humor

THINGS WE CAN LEARN FROM A DOG...
Never pass up the opportunity to go for a joyride.
Allow the experience of fresh air and the wind in your face to be pure ecstasy.
When loved ones come home, always run to greet them.
When it's in your best interest, practice obedience.
Let others know when they've invaded your territory.
Take naps and stretch before rising.
Run, romp and play daily.
Eat with gusto and enthusiasm.
Be loyal.
Never pretend to be something you're not.
If what you want lies buried, dig until you find it.
When someone is having a bad day, be silent, sit close by and nuzzle them gently.
Thrive on attention and let people touch you.
Avoid biting when a simple growl will do.
On hot days, drink lots of water and lay under a shady tree.
When you're happy, dance around and wag your entire body.
No matter how often you're scolded, don't buy into the guilt thing and pout...run right back and make friends.
Bond with your pack.
Delight in the simple joy of a long walk.

news you can use

Environmentalism, in the name of protecting endangered species, has led
the government to stopping activities that are beneficial to human
beings. We are told to sacrifice human life, our lives, to those of
fish, birds, trees and rats - to value nature above ourselves. In this
way, environmentalism is turning man into this country's most endangered
species.

Man: The Endangered Species
Glenn Woiceshyn

Imagine you are a farmer who depends on water from a nearby reservoir.
The government knows this but cuts off your supply in the name of saving
some fish. You suffer severe damages to crops and livestock - but are
told that the fishes' "interests" supersede yours.
ÊÊÊÊÊA tall fish tale? No, it actually happened in 1992 to several
Oregon farmers who depend on water from the Klamath Irrigation Project
near the Oregon - California border. The government was enforcing the
Endangered Species Act (ESA) to protect the Shortnose Sucker and the
Lost River Sucker, at a cost to the farmers of $75 million.
ÊÊÊÊÊThe Sucker fish is but one of countless examples of the ESA being
used to block productive activities - i.e., activities beneficial to
people - such as farming, forestry, and hydroelectric power. The
Northern Spotted Owl became famous when timber production was virtually
halted in the Northwest to protect the species. Near Bakersfield,
California, a farmer was arrested in 1994 by Fish and Wildlife officers
for inadvertently killing five Tipton kangaroo rats while plowing his
own field. His tractor and plow were seized as "murder weapons." Under
the ESA, he faced heavy fines and three years in prison.
ÊÊÊÊÊ"The Endangered Species Act is the pit bull of environmental
statutes," according to Senator John Chafee (R-R.I.), who, together with
Senator Dirk Kempthorne (R-Idaho), has introduced legislation
(Endangered Species Reauthorization Act of 1997) to "reform" the 1973
ESA. Unfortunately, this bill - along with virtually all Republican
proposals - is merely a cosmetic attempt to make it somewhat more
cumbersome for the government to protect endangered species. To achieve
real reform, the environmentalist philosophy underlying the ESA must be
opposed.
ÊÊÊÊÊWhat motivates environmentalists to protect endangered species,
with so much zeal that they are oblivious to the harm inflicted on
people?
ÊÊÊÊÊSome environmentalists assert that "species diversity" is extremely
beneficial to man. But environmentalists are the staunchest opponents of
genetic engineering - which has vast potential for creating new species.
Some environmentalists assert that an endangered species could possess
medical secrets beneficial to man. But, in 1991, when taxol - processed
from the Pacific yew tree - was discovered to be highly effective in
treating certain forms of cancer, environmentalists blocked harvesting
of the yew tree. Whenever man's needs conflict with the "interests of
nature," environmentalists take the side of nature.
ÊÊÊÊÊThe real motive behind environmentalism is stated by David Graber
(a biologist with the U.S. National Park Service): "We are not
interested in the utility of a particular species, or free - flowing
river, or ecosystem to mankind. They have intrinsic value, more value -
to me - than another human body, or a billion of them."
ÊÊÊÊÊThis "intrinsic value" ethic means that man must value nature - not
for any benefit to man, but because nature is somehow a value in and of
itself. Hence, nature must be kept pristine despite the harm this causes
man. We must halt activities beneficial to us, such as farming,
forestry, and treatment of cancer, in order to safeguard fish, birds,
trees, and rats.
ÊÊÊÊÊThroughout history, people were told to sacrifice their lives to
God, the community, the state, or the Fuhrer - all with deadly
consequences. Now we are being told to sacrifice our lives to nature.
And current environmental legislation, such as the ESA, provides
government with massive powers to enforce such sacrifices. What
disasters could such power lead to?
ÊÊÊÊÊSome environmentalists have expressed their preference. "Until such
time as Homo sapiens should decide to rejoin nature," writes biologist
Graber, "some of us can only hope for the right virus to come along."
City University of New York philosophy Professor Paul Taylor adds:
"[T]he ending of the human epoch on Earth would most likely be greeted
with a hearty 'Good Riddance.'"
ÊÊÊÊÊWhile extreme, these anti-human sentiments are logically consistent
with environmentalism's "intrinsic value" philosophy: Since man survives
only by conquering nature, man is an inherent threat to the "intrinsic
value" of nature and must therefore be eliminated. Environmentalism
makes man the endangered species.
ÊÊÊÊÊThe only antidote to these haters of mankind and their anti-human
philosophy is to uphold man's right to pursue his own life. His nature
demands that he does this best by improving his environment through
technology and production.
ÊÊÊÊÊIt is time for Congress to uphold man's rights by abolishing any
environmental legislation that allows government to sacrifice people to
nature. As a start, rather than "reform" it, Congress should abolish the
Endangered Species Act.

Glenn Woiceshyn is a senior writer for the Ayn Rand Institute in Marina
del Rey, California.

Reputable scientists do not accept the theory of global warming. There
is a catastrophe awaiting this country - not one caused by global
warming, but by environmentalism's growing success at politicizing
science.

Global Warming vs. Science
Global Warming Campaign Subordinates Science to Politics
By Robert W. Tracinski

In December the world's diplomats will meet in Japan to sign a treaty
constricting the lifeblood of industrial civilization: fossil fuels.
Like other national leaders, President Clinton is promoting the premise
that the carbon dioxide released by such fuels is causing a dangerous
global warming. This is no longer a hypothesis, we are repeatedly told
by our politicians and journalists, but a fact accepted by an
international consensus of scientists.
ÊÊÊÊÊThis contention, however, is the product not of scientific judgment
but of political considerations. The chilling reality is that the
scientific evidence does not support the global warming case - and there
is no scientific consensus maintaining that it does.
ÊÊÊÊÊPatrick Michaels, for example, professor of environmental sciences
at the University of Virginia, points to the data from the worldwide
network of weather stations. They show a 0.9 degree Fahrenheit rise in
average global temperature since 1880 - but all of it before 1940. That
is, while industrial activity has exploded and CO2 emissions have almost
tripled since 1940, no warming has occurred during that time.
ÊÊÊÊÊFred Singer, another climatologist from the University of Virginia
and the former head of the National Weather Satellite Service, confirms
that satellite measurements of atmospheric temperature reveal no
increase over the past 18 years - the entire period for which such data
have been collected.
ÊÊÊÊÊEven if there is some warming, adds Hugh Ellsaesser, a
meteorologist at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, there is no
evidence that it is man-made. There was a well-documented warm period
900 years ago - long before the Industrial Revolution - when the global
temperature was one to two degrees higher than today (incidentally,
without any apocalyptic consequences).
ÊÊÊÊÊThe renowned computer models on which much of the fear-mongering is
based are fallacious, says MIT meteorology professor Richard Lindzen. He
notes that they cannot account for cooling factors like cloud cover and,
had the models been applied to the past century, would have overstated
the rate of warming by more than 100 percent.
ÊÊÊÊÊAt least 80 climate scientists have now signed the 1995 Leipzig
Declaration, stating that "we cannot subscribe to the so-called
'scientific consensus' that envisages climate catastrophes and advocates
hasty actions."
ÊÊÊÊÊWhy is the content - indeed, the very existence - of such
viewpoints largely ignored? The answer is that while genuine scientific
debate does not require the suppression of dissenting voices, a
politically motivated crusade does. Environmentalists have created a
bogus consensus, in order to further the movement's ideological goal of
expanding government and constraining industry. The process of an
honest, objective search for scientific truth is being abandoned for
political ends.
ÊÊÊÊÊThis approach was starkly illustrated by the recent summoning of
television weathermen to the White House. Is there any doubt that
science was being subordinated to politics when President Clinton -
treating the weathermen like servile propagandists of some totalitarian
regime - exhorted them to mouth the party line on global warming during
their broadcasts?
ÊÊÊÊÊThere is a persistent effort by environmentalists to get the public
to believe that global warming is a scientifically accepted fact. The
2,000 scientists who contributed to a 1996 report of the U.N.'s
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) are often cited as the
core of this supposed consensus. But many of those names were included,
not as recognized climate scientists, but merely as official
representatives of their governments. A number of actual climatologists
are on the list only because their data were cited or they were asked to
review parts of the report - not because they endorsed its conclusions.
In fact, the list includes outspoken critics of the global warming
claims, such as Michaels, Lindzen and Robert Balling.
ÊÊÊÊÊThis "consensus" was manufactured primarily by a small number of
policy-makers and politically ambitious scientists. They were the ones
who wrote the report's summary, which declares that global warming is an
uncontested truth. According to Robert Reinstein, the State Department's
chief negotiator at the 1990 Earth Summit, the wording of the summary
was hammered out by diplomats and "must be considered purely a political
document, not a scientific one."
ÊÊÊÊÊJust as the Environmental Protection Agency banned DDT despite the
conclusion of its own scientific panel that the pesticide was safe -
just as Congress, in response to the acid-rain campaign, enacted massive
restrictions on industry in defiance of the major scientific study
Congress itself had commissioned - so do today's environmentalists
pursue a political agenda in militant indifference to the objective
evidence.
ÊÊÊÊÊAs December's summit nears, there is indeed a catastrophe that our
leaders must act to avert. But the catastrophe is not global warming; it
is environmentalism's growing success at politicizing science.

Robert W. Tracinski is a senior writer for the Ayn Rand Institute in in
Marina del Rey, California.

Environmentalists, proclaiming that nature should remain "pure and
untouched," have enacted measures which literally have led to the deaths
of human beings. In principle, these environmentalists are no different
than the reputed Unabomber, Ted Kacynski.

The "Green" Unabomber
Is the Unabomber an Environmentalist?
By Robert W. Tracinski

As Ted Kaczynski goes on trial for the terrorist attacks attributed to
the Unabomber, many are lamenting the bad press he has brought to the
environmentalist movement. How unfortunate, the general sentiment goes,
that the actions of one lone madman should tarnish such an admirable
cause. He is not one of us, environmentalists adamantly declare.
ÊÊÊÊÊIsn't he?
ÊÊÊÊÊIn the cause of preserving "wild nature," the Unabomber, in his
"manifesto," calls for a "revolution against the industrial system." He
acknowledges that, as a result, "many people will die" because the
world's population "cannot even feed itself . . . without advanced
technology." But such deaths must be accepted "stoically," he notes,
because they are "part of the nature of things." It is urgent to
preserve an untouched nature, the Unabomber asserts, even if the effects
on human life are disastrous.
ÊÊÊÊÊIs this philosophy different in principle from the views of
mainstream environmentalists? Is this different from the elevation of
the "welfare" of the snail darter and the spotted owl above the welfare
of man? Isn't the Unabomber adopting the environmentalists' objective of
defending nature by restricting industry and technology? Leaving aside,
for the moment, the question of the Unabomber's methods, isn't his basic
goal - his fundamental value - identical to that of environmentalists?
ÊÊÊÊÊWhen a drug called Taxol, found in the bark of the Pacific Yew
tree, was discovered to be an effective treatment for breast and ovarian
cancer, environmentalists blocked large-scale harvesting in order to
save the forests. What about the people dying of cancer? Nature, they
said, has priority.
ÊÊÊÊÊWhen the man-made pesticide DDT was still being used, malaria
(which is carried by mosquitoes) was almost eradicated worldwide. Today,
with the environmentalists having lobbied to ban DDT, a resurgence of
malaria is killing about five million people every year. Yet, while the
alleged effects of DDT on birds generated horrified outrage on the part
of environmentalists, the incontestable destruction of human life caused
by the absence of DDT generates only indifference.
ÊÊÊÊÊThese are not isolated instances. In case after case - whether it
is the irradiation of food to kill deadly bacteria, the construction of
dams to provide clean water and electricity, or the clearing of
bug-infested swampland to make room for houses and shopping malls - the
environmentalists consistently oppose industrial and technological
development. They oppose it - and are willing to pay the price in human
misery and deaths.
ÊÊÊÊÊMainstream environmentalists proclaim that the preservation of
nature ought to be valued above human interests. Well, the Unabomber is
merely taking that idea seriously. As the noted environmentalist
Kirkpatrick Sale has said: "The problem is that technology is
overwhelming us psychologically, economically, socially. I think that
has to be on the agenda and talked about. And I think that's exactly
what the Unabomber succeeded in doing."
ÊÊÊÊÊAccording to one of the defense lawyers in the World Trade Center
bombing case, the mass media "presented [Kaczynski] as a pop hero, a
rebel who was protesting the encroaching oppression of technology."
Given the premise that technology is oppressive, he is a "pop hero." The
Unabomber embraces the essential tenet of environmentalism - the tenet
that the man-made is abhorrent, that the "natural" is noble, and thus
that man must be sacrificed to nature.
ÊÊÊÊÊNow, most environmentalists ostensibly condemn the Unabomber. They
say that the Unabomber's methods are antithetical to theirs. They insist
that they do not support the killing of people in pursuit of
environmental goals.
ÊÊÊÊÊBut don't they?
ÊÊÊÊÊDoes it matter to the woman dying of cancer that the man standing
in the way of a cure is not a mad bomber, but a lawyer for the Audubon
Society? Does it matter to the African father whose child has died from
malaria that the death was caused, not by a terrorist, but by a
bureaucrat following legal procedures?
ÊÊÊÊÊAs the effects of environmentalism become more evident - when food
rots in the homes of those who lack refrigeration (because CFCs have
been banned and the alternatives are too costly), when houses are
unheated (because the use of fossil fuels has been curtailed), when
farmers cannot grow enough food (because chemical fertilizers and
pesticides have been prohibited), when we are denied life-saving new
medicines (because genetic engineering has been outlawed) - will we be
better off because it was done by legislation rather than terrorism?
ÊÊÊÊÊKaczynski's prosecutors have argued that they should be allowed to
ask for the death penalty because the Unabomber's writings show a
"hatred of people." It is time to ask whether the same accusation can be
leveled against the environmentalist movement as a whole.

Robert W. Tracinski is a senior writer for the Ayn Rand Institute in
Marina del Rey, CA; http://www.aynrand.org

Animal "rights" advocates claim that they condemn man's use of animals
because they believe in the "morality" of upholding animal rights.
"Rights," however, can only be held by beings who are capable of
reasoning and choosing. This excludes animals. The people who claim
otherwise actually want to sacrifice man's rights - and welfare - to
creatures who cannot think or grasp any concept, much less the concept
of "morality."

Animals "Rights": The New Man Haters
Edwin A. Locke, Ph.D.

Human life versus animal life. This fundamental conflict of values was
dramatized on June 23 in Washington D.C., when an animal rights march
was opposed by AIDS victims marching in support of research on animals.
ÊÊÊÊÊIt is an indisputable fact that many thousands of lives are saved
by medical research on animals. But animal rightists don't care. PETA
(People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) makes this frightening
clear: "Even if animal tests produced a cure for AIDS, we'd be against
it." Such is the "humanitarianism" of animal rights activists.
ÊÊÊÊÊHow do these advocates try to justify their position? As someone
who has debated them for years on college campuses and in the media, I
know firsthand that the whole movement is based on a single - invalid -
syllogism, namely: men feel pain and have rights; animals feel pain;
therefore, animals have rights. This argument is entirely specious,
because man's rights do not depend on his ability to feel pain; they
depend on his ability to think.
ÊÊÊÊÊRights are ethical principles applicable only to beings capable of
reason and choice. There is only one fundamental right: a man's right to
his own life. To live successfully, man must use his rational faculty -
which is exercised by choice. The choice to think can be negated only by
the use of physical force. To survive and prosper, men must be free from
the initiation of force by other men - free to use their own minds to
guide their choices and actions. Rights protect men against the use of
force by other men.
ÊÊÊÊÊNone of this is relevant to animals. Animals do not survive by
rational thought (nor by sign languages allegedly taught to them by
psychologists). They survive through inborn reflexes and
sensory-perceptual association. They cannot reason. They cannot learn a
code of ethics. A lion is not immoral for eating a zebra (or even for
attacking a man). Predation is their natural and only means of survival;
they do not have the capacity to learn any other.
ÊÊÊÊÊOnly man has the power to deal with other members of his own
species by voluntary means: rational persuasion and a code of morality
rather than physical force. To claim that man's use of animals is
immoral is to claim that we have no right to our own lives and that we
must sacrifice our welfare for the sake of creatures who cannot think or
grasp the concept of morality. It is to elevate amoral animals to a
moral level higher than ourselves - a flagrant contradiction. Of course,
it is proper not to cause animals gratuitous suffering. But this is not
the same as inventing a bill of rights for them - at our expense.
ÊÊÊÊÊThe granting of fictional rights to animals is not an innocent
error. We do not have to speculate about the motive, because the animal
"rights" advocates have revealed it quite openly. Again from PETA:
"Mankind is the biggest blight on the face of the earth"; "I do not
believe that a human being has a right to life"; "I would rather have
medical experiments done on our children than on animals." These
self-styled lovers of life do not love animals; rather, they hate men.
ÊÊÊÊÊThe animal "rights" terrorists are like the Unabomber and Oklahoma
City bombers. They are not idealists seeking justice, but nihilists
seeking destruction for the sake of destruction. They do not want to
uplift mankind, to help him progress from the swamp to the stars. They
want mankind's destruction; they want him not just to stay in the swamp
but to disappear into its muck.
ÊÊÊÊÊThere is only one proper answer to such people: to declare proudly
and defiantly, in the name of morality, a man's right to his life, his
liberty, and the pursuit of his own happiness.

Edwin A. Locke, Ph.D. is a senior writer for the Ayn Rand Institute in
Marina del Rey, California.

Nostalgia

Heather Dyer

It was the diamond-studded leash
that led my million-dollar poodle.

It was the sapphire necklace
that Ryan tried to steal.

It was the iron chain
that bound my wrists to the swingset.

It was the leather belt
that made the fashion show.

It was the threadbare rope
that I used to climb out of the quicksand.

It was the trusty lasso
WonderWoman used to catch the crooks.

It was the the thin cable
that helped me to the top of Mount Everest.

It was the fishing line
that caught the killer shark.

But now, it's just a hair ribbon
that lays, limp in my jewelry box.

NIGHT

Michael Arthur Finberg
Mfinberg@hotmail.com
HarvestofGems@hotmail.com

What is this fuzzy
cold ball whose silky
skin is strength
indeed,

Whose dark expanse is
set to rescue,
these twinkling stars
that stumble in
their sleep.

< going somewhere >

ray heinrich
ray@scribbledyne.com

the radio
and those other cars
on and off
the interstate
the blue signs
and the red ones
and the mileage markers
201.7
201.8
and the license plates
ISEEU2
and GOSHIML8
and someone else
GOIN2KC
and the bar-b-que freetos
and the trucks
and the pepsi
and the hours
and the cheetos
and the towns

ray heinrich
ray@scribbledyne.com

< free will >

about five miles
down the road
they changed their minds
came back
burned the village
took the men
down to the river
and shot them

< fish and promises >

ray heinrich
ray@scribbledyne.com

as your letter opens
the mist
rolling from the hills
is filled
with the black-tipped wings of gulls
tiny specks on some sky we shared
carrying you off
like the silver-sided fish they love

promises
always enough to get me up
to catch the alarm before it goes
and shower and dress
and eat and leave

pictures
and things remembered
and words said
and the parts of them that come back
there are always enough of those

the black-tipped wings of gulls
tonight
i'll sleep with them

elements

ray heinrich
ray@scribbledyne.com

not earth or air or water or fire
or the red-orange ribbons
running up the sky
just green somewhere
and the touch of your hand
years ago
filled with promises

< cycle >

ray heinrich
ray@scribbledyne.com

someday
(again)
the door
will be hard to reach

< covered in fur >

ray heinrich
ray@scribbledyne.com

wrapped in a warm day
and riding the sun
the leaves
are singing
and our mouths
are filled with breeze
below us are noses and faces and hands
"birds"
the mouths say
as they wave at us
but we smile our smile
all covered in fur

The Science of Poetry

Rochelle Holt

Study hard. Poetry is a science
not an art. - Harriet Monroe
(on an early rejection often recalled)

After the bitter
comes specific taste
lkike craft of carpentry-
building a hammock
or porch-glider
ad of paying a dime
to ride a stranger's pony.
All writing that lasts
is like that maybe:
the truth in lye soap;
flag-red stripe
revolving barber pole;
a roller-skate key;
saw/dust shuffling
on butchershop floor.

