Awakening in the Dream: Contact with the Divine

 

Little did I know that within a few years, my lucid-dreaming research would plunge me into a world that seems completely supernatural by most people’s standards. I would eventually come into direct contact with angelic, human-looking extraterrestrial beings who helped me completely reenvision science and spirit into a new and greater unified whole. The beings also helped me to identify a huge wealth of new evidence and proof that would help me make the case. I would learn that these people initially reach out to you through dreams, synchronicities, and visionary experiences. They proved over and over again that they could predict the future as easily as if they were reading a book. And they would soon pass along the greatest message of all: namely that we are right on the threshold of a spectacular mass evolutionary event many have called Ascension. I have uncovered far more than enough scientific evidence to make a very compelling case for this, as I have presented in my previous books. For those of us who “do the homework” and prepare ourselves for this fascinating global transformation, our everyday lives will become indistinguishable from a lucid dream. The awesome popularity of superhero films may be another way in which our mass, collective subconscious mind is preparing us for what may be coming — far sooner than we would have ever believed possible. We may well find ourselves awakening within the dream we were once so convinced was reality.

I only know David Wilcock from watching Ancient Aliens — and I do watch Ancient Aliens; all the time — but even so, I didn’t know if I was really interested in reading his latest book, Awakening in the Dream, when I saw it was available on NetGalley. I like Ancient Aliens for what I think of as excellent storytelling, its global sense of adventure (every episode is history, culture, and geography combined), and the fact that it always leaves me thinking, “It’s not like I actually believe the ‘ancient astronaut theory’, but it’s sure cool to think about…” So what would a book by one of the show’s contributors actually have to offer me? Turns out: quite a bit. Wilcock starts with personal stories about his childhood and college years, and mirroring a post I once wrote here myself, his experiences with synchronicities (which I have always found meaningful) and lucid dreaming (which I for some reason shied away from) led him to read many of the same books as I had at about the same age — but whereas my reading eventually spooked me into dropping the metaphysical line of research, Wilcock got to work, developed his gifts, and has made a career out of connecting the dots between disparate sources of scientific and philosophical thought. As for this book: I really liked all of the personal bits, got a bit bored by the Pyramid Timeline/Law of One information, and the overall message — that the world is an illusion made for us to work on karma, and it might be coming to an endpoint — really resonated with me. This book wouldn’t be of interest to everyone, but it was for me. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)

The combination of these two quakes completely and utterly destroyed the China Lake black-ops megabase. But the media never said a word about it. Various insiders suggested that nefarious covert aerosol spraying operations were being run out of the facility and poisoning our skies. On the very next day, July 6, 2019, the notorious Jeffrey Epstein was indicted and arrested. I wrote a huge article about all this on July 7. I do not see the timing of these three major events as an accident. I believe this was the work of an alliance that had formed within the government, military, and intelligence communities around the world. Earthquake weapons were used to take out a mission-critical base for the Deep State, and then Jeffrey Epstein, a criminal who could expose the ugliest secrets of this secret organization, was arrested. This was a major combined attack that could lead up to massive arrests of Deep State / Illuminati / New World Order / Cabal operatives — which my own source has been predicting since at least 1999.

Wilcock is apparently in contact with various insiders and whistleblowers (including those "who have security clearances that in some cases are thirty-five levels of 'need to know' above the president of the United States") who want information about the Deep State and the Secret Space Program to become common knowledge. So, although my mind is not very open to conspiracy theories about chemtrails and the Illuminati, lizard people or 9/11 truthers, they’re in here. On the other hand, I am not against Wilcock’s explanations for crop circles, Bigfoot, and the Loch Ness Monster; maybe I’d just rather think on undiscovered wonders of nature than contemplate mundane human evil (or maybe cryptozoology is simply low stakes woowoo). But when Dave asked me what I was reading, and I tried to explain Wilcock’s ideas about karma being the engine driving our reality, and our ultimate fates, he got pretty excited: this is exactly what he believes to be true and he liked having his intuitive beliefs backed up by someone else’s research (naturally, I didn’t tell Dave that Wilcock’s proof comes from conversations with spectral aliens while in a trance state). Overall, though, this book has a lovely message:

The Ascension teachings are almost absurdly simple. According to the Law of One, if you want to graduate into your new life as an angelic being, all you have to do is Just Be Nice. Dr. Scott Mandelker and I would always joke about this at our conferences. Look at your thoughts about yourself and others. If those thoughts are even slightly over 50 percent oriented toward love, patience, forgiveness, and kindness — what the Law of One calls “service to others” — you are cleared for takeoff. If more than 50 percent of your thoughts and actions are geared toward negative emotions such as manipulation, control, jealousy, anger, rage, and fear, then you have some work to do…but there’s still time to change the road you’re on.

I understand that David Wilcock was one of the main drivers behind the idea that the end of the world as we know it would coincide with the end of the Mayan calendar in 2012, but apparently, when December 21st (coincidentally, my Dave’s birthday; not that there are coincidences) came and went without apocalypse, proof then arose that we had been given a brief reprieve; the end will now come some time between 2029 and 2031, and those who have worked out their karmic debts on this plane will be elevated to the next (where life will be about a hundred times better than here). And while it feels cultish to accept anyone's firm prediction of an impending rapture, what decent-living person wouldn’t root for the end of human suffering? It’s not that I really believe this is going to happen, but it’s sure cool to think about...

Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth

 

If evidence of extraterrestrial life appeared in our solar system, would we notice it? If we were expecting the bang of gravity-defying ships on the horizon, do we risk missing the subtle sounds of other arrivals? What if, for instance, that evidence was inert or defunct technology — the equivalent, perhaps, of a billion-year-old civilization’s trash?

