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| "When Crazy Horse was a young man, he realized that the world we see around us with our waking eye is only a pale shadow of the real world, and the only way to pierce that veil is through dreams.
"So Crazy Horse began dreaming himself into the real world before going into battle, and that made him unbeatable. Do you understand what I'm telling you?"
--Gina Bad Horse, in Issue 12 of the graphic novel Scalped.
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| Story Highlights
• In Dade County, Florida sex offenders couldn't live within 2,500 feet of places children might gather.
• In an urban area like Miami, this left few options for housing the inmates who were released, causing squatter towns to rise up in the few remote areas that met the 2,500 foot guideline.
• A handful of sex offenders living under the Julia Tuttle Causeway grew to a 3,000 plus member community when the combined stresses of competition for energy, housing, transportation, food, access to natural areas and health & safety concerns-- exacerbated by sea-level rise-- caused most offenders to be ejected from their housing and forced to live in squatter towns.
• Genetically modified silkworms can grow up to nine feet long.
It was like trying to bail a slowly sinking ship.
There were attempts to make Miami the "carbon-trading hub" for the Americas. There was a long term CO₂ reduction plan. They withdrew public investment from vulnerable coastal areas, relocated inundated communities and halted coastal development. They tried to protect or reinforce roads and bridges, relocated pipelines to safer ground, and attempted to halt erosion by pumping in additional fill from offshore. When they exhausted the available quantities of high-quality fill they began to construct immense systems of coastal armor to hold back the sea. When this became an unsupportable expense they convinced the people of Dade County to accept a strategic retreat and left many major roads, rail lines, coastal wetlands and other coastal features submerged, inaccessible and ungoverned.
Miami was the "epicenter of sea-level rise" for the financial centers of our nation. Miami served as the first example of how a banking infrastructure would find itself hounded by climate change until it had to pick up its skirts and wade to higher ground.
Tourism and agriculture dropped off, taking the wind out of the local economy, and the South American drug cartels moved in to occupy the vacuum created by the city's retreat inland.
Seminole gaming began to operate on floating palaces, modeled on old paddleboat casinos like the Mississippi Queen or the St. Charles “Casino of the World”, using the lack of oversight or enforcement to operate Las Vegas-style slot machines and banked card games without paying the State a dime.
Different classes of criminals and mercenaries were attracted by the "wild west" attitude and abundance of poorly policed drugs and money, which swelled the ranks of people frequenting the flooded remnants of coastal Southern Florida. Like the wild west, it was mostly men in search of money and adventure.
But there was one group of people left out of most of these plans.
Registered sex offenders.
The problem of housing sex offenders away from the general population had been an issue since early in the century. Legislators found it hard to relax the law requiring a registered sex offender to live 2,500 feet away from places that children might congregate (including every bus stop in Dade County) and with the growing pressures on existing housing they actually faced increasing pressure to exclude sex offenders from being housed in Dade County at all.
In time, most of the sex offenders with apartments were kicked out on the streets (on various technicalities) and the prejudice against sex offenders grew.
This prejudice was no different, if anything stronger, among the lawless men of the open waters of the new submerged Miami.
It had always been difficult for a registered sex offender to get a job, but with harder economic times their prospects became even worse.
They fished and hunted and shared their food. As more of the city was abandoned they looted and scavenged and collected materials to improve their dwellings.
Their settlements located near the causeways had a certain legitimacy, but anywhere else they were free game for joy riders on their motorboats or young renegades taking pot shots at bums, so they stayed in their established communities and for the most part were left alone.
There was little prospect for improvement. The only good thing was that no one came out to check on them or their ankle monitors so there was very little chance of anyone violating parole. No one came to evacuate them or to provide them with medical services or to offer them any sort of employment or other means of sustenance.
They were just left behind.
But one day all three-thousand or so sex offenders got a job.
What happened was that representatives from a clandestine lab came and offered them a real place to live, a real income, a new identity, places to shop and gamble and freedom from U.S. laws. They offered them a new life.
At first there was resistance, but the scientists started slow, handing out cash for blood samples, giving immunizations, providing food and medication with no strings attached, swabbing for genetic material, and treating them like human beings. They restored electricity and clean water to their shantytown. They brought clothing and other comforts. They built relationships.
So eventually some men decided they wanted to go somewhere to spend their money. They came back happy and excited. Other men worked up the courage to clean up and go out to gamble, see comedy shows, dance and drink and bring back their stories. The excitement grew and in time the whole community had decided to go. They picked up and moved to the scientist's artificial island, and then everything changed.
Each man was confined to a cell and subjected to a regimen of tests and experimental procedures.
They were repeatedly injected with transgenic material from herons and certain lizard species and then studied to see how their brains and cells would react.
Then the most promising candidates were transferred in a sedated state into a transgenic animal bioreactor, constructed out of a nine-foot long genetically modified silkworm (or megaworm) designed to be a containment vessel for the transformation from human to chimera.
