"They Wouldn't Let Us Win": Jackson County, Alabama, Veterans Relive the Vietnam War

By Ronald H. Dykes

For They Wouldnt Let Us Win, Ronald H Dykes did in-depth interviews with fifteen Vietnam veterans from Jackson County, Alabama. In these interviews, the veterans graphically describe the extraordinarily difficult experiences they endured during their tour of duty. Most of them were teenagers who had little idea of where Vietnam was or what the war was about. Yet, they did serve, follow orders, and try to stay alive. When they returned to the United States, though, some of them were greeted with curses and spittle. Perhaps even worse, their peers at home seemed uninterested in their experiences in Vietnam. Despite the horrors of the war and their reception back in their country, most of them do not regret serving in Vietnam. They do regret, however, that the politicians would not let us win. Dykes thesis in this book is that readers like himself who were opposed to the war will be convinced that these veterans got a raw deal when they returned home.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Sep 4, 2012
• ISBN: 9781475943788

Ronald H. Dykes

Ronald H. Dykes lives in Scottsboro, Alabama. This is his fifth book, the fourth on a series on the history of Jackson County sponsored by the Jackson County Historical Association, an organization dedicated to the preservation, research, and dissemination of the county’s history.

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Copyright © 2012 by Richard Leviton.

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ISBN: 978-1-4759-4809-7 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4759-4810-3 (ebk)

iUniverse rev. date: 08/28/2012

Contents

Editor’s Preface

The Journals

About the Author

The Blue Room Consortium

For Judith A. Lewis and Silver Boy

Editor’s Preface

The manner in which these pages—eight fat notebooks in all, handwritten—came to me, or, I should say, were first discovered, is a bit odd. They were found on a ledge next to the Palace of the Jaguars, at the ancient archeological site known as Teotihuacan some 25 miles from Mexico City, just beyond the restricted area before the ancient chamber, itself inside a larger chamber, in such a way as to suggest their owner had just stooped for a moment to, perhaps, tie his shoe and set them down on the ledge. Except he never returned to collect them. They remained; he disappeared.

The notebooks themselves were in a sorry state, dirt-stained, water-logged, mud-smeared, sun-bleached, in places illegible from the elements, and in others incomplete because of torn, missing, or water-blurred pages. They were held together, in rough fashion, by pieces of twine. Clearly, these notebooks had seen a considerable deal of outdoor weather. You could see the palm oil smudges on them. (Appreciation is extended to Mrs. Gertrude Kalheny for her diligent and flawless notebook transcription, making the editor’s job a great deal easier and smooth.)

But why the author—we can only call him Blaise, based on the inferences in the text—left them on that ledge, or perhaps abandoned them, is a mystery. It is not clear if he forgot them, mislaid them, or simply dropped them as he departed, though the third possibility raises another probably unanswerable question. Departed to where? And how? And where is he now? No trace of this Blaise has been found in the six-plus years since the recovery of the notebooks. No body, no missing person’s claim, no newspaper report, no phone call, no rumor or insinuation—frankly, no clues at all, other than the inferences one might draw from the notebooks, should one dare invest credulity in their chronicle. That, epistemologically, is indeed a risky venture. It’s as if he vanished from the face of the Earth, a cliché in expression, but undeniably a mystery in execution, and one that seems likely to remain unresolved for years.

Even Professor Arturo Romano Munoz, archeologist with INAH (the National Institute of Archeology and History) in Mexico City, which oversees the Teotihuacan site, and who passed the notebooks on to me, mostly as an academic curiosity, after the INAH guards notified him of the find, could shed little light on the origin of the papers, their authorship, or, to be honest, their overall purpose. Apparently, the notebooks spent several years in neglect or possible near oblivion in a bureaucrat’s office. I received them in July 2023, and began preparation for publication in January 2025. Clearly, the writer was not a Mexican national. One deduces he was an American, though an unusual one. The impression he creates through these journals, and it will no doubt strike many readers, as it has this editor, is that he is both a strange and an intriguing man.

He seems uninterested in most of the pursuits and activities common to Americans, and sometimes, one almost says, to human beings in general. He is not apathetic or depressed; rather, he seems disengaged, indifferent, as if he’s washed his hands of it all. It is difficult to picture him living in suburbia mowing a lawn or washing his car on a Saturday morning. He is not ill or physically disadvantaged in any way, despite his age (69); in fact, if he hadn’t given his age at one point, one might conceive of him as much younger. Almost nothing is known of his earlier life, other than the few clues and allusions he drops in his journal entries. Clearly, he is educated though perhaps more in an autodidactic rather than conventional sense; most readers will assent that he is capable of expressing himself clearly and even at times elegantly. He is at times humorous, vulgar, denunciatory, passionate, lyrical, prolix, crude, and lucid.

As to what he expresses, that is another matter altogether, one likely to challenge the credulity of most readers not only for its unorthodox interpretation of mythic characters and scenarios but for the cognitive range the author claims to have had. No, it is not boasting or strutting in any way; rather, it is more his matter-of-fact presentation of matters that would otherwise be couched in the language of high mysticism that this editor finds most arresting, and in many respects, perplexing. Is it really possible that the author had the experiences with such routine regularity as he implies, that his extrasensory perception, that most would describe as acute and vivid (putting aside whether one can credit them with any reality or epistemological basis), was so ordinarily deployed to yield an astonishing array of impressions and conclusions? Every reader will need to make their own determinations as to credibility and truth.

A matter that will inevitably trouble the reader as it did this editor is the writer’s repeated references to the Blue Room and the institute leading one to believe these (or this: it is probably one institution referred to) had actual existence. Much depends on this factuality, and regrettably this editor has been unable to establish the actuality of any such educational or mystical center anywhere in New Mexico. No business, educational, or scientific listings for the city of Santa Fe for the presumed period of activity, roughly 2010 to 2018, exists for a Blue Room Institute. Surely the reader will appreciate the troubling aspects of this disparity: it erodes one’s confidence in all the admissions, claims, and revelations put forward in the journals.

