Duality Point – The Blinding Stargate

There’s plenty of wonder in the world and for that which exists, for the most part, it can only be seen if one is to achieve even a slight understanding of its complexity. If you can, however, I would truly recommend that in that precious moment of time when you are in the midst of certain chaos and have seen something beyond our comprehension, allow it to invade all of the senses.

I found one just a few days ago in my town, for which I’ve lived for well over thirty years. It exists at the point where Partition street loops around, as one big hill, to which Third street then intersects.If you were to look down from this point on either side of Partition, you would be reminded of Sisyphus from Greek lore pushing a boulder up a hill only for it to drop down moments later. If that isn’t a fitting metaphor for this city I don’t know what is.

If you approach this point at the right time, you’ll witness an amazing sight, as a rift out of some unreality forms a mesmerizing stargate. Partition street becomes the horizon and captures at this most perfect moment the full majesty of the sun. The sun manages to shine down the entire length of Partition to a point where if you’re at the bottom coming up you’ll be blinded. You won’t be able to move, utterly humbled by the radiance of this blinding light. Many bow in reverence, while others flock to bear witness to its brilliance. It reminds one of the ‘Trial of Sysiphus’, in which he is forced to roll a boulder up a hill only for it to fall back down, repeating this over and over for all eternity. If you force yourself to the top of the hill, fighting the brilliance, deciding not to wait for it to pass, you will see the cataclysm that waits between worlds. You’ll enter the stargate and be taught every secret there is to know.

It only takes a moment for the gate to close. You’ll look down on the other side of Partition. There’s the Stewart’s Shop and the Broadway Bridge, as well as the empty field of rubble that used to be my high school. There’s also a laundromat that’s been closed since I was born. You’ll sit at the top of the hill and think maybe the stargate will return, but time and wonder are passing fads. You’ll learn just like Sisyphus and roll your ass back down the hill.

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Song of the Hill People

Look like crows to me…

Stretching around Partition St and going for miles, passed Central Park and out to Herkimer St is what historians have labeled ‘Land of the Hill People’. Starting at Partition, the streets become narrow and slanted, as this half of the city is constructed on a hill… well, a mountain. In the early seventies, a group of nomads conquered this section of the city, known as the ‘Comanchi Hill Squatters’. They took the south side of Partition by force, invading the Stewarts and forcing out indigenous people that had lived there for generations. From there, they sped along the hill, gathering a brute army that slaughtered hundreds, before the city evacuated to the south. An army had to be called in to monitor the growing strength of this invasion, which amassed so swiftly it could hardly continue with such energy. Military experts could do nothing to save those within the area of Partition to Herkimer St, and thus the hill people either murdered those left behind, enslaved them or used them as a type of broodmare for their rotten genes. Since that fateful time, the hill people have become a staple of this fair city, with their genes being so inter-spliced amidst one another that their DNA can hardly be differentiated between one another. They’ve made this central point of our town their kingdom, which slants at an awkward right angle and forces all who park here to use their emergency brake.

There is a great hymn that these people have preserved over the years, sometimes editing to make their heroes sound that much greater to the ears of their children. It’s an important piece of their history, protecting it from invaders, as the Hill People are oft to do. They don’t take to outsiders with affection. They’ve always been xenophobic to a point where even their neighbors become enemies, if only for a while, before they’re friends again. History is their bond and theirs is full of myth and superstition. There’s this song that has escaped their secrecy, for which plenty have heard. I will share it now. This is the ‘Song of the Hill People’:

Many deeds have bested belly Bibby Bobby Maroo

Who tied together both his strings and gave the world his shoe

Not one to bother ever more to see between his sneakers

and belly slim amidst the mass of unrepentent tweekers

To cringe a toss so delicate betwixt his bloody fingers

That wrapped around those blackened cords with not a twinge of singer

And Billy Bobby broke it down to dance before his rivals

as they cringed with crimson rage and tossed their shoes in piles

For victory had been denied, because of Bobby Maroo

Who tossed, just one, but plenty more, his bloody, busted shoe.

Going through the land of the Hill People, one will see these decorations, shoes tied at the laces, strewn about the power-lines, as a show of respect to Bobby Maroo. Outsiders aren’t welcome for good reason. We can’t possibly understand the complexity of their culture. It would take anthropologists decades to infiltrate and understand the superstitions and religious hierarchies of the Hill People. This seems an impossibility, since the core belief among all Hill People is that if they can’t trust you they can have nothing to do with you. Still, one has to wonder what occurs at night, when they sing these songs, howling at the moon and honoring their dark gods.

