William S. Burroughs at 99: Viruses, Memes, Cats, Art, ETC

On Feb 5, WSB would've been 99. What follows is a hodgepodge of Burroughsianiac musings.

For virtually all of his life, WSB was at odds with the trans-societal forces he eventually labeled Control. (On the Wiki page for WSB it says he was turned down by the OSS, and IIRC that was in Morgan's bio, but I digress already.) I've always found it interesting that Edward Bernays, the nephew of Freud who used Freud's ideas to manipulate the masses in the new "science" of Public Relations, had as an early competitor Ivy Lee, who was WSB's uncle via marriage. Lee was the epitome of Control, and just before he died of a brain tumor at age 57 in 1934, Congress had begun investigating Lee's ties to the Nazis and IG Farben.

In Ezra Pound's Canto 74, he mentions the stark fact that the Allies bombed the hell out of Germany, but somehow they missed the Farben plant.

WSB, the grandson of the founder of the Burroughs adding machine corporation, was sent to the Los Alamos Ranch School, a boarding school and college prep for rich kids that was influenced by the Boy Scout code, around 1930. He hated it. Later the US government bought the school and all the surrounding land, for the secretive Manhattan Project. Gore Vidal had also gone to Los Alamos Ranch, and in his autobiography Palimpsest he compared WSB to Pound (p.228) WSB was influenced by Pound (and Joyce). The NY artist/critic Richard Kostelanetz asserted that Pound's The Cantos was the last great poetry collage, while WSB's Naked Lunch was the last great prose collage. (Kostelanetz: ABC of Contemporary Reading, p.53)

Pound and WSB were very much in love with cats. See these photos of writers and their cats. If you know much about these writers - they were all (perhaps?) "weirder" than the average weird great writer. I wonder if it had anything to do with toxoplasmosis, or tiny organisms that get into the brain, which originate in cats?  (They are actually protozoa, these cat-carrying microbes...)

Pound was found "insane" by the US for his very poor use of First Amendment ideas on behalf of Mussolini and "the US Constitution" and other things.

If this had anything to do with explaining the avant aspects of WSB and his art, it seems almost too ironic, as he, under the influence of a course of study with Korzybski, developed the idea that language was a virus that had commandeered humanity's minds; we are language's "host."

[The great Stanford neurobiologist Robert Sapolsky on toxoplasmosis. Some of you hardcore Pound and Burroughs exegetes might want to invest 25 minutes of your time to listen to this guy, keeping in mind those writers' love for cats. Has anyone else pointed this out? I wonder if toxo can make someone sort of "half-schizo," where they are really weird, but creative, and not bothered by auditory hallucinations and the complete consort of the full-blown paranoid schizophrenic? Pound went around Rapallo feeding the feral cats despite not having any money; WSB was horrified at the prospect of nuclear annihilation because it would mean his cats would die. If there's something to it, then maybe we can venture that a protozoa has had a huge influence on Literary Modernism. OR: the OG is a cat lover: maybe I'm toxo-infected and what it does is give you grandiose ideas about unforeseen connections?]

This reminds me of an essay called "The Aliens Are Among Us," by Nathan Wolfe, who founded the Global Viral Forecasting Initiative. He's talking about viruses: "Viruses operate along a continuum with their hosts and other organisms they interact with: some harm their hosts, some benefit their hosts, and some - perhaps most - live in relative neutrality with them, neither substantively harming nor benefiting the organisms they must at least temporarily inhabit for their own survival." (p.191 of What's Next: Dispatches From the Future of Science)

The Burroughs scholar Oliver Harris said that Burroughs himself was like a cultural virus: "Burroughs dedicated himself to immortality by becoming what Richard Dawkins, in The Selfish Gene (1976), called a 'meme.' : 'a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation which propagates analogously to the genetic code and the parasitism of viruses, and is more than metaphorically 'alive.' If memes survive by parasitizing human minds, so, reciprocally, can the mind survive parasitic self-replication. The viral programme 'simply says' "Copy me and spread me around." This is Burroughs: 'all poets worthy of the name are mind parasites, and their words ought to get into your head and live there, repeating and repeating and repeating.'" (from Harris's essay, "Can You See A Virus?: The Queer Cold War of William Burroughs")

Speaking of viruses from space, language as virus, cats infecting human brains, and memes: Scientology has been in the news a lot lately. And Burroughs had his fling with it. See here. This is another aspect of WSB that fascinates me.

