Bonecarver

Writing About Music: Time and Time Again

2010-12-29T01:42:00.000-08:00

Murderer's Song #2

2010-12-10T13:21:00.000-08:00

East Texas rain making me insane
Coming down like blood dripping out of my brain
Skull on fire with a dark desire
Hear my woman's been fucking the whole church choir
East Texas rain making me insane
Coming down like blood dripping out of my brain

Crosscut saw shivering in my hand
Drank a bottle of whisky until I had a plan
Come up through the back door screen door slams
Now a man without a head ain't much of a man
Crosscut saw shivering in my hand
Drank a bottle of whisky until I had a plan

Slaughterhouse skull puncher against her head
As she's lying there dreaming about the lies she said
Kiss on the lips and now she's dead
A whole lot holier with her brains on the bed
Slaughterhouse skull puncher against her head
As she's lying there dreaming about the lies she said

Like a wind-up toy with an unsprung spring
I walk through the town and make the whole choir sing
Skull punch percussion with the angel's screams
Everyone tonight is going to have bad dreams
Like a wind-up toy with an unsprung spring
I walk through the town and make the whole choir sing

The Murderer's Song #1

2010-12-10T12:34:00.000-08:00

[source]

Used to be
She'd never come home
Sitting here in the dark
Drinking alone
Now days go by
Cut down to the bone
Used to be
I gave a shit but now I don't

This idea like a splinter
Works down deep in the mind
First there every now and then
And then all the time
Can't get away from thinking
How it'd make it all right
One quick cut into the flesh
With the edge of a knife

One night
She come in covered in sin
Could see bones burning
Under her skin
Inside of her eyes
Her beginning and end
Thought I might as well get to it
And started in

Sitting here in the blood
Bones stacked in the shower
My entire sad life
Redeemed if just for an hour
Her face in my hands
Cut into the shape of a flower
I want to call it love
But I know it's just power

Used to be
She'd never come home
Sitting here in the dark
Drinking alone
Now days go by
Cut down to the bone
Used to be
I gave a shit but now I don't

Laughing Ukulele Blues by B. Jones

2010-12-02T11:31:00.000-08:00

[ source unknown ]

Recorded one hot summer afternoon in Austin, Texas, late 1990s, on a beat-up ukulele: screen door open, airplanes passing, dogs barking, crows laughing, cats watching from the porch.

Black Drop Ephemera

2010-06-29T23:15:00.000-07:00

Some recent design work for The Black Drop:

Images From A Deserted Camera PDF

2010-06-29T00:40:00.000-07:00

Since I posted a couple of images from the Monastery, I thought I might as well post a pdf (for download, if you like) of the little book, Images From A Deserted Camera. Enjoy.

Access pdf via Google Docs.
You can choose to download it from here.
The images are much better if you do.

Flower Porn Haiku || The Interior of 含笑花 (Ham Siu fa) or Smiling Flower

2010-06-28T20:16:00.000-07:00

Posted these as a update on The Anacortes Review. Was fairly pleased with the narrative that emerged out of the set.

Was just talking with Jonathan at the Black Drop about what happens in the gutter between two comic panels.

From Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics:

The gutter: the space between the panels of a comics; our imagination takes the two images that boarder the gutter and transforms then into a single idea. Notice how the gutter in comics is similar to the pivot between two juxtaposed images in haiku.

When I was placing these images on the page, I obviously was following a temporal sequence, didn't pay too much attention to any possible narrative. But once I went back over them, I found myself smiling, my thoughts working out this little tale of seduction, vulnerability, exposure, penetration and ecstasy. The shiver in the gutter between the last two images almost makes me laugh out loud.

To become a stranger to the world's ways || Everything else is advertising

2010-06-27T02:51:00.000-07:00

[source]

Been thinking a lot about The Rule of St. Benedict: The Instruments of Good Works #20:

To become a stranger to the world's ways.

And Michael Hastings, reporter from Rolling Stone, defending his publication of "on background" and "not for attribution" remarks from Gen. Stanley McChrystal:

"Hard not to respond to this without going back to an old saying. I'm paraphrasing: Reporting is what someone somewhere doesn't want known," Hastings wrote. "Everything else is advertising."

[source]

Wondering: how much of this world is NOT advertising? How much of my attention is "paid" to advertising? How much of my time is "spent" listening to the internal monologue/virus that is the language of advertising? How to prevent it from inserting itself into the grammar anymore than it already has?

How to maintain purity? Ritual.

Three quotes from [pdf] Purity and Danger: An analysis of the concepts of pollution and taboo by Mary Douglas:

"Ritual recognizes the potency of disorder. In the disorder of the mind, in dreams, faints and frenzies, ritual expects to find powers and truths which cannot be reached by conscious effort. Energy to command and special powers of healing come to those who can abandon rational control for a time. Sometimes an Andaman Islander leaves his band and wanders in the forest like a madman. When he returns to his senses and to human society he has gained occult power of healing. This is a very common notion, widely attested."

"In these beliefs there is a double play on inarticulateness. First there is a venture into the disordered regions of the mind. Second there is the venture beyond the confines of society. The man who comes back from these inaccessible regions brings with him a power not available to those who have stayed in the control of themselves and society"

"During the marginal period which separates ritual dying and ritual rebirth, the novices in the initiation are temporarily outcast. For the duration of the rite they have no place in society. Sometimes they actually go to live far away outside. Sometimes they live near enough for unplanned contacts to take place between full social beings and the outcasts."

[source]

I once asked a monk at the Monastery in the Desert if he ever thought that he was running away from the world by secluding himself out in the Desert. I expected him to reply that he was doing the precise opposite: turning away from the superficial world into the profound. Instead, he said it depends upon where you stand. If you are on the inside then those who move outside of the circumference of the world are often seen as "running away" from their social responsibilities. But for those who are searching in the darkness, when they step beyond the pale, they see that others have come before them, that there is a path that leads them to sanctuary. Often, he continued, I hope that our responsibilities to society are similar to those of the lighthouse keeper. We have built this structure that stands upon the border between two worlds so that those within might find a measure of reassurance that there is someone out here, trying to live in a more rigorous, religious manner. But more: that those that are lost out there in the beyond can find a way home.

Just hanging out here while you are what?

2010-06-21T01:24:00.000-07:00

"It's brilliant and charming effect while drawn through the water
will attract game fish from a greater distance than any other bait." [source]

A down and out 21st century Walter Mitty
waging war in his daydreams
against the Bone God and the Skeletons of all the Letters
who do the voodoo dance inside all the words
while holding down the late afternoon turns at the Black Drop
learning all the mysteries of the yes/no espresso
gnostic milk foam latte acrostics
sitting at home late at night
lone hands hanging above the keys
like outlaws dropped through the trapdoors of the gallows
gasping out their last breaths
for the Usayable Word
carved into the Laughing Skull
of the Nameless God
blowing away the dust on the bone to just see it
before the lights go out
before the shot in the dark is sounded
and time unspools like an overthrown rod and reel
sitting here in the boat sorting out all the nots
every now and then nervously
looking up at the word-lure
bobbing out there in the water
looking back at me with its pathetic painted face
whispering with fear
between its fixed painted teeth
get me out of here man
I'm like a sitting duck man
c'mon c'mon hurry up with that untangling of the line
God is down there looking up at me
God is coming to lay his hand down upon all these hooks
you screwed into me while he was gone
God is going to strike down upon me
and you better have both hands on the rod
pull your anchor up
get both feet on the gunwhale
get your sunglasses on straight
your hat on tight
be facing in the right direction
balanced on the beam
have your teeth brushed
your back scratched
get all your affairs in order
and be ready to set that hook
when he bites down
cause this is it
this is the Last Chance
the Last Judgment
the Reckoning
and
what
are
you
doing?

No!

Please please don't tell me
that you left me
poor hooked up god-catching word-lure
painting up like a fifty-cent whore on a two dollar dance floor
just hanging out here while you are what?

Taking the whole Goddamn rod and reel apart
with all the parts laid out in the bottom of the boat
and all the line draped around you
like Christ the Tailor
hemming a hymn
just sitting there whistling in the sun
not realizing that it's when you least expect it
that he's going come up and hit me so hard
that it will flip you out of your boat
and all the parts will be flying
like a pocket watch unsprung
unspringing in slow motion
stars planets frozen in rotation
time undone and undoing
as all the spools of line tighten around you
and cut you right down to your bones
strips your meat cleanaway
while you are pulled down
to the multitudinous murmurings
of the Ocean's utmost bones
down to lie and lay with pearls in your eyes
with the unrepentant Jonahs and Ahabs
and all the Joneses
Davy Charles and Bonesy
singing in the stinging arms of the anemones
clown fish skulls with ink black octopi brains
laughing
laughing
laughing
eternally in God's complete enraptured embrace.

- For Shelton Walsmith

"It is bitter -- bitter," he answered; "But I like it."

2010-04-12T05:35:00.000-07:00

[ source ]

From Stephen Crane's The Black Riders and Other Lines:

In the desert
I saw a creature, naked, bestial,
who, squatting upon the ground,
Held his heart in his hands,
And ate of it.
I said, "Is it good, friend?"
"It is bitter -- bitter," he answered;
"But I like it
Because it is bitter,
And because it is my heart."

See also: http://cnx.org/content/m29214/latest/

Carving A Bone

2010-03-23T18:06:00.000-07:00

Nothing is Easy

About Carving a Bone.

R.I.P. - The Canon is Dead

2010-03-23T16:29:00.000-07:00

Canon PowerShot SD400 - 5.0 MegaPixel
[Taken with the camera on my phone.]

Haiku Upon the Death of My Camera

Morning walk with the dog
Pine branch against the blue blue sky
I dropped my camera

Funeral Blues - W. H. Auden

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.

Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling on the sky the message He is Dead.
Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves,
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.

He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong.

The stars are not wanted now; put out every one,
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun,
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the woods;
For nothing now can ever come to any good.

The Story of A Bone: A Short Experiment in Narrative

2010-03-18T03:41:00.000-07:00

A primitive attempt to tell a story with images. It is the simplest story that I know that retains meaning even through my coarse renderings. The experience made it all too clear, once again, that I have miles to go before I sleep.

The Insane: 48 Page Booklet and 5 Sound Files

2010-03-15T11:01:00.000-07:00

Download The Insane PDF - 3 MB 48 page Booklet

[ A Note: I have been somewhat hesitant to publish The Insane PDF on this website because many of the images in it are without source. Over the years, anticipating the creation of this book, I collected hundreds of "Insane Images". Unfortunately, I neglected to keep a file of where they all came from. To that end, if there is an image here that you gave good blood for and would either like attribution, or removed, let me know and I will be happy to do either.]

A
Series of Subtle Interviews,
Conducted by the Inimitable Dr. Geo. Kisker,
With
Five Tortured Souls
Who Have Spent Some Time
On the Other Side.
Additionally,
Uploaded As Supplemental Material,
Five Audio Files Consisting Of
Some Musical Accompaniment,
Embellished
With Clever Lyrics,
Has Been Prepared
In A
Vaguely Tuneful Manner;
And,
Has Been Earnestly Performed
By S. Casey, Esq..
1986 - 2006

PROLOGUE

In the Fall of 1983, I was a teaching assistant for the course in Abnormal Psychology at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. The course was taught by a garrulous old professor who had the improbable but appropriate name of Dr. Strange.

One of my duties during class was to set up an old Wollensak reel-to-reel player and cue-up a series of interviews with people suffering from the particular “mental disorder” Dr. Strange was discussing that day.

These interviews were conducted in 1964 by a Dr. George Kisker to accompany his textbook, The Disorganized Personality. Of course, the textbook and classifications were far out of date, using the old, somewhat charming, DSM-I terminology. But the voices of those patients transcended categorization and quaint terminology.

Naturally, I found them fascinating and, at the semester’s end, asked Dr. Strange if I might borrow them and work on transcribing them; and transferring them to a more durable medium - the reel-to-reel tapes were brittle and often broke. So I took the tapes home and started listening to them a
lot - eventually having my own, unrelated, personal episode of insanity - or “mental disorder”- which led to my dropping out of S.M.U. and moving to Austin. Consequently, the tapes were never returned and remained safely stored in an old trunk.

Three years later, in 1986, Dr. Strange was dead, and I was living down in Manchaca, south of Austin. I had just bought a new tape deck and remembered my project of transferring the Insane Tapes - as I called them. While listening to them, I idly played the guitar and got the notion to write and record a few songs on top of and inside the spaces of the interviews. The results were not intolerable - due mostly to the raw effect of the voices of the patients. I made a few tapes, sent them out to even fewer friends.

So now, twenty years on, perhaps just to appease the ghost of Dr. Strange, I figured to finally complete my project of transferring the tapes - this time into mp3 files on my computer. And likewise, also for a few private ghosts, I re-recorded four of the original songs of The Insane and one new one.

You know, when it comes down to it, there are few things more enjoyable (for me) than sitting in a windowless room surrounded by books, listening to the screams and cries of the insane while playing guitar.

I hope that my accompaniments and embellishments will find you in a forgiving state of mind -

The Mechanics of Nostalgia: Little Hope Cemetery

2010-03-11T15:24:00.000-08:00

Experienced Present

Remembered Past

A Google Buzz post from my friend Staci sent me to a recent Boing Boing post on Through a Plastic Lens: Toy Camera Photography. This led to me to a search for toy camera actions for use in Photoshop. I found a link off of a Flickr page from Dave Ward Photography (see below) that produced outstanding results. When the final image came through, I laughed out loud. Makes me want to find an old toy camera and get deep into the darkroom alchemies of actual film.

The "Old Toy Camera" action gives photos a look similar to an aged print shot on a toy camera (like the Diana or Holga), or on an antique camera. This particular action is not intended to imitate any one camera's particular look, but rather to simply add some of the general elements which make aged photos and images shot on toy and antique cameras so beautiful.

The file also includes two additional actions which imitate the borders often found on vintage and toy camera images.

The action was created on a Mac using Photoshop 7.0, but should work on a PC and on later versions of Photoshop.

Download the Old Toy Camera action for Photoshop

This action is also available at the Adobe Studio Exchange.

How a specific time is represented photographically is fascinating to me. I sense that this is going to become a moot point in the digital age, but not long ago you could "tell" the time period of a photograph by a wide variety of semiotic markers extraterritorial to the subject of the photograph. Types of camera, film stock, developing processes, etc. all marked or "dated" the image quite specifically.

A few examples all from the excellent Square America: A Letter From The Vanishing World (The Readers):

[ source ]

The Bone's Prayer to Death its God - The Dry Salvages, Section II

2010-03-09T20:23:00.000-08:00

Where is there an end of it, the soundless wailing,
The silent withering of autumn flowers
Dropping their petals and remaining motionless;
Where is there and end to the drifting wreckage,
The prayer of the bone on the beach, the unprayable
Prayer at the calamitous annunciation?

There is no end, but addition: the trailing
Consequence of further days and hours,
While emotion takes to itself the emotionless
Years of living among the breakage
Of what was believed in as the most reliable—
And therefore the fittest for renunciation.

There is the final addition, the failing
Pride or resentment at failing powers,
The unattached devotion which might pass for devotionless,
In a drifting boat with a slow leakage,
The silent listening to the undeniable
Clamour of the bell of the last annunciation.

Where is the end of them, the fishermen sailing
Into the wind's tail, where the fog cowers?
We cannot think of a time that is oceanless
Or of an ocean not littered with wastage
Or of a future that is not liable
Like the past, to have no destination.

We have to think of them as forever bailing,
Setting and hauling, while the North East lowers
Over shallow banks unchanging and erosionless
Or drawing their money, drying sails at dockage;
Not as making a trip that will be unpayable
For a haul that will not bear examination.

There is no end of it, the voiceless wailing,
No end to the withering of withered flowers,
To the movement of pain that is painless and motionless,
To the drift of the sea and the drifting wreckage,
The bone's prayer to Death its God. Only the hardly, barely prayable
Prayer of the one Annunciation.

It seems, as one becomes older,
That the past has another pattern, and ceases to be a mere sequence—
Or even development: the latter a partial fallacy
Encouraged by superficial notions of evolution,
Which becomes, in the popular mind, a means of disowning the past.
The moments of happiness—not the sense of well-being,
Fruition, fulfilment, security or affection,
Or even a very good dinner, but the sudden illumination—

We had the experience but missed the meaning,
And approach to the meaning restores the experience
In a different form, beyond any meaning
We can assign to happiness. I have said before
That the past experience revived in the meaning
Is not the experience of one life only
But of many generations—not forgetting
Something that is probably quite ineffable:

The backward look behind the assurance
Of recorded history, the backward half-look
Over the shoulder, towards the primitive terror.

Now, we come to discover that the moments of agony
(Whether, or not, due to misunderstanding,
Having hoped for the wrong things or dreaded the wrong things,
Is not in question) are likewise permanent
With such permanence as time has. We appreciate this better
In the agony of others, nearly experienced,
Involving ourselves, than in our own.

For our own past is covered by the currents of action,
But the torment of others remains an experience
Unqualified, unworn by subsequent attrition.
People change, and smile: but the agony abides.

Time the destroyer is time the preserver,
Like the river with its cargo of dead negroes, cows and chicken coops,
The bitter apple, and the bite in the apple.

And the ragged rock in the restless waters,
Waves wash over it, fogs conceal it;
On a halcyon day it is merely a monument,
In navigable weather it is always a seamark
To lay a course by: but in the sombre season
Or the sudden fury, is what it always was.

Dry Salvages from The Four Quartets by T. S. Eliot

Response to Shelton Walsmith's Hamden Series

Remember, O Man, that you are dust, and to dust you shall return

2010-02-17T15:44:00.000-08:00

And He said unto me, Son of man, can these bones live
And I answered, O Lord God, thou knowest... Ezekiel 37:3

Note: [click for larger image] as always, the details in Dore are astonishing: the skeleton on the left pushing the coffin up, the incarnating forms as the eye travels up to Ezekiel, the riveting skeleton on the right with arms raised, seeming not to be agonizing with incarnation but rejoicing in it, one imagines the skull at lower center to start rising out of the ground, bones gathering together underneath.

The poetry of T. S. Eliot has shaped my development perhaps more than any other. I remember being a sophomore in high school, studying in the library, a friend throwing down a copy of The Waste Land upon the table with frustration, saying that it would take a genius to understand it. Why, I asked. It's just really difficult, they replied, significantly adding, everyone knows it means something, but Eliot made it difficult to figure out what exactly that is. My friend continued, he even added footnotes because no one could figure it out. I was intrigued. I wondered why a poet would make something intentionally difficult.

At the time, I knew of basically two types of poetry: Shakespeare and everything else. With Shakespeare, the difficulty - as I sophomorically conceived it - was in the language being dated, "old." To figure out Shakespeare's poetry, you just had to look all the strange words up in the dictionary, learn about Elizabethan customs. But he was not deliberately trying to be difficult or obscure. That was just the way people talked and wrote back then. (I had much to learn.) What other poetry I knew was mostly comprised of Poe, Frost and Dickinson.

