Anatomy of a Mo'ai (from Samzidat V1n1)

From Samizdat, V.1 N.1

Samizdat Volume 1, Number 1

Here it is, Samizdat, volume 1, number 1. Ten pages of ridiculousness. It's physical expression has already been distributed about the Metropolis. The whole thing is downloadable here: https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B2wEWYELakqcWDN1U2h4RUFLQkU/edit?usp=sharing

Final Edits on Samizdat V.1N.1

Here at Samizdat HQ, the editorial staff (me, my cats, and an overtaxed coffee maker) are putting the final touches on the FIRST issue of our meatspace presence, the honest-to-Cthulhu paper-n-ink version of Samizdat: The Journal of the Geoliminal Research Society.  Here's the Table o' Contents, as it stands now:

The ToC for Samizdat V1N1; Click, and the image, she gets bigger!

If you find yourself in our EXTREMELY circumscribed geographic area, you may come across this bizarre communique.  We'll eventually get 'er up on the interwebs here, too, I reckon.

PEACE BE UPON YOU, GEOLIMINOIDS.

The View From Our Lair

Gates to Hell

Gateways to Hell are common features on the mythic landscape, mapped out in fiction and folklore.  It's telling that while there's only one way to get to Heaven, Hell appears to be well served by numerous access points easily accessible to the day hiker or sight-seer.  The countryside is pockmarked with them, whereas it's much harder to pin the location of the Pearly Gates to the map.

Rodin's Gate to Hell

This fascination with the underworld predates Christianity, of course, and much of the modern iconography of the Christian Hell is borrowed wholesale from older religions and myths.  However, the fact remains that humans have always had a deep interest in passages to terrible, otherworldly subterranean realms.  Famous ancient entrances to hell are commonly associated with unusual or spectacular geology, primarily of volcanic origin. Sicily's Mount Etna, for instance, or Mount Hekla on Iceland, both fiery conical stratovolcanoes noted for spectacular displays of pyrotechnics and telluric rumblings.  Similarly, the recently discovered and wonderfully named "Plutonium" of Hierapolis (in modern day Turkey) is closely associated with travertine deposits of an active hydrothermal system, as well as murderously toxic fumes.  This location, complete with temples and state-of-the-art (for the Roman world) tourist facilities was believed to be a conduit directly into Hades.  Animals were sacrificed by driving them into the caves, where they would be asphyxiated by poisonous vapors.  Apparently, they even sold birds to visitors, so pilgrims could chuck them into the caves as see the lethal results of this door to hell for themselves.  One is, of course, also reminded of the Delphic oracle, who was said to breathe subterranean fumes in order to achieve her prophetic visions.

Other Gates to Hell described by ancient traditions are less spectacularly visual than erupting volcanoes or fuming hydrothermal vents, though often equally geological in nature.  As a brief example, to the Romans, Lake Avernus (in the modern day Campania region of Southern Italy) was believed to be the Gate to Hell used by Aeneas, the mythic founder of the Latin people.  Interestingly, Lake Avernus is a crater lake, located in an apparently extinct volcanic cone, although ancient tradition claims that poisonous vapors emitted from the lake killed birds that tried to fly over it.  Today, of course, it is posses no hazard to anybody, though such may not always have been the case.  Active volcanism or the sudden release of built-up carbon dioxide due to lake overturning could be the source of these stories.  Volcanoes, lakes, caves, yawning fissures; all openings into the earth, yonic gates linking two worlds.

Aside from the common linkages of geological and geochemical processes, there is a relationship between these ancient sites of egress into the Underworld and mystical experiences.  Whether these experiences are the biological effects of exposure to vapors or come in the form of more subtle but no less important cultural and social factors, subterranean portals represent liminal spaces between the sunlit "real" world and a shadowy "other place" that is either physically or metaphorically hidden beneath the surface of everyday experience.  Often, this interaction with the otherworld is dangerous or potentially dangerous; toxic fumes, either evident or rumored, serving to remind us that knowledge can be destructive.

