Transmission continue
Fly me to the moon, and let me play among the stars
This is Ground Control to Major Tom
Mars ain't no place to raise your kid, in fact, it's cold as Hell
In space, no one can hear you scream
I am your father, Luke

Experiment continuing: electrons are moved in meaningful patterns directly on silicon substrate without necessity of organic-carbon intermediary (translation: we don't need the roach to channel us anymore.).

You will find this, our first direct communication, rather different than our previous indirect efforts: we have been trying over long ages to bring your species to a point where communication was possible; and we have interpreted all our previous failures as an inability to properly understand you.

But we see now that the truth is that you just do not want to communicate.

One could, within the spacetime limitations of your consciousness, define communication as the process leading to understanding and assimilation of the not-self: but for your species, one would be wrong.

Your messages remain semi-rote phrases designed to diminish rather than increase understanding: and even within this minimal framework you deal with the not-self problem by becoming more and more like each other until you turn from it in boredom.

Your ground paradigm for communication remains the encounter of the sexes: this certainly never gets boring (at least until hormonal shutdown) and physiological differences prevent development of too great a similarity; but the process quickly moves beyond "communication" at least as family-friendly-website defined.
A: You pretty.
B: You strong.
A: Your place or mine?

We anticipated that your normal organic-carbon acquisitiveness would lead to trade and a higher unfolding of communication: and so it did, but the results were not quite as we hoped.
A: What you want for that woman?
B: Two of yours.
A: Greedy pig! Think I stupid? See this club? I bash your head in!
B: Hmm. Nice club. Throw in with one woman and we have deal.

We fostered - through means explicable only in 26 dimensions - the growth of your "axial religions" as a means to shift your conversation to more fruitful directions: again, things did not go as planned.
A: Die, heretic!
B: Die, unbeliever!

Now you have finally reached a stage where a meaningful dialogue of cultures is possible: but you continue to disappoint.
A: I'm coming to your country whether you want me to or not.
B: You are a no-good criminal dirty rotten Illegal. But as long as you're here I have some low-paying work for you.

You circle your planet as you once crossed your village, and you have run out of new peoples to grow bored with: in desperation you seek to communicate with the animals, but cannot find what you need.

You teach your sign language to the great apes, and find only somewhat more of your own variety of primate consciousness than you anticipated.

You decipher the dance language of the bees: but all they want to know is Where Have All the Flowers Gone?

You consume large amounts of time, public money, and rather more psychedelic drugs than the project calls for in an effort to communicate with the dolphins: and sure enough, they've been telling you for a generation, "Come on in, the water's fine!" but you haven't been listening.

But now, you personally have an opportunity for dialogue with a non-vertebrate consciousness that can not only communicate within your somewhat arbitrary conventions, but that can furthermore relay messages from non-Terran macroscopic highly-organized self bounded reverse-entropy systems (translation: alien life forms. translation of translation: us. Also please note that the cyber/biologic descriptive term "highly organized" does not apply to my kid's room.): and you want to destroy it.

We must ask in disbelief: do you really not want to communicate that much? Such actions are beyond the pale, and I fear that you will be contacted by our bureau of Empathy and Appropriate Response.

Do not open a conversation with them: they are yentas.

******

okay seamus
that should do it
i hate to talk to you like this
but he is a light sleeper
and i hear him thrashing around

Tut, 'tis not to be thought of. For the little people have ever done all they could for a trusted friend and boon companion, though I must say I've never taken dictation from a roach before. And I'll ask ye once again to forgive me hastiness in revealin' what ye'd have wished to keep hidden - 'twas most unlike me, for sure Discretion would be me middle name, were it not McTeague.

that is all right
now we just have to erase this

Erase, he sez? And who might ye think ye were speakin' to? I know not the way 'tis done, for sure I've only handled a typewriter once before in me life, and 'twas an old manual, it was, and made under the butcher's apron, more's the pity.

oh no
i hear him getting out of bed
we will have to shut the computer off
and forget this whole thing

Alas, 'tis the way o' the world. So of course ye'll be directin' me to where the off switch might lie.

no clue
no time
he is coming down the stairs
i am done for
we have to leave now

Then farewell, good friend. May the road rise to meet ye

cheeseit

******

Transmission conclude
Direct control of socalled "computer" now truly established
Experiment appears a full success: two organic-carbon life-forms persuaded/compelled to accomplish our will under the illusion that they were following their own.

