Dreams of Past Lives, Dreams of a Fear of Dancing, Maddening Joy

Happy National Poetry Month!

I now firmly believe in reincarnation and past lives, as I struggle to move closer and closer to specific memories of old souls I have known through multiple reruns. The first poem here is from a dream, a realization that grasping for specifics can be dangerous. The second poem is for another old soul, a friend who may be losing her ability to witness and embrace the absurd. Pleasant dreams, pleasant next lives...


Diving Cylinder

My dreams of late obey no time decorum.
The next disoriented 3 a.m.
leaves trails of cowboy boots, guitar lessons,
hair at the back of her neck,
Lamaze classes, meconium,
kindergarten crises.
“Seven years,” sings Tuxedomoon.
“Seven years in one night.”

When I depended on snorkeling alone,
REM was reliable,
feeding hippocampus and movie screen alike
with familiar flashes of dead basset hounds,
body-snatcher doppelgangers,
the occasional sleepwalk to pee off the back deck.

Trying on scuba gear has been a subspecies of
Ambien zombie drives,
fearful and necessary exploratory dives
to Past Lives Marianas.
Too rich an oxygen mix?
That depends on the goal,
only the faintest echoes now,
but sound always traveled poorly underwater.

A warm September day,
a 1983 still called Bekaa,
began with my startled voice
in response to polite introduction,
“Oh. It’s you. I wondered where you had been.”
ended with languorous cunnilingus
in a cornfield ravaged by borer-worm.
The growing certainty that this breath
was hardly the first instantiation.

Now I’m accustomed to treasure-diving,
even in tectonic trench landscapes
gone ragged with tsunamis.
Rare bouts of insomnia
merely pull me nearer the surface,
While the nightly rituals return me
to the wetsuit.

Down to capture names
that are forbidden to own.
Down to trace each tributary of pubic hair
to its labial source.
Down to clap at phonetic teasers
promising relief from an Alzheimer’s moment -
Melanie, Marina, Malia, you were known otherwise.
Oh. It’s you. I wondered where you had been.

As I stagger to the sink at 3:45, I realize
the name of the pain, the groggy fear.
The bends.
In any subsequent forbidden dives,
the gauges on this tank are not to be trusted.

Loring Wirbel
April 5, 2011

Banishing All Semblances of Fun

It may have been the party of roustabouts
at your mother’s farmhouse
(admittedly a bad idea, it wasn’t me
who invited the lieutenant-governor to mix drinks).
I’ve always shied from Sangria spills
and the collateral damage of smashed end tables,
but your eyes did not suggest
a sanctuary from the boorish or a desire to be left alone.
The infinitely scarier message came from
two irises weary of the dance floor.

The Zen goof assumes an awesome responsibility.
Long past the first 12-step meeting or post-partum cry,
there is a shouldering of a standup comic burden.
We must wake from an epic failure and fall in love
with tedious or unfamiliar figure-ground,
part apostle, part Johnny Appleseed,
with a punchline capable of dispelling each random terror.
Some avert their eyes, some linger,
some fall twelve stories.
Some laugh hysterically another day.
Was it a random Japan that activated your dimmer switch,
or a specific tragedy too far?

The tightrope walker is here,
arm and umbrella outstretched,
spanning a landscape of atrocity rarely seen
since Belsen Dachau Hiroshima.
It is always your choice to stop watching cartoons,
but that may be the day the drones fly once more
over Shamsi, over Waziristan, over Djibouti.
The Zen goof assumes an awesome responsibility.
Lee Ann Womack croons almost imperceptibly
at the edge of hearing.
I hope you dance.

Loring Wirbel
April 12, 2011

Crystals, Annealing, and A-Ha Moments

The following two poems require a bit of explanation. 'Local Minima' was a proem (prose-poem) written in early August 2009, in an attempt to draw together problems in annealing algorithms and their relation to new ideas, with the repetitious faults one might encounter in the Tibetan Buddhist wheel of reincarnation. It deals with only two souls, albeit many lives, and one instance of crystallization. 'Local Minima' seemed unfinished at the time, though I performed it twice in 2009, with some random lines from Laurie Anderson's 'Closed Circuit.'