If there was no research institute with staff then this throws serious doubt on the narrative of scientific research, collusion, and resistance with intelligence agencies. It further opens the distressing door to the possibility of psychological imbalance or fantasy. Was the author imagining this narrative, making up the research activities? If that is the case, then what about the veracity of all the other claims, about this Blaise? Once this door is opened wide, it imperils the credibility of much of what the writer reports with his firm confidence and seeming truthfulness. It is indeed puzzling.

It seems clear that this Blaise never intended these notebooks for publication but that they represented in some way for him a summing up. He evidences no sense of obligation to prove, justify, or even fully explain any of his entries. One never does in a journal; the context is so well known to the writer it is entirely superfluous to reiterate it, and even the great journal writers of literature, such as Anaïs Nin, Virginia Woolf, and André Gide, did not intend them for publication. I caution the reader that what the writer appears to sum up is quite unusual and unconventional. Much in this book, these notebooks, will be to most readers improbable and unlikely. There are many things too that strike one as impossible, hallucinatory, or dreamlike.

One gains the impression he was working things through in his mind, to his intellectual satisfaction, triggering his memory perhaps by the writing process itself. What he claims to have remembered—well, that challenges one’s credulity. Nor could Dr. Munoz clarify the perplexing matter of the seeming duality of Blaise. This odd term—French, yes, but the author seems to have had something else in mind, who, exactly, is hard to pin down—apparently referred to both the putatively human writer and to someone else. About this someone else it is at best ambivalent as to identity. Quite often the identity of this complementary Blaise seems other than human, alien, not in the sense of any inimical strangeness, but too big, too old, too vast, to be human.

All this editor can say on this matter is that the many wild, unsubstantiated, and, arguably, outlandish inferences as to identity are beyond the purview of this scholar to consider. Some academics from other branches—creative writing, one should think—suggest that perhaps the author of the notebooks, clearly on the run from the authorities, was entertaining himself in what might have been his last days with imaginary flights. Others have noted the uncanny accuracy of references to a variety of mythic motifs and deities from many different cultures, although the unorthodox interpretations and conclusions given to these ruminations are unsupported by even the most progressive, innovative, and daring scholarship of recent decades. Perhaps these notebooks were rough workings for science fiction. In any case, though the subject matter is extremely outré and metaphysically feral, one should not fail to observe that the writer evidences a scholarly, syncretistic mind. Had he disciplined his attention to remain within accepted academic parameters, he might have achieved distinction in some field, perhaps that of comparative mythology, mine.

Within the scope and expertise of my own discipline, comparative mythology, the general hermeneutic trend of the author to describe a multiplicity of mythic forms and guises for a singular spiritual personage, Blaise, of antique age and status, is intriguing, at times revelatory, at others, deeply shocking for its radical import. It is true that since the innovative interpretations and cross-mythic correlations of Joseph Campbell and his applications of the Jungian model of the Self and the individuation process to the wealth of mythic images and scenarios from multiple planetary cultures a certain permission in academia has been noted to interpret in accordance with the multiple and various masks of God and the hero [or mythic personage in general, such as, for the author, Ganesh, Garuda, Hanuman, and others] with a thousand faces. That many of these heroic guises reduce to the same protean spiritual being is part of what the author takes for granted and for which his visionary experience provides the empirical framework. For us it is perhaps a potentially fruitful indication.

A scholar can customarily find oneself left with a heap of images from the past, like old clothes handed down from remote ancestors, never thinking to wear them. The intrepid man from the notebooks certainly thought that and wore them with aplomb. As a scholar of comparative mythology, I cannot but wonder at times what is the utility of this wealth of mythic images, fragments, story bits, and ancient scenes. Dr. Campbell took us to the edge of the Jungian hermeneutic paradigm, that these images and events illustrate interior psychological processes, and do so vividly, memorably, but as to any interpretation beyond that, any extension of their story lines to actual, lived human reality, or, as the notebooks author assumes, to the Earth itself, has for many years lain beyond the sanctioned scope of academic probity (and daring). But Blaise routinely assumes these personages are entries in some celestial Debretts, short biographies and colorful snapshots of actual lives of antique spiritual beings.

One also cannot help but note the evident fondness with which the notebook journalist regards his pal, Blaise, in whatever guise that shapeshifting guide takes. The author is clearly not Hindu, nor are his religious roots clearly discernible, though he shows a marked preference for metaphors and models from Judaism and Qabala and an unmistakable, sometimes strident, anticlericalism in general. It may seem ungracious to say but from an intellectual traditions viewpoint, he is a pillager, a syncretist, a collector, a profligate raider of the world’s storehouse of images. That is, maybe, the wilder or intellectually more adventurous side of my own field: to compare, contrast, assemble, and cross-check multiple valences of the same myth, but while the academic understandably holds the data at some distance as if with tweezers for analysis, the notebooks writer has gone native, has jumped into their world, and, with no doubt as to their empirical validity and ontological life, has lived in them, worn them as theater costumes, taken them seriously, followed their protocols. Followed them, one is tempted to add, right out of human culture and off the planet.

One may be struck at times (this editor certainly was on many occasions) with the strangeness of the familiarity of the relationship between writer and Blaise. This shortchanges the larger bafflement as to which narrative voice is the true Blaise, though it seems evident the writer was either inattentive to precision (for which he cannot be faulted since these are personal journals never intended for publication or perhaps any form of readership) or assumed an inherent consanguinity between the two. The strangeness arises, one believes, from the tone of intimacy, deep friendship, and long-term companionship, something like one might have for a revered uncle, and the utter otherworldliness of the corresponding Blaise, the one of many forms. One’s sensibilities are arrested, as if shaken by the collar, by this odd juxtaposition.

A related scholarly question is how did the other Blaise’s writing come to be entered in the notebooks? The presumption of the notebooks is that the human writer, Blaise, writes the entries and is unaware of the complementary cogitations of the other entity or presence also called Blaise. Or he is aware of it but does not comment on them, seemingly accepting them as part of his own cogitative stream.