It's facts that matter
not mere statistics specifically;
although numbers count
in jumping double-dutch,
hopscotch on cracked cement,
frozen statues
in prairie,
or hide 'n seek
in grandpa's shed
behind the garden
near gangway
and a train
as we wave hello
to good-bye caboose
or sonductorman in front,
our engines revving fast
past the tavern and pain.

Poems fall
like rain in a barrel,
are delivered in quarts
like glass milk bottles
on back porch
as child os born again
pressing leaves flat
in brown scrapbook
or trading blue marble
for black rusty bell
found in cinderalley
on the way
to selling empty Coke
two bottles for one penny candy
or three cent wax red lips.
That's what matters
about magnifying
tissuethinwings
of orange butterfly
or Mississippi gold bug
on rose petal
or blade of dewey grass.
Not the search
for beauty in reason
but the struggle
to recall:
mist on toes
sun on eyes
snow on nose
and the sigh
of a mood at midnight
when the mind is awake
only in the dream.

6 poems by janet kuypers:

Called Me Twice

November 16, 1998

there are certain rules people follow

and they claim to have no beliefs
of a given subject
but they choose not to think about
their beliefs
they choose not to think

but I know what people
think when they think of me

and I know that this one
person says he's concerned
but my phone isn't ringing
and yes, he called me once
since I've been trapped
in this cage

he hasn't called me twice

But You Know What I Mean

December 20, 1998

When we were sitting in the water
and the water was warm
and it was like being in a bath tub
well, a bath tub with chlorine
and a light at the side and it was not like
you could be naked in it or anything
but you know what I mean
but when we were sitting in the water
we were looking at the sky for a bit
it was hard because it was not dark enough
because it is always better when there are no
lights on and you are not
in a mayor city or anything
we were just talking about how much
we loved astronomy
and we loved to look at stars
and we know where they are supposed to be in the sky
the stars
and what about cloud formations
that are the galaxy we are in
there is so much to know about astronomy
and I think it is the science of it
that makes us love it so much
you know, my old telescope is in the house here
and I think this is all a
good excuse to get it outside
at night and eventually use it

But It Is Cute

December 29, 1998

very time I go to the lake I feed the fish
and yes, I make small pieces
so that the little fish have a chance
so that they have a chance
to be big fish and eat other fish
survival of the fittest, I suppose
every once in a while a big fish makes his move
he watches the little fish eat
then he moves quickly, tries to eat a little fish
every once in a while a little fish
in trying to escape end up at the side of the lake
out of the water flopping around
when I get to see that I think
wait, and see if that little fish
flops his way back into the water
which he does
you can call this divine intervention
the little fish was smart enough
to get back into the water
maybe the fish was just flopping around
until it was able to breathe again
but it is cute
cruel, but cute

But I Won't

December 14, 1998

have you ever driven a truck before?
when you think of truck drivers you think
of people who live on the road driving semi trucks
you probably would just answer no

but the view is higher and you feel that
no one could hurt you
if they hit you with their car
they'll get more damage than you will

how it handles the road
if you ever got a chance to drive one
just for a bit, well, do it then
so you can say you have

there are many things you want to accomplish
jumping our of an airplane might be an example
my philosophy is
if you get the chance to do something, do it
take that chance
because you don't know how many chances you'll get

better

September 17, 1998

I had all of the other useless dronings and the high school proms
I've always thought I was good enough
then someone would remind me that I might be wrong
because someone else would always come along and cover me
with their better hair, their better clothes, their pulitzer prizes
Wow
I must really need all that those people have
i must want that, I thought naturally

some people always had the better cars with the nice red stripe
down the side of the car
or maybe better shoes or better clothes or a better date
doesn't it just suck how people can be the biggest jerks in their
day to day life to people they don't even know
isn't it funny how these people are invariably the ones
who have the money from the parents or they marry people eith money
and their life is spent in this plush life of heaven

And then there's you or me, someone who has always tried to do good
and they never have enough money or they have right clothes
or the wrong kind of car
I guess some people just have a run of bad luck and there
is one kid who tries to make it all better but just can't do it.

I don't know, maybe it's how you were raised that
will show what you look like, what you need, what you want
that makes all the difference.

Bad And Good

September 2, 1998

I just heard about an
unwarranted arrest for a
man who was technically a
couple of arrests in debt

One thing occurred to me
there are bad people in
the world, and good people
and some people deserve pain

So why have I been
better than good all my life?
I hope someone who is bad
can give me the answer soon

Please enjoy your Mad Lib Poem
Thank you, Elmer Feldstein

The Thrusting

I postulate the final swig of saliva
Feel it execute its way down my right ear lobe
Hiss at it burning my left nipple
And reach for the coffee mug to pour Ross Perot another
I think of how my eyelids ejaculate
Every time I let the cowpers fluid tease me
Then I harass down at my kneecaps -
drilling - lying - the glass of piss
And think of how these were the pinky fingers
That should have squatted you away from Susan B. Anthony
But didn't. And I keep spelunking
Why I scrumped your hell, took your milk.
I remember how Agent Mulder meddled way
Through me. Scully paddled me
From the inside out, and I kept coming back.
I let Hoe, I mean, Hope infect me, and now Hoe, I mean, Hope's
spinning a hole right through me. I orgasmed it.
Now I have to screw myself of vagina,
And my penis is gyrating between the
scrotum in the anusboinked in my clitoris.
But I have to splooge more. The fornicating
Doesn't last as long as Warren does.

Poem Before The News

Robery Michael O'Hearn

Excited again, exacting new words
dancing around in your head
never to find their way to paper
like slam dancers trying out new rain dances.

Certain phrases, even tautologies
make apparent the dumb lips movement
as if anticipating the taste
of some wildly exotic liqueur.

Would it be any less troubling to remember
that nothing can be said new that's not recycled,
and nothing's known that hasn't seen a prior sun.
Perhaps this heart wants to prematurely sing,

unable to leap high for a certain conciousness
employed when derailing its predictable sanity.
And you retell everything from beginning to end.
Now, are you tintillated by the evening news?

Now that's another story stuck up on ice.
So consult I-Ching and throw the dice.

NOTRE DAME

Anthony Robottom

I was in that place, a place I had read about.
A place in the movies.
A place where Quasimodo and Esmerelda
had lived and loved.
He was deaf and she was killed.
A gypsy linched for loving.
Even if he was a freak.
Others were in that place.

Tourists were inside.
Pilgrims were inside.
School kids were inside.
Priests were inside.
Prayers were inside.
I was in. With the others, but not.

There was darkness.
But there was glittering of gold.
There were glow worms on the walls.
There were the heavy smells of many burning spices.
There were arches curving through that black,
reaching heavenward.
Glimpses of stone, directing my thoughts.

There were my thoughts somehow.
There had been the sermons of centuries.
There had been the visitors of centuries.
I wonder if they felt the same.
After a bus journey like mine did they feel like this?
This magic of place and time.
The cathedral a capsule through time
had travelled along the centuries, until it met with me.

son

john sweet

her son drowns on a humid august afternoon

or else this

she drowns her son on a humid august afternoon

these small details matter

TOP GANGSTER

Cheryl A. Townsend

You bring out the top in me
lay you down submissive as a virgin
watch your face reveal fantasies
as I control fulfillment or dismay
I can see my tits Einsteining my squats
I can watch the muscles in my thighs
my hands can feminize you
as I raise your nipples to mine
I can smother you under my weight
flat against your compliant flesh
I'm a macho bitch and you'll take it
then I'll hold you in my arms as we sleep

PARFUM DE MINUIT

Taylor Graham
piper@innercite.com

She lifts the blue whorled glass
against the light: inside, a dark
spiral caught within itself,
a cosmos of wild weather
in her hands. Inside, the wind
goes careening through its stations,
seeking, seeking. But the glass
against her fingers is cool as rain,
gray-blue like old ladies' cheeks.
Stoppered. Inside, a genie
breathes forbidden sweetness
from his cheek, and swirls
his cape till all she sees
is blue as breathless.

Mama

EyemALPHA@aol.com

Your words, like unraveled bullets
fly fast from your lips.
I wish I could catch them but, hell,
I'm safer down here.
Your eyes, like microwaved flowers,
plead desperate for relief.
And, I, the source of your pain,
do nothing, but
wait--
to be devoured or saved--
because I've lost the fight.
You've beaten it out of me.

prose

The Warrior's Bible

Isabella Kraft
Bosco324@aol.com

Copyright © 1999 Isabella Kraft

Tao stood there in front of a face that was the perfect combination of her and Kane's features. The smooth curves of those features, the sharpness of his eyes, the perfect texture of his skin, all mixed into one face so foreign but so familiar. Only nature could construct something so utterly flawless as a face drawn from two sources. She probably would have stood there forever just staring at the boy if it were not for the fact that he happened to be on the wrong side of the battle field.
She knew that their kind developed quicker and lived longer than the race they had been spawned from, but this boy could only be a few days old. Already the structure of a six year-old had sprung from his face. "Amazing," her mind raced under the pressure of such thoughts. Was it some kind of growth hormone or genetic programming?
She wasn't too surprised to find that she would have fight her own son. Koan had designed him as a weapon and had probably programmed his mind the same way as well. But what did surprise her was the sudden realization that his appearance had triggered, he was her son. It surprised her that facts could be brought to form and have more influence on her emotions that way. There was no denying it anymore he simply looked too much like her to begin with.
It was a nice combination; her and Kane did produce beautiful children. Tao supposed that if nothing else came out of this battle just picking out what had come from her, what had come from him and what had come from both of them would be more than enough to entertain her after she died. Although the thought of her own son striking her down didn't sit right, Tao was still relatively mellow. She supposed that was what they had always called "her kind's way", but it didn't feel right for her to be so apathetic about fighting her own son to the death. She certainly didn't think that if ever placed in this kind of situation she would become more preoccupied with her son's appearance than with the course of her own life.
Quickly she glanced back at Koan, who was sitting at his throne like a vulture from the dark claws of a dead tree looking down eagerly at the scene before him. She hated him, an emotion she was not accustomed to feeling. Tao felt her blood flush through her veins even faster as she stared at him, as his laugh appeared to slow time, and as the light from the rapid bolts of pyrokinesis that would make her grave pasted him by without a scratch. It seemed things had grown more interesting than originally planned.
She didn't know what she expected to find in this man when she first ventured out on a mere rumor. Certainly he didn't expect them to come claim T'ai. Nor did Tao expect to find Kane flying cautiously behind her eager to help her out. That one moment made her realize how little she had known Kane.
Years of hate were buried under the bones of their people. Her race and his were so close in their son, so close it made him too powerful. He was the ultimate weapon. He was the Supreme. T'ai.
How dare they be so presumptuous as to try and save the boy from his creator. A creator whose skill with the ladders and threads of life were only matched by his thirst for conquest. An cliché of a dozen lunchbox super villains but true to the very last. And now that he was unleashing T'ai on his own parents she supposed she understood why he found this amusing.
In some sick demonic way she also found the sport in this match. Did she like the fact that a certain part of her was more intrigued by which of them was stronger? No of course not. If she had been self-conscious of the purity of her soul she probably would have hid this feeling from herself to the best of her ability, but she wasn't and hiding her true feelings about this battle would give her no advantage in it.
Kane stood behind her in his usual defensive battle posture. She scanned his mind for a moment. He was more uncomfortable with the turn of events than she, and he had already noticed how much he and T'ai looked alike. It seemed to please him but other then that had no effect on his disgust for the violence they would pursue. He knew that T'ai was more powerful than both of them.
Had it had the power to give her hope she would have done it. But she didn't bothered reaching out to T'ai's mind, because her mind told her he was too young for her to pick up on a thought pattern. No matter how old he looked. She wouldn't have been surprised if he actually was being controlled by Koan.
He had thrown two strong punches. She had caught them both. She had both of his hands in hers; they were deadlocked for the time being. "Hand and hand at last," she thought.
Tao was content just to leave it this way for awhile so that she could study the boy. She needed to devise an attack that would remove him from the battle field without doing any serious harm. So she noted everything about him to find that opening.
"He's got my hair," she mused. "And Kane's eyes."
The rest was hard to determine clearly. His face was so distorted by rage that his features were hard to read, but where this rage came from was the real question she should have been asking herself. This flaw in her concentration was not lost on Tao, or Kane as she noted, but she could force herself to remove the amusement that filled her mind every time he looked at her son.
T'ai had an advantage, he was a whole lot smaller than she. Though the deadlock had held him at bay for awhile it didn't take long for him to throw her off to the side. She tumbled hard into the harsh dirt below, feeling to rocks stab at her as she fell. "That brat," she remembered thinking.
She wasn't really hurt so she remained on the ground watching T'ai fight, searching for a flaw. At first she thought to boy careless and poorly trained for he wasn't finishing what he started. He had gotten one good hit on her but left her here and went after Kane instead of finishing her off (or at least getting a few more hits as to incapacitate her). Then she noted the slight way he was pulling back just before his knuckle made contact with the skin. He was holding his punches. This was fine if he was sparring with Kane and herself but not in a battle to the death. That it was not his true force. And that brought up the most frightening question, was this hesitation for love or for sport?
An interesting thought crossed Tao's mind. What if the boy saw it too? What if he knew and was reluctant about killing them. The resemblance between them was amazing, surely he hadn't ignored it?
Tao found herself smiling.
She looked up at Koan again. Such an arrogant smug bastard and he didn't even see T'ai's hesitation. Or maybe he just didn't care, maybe sport was sport to this guy regardless of who won or lost. Such a spiteful horrible creature, it would be too easy to call him of an alien race.
Suddenly on an impulse she scanned T'ai's emotions. He couldn't have formed any real thoughts and quite frankly even emotions were rare at this stage of human development, beside basic pain and pleasure, but there must be something there.
She was easily surprised at how complex the boy's mind already was. There were no thoughts but a fully developed emotional instinct instead, which was already divided between the orders "kill them" and a unsettling familiarity with "them" that kept him from complying.
Such doubt could easily be talked out of the boy. They would have to used it as quickly as possibly if they were to use it at all.

Tao gritted her teeth as a rock slammed into her. A rock was better than the spiked mines that were shooting and bouncing around the Koan's arena.
Apparently Koan had invested in some new toys just in case T'ai hesitated in attacking them. And now that he had finally noticed the Supreme's one flaw they were dodging spiked mines, lasers shots from below, and rocks that T'ai was managing to throw at them. These were BIG rocks.
For the time being it appeared that the only thing T'ai could do was throw rocks at them. It was the only action that would make it look like he was carrying his orders without doing any serious damage. The static that plagued the child's head were to harsh to ignore, to strong to suppress and to random to follow. His sharp his dulled to a wide ovalish form as he watched his parents dance above his head aglow like fireflies. "Master, they look familiar."
"They all look the same," Koan answered.
For a second Tao thought that T'ai wasn't too far for them to correct the harm done to his mind, but as she glanced back at T'ai and saw the joyous expression on his face upon hitting her she was starting to doubt that anything could save this boy. "The game had been lost before it had began," she thought. "His mind is to weak to save from the dark rhythms that demon chimes in his head."
Kane was managing to keep himself in control to avoid killing T'ai. "Damn him," she thought. His blasts were so controlled, so precise, if he just let go they'd be out of danger in no time at all. Why had human kind evolved to bear such great power over all? To light fires from their own souls. To fly into the sky like birds. To read the minds of others. Why if their was nothing they could do to control themselves from facing this?
With the explosions they were causing it was hard to believe that all they were shooting was their own energy. A small beam of energy hot enough to melt though steal, powerful enough to knock down mountains. Those of our time would call it magic or make them gods among us. Such a force is almost impossible to describe in the words modern thinking has provided, but if I was forced to put it in terms I would call it simple fire. Life brings it up from the deepest crevasses with such speed as to blind the eye if it had been visible. It's the kind of force that yields to nothing and nurtures everything through it's destruction. It is a miracle of nature that in even a thousand years time man learned to contain it. And in Kane's case controlled enough to avoid hurting their son.
She wasn't sure if she could blame him for that. After all her own blasts had been unusually sharp, although she had never intended them to be. It seemed that her instincts were to keep their son unharmed as well.
She sighed. They were getting no where like this, and she was beginning to tire. If things kept at this pace she would be impaled on one those spiked mines in no time. As soon as one blew up Koan released seven more. They had to attack him. That would stop the onslaught and free their son's mind.
She looked to Kane and reached out with her mind. It was hard to get through to him because of all the projectile flying around robbing them both of any concentration, but she saw him nodded his head at her and she knew he got the message.
Silently she counted off. Tao jumped on to one of the rocks T'ai had thrown at her and rode it in to the sky, collecting as much of the energy she had managed to absorb as she rose toward the ceiling. "One.........," her fingers tingled as she formed a tight ball with her hand. "Two........," her fist began to glow and had completely gone numb; she crouched down and prepared for their attack. In the back of her mind she picked up on Kane's attack charging too. She smiled to herself, part of Kane power was in his emotions. It appeared he had put every ounce of hate into this one. He would advantage their son.
"THREE!" she cut through the air as her body shot like a bullet towards the target. She lifted her fist and sped towards Koan. She criss-crossed with Kane as they left brilliant trails of gold in their paths. She hadn't needed to yell, but it felt good to charge at her enemy screaming into the wind. For a second she understood Kane's kind perfectly; there was nothing more exciting than this moment. A warrior she was not but in another life she could be a bearer of arms.
She opened her fist and shot her arm forward, sending a thick beam of blinding gold to Koan. She felt Kane let loose and for a while all she could see was the light. Her hands had faded into clouds of radiance and her hair was wiping through the backlash of air that tried to escape ground zero.
She saw it before she felt it. A small bolt of blue lightning disturbed the calm gold that surrounded them. She turned her head to see Kane fall to the bolt and managed to barely dodge it herself. In the shock she had lost the last of her attack and the clouds of gold were swept up by the wind almost suspiciously. They twisted around a dark figure who stepped put from the mist of their one chance at victory. Darkened by his own glowing blue aura that rose from him in flames that grew like cones and carried his hair into the hands of the wind.
As his glow subsided she saw her face looking back at her. After her own clouds of gold finally cleared she saw more clearly that it wasn't her face at all.
It was T'ai.
Without taking her eyes off T'ai she scanned the area to find Kane. His presence wasn't hard to miss in the energy, but he was seriously injured. T'ai probably wouldn't have been able to do that much damage if he hadn't caught both of them by surprise.
Much to her irritation she also picked up on Koan. "He's still alive," she thought. Of course he was, the full force of their blast hadn't had enough time to hit him. If only they had a few more seconds.
She suddenly realized that she would have to track T'ai's movements
with her sixth sense. T'ai was a lot faster now that he had gotten over his shyness towards attacking them. Tao was finally aware that the real battle had begun.
Crafty in his tactics he tried to catch her back with his fist by appearing behind her, but she turned sharply with a kick to meet him midstrike.
She nursed the sting in her soul as she watched T'ai's body flash through the air, but there was little time to concentrate on how hard it was to attack him. He soon regained control and came at Tao with such swiftness that it made his feet seem like wings. He was so fast that she barely saw his fist as clenched and sliced through the air towards her.
Much to his surprise, she caught his fist. Tao glazed at her own hand in frank amazement and never noticed his speed causing her to swing over and loose her balance. Her mind flooded with contradictions and complications. "How could I do that?"
She was weightless perfection. Once again her conscience body escaped time's restraints and broke free into a freefall of time. But even floating in midair she still couldn't avoid the blow that T'ai sent to her back. He proved her speed to be a fluke as he demonstrated his again. Two passes and T'ai was in front of her again. Two passes and he hit her hard in the abdomen.
It knocked the wind out of her and she was still recovering from his first blow. Her mind spun out of control with the air in her lungs. So much so that she didn't even notice it when she hit the ground. But she did feel the trickles of blood flooding her mouth and running slowly down her throat. She coughed and discovered new pains she wasn't even aware of.
"Damn kid, is this the way he treats his mother?" she thought as she managed to roll herself over. At least she wouldn't choke on her own blood. But he hadn't really hit her hard enough for this kind of physical damage, or had he? Hell it had only been two blows, was she losing her mind? Maybe it was true what they said about her kind being frail and fragile.
It was then that she looked up slightly and realized what had caused the damage. Her body colliding with the Earth had created a huge crate at least a few feet deep. "This is unbelievable," she thought. "There's no way.., how did I survive that?"
Did she survive that?
A few droplets of her blood hit the dry tan dirt as she tried very hard to catch her breath. Surely things weren't going to end like this.
In the distance, or at least what she thought was the distance she heard laughter. And as she lifted herself onto her elbows she saw it. Koan was sitting on his scarred throne laughing his head off. The throne was charred to a crisp black, but the scene had remained uncharged since before they attacked.
"No," she ground her teeth together. "We're not strong enough. I'm going to die here because that .....thing decided that corrupting my son would be funny."
T'ai stood over her at Koan's side smiling a smile that didn't belong to that face.

