A 3D 1:48,000 scale model of the Cybercabin Land, Built of 1/8" foam core board and rubber cement, April 2003 November 2003 Cabin Diary |
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11 November 2003 -- The many, and the one
It is now fully "into" the season, that one that is euphemistically called "the holidays", by those who cater to all denominations of celebration. The leaves are just about through, with the deciduous oak, maple, aspen and others I've not taken time to call out by their more exotic species. There are plenty of pine and spruce intermixed along the folds of the upper hollow, of course, and this must have been the genesis of 'rounding the Solstice, back in those dark days spent above 45 degrees of latitude. Walking about today, there was the solid, crunchy and dry upholstery, deep and overflowing in places where wind had driven it. I am surprised it hasn't snowed by now, at this altitude of 3765 feet. It is late afternoon, with the sun out of the way, and I wander in to the shadowy world of the Hunter's Moon. Yes, I probably have the date off; I should go read The Atlantic more often. Oh, but the land is so plentiful, the balm to the semi-crowded on their suburban plots, back in real life. The leaves are a problem there, and of some magnitude, for property values depend on it. I suppose I could launch into one of those apologetic rhapsodies of my "belonging to the earth", in a place like this, but I just spend my time, away from the others, who would consume me into the world as Paul reviles it in Scripture. "But wait a minute", I tell myself, as I finally reach the porch and head in to light the fires and the lamps, "you cannot dismiss this great and upwards thrust." What is man, anyway, but man? We see into the higher rooms, as if someone will open the door, by dint of our supreme sentience. What great merit ever ordained such a thing? "That's a whole lot of ill-formed hooey!", I remind myself finally, as I come in to the rather dark and decidedly cold living room. We must have a fire, or rather, I must have it.
I'm sure to be missing out on the great plan going on, down there in the melting pot. They would endeavor to form us into the "one", as in E Pluribus Unum. But are "we", that pronoun of decided plurality, really capable of that? I see instead how divisions cannot be bridged; how the Kingdom is thwarted, in its coming. This pagan farce that they hold in the malls and department stores becomes offensive, for its metric is not unity, but exceptionality. I get some kindling and tinder, then load up the logs from the handily-split pile I hauled earlier to the woodshed from the fellow down on Route 735. Really, really nice seasoned oak this wood is, the envy of any hearth-tender. I huddle for awhile in my full field dress before this flame, the one that singles me out as the human; the master of fires, the one who commissions and fulfills. "Be quiet," I order myself. "You have your place and your duty, and that's your only hope of getting out of this mess alive". We are no longer condemned by original sin; no, the second Adam has put us back. Yes, that's the old time religion. Where has it gone, now that we have a "holiday" instead? It is truly getting dark outside now; I cannot distinguish the sky from much more than the total pitch black that appears when the stars come out. Dark it is, and I huddle, as would a Saxon or a Frank, while recounting the day's exploits for his own edification. But then, for the hunter and the gatherer, "this land" really "is your land; this land is my land, from the Harz Woods forest, to the Gallic Saarland." That's goofy, truly goofy, to make up a song about Germany though einheit is one of the crowning glories of the neo-Europa, whose population is actually in decline.
"We" could never go back, of course, to the idyllic and the sincere. "We" will always need to submit in the coin of the realm, to the great Capitalist Caesar (or is that Kaiser?) that holds sway over his gangling empire. Is not his imprimatur upon that coin? Well, chuck it, then in his general direction, for he wields not the sword for nothing. I just don't know how people come to discern their levy in the other direction; that which is rendered to God. It looks difficult, like flying a F/A 18 Hornet by the seat of one's pants. Supposedly instilled in the upward-oriented is the conviction of right discernment, wherein the Kingdom is glorified as the taxes are paid. The hooks are firmly emplaced, only we're now in a Newtonian ideal special state case, with absence of gravitation. A body a rest tends to stay at rest, and holiness, when reconciled with the exchequer, will be accorded its place. There is, then, the "eigen-state" that a person ideally occupies, when reduced to matrix algebra. That is the matrix, much as I hate to quote that obvious Hollywood thought-experiment. The matrix will always fail, but it does have enough rows and columns to float the higher-order "stuff" along. Built upon the elemental, the thing is not a thing any more / It has a soul, you can't ignore. It is so dark in here, yet I have the fire. It is too rarely, that I ride the meditative mighty high, on the simple transaction of worldly fire. There we see expression in the leeway; those processes that operate despite being confounded by explainants who declare that order cannot be at such a scale. The rebels are against the empire, and that's the way it has to be. Above and below is the duality. Evil becomes immediately evident to the discerning wanderer, who is straight in his bearings and has accounted for declination.
So then, I am sent, to the state of least constraint and minimization of stressor deviation, in some Gaussian excursion. To live with the understanding that the flesh shall fail, as do the tree-fragments I have before me now, is difficult, once someone has been shown what is real, outside the linear approximation. Oh, how fine they've built it, now thinking of the psychohistorical modeling of the Asimov Foundation. It is complete, unto itself, only it is finite. They create such a structure, whereby our disbursement is our endorsement, as we buy in to the window to love. It is the living reality; the orthogonal transcendant, or whatever pseudo-philosophical framework you'd care to use. Yes, and it is here, and it has determination precisely coordinated to exploit the weaknesses in the worldly model. It is the grass, that grows between the homeowner's ardent attempts at keeping a pavement tidy. All about, flows the "stuff" of the upper, and those who see it firsthand do not need to ask as I do. The fire burns along, and I seem somewhat disheveled. I suppose I will survive, and see some amazing stuff, before I am commited to the greatest question mark in the whole game. What will I get then, when I pick up a Chance card? Might there actually be a card slipped into that deck that says, "you lose the game, right now. Pay all funds to the Bank and walk away"? When I see the Lord walk about in the temple precints, at times I tremble. There is order, and I'm with you, Herrn E. Gott würfelt nicht. What a predicament.
