Maxwell’s Demon, and the Quartermasters of Reductionism

Maxwell’s Demon, and the Quartermasters of Reductionism

Maxwell Silverhammer

Is teaching a class in Statistics.

If you take a stand outside the Normal Curve

You will be called Maxwell’s Demon

April 28, 1994

      I am standing outside the Drugstore Café In Santa Fe. The battle between

Santa Fe. The battle between the Viet Cong and the Hell’s Angels has come and gone. Regina comes walking along, and we promenade, until we find ourselves looking on an Oriental garden, in the year One After Zero.

      In the tents of that garden, the Quartermasters of Reductionism are being judged. A correlation is being made, between a very large pile of bleached bones, and what are now established to be Fascist banners. How did a whole nation come under the control of teenagers who had been schooled only in the ethic that Sadism is Cool?

      We walk across the street to see a ventilated world. The statistical graph of the ‘80's is written in bullet-hole code. The world which was so inflated is punctured in so many places, it may not be repairable.

      Behind the shrubbery in the Oriental Garden, Renata and Thieu Erathna are sharing a foxhole as they clean and oil their automatic weapons.

       “Watch out for statistical profiling,” Renata warns Thieu. “It’s getting much harder for them to get away with sniping at you with a rifle. The problem these days is, they will use our scientific achievements to map our statistical profiles. Then they can fire projectiles that are programmed to seek out those profiles, and claim that it is an accident when they actually hit us.”

      “Is it time for me to make my Tet Offensive?” Maxwell’s Demon stops by to ask the two women.

      “Not yet and get down,” they answer back.

Spiritual failure is the statistical norm.

This is what we learned from the years of the stuffed men,

The stick men, who take no thought of their Creator

But are proud of the way in which economic compulsion

Irons out the lives of the people.

Image by Nurioneheart. Reprinted by permission

http://i295.photobucket.com/albums/mm149/Nurioneheart/1b.jpg

The Myth of the Star-Spangled Banner

The
Myth of the Star-Spangled Banner

“But we aren’t corsairs,” I confided to Ms. Kirkegaard
"We are actually root-rock social scientists
 Measuring the vectors of those glamours
Which turn us into slaves and enslavers.

April 15, 1994

There are so many legends that rise from the hot air, on the western edge of the Great American desert. For example, the Myth of Billy the Kid will tell us that the freshly widowed Mrs. Alexander McSween remained in a her burning Lincoln County house long enough to play The Star Spangled Banner on her imported piano.

      Yet there may be subtle truths embroidered on the rudely hooped canvasses of these cloud-schooners which drift up from the smoke of the Western campfire. It would not have been much of an exaggeration to have represented all of the New Mexico of 1877 as one big burning house. The delicate fabric of compromises, alliances, and co-existences which balanced the Hispanic, Native, and Anglo elements of the complexly interwoven culture were being menaced by an insurgency of Anglo-Norman conquistadors in the Jesse James mold.

      Susan McSween’s protests over the indifference of paid-off civilian and military officials towards the murder of her husband played the national anthem loudly enough that way back in Washington D.C., President Hayes was prodded to appoint the veteran Abolitionist Lew Wallace as the territorial governor, with instructions to put out the
still-smouldering fire. This is why the legend persists, in spite of Susan McSween’s documented insistence, that she would never have been that foolhardy.¹

      When we drum and tune our guitars to accompany the coyotes under the stars, some people will call us corsairs. Even the Lady from Denmark, who should have known better, doesn’t yet understand the difference between a bandit like Jesse James, and a battina like Alexander McSween.

     “I want to join your banditoes,” she confided to me, back when Paranoid Alien Radio was just beginning to broadcast.

      Of course, I found myself confronting what seemed to me a rather unreasonable prejudice. Because we are a community of dark-skinned people salted with the occasional pale cosmopolitan, we are more than likely to be typecast in the role of Dick Turpin. This is unhistorical. To quote Walter Noble Burns, who was a fairly observant historian, “[The gun-slinging killers of the Wild West] were all blond. There was not a pair of brown eyes among them.”²

      But  even now, after various Marxist parties control about 1/3 of the seats in your Northern European parliaments, you Europeans still persist in clinging to the myth, that it was the Real People who were the aggressors, and that armored European prospectors who weren’t afraid to torture the Leprechaun to find the pot of gold, were simply our passive victims. We know that you have degrees, and that you have studied the Marxist theory of colonialism. But do you remember us?

     Do you remember who it was that taught the earliest cowboys and loggers how to live on the open plains and camp in the woods? Do you remember the people whose identity has been confused, because they were betrayed in their own homeland?

      “So  tell me a little of the data which you intend to publish in the journal of your Socialist Monarchy,” I challenge. “You found the noble savages, recorded their music – and in a few years your published reports shall have inspired a new form of rock and roll.”

