Landscapes

As a certified "mad walker" who sets a goal of 1,250 miles per year (5,000 miles every four years), indulging occasionally in insensate literary projects, we appreciated Joyce Carol Oates' essay "Running and Writing" in Great Writers on the Art of Fiction (ed. James Daley, Dover Books 2007), pp. 153 - 158. To wit:

"A good run ... is (akin) to a good dream ... as musicians experience the uncanny phenomenon of tissue memory in their fingertips, so runner(s) feel ... extensions of an imagining self.

"Writers and poets (famously) love to be in motion ... English Romantic Poets were inspired by long walks in all weathers: Wordsworth and Coleridge in the Lake District, Shelley in Italy ("I walk until I am stopped, but I never am stopped"). New England Transcendentalists, most notably Henry Thoreau, were ceaseless walkers. Thoreau acknowledged that if he spent less than four hours a day outdoors "in motion," he needed almost "to atone for sin."

Like Samuel Johnson before him, who ranged London at all hours, Charles Dickens in his middle years suffered an insomnia "that propelled him onto the London streets at night." His haunting essay Night Walks hints that this terrible "night restlessness" revealed a soul-in-passage, compelled to press on "through darkness and pattering rain." Walt Whitman "tramped impressive distances ... we feel the walker's pulse-beat in his breathless, incantatory poems." Henry James (of all people) "loved to walk for miles in London."

"Stories come to us as wraiths, embodying a vision," writes Joyce Carol Oates. "Outdoor movement amounts to meditation ... (as if) waking dreams keep us from actual madness." St. Augustine of Hippo (AD 354 - 430) was notorious for perambulating night and day. An entire philosophical school, the Peripatetics, marched up and down their 100-yard long colonnaded Stoa engaged for hours in speculations purposely divorced from inkpots and scrolls.

As large, hairless, bipedal primates, humans inherit a compulsive kinetic tendency-- nature designs us to range in long, loping strides across primordial grasslands, savannahs, spreading veldts. From earliest times human minds have focused of necessity on end-points, covering intervening distances in easy, fluid steps. Awake and aware yet strangely disembodied, our streams-of-consciousness bear onwards to far-distant goals. Like floating or flying, this sense of sweeping forward relegates doubts and fears to an imaginary realm where dangers pose no obstacle, however real.

Serious walkers accept their fate neither as an accident nor by design, but rather as a discipline imposed by that most rigid of all task-masters-- themselves. Walking surfaces unbidden; like flotsam washed ashore, by meditative wind-and-tide it's something you just do. "The greatest poverty is not to live in the natural world"... and we recall in 1996 noticing a small, skyward patch of light which turned out to be a "long period" comet called Hale-Bopp in 150,000-year hyperbolic orbit on the Sun. Hale-Bopp shone briefly opposite Earth across our entire solar system, and will re-appear in due course after 75,000 years.

We could do without Hale-Bopp, but we cannot do without the vision such a body represents. Here is a phenomenon so remote in Space and Time, yet real, that contemplative steps become imperative. Eventually we all will take a final step, beyond which lies another road. Meantime, pursue your Journey looking skyward, for that way lies the stars.

The Destroyer

Speaking of Nuberu, ancient Sumer's earth-like planet in close orbit about our sun Sol's mysterious brown-dwarf companion (a Jupiter-size body called "the Destroyer" in creation myths based on priestly sky-watchers' millennia-long "portent astronomy"): By Hubble telescope and earlier observations, binary stars make up eight out of ten (80%) of all galactic systems. Due to its distance and eccentric orbit, Nuberu's unobserved --conventionally unsuspected-- parent sun approaches Sol only at intervals of 3,600 years. When this occurs we might expect all manner of periodic disturbances, ranging from orbital and Oort Cloud perturbations to climatic, volcanic, and other geophysical effects on Earth.

Interestingly, an esoteric Dark Age work known as the Kolbrin (Culbrian) Bible, said to have been salvaged from Glastonbury Abbey following an arson attack in AD 1184, collects secular historical accounts of worldwide cataclysms datable by Sumerian cuneiform to about 5200 BC. As recounted by Kolbrin's 6-book Egyptian Texts, these events were followed 3,600 years later by Pharaoh's biblical Ten Plagues recounted as divine retribution in the Old Testament's Book of Exodus (c. 1600 BC). Tying Moses to New Testament prophesies, Kolbrin preserves a 5-book set of Celtic Texts in form of a "survivors' diary" rather than a revelation, extrapolating from Exodus and the later Crucifixion to an end-of-days scenario set thirty-six hundred years after Pharaoh's troubles, i.e. in this, our early 21st Century AD.

