The Diamond Island

There’s this television program I watched back in the day.  A show called The Prisoner that played on PBS (The Public Broadcasting Station). My folks and I would huddle around the television set and marvel at The Prisoner’s originality.

Ugh, the term “television” seems so dated now, even though it’s still useful in describing a dominant electronic device in use.  Who would ever have guessed television sets would end up being the precursor to the monitor, whose job it is to communicate computer activity to us?

Or that tell-a-vision would become 2-way?

The slot for The Prisoner was set at an hour, but the episode only lasted 45 minutes. Since this was PBS there were no commercials—what a novel concept!  A short program based around playing chess took up the remaining 15 minutes.

Jerky stop motion animation of a chessboard and its pieces, accompanied by a measured English voice, described the game as it unfolded. It was entertaining and engaging to my folks and I, so we stayed through to watch it.

But enough talk! The Prisoner is today’s topicality of chitchat.

What Is This Show On?

The Prisoner is about a secret agent (or perhaps he is a highly placed government official with access to sensitive information) who resigns from his job and begins packing for a trip. While he is loading up his suitcase, a group of men break into his home and fill the room he is in with knockout gas.

He awakens to find himself in a high-tech security town known as “The Village”. Everyone is called by a number instead of their real name.  His new name is “Number 6”, or just “6”. The Village is self-sufficient, cut-off from the rest of the world, and presided over by a director who is always referred to as “Number 2”. This director is almost always a new person in each episode of the show.

And those are the least weird parts of the place.

For example, The Village relies on security patrols (by foot, helicopter, and boat) to keep people from escaping.  But their primary means of recapturing escapees is a gigantic flying blob-sphere called “Rover”.

Rover paralyzes (and sometimes kills) those who go too far, bringing them back by dragging them to a pick up point.  The thing also makes really scary roaring and movement noises as it goes about its business.

The series lasts only one season, and consists of attempts by the forces of The Village, led by Number 2, to force Number 6 to answer the question, “Why did you resign?” Every kind of coercion is attempted, from outright physical torture to psychological manipulation involving hypnosis and drugs.

Number 6 tries to escape and resist as best he can. Most of the people who live in The Village are operatives for whatever political force runs the secret prison; many of them are undercover, posing as prisoners themselves.

Some inhabitants are genuine prisoners like Number 6 who usually think he’s “one of them”, or are too far broken down to be of use. Mainly it’s up to Number 6 to muster enough wits and skill to keep from being broken.

What Is This Post On About?

Okay, so if you haven’t seen this series yet then stop here and go watch it! I’m about to go into spoiler territory, so ahrooo!

The final episode of The Prisoner has provoked heated discussion over what it means. Basically Number 6 eventually turns the tables on his captors and is invited into the inner circle of power to join them as their new leader, or to depart.

In a surreal unfolding of events, Number 6 leads a machine gun attack on the inner circle and causes what looks like the destruction of The Village.  He and a few compatriots escape back to the real world, where these helpers resume their roles in society.  Number 6 drives off into the sunset.  The number on the door of his home says “1”.

What does the ending mean? How does it explain the events of The Village? Many viewers were expecting a sophisticated puzzle ending.  Here’s what’s been moving through my brain as I consider the meaning of the show for me.

The entire series represents a complex hallucination in which his captors attempt to brainwash him into a state of compliance, whereupon he can do no harm as an independent agent.  The elites of political entities really hate those independent agents.

At the end, Number 6 manages to overcome this hallucination and return to reality, symbolized by him leaving his home and driving off into the sunset, or the endless horizon of freedom.

Which can also be interpreted as a return to the cycle of the beginning of the series, but I think this only reinforces a closure of a complete experience in which Number 6 is no longer Number 1 or Number 6, but Number 0—a fool free to roam at will through any boundary or state of mind.

The last episode is a collapse of the hallucination and the return of sanity.  He has escaped his role as Number 1 (the leader of the system of coercion and repression which he served)—the mysterious butler is the part of him that “served” this system in his capacity as Number 1—and he has escaped his role as the prisoner, Number 6.

The inner circle would prefer he resume his post or be broken.  They divide his personality in an attempt to either cause his complete mental breakdown or remake him into his old role.  Perhaps they are the same thing!

However, instinct triumphs over programming. His stubborn refusal to give up his identity (“I am not a number, I am a free man!”), to cling to the zero as it were, preserves him.

