Archive for January, 2011

After all the time I’ve spent trudging through Mexican and Central American jungles, I only have to hear the word MAYAN on TV to be hooked, so quite naturally, I was drawn to a program about the end of the Mayan long count calendar. The Maya were BIG on calendars and they’re often quite lovely. I have one hanging on the side of our fireplace…crushed green jade. It’s only a copy, but it looks nice and I got it for a song.
For those who don’t read history or watch Discovery, the History Channel, the Science Channel, TLC, or NATGEO, perhaps I should explain. Their all-encompassing calendar comes to an end on December 21, 2012, and we’re nearly there. They divided all time into five eras, four of which came to an end followed by new, often severely compromised ages, but at the end of the fifth era, called a baktun, it seems they decided time was done with, allowing for no new beginning.
That was it…five eras then no more…the end. When each previous baktun ended, things changed drastically for the Maya, who regularly abandoned their cities to begin anew, and why not? They believed what their timekeepers were saying, time to ditch the old place and move on, so they did…but what did they ACTUALLY believe would happen at the end of the long count?
The way I see it, there are only two logical answers. Either they thought it was all over…as several inscriptions suggest, or they thought 2012 was so far away they didn’t really want to worry about it…and that makes a lot more sense to me. Things were transforming in new and scary ways for the Maya, particularly after the advent of the conquistadors. To them December 21, 2012 must have felt like a couple of million years to us. I can almost hear them. Who cares what happens? Most likely we won’t be around. Let ‘em write their OWN calendars when ours runs out.

To be fair, a few really unusual astronomical events are going to occur just before Dec 21, 2012, a solar eclipse mostly visible in the south Pacific, an even rarer transit of Venus across the face of the sun, and while all this is going on, we’ll be in perfect alignment with the “dark rift” in the Milky Way, pointed directly at the center of our galaxy and its resident black hole. That’s even RARER, like once every 26,000 years.
To tell you the truth, I don’t really understand all the hoo-ha about that. Our galaxy is a giant pinwheel, and just like those rides at amusement parks where you’re spun around, you can make the case that we’re ALWAYS looking at the center of our galaxy. I guess it’s the alignment of Earth, the sun, and all the planets in our solar system making it unusual and memorable…but it happened 26,000 years ago…and we’re all still here.
I remember reading a book about Antarctica, you know, that huge chunk of ice way down south? Once it was warm and lush with vegetation and animals, and the fact that it changed so dramatically seems to bother a lot of people. I tend to relate it to changes in weather patterns, going from a warm world to a slightly colder one, but the author of the book was worried about the possibility of a shift in the Earth’s crust, kind of like the skin of an orange sliding around while the pulp stays in place.
In my entire life, I’ve NEVER seen an orange do that, and I’m fairly confident it’s not going to happen to the orange we walk around on. Rock is pretty solid…but it IS an interesting theory. If it had happened before, just think how devastating such an event would have been. My thought is it would have made our gentle planet uninhabitable…but like I said, we’re still here. I tend to look to the past when evaluating predictions for the future.
When I was a little kid, there was always some idiot running around announcing the end of the world, usually predicted on a Saturday or Sunday, for some reason. The first couple of times I was scared to death…and had a horrible weekend, but when apocalypse after apocalypse failed to destroy me, I began to understand how unreliable that sort of announcement really is. Learn from my experience. Don’t bend over and kiss your sweet ass goodbye unless you look up in the night sky and see an enlarging, glowing ball heading straight at us.
And that’s pretty much how I look at those end-of-the-world predictions based on completion of the Mayan long count, but when I hear nearly hysterical discussions on TV, I start to worry…mostly about how all this is impacting vulnerable people. I still remember the group who killed themselves because of what they believed were space ships in the tail of Hale-Bopp. No, Guys, the long count was a MAYAN thing, based on Mayan astronomy…ANCIENT Mayan astronomy at that, not telescopes, not satellites, not physics…a couple of guys standing around marking star locations out on the ground.