On October 19, 2017, astronomer Robert Weryk at the Haleakala Observatory in Hawaii discovered the first interstellar object ever detected in our solar system — a “wildly anomalous object” that would eventually be named ‘Oumuamua (Hawaiian for “scout”, or more poetically, “a messenger from afar arriving first”) — and although this object was only detected as it was exiting our Earthbound field of vision (racing toward and then beyond the sun), scientists were able to observe ‘Oumuamua for eleven days before it disappeared; gathering data that matched no previously known celestial object. The majority of scientists filed ‘Oumuamua away as a weird comet or asteroid (that behaved like no known comets or asteroids) but Dr. Avi Loeb — the chair of Harvard University’s Department of Astronomy, founding director of Harvard’s Black Hole Initiative, director of the Institute for Theory and Computation within the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, chair of the Breakthrough Starshot Initiative, chair of the Board on Physics and Astronomy of the National Academies, etc., etc. — came up with a competing theory: All of ‘Oumuamua’s strange composition and erratic movement could be accounted for if it were a piece of technology manufactured by some nonhuman intelligent lifeform. This theory, despite explaining the anomaly simply as per Occam’s Razor, met with official resistance and dismissal, and Extraterrestrial:The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth seems to be Loeb’s longform explanation of the facts, how the data fit his theory as proof of extraterrestrial intelligence, and ultimately, why the mainstreaming of this theory matters. Loeb’s writing is clear and easy to understand, certainly persuasive to a lay reader like me, and as his first love was Philosophy, Loeb is able to connect the arrival of this extrastellar object to all the big questions facing us Earthlings. This is everything I love, told engagingly, and I recommend it highly. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms; quotes selected primarily to demonstrate the author’s style, not as an overview of his theory.)

Some of the resistance to the search for extraterrestrial intelligence boils down to conservatism, which many scientists adopt in order to minimize the number of mistakes they make during their careers. This is the path of least resistance, and it works; scientists who preserve their images in this way receive more honors, more awards, and more funding. Sadly, this also increases the force of their echo effect, for the funding establishes even bigger research groups that can parrot the same ideas. This can snowball; echo chambers amplify conservatism of thought, wringing the native curiosity out of young researchers, most of whom feel they must fall in line to secure a job. Unchecked, this trend could turn scientific consensus into a self-fulfilling prophecy.

I don’t actually want to go over what made ‘Oumuamua so anomalous — or how its anomalies can be easily explained by Loeb’s theory — but I do want to note what Dr. Loeb has to say about conservatism in academe and how it stifles original thought (even suppressing it a la Galileo). He notes in several places that there is plenty of Physics Department money and brainpower devoted to studying theories such as supersymmetry and multiverses — despite there being zero proof (yet) that either actually exists — and scientists would rather propose pure hydrogen comets or “fluffy cloud objects” — despite there being zero proof (yet) that either actually exists — in order to explain ‘Oumuamua’s eccentricities than entertain Loeb’s theory that it behaved exactly like a pancake-shaped, metallic solar sail (could be a buoy that our solar system passed by and disturbed or a wandering piece of space junk). The gatekeepers of the world’s large and expensive observatories decide who gets to use them and for what purpose (as they must), but with the SETI project treated as fringe science, and Loeb determining that SETI’s concentration on searching for radio transmissions is probably flawed anyway, it’s frustrating to see that even compelling proof of intelligent extraterrestrial life isn’t sparking a pursuit of space archaeology as Loeb has argued for (“Similar to archaeologists who dig into the ground to learn about, say, Mayan society, astronomers must start searching for technological civilizations by digging into space.”) And because Loeb’s first interest was Philosophy, I was drawn to his explanations (beyond the pursuit of scientific advancement) of why acknowledging the existence of extraterrestrial life matters:

In astronomy, we realize that matter takes new forms over time. The matter we are made of was produced in the heart of a nearby massive star that exploded. It assembled to make the Earth that nourishes plants that feed our bodies. What are we, then, if not just fleeting shapes taken by a few specks of material for a brief moment in cosmic history on the surface of one planet out of so many? We are insignificant, not just because the cosmos is so vast, but also because we ourselves are so tiny. Each of us is merely a transient structure that comes and goes, recorded in the minds of other transient structures. And that is all.

I enjoyed Dr. Loeb’s clear writing style and the personal details that he shared — I was as interested in his daughter meeting Stephen Hawking as I was interested to learn of Loeb’s Jewish grandfather fleeing 1930’s Germany — and I was intrigued by the hope for the future of humanity that the discovery of ‘Oumuamua represented for him. Our best future is probably out in space, and to get there, we need the search for extraterrestrial life not to be dismissed as fringe science, for young scientists not to be lockstepped towards conservative areas of study, and for the population at large to be informed of and become excited by ideas that could unite us all in a shared vision of a better future. I loved the whole thing.

I may not have wanted to go over the details in my Goodreads review, but this is a paper Loeb wrote for Scientific American that explains the facts.