Every high school sophomore would like to think themselves a genius, so I started in on The Waste Land. I quickly came to the realization that by this standard, I was no genius. Nevertheless, I determined myself to read it through to the end. I tried reading it out loud, under my breath, and this opened up the meter for me, being able to listen for hints of meaning. (I have never stopped this practice of reading poetry "out loud to myself.") Images and ideas piled on top of each other, like photographs in a drawer. By the time I reached the dialogue in the Game of Chess section, I could discern flashes of meaning beneath the surface. Enough to hook me. Enough to change my life. Not long after, I was deep into reading Weston's Ritual to Romance, Campbell's The Hero With a Thousand Faces and Jung's Man and His Symbols. The Waste Land started to make a great deal of sense to me. Took me a few years and a lot of hard work until I could say that I finally "understood" The Waste Land. So much for my genius. And I should add that it was about ten years later, sitting on a bench in Hyde Park in London, alone and in love with that city, that the poem surrendered completely, unforgettably, to me.

Of course, during my agonies with The Waste Land, I read the rest of Eliot: The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, The Hollow Men, Gerontion, Journey of the Magi, the masterpiece, The Four Quartets. Also Ash Wednesday.

The poem was written in 1927, his first work since his conversion Anglicism. Eliot stayed deep in the shadows of Dante all his life. And it is through the reflected radiance of the Commedia that you can best discern the momentous Purgatorial Turnings glowing between the lines of Ash Wednesday. This is a poem about conversion and redemption. Eliot is turning away from the old life, from the muted apostasies of Gerontion (1920):

Signs are taken for wonders. “We would see a sign!”
The word within a word, unable to speak a word,
Swaddled with darkness. In the juvescence of the year
Came Christ the tiger
In depraved May, dogwood and chestnut, flowering judas,
To be eaten, to be divided, to be drunk
Among whispers

from the bleak quips of prediction in the Hollow Men (1925):

This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.

towards an authentic petition for redemption:

Teach us to care and not to care
Teach us to sit still.

Pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death
Pray for us now and at the hour of our death.

into a genuine religious longing, "even among these rocks":

Blessèd sister, holy mother, spirit of the fountain, spirit of the garden,
Suffer us not to mock ourselves with falsehood
Teach us to care and not to care
Teach us to sit still
Even among these rocks,
Our peace in His will

In the Dantean cosmology, those who suffered in the Inferno had no hope of Purgatory. None but Dante and Virgil had ever traveled to the absolute nadir of that Hell and moved on, and up, into Purgatory. There are few inventions in the history of the written word that show greater audacity, of creative transgression, than Dante's recounting of this journey out of the Inferno. Dante created a Cosmos that verges upon being more substantial than our own. He mapped out the Christian World of the Soul. To this day, many understand the afterlife as according to Dante. To do this, he allowed himself, as the living author to transgress Divine Law. Dante wrote himself a way out of Hell. It's beautful. One of the first on a series of literary coup de graces to God.

Dante's intention was to set up a moral allegory: that the "lost souls" of the living still have hope. Turn your life around. Release yourself from the bindings of sin and begin the Purgatorial ascent up to the Divine.

Here is Eliot on the matter:

Ash Wednesday by T. S. Eliot

Because I do not hope to turn again

Because I do not hope

Because I do not hope to turn

Desiring this man's gift and that man's scope

I no longer strive to strive towards such things

(Why should the agèd eagle stretch its wings?)

Why should I mourn

The vanished power of the usual reign?

Because I do not hope to know

The infirm glory of the positive hour

Because I do not think

Because I know I shall not know

The one veritable transitory power

Because I cannot drink

There, where trees flower, and springs flow, for there is

nothing again

Because I know that time is always time

And place is always and only place

And what is actual is actual only for one time

And only for one place

I rejoice that things are as they are and

I renounce the blessèd face

And renounce the voice

Because I cannot hope to turn again

Consequently I rejoice, having to construct something

Upon which to rejoice

And pray to God to have mercy upon us

And pray that I may forget

These matters that with myself I too much discuss

Too much explain

Because I do not hope to turn again

Let these words answer

For what is done, not to be done again

May the judgement not be too heavy upon us

Because these wings are no longer wings to fly

But merely vans to beat the air

The air which is now thoroughly small and dry

Smaller and dryer than the will

Teach us to care and not to care

Teach us to sit still.

Pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death

Pray for us now and at the hour of our death.

Lady, three white leopards sat under a juniper-tree

In the cool of the day, having fed to sateity

On my legs my heart my liver and that which had been contained

In the hollow round of my skull. And God said

Shall these bones live? shall these

Bones live? And that which had been contained

In the bones (which were already dry) said chirping:

Because of the goodness of this Lady

And because of her loveliness, and because

She honours the Virgin in meditation,

We shine with brightness. And I who am here dissembled

Proffer my deeds to oblivion, and my love

To the posterity of the desert and the fruit of the gourd.

It is this which recovers

My guts the strings of my eyes and the indigestible portions

Which the leopards reject. The Lady is withdrawn

In a white gown, to contemplation, in a white gown.

Let the whiteness of bones atone to forgetfulness.

There is no life in them. As I am forgotten

And would be forgotten, so I would forget

Thus devoted, concentrated in purpose. And God said

Prophesy to the wind, to the wind only for only

The wind will listen. And the bones sang chirping

With the burden of the grasshopper, saying

Lady of silences

Calm and distressed

Torn and most whole

Rose of memory

Rose of forgetfulness

Exhausted and life-giving

Worried reposeful

The single Rose

Is now the Garden

Where all loves end

Terminate torment

Of love unsatisfied

The greater torment

Of love satisfied

End of the endless

Journey to no end

Conclusion of all that

Is inconclusible

Speech without word and

Word of no speech

Grace to the Mother

For the Garden

Where all love ends.

Under a juniper-tree the bones sang, scattered and shining

We are glad to be scattered, we did little good to each other,

Under a tree in the cool of day, with the blessing of sand,

Forgetting themselves and each other, united

In the quiet of the desert. This is the land which ye

Shall divide by lot. And neither division nor unity

Matters. This is the land. We have our inheritance.

III

At the first turning of the second stair

I turned and saw below

The same shape twisted on the banister

Under the vapour in the fetid air

Struggling with the devil of the stairs who wears

The deceitul face of hope and of despair.

At the second turning of the second stair

I left them twisting, turning below;

There were no more faces and the stair was dark,

Damp, jaggèd, like an old man's mouth driveling, beyond repair,

Or the toothed gullet of an agèd shark.

At the first turning of the third stair

Was a slotted window bellied like the figs's fruit

And beyond the hawthorn blossom and a pasture scene

The broadbacked figure drest in blue and green

Enchanted the maytime with an antique flute.

Blown hair is sweet, brown hair over the mouth blown,

Lilac and brown hair;

Distraction, music of the flute, stops and steps of the mind

over the third stair,

Fading, fading; strength beyond hope and despair

Climbing the third stair.

Lord, I am not worthy

but speak the word only.

Who walked between the violet and the violet

Who walked between

The various ranks of varied green

Going in white and blue, in Mary's colour,

Talking of trivial things

In ignorance and knowledge of eternal dolour

Who moved among the others as they walked,

Who then made strong the fountains and made fresh the springs

Made cool the dry rock and made firm the sand

In blue of larkspur, blue of Mary's colour,

Sovegna vos

Here are the years that walk between, bearing

Away the fiddles and the flutes, restoring

One who moves in the time between sleep and waking, wearing

White light folded, sheathing about her, folded.

The new years walk, restoring

Through a bright cloud of tears, the years, restoring

With a new verse the ancient rhyme. Redeem

The time. Redeem

The unread vision in the higher dream

While jewelled unicorns draw by the gilded hearse.

The silent sister veiled in white and blue

Between the yews, behind the garden god,

Whose flute is breathless, bent her head and signed but spoke no word

But the fountain sprang up and the bird sang down

Redeem the time, redeem the dream

The token of the word unheard, unspoken

Till the wind shake a thousand whispers from the yew

And after this our exile

If the lost word is lost, if the spent word is spent

If the unheard, unspoken

Word is unspoken, unheard;

Still is the unspoken word, the Word unheard,

The Word without a word, the Word within

The world and for the world;

And the light shone in darkness and

Against the Word the unstilled world still whirled

About the centre of the silent Word.

O my people, what have I done unto thee.

Where shall the word be found, where will the word

Resound? Not here, there is not enough silence

Not on the sea or on the islands, not

On the mainland, in the desert or the rain land,

For those who walk in darkness

Both in the day time and in the night time

The right time and the right place are not here

No place of grace for those who avoid the face

No time to rejoice for those who walk among noise and deny the voice

Will the veiled sister pray for

Those who walk in darkness, who chose thee and oppose thee,

Those who are torn on the horn between season and season,

time and time, between

Hour and hour, word and word, power and power, those who wait

In darkness? Will the veiled sister pray

For children at the gate

Who will not go away and cannot pray:

Pray for those who chose and oppose

O my people, what have I done unto thee.

Will the veiled sister between the slender

Yew trees pray for those who offend her

And are terrified and cannot surrender

And affirm before the world and deny between the rocks

In the last desert before the last blue rocks

The desert in the garden the garden in the desert

Of drouth, spitting from the mouth the withered apple-seed.

O my people.

Although I do not hope to turn again

Although I do not hope

Although I do not hope to turn

Wavering between the profit and the loss

In this brief transit where the dreams cross

The dreamcrossed twilight between birth and dying

(Bless me father) though I do not wish to wish these things

From the wide window towards the granite shore

The white sails still fly seaward, seaward flying

Unbroken wings

And the lost heart stiffens and rejoices

In the lost lilac and the lost sea voices

And the weak spirit quickens to rebel

For the bent golden-rod and the lost sea smell

Quickens to recover

The cry of quail and the whirling plover

And the blind eye creates

The empty forms between the ivory gates

And smell renews the salt savour of the sandy earth

This is the time of tension between dying and birth

The place of solitude where three dreams cross

Between blue rocks

But when the voices shaken from the yew-tree drift away

Let the other yew be shaken and reply.

