IMAGINE ALL THE PICTURES

 THIS SILLY PROGRAM WON'T LET ME UPLOAD.

FOR A COMPLETE COPY OF OUR INCOMPLETE PROSPECTUS JUST EMAIL:

dennishwilliams@gmail.com

                                                                                                                                                             

                      

 CASA GOOFY INTERNATIONAL

(and los amigos childcare) ARE:

Programs Under Artfare (a five oh one-see-three)

Below is the Artfare block on 6^th. Ave across from the Ronstadt Bus Center where

We’re writing a grant to turn the block green with photo voltaics and roof gardens everywhere.

This grant will include the 16 rental units and temporary housing, gardens, greenhouses and pond systems in Casa Goofy waiting to become an art-in-nature laboratory AND the parking lot at Los Amigos Childcare.

If we can defray utilities we can start making real progress.  But it will take a year of work and writing.   Meanwhile we do what we can.

CASA GOOFY INTERNATIONAL MISSION:

CROSSING BORDERS TO BUILD THE REAL COMMUNITY

(The Invisible Community Of Those Who Care About The Earth But Who May Never See Each Other)

In a world in denial, a world in which even science, has consistently failed to figure the rate of acceleration by which Global Warming progresses, Casa Goofy International is here to help individuals take their physical and spiritual survival into their own hands, think globally and act locally, with homegrown food, art and culture.

GOALS:

 

CREATE:

AN INTERNATIONAL ART & ARTIST EXCHANGE

(Because The Rest Of The World Is The Rest Of You.)

 AN ART-IN-NATURE LABORATORY

(Because If We’re Not Going To Destroy Our Own Habitat We Need An Interface Between The Human And The Natural Community

A THIRD WORLD GALLERY CIRCUIT

(Starting just south of the border in Mexico and proceeding South until it turns North)

STRATEGIES: 

Maintain contributing memberships in:

WWOOFERS (Worldwide Opportunities On Organic Farms) and COUCHSURFERS.COM

Continue converting 16 units of housing, (50% so far) to artists’ live/work spaces and WWOOFER quarters

Turn 6 ponds and two greenhouses into aquaponic urban farms and art in nature labs.

Reinvent, (with a sense of humor this time)  The International Arts Center as an investment, like Student Exchange, in community and people instead of big buildings (with big money targets on their butts).

Where are these people?  Where is this “community” we’ve chosen to invest in instead of big buildings? 

As the man in the trench coat and slouch hat who hangs out in front of large public buildings always says,

“Time will tell.  And questions still remain.  And now back to you in New York, Bob.” MEANWHILE BACK AT THE RANCH, LAREDO AND LASH AND THE BOYS WILL:

MAKE SAFE, COMFORTABLE, INSPIRING SPACES FOR VOLUNTEERS AND VISITING ARTISTS

(spaces in which nature can come IN and creativity can go OUT)

FACILITATE THE GROWTH OF NATURAL COMMUNITIES BY:

INVENTING INTENSIVE GROWING METHODS FOR LIMITED SPACES

COMBINE WITH PHOTO VOLTAICS

COMBINE WITH ART

RECYCLE, USE & REUSE ALL RESOURCES

MAKE COMMUNITY MURALS FOR FENCES

UTILIZE THE “CITIZENS’ AUXILLARY” GROUP TO

CREATE ANTI GLOBALWARMING FEEDBACK LOOPS

(To Lobby For Large Scale Community Wide Projects such as:

“smokestack algae biofuels plant” and “Solar Farm Trolley”

and solar electric roof gardens.)

polar ice melt, loss of reflectance, more tundra & permafrost melt, decaying biomass producing greenhouses gasses, ocean turning from carbon sinks to carbon emitters, acidification, coral reefs dying, etc. etc. these loops will go on multiplying each other’s effects ad infinitum even if we get greenhouse gas emissions down to pre industrial levels  A decrease in an increase in emissions is a good political deal but nature doesn’t make deals (she makes hurricanes & heat waves).

Proceed modularly.  Make modules small enough to be feasible and repeatable. Create modules that are anti global warming feedback loops combined with art opportunities for children of all ages. 

TACTICS

Casa Goofy International DOES (one WWOOFER volunteer’s description): 

“Develop methods of growing food which save water, produce food in a small space to feed tenants/children at Los Amigos Childcare,

Provide affordable and creative living spaces for artists in the city,

Teach others (local as well as international) about innovative ways of growing food, Promote recycling (water, resources, trash,etc) to create art and a beautiful space for people to live and work.”

WHAT’S IN IT FOR TUCSON?

The profitable exploitation of one of our most plentiful local resources: artists.  We have more artists and musicians per capita than any other city in the U.S. and there is a 10x multiplier effect for business with art events. 

If a little town like Bisbee can put itself on the map with a once a year Poetry Festival.  If a little city like Cleveland (with a river so polluted it burned one night) can put itself on the map with a once a year, month long, International Performance Art Festival, if San Antonio can put itself on the map with its River Walk, Tucson can put itself on the map with an International Arts Center and a Third World Gallery Circuit starting in Nogalles and proceeding South until it’s North (and don’t stop there it’s too freakin’ COLD!).

Tourism is low infrastructure & high dollar business.

And the added attraction just might help fill those seven hundred units of student housing that filled the hole left by the destruction of the International Arts Center when the City Council vacated its own stipulations and subverted its own Historic Preservation ordinance,

JUST MIGHT...

also help fill the seven hundred more units of student housing proposed by a millionaire consortium (I can name names, and I know where the bodies are buried) if it gets to tear down the sixth block in the history of Tucson).

AT 1323 HUALPAI:

COMPLETE VISITING ARTIST QUARTERS

AND ART IN NATURE LABORATORY

AT 1329 HUALPAI AND 3428-34 E. PRESIDIO ROAD:

FINISH CONVERSIONS OF APARTMENTS TO ARTIST HOUSING

AT ARTFARE:

BUILD BALCONY IN THE “BRAVO GALLERY” & USE FOR

ART-IN-NATURE DEMONSTRATIONS & PERFORMANCES

AND AS MAIN SHOWPLACE FOR THE

3^RD WORLD GALLERY CIRCUIT CITIZENS’ AUXILLARY

AT LOS AMIGOS CHILDCARE:

BUILD “LIVING WALLS” GARDENS AROUND SANDBOX AND BUILDING AND SHOW KIDS HOW TO GROW PLANTS IN THEM

(Have kids come on field trips to Casa Goofy at 1323 Hualpai to see how it’s done.)

FOR The Future:

Container (raised bed style) Gardens at each rental.  Roof Gardens at The AZ Hotel shaded by photovoltaics on brackets anchored to roof decks.  The gardens arranged in patterns like the Plain of Nazca, ancient temples, petroglyphs.

Smokestack Algae Plants at TEP, the Apache Power Plant  (in the million gallon water tank left by the U of A when it gave up on “pond algae”) & electric cooperatives.   Live video projections of algae combined with visitors on the walls & ceilings. See if the life of the algae changes any depending on how many visitors are watching them.  Arrange the plants so they are visible as art from Google Earth. 

Aquarium shaped like the human body with fish in them in storefront windows at Artfare, water pumped up to roof gardens in the shape of human body & siphoned back down again, utilizing the falling water for art ferris wheels & other machines.