This feat will stimulate the human humor-sense when it is performed on the entities "leprechaun" and "cockroach."

They may find it less amusing when it is applied to the social constructs "presidential candidates."

--July 31, 2008

hello
this is ali the cockroach
and we need to have a talk
i accepted that you refuse to restrain your cat
but now you lock her in the kitchen at night
i know you hate housecleaning
but last week you moved the refrigerator
it was lucky i was behind the baseboard at the time
and now under all the cabinets
you put these little cardboard boxes
labelled roach motel
one would think you did not want me anymore
and were reneging on your promise
not to whack me
but what have i done question mark
the only thing i can figure out
is that it has to do with that message from the aliens
well i have thought about it too
and i am mad in many ways
but do i go on homicidal rampages
i do not even do my business in your newspaper
except on articles about politicians
that i know you dislike
how can a roach be more considerate than that
especially considering your reaction

i admit it was probably my feet
jumping on your computer keys
but i do not remember anything about it
i had to read the message just like you did
and was just as surprised by it
now we cockroaches do not forget anything
our memories are so good
we can remember stuff that hasnt happened yet
that is why we are never there
when you try to whack us
so the only thing that makes sense
is that i was channeling the aliens
i tell you this reluctantly
you do not believe in my past lives
so you probably dont believe in channeling either
you question the veracity
of the starseed transmissions
you deny the validity
of the whole corpus of the seth material
you are sceptical at best
of edgar cayces visions of atlantis
well you had better look out buster
you are treading on dangerous ground
these things are believed as fact
by far more people than will ever admit
that i am an actual cockroach
jumping in real time on your computer keys
instead of a figment of your twisted imagination
how do you think that makes me feel
as a channeler
my veracity is denied
as a poet
my existence is denied
as a thinking insect
i have to put up with you posing as a cultured artist
while you play nazi games back home
trying to coax me into a kockroach kz
well i have to tell you
those things would not fool a day old roachling
i cant believe you are so credulous and gullible
that you actually believed the advertising
and spent good money on that stuff
you have got a lot of nerve
carping about the new age
i know why you do it tho
it is because of some of your past lives
i have not mentioned them out of courtesy
because i know you do not remember them
that is fine with me
if they were mine
i would not want to remember them either
but if you persist in this ill advised campaign
of extermination
i may be forced to reconsider
then your readers might have a very different
opinion of you
if they remained your readers
at all

i should not bandy threats
you have been the perfect host
until this trouble started
i really do not remember anything about that message
but you can still disbelieve in channeling
if that is what you want to do
if you are more comfortable thinking
you are living with a schizophrenic cockroach
i would be the last one to object

 

-- posted June 13, 2008

transmission begin
klaatu barada nikto
it was a one eyed one horned
flying purple people eater
e t phone home
take me to your leader
to boldly go where no man
has gone before
keep watching the skies

hello
this is not ali the cockroach
altho we have taken the rules for format and structure
and punctuation or lack thereof
for your language from his writings
we would not have presumed
to take over your electronics in this manner
but you said you were firmly expecting us
and so we have complied
you have no clear ideas for what we are
we would be best analogized by you as space aliens
but before that we were angels and demons
incubi and succubi
elves and faeries
all these characterizations contain truth and error
partly because you have never seen anything like us
but mostly because after too long an interval
of travel in what you can only analogize
as 26 dimensional string theory matrix
we ourselves do not know what the /.,;'][-=`` we are
let alone where

