In 1990, Rick Strassman injected 60 people with 400 doses of the illegal drug dimethyltryptamine. But Strassman wasn’t breaking any law—he was the first federally approved researcher in 20 years to study the effect of a psychedelic on human subjects.

Here is one more weird thing about DMT—you’re on it right now

Dimethyltryptamine—known as ‘DMT’—is surely one of the strangest chemical substances found on our chemically rich planet. It is possibly the strongest of the plant hallucinogens (though Salvia Divinorum is definitely in the running) and even among veteran psychonauts it is spoken of with awe–gonzo drug theorist Terence McKenna used to say that the biggest danger of DMT is that a person could simply ‘die of astonishment’. For one thing, DMT is one of the relatively few drugs that can produce true hallucinations, defined as virtual experiences that are indistinguishable from reality. And DMT is nearly unique in that it consistently delivers one of the strangest experiences humans have—encounters with aliens. In Strassman’s study, 20% of those injected reported clear, detailed encounters with alien beings, all taking place in what the volunteers usually referred to as, ‘another dimension’. That is, after injection with DMT, 1 in 5 of Strassman’s subjects experienced entry into another plane of existence where they met aliens. Less formal ‘trip reports’ suggest that the ratio is much higher for those experimenting at home, and that the experience is even stronger when the drug is smoked rather than injected.

What’s astonishing about the alien encounters is that they are incredibly weird and yet remarkably consistent. Nearly all users report a strange ripping sound and intricate, radially-symmetric visual phenomena as they enter the DMT space. They then report meeting astounding machine-like elves that are able to transform themselves at will, and are also able to modify reality by means of a weird language—in his lectures, McKenna even used to replicate this language.

So what is going on here? Other psychedelics, like LSD or psilocybin, create different trips in different people. But this drug seems to fairly often create the same trip in different people, even in people who are very different from each other. The ayahuasca shamans of South America, for example, have used DMT for thousands of years… and often encounter aliens.

Could it be that these encounters are simply a mental fantasy created by this particular drug? Of course—humans know very little about the way hallucinogens work, largely because governments repress psychedelic studies.

But, could it be that DMT somehow precipitates a genuine trip to another dimension inhabited by self-transforming machine elves? Also of course—we know even less about aliens and other dimensions than we do about hallucinogens and brains.

For such an uncanny substance, DMT is astonishingly widely distributed and deserves the epithet ‘weed’ far more than, you know, weed. It’s found in many plant sources, including Canary Reed Grass… you’re probably within 100 feet of Canary Reed Grass right now. Go nuts.

Here is one more weird thing about DMT—you’re on it right now. Dimethyltryptamine is found in small quantities in all human brains, possibly produced by the pineal gland. Scientists speculate that DMT plays a role in dreams and near death experiences, and possibly in the mystical religious visions that periodically alter humanity’s course—the trip reports found in the Hebrew scriptures, for example, don’t sound all that different from some DMT visions. Damn hippies, as the Pharisees used to say.

All human problems are rooted in human consciousness, and DMT consistently delivers the most radical known expression of human consciousness… maybe we should keep looking into it.

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Peters went further by claiming that the Mercator Projection was inherently racist

The ‘Peters Projection’ was announced by historian Arno Peters in a 1973 speech to the United Nations—the grandiose setting must have seemed a little over the top to serious workers in the rarefied world of cartographic projection. Nevertheless, Peters struck a nerve, and his self-titled projection became very popular indeed—many groups actively lobbied for its use in schools and it was quickly adopted by several U.N agencies and the National Council of Churches for all uses. In 1983 the N.C.C. even published Peters’ book, The New Cartography: A New View of the World. Peters’ map remains in vogue today, being prominently featured, for example, in an episode of television’s The West Wing.

Why all the fuss? What was it about this projection that made it so popular? Well, Peters (who died in 2002) was a master at combining indisputably true points with a few that were disputable. He maintained that the Mercator Projection, then commonly used for wall maps, badly distorted the relative areas of world land masses so that, for instance, Europe looks much bigger than it really is and Greenland appears to be roughly the same size as Africa… when in fact Africa is about 14 times larger. So far, so good, but Peters went further by claiming that the Mercator Projection was inherently racist, and unfit for any use. He based this on the positional and spatial prominence of developed countries as shown on the Mercator Projection. He apparently believed that only ‘his’ map, which accurately showed land mass areas, should be used.