Still one of the best biographies of WSB is, in my opinion, Ted Morgan's Literary Outlaw. Last year Morgan wrote an article about why WSB hated Morgan's book. In Morgan's book he pointed out that, in Naked Lunch WSB seemed to foresee AIDS, liposuction, autoerotic asphyxiation becoming common, the crack epidemic. I'd add that WSB seemed, very early on, around 1961,  to suspect the CIA would be behind LSD flooding the streets of Unistat, and they would be doing it in an effort to staunch a youth rebellion.

I think WSB also foretold Kenneth Starr sexual fascism, but maybe that's for another day.

Oh yea: there's a wild little book called The Great Naropa Poetry Wars, by Tom Clark. In it he asserts that the antics of Chogyam Trungpa are like WSB's character "Dr. Benway."

Not long ago I went looking for the origin of a line WSB repeated: "And beside, the wench is dead." It looks like he got it from Christopher Marlowe via TS Eliot. (See Lives of the Poets, Schmidt, p.606)

Robert Anton Wilson: two passages around WSB:

"My friend, novelist William S. Burroughs, liked to say that 'anything which can be accomplished by chemical means can also be accomplished by non-chemical means.' I have personally found this to be true. There is no area of new perception and expanded awareness discoverable by peyote (or LSD or similar drugs) that cannot also be reached by techniques well-known to Oriental yogis and Western occultists. The sensory withdrawal techniques pioneered by Dr. Lilly and the new biofeedback machines also duplicate most of this expanded awareness." -pp.32-33, Sex, Drugs and Magick

From a 1992 interview:
Q: And what are some of your memories of that whole scene at Millbrook at that time?

RAW: Well, I'm sorry to sound like an advocate, but my impression was that Leary was one of the most brilliant people that I've ever met. Very much like my impression when I first met Buckminster Fuller and William Burroughs. The three people who gave me the sensation that I am in the presence of higher intelligence.

Q: And would you elaborate a little bit on why you put William Burroughs in that company? What do you see in Burroughs's writing, or his particular brand of intelligence that put him in that company?

RAW: Well, it's the choice of words. I first read Seventeen Episodes From Naked Lunch in a magazine called Big Table, and I felt no writer since James Joyce was able to put words together so efficiently and effectively to create the exact images and emotional overtones that he wanted. And I began to notice that not only was he a great prose poet, but he had a lot of interesting ideas, too.

Q: Had you also had the familiarity with Alfred Korzybski at that point?

RAW: Yes. That's one thing that Burroughs, Leary, Bucky Fuller and I all have in common - we all have familiarity with Alfred Korzybski and General Semantics.
(-from transcript of radio interview for Off The Beaten Path, see near the end. The person that transcribed the interview was quite unfamiliar with names mentioned, so I corrected the gross misspelling of Korzybski's name in the original.)

- In an effort to induce altered states without using drugs, Burroughs, in collaboration with Brion Gysin (the main brain behind the Thing) and Ian Sommerville, they came up with The Dream Machine, which uses flickering light patterns to interact with the eye/brain rhythms. You sit in front of it with your eyes closed and it does things to your brain. See the 2008 documentary by Nik Sheehan. Anyway, here's a brief:

WSB on art and making people aware of what they didn't know that they knew:

William S. Burroughs and Giambattista Vico on Immortality, and Other Ragtag Observations on Death

First: A Gnostic: Simon Magus
In Jacques Lacarriere's little gem of a book, The Gnostics, he's discussing the diffusion of gnostic ideas "along the great routes of the Orient," on "the road to Samaria," and the wonderfully odd figure of Simon Magus, one of history's uber-heretics. His ideas contradicted the ideas of the Apostles quite radically. For what would turn out to be the orthodox view, the Apostles said a human's soul is immortal, no matter what he or she does; we are all condemned for eternity to burnish or tarnish that soul, know the depths of hell, or paradisical delights. Simon preached, or railed rather thus: We all have a fragment of God in us. We are special creatures because, for example, we can use language and reason. But these are potentialities, not eternal. We must use it or lose it. (In the 20th century, we found that if a child was not exposed to any language by age seven or so, their brain's innate language acquisitive feature soon dissipates. And who really "reasons" much even these days?) Simon says: we have the capacity for speech, grammar, and geometry...but it's up to use to seize the day and work that stuff, get really good at it. The point is: we have the capacity. Simon seemed to think we also had the capacity for immortality, but time's a wastin': let's get to it, figure it out...

