Rural Electrification

Oak tree down: Saturday Jan 21, 2012, 8 AM.

Living among the redwoods is not without its perils--one of which is falling trees. During the summer the trees grow bushy and top-heavy; then winter rains loosen the soil around the roots and some trees succumb to the force of gravity. Every year during the first big rain we can count on losing electricity  for a day or so when a tree falls across a power line. Trees have been known to fall on cars and even houses during the redwood rainy season.

Saturday morning, after a night of heavy rain, I was awoken at 8 AM by the sound of a big tree falling somewhere close by and the "beep-beep" of my computer's UPS switching to battery power. I put on my robe and walked up to the road to check on my car and the neighbor's houses. I found that a big oak had fallen across the main access road to our little community as well as taking down power, telephone and cable lines. The stress on the lines had also snapped a power pole which fed the rest of the neighborhood. Until the tree was removed, which was accomplished by Davey Tree around 2 PM, the PG&E crews could not get in to repair the damage.

Electric power pole snapped by fallen tree.

Fortunately the rain had stopped and it was still daylight. The PG&E crew arrived with their big trucks and checked the extent of the damage. Their main complaint was the narrowness of our roads covered with mud and lined by deep ditches. I have seen PG&E trucks get stuck in the mud here on other occasions. But not this time.

These guys went straight to work, pulled out the stump of the old power pole, drilled a new hole, then rigged and erected a new pole on the spot. But the wires were still down and it was getting dark.

Drilling the hole for new power pole (on right).

The pole was up, the lines were down but it was getting dark. The crew donned headlamps and placed small generator-powered spotlights along the road to illuminate the scene. A two-man crew went up the pole and began cutting, splicing and attaching wires beginning with the topmost high-voltage lines and then the lower household-voltage lines plus installing the frames to hold these wires and the cable TV and telephone lines.

PG&E workers rigging the new pole in the dark.

Meanwhile other workers were hoisting wires and fixing broken connections on the ground and on the other poles. In the spotlights, in the headlights, with the sound of big engines and small generators and the sight of helmeted men carrying strange tools and intent on accomplishing mysterious tasks, our cozy neighborhood took on the look of a science-fiction movie set.

Night creatures refilling our homes with charged Fermions.

By 8 PM we all had electric power again--it only took 5 hours once the trucks could get past the fallen tree.  These men really knew what they were doing and seemed to be having a good time doing it. I have seen them doing the same job under much more stressful situations--on the much trafficked main highway, at night, full rainstorm with landslides partly closing the roadway. Thanks PG&E for so quickly restoring our electricity. You guys are real heroes.

Nick Meets the Galactic Telepaths

Nick Herbert parts the veils between worlds

In the late 60s I had experimented with the then-legal consciousness-expanding drugs LSD and peyote (available by mail from a ranch in Texas) and was ready to explore the effects of a substance considered so satanic by the American government that it is classed with heroin and its use forbidden even to sober scientists.

For me legal LSD and peyote acted as gateway drugs to the illegal use of marijuana.

At that time the street price of marijuana was $100 a "key" (kilogram = 2.2 pounds) which was broken down into "lids" (each about an ounce) which sold for between 5 and 10 dollars--the so-called nickel and dime bags. Unlike today's powerful sinsemilla buds, yesterday's marijuana was mostly leaf which had to be separated from seeds and stems. And to obtain pot, one had to have connections with a (technically) criminal underground. For the sake of science I made such connections and learned how to "clean a key" and "roll a joint". My mind seems to have an affinity for this forbidden substance and I have since had many unusual experiences with cannabis in various forms.

One evening I was alone in my house in Los Trancos Woods when Paul and his wife Miriam dropped by. Paul was a Stanford med student (now a therapist in So Cal) who was interested in psychedelics and psychodrama. I rolled a joint and we "got high". Someone suggested that we read aloud and I proposed "The Song of Songs". "I hate the Song of Songs," said Miriam. "Let's try this," she said, picking up an old college humor magazine from a pile of books. Miriam began to read and pot's ability to make the lowest silliness seem profoundly funny began to kick in. We laughed at Miriam's every word.

