THE TERMINATOR AKA THE GRAY LINE

The Mick watches Finnegan

Since I had taken an antihistamine pill at bedtime, I slept hard.  But I dreamt that I was living in a university town in an apartment on a high floor, very pleasant, but then acquired another small house “on the flats”, from a woman who was an artist and moving somewhere else.  The rest of the dream was about moving my collection of art work from one house to the next as she made wall space by moving out her own paintings.  Both of us had large bright works.

You can analyze and so can I.  Maybe it’s a novel.  As I was drifting off last night I was thinking about animals and insects that move into the structures built by others, like hermit crabs.  (I identify as a hermit.)

I was woken by Finnegan and the Mick, crusted with ice, diving down my neck to get under the covers where it was warm.  The whole outdoors is a white sheet of paper: snow.  Probably gone by the time night comes again.  I had turned on the floor furnace so when I accidentally stepped on the Mick’s paw while trying to get all our breakfasts, she staggered onto the hot grill over the furnace, and after a scream of indignation, she regards me as a great traitor and has reverted to feral.

So the first mark on the paper is a burning indignation and resentment.  Finnegan, however, has no sympathy for his little devoted buddy and leaps into my arms, climbing my shoulder as usual.  By the time I went out to the garage to feed the ferals, I was conditionally forgiven, but was surprised to see that the cat hole in the garage door had been drifted over so that they had had to dig their way out.  They’ve also dug multiple hole entrances under the back shop, acting more like foxes than cats.  Since they are under a floor made of 2X12’s, I can’t get at their nests of kittens.

The Terminator Line

The limber bushes are crushed under the weight of the snow, but the trees were so far barely generating catkins so they are "bearing up".  I hadn’t gotten around to checking the tarp on the garage yesterday as I intended, so it may leak.  Everything is under plastic sheets.  Yesterday had been very pleasant.  Squibbie, who sleeps all day next to the computer like the grannie she is, got a little overheated so I cracked the window.  She rearranged herself to plant her nose in the crack.  

My mother slept like that: warm body, nose out to the weather coming in through her north window.  She didn’t trust electric blankets and, truthfully, in Portland one wasn’t usually necessary.  As a child I would wake to her adjusting our kid-bedroom windows.  They rattled unless they were wedged with half a pinching clothespin.  I'm free-associating.  That's what writers do.

For a few days I’ve been thinking about the line between day and night as it travels around and around the planet.  It is so grown into our cells that we follow the rhythm even when we can’t see it, but I’d forgotten its two exceptionally suggestive names: the terminator and also the gray line.  On this planet the atmosphere fuzzes it up enough to make an ambiguous transitional twilight zone, but on the moon it is sharp.

“A terminator is defined as the locus of points on a Moon or planet where the line through a Sun is tangent.”  I barely remember that a tangent is sort of like a perpendicular except coming out of a circle from the center.  I had not realized that in the polar regions there are times when they are entirely night or entirely day, no line between.

The Terminator not quite touching the South Pole

“The terminator path varies by time of day due to the rotation of the Earth on its axis. The terminator path also varies by time of year due to the revolution of the Earth around the sun: the plane of the terminator is nearly parallel to planes created by lines of longitude during the equinoxes, and at its maximum angle of approximately 23.5 degrees to the equator during the solstices.”

“The terminator moves at approximately 1668 kilometers per hour (1036 miles per hour).”  The fastest airplanes and the satellites can overtake and cross it repeatedly, but at the poles when the planet tips to its extreme, there is no terminator.  “It is possible to walk faster than the terminator at the poles, near to the equinoxes.”  How poetic all this is!  

“Amateur radio operators take advantage of conditions at the terminator (so-called "gray-line" propagation, or "grey-line" to the British) to perform long distance communications. Under good conditions, radio waves can travel along the terminator to antipodal points. This is primarily because the D layer, which absorbs high frequency signals, disappears rapidly on the dark side of the terminator line. This process is known as skywave propagation."

Mimas (left) and the Death Star (destroyed)

“Mimas” is a satellite, a moon, that has two  “terminators”— one for the light from the sun and the other for the reflected light of Saturn, its planet.  The facts get entangled in Greek mythology used as a naming resource.  In this case, Mimas was a giant son of Gaia, one of the seven Titans ruled by Saturn, whose other time was Chronus (Time).  The Wikipedia entry is worth reading.  (Wiki accounts seem to stay sane so long as they aren’t addressing people.)  Some call Mimas the Death Star because it’s about the same size and shape as the totally invented figure in “Star Wars IV: a New Hope.”  Los Angeles writers love their scifi as much as their Joe Campbell.  The satellite showed up in Star Trek as well.

Connectome before and after psilocybin, similar to LSD

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/apr/15/lsd-research-brain-neuroscience-human-nature-psychedelic?utm_source=esp&utm_medium=Email&utm_campaign=GU+Today+USA+-+Version+CB+header&utm_term=167343&subid=10790770&CMP=ema_565

<sup>Today’s news cycle includes brain scans of people on LSD, which the scientists say show that the drug is able to change the process flow of the neurons.  Ordinarily they are in feedback loops with specific purposes that don’t interact loop-to-loop.  LSD temporarily erases the boundaries to let the loops communicate among themselves, allowing a reconfiguring of the separations.  The obsessions and conflicts disappear, at least for a time, setting the person free.

Now for the poem my subconscious has been working on.</sup>

Time and place are the great terminators.

I walk along the gray line

Looking for you

Hoping to walk faster than regret

So as to overtake the dawn.

Why were we antipodal 

When we seemed to have the radio

Frequency set to survive

International air flights,

But then the D layer

Disappeared in darkness.

Maybe it was the high frequency 

Of cognitive dissonance,

A snowstorm that erased the words.

