Non-precious Fiat and Chips on the Shoulder

Ambrasia Kurtz | Culture and politics | November 12, 2009

This month we’re delighted to have one of our skills exchange members, a South African artist living in Ireland, writing an essay on her cultural journey in a new land 

Sendings’ sources, it must be acknowledged, have truly expended aeonics in an attempt to respond to a general and editorial beg, for pertinent content that preferably obviates necessitating extended cerebral acrobatics for re-invigorated, re-invention of scripting skills; although an eventuality of having singed finger tips for tackling, typing up and emailing stuff that’s too hot to handle, is turf of Acerbica.

And one does have to be gentle with prized sources, prized sources who are obsessively, consistently diligent with assessing and reassessing and checking and cross-checking their own sources.  Serious, self dubious and self sceptical enough to be confident that they’ve really, diligently assessed and reassessed and checked and cross-checked their own sources, when they come up with recurring controversial formula in the general equation, in repeated, social laboratory control situation, they can just become so blandly stupefied into a passive stun, that they’ll simply walk off the nearest presenting continental shelf in a benign confidence that they’ve really seen and experienced and known and found out what they’ve lived and done, by what they’ve really seen, experienced, known and found out by what they’ve lived and done, so that there’s nothing else that can be done, except walk off a continental shelf, if anyone never gets, that they do get, that there’s nothing that can be done when slowly, so ever, laboriously slowly, their growing up becomes tantamount to a retrospective waking up, to a trail of controversy following every step of their life, when, in any of the contexts, at any given point in time, in that moment, they were merely being, and they didn’t get there was controversy, they didn’t intend to propagate controversy and then they got, after the fact, that there had in fact been controversy, which they had gotten after the fact before, and now were getting, after the fact, again; they most remorsefully don’t want any more of the bother that goes along with the trail of controversy that follows their every step, so with dedicated, sincere intent, they earnestly travail to rehabilitate self away from circulating in places or, with faces, that are likely to create scenarios which generate more controversy, and then, they become even more vulnerable to potential controversy because, in battening down into an optimum optimism that they can exist in delineated pathways, so that things can just be a whole lot easier, [Shut the mouth.  Just carry it all in silence.  Discreetly.  Don’t ever let on.  Be].

A search for a space in which they can just neatly live quietly, in simple truth, seems to identify and zoom in on a whole lot of incongruities which really come jumping out of the woodwork and then, all there is, yet again, is to determine, by what degree, just how much controversy has to be side stepped and then, they are just back at the beginning of finding out just how controversial a life can truly be.

Some controversies might just be too good to be true to be believed.  But readers invest and we send.

It can be asserted definitely that the female protagonist of Sendings presented a certain case of brainwashing.  Her very early years were invested in imploring herself to get that she got that it was clear that there were clear instructions, and that it was clear that she be clear that she was compelled to comply clearly with the clear instructions that she clearly got: 1. there. 2. there are. 3. there are dots. 4. dots are. 5. dots. 1. there. 2. there are. 3. there are lines. 4. lines are. 5. lines. 1. join. 2. join dots. 3. join lines. 4. join dots with lines. 5. join lines with dots. 1. dots join lines join lines join dots. 2. dots go to lines. 3. lines go to dots. 4. go to dots on lines. 5. go on lines to dots. (Ancestors of Bot Way Points /html /Java.)

She did try.  Hard.  [A puckered, little frowning face, with eyeballs intently concentrating in a presupposed, revelatory space that was imminently going to bestow an opening grace.]  She tried hard.  A lot.  For a very long time.  But she always wriggled with a sense that it was somehow off, somehow strange.  Dots were misplaced, or lines had to be rigged to meet dots or, she couldn’t line lines up both ends to join dots very comprehensively and precisely.  It was messy.  Rulers?  Pah!  Then focus would blur and dots would animate into bi-locating slur, as if they had merging, flapping, drunken tongues- like when she had to get spectacles for the first time because she’d tried to read everything she clearly deemed she needed to read as a way to get through History I.  Then her eyesight was history.

She wasn’t deterred.  She was tenacious!  But no matter which way she attempted a configuration, the model that emerged would appear totally inferior, tatty, blear, certainly incomprehensible when she needed to defend her steps along lines she’d joined to dots.  So she always found herself back at the start of her work.  Mal lined.  Maligned.  In the dark.  Hurt.  It was all a murk, a haze.  She was dozed in a fog.  She knew she was.  The fog was palpable.  Like a chronic bout of never-let-up sinusitis that won’t let you own conclusively that you’re really allowed to acknowledge that you’re suffering, but, on the sly, truly let’s you have it anyway.  Of course, what she didn’t perceive, and might always have been on the brink of perceiving, and what would have brought instantaneous, unanimous, complete, ubiquitous relief, was the clear perception of perceiving that she knew that she was brainwashed.