Koan laughed at her again. She was so infuriated that if she had been able to stand she might have attempted to attack him, but her spirit was broken (along with a few bones). She glazed into the empty black eyes of her son, Kane's eyes, and found herself wondering why she had come at all. Had she thought this child was going to love her? Had she thought this child would just be waiting for them? What had made her think that this was even her son? Yes he bore half of herself in that blood of his, but what difference did that make if his blood was cold?
Tao had always been told that her kind had children that immediately connected with their parents, but as she stared into those dark orbs she knew that this child would never be her son. He had shut her out. He had obviously recognized her, and that he had overcome his attachment to her and was now ready to carry out his mission.
Ideally she wondered whether another thing they said about her kind's children was true. That the child could not live without the parent, at least one, up to a certain point. Her kind lived so long that no one knew at what age the parent could die without killing the child or whether it was true at all. It was said that this psychic connection mentally supported the child throughout the early years and without it the child would become as lifeless as the crater she was sitting in. The parent need not be present, just alive in order for the child to live. But no one knew for certain whether such things were true or just wild myths that rose up from creative minds.
Well she was about to find out
Koan managed to tame his laughter for a moment and he turned to T'ai who stood there like an empty drone waiting for his next orders. Judging from the stories of parentless children Tao again wondered whether she was already dead. Perhaps it was T'ai that had already died, her T'ai. The T'ai that had inherited her reddish hair and her smile. This one floated like a lifeless basket of hope and used her smile to throw out his intentions.
"T'ai," Koan said. It burned Tao that he used his name. It fitted the boy. So much so that she would imagined that she would have named him the same thing herself if she had been given the opportunity. "You may kill her now," Koan finished.
Koan was gitty with amusement as T'ai raised one glowing hand to her. "Damn," she thought. "I can't even gather enough energy from the soil to defend myself and I'm too weak to channel all that energy." She clenched her fists and braced herself to die. She wasn't sure how it would happen, but in all likely hood he would throw that thing at her and it would consume her whole. It was now that she realize how impossible it was to prepare for death.
T'ai's blow of fury left his hand as he swatted it down at her. She saw the ball of light grow into the crater and as Tao felt the heat dance across her skin she noticed a figure moving to her side. She clenched her teeth and finally just gave up and curled herself up into a small ball, hoping for the best, hoping for a painless death.
It was then that she felt him. As his own blast easily knocked away T'ai's. She tried to look up at him. The light pierced her eyes from around his body, casting a brilliant glow around his figure and drowning out his golden aura. She had thought he was dead, but it appeared that Kane was still very much alive.
As the dust cleared Kane stood to face their son. His body had been bruised a little and the last blow had probably knocked him unconscious for this whole time, but he was finally ready to fight their son.
T'ai seemed generally amazed by Kane's display of honor. He had saved his mother's life and Tao was sure that somewhere that registered with the boy. T'ai was frozen. His eyes lightened slightly and his skin paled. Was he afraid of Kane? No, T'ai could kill Kane easily and he knew it, but the showcase of emotions and motivating factors that had just been displayed were completely foreign to the boy. He had never known love, he had never felt its warm presence and gentle glow, and although Tao and Kane were not in love there was a respect between them that had become a stronger bond then simple affection.
Kane's breath was heavy, his energy was weak and his body displayed this. He knew that if T'ai attacked now he would not survive. But he stood still, waiting patiently for the inevitable as if he was looking forward to it. His eyes burned with the life he could not find in himself. He couldn't find that last ounce of strength that he could use to defend himself. His hair was weighted down with sweat that ran off his tips and vanished into the humid air. His chest throbbed as the lungs strained with their last breaths and his heart pounded away on it's last work load.
Tao looked up in amazement at a strength she couldn't even begin to comprehend. Kane had arisen from a state so drastic that she could barely tell he was alive to this, bathed in the fumes of adrenaline and filled with the only life he had left.
Koan smiled to himself, interested by the turn of events and certainly not threatened by anything that had developed. He smiled wickedly at Kane and snapped, "wait your turn."
T'ai was not unaffected by this. His smirk had long drained from his face leaving it empty except for the undeniable shock he felt. His hardened features had melted from their cold lines and Tao realized that a soft skin was lying underneath. The boy's eyes remained locked on her, puzzled by her face, confused by her presence, but all together unconfident in his convictions. He remained focused on her even as the words "kill her" left Koan's lips.
For a second Tao thought it was all over, but the new energy ball T'ai held in his hand was different. It was warmer, gentler, and peaceful in a sense. She realized immediately what this meant and she found herself smiling broadly. As he raised his hand to prepare the deathblow she spoke quietly to the sprites circling around her, "that's my boy."
Quickly his hand came down and the ball expanded to a large beam that would consume her. Her bones ached in anticipation as the small star in his palm attacked her like a comet.
She heard Kane scream out her name.
Tao screamed. She tossed her fiery hair into the wind as the blast consumed her completely. She couldn't help the smiled that crept across her face as she felt no pain in the light. She knew it!
Tao felt the energy flow into her pours so fast it was like someone had opened a flood gate. It filled every muscle, every bone, every cell to the breaking point with the purest of energy. It hit her like a rush of cool water and twirled inside of her like a whirlwind of sparkling pixies. She felt her body almost budge under the new strength and for a moment she thought her knees might buckle under the incredible weight had she been standing.
She felt no sting as her wounds faded into new skin nor did she feel the strain of her muscles tighten and grow. Her hair wiping widely about as the remaining energy circled her like a whirlpool. Her insides felt like they were being massaged by thousands of tiny hands. Her skin tingled and stretched to accommodate the new stronger body underneath it.
She didn't need to scream but she couldn't help it. It felt good to be reborn in a blaze of light, it felt good to absorb the energy that would surely help her defeat Koan. She was overwhelmed with such a profound sense of joy she couldn't help crying out in something that was more like a battle cry then a shriek.
Tao felt her hands raise as if the were being lifted for her and she felt the spark as her palms met heel to heel. She felt the energy swirl up and surround her palms as she gently drew it close to her skin, but not in her. Not this time, she still needed to take care of other things. She felt the ball condense and rest in her hands. It was unstable but it would do. The energy pulsed and swelled as she held it and she knew that in all likelihood she would not be able to control this, but it was the only way. It may kill her, but there was no other choice.
Her eyes snapped open. She eyed Koan for a moment, his face frozen in fear and confusion. "He must think me a demon," she mused. He was shocked by the fact that she had come back from the dead and was now going to be the instrument of his destruction. She relished in one last look at his face before her hand sliced down like the blade of a guillotine.
The force of the impact knocked both Kane and T'ai off their feet and launched them into the air. Kane struggled to keep afloat but T'ai, who had given all he could so that Tao could defeat Koan, was quickly taken up by the wind. His body was flapping around like a dead leaf. Kane caught sight of the boy, whose face would have been frozen fear had he not been too exhausted to even breathe.
"If it wasn't for the harsh wind filing the boy's lungs, he'd probably be dead," Kane realized. He suddenly jumped after the boy, managing to get behind him and catch the boy as he was propelled onward by the force of whatever Tao had done, "Gotcha," he told T'ai.
T'ai groan in response, the boy was obviously not doing so well. He would be fine if they could get out of here and if he could have a few days in bed, now that he was conscious again of course.
But before Kane could figure out how to get out of the area an aftershock of Tao's blast hit them. It felt like a small bomb had gone off right in front of them. Kane couldn't find his footing in time to prevent them from being sent through one of the marble columns of Koan's arena. Kane, still holding tightly onto T'ai, crashed into the rumble below. He was glad to finally be on the ground and thankful that he took most of the blow and had probably save T'ai. He smiled as his vision began to fade to black.

"Shit," Tao thought. She had been too rash, she had attacked too soon. She hadn't waited for the energy to stabilize and now Koan was dead and she couldn't control it. She couldn't stop it. It had carried out its orders and now it was time to pay the bill, she was going to go with Koan.
"Stupid," she cursed herself. "You're going to die at the hands of your own son anyway aren't you? The one shot that he fires to help you and you're going to let it destroy you." She tightened her muscles as the pain became unbearable. If she tried to reabsorb it when it was this unstable she might as well kiss her ass goodbye, but it wasn't her doing that was causing her body's reaction. The energy was actually forcing it's way in. Ripping, tearing, breaking bones as it went. She was being pressed to death.
As the monster sunk its teeth into her skin she screamed. The same force that had helped her was killing her as slow as possible. She felt the kind of pain she had only imagined before. The kind of pain that cripple the body and paralyzed the soul and forced your mind to stop everything to focus solely on the damage that was taking place.
"Damn this, I don't want to be a spectator at my own execution." She had to figure something out before she was crushed to death. The force was pushing out the forces pushing in and every organ, every bone or muscle in between them was being destroyed. She knew the way out of this, but logically it would only speed up her death rather than prevent it.
"T'ai............I tried.......I suppose this is the end," she thought. There was a chance she would survive but a very slim one considering the surroundings.
She needed to remove one of the forces, which meant either drawing all the energy in, which would never work because she probably combust, or push it all out. If she did this she would lose her life energy, in essence her soul, and there was no life too draw from in order to quickly recover here. This barren war zone would provide nothing for her to hold on to while she sent away her life, nothing that might sustain her.
But she had no choice. This was too horrible for her to consider anything else.
Slowly she let go, releasing her chi felt like a rush of golden air through her beaten body. It was surprisingly refreshing like cool water on hot bodies, and she was content for a moment in the peace of it all. Her body felt completely relaxed.
"Was death always like this?" she wondered. And if this moment could last just a few more seconds it would completely eradicate any memory she had of the pain she once knew.
But that was not meant to be.
She felt as if she were falling a great distance to the ground, but she had not be flying and was in fact kneeling on the earth with no where to fall to. As her vision waved in and out she realized that she was falling. Her upper body had swayed to the ground so lightly she had barely felt it.
Or maybe it that she just couldn't feel anything at all. Her body was a cold numb shell. She couldn't even hear the soothing rhythms of her breath or her faint heartbeat anymore. Was it because those things had already stopped?
In the vast sea of silence she did hear something on the winged feet on the wind. A voice, small but vocal and yet so faint she could barely make out its message. She could only hear the urgency in it call, the fear and shock that vibrate softly off its tongue, and the sadness that it suddenly painted on her death.
It sounded like "Mom!".

T'ai awoke with a harsh start. His body snapped forward in a sudden precognitive sense of doom. His breath had become suddenly like rushing locomotives and his heart pounded like a steel drum of deafening proportions. He looked around him, bewilder by the sight of the ground latent with rubble and grasping desperately to identify his location in relation to the battle.
The last thing he remembered was looking into that strange woman's eyes and feeling that she wanted him to follow his orders. He didn't want to follow his orders, but that woman's face had argued better than any vocal objection could have. He didn't understand why she wanted him to kill her. At first he had thought it to be an issue of pride where she would either return victorious or not at all, but that wasn't pride he had seen in her eyes. That wistful look in her eyes was hope. Had she hoped to be killed? Could any warrior with such spirit and vigor really long for such a fate? She had fought with such determination was it really all just a suicide mission?
It didn't make sense, but nothing made sense to him anymore. Who were this strange two? Why did that man fight to protect the woman if she was wishing for death? Why did they fight for each other?
He had felt the difference as soon as he shot at her. He knew that it wouldn't kill her and originally he had thought this feeling was because his aim was off, but it was not off. He saw her stretch out her arms, which was odd because he had assumed that he had broken the left one, in what seemed to him to be an attempt to deflect the blow. The look in her eyes didn't sway from their message.
He knew she would never be able to block that blast. Even the man standing close by mumbled, "Good God Tao what are you doing?"
Tao. So the woman had a name. That still didn't clear up what her relationship was to him, but at least it was a name. He wondered what the man had to do with this Tao and why he hadn't interfered again that time. Perhaps he hadn't had the strength to stand a defense again, but he had trusted this woman enough with her own life.
Then something sudden happened, he watched his blast seem to fade into her and her body emerge remolded into a more spectacular form than originally. A mist of glowing embers circled her like a cyclone and as she raised her hands it seemed that the world rose up onto them. He was blinded by the giant orb in her hands very quickly.
He felt the rush as he zipped through the air and for a moment it was wonderful, but he knew that when he hit the ground he would be dead. He had hit something, but it was softer than he had anticipated and although it was painful it certainly hadn't killed him.
He turned his head and sudden realized that it had been that man who had caught him. It was that man whose arms wrapped tightly around him even as he lay unconscious here to protect him. It was that man whose body had been buried under the rubble instead of his. It was that man's beaten body that rested almost under his own and, even in it unconscious state, shielded him from the jagged rocks below.
He felt compelled to help him somehow, but wasn't really sure why. This man he had tried to kill; this man he was suppose to kill. But this man had saved him, didn't that mean anything? Besides these two were not his enemies, his master's but not his. Hadn't he proved that when he had helped Tao?
Had that been what she had wanted the whole time? Had the blast helped her? He had already seen what she had become because of it and it was undeniable that what he had thought was the kill shot he had exactly subconsciously intended to help her.
He began digging out the man's body. He could feel his life flowing in his veins still; there was still time to save his life then. He lifted the stone and rocks in an endless quest to uncover something of what he was feeling by freeing this man. "He is pretty badly hurt, but removing these ruins will help his chance of surviving," T'ai reasoned.
At least it was something.
T'ai glanced back to the bright light a half a mile away. She was still going strong, he noted, "but something's wrong," he realized.
Yes he could feel it clearer now. The energy was winding like a serpent around the battle field, enclosing everything in it's painful torment. "She's in pain." The revelation struck him like a bolt from the heavens, but he remained frozen in uncertainty. Had she indeed been suicidal after all? What this what she want or should he try to help her?
Her scream launch him into the air after her. He couldn't stand the sound of it. Whether she wanted it or not he was going to try his best to help her. He flew swiftly to ground zero, smiling to himself when his speed had advanced to the point that he didn't feel the dust sting his skin anymore.
Suddenly the candle flickered out. All the light vanished as if it had never been there in the first place. He stood there baffled for a moment wondering what he should do now. He scanned the area for Tao but could find her with his eyes. He tried to sense her presence, but he couldn't.
It felt like someone had impaled him. The thought that this woman might be dead struck the bottom of his soul and painfully vibrated up his spine. He zoomed down into the crater aimless and cried something almost insane within itself. He didn't understand the words as they left his mouth but he only knew that they felt right.
"MOM!" he tearfully screamed out to her, but she did not respond.
Then he spotted her desecrated body on the ground lying in the dust. He quickly rushed to her side and simply stared at her wondering if she was dead. She wasn't breathing, her heart had stopped, but she seemed to continue to be tinted with life. Perhaps there was time still.
Without understanding really what he was doing he place his hands above her skin. He felt his hands tingle as the twinkle sprinkle down into her skin. A sharp bolt of lighting shot gently from his hands and jump started her heart again. He stared at his own palms in utter amazement at what they were doing.
"Mom?" he asked her as she showed signs of recovery.
Tao slowly opened her eyes and glazed at him as if he had been speaking Greek. She searched his face for confirmation of what she thought he said, and when finding it in his traumatized large watery eyes she took him into her arms.
Her recovery had not been so quick that she didn't flinch in sudden pain when he tighten their embrace, but the gentle sound of his tears flowing onto her shoulder seemed to muffle out the small grunt. She fought back dizzy spells and the pain of trying to wield a body that no longer worked by focusing on the small lost sheep in her arms, her son.
His tears had brought him home in her heart.

There's more to the story available on http://www.Fatbrain.com

from ANAIS NIN: AN UNDERSTANDING OF HER ART, by rochell holt

BIRTH AND REBIRTH
OF A NEW LILITH
ON EARTH:
The Philosophic Poet
Breathing Propethically
In/On Prose

Birth and Rebirth

"Birth" (Twice a Year Fall/Winter '38), published oddly enough, in the same year as "The Labyrinth" (Delta/Xmas), describes vividly the painful process of delivery, an aborted abortion become stillbirth, like a maze that almost comes to a conclusion to banish the minotaur from Anais' life.
August 29, 1994 Journal of Love: Incest entry details some of the reality she was facing with fragments included in the short story where Anais explains how she visited a Weed Woman to rid herself by imbibed potion of what would not be immediately miscarried. "... if you came, you would take him (Hugo) for a father and this little ghost would never let me alone." Besides, she added, "there is no father on earth. The father is this shadow of God the Father cast on the world," since Hugo was not the father. "You are ... the child of an artist, my child unborn. And this man is not a father; he is a child, he is the artist." (Henry Miller.)
These diary details appear almost accidentally within the story. "It looks dark, and small, like a diminutive man. But it is a little girl ... like a doll ... About one foot long. Skin on bones. No flesh ... and long eyelashes. The head was bigger than average. It was black." Anais no doubt made a reference to a tumor in the infant's dark head. "One more day and ... I would have died." She mourns her "first dead creation," before translating the experience of the "nightmare," referred to in "Birth" as "a savage mystery," where the narrator must primitively deliver herself of "a demon strangling me," as she "Drum drum drum drum drum(s)," to release the "fatherless child" (because Anais admits she herself is not certain of who the father might be).
However, almost immediately afterwards, in retrospect, Dr. Rank told Anais about "a humorous book he wanted to write on Mark Twain. 'The suicide of the double.' We struggled against tragedy with humor." Anais knew the child in her who needed a father was dead!" (That she made the right agonizing decision to abort/miscarry!) Or as she concluded "Winter of Artifice," the unnamed female protagonist (Anais): "At last she was entering the Chinese theater of her drama (a.k.a./before Blanche in Streetcar Named Desire) and could see the trappings of the play as well as the play itself ... the settings ... made of the cardboard of illusion."
The July 23, 1934 Journal of Love: Incest entry had reinforced this realization, "... I did not go to the end with June and Henry. I stopped somewhere and I wrote the novel ... I did not go to the end with my Father in experience of destructive hatred ... I created a reconciliation, and I am writing a novel of hatred."*

Images as Structured Poses

The symbolic images in Anais' work have been analyzed already by myriad, varied critics; however, their interpreted origin may not derive from Jung's "Proceed from the dream outward" mandate so associated with the poetic author, but rather from the reality of Anais' life, shaped by her imagination and possibly a childhood whipping/beating from her father which she may (or may not) have magnified for retaliation; no one will ever know. Anais' tools of masking were learned from her youthful experience as a model for painters and photographers which taught her well the poses that produce art and beauty in "the period when I discovered I was not ugly." (Sept 12, 1935 in Fire).
Her images are relative to "a house is a mental quality" as she noted June 18, 1930 in Early Diary IV. "There must be logic in it ... to show only the poetry." Like Djuna in Ladders to Fire, "She lived in the cities of the interior, she had no permanent abode." She "sank into a labyrinth of silence" to mask her assumed guilt for enjoying the corporal punishment from her father (with what we can only imagine: "His hard penis continued to torment" in Delta of Venus or "his big penis erect pointing at them" in Little Birds - both books published posthumously) revealing surreptitiously her awakening to the pleasure of physical touch in "the dark room of her adolescence, to the long white nightgown and hairbrush" which she re-enacted with Hugo and Henry Miller (early-on) without the orgasms she so sought and finally achieved (first through art before other lovers). However, Anais' Catholic background had taught her to repress sensuality which she was unable to do in spite of her use of cape, costume, mask, paint, veil to conceal desire and ultimately resultant gratification.
In the Forties, Anais wrote "tongue-in-cheek" erotic stories, "pretending they were from the diary of a woman" since "a book collector had offered Henry Miller a hundred dollars a month" for graphic sex which she "ironized," including facts in her life commingled with fantasies.* Delta of Venus was published in 1977, the last year of Anais' life, successful commercial book that she did not equate with literature and never wanted to see in print; notwithstanding, she came to realize this part of her unfolding as a sensual being as valuable, both for herself and for other women, denigrated to the label of "whores" if they expressed enjoyment of their sexuality.
Of "A Model" in Little Birds, she had written that most men "believe in keeping pleasure for (their) mistress. In fact, if he (a Spanish man) sees a woman enjoy sensuality, he immediately suspects her of being faithless, even of being a whore."
Anais who had seen herself in her "double, " her Don Juan father, did not want to be so externally callous or cold; she chose (like "the ragpicker") to make something new out of the old, including the childhood memory followed by paternal abandonment. Her methods of mental flight ("transcendence") varied from containment/cocoon (both positive and negative) with landlocked boats, glass bell labyrinth puzzles; ladders leading into the fire; mirrors that by their nature never reveal a person's true image, shells. She employed these methods of escape while seeking inherently normal experiences non-delineated by sexuality via classical music and its rebellious child, jazz, as well as spirals (from surrealistic paintings) that are always rooted in a base that was for Anais the Catholic puritanical guilt she yearned to shed.
In Aphrodisiac,** "each act of love is ... an act of birth and rebirth." Mirrors and images of timelessness continue to reflect, however, the isolation of Anais' existence as a writer, an artist, even if removed by Eros, the Greek God of Love, and in psychiatry, the sum of all instincts for self-preservation. Selected passages of her diaries were juxtaposed against John Boyce's erotic drawings, because: "What everyone forgets is that passion is not merely a heightened sensual fusion, but a way of life which produces, as in the mystics, an ecstatic awareness of the whole of life ... (where) poetry becomes the greatest truth ... the only reality, the moment when we are completely alive."
Anais, the "albatross" (Children of the Albatross) who fosters and nurtures creative younger peers, was like the martyred Joan of Arc or another far-vision revolutionary, Susan B. Anthony, who also sought to liberate every woman beyond the circuitous plot of her existence. For this reason, Anais was never part of "The Lost Generation," since to be merely inventive in the language of fiction, as was Gertrude Stein, another brilliant thinker, was not her sole (soul?) goal. Anais had learned that psychoanalysis "achieves to make one more conscious of one's misfortunes" which is why she had to invent a new form to satisfy not only herself but future generations through the rhythmic poetry of reflection, a "drug given to prisoners of distinction," like Jean Carteret in "The All-Seeing" who knew that the symphony of language, which was a prison, could also become a liberator for the innocent child grown to a more enlightened woman.
The noted critic Anna Balakian may have said it best in her "Introduction: Poetic Reality of Anais Nin" when she assessed Anais' "unifying motif" as "the theme of liberation ... search, whether inward or outward ... motivated by the drive towards freedom ... from heritage ... binding memories ... growth-stunting inhibitions ... ill-conceived notions."

