Anatomy Trains

We have our first view of the Santorini caldera exactly at sunset (I am sure George engineered it this way).

Easy enough to find pictures; hard for those pictures to convey the drama of emerging from the close little alleyways of the town (almost Arabic in their coolness, though totally cruise-ship oriented in their contents - good jewelry, bad painting, “We ship anywhere” on crockery) to a sudden view of the whole circle of the volcano - raw, edgy, dipped into the sea opposite us, but clear in its crescent moon-like embrace of 24 square miles of ruffled water dotted with ships, bigger than Haleakala in Maui, with us perched on its highest point above the absolute black cliff straight down a couple of thousand feet into the harbor far below.

The explosion of this volcano, around 1600 BC, shook the Mediterranean world. The ash has been found in the Greenland ice, and in the rings of fallen sequoias in California. It produced a tsunami of 500 feet (the Javan tsunami of a couple of years ago was 60 feet). The island of Santorini itself was of course obliterated, and the island of Kriti (Crete) to its south took the full force of the tsunami and earthquake, and these two islands were the seat of the ancient Minoan civilization, that of the House of the Ax and the Labyrinth, the bull dance and the mosaics of Knossos, which ruled the whole of the eastern Mediterranean and perhaps beyond before the rise of the Phoenicians, the Athenian states and the whole Platonic school (Plato himself, writing many centuries after the event, theorized that the earthquake and volcano sank Atlantis, placing Atlantis here in Santorini), and way before the Roman triremes ruled the waves. The mighty Minoan empire was wiped out in a matter of days, never to rise again. See Mary Renault’s The King Must Die for a fictional but brilliantly realized tale of this time.

And oh yes, one other minor effect of this huge cataclysm: the initial pull of the tsunami drained the water around the head of the Red Sea, allowing a small group of escaping slaves from a minor tribe on the Levant to cross to safety from Egypt to the Sinai, while the pursuing army was caught in the returning water of the tsunami itself. “Pharoah’s army got drownded, Oh, Mary, don’t you weep.”

“Oh, Greece”, I cry with my arms outspread in prodigal welcome and heartfelt love of your wine-dark Aegean under your flawless turquoise sky, love of your good-humoured folk with their seductive gift of gab fronting for their fundamental generosity of spirit.  My cry is tinged with despair and nostalgic regret at the invasion of American music and Anglophonic Europeanism into your unique corner of the world.

We are but a mile or two from our arrival spot, a jetport on the ancient island of Thira, known to all now as the island of Saint Irene – Santorini.  I have never visited here before, but I have visited dozens of islands just like it here in the Cyclades, so it feels like a homecoming.  And a homecoming one both welcomes and holds one’s hands against – the tiny fishing village of the 60’s that would have had a pension with a couple of rooms for the few Germans intrepid enough to cross the island by donkey is now a distended strip of tourist restaurants, with menus in English and French, everything written in the Roman alphabet.  Restauranteurs solicit the tourists like touts, with a bit of the old Greek insouciance, but a tiredness and desperation that speaks of a Johnny-come-lately to the European Union grasping for euros in place of the old drachma, no longer the proudly independent inheritors of the cradle of Western civilization.  Now they’ve inherited the printed towel maps and the crappy tourist dreck that follows the money everywhere.

This morning I stirred at 7 to find a cloudy day.  I slipped from our bed and put on my sneakers to climb through the village to the switchback road that led up through the olive groves to the pass between two mountains. It was an hour’s upward walk, getting wilder and windier as I rose above the beach and town.  The winds were flaring down off the slopes across the sea, cat’s paws and williwaws among the few caíques moored offshore.  By the time I get to the crest of the pass, the tops of the mountains on either side are shrouded in swirling cloud, the wind so strong that I am being pelted with small stones as I stood leaning into it and looking down to the similar beach town far down on the other side of the island.

