The Tower of Rot
Preparing to Launch from the Landfill of Los Angeles on a Ruined Nazi V-2 Rocket (The Heights of Weird Part 6)
This post picks up where the last left off in my series, “The Heights of Weird.” It comes dangerously close to revealing why the book about Santa Susana is a freakishly uncanny sequel to my first book China Lake.
The final post in the series will follow in several days. If you read this and you’re inspired, horrified, concerned—please consider supporting Dumpster Fires.
“Chains of more-than-coincidence occur so often in my life that, if I am forbidden to call them supernatural hauntings, let me call them a habit.” —Robert Graves
…So what happened then? How was it that in February of 2021 I found myself making a solemn commitment in Joshua Tree, California while thoroughly drunk—having taken a bottle of Bulleit to the brain in the wake of my beloved grandmother’s death—to abandon drinking and research something as asinine as ‘coincidence’? How had I backtracked so badly? Hadn’t I buried all that embarrassing woo-woo with the book? After so many months immersed in China Lake and plagued by that core coincidence, how had that stupid spooky feeling stolen its way back into my brain?
Could I blame the booze? Had my decade of unabated alcohol intake really throttled my thought so badly? Had I pickled myself beyond return? Was the thought of coincidence that night in Joshua Tree and in the days that followed—that sudden injunction to research coincidence—was it some final soft-core stab at a crappy religious solace? Was my existential gas tank really running on such fumes, my will to live so reduced that, in a last sad grasp at survival, I might reach out for anything, even this vapid trash staple of New Age woo?
Maybe. It might have been all of that.
But there was something more: the Santa Susana Field Laboratory, the site of America’s largest nuclear meltdown, a place seemingly no one had ever heard of, that had killed perhaps thousands of people, and that lay just up the hill beyond the backyard of Christina’s childhood home at the end of the San Fernando Valley suburbs of Los Angeles.
It was the Santa Susana Field Lab, the joint property of NASA, the Department of Energy, and the Boeing Corporation that exhumed the pale corpse of coincidence—a corpse that I realized finally, that night in Joshua Tree, that I had to confront before it killed me.
How had it ever clawed its way back into my brain?
It started in the spring of 2017, two and a half years after Stanford’s Ken Caldeira, recall, helped me bury any last taboo belief in the significance of my China Lake coincidence, when I finally Googled the rock art at the Santa Susana Field Laboratory.
Anxiety around that rock art had been stewing for over two years, ever since I caught my first whiff of the Santa Susana Field Lab from the archaeologist David Whitley. Yet it wasn’t until I moved into Château Westmoreland, the crumbling century-old apartment building from which I initially launched this blog, that I really debated digging in.
“You gotta Google that shit,” I’d tell myself some mornings, smoking American Spirits on the château rooftop, behind the crappy faux-French turret that fronted the building. “Do it. Do the research today.”
But for some reason I kept putting the research off.
“Just think, then: how many other men, yesterday and today, have been possessed, or are still possessed, even to the point of death, by the demon of research?” —Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, “On Happiness,” I943
I figured there was nothing up there, certainly nothing spectacular, nothing that could ever carry that creepy uncanny charge I’d chanced upon in the rock art at Naval Air Weapons Station China Lake. How crazy, really, could any Native American rock art be if it was just sitting out in some canyon behind the backyards of boring ass suburban Los Angeles? Probably it was just a squiggly swastika some gothic eighth grader spraypainted back in the day to impress a pretty girl. There might be a few dabs of brown paint up there on a boulder behind the Starbucks. A stoned PhD candidate from nearby CSU Northridge had misidentified that faded graffiti as the glorious relic of some ancient Chumash sunburst motif. That might be kind of funny and a little sad, perhaps worth a couple comedic paragraphs, but hardly on the order of the discovery I made at NAWS China Lake.
Fear of disappointment, in short, postponed my research.
I think there was a fear too, maybe, of actually finding something cool and having to adjust my worldview. As a San Diego native raised by a single mother who loathed anything outside her narrow comfort zone, I’d been bred to believe that the glitzy television city to the north could never be concealing anything other than its own catastrophic emptiness. What was the point of investigating some genuine cultural artifact lurking in the suburbs of such a shallow shithole? None. There was no point. The only thing of depth or substance in Los Angeles that I’d ever heard of was the San Andreas Fault, that slumbering behemoth buried at the city’s outskirts waiting forever to swallow the whole fragile encampment the real estate agents, water engineers, TV producers, and oil executives had pitched precariously atop its scaly backbone over the past century and a half, the whole construction no more permanent or impressive than a plywood façade rotting in a Warner Bros backlot.
