09 On Ingenuity

A consultant said, speak to us of ingenuity.
And the prophet spoke thusly:

When James Watt pioneered the steam engine, it powered a revolution. His key insight was the seemingly simple idea to separate the piston from the condensation chamber. Keeping the piston hot transformed the machine from a curious gadget into a powerful tool.

Unfortunately, as industrial society mushroomed, Watt’s machine rapidly gobbled up Europe’s forests. The solution to one problem had created an even greater challenge, and more ingenuity was called for.

The use of coal became widespread, giving rise to a new axiom: You gotta spend energy to make energy. Steam shovels dug the holes. Steam pumped the sump water out, crushed the ore, and transported whatever coal was not needed to power the machines that had helped produce it.

A concept is needed to define the relation between energy that goes in, and the energy that comes out. That concept is called the E.R.O.I. - the energy return on investment.

As our holes get deeper and deeper, and we crush the oil sands, we are rapidly heading towards an E.R.O.I. of one to one. For every barrel of oil produced, one barrel of oil will be required to produce it.

We’ve got to include the costs people! Global warming is also a cost of the energy extraction game. And the dreadful wars ! The wars to gain control of the lands through which the pipelines flow. How much oil does it take to keep a Hummer humming?

Dear people of Orphalese. This black sludge leaking from the rusty bucket behind me - we live in an age in which we are killing each other to secure its flow. Can you think of any reason to minimize its use?

We’ve reached the end stop of James Watt’s mechanical dream. It had its time, but move on we must. Ingenuity people. Ingenuity.

08 On Transportation

And then the ice-cream man said, speak to us of transportation.
And he answered and said:

Verily the world is in motion, even as the glaciers do not rest. Everything is in constant flux, transforming itself and all else in time and space.

Nature has such unnerving patience. Patiently the fig leaf is harnessing the sun’s life-giving rays, restoring a tiny bit of order to your tangled gardens.

Humans, though we too be born of nature, are less patient than our mother. We buzz about in our jolting jalopies, and floating fortresses such as the perforated bucket bobbing behind me, leaking fuel oil into your waters even as I speak.

Alas I am no efficiency expert, but I do know this. Internal combustion engines are big on explosions. These are fabulously loud, but irreversible. To wit: The faster you seek to transform your world, the less efficient you will be. Patience, people, patience. Patience, I’m afraid, is the key.

Your cars are to you the very symbol of your freedom when actually, they are the fetters that make you immobile. You would do better to see the car as the symbol of your mania. The bee does not leave its hive to collect pollen from just one plant, yet you think it nothing to fire up your engines for a million single-errand, one-stop trips.

And when you speed past a hitchhiker, do you feel a moral obligation to stop? Perhaps you should.

07 On Paranoid Delusions

Then a young schizophrenic said, Speak to us of paranoid delusions.
And he answered, saying:

Paranoia will destroy ya. And yet I do still wonder. Have we really no right to be paranoid?

For though there be no mastermind, you may yet be the victims of a conspiracy. And though the monster be faceless, it may yet be out to get you. For you are naught but a number in a file on a data bank of a gargantuan, impersonal bureaucracy. As such, is it relevant whether “they” actually exist? And if not, then try telling that to “them”.

More often than not, perceptions of reality and definitions of sanity are naught but an exercise in democracy. Verily, schizophrenia is but a break from reality. This we know to be true. But who would be the arbiter of reality? You look to me, but am I aught but a raving lunatic?

Here a brief, but uneasy dissenting murmur made it’s way through the crowd. The prophet continued unfazed:

What can it mean to be “diagnosed” with schizophrenia? In the case of mental illness, diagnosis is really no more than the attaching of names to symptoms perceived.
If my doctor should inform me that appendicitis is the cause of my abdominal pains, then I shall gladly deem this a diagnosis. But to be “diagnosed” with schizophrenia is the equivalent of being told that one is suffering from abdominal pains.

May I quote Aldous Huxley?
“They are normal not in the absolute sense of the word; they are normal only in relation to a profoundly abnormal society”.

Schizophrenia then is the likely result of broad thinking. Even as the beating of a butterfly’s wings is inexorably linked to the surging price of gasoline, if you are to think too intensely about the incestuous bureaucratic sludge of an unaccountable, uncaring government, you will in all likelihood get your wires crossed. Ponder this at you own peril.

05 On Television

The man with the camcorder in his pants harbored a dark secret. Ail was a blind filmmaker. Riding on past successes he thought it prudent not to tell the studio executives of his fading eyesight.

Ali was a sad and broken man. His only saving grace was that he had not had to see any of his last five films, or The Blair Witch Project for that matter.
Speak to us of television, he said.

