MARS / ARES
[In the Order of Appearance]
its own myth “In one of Ray Bradbury’s stories an Earthly colonist of Mars takes his daughter down to the canal to show her a Martian. She is told to look into the water, and there she sees her own reflection.” F.Turner, Tempest, Flute, & Oz. New York,1991.
the technological hurdles: I. Sample, "Mars astronauts risk brain damage from cosmic rays." http://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/may/01/mars-astronauts-risk-brain-damage-from-cosmic-rays-say-scientists
the old gods: "The old gods are gone. What lives on / in my heart / is their flesh / like a wound / a tomb, a bomb." J. Weiners. From, "Billie."a trailer: Located on Creech Air Forse Base, at Indian Springs, NV, about 35 miles north of Las Vegas.
dust: R.F. Worth, "What If PTSD is More Physical Than Psychological?" New YorkTimes, June 10, 2016.
the outcome of which: J. Cage on experimental music. Quoted in, K. Larson, Where the Heart Beats: John Cage, Zen Buddhism, and the Inner Life of Artists. New York, 2013.
Is it sound?: J. Cage, "Composition as Process." Silence. Cambridge, MA, 1969.
a new kind of life: W. Mules, "The Edges of the Earth: Ciritcal Regionalism as an Aesthetics of the Singular." Transformations #12, December 2005.the rain falls: G. Oppen. From, "Of Being Numerous 12."
visor: Unlike Mars/Ares, blue-eyed Athena, goddess of both war and wisdom, and a siter of Ares, wore full battle gear, including a helmet that sported a visor.
Athena was also a proposal for a piloted Mars mission that was to be launched "as early as 2001...This mission plan is called Athena because it will bring intelligence to Mars" R. Zubrin, "Athena: A Possible First Step in a Program of Human Mars Exploration." American Institute of Aeronasutics and Astronautics, 1996. The proposal, now called Mars Direct, was supported by President George W. Bush, then dropped by President Barack Obama because of the many unsolved problems humans would have surviving on Mars. The work toward such a mission is now carried on by the Mars Society. http://www.marssociety.org
pottery shards: http://www.greeceathensaegeaninfo.com/h-athens/ancient/agora-temple-ares.htma map: "No cities. No seas. No forests and no battlegrounds. No praires. No nations. No histories or legends. No memories. Just features, features and names. Argyre and Hellas and Isidis. Olympus and Alba and Pavonis. Schiaparelli and Antoniadi, Kasei and Nirgal. Beautiful double-rimmed Lowell. Names from one world projected onto maps of another. " O Morton, Mapping Mars. New York, 2002.
Mars Civilized: Magnified View: "A century ago, Percival Lowell, convinced of the reality of the Martian 'canals' that he thought he had seen from his observatory at Flagstaff (AZ), was keeping up a relentless campaign—in books, lectures, popular articles, and widely reproduced maps—on behalf of his notion of a Mars populated by a heroic race staving of extinction through the monumental engineering feat of a global irrigation system. Although challenged and discredited by most scientists, Lowell was the principal figure in the so-called 'Mars mania'' at the turn of the twentieth century and he had a strong popular following that persisted long after his death in 1916. Lowell never accepted that the work he produced was itself a dexterous if somewhat willful blending of science and fiction, but his eloquently articulated and beautifully illustrated figments took hold on the public imagination in spite of the scorn of astronomers and generated a flood of literary fantasies that lasted well into the 1960s." R. Crossley, Imagining Mars. Middletown, CT, 2011. Also reference.: http://www.cddc.vt.edu/host/weishaus/Cosmography/Saturn/Saturn-14.htm
flight between worlds: Between Florida's humid green integument and New Mexico's dry brown deserts, as if Earth becoming and Mars having become.
To find your way: “There is no evolutionary selection pressure to develop a mind to represent reality as it really is.” J. Baggott, Farewell to Reality. New York, 2013.
when the river last appeared: "The lack of water served to differientiate imagined versions of Mars from the earth—but the fact that there was some water there, just a little, meant that even such an unearthly place could still be related to the human world as an alternative, a warning, or a promise." O. Morton, Mapping Mars. New York, 2002.
Dreams bear: B. Bova, Mars Life.New York, 2008.
How can this be? "How does consciousness cause matter to materialize? We are not told. Where (and how) did consciousness exist before there was matter? We are left wondering. As far as I can tell, all the evidence points in the direction of brains causing mind, but no evidence indicates reverse causality." M. Shermer, "What Happens to Consciousness When We Die?" Scientific American, July 1, 2012.the depthless line: T.J. Clark, "On Picasso's 'Guernica.'" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lEG1pBjABrM
a heap of broken images: "...where the sun beats, / And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief, And the dry stone no sound of water." T.S. Eliot. From, "The Wasteland."
the whole bloody business: J. Hillman, A Terrible Love of War. New York, 2004.