But something came knocking on my hundred-year-old Château Westmoreland door that sunny warm day in the spring of 2017.
Thok, thok, thok.
There had been a dumpster fire that afternoon and the interior of the apartment smelled like I’d grilled a packet of hot dogs with a Zippo and a steady stream of $2 Sauve Max Hold hairspray. Not many know, but LAFD fire engines don’t douse burning dumpsters with water but some kind of soapy foam and I remember watching its scented white steam waft out from the alley, drifting before my window and the mirrored glass of the office building out back. Already below, into that relative calm that invariably follows a conflagrating dumpster, I could hear the rattling cage of a shopping cart off-roading over the alley potholes, followed by the pop of shattered glass and a garbled litany of vague schizophrenic regret.
“Fudge packer!?” the voice called. “You think I’m a fudge packer? Fucking faggot! Fuck! We’ll see who sticks a fist up that hairy asshole again. Fuck. Fucking fudge packing piece of shit!”
Christina, thankfully, was at work. She ran social media at a real estate office in Calabasas and I felt confident she might kill herself soon.
We have to get the hell out of here, I thought, pacing between my dying Dell laptop and the windows at the back of the living room, eyeing those offices across the alley. I could see the faux-French turret at the front of our building sitting inside their mirrored glass, its sharp tip poking past the sagging telephone wires along Westmoreland Avenue. That turret was a tasteless piece of ornament, clownish and functionless, a bit of architecture Carey McWilliam’s might have numbered among Los Angeles’s “debauch of eclecticism,” but it’s ugly unwanted effort at raising some kind of culture occasionally lifted my spirits.
Behind the turret reflection, inside that half-empty office building, there was a Korean printing shop and some kind of Russian adult daycare. Any moment I could picture the young Latina attendees escorting the horrified hulk of those elderly eastern Europeans out into the burning glare as the lids of the Xerox machines let leak those blinding white beams born of some shadowless realm beyond all reproduction (many days I managed to convince myself the entrance to hell was hidden underneath that building). It was about that time. They’d plop the old people down in plastic chairs at the back of the parking lot, just beyond the alley wall, toss bingo sheets out across the tables, and then the banda music would begin to blare out from the big Peavy speakers and I’d be lucky to summon the concentration necessary to write a single incomplete sentence beyond Fuck my life.
I thought of two years earlier, how when we first moved into that apartment, I used to stop in front and admire the turret’s rounded windows lit with orange light as I walked up to the building at night. The black conical roof was always backlit by the rising moon and staring at its sharp cap pointing toward the starless sky, I used to imagine those windows somehow as portholes on a rocket ship, and I’d think from here—from the drab majesty of sad little Château Westmoreland—I would launch. It wasn’t going to be just some middling literary career anymore but an improbable daring ascent to the heights of hipdom, and one all the more heroic for having been effected from within the very heart of the wasteland: Hollywood, Los Angeles.
Many nights, wandering up through the rising fog and eyeing that tacky turret, I’d pause in the middle of the sidewalk with highly unhip thoughts unspooling in my head—a picture of the long dead Frenchman, Michel de Montaigne, father of the essay, the man who penned his famous Essais (1580) in his own Bourdeaux château, Château de Montaigne, upon whose walls, on a cross beam of the study supporting the turret ceiling, he carved his now immortal motto: Que sais-je—“What do I know?”
Yes, there was something romantic in that tacky turret. At least for the first few weeks we lived there. It was the closest thing I could conjure to a good luck charm, a subtle sign, however absurd, that I was on the right track, a null non-entity so far still as a nonfiction essayist, and, what’s more, a nullity now lodged within the colossal jaws of Los Angeles, having mistakenly emigrated to the Angel City for a girl named after Jesus Christ, but if the life of Montaigne was any indicator, time spent in a turret could truly turn things around.
And really, did I have so far to go? Maybe my fantasy of future literary fame was not wholly insane?
