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CHAPTER 5 THE TREE OF KNOWLEDGE 
BACK TO THE PAST'S PRESENT
I'm not getting anywhere. I've been in this smallish Service Station, now, for quite a while. It's like a crammed can of sardines
I want to leave but everybody is going into Lyon.
I hang around the self-service part of the Station, where hot and cold drink-machines surround me and surround the other customers, in mute concert stimulating need, and, also, surround two, chest-high, chairless, circular tables upon which to put one's food and drinks. Anyway, nothing is happening for me. And i'm sort of getting anxious about my progress. Am i in a trap? Though still on the motorway going South, had i been sucked too far, into Lyon's heart, to be able to get beyond Lyon's sprawling body with a single lift from here? Perhaps, i'lI have to settle for any lift into Lyon; just go where the motor flood will take me and from there --somewhere in Lyon-- wend myself out of it by local transport to a hitch-hiking take-off position going intercity South.
INFORMATION RETRIEVAL
But where? From 'what' or from 'whom' can i retrieve this information?
5=5+5+2 I walked out of Lyon because i was young and strong and desired a test of my body strength and to answer my spirit's need for adventure.
Yet, some person had told me that 5 kilometers down the road was a Service Station.
and couldn't find the Service Station. The motorway ran alongside of where i was. But no Service Station.
Speaking to people, i was told that
So i walked into that summer night, walked out of Lyon along the motorway, walked alongside a huge depot of ten-story high Petrol tanks, walked alongside the fire-spouting, as-in-hell, petrol refineries, walked more than two hours and still no Service Station in sight. I couldn't turn back. So i continued walking, with the heavy weight of a rucksack on my back.
WHAT IS LYON TO ME?
When the river forces the swimmer onto dry land,
then the swimmer
Should i continue hitching in Lyon,
I could reconceptualize what Lyon is to be for me. Insteadof treating Lyon as a stretch of complicated roadway on my hitch-hike to Toulouse, i could understand it as a kind of magic marsh
i could treat Lyon as though it were a woman
What shall i talk about to Madame Lyon? She requires more than talk for her pleasure. She wants me to discover her insides. She is available. I'm available too. i tell her, "I shall dance within you, make love to your parts. But evening is coming on. Where inside you shall i sleep? I won't pay for one of your hotel rooms. I would not want to prostitute you."
I don't know the lay of the land.
This Lyon four years on.
Before,the major North-South Motorway coursed through Lyon's center.
REVELATION AND MEMORY Ahhh!! That is the reason
I have come too far in! The ring road has already branched away! Fuck it!
I always had quite easily gotten over this hump, Lyon, in my hitch-hiking South. But this time i'm really in a jam.
It's getting on to evening. For me evenings are very difficult in a new city. Night entry into Lyon, the unknown, seems a necessity. Fuck it!
Except,
or, out of sight, under one of the building's awnings. It's fairly murky out, but i have a good sleeping bag.
Or --my favorite solution for winter weather--
Hitch-Hike On The Information Highway
My heavy, wheeled rucksack makes every spatial move of mine taxing. Every dead-end would be payed for. So i must move last and think first.
I know nearly nothing about Lyon. I never spent a relaxed day in it. For me, she had been only an obstacle.
into other, information highway files.
ASKING QUESTIONS
stored in dead material or in dead machinery,
As though a modern Sherlock Holmes doesn't need to use his body. He need only plug himself into
As though reality didn't require a million, billion updates per second,
As though reality didn't
Besides, i am of the 'old' school. I prefer people to machines. from 'whom' rather than from 'what' to receive my succulent fruits of knowledge.
It reveals, to me, where --in this knowledge-- the person takes pride.
And the gal or guy answers from the bedrock of personal experience. And the gal or guy blesses me with true knowledge. It is here where my sacredness enters. It is one with my refusal to not understand exactly what someone else is saying. So i ask and ask. Becoming a child again. Asking about everything. Interested in everything. I want to be astonished by grown ups.
REVERY ON ARTIFICIAL LIFE
I might say to myself,
as i might say to myself
And as a perfect slave, its raw material --its 'INFORMATION'-- must be originally supplied.
Where is the morality of shallow sequences of 0's and 1's? Are our received and achieved subtleties of conviction
For shallow knowledge, called information, perfect-recall is desireable.
PERFECT RECALL I was a student in New York,
But Friedrichs kept on asking for
After a while, the young researcher couldn't contain himself, and said, to Friedrichs ,
And Friedrichs , answered him, saying,
When you can't remember, a rethink is obligatory.
STUPID QUESTIONS Another truth, much in the same direction,
came about in the following manner.
