Charles D'Ambrosio - Loitering - New and Collected Essays

I, for one, was willing to believe. I was willing to believe that, on a warm fall night in the future, estivating frogs would bellow to life in ponds that, as of now, don’t exist. I was willing to believe that human shit is second only to bat guano as a nutrient and fertilizer, and that it’s entirely odorless when mixed with mulch. I was willing to believe that a recipe of soybean oil and chili peppers would eradicate the mosquitoes and make for an edible pesticide. I was willing to believe in things I did not understand, in Hilbert space and eigenforms and combinatorics, and I was willing to believe in houses that would someday look, fantastically, like big puppets. I was more than willing to believe in a world in which, quite beautifully, nothing was outcast or lost or abandoned, not people or things or ideals. I was willing to believe in all the enthusiasms Dave Santos believes in — the radical circus and the mutant bikes and the chicken tractor and the gnat goggles and the flying robots and the car that runs on rain. I was even willing to believe, in principle, that an earthly paradise, lush and complete, could be improvised and sustained with rainwater, PVC pipe, a homemade cistern, and a solar-powered bilge pump. I was willing to believe all of this and more — that human migration and nomadism make sense, that pedaling a bike a mere six weeks a year will keep you in an eternal spring, that Bucky Fuller once bathed a family of four with a single cup of water — but I was not willing to believe this:

“Ultimately, I think colonizing the atmosphere is the solution to a lot of ecological problems. [ Uh-huh. ] 1And it’s also more sensible than the space fantasies — the idea that we’re ready to build a bunch of rockets and blast off and live in orbit. [ Right. ] Engineering-wise, it’s much simpler to colonize the lower atmosphere. [ Uh-huh. ] And so we have the stratosphere, is where I started theorizing. I lectured at UT Aerospace on the subject. We could take carbon out of the atmosphere. We have excess carbon dioxide, we’d liberate oxygen to help us breathe up in the stratosphere, we could mix that oxygen in with our helium and live inside these huge cathedral spaces — we’d be talking a little like Donald Duck — but because of the solar energy coming in we’d have a shirtsleeve, close-to-sea-level-pressure environment, up above the weather [ Uh-huh. ], and totally reliable electric solar power. [ Yeah. ] And we could use that electricity for ion propulsion to crack the carbon dioxide, to regenerate the ozone, using the catalytic reactors of these ion propulsion engines, and get carbon credits, from, like, the nations that want to do something good for the environment. We could build this aerial civilization from the carbon we’ve dumped in the atmosphere. [ Yeah, yeah. ]

“And then go anywhere we want, like the round-the-world ballooners. By knowing, by being able to visualize the atmosphere, they can steer. [ Uh-huh. ] And they didn’t even have any propulsion except the ability to go up and down. [ Right. Right. Right, right. ] So we have these sites around the world that are like stratospheric elevators where prevailing winds hit a mountain and create a stratospheric mountain wave, and so those are places you could have gliders that soar up to your stratospheric cities. [ Yeah. ] Getting down’s easy. [ Right. ] You could just skydive. [ Uh-huh. ] Out of the stratosphere. [ Yeah, yeah. ] It would be the basis of an Olympian civilization, living up in the clouds. I’d like to see socially conscious hippies get there as opposed to some death star. [ Yeah, yeah, yeah — so you see Biosquat in relation to everything you’re saying as. ] As a stepping-stone. [ Yeah — it also seems somehow, uh, it seems very fluid. ]”

Dave Santos has some higher education, but essentially he’s a kind of autodidact. He went to Washington College (“a party school on the great waterbird migratory flyway of the Chesapeake”), dropped out, enrolled at the University of Texas, dropped out, matriculated, dropped out, whereafter he cut tuition costs by auditing classes or simply sitting in on lectures that interested him. (“I was able to lap up aura and knowledge from Nobel laureates and other legends in this way.”) In conversation he has that ravenous fierce range of the self-taught: Hilbert space, Foucault, ion propulsion, Hazlitt’s translation of Montaigne, heuristic programming, Rousseau in the original French (“It wore me out.”), matrix algebra, zines, Mircea Eliade, Radio Shack manuals, predicate calculus, pamphlets on composting. Without much lingering or elaboration the learned references pile up — some Foucault here, a little Rousseau over there — in an allusive, jumbled analogue to the vacant lot Biosquat is built on. For Santos — fringy, wandering outside the codes and canons of academe — every book he’s read is a perfect, remarkable objet trouvé , to which he brings tremendous zeal.

Like a lot of autodidacts, Dave Santos wants to outsmart you. His language sounds impressively academic but slightly forged. He favors, for instance, coinages (“biobikes,” “edjidotopia”), as if he were exploring the frontiers of a discipline, working a lonely terrain and discovering things for which, as yet, there are no names; or he dresses up a phrase for the scientifically credible sound it will make (“Arrest Proofing Protocols,” “Bivy Head Observatory”); and whenever there is an opportunity to swap in a complex word for a simple one, an elaborate construction for a clear explanation, Santos is there, substituting “rear-optics” for mirror, “micro-hedonics” for good fun, and “dive reflex” for hitting the ditch, creating his own taxonomy, a systematics behind which, I suspect, there is no system.

This makes him powerful and persuasive to a point, and never less than entertaining, but I think too that his showy, protesting intelligence masks an insecurity, a feeling, never entirely put to rest, that he doesn’t belong in the room. He talked about attending AI conferences with his home-built robots and being “respected by these people who, normally, without a PhD, you shouldn’t even be in the same room [with].” “Shouldn’t” is a curious choice — why not the more neutral “couldn’t” or “wouldn’t”?—in that the word subtly switches the speaker: it doesn’t actually belong to Santos but to the voice of an absent, unnamed, scolding authority. Here, then, is the central theme of paradise — banishment and exile.

And so in exile — let’s say — he elaborates his own thing. The various structures on Biosquat proper include the sleeping quarters, mostly tents and mosquito netting, and “the mother ship,” as Santos calls it, a travel trailer the color of canned peas that sits under a carport. The trailer is rough and shabby, the kitchen kind of a sty, ruling out any chance that Biosquat has a hidden desire for conventional uptight domestic order. All of this is fairly standard, and the cheap, sagging tents in particular give the place the familiar look and feel of a homeless camp. The chicken tractor is interesting — a low cage laid out along a footpath, with a plywood coop at one end. The idea is that the chickens, confined to a run, will peck and till the earth, kill the weeds, eat the insects, shit and thereby fertilize the soil, but just before I arrived they were depredated by raccoons (dramatizing a flaw in the curious harmonic stasis of Eden that I could never resolve in childhood: What would everybody eat, I’d wonder, if they couldn’t eat each other?) A homemade cistern collects water from the roof of the carport; the water is then pumped to the terraced gardens, and a solar oven, sitting on a shopping cart — a corolla of petal-shaped panels open to the sun — generates just enough heat to cook a pot of beans.