(I was supposed to seek, not find it.)
There is a rebirth and an image of rebirth. It is certainly necessary to be born again through the image of Resurrection. The image must rise again through the image. The bridal chamber and the image must enter through the image into the truth: this is the restoration. This power the apostles called "the right and the left." For this person is no longer a Christian but a Christ.
(Gnostic) Gospel of Philip, Codex II, 3
I tried easing, rather than tossing you into it, but then it just seemed like I was rolling out the red carpet only to pull it out from under your feet and bring down the floorboards with it. So just take a deep breath, crawl onto the flying carpet --language describing language in a metamorphosing metaphor also morphing into many literary forms and genres -- don't let this Proteus return to the water until he spills the beans! Hold on, and as we take off, begin studying the cryptic code of the operating manual written into the undulating, somersaulting loosely woven threads as the wind sings howls and whistles through them. Or don't crawl on. If the latter, good-bye. If the former, hello!
Some works are indispensable, or they are nothing. It is discouraged to endeavor such a work, idleness is a deadly sin, and the risk of doing nothing is too great. Also, such works function as actual, literal time machines, where there is great fear of the repercussions of an intrusion into the already recorded past. Such works though travel through time in hermetically sealed bubbles. They produce indispensable vision or they are nothing. Such works are the wheels underlying the wagons, the wheels circling around in an almost perfect circle to arrive where they began, thus advancing the caravan that might have been sequestered in a ditch for centuries, or even millennia, as the many mediated by the media cash in on many false starts and jet propelled, high flying flops, on which many die on the fly never glimpsing the truth until it's too late, and they pass away. Such works not only point to, but crystallize the very specific meaning of these words and the very specific thing to which they apply. I'm not just saying what that thing is at the outset, because outside of these works and the way the thing plays and comes alive in these works, the thing is not itself. It is like a rough shell, ugly and abrasive, impossible to smooth into even a cold smooth stone, with no sign of the pearl or the delicious, living oyster. You would say (as I long did) -- you say, writer, not only that the thing can be found [but not captured, I would not capture it and limit its freedom even if I could, but it's a moot point, as once you find it, it captures you], but also that this ineffable thing can actually crystallize here and now in delimited matter, that it can be found There? Impossible and IMPOSSIBLE! and if not impossible too horrible to accept, or too anomalous and idiosyncratic to apply to, or signify, anything, but nevertheless a palpably dark and scary, ghostly shadow whose only decree is FLEE, and so you would, and read no further. So to avoid these chimera, you must stumble into it there having snuck in from behind in spite of yourself, by a long circuitous side road, walking with a limp ((one leg being supple, sentient intuition, another wooden logic) echoing the rhythm of a heartbeat), as I did, reader, or to avoid finding it there, somehow manage to fail to find it (while appearing always to seek it), if that is your immutable destiny, although I for one do not believe in immutable destinies. It does seem though that destinies are extremely resistant to mutation. (Perhaps destiny, once its genetic code is mapped, could serve as a model for genetically engineered beneficial gut bacteria, to limit their ability to mutate into the bad type.) Oh what the hell, by now you've probably guessed or are about to, so I will just tell you. The Mongrel Discourse is word crystallizing, 14th century (I'm just the translator) Catholic art and theology (not to be confused with modern or any other brand, that would be like comparing a B M W to plastic toy turtle that only walks when you pull the leash sized for a two year old) revivified in this mad scientist's laboratory from a cell found on a fossil. Many non-Catholics adore and dote on this material and constantly consume it for the mega-vitamins, however it drags around this vile theo-ist baggage filled with vials for injections to keep what would have otherwise been stillborn art up and running at an uncanny, superhuman speed, such that the elixir in the vials has for a while now been banned in the official art Olympics, and any user expelled in probable perpetuity. However this paragraph suggests the existence of, and points to, a natural source -- a single living ember of that long lost fire hidden in the cave I found and dancing intermittently into little flames as I speak, flames that the greater wind (from where I rolled away the stone at the opening to the cave) keeps extinguishing -- rendering this decree itself illegal.
*aka the renaissance
July ?, 2019
There is a rebirth and an image of rebirth. It is certainly necessary to be born again through the image of Resurrection. The image must rise again through the image. The bridal chamber and the image must enter through the image into the truth: this is the restoration. This power the apostles called "the right and the left." For this person is no longer a Christian but a Christ.
(Gnostic) Gospel of Philip, Codex II, 3
I tried easing, rather than tossing you into it, but then it just seemed like I was rolling out the red carpet only to pull it out from under your feet and bring down the floorboards with it. So just take a deep breath, crawl onto the flying carpet --language describing language in a metamorphosing metaphor also morphing into many literary forms and genres -- don't let this Proteus return to the water until he spills the beans! Hold on, and as we take off, begin studying the cryptic code of the operating manual written into the undulating, somersaulting loosely woven threads as the wind sings howls and whistles through them. Or don't crawl on. If the latter, good-bye. If the former, hello!
Some works are indispensable, or they are nothing. It is discouraged to endeavor such a work, idleness is a deadly sin, and the risk of doing nothing is too great. Also, such works function as actual, literal time machines, where there is great fear of the repercussions of an intrusion into the already recorded past. Such works though travel through time in hermetically sealed bubbles. They produce indispensable vision or they are nothing. Such works are the wheels underlying the wagons, the wheels circling around in an almost perfect circle to arrive where they began, thus advancing the caravan that might have been sequestered in a ditch for centuries, or even millennia, as the many mediated by the media cash in on many false starts and jet propelled, high flying flops, on which many die on the fly never glimpsing the truth until it's too late, and they pass away. Such works not only point to, but crystallize the very specific meaning of these words and the very specific thing to which they apply. I'm not just saying what that thing is at the outset, because outside of these works and the way the thing plays and comes alive in these works, the thing is not itself. It is like a rough shell, ugly and abrasive, impossible to smooth into even a cold smooth stone, with no sign of the pearl or the delicious, living oyster. You would say (as I long did) -- you say, writer, not only that the thing can be found [but not captured, I would not capture it and limit its freedom even if I could, but it's a moot point, as once you find it, it captures you], but also that this ineffable thing can actually crystallize here and now in delimited matter, that it can be found There? Impossible and IMPOSSIBLE! and if not impossible too horrible to accept, or too anomalous and idiosyncratic to apply to, or signify, anything, but nevertheless a palpably dark and scary, ghostly shadow whose only decree is FLEE, and so you would, and read no further. So to avoid these chimera, you must stumble into it there having snuck in from behind in spite of yourself, by a long circuitous side road, walking with a limp ((one leg being supple, sentient intuition, another wooden logic) echoing the rhythm of a heartbeat), as I did, reader, or to avoid finding it there, somehow manage to fail to find it (while appearing always to seek it), if that is your immutable destiny, although I for one do not believe in immutable destinies. It does seem though that destinies are extremely resistant to mutation. (Perhaps destiny, once its genetic code is mapped, could serve as a model for genetically engineered beneficial gut bacteria, to limit their ability to mutate into the bad type.) Oh what the hell, by now you've probably guessed or are about to, so I will just tell you. The Mongrel Discourse is word crystallizing, 14th century (I'm just the translator) Catholic art and theology (not to be confused with modern or any other brand, that would be like comparing a B M W to plastic toy turtle that only walks when you pull the leash sized for a two year old) revivified in this mad scientist's laboratory from a cell found on a fossil. Many non-Catholics adore and dote on this material and constantly consume it for the mega-vitamins, however it drags around this vile theo-ist baggage filled with vials for injections to keep what would have otherwise been stillborn art up and running at an uncanny, superhuman speed, such that the elixir in the vials has for a while now been banned in the official art Olympics, and any user expelled in probable perpetuity. However this paragraph suggests the existence of, and points to, a natural source -- a single living ember of that long lost fire hidden in the cave I found and dancing intermittently into little flames as I speak, flames that the greater wind (from where I rolled away the stone at the opening to the cave) keeps extinguishing -- rendering this decree itself illegal.