I haven’t seen a Mayan stargazer lately…have you? People, get a grip…WE’RE NOT ANCIENT MESOAMERICANS! I’m willing to bet big bucks I know what will come after December 21, 2012…December 22. I don’t know about you guys, but if it’s cold enough, I’ll probably make a gumbo that night, maybe even take Angel out for a walk just to see if I can FIND the dark rift. After some amazing stuff in the sky most of us won’t notice, we’ll all wake up in the morning and work on our holiday preparations. Of course, my jade calendar will be hopelessly out of date, but I’m going to leave it up anyway. I like it, and I can always get a 2013 calendar at the office supply store.

Last week my lady and I went to the Star Wars exhibit at our local science museum, and it was a kick, really fun, looking at all the models and costumes they had actually used and realizing how big Chubacca and Darth Vader actually were and how slight Han Solo seemed to be in comparison…but by far the most interesting thing we did was to take a trip in the Millenium Falcon…simulated, of course. We sat in a re-creation of Han’s cockpit and soared into the absolute blackness of space, through the solar system, then out into space beyond, but the most spectacular thing I saw was our galaxy from above, beautifully rendered, with millions of other galaxies in the faint distance, the way I’ve always dreamed of seeing it. Even artfully manufactured in some special effects, high-tech lab in California, it was more satisfying than I could ever have imagined…mostly because fulfilled a life-long dream and in the process, made me think about something I hadn’t for quite a while.
There’s NO WAY we could be all alone in our plane of existance; it’s just too improbable. I know I write science fiction, which ALWAYS has a couple of aliens running around, but to tell you the truth, my brand of sci-fi mostly focuses on this planet and what we have here…and often fail to appreciate. More often than not, MY aliens teach us something, even if it’s what NOT to do or how NOT to be…but sometimes they surprise even me and show how we can be better.
The other day I read a piece tolling the death knell for religion on Earth if aliens were actually discovered…a STATISTICAL probability, though these days even the Catholic Church acknowledges it, slowly swinging around. The Church does EVERYTHING slowly, but I don’t really see how finding intelligent life anywhere should drastically change our concept of the Supreme Being. I don’t know about yours, but MY God is infinite. Dealing with more than one bunch of sentient beings in the universe, even millions of them, would be child’s play the way I see HIM.
Christians have tied their belief system to Jesus, as have I, but we part company pretty quickly when they start telling me His coming means we’re somehow unique, the only ones in the entire universe. Who says? They probably haven’t considered it, but maybe we were so screwed up we needed special attention…and THAT’S why He was born. We were drifting too far off course, so Providence sent help to steer us into a midcourse correction. You non-Christians can use the same reasoning for YOUR luminaries. It works every which way.

As I see it, I’ll bet there are lots of other sentient beings up there in our starry swirl, and God knows how many in all those other fuzzy swirls too far away for us to ever reach or learn from. I’m even willing to bet there are some beings who haven’t required Divine intervention.  Now, THOSE are the guys I’d really like to meet! It’s funny, because I wrote just such an alien into Dawn on Earth; I just didn’t realize it at the time. Life is a learning process…at least, mine is.
I was trying to show what I consider an ideal being, the likely product of a civilization and society on the right track from the beginning, someone who abhors violence, cherishes God, and lives a life of gentle love and the endless hope of helping others. Interestingly, in Dawn he changed after he was stranded on Earth and came to see the need for violence at times, and I for one didn’t really realize what was happening to him.
On a new planet threatened by rapacious intruders, he accepted our aggressive philosophy and DEFENDED those beings he had come to love, and maybe that’s what might actually happen when interstellar visitors confront others who don’t share their life concept. I, for one, sure as hell hope so. My innocent and pure alien decided violence in the defense of those you love is an absolute good, but while I agree with him, it’s the possibility of INTERACTIONAL change I find most interesting, change working both ways.
I feel sorry for Gamma, my perfect alien. He abandoned a pure and wonderful philosophy because he was stranded on a new and disturbingly violent world, but…you know…I think he gained something, too. He learned to identify EVIL, which he could never have known in his idyllic world, and he responded the way I hope we all would; he HATED it. In a way, it completed his education as a sentient being, but that’s just how it worked out for my buddy, Gamma.
