.
These three novels are horror stories by Dan Simmons, and they are part of a very loosely related series. Summer of Night (1991) is the first one, which should be read first, and it introduces us to all of the characters when they are kids in 1960. The other two, Children of the Night (1992) and A Winter Haunting (2002), each take up the story of one of these kids as adults. Other Simmons novels also mention more of these kids as adults.
.
Summer of Night occurs in small town America in 1960. Our characters are 11 or 12 years old, a group of friends in Elm Haven, Illinois. They have a club called The Bike Patrol and they enjoy all the innocence of summer, playing baseball and swimming, until some increasingly creepy things happen and they learn that there is profound evil in the world. There are hints of ancient curses implicating the brutal Renaissance Borgia family. As are all Simmons tales, it is a great read.
.
The direct sequel is A Winter Haunting, although it was published a decade later (2002). One of the main Bike Patrol kids, Dale Stewart, is now a troubled adult 40 years later, and he is somehow compelled to return to Elm Haven even though he does not consciously remember the events of 1960. This novel was chilling. Before reading it one should read Summer of Night.
.
In Children of the Night (1992) we find a former Bike Patrol kid, adult Mike O’Rourke, as a wounded Vietnam vet and now a Catholic priest, and he is called to look into some strange occurrences in post-communist Romania. He finds orphanages with staggering amounts of HIV infections (as in fact there was). Romania and Transylvania are loaded with legends of Dracula and vampirism. Can such evil be involved in our story? This novel can stand alone by itself without any prior reading of the Simmons corpus.
.
Simmons continues to astound me. I read anything he writes.
.
-Zenwind.
25 July 2011
17 July 2011
Nixon’s War on Drugs and its fatally unintended consequences
.
President Richard Nixon launched his War on Drugs in the early 1970s, and two of the fatalities in this war were not drugs at all but rather two young American human beings that I happened to know at the time as acquaintances within my social circle. I guess you could call them “collateral damage” in that war, mere numbers who happened to die while our noble all-knowing government was fighting those elusive demon drugs.
.
Forget for a minute the viciously immoral and un-American action of an anointed power figure such as Nixon directing the coercive power of the law, of the police and the courts against the act of recreational self-medication chosen by free individuals – an act that was victimless as long as these individuals were not hurting anyone else. This is a tale of unintended consequences caused by the fatal conceit of elitist holier-than-thou “moralists” with political power.
.
In 1968 very few of my friends or acquaintances in my rural community were using outlawed drugs. When we partied, we used alcohol. However, when I returned home in 1970 after a tour of duty in Vietnam, almost all of my close friends were now smoking marijuana – just as an estimated 85% of my combat unit in Vietnam had smoked pot frequently there. In my rural culture, pot was becoming almost everyone’s number one partying choice. There were good times. We slowed down the pace of life and no one got hurt. It was much the same across the rest of America.
.
A few of those in our local youth culture stubbornly stuck to their hard-drinking ways. We called them the “Boozers.” One guy, E., was scary. He drank extremely hard while driving insanely fast. I once caught a ride home from him, and I vowed that I would never get into a car with him again. We all agreed that he would never live to be 21.
.
Then something weird happened. E. started coming to pot-smoking parties – probably because virtually all the decent young ladies in our area were regularly there. He started to enjoy pot more than alcohol. We would be amazed to see him driving his powerful V8 car slowly along the backroads at an idle to arrive safely home. We started to talk about it and agreed that maybe E. would actually live to be 21 and more. It was a remarkable transformation. He had mellowed out and slowed down.
.
Enter the federal government under Nixon. An easy target in this War on Drugs was the Mexican border, where much of the pot that Americans were smoking came across at that time. Nixon increased the number of drug cops and pot-sniffing dogs along that border, and immediately it shut off access to pot in small town areas such as mine.
.
Well, it only shut off the flow of pot for a month or two, until pot that was much more powerful started coming in steadily from Columbia in much bigger quantities. There is a lesson in this, an iron law of economics. Where there is a solid demand, suppliers will find a way around obstacles to meet those consumers’ demands. Legal prohibitions will never stop it.
.
The more important point I want to make is about the unintended consequences that may occur because of such arbitrary blocking of free-market economic supply. Consumers often have primary or preferred consumer goods as a first choice, for example, pot, and then secondary substitute goods are their second choice if the preferred good is unavailable. With access to the preferred good, pot, temporarily blocked by the whim of coercive government, people picked substitutes.
.
The chemistry majors from nearby colleges would come by every community in VW minivans equipped with all they needed to manufacture acid, aka, LSD. They were acid labs on wheels. It was now cheap, available, and it partially filled the consumers’ demands. Nixon did not intend this, but he was instrumental in establishing the use of LSD as a regular party drug by blocking access to pot.
.
Other frustrated pot smokers chose other substitute drugs. Our friend E. chose to go back to alcohol. Denied pot, he started to drink hard again and to rev up his big V8 Pontiac and speed off like a rocket down the highway. Then the news hit us: E., with another friend of ours as a passenger, drove that Pontiac off the road and wrapped it around a huge tree. Neither of them reached 21.
.
This is part of the tragedy of humanity’s modern loss of freedom. Men who are puffed up with moral righteousness and possessing political power, like Nixon, get arrogant and think they have the wisdom and the right to direct the lives of sovereign individuals. They appoint themselves as social engineers and use law to coerce people toward some kind of imagined ideal of their own.
.
However, they have neither the moral right to do this, the political right to do it, nor the wisdom to foresee the unintended consequences of using force to interfere with the peaceful spontaneous order of Free Minds and Free Markets.
.
-Zenwind.
.
President Richard Nixon launched his War on Drugs in the early 1970s, and two of the fatalities in this war were not drugs at all but rather two young American human beings that I happened to know at the time as acquaintances within my social circle. I guess you could call them “collateral damage” in that war, mere numbers who happened to die while our noble all-knowing government was fighting those elusive demon drugs.
.
Forget for a minute the viciously immoral and un-American action of an anointed power figure such as Nixon directing the coercive power of the law, of the police and the courts against the act of recreational self-medication chosen by free individuals – an act that was victimless as long as these individuals were not hurting anyone else. This is a tale of unintended consequences caused by the fatal conceit of elitist holier-than-thou “moralists” with political power.
.
In 1968 very few of my friends or acquaintances in my rural community were using outlawed drugs. When we partied, we used alcohol. However, when I returned home in 1970 after a tour of duty in Vietnam, almost all of my close friends were now smoking marijuana – just as an estimated 85% of my combat unit in Vietnam had smoked pot frequently there. In my rural culture, pot was becoming almost everyone’s number one partying choice. There were good times. We slowed down the pace of life and no one got hurt. It was much the same across the rest of America.
.
A few of those in our local youth culture stubbornly stuck to their hard-drinking ways. We called them the “Boozers.” One guy, E., was scary. He drank extremely hard while driving insanely fast. I once caught a ride home from him, and I vowed that I would never get into a car with him again. We all agreed that he would never live to be 21.
.
Then something weird happened. E. started coming to pot-smoking parties – probably because virtually all the decent young ladies in our area were regularly there. He started to enjoy pot more than alcohol. We would be amazed to see him driving his powerful V8 car slowly along the backroads at an idle to arrive safely home. We started to talk about it and agreed that maybe E. would actually live to be 21 and more. It was a remarkable transformation. He had mellowed out and slowed down.
.
Enter the federal government under Nixon. An easy target in this War on Drugs was the Mexican border, where much of the pot that Americans were smoking came across at that time. Nixon increased the number of drug cops and pot-sniffing dogs along that border, and immediately it shut off access to pot in small town areas such as mine.
.
Well, it only shut off the flow of pot for a month or two, until pot that was much more powerful started coming in steadily from Columbia in much bigger quantities. There is a lesson in this, an iron law of economics. Where there is a solid demand, suppliers will find a way around obstacles to meet those consumers’ demands. Legal prohibitions will never stop it.
.
The more important point I want to make is about the unintended consequences that may occur because of such arbitrary blocking of free-market economic supply. Consumers often have primary or preferred consumer goods as a first choice, for example, pot, and then secondary substitute goods are their second choice if the preferred good is unavailable. With access to the preferred good, pot, temporarily blocked by the whim of coercive government, people picked substitutes.
.
The chemistry majors from nearby colleges would come by every community in VW minivans equipped with all they needed to manufacture acid, aka, LSD. They were acid labs on wheels. It was now cheap, available, and it partially filled the consumers’ demands. Nixon did not intend this, but he was instrumental in establishing the use of LSD as a regular party drug by blocking access to pot.
.
Other frustrated pot smokers chose other substitute drugs. Our friend E. chose to go back to alcohol. Denied pot, he started to drink hard again and to rev up his big V8 Pontiac and speed off like a rocket down the highway. Then the news hit us: E., with another friend of ours as a passenger, drove that Pontiac off the road and wrapped it around a huge tree. Neither of them reached 21.
.
This is part of the tragedy of humanity’s modern loss of freedom. Men who are puffed up with moral righteousness and possessing political power, like Nixon, get arrogant and think they have the wisdom and the right to direct the lives of sovereign individuals. They appoint themselves as social engineers and use law to coerce people toward some kind of imagined ideal of their own.
.
However, they have neither the moral right to do this, the political right to do it, nor the wisdom to foresee the unintended consequences of using force to interfere with the peaceful spontaneous order of Free Minds and Free Markets.
.
-Zenwind.
.
09 June 2011
Movie Review: Enemies of the People (2009)
.
Enemies of the People (2009) is a documentary about the Cambodian genocide by the communist Khmer Rouge. I recommend it highly. It is in English and Khmer with English and Thai subtitles.
.
In the late 1970s the Khmer Rouge took their version of Marxist-Leninist-Maoist ideology and tried to out-do Mao. They abolished city life, herded everyone into the jungles at gunpoint and forced them to be peasant farmers. “Enemies of the people” were thought to be everywhere, and they killed hundreds and hundreds of thousands of those they identified as middle class Cambodians, e.g., students, teachers, professionals, and even “middle peasants” who husbanded small plots of land. Money and markets were abolished, so death by starvation resulted, and it is hard to sort famine deaths from murders. Estimates vary, but around 2 million Cambodians died during the Khmer Rouge regime, perhaps 21% of the population.
.
The filmmaker, Thet Samboth, one of today’s leading news journalists in Cambodia, lost his family during the killings. His father, a Khmer Rouge member, was purged during the madness, his brother was killed later, and his mother died soon after. But he said he doesn’t seek revenge. He just wanted to understand it all and to record this history as a lesson for future generations before it is forgotten. He took 10 years to make the film, slowly gaining the confidence of many former Khmer Rouge killers including one of the former top two leaders of the Khmer Rouge, Nuon Chea, former Brother Number Two (to the late Pol Pot’s Number One). Nuon Chea is now 82 and facing a criminal justice tribunal.
.
Lower in the ranks of the Khmer Rouge were the actual killers out in the provinces, the people who had to slit the throats of countless “enemies of the people” on the orders of those higher up. (The orders were to “save bullets” and thus kill in a more personal face-to-face manner with knives or iron bars.) Khoun was one of them, and he points out where in his rural neighborhood the killing fields and burial grounds were, pointing in all directions around them. Neighbors passing by confirm it.
.
Suon was a bit higher in rank and ordered Khoun and others to kill, as well as himself taking part in the killing of many. Today both of them are very remorseful that they blindly followed such orders. Suon, referring to traditional Theravada Buddhist beliefs, asks: How many rebirths in how many holes in hell must I endure to wash away my evil karma? He is in absolute despair.
.
Sister “Em” is interviewed, an even higher ranking Khmer Rouge official at their local level. She had ordered Suon and Khoun to kill. She is reluctant to have her face filmed, so all we see is her back-lit outline. She is not as forthright as Suon and Khoun, seemingly not admitting her own guilt so much as it just being a case of
“following orders from above.” The higher we go in the Khmer Rouge hierarchy, the less we find the acceptance of responsibility. The higher we go, the more they remain True Believers in their holy struggle.
.
I wished that there had been more analysis of the ideology motivating the leaders. The closest we get is when Brother Number Two Nuon Chea still insisted that it was, after all, right to value (an abstraction called) “the people” over “individuals” – somehow justifying the killing of maybe 2 million of these individuals. Rationalizing to the bitter end, he said they were “enemies of the people.” 20% of the population?!?
.
Who really were the Enemies of the People? Individual Cambodians who just wanted to pursue life, liberty and happiness with their families? Or self-anointed intellectual leaders such as Pol Pot and Nuon Chea? This is classic Collectivism, where the abstract good of the collective group, e.g., variously called the “people,” “nation,” “community,” “society,” “tribe,” “race,” or “gang,” somehow justifies sacrificing the actual real-life individual members of those collective groups. As Ayn Rand and other libertarians have reminded us, a collective is nothing but an arbitrary grouping of individuals. It is the individual person that lives, feels, thinks and aspires, and who suffers and dies at the hands of the political True Believers (be those politicians self-labeled as “brothers,” “comrades,” “conservatives,” “progressives,” etc.). In Cambodia’s case, multiply that individual’s pain, suffering and death by 2 million.
.
Nuon Chea seems unrepentant. Yet when filmmaker Thet Samoth finally did tell him at the end of the film that his own family was killed by the Khmer Rouge, Nuon Chea did say that he felt very sorry. Perhaps this one concrete example of the personal tragedy of an individual, Samoth, who had befriended him and talked to him for many years made some kind of connection to reality in the mind of Brother Number Two. A bit too late, I think.
.
-Zenwind.
.
Enemies of the People (2009) is a documentary about the Cambodian genocide by the communist Khmer Rouge. I recommend it highly. It is in English and Khmer with English and Thai subtitles.
.
In the late 1970s the Khmer Rouge took their version of Marxist-Leninist-Maoist ideology and tried to out-do Mao. They abolished city life, herded everyone into the jungles at gunpoint and forced them to be peasant farmers. “Enemies of the people” were thought to be everywhere, and they killed hundreds and hundreds of thousands of those they identified as middle class Cambodians, e.g., students, teachers, professionals, and even “middle peasants” who husbanded small plots of land. Money and markets were abolished, so death by starvation resulted, and it is hard to sort famine deaths from murders. Estimates vary, but around 2 million Cambodians died during the Khmer Rouge regime, perhaps 21% of the population.
.
The filmmaker, Thet Samboth, one of today’s leading news journalists in Cambodia, lost his family during the killings. His father, a Khmer Rouge member, was purged during the madness, his brother was killed later, and his mother died soon after. But he said he doesn’t seek revenge. He just wanted to understand it all and to record this history as a lesson for future generations before it is forgotten. He took 10 years to make the film, slowly gaining the confidence of many former Khmer Rouge killers including one of the former top two leaders of the Khmer Rouge, Nuon Chea, former Brother Number Two (to the late Pol Pot’s Number One). Nuon Chea is now 82 and facing a criminal justice tribunal.
.
Lower in the ranks of the Khmer Rouge were the actual killers out in the provinces, the people who had to slit the throats of countless “enemies of the people” on the orders of those higher up. (The orders were to “save bullets” and thus kill in a more personal face-to-face manner with knives or iron bars.) Khoun was one of them, and he points out where in his rural neighborhood the killing fields and burial grounds were, pointing in all directions around them. Neighbors passing by confirm it.
.
Suon was a bit higher in rank and ordered Khoun and others to kill, as well as himself taking part in the killing of many. Today both of them are very remorseful that they blindly followed such orders. Suon, referring to traditional Theravada Buddhist beliefs, asks: How many rebirths in how many holes in hell must I endure to wash away my evil karma? He is in absolute despair.
.
Sister “Em” is interviewed, an even higher ranking Khmer Rouge official at their local level. She had ordered Suon and Khoun to kill. She is reluctant to have her face filmed, so all we see is her back-lit outline. She is not as forthright as Suon and Khoun, seemingly not admitting her own guilt so much as it just being a case of
“following orders from above.” The higher we go in the Khmer Rouge hierarchy, the less we find the acceptance of responsibility. The higher we go, the more they remain True Believers in their holy struggle.
.
I wished that there had been more analysis of the ideology motivating the leaders. The closest we get is when Brother Number Two Nuon Chea still insisted that it was, after all, right to value (an abstraction called) “the people” over “individuals” – somehow justifying the killing of maybe 2 million of these individuals. Rationalizing to the bitter end, he said they were “enemies of the people.” 20% of the population?!?
.
Who really were the Enemies of the People? Individual Cambodians who just wanted to pursue life, liberty and happiness with their families? Or self-anointed intellectual leaders such as Pol Pot and Nuon Chea? This is classic Collectivism, where the abstract good of the collective group, e.g., variously called the “people,” “nation,” “community,” “society,” “tribe,” “race,” or “gang,” somehow justifies sacrificing the actual real-life individual members of those collective groups. As Ayn Rand and other libertarians have reminded us, a collective is nothing but an arbitrary grouping of individuals. It is the individual person that lives, feels, thinks and aspires, and who suffers and dies at the hands of the political True Believers (be those politicians self-labeled as “brothers,” “comrades,” “conservatives,” “progressives,” etc.). In Cambodia’s case, multiply that individual’s pain, suffering and death by 2 million.
.
Nuon Chea seems unrepentant. Yet when filmmaker Thet Samoth finally did tell him at the end of the film that his own family was killed by the Khmer Rouge, Nuon Chea did say that he felt very sorry. Perhaps this one concrete example of the personal tragedy of an individual, Samoth, who had befriended him and talked to him for many years made some kind of connection to reality in the mind of Brother Number Two. A bit too late, I think.
.
-Zenwind.
.
23 April 2011
Book Review: With the Old Breed, by E.B. Sledge
.
With the Old Breed (1981/2007) is the finest combat memoir by an enlisted man that I have ever read, and this is merely a brief note on it after I finished reading it today. The “Old Breed,” of course, is the First Marine Division (1st MarDiv), first activated in WWII to fight at Guadalcanal, the first US ground offensive against the Empire of Japan. This book was one of the main primary sources used for the great HBO miniseries The Pacific (2010), which is quite true to the book.
.
The 1st MarDiv went on to fight at Cape Gloucester on New Britain, Peleliu (the ferocious but “forgotten” battle), and finally on Okinawa at war’s end. E.B. Sledge joined the division in time to see action on both Peleliu and Okinawa; my father joined them in time to see action on Okinawa (see the photo on p.77 of a 75mm “pack” howitzer like one my father crewed); and I joined the Old Breed in 1969 in Da Nang to see action in Quang Nam Province, RVN.
.
Sledge was a fine writer and a sensitive soul whose horrific personal experiences in the meat-grinder battles of Peleliu and Okinawa are given to us honestly, starkly and humanely. He does not glorify war. Rather, he gives the reader the actual realities: the terror, stink, brutality, inhumanity, soul-killing fatigue and madness of it. The American and Japanese casualty statistics he gives are sobering; but the experiences, sights, sounds, smells and emotions he personally relates are horrifying.
.
-Zenwind.
.
With the Old Breed (1981/2007) is the finest combat memoir by an enlisted man that I have ever read, and this is merely a brief note on it after I finished reading it today. The “Old Breed,” of course, is the First Marine Division (1st MarDiv), first activated in WWII to fight at Guadalcanal, the first US ground offensive against the Empire of Japan. This book was one of the main primary sources used for the great HBO miniseries The Pacific (2010), which is quite true to the book.
.
The 1st MarDiv went on to fight at Cape Gloucester on New Britain, Peleliu (the ferocious but “forgotten” battle), and finally on Okinawa at war’s end. E.B. Sledge joined the division in time to see action on both Peleliu and Okinawa; my father joined them in time to see action on Okinawa (see the photo on p.77 of a 75mm “pack” howitzer like one my father crewed); and I joined the Old Breed in 1969 in Da Nang to see action in Quang Nam Province, RVN.
.
Sledge was a fine writer and a sensitive soul whose horrific personal experiences in the meat-grinder battles of Peleliu and Okinawa are given to us honestly, starkly and humanely. He does not glorify war. Rather, he gives the reader the actual realities: the terror, stink, brutality, inhumanity, soul-killing fatigue and madness of it. The American and Japanese casualty statistics he gives are sobering; but the experiences, sights, sounds, smells and emotions he personally relates are horrifying.
.
-Zenwind.
.
Book Review: The Earthsea sagas, by Ursula K. Le Guin
.
This is a wonderful cycle of five fantasy novels (plus a short story or two) which Le Guin wrote over a period of three decades. She is a very fine writer, and I seek out anything else that she wrote. At this time, my review will only be a short note on the Earthsea novels, because I feel that I really cannot do justice to them by reviewing them yet. I need to come back to them much later to re-read and re-absorb them. Hopefully, I will update this someday into a full review.
.
Earthsea is a fantasy world of islands with rich cultures, and various types of religion, non-religion and magic are practiced there. There are dragons, too. Some of the beloved key characters – such as Ged and Tenar – are traced through the series of novels from their youth to older age. The novels should be read in their proper order to best understand the sweep of the tales. The novels and major stories, in order, are:
.
* A Wizard of Earthsea (1968)
* The Tombs of Atuan (1971)
* The Farthest Shore (1972)
* Tehanu (1990)
* “Dragonfly” (1997) short story from collection, Tales From Earthsea (2001)
* The Other Wind (2001).
.
-Zenwind.
.
This is a wonderful cycle of five fantasy novels (plus a short story or two) which Le Guin wrote over a period of three decades. She is a very fine writer, and I seek out anything else that she wrote. At this time, my review will only be a short note on the Earthsea novels, because I feel that I really cannot do justice to them by reviewing them yet. I need to come back to them much later to re-read and re-absorb them. Hopefully, I will update this someday into a full review.
.
Earthsea is a fantasy world of islands with rich cultures, and various types of religion, non-religion and magic are practiced there. There are dragons, too. Some of the beloved key characters – such as Ged and Tenar – are traced through the series of novels from their youth to older age. The novels should be read in their proper order to best understand the sweep of the tales. The novels and major stories, in order, are:
.
* A Wizard of Earthsea (1968)
* The Tombs of Atuan (1971)
* The Farthest Shore (1972)
* Tehanu (1990)
* “Dragonfly” (1997) short story from collection, Tales From Earthsea (2001)
* The Other Wind (2001).
.
-Zenwind.
.
26 February 2011
Book Review: Black Hills by Dan Simmons
.
Black Hills (2010) is yet another great Dan Simmons novel. He continually amazes me with his variety of genres, subject matter and his deep research. This is historical fiction with a fantastic twist, and I loved it. The action starts immediately in 1876 as an 11-year-old Sioux boy happens to be on the battlefield at Little Big Horn during Custer’s Last Stand just as Custer dies in front of him, and Custer’s ghost enters into him and haunts him for decades, providing insightful dialogue between the two personalities/cultures. The boy’s Sioux name is Paha Sapa (meaning “Black Hills”), and it is his story that we follow – with Custer’s ghost trailing along. Native American Indian worldviews, mythologies, visions, sentiments and complex histories are well-respected and well-represented throughout this story.
.
Custer’s history is well researched. Crazy Horse, Sitting Bull, and the massacre at Wounded Knee are part of the story, and their histories are presented well. We are swept along through general American history, all within Paha Sapa’s experiences, as the Indians’ day is over and the white man’s story is ascendant. The construction of the Brooklyn Bridge is detailed far to the east. The 1893 Chicago World’s Fair is an important setting in the plot, along with Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West Show. The ambitious 20th century project of carving Mt. Rushmore by the visionary Gutzon Borglum is also integral to Paha Sapa’s story.
.
Simmons’ vision of Native American Indians is extremely sympathetic and respectful, but it is not mindless or politically correct (thank the Great Spirit!) because he is not afraid to be historically accurate rather than just being a wishful thinker about it. Many well-established historical points may not be so easily accepted by primitivist mythologizers: i.e., when Simmons writes of the “fun” of war for Plains Indians, and of the Sioux as “a ruthless, relentless invasion machine,” attacking other Indian tribes and pushing them off their traditional lands (p.429). (It is also noted that the whites are just as bad with their own relentless warfare, soon becoming worldwide.) It is admitted that the Plains Indians often stampeded buffalo herds over cliffs (buffalo drops), killing them by the hundreds, just to cut out a select liver (or tongue) from the top layer of carcasses and leaving the rest to rot. It was not just the Euro-Americans who wasted natural resources that seemed to be without limit. No race or culture is promoted over another here; instead we find a common, complex, understandable human history, weird as it may turn out to be.
.
One thing extra I like about this novel – besides its usual Simmons genius – is the appreciation for wilderness and natural settings, which Simmons describes so well. That speaks to me personally in a powerful way. Paha Sapa sees the ever-encroaching growth of human settlement and development as a grim inevitability, but he still sees the spirit of natural beauty left. And in the end he can still say: “This is a good day to live.”
.
-Zenwind.
.
Black Hills (2010) is yet another great Dan Simmons novel. He continually amazes me with his variety of genres, subject matter and his deep research. This is historical fiction with a fantastic twist, and I loved it. The action starts immediately in 1876 as an 11-year-old Sioux boy happens to be on the battlefield at Little Big Horn during Custer’s Last Stand just as Custer dies in front of him, and Custer’s ghost enters into him and haunts him for decades, providing insightful dialogue between the two personalities/cultures. The boy’s Sioux name is Paha Sapa (meaning “Black Hills”), and it is his story that we follow – with Custer’s ghost trailing along. Native American Indian worldviews, mythologies, visions, sentiments and complex histories are well-respected and well-represented throughout this story.
.
Custer’s history is well researched. Crazy Horse, Sitting Bull, and the massacre at Wounded Knee are part of the story, and their histories are presented well. We are swept along through general American history, all within Paha Sapa’s experiences, as the Indians’ day is over and the white man’s story is ascendant. The construction of the Brooklyn Bridge is detailed far to the east. The 1893 Chicago World’s Fair is an important setting in the plot, along with Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West Show. The ambitious 20th century project of carving Mt. Rushmore by the visionary Gutzon Borglum is also integral to Paha Sapa’s story.
.
