A dog: "Hermes said, 'My son, take a Corascene dog and an Armenian bitch, join them together, and they will beget a dog of celestial hue, and if ever he is thirsty, give him sea water to drink; for he will guard your friend, and he will guard you from your enemy, and he will help you wherever you may be, always being with you, in this world and in the next.'" Liber Secretorum. Quoted in, C.G. Jung, Mysterium Conjunctionis. The Collected Works,Vol. 14. Princeton, NJ., 1977. p.174.

taking place: "In the 1970s John O'Keefe and his colleagues recorded the activity of nerve cells in the hippocampus of a rat that could move freely around in a enclosure, and they made the startling discovery that, while the firing of some cells depended on what the rat was doing, the firing of others depends only on where the enclosure was. These place cells therefore seemed to represent a cognitive map of environmental space. Cells with similar properties were later found in the rat's posterior parietal lobes." I. Glynn, An Anatomy of Thought. New York, 2000. p.321.

desert:  First image of animation is of Marsden Hartley's "New Mexico Recollections No. 12." 1922-23. Oil on canvas. "In the city, as in the desert, the stranger, the wanderer, the nomad, the flâneur finds reprieve from time." Z. Bauman, "Desert Spectacular." In, K. Tester, Editor, The Flâneur. London, England, 1994. p.140.

receives and processes: J.Philbeck, http://www.jsmf.org/old_site/programs/mcpewprograms

homunculus: "Within the somatosensory cortex is a representation of the human body called the homunculus or " little man". Neurons in this location can identify the area of the body being stimulated by the information they receive from the somatic receptors in the skin.  A particular body region is represented on the cortex with an area that is proportional to the density of touch receptors in the body part, not by its actual size. Since your right index finger is very dense with touch receptors, it takes up a lot of cortex compared to say your arm. Therefore, the neurons form a geometrically distorted projection of the body surface." http://www.macalester.edu/~psych/whathap/UBNRP/Phantom/homunculus.html

ruin-bunting: Antiquarian term for discovering the beauty of small details.

ordinary-looking stones: "We know that the lapis is not just a 'stone' since it is expressly stated to be composed 'de re animali, vegetabili et mineriali,' and to consist of body, soul, and spirit; moreover, it grows from flesh and blood.For which reason Philosophus says, 'The wind hath carried it in his belly. And therefore it is plain that the wind is air, air as life, and life as soul. The stone is that thing midway between perfect and imperfect bodies, and that which nature herself begins is brought to perfection through the art (alchemy).' The stone 'is named the stone of invisibility.'" C.G. Jung, Dream Symbols of the Individuation Process. In, J. Campbell, Editor, Spiritual Disciplines: Papers From the Eranos Yearbooks. Princeton, NJ., 1985. p.401-2.

mined before: "Bronze-age Celtic civilization  was agricultural, and it evolved a loose pantheon of deities related to the goddess Dana, who is associated with the water of life (she gives her name to European rivers from the Danube to the Don). But in ancient Irish mythtelling, where a Stone-age sensibility lies beneath an agriculturist frame of mind like volcanic rock beneath peat, one encounters all the intelligent energies of animism--that is, of a nature seen as having mentality (animus). Neither generically benevolent nor malevolent, these spirits are at best ambiguous. For example, in one eighth-century text, where they are first mentioned, a swarm of 'small bodies' (lúchoirp or luchorpáin) comes out of the sea. Water spirits, they grant the hero the power to travel underwater, like a shaman, and the power is his until he breaks a taboo they have warned against." S. Kane, Wisdom of the Mythtellers. Peterborough, Ontario, Canada, 1998. p.35.

in the massive: S.A.Greenfield, The Human Brain: A Guided Tour. New York, 1997. p.16.

nowadays physicists: D.S. Overbye, "No Man, Quark or Electron Is an Island." The New York Times, 20 March 2001.

a journalist: Richard Read, a reporter for The Oregonian, is the recipient of two Pulitzer Prizes.

Dalai Lama: His Holiness, the Fourteenth Dalai Lama of Tibet, was born on July 6, 1935 in a small farming village of Taktser in the province of Amdo, northeast Tibet. At the age of two, following a nationwide search, he was recognized as the reincarnation of  the Thirteenth Dalai Lama. He was brought to Lhasa, the capital of Tibet, and on February 22, 1940 was formally installed as the Tibetan head of state.

Dharamsala: Dharamsala is situated in the northern Indian state of Himachal Pradesh, in the Pir Panjal region of the Outer Himalayas, within sight of the awesome Dhauladhar, "white ridge," Range above, and the Kangra Valley below.

In 635 AD, the Chinese monk-pilgrim, Hsuan Tsang recorded fifty monasteries, with a population of around 2,000 monks, in this region. A century later, during an upsurge of Brahminical revivalism, Buddhism and all its sites were eliminated from the valley. His Holiness the Dalai Lama established the Tibetan Government-in-Exile at Dharamsala in 1960.

journalist asked: The Dalai Lama first replied to this question by saying, "I think...making many friends." He concluded with, "Anyway, it's better to ask others about his achievements. Then they can easily exaggerate." Then the Dalai Lama began "breaking into laughter again." R. Read, "A Struggle For Enlightenment: The Dalai Lama Will Visit Portland This Spring..." The Oregonian, 25 March 01. p.A01.