Those creatures you dream up banging away at the computer sometimes surprise you…actually, a lot of the time. They sort of take on a life of their own while you watch, and if you’re smart, enjoy what’s going on. Gamma grew from my thoughts about the nature of goodness and went the only way he could when challenged, and I forgive him the choices he made, just like I hope SOMEBODY forgives me for some of the really dumb-ass choices I’ve made. Knowing Gamma, I’m sure he does, but the rest of you have to decide for yourselves…if you EVER read my book.
Actually, Defending Hope is the subtitle Dawn on Earth carries, and I MEANT it to be that way. Hope is the only thing we can hold onto when we tread uncertainly into frightening and potentially forbidding new experiences, but what I REALLY worry about is…what if the visitors are NOT like Gamma? What if hope is inappropriate? What if they’re really TERRIBLE assholes? Are we ready for them? I gotta say…not right now, but until they actually show up, my thoughts will remain only the stuff of FICTION.
We’re confidently comfortable and happy here on our perfect, beautiful blue planet, protected by the conceit of unbelievable distance way out on one spindly arm of our whorl, but what if it’s really self-delusion? WHAT IF THEY ACTUALLY COME? What will we do? What will our governments do…more importantly, what will THEY do? You know, when threatened, ostriches believe they can hide from danger, and they always give it a shot. I like ostriches. They’re beautiful, innocent, and hopeful creatures…but the lions almost always get them in the end.

It seems like every day somebody is walking up to a crowd and opening fire on innocents, like the attack on the congresswoman from Arizona this weekend…which included the murder of a nine year old girl. My heart bled for her family, and after prayers for her young soul and the others senselessly gunned down, I watched the Sunday news shows with great interest…mostly to see what thoughts are floating around in that event’s turbulent wake.
Of course, everybody was horrified about it…as they should be, just as they are about suicide bombers taking out equally innocent people. Nobody mentioned innocents living in a war zone and killed as “collateral damage,” which bothers me, too, but I understand why commentators turn a blind eye in these days of political correctness. They don’t want to piss off ANYBODY these days, particularly those people in power. We get precious little from them as it is.
Somebody on TV went on and on about gun control; get rid of ‘em all, but that disturbs me, too, like a lot of people I know. When everybody is disarmed, only criminals will have guns…and cops, but that ain’t going to help a lot when somebody’s breaking into your house and you’re afraid they might kill you. People want to keep their guns, not because they intend to do harm but because they aren’t completely hopeful about the level of protection they can expect…or how quickly it will be provided. We’ve all heard those panicky 911 calls on the evening news.
A lot of panels and commentators said the shooting was a result of all the hateful political rhetoric we hear. I find it interesting because some of the loudest voices had been some of the worst offenders before all this, but while I don’t think that was really a factor, I agree with them…in a way. People flock to invective spewed on their behalf and develop walls, widen gaps, create resentment and fear. It seems somewhere along the path of subdividing citizenship…Italian Americans, Chinese Americans, African Americans, Euro Americans, Native Americans…the list goes on FOREVER…we forgot we’re all collectively AMERICANS.
The tent-pissing analogy comes to mind. It’s better to piss out of the tent on somebody else than inside where you’ll have to deal with it, but when you piss on a Whatever American, YOU’RE PISSING IN THE ONLY TENT WE ACTUALLY HAVE! It’s time for ALL OF US to take a hard look and decide what kind of country we want…if we want a country at all, but I gotta tell you. It’s better to have a tent to wander in than to wander around outside wishing you had one.
Our politicians don’t do well when we leave them to their own devices…easily distracted…lemming-like…sometimes not extraordinarily bright. You’ve got to lead them, slowly, sometimes painfully. TELL THEM in no uncertain terms, what kind of country you want, how you want them to place EVERYBODY’S concerns before their own agendas or the insipid pursuit of party advantage. If a couple of people say it, they’ll ignore them in a New York minute, but if almost everyone is saying it, they’ll listen…they’re politicians.