And the prophet answered:
In the evil east, television is run by the state (a collective gasp of horror), as a propaganda tool. In the wicked west, television is run by advertisers, as a teaching aid. Television teaches us many meaningful lessons about the meaning of life. The modern world, to which I’ve recently been, is full of shiny things. Television teaches you to collect them all. It teaches you how to need. That is it’s role. That is it’s purpose.

To buy these shiny things, you must needs rise early tomorrow morning, so better go to bed soon. You will return tired and late, desperately seeking an escape from your life. And in the comfort of your own home, there shall be a large black box, to transport you far, far away from this drudgery.

The box does not demand wakefulness. It does not even demand your attention. You’ve had a rough day. And the couch is comfy, is it not?

In your semi catatonic state you are hardly engaging company. Fortunately the box does not judge you, but simply accepts you as you are. It lulls you into sweet, comfortable rest, like sleep. So very much like sleep, but not of the deep variety. For in deep sleep, there can be no alpha waves.

Without alpha waves, there can be no dreams. And the black box wouldn’t dream of depriving you of yours. It nurtures them kindly, allowing you to float freely in a boundless sea of alpha waves.

And in so doing, the black box happily obliterates the remaining hours of your day, the dangerous hours in which an idle worker, a waking worker left unattended could turn into a blundering political force.

Happily such nightmarish scenarios are as unlikely as unhappy endings. So hypnotists of Orphalese, please take a deep bow before the ad man with a budget.

And even as the sun is a thousand times brighter than the moon, so the ad man’s budget shall be decided by a simple mathematical formula: The budget for each commercial programming shall be equal to the entire budget of the forty two minutes of filler that are required to round out an hour of programming.

The reovolution, my friends, is not being televised. Or, if it was televised, then surely we blinked and missed it.

Here the prophet paused, caught his breath, and took a lengthy drag from his fag.

04 On the Evils of the Modern World

Speak to us of the evils of the modern world, spoke a middle aged woman, whose job it was to write movie blurbs for TV Guide magazine.
The prophet said:
There are exactly two. One is the camcorder, and the other is the cellphone.

At that point, a slight hush rippled though the gathering, and Ali, who had been taping the event for future generations, quickly shut off his camcorder, and tucked it away.

The prophet continued his narrative:
Seek not to mummify your memories on electromagnetic tape, for they refuse to be embalmed. The lens is not an eye. It records, but it cannot see. Can a Frog, high on formaldehyde, recapture the gay bounce of his former days? The more you record, the less it will mean.

Fain would I seek to live life while manufacturing a myth, but how can this be done? Don’t obliterate your present by seeking to relive the past. Would you willingly lay bare your waking hours on the editing altar, to create a memory of an event not experienced?
Or would you rather refuse to even digest your tedious footage, simply to add to the detritus that is Bob Saget’s private collection, and our very public hell? The camcorder has bestowed upon us an aesthetic that allows our eyes to be blinded by reality television and our minds to numbed into accepting without outrage a cinematic hoax titled: “The Blair Witch Project.”

Dear people of Orphalese, please don’t accept the bastardization of truth - not even in your fiction.

Just then his bloody phone rang. He chose not to answer it.

03 On Travel

And thus Achmed, an enterprising young travel agent (proprietor of Club Achmed) said:

Speak to us of the distant lands you have seen, and tell us which of these the weary traveler might seek for a quiet get-away.

The prophet replied:
I boarded a train to the modern world, and found it to be a world of evils. Thence, I hitched a ride to the postmodern world, and found it to be a place of cynics. Everyone I met there was a prophet. And everything the prophets prophesied was true. For truth was relative, and everything was relatively true.

Astrology, personology and pop-psychology - you just couldn’t go wrong. Work became simple, but boring. There was so much new-age good feeling to go around, that I very nearly made the fatal mistake of slitting my wrists. Existence felt as empty as a mixed metaphor, straining to break free from the pages of a two bit blog. I found myself once more, helplessly pining for the evils of the modern world.

With this the prophet scratched his balls for emphasis, and pulled out a cigarette.

02 On Loneliness

And No one said, speak to us of loneliness and excessive masturbation.
To which he replied:

Wouldn’t it be much better to have this conversation with your father?

My father was gone ere even I entered this world, and in her desperation, my poor mother gave me a foolish name.

And so he answered:
Should one pity the demented bag lady who converses with shadows and holds council with her own self? Though she be lonely, she is not alone, for even in her solitude, she has someone to talk to.

Let me ask you, dear people of Orphalese, a strictly hypothetical question. Imagine what it might be like to be the smartest person in the world. To know all there is to know in this universe, and to bask each day in the general idiocy that surrounds us all. That would be, I can only imagine, the loneliest perch in the world, far more so than the top of this oil drum.

