Chapter 27

"Focus on the dance, not the disease."

-Olie Westheimer
(Brooklyn Parkinson's Group)
Darcey Jerrom reminded me of that.
Darcey Jerrom
Metis leader, shaman, hunter, Blues musician and historian, engineer, writer

I am getting bombarded with the Blues again. Darcey did not accept my verdict. He says I can do better than that. He's not the kind of guy you want to contradict too much, what with him being a shaman with magic powers and all, and heavily armed to boot. And a major agent for the Blues Police. So I sit up and pay attention when he starts channeling the future. In preparation for which he goes back into the past. He seems to find patterns that are in harmony, from the past to the present and the future. Which gives the impression that he is clairvoyant, that he sees the future. Because he does; as the patterns of harmony and disharmony, of freedom and repression, of victory and defeat, of spiritual and practical, are patterns that repeat; and causes that have effects, and tribal memories that echo for centuries, and reactions that are only human. It gets so refined, sometimes he can tell me how the meeting is going to go. Without knowing who I am meeting, or why. No use trying to hide any information from this guy; he will see where you hid it before you hide it. Which is a philosophical dilemma; if there is one thing we really need to believe, it is that time flows in only one direction. Time travel is something you really won't want once you have it. But predicting the future well enough to choose a road where there are many roads to choose, that's the kind of futurology that can keep you out of jail.

Very handy dude to have around when you are paralyzed at the crossroads. He can see down the road, around the corner. Exactly the information you need, before choosing the path. You want the path to freedom, but they all look the same.

Some tribes liked the crows for that reason. They will fly on ahead and then circle around and make a lot of noise if there is something up ahead. The Oracles do that too. They fly on ahead, and report that the bridge is out. Things you need to know, but know no way of knowing. A shaman will drop an answer on your head before you ask the question.

March 6, 2010. You win, Darcey. I am blasting the Blues in the barn and bracing myself to go beyond the crossroads. One path leads to freedom. I wish I had your raw courage.
And Innu of Uashat-Maliotenam sent me a song: "Everybody knows what we are to do; what we are to do is this: not let our fire burn out." (It rhymes in Innu, a language spoken by about 9,000 people.)
So I replied to them what you always say, "Let's get it on."
Not let our fire burn out.

Identity theft

Genevieve wrote again. She is Field Commander for the Conspiracy in the Saguenay-lac-St. Jean area. I have never met her. We have corresponded maybe 5 times in 6 years.

She said that she also had experienced Parkinson’s as an identity thief.
As with David, the writer who could no longer write. The man of words who could no longer speak.

As with Cecil, who installed and repaired roofs until Parkinson’s took away his sense of balance. Tragedy piled on top of tragedy.

There were things that Genevieve had been good at all her life. Those were the first things it took away from her. And then as the disease progressed, the Beast took power and robbed her of her definition of herself; it destroyed her self-identity.

And, she said, “It was SUCH a relief.” She felt so much lighter.

She said she even dreamed that she was walking down the street with her entire self-identity in her purse; not just her credit cards and driver’s permit; her entire selfhood and life story were in her purse.

And these two purse-snatchers grabbed her purse and ran down the street with it.

They looked back to see if she was following them. She was not. She was standing there waving, and she called out, “Good luck!. I hope you are satisfied!.”

Hecklers again:
Marty said: "What is this, the Joy of Parkinson's?"
Hey Marty, when those people were looking for a bad guy who fit your description, I told them you were too stupid to be that guy. I stood up for you and told them there was no way you were smart enough to be the scoundrel they were looking for. But you just get stupider every day.

Marty: Seems you want to surrender rather than fight.
That's about right, Marty. Surrender to the Zone. There is a time for anger, there is a time to fight back; but battling organized crime in the Parkinson's Industry is like fighting the Mafia. We don't have the resources and they will always be there anyway. There is a time to return to the Source, to the cold pure water; there is a time to focus on the dance, not the disease; in everything in life. There is even a time to be happy, if you can smuggle that across your own border.

ONE

Nature; numbers.

Every hair is counted, like every grain of sand.

Albert Einstein said that nothing happens until something moves.

Albert Einstein could listen to music and visualize it as a mathematical formula.

Albert Einstein could look at a mathematical formula and hear it as music.

And he announced to the world that it is all the same. Everywhere. All the time. Everything.

Energy is the same as matter. It’s the same thing, at a different speed.

And there are laws that cannot be broken, at least within the universe as it now appears to us. For example, nothing can go faster than the speed of light. Nothing. Not ever. Because the mathematical formula could not be made to work. Time would have to stop.

Albert Einstein flunked math and physics in high school, and never set foot in a science lab in his entire life.
And, phooey on you who believe that God just throws the dice; the theories of random consequences and indetermination. Einstein said it loud and he said it clear: One plus one equals two. And so on and so on, on down the line to infinity of numbers, but in terms of speed, never faster than the speed of light. Change the formula, and the thing falls apart. One plus one equals two. Here. Now. Around the world. Everywhere. In the past. In the future. Change any number anywhere and the conclusion of the formula will be faulty. It’s a law of nature.

If that’s not enough to be a unifying concept of the universe, I don’t know what is.