The silkworm is triggered to go into its chrysalis state with the human subject inside of it. The human subject is connected into a life-support system and is maintained in suspended animation until the process is complete.
The megaworm has been altered to produce all the human and animal proteins necessary for the experiment-- for the dissolution and reconstruction of the human body. During this process the brain and central organs are left alone.
Their first successful chimerans were something to behold-- taller than before, with long heron-like legs armored in scales, sometimes with alterations to their eye-color, occasionally with some vestigial plumage, but most notably with changes to their genitalia.
Because almost all of their available subjects were male, and because they wanted to produce a new sub-species capable of procreation, they opted for hermaphroditism.
They conducted painstaking research on the Teiidae and Gymnophthalmidae (spectacled lizards or microteiids) of South America in order to produce in their new chimerans a quasi-parthenogenic mode of reproduction, wherein they would normally exchange sperm, thus avoiding the doubling and tripling of the number of chromosomes in the offspring, but could default back to parthenogenesis if the male sexual organs failed.
So each chimeran possessed a cloaca and a working uterus, but they were also equipped with a barbed penis of the bird variety.
Their legs bent backwards like a bird's and their torso leaned forward slightly.
They were perfectly adapted to living in the flooded waters of Florida's southern shoreline.
They were the apex of genetic science.
They were art.
Of course, there were many notable failures of their experiments, but a successful Heron-legged or Ardeidaean race was indeed formed, and they were able to reproduce.
They were set to work salvaging the flooded remains of society.
They were kept on the periphery, marginalized, but largely left alone.
And a few of them suffered from fitful dreams of their former life, as they slept, like human flamingos, on one leg above the shallows of their new settlement, set up like a rookery above their flooded homeland which stretched from the former Everglades up to Okeechobee.
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| "Remaining fully expressive is the noble enterprise." -Vivian Gornick, Approaching Eye Level
While walking in the mid-morning sunlight yesterday, I was not only aware of the warmth of the sun, the chill of the wind and the muted bustle of human and animal life around me, but I was also aware of my bodily response to things.
I was pushing the stroller up a hill near my house, with my son in it, on the way to walk a friend's dog and I realized that everything that I had done up until that moment was an attempt to make my body ready for the day.
From the moment I woke up, and in various ways throughout my waking life, I manipulate my body's responsiveness and try to create in myself a preparedness for the things that come my way.
Even in that very moment, as I pointed things out to my son like hummingbirds and squirrels, flowers and airplanes, lawn mowers and people to wave to, I was adjusting my bodily awareness to the demands of the day, calibrating myself to my reality, gravitating toward a state where I am relaxed and responsive.
There are things that I believe in, things that I regard as real, but they masquerade as ritual and habit. Their underlying purpose is not self-evident.
I did several things earlier that day, as I prepared myself to leave the house on our little mission.
I believe in coffee as a way to transition myself from a self-insulated dream-state into waking life. With some caffeine in my veins I am ready to interface with the people. Without it, even with the best of intentions I find myself bemused by the requirement to interact at all.
Without coffee, people simply do not seem necessary (when I say this, I do not-- of course-- include my children)-- with coffee, I find myself more easily amused.
This is coffee defined purely at the level of bodily responsiveness and personal readyness. Often, to me, this is all there is in a cuppa'Joe. However, the occasional strong cup at Peet's does give me an added jolt and reminds me of the hedonistic pleasures of the drink.
I also took a shower. A shower has obvious benefits, but for me it seems most precisely to serve the purpose of removing a layer of grime that dulls my nerves to sensation. If I am clean I am aware. If I am clean, my nerve endings are open to what is around me. I am ready to feel.
Like the Buddhists and their removal of "ignorance grass" (hair), I remove a layer of unawareness.
I also shaved my face and this habit struck me in an odd way this morning-- I was suddenly aware of how I was preparing myself for the perceptions of others. I was suddenly aware of how I carry the awareness of their awareness, whether real or imagined, in my muscle memory and body posture.
Like a man who realizes his fly is down, I can carry an extra measure of tension when I feel too grungy or unkempt. I live perpetually in the borderlands of self-care, paring shaving and haircuts down to their bare minimum and opting for radical, long-term solutions out of laziness.
Today, I wanted to impose a certain, small amount of order on my facial hair. Why? So I could promptly forget about it.
So the thought would cease to arise.
I realized how much of my dress and self-care was designed merely to avert any undue judgment or attention. I wanted to be moderately neat so as to not appear exceptional in any way. I wanted to fall within the normal range. I wanted to meet, but not exceed, expectations.
I do not feel that it is possible for others to perceive the "real me"-- certainly not from clothes or style-- and so my dress and self-care have taken on a different purpose. They remove from me, as much as possible, the need to be aware of someone else's perceptions. They render me unremarkable.
So in those ways I had prepared myself to meet the day, with as few barriers as possible.
