"Savage land, yielding neither water enough to drown a man, nor a tree to hang him, nor soil enough to bury." One of Cromwell's surveyors summed up that part of Ireland known as the Burren. Cruel, bleak, and gray. No rolling hills, nothing but ankle busting rocks so porous that lakes form a few feet under the surface when it rains. Nothing grows here except small grasses and smaller flowers. Pooler and I stopped at the megalithic Portal Tomb known as Poulnabrone. It's 5,800 years old and was found to contain 22 bodies which had been scatter buried over 600 years from 3,200 to 3,800 BC. Probably some high status dudes. Ireland is a country which once sported 50 Kings at once. There is a church in the Burren at Kilnaboy, ruined, shrouded in its ivy petticoat - an ancient Norman structure, small by any standards. The church sports a Sheila-na-gig over its east entrance - both Pooler and Skippy had seen it before on previous trips but each of them used the place as a pilgrimage destination.
The Îlot de Mouettes reminded Skippy of the Burren in Ireland. It was a surreal landscape whose foundation was stone and rock. There had been several attempts over the centuries to inhabit the island; all of them had failed and you are looking at the reason. Gulls, more Gulls. Cormorants, more Cormorants. The birds grew more and more excited the closer our boats got to the island and when we were 100 feet or so from the shore a thousand gulls took to the air and began to dive on us, wheeling aside at the last moment. Hitchcock knew this scene and the terror that it can cause. There is something visceral about the air being filled with wildly flapping wings and the screeching cries. We cut the engines and drifted towards the beach. The Landing Team buckled themselves into helmets and rebreathers. Conversation became near impossible over the bruit of wings and screeching. The geography looked out of Danté. It was Berlin, late April, 1945 . . . or Varanasi that early morning on the Ganges and Skippy was watching huge meat-eating bats dive on the little wrapped bundles which were bumping up against his boat in the semi-darkness. Those were dead babies whose parents could not afford the sandlewood or the gee, or even a match to light a funeral pyre. You could not do drugs and take this beach. Your mind would snap like a dry wishbone from a game hen. It stank. It was hot under the breathing masks. Skippy checked Eddy Rickets and Cairo for any signs of panic. They looked good. Surprised. Absolutely. You had to be surprised. You cannot prepare for hellish nightmares. So there is always surprise.
UNDERSTANDING ACTION - neurons associated with hand/mouth actions fire when a monkey grabs a raisin on a plate [1]. The same neurons fire again when an Eyetie grabs a raisin as the monkey only watches [2]. Fuckin' monkeys - they'll steal raisins from Italians.
I am quoting from: "Mirrors in the Mind," by Giacomo Rizzolatti, Leonardo Fogassi and Vittorio Gallese, in Scientific American, November, 2006 - In experiments with monkey, the authors discovered subsets of neurons in brain-motor regions whose activation appeared to represent actions themselves. Firing by these `Mirror Neurons' could therefore produce in one individual an internal recognition of another's act. Because the neurons' response also reflected comprehension of another's goal, the authors concluded that action understanding is a primary purpose of the mirror mechanism. Involvement of the mirror neurons in comprehending the actor's final intention was also seen in their responses, which distinguished between identical grasping actions performed with different intentions."
DISCRIMINATING GOAL -"An F5 mirror neuron fired intensely when the monkey observed an experimenter's hand moving to grasp an object [1] but not when the hand motioned with no object as its goal [2]. The same neuron did respond to goal-directed action when the monkey knew an object was behind an opaque screen, although the animal could not see the act's completion [3]. The neuron responded weakly when the monkey knew no object was behind the screen [4]." It's obvious that it is Mirror Neurons which provide "a direct internal experience, and therefore understanding, of another person's act, intention or emotion." I think that if the Vatican would have known about Mirror Neurons at the Council of Nicea in 325 we would have inherited a very different model of the Trinity and especially the position of the Spirt, the Ghost, the Shekhina within that Trinity. Mirror Neurons provide the bases for Society, for reciprocity systems within all animal behavior. I'll scratch your back, you scratch mine is impossible without Mirror Neurons. Love your Neighbor as Yourself and Do Unto Others ... are all empty abstractions without the ability of understanding the needs and the actions and the intentions of the others. Sartre was right: Hell is Other People. But Hell is where we live, down here with the rest of the shards. Broken Vessels disrupt Unity and occasion Multiplicty. Suddenly there are Others. What the fuck do they want?
"We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown"
Gull Fever! We beached the boats and started unpacking the gear. The air became plastic around us as it filled with moving things - it literally leapt into animation. Skippy had this horrible flashback to Mississippi on a 105° June afternoon when he & Lou abandoned the motorcycle and ran down to the rocky shores of the Ross Barnett Reservoir. They were throwing off pieces of clothing as they ran giggling down to the water - Skippy hung there, near-naked, over the man-made lake and wondered why the waters were boiling. Snakes! Thousands of Snakes, all intertwining like Celtic Knots and making the water alive. Now he stood on the cusp of the Island and braved the thick air as it broiled and bubbled and cursed and shrieked. The observation boats were hanging off shore 50 to 100 yards, just outside the roiling hemisphere of birds. It's a damn good thing that nothing bothers the Cormorants and that they're so fucking dumb you can walk right up to them and spit in their beady, dead eyes. If those black bastards also took to the air the Landing Team would have stalled on the beach like at Omaha & Juno and lay cowering behind their shit stained boats.
"A casual stroll thru the lunatic asylum shows that faith does not prove anything." - Nietzsche
"The Christian resolution to find the world ugly and bad has made the world ugly and bad." - Nietzsche
"All things are subject to interpretation; whichever interpretation prevails at a given time is a function of power and not truth." - Nietzsche
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