that served them. So I’d need to break clean. But I couldn’t do it properly for a long time. Soon I was alone. There is nobody here that is for me. I am not even for me. Damn you Binary Man! I think you were my father whispering in one ear all of the time, extreme and righteous, bending me, bending me, bending me until I was tweaked. The data that comes in is always tweaked as I process it. They are all against me. There is a distinction, however, between everyone being for themselves and everybody being against you. They are not all automatically against you, they just aren’t for you. There is a subtle difference. It is not a one or a two yet, not a yes or a no. There is a big gray forest that we may abide in, a shadowy place from which many shapes and possibilities may be plucked, raised, lifted, conjured. Yes and No man is coming with his machete. His goal is deforestation. He wants us to join him or die, twisted and alone in the desert he makes for us. Fuck you Binary Man. You are no hero! You are a mediocre Villain. I’m not going to join you. And I’m not going to be alone. I’m gonna fill my pockets with seeds of ambiguity and Johnny Appleseed it across the globe. You can loop de loo all you please, but you won’t get me. I’m gonna run up, up, up the holy mountain planting these little seeds. Like Luke Skywalker, I can still see the good in you father, but you are mostly machine now. It you come any closer I’ll lop off your machete hand with this gardening spade and watch you twitch. You are not a magick man, you are just THE MAN, taking names and asking, “Are you with me?” *chalks an x on your skull and slowly guides the machete to the mark for practice* “Or not?”

Death

We are immersed in a culture so afraid of dying that it’s only purpose is to live, at any cost, in any way that one can manage. And yet each one of us will die eventually, despite our best effort to outmaneuver death. In the end, we have not lived at all, we were always avoiding death and doing things based on whether or not they might lead to our demise or to bodily harm or to shame. We might long to see the step pyramids nestled in the pulsing wet bosom of Central America but choose not to take the trip because the politics of the region are unstable, there are scorpions and snakes in the jungle, there are thieves and murderers waiting for victims outside of the airport and the plane might crash before they can even get you. You might be sold into white slavery, your organs might be traded in the black market, you might be arrested due to a minor misunderstanding and rot away in a third world jail cell where you may contract a life threatening disease.
So, for all of these reasons, you do not do the thing that you long to do. Instead, you go to work and come home and pay your taxes and change the oil in your car and watch the movies that Netflix delivers to your mailbox, like some crawly thing creeping in the shadows hoping that the hungry crow won’t find you. But she will eventually, she always does, no matter how skillfully you avoid living, you can never avoid death.
One day you will go for your routine checkup and the doctor will tactfully announce that they have detected something abnormal and would like to run more tests and after more tests he will solemnly explain that you have cancer but might recover if you undergo chemotherapy. You’ll agree, clinging to the idea of complete remission, a full recovery, so the treatment will begin and it will make you feel sicker and your hair will fall out and you will have trouble paying your medical bills and, within three years, you’ll finally die with a bad taste in your mouth, hooked up to an IV in some hospital, leaving your family buried under a mountain of debt.
You will be dead without ever having seen those pyramids where kings and priests plucked beating hearts from warm bodies and held them out before the eyes of the mesmerized crowd below, before rolling the now cooling body down the steps and bringing out another hot screaming live one. You will not know what it is like to walk in the jungle listening to the monkeys scream and the insects hum and catch a glimpse of the vivid plumage of the quetzal bird before she flies away after the blue butterfly. You will not know what rich heart you sacrificed when you opted to stay safe and comfortable rather than embrace an experience of the real, will never receive the secret communication that was meant for you alone and might have been transmitted to your deepest being, coursing from the ancients stones into the soles of your hiking boots and up your legs until it bursts in your chest and washes over every cell of your brain like waves crashing over a breaker. You will die without understanding why you should have gone, without guessing why you should have spent your days under the hot brilliance of the glorious sun without fear of the hungry black bird that circles perpetually over head.
You will die without ever having lived.
Staying alive is not the purpose of life and death is a doorway which you will definitely cross.
In both life and death, keep your eyes wide open and place fear aside, like an old battered hat.

Spelunking With Papa Bear

"You’ve got to hi de hi, you’ve got to ho de ho, you’ve got to he de he de he, to get along with me!" The old man in the mountain, he wants one thing and the little lady she wants another, but the old man always gets his way because he’s bigger and his beard is longer. He just slaps his big feet around on the cave floor and asks: ”Whatcha gonna do now?" And in a lilting voice she wiggles her hips and says: "I’m gonna do the best I can."
So he chases her round and around through the twinning tunnels that twist through the mountains guts. They run over little bridges that hang over dark abysses, and down paths that grow narrower and narrower and sometimes disappear under pools where pale frogs croak and swim after glow-in-the-dark minnows. They run through hallways were fungi grow on the walls and turn their caps in their direction as they fly past. Just rubbing up against this fungal federation is enough to send the body into shock, it has so much to say in the language of light and so few people come down into the dark to rub it and lick it and listen to its incredible story.
The old man and the little woman squeeze their arms close to their bodies and rush by so that they won’t be drawn into a conversation that could take an eternity and change the course of evolution forever. Whoosh, they whiz through tunnels like hamsters scurrying through plastic tubes. She is always just a step or two ahead, barely defending her lead, and his big hand reaches out, groping the space between them, waiting for the moment to come when she will fall back into his hands.
On they go, deeper and deeper, down staircases that spiral into the earth’s core like a corkscrew. They swing over pits of molten lava and disappear down ramps of bright red adobe. Lucifer is pitching a shovel full of coal into the fire, his tail a-twitching. As they pass, he waves courteously, and grinning, he puts his back into it, heave ho, in goes coal and the flames dance up higher than ever, wiggling their indistinct hips and bosoms.
The heat is intense, and the old man is slowed down just a little bit more than the young woman, so she manages to put a few extra feet between them, but the sweat is running into her eyes and making her hair and dress cling to her body. Squish, with every step the perspiration that has pooled down in their socks is squeezed out under the pressure of a foot to leave little wet prints.
The heat slowly diminishes as they journey through a corridor that slopes steeply uphill. Neither can run at this point, both parties walk huffing and puffing, grabbing onto little roots that protrude from the dirt walls to prevent themselves from loosing their footing and tumbling backwards into the broiling flames behind them. Wheezing and hanging their heads between their legs, they catch their breath when the ground levels out and a colony of little brown rabbits hops by on its way to the surface, brushing up against their ankles as they go, strong bucks, plump does and downy soft little youngster all wrinkling their noses and twitching their ears.
The little woman doesn’t know it, but these rabbits work for the old man, so when she coos, "Oh how cute!”, and reaches down to pet them, they hold perfectly still and act as if they enjoy it, staring up with dewy little eyes that glisten in the darkness. Then, whoosh, the old man leaps forward and catches her by the hair. Still holding on tight, he uses his other hand to pull bunches of baby carrots from his bearskin smock and rewards the bunnies for a job well done. They giggle gleefully and hip hop away.
"Ooooh!" the little lady exclaims in an endearingly angry little voice, sweet on the surface, smoldering at the core. The old man drags her the rest of the way home, singing, "You’ve got to hi de hi, you’ve got to ho de ho, you’ve got to he de he de he, to get along with me!"