Sunday April 18, 2021
Stream 1 – Satan and Satanism: Maya Angelou said something like, “when a person reveals themself to you, believe them the first time.” Is it so hard to understand what Donald Trump is? Was? And for what I can see always will be?
It’s been shown, spelled out, proven, over and over again – and yet – there are those who say, “Well, I don’t know.” To which I say, “Yes, you do.”
What is it about the human condition that doesn’t allow people to accept reality?
Ah me.
In more interesting stuff – well, more interesting to me. A week or so ago I was at VMFA and picked up a catalogue on The Bourne Collection. Yeah, don’t get all worked up on the name. The guy was 19 in the mid 1940s went to Mexico and was part of the team that was shown Bonampak. His collection is of artwork from Mexico through Peru. Some of it may be fakes. It has been criticized for showing how someone who is trying to collect ancient stuff can be duped – possibly, and then whomever is writing the article points out “you know, like the Getty.” The forward to the catalogue has John Bourne’s article about being in Chiapas and living with the Lacandon.
He mention his inspiration “Enchanted Vagabonds,” which is the true story of a couple that put out of San Diego Harbor in a craft they built and went down the coast of Baja to Panama. This was 1933. The boat was a kayak/canoe with sail. It was 16 feet long, 42 inches wide and drew 25 inches. It had a canvas bottom and they took it out into the Pacific Ocean! This was before RADAR and antibiotics. I’m only to page 25 and they’ve survived two horrific ocean storms, been picked up by rum runners, trapped inside a volcanic lava tube, and he’s stepped on a gaff that went 1/2” into his heel. His solution to keeping the infection down is to keep it clean and walk on it, which keeps opening the wound and letting it drain. OMG!
What was their inspiration? Richard Halliburton who they mention as having swum the Hellespont back in the 1920s.
The 1930s was probably the last decade of good old – what the British would call – “pluck.” Here these two idiots are in the middle of the biggest ocean in the world bailing for their lives with two canteens of water going to one of the most desolate inhospitable places on the planet and they are talking about adventure! The coast of Baja has few place where one can easily come ashore. No problem, when they get close to the rocks hop out of the canoe, hold the trailing ropes they threw over the side, stop the boat’s forward progress. She holds the boat back while he unloads it then they carry the boat to dry rock and camp out.
Out of water? Make a still from the riffraff found from a wrecked ship that wasn’t so lucky, nor the crew so ingenious as to convert sea water into fresh. See the graves? OMG.
But there is a through-line here from the 20s to the 30s to the 40s. Then there’s a more recent work “Barbarian Days,” which recounts one man’s quest to surf in the later part of the 20th Century and into this millennia.
Each story, each person, had pushed aside the norms of their day to look for something else.
The opening of Enchanted Vagabonds recounts how this man and his wife had prepared for their trip for two years and at the last minute a group of five women, whom neither knew descended to say they were going to get an injection to stop them. This man said he had prepared by building a boat, learning to sail, reading and studying and doing things an adventurer would need to know but the one thing he had not prepared for was committees. How do you deal with committees?
Ah, the eternal question. Did pharaoh have pyramid building committees? What about Pakal in Palenque? Perhaps we will never know, and that might be for the best.
We have yet to find an ancient inscription that reads something like this “The Budget and Oversight Committee on Construction submitted their interim report …”