It was to be three lectures upon
--a sort of frightening, grinding region of darkness--
Professor X,
During the first lecture, for about twenty minutes, i followed what X was doing. Prof Kurt Otto Friedrichs, sitting in the first row with all the other, smiling, confident, proven mathematicians, about the five minute mark, asked a question of which i felt ashamed for the prestige of our Institute.
But X chatted a bit to Friedrichs and it all got cleared up. I thought Friedrichs showed himself to be an idiot. His query had to do with an error arrising from Friedrichs forgetting one of the earlier definitions made by X. I was ashamed that such a stupid question can come from one of Our Professors.
Friedrichs again posed a question
What counts is what you do with the information or lack of information.
The BIGreal-timeMedia doesn't ask to be answered or altered. It asks to be watched, understood, booed or applauded IN THE PRESENT
feeding us
feeding the older of us
As this last description is true for
More than useless information for most everybody.
We cannot practice such SCIENCE. There are real guards at the real gates of ITS real laboratories
THE PUBLIC FRONT FOR THE GUIDINGHAND OF YOUTHFUL THINKING,
YOU DON'T GET TWENTY STEPS BEYOND THE DOOR.
Like COUNT DRACULA
It disdains discussion with the common person. It haughtily sees itself as the only experts in its field. THE DEPARTMENTS OF EDUCATION AND SCIENCE want only second-hand-information bearers...
It makes exams to judge
In the hands of THE DEPARTMENTS OF EDUCATION AND SCIENCE we can only hope
TOGETHER THE TWO DRACULAS FORM A TEAM.
The BIGreal-timeUniversity For Good CitizensMedia'
"IT IS THE WORLD'S GREAT SIN,
THEY ARE THE SWORN ENEMIES OF AN INDIVIDUAL'S WORTH. THEY ARE THE SWORN ENEMIES OF PERSONAL ADVENTURE. THEY ARE THE WOOD-BE MURDERERS OF UNCORRALED LIFE. Were i to leave this discussion here, i would be accused of sowing hatreds and not strengths, sowing blind DOGMA and not hopeful encouragement. So i continue.
Have you ever questioned the assertion 1+1=2 ? Reconquering understanding can begin at the beginning. At what age were you dragooned into 1+1=2 ?
When you, WHILE carrying 1+1=2 ?,
THE IRRATIONALITY OF THE RATIONAL
THE RATIONALE OF THE IRRATIONAL
People must believe themselves bound by rational social rules. WHY? How else could a social system maintain its internal rationality? How else could a social system believe in a perfectly recallable answer? How else could 'The Absolute History Of The World' be conceived? How else could 'Progress' be believed? How else could people be led? How else could fences be accepted? How else could hitch-hiking be condemned?
THE BEST MEMORY BANKS
If i were to take a lift into Lyon, i should go to a car garage, and ask the drivers, "How do you get to the motorway going South?" Or, i should wait at a red light, and querry the stopped drivers? Yes. These are better ways than the dead route of the computer information highway.
But how can i recognize a hitch-hiker to ask him my question? By his dress? That's impossible. You couldn't pick me out from the crowd by my dress.
But, if not all hitch-hikers are pick-out-able by their dress,
Answer: The young people of Lyon who can't afford The System's prices.
They are in front of this free-travel problem,
I have only to look for such a human variety of youth.
My hitch-hiking, information retrieval problem has now become crystal clear. I am now preparedto take a lift into Lyon tomorrow morning.
What a marvelous position to be in for an elder person! What a marvelous place in this fluid universe!
Mediterranean MEMORIES
i'd go up to the first, non-defeated young person i would see in Lyon, who was dressed as though he didn't participate in The Money-Kulture, and say
COPPING OUT My thoughts continue to jerk out like a tongue which has discovered the sharp whereabouts of a hole in a tooth,
At that moment, of giving in, there is a release FROM NERVOUS TENSION.
From that moment my voyage promises to be a smooth, downhill ride.
But i know also, that i must treat my life in a strategic fashion.
I understand that my hitch-hiking religiosity is impure. When blocked, without a qualm, i am ready to push the required money across the guichet window to a poor fucker bound to his official seat. i would feel it as though i was temporarily best-ed by the death machine, and admitting it, wanting to hurry-on into my life's next challenges. Hurry on, knowing that i have a rendez-vous with this problem again. Hurry on, feeling confident.
THE SOCIAL PRICE OF DROPPING IN
BUT, apart from their time-clock quickness, i find their travel tediously long. The cocooned life-style, forced on the voyager, kills potential excitement. An atmosphere akin to a social desert is fostered
Make your choice and your arse must die there,
Nobody is expected to speak
Adjacent to me are fellow travellers who have payed for their seats, and, thereby, rendered essentially useless to me as i am to them.