So how did that Blaise’s writings get written? They are written in the same ink and therefore presumably by the same pen, though the style of penmanship is different. The author’s own style is rough, imprecise, quick, one might say sloppy. The interpolated entries are written in more formally executed, fatter letters, with more time taken to create them; that script, frankly, is easier to read. One possible explanation, though even to suggest it contravenes most acceptable standards of academic protocol and epistemology, is that the human writer transcribed it in a trance state the way metaphysical accounts purport automatic writing is produced.

A human hand is the executive agency, but the initiating agency is what is described as an otherworldly, nonphysicalized intelligence overseeing the hand. Even so, one wonders why the human writer did not comment on these additional entries to what was putatively his exclusive, personal, and private journal. Another explanation, perhaps more psychological, is that the interpolated entries represent another aspect of the writer’s own psyche, offered as a text counterpoint, like a Greek chorus.

Mythological hermeneutics, as challenging or unlikely as they may be, comprise only part of the topics covered in the journals. There is the matter of Blaise’s backroom involvement with various of the country’s intelligence agencies. These incursions into the world of professional secrecy and veils are hard to substantiate; but they are not untypical of what one reads or hears about elsewhere. In his accounts of these activities, the journalist evidences an unusual, quirky, and at times maverick scientific mind (one is tempted to call it intellectually scruffy); his discussion of wormholes and the mathematics and algorithms of their distribution patterns, mechanics of operation, methods of use, and dependent physics model (we will put aside the matter of whether any of this is creditable scientifically) sounds scientific, rational, and plausible, but it might be the persuasiveness of the deluded.

One cannot refrain from perhaps a moment or two of applause from the way Blaise appears to have outwitted or at least eluded these government agencies which after a while made their true intentions clear to him and took measures to extract the desired information from him, and failed. One is buoyed by the moral choice Blaise made to not use this specialized information to the detriment of planet or society and to withhold it from those who sought to do precisely this. Apparently, Blaise took some of the most important data about subjects such as wormholes and the assemblage point of Earth with him—where? I cannot with certainty say to his death. That is unclear. It is not at all certain that his total disappearance was evidence of a death. It is mysterious; he disappeared. He vanished with this special knowledge.

As for the title, it should be obvious that nobody keeps a journal with a publication title in mind. Even the great journalists—Anaïs Nin and Virginia Woolf come immediately to mind—did not assign titles to their journals, either individually or collectively, to however many volumes the journals eventually spanned. Nobody, one reasonably assumes, keeps a journal with a mind to publication. Let us keep in the forefront the sheer fact that the author abandoned the journal, left it for the world or the trash-bin, it is not clear which, a gesture that seemed to absolve responsibility for its fate, for whether it entered the world in some published form or perished utterly.

I devised the title, My Pal, Blaise, based on numerous inferences by the author to that enigmatic—person? Spirit? Imaginary companion? It is not quite clear, at least to this editor, who Blaise was, or, more acutely, how anyone could be the many exalted, even fantastic, things attributed to this figure. Taking on different animal and bird forms? Living in a crystal cave? Acting as if the galaxy, or many galaxies, were one’s own backyard? Surely, those of sound mind and probative judgement will balk at such suggestions. Clearly, and there is no dispute here, the two Blaises were friends, however impossible that may at times seem since one of the Blaises seemed disembodied or queerly bodied or never formally human bodied. It is mysterious.

Add to this the author’s ruminations about the imminent coming into human bodies of his pal, Blaise; even that is unclear, because there seemed not one but a myriad of Blaises, which points to yet another anomaly: is the counterpoint Blaise (the one who inserts comments occasionally in the journal entries) one being or a multitude? It is unclear. The writer addresses Blaise as if a singular being, yet on many occasions he also clearly alludes to the multiplicity of simultaneously inhabited forms Blaise takes. As for the predicted, even anticipated, imminent incarnation of this Blaise, the writer clearly expects not a singular human manifestation but a crowd.

In addition there is the textual tautology whereby both narrative frames in the journal refer to Blaise, or, more precisely, to each other as Blaise. There is no confusion, again on a purely textual level, that two voices or communicants are involved in the journal entries and that they are not identical in framework, voice, experience, or knowledge. It’s as if two hands, two minds, made the journal entries. Both know each other as Blaise, like reflections in a mirror, yet that seems a provisional, not an ultimate, name, a convenient, even fond, moniker. Blaise’s identity remains obscure. But the friendship quality, that aura of companionship that warrants the description of pal, seems warranted. It emits warmth. One can only hope that the author, wherever he might be now, and he may well be deceased, will not object to this editorial license in the choosing of a title for his abandoned notebooks.

The present editor claims responsibility for the subtitle, though one admits it was undertaken and accepted with a great deal of caution if not skepticism. The time frame is, for most reasonable people of sound mind, fantastic, bordering on the outrageous. Perhaps the journal author meant it metaphorically or poetically, although one gets the distinct impression, reading the many entries posted during that last, for the author, certainly eventful year of 2019, that he was in earnest in assigning this number to quantitatively frame the duration of their friendship. 60 billion years indeed. How is one to plausibly frame that number for comprehension? A number more than 13 times the reputed age of the Earth itself. How that is possible other than in an imaginative or science fiction context is arguably hard to fathom. Only the author could tell us, and he is removed from consideration, and probably a fantasist.

Perhaps the author, apparently on the run from what he claimed or presumed was a shadow governmental agency in search of specialized knowledge he somehow possessed, wiled away his time in the wilds of New Mexico and places south of that in charting imaginary forays into speculative planetary and, dare I say it, galactic history, not to mention the many obscure references to energy patterns and transportation devices embedded or somehow—unbelievably—implicit in the fabric of the planet itself. The author claims to know of systems linking points on the Earth with destinations on dozens of other planets, that the mode of transportation is almost immediate, and that, mirroring the hypothesized Einstein-Rosen bridge or the Lorentzian traversable wormhole, a species of wormhole or adapted mini-blackhole or lateral quick-way transportation portal also exists, and in great numbers, on the Earth.