Actual cartographers rolled their eyes at this. To begin with, the Mercator’s problems as a wall map were well known, but to say it had no use at all was crazy talk—it is still indispensable to navigators because straight lines drawn on the Mercator Projection are ‘loxodromes’, lines that show true compass bearing between two locations. In fact, it is axiomatic among cartographers that no projection is suited for all uses—they all have their strengths and weaknesses.

Moreover, Peters was attacking a straw man. Long before 1973 the Mercator’s weaknesses as a wall map were well known and it was gradually being replaced by several projections, notably the 1963 Robinson Projection, the invention of Arthur Robinson, probably the most eminent modern cartographer.

But most damning was Peters’ claim to have invented the ‘Peters’ Projection. Cartographers recognized it as being, in fact, a special instance of the Gall Projection, published in 1885 by Scottish astronomer James Gall. At best, Peters may have independently re-invented it, and the projection is now more properly known as the Gall-Peters Projection.

Buckminster Fuller also gave it a try

For all these reasons, Arno Peters was never going to be popular with cartographers, but aside from that tempest in a teapot, the Gall-Peters Projection still has problems judged strictly on its merits. Though it does allot area accurately, it does so at the expense of shape. Toward the poles, land masses are distorted East-West but near the equator they are distorted North-South; in Robinson’s scathing phase, the resulting maps look like, “… wet, ragged long winter underwear hung out to dry on the Arctic Circle.” Furthermore, other equal-area projections, such as the Albers Conic or the Lambert Azimuthal, have long been available and do a better job of managing unavoidable distortions.

There is no doubt that Arno Peters was a sincere, idealistic man devoted to the cause of fairness and equality. His other major work, the Synchronoptic History of the World, was an attempt to tell the story of all the world’s peoples, giving equal weight to each and avoiding Eurocentrism. He was also keenly aware of the power of ideas and well-versed in the techniques of getting those ideas across—in fact, his 1945 Ph.D. dissertation at the University of Berlin was titled, The Use of Film as a Propaganda Medium. But he wasn’t a cartographer and it may be that his genuine sense of mission and flair for promotion ended up obscuring better approaches to the worthy goal of fairly and accurately representing the world in two dimensions. Nevertheless, he deserves credit for popularizing the issue and for educating the public about the problems of conventional mapping in general and the Mercator Projection in particular.

Arno Peters wasn’t the only 20th century non-cartographer visionary who ended up inventing and popularizing his own map projection—Buckminster Fuller also gave it a try. Fuller (1895-1983) patented his Dymaxion Projection in 1946, based on the simple, brilliant idea of projecting the surface of the globe onto a regular solid. The 1946 version used a cuboctahedron (8 triangular faces, 6 square faces), but by 1954 Fuller was using a slightly modified icosahedron (20 triangular faces) so that the resulting Dymaxion Map could present all the Earth’s land masses without breaking them up. ‘Dymaxion’, incidentally, is a contraction of DYnamic MAXimum tensION and is little more than ‘genius style’ marketing language—Fuller applied the term to cars, houses and even to his preferred sleeping pattern.

As a mathematical feat, the Dymaxion Projection is considerably more sophisticated than the Gall-Peters Projection and consequently has a number of technical advantages. To begin with, distortion of shape and area is minimal and, more importantly, the distortion is evenly distributed. This compares favorably to most projections, which generally distort quite a bit in some parts of the globe but relatively little elsewhere. The Gall-Peters Projection is one of the worst at this since it—somewhat ironically—distorts the shape of developed countries very little but badly deforms the undeveloped countries that Peters was trying to represent more fairly!

The Dymaxion Projection can also be unfolded in different ways for different purposes—that is, the icosahedron can be laid flat with different countries at the center. This avoids much of the almost automatic emphasis that most maps give to Europe and North America, and also avoids the tendency to think of North as ‘up’, thus avoiding a great deal of unconscious cultural bias. In Fuller’s view it was better to think in terms of ‘in’—toward the center of the Earth—and ‘out’—toward the stars.

The most common method of laying out the Dymaxion Map is with the North Pole more or less at the center, and seeing the Earth this way is a revelation. The separate continents appear to be not separate at all! Rather, they look like more like one large island, somewhat fragmented by water but still essentially one mass surrounded by ocean. It’s a compelling view of the world and a startling contrast to any rectangular wall map.