      “Are you not the cynical one!” she declares.

      “Since I came out West I have learned a lot about the Marginalized Peoples.” I answer her. “If the thought of Marginalized Peoples is discussed in your academies, it is usually presented, as interpreted by anthropologists. So since you have come out here to interpret, will you allow me to interpret you?”

      “You’re  not a Noble Savage!” she exclaims. “What I can see, is that you are simply a goat, who has found a way to get through my defenses.”

1 Let us look a little more closely at the Myth of the Star-Spangled Banner. The custom of standing up for the Star-Spangled Banner is credited to Rossell G. O’Brien, who was regarded as the founding father of the Washington State Territorial Militia. O’Brien was also close to the Bar Association, and served as court clerk for the Territorial Court. His Civil War service brought him into hostile contact with Quantril's guerrilla forces in Missouri, so we can be assured that he was aware of the continuing neo-Confederate threat.

This may provide the clue to the riddle of why Susan McSweem was credited with playing the Star-Spangled Banner in a burning house. Alexander McSween was a lawyer who gave his life for the vision of an American West which would be ruled by reason and due process rather than through mobs driven be racial prejudice. Walter Noble Burns wanted to plant a flag on the trail, because he wanted us to remember that when Rossell G. O’Brien stood up for the Star-Spangled Banner in 1893, he was saluting Alexander McSween, as well as all of the others who had suffered and even died for the same vision.

The Star Spangled Banner did not actually become the National Anthem until 1931, although a 1916 presidential order by Woodrow Wilson paved the way.

¹Like all the noted killers of the West, Billy the Kid was of the blond
type. Wild Bill Hickok, Ben Thompson, King Fisher, Henry Plummer,
Clay Allison, Wyatt Earp, Doc Holliday, Frank and Jesse James, the
Youngers, the Daltons – the list of others is long – were all
blond. There was not a pair of brown eyes among them. – p. 60, The
Saga of Billy The Kid. 1925, University of New Mexico Press Edition, 1999. Albuquerque.

The Corner of Beastie & Harlot

The Corner of Beastie & Harlot

Mar. 25, 1994

Renata and I had agreed to meet at the Drugstore Café, on the corner of Beastie and Harlot. Only thing was, the photos all around were from another “Drogstore Café” that had once existed on the corner of Haight and Masonic in Old San Francisco, in the Year of Our Lord 1967. It had been in this café that the hippie had died, after the ethic of the grimmer sorcery had been imported in the saddlebags of the motorcycle banditoes.

      All through the Ramadan fast, I had been trying to forget that woman. It wasn’t that my sympathy for her had died – much to the contrary. I understood too well, the danger that Renata faced if she were to be seen with me. It was much too obvious to me, that if her jealous persecutor was capable of arranging the accident in which she had broken her leg, the situation was lethal.

      I would have expected this sort of behavior from, say, a Wahabbi with fanatical notions concerning marital propriety. At least, it would be understandable. I am scandalized to see a secularized Vespuccian acting this way.

      I tried to let go of her by seking out affairs with other women, but these efforts were not completely successful. I felt far too much sympathy – and sympathy opened the gates of desire.

      Our legs touched under the table, and I knew that the time would soon come when she would beg me to appreciate the terrible pain that still crawled beneath the long scar on her thigh. A tremor communicated itself between her thigh and mine. I grasped in that moment the relativity of incarnation. We love because, being both poetic fictions fashioned by the same Creator, there is enough similarity in our makeup that we can identify with each other’s experiences, as though they were our own.

Virtual Memories

If our bodies are relative, time must be relative also. When we travel back before the time at which our identities became sufficiently solid that we began to pretend that we were adults with serious work to do, the collective memory we access through literary records, examination of artifacts, and anthropological intuition, becomes a cultural resource filled with possible past incarnations.

      Because it really is part of our history, Renata and I can feel that we were there, in Old San Francisco, even though I was still a screaming infant and Renata had not yet been born. The disappointed aspirations of those times still seek to expand their consciousness by entering into our own lives, as though they were our own personal memories. We have met people who are now old, but who were once part of the Be-ins at Golden Gate Park, when they were young.

      As Renata and I understand, we could have walked among them. We can feel certain memories, almost as if they were a part of our own skins. We walk beyond Masonic Street, climb up the hill of Buena Vista Park, and crouch among the boulders to meditate.

       We, who had been trying to protest the complacency with which the nation was embracing a war, discovered that we did not need to go to Viet Nam to find violence. We concealed ourselves behind the foliage, as Violence rode down Haight Street on a Harley Hog, seeking for fresh innocence to deflower.

      The Be-in was supposed to be about peace and love. We walked into Golden Gate Park, and wondered why Timothy Leary had nothing more to say than “Tune in, Turn On, Drop Out.” Why was he afraid to admonish us that the nation had become an empire, and the empire was falling? Why was everyone so terrified that speaking words of truth might put people on a bum trip?