These enable one, in full physical presence, to immediately translocate to other points, moving almost instantaneously across great distances, many hundreds of miles. He calls these translocation nodes wormholes and claims to have worked out (or remembered) the mathematics that describe the geometry of their route map. In a simplified sense, one could say he claims to have compiled the subway route system. My informal consultations with experts in mathematics and physics suggest his schematics for wormhole distribution and operation have some theoretical basis. The mathematics seem plausible, though the field of application seems wildly not so. We are left with unsubstantiated claims for seemingly impossible physical situations backed by equations, formulae, and theoretical modeling that at least appear possible.

The author in passing alludes to other spiritual feats. Had he intended these notebooks for publication one would be justified in calling them unsubstantiated claims. But, as mentioned, it appears he never intended a readership for his writings. Among these claims or allusions include references to the star cluster known as Pleiades and the putative residents of that star system, commonly called Pleiadians. It is true that in recent years more substantiation from reputable, even official, sources has tended to establish some aspects of the reported reality of this alien presence. Governmental authorities have started, reluctantly, and only in piecemeal, to admit official contact with representatives from the Pleiadian delegations over the years.

But these disclosures beggar the scale at which this author claims to have had contacts. In fact, it is more than contact; he puts forward the claim (again, only a claim to the reader; he alludes to it only as a matter of biographical fact) that his point of origin is there, somewhere in the Pleiadian system, that he came here eons ago (of course in a different form) to fulfill certain tasks or missions and has remained in contact with his home ever since, though with varying degrees of lucidity and efficacy. Complementing this arguably wild allegation is the scale at which he appears to remember earlier events on what he calls his multilifetime biographical timeline. He seems able to swoop and dip, reminiscent of the flight of a lark or swallow, into many nodes on this timeline, recalling events, personages, and episodes with Blaise. It is a logical possibility, one entertains as a reserve interpretation, that he made it all up.

Among my colleagues who have professionally reviewed these journals, a few have wandered into the darker realms of speculation or presumption to suggest the author might have vanished from the Earth, but not necessarily died, by using a combination of both transportation modes—a wormhole to a stargate perhaps? One colleague (he has asked to not be named in this preface) proposed this with some enthusiasm though not so overtly as to jeopardize his professional standing. One assumes the fate and perhaps even the authenticity of the journal writer and his claims and reputed experience and intentions will remain a mystery for some time.

As to one of his claims, that beginning in 2020, now six years ago, human babies would start being the carriers for this Blaise, the epistemological burden of such an assertion staggers one. How would one go about proving such an eventuality? Is there a basis, even, for wondering if it ever happened? To even pose the question is to virtually endorse the premises, allegations, and prophecies of the notebooks, a dangerous course for an academic grounded in tradition, texts, scholarship, and peer review. Notwithstanding, and perhaps this is too personal a remark to offer in a professional preface, this author can report certain anomalies observed in a grandchild. On more than one occasion, the child, now a boy approaching six years old, seemed, if for a moment, unlike an ordinary human child, and more like something else, finer. This is not to disparage other children in any way, but more to suggest (or at best evoke or allude to) a sense of brighter light and finer substance to this child, as if in a strange way a beacon shone within him, in fact, illuminated his small physical form.

Perhaps this is sufficient foundation for addressing an anomalous event. Many readers will remember the much publicized Rash of Heavenly Baby Births of 2022. Parents and schoolteachers, and sometimes family physicians, began noting unusual behaviors in young children, roughly the age of one and two. This was observed in many countries, not only the United States, though this country had many reports.

The accounts were various: the babies seemed to glow, as if their skin were illuminated; they achieved verbal abilities much earlier than is normal, speaking in their first year, showing signs of writing ability and reading comprehension early; not only did they master the art of standing upright and walking unassisted early, they seemed to move with an unusual balletic grace and precision, like expert dancers. Their eyes—here we encounter what is perhaps the greatest anomaly. Beautiful and clear, yes, no argument there, sparkling, bright, full of intelligence, but the quality most often noted, both with surprise and a type of intrigued alarm, was the crystalline nature of the pupils, as if the eyes were more, somehow compound multifaceted gems.

Due to my scholarly focus it is hard to refrain from evoking a comparison to the Irish mythic hero, the Hound of Ulster known as Cuchulainn; those who wrote about him said each of his eyes seemed to comprise seven bright pupils with seven gems in each. That is a myth of course and therefore expectably fantastic and biologically improbable, yet that account credited this antique hero of Ireland with two sets of 49 pupils. One might imagine each eye would resemble a colorful crystal cave.

In the cases of the 2022 babies, the eyes, on a physical, quantifiable level, appeared to be normal with a single if overly bright and uniformly colored iris, at the same time those contemplating the infants’ eyes for more than a few moments experienced the uncanny sensation of seeing multiple eyes, or perhaps one eye reflected in dozens of mirrors, or, as alluded to, a human eye strangely resembling a composite eye, as if, as one commentator noted, one were gazing into a shifting crystalline kaleidoscope. Sociologists and psychologists continue to monitor the development of these babies, whose numbers today, by informal estimate from multiple health authorities, are placed in excess of 10,000. All reports indicate the children are exceptional students.

The reader will, one hopes, forgive the editor’s intrusion on occasion to clarify a point or link ideas across a missing passage in these fairly battered notebooks. The journal writer, Blaise, evidences a capable hand at expression in English, although his mind, or the synaptic-intellectual leaps and connections he frequently and wildly makes, can at times challenge one’s sanity or at least certainty in the norms of reason. He appears to be well educated but in an uneven, patchy sense, as if self-taught. He exhibits, one will quickly observe, a tendency to coarse language though, one also admits, often used to good effect, once one gets over the surprise or shock of it. It is not uncharitable to say that had he retasked his literary ability to fiction he would no doubt have prospered and gained many readers and perhaps not felt he had to run.

Frederick Graham Atkinson, Ph.D.

Department of Comparative Mythology

Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire

June 21, 2026

The Journals

. . . . (pages ripped away, gone). April 23, 2019: Man, this wind is fierce up here in the high mesa. I’ll have to rewrite yesterday’s entries. They are gone. I can barely hold the pages down. Still, it’s probably secure up here, for a while. I still have some time, before they find me, or before it’s time, but that time I look forward to.

