Kudzu Review Summer Solstice 2012 Edition, Madison Percy Jones IV (Editor), Arthur Wilke (Editor), Robin Ward (Editor) [books to read to improve english txt] 📗

opaque without words. Lincoln had never been any good at reading expressions or body language. A silent companion made Lincoln feel clumsy.

“You’re taking this frost pretty calm,” Lincoln finally said.

“Oh, outside I am. Outside I’m as silent as a printed circuit. Inside. . . .” Robertson searched the cold halo above them as if it had words or numbers written on it. “You remember punch cards, Lincoln? You don’t see them anymore, but they used to be how everything was figured, and they clacked and slapped when they went through the computers. Inside I’m all punch cards, whole boxfuls riffling and sorting, just clacking away.”

“Oh.” This exchange had not been helpful.

“But the halo around the moon is lovely, isn’t it?” Robertson nodded at his own words.

Lincoln felt the crystal damp slipping in between his buttons. The circle around the moon wasn’t a halo, he decided, and then he thought he saw what it was. He turned to tell Robertson, but he was already walking back upslope to the dark house, taking his cold May into her warm December.

“It’s not a halo,” Lincoln said, softly to himself. That tight circle around the moon was more like the barrel of a muzzleloader, and the big moon like a musket ball aimed their way. The sad thing was that, yes, the barrel he was staring up into was, undeniably, beautiful. He felt himself beginning to shiver.
THREE NOTES ON BIOSPHERE 2 by W. C. Bamberger

I: July, 1994

In the last week of July, 1994 I flew to Arizona to visit novelist William Eastlake. A decade earlier I had written a book about Eastlake’s work, highlighting what I saw as his growing dismay at the failure of man to engage in moral evolution. Bill hadn’t published a novel since 1977, and I wondered whether this was a sign that his disillusionment had driven him into silence.

I flew into Sky Harbor International airport in Phoenix very late in the afternoon. The sky was going dark as I drove toward my motel in Casa Grande, a city I had picked from a map because I wanted to spend the night outside the maze of the greater Phoenix area. A miles-long stretch of the south-bound expressway was under construction so I drove through the desert night with a double yellow line on one side and blinking caution lights on the other. Staring at miles of these winding strings of blinking amber lights I began to imagine they were the eyes of large electric insects.

I was exhausted by the time I got to my motel room. I turned on the television for distraction. William Burroughs suddenly popped up on the screen, hawking Nike shoes, a commercial I hadn’t known existed. “The purpose of technology is not to confuse the brain, but to serve the body,” he intoned, from a laptop screen set down on an athletic field. “Oh,” I thought, “this commercial is what made me think of giant electric insects; a very Burroughs image.” This unscientific thought was one of my last before I dropped off to sleep.

In the lobby the next morning I saw pamphlets for Casa Grande itself, built by the Hohokam Indians, circa the early 13th century. I backtracked slightly and went to see these ruins. “Casa Grande” is of course Spanish for “big house.” This refers to the remains of the four story structure which has managed to survive here for some seven hundred years. I walked the tourist paths, took pictures, and was careful not to touch the fragile surface of the honey-gold adobe walls. Casa Grande has a kind of nested architecture, with several three-story outer rooms that surround an inner structure a story higher. The walls are eroded, broken, irregular, but the damaged structure has a strong presence under its soaring roof. Casa Grande is covered by an immense free-standing roof to protect it—its building materials processed from the ground itself—from the environment. The on-site guards—the term “park rangers” didn’t seem to fit—told me the roof had been constructed to protect the walls from acid rain. I later found out the first roof had been built in 1932. The guards, with their chest-out attitudes, clearly had a protective interest in this battered survivor.

I began to wander south again toward Bisbee, where Eastlake lived. Near Oracle, I saw a sign giving directions to “Biosphere 2.” I couldn’t remember what this was but, even while I knew I should keep moving south to get to Bisbee by our agreed-upon time, I turned to follow the signs.

By the time I pulled into the parking lot I had recalled Biosphere 2. This was a huge domed environment inside of which teams of volunteers were sealed, spending a year or more studying the effects of human biology and activities (farming, producing carbon dioxide, et al), on this enclosed miniature model of earth’s environment. From the beginning then, the explicit premise of Biosphere 2 was that earth’s environment was a separate entity from us, and needed to be protected from us.