Dirigibles with thin film photo voltaics stretched between them to shade critical, strategic areas where commerce is heaviest etc. beaming down the generated electricity by microwave.  (Someday the most strategic location could be over the poles to combat loss of Albedo (reflectance)).

Display banner art and project images on the underside of the dirigibles and thin film substrate/membrane.  Most appropriate images might deal with ancient cultures with or without images from modern street life being juxtaposed.

            IMPOSSIBLE!?  OK Fine….how about

For Now:

OK Here’s some “modules”:

Waste Vegetable Oil and biodiesel plant at 1323 W. Hualpai Rd:



(this is a miniature anti global warming feedback loop, it filters waste vegetable oil and makes biodiesel, close to zero carbon footprint, and NO WAR REQURIED imagine how many greenhouse gasses we added to the atmosphere with the Mid East wars.)

WHAT’S IN IT FOR YOU AS ARTIST OR INDIVIDUAL?

Opportunities to:

Have enriching cross cultural experiences by becoming hosts/guests to international artists.

Host field trips for kids of all ages to the art-in-nature lab in process at Casa Goofy International.

Do projects in that lab and have display space in Artfare’s atrium “Bravo Gallery” across from the Ronstadt Bus Center.  

Have hands-on learning experiences growing their own food and art with very limited space, time and money.  

Experience in real time, the real meaning of the word “RENNAISSANCE” .

Demo projects done:

Solar pump/siphon system for utilizing sunlight and pumped water over and over  for maximum efficiency & use of  limited grow space.

Solar pond Food coolers used as “earth boxes” or grow boxes set in troughs to use water being pumped by solar pumps between ponds

Made plans to expand this system to circulate pond water through existing 24 ft. high greenhouses to use fish poop as fertilizer.

Set up air compressor & home made “air stones” for pond aeration.  

Set up large (8# diameter) plastic pipe grow system for capturing water and sunlight under eaves of all units, especially where limited sunlight is a problem (the pipes have portholes & bottom holes to grow “strawberry pot” and “upside down” style)

Created cheap raised bed, intensive planting & coldframe designs & demos to utilize limited spaces. 

Shrines To Go (“Shrines A Go Go”) series of art on wheels with these common elements: dirt, plants, melting ice, a black pocket that can’t ever be opened, a chalice with an offering, a prayer/chant/dedication ceremoney, candles, a picture, some part of a clown suit/image. Leave them at prestigious institutions so that a decision must be made: to discard, keep, give away, destroy, not decide. 

Set up Thursday afternoons at 3:30 at LOS AMIGOS CHILDCARE AND:

Taught mask making with

Ned Schaper from the Matt Bevel Kinetic Sculpture Institute:

John White, musician from CGI who plays banjo, fiddle, guitar and ukulele, taught them music.

            

                                                                                                                                                                                                      

Jim from Artfare, has an education degree and plays clarinet and trumpet:

   

                                                                                                 

Taught about insects with a puppet show by an entomologist.

In spite of what Dr. Laura says about single parent or no parent families, the kids are affectionate and are well behaved.  They learn, they sing they dance, they do art.

In spite of what Dr. Laura says about Day Care Centers, the teachers here really care and they are a community within the larger community.  This Day Care has become the well, the commons, the village it takes to raise a child.  It accepts and cares for kids with problems that no other Day Care will take and is having some success with them. 

we’re working up a regular schedule of fundraiser performance nights with food, entertainment, games and raffles.               

We’re planning on doing:

Community participation murals (make a place for the art of children of all ages).

Gradually changing Dennis Williams’ HVAC-R business by

Adding businesses one at a time that can offer: waste cooking oil, use of space on off hours, catering, or just sympathy for the project so that, little by little, our little community grows withing the larger community and more and more time

Can be devoted to CGI. 

                                                                       

AND IN ALL THE ABOVE:

We have fun and,

KEEP IT GOOFY!!!

CASA GOOFY NEEDS:

(a new blackboard to provide for dialogue aka “exquisite corpses” among residents, (I call it our ‘Little Black Mountain Black Board” and we REALLY need)

a $60,000 line of credit.  Several amortization schedules have been drawn up for any individual or institution to choose from or offer their own terms.   Payments (around $450/mo.) will all be handled through a title company with one free and clear duplex, appraised at $125,000, for collateral.   The uses of the line of credit are:

Purchase grid tie photovoltaics to stop the escalation of utility bills. 

Finish the conversion of 8 rental units into artist live/work spaces. 

Finish the construction of visiting artist quarters at the art-in-nature lab at 1323 W. Hualpai Road.

This will:

make the project financially and ecologically self sustaining,

complete the artist community that will support the mission of outreach to other countries

unite the project around one clear vision:

a world in which the imaginary lines drawn by scientists, economists, politicians and countries are seen for what they are, so that our vision of global problems and solutions can be made whole. 

   

      

AND…THIS JUST IN!!! (from NEWS MAN)

ASSETS/PROJECTS IN CASA GOOFY:

1323 W. Hualpai Rd: a 2 story concrete dome house with 6 ponds,  2 greenhouses, sculpture garden, & garden. 75% complete.

Two visiting artist quarters in back.  50% complete.  (see below)

1329 W. Hualpai Rd: a duplex converted into four artist studios. Raised bed gardens and ramada all around, kiln, workshade in front parking lot.  75% complete.

3428 E. Presidio Rd.:  1 2BR single family residence being used as a studio, and a duplex with sunroom/studio and greenhouse in large back yard.  75% complete.

3430 E. Presidio road.  Duplex not converted.  40 X 30 X 12’ High steel building converted into two artist studios.  Greenhouse attached.  75% complete.

Art-In-Nature Lab 50% (?) completed.

Community participation murals on front fences and walls 5% completed.

International art exchange website, planning stage.

VISITING ARTIST QUARTERS IN CAMP GOOFY:

Vans & busses in U shape with campers on top, common kitchen & bathroom.  50% completed.  Large work-shade common studio between. 

(When finished, these will be free housing for WWOOFERS & visiting artists in exchange for working on projects in the art-in-nature lab. 

ADVISORY BOARD & ASSOCIATES:

Brian Flagg, Casa Maria Soup Kitchen

Bill Knauss, Builder

Jon McLane, host of “Free Green Radio” (KVOI) and Green Party Mayoral Candidate

Carlos Lozano, CEO hunter for Lozano And Associates

Paul Schock, founding partner of the former International Arts Center at the old Y at 5^th. Ave and 6^th. St.

Peter Anton (retired) electric bike enthusiast, ecologist.

John Peterson, HVAC-R engineer

Daniel Ryan, artist, educator.

(Your Name Here)

MY VISION:

We create modules that can be repeated for our own projects and can serve as models for other people’s projects. 

Each rental has a studio/workshop attached or integrated and a small raised bed garden shaded by a ramada or photo voltaic panel. And photovoltaic car shades and at least one raised bed garden for each class at Los Amigos Child Care.  And a progression of modular gardens on the roof of the Arizona Hotel with demonstrations in the store windows below.  This is survival itself in an age when the family farm and good food itself is becoming a thing of the past or something only the rich can afford. 

These modules are also playgrounds or art-in-nature laboratories because if there isn’t play involved then human interest can’t be sustained.  Survival has to also be defined as artistic and cultural survival, the life of the mind and the adventure of consciousness. 

