<meta name="description" content="This is a work in two main parts--one hidden and one open. Each part has three other counter parts--one more or less open and the other three hidden. The story of the boy provides the parabolic base for these insights into the modern world of humanity and community. The text within the alt tags of the introductory navigation provides the talmudic or taoist commentary on the text. The texts within the alt tags of the boy's story provide the alternative history of the dissident and the internet cafe. The Official History of Salmon in Clear Water Ravines is
exactly what it appears to be.">

<meta name="keywords" content="electronic literature, links, imagery, secret text, internet consciousness">

This may --or may not --be a cautionary tale for the Modern Age. For the Information Age. It might be a commentary on the way we handle confidential information. Or many- to-many communication structures for society. Or information verification. But it probably isn't, really.

It may --or may not --contain an obvious moral. It may--or may not--have happened in this order. Or in any other particular order. You might want to believe what each page says about itself. Or you might not.

A salmonic commentary to the human story.

1. Where is Truth?
2. What is Truth?
3. Consider the Shekinah, the Divine Indwelling of G-D. Is she gazing out over the edge of the Ravine? Is she the ponded river?
4. The names of the What Is are a trap, clouding What Is.
5. The curious old woman responds to each moment as It Is.
6. The story stops when we refuse to continue gazing out over the edges.
7. One sees What Is when one learns to see not with one's eyes.
8. Is it painful for the curious old woman to allow the boy to figure it out for himself?
9. Learn to see. Learn to speak.
10. Beware the guru.
11. Explore the nature of desire.
12. The boy mistakes the clarity of the water for the clarity of his heart.
13. As the boy's heart becomes clouded, so do his eyes.
14. The boy refuses to explore perspectives outside himself.
15. Consider your own ability and willlingness to exploit.
16. What darkness in the boy made him susceptible?
17. What was once simple, clean, and obvious becomes muddy and murky and obscured.
18. The boy's failure positions him to learn to see.

Study Questions:

• Explain the symbolic importance of the alternative navigation order provided in the textual links.
• Determine if the figure in the image is the reader or the writer or the boy.
• Why would this tale term itself A Modern Moral Fairy Tale?
• Explicate the importance of the indifferent tone in Derridean terms.

<meta name="keywords" content="ravines, dreams, inability to travel, boats, airplanes, Transportation Security Administration">

Once upon a time, in a land that could not be reached by boats, and could not be crossed by air, and had only been reported in dreams, there was a village perched on a ravine.

1. You want my full confession.
2. You want me to renounce my ways.
3. I don't care anymore.
4. I want to sleep.
5. I will give you my soul to torment forever
6. on the unspoken promise of five minutes of silence.
7. of five minutes of sleep before you invade my body again.
8. or perhaps I am trading my soul for an eternity
9. of silence you will not ever let me reach.
10. I coveted the ways of the West.
11. I wanted the full truth.
12. I was willing to take all of the lies, too.
13. But you gave us only your own lies, which even you would not believe.
14. Yes, yes, I took my family's savings, hidden all these millenia from the State.
15. Yes, I created a tesla coil responder that would work as a satellite in the high mountains.
16. Yes, I was the one who let everyone find out exactly what was going on.
17. Yes, I created the equipment that ensured you would never find us.
18. Yes, I was the voice that everyone heard.

Study Questions:

• If this land can not be reached, how does anyone know about it?
• What is the relationship between physical isolation and information isolation ?
• Whose dream is being reported?
• And what mechanism is used to retrieve these dreams?
• Explain the dream sequence in neo-Platonic terms.
  

<meta name="keywords" content="mayors, internet cafe, tailors, proper methods to sweep a room, rice paddies, factory work, labor exploitation, rural economies, industrialization, industrial age meets the internet age.">

The village itself was simple: a mayor, a tailor, an internet café. Old men who had toiled all their lives in the little rice paddies that led up to the village from the south. Old women who swept their houses once a day from south to north, as they had done since they were infants. Children too young to go to the city to look for factory work. And no one else ever came by.

Study Questions:

• What was the impact of the Technological Revolution on the morals of female factory workers?
• Would the improbable success of the Luddite Revolution have made any difference in the quality of life of these villagers?
• Explain the relative evolutionary advantages and disadvantages of teaching infants to sweep in Darwinian terms. In Marxist terms. In Freudian terms.
• Explain the plight of the factory workers in Marxist terms. Relate to the history of the Wobbly movement.

The village was perched on top of a high ravine to the north, and the buildings slanted in just so, so you could see deep into the ravine. The first half of the ravine were stark tan cliffs punctuated with an occasional brave blue flower. What was once a river long ago had met with too many boulders at the mouth of the ravine, and had backed up, lazily prepared to wait its turn to leave.