We must cultivate an attitude towards our aptitudes. That spark of he Divine in us is not eternal. It can only become eternal if we feed that spark, make it into a fire. Otherwise, we revert to nothingness.

And here's how the eloquent Lacarriere unpacks Simon Magus's heretical view of immortality: "For the gnostic, the die is cast, here, before death. (No wonder Simon Magus was hated by the orthodox! - the OG) Which is why he feels this sense of anguish in the face of time and the brevity of the human span, a feeling that is so characteristic of the Gnostic sensibility, and one which is only remotely related to the melancholy Jeremiads of the poets who lament the passing of the days: every moment of our lives is counted, for each is a door opening on to immortality or the void." (p.49)

Another gnostic heretic, Valentinus, is quoted: "Make death die."

It is because of the Gnostics, the Sufis, the Taoists, much of Buddhism, some mystical Judaism, and some Hinduism and certain Christian mystics that I find a line of the so-called "new atheism" interesting, and that line says something like, "Religion is too important to be left to the believers, the faithful." See Alain de Botton's views in this article, which also mentions Nassim Taleb.

It would seem the Extropian/Transhumanist manifestoes echo certain things some gnostic sects were already groping towards, in the first two centuries of the Common Era.

A Quick Thought and/or Inchoate Koan
Let's say the worldwide army of scientists working on the Death Problem solve it. A few huge key findings fall into place, the rest is like knocking over dominoes, and WHAM!: we've got immortality. Is this something like Sisyphus pushing his stone all the way to the top of the mountain, and over the edge, finally, wiping his hands and going home?

Burroughs and Vico
After Norman Mailer published his book Ancient Evenings, Burroughs, from roughly 1972 till death, showed a Mailer influence with an Egyptian-based death as mythic antagonist, which comes out in unique Burroughsian full-force with his use of the "seven souls" one has and must deal with correctly in the afterlife, largely derived ultimately from The Egyptian Book of the Dead. Here, have a listen to Ol' Bill reading from his novel The Western Lands, accompanied by the fantastic electronic-world music of Bill Laswell's band Material:

Here's the lyrics as WSB reads them; he added a few bits here and there as improv, like "Sort of thing you might see on a screen in an Indian restaurant in Panama." I confess the first time I heard this piece I went into an altered state, and when WSB says the first three souls are immortal and go back to heaven for another vessel, but the last four souls must "take their chances with the subject in the land of the dead," I was floored. O! The primal poetry of it all!

My blogging colleague Oz Fritz is all over this soul-after-death bardo trip, and I eagerly refer to his recent post HERE.

Throughout Burroughs's dazzling oeuvre, there's an obvious obsession with memory and vital, sexual young men (some of this for obvious reasons); but he also liked to remember himself as young and vital when he was an old man. He thought and wrote about death in ways that few of the candidates for Great American Novelist did. And apparently, from at least around the time of the appearance of the book that would make him famous, Naked Lunch, in 1959, he'd dreamed about afterlives. Personally, I do not think much about an afterlife, possibly because of my overweening materialism and non-religiosity. But I'm fascinated by what cultural anthropologists have told us about the various beliefs about death. Someone once said, "We are all greater artists than we realize." When it comes to religious ideas about life and death I see them as sort of collective artworks, and who knows? Maybe I'm just lacking imagination, and some of these ideas are "right"? How hilarious! How ironic! How...marvelous to contemplate.

Back to Burroughs.

In his book from 1995, (he died in 1997), My Education: A Book of Dreams, WSB recalls a dream he'd had right after Naked Lunch was published:

Airport. Like a high school play, attempting to convey a spectral atmosphere. One desk onstage, a gray woman behind the desk with the cold waxen face of the intergalactic bureaucrat. She is dressed in a gray-blue uniform. Airport sounds from a distance, blurred, incomprehensible, then suddenly loud and clear. "Flight sixty-nine has been----" Static... Fades into the distance... "Flight..."


Standing to one side of the desk are three men, grinning with joy at their prospective destinations. When I present myself at the desk, the woman says: "You haven't had your education yet." 