Number 6 asks, “Who is Number 1?” and he is always answered, “You are Number 6.”  This is said in plain sight of the television watching audience many times.  He doesn’t catch the comma in that answer, nor does the audience!  “YOU ARE, Number 6.”

What’s That Again?

The interesting thing for me is how the conflict is always framed in terms of Number 6’s refusal to answer the question, “Why did you resign?”  The thing is, Number 6 answers this question at one point—that his conscience was bothering him about what he was doing.  Being Number 1 must have meant decisions that led to the suffering and death of not only many establishment agents, but innocent people as well.

For example, when Number 2 kills number 73 (an innocent woman), Number 6 reacts with brutal efficiency in destroying the man.  It must have been a similar incident—the death of an innocent in the performance of his duties—that led to Number 6 questioning his role. He gained back part of his soul when he felt remorse, and this in turn led to him to suddenly react against the system.

That Number 6 finally gives an answer—and this answer is ignored-—shows that his captivity isn’t about information at all.  It is about obedience.  The concern about his resignation is a pretense for removal of his identity and re-education.  Send him to the Gulag, folks!  Just make sure it is “justified” by some official reason.  That is, mask the real issue.

Number 6 tries to tell the inner circle but they shout him down.  “I, I, I!”  The magistrate looks on at Number 6’s anguished face.  He understands as Number 6 realizes, it has never been about his stand of conscience, or the fear of his going over to “the other side”—is there such a thing when the inner circle is both black and white in dress? Where the system is total and complete?

There is only one political force—ownership. They merely argue over method.

The Number 2 destroyed by Number 6 returns to initiate the last and most brutal interrogation of Number 6 before the final episode. The inner circle must have believed using this personality piece was key to breaking 6’s will. But I think by this point they had already lost the upper hand and were clutching at straws.

For this Number 2 is, in effect, a form of Number 6’s own past persona.  The part of him that initiated Number 6’s development out of the previous trauma involving the dead woman.  He has, in effect, betrayed the system by self-recreating his own conscience and therefore a person who does not fit under the typical number system.

Number 2 is “destroyed”. He is “dead”. The truth of self-captivity ended his ability to perform his duties. Number 6 is free to go.

This Number 2 is brought back to life and put on trail as an example of a “betrayer”, who bites the hand that feeds him.  But it is a futile gesture.  Nature trumps the system in the end, always. Number 6 is who our protagonist is now, and putting his old identity on a rocket to be shot into space is no use.

Not that the inner circle won’t try to place all the “bad” personalities into that rocket in hopes of being left with only a butler (Number 1).

The young man gunfighter Number 8 from the Living In Harmony episode is brought onto trial as well (as Number 48).  He is put forward as an example of youth that does not rebel in the societally accepted way. He is guilty of rebelling with no purpose, rhyme or reason—not unlike the fool.

This nemesis “kid” was used by the system to threaten others, but he had a drawback.  He was difficult to control and extremely violent.  Youth stifled and manipulated is a dangerous tool to the system.  When we allow the system to send youth out to kill those who oppose repression, we create dysfunctional individuals.

By refusing to fight, as Number 6 did in this episode, one threatens the source from which coercion draws the strength of its force.  Displaying a character who held this kind of basic stance of non-violence was the reason the episode was not allowed to be shown in the U.S. at the time.

It’s revealed that the Living In Harmony episode has been a hallucination within a hallucination in an attempt to get Number 6 to either resume his former post as gunslinger for the ownership or be a victim of his immature personality of violence and confusion, to be “destroyed” by his shadow as it were.

Number 6 “killed” Number 8.  By refusing to strap on a gun and a badge at the same time, Number 6 showed that he wished to remain independent.

Number 48 will also be going up into space on the rocket.

I, I, I!

Number 6 is sent into the rocket to meet with Number 1.  Meaning he will either end up in the tube with Number 2 and Number 48 (who are both laughing and babbling insanely) to be blasted off and disposed of, or he will emerge in a form suitable for control once more.

In the rocket, Number 6 meets a figure wearing the mask of the inner circle.  He strips the mask away only to reveal an ape’s mask underneath. He strips more masks off.  Finally he comes face to face with himself as the figure is revealed to be—himself!  The two of them struggle, the unmasked version of himself laughing maniacally and babbling like a fool.

A fool. His true self!

Number 6 attacks the guards and frees Number 2 and Number 48.  They lead a counterattack against the inner circle; launching the rocket in a surreal confrontation of energies that can only mean the fundamental construct of the hallucination can no longer be defended.

