May 19, 2013 |
I just crossed the equator for the first time and it felt kind of monumental. I have been pretty much everywhere, or so I thought, but all my travel was up here. North of the equator. I mean the USA, Europe, Asia – that’s where the action is, right?
I mean, sure, Africa is where all human life originated, and I know it’s our racial birthplace, not to mention incredibly scenic and exotic, but in a lot of ways it’s kind of a has-been continent, huge parts of which aren’t exactly dream vacations, but more like travel nightmares. Paul Bowles material. Places one might vacation to the death.
Naturally we root for Africa to move its historical clock into this millennium, into modernism and tranquillity, but the prognosis still seems grim. And I’ve been there, visiting parts of West Africa that didn’t seem potentially disastrous or fatal. But I never dipped below the line. South Africa never appealed to me. I mean, they make a mean sauvignon blanc and they have some good music down there, but my childhood image of South Africa, Rhodesia, diamond mines and apartheid kind of soured me on its charms.
And South America looks good on paper, sure – the Amazon, Machu Picchu, Angel Falls, samba and tango, and girls from Ipanema, it all seems like a great erotic sightseeing adventure, but is it really worth it? Worth the favelas and dictators and burning rainforests and kidnapping and not being able to stop at traffic lights because of carjackers? It was never at the top of my list. Sicily seemed adventure enough. But then I got invited to Argentina. How could I not check out how the other half lives? I started to get excited. It seemed like a sort of cosmic passage to me, although some people do that trans-equatorial thing every other day. It got me thinking.
Half the earth lies below that longest line, but only about 10% of its population resides below it. The Southern Hemisphere is about 80% water compared to 60% for the Northern Hemisphere, and consider that Antarctica, with no permanent inhabitants, constitutes much of the Southern Hemisphere land mass. A big hunk of frozen earth with nothing on it but ice. I guess I always considered the Southern one a sort of second-class hemisphere.
Crossing the line seemed like venturing into unknown territory, almost like entering fable, visiting the realm of King Neptune – whom I once played in an elementary-school pageant. I suppose this all goes back to my navy-man grandpa, who schooled me in the lore of the equator.
In seafaring days, crossing the equator was a momentous occasion. It was the occasion of an initiation rite for first-timers, an equatorial baptism. Crossing the line made you a Trusty Shellback, and it was the Shellbacks, aka Sons of Neptune, who initiated the “Slimy Pollywogs”, or first-timers, into the mysteries of the deep through a series of ordeals. On the evening before the crossing the first day of the “wogs” were permitted to abuse the veteran Shellbacks, knowing that their transgressions would be punished the next day after the line was crossed.
On crossing the equator, the Shellbacks would become King Neptune and his Court, with Neptune played by the sailor with the most crossings behind him. His court included his assistant, Davy Jones, the keeper of the notorious locker, the Royal Navigator, the Royal Doctor and others, depending on how many Shellbacks were available. Invariably there was a Royal Barber who would cut the Pollywogs’ hair in a manner not requested by the client. Usually there were fellows in drag, and the winner of a drag beauty contest among the Shellbacks played Amphitrite, the wife of the sea god. A goddess with a five o’clock shadow.
My friend John Chamberlain, the great abstract expressionist sculptor known for his colourful contortions of car body parts, was a sailor who had crossed the line several times and he was known to have a bird tattooed on his chest and pigs on his feet. One night I was drinking with John at 150 Wooster Street, a hotspot frequented by hotties, two of which approached our table nervously. Giggling, one of them said, “Mr Chamberlain, we’ve heard you have a pig tattooed on your toe. Can we see it?” Without missing a beat John said, “Sure, but first you have to see the fly tattooed on my cock.” They ran.
Crossing the line was often an occasion for tattooing. My grandfather was a US Navy officer who crossed the equator on a coal-fired destroyer and he recounted that some of the new Shellbacks marked the occasion by having pigs tattooed on their feet or toes. The pig was often tattooed on sailors’ feet as a charm against drowning – pigs notoriously do not like water. Other traditional tattoos marking equator crossing were a turtle standing on its hind legs – meaning a man was a “shellback” –or King Neptune himself. In the wind-powered days crossing the equator was often the occasion of piercing the left ear.??
The geographic poles are the axes of the earth; these have their electromagnetic counterparts, the magnetic poles. Which sort of wander around the vicinity of the geographic poles. They interest me. Maybe because my Pollywog grandpa worked as a compass adjuster, and what was the wandering pole but God doing the same job. In the past 150 years the earth’s magnetic pole has wandered northward about 1,100km, and this movement has accelerated recently, leading some scientists to speculate that the earth is about to undergo a reversal in polarity, with the North becoming the South and the South the North. (In fact, the North Pole is actually a South Pole magnetically, so the North would actually become North.) This sort of geographic reversal of magnetic polarity is thought to occur, on average, every 450,000 years, and it is estimated that the last shift took place 780,000 years ago.
Now, all kinds of apocalypse enthusiasts, pessimist new-agers, dire-minded occultists and gnarly survivalists are agitating that the end is once again at hand. When the Mayan calendar ends, many of them say the poles will reverse. Electricity will stop working – as it has on the popular new network television show revolution – or at least our phones and computers will be far more at risk than they were during the Y2K panic of a dozen years ago.
In the sensationalist film 2012, the end of the Mayan calendar nailed the polar reversal and a consequent disaster in the earth’s core, which stops spinning, seemingly killing all of mankind except, apparently, John Cusack and his family. I’m not too worried about that, although the sun reversed its magnetic field again this year. Just hope it doesn’t erase the Cloud or my iTunes.
