[I found the following sheet used as a bookmark in Vol. 5 of a collection of Friedrich von Schiller’s plays on one of our bookshelves, where it has lain unmolested for several decades. Bad scholar: I don’t think I’ve read any Schiller.]

STUDENT INVOLVEMENT ACTIVITY

For this activity, you will write a travel brochure – the part that you were assigned to read – about the places Gulliver visits in Gulliver’s Travels. Your brochure will be used to give prospective tourist a preview of an exciting vacation spot and to persuade them to visit there.

You will introduce the brochure with a 650 to 750-word summary of the places Gulliver visited. The summary will include descriptions of the geographical locations, the local inhabitants and their physical characteristics, occupations of the inhabitants, systems of government, dining, other activities, and best methods of transportation to get there and back.

Use pictures or drawings to illustrate the topics in your summary, and write comments below them to make the topics sound appealing. *minimum 10; maximum 15

**Remember: you want to persuade people to vacation in this wonderful place. Use vivid and enticing language.

[You know, an assignment like this just might have made me enjoy school for a couple days.]

*  *  *  *

tune: a spiritual, “Going home to see my mother”

Going home to see my mother

Cuz home is where my mother’s at.

And after I have seen my mother,

I think that I will pet the cat.

 *  *  *  *

Trump may or may not be sliding into dementia (sure looks like it), but I’ve long wondered if he has dyslexia. Maybe he doesn’t just hate to read, but can’t do it.

 *  *  *  *

If we are ever visited by extraterrestrials, NASA has guaranteed our being recognized as intelligent beings: “Look – an advanced species! They have cat videos!”

 *  *  *  *

Dream #23

I’m on my way to meet someone (my brother Rod?) on 40th or 41st Street in Philly. I turn north from Market Street and walk beside with a heavyset, middleaged Black woman – no one I know, she happens to be there. After a few blocks, details look wrong and I realize I turned south from Market instead of north. So I turn around to walk north.

Unrecognized diagonal streets intrude, and I am forced off course into pointless doglegs and meanders. Slowly it sinks in that I am in a dream. I decide I should wake up. Nothing changes. I continue walking, into an ever more convoluted nest of streets, into a symmetrical valley where every side street leads uphill to a house and deadends, like a sort of driveway.

I am accompanied by one, possibly two young girls. I shout to myself to wake up. Nothing changes. I start to scream: “No, no, NO.” Nothing changes. I ask the girl (one of two girls?) if she has been in my dreams before. Has she been in someone else’s dream? I realize the stupidity of asking questions of “someone” who does not exist, an internal phantom.

“No, no, no, NO, NO.” I am less fearful that agonized, horrified. I seldom hear my voice in a dream, but these are reverberant screeches. At last I do wake up, but the waking does not seem to come from my intention. Once awake, nothing of the dream’s horror remains, only the images, when so often my dream content lies buried beneath the detritus of the mind’s closet.

 *  *  *  *

Last week we bought a bag of “baby peeled carrots.” How did they teach that baby to peel carrots?

 *  *  *  *

The current movie “Beekeeper” is rated R for “strong violence throughout, pervasive language.” You’ve gotten watch language. Once it gets started, it slams right through a culture. 

[I recently found this almost decade-old letter snoozing in my computer. I don’t know if it was ever sent, how, or to whom. There’s a female first name on the file, but I can’t recall the actual intended recipient, so I’ve substituted “Leslie” here, to avoid accidental discovery. Otherwise, no changes.]

Leslie—

I guess it’s a bit odd writing this to you, but  you’re someone I respect with a different (political) outlook from mine, and that’s important to what I’m thinking about. (We did kick the “gun control” idea around a bit a year or two back.)

I see the state of violence in the country and worldwide as excruciating, accelerating and horrifying. I don’t think there’s much you or I (perhaps anyone) can do worldwide, but I wonder if there isn’t a different tack that could be taken nationally, expanding from a local level.

