"Oh poor pale thing" said the Dogon elder of the western Sudan addressing the Pale Fox, " You who are useful for divination, tell me by your wanderings what the future will bring." The Dogon Elder waited for the Pale Fox to answer, letting his own mind link with the distant stars and constellations: the stone altar replicas of which were scattered all across the village.

"Brring!" The ivory coloured telefax machine beside the keyboard, rang again. This time the connection was allowed to proceed and the heat sensitive paper came spitting slowly out.

"Oh dour pale thing" said the Anthony Moore to the humming fax modem. You who are useful for machine to machine transmissions tell me by your murmurings what the future will bring."

In Anthony's mind, it was the greatest of coincidences that just like the Pale Fox and real stars with their ancestral connections, it was the imitation stars flung into heavenly orbit by fiery rockets which were responsible for most of the current pale fax linkages.

Even stranger, was that though these stars were all artificial, the ever present ancestors could apparently still use them. He knew this to be so, because as he read the incoming message he sensed that the contents were all about linking the ancestral voices with those of current griots and modern story tellers to allow the flows of the ancient love and knowledge to come pouring in from the Great Center of all Creation.

Anthony Moore there and then realized the highly important connection between the Dogon, the Pale Fox and the emergence of pale faxes in general all across the globe.

He remembered that the Dogon were masters of interstellar communication using entirely different networks and technologies. He remembered that they viewed Ogo - the Pale Fox, as an incomplete being; one who had rebelliously broken away from Creation before his time; one who was half formed, individualistic, dangerous, wild and inadequate.

On the other hand the Dogon, knew all about the completeness of their own creation. Who they were, and how it happened. Where their ancestors had come from through the spectrum of the great color grid. Their adepts still continue to visit them in the distant galaxies, going back and forth at will.

Masters of dream space, spirit time and trans-dimensional motion. But WHO KNEW? Or for that matter, who cared to believe their genius and sacred knowledge, being too caught up in useless Pale Fox fantasies.

The fax message that morning was all about identity and short stories and art, and culture, and poems, and fake alarms and faked histories and family branches and coconut trees and palm oil and date palms and irrigation and great giant cattle herds roaming the well pastured lands. Yes, this is what the ancestors were coming through to tell ever younger generations, via the fax machine that day. Not in words mind you but in the invisibles spaces they love to inhabit, there between the lines and amongst the molecules of tree fibers which went into making the paper page.

The document carried a letter-head from an American university. It turned out that his friend The Professor was compiling another anthology.... this time one of letters. He read her note in silence, imagining The Professor's voice.

"Dear Anthony, I am nearing completion of the digest and time is pressing, do you have any scripts (already completed) to send me? The polemical title is 'Living Colourblind- Writings on Art, Identity and Culture.' Fax or airmail your response."

Yes, she was obviously requesting contributions. But what connection was there supposed to be between essays and poems and art and identity and color and.... what was this? Color blindness? What was so important about color blindness anyway, to need to write about it. Certainly colour blindness had no place in the world of "art" which besides being about culture was essentially about light and colour.

Besides, why would The Professor suddenly now be interested in color blindness? Defective colour vision affects only about four in every hundred male humans and four in every thousand females. At any rate total, repeat total colour blindness is extremely rare.

Maybe, thought Anthony, the anthology was supposed to be more about identity than perception, since colour blind people are rarely aware of their disability until they are matched against others. Only then are they able to notice their own deficiencies. Mainly their failure to properly recognize hues from particular parts of the visual spectrum.

"Their other visual functions are fine," he said to himself,"it's just that they only see certain colours and not all the others.... Imagine a whole society that works like that."

"Even though they are impaired, all colour blind people can see yellow." His father in law had explained some years before by way of justifying why he had had his vintage Mercedes re-sprayed in yellow. "It will help avoid accidents."

He imagined a news story about the vision impairment. A colour blind entity was found stumbling around in the downtown area having missed the message of the traffic lights. The entity was reported to be completely unaware of when red was red, and green was green, and when amber was just old tree sap which had hardened over millions of years and still had flies trapped in it."

What a dangerous state to be in, thought Anthony. To be colour blind. To not know the vermillion of an apple or the scarlet of a tattered communist flag in a Moscow street, or the colour changes at all the twists and turns along the road that the universe may take.

He decided he definitely did not want to work color blindness into any of the stories he was currently writing.

On the other hand it occurred to him to mention in whatever he would send in response to the professor's request, that a colour blind entity could not have developed the traffic light like the African American Garret Morgan did. Morgan had used the colours red, gold and green or rather as some would have it, red, AMBER and green. The colours of the Ethiopian flag.

Was Morgan a closet Ethiopianist? Was he influenced perhaps by the crowning of the African emperor Haile Selassie or by the rantings and ravings of Marcus Garvey who was prophetically preaching about reclaiming one's identity and redemption and spiritual upliftment just around the time that Morgan was tinkering in his lab with red glass and green bulbs and gold lights and silver metal housings.

Which was another reason Anthony thought it was important to not be colorblind..... so as not to mistake the difference between gold and yellow and amber and silver.

Ostentatious, sometimes gaudy, but always expensive amber and silver jewelry were among the products he had sold in his craft store, and gallery back in Toronto Canada. Which is how he had met The Professor in the first place.

She had created installations, showed works of art and performed ritual acts in the gallery and demonstrated how important and possible it was to celebrate the African identity wherever one was, and in whatever one did. Sometimes the showings had even helped increase the sale of the amber and silver jewelry by attracting additional patrons.

There was also the ancestral significance of amber, an ancient commodity holding many memories in its molecular chains. The million year old petrified resin of trees from somewhere along Europe's Baltic shore line. The lands of the ancient Thracians and Scythians of North Asia, over which successive empire building Egypto-Nubian Kings like Sesostris had marched. No wonder people got into the habit of trying to drink powdered amber. After all even the colour blind could see it. Could they have been seeking to bring back ancestral memories?

Since a visit to Egypt twelve years earlier, Anthony himself had become very concerned about recall and ancestral memories. As it turned out, remembrance and lost rites were also very much The Professor's concerns.

