tackling the Hegel problem on drugs

orthodox rainbow neptunian planetoid charismatic repellant organic fusiform nerobiological paradoic quotidian forfeiture of mindscatter biledust wormwood fragrant perpetual neuropteroid anatomical directive.

the prime proof of a thing is the non nonexistence of it? certainly not. there are an infinite number of nonexistents. not everything that does not not exist, in fact, exists. there are some things that are neither nor. the unrealized. the potential. the nonstatic.

actuality is nonparsimonious. the normative asthetic of preferred actuality is nonso. thus, the illusion of actuality is ubiquitous. it is a stating point that, though necessary, must be immediately rejected.

in essence, conceptual structures are analogous to three dimensional spatial configurations when time, the fourth dimension, is considered. no three dimensional entity exists properly if it does not occupy a span of time, as an object in this universe. no idea is entirely lacking in development. both entities can be considered lacking in this last dimension, successfully, and often productively, but the fourth dimensional element is essential to existence, and the object, conceptual or spatial, must ultimately be considered in light of the last.

Hand reads...

As I write this, the La Selva experience is far away, mentally and geographically. I obsess over Garage Band, and my new found power (not ability, metal is all about power) to be done with artistic collaboration and create Plasmodium, a solo band composed of four bass guitars. My notebook is full of bass tabs. I have finally resolved to learn to play Black Sabbath's Iron Man. I am writing some fantasy. My wife and I make hot chocolate. I have rediscovered tea. I must remember that I lecture in a few moments. My world is frozen, urban, and dormant. This is not bad, just very far away.

The blurry frog is Dendrobates pumilo. They are very abundant at La Selva. My guide the first day described them as "happy" because it was raining so consistently, and they were mating.

The blurry flower is a banana plant, volunteer, a pest in Costa Rica. The Trigona bees are a very common species, whatever they are, and are robbing it of nectar. This species never really reproduces sexually, as far as I know, so this is a case of bees robbing a structure which is superfluous to the plant itself.

The bridge crosses the Rio Puerto Viejo, and divides the two halves of the La Selva compound. To get to the rainforest from lunch, or from where most people sleep, a person crosses it. It wobbles magnificently as foot traffic passes.

Super Liquorea Cisneros is along the highway to San Jose. A lot of Costa Rica looks just like that...logged, tropical, and with a strange aesthetic that has its own internal logic.

Thursday.
Lycaenidae. A messy howler monkey. A cricket nursing its brood. (I looked this one up, the genus was Anurogryllus, one of the few crickets that provides parental care. This genus is widely distributed in the Caribbean and Central America...the particular species was one of the flightless ones. It nursed a very large brood of nymphs under a rock, one of the only rocks I turned over while I was there). A great tinamou, the bees are attempting to rebuild their nest.

I was very excited about the discovery of a Trigona colony at Cuerva, the curve in the path to my cabin. Workers of a second species, black, possibly a halictid and possibly another Trigona, were entering and exiting all morning, unmolested. It looked like a case of commensalism. I shared my ideas with the staff here, prematurely. In the afternoon, guards of the more common, yellow species, were giving the intruders hell. Much repair was being done in and about the entrance tube. Still, it is a fine nest, inside a Naustitermes colony, and the process of sharing my completely erroneous idea brought me back to the gazebo in the botanical garden. I don't know how I missed it earlier, but nest boxes hang beneath its roof, three of the four are full of stingless bees. I stayed for a while, watching a cloud of workers of the common, small, species hover aloft in the sun as foragers returned from pollen runs. There was as second species, black, larger, building no nest-entrance tubes, and more sullen. Their guards sat motionless...all business. It had an interesting pronotal shield. I have no idea as to the identity of these two species, or the large banana-raider, or the medium-sized brown species in the fallen nest. I am not collecting specimens on this trip. They might not all be Trigona, even.

I saw my first snake this morning, after Lil'Hateful chastized me by email about being careless about walking about in the dark. It was small, brown, immature, probably about 14 inches long, and might have been elaphid. It looked like a dark brown garter snake. Could have been anything though, even a colubrid.

An impressive basilisk. Green Honeycreepers. Clay colored robin, woordcreepers, orioles, parasitoids. Going to miss this place.