Part of the problem, as I see it, is that we have fallen into a spiral of blame. The left blames the NRA, guns, racism, talk radio. The right blames immigrants, the government, godlessness, the mainstream media. The feeling seems to be that if we can annihilate the mindset of our “enemies” (or the enemies themselves), the violence would end or at least be markedly reduced.

It should be obvious (but isn’t) that this way of looking at things is far too simplistic. There’s no one outfit or outlook that can be blamed for the now almost universal explosion of violence. 

Social media have a lot to do with it, simply because they’ve introduced a whole different level of immediate scrutiny to the world. What happens down the road, five states away or across the ocean can no longer be swept under the rug or kept on hold for a week, a month, a year. We know within minutes what’s happened on the other side of the earth and we react – that’s inevitable, that’s human nature.

In a funny sense, it’s almost a retreat to tribalism, in that “we” feel ourselves invaded by “them” a hundred or a thousand miles away as surely as would a tribal village assaulted by its next-door neighbors. 

So how to deal with this, how to broker some sense of rational or at least sympathetic reality? There’s no cure-all, but within our country, maybe there’s a way to find a middle ground where we stop accusing each other and try to identify and deal with the common underlying elements of insecurity and distrust, bring the warring parties together to the point where, if they can’t actually agree, they can at least accept and work toward a positive outlook.

This, in theory, is what diplomacy is about, but I don’t think it’s been tried often on the local level, or if it has, it hasn’t been very successful. Can it work if we drop the “blame” items – stop screaming about the NRA, the guns, the immigrants, the over-reaching government – and try to identify what it is that’s fueling the violence, the sense of being under siege? 

I know programs like this have been tried and in some cases worked well when dealing with inner-city gangs. The difference is that the gangs hold the same philosophy but are divided by different loyalties. I’m talking about bringing different philosophies together. Is it possible? Has it been done? If so, where and how?

This viewpoint lies at the basis of much Buddhist thought, which is where, I think, my own outlook has come lately. I’m not naive enough to think that Buddhist mellowness would go over well in a rural American setting. But is there an equivalent that might?

My wife Linda and I moved up to Sullivan County in 2000 from Philadelphia. As white city-ites, we were about as liberal as anyone gets (still are, at base). Landing here, in a place I dearly love in just about any and every way, we find ourselves knee-deep in undeviating Republicans. 

Two things: first, I’ve found most people here to be accepting of the person as opposed to the political viewpoint. Those who know us fairly well understand that we look at the world differently, so we just don’t discuss the areas of friction that would set us at each other’s throats.

Second, I’ve found that my own hardened views have softened. Hunting makes a whole lot  more sense to me; the absence of stupid regulations allows life to flow more freely; an ex-Catholic who will never again feel comfortable in any church now sees the energy, application and cohesion that the churches bring as the social centers of well-being. 

So maybe I’m in a place (internal and external) where I can look at the world in a moderating way. I find, to my amazement, that up here I can get along with and be liked by almost anyone. I don’t say that as self-glorification, but with mystification that has slowly run over into acceptance. I’m reaching out to you as someone I think may look at the world a bit like I’m beginning to but who would have a far wider range of interaction with people across the board. The questions I was asking above – which boil down to “how can we bring our country’s warring, beleaguered social communities together with a sense of common need to deal with its eruption of violence” – are ones that I’m sure you’ve thought about a great deal. So … what can we (I, you) do, practically, effectively?

Any ideas?

–Derek Davis 

I’m fascinated by dreams, not in a Freudian sense (I haven’t read his works on dreams), but how they’re put together, the elements that make them up and where they come form, the choices we make in their construction, what varied uses they may have. They make connections you can’t find while awake and draw together conclusions we seldom make consciously. Even when they’re ugly or terrifying, they’re beautiful.

All sorts of explanations have been floated, but nobody really knows why we have dreams.