their mother: "A duckling needs its mother and it needs this construct of mother to be its real mother. That only one combination of stimuli comes to mean mother is an intrinsic property of the circuits that embed this material representation. An attractor-like property through repetition of a given sequence of stimuli--hear quack, orient to quack, see this big duck--ultimately comes to embed the construct of mother."  R.R. Llinás, i Of The Vortex: From Neurons to Self. Cambridge, MA., 2001. p.197

with strained and sore eyes: "While watching the glass vase with strained and sore eyes, the alchemist would ponder the words of the golden ones; and then, spontaneously, his spirit would begin conversing with the ghosts of Hermes Trismegistus, Moses, Pythagoras, and Plato. That this conversation was not unusual is suggested by the initiates' definition of the long, melancholy meditation before the vessel, the immensa meditation, as an interior conversation with an invisible other." R. Sevenson, "The Alchemy of Dreamwork: Reflections on Freud and The Alchemical Tradition." Dragonflies. Spring, 1979. p.101.

mapping: "Humans are remarkably accurate and precise when walking blindly to a previously viewed target. This behavior relies heavily upon the ability to keep track of one's changing location. Recent evidence suggests that some aspects of location monitoring may be subserved by the parietal cortex; in particular, the parietal lobe appears to mediate the construction and maintenance of an internal spatial representation. However, there are many unanswered questions regarding both the processes involved in spatial updating and the properties of the representation that is constructed." J. Philbeck, http://www.jsmf.org/old_site/programs/ mcpew
programs.

"But authentic mobility, the essence of which is to be found in imagined mobility, is not properly aroused by the description of reality, not even of reality in the process of becoming. The true voyage of the imagination is the voyage to the land, to the very domain of the imaginary. By this, I do not refer to one of those Utopias which creates all at once a paradise or a hell, an Atlantis or a Thebes. It is the journey which interests us, and instead we are given a description of the stay." G. Bachelard, "L'invitation au voyage." C. Gaudin, Editor, On Poetic Imagination and Reverie. New York, 1971. p.22.

sealed: if the mystical operations are to produce 'the treasure hard to obtain,' then a tightly sealed apparatus is an absolute necessity." R. Sevenson, "The Alchemy of Dreamwork: Reflections on Freud and The Alchemical Tradition." Dragonflies. Spring, 1979. p.103.

Joycean jar: "It is a considerable historical irony that (the computer's) architecture was misdescribed by the popular press from the moment it was created.These fascinating von Neumann machines were called 'giant electronic brains,' but they were, in fact giant electronic minds, electronic imitations---severe simplifications--of what William James dubbed the stream of consciousness, the meandering sequence of conscious mental contents famously depicted by James Joyce in his novels. The architecture of the brain, in contrast, is massively parallel, with millions of simultaneously active channels of operation." D. Dennett, Consciousness Explained. Boston, 1991. p.214.

but oneself: "A fifty-seven-year-old World War I veteran who received a shrapnel wound to his right posterior parental lobe began to have seizures several years after the injury. On a occasion during one of these spells, he reported, 'I was in the doctor's surgery staring into the garden. Then I saw a man about four feet away to my left. It suddenly dawned on me who is was. It was me.'...On another occasion he reported that he saw 'crowds of tiny figures all the colors of the rainbow--all myself." T.E. Fineberg, Altered Egos: How the Brain Creates the Self. New York, 2001.p.82. (Autoscopia, also known as heutoscopy, can be caused by the shrinkage of the parietal lobes. It refers to visual hallucinations of one's self.)

James Joyce: M. Eliade, No Souvenirs: Journal, 1957-1969. New York, 1977. p.181.

We part: "It is a question of 'discontinuous parting' born of inventions that arise from chance encounters. The event that is elicited by the 'wild profusion of beings' adds to each carefully constructed map another possibility." M. de Certeau, "The Laugh of Michel Foucault." Heterologies: Discourse on the Other. Minnesota, MN., 1986. p.197.

preserve: "the spaces we deem nature (wilderness preserves, national parks, etc.) are defined precisely by their cultural value, as are museums, monuments, and other specially preserved spaces, which thus renders the spaces most identified with nature as culture. Indeed, we might call such places 'nature museums to emphasize that preservation itself is a distinctly cultural act." D.R. Shumway, "Nature and the Apartment--Humans, Pets, and the Value of Incommensurability." In, M. Bennett, and D.W. Teague, Editors, The Nature of Cities: Ecocriticism and Urban Environments. Tucson, AZ., 1999. pp.256-57.

lapis-haunted air: W. Stevens. In, "Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction."

pale woman: In his discussion "connecting Arthur with the invisible world where the Fairy-People live," Evans-Wentz traces the name of Arthur's wife, Gwenhwyvar, back to "a Brythonic word meaning white, and hwyvar, a word not found in Brythonic dialects, but undoubtedly cognate with the Irish word siabhradh, a fairy." W.Y. Evans-Wentz, The Fairy-Faith in Celtic Countries. New York, 1966. pp.310-11.

a falcon: I am circling around God, around the ancient tower,
              and I have been circling for a thousand years.
              And I still don't know if I am a falcon,
              Or a storm, or a great song.
             -R.M. Rilke. From "I Live My Life." R. Bly, Translator.

caressing: "The postcentral gyrus of the parietal lobe is involved with the primary reception and processing of somatic sensory information, or that derived from the sense receptors in the skin, muscles and joints. This sensory information includes tactile or touch sensitivity in the skin, sensations of hot and cold, pressure exerted on the skin surface and the sense we have of the position of our joints and muscles." http://www.braincampus.com/nanatomy/cereb/parietal.html

white stones: "Like the ocean which rings the earth, and like the gates of the sun, the rock marks the boundary between this world and the world beyond; and it is white because that boundary is also the boundary of light and life." C. Rowe, "Concepts of Colour and Colour Symbolism in the Ancient World." In, Color Symbolism. Dallas, 1977.

up there: W.B. Yates. From, "The Man and the Echo."