Isn’t that what the system is, after all? A shared imaginary space we participate in? But as they say in gaming circles, “system matters”. Dysfunction leads to typhoid game play and “fun, never.”

Rover is destroyed, melted to slag.  His job was to maintain the boundaries of the hallucination.  In the episode Many Happy Returns, Number 6 actually manages to escape back to the real world for a brief time.  There is no “Rover” or guards to stop him.  The purpose of letting Number 6 temporarily escape was only to fool him into thinking The Village was a literal place.  But it never was!

As the hallucination collapses, the personalities return to their appointed places in the psyche as the “world” becomes more real. We were only a short drive from London after all!  The youth, Number 48, goes off to hitchhike. Number 2 goes off to a job in the government. The butler enters the residence of Number 6. All the personalities within our fool protagonist return to their proper place in the psyche (and appropriate memories).

Number 6 gets in his car and drives off into the sunset/sunrise of consciousness. He is free to go.  At the very least he will awaken and perhaps find himself in a real captivity, but one in which he can actually physically escape from.

It is the fool who encourages us to resign, to claim our life as our own, and to reject numbers altogether. At the end of the adventure he comes around to encourage us to begin anew.

Back in the college days of yore I encountered a mighty strange phenomenon.  In the student center there was a dining area for all the students on the generic meal plan (which at the time was called SAGA, or as it was nicknamed in fun, Soviet Attempt to Gag America; ironic since it was a liberal arts college).

Basically, you’d be sitting there eating your meal (usually dinner) and someone would say, “Rat-hump.” Someone else would say a little louder, “RAT-HUMP.” Then the real contest would begin: There would be a rush to see who could say “RATT-HUUMP!” the loudest without being embarrassed.

These things happen.

Just the other day on the FaceCrook channel my colleagues in college were doing the still-alive-but-past-life analysis in order to revisit this strange irrational gift from the beyond.  Alas, like all mysteries we could not find a suitable answer.

Where did it come from? Who brought it into being? The seed of this break in so-called well-behaved discourse must have come from somewhere reasonable and rational, right?  Right?!

I talked to the “cool” people of that time period, and they refused to say.  Maybe they know too much! In any case I got nothing on that angle.

I spoke with the folks from the period before where it might have manifested. They knew nothing.

The rational minds of the crew came up with some interesting (NSFW) origins of the word, but not quite the practice:

• This blog provides general analysis.
• Google Books references placing clues in 1922.
• Democratic Underground digs up the popular culture graveyard.

My initial rant went as thus in the discussion:

***

Rat-hump is used in an escalating declarative sense to achieve a conscious recognition.

• Step 1: “There is a rat-hump, hello!”
• Step 2: “No, there’s a rat-hump, HELLO!”
• Step 3: +1 until consciousness raising achieved.

At which point someone recognizes that yes, there is a rat-hump and someone’s face is red. In other words ritual re-enactment of “shock the monkey”, in which we all participate in the recognition of “crap thru a goose” life.

So the definition is rat-hump as a state of mind in which one realizes one is rat-humped, or someone you know is rat-humped.  QED: we are alive and life is rat-hump, Gloria Et Domine or Kyrie depending on where you stand on the rat-hump wheel at that particular moment

***

Spontaneous affirmation of life through a subversive exclamation of experience? Such things are among us now, refusing to allow our mere reason or tyrannical infant-services to repress them.

THERE IS NO SANCTUARY.

I spend time now and then investigating the livejournal shoals for interesting tidbits of brain food.  There’s this writer who goes by the name Livia-Llewellyn over there that I started keepin’ an eye on, mostly because she has a certain kind of bleak attitude that I find appealing enough to listen to.

She wrote this four-part story and since I was listening I decided to read.  Must have made some kind of impression, because here I am compelled to do an exploration about it.  Spoilers are a cumin’ in, so ahroo!

Feel free to read first:

1. Sometimes There’s No Poison Like a Dream
2. I am the Stone the Builder Rejected
3. Ride easy, lover: Surrender to the land / Your heart of anger
4. I ride the wings of the morning sun, and dwell in the uttermost arms of the deep

Okay so what do we have here?  The story follows Gillian, a sculptor of tombstones, who is about to receive a promotion (or a hek of an eternal demotion, depending on how you see it) for her fine work.

She has a talent for finding and expressing evocative character in the tombstones she carves.  A talent she honed during her childhood years dowsing for coal in a mine, a job from which she escaped after a horrific mystical experience.