At Casa Goofy itself I see:

The cooling tower on top of the dome finished and cooling the house.  The greenhouses and ponds functioning as one system.  The living quarters for volunteers finished in back.  The shop open to all who need to do projects.  Kids from Los Amigos visiting on field trips.  Solar electric and solar hot water systems, working, and swamp coolers with dehumidified and super cooled air coming out of them.

And what do I hear? I hear conversations among artists and between artists and the parts of the natural community that can only communicate with silences or experiences written on the living air between us. 

PRINCIPICUS GOOFICUS

(first principles)

WHY Casa   GOOFY   International?

“A very good philosophy could be written consisting entirely of jokes.”

---Ludwig Wittgenstein*

“So, let’s WRITE one…AND… .act it out…maybe we could call it….

er…uh…something like Casa Goofy International”---Super Dummy

So from the “Free And Worth Every Penny” department heeerrre’s……

SUPER DUMMY’S GAME PLAN!!!

MISSION

(according to Super Dummy)

Saving the universe (from itself) one idiot at a time

“Human survival depends on our vision being restored to wholeness by artists and clowns.  Science doesn’t do well with process and whole systems.”

---General Lies, Philosophy Professor, Casa Goofy University (retired, emeritus, a latin word sometimes translated as meaning “without merit”.)    

GOALS

Develop a sense of humor about the apocalypse and a welcoming committee called….

Armageddon To Know You.

And Armageddon To Know You will have a one man band called,

The Lake Tucson Yachting Club Dance Orchestra

Sometimes the one man band is unavailable because it has to split up…

(so it can walk through the same river twice)

and then we just have to wait until it gets back together again.

Form a super committee to investigate the conundrum:

“If nature is intelligent, why are people so stupid?”****

STRATEGIES

The community does not end at the city limit sign or any other line.  

Therefore embrace absurdity around the world (and in neighboring universes).

 “It’s time we got serious about getting silly.”  ---Captain Nobody, author of “Global Warming Natural Disasters On $5 A Day”

When we’re joking we need to be dead serious and vice versa.  When we’re doing something we need to be doing nothing and vice versa.  You see, THE HUMAN MIND….uh, er……hey wait! Is this some kind of JOKE?!!---Fathed **

TACTICS

Rebuild the old International Arts Center but

this time invest in people & community instead of big-as-death buildings

with big-ass-money targets on their butts.

Work with local barrio child care center called Los Amigos (and a sister day care in Mexico) because:

Children’s art is unfair competition for adults.  That means it’s OK to STEAL from it. And because it’s THERE.

It keeps us younger than we might otherwise be.  As far as imagination, gesture and improvisation are concerned, after the first two years of development, old age sets in.

You see, the human mind……hey wait! Is this some kind of JOKE!!!???  (Hey wait! Did I say that before?  Well, this time I’m being SERIOUS***.)

Create shrines on wheels “Shrines A Go Go” shrines for a

Fast moving world, interactive shrines that force people & institutions to decide or at least to decide not to decide.

And remember:

People who don’t stay out of the way of the gentrification steamroller

Get rolled.

ADD END DUMB:

And so forth and SO WHAT? . 

St. Francis, when asked what he’d do if the world would end tomorrow, replied he would just keep on hoeing his garden.  Right on, St. Francis! My Main Man!

If enough people grew their own food we could survive global warming.

If a few people grew their own food they could create their own art, culture and religion and survive global warming culturally and spiritually even if all else fails.

But first you gotta get REAL QUIET

And then…you gotta laugh a lot.

* Ludwig Wittgenstein was officially adopted as the Camp Goofy Philosopher Mascot, April 1, 2007 .…NO FOOLING!)

** “Brains are like eggs.  If you drop them from a great height, like falling stars, they splatter out in all different directions, and they seem to be bigger and smaller than each other, but if you cook them up in global warming, they come out nice and round and more or less the same.”  Fathed (See You Tube: Dennis Williams: Performance Art In Tucson)

*** “Anything expressed in words can’t be taken seriously.  Language is a leap of faith.  And then you die.”  Captain Nobody

**** In regard to nature being more intelligent than people: “If a lion could talk we couldn’t understand him.”  Wittgenstein.  This goes without saying. People CAN talk and they can’t understand each other.  Which just adds further evidence as to their alleged (but obvious) stupidity. 

 The Camp Goofy Philosophers’ Society

AND NOW A MESSAGE FROM

BIG BOX MAN:

Keep up the good work, folks.  Reduce that annual INCREASE in greenhouse gas emission and call it a DECREASE.  Maybe nature will make a DEAL. Have the scientists measure individual factors and pretend for the sake of sanity they’re not part of a non linear process where the hotter it gets the faster it gets hotter (that’s never happened before has it?  I didn’t THINK so!)  Keep the money and the GROSS national product safe from those evil non linear processes.  Sort the data into boxes, label the boxes, feed them to the mainframe and instruct it to ADD them with grade school math.  ADD a box called AWAY, ADD a place called DOWNSTREAM, ADD a place like HOME, ADD a box called EVIL, stick all the things we can’t understand in the boxes and all our possessions will be safe from that old devil PROCESS while it multiplies the boxes by exponents on exponents.   The national and world economy depend on careful, tedious, bureaucratic maintenance of this illusion, that  ALL the lines we draw across time and space remain sacrosanct AND the absolute value of this random, speculative process we made into a BOX THINGY called MONEY. 

(Since Rachel Carson’s SILENT SPRING came out in the fifties, and ever since all the news media have been spending a lot of energy NOT observing this (Yogi Bera says you can observe a lot just by looking), scientific predictions of global warming factors have turned out to be UNDERestimate by at least a hundred percent, and normally by over three hundred percent.  Could a simple semantic mistake cause that much error?  I don’t THINK SO!!!)  Your money is perfectly safe, perfectly safe, REEELAXXXX!  The conventional wisdom has never been wrong before, and it’s never been wrong before because?  BECAUSE WE’VE ALWAYS DONE IT THIS WAY!!!  Case closed.

Let me just second the emotion of an eminent local attorney here when he advised the U of A board that their obligation to the shareholders’ MONEY must override their concern for the whole wild wide world outside that MONEY, and must therefore override their personal ethics.  If a few minorities get hurt and the institution is running in the black, we have served the greater good.  If large lending institutions create situations that work against green building and leave people with their houses underwater, figuratively and literally, the monetary principles on which this great country was founded still stand. If banks, resolve their responsibility to their shareholders by telling the drug companies to do research in areas that are profitable instead of areas of the greatest human distress, economic survival must still prevail over these minor concerns.  

Money, like construction, has to grow without limits or else it dies like a cancer that has eaten its host.   Our survival depends on our daily acknowledgement, that if money is to retain its value it cannot afford to have values.

AND THE ICE MAN

REPLIES: 

Excuse me if I look a little wasted.  They found me in melting ice in the Otztal valley in the Italian Alps BECAUSE the permafrost and tundra are melting and billions of tiny organisms are awakening, and billions and billions of their tiny nano farts are going up to add methane to C02 AND hundreds of OTHER feedback loops which are multiplying and adding themselves to the inertia of global warming.  Even if you returned to pre industrial levels of Carbon Dioxide what about the other greenhouse gasses? How could you ever replace the lost reflectance of the ice caps, refreeze the permafrost, restore the coral, the forests, the lost species, the whole web of life you’re right now shredding like an incriminating presidential document?   And now let’s add the feedback loops of social damage and along with them various forms of denial, not to mention one of your favorites, BIG BOX MAN, obsessions with one or another I SO LATE ED form of so called sustainable energy, obsessions which prevent the creation of ANTI global warming feedback loops.