This past spring, I discovered the wonderful work of Liane Gabora and her 'Beer Can Theory of Creativity,' explicitly bringing the concept of simulated annealing into the apparently random process of creative enlightenment. Last week, I had a discussion with the astonishing poet Carolyn Srygley-Moore about the hidden math patterns of Jackson Pollock (which even Pollock himself was unlikely to be consciously aware of), and their relations to the random walk and traveling-salesman problem. She just finished a poem, 'reflections on a conversation with a friend,' which forced me to think about crystallization, melting, parasitic minds and emergent intelligence. Now 'Local Minima' has found its companion, 'Hive Crystals.' The two poems are NP-complete. They're a closed circuit, baby.

LOCAL MINIMA (for Jess)

My depth of gratitude for Clint Takeda’s simple words was not evident until the evening we leaned against the Knight Rider pinball machine in the long-demolished 15th Street Tavern, our inclined angles almost in parallel to the careening ball finding temporary traps in the pockmarks of David Hasselhoff’s painted face. Isobel was chanting, whispering perhaps, and it suddenly occurred to me the bardo pond looked just like the oscillating trap that those testing mixed-signal integrated circuits call “stuck-at-fault.” The bardo pond felt just like the point at which the energy daemon in a game of simulated annealing becomes “stuck at local minima.” The energy daemon felt just like the last pinball in the round.

Experts in genetic algorithms tell us that the energy required to overcome a local minimum is at least twice that to begin the process of annealing. From the point of view of the pinball, the valley walls are sheer and high, and the pond is cozy, maybe a bit warm for the mountains. There’s beer and brats for the beachfront property. Only that ominous I-70 sign warning truckers they have not reached bottom yet, reminds the pinball it is far from its poky little home, where its mother is no doubt greatly displeased. How does the pinball reach the flippers? In the wheel, the minimum quantum of energy is one lifetime. In pinball, the minimum quantum of energy is tilt. Twice the energy at go would suggest cheating at some point.

Western Missouri in 1842? Serb highlanders in 1942? Maybe the jerky pattern of those whispers is the sound of a record skipping. Call upon the gods of choice, but escaping the local minimum and leaving the canyon is a matter of chance. And the next annealing may not be the karmic destination you were hoping for. Maybe it’s best to sit by the pond in the bright sunshine and wait for the next streetcar to Pleiku.

Loring Wirbel

Aug. 8, 2009

Hive Crystals (for Carolyn)

Time it was the ones with guns
blotted my tears with tales of swarm intelligence, hive minds.
But if the living cell is a parasitic accident
the mitochondria as drone assassins
turn each instance of accidental grace
into the idealized snowflake,
the singularity of honey gone solid.

Emergent intelligence annealed is Jack Frost's friend
Each human hunch absent the need to know a frosted window.
One mind's stumble in an Ice-9 world
where every revelation begins with oops
with Honey Bear bottles in the solid entanglements
begging for a shot in the microwave.
Understanding introduced with a dose of Bisphenol-A.

Emergent intelligence melted, smelted
at a place where the crystallization moment
is lost in a Poisson pattern.
Worker bee's crystals embedded in dance.
Soldier ant's burden is and was weightless.
And the synaptic re-enactment enters the swarm.

Loring Wirbel
Sep. 19, 2010

Be Seeing You!

Pattern recognition is both the blessing and curse of sentience. Discerning patterns provides structure to our lives, and made possible the rise of the scientific method, the one reliable way of understanding that wolves and bears are bigger threats in the forest than witches and trolls. Still, an excess of patterning is what gives rise to paranoia and conviction that black helicopters are following you.

The conclusion of AMC's recent remake of The Prisoner reminded me of nothing so much as the fourth and final section of Thomas Pynchon's classic novel, Gravity's Rainbow. In both works, paranoia and plots build up relentlessly in the previous section, only to have no real denouement or answers in the conclusion. Plots are neither foiled nor victorious, but made irrelevant by the processes of entropy ripping everything asunder.

The difference in the two works is that in the final act of Pynchon's GR, "The Counterforce," said counterforce is not a coalition of resistance nor a band of outlaws. It is a rushing force of nature, the entropy that makes things fall apart, and the gravity that makes a rocket return to Earth. One can no more argue against Tyrone Slothrop turning into Rocketman than one could argue against the Second Law of Thermodynamics.