      The Greatful Dead began playing, and Janice began singing in her Southern Comfort dialect of Motown. Did anyone care that the blues were her way of crying about the domestic violence in which we all found ourselves immersed?

     Everywhere, blood from the railroad tracks was crawling up into into the cultural atmosphere. Civic leaders imagined the world could keep rolling down El Camino Imperiale, so long as the protestors could be kept on survival rations in vacant tax shelters that were waiting for the hour when they could become hot items on the San Francisco real estate market.

      Even the Hell’s Angels had their role. They were more subtle than the American Legionaires of the past, who simply shot and killed the labor organzers. The New Legionaires simply appropriated all the local color, so long as it was not Black. They also would grow their hair long and wear the love-beads – but their role was to lead us all back to worship of the Jealous God.

Om Namon Shivaya

We felt the Year Zero approaching, and we began to study yoga and meditation, in order to prepare ourselves for the Catastrophe that we could feel approaching. We begged the Hindu Trimurti to give us the power of Shiva, who had been able to save the world from destruction by holding all the poison in his throat.

      Most of the world laughed at our antics, our communes, our experiments in consciousness, and our rejection of most of the accepted social institutions, including monogamy and marriage. Even as the spiritual francscians shared their little “dubies,” they were hoping and praying that if they could starve their egoes and lay low, the crest of the Catastrophe would roll over them like a breaking wave.

      Aside from this very small minority living in Haight-Ashbury and similar cultural ghettoes, almost everyone was hanging ten, getting high on the good wages that could be made if only one would turn up at factories like Boeing or Grunman to support the war effort. For those who wanted to get higher there were stocks and bonds, and especially, real estate.

      In 1967 the leaders of the world were making moves and planning strategies that would bring about the necessity for another Genocide Tribunal – but really, only a few people cared.

      It is a world that is gone now, never to come back again. The realities of that world now represent a quantum level which has been filled – it’s gone now because in that world, no more open possibilities are left. It’s a world that cannot be brought back, because after the events of the long Year Zero, it will no longer be possible to redeem the world merely by reforming the politics of the United States.

a=a

The Song of the Lord of the Gallows

The Song of the Lord of the Gallows

Must love be as fragile as those anemones which drank the blood of Adonis when he was castrated and slain?

     Is love just a hallucination perceived by the fainting soul?

     Are we no more than shadowgraphs of the earth’s secret fears? Should we be ashamed of the pain that stiffens our necks, as we watch the Shadow growing ever bolder in his domination, down there on the ground?

      What shall the next century’s domestic violence professionals have to say, concerning the persecutions which have been committed in the name of morality? If we cannot learn to love without crushing, what can be the object of any moral code?

      As I hang from the gibbet, my Moral Majority coat gets ragged. The crows are pecking at it in order to get to the breadcrumbs which were in the pockets all along, even when I was eating my 700 Club Passover meal. But why am I hanging from the gibbet? Do you really believe that when I broke through that wall it was really to get rid of the breadcrumbs?

      Mary Magdalene has gotten the better of me. She’s made me see, when I condemned her style of loving, I left the rose on the vine and filled my pockets with what were only the thorns. I look down from the gibbet and see a fox, who waits for the rotting gallows rope to break.

      “I am the one who got you dishonorably discharged from the Salvation Army,” laughs the pretty little red fox. “Don’t you realize why I had to prosecute you, on the grounds of “Giving Information to the Enemy?”

The Hearth of Love's Fiery Furnace

When I was bitten by the fox whose heart was a butterfly, I was changed to a bull, who ran through the fields without reason. I had already been driven to madness by fear of the guillotine, when I encountered your picadores. Maddened by the arrows in my shoulders, I continued to pursue you. When you stepped away, and then drove the moment of truth into my heart, my desire was only inflamed.

♱♱I sought to gore the Lady, but the sword was already embedded in my heart. There is only one enchantment in nature that can reduce a man to being such a fool.♱♱It may have been my blood which was shed when Adonis was castrated and slain – but love may not be as fragile as those anemones which grew upon the hill of sacrifice. It is not love which is fragile, but we.

♱♱We still have not understood, it has been our cruelty to each other which has brought on the Last Judgement. We are only spared the pain of the fire, because love has seduced us to believe this burning ground is Paradise.

♱♱And so we shall look down upon the Reality Theatre, where Beast and Harlot burn each other at the stake. If only they could manage to forgive each other, the world might continue until another day.

While the world burns in the Last Judgement it deserves, we temper each other’s souls on the hearth of Love’s fiery furnace. We, who were more proud than any in the face of our Creator, are the only ones who know the dark secret for which we must expiate.

♱♱And so, in order to expiate for the pride which causes us to question our Creator, we are condemned to live.