sayings from Our Armchairman
We’ve gotten into the pernicious habit of dismissing utopia as impractical. It may be that utopia is the only way out.
-- Doc Humes, c. 1980, in taped conversation with Oliver Trager
There's a spark of divinity within each of us,
and it's when we share that spark that we become most fully human.
-- Doc at St. Rose's Hospice, 1992
Improvisatory music is different from the old
style music, which first you had to write down and then you had to
rehearse. Then you had to get a whole bunch of dudes dressed in the
same uniforms and a guy with a stick out in front. A big symphony
orchestra is like a military organization. Modern music is created and
performed in the same instant, which makes it generically different.
-- Doc Humes, in taped conversation with Ruth, c. 1980
The discovery of nuclear energy means that we all have to learn how to live like saints and angels
merely in order to survive. It may simply be a fact of history that we either have heaven, or hell, perpetual warfare.
-- Doc Humes, talking to Oliver Trager on tape, c. 1980
The
reinstitution of cannabis in the pharmacopoeia, and the careful
explanation to the general public of its proper use--its proper
medicinal use, to reduce tension--is probably another thing you could
do via television. With qualified MDs explaining calmly, and patiently,
and non-hysterically, the uses of cannabis.
-- Doc, at the blackboard, to a class of students at B.U., c. 1980
You know the famous non-recognition policy of Pope Urban? When Galileo discovered the moons of Jupiter, he invited Pope Urban to look through the telescope and see for himself. The Pope decided that if he didn’t look through the telescope they didn’t exist.
Then you have John Foster Dulles non-recognizing China. A quarter of the world’s people. Just didn’t recognize them.
Now they’re non recognizing this and non-recognizing that. Pretty soon there’s nothing left to non-recognize. So the media start doing interviews with each other. You see it on television. Where one talk show host invites another talk show host on and—the other day, the day the disarmament conference in New York opened, they had a 2-hour talk show on mis-matched socks!
The ultimate of the non-recognition policy is that there’s nothing left to non-recognize. So you got this bizarre spectacle of the media interviewing the media. And when someone gets promoted or fired it becomes news.
-- Doc Humes, talking to Oliver Trager on tape, c. 1980
The thing I’ve discovered most recently is: you never fall out of love with anyone you’ve ever loved. I mean, once the anger has diminished, once the stone is removed from your shoe, the love is still there. And that’s just amazing. Just amazing.
-- Doc, in St. Rose's Hospice, NYC, 1992
Somebody ask me a question--I feel like explaining something!
-- Doc, c. 1949, Cafe Royal St. Germain, Paris, to Russ Hemenway -- correction, to Leon Kafka!
I think we can demonstrate in a court of law that cannabis is a drug that does heal and liberate the human spirit.
Everybody who ever wrote, or hoped to write, or even dreamed
of writing, drifted through Paris in those years after WWII. And we all
knew each other, more or less, and we hung out on cafe terraces. The
original scenario for that life was copyrighted by the writers of the
twenties—you know, Gertrude Stein and Hemingway and all those guys—they made the scene and all we had to do was come along and fill the roles.
-- Doc, taped conversation in Billerica Prison, c. 1980
Dying has become entirely too gloomy a business.
All the reviews of that time, like the Sawanee Review, and the Kenyon Review, were just overloaded with the so-called New Criticism. Articulate stuff, but it was tedious--there’d be a few highly intellectualized poems and then another article on Moby Dick’s toenail.
There was very little real creative writing going on. And the idea in the beginning was that it was going to be a magazine by writers for writers, with the emphasis on the act of writing itself. That’s why we did the Paris Review interviews--it was as close as you could get to standing over the shoulder and watching one of the great masters at work.
-- Doc, taped conversation in Billerica Prison, c. 1980
The literature on the subject is abundant. Its use in medicine goes back centuries and centuries. And physicians like Doctor Reynolds, who was Queen Victoria’s physician, stated that he had studied the drug for 30 years and found it to be useful for a wide variety of ailments. It’s useful in detoxification of addicts, it’s useful in childbirth as we recently demonstrated.
The media, the politicians, governments, are always reluctant to admit the existence of anything they can't slap a tax on or stick in a box. Something that can't be immediately explained tends to undermine their authority, 'cause they're supposed to be able to explain everything. So along comes something they don't have the answers on, and they tend to dummy up and put a bag over their head, pretend it's not there. You know, when Pope Urban VIII refused to look through the telescope of Galileo, it was because he didn't want to admit the fact that Jupiter had moons around it. His argument was that if he, the Pope, who was the top dog at the time, the top tweet in the birdhouse, if he didn't see it, it didn't exist.
You've got to remember that the word real originally meant "royal." It still does in Spanish. In French, montreal, Montreal, is "mount royal." If the king didn't see it, it didn't exist. If the court chronicle didn't record it, it didn't exist. When John Foster Douglas refused to recognize mainland China, he was pretending that the quarter of the world's people living there didn't exist! It's like an ostrich sticking his head in the sand, you see what I'm saying?
This non-recognition syndrome is a symptom of anxiety and neurosis. Anxiety neurotics don't like to see anything that upsets them. So they pretend not to see it.