We laughed and laughed. And then something strange happened. It seemed to all three of us that there was only one person laughing. We had merged minds, so it seemed, into one laughing entity. "It's the sound," Paul conjectured. "It's the sound that's uniting us." So shocking was this new experience that we quickly came down. Drawing pictures on a napkin, Paul gave a mock-scientific explanation of the cannabis molecule's action on the brain which we all found funny but we were now laughing separately not as one being. They invited me to a party but I claimed to be too stoned (on one shared 60s joint?) to be good company. Paul and Miriam left and I stoked up the fire in my living room and prepared to enjoy an evening by myself.

Then inside my head the voices began to speak.

They claimed to be an ancient group of galactic telepaths traveling through space mind-to-mind rather than in clunky metal ships. "Here is what we do," they said and suddenly I experienced a kind of LSD trip. Then they turned off the "mind ray" and I become completely normal. They took me in and out of this odd psychological space several times to show off (I suppose) their prowess in the mental realm.

Then the aliens revealed the purpose of their visit. They were inviting me to join the conspiracy of galactic telepaths. They told me that some of my friends were already members. Unlike "Tony the angel" whose voice projected a clear persona, these alien voice seemed colorless, like ticket agents or office clerks. My initial response was that if this community really existed its goals would differ from human goals as much as human goals differ from the goals of fishes. This group must by necessity be non-human. So by joining it I would in some sense be betraying the human race.

The aliens seemed to understand my misgivings, but assured me that although I qualified for membership, there was no pressure to join. Then they withdrew from my mind and left me alone.

For the next few days I was obsessed with this contact and tried to discover other members of the group. Some of my psychedelic pals in the Stanford psychology department were prime candidates but they all shrewdly denied being galactic telepaths.

If this offer was real then I missed my chance to meet a million alien beings, to learn startlingly new truths about the mental and physical universe and to hear dozens of alien ethnic jokes.

On the other hand, if this experience was a message from my larger self, it may have been a prescient hint concerning the nature of quantum tantra--a more intimate way of doing physics that may look less like the physics of today and more like the sort of science practiced by galactic telepaths.

Nick Meets an Angel

Nick Herbert caught off guard at his lab bench

In the summer of 1960, I was living in a loft in Berkeley near Rose and Shattuck and working as a lab tech at the Berkeley Radiation Lab, minding the liquid hydrogen refrigerator for the 72-inch bubble chamber which tracked nuclear events spawned by protons from the Berkeley Bevatron--the highest-energy particle accelerator of its day, comparable to today's LHC. A few years earlier physicists at the Bevatron had discovered the antiproton  and were exploring other new high-energy hadron reactions.

I had just completed my first year of course work at Stanford, was teaching a graduate physics lab and preparing for the qualifying exams for the PhD. I was a practicing Catholic then and was reading Dante's Inferno, the Book of Job, Chesterton's Orthodoxy and planning to find a spiritual advisor at Berkeley's Newman Club. I was working swing shift at the Rad Lab which seriously disrupted my sleep schedule. I had fallen in  love with a woman named Audrey in San Francisco and was enjoying exploring the City's bounties with her and her two roommates. At that time (Summer 1960) the only mind-altering drugs I had ever experienced were legal and ethanol-based.

The bedroom in my loft had a small window with a view of San Francisco Bay. I was sitting on my bed in T-shirt and sweat pants with my back to the window getting ready for sleep one night when I suddenly heard a voice in the empty room. "Hello, Nick." I turned to the window but no one could have climbed up the sheer wall and spoken thru the panes. The voice was inside my head.

"Hello, Nick." The voice was male, a middle-aged man, spoken in a matter-of-fact way. The man, who I will call "Tony", did not identify himself and got straight to the point.