In the mongrel discourse, what's presently divided, like hydrogen and oxygen, and nearly impossible to combine, is found naturally, chemically bonded -- alas it's a long way to the moon*...
and lunar language is called lunatic, a failure to synthesize, an absence of water, just because it runs under the surface.. And it might be time to tap this source.
and lunar language is called lunatic, a failure to synthesize, an absence of water, just because it runs under the surface.. And it might be time to tap this source.
*aka the renaissance
July ?, 2019
The Mongrel Discourse pours out of, and leads back to a source. The source consists, overtly -- which is always a good start, and if the thing is good through and through and quite transparent, a good end as well -- in a strange, scholarly finding described in detail in the links below. At the climax of my inquest into the origins of perspective, or modern, mathematical, objectivized space in Renaissance painting, I found myself spiraling in on, and bringing into focus, a highly charged locus where the official, sacred, centered world known by qualities crosses into the official, de-centered, quantified one, well before it’s official. I was quite palpably sucked into this vortex, a whirlpool in the waters of the crossing, and pulled under. I had found a soft spot in the wall of time, like in The Twilight Zone. As I passed through the wall all myths and all the many angles in the many metaphors converged and became one living one in which they all live again, with science responding by cycling through the emoticons, as the metaphors now fuse to converge on it, now disperse to refuse convergence, round and round. These rays it sends out that also point back to it are all we know of it. The fiery source itself is too alien to know anything about it. The sun metaphor is just another ray, not privileged over any other.
Both art and everyday life elude by transcending the official, crudely categorical paradigm, say, secular versus sacred, but it influences them profoundly, until its stranglehold on, and repression of, integral reality reaches the tipping point, then the pendulum swings again -- from one inadequate paradigm to another. Yet perhaps the pendulum is oh so gradually losing momentum. A cipher, perhaps, to the resistance of nature itself to human insanity*, my finding is fortuitously arcane and seemingly irrelevant to any known cultural concern — eluding the authorities, who will read this and just think I’m kidding and/or blowing off steam, art’s critical social function -- luckily mine isn't the only Trojan Horse in the field, just giving you some possible inside info on the possible, unlikely favorite -- service to the status quo. In around seven centuries, a researcher will spiral in on it, notice the huge contribution it made to the advance of civilization and endeavor another translation, as the bâton is passed quietly along. What is essential is invisible.)
*well, in fact, nature's just as crazy as we are; there's always method to our madness too -- culture imitates nature to battle neck in neck with it -- and this leads at best to cold war, as is often waged in the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. BEWARE THE SIRENS AND POPPY FUMES, DON'T FALL ASLEEP! YOU MUST ARRIVE BEFORE I DO TO MAKE THE ARRIVAL YOUR OWN. THEREFORE YOU MUST FLESH OUT THESE LOOSELY OUTLINED, EMPTY ABSTRACTIONS AND ASSEMBLE THESE FADED SCRAPS OF AN ANTIQUE MAP AS IF THIS WERE AN EXTREMELY DIFFICULT CROSSWORD PUZZLE THAT A VILLAIN DEMANDS YOU SOLVE AT A "REASONABLE" PACE, OR HE WILL DESTROY THE WORLD.) So that's what I mean by the pendulum gradually coming to rest in the middle. At this crossing between then and now, here and there, both sides are conjoined, and the world and history become whole. I will carefully trace and show when and how the modern paradigm of knowledge was born in a mystical, hallucinatory dream and try to help you glean just what this really means. THESE WARNINGS WILL NOT BE REPEATED, PLEASE DESIGN YOUR OWN HELPS -- AS WHEN WORKING SO HARD TO PRETEND ONE LIKES THEM BEFORE ONE CULTIVATES THE TASTE FOR BEER OR CIGARETTES. SURGEON GENERAL'S WARNING: SO FAR IT HAS ONLY ACCOMPANIED AND NOT BEEN PROVEN THE CAUSE OF THE WRITER'S SOMEWHAT DYSFUNCTIONAL GUT, BUT THIS ACRID, BITTER, YET ACUTELY REFRESHING ILLUMINATION MIGHT WELL SIMULATE THE BRAIN STIMULATING AND RELAXING EFFECTS OF TOBACCO AND BEER RESPECTIVELY. MEANWHILE TO RETALIATE AGAINST YOUR RISING ELATION AND ENHANCED CREATIVITY AT THE ACCUMULATED EFFECT, SOMEONE OR SOMETHING IS BOUND TO TRY TO KILL YOU; BUT DON'T CONFUSE THE SIDE EFFECT WITH THE THING ITSELF, BEFORE THE FALL OR AFTER THE REDEMPTION, WHEN CLEANSED OF ALL TOXIC ADDITIVES IT SERVES IN A PEACE PIPE OR AS A GOD-GIVEN ELIXIR. "TRUTH IS A BACCHANALIAN REVEL IN WHICH NO-ONE IS SOBER." (HEGEL)
September 9, 2019
philosophy both doesn't matter and matters more than anything. The full perception of emptiness triggers the flowering of the replete. A house built on poor foundations cannot stand. The full perception of emptiness does not simply accrue to a feeling of emptiness or the "getting" of an idea of it; it leaves no stone unturned.
July 7, 2019
You can press at the edge of the present and create some leakage from thé future into it, but if you sail over the horizon of thé present, you discover that time is round, not flat, and soon arrive in the past. Hoping to find your way back to the present, you keep circling around the new and old worlds of the future and past. You’ve been sucked into the legendary vortex, as in an episode of The Twilight Zone, except it isn’t fiction. It feels like fiction, and I could get away with it, maybe, and squeeze into an approved, socially functional slot if I wrote it as fiction, but it isn’t fiction, and in the vortex, one cannot tell a lie. Lies stick in the throat and won’t come out. The metaphors get a bit florid, and without saying “like”, or “as it were” every time I use one, it can get confusing, but as mentioned elsewhere (in so many words) “let the weeds grow among the tares, at harvest time the wheat shall be separated from the chaff. »
(Thé présent to which I’m referring is the breaking news. Being present is another thing. If one awakens in the past or future or anywhere, one usually does well to be present to it with some regularity, though thé vortex doesn’t fetishize being present as many presently do in the present. Dreaming is essential. Drifting off into past or future to ruminate or worry over it, of course, is not encouraged, but can be an occupational hazard. "The more a soul perfects itself, the more it feels the good the more the pain. (Dante) Unlike a typical course in miracles or enlightenment, the mongrel discourse is not offered, even if it might in some areas function, as a psychological cure. No results are promised, as results are irrelevant. I have no stars to give it. I don't even recommend it.