Tone down the aggressive oratory, you guys in Washington; whether it motivated the shooter or not, it’s hurting us, having an adverse effect on our shaken country…which is kind of fragile right now. Put PEOPLE first, all people…as you should be doing anyway…as you constantly say your are…but not really…and remember; the best laws, like the best actions, are those which DO NO HARM.
Find a different ethnic brand of American, people you might ordinarily avoid, and talk to them, but don’t forget to listen. I can pretty much tell you what you’ll learn. Except for the packaging, they’ll turn out to be just like the rest of us…same desires, same hopes, same disquiet…and same fears, and at the same time, you might find friends you didn’t know you could make. The way I see it, the greatest potential strength of our country is its DIVERSITY. In a democracy, division is complete IDIOCY!
Maybe I have an edge there, growing up and living in Louisiana. We’re diverse as hell, I think more than almost any other area, and we learned a long time ago it’s a PLUS rather than a minus. If you don’t believe me, just look at gumbo. It took the combined cultures of the French, the Africans, the Cajuns, and the Spanish to create that dish, and if you don’t think it was worth it, you haven’t had good gumbo.
Of course, we have a lot more than food to show for our tolerant diversity. It was just the first thing to pop into my head, but what I’m trying to say is diversity adds color, interest, and almost unlimited potential to our lives. All you have to do is go out there and ENGAGE. When I was young, the powers that were decided they didn’t want youngsters speaking French. You could actually be punished if you spoke it at school.
Naturally, the language died out pretty quickly, and it took a lot of years before somebody noticed we had lost something valuable in the process. Now, it’s being TAUGHT in the same schools that would have punished you just a few years ago…and language brings up another point. Almost daily, I hear somebody complaining about all the Spanish they hear spoken all over the place, but I only agree with part of what they’re saying.
Yes, they should learn English…just like we should learn SPANISH. What the hell’s so terrible about learning a new language? Europeans have to know three or four just to hail a taxi…and it hasn’t killed them. There’s a French axiom which says…loosely translated…”A man who speaks two languages is worth TWO MEN.” Two for one? Sounds like a plan to me, so buck up, quit limiting your horizons and bad-mouthing the others in our tent. EMBRACE diversity; it’s our ace-in-the-hole.
I have no idea whether the rhetoric flying around in the electronic ether influenced the shooter in Arizona, but I wish it would stop either way. Personally, I think he was just a garden variety fruitcake, a screwball, and I’ve had to deal with a lot of those in my life. I’ve seen cukoos motivated to action by things as innocuous as weather reports; they don’t need anything that makes sense…they’re nuts. It’s up to the rest of us, the SANE ones, to do something about potentially homicidal, deranged people running around in our free society, but I’ll save my thoughts about mental health care in this country for another blog.

A medical student was administering a Rorschach test to a lady, flipping cards and recording her answers.
“That’s a penis.”
“That’s a vagina.”
“That’s a couple having sex.”
“You know, Ma’am, you have a dirty mind,” he said.
“Don’t blame me. YOU’RE the one showing all the dirty pictures!”
We have the same problem when we evaluate objects and drawings from the distant past…injecting our modern life experience and viewpoint into them. If it looks like something we’ve seen, we almost automatically assume it’s just that and then wonder how on Earth people knew about stuff like that so long ago. It can be very confusing, you know…trying to look through the mist of dead ages.
Archaeologists have discovered a representation of a light bulb in an ancient Egyptian tomb, and it REALLY looks like one…if you ignore the fact that they didn’t seem to have electricity…and no WIRING of any kind. It simply looks like it to us, so a lot of people assume it probably was. A LIGHT BULB? Things like that can be unusually tricky…and deceptive. If you doubt me, look at some of the stuff pictured on the walls of Tutankhamum’s grave screens.
They make absolutely no sense at all, snakes biting their tails in some sort of globe, others spitting fire and stars…all kinds of peculiar stuff, and everybody is quick to say it’s undecipherable…mostly because it’s unlike anything they’ve ever seen. I can just picture people two hundred years from now saying, “Wow, it’s a quantum generator! It looks just like it. They were FAR more advanced than we thought.”