So mostly, people remain silent, separate, secure in their seats,
in which to stretch out or enact some other self-cushioning activity.
Why be blocked in by Proper Behaviour In Public ? So, i go in search of people with whom to talk.
--except by me.
To there i escape, with all my rucksack gear. Though it's a drag, i still do it. Death is death though it only be in the form of muteness. So you now have a more rounded appreciation of me. I am a very social person. Train compartments, in whose poisoned atmosphere nobody dare speak,
Unhappily, in each train, as the train carries them onwards, there are tens of people who would enjoy discovering each other , --akin to the fleeting contacts between hitch-hiker and driver-- who are forced to not even try for a single contact.
I was searching for something that only the voyagers could give me.
I was searching for a something which i don't remember now.
from huge audiences of a thousand to intimate tete-a-tetes.
for i'd pick-up on what's being said
Like throwing a ball into the common space and then keeping it rolling, if the others didn't.
And what i discovered is:
and stupidity. Yet, what an opportunity is travel with a hundred people! All sorts to meet, to gravitate to, to move away from. All sorts of people.
Cocooned. We are cocooned. We are cocooned We are cocooning ourselves. De-cocoon! De-cocoon! We must De-cocoon.
So you now know why i don't rate buses or train-travel very high.
I have money enough to pay for the voyage. But why make my voyage stupid? Why make my life stupid? Why not go into adventure land where miracle people show some of their powers to me and i, in return, unveil mine? Outside of The Kulture i travel. And gather real, important knowledge outside The Kulture.
CONFIDENCE FROM A DEEP POCKET I got the money to pay for the money options to escape this magnet, Lyon,
In Lyon, i can pay Lyon to whisk me to
I can pay.
I can cop out of hitch-hiking by accepting one of the many offers into Lyon.
Then
and, then,
"By the way," he says,
and he goes shuffling off and brings back this map of motorway France
I say o.k. and he gives me the map. Satisfied, he turns and goes out the door. I follow him. Just to the right of the door, ten steps away, is his transport machine.
I know them well. I've ridden in many a friend's "Deux Chevaux". Great for the independent artisan that he tells me he is. He is a metal worker. He has always been in business for himself.
We walk to the back of the well-worn van to stow away my rucksack. The back of the van is filled with his artisan gear. He tells me he is going near Avignon to where his wife lives with their son. He lives in Paris. He hands me a couple of finished metal pieces fashioned for his wife's house. I don't know what building's system they are part of,
He rearranges his gear to make room for my rucksack. I turn around and suck the night air.
Turning to him, i get a better look at this 'he', with whom i will be spending some part of my lifetime. He keeps an unlit pipe in his mouth all the time. He is wearing workman's clothes. There's no money pretentions about him. He's shorter than me by a half a foot. One of his legs he uses as though it is in a cast. He is strong, but crooked. For some reason, i am worrying about going with him. But he's the only going offer, so into his '2-horse chariot' i descend.
Inside and before i strap myself in, i give him the thirty francs i owe him for the map.
Takeoff is about to happen.
He, suddenly, turns proudly to me,
And he smiles at me again and says, "Pedra".
He is a very down-to-earth sort of guy. Very open. I am meeting Pedra.
We're zooming. The rays of headlights are eratically broken by the night and its heavy mist. Surrealism invades us. The mad melange of lights, like searchlights of a prison, donates a fearful intimacy as i settle-in for the night's journey, settling-in to encounter a man of the earth, a pipe-smoking, artisan. The light patterns are quick and violent and irrational. Pedra is hidden under this play of lights .
He tells me he is in treatment for throat cancer.
His pipe is no longer lit. A little later he wants to smoke again but he can't find any matches. He's looking everywhere, groping with his hands everywhere,
as the car hurdles forward. He has to find a match. He has to smoke. He asks me to check the car's glove compartment just in front of me. I do. There's no unused matches to be found anywhere.
I consider his proposal There are now three cars behind us, and fifteen in front. There is a line of cars to the left of us and a line to the right of us. Our car is bottled in. Moreover, we are in a one-way part of a very controlled motor-way system. There is no turning around. All cars must continue forward till they pass through the toll gates.
I think i am safe in leaving my rucksack in his car, separate from it, and reconnoitre the other cars around me. I would be doing something i had never done before in my life.