The feeling of being in the vortex, the experience of the vortex tends to overwhelm all perception of its objective nature as something out there in a specific place and time. One twin of the twins I am experiences it like that and channels that quality. The other twin has an optical aberration that allows her to stare at the sun. I'm both overwhelmed and not overwhelmed, which is possible in the vortex, and I'm not sure why other visitors haven't seized the opportunity. If you stay close to this guide, you will intermittently see right through her as if she weren't there. You will see the vortex for itself, apart from any experience of it, as a kind of mathematical proof. Of course, as such it will be quite meaningless, and you will by this, easily dismiss it, just as you can quite easily dismiss it if nothing objective is shown of it. If you dismiss both subjective and objective accounts of it, though, you are obliged to take this approach to all other evidence, which means you must deny the existence of evidence. And that means fake news is just as true as any. I doubt it.
By the way, I've often found that atheists seem, if anything, more ethically inclined than believers, but that could accrue to a tendency to reflection and long-sightedness. Maybe atheists only perceive the long term gain to themselves of their own of ethical behavior, where indeed such motives alone survive the scrutiny of the atheist world view. Can one truly transcend self-interest if one does not believe in transcendence? Maybe that's why "there are no atheists on a battlefield", not because fear reduces great thinkers to blubbering fools, but because the transcendental acts of heroism enacted on a battlefield defy all that disbelief in transcendence. The mongrel discourse is such a battlefield.
Why scholars deny the locus of the vortex that they themselves locate, though it is right before their eyes, and other reflections on the meaning and significance of the finding.
For thé finding consists not only in the discovery of the portal, a hieroglyphic, the discovery that unfolds in the links below, but its decoding to learn what it signifies, the open sesame, with the relative vacuum on the other side sucking one in the instant the door is cracked, no wonder a similar wind seems to be pressing against your forward advance to acquire the necessary knowledge offered here. This happens to represent a novel way to signify everything including itself, a world quite transparent to its own construction.
Consider a highly unusual object discovered at an archeological site. Knowledge of context leads us to unearth and recognize the consummately cosmopolitan city where the artifact is found, but soon this knowledge becomes an impediment to understanding this unusual object. Only prolonged thought and hyper-attentive observation can make sense of its form, constructed with the express purpose of transcending its context, to be a self and world descriptive language sufficient unto itself, yet also programmed to teach itself to a reader willing to do the work. The maker of the object was so advanced in his understanding, it could not be recognized in its moment.
In truth, the object considered here is so futuristic-retrospective, so of the vortex, nobody, even now, will be able to recognize it without themselves getting sucked into the vortex. Thé historian has a job to do and a family to feed, he’s not about to be sucked into any vortex. So he conveniently overlooks any object that doesn’t fit into his up to date, fractured world view, by now as entrenched and conventional as the medieval one, the one that obviated recognition of the object in its own time.
You can press at the edge of the present and create some leakage from thé future into it, but if you sail over the horizon of thé present, you discover that time is round, not flat, and soon arrive in the past. Hoping to find your way back to the present, you keep circling around the new and old worlds of the future and past. You’ve been sucked into the legendary vortex, as in an episode of The Twilight Zone, except it isn’t fiction. It feels like fiction, and I could get away with it, maybe, and squeeze into an approved, socially functional slot if I wrote it as fiction, but it isn’t fiction, and in the vortex, one cannot tell a lie. Lies stick in the throat and won’t come out. The metaphors get a bit florid, and without saying “like”, or “as it were” every time I use one, it can get confusing, but as mentioned elsewhere (in so many words) “let the weeds grow among the tares, at harvest time the wheat shall be separated from the chaff. »
(Thé présent to which I’m referring is the breaking news. Being present is another thing. If one awakens in the past or future or anywhere, one usually does well to be present to it with some regularity, though thé vortex doesn’t fetishize being present as many presently do in the present. Dreaming is essential. Drifting off into past or future to ruminate or worry over it, of course, is not encouraged, but can be an occupational hazard. "The more a soul perfects itself, the more it feels the good the more the pain. (Dante) Unlike a typical course in miracles or enlightenment, the mongrel discourse is not offered, even if it might in some areas function, as a psychological cure. No results are promised, as results are irrelevant. I have no stars to give it. I don't even recommend it.
The feeling of being in the vortex, the experience of the vortex tends to overwhelm all perception of its objective nature as something out there in a specific place and time. One twin of the twins I am experiences it like that and channels that quality. The other twin has an optical aberration that allows her to stare at the sun. I'm both overwhelmed and not overwhelmed, which is possible in the vortex, and I'm not sure why other visitors haven't seized the opportunity. If you stay close to this guide, you will intermittently see right through her as if she weren't there. You will see the vortex for itself, apart from any experience of it, as a kind of mathematical proof. Of course, as such it will be quite meaningless, and you will by this, easily dismiss it, just as you can quite easily dismiss it if nothing objective is shown of it. If you dismiss both subjective and objective accounts of it, though, you are obliged to take this approach to all other evidence, which means you must deny the existence of evidence. And that means fake news is just as true as any. I doubt it.
By the way, I've often found that atheists seem, if anything, more ethically inclined than believers, but that could accrue to a tendency to reflection and long-sightedness. Maybe atheists only perceive the long term gain to themselves of their own of ethical behavior, where indeed such motives alone survive the scrutiny of the atheist world view. Can one truly transcend self-interest if one does not believe in transcendence? Maybe that's why "there are no atheists on a battlefield", not because fear reduces great thinkers to blubbering fools, but because the transcendental acts of heroism enacted on a battlefield defy all that disbelief in transcendence. The mongrel discourse is such a battlefield.
Why scholars deny the locus of the vortex that they themselves locate, though it is right before their eyes, and other reflections on the meaning and significance of the finding.
For thé finding consists not only in the discovery of the portal, a hieroglyphic, the discovery that unfolds in the links below, but its decoding to learn what it signifies, the open sesame, with the relative vacuum on the other side sucking one in the instant the door is cracked, no wonder a similar wind seems to be pressing against your forward advance to acquire the necessary knowledge offered here. This happens to represent a novel way to signify everything including itself, a world quite transparent to its own construction.
Consider a highly unusual object discovered at an archeological site. Knowledge of context leads us to unearth and recognize the consummately cosmopolitan city where the artifact is found, but soon this knowledge becomes an impediment to understanding this unusual object. Only prolonged thought and hyper-attentive observation can make sense of its form, constructed with the express purpose of transcending its context, to be a self and world descriptive language sufficient unto itself, yet also programmed to teach itself to a reader willing to do the work. The maker of the object was so advanced in his understanding, it could not be recognized in its moment.