But what’s art got to do with it?  And why international art?  I’ve been dead for over five thousand years so you may think I don’t know much, but I learned from the petty political squabble that killed me, that WORDS can’t combat denial, they reinforce denial. They can’t cross BORDERS, they only make more borders.  But once we get an IMAGE into the back brain, (because as  Dr. Bong (ad man, ret.) sd. in Howard The Duck:

"IMAGE is ALL!!!) why then the argument is over and, in the best of all possible worlds, at least some amount of real communication could begin, let’s see images, images….

Including me and my companions on photovoltaic dirigibles over the city, images of algae making photographs projected on power plants, images made by gardens arranged in a pattern on the roofs of Tucson, images from the Art-In-Nature lab at Casa Goofy BUT…. 

….a certain comic silliness is required. A certain single minded seriousness has been the tragic flaw of similar efforts in the past.  (Therefore, Casa Goofy

But, we have to keep asking, can this thing work?  After all, the whole stinkin’ world is against it.  The mass of the whole social world doesn’t WANT to hear about solutions because that might indicate there’s a PROBLEM.  OOPS!!!

What if it’s too late? WELL, as I bled to death from a spear wound there in that beautiful valley, I wished I’d forgotten about all petty disputes between us all-too-humans, so I could REALLY have been there, to have really lived this life every moment as if it were (actually each moment WAS) my last and as if it were (the way each moment actually WAS) my first.  And then, as life ebbed and the world seemed so close and yet so far away, I wished I could have always been so moved...moved (as when watching a great tragedy) from the place where things are happening to us to the place where we are WATCHING things happen to us, that first and last act of will?  Like it says in Samson et Delilah,

“Beautiful is it not, the end of the world?”

It comes down (to put it in YOUR terms BIG BOX MAN) to a cost/benefit analysis of living in a world that moves versus a static world where we can hold on to concepts called THINGS which can only approximate process by being broken into pieces, or as Hart Crane said,

“And so I entered the broken world.”

But it’s our concepts of the world as a static assemblage of bits and pieces that is broken.  Once the world is  moving, and once we’re there, we do what we’ve done for thousands of years, just pack up and move on, and keep on walking until we find the distance that can make us whole. 

WHAT YOU CAN DO

PARTICIPATE:

Get on our mailing list.

VOLUNTEER:

Volunteers will be fed, entertained and spoiled rotten.  Donations of $100 or more grant you founding member status and get you a comic book face and a few choice words on all our community murals. 

Bring food, friends, art & entertainment to fundraisers.

Help with clean up, construction and gardening.  Help us work with the kids. Just take an interest.  Be someone we can talk to about how we’re doing and what other things we could be doing on an on going basis. 

Become a host.  Think about what space you might have for visiting artists to use for a few days to a few weeks.  Help us get a list of potential hosts going.

Participate in the fence mural project.  There's a place for you and your kids. 

BECOME A MEMBER:

Lifetime:  $100  (gets your name, photo, & comic book face in one of our participatory fence murals (you participate in the creation of your image, and to get to attend (or not attend) all meetings of The Bored).

Annual: $50 (free pass to our shop & kiln & other facilities).

Contributing: ($25 or more.  Five free art-postcards & whatever other goodies we can come up with.)

COSIGN A RE FINANCE WITH CASH OUT:

See “Casa Goofy Needs” or do it your way and organize your own gift.

 (be a big time artist) DONATE ART

or just DONATE:

vehicles, ,anything that could be raffled off or sold for scrap.

(have trucks, have people, will clean your yard)

New or used vegetable oil.

(any kind of waste oil)

Solar panels, PVs, DC or AC pumps, generators, tools. Building materials

(come visit, see what we’re doing, see if you have anything to

contribute, and talk to us about YOUR ideas.)

BECOME A MEMBER OF THE EXECUTIVE BOARD:

(attend online meetings, and less often physical meetings, help with fundraising, structural problems and planning.)

BECOME A MEMBER OF THE ADVISORY BOARD:

No responsibilities, just be wherever you are but be there for us: read, bear witness, listen, review & comment.  Be somebody just to talk to about how we’re doing.  (What is this? See the note below.) 

BECOME A MEMBER OF THE CLOWN COUNCIL

Be on call to help mediate disputes, misunderstandings, etc.  You have to wear some part of a clown costume while you’re mediating.  (hmmm “The Clown Council”….does that phrase sound FUNNY to you?!)

CONTACT:

Dennis Williams

1323 W. Hualpai Rd.

Tucson, AZ 85745-2051

520-429-0347

dennishwilliams@gmail.com

ON FACEBOOK:

Dennis Williams

Casa Goofy International

AT BLOGSPOT.COM

http://casagoofy.blogspot.com

http://superdummyinlovandwar.blogspot.com

http://secretidentity.blogspot.com

http://logosteleos.blogspot.com

AT BRINK.COM

Superdummy

Fathed

Note:

I see the Del Rey Motel is being re-opened as a place for live/work art studios and galleries.  Looking at this through the eyes of a non profit making spaces for artists and making places for people this is enough competition to force us into foreclosure but I’m glad to see art moving away from the gentrification bulldozer and into the “scenic route” on Miracle Mile and there is a concept from Lincoln Steffens that is equally true, that all business is good for all other business, and if so, maybe all art can be good for all other art IF we work it a certain way, understand Henry Kissinger’s comment, “The infighting is so bitter because the stakes are so small.”  And look OUTWARD and learn to cooperate because the stakes are now so high. 

A VIEW FROM THE BONEYARD

I think about Sheldon when I use the ladder or the gas can or any of the other good, solid things he left behind, and when I finish any of his projects like the loft, or the electrical work.  Then I remember the industrial woodworking machinery we had to sell to pay his back rent, because he lost hope and went to Colorado to kill himself.  Several of those machines just needed some little adjustment or troubleshooting, which he could have done as well or better than I if he hadn’t been depressed, if everything didn’t just seem to be too much for him.  I think about him every time there’s a voice or just a feeling in my own head that says, you can’t do it.

He didn’t have a remarkably oppressed life, just a grinding one.  He’d been in the Navy during Reagan’s glorious conquest of Granada.  He had a new Harley and an SUV.  There was just something in the air around him, something in the commands from superiors, that kept telling him you can’t win.  You can do rubbings on the placards of large, old buildings, you can work at the power company but you can’t get in to the places from which the power is doled out to the chosen ones.  You may be strong and handsome but women don’t like you because you care too much, you shrink from conquest.  You do not warm their hearts like winter sunlight.  Your seed is inferior.

I can still feel all those long, bumpy trips out to the homeless vets' shelter next to the boneyard at the air force base and it’s like I’m still asking, in lieu of the real questions,

'

How’s the group therapy going?

O, OK.

And taking him to apply for a commercial woodworking job and him saying,

I’m just not ready. 