Basically she wants to be a good little doggie:  work a 9-5 job in the city, gain some security, and provide for her son’s future.

The world she lives in is a nightmare planet.  Otherworldly forces of unspeakable horror have bled into the world at large, expressed as rampant pollution, corruption, urban lifelessness, and environmental defilement.

Kind of like now.

Instead of a promotion, her talent brings her to the attention of a band of well-connected cultists.  They want to use her talent to summon a god-monster-entity from a large boulder they’ve found.  Just the sort of scary stuff she used to run into all the time when she worked in the mines, showing the machines where to dig.

Gillian is abducted and taken to the boulder.  She betrays the cultists by turning the boulder into a stone elemental to smash them into jelly. Unfortunately, this means giving into the after-effects of that horrific experience from her past.  She enters into the darkness of a mining tunnel in an ecstatic state of madness, experiencing it as a plunge into the depths and a spreading of monstrous wings to dark flight.

That’s all folks.

Here’s my beef:  Gillian has no agency.  In Part 1, it’s suggested that her promotion means taking on a difficult mission that will force her to confront her past.  If she chooses to accept, she will be going on a journey that is both professionally challenging and personally dangerous. The alternative means giving up her upward mobility (so to speak).  This is awesome.

The stakes are the new life she’s built for herself.  This is stuff anybody struggling to survive in a post-industrial apogee world can understand.  Debt-servitude makes for hard choices, and here’s one that promises to put her drive to escape to the test.

Once she is abducted, her choice is reduced to narrative zilchplay—there’s no tension as to what will happen.  Gillian is certain everyone is going to die.  We’re just waiting with her for the inevitable date with the boulder of destiny.

While we wait, she looks back at her life in the mines.    Gillian grew up in dark tunnels under conditions of industrial servitude.  Her special talent for locating hidden veins of coal may have led to an explosive encounter with a horrific underground entity.

At some point she decided to escape the mines by getting pregnant.  She had a sexual encounter with a person who may have been an incarnation of the god-monster-entity the cultists hope to free and get goodies from.

Gillian left the mines behind to find a job carving tombstones in the city, but it’s a farce living on borrowed time.  I get the feeling that if she ever had any major decisions to make in her life they were made back then, but it’s unclear to me what they were.

At this point it’s obvious Gillian is at best a hybrid human, may not have ever been human, and could be a simulacra cycling through various incarnations of mother and daughter in imitation of human life.

Even though the cultists suggest her son’s life is in danger should Gillian not cooperate, she is unconcerned.  Her thoughts suggest he has abilities that allow him to escape capture and make it on his own. This detail basically ensures all stakes in the story are removed.  We are on the exposition train from here on, where the character goes from one place to the next.  She isn’t allowed to matter.

Without agency, the character just goes through the motions.  Because we don’t know the details of her story in the mines—what she experienced and what it meant—the current story is just the last gasp of a person who died a long time ago.  If she was ever even alive!

The villains are your standard black hat fanatics with no agency themselves.  Led by the void-filling but unexciting and lying evil boyfriend.   They exist simply to make the colossal mistake that sends them off a cliff screaming.  Whatever!

The ending leaves us plunging into the unknown, which is an effective technique.  However, what does it mean?  Does she become a monster servant of the god-monster in the underworld?  Has she succumbed to madness in which she imagines rebuilding her daughter? Has she fulfilled her instinctual purpose and will now wander around the fiery tunnels of a coal mine until she slowly expires?

Whatever the answer, I’m left with the feeling this is the end of Gillian’s own experience.  That feels like a cop out; her monstrosity was her most human quality, the part worth exploring.

The story that matters is her previous life in the mines, but we don’t get that.  It’s already in the past.  If horror is about violation, Gillian experienced that long ago and didn’t survive.  Or rather, she survived as a ghost long enough to drag others to their destruction.  As readers, we’re robbed of an experience of her true horror.

One angle that might have been interesting would have been an approach towards the discovery that she had been made into one of those Lovecraft-based automatons one reads about.  There are stories of unfortunates who delve too deeply into the Cthulhu Mythos and are never heard from again, save as eerie doubles of their bodies.

She might have been already dead, driven by her Chtulhu-infestation of the mind into building some kind of false life on the surface.  Her “secret compulsion” would be like a locust of doom crawling overland, only to kill and then descend again into the depths to nurture a new brood of madness.  She, her father’s mother.  Leave the cultists out completely and make her boulder-job just another day at the office, as it’s originally suggested.