Friday-12/21

Amegillia foragers at mid-tree stratum in morning, nests in banks, keystone pollinator, Trypoxylon present, another story here, is politum or leucotarsae (this species was the subject of my doctoral dissertation. The story is that politum, and the nests looked like politum nests, is not supposed to occur there. It was not T. monteverdeii, as far as I could tell, which is supposed to occur there). Was sad earlier, woke for birds.

Hand reads
Wren, white tail, woodpecker, mantis, striped anole, doves, unafraid bird (a black headed trogon), striped wren, a halictid, ground doves, other hummingbird, varigated squirrel, kingfisher, parrots, etc.

A Postcard Home

This is the story of a crooked landscape-an eroded volcanic arc decked in a thicket of fog and leguminaceous, old-growth, bromeliad-heavy, liana-choked, woody and bearing toxic alkaloids, chosen by frogs, populated by hormigas, beloved of orupendulas, thick with heavy webspider strands. Aloft in the thick of it, lycaenidae, apidae, braconidae. The near-extinct jaguar, the zebu cattle, like lawnmowers, unravelling the tapestry as it hangs.

A robot warned me about changing tires here. I have been told that it usually too hot to do anything but lie around for want of beer and drinks that come with umbrellas. In fact, it is barely twenty four degrees celsius, but Central America encourages that kind of thinking, a sort of "Bueno, bueno. No lluviar ahora. Let's take off our clothes and play soccer."

Desnudar-to undress.

No local would approve of such a thing, it is the invention of young intellectuals from places where snow tires are an option.

I imagine that I am, in actuality, my hero, Alfred Russell Wallace, and that this is really the Amazon, and that all the pet Boa constrictor constrictor worldwide have been released back where they belong, and that I have spotted a black scorpion on my pillow, and though scorpions have no real sense of hearing, I whisper "stay very still.....it is highly venomous."

No, my field assistant is at home nursing a parasitic appendage. The trails here are safer than Oak Park sidewalks, except that they are owned by bullet ants, a vestige of the distant Cretaceous Period, a family so primitive that its members still possess the autonomy to regard the passerby with looks of suspicion.

In fact, the remaining forest is a lost little machine, a clock that has permanently assembled itself for the last eighty million years, with the bullet ant in its innards, now isolated among the hives of zebu cattle and highways decked in shacks serving Pollo y Cervesa, where women in shorts wander barefoot in the middle of the road for lack of sidewalks, lacking fear that the inevitable traffic fatality will somehow affect them. These people are to sensible for green lawns, too frugal and intelligent for anything like a military, trusting the world to leave them alone because, after all, why bother?

In that darkened sanctuary, bats still creep up tree trunks at night and trees fall stupidly to earth with each passing breeze. Somewhere, in Asia, perhaps, like the Anthropophagi, dangerous cannibals, and medicine men hopped ho on Jaje, eating tourists and discarding their disposable cameras by the roadside, the last few images bearing snapshot of tropical hibiscus as a backdrop to their smiling faces, handed off to brown-faced children with strange features and oddly impure intentions. I will see them too, my Lovely, I will see them too. The monkey temple, where human slaves, wait on simeon masters, the cave dwellers of Appalachia, unable to come to the surface because a recessive mutation has made it so that they burst into corpuscles at the first ray of sunlight. The eyeball finch, who pecks through sunglasses for the tasty treat below, I will see it too.

I shall see it all, my Lovely, I shall see it too. Your strange travels, through Himalayan step pyramids and goat brothels have taught me that it is OK to eat the green curry with snake venom, that it is never OK to wade through anything as deep as an anklet tatooo, and at all times, too keep enough money to tip the strippers, who after all, except for the one who brings cupcakes, are not your friends, but are likely to be the only ones who have opium.

I shall see it all. insect net in one hand and magnifying monocle in the other, ready to jump on every last mushroom and ingest it. To see stars and visions with Lil' Hatefull and encroach on some of that strange territory that the werewolf hunter regularly visits and makes plans to circumnavigate, in the afternoon, in between visits by grey blobs. Lenore, if I had your dark footwear I could make the right kind of tracks here, and tell My Clone that, with his genius for devices,I would not be locked in this sweaty cage, with nubile, tan-skinned women wearing leopard print loincloths, smoking cloves, and complaining in strange languages. Metal Brother, you have been here before. Do not insist otherwise, you have a scar from it I have seen. Parsifal, you will be here soon enough. Please, any of you, bring me the key to these handcuffs, they put them on promising wonderful things, and bring my Brother, who is the only person who can make sense of all this. These women have eaten the Giantess, and the others, for dislike of Boston. Soon, very soon, the Viking and the Zombie hunter will pull up in their trailer, their cat spies must have located me by now, and I can hitch a ride home.