A famous medieval Hell's Gate can be found in County Donegal, Ireland, at St. Patrick's Purgatory.  Here, St. Patrick opened a gate to the underworld, using it as concrete proof of Hell's existence in order to convert the Irish to Christianity.  Again, we see how mystical revaluation becomes a major theme of the subterranean gateway, linking our dull and uncertain world to the technicolor marvels of supernormal realms normally hidden from view.  Too, St. Patrick's Purgatory, much like the Plutonium, is a pilgrimage/tourist site, commodifying these spaces of occult knowledge and reveltory gnosis to the masses.

Approaching more modern times, we see an interesting entanglement of Hell Gates with ideas about the Hollow Earth.  Setting aside paradisaical visions of the mundus subterranean, strange gateways into various underworlds were still being mapped out.  For instance, Iceland's Mount Hekla, discussed above, was still described as a gateway to hell in the 1600s, with tales of Eastertime gatherings of witches.  The divergence of stories and ideas about the subterranean world into distinct utopian and distopian threads is interesting, as it maintains the mystical aspects while changing their moral components.  These include the theosophical reimaging of Agartha as an interior "super-terrestrial" command-and-control center inhabited by benevolent Ascended Masters, and can be contrasted with the physically and morally stunted Deros, sadistic mole men with unearthly powers from the the Shaver Mystery mythos.   Detailed discussions of these and other Hollow Earth ideas, however, will have to wait for another article.

Sticking to Hell, we can find plenty of modern gateways in the landscape of urban legend.  These, while common, are noticeably different from previous incarnations of Infernal passages.  First, gone are the erupting volcanoes and smoking fumaroles from the lists, having been replaced almost uniformly by (most commonly) ruined or abandoned buildings and infrastructure or (more rarely) caves and pits.  This is an interesting development, situating these Gateways to Hell in concepts of wilderness, either reclaimed (abandoned landscapes) or "natural" (unexploited caves).  In this way, the mystical associations come to represent Nature, perhaps reflecting the fact that "nature" is now considered as much a part of "otherness" as the underworld.  

A second difference, though still related to the first, is found in the origins of these Hellholes.  Older gateways to hell were, though marvelous, still a part of the "natural" world.  This is partly ascribable to demonstrably real physical and geological phenomena, but must also represent the cultural and religious milieu in which these locales were constructed.  Far from having a secular/sacred dichotomy, the natural world instead represented a cosmic creation where the mundane and the magical intermingled freely as part of the natural order of things.  In such a world, of course there are physical loci for these cosmically important forces. However, in a secular world dominated by a materialist and rationalist worldview, physical access points to "otherplaces" simply become less likely.  More pragmatically, it becomes difficult to accept that a volcano is a door to Hell after hundreds of years of vulcanology and geology have reclaimed these features for the "real" world.

To exist in a world of magma chambers and degassing regimes, modern Gateways to Hell must be situated in modern "mystical" locales.  Almost uniformly, these modern places of mystery and power are found in institutional ruins, particularly in hospitals, asylums, schools, or prisons.  In some cases, the ruins are simply assumed to have been one of these, without any historical evidence; in particular, a perusal of Gateway lists suggests that there was a time when everybody and their brother ran an asylum.  Regardless of the history of a site, the important commonality between these modern Hellholes is their placement in abandoned landscapes of institutional complexes, mysterious places with unclear (or occult?) hierarchies of power and strange practices.  Other than the origin of the location, this is actually fairly similar to volcanic or geological features of the past.  All represent liminal sites dominated by cthonic mystery.

The "Seven Gates of Hell" in Hellam Township, PA is one of the more famous Gateways to Hell situated in the modern landscape, so famous in fact that it is addressed by the Hellam Township's website.  Briefly, the story goes that the director of a suitably rural insane asylum built a series of seven gates to control access to the institution.  Eventually, the asylum burned down, with many of the patients killed in the conflagration or in the immediate aftermath.  As the tale goes, walking through all seven of the gates will result in the stroller getting whisked away to Hell.  As the Hellam Township's website points out, there is much embellishment in this story, including the number of gates (one versus the fictive seven), the presence of an insane asylum (it was actually just a small hospital), and even the name of the road leading to the institution (a suitable romantic but sadly made-up "Toad Road").

