The Rising Sun Neighborhood is a book of words and pictures by Anne Herbert and Kathleen O’Neill that will be published by Random House later this year. Portions of it have appeared in The Next Whole Earth Catalog and in CoEvolution Quarterly, where Anne and Kathleen work. Anne sent us this excerpt, which we’re pleased to print. She also writes:
“The Rising Sun Neighborhood is the neighborhood we’re each in when the sun rises, so the book is partly about noticing what’s there, noticing what’s immediately around you, and going out from there to where the sun rises for other people. The book is a collection of (often) short pieces and graphics by many people, edited by me, designed by Kathleen O’Neill, that gathers together a bunch of moments when people woke up and noticed — the most courageous and fun thing to do: to notice truly and respond truly.
I was lamenting to Kathleen that maybe I had too many anti-tv rants in the book, because I think when you’re against something it’s better to figure out what you’re for and talk about that instead. But I couldn’t figure it out — I’m against tv and that means I’m for . . . ? Kathleen said, ‘The unconscious.’ and I said, ‘Oh, yeah, right.’ That’s where the neighborhood really starts, what we think is so private we can hide it from ourselves but really is the deepest commons among us. And whatever shall we do with it? I dunno, but the book as a whole and this part in particular is about that.”
— Ed.
If you are willing to discipline yourself, the physical universe won’t need to discipline you.
— Leonard Orr
The Father will never give the child a stone that asks for bread; but I am sure that He will never give a child a stone who asks for a stone. If the Father says, “My child, that is a stone; it is no bread,” and the child answers, “I am sure it is bread; I want it,” may it not be well that he should try his “bread.”
— George MacDonald
“Well, I found, for instance that I was fascinated by their old stories and their koans (riddles). I loved to read things like ‘A dunce once searched for fire with a lighted lantern; had he known what fire was he could have cooked his rice much sooner.’ ”
— Nancy Wilson Ross talking
to Satish Kumar in Resurgence
March-April, 1982
The expedition of Captain James Cook in 1772-75 was the first to cross the Antarctic Circle, on January 17, 1773. Cook circumnavigated the Antarctic continent without ever coming within sight of it, and concluded that no such continent existed.
— caption writer for
Antarctica by Elliot Porter
Icebergs have deluded explorers in search of land at least since Captain James Cook, one of whose officers in December 1772 mistook the sight of one for the mainland of Antarctica. Later, he wrote in his journal that icebergs “are now become so familiar to us that our apprehensions are never of long duration and are compensated by the very Curious and Romantic Views these ice islands frequently exhibit.”
— caption writer for
Antarctica by Elliot Porter
To penetrate the public imagination, these images must be as vivid as dreams.
— John Lahr, Astonish Me
Those who refuse to listen to dragons are probably doomed to spend their lives acting out the fantasies of politicians.
— Ursula K. Le Guin
“My father was transferred to the Lithuanian diplomatic corps after about 1927, and he and my mother were stationed in East Prussia. We always lived in a hostile environment. The only two people I could talk to intensely day after day were my mother and father; everyone else around me was German. They were nice, pleasant people, very neighborly, and very loving toward this very Aryan kid. I had ash-blond hair — not merely blond, it was white — and I had these enormous blue eyes and these wonderful clean-cut features. That was before I got to weighing 250 pounds. I spoke German with such an impeccable East Prussian accent, and carried myself like a little soldier, they doted on me. And then they did something that completely changed my life.
“Adolf Hitler drove by our house a couple of times, and they went insane. Hordes of German housewives and househusbands, people that I knew, who were all living in the same apartment complex together, were tearing themselves psychically to pieces all over the sidewalk, just watching the man go by. They weren’t simply shouting or clapping their hands or going ‘hooray,’ they were going through an animal frenzy to the point where some of them were having what I guess were epileptic seizures. Others were defecating in our bushes, couldn’t control their bowels. I was four years old. I remember a guy hopping across our lawn with his pants around his knees, tugging desperately at his underpants, trying to get to a bush; and men and women rolling on the ground, writhing, clutching at each other. A hell of a thing to see; I’m four years old and I suddenly realize that I know absolutely nothing about the world except that it is populated entirely by monsters — werewolves.”
— Algis Budrys talking
to Charles Platt in Dreammakers
A man who is not afraid of the sea will soon be drownded, he said, for he will be going out on a day he shouldn’t. But we do be afraid of the sea, and we do only be drownded now and again.