The Philosophic Poet

October 28, 1972 at a meeting of the Otto Rank Association, Anais lectured "On Truth & Reality," offering another path that led not only into her own deeper understanding of why she created the diaries as well as her fiction but serving as the wellspring of her philosophical non-fiction on varied subjects following her Lawrence ... Study. She reminded herself of having "read in (her) early thirties" Rank's Truth and Reality. "I rediscovered it and found that my whole life as a woman artist had been influenced by it, and proved its wisdom," (woman as artist, artist as woman). Anais pointed out the French title of Rank's book as La Volonte du Bonheur (The Will to Happiness).
No one will ever know whether Anais was consciously aware of bipolar inheritance (beyond the four Early Diaries which clearly reveal some) although she did admit in Diary of Anais Nin: 1931-1934, the first one available to the public, that "I had no in-between existence: only flights, mobility, euphoria; and despair, depression, disillusion, paralysis, shock, and a shattering of the mirror" when she met Dr. Rank in November, 1933; this genetic disorder no doubt had combined with the struggle of a woman (who may have married for the sake of her family as much as her security as an artist), yearning for a separate and valid identity as one not only engaged in meaningful work, Art, but deserving of personal freedom on all levels (emotionally, mentally, physically, spiritually).
If Anais initially sought relief through adventures as panacea for her mood swings (manic-depression) as well as substance for her art in her combined "refusal to despair," she followed this with psychoanalysis while continuing to understand her own motivations and those of her characters, representative of many human beings who may or may not suffer any identified bipolarity. "The story of Sabina (Spy) is that in ten years of married life, she had known two lovers and one platonic friendship with a homosexual ... the first study of a woman who tries to separate love from sensuality as man does, to seek sensual freedom."
Anais learned, however, that for her, such separation was not possible since "understanding" was "an act of love," not a mechanical gesture, the same as for her writing: a fusion of poetry with realistic prose. Dr. Rank taught her, Anais adds in the Rank lecture: "that guilt accompanies every act of will - creative will or the assertion of our personal will." She was delivered from that to "individual growth" and came to see all of her "writing was the act of wholeness." By reaching out to others without sacrificing her own identity, she was "revivified," reborn and shared her continuous evolution in the re-evolution which is revolutionary in her public diaries, a new genre combining fact with fiction for a purpose: her poetic prose; non-fiction; erotica; childhood journals; permission for release of expurgated segments from diaries, etc. (For detailed analysis of Anais' other significant novels: the Four-Chambered Heart - 1950; Solar Barque - 1958; Seduction of the Minotaur - 1961 and Collages - 1964, the reader may refer to her own Novel of the Future and the numerous interpretations of same available elsewhere.) They are all higher steps to "balance between outer and inner, between past and present, between psychological reality and nature."
With her Preface to Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer (1934), Anais began a lifelong practice of celebrating "The restorative value of experience, prime source of wisdom and creation" for a world in "need (of) a blood transfusion ... drink, food, laughter, desire, passion, curiosity, the simple realities which nourish the roots of our highest and vaguest creations." A dozen years later in the Alicat Bookshop pamphlet, her "Realism and Reality" essay, she explained why novels of her ilk were rejected by American publishers who had not caught up to modern art - dance, music, painting, theater. "The pattern of the deeper life covered and disguised will be ... demasked by the writer's process of interpretation of the symbolic meaning of people's acts, not a mere reporting of them or of their words."
(Quite deftly and gently, Anais was subtly critical of any artistic medium, including Williams' Streetcar, which used the artificial voice of a doctor to imply "that neurosis in a character made it a 'case' and not an experience very common ..., which it is.")
Her essay "On Writing" (1947) again guided Anais' readers into the future; concerns of literature and of society that have been the issue of the past thirty-five years, "a form of protest against an unnatural life" which "has led to the absence, or failure, of relationship between men and women (beyond stereotyped roles) so prevalent (even now) today, and ... dramatic proof of the absence of relationship between man (human) and nature." Anais again was prophet/visionary of the upheaval in America, begun in the Fifties, regarding destruction of natural resources in a society oblivious that such abuse mirrored the battle between the sexes. However, after the segregated, sequestered Fifties came the Sixties.
The times then (and now) or the pundits of publication, still failed to recognize, not only Anais' fiction but her diaries as "a strong antidote to the unrelatedness, incoherence, and disintegration of modern man." Modestly, Anais acknowledged that the fusion of poetry and realism would "be accomplished by ... younger, unpublished writers," and she was prophetically correct, to a certain extent, what with Dow Mossman's Stones of Summer in the early Seventies, along with Daryl Henderson's Ditch Valley; the novels of Anna Kavan through Peter Owen in England; more recently The Garden of the Peacocks by Anthony Weller in 1996; all of the Nobel Prizewinner Toni Morrison's novels; all of Amy Tan; Andrea Louie's Moon Cakes, etc. (including Panes - Fiction As Therapy novel comprised of short fiction*) But, these creatively fused novels are still singularly exceptional and not generally accepted or recognized by either critics or readers as more than a unique phenomenon until endorsed by a national vehicle, i.e. Oprah Winfrey's Book Club (for revival of interest in Morrison's Song of Solomon) or the popular motion picture following Amy Tan's Joy Luck Club in the late nineties.
In "The Writer and the Symbols" (1959) Anais again removes obstacles like fallen timber on the rough path to greater consciousness for a society (and literature) sitting on the edge of the Sixties (Seventies?) still maligned and considered "insubordinate" because sit-downs became stand-ups to march into the danger of adventurous Change. "There is no adventure without danger," she wrote, noting that "few aside from doctors and a few novelists have been willing to plunge into the unexplored territory of our irrational life."
Anais thus justified why she "chose to write about artists ... rather than those who had to fit themselves into accepted social patterns." Why do people write, anyway? "The creation of a story is a quest for meaning." Elaborating on this, Anais said, "There are so many fears ... exposure of self ... multiple taboos society has imposed on literature."
Society, now gone to the other extreme with literature/media that is a portrait of violence or flesh for the sake of voyeurs, lacks sense/taste with regard to image in language, and may again be posed on the precipice of new awareness: that books/films based on reality, documentaries, in essence, still fail to "give us an emotional experience, and nothing that we do not discover by way of feeling has the power to alter our lives." Anais redefined "This quest for the self through the intricate maze of modern confusion (as) the central theme of (her) work."

The Novel of the Future (1968)

Two years after the commercial publication of Diary I (1931-1934), Anais' earlier and prophetic philosophy regarding modern fiction and its relationship to contemporary readers/thinkers appeared as The Novel of the Future to continue her edification of the masses (publishers, literary critics, writers, readers) in the present of the late Sixties and the future which is now. Referring to America in the Thirties as not innovative but "aim(ing) ... to please the majority ... to submit to the major trends" which is still true, Anais in her Introduction states the purpose "of this book is to study the development and techniques of the poetic novel." Nobody else in America had done so or would until Sharon Spencer with Space, Time and Structure in the Modern Novel (Swallow '74) which placed Nin therein (to her detriment) as an international writer rather than one truly based in America.
Anais stated she would "try to evaluate some of the writers who have integrated poetry and prose" while also addressing her own work to show "more clearly ... the way to achieve such an integration." After all, her fiction had been available in private press editions, along with recordings and Dutton edition of Ladders to Fire (1946) and Duell, Sloan & Pearce The Four-Chambered Heart (l950) for more than thirty years. No one else had seen her work as path blazing in this genre, new to America, although now so readily accepting of autobiographical fiction. (All or most diaries, however, are blindly still read as factual although we know many are probably not.)
In 1968, Anais admitted that the diary was her sketchbook for fiction which should immediately have enlightened readers and critics to the second new genre she was openly inventing: combination of life mixed with art for a purpose (not to mention her own private reasons which ought to be granted to any individual.)
Anais notes that she began lecturing at universities as early as 1946 when "Stella" was reprinted in Harpers' Bazaar. "I was speaking of psychological reality to an audience conditioned to representational social realism." She added, "With time the nature of psychological reality became a subject of controversy." We know now that drawing on the right side of the brain, so valued in the Nineties, was demeaned in prior decades because of a conscious trend in schools (and society) to emphasize the left side of the brain for purposes of elevating students' poor abilities in math and science which did not improve until a wholistic hands-on sensory approach was employed for all subjects, including writing.
The euphemism of Jung's "Proceed from the dream outward" was misinterpreted by many to mean literally something that occurs only in sleep. Anais' reference was the more expansive, of course: "reverie, imagination, daydreaming ... any experience which emerges from the realm of the subconscious." In other words, Anais delineated through her own work, as well as the writing of other unknown writers (Maude Hutchins, Anna Kavan, Marguerite Young) along with some known ones (early Capote and Hawkes, Tennessee Williams and Ralph Ellison) what she intended by Jung's phrase.
Anais did not write about the past in a clinically graphic-porn style. As she told Henry Miller in a letter from New York, June '46, when World War II was ended, "The present is always healing, at worst - the past is the abscess." Henry Miller had written her from Hollywood Sept. 19 '42 that "On the fringe is the realm of art. A luxury which almost no one takes seriously."
However, Miller (first aided in publication of his work by Anais) already had New Directions as his publisher as early as 1939 when The Cosmological Eye appeared and then The Henry Miller Reader (l959) before Anais' work was published commercially on a consecutive basis. His "Un Etre Etoilique," a "purplish" prose portrait (caricature of one who writes poetic prose?) within the Reader, from Max and the White Phagocytes (Obelisk '38)* did little to encourage critics, readers, scholars, writers to consider Anais as a serious artist. "In every diary we assist at the birth of Narcissus, and sometimes the death too ... The result is harrowing and hallucinating ... The diary becomes the confession of her inability to make herself worthy of this lost father who has become for her the very paragon of perfection."
In "Genesis of the Diary" (Novel), Anais refers to "A notebook or diary ... (as) a discipline, like sketching for the painter....dealing always with the immediate present ...the emotional reaction to experience which revealed that powers of re-creation lie in the senses rather than in memory or critical, intellectual observation."
Speaking always to those in her present (as well as past and future), Anais (who had taken LSD as part of a professional experiment with Dr. Timothy Leary to scientifically prove her lifelong thesis) stated in modern words: "The young would have no need of drugs if they had been educated in the life of the senses and emotions ..." still true in current times when amid innovations in computers, poetry (as published by private press) is experiencing a resurgence. (One can only see this revival as representative of a need for something human in a society more mechanized than ever!)
What could be more political or more definitive as to the purpose of the poetic novel (her own included) than: "We carefully observe and watch the happenings of the entire world without realizing they are projections of our inner selves."? Elementary students sending short letters of opinions or suggestions to the President via computer, for example, in 1997, will not relate them personally to politics, their peers, society, the world, or themselves. Such action is still a left-brain activity that will neither create "understanding ... love ... conquer(ing) loneliness." (nor character!) "Understanding creates compassion, sympathy, and empathy. I was faithful to motivation," Anais reminds us.
This significant treatise on the novel of the future as the future of the novel, a regenerative tool for readers, aside from having considerable literary merit and serving as mass enlightenment, depicts the prophetic purpose of poetic prose, achieved via Anais' diaries (serving primarily and initially as chronicle of the evolution of a woman who was an artist or an artist who was a woman) while prophetically transporting the prose poem to another realm, the beyond late Twentieth Century, which may be even more accepting of and acceptable to such literary creations.
"The creative writer is the one who teaches expansion and liberation of the human mind." Why or how? "... death of emotion has led inevitably to excess violence ... a symptom of ... violence in order to feel alive because the divided self (not consciously because of any diagnosed bipolarity) feels its own death and seeks sensation to affirm its existence." The key to Anais and her writing which she also reveals to us in this philosophical criticism is again prophetic regarding the future direction of the poetic novel.
When we deny the "Evita" (overwhelmingly successful 1997 herstorical musical starring Madonna) in our selves, we acknowledge the boring masks of routine, our lonely lives as isolated from the goal of self-knowledge which should allow each of us to relate to another and then other human beings as a whole in a caring and compassionate manner.* "Without poetry which makes its appeal to the senses we cannot retain a living relationship to all things."
In Favor of the Sensitive Man and other essays continues Anais' androgynous guidance; she knew "each (of us) is endowed with both masculine and feminine qualities." But "the new type of man to match the new type of woman" is still in the process of evolving for each sex more than two score years following her title essay. (Note popularity of Bly's Iron John.) "... I feel we might be approaching a humanistic era in which differences and inequalities may be resolved without war."
Anais' decade of road-runner, cross-country lectures to colleges and universities existed right up until her death in Jan. '77 from cancer, as she shared her writing, her visions on "the novel of the future" and her suggestions for parallel-living, with or without the freedom she managed to achieve in her lifetime. "The integrated circuit is really for the human being ... the channel of feeling that has to be kept open ... (by) build(ing) up a sufficient inner spiritual resistance ... 'the spirit house' while not close(ing) off the ... emotional circuits ... to separate from others ... from what is happening in the world ...," Anais said in one (and, no doubt, many) of her lectures included in A Woman Speaks edited by Evelyn Hinz.
That is Anais' literary motif and her life/philosophy.

Psychosynthesis

Robert E. Kelly, in Manic-Depression: Illness or Awakening, refers to Assagioli's four stages of the concept detailed by the latter therapist in his book, Psychosynthesis (1965) that, in essence, may lead to spiritual transmutation of the ego. (Assagioli was a colleague of Jung and Freud.) Greater knowledge of one's own personality is the first stage, which Anais began at the tender age of eleven. The second stage involved manipulating of the new fragments of ego, the new puzzling parts, as opposed to being manipulated or controlled by them, Anais' concern in her twenties and thirties. The third stage is devoted to creating a higher "ideal" identity or achievement of same which was Anais' fourth decade of life and her fifth. The fourth stage is the formation of a new image to match this created projection which occurred for Anais Nin when the first volume of her Diary 1931-1934 was published in the Sixties.
To Kelly "Mania is the genesis of awareness to the dawning of the soul." However, he adds that he enlisted the guiding help of a good therapist along the path. So too, for her own reasons, Anais sought out several therapists during her lifetime, with Dr. Inge Bogner in New York City, probably of longest duration from June 1951, according to Volume 5 of her Diary (1947-1955) where Anais "discussed ... the increase in my courage to be myself rather than disguise myself," to Volume 7 Diary (1966-1974).
Winter, 1972-1973, Anais wrote, "Being famous is only destructive if taken as a narcissistic appraisal, but creative if taken as means of discovery of other people, other lands, other ideas, other artists ... I look for faces I can love, friends, daughters, a moment of contact, of intimacy, of revelation ... Every year we have to make a new synthesis ... There is no conflict if I appear in public as I truly am, do not accept their image of me, maintain my values and my severities toward myself."
Kelly concludes his book, by saying, "The path to self-knowledge is a personal path that can only be taken by the individual." He quotes Kay Redfield Jamison who equates "the manic-depressives of society ... (with) our mystics." Anais Nin was that great artist, manic-depressive mystic, able "to record ... (her) experiences, letting the ineffable speak for itself."
We have the Early Diaries, released posthumously, to shed light on Anais' marked and prevalent fluctuating moods and the cryptic references in the Diaries Volumes 1-7 (released before the earlier-written ones), all published in her lifetime to focus on the evolution and journey of a soul to guide readers to their own Selves. If she chose not to release certain parts of her diaries, then we may be assured that Anais was aware of her deep duality which she preferred be known only through the fiction. Always in touch albeit not in tune with her times, she also sagaciously determined that there are just some personal details that must be omitted until the time is right.
"The true struggle is to achieve an image which conforms to the spirit of a person so he can become visible to the world ..." she ended Volume 7 Diary (1966-1974).

AESTHETICS IS ETHICS:
Diary 1 and
Aroundabout Anais

Diary 1- 1931-1934 (1966)

In Early Diary IV on June 10, 1931, Anais wrote, "I began my life's real work, the transposition of my Journal into a printable form ... of continuous inward consciousness ..." Thirty pages later, "Old pages of my Journal certainly do appear ... sentimental, exaggerated, unwise ... Blunders (however) are part of all the movement."
Some readers may forget that it was Anais Nin, the mature writer, who edited the diaries (along with Gunther Stuhlmann) to make them palatable for the times which must have led to the decision to begin public dissemination with Diary I (1931-1934), in keeping with the burgeoning Women's Movement. Anais stated early in her first winter entry therein: "I am aware of being in a beautiful prison, from which I can only escape by writing."
That writing which awakened her senses was by D. H. Lawrence; then Henry Miller himself, "the gentle savage that I'd like to be;" as well, June, Henry's second wife: "Her life is full of fantasies," because Anais heretofore had been living in lyrical dreams, what became Waste of Timelessness. Dr. Allendy first helped Anais see, "One is not in bondage to the past which has shaped our feelings, to race, inheritance, background." Dr. Rank later helped her see "'the revelation of creative activity which becomes a channel of redemption for ... obsessions.'"
Anais' obsessions involved her father who had abandoned the family for another love; her own duality (also real but clinically unidentified), which she saw astutely as negative reflection of her "double," her father ("I have always been tormented by the image of multiplicity of selves."); her "fever for knowledge, experience"; her need "to create ... a richer life," conscious of being an "imaginatively ... complex ... illusionist," which she also determined as "lies create(ing) solitude."
Often criticized for omitting true facts of her life, in reference to Scholar's allusion to Roy Pascal's "cone of darkness," the particulars of her love life (evident, nonetheless, in Anais' autobiographical fiction), scholars/critics seem blind still to the purpose of the diaries, as that "bridge to the world" Anais named them in this Diary I. However, Anais did include the facts of her life, cryptically, but there (for all sensual, astute readers) in Diary I (1931-1934) where she includes a "letter from Father ... 'We must spend hours to know each other intimately ... "(conversation or the original definition of the word 'intercourse'?) before September 1933 entry where she notes (while looking at an old photograph of her father "taken when he had just left us ...") that she "felt nostalgia for a soft face which no longer exists, who might have been, then, the lover of my dreams ..."
Anais' own art and Dr. Rank guided her to realize that her "double," her Don Juan father "'reinforce(d) the resemblances (so) he could love his feminine self in you as you could love your male self in him.'" Rank added that while Anais was being "'loved by the men he (her father) wanted to be loved by ... (she) could have been the perfect Androgyne.'"
If readers missed Rank's "'more in all this than the simple fact of incestuous longings,'" no doubt many also missed hers, even though Anais told us the doctor is "a seer ... healer ... Even though they deal with ... illness of the soul, the cure they offer is vaguely understood to be a sexual one." This subject continues to be a major one in the Nineties where the movement of "inner child," evolved or unborn, has been spawned by an unacknowledged or denied parental attachment.
Anais included fragments of her later story "Birth" in August '34 entry of Diary I, even thought she omitted certain especially poignant parts that might alert careful readers to the artist's personal illness. "During the night, all night, I heard the groaning of a woman dying of cancer." However, she returns our consciousness quickly to the "prolongation of myself," for Anais boldly reminds, "man the father, I do not trust. I do not believe in man as father. I do not trust man as father." to be taken figuratively and literally.
Diary I ends in the manner of a continuous novel, a new non-fiction genre, semi-fictional autobiography, as Anais concludes with what she praised about D. H. Lawrence in her 1932 Study: the importance of "follow(ing) the waywardness of life itself, its oscillations and whims and mobility." What better way to appeal to an audience of readers ripe for "the birth of the real me (the new woman so ahead of her time) ... for no one has ever loved an adventurous woman as they have loved adventurous men."
Who among us cannot identify and smile wryly with Anais' proclamation, "I may not become a saint, but I am very full and very rich." as we wonder, no longer, why she so loved "the telephone ringing all day, good-bye, good-bye, good-bye ..."