It’s like that so-called summer day back in Somerset, Hill of Mort, June 22, 1984. Solstice. Started out sunny, by the time we got to top of this hill, no big deal, really, it was pissing down rain, blowing, storming, high histrionics with the weather gods. Damn umbrellas blew out, glasses fogged up, streaked with water, notepad soaked, pen ink smudged, and we could barely hear the Ofanim declaim what this day was dedicated to. It all began then, I suppose, or at least the current—the last?—phase of all this. We didn’t know it then, but we were there to help—watch, more like it—the official upgrade of the whole damn Light grid, like a new gigantic building, a casino-style black hole to suck in consciousness and your money, going up in Las Vegas. And that would lead, inevitably, unavoidably, perturbably, to this, the discovery. Once you start remembering, get shown a few sleights-of-hand, how they do the magic tricks, you will sooner or later come to this, find it, unlock it, make it work, use it, then run.

I’m not really a runner, a fleer. My prosecutable crimes have always been mental or energetic, not overt or tangible, the kind of thing that would set the cops after you. If only it was cops. I’m more of a stay-at-home rebel, very domesticated while I’m refashioning the world. How did Gustave Flaubert put it? Live like a bourgeois but think like a demigod. This place was so good when we started ever so long ago. High tea, books, magazines, a couple of hours to do nothing more than sit back in our wicker chairs, read, talk, pour tea, enjoy our treasures from the latest 25¢ a book table. The bourgeois comforts while I plotted the end of the world, revealing its secret structure, this God-designed reality we’ve been living in, oblivious. The only escape scenarios I ever ran through the old brain were in dreams: down, fast, sprinting, along that fast-moving escalator from my parent’s house, except I wasn’t fleeing, or escaping, it was just the speed of the energy track that caused that. I wasn’t in trouble, at least about anything I could remember. Just practicing my escape routes, or maybe escaping, leaving, then, second thoughts, returning for more. The unfinished job. 27 million years or so to set it up. I never could remember exactly how long the set-up took, had to ask Blaise for the figure. How long would we have to stay?

April 24: About that funn [ . . . ] the extrapolated values undoubtedly [ . . . . ]

[Editor’s Note: With the exception of these seven words, the rest of the journal page was evidently ripped out of the notebook and lost, presumably due to wind gusts. It is understandably impossible to reconstruct what the author might have meant.]

April 25:—that damn helicopter. Unmarked. It’s them. They’re looking for me. I can’t, goddam cannot, let them militarize it. It was not designed for that purpose, to be locked away from public use and knowledge, never to be used for the convenience and marvel it was implemented for here on the planet. I didn’t spend all this time uncovering it to let that happen. Nor did we spend all that time designing the system to let it get removed from public use. It’s part of the planet’s patrimony. Uncovering, indeed, though it was as much in my mind as on the Earth that the covering veiled it. No more. At least we have that. Funny thing about all this, the times when I didn’t believe my own knowledge, even though it was all based on experience and recall. Maybe it was the gap between that and my body’s experience, sitting still, breathing quietly, for hours, on the land. Wilson told me I’d be the one to remember it, rework the details, plot the map, do the geometry, yield the route map.

Temporal personality, my cover story, or as they used to call it in the spygame, my legend, body and personality, sitting quietly, like a well-trained dog, while the other parts went exploring, documenting, calibrating, traveling, and, let’s face it, when you account for the long span of years—mega-millennia, really—wandering. Wandering from planet to planet as a freelance itinerant engineer, the wanderer… .

The stars have come out in the unobstructed sky. Billions of them. What did Blaise’s book say, the sages sitting by their celestial campfires—that’s how those amazing psychics saw the stars, as inhabited, from within, ensouled, intelligent, spiritual, sentient, alive, prescient, the outer shining gaseous bulk just the cover story for a celestial spirit. But this is what it’s all about, has always been about: seeing the stars in the daytime. The gnomes used to tell me they see the stars in the daytime when the Sun is out. That was cool, all those wheeling star-wells overhead, those domes of moving star paths, us living down here under the billions of ribbed half-spheres of light continuously remade by the wandering motions of the stars as seen from the Earth’s surface. I suppose not wandering as such. They can’t deviate from their appointed courses; it reminds me of the donkeys I saw in Greece when I was barely out of adolescence and traveled around a bit, how they walked in a tight circle inside some shed pulling a huge heavy millstone to grind against another to squeeze the virgin oil out of the olives. But it’s not just about seeing the stars in the daytime, seeing them in the upper sky, like scintillations on a pale blue dome, but seeing them on the Earth, as indigenous to the planet’s body, as necessary as trees and rivers.

But the helicopter, the search for me, and all it portends—maybe it’s not a bad thing. Open conflict is probably better than suppressed antagonism. Fuckbrains. This Antichrist thing has plagued the Earth since its inception. We brought that damn Cain and Abel tint with us. House of Atreus indeed. If people only knew. At least the dialectic is out in the daylight of consciousness, as unpleasant as the other half of it might seem. Ah, to be on the winning side, I used to quip to myself, instead of running or resisting or complaining or plotting in the dark, shadow boxing, but the joke is, we began on the winning side. In fact there only was one side, really, the side of the plan, the design, the Architect’s side, which, ironically is an infinity of sides or angles… .

The breastplate would be handy. In some damn cave in Bhutan now. The other two removed from the planet for the usual reason: misuse, abuse of privilege. Touch the two stones to the right gem on the breastplate and off you go. A limited destination portable wormhole. Touch down at any of the 12 Tribe nodes. Emerald sites. We could check on progress, get reports, upgrade the geomancy. Very efficient.

I know what they want. They want the route map. The math I worked out that describes the geometric grid of the wormhole distribution and the orientation coordinates for the correct overlay. Without that last bit you could enter the system ass-backwards and get lost in the labyrinth. The pattern is pre-designed, like everything else about this planet. The prime access point is particular. You have to fit the grid around that location; then the correct pattern and route map are revealed. And I’m not fucking telling them that. Without that, it’s just a useless strip-tease.