— J. M. Synge in The Aran Islands
CARNIVAL
Just as an individual person dreams fantastic happenings to release the inner forces which cannot be encompassed by ordinary events, so too a city needs its dreams.
Under normal circumstances, in today’s world the entertainments which are available are either healthy and harmless — going to the movies; watching TV, cycling, playing tennis, taking helicopter rides, going for walks, watching football — or downright sick and socially destructive — shooting heroin, driving recklessly, group violence.
But man has a great need for mad, subconscious processes to come into play, without unleashing them to such an extent that they become socially destructive. There is, in short, a need for socially sanctioned activities which are the social, outward equivalents of dreaming.
In primitive societies this kind of process was provided by the rites, witch doctors, shamans. In Western civilization during the last three or four hundred years, the closest available source of this outward acknowledgement of underground life has been the circus, fairs, and carnivals. In the middle ages, the market place itself had a good deal of this kind of atmosphere.
Today, on the whole, this kind of experience is gone. The circuses and the carnivals are drying up. But the need persists. In the Bay Area, the annual Renaissance Fair goes a little way to meet the need — but it is much too bland. We imagine something more along the following lines: street theater, clowns, mad games in the streets and squares and houses; during certain weeks, people may live in the carnival; simple food and shelter are free; day and night people mixing; actors who mingle with the crowd and involve you, willy nilly, in processes whose end cannot be foreseen; fighting — two men with bags on a slippery log, in front of hundreds; Fellini — clowns, death, crazy people, brought into mesh.
Remember the hunchbacked dwarf in Ship of Fools, the only reasonable person on the ship, who says, “Everyone has a problem; but I have the good fortune to wear mine on my back, where everyone can see it.”
Therefore:
Set aside some part of the town as a carnival — mad sideshows, tournaments, acts, displays, competitions, dancing, music, street theater, clowns, transvestites, freak events, which allow people to reveal their madness; weave a wide pedestrian street through this area; run booths along the street, narrow alleys; at one end an outdoor theater; perhaps connect the theater stage directly to the carnival street, so the two spill into and feed one another.
— Christopher Alexander, Sara Ishikawa, Murray Silverstein, Max Jacobson, Ingrid Fiksdahl-King, Shlomo Angel,
A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction
Once I’d dreamed that a fierce wildcat was attacking me. I was very afraid, and then I thought, why, it’s hungry, and I offered it my hands to eat. It didn’t eat them. It immediately became gentle, a friend.
— Isabel Miller
Patience and Sarah
The brain right around the brain stem is the reptilian brain — the brain that developed when we were reptiles. It’s what remembers smells. When we were reptiles was the first time we lived in air our whole lives so — smells. No language though. That was lots of brain layers before language. Hard to name smells. (A smell from another part of your life fires up your heart and swallows your tongue.)
— Anne Herbert
Man, in short, has, like no other beast, tumbled into the crevasse of his own being, fallen into the deep well of his own mind. Like modern divers in the sacrificial wells of the Maya, he has drawn from his own depth such vast edifices as the Pyramids, or inscribed on cave walls the animals of his primitive environment, fixed by a magic that inhabited his mind. He retreats within and he appears outward. Even the fallen temples of his dead endeavors affect, like strange symbols, the minds of later-comers. There is something immaterial that haunts the air, something other than the life force in squirrel and chipmunk. Here, even in ruin, something drawn from the depths of our being may speak a message across the waste of time.
— Loren Eiseley, “The Time of Man,”
Darwin and the Mysterious Mr. X
An Imperial Message
The Emperor, so a parable runs, has sent to you, the humble subject, the insignificant shadow cowering in the remotest distance before the imperial sun; the Emperor from his deathbed has sent a message to you alone. He has commanded the messenger to kneel down by the bed, and has whispered the message to him; so much store did he lay on it that he ordered the messenger to whisper it back into his ear again. Then by a nod of the head he has confirmed that it is right. Yes, before the assembled spectators of his death — all the obstructing walls have been broken down, and on the spacious and loftily mounting open staircases stand in a ring the great princes of the Empire — before all these he has delivered his message.