In truth, the object considered here is so futuristic-retrospective, so of the vortex, nobody, even now, will be able to recognize it without themselves getting sucked into the vortex. Thé historian has a job to do and a family to feed, he’s not about to be sucked into any vortex. So he conveniently overlooks any object that doesn’t fit into his up to date, fractured world view, by now as entrenched and conventional as the medieval one, the one that obviated recognition of the object in its own time.
In a world mired in massive suffering screaming for relief, how dare one waste time on these anally analyzed distinctions, these minimal differences, this least massive minutia in the world? The answer is: a craft held together by millions of them will crash with one loose screw. And so it is said that both God and the devil live in the details, that is the scene of the battle, justifying, if I had not already discovered it, the construction of massively expensive high speed accelerators in quest of the tiniest existent particle.
Who will verify the finding? Who will follow the map to the one loose screw, and then do what there is to do to get them to tighten it? If not you, who? If not now, when? The fundamental things apply as time goes by.
Who will verify the finding? Who will follow the map to the one loose screw, and then do what there is to do to get them to tighten it? If not you, who? If not now, when? The fundamental things apply as time goes by.
 |
| invitation to lecture performance, 2016 |
The archeological finding of the bones (with ongoing commentary by the surveillance team in the cerebral cortex, along with remarks from the ego and the id, which ended up with the donuts, as the surveillance team now scorns junk food (a little scary, I prefer cops with pot bellies, but then again, I'd rather they live a long healthy life and stay alert to the bitter end, lest, at my final hour, I murder Desdemona while playing Othello, after all this effort to stay a good girl and make my mama proud)) carefully assembled into the dinosaur skeleton of the journey into the belly of the beast appears in this 5 hour lecture/performance accompanied by Carolyn Heitler (alto sax/flute) and Lucas McCrossen (bass) at Galerie Tanja Grunert in NYC in 2016, click below
You must, using your own, unfolding life story, flesh out the skeleton of the journey and bring it to life in order to negate the negation in practice, not just theory. The finding of the bones and assembly of the skeleton is just the preface. Unless you choose to cut the flowers, enjoy the scent, and toss them in the trash after the performance, as most now do with, say, a performance of a symphony by Beethoven. As the flowers, at the very least, have botanical interest in being of a novel species, I trust someone will preserve a source of the seeds.
*Regarding form, consider the DNA molecule. It's composed of dead minerals. By its form alone it claims the status of life. Form, whose qualities can't be quantified, transubstantiates what we call material by redirecting its energies, where the directions of its energies, what it does, the way it moves, where and how it reflects or emits light, all these originally unquantifiable qualities, determine how we recognize it as there at all (obviating the verity of strict materialism, the parched soil of the secular world view, in which nothing can grow but artificial flowers. Artists can make anything sing, don't get me wrong, but the theory that rationalizes the merits of building edifices of edification on parched dust that can't grip a footing it's so full of holes, holds as little water as dry dust does. A curve is made of so many sloped lines. So many sloped lines are made of so many points, so many points are made of so much nothing, this tale of sound and fury signifies so much nothing, but only because everything is assumed to be made of so many of this or that, or of lacking so many of this or that, and zero lies at the center of the mathematical field, but they forgot to include the imaginary and irrational numbers that turn matter into life just by rearranging it, and then all the sound and fury melt into music, not once and for all though, the sound and fury are the necessary fodder, but it is rotten to let the fodder rot and not turn it into roses.
opening meditation
:
abandon hope all ye who proceed past this point.
introduction to part 1:
 |
| studio of the moi mole, 2016 |
The Mole had been working very hard all the morning, spring-cleaning his little home. First with brooms, then with dusters; then on ladders and steps and chairs, with a brush and a pail of whitewash; till he had dust in his throat and eyes, and splashes of whitewash all over his black fur, and an aching back and weary arms. Spring was moving in the air above and in the earth below and around him, penetrating even his dark and lowly little house with its spirit of divine discontent and longing. It was small wonder, then, that he suddenly flung down his brush on the floor, said, "Bother!" and "O blow!" and also "Hang spring-cleaning!" and bolted out of the house without even waiting to put on his coat. Something up above was calling him imperiously, and he made for the steep little tunnel which answered in his case to the graveled carriage-drive owned by animals whose residences are nearer to the sun and air. So he scraped and scratched and scrabbled and scrooged, and then he scrooged again and scrabbled and scratched and scraped, working busily with his little paws and muttering to himself, "Up we go! Up we go! (the wind in the willows)
ROUGH DRAFTS
...the meticulous mathematical calculations, culminating in Giotto's contribution, by which history arrived -- traveling from opposite directions in pursuit of objects thought to be different, but actually the same, demanding a radical reform of categories -- at the origin and end of perspective, an event of earth-shaking significance, denoting, among other things, the rebirth of living prophesy in our age. Probably only mathematicians can follow all of the concatenated calculations without falling asleep, so I hope at least a few of you will try to stay focused to the end, in order to corroborate the results, despite the terribly fuzzy edges around verbal signs. Just remember that most words represent irrational or imaginary numbers and hone in on the sign's center as you always do -- two can mean a lot of things too, and if you wonder too much about it, you will wander into a black hole, and lose your job, if not your mind. Be assured that prophets do not speak with forked tongue, our words indeed are as the numinous numbers, ringing like bells to the music of the spheres, a well developed mathematical argument, such as this one, after you crack the shell and bite into the sweet nut of the number, a lusciously sensual symphony to those with ears to hear...
part 1:
 |
| photo by Jerid Gooding of lecture/performance |
part 2:
many more illustrations illuminations and elaborations forthcoming!
May, 2019
aside -- reasonable methods for gaining historical knowledge of whole, living beings and phenomena include acting and psychoanalysis. To understand a subject objectively one allows it inside and enters into it subjectively. Then one departs, changed by the experience, more transparent to oneself, as the subject is more transparent to itself, and no longer a cipher to the subject, who goes its own way. There are dangers, but when successful, you shall know the process by its fruits. Does the understanding accrued reveal a consistent, organic whole making sense of the subject's behavior?
However imperfect, the process is rationally evolved, and notwithstanding many failures, results have been many times empirically verified — unlike the only philosophical method currently authorized — heading directly to a target, getting blinded by the light, and then running over it, or vice versa. I'd rather be a friendly Freudly informed, method acting freight train, with the living truth -- just like R&B's kid, the maximum Max, Calliope's twin bro -- if I might happen to be going its way, hopping on and sliding inside of me for a while in order to hook up with its friends all over the country and make new ones, and then I'll be moving right along until the living truth might be going my way again. My main job is to deliver roses from my Brooklyn backyard ex-trash dump rosary -- in full bloom as I write this!