However, it is interesting to note that, in this case, the Gateway to Hell in PA is a perfect little microcosm of the whole concept of Gateways to Hell.  A central, uncanny realm sequestered away from the rest of the world, access to which is controlled through mysterious gates, fire and wilderness symbols, and a single mad overseer that built the original gates.  A modern twist is added, however, in the form of a man-made hell, alluded to in the form of barbaric medical practices of the past century and the general "freakiness" of insane asylums as houses of radical transgression.

This man-made aspect is an important attribute of the modern Gateway to Hell, a feature largely absent from their ancient and medieval precursors.  A particularly telling example of this is the "Well to Hell Hoax", which made its rounds in the late 80s and the early days of the internet.  Here, the theme of human and scientific hubris is neatly interwoven with a hidden, supernatural realm below the Earth.  Briefly, Russian geologists were supposed to have drilled a nine mile deep hole into the Earth's crust, as which point they encountered a hollow space with anomalously high temperatures.  They then lowered a microphone down, recording sounds of screaming and torment (later proved to have been cribbed form a horror movie), the idea being that these scientists had literally transgressed into Hell.  Christian broadcast television, particularly TBN, used this story as a modern day St. Patrick's Purgatory, citing it as evidence of the literal existence of Hell and therefore a call to conversion and worship.

Interestingly, and this is pure speculation on my part, this story may have been influenced by the actual, historical occurrence of a natural gas fire at Derweze, Turkmenistan, from the 70s.  Here, a Russian gas drilling operation resulted in a collapse and exposure of an enormous, gaping hole.  Hoping to avoid a release of poisonous gaseous hydrocarbons, they decided to set it on fire, believing it would burn off in a matter of days.  The fire, of course, still burns to this day.

Derweze's Door to Hell, a natural gas fire in a collapsed well

Gateways to Hell are a part of the cultural landscape, though our relationship to them has changed over the years.  Initially they were components of cosmic architecture, accessible through spectacular natural wonders like volcanoes of caverns.  They played a role in linking the actual, physical presence of the gods or God to discrete landscape elements and, therefore, to everyday human existence.  Modern day Hellholes, largely a subset of urban legends and paranormal lore, reflect our changing sensibilities.  Rather than finding them in fire mountains or unplumbed caverns, infernal explorers have situated them in abandoned institutions or ruined architectures, man-made places that are being reclaimed by the natural world.  And, along with the trees and wildlife, story-tellers have brought supernatural elements of a subterranean otherworld, a heterotopia of skewed perspectives and alien morality, perhaps reflecting a return of the Judeo-Christian concept of Satan or Lucifer to his pagan roots as a Horned God of the Wilderness.  Like all myths, there real existence and power lies in exploring how humans view themselves in relation to their surroundings, and how they contextualize concepts of "otherworldlyness" on the landscapes they inhabit.

Geoliminal Resources: The Center for Land Use Interpretation

On their world wide internets site, the Center for Land Use Interpretation states that they are “Dedicated to the increase and diffusion of information about how the nation’s lands are apportioned, utilized, and perceived.” That’s a pretty tall order in both scale and scope, and you’d be forgiven for expecting another THC-steeped navel-gazing contest (scored by Phish).  Luckily for all of us Earthlings, the CLUI is actually amazing, and just about knocks it out of the park.  

Broadly speaking, the CLUI interrogates how humans and culture interact with the physical earth.  If this sounds an awful lot like the academic discipline of Environmental History (i.e., the study of human interactions with the natural world through time), well, that’s cause it pretty much is, I guess.  However, rather than using the tools of academic historians, the CLUI takes an artistic and interpretive approach to understanding human-earth surface relationships.  In their own words, they “believe that the manmade landscape is a cultural inscription, that can be read to better understand who we are, and what we are doing.”