I spent a week in Buenos Aires and it was incredibly scenic and kind of low-key cosmic. I saw stars I had never seen before and I hoped to experience the Coriolis effect, the reversal of natural spin direction that occurs when passing from one hemisphere to another, but when I flushed the toilet I forgot how it flushed at home in New York. Was it clockwise or counter-clockwise? I couldn’t remember. And I later learned that the spin of things is only reversed on a large scale, like hurricanes and maelstroms and such. But I also wondered if it did something similar to our brains. Do our neurons spin differently down South? I couldn’t really tell. I didn’t feel upside down or left-handed, but maybe I felt a little different. My angular momentum was keeping me upright, like a gyroscope. I sensed that Southern Hemisphere ladies, no doubt in contrary spin, exerted a powerful attraction. Although maybe it wasn’t biophysics, but the tango dancing I observed every night. I thought about Scylla, the monster that wrecked Odysseus off Sicily. Here’s should have a clockwise motion.
Anyway, I got on a plane for Argentina the night of the US election. I had a few drinks in the airline club before boarding and watched the returns. Romney was leading in the vote count and I thought, “Well, maybe Buenos Aires is a good place to live.” I had a troubled sleep on the 10-hour flight and when I awoke the pilot announced that Obama had been re-elected. The entire plane burst into applause.
People are electromagnetic. I have a theory that the reason we are so culturally stupid now, having lost the ability to speak in complete sentences, write in beautiful cursive and engage in ballroom dancing, among many other retrograde tendencies, is that the electric grid (not to mention the microwave generators we hold next to our heads all day) radically alter the human electromagnetic atmosphere. We lived in radio silence for 1.7 million years before getting zapped, starting with Edison’s patent of electricity distribution in 1880, and we’ve never considered how this wired and microwaved environment interferes with the human brain’s reception of signals that we might not even suspect are there. Even if you don’t believe in astrology, there is no reason to ignore the possibility of influence by what we used to call the firmament. Does our electronic ambience block out the music of the spheres, the transmissions of the stars and planets, ESP, the dicta of the Olympian gods? Can angels, devils and muses still get through to us?
As I looked out on the Southern Cross, listening to tango music, I thought about Jack Parsons, the founder of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, father of the space programme. Before his rocket test launches Parsons would chant Aleister Crowley’s hymn to Pan. When he had a falling out with L Ron Hubbard and Hubbard absconded with his boat, he attempted to invoke the planetary spirit of Mars to produce a typhoon. Maybe it was quieter here. Less static. The firmament seemed closer anyway. The sky is less polluted here – fewer people, less industry, less land…
According to Plato the firmament or consisted of eight crystal spheres, the stereoma, which moved the sun, moon, planets and stars. Aristotle calculated that there were 55 stereoma. We now know that the firmament is not as firm as it was thought – it’s not metal or glass or anything solid, but electromagnetic.
What surprised me most about Buenos Aires was how utterly European it is. I rarely saw a trace of indigenous blood. The blacks there seemed mostly African students, not descendants of slaves. If you were shanghaied and set down there you would probably assume you had awakened in Spain. But Argentina is to Spain what the US is to England. It’s the big melting pot, where the stock from the motherland was mixed with a healthy blend of folk from hither and thither (Italians, Germans, Basques, Scandinavians, British, Irish, Welsh, Polish, Russians, Ukranians and Arabs), making for a delightfully good-looking populace.
The Coriolis effect is more interesting than watching the toilet flush. I remember being scared as a child by the film On the Beach. It took place after World War III – a nuclear holocaust had devastated the Northern Hemisphere, killing off its population by radiation poisoning. Those living in the Southern Hemisphere lasted longer because the Coriolis effect tends to keep air and ocean currents in one hemisphere or the other, although over time there is leakage through the Intertropical Convergence Zone, so Australia was the last safe place. Of course, in the end, everyone dies, including Ava Gardner, but the hemispheric thing stuck with me. I thought about it during the Three Mile Island meltdown in Pennsylvania, during Chernobyl and Fukushima. Next big meltdown, I’m taking up tango in Buenos Aires.
Similarly, the culture is a fantastic blend. Buenos Aires is an architectural smorgasbord of neoclassical, Italianate renaissance, belle époque French and Italian, fantastic art nouveau and art deco, and brutalism right out of Blade Runner. Then there are home-grown styles, such as the buildings in the old port made of corrugated steel panels and painted in blocks of wild colour with paint salvaged from the shipyards. In short, it’s sort of an all-star team of a country, racially, architecturally and artistically. It reminded me of a golf course made up of facsimiles of the best golf holes from around the world.This was just my first dip below the equator. I’ve got the rest of South America to look forward to, but I found the spirit there fantastic. Rich people have pictures of Che Guevara on their walls, right next to Evita. And the culture has a lot of confidence in itself; they seem to have had enough of being behind. They think that this is their millennium coming up. Maybe it’s not the earth’s poles that will flip, but the power balance of hemispheres. As America and Europe struggle along, South America seems to be bubbling under with boom potential. We’re burned out, they are burning to shine.
They have their economic problems; while I was there, a vast demonstration called a cacerolazo took to the streets, with a quarter of a million citizens beating on kitchen pots to exorcise the government of President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner, who looks sort of like a cross between Sarah Palin and Kris Jenner. Even if their message was a little unclear, the beat was catchy and it gave me the feeling that the tango toward major progress was just beginning. If the world is going to turn upside down, I wouldn’t mind Buenos Aires being on top.
by Glenn O’Brien