Gremlin: Rolad Dahl, a pilot injured in action with the RAF, wrote The Gremlins, a book for children about the hazards of being an RAF pilot. Unlike the homunculus in the brain, an explanation for organized consciousness, Gremlins were the anthropomorphized explanation for inexplicable mishaps experienced by pilots and their machines. Dahl later wrote the screenplay for the James Bond film, You Only Live Twice.

a theory: With these fingers and quick chemicals
               casting divination and combination by
               a specter's ring, giving ear and performing
               heat here from beyond here
               as if existence was not
               'as if' existential and
               the reality was into moving light
               switches with thought.
               -T. Purdue. From, "Seen Not Spoken."

Renaissance: "The whole Italian Renaissance was impregnated with hermeticism, occultism, and Egyptianism....the hermeticism of the Renaissance ought to be understood as a reaction against medieval rationalism, which sprang from Aristotelianism, and that the passion for occultism and magic reveals the dissatisfaction of the humanists with Christian provincialism and their thirst for a primordial, universal teaching revealed several thousand years before Moses, Pythagoras, and Plato. All this deserves to be taken up again and elaborated." M. Eliade, No Souvenirs: Journal, 1957-1969. New York, 1977. p.174.

the good gray poet: Walt Whitman was born on May 31, 1819 on Long Island, NY. Largely self-taught, he read voraciously. He published the first edition of what would grow into his epic collection of poems, Leaves of Grass, himself, and sent a copy to Ralph Waldo Emerson, who wrote a letter praising the poet's originality. Whitman released a second edition of the book in 1856, containing thirty-three poems. Overcome by the suffering of the wounded in the Civil War, the poet worked as a nurse for eleven years. Then he took a job as a clerk for the Department of the Interior, which ended when the Secretary of the Interior, James Harlan, discovered that Whitman was the author of Leaves of Grass, which Harlan found offensive, and fired him. Whitman struggled to support himself through most of his life.

an actor: Like Whitman, Bruce Noll was born on Long Island, NY. Out of his love for Whitman's work, he began to perform "Pure Grass" during the 1970s. 

disguised: "The Capgras syndrome (named after French psychiatrist Joseph Capgras) is an example of a delusional misidentification syndrome. The term "delusional misidentification syndrome" applies to several clinical disorders in which a patient confuses the psychological or physical identity of a person, or thing. The patient with Capgras syndrome knows that a certain individual looks like the misidentified person, but there has been a change in the psychological identity of the individual." T.E. Feinberg, Altered Egos: How The Brain Creates the Self. New York, 2001. p.33.

rhythmical lines: "Whitman wrote in a form similar to 'thought-rhythm'. This form is found in Old Testament poetry and in sacred books of India such as the Bhagavad-Gita, which Whitman knew in translation. His rhythms and cadences are also heavily influenced by the music he heard as a regular devotee of the opera in New York City. In "Proud Music of the Storm" Walt sings: 'Composers! Mighty maestros! And you, sweet singers of old lands-Sopani! Tenori! Bassi! To you a new bard, caroling free in the west, Obeisant, sends his love.' These influences are combined with nature's influence in the form of the rise and fall of the sea that he loved so much." G. Mallis. http://www.liglobal.com/walt/waltbio.html

Adamic: Mircea Eliade says that, in his book, The American Adam, R.W.B. Lewis "rightly sees an Adamic narcissism" in Whitman. "Lewis also points out this theme in Whitman: the past is dead, it is a corpse, etc. All this in order to be able to affirm that the human race is born to a new life in America." M. Eliade, No Souvenirs: Journal, 1957-1969. New York, 1977. p.229.

passionately: "The difference between the prosaic fact and the poetic expression was not greater than the contrast between Whitman as I had imagined him and the simple, well-mannered man who stood and talked to us. From his own descriptions of himself, and from the swing and impetus of his lines, I had pictured him proud, alert, grandiose, defiant of the usages of society; and I found him the quietest of men. I really remember but one thing he said....The talk turning on his proof-sheets, I asked how the first poems impressed him, at this re-reading; to which he replied, "I am astonished to find myself capable of feeling so much." J. T. Trowbridge, "Reminiscences of Walt Whitman." The Atlantic Monthly, February 1902.

stuttering: Walt Whitman was planning a tour of performing his poetry, when he suffered a stroke, and spent his declining years preparing his final volume of poems and prose. He died on March 26, 1892.

“Four patients who developed stuttering speech in association with an acute ischemic stroke. A 68-year-old man acutely developed stuttering with a large left middle cerebral artery distribution stroke. A 59-year-old man who had stuttered as a child began to stutter 2 months after a left temporal lobe infarction, as nonfluent aphasia was improving. Another childhood stutterer, a 59-year-old originally left-handed man developed severe but transient stuttering with a right parietal infarction…Conclusion  The clinical presentation of stroke-associated stuttering is variable, as are the locations of the implicated infarctions." http://archneur.ama-assn.org/issues/v56n5/abs/nob7656.html.

parietal cortex: S.A.Greenfield, The Human Brain: A Guided Tour. New York, 1997. p.16.

bizarre denials: "Immediately after the surgery, and for nearly a year following, I had the distinct impression of a large part of my upper body being missing, as if it had been cut away. This was not a physical sensation exactly. But there was part that had been there that either no longer was or that I no longer had access to or contact with. More significant was no longer having any sense at all of a connectedness I had always felt, with the world, nature, other people, and so on. I am 49 years old, a Native American, and have worked with healers both Native and non-Native for a long time, and was considered something of a healer myself. Following the surgery and ever since, I no longer am able to use of even feel these energies. An Apache medicine man I recently saw for help told me I had a 'hole' in me, encompassing what would be the heart chakra and solar plexus, out of which my life was draining. I knew this and could feel it' it was why I had gone to him. He sealed the hole, at least temporarily." L. Gilbert. May 29, 1998. spiramed@maelstrom.st.johns.edu

as an adolescent: M. Cartmill, Professor of Biology, Duke University.

die young: "Until recently, dogma held that mature brains were static: no cells were born, except in the olfactory bulb...The prevailing view has since held that primates--and, indeed, mammals in general--are born with all the neurons they are going to have. Such neural stability was considered necessary for long-term memory. So in the late 1980s when (Elizabeth) Gould, who was then researching the effect of hormones on the brain as a postdoctoral fellow in the laboratory of Bruce S. McEwen at the Rockefeller University, saw evidence of new neurons in the rat hippocampus, she was perplexed....'It wasn't until we delved far enough back into the literature that we found evidence that new neurons are produced in the hippocampus.' Those earlier studies had never been widely noticed. Beginning in the 1960s Joseph Altman, now professor emeritus at Purdue University, and neurologist Michael S. Kaplan independently recorded neurogenesis in rats and other mammals. They saw growth in the olfactory bulb, in the hippocampus--a region important to memory--and, most strikingly, in the neocortex, which is the part of the brain involved in higher thinking. "But nobody picked up on the results," Gould says. 'It is a classic example of something appearing before its time.'" M. Holloway, "Young Cells in Old Brains." http://www.sciam.com/2001/0901issue/0901profile.html

Fairy Folk: "in North America (as in Celtic land), there is no proof of there ever having been an actual dwarf race, but Lewis and Clark, in their Travels to the Source of the Missouri River, found among the Sioux a tradition that a hill near the Whitestone River, which the Red Men called 'Mountain of Little People' or 'Little Spirits', was inhabited by pygmy demons in human form, about eighteen inches tall, armed with sharp arrows, and ever on the alert to kill mortals who should dare to invade their domain." W.Y. Evans-Wentz. The Fairy-Faith in Celtic Countries. New York, 1966. p.237.

from where: The inferior parietal lobule is where "our viewer-centered representations relate the self of our own physical body to the world outside it. Perhaps in a sense, this is where we start to feel certain that the apple lies inside or outside the clutch of our own grasping hands. Do we know how far an arm can reach? We know exactly how far. Because every day, for years, we have made deposits of such representations into our autobiographical memory bank." J.H. Austin, Zen and the Brain. p.244.

forest's veins: "In the subterranean regions there are alternate layers of earth and rock and flowing spring waters. These strata rest upon thousands of vapors which are distributed in tens of thousands of branches, veins and threadlike openings...The body of the earth is like that of a human being." Chen Ssu-Hsaio (d. 1332 C.E.)

net of neuronic cells: "The rapidly developing field of artificial neural networks emphasizes biologically inspired approaches to problem solving. Artificial neural networks process information differently from traditional computers. Computation occurs in parallel across large numbers of simple processing units, rather than in the serial fashion of traditional computer architectures. Similarly, information is distributed across the entire network rather than being located in one specific place or address. In fact, neural computation is sometimes called parallel distributed processing to emphasize how it differs from traditional computing….In the human brain, there are approximately 10 billion neurons, each of which is connected to about 10,000 other neurons. A single neuron consists of a cell body called the soma, a number of spine-like extensions called dendrites, and a single nerve fibre called an axon which branches out from the soma and connects to other neurons. Neurons combine input signals from these connections or synapses to determine if and when it will transmit a signal to other neurons through the connecting dendrites and synapses. The synapses modulate the input signals before they are combined, and the system learns by changing the modulation at each synapse. Neurons inter-connected by axons and dendrites form the basic neural network." http://www2.psy.uq.edu.au/~brainwav/Manual/WhatIs.html#WhatIs

Mt. Hood: Mt. Hood rises 11,235 above sea level, with a base spreading over 92 miles. Dating from the late Pleistocene Era, steam constantly spewing from fumarole areas, with eleven glaciers, it is the highest mountain the string of the Cascade Mountain Range

that stretches from Mt. Garibaldi in British Columbia south to Mt. Lassen in Northern California. In 1805, Lewis & Clark became the first Americans to see the mountain. Mt. Hood is the second most climbed mountain in the world, second only to Japan’s spiritual icon, Fujiyama, which it resembles.

shape of clouds: One navigational aid to early Polynesians was the shape and color of clouds. For example, "Cumulus  tend to dip in 'V' shapes down towards an island, or be locked to it while other clouds pass by on either side. Reflection from the shallow lagoon in an atoll gives a greenish cast to the underside of any low cloud, while a solid landmass tends to darken it." L. Watson, Heaven's Breath. New York, 1983. p.93.

Edith Piaf: Born in Paris, 1915, Edith Giovanna Gassion, beginning as a street singer, she gained a worldwide reputation as a torch singer, a French version of the Blues. Edith Piaf died in 1963.

is still a homunculus: E. Rousselle, Spiritual Guidance in Contemporary Taoism. In, J. Campbell, Editor, Spiritual Disciplines--Papers from the Eranos Yearbooks. Princeton NJ., 1985. p.99.

small in stature: The homunculus looks somewhat strange because each area is represented by the number of sensory neuronal connections, not its physical size.

the bridge: The Thurman Street Bridge runs above a dry creek bed.

Amidst yellows: "During summer, the leaves of trees are factories producing sugar from carbon dioxide and water by the action of light on chlorophyll. Chlorophyll causes the leaves to appear green. (The leaves of some trees, such as birches and cottonwoods, also contain carotene; these leaves appear brighter green, because carotene absorbs blue-green light.) Water and nutrients flow from the roots, through the branches, and into the leaves. The sugars produced by photosynthesis flow from the leaves to other parts of the tree, where some of the chemical energy is used for growth and some is stored. The shortening days and cool nights of autumn trigger changes in the tree. One of these changes is the growth of a corky membrane between the branch and the leaf stem. This membrane interferes with the flow of nutrients into the leaf. Because the nutrient flow is interrupted, the production of chlorophyll in the leaf declines, and the green color of the leaf fades. If the leaf contains carotene, as do the leaves of birch and hickory, it will change from green to bright yellow as the chlorophyll disappears. In some trees, as the concentration of sugar in the leaf increases, the sugar reacts to form anthocyanins. These pigments cause the yellowing leaves to turn red. Red maples, red oaks, and sumac produce anthocyanins in abundance and display the brightest reds and purples in the autumn landscape. (The purpose this red color may serve for the plant is the subject of some scientific speculation.” W. Hoch, http://scifun.chem.wisc.edu/chemweek/fallcolr/fallcolr.html

Green Man: "The earliest known examples (of the Green Man) are in the art of Classical Rome, from where the idea seems to have moved northwards, to be adopted by Christianity and spread far and wide along the pilgrimage routes. The Green Man vanished with the ‘Old Faith’ after the Reformation. By the time of his reappearance, on seventeenth century memorials and eighteenth century Scottish gravestones, the emphasis had shifted, the purpose redirected. For the Victorians, he played a major role in their church restorations and as a decorative motif on street architecture. Even today, when he enjoys a revival, his significance can be manipulated to suit our particular needs." Ruth Wylie, http://www.indigogroup.co.uk/edge/greenmen.htm

one could see: The ability to recognize the same object from different angles or perspectives is mediated by the parietal lobe.

apoptosis: "The term apoptosis was coined in a now-classic paper by Kerr, Wyllie, and Currie (Brit J. Cancer 26:239) in 1972 as a means of distinguishing a morphologically distinctive form of cell death which was associated with normal physiology. Apoptosis was distinguished from necrosis, which was associated with acute injury to cells." Apoptosis Interest Group, http://www.nih.gov/sigs/aig/Aboutapo.html

Wall: Parietal (Lobe) means: "Of or pertaining to a wall, or building or the care of them." New World Dictionary of the American Language. New York, 1980.

caves: "He found a small cave...Here no man could do him harm. He had the idea of writing down his thoughts, which was so dangerous for him to do anywhere else." J. Sorel, "Cloud Peak (Reflections in a Small Cave)." In, R. Célia Pinto, "The Black and the White." (O Branco E O Negro.) http://digitalmedia.upd.edu.ph.

that's their reality: James Hillman, "Once More Into the Fray." Spring 56. (Fall 1994). This is Hillman's reply to Wolfgang Giegerich's, "Killing: Psychology's Platonism and the Missing Link to Reality." Spring 54. (1993)

un-balanced: "The problem is this: theories and observation all suggest that in the first moments of the universe particles of matter and antimatter were created in equal abundance. Yet today the universe is not like this, as everything that we know in the large-scale cosmos consists of matter. How this asymmetry came about is one of the great puzzles of both particle physics and cosmology."   F. Close, Lucifer's Legacy: The Meaning of Asymmetry. Oxford, England, 2000. p.217.

who will admit it: "We now come to another disorder of the body-image which may be found in patients with parietal disease, especially in the right hemisphere. Hemiparesis may or may not be present. The characteristic feature is a subjective sensation as if there existed nothing to the left of the midline of the body. The left arm and leg seem to be 'missing'...as if the body had been sawn through the vertical midline. The sensation is often a vivid one, but ordinarily it does not assume delusional proportions. The patients insist that the feeling is one as if no left arm and legs existed. Only rarely, and in cases where considerable mental confusion exists, does the patient dispense with the term 'as if' and proclaim that he actually has no arm or leg at all on the affected side." M. Critchley, The Parietal Lobes. New York, 1966. p.237.

we will conduct: J. Philbeck, http://www.jsmf.org/old_site/programs/mcpewprograms

the auras: "We report the clinical manifestations and outcome of 82 patients with nontumoural parietal lobe epilepsy treated surgically at the Montreal Neurological Institute between 1929 and 1988. Patients with extensive resections extending outside the parietal lobe were excluded. Ninety-four percent exhibited aurae: the most common were somatosensory, described by 52 patients; 13 of these also described pain. Other aurae included disturbances of body image, visual illusions, vertiginous sensations and aphasia or dysphasia. A few patients exhibited complex visual or auditory hallucinations and elementary visual hallucinations..." V. Salanova, et al.: "Parietal lobe epilepsy. Clinical manifestations and outcome in 82 patients treated surgically between 1929 and 1988." http://research.bmn.com/medline/search/record?uid=MDLN.95323444

prosthetics: "(K) Shenoy, (D) Meeker and their colleagues showed that electrical signals from the parietal reach region (PRR), the part of the brain responsible for planning arm movements, can be used to control the movement of a cursor on a computer screen. Using signals from an electrode implanted in the PRR of a monkey, the researchers were able to mimic the animal's arm movements with the movements of a cursor called a prosthetic icon. Eventually, the monkey was able to control the icon by thought alone." M. Alexander, "Stanford engineer studies neural prosthetics." http://www.stanford.edu/dept/news/pr/01/shenoy1128.html