Well, now! Most dime-a-dozen Doomsday forecasts do not cite Sumerian portent-astronomy from c. 5200 BC in context of Egypt's Ten Mosaic Plagues, nor are they Dark Age manuscripts traceable to 12th Century monastic libraries. Moreover, for Kolbrin purposes Glastonbury Abbey seems singularly a propos. Founded in the mid-6th Century, endowed by Kings of Wessex from AD 712, this "rich and powerful" community in Somersetshire had compiled legends of King Arthur and the Holy Grail for centuries before the Conquest. The Abbey's famed collections extended far-afield, most certainly to Alexandrine and Syriac repositories where Sumerian records of interest would remain semi-intact.

The plot thickens. In Crop Circle Connector, a major archive source despite certain, um, credulous or even conspiricist tendencies, an article by one Marshall Masters dated 07/26/2008 discusses a "Planet X / Nibiru" (sic) circle that appeared in Avebury, Wiltshire (U.K.) on 07/15/2008, ten days before (qv). On the basis of this quite elaborate, large-scale diagram, Masters asserts that during the Winter Solstice of 2012 planetary alignments "clearly indicate" that our ninth planet Pluto is poised for violent expulsion from the solar system. This could occur only in context of a major gravitational anomaly such as Sumer's dark Destroyer swinging close to Sol again with Nuberu in tow. Whatever earthly disruptions follow, they are sure to be unpleasant, sweetheart.

Strangely enough, December 22, 2012 is the date specified by Aztec and Mayan astrologic/zodiacal canons for the 26,000-year completion of a Great Cycle, when Earth's precession comes full-circle to "fold the page again." Various New Age doom-sayers have exploited this sophisticated Long Count calendar (which employs zero in its positional notation) to independently predict Earthly disasters ranging from magnetic-reversal to Pole shifts, even plate-tectonic upheavals due to a "galactic realignment" casting Sol off-balance from the Milky Way's vast plane-of-the-ecliptic.

Since Meso-American and Aztec cultures perished many centuries ago, their forecasts are certainly disinterested. Even so, an unseen brown-dwarf Destroyer in an eccentric 3,600-hundred year orbit about Sol impinging on Earth coincident with these antique Codices' 26,000-year calendrical cycle seems far-fetched. But viewed in conjunction with recent Crop Circles, Glastonbury's Kolbrin Bible, and cuneiform astronomical records of Sumer, major upheavals would have ample precedent. Hogwash, say all reputable commentators.

It had better be.

Equal Protection

As of Tuesday, 2 December 2008, BHO and Dean's DNC have ignored a Monday deadline for responding to Philadelphia attorney Philip J. Berg's October 30th petition for a U.S. Supreme Court "writ of certiorari" demanding that BHO produce independently verifiable documentation of his eligibility to serve as U.S. Chief Executive.

Federal Election Commission (FEC) officials charged with protecting citizens' public interests in such cases (there have been many) "dodged questions" concerning the status of Berg's writ. True to bureaucratic form, Federal authorities in the U.S. Solicitor General's Office and the U.S. Supreme Court referred inquiries back to the FEC.

"This reeks of collusion," writes Jeff Schreiber, legal correspondent for various right-leaning "public interest" non-profit organizations. "Perhaps the FEC and other respondents feel they can get away with not taking (Berg's) allegations seriously." Of course as non-partisan Federal agencies the FEC, Solicitor General's Office, and Supreme Court staff are prohibited by statute from favoring --nevermind effectively representing-- private parties such as BHO, his campaign organization, and the DNC. Try this as a Republican and see what happens.

This sets a template for a Banana Administration approach to bureaucratic and judicial challenges from any quarter: Ignore deadlines, treat legal policies and procedures with contempt, act without regard for disinterested, impartial rulings in the --apparently justified-- expectation that no-one (certainly no mere private citizen) will ever bring you to account.

Such run-arounds, in violation of every established code and precedent, will sound a knell for Governance in every constructive sense. What we see here, months before a feckless and malfeasant BHO smirks as he takes his Oath, is but a precursor of the next four years. If U.S. Courts and all-powerful bureaucratic entities such as the FEC and Solicitor General's Office, so quick to rule-or-ruin in most cases, cannot bring themselves to address ultimately simple issues regarding BHO's Hawaiian Birth Certificate, they will compensate by mounting crack downs only in politically safe contexts, meaning against BHO opponents (boy, are we tough!).

Thus perishes American democracy. Having elected this bizarro fraud, who's to say it isn't well-deserved?