The Professor was a pioneering artist and philosopher which would only partly explain why she was so interested in The Great Recall. She was one of a growing number of her generation who had become very aware, and even angry at how much and how very wickedly The Great Lie and Cover Up of Truth had been propagated, while the planet ground through its current period of psychic darkness.

He remembered one of their many discussions while sipping freshly brewed coffee in his kitchen.

" You know Anthony, in the spirit universe they must have started calling these The Darkest Ages over five thousand years ago." she had said. "The dark dark ages of plunder and savagery."

"Probably much more so over the past 500" he had replied, "especially when those tall ships with their billowing sails roamed the seas slaughtering everything in sight."

"I think we must keep the name in reserve and popularize its use again when the lights return to normal." The Professor had said.

Sitting beside the machine, fax print in hand, contemplating color blindness, Anthony decided that the wandering sailors of the Darkest Age for all their other insensitivities were nevertheless ruthlessly proficient in distinguishing hues in one very particular part of the spectrum. They pillaged and looted and always shot anything that looked a darker shade of brown. Brown bears, and Bantu, Bengals and Blackfoot and Buffalo across the Great Plains. Was it mere co-incidence that ship after loaded ship carried brown cinnamon, brown nutmeg and cloves, brown sugar, brown rum, and tea, brown cacao, brown coffee beans, and brown leaves of tobacco.

And yet thought Anthony, there must have been another side to color blindness, and this is when the strangeness of the village-like world in which he now lived began to manifest itself. A gecko, sporting the same ivory color as the fax machine, scuttled across the wall and peered down at him, then wiggling its wattles it produced a series of loud sucking screeches.

Ever since he had moved into his present house one year before, the ancestors had seen fit to use this community of lizards to communicate with Anthony. Their strategically timed throat noises were known to turn into whole discussions in his mind.

He looked up at the creature from his techno-table of communications boxes and wires and circuit boards and modems and motors and gear wheels, and without so much as an additional twitch of its tail the gecko began to explain some of the issues at hand.

"It was all too evident in the spirit universe," it said, "especially to those ancestors who were first hand witnesses, and even victims of these wild acts, that the limited color perception of the wild rovers was a symptom of something even more alarming. A feeling of cold nakedness and a profound spiritual numbness. An inner psychic darkness of a most unimaginable mind-less sort. And since the mind of the Divine is the ultimate ALLMIND, for an entity to be mindless; to not have any mind, mind you, means to not be connected. Means to not be linked as a nodal synaptic part of the divine omnipresence; to be the casualty of a lonely, sad and pathetic non-consciousness of a most unimaginably God-less sort."

This God-mind-lessness leaves an enormous spiritual vacuum into which can pour whatever thrash is floating around in spirit limbo in fear of going on into the light of the many sided glowing jewelled spheres at the centers of the ALLMIND.

The issue, was that much of this spiritual debris happened to have once been forbearers of the restless wandering pillagers. Like everything else about them, their ghosts were also mobile, and followed them around. But these ghosts did not have the noble qualities of other ancestral souls who having been consciously part of the ALLMIND in their material state could now be simultaneously present in all dimensions and could instantly traverse ALLSPACE and be welcomed at the courts and central councils of the spirit universe.

These were not wise spirits of myriad illustrious achievements who no longer needed to re -incarnate. No, these were renegade souls. Dwelling in the equivalent of spirit prison and confined to earth plane. Delinquents....spirit dropouts, who had refused to go through the required afterlife learning stages and preferred to remain around the dull lights of the material world as ghosts looking for empty humans and other vessels to enter and continue taking part in the illusions of earth life. Some of the souls of these roving barbarians had apparently also taken that dangerous wrong turn in Spirit City and instead of being reborn as humans, had returned as genuine malicious demons who sat on peoples' shoulders waiting to go dance on the brain of whoever they were sent to weaken and confuse.

"To make a long story short", the lizard continued, " your average hairy barbarian travelled together with an enormous entourage of wandering ghosts and demonic ghouls who lurked around waiting to place themselves at their disposal. Kind of like dogs and horses.

The barbarians would send the wraiths on errands and the wraiths would turn around and send the barbarians themselves on errands. And drive them and be driven in turn to perform acts that ranged from delivering simple everyday curses and petty jealousies, to terrorizing whole eras, and both would end up participating in missions of the most unbelievable wickedness and irresponsibility.

"How do you know so much about all this" was Anthony's thought.

"We reptiles are a very ancient line," the gecko replied simply.

He wished at that moment that The Professor had been physically present to witness this phenomenal family of lizard avatars. She would have smiled an enigmatic smile and suddenly let out an explosive YES. She would have then proceeded to enthusiastically jab the formica kitchen countertop with an extended forefinger.

"Yes,... yes, and let me tell you," she would have said, " and every millipede you see is not necessarily just an ordinary millipede, and a coiled-up millipede can tell you a whole lot...a whole, whole, lot, about the twisting of a tornado and the circling of a giant eddy in the River Niger and about vortexes and celestial mechanics and about the universe itself with all those millions of time tunnels and spiraling galaxies."

But The Professor was at that moment at the other end of a potential satellite link; a one day plane ride away, hoping he and the other contributors would meet the publishers deadline.

This then thought Anthony must be the stuff of which ancestral recollections are formed. Seed after seed, summoning from someplace deep inside yet ever so distant, a mesh that communicates with a faraway Yeti and a lumbering Bigfoot or a venerable Dogon elder; requesting them to witness the eternal vortex and the visions and sounds of the drunken tramplings of the reckless wandering hunter. Generation after generation retaining intuitions of the wild bush where the Pale Fox dwells.

Knowing that although the wild bush is the proper domain of the Pale Fox, yet observing that the wild hairy hunter and uncultivated bush do not dwell well together, because the bush is full of trees and these are rooted and branched and green and brown and full of ancestral spirits who sit and watch the aimless passing of restless ghouls. The ceaseless roving of the wild ones who do not respect spirits, but yet are afraid of ghosts. An ethereal incompatibility; because spirits speak of origins and wild wanderers stumbling around the forests in spiritual blindness, have no recall of lineage -- neither theirs or others-- only that nameless fear of ghosts and of becoming ghosts themselves.

