photo: Scott Umstattd
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June 8, 2025
by Dr. David Fialkoff, Editor / Publisher
In 14 years of living in San Miguel, until the last I never noticed the fireworks display every first of June in el Centro. The occasion for the spectacle, I learned, was the start of the two week period of festivities honoring Saint Anthony, a period which ends, of course, with the grand Los Locos parade.
This oversight surprises me because I am a great fan of fireworks. Without fail I'm up on a rooftop (usually my own) watching the extravagant displays for New Years and Mexican Independence Day. Also, for the 13 years I lived in San Antonio I kept my ears open for sequential booms and pops. Hearing those I always left off what I was doing (so much work) and hurried outside, positioning myself up on the remains of the foundation in the corner of the empty lot next door to see the pyrotechnic wedding displays exploding in the sky above Rosewood or Instituto Allende. These lesser shows always impressed me and, no doubt, the wedding guests.
Here just above San Luis Rey in Colonia Insurgentes, I have a good view of the Parroquia right out my large front window. Last night [June 1], alerted by a series of pops, I looked up from my work (so much work) to see pyrotechnics exploding in the sky over our town's iconic edifice. Then, standing in front of the open part of the window, I relished a very beautiful fountain of lights erupting for a considerable time.
photo: Tomas Castelazo
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Last night's show made quite an impression on me. Not nearly as lengthy or ostentatious as New Years or Independence Day, it avoided the gaudiness associated with those displays. Its pomp was more measured, almost regal. In fact, at one point, just for a moment, I saw in it an emblem reminiscent of a coat of arms.
Los locos, "the crazies," the saints and seers, mystics, shamans and madmen, like psychedelic travelers, achieve a super human perspective. Theirs is a point of view transcending all mundane restrictions, where everything does make sense, does fit together. It is the Diamond Consciousness, reflecting the perfect facets of some very non-Euclidean geometry.
The brain looks for patterns, because perceiving a pattern allows the brain to stop the energy-intensive work of observing particular details. Just so, on one of my rare indulgences with psilocybin, one night, alone stretched out on the grassy lawn outside the party on the commune in NE Vermont, looking up at heaven's starry, starry vault, it all came together. The stars resolved, magnificently, perfectly into a wonderful regular geometry, a fluid pattern of lights.
Walt Whitman
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Walt Whitman's birthday just passed, the day before last - anteayer – as they so beautifully say in Spanish – May 31. The bard was obviously and ecstatically familiar with this "cosmic consciousness" (as his friend and biographer dubbed it). He sang, "the body electric."
I've been exploring Whitman these past few days, which redisposed me, last night watching the fireworks last night, to consider that the entirely non-ordinary display of pyrotechnics as also a rending of the veil that separates us from a more cosmic, more exalted view of things. Aided, no doubt, by the actual geometric symmetries of the display, I thought, like Whitman might have, that such rapturous pageantry was a non-verbal language, a message revealing another more perfect world, or revealing better the perfection of this one.
Walt Whitman
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Even when not gazing at fireworks displays, I see another more perfect world on the horizon. And I've realized that in order to convey my ecstatic, very hopeful vision, like Whitman (whose vision was also very hopeful), I have to go a little mad. And why not? What am I saving it for?
Not seer, saint nor shaman, but poet perhaps, I assert that there is no one in town who has been meditating and actively working (so much work) on community as me, at least not from such a macro, inclusive perspective, connecting the dots into a fluid, patterned whole.
photo: Scott Umstattd
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The scientists and mystics are talking about the singularity, about a new dispensation, a development that changes the way we are in the world. (The nerds imagine it as the next level of artificial intelligence. But their machine and the nerds themselves lack the necessary human ingredients: emotion, imagination and intuition.) They talk about the singularity, but I've got it:
It is the town and city, starting with our beloved San Miguel, coming together, rising up to locally apply the world's greatest economic dynamo ever - search engine and social network, think Google and Facebook but local. It is this, a local search engine and social network as a public service, with the profits of that kept circulating locally (through charity and microfinance) instead of being extracted, as they are now, into the pockets of our tech oligarchs.
Philosophy and self-help methods are all fine and good, but when you really need money, as so many really do, there's nothing else like it. If you want to change the world, San Miguel is a good place to start. We can do this – Mission.
Already years ago, the poet in me exhorted and questioned:
