Craig Berry

Last night I left work around 7:15, stepping out into deep twilight in the alley between my office and the buildings on Third Street Promenade.  We're just a couple of blocks from the ocean, so it's always cooler here than further inland; in the fall, it usually gets pretty brisk out as the sun sets and the onshore breeze blows the fog in.  So as I step out the door heading homeward, I'm always unconsciously bracing myself for that first touch of cold, damp air.

Not last night.  It was around 80 degrees outside.  There was a breeze, but it kept shifting direction; it felt like a weak Santa Ana, dry and silky on the skin.  I caught the bus back to Westwood, around five miles inland, and it was even warmer there as I walked home in the velvety darkness, leaves rustling in little whirlwinds and chaotic rushes of air.

Santa Ana weather always makes me feel energetic and on edge, somewhere between anxious and exhilirated.  It was leaning toward exhilirated last night.  Apparently my cat Wafer felt it too; he came in with me just long enough to get fed, then rocketed back to the front door, begging to be let back out into the windy darkness filled with the chirping of heat-loving crickets and the echoed barking of distant dogs.

I've felt very much like an animal lately.  Not in the sense of losing my humanity, but of gaining an appreciation for the meat and bone I'm made of, and of how much like all the other animals on the planet we humans are.  This morning, on the way to work, i was waiting to cross busy Westwood Boulevard with a dozen other people.  The crosswalk signal was about to change for us when we all heard a siren approaching.  It was still out of sight but getting louder when our signal changed.  There was a beautiful moment of nonverbal tribal consensus as we all looked at each other, looked toward the apparent source of the sound, shifted toward the street, hesitated, and then all at the same instant concluded that the siren had stopped getting closer, had clearly turned on another street; and we all began moving in unison.

I'm sure that a Neolithic hunting band hearing a branch crack in the forest would have looked just the same.  Or a band of wolves catching an unfamiliar scent on the breeze.  And that is an intensely wonderful realization.

I spent the Memorial Day weekend in Philadelphia helping to run Kaaba Colloquium, an OTO leadership training seminar.  We were jointly hosted by Thelesis and Tahuti Lodges; my thanks to everyone who worked so hard and so successfully to make us welcome.  My only regret is that I had so little time to explore Philadelphia; I ate at a couple of great old restaurants, and gawked out the car window at Liberty Hall twice, but mostly had to concentrate on business.  From what I saw, it's a lovely city, and I want to go back some time and really see the place.

We were staying in the central city area, where the street grid was laid out far before the age of the automobile.  As a result, most of the so-called "streets" looked to my West Coast eyes like narrow alleys; nearly all of them are single one-way lanes, often with parking on just one side, or neither side.  Over and over, we'd make a turn into what I took for a driveway, only to tool along for blocks on what turned out to be what the locals consider an actual street.  And of course the impression of crowding is very much enhanced by the towering office buildings looming on all sides, which are also unusual to my LA-accustomed eyes; we keep our skyscrapers in one tiny area downtown, where nobody ever goes. :)

This especially struck me when I got back to LA last night.  As my taxi headed up La Cienega, I was very aware of how wide it was, how low the buildings on either side were, the broad sweep of the sky above, the Hollywood Hills ranged across the horizon ahead of me.  It felt open, expansive.  And then I remembered returning from a previous Kaaba in Tucson, a city of enormously broad boulevards and low, isolated buildings set in sprawling lots.  Coming home from that trip, on that same stretch of La Cienega, I was impressed by how close together the buildings were, how they crowded the street, many with two or three floors, all nestled tightly around the narrow, traffic-thick lanes of the road.

Amazing how little of the unusual it takes to make the ordinary seem new again.

Today is my last day at my current employer; on Monday I report for indoctrination at my new one.

I never know how to deal with the ends of things.  Part of my wants to dwell on the last-ness of every little event -- "This is the last time I'll ride Culver City Line 1 to work!  This is my last dev-team meeting!  This is the last cup of coffee I'll drink at this desk!"  Another part pushes that even further, realizing that some time earlier this week was the last ordinary time for all those things, and that the actual last versions are so distorted from the norm that they don't count.  But then when was my last ordinary cup of coffee here?  If today's was so unusual, then yesterday's was the last ordinary one...but that makes that one unusual, too.  This reasoning can be extended backward in time as far as you care to go.  It's a variant on the unexpected hanging paradox.

Musing on this today (on the Culver City Line 1 bus), it struck me that the only reasonable conclusion is that every day is in fact special.  This can be seen as a circuitous route to the "Best Day EVAR" theorem developed by noted philosophers belladonna93, maeghanne, and lady_saffir.  In its highest sense, it's a call to stay awake, in the "Wake World" sense of that term -- fully participating in and appreciating each moment, never falling into the robotic coma of rote behavior.  Alas, in its more prosaic reading, it sounds like Rod McKuen.

I suppose that's why we have the word "ineffable".  When you say these things directly, they end up looking silly, tautological, or both.  You have to feel them, and then you're left with a feeling you can't express, which is frustrating.

But enough philosophy for now.  I have documentation to complete.

laurellady and I had one of those melancholy conversationss about how entirely doomed we are, for values of "we" ranging from Los Angeles to the entire planet.  We spent the most time on the latter end of the scale, discussing the ongoing wave of extinctions, global warming, pollution, overpopulation, peak oil...

I'm getting overwhelmed again just listing the topics.  But oddly, our mood shifted during the discussion from worry to something else.  I'm tempted to use the word "resignation", but that's not quite right.  I still hope we can avoid disaster, and I still believe it's possible.  But both laurellady and I started talking about how this isn't the first time Earth's climate has undergone rapid change, nor the first major extinction event.

In the big picture, there's no separation between humans and the environment; humans are just one part of the environment.  We are simply another species on the planet, and it is by definition impossible for any of our actions to be "unnatural" or "wrong" in an ecological sense.  When plants evolved photosynthesis, the resulting buildup of oxygen in the atmosphere killed off countless anaerobic organisms, pushing the survivors into isolated niches.  Were the plants unnatural or wrong?  No; changes like that are part of what happens in an active biosphere.

How do you distinguish between multiple species being killed off by the aftereffects of an asteroid impact and multiple species being killed off by humans?  They're both just events in the natural world.  Arguably, the latter case is "more natural" as it all transpired inside our own biosphere, with no random intrusions from outside the system required.

Nothing we humans can do will end life on Earth.  With supreme effort we could probably knock out most land life, and a good fraction of large ocean life.  But even if we managed that, it would just open niches for evolutionary radiation; come back in a hundred million years, and you'd find many new species filling those niches.

For that matter, I think it would prove extremely hard to wipe out the human species.  We're feckless and irresponsible when we have it good, but when times get bad we become as hard to kill as cockroaches.  Human groups have survived some unbelievable challenges.  Even if we make most of the planet uninhabitable, my expectation is that a few million of us will figure out new ways to live, and eventually, thrive.

My best guess is that the next century or so is going to be hard, as we deal with a number of global crises all boiling over at once.  Bad choices over the next two decades could move that outlook from "hard" to "disastrous".  But there are some encouraging signs that we're ready to start making better choices.

I suppose the word to describe my mood is "detached".  Whatever happens, it's what we have made for ourselves; there's no moral dimension to it, no dichotomy between us and the world.  The wheel turns, and we both spin it and ride it.

Yesterday evening's Gnostic Boot Camp at LVX Lodge was well attended and a lot of fun. We were doing a "Meet the Saints" night featuring Osiris, Charlemagne, and Valentinus. All three were great presentations that provoked boisterous and insightful conversations, along with some welcome silliness. I was in a bad mood most of yesterday, but by the time I was on my way home last night I felt wonderful.

I think one of the best things about getting older is that you can recognize a Golden Age when it's actually happening. Ten years from now, it's guaranteed that the magical chemistry of the current LVX crew will be gone. A whole succession of other things will have replaced it, some painful, some good in different ways, but none of them exactly what we have now.

When you are young, you think everything is eternal, and thus don't know how much you should savor times like this as they are happening. Only after losing a few Golden Ages do you learn to spot them when you're in them, and to understand how transient they are. Like the Aztecs, I am learning to find that most beautiful which is most fragile. The Aztec idiom for supreme beauty translates as "flowers and song", two of the most ephemeral pleasures in the world. I can't think of a better description for what I feel right now.

My personal symbolic work incorporates Aztec mythology and mysticism, along with an eclectic stewpot of other traditions. In particular, the figure of Quetzalcoatl resonates for me. Like most of the mesoamerican gods, he is a complex and contradictory figure. Our knowledge of pre-Conquest Aztec culture is pathetically meager, and it's impossible to tell how accurate or biased our views of it may be. It could well be that there is a coherent synthesis of Quetzalcoatl which the priests of Tenochtitlan held as an esoteric secret, and which has been lost forever.

However, I find it more likely that the apparent confusion of Quetzalcoatl's mythology reflects the actual pre-Conquest situation. Quetzalcoatl is a very old god, revered in one form or another by cultures from the Yucatan clear up to Sonora over at least two thousand years. This provided plenty of opportunity for regional and temporal variation in mythology. I'm sure the legends of Quetzalcoatl diverged and recombined dozens of times to produce the complex narratives recorded in the surviving codices, and in the scholarly works of Sahagun, Duran, and other sympathetic Spanish priests.

Of all Quetzalcoatl's surviving myths, the legend of Tula is (for me) the most compelling. Quetzalcoatl Ce Acatl Topiltzin ("Plumed Serpent, One Reed, Our Prince") was the divine king of the semi-legendary city of Tula, regarded as the fountainhead of all later art and science. The term "Tolteca" means "of the people of Tula", and it is a measure of the power of the legend of Tula that the greatest compliment an Aztec artist could receive was to be called "Tolteca".

Quetzalcoatl presided over the greatest flowering of Tula, but his arch-rival Tezcatlipoca tricked him into a sin so great that he abdicated his rule and left the city, to either die on the Carribean shore, or sail into the east, promising to return. The golden age over which he presided soon ended as civil war tore apart Tula's empire.

There is an archetype complex of which Quetzalcoatl is my favorite example -- the leader with an impossible but beautiful dream, who succeeds for a time only to see his dream fall to ruin. Frequently he is killed or otherwise silenced as part of the general collapse. Jesus is an obvious example; others include King Arthur, John Lennon, and Mahatma Gandhi.

Interestingly, Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle's classic novel The Mote in God's Eye incorporates this archetype as the central myth of an alien civilization. Translating for humans, the Moties name him "Crazy Eddie". Crazy Eddie is the innovator whose ideas are truly good and even noble; alas, he always manages to try to implement them at the worst possible moment, tipping precarious situations into disaster. One of the Moties explains (quoting from memory) "When a city has grown dangerously crowded, and every available vehicle is working full time moving food in and waste out, it is Crazy Eddie who leads the movers of garbage on a strike for better working conditions."

I'm writing all this because the Quetzalcoatl Ce Acatl Topiltzin (or Crazy Eddie) archetype is very much on my mind today. I was hoping putting this into words would trigger useful associations in my mind, and indeed it has. Thanks for coming along for the ride. :)

It's very foggy outside.  The sun set a few minutes ago, but the only sign of it out my window was that the hazy-white gloom is turning into hazy-grey gloom, and getting gloomier by the moment.  I actually rather like fog -- it suits the Irish part of my temperament -- so I'm hoping it lasts until I can leave work.

This pleasant melancholy has me thinking about something that has been on my mind for a couple of years.  When I was young, I never imagined being sick or injured when I wasn't afflicted at that moment.  I think this was just one aspect of the transient immortality experienced by all healthy people until approximately their early twenties.  Then, in my late twenties and through my thirties, I grew familiar enough with sickness and injury to take them seriously, and to take steps to avoid them.  Suddenly riding a motorbike through a thunderstorm with no helmet and iffy brakes didn't seem like such a great idea, just for example.  Neither did endlessly pigging out on deep-fried foods.  And so forth through the usual litany of boring adult self-responsibility.  Nothing noble in it at all, of course; I just knew what hurting was like, and didn't want to experience it needlessly.

Just in the last few years, a new phase has begun.  Rather than just being cautious about inviting illness, I am actively noticing being well.  I find myself spontaneously thinking, as I walk down the street, that my heart is pumping efficiently, my legs working flawlessly, my body feeling healthy and energetic, with no significant aches or limitations.  I'm sure some of this comes from yoga practice, which focuses attention on the normally unconscious activities of the body.  But I'm equally sure that some of it has a darker origin: my growing awareness that, some day, there will be a last day I ever feel entirely good.  Whether I die quickly from a state of apparently good health, or acquire an injury or disease that erodes my health and fitness, there will be a day before that on which I still feel fine...and then the day after, when nothing will be entirely okay ever again.

Watching Chris's decline certainly underscored this idea in my mind, but it was already gaining ground at least two years ago.  It's a classic dark cloud with a silver lining -- it's wonderful being able to notice and appreciate my good fortune in being well, but it also leads to a certain Sword-of-Damocles tension in my life as I remain uncomfortably aware of the precariousness of my position.

But I sure do feel good today, and I suppose that's what I should be concentrating on today.  I won't know when that last day like this is, nor, truly, would I want to; it would spoil it.  The Aztecs would say that the ephemerality of life (and of the pleasures of life) is its greatest beauty.  I've said repeatedly that I agree with them.  Time to say that with my heart, too, I suppose.

( Look out! He's philosophizing again! )

In one of his fascinating books on how brains malfunction, Oliver Sacks mentions in passing that he has a peculiar desire to swim in remote lakes. If he's driving through the mountains far from civilization and sees a lake, he's prone to stopping for a quick dip. He dreams of swimming in Titicaca or Victoria.

Ever since, I've been intermittently pondering why and how it is that each of us has the weird bundle of preferences and tastes that we do. Not the big issue things -- career interest, sexual orientation -- but little quirks like Sacks describes. This is on my mind because as I walked to lunch today, I saw an example of one of my own odd joys -- sunlight falling at a shallow angle across the rough surface of a wall. Yep, I like that specific thing enough to have noticed my enjoyment of it, and even to be aware of when sun angles might combine with wall geometry to create a good display and keep an eye out at that time. This photograph captures a nice example of the sort of effect I like.

This very specific inclination of mine has always struck me as a perfect personal laboratory sample for answering questions about where our minor interests come from. It's not connected to any life event of which I'm aware, it's nothing anyone else ever taught me to see, it has no cultural presence as an esthetic item -- in short, as near as I can tell, this one is entirely "mine".

So why do I like sun-grazed walls? I still don't know. One theory is that, lacking depth perception, my brain likes how the strong shadows bring out surface texture which other people can see directly. Another theory is that it's connected to my more general love of fractals and related patterns; the self-similarity of large and small pits and bumps with large and small shadows all blending together does have a fractal character.

So far, I haven't pinned this down, nor am I sure I ever will. But it's an interesting interior explanation. And, beyond that, it's nice being unusually stimulated by something free and nearly ubiquitous.

I was reading Stephen Jay Gould's The Dinosaur in the Haystack essay collection on the way into work this morning, and found a minor error -- referring to fossilized organisms, he wrote "soft parts" when he clearly meant "hard parts". I've found that reporting such errors often leads to interesting correspondence with authors, so I resolved to look up his email when I got to work and send him a friendly correction.

Then, a moment later, I remembered that he died of cancer in 2002. As if it had never occurred to me before, I was struck by the gross, bitter, horrid unfairness involved in removing such a brilliant and engaging person from the world. Whatever he might or might not be up to now, his thoughts, his humor, his perspective are inaccessible to me, and I found myself getting angry at that -- not intellectually angry, but meat angry, in my blood and muscles.

This episode passed rather quickly, but it's put an odd emotional spin on my day.

Ironically enough, tonight's Gnostic Boot Camp will cover the other end of life: the rituals of Baptism and Confirmation. Mental gear stripping, here I come!

( In which Craig blathers on at some length )