Blessèd sister, holy mother, spirit of the fountain, spirit of the garden,

Suffer us not to mock ourselves with falsehood

Teach us to care and not to care

Teach us to sit still

Even among these rocks,

Our peace in His will

And even among these rocks

Sister, mother

And spirit of the river, spirit of the sea,

Suffer me not to be separated

And let my cry come unto Thee.

Fibonacci's Sequence: Series II: killers exist, and doves, and doves

2010-02-16T14:20:00.000-08:00

doves exist, dreamers and dolls;
killers exist, and doves, and doves;
haze, dioxon, and days; days
exist, days and death; and poems
exist; poems, days, death

- From alphabet by Inger Christensen

The length of each section of Inger Christensen's alphabet is based on Fibonacci's Sequence, a mathematical sequence beginning 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21..., in which each number is the sum of the two previous numbers.

Silk by Alessandro Baricco: What is most beautiful...

2010-02-15T12:54:00.000-08:00

Snow, Moon, and Flowers | 雪月花山水図 | Mori Kansai | 1868

I found a copy of Alessandro Baricco's Silk on one of my sister's bookshelves the other day. It had been several years since I had last read it, so at the end of a long day, I opened it and began. I was tired and didn't figure to last long with a book I had read several times before. But the story worked its enchantment upon me once again. I read it on through to the end. As I lay there with the closed book upon my chest, I felt as if I could start it over again. It is a good story.

Silk is a mere 91 pages long, comprised of 65 chapters. The story is supported by an elegant architecture - almost zen-like in its simplicity. Some of the short chapters trace over months of time, while others, often with fewer words, explore a single moment. The effect is similar to the Chinese painters that used emptiness to charge the meaning of their landscapes. What is most beautiful is what is evoked but never described.

The story is set in the late 1800s. Herve Jouncour is a silk merchant who lives in a small town in southern France. He is married to a woman with a beautiful voice. Each year, due to various circumstances, he must travel to Japan to buy silkworm eggs. While in Japan, he meets a young woman, the mistress of the most elusive man in all of Japan, Hara Kei. Herve and the young woman do not speak to each other. But something happens between them. He leaves. The next year, he returns. Barrico weaves his threads over the same patterns, deepening the detail with each passing. By the end, you realize in the hands of an author with less control, less discipline, the story could have easily run to a thousand pages.

I was having dinner with one of my most influential teachers one night, not long before he died, and asked him what he was reading. He told me that as he had grown older, he had less desire for new stories, new books. He found himself returning to the old ones again and again, reading through the familiar traces, moving into narrative depths he had not had access to on previous readings. He rarely smiled. But I remember him smiling then, and saying, one of the gifts of age is to have a beloved book open up after many years to reveal previously unknown treasures within. He paused and added: such a gift.

In a few years, I am certain, I will read Silk again. And I am sure that it will again have some small gift to offer me, something that I have passed by on all my previous readings, something that I barely even noticed.... It is one of those kinds of books.

The Laughing Bone Store: Silk: book information, blurbs, editorial and customer reviews, lists and more of the usual Amazon razmatazz

Fibonacci's Sequence: Series I: poems, days, death

2010-01-22T13:52:00.000-08:00

doves exist, dreamers and dolls;
killers exist, and doves, and doves;
haze, dioxon, and days; days
exist, days and death; and poems
exist; poems, days, death

- From alphabet by Inger Christensen

Three Pizza Boxes and a Sharpie

2010-01-21T23:35:00.001-08:00

I got three motorboats and every damn one's got a hole in it. Is this thing on? Working through negative technique in three different ways. Line's been in the water for a while. I can feel the weight. The challenge is to see if I can get it to the surface. What I want is this: 'Waterfall and Monkeys' by Shibata Zeshin. (Did you notice that monkey with his ass to you, balls hanging out, bottom center? Beautiful.) Got a lot of line to pull in before I can get it in the boat.

The Key to the Cathedral

2010-01-20T21:11:00.000-08:00

I know that no one is going to get this. But with this one, I figured it out. It is the key to the Cathedral.

Burroughs on Wilson: Mind Parasites Will Now Destroy You

2010-01-13T13:35:00.000-08:00

[ source ]

When I first encountered Colin Wilson's The Mind Parasites, it made an indelible impression upon me. While it is certainly not one of the best books that I have ever read, it is one of the most influential. About halfway through, I remember calling up a friend and telling him, all serious, "This book is an allegory for the crisis of Modern Man. The Mind Parasite are real!"

It is one of the few books that I consistently reread, partly to remind myself of how fired it got me when I first encountered it, but also because I still believe in its allegorical validity.

So it was refreshing to discover a review of The Mind Parasites by William Burroughs on the RealityStudio site. I've quoted a brief excerpt below. It is worth reading in its entirety.

There is considerable inferential evidence to indicate the actual existence of such a parasitic instance as this book postulates. An Italian sociologist said if you want to get to the bottom of any situation that seems on the surface inexplicable ask yourself the simple question ‘who profits?’ Who would profit from blocking every basic discovery about the human mind? Techniques are now available to alter consciousness and effect the hypothalamus directly. In a recent Mayfair article I described the experiments of doctor Miller who has demonstrated that any mammal can learn to control such seemingly involuntary processes as brain waves, blood pressure, rate of heart beats, his whole state of mind and body. Doctor Miller had great difficulty in raising funds for his experiments. The importance of these experiments was completely missed by the press. The means are at hand to conquer inner space but they are not being used. Despite impressive technical advances the planet is still in the stone age psychologically. Who would profit from turning the clock all the way back to the stone age and keeping man out of space? A parasitic entity that lives in the human body and could not survive space. Only in the last two hundred years have technological advances made space exploration a possibility. By maintaining control of inner space the parasites can block any discovery or destroy anyone who suspects their existence.

- William Burroughs

Ephemera: This Is The Skull of Adam

2010-01-07T07:07:00.000-08:00

I saw the Prophet Eliseus descend into these caverns, I cannot say whether in reality or only in a vision, and I saw him take out a skull from a stone sepulchre in which bones were resting. Some one who was by his side—I think an angel—said to him, ‘This is the skull of Adam.’ The prophet was desirous to take it away, but his companion forbade him.

- Dolorous Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ

From Ephemera

The Red and The Black in The Reader: My Bell Rung with Mozart

2010-01-02T13:27:00.000-08:00

Pablo Picasso | Young Girl Reading a Book on the Beach | 1937

Still have a few dollars in credit at Henderson's- the local used bookstore. Bought The Reader by Bernhard Schlink. Oprah stain on the front redeemed by Steiner quote on the back. Looked for Hamsun's Hunger. Anything by Thomas Bernhard. Bookstore. Nada. Library. Nada. Also picked up Auerbach's Mimesis. Lost most of my books in the Great Sell Off.

Started The Reader, little ways into it, trying to discern the architecture of it, was suddenly reminded of Stendahl's The Red and the Black - which I read about 20 years ago. One of the few books that I brought up here from Austin. Found it on the shelf and started re-reading it. Up to Chapter VI: Boredom with the epigram from Mozart's Figaro:

Non so più cosa son, cosa faccio.
I no longer know what I am, what I'm doing.

I set Stendahl down and went back to The Reader, hoping that it would "get to the meat" before my patience ran out. Reading where I left off, turned the page (40) and had my bell rung with this sentence:

But I identified more with Julian Sorel's relationship with Madame de Renal than his one with Mathilde de la Mole.

I'm not placing cosmic significance upon the synchronicity of this. I just note it here for future reference.

Finished The Reader. I do not share all of Steiner's enthusiasm ("A masterly work.... The reviewer's sole and privileged function is to say as loudly as he is able, 'Read this' and 'Read it again.'") It would be my "privileged function" to say, rather quietly, "Read this and that should be enough."

The novel is divided into three parts. Written in an engaging simple style, the first part concerns a young man's falling in love with an older woman and her mysterious disappearance. This was the most tedious part of the book for me - and I set it down several times to return to Stendahl. But I persisted, slogging through to the second part, the woman now on trial for crimes committed in the service of the Nazis during the war. About halfway through this part, the young man discovers the core "secret" of the woman's character. And it is from this point on that the novel gains traction and depth. The elegiac final section is beautiful and redeemed the juvenal banality of the first. Read it - then read The Red and the Black.

A novel is a mirror carried along a high road. At one moment it reflects to your vision the azure skies at another the mire of the puddles at your feet. And the man who carries this mirror in his pack will be accused by you of being immoral! His mirror shows the mire, and you blame the mirror! Rather blame that high road upon which the puddle lies, still more the inspector of roads who allows the water to gather and the puddle to form.

- The Red and The Black, Ch. XIX

Box

2009-12-12T11:09:00.000-08:00

Provisional Bestiary

2007-10-12T01:51:00.000-07:00

The Donkey:

http://laughingbone.blogspot.com/2005/02/mechanics-of-laughter.html

I once read that the Greek Philosopher, Chrysippus, died from laughter after he saw a donkey eating some figs. That seemed strange to me until I imagined the scene. To this day, I find donkeys almost unbearably amusing, especially if they are eating. I can't explain it. Something about the donkey's mouth and teeth and the simple donkeyness of it all.

From Balaam's Donkey: The Tale as Rendered by the Rev. B. Jones:

There once was a whiskey-priest name of Balaam. Used to ride around on a Donkey. Get drunk, pass out on the donkey, wake up in an another town. Not a bad life for Balaam.

Come a time when Balaam stumble into a difficult place called Moab and meet up with a local boss name of Balak. Boss Balak told Balaam that he’d give him some silver if he cursed the next town over, place called Godspeople. Balaam thought about it for about a second, asked for another bottle of whiskey, and said no problem. Who cares about the curses of a goddamned whiskey-priest?

