10/03/2021
Hello Nine-panners of the echoes through times gone and present and future neological family!
About "Operation Prometheus in Reverse," an excerpt from my scifi novel / dance / music / drawing thing "How to Talk with Children about Global Warming" (HtTwCaGW):
Operation "Prometheus in Reverse" is the animals' plan to steal fire from the humans -- in the sci-fi story. This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual animals, humans, or gods that were harmed, or that may or may not exist at all, living or dead, is purely coincidental. Operation "Prometheus in Reverse" of course refers to ancient Greek mythology and the figure of Prometheus. Among other feats, he was credited with stealing fire from the gods and giving it to humans, in other words giving them the "gift" of civilization (some might say the "curse" of civilization, but we'll get to that question later. Much later. Like when civilization collapses. Oops, that might not be "much later").
Fantastic news about the soundtrack
I have fantastic news about the music for the project — some AMAZING guest musicians have agreed to compose and record additional tracks for parts of the soundtrack. I’m not ready to go public with the details — there are still some i’s to be dotted and t’s to be crossed. Stay tuned.
In case you’re wondering “What the heck about music, I thought this was a sci fi novel / dance piece / series of drawings?!” or in case you're new to How to Talk with Children about Global Warming, or in case I haven't explained this multi-headed Hydra of a multi-media project clearly:
HtTwCaGW is mainly a dance performance. The dance, of course, is accompanied by music. The music was inspired by a sci-fi story, and inspired a series of drawings, which will be used as the projected setting for the dance. I am the choreographer, composer, performer, author of everything (except the additional music tracks mentioned above). As usual, a note about the title: the "children" in HtTwCaGW are, metaphorically, all the forces, institutions, and alleged "adults in the room" who seem unable to plan ahead coherently when faced with a serious threat. And "global warming" is a stand-in for any dangerous, complicated problem, a sword of Damocles of our own creation that threatens many, not only those who created it.
The reason I'm doing everything myself is not necessarily because I'm an egotist (though a slightly exaggerated sense of the importance of one's work may be one of the qualifications for the job of "artist"). The main reason is that I want to invite you to enter into the world of the project without any compromises. This is hand-made artwork, artisan artwork so to speak (made in the traditional non-mechanized way with high-quality ingredients). Like artisan bread, it takes time, and that's why I really need you to keep supporting this Patreon, or join if you are reading this elsewhere, or if you are a Patreon member, maybe up your level of support.
Back to Operation "Prometheus in Reverse" and the Rainbow Gathering (a.k.a. "non-stoned hippies gather in the woods to do yoga and Shintaido")
Now: Operation "Prometheus in Reverse" is an element in the sci-fi novel, and without giving too much away, it was inspired by my adventures among the "Healing Rainbow Gathering" community in the Czech Republic. For readers who haven't heard of "Rainbow Gatherings," these informal gatherings are loosely organized by members of an international subculture that spun off from the hippie movement and non-commercial music festival circuit in the 1970s. The general intent is to nurture an alternative culture that values peace, humanity, and non-consumerism. However, many Rainbow Gathering events have a reputation for including a substantial dose of mind-altering substances.
The event I attended was a spinoff of the Rainbow Gatherings, billed as a "Healing Rainbow," meaning no drugs, no intoxicants, no to***co, no meat, and no tea or coffee. Also no devices on-site. These rules may seem restrictive to some people, but they have a very good effect: people being with people, fulfilling the basic necessities of life, talking with each other, making music and doing various creative activities.
There wasn't much dairy, but there was fresh goat milk supplied by a beautiful goat right on site, no middlemen involved, thus supporting the non-consumerist ideals of the Rainbow. I was invited to present Shintaido, which in case you aren't familiar with it, is a Japanese health exercise and expressive movement discipline created by disillusioned martial arts experts in the 1960s (see Shintaido Czech Republic or Shintaido of America).