"You are reaching a crucial stage in your life, Nick, and must make a choice between two careers. Two kinds of life await you and I am asking you now to choose between them. One life will be regular, understandable and conventional; the other will be unusual, unpredictable and unconventional. Both of these lives are good lives. Now choose between them."

"How can I choose?" I told the voice in my head. "Tell me more about these lives."

"You know all you need to know," the voice replied. "Now choose."

"Tell me more, " I pleaded. "Make your choice," said the voice in my head.

And so it went for five or ten frustrating minutes. I wanted more info. He wanted me to choose.

"Alright," the voice said and vanished. I got the sense that "Tony" had other obligations that night and didn't have the time to waste with me. I was shaking all over during this encounter and my clothes were soaked with sweat. "What the hell was that?" I thought.

I did what any scientist would do. I went to the library.

I found that people hearing voices was not uncommon. More than 10% of folks have heard voices and now I was one of them. This experience gave me a sympathetic ear for people whom I met later in life who reported hearing voices too.

Being a sophisticated scientist, my first assumption was that "Tony" was a part of my subconscious and that I was simply "speaking to myself". However, the experience didn't feel that way. Tony felt like a real person, different from me, with a distinct personality. From his tone of voice and manner of speaking, "Tony" came across as a regular guy, a butcher or a bus driver, who was now working as some sort of discarnate beaureaucrat. I call him an "angel" because he was a discarnate entity, but far below the level of God and the saints. If I was making "Tony" up, I was doing a great acting job. It really worked. The guy felt real.

A second argument against my making this up was the utter ordinariness of the transaction. If I possessed a need to star in some imaginary drama, why not invent some Egyptian king, wizard or holy man to talk to?  Why did I make up Tony and not Hermes Trimegistus?

I marked this experience as "unsolved" and went on with my life. But three years later I met "Tony" again.

In three years a lot had happened. I had been accepted for the PhD program, I had (uneventfully) ceased being a Catholic, I had come within inches of losing my life in a climbing accident on Mt Shasta and, thanks to some dear friends in the Stanford psychology department, I had experienced LSD--a big dose.

I was then living in Los Trancos Woods, a semi-rural area in the hills behind Stanford, and had just dropped acid for the third time. I was awaiting my sitter (in those days we always had sitters to provide "ground control") but he was delayed waiting for a pie to bake. So for the first part of the trip I was on my own and exploring the sensual distortions, the merging with the walls and scenery and the philosophical paradoxes that a few mikes of this mind medicine can be counted on to produce.

What I didn't count on was that in the middle of my trip, Tony showed up. "Hi, Nick, " he said. "Same choice. No new information." "OK," I said. "I'll take that strange life." (Given the context, it was obvious what path I had already chosen.) "Thanks," said Tony, noting my decision in some invisible book. My angel vanished and though I have since had a few more episodes of voices in my head, none of them sounded like Tony.

Science Friday

Wisdom is often found between the covers.

SCIENCE FRIDAY

1. Matter Fundamentalism:
Matter is all there is.
Behind phenomena
there is no Other
with Whom to connect.

2.  Classical Mysticism:
Every instant of our life
is an exercise in merging
with an ever-present Mystery
that today's scientists
are impotent to discern.

3. Classical Tantra:
Every glance is Her Glance
Every touch Her Touch
Every smell is Her sexual attractant
Every meeting a teaching.

4. Quantum Tantra:
For millennia we've played in the shallows
Our sciences mere baby steps
With the advent of quantum reality
Get ready to taste Nature's depths.

Nick's New Eye

Left eye lens implant 12/8/2011

Having trouble driving at night: headlight glare and 4-6 degree rainbow halos around small light sources; loss of contrast and fuzzy vision similar to dirty glasses. Black musical notes look grey. Diagnosed with cataracts in both eyes. Cataract means opacities in the lens which in advanced stages look white like water at the bottom of a waterfall. Hence the name. Modern cure for this eye disease is surgical removal of lens under local anesthetic and replacement with optically corrected clear polymer lens.