Simmons’ vision of Native American Indians is extremely sympathetic and respectful, but it is not mindless or politically correct (thank the Great Spirit!) because he is not afraid to be historically accurate rather than just being a wishful thinker about it. Many well-established historical points may not be so easily accepted by primitivist mythologizers: i.e., when Simmons writes of the “fun” of war for Plains Indians, and of the Sioux as “a ruthless, relentless invasion machine,” attacking other Indian tribes and pushing them off their traditional lands (p.429). (It is also noted that the whites are just as bad with their own relentless warfare, soon becoming worldwide.) It is admitted that the Plains Indians often stampeded buffalo herds over cliffs (buffalo drops), killing them by the hundreds, just to cut out a select liver (or tongue) from the top layer of carcasses and leaving the rest to rot. It was not just the Euro-Americans who wasted natural resources that seemed to be without limit. No race or culture is promoted over another here; instead we find a common, complex, understandable human history, weird as it may turn out to be.
.
One thing extra I like about this novel – besides its usual Simmons genius – is the appreciation for wilderness and natural settings, which Simmons describes so well. That speaks to me personally in a powerful way. Paha Sapa sees the ever-encroaching growth of human settlement and development as a grim inevitability, but he still sees the spirit of natural beauty left. And in the end he can still say: “This is a good day to live.”
.
-Zenwind.
.
12 January 2011
Nightmares of War & the Sense of Smell
.
(Do not read this too close to mealtime.)
.
This incident took place in northwestern Pennsylvania USA in April, May or June sometime in the mid-1990s, in the first really consistently hot days of the year. This is the time of the year when the remains of animals that had been road-killed by cars during winter and left along the roads smell most rank. My many walks along highways and back-roads have always confirmed this.
.
I was living at Wilderness Park high up on the Allegheny Plateau and hiking often out on the back trails in the Allegheny National Forest, which was just out my back door. One section of my favorite trail paralleled a back-road for a brief while at a distance of several hundred yards across a quite wild forested area, but if the wind was right you could occasionally hear motor vehicles on the road across that stretch of woods.
.
On this one particularly hot day as I was hiking this trail, the wind was blowing from the direction of this back-road, and I caught a couple of different whiffs of road-kill from that direction. One of the smells was extra strong, and I was sure that it must be a very big animal such as a deer or even a bear.
.
Immediately after this time I started to have very vivid, extremely violent and disturbing nightmares that involved stark images and memories of the Vietnam War. They went on for a week or two. I had not had nightmares like this for a long time, so I could not account for it.
.
I have had other war-related nightmares that could be easily explained, before and after this episode. Back in 1986 after seeing the very authentic movie “Platoon” in the theater, I immediately had nightmares and disturbed sleep for a two week period.
.
Also, a number of years later – long after this incident at Wilderness Park that I am presently describing had occurred – I again had disturbed sleep for a period, and I am sure that this latter episode was because at that time I was teaching US Military History for two semesters. As a brand-new course preparation for me, I was reading about and thinking of war all of the time, and I was especially thinking of it last of all before sleep-time. (I gladly handed over this course to a teacher both well-qualified and very eager to teach it, because it pleased him very much and contributed to his morale as a history teacher on our team, it strengthened our history department’s program, and it got the nightmares out of my head.) But these two episodes, the one before and the one after the Wilderness Park one, were not as disturbing as the one I now describe in the mid-1990s.
.
I could not explain why I was having these vivid nightmares at this particular time, so I just assumed it was the hot humid weather triggering memories of tropical Vietnam. I turned up the a/c at night but still had the horrific nightmares.
.
Then I belatedly got the community gossip. It was not road-kill that I had smelled after all. Two neighborhood boys on their bicycles had discovered a woman dead in her car on an obscure turn-off dead-end lane off from that back-road that paralleled my hiking trail. She had committed suicide in her car with the windows down earlier on one of those fine days of spring, and she was not discovered until a while after the fact, and this along with the extreme hot weather put her into a bad state of decomposition. The location of her body was exactly upwind of the place on my hiking trail where I had smelled on that day what I thought was a big animal road-kill, and the timeframe was an exact match – i.e., I had smelled the scent before her discovery. It had never occurred to my conscious mind that it was not the smell of a regular road-kill of a forest animal.
.
Dead mammals have a particular smell, but dead humans have a unique one. The best descriptions will usually tell you that a human’s decomposition smell is a sickeningly “sweet” smell. The only time I smelled this smell intensely was in Vietnam. In the tropical heat, decomposition worked fast. Our own dead were zipped into body bags and brought out as quickly as possible, but sometimes not quick enough. Enemy dead were often neglected, especially in more remote areas, and you were reminded of them by the smell whenever you went back through that area. It was a smell that you wished at the time that you could somehow flush and cleanse out of your nostrils, sinuses and skull, but it stayed with you. By the 1990s I had completely forgotten about all of this through the years, especially the fact of the uniqueness of the smell of human decomposition.
.
So now I became convinced that, 25 years after being in Vietnam, the ripe death-smell of this unfortunate woman near Wilderness Park triggered memories of the war somewhere inside my subconscious and completely without my conscious knowledge, thus producing unexplained nightmares. It made me a believer that memories can reside in the mind closely linked to the sense of smell.
.
I began writing this document when I read (on 18 September 2008) the following article in Science Daily online. The linked article is named, “Emotion and Scent Create Lasting Memories – Even in a Sleeping Brain,” and describes experiments on the brain chemistry of mice at the Duke University Medical Center and is published in The Journal of Neuroscience. Implications for other mammals such as humans are clear.
.
It all falls into place and makes perfect sense to me.
.
-Zenwind.
.
(Do not read this too close to mealtime.)
.
This incident took place in northwestern Pennsylvania USA in April, May or June sometime in the mid-1990s, in the first really consistently hot days of the year. This is the time of the year when the remains of animals that had been road-killed by cars during winter and left along the roads smell most rank. My many walks along highways and back-roads have always confirmed this.
.
I was living at Wilderness Park high up on the Allegheny Plateau and hiking often out on the back trails in the Allegheny National Forest, which was just out my back door. One section of my favorite trail paralleled a back-road for a brief while at a distance of several hundred yards across a quite wild forested area, but if the wind was right you could occasionally hear motor vehicles on the road across that stretch of woods.
.
On this one particularly hot day as I was hiking this trail, the wind was blowing from the direction of this back-road, and I caught a couple of different whiffs of road-kill from that direction. One of the smells was extra strong, and I was sure that it must be a very big animal such as a deer or even a bear.
.
Immediately after this time I started to have very vivid, extremely violent and disturbing nightmares that involved stark images and memories of the Vietnam War. They went on for a week or two. I had not had nightmares like this for a long time, so I could not account for it.
.
I have had other war-related nightmares that could be easily explained, before and after this episode. Back in 1986 after seeing the very authentic movie “Platoon” in the theater, I immediately had nightmares and disturbed sleep for a two week period.
.
Also, a number of years later – long after this incident at Wilderness Park that I am presently describing had occurred – I again had disturbed sleep for a period, and I am sure that this latter episode was because at that time I was teaching US Military History for two semesters. As a brand-new course preparation for me, I was reading about and thinking of war all of the time, and I was especially thinking of it last of all before sleep-time. (I gladly handed over this course to a teacher both well-qualified and very eager to teach it, because it pleased him very much and contributed to his morale as a history teacher on our team, it strengthened our history department’s program, and it got the nightmares out of my head.) But these two episodes, the one before and the one after the Wilderness Park one, were not as disturbing as the one I now describe in the mid-1990s.
.
I could not explain why I was having these vivid nightmares at this particular time, so I just assumed it was the hot humid weather triggering memories of tropical Vietnam. I turned up the a/c at night but still had the horrific nightmares.
.
Then I belatedly got the community gossip. It was not road-kill that I had smelled after all. Two neighborhood boys on their bicycles had discovered a woman dead in her car on an obscure turn-off dead-end lane off from that back-road that paralleled my hiking trail. She had committed suicide in her car with the windows down earlier on one of those fine days of spring, and she was not discovered until a while after the fact, and this along with the extreme hot weather put her into a bad state of decomposition. The location of her body was exactly upwind of the place on my hiking trail where I had smelled on that day what I thought was a big animal road-kill, and the timeframe was an exact match – i.e., I had smelled the scent before her discovery. It had never occurred to my conscious mind that it was not the smell of a regular road-kill of a forest animal.
.
Dead mammals have a particular smell, but dead humans have a unique one. The best descriptions will usually tell you that a human’s decomposition smell is a sickeningly “sweet” smell. The only time I smelled this smell intensely was in Vietnam. In the tropical heat, decomposition worked fast. Our own dead were zipped into body bags and brought out as quickly as possible, but sometimes not quick enough. Enemy dead were often neglected, especially in more remote areas, and you were reminded of them by the smell whenever you went back through that area. It was a smell that you wished at the time that you could somehow flush and cleanse out of your nostrils, sinuses and skull, but it stayed with you. By the 1990s I had completely forgotten about all of this through the years, especially the fact of the uniqueness of the smell of human decomposition.
