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Cycles of Nonviolence

Dreaming of Birds

O'r Camp Bike-Ray,
as the caravan left (t'was May)
there appeared a soaring
kettle of accipitridae;
3 juvenile golden eagles on
great white-splashed wing,
with two black shouldered kites,
looking like giant seagulls.
Convivial species co-migrating
and exploring; wizened elders
showing punk eagles the world.
So we all floated north
with the season, endless
adventure everywhere;
nine nomad cyclists out of Austin-
sailing with butterflies,
before a perfumed kite breeze,
surfing budding waves of spring,
foraging ramps (wild garlic),
dandelion, prickly lettuce,
plantain, chick weed, cleavers,
shamrocks, mustard greens,
and the last pecans of winter; a
vast salad landscape, a geo buffet.
Gypsy gardening first at Rhizome,
Oasis, and Camp Bike-Ray,
then Garden of the Ancients, &
finally, four days out, gardening the
Crawford Peace House itself.

The verse ran out and got copied into Cry of the Ballbearian, the notes begin-

We were Thistle, Doug, Emily, Kim (photos by kimika), Guy, Ed, Heather, (young) Dave, et moi, ol’ dave. Also riding off and on- Quintin, Margarita, and Scotty. Thanks to Dick, of Veterans for Peace, for logistical and moral support.

El ChupaDemocrat en Crawford

March 20, ‘04 was Global Action Day, folks coming in to the "Western Whitehouse" from all over Texas, plus Ralph Nader, arch-terrorist of Democrats. As default Nadiristas, we dreamed of what El Uncommandante could do for us: He could play in our mutant puppet circus- we would make a big hoop and have him jump thru it, pass him a nickel and dime literally under the table, make him kiss an ugly puppet baby, whatever.

Unsafe at Low Speed

Ralph emerged from "quiet time" clutching a scrawled speech on crumpled sheets. It was past time to go to the town park. The alpha handler asked directions. Jim sez “Take a left then a right and you’re there.”, but what kind of left? Far left? Centrist left? New right? They were lost. “Follow me!” sez i. and they rolled up the 6’4” candidate, restuffed him into the humble folk Taurus and fell in behind my bottom-secret streamlined x-continental puppet bike. Oh, the temptation- to lay her down and get run over by Nadir and be immortal, but such an easy fate is forbidden a mutant superguia.

Cookies for Counter-protesters

Some thousand strong the anti-war folks far outnumbered the few dozen counter protesters. My brother, Quintin, and I hung out with them out of cultural affinity and we found common ground in believing in peace, only disagreeing on the time frame, now v. who-knows-when. They were shy about entering the Peace House for lunch. Next time I’ll bring out a tray of cookies. Another sure way to confound would be to say “Please tell me what you think,” listen attentively, thank them, make no rebuttal, and walk away.

The Power Fringe

This is Texas, whence sprang the great “radical nomad”, sociologist C. Wright Mills, author of such classics as The Power Elite. Crawford Peace House is a social centrifuge, remoteness and power gravity sorting out some of the heaviest and lightest characters in the grand Texas asylum. The following account describes some singular characters who formed an ad hoc social network, a tiny temp ecosystem of attention, at the Global Day of Action.

Ground Control to Capt. May

One such native specimen is Capt. May, a chipped superman of J. London or Kesey mold. Of ominous physicality, his manic mind boils furiously with gov/mil conspiracy theories and martial-artistic ultra-violent fantasy. Picture Capt. in his Ghost Troop uniform; cowboy hat and medal studded cavalry jacket with the sleeves torn off. I'd heard of this dude and had been nursing questions- Did he still believe a sniper assassination order was on him? Ain’t the violence fetish kinda passé? Does he believe evil conspirators are so demonically competent that the world is fooled? Posing these before an adoring circle of his fans he replied that I was only trying to show how smart I was. Yes, but the questions remain.

I told a grizzled fellow mutant superguia that this was what I warned nomad newbies about, the sort of rural monsters one might find drunk and armed on a remote Texas road, that I could fend off a few of them, but after that could not guarantee the safety of the newbies. Then, to save themselves, they might have to buy beer. The veteran nomad cracked a smile, in other cultures equivalent to soiling oneself in laughter.

There is brutalized nobility to the Capt., his formation a mirror of Texas’s falsified mythology and uneven education system. Deeply invested in militarism, he is contemptuous of the pacifistic vanguard of the Peace House and attracted to them. Capt., I salute you, stay cooler.

Scared of everything- Austin bred Rush Limbaugh and now presents a lefty clone, Alex Jones, who thrashed around the peace house like a beached whale, baying into a cellphone over a burble of scheduling. He spoke after Nader, quarantined. Capt. May riffed with him from the audience so resonantly that Edo thought him a “plant”. I listened to Alex over the web and heard what his Austin critics claim, narcissistic paranoia brushed with truth. Austin’s best home-grown media commentator remains Jim Hightower.

Alex and the Capt. obsess on personal and affinity fears. Thus Capt. favors a “Ghost Troop” over noncombatants, and Jones seems personally threatened by everything, air, water, govt., etc.. They bleed, but not for the truly misfortunate. Believing that history is under the control of evil conspirators, they neglect envisioning a coherent future.