How Much of These Hills Is Gold

 

There is claiming the land, which Ba wanted to do, which Sam refused — and then there is being claimed by it. The quiet way. A kind of gift in never knowing how much of these hills might be gold. Because maybe if you only went far enough, waited long enough, held enough sadness pooled in your veins, soon you might come upon a path you knew, the shapes of rocks would look like familiar faces, the trees would greet you, buds and birdsong lilting up, and because this land had gouged in you an animal’s kind of claiming, senseless to words and law — dry grass drawing blood, a tiger’s mark in a ruined leg, ticks and torn blisters, wind-coarsened hair, sun burned in patterns to leave skin striped or spotted — then, if you ran, you might hear on the wind, or welling up in your own parched mouth, something like and unlike an echo, coming from before or behind, the sound of a voice you’ve always known calling your name —

How Much of These Hills Is Gold started so intriguingly — a pair of young Chinese-American orphans, fleeing a tapped-out coal-mining camp, need to bury their newly-deceased father according to vaguely understood cultural customs before figuring out the rest of their lives — and with debut author C Pam Zhang’s lyrical and entrancing prose, I thought I was in for a beautifully written account of a unique struggle. And while this book does give us some of that, somewhere between the novel’s time-jumping structure (that pretty much skips over the struggle) and Zhang’s conspicuously precise writing (I loved her sentences, but was always aware that they were impressing me), I was left with the sense that this was more about style than substance. There is certainly skill here and I would read Zhang again.

The family chased the next mine, and the next. Their savings swelled and shrank in seasons as reliable as dry and wet, hot and cold. What’s home mean when they moved so often into shacks and tents that stank of other people’s sweat? How can Lucy find a home to bury a man she couldn’t solve?

Lucy (“who after years lived in towns like this has no more tender parts to tear”) and Sam (“young enough to think desire alone shapes the world”), at twelve and eleven, flee into the California desert with their father’s body tied to the back of a stolen horse, knowing that according to their dead Ma’s “burial recipe”, their Ba would need to be laid to rest with silver (to weigh down his spirit), running water (to purify his spirit), and the body must be placed in a “home” (so the spirit will rest and not repeatedly return “like a migrant bird”). Although the older sibling, Lucy (who takes after Ma) must take direction in this quest from Sam (who is the squint-eyed image of Ba), and Lucy despairs of finding an appropriate resting spot for the failed and violent man who had taken to drink after the death of their Ma. And as I wrote above: I found this opening section to be intriguing and affecting. But then the narrative jumps back three years (to 1862), and I thought, “Okay, this is how the family lived when Ma and Ba were still around.” And then it jumped to the newly dead father’s perspective as he tries to whisper to Lucy the story of how he met her Ma in 1842 (weird, but okay). And then we are in 1867, catching up with Lucy and Sam again as they make their way in the West as absolute outsiders. And again: I think that Zhang writes really fine sentences, but the plot doesn’t stand up to the unconventional structure, and the whole doesn’t add up to something deeper.

I grew up in these hills and they raised me: the streams and rock shelves, the valleys where scrub oaks bunched so thick they seemed one mass but allowed me, skinny and swift, to slip between trunks and pierce the hollow center where branches knit a green ceiling. If I had a people, then I saw those people in the reflecting pools, where water was so clear it showed a world the exact double of this one: another set of hills and sky, another boy looking back with my same eyes. I grew up knowing I belonged to this land, Lucy girl. You and Sam do too, never mind how you look. Don't you let any man with a history book tell you different.

At its core, this is a story about otherness; about the history of Chinese-Americans and how their contributions to the building of America have been overlooked and erased. We learn that not only Lucy and Sam, but also their Ba had been born in California, but even so, they are all treated as no more American than the Native Peoples who were repeatedly driven further and further off the lands that the newly arrived white men from the East claimed as their own. But while these facts colour everything that happens in the plot, Zhang doesn’t really probe the facts deeply enough to make this a satisfying piece of social or historical commentary. Things just kind of happen, and although they are prettily described, I was left wanting much more.

The Buddha and the Bee: Biking through America's Forgotten Roadways on a Journey of Discovery

 

As for the day, Vernal, Utah was my goal, just seventy-one more miles. None of it really mattered. I didn’t care. I wanted to throw my rear wheel as far into the desert as possible, followed by the whole damn bike. Then I would just lay there on the side of the road waiting for somebody — no idea who — to pick me up and drive me directly to Truckee.

In August of 2001, Cory Mortensen decided to take a two month leave of absence from work and ride his bike across the United States from Chaska, Minnesota to Truckee, California; no set schedule or reservations set up along the way; very little gear (no spare socks, cell phone, or even a helmet); just a wedding to get to eventually, and what he figured was plenty of time to test himself on the open road. Naturally, as these things go, Mortensen faced unexpected obstacles — from mechanical failures to hostile small town inhabitants to mental stress — but he overcame everything and better liked the person he was by the end of his trip. It’s not explained why it took him nearly twenty years to make The Buddha and the Bee out of his adventure (or even where the title comes from), but now that it’s out...it’s just okay. The writing is fine — generally the tone is sarcastic and self-deprecating — and not terribly introspective; this is a light and breezy read about a mentally and physically tough challenge; interesting if not exactly inspirational. (Note: I read an ARC and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)

One could prepare for many things. One could prepare for climbing hills by doing hill repeats or for wind by riding in it. One could even build up a resistance to rain and snow. I, of course, spent no time training or preparing for any of these things. However, what I was completely unprepared for was the overwhelming sense of loneliness.

