Kaleidoscopic Reality

I climb the dead tree, naked except for my hat, trying to hold onto the heavy camera and the branches at the same time. Carefully, I work my way out along the big limb overhanging the white sandy beach. From my perch, I see way down the deserted beach to the rocks on the north end of the cove and to the forest on the south end of the beach. Untrammeled white sand.. The South Pacific glows a deep powerful cobalt blue beyond the turquoise shallows just on the other side of the surf.

I steady myself and look down. Exactly below me three lovely naked girls form a circle, lying on brilliantly colored beach towels with bright bikinis carefully strewn around - just so. I examine the scene with my reality scope. This is my newest model. It has a set of lenses to kaleidoscope the world. The girl-pattern is breathtaking when arrayed in the interlocked hexagons of the reality scope. "Wow, Great!" I call down. "Hold it right like that. Nancy, move over slightly towards Freddy, put your left arm up a little - no, too far, back the other way. Yes. Perfect. Hold it now."

I have built a kaleidoscope camera to make the world's finest kaleidoscope photographs. What better objects for the action chamber than three beautiful girls lying naked on a beach? I focus and shoot.

"Ok, now everyone roll over on your backs and put your arms out side to side touching fingers together." I marvel through the reality scope as hundreds of multiple images of my models ballet into position. "Whoa! Hold it, Back up a little there. Nancy, put your legs a little further apart. Right. Freddy, straighten your hip. This makes the kaleidoscopic image into a perfect web of color with smooth arms and legs and torsos forming the threads of the net. Right. Hold it!" I shoot. Terrific. Fantastic.

A helicopter thwops 'round the point and swat-ta-tats down the beach about 50 meters offshore and 100 meters in the air. No doubt patrolling for drug smugglers or perhaps just using up surplus taxpayer's money on a joyride. The helicopter passes us and, in an act of unbelievable flying agility, the pilot stops, bounces the craft up and down, and backs up to hover just offshore. I see every face in the helicopter - 5 - appear in the starboard windows and cram into the open door. No doubt it is an unusual scene. I, naked in the tree, the girls naked on the beach lying on day-glow colored towels. On second thought, maybe they don't see me.

They wobble there in mid air, drooling like idiots, grinning like fools, looking militarily fiendish, their bulging eyes displaying all their low minded carnal thoughts. Then the helicopter flops off drunkenly down the coast and we get back to work.

When I finish the series of shots, we drape our pelts on the beach and picnic from the basket of goodies Freddy prepared. While we munch, I pass the small reality scope around and everyone giggles over the miraculous effect of breaking our world up into symmetrical, repeating images of itself.

"Oh my God, come see this," Nancy calls from the water's edge. We nude over and take turns watching the waves foam onto the beach. The effect is marvelous, enough to make me forget - for about a minute - the smooth, tanned expanses of skin around me. The movement of the tumbling waves makes exquisitely beautiful, ever changing snowflake patterns. From one apex of the interlocked triangular images, the water comes flowing upwards from some deep unexplored magic sea. It condenses into crystal patterns of white lace through the center of the image and flows into the next apex, as if merging into another dimension.

"It's... it's like its alive." Debbie peers into the little reality scope, watching the images snowflake from one dimension of reality into another. She's right. It does look eerily alive.

At the top of the beach, I reality scope the dark green leaves of the forest. The wind flicks each leaf according to its own inner tensions, the angle of the leaf to the wind, the elasticity of the stem, the surface smoothness. The result is unbelievable and indescribable. "You've got to see this to believe it," I hand the reality scope to Freddy.

"Wow. It's like... like the plants are talking to each other." she whispers.

"Let's see," Debbie brushes her long blonde hair away from her face in one of those totally magnificent feminine motions. Freddy hands her the scope and Debbie, too, is absorbed in the amazing vision of the forest talking to itself.

"The Abos would think they were in Dreamtime if they looked through this," Debbie breathes. "You really can see the spirits of the forest. The plants look like they are having an intelligent conversation with each other."

"Well, they are. Of course they are. Plants are living beings, after all. And they interact with the air and sun and each other in a very complicated network of behavior. You just can't see it, normally, because your mind is fixed at a different time rate than the plants. You ever see time lapse pictures of plants growing?" I ask my audience of naked femininity.

"Yes, I know what you mean. I love it." and "Uh-huh." and "Sure, but this is in our time rate, not time-lapse." They say.

"It's in our time rate, but not our normal hominid visual framework. By busting up the world into symmetrical interacting images, we destroy our habitual way of seeing. This opens our minds to a new view. And in this new view, we recognize life and integrated behavior in the symmetrical movements."

They all look at each other, suitably impressed my penetrating mental analysis.. Freddy opens her eyes wide, "Wow! Golly Gee whiz."

"I think I'd rather do it than hear about it," Debbie deflates my ego as they all burst into laughter.

"Me too," Nancy chimes in.

"Less bullshit, more action," Freddy grabs the reality scope and they go back to reality-scoping the forest while I go back to scoping them with my camera.

We drive back to Cairns and drop Nancy and Debbie off on the El Torito. About midnight, I finish developing the first of the world's greatest Kaleidoscope images. It is an 8 by 10 inch Ektachrome transparency. Stunning. I am enormously proud of myself. But although the images are terrific, they are nothing compared to the feeling of wonder imparted by the interacting movement within the reality scope. The reality scope is a motion analyzer.

Holding up the wet 8 X 10 transparency against the light, I begin to understand the biological meaning in the reality scope. When the real world is viewed through a precision kaleidoscope, it becomes a nested, interlocked pattern of behavior, made of interacting motions.

This alternate view of the real world is at once alien and hauntingly familiar. Alien because of the sense of intelligent life in every movement.

Familiar because it is how all of reality is constructed. Interacting, symmetrical motions build nested layers of behavioral images.

Freddy looks at me over the dozens of chemical bottles, trays and the development tank on the dinette. "Are you going to let me look at that or are you going to stand there and ogle the tits and asses all night?"