I said the ancients didn’t have electricity, but that may not be completely honest. A battery was uncovered in what is now Iraq, an earthenware bottle fitted with a lid containing a cylinder of copper and an iron core…and it works…with the simplest of materials, lemon or orange juice…but only produces a weak current. Using it to produce anything NEAR useful voltage would have required hundreds of them in series, but so far we’ve only found ONE…and no wiring there either, by the way.

To tell the truth, that tomb cover in Palenque is the only thing I find disturbing. I know I’m looking at it through twenty-first century eyes, but even when I try to divorce myself from my reality and mentally fly to theirs, I can’t even imagine what they were trying to depict, can’t nearly escape the trap of saying, “It looks like a man flying a rocket, so THAT’s what it is!” It’s seductive when you see it…and very, VERY strange…BUT.
A couple of things bother me. For one, it’s the ONLY representation discovered so far. The area is COVERED with stone carvings, and there should be at least DOZENS of rocket guy pictures if they had actually ever seen something like that…CERTAINLY more than one. People are always saying those primitives were just like us. They say it helps us understand them. Really? Savage wars to capture slaves? Reverently cutting hearts out of LIVING human beings? I don’t know what neighborhood those people live in, but if I find out, I’m sure as hell going to stay away from it.
Face it…they were different. They thought differently, and what they saw and recorded reflects a life-journey and perspective completely unlike ours. Birds were messengers from the gods. You could read the future from the entrails of a slaughtered animal. You kept worrying whether your obsidian axe was sharp enough to provide a few more slaves for the household…or defend yourself if THEY came to try and enslave you.
The only way we could ever know for sure would be to develop some form of time travel and go back to see for ourselves, but it ain’t going to happen…not ever. I touched on that in the preface to Kukulkan. Surely SOMEBODY somewhere in the future would have found SOMETHING in the past worth revisiting…I mean, there’s an awful lot to check out…but nobody ever has. To me it means THEY CAN’T.
Einstein said, “Time is an ILLUSION, but a very STUBBORN illusion.” Theoretically, it should be possible to escape time’s iron embrace, but like I said, they haven’t come to visit…so they probably never will. They didn’t figure it out, and only God knows why not. Maybe, they never solved the problem, maybe it can’t be solved…or maybe…just maybe…they destroyed themselves before they could do anything about it. I hope with all my heart that’s not the answer…much too sad for so promising a species as we.
I tend to look at time as simultaneous, the way I choose to believe God sees it…everything happening at once. We already know time is a variable, and if it REALLY IS an illusion, we can play with it like that. To me, while we’re doing our thing, others are flying through wormholes to new realities, and still others are piously burying King Tut in magnificent but compromised splendor. Everything is happening at the same time…but at different points on some strange sort of time curve in an energy field. If Einstein is right, it makes sense…and he hasn’t been wrong yet.
Anyway, that’s how I look at time. Our big problem seems to be that our consciousness is LOCKED into the one tiny moment we have called NOW, with no way of going back and asking those people what the hell they were getting at, just like we can’t talk to people out there way ahead of us on the curve. We’re stuck here, and it’s frustrating, IMMENSELY frustrating…so we try to wiggle into the minds of ancients, the only others we know…to achieve some sort of enlightenment.
Of course, what we have about them is only fragmentary; it always will be, but sometimes, insight comes screaming through. I remember visiting a decorated wall in Central America. The carvings, designs, and colors were beautiful, but the thing I will never forget was a handprint way out on one side. Somebody MADE that wall, and he signed it the only way he could. Light bulbs and rockets be damned…HE WAS A PERSON, and he left his handprint to attest, dipped in the same red paint he had been using. It blew me away…still does.
In my concept of cosmic reality, he’s still working on that plaster wall and occasionally slapping in a handprint. I bet he didn’t have an obsidian axe; he wouldn’t…he was an artist, begging SOMEBODY somewhere on the time curve to notice, trying to leave something, ANYTHING to validate his life. There are lots like him buried under mounds of sand and dirt and slowly surrendering to vines, forest, and merciless desert, but please, don’t forget my handprinter. I know I won’t…he’s become a friend.