Yes, totally and utterly brainwashed.  Like a futuristic, Sci-fi, horror story, where a little girl has a tiny mind control implant device injected into her shoulder via ulterior, medical vaccination and her days fade in soporific, finger tip attachment to an electronic work board that renders her neurology fully deplete and despatched, but for a virtual functionality that is sustained to keep her alert to operating the board through which, she is managed and tracked by constant pulsing running along cables that intersect universal airwaves that are controlled by the agenda of an ominous, central network.

“Nonsense!  You have an overactive imagination child.  Go to dots on lines!”  “Yes…”

How do you send your child into schooling when you’re still busy with the drivel and duel of panel beating 28 year old shunts out of your own brain that were imprinted there upon your impressionable, trusting running system by an outmoded belief pattern that somehow got caught up in the workings of an education system that didn’t detect that it had left you languishing in a mental fender bender because its proper channels hadn’t done enough homework to learn how to square away bits of retrograde data by thorough and regular, official defragmentation after admitting fresh data from an otherwise reputable source that was subsequently deemed corroborated enough and sufficiently and fundamentally important enough to be included in the school curriculum, years after erstwhile emergence of such ‘facts’?  Ask every teacher of every syllabus that was ever imposed on her, if any bit of it, or anything of their own personal bent, was ever intended to inculcate into her that the Earth is 3000 years old [sic] and they’d all, most probably, categorically deny knowledge, whatsoever, of any glitch glitching on their watch:

 “Ha, ha, oh WHAT a s-i-l-l-y girl!”
“Hmph!  Vel, I don’t know vot is da matta viff her; sometime she vurk ant sometime she do not.”

So!  Why then, were all her apps specifically set up to work all her delvings, musings and fathomings into conforming dots and lines into contrivance that could squeeze into a 3000 year time span?

All through tertiary and post-grad study and post, post-grad enquiry discovery, furtively, unwittingly, she had been constructing a clandestine template of all the bits and pieces along the way that felt as though they were lucid and meant something, had something valid to say, display, but which disparate pieces she’d secreted away for a better day because they caused dots and lines to go further awry.

Finally, near the festival of her 31st Earth year came that glorious, better day!  She’d wanted to run the streets, broadcasting her personal eureka streak that, no actually, she’d read it, at last, in someone’s authoritative black and white, the Earth, -the actual bloody big ball that she lived on that she could suppose wasn’t just someone’s imaginative fake, she could stake truth upon it, couldn’t she, that the planet was really real, exactly as it had been represented, all of it, from Pakistan back to India, from the North Pole down past the Equator and then back up around the other side again, leaning at a slight angle, spinning very fast, and cavorting at unimaginable speed in a sortive circular path?  -That Earth, she could pretty well be almost utterly sure now, is more like 4.5 BILLION years old – (old, old, old)…
[“...say what? Just a little bit of a calculus difference between 3000 and 4500000000 don’t you think?”]

A whole lot of all things suddenly made some kind of supreme sense and intersectedly, miraculously arranged into a kind of pre-ordained, natural order and her intelligence could perceive the dimmedness of cranial bone pressure roll away from her mental optical nerve, like the eternal reprieve in the brain of the King of the Dead when Aragorn says: “I hold your oath fulfilled; go; be at peace.”*  awrrrhhhh. . .!  Washed brain.  Then could she j-u-m-p for joy!  Freeee fall . . . ..”

But, for this, er, minor error, this little discrepancy that had kept her machine in grave incompatibility for all of her miniscule years and had kept her adult busy with subsidiary musings, delvings and fathomings that might otherwise have never been necessary, who could she sue?  Granted, it has to be admitted that there were some who ventured to diagnose her as paranoid delusional.  Others thought faintly to peg her manic depressive.  Then there was the spell of RE-ME-dial sessions in grade classes because she reversed her ‘S’s’ and looked with her closed eye through the toilet roll she was holding that they expected her to interpret as a telescope, so they named her dyslexic.  And when the school doctor (a little old man with hairy, exploratory hands who wheezed and peered through bulging eyes) came to the school library, and made her take off her dress behind a screen (before she wore a bra) and physically examined her chest, and then pulled back the elastic on her panties and had a good look inside, she did get rather extremely hyperventilatative and while she was trying to work out why he would need to do that, but that no matter what, she really did think it was not ok by her, the teachers were making her line up with all the other little girls and no one warned her that some scary woman in a white dress was going to grab her by the arm, and jab a series of different, painful needles into her shoulder, (AND that she’d never lose the scars) and well, well, that made her finally, totally, combustatively hysterical.