Tocan Ustedes Cafe?

Last night, in the distance, over the rainforest sounds, the inevitable two-note chord progression of acoustic bass guitar. Simple, sad, melodic, and somehow, distinctly Central American. There was singing, amazingly proficient for borrachos. Closer to home and I hear laughter, guitar, and stories in Spanish....everything else was velvety dark. It was like Borjes wrote that scene in my life.

Olvidar-to forget.

I stopped to check the lights for insects, and I saw a very large Central American smooth gecko, a little beetle with huge antennae, probably a lonely male looking for mates. It had a black, shiny carapace. I have no idea what it was.

This morning, between waking to rain and misty bird calls, and actually waking up, I dreamed.

A half a dozen Tico boys had broken into my apartment, for the purpose of various types of mischeif. It was my apartment, and yet, it was where this room is. Funny, the topography outside had adjusted itself slightly-the building now sat sensibly on the ground rather than on stilts. The exterior had morphed slightly to become more rustic. My Costa Rican apartment had a pleasantly cluttered kitchen. The miscreants had gone through my things. I had somehow coralled them into my kithen and explained that they could borrow all the books they wanted.....I had plenty downstairs. My mother in law was somehow visiting here, not in far away Chicago...and this was an additional complication. The boys smiled impishly, but warmly, messing with the light fixtures, but genuinely interested as I offered "I need coffee. Do you guys drink coffee? Toca ustedes cafe?" I woke. I am here, in dreams. The 72 hour threshold has passed.

This morning, over coffee, hawkmoths, orange and black tufted in the abdomen, visited the flowers near the cafeteria. A white-collared swallow swooped over me to devour some of the bees I was watching. Later, a walk through never-logged, undisturbed rainforest. Clearwing butterflies, a huge spider devouring a braconid leftover from the night before (it was a great morning for spider watching. On the bridge over the river, I watched an orb weaver build its web), noisy aracaris, chestnut-headed orupendulas, parrots, a swallowtail, spider monkeys in the distance, a catkin covered with Trigona bees. I keep trying not to forget it all, each image, but it flows like maple syrup over pancakes.

The arthropods are so much harder to identify than the bees. I am lucky to get them to family. Nymphalidae, Lycaenidae, evanoidea, meloponini.

Like my hero, Alfred Russell Wallace, I have come to a place like this and am hatching strange ideas. I am starting to wonder how much of this -habitat structure breeds diversity in a high productivity setting-is really just evolutionary history. So many things here have long fossil records. Tropical environments have existed for millions of years before the seasonal, temperate, environments of North America. These neotropical forests are far older than the land on which they sit. This is the discredited view of things.

Strange Isthmus.

The Hippie was Eaten Alive Where He Meditated

There was a man who came here once, a hippie, who took to meditating in the forest. He was damn good at it, meditation that is. He sat on the wrong log, I guess, and the army ants found him. Within minutes, they reduced him to a skeleton. Earlier today, I think I saw his femur.

I stopped to take a piss in the river, and before I knew it, a Candiaru catfish was swimming up the stream of urine. Fuck. Somewhere out there, there are cannibals.

The plants above are growing on the corrugated tin roof of an "entrance" to a trail. I do not know how long they have taken to grow that size.

Maybe not. But I did something stupid today. Inspired by Jack Kerouac's rantings in Dharma Bums, I sat down on the trail and closed my eyes, listening. I wasn't exactly asleep, but close enough, and suddenly, there was Dimebag Darrel in my head, telling me I was an idiot. I opened my eyes. There were bullet ant foragers everywhere. I hadn't noticed them. Fucking hippie.

All day, I saw those whiptails. Also, slender anoles, and at least one ground anlole. Yesterday's lemur anole was not in the guidebook, presumably because it is a canopy species that should never have been on the ground in the first place. Birds' nest fungi, pale-billed wookdpeckers, making an awful racket.

My Trigona colony has finally posted a perimeter of workers around the entrance to their fallen home. I do not know whether they are capable of abandoning it by swarm, like Apis, or not.