The semantics of "education" seem vital here: by 1959 WSB had long dropped out of Harvard, where he studied medicine and anthropology, and had travelled and written a couple of novels and many later-to-be-published letters of literary delight to weirdos like myself. Aside from formal education, he had earlier astonished young Ginsberg and Kerouac with his erudition, and shaped their thinking - and other notable "Beat" types - mostly via his learning of Arcane Things and WSB's spectral presentation of himself. It's easy (and valid, methinks) to surmise the dream's semantics of education had to do with imagination/narrative/tapping into post-terrestrial circuits of brain/magick/experimentation.

It was much later that WSB began to concentrate on the cosmi-comic high drama of Death as the Adversary, like a character in multifaceted forms. And he drew from many sources regarding this, not just the Egyptians. Emotionally, a very strong actuating force for his thoughts about death had to do with his beloved cats. I recall reading once - I forget where - that Burroughs thought nuclear annihilation would be particularly horrible because then his cats would die.

(At this point in my rambling little blogspew I'm quite tempted to link to articles on cats and taxoplasmosis and its potential to make humans quite a bit odder than they would've been, if only for the irony of someone I thought was maybe Unistat's greatest writer during the second half of the 20th century, and who used the metaphor of language-as-virus extensively, but I will just link this and you go ahead and make of it what you will. Hmmm...Ezra Pound loved cats too, feeding them all over Rapallo...)

Yes, but what about Vico? He had something to say about immortality and the afterlife too? Of course he did.

Vico thought a looming large and distinctive feature of human law, as opposed to natural law, was that we humans bury our dead. And with ceremony. (We have good reason to believe Neanderthals did too, but there was no way Vico could've been on to that.)

Vico:


Let us imagine a brutish state in which human corpses are left unburied as carrion for crows and dogs. Such bestial behavior clearly belongs to the world of uncultivated fields and uninhabited cities, in which people wandered like swine, eating acorns amid the rotting corpses of their dead kin. This is why burials were rightly defined in a lofty Latin phrase as "the covenants of the human race," foedera humani generis, and were characterized less grandly by Tacitus as "exchanges of humanity," humanitatis commercia."

Then Vico enumerates many books he's had the privilege to get hold of, about peoples from far-flung areas of the world. What all these books prove is that "all pagan nations clearly agree in the view that the souls of the unburied remain restless on the earth and wander around their corpses: which is to say, souls do not die with their bodies but are immortal." Vico doesn't have much at all to say about what happens to anyone's soul after death. But I do like his proto-ghost/zombie vision idea. I like it in the same way Burroughs talks about the at-times treacherous roads to the Western Lands. I don't "believe" it, but it makes for tremendous poetry.

The end of the section of The New Science in which Vico here discusses burial as a human law, culminates with this quote from Seneca:

"When we discuss immortality, we must grant considerable importance to the consensus of humankind, who either fear or worship the spirits of the underworld. I follow this general belief." (section #337)

Nietzsche On This Topic...
...Seems to lead us by some sort of circumambient commodius vicus of recirculation to Nietzsche's The Antichrist, and back to a quasi-Simon Magus-like gnostic view. In section #58, Fred N. rails against the quasi-Neoplatonic "life is better up there" crowd, where the real immortality lies. For these weak, unimaginative folk, the Good Life is to be found after death. And before orthodox Christianity became the master of Rome, Epicurus had already battled against these types. I will leave it to the better minds who know the gnostics (such as Simon Magus) and Nietzsche to say just where and how they diverge with regard to immortality, but clearly, in The Antichrist, Fred N. doesn't dig the Christian version either:

"One should read Lucretius to comprehend what Epicurus fought: not paganism but "Christianity," by which I mean the corruption of souls by the concepts of guilt, punishment, and immortality. He fought the subterranean cults which were exactly like a latent form of Christianity: to deny immortality was then nothing less than a real salvation."

Final Thoughts: Professor George Carlin
"When I die I don't want to be buried, but I don't want to be cremated either. I want to be blown up. Put me on a pile of explosives and blow me up. Or throw my body from a helicopter. That would be fun. One stipulation: wherever I land, you have to leave me there. Even if it's the mayor's lawn. Just let me lie there. But keep the dogs away." - N&S:9


"If I had my choice of how to die I would like to be sitting on the crosstown bus and suddenly burst into flames." - N&S:10


"Isn't it time we stopped wasting valuable land on cemeteries? Talk about an idea whose time has passed: 'Let's put all the dead people in boxes and keep them in one part of town.' What kind of medieval bullshit is that? I say, plow these motherfuckers up and throw them away. Or melt them down. We need the phosphorus for farming. If we're going to recycle, let's get serious." - N&S:79