Posted along the gently rising walkway from the parking lot to the information center were short metal figures, their height and spacing almost identical to that of the amber electric insects of my previous night’s imagining. An information plaque informed me that these figures were updated versions of kachinas. Kachinas are spirits important to southwest Pueblo peoples. Many people think kachinas are the dolls that are often made, either as toys or as spiritual objects, but these are only images of the spirits. A kachina can be the spirit of land, of wind, of rain, of hundreds of things important to the people who honor them and ask for their aid. These particular kachinas, the Biosphere 2 plaque proudly declared, had been designed and built specifically for the site, created from “obsolete atomic hardware.”

Biosphere 2 itself was just beyond the barrier of the information center—accessible for $12.95. The receipts tucked into my Biosphere 2 Visitor Map & Directory tell me that I bought a disposable camera and a Biosphere 2 pencil. Pictures and pencil have all fallen away; only the financial particulars linger on.

Our tour guide was the opposite of the taciturn, bristling men at Casa Grande. He was a jovial chatterbox who, after he saw me scribbling away in my notebook, often spoke directly to me. His enthusiasm was a little off-putting from the beginning: as we began our tour he said, “Welcome to Biosphere 2. Who can tell me where Biosphere 1 is?” After a long awkward silence, a man said, “I think it’s near Chicago.” “You’re right,” the guide said. “But it’s also near Los Angeles, and it’s right here, too. Because Biosphere 1 is the earth itself!” The embarrassed man was not pleased.

For the first part of our tour we were taken through a series of greenhouses and habitats uphill from the main structure. We trooped from room to room, from one tiny sliver of an environment to another. (It came to me that this array, the egg-carton compactness of these experimental plantings, was almost identical to that in Andre Norton’s science fiction novel Beast Master, where an alien civilization had gathered together bits of dozens of worlds—including the dead earth—and put them inside a mountain on Arzor, a planet clearly modeled on Arizona, as a kind of galactic sample case.) Our guide stressed that these plants, while on a kind of life support in these small rooms, would become parts of a total self-sustaining, earth-duplicate environment in future experiments within the sealed structure. This led to his most telling line of the morning. “Here,” he told us with an earnest smile, “we replicate the outside world in miniature.”

Out of the jungle rooms and into the light—and our first unobstructed view of the Biosphere 2 enclosure. From a distance it made me think of a glass shopping mall with a giant light bulb, less rounded than beveled with Bizarro-World anglings, protruding from its peak. We were told that this was in fact the environment’s library, positioned high above the humid welter of the biological processes. (The facility had been designed by John Polk Allen, who had just a few years earlier designed a performing arts center in Houston called Caravan of Dreams. Attendants at the opening night festivities in Houston in 1983 had included William Burroughs.) I wondered what books were in that library.

As we walked down toward the main facility, the guide detailed the size, make-up and processes of the elements inside. There were trees and birds and underwater life, and a crew of seven, all of which were visible through the glass walls. Theoretically, at least: the observation walkway was far enough away that it gave the crew some sense of privacy.

As we viewed the thriving rain forest area, the guide told us how the two-year-long first experiment had attempted to replicate a complete rain forest environment. The most exotic denizens of this forest had been two pairs of small rain forest animals. In the official Biosphere 2 literature these kitten-sized primates are referred to as “galagos” rather than by their vernacular name, “African bush babies.” It was thought that these cute African creatures would provide the closed-in group with a kind of delightful animal companionship that goats and pigs couldn’t. (The pigs were, in fact, there to be eaten.) But, like the humans, the nimble, territorial galagos were true to their basic characters even in the controlled environment: they took most of the best fruit for themselves,and chased humans away from the trees by bombarding them. I wrote again, “We replicate the outside world in miniature.”

We walked past the long wall of the vast glittering greenhouse shape, peering in as best we could at the tiny figures, with no sense of what work they might be doing, if any. As we came around the back side of the environment we could see the piping, the ducts, and the huge expansion chambers called “lungs” that regulated pressure inside. We also saw, though we didn’t speak to, a scattering of men in overalls, driving a small truck, walking in and out of a shed, walking under Biosphere 2 itself, into the more than three acres of propane-powered support machinery humming there. To be self-sustaining the environment had to be positioned in and on a fairly steady “earth” and million-gallon sea, something these technicians helped to maintain. (At one point a large helping of oxygen had to be pumped in, for example.) Even achieved, the ideal equilibrium sought inside Biosphere 2 had shortcomings of its own. They had trouble with collapsing trees, for example—in the sealed atmosphere of Biosphere 2 there were no windstorms to put stress on their trunks, a process that lets trees develop the strength they need to remain upright. Also, because the miniature earth wasn’t connected to the earth’s atmosphere, it didn’t have unlimited space above to dissipate heat, and so the