When her second child was only very little, she’d only just instituted her own carefully constructed series of occupational therapy sessions for “flat map syndrome”: she had believed, conceptually, yes, there was cognizant, that the Earth was round, but, what should have been experienced as a sphere, had been implanted in the sensory receptors of her brain as a forever flat, double A4 portrait page.  North was up, Alaska and Russia were ‘on opposite ‘sides’’.  Off the blue edges of the pages, the inconceivably huge Ocean that took up most of ‘the back’ of the planet was non-existent.  To really re-construe in her whole being that the Earth was round, she began to draw balls and orbs, bounce soccer balls and twirl them round; she tore the A4 pages from the book and would fold them into a cone so that Alaska could meet Russia.  Then she remembered that she’d seen, with her own eyes, the curve of the skies from the top of the World Trade Centre and soon, the black canvass of night sky, that used to hang flat above her head, was transforming into a dimensional dome of infinite space.  She handled a children’s globe, spinning it, tying string around its latitudes and longitudes to see where the strand would pass through in mirror hemispheres.  Aeroplanes no longer flew perpendicular when they were going North.  Visually, she entered and re-entered into herself the one third ratio body of water that the Pacific is, across which, arching backwards towards it, with the theoretical ‘back’ of the Earth being Africa, she’d reach left and right hands to feel the arc from Hawaii’s Haleakala Crater to New Zealand’s Lake Rotopounamu.

If she could’ve sent her first child off to a school that reassured her that they weren’t also going to put into his little operating system such a conflagrated mess of jabs and invasive medical inspections and bits of irregular scientific sentiment that would firewall the vast reaches of his neurological notions, she surely would have.  But when she politely enquired of the secretary how they dealt with religious education and the person shrieked back down the phone,

“well, do you believe that Jesus is the son of God or don’t you?”

she had to confess that she might be a little deterred by some doubts; and then she just had to retreat in reiterated cowardice when a neighbour’s child came home from the school and taught her child the statement of fact that Jesus made the Earth.  She really couldn’t claim that her emerging scientific brain was in any way endowed with the tools or skills necessary to make such a quantum leap of that sort of girth.  When no other schools appeared in the vicinity after long hard looking, an interim turned permanent and her kid was unschooled, with her ever telling him,

“don’t believe what I’m telling you.  This is what I’ve found out for now, but, it might all be wrong anyway, so wait until I’ve read some more and then I’ll tell you what I’ve read.  You read too and make up your own mind”.

Privately she continued a modest interlude of mourning that no-one around her, when she was supposed to be experiencing genuinely that the Earth was round, knew anything of Maria Montessori.

Of course, all of that had put her into a most exponentially, incendiary position with the in-laws, who’d already had quite the painful haul of getting over the home birth stints.  She’d just had enough of being prodded and poked and being made to be naked for invasive examinations of the most confronting sort and she didn’t like stark, long, cold corridors smelling of chemicals – gave her the creeps; as her belly had been inflating, so had her heeby jeebies.  So when she bumped into some lovely, angel adorned literature presenting verifiable references in an informed article that spoke with credible, substantiated, authoritative witness about the very real option of avoiding pushing the babe into the waiting arms of a sterile, starched white tunic and shining metal implements that were ready and waiting to intrude, invade, slice, through skin, tissue, sinew and ligaments, interspersed with more gratuitous pricks by a medley of more needles, she thanked magical grace of provision and made spontaneous, intuitive decision, which she clinched by reading Leboyer* and Odent, a world famous, natural obstetrician.

On Sunday 6 September, 2009, she was relating an episode of her sagas in ongoing epic escapading:

Circa 1997, she was driving along in a car with her father-in-law.  He was her second.  Roman Catholic. Her first was Protestant.  She hadn’t wanted to have another.  Of any sort.  In fact, she’d been determined not to have even the first one.  But, the channels of the stream of early life simply swept girls being reared in those times into becoming a daughter-in-law and wife.

There’s a photo of her, standing pensive by the Kirk door, about to be given away to a second man as his daughter, by law.  She tells she’ll never forget lucidly thinking, “What the b. h. am I doing?  Here I go again . . .” because the government of her partner-in-love wouldn’t accept his paternity of their unborn child if he wasn’t officially wed to the mother before the happy arrival.  For nationalities and registries dear, for bits of stamped, signatoried paper and little, official A6 books.  Against her accruing personal judgement and will, but, with controversy on the mend and no conspiracy to contend, wending down the portentous altar again.

So, five years later, she’s driving along in her second m i l’s Fiat with her second f i l, whom she’d already p’d off by homebirth and homeschool and a whole lot of other controversies.  No wonder he was piqued at managing to land himself this little, inconvenient errand of ferrying d i l to an appointment with some sort of strange doctor.

A complimentary therapist in fact, one of the few to choose from in the small town some person of the future might deem stranded back in inquisitional waters of the dark ages; an upper crust woman with a chip on her shoulder, because, poor soul, in that controversially correct milieu, she’d wandered into a modality that required of her, to be brave enough, to dangle a rabbit’s foot over her clients.