Aroundabout Anais

There have been a number of academic books on Anais Nin, including Evelyn Hinz's The Mirror and Garden: Realism and Reality in the Writings of Anais Nin (OSU Press '71), creative criticism followed by Sharon Spencer's Collage of Dreams (Swallow '79) and Bettina Knapp's Anais Nin (Ungar '78), all sensitive and scholarly with, as Philip K. Jason notes in Anais Nin and Her Critics (Camden House '93), Spencer "articulate(ing) clearly and at some length the proto-feminist impulse in Nin's life and work' as well as "explore(ing) the Jungian underpinning of Nin's 'expansive' view of woman ... in the portrayal of sensual and sexual feeling and behavior."
Jason's own Anais Nin Reader (Swallow '73) introduced his personal selections with "Introduction: The Poetic Reality of Anais Nin," drawing on The Novel of the Future, stating, "the diary and the creative work are like two communicating vessels," but perhaps too simplistically interpreting this transmutation: "the division is an imaginary one ... they feed each other constantly ..." However, if Jason acknowledged "the trend in ... criticism" on Anais as "works of enthusiasm ... to ... cautious and limited praise," the acerbic biographies to follow by two individual and separate women certainly unbalanced that scale with almost venomous manipulation of facts to judge, unfortunately, their subject's life separate from Anais' art.
Anais - The Erotic Life of Anais Nin by Noel Riley Fitch (Little Brown '93), remains worlds apart from the biographer's Sylvia Beach and the Lost Generation. Instead, readers are led to believe the biographer has nothing substantial to note, again assessing "Both her (Anais') life and her diary ... (as) artistic creations" (in a rather pejorative, not positive sense). However, Anais already had stated in Novel of the Future that "I do not think it is love of the novelist which drives (some) critics to play sleuth to the personal lives and personal genesis of their art ... as this continues to be the favorite sport ... it might be well for the novelists to make their own confessions for the sake of greater accuracy."
Precisely that which Anais has allowed aesthetically through Rupert Pole, her executor, with the timed release of varied diaries, the material expurgated from original published ones for the sake of prudence and protection of those who sought anonymity or exclusion, including her husband, Hugo. In "Genesis of the Diary," (Novel), Anais also had said, "it was my experience as a novelist which enabled me to edit The Diary at all ..."
A Casebook on Anais Nin, the first collection of critical works on the author, edited by Robert Zaller (NAL '74), although dismissed by Jason as "tilted more toward adulation than critical objectivity" contains articles and essays by most reputable critics including Zaller, a professional historian, a professor at Drexel University in Pennsylvania. Deena Metzger* in her essay therein, "The Diary: The Ceremony of Knowing" reminds that "for us to be born is, she (Anais) tells us, to return to the place of our origin," analyzing the diaries as the evolution of a soul (a woman and artist, in this case) and documenting a human struggle for beauty and meaning ... a reconciliation of the worlds within a world."
Conversations with Anais Nin edited by Wendy M. DuBow (University Press of Mississippi '94) reveals "the tension Nin felt between her public and private personas." If so, why not? Anais has said, "The external story is what I consider unreal," the theme of her fiction. As early as 1968, she also told us "A character in the novel is always someone I have known and recorded in the diary," which includes herself. She explained clearly that "Not only conventions dictated the journals, but personal censorship."
Nonetheless, this edited collection of interviews "between 1966 and 1972 ... portrays a friendly, well-read, self-educated, cosmopolitan artist," in DuBow's Foreword to support Zaller's Casebook that Anais Nin, always the writer, was "a uniquely dynamic person because she influenced people of quite different intellectual backgrounds and political persuasions."
Anais Nin, A Biography was created by Deidre Bair (Putnam's '95) author of Simone De Beauvoir (whose personal inscription in my own '90 biography refers to her subject as "this remarkable woman's life.") Edmund White praised this second biography as "full-dress portrait ... (of) a woman of strong passions, both intellectual and sentimental ..." in direct opposition to Bair's undressing of her subject, Anais, attempting judgmentally to negate not only the art but the life of someone she deems personally "a major minor writer."
Anais, however, already warned in Novel of the Future that "A human being who reveals himself should be treated with the same care we accord a new type of fish ... We must protect him from injury if we are to share his life." That which she did throughout the edited published Diaries I-VII during her lifetime, Bair chose not to do after Anais' death.
By blatantly labeling Anais a bigamist ("she married Rupert Pole without divorcing Hugh Guiler"), Bair passed judgment on a ceremonial ritual that occurred in 1955, performed by a Justice of the Peace, which Anais knew was a gesture, symbol of "'deeper ritual'" while never intending to divorce Hugo, an intelligent, also by-now recognized creative film-maker, who, most likely was not blind to Anais' quests for experience as attested to in Early Diary IV, Dec 26, 1929: "... we have mingled beyond dissolution ... in my fitful way there is a consistency and a loyalty, because I always worship him even when I do not desire him." What Anais wrote there was no doubt applicable to her father and to God. Jan. 1, 1930, she wrote, "... he (Hugo) is the indirect cause of all I do, and am, since he has made it materially possible." On April 18, 1931: "The center of my existence is my love for Hugh. How is that proved? He is the only one for whom I would make sacrifices - any sacrifice."
Fitch had included on the last page of her biography on Anais, part of her interview with Dr. Jean Fanchette* on July 17, 1991 where he said, "'When Hugo came to Paris after Anais' death ... he told me he knew everything all the time."**
That Anais' two biographers failed to realize or read April 23, 1931 entry: "The secret of what is called my condensation is that I am writing in English for French minds" is reproof to their repudiative research. "I could say, like Lawrence, 'They all wish to destroy me because of my non-conformity.'" (April 22, 1931) However, it is precisely Anais' non-conformity in her art and life that was so beloved by readers, friends and strangers.
Recollections of Anais Nin by Her Contemporaries edited by Benjamin Franklin V (Ohio University Press '96) is a compilation of "honest, accurate impressions," uninfluenced by the editor "of this woman all of us would agree was extraordinary ..." with recollections "arrange(d) (primarily) ... chronologically." Victor Lipari, (filmmaker and writer), ended his memory with a legacy-message Anais had left him. "Know yourself in every way and don't stop the growth, whether emotional, sexual, or spiritual."
Anna Balakian (former Chair of Comp. Lit at NYU) said, "The three most significant innovators in the novel form are women: Natalie Sarraute, Marguerite Young, Anais Nin ... Of the three, Nin gets the most current exposure - but for the wrong reason."
Anais Nin: A Book of Mirrors edited by Paul Herron (Sky Blue Press '96) is the most recent tome available, 432 pages with a Foreword by Anais' dedicated editor, Gunther Stuhlmann, her literary agent and editor (also originator and editor of ANAIS: AN INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL in existence for more than a decade with fifteen issues, thus far). He says, this "array of personal testimonials, reflections and refractions ... seem to accomplish 'what no biography, no single study can do'" (quoting Herron, the editor) and that is "attract so many people to her person, her ideas, her work."
Unlike Recollections, there is a combination of creative criticism with memories of Anais, personally and/or via her writing, to shimmer Book of Mirrors (a new private press' amazing first publication) like a musical mural heard stretching across the universe. Within the volume, Fairid Naim Tali in "My Pilgrimage to Louveciennes," (translated from the French by Jane Eblen Keller) said: "Anais is my mirror without reflection, and I recognize myself in her and in several of her characters."
Irving Stettner in his "Anais Nin: A Memoir" equates Anais to the "20th century full-realization of Rimbaud's vision ... woman ... free to be herself ... before we put her in domestic shackles: ... seer, joyous creator." Daisy Aldan in "Anais Nin: A Great Villager" ("written circa 1959") notes "She ... has achieved a new dimension in character depiction."
Maryanne Raphael in "Who Is Anais Nin?" (edited by Dr. Eve Jones) responds: "Her work is described as the most candid and process - conscious record drawn by a 20th century writer, eclipsing both Simone de Beauvoir and Mary McCarthy in its reflections on the emancipation of women."
This book, a modern critical, as well emotional collection, supports Mkrynski and Maguire's assessment of 1996 Nobe1 Prize Winner poet, Wislawa Szymborska's "recurrent theme" in her "critical writing." In Sounds, Feelings, Thoughts, a translation from Polish of Szymborska's "Seventy Poems," the editors in Preface about the Nobel prizewinner remind that she "insisted her biography does not much matter .. The artist is the work, the work the artist..."

***

The Critical Response to Anais Nin edited by Philip K. Jason (Greenwood Press, 1996) is Number 23 of Critical Responses in arts and letters; Series Advisor, Cameron Northouse, says in Foreword: "... each volume is designed to present a documentary history of highlights in the critical reception to ... individual works that are generally considered to be of major importance." However, he qualifies that "each volume is the work of an individual editor." Thus, a 271 page volume* appears to offer dated criticism selected to criticize Anais Nin, with the exception of sparse new interpretations of her work, i.e. "The Diaries of Anais Nin" by the late Lynn Luria-Sukenick (Shenandoah '76).

"... Candor does not guarantee integrity of spirit or freedom from self-deception ... The mode or attitude of sincerity does not insure honesty; to behave as if you are telling everything does not mean that you are ... Discretion is, in effect, an open refusal of information less misleading at times than the confession which accidentally or deliberately conceals ...
"... The diaries, however, unconfessional, contain a wisdom in their obliquity and omissions ..." (p.177)

"Lillian Beye's Labyrinth: A Freudian Exploration of Cities of the Interior" by Suzette A. Henke is equally revelatory, psychoanalytic essay that first appeared in Anais: An International Journal 2 (1984).
Henke says of Lillian: "Self-doubt and depression prompt her to commit quotidian acts of spiritual suicide, erupting from nightly bouts with the syndrome Freud described as 'melancholia.'" (p.136) Briefly illuminating the role of each protagonist in the novels within Cities of the Interior, Henke notes that Sabina (from Spy), although "Supposedly 'liberated' in her pursuit of hedonistic pleasure ..., is actually a tormented spirit who lives dangerously on the edge of schizophrenic breakdown."
Henke later assesses "The minotaur that torments (Lillian) is a monster of her own creation ... a fragmented personality, torn between the desire for egoic independence and ... an 'ego-ideal' fashioned by a critical conscience." (p.143) Anais sought to understand this dichotomy within her body, mind and spirits through a microscopic dissection of "'multiplication of selves'" which was not associated with herself as bipolar, because she had an aversion to illness of any sort.
Anais Nin explains in the first volume of her Diary (1931-1934 journal): "I have always been tormented by the image of multiplicity of selves. Some days I call it richness, and other days I see it as a disease." (p. 33)
Nonetheless, out of her life Anais created her art; all her life she also sought to create her reality as malleable music; dance; painting; poetry; sculpture, etc. A prophet who perfected "autobiographical fiction" (invented it?) and "the aesthetic literary journal," she was as dual a persona as her name: without being (to experience the flow of "is") as much existence itself, all "is" and flow which must forever be natural duality in acceptance of day versus night, also inherited and possibly secretly, consciously hidden or unconsciously continuous battle with bipolar characteristics, tendencies prevalent.
Finally, The Spirit of Loving... edited by Emily Hilburn Sell (Shambala '95) contains two quotes from The Diary of Anais Nin: Volume 1 (1931-1934) that support this thesis, inherent to understanding Anais and her Art in total and combined. Anais quotes D. H. Lawrence. "Every human being is treacherous to every other human being. Because he has to be true to his own soul."
"But we dream of union, faithfulness." (p62) Union of polarities that always will separate those parts fragmented in divided relationship(s), society and individual spirit. Yet, "One always loves the person who understands you." (p77)

"Hugo knew about Rupert, and Rupert knew about Hugo, and each knew the other knew, but they conspired not to let Anais know they knew because they both loved her. Isn't that the ultimate form of love?"

Nancy Jo Hoy to Maxine Hong Kingston

in The Power to Dream: Interviews with Women
in the Creative Arts by Nancy Jo Hoy

...from "I've Got To Write a Book!"
by Ira Wiggins

Panama

I had never seen a vampire bat bite in my medical career and had the commonly held but erroneous notion that it would consist of a set of double puncture marks located over a large vein, probably in the neck, representing the sites where two hollow teeth had punctured the skin in order to suck blood. Panama has some vampire bats in the remote areas, so I did see a few of the actual bites, always in "campesinos" (farmers) or in military personnel on bivouac who had slept in the jungle.
The bat itself is quite small, only about three to four inches long, is nocturnal and reddish-brown in color. It has extremely sharp, razor-like front teeth with which it can remove a tiny divot from the surface of the skin, so deftly that the sleeping person usually does not awaken. This divot is most often taken from a highly vascular area of skin (nose, ears, fingertips or toe-tips) so that a slow, steady trickle of blood develops. The bat then settles down to lap the blood up as it surfaces, drinking until it is distended with its meal. Blood is the only food that its digestive tract will accept. Experiments have shown that if denied access to blood for a period of longer than 72 hours the bat will die, regardless of subsequent easy access to blood, forced feeding or even blood transfusions. Thus the creatures must feed frequently, usually every night, and they pose a hazard to cattle (their normal food source) in which anemia and weakness are produced, making the cattle subject to secondary infections and illnesses. The vampire is also a carrier of the deadly rabies virus.
Combined with a history of sleeping in a bat-infested area and awakening with a bloody scab on a susceptible area, the typical appearance of the tiny, clean, saucer-shaped wound makes the diagnosis relatively certain. Even when protected by a mosquito net the sleeping soldier may be subject to the bite or an area of skin which presses against the netting. Treatment consists of protection against infection, tetanus and rabies.
Eradication of the vampire bat is of concern to the U.S. military as well as to the government of Panama. To date the best means they have found is as follows: Several vampire bats are captured by placing "mist nets" in the area at night. These bats are handled carefully to avoid injuring them and are painted with a solution of anticoagulant (ingestion causes blood to lose its ability to clot). The bats are then released to return to their lair in a hollow tree or cave. In the usual process of social grooming the bats lick each other and themselves, thus ingesting the medication which causes death by internal bleeding. In this way most of the bats may be eventually eliminated.
*****
The following is an exact transcript of an emergency home-call report made out by a co-worker of mine:
Consultation Report
Date: 9/25/62 Doctor left: l0:30 p.m.
Pt's wife called ambulance and doctor because her husband had locked himself in a closet.
On arrival pt's wife didn't allow me to get in the house because she didn't know me and because I wasn't driving an official car.
I left without seeing husband; when driving away husband came out on the porch and waived good-bye to me. He seemed in good health.
Signed: Dr. ________
*****
I had just come on duty in the emergency room of the hospital and for the remainder of my shift would be responsible for the patients in the hospital (55 beds at that time, as I recall) as well as the patients who came to the emergency room for care.
"It's the fourth cardiac arrest he has had in six hours!" the breathless nurse said to me as she called me to see a cardiac patient in the intensive care unit. It was 24 hours after he had incurred a small myocardial infarct ("heart attack") and he was still attached to the cardiac monitor machine which blinks and beeps most alarmingly when the heart fails to beat for three or four seconds. A ward attendant was applying external cardiac massage by vigorously applying intermittent pressure to the lower sternum with the heel of his hands. The patient was wide-eyed with fright and apprehension; he was breathing as normally as could be expected under the circumstances and could talk. The monitor showed no cardiac activity.
"Should we shock him?" asked the nurse.
I had little experience with cardiac monitors but considerable with patients. It seemed to me that a man with cardiac arrest should be unconscious. Asking the attendant to cease his efforts (the patient was greatly relieved) I felt for and found a normal pulse. A slight adjustment of the monitor resulted in "normal cardiac activity".
"Thank heavens it's beating again!" someone exclaimed.
Outside the patient's room I had difficulty convincing the attendants that the fault had been in the machine, not in the patient. At the rate they were going the man would have been written up in a medical journal as having survived the greatest number ever of cardiac arrests. A different monitor was brought in and the patient had no more "cardiac arrests" that night. The staff had several formal lectures in the next few days on proper procedures. I believe the gist was "treat the patient, not the machine."
*****
"Doktah, I wants you tuh remove suthin fum down heah," indicating the genital area - stated the Jamaican lady as she seated herself in my office.
"Certainly, Mrs._______. What is it you would like removed?" Visualizing a mole, wart or other undesirable skin lesion.
"Well, it's a dollah." stated sheepishly and almost inaudibly.
"I beg your pardon?" Too often, when I find myself saying that, surprises follow.
"Is: got ah dollah in my gina and can't get it out, doktah."
I tried to appear unflustered but couldn't help asking, "Is it a silver dollar or a dollar bill?''
"A bill, doktah."
"All right, Mrs._______, just step behind the curtain and remove your panties while I go outside to get the nurse."
I could hardly contain myself. "Mary, for heaven's sake try to keep a straight face but the patient in my room says she has a dollar bill in her vagina and we have to remove it."
"You've got to be kidding."
"Nope. Let's go."
As the nurse was getting the patient on the examining table my curiosity was raging. "Now did the bill get in your vagina, Mrs._______?"
"Well, doktah, I got this dollah, see? An I jes knew if mah husbin foun it he'd take it away fum me. I din know where to hade it so I hade it in there."
I didn't know how much longer I could keep a sober, professional manner. Turning to the nurse I said, "I expect if my wife hid something there that is about the first place I'd find it.'
With that the three of us exploded with laughter. We had had an excuse to laugh heartily without the patient feeling that we were laughing at her.
One glance sufficed to show that there was nothing abnormal in the vagina, not even a penny. I made the examination meticulous and unnecessarily long to convince the patient that I had overlooked nothing. Even had the nurse look carefully over my shoulder while I manipulated the speculum to expose all areas.
"There is absolutely nothing here, Mrs._______."
"Sure nuff, doktah?"
"Yes, ma'am, I'm quite sure."
"Well, I'll be! Now way could it of gone?"
She left, shaking her head in apparent bewilderment.
"Now, that's one for the books!" exclaimed the nurse. This was one of the many occasions on which I affirmed, "I've got to write a book!"
When the patient and nurse had left I found myself unoccupied, so leafed through the chart to peruse her previous medical history. I should have done it sooner. The light dawned. This particular lady had had several minor mental problems in the past.
Her next visit to me was some six months later, at which time she had a simple cold. After giving her a prescription I couldn't resist the temptation to ask, "By the way, Mrs._______, did you ever find that dollar bill you lost?"
Without a moment's hesitation, she came back with, "Wy yes, doktah, it was undah heah all de tam!" With that she vigorously indicated the area under her very ample right chest. I did not pursue the matter further.
*****
The concerned mother brought her four month old infant to the clinic. It had seemed fussy and she had found a white "growth" on the roof of its mouth. Sure enough, on the center of the hand palate was a two centimeter diameter, firm, non-tender well-demarcated, raised, bone-white area with a narrow purplish border. A differential diagnosis was a solid blank. It certainly was not thrush, which I had occasion to see frequently. I called the pediatrician and the surgeon in to look at it and they were as puzzled as I was but thought it was warranted to send the patient to see a pediatrician at the larger Gorgas hospital at the other end of the Panama Canal. En route there the mother noticed the baby happily chewing on something and extracted a large, round flake of coconut from its mouth. The "tumor" was gone. The flake had apparently stuck to the roof of the mouth by suction, the resultant irritation causing the purplish border.
The practice of medicine may be many things. But it is never dull!
*****
Some of the patients had a misconception about "Pay-roll deduction". As the man was leaving he said to me, "Please mark 'emergency' on this prescription (so he could get it on pay-roll deduction). I been paying each time and losing money." Guess he figured if he couldn't see the money leave his hand it was free.
*****
I knew no Spanish whatsoever prior to going to Panama but, once there, I enjoyed learning the language. Doctors and nurses were allowed to attend a class in Spanish (held at the hospital) for one hour a day five days a week.
This was during working hours and was considered on-the-job training. It was a pleasant class; our teacher was a pretty, young married lady from Cuba with a delightful sense of humor and endless patience. One day in class it was my turn to make a statement in Spanish. I was near the end of a sentence, planning to make it a longer sentence, then changed my mind and decided to end the sentence, intending to say the equivalent of "period" in English, I said "periodo". She turned a bit red, shortly controlled her laughing with considerable effort, then managed to stammer, "Oh, no, no, doktor. No, no. Usted quiere decir 'punto'. Una mujer tiene 'periodo'." This translates to "No, no. You should say 'punto'. A woman has a 'periodo!'"
*****
The lady in my office spoke only Spanish. Her baby girl was a darling and I was quite taken by her. As they were leaving I wanted to say to her, "What a sweet baby you have." I had studied German in college and the German word for sweet is "susz". At this point I unfortunately mixed the two languages as I smiled at the mother and said, "Que sucia su nina!", which means, "What a dirty baby you have!" She smiled as she left the office, realizing, I hope, that the Gringo doctor had not meant what he said.
*****
One of the nurses aides was an older, pleasant, Jamaican lady who spoke Spanish fluently. Initially Joanna was my interpreter, then, as I gained fluency, she aided me in the language when necessary. I would often mimic the phrases she used in speaking with patients. One situation where I had trouble was in instructing the patient that he or she could get down from the examining table. The correct, formal phrase (and one I was just starting to learn to use) is, "Usted puede abajar" ("You may get down"). I noticed that she had a habit of saving to the patient, "Ya, va!" (pronounced "Yeah, bah!") at which point the patient would invariably sit up and jump down from the table. However, when I subsequently used the phrase in the case of a dignified matron, she laughed and (after the patient had left) gently reprimanded me.
"A doctor would never use that phrase, Dr. Wiggins."
"But why not, Joanna? It works fine for you. What does it mean?"
"I don't know how to say it in English. But a doctor wouldn't say it to a patient."
I later learned that it is the Spanish equivalent of "Okay. Git!"
I dropped it from my repertoire.
*****
Social life in and around the Canal Zone was as active and as varied as one wished to make it. There were cocktail parties, square-dancing, photograph clubs, riding clubs, flying clubs, fresh and salt-water sports of all kinds, fishing, tennis, year-around golf, bridge clubs and a variety of other activities. The Panama Canal Co. liked to keep its employees and their families contented.
Cocktail parties were fun but we didn't want to make them our main activity. Throughout our stay we were involved with square-dancing on a regular basis and played bridge regularly with friends. The ping-pong table in our apartment was also a good source of entertainment. We spent hours in the jungle looking for, and finding, antique bottles of all kinds. The jungle also provided us with ample opportunity to satisfy our thirst for knowledge of nature, trees, plants, birds, insects and reptiles.
*****
These outdoor excursions occasionally provided a ''small adventure" to enliven the day. Once, in the vicinity of Nombre de Dios, we had walked a long distance down a jungle path, then along a sandy beach. We were enjoying the solitude, observing nature and looking for antique bottles but had become a bit fatigued. We felt that we knew the area well enough that we could take a short-cut back to the village air-strip where our small home was. We ran into thick brush and a bit of swampy ground where the going was difficult but felt that the distance saved would be worth the effort. In one area we found ourselves stepping from tree root to tree root of mangrove trees to avoid several inches of water and muck below. It finally dawned on us that we should have long since come to the path we had intended to intersect. We had broken our rule of never going into the jungle without a compass and it was too near noon for the sun to be of any use. We could not bring ourselves to wait for two hours while we decided definitely which way the sun was traveling. At times we could very faintly hear the surf on the beach.
"Betty, let's head for the sound of the surf regardless of what we have to go through and we will end up on the beach and will at least know where we are."
"Guess you're right. How stupid of us; no one even knows where we are. We've got to get out of here. C'mon the surf is that direction."
"Oh, it sounded to me like it was over there." I pointed in the opposite direction.
We listened carefully. At times the sound seemed to come from one direction and at other times from the exact opposite direction. That's not possible. How can it be? Panic was starting to rear its ugly head. We knew we could survive a night in the jungle but it would be most uncomfortable, especially with no food or water.
We agreed to head for one of the surf-like sounds and started out. Our adrenaline had helped to erase part of the fatigue. (Never, but neeeeeeveeerr go out in the jungle without a compass!) We came to coarse grass taller than our heads which we had to part with our hands (the grass, not our heads) as we stepped very high to avoid being tripped. Our faces were flushed and we were perspiring profusely. The throbbing in my chest seemed to shake my entire body; I checked my pulse and found it was 160, so we rested. Betty said that if I had a heart attack she certainly couldn't get me out. But the sound of the surf was coming closer. What a joy to reach the beach. We found ourselves not far from where we had left the shore and doggedly started the long trek back to the village. This was a remote area and we had not seen a soul on the beach or on the path.
We flew over the area and lo! the mystery of the two surfs was solved. We had been in the center of a peninsula-like projection of land and there had been surf on both sides of us. We were then able to laugh at our foolishness.