Then her lack of agency becomes a self-discovery as she learns not only is her new life a mask, but she never escaped to begin with.  Slavery in the mines was replaced by something unspeakably worse—a veneer of hope designed to lure victims to their doom.  I’d have left the cultists as a suggestion that they are behind the mining operations, using “canaries” like her to satisfy their simpleton understanding of their monster-god’s wishes. Profit becomes a means for maintaining the faith only.

Personally, I’d have gone the romantic adventure route.  Gillian becomes half-Byakhee and half-woman.  Something new and different, truly dangerous.  Free to live her life more fully.  Horror as violation that shows you who you really are.  Wouldn’t that be a kick in the Rumplestiltskin?

Dang though, can Livia write some mutherscrathin’ prose.  Her descriptions of the nightmare world of Obsidia are inescapably vivid.  In one scene, as Gillian moves between train cars a piece of trash smacks her on the cheek, nearly missing her eye.  I flinched when I read that, it was so visceral. This is the kind of putrid stuff that sticks in your mental craw, needing floss to pluck out.

Livia’s eye for detail and sense of place is relentless, with a charged slant toward the erotic.  Strong stuff there.   She is a master of setting, painting her world with soft and harsh touches in equal measure. The gargantuan mega-city of Obsidia as a setting ate me alive and doG bless it.

Listening, hearing.  A song from outer space experienced from the inside. The sphinx is a lion tree in which a swarm of killer bees make sweet, sweet honey.

Dark and dry the desert of the damp and misty soul, calling return to broken, sunken ships of odyssey trust.  The lantern given out of sincere anguish knits a flickering, uncertain glow.

Full moon ascending, bathed in halos of clouded night reflects back my empty new moon of scaled darkness in the deepest trenches of still water beneath the skeleton trees.

Girl instincts arise, guiding the sphinx at last to a place of rest, upon moth-woven blankets of wool from the softest silver lambs with the strength of thunder in their bones.

Dreams of peaceful accord drift among the clouds, rumblings stir the sky with the forgotten ecstasy of finding.  A silence swallows up sensation, burying it within the beyond.

These wonders, I endure.

I remember what it felt like to be alive, free of coercion and restraint, bearing a fire inside of indestructible fireflies of gemstone in every color of the rainbow, its twin, and the rainbow unseen further than the reach of human destiny.

Gone forever, sacrificed on the altar of space and time for all eternity, never to be recovered.

Out of this death burns a star in all skies throughout all nothingness and somethingness.  This light remembers all I have lost and will remind me if I forget again.  Furthermore, miraculous new life is granted me in this valley.  Song of the trees a signal of wakening to what I have always been.

A door opens in me, and I know now I will be a beekeeper.  Both in the outside world where I will raise and cultivate bees, and in the inner world where I will tend the killer bees for their honey so that others might know sweetness.

I have stuff to learn now.  Small steps to take towards helping bees go about their business.  I have the feeling that Lucerna is behind this in some way.  More psychic kung fu training.

Hanging out with the Sphinx in the valley.  Trees but no trees.  Mizzle in the desert.  Listening to the silence and the inactivity until I wonder if I can listen any more.

The skeleton trees sing to me with voices of nothingness.

They remind me that I’ve been here before many times, striving to see and understand.  Their song digs out of me buried and forgotten memories, prayers, and responses.

The Sphinx shows me there is no riddle and that I must create my own answers.

The Celtic New Year, a time of spirits and dreams of the imagination, comes to a close again.  Inside me, fresh life is being brought out of the darkest crawlways and unexplored cubbyholes of my failures and mistakes.

Lucerna’s training comes back to me; her wise and understanding influence has opened up in me a wholehearted casket of human riches. Expanding myself to fill those potentials is a lifetime of commitment and practice.

There is a UFO being built inside of me.

I see myself as I used to be, and might have been.  Surviving the outgrowing of those parts of me has been a chimerical nightmare.

I once went looking for Shiva in search of an explanation. Now I’m the one who will provide the explanation!

It’s as if I’m in the source of all Destroyed Bourns and simply recharging, rebuilding, renewing; and this time I and the universe are zero and one at the same time because I’ve passed through the temptation of unredeemed lust and released the power that does not belong to me.  I think, I feel the sun shining through me is an opening even as I close a circle to completion.

I have other promises to keep.

The collapse of the popular music sacrificial fire into millions of glittering coals marks the slow death of a sub-cultural era of psychic exploitation, repression, and propaganda. Beware of many last salvos as the conflagration expires, crackling and burning with a final extraction of warmth before we are free of the spectacle.