I made appointment with surgeon Harvey Fishman and after exchanging the secret Stanford handshake he told me more than I needed to know about the structure of my eye and details of the surgery. Using space-age diagnostic instruments, his staff measured lots of parameters of my eyes including corneal topography so that the replacement lens would give me perfect vision. Harvey is also the inventor of an iPhone app called EyeSnapi for taking pictures of the eye to email to your doctor.

I was very anxious about this operation because it involves being conscious while someone cuts opens your eye. Yet many people that I spoke to assured me that the operation was not unpleasant. During the operation I was conscious of a bright field of light containing three fuzzy rectangular objects and could hear and respond to voices but the operation was generally comfortable and not traumatic. In addition to the local anesthetic, nurses administer a sedative related to Valium thru an IV. The operation lasted about half an hour after which my friends Alan and Sun drove me home.

Recovery consists of administering lots of expensive eye drops four times a day and wearing a protective eye patch at night.. After a few days I have pretty good vision in both eyes but the size of the image in the operated eye is about 20% larger than the natural eye which still requires a corrective lens. My neural programming is rapidly adapting to the new eye and for most activities I can function just fine. Going down stairways is difficult--I sometimes perceive twice as many steps as normal beings. An informative account of recovery from this surgery by Charles ("Doctors make awful patients") Slonim, a cataract surgeon who experienced the operation himself, is here.

So now I am seeing the world in two ways, thru an artificial lens in my left eye and thru a natural lens in my right eye--a bit of a cyborg like Captain Picard who was captured by the Borg and transformed into Locutus, a human/Borg hybrid with artificial enhancements including an artificial eye. Thanks for my new clear vision, Doctor Fishman. Resistance (to artificial lens implants) is futile.

Captain Picard as the Borg Locutus

Ode to Ed

Ed Cramer MCs at the BC Bistro

ODE TO ED
An artist, a dreamer, a roustabout clown
a friend, a sativer, a man-about-town
a poet, a lover, a sly mischief-maker
a scholar, a shaman, a fine master baker
a lover of life and of yeast and of dough
and of things that go "squish" in the night.

You've seen the movie "Oklahoma"
It celebrates historic pride
where farmers, ranchers made there home--ah!
Well, Ed's folks were on the other side
and (if they could speak)
they'd sure want us to understand
we're squatting here tonight on Indian land.

What scent is that thru yonder window breaks?
Methinks it smells of something good that bakes
Mayhaps some freaky pizza, magic muffins, 
grainful bread
We see, smell, touch and taste the genius of Ed
True Nature's* hearty oven-tending fiend
he daily masterbakes behind the scenes.

In our Moorish Church, his holy name
is Grand Imam Omar abu Khan
Fakir of the Mountain's Teat
a friend to woman--and to "mon".
As part of his august profession
Omar's empowered to hear confession
Your guilt, your shame, your most obscene...
bring to Omar: he'll wipe you clean
With Omar, you never have to take a chance:
your sins are always pardoned in advance.

And Ed invented Captain Bathrobe
a champion in the war on drugs
who knows that downing tabs or mugs
of mind-perturbing chemistry
is part of ancient human history:
for where would we ignorant monkeys be
if you chopped off our curiosity?

To JJ's mountain lair** he oft repaired
with Craig# and Ashley##, 
our late lamented Buddhist bard
seduced by that hot flirtatious muse
of poetry to launch enormous argosies
of verse on love and death and life
and catch the scent of poet's paradise.

An artist, a dreamer, a roustabout clown
a friend, a sativer, a man-about-town
a poet, a lover, a sly mischief-maker
a scholar, a shaman, a fine master baker
a lover of life and of yeast and of dough
and of things that go "squish" in the night.

*True Nature: BC organic restaurant
**JJ's lair: J. J. Webb's Poetry Grove north of BC
##Ashley: Ashley Walker, Australian performance artist
#Craig: Craig Anderson, BC's own Arthur Rimbaud 
See Boulder Creek BistroScene

The Poet by Ed Cramer

Schrödinger Cat Comix

Also see I can has Heisenburger?