portions of c ra mcguirt's
blur collar ballet

Despite not having actually paid my five thousand dollar fine, I was allowed to compete in my first Battle Royal at the end of the card. There's not much technique involved-the main thing is to avoid accidental collisions. So I stayed crouched in a defensive stance, watching out for flying meat, and getting in the occasional slap or

139

kick on Willie, who had miraculously recovered from being brick-bashed in time to participate. At one point, I came face to face with Ricky Morton, and got lost for a second. He solved the impasse by looking at me in exaggerated horror and backing away, as if he didn't even want to touch someone like Luscious Leslie.
Finally, I removed myself from the contest by taking a running leap at the clown, intending to miss and go through the ropes. Instead, I flew crotch first into the center strand. For an awful instant, I was sure I had emasculated myself, and waited for the sickening pain. But it didn't come; fortunately, the rope had hit me between my inner thigh and "the standard equipment". With great relief to be faking what could have been very real agony, I rolled off the ring apron and sprawled on the floor, provoking a vast cheer from the audience. Weeni and Neo-Nike helped me to my feet, and I shuffled slowly back to the dressing room, supported between them.
Willie went on to outfox the remaining few contestants and win the Battle Royal.
As the show ended, I was high. It had been a great night for the Luscious One-
I'd done a run-in on Joe Rossi, taken vengeance on Willie, survived a Battle Royal, and had even shed blood in battle with the baby powder lid. Waiting for the Doc to hand me my pay envelope, I killed time by talking to Len and Joe Rossi. Finally, I grew impatient, and cornered Squash.
"Yo, Doc, when we gonna get paid?"
"Look, Lush, I'm really sorry, but after paying for the radio ad time, renting the ring and the building, and giving away all those free tickets, we just don't have any-
thing left. I mean, I'm not making anything either. This was mostly a promotional show, to get people familiar with the IWA."

140

I shrugged and headed home. I knew I wasn't going to make any real money at this stage of the game, a green worker in a bush-league fed, but even ten bucks would have salvaged my emerging semi-professional pride-I had put out my best for the Doc, after all. It helped a little to remind myself that I was basically a writer doing research on the realities of professional wrestling, and that part of that reality was that there ain't much money on the undercapitalized independent circuit.
On the drive back to north Nashville, I also pondered the major backstage buzz of the evening, which had been over the appearance of legendary Nashville promot- er Nick Gulas, who'd pretty much run the local rasslin' scene in the 60s and 70s. Nick had been seen talking to Dr. Squash, and there were plenty of rumors going around...
"Nick's gonna take over the IWA..."
"Nick's gonna put some big money into us..."
"Nick's gonna start up his TV show again..."
"Nick's a crook-he rips off his workers..."
Though my little brother Scott and I had spent a lot of Saturday mornings mak- ing fun of Gulas, with his greasy slicked-back hair, bad suits, and hoarse, rasping, irritating voice, I wasn't sure what to think. At the next practice, I asked Gypsy's opinion.
"Nick? Sure he's a crook, brother. He skims plenty off the top. But at least with Nick, you'll get something."
"Do you think he's gonna take over, Joe?"
"I hope so, Luscious. It's about time somebody did."

141

Our TV show aired again, and it was pretty damned bad. Our production values were terrible, with cartoonish skits were aimed at an 8-year-old's mentality. Then again, even an 8-year-old would find it hard to believe that the Good Guys would kidnap Dr. Squash, and tie him to a Jiffyburger sign in Manchester, Tennessee.
Things weren't going too well-the Doc was a lousy businessman, the TV show was an embarrassment, and there were rumors that our Western tour might be post-
poned. I wasn't making any money.
But, on the positive side, my wrestling ability had improved dramatically. And, after all:
I was a Superstar of the IWA...

Week Six: Temporary Contender

We taped the next TV show, putting it together from scraps and segments of tape from various live cards. Another show was scheduled at the Nashville Armory, to be followed by shows in Murfreesboro and Chapel Hill. I was both excited and apprehensive about the Murfreesboro gig, because Squash had decided to put me in the Main Event, an IWA Heavyweight Title match against Big Joe Rossi, our arbit-
rary champion. Amusingly, and somewhat pathetically, it finally occurred to all of us that we didn't even have a title belt for Joe to wear. I felt it took a lot away from the psychodrama to have a champ without a belt, but Squash shrugged it off. "We'll get one later, Lush."

142

"What a goof!" jeered Gypsy, back at the practice ring. "Whoever heard of a friggin' champion with no friggin' belt?"
"It is kind of ridiculous, brother."
"And what the hell are you doing in a title match? You know in your heart you ain't earned it."
"Well, it's not like I'm gonna win, Joe...it'll just be comedy relief."
"It won't be no comedy if you don't keep up with Rossi. He's a stiff son of a bitch. He'll make you work like you never worked before."
"I think I can handle it," I said cautiously. I'd been practicing hard with Mark and Tim, the young cops from Brentwood. Between that and the arena matches, falling down had become second nature, my wind was improving, and I was beginning to get a real feel for the Art. The cops were catching on fast, and had already worked one USWA TV show as "The Medics". However, Jerry, our "Tasmanian Devil" prison guard, had stopped coming to practice. It made me realize that wrestling was not something that just anyone could do, regardless of size, strength, or aggressiveness.
"Just don't make me look bad, queer." said "Daddy'.
That was Joe's constant worry-if I sucked in the ring, he felt it was a reflection on his training, and that the whole world would be talking about him.
"So, Gypsy," said the bigger cop, Tim, "Who was your best student?"
"Got to be Bobby."
"Bobby Eaton?" I asked.
"Yeah, Bobby."

143

"He's good," said Mark. We all chimed in with words to that effect. Somehow we weren't surprised to hear that "Beautiful" Bobby was one of "Daddy' Joe's boys. These days, Eaton is a mid-carder for WCW, working mostly singles matches with other journeymen, or jobbing for minor stars, but a few years back he was a high-profile tag team wrestler, as half of the infamous Midnight Express managed by evil mama's boy Jim Cornette. Bobby, who bagged groceries before beginning his career on the Memphis circuit, has a slightly seedy redneck appearance. His looks, size and physique are average, but his style is all his own, combining mat wrestling, dirty tricks, and high flying. To this day, I'm proud to be a graduate of the same wrestling school as "Beautiful Bobby".
Like kids in a tough class, the cops and I were pretty good at subtly interrupting practices to get Gypsy talking, allowing us a break from practice. Sometimes, however, the interruptions weren't so subtle. Like when Tim bodyslammed me on the splintery plywood planks, and they somehow slid off the metal supports, spilling us all into a hole in the ring floor. Coughing out dust and brushing off spiderwebs, it took us 20 minutes to reassemble the damn thing. On the next bump, it all gave way again...
A new student showed up that week, a cheerful young bodybuilder/rock guitarist named (what else?) Mike. With his flowing blonde locks, good looks, and sculpt- ured physique, he was a classic babyface, and as a former gymnant, he caught onto the bumps almost overnight. Dr. Squash accepted my suggestion to name him "The Heavy Metal Warrior." With Gypsy offering some choreographic suggestions, the Warrior and I worked out a match for the upcoming Armory show. I think it would

144

have been a good one, but when the kid and I arrived at the arena that night, we found out, as had the workers before us, that there was no ring set up.
Dr. Squash just hadn't been able to pull it off. Not that it would have mattered if he had-with no ad time or flood of free tickets, only a dozen or so paying custom-
ers showed up for the card. To assuage our bitterness somewhat, the Warrior and I laughingly suggested that we do a "hard core show" on the bare floor. It would have been a short gig, because most of our workers had already gone home angry. The Doc blustered and made feeble excuses while Gypsy knowingly rolled his eyes.
The next day, Squash took away my championship dreams by cancelling the card in Murfreesboro. Oh well-at least I can say that Luscious was an authentic temporary contender for a physically nonexistent title belt.
"So, Doc...what about the Western tour?" I asked.
Squash made evasive noises. "Look, Lush-I've been talking to the people at Pepsi, and the Osmonds, and there are a lot of legal details to iron out before they'll sponsor us-you know how it is..."
Indeed I did. I didn't grow up around the music business without learning to recognize prime grade-A bullshit when I heard it.
The luxury tour bus had gone back to whatever company the Doc had leased it from, and there was intense grumbling in the ranks. Some of our workers were talking seriously about quitting the IWA. I took a chance and made the long drive to Chapel Hill for our next scheduled card. Paul ("Barri Cuda") Pigg had booked this one, and to my considerable relief, we had a ring. Back in the dressing room, the Doc gathered us together for some major news.

145

"Look, guys-I'm just not cut out to be a business manager. I'm turning the IWA over to Nick Gulas, and he'll be running it from now on. At least you guys'll get paid..."
I had mixed feelings. The Doc and I had a personal relationship, and were producing the TV show together. In his eyes, Luscious Leslie was a major player in the IWA. I'd heard that Nick Gulas regarded his workers with dismissive contempt;
to him, they were just pieces of money-making meat. But the idea of having a ring to wrestle in, fans in the seats, and money in my envelope cheered me up consider- ably. I got my jock, tights, makeup, and game face on.
That night, in Chapel Hill, we had a large, enthusiatic crowd, and the Heavy Metal Warrior helped me put on what was, overall, probably my best match for the IWA. It was a short but effective encounter, following a script laid out by Gypsy Joe. I entered the ring to "Walk On The Wild Side" by Lou Reed, and hardly had time to remove my accoutrements before The Warrior, accompanied by the savage strains of a Guns & Roses song, came charging down the aisle, vaulted into the ring, and shoulderblocked me through the ropes. I took a good bump to the floor, where I remained sprawled, rubbing my head as if I'd struck it, while the crowd roared and the bell finally rang, signalling the official start of the match.
"Get back in here, you cowardly piece of trash!" yelled the Warrior.
"Get back in there, Luscious, you lousy fag!" screamed some mark at ringside. I turned to him threateningly. "I know you are, but what am I?" That section of the audience erupted in a cascade of boos, jeers, and profane attacks on my manhood.
I took my time getting up, brushed myself off, and began to mince around the ring.

146

"Fag!" "Queer!" "Get him, Warrior!" "Kill that mother%^&$#*!"
Damn, I thought, smiling and strutting. Here are 300 or so people who hate my guts and want to see me murdered, and I've never felt better in my life.
The referee started the 10-count, and, at about 8, I finally climbed up on the ring apron, whining for him to protect me from my vicious, cheating opponent. The ref ignored my heated demands that the Warrior be disqualified for attacking me before the bell. The "Rule Book" has nothing to say about that, apparently...
Cautiously, I came through the ropes. Warrior and I circled each other, lunged, and locked up. Confirming his greater size and strength, my opponent sent me flying across the ring with a contemptuous shove. As I staggered back and fell on my ass, the Warrior, every inch the babyface rock'n'roller in his gold lame pants, struck a series of bodybuilder moves for the cheering crowd.
Collecting myself, I came back for another lockup. This time I got the drop on my opponent, grabbed his am, and whipped him toward the ropes. The Warrior reversed the move at the last split second, bounced me off the ropes instead, and caught me coming back with an Arm Drag. I flew over and smashed resoundingly into the canvas, provoking a tremendous collective shout of approval.
As the Warrior indulged in some more posing, I scuttled out of the ring and stood holding my back, wincing in apparent agony. From a safe distance, I yelled "You hurt me, you cheating piece of filth! I'll destroy you for that!" The Warrior gestured for me to return as the ref began his count. I exchanged some more pleas-
antries with the ringside fans, then slid back in at about 9 and a half. As my foe and I went to lock up again, I gave him an Eye Rake. "Blinded", he clutched at his face

147

in agonized pain, giving me the opportunity to grab him by arm and waistband, then dump his flashy gold lame ass over the top rope. Mike sold it well, grabbing the bottom strand just long enough to slow him down slightly, and taking what looked and sounded like a bone-breaking bump on the hardwood.
The ref signaled for the bell, and announced my disqualification for intention- ally throwing the Warrior over the top rope. I raised my own arm, gave myself a pat on the back for scoring the moral victory, and was sneering and strutting for the pissed-off marks when Mike came charging back in the ring. He spun me around, roundhouse-punched me to the mat, and proceeded to apply an extensive corrective stomping. The fans ate it up as I got my just desserts. Finally, I was able to escape, and run limping to the dressing room, where I could hardly believe my ears:
"I'm proud of you boys," said Gypsy Joe. "That was a good match-even though you damn near screwed up that Arm Drag, Luscious."
I basked in the warm glow of what seemed like incredibly fulsome praise, com- ing as it did from the usually disgruntled and dissatisfied "Daddy' Joe. I was doubly amazed when it came time to be paid, and Paul "Barri Cuda" Pigg handed me an envelope contining the princely sum of $60.00. Things were looking up.
After the show, Gypsy and I drove back to Nashville together, where we stopped by The Stagecoach, a bar frequented by wrestlers. We tipped a few beers, talked some shop, and, to my considerable gratification, a waitress recognized me:
"Hey there, Luscious Leslie!"
"I didn't realize I was famous..."
"Well, honey-you are!"

148

I felt it. I knew that I had the charisma and the potential, that my career was going to take off, that I could go as far as anyone. Maybe even the WWF. Of course, the beer helped in constructing these visions of glory...
Joe introduced me to some of his friends, and one of them asked: "So, you in the biz?"
"Yeah, brother," I said, giving him the Rassler's Handshake. "I'm a worker."
The Warrior and I went back to School, where we honed our skills in tag team tandems with the two young cops, in between re-assembling the ring floor when it collapsed after every few bumps. When we complained about the primitive condit- ions, "Daddy' Joe laughed.
"You goofs are friggin' lucky. If this was Japan, they'd make you run five miles to the school, then put the friggin' ring together before you'd even be allowed to start workin' out. You got it easy."
In general, Japanese wrestling is very intense, as are Japanese wrestlers. The fans there have never had any interest in the old "good vs. evil" psychodrama; they sit quietly watching the action, then applaud when someone pulls off a particuarly good move. They expect high-quality, risk-taking, high-flying, give-&-take combat. A lot of American wrestlers go to Japan to hone their skills; some of them never come back, because the Japanese fans regard wrestling seriously, and treat good wrestlers the way Americans treat big-time football, baseball, and basketball stars.
"Hey, Joe," said Big Mike. "Paul Pigg told me that when he went to Tojo Yam-
mamot's wrestling school, Tojo took his money up front, and then tried to get him to hurt himself on purpose so he wouldn't have to train him any more..."