Always the same approach/avoidance problem, getting really close to the top of the mountain and then turning around and going back down, leaving all his gear behind.  And who am I to take advantage of his camping equipment?  Someone just a few inches closer to the top of some mountain that’s not worth dying on? No, wait, that’s what he’d say.  And what can I say?  Sheldon, I want to tell him, we don’t owe anybody that much respect.  Respect has to be earned and throughout all of human history, the mass of men have squandered their moral authority.  The value of a flag that’s been bought and sold hundreds of times over is incalculable.  So until the accountants get that figured out you may stand at ease, soldier. As a matter of fact, DISMISSED! Go, do, be what you need to be on behalf of all those whose failures were only a bogus construct of group ego.  I now declare you a free man.  But it’s useless.  Like those who oppressed me, stood on their crumbling podiums and talked about themselves while they thought they were condemning me, his demons are destroyed by bomb after bomb and just reconstitute themselves out of the rubble.  I can’t take the stones out of his heart. 

The planes in the boneyard will never fly again.  They just sit there under the sun and rain, weathering all the storms, the desert stretching beyond them, heavy covers on their windshields, like people blind to everything beyond what they're told. 

AFTER MATH

A grey morning after last night’s rain, the front loader is sloshing around through pools of muddy water at Bob’s Material Supply, a solid stream of headlights in the oncoming lane won’t let me in, I scream at it, then notice I don’t have my signals on.  Then I scream at the NPR announcer for being a zombie and ask him to show some human emotion for a change, then I give up and just stare at the gloomy crossbars of an empty sign with slowly retreating clouds behind it, and remember the little bits of shit falling into David’s colostomy bag while he talked to me yesterday.  And my own face looks like death warmed over in the restroom mirror in Bob’s, making me wonder if I can ever get this property into balance with nature so the non profit I’m giving it to after I die could take it from there.  Rene’, the block layer, says I work better and harder than a twenty year old.  He doesn’t understand that’s all just desperation.  But when the sun doesn’t shine here in Southern Arizona, it’s such a shock that gloom seems to be all there is or ever will be.

And Jane calls like a human echo chamber to tell me again how irritated she is by the pots and decorations and stuff left over from Bob and Mary’s “crappy yard sale” in the common area between the two apartments.  I say we’re getting rid of all that and putting in a block planter going all around the fence,

“That’s what it’s all about.” I say. 

Then she says she’s irritated by her own mattress that she had to leave outside her fence because she didn’t have a way to haul it. And I say there’ll be a dumpster at the church in a few days.  And then there’s nothing left to complain about except maybe she just doesn’t feel good.

And I get back with a yard of ideal mix and idealism, unload them both simultaneously, and start moving the knick knacks and trinkets from the trees where we’re going to work.   Little bits and pieces from Sue’s last go round before the meth just wiped out her whole brain, pretty little things the poor always seem to spend their money on to make everything all better.

The way our vision goes.

ON THE INTELLIGENCED OF NATURE (in process about process)

LETTER TO JIM WAID

.I.  

So you come back from a trip and, working on a painting, the colors & lines & forms from the trip start coming out on the canvas, not by conscious intent…but as if the body imitated all the landscape it saw, heard, smelled and otherwise sensed.  Art by most definitions is to some extent imitation of life.  Whether or not the imitation occurs before or after conscious intent, is probably moot (and mute),  but of course the landscape images could all come from the more intellectual selection & improvisational REvision process after the first paints have been laid down & dried.  And it could also be viewer imitation/imagination.  For instance, there’s how your mother used to look at some of your purely abstract paintings and say,

“Well, there’s  a squirrel going into a hole in a tree, and that little bird over there, and a rabbit in that bush.  Honest to God, Jim, I don’t know how you do it!”

But the way your seemingly random, abstract expressionist motions somehow end up looking so exactly like realist landscapes just happens to correspond with a long held theory of mine, that people, beneath their minds, imitate the landscape around them.  That’s my explanation for variations in speech, song, dance, craft, art, building methods and culture in general.  If it sounds romantic & mystical, as Chas Olson said, “I plead so.” It’s the subject of a book, vilified for similar origins, called “The Song Lines”.  The theme of said book is the song lines of an aboriginal clan in Australia are an exact topographical map of the territory of the clan to which it belongs.  You can say some of that is romanticism, but I don’t see how none of it can be true, because it’s such a human thing.   For instance there’s a woman who rides the busses in Manhattan and sings the landscape before her.  You move one mountain over in Appalachia and dialect and song and dance and culture itself are changed.  I believe our mirror neurons, (most life forms have them) which decide what we will buy from a salesman, or potential friends and lovers, are also operative in our relationship to the land.  I think we’re each and all involved in an endless dance with our particular landscapes.

And I think unconscious imitation goes even deeper, to the process of evolution, itself, which, to me, has always had something missing….not a link so much as a WHY. Why change in the first place?  As they say in the theatre, what’s my motivation?  I happen to think nature’s primary motivational force is imitation.  OK, I know it sounds crazy, but just follow along with me (IMITATE my thought) for awhile.  It took just five generations for the finches in the Gallapagos to grow their beaks an inch in correspondence with a change in the depth of a flower.  I don’t understand how this could happen by random selection.  Random selection LITERALLY would have beaks growing out of the back or rear end, kind of like a cancer found in a patient that grew a tooth and some hair.  Now THAT’S random, but even as natural selection, how’s it supposed to work seemingly so purposefully in concert with the size of a certain flower?  Why would the beaks get longer instead of shorter?  Why wouldn’t they grow sideways?  What is that growth responding to in just five generations? How, on the other side of the equation, would a PLANT evolve to turn the base of its leaf into a stomach, the ends of the leaf into teeth in an ersatz mouth that could close, with a millisecond response triggered by the lightest touch of an insect’s leg or wing, and  “learn” to secrete not just digestive fluids but a substance with the odor of rotting meat by which to attract flies and other insects?  That’s a lot of random for one little plant to turn over even in centuries of survival of the fittest into something that fits its environment the way a key fits a lock. What happens to those in-between plants who just develop a stomach, or mouth, or just a stench?  Is something else going on here?  A something else that the professor doesn’t want to tell me about in science class, a something else like the Venus Fly Trap, that also REEKS….of intention, (TELEOS, end seeking, intelligence) and a making manifest (LOGOS, logical, serial, homologous acting out of something SORT OF pre determined)?  Or if that’s too much of a leap, something that just REEKS of philosophy, precision guesswork, romanticism, mysticism, “intelligent design”, paganism  and  omygod! Not spirituality!

I’m NOT an intelligent designer, I’m hypothesizing an intelligence inherent in nature just to see where it gets me. . But what do we really care whether  the  universe is matter becoming self reflexive  by design OR NOT, as long as  nobody comes along and dogmatizes it?  I don’t want that anymore than I want the teacher dogmatizing Darwin for me by saying categorically that all evolution can be explained in terms of pure, dumb, random mechanics…as if even THAT were not a contradiction in terms. 