Supernature--the Story of Esalen

Esalen Institute--a lab for exploring radical human possibilities.

I got my first glimpse of Esalen in February 1963. Stanford psychology grad student Allen Sidle and his wife told me about something hot happening in Big Sur. Together with Tom Records (who later joined a Gurdjieff group in New York) we drove south along the rugged California coast to a spot on the map labeled "Slate's Hot Springs", which boasted a cliff-side bath house, a lodge and several motel rooms.

We traveled down there to hear a Stanford religion professor talk about his mystical experience. Frederic Spiegelberg, author of many books on comparative religions, as a teacher at Stanford had deeply impressed both Dick Price and Michael Murphy, who were busy turning Slate's Hot Springs into a meditation and seminar center which they were calling "Esalen Institute".

Our little gang was privileged to witness Esalen in embryo--the place was barely six months old.

Professor Spiegelberg spoke that sunny afternoon to an audience of about 20 people, standing not in a traditional classroom but on the edge of a cliff with the Pacific Ocean as his backdrop. He told us of his trip to the ashram of Shri Aurobindo in Pondicherry, India. Aurobindo was seated in a chair in a small room with a long line of devotees at the door who one by one came forward to receive his blessing. Spiegelberg awaited his turn, stepped forward, met the Master's gaze and was suddenly "X-rayed to the core" by some psychic emanation flowing from that being in the chair. The encounter lasted no more than a few seconds in "real time" but to Spiegelberg it seemed to last forever. He spent an hour attempting to describe to us what he could remember and express of this powerful and unexpected shaktipat experience in the presence of Aurobindo. It sounded to me an awfully lot like LSD.

I returned to Esalen many times: to hear Tim Leary speak, to participate with Ed Maupin in his "Symbo Experiment" in group telepathy, to attend meetings convened by Ralph Abraham, Terence McKenna and Jeffrey Kripal, to explore with wife Betsy near-by Lime Kiln Creek and sometimes just to enjoy the baths. For several years, with Saul-Paul Sirag, I led seminars on quantum physics which are mentioned in Rice University professor Jeffrey Kripal's authoritative history Esalen: America and the Religion of No Religion.

Recently Kripal and Cinema Arts film producer Scott Hulan Jones have been constructing a film version of the history of Esalen with the working title Supernature: Esalen and the Human Potential. A big portion of the movie is already "in the can", and using material from the Esalen archives, they hope to complete a rough cut by September 2012, to coincide with the celebration of Esalen's 50th birthday.

You can view here the first Supernature trailer, featuring a few of "the hippies who saved physics", as well as founder Mike Murphy, Jeffrey Kripal and other Esalen worthies. To raise money for additional filming and editing, the Supernature crew is seeking funding via Kickstart. In its nearly fifty years of existence, Esalen Institute has transformed many thousands of lives. If you have benefited in any way from Esalen, kicking in to support Supernature would be a great way to return the favor.

Scott Hulan Jones at Esalen's Big House

Time Machine Design

Japanese Translation of Nick Herbert's Faster Than Light

Starting from the upper right, and reading downward, the characters are phonetic ta-i-mu, but the ending u goes silent, so this is "time" and is written in English (katakana).

The middle column phonetically reads ma-shi-n, or "machine" again written in English.  The bottom character is the phonetic Japanese particle -no- indicating possession.

The top character in the left column is the verb tsuku- which means "to build", and it is followed by a phonetic -ri, turning it into a noun meaning "construction".

The bottom character on the left is kata (the same word as in martial arts), meaning "form".  The composite tsukurikata means "building instructions".

So the whole thing reads time machine no tsukurikata which literally means "time machine's building instructions" -- Cool!

(translation by Alec MacCall, Santa Cruz NOAA scientist and Celtic musician). Thanks, Alec.

=====================================

How could the ability to signal faster-than-light be used to construct a time machine? Here physicist/programmer Richard Baker shows what you would need to send a signal from the present to the past if your FTL signal was infinitely fast--instantaneous communication as in Ursula LeGuin's science-fiction "ansible". 