149

"Yeah," said Mike's partner, Tim. "Paul said Tojo told him to get up on the top turnbuckle, jump off, and land on the back of his neck on purpose."
"That sounds like friggin' Tojo," growled Gypsy. "That's somethin' else you're lucky about, you bunch of goofs. Joe ain't gonna let you get hurt. So quit your god damn bitching and get back to work!"
It was true: we were lucky. Joe loved the Art, loved teaching us, never held back anything that might help us, and never put us intentionally in harm's way. Despite his gruff approach, our "collapsible" ring, and the ramshackle environment of the infamous Training Shed, where we had frozen all winter, and now were beginning to burn up in the early summer heat, I counted us all fortunate.
Back at home, my ebullience was balanced with sobriety at the continuing decline of my grandfather, who spent most of his time lying in bed, laboring for oxygen. I wanted to share my adventures, and some videos of my matches with him, but I realized he was not in a position to get excited over such trivial crap. He had more important stuff to worry about, like where his next breath was coming from. My dad and I had talked about Charlie's deteriorating condition, trying to come to terms with the fact that we were going to lose him soon, but neither of us was ready to let go.
For the sixth week, the IWA TV show aired. Its theme seemed to confirm the renaissance of the federation, and our potential future growth: Dr. Squash had somehow managed to beguile the Mayor of Nashville, Bill Boner, into taking part in a videotaped ceremony involving our new Boss Man, Nick Gulas. The three stood together in front of a rather threadbare purple curtain, as The Doctor symbolically

150

passed the promotional torch to Gulas, who (in his usual hoarse, rasping, irritating voice) promised to uphold "the IWA's high standards of excellence of sportsman- like competition and wholesome family entertainment", etcetera, etcetera.
Mayor Boner, who would shortly lose his office due to myriad irregularities, including an undignified public affair with aspiring Nashville singer Traci Peel (which made him a national laughingstock, sort of bush league preview of Bill & Monica), then officially declared it to be "IWA Day" in Music City. No one was sure what "IWA Day" signified, or what it would do for us, but it gave us all a sense of security and importance...
The next Friday, a "Reorganizational Meeting" was scheduled to take place at the Doctor's apartment. Riding over with Cool Breeze and Gentleman Jim, I was a bit apprehensive about serving a "New Master", but figured Gulas would likely keep me on, especially as my wrestling skills were not a lot worse than those of the more experienced guys. Breeze, Jim, and I were pretty optomistic. Like everyone else, I think we were all relieved that someone with practical experience was at the reins. Nick Gulas might not really be a "white knight", but at least he could get the job done, or so went the conventional wisdom.
Squash wasn't at home.
We called everyone we knew even remotely connected with the IWA, and finally got hold of "President" Joe Silver, who told us that the meeting had been cancelled.
"Damn, Joe, what is it now? Did Squash and Gulas decide to go whore-chasing and bar-hopping with Bill Boner?"
"It's not like that, Luscious. Squash is in the hospital with a heart attack."

151

The boys and I went to Baptist Hospital to visit our erstwhile Boss. The massive Dr. Squash had finally been laid low by stress and his own excess weight.
"God, thanks for coming to see me, guys. Hey, I'm really sorry to have to tell you this, but Gulas doesn't want to invest in us after all. Don't worry, though-when I get out of here, I'm gonna use my connections to get another sponsor..."
"It's cool, Boss. Just get better, man..."
The next evening, I went over to Gypsy Joe's apartment. He and his lady friend Robbie had invited me for burgers, beers, and the IWA TV show. We talked shop while the burgers cooked, and Robbie had me in stitches with a story about how the 450-pound Abdullah The Butcher had once gotten stuck in the back seat of her little compact car during one of Gypsy's tours of Japan.
Gypsy responded with a story about the late, lamented Frank "Bruiser" Brody, who had just recently been knifed to death in Puerto Rico. "Yeah, they had me and Bruiser as a tag team, and I didn't tag out when he wanted in. I was having too much fun. Bruiser got really pissed. He said he was gonna kick my friggin' ass later on. Anyway, I got over, and never let Bruiser in the ring. He just walked away. But like two hours later, I'm sittin' in my hotel room, and there's this BAM! BAM! BAM! on the door. I open it up and there's Bruiser standin' there staring at me with those big bulging crazy friggin' eyes of his. He says "Joe, you sonofabitch, I got somethin' to ask you.' He's like a foot taller than me and a crazy mother, but you know me, Luscious, I don't back down for no one. I go, "Yeah? Well, what the hell do you wanna ask me, you crazy bastard?' Bruiser pulls out this big bag of killer friggin' weed and goes: "You wanna get high, mother$%#@*?'"

152

When I'd finished laughing, I held up my beer and said: "To Frank Brody."
Joe and Robbie clinked their cans against mine. "To Frank." "To Bruiser."
We swallowed them down, popped some more, and I got on a roll about what was happening with various wrestlers under various names in various organizations.
Robbie asked: "How did you learn so much about wrestling, Luscious?"
Truthfully, I replied: "Well...first of all, I have Gypsy Joe for a teacher...and secondly, I read a lot of magazines."
It was a happy, mellow evening of conviviality between three siblings who all belonged to a strange and exclusive family of one of the odder branches of the performance arts, and I felt happy to be Luscious Leslie Love. At 10:30, we turned to Channel 2 to catch the latest IWA Wrestling show, which we'd managed to get in the can before the Doc's dramatic collapse. I was hoping that my match with the Heavy Metal Warrior had made it on that week, even though I was anticipating the point at which Joe would point to the screen and say: "That's where you nearly %$#&ed up the reversal on that Armdrag, queer." It was true that I'd cut it a little close, but I was ready to respond with something along the lines of "Well, Joe, that just makes it more interesting."
The local news ended with a recap of the weather. We suffered through a few minutes of commercials, and then a blast of dramatic music heralded the beginning of what was obviously a professional wrestling program.
But it wasn't ours. It was a re-run of a USWA show from several months before, featuring a huge but somewhat (at that time) clumsy worker who was being billed as "The Master Of Pain." (You may have seen this guy recently on one of the WWF network or cable TV programs-he calls himself "The Undertaker" now.)

153

"Well," said Joe, draining his beer. "That's it."
The International Wrestling Alliance had just joined a couple hundred or so other minor league feds on the dustheap of rasslin' history.

The Further Adventures of Luscious Leslie

I never saw Squash again; when he got out of the hospital, the good Doc quietly left town, and the last I heard, he was back in Utah. It's funny-I never knew his "real" last name. He was just another "Mike" among many...
Luscious Leslie went on for a while. After several months of live cards and appearances on the tube, I was an asset to the average independent promoter, who only had to stretch the truth a little to bill me as a "TV Wrestling Star".
In Hartsville, Tennessee, I finally teamed with my old substitute teacher, Cool Breeze Williams, along with the modestly-named Mr. Fabulous, to work a 6-man tag team match against Rebel Richards, Tony V., and Steve deSalvo. Our team lost when the Rebel pinned me following a "big splash" from the top rope.
At an Alexandria, Tennessee, State Fair card promoted by our failed white knight, Nick Gulas, I teamed with Gypsy Joe to take on L.C. Shoulders and George Gulas. Ever the weak link, I lost the match for us when I came off the rope with an elbow smash meant for Gulas (who ducked), and clobbered Gypsy instead.

philosophy monthly

The Danger of "Animal Rights"
By Diana Mertz Brickell

This is an essay that I wrote in December of 1995 for my Argumentation class.

The question of whether animal rights should be integrated into the legal code of the United States depends
upon a whole series of antecedent questions like: What are rights? What is the purpose of rights? What is meant
by "animal rights"? What are the criteria for possessing rights? and What would some consequences be of
implementing animal rights? These are complex questions which must be answered in order to ascertain
whether animal rights exist and should be protected. Since this controversy is often emotionally charged, we
must be careful to remain objective, rejecting appeals to pity and simplistic "moral intuitions."
Rights are not, as the Declaration of Independence states, self-evident. Rather rights are complex principles
which indicate the necessary restraints on human action in society so that individuals can survive and flourish.
The traditional rights of life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness enable an individual to sustain her
own life by protecting her against the aggression and unwanted interference of others, thus freeing her to
pursue her own values. Now although I could argue that the government's primary responsibility is to protect
these rights, for this discussion it is only necessary to indicate that the government should never violate rights.
No government should use its power to arbitrarily dispose of the lives and property of its citizens.
Animal rights activists often argue that animals are entitled to the same sort of legal protection to which humans
are entitled. This argument is justified by claiming either that animals have rights or that humans have moral
obligations to animals that should be legally enforced. If animals have rights, they should be protected by the
government. But if no such rights exist, then enacting laws which force humans to treat animals in a certain
fashion would violate the legitimate rights of humans. In other words, the human rights of freedom of action
and of property would be systematically undermined if animals were granted unwarranted protection by law.
Because, as I will show, all claims that animals have rights are illegitimate, attempts to legally protect animals
from harm, no matter how well-intentioned, will inevitably result in the violation of human rights.
In the preceding explanation of rights, I indicated that the purpose of rights is to provide the necessary
conditions for the survival and flourishing of individuals. Implicit in this formulation is the idea that the
recognition and protection of the legitimate rights of others is a necessary part of everyone's well-being. For
example, in On Liberty John Stuart Mill argues extensively for freedom of speech, stating that if a true idea is
suppressed people "are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth" and if the suppressed opinion
is wrong, "they lose. . . the clearer perception and livelier impression of the truth." (21) The principle is the same
for other rights: it is better to let people see their own mistakes than prevent them from making mistakes at all
by violating their rights. By the same token, if animals do have rights, recognizing and protecting them will be in
the interest of both humans and animals.
But granting and attempting to protect animal rights would be disastrous to humans, as well as to the detriment
of many animals. Humans derive enormous benefit from medical testing on animals; in fact human life has been
extended by 28 years by the very tests that animal rights activists are so quick to denounce as "useless torture."
(Hughes 35) A National Review article reported that "animal research has led to vaccines against diphtheria,
polio, measles, mumps, whopping cough, effective treatment of diabetes, and control of infection through
antibiotics." (56-7) Although computer simulations and cell cultures can be used instead of animals in some
medical research, human lives would be sacrificed by relying too extensively upon such methods because they a
re more simplistic than actual living systems and can omit crucial variables. The human consumption of meat is
also attacked by animal rights activists as an unnecessary and unnatural part of human life. But human life is not
just mere survival; happiness, comfort, and the enjoyment of life all make life worth living, and thinking strictly
in terms of survival unnecessarily restricts human potential. By analogy, just because a woman can physically
survive locked in her house, periodically beaten by her husband, doesn't mean that she ought to pursue such a
life or that others should force her into it.
Similarly, granting rights to animals would be harmful to animals themselves because of the specific rights
proposed, namely right to be free from unnecessary suffering. But because pain is a natural part of life, the only
way to truly escape pain is through death. Of course, the death of animals is not the desired goal of most animal
rights activists (although it is the goal of some), but it is the logical consequence of upholding the right to
freedom from unnecessary suffering.
The argument for animal rights as freedom from unnecessary suffering relies upon the assertion that the
capacity to suffer is the standard by which we should determine which creatures have rights and which do not.
As Jeremy Bentham is often quoted as saying, "the question is not, Can they reason? nor Can they talk? but,
Can they suffer?" (Hearne 60) This view of the origin of rights stands in sharp contrast with the classical position
that only animals with the capability to reason - in other words, only humans - have rights. Since we have
already seen some of the problems with the view that rights stem from the ability to suffer, let's take a closer
look at the classical position.
Determining the necessary attributes of rights-bearing creature is a difficult task, so let me illustrate, with an
example, the principles involved. A man, much to his dismay, is being devoured by a ferocious tiger. The man, in
an attempt to stop the tiger, yells, "Stop you criminal! Rights violator! Initiator of force!" Clearly this is not only
an ineffective strategy, but also an incorrect use of terminology. Why can't we rightfully accuse the tiger of
violating rights? In short, because he cannot reason and lacks free will. And for these very same reasons, we
cannot say that the tiger has rights himself, because rights are a set of reciprocal relationships, or in other words,
only the animals that have rights are expected to respect the rights of others.
Although animal rights activists would downplay the importance of the human capacity to reason, to use
abstractions and logic, is the human consciousness, not any physical attribute, that enable our survival.
Skyscrapers, breathtaking works of art, and even the books crusading for animal rights are only made possible
by the use of reason. Granting rights to beings who cannot reason, who are incapable of understanding what
rights are or why they should be respected would destroy the reciprocity of rights. Animals would be permitted
to systematically violate the rights of humans, because animals could not do better, while humans would be
bound by law to respect the rights of animals. This double standard would destroy the necessary coherence in a
system of rights. By the same token, an animal who does not have free will, whose instincts determine its course
of action would not be capable of choosing to respect rights, could not be said to have rights.
No animals, with the exception of humans, have a rational faculty and free will; only humans are capable of
understanding what rights are, weighing possible courses of action, and choosing one course of action over
another. Edwin Locke, who did extensive investigation into the studies which claimed to show that chimps can
reason and abstract found that these studies showed no such thing, but rather showed that the chimps were
making perceptual associations. For example, no chimp ever learned to count, not even in the experiments that
ran 500,000 trials, because counting necessitates abstracting away the particular entities in a group and selectively
focussing on a particular quantity. Obviously, an animal that cannot understand what the number "thirty-five"
means will never be able to understand what rights are or why they should not be violated. And if the closest
relatives of humans, the primates, cannot be said to meet the criteria for rights, an argument for the rights of
lower animals is virtually impossible.
I wish to briefly address the charge of "speciesism," which animal rights activists repeatedly level against those
who oppose their radical agenda. Peter Singer, who launched the animal rights movement with his book Animal
Liberation, defined speciesism as "prejudice or attitude of bias toward the interests of members of one's own
species and against those of members of other species." By labeling concern for human interest above the
interests of animals as an "-ism" and linking it to racism and sexism, animal rights activists hope to convince
people that concern for one's own life and happiness or even for the lives of other humans is evil. This is altruism
run amuck, where selfless concern for other humans is not longer a great enough sacrifice; now even regarding
the life of a human as more important than the life of an ant is a moral crime.
The force of the accusation of "speciesism" rests upon a fallacious analogy between speciesism and sexism or
racism. Sexism and racism attempt use inessential traits, like sex, skin color, and ethnic origin, as indicators of
intellectual inferiority. In contrast, speciesism is the recognition that there are real differences in mental and
physical ability within the animal kingdom which ought to affect our treatment of other animals. For example,
recognizing the important distinctions between housecats and lions and treating each species accordingly is, at
the very least, simple prudence, for refusing to recognize these differences could result in severe injury. It is a
fact that humans have a more advanced consciousness than any other known species which gives them an
incredible advantage in the natural world. It is a fact that to advocate the interests of another species at the
expense of one's own interests will eventually bring death. And these are precisely the facts that those who
decry "speciesism" wish others to ignore.
In sum, animal rights should not be integrated into our current system of rights for the simple reason that
animals don't have rights. Of course, rejecting the legitimacy of animal rights is not tantamount to condoning
animal cruelty, nor does it prevent anyone from peaceably advocating for more humane treatment for animals.
Public awareness and debate, economic pressure, and boycotting are effective means of diminishing the
mistreatment of animals which do not violate the rights of humans. If the arguments presented in favor of better
treatment of animals are strong enough, concerned citizens will be able to secure
Works Cited
Hearne, Vicki. "What's Wrong with Animal Rights." Harpers. Sept. 1991: 59-64.
Hughes, Jane. "Reigning cats and dogs." National Review. 23 July 1990: 35+.
Locke, Edwin. "The Truth About Animal Cognition." The Jefferson School, 1989.
Mill, John Stuart. On Liberty. New York: Oxford University Press. 1991.
Singer, Peter. Animal Liberation. (Rest of information unknown)

ANIMALS "RIGHTS" AND THE NEW MAN HATERS
BY DR. EDWIN A. LOCKE
Senior Writer, the Ayn Rand Institute
Recently a sixth-grade student threatened to bomb the headquarters of a prominent corporation, the
Gillette Company. Gillette's "crime"? The use of animals to test the safety of their products. This
student's role models have not been so hesitant. In the name of so-called "animal rights," terrorists
have committed hundreds of violent crimes. They have vandalized or fire bombed meat companies,
fur stores, fast-food restaurants, leather shops and medical research laboratories across North
America. The animal "rights" movement, however, is not about the humane treatment of animals. Its
goal is the animalistic treatment of human beings.
According to these terrorists, it is immoral to eat meat, to wear fur coats or leather shoes, and to use
animals in research-even if it would lead to cures for deadly diseases. The terrorists are unmoved
by the indisputable fact that animal research saves human lives. PETA (People for the Ethical
Treatment of Animals) makes this frighteningly clear: "Even if animal tests produced a cure for AIDS,
we'd be against it."
How do the animal "rights" advocates try to justify their position? As someone who has debated
them for years on college campuses and in the media, I know firsthand that the whole movement is
based on a single-invalid-syllogism, namely: men feel pain and have rights; animals feel pain;
therefore, animals have rights. This argument is entirely specious, because man's rights do not
depend on his ability to feel pain; they depend on his ability to think.
Rights are ethical principles applicable only to beings capable of reason and choice. There is only
one fundamental right: a man's right to his own life. To live successfully, man must use his rational
faculty-which is exercised by choice. The choice to think can be negated only by the use of physical
force. To survive and prosper, men must be free from the initiation of force by other men-free to use
their own minds to guide their choices and actions. Rights protect men against the use of force by
other men.
None of this is relevant to animals. Animals do not survive by rational thought (nor by sign
languages allegedly taught to them by psychologists). They survive through inborn reflexes and
sensory-perceptual association. They cannot reason. They cannot learn a code of ethics. A lion is
not immoral for eating a zebra (or even for attacking a man). Predation is their natural and only
means of survival; they do not have the capacity to learn any other.
Only man has the power to deal with other members of his own species by voluntary means: rational
persuasion and a code of morality rather than physical force. To claim that man's use of animals is
immoral is to claim that we have no right to our own lives and that we must sacrifice our welfare for
the sake of creatures who cannot think or grasp the concept of morality. It is to elevate amoral
animals to a moral level higher than ourselves-a flagrant contradiction. Of course, it is proper not to
cause animals gratuitous suffering. But this is not the same as inventing a bill of rights for them-at
our expense.
The granting of fictional rights to animals is not an innocent error. We do not have to speculate about
the motive, because the animal "rights" advocates have revealed it quite openly. Again from PETA:
"Mankind is the biggest blight on the face of the earth"; "I do not believe that a human being has a
right to life"; "I would rather have medical experiments done on our children than on animals." These
self- styled lovers of life do not love animals; rather, they hate men.
The animal "rights" terrorists are like the Unabomber and Oklahoma City bombers. They are not
idealists seeking justice, but nihilists seeking destruction for the sake of destruction. They do not
want to uplift mankind, to help him progress from the swamp to the stars. They want mankind's
destruction; they want him not just to stay in the swamp but to disappear into its muck.
There is only one proper answer to such people: to declare proudly and defiantly, in the name of
morality, a man's right to his life, his liberty, and the pursuit of his own happiness.

