Peculiar Worlds and Circular Illusions

By Walter Winch

These short stories are about what we may think we see and feel as much as they are about any reality we are living in. From the well known Professor Kurtz and his groundbreaking paper on "human de-evolvement," to giant sea turtles suddenly appearing in neighborhood swimming pools, to state governments desperately searching for novel ways to raise money in dire economic times, and to hope in unusual places. We all continue to look for resolution of some kind. Do we not?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Walter Winch
• Release date: Oct 28, 2013
• ISBN: 9781310891298

Walter Winch

Walter has lived and worked in the U.S., South America and the Caribbean, and has written both fiction and non-fiction, including radio drama, a stage play, newspaper column, an environmental blog for local paper and a grammar book for speakers of English as a Second Language. He has worked as a Peace Corps Director in the Caribbean, taught ESL at two universities in Miami, been a director of a private adult vocational school and has acted in repertory theater. Walter has a B.A. in History from Boston University and an M.A. in Political Science from Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut.Do you like radio stories? Go to http://www.prx.org/pieces/68054-ozark-reflections-an-american-story

Book preview

Peculiar Worlds and Circular Illusions

by

Walter Winch

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2013 Walter Winch

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Also by Walter Winch at Smashwords.com: The Balkan Cross— https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/356977

Table of Contents

Musings of a Member

A Brief Visit to Ceuta

The Shobashi Sanction

Dark Times

Casa Luminosa

A Daguerreotype

Pure White Primitives

Esmond Esmond

Absence of Rain

About the Author

Musings of a Member

Because of the outstanding science reporting of Thoral Ibn Said, we now know that Professor Ivan Kurtz of Moscow University, a respected mibo-ethnologist, recently presented a novel hypothesis regarding the future of our species. His published paper entitled The General De-Evolvement of Homo Sapiens will be presented to the National Academy of Science in Washington, D.C.

The late Stephen J. Gould, the well-known evolutionary biologist, said in his book A Full House that we humans are here by the luck of the draw. For Gould, it has nothing to do with any grand design or evolutionary mechanism. Evolution has been full of fits and starts, frequently leading to evolutionary dead ends.

Gould believed it was pure arrogance on our part to think that evolution has traveled in a steady, predictable direction toward human life. And, if it could be done all over again, it's unlikely the universe would come up with anything remotely resembling us.

In Professor Kurtz' view, Homo sapiens may in fact be reaching some sort of evolutionary brick wall. His paper also suggests that the speed at which we humans could be arriving at this dead end might be increasing by a factor of two every 24 months!

While it would be impossible here to cover all of Kurtz' paradigm, a brief review of his two principle concepts are worth mentioning. The first he calls the survival-fear constraint. Kurtz believes all living organisms, including something as supposedly simple as bacteria, create a kind of knowledge log, which acts as an internal gyroscope, keeping the organism's survival instincts focused.

Professor Kurtz has developed a numbering system from one to ten. Number one represents a species that possesses total fear of almost everything. Number 10 represents a species that lacks essentially all fear. It can be assumed in Kurtz' model that no species is a perfect 1 or 10, as that would make its survival virtually impossible.

Predators in general cluster closer to 10 because they are hunters and, if not completely carnivorous, will eat meat from time to time. For example, Kurtz assigns the number 8.6 to a lion and an 8.0 to a cheetah. The cheetah gets a lower number than a lion because of a weaker jaw and a kill rate of only one in five attempts, a lower percentage than a lion.

An elephant, on the other hand, is assigned a number 6 because it is not carnivorous and has a highly developed sense of group responsibility to its own immediate herd and its species. In general, species that fall in the middle of the scale are more willing to integrate into their environment.

In Kurtz' classification scheme, only humans go above 8.9. As well, unlike any other species, they fall into a range of between 9.0 and 9.5. Without going into lengthy detail, the broad factors the professor uses for assigning numbers for humans include (1) population expansion and habitat destruction (2) environmental degradation attributable to humans (3) species cooperation and (4) human belief systems.

Professor Kurtz has concluded that Homo sapiens have a low fear threshold because of a poorly developed internal gyroscope. According to Kurtz, because of the primitive alarm mechanism of humans, our survival as a species is uncertain.

Of particular interest is the possibility we may be actually reverting or retreating back to a state we had passed through at least 40,000 years ago. If this hypothesis proves to be true, it would make our species truly unique.

But an even more astonishing possibility may be presenting itself at the same time, according to the professor. The reason Kurtz has used a range of numbers for humans is because he is strongly suggesting the possibility—admittedly tenuous right now—that we could be at the beginning stages of creating a new species, one that is related to us.

In a worldwide population of of more than 7.2 billion people, the professor estimates, using his classification model, that possibly from one to two million individuals are consistently exhibiting a more highly developed internal gyroscope, thus the reason for a number in the range of 9.0.

The second principle is called the