On the way down, loath to take the same route home, I followed a little path across the steep slope just to see where it would lead, and ended up at one of those ubiquitous Greek shrines – a little building of blue and white so small I had to duck as I entered.  I cross myself not in homage to the Olympian gods or God of the Book, but to the Greeks and their orthodox faith.  The tiny building is full of icons to St George, St Nicholas, and the Virgin Madonna, and incense and candles and spent matches and little burners for the faithful who make the climb to this altar nestled into the rocks in the side of the cliff.  A little more investigation and I find out why it’s here in particular – a cave snakes into the hill from behind the building, and deep within, my eyes adjusting to the trickle of light, is a trickle of water that has made, over centuries, strange-lipped pool formations in the cave.

The water is presumably consecrated in some way; people use it for offerings.  I suspect, as in England, this little church is a Christian overlay on a pagan sacred site, an intuition later confirmed: this was a sacred source of water for the ancient Thirians priests who had their acropolis fort at the top of the hill. Putting thoughts of bat-shit and snakes aside, I scramble into the dark, following the sound, and drink the sweet water, tangy with the mineral earth.

As I descend the smaller switchback path, braking myself with my jelly-like quads, the peculiar heaviness, almost grief, that comes from descending back into the human world from an accomplished height accompanies me back to the sea-level hotel.  The town of Kamari is now up and moving - cleaning the streets, opening the stores, setting out the racks of postcards, and the early tourists out to get their sun cream and plan their days, overfilling them as they do at home, spreading their endless money indiscriminately among these ever-more impoverished people – in my opinion, having known them when they were really poor but still rich in culture.  Blessed, sayeth the Lord, are the poor in spirit.

One of the most vexing questions in evolution is why and how we got up off all fours and started to walk on two legs.  The plantigrade human posture is quite unique in the mammalian world, and no other primate adopts it for long, let alone as a lifetime strategy.  Owen Lovejoy posits throwing (rocks at stationary or moving prey, or indeed predators, as the baboons still do today, standing on three legs and bravely seeing off a leopard with a hail of stones) as the basic impetus for getting up on two legs, and even for developing calculation and language.

(http://williamcalvin.com/1980s/1983JTheoretBiol.htm)

Don’t tell meine freunde Simone, as she is quite wedded to another controversial theory - the aquatic ape theory that we went through a period of being aquatic (and therefore lost our hair, gained fat, and a number of othet things that can be explored via the articles of Aliter Hardy and the books of Elaine Morgan, et al.) where we learned to stand, hold our breath (and thus initiated the impetus to speech), lost our hair, stood up in the bouyant environment, and came back to land a changed monkey.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aquatic_ape_hypothesis

The throwing theory has a lot going for it, though it does nothing to explain how we lost our hair, but then the aquatic ape theory does nothing to explain why our eyes moved around to the front of our head.  The bicameral mind that results is certainly different from the whales, dolphins, seals, rabbits, and squirrels (for instance), who kept their eyes on the sides of their heads, the better to spot attacks from the side and behind (lions and tigers and bears, oh my).

Bringing the eyes around front - generally a hunter’s strategy - allows for parallax, which is useful in catching a branch while brachiating, and it also allows the calculations for a ‘launch window’ and trajectory for a stone thrown now to collide with it’s object somewhen and somewhere later.

Whether we stood and walked from throwing, or stood and walked in the water and later put our new-found hands to throwing may be put to rest in our lifetime, or it may remain part of the wonderful mystery that surrounds our origins.  But there is no doubt that throwing is an art we have taken to, developed, and finally perfected in a big way.

The image that ends the first scene in 2001 - A Space Odyssey, of the ape throwing the bone-tool into the air and it becoming a space station (cue the Strauss waltz) is an accurate one.  We have become so good at throwing that we can throw cars down the highway at 120 km/hr.  We have become such adept hurlers that we can hurl an airplane at 1200 km/hr.

But the real test of throwing comes in our ability to throw small ’stones’ at other planets.  After a couple of trial runs, the folks at NASA have just succeeded in throwing a half a ton ‘rock’ at Mars.  Not only are we good enough at throwing that we can accelerate a rock fast enough to escape the Earth’s gravity, we can then aim that rock at a planet that is 35 million miles at its perigee, which means it takes more than 3 minutes for any light-borne electromagnetic message to get to the ’stone’ of the satellite for any course changes we might initiate.