There’s been enough recycled commercialization through the grinder now to recognize the taste of the bodies being fed to us as having a same-old, lifeless lack of flavor.  To satiate our robust hunger for the flesh and bones of dreams we don’t dare for ourselves, the human fuel was piled high.  Every kind of expression, disposable and forgettable unless you happened to catch a particular body’s colorful spattering burst of color as it was consumed.

That’s just how the sausage is made, mind you. It’s true that sacrifice is what keeps us all alive.  Mindful sacrifice that is. Making an automated industry out of it—at the cost of a wasteland of the mind and the earth in its wake (never mind what those planting monoculture clones in the wake say)—hardly satisfies.  The junkfood consuming of the pRonographic never provides enough psychological nourishment.  It just gets you to the next storefront

Only the art which turns the one participating back upon themself is any damn good.  The point is to adapt us, to bring us back to ourselves with a fresh re-imagining that shakes us from our ossification of the routine. The pieces are always the same, it is in the near limitless application of those parts into a whole experience that one is reminded of their true humanity.

It’s easy to jump in the fire, throw some embers up in the air, and shout loudly.  Can you pull free the searing gemstone in the coals for us to see?  Without crying out? Look, there are glimmers in the fire.

Facing the dehumanizing trial of speaking across lines of distance has already been done, with more willingness to open the heart, more maturity about the difficulties that might arise, and more knowing when to wield the keen sword of wit when it’s time.

Untangling the hardship and confusion of speaking to someone who refuses to listen?  Been done with style, flair, and no small amount of insight.

You want ragged, road bitten humor with an edge? Quite a few gals out there know how to approach the monsters and deal blow for blow with a few human touches.

Or if its the mirror to society you want held up, then there are forces of unspeakable talent so frightening they weaken the phony system with every mere gesture.

A mountain of women have piled high whatever they could give to show us that smashing others isn’t enough, nor is it strength or smarts or even a good mock.

How many more times must one re-imagine the victim-girl as dispenser of brutality in the name of her owners before they hear the ringing of bells and understand the night has passed?

It’s time. Because we are in relation to one another.

Of course, as cool as the Robotech anime was for me back in the day, what has that got to do with the here and now (such as it is)?  Fear not intrepid reader, for I shall reveal more.

I mentioned that I had kept my die cast metal SDF-1 in part one.  I took it with me to college as a protective talisman.  During times of stress, it helped me to imagine I was the commander of the space defense fortress, fighting off the invading problems of my life.

The toy-as-talisman, or security blanket, encapsulated several reassuring images for me.  While being a military vessel it also contained the citizens of Macross Island, who had rebuilt their destroyed city within the ship.  They grew crops, manufactured goods, and engaged in trade with one another as the ship pursued its course back to earth.

There’s an element of Lost In Space inherent in the image, as well as a Noah’s Ark archetype at work.  The whole of humanity contained within a protective vehicle that manifests all their needs as it transports them to a new state of consciousness.

In the series, most of the population of earth gets destroyed during the final Zentraedi attack.  It’s the unlucky refugees who are isolated from their old life on earth who primarily survive to continue humanity in the new intergalactic world.  Bad as that recycled air and water must have been, it beats being atomized by reflex cannon bombardment from orbit!

Not exactly a wholesome or reassuring reality when you think about it.  The archetype still captures our imagination, however.  Battlestar Galactica used it’s titular spaceship as the flagship that rallies the survival of humanity in the fleet.  Starblazers used the Argo as the means by which the crew accomplishes their goal of restoring earth.  The Discovery in 2001: A Space Odyssey brings humanity in touch with the alien intelligence of the monolith at Jupiter.

The ship as the transport vehicle through the unknown or the unconscious (represented by the sea or space), carrying with it the experiment of humanity from one state of awareness to the other.  The whole package by default carries with it all that is needed.  As they say, wherever a human being goes they carry themselves with them!

You might say that these ships are all small imitations or intimations of the biggest ship of all, the earth.  These ship-tales echo our own world experience by bringing the grand affair into a more comprehensible field of form.

So while I’ve been making use of these popular tales, from Star Trek to Robotech, I’m getting the feeling that it’s time for me to consider what my own, personal, individualized form of the ship-tale is.

If this were an ocean based exploration I’d choose a submarine, something closer to Voyage To The Bottom Of the Sea or 20,000 Leagues Beneath The Sea.  One could make it an earth adventure, and then get something akin to At The Earth’s Core or The Last Dinosaur.  Outer space could mean the vast strangeness of Space: 1999 or long struggle and searching of Lost In Space.