I had in fact just finished a book. Now I just had to sell it. And toward that end, in the fall of 2015, I’d signed with an agent, the prestigious Matt M-, representative of some of America’s most cutting-edge essay talent. Writers I’d come up reading and admiring were on his roster, and now, with my first book, I numbered among them. I just had to hunker down, I decided, bide my time, keep doing whatever I was doing writing-wise and my life would finally launch. And in the coming years, when interviewers wanted me to sit and look back on my meteoric rise, hear me speculate on the secret to so much achievement, that turret would already have acquired a kind of cult aura. They would ask me to rehash the legend, how I’d ever had the audacity to cleave to my dreams and carve upon my very own rotted cross beam those precious few words, my personal motto, which would not be Fuck my Life but…
What was it? I often wondered. “A refusal to be deprived of the stimulus of the enigmatic?” No, that was too stiff, a workout on the lips. “There is nothing important in waking up in the morning?” That had been my frequent refrain of late lying in bed gazing up at the cracking ceiling, its plaster fissures a perfect picture of the splitting pain hanging over my skull. But never mind. I had only to drink more water, a little less whiskey tonight, maybe a bottle of Pedialyte, and I’d feel all right. We all have bad days, a season of malaise. No need to force a change. I had only to keep researching and writing, to trust the process, dig down and work diligently, await inspiration, and rising from that humble rent-controlled roach-infested hovel I could hardly afford, I could not fail to launch. No matter the trash and misery of its streets, the landfill that was Los Angeles, here, in this rocket-like turret, this old tower at the center of the city, I would continue connecting the threads, weaving together a glowing tapestry that might illuminate the mystery. There was no better place to try, and no more auspicious omen than that rocket-shaped turret.
Rocket, from the Italian ‘rocchetto,’ meant a bobbin or spool, the rotating cylinder from which all threads are pulled.
But that warm spring day with the release of China Lake only weeks away, I had hardly written a thing. Two years had passed and what had I accomplished?
“Rocchetto…” I kept thinking, pacing the apartment, “rocchetto… forgetto…” pondering the slipped and knotted strands of my destiny, “Forgetto ‘bout it,” as that sad schizo litany echoed on down the alley.
“Fudge packing faggot! I’LL CUT YOUR FUCKING FACE OFF!!!”
I remember leaning over the sofa and studying myself in the mirror. I looked fat and old, my cheeks puffy from four to seven IPAs the night before. Montaigne had called his turret, “The Tower of Thought.” I had begun to think of mine as the tower of rot. Sure, I’d published essays in The Paris Review and The Gettysburg Review, two top journals. Jonatham Franzen had selected one of my essays as a Notable of 2016. But what of it? I wasn’t interested in publishing these little things. As Cormac McCarthy said, “I’m not interested in writing short stories. Anything that doesn’t take years of your life and drive you to suicide hardly seems worth doing.” But what about that big thing, the book?
China Lake had been roundly rejected. My fancy New York agent failed to sell it. Probably the book was no good. Only my graduate alma mater, the University of Iowa, agreed to touch the thing, and suddenly, as the insufferable banda music went on looping through my own long litany of literary regret, somewhere between the talk of unlubricated back alley anal and the image of senile Russian grandmothers drooling in their moo-moos, I saw clearly for the first time—as if inside some heartless Xeroxed light—that my sudden heroic ascent had all but slipped away.
I thought of that other phrase Montaigne had carved on the cross beam of his ceiling. A line attributed to the Roman naturalist, Pliny the Elder (also an excellent IPA):
“There is nothing certain but uncertainty, and nothing more foolish and arrogant than man.”
Yes. I was a stupid arrogant piece of shit, complacent with my first accomplishment, a book that no one bought. And listening to the banda’s blubbering tide of tubas and raking cymbals overrunning the alley wall, like some kind of advanced chemical weapon baneful only to the gringo soul, I could not hold back the conclusion that the inspiration wasn’t coming. I was finished. I had not yet carved one word on the apartment wall. I had no motto. And all the ideas I’d kicked around for a second book—a biography of Cormac McCarthy, a compendium of inventions that killed their inventors (jogging, the Segway, man), a comic novel about a failed rideshare startup in small town Nebraska—none of it held an edge or carried any spark. There wasn’t anything weird or worrisome enough to hold my attention all throughout any of it.
Only a single possible topic remained on my radar: The Santa Susana Field Laboratory.
And yet I didn’t want to write that book!
A big, long investigation into the Santa Susana Field Laboratory just sounded sad. I didn’t want to interview suburban moms about their children’s bone cancer. I didn’t want to hear about how no one told them their dream home backed up against a secret lab, the site of America’s largest nuclear disaster, how they all first started to figure it out in the halls of the hospital, comparing their addresses, noticing altogether that strange grey blank hiding in the hills when they peeled their fingers apart on the face of their phones, pinching-out to zoom in slowly on that empty spot on the map they’d never really eyeballed, all the pointer fingers lifting and falling, opening and closing carefully like the claws of fiddling crabs, a black inhuman feeling spreading throughout their extremities as they stared down and read the secret meaning held within that unwelcome word Lab:
Cancer was what one inferred. Cancer, Latin for crab.
