Here & There

by Joshua V. Scher

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  Shaman or Charlatan?

  by THE ███████ ███

  FEBRUARY 22, 2011 8:29 AM

  K.E. HODGE/██

  ANAPAIKE, Suriname (██) — Flash frosts, technoshamanism, and artifacts from the spirit world. Juan Castillo, a medium of the María Lionza religious sect, has channeled it all through his portal in the jungle.

  This isolated border town, deep in the wilds of the Amazon basin, has long claimed to share a boundary with the mystical, boasting a rich spiritual history of the otherworldly, and are claiming the recent feats of their local shaman as proof.

  Mr. Castillo has often retreated to the wilds of the jungle to commune with hidden forces, employing the aid of psychedelics to speed him along on his vision quests. While in the past he has returned from these sojourns with divinations and epiphanies, of late Mr. Castillo, a self-proclaimed technoshaman, has brought back with him an altogether different phenomenon: blizzards.

  Though the Amazon is host to many bizarre creatures and nonpareils, snow has never been one of them. Unfortunately, the tropical climate has precluded any photographic documentation of these flurries. However, a team of climatologists from Brazil’s Universidade Católica do Salvador did travel to the remote village and confirmed what appear to be the residual effects of a flash frost on jungle vegetation. The affected flora circumscribe an almost perfect circle with a 100m radius.

  While Mr. Castillo refuses to “perform” for foreign cynics, locals claim to also have witnessed him conjuring objects out of inter-dimensional portals. Objects range from the mundane: rotten Russel River limes (Microcitrus inodora), flat cans of beer (Carlton Draught); to the miraculous: a carbon dodecahedron, a blue sapphire; to the peculiar: a green plastic bead.

  Though impressed by these recent feats, villagers prefer Mr. Castillo attend to his priestly duties as the village spiritual guide and resident psychosurgeon.

  shaman     charlatan     Suriname

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  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Off and on, this project has taken years of effort and dedication. It was a journey I could not have completed on my own without the love, support, and, most of all, patience from my friends and family. A few particularly masochistic individuals deserve a special thanks: my wife, for her love, tolerance, and taste; Jason, for being my ideal reader and careful critic; Jeff, for his belief, acumen, and collaboration; Mike, for the numerous math, coding, and cryptography conversations (which definitely got him red-flagged on the NSA’s watch list); Laurel, for her encouragement and mad French skillz; Jon, for his artistic vision and generosity; Paul, for his endless reading suggestions (especially Murakami); Mrs. Eder, for letting me play with her typewriter when I was little; my mother, for nineteen hours of labor (and other subsequent sacrifices); and my father, for warping me.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Photo © 2015 Josh Ryan

  Joshua Scher is a recent transplant from New York City to the hills of Hollywood, California, where he is continuing his transition from writing for the stage to writing for the screen, both theatrical and television.

  Scher’s film, I’m Ok (2015), starring Dot-Marie Jones and Alex Frnka, is currently in postproduction and is anticipating a film-festival run in 2016. The cinematic adaptation of his play The Footage was developed with Pressman Film and is currently being packaged. In 2006, a fruitful collaboration with Joe Frazier and his manager, Leslie Wolff, brought forth the treatment of Behind the Smoke, the Joe Frazier biopic for Penny Marshall and Parkway Productions. In the TV world, Scher’s one-hour action drama, JiGsAw, was developed with Danny Glover and his company, Louverture Films.

  His musical Triangle played at the Lyric Theatre of Oklahoma, was part of TheatreWorks New Works Festival (Silicon Valley), and debuted in New York City as part of the National Alliance for Musical Theatre’s Festival of New Musicals. The Footage had its Australian premiere at the Stooged Theatre after enjoying its World Premiere at The Flea Theater in New York City. His work MARVEL was included in Roundabout Theatre’s New Voices Program, directed by Charles Randolph-Wright. Scher has also worked with the Huntington Theatre, Portland Stage, the O’Neill Theater Festival (with Robert Longbottom, director of The Scarlet Pimpernel), and the Williamstown Theatre Festival. His first play, Velvet Ropes, was published while he was still a student at the Yale School of Drama. A collection of his monologues was published by Smith and Krauss in their 2006 Audition Arsenal series, and his play Flushed was published by Baker’s Plays. He holds a BA with Honors in Creative Writing from Brown University and an MFA in playwriting from Yale University.