Baker starts by considering the rest frame V = 0 and drawing a Minkowski diagram with time increasing in the upward direction and one spatial dimension plotted in the sidewards direction. In this diagram, the speed-of-light limit divides spacetime into two distinct regions: 1) those events that can be causally connected to point P (which are called "time-like") and 2) those events that are causally disconnected from P--called "space-like". In Baker's diagram time-like events occur in the yellow region, which is called the "light-cone", and space-like events occur in the blue region, called the "absolute elsewhere".

If we could send an instantaneous signal from P, it would travel along the white horizontal axis (t = 0) in FIG 1, but it would not go backwards in time. To build a time machine we need to introduce a second reference frame moving to the right at velocity V with respect to the rest frame.

FIG 1 -- Spacetime diagram: Rest Frame V = 0

The fundamental premise of Einstein's theory of special relativity is that space and time look different for observers that are in relative motion. A system of equations called the Lorentz Transformations shows how to translate between the spacetime events as they appear to an observer in the rest frame (V = 0) and to an observer in the frame moving at velocity V.

FIG 2 -- V= 1/4 c Frame as seen in V = 0 Rest Frame

Assume that our moving frame is traveling at 1/4 of the speed of light. This moving frame is bounded by the same light cones but in the rest frame the moving frames time and space axes seem tilted as
shown by heavy blue lines in FIG 2. Now if the observer in the moving frame sends an instantaneous signal to the right--the direction of his frame's motion--it will always go forward in time (as seen from the rest frame). However, if the moving observer sends an instant signal in the opposite direction, it will seem (in the rest frame) to go backwards in time.

One way to remember the direction of this effect is to imagine running on an escalator. If you run UP the UP escalator, all you do is go faster. But if you run DOWN the UP escalator fast enough you can go backwards in time.

The signal goes back in time but it is traveling into the rest frame's elsewhere. To construct a time machine in the rest frame we have to bounce that signal back. This is accomplished with a second frame located at distance D traveling at velocity minus V. We do the "DOWN the UP escalator trick" in this second frame and the signal returns to the rest frame BEFORE IT WAS SENT.

Richard Baker concisely derives the time machine effect for FTL signals which travel instantly. I will follow his example (and modify his diagrams) for FTL signals of finite velocity Z where Z is greater than c--the velocity of light. I will derive the "time machine equation" for all frame velocities V and all FTL signaling velocities Z, but in FIG 3 will show the results for only one frame speed (V = 1/4 c) and three FTL speeds (Z = 2c, 4c and 8c).

FIG 3 -- FTL signals (Z = 2c, 4c, 8c) in the 1/4 c frame--viewed from the Rest Frame

Deriving the time machine equation is a schoolgirl exercise in special relativity. Lorentz transforming into the moving frame, putting in a slanted line representing a signal traveling at velocity Z, then transforming back to the rest frame, it is easy to see that the "time machine factor" F is given by the simple expression:

F = (ZV - 1)/(Z - V)

when Z and V are expressed in multiples of c, F is a dimensionless number proportional to how far back you go in time when sending an FTL signal Z a distance D from a frame traveling at velocity V. Only if F is positive do signals go backwards in time.

The "one-way time-travel equation" is: T = FD

For example if D = 1 light-year and F = 1/2 then T is 1/2 year backwards in time. Since the time machine is not complete unless we bounce the signal back, this number must be doubled.

The "time machine equation" is: T = 2FD

It is easy to see that the time machine factor will only be positive if Z > 1/V. Therefore for a pair of frames moving at V = 1/4 c, the FTL signal must be faster than 4c for the time machine to work. FIG 3 shows three values of Z. For Z = 2c, the signal goes into the future; for Z = 4c, the signal stays at t = 0, traveling neither into the past nor the future. For Z = 8c, the signal travels into the past. Only the last FTL signal is fast enough to build a time machine.

