Second Anthropology

Second Anthropology

Dear Dr. Reinhold:

“Torah teaches that when you arrive in heaven, God first inspects your kidneys. Like a bouncer, like a mechanic, like a record store clerk when you’re buying a Rod Stewart box set, he casts on you a critical eye and reads your kidneys where you stand. She learned that from the time of Shakespeare, kidneys were seen as the origin of conscience, a ruminating organ, the place where the first pulse of introspection begins. When looked at laterally, kidneys appear like faceless fetuses, buckled inward and tucked tenderly around their renal arteries and veins. One kidney is good (see: flicking white overcoat, compassionate smile, pat on the back, banana cream pie to be savored and shared with the neighbors) and the other evil (see: black leather faded brown, dry flicking tongue, exasperated eye rolls, rubbing woodchips in your hair, lighting a trashcan on fire). Together with the heart, they conspire, driving you toward whatever your inevitability. So when you arrive in heaven, God’s got to check them out, see which one succeeded, maybe even have a conversation: So how’d she do? God might ask, and the kidneys would waiver their ureters: Comme si, comme ça.”

Kate Rutledge Jaffe, Talk About the Weather

That first Anthropology of Orc observed many forms of fish, bird, & beast unsubscribed by Blake. It was not known then as the Flaming Oracle or even a symbolic. Neither flaming nor Oracle were intended as literal, the idea of flame being blatant. To literally catch flame as Buddhist monks or human bombers appalls. This compulsive maligned  pole was a series of habits and attitudes more than actual being.

First mention of Orc hardly a few hundred years ago in Blake had a quasi noble birth and place, if eventually debased to "repressed love turned to war," even to the confession that Orc "stole thy light & it became fire consuming" (Four Zoas, xi, 147f). An entire monograph is justified. Orcish ways, Orcish talk, behemoth beasts, an intermediary race of beings who lived in dark caves where brutes plundered at night, were never much danger to the ordinary horses and men they defeated.

That has changed now the Orc ascends to world culture, transcending nationality. It represents a series of attitudes and prerogatives that dare a reality different from caves and holes and black blood. Oracle gone global looks like a man, but is no more man as classically defined than ever. Please forego at this time asking exactly what is a man. Change the appearance and you change the life. Significant parts of Oracle thought  justify itself. Never at loss for words on the offense, verbal extremes of  "hate," "bigot" name calling make the Oracle what it is. While it may refer to mythical races, a character in the Scarecrow of Oz, an Orc like an ostrich that acts like a flying horse, or a dozen acronyms of Origin Recognition Complex of DNA,  these do not prepare us for the truly extraordinary excitation of its flaming.

That literality will of course rouse taunts of spontaneous combustion. What is on the bounds of science is hardly ever believed, especially in such reclusive and secretive beings. For when the moment of its taking off appears, the Oracle withdraws from that active outer existence and goes into hiding in the most remote deserts of south Texas, huge stretches of Nevada, any number of national parks in off season, sometimes even the Grand Canyon. I say this is hardly believed first because there is little evidence after the fact that it has occurred, as would be natural in an explosion. Since no damage is done and the effect is taken as heat lightning, and it happens often at night, there have been few if any sightings outside anecdotal and folklore accounts. These as we know can hardly constitute evidence, like anecdotes of Sasquatch, Loch Ness or the Marfa Flats. What solid evidence we have comes from the Oracle itself that in the combustion its flaming divests its (outer) shields. These have been recovered and are a subject in themselves, but the method of their taking off is germane. Partly because the Oracle is such an extreme being, given to mood swings, its rhetoric being proof of this, it had an on again off again relation to this shield. At one point the shield was organic like a crustacean's, but various frictions created inner drives to be free. The Oracle must be free of all constraint, that is its mantra. Frictions from mutation too perhaps, and better diet, weaponized ginger, played a part, but Oracle grew enormous and had to shed the shell or be crushed within. The ingenious manner of this taking off has been much celebrated, I mean its desiccation, but the result was that the minute Oracle was free of the shell it sought to be bound again and manufactured new shields to carry on primitive forays, that is before these were sublimated into the offensive rhetoric it now possesses. That this was done serially further complicates so that at no point in the evolution of the shelless state could it be said that evolution was complete. Sections of Oracle geography seem to undergo this separately, which argues it may have a viral cause and the loss of the shell is a kind of live Oracle decline, leaving some untouched but affecting the whole with disastrous results. On again off again, those shells became the best record. Being bone, dermal bone, lost or buried and dug up, they gave account much like the hieroglyphs of Egypt.