"'The nervous system is quite different than a computer,' said Eve Marder, a professor of neuroscience at Brandeis University who studies how the brain adapts to change. 'Many functions that are physically separate in a computer are carried out by the same piece of tissue' in the brain and nervous system. The greatest challenge has been in building the interface between biology and technology. Nerve cells in the brain find each other, strengthen connections and build patterns through complex chemical signaling that is driven in part by the environment. Slice away some neurons, for example, and others will leap in to replace their function. No one understands how the brain learns to adapt to change, but it is a process that is as sophisticated as it is messy. Silicon chips, on the other hand, can perform specific functions with great reliability and speed, but have limited responsiveness to the environment and almost no ability to alter themselves according to need. 'Things are constantly changing ... processes are growing, there are substances called neuromodulators that change the properties of nerve cells and the strength of connections,' said Marder. 'That's the challenge of making a silicon-brain interface - the rules of computation are not the same.'" S. Vedantam, "Brain cells linked to silicon chips. Researchers create part-mechanical, part-living circuit." The Washington Post. 28 August 2001.

navigate: The parietal lobes "are concerned with discerning the spatial layout of the external world, allowing you to navigate through space, reach out for objects, dodge missiles and otherwise know where you are." V.S.Ramachandran and S. Blackeslee, Phantoms in the Brain. New York, 1998. p.115.

complexity: "the are things Darwin couldn't have known. One of them was self-organization in complex dynamical systems. If the new science of Complexity succeeds, it will broker a marriage between self-organization and selection. It will be a physics of biology." J.M. Smith. In, R. Lewin, Life At the Edge of Chaos. New York, 1992. p.43.

a pole: "Opposition is one of the great symbols of alchemy, and the union of opposites is its great mystery, its ultimate goal. In one version alchemy speaks of it as the homunculus, the new man or spiritual rebirth, which is viewed as the great desideratum. We cannot seek to identify ourselves with only one of two poles; both poles must be transcended, transformed into a new being and thus reconciled." R. Bernoullio, Spiritual Development in Alchemy."  In, J. Campbell, Editor, Spiritual Disciplines--Papers from the Eranos Yearbooks. Princeton NJ., 1985. pp. 318-19.

metallic: "in Italian folklore the spot in the earth where a mushroom appears indicates a specific metallic body below, i.e., the planetary figures or archetypal bodies of the underworld." J. illman, The Dream and the Underworld. New York, 1979.

a circle: To live your life in circles, to go in circles, to repeat what you have already done, this was the nature of agricultural people, and of tribes who hunted species appearing in predicted places at predicted times. To a technological people such as ourselves,  circle means redundancy.

drunk:
            One should always be drunk.
            That's all that matters;
            That's our one imperative need.
            So as not to feel Time's horrible burden one which breaks your shoulders
            and bows you down, you must get drunk without cease.
            But with what? With wine, poetry, or virtue as you choose.
            -C. Baudelaire, "Get Drunk!"

 

Lew Welch appeared: Lew Welch was born on August 16, 1926 in Phoenix, Arizona. He attended Reed College, in Portland, Oregon, with fellow poets Gary Snyder and Philip Whalen. In Jack Kerouac's novel Big Sur, Lew is the hard-drinking Dave Wain. He appears to have committed suicide in May 1971 while staying near Gary Snyder's house in Nevada City, CA.

"Today it is just one year since Lew Welch walked into the woods, leaving behind his sleeping bag, his car, his notebooks, his unfinished MSS, his wallet, his ID. He was never seen again; search the slopes and brush as we would never a trace was found." G. Snyder. From, "Postnote." J. Weishaus, Editor, Bits & Snatches: The Selected Work of Sam Thomas. New York, NY., 1974.

Arising: Murray Gell-Mann.

Carmen Miranda: Called “the lady in the tutti-fruitti hat," and the inspiration for Chiquita Banana commercials, Miranda was born Maria do Carmo Miranda da Cunha on February 9, 1909 in Marco de Canavezes, Portugal. Her family moving to Rio de Janeiro when she was about two years old. A successful performer in Brazil, she was lured to Broadway, and then to Hollywood, where she starred in several "south-of-the-Border" Technicolor musicals, establishing the stereotype of the fiery, English-mangling, Latin. By 1945, such goofy films as “The Gang’s All Here," in which she wore a skyscraper of bananas, she was the highest paid woman in the U.S.  Miranda only returned to Brazil on a few visits. She died from a heart attack on August 5, 1955, in Beverly Hills, California.

 

 

Stone House: Built by the Works Progress Administration (WPA) during the 1930s, the structure was maintained as restroom facilities. Two stories, it now has no roof or wall.

the alchemist Paracelsus: C. Preston, "Homunculus." "Paracelsus who was born Philippus Aureolus (1493-1541) took the pseudonym of Theophrastus Bombastus Von Hohenheim. He became a renowned physician, alchemist and occultist. Supposedly he invented the name Paracelsus, which he was widely known by, which means 'superior to Calsus.' Celsus was an early Roman physician."

a golem: "After saying certain prayers and observing certain fast days, the Polish Jews make the figure of a man from clay or mud, and they pronounce the miraculous Shemhamphoras (the name of God) over him, he must come to life. He cannot speak, but he understands fairly well what is said or commanded. They call him golem and use him as a servant to do all sorts of housework. But he must never leave the house. On his forehead is written emeth (truth); every day he gains weight and becomes somewhat larger and stronger than all the others in the house, regardless of how little he was to begin with. For fear of him, they therefore erase the first letter, so that nothing remains but meth (he is dead), whereupon he collapses and turns to clay again." G. Scholem, On the Kabbalah and Its Symbolism. New York, 1965. p.159.

the reality: "The assumption is made that what is not held to be false must be real. Thus, for example, in the past, arguments against 'false' gods were used to induce belief in a true God. The process repeats itself today in contemporary historiography: by demonstrating the presence of errors, discourse must pass as 'real' whatever is placed in opposition to the errors. Even thought this is logically questionable, it works, and it fools people." M. de Certeau, "History: Science and Fiction." Heterologies. Minneapolis, MN., 1986. p.201.