 |
| my rosary, Callisto's Garden, May, 2019 |
August 31, 2019
Humans bring memory and experience to an innocent world and replace that world with an idea of the world. The often deemed illuminated idea, far from the light of the world that it purports to be, only appears relatively luminous compared to the often merely temporarily obsolete idea it replaces. Once that presently dysfunctional idea recedes, the later idea soon reveals itself to be just another dark speck around which a new world order snowballs, same is it always was. A long ago debunked idea that is now in style again as the central idea around which the world we humans perceive forms is the idea of nature, or naturalness. Scientific inquiry, while quite naturally camouflaging this fact, now revolves around this idea of nature -- in the beginning is the word, despite science's claim to have escaped it -- because scientific inquiry always revolves around the latest idea, which is "verified" by the observable objects that reflect it, as all other empirical evidence is ignored. Only the somewhat recently established discipline of science offers objective methods to verify that its selected objects, objects conforming to the idea of nature, behave in certain ways most or apparently all of the time. This in no way affirms the objectivity of the idea that determines what objects appear, again, only those that reflect and affirm the idea. Objects deemed unnatural, objects not conforming to the a-priori idea of nature as it crystallizes and expands like a prion in the collective brain are considered delusions. The poetry of the world, for instance, remained an object recognized in every single human culture as its salient quality before the idea of science came to question its objective status despite the fact of so many isolated samples coming up with the same result, a consummately scientific method of verification. A scientifically inclined philosopher, Merleau-Ponty, sums it up by naming a key work The Prose of the World. The prosaic idea of prosaic nature has widely replaced the idea of a poetic God as what transcends verification but simply is that it is, demanding abject surrender to its primacy. The idea of nature is, no less than the poetic god was, a jealous tyrant demanding crushing of all other gods, such as, again, poetry, now merely a form of entertainment or escape involving cryptic puzzles or word play, and/or serving emotional catharsis for our psychological health and/or to blow off steam or build it up with well designed political provocation. Quite naturally, form follows function; even formalist refuseniks are stuck with the function of refusing, the negative space that quite naturally forms around conformance. Philosophers recognizing the problem came up with a new idea -- an idea as practice, the practice of deconstructing all ideas all the time, so as to avoid fostering the dangerous delusion of ideation. By intoning such deconstructions constantly, one could be set free, purportedly. As if by tearing ideas apart for a nice salary and rock star status for insiders versed in the jargon, one could not just foster a few useful insights perhaps justifying this circuitous side road, but actually restore the world to innocence. As if one could purge language of bias without taking a vow of silence. As if all these ancient words don't carry so much baggage, one can but stumble under their weight like Christ carrying the Cross. While swerving along that side road with other seduced students, but strangely feeling the weight of words for all the "jouissance" of the practice, I caught a glimpse in one of the cliffside views of a better idea in the distance, a kind of mirror image of deconstruction, inverting its inverted nature, the way the brain corrects the retinal image. The idea came from linguistically sophisticated, performance and visual artists, or from art itself and human history, a dream full of symbols and warnings driven by unconscious as well conscious desire. The idea, I had reason to suspect (without knowing that yet, I was still just recoiling from what was clearly wrong, the deconstructive impulse like, or as, a virus now turning on itself) had crystallized in a single work of art squirreled away in a shell, and so I defied the leaders and departed from the by now well paved, billboarded, and concession crowded side road, and got lost in the dark wood, where after much hell harrowing rummaging, I finally caught a glimpse of IT, cracked open the shell, and now live on its sweet and nutritious meat. Here's the impeccable, infallible idea: Make the central idea transparent to its own construction, for whomsoever wishes to look and with the microscopes and telescopes provided, study and understand the complex clockwork. Others can just go about their business in the world spun around the idea. A wicked and foolish generation seeks for signs and proofs. By faith alone will you bother to live in truth, to know, as far as possible (which is not too far, but it's far enough), who and what you are, or believe that it matters. (A Faustian bargain? Maybe but I doubt it, as such promised knowledge, hair of the dog that bit us, is the gospel tooth.) Who does this writer think he or she is? Nobody especially special, that's the only criterium, and then the one to be stuck with this job may as well have been chosen by a lottery, so far as I know. As if the world were made by tossing confetti up in the air in a wild and harrowing celebration of the greatest idea ever to occur to man* or god -- creation! -- and one little scrap happened to land on this critical spot transparent to the critical transparency of all spots. Only this spot is bespoke as such, that is, dressed for the occasion and will surely become the classical model for such soaring, high gothic occasions. It was born in its formal suit, like a penguin.
*includes woman etc. True, to preserve the ancient gender references in languages can perpetrate prejudice, but if prejudice is bound to persist without it, best not to provoke the reaction that revolution is bound to restore to the helm. Just keep the enemy close, and never forget what it's up to. (To play it cool is hot.) Plus ancient languages are poetically formed, the piano quite perfectly tuned, and to flatten or sharpen a note is a sin against music, the language of love; and it is written that sins against the holy spirit are unforgivable. Imagine ridding romance languages of all gender references, however silly it might seem to the practical English to give a chair or a carrot a gender. In such languages the world is a love song, the hills are alive with the sound of music. To crack the seemingly opaque code, turn it around and let spakeShearian inklish appear in the mirror of those fanciful romance languages. You will see our native tongue merely lacks the satin lined box that conceals the complex mechanism with many moving parts and shifting gears. Like a music box I found that plays happy birthday, it is transparent to, really nothing but this beautiful machinery that is music in its own right, even before you turn the crank.
Humans bring memory and experience to an innocent world and replace that world with an idea of the world. The often deemed illuminated idea, far from the light of the world that it purports to be, only appears relatively luminous compared to the often merely temporarily obsolete idea it replaces. Once that presently dysfunctional idea recedes, the later idea soon reveals itself to be just another dark speck around which a new world order snowballs, same is it always was. A long ago debunked idea that is now in style again as the central idea around which the world we humans perceive forms is the idea of nature, or naturalness. Scientific inquiry, while quite naturally camouflaging this fact, now revolves around this idea of nature -- in the beginning is the word, despite science's claim to have escaped it -- because scientific inquiry always revolves around the latest idea, which is "verified" by the observable objects that reflect it, as all other empirical evidence is ignored. Only the somewhat recently established discipline of science offers objective methods to verify that its selected objects, objects conforming to the idea of nature, behave in certain ways most or apparently all of the time. This in no way affirms the objectivity of the idea that determines what objects appear, again, only those that reflect and affirm the idea. Objects deemed unnatural, objects not conforming to the a-priori idea of nature as it crystallizes and expands like a prion in the collective brain are considered delusions. The poetry of the world, for instance, remained an object recognized in every single human culture as its salient quality before the idea of science came to question its objective status despite the fact of so many isolated samples coming up with the same result, a consummately scientific method of verification. A scientifically inclined philosopher, Merleau-Ponty, sums it up by naming a key work The Prose of the World. The prosaic idea of prosaic nature has widely replaced the idea of a poetic God as what transcends verification but simply is that it is, demanding abject surrender to its primacy. The idea of nature is, no less than the poetic god was, a jealous tyrant demanding crushing of all other gods, such as, again, poetry, now merely a form of entertainment or escape involving cryptic puzzles or word play, and/or serving emotional catharsis