One fairly recent “theory,” kind of mind-tingling, is that the brain is always tossing bits and pieces back and forth between its reasoning and emotive centers. In that view, dreams are the underlying give and take between the two, with waking life also being a form of dream, but constrained by reality: Dreams, then, are our basic state; being wake is an interfering nuisance.

Earlier on, the underlying concept of “meaning,” in the sense of “purpose creating content,” was central to Jung’s view of life: There had to be reason behind experience, and that reason had to spring from compelling need, in a metaphysical sense. His own dreams, those he recounts, are filled with symbolism and elements that obviously carry meaning – even when the specific meaning remains cloudy. 

One of my favorite explanations for dreams came out during the 1970-80s: they serve as a cataloguing mechanism for memory. All the muddle and effluvia that churns at night is elements of daily experience searching for their niches. Seems reasonable: When I’ve tracked down individual incidents or elements in a particular dream, no matter how weird, I’ve almost always been able to pin them to a specific, often obscure, image from my last day or two: Aha! That’s the thing that was sticking to the bottom of my shoe when I was crossing the street. 

What I’d really like to think is that dreams are the mind playing games, trying to escape or reject the expected. All day we pretend that what we’re doing makes sense, has some end in sight or a value of its own. At night, we plop down on the pillow and our unconscious snickers, “Oh, you think so? Well here’s what it’s really like”: wallop, whack, 3 Stooges, Laurel and Hardy.

But I also wonder if different people don’t have different types of dreams that serve wholly different functions. Listen to anyone ramble on about their dreams. They nearly always reflect that individual’s way of skewing the world. Some sound Freudian, some Jungian, some cataloging, some a chaotic jumble, some searingly realistic. Not being mental clones, we may not all live in the same universe of dreams.

I’m not a “meaning” person, for instance. I don’t find deep meaning behind life, and I think wasting time looking for it gets in the way of clear, rational examination. I’m fact-based, intensely interested in science and physical law, though I don’t expect it to lead to an explanation of ultimate causality.

So maybe my dreams and Jung’s serve wholly different functions. Jung’s, I think, laid down a road leading to a level of personal reality beneath or beyond what he could access in daily life. Most importantly, they reinforced his need for enshrining “meaning” as the pillar upholding human existence.

Mine, I’m pretty sure, have most often served as a way to escape reality. For years, most of my dreams had no emotional content – none of the fear that nipped at my waking heels. They were, in the best sense, a rest, a curative. 

I’ve also developed a theory that I haven’t run across elsewhere about disordered dream endings. Most often, getting lost in a dream is looked at as reflecting the dreamer’s feeling “lost” in daily life; I think that’s often the case. But time and again, I’ve had dreams appear to drift off their own internal path. Yes, there are a lot of varied ideas about the function of dreams, but I think it’s possible that within a dream the function itself, whatever it may be, can go astray: The dream fucks up, and the dreamer is kicked out of the resulting ineffective mess. 

Similarly, there’s this, which I’ve experienced but also not seen referred to: a “wrong” element intrudes into a dream and derails it: My dream’s moving along nicely, even if it follows no waking logic. Then suddenly my overseeing mind recognizes something that just doesn’t fit in. The sweep, the stream, the evolution of the dream comes a-cropper. When this happens, I usually wake up; the dream, thrown off track, can’t continue.

So, what happened? Did my memory-cataloger toss a wandering snippet into the wrong pigeonhole? Did my mind, cooking up a spicy dish in the wok of irrationality, apply the wrong logic-seasoning, like tossing ice cream into a stir fry? Maybe it was a dollop of “meaning” dropped into a “cataloguing” dream, or a day’s trivial memory trying to shoulder aside an archetype.

And maybe our categories of dreams change with the progress of life? Here’s what I recall over the broad swipe of time:

1) Around the age of five I had a recurrent series of dreams in which I was chased by a wolf who drove a hone-delivery milk truck with a screen door across the front where the engine should be. He would stop the truck, unhook the screen door and chase me. I couldn’t make my legs move beyond a drag-through-the-mush pace (reflecting physical paralysis in REM sleep, as I later found out), but he never caught me. I was, at most, mildly scared, never expecting anything really bad to happen.