Mortensen wasn’t completely unprepared for his journey: he had run several marathons, was an Eagle Scout, had a history of cross-country motorcycle and international backpacking adventures, and owned an expensive (if not completely suited to the task) bicycle that he had used in road races before. Whatever the office job was he was taking a break from, it would seem it paid well: at thirty-one, he owned two houses (which, yes, he had bought cheaply and fixed up), and after selling one of them and renting out the other, it seems he had plenty of money for motel rooms and diner meals along the way; this is not an “everyman” story. On the other hand: he left home without proper tools, only four spare inner tubes, and when the pack he thought he’d be carrying on his back bumped up against the rear of his helmet, it was the helmet he left behind. (By the second day Mortensen reduced the contents of the backpack to the minimum so he could strap it to a rear carrier.) It would seem that this trip should have been much harder on Mortensen, but as a fly-by-the-seat-of-the-pants kind of guy, things just kept working out for him and he met all of his difficulties with the following humour:

I was exposed, helpless, naked, an innocent lamb in search of my shepherd. The dogs — maybe five, maybe ten, it was hard to tell in a quick, terrified glance over my shoulder — were fast and agile. Hellhounds, their hot breath straight from the fiery pits. Your hero was slow, weighed down, unprepared. The beasts could smell my fear, no doubt. My only hope for survival was the adrenaline now surging through my body — nature’s nitrous oxide. I sprinted. I reached twenty-eight miles per hour, heart racing, lungs wheezing, drool hanging from my lower lip, snot pouring from my nostrils, legs burning from lactic acid. In just twenty seconds — though it felt much longer — it was over. The dogs suspended their chase and stood in the street barking, the littlest one out front.

And again, I found this writing to be just okay (did not think it was okay that he kept using the phrases “dear reader” and “your hero” throughout). I had noted at the beginning that Mortensen would be on the road over Sept. 11th, and while he does relate how he learned of the terrorist attacks and how he reacted (a distanced reaction at first that slammed him later), even this part of his story didn’t really land with me. Throughout, as he writes about what little town he is biking through, he’ll wedge in some factoid that reads as interestingly as a condensed wikipedia entry; this is not first rate travel writing. And while Mortensen does eventually come to an epiphany about himself, it’s pretty much summed up here:

The road freed me from the daily chaos and doldrums of life. It freed me from everything. I had spent the last few weeks recreating who I was, without knowing it was happening. I realized now I could be anywhere and anyone or nowhere and no one.

I’ve read better memoirs about using a physically tough journey to transform yourself (Cheryl Strayed’s Wild:From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail, for one) and better on an epic bike trip (Lands of Lost Borders: Out of Bounds on the Silk Road by Kate Harris), so maybe I was expecting more from this? At any rate, I did think this was fine: the journey was interesting and I found Mortensen likable; looking at the website for this book, I’m glad to see that he continued to find adventure in his life and wish him well.

Olav Audunssøn: I. Vows

 

“It’s easy to be a good Christian, Olav, as long as God makes no more demands upon you than inviting you to church to listen to beautiful songs and asking you to obey Him while He pats you with His fatherly hand. But a man’s faith can be tested on the day when God does not want the same thing he wants. Let me tell you what Bishop Torfinn said the other day when we were speaking of your case. ‘May God grant,’ he said, ‘that the boy learns to understand over time that for a man who insists on doing what he wants to do, there will soon come a day when he sees he has done what he never intended to do.’”

Sigrid Undset received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1928 — mostly in consideration of her Kristin Lavransdatter series which centres on the life of a headstrong woman in Medieval Norway — and now in a new English translation, her series about Olav Audunssøn (which centres on a headstrong young man in Medieval Norway and released previously as The Master of Hestviken in 1927) is evidently being rereleased, beginning with this first volume: Olav Audunssøn: I. Vows. I haven’t read Undset before and I find myself impressed by her ability to bring such a foreign time and place to breathing life without resorting to digressions on culture and customs and artefacts; everything we need to learn is organically inserted into the plot and dialogue, and it was all simply fascinating to me. The plot itself is pretty melodramatic — with murders, betrayals, seduction, and exile — but it works well to put Undset’s characters into extreme situations in order to explore Norway’s evolving religious and legal codes. This was a pleasure to read and I look forward to finding more by Undset. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)

That was how things stood for Olav Audunssøn, that was his fate; he would be with Ingunn forever. That was the only certainty in his life. He and Ingunn were inextricably bound to one another. He seldom thought of that evening when he and Ingunn were promised to each other, and it had been many years since anyone had mentioned the betrothal of the two children. Yet underlying everything he felt and thought, it was there like solid ground beneath his feet: the fact that he would always live with Ingunn. The boy had no kinsmen he might turn to. No doubt he knew that Hestviken was now his property, but with every passing year his images of the estate became less and less clear. They were like bits and pieces of a dream he recalled. If he imagined that one day he would return to live there, he found it comforting and right that he would take Ingunn with him. The two of them would face the unknown future together.

When Olav Audunssøn was seven years old, his dying father implored his acquaintance Steinfinn Toressøn to take his boy in as his foster son, and in a gesture of drunken goodwill, Steinfinn agreed and also bound the boy in betrothal to his own six-year-old daughter, Ingunn. Olav and Ingunn were then raised together as brother and sister, but always aware that when they were grown, they would be wed. But when Ingunn’s parents both die while she is still underage, her father’s kinsmen refuse to acknowledge Olav’s claim to the girl, and begin seeking a more advantageous alliance. Olav — only fifteen himself at this point and uncertain of what inheritance awaits him in the south of the country — will take matters into his own hands, and always believing that he is following God’s law if not man’s, will tread an honourable path that nonetheless puts Ingunn under unbearable pressure.

Olav and Ingunn are both from Norway’s noble class, and the family they are raised in are rich landholders with crops and livestock, hired servants and thralls. The people follow ancient codes of honour — revenge can involve duels and murder, with bloodprices paid out to families and fines paid out to the Church — and while the Church is attempting to enforce a new common legal code, the noblemen themselves believe, “These new laws are as effective as a fart. The old laws work better for men of honor.” The question of whether Olav and Ingunn are legally bound is interpreted differently by the Church and the kinsmen, but appealing to the protection of the Church, Olav sets off on a very long quest while Ingunn finds sanctuary with other family members:

Shivering with cold, she realized that she was nothing more than a defenseless, abandoned, and fatherless child, neither maiden nor wife, and not a single friend did she have who would uphold her right. Olav had disappeared and no one knew where he was; the bishop was gone; Arnvid was far away, and she was unable to send word to him. There was no one to whom she could turn except her old paternal grandmother, who had now retreated into childhood, if her ruthless kinsmen should decide to take their revenge on her. A small, quivering, and trembling thing, she curled herself around the only scrap of determination within her weak and instinct-driven soul: she would steadfastly trust in Olav and remain faithful to him, even if, because of him, they should torture the very life out of her.