I have crossed the ocean many times, and always I have made loneliness my dearest companion. With loneliness by my side, I was never cold, and never alone.

Your ancestors have called me aloof, and drunk with my own aloneness. And so I left. And some have said: “He holds council with the trees of the forest, but not with men.” It is true, I did once get into a philosophical argument with a Douglas Fir, but as we were alone in the forest, we made no sound. And if I was drunk at the time, then it was not of aloneness that I was drunk.

Fain would I get sloshed with my aloneness.

Who are we to judge the peculiar sensibilities of a Douglas Fir?

And is it not solitude herself, that gives flight to the imagination? Thus in many a dark and smelly hour, holed away in the hold of a leaky bucket, with not even rats to keep me company, (for the rats had long fled to the upper decks), I pressed loneliness especially tightly to my bosom.

And through my minds eye did I gaze over her immaculate nakedness, and though I may have had to beg of my imagination for her gentle caress, my own busy hands over the soft contours of her breasts, and hers gently stroking…

A gasp went through the crowd, even as his voice trailed off in a fog of lost memories. Thereupon the crowd fell silent, in rapt attention causing the prophet to look down shyly, as if searching the oily puddles for remnants of his flowing discourse.

Meanwhile, more people had gathered, for if there is one thing the people of Orphalese could not resist, it was a loony old fart preaching from a rusty oil drum, especially one who absentmindedly scratched his balls as he spoke of masturbation.

And even as the drizzle gave way to rain, and the rain started to give way to a downpour of biblical proportions, the population of Orphalese continued to flock near, unable to tear themselves away from a prophet with a beard long enough to touch the ground, from his perch high atop the oil drum. Their eyes and ears existed for Almustafa alone.

Unnoticed by the people of Orphalese were the two hundred illegal immigrants who formed the backdrop to this gathering. Like the prophet who had stowed away among them, they too had survived the treacherous passage in the unsanitary, unseaworthy bucket that was now straining to be free of it’s screaming leash. They too looked on in utter amazement, for although they understood not a single word spoken, their souls drank freely from the fountain of discourse that was the prophet’s wisdom. They dared not leave the boat for fear of interrupting the glorious spectacle in progress, even if there was a very real fear that the ship, as it was now moored, might yet sink, driven down by the relentless rain. Collectively they dared not even to make a sound for fear that it could silence the prophet, or else, cause their ship to disintegrate.

More and more people joined the gathering, their eyes unseeing of the shivering migrants, their loving gaze bathing in the prophet alone.

Among these newcomers was a frail Methuselah, to rival in years the prophet himself. He was the tax collector of Orphalese, still active after countless years as a dedicated public servant. He now spoke:

Speak to us of…
But his modest words emerged merely as a faint croaking sound, unheard above the general din, easily drowned out by the hum and the haw.

01 The Coming of the Ship

No one had climbed the hill, though once without the walls of Orphalese, now well within it’s urban sprawl. Through the smog, No one beheld a decrepit ship, limping into the harbour. Because he was a seer, son of Almitra, No one at once saw in this, the ancient prophesy confirmed. On the eve of the new millennium, this was indeed the second coming of Almustafa.

Almustafa had grown old and frail in his long absence. He was tired from his arduous journey at sea. The crowd that awaited him now, cheering as he stumbled onto the gangway, was something unexpected. So pleased was he to see so many of the daughters and sons and granddaughters and grandsons of the ones he had left behind so long ago, that he tripped over his own beard, nearly rolling off the plank. And though the crowd was not huge - there were ten people in all - it was a smashing good turnout considering that in all his absence, he had not written once.

The tour itself had been promoted badly and received worse. His agent fell victim to a fatal stoning, in connection with a recent hasty departure from a far off place. Those who once knew Almustafa were long dead. He found himself once again, solitary and alone.

On this cold and wet December day, the shivering group of ten consisted of No one in particular, and the first nine people he had encountered on his run from the top of the hill to the edge of the pier, where Almustafa’s long white beard was finally touching solid ground once more.

Then, for the first time, the great prophet spoke:
“Dear people of Orphalese,” he said to the ten that were listening, “It’s good to be back”. (1)

Here a change seemed to sweep over the old man, a past life remembered, leading him to leap almost nimbly onto a rusty old oil drum, it’s bright orange glow matching perfectly the perforated vessel that had brought him here. No one looked on in awe. The transformation of the old man’s visage was so striking, that suddenly, in those valleys and craters of wisdom, he began to see shadows of his own wiser, kinder self.

No one hailed him, saying:
Please speak to us, and give us of your truth.

And he answered:
People of Orphalese, of what can I speak save of that which is even now moving within your souls?