California Multilogue Five "Headless Hydrae"
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-JA
To build a house on a hill is no mean accomplishment. You have to get the angle just right, cantilever the foundation or whatever, pour the concrete and stay on top of it or you get a place like my old apartment in Chicago where all the pens and dog toys eventually gathered in an uneven row below the front window like the house was leaning forward to hear better the house across the street or to tell its secrets. It was old and bent and sinking the way buildings do into the dirt. Gradual descent. Out here there's the added peril of none of this being permanent, everything on shifting plates, no trust in granite or the works of women and men.
I still don't know what an earthquake feels like. In Michigan a truck going by on the cobblestones would shake the whole house and you could hear the windows rattling in their panes. When the Blue Angels swooped in overhead it was even worse, with the noise infiltrating and taking root in your bones. Once in Oregon I noticed a coffee cart shaking and the glasses rattling around then returned to whatever I was reading. Found out later that was one and I was a little disappointed.
At sunset with the hills rolling away toward the Bay it looks like E.T. around here, I've been meaning to tell you, and I wish for once you'd seen the same movies I did but you're more likely to be reading a biography of a ballet dancer while I'm trying to find the movie version of the book I was listening to about the history of consciousness because I've been reading a few pages a day like I do and I'm just not really all that into it; the last thing I really understood was how eukaryotes basically just captured pieces of other life forms and assembled them into more complex organisms, the way alien life forms do in the other kinds of books I like, which makes all of us modular, pretty much anything with more than a flagellum or two, hybrid monster creatures whose brains are separate organisms telling the rest of our bodies what to do, which is also how octopuses are organized only I'm told it's different somehow, that they operate more as a committee or a military unit with the head sending out basic instructions or orders to each tentacle which has its own limb command center and they carry out the actual stimulus-response action items, making the head more like a project manager who's only as effective as its weakest appendage.
Anyway I'd like to see a movie with cool graphics and an Attenborough wannabe narrating the whole thing or maybe a Nova or even a generic PBS special so I can see what the hell is going on in this book though I will give the author credit for titling one of the chapters "Oral or Anal" to keep us invested, as I was literally nodding off and trying to get a couple more pages read into my command center when I saw that and thought okay I can put in another minute if I have to.
Which brings us to the obvious: when is a town not a town? This town is not a town, not the way I think of one. No central government or command center. Houses are built deep into streets filling crevices and dead ends have two or three rows of houses behind them. Sometimes in some version, prehistory or some other, there's a crack in the world and a schism opens up down the middle of the road. Sometimes the theme is that there's no theme. This guy knows what I'm talkin' about.
Joseph E. LeDoux