On the way to Godspeople, Balaam’s Donkey come upon a Fiery Angel Of God Swinging a Bloody Sword and stopped in the middle of the road, wouldn’t budge. Balaam was too drunk to see anything and started beating the Donkey until they both fell down into the dust of the road.

It was then that they Donkey whispered into Balaam’s ear: Lookout, there’s a Fiery Angel of God with a Bloody Sword coming over to whoop your own ass.

God, I must be drunk, said Balaam as he sat up. But it was then that he too saw the Angel and the Sword. He passed out cold right there. But the Donkey listened to what the Angel had to say. And, most importantly, understood.

To this day, it is said by some that donkey’s can talk, but they choose only to laugh their hee-haw because of what the Angel told them.

❂

Tippoo's Tiger. Automaton with mechanical organ. India. About 1793

The Tiger:

Tiger! Tiger! burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

In what distant deeps or skies
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand dare seize the fire?

And what shoulder, and what art,
Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
And when thy heart began to beat,
What dread hand? and what dread feet?

What the hammer? what the chain?
In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil? what dread grasp
Dare its deadly terrors clasp?

When the stars threw down their spears,
And watered heaven with their tears,
Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the Lamb make thee?

Tiger! Tiger! burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?

- Blake

☷

A tiger comes to mind. The twilight here
Exalts the vast and busy Library
And seems to set the bookshelves back in gloom;
Innocent, ruthless, bloodstained, sleek
It wanders through its forest and its day
Printing a track along the muddy banks
Of sluggish streams whose names it does not know
(In its world there are no names or past
Or time to come, only the vivid now)
And makes its way across wild distances
Sniffing the braided labyrinth of smells
And in the wind picking the smell of dawn
And tantalizing scent of grazing deer;
Among the bamboo's slanting stripes I glimpse
The tiger's stripes and sense the bony frame
Under the splendid, quivering cover of skin.
Curving oceans and the planet's wastes keep us
Apart in vain; from here in a house far off
In South America I dream of you,
Track you, O tiger of the Ganges' banks.

It strikes me now as evening fills my soul
That the tiger addressed in my poem
Is a shadowy beast, a tiger of symbols
And scraps picked up at random out of books,
A string of labored tropes that have no life,
And not the fated tiger, the deadly jewel
That under sun or stars or changing moon
Goes on in Bengal or Sumatra fulfilling
Its rounds of love and indolence and death.
To the tiger of symbols I hold opposed
The one that's real, the one whose blood runs hot
As it cuts down a herd of buffaloes,
And that today, this August third, nineteen
Fifty-nine, throws its shadow on the grass;
But by the act of giving it a name,
By trying to fix the limits of its world,
It becomes a fiction not a living beast,
Not a tiger out roaming the wilds of earth.

We'll hunt for a third tiger now, but like
The others this one too will be a form
Of what I dream, a structure of words, and not
The flesh and one tiger that beyond all myths
Paces the earth. I know these things quite well,
Yet nonetheless some force keeps driving me
In this vague, unreasonable, and ancient quest,
And I go on pursuing through the hours
Another tiger, the beast not found in verse.

- Borges

From Emblem, Prisoner and Fiction: The Tiger in Western Literature by Ruth Padel:

To the American poet Wallace Stevens (1879–1955), imagination was “the power that enables us to perceive the normal in the abnormal, the opposite of chaos in chaos.” His poem “Disillusionment of Ten O’Clock” (1923) pictures conventional people at home at the end of their day, pressured to be like everyone else. Even in dreams they are caged, not free. They do not “dream of baboons and periwinkles.” Out on the street, however, an old sailor, “Drunk and asleep in his boots,” conjures up in his stupor the exotic dreams he once had in far-off places. In his alcoholic haze, he “Catches tigers / In red weather.”

That “red” could mean many things, but it certainly suggests the power of imagination. Unlike the people caged in their houses, and in boring “white night-gowns,” the tramp-like sailor is colored and enriched; saved, by dreaming of tigers, from the caging “disillusionment” of modern living. Catching tigers in red weather is an image for imagination and dream.

❂

Chen Rong, The Nine Dragons, handscroll, ink on paper

The Dragon:

The ant's a centaur in his dragon world.

- Pound

http://bonecarver.blogspot.com/2007/10/on-being-difficult-wind-through-skull.html

Concerning the relationship of the Donkey and the Tiger to the Dragon: the Donkey and the Tiger are derivatives of the Dragon and have no knowledge of the Dragon. The Dragon represents the Abyss out of which all we know had been formed. Gnostic connotations here. Pre-socratic. Primal Myths. Upanishads. Revelations.

And I saw an angel come down from heaven, having the key of the Abyss… And he laid hold on the dragon, that old serpent, which is the Devil, and Satan, and bound him a thousand years, And cast him into the Abyss, and shut him up, and set a seal upon him, that he should deceive the nations no more, till the thousand years should be fulfilled.

- Rev.20:1,2, AMP

Lucas Jennis' engraving published on an alchemical emblem-book
entitled De Lapide Philisophico (1625)

From http://faculty.vassar.edu/brvannor/heidegger.html:

Finally, we would like to explore very briefly a few of the most promising connections that might obtain between Heidegger and the Taoists, Chuang-tzu and Lao-tzu. Otto Pöggeler's essay, though it often wanders well off the subject, offers the most substantial textual support for the various possible influences and analogies.

In chapter 17 of the Chuang-tzu Hui Shih puts forward a challenge: "You are not a fish. Whence do you know that the fish are happy?" Chuang-tzu replies, famously, "You aren't me, whence do you know that I don't know the fish are happy?" [Chuang-tzu: The Inner Chapters, A. C. Graham, ed. and trans. (Boston: Unwin Paperbacks, 1986), 123.]

Heidegger is known to have been fond of this passage and to have read aloud from it in 1930 during a discussion of intersubjectivity and empathy (Pöggeler, 52). It is easier to see what divides Heidegger and Chuang-tzu than what unites them, however, since, as Pöggeler says, the moral of the story has to do with "the universal sympathy which joins together all the things of nature -- such as men and fishes" (53). For Heidegger, on the contrary, other living creatures are "separated from our ek-sistent essence by an abyss." [Heidegger, "Letter on Humanism," in Basic Writings, D. F. Krell (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), 206.]

Or consider chapter 11 of the Lao-tzu:

Clay is molded to make a pot
In its emptiness [lit., nothing]
Is the usefulness of the pot.

[Cf. Pöggeler, 61, and Parkes, 120-121. Translations from the Tao Te Ching are by Bryan Van Norden.]

In what might appear to be a strikingly analogous passage, Heidegger describes a jug as a paradigmatic "thing," that is, an artifact that holds human practices together and makes them intelligible. He writes:
When we fill the jug, the pouring that fills it flows into the empty jug. The emptiness, the void, is what does the vessel's holding. The empty space, this nothing of the jug, is what the jug is as the holding vessel. ... But if the holding is done by the jug's void, then the potter who forms sides and bottom on his wheel does not, strictly speaking, make the jug. He only shapes the clay. No -- he shapes the void. ... The vessel's thingness does not lie at all in the material of which it consists, but in the void that holds. [Heidegger, "The Thing," in Poetry, Language, Thought, A. Hofstadter, trans. (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), 169.]

cf. From Taoism and the Arts of China by Thomas Christensen

The tiger and dragon are often found as a paired motif in Taoist iconography. "In addition to symbolizing yin and yang, the tiger and dragon also symbolize west and east, and the elements (or phases) fire and metal. In Taoist chemical alchemy (waidan, or "outer" alchemy), the tiger and dragon also represent two of the most powerful elixir ingredients known, lead and mercury, while in the Inner Alchemy (neidan) tradition, the two animals symbolize yin and yang as they are brought together in the inner (human) body through visualization and transformed to create a divine embryonic form of the practitioner" (Stephen Little).

❂

Shibata Zeshin, Japanese (1807–1891)
Waterfall and Monkeys, 1872

The Monkey:

http://laughingbone.blogspot.com/search?q=monkey

From http://www.laughingbone.com/ashipadrift:

"With the Fall of Man,
the image of God in him is darkened."

-The Eros of Repentance

The Bones of Man and
The Wreck of the Ship.

There washed up on the Beach,
Ragged with weeds
And torn sails,

The tide red and churning pink.

The Monkey and the Man Collecting Bones
For tools, for dignity and,
most of all,
For Memory.

Sitting with the Mermaid’s
Wooden stare and
The Skin of a Tattooed Mariner.

Blue Flames and
South Sea Mysteries.

A Ship adrift
And spinning...

Through the Skull of God.

From the Collected Letters of Charles "Bonesy" Jones:

Since we last spoke, the monkey of little "w" work covered in blood and shit wailing around the room of my mind, breaking everything, fucking every hole, masturbating the monkey cock every second, a constant stream of ink-like diarrhea oozing out of its ass writing the meaningless story of the days everywhere, blotting out blankness with its same as it ever was doing over and over obliterating monkey robot insane slavery shit blackness.

Finally, about a month ago, get the little fuck back into the cage in the corner and calmed down with the food pellet hook-up to the pleasure center press the lever loop.

Get my mind returned to winter beach Emptiness, spread eagle in the surf, turning like a star. The master of my imagination down there in some deep coral cave like Blake's Newton with his compass and his square, reckoning the figure of God's face upon the waters.

Went back down to Mexico to ease the flesh around my bones, watch the stars plough furrows across the night sky, drink from the endless bottle of tequila. Maricela, Dulce, Alma, Rojo, Muertos and Calaveras. Figure that I am not too much longer for this world. Got a hole in my bucket and all the alcohol in the world isn't enough to keep it from getting closer to empty every day.