I recalled a story: In, I. Calvino, Invisible Cities. San Diego CA. 1974.Sasquatchian: See, J. Weishaus, "The Silence of Sasquatch." https://weishaus.unm.edu/Bigfoot/intro.htm
Then a large ape-man: C.G. Jung, Psychology and Alchemy. London, 1953. "From the point of view of the conscious mind this is highly irrational; it constitutes a secret which must be amxiously guarded, since the justification for its existence could not possibly be explained to any so-called reasonable person. Anyone who tried to do so would be branded as a lunatic."
The Old Ones knew: B. Bova, Mars Life.New York, 2008.An old story emerged: From, “Lung-t’an Blows out a Candle.” Case 28 in the Mumonkan or Wu men kuan. "The next day Lung-t’an took the high seat before his assembly and declared, 'Among you monks there is a brave fellow whose fangs are like swords and whose mouth is like a bowl of blood.'" Hearing this, Te-sh'an, the newly enlightened scholar, gathered his notes on the Buddhist teachings and burned them in front of his fellow monks, saying, "Even though you have learned all the secrets of the world, it is like throwing a drop of water into a deep ravine.”
red: G. Brooks, People of the Book. New York, 2009.
The Hippoeans: The Hippoeans were first cousins to the people Henri Michaux calls the Hivinizikis. "The Hiviniziki lives on horseback. He will wear out three horses in a day. Always astraddle, always galloping. There you have the Hiviniziki." R. Kuhn, "The Hermeneutics of Silence: Michaux and Mescaline." Yale French Studies #50 (1974)
March to October: The so-called October Horse, the “off-horse” of the winning team of a chariot race, was sacrificed to Mars. In Rome the horse was killed with a thrust of a javelin; in India it was smothered to death. Its head and tail were cut off and hung from “a conspicuous building. The two ends represent the whole, a common equation in magic. No one knows what happen to the rest of the horse’s body.
reddish foods: “(T)he red of the salve and the sinew could represent the blood of birth, assistance for a person in their delivery into the next world, envisioned as a kind of rebirth. Such an association could also indicate a threshold between life and death, connecting the living with the dead. Or, it might represent attempts to protect the dead, or to bring the dead back to life. Whatever speculations or amplifications are made, red, viewed as a dominant ritual symbol in prehistoric burials, is closely related to death, and therefore to its archetypal partner, life.” C.A. Hale, “Follow the Red: Exploring the Archetypal Experience of Color.” Ph.D dissertation, Pacifica Graduate Institute, Carpinteria, CA., 2006.
god of fertility: Mars, whose name derives from the Latinized form of the Etruscan agricultural god Maris, was originally a god of vegetation and fertility.
12.the cavern beneath the cave: S.R. Hopper, "Ontology as Utterance, or The Cavern Beneath the Cave." Quoted by David L. Miller, "Theopoetry or Theopoetics?" Cross Currents. March 2010. "...behind every cave in him there is...and must necessarily be, a still deeper cave...an abyss behind every bottom, beneath every 'foundation.'" (F. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil. New York, 1966. [Miller, note 62.]
and the poet's voice: R. Duncan. From, "Tribal Memories Passages 1."
chevron prints: Chevron marks have been found in Africa that are believed to be around 100,000 years old.circling the void: "supermassive black holes at the centre of each galaxy could have moved closer together and begun to circle each other, forming what is known as a binary. The gravitational influence of this system could have destabilized the orbits of nearby stars and hurled them away from the centre of the galaxy like a slingshot. "Each time they eject a star [the black holes] lose a bit of energy and the binary becomes smaller:' said Dr Jens Thomas, an author of the paper from the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics. "At some point the two black holes are so close to each other that they merge:' N. Davis, "Supersized black hole discovery forces universal rethink." The Guardian, April 6, 2016.
I need to be a crow: "As a student of ravens, Sonam, I'm quite sure, had long practiced holding himself in the various postures of that bird, had practiced Raven's ways of walking, of moving his head, of spreading feathered limbs. Learning to dance another animal is central to the craft of shamanic traditions throughout the world. To move as another is simply the most visceral approach to feel one's way into the body of that creature, and so to taste the flavor of its experience, entering into the felt intelligence of the other." D. Abram, Becoming Animal. New York, 2010.
the mind: R. Creeley. From, "I Keep To Myself Such Measures..." (Punctuation slightly changed.)When I first read: R. Grossinger, "The 'Face' On Mars." Planetary Mysteries. Berkeley, 1986.
cosmologist's aqueous dreams: "Scientists have for the first time confirmed liquid water flowing on the surface of present-day Mars, a finding that will add to speculation that life, if it ever arose there, could persist now." K. Chang, "Mars Shows Signs of having Flowing Water: Possible Niches For Life, NASA says." New York Times, Sept. 28, 2015.
