Daily Super High

Inner Solar Eclipse

"The world is constantly filling up with entities that can survive well and is being liberated from those that cannot," says Richard Dawkins. Societies are communities of information carriers. They only survive as long as they have the strength to change. In the interim of survival, diversity is the only constant.  

No remembrance societies will emerge from this war with kettledrums and trumpets, thought Staff Sergeant Amsterdam Vaughan. It will all be forgotten in a moment or forever disgraced. Okra and black-eyed beans - Amsterdam came from a moonshine dynasty in Jerry Lee Lewis' hometown of Ferriday on the Louisiana side of the Mississippi. He thought of a 1950s Technicolor phantasmagoria  with John Wayne on the deck of an aircraft carrier in front of a shattered coastline and under a sky full of tracers and kamikaze pilots on speed. Resting next to Amsterdam was Second Lieutenant Binh Văn Hương. Binh opened one eye. Lightships streaked over treetops, their wings sailing. Lightships - flying gunships - gunships. 

Lockheed C-130 Hercules - it's Gatling machine gun could fire 6000 rounds per minute.  

The gunships shaved a jungle fringe and shot trees to shreds. During the Tet Offensive, Amsterdam had been hit by shrapnel from a Claymore mine, he had been patched up in Japan, the longest scar measuring a whopping eight inches. Amsterdam could have been sent home.

Many were left lying in the dirt. Binh had seen troopers go insane from exhaustion. Some men lacked the strength to swat a fly off their noses. 

 A machine gun sang its song. Men slipped back into their holes like released dolls, the fire ships turned away. An American lieutenant dropped to his knees, looking annoyed. Amsterdam said, "Doesn't seem to be a game for higher ups." 

In Wyoming they called bull testicles prairie oysters, Amsterdam handled official matters with the equanimity of a man who can imagine nothing else but being worn out in battle. His manners betrayed little, as if he feared that an image of him might be solidified and he might be pinned down to it. Amsterdam's ancestors had competed with white and black sharecroppers for the rim of fat just under the back skin of domestic pigs. Their gumbo, a stew with fish and meat, denied its relationship to bouillabaisse, because bouillabaisse sounded like treason.

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An inner solar eclipse darkens the Swabian rebel at the end of the 1970s. In her original surroundings, she discovers only narrowness and dreariness. Following a family quarrel, Doris moves abruptly from Ö... at the river Enz to Frankfurt at the river Main. On the day of her arrival, she finds a bright, unusually large room in a shared flat in Sachsenhausen (a district of Frankfurt). On her first night, Doris becomes the lover of the lion-like philosophy lecturer Wolf von Löwenstein. Before the end of her first week in Frankfurt, Binh arrives at the mat and smiles at Wolf's foaming claim to power. He takes his place in the regalia of magical certainties. He makes love to Doris under her personal canopy of sagging sheets, while her comrades argue in the kitchen. Melodies of fear underscore their irritation. Incendiary devices have been set off in the Hamburg office of Grönewolf, Reinhardt & Degenhardt. (A left-wing law firm.) Reinhardt also represented the German terrorist Gudrun Ensslin. 

"As a co-founder and leading member of the Red Army Faction, she was involved in five bomb attacks with four fatalities. On October 18, 1977, she died by suicide ... in Stammheim."  Wikipedia

Wolf blames the cop state for the terror. He has the big word, but that means that those who are always better informed than the rest are just going around the houses. Wolf leads the rest, which can be seen as sad and unpromising. Binh sucks on the smell of the woman's room. He is a child of war, the colors of peace are unfamiliar to him.

In some shared flats, the doors are locked, which is out of the question for Doris. She stumbles over her shame boundaries, she knows that she is wearing a character mask, just as she is aware that capitalism is one-sidedly quantitative in its origins and core: the production of ever larger quantities of goods, of which Doris finds every quantity chic. Her self-confident orgasm makes the flat-sharing community sit up and take notice of how Wolf takes it.

Some are gloating, others worried. Doris and Binh mobilize their qi in a ritual that the unsuspecting must mistake for tantra sex. It's a Buddhist revelation, a greeting from the jungle. The couple experience a meltdown. 

Binh is back in the Vietnamese jungle. He shoots a sniper, searches for the body and finds a dead girl in the enemy's black uniform. 

Someone pulls a living child out from under corpses.

Binh stands on the sidelines. He has the mimic and gestural agility of a statue. An explosiveness of mistrust and introverted irritation boils inside him. 

Doris turns onto her stomach in front of Binh. She also sees her own movie. So out of it and yet completely there: it's a state that can only be achieved with the body's own drugs.