No, I didn’t want to write about moms and dads and leukemia and empty twin beds and Barbie dolls with shaved heads. I didn’t want to write about the cancer in Christina’s family. Christina’s mom’s cancer. Her aunt’s cancer. Her uncle. Her stepfather. I didn’t want to write about the tumor in Christina’s pituitary gland. I didn’t want to write some crushing exposé against Boeing’s relentless greenwashing campaign, the largest and most well-funded in the history of the planet perhaps, all of its pamphlets, speakers, advertisements and independent studies calculated to convince parents, activists, and bureaucrats at the California Department of Toxic Substance Control (DTSC) that there was nothing ugly hidden in those hills and thereby spare shareholders the countless billions the full clean-up to background levels entailed.
“Protect Santa Susana,” was Boeing’s Orwellian motto.
Yes, save the superficially perfect, pristine parkland at the edge of Los Angeles home to pumas, peregrine falcons, monarch butterflies, and old growth oaks—save the horrifically irradiated hills of Santa Susana, so rustic and charming on the surface, from the insidious creeping crabby effects of… state-mandated safety. Protect Boeing’s Santa Susana from being cleaned up.
NIMBY they used to cry throughout the 1990s, the well-off white suburbanites afraid of a new streetlight, some long-promised recycling plant, or an improved powerline access road. NIMBY. Not in my backyard! No SoCal soccer mom ever had the gall to imagine anything quite so ghastly as the Santa Susana Field Laboratory.
The book had the makings of a bestseller, a Pulitzer Prize winner. The first book on the laboratory and its cover-up, a nightmare only .00001% of Americans had ever heard of and few would even believe. It would pull a full-page spread in People, fetch a handsome advance from Penguin or Scribner, a place in Oprah’s Book Club, Obama’s reading list. A best of the year at the LA Times and short-listed for the Man Booker Prize. And yet it was too easy. The content made me queasy. Some child cancer trauma porn awkwardly marketed as an underdog story starring affluent white families did not appeal to me. At its best it might make for a twisted post-mortem on the American dream. But even then, a book revolving around Boeing’s absolute corporate greed sounded to me, well, boring. Corporations are cruel entities beholden only to profit!? Hardly a prophetic thesis.
The only thing that really got me thinking in the three years since I’d caught wind of a reactor core meltdown in the Valley was the rock art.
There was some kind of ancient Native American rock art locked away at the back of the San Fernando Valley inside the Santa Susana Field Laboratory.
But my brain cells rebelled.
I didn’t want to write about rock art anymore!
Hadn’t I already penned a 300-page book that was basically one-third Native American rock art? Were pictographs and petroglyphs to become my schtick? Was I some gross guy lured to ancient ruins like a blow fly to shit? Infected with such foul lust, what would I become?
I could see myself, a relic hunter rushing headlong toward the hills behind Sizzler. The unscratched paint of my Jeep peppered with stickers of National Parks I had yet to visit. The bridges at Arches but an afterthought compared to the algorithm’s royal road. A budding culture vulture subsisting on content rendered from dubious esoteric fats. Every new clue a jewel in synchronicity’s majestic crown, and a credit extension on my Synchrony card. I’d be buying big time from Best Buy by then. “Don’t forget to smash the Like button,” I’d crow into a brand new Shure microphone, sporting my signature floral Hawaiian-print hat and jet-black funeral doom metal band tee. Laid back shamanic vibes, a master of dark and light.
It was hard to think of anything less hip or heroic or more of the moment. Far from a daring launch out of the landfill of Los Angeles, the Discovery+ producers might pay for my two-mile Uber ride up to Hollywood and Vine. They’d sit my tubby ass down on a dirty couch before a forty-thousand-dollar camera. Put me on the Travel Channel to talk about the pyramids and totem poles. The Gaia network might give me a hundred bucks to bloviate incoherently about the Biblical connection and alien greys. A shameless parasite of the sacred, I would pursue every questionable lead into ever more unimpressive caves and further internet niches until my non-existent readership gradually diminished, darkness closed around me, and I disappeared into some spraypainted storm drain beneath the I-5 freeway.