Study Questions:

• Explain the geomorphological processes that must have been involved to produce this landscape.
• Explain the biological processes needed to postulate the existence of the brave blue flower.
• Explain the overt symbology of using a brave blue flower as a flagholder for the revolution.
• Explain the inertia of escapism using Freudian undertones.

<meta name="keywords" content="New York skyscrapers, double-decker London buses, salmon of inordinate size, economic significance of clear water.">

So the bottom half of the ravine was a placid lake—but the sheer absence of dirt or metals or anything else of value had allowed the water to grow very clear. On transparent days, you could see straight to the bottom of the ravine, where salmon the size of double decker London buses swam lazily over green tinged river rocks, which actually easily outmatched the tallest New York skyscrapers. On cloudy days, you could see nothing, not even the edge of the ravine, which is why this story has so few children in it.

Study Questions:

• Provide the necessary equations to calculate secchi depths and temperature hydrographs for the lacustrine areas.
• Explicate the relationship between clouds and children.
• Elucidate the symbolism underlying clouds in relationship to the Information Age.
• Would the improbable success of the Wikileak Revolution have made a difference in the hidden deaths of these children?

And that would be the end of the story, except that there was a curious old woman who lived in a tiny house at the western edge of the village. The house had once been the shipping container which had brought the furnishings and computers for the internet café, but the old woman had carved windows in the sides of the box like grinning jack-o-lanterns (a picture she’d found online and which had nothing whatsoever to do with the history of the village—so it was somewhat controversial until the others had gotten used to it), Every day, she would walk out to the rice paddies, watching the old men and old women bend down first to plant, then to weed, then to harvest.

Study Questions:

• Relate the symbolism of All Saints Day to the previous node.
• Relate the cyclic nature of time to the descriptions of old men.
• Explain the ecological benefits of the tiny house movement.

But even with a curious old woman who ate nothing but parboiled rice and who spent her days watching rice grow and her nights imagining the salmon swimming through the skyscrapers of the ravine, this would be the end of the story had there not been the child. On a bright Tuesday afternoon when MSN had declared that there was no news of note and had instead offered Bing searches of scantily clad movie stars, a strange woman walked toward the village.

Lines of exhaustion moved not only under her face, but under her arms where she carried a heavy bundle of child and under her stomach where she had not eaten for many weeks, and under her feet where she had walked countless thousands of miles on the edge of the ravine. (For really, there was nothing other than this tiny village perched on the edge of the ravine for as far as you could walk without becoming so exhausted that you simply could not walk any longer. )

Study Questions:

• Provide a detailed explanation of the classical chinese painting philosophy underpinning the human scale in these images.
• Identify and contrast the mentions of distance and isolationism in this piece.
• Explain the physiological hardships involved in walking with a hungry child under your arm.
• Explain the revolution in the neo-marxist terms used by the Myanmar coup.

<meta name="description" content="This seventh node makes explicit the continuing cycle of awareness, death, and birth that the story is based on. Again, the reasons for the woman's death are only obscurely and darkly hinted at as this work wishes to be published without further censorship. Note that nothing in this work shall be construed as advocating parboiled rice as an effective medical treatment." >

<meta name="keywords" content="BBC, picture of the day, Virtual academies, online schools, education as propaganda tools, mass education, literacy rates, rural villages, rural medicine, medicinal effects of parboiled rice">

The curious old woman watched the worn-out traveler as a tiny dust speck moving at the edge of the horizon, as an ant crawling at the edges of sight, as a tattered bundle carrying too many burdens. The curious old woman walked out to meet the traveler at the edge of the village (which was honestly as far as she had ever walked, because only in her dreams at night or in her daily perusals of the BBC pictures had she gone beyond the edges of the tiny village where she was born.) They never spoke, but the curious old woman took the baby from the traveler, who fell to the ground, exhausted. And the old woman spooned parboiled rice into the traveler's dry mouth caulked over with sores and gave her cool, clear water that the salmon had swum in the night before (the children hauled up pails of water from the ravine each morning, before they went into the internet café to attend the State Virtual Academy for Outlying and Backwards Villages). But this was not enough to revive the traveler after her journey, when she had, of course, given every bit of life to her baby and kept nothing back for herself to live on.

Study Questions:

• Explain the advantages and disadvantages of starving oneself for one's child in Darwinian terms. In Marxist terms.
• Provide a political manifesto on the advantages and disadvantages of ensuring a State-run education in Machievellian terms. In Wikileaks terms.
• Explain how the curious old woman got a table down the ravine.
• Find the hidden figure of the traveller in the image.

And thus the curious old woman took the baby back to the village to live in her shipping container. And every evening they would watch the sun go down and pause where the traveler had left her child. And every night they would dream of swimming around the salmon who played about the ravine’s skyscrapers as if they were pebbles.

