Plus c’est la meme chose.
Gail Armstrong is seeking some little comfort. And so I went looking for that marginal note Ada makes to Van: “If we all remembered the same way, we would not be different people,” I think it goes, but I can’t find it, not tonight; it’s a terribly frustrating book, after all—appalling, heartbreaking, beautiful, vicious. This is what it offered up, tonight, instead:
An individual’s life consisted of certain classified things: “real things” which were unfrequent and priceless, simply “things” which formed the routine stuff of life; and “ghost things,” also called “fogs,” such as fever, toothache, dreadful disappointments, and death. Three or more things occurring at the same time formed a “tower,” or, if they came in immediate succession, they made a “bridge.” “Real towers” and “real bridges” were the joys of life, and when the towers came in a series, one experienced supreme rapture; it almost never happened, though. In some circumstances, in a certain light, a neutral “thing” might look or even actually become “real” or else, conversely, it might coagulate into a fetid “fog.” When the joy and the joyless happened to be intermixed, simultaneously or along the ramp of duration, one was confronted with “ruined towers” and “broken bridges.”
See? Tedious. Pedantic. Ferocious. Utterly necessary. But ultimately useless. Damn!
So instead I pick up one of my recent obsessions, Diane di Prima’s Memoirs of a Beatnik, picked up at Powell’s for a song, and I flip to the passage that first caught my eye:
We lived through the horror of the 1956 election as we had lived through the horror of the Rosenberg executions and the Hungarian revolution: paranoid, glued to the radio, and talking endlessly of where we could possibly go into exile. Every inch of walls and floor in the apartment was covered with murals and wise sayings: “The unicorns shall inherit the earth.” “Sacrifice everything to the clean line.” “Think no twisty thoughts.” Etc., etc. Wilhelm Reich was in federal prison.
The first fallout terror had finally struck, and a group of people were buying land in Montana to construct a city under a lead dome. In New York, the beginnings of neo-fascist city planning were stirring, and the entire area north of our pad was slated for destruction, to make way for what was to become Lincoln Center. The house next door to us, which had been empty for twenty-eight years, and had functioned as our own private garbage dump for as long as we had lived there, was suddenly torn down, leaving a number of bums homeless and scattering thousands of rats—most of them into our walls.
Most of the more outrageous gay bars had been closed, and people cruised Central Park West more cautiously: there were many plainclothes busts. There were more and more drugs available: cocaine and opium, as well as the ubiquitous heroin, but the hallucinogens hadn’t hit the scene yet. The affluent post-Korean–war society was settling down to a grimmer, more long-term ugliness. At that moment, there really seemed to be no way out.
And it’s not that the disaffected we will always have with us, and it’s not that these grim ugly battles have always been fought and look! We’ve largely come out okay. Those are crap lessons, New Age pablum, mealy morals for people who don’t want to listen to older, colder fairy tales. —No, it’s the sharp shock of deja vu: I know this place, though I have never been here before. It’s a backstage pass; a Golden Ticket. It isn’t History, it’s a story you feel in your bones. The world sits up and opens its dead eyes and tells you something three times, and the hairs on your chin stand up. Diane di Prima’s glued to the radio, paranoid, listening as Eisenhower kicks Stevenson’s ass, and I’m on a futon in a second-floor bedroom of a ratty unheated house in Boston watching the bombs fall on Iraq for the first time, and maybe this doesn’t ring true for you at all, but that’s okay, because if we all remembered it the same way, we wouldn’t be different people. Would we?
Comfort. —We all need comfort, but suddenly I’m thinking of Ann, so very tired, who lay down in the Martian snow to die, and then Simon came up out of nowhere and kicked her helmet and turned her suit’s heater back on, dragging her back to the world as it was, as it is, and she kept asking him why, why he wouldn’t just leave her alone and all he could say was because, because, because. It’s not that sort of comfort, where you’re so tired of fighting you just lie down and wait till you stop shivering. (Though they do say freezing to death is a comfortable way to go. —They also say that about drowning.)