Anyway, not only can we throw this stone out of the Terran pull, but ‘hit’ a planet more than three light minutes away.  Not only can we hit Mars, we can just miss Mars at precisely the right angle so that our stone goes in orbit around it.  Not only can we go into orbit around it, but we can take a half-ton piece of it and so calculate our throwing such that this 1000-lb piece will land where we want it, within one degree of the angle we planned, and with such a soft landing that the machinery inside the stone will still work to take pictures, dig, analyze the results, and report back to Earth over the vasty spacingness in between.

This is what has happened with the Mars lander:
http://phoenix.lpl.arizona.edu

I salute the men and women of the team that accomplished this refined form of throwing, which may help us know whether life is easy or difficult to start in this universe (and thus whether God is a K-related or r-related species - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K-selection).

I suppose I should salute those who are throwing bullets and shells with a smaller but deadly accuracy in Iraq and Afghanistan, but I find it hard to justify this aggressive or defensive throwing, as it seems just one step above the murderous ape in 2001.

But our ability to throw extended into space seems not a waste of money to me, as war does, but a very refined development of a basic ability.  If we were to look at the same thing applied to swimming, we can certainly point to the development of the aqualung and fins, and maybe sailboats and navy ships, but nothing up against this wonderfully precise application of throwing we call the space program.

Speaking of the boat, I spent 7 hours at the wheel yesterday without a break.  I escaped the endless list of the home front at 2:15 and beat my way downriver (but uptide and against a freshening SW breeze) into the bay.  These springtime days bring sudden strong winds, cold and sharp-tongued as your 5th grade teacher. By the time I cleared Thrumcap Island, I was rail under, hard on the wind, chop spray flying overhead and salting my glasses, riding the edge out to sea with straining sails and sheets.

The goal was Damariscove Island, a long, thin treeless and haunted offshore island, the last before the deep Atlantic.  Damariscove is distinguished by having been the stopping place for Maine’s first tourists, the first ’summer people’. English fishing boats followed the explorers over to gather the cod when they were too numerous to count.  They set up on this island as a shelter and resting spot, to store gear they wouldn’t have to carry back to Old Blighty, as a place to dry the salt fish, and as a gossip and trading post. It was far enough ‘off the main’ to be safe from the ’savages’ that prevented permanent mainland settlements.  Although no one knows when the visiting first started, it was certainly in full swing in the late 1500’s.  The island is named for Captain Dameril, who set up a store there in 1608.  It is hard to credit that maybe thirty ships sailed out of this tiny sleepy harbor fully 400 years ago.

But the Pilgrims, landing a couple of days’ sail south on Cape Cod, and desperate after the deadly winter of 1620, sent a boat up to Damariscove in the spring of ’21 to get fish and other things, and were generously assisted - so this summer settlement helped save the Pilgrims.  It was also the rendezvous for English, French, and Dutch ships making their way to the colonial settlements in Virginia and New Amsterdam (New York).  Men drank, gambled, quarreled, bartered with each other and the Indians – in other words, a typical commercial seaport.

The harbor is mightily thin and open to the southwest, which makes it a challenge for single-handed boats from that day to this, so I rounded up to take one of the moorings near the old Coast Guard station, only to find at the crucial moment that my batteries were dead.  (The floating switch on the bilge pump had packed up and run them down.)

In a high wind, you have only a few second to get a mooring secure, and I missed my moment. I couldn’t hold the mooring pennant, and without an engine was pushed ignominiously up the tiny harbor to rest bumping against the rocks.  Desperate, breathing hard – it was a falling tide, I was alone, and I had been in this situation before without good result – I used the whisker pole to push myself off before I got stuck fast, got the sails up again, and – shaking - short-tacked my way up the cove past the ledges to the open water.

I decided to spend the night closer to shore, as I would have no power for lights, stove or anything. Starting at 6:30, I opened the sails and made my way shoreward, fighting the ebbing tide, but helped by the wind that persisted long after the sun had gone to bed, I decided to try to make it all the way home, and arrived back on the mooring at exactly 9:15, far into nautical twilight – I put the sails away mostly by feel.