ignoring: In Balint's Syndrome, "there is bilateral damage to the parietal lobes. In a kind of tunnel vision, the patient's eyes stay focused on any small object that happens to be in her foveal vision (the high-acuity region of the eye), but she completely ignores all other objects in the vicinity. If you ask her to point to a small target in her visual field, she'll very likely miss the mark by a wide margin--sometimes by a foot or more. But once she captures the target with her two foveas, she can recognize it effortlessly because her intact what pathway is engaged in full gear." V.S. Ramachandran and S. Blakeslee, Phantoms in the Brain. New York, 1998. p.80.

bloodless surgery: "We provide medical care without transfusions to all patients who request it&.There are many reasons why you might prefer a bloodless treatment method. For instance, you may have a deeply held religious conviction, such as that held by Jehovah's Witnesses, that prevents you from receiving blood transfusions. Or, you might feel more comfortable knowing that, with bloodless techniques, you don't risk infection of blood-borne illness, such as hepatitis and AIDS.; Legacy Good Samaritan Hospital & Medical Center. http://www.legacyhealth.org/healthcare/surgery/bloodless.ssi

can free himself: H.M. Enzenberger, Topological Structures in Modern Literature. Quoted by I. Calvino, Cybernetics and Ghosts." The Literature Machine. London, England, 1987. p.25

these Lilliputian humans: J. Raff, Jung and the Alchemical Imagination. York Beach, ME., 2000. pp. 207-8.

religious belief: "In one early reference, the Creator declared: 'Everything that lives and moves will be food for you. . . . But you must not eat meat that has its lifeblood still in it.' He added: 'For your lifeblood I will surely demand an accounting,' and he then condemned murder. (Genesis 9:3-6, New International Version) He said that to Noah, a common ancestor highly esteemed by Jews, Muslims, and Christians. All humanity was thus notified that in the Creator's view, blood stands for life. This was more than a dietary regulation. Clearly a moral principle was involved. Human blood has great significance and should not be misused. The Creator later added details from which we can easily see the moral issues that he links to lifeblood. He again referred to blood when he gave the Law code to ancient Israel. While many people respect the wisdom and ethics in that code, few are aware of its serious laws on blood. For instance: 'If anyone of the house of Israel or of the strangers who reside among them partakes of any blood, I will set My face against the person who partakes of the blood, and I will cut him off from among his kin. For the life of the flesh is in the blood.' (Leviticus 17:10, 11, Tanakh) God then explained what a hunter was to do with a dead animal: 'He shall pour out its blood and cover it with earth. . . . You shall not partake of the blood of any flesh, for the life of all flesh is its blood. Anyone who partakes of it shall be cut off.'-Leviticus 17:13, 14, Ta."

http://www.med.unipi.it/patchir/bloodl/bmr/blood_op.htm

Filipino healers: "In February 1989, Baguio-based (psychic healer) Placido Palitayan was arrested in Oregon For (fakery). He was caught using cow organs. In March 1987, Brother Jose 'Joe' Bugarin who operated in Sacramento, California, was arrested for cancer quackery and the illegal practice of medicine. He was sentenced to nine months in jail. The arresting officer who frisked him found several red-colored cotton balls in his left rear pocket. These 'bullets' are used by healers to create the illusion of surgery and produce 'blood' at the appropriate time. One of Brother Joe's victims, Mary Armstrong had earlier visited the healer hoping he would cure her of cancer of the larynx. After pulling out diseased tissue from her throat, Bugarin assured her she was healed - the cancer was gone. Wait six weeks and see your doctor afterwards, he told her. 'Armstrong finally did see her doctor, confident she'd find a miracle. Instead the disease had spread, and when it came time for a biopsy, she had a heart attack under the anesthetic. She had to wait for two more months before the surgeons would finally operate.'" http://www.harvardmagazine.com/archive/00nd/nd00_feat_surgery_4.html

genius: "Einstein's brain had an unusual pattern of sulci (grooves) on both right and left parietal lobes. This particular area of the parietal lobe is thought to be important for mathematical abilities and spatial reasoning. Einstein's brain had a much shorter lateral sulcus that was partially missing. His brain was also 15% wider than the other brains. The researchers think that these unique brain characteristics may have allowed better connections between neurons important for math and spatial reasoning. Although these results are interesting, it must be remembered that this study had only one brain in the experimental group...Albert Einstein's brain. It remains to be seen if other mathematical geniuses also show these distinguishing brain characteristics. Moreover, the study did not investigate the brain at a microscopic level. In other words, the study says nothing about how neurons in these brains were connected and of course, could not tell if there were differences in the way the neurons functioned. http://faculty.washington.edu/chudler/ein.html

thorns: "The Sheoques are the (tiny) spirits that haunt the sacred thorn bushes and the green raths....Many a mortal they are said to have enticed down into their dim world. Many more have listened to their fairy music, till all human cares and joys drifted from their hearts and they became great peasant seers or 'Fairy Doctors', or great peasant musicians or poets like Carolan, who gathered his tunes while sleeping on a fairy rath; or else they died in a year and a day, to live ever after among the fairies." http://www.belinus.co.uk/folklore/Files8/WBYClassIrishFairies.htm. They have also been known to steal children, and return them old.

