Strange Attractor by Graham St John
“They ‘really pressed upon us…the idea that everything is alive,’ Klea has noted about her parents. A species of animism came to permeate their everyday life. ‘If I stepped on something, or even slammed my bedroom door, I would apologize to the door.’ When contemplating Finn and Klea, I am compelled to think of the deferred pressure evoked by Terence when speaking of the challenges faced by ‘alienated individuals’ who raise children. He couldn’t allow his kids to grow up to be ‘marks,’ he declared, to be ‘pawns of the market economy and the propaganda machine, people scratching their heads trying to figure out whether they’re Republicans or Democrats.’ No, ‘they must join in the alienation,’ he thought. “They must be taken out of the culture as we were taken out of the culture.’ It was ‘the only way to find the self.’ As a result, Finn and Klea were not like the others; they were meant for something different. ‘Anything, even total failure, was better than mediocrity,’ said Klea. Being intelligent mattered a great deal more than being happy.”
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”The family eke out an unusual existence, with their feet planted in both the beige universe of eighties America and the dark green underworld in which they thrive. Half of the time, they are cultural outsiders dwelling beyond jurisdiction, Klea explained, ‘not only of law enforcement and conventional codes of conduct, but also of television advertising, big box stores, PTA meetings, anything that approximated mainstream culture.’ They sometimes participate in soccer games, birthday parties, and other conventional activities, but only as interlopers imagining themselves as spies, or as their mother was known to proclaim before arriving at events in the world of the normals: ‘undercover anthropologists.’ But while Kat felt safer in the detached role of participant observer, ‘just enough distance to not be implicated in conformity,’ Klea adds, ‘my father was less subtle.’ At the age of eight she recalls a moment when the family was escaping a birthday party at Chuck E. Cheese. Turning to the crowd of teenage waiters, single parents, and sugar-saturated kids, he bellowed over the din of the arcade games: MEDIOCRITY IS DEATH!’”
-Graham St John
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”It’s going to happen—the egg shell is breaking. The womb is ruptured, and there is no way out now but some kind of journey down the very frightening birth canal of experience. The next 30 years will stand your hair on end, guaranteed, because it’s barely begun. Right now, we are living in the golden twilight of Western Civilization. The long afternoon of Cartesian rationalism. Ahead lies agricultural failure, atmospheric disruption, ethnic warfare, sexually transmitted diseases, propaganda, superdrugs, AND a whole bunch of good stuff. But it’s going to be a white-knuckled ride to break through at the end of time, because there is so much to be unleashed. What’s happening is we’re turning into something else.”
-Terence McKenna, 1992