As the speed Z is made faster and faster, the time machine factor F goes to V. Thus the time machine expression T(instant) for instantaneous (ansible-class) signal speeds is:

T(instant) = 2VD

To put these numbers in perspective, we imagine building a time machine that sends an FTL signal from Earth to the Moon and back that arrives at Earth before it was sent. For our moving frames we use rotating disks whose rim velocities are V = 1/4c from which FTL signals can be sent and received at speed Z. To keep the numbers simple, we assume the Earth-Moon distance to be D = 2 light-seconds.

Time Machine operating between Earth and Moon

To operate the time machine we send the FTL signal when the disk is moving in the opposite direction to the motion of the FTL signal (using the DOWN the UP elevator effect) and we receive this signal at a detector moving at the same speed and direction as the sender. When V = 1/4c and Z = 8c, the time machine factor F is 0.129. From the time machine equation we see that the signal will/did arrive at Earth about 1/2 second before it was sent. The signal can be resent N times and progressively displaced 1/2 N second backwards in time but no further back than when the machine was first turned on.

For Z = 8c, the one-bounce time travel is 1/2 second. If the machine were operating in ansible mode (Z = infinity), the time machine factor F is equal to V which in this case is 1/4. Hence in ansible mode the one-bounce time travel interval is 4 x 1/4 = one second backwards in time.

Faster-than-light signaling devices have long been a science-fiction staple, from Ursula LeGuin's ansible to Star Trek's subspace radio. A short review of famous fictional FTL devices can be found here.

Artist's conception of Ursula LeGuin's Ansible FTL communicator

Sward Soars

Santa Cruz poet Robert Sward (photo: Alan Lundell)

Gathering this Sunday at artist/sculptor Coeleen Kiebert's garden studio overlooking the Pacific to celebrate the publication by Red Hen Press of New and Selected Poems 1957-2011 by Robert Sward. Poets and artists in great abundance. Many of the Santa Cruz cogniscenti showed up at Coeleen's including local columnist Bruce Bratton, poets Len Anderson, David Swenger, Tilly Shaw, T. Mike Walker, Joanna Martin, Robin Lysne. Stephen Kessler, Dean Cervine, Sun Lundell. Angela Blessing was there, along with Bruce Damer, Elke Maus, Ken Adams and dozens of other colorful folk I did not recognize. Encouraged by his many admirers, Sward roared and soared. The event was videoed by Alan and Sun Lundell.

Sward's wife Gloria Alford created the cover art Words, Words, Words for her husband's book. In Gloria's painting the alphabet seems to be emerging from the walls of a cave--as if humans were only just beginning to discover the uses of language.

Sward often uses humor as a wedge to pry open and examine the insoluable complexities of ordinary life. Some of his poems consist of imagined conversations with his dead father, a Chicago Jewish podiatrist turned AMORC  mystic, the subject of Sward's collection Rosicrucian in the Basement. For example:

ONE STOP FOOT SHOP

"We walk with angels
and they are our feet."

"'Vibrating energy packets,'" he calls them. "'Bundles of soul
in a world of meat.'  Early warning system--
dry skin and brittle nails;
feeling of numbness and cold;
these are symptoms; they mean something.
I see things physicians miss."

"All you have to do is open your eyes, just open your eyes,
and you'll see: seven-eighths of everything is invisible, a spirit
inside the spirit.
The soul is rooted in the foot.
As your friend Bly says, 'The soul longs to go down';
feet know the way to the other world,
that world where people are awake.
So do me a favor: Dream me no dreams.
A dreamer is someone who's asleep."

"You know, the material world is infinite,
but boring infinite," he says, cigarette in hand,
little wings fluttering at his ankles.

"And women," he says, smacking his head,
"four times as many foot problems as men.
High heels are the culprit."

"I may be a podiatrist, but I know what I'm about:
feet. Feet don't lie,
don't cheat, don't kiss ass. Truth is,
peoples' feet are too good for them."

Robert Sward and Gloria Alford in Coeleen's garden