Besides leading a Shintaido practice, Rainbow events tend to include spontaneous creative activities around the fire in the evening. The human fascination with fire -- one might almost say the ancient "cult of fire," dating back to our imagined prehistoric caveperson past -- is honored with the (stereotypical) drum circle and jam session on various other instruments (guitars, fiddles, and a trumpet were present). But don't knock the drum circle, there were several excellent musicians in the crowd, and in general the Czech Republic is a relatively musically literate society.
There were breaks when, for example, people would sing, chant, and a guy from Vienna read some of his poems and a short story in English. The ice having thus been broken, I overcame my shyness (yes, it may surprise some of you to hear this, but I do experience shyness -- and I try to overcome it, much like forcing oneself to jump into a cold lake at the count of ten) and shared a part of HtTwCaGW The Sci-fi Novel. I felt that being called a "performance artist" (thank you Mobius, no hard feelings, and thank you ArtSpeech.org ), I almost had an artistic duty to embody what is no doubt one of the most ancient art forms / rituals, storytelling around the fire. And although this romantic fireside chat is not exactly how it was described to us at the Harvard Anthropology Department when I was a kid, they do agree that "anthropology is the study of what makes us human," which leaves a lot of latitude for interpretation.
But it's a bit anthropocentric. Just because we're living through the so-called Anthropocene, that doesn't mean that our opinion of ourselves is the only one that counts. Therefore I imagined a scene, a scene to be added to HtTwCaGW The Novel, in which all the other animals on Earth, past and present, discuss the question of "What makes them humans human, and what should we call them?
EXT. AROUND A CAMPFIRE -- NIGHT
A group of modern-day hippies, mostly long-haired and in case of the men often bearded, ages ranging from 6 to 60, in various stages of undress, are gathered around a fire in an improvised campground in a meadow in Central Europe.
DAVID, a slender but muscular middle-aged man, steps forward closer to the fire to be seen.
DAVID
Hi everybody, would you like to hear a story? It's part of a science-fiction story
I'm writing called "How to Talk with Children about Global Warming." (He repeats
the same in Czech).
GROUP
Yes!
DAVID
Great! Thank you! I don't speak Czech too badly, but this might be a bit too
difficult for me to improvise and translate for myself. Could someone
who is pretty confident about their English help me out as a translator?
JAKUB, a tall blonde neo-hippie steps forward and sheepishly waves that he'll give it a try.
DAVID
Awesome, thank you! Once upon a time in a time outside of time...
(The following excerpt from the prologue of HtTwCaGW The Novel has been modified for length and clarity):
All the animals were having a meeting. Except Human. Human was not invited to the meeting. Human was the Problem Child.
This being the Time Outside of Time, all the animals that ever have existed, or will exist in the future, extinct, living, or probable, on Planet Earth, were present. Mammoths. Microbes. Bats, fish, sea urchins, albatrosses, octopuses, snails, mice, whales; pterodactyls, crocodiles, sloths, lice. A meeting of Mice, but not of Men.
The seriousness of the meeting did not in any way prevent them from having a good time. A meeting is still a chance to meet, after all. A party at Noah’s Ark — without Noah.
The task at hand, paw, claw, hoof, te****le or other prehensile extremity was to re-name the Human Species. The animals had grasped that in the brains of a large number of humans, words like ‘humanitarian,’ ‘humanistic,’ or ‘humane’ are connected with positive feelings of kindness, gentleness, mercy, empathy, and sharing.
“But,” explained Gorilla, knowing the cruel side of human behavior well, “the humans are not living up to the meaning of this word. The increasing differences between what the humans think they believe and what they really do is creating a disturbance in the Life Force Field. The tension is building up, like continental plates that are about to shift suddenly along a fault line. There is a chance of a large eco-spiritual earthquake and re-alignment of the Earth’s ethereal axis in a direction that would be very challenging and sad. A re-alignment is necessary, just as the continental plates must move and shift. But to avoid a sudden, violent re-alignment, we could try to find a way to relieve the tension more gently.”
Lion spoke: “That sounds complicated. We can grasp a problem when we can name it. Gorilla, could you name the problem more clearly?”
“We should start calling Humans inhumane. Or inhuman. The Inhumans,” quipped Gorilla... (various other animals propose re-naming the “humans”) —
Lion: "No other animal could challenge us until the Humans came along with their flying teeth. Without their flying teeth they are very weak and delicious, but with flying teeth, now they are the dominant ones. So I think we should name them Weak Lions with Flying Teeth."
Giraffe spoke next: “I am very tall, and so I look down on most of the other animals. But the Humans look down on all the animals. They think that they are better than us, that their needs are more important than ours. Let’s call them Giraffes with Short Necks.”
Whale started to speak in bubbly, rumbling tones: “Humans have big brains, almost as big as ours,” said Whale. “And they communicate over long distances by multiplexing signals in waves, just like we do. We should call them Little Land Whales.”
“Humans are bigger shark-killers than Dolphins are,” said Dolphin.
“Shark-killers!” snapped Shark. “Let’s call them Shark Killers. So-Evil-They-Would-Even-Kill-a-Cute-Little-Baby-Shark Shark Killers.”
“How about Walk-on-Two-Legs-Not-as-Big-Brains-as-Dolphins Shark Killers?” proposed Dolphin, in an effort to build an alliance between dolphins and sharks, who are not traditionally on good terms.
Ostrich took her head out of the sand for a rebuttal. “Not only do they walk on two legs, just like ostriches, and they can’t fly unassisted, just like ostriches. Just like ostriches, when they are faced with serious problems, they stick their heads in the sand and ignore the situation. And look how much sand there is in the Middle East for them to stick their heads into! I propose we call them Ostriches that Live Birth their Young.”
Bee buzzed: “They construct complex societies with sophisticated supply chains, intricate social hierarchies, vast networks that transport information and materials long distances to their hives — they build something like hives, which they call ‘cities.’ We could call them Bees that Don’t Make Honey.”
“When they hear about bu****it, they immediately gather around it,” said Fly. “Many of them even consume it, just like us. But they kill us mercilessly, even when it’s unnecessary. Some human children even take joy in torturing and murdering us just for fun. Let’s call the humans Flies in the Ointment With No Conscience and Little Mercy...”
I'm not going to give away just yet what the animals decide to call the humans, nor exactly how they implement Operation "Prometheus in Reverse." For that, you should SUPPORT MY PATREON so I can write more of this Just-So story -- a genre of stories which are often charming, but around which we might want to exercise skepticism. From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just-so_story : "In science and philosophy, a just-so story is an untestable narrative explanation for a cultural practice, a biological trait, or behavior of humans or other animals. The pejorative nature of the expression is an implicit criticism that reminds the listener of the essentially fictional and unprovable nature of such an explanation. Such tales are common in folklore and mythology (where they are known as etiological myths). ... [T]he first widely acknowledged use of the phrase in the modern and pejorative sense seems to have originated in 1978 with Stephen Jay Gould, a prominent paleontologist and popular science writer. Gould expressed deep skepticism as to whether evolutionary psychology could ever provide objective explanations for human behavior, even in principle..."
Why you should support HtTwCaGW
If you would support the project by becoming a Patreon member, it would mean so much to me. It is absolutely essential for me as I develop this completely non-commercial extra-institutional art project. Support via Patreon is what will make it possible for me to create and assemble the many moving parts of HtTwCaGW according to my vision as an artist, rather than according to the demands of grants, residencies, doctorate programs, or any other institutional gatekeepers. You will be funding pure art. Thank you incredibly much. Go to www.patreon.com/HTTWCAGW
Till next time -- with love,
D. Franklin a.k.a. manta
Pilsen, Czech Republic