"Bo"
24 November 2003 -- The quest towards the higher
It is now so incredibly cold, as I huddle near the continual fire, with the wind arguing with the Cabin's stance in its cross-section. I saw some snow flurries the other day; the real dumping has to be coming soon. Usually there'll be good snow on the ground by now, and I'm not sure what's holding it up. I like it, when the external system operates within its chaotic definition, for then the solid structure can be confirmed. I am clad in polypropylene skin, for there are times I need to step out, as with the outhouse. I need a good shot of the cold every so often, and it's about 35 degrees Fahrenheit at the moment. There is an excitement of living on that edge, between what lives and what does not. Looking at the barren trees, punctuated with the hemlock pine and the spruce that carry on, I have the fine sense that a mechanism "knows well" what it's doing, and I am the interventionist who puts his impact where it was never designed to be. The leaves now carry frost, pretty much all the day, and the smoke column drifts about from the fieldstone flue with its sheet-steel cover. Oh, yes, but I am encamped! I am about to "winter" again, as in the fine style of many a mountain man or far-garrisoned soldier. This is the Lewis and Clark life, only minus Clark and Sacagawea. The structure is looking good all around; it was built to last. I look out the window now, and a pretty solid curtain of snow has started. It may be colder than 35 F; I don't know. It is filling in now, on the cold-hardened mud and openings in the crags and dormant shrubs of the clearing. Like it or not, the "winter wonderland" is coming forth, with its condition that I have the means to preserve a warm-blooded mammal who does not know how to hibernate.
Sitting by the fire, the snow falls, and the latest I've heard from meteorological authority tells me it's a major system. They're probably getting rain and slush, down there below 2000 feet in the village and beyond. Altitude is governing the effect, it would seem, with my being so tangibly close to the ranges of peaks and the summits that include the Pass. I just hope the truck will get me out, or I'll have to be here for awhile, splitting off a part of myself that does the best he can with the fuel supply in the woodshed and the comestibles in the pantry. I need to let this creature hunt about in the empty woods, so that he'll fill in the void that is built into every man by city life. All around the world, the folks throng to the city, for it is there that opportunity lies. Only the backward and incapable are supposed to occupy the high ground, and the contact I've established with those settled near the 735 - 753 intersection tells me they think the secondary creature is some sort of "kook". "Yeah," they say, "an outrageous wannabe who thinks he can have it all". Folks who remain nestled in the hills have little tolerance for the "trekking" city boy. But this is what it's all about, after all. This character looks like he's going to get snowed in, and for some time, for his vehicle hasn't the ground clearance of a real tactical transport. Fast approaching is the season that consumed the 101st Airborne, in those highlands of the Ardennes, 59 years ago. It's snowing; just watch it snow. The hills bristle with resistance, but they're such a solace. Men in Bastogne fervently stoked their woodstoves, wherever they were holed up. Oh, but the real situation there was so intense, that it was the ultimate urban encounter, like nothing polite society could offer.
I sigh, as I temporarily invigorate the secondary character, who sits in the woods. He will go back, of course, and do his thing as he dares, but his real place is right here, as the snow comes in. Self-sufficient is he, but not the violent survivalist; no. He treads lightly, for he knows what a gift it is, to be so encamped. I picture again the blessed and solemn place that I, or rather, "he" found, so long ago in the Dream. It is hard to divide one's self against one's self, only "I" continue to do it, for the anchor in the esoteric seems so very "right". I must sit for awhile by this fire, and stoke it well, but also while stepping out into the immense and harsh handhold of "mother nature"; "old man winter". How much do I wish, that all of this could come true, only the city calls me back, to stoke its various fires. Those are the fires that never quench; the engines of industry, reaping useful work at the expense of rejected heat. Good heavens, here comes the psychedelia of thermodynamics, the fine mechanical diversion that it was, 17 years ago. The mechanism is the fundamental and "true" reality; all of this microelectronic and circuit-structure aims to mock it, with its linear components. Yes, as is the very tangible elasticism of the spring; the bended branch that has yet to break, is the invisble-yet-useful charge on the capacitive condenser. Information floats along on its highway, while my analogous alternative carries information of a different kind, so profoundly "different" that it defies the usual metrics of "information".
I'm getting at a search for the "source" now, the reality that operates autonomously and has its own feedback loops. This is the venture into pantheistic contemplation, where all the snow and all the trees and fauna affected can describe the "living" fountainhead. It is so good, to have one's hand on something so superior. I know not where God keeps the snow, only it continues to be given. I guess this really is the search for the "godhead", that projection upon the almighty that sits at the core of every faith. Yes, my evolutionary philogeny cries for it, in some sort of vocational quest that could be found in a work by Teilhard de Chardin. The second self, who is but a facet of the total "self" must be in this place, even if it means hunkering down and camping like a real camper does. Merriweather Lewis had no compunction against living off the land, up in the highlands beyond the Great Falls. At the heights, however, his game became scarce. This is the PBS attempt, courtesy of the Ken Burns editorium, at least. No one really survives, so close to the Summit. It is some sort of drastic "mistake", to find one's self in such a place. The snow has now created a fine white landscape, in those times I venture to the windows to see it. It tells me, "settle in, for the winter is upon us". The folks in town drive their Land Rovers, Hummers and Jeeps, eagerly looking for roads that might roll them into a ditch. Everyone wants the image in their head of the highlands, only my construct is such that I'm forced to live out the real consequences.
"Bo"
Ahead to December 2003