I could see it all. A brief career marked by an infantile appreciation for the cosmic mystery I systematically expunged through cowardice, rapine, and lies, not to mention the men’s multivitamin you might buy on my website for $39.99 (Use Discount Code: GURU). No, I didn’t want to be the rock art guy. Didn’t want my name associated with any such grubby, grifting, self-aggrandizing, shameful shamanic shit scam.
And even if I wasn’t so lucky as to sell out to the profitable mills of ‘specialist factual programming’—those cheap channels churning out an endless supply of dubious low-quality pseudo-documentary fare for the undiscerning consumption of non-college-educated Americans—I still did not want to keep looking at creepy rock carvings made by shamans in trance states thousands of years before the crucifixion of Christ.
Lame, lame! my brain kept saying. Lame to lurk around the same terrain.
Lame and life-threatening.
What was it? What was the real repulsion, the true seat of my unease?
I think it was a desire to distance myself from the past, a hard-earned awareness of the insidious slow undertow inherent in all nostalgia, the ruin you risk inviting whenever you try to relive a prior moment.
Yes. It was not only a fear of disappointment that put off that research but also the stench of stagnation, a presentiment of death. A Healthy Focus On the Future might have been the chapter title in the self-help manual that forbade my further rock art research. I had to do something untried, forge a new path, illuminate a fresh frontier, flex my mental muscles to a different, more discordant tune. The ailing hipster in me craved more novel subject matter, new sights and sounds, a feast of untested sensations and assimilations (fight the taste freeze!). I did not want to be the guy that milked a military base for all its UNESCO-worthy world-historic artwork only to follow it up with another similar stab, this time at a Boeing-owned nuclear lab.
And further prohibitive too—a factor far beyond the personal desire for growth, to say nothing of the cringe factor inherent in finding oneself the washed up ‘rock art guy’ hawking conspiracies on the History Channel—was the practical matter of attention. Familiar ground never fails to bore, and boredom, you best believe, does not help one hunker down and work hard alone for years on a piece of writing that might just die in a drawer. Even if I wasn’t hip or heroic, I needed to find a topic that would take control of me, possess me. Obsess me. Something undeniable, impossible, unstoppable. Another book about rock art just wasn’t calibrated to deliver the escape velocity I needed to lose myself and truly launch.
But something unexpected happened that afternoon. I found myself looking up the rock art suddenly. I had to look it up at some point.
“Santa Susana Field Laboratory rock art” I typed into a tab on the dying Dell laptop, as the banda music ducked into the background suddenly, replaced by the hysterical, amplified cries of bingo numbers. “Dieciséis! Dieciséis!”
The simple fact was one had to know for certain what was up there. Was a more convenient moment coming? It was like agreeing to sit down and let the dentist rip out a rotten molar… What was the wisdom of waiting? Would a root canal somehow be more pleasurable if the proper music were playing? This rotted thing, this cavity that I’d left unattended at the back of me—this black cave at Santa Susana, hidden back in the head of the Valley—would its illumination be less wounding if Bach were booming outside instead of banda? What about the heat? Was it better to bite the bullet in winter weather? Do skeletons exit closets easier during dewy morning hours? Was there a better breakfast, a finer mood, a cleaner room where a corpse might impose less upon one’s chores? No. All atmospheric conditions were immaterial. Smell, music, the balance of bodily humors, it didn’t matter.
Why had I ever waited? The endless rounds of rationalization and procrastination required far too much work and paid zero dividends. All the effort expended avoiding research was meaningless as the outcome was presupposed—sooner or later I would have to know. You don’t pen a 300-page book that was 1/3 ancient Native American rock art only to categorically deny the existence of all such creativity again.
Certainly, some kind of pathology was at play, an undiagnosed adjustment disorder maybe, an avoidant personality disorder or a partial post-traumatic stress disorder. Writing a book had, after all, been one of the most difficult and disruptive events of my life. Maybe that’s all that I was fighting? I feared the fraught years that would follow if a fertile book project was ever found. Better to go on safely spinning your wheels, tilling the sterile soil, raking the sandbox round the merry-go-round. Whatever the mixed metaphor, my fears were wildly disproportionate to the dangers posed. And what’s more, in the avoidance of harm, I hurt myself worse. Looking back, there was so little logic involved. It felt almost like a phobia. But of what? Hard work? Becoming the wrinkled regular on the Gaia network? Making six figures off of YouTube ad revenue? The whole thing was absurd, cowardly, useless. Unless…
And here was a possibility I did not entertain until recently:
What if all my denial and displacements, all my certainty, overconfidence and intellectual arrogance, all my fears and self-deceptions surrounding that Santa Susana rock art—what if it was really the right move after all? What if I really was defending myself not from disappointment but disaster—some possibility far more alien and repellent than becoming any greasy old rock art guy? What if that great bobbin of fate, the grand celestial rocchetto, what if she were weaving something far weirder and more worrisome than I was ready for?