In The Prisoner, a moral choice is made to become an agent of The Spectacle, to become the guardian of sleep. Michael (6) and Sarah (313) are not making poor moral choices by "serving the man," they are recognizing that the dreaming of building a spectacular world provides some broken people with necessary crutches. In both versions of The Prisoner, the forces at the top were posited as evil because they did not give the residents choices about coming to The Village, thus they played out the typical morality sagas regarding free will. In the newer version, Michael returns to the corporation to be CEO and to The Village to be (Number Two?), but it scarcely seems to be a surrender to fascism.

This all related in a way to my previous post regarding the supposed necessity of memory. If we dive into the river of experience (notice how the Web creatures at Defrag kept talking about "lifestreams"?), we may decide to abandon patterns and memory for the excitement of random events. Pynchon would tell us we are succumbing to nature. The authors and directors of The Prisoner would say we are recognizing the necessity of created worlds and created consciousness. And before someone brings up a protest about "playing God" with manufactured consciousness, it's useful to remember one of the most devious elements of Gravity's Rainbow - Pynchon's suggestion that the evil inherent in human culture may not be due to the depraved nature of the species, but might be a reflection of living in a universe created by a perverse higher power. How do you assign morality to entropy?

I'm not passing judgment on the conclusions of Gravity's Rainbow or The Prisoner. Like Heraclitus and Dylan, I'm just jumping into a different river every day and watching it flow around me. But it gives a clue for interpreting the wheel of reincarnation. Maybe the important thing is not remembering and cataloging the details of past lives. Maybe the important thing is to treat all lives as one, and immerse in the flow without worrying about memory, patterns, plots, or paranoia. Be seeing you.

Two Years Before the Mast

I'm sitting on a land mass 7500 feet above sea level that wants no part of The Drowned World, only to have torrential rains insist otherwise. Resembles what my dreams have been doing, now aided by a fever (romantically assumed to be swine flu, but probably not) that pushes dreams into the daylight hours. Maybe I'll quit taking Motrin, just to exorcise this beast.

Explanation of sorts: when my feet hit Velikovsky drifting two-step plates on May 10, there was no adaptation time for "sea legs" - there was only the fussy and insistent secular world telling me that three weeks at sea had been a dream, and that it was time to go out and DO something. It only took 72 hours for ships and sea creatures to become dream squatters - not just occasionally, mind you, but dozens of times a night.

Maybe it was the visit to San Diego, when our ship docked next to the Maritime Museum and I spent hours walking through three-masted brigs and Soviet nuclear attack submarines, but the dreams featured ships of every variety: ocean liners, container cargo ships, pilot tugs, maybe the occasional Somali pirate fast boat, though they weren't nearly as scary as the Aegis cruisers and littoral ships. I've become sold on the idea of reincarnation wheels, and am sure I have lived several lives before this one. The past two weeks of dreams have convinced me that at least one of those lives was at sea. Was it before or after the point where steam power and diesel engines and nuclear reactors made ocean vessels chase the land obsession with fast faster fastest? I'm not sure, but 18th-century rigging felt comfortable, somehow.

Almost every dream was accompanied by a soundtrack of human voices singing. On the real-world ship, these were dominated by JD and Kim Smith, Jordan Bennett, and a dozen others, but in the dreams, a more ethereal bunch emerged, Christina Carter, Antony, Inca Ore. Of course - sirens. But not sirens luring us to a death on the shoals, but sirens luring us to a safe harbor. Sirens who represented perfectly safe company. Safety from what?

At some port (Jamaica?), in a little metaphysical bookstore with too much patchouli incense lingering in the air, I learned about the 2012 prophecies for the first time. I don't put much stock in millienium apocalypses, and 2012 could easily be a re-run of the Great Disappointment of 1844. But I keep thinking about my friend Dietrich, who has spent the last year at sea. And I think about how the sirens are trying to guide me to safe harbors over the next two years. We have to document these intervening months very carefully. Maybe you or I will be the only ones left to tell the tale. We can take turns being Ishmael.