The messenger immediately sets out on his journey; a powerful, an indefatigable man; now pushing with his right arm, now with his left, he cleaves a way for himself through the throng; if he encounters resistance he points to his breast, where the symbol of the sun glitters; the way is made easier for him than it would be for any other man.
But the multitudes are so vast; their numbers have no end. If he could reach the open fields how fast he would fly, and soon doubtless you would hear the welcome hammering of his fists on your door. But instead how vainly does he wear out his strength; still he is only making his way through the chambers of the innermost palace; never will he get to the end of them; and if he succeeded in that nothing would be gained; he must next fight his way down the stair; and if he succeeded in that nothing would be gained; the courts would still have to be crossed; and after the courts the second outer palace; and once more stairs and courts; and once more another palace; and so on for thousands of years; and if at last he should burst through the outermost gate — but never, never can that happen — the imperial capital would lie before him, the center of the world, crammed to bursting with its own sediment. Nobody could fight his way through here even with a message from a dead man. But you sit at your window when evening falls and dream it to yourself.
— Franz Kafka
in Imperial Messages
There reigns, then, around the conscious a never-ending crush, a pushing and shoving, and the conscious is not — not at all — the highest, serene, sovereign helmsman of all mental phenomena but more nearly a cork upon the fretful waves, a cork whose uppermost position does not mean the mastery of those waves . . .
— Stanislaw Lem
A Perfect Vacuum
Whatever you may think about yourself, and however long you may have thought it, you are not just you. You are a seed, a silent promise.
— Marilyn Ferguson
The Aquarian Conspiracy
When he entered into himself, as no other animal on the globe is capable of doing, he also entered the strangest environmental corridor on the planet, one almost infinite in its possibilities, its terrors, and its hopes. It was the world of history, of symbolic thought, of culture. From the moment when the human brain, even in its dim red morning, crossed that threshold, it would never again be satisfied with the things of earth. It would heft a stone and make of it a tool grown from the mind; fire would become its instrument; sails on the invisible air would waft it far; eventually a little needle in a box would guide men to new continents and polar snows. In each case there would be the aura of magic. The powers would not be what we of today call natural; around them would hover a penumbral mystery drawn from the abysses of the mind itself. Time and the foreknowledge of death would rise also in that spectral light. Of the fears that beset our dawning consciousness, the brown bone on the shores of a vanished lake bed will tell us nothing. It will tell us only how we changed.
— Loren Eiseley
Darwin and the Mysterious Mr. X
The bone of our forgotten ancestors won’t tell us of their fears — or their joys. Little dancing figures and leaping animals they left us on rock walls all over the world look like getting conscious was fun. I can leap, and save the leap with markings on the wall.
— Anne Herbert
It happened, simply, that certain very old evolutionary solutions to problems of control and regulation, common to the nervous system, were “carried along” up to the level at which anthropogenesis began. These solutions ought to be have been, from a purely rational, efficiency-engineering standpoint, canceled or abandoned, and something entirely new designed — namely, the brain of an intelligent being. But, obviously, evolution could not proceed in this way, because disencumbering itself of the inheritance of old solutions — solutions often as much as hundreds of millions of years old — did not lie within its power. Since it advances always in very minute increments of adaptation, since it “crawls” and cannot “leap,” evolution is a dragnet “that lugs after it innumerable archaisms, all sorts of refuse,” as was bluntly put by Tammer and Bovine. . . . The consciousness of man is the result of a special kind of compromise. It is a “patchwork,” or, as was observed, e.g., by Gebhardt, a perfect exemplification of the well-known German saying: “Aus einer Not eine Tugend machen” (in effect: “To turn a certain defect, a certain difficulty, into a virtue.”). A digital machine cannot of itself ever acquire consciousness, for the simple reason that in it there do not arise hierarchical conflicts of operation. Such a machine can, at most, fall into a type of “logical palsy” or “logical stupor” when the antinomies in it multiply. The contradictions with which the brain of man positively teems were, however, in the course of hundreds of thousands of years, gradually subjected to arbitrational procedures. There came to levels higher and lower, levels of reflex and reflection, impulse and control, the modeling of the elemental environment by zoological means and of the conceptual by linguistic means. All the levels cannot, do not, “want” to tally perfectly or merge to form a whole.