Mt. Hood: At 11,235 Ft. above sea level, Mt. Hood is the highest mountain in Oregon, and the the 4^th highest in the Cascade Mountain Range of volcanoes that stretch from British Columbia south to Mt. Lassen in Northern California. Its last eruption was in 1907, and, as scientists have figured one ever 75 years, it’s past due.

out of reach: "we know that certain neurons in the left orientation area (situated in the posterior section the parietal lobe) respond only to objects within arm's reach, while others respond only to objects just beyond." A. Newberg, E. D'Aquili, V. Rause, Why God Won't Go Away. New York, 2001. p.28.

swaddled in mist: "There are many stories of the spiritual hero who disappears on the cloud-covered peak---passing, in the process, into a higher form of consciousness. Jesus is transfigured in the thick cloud on Mount Tabor and ascends into heaven from the cloud-covered slopes of Mount Olivet. King Kay Khusrawm an Iranian hero and spiritual teacher in the Muslin tradition, is said to have disappeared in the swirling mists of Mount Kaf. The Mahabharata, India's epic narrative, ends with King Yudhistira's ascent into heaven from the clouds surrounding Mount Meru. Why do these tales transfix the analogical imagination? What passage from a state of 'knowing' to a deeper way of 'unknowing' is symbolized for us in the experience of being enclosed by mountain clouds?" B.C. Lane, The Solace of Fierce Landscapes. New York. 1998. pp.103-4.

I asked him: B. Porter, Road to Heaven: Encounters with Chinese Hermits. San Francisco, CA., 1993. p.138.

myth: "In a sense, the parietal lobe is a crucial part of the brain's myth-making center. No brain lacking (sic) some kind of parietal area could think in terms of opposites, so it could not create the basic components of mythic structure." A. Newberg, E. D'Aquili, V. Rause, Why God Won't Go Away. New York, 2001. p.65.

Mount St. Helens: "Mount St. Helens is located in southwest Washington State, USA, approximately 65 miles from Portland, Oregon. On May 18th, 1980, 8:32 am (PDT) the mountain erupted, triggering a 5.1 earthquake. Its height was 9,677 feet before the eruption and 8,363 feet after. The largest landslide in recorded history swept down the mountain at speeds of 70 to150 miles per hour and buried the North Fork of the Toutle River under an average of 150 feet of debris. Some areas are covered by as much as 600 feet. The lateral blast swept out of the north side of Mt. St. Helens at 300 miles per hour creating a 230 square mile fan shaped area of devastation reaching a distance of 17 miles from the crater. With temperatures as high as 660 degrees F, and the power of 24 megatons nuclear blast, it snapped 100-year-old trees like toothpicks. The massive ash cloud grew to 80,000 feet (18 kilometers) in 15 minutes and reached the East Coast in 3 days. Although most of the ash fell within 300 miles of the mountain, finer ash circled the earth and may continue to stay in the atmosphere. 57 people, along with 7,000 big game animals,12 million Chinook and Coho salmon, and millions of birds and small mammals, were killed as a result of the eruption. The lava dome rises 876 feet above the crater floor and is about 3,500 feet in diameter. There have been no dome building eruptions since October 1986. If the dome were to re-establish the growth pattern it had in the 1980's, it would take 200 years to rebuild the mountain to its pre-1980 size." V.A. Smith. valerie@olywa.net.

words: I talk to flowers
           My fingertips withstand
           The glance of roses.
           -S. Diamond. From, "Shaman's Song."

rosary: "The rosary's association with the rose garden is connected to the Middle English word 'bede' (bead) and the Anglo-Saxon word 'gebed,' so close to the German 'Gebet,' to complete the transition from roses to jewels to prayers." B.S.Bullock-Kimball, The European Heritage of Rose Symbolism and Rose Metaphors in Views of Rilke's Epitaph Rose. New York, 1987. p.47

unconsciously: "We all have this illusion of a homunculus inside the brain (that's what I am), so this illusion needs an explanation. The problem of the infinite regress is avoided in our case, since the true homunculus is unconscious, and only a representation of it enters consciousness. This puts the problem of consciousness in a somewhat new light. We have therefore named this type of theory as one postulating an unconscious homunculus, wherever it may be located in the brain. The unconscious homunculus receives information about the world through the senses and thinks, plans and executes voluntary actions. What becomes conscious then is a representation of some of the activities of the unconscious homunculus in the form of various kinds of imagery and spoken and unspoken speech." F. Crick and C. Koch, "The Unconsciousness Homunculus." http://www.klab.caltech.edu/~koch/unconscious-homunculus.html

Like Seoul: John Rumler is a free-lance journalist who lived in Seoul, Korea, and now resides in Portland..

emergent cycles: "According to Medawar and Medawar, in their book The Life Science (P.B. and J.S. Medawar. New York, 1977) the nonredictionibility which declares that in a hierarchical system each level may have properties and modes of behavior peculiar to itself and be fully explicable by analytic reduction. According to the Medawars, if a property is emergent, it is not reducible to those parts. It follows that if a property in a hierarchy is reducible to the properties of things at lower levels of the hierarchy it is not emergent." T.E. Fineberg, Altered Egos. New York, 2001. p.123.

oldest of shadows: "We have seen that among primitives the designations for shadow, reflected image, and the like, also serve for the notion of 'soul,' and that the most primitive concept of the soul of the Greeks, Egyptians, and other culturally prominent peoples coincides with a double which is essentially identical with the body." O. Rank, The Myth of the Birth of The Hero. New York 1952.

a bridge: The Burnside Bridge opened on May 28, 1926. A "street double-leaf Strauss bascule drawspan bridge," it is 2,308 feet in length, and rises 64 feet above the Willamette River.

there is no one: S. A. Greenfield, The Human Brain. New York, 1997 p.23

 

a dancing god:

       "Dance all of you...
       To the universe belongs the dancer.
       He who does not dance does not know what happens...

       "Now if you follow my dance, see yourself in me who am speaking,
       And when you have seen what I do, keep silence about my mysteries.

       "I leaped: but do you understand the whole?"
        -Acts of John, New Testament Apocrypha.

misstep: Damage to the parietal lobe can results in symptoms may may include clumsy movement on the side opposite (contralateral) to the damaged cortex.