Study Questions:

• Psychoanalyze the symbolic importance of salmon in Jungian terminology.
• Contrast the importance of the mourning, half mourning, and quarter mourning Victorian clothing requirements with the undefined times of grief in this passage.
• Explain the advantages and disadvantages of fostering a child in Darwinian philosophies.

<meta name="description" content="This ninth node introduces the concept of communication in the internet age and portends a time when communication between family members will no longer be necessary. Note the various types of communication have been outlined in this story for the convenience of teachers who wish to assign homework. ">

<meta name="keywords" content="instant messaging, You Tube, funny cat videos, internet cafe, grocery lists">

And in the tradition of the village, they did not speak. There were hurriedly IMed messages waiting for each other sometimes at the internet café—messages of needing more parboiled rice or inviting the other to watch the latest--and definitely best--Funniest Cat Video on You Tube. And thus the boy grew up, attending the Virtual Academy of the State by day and watching the salmon by night.

9. Internet cafe realizes that it has become sentient

Study Questions:

• Compare and contrast these methods of communication. Who uses what and when and why?
• Explain the political advantages to a dictatorship of reducing vocabulary. Feel free to borrow Orwellian terminology.
• Explain the evolutionary advantages or disadvantages gained by night vision.
• Explicate the relevance of communication strategies in Turing tests.
• Explain the symbolic and evolutionary importance of monkeys, bearing in mind the Official State History books do not endorse creationism.

<meta name="description" content="This tenth node discusses the underlying problem of the internet age and the modern consumer-based economy. (The economy and technology depend on frequent upgrades, which waste resources and create an ever-increasing Ponzi scheme that will inevitably result in either collapse or expansion to an infinite level.) This explanation is not made explicit for the convenience of economics professors who wish to have real world examples.">

<meta name="keywords" content="ponzi scheme, LCD monitors, Internet 7 relics, cathode ray tubes, technology upgrades, air travel destinations, post-Keynesian economics, one percent, income inequality">

And this would still not be a story (except to say that life in the village went on in the same time-honored way it always had, that the boy grew up and had a child with the tailor’s daughter and went to the city to find work and never came back again and his daughter did the same and her son did the same), but that the flickering screens of the internet café enticed the boy.

The internet café had been set up before flat screen LCD monitors and only boasted Internet Explorer 7 and as the years went by, fewer and fewer options were available to the boy for everyone forgot to come to the internet café and offer upgrades. But even so,the internet café showed the boy luxuries he could not even begin to understand, such as jacuzzis and airplane rides that took one from one large village and deposited one into another large village that looked exactly the same.

Study Questions:

• Explain the psychological root causes of internet addiction in young boys.
• Research lists of banned sites and explain the dangers of each site. Please Bawdlerize your examples.
• Explain the effects that unlimited access to television commercials had on the fall of the Berlin wall.
• Explain the alternate version of history in Plantagenet terms. In Marxist terms.

The boy wanted these things, and he wanted a way to reach the world beyond the shipping container, mayor’s office, tailor shop, and internet café. And he also wanted upgrades so he could watch tv.com or hulu or fancast or the latest Flash 21 version because it promised so many more funny videos of cats (creatures he had never seen other than in the internet café, for the dreams of salmon larger than houses had long since frightened the cats into going deeper and deeper south into the rice paddies in search of tiny frogs and things that could easily be eaten in one gulp).

But to have these things required money.

Study Questions:

• Compare and contrast the intelligent actions of the cats in relation to the boy.
• Explain the commercial expedience of obsolescence.
• Explain the advantages and disadvantages of an economy based on obsolescence with shrinking resources in Darwinian and then Keynesian terms.
• Why is the monkey staked and why are the cats free? Explain your answer using concepts from the Tea Party Manifestos, basing them in the Constitution of the United States of America. Then in terms George Lucas would have used.

<meta name="description" content="This twelfth node ends the cycle of growth and desire and introduces the commercial possibilities of the salmon. It also explains the geographic placement of the village and ties it into the global economy.">

<meta name="keywords" content="tourists, industry, explorers, salmon, gold-mining, rope-weaving,">

And there was no money to be had in the village (which was why everyone went off to the factories to work and came back only when they were too exhausted to live). The place was too desolate for tourists, too far for industry, and too undiscovered for explorers. But there were the salmon, swimming long and lazily over the gold-tinged rocks that would tower over the skyscrapers of London or New York (but possibly not Singapore).

The boy started watching the salmon in the ravine, first from the window of the internet café that perched perilously close to the edge of the ravine, and then from a tiny spot almost to the water’s edge, which he got to with ropes he carefully and painstakingly wove from rice stalks.

Study Questions:

• Compare and contrast the prehensile strengths of rice stalks and bamboo.
• Explain the survival advantages and disadvantages of gold hues.
• Compare and contrast the migratory habits of humans and salmon.
• Determine the most effective methods for validating your observations.