So much of the tropical ecology I have been reading, for years, has turned out to be correct. This trip has been an astounding exercise in seeing things firsthand. The leaf litter is thin, and beneath it, red clay. Thin soil horizons and rapid decomposition everywhere, just like the textbooks teach. Light gaps full of regrowth. A surprisingly open canopy, however, not the midnight dark of Amazonia. Hurricanes, I hear, or read, fell the tall trees frequently enough so that regrowth is perpetual. Flowering is idiosyncratic, irregular, and intensely particular to the plant in question, as is fruiting. This also, I read in books. Termites really do construct tunnels over their foraging columns, and, also true, there are a great many leafcutter ants. With this maddening diversity comes a certain lack of abundance. I have seen a few parasitoids, but never more than one representative of a species. The biomass of a single common species of Trigona (I have that black one in mind, whatever it is) is probably greater than the combined biomass of all the Braconids out there, all fifty thousand of them. Trigona are so common that, drinking coffee in the morning, they land on my knee and investigate.

There are so many medium-sized leguminaceous trees here. I wonder if the productivity is actually as high as they say it is. If this is the case, the standing crop biomass does not represent it at all. Not exactly surprising, true. What seems to happen is that everything grows abundantly, and either falls over, is thrown to the ground by monkeys, or just kinda breaks off and disappears somewhere. These trees are built like Ikea furniture.

Tiene Jungle Rot

Tuesday 5:15

Already, it starts. Not just my feet, either. It has found my butt crack. It won't kill me. The Colorado Desert had this for me as well. My feet look like dead white jellyfish. It was wet boots that did it. Wet boots, and I sat on a wet bench this morning. Now, I need Tinactin spray desperately, and there is not a Walgreens for two thousand miles.

Today's catch was a huge clearwing butterfly. Amegilla sp. nesting in earthen banks. What little literature that exists on tropical pollinators seems to indicate that those bees are disproportionately important for allele flow because they trapline, rather than going straight home with their load and putting it to good use immediately Small butterflies, nymphalids, perhaps, defending a light gap in the old-growth rainforest. A distant view of a howler monkey. Many, many whiptails, all exuberant in the first real day of sun. The real sight was an tayra, I think. A fearsome weasel the size of a bobcat. It stood down the path from me, a little surprised.

A Strange Array of Unknowns

11:00 Tues

Lizards, Teiidae, Central American Whiptails, Ameiva festiva. Many. About five times as many juveniles as adults, a territory every few feet along the trail. I respond to the head bobs with head bobs of my own. Sunny now, hot and humid. The rain has stopped, and the tropical sun has finally emerged, shrouding this place in a mist so thick it looks like a movie set with a fog machine.

Earlier today, over coffee, I saw my first orchid bee. It was a female, probably Eulaema sp. The things dangle their legs oddly in the air as they hover, as if pumped up on too much coffee. Beautiful, green.

A social species, its whole nest tossed to grown by the storm Sunday, brood comb exposed,

lies in a matt of fallen bromeliads near the trail. It is probably some species of Trigona.

Workers pointlessly defend pieces of brood comb and honey pots.

Other bees, Trigona also, and ants as well, are giving them hell. The colony is in disarray....workers mill about

with no clear purpose. Later, I will attempt to photograph it.

Moss-covered rocks, mist, howler monkeys in the distance, over the river.

Same green iguana, in a different tree, peering down at me as I cross the river.

Honeycreepers, variable seed-eaters, blue swallows in the morning, diving at my head, pre-caffeine.

In the forest, orupendulas, Montezuma's orupendula. Ants. Atta spp., and bullet ants are everywhere, along with

a strange array of unknowns.

Some day, the trail will be the same, but the world will be different.....

Monday, Late

The iguanas here are lazy. They lord over us from treetops, having nothing to do all day but digest fig leaves. The millipedes have sex all day. This occurs, day after day, nonstop. They bats do not know they are in imminent danger of extinction. They get right up in a person's face, regardless of any resemblance to Ozzy Osbourne. Poor vision. I did not bring any Slayer to see if it attracts them. Early experiments in California suggested this was the case.

I cannot get enough of walking through dark forests, stopping periodically to turn off my flashlight and loose myself in strange thoughts. The rain came down so thick that when I turned the light back on, there was a reflective sheet of water hiding me from the world. Better to use the moonlight to see on days like this. The fuzzy boundary between this world and the next blurs a great deal. One day, the trail will be the same, but the world will be different.