What if more than being letdown, I feared being lifted up, launched, into knowledge I didn’t want?
Somewhere deep down I must have felt myself meddling with forces far beyond my ken, pulling at a thread whose span I knew not where it led. Because although I hardly dared articulate it to myself at the time, what I wanted, what I needed, what I kept wishing for the most over those months and years of stagnation and frustration was another coincidence—some kind of crazy collision that might stop me dead in my tracks, deliver the whiff of mystery, the spoor of some uncanny force creeping at the edge of perception—just as I’d encountered at NAWS China Lake. I wanted something impossible that might compel me into the first improbable weave of another weird essay. I wanted that frightful, uneasy feeling again that there was something bigger than myself, my cynicism, my education, moving in upon my existence, looming in from outside, beyond the fence line of the rational mind…
Or so I can see it today: a dangerous attention to the depths. Quietly, somewhere, I always kept a hand on that long slack of barbed wire, one eye trained far beyond the break in the fence line, focused on that point out past the perimeter where that drooping wire fell from sight, its tortured glint swallowed up by night. And watching, listening, my fist slowly clenching, I’d give a tug at that loose strand of slack and wait, wait… to feel nothing pull back.
“Do not call up anything you cannot put down.” —Robert Anton Wilson, Cosmic Trigger, 1977
Of course, to confess such a want would have sent me leaping from the turret at Château Westmoreland. I couldn’t admit it in those few scattered moments before China Lake failed to sell, I fired my agent and found I hadn’t a second book topic any better than some execrable drek about the Segway inventor accidentally driving himself off a cliff.
Such an admission would have meant that my survival as a nonfiction writer was somehow bound to something I could neither summon nor store, not trap or control, nor craft, create, or ever re-create—a coincidence. And this dependency was all the more debilitating because I had proudly demolished all such feel-good gullible woo-woo; I had in fact shit hard down that Nag Champa scented hole, dumped a deluge of diarrhea so despairing in the closing pages of China Lake (O! Kenneth!) it’s a wonder Sandra Ingerman, author of Shamanic Journeying: A Beginner’s Guide, hasn’t sued me. Never again would any fragrant ribbon of smoke rise from my inner rabbit hole; I was purged of all hope.
“Only desert,” that was the last line of my book. From the Latin deserere, to forsake.
And that was the most unfathomable part of it all: I was awaiting the return of illusion, holding out and hoping for that weird, wayward force I’d foresworn and fought a whole year to cast off, only succeeding after Ken Caldeira finally trashed it outside the lunch court of his Stanford Carnegie lab. “Is there anything more to it than irony?”
I was waiting for something without which I had nothing. Waiting for something that wasn’t coming. Waiting for something that was nothing. Waiting for a coincidence…
No, I did not fear any grand uncanny collision at Santa Susana. I was not postponing research because of any possibility alien or repellent. I was not afraid that some sequence of coincidence nearly identical to the shamanic rock art and military research at NAWS China Lake would swoop down upon me with frozen wings, the cold press of outer space trailing in its wake, the unlovely lick of some ineluctable tongue whispering and weaving, an eagle beak snipping and stitching—delivering this network, stuffing the nest—filling the tangled lattice of time with hidden meanings and still undiscoverable signs.
Sidebar: Eagle and angel are two ancient, related words from a common root, meaning ‘carrying, delivering.’ Angel from the Greek angelos (ἄγγελος), ‘messenger.’
That kind of creepy event, one fit to carry home “that spooky feeling,” that phrase, recall, from Diaconis and Mosteller, authors of “Methods for Studying Coincidences,” that famed 1989 paper published by the American Statistical Association—that might happen once in a lifetime. “The point is that truly rare events, say events that occur only once in a million… are bound to be plentiful… we can be absolutely sure that we will see incredibly remarkable events.” But such staggering uncanny synchronicities, you won’t see them repeat. Not if you’re honest. Not in your own life. And especially not in the same terrain. Not in the same vein. And not in Los Angeles.