Where The Buffalo Roam

Photo of me, circa 1995. I enjoy hay most times, but there’s just something about grass… Oh give me a home… where the buffalo roam…

Over time, I’ve grown accustomed to my cynical interpretations of the world, although I will admit for honesty’s sake that I don’t think it’s the proper way to view the world. Being a cynic is the same as being an optimist, is the same as being a broken clock… you’re likely to be right at least twice in a day. Still, when you see the amount of stupidity and arrogance and brutality it’s just impossible not to cling to your ideals. Most of us need them for comfort. I see the future in blips that my mind tries to decipher. I see a little bit of what I remember from history classes. Repetition is the way of the world. You’ll see a glorious Fourth Reich emerge under the guise of the ‘American Dream’ and that’ll be the end of it. Rome prospered as a Republic. It floundered as an Empire. The era of the Christian empire… we refer to that these days as the ‘Dark Ages’. And, for all my cynicism, I can’t shake the bitter truth that’s chewing on my insides… you know, that vital point where the gut calls out to those who refuse to accept it.

I woke up during a generation that wasn’t accustomed to such harsh realities. We knew the world around us from a twenty-inch television screen. We saw the horror appear between cartoons, when our fathers would flip the channels for a moment, and in this way we were exposed to the densely packed chicanery of the outside world. If anything separated us or made us unique when compared to the generations before it’s that our parents and various consignment of adults seemed to inspire the apathy that would cement our legacy. They wanted us to be less inspired. They wanted us to be comfortable, because they weren’t when they were at our age. We weren’t hippies, although we enjoyed the drug use. We weren’t our harsh conservative counterparts leading impetuous, vulgar crusades against any other forms of reality that might coincide with our belief structures. Simply put… we just were. We saw the worst of both worlds. We saw Columbine, when two teenage boys brought in assault rifles and made their school into a war-zone. We saw Bill Clinton and the amorality that accompanied him, although the macabre demeanor of the entire circus was something all the more vulgar, as those who persecuted him were outed as pederasts and conmen. This is the world that my generation knew. We heard the words of our doom and devastation, but none of it seemed so real as to shake us out of this spell, for which I have no words.

I’ll admit that all the dangers seemed far away. We were a generation that grew up playing as pirates and soldiers, while not knowing that children are age in worlds far away were playing these games for real. Child soldiers, child slaves, child abduction. There was no such thing as ‘a childhood’ in other worlds, where kids our same age were forced to grow up much too fast, while we were allowed to hold onto ours up to the age of… well… I’m thirty-one… so… I think I have a few more years.

If it was one issue… and only one… which is a stretch, as I’m sure you could pick several issues with how our society operates… I think that our culture developed some form of impenetrable, narcissistic wall around us. Our parents, along with various corporate sponsors and conservative, amoral senators, took special care in protecting their children, protecting us, although the harsh realities of the outside world still remained. We maintained a delicate, oblivious nature that continued into adulthood. That’s what I blame. Every generation has a struggle of self, something that would’ve been labeled a ‘spiritual dilemma’ in days of old. Our generation has no spirit. We have no struggle. This is the dilemma. We’ve never been challenged or at least, whenever we’ve been challenged, someone else comes to our aid in miraculous fashion.

The real price of our narcissism is a willingness to allow everything to fall apart, because we think it will illicit a response from a yet to be determined messiah. We’ll let the world fall apart, because we expect a winged figure, not an angel, but superman, batman, whoever, to put all our fears to rest. The problem with this belief is that the rest of the world isn’t in on the joke. Our parents let us believe in monsters for too long, while the rest of the world already knew. We have a lot of catching up to do, but I don’t see it happening. We’re far too cynical. Most likely, we’ll let it all fall apart, because the comfort of our situation has yet to be compromised.

Overcoming this era in our lives, when we’ve been set to such a moderate standard, for which the challenge was never necessary is, in itself, the greatest challenge of our generation. We have plenty of goals, we just have to accept them. We have far more goals than we do limits. We have far more opportunities than we’d like to admit. We have far more chances for greatness than we do possibilities to hide when the nightmare finally asserts control.

Rensselaer Little League

Duality principle is allowed to work even when you don’t take the time to consider it. You don’t have to think about belonging, becoming, existing with the world around you. Every once in a while, the cosmos create a certain blending of delicate harmonies and the world functions as one. It doesn’t have to be made into anything spiritual. It’s just a perfect moment when time, place and opportunity unfold before your eyes to allow a certain unknown reality to unfold.

One of the worst things about revelation is that it can fold back into unreality in a moment’s notice. If you don’t understand it or take the time to think about it, the moment disperses and you’re left with nothing. You might maintain certain illusions about the moment and how it made you feel, but unless you examine and learn from it, you’ll never manifest it in your everyday life… unless luck allows for it, if only one last time.

When I was a kid, I remember having such a moment. It’s amazing and unforgettable, because it’s not just happening to you. It happens to everyone around you. They sense it in some way, but for some it doesn’t register as anything significant. It’s duality principle taking effect, although, it can happen in a flash, and often manifests in the form of chaos. Nobody notices that it’s an organized chaos. We just see the bomb going off, the aftermath, the devastation, but we never catch the essence of what occurred.