So i jump out and hurriedly make a half-circuit of the neighboring cars and tap at their windows
No one rolls down their windows to find out more. They universally deem me crazy. All this happens very quickly. I am on edge. All my systems are working at 111% I am always uncertain about separating from my rucksack. The rare person who pushes me to it --like Pedra is doing now-- is involuntarily signalling to my paranoid me,
So, when i get to the car just in front of ours,
i, very theatrically, shake my head "Nothing Doing"
and jump back in the car and fasten myself in and feel safe once again.
He understands my failure to get him matches is not my fault. People don't believe in your sanity if you do anything in in-appropriate circumstances. What i was doing was too different to be believed.
So Pedra is determined to stop at the next motorway Service Station,
Lyon, all this while has travelled behind us. We are on the other side of the magnet. We have escaped its pull. But his need for matches is greater. It drags us into the forecourt of the first motorway Service Station beyond Lyon, going South.
PEDRA LETS ME HAVE IT In fact, as we are pulling in, he decides he better put some petrol in the tank. So he drives to a petrol pump and stops the car. I get out and hang around, stretching my legs while he puts in a hundred francs worth of petrol, pays for it and then, all of a sudden, shouts something at me, and goes walking off to get something i don't quite know what.
He goes walking off Into the sharp, white lights of the huge Station, hobbling one good foot after one bad foot swinging back and forth, getting smaller and smaller, hobbling to the very distant other side of this large Service area for cars and trucks. He just hobbles away into the surrealist midst of this black-white luminosity, leaving behind him, me and his car in which my dear rucksack is snuggled.. In which is found a very good video camera. I am left alone. I can't go anywhere. It may be a trap. If i leave he might arrive and just drive off. So i have to stay, and wait.
I say to myself, "o.k. this is the last extraction of money from me, you're going to make, Pedra." But i don't voice these thoughts. I keep them from him. I merely show him a lack of enthusiasm
He's taken out two gerry cans, and i'm beginning to understand. He wants to fill them both with petrol direct from the pump. I'm to hold the funnel , in place: keeping the funnel's narrow end in the mouth of a standing gerrycan and he is going to place the petrol pump's muzzle into the funnel's wide open end and fire. I take hold of the funnel and place it firmly in place. I know how to be a good apprentice helper to artisans. He takes the nozzle in his hands, points, and then, all of a sudden, with no outside causes apparent, ---as though he is having an orgasm--- he loses control of the nozzle and it jumps wildly around, pumping petrol everywhere. And i get a wack on my clothes And my left eye takes a dousing.
The sting in my eye is gone. Everything seems to be getting back to normal. We have a coffee. He pays.
THE ACTION CONTINUES Till now, i have always been compliant to his iniatives. And his iniatives have quite a scope. He must see me as a very plastic type. One with whom he can go very far. One who might prove to be the needed co-actor
"Attention! Danger!" my instincts roar within.
We go back to the car and he says, that he's decided to immediately empty one of the gerrycans into his car's tank. No explanations do i ask. No explanations does he offer.
(Before we did that. Now we will do this.)
"Yes i'll help you. What do you want me to do?"
Of a sudden, he gives me a mission: to get him some matches. He goes walking off in his hobbling act once again across the car park into the light-dazzled world. I see him fade into the distance. I judge that i have time enough before he comes back
I don't trust him returning to the car
He might just drive off 'without thinking'. I'm not going to allow him to undo me under the cover of an accident.
He's a guy who is an obsessive smoker. He must have two pipe inhalations whenever he wants. Which is very often. So he keeps his pipe in his mouth always.
THE INSIGHT
So far, in this voyage , Pedra has called every tune.
So Pedra now must feel he could pretty well do anything with me. I have been an innocent doll dancing to his music.
So i go to the back of the van.
I close the door and wheel my rucksack fifty steps away. I place it next to the entrance to the Services' large store-restaurant.
I want to tell him 'thanx for the lift.'
Though my frugal economic alarm bell is ringing,
It is wordlessly appreciating the insight gained
And the accident was caused by his incapacities to handle the petrol pump's muzzle. Yet, it was he who suggested this operation.
Till now, to everything he's asked of me, I've only said "yes". But i'm not buying him a cigarette lighter for 18 francs!
"But i owe you many more kilometers" You must come with me! You must!" and he doesn't take my "No" as final. He is trying to crash in on my independence of being. "You must come with me!" he is shouting with fury. I say "No." and that's final and start to walk off. He quickly gets in front of me and blocks my way and demands that i come back in the car with him. "I owe you more kilometers."
In the drinks area i stop. He's still at me, demanding, --refusing my right of sovereignty over myself. There's no one around. I'll reason once more with him. "Thank you. I don't want to go further. I'll stop here for the moment." He responds, "What are you going to do here? Wait more? I'll give you a lift right now. It's cold and its night-time. Come with me."