-- Doc Humes, in taped conversation with Ruth, c. 1980
You don’t have to have destructive tasks to hold a bureaucracy together, they can be constructive tasks. But they have to be big enough to engage everybody’s enthusiasm. When you set about turning the nation into a national park, that’s exciting enough to get people involved.
And it’s a question of altering the priorities. We have the means now to feed the entire planet and to literally turn the deserts into gardens. We’ve got the technology, it’s not tomorrow, it’s here now. The question is: do we have the simple smarts to apply it? Or are we so afraid of abundance that we die of hunger and thirst and scarcity?
-- 5/8/78 conversation in Billerica prison, with Oliver Trager
But the word hippie, generally speaking, applies to people who are concerned with things of the mind, concerned with things of the spirit. That doesn’t mean that they’re aesthetes. On the contrary, you know, they also fling a mean Frisbee.
-- 5/8/78 conversation in Billerica prison, with Oliver Trager
The possibilities for improving the human condition through instantaneous global communication via pictures, and color pictures at that, is immense. It seems almost infinite as you gaze down the road at the future. But so far, we haven’t had the smarts to use our TV to benefit ourselves, we tend to waste our time with television. There’s a lot of anesthetic TV going on, just sort of kills the pain, get us through the day. There’s a fear of creativity in TV, which is a reflection of a general fear of creativity.
-- 5/8/78 conversation in Billerica prison, with Oliver Trager
Lenticular Clouds
- From a conversation with Harold “Doc” Humes, circa 1980, Cambridge, Mass.
The story in a nutshell is this: when lenticular clouds were first sighted in the 50's, the problem nobody could get around was the fact that they were able to hold their position against prevailing winds. Now, a normal cloud moves with the wind because it's part of the wind. In other words, a cloud is water vapor, coming out of a solution. It's condensing to make a cloud. Water vapor is one of the gases that make air. When water vapor comes out of the air to make a cloud, the cloud moves along normally. It's perfectly logical, common sense tells you that.
The puzzling thing about lenticular clouds--which are water clouds too--the thing that puzzled everyone who looked at them, from airline pilots to meteorologists, was the fact that they could hold their position against prevailing winds. For example, you'd see a lenticular cloud sitting over the Charles River and there might be a prevailing breeze of 25 knots blowing but the cloud would stay in exactly the same position. The wind goes on but the cloud stays put. That presented a lot of problems, because if the cloud's not moving with the wind, that suggests it's not an ordinary meteorological phenomenon. There's something going on that's new. Definitely novel. It suggests the possibility that the cloud is not a meteorological phenomenon but in fact an ethereal phenomenon.
The idea that space is empty is something that everyone has accepted for the last 100 years or so but there's no reason that it has to be. In the 17th and 18th centuries, it was discovered and proved that light was a wave propagation. So the question arose, what is light making waves in? For example, you can set up a glass bell jar and exhaust all the air out of it and a beam of light will still go through it, so obviously it’s not making waves in the air. If light is a wave propagation and it can go through a vacuum, what in the world is it making waves in? So came the idea of the luminiferous ether, as it was called--luminiferous, meaning “light-bearing” right? And ether, not like the medical ether--it doesn't have anything to do with the ether you use for anesthesia--but an earlier use of the word, meaning a very insubstantial substance, an essential fluid, something very thin.
For about two centuries the ether was more or less an accepted idea of physics. There was no such thing as empty space. It was filled with the luminiferous ether. And that sounds like the old theological idea of the spirit. The Holy Spirit is supposed to be a fluid that fills all space.
People have always puzzled over where you go when you're dreaming. You're obviously conscious in a very real sense but you're obviously not in the body. The idea of an ethereal place of existence was a very attractive idea to the religionists, and for a while science and religion got along pretty well with this idea of the ether and the spirit being more or less the same thing. It's a little bit like being a fish. For example, if you were a fish you'd know a whole lot about bubbles. They're round and they're shiny and when you let go of a bubble, it falls, and for a fish it falls up. It's possible that the atoms and molecules that make up physical matter are like bubbles that hold together and make up things. The body is made of a whole bunch of molecules that are like little bubbles but the real thing may be the spirit of the fluid that surrounds us. What are these little bubbles in? Well, a fish would be the last to discover the existence of water. A fish would know a whole lot about bubbles but if you're living in the stuff you wouldn't know anything about it--unless you were a flying fish, of course, and got out of the pool every now and then, but basically speaking, a fish wouldn't know anything about water.
The thing is, there probably is no such thing as empty space. Space is fluid. All of what we think of as empty space is not empty at all. It's filled with a fluid and the particles that make up ordinary matter are tiny bubbles and droplets in this fluid.
That's where the lenticular clouds come in. Up to the time lenticular clouds appeared, about ten or twenty years ago, there was no way to perceive the spirit. You couldn't see it. It's colorless, odorless, and tasteless. It doesn’t have any physical appearance, you see what I'm saying? But a cloud that can hold its position against prevailing winds...