Countless environments, phenomenon and consciousnesses waiting to be experienced and meditated upon.  All worthy and interesting explorations to me.

Trouble is, what will I pick?  Perhaps I will build something from the ground up, exploring what components the experience consists of through discovery.

Stay tuned!

Nowadays Anime and Mecha (giant robots piloted by humans) are no big deal.  While I was still in high school though, many a moon ago, any appearance on television was a huge event. Of course, the concept of television was not the endangered species it is today either.

You had to get up early to catch this kind of stuff, like many shows that were barely allowed to show in the backwaters far from prime time slots.  But Robotech blew my mind with its character complexity and ongoing story.  Like Speed Racer, Marine Boy, and Starblazers before it I would be exposed to new ways of thinking and civilization would move forward in microscopic ways.

The premise is this: An alien vessel crash-lands on earth, filled with advanced technology and a brand new fuel source—protoculture.  The event causes the earth to unite under a world government and rebuild the alien ship into the flagship of a military organization called the Robotech Defense Force (or RDF for short).  It is believed that the aliens will come looking for the ship and earth wants to be ready to repel them.

Turns out that’s a correct assumption.  On the day of the maiden voyage of the flagship (known as the SDF-1 or “space defense fortress”), the aliens (giant humanoids called the Zentraedi) appear with the intention of capturing the flagship and returning to their home planet.

In the first series, known as “Macross” (named after the island the SDF-1 crashed and was rebuilt upon), we follow the adventures of both the humans and the Zentraedi involved in the struggle over possession of the SDF-1.  During the initial attack to recapture the ship, the humans discover not all of the modified-for-human-technology works at they believe.  Despite their superior forces, the Zentraedi find the behavior of the humans confusing and are constrained by orders not to destroy the SDF-1.

The Macross series really begins in earnest when the humans use the SDF-1 to execute a “space fold”, but botch the process.  They end up transporting themselves and most of Macross Island to outer space, at the far end of the solar system.  They are forced to rescue the 50,000 or so inhabitants of the island along with as much supplies and material as they can, then try to return to earth.  The Zentraedi attempt to stop them as the SDF-1 makes its way back home.

All a decent enough back-story for what happens, and in many cases that would drive the action of most television shows. What struck me as most powerful though was the idea that you could have a vast array of different iconic characters that included the “bad guys”.

Who it turns out aren’t as bad as first thought. The Zentraedi are controlled by the Robotech Masters who have stolen the fuel source of protoculture from another alien race—the Invid.  Protoculture, the source of immense power that fuels all the giant robot machines in battle, is a life form that belongs to the Invid.

The second series would examine the Robotech Masters and the third the Invid—and their effect on humanity.  In the second series the main protagonist is a woman.  That was another cool thing; how different kinds of women could have important parts in the drama.

The Zentraedi find the human culture awesome and exciting and many eventually elect to “micronize” themselves to human size and assimilate into humanity. The show evolves from a struggle for survival to a question of integration among different cultures.  This is handling the big stuff folks.

It isn’t perfect. There’s bias creep in the stories, not all of which holds up today.  But back then it was like advanced technology.  Cool characters dying? Questions of gender identity? Complexity in villains?

It was hard, getting up to watch this show.  Remembering to program my folks’ Beta VCR to record it wasn’t easy either.  Sometimes there’s only so much willpower available to a teenager, even when the stakes are something you really care about. This wasn’t the first or last show I had to fight to watch.

But sometimes that’s what young people have to do, fight for the things that matter for them.  Their very education is at stake. I would argue the future of civilization itself is at stake.  For where else will you learn the important lessons of culture if not through the hard-to-reach treasures of artistic pronouncement?

I still have my die cast metal SDF-1, bought on discount from Kaybee toys for ten bucks. My symbol of the adaptability of human transformation and the ability of new forms of thought to disrupt even the most ingrained forms of coercion and repression.

Nothing belongs to us; it is all borrowed on the backs of someone else.  Yet in a sense we are stealing from each other because we need to separate ourselves from truth, believe we are special above all others.  This is the dilemma of our civilization, the ability to recognize our limits and accept our indebtedness to others’ lives, yet still celebrate the individual who dares to speak with an honest need.

The stories are there now—alive—as we speak. What secret wonders are being revealed to youthful and eager eyes beyond our imagining?