Except for a 30-second run down below to check the bilge, I had not left the wheel for 7 hours.  It was a great lesson, and one that ended with a welcoming committee (no one should have been out alone on such a windy day, so Annie, Quan, Peter and Sarah, knowing I was out in the airy dark, were anxiously awaiting my return) and with me in my soft bed – not bad therapy.

In these few brief days between the coming of the light and the arrival of the bugs, it is good to get your hands in the earth, turn the soil, pluck the weeds, set the seeds - Maine is glorious at this time, so don’t tell anyone else.  These nails of mine - that spend too much time coaxing sense from these computer keys and feeling for the terrain under the human skin - need dirt under them.  By the end of these days, between the boat and garden, my city hands are scraped and gouged, no good for bodywork, but they feel like hands again.

Does anyone have a copy of Light Years Away?  A sleeper film from the early 80’s maybe; doesn’t seem to be on anyone’s list (like Netflix). Trevor Howard plays a spiritual teacher in back-of-beyond Ireland whose quest is to fly.  At one point he is pecked, scratched, and torn by all his raptors, and he has his assistant bury him up to his neck in the peaty soil for three days and feed him soup by hand.

At the end of the three days (a little heavy on the symbolism here), he rises from the soil with his skin restored.  I have never tried the method (we hit Presumpscot clay within a foot or two here), but I wonder if the skin can absorb minerals directly from the soil.  Between that and the bacteria that could act commensally to seal the skin, it looks like a good idea.

Spring here means the ‘Order of the Bloody Knuckle’, seasonal changes around the boats, docks, plumbing fixtures and the barn are hard on the hands.  Working the soil speeds the recovery.

New York, this time, is by turns wonderful and awful.  From the pleasant spring sunshine of Maine, I dive into the canyons of the city, where a cold wind tunnels down between the buildings, turning umbrellas inside out and getting in your crevices.  The clerks seem hostile, the traffic aggressive, the streets dangerous.  Intending to take a long walk, I get some water instead and quickly return to Michael’s loft, softly lit, warm furniture, full of good cooking smells.

By yesterday the sun is warm and the clerk at Starbucks gives me a coffee rather than break my $100 bill, and I am so warmed I come back to give her both the money and a tip later when I have change.

The course - my last in a long string of traveling gigs - is likewise up and down as we search out a modus vivendi for conveying what we have in bigger ways to the yoga, Pilates, and personal training professions.  Sometimes I feel we have a coherent message, and sometimes it feels as if we are being spread way too thin, but such is the nature of experiment and working into new areas.

But I am too tired to really pop in the class, so let’s go home and see if there’s a rest available for me to recharge the batteries for another round later this year.  Fatigue is something I often feel temporarily, but this  - 45 of the last 54 days teaching or traveling (so those 9 recovering, packing, doing laundry) – feels a deep tiredness – systemic, a more profound level of chemistry, and a Dantean level of lostness that goes along with it.

The fatigue spreads like a virus – I am tired of the election.  I am tired that after one or two debates last winter where, for one brief shining moment it looked like we might have a discussion of the truly pressing issues at hand.  But instead we have been dragged back into old-style gutter politics by the very first woman who had earned our grudging and then genuine admiration as the first woman to contend on the playing field of the presidency.  I am tired of the non-work on energy and the silly prating of the chattering classes while the world spins out of control and we, the people, can seemingly do nothing, and evince no interest in doing so.

So it was with some interest that I emerged onto the street to the sounds of 60’s protest chants, and the sight of banners across the sidewalk.  It was a small but well-organized protest by W.A.R. – a PETA-like group called Win Animal Rights – who had discovered that Roger Waltzman, an executive with ties to a lab that kills test animals, lived across the street, and was embarrassing him to his family and neighbors by holding this noisy protest outside his home.

“Huntington Life Sciences Kills 500 Animals Every Day – Novartis Pays Them to Do It” read the headline on the paper they were passing out.  Huntingdon Life Sciences kills these animals for product testing – toothpaste and tanning lotion in the eyes, poisons, cuts, burns, broken limbs – if it is all true, then more power to these folks, at least they are up and doing something.