All at once i've blown his expectancies and, all at once, he is confronted with the failure of them.
"No" again i say and seeing that he'll not let up till i've capitulated, i, once again, take the initiative and wend my body and pull my rucksack on wheels across this huge Station's indoor consumer-torium to a table in front of a bar, with a waitress behind the bar serving and chatting with 4 bona fide clients. They understand that something is going on when i take a seat in front of them and to make sure they understand, i quietly, but forcefully, announce: "The guy won't leave me alone," i speak to them across a small gulf of space, so that they know that i am looking to them for security.
Pedra comes over to me and starts again the same harangue, as loud as before. It's as though we are having a family dispute. As though he is my father telling me to come back with him etc. And i am leaving.
What a coocoo world this is! He's still imploring me to go with him. Passionate, intimate sentences, upon passionate, intimate sentences
But i am sure of my grounds.
He continues his harrangue
I become mute and concentrate on looking at the bar and its clientele
Witnesses are being created as he continues to implore me. His position is getting dangerous for himself.
I am still sitting at the table in front of the bar. I am vibrating. I can't get tranquil. My body is finally telling me in what danger it felt itself. I can't settle down. I go over to a table in the automatic drinks area. I take a seat there. But i can't settle down. To think i was as close as nothing at all to follow him further. What danger! Only now do i think of the melange of petrol in the gerrycan back of his seat, and his incessant use of matches, and his still, uncured cancer of the throat. Of my willingness to go along with him... of my marvelous confidence to risk that night ride with him to get beyond Lyon. I've hitched enough to know its a rarity
When i entered his car and, probably before, i knew i had to be on my toes with him. I knew that i had to be responsible for the car's safety.
Anyway, anyway. I'm on the other side of Lyon, in a large Service Station, poised to descend quickly toward Avignon and the sweep of Mediterranean coast-road, passing near Carcassonne and Narbonne, the easiest part of my voyage, on my way to the city of the plain, Toulouse.
POST SCRIPT
The problem began for them, once in the car or cabin. Will the guy lose his self-control, and let his sexuality drive him to be unfriendly?
Only once, did i come across that which a woman might frequently confront. I was picked up by a guy who only spoke Italian. I don't speak Italian but my weak Spanish allowed me some Italian comprehension.
We're buzzing along the Mediterranean, when somehow he let's me know that he wants to have me sexually. I, a bit shocked, refuse. And he pulls over to the side of the road, near nowhere, and says, "Get Out."
Once, hitch-hiking with Rosy, it happened that a lorry driver had somehow convinced us to accept being split up. (It shows how naive we were then.)
I was to remain, where i was, in some abandoned, lorry park. It was very crazy. (How naive we were then.) I even left my rucksack in the lorry.
Rosy is a wise gal when it comes to men.
So i had confidence in her ability to come through. But now i was worrying.
My irrational mind plays with the idea that Rosy is going off with him.
Yet, risks have to be taken in life.
Perhaps hitch-hiking in this fear-ridden era has its risks? Thirty and forty years ago, hitch-hiking was an unthreatening adventure. Today, so i am told by people who read The Media,
The Media can blow up one story sky-high and make what they will of it. I never saw an article in praise of hitch-hiking in The (established) Media. So i know for certain that they are against it. The Bus companies and train companies are certainly against it.
The doing-something-for-nothing mind-set
So rare cases of violence in the world outside of their domination are magnified, making hitch-hiking and all 'free' behaviour to appear full of horrendous risks.
How far i go into my risks, is how far i enlarge my freedom. My confidence in my own judgement of what is risky
It can grow large --and that only through risk-taking--
What a greater danger that is!
I have entered cars and lorries in which i really was uncertain.
My mind naturally turned to the question:
I don't get frightened in such a case.
The more i understand the less i fear.
And i am for him. He is doing me a favour. He is giving me a lift. But i am not less aware of him as a a potential danger. He wasn't a talker. And his mood was a deep dark purple. It worked out all right. He dropped me where i wanted to be dropped. We left each other amicably.
As i remember it,
They were in the middle of nowhere when the car driver says he's going to stop for a piss. Going, as though to piss, behind some trees, he masturbates looking at her. When he got back into the car,
It was a very difficult hitch-hiking location. Getting a lift was not going to be easy.
When he offered, she accepted.
"Because I accepted his lift", she says now, "he learned a lot." Because i know Kathy, i know he learned a lot.
My response to her story, i do remember. I told her:
The final part, "The Tao", will appear later this year. The author welcomes the usage and publication of this work for non-commercial purposes. He also welcomes correspondence!
Martin Segal |