  FOOTNOTES

  1. Throughout the lab, a host of video cameras documented any and all activity within. The system was originally implemented at the insistence of Reidier, who viewed it as a resource for reviewing and replicating any “unplanned or unaccounted for factors.” The video was recorded onto lab hard drives and backed up through a secure network on storage towers in Brown University’s CCV (Center for Computation and Visualization), as well as on computers in Reidier’s home.

  2. Paradoxically, doing so emphasizes what it is not, rather than what it is. Inherent to an incident is ignorance, a lack of articulation, and an inability to describe. It induces aphasia, which ratchets up fear, and thereby heightens the impulse to contain.

  3. It’s more than likely that the mass media’s contradictory coverage contributed to the Department’s own epidemic of misnomers.

  4. The Pentagon promptly issued a press release, which stated unequivocally that there had been no weapons testing at Newport NAVSTA, secret or otherwise. Its remote test facilities are located at Seneca Lake and Fisher’s Island in New York, and Dodge Pond, Connecticut. Neither of these had run any weapons test in the past three weeks. One month later, the Navy’s website issued a small announcement about a retired aircraft carrier having been sunk off the coast of Puerto Rico for a coral reef rehabilitation project.

  5. The specific amount of energy required was bleeped out by DARPA.

  6. As far as my research shows, there was no scientific purpose for having a separated two-button “ignition” system. Rather, like with a nuclear missile launch, it serves merely as a safety measure.

  7. Reidier had installed a similar set of cameras in the home office/lab in his basement to record all of his lab activity. These cameras only saved footage to his personal computers in his home office. The above-referenced footage, however, is from Reidier and Eve’s bedroom. Without the family’s approval or knowledge, a nanosurveillance system was integrated into their entire home by the Department. The Microsystems Technology Office stated this was a precautionary measure to protect the Department’s intellectual property along with the human assets (aka the Reidier family) from competitive interests, i.e. foreign governments and multinational corporations. See Chapter XI.

  8. Thank you to Deputy █████, for facilitating the release of the hours of videos from these multiple feeds.

  9. There is no corroborating Department nanofootage of the basement.

  10. Extrapolating the inquiry, if Reidier the genius also ended up being Reidier the madman, then human error if not sabotage becomes a much more likely, and more easily digestible, explanation for what went wrong.

  11. According to one study, 87 percent of famous poets experienced psychopathology whereas only 28 percent of the eminent scientists did so, a figure close to the population baseline (Ludwig, 1995 - Ibid).

  12. The majority of this evidence comes from the results of the Minnesota Multiphasic Perso
nality Inventory (MMPI) and the Eysenck Personality Questionnaire (EPQ) (Gough, 1953). Still, it is nowhere near as conclusive as it seems. While creative individuals score higher on psychopathological symptoms, they rarely score high enough to indicate a psychopathology. Rather, their scores fall somewhere between normal and abnormal. Furthermore, as Simonton notes, elevated scores on psychoticism are associated with independence and nonconformity, features that lend support to innovative activities. In addition, these score levels are associated with the capacity for defocused attention, which enables ideas to enter the mind that would normally be filtered. One must also consider that these creative individuals also score higher on other characteristics, such as ego strength and self-sufficiency, which dampen the effects of psychopathological symptoms.

  13. Hara Estroff Marano, “Genius and Madness, Creativity and Mood: The myth that madness heightens creative genius,” Psychology Today May 07, 2007.

  14. Guiana Space Center.

  15. Named after its inventor and the year he published it.

  16. See Appendix.

  17. See Appendix.

  18. Presumably, Clyde is referring to Eve being a Visiting Assistant Professor in Brown’s Comparative Literature Department.