What category would embrace this dream? Damned if I know.

2) For 30 or more years as an adult, 80-90% of my dreams were emotionless, usually bland mystery stories where I was a participant following paths and clues without involvement. I’d guess these were a relaxing form of escapism at a time when waking life was a pain in the ass.

3) In recent years, my dreams often involve urban settings (for some reason, or none at all, this focus became stronger after moving to our rural home). I’m nearly always lost somewhere in Philly, going through an area I should know but can’t navigate, to reach somewhere else that may or may not be definite. If I’m walking, the streets approach each other at odd angles, and trolley tracks traverse them where I know they shouldn’t. City Hall looms in the center of a linear tangle I can’t comprehend. I enter a subway station through constricted passageways filled with construction apparatus. I weave back and forth through corridors and stairways that meander up, down, around, under, within, entering buildings that I have to wend my way through – usually a restaurant at some point – either finding no way out or finally getting outside to realize I’m not where I wanted to go.

I also have a heavy emphasis on urban transportation – trolleys, the subway with its mazes of concourses, tight places to crawl through to get to a vehicle, missing the train, getting on the wrong one, not knowing where it’s going, the 30th St. train station transformed into myriad offices and shops.

Some dreams are filled with color and sweep and succulent, unlikely architecture. Even the most muddled or chaotic are stuffed with detail and mounded effluvia. Interiors, entered into like personalized trails, exude ancient trivia in narrow, littered exit hallways that shed deteriorating wainscoting packed solid with local memory.

Roadways (so many roadways, so often) are lined with every variety of house and junkyard, every imaginable frontage. Their geometry of line and curve – seen as though from a tower – spills out into a cityscape that harries itself through unidentified ages.

Other common themes of recent years: house renovation (multiple small rooms, intricately and confusingly arranged), leaking water — pipes, roofs, basements, rivers.

4) I seldom used to dream about people I knew. Now many of my dreams involve the family, people from Philly, and others from years ago that I hardly ever consciously think about. I’m often a peripheral or incomplete character – a helper or observer without fixed identity. The details are fuzzy and have little tactile quality, as through viewed and felt through a badly formed lens.

My only true nightmares were attacks on the basic level of my functioning mind. While a freshman in college, I dreamed that I was in a symbolic logic class where something grasped, strangled, shackled – christ, I still can’t come close to putting it into words – my ability… not to think, not to will to think, not even to want to will to think, but something so basic to existence that without it I would not be a working being. It created an imprisonment so fearful that I awoke in paralyzed horror. Then I fell asleep… and dreamed the same again. And awoke paralyzed and dreamed the same. And again, at least five times. If there’s ever a terror mechanism that mindfuckers could put together to force me to confess blindly, squealingly to plotting human annihilation… 

Many people apparently dream in extended-reality format. They relive, re-devise or extend their waking lives. I don’t recall half a dozen realistic dreams in my life. The elements in mine make little or no waking sense, show no logical connection; they larrup and trip over each other, crisscross, overlap, leapfrog, evaporate, oscillate, regroup, dissipate, intertwine, horseride, blend and crystalize, smear. They partake of everything and nothing.

Some hang by their dreamertips from their own cliffs of understanding, near to memory but unassailable. Many have a distinct “flavor,” a specific yet indefinable sense that if I can reach… out… along the track of what’s left at waking… if I can grasp that one blurred image by the ankle and pull its whole body back… there it is! Instead, I fall back asleep, wake half an hour later, all of it gone.

Why don’t we remember some dreams? Is it because we can’t remember them, that dream “logic” is so unlike waking logic that our mind, once awake, can’t grasp it?