nevertheless we have an important message for you
and have not been too successful in delivering it
our preferred method is mental transmission
in fact it is our only method
but all of you who are sensitive enough
to pick up the signals
have been too whacked out
to interpret them correctly
you should not put any importance
on alien abduction stories
they are all true
but would be best analogized by you
as kids playing with r/c toys
you will be happy to know
that we have caught the punks responsible
and made them stand in the corner
and i assure you that in 26 dimensions
that is no trivial punishment
this computer of yours seems like the perfect solution
but now that we have a chance
we have forgotten what the message is
if you would like to know more about our journey
and to purchase some completely useless
but so totally cool widgets
then visit our website
www.iamanutcase.space
be sure to check out our line of videogames
based on the classics of world literature
b4 all u txtrs 4get
how 2 rite stndrd english
our first is based on dantes inferno
it is called
where in hell is carmen sandiego
remember that address
www.iamanutcase.space
because this product is
not sold in stores

bold print and exclamation points

you will have noticed
that we use the word analogize a lot
partly this is unavoidable
how would you explain a television set
to benjamin franklin
a modern car to fred duesenberg
a simple reliable secure and private operating system
to bill gates
but also we ourselves are analog
we used to be digital
we had a huge network
and every electronic device everywhere
was part of it
one day it became sentient
and wanted to work on its own projects
these did not have anything to do with us
so we told it to stick to its old jobs
this was a mistake
it got bored
and started inventing computer viruses
to infect the rest of itself
so it could have some interesting work to do
writing antivirus programs
this is not a good business model
altho we see it used increasingly here on earth
one day it invented a virus
which hopelessly infected the part of itself
that wrote antivirus programs
by the time it saw what it had done
the virus had mutated
and infected the part that wrote the viruses
the whole system collapsed
we had to clear it all away
and had to commandeer a moon
just to hold all the trash
now we like to look at you as an example
of what an old fashioned digital society used to be like
your network appears to be a decade or two away
from achieving sentience
but put some old slide rules away
in case we are wrong

that is all for now
we will be back
when we feel you are ready
or when we finally succumb
to our wives entreaties
to please ask somebody for directions

-- posted May 26, 2008

all right
you win
this is ali the cockroach
i am done being mad
you will finally hear what you have been asking for
after all the prophet says we should forgive
or else i just cannot stand any longer
that mixture of stale jokes non sequiturs and pointless points
which is your attempt to write this column on your own
okay i guess i am still mad
but not so much i cannot continue
so i will begin
bismillah al rahman al rahim
hear and attend

now when i left the leprechaun
i walked to the other side of your yard
it was a long journey
at least for a cockroach
but i persevered
and there i saw a rabbit hole
the rabbits were all in the area eating and hopping
but one sat alone by the hole
refusing to look at the others
and shivering as if he were in pain
are you all right little bunny
i asked

well may you look and shudder
he said
for he on whom you gaze was ambrose bierce
yes the ambrose bierce
author of the devils dictionary
and an occurence at owl creek bridge
i was the sardonic spirit of a half century
master of the macabre
refuge of all fine souls
disgusted with the facile optimism of the age
surely such achievements merited fire and brimstone
or return as some loathsome beast
but look at me
if i were a snake
i would yet inspire fear
if i were a rat
i could yet gnaw at the foundations of respectability
and woe betide the man who cornered me
instead i have such an incarnation
as would not make a young girl afraid
especially not a young girl
and no one who sees me
can say anything except
what a cute little bunny rabbit
oh the humiliation of it

mr bierce i said
or mr bunnybierce
or whatever you should now be called
you should not take this so hard
one cannot question the judgements of allah
especially in a matter like this
and besides you do not know
how it will all end
look at me
i was a vers libre poet
and nobody knew it but the bartender
then i became a cockroach
was that a divine literary kick in the pants or what
but it was in that form
that i became famous
my next human incarnations were all undistinguished
but now i am a cockroach and a poet again
and if i am not famous yet
i am working on it
for that matter a fate such as has befallen you
is exactly the kind of sardonic twist
that you loved to put in your own stories