And in that precise moment, as I was pushing the stroller up the hill, while I was realizing the beauty of the day, as I was settling into an enjoyment of our walk, I also began the internal process of assessing different small tensions in my body and going through the mental tricks that I use to set myself at ease.
With an ache in my thigh I reminded myself that if I cultivated a mild meditative state, then things in my body tended to "find their own way back." This is something I realized when I first experienced Transcendental Meditation. Rather than adjusting my gait or expending effort to stretch and tune myself, I relax from within. The pains and discomforts just tend to unravel and wander away.
While modeling wonder and curiosity and interest and friendliness to my son I became aware of my own insecurities in my self-image as a man. There is an odd balancing act entailed in being sociable and talkative and engaged with my son while pushing a stroller up the hill in a manly fashion. I became quickly aware that I needed to discard the pressures of these imagined interpretations and become grounded in my own experience.
I needed to discard an external locus of awareness and become centered in my own internal awareness.
This was not to shut out the world, but rather to become prepared for the world.
In grounding myself and letting my tensions ebb into the earth I also become less of an actor in the world and more a part of the World.
If my mind and posture were not clouded with external, imagined pressures, then I would be ready for what reality brought me. I would be more responsive to people and things and my preparedness would allow for more creative possibilities in how I felt and interpreted my experiences and more accuracy and openness in my perceptions and my way of relating with the world.
It struck me that the entirety of things-- how I experience people and events, the world as I process and relate to it, my memory of things after they have passed-- exists in a specific form of perception, the interface between my body and reality.
My mind cannot get to reality but through my body. My mind and my body are one and the same. My reality is fully subjective, and I live in it.
The ideal way of occupying this subjective reality is to cultivate what I like to call "preparedness."
The less of ourselves and the less societal conditioning that we carry into each situation, the greater our preparedness.
The greater our preparedness the more we open ourselves to kinship, connection, the subtleties of wonder and the chance confluence of circumstance.
The more prepared and open we are, the more we choose to be engaged with our reality (subjective as it may be) and to retain our experiences rather than being insulated from them.
The more engaged we are, the more we have examined our own thoughts and grounded ourselves in our own bodily experience of reality.
We choose to be aware. We choose to become ready.
Vivian Gornick also says, in her book Approaching Eye Level, that "power over one's own life comes only through the steady command of one's own thought" (a Buddhist sentiment if I ever heard one, but she claims it as a feminist insight).
She also mentions the patterns of being that we occupy out of convenience.
We live in ways that we do not agree with.
We can blame it on circumstance and history, but there is really more to it.
She says, "But I don't prefer it. It is simply what I do. It is what everyone does: the habitual response of the world I find myself in, that which does not require an active will" (Approaching Eye Level).
Preparedness requires an active will.
We use our awareness and our discernment to become ready for the world.
This awareness arises from a groundedness in our own experience of being.
We become fully responsive and in doing so, we may become fully expressive of who we really are-- carrying in our bodies only the will to engage the fullness of ourseleves with the fullness of our lived experience.
"It remains one of life's great mysteries-- in politics as well as in love-- readiness: that moment when the elements are sufficiently fused to galvanize inner change. If you are one to respond to the moment you can never really explain it, you can only describe what it felt like." --Vivian Gornick, Approaching Eye Level.
Maybe we can enter into that mystery every day.
Who knows what might arise from such a ready awareness?
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| In our current society relationships are an accessory, not a necessity.
They are an accoutrement, a sign of success, an aspirational social and financial relationship, more about self-image than self-preservation.
The continuity of the species is in the hands of the poor of the world. The poor continue to have children, even though the added expenses of raising a child tends to lock them more firmly in poverty.
Most of the middle class must struggle with two incomes to make ends meet, if they choose to have children. If their relationship survives and they achieve financial stability it will be at a later age than before (or it will be in a later relationship).
The bonuses of delaying or avoiding parenthood grow as career stability becomes more elusive while the cost of living goes up. Meanwhile the societal focus on consumption does not flag.
Relationships become a purchase, an investment, a lease on normalcy and respectability. The currency of the transaction is time and emotion and commitment to a shared delusion.
There are different ways to maintain the illusion, but all the financial efforts we make and relationship tips we follow are designed to maintain the delusory reality that fulfills our fantastical self-image.
But, of course, first we must find our mate with whom to share this delusion.
With online matchmaking relationships become closer and closer to being a commodity on the market place, with an initial financial investment in an assurance that one's time and emotional commitment will not come to naught.
Our relationships become the biggest of big-ticket items, paid for with the most intimate moments of our lives.
When we squander ourselves on relationships without shared goals we squander our souls.
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| I haven't achieved any finished portrait of Elena, at the age of 26, but here is a taste of what I have so far.
This is all computer-generated tomfoolery (I'm not really good at it yet) and a real portrait would probably require either some sculpting or 3d-modeling (or both), but I haven't reached that level of insanity yet.
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