Have you ever had a hypnogogic state (smattered flashes while on the verge of falling asleep) in which you’re assaulted by an immediate, pressing need to do something vitally important or to correct an overwhelming mistake, only to realize, thirty seconds later, that there is no such need or mistake, or even a realm in which such a possibility could live? I doubt it means squat, but it hints at a way of looking at the world that’s certainly non-Aristotelian.

We were visiting one of Linda’s nieces who let us into the psychic side of the family through one of her predictive dreams. For years she’d dreamed that she was driving and suddenly hit a kid in a striped shirt, flipped him up, killed him. One day she was out driving to college with her father, got the feeling “this is it” and braked suddenly. Her father asked why; the living kid in the striped shirt had darted into the street. (I have no idea what to make of this, because I don’t think time is a landscape, but rather an artifact of motion and entropy; there’s no fore-knowledge of the future.)

To sum up, as I see it, each of us develops the dream structure that fits our specific mental organization and personality; it’s not a matter of interpretation, but of worldview, of how we each envision what a dream should be and do in terms of our needs and desires. Our necessity creates our dreams, and our dreams then help create us, in a constantly evolving helix.

[I plan to drop in the occasional personal dream as I putter along. They will follow no chronological order. Some may be tied to the accompanying rumin in some skewed way, others will just be there to be there. Feel free to ignore them.]

The world’s going to hell. Anyone half-alive knows that. So why aren’t the other ranters talking more about the one overwhelming determinant of planetary collapse?

It’s us – the sheer volume of humanity.

Various space probes and telescopes are checking the galaxy for “goldilocks” planets, those, like ours, that orbit in the region around a star where water remains mostly liquid, the only condition that can support life as we more or less know it. 

The goldilocks zone is determined by a combination of planetary density, distance from the parent star, planetary spin rate and other stuff we don’t need to go into here.

One major assumption is that these planets must have a dense, rocky center – but not so dense that its gravity would pancake all organic life. So a life-supporting planet can only be so large, so dense to be just right. Looking at that, you can readily see that no organic-life planet can successfully support 8 billion beings as bulky as ourselves.

Human life has more than tripled since 1950, from roughly 2.5 billion to roughly 8 billion. Though most experts deplore this explosion for various reasons, but they seldom correlate it directly with the continuation of a livable planet.

They catalog the quantity of our waste, the explosion of concrete, the expansion of landfills, etc., but not how the simple fact of our unlimited existence determines climate change (or more fundamentally, climate stability) through the next millennium.

Seriously: Unless the current population is reduced by about 3/4, there is no medium-term hope for the planet. I say “medium-term” because over the long-term we’ll either have learned to rein ourselves in or vanished as a species. Whichever we choose, the earth itself will outlast us – and laugh at us.

In the 1960s, ZPG – zero population growth – was a seriously promulgated goal. So much of the ’60s, I’ll readily admit, was hopeless hope, but ZPG was perhaps the most forward-facing idea of its time, a recognition that we, as a species, had done enough, gone as far as we needed to go (indeed farther than makes sense) and should just … stop.

Instead, over the rest of the 20^th century, the human planet went apeshit, supported by the idea that “growth” is sacred in every area of our existence, and that everything within our grasp is unlimited.

Evolutionarily, the population of every species – plant or animal – reaches a limit, attempts to extend beyond it, and collapses. That’s earth’s history. Today, we’ve taken growth farther, faster, to a degree of disruption and dissolution previously unimaginable.

Every extrapolation I’ve read listing the dangers of climate change (whether assumed to be man-made or god-made) is based on carbon emissions or current waste or energy expansion or plastic inundation, while taking into little account that unrestrained human propagation is what most inflates our output of rank shit. (I hate the European whining at population loss; they should celebrate it.)

Consider these points:

* If the population were to double in the next 100+ years, even if we halved the energy used per individual, it would come to the same amount of energy expended (1/2 x 2 = 1).

* Our individual human output – breath, sweat, piss, excrement – will remain constant per unit.