In the car some inane exchange was going on to pass the stationary moments until the robot (traffic light) said go and imminent reprieve from the awkward proximity would be in just a few streets.  She was probably babbling on unformulatedly, the way she would when she zoned out and deserted her mouth because the context was too phobiac to handle.  Then the car lurched her extroverted into f i l’s gruff grunt, “Yes, I’ve read ggggGrof!”.  The few streets were passing and she was speeding her library for something that was ringing, “Grof, Grof, who’s this Grof, sounds like that Janov guy, the primal scream thing, Grof, Grof”, and f i l is still gruffing invectively and she’s still processing, “he thinks I’ve read this Grof guy, must be a really controversial dude, this thing has got him hot” and then, simultaneously pumping anchors and professorial pomposity, f i l expletes, “you, you, you  . . . Stonehengers!”.

“. . . Take me back to the Ring Stones, blah blah”*, a song of hers, from four years earlier!  Neatly and succinctly, f i l had classified her within a certain framework and held over her a controversial opinion that she couldn’t deflect, because, cast in stone, it was after the fact.  She would catch up on some of f i l’s background reading twelve years later, to discover, that ‘ggggGroff’* would say, she’d been going through a ‘Spiritual Emergency’ without support or understanding in any way.

She should have got it when she was harassed out of her tree for wanting black people of her land to be free.  But she didn’t get it.  A general spirit of allowance, tolerance and celebration of diversity?  No.  Wherever did she line up that pile of hooey?  With much more sidelong gruff she’d get that her sense of stuff was dire degree of controversy: home birth, homeschooling, breast feeding, child centred nappy training, natural remedies, allowing boys to play with dolls, staying up late to watch the stars and the dawn, men with long hair, friendly meal times, being in love, meditation, dancing, children’s gift hunts at Christmas, heartfelt, transparent communication, a garden fence made of wattle sticks, growing things, mulching, recycled irrigation?  Living au naturel in an eco exercise – that, was certainly uncivilised!  A thespianic festival for her second born, telling an allegory from “Story of an African Farm”*, with Earth, Fire, Air and Water in a performance art piece?  It had seemed fitting- the Earth was four and a half billion years old!  Some kind of matriarchal entity definitely a senior, surely one would find it in one’s own interests to pay respects, especially since the large, apparently living ‘She’ is the only, actually known version of home for as far as the eye can see . . ..  “Yes!  I’ve read Eliade!”

Under the auspices of his full time, full pay, music education post in an academic institution, f i l surely voyeured Shamanism, in a leisurely, in-depth study of Eliade.  But this is most forbidden foray for d i l, fathoming her fulcrum toward quantum definition, while delving the development of appropriate skills and running around between a toddler who’s 1, a boy who’s 4 and f i l’s 26 year old boy who’s faithfully joining lines and dots on a stave.  While he’s trying to straight line his dotty family through non controversy, without labels – new age, conspiracy theorists, life artists, musicians, whatever, his bank account is flat-lining and he’s uncovering that his teachers withheld the secret that fiat is not only a car.

Washed brainers get that dots join lines in an electronic board that controls supremely via the spread of bits of highly prized, printed paper.  But it’s all apparently phony, worthless actually, since the paper’s value is based on gold that is all vanished and gone from some Fort or other.  Or so it is said.

A number of seemingly intelligent and credible experts inside the internet are talking most authoratively about a small group of debased villains who blackmailed a large government into escalating a global banking scam to the tune of a couple of some trillion digits, in the most fraudulent, sinister scheme of dastardly robbery of the people’s money in Common and Post Common Era* history.

To be or not to be conned?

To be cont.

Ambrasia Kurtz

Post Script from Sending’s sources:

In Sending Fie, Ambrasia took the liberty of trying to convey the complexity of working with truly authentic sources that have been on extensive foray through the cavernous membranes that cajole between different dispensations that jostle in contra-distinctory disarray in the worlds between worlds of converging eras in the 21st century P.C.E. societal display of diversity within humanity on 4.5 billion years old planet Earth.

*1  Peter Jackson’s “Lord of the Rings” Movie Trilogy after the works of J.R.R. Tolkien
*2  “Birth Without Violence” Frederick Leboyer
*3  “Red Stones”, a song, from the album and staged show: “. . . and on the way I dropped it.” 1993
http://dl.getdropbox.com/u/1469150/red%20stones%20151009.mp3 (see from d.p.w.t., notes page)
*4  “The Stormy Search for the Self” Christina Grof & Stanislav Grof MD
*5  the allegory of ‘The Hunter’ in “The Story of an African Farm” Olive Schreiner
*6  (as opposed to the terms B.C. and A.D., the terms B.C.E. – Before Common Era,
C.E. – Common Era and P.C.E. – Post Common Era offer universally courteous options for
referencing dots that join time lines.)