You won’t find military research and shamanic religion converging perfectly again upon the same speculative end. No. I’d discovered two cultures and states of art layered one on top of the other one time, standing side by side in the same cratered waste of desert, a volcanic badland virtually unknown to the public—NAWS China Lake—where practices isolated by thousands of years coalesced without the notice of any human individual, overlapping for generations in a silence as secret and strange as the very heavens both sought to ply and propitiate through the technologies of song, art, and trance, engineering, war, and math.
That convergence had been the catalyst for my first book. But it wouldn’t happen again. Not in my lifetime. And not in the landfill of Los Angeles.
No, I did not fear the repeat of such a remarkable, rare event. Such a coincidence was never coming. But to need such a thing, to want it, wish for it, and to make its appearance a prerequisite for any artistic quest, indeed that which you depended upon first to launch a book—that much was doom.
I can see it today: I hadn’t a fear of being lifted up, of being launched into knowledge I didn’t want. No.
My fear was of finding out I had long ago lifted, reach the zenith.
Now I was broken down, stuck in the slow undertow.
Interred in my tower of rot.
But is that true? “What do I really know?”
A large part of me still wonders if I did not have an actual intuition of the impossible world-historic coincidence hidden up at Santa Susana and its status as a disturbing, too-perfect sequel to the strangeness that sparked China Lake. Part of me wonders if I somehow knew and wanted nothing more to do with that weird, wayward force, whatever it was…
Maybe a fear of an anomalous and totally taboo possibility destructive to my proud and isolated, masculine, rational materialist shithole ego really did keep me from turning and facing directly that dark cave at the Santa Susana Field Laboratory. Maybe I was not remotely ready, am still not ready, to recognize the possibility of any supernatural agent active on earth beyond that most miserable and arrogant animal—man. Like a camera eye, my overactive rational mind patrolled the perimeter, alert and watchful, an alarm system of cynicism and irony always waiting, ready to launch a withering wave of laughter should any drab phantasm approach the prison. Important to remember good clean thinking… Don’t be dumb... Help fight infection... Stamp out the germ of doubt…
Since AP Biology at the age of 14 I’d had modernity’s fearless motto emblazoned over every porthole in my skull: “Every physical process and causal mechanism will one day be explained, I promise you, because all that exists at bottom is material matter.”
And if those lines looked circular, if the argument presumed what it sought to establish—what would you prefer? Let the unknown in? Let it live?
No. Control was always the goal. Discipline and punish. Rip up the wild weeds. Cultivate an orderly walled garden of discrete material objects—atoms, quirks, quasars and books, billiard balls, and nuclear bombs. Matter is all that matters.
Go beyond that fence line you’ve lost your mind.
Matter… the mother of all invention. Matter the origin of all conception, cause, and effect.
Material matter the prima mater, maternal—mother—protecting consciousness from the shock of its own physical irreducibility by refusing to admit any other possibility.
Matter, dead matter, the crowning achievement of that paranoid matricide: man. Matter the motto of those who will not enter the grotto—the grotesque cave at the back of the wood wherein hides all that shall not be understood.
“After having remained at the entry some time, two contrary emotions arose in me, fear and desire—fear of the threatening dark grotto, desire to see whether there were any marvelous thing within it.” —Leonardo da Vinci, Diaries
Perhaps I really did intuit the impossible world-historic coincidence hiding in that uncanny cave at the back of Santa Susana. Perhaps I really did intuit the ruin one risks inviting whenever you attempt to relive a prior a moment, particularly one tinged with the vague and unmistakable taste of the totally unknown.
Of the ineffable, I’d had my brush—and once was enough.
I’d caught an “ambivalent flash of the sacred.” The mysterium tremendum et fascinans, “the awe-inspiring mystery,” at once tremendous and frightening and infinitely fascinating. Something had brushed by me briefly, a force or entity stitching and weaving throughout human history, connecting people and places that should not have been connected, sowing patterns one isn’t supposed to see, forging linkages and correspondences that pushed the limits of statistical possibility.
Yet I wanted no further confirmation or flirtation. It just wasn’t worth it. It wouldn't further my ‘career.’ Even if it brought me a book and galvanized my work, that gift would retain a certain aura, a gravity of anxiety, a dark charm that would complicate any carefree cashing at the bank. And even if you dared to… “Where did you get this?” the teller might inquire, and then the whole disquieting question as to the chain of custody, the one question you wanted to quit asking yourself, it would come rattling to the fore; that far-off rattle itself the source of the aura, a nearly inaudible sound, a subtle vibration rooted in the far-off clink and clang of iron links and the wound barbs of wire running off the table, crossing the desert, and stretching taut like some dread anchor chain disappearing into the depths of… What? A network? An ocean? Some quantum semiotic system? An associative dimension underpinning the universe and discoverable perhaps, one day, once we retire the notion of time?