All this is beside the point of Orc flame consuming the orcopologists of being. The Flame is inferred to occur from compromise of the skeleton after taking off the shields. Simply, that sunlight, UV rays, oxidation, simple wear and tear degrade the exskeletal. Even under clothes Oracles wear in our time this occurs as an inevitable product of entropy. Modern missing person reports notwithstanding, in Orc circles, and these are closely guarded, it is understood that this final rite of passage has occurred. Many disappearances attributed to crime are easily explained away. Suffice it that concomitant erosions of outer being contribute to the explosion.

 

Anthropology of Orc

Dr. Sizemore:

[Rough copy unsigned found appended to previous article]

You ask about Tollcork's misinformation regarding spinal adjustments of those remedial wing sockets. The Hollywood Orc said and thought a lot of things foolishly believed, but we should not think the Orc false even if its intellectual and emotional capacities degenerate to physical characteristics, the jagged fangs, yellow mouths, red tongues and eyes debased of habit. Tollcork tried to prove it had been tortured into Orcness by savage alien interrogation, as though Orcs were aliens. They were cannibals, if understood metaphysically. The Tork school had their foul pits and tunnels prejudicially slavering, spawning and rendering a cartoon of poison darts and scimitars. There is no room here to explore the clash of Orc armies’ subservient to the MoDork. Putative wars surviving, the Orc escaped and sought abroad where it continued fighting, serving buffalo and wolf on a piecemeal basis, but not so prolific in breeding, territorial imperative gone. It became a rough skinned, claw handed back yard breeder, lost heinous trappings and lived in communities such as used to be in Arkansas.

Its evolutionary reptilian likeness to old myths of half men half beasts common to anthropoids was only secondarily a bestial case for mythological giants. This monstrous includes a deeper depravity than thought, a hyperspace Orc, a marooned arthropod degraded from citizenship, a debased angel coming out a bug. But Oracle paranoia differed thus in its ability to solve epistemological questions of destiny. Inner dislocation and personality fusion made those separate realities monstrous.

Various explanations of Orc genesis occur, Cain's wife not a daughter of Adam, his children's imperfect descendants interbreeding to produce antediluvian Orc, a cerebral hypertrophy-induced ideation of hatred, a power over nature so great it became the ruling class. Even Tollcork himself used the words og and ob before designating Orc. It all depends on whether we believe it a foreign presence in that ancient passage.

Orc writing reflects Orc speaking, itself a surprise, being of bird origin, ostrich or egret, articulating from the epiglottis to the beak. Stops occur in the back and front of the mouth due to its odd shaped tubular jaw with side tunnels digesting flesh. The Orc voice is subdued, these pockets full, but empty they echo, which roaring enables its seduction of prey. The shoulder sockets now fleshed over show where wings once attached. The Orc is above the ape but beneath the dolphin in this. Bick first mentions that. Orc never properly understood law and force, arrogated to itself privilege from the breast. Breastfed an inordinate time, Oracle deactivated the coping mechanism of survival. Science does not credit that the Orc is real. Whether a medieval allegory or simply the worst kind of human being, we would like to forget. A third opinion suggests we share traits with it beyond the debased. Orc mind or heart as our own is a recession to fantasy where they had magical properties akin to the urim and thummim when it walked with giants on the earth. Supposed memories were retained of the expulsion. Spirits with bodies, bodies with spirits, the upper classes still believe. It was a shock to the establishment when the shields dug up were displayed. It argued something had been missed.

If you never bucked on a flak jacket when you want to take it off, which feels like a tourniquet, the security of its bulk changes when there’s a desire to go naked. Oracles wanted safety but the shield bound their life, which took a curious relief in remedy, if you’ve a liking for disparate facts. It grew a kidney as a third brain to alleviate the pressure. That and the ingestion of silicone reeds provoked a diuresis that regulated the body in its plastron through cycles of desiccation and uresis. This required a whole new way of life when the shell was permanently removed.  Living in utter nakedness was of course another problem.

Naked they chanted  their kidney hymns before the fire in front of the standing shields. We’d not know any of this were it not for survival of bone from those undersides. These, heated and cracked by the Amerind as the ancient Chinese oracle bones, reveal that in the ancient past it could remove the shell.