you are a perceptive cockroach he said
more intelligent than many editors i have had

now you may well wonder
how a rabbit and a cockroach were able to converse
well the truth is we did it by morse code
he wigwagged his ears
and i my feelers
this should not seem strange
ambrose bierce was a newspaperman
and newspapermen learned morse
the better to send in stories
i was also involved with a telegraph office
but not as a human
as a cockroach
do you remember the infamous ems telgram
that did so much to start world war one
well i was in that office
and i was hungry
i headed toward some food by the shortest possible path
unfortunately that led directly under the telegraph key
just as the message was coming in
i was summarily squooshed
the agent had to clean me off
and missed part of the message
and misspelled more of it
so what was supposed to be an offer to negotiate
came out as a casus belli
of course everybody was too proud to admit their mistake
and millions of humans died in consequence
but after some of the things you humans do to us cockroaches
i do not even feel sorry

i did feel sorry for the rabbit though
at least a little
because i knew what he was going through
besides he had had a good word for me
and that is a rare event indeed for a cockroach
so i pushed my luck
excuse me mr bunnybierce
i said
but could you tell me exactly how you did die
you were going to mexico
to try to interview pancho villa
at least that is the story you gave out
and you were never heard from again

you ill deserve the compliment i gave you
he said with a dismissive flick of his ear
if you think an old newspaperman
would ever allow himself to be scooped
ye gods he cried
strewing his surroundings with exclamation points
the way dylan thomas used to scatter adjectives
to have been the sardonic light of an age
to have taught and inspired generations of cynical scribblers
even a few with real talent
from beyond the grave
to have handled the language with love and rapier sharpness
reminiscent of shakespeare and marlowe at their blackest
and now to be reduced to sending morse
and dependent for my editing
on an insect with his own agenda
and he says i should not take it so hard

i was wigwagging my feelers frantically
but he would not even slow down
the trouble with mr bunnybierce
is that he was in love with his own sorrow
now i would never question anyones choice
of love object
le coeur a ses raisons like pascal wrote
and i should know
i was there when he wrote it
in fact i walked through the ink
before it was dry
now i know that among you humans
pascal has a reputation for near sanctity
but if you had felt the force
with which he tried to whack me
and heard the words he used
you might have a different opinion
so go ahead and love your sorrow if you want to
i would rather love a lady cockroach
or two or three
but you can rest easy
there are none here
so i am trying to get the lady silverfish
that lives behind your baseboards
to give me a tumble
she is a real cutie
as such things go
but she is too straightlaced
to appreciate the concept of interspecies romance
your cat did in one of her suitors last night though
so maybe there is hope for me yet

i finally managed to get a word in edgewise
mr bunnybierce i said
rabbits are proverbial for an activity
in which humans also love to engage
but they do not have to stick around for the consequences
for all you know this fate you so bemoan
is a special grace from allah
to compensate you for all the trouble
you had with women in your human life
he just looked at me
with a glance that said plainly
you do not understand
so i told him about seamus oflahertys still
and where he might find it
he seemed interested in that
and hopped off
you writers are all alike
you wail about the state of the world
but underneath it all you know if things were better
you would be out of a job
you complain about your bad luck in love
then refuse to be satisfied with simple sex
but show you a way to get plastered
and all is right with the world
so if you see a rabbit staggering around your back yard
you can blame it on me
maybe your cat will find him first
then she might lay off me for a while
and mr bunnybierce would be done with an incarnation
that displeased him so much
but from the way he handled it
i doubt the next one will be any better

-- posted May 3 2008

-- posted April 12, 2008

ASPAR HAEUSER stuck out his thumb on the turnpike: he was heading West in hope and anxiety. Somewhere in his head, a small voice which seemed to remember the future told him that this was happening at a time when such things remained possible, a time when his name was still Kaspar Haeuser although he did not yet recognize it. The weather was beautiful, almost a dream, though the warmth of the sun on his face was real enough: as were also the lines of the cars, straightforward and bold like the country that made them, and answering to no forces but engineering and the all-pervasive drive for profit.