Novartis, a pharmaceutical company, publishes Netter, a great service to our trade.  But if you want them to stop being associated with killing animals, you can email Roger Waltzman at roger.waltzman@novartis.com, or follow up with WAR at http://www.myspace.com/winanimalrights.

May my children, real and children of spirit, rise up and take control of our country.  “The Earth has a skin and that skin has diseases,” I paraphrase Nietzsche, “and one of those diseases is Man.”  Are we a disease or an embryonic demi-urge?  The next few generations will tell, and it seems a pretty close run question to me.  I am interested in the continuation of the human experiment, but not at the cost of all these innocent animals, all these innocent children, all these nascent countries, and the exquisite resources of the earth – our yolk sac for this developmental journey.

Cheney has amassed $40 billion out of this war and the attendant oil profits. The continued ascendancy of him and his ilk is the most fatiguing thing of all.  He deserves to be on trial in Den Hague.

I’m with David Mamet, who says:  “I’m afraid of only two things:being lazy and being cowardly.”

Here’s the full paragraph, quoted from the New Yorker:  “I hate the computer, I hate their spell-check.  I won’t ever do email.  I love working on a typewriter, the rhythm, the sound; it’s like playing the piano, which I do too.  I’m afraid of only two things:being lazy and being cowardly. I get up early in the morning and go to work.  I love to write.”

I suppose one must admit the primal landforms shimmering in lovely light, with cool dawns and dry warm days, and towns full of rugged individuals.

But underfoot, the entire desert southwest of the United States is one big catbox; everywhere you walk off the road, it feels like kitty litter.

(thanks to Kathleen Mary)

For one day, the weather finally clears in Oslo, and in the lingering evening from my tiny 15th floor balcony (reminiscent of a hot-air balloon basket – I have the sickening feeling that my evil twin is going to grab my body, leap to the railing and jump wildly for the waterfall) I can finally see more than the pounding spray below me. A sliver of cupped moonlight follows the sun to bed, and far to my left, the harbor – I didn’t know I had a sea view until this moment - reflects the last orange of the daylight.

By tomorrow, according to CNN, it will be cold rain again, and Patreus and Crocker will be tossed softballs by Congress for an easy hit into more war, more lives lost, more disruption for the poor people who were unlucky enough to be in Dick Cheney’s way. The way they got this war started – Rummy and Cheney and Perles and Wolfowitz – that’s got to be a form of cheating? It is hard to keep going sometimes, having faith that the political and the environmental degradation will not overwhelm this human experiment before the work that we do – preparing the next generation of children for this 21st century world - has a chance to take hold.

Each day I travel down the hill to the class in the town center on a five-minute tram ride. The ticket is 30 kr., about $6. No one checks whether you have a ticket,. My American sensibility suggests that $12/day is a bit much, and for reasons too complicated to explain, I have trouble getting Norwegian cash. In any case, I confess to jumping on and off again without a ticket some mornings.

The ethic that we grew up with in the hippie era – it’s ok to stick it to ‘the man’, including the phone company, the government, or anyone corporate, while maintaining a high personal ethic with our fellow individuals. (Supposedly – in fact we were sexist in our treatment of both women and gays.)

Nowadays, this kind of petty cheating is very rare for me – this one was remarkable for its appearance. Nobody wants to pay more taxes than they have to, so that’s simply a form of disguise. But not only can I afford the things I used to rationalize cheating on, but decades have shown me the humans in the corporations – and of course I have a few of those corporations myself these days. I still think ‘the people’ are getting screwed, but the sharply-drawn blacks and whites have all gone for the gray wash like those a friend showed me on some drawings in a museum in Edinburgh.

I have spent nearly $1300 replacing 2 shirts, 2 pairs of pants (a shirt has two sleeves, but it’s not a pair of shirts – why is that?), underwear, and a belt and a toothbrush, toothpaste, and shampoo – and not even high quality clothes. Surely that’s enough? Doesn’t that justify some cheating? But what does the Oslo Transit Authority have to do with British Airways?

In some form of poetry, British Airways coughs up my suitcase in my literal last hour in Oslo – I collect it and drop it onto my flight to Munich. BA offers to pay me £35 ($70) for having lost my luggage – surely that’s a form of cheating? Not even worth filing for, as it will take more time than it’s worth.