for our psychological health and/or to blow off steam or build it up with well designed political provocation. Quite naturally, form follows function; even formalist refuseniks are stuck with the function of refusing, the negative space that quite naturally forms around conformance. Philosophers recognizing the problem came up with a new idea -- an idea as practice, the practice of deconstructing all ideas all the time, so as to avoid fostering the dangerous delusion of ideation. By intoning such deconstructions constantly, one could be set free, purportedly. As if by tearing ideas apart for a nice salary and rock star status for insiders versed in the jargon, one could not just foster a few useful insights perhaps justifying this circuitous side road, but actually restore the world to innocence. As if one could purge language of bias without taking a vow of silence. As if all these ancient words don't carry so much baggage, one can but stumble under their weight like Christ carrying the Cross. While swerving along that side road with other seduced students, but strangely feeling the weight of words for all the "jouissance" of the practice, I caught a glimpse in one of the cliffside views of a better idea in the distance, a kind of mirror image of deconstruction, inverting its inverted nature, the way the brain corrects the retinal image. The idea came from linguistically sophisticated, performance and visual artists, or from art itself and human history, a dream full of symbols and warnings driven by unconscious as well conscious desire. The idea, I had reason to suspect (without knowing that yet, I was still just recoiling from what was clearly wrong, the deconstructive impulse like, or as, a virus now turning on itself) had crystallized in a single work of art squirreled away in a shell, and so I defied the leaders and departed from the by now well paved, billboarded, and concession crowded side road, and got lost in the dark wood, where after much hell harrowing rummaging, I finally caught a glimpse of IT, cracked open the shell, and now live on its sweet and nutritious meat. Here's the impeccable, infallible idea: Make the central idea transparent to its own construction, for whomsoever wishes to look and with the microscopes and telescopes provided, study and understand the complex clockwork. Others can just go about their business in the world spun around the idea. A wicked and foolish generation seeks for signs and proofs. By faith alone will you bother to live in truth, to know, as far as possible (which is not too far, but it's far enough), who and what you are, or believe that it matters. (A Faustian bargain? Maybe but I doubt it, as such promised knowledge, hair of the dog that bit us, is the gospel tooth.) Who does this writer think he or she is? Nobody especially special, that's the only criterium, and then the one to be stuck with this job may as well have been chosen by a lottery, so far as I know. As if the world were made by tossing confetti up in the air in a wild and harrowing celebration of the greatest idea ever to occur to man* or god -- creation! -- and one little scrap happened to land on this critical spot transparent to the critical transparency of all spots. Only this spot is bespoke as such, that is, dressed for the occasion and will surely become the classical model for such soaring, high gothic occasions. It was born in its formal suit, like a penguin.
*includes woman etc. True, to preserve the ancient gender references in languages can perpetrate prejudice, but if prejudice is bound to persist without it, best not to provoke the reaction that revolution is bound to restore to the helm. Just keep the enemy close, and never forget what it's up to. (To play it cool is hot.) Plus ancient languages are poetically formed, the piano quite perfectly tuned, and to flatten or sharpen a note is a sin against music, the language of love; and it is written that sins against the holy spirit are unforgivable. Imagine ridding romance languages of all gender references, however silly it might seem to the practical English to give a chair or a carrot a gender. In such languages the world is a love song, the hills are alive with the sound of music. To crack the seemingly opaque code, turn it around and let spakeShearian inklish appear in the mirror of those fanciful romance languages. You will see our native tongue merely lacks the satin lined box that conceals the complex mechanism with many moving parts and shifting gears. Like a music box I found that plays happy birthday, it is transparent to, really nothing but this beautiful machinery that is music in its own right, even before you turn the crank.
July 7, 2019 4 am
(going backward to go forward, the way of the wheel, grounded in flight, the vehicle of all lasting progress. Since its inception, engendering the concept of progress in around 3500 bc, the status quo hates the wheel. Don't lend your little toe to the status quo around here, though be prepared to don camouflage (the way of the wheel, seeming only to go around in circles while sneakily propelling us forward) to infiltrate the inner sanctum. Every new invention, every progressive act, is a reinvention of the wheel, same old same old -- this is really happening! something new under the sun! like a genetically engineered element, or maybe a natural one discovered on the moon, that disturbs all previous sense of what could be ontologically possible. Like any work of art, but more, therefore less, camouflaged. The same old novelty growing more and more weird by yet greater conformity to what always has been. One continuous curve, as impossible to stop its motion or the smoothness of the ever steeper slope as it approaches and never arrives at the vertical. How can this be? Leave language behind in the dust. The mongrel discourse is constantly locking horns with language, just as it's made of it. Language wants it to be either/or, but the mongrel discourse, one slippery fish, won't bite that bait. It won't be possible to catch it, and it won't be easy even to assimilate the fact that it's out there, however many leaps it takes when it swims with the dolphins, as these streamlined superhuman creatures without extremities speaking in a foreign language are easily confused with it. Always take time to think about it, one paragraph/day at a time. If only there were an hmm button. Hmm is the highest compliment you could pay to it until you fall off your horse into the muddy, sticky mess of a great hearted yes. Like at first sight is too easy to trigger love, and love at first sight would never admit it and blow it. To play it right, hmm at first sight is perfect. I started a petition to instate the hmm button on facebook, but only twenty people would sign it, so I stopped using facebook.). But humming a tune is even better. Just roll right along, suspend disbelief, I think I anticipate your questions, but there are many spokes that connect the wheel to the hub, but I can only cover them one at a time.
July 26, 2019
Yesterday I began again -- the first draft that will lead up to a revised version of the finding presented in the attached files a ways below. I feel determined to push through to a final form that will put all this together this time, as flowering spring fructifies into a freezable harvest. Alas, instead of writing, I should be packing the house as we're moving in a week. H and E came at the last minute for dinner, and as I was preparing the barbecue in the garden, she jotted down the thought I had biking over to the public pool that I didn't want to forget, the thought that grew into the preface and introductory note below what's below.
As the denouement to another screaming fight dissolved into requiting tears, my mother sat at the edge, and I lay on my side, head on elbow, on the four poster Bombay Company canopy bed that never got a canopy. It had survived the move from the colonial on Rio Vista to the modern ranch house on Creekwood Lane even with all these years of the three of kids using it as a trampoline, as we sang into the microphones and twisted the imaginary cords of the removable, solid wood stanchions. Now the tips of my fingers ran across the tiny cotton beads of the decorative seams woven into white aged faux Victorian bedspread that had also survived the move, as I gazed through the picture window at the red and white striped, foil faced cardboard corral in her slate paved sunbathing stall enclosed in the high wooden picket fence. “At least I haven’t lost you to religion”, she sighed.
Her always enviable tan and concomitant bright and healthy look lasted all winter without a Florida vacation, which never interested her or my father. The sea never called them. I used to think (and I was not too far off) that the Atlantic Ocean was in black and white, and the Pacific Ocean was in color. I saw the sea for the first time at the Democratic convention where she served as a delegate in Atlantic City, the one where they nominated Lyndon Johnson to defeat Barry Goldwater. When we kids were very young, we vacationed on a ranch outside of Tucson, Arizona. Though the Hotel Traymore fronted it in Atlantic City, neither he nor she walked out on the beach, not once, come to think of it. They were both born landlocked and seemed to like it like that. They were ancient water signs though, both Pisces, and Old Man River, the mighty Miss', was omnipresent in song (his favorite) and feeling, even way out in the suburbs of Saint Louis.
