Aloja, Latvia. Abandoned railroad platform. Railway dismantled.

November 12, 2111

I slept well, but woke up at 5 a.m. with a start, all tense and thinking about money. This has happened before. It gets worse with age, because then you no longer can go and do, but must do on a pension.

I lay in bed not wishing to rise, to either know my problems or think of them. For a brief moment, I felt happy that I am getting old and my worries are not for the long term. However, my greatest concern remains--what am I to do with my temple?

With Agnese abroad, I fear that I will have to leave the temple stand as is (just like the photo of the abandoned railroad platform at the head of this blog). It means that instead of someone paying taxes on the land until better times, the temple will simply fall apart. The countryside is too far away for today's urban dwellers. Soon thieves will break the temple’s indoor spaces, its windows, and that will be that.

At best--and it is no small best--the trees, which I have planted on the bare plots of grass. are immature and, therefore, have a long time to grow. Better still, this side of the road has not been ameliorized, which is why some of my land is on swampland. Tractors do not like to drive over such land.

I mentioned my temple in one of the blogs just a day or two ago. If one makes a temple with one’s own hands, it is or becomes part of one’s own self. It is like an extension of one’s own body. In my temple, it is mostly trees that are its visitors.

Right now, I am thinking about Kubla Khan, a king, who my mind associates with temples. I must have read Coleridge's poem over fifty years ago now.

Kubla Khan is an interesting name. If I break the words that spell “Kubla Khan” in a freely associative way, they come back to me with the echo: “King John!” That is what is known as a pareidolia effect.

What is pareidolia?

The internet generally refers to pareidolia as “an erroneous or fanciful perception”. Such a prejudicial statement is a customary preface to the actual (unprejudiced) part of the definition: pareidolia is the ability to spontaneously see patterns or meanings in ambiguous or random sounds or shapes. It is a kind of body English one practices when playing the pinball mashine.

In other words, pareidolia is a way of mimesis. The mind of the listener spontaneously sees (for example, in a cloud) a running elephant. Most of the time, I am unlikely to mention the “elephant” to my traveling companion(s), but if I do and point my finger to where I see it, you may see it as well.

In any event, when I call up the name of Kubla Khan, I associate with the name other exotica as well. For example, words such as ‘katls’ come to mind. It means a kettle in Latvian. Also, the word ‘kupla’, which means full—like in a full head of hair. I see these words become so saturated with meaning and significance (for mine and your ancestors) that the words ‘koning’ amd ‘king’ emerge from them next. In the same way, I associate chan = han = yan = John. Chan to John, what with ch = y is a safe bet. This is why John Kubla is more likely to be called John King in America.

Enough said about pareidolia, except to ad that it can be a good thing.

When it comes to my temple, I hear in my ear the first lines of "Kubla Khan" , a poem by Samuel Taylor Cooleridge.

“In Xanadu did Kubla Khan

a stately pleasure-dome decree:

where Alph, the sacred river, ran

through caverns measureless to man

down to a sunless sea....”

I actually I take greater delight in such natural temples as form under a low bridge when the sun is shining. The water that reflects back upon the bottom of the bridge is like a cloud, like a current, and quite something other. Such temple spaces are seen by just about by everyone who has ever been in a boat, and the boat passes under a bridge. Tourists in Venice and Amsterdam know such temples to appear as if out of nowhere.

I imagine that Coleridge’s Alph runs through as sunless a cavern as sunless is the sea that it disappears into. There is no light. There is only a roar. Death!

On the other hand, my temple, whom (or which) I call “Temple Black John in memory of destroyed forests”, stands on a concrete platform. The temple is both a he and it. He is a large—with limbs severed at a short distance from his body—oak stump painted black. It stands on a paved platform that was once part of the foundation of a country barn and hayloft.

The way of life that built haylofts has been overtaken by humongous tractors pulling a dozen steel knives across our planet. Mega farmers call it “plowing”.

“Temple Black John” is where I am at. As Coleridge goes on to say: “And here were forests ancient as the hills, enfolding sunny spots of greenery…. ” once stood, but stand no more, today stand I.

The forests about me are being cut down.

The private lots of forest, once and still owned by local farmers, are losing their trees to pay the banks. The government keeps silent over the fast pace that the forests are disappearing, because the government created such conditions in the first place. It did not look out for the long-term welfare of the nation's people.

Interestingly, the trees appear to have been tightly bound up with the people, the countryside dwellers who were once known as “the salt of the earth”. Now it is the extra skin that they can slough off. They have to slaugh it, because the government did not caution them to be careful when borrowing money. “Push the gas pedal to the floor” was a widely heard motto in Latvia. One politician rose rather high with that motto on his lips.