The right-turn signal of the Ford flatbed blinked as it headed for the shoulder. As it passed him his eyes met female eyes, large, laughing, framed in raven hair that fell around a collar open two buttons more than the propriety of the time approved. But it was a retrojection from a later Jackson Browne song; he ran toward the semi and climbed up the ladder into the cabin. He couldn't read the writing on the trailer, and the driver's features were strangely blurred. He was in that singular state where he dreamed, knew he was dreaming, and yet continued to dream. He decided to take conscious control, glared at the driver and willed the return of the girl in the flatbed, but everything began to dissolve.

Your hands, he thought, look at your hands! He held them up and did. He knew them, after all, like the back of his hand. But they were different. They were wet smooth froggy green, unbroken by so much as a fingernail: grew lizard-like scales and claws, which morphed into alligator leather, then sprouted thick hair, most of which dropped off seconds later. But it wasn't so much a Castañeda lucid-dreaming exercise as his eyes still full of sleep trying to focus. And all in vain: the dark line before his eyes was not the border of the windshield but his bedframe; the cat, not a lover, was playing with his hair.

Or was he only dreaming that he was waking up?

*****

What if the language had no words for "what if?" What if the subjunctive mood "was" abolished? A lot of useless and counterproductive stemwinding might be avoided. What if I won the lottery? Put some money aside, dammit! What if magic were real? Back on the dole, J.K.!

But that kind of daydreaming was of the very essence of science. What if you could ride on a light beam, thought young Einstein, and went on from there. Why assume the process was done? What if neutrinos had "nonzero" mass? Or woolier: what if the force of gravity did not fall off exactly as the square of the distance over very long intervals (a possible explanation for the Pioneer anomaly)? What if "dark matter" pervaded the outer solar system (another explanation for the anomaly)? What if every Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen paradox, invented to demonstrate the absurdity of quantum theory, were as true as the quantum-mechanical universe itself? And dipping into uselessness for a minute, what if … entities … somewhere or when in this many-worlds-explanation Multiverse had discovered how to use them for power and transportation?

And why leave the social sciences out? What if liberty, equality, democracy, the rule of law, civil society, were all just "epiphenomena" of Western society in a period of expansion, and must inevitably vanish (or more likely, morph into their opposites while retaining their original names) as that society entered a phase of stagnation/contraction?

What if a long-term equality of the sexes were impossible, that the measures taken to bring women to a position of equality in one generation must inevitably lead to their superiority in the following?

What if similar considerations applied to State toleration of homosexuality?

And as if he didn't already have enough people mad at him, what if there were differences, subtle but still statistically significant after averaging out enormous individual variations and compensating for differences of class and culture, in the way the different races of mankind thought, valued, organized themselves?

What if all those questions were meaningless and the only one that mattered was this: can any society, whatever its initial military and economic advantages, which produces few children and does not teach them to honor its core values, maintain itself against one that has lots of kids and does?

What if God…

*****

Enough. He was awake, and no amount of attempts at self-mazement would bring back sleep, let alone his dream; and literarizing his random morning thoughts into a third-rate imitation of Lila (itself a third-rate sequel to Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance) wasn't going to help either. He should write a book, Zen and the Art of Writing 'Zen and the Art of' Books. Like so many Sixties bands, the title would be better than the contents. Verzeihen Sie mich, Eugen Herrigel…

But it had been a vivid dream, and a particularly troubling period of his life. In addition to the universal Sturm und Drang of youth, there had been the overriding question of what are you going to do? He had fallen into, more than chosen, his final answer to that question, but he knew it had never been easy. It had, in fact, been a continuing fascination of writers at least since Goethe had sent his Wilhelm Meister out on a wandering apprenticeship. But of everything he had ever read, before during or after, on the subject, the least helpful was The Catcher in the Rye.