I love the beach and would never again live landlocked, I don't think, but as my mama always said, the fruit does not fall far from the vine. I guess at heart I'm a river rat, or mole in tidy little hole, or a toad with a flying machine in The Wind in the Willows. It's been a wonder-full and sufficiently odd odyssey everybody, we made it past the sirens, aren't we ready for the "green oasis, not wonders" (Borges). The odysseys are still out there, don't worry. We don't need to create horror movies, they're everywhere coming to get us. As Anthony Lane notes (quoting from memory) in his review of the remake of Mary Poppins, there's courage and joy, not just fear in playing it safe...
but that's not really it either. I'm a mercurial Gemini and the minute one of me defines me one way, the other one objects. It's perfect that I'm keeping one room in this tidy little mole's house, but we're moving up to a view of the bay guarded by the statue of liberty, and beyond, the wide world. Geminis are ciphers to the schizophrenia of everything, including an oyster, that lives in language. Why does an oyster, which science says feels no pain, grip against the knife in love of its life? Because it is a self versus everything else, a self I can highly relate to, in fact, in its tearful annoyance at the invasion of its quiet hermetically sealed retreat, of an abrasive grain of sand spinning a pearl around it. Life is language. And language splits the body into a being and an observer constantly warring for possession of the one land that will not be divided, the integral self as it mirrors the integral world. Say one or the other doesn't exist to a mother who's lost her child, even a mother who took the costly course that allowed her to transition, in record time, to non-selfhood. If such a thing exists, so does the negative space where the self that isn't isn't.
I think I'm beyond existing, I'm simply everybody equally, that's why I'm not afraid of and feel no need to build a wall between me and my old, rejected existence. We're divorced, but we can still be friends, like Bettina and Brucie. He recently passed on, RIP, but still lives on, like my existence. Pay homage to the ancestors lest they bring plagues to the land, not that Brucie would ever do that, but I'm not so sure about my dead (but far from post-existential) existence.
Consider all these principles, the pristine pearls you find inside of all this rough, idiosyncratic shell material after the slime that wove them has shriveled or been slurped up. If these pearls are principles, they are not equal to, and interchangeable with, contrary principles. They are like geometric axioms, as they are rooted in the historical finding, the golden egg for which I'm preparing this nest, of the geometry of language before the body fell off the bones -- point (subject) line (verb) volume (object) sentence (where the lines connecting subject and object intersect the plane to form a picture), when being human briefly possessed both backbone and integrity, when it was whole, both ancient and modern, both visible and invisible, both language and matter, both east and west, both north and south, both of everything -- at the pinnacle of a hierarchical pyramid and lying flat as the sea. The golden egg in the palm of your hands! Prepare yourself. If you believe in something, if you tout it, if you strive for it, you must -- spoiler alert -- fall on your knees before its total realization.
Ursula Goodenough, a self-proclaimed religious naturalist, notes that religion literally means means religament or re-sewing. I learned this when she happened, because she lives and teaches there, to give a talk in Saint Louis, where I'd returned to nurse my dying mother. Goodenough said that her credible way of mixing up reverence for science with religion had earned her death threats. As with Spinoza, for her God is nature, but she adds that religious devotion to nature means taking it to heart, suffering over it, not transcending it. Her definition of religion is indispensable to this project, centered around an image that quite literally shows God being sewn to a man being sown like a seed in the world. Strange how these indispensable components constantly appear, and by now I have no place to store all the surplus. Goodenough's definition of religion is more than good enough. It's as good as it gets. It's not her idea, really, she just discovered what language knew all along. Though she scorns the sky god in favor of a type of earth god, this was a sky god's idea. You can't overcome dualism by making a villain of what it supposedly isn't. The mongrel discourse scorns all categorical language while, again, wearing its camouflage.
Her always enviable tan and concomitant bright and healthy look lasted all winter without a Florida vacation, which never interested her or my father. The sea never called them. I used to think (and I was not too far off) that the Atlantic Ocean was in black and white, and the Pacific Ocean was in color. I saw the sea for the first time at the Democratic convention where she served as a delegate in Atlantic City, the one where they nominated Lyndon Johnson to defeat Barry Goldwater. When we kids were very young, we vacationed on a ranch outside of Tucson, Arizona. Though the Hotel Traymore fronted it in Atlantic City, neither he nor she walked out on the beach, not once, come to think of it. They were both born landlocked and seemed to like it like that. They were ancient water signs though, both Pisces, and Old Man River, the mighty Miss', was omnipresent in song (his favorite) and feeling, even way out in the suburbs of Saint Louis.
I love the beach and would never again live landlocked, I don't think, but as my mama always said, the fruit does not fall far from the vine. I guess at heart I'm a river rat, or mole in tidy little hole, or a toad with a flying machine in The Wind in the Willows. It's been a wonder-full and sufficiently odd odyssey everybody, we made it past the sirens, aren't we ready for the "green oasis, not wonders" (Borges). The odysseys are still out there, don't worry. We don't need to create horror movies, they're everywhere coming to get us. As Anthony Lane notes (quoting from memory) in his review of the remake of Mary Poppins, there's courage and joy, not just fear in playing it safe...
but that's not really it either. I'm a mercurial Gemini and the minute one of me defines me one way, the other one objects. It's perfect that I'm keeping one room in this tidy little mole's house, but we're moving up to a view of the bay guarded by the statue of liberty, and beyond, the wide world. Geminis are ciphers to the schizophrenia of everything, including an oyster, that lives in language. Why does an oyster, which science says feels no pain, grip against the knife in love of its life? Because it is a self versus everything else, a self I can highly relate to, in fact, in its tearful annoyance at the invasion of its quiet hermetically sealed retreat, of an abrasive grain of sand spinning a pearl around it. Life is language. And language splits the body into a being and an observer constantly warring for possession of the one land that will not be divided, the integral self as it mirrors the integral world. Say one or the other doesn't exist to a mother who's lost her child, even a mother who took the costly course that allowed her to transition, in record time, to non-selfhood. If such a thing exists, so does the negative space where the self that isn't isn't.
I think I'm beyond existing, I'm simply everybody equally, that's why I'm not afraid of and feel no need to build a wall between me and my old, rejected existence. We're divorced, but we can still be friends, like Bettina and Brucie. He recently passed on, RIP, but still lives on, like my existence. Pay homage to the ancestors lest they bring plagues to the land, not that Brucie would ever do that, but I'm not so sure about my dead (but far from post-existential) existence.
Consider all these principles, the pristine pearls you find inside of all this rough, idiosyncratic shell material after the slime that wove them has shriveled or been slurped up. If these pearls are principles, they are not equal to, and interchangeable with, contrary principles. They are like geometric axioms, as they are rooted in the historical finding, the golden egg for which I'm preparing this nest, of the geometry of language before the body fell off the bones -- point (subject) line (verb) volume (object) sentence (where the lines connecting subject and object intersect the plane to form a picture), when being human briefly possessed both backbone and integrity, when it was whole, both ancient and modern, both visible and invisible, both language and matter, both east and west, both north and south, both of everything -- at the pinnacle of a hierarchical pyramid and lying flat as the sea. The golden egg in the palm of your hands! Prepare yourself. If you believe in something, if you tout it, if you strive for it, you must -- spoiler alert -- fall on your knees before its total realization.