One-Eyed Shark Fetuses and Other Animal Wonders

If I recall Hamlet's lines to his chum Horatio, it was something like, "Yo, Ratio-dude, there's like a crapload of things in heaven and earth - especially earth - way more than are even dreamed about in your Plato 'n shit." (William Shakespeare, Hamlet Unplugged, New Revised Edition for the victims of Unistat's secondary school system)

And Hamlet might produce as Exhibit A, this:

Caught off Baja California, a victim (?) of a genetic condition called "cyclopia," which apparently can afflict humans also. I do not want to see that picture; this one was disturbing enough. I found Marty Feldman quite enough for my tastes. But this? It's like Nature imitating Art, namely The Simpsons, and the Fukushima jokes were flowing like irradiated sake yesterday when this critter emerged and flopped all over the decks of the Internet. Chime in with the best pun or joke you've heard about in the comments, if you wish.

Wild Lighting Among Scorpions (and Other Critters)
An enchanting aspect of life is animals that give off light themselves, as if they had captured some sun and are radiating it back so we can see them propel through the oceans or scurry along the lands or flit through the warm summer fields. The more biology-based term is bioluminescence, and very many animals and smaller organisms and even some mushrooms have it. Biologists theorize that this light-emitting property evolved for many "reasons," namely as a communication device, to repulse foes, to attract partners, and as camouflage.

It works when a chemical in the body called - appropriately - luciferin reacts with oxygen and gives off energy in the form of light on the electromagnetic spectrum such that we humans can see them with our naked eyes. Marine biologists estimate that in the darkest depths of the ocean up to 90% of the odd critters bioluminesce to some degree. And many species of squid shine their inner lights, too. But closer to home, fireflies, glow-worms, and some spiders "do it" too.

Check out this scorpion, as seen under blacklight at night in California's Mojave Desert. I can't tell if this is due to luciferin or not, but it sure gives me pause:

It appears that geneticists have learned quite a lot about this complex process, and I imagine the psychedelic uses when they have genetically engineered Christmas trees that already light up on their own. This is apparently a very real possibility. There's an idea for planting trees that give off their own light along dark stretches of road, so as to save on electricity. There will be crops and houseplants that start glowing when they need water. Foods will light up when they've been contaminated by bacteria. The creepiest suggestion I've seen along these lines: using bio-luminescent markers for possible escaped convicts or mental patients. For more on this phenomenon, and proof that I wasn't yankin' your chain with the Christmas tree and escaped convicts and all, see this informative article.

O! Brave new world that has such freaky stuff in it! (Okay, that'll be all from my quote-manglings of The Bard for this blogspew, I promise.)

Zombified Ants and Moths: The Curse of the Fungi! The Dread of the Virus!
This eerie science fiction-y horror mechanism really kills me, because when I lived in Los Angeles I used to love to visit a tiny place called The Museum of Jurassic Technology, which one of Unistat's best non-fiction writers, Lawrence Weschler, wrote an entire book about, called Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder. The Wilson here is David Wilson, an Irishman with a devastating wit, and a MacArthur "Genius" Award under his belt. When I first read Weschler and then visited the MJT, I realized the museum was one big work of guerrilla ontology: it seemed like a real museum, but the claims made, the very choice of exhibits, made you wonder very deeply if your leg was being pulled, or to what extent it was being pulled, and when. Some of the stuff was so weird I felt Wilson had to be putting me/us on. Other stuff seemed reasonably plausible, if exceedingly odd (like the exhibit of microminiaturized art by "Hagop Sandaljian," who apparently "really" existed and did this stuff, after he developed a new way of playing the violin. But I digress...

Each time I returned to this magical place, I felt I "knew" which exhibits were based on "real" things, which ones were wildly imaginative fakes meant to confound us, and which ones were just "strange but true" verifiable "facts." But I was never totally sure of myself. The feeling of not being quite sure is the test, the crux, the heart of the matter, I now feel. It's like a test of a person's "negative capability." I think Wilson's impish humor mesmerizing.

One exhibit I felt was too fantastical to (maybe?) be real was the impressive visual display of the Stink Ant from Cameroon, which supposedly had its brain infected by some fungal spores, which made it climb to the top of tall trees in the rain forest, nail itself to a leaf, then die and rain down spores onto the forest floor for other ants to get infected and repeat the same zombifying dynamic, over and over.

                                          Here the fungus Ophlocordyceps camponoti-balzani grows directly out 
                                          of the head of its zombified host ant in the Brazilian rain forest. For more, here.

I thought Wilson was really fucking with me on that one. It plays into our deep-seated paranoia of being invisibly, indiscernibly invaded from without and being deprived of autonomy and agency, like the great Manchurian Candidate-ish Communist scare, the "chemtrails" you read about in conspiracy books, the Illuminati that have brainwashed the entire population, and you're the only one who can see through it! You must wake up the Others, somehow!...this is a long list, folks. Needless to say: etc, etc, etc.

But it turns out Wilson was on the up-and-up with this story. There's a moth in the Brazilian rain forest that, instead of mixing in with safe tree-bark, gets infected by a virus (a baculovirus), whereby it climbs to the top of the tree, to be eaten by birds, or if not eaten, dies, liquefies, and rains down virus to the underlying foliage or the forest floor, to be picked up by other unsuspecting moths, and the story repeated. Biologists working on this problem don't know the exact story, but they're working on it. It does happen! The mechanism is understood, but as scientists sometimes say, not well understood.


The Cameroonian Stink Ant story from the Museum of Jurassic Technology is HERE, sketched out. I didn't believe it. If you live near LA, I strongly encourage you to visit this little museum, which is a work of art in itself.

This bizarre zombification happens to other ants, too. A fungus in the area emits spores, which get into an ant's system, and instead of a worker ant going through his absurdly strict meta-communist life of working his pre-programmed routine doing what he does for the good of the hive and then dying, the spore zombifies the ant, and he leaves his comrades, climbs up a tree to a leaf that is 30 centimeters off the ground, with the sun alighting on the leaf just so. The ant clamps his jaws to a vein on the underside of the leaf, then the fungus's chemical attack totally overwhelms the ant's nervous system: the ant's body turns into a spore-producing factory as its carcass continues to emit infectious spores for up to a year.

One scientist says the fungus in this case is the same fungus that gave rise to LSD, so ponder that for a few long moments, friends! (I have done LSD and was "never the same," but I assess the changes as wholly positive. Hmmm...If this isn't cosmically hilarious, I don't know what is!)

If "God" created everything, He/She/It had an exceedingly bizarre sense of humor, I must say! (Maybe even a "devilish" sense of humor? Muahahaha!...Hey! It's almost Halloween. Humor me?)

To further your reading on this exceeding weirdness, maybe start HERE and HERE. Good pics there, too. BREAKING NEWS: As I was finishing this bit, Wired Science came in with this one. Wow!

How Your Cat Subliminally Manipulates You
I have two male cats, one an indoor-outdoor "tough guy" who likes to share his prey with us by leaving half-eaten mice, rats, gophers, and even birds on our doorstep. He's actually a really sweet guy, very easy to get along with. He sits patiently by the door and stares until we notice him, then we let him out.

The other cat is 16 and about 95% indoor. I fell in love with him at first sight when someone was giving away kittens. He's all-black, with long hair, sorta like a Maine Coon. Here's a typical Main Coon. My guy is all-black with a huge furry tail and probably has some Maine Coon in him:

When my guy - Mister Jinx, if you must know his name - was around six or seven, he began to seem like a spoiled brat. And I blamed myself. I gave him everything he ever wanted, whenever he wanted it. It seems his two favorite things in life were eating and sitting on my lap late at night when I watched old movies, like the films noir I wrote about recently.

Then I began to notice his crying demands were becoming overly annoying. He'd developed a sort of meow-cry-purr that demanded I drop whatever I was engaged in and feed him. Or sometimes he just wanted my attention, to be picked up and held.

Then, one day, I stumbled onto an article that provided that "Ah-Ha!" moment most of us reader-types find so delightful. It turns out this is a common thing: cats develop a strategy of crying out in just such a way that it activates something subliminally parental in us, probably evolved over millennia to keep us attentive to our human children. Here's a short report on this.
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I find wonders in the animal-human-plant symbiotic world contain innumerable opportunities for moments of transcendence, and at times the astonishment at how wonderfully weird "reality" seems to lead to what the Greeks called ekstasis, or "standing outside one's self."

If you have any favorite animal-plant-human stories along these lines, feel free to turn me on!

                                          Bioluminescence, by Rachel Anderson. So far scientists  
                                                                have found no mermaids. So far...