I’ll tell you one big reason they want the map. It’s a route map through the galaxy. Has to be, as above, so below. It’s the same pattern. But it’s a higher dimensional math based on a geometric model of the galaxy, the Earth being its copy. The galactic highway map of all the shortcuts through the big wheel of stars. Those fuckers like backdoors. The route map is all about backdoors, the quick ways through. I know the backdoors because I goddam put them there. I just have to remember them.

That took me 60-plus years to remember. Ever since I first went through a wormhole on Earth I was hooked, intrigued—that’s too weak: creatively obsessed is more accurate. We each had assignments or perhaps they were specialities when we first came here to set things up. Mine was wormholes, the backdoors, the route map, the math and geometry of it. You help set it up, monitor it for a while, come and go in lifetimes as you feel like it (or, when you finally get suckered into the gravity well of physical life and desire and start getting your monthly credit card statements for karma owed or points earned: you start coming back because you have to, you owe, are owed, have to square accounts). Now in this omega-style lifetime, in which, as Blaise tells me, my purpose on first coming here and my current lifetime purpose are the same, the possibility of remembering opens up, searingly, but in slow motion. What I came to do originally I now remain to remember, recapitulate, and revive.

This place may do me well for a while. The first time I came to Chaco, I sat up here—what did the Spanish call it? Penasco Blanco—and I couldn’t believe the view. I was used to the cozy, tucked-in, topographically insular little hills and mountains of New England, the short vistas, but here was the long vista, seemingly endless. I imagined walking out over this strange more or less flat land for hours, days, forever. I doubt I even knew where it went—Utah, eventually. So here I am, again, under different circumstances. But the flatness of it reminds me of the planet’s original flatness. It’s hard to conceive of the world as flat, but it was at first. I remember it, walked it. The land was empty, quiet of Nature though not of geology’s borborygmus. Nobody was here yet, other than us, and it begs the question if we were here because the bodies we wore were unlike what we consider to be human bodies today. It was flat everywhere you looked, no mountains or valleys yet. The orogenies were yet to come, and not even soon. Far into the future, as time stood then.

What you could see was the pattern. I’ve called it lots of names over the years of remembering it. The plan. Matrix. Map. Template. I tended to prefer that term. The whole topography, the celestial world Xeroxed and fitted to scale for this planet. I see now how I took my knowledge of the map for granted then; we lived it, saw it, worked it, modulated it, every day, for, and it’s still a little hard to believe, 27 million years. That’s my human body-mind staggering around this long date. You can’t rush this. It’s organic, this map overlay. It has its own necessities, pacing, growth cycle. It fit like a tattooed skin over the physical surface of the planet. Although it’s more correct to say the physical Earth was extruded from out of this etheric skin network.

No people were around yet. The Elohim were still perfecting their design. But friends we had, colleagues from all places and categories of being and experience. Blaise, in those days, seemed to inhabit a form that made more sense to me, was more easily perceived and understood despite the still baffling mystery of their—

The pull of gravity is most unusual. We understand it, know it, but it is new to us. The elephant form, with our amusing additions and alterations, has been but a façade, a party costume, but we never took it seriously, if we took anything seriously. We liked the long trunks. It amused us how it made our point that we got our noses into everything. Permeated, pervaded, participated, even, when appropriate. This gravity—we shall have to get accustomed to it as the time draws near for the descent. Nine months, is it? The go-ahead was given for then. Such a cramped time-frame. We see why sometimes Blaise failed to understand us or to appreciate all the nuances. Range of motion limitation, it would be called. That and only two eyes, not 8,466.

—reality, what they really are, what they look like. They promised that one day they’d show me their true form. Of course, it might be the mind-blower that Arjuna got from that show-off Krishna in the Mahabharata. The whole of universal time like a goddam huge, open, sucking, devouring mouth, consuming everything. On the other hand, it’s always comforted and amused me to revel in their elephant guise.

Ganesh. Beloved pot-bellied elephant god of India, merry old sod, remover of obstacles, charging through dense undergrowth of psychic obstructions, Shiva for a Dad, honored throughout all India, subject of my dreams, and of a few friends, all independently, and, can you believe it, for I barely can, without us figuring it out. We used to have dreams of dancing elephants; I even saw them mimicking Fred Astaire in Top Hat, with canes, bowlers, tuxedos, and swift-moving dance steps—elephants! But here’s the key part: there was never one elephant, always a minimum of six. Imagine being not one body but six; not one focus of self-awareness but six, always six, or more. Our minimum form manifestation is six, then we build upwards from there, they’d tell me. But why six, Blaise? Why one? Because six can do so much more. Six can move—

Perhaps we have never properly looked at ourselves this way. The sphere of us, which Blaise likes to call the diamond sphere of all the Blaise facets, we appreciate now that this will begin to diminish, lose complexity and number. He wonders how can we manage being six and not one. It is not really six but 40 million, and then some, when we are expanded, when we inhale the full possibility of being.

When we become I, that 40 million-strong mass that has defined us will compact into this one, we suppose. Will each of our ones comprise 40 million? How will we manage this compression? We suppose because we have not done this before, not in this Life of Brahma. It is not known. The Elohim did it, as did the Nefilim. Of the first, all came back, but of the latter, some never came back, preferred to stay and decline. If He remembers, He is not telling. Maybe He likes surprises. Our closeness has never, really, reduced His inscrutability. We may chauffeur Him around the universes, be as close to Him as driver to sole window-gazing passenger, but not close enough to know all the plan, the full roster of expectations and planned outcomes.

—so fluidly, surrounding a subject, enveloping me when it suited them, like the soft, delicate, insistent, affectionate regard, the eyes all around me, eyeing me favorably. How could they not? The Lord of the Universe, as the rabbis like to say, made them that way. I always liked the way they started to draw in closer, tighten the circle of regard around us, the moment when I sensed it, expectantly, eagerly. They’re coming, I’d announce to Russell and Berenice. We’d sit in the living-room by the fire—the only thing that warmed those old English houses that never heard of central heating or if they did, didn’t know how to make it work properly and run hot—and relish the approach, the squeeze, the insinuation, the seduction, I suppose it was. Or maybe they couldn’t help themselves. That was their base-level vibration.