.
So now I became convinced that, 25 years after being in Vietnam, the ripe death-smell of this unfortunate woman near Wilderness Park triggered memories of the war somewhere inside my subconscious and completely without my conscious knowledge, thus producing unexplained nightmares. It made me a believer that memories can reside in the mind closely linked to the sense of smell.
.
I began writing this document when I read (on 18 September 2008) the following article in Science Daily online. The linked article is named, “Emotion and Scent Create Lasting Memories – Even in a Sleeping Brain,” and describes experiments on the brain chemistry of mice at the Duke University Medical Center and is published in The Journal of Neuroscience. Implications for other mammals such as humans are clear.
.
It all falls into place and makes perfect sense to me.
.
[Addendum (12 Dec. 2013): Here is a link to news of a new study, reported in Science
Daily online, Sniffing Out Danger: Fearful Memories Can Trigger Heightened Sense of Smell. The original journal article was
published in Science and titled, “Fear Learning Enhances
Neural Responses to Threat-Predictive Sensory Stimuli.”]
.-Zenwind.
.
10 November 2010
Movie Review: The US Marine Corps, Avatar (2009), Aliens (1986), and James Cameron
.
[This is posted on the Marine Corps Birthday 2010.]
.
I was starting to wonder: what is it with James Cameron and his ongoing respect for the US Marine Corps? He is native Canadian with no military experience, but he has written rather good portrayals of Marines in at least two of his great films. Then I find out that Cameron’s younger brother, David, was in the Corps, and James has the highest respect for Leathernecks (aka, Gyrenes, Jarheads).
.
Cameron was screenwriter/director for Aliens (1986), the second and perhaps best film in that series, and which had Colonial Marines of the future. Al Matthews, the actor that played the Colonial Marine sergeant in this film, was actually a Marine Vietnam War vet. So his dialogue to his Marines after they all come out of cryo-sleep came naturally, namely when he said:
.
“All right, sweethearts, what are you waiting for? Breakfast in bed? … Another glorious day in the Corps! A day in the Marine Corps is like a day on the farm! Every meal’s a banquet! Every paycheck a fortune! Every formation a parade! I LOVE the Corps!”
.
Maybe it is Cameron’s temperament that also makes him feel akin to the Marines – Cameron is an infamous hard-ass on set who demands that things are done with complete perfection. I was particularly impressed with his treatment of Marines in the science fiction film Avatar (2009) in which he was the writer/director.
.
The protagonist of Avatar, Jake Sully, is a disabled veteran Recon Marine whose combat injuries confine him permanently to a wheelchair. He has a chance to join the Avatar Program on the planet Pandora only because an avatar driver’s body (a hybrid of a human mind inside a Pandoran-native humanoid Na’vi body) had been prepared from the DNA of his twin brother. His twin was a Program scientist who just died, and his avatar body had been prepared at great cost, so Jake’s genetic identity with his brother makes him uniquely able to use it. And in an avatar body Jake will be able to walk again. So he is a misplaced warrior thrown into a science program, and yet the wild and dangerous world of Pandora might demand such a warrior spirit.
.
When in his human body in the wheelchair, Jake always wears a T-shirt with the USMC’s Eagle, Globe and Anchor emblem. He’s proud. In an early voice-over narrative monologue that defines who he is, he says: “There’s no such thing as an ex-Marine; you may be out, but you never lose the attitude.” Ooh rah!
.
When Jake, in his avatar Na’vi body, is brought before the Na’vi tribal leaders, they ask him what he was before as a human, if he was not a scientist. He replies with pride, “I was a Marine,” and then, to further explain this concept to them, he continues, “a … uh … a warrior … of the Jarhead clan.” That was the moment I became a really big fan of James Cameron’s writing.
.
The villain, Col. Quaritch, is Security Director of the Pandora mining operation, heading what is really a mercenary force of tough guys. He is also a veteran Recon Marine, and he is tougher than nails. His dialogue and delivery are priceless. (He is played perfectly by Stephen Lang, who played Stonewall Jackson in Gods and Generals, I thought Lang should have gotten an award for movie “villain of the year” for his performance in Avatar.)
.
Here in the real world of movie critics there has been some misplaced controversy about Cameron’s treatment of the USMC in Avatar, with many people thinking that he is making the Corps look bad through the former-Marine villains such as Col. Quaritch and many of his mercenary thugs. This argument goes thus: the actual USMC strategic doctrine for over a century has been to win over the “hearts and minds” of the indigenous people. To truly win them over. This strategic vision came from the Marine experience of always being a small force landed in hostile places a long way from home, and it evolved into the Small Wars Manual, the bible of counter-insurgency operations. (The Small Wars Manual has consistently been ignored by the Pentagon until it is too late.)
.
Critics of Cameron say that the official policy of villain Col. Quaritch – which is a hostile contempt for the indigenous Na’vi of Pandora – disrespects this USMC vision. But the critics completely miss the point. Hero Jake Sully fully redeems the story in two ways: First, he serves the just cause within this story’s context. Second, he actually is devoted to a Marine-like vision of understanding and working with the indigenous Na’vi. And as a Marine, Jake is solidly brave, wonderfully true, and always faithful.
.
Semper Fi. Enough said right there.
.
-Zenwind.
.
[This is posted on the Marine Corps Birthday 2010.]
.
I was starting to wonder: what is it with James Cameron and his ongoing respect for the US Marine Corps? He is native Canadian with no military experience, but he has written rather good portrayals of Marines in at least two of his great films. Then I find out that Cameron’s younger brother, David, was in the Corps, and James has the highest respect for Leathernecks (aka, Gyrenes, Jarheads).
.
Cameron was screenwriter/director for Aliens (1986), the second and perhaps best film in that series, and which had Colonial Marines of the future. Al Matthews, the actor that played the Colonial Marine sergeant in this film, was actually a Marine Vietnam War vet. So his dialogue to his Marines after they all come out of cryo-sleep came naturally, namely when he said:
.
“All right, sweethearts, what are you waiting for? Breakfast in bed? … Another glorious day in the Corps! A day in the Marine Corps is like a day on the farm! Every meal’s a banquet! Every paycheck a fortune! Every formation a parade! I LOVE the Corps!”
.
Maybe it is Cameron’s temperament that also makes him feel akin to the Marines – Cameron is an infamous hard-ass on set who demands that things are done with complete perfection. I was particularly impressed with his treatment of Marines in the science fiction film Avatar (2009) in which he was the writer/director.
.
The protagonist of Avatar, Jake Sully, is a disabled veteran Recon Marine whose combat injuries confine him permanently to a wheelchair. He has a chance to join the Avatar Program on the planet Pandora only because an avatar driver’s body (a hybrid of a human mind inside a Pandoran-native humanoid Na’vi body) had been prepared from the DNA of his twin brother. His twin was a Program scientist who just died, and his avatar body had been prepared at great cost, so Jake’s genetic identity with his brother makes him uniquely able to use it. And in an avatar body Jake will be able to walk again. So he is a misplaced warrior thrown into a science program, and yet the wild and dangerous world of Pandora might demand such a warrior spirit.
.
When in his human body in the wheelchair, Jake always wears a T-shirt with the USMC’s Eagle, Globe and Anchor emblem. He’s proud. In an early voice-over narrative monologue that defines who he is, he says: “There’s no such thing as an ex-Marine; you may be out, but you never lose the attitude.” Ooh rah!
.
When Jake, in his avatar Na’vi body, is brought before the Na’vi tribal leaders, they ask him what he was before as a human, if he was not a scientist. He replies with pride, “I was a Marine,” and then, to further explain this concept to them, he continues, “a … uh … a warrior … of the Jarhead clan.” That was the moment I became a really big fan of James Cameron’s writing.
.
The villain, Col. Quaritch, is Security Director of the Pandora mining operation, heading what is really a mercenary force of tough guys. He is also a veteran Recon Marine, and he is tougher than nails. His dialogue and delivery are priceless. (He is played perfectly by Stephen Lang, who played Stonewall Jackson in Gods and Generals, I thought Lang should have gotten an award for movie “villain of the year” for his performance in Avatar.)
.
Here in the real world of movie critics there has been some misplaced controversy about Cameron’s treatment of the USMC in Avatar, with many people thinking that he is making the Corps look bad through the former-Marine villains such as Col. Quaritch and many of his mercenary thugs. This argument goes thus: the actual USMC strategic doctrine for over a century has been to win over the “hearts and minds” of the indigenous people. To truly win them over. This strategic vision came from the Marine experience of always being a small force landed in hostile places a long way from home, and it evolved into the Small Wars Manual, the bible of counter-insurgency operations. (The Small Wars Manual has consistently been ignored by the Pentagon until it is too late.)
.