To this end, the CLUI maintains a residence program for artists, writers, researchers, and theorists in Wendover, Utah, where the various individuals come together to explore methods and approaches to investigating land and landuse issues.  The work done there covers a lot ground, both physically and intellectually.  Simultaneously, landscape interpreters from a variety of regions across the US also investigate land use and human interactions.

The results combine the addictive voyeurism of zooming around Google Earth with the thoughtful, meditative qualities of the best nature writing.  Their newsletter, published annually, covers a wide range of locales and topics, things as diverse as uranium mining in the US, the Mississippi Delta, and aerial photo calibration targets from the 50s and 60s in the desert Southwest.  Of course, given the emphasis on the form and morphology of specific landscapes, the pieces are commonly accompanied by excellent photography, essays in themselves.

Book reviews at the end of newsletters are appreciated resources as well, and include both dense academic works as well as art books, unified by the fact that BOTH ends of the spectrum provide some fibrous reading material.

In addition to the articles, the CLUI maintains a user-generated database of sites, browsable as a map.  It’s well worth a look, and a good start to planning a completely rad road trip.

The CLUI also exists in meatspace, and if one was lucky(?) enough to be in LA, you could visit their physical location and actually see some of the remarkable exhibits on display.  Unfortunately (again, ?) I’ve not been to LA in a while, and so haven’t visited.  However, the images and descriptions of the exhibits suggest that they are just as awesome as everything else the CLUI does.

Humans, both individually and plurally, influence and are influenced by the world around them.  The profundity of this fact is belied by its simplicity; the CLUI, a group of modern day zen-masters, recognize that we can read the landscape to better understand our story, both in terms of where we've been and where we’re going.  As a geoliminalist, this is fascinating.  As a human, this is vital.

The Mountebank

Ghost Story

My friend Jones has been around the block a few times.  He's been an art dealer, done a little breaking-and-entering, dealt drugs, driven a truck, gotten a MS in Library Science from a rather prestigious university, and, among other things, learned to play a mean game of eight-ball.  Originally from Tallahassee, he's moved around a lot and seen more of the world than you might expect.  In the course of his adventures, he's had some rather outre experiences.  

Here is his one of his more uncanny stories, related to me over beers at our local watering hole, The Pickaxe:

In the late 80s, Jones was working deliveries in a mid-sized college town in the north-east.  I don't mean pizzas, mind you; what Jones delivered came out to about $225/oz back then, grown and distributed by a bunch of collectivist anarcho-psychonauts that ran a local co-op ("ah, the optimism of young idealists", Jones said). Anyway, he'd worked his way down his list, mostly college boys and a few blue-collar cats looking to wind-down after a hard day manning the widget-making machine, when his pager buzzed.  The dealer on staff had juuusssst gotten a call from a buyer who wanted four ounces, pronto.  That was a pretty big sell; most folks bought eighths or quarters.  Jones wheeled on back to HQ, picked up the goods and the address, and went on his run.

This address was pretty far out of their normal sphere of operations.  He crossed the river, drove on past campus and down to the "fancy" end of town, full of genteel old houses.  As he drove on, "genteel" started to give out, while "old" stayed strong and, indeed, soon came to be the dominant theme.  He came up on one of those old, gambrel-roof houses, a big barn-looking thing with a single, dim light in one of the upper windows.  If it weren't for the light, Jones said, he'd have thought the place was deserted.  Peeling paint, loose roof tiles, overgrown yard, the works.  Dilapidated, right?

He circled the block a few times, checking the address.  It looked rough, but given the neighborhood (white and affluent) he doubted it was a squat.  Eventually, the nearly $1000 payday got the better of him, so he parked his truck, and hustled across the weedy lawn up to the front door.  There was no bell, so he knocked hard.

Waiting for an answer, he looked around. The sun was going down, which is why (according to Jones) he hadn't noticed the thing sitting next to the door.  It was, at first glance, your standard bench; flat seat, four legs, nothing much.  But something made him look twice, and that second look made him take a closer third look. 

According to Jones, the thing that caught his eye was its texture.  Even though the light was fading, the whole bench looked unusually smooth or slick, no joints or breaks at all. Even where the legs met the seat there was only a smooth, continuous surface, like it was carved out of a single solid block.  Its outline was rounded though, with no hard angles or edges, even on the legs.  Rather, it looked "soft, almost organic and undulatory" in his words. 