Date? What the hell is the date gotten to anyway? Other than for keeping an accurate record, I suppose it doesn’t matter. It must be almost May. Let’s call it April 30. I know a few days have passed. My previous dates might have been wrong. I don’t have a calendar, just a mental count. This will probably never be read by anyone anyway. I’m just trying to get my thoughts straight, my personal record straight.

I like traveling on foot. It’s what I wanted to do the first time I came here and saw this outrageously spacious land. I wanted to walk all the way to—whatever the hell was out there, Colorado or Utah probably, though my sense of physical geography was always dyslexic. Could find my way around a Light temple, all right, I used to joke. I’d never seen such open, endless land, this high prairie; I was too used to tucked-in, cozy, insular, tiny-hilled, green Massachusetts. Trees everywhere. Lush in summer, barren in winter, no big expanses, even the lakes are tiny, never overstated. You could probably put the whole state in the vista I’m enjoying right now.

On foot, indeed. No more airports! I used to get a bit wroth over that. Goddam airports and their security. Every American a terrorist suspect, the government itself the principal terrorist. You become what you oppose. That’s what propelled me to find the quick ways and use them. I just got to a point where I couldn’t bear the cumbersome primitivism of airplanes and the indignity of airports. Lucky we could even keep our clothes on. Shoes off, belt off, jacket off, every goddam personal item in the trays, arms up. That just compounded the inherent boredom of sitting mostly motionless in the tin slivers for hours on end. I knew there had to be a better way to travel, and I found it. Never got on an airplane again. Never had to.

If you were studious, you’d see the clues here and there. In the movie version of The Mothman Prophecies, the Richard Gere character traveled 400 miles by car in 90 minutes, leaving Washington, D.C., for Richmond, Virginia, but ending up, seamlessly, at Point Pleasant, West Virginia, on the Ohio River. How’d he get there? He said he was going 80 mph; that would have taken him five hours, not 90 minutes. He passed through one of them, didn’t realized it, slipped outside of normal spacetime, and arrived, seemingly seamlessly in an altogether different, unplanned place. Why did he get there? The movie says to save the life of somebody drowning. Big deal. The real point was to reveal the reality of the portal itself. But that was downplayed. Still, that’s a lot like my first go-through of one of these openings near Newark, New Jersey, ironically, or appropriately, the only time I’ve ever been to New Jersey or the Newark-Orange area since I was born there and talked my parents into leaving fast.

And Jim Butcher, the author of the Dresden Files series, Harry Potter magic for grownups with a nice smart-ass twist to his character—he alluded to them often. The wizards used them all the time. Step into a portal, arrive in a strange extra-physical zone where the topography is compressed and distorted with respect to expected physical world coordinates, then step out again into the normal human topography, hundreds or thousands of miles away, a few seconds only having elapsed. Efficient! I never knew if he was merely clever and imaginative or spoke from experience. He said these travel nexuses appeared at confluences of ley lines and reservoirs of Earth power. They passed through Nevernever, his name for the in-between place, in his stories, the place of Faëry, though a deeply ambivalent place.

The geography in there is very screwy with respect to outer physical Earth world geography, and in his conception, the denizens of that realm have a different approach to reality and how to occupy their time. Adjacent Ways may take you to destinations radically distant from one another. It takes a lot of psychic energy to open a Way; they may be collapsed, even disintegrated, by the powerful; they may appear the size of a home’s front door six feet off the ground, or like an oblong mirror of silver light, though he mentions seeing an aqua-green light pouring out of one.

He said Chicago was riddled with these portals. Chichén Itzá had some. He called them Ways: Peru to Mexico in 3.5 seconds was about the typical travel speed to expect, he said. It was like stepping through a light curtain, one stride and you go from Chichén Itzá to Chicago, though sometimes the residents of Faëry might detain you. Might make you become their Summer King or something problematic. They had their own agendas and these often involved power plays, battles, magic, and treachery. I figured that’s the part where he was making things up to fit his overall story line, although it’s quite possible he invented the phenomena of the Ways as well, or intuited its existence and decorated the reality with some of his own highlights. He did pick up on the military tactical advantage of using a wormhole to sneak up on your enemies and ambush them from behind and with a great surprise and advantage.

Jewish folklore retains a few indications of wormholes, too, in the form of caves. A rabbi and his son need to get to the Red Sea to find Miriam’s Well, a pool of sacred water associated with Miriam the Prophetess, sister to Moses and Aaron. The trouble is, they’re in Babylon, or near it, today’s Iraq. They get tipped by Sarah, wife to Abraham, father of the Jews, both in Heaven (specifically, in the Garden of Eden, where he’s collecting leaves from the Tree of Life and she’s crushing these leaves and blowing the powder into the finite human world as a reminder for us of Paradise) to walk through a special palace, then its garden, then a magnificent hollow tree, where they’ll find a cave entrance. They walk through this cave, long and illumined with a pale light, and soon emerge by the shore of the Red Sea in Israel and find Miriam, a young woman of shining beauty, sitting by the water, playing a tambourine.

In another story, Joshua and his father, who live in a Polish village, follow their goat who had been unaccountably disappearing every day and find it’s been going through a magic tunnel accessed through a cave veiled by a bush in the forest. It had been coming back every evening looking remarkably well fed, healthy, and happy. They walked through the cave but a short distance and soon emerged in a beautiful orchard; they soon learned they were in the Holy Land, close to the Wailing Wall, the Kotel, at the base of Mount Moriah in Jerusalem, which had been their desired destination all along—they hadn’t known how they could accomplish the trip.