Must see video: Nature by Numbers

Marty said: Now you’ve got God on your side. Your proof of God is that bugs have patterns on their wings.
Marty, you are a perfect example of why no one should be taught to read and write until they are fully adult, which in your case, would be never.
If you are squeamish or prudish about the word “God”, as most people are, just take the word out. The story remains just as powerful. And whatever other word you put in there to replace “God” means the same thing. The point at which we fall silent, in wonderment.

FOCUS ON THE DANCE, NOT THE DISEASE

I see all those painted faces
they're smiling on TV
they're all rank strangers to me
the radio's got the top ten on
the kind you hear today
and know tomorrow will be gone

THIS CHAPTER IS NOT OVER UNTIL A FEW MORE PEOPLE SING
Major delay caused by massive meltdown at head office. People chanting:
"PARKIES OF THE WORLD, DISPERSE"
new chapter may start so they stop shooting flaming arrows
THIS chapter ain't over until Kathia and John Lee sing.
Delay caused by major mutiny in the Parkinson's Underground.

Beautiful sleepwalker
she keeps on dancing
without knowing she is strange
throwing away and picking up
all of her gestures
Unique, whirlwind, alive
the sky is helplessness
if the moon falls into the sea
but I, who loves you
feel no loneliness

(Mistral)

Very short reply; longer explanation will follow. Parkinson's Underground Internet Conspiracy has for some months been in the process of splitting up into semi-autonomous units with 2 to 4 Parkies in each unit. Local action only. Sending as many of us as possible out into the world.; for example, Parkies going to Town Hall meetings. To talk about renovating the old library. Walkers, canes, wheelchairs, trembling, everyone could see they were Parkies. But the Parkies were not there to discuss Parkinson's. Like everybody else, they came to talk about the library. Check up on the others in your unit, weekly if not daily. Multiple units prepared to gather together if necessary. It is looking good.

I want you to listen to Kathia Rock. She is focused on the dance, not the disease. She calls on her people to be strong, proud and free. She is not speaking of bitterness, of past wrongs, or present pain: she offers us the dance.

It was on her Reservation, Uashat – Maliotenam – that Ursula and I fled to in 1970. It’s about 900 km north-east of Montreal. At that time, almost everyone over the age of 35 spoke only Montagnais; there was still a whole generation who remembered being semi-nomadic, living in tents, surviving by hunting and fishing, in a severe and inhospitable climate.

We were the only white people on the Rez. Our eldest son, Sören, was born there.

There was poverty. There was alcoholism. There was extreme violence, under the influence. We had a great time. We never met, before or after, people who laughed so much. Or people who wasted so few words. Or people so competent in the forest; so able to survive if they had to.

And we predicted then, that there will be a new generation of young leaders among the native people of Canada, and they will be proud, self-reliant and independent of government hand-outs. And that is happening in many places - Darcey Jerrom and Frank Godon among the Metis; some bright young tribal leaders in B.C. and Alberta; an extraordinary percentage of the Inuit are advancing fast, and, from a family that lived close to us on the Reservation comes a new leader, of great strength and beauty; KATHIA ROCK. And she focuses on the dance, not the disease.

Let us not dwell, today, on what she could have reacted to with bitterness, but instead she brought us beauty and strength. We will not, today, dwell on the first sentence of Canada’s Indian Act, which, up into the 1960’s, stated: “For the purposes of all the laws of Canada, a “person” is defined as being any human being other than an Indian or an Eskimo.” A document that became the model for early laws enforcing apartheid in South Africa. We will not review that winter in the mid-1940’s, when one-third of the children died in villages along the Ungava coast.
We will not go over the campaign to destroy their culture, such as: the drum that Kathia plays in the video was forbidden on the Rez for many years -- the drums were gathered up and burned by the priest – because the native music was pagan.
We will not make an issue of the fact, in 1957, when the Prime Minister of Canada won the Nobel Peace Prize, the average life expectancy of native people in Canada was 27 years of age (mostly because of child mortality); this was worse than in any of the countries to which Canada was giving foreign aide. And it was scarcely even whispered about in Canada.
We won’t linger over the question of why Indians were not allowed to vote until 1958; Eskimos in 1963.
We will not review our extensive writing about the Killinik Inuit in the NorthWest Territories, who were told at midnight on February 8, 1978, that their village was being shut down the next morning; and Hercules aircraft landed on the sea ice and flew them away with whatever they could carry; the Inuit rifles were confiscated; and they were flown to 6 different villages where there was no housing for them, and a government employee went back to their island and burned down the village co-op, which was full of food and supplies, and which had been the first Inuit-run co-op to make a profit.
The government considered their location to be “too isolated”. A phony excuse for a cynical obliteration of a rebel community. “Too isolated”. They had been living there, as semi-nomads, for five thousand years.

Let us not dwell on any of that, because I could easily go one for 100 pages; or I could just tell you about the time I took a Montagnais teenager to the emergency ward with a gunshot wound, and they gave me a bucket for him to bleed in while we sat in the waiting room.

Kathia Rock sings partly in French, partly in her own language - a language that is spoken by a total of 9,000 people in the world.

Kathia Rock knows all the injustice that was done; the bigotry, the despair, the poverty, the affront to the dignity of all mankind.

And now, pay careful, careful attention to Kathia Rock’s response to all that:
She focuses on the dance, not the disease. I bow down to your spirit, Kathia Rock.
FIER FORT LIBRE