Like I said, melodramatic stuff, but it serves to explore the crimes and consequences attributed to men (mostly involving murder), the crimes and consequences involving women (mostly involving chastity), how the rapidly changing fates of Norway’s monarchial class affected the lives of their noblemen in the sticks, and how the Catholic Church was attempting to enforce control over folks who defaulted to their own ancient codes of honour. At its heart, this is a love story, but it so completely explores the inner lives and outer realities of people from such a different time and place from me that I don’t think it could have been done half so well without the melodrama; it’s epic and I hope to eventually learn how the story ends.

Shit, Actually: The Definitive, 100% Objective Guide to Modern Cinema

 

 

Crashing a pharmaceutical gala when you are a fugitive literally drenched in blood? This movie is from 1993, but that’s a 2020 mood.

The Fugitive Is The Only Good Movie Rating: 13/10 DVDs of The Fugitive

Once upon a time, Lindy West was the movie critic for Seattle's alternative newsweekly The Stranger before moving on to write about more serious, political topics. Locked down during the COVID-19 pandemic as she was finishing this book of essays intended to reconsider the movies she loved as a younger viewer, and increasingly disturbed by the state of America’s political situation, West “started to find a strange comfort in the task of making this book for you and thinking about it in your hands and homes — this silly, inconsequential, ornery, joyful, obsessive, rude, and extremely stupid book. More than anything I want this book to make you feel like you were at a movie night with your best friend (me).” This book is silly and ornery, and really very funny; it’s exactly what I hoped for without knowing how much I needed it. I’m not a huge fan of Hollywood movies, so West’s takedown of various blockbusters was hilarious and relatable to me; and even where she brings out her feminist lens to dissect some of these movies — and especially romances, written by men for women (as in The Notebook, Titanic, or Love, Actually, from where she gets the book’s title) — she makes you think, “Yeah. Why did I ever go along with that being okay?” I laughed out loud reading several of these essays and Lindy West made me think — What more could I want? (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)

Gump reunites with Lieutenant Dan and vows to use his Ping-Pong endorsement money to fulfill Bubba’s dream of being a shrimp boat captain. Lieutenant Dan, for some reason, is EXTREMELY SKEPTICAL that this dude who’s already met three presidents, won a Congressional Medal of Honor, wrote John Lennon’s “Imagine”, blew the whistle on Watergate, and made tens of thousands of dollars PLAYING PING-PONG could possibly achieve the famously insurmountable dream of buying a medium size boat in Alabama and riding around on it looking for shrimp. “If you’re ever a shrimp boat captain, that’s the day I’m an astronaut.”

DUDE. HE IS THE MOST SUCCESSFUL MAN IN THE WORLD.

Dude, You Gotta Stop Listening To Your Mom (and also, Jen-nay sucks) Rating: 5/10 DVDs of The Fugitive

For whatever ironic? reason, West opens this collection with an essay on The Fugitive — The best movie because it has the best lines and is never scary, only interesting and exciting. All other movies should quit. Case Closed. GAVEL. — and all other movies are rated against it. Most movies score in the midrange, but her least favourites (American Pie and Love, Actually) score just one and zero “DVDs of The Fugitive” respectively, and her most favourites (Jurassic Park and Shawshank Redemption) come in at a whopping ten and eleven “DVDs of The Fugitive” (Note above where The Fugitive itself rates 13/10 DVDs of The Fugitive). There’s a lot of fun to be had watching West recount the ridiculous plotlines of movies like Face/Off or Bad Boys II (I can not imagine the story pitches that got these projects greenlit: John Travolta and Nic Cage? Will Smith and Martin Lawrence? Say no more! Take! My! Money!) and it’s interesting to see how she has had to reevaluate some adolescent favourites like Reality Bites or Garden State. I don’t need to go over all of her reviews, but here are a couple of samples of the writing style. On Nicolas Cage in Face/Off (who makes a reappearance in The Rock):

It is madness, by the way, that every director does not do whatever it takes — financially, spiritually, erotically — to put Nicolas Cage in everything they make. He is the only person who ever does anything interesting in any movie. Yeah, I said it! Do I mean it? I don’t know. But I do know that sometimes I forget about Nicolas Cage for weeks or even years at a time, and then I watch a Nicolas Cage movie again and it feels like coming home — to a house where your dad is cocaine and mom licks your face if you’ve been good AND if you’ve been bad. I’m happy there!

Ma’am, Please Just Get a Divorce Rating: 6/10 DVDs of The Fugitive

And a 2020 view of American Pie:

I know that gen Z has it tough — they’re losing their proms and graduations to the quarantine, they’re on deck to bear the full brunt of climate catastrophe, and they’re inheriting a carcass of a society that’s been fattened up and picked clean by the billionaire class, leaving them with virtually no shot at a life without crushing financial and existential anxiety, let alone any fantasy of retiring from their thankless toil or leaving anything of value to their own children. That’s bad. BUT, counterpoint! Millennials have to deal with a bunch of that same stuff, PLUS we had to be teenagers when American Pie came out! What I’m saying is that suffering IS a contest and I DO stand by that and straight teenage boys losing their virginities IS worse than not having breathable air. Okay??????