Critics of Cameron say that the official policy of villain Col. Quaritch – which is a hostile contempt for the indigenous Na’vi of Pandora – disrespects this USMC vision. But the critics completely miss the point. Hero Jake Sully fully redeems the story in two ways: First, he serves the just cause within this story’s context. Second, he actually is devoted to a Marine-like vision of understanding and working with the indigenous Na’vi. And as a Marine, Jake is solidly brave, wonderfully true, and always faithful.
.
Semper Fi. Enough said right there.
.
-Zenwind.
.
31 October 2010
Werewolves of London by Warren Zevon
.
“I saw a werewolf with a Chinese menu in his hand,
Walking through the streets of Soho in the rain.
He was looking for the place called Lee Ho Fook's,
Going to get a big dish of beef chow mein.
Ahooww-Ooooh! Werewolves of London.
Ahooww-Ooooh!
Ahooww-Ooooh! Werewolves of London.
Ahooww-Ooooh!
.
“If you hear him howling around your kitchen door,
Better not let him in.
Little old lady got mutilated late last night,
Werewolves of London again.
Ahooww-Ooooh! Werewolves of London.
Ahooww-Ooooh!
Ahooww-Ooooh! Werewolves of London.
Ahooww-Ooooh!
.
“He's the hairy-handed gent who ran amuck in Kent,
Lately he's been overheard in Mayfair.
Better stay away from him,
He'll rip your lungs out, Jim.
I'd like to meet his tailor.
Ahooww-Ooooh! Werewolves of London.
Ahooww-Ooooh!
Ahooww-Ooooh! Werewolves of London.
Ahooww-Ooooh!
.
Well, I saw Lon Chaney walking with the Queen,
Doing the werewolves of London.
I saw Lon Chaney, Jr. walking with the Queen,
Doing the werewolves of London.
I saw a werewolf drinking a pina colada at Trader Vic's,
His hair was perfect.
Werewolves of London again.
Draw blood.
Ahooww-Ooooh! Werewolves of London
Ahooww-Ooooh! …
Ahooww-Ooooh! Werewolves of London
Ahooww-Ooooh! …
Ahooww-Ooooh! Werewolves of London
Ahooww-Ooooh!”
.
-(Music and Lyrics by Warren Zevon)-
*
[This song was the radio song-of-the-week in May 1978 when I did a solo rock climb of Fritz Wiessner’s “Old Route” on the Upper Washbowl Ledge, Chapel Pond, Adirondacks, NY. It was a great high point in my early climbing development. High, wild, and throwing out all restraints. My theme song of that day. Ooh Rah! –Zenwind.]
.
“I saw a werewolf with a Chinese menu in his hand,
Walking through the streets of Soho in the rain.
He was looking for the place called Lee Ho Fook's,
Going to get a big dish of beef chow mein.
Ahooww-Ooooh! Werewolves of London.
Ahooww-Ooooh!
Ahooww-Ooooh! Werewolves of London.
Ahooww-Ooooh!
.
“If you hear him howling around your kitchen door,
Better not let him in.
Little old lady got mutilated late last night,
Werewolves of London again.
Ahooww-Ooooh! Werewolves of London.
Ahooww-Ooooh!
Ahooww-Ooooh! Werewolves of London.
Ahooww-Ooooh!
.
“He's the hairy-handed gent who ran amuck in Kent,
Lately he's been overheard in Mayfair.
Better stay away from him,
He'll rip your lungs out, Jim.
I'd like to meet his tailor.
Ahooww-Ooooh! Werewolves of London.
Ahooww-Ooooh!
Ahooww-Ooooh! Werewolves of London.
Ahooww-Ooooh!
.
Well, I saw Lon Chaney walking with the Queen,
Doing the werewolves of London.
I saw Lon Chaney, Jr. walking with the Queen,
Doing the werewolves of London.
I saw a werewolf drinking a pina colada at Trader Vic's,
His hair was perfect.
Werewolves of London again.
Draw blood.
Ahooww-Ooooh! Werewolves of London
Ahooww-Ooooh! …
Ahooww-Ooooh! Werewolves of London
Ahooww-Ooooh! …
Ahooww-Ooooh! Werewolves of London
Ahooww-Ooooh!”
.
-(Music and Lyrics by Warren Zevon)-
*
[This song was the radio song-of-the-week in May 1978 when I did a solo rock climb of Fritz Wiessner’s “Old Route” on the Upper Washbowl Ledge, Chapel Pond, Adirondacks, NY. It was a great high point in my early climbing development. High, wild, and throwing out all restraints. My theme song of that day. Ooh Rah! –Zenwind.]
.
14 October 2010
Book Review: Mountains of the Mind: a history of a fascination, by Robert Macfarlane (2003)
.
Robert Macfarlane can really write. As expressed in its subtitle, Mountains of the Mind is a sort of history of the human fascination with mountains – and more. It is part history, part geography lesson and part literary survey, and there are great bits of lore on almost every page. He chronicles the changing ideas about mountains that led to people actually climbing them. He also intersperses the text with some of his own personal experiences in the mountains, which are eloquently written.
.
The first chapter is named “Possession,” and that says it all. Mountains do possess some of us. From his own youth, reading through his grandfather’s books, Macfarlane has been possessed, i.e., obsessed. The gory details of injury and death in the mountains are part of its romance. It is a familiar path: one reads the thrilling, and often tragic, stories of great mountaineers and expeditioners of the past and one gets caught up in the quest. Alpinists have often been very literate, and their writings are usually impossible to put down.
.
There is the great 1924 mystery of Mallory and Irvine, who were last seen climbing ever upward on a high ridge of Mt. Everest before the clouds obscured them from below. There are books on the great polar expeditions. There is John Hunt’s The Ascent of Everest (a personal milestone in my own young adventure reading), telling of the 1953 ascent by Hillary and Tenzing. There is Edward Whymper’s Scrambles Amongst the Alps, with graphic illustrations by Whymper. Then there is Maurice Herzog’s Annapurna.
.
Herzog’s account of the French 1950 ascent of Annapurna, the first-ever ascent of any Himalayan peak over 8,000 meters, is a mountaineering classic that possessed me as it did Macfarlane. It was a tipping point into obsession for both of us. Herzog and Louis Lachenal set off on a cold, clear morning from the highest camp for Annapurna’s summit. As Macfarlane paraphrases, “Quite soon it became apparent that they would have to turn back or run the risk of severe frostbite. They carried on.” (p.7) Herzog lost all his fingers and toes to frostbite, but they reached the summit and lived to tell about it. (My own 1976 experience – see “The Frostbite Trip” – was a painful one of freezing my toes and thinking I would die, but still carrying on and up, a decision I have never regretted.)
.
Chapter Two is “The Great Stone Book” and tells of Europeans first treating mountains as objects worthy of study, with the new science of geology slowly giving birth to concepts of “deep time.” The early geologist, Scotsman James Hutton, ended his Theory of the Earth (late 1790s) with this: “The result therefore of our present enquiry is, that we find no vestige of a beginning, – and no prospect of an end.” This was a mind-stretching concept, and the Romantic poets and painters became possessed by mountains and wilderness.
.
Chapter Three is “The Pursuit of Fear” and discusses attitudes toward risk, death, the 1865 Matterhorn disaster, etc. Poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, a recklessly addictive personality, took up what he called “a new sort of Gambling” – addiction to heights. He would climb a rocky peak and then pick a blindly arbitrary descent route, knowing that down-climbing is much harder than ascent. In 1802 he found himself stuck on a ledge in England’s Peak District with a storm coming in. He obviously lived to tell of it, but he was lucky.
.
The great English climber Alfred Mummery was an early advocate of solo climbing, and he died in 1895 in one of the first attempts to climb an 8,000 meter peak, Nanga Parbat, with a small climbing party. Nietzsche wrote of the “discipline of suffering – of great suffering” being what has “produced all the elevation of humanity hitherto,” and that “This hardness is requisite for every mountain-climber.”
.
In 1865 the Matterhorn was first ascended by Edward Whymper in a party of seven, several of whom should not have been on the hill. All seven were tied into one hemp rope, the common practice at that time. Descending after victory, the most inexperienced man slipped and dragged down three others, and these four fell thousands of feet down the North Face. Killed were a young English lord, a preacher, a Cambridge student and a Swiss guide. Whymper and two others only lived because the rope broke. The reaction in England was hysteric, with outcries that mountaineering was lunacy and “a depraved taste.” Maybe so, but we climb.
.
Chapter Four is “Glaciers and Ice: the streams of time.” Geology came to the idea of a great Ice Age in the past, of a once-frozen Earth as well as a possibility of a return in the future of “icy death.” 1816 was “the year without a summer,” a disastrous cold spell caused by volcanic ash in the atmosphere, and it caused poets such as Byron and Shelley to contemplate this with dread. Later, the wider spread of the idea of ice ages changed not only science but the popular way of looking at landscapes.