Parts of this place recall a dream I had, years ago, about Nepal, a place I have never visited elsewise. In my dream, which was so real I could hear monsoon rain clink thunderously against corrugated metal roofs, it was mostly dark and wet like this.

The best I can gather from repeatedly replaying the animations on geology websites, Central America was an island arc in the Pacific, off the coast of California, about 25 million years ago.
The cocos plate seems to have crammed them into their current position. Woe to the extinct South American megafauna. Strange Isthmus.

Lluvia mucho ahora

Monday Afternoon

Why doesn’t it rain indoors here? It seems like it should. The rain has rendered it obvious, now, at this soaking moment, that the Book of Genesis was written by desert nomads who simply could not comprehend large amounts of rain. Forty days and forty nights of continuous rain would produce what? Destruction?

No indeed.

Toucans.

Two species of the birds, and also, a rainforest full of toxic plants.

The logic is irrefutable. As hard as it rains, the water runs downhill. It goes somewhere else, down river and waterfall, past iguana and through gorge after gorge, taking every soluble nutrient with it. The nutrients are all locked in the plant life, just as I have been teaching every year.

Even if it pooled up, at a rate of eight inches a day/night, that would give 320 inches of freshwater. That depth of water would not inundate the globe unless the sphere were as flat as Chicago. It is barely deep enough for paddlefish. The water does not pool, though. It moves. And even after it stops raining, it continues to fall from the trees.

Toxic trees, yes. These include various species of Virola tree, the dark red resin of which is full of DMT. Two species of toucan; the keel-billed Ramphastos sulfuratus, and the chestnut-mandibled Ramphastos swainsonii.

Dendrobatiid frogs (the red one, Dendrobates pumilio) calling restlessly for mates, the guide said that the rain made them “happy”, and affirmed that the tadpoles are indeed transported to bromeliads in the canopy. It seemed a crazy notion to me before. It makes sense now. There are bromeliads everywhere. A great Curasssow, idly strolling the pavement in the morning, a strange forest turkey called a crested guan, a coven of black Trigona bees robbing a banana flower, gold-headed tanagers, scarlet rumped tanagers, collared peccaries, bats sleeping in the shade of a wilted Heliconia leaf. The mouse-sized creatures had cut the veins to produce a rain-shade for themselves. Philodendron vines everywhere, strangler figs, the Mayan tree of god, the Ceiba, reaching between this world and the next.

Feral cocoa, leafcutter ants everywhere, lemur anoles, some gymopthalmid lizard, clearwing butterflies, Heliconia butterflies, owl butterflies, and a few things so strange I am wondering if they were real. That is the unmistakable impression I got, this morning, over coffee, looking at the birds. The gold hooded tanager, the green honeycreeper, and the scarlet-rumped tanager looked cartooney to my eye.

In fact, for the first time in several years, I do not need drugs. Perhaps they would be nice, after all. I have a feeling that any random tea made from that wall of green out there would either send me to my grave or have me sitting at the right hand of Aztec Elvis.

Bullet ants, Paraponera sp., unnamed ants and spiders, walking palms, mealy parrots, agoutis, howler monkeys, and mushrooms to mention except that some were ghost white doileys and others resembled little brown baseball bats.

An old stoner trick-If the washing machine is full, or too expensive-dry the clothes instead. Most of the unpleasant volatiles escape in the air. In fact, one washer was full, and the other accepts only alien currency. As I write this, lukewarm laundry cools on the bed. I stare at a pastiche of second-growth whatnot near the river. This morning, the guide told me that part of La Selva, near the Rio Puerto Viejo, used to be a Cocoa Plantation. Fungal disease wiped out the crop, year after year, taking most of Costa Rica’s enthusiasm for the crop. Some of the trees are still there, but most have been removed to speed up the process of ecological succession. I see at least one chestnut-mandibled toucan, and hear the sound of the river. On this side of it, a hill covered with ferns, Paleocene-style, making me wonder as to its origins.

Birds and lizards nest alongside each other amid the clay banks of the trail. Like Vegas, the forest does not sleep, making me pause to budget my energy. I am about to go out alone.

Holy Christ! More cool birds. And another two, nearly sideswiping my head from behind as they flew by. The animals here seem either totally oblivious to humans (mating millipedes, Trigona) or nonchalantly curious. None of them look like they have ever seen a rifle. Or a jaguar.

More. What will my brain retain, and what will regress into that dark velvet land I visit as I sleep?