Well, this is probably why the Indians called them spirit clouds. Rastas call them Ja clouds. They're one of the signs of a new age. If you look in the Book of Revelations, it speaks about shining clouds as being one of the hallmarks of the New Age. They shine, and at night they have a pale glow to them. They're really beautiful. That's the whole point of this thing, that these clouds are more then just a novel phenomenon. I've been watching them for twenty years and I can tell you they're definitely novel. You can see them more and more often. Ten years ago, you might get one or two sightings a month. But their numbers have increased dramatically so that hardly a day goes by that you don't see a few in the sky. Especially the ones that are shaped like flying saucers. If you see them low on the horizon, they look exactly like a flying saucer or a ladies' hat. You can see why people call them flying saucers.
The media, the politicians, governments, are always reluctant to admit the existence of anything they can't slap a tax on or stick in a box. Something that can't be immediately explained tends to undermine their authority, 'cause they're supposed to be able to explain everything. So along comes something they don't have the answers on, and they tend to dummy up and put a bag over their head, pretend it's not there. You know, when Pope Urban VIII refused to look through the telescope of Galileo, it was because he didn't want to admit the fact that Jupiter had moons around it. His argument was that if he, the Pope, who was the top dog at the time, the top tweet in the birdhouse, if he didn't see it, it didn't exist.
You've got to remember that the word real originally meant "royal." It still does in Spanish. In French, montreal, Montreal, is "mount royal." If the king didn't see it, it didn't exist. If the court chronicle didn't record it, it didn't exist. When John Foster Douglas refused to recognize mainland China, he was pretending that the quarter of the world's people living there didn't exist! It's like an ostrich sticking his head in the sand, you see what I'm saying?
This non-recognition syndrome is a symptom of anxiety and neurosis. Anxiety neurotics don't like to see anything that upsets them. So they pretend not to see it. The cloud phenomenon is interesting because it's there for everyone to see, and kids see them all the time. The kids have no blocks on this stuff; they’re not conditioned like older people are. So the kids go out and see shining clouds doing all these incredible numbers, playing cha cha cha in the sky. They spot them right off the bat and they have no problem with them. It's the older people who have difficulty recognizing that we're actually moving into a new age. This is being seen by people all over the world. There are a thousand things that tend to show this.
Repressive measures are the last gasp of the pyramidal hierarchy, measures by which the whole materialistic, mechanistic culture tries to keep control. That kind of control mania is a symptom of anxiety. And it's not going to succeed. They can collect all the transmitters and shut down the phones, but people can still communicate. It's global communication that makes the difference, I think. People can get the word around, whereas 30, 40 years ago they couldn't.
The spiritual revolution of the 60's is a real revolution. It opened up a whole lot of people's minds. Everything from people rediscovering marijuana as medicine, to rediscovering music. This is a banner thing, the first time in the history of the planet that this has happened. One of the other signs mentioned in the Book of Revelations is a new music? Shining clouds and a new music. Do you realize that rock and roll went all over the planet in less then 20, 30 years? And jazz too, improvisatory music in general.
Improvisatory music is different from the old style music, which first you had to write down and then you had to rehearse. Then you had to get a whole bunch of dudes dressed in the same uniforms and a guy with a stick out in front. A big symphony orchestra is like a military organization. Modern music is created and performed in the same instant, which makes it generically different from the old style of music. So one of the predictions in the book of revelations is that there should be shining clouds and new music. And here you got the shining clouds and the new music.
I'll tell you an interesting thing. There's a place in Rome called the Spanish Steps, where all the kids gather. You've got kids from Poland, Africa, France, Germany, and the amazing thing is that they all wear the same clothes and they all listen to the same music. There's less of a barrier between two kids, one from Greece and the other from Algeria, than there is between their own parents at home. The generation gap is a bigger deal then the language barrier. Now this is the first time in history that that's been true.
We've entered a modern age, and as Mao Tse Tsung put it, the masters of the modern age are the children. That's what the lenticular clouds signify. It's like a sign. It's like what they, in the old days, in biblical times called a sign. In the days when there were no books, you had to teach things one on one. Mohammed had to teach a few people, then he taught a few more people. But even though there was no Eyewitness News, the word got around, and everybody knows about Mohammed.
If it's true, the word gets around. The point is to get ideas across to people without getting hung up behind an ego trip. A lot of people run around thinking they're the prophet Isaiah or Jesus Christ or whoever. Well, yeah, you're the prophet Isaiah, you are Jesus Christ--everybody's a star, that's the whole point. Mao and Martin Luther King were sort of like early blooms in the garden; they saw it before anybody else.
In the Book of Hebrews, it says that Jesus speaks of himself as being the first of many brethren. In other words, the idea is that everybody is supposed to come up to his level someday. It's the idea of brotherly love. When the idea is extended far enough and the whole world gets into it, then everybody arrives at the level of enlightenment as the original teachers. In the Latin, when it speaks of Christ returning to earth, it uses the term cum, meaning "with," comes with clouds. Not on clouds. In English, it's often translated as coming on clouds, which sort of makes it hard to believe. Jesus, you see, is not a one man show. It's a "here comes everybody" thing, you dig what I'm saying?