HOW I KNOW TIM BARRUS

Cover Image from "Puer Papers" Spring, 1979

It’s unclear how self-revealing I should be. On the one hand, everyone in this village sees every move I make and feels free to comment. That’s fine. They don’t interfere and sometimes they help. The people my age have heard the stories and opinions and now acknowledge me as a “character,” which is an affectionate compliment in Montana. Some people   even call me “young lady,” which passes for a compliment — they think I’ll be pleased since I’m 76 and YL is clearly code for something, like “Character who is old.” They mention their moms a lot. (I’m not a mom.)  What do I do that's so risky?  I think outside the box.  That means NOT Hollywood boxes: sex and crime.  Other ideas.

It’s the “successful” youngsters who are baffled, which is part of the reason I’m not at all qualified to be a teacher again. But there is one bunch of youngsters who understand: “boys at risk,” which is code for “they drive everyone crazy.” That’s because their world-view is not about beer and good grades. It’s more about survival and cosmology, though they might not describe it that way. Since 2007 when I read “The Boy and his Dog Are Sleeping,” I’ve been in conversation with this tribe of constantly changing boys who have HIV and confront it by making art, often photography.

Tim Barrus wrote the book, which is only about one dying boy. Officialdom, as in publishing, is mostly about profit. Tim had no real way to defend himself from attack by moral/political inquisitors because to him Indians were People, not pawns to be pressed into Procrustean conformity to missionary ideas. He’d known them as People since he was a boy picking up pink quartz flint-knapped tools on the plowed fields of his grandfather’s farm.  Sometimes he came across Indian corn that had gone feral and survived.

Later he was a teen cooking for a timber crew, caring for an abandoned Chippewa baby because all day he was in the kitchen where he could feed it and wash it until -- after weeks -- Mom got out of jail. (There were older women watching but they never intervened.) He was a natural nurturer, a lover of puppies.  He himself was only cherished until he started primary school. Then some teachers were abusers and a few held the magic key to other worlds.

"You'd better show some respect!"

This was also true in his birth family, particularly his raging alcoholic father, a kind of person Indians know. Like an Indian his father sometimes sought relief in wilderness, often in boats. He took Tim as a safeguard in case of accident, even the ones he caused himself by driving drunk. If the boy began to fear or complain, his father left him on frozen lakes or star-crammed desert — with no assurance that he’d return — to toughen him up. Eventually buying him a Harley-Davidson worked better, though it meant the boy could escape down the highway and did.

I’m not a mommie-person, coaxing and comforting. As far as I can see, many forms of compassion are just domination and give me a stomach-ache. I respond to wonder and justice — like, I wonder where the justice was in this attack on a writer who helps boys? So, metaphorically, I went over and sat down next to him to listen. (It’s easy on the Internet. Some of those sitting with me, cross-legged on the ground with their cell phones to their ears, were in Africa or Asia. Many Russians.) Sometimes, before the haters and their pillories got to them, the boys themselves talked to me. Some are dead now.  I still grieve for them.  Always will.

The planet's kids talk to each other.

I’m dazzled that T. is still writing and even mentioning me. He says he’s hard to love — I find it hard to accept that anyone loves me, so it’s a kind of sharing. We fit. Somehow he has gotten through my defenses, which means he is capable of doing dire harm. But he seems able to love people (me, for instance) without owning them and telling them what to do.

We live in our dark brains, more than many others do. The image of the dismembered boy in this cross-media production called "Just Before the Cure" — a young blonde boy who once looked a bit like Tristan — still speaks though his flesh is now all-in-a-pile. Other people might turn away from horror, but we think it has something to say. The skull of Orpheus is singing. Eavan and Kilian, the Irish poet-boys, recognized that story and named the ancient singer.

Publishing is still mostly a matter of people with capital investing in paper manuscripts, printed, bound, stored in warehouses, distributed to book stores, promoted by reviewers, and so on. It’s a business model. The content doesn’t matter so long as it sells. It doesn’t even have to be what it says it is -- or is accused of being -- so long as it sells. But now publishing is text-and-video with sound and takes on its own life because it sings, all its teeth in a grin. It follows the paths of music, which means intricate patterning, the reader joining the chorus, a planetary shower of meaning that can change whole cultures — and about time, too.

A visionary future.

They say that the 2%, now realizing how much money they have and wondering how to spend it since just hoarding is not much fun, are turning to nonprofits and experimental strategies. In 1961 when I came to the rez, the Peace Corps was just forming. I had realized that a reservation was an internal “third world” and so I joined a white sculptor near-shaman born in 1914. We were quiet participants in ceremonies of people born in the 1800’s. They were Bundle-Keepers, focused on a rolled-up bundle of animal hides — more like scientific study-skins than today’s tanned hides — but science was often blind to their meanings, which come from watching the live animal on the prairie.

So intent on categories and labels, the anthros sometimes didn’t feel the true meaning of them. A notorious photo shows an anthro holding forth to an old Blackfeet man. The anthro is comfortably seated on a Beaver Bundle, one of the biggest and most significant Sacred Bundles. The polite old Indian must not have told him what it was. Anyway, such a thing doesn’t need polite social juju to make it potent. It is what it is and exerts great power that can’t be felt, anymore than one feels x-rays, though derived images exist.

At Risk Boys also know how to be invisible, minimal, interstitial. They are a force for the future we can’t predict because they have abilities we can’t recognize. No one knows what their limits are, so long as they can stay alive. People sometimes remark that in news stories we see indigenous people suffering and then, at the same time are impressed by their Dionysian rhythm of joy and participation. That’s what these boys can be like. They are a tribe, self-determining, evading capture.

Alessio Pizzech, opera expert, with a singing Orphean skull