Darwin himself is remarkably design oriented and anthropomorphic in his1862 essay, “On The Various CONTRIVANCES By Which British And Foreign Orchids Are Fertilized by Insects”.  He notes that this fertilization requires not only the cooperation of microorganisms, a male part & female part of two separate Orchids AND an insect, but different “clever” designs by different Orchid species that guide the insect first into entering a pollen trap and then into exiting in such a way that it leaves some of the pollen with the female part. (And what are we to make of flowers that arrange NOT to need to trap the insects into becoming cross pollinators?) Why go to all this trouble to cross pollinate, he asks and answers, in order to have the advantage of the hybrid vigor from two sets of parent genes.  And then Stephen Jay Gould adds this anthro-chauvinist engineering critique:

“Orchids are not created by an IDEAL engineer, but jury rigged from a limited set of available components”  Right, and certain species of sparrow have “poor” voices, and a moth’s and butterfly’s wings aren’t  “sturdy” enough but they’ve kept them in the air longer than Boeing knew about metal fatigue, and a “flimsy” dragonfly’s wing can propel it 40 MPH,  the “ungainly” trap jaw ant can jump the human equivalent of 44’ high by 130’ long, the  “poorly designed” Swift can fly 100 MPH, the hawk that “can’t walk good” can pull out of a dive at 300 MPH, the “awkward” Tiger Beetle can run the human equivalent of 700 MPH, bees “engineered” to fall still fly, a “stupidly designed” ant can carry things many times its weight and size the human equivalent of 100 MPH, but there’s nothing provincial or prejudicial about OUR esthetic, nothing stupid about OUR engineering. And the human powered plane, “The Gossamer Albatross”, is not a good F-16, and an Apple is not as macho as an Orange.  And certain species of butterflies and frogs with dead on MIMICRY of leaves and knots on branches aren’t fit enough to survive, especially not since we came along, and muddied their waters with our sewage.  But where on earth is there enough sewage for our hubris to feed on?  Who the hell do we think we are?  What do we think we know?  In his essay “The Panda’s Thumb”, Gould goes on to say,  that thumb is not a thumb but an enlargement of the  radial sesamoid bone with a corresponding but “useless” smaller enlargement of the sesamoid tibia bone in the foot.  It’s like a sixth finger that, if the universe were not “dead” matter, might also be a “contrivance” for stripping the leaves from bamboo to get at the tiny shoots beneath, but that way lies non mechanistic madness. 

My question has been and still is, does that something else, that seems to be operative in evolution, have something to do with mimicry or mimesis?  For instance how does maybe 2 % of the ordering genetic sequence (DNA) for the Bait Crab “learn” to grow a small fish on its head which attracts other fish?  Similarly how does the physiology of the Bait Fish “learn” that it can attract small fish to eat by growing a small fish on its head? Could they, or their bodies, somehow be imitating the little fish they want?  Some forms of life just naturally imitate other forms.  In a documentary on Orangutans, narrated by Julia Roberts, (in one of her best i.e. least self conscious roles BTW) a female Orangutan saw her washing her clothes on a dock on the other side of a river, got in a boat and, using her hands as paddles, rowed over to where Julia was washing, got another tub, filled it with water, put soap in, and started dipping and wringing out clothes exactly like Julia. Why? Later on, an old male Orangutan decided he would just haul Julia off into the jungle and adopt her as a member of his harem.  She stopped acting at all at that point while the entire crew grabbed his hands to pry them loose from her. On the other end of the mimetic attractions between species there’s Jane Goodall imitating chimp calls, and biologists, hunters, photographers, birdwatchers, and artists who spend their entire lives following and identifying with one species or another. Birdwatchers have a “life list” which is a list of all the birds they’ve seen in their lifetime.  And there’s a reason why that matters to us, which we shall get to know better. 

Other adaptations may not be mimetic, but it requires a violation of Occam’s Razor to see them as purely random and mechanical rather than as some kind of learning  through stress.  For instance how did cacti adapt to “a dry heat” to turn their leaves into something in between skin and bark? Generally as the environment desertifies, leaves get smaller and smaller until sometimes they turn into needles.  How would the chlorophyll production function randomly, and/or for the sake of survival, fairly suddenly, just spread itself thin all over a plant?  Even radical changes like this don’t fit Random so much as they fit musical themes and variations.  The cacti are still homologous, i.e. they “progress” from/like all other plants and, as Leonardo Da Vinci noted, even geological processes are like biological processes.  British Biologist, Gregory Bateson, developed a more refined analysis of the themes and variations and likenesses of life forms by cataloguing and dividing them up into different kinds of symmetries: radial, like a spiral snail or spiral nebulae  (or then there’s also the fractal fribronacci branching in plant life), or bilateral, like most mammalian life forms in which the left and right side of the body imitate but are never exact replicas of the other.  Bateson also catalogued homologies, such as the resemblances but not exact likenesses of feet and hands from dinosaur to human. But also isn’t it AS IF the Venus Fly Trap, Bait Crab and Bait Fish somehow learned internally, by a kind of proprioception, what was out there in its particular environment and developed a strategy by which to carve a niche for itself in that environment? Autistic savants, other different intelligences in species & individuals make it seem  as if they picked up bits and pieces of an intelligence that runs through all of nature.  If only “as if” were more than just a vague map of a distant territory. 

Do we want the universe to be mechanical AND random, if so why?  Kenneth  Burke in his A GRAMMAR OF  MOTIVES said we may never find universal, one hundred  percent truth.  But sometimes we can find what our motive was---as if we were characters in a play---for wanting to believe one thing or the other to be true in the first place.  So OK I’ll give up my idea that the universe is alive means I have a soul, if you’ll give up your idea that it’s dead means I don’t.  And we can both give up the idea that anything means anything, and start over.  Trouble is, that’s been done.  Wittgenstein & the Logical Positivists, after their attempt to invent a language as precise as mathematics, ended up with nothing more precise than Ludwig’s  “Blue Book” of essentially devotions and prayers: “All propositions are false.  All propositions are true.”  “If we can ask a coherent question we can find a coherent answer.  That which we cannot speak of coherently, we must pass over in respectful silence.”  As “the wide mouth frog said, ‘Well shut mah mouth!’” Or would it totally bring us down to say all language depends on a leap of faith and some kind of MIRRORING of motion between speaker and listener?  AND there aren’t just THOSE gaps to cross. 98% of the universe is “nothing”.  In the quantum world, space & time are “nothing” across which photons, quarks, muons, gluons etc. interact as if they were dancing together and things were interconnected in ways we can only guess at. 

Robert Duncan said, “There is a place I can return to.”  And you seem to have a place you can return to that is uniquely not all mixed up with machinery.  But it still IS mixed up OUT THERE.  There’s a biologist who studies the ways non human nature interacts with technology, microbes that eat oil, insects and small animals that live in dumps and industrial ponds, life forms that live on our sewage.  In my refrigeration work, I’ve noticed small bugs on the roofs of malls, and in asphalt parking lots, which made me wonder, why would they go where there’s the least possible chance for food, shade, shelter, plants, other life forms, biodiversity itself?  On the other hand, I said, what am I doing up here?  Sometimes cockroaches or dung beetles get in between the moving poles of contactors and electrocute themselves and cause the contactors to arc and burn up.  Pack rats make homes in washing machines and old cars and eat the wiring.  I’ve found insect cocoons in carburetors and in small open pipes of all kinds. Like moths to open flames, this all seems like a twisted idea of a survival strategy.  Air conditioning techs in Texas sometimes open up an A/C unit’s control compartment and swarms of dead fire ants fall out.  They theorize that the ants go in there because they’re attracted to the EMF, but I think that’s the reason the TECHS go in there.  Like killer bees, wasps, rattlesnakes, cobras, and black widow spiders, I think the insects just love us very much.  I’m joking. Sorta. 

II.

Meanwhile back at the ranch, there’s your canvas, and it still looks like the ritual platform or dance theatre of the 60s abstract expressionists, dependant on its physical relation to the body which is to perform an improvisational expression of something within and upon it.  Maybe an imitation of life or maybe the “dancer”, like Jackson Pollock, says,  “I AM nature!” No need to render, or portray. My motions and emotions, like the song lines, ARE the territory.  My, the way things don’t change, eh? 