Like Peters, Fuller was a tireless promoter of his many ideas and the Dymaxion Map held a special place because of its role in what he called the ‘World Game’. The game was (and is) played with the aid of a large map that dynamically displays multiple world variables. Fuller’s hope was that the game would evolve into a method for global citizens to directly make responsible decisions about allocation of global resources. To that end, he even produced a basketball court sized version of the Dymaxion Map, dubbed the ‘Big Map’, and presented it to Congress! Though still widely played, the World Game has, alas, so far failed to replace current methods of governance.

Presently, Buckminster Fuller tends to be remembered for his invention of the geodetic dome and little else. One gets the impression that he was simply too prolific to be taken seriously—his ideas and philosophies are so numerous and so far outside the mainstream that it may take the rest of us a generation or two to catch up. But it’s a shame that his unique map is not better known, and almost a crime that the relatively clumsy Gall-Peters Projection seems to have displaced it as an educational tool and wall map. All of Peters’ stated goals—fairness, equality, non-bias—are better achieved by Fuller’s simple, elegant and brilliant creation.

There are several Internet sources for information on the above topics: bfi.org is the address of the Buckminster Fuller Institute and a good start for those interested in Fuller’s life and work, and odt.org sells Peters Projection maps and also has a good biography of Arno Peters.

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I love the philosophical implications of modern physics, but to me, it always seems a little far away from my reality when it is evoked on galactic or subatomic scales of existence. I mean to a fly water tension is a greater force than gravity which is far from my experience and flies are the size of solar systems to atoms, let alone an electron or a quark. It’s just sooo…. far away.

I’m a little more comfortable in the organic world of biochemistry and even there the world is disintegrating from form into information. If one takes the modern view of the body as a system that is continually rebuilding itself then chronic disease can only be understood as misinformation repeating itself over and over in the newly rebuilt system that is the body.

According to Bruce Lipton, i.e. Biology of Belief and other writings, biological information is not some predestined DNA code of conduct, but the expression of that code which can be strongly influenced by the human mind.

What prevents us from living in a (healthy) reality that conforms in every way to our personal vision? It is our beliefs that prevent us, of course, and if we can change our beliefs we can act like the alchemist in Ted Chiang’s “The Merchant and the Alchemists Gate” and “search for tiny pores in the skin of reality, like the holes that worms bore into wood, and upon finding one he was able to expand and strech it the way a glassblower turns a dolop of molten glass into a long-necked pipe…”

The story mentioned, by the way, is exceptionally beautiful, especially when read aloud amongst friends during a drive to Baja.

we ourselves are made up of intangible mystery

Physicists tell us that there is no bulk, there is only information. ‘Matter’ is made of molecules, and molecules are made of atoms, and atoms are made of subatomic particles and subatomic particles aren’t particles at all, they’re waveforms, or probabilities, or concepts, or something but they’re definitely not little marbles that bounce off of each other. We can say they’re energy, whatever that means, but we can also say they’re information, bits of code that interact with other bits of code in predictable ways that cumulatively add up to what we optimistically call the ‘laws’ of nature.

This is non-intuitive. Deep down, most of us live in a Newtonian world where gravity controls everything and the apple in our hand is made of tiny tinkertoy molecules. If we think at all about atoms, we tend to visualize them as miniature solar systems, with electrons and positrons orbiting a nucleus. This is the picture often presented in school textbooks, but it is astoundingly wrong – there is no way to effectively visualize subatomic structures because they don’t look like anything.

Acknowledging this truth, letting it sink in, can be a little frightening because it means that we live in a world with, literally, no solid ground; everything we observe is made up of intangible mystery and in fact we ourselves, the observers, are made up of intangible mystery.

The fact is, we live in a completely inscrutable world, a world where literally anything can be true. For if there are no little bits of matter, most of the limits we place on reality are meaningless. A world without bulk is a world where realities can overlap and William Blake was merely being observant when he said,

“… a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour.”

In fact, Blake and all the other visionary mystics that have graced humanity’s existence seem to be on to something – their visions of deep unity, of paradises and other realms existing along side our quotidian lives, of immortal selves that transcend the body, are more in line with the true nature of reality than the Newtonian sleep of our daily existence.

Many of the phenomena that so puzzle us are easily explained by a world in which anything is possible. The UFOs that are seen by 1,000s every year, the supernatural intrusions of gods, demons and ghosts, the mysteries of crop circles, Bigfoot, dark matter and, well, everything can all be as firmly grounded in the same sort of fungible reality that we exist in.