A third story has the Baal Shem Tov introduced to a magic cave somewhere in Eastern Europe—Poland perhaps?—that connects directly with Jerusalem. That would be a great advantage in the 17th century as it would otherwise take six months to get to the Holy Land by ship. The Baal Shem Tov noted the cave passage was lit by a bright light with a holy aura to it, and he understood that such caves were designed to transport the bones of the Righteous to Jerusalem at the End of Days, when the Age of the Messiah begins. I remember a character in a story by Isaac Bashevis Singer saying he wanted to move to Israel so his bones wouldn’t have to travel underground to get there when the Messiah arrived. The underground reference is intriguing.

For this reason their locations were secret, known to only a few people in any generation, including the Baal Shem Tov. Ironically, his passage to the Holy Land was blocked at the cave-tunnel’s other end by a fiery, ever-turning sword wielded by the angel guarding the Gates of the Garden of Eden because if the Baal Shem Tov stood in the Holy Land it would prematurely precipitate the End of Days. The stories emphasized the caves were hidden, that sometimes you couldn’t find one again; and a few are specific as to destination: the bones of the Righteous (presumably buried in Poland) will roll directly to the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem where the resurrection of the dead will happen as the Messianic Age begins. Why there? Because when the Temple of Jerusalem was destroyed, the Shekinah departed it, officially beginning its exile at the Mount of Olives. When the Messianic Age begins, Elijah will blow the shofar from its summit, the mountain will crack open, and all the dead Jews buried there (after being transported here magically by the hidden cave tunnels) will arise.

The basic story has further variations. One version names the village, Shebreshin, and says the enchanted cave is in a forest outside this city in Poland. Its specific landmark are two overlapping trees which conceal the cave entrance. Passage through the cave requires concentration, and distraction can cause it to disappear. Several distractions are named: black demons with tongues of red fire to scare people; naked women acting lasciviously to distract travelers; piles of golden coins to bewitch. Three brothers follow their steadfast goats through the Shebreshin cave, but two get ejected immediately and the cave disappears when they succuumb to the temptations. Even though the distractions of money, women, and demons are all illusions, they are sufficiently potent to lure one’s concentration and cause the cave to disappear. That’s like the Grail stories of Caer Sidi, the Revolving Castle, an early picture of the Grail Castle; the minute your complete psychic focus on the place falters you’re not there.

One story had a variation: the spirit of Reb Hayim Vital, the principal student and amanuensis of Rabbi Isaac Luria, appeared before the Hasid Reb Nachman. He said he had traveled by way of underground caverns that cross the Earth, the same caverns through which all souls will travel to reach the Holy Land when the Messianic Age begins. The point of interest was the reference to the wormholes being underground. But he was right that numerous caverns cross the Earth under ground, but these are physical tunnels, well hidden, but material, and require walking; the wormholes are tunnel-like, and move you through almost instantly, without walking.

I derived a few clues from these folklore accounts. The wormhole is hidden in plain sight by something in Nature, a tree or bush. The wormhole appears like an illumined cave, a plausible pre-technological description of a conduit across space. The distances connected are not overly formidable, reckoned only in hundreds of miles. It doesn’t take long to go from point a to point b through the cave-wormhole, meaning far less time elapses to get there than to physically walk or travel the requisite distance, although the travel time is less than instantaneous, i.e., less than light speed. Great concentration of purpose and consciousness is required to remain in the caves. Only animals, such as goats, may reliably be counted on to unfailingly know the routes.

The wormholes might have a selective eschatological purpose, conducting the bones of the Righteous to the Holy Land at the time of the Tikkun or repair of the world. Folklorists call them Messianic caves; they lead directly to Aretz Israel, the Holy Land, and are reserved, mostly, for rolling the skeletons of the Righteous Dead into Jerusalem for a bodily resurrection when the Messianic Era begins. That’s what Orthodox Judaism believes ever since Maimonides encoded it as one of his 13 Principles of Faith, a bodily resurrection of once physically existing human bodies. I doubt it. That’s too literal; that’s the concreteness of literalism all over again, and anyway, I know magical caves exist elsewhere and do not all go to the Holy Land.

That visual clue of two overlapping trees veiling the cave entrance is intriguing. I saw something like that once. I thought it was something else then. I was standing in the woods in Western Massachusetts outside a town called Westhampton. I stood before two deciduous trees, probably maples, with a little drop behind them. The trees framed a woodland path stretching out from these trees but clearly in another dimension. I saw a Yeti just inside the doorway framed by the two trees. He gestured beside an open doorway that I should not go through, at least not then. I didn’t see a cave, but it doesn’t matter because that is a plausible physical metaphor for a portal.

The Harry Potter books had a child’s version of this; Rowling called them portkeys. A boot or some odd thing, a common object easily overlooked, put in the right place, all the teenager wizards touching it at the same time, and you’d whirl swiftly through space to another location. The portkeys magically facilitated the teleportation of bodies; where they were placed was not fixed, and therefore the wormhole conduit was dependent on the portkey, not on a pre-existing landscape of wormhole portals. Cute idea, but not a geomantic model, not inherently part of the composition of the Earth. A literary conceit pointing towards something real. At the other extreme are the hints from the Jewish tales of rabbis pronouncing a Name of God and being instantly transported to their desired location, usually the Holy Land. This sounds like the real-life and free-ranging version of apparating in Harry Potter.

I wanted the real thing because I reached a point where I would not take another plane or pass through an airport or take my belt or sneakers or jacket off for anybody. The trouble is, and this is pretty much why I find myself outlawed on the mesa, is you can’t tell the government boys about it. They will immediately militarize it, close it down. Prevent everyone from using it. Or surround it with idiot guards to keep the tourists moving past it like at the Palace of the Jaguars at Teotihuacan. That one was so close I could feel it, practically use it. It was only inches away, a chamber within a chamber. The Mexican guard thought we had halted there because we were praying, and they could not allow the Palace of the Jaguars to be the focus of a religious cult. Imagine. Praying. For Christ’s sake, I wanted to make the thing work. I had turned to Wilson, one of our group, and said, "Do you think this is a—

Funny, in a way, we suppose, how they use that word, God, in so many ways. Words, for that matter. We shall have to become accustomed to that, to words. Even when we transmitted our story of Great India to Vyasa and he, or his later editors, misattributed