Yet those restless rovers who wander in the wake of the Fox, oftentimes whistle happy tunes so no one will suspect their abiding fear and they focus only on satisfying some sanguine lust or other of the NOW by any means necessary; trapped by the materialistic pull of earth ties with iron-red blood dripping down thirst slaked chins to fall onto the ground and dry into round rust-brown drops.

And this, Anthony decided, would explain the dilemma of those who are born to be wild and are nevertheless so afraid of the forests. Why, being unable to see the forest for the ghosts, they prefer to move on and on and on, relentlessly felling the trees where ancestral spirits dwell, not in a pattern of ever shifting self regenerative clearings for cultivation but savage clear cuttings of whole densely vegetated spaces to open wide the plains over which to run their horses, dogs and bonneted wagons.

And ghosts do not cross water, but demons do, and Perception Impairment perched like a demon parrot on some fiendish pirate's shoulder sailed along with the shipbound barbarians who clanged across the decks in their iron boots as they tossed in the tall galleons with the horses and the dogs and the wagons.

And then another gecko appeared and like a pair of griot rappers they began a verbal duet in stereo.

"And those who read the signs of their coming in dream space said "It is not the colour blindness that will be the problem it is the fact that they -- as polite circles would later say-- they will be "spiritually challenged." Of course before these politically correct times the ancestors had said "spiritually crippled", which produced in them feelings of sympathy and even thoughts of assistance and understanding of the victims' need for quests and wheels and wagons; secure in the knowledge that in the swirl of the universe every dog has its day and even the wicked had been specially created: for the Day of Evil.

And the ancestors passed by-laws in spirit council to build special spirit ramps in the spirit buildings of the spirit universe for the spirit wheel chairs the barbarians would need to get around in their spiritually disabled state, and organized Special Olympics and cheered politely, all in sympathy, wagging their heads and thinking that given their impairment regarding linkage with the divine: as spirit cripples go, they do do the best with the little they have."

Then as mysteriously as they had come, the lizards were gone, scurrying off to catch mouthsfull of hapless insects for lunch.

The geckos had been most helpful. They had made Anthony certain that his first interpretation of the fax must have been right after all. A debate on color or blindness was not what The Professor was likely assembling in the anthology. Given her interest in the Great Recall, she was probably more interested in cultural identity than anything else. After all cultural identity was the nucleic center of the Great Recall and identity like any number of other cultural intangibles had over recent years blossomed into a major industry.

His current planetary position on the isthmus between the Atlantic and the Pacific oceans, enabled him to tune into an alarming array of tabloid-television talk shows. A blurry mind-numbing spiritually empty world of makeovers, liposuction, and buns of steel. Time zone differences cabled some of these into his house from as early as 7 a.m.

On those days when he could channel surf during his morning cup of tea, he would watch willing victims being pelted with the vocal equivalent of old boots and rotten fruit. They volunteered to sit locked into electronic stocks, fettered, hand, mind and foot, before their hooting abusive peers. It was the price they agreed to pay for a moment of notoriety in the huge identity producing and consuming industry.

As it happened, earlier that very morning Anthony had heard a member of studio audience of one show loudly proclaim: "I think people should be free to change their identity anytime they want, but you, you there with the low cut spangled dress and the safety pins in your tongue, you should get help from someone. You should get professional help."

She had stressed the word "professional". It had given her comment legitimacy. Everyone applauded and knew she was referring to therapy. Audience members who found it impossible to keep their opinions to themselves on these shows invariably used "couch slang" and recommended the service of specialists for their fellow nonentities. In this world of the spiritually flat chested, psychotherapy had singlehandedly commandeered the identity implant industry.

The programs were all tailor made for the identity experts who sat on specially provided stools beside the victims in the stocks. They would always have much to say about the "id" of the entity under interrogation. Always carefully avoiding real id-entity issues like ancestors and culture. Anthony knew that being spiritually numb themselves, they would be totally unwilling to admit that they were there mainly to advertise the customized range of fake identities being offered for sale.

"I think some members of the studio audience need to be more sympathetic," the hired expert would proclaim. " It is time we realized that sex change surgery is perhaps more than just the ultimate form of cross dressing."

"We thank the good doctor and we'll be right back." The benumbed host or hostess would say. The floor director in the studio would hold up the "APPLAUSE" sign. The camera would pan across the fake standing ovation and the station would go to commercial break.

This being the case, there was no doubt in Anthony's mind that what the Professor most needed from him in these upsidedown times, was a piece of writing about recalling the authentic ancient personality. The identity which one developed over eons from knowing about life and rebirth, and art and the eternal nature of the full spectrum universe. He did not think any one piece of his existing work did justice to the topic so he decided to prepare something fresh.

Anthony pushed a button on one of the communications tools on his desk and popped out the diskette he used for saving the Dogon story. He replaced it with a blank other, on which to prepare his contribution, but his fingers froze. He had no ideas and no notion of where to begin.

He contemplated writing about a lifetime of observing how tools and gadget ownership had become one of the most important means of determining identity. The number of tools people accumulated, and how they used them, and whether their society manufactured them or not, had became significant in determining just who people really were. But he reasoned it would only appear as if he was endorsing the ideology of the spiritually impaired, since the only reason they held that belief was because they could not conceive of culture and identity as being directly related to the celebration of the divine spirit.

He typed some text: Unbelievable as it may sound, humans have actually tried to equate tool making with culture and culture itself with machines.

He stopped to re-think the concept of a machine culture. It was the stuff of science fantasy. As if inanimate devices like the ones on his desk had spirit lives of their own and were somehow linked directly to the great ALLMIND independently of the human mind. As if there was some connection other than the copper cables patched into that sinister looking grey junction box on the corner.

The devices arrayed before Anthony were all being monitored in one way or another by people who regularly checked the meters to discover who was using them and for how long. "Maybe I should write a short science fiction type story on technology and humans, and cultural identity." Anthony Moore said to himself."

He deleted what he had just written and replaced it with a title:

THE GREAT WHODAT - A wanderer's tale.

The Great WHODAT had been developed by the WHOTHEM to check tickets of admission to the Universe. This had been going on ever since the day that They Of All Folly began selling time, space, and motion. Not copies, mind you but supposedly the real thing. Real time, real space, and real motion, and if anyone challenged this, the WHOTHEM would avow that they had all the patents to prove originality.

