remington, in
harriman, contact, c r.n., (made), directive, accepted, northern, remington, old indiana, agricultural security collective, growing and harvesting, predominantly corn, community built around and about functions, specialized? dangerously so? possibly, ,, apparently strong barter community in west remington and great diversity of crop usage... corn crop applications: (foodstuffs) gluten, bran, meal, grits, hominy, flour, sweetener. (utility) fabric, rope, fuel, structures (bundled and dried stalks, approach bamboo in tensile properties). distance to remington? 789 km. contact in remington?
this is my move? is it? am i comfortable engaging an already active community. honestly, i am not an idea man, i am a transcriber. do they need me? i am willing and i am enthusiastic. timespan... i will dedicate myself for 5 years, a full crop cycle...
when i had been in remington for some time, the effects of those early years, my last in atlanta, became clear. those days did not really play into my efforts that focused inward on our small community. i had lost touch with folks from my past by then, those people i saw as icons of the grander movement, having moved and shook the usonian pillars into new heaps. we moved seamlessly into times where the outspoken primacy of the urban centers had settled into the not necessarily idyllic, but livable landscapes defined by self-determination, empowerment, and creativity. we felt alive and we felt as though we were moving forward. if not through the progress that defines ages, at least through our own lives, as organisms expending energy, without regard to our own pasts much less the past of our civilization. we longed for nothing, no one, and we had not the idle time or the ennui that had once dragged us into the collective unconscious to battle the demons of spiritual death. we were not distracted from all of this; those things had been our distractions. we lived. during my travels to reach remington and my time thereafter, i learned a certain equivalence. that continuity through all the people and the lands i encountered was uncertainty. these had been uncertain times and they engendered determination and drive. that collective uncertainty was also levelled across the field of play, and it took that for each of us to truly live for ourselves and with an immediacy that caused us to be truly alive. we were exhausted and we dwelled in hope rather than regret. having no recourse but to hold yourself entirely responsible for your own survival does not afford you the spirit that can regret. regret is idle. regret is the end of survival. we were uncertain though because now, it was given that we each needed to create our own conditions. suitability and fit were no longer acquiesced to. yet, having been prescribed conditions under which to live our entire lives, we were overwhelmed and scared. we knew even then, it had been the poultice on our collective ennui, that the demographics and tombs that had defined us as glossy groups also brought us to resent our fellows. yet, it was only through an evolution that included the history we had travelled through in which the myth of individuality was developed that we could now both live in an equal yet individual society. we retained the rights we needed yet shed what in the animal kingdom was law but in intelligent society became an excuse, that one must fail for another to succeed. during those ten years i lived in remington, i believe i held these ideals so firmly that i feared encroaching on the liberties and trajectories of others; i was solitary and elusive. it took a figure from that grand past to remind me that my debt to the greater collective was to continue affecting that trajectory lest it cycle back upon itself.
this morning at 5h30, shortly before dawn, my quad awoke. today we rose slightly earlier than usual as it was imperative that we callibrate and synchronize our long range reflectors in darkness. in the dark i could hear voices calling out approximations of altitudes, bearings, deflections (concavity or convexity of reflectors). my own reflector system creaked on the roof of my chambre. we were able to reach an approximated alignment at about 20 minutes before sunrise. i ascended to the crow's nest to await the tiny birth of the day and get the first glimps of our new monitoring tract.
this past week, a plot of hybrids was harvested and some strawberry seedlings were sown. our quad is in the most effective location to monitor this newly revealed stretch of the horizon which expands out south of the tracks. also, quad 7, which could have picked up this zone, only has the capability to run 2km excedo horizontem while our array can pick up 5km.
the sun gently peeked above the overpass out at i65 and we called out to make our final adjustments. tower 4.1 was picking up some glare which would have translated into certain blindness for the rest of us come full breach. this was a simple matter to rectify and we were soon all gathered in tower 4.3 to observe the first quarter reflections of the new tract.
the reflector shewed several square kms of harvested fields cut by asphalt and dirt roads. we all looked over the terrain carefully and without speaking, familiarizing ourselves with the features of the tableau. it was still, tall grasses swayed at the edge of a road and the focused sun illuminated the east faces of a bordering crop of hybrid corn-beans. the posts for a future corn-bean crop marched across the middle of the tableau like the head of some cenobite, and through the array, at about 4.6km out, strode a man on foot with a tall green pack. i think we all saw him at the same time yet the two scouts were gone before i could even comment. i watched him for a few minutes curiously, having no idea what he was about to drop into my routine day.
i watched from my tower as the scouts escorted the man with the pack through the blind alley and left him to ascend my scaffold. he was rather nimble and dropped his pack over the rail before throwing his feet onto the planks and resting his backside and palms on the rail with elbows bent.
«i will not waste your time this morning amsterdam. it was important to publius/3 that someone come in person.»
«publius/3?! are you from manhattanville?»
«yes. well, i was. i am on my way to the republic of los angeles county. publius/3 has left manhattanville as well. he insisted that i find you here. he has been following up on you since you left atlanta and has some things he wants to relate to you and to ask of you. i am to do both, and here you are, just as publius/3 said you would be. things are much different than when you two were in contact. things have changed in this land. every day an old standard we had lived in spite of is toppled. you once had a hand in that did you not? i never understood why you left it behind.»
«what the fuck are you talking about? i am continuing on doing just what i was.»
«amsterdam, you are a security guard. you are operating at a scale that, well, do not get me wrong, is seated within the swells of change, but it rides them, it does not guide them or incite them anew. the system underneath all of this, under what you are doing here, under what is happening in atlanta, and under what is going to happen everywhere else needs to keep changing. it stopped changing for a long time because people fell in line with it. that is what you are doing now. you have been here for how long? ten years? nobody can be indentured to a context for that long. it used to be that we were, not because we wanted to be, but because the system we were indentured to did not change as fast as we needed it to. that system is not in place any longer, amsterdam, not for the time being. not as long as we remain fluid, not as long as the social tendency toward order and dependence cannot catch us. there always have to be some people doing the work of the system, amsterdam. there are too many of us for there not to be a baseline, an infrastructural population. but you are not one of those people, you were not and you should not be. it was clear to all of us in manhattanville that you were a meliorist. it was a disappointment then to me, to publius/3, to manhattanville, to wait so long on your experiment out here to run its course. the grand experiment, the current reality we are riding, needs you. publius/3 is en route to the old capital, arlingtonton and georgetown. i suspect you will want to meet with him.»
this was all over before 7h00 this morning. it is nightfall and i am bedded down with some colleagues in wolcott. i said goodbye to my quad at 10h30 this morning. it took me 70 minutes to pack and rig my reflector. and so i dive beneath the swells to swim cross current, back across the land, to arlingtonton.
