THE REST OF YOUR POST-NEARLY HALF-REALIZED BIRDLIKE THOUGHTS

Twilight Cat Dreaming of Flames by David Tibet

Passage from the book I'm reading currently, Women of the Forest by Yolanda and Robert Murphy, based on a 1952 ethnography of the Mundurucu people of the Tapajos river, Brazilian lowlands.

The majesty and mystery of [the Amazon basin's] raw nature are conveyed in stories told among both Brazilians and Indians of dark, bottom-less areas in the river where dwells the cobra grande, an anaconda as large as a steamboat with eyes that have a fiery glow. And the forests are populated by strange and dangerous creatures that must either be avoided or placated if man is to maintain his delicate balance with nature. The Indians have a keen sense of the tenuous quality of the relationship between human culture and the natural environment. One Mundurucu myth tells of a young man named Perisuat, who left his home and traveled through the forest for years, having remarkable encounters with the animal kingdom along the way. At the end, he returns to his village covered with insect bites and bee stings, really more animal than human, and dies shortly thereafter. There is an allegory here of man's regression from his delicately contrived cultures, of the irreversability of his progress from the natural to the human state, of the death that lies within nature. But it is an attractive regression that appeals to the atavistic tendencies in all of us. The jungle exercises a pull to enter more deeply, to penetrate beyond man into unknown wildernesses, to become unfolded in the great forests. Seemingly an impulse to set out, it is really a call to return -- back into nature, back into ourselves and our origins. It provides the realization of what, to most of urban mankind, is fantasy, and it is not adventitious that twenty years later it appears to us in retrospect as a dream.

REAL-LIFE CAREER-TYPE activity detected happening today. I talked to a lady today (on the phone) from the City of San Diego Development Services Department who wants to interview me for a paid student internship position assisting their senior environmental planners. PERFECTO! Will summon all my spirit animals for Friday morning at 9:30 AM and take them into the elevator with me to the fifth floor, where I will exit the elevator with the spirit animals and approach the desk of Tony Something Or Other, who will interview me (guided by invisible, empowering spirit animals). Little does he know that I, with the help of my excellence-granting spirit animals, will totally shred his interview to pieces and eat it for breakfast -- a good thing for me!

So I guess our president has now made the transition from awful president to total media illusion, have you heard about this? Hundreds of volunteer firefighters converged on Atlanta, and after awaiting instructions on how they would be dispatched into New Orleans to do some actual physical direct good, they finally, finally get their assignment: be used as a backdrop against which the president can make a speech. FEMA ordered them to be used as "community relations specialists," relating a mindless, useless sense of security and, I don't know, sense of purpose? to the public eye. FEMA, of course, the same organization that wasn't capable of ordering their own workers to a large dome filled with evacuees when it actually, you know, mattered.