The great WHOTHEM had erected huge gates claiming that the portals were genuine doorways to the entire known universe and then stationed the great WHODAT at all entrances. The turnstiles were to ensure that people respected tariffs and royalty payments for those once free parts of the material world which had already been patented and parcelled out.

Crucial too, was that the Great WHODAT also revoked and issued identities. Whenever the great WHODAT asked the question -Who are You,- an entity would be required to give an answer previously provided by none other than....THE GREAT WHODAT itself.

"Who are you?" the great WHODAT who would ask.

"I am whoever you say I am oh great WHODAT", the totally confused respondent would reply.

"Entry approved" the great WHODAT would then flash.

Anthony's reverie was suddenly interrupted by a loud bird call.

"Gimme a break. Gimme a break. Wow! What a concept!" thrilled one of the birds feeding on hot peppers placed for Shango near the shrinestones Anthony had erected outside the office window. "Just imagine," chirped the bird to no-one in particular, "Monitors to check on the meters and to patiently probe the patents."

How Anthony Arthur's musings became the subject of the neighborhood wildlife morning talk fest he would never fully understand, but that was the nature of the Spirit Universe. Everyone was always plugged in and on-line, and when needed, travelling African hunters could sing quiet songs to their families many miles away back home in some remote village, to let them know that all was well.

It was evident from the excitement building outside his window that the latest gossip on human misadventures was about to be spread across the spirit waves by this noisy bird which had been listening in on Anthony's private thoughts.

"Have you heard about this? They're trying to patent the universe!" the bird called out to nature in general and the cry was taken up by all the other birds in the neighborhood who had been up long before dawn but still had enormous reserves of energy. They joined the chorus in a mid-morning call and response as they sought worms in the brown earth and chased insects about the green trees.

They're trying to patent the universe!
They're trying to patent the universe!
They're trying to patent the universe!

Then a gecko screeched a burst of ten tones. It actually sounded like "Patent the universe. You're kidding" and Anthony heard it as the guffaw of a particularly unruly ancestor asking his rhetorical question: "How can you patent someone else's creation?"

"Hadn't the great WHODAT and those poor sad creatures the WHOTHEM, ever heard about the role of the Universe in creating life. And the role of life in creating art and identity. And the role of identity in creating artists and the role of artists in recalling identity. And all the vice versas and vices and versus, and chapters and verses and all other psalms and sing-songs of praise and celebration." said another truly venerable ancestor of unimaginable wisdom who at that moment was communicating to Anthony via a passing white butterfly.

"Maybe we should show the great WHODAT how the universe really works" said another ancestor way off in the distance somewhere riding a vortex across the plains of Kansas.

"No" said another, surfing a huge tidal wave heading for some unsuspecting shore, "being victims of such acute spiritual numbness the WHOTHEM would not have a clue as to what the term "workings of the universe" could possibly mean.

"How can they not?" asked the ancestor atop the roaring spiral, "Will the evening headlines not read -TORNADO FLATTENS TRAILER PARK- Will the morning newscasts not say:- Tsunami devastates shoreline.- How come they can't see."

"Numb and dumb. Because the WHOTHEM are not so much mean as just plumb stupid," remarked another member of the gecko family high in the rafters somewhere. It was monitoring the conversation between the spirits of the tornado and of the tidal wave on the ULTIMATE INTERNET. Like those who eavesdrop and comment on other people's ham radio transmissions, this lizard just had to get in its two bits as well.

"Looks to me like having no ancestral dreams or feel of majesty, the makers of the WHODAT need hard material machines to create electric mirages with which to confer identity. All the while they forget the Great Dream which created the metal molecules for the machines in the first place." offered the ancestral spirit in the tidal wave.

"Do you think they would be a little more polite to our descendants if they knew it was the ancestors of the same people they pretend to despise who control the weather systems?" asked the ancestral spirit of the tornado.

"I guess maybe they would if you finally demonstrate it to them once and for all." replied the tidal wave.

And without another word the tornado abruptly changed direction and headed off to the center of the financial district in the downtown area of a major city. It was a sudden pivoting side shift, like that of a basketball player charging through "the paint" to end the drive with a decisive slam dunk.

"I don't understand this tie-in with image making and how the technology thing became a measure for determining culture and identity," said the shameless bird by the shrine, now boldly addressing Anthony's thoughts directly.

Anthony did not have a reply. A member of the community of geckos volunteered an explanation. This small dark brown lizard liked hanging around from its suction pads on the wall of the hall outside the office. Mostly waiting for mites in the shadows behind the ancient photograph of Anthony's maternal ancestor.

"Because the spiritually impaired barbarians were ignorant of their origins, they had to seek replacement identities for themselves." the reptile began, "Being universally known mainly for rape and plunder is no kind of identity to have. It's certainly not an identity of any spiritual value and definitely not universally respectable. So they needed to invent something. A great WHODAT to take care of the absence of real ties and to provide identities and illusions of cultural grandeur. They also needed to develop identity conferring tokens and tickets and laminated cards and coinage ..or as it came to be known due to the original means of gaining it in the first place..LOOT. "- and the lizard paused for dramatic effect before continuing.

"And the WHOTHEM used loot to manufacture more dream-identities and the more loot that had been pillaged over the years, the more elaborate the identity could become." it said, " And those in the wasteland of no natural ancestral recall worked the dream making machines round the clock to create ancestral fantasies and current illusions. Fashioned especially for the spiritually numb and their ghoulish demon guides. Made expressly for those who could feel no feelings. For those who knew not their ancestors as anything other than ghosts. For those who knew not from whence they came. For them came help from plastic chimeras, flickering shadows, ghostly images and demon voices posing as real spirits and real ancestors. Ghostfully telling ghastly lies which they hoped would provide an answer to the question:

- It's invocation time, do you know where your ancestors are?

Not knowing WHO they were it was doubly impossible to know WHERE they were, and so in the brave new world of fake identities they invoked even more demonic falsehoods and desperately made more and more tools to fashion dreams and those tools and dreams became all the rage and fashioned fashions; and fashion was a fad, mad and glad and clothes and tatoos and body paint made the man and the woman and the vogue would come and go at an alarming rate leaving people washed up on the shore of illusions and floundering like fish cast out of water. As devoid of identity when the wave left, as it found them when it initially came in. Then the great WHODAT would be re-programmed to ask a bunch of other questions, for which everyone would then go about dying to get the right answer to...at a price."