Know Your Enemy Rating: 1/10 DVDs of The Fugitive

Reading this didn’t change my life but it certainly entertained me (and snuck in some thinking points) and I am thoroughly glad to have cleared an afternoon for it. Highly recommended for anyone who doesn’t take their films too seriously.

Invisible Ink: A Novel

 

Trying to bring my research up to date, I get a very strange feeling. It’s as if all this was already written in invisible ink. How does the dictionary define it? “Ink, colorless when first used, that darkens when treated with a given substance.” Perhaps, at the turn of a page, what was set down in invisible ink will gradually emerge, and the questions I’ve been asking myself for so long about Noëlle Lefebvre’s disappearance, as well as the reason I’ve been asking myself those questions, will be resolved with the precision and clarity of a police report. In a neat hand that looks like mine, explanations will be provided in minutest detail, the mysteries cleared up. And perhaps this will allow me, once and for all, to better understand myself.

I was attracted to Invisible Ink because author Patrick Modiano was the winner of the 2014 Nobel Prize in Literature, and because I hadn’t read him before. Now finished this fine novel, I see that other reviewers recognise various settings and characters in these pages; it would seem that Modiano has revisited the themes of memory and writing and missing persons across his oeuvre and his regular readers can see how Invisible Ink figures into that bigger picture. Alas, I would love to join their laudatory ranks and exclaim, “This is genius and essential!”, but that would be posturing on my part: This novel is fine — interesting and impeccably written (kudos to translator Mark Polizzotti as well) — but taken as its own discrete entity, I found it a short diversion and not much more. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)

If I continue to write this book, it’s only in the possibly vain hope of finding an answer. I wonder — must I really find an answer? I’m afraid that once you have all the answers, your life closes in on you like a trap, with the clank of keys in a prison cell. Wouldn’t it be better to leave empty lots around you, into which you can escape?

Invisible Ink opens with author Jean Eyben looking back on a time, thirty years earlier, when he briefly worked for a detective agency (as life experience for his writing) and the one missing persons case he worked on, never solved. He recounts his efforts to locate this Noëlle Lefebvre — starting with the strange characters he encountered around Paris and their efforts to stymie the investigation — and at first I found the tale to be a bit Hitchcockian; suspenseful and potentially menacing. But as the narrative progresses, Eyben discloses that he has been intermittently working on the case file for all of these years (without encountering menace), and as he relates more encounters he has had with people who may have known Noëlle, never concerned with keeping the story chronological, it becomes clear that the author is looking for Noëlle — and making whatever writing he can out of the experience — in an effort to better understand himself and his own memories.

There are blanks in a life, but also sometimes what they call a refrain. For periods of varying length, you don’t hear this refrain, as if you’ve forgotten it. And then one day, it comes back to you unbidden, when you’re alone and there are no distractions. It comes back, like the words of a children’s song that still has a hold on you.

As a metaphor for memory, “invisible ink” is incredibly apt; what Modiano makes of it here (literally and figuratively) is clever and wise. This is, however, quite a short book (I don’t think it took even two hours to read) and without any bits that jumped out and grabbed me, it just feels thin somehow. And yet: I am totally open to reading more Modiano and discovering how this relates to the whole.

This Is Not the End of Me: Lessons on Living from a Dying Man

 

 

remember that time i first told you i had a terminal illness? that was awkward, huh? are you interested in hearing a little bit more about it? alright then.

just over six years ago at a walk-in clinic in ottawa i had a sketchy mole removed from my back which turned out to be melanoma. between 2010 & 2016 i’ve had five surgeries, tried conventional medication, an intensive two-year natural therapy, yoga, hypnotherapy, meditation, excessive masturbation, scientology, the list goes on. i visited a rogue health clinic in tijuana, mexico with my mom, bathed with a camping shower for a year and a half, sat through thousands of coffee enemas and drank more pressed carrot juices than any one human should consume in their lifetime.

one year ago yesterday, while i was playing with finn in the backyard i had a seizure, and we discovered a handful of inoperable brain tumours in my head. fifteen wholebrain radiotherapy treatments followed by two targeted stereotactic sessions and we’re happy to announce that i am now 100% tumour free.

just kidding.
still kind of fucked.
but hey, it’s ok.
really.

Toronto-based reporter Dakshana Bascaramurty met Layton Reid when he photographed her wedding: their immediate connection was unusually strong, and although Reid eventually relocated to Halifax, the pair remained in friendly communication. It was a bombshell, therefore, when Reid emailed Bascaramurty to let her know that his cancer had returned and the prognosis wasn’t good — he had months to a few years to live and he worried what of himself would be left behind for his unborn child. While Reid began a series of legacy-related posts on Facebook, he and Bascaramurty decided to collaborate on a memoir as well, with This Is Not the End of Me being the result. There is much that is valuable and relatable in this book, but to be honest, I much preferred the excerpts of Reid’s own writings to Bascaramurty’s distanced journalistic tone. I will say that Bascaramurty successfully captured this end-of-life story — warts and all, the stresses acting on Reid and his entire family — and in a world where death is hidden away and caregivers are reluctant to complain, there is real value in sharing a story like this. I just expected to feel more. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)

It was a strange spot to be in. He shared so much with me — sometimes, he confessed, more than he did with Candace and his parents — that our friendship had evolved into something I hadn’t expected or prepared for. I recorded most of our conversations and took notes every time we talked, whether I was scrawling them in a notebook or typing them in my laptop. I was now emotionally invested in Layton in the way I was with any of my close friends. Though he had seven years on me, I thought of him as like a younger brother I adored and felt protective of. Still, I never lost sight of the fact that I was also writing about him and his family. Sometimes, I wondered if he routinely forgot that, despite constant reminders that I was planning to document his story. Or maybe there was some kind of logic that governed all of this: these were intimate confessions now, but months or years down the road, after conflicts were resolved and feelings couldn’t be hurt, it was okay for me to publish them. He often told me I was the closest thing he had to a shrink, and while I was flattered that he trusted me so much, hearing this also made me squirm.