Where do we turn for comfort, then? Sometimes I turn to David Chess:
Last year I told y’all about how in my vanished youth I used to go square dancing every few weeks with a certain bunch of people, to a certain caller, and how that caller had had this great handsome house big enough for three or four squares, and I wondered if he still had it? Well over the weekend we went across the river and square danced with roughly those same people, to exactly that caller, in that same house.
A house where some of my fondest childhood memories were formed, and a house I hadn’t seen in thirty years. It was just the same, and completely different. Same woods, same rooms, same chairs and benches, same stairs down to the bedrooms downstairs, same livingroom big enough for two squares, and a posible third over in the alcove. But not as enormous as when I was little, not as mysterious, not as filled with that amazing unconscious kid-sense of being cupped in the warm palm of the universe, with everything being taken care of for you by other people, and nothing to do but dance and sing and run around shouting.
It was great fun, and (but) I was all melancholy all night after we got home.
What a world.
Because the trick of it, of course, is that you can’t just order up one of these moments, these bridges and towers, whenever you suddenly need one. You have to have built them out of the stuff you’ve got lying around, or picked up from what somebody else made once, or found, and told you about in a book or a conversation or a song, and so you tucked it away in your pocket and forgot about it until, and you have to have left them just scattered haphazardly across the floor of your memory, and you can’t ever stop; you never reach a moment when there’s finally enough. You have to keep building them and scattering them like bread crumbs, these booby traps benign and otherwise you stumble over when you least expect them but most need them, and suddenly oh, I see. Oh, I get it.
What a world.
How I got to be where I am at the moment.
¡Journalista! is a daily must-read during the week. Dirk Deppey regularly pulls together an entertaingly varied assortment of comics-industry and comics-related news items, with occasional flights into spot-on if cantankerous analysis; just the thing for someone too terribly lazy to keep himself on top of The Comics Journal boards and Comicon.com’s boards and the Pulse and Talkaboutcomics.com and Comixpedia and Sequential Tart and all the other sites I’m leaving out, God knows. (To say nothing of the ever-burgeoning comics blogosphere.) This morning, in addition to a great John Barber rant I’d missed the first time out, Dirk pointed out an article from my own backyard: the Portland Tribune profiled Craig Thompson, whose Blankets is not to be missed. In the profile, Thompson mentions in an off-hand fashion the three books his father has read: “a book by Jerry Falwell about the economy in the apocalypse; Rush Limbaugh’s autobiography, the first one; and the Promise Keepers manual.” Those last two didn’t really engage me—I mean, Rush, you know? And if you’ve seen one stadium full of men in Tommy Hellfighter T-shirts, you’ve seen them all. But the first: Jerry Falwell on economics during the Tribulation? Damn.That’s one of those must-haves for the library, you know?
Unfortunately, some desultory coffee-break Googling (and Amazoning, Powellsing, and aLibrising) failed to turn up a likely candidate. However: I did turn up this interesting-looking essay on the politics of Christian domination—to be dug into later; it seems to speak nicely to this post over at Body and Soul—and Frontline’s site for its show on apocalyptic belief in the Western world, which includes a page on Hal Lindsey and his coattail riders (among which is numbered, of course, good ol’ Jack Van Impe), as well as some much-need historical perspective: Cliff’s Notes backgrounders on the Millerites, the Great Disappointment, and John Darby’s dispensationalism—which features a scrummy-looking chart by Charles Larkin that bounced me through Making Light to the Planet Kolob, from which hasty retreat was beaten back to the Museum of Jurassic Technology—and would you look at the time? So I rounded it off with a dose of Apocamon, Patrick Farley’s manga-bright retelling of the Revelation of St. John the Devine. (Coming soon—Part 3: Attack of the Locusts.) Gotta get ’em all!
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m feeling a little dizzy.
PROM-1 (AP bounding fragmentation mine, steel casing, former Yugoslavia).