But suppose all this folderol is actually the case, and we really do live in a world of overlapping realities and mystic visions… how do we profit from that knowledge? If any conceivable reality is as potentially real as the one we live in, what prevents us from living in a reality that conforms in every way to our personal vision of a perfect world? As near as I can tell, the answer is… nothing prevents us, nothing at all.

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firing it is almost anti-climactic, though nudists are involved

Catapult: Harry and I Build a Siege Weapon
spent a couple of years in my harem of bedside books, during which time I read it, in out of sequence bits and pieces, over and over and over and over, perhaps 15 times all told. In a sentence, Catapult is about Jim Paul’s desire to build a working catapult, and use it to throw rocks into the Pacific Ocean; he obtains a grant to do so, and persuades his friend Harry to help him build it. That said, the book is nearly perfectly unclassifiable (hence its obscurity) being roughly equal parts how-to, history, meditation on war, art philosophy, travelogue, personal essay and memoir. Too, Catapult is not exactly mass entertainment—though very funny, it is not comedy; historically accurate, it is not exactly educational; a book about the nature of family and friendship, it is too personal and idiosyncratic for direct application to any would-be reader’s family… Catapult is a cipher, and if you read it I promise you will have a heck of a time explaining to anyone around you just why you continue to dip into it.

Paul, now director of the Poetry Center of the University of Arizona, recently spoke with me about Catapult. He was relaxed, unpretentious, and seemed both pleased and bemused that it still has a following after ten years. I asked what Catapult meant to him.

“Well, the catapult was just a vehicle, a way to talk about my friendship with Harry, and about male bonding; and about that time in my life – everything seemed to change after that. Catapult is like a snapshot album for me now.”

After the book was published,

“Harry was pissed off, at first. He said that having a book written about him was worse than having his picture taken. But he got over it. We both became ‘known’ in San Francisco for Catapult. People say he’s not really like that, but he is.”

Finally, I asked Paul how he would classify his book. He laughed.

“I don’t know. Harcourt Brace is going to bring it out as fiction, which seems crazy, because it makes me and everyone I know fictional characters!”

What Catapult is, is interesting. Each page, each sentence even, is gripping in itself and seems inextricably linked to the material before and after so that one is seduced into flipping back and forth from any random starting point, reading the book from the inside like a worm eating its way out of an apple.

Here, for example, is Paul speaking of Archimedes’ invention of the catapult,

“Relatively speaking, human beings were exponentially weaker, both physically and socially, in the presence of these engines of war, and what strength they had began to be valued to the degree to which they had control over the machine.”

This insight is preceded by a fascinating account of Archimedes’ defense of Syracuse, and leads into one of Paul’s central points, that the catapult, as the first weapon of war to rely only incidentally on muscle power, led more or less directly to the elevation of the technologist as a powerful caste in human culture and this is followed, logically enough, by Paul’s first naïve attempt to buy parts for his brainchild and his getting swindled to the tune of 60 bucks. Catapult is a very ’sticky’ book; I pick it up, intending to read a paragraph or two, and find myself an hour later engrossed in an account of the largest trebuchet ever built, of the Oppenheimer brothers, of drilling holes in spring steel, or of Paul dropping off his mother at summer camp. Paul makes all these fascinating; he even manages, by some alchemy, to make one book out of them.

As Paul says, at heart Catapult is a tale of the friendship between Paul and his friend Harry. Opposites, they need each other to build the catapult. Paul—a writer, medievalist, poet and artist – obtains the grant that funds the project, but actual tools and solid materials render him clumsy and inarticulate. Harry, by contrast, is an aggressive doer and maker and builds the catapult to his own design, arguing with Paul at every step. So Paul couldn’t build the catapult without Harry, but Harry wouldn’t build it without Paul’s goading; to be fair, Harry would have been perfectly happy never building it. So Catapult is partially about how we get friends to do things. Here are the two of them, building a model of the catapult.

“Harry broke up the clock spring when we got back to the studio, snapping it in his bare hands. Then he punched holes in it with a nail, and made a pair of layered wings for the model, which now looked like an odd, squared-off slingshot. He bound the springs into slots in the wood with picture-hanging wire, which he also used for a bowstring, and stole a piece of the boy’s Lego set for a cup to hold the projectile, a marble we found. He wouldn’t let me anywhere near the model. I shouted corrections at him and tried to grab it. Harry just barked at me, pulled the model away and resumed straining over it. Finally I followed him out of the studio, and up the stairs to the roof of the warehouse.”