When the little gecko finished there was shocked silence throughout the neighborhood and the spirit universe, due to all the amazement over what a strange upsidedown twist it was. To have a blundering material system create illusions disguised as dreams. Living lives of lies all puffed with stuff and manufactured memories. Forgetting that dreams and memories are themselves the stuff of puff; Using metal boxes to manipulate the world of perceptions instead of having real dreams directly manipulate material without the aid of any other tangibles.

The birds outside became quite derisive, and began loudly announcing that THEY did not have to worry about having to learn the workings of more and more models of WHOTHEM-built WHODAT-magic-machines which appeared with ever increasing ranges of add-on modules and tributes praising industrial fantasies as the work of wizards. The wizards of the film world. Special effects wizards. Wizards of shadow manifestations on a flickering screen. Computer Whizzes and wizards of high technology.

And the ancestors in spirit time too laughed at this childish notion saying:

"Friends oh wild, wild, running-wild friends, real wizards do not tinker with metal boxes or battery powered remote controls, real wizards summon images in calabashes of water. Real wizards turn themselves into birds and reclining lions and go wandering the plains at midnight.

Real real wizards use the dream world to make physical manifestations. To make stones fly. They do not need metal, muscle and stones to make their dreams fly. Dreams fly on their own, and you too in case you forgot you too come from The Great Dreams. The ancestors yours and others' dreams, even those of the Lion; even those of the Fox. The Pale Fox of divination dragging its sorry tail across the grid and leaving his footprints in the ever shifting sands.

And all who know real dungeons and see real dragons with their inner eyes will see that the grand high-definition screen illusions made from metals and matter are not real internal endomorphin meta-morphing dreams of alchemical expertise but fake Mighty Morphin Power Ranger type nightmares that biff and bash and flicker on white sheets and on rat- race-screaming-engine-living-room-pit-stop cathode ray tubes for boobs, hung on walls with siren wails like those which millions are now silently mouthing.

"May we suggest you mouth and mount an oration instead," an ancestor whispered in Anthony's inner ear, this time without the aid of any intermediary whatsoever.

"Mouth and mount? What do you mean mount an oration?" Anthony wondered.

"Build a prayer rendered in stone. A benediction, a thanksgiving a glorification and adoration, an invocation. A trans-dimensional interstellar communications transducer rendered in rock."

"And how does one do that?"

"Well if you want me to spell it out....Go build yourself a household shrine..... like we all used to have in every home and homestead across the land before the wild ones came," and the whisper trailed out of Anthony's mind.

"Another shrine, what's wrong with this one," said a tiny voice outside the office. An ant had spoken. The voice of the little insect rode into the room on a micro wave of the microest sort. The small black creature was an ordinary formic-acid filled ant which could just as easily have been acting on behalf of Anthony's ancestral aunt as someone else's. It was taking off with a crumb of white bread. A remnant from the previous day's shrine offering to Obatala. Returning to its home under the stones within the electric blue fluorescent spirit tunnels it had built to span ALLTIME.

And in a brief flash Anthony saw all the gathered ancestors passing through the minds of their descendants saying to every mind though which they passed:

"May we suggest that every one of you lift up your chins high and all mouth invocations that ask for sense to once more return to your minds that know so well, and all too well, about using dreams to move rocks and especially to balance them in soaring material praises to all creation, from Akkad to Azania and from the Cape to Cairo."

And he heard more and more of their descendants say, "We hear you because after everything we still remember. We recall The Ways of Righteousness and this is WE MUDDA land. Where is YOUR ancestral land? We recall the Ways of Truth And this is we FADDA things, where are YOUR ancestral things. And we reclaim the Ways of Justice, the way of our ancestors, and ask where were your ancestors when ours were raising temples in praise of All Creation?"

The gurgling of the washing machine interrupted his musings. It was time to hang the clothes. They were mostly home made and multi colored, manufactured with cotton prints favored by West and Central Africans. It was another part of Anthony's overall effort to recreate an authentic African personality, but how authentic could it possibly be with imported Dutch Java prints. Cloth importation had been a new African affectation. Just a few hundred years at best. Another example of the capricious tastes which inevitably got them enmeshed in other people's mentally crippling cotton mills.

Anthony's ancestors being originally very self-reliant, had never actually needed any one else's imported cloth. They had always made their own fabric and traded it with others. Not only bark cloth and everyday cottons and linens, but beautiful home spun and handloomed strips of real gold, silver, and purple. Pinks, vermillions, whites, blacks and blues. Radiant shining clothing as brilliant as the center of the sun.

As he pinned the clothing to the line, he contented himself by thinking that it was the loose baggy cut and the willingness to wear bright colors more than the fabric's manufacture that constituted his reclamation of the African personality.

In the searing and hence quick drying Central American starshine, the nearby range of tree covered mountains stood silhouetted dark green against patches of threatening rainclouds. A slight mist covered the top of the highest peaks in the row. The grey/white clouds were waiting to hurl the water sucked from his shirts and shorts back down in sheets of wind driven drops which would turn into temporary downhill rivers in the street outside his front windows.

If he was a child, he would have probably asked an adult like himself. "Are the vibratory memories of the atoms of your previously wet underthings trapped in molecules of recycled rain?"

And as an adult he would have replied "Maybe they are. Which means you should always think about that and about it being more effective to make rain by prayer and incantations than by seeding the sky with iodide crystals. And think about ghosts of yesterday and today and about spirits of all time whenever the apparitions of the moment dazzle the eye in the name of higher technology. Who knows, in a teeney tiny universe of the molecules of water why not teeny teeny tiny atomic ghosts."

"Ask him, ask him", Anthony as the child would have imagined a passing millipede to say.

"Ask what?" he would have asked the millipede.

"Ask him - who made the technology that made the technologist who claims to be making high technology," would have quipped the passing millipede, taking time to write the words in english on the concrete. Using water from the puddle of a nearby drainspout and doing so Anthony thought, remarkably quickly due to the large number of limbs with which she was naturally equipped and had at her disposal...not only in this, but also in all those multiple other dimensions

And as the child, he would then ask, "Who made the technology that made the technologist."