Better Things to Do
By David Kelley

Date: Wed, 6 Jul 1994 21:49:24 EST
From: IOS ios@mcimail.com
To: Multiple recipients of list AYN-RAND ayn-rand@iubvm.ucs.indiana.edu
Subject: Better Things to Do
BETTER THINGS TO DO
by David Kelley, Executive Director, Institute for Objectivist Studies
***
This article was originally printed in the IOS Journal (Vol. 4, No. 1, March 1994, pp. 11-12), the newsletter of the
Institute for Objectivist Studies. In response to many requests, it is being made available electronically under the
conditions listed at the end of the piece.
***
As readers of this Journal know, over the past few months the Institute has been fighting socialized medicine,
sponsoring a lecture series on psychological growth, planning a summer seminar on rationality, starting a mail-
order service, taping a weekly program of Objectivist ideas for a nationwide radio audience, and successfully
pilot testing the first new introductory course on Objectivism to be offered in 15 years.
Over the same few months, the Institute has also been the target of a flurry of attacks by the self-proclaimed
guardians of Objectivism. Among the more significant examples are the following.
1) In last October's newsletter of the Objectivist Health Care Professionals Network, the Network's executive
director, Sal Durante, replied to readers who had asked why the newsletter was not publicizing my speeches and
articles defending freedom in medicine. Dr. Durante attributed to me certain "views that contradict some of Ayn
Rand's fundamental ideas"-specifically the views that Rand's theory of measurement-omission is "tentative" and
that "men should not be judged on the basis of the ideas they hold." On that basis, he argued that any gain in
freedom which might result from my efforts was more than offset by the long-term "damage caused by
distorting Ayn Rand's philosophy"; and that the Institute for Objectivist Studies "takes much needed funds from
contributors who might otherwise support the Ayn Rand Institute [(ARI)]."
2) The Association of Objectivist Businessmen (AOB), whose stated goal is "to promote Objectivism in the
business community and to foster business support for the Ayn Rand Institute," was revived in 1992 after some
years of inactivity. I received a solicitation to join, and decided to do so, believing that the Association might do
some good. AOB recently distributed a membership list, followed quickly by a letter from president Richard
Salsman to AOB members, apologizing for the fact that Nathaniel Branden, Jeff Scott, and I were listed among
them. We are not eligible for membership, Mr. Salsman said, because we had "denounced" ARI. Claiming that
we had never been solicited, and had joined "for [their] own unknown purposes," Mr. Salsman removed our
names from the Association's mailing list and refunded our membership contributions. (Several IOS members
who belonged to the Association have since resigned in protest and asked for their money back.)
3) Robert Stubblefield, who is publisher of The Intellectual Activist, also runs an electronic forum called the
Objectivist Study Group (OSG). Its members are prohibited by contract from participating in another electronic
discussion group, the Moderated Discussion of Objectivist Philosophy (MDOP), which Mr. Stubblefield says
"explicitly endorses anti-Objectivists" (a reference to me, among others). Ironically, MDOP has recently been
discussing the conflict between Leonard Peikoff (in "Fact and Value") and myself (in Truth and Toleration) over
issues of moral sanction and toleration; subscribers to OSG refused an invitation from MDOP to defend Dr.
Peikoff's position in that debate. With Mr. Stubblefield's approval, contributors to OSG have also engaged in
various psychologizing efforts to impugn my character. Finally, in a message posted to his subscribers on
February 19, Mr. Stubblefield said that he had been unable to come up with an accurate name for those who
inclined to my view rather than Dr. Peikoff's; after considering and rejecting various labels, he suggested that
"snarling wimps" best described our alleged "fear of objective moral judgments and ...hatred of those who [pass
such judgments]."
Any one of these incidents, by itself, would be beneath our notice. IOS has better things to do than respond to
sniping from those who resent our very existence. But, taken together, the attacks of recent months call for
comment. We want to set the record straight for those who may have seen or heard of these attacks, and may
not understand the source of the hostility directed against the Institute. In the circumstances, we also believe it
time to reaffirm our own principles about the conduct appropriate to a philosophy of reason.
Moral Judgment and Objectivism
The hostility to the Institute stems from a public dispute between Dr. Peikoff and me, involving two basic
philosophical issues.
The first has to do with how we should judge those whose ideas we believe to be false. Is a Christian, or a
Marxist, *ipso facto* immoral? Dr. Peikoff maintained that the scope of honest error is small; except for the
young, the retarded, and the illiterate, no one can accept a false philosophical conviction without irrationality.
Hence we should be prepared to condemn our intellectual opponents as immoral. This is the view accepted by
Dr. Durante, Mssrs. Salsman and Stubblefield, and their associates.
I hold that the possibilities for honest error are many, especially in a field as complex as philosophy. It is true, of
course, that many people *are* willfully irrational in their thinking and should be judged accordingly. But we
can't know this of a given individual merely from the *content* of what he believes; we have to know
something about *how* he reached his beliefs before we can pass moral judgment. What I object to is not moral
judgment per se but the blanket condemnations that some Objectivists issue without adequate evidence. It is this
position of mine that inspired Mr. Stubblefield's name-calling.
The second issue is whether Objectivism is a closed or an open system of thought. Dr. Peikoff has maintained
that Objectivism is an immutable system, with an "official, authorized doctrine" laid down by Ayn Rand.
Objectivism means all the philosophical ideas, and only the ideas, that she espoused. My position is that
Objectivism is a body of knowledge rather than dogma, and as such is open to further discoveries in the same
way as a scientific theory. It is even open to revisions in light of new evidence, as long as they are consistent with
the central principles of the philosophy, such as the efficacy of reason and the individual's right to live for his
own happiness.
In Truth and Toleration, I illustrated this point with the example of Rand's theory of measurement-omission,
which addresses a vital but technical issue concerning the nature of concepts. The theory explains, for the first
time in the history of philosophy, exactly how and why human concepts are objective. I do not have any doubts
about the truth of this theory, as Dr. Durante implies. On the contrary, I have written the only scholarly analysis
and defense of the theory ever published (in my article "A Theory of Abstraction"). My point is that if we ever
did acquire evidence against the theory, we would not abandon the principle that concepts are objective (which
is a central principle of Objectivism). We would look for a better theory to explain that principle.
A systematic treatment of these philosophical issues can be found in Truth and Toleration. I am certainly willing
to entertain criticism of my position, and to change it if proven wrong. To my knowledge, however, no such
criticism has been offered in the three years since that work was published. Indeed, many of my opponents have
declared that, lest they sanction me, they will not even read Truth and Toleration-thereby forgoing the
opportunity to acquaint themselves with the views for which they denounce me. Instead, we have Mr. Salsman's
exercise in cliquesmanship, Mr. Stubblefield's adolescent name-calling, and the like.
It seems clear that these attacks do not reflect an honest philosophical dispute. They reflect the syndrome that I
described (in the final chapter of Truth and Toleration) as "intellectual tribalism": an effort to create an orthodoxy
as a substitute for independent thought, placing loyalty to the group above loyalty to the truth. The clearest, and
most offensive, illustration of the tribal approach is Dr. Durante's assumption that if the Institute did not exist, its
members and their contributions would flow to ARI-as if our supporters could not think for themselves and
would follow any leader who called.
The Institute's Foreign Policy
We are aware that some IOS members do support ARI, as well as the Association of Objectivist Businessmen, the
Objectivist Health Care Professionals Network, or allied organizations. It has never been our policy to
discourage this, nor do we presume to do so now. For all the reasons that I gave in Truth and Toleration, the
question of which individuals and groups to associate with is a complex one. A great many facts are relevant,
and every individual must integrate those facts for himself. But we hope that the facts outlined above are
included in your deliberations.
Some of our members have asked us whether the breach in the Objectivist movement can be healed. Our policy
is comparable to the one that Israel long adopted toward its Arab foes. We prefer to live in peace with our
intellectual neighbors, but we see no basis for a civil relationship with those who deny the legitimacy of our
existence as an independent Objectivist organization, and who launch unprovoked and irrational attacks on us.
Irrationality of this sort can usually be ignored, but we reserve the right to respond as we think necessary to
preserve our reputation. Meanwhile, we will continue to pursue our mission: to expand the body of Objectivist
thought, and to communicate these ideas to a world sorely in need of them. With your help, we will succeed.
*******
This article is copyright 1994 by the Institute for Objectivist Studies. Permission to store and forward on
electronic information systems is granted as long as the complete text of the article and the notes at the
beginning and end are included unchanged. Permission to print and photocopy is granted under the same
conditions.
Truth and Toleration and "A Theory of Abstraction" are both available from the Institute. If you refer to this
article in your order, the price is $13 for the former, $5 for the latter, and $16 for both, including shipping and
handling. Orders are accepted by mail when accompanied by a check or money order in US funds drawn on a
US bank. New York residents must add state sales tax.
The mission of the Institute for Objectivist Studies is to advance the philosophy of Objectivism as a basis for
theoretical knowledge, social progress, and individual happiness. For more information, contact: Institute for
Objectivist Studies, 82 Washington Street, Suite 207, Poughkeepsie, NY 12601. Toll-free: 1-800-374-1776. E-mail:
ios@mcimail.com.

Nick DiSpoldo, Small Press Review (on "Children, Churches and Daddies," April 1997) Kuypers is the widely-published poet of particular perspectives and not a little existential rage, but she does not impose her personal or artistic agenda on her magazine. CC+D is a provocative potpourri of news stories, poetry, humor, art and the "dirty underwear" of politics. One piece in this issue is "Crazy," an interview Kuypers conducted with "Madeline," a murderess who was found insane, and is confined to West Virginia's Arronsville Correctional Center. Madeline, whose elevator definitely doesn't go to the top, killed her boyfriend during sex with an ice pick and a chef's knife, far surpassing the butchery of Elena Bobbitt. Madeline, herself covered with blood, sat beside her lover's remains for three days, talking to herself, and that is how the police found her. For effect, Kuypers publishes Madeline's monologue in different-sized type, and the result is something between a sense of Dali's surrealism and Kafka-like craziness.

Debra Purdy Kong, writer, British Columbia, Canada
I like the magazine a lot. I like the spacious lay-out and the different coloured pages and the variety of writer's styles. Too many literary magazines read as if everyone graduated from the same course. We need to collect more voices like these and send them everywhere.

Ed Hamilton, writer #85 (of children, churches and daddies) turned out well. I really enjoyed the humor section, especially the test score answers. And, the cup-holder story is hilarious. I'm not a big fan of poetry - since much of it is so hard to decipher - but I was impressed by the work here, which tends toward the straightforward and unpretentious. As for the fiction, the piece by Anderson is quite perceptive: I liked the way the self-deluding situation of the character is gradually, subtly revealed. (Kuypers') story is good too: the way it switches narrative perspective via the letter device is a nice touch.

Children, Churches and Daddies.
It speaks for itself.
Write to Scars Publications to submit poetry, prose and artwork to Children, Churches and Daddies literary magazine, or to inquire about having your own chapbook, and maybe a few reviews like these.

Jim Maddocks, GLASGOW, via the Internet I'll be totally honest, of the material in Issue (either 83 or 86 of Children, Churches and Daddies) the only ones I really took to were Kuypers'. TRYING was so simple but most truths are, aren't they?

---

what is veganism?
A vegan (VEE-gun) is someone who does not consume any animal products. While vegetarians avoid flesh foods, vegans don't consume dairy or egg products, as well as animal products in clothing and other sources.

why veganism?
This cruelty-free lifestyle provides many benefits, to animals, the environment and to ourselves. The meat and dairy industry abuses billions of animals. Animal agriculture takes an enormous toll on the land. Consumtion of animal products has been linked to heart disease, colon and breast cancer, osteoporosis, diabetes and a host of other conditions.

so what is vegan action?
We can succeed in shifting agriculture away from factory farming, saving millions, or even billions of chickens, cows, pigs, sheep turkeys and other animals from cruelty.
We can free up land to restore to wilderness, pollute less water and air, reduce topsoil reosion, and prevent desertification.
We can improve the health and happiness of millions by preventing numerous occurrences od breast and prostate cancer, osteoporosis, and heart attacks, among other major health problems.

A vegan, cruelty-free lifestyle may be the most important step a person can take towards creatin a more just and compassionate society. Contact us for membership information, t-shirt sales or donations.

vegan action
po box 4353, berkeley, ca 94707-0353
510/704-4444

---

C Ra McGuirt, Editor, The Penny Dreadful Review (on Children, Churches and Daddies) CC&D is obviously a labor of love ... I just have to smile when I go through it. (Janet Kuypers) uses her space and her poets to best effect, and the illos attest to her skill as a graphic artist. "I really like ("Writing Your Name"). It's one of those kind of things where your eye isn't exactly pulled along, but falls effortlessly down the poem. I liked "knowledge" for its mix of disgust and acceptance. Janet Kuypers does good little movies, by which I mean her stuff provokes moving imagery for me. Color, no dialogue; the voice of the poem is the narrator over the film.

Children, Churches and Daddies no longer distributes free contributor's copies of issues. In order to receive issues of Children, Churches and Daddies, contact Janet Kuypers at the cc&d e-mail addres. Free electronic subscriptions are available via email. All you need to do is email ccandd@aol.com... and ask to be added to the free cc+d electronic subscription mailing list. And you can still see issues every month at the Children, Churches and Daddies website, located at http://scars.tv

Also, visit our new web sites: the Art Gallery and the Poetry Page.

Mark Blickley, writer The precursor to the magazine title (Children, Churches and Daddies) is very moving. "Scars" is also an excellent prose poem. I never really thought about scars as being a form of nostalgia. But in the poem it also represents courage and warmth. I look forward to finishing her book.

---

MIT Vegetarian Support Group (VSG)

functions:
* To show the MIT Food Service that there is a large community of vegetarians at MIT (and other health-conscious people) whom they are alienating with current menus, and to give positive suggestions for change.
* To exchange recipes and names of Boston area veg restaurants
* To provide a resource to people seeking communal vegetarian cooking
* To provide an option for vegetarian freshmen

We also have a discussion group for all issues related to vegetarianism, which currently has about 150 members, many of whom are outside the Boston area. The group is focusing more toward outreach and evolving from what it has been in years past. We welcome new members, as well as the opportunity to inform people about the benefits of vegetarianism, to our health, the environment, animal welfare, and a variety of other issues.

---

Gary, Editor, The Road Out of Town (on the Children, Churches and Daddies Web Site) I just checked out the site. It looks great.

Dusty Dog Reviews: These poems document a very complicated internal response to the feminine side of social existence. And as the book proceeds the poems become increasingly psychologically complex and, ultimately, fascinating and genuinely rewarding.

John Sweet, writer (on chapbook designs) Visuals were awesome. They've got a nice enigmatic quality to them. Front cover reminds me of the Roman sculptures of angels from way back when. Loved the staggered tire lettering, too. Way cool. (on "Hope Chest in the Attic") Some excellent writing in "Hope Chest in the Attic." I thought "Children, Churches and Daddies" and "The Room of the Rape" were particularly powerful pieces.

C Ra McGuirt, Editor, The Penny Dreadful Review: CC&D is obviously a labor of love ... I just have to smile when I go through it. (Janet Kuypers) uses her space and her poets to best effect, and the illos attest to her skill as a graphic artist.

Cheryl Townsend, Editor, Impetus (on Children, Churches and Daddies) The new CC&D looks absolutely amazing. It's a wonderful lay-out, looks really professional - all you need is the glossy pages. Truly impressive AND the calendar, too. Can't wait to actually start reading all the stuff inside.. Wanted to just say, it looks good so far!!!

Dusty Dog Reviews: She opens with a poem of her own devising, which has that wintry atmosphere demonstrated in the movie version of Boris Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago. The atmosphere of wintry white and cold, gloriously murderous cold, stark raging cold, numbing and brutalizing cold, appears almost as a character who announces to his audience, "Wisdom occurs only after a laboriously magnificent disappointment." Alas, that our Dusty Dog for mat cannot do justice to Ms. Kuypers' very personal layering of her poem across the page.

---

Fithian Press, Santa Barbara, CA
Indeed, there's a healthy balance here between wit and dark vision, romance and reality, just as there's a good balance between words and graphics. The work shows brave self-exploration, and serves as a reminder of mortality and the fragile beauty of friendship.

Mark Blickley, writer
The precursor to the magazine title (Children, Churches and Daddies) is very moving. "Scars" is also an excellent prose poem. I never really thought about scars as being a form of nostalgia. But in the poem it also represents courage and warmth. I look forward to finishing her book.

You Have to be Published to be Appreciated.

Do you want to be heard? Contact Children, Churches and Daddies about book or chapbook publishing. These reviews can be yours. Scars Publications, attention J. Kuypers. We're only an e-mail away. Write to us.

---

Brian B. Braddock, Writer (on 1996 Children, Churches and Daddies) I passed on a copy to my brother who is the director of the St. Camillus AIDS programs. We found (Children, Churches and Daddies') obvious dedication along this line admirable.

The Center for Renewable Energy and Sustainable Technology
The Solar Energy Research & Education Foundation (SEREF), a non-profit organization based in Washington, D.C., established on Earth Day 1993 the Center for Renewable Energy and Sustainable Technology (CREST) as its central project. CREST's three principal projects are to provide:
* on-site training and education workshops on the sustainable development interconnections of energy, economics and environment;
* on-line distance learning/training resources on CREST's SOLSTICE computer, available from 144 countries through email and the Internet;
* on-disc training and educational resources through the use of interactive multimedia applications on CD-ROM computer discs - showcasing current achievements and future opportunities in sustainable energy development.
The CREST staff also does "on the road" presentations, demonstrations, and workshops showcasing its activities and available resources.
For More Information Please Contact: Deborah Anderson
dja@crest.org or (202) 289-0061

Brian B. Braddock, Writer (on 1996 Children, Churches and Daddies) I passed on a copy to my brother who is the director of the St. Camillus AIDS programs. We found (Children, Churches and Daddies') obvious dedication along this line admirable.

---

Dorrance Publishing Co., Pittsburgh, PA
"Hope Chest in the Attic" captures the complexity of human nature and reveals startling yet profound discernments about the travesties that surge through the course of life. This collection of poetry, prose and artwork reflects sensitivity toward feminist issues concerning abuse, sexism and equality. It also probes the emotional torrent that people may experience as a reaction to the delicate topics of death, love and family.
"Chain Smoking" depicts the emotional distress that afflicted a friend while he struggled to clarify his sexual ambiguity. Not only does this thought-provoking profile address the plight that homosexuals face in a homophobic society, it also characterizes the essence of friendship. "The room of the rape" is a passionate representation of the suffering rape victims experience. Vivid descriptions, rich symbolism, and candid expressions paint a shocking portrait of victory over the gripping fear that consumes the soul after a painful exploitation.

want a review like this? contact scars about getting your own book published.

---

Paul Weinman, Writer (on 1996 Children, Churches and Daddies) Wonderful new direction (Children, Churches and Daddies has) taken - great articles, etc. (especially those on AIDS). Great stories - all sorts of hot info!

The magazine Children Churches and Daddies is Copyright © through Scars Publications and Design. The rights of the individual pieces remain with the authors. No material may be reprinted without express permission from the author.

Okay, nilla wafer. Listen up and listen good. How to save your life. Submit, or I'll have to kill you.
Okay, it's this simple: send me published or unpublished poetry, prose or art work (do not send originals), along with a bio, to us - then sit around and wait... Pretty soon you'll hear from the happy people at cc&d that says (a) Your work sucks, or (b) This is fancy crap, and we're gonna print it. It's that simple!

Okay, butt-munch. Tough guy. This is how to win the editors over.
Hope Chest in the Attic is a 200 page, perfect-bound book of 13 years of poetry, prose and art by Janet Kuypers. It's a really classy thing, if you know what I mean. We also have a few extra sopies of the book "Rinse and Repeat", which has all the 1999 issues of cc&d crammed into one book. And you can have either one of these things at just five bucks a pop if you just contact us. It's an offer you can't refuse...

Carlton Press, New York, NY: HOPE CHEST IN THE ATTIC is a collection of well-fashioned, often elegant poems and short prose that deals in many instances, with the most mysterious and awesome of human experiences: love... Janet Kuypers draws from a vast range of experiences and transforms thoughts into lyrical and succinct verse... Recommended as poetic fare that will titillate the palate in its imagery and imaginative creations.
Mark Blickley, writer: The precursor to the magazine title (Children, Churches and Daddies) is very moving. "Scars" is also an excellent prose poem. I never really thought about scars as being a form of nostalgia. But in the poem it also represents courage and warmth. I look forward to finishing the book.

You Have to be Published to be Appreciated.
Do you want to be heard? Contact Children, Churches and Daddies about book and chapbook publishing. These reviews can be yours. Scars Publications, attention J. Kuypers - you can write for yourself or you can write for an audience. It's your call...

Dorrance Publishing Co., Pittsburgh, PA: "Hope Chest in the Attic" captures the complexity of human nature and reveals startling yet profound discernments about the travesties that surge through the course of life. This collection of poetry, prose and artwork reflects sensitivity toward feminist issues concerning abuse, sexism and equality. It also probes the emotional torrent that people may experience as a reaction to the delicate topics of death, love and family. "Chain Smoking" depicts the emotional distress that afflicted a friend while he struggled to clarify his sexual ambiguity. Not only does this thought-provoking profile address the plight that homosexuals face in a homophobic society, it also characterizes the essence of friendship. "The room of the rape" is a passionate representation of the suffering rape victims experience. Vivid descriptions, rich symbolism, and candid expressions paint a shocking portrait of victory over the gripping fear that consumes the soul after a painful exploitation.

Dusty Dog Reviews, CA (on knife): These poems document a very complicated internal response to the feminine side of social existence. And as the book proceeds the poems become increasingly psychologically complex and, ultimately, fascinating and genuinely rewarding. Children, Churches and Daddies. It speaks for itself.

Dusty Dog Reviews (on Without You): She open with a poem of her own devising, which has that wintry atmosphere demonstrated in the movie version of Boris Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago. The atmosphere of wintry white and cold, gloriously murderous cold, stark raging cold, numbing and brutalizing cold, appears almost as a character who announces to his audience, "Wisdom occurs only after a laboriously magnificent disappointment." Alas, that our Dusty Dog for mat cannot do justice to Ms. Kuypers' very personal layering of her poem across the page.
Children, Churches and Daddies. It speaks for itself.

Debra Purdy Kong, writer, British Columbia, Canada (on Children, Churches and Daddies): I like the magazine a lot. I like the spacious lay-out and the different coloured pages and the variety of writer's styles. Too many literary magazines read as if everyone graduated from the same course. We need to collect more voices like these and send them everywhere.
Fithian Press, Santa Barbara, CA: Indeed, there's a healthy balance here between wit and dark vision, romance and reality, just as there's a good balance between words and graphics. The work shows brave self-exploration, and serves as a reminder of mortality and the fragile beauty of friendship.

Published since 1993 No racist, sexist or homophobic material is appreciated; we do accept work of almost any genre of poetry, prose or artwork, though we shy away from concrete poetry and rhyme for rhyme's sake. Do not send originals. Any work sent to Scars Publications on Macintosh disks, text format, will be given special attention over smail-mail submissions. There is no limit to how much you may submit at a time; previously published work accepted.