I’ve known Maria since the day she wandered into my dorm room and hung out, chatting sagely about what I could look forward to as a newbie student.  She’s still that insightful, hard-working, outspoken and charming woman from those days.  Only now she’s more powerful.

She’s had an album for a while. If you’re really lucky you have a copy of one of her bootleg cassettes from back in the day before the internets made music a telepathic experience.  Now she’s got a new song available, and I hear tell there’s more in the hopper to come.

So what is she about and what do you, her listener, do?  Maria sings about relationships using her voice and an acoustic guitar.  She explores intimate and personal experiences, confessing and declaring more to you the listener than she might be willing to admit to herself or those she knows.  You are the privileged stranger, witness to the satisfaction and frustration of her proud, vital, vulnerable self.

Speaking of dragons, there’s another dragon worth mentioning.  The ruby dragon of alchemy, represented by the number nine.  Nine is the highest individual number and therefore representative of the highest degree to which a human being alone may attain.

The symbol of the nine, or 9, is a hovering circle (the zero) with a dangling tail (the one).  The divine zero is about to descend to join the one (the human being) and begin a new level of consciousness.

This can be imagined as the descent of the Holy Ghost or the bringing down of the Holy Grail to the consciousness of a human being, who will now experience a wider awareness.  So too, will the divine, the most high finding fulfillment in the lowly human being the plan that unfolds from infinite mystery.

This is the moment of transformation, of great danger, and unpredictability.  Often we can only use veil-names to hide the contents, lest they become institutionalized by earthly concerns or disappear back into the heights and depths of the unimaginable unknown.

Number nine.  Number Nine.  Number Nine.  The Beatles played with this formula, encompassing the vastness and complete bedlam of existence in a mantra of return.  The number always brings us back to the beginning even as we reach the end.

Nine is fine, nine is naughty.

So what is going on with all this, say you?  Think of it as a wandering in the midst of a great dried out cistern-like structure stretching out to all horizons. Blue skies and arid heat bearing down from a bright sun, while sharing snacks with a gigantasaurus of a sphinx, feet and paws roasting on the baked clay.

One tends to see things out here, hazes of steamy far-off imagery wafting unsteady in the oppressive daylight.  Strange lights reflecting and bending off currents of particles in the superheated air.  I swear, out in this desert of the mind I hear weird noises: dull roars of wind as though there were a tunnel far in the distance, occasionally the crackling titter of granules just beyond sight.

Is there anyone there?

Hard to tell, the brightness makes it hard to see through the visual trickery of an outdoors so spacious one mind isn’t enough to conceive it.  I perceive an increase in the glitter of the lights; they sparkle such that they leap in and out of the air as I move.  The noises might be that of my own body, magnified by the silence of nothingness.

Dang this heat is oppressive.

Summer empties us as surely as winter fills us.  I’m of the mind that there’s a jumping about, a joy to the burning up of emptiness.  The time it takes to wait for an inside spirit to come to our attention.  Most people I imagine grow despondent waiting for their souls to be filled.  Imagine one’s surprise when one is faced with cold rain in the hot desert?  Talk about bizarre, but living it is believing.

I pick up the psychic communicator.  Looks like my friend Alexi scored the job, defeated the robotozoids of torment, sent Crush-em No-thousand to the scrap heap with a fake lightsaber.  He’s at the threshold of his kingdom; it helps to have a horse to power the cart after all!

Also on the Good News sandwich line, Chopper Angel Le Wolf extracting an upgrade from her pesticide commanders for more gold and mead; Going to be able to survive to the next cookie round-up.  Busy training her daughters to fight in the living dead girl olympics on rationed Scooby snacks and a world where princesses get sold out for free.

Bonus round for Vampy Kimbers, expressing the lost dark side as best she can given that living in the sunlight takes it out of her.  Writing, exercising, raising youngsters, working, keeping husband recharged for the day-to-day work spin-cycle and still finding time to re-grow and re-learn psychic limbs held still by decades of invasive programming.

Getting kind of cool now, probably could have packed my rain gear, but who expects the Spanish Inquisition?  Even though that’s all we get.  Hardly expecting to see vaporous mists and gray clouds where a moment ago I was baking to the crisp?  Hey, you know, in this psychic terrain things turn on a dime, crumbs!

As Roseanne Roseannadanna said, “It’s always something.”

I approve.  Rain, shine, it’s a state of mind.  No trees, except I know this is the Valley of Trees.  Yeah, in a desert, which is raining.  Talk about a mystery oasis.