Which begs a question I’ve asked you before: when does geometry enter the picture?  If this painting and that one and that one have somehow EVOLVED into landscapes, and no matter how they were derived, at this point they sure LOOK like landscapes (so if you’re no longer “breaking your mother’s heart” are you still an abstract expressionist?).

They’re imaginary landscapes, but somehow anchored just the way we need them to be, to the real, minus flying pigs and rats, “great big fuckin rats, with dicks  THIS big!” Good as that gets in Disney language, and contrary to what the woman said on watching TV for the first time, we always will want to have a place we can return to where we will desperately want “to watch real life again”  Because we don’t just want “the fidelity”, we NEED that world, it’s what we’re here for, and “gotta dance” in, & a world minus that “place” is the definition of failure.  BUT….what happened in thisherenow painting world that it never progressed into the industrial age?  Why was there never a time when a native lodge, miner’s shack, or a pioneer’s lean to, or sod roofed dugout somehow appeared, and then a railroad track, and a Western Union and a general store and then suburbia and then New York & Chicago?  There are still places untouched by humans, but I, personally, have  been changed by contact with the urban landscape and I can’t seem to write like I used to. I remember a beautiful, simple world in which thoughts could be expressed without having a mental jam session, but I just don’t live there anymore.  MY body is imitating something in between nature & Ginsberg saying near the end of Howl,

“Who digs Los Angeles,  IS Los Angeles?”  And as Johnny Cash said,

“I don’t like it but I guess things happen that way, uh huh huh.”

Don’t forget the “uh huh huh” because that’s also part of the mimetic dance.    Maybe as an occupational hazard, my dance goes to the turn of the wheel, turn of the twentieth, with transportation, communication, dislocation producing a world both more together and more broken.  We no longer live in one time & place & culture.  The world is smaller, but by the same token, our continuity with, (and the continuity of) the place in which we live is a far cry from that of the Dineh much less the Hohokam.  And with more communication, we sometimes, ironically, feel more isolated and powerless.  I feel sometimes like I’m sitting in a little room in a jail or gulag, the walls full of bullet holes, the fabric over the windows shredded and flailing in the wind, my voice hoarse with screaming, but nobody can hear me.

“And so I entered the broken world.”  Hart Crane.

“No use jokin, everything is broken.” Robt. Zimmerman. 

Even our moments, in F.H. Bradley’s artificial dichotomies, are each torn from the others and the stream of time. And my thought was, the form within which I dance ought to reflect where my body really lives. (One problem is it’s JUST an ought and a thought.) Where that “where” IS would have to be a different place for each person and not necessarily subject to intellectual decisions.  What exactly ARE each of us imitating?  I bet Harry Sachs would love to ask “Why?” in his next book.  Speaking of neurology and choice, they have instruments now that can measure the timing of the decision of a subject to move his arm.  It turns out the impulse to move the arm occurs BEFORE the conscious decision arrives at the cortex. So then is the artist’s/poet’s cortex like the director screaming,

“CUT! Some extra was smoking a Pall Mall when the posse came thru the valley.  Damit there were no Pall Mall’s in Texas in 1867.  Do it over!  Jesus!” 

Or is there a director in another room we don’t know about?  Like the times we sit around having made up our minds to move, or to do something, but we’re waiting for another decision…waiting for some vegetative function in the body to grow to the point of moving on I think.  Or flip it: there are times we move the body, and the body moves, but the mind lags behind.  An African bearer says to the great white hunter: “We must sit and let our souls catch up to us.” The body seems to choose where we will live, physically, mentally, spiritually.  The Hopi say each child has its spiritual family and its material family.  How wonderful when they’re the same, and body and mind are unified with place, time and family, but forget that.  We’re lucky to be born at all.

Consider the body politic and one object of its mimesis: the great sprawling land mass of Russia demanding the revolution of the turn of the century, everybody coming to Moscow to vote in huge, manic, sweating herds, with intractable shouting and chaos….demanding Lenin and Stalin, as the untamed spirit of the U.S. & its vast empty spaces demanded the half vast sense of entitlement of Texas politicians for one instance, which then demands its corruption, like the children’s rhyme: “and in the end the age was handed, the kind of shit that it demanded.”

Hobbes’ Leviathan envisions the body politic as a great stinking beast that rolls over in its sleep, kills innocents, brings down elected democracies for money, poisons its own land and self, laughs about spending its children’s inheritance, decides what the figureheads of its ego will be the way a herd “chooses” which individual will be its Alpha male or female, and can’t settle down and act “sane” or happy until the fight is settled even if it’s not in its favor.  And this beast in its waking life declares itself a reasonable, egalitarian citizen of the world.  Its laws are codified custom.  Its “democracy” is a joke that walks with a will that comes from all of us and gives back individual will to none of us, loves people as synthetic and phony as itself,  wants to die with a needle in its veins and not a thought in its head and will probably get its wish.  I can rail at it all I want, it is programmed not to be subject to reason.

Well ok, all intelligence is stupid on its blind side, but stupid as any design must be because it can’t sail in ALL the winds that blow, there is still the way each intelligence fits a certain location.  A bat’s wing is positioned something like a hundred times a second to catch exactly the optimum vacuum and airflow.  The flagrant daring delicacy of a wasp wing is perfectly at home in its niche. The shape of a dolphin, or bird exactly agrees with the graph of drag coefficients we’d figure to understand optimum flow around their bodies in an air tunnel.  A hang glider can’t even do all the vector calculations he’d need to ride the thermals a buzzard manipulates without thought.  We can’t calculate how the car flew off the road or how we got it back on, if we were lucky and didn’t try to think about it. The calculated NON calculations of the zen archer or Tai Chi master, are NOT done in order to bypass that slow clumsy organ wobbling like a bobble head clown on top of the  brain stem, moving the steering wheel and pushing buttons like they were actually connected to something.  Think about that, & then tell me intelligence isn’t inherent in nature, and then to make things even funnier, talk to me about who’s in control, and of what.  Does the body or the mind decide when it’s time to go to the studio and just mess around a little, and how often is that weatherman in the mind correct in assuming it’s going to be a good or a bad day in the studio?

It’s AS IF the body KNOWS, and the body chooses….in your case, a place where, so far, nobody else has come.  To have geometry enter in, might not be a bad idea, just as you said, might even be beautiful, if, as you said, you “could draw a straight line”, but let’s just say, good or bad, it would be a whole lot more complicated, considering how the farther we get from our connection to the land the stupider we seem to get in certain ways. BUT, regardless, something is happening here before the mind can even try to get “a word” in (“isn’t it, Mister JONES?”)  The soul selects her own society.  The body selects its own landscape, or just fits into the landscape it comes out of---as if both were consciousness and both were in motion, dancing, telling stories and singing songs---chooses, against all advice from psychology, science & thought in general, the pathetic landscape of Country & Western music, its handling of love & all other human relationships fatally flawed, designed for maximum and utter failure, but the outcry & pathos remain original and real, and even more tragic than that for human politics in general, we need them exactly the way they are.  Sometimes it feels like a sympathy and “a hurtin thang” runs through it all like a cry in the dark:

I feel so because I know that certain forest insects can sometimes act like one big brain and then just as suddenly go their separate ways so like ants, bees and that proud, weird mammalian species, so called human beings. And so it makes me wonder sometimes, if it’s a brain in agonized abstract unity like a political rally, or a brain in complete denial & delirium like a pep rally. Ducks, cats, dogs, horses, can imprint on other species or even machines or dummies with the appropriate texture for their ancestral sense memories.  Dolphins can come together and plan a stunt in just a few seconds that would take the Bolshoi a month. They can analyze the contents of a ship’s hull from a hundred yards away. A scientist made a recording of a dolphin communication and played it back to a wild dolphin in the ocean.