California Black Oak: Quercus kelloggii "is found from Lane County, Oregon, south through the Cascade Range, the Sierra Nevada, and the Coast, Transverse, and Peninsular ranges to San Diego County, California and into Baja California." Wikipedia.
Smokey the Bear: Created by art critic Harold Rosenberg in the 1940s for the U.S. Forest Service, his famous slogan was: "Remember... Only YOU Can Prevent Forest Fires." The symbol also based on a Black Bear cub saved from a forest fire in New Mexico.
Center of the Universe: "The omphalos, in every tradition, is a stone consecrated by the superhuman presence, or by symbolism of some kind...the omphalos bears witness of something, and it is from that witness that it gets its value, or position in the cult." M. Eliade, Patterns in Comparative Religion. New York, 1963. According to Einsteinan physics, the center of the universe is not a place, not space, but time.Sam & Alberto's tree: "The tree (that Samuel Beckett and Alberto Giacometti made together) was a schematic abbreviation, being roughly finished in white plaster. Two metres tall, it had four branches arching out from the top like spokes of an umbrella, one dividing in two further out. The trunk itself was gaunt and spindly, barely thicker than a common drainpipe. This and the ashen colour gave the tree a starved look, so that it appeared quite dead in the first act (of 'Waiting For Gogot.'). Several white plaster leaves were hooked on to branches for the second act, suggesting a bare flicker of life animating the form, and recalling the cemetery bronzes....And what happened to that tree the artist and writer had made together? The staff at the Théâtre de l’Odéon recognised its potential artistic value, and put the piece into storage when the production of Waiting for Gogot ended in July (1961). It was safe there for seven years. Then, during the Paris riots of May 1968, students occupied the theatre and vandalised the interior. Which is how, along with the historic décor for many dramatic productions, Giacometti and Beckett’s tree was destroyed." C. Heathcoate, "When Beckett Commissioned Giacometti." Quandrant, January 1, 2013.
a serpent's: Oblique reference to the Australian Aboriginal Rainbow Serpent. "Some scholars think that the link between snake and rainbow suggests the cycle of the seasons and the importance of water in human life." K. Maddock, "Metaphysics in a Mythical View of the World". In I. R. Buchler and K. Maddock, The Rainbow Serpent: A Chromatic Piece. Chicago, 1978.The head is round: H-Lhote, The Search for the Tassili Frescoes: The Story of the Prehistoric Rock-Paintings of the Sahara. London, UK, 1958.
we named: Although the names of Mars' features changed over the years, from explorers to astronomers, in 1973 the International Astronomical Union "devised a rather more erudite and much more systematic nomenclature. Almost two hundred craters were named after people associated with Mars, a tradition that continues to this day...To deal with features other than craters, the committee turned to a range of descriptive Latin landscape terms that had been put together by various geologists, mostly at the USGS." O. Morton, Mapping Mars. New York, 2002.
linguistic production: C. Tilley, “On Modernity and Archaeological Discourse.” .Meta Archaeology Project. http://archaeology.kiev.ua/meta/tilley.htmlI love all waste: P.B. Shelley. From, “Julian and Maddalo.”
caught up: R. Hardman, “Unshakeable courage of the real War Horses: The eight million forgotten animals who were killed on the frontline (of World War One).” Daily Mail, May 18, 2016.
led to a dramatic change: S. Mithen, "On Early Palaeolithic ‘Concept-Mediated Marks, Mental Modularity, and the Origins of Art.'” Current Anthropology 37 (1996).folded, faulted: S.A. Minor, et. al., "Geologic Map of the Santa Barbara Coastal Plain Area, Santa Barbara County, California." http://pubs.usgs.gov/sim/3001/
Growing roots: "The evidence against the deep-roots theory of war keeps mounting. The theory holds that war’s roots extend back hundreds of thousands or even millions of years, and that war is an adaptive trait, favored by natural selection...The debate over the deep-roots theory matters, because many people think that if war is ancient and innate, it must also be inevitable." J. Hogan, "Japanese Study Deals Another Blow to Deep-Roots Theory of War." Cross Check Blog, Scientific American, April 4, 2016.
pink moment: "Instead of looking west at the setting sun, you look east to see its reflection on the bluffs of the Topa Topa Mountains, which for a few short moments are airbrushed a Day-Glo pink." S. Boorstin, "Weekend Escape: Ojai : Chasing the Pink Moment : Sunset-watching hits a new peak in the Topa Topas." Los Angeles Times, January 7, 1996.
The mystery of existence: A. Bleakley, The animalizing imagination. New York, 2000.
black, sinister night: "For the most part, however, they are monotonous clichés about totally unspecific dangers, the terror, awe and fear coming with the night, 'black, sinister night.'" W. Giegerich,"Saving the Nuclear Bomb." In, V. Andrews, et. al., editors, Facing Apocalypse. Dallas, TX, 1987.