Ursula Goodenough, a self-proclaimed religious naturalist, notes that religion literally means means religament or re-sewing. I learned this when she happened, because she lives and teaches there, to give a talk in Saint Louis, where I'd returned to nurse my dying mother. Goodenough said that her credible way of mixing up reverence for science with religion had earned her death threats. As with Spinoza, for her God is nature, but she adds that religious devotion to nature means taking it to heart, suffering over it, not transcending it. Her definition of religion is indispensable to this project, centered around an image that quite literally shows God being sewn to a man being sown like a seed in the world. Strange how these indispensable components constantly appear, and by now I have no place to store all the surplus. Goodenough's definition of religion is more than good enough. It's as good as it gets. It's not her idea, really, she just discovered what language knew all along. Though she scorns the sky god in favor of a type of earth god, this was a sky god's idea. You can't overcome dualism by making a villain of what it supposedly isn't. The mongrel discourse scorns all categorical language while, again, wearing its camouflage.
Maybe my mother gave me the idea right then, not just to wend my way there, and then try out that horse, but hold in the reins, and then master so many hurdles and jumps that when I read out loud to her from my fractured illuminated manuscript decades later, she discerned that though I seemed to have found religion, she hadn’t lost me to it. It more like lost itself to me — “though I can’t understand it and doubt anyone will for two hundred years”. -
“I have everything I always dreamed of [a handsome, bright husband with a hearty will to succeed in business], but I sometimes have the queerest ache inside of me.” she wrote to my aunt in Saint Louis from Oklahoma, where she was working as a shop girl, and Harry was running a store and initiating his grand plan to strike it rich.
And then a few days later “I’m sorry I wrote all that mallarchy. I’ve got my chin back up where it’s sposed to be.”
Reading The Second Sex finally liberated her, and she eventually won in a seat in the state legislature and a room of her own in Jefferson City three hours away from her tyrannical dream come true. She found her element addressing unjust incarceration of women, uncontrolled gun availability, the legal right of a woman to kill off an alien life form, however proto-human, arising in her own body with the clear intent eventually, after sucking it dry, to replace it.
And then a few days later “I’m sorry I wrote all that mallarchy. I’ve got my chin back up where it’s sposed to be.”
Reading The Second Sex finally liberated her, and she eventually won in a seat in the state legislature and a room of her own in Jefferson City three hours away from her tyrannical dream come true. She found her element addressing unjust incarceration of women, uncontrolled gun availability, the legal right of a woman to kill off an alien life form, however proto-human, arising in her own body with the clear intent eventually, after sucking it dry, to replace it.
She could be sweet as the cantaloupe whose quarters she gridded into such easily slurpable warped cubes, but I knew where I stood. When home alone with us, her hooded eyes, otherwise known for laughing, often surrendered to that introspective gaze mingled in cosmic angst and roiling resentment, the gaze that a local artist captured in the oil painted portrait that she hated, but that stayed up in the living room on the antiqued (versus antique) easel. At least it made a valiant effort to push back the suburban-ly sprawling aura of the rain drenched Parisian girl with the big dark outlined eyes that Harry had picked up from Woolworths.
When after passing my orals, I flew back to Saint Louis to spend the year that passed between the diagnosis and death of my mother as her nurse — after she fired about five of them, and her dogged eyes with a look that said she’d find a way bring me down with her if I disobeyed her, drily cried — don’t leave me! So unlike my late friend Gene, who, dying of leukemia in his thirties, demanded in his last hours that his closest friends get out of there and go enjoy their Passover seder. I’m not sure which is worse, but the middle way has got to be even worse than the worst of those; extreme responses are required in extreme situations. Aesthetic principles should guide life at all times. Be dogged — like Gene or my mother. Make no small plans. They have not the power to move men’s minds.
to be continued after the move
The finding really has nothing to do with my biography, it is an autonomous entity. It could have been found by a machine. It's an important finding and that's why I'm posting it here now, as who knows if I'll ever be satisfied with the form enough to publish it officially in a concluded work. (If I do, though, it will include all these caveats and confusions, as a limpid stream in which all the stones sleeping on the bed and all the fishes that swim below the surface appear in all their detail is beautiful and inviting to swim in. The mongrel discourse is like Rome, a palimpsest that grows more and more deep and transparent the longer you gaze.)
July ? 2019
academic science and philosophy analyzed the ingredients, and institutions and internet distribute the highly refined list. I got my annotated copy right from the source, in the hallowed halls, and what they call mastered it, luckily, as these super-duper chemists know beans about what it takes to make and bake a cake. Now, when they're not tampering with the genetic codes, they're just playing with the ingredients, as when the faithful arrange dried, colored beans in an elaborate, geometric pattern down the central aisle of the church on a holy day. I, being a maker and baker, a fish out of water among the chemists, gathered and bagged the ingredients, then dove into the stormy sea of my kitchen. Now that the next batch is cooking, I'm wondering -- will anybody be able to digest it? Maybe only I can, and my stomach is perpetually upset, so to call it digestion is stretching it. Maybe I need help digesting it. I'm only a baby bird after all.
hard core
Different chapter
Marcel Proust says --the thing people will try to avoid more than anything else, even physical pain, is thinking. By which he means thinking in the vernacular tongue, as the technical tongue is doomed at the outset, for reason's elsewhere explained. It's the hardness of hyper-restrained thought that verifies its contentment to point to the truth at a distance rather than mow down and squash it. To train one's thought is as hard as training a puppy. To think a brand new, truly free thought, with a novel set of roots, after the age of sixteen goes against the call of nature and the genetic code -- crying danger danger! do not proceed further. That thinking job is over, now you must reproduce and distribute yourself and your brand of thought, nurture and tame the spawn, and a job -- sure professional philosopher will do perfectly -- that will not interfere with that primary function. A plant is called dead when it can no longer reproduce. A human mind is dead when reproduction kills it. Perhaps that's fine. Many Buddhists and other religious practitioners (as opposed, in my view, to essential Buddhism or religion) call for killing the mind. Okay, but then don't call yourself a free thinker.
To all that's stone, to stone's last stand within and without us, welcome to this only seemingly innocuous water. But why would stone consent to be here, subject to persistent erosion and inevitable defeat? It wouldn't. It doesn't come itself. It's brought. But I cherish that bit of stone in me, that three percent that's dry minerals. Why would I bring it here and let water win and carry it away, why would I seek death? Because it is best to seek what's seeking us and bound to drown us. We must consolidate our consciousness, gather our chi, plant our flag, and take command of eternity. I'm not the first to say that the purpose of life is to know death while alive, transcend self, become everything, the spirit first willing, the recalcitrant body to follow. The water is so like us, really, the clearest of mirrors of what's on and within us, each aspect revealed according to the weather. Who could fail to drown is such a beautiful reflection so as to awaken a flower. Pathological "narcissists" betray the myth and won't relinquish their stony parts. Their syndrome is improperly named, therefore not understood, and that's why they're so incurable. Those dead to the world and themselves inherit all its treasures, not just the jewels but the rhinestones. We are the cats that ate the rat, known only by the gleam in our eyes among the all the dead, dull stares.