And the adult would reply:"Ask your ancestors."

Anthony hung the last garment on the line and let himself back into the relative cool of the kitchen. He poured a cup of coffee and sighed. None of the adults he knew as a child had ever talked about ancestors but somehow he had come upon the knowledge eventually, through travel and memory.

Right that moment though, he still had a problem. Not only had his spirit universe animal contacts practically hijacked the short story he was preparing, they had not even bothered to provide any coherent alternative and he still had nothing to send The Professor.

Back at his desk, he wondered how to link culture, identity and spiritual impairment which the geckos had been talking about, with his story about those who program the great WHODAT. Given the gap that there was between them and the divine mind.

Anthony thought that in the story he should get his ancestors to secretly reprogram the WHODAT themselves. It would then be impossible for the spiritually impaired to ever give the right responses to the really important questions.

The first riddle they would write-in would be: Do you know the Ultimate Whodat who conceived and created the UNIVERSE and all within it?

"Being a part of IT, how could I not?" would be the correct reply.

But the spiritually impaired would not have an answer and would stand mumbling and fumbling around looking for some dog eared WHODAT provided ticket, coin or laminated Cue card to find the answer.

And not knowing the answer the barbarians would continue moving on, felling more and more trees and paradoxically, green would increasingly become the color of choice among the colorblind.

Green paper money and the green of who was wearing sun-glasses and packing heat and discussing how many green backs the green shades cost and how many wetbacks needed to be wasted.

All in the quests for identity which include colored paint, colored plaster, and continuing total-makeovers of the hollow shells. People trying to relive old identities based on reruns of old movies of ghostly splendour like computer-colorized versions of past black and white barbaric times which had now...gone with the wind.

And he would have a stream of ancestors of ever more angular facial forms enter the story and reveal in unison that it was amazing how quickly and conveniently people pretended to forget that once upon an era, those with bold ambitious zeal, could actually say: "I wonder how many guineas my mansion will cost?" and then reach for a handful of guineans of the finest sort: brown backs. Male Guineans, and female Guineans, guineas brown for guineas gold. And the ambitious would wonder aloud whether they had enough guinea brown backs in their pocket to realize their wishes and maybe then have to reach down some more into old Guinea and Ghana and New Guinea and grab themselves a few more brownbacks and maybe make some good things happen in some gold mine in the wild bush somewhere close to the Villages of the StarFilled Universe.

And miracle of miracle if the number of brown backs which they held did not end up giving them an identity after all. Just like they hoped they would, but in the end not in the way they thought they should. They figured owning browbacks would make them into somebody but all that happened was that brownbacks made them into something far better than the somebodies they originally thought they were going to become. Brownbacks succeeded in making them yearn to become brownbacks too, and they bronzed their own backs in tropical suns to show that they could afford the excess greenbacks required to try to become brownbacks.

Meanwhile others in frustration donned brownshirts and stomped around in a destructive rage to prevent themselves from breaking down and sobbing orphans' wrenching sobs of anguish at a parentless past with only memories of being suckled by canines and no knowledge of when or from who or from which wild bush the wandering path had originally led.

But they bravely dried their tears and pretended it did not matter from whence came the lost children of the wild in their wobbly wagons, because they too now had the golden guineas, and they could go anywhere and anywhen they pleased...first class in supersonic ships of Amnesia, feeding on fish eggs and fizzy wine, or munching on marinated meats and malt liquor. And they scanned and spanned the skies seeking origins, having tramped the earth in vain.

And Anthony thought of writing about the wild wanderer dreaming dreams of being a bird and pecking at the sky and floating on magnets and sprouting flaming wings and flying into the deep black bottomless pit on pillars of fire to lay eggs in micro gravity. But this was no Phoenix rising from the ashes or ancient tin laden Phoenician ship out of Somalia, riding on the waves. This was no flying pharonic falcon Horus. Just frozen metal tubes and a tin can full of plumbing.

This was no natural hawk with natural piping or even a stone bejeweled metal bird-statue to represent a godly concept of truth, righteousness, and redemptive power: One turquoise eagle eye on the sunstar, and the other of lapis lazuli on the dead and lifeless post menstrual moon. No Horus this, whose name they changed to Apollo, but a fake falcon; a hoax Horace ; a counterfeit Horatio. An artificial chicken. A phony falcon laying metal eggs in the air. Meanwhile In spirit space the original Phoenix whose eggs were still on the ground somewhere in Somalia would chuckle waiting for the fake falcon eggs to come crashing down aflame when they grew too heavy to ride the liquid magnets of a hot molten core.

And in his story the ancestors would say "Gone are the nation states, now only nation stations in a one world state linked together with artificial satellites talking to each other night and day, and day and night, asleep on one side and awake on the other but spiritually unconscious on both. Ha!!!!!. with the demons dancing dances on microwave towers."

And out of all that vain glory, thought and word would became deed and titles and ground station dishes and hopes of finding something on some distant planet and of building networks on this one, and speed up the creation of the fax machine.

And it was as if an even deeper darkness had come to somber the wild barbaric mind and the demons longed for high-collared capes of stygian black and mouths full of blood. Modulations of color in a high harmonic were too shattering; cracking the veneer of civility and hinting too openly of wild plains and shrieking fights for clumps of meat.

And the whole world tried to forget the kind of blood thirsty Thracians and Sakas and Persians and Medes they once were and the kind and wise Woloof, learned Y-araba, Fonecians and Phulani they once were and the kind of Teutons and Celts and Slavs and Krauts and Croats and Serbs etcetera everyone became, before they began to confuse themselves with the concept of a united national world state.

Some Yorubas and Woloofs and Fulani and Ashanti and Bemba, and the children of the four thousand tongues and towns and Villages of Light long left from the Villages of the StarFilled Universe, yes they too thought there were no more Medes or Persians or Scythians and anguished at the thought of their own four thousand tongues and one million villages and short towers and all that green money floating around the world and warehouses full of ready made, ready to wear identities for those who ignore their ancestors.