.
(My hometown in northern Pennsylvania has a classic U-shaped valley cutting through the hills to the south, caused by huge glaciers of the last ice sheet advancing overhead. I pointed this out and explained it to my Thai wife – who had never until that April been out of the Tropics – and she laughed at me, convinced that I was telling an outrageous jest. I did not press the issue since it was not a concept that she would easily assimilate, and, after all, it really is a mind-blower.)
.
Chapter Five is “Altitude: the summit and the view.” In 1786 Mont Blanc, the highest peak in the Alps, was climbed by two Frenchmen, Paccard and Balmat. By the end of the Eighteenth century, Macfarlane writes, “Summit fever was catching.”
.
In 1818 the German Romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich painted Wanderer Above a Sea of Clouds. Macfarlane writes that this Friedrich painting “became, and has remained, the archetypical image of the mountain-climbing visionary, a figure ubiquitous in Romantic art.” He continues, saying that “…as a crystallization of a concept – that standing atop a mountain is to be admired, that it confers nobility on a person – Friedrich’s painting has carried enormous symbolic power down the years in terms of Western self-perception.” (p.157)
.
For artists and poets of that day, such as Friedrich, Keats and Shelley, “[altitude] coincided perfectly with the Romantic glorification of the individual. … The mountain-top also provided an icon for the Romantic ideal of liberty: what could more obviously embody freedom and openness?” (pp.158-9). Height now “equaled escape, it equaled solitude, it equaled spiritual and artistic epiphany.” (p.160)
.
Chapter Six is called “Walking Off the Map,” and it recounts the joys and rigors of exploring new mountain ranges. It makes me want to put on my boots and go.
.
Chapter Seven is “A New Heaven and a New Earth.” Macfarlane mentions an experience that I have often had: of returning to the lowland civilization after being awhile in the mountains and finding it to be a disorienting episode, solitary and incommunicable. One feels like an exile returning home after long years abroad, “bearing experiences beyond speech.” (p.204)
.
Chapter Eight is “Everest,” and tells of George Mallory’s fatal obsession with that mountain through his letters and other writings. (“Why?” “Because it’s there.”)
.
Chapter Nine is a short final chapter, “The Snow Hare,” and it sums up many of the threads earlier in the book. Macfarlane tells of meeting a snow hare briefly on a winter mountaintop in Scotland in a completely blinding snowstorm. This solitary encounter, a crossing of paths, sums up for him the feeling of “wonder” found on mountains.
.
“The solitude I had [earlier] experienced in the whiteout on the ridge had been replaced by a sense of distance invisibly before me. I no longer felt cocooned by the falling snow, I felt accommodated by it, extended by it – part of the hundreds of miles of landscape over which the snow was falling. … I thought of the snow falling across ridge on ridge of the invisible hills, and I thought too that there was nowhere at that moment I would rather be.” (p.278)
.
I have never been on that specific mountain, but I know exactly what he means.
.
-Zenwind.
.
Robert Macfarlane can really write. As expressed in its subtitle, Mountains of the Mind is a sort of history of the human fascination with mountains – and more. It is part history, part geography lesson and part literary survey, and there are great bits of lore on almost every page. He chronicles the changing ideas about mountains that led to people actually climbing them. He also intersperses the text with some of his own personal experiences in the mountains, which are eloquently written.
.
The first chapter is named “Possession,” and that says it all. Mountains do possess some of us. From his own youth, reading through his grandfather’s books, Macfarlane has been possessed, i.e., obsessed. The gory details of injury and death in the mountains are part of its romance. It is a familiar path: one reads the thrilling, and often tragic, stories of great mountaineers and expeditioners of the past and one gets caught up in the quest. Alpinists have often been very literate, and their writings are usually impossible to put down.
.
There is the great 1924 mystery of Mallory and Irvine, who were last seen climbing ever upward on a high ridge of Mt. Everest before the clouds obscured them from below. There are books on the great polar expeditions. There is John Hunt’s The Ascent of Everest (a personal milestone in my own young adventure reading), telling of the 1953 ascent by Hillary and Tenzing. There is Edward Whymper’s Scrambles Amongst the Alps, with graphic illustrations by Whymper. Then there is Maurice Herzog’s Annapurna.
.
Herzog’s account of the French 1950 ascent of Annapurna, the first-ever ascent of any Himalayan peak over 8,000 meters, is a mountaineering classic that possessed me as it did Macfarlane. It was a tipping point into obsession for both of us. Herzog and Louis Lachenal set off on a cold, clear morning from the highest camp for Annapurna’s summit. As Macfarlane paraphrases, “Quite soon it became apparent that they would have to turn back or run the risk of severe frostbite. They carried on.” (p.7) Herzog lost all his fingers and toes to frostbite, but they reached the summit and lived to tell about it. (My own 1976 experience – see “The Frostbite Trip” – was a painful one of freezing my toes and thinking I would die, but still carrying on and up, a decision I have never regretted.)
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Chapter Two is “The Great Stone Book” and tells of Europeans first treating mountains as objects worthy of study, with the new science of geology slowly giving birth to concepts of “deep time.” The early geologist, Scotsman James Hutton, ended his Theory of the Earth (late 1790s) with this: “The result therefore of our present enquiry is, that we find no vestige of a beginning, – and no prospect of an end.” This was a mind-stretching concept, and the Romantic poets and painters became possessed by mountains and wilderness.
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Chapter Three is “The Pursuit of Fear” and discusses attitudes toward risk, death, the 1865 Matterhorn disaster, etc. Poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, a recklessly addictive personality, took up what he called “a new sort of Gambling” – addiction to heights. He would climb a rocky peak and then pick a blindly arbitrary descent route, knowing that down-climbing is much harder than ascent. In 1802 he found himself stuck on a ledge in England’s Peak District with a storm coming in. He obviously lived to tell of it, but he was lucky.
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The great English climber Alfred Mummery was an early advocate of solo climbing, and he died in 1895 in one of the first attempts to climb an 8,000 meter peak, Nanga Parbat, with a small climbing party. Nietzsche wrote of the “discipline of suffering – of great suffering” being what has “produced all the elevation of humanity hitherto,” and that “This hardness is requisite for every mountain-climber.”
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In 1865 the Matterhorn was first ascended by Edward Whymper in a party of seven, several of whom should not have been on the hill. All seven were tied into one hemp rope, the common practice at that time. Descending after victory, the most inexperienced man slipped and dragged down three others, and these four fell thousands of feet down the North Face. Killed were a young English lord, a preacher, a Cambridge student and a Swiss guide. Whymper and two others only lived because the rope broke. The reaction in England was hysteric, with outcries that mountaineering was lunacy and “a depraved taste.” Maybe so, but we climb.
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Chapter Four is “Glaciers and Ice: the streams of time.” Geology came to the idea of a great Ice Age in the past, of a once-frozen Earth as well as a possibility of a return in the future of “icy death.” 1816 was “the year without a summer,” a disastrous cold spell caused by volcanic ash in the atmosphere, and it caused poets such as Byron and Shelley to contemplate this with dread. Later, the wider spread of the idea of ice ages changed not only science but the popular way of looking at landscapes.
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(My hometown in northern Pennsylvania has a classic U-shaped valley cutting through the hills to the south, caused by huge glaciers of the last ice sheet advancing overhead. I pointed this out and explained it to my Thai wife – who had never until that April been out of the Tropics – and she laughed at me, convinced that I was telling an outrageous jest. I did not press the issue since it was not a concept that she would easily assimilate, and, after all, it really is a mind-blower.)
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Chapter Five is “Altitude: the summit and the view.” In 1786 Mont Blanc, the highest peak in the Alps, was climbed by two Frenchmen, Paccard and Balmat. By the end of the Eighteenth century, Macfarlane writes, “Summit fever was catching.”
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In 1818 the German Romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich painted Wanderer Above a Sea of Clouds. Macfarlane writes that this Friedrich painting “became, and has remained, the archetypical image of the mountain-climbing visionary, a figure ubiquitous in Romantic art.” He continues, saying that “…as a crystallization of a concept – that standing atop a mountain is to be admired, that it confers nobility on a person – Friedrich’s painting has carried enormous symbolic power down the years in terms of Western self-perception.” (p.157)
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For artists and poets of that day, such as Friedrich, Keats and Shelley, “[altitude] coincided perfectly with the Romantic glorification of the individual. … The mountain-top also provided an icon for the Romantic ideal of liberty: what could more obviously embody freedom and openness?” (pp.158-9). Height now “equaled escape, it equaled solitude, it equaled spiritual and artistic epiphany.” (p.160)
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Chapter Six is called “Walking Off the Map,” and it recounts the joys and rigors of exploring new mountain ranges. It makes me want to put on my boots and go.
