Conspyramids

            On Tuesday morning I worked at OCADU for an instructor that I’ve known since the early 80s when I first started modeling. I think that Marie Charbonneau was in her twenties when I first met her but since she had prematurely grey hair, she doesn’t look much older now than she did back then.

She had her back turned when I walked into the classroom as she was engaged in writing on the blackboard her usually meticulous outline of the day’s itinerary. I walked up behind, put my hand on her shoulder and said, “Hi Marie!” She turned around, recognized me and gave me a big hug. I think that’s the first time in thirty years of working as a model that I’ve ever been hugged by an instructor in my place of work. I wonder if she would have hugged me if I hadn’t first made body contact with her by touching her shoulder but had only walked up and said “Hi Maria!”

I did a set of two minute poses for her class, followed by fives, then tens, then fifteens and then finally a twenty. On my short and long breaks I made notes on a comparison of two poems by El Jones and Wayde Compton for my upcoming English essay. One piece is “Light Skinned Girl” by Jones and the other is “Declaration of the Halfrican Nation” by Compton. Jones tries to show what it was like to have been the darkest skinned girl in grade school by describing how wicked sisters and witches are described in fairy tales. I don’t think either of these types of characters tends to be presented as darker than the heroine. Witches in particular come to mind as being white haired and pale skinned. Compton, on the other hand, makes the reader experience halfness by splitting words up at the end of a line so that it is not complete until the next. He also throws in various words that are synonyms for “half” or “halved” such as “co”, “side” and “entre”.

At the end of class Maria asked me what I’ve been up to and so I told her about taking Canadian Poetry with George Elliot Clarke and working on a manuscript of poems for his class for the end of the term. That led to her telling me about a project called “Atlantis Rising” that she is working on that contains her paintings plus some of her own creative writing. She said it was inspired by William Blake and what she has read about Atlantis, which she is convinced was a real place. She told me that they have discovered pyramids by satellite deep under the melting ice in Antarctica, which is where she thinks Atlantis was. She went on to talk about the Nazis having been very interested in Antarctica and also recounted an apparently recent story of a forbidden zone at the south pole over which planes are forbidden to fly but that one pilot disobeyed that order and lost control of his craft. I think the skepticism might have been visible on my face. She said something else about a pyramid recently having been uncovered in Indonesia that they’d thought at first to have been a buried mountain.

            A quick search shows that the “pyramids” that Marie thinks are in Antarctica are actually mountains that happen to be shaped like pyramids if viewed from certain angles. The Matterhorn in Switzerland and another mountain in Iceland are also pyramidlike in a similar way. As far as a no fly zone over the South Pole is concerned, there may be a research area where scientists want to keep their signals clean and so they don’t want planes flying overhead. I couldn’t find anything about a plane mysteriously losing control over its instruments and going down. There are also conspiracy theories about Nazis in Antarctica to the point of them building a fortress and forming alliances the extraterrestrial aliens that had a base there. The fact is that Antarctica was sort of like an early 20^th Century equivalent to the space race. Germany was one of the many countries interested in exploring the area and one German expedition just happened to go there during the Nazi regime. Germany actually lost interest in the South Pole after the war, probably for economic reasons and so Norway took over the study of New Swabia. Finally, the Indonesian “pyramid” is so far only a speculation based on studies with electronic signals projected under an ancient site where real artifacts of a Neolithic community have been found. One researcher and his team claim that there is a structure beneath the site with smooth walls and large chambers. Other scientists are skeptical that it’s actually a man made structure. The president of Thailand has put funding behind the pyramid team, but then again, he also gave $1.2 million to someone that claimed he’d developed a method of turning water into fuel but after getting the money he disappeared. I had no idea that Marie was into that kind of Von Daniken stuff.