And their exiled children also thought there were no more ancestral ties and no spirits left in the woods which were felled to make the cities. Just only ghosts clanking down the cold black windswept streets lined with boarded up buildings. And demons perching on the spires of skyscrapers waiting to descend at night with their vampire dates to party and enter their exile dreams, and cavort on their heads, confusing and weakening them with shrieks of self-hate and impulses to mutual homicide. But even the ghouls did not think that there could be such things as mercenary ghosts hired by tree spirits. But there they were as well, clinging to the two by four wood frames of the exile houses and lurking in the veneers of their kitchen cabinets also waiting to invade their exile dreams.

And the children of the Villages of the StarFilled Universe roamed the cities like those who had never known about having ancestors and grew wild and numb too, and insulted each other and thought nothing of wasting each other's lives at the bidding of prowling demons; but suddenly in this fantasy world of black and white images in which they slept, they saw the mercenary warrior ghosts of tree spirits charging through their dreams to battle the demons riding their brain and they fought to awaken from the nightmare, only to wake up in another era with no green backs to make their own movies and no dreams of how to make their own dream making movie machines or graven silver nitrate images to honor their own ancestors in flickering light.

And like their ancestors before them they too laughed patiently because they realized that all was blind folly and they had no need to fuss with sterile stunts. Because their bodies still remembered that their own ancestors were already there as shimmering lights which danced eternally above their heads, and the flickering shadows on the screen were mere distractions that blocked their view of the ever present powershine of the great divine, which floats through waking and sleeping dreams.

And the ancestors swirling through dream space cautioned the Children of the Villages of the StarFilled Universe to never again forget, and moved in their souls to make them wary of the spiritually numb with their ghosts and ghouls. And they warned that those who vision the dreams that make stones fly cannot afford to be spiritually numb or psychically blind. Since they then could not see and talk with weather systems and with each other across time and space, and they then would not know that colors were tones of light all modulated by sight, and sounds were the buzzing touch of the inner rungs of some ancient distant snaking DNA ladder humming a high harmonic in the inner ear, and in rhythmic pulses that shimmer down to the soles of the feet. Radiant, bright and shining like the center of some eternal sun in the billion twinkling eyes of the ALLMIND. And not knowing all that, that they would then lose touch with their ancestors.

And with the warnings ringing in their inner ears the Children of the Villages of the StarFilled Universe wearied of the questions of the WHODAT and knew that all answers boiled down to countless other dimensions in the copper-colored still of cosmic queries.

And all those other dimensions were the equivalent of liquid spirits of ever higher octanes and the Children of the Villages said "Hold it right there WHODAT, you who are always telling people who they are supposed to be. I got me a couple of questions for you."

"Who are you, and who are YOUR ancestors? And the great WHODAT could not answer because it was a programmed machine, and it looped out, overloaded, and short circuited in a fizzle of sparks.

Then special pre-recorded programs came through the spirit waves, broadcasting across the planet on "Ancestors Calling- the 24 hour World-around Radio Show", and they spoke extensively about The Villages and the lies which had been spread about the Children of the Villages of The StarFilled Universe. And the Continent Wide Village the announcer was describing in the broadcast was no stagnant pool but a flowing stream of humanity with its source among the constellations, meandering back and forth across the green Sahel and the Rift Valley like a snaking current of migrating clans following their floating pillars of stone.

Art was the village and the village was creation, and art was magic and magic was creation and art was majesty and the village was majesty of a very profound sort and Africa was covered with villages of such majesty.

And the announcer would say- Kola nut is one powerful thing yeh. You know in this whole issue of identity and the need for my father pickenny to decide just who they are: Just as we sing our own songs we must wear our own clothes. They are bettah. And we must eat our own foods which we grow ourselves, and build our own houses with style and pattern. They are bettah. Cool in the day and warm and cozy at night. Houses that heal and work in concert with the material world like the spiritual intricacy of our herbal medicines. And we should celebrate and circulate and shine and we can't do worse that what's already there and in fact I am sure we could do a whole, whole lot bettah.

And once again out of nowhere and without any intermediaries of birds or beasts, the ancestral chorus sighed in Anthony's ear at the thought of using the material world to make dreams fly and whispered that they had to get in on the action to set the notion straight because the ancestors needed to remind the Children of the Villages of the StarFilled Universe that they too had once been very ancient ancestors themselves who had now returned as spirit warriors to see how cyberlink can work for spirit space. Using gadgets like the fax machine to speed things up. Dimensional interfacings to reach their descendants who wander in the down town haze of spiritual numbness and non identity and the emptiness of empty nest nonentityness with demons on the brain.

"But who can one be in a time were the wires are all becoming frazzled and unwound because we have reached the water's edge in an age of aqueous currents, light flows and cleansing rivers," Anthony wondered.

And as if in some mental CDROM playback, he had a vision of all the auto-crats and other rats who go delving for their identity in the innards of the barbarism of metal age machines; saw them begin to bash their brains against automobile bonnets trying to figure out why the dream of asphalt and metal and superhighways had become such a nightmare. "They were supposed to mean a great new future," a robot engine whined. "It looked real neat when they first showed off the concept breathlessly at the 1936 World's Fair. A great gleaming glass and chariot world in which everything hummed along tickety boo, no tickey no passee and boohoo to you. A black and white science fiction movie version of what the future would be."

No thoughts then of fuel, sacrificial desert battles and what to do with broken chariots and spent tires. There were earths to conquer dreams to build and destinies to behold with Wings Over The World on every cinema screen. The other considerations would come much later, stuck cell phone in hand somewhere in the middle of a static hot fuming traffic jam in Manchester, Milan, South Central LA, or South East Asia.

Which is why the fax could come though across the satellite channels of the new universal light paths which humans were in the process of constructing. Cyberspace people whispering breathlessly at World Around Fairs bathed in fashionable colors of rainbows and shades of brown. The age of iron was disappearing, even as the nettings were going around to be filled with light. New dreams, new highways. Some spoke of highways of information. New traffic jams, new truckstops, new hitchhikers, new roadkills. New strands to cover the planet, new aspirations and fantasies. A Global Identity patched into the gigantic neural network. A global light web.

Were these webbing threads a cocoon for the metamorphosis of a caterpillar into a butterfly or the strands of a spider or fungus which had snared the earth like an insect and was now about to suck it dry.