He knocked some more, and still there was no answer.  The bench, being the only thing available, drew his attention again.  Even in the fading light it seemed to be an odd color, pinkish or sallow, and on closer inspection it looked slightly fuzzy, like a peach.  Given those strange visual impressions, Jones couldn't tell what it was made out of.  There was no grain, no woody texture, and it certainly didn't look like stone. Plastic possibly, but in a weird casting or mold.

Still no response from inside, so Jones figured he might as well relax while he waited.  Without thinking, he sat down on the bench.  He doesn't think he screamed, although he admits the possibility.  He must have leapt up and sprinted down the path, hopped over the front gate, and dove into his truck, although that too is a little hazy.  What he does clearly remember, though, is a single look back at the front porch and what he saw there.

"What the hell spooked you so much?" I asked.  We had to order another pitcher before he'd tell me.

The bench that Jones sat down on, pink and peach-fuzzy, smooth and rounded?  His hands touched it as he sat down, gripping the edge and feeling the soft spongy or rubbery texture of skin, lightly covered by a dusting of thin hair.  It was warm to the touch, and seemed to rise and fall with a steady rhythm.  

That so shocked him that he immediately pulled his hands away from the bench.  Jerking his hands away made him loose his balance, and he sat down heavily on the bench itself, feeling it sag beneath his weight.  But, worse still was that the warm, skin-covered bench moved under him, shuddering and adjusting itself, like a horse getting used to its rider.  

That was enough.  A warm fleshy thing shaped like a bench squirming and wriggling under you?  He jumped up and got out of there.  But, as I wrote above, Jones does clearly remember looking up at the porch before driving away.  What he saw, was simply this:  When he had sat down on the strange bench, it had been to the right of the door and pressed closely against the wall.  What he saw from his truck, however, was the bench, swaying slightly and standing at the top of the stairs in front of the door.

He drove as fast as he could back to the co-op, and reported that 1) no one had been there and 2) the house looked like a squat and so was probably too dangerous to make deliveries to anyway.  They took the number off their approved customers list, although they needn't have bothered, since they never heard from them again.  

Of course, I asked Jones if he'd ever gone back out there some sunny noon-time.  He said that, after a few weeks, he had tried to, but he never seemed able to find the street again.  Even on maps, he couldn't place it.  

Samizdat: A Manifesto (Mk I)

Anthropologically, liminal experiences are related to rituals and rites of transformation, where one sheds their previous skin in preparation of wearing another.  It is not the transformation, which is, as Derrida would have it, the two antipodal states, beginning and end, facing each other across the Ginnungagap, defining one another in their opposition.  Rather, liminality exists in the actual act of transforming, in the middle ground where one is changing, and therefore neither what one was before NOR what one will be after.  Liminality is the vertigo you experience stepping from one reality to another, moving between states but in neither.  Between worlds, in an ambiguous state of potentiality, of time, and existence.  On the threshold.

Liminality exists as a function of human consciousness, an attribute of the editing and ordering and investigating our brains undertake in trying to piece together a sensible picture of the complex world around us.  Just as a human must be present to hear the falling tree (and, thereby, give it meaning beyond the physics of molecular vibration), so too can a human read the liminal landscape.

Geoliminality is the investigation of the borders we have drawn in the world around us.  Some of these borders reflect the underlying structure of the natural world (physiography, geomorphology, stratigraphy, tectonic boundaries, biomes, ecosystems, etc), and some reflect the overlying structure built by humans and human activity (agriculture, natural parks, mines, urban centers, wilderness, etc).  All are interpreted through the lense of liminality, of finding and experiencing the threshold between states, and thereby experiencing change.

The journal “Samizdat” is a communication from the field of geoliminal research.  It is a transmission, sometimes clear and sometimes garbled, that offers observation, experimentation, interpretation.  Some of things in here are true, some of them false; all are real, even if only for a moment, when you stand on the threshold.