How nice that humanity is more than any of us, for we evolved as communities of complimentary abilities.

Epilogue- The bike caravan split up in three directions. i headed North to visit folks.

Bonus Notes-

Rap War- Hesiod v. Homer

A fine story of young Hesiod challenging elder Homer in a rap contest emerges from fragmentary sources. The competition format has Hesiod laying down lines for Homer to finish as couplets.

Again and again Hesiod fires and Homer back-flips to safety with astounding invention. The encounter, if it ever happened, was not steno graphed, rather the brilliant verses piled up by later writers, much like the natural selection of superhuman wit, polished by many hands as they circulate in email listservs.

So Homer wins by public acclaim, but the king over-rules and grants Hesiod victory, on pretext that his verse expresses pacific themes, while Homer’s poetry glorifies war. The king commits authoritarian hypocrisy, as a true reading of Homer is of tragic reality.

The oracles and gods get the last word; Hip superstar Hesiod is fooled by ambiguous prophecy and wanders to his death, killed by angry brothers of a romanced sister (the brothers flee to sea to be sunk by a thunderbolt, Hesiod’s body brought to shore by dolphins). By contrast, old school Homer lives on, ultimately to be properly alerted to his own death moment and is even able to compose his epitaph, just in time.

Bardic verse wars still thrive in modern hip-hop, our latter day griots flourishing in timeless tradition stretching far back into the paleolithic.

We are torn from nature. The world is a broken paradise. We need-

Living Water Systems

Rain falls on a roof and washes it. A leaf screen over the gutter keeps big objects out of the gutter. A balance device (permaculture transistor) switches the initial flush to higher quality collection barrel

Kinds of water at Biosquat; 1)potable, 2)cook/wash, 3)garden/cob. Rain water is the basic resource for all uses. Simple sand filters are cheap and effective for general purification provided they are maintained by systematic cleaning, back flushing and/or drying protocols. Carbon filters provide the next step in purity, but also must be well maintained to avoid bacteria colonization. Membranes and or (solar)pasteurization provide the high biohazard safety.

Compostics creates a collective human body, a group gut, which is itself fused into nature. Mulch flushing

Its a continuous flow process, a slow roving puppetecture privy trailing garden and forest in its wake.

Chernobyl went online at Camp Bike-Ray in early 2001. In its first year it roamed 2 meters forward while growing a 5 meter tail. Spring 2002 marked the first garden planting and a second unit came online. Three years later some twenty person-years of use experience have proven and refined the concepts.

Roof rain collection supplies wash water. The resulting grey water is used as needed to make the accumulated thermopile “go critical”, to fully activate the alchemic bacteria

Urine is collected apart from solids and runs in a hose back to the end of the main bioreactor. The sitting female urinal is in the toilet seat top. A standing male urinal is off to the side. made from a large plastic detergent bottle scavenged from a laundromat.

The containment vessel is floored with clay pan and walled in pallets and spoked bike rims wired together. It has a plastic sheet liner on all sides and a tall chimney vent.

Containment access is via the “black hole” under toilet seat and a rear flap within movable pest barriers. Pest barriers of pallets, plastic and metal mesh, brush, and thick mulches all find useful places in the system.

The secret to this technology is plenty of mulch. 2 parts “coolant” (rotted leaves) to one of “fuel rods” (poopie) works great.

From from to rear- steps/ramp, deck, seat, ground-zero, main bioreactor, aging bioreactor, hot bed, cool bed, garden, forest,

Future directions include- closed cycle (mulching with its own soil), venturi vented seat, all natural (made of 100% logs, brush, and leaves, without compromising performance), thermopile cold frame, nomadic versions, attached to house by articulated tunnel or scanning seat.

Overt superiority inferiorizes, brutalizing innocence or poking complacency.

a little anagram- !RAW FOOD (not) DOOF WAR!

Sandbox-

Beyond physics embracing, first chemistry, then biology, becoming in recent years, biophysics, there lies a physics of poetic consciousness, a “final science frontier”, for evolving spirit shall ultimately sweeten the physical multiverse suggested by the simply profound classic two slit/single photon interference experiment. The implications are grandly explanatory. If every possible universe taken together expresses every ethical outcome, every creative potential, then all pre-existing theories can be powerfully rethought. Quantum logic becomes intuitive. Collective imagination across parallel universes, a historic threshold. Nonuniform structure of the multiverse, dendritic according to quantum probabilities. Information theory & meme theory as the bridge from thermodynamics to poetics

Evolution and art merge. Rethink everything always, never forget. Nature as endless love. Wish what is, not lost. The set of all good ideas is the godhead and usefull. Design for joy, no less.

Amoeba Think

Conciousness is "slippery" because brains consist of seething goo. Brain cells are amoeboid; they migrate, branch, and extend themselves dynamically. When our amoebal constellations are manipulated verbally or by other sensory channels, they react strongly. They thrive or die according to personal fortunes in the global mass. Watch a story listener's writhing face to read the twitching of this inner can-of-worms. Brains are weird, not robot like. Mental brutality is not quite guns and bombs, but there is a violence to the amoebas under attack, especially children or subcultures. Amoeba also struggle in single brains, civil war of the soul, depression the battle, hopefully to renew the amoeboid collective.

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