And a lone drummer thumped out a pattern on a hollow tree trunk to summon the ancestors so they could broadcast directly to small villages on the material plane planet to tell the people. "Look up at the sky and pray for rain to heal the parched earth. And half a world away in the lands where drum sounds bass boom from passing chariots to shake and crack the towers of steel and glass and send shrieking demons running from their high perches, the ancestors of the spirit time had all determined that the fax machine would now like the drum, speed the summons for identity recall so they themselves could be daily remembered and venerated and thus transmit their blessings with the proper grace.

For they had grown tired of waiting around unrequired like under-employed appliance repair people of spiritspace, because their descendants had forgotten them, and no longer had the appliances necessary for requesting diurnal service calls.

And they had decided that their own earth-wide radio station networks were now a must; broadcasting directly from them to their spirit children so they could inform those who had placed the great WHODAT to sit hovering on its throne somewhere between earth and sky, about The Truth of THE ULTIMATE WHODAT who created the UNIVERSE.

And about the myriad manifestations as Shango and Obatala and Yemoja Oshun, and about fire, air and earth-ocean and about Father, Mother and daughter-sun and rain and wind and lightning and love and power and peace and justice and about Esu the trickster and the fox lingering at the crossroads to see which renegade spirits were fugitives from the eternal lake of fire.

And they cautioned all by saying: "When you pray to our Father who art in heaven ask why no one ever told you to include your Mother because she Neit-Athena the mother goddess too had come from the sky." And they told them to wonder about such prayers and to ask their bodies to remember to recall the ancient orations from whence those copies came, and to find again the original verses which say: "Our foreparents who art above our heads."

"This," thought Anthony at the end of the vision," This then was the real connection between the Dogon, the Pale Fox, pale faxes in general, and himself, and his ancestors and The Professor.

The fact that the ancestors had collectively resolved that they would universally help produce success stories of young boys and girls in the desert, because the boy in the desert was once the man from the stars and he now sat in the dust with his seven stringed harp singing songs of ancient recall waiting for the time when the heavenly bodies are once more in proper alignment to successfully call up for rain, then perform a prayer of gratitude and a dance of light. The spirit dance of brilliance that will drive away the demon ghosts which the color blind let into this dimension.

"Color bland" said a gecko out loud like an old time Souther dixie devil. "Culuh Blaand. Bein' spit-ually numm as well as culuh blaand."

In the meantime in the spirit spaces the elders watched the passage of the days of folly knowing full well that in the fullness of time it will once more be demonstrated to all, including the color-blind, that on this the is/was/and ever-shall-be Cosmos Wide Natural Universal Multichannel, the ability to irrigate a desert patch to feed your flocks and to plant and climb the descendant of an ancient resilient palm tree to tap its wine, will once again prove to be invaluable assets. And just as precious will be knowing how to extract oil from its red kernels in your home by yourself and how to use it for cooking up a delicious fish dish from your own personal fishpond outside.

And priceless too will be camel trains that do not pollute, slow and gradual, dependable and harmonic, self sufficient and solar powered like the water craft quietly plying the Nile and the Niger and Lake Nayasa and there will be no room for wild barabaric ranchers who persecute their flocks with whips and lariats and bolas and wild horses and redhot scarring irons. But the dust clouds will signal the return of quiet conical hatted cattle herders who merely call the kine by their individual names with a click of the tongue or myriad patterns and sound tones of finger snaps and move huge herds quietly across the nights reading the stars and singing mystical songs of reasoned effort.

Meanwhile in the spirit spaces where multiple dimensions connect directly with light webs used by ants and millipedes, the ancestors laughed. Not everyone in the Spirit Universe was amused however, and the disgruntled sighed a collective sigh, causing a rash of hurricanes across the great oceans until their companions told them to cut it out it, because it was disturbing the fax machine and microwave transmissions and plane flights of their favored descendants.

They agreed to cool it, but then started scratching themselves which caused the ground to shake and volcanoes to spit and the waves to rise and the winds to say for all to hear.

Hail Shango, Hail Obatala, Hail Yemaya Oshun. Hail Obatala in princely white, silver and gold, Hail Shango in the powerful red of magnetic lightning and hail Yemoja in the Blue and green of aquamarine of the deep ocean and you somewhere at the crossroads in Red, white and blue, you Esu.

I the circling winds ride on the heavenly cloud chariot of Shango as it roams across the stormy skies bedecked in flashing light.

I watch as the forked rays leap up from the earth to answer to the hurling of his thunder stones.

Some people call me MO some people call me JO
some people call me a weather systems while others just call me JAH...OH.

It all depends on who they be and how and what they see,
And that whether you believe it or not will always depend on Me.

That night, after folding and putting away the day's business, including his laundry, Anthony Moore would dream a dream of the color blind. Images full of yellows and browns and greys and whites and blacks.

When he awoke at 5.30 the next morning, the dream was still stuck in his head. He had seen himself sailing over a sea of milk in a cruise ship called Global Reach, in which everyone aboard claimed to not notice the cultural and pigmentation differences of their fellow passengers but nevertheless proceed to unfailingly act in a manner that demonstrated those will always be the main things the passengers aboard the goodship are really concerned with.

And as they sailed forever from Alaska to Argentina and back, the individuals making the loudest claims of colorblindness proved inevitably to be the ones most concerned about the relative values of shades of brown, and about clear cut treeless greens, and property values, and maintaining ever more elaborate lies about origins and destinations, conveniently forgetting about the restless wandering wagons and the horses and the dogs and the wild bush.

At 9.30 the phone rang. It was The Professor calling for an update. To find out whether or not he was going to submit a contribution. He reassured her that he would, but that he really had nothing already prepared which would fit the title - "Living Colorblind."

He confessed that he had so far been unable to come up with a specially written piece, and that he would just have to courier an excerpt from "Leaping Lizards" - the book of short stories he was currently putting together about culture, the children in the desert and the preparation of homemade fish dishes from scratch; because village life and the Children of the Villages of the StarFilled Universe were all his ancestral muse and course adviser in identity recall wanted him to deal with for the moment. Then Anthony said yes, the rumblings The Professor could hear in the background were indeed from an approaching thunderstorm. And somewhere overhead a gecko screeched.