Anatomy Trains

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.

You can have haggis.  Like the pig intestines in Taiwan, everyone urges me to try it, each assuring me that this recipe or that restaurant transcends the bad reputation to achieve edibility, while each one actually manages to approximate a different kind of cat food.  I will somehow survive without delving further into this line of nutrition.  I don’t expect you to try raw oysters or urchin roe or clam chowder when you come to my house either.

I walked up on Costorphine Hill this dawn, ahead of my presentation for 100 or so therapists.  It was colder and windier than it looked, ruffling my shirt so I buttoned my cuffs and sought out a pathway up through the woods. After a sleepless night (there was a wedding at the hotel, and the DJ had the whole building thumping until well after midnight), it felt good to let the muscles loose and the mind coordinate to the rhythm of feet on the ground.  At the top was a beautiful view east over the zoo to Edinburgh, certainly one of the most comely cities on this planet.

Walking along the ridge among the mossy trees and lichen-covered rocks, I scared up a bunch of rabbits, small like Quan’s, and similarly poised between curious and scared.  The wild rabbits at home – used to hunters and beagles – are seldom seen and disappear like a shot if discovered, but these fat and happy little beings were clearly protected, as they loped calmly out of my sight in the ferns and rocks of the glen.

God knows if I used the word ‘glen’ right.  It means ‘shallow’, as in glenoid fossa, the shallow shoulder joint, but these Scots are as fiercely protective of their language as they are of haggis, so my natural tendency to imitate is not received kindly, but rather with severe looks, declarations, and dismissals.  It is with joy, not ridicule, that I affect assimilation, but they have had enough of English dominance, and American attempts at badly-accented chumminess are about as welcome as ‘MacDonalds’ – a perfectly good Scots name that is known the world around for the bland reliability of its mediocrity. .

Ducking into the men’s room in the midst of the Schipol polyglot after my ride over the pond, I came across something I had heard about, but had never seen.  The report said that putting a fly in the urinals improved men’s aim.  Sure enough, they had etched or somehow engraved a black insect shape into the white ceramic.  Despite the fact that it looked more like a trout fly than a real one, and despite the fact that I clearly knew it was a simple image, it was irresistible.  One’s aim is indeed truly drawn toward trying to hit the fly, even though one ‘knows’ it will do no good.

Of course it does do some good, because the fly is placed where it is on purpose, as this is the spot with the least ‘sprayback’, so aiming there reduces cleaning and public hazard.  So simple, and such a strong psychological effect.

We’ve been pooping and peeing for 350 million years, and we’ve been dealing with the result of waste accumulation due to crowding since Hammurabi wrote out the first law of sewage.  We’re still not doing every well.  As I walked away from the from the wall of gleaming porcelain mouths, my unit tsked, clanged, and whooshed a couple of gallons of water through, mixing a pint or so of liquid waste with perfectly good water, and then dumped the whole lot into a system that produces nothing but cost.

We do the same with solid waste, and back at home, we are about to spend a great deal of money for the privilege of mixing our waste immediately with tons of good water and running it gradually out through our dense Presumpscot clay ground to filter it.  The first builders of latrines and privies had to deal with the smell, which isn’t, of course, pleasant.  The invention of Sir Thomas Crapper’s toilet, on which modern toilets are based, had the wonderful advantage of allowing you to void waste inside your shelter without having to put up with the smell.

Today, the waste of good water is more a problem than the waste itself.  What we now have available to us is technology that could rapidly dry out the waste (thus eliminating the smell also) which would give is a net gain in good water, and incidentally, give us the basis for a dry composted material.  This may sound disgusting, but the composting toilets my father installed in 1972 still produce, over time, a dry and odorless dirt that can be added to a garden without penalty.

Why should we mix our bodily waste with clean water and then run it underground to settle out without using it again?  It is another of the ways of human beings that make no sense.  Pollution is just a resource in the wrong place at the wrong time.  If we could capture some of the resources we waste, everyone – even the poor Zimbabweans trying to vote today – would succeed.