Burrowing along waterways where it loved to stretch in sand and rub those reclusive parts with silicone reeds, these interpopulating predacious colonies first caused the diuretic property that is our concern, I mean the principle by which it escaped its own imprisonment.

There are three stages in this development. At one point the  shell cracked. While ancient Chinese used a pin to create oracle bone script, the Western Oracle had an organic crackling of the shell interpreted as the same. The vagary of these led it to prey upon other species, fragments of which serve as their oracle bones today, an art interpreted in the craquelure. These have semantic import beyond decoration. Indeed colonies of a higher level of culture formed and began to hunt others.

A conflict between archeology and anthropology finds that these creatures survived even the late settling of the West, then moved back up in the mountains where it was apparent they were more intelligent than first thought, excelling in politics and psychology. For this the shells are the best informant.

The aesthetic appeal of these chest plates is a major interest compared with ancient Greek Vase painting, even more  because it is the force of nature that  decorates it. To what degree that being cooperated individually in the making of these designs is debated. The relation of shield is personal and intimate, meant as a mask to frighten enemies and inspire the imagination of friends, so it is no extreme to say that it is its shield.

First, a shield is spherical and covers the midsection and chest. It attaches over the shoulders and down the back. In that sense it is a carapace. Once detached or detachable, over the course of  survival the shield maintained  under stress literally fused with the scute, the dermal bone beneath.

The shell of this scute has a thin ventral plastron whose epidermis is a leathery skin, but the scutes and dermal bones do not have the same composition, which explains the craquelure. Fine networks of cracks occur when the shell shrinks and becomes brittle. Craquelure records the environmental conditions the shell experienced as an exoskeleton. The jet black carapace matures to a deep amber under the extended prognathous jaw. Even if an insect derivative, the pantheon of diversity claims all phyla relative. Genomes connect to the claw that protrudes from its helmet in stress.

This celebrated and imitated patina produces a pattern of hairlike cracks in the varnish of mature shells. These apparent floral patterns, whether from UV light, shrinkage or age, appear in the armors of the Smithsonian as an Acanthus baroque styling older than Rome, with marks of early hand hammered hardware in its rosemaling. Whether the result of natural force, or manipulated at will, this craquelure throbs with wide sprouts or barbs. Fissures reverse to forks, especially when there are ribs in the pattern. Inscrutable crack formations of simple branching describe neural networks under black light. Dimpled fingerprints, fine cracks in the finish, cleavage, cupping, spirals and dimpling occur.

Possessing a shield today means owning an entire carapace. People collect tortoise shells for such patterns. The same types grow species of Indian corn and display blue and red kernels in their dining rooms, but have no use for tureens and pots.

The shields together tell a communal story, decipherable as words and paragraphs out of their large storybook. Their wars and their gods are Norse in effect. If this seems foreign to designs produced by nature, let it be compared with the fossil record that tells a grand epic, even as geology shapes land. How these natural forces interact on the shields, making them figurative and narrative, is our study in addition to the point its symbols of identity were absorbed into the body.

Without the shell the Orc body Orcs is a white mottle, spindle shanked. The shell was an evolutionary insistence from the Pleistocene deprived of birds and flying reptiles. This became the biped that forgot to fly and lost its wings when legs grew muscular three-pronged toes. What doesn’t that explain? DNA bears this out.

It gets interesting if Aristotle were finally right and Lamarck’s habitual behaviors entered this genome. Temperatures at the poles were rising. The atmosphere heated so much that the Orc shed for comfort first, and then for necessity lest it be steamed in the shell. Psychologists say it internalized the shell like a footballer would protect from concussion. Circumcisionalists say it did it to free up sense awareness. The shell outside went under the rib as a leathery scute, over layer of skin which lasted until it peeled and left it standing naked. In short the shield and helmet developed cracks, which widened and flaked in the salt pan deserts.

This inquiry were moot without the cracks. New shed scutes are collectible in the west where they are read as primitive oracle bones of divination. Trade is extensive, the bulk going like ginseng to Japan. Scutes displayed as wall hangings, abstracted on pottery are argued in some Museum bulletins as the base of ancient Shino. Imagine Orc shedding like falling elk antlers in season when there were wagon loads, but years since the trade has died. Present day scutes are thin, and shed, dissolve in the explosion. Dénouement Orc explodes in a flash so blinding no one has actually seen them naked. They avert eyes either from the flash or from revulsion.

Best wishes on your coming presentation, DV