While walking hungover through the worn out pussy pink, sweat soaked stink of a Matamoros dawn: where the little monster fuck monkey was released. Not for the Old Man but for the genetic ghost that haunts my bones. William James' nightmare of the green idiot boy and the slobbery whisper of the drunk into your ear: that shape you are potentially.

❂

Octopus living in the remains of the whale’s skull

The Whale:

http://laughingbone.blogspot.com/search?q=whale

I grin at thee, thou grinning whale! Look ye, sun, moon, and stars! I call ye assassins of as good a fellow as ever spouted up his ghost. For all that, I would yet ring glasses with thee, would ye but hand the cup!

- Ahab

❂

Drawing by Tom Canny

The Dog:

http://laughingbone.blogspot.com/2005/02/god-is-haunting-me-with-his-damn-skull.html
http://laughingbone.blogspot.com/2004/07/dog-at-temple-gate_108997349210721852.html
http://www.laughingbone.com/scrimshaw%3Ast.john%27sdog

Near the center of the grove, I turned and the stray was suddenly there. Standing on the border of the shadow and the sunlight. A strange thought danced through my head as we watched each other: it was of his concern for me, seeming to say: I only wanted to make sure you got through the storm.

I stared at the dog a long time and made a half-hearted gesture of raising my hand in acknowledgement. At least there is this, I said quietly, as if it were part of a prayer.

❂

The ox yoke was brought to Butler County, Nebraska, in 1866.

The Ox:

http://www.laughingbone.com/theox-herdingseries
http://www.laughingbone.com-a.googlepages.com/bonecarver%3Adistantbell

- Some goddamned fool has let the Ox loose again.

The Ox. Loose. A goddamned fool. I was struck silent.

He steered the boat across the water and into the seclusion of the inlet that was once a Mill Pond before the Damm was built. Cutting the motor, we drifted up to the decaying dock. Scattered portions of a broken waterwheel. I tied us onto a mossy post.

The bell rang again. Not far off.

- Go on. See if you can find the thing and stay with him till I get back from the Boathouse. We’re going to need some help to get it back around the Lake.

I got out. For some reason, he handed me the stringer of fish we had caught earlier.

I held it up and back towards him. He waved me off.

- Don’t know. Maybe you can lure him to you with those fish.

He pushed back through the lilly pads and started the motor back up. I just stood there. He said something I couldn’t hear.

- What?

- Careful with those fish.

The fish pulsed on the stringer, twisting gracefully.

The bell rang again. Seemed closer.

I walked off the dock and around to the front of the Old Mill. The bell again. To the right. Off the path. In the woods. I walked towards it, holding the fish high.

After a while, I reckoned the Ox was just playing with me. Whenever I would be ready to give up, I’d hear that bell again. Never did see it. No other sound but that bell.

The fish were getting heavy. And I wondered why I was walking around in the woods trying to find the goddamned Ox in the first place. What good could I do? I decided to head back to the Mill and wait for my Grandfather.

I turned back and walked a ways. Then stopped. I was lost. Lost. Dammit. I sat down on a fallen tree. The bell again. I didn’t move. Then again. Closer.

I turned and there it was. The Ox. About twenty yards across a clearing. Staring at me like he was wondering why I stopped. I shrugged, held up the stringer of fish. Turned back to consider my predicament.

The Ox ambled closer. I kept my back to him. Wondering how close he might come and what I was going to do if he came too close.

He blew air onto my back. I jumped up, turning, dropping the fish. He was enormous. Kind of awful. I froze. He pushed around the tree, cracking branches, to come around to my side. Around his neck, the bell, softly sounding.

❂

Philosopher in Meditation by Rembrandt

The Old Man:

From The Eros of Repentance:

To walk this way means to lift up the cross of repentance. The Old Man does not give way without violence. And the devil is not conquered without hard warfare.

This is inextricably associated for me with this bit from an interview with C. McCarthy:

There's no such thing as life without bloodshed. I think the notion that the species can be improved in some way, that everyone could live in harmony, is a really dangerous idea. Those who are afflicted with this notion are the first ones to give up their souls, their freedom. Your desire that it be that way will enslave you and make your life vacuous.

From The Eros of Repentance:

A God who does not deify man; such a god can have no interest for us, whether He exists or not.

In order for the believer to be joined to Christ and made alive, he must first die to the old man by means of repentance. One must crucify and bury the old man, (that is, egoism, the passions, and the selfish will,) at the cross and tomb of Christ, in order top rise up with Him and walk in 'newness of life'. This is the work of repentance and the carrying of the cross of Christ. Without repentance, the continual crucifying of the old man, the believer is incapable of believing evangelically.

See also: http://esotericteaching.org/articles/parable_of_the_mountain_path.pdf

Enough. The Old Man took me out of the Zoological into the Anthopomorphs / Imagos: Old Man, Gatekeeper, Bonecarver, Bonecharmer, Holy Fool, etc. - which is a can of worms to be opened at another time.

❂

On Being Difficult: Wind Through A Skull

2007-10-10T10:37:00.000-07:00

Bone Dragon by Dan Kuzmenka

+ Why "Things" Are So Difficult For Me +

Mortals dwell in that they await the divinities as divinities. In hope they hold up to the divinities what is unhoped for. They wait for intimations of their coming and do not mistake the signs of their absence. They do not make their gods for themselves and do not worship idols. In the very depth of misfortune they wait for the weal that has been withdrawn.

- Heidegger

Who among us is not waiting for the weal that has been withdrawn?

+ Self-Usufruct +

http://laughingbone.blogspot.com/2006/01/notes-on-difficulty.html

Ontological Difficulties - Essential questions. The very existence, being, of the thing is in question here. Why was it created? Who is the audience? Why is there performance at all? I think of a spectrum from an autistic savant filling page after page with unreadable language to serial murderers 'decorating' their dungeons to Holy Men chanting mantras in isolated caves.

Because this type of difficulty implicates the functions of language and of the poem as a communicative performance, because it puts in question the existential suppositions that lie behind poetry as we have known it, I propose to call it ontological. Difficulties of this category cannot be looked up; they cannot be resolved by genuine readjustment or artifice of sensibility; they are not an intentional technique of retardation and creative uncertainty (though these may be their immediate effect). Ontological difficulties confront us with blank questions about the nature of human speech, about the status of significance, about the necessity and purpose of the construct which we have, with more or less rough and ready consensus, come to perceive as a poem.

- George Steiner

This is certainly the most interesting type of difficulty. Perhaps the most vital to my outwardly formed interpretation. To exploring a life lived and died as a poem of sorts. I realize now that the difficulties that I have had in coming to terms with the death of B. Jones are mostly of the ontological type. His life was/is like a poem to me. And I guess the crux of the difficulty is in that tense change marked by /. Because I don't/didn't want the poem to ever end.

+ I Dream of A Dragon in the Main Cardoid Bulb of the M-Set +

Are you familiar with the Mandelbrot set? It is the set of points that defines a fractal. All stemming from a beautifully elegant equation: Z ⇋ z² + c. There is a large heart shaped blackness that attracts one set of points and another smaller bulb which has another attracting cycle. Together they from a sort of Buddha-scarab, the edges of which generate an infinite number of fractals.

http://laughingbone.blogspot.com/2007/10/buddhabrot-do-not-filter-out-non.html

As you "zoom" into any one aspect of these fractals, new iterations are formed around new Buddha-scarabs, infinitely. Soon you forget the presence of the blackness as each new iteration of the fractal forms around it.

Lately, I am unable forget the blackness at the center.

I had a dream once about these fractals. Instead of the a Buddha-scarab, it was a Dragon. And the fractals burning off of its edges were language. As I fell deeper and deeper into the infinite fractal fires, I could sense the Dragon becoming aware of me. And a horror dawned over me that the Dragon was an Abyss.

Language was fractally burning off the edges of a Great Dragon of Nothingness. Every word, every meaningful set of sounds, was predicated upon Nothing. And I woke up covered in sweat, filled with a nameless fractaling fear.

Along these lines, I also once dreamed of words as small children chasing after a wagon of reality, most often never reaching it, but, every now and again, hopping up onto the bed of the wagon and riding for a little while. You imagine the most sublime poem. And each word of it is a laughing kid in the back of that wagon - which because of the weight is threatening to fall apart.

A few times in my life, moments that have defined my being, I have touched the back of that wagon.

What disturbed me so much in my dream of the Dragon and language was that my wagon of reality that underwrote language, that gave words their deepest ontological meaning, was No-Thing. Language had nothing underneath it, inside of it, around it. Smoke in a universe composed entirely of mirrors.

I have talked to you about the sound of particular words. How "glad" is such a Stepford Wife word to describe a state of being. How "happy" is such a goofy kangaroo word. But what happens when a word such as "hope" sounds like the wind through a skull, a last breath, a time-lapsed collapse of a bone into dust? What happens to someone who cannot speak in a future tense? When every word is a solitary being in the middle of a black ocean constantly terrified by the dual immanent threats of going under and the sharks of silence?

Of course, I am smiling at my tortured metaphors.

My difficulties seem to leave me little recourse. I fall back upon black irony and gallows humor. But it comes down upon me all too heavily. I kneel for hours before an Altar of the Abyss that allows no language, no prayer, no song, word, sound, cry, sigh, scream or death rattle. My mouth is filled with dust. And my entire being with the absence of what was once present. God has withdrawn from the world. And I feel it like a hammering upon my skull.

+ Absence in Presence +

It is not so much the poet who speaks, but language itself: die Sprache spricht. The authentic, immensely rare, poem is one in which 'the Being of language' finds unimpeded lodging, in which the poet is not a persona, a subjectivity 'ruling over language', but an 'openness to', a supreme listener to, the genius of speech. The result of such openness is not so much a text, but an 'act', an eventuation of Being and literal 'coming into Being'. [...]