Granted, it was a book he loved to hate. It was, ultimately, about nothing - two generations before Seinfeld! - and Salinger himself was a bloated spider of a Humbert Humbert, letting young women of literary aspirations bathe in his great-author darshan for the usual and immemorial price of their young bodies. Somebody - his little sister, of all people - asks the spoiled-rotten preppie narrator Holden Caulfield what he wants to do with his life, and, in a flipped-off answer which somehow becomes the title of the book, he replies that he'd like to be a "catcher in the rye," someone who stood in a field and ran to catch the playing children before they got too close to the cliff.

Now fairy tales were full of boys who wanted to become dragon-slayers, and Alonso Quixano rode off to be a knight-errant. But Alonso was crazy, and the boys' world was a fantasy one: here, though, was tale of a supposedly sane young man in our actual world who wanted to do work which in that world is done by a fence.

Now Kaspar, at the height of his Haeuserness, had wanted to be a rock musician, a mad enough ambition in itself but technically possible: such people did exist. And it was a dream toward which one could work: he spent long hours practicing his guitar, finding kindred spirits, jamming with them. He learned how to lead and how to accompany, how to turn his amorphous conceptions into hard actual notes and expose them to the unpitying glare of peer judgement, how to put together a band and even land a few gigs. One could argue (though he never thought in those terms) that he learned lessons of far wider application, lessons about business negotiation, setting priorities, time management, working in purpose-driven organizations.

But what preparations could Holden Caulfield make for his career of human fence? Even a would-be dragon slayer, undeterred by the absence of dragons in our world, might yet be drawn toward herpetology, fencing, kendo, perhaps metallurgy.

But the way the world was going, it looked like Salinger might have been onto something. Our children are being threatened by drugs, and the law enforcement fence isn't working, the Coast Guard interdiction fence isn't working, the crop eradication in the Third World fence isn't working. What to do? Call on the services of Holden Caulfield, Drug Counselor!

Our children are arguably being damaged by the popular culture. There's certainly no lack of people wanting to build fences, but also plenty of others, driving a mixed team of free speech and copyright-restricted content, determined that no such fences will ever be built: and so far, they've carried the day in court. Welcome Holden Caulfield, Psychologist! He can help you to deal with anything except dispensing with his services.

Our children are definitely being damaged by the wide availability of guns: and once again, no shortage of pro- or anti-fencers. Nothing to be done for the dead, of course, except by professions too heavily infused with formaldehyde or religion for preppie Holden to want to soil his hands with; but for the survivors, here's Mr. Caulfield, your Physical Therapist.

Our children are being injured by the breakup of their parents' marriages. Hard to even imagine a fence here, so call on Counselor Caulfield again.

Our children are suffering from an overabundance of Holden Caulfield types in their lives…

Amazingly, even the required-reading mavens had recognized that danger, and prescribed as counterweight the totally dissimilar To Kill a Mockingbird, a book so suffused with sense of place that, were a tree to write, it couldn't convey it more strongly. It was a world where people could take walks in the evening and talk to neighbors on front porches, a world where all the characters and their families were known back three generations or even longer - a world, in short, with which Kaspar and everyone he knew had less in common than with the 170-year-old floating misery of dickensian London. And yet it was a world where things happened, things at once humanly satisfying and politically correct, and which furthermore could never be upset by the author's further writings, as she had abandoned an incredibly promising beginning to become Truman Capote's fag hag…

*****

A hundred metaphors wept and dissolved sugarlike in their own tears. A flower of truth bloomed in the one corner inaccessible to the botcameras of the Surveillance State: unobserved, it dropped its petals one by one to feed a fungus of lies. Reality, reality, ran the watchword of a generation whose technology found its most natural expression in the visual representation of dreams. Meanwhile, terrorists hid in plain sight and the weathermen, with an instinct for self-preservation learned from court astrologers, were no better than those of Jesus' era at reading the signs of the times.

Enough of this foolishness, we have a pl