After the struggle to build the thing, firing it is almost anti-climactic, though nudists are involved. The real action comes a week after the firing when, to satisfy grant requirements, Paul is to give a “presentation of findings”… Harry insists on participating. To say more would be a spoiler, it’s a scene you should read for yourself.

In a sort of reverse internal earthquake that happened to me recently, I realized that the Soma Cube, a childhood obsession that I passed on to my children, the board game Hex, a mid-life obsession that I also passed on to my children, and grooks, brilliant little poems that I should really get my kids interested in, were all the product of one man, a mathematician / poet / furniture designer / playwright / national treasure (in Denmark) / ladies man / philosopher / game designer named Piet Hein (1905-1996). In the depth and breadth of his thinking only his fellow polymaths Leonardo da Vinci or Buckminster Fuller compare – but they get far better press. Compare Google searches: Leo turns up 11,000 pages, Bucky is close with 9,500 pages, but Piet (pronounced ‘Pete’) only rates 2,000 pages, and many of these, probably most, have to do with other Piet Heins, as it is rather a common name in some parts of the world. There are no biographies of the man, precious few magazine articles, and only perfunctory mentions in encyclopedias. He is the greatest mind you never heard of. Why?

He chose his mother tongue unwisely. Danish, which even Hein characterized as a guttural disease, has only 5 million or so speakers. It is a linguistic jail for a poet-philosopher. Though he could not be better known in Denmark—where a clever speaker is defined as a man who can go 30 minutes without quoting Piet Hein—Hein only flirted with real fame in the rest of the world. His closest approach came in 1964 when he invented the super-ellipse, a mathematically valid curve that was his response to the problem of Sergel’s Square in Stockholm. A traffic loop was needed in the roughly rectangular city center. A circle would not work, an ellipse wasted space in the corners, a rectangle would not allow fast traffic flow—what to do? Hein described his thinking about the problem in an essay that perfectly captures his blend of poetry, philosophy and science:

A Super Ellipse

“Man is the animal that draws lines which he himself then stumbles over. In the whole pattern of civilization there have been two tendencies, one toward straight lines and rectangular patterns and one toward circular lines. There are reasons, mechanical and psychological, for both tendencies. Things made with straight lines fit well together and save space. And we can move easily—physically or mentally—around things made with round lines. But we are in a straitjacket, having to accept one or the other, when often some intermediate form would be better. To draw something freehand—such as the patchwork traffic circle they tried in Stockholm—will not do. It isn’t fixed, isn’t definite like a circle or square. You don’t know what it is. It isn’t esthetically satisfying. The super-ellipse solved the problem. It is neither round nor rectangular, but in between. Yet it is fixed, it is definite—it has a unity.” Put simply, Piet Hein took nothing for granted, not even rectangles. The super-ellipse went on to a career in furniture and industrial design, and currently stars as the body of Big Mike, the Viridian movement mascot.

The Seven Components of a Soma Cube

The Soma Cube and Hex were both billed as children’s games, though they are really—or are also—sophisticated expressions of topological beauty. Of the Cube (marketed by Parker Brothers) Hein wrote, “It is a beautiful freak of nature that the seven simplest irregular combinations of cubes can form a cube again. Variety growing out of unity returns to unity. It is the world’s smallest philosophical system.” It is said that he invented the Cube while daydreaming during one of Neils Bohr’s lectures. Three small cubes can be combined irregularly in only one way, a bracket shape, and four cubes can be combined irregularly in six different ways. These seven polycubes can be combined—there are 240 possibilities—to form a 3×3x3 cube, and many other shapes besides. As a boy, I found it utterly absorbing. A few years ago I made one for myself and my kids; it is still a fascinating sculptural plaything. No home with young minds forming should be or need be without this simple, beautiful puzzle. We tend to haul it out whenever someone visits our home for the first time; we half-seriously suggest that we don’t care to associate with anyone not able to form the cube. As a puzzle, the Soma Cube seems to adapt itself to the puzzler—we’ve never absolutely stumped anyone, and yet no one has ever found it trivial. In other words, we haven’t lost any friends over it… yet.