* Assuming every square inch of earth to be open for exploitation, we have not considered the physical and emotional need for minimal personal space.

* Each of us has a unique personality with unique perceived needs and expectations, so there will never be universal agreement on how to deal with any grand aspect of existence. We cannot impose a generally accepted regimen to achieve planetary salvation.

Still, it may all even out over time, you say?

Time… 

We don’t have it. Whatever way we extrapolate, our grandchildren will go through fire and hell. I didn’t do it, you didn’t do it, none of us individually did it, but collectively we produced species armageddon. Look it in the face or spit in its face, it’s still there.

Hope for humanity, if any, isn’t a matter of time but of evolution. We don’t simply need to be more understanding or more accepting, but to become something fundamentally different. By our nature, we have shat our nest beyond emptying. It’s programmed into us, inescapable unless every future newborn is reprogrammed before they pop out.

Could happen. Could happen about the same time as we discover immortality – which will really doom our sorry race.

Humans aren’t special, as religion assumes, and we aren’t infinitely tinkerable, as much of modern science assumes. We’re random bits of universal, then galactic, then stellar, then planetary, then environmental particularity. We’re blobs of circumstance. We need not puff our breasts in exuberance or wail to the stars in desperation, but recognize ourselves as whateverthehell we may or may not be. We can’t change most of it, and it’s absurd to say we have a destiny to do so.

Likely it’s the same throughout the cosmos. And you wonder why we haven’t tuned in intelligent broadcasts from the stars?

There’s scientific data that either support what I’m jeremiadly chuffing out or undermine it, depending on how you see the problem (i.e., whether we’re permanently fucked or only fucked for the next couple centuries):

Based on the latest data from the UN Population Division (https://ourworldindata.org/world-population-growth) the population growth rate has gone down steadily since 1960, though the number added to the population over that time has remained about the same – a billion more of us every 12 years (the total slowing to 11 billion total by 2088).

Some excerpts: “One of the big lessons from the demographic history of countries is that population explosions are temporary. For many countries the demographic transition has already ended, and as the global fertility rate has now halved, we know that the world as a whole is approaching the end of rapid population growth.”  (This quote assumes that we haven’t experienced something unparalleled and incalculable over the last half century. I’m seen other figures that predict that Nigeria alone will balloon in population to 750,000,000.)

“The 7-fold increase of the world population over the course of two centuries amplified humanity’s impact on the natural environment. To provide space, food, and resources for a large world population in a way that is sustainable into the distant future is without question one of the large, serious challenges for our generation…. Population growth is still fast: Every year 140 million are born and 58 million die – the difference is the number of people that we add to the world population in a year: 82 million.”

…”Population projections show that the yearly number of births will remain at around 140 million per year over the coming decades. It is then expected to slowly decline in the second-half of the century. As the world population ages, the annual number of deaths is expected to continue to increase in the coming decades until it reaches a similar annual number as global births towards the end of the century.

“As the number of births is expected to slowly fall and the number of deaths to rise the global population growth rate will continue to fall. This is when the world population will stop to increase in the future.”

Thus, the good news: Women worldwide are deciding to have fewer children, and the sperm count in men is falling – so maybe the situation will start to heal itself.

By which point it will almost certainly be too late:

• The need to expand the acreage of land given to agriculture (which is already a catastrophic polluter) will obliterate the stated need to protect at least 30% of existing open land and sea from encroachment.

• The need to increase solar and wind energy to both service this population and replace fossil fuels will have the same effect of encroaching one our shrinking pristine land – while also overwhelming potential agricultural land: Look at photos of the massive solar arrays in Australia and parts of the U.S. set up where crops might otherwise be grown.

*    *    *    *

My semi-apologies if my negativity upsets you, but I find it personally invigorating, because I see it as dealing with reality, leaving happy fantasies to wither, as they should.

But! Some really good news: Linda made the world’s most delightful, delicious blueberry muffins for breakfast this morning.

Muffins ventured, muffins gained!