We bear witness to its precarious possibility of existence in an 'open' space of collisions, of momentary fusions between word and referent. The operative metaphor may be that crucial to Mallarme's famous L'absente de tous bouquets, to the modem physicist's determination of 'the unperceived event' in the cloud-chamber, and to Heidegger's equivocation on the 'absence in presence' (the play on Ab- and Anwesen). ln each case the observable phenomenon - the text - is the inevitable betrayal, in both senses of the term, of an invisible logic.

- More Steiner

+ Two Very Short Uneasy Pieces Burning Inside My Skull +

The Transcendental Pretense of Feigenbaum Constants

Lying in the middle of her cosmic legs
Dive into a puddle of some scrambled eggs
Back in the bedroom
Melt in the full moon
Howl with the possum
He's playing a good tune
Sit with me baby, up here on the fence
Try to make some sense of the Transcendental Pretense.

How Many Planck Lengths Long is God's Cock?

"She said she wanted to know what it was that I wrote about. I told her: the essential human condition from hole to hole. Hole to hole? she asked. Yep: womb to tomb. All about the Dance of the Bone out of one and then into another. Dance of the Bone? she asked, not following. You and me, bones dancing inside bags of skin. That's not a very pretty picture, she said. I disagree, I replied. Nothing prettier than a lil pink bone hole waiting for you at the end of the day. I'm sorry, she started to say. But I cut her off and I asked her, do you know why an electron isn't a black hole? Of course, she had no answer. She replied that it sounded like a joke, you know, with a funny punchline. I said, actually, the punchline is kind of funny because an electron can't be smaller than Planck's length. She laughed and said that was silly because she has seen lots of planks bigger than an electron. I laughed too. It was really funny. Then I asked her how many Planck's Lengths long she imagined god's cock to be? Well, I've never thought of God as having a cock, she said slowly, the notion sinking in, but I imagine a lot. I said, I can show it to you, if you really want to see it. She looked at me, wide-eyed. And then said the most beautiful thing: how long will it take. I smiled and said, Sweetheart, as long as you like."

+ Van der Waalsian Connections +

Colors of Infinity:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-3034959314635185121

+ Evidence +

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ivRQDbAduoM
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G_GBwuYuOOs

+ A Caesium Moment of Humor +

The Mandelbrot Set Song
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gEw8xpb1aRA

Pathological monsters! cried the terrified mathematician
Every one of them is a splinter in my eye
I hate the Peano Space and the Koch Curve
I fear the Cantor Ternary Set
And the Sierpinski Gasket makes me want to cry
And a million miles away a butterfly flapped its wings
On a cold November day a man named Benoit Mandelbrot was born.

+ Loomings +

http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2006/fractals.html

Mandelbrot recently began to apply his knowledge of fractals to explain stock markets. "Markets, like oceans, have turbulence," he said. "Some days the change in markets is very small, and some days it moves in a huge leap. Only fractals can explain this kind of random change." He and a journalist, Richard Hudson, have co-written a book on the thorny subject to explain the complex gyrations of stock prices and exchange rates.

+ Looks Back Into You +

Dangerous Knowledge
http://bestdocumentaries.blogspot.com/2007/09/dangerous-knowledge-full-documentary.html

The film begins with Georg Cantor, the great mathematician whose work proved to be the foundation for much of the 20th-century mathematics. He believed he was God's messenger and was eventually driven insane trying to prove his theories of infinity. Ludwig Boltzmann's struggle to prove the existence of atoms and probability eventually drove him to suicide. Kurt Gödel, the introverted confidant of Einstein, proved that there would always be problems which were outside human logic. His life ended in a sanatorium where he starved himself to death.

+ After Words +

http://www.azibaza.com/lecture/images/Image-03.jpg

❂

The Zen of Otis on Andy Griffith

2007-08-19T07:37:00.000-07:00

Andy: Otis, what in the world are you doin'?
Otis: I just got back from old man Davis's place and he sold me this entire horse for twenty dollars.
Andy: Otis, I don't reckon you can notice, but you got a horse that gives milk.
Otis: I knew he was a good buy.

Been curiously fascinated with the Andy Griffith Show recently. About the world that it existed within. About the world that it mirrored.

From Wikipedia:

The Andy Griffith Show was set in and around the fictional town of Mayberry in the county of Mayberry, North Carolina. (Andy and Barney were employees of Mayberry County.) According to roadside signs seen in various episodes, the town population varied between 2,000 and 5,360 during the eight seasons of The Andy Griffith Show. Raleigh was a few hours' drive away but the nearest city was Mount Pilot, located to the east of Mayberry in Pilot County. Mt. Pilot had a population of 30,000 and was known for its fast pace. Another nearby city mentioned numerous times on the show is Siler City, in Chatham County. It is also the town where Frances Bavier, the actress who played Aunt Bee, retired and was buried. One episode had a fictional neighboring district called "Pierce County" near Mayberry County.

There is no real town of Mayberry, but despite Griffith's denial, it is widely believed that it was based upon his real hometown of Mount Airy in Surry County, North Carolina. (In one 1965 episode, "Aunt Bee's Invisible Beau," he can be seen perusing a copy of the Mount Airy News [1] in his living room.) More likely, Mayberry was the brainchild of not only the writers, directors, and producers of The Andy Griffith Show, but also of the several other actors besides Griffith who hailed originally from southern towns and cities (e.g. Don Knotts from Morgantown, West Virginia, Jim Nabors from Sylacauga, Alabama, and George Lindsey, from Jasper, Alabama).

Mayberry has become synonymous with the peaceful charm and wholesome goodness of small town America. In a negative sense, the term has also been used to connote the ignorance and lack of sophistication often associated with people from rural areas, and as an example of an idealized, fictional white south that never really existed.

Just watched episode 145, The Rehabilitation of Otis, which starts off with Otis riding into town on a cow that he drunkenly believes to be a horse. Later, Barney takes it upon himself to rehabilitate Otis using "psychological" methods he gleaned from a .25 cent magazine. In the end, Otis resists Barney's efforts and receives a warm welcome as he drunkenly rides back into Mayberry on the cow and directly into the courthouse.

It is a beautiful world where the town drunk is allowed to sleep peacefully in the county jail, wake up the next morning with no ramifications from the previous night (other than the comical hangover) and stumble off to get a shave from Floyd the barber. I have a particular fondness for the character of Otis (played to perfection by Hal Smith), especially when he's deep in his cups. Echoes of a Holy Fool, spinning wisdom under the guise of intoxication/ madness. Like the Fool in Lear, he has the best lines - at least, the funniest - and is immune from their repercussions.

Anyway, three times in this episode, Otis is found riding his cow that he believes a horse. The first time is the humorous entrance, then when he falls off the wagon and, finally, in a sort of triumphant return. I thought the parallels to the Zen Ox-Herding Series of Kakuan were amusing to contemplate and, not wanting to already stretch this already threadbare argument, present only a couple of instances here. (Oh I could go on.)

6. Riding the Bull Home

Mounting the bull, slowly I return homeward.
The voice of my flute intones through the evening.
Measuring with hand-beats the pulsating harmony,
I direct the endless rhythm.
Whoever hears this melody will join me.

10. In the World

Barefooted and naked of breast, I mingle with the people of the world.
My clothes are ragged and dust-laden, and I am ever blissful.
I use no magic to extend my life;
Now, before me, the dead trees become alive.

The only thing bigger is the sky...

2007-08-03T17:43:00.000-07:00

Traveling: I-10 West to Las Cruces, New Mexico. Big sky everywhere. Burning with blue. Then, big enough to see more than five storms falling.

[ More Big Sky ]

Zeb Calloway: I remember once there being a trapper named Parker. He run smack into a big grizzly bear. The bear sure made a mess out of Parker before we killed it. Ripped one of his ears clear off. But this child just happened to have a needle and some of this deer sinew, just like we got here. Yeah, while his ear was still hot, I picked it up and sewed it back on his head. And it growed most as good as ever.

[...] I said growed most as good as ever. Not hardly. It seems I sewed Parker's ear on backwards. Yeah, he hated me until the day he died, on account of every time he heared a rattlesnake, he'd turn the wrong direction and step smack into it!

From the film The Big Sky (1952), directed by Howard Hawks, based on the novel of the same name by A.B. Guthrie Jr..

Where is the drink you promised me?

2007-06-25T07:26:00.001-07:00

[ Photo by Greg Elliott ]

“WHAT do you think
The bravest drink
Under the sky?”
“Strong beer,” said I.

“There’s a place for everything,
Everything, anything,
There’s a place for everything
Where it ought to be:
For a chicken, the hen’s wing;
For poison, the bee’s sting;
For almond-blossom, Spring;
A beerhouse for me.”

“There’s a prize for every one
Every one, any one,
There’s a prize for every one,
Whoever he may be:
Crags for the mountaineer,
Flags for the Fusilier,
For English poets, beer!
Strong beer for me!”

“Tell us, now, how and when
We may find the bravest men?”
“A sure test, an easy test:
Those that drink beer are the best,
Brown beer strongly brewed,
English drink and English food.”

Oh, never choose as Gideon chose
By the cold well, but rather those
Who look on beer when it is brown,
Smack their lips and gulp it down.
Leave the lads who tamely drink
With Gideon by the water brink,
But search the benches of the Plough,
The Tun, the Sun, the Spotted Cow,
For jolly rascal lads who pray,
Pewter in hand, at close of day,
“Teach me to live that I may fear
The grave as little as my beer.”

- Robert Graves, Fairies and Fusiliers. 1918.

[ image source ]

“What is Maya?” asked Narada, the devoted student.

“The world is my Maya. He who accepts this, realizes me,” said Vishnu. “Before I explain further, will you fetch me some water?” requested the Lord pointing to a river.