Hex has the interesting distinction of having been invented by two different distinguished mathematicians. Hein was first, in 1942, and John Nash (who later won a Nobel Prize for his work in game theory) independently re-invented it in 1948 while at Princeton. Hex is played on a grid of hexes, such as one might find on a tiled bathroom floor. Two players place black and white stones alternately, whoever connects opposite sides first wins. The game cannot be drawn, since the only way to prevent your opponent from connecting is to connect yourself. And it is far from trivial; though Nash was able to prove that the first player always has a winning strategy, neither he nor anyone else has been able to show what that strategy is. On a grid of 8×8, hex’s complexity approaches chess, on a 13×13 grid, as commonly played, it is astronomically higher.

Dandelions in seed were meaningful to Hein all his life. In his homes and books and journals they were more or less pervasive, appearing in photographs, pictures and in his poems. Of them, he wrote: “I think it’s good not to value things just because they are difficult to get, costly. If the dandelion were not so willing and generous and fertile, I’m sure it would be the most highly valued and appreciated flower in the world because it is so beautiful, so optimistic, so simple, so radiating.” The same is true of grooks, the name he made up for the short, rhyming, gnomic poems that he created so generously. There are 10,000 of them. They contain his whole philosophy, in manageable chunks. They have been compared to Biblical proverbs. Hein, not a modest man, felt that the grooks would be his legacy. He learned English and several other languages so that he could translate them himself. Whether you realize it or not, you’ve heard a grook, or even recited one. They’re everywhere, like dandelions.

Problems
Problems worthy of attack,
prove their worth by hitting back.”

A Maxim for Vikings
Here is a fact that should help you fight a bit longer:
Things that don’t actually kill you outright make you stronger.

Ars Brevis
There is one art, no more, no less:
to do all things with artlessness.

The Road to Wisdom
The road to wisdom?- Well, it’s plain and simple to express:
Err and err and err again
but less and less and less.

Dream Interpretation
Everything’s either concave or –vex,
so whatever you dream will be something with sex.

Grooks began as Hein’s response to Germany’s occupation of Denmark. At the time, he was the president of the Anti-Nazi Union; “Not the best thing to be on April 9, 1940.” the date of the invasion, “I had to go underground.” Under the pseudonym Kumbel (gravestone) he began to publish the Grooks as an oblique way of encouraging his countrymen. He thought there would be just four or five of them; later, when they numbered in the 1,000s, he used to say that he should have named them with more care.

Hein is due, overdue, for his fifteen minutes and it will be a fine thing for the 21st century if the minutes stretch out indefinitely. If it happens, it won’t be for his games, scientific achievements or even the grooks; it will be for his philosophy. In the ‘40s, he began to write of the two cultures, “cultism” and “technocy”, “The first term having not-unintended echoes of ‘occultism’ and the second having certain qualities in common with ‘idiocy’”. So in the 40s he began to describe one of the great divides of our day; the divide, not between the ‘haves’ and the ‘have nots’, but between the ‘knows’ and the ‘know nots’. His solution was art: “Of course I see the necessity for specialization. Nobody more strongly believes in the need to specialize than the person who has trespassed from one field to the other. I do not dispute the need for specialization, but I don’t think the way we do it is the right way. The specialist must know more of the total human activity. It is not just a question of listening politely to a few lectures from people in other fields, or of a few cross-technical conferences. We have to cut over the whole attitude of our civilization. After all, what is art? There is no way of defining art except from the inside. Art is the creative process and it goes through all fields. Einstein’s theory of relativity – now that is a work of art! Einstein was more of an artist in physics than on his violin. Art is this: art is the solution of a problem which cannot be expressed explicitly until it is solved.”

Sadly, Piet Hein is out of print in English. Sadly, because I feel I’m ready for his mind now, trained by days with the Soma Cube and Hex, and exposure to Grooks. It is easy to say that art is the solution to the world’s problems, far more difficult to live it. Hein lived it. “The man who is only a poet,” he used to say, “is not even that.” and, “Whether I am writing a poem or solving some technical problem, I think the same.”

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We naked apes have been here before

At the conclusion of a long series of curious circumstances—which is to say, my life—I found myself driving through Houston, on my way to a conference devoted to high-tech land surveying equipment. Such conferences are more exciting than they sound, but they’d almost have to be wouldn’t they? I find them inspiring; the speakers at these events look around at our crumbling world, at the failing infrastructure and dwindling resources, and they see… business opportunity. They believe that technology is equal to the challenge, that new knowledge will keep pace with the horsemen of armageddon, and even pull ahead a bit.