GENERAL DESCRIPTION OF THE MINE
The PROM-1 is a circular AP bounding fragmentation mine with a body made of forged steel. There is a threaded fuze well in the centre on the top of the mine, in which the UPROM-1 external fuze is screwed into. The base of the mine is secured to the bottom of the mine body with five screws. The mine body is pre-fragmented inside. The main explosive charge is made of cast Trotil in earlier models and Hexolite in later models. The propelling charge is made of 3 g. of black powder and is filled into a metal tube located through the centre of the main charge. An internal fuze is located offset inside the mine body. It is initiated by a wire which is attached to the lower side of the fuze and secured to the base of the mine. The fuze is built into the mine at the factory and is not to be removed. The external UPROM-1 fuze is similar to the UPMR-3. The difference is that the UPMR-3 doesn’t have a built in initiation capsule while the UPROM-1 has. The PROM-1 is delivered with two rolls of trip wire, which are 16 m long and covered with polyvinyl-chloride plastic. A hook is fastened in each end of the trip wires for attachment to the fuze and anchor. Although the PROM-1 only comes with two trip wires, it can be set up with up to six trip wires. On the upper side of the UPROM-1 is a carrier on which the pressure star is located. On the top of the carrier is a split ring for connection to trip wires. Under the pressure star is a fuze carrier on which the safety clip is attached by means of a puller. When the puller is down the safety clip is locked and cannot be removed. When the puller is in the horizontal position the safety clip is free to be pulled out. The pressure star carrier is shaped like a rod and has a hole through the end to attach the trip wire split ring. The pressure star has four arms which are directed upwards. In the middle is a hole to insert the pressure star carrier. The mine is normally buried with only the pressure star and the star carrier exposed above the ground.
METHOD OF OPERATION
Required pull of the trip or pressure on the pressure star, pushes an internal cylinder in the fuze down until the retaining balls fall out, releasing the spring loaded striker which strikes the ignition capsule which in turn fires the propelling charge. This creates a pressure between the base and the mine body. The screws on the bottom of the mine breaks and the mine body is thrown upwards until it reaches the end of the anchor wire. The length of the anchor wire is 0,7-0,8 m on older versions and 0,2-0,3 m on newer versions. When the anchor wire becomes tight the spring loaded striker is released and fires the detonator which in turn fires the booster and the main charge.
NEUTRALISING
Trace both ends of the trip wire. Remove the trip wire clip from the mine or cut the wire. Insert safety clip with the puller in the horizontal position into the bed of the fuze. Lock it by lowing the puller down. If a safety clip is not available, a 2 mm wire or nail can be inserted into the hole of the safety clip carrier.
DISARMING
Neutralise the mine. Remove fuze from the mine body.
REMARKS
Lethal radius is 40 m and hazardous radius is 50 m.
Just in case, you know, you ever came across a dark steel cylinder 26 cm tall with some sharp spines on one end, attached to a couple of trip wires, and you were wondering how to keep it from killing you. You’re most likely to run into one in Angola (“the greatest concentration of landmines in the world,” says the BBC, citing some 15 million mines; other sources say anywhere from 6 million to 20 million; 145 of them went off last year, down from 339 in 2001. “Previous attempts at peace did not last, and crime is still widespread,” warns Lonely Planet Angola. “Kidnapping, car-jacking and robbery continue to put foreign travelers at risk. The UK, US and Australian governments are still warning against travel to this hopeful but volatile nation. Stay tuned”)—but the PROM-1’s a popular little number: they’re also found in Mozambique, Iraq, and of course throughout the former Yugoslavia, their country of origin. —The Landmines Database was found via Futurismic, whose permalinks aren’t working for the day in question; “If not for the subject matter, you’d think they were assembly instructions for a Target bookshelf,” says poster Jeremy Lyon. And what blog post on landmines from a Yank still peaceably sipping his morning coffee would be complete without the requisite list of our compatriots and fellow travellers?