Narada did as he was told. But on his way back, he saw a beautiful woman. Smitten by her beauty, he begged the woman to marry him. She agreed.

Narada built a house for his wife on the banks of the river. She bore him many children. Loved by his wife, adored by his sons and daughters, Narada forgot all about his mission to fetch water for Vishnu.

In time, Narada’s children had children of their own. Surrounded by his grandchildren, Narada felt happy and secure. Nothing could go wrong.

Suddenly, dark clouds enveloped the sky. There was thunder, lightning, and rain. The river overflowed, broke its banks and washed away Narada’s house, drowning everyone he loved, everything he possessed. Narada himself was swept away by the river.

“Help, help. Somebody please help me,” he cried. Suddenly, Narada awoke face down in the desert sand under the blazing sun. The flooded river was nowhere to be seen. He heard a voice: "My son, where is the drink you promised me? It's been half an hour since you went to fetch it for me!"

“How can you be so remorseless? How can you ask me for water when I have lost my entire family? Narada responded.

Vishnu smiled. “Calm down, Narada. Tell me, where did your family come from? From Me. I am the only reality, the only entity in the cosmos that is eternal and unchanging. Everything else is an illusion – a mirage, constantly slipping out of one’s grasp.”

“You, my greatest devotee, knew that. Yet, enchanted by the pleasures of worldly life, you forgot all about me. You deluded yourself into believing that your world and your life were all that mattered and nothing else was of any consequence. As per your perspective, the material world was infallible, invulnerable, perfect. That is Maya.”

Amazon Links:
Fairies and Fusiliers by Robert Graves
Teachings of Sri Ramakrishna

Skull Scooter

2007-06-21T20:58:00.001-07:00

Flickr Set: Skull Scooter

After Compline: 20 October 2004

2007-06-21T05:22:00.000-07:00

[ image source ]

Half moon hung up in the sky
Wreathed with clouds like Nine Chinese Dragons,
Illuminating a path before me,
Shadows shifting on canyon walls.

Of the times I've been here,
I've never noticed that.
I walk along, shadows shift
From a Skull to Sphinx to King.

Enormous silence,
Not an in-breathing suspension
But an absence of breath entirely.

The monks are simple, spiritual.
The place is terrible, sacred -
Haunted by god's presence
More than any I have ever known.

Yet, I was born in this beautiful tomb.

Tacitus did not perceive the Crucifixion.

2007-03-27T11:45:00.000-07:00

From the excellent Giornale Nuovo

Been thinking a lot about the origins of Greek tragedy. Readings in Steiner's Antigones and The Death of Tragedy.

There is an illuminating passage in Borges' Other Inquisitions regarding the introduction of the second actor as one of the most significant events in human history:

"I have suspected that history, real history, is more modest and that its essential dates may be, for a long time, secret. A Chinese prose writer has observed that the unicorn, because of its own anomaly, will pass unnoticed. Our eyes see what they are accustomed to seeing. Tacitus did not perceive the Crucifixion, although his book recorded it.

Those thoughts came to me after a phrase happened to catch my eye as I leafed through a history of Greek literature. The phrase aroused my interest because of its enigmatic quality: "He brought in a second actor." I stopped; I found that the subject of that mysterious action was Aeschylus and that, as we read in the fourth chapter of Aristotle's Poetics, he "raised the number of actors from one to two." It is well known that the drama was an offshoot of the religion of Dionysus. Originally, a single actor, the hypokrites, elevated by the cothurnus, dressed in black or purple and with his face enlarged by a mask, shared the scene with the twelve individuals of the chorus. The drama was one of the ceremonies of the worship and, like all ritual, was in danger of remaining invariable. Aeschylus' innovation could have occurred on but one day, five hundred years before the Christian era; the Athenians saw with amazement and perhaps with shock (Victor Hugo thought the latter) the unannounced appearance of a second actor. On that remote spring day, in that honey-colored theatre, what did they think, what did they feel exactly? Perhaps neither amazement nor shock; perhaps only a beginning of surprise. In the Tusculanae it is stated that Aeschylus joined the Pythagorean order, but we shall never know if he had a prefiguring, even an imperfect one, of the importance of that passage from one to two, from unity to plurality and thus to infinity. With the second actor came the dialogue and the indefinite possibilities of the reaction of some characters on others. A prophetic spectator would have seen that multitudes of future appearances accompanied him: Hamlet and Faust and Segismundo and Macbeth and Peer Gynt and others our eyes cannot yet discern."

From http://www.wayneturney.20m.com/AESCHYLUS.htm

Innovations: Introduction of the Second Actor. Judging from his earliest surviving plays, Aeschylus added a second actor at first not so much to increase conflict, as to advance the story (as opposed to the plot) by introducing new material while adding visual and aural variety to his plays. The messenger telling Atossa of the death of her son Xerxes in the Persians is thus the oldest extant "messenger speech." It clearly heightens the emotion, but creates involves no agon. The fellow who took the role of this "second" actor is, then, the first professional actor and we happen to know his name-Kleander (but, alas we know nothing else about him). This marks also the first stage of the decline of prominence of the khoros, a literary event that can be traced through Sophokles and Euripides and which was to have very far reaching consequences indeed.

From Aeschylus and His Tragedies

The closing years of the life of Aeschylus were passed in Sicily, which country he first visited soon after his defeat by Sophocles. At Syracuse his Persæ was several times performed at the request of the king, and here also he brought out his Women of Etna, celebrating the foundation of that city by Hiero and prophesying happiness for its inhabitants. Returning to Athens, he produced his Orestean trilogy, probably the finest of his works; but the Eumenides, the last of the three plays, revealed so openly his aristocratic tendencies that he became extremely unpopular, and returning to Sicily, died soon afterward at Gela. The story as to the manner of his death, that an eagle, mistaking his bald head for a stone, dropped a tortoise upon it to break the shell, is the sheerest fabrication, and, it would seem, entirely unnecessary to account for the natural death of an exile nearly seventy years of age.

Amazon Links:

The Oresteia: Agamemnon; The Libation Bearers; The Eumenides by Aeshylus
The Three Theban Plays by Sophocles

Initial Thoughts on Re-entering Gravity's Rainbow

2007-03-11T17:21:00.000-07:00

Back in the early 80s, a friend presented me with a copy of Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow saying something to the effect that all the lamentation over the death of the novel since Joyce is now appeased by this book. Read it.

I must confess that I, like many others, waded in to about page 100 and set it down. That gold Bantam paperback sat there on my shelf for many years, occasionally catching my eye like a lost lover. But I never picked it back up. Over that time, I did read V, The Crying of Lot 49 and Slow Learner. Gravity's Rainbow hovered: still unread.

A few months ago, I found myself combing through the bookshelves for my copy. It seemed to have disappeared. No matter. I figured that I would easily find a copy at a used bookstore. After several stores in several states, I came to understand that used copies of GR were not so easy to find. So I bit the bullet and biked over to the nearest chain to buy a new one.

Entirely unrelated was my interest in the film 300. I wanted to read Miller's graphic novel before seeing the film. I found 300, a beautiful Penguin Deluxe Edition of GR, and A Gravity's Rainbow Companion: Sources And Contexts for Pynchon's Novel.

Later that evening, after finishing Miller's 300. I picked up GR and the Companion and started in again. As often happens with me these days, it was suddenly a new book. I wondered at the idiot who set it down so long ago. Who was that person? The prose style was stunning, immediately accessible and entertaining. I quickly forgot about my concurrent reading in the Companion and sailed past page 100 finding it difficult to put down. Closing the book, I studied the cover, a sort of splatter abstraction with an outline of falling rocket, turned to the back flap to see if, perhaps, it was a Jackson Pollock. Lo and behold, it was Frank Miller - of the 300. A happy synchronicity.

I then decided to catch up to where I was with the Companion and not but a few pages into that found the author quoting Chaplin's Look Up, Hannah! speech from The Great Dictator. The same speech I posted on the Laughing Bone a short time ago.

I don't think there is anything terribly meaningful about these coincidences. But you sense a part of your self being rung when they occur. When they happen within the pages of a book, it is a beautiful thing. There is laughter in the room. Time outside the book fades. It seems you are reading yourself, that your blood, your innermost self, burns through the letters of the words. And it may be damning, but some of the most important moments of my life have occurred in such a manner, between the covers, inside the pages and deep within the words.

Trying To Speak Towards: What Is Uncovered

2007-02-20T02:40:00.000-08:00

From Theater Junge Generation

It is all about those unburied corpses...

Undergoing a deeper reading of Antigone along with Steiner's critical analysis.

All three of the Theban plays have been resonate for me lately. The hauntings of old men late at night.

Sophocles wrote Antigone, the first of the three, in his early 50s? And Oedipus at Colonus in his late 80s....

Getting to the point of understanding what it is to "say a thing" - soon perhaps even to spell out the signs that point to that saying.

Working on a long piece on the death of B. Jones where he is the unburied corpse of Polynices and there is a sort of fractured first-person Rashoman narration of the Antigone role - instead of the primary dialectic being between the individual and the state, it is between the individual and God.

Delighted by the allusive undertones in Anti-Gone - referencing those Bones of God that I go on about all the time.

God is dead but not gone - haunting us. Those Heideggerian fugitive traces. The Devil wearing the Godshoes.

Also, a thing about the death of Paul Celan - the story of his bones and flesh between April 20th and May 1st 1970 - those seven miles in the Seine - the Shakesperian sea-change.

From Felstiner:

[I]n 1964 he had written:

Water needles
stitch up the split
shadow- he fights his way
deeper down,
free.

About 20 April 1970, around Passover, Celan went from the bridge into the Seine and, though a strong swimmer, drowned unobserved.... On 1 May a fisherman came