— Stanislaw Lem
A Perfect Vacuum
Dream: Floating on the surface of the sea, facing the blue daylight sky, a cut begins forming on my body, lengthwise. A vagina opens me up, parts me in two, and it keeps opening ’till I can see the night sky through it and below me. As if sucked by the vacuum, the sea water begins rushing through me, falling toward the stars below, dissipating in the void.
— Narcissus Quagliata
Stained Glass from Mind to Light
The themes of water and reflections are very dear to me. I think first of all of the affinity of water and glass; one reminds you of the other.
Looking into a pool of water along a creek is a complex experience. Right away you notice the body of water, cool and transparent, moving or still. On its glossy surface you’ll see the trees, the sky and the reality around you. The temptation to lean over and look at oneself is almost irresistible.
But whatever you see reflected looks like a dream image of your surroundings. This image is upside down and vertically penetrates the water; it defies the feelings of just resting on the surface. Through this reflection you will see appear the forms of the bottom; that, too, is a whole world in itself. The creek bottom can be rich with different stones and pebbles of all sizes and color.
Finally your eye may catch sight of a fish or a whole school swimming through, and you can feel their organic presence.
These worlds penetrate into each other playfully, fade in and out of each other, and to me are a beautiful symbol of the multidimensional quality of the human mind.
— Narcissus Quagliata
Stained Glass from Mind to Light
Evelyn moved from Montana to San Francisco when she was 19, to get a job, to live in a city. She was working as a Western Union operator and living in a cheap neighborhood called the Haight-Ashbury when suddenly minds and lives started blooming around her and she joined in. She remembers people on the street all the time, day and night, friendly. If you were walking down the street high, people would give you a flower or a beautiful stone or a feather to help you enjoy. It was a beautiful time, several years before publicity brought crowds and ugliness.
Any form of consciousness, not just with acid, is a strange trip. A nice custom would be to help each other with it as we go, handing out smiles and brightly colored pieces of hope as we go. On the street. Today.
— Anne Herbert
Mustn’t leave too much oddness stuffed up inside or some bad person will help it come out in some bad way and you’ll be in some bad crowd screaming for what you thought you hated, because at least it’ll be a change. Too tight a hold makes for too quick a looseness. An uncharacteristic act a day keeps the demagogue away. The only way I can make any sense of recent presidential elections is that the most vivid person wins, regardless of content, because too many of us have been dressing our lives in beiges and are suckers for a red tie and shiny shoes that look like relative strength. Which means we owe it to each other to share our true gaudiness, however silly or bizarre. So the reptilian brain and the amphibian mind and the bird soaring memories of flight will have true music to dance to and not have to march to the first loud dumb bugle that comes along.
— Anne Herbert
What all wars have in common is that they’re too serious.
— Anne Herbert
Dream — Travels overland, perhaps a jeep. Several people stopping to look at wondrous sights. Agate in the roof of a sea cave, sunlight filtering through its whorls. A city built on hill sides with winding roads that take us to the inevitable buildings. Lots of people inside, lots of talking, deciding. Learning solidarity for each other. Awareness grows that we must escape from this place. Plots begin, methods to get us all out, no one should be left behind.
In a suddenness of change we are running along the beach, dazzling sun, crashing waves. I turn slightly and one of the men chasing us raises his gun and fires at me. I get ready to scream, but as the gun fires I get a pop in my ears, remember and begin to laugh. As he shoots the others, I recall this island we can’t leave and the game of forgetfulness we play to pass the time. Already we are regrouping to make new rules, and then erase the memory.
— Kathleen
I was dreaming that I was dreaming that I was dreaming that I was dreaming that I was dreaming and I woke up. And I was dreaming.
— Anne Herbert
All the characters are trying to do some housework: they’re trying to clean up their brains. They’ve all been plunged into a giant electronic whispering gallery. They’re trying to regulate their infective thresholds; and if they can’t do it, they’ll seal them off.
— Heathcote Williams on AC/DC
in Astonish Me by John Lahr
As with any street theater, it is not the poetry or the power of words which dazzle the imagination and linger in the memory, but the evocative clarity and sharpness of the stage images. Street theater trades in essences. To be persuasive, its images must be irrefutable. To penetrate the public imagination, these images must be as vivid as dreams.
— John Lahr
Astonish Me
This, this now, this is peace, messy and mundane and boring. Every day when I walk out onto the sidewalk it’s my turn to give peace a chance to be more interesting than war.
— Anne Herbert