No. That rattle was dangerously distracting. Better to banish it from the mind. Return the gift. It might drag you away from your research, open the mind to idiocy, secure a premature senility, prevent you from discharging your dire academic duties. Don’t be dumb, Doctor…
I was like the respectable scientist in good academic standing dressed in tweed. Better to abandon that particular mystery. Don’t pick at it. Admit you had a good laugh. That had been a good bit of fun, a dazzling, if devilish, little trick! Admit you might have tasted something strange, stumbled around spooked half the day—But it was nothing one should not dismiss! The whole episode was immune to measurement, of course, an anecdote isolated from any replication. Assuredly some harmless neural glitch, the product of a bad breakfast, sleep deprivation, stress. Sure, sure… there had to be astounding shocking crazy shit… out there! But not in here. All kinds of astonishing alien life littered throughout the cosmos. More stars in the universe than grains of sand on earth. Our current grasp of physics likely but a drop in a bucket the size of all the globe’s oceans. Our paradigm not worth one septendecillion of a dime. But if you listened too long to that rattling chain, it would wrap around your leg, and you’d be dragged overboard, heading down, and drowned—in a sea of laughter, irrelevance.
A wise man wanted nothing more to do with that weird, wayward force, whatever it was… Don’t be dumb. Hit the lights on the lab. And understand, take heart from the fact that whatever impossibles you might ponder there in the dark as you peer back over those polished rows of microscopes, they’re safely stowed away inside some distant future date the human race will probably never have to face—a bacterium beneath the fingernail of all neanderthaldom.
Yes, one brush was enough. Better to get back to business and go on giggling. Give back the gold. Discipline and dismiss. Better to exclude and conclude… Ridiculous!
“All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.” —Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860)
Ridiculous, yes. But one still had to know.
“Santa Susana Field Laboratory rock art” I typed into a tab on the dying Dell laptop.
Research, I thought, hitting return.
“I think the most important question facing humanity is, ‘Is the universe a friendly place?’ This is the first and most basic question all people must answer for themselves.” —Einstein
It took me a minute to realize I’d been Google-jacked, the engine’s predictive algorithm overriding my search with an evidently more popular term, not ‘rock art’ but rocket. “Santa Susana Rocket.” But what I started reading was intriguing. The Santa Susana Field Laboratory (SSFL) had not just done nuclear research, Wikipedia said. It had operated ten experimental nuclear reactors at the facility between 1953 and 1980—“It was my impression that Atomics International had been given verbal instructions from the Atomic Energy Commission to test the reactor to destruction,” one former SSFL employee was quoted as saying. “They were pushing the limits on purpose.” But the field lab’s primary mission, more critical than creating nuclear meltdowns, was rocket research. And SSFL wasn’t just any average rocket research center, if such a thing existed…
Santa Susana, I read, clicking further, was actually “the most gigantic rocket engine workshop in the western hemisphere.” Around 30,000 rocket engine tests were conducted at Santa Susana between 1949 and 2006. Most of these tests took place on Area II of the laboratory, a crucial 400-acre cross section of the 2,800-acre lab home to a series of towering “static” rocket test stands bolted into the bedrock. The first rocket engines SSFL workers ever anchored to Area II’s monolithic sky-scraping frames were, incredibly, Nazi V2 “Vengeance” rockets. In fact, the quiet dismantling and analyzing of German V2s above the expanding suburbs of the San Fernando Valley was the very first project undertaken at Santa Susana in 1947, or so the internet said.
Stay tuned, the final post is coming…
Nonfiction books, blogs, and podcasts that have assisted this series so far:
The Flip by
The Living Dark blog by
The Secret Life of Puppets by Victoria Nelson
Sinister Forces by Peter Levenda
The Roots of Coincidence by Arthur Koestler
“And in truth, what are these things I scribble, other than grotesques and monstrous bodies, made of various parts, without any certain figure, or any other than accidental order, coherence, or proportion?” —Montaigne, Essais
I immediately thought of Jack Parsons who helped found Jet Propulsion Laboratory. He was involved in a cult. Rockets and weird shit, they just go together.