DESERT HEARTS
                                     


Before you study Zen, mountains are mountains and rivers are rivers; while you are studying Zen, mountains are no longer mountains and rivers are no longer rivers; but once you have had enlightenment mountains are once again mountains and rivers again rivers.

I read and loved Riders Of The Purple Sage before I'd heard of Jerry Garcia, and the raid on Lavoisier in the Desperados chapter is my tribute to the best Western ever. Okay, it's not Utah, there aren't any cliff indian houses, or any hidden valley, or, er, any cows. Still, the Cow Castle & all that's from here. In spirit. The link takes you to an appreciation.

Roll the stone, Lassiter...!
Sadly, the splendid site run by the webmaster of Darwin, Inyo County, is having a break, but I've made the link in case it comes back. This was the Death valley neighbourhood ghost town location I scouted for Lavoisier, and it has many points in common. Tho' not, so far as I know, a haunt of no-knickers Goths or death wish geeks.

As a vaguely hippie undergraduate, I tried A Separate Reality. I quickly concluded it was rubbish, fake, and dull. Coming back to it, well, the bloke was clearly a charlatan, but it's not such a crime. Maybe he transported the 'Rinzai', or sudden, school of Zen to Mexico, because he fancied doing a mystical-path thing (for sound financial reasons I daresay); and called it Yaqui because he was too bone-idle lazy to go out and research the Toltec dao. I leave you to judge.


We must clean house thoroughly, for they have made use of an enigmatic language peculiar to themselves, which in general presents one meaning for the adept and another for the vulgar, and at the same time contains nothing that is rationally intelligible either for one or for the other."

Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier is the original and greatest scientist in a time of revolution. He drew chemistry into existence, out of the bizarre soup of precursor protiens that had existed before, just as magic (fusion consciousness) becomes science in my fantasy 21st century. Married to Marie-Anne Pierrette Paulze when she was not yet fourteen, whereupon she taught herself engraving and became a competent translator of scientific English, so she could work with him in the lab. There's a tragic story about how Lavoisier ended up under the blade of the guillotine, it concerns Marie-Anne, and it's not the one everybody knows. I'll leave you to find out for yourself. The more I found out about them both, the better I liked them. Hey, compadres.
the stuff about the goldfish and so on comes from: Antoine Lavoisier: Science, Administration and Revolution (Cambridge Science Biographies) Arthur Donovan, David Knight (Preface)

Blinking for 20 seconds? Nah, not Lavoisier. Some other bloke. I'm sure the guillotine story's apocryphal. But definitely a meme.