The old woman IM'd him not to disturb the salmon, whose skins rippled emerald and alabaster, turning ebony in the shadows. She referred him to the Virtual Academy of the State’s Official History of the Salmon of Clear Water Ravines, but the text was too dry for him to follow. He would rather watch the salmon, and surf the net, and so he did.

Study Questions:

Compare and contrast the main philosophy of the Official History of the Salmon of Clear Water Ravines with the philosophies of

• The boy
• The curious old woman
• The State
• The internet cafe

Provide a detailed history of the author of the Official History of the Salmon of Clear Water Ravines.

<meta name="description" content="This fourteenth node begins the ascendant cycle of worldly success or revolution. This invites outside participation and promises an equal footing of wealth but renegs on these promises. The authors do not endorse the scams reported in this node and distance themselves from them.">

<meta name="keywords" content="get rich quick schemes, 419 scams, time, money, email, spam, toilets">

He read that Time and Money could get anyone anything, and so he bought a spam email package (promising to pay with Western Union funds, but never actually doing so) inviting those with Time and Money to pay him for a fishing expedition. And, eventually, one or two responded. They figured out the logistics of coming to the village, and the proprietor of the internet café agreed to pretend to be a hotel with Accommodations (he meant the indoor toilet, of which he was inordinately proud).

Study Questions:

• Explain the role of sanitation in developing nations and prosperity.
• Explain the role of many-to-many communications in fostering revolutions.
• Explain the figurative meaning of the bridge in the image in Jungian terms. In Kristevan terms. In Derridean terms.

And so the People with Time and Money came to the village and saw the salmon. This is too easy, they remarked as they carefully took aim with the harpoons under the helmets that they had brought for just this occasion. And they ate the salmon, which they declared delicious, a bit richer than truffles but a trifle sweeter than gold-encrusted chocolates. And the curious old woman IM'd the boy not to eat any, but to satisfy his hunger with parboiled rice. And so the boy did.

• Understand the focus on the next quarter's profits.
• Explain why prophets are not tolerated in their homelands.
• Compare and contrast the relative scale and importance of the figures in the image.

<meta name="description" content="This sixteenth node represents the denoument of the wealth cycle, as the boy and the internet cafe degenerate into a constant vicious circle of ever-expanding requirements. The node does not refer back to the ponzi-scheme aspects of expanding global consumerism as brought forth in node 10, but could do so if it wished. This node also foreshadows the inevitable outcome of these schemes. The timelines have been shortened for the convenience of economists searching for a fable.">

<meta name="keywords" content="sports fishing, money, excitement, game fishing, trophy fishing, thrilling sports, clear waters, resorts, water sports">

But the boy pocketed the money, and with the extra tips, the proprietor of the internet café upgraded his four computers (with one as a spare) and urged the boy to invite others. And so he did. And more People with Time and Money came to fish. And the upgrades continued, until the salmon got wise.

• Compare and contrast the fall of the Berlin Wall with the fall of the Cultural Revolution.
• Understand the events that lead to the Prague Spring.
• Explicate the genesis of genocides.
• Explain why that man is smirking in the image.

<meta name="description" content="This seventeenth node represents the slapdown of the State or natural physical processes that will not be subverted. Note that the metaphor of salmon as a natural physical process breaks down here for in reality unmetaphoricized beasts do not have the salmon's wisdom and thus become extinct from this sort of exploitation.">

<meta name="keywords" content="scambusters, Tiananmen Square, Prague Spring, Tamil Tigers, ISIS, Egyptian Revolution, Civil Uprising, Ukrainian Revolution">

The salmon now would no longer haunt the grey boulders by day, but stayed quietly in the shadows, haunting the boy’s dreams by night. For now instead of swimming with them lazily and luxuriously in the cool, deliciously clear water, the boy would be frantically dodging turbulent undercurrents of mud, grabbing through the filthy water to grasp—nothing, knives which cut into his nerves, electric eels, man-of-war jellyfish, cut-glass shards. And the People with Time and Money left without the salmon, as they mocked the boy and told him not to play such silly Nigerian scams again.

Study Questions:

• Explain the importance of dragons in mythological terms. In neo-Marxist terms.
• Determine the dangers involved in swimming in dreams.
• Provide a detailed flowchart to assure information verification for the Internet.

<meta name="description" content="This last node represents the isolationist aftermath of a State Victory. The node hints at the possible redemption for the boy and the internet cafe. But like a monkey caught with the cookie in the jar, it is only from letting go of the primary goals of the story that freedom and redemption can occur. ">

<meta name="keywords" content="absolutely nothing">

And so the boy forsook the internet café, spending all of his nights dodging the salmon through the murky, mercury-laden waters of his dreams and his days watching the clear water for the salmon, and yelling out when he saw one—but there was no one there to hear him.

Study Question:

Write what no one will read.