As the plane peels out over the rugged and extraordinary coast, I contemplate what constitutes cheating, and rapidly move from the convoluted but navigable pathways of the mind to the wild and stormy uncharted domain of the heart.

I recently had to tell a good friend that he hadn’t made the cut for a team. From the brain’s point of view, it was a straightforward call, but my heart – my compassion and my fear all mixed up – blew the communication, and the friendship was shot out of the sky. I never did team sports as a kid, and I guess I missed out on how to do these things kindly but quickly and clearly.

More recently still, I had to tell another friend - who was much younger emotionally than I ever suspected – that her fantasies about our ‘deep connection’ were just that. This was a blow, as I had thought I had a good friend, with none of the clutter that can gum up the easiest cross-gender friendship (at least in my generation – Misty seems immune to the problem and has equal friends in both genders). But the empathy and charm I use to create the bonds of friendship is all too easily mistaken for seduction, so - all unintended – I was the cheat. I must be so careful, and I hate having to be so watchful, so closed-hearted, so vigilant. Must I so close my heart to live as I am in this world?

But: Thou shalt not commit pain.

And I did.

My dear, sweet, infirm and insane wife understands the pathways of the heart better than anyone I know. A lot of good it has done her (not). Some people ‘get’ her and celebrate her wisdom, some (like my family) see only the surface and shake their heads in disbelief that I am with her, and gloriously happy with her, despite our differences, despite the frustrations, despite the fact that in learning her, I have committed pain.

The human heart is minefield, a battlefield, a stormy ocean, and a nightmare of phantasms all rolled into one. Of course it’s an Alpine meadow, a calm Aegean sea, and an exhilarating flying dream as well. Right now, though, with my body breaking down and my mind running on fumes from too much travel and too little reflective time, my heart and everyone else’s seems terra incognita, ultima thule, one of Dante’s circles of Hell.

I look forward to time off the road, out of this plane, in the arms of the one who sets straight the paths, calms the storms, and sorts the complexities out in simple, direct, and refreshingly earthy terms. Quan, I celebrate you.

With the typical English superficial horror of / secret delight in inefficiency, the newly opened Terminal 5 at Heathrow went from ‘All hail!’ to shambolic within hours of its grand opening. I had seen it on the news from my hotel in Edinburgh, and so took the precaution of checking the bag only to Heathrow. I fetched it, rechecked it again to Oslo so it wouldn’t get lost, and went back in through security. Since the plane from Edinburgh was an hour late, I was running and puffing through this process and made it just in time for the Oslo flight.

Terminal 5, handsome though it is, is, was indeed a mess – hundreds of men (and a few women) in security yellow coats with BA (British Airways) or BAA (British Airports Authority) on the back - were wandering up and down the corridors, in and out of those doors you and I may not breech, carrying flashlights or clipboards, but obviously lost, trying to look busy so no one would ask them anything or send them on an errand even more foolish and hopeless than the one they were currently on.

Passengers, meanwhile, with no information, no luggage, no signage or anything to help them along, went to pieces in queues or in corners, manifesting all five stages of grief.

I needn’t have bothered with my extra trouble – they lost my bag anyway. So here I am, high in an apartment building over the Aakers Elve Falls with only the sweaty clothes I threw on to make the trip, and BA has no idea, this next day, where my bag is or when it might arrive. CNN says there are 28,000 lost bags in Heathrow, so it could easily be weeks.

Oslo feels a bit lonely and sterile – and I am bound to this apartment for the evening in any case, since I have washed out my only clothes and have hung them to dry for the morning. (I hope). The falls are my straw to clutch at the moment, a beautiful cataract whitewater feature running full force down through the city, the old mills that line it now gentrified into boutique apartments and clever little shops. I look down on it wondering how one would run it in a kayak, a feat I will leave to younger bodies and reflexes.

The constant tumult of white water and spray is a balm to the eye, and background noise so like and yet so unlike the roar of an airplane, which I would welcome if it were the one bringing me my bag with the phone charger, the visual aids I need for class, my shaving brush, and a hundred other things that it will, in the fullness of time, be possible to replace, but I would really rather not.