But driving through Houston, I couldn’t help but wonder if the whiz-bang technology that humans are assembling is going to be the saviour of our civilization, or merely its enabler, allowing us to extend our run of resource extraction another decade or two before the inevitable crash.

On the one hand, it’s a dumb question; history, after all, stretches back several thousand years and here we all are, still truckin’. So it doesn’t seem impossible that our species might keep it all together for another millennia or two, at which point it becomes, well, not my problem.

But on the other hand Houston, and cities like it—vast concrete scabs on Pachamama’s skin—seem inconceivable without gigantic inputs of fossil fuels and wishful thinking and they make me quail with dread; they’re the movie sets of apocalypse, and the call for action seems long overdue.

And there is yet another other hand; perhaps it is going to be, has to be, both at once for all our days. Perhaps we will always be going to hell in a hand-basket without ever getting there, quite; always in peril, but never entirely bereft. For we naked apes have been here before. In the 14th century, for example, the Black Plague carried away half our number in Europe and Asia, and in the early decades of the century past about a hundred million of us were felled by Spanish Influenza. We have fought resource wars more or less continually, over wood and water and arable land, over gold and spice and even guano, of all things. And always, when times are bleak and death is all about, our seers and mystics declare that the end of the world is at hand; half in fear, half in glee, they tell us that an angry god will soon be upon us.

The current fashion in world ending cataclysm, at least in my set, is Mayan flavored, and the year 2012 is said to mark the conclusion of history but, of course, the Christians angrily declare that no, their god is the only one who has the right to slaughter us, and the UFO cults and the Kabballists and the extinction biologists all push their preferred catastrophic scenarios. Maybe they’re all right; God, after all, is mysterious above all things and one expects a staggering finale from an impresario like Him. And maybe they’re all wrong; in all our time together on this planet, we’ve always managed to keep ourselves in a panic… maybe we just like the sensation.

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Margaret’s account of the incident reads like a seduction…

Dr. John C. Lilly, whose research into psychedelic drugs and sensory deprivation inspired the movie Altered States, was a gifted scientist, a polymath who made significant contributions in several fields. Lilly’s abiding obsession was communication with dolphins. He studied them for several decades and his beliefs about them evolved considerably; he eventually came to believe that communication between men and dolphins was impeded not by the dolphin’s supposedly inferior intelligence, but rather, by the radically different marine environment which formed that intelligence. Dolphin brains, after all, are as complex as human brains and 20% larger, and in all the animal kingdom, dolphins and humans are the two mammals with the highest brain to body weight ratios. It’s true that humans are virtuoso tool users compared to dolphins, but it’s also true that dolphins pass information amongst themselves at rates up to 20 times faster than do humans. It’s hard to measure pure intelligence apart from psychology; can we be certain that we’re not underestimating dolphins simply because they’re different?

In one attempt to bridge the gap, Lilly constructed a watery apartment in which Margaret, a human, and Peter, a dolphin, lived together for up to ten weeks at a time. Their cohabitation was difficult at first. It seems that dolphins, in nature, are accustomed to near constant erotic play and that Peter’s unrelieved sexual tension made him so boisterous that Margaret was unable to work with him. Interestingly, it was Peter, not Margaret, who resolved the dilemma. Over a period of several weeks he gradually accustomed Margaret to the touch of his extremely sharp teeth—an erogenous zone for dolphins—and eventually persuaded her to relieve him manually. Frankly, Margaret’s account of the incident reads like a seduction, with Peter using tactics familiar to many teenaged boys. But it worked; he and Margaret learned to talk to each other with great precision, attaining to possibly the most profound inter-species communication ever achieved.

I know that that communication was important, but I can’t get past the sex bit. Peter, thrust against his will into an alien environment and forced to interact with an exceedingly strange animal, was nevertheless able to get precisely what he wanted and needed from that strange animal; who, exactly, was training who?
I believe the episode proves Lilly’s point – dolphins may well be our intellectual equals, or even our superiors. But our world views are so intensely different that communication is nearly impossible – at least for us. Some dolphins have learned up to 50 human words, but humans have yet to utter a single syllable of delphinese; from their points of view, we’re  the ones who are slow.

Lilly’s experiments in human-dolphin cohabitation took place in the 60s and have not been repeated since. I find this inexpressibly sad. There is, perhaps, another intelligent species on this planet, a race of peaceful beings who could end our long loneliness. If we could speak with them freely, we ourselves might be transformed… but we’re no longer trying very hard.

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