Six years after “beating” melanoma, it was found that the cancer had spread to Layton Reid’s brain; and not wanting to risk unknowable side effects from traditional cancer treatments, Reid decided to commit to two years of Gerson Therapy. Thousands of freshly-prepared glasses of juice and thousands of self-administered coffee enemas later (all of which was hugely costly in terms of money, time, and effort), and eventually, the brain tumours came back and Reid and his family needed to face the fact that he was nearing the end of his life. Bascaramurty reports the facts more or less dispassionately, only occasionally inserting asides about how events were affecting her as well, but again, I was mostly taken by Reid’s own writing:

would you like to learn the secret to taking on life’s most brutal obstacles? here it is.

there is no secret. just keep moving, dummy. that’s it. physically, figuratively, whatever. my hundred year old grandfather taught me that by walking the circumference of the earth over the course of his lifetime. my father taught me that by running over thirty-seven thousand kilometres since he graduated from high school, and my son teaches me that by digging, sprinting and splashing his way through a seemingly infinite well of energy, and that kid’s only three years old.

run. walk. crawl. i don’t care. just keep moving forward and you’ll eventually get to where you need to go.

i promise.

I was taken by Reid’s struggle with what to include in a memory box he was filling for his son, Finn; I was impressed by the unflagging care and support he was shown (and especially by his wife and mother); and I was moved by circumstances after his death that led loved ones to believe that Reid was sending them signs. There is much to learn from in this book, and beyond the tragic story of one man and his family, it serves to bring the reality of a cancer diagnosis and death out into the public realm.

The Human Cosmos

 

Looking back over the history of our relationship with the cosmos shows how we’ve banished gods, debunked myths and written our own, evidence-based, creation story. Stripping out subjective meaning and focusing on quantifiable observations has given us an epic power to understand and shape the world that dwarfs anything that has gone before. But unchecked, it has the potential to be a cold, narcissistic, destructive force. This is a book about how we closed our eyes to the stars. The challenge now is to open them again.

The Human Cosmos is an overview of humanity’s relationship with the night sky — from groupings of dots in the cave paintings at Lascaux that can be interpreted as constellations to the awe-filled experiences of astronauts at the International Space Station as they perform their first spacewalks — and in an incredibly wide-ranging and consistently fascinating variety of historical anecdotes, author Jo Marchant makes a solid case that the more we have relegated the study of the stars to scientists alone, the more we have lost something of what made us human in the first place. I loved every bit of this. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)

When scientists first split light with the spectroscope — turning its colors into numbers — they took one more step away from a subjective, qualitative view of the cosmos toward an objective, mathematical one: from an internal universe that we experience, to an external one that we calculate. And with the development of electronic detectors, our sense of vision — how the cosmos looks to us — was finally erased from the picture altogether. In this sense, modern astronomy is radically different from any kind of cosmological inquiry or understanding that has gone before. It no longer requires us to turn our faces to the sky. Our dominant source of knowledge about the universe — what it is, how it was made, how it relates to our life, and to us — is now our instruments, and not our eyes.

Marchant starts right at our beginning — with cave paintings and the construction of Stonehenge and the rise and fall of Babylonian kings — tracing how studying the stars led to superstitions and the divine rights of monarchs, and eventually, monotheism. In every section (with chapter headings such as Myth, Land, Faith, and Fate), she tells simply fascinating stories that explore humanity’s evolving relationship with the cosmos — and it would seem that everything (in the West) suddenly changed with Isaac Newton: with gravity proven as the fundamental force of nature, there was suddenly less need for divine intervention in ordering human affairs (Thomas Paine would eventually use the language of Newton to demand the equality of men as a “Natural Law” that led to the overthrow of kings; his subsequent release of Age of Reason would ultimately lead to the death of God; from that point on, the Milky Way could coldly spiral and the universe blindly expand with or without humanity). The new Rationalism and Positivism insisted on scientific facts as the only markers of reality, but eventually, Einstein and Quantum Mechanics and collapsing wave functions came to suggest that “reality” can never be measured separately from human consciousness. And while we have come such a long way from sacrificing to the sun gods to ensure another dawn, recent studies have shown that we are more in communion with the stars than we might suspect:

Doctors are realizing that most medical conditions display daily fluctuations in their occurrence or symptoms, including heart attacks, asthma, bronchitis, cystic fibrosis, strokes, fever, pain, seizures and suicide, to name just a few. The time of day can determine how we’ll respond to an infection or drug, or whether eating exactly the same meal will cause us to gain or lose weight. And even seasonal changes are important: the month in which babies are born affects their later risk of diseases such as dementia, multiple sclerosis and schizophrenia ( with opposite patterns in the northern and southern hemispheres). Scientists don’t understand exactly why (theories include early-life infection risk, nutrition, and vitamin D levels) but it’s clear that the position of the Earth relative to the Sun at the time you are born has health consequences that last for life.