So, the Latvian's car suffered a catastrophe before it was paid for. The banks however insist on being paid, and the salt of the earth are in a hurry to sell while there is still a chance to grab a ticket for England or Ireland and go pick mushrooms there in a Quonset hut.

This is where my interest in wild boars comes to fore again. The boar has a will and power that I do not have, but then I do not have to have it in a direct manner. I can have it by outlawing wild boar hunting, and the wild boar will do the rest.

However, for all of that to happen, I have to become king.

Aloja, Latvia. Abandoned railroad platform. Railway dismantled.

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November 13, 2111

Four men interested in the preservation of Latvia’s forests are coming to visit next Monday, November 21. It will be another chance for me to explain that it is no longer preserving forests, but humankind itself. My sense is that we have to move back into the forest taking with us, of course, our computers.

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I am taken by the idea that there was a day when all of the men of Selk’nam tribe got together (in the mythological story only of course) and decided to kill all the women.

The men made that decision, because the women had become unhappy with the men’s laziness, with men’s belief that one’s cock is the greatest, and that he can persuade almost any woman to see his way all things that are important to him.

Some women had gone as far as to say that that it was too bad they had stopped sacrificing male babies and their bodies were not placed under the whorehouse floor before that of their daughters. After all, the practice had kept the numbers of men under control.

True, the women admitted, they had built whorehouses themselves, but they had done so to keep men under control and serve the Sun. At that time in history a woman could still drive a nail through a man’s head if he was a violent one. The community of women excused her for that—as Jael had been excused for driving a tent peg into the head of  Sisera.

Even so, apparently Jael’s act was an exception. Perhaps it happened when women had lost or were already near losing their power.

According to the etymologist Martin Gusinde, the myth of the Selk’nam men does not hide that the tribe’s first women were killed. Indeed, when one thinks about it, the event did not only happen on Tierra del Fuego, but occurred in many places.

The slaughter of women (poetically referred to as “daughters of the Sun”) also happened in proto-Latvia. Not that it was always necessary to do it in a physical way. Men simply renamed Saule (the Sun, feminine Gender) for Dievs (God, male gender). In our day, we do not remember that ‘dievs’ was once a common word for day, ‘diena’, and that ‘’diena’ is a word at the root of ‘daina’. Daina today means a short poem. In other words (to take advantage of the pareidolic license), proto-Latvians used to think of their days as poems, while the Gods were many.

Is it not obvious that “day” is related to the Sun? Yet, though the changes did not happen that long ago (perhaps as recently as two three hundred years), the Sun Goddess is barely remembered today.

The same fate as befell the Sun Goddess befell the Moon Goddess also, the Latvian Mehnesnica (moonlight). While no story of the death of Menesnica survives, we can borrow from the Aztecs, who, too, killed their Moon Goddess, Coyolxouhqui.  Indeed, after Coyolxauhqui was killed, she was dismembered, and an image of the dismembered Goddess was placed at the foot of Templo Mayor, Tenochtitlan, now Mexico City. On top of Templo Mayor sat, of course, a male God, Huitzilopotchtli, who in subsequent years officiated there by sacrificing human beings. After the victims had been sacrificed, the priests of Huitzilopotchtli threw their bodies down the temple staircase as unceremoniously as Huitzilopotchtli had done with the body of the Moon Goddess.

After the Selk’nam men kill their women (mothers, daughters, lovers, all women above ten or maybe younger), they go find for themselves other women. They go as far as the tribe that speaks a little funny, a different language, which makes it strangers, and rob it of its women. They rape the kidnapped women either on the spot or after they bring them home. The women get pregnant.

Pregnancy is said to be endorsed by God. So says the Pope. Life goes on. Alas, violence now must be squared to keep the peace.

The Sun smileth no longer. The feminine gender is forced to forget its former power, and the women become birthing machines for liberal capitalism. In my lifetime alone the population of the world has gone from two to seven billion people. Nevertheless, only yesterday I again heard some government lackey say that the only way that countryside people can break out of their poverty is by moving to an urban area.

Is this because banks can then go out in the countryside, impoverish the Earth as well as humankind, and urban folks, more familiar with the virtual than real, will live and die for ever after happy?

Hello?

Rubbish of a former and present civilization.

Now we see what happens when the Bible does not start with the story of Adam and Eve, but the ancestors of a tribe of men in Tierra del Fuego, Latvia, Rome, China, Mexico, just about anywhere. Men learn the art of violence and start using violence to rule.

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