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Chapter Seven is “A New Heaven and a New Earth.” Macfarlane mentions an experience that I have often had: of returning to the lowland civilization after being awhile in the mountains and finding it to be a disorienting episode, solitary and incommunicable. One feels like an exile returning home after long years abroad, “bearing experiences beyond speech.” (p.204)
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Chapter Eight is “Everest,” and tells of George Mallory’s fatal obsession with that mountain through his letters and other writings. (“Why?” “Because it’s there.”)
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Chapter Nine is a short final chapter, “The Snow Hare,” and it sums up many of the threads earlier in the book. Macfarlane tells of meeting a snow hare briefly on a winter mountaintop in Scotland in a completely blinding snowstorm. This solitary encounter, a crossing of paths, sums up for him the feeling of “wonder” found on mountains.
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“The solitude I had [earlier] experienced in the whiteout on the ridge had been replaced by a sense of distance invisibly before me. I no longer felt cocooned by the falling snow, I felt accommodated by it, extended by it – part of the hundreds of miles of landscape over which the snow was falling. … I thought of the snow falling across ridge on ridge of the invisible hills, and I thought too that there was nowhere at that moment I would rather be.” (p.278)
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I have never been on that specific mountain, but I know exactly what he means.
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-Zenwind.
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03 August 2010
Book Review: The Terror, by Dan Simmons
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The Terror (2007) is my favorite Dan Simmons novel and one of my favorite novels ever. (See earlier intro post about Simmons here.) This is historical fiction and horror. It is based on the historic lost Franklin Expedition, a British expedition of two ships, the HMS Erebus and the HMS Terror, sent to look for the Northwest Passage in the Canadian Arctic in 1845 under the command of Captain Sir John Franklin.
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Historically, the two ships and all hands were lost without a trace except for the graves of three crewmen and a note left behind. It is still one of the great arctic mysteries. Simmons researched the case, as well as arctic exploration in that age, and then added his own imaginary spin to it. As we read, we experience the deep cold of the six-month arctic night as the ships are frozen into the icepack. Added to this is Eskimo mythology and the associated terrors of the Far North.
.
One reason that I like this book is because of its authentic descriptions of true cold. I have bivouacked out in the cold down to 40-below-zero but never in the amazing deeper cold experienced by these men. While I had lived outside at minus-40 for a week in 1970s gear, these guys had inadequate clothing and gear, and they were starving to death over a long, long time. It gives you the shivers, and this might be a good book to read on oppressively hot summer days. If you read it during a long northern winter, it will take you into a long dark tunnel of terror.
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I also like the main character, Captain Francis Crozier, historic captain of the HMS Terror and second-in-command of the expedition under Franklin. Crozier was an Irishman, and thus an outsider in the mainly English naval establishment. He was also a melancholic and a substance abuser – much like me in my younger military days.
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Simmons also gives Crozier memories of alienation from his earliest days, of standing alone outside a village on a winter’s night, looking at the village lights but feeling completely estranged from his community. I had this same winter experience – many, many times while growing up – e.g., standing alone in a frozen pasture, or a wood lot, or on a snowy hilltop above my own native village after dark, watching the snowstorm against the town’s lights, feeling apart from all humanity. The character of Crozier really touched me, and my own experience of expatriate re-birth outside of my native culture makes me appreciate him and the destiny Simmons gives him even more.
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The only previous literary background required to enrich the reading of this novel is just a minor familiarity with English philosopher Thomas Hobbes – and I can provide the context you need right here. The few references in the novel are more of an inside joke. Hobbes was an extreme pessimist and an advocate of completely authoritarian political rule. His most famous work was Leviathan (1651) in which he argued for an extremely strong government because human nature is perversely wild and dangerous.
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Caveat: I do not agree with Hobbes about human nature, and I am completely opposite him in politics. I advocate little or no government while Hobbes wants absolutism.
.
One of Hobbes’ primary arguments is that the horrible religious warfare of his times was because of too much freedom of religion – too much choice – and that one absolute ruler or ruling group should dictate one religion for all to follow in order to stop the fighting between sects. (But I would say that, while a large amount of religious freedom did encourage the flowering of countless religious sects, it was precisely the mix of government power with religion that caused the insane wars within Christianity in Hobbes' day.)
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When Crozier is assigned, against his inclination, to conduct a Sunday religious service on his ship, he announces that he will read from “The Book of Leviathan, Part One, Chapter Twelve,” and he reads from the very cynical Hobbes on historical religious flights of fancy from the most ancient of days. That whole episode is – to me – a philosophical joke, one of my favorite passages in the book.
.
In addition to the above, certainly the most famous quote of all from Hobbes’ Leviathan is that, without an absolute government to intimidate and control people, man’s life will be “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.” Keep that quote in mind, as it identifies Crozier's attitude before his redemption.
.
A final note on this book. I was reading it while waiting for supper at The Saxophone pub in Bangkok and listening to a good jazz band, and I came upon its description of a bonfire on the ice as a “Guy Fawkes Day above the Arctic Circle.” I checked my calendar, and indeed it was 5 November, Guy Fawkes Night, that very night. (“A penny for the old guy.”)
.
I love this book.
.
-Zenwind.
.
The Terror (2007) is my favorite Dan Simmons novel and one of my favorite novels ever. (See earlier intro post about Simmons here.) This is historical fiction and horror. It is based on the historic lost Franklin Expedition, a British expedition of two ships, the HMS Erebus and the HMS Terror, sent to look for the Northwest Passage in the Canadian Arctic in 1845 under the command of Captain Sir John Franklin.
.
Historically, the two ships and all hands were lost without a trace except for the graves of three crewmen and a note left behind. It is still one of the great arctic mysteries. Simmons researched the case, as well as arctic exploration in that age, and then added his own imaginary spin to it. As we read, we experience the deep cold of the six-month arctic night as the ships are frozen into the icepack. Added to this is Eskimo mythology and the associated terrors of the Far North.
.
One reason that I like this book is because of its authentic descriptions of true cold. I have bivouacked out in the cold down to 40-below-zero but never in the amazing deeper cold experienced by these men. While I had lived outside at minus-40 for a week in 1970s gear, these guys had inadequate clothing and gear, and they were starving to death over a long, long time. It gives you the shivers, and this might be a good book to read on oppressively hot summer days. If you read it during a long northern winter, it will take you into a long dark tunnel of terror.
.
I also like the main character, Captain Francis Crozier, historic captain of the HMS Terror and second-in-command of the expedition under Franklin. Crozier was an Irishman, and thus an outsider in the mainly English naval establishment. He was also a melancholic and a substance abuser – much like me in my younger military days.
.
Simmons also gives Crozier memories of alienation from his earliest days, of standing alone outside a village on a winter’s night, looking at the village lights but feeling completely estranged from his community. I had this same winter experience – many, many times while growing up – e.g., standing alone in a frozen pasture, or a wood lot, or on a snowy hilltop above my own native village after dark, watching the snowstorm against the town’s lights, feeling apart from all humanity. The character of Crozier really touched me, and my own experience of expatriate re-birth outside of my native culture makes me appreciate him and the destiny Simmons gives him even more.
.
The only previous literary background required to enrich the reading of this novel is just a minor familiarity with English philosopher Thomas Hobbes – and I can provide the context you need right here. The few references in the novel are more of an inside joke. Hobbes was an extreme pessimist and an advocate of completely authoritarian political rule. His most famous work was Leviathan (1651) in which he argued for an extremely strong government because human nature is perversely wild and dangerous.
.
Caveat: I do not agree with Hobbes about human nature, and I am completely opposite him in politics. I advocate little or no government while Hobbes wants absolutism.
.
One of Hobbes’ primary arguments is that the horrible religious warfare of his times was because of too much freedom of religion – too much choice – and that one absolute ruler or ruling group should dictate one religion for all to follow in order to stop the fighting between sects. (But I would say that, while a large amount of religious freedom did encourage the flowering of countless religious sects, it was precisely the mix of government power with religion that caused the insane wars within Christianity in Hobbes' day.)
.
When Crozier is assigned, against his inclination, to conduct a Sunday religious service on his ship, he announces that he will read from “The Book of Leviathan, Part One, Chapter Twelve,” and he reads from the very cynical Hobbes on historical religious flights of fancy from the most ancient of days. That whole episode is – to me – a philosophical joke, one of my favorite passages in the book.
.
In addition to the above, certainly the most famous quote of all from Hobbes’ Leviathan is that, without an absolute government to intimidate and control people, man’s life will be “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.” Keep that quote in mind, as it identifies Crozier's attitude before his redemption.
.
A final note on this book. I was reading it while waiting for supper at The Saxophone pub in Bangkok and listening to a good jazz band, and I came upon its description of a bonfire on the ice as a “Guy Fawkes Day above the Arctic Circle.” I checked my calendar, and indeed it was 5 November, Guy Fawkes Night, that very night. (“A penny for the old guy.”)
.
I love this book.
.
-Zenwind.
.
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