The forms that it takes can be the ugliest thing you’ve ever seen. For me and for several of us who signed up… it occurred at the Rensselaer Little League. There aren’t as many ‘city-lines’ that divide us… which is to say, people from one part of town don’t hate those on another part of town. Our hatred is individualized. This is what gives it its power. A man can hate another man for any damn reason that he pleases. We’ve all heard horror stories about parents acting more like children during these games. It happened more than I care to remember during my time playing at the Rensselaer Little League. Parents didn’t seem to understand that this was a pointless endeavor. We played in a field that ended a cul de sac, with a crick just behind the outfield fences. Somehow, the parents thought we were playing at Yankee Stadium. They’d bicker among one another, argue with umpires or even manage to call-out other people’s children. Usually when the last thing happened, the parent of the child would get involved and a fight would have to be broken up.

I’m relatively certain that this ‘Parents Behaving Badly’ occurs enough that it could be made into its own reality show. I can’t even begin to try and understand what’s going on in their minds. The point is that instead of bringing us together for an enjoyable time, it was made into something that seemed to bring out the worst in people. It wasn’t every time, but once in a while, some underlying psychosis got the better of them all and just… POOF… our fun time was taken away. Baseball provides for many a scapegoat for the excitement one finds in life, capsulizing it to brief moments, where children steal home or hits his first home run. The Little League that hides within a cul de sac off of Partition provides a place for children of all walks of life to meet, to see that they have something in common with one another, while their parents maintain their cultural bias.

How duality principle presented itself to me can be explained by the clever adage, ‘The enemy of my enemy is my friend’. The hatred in this town performed two amazing feats of mental gymnastics when the summer came on and a few of us made the ‘All-Star League’, which brought other teams to our field at the end of a cul de sac. The first amazing feat of our hatred was to bring us together. Our hatred became infectious, spreading throughout the parents and bringing them together in order to form a united front against the parents and children of the opposing teams. It wasn’t a good things. I know this, but it happened. You could see people who always hated one another working together to act like fools and bicker about how the other teams were getting all the good breaks, good calls, good things overall. In this respect, the second mental gymnastic that formed this day out of duality principle is that our people understood the necessity of a decent scapegoat. The parents and people who came to enjoy the game found something special in berating the outsiders that came to the end of our cul de sac. There was a real feeling that we lived in a place close to ‘Thunderdome’, where two teams enter and just one could leave. We never put together the reality… THEY were the ones that get to leave. It didn’t matter. We were full of a sense of pride for where we were, brought on by these foreign invaders with nicer uniforms. That never mattered. We didn’t want to be them. We wanted… well… who the hell knows.

Duality principle didn’t last too long in those trying times and god knows nobody learned anything from the moment that we had. I was too young to understand the significance and even now, several years down the road, all I can see is the blurry memories of losing a summer because baseball felt like the sport that would never end. The duality of it is this… we can walk around or bump into each other. We can bump into each other and pick each other up or knock ourselves out into space. We can crash and put each other together or pull one another apart. That’s what I learned in between watching parents act worse than kids and trying to figure out why the god damn summer league would never, ever end.

Embrace of Calliope

Our town isn’t known for much. It’s rare for us to get in the papers and when we do, it’s more likely for something terrible that will bring us great shame. After a while, you just sort of become numb to it. You laugh it off, not to laugh at yourself, but laugh at the regular humiliation of your people. It’s kinda like being a Cleveland Browns fan… for which I offer my deepest sympathies.

On the day in question, when we received our deepest veneration from the world, it took the death of two of our greatest patrons, Calliope the Immortal and Eseferon the Great. Their story was something that brought hope to the world, but their ending was what caught people’s attention. They died in each other’s arms. It was a beautiful moment, so much so that someone even took a picture and, someone even more morbid had it framed. It stood in our local library for a few days, before it appeared distasteful to some and had to be removed.

Now, what came as an even greater surprise and helped create a mythology about their love was that Eseferon the Great somewhat predicted their deaths. I don’t think he predicted it as much as hoped. He wanted nothing more than to fall asleep forever in her arms. Eseferon the Great told the world that he had cancer, stricken limbs with rigor before his death, pulsing pains here and there, but, so it goes, when Calliope moved her hands over his body he felt nothing more. He claimed to have a sore on his neck, but when she touched it the pain dispersed. He believed himself to have something terrible lurking in his sides, but with a gentle caress she made the pain go away. He claimed that her touch held mystical powers. He claimed that when he was around her he felt no more pain.

This was something he said over and over again. For years, he’d admit to believing that she had something special that he couldn’t put his finger on, although it was her love that truly drove him to feel better. Calliope the Immortal I never saw a picture of in her younger days, although she maintained an undeniable beauty in her declining years. She appeared above the fatigue of death, doom and old age. People thought they were both crazy, because Calliope never had a job and all she ever seemed to do was walk around. It was something to see, however, as if we had a guardian angel roaming the streets without concern. It almost seemed as if we should also live without concern. She’d walk through our Riverfront Park and disappear under the bridge, only to return, same upright stance, same graceful walk, as if above water.

The coroners said there was nothing wrong with Eseferon, although he was always the hypochondriac, but I’m sure he’d assume his lack of distress on his loving partner. Calliope called them back. Her gift must’ve run out. Either way, I believe they knew their time was running out. She’d held him together for so long. What do you do when you have no time left? They returned to what brought them here in the first place. They did what they loved to do.