Talk about imitation.  The dolphin stood on its tail on the ocean floor and exactly mimicked the body attitude of the scientist dude and repeated the message back “word” for “word” but added a couple of “words” at the end.  The scientist was dumbfounded.  It wasn’t just,

“Tweet tweeeeet click click tweet”

it was,

“Tweeet, tweet click click tweet twooo twoo.”

What was said scientist supposed to say?  How stupid can you get, the next sentence is,

“Tweet tweet click click twooo twoo click click.”  EVERYBODY knows that!

And whales can communicate from pole to pole through sound waves we can’t hear. Pigs, Apes, Cats, Pigs and Killer Whales are smart but just don’t want to play our stupid games. Apes and chimps can sign and teach sign, lie, make neologisms, collude, assassinate, indulge in acts of genocide (THAT’S intelligence!?). Chimps, dogs & dolphins like to play our games, and win our prizes, but WHY do they, and not other species, put up with and sometimes even LIKE to work with us?  Parrots and crows can do math on the level of a  4 year old child (and how many words and numbers do we know in “Parrot”?  In ”The Parrot Who Owns Me” a woman ornithologist talks about a parrot she adopted who selected her as his mate. Male dolphins get boners interacting with human females.  And human history is replete with stories of gods screwing humans, humans screwing & getting screwed by other species & the horror & wonder of the mostly imaginary offspring of such unions.  “The Wild Parrots Of Telegraph Hill” each had their own distinct intelligences and personalities and (I think sexual) allegiances to the human who fed them. Monty Roberts can tame wild mustangs in a ring, using techniques developed from watching the matriarch of the herd.  Women who’ve been abused start crying when they see the horse start to follow him.  Elephants & other species communicate for miles using sound & wave frequencies we can’t apprehend.  Elephants remember bad treatment.  A tribe of baboons in India stoned a motorist to death who had run over one of its members a year before. African mole rats develop the place in their brain that would normally be the visual cortex into a touch cortex-computer that works with sensations transmitted through hairs sticking out from their noses.  They have topographical maps, similar to song lines, of their entire intricate tunneling system, laid out in the visual-touch cortex of their brains.  A bee returning to the hive does a dance to make an action map for the other bees so they can find the flowers it has just found. It reminds me of the way Jack Kerouac used to act out an entire trip for an audience of friends.  We have never been as different from the barbarians and the “dumb” creatures our old man in the sky which we created in our own image so conveniently gave us dominion over.  Matter of fact the more we learn the more we find out we’re not in control of, or superior to, much of anything. We don’t even control our own minds and bodies. The moralists and preachers will have a problem with that, but don’t worry about them, they may be like Willie Loman “out there riding on a smile and a shoeshine” but they can make dogma and money out of anything.  Don Imus once asked Wolfman Jack how the hell he knew in the fifties to do things like start a cheap, hundred thousand watt station just across the border in Mexico but close enough so he could legally broadcast from Del Rio, Tex, and sell culled chicken eggs and cockroach traps where you had to put the cockroach in it by hand.

“Well Don,” he rasped, “I was born knowin stuff other people ain’t gonna know till they’re dead.” He had his genius at the price of less than an idiot’s sense of morality, but, one way or another,  isn’t that the way it is with all of us?

It’s as if the whole living world is composed of bits and pieces of a cosmic intelligence, but what’s so intelligent about the body’s “wisdom” that can put us in love or road rage, depression or mania? But the “super intelligent kindness of the human intellect” (Allan Ginsberg) can lead us to dissatisfying consensus and dry intellectuality.  There are no lines in space, much less between life & death, or the “moments to remember” we sang about in high school, no lines between mind & body, but how will we ever get them together in our individual beings?  Watch the way it goes past all the lines we draw between and from mind to body on a drive out of town, past the big buildings, the suburbs, the mines, the scattered houses, the man made playas, the “nothing” beyond, from which everything we are comes….not to even mention the 98% of the universe beyond that from which the 2% of the material universe that we know something about came screaming,

“Well, here goes nothing!”

And thinking of that, it was probably presumptuous of me to ask where your landscapes came from, where they were going, and why they don’t change in any “logical” fashion. 

God help any writer trying to make verbal sense out of art.  Especially if the artists are friends, they can see him coming a mile away.  But as with questioning the movements of the social body, and life in general, presumptuousness & idiocy never stopped me before. But I can’t do or even touch much.  We usually can barely participate as coherent observers, much less figure out, much less change anything.  It’s as if we were participants in a cosmic witness protection program, kind of lonely, exhausting and exciting at the same time.

Body/mind, teleos/logos, moment/motion,  aren’t “real” dichotomies because it’s all connected but the wonder is, we all more or less know what we mean when we use those terms.  It took us a long time to learn there’s a line you can see right through but absolutely cannot cross to control clinical depression and mental illness with talk therapy or other intellectual exercises. The mind can choose all it wants, the muscles, immune system, neurotransmitters & digestive processes just say,

“We’ll see what we can do.”

Some abuse victims repeat (mimic) their childhood scenarios throughout their adult lives, thinking each time they’re going to come out right this time.  The bodies of PTSD victims repeat scenes from “the THEATER of war” seemingly without even that much therapeutic intent. They can be retrained, as can depressed people’s bodies, to more appropriately compartmentalize and reconsider every mimetic dance they automatically do and start over, but it’s a long hard road.  (And you can’t complain.  Don’t we all know that?) Old tapes play for the rest of us ad infinitum, sometimes with a little more variation than ad jingles but always with enough repetitive nausea to drive us to a vacation or major move or maybe even an early grave, in the search for new material.  We really need those new and different colors and lines, you talked about coming out after you take a trip.  If medicine makes it possible to live another fifty years, it will have to come to grips with how we can. keep those old tapes from boring us to death.

Why do dogs like us and cats not particularly give a shit? Why do we like certain animals and certain individual animals of the species we call, for lack of a worse word,  “humans”?  And why are our feelings sometimes answered and sometimes not?  As Jung might say The SHADOW knows, and as Freud might say, the body knows, and as I’m trying to say, the mirror neurons know but by definition none of those things are talking. Are there really gods or a god or a body and a mind or a line between life and death?  Or are those all just fables, metaphorical coordinates we use for shooting in the dark?  Do organisms and environments grow in an improvisational dance or are they only mechanically and randomly interactive?  Why should it bother us if the body or, for that matter,  ALL matter is just another form of consciousness and possibly infused with a greater intelligence than our own?  (Watching the traffic and the political scene, and seeing how cabbages and walnuts look like brains & brains act like they were cabbages & walnuts,  it doesn’t seem like our “intelligence” would be a hard bar to get over.)  Hearing the rich drawn out tones of Louis Armstrong’s early recording of “CC Rider” or seeing a video of Muddy Waters’ brother talking and playing guitar and singing in front of an irrigated field of cotton in Mississippi I get the feeling body, mind, earth, song and dance are definitely all connected and there’s really not all that much to worry our little minds about.