  19. Note: Phillip can also boast an impressive, more “conventional” CV. He was the editor-in-chief and chief executive officer of Esquire magazine for most of the ’80s. He has coauthored numerous books, holds a black belt in Aikido, and has served on the boards of the C. G. Jung Foundation in New York and the C. G. Jung Institute in San Francisco.

  20. Jumeau still enjoys modest fame in French literary circles for his groundbreaking biography on Foucault, The Mirror’s Cartographer. Today, however, most Americans would know him for his outspoken defense of Roman Polanski and the infamous confession of his time as a foreign correspondent in Cambodia. While investigating child labor abuses in Cambodian factories, he developed a penchant for photographing child workers in compromising positions with the very mannequins they were making.

  21. Phone interview, February 27, 2009.

  22. Literally translated, “They’re like two drops of water,” but in essence the French version of “they’re like two peas in a pod.”

  23. This rumor probably succeeded due to Eve’s mixed background, as her mother was Moroccan.

  24. Reidier was video recording his lab activity even then. He actually started in grad school after a botched attempt at creating an ion trap using laser cooling resulted in a “frozen” photon. It was a miraculous effect that no one on the team could figure out how to replicate.

  This particular video was saved on his hard drive in RI in a folder titled “Family.”

  25. “Entangled in the Bourg,”I published in Ceris Press, Volume 11, Issue 2, Summer 1999.*

  I The Bourg, literally The “Strip,” is the area in Kourou for eating and drinking, filled with Créole, African, Brazilian, and Moroccan restaurants.

  * * *

  * I don’t know what this is about. While the Ceris Press does exist (as any Google search will tell you), Eve Tassat has never published anything with them. Not a story, a poem, or an essay. Nor has there ever been a story “Entangled in the Bourg” published by them. Furthermore, Ceris Press didn’t publish its first volume until the Summer of 2009. Was this just a typo or a research error by Mom? She’s not prone to mistakes like this. Then again, she’s not prone to just up and disappear either.

  * * *

  26. Donkey piss or an enema broth.

  27. Absent none without fault; present none without excuse.

  28. The absent are always in the wrong.

  29. A little absence does much good.

  30. To better paint Paris, one must leave it.I

  I This last saying was paraphrased from Louis-Sébastien Mercier’s Le Tableau de Paris, published between 1781 and 1788.

  31. Inebriated prime Sophie-Germain primes g = 3 and n = 11

  Elle picks a random number: 4

  Reinier picks a random number: 7

  Elle calculates her public key: 34 mod 11 = 81 mod 11 = 4

  Reinier calculates his public key: 37 mod 11 = 2187 mod 11 = 9

  Reinier and Elle exchange the public keys.

  Reinier calculates the private key: 47 mod 11 = 16384 mod 11 = 5

  Elle calculates the private key: 94 mod 11 = 6561 mod 11 = 5

  The private key is 5.

  In real life, “n” will be a very large value.

  32. European Space Agency, headquartered in Paris, and launches out of CSG.

  33. Phone interview, summer 2009.

  34. Excerpted from Eve Tassat’s journal, March 21, 1999.

  35. “Crypto-Colonialism: The Presence of Absence,” World Politics Quarterly Journal - Volume 54, Number 4, Fall 2002, pp. 899-926.

  36. Hausler refers here to the Edgar Allan Poe story, “The Masque of the Red Death,” in which Prince Prospero and one thousand of his nobles take refuge in his castellated abbey, locking themselves in to escape the ravages of a terrible plague.

  37. Supersymmetry,* in particle physics, relates the elementary particles of one spin to other particles that differ by half a unit of spin and are known as superpartners. Traditional symmetries in physics are generated by objects that transform under internal symmetries. According to the spin-statistics theorem, bosonic fields commute while fermionic fields anticommute. In order to combine the two kinds of fields into a single algebra requires the introduction of a Z2-grading. Such an algebra is called a Lie superalgebra. The simplest supersymmetric extension can be expressed in the anti-commutation relation: {Qα,Qβ} = 2(σμ)αβPμ

  * * *

  * I honestly have no clue what any of this means, but I have a feeling neither did Hilary. In fact, doing a simple Web search on supersymmetry showed that she got most of this info from Wikipedia. I’m guessing that that was as far as DARPA let her go. All the good stuff must have been blacked out or never even given to her. This is just the stuff that’s already public. Not that it would have really mattered, ’cause as smart as she was, Mom just didn’t have a head for this sort of thing.