(In 1954, an American Biologist named Frank Brown tried to publish his findings that clams will continue to be affected by tides — even correcting for local conditions — when moved inland and shielded from environmental clues. Brown knew that they were responding to electromagnetic cues from the sun and moon, but the idea was too outside the mainstream to be published or discussed at conferences — which I include as a curiosity when thinking about “scientific consensus”.) The Human Cosmos was full of so many interesting stories, I’ll just collect a few here: I had heard of Constantine’s celestial vision of a cross that led to his subsequent conversion and promotion of Christianity, but I never heard before that he never stopped his pagan sun worship, or that Constantine simply merged the two traditions in order to hedge his bets (which is why we hear that Christian holidays are co-opted pagan festivals) and this is where the Christian halo came from (“Thanks to Constantine, the humble teacher became a cosmic emperor, ruling over the universe with the radiance of the sun.”) When an assistant curator of the British Museum, George Smith, translated a section of The Epic of Gilgamesh in 1872 and realised that it was an alternate version of Noah and the Flood — written centuries before Genesis — “he reportedly became so excited that he started taking off his clothes”. Polynesian navigators who worked with Captain Cook in the Eighteenth Century were so in tune with subtle markers on the ocean — from the positions of the sun and moon to tidal swells, wind direction, and cloud formations — that if fog obscured the direction of waves approaching one’s canoe, “he stood with legs apart to feel the swell patterns using the swing of his testicles”. And I don’t know why it hasn’t made a more lasting impression on my memory that it was only in 1995 that astronomers discovered 51 Pegasus b — the first planet definitively identified outside of our own solar system; it has only been since 1995 that science has even contemplated the possibility of life on other planets because until then, they couldn't prove there were other planets.

I love that Marchant brings our relationship with the cosmos full circle: early humans were obviously filled with awe when they looked at the night sky and endeavored to understand its workings. This led to superstitions and pseudoscience, civilisation and religion, and eventually, the Scientific Method and its efforts to erase mystery. Today, when light pollution and traffic jams of satellites obscure most people’s vision of the heavens, we’re beginning to realise that perhaps we’re more connected to those celestial bodies than mathematical equations alone can explain (I was fascinated by her explanation of Panpsychism), and I’m left wondering how close we are to affordable space tourism and a return to widespread awe at the sight of the depthless cosmos. I will admit that this perfectly piqued my own quirky interests — Marchant even references Michael Pollan’s How to Change Your Mind (an investigation into the use of psychedelics to prompt an awe-filled experience, which I loved) — so while this may not have wide appeal, I found it to be an engaging and informative read.

Summer

 

Summer’s surely really all about an imagined end. We head for it instinctually like it must mean something. We’re always looking for it, looking to it, heading towards it all year, the way a horizon holds the promise of a sunset. We’re always looking for the full open leaf, the open warmth, the promise that we’ll one day soon surely be able to lie back and have summer done to us; one day soon we’ll be treated well by the world. Like there really is a kinder finale and it’s not just possible but assured, there’s a natural harmony that’ll be spread at your feet, unrolled like a sunlit landscape just for you.
Care free.
What a thought.
Summer.
The Summer's Tale.
There's no such play, Grace.
Don't be fooled.

“Summer” is variously defined here as a lintel (the most important beam, structurally, in a building), as a horse that can carry a great weight, as the season most overloaded with our expectations. That’s a lot of pressure for Ali Smith to put on her own Summer — the final volume in her Seasonal quartet — but, too, Smith writes: “Summers can take it. That’s why we call them summers.” Once again, Smith has released a volume written completely in the moment (she may have started this thinking her themes would continue to concentrate on climate change, the rise of right wing politics, and refugee detainee camps, but she was able to organically include COVID-19 and the death of George Floyd as though her narrative had been inevitably moving towards those world-changing events all along), and taken together, I simply can’t imagine a more appropriate encapsulation and exploration of our moment in time. I think that Summer did an amazing job of tying everything together, and while Autumn was the absolute standout of the series for me, and although the other three in the quartet merited four stars on their own, this is definitely a five star series overall; I can imagine this being read and studied deep into the future and look forward to soon rereading all four as a cohesive experience. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)

Well, that’s what art is, maybe. Something that impresses mysteriously on you and you don’t know why.

Perhaps this definition for art is all I really need to write, and while I don’t want to rehash the plot for Summer here, I do want to record some impressions. As in the first three volumes, Smith invokes Dickens (the beginning of the actual plot echoes David Copperfield) and Shakespeare (this time, The Winter’s Tale) and we are introduced to another woman artist who deserves to be better remembered (the visual artist, novelist, and filmmaker Lorenza Mazzetti). There are references to Chaplin and Einstein, and along with frequent punning and word play, there’s a revisit with the sculpture of Barbara Hepworth that allows for word play on Einstein’s name. Characters from the first three volumes are reintroduced and we learn more about their pasts and see the threads of their present all tied up (the deep state agents of SA4A make another appearance, demonstrating how bureaucratic overreach inevitably leads to the comically absurd). And while — perhaps particularly in a COVID lockdown — it’s easy to despair that the world is closer to its doomsday than ever before, Smith offers up the twin meaning-makers of art and activism.

It’s not incidental that Smith has populated these books with so many artists: confronted by their own doomsday times, they, like Smith in this quartet, strove to create meaning out of mortality:

What art does is exist. And then because we encounter it, we remember we exist too. And that one day we won’t.

And with several generations of British activists giving their opinions on the present in Summer, Smith reminds us that it is always doomsday somewhere:

Yes, it’s surreal for us here right now. But it’s never not a state of emergency somewhere. We’re naive if we think life normally isn’t surreal as fuck for most people scraping a living on this earth

The overall philosophy of the series seems to be: When we are confronted with confusing and dangerous times, we ought to strive to make meaning and help others; it was ever so; the seasons will continue to follow one upon the other, world without end, but the fate of humanity lies in human hands. This is the masterwork of a deep thinker; it is art and I find myself, thereby, mysteriously impressed.