  Still it’s pretty curious that she would put this in here at all. I mean, you gotta figure that whoever’s reading her report would either know way more and understand way better or be just as in the dark about shit going the speed of light or whatever the hell that equation means.

  But she put it in. And as far as I know, she hadn’t handed it in. So maybe it’s more of a note to herself for her rewrite. I have a feeling though that she’s the one who underlined supersymmetry, italicized superpartners, and bolded Lie superalgebra. Maybe these ideas just resonated with her. Maybe she wondered if they’d have some sort of symbolic echo later down the line. I’ll tell you for someone in my field, it’s pretty stimulating: superpartners and the algebra of lying.**

  * * *

  ** Maybe she dug the term because it echoed her J. Jumeau quote on page 57?

  * * *

  38. A hodgepodge jungle religion blending Catholicism, West African traditions, and Venezuelan superstitions.

  39. TO DO—Check local periodicals for any phenomenon around this time. If Reidier was in fact successful in running an early experiment in his work, it might be useful to know if there was any coinciding “incident” in the area. Some sort of foreshadowing of what was to come with The Reidier Test.*

  * * *

  * And that’s it. A nice intriguing little note to herself with no follow-up. So guess who had to go out with his proverbial shovel and dig? And guess what I found. Nothing. No, wait. There was an early frost in Hyde Park a week prior that resulted in glaze ice. Ice. In Chicago. Yeah. Huge news . . . ok, maybe Hilary did follow up, found as much as I did, and therefore put nothing in. I suppose that makes sense. She could’ve deleted that little footnote, though, and saved me some unnecessary legwork.

  * * *

  40. Dr. Bertram Malle, Professor of Neuroscience and Psychology at Brown University and cofounder of Cyberkinetics N
eurotechnology Systems, Inc.

  41. Brain-computer interface, AKA direct neural interface, which creates a direct communication pathway between a brain and an external device.

  42. Malle and Reidier are not only old friends, but were roommates at MIT.

  43. Nanobugs/nanobots: microphones, video cameras, and radios constructed on a nanometer scale (1nm = 3.281×10−9 ft; a CD indentation is 500nm wide), developed by DARPA for surveillance. A practically undetectable, full-coverage system.

  44. Pierce is most likely interested in Malle’s work developing a system of implanting a sensor in a paralyzed patient’s brain that allowed the patient to “manipulate a cursor on a computer, change television stations, and maneuver a remote controlled robot simply by thinking. ‘If you can think it, we can hack it.’”I

  I “Robot Thoughts: remote control multimode micro-stimulators.” Biol Tech. Exp J., July, 2006 www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed~24337709.

  45. Princeton philosopher.

  46. “First Person Plural” in The Atlantic, November 2008.

  47. Malle wrote an award-winning dissertation on social interaction, familial dynamics centered on recognition of intentionality, and how we learn to make inferences about mental states in morally evaluating behavior.

  48. To Me, published in Fictions of the Self, Princeton University Press 2008.

  49. What Freud called our Eros impulse.

  50. Kai remains a mystery. There’s no record of any graduate students, lab assistants, or Department employees by that name. Who was this? To Reidier? To Eve? Extramarital?

  51. Seife, Charles. Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea. New York: Penguin, 2000. Print.

  52. One of the most famous consequences of relativity: time slows down at high speeds. Time is relative. In grasping this, Einstein, in one fell swoop of chalk, also obliterated absolute speed. A person on the train is correct in stating the station is moving backward, as the person on the platform is equally correct in asserting the train is moving forward. If they both happened to be carrying synchronized stop watches and the train went half the speed of light on a round trip to the restaurant at the edge of the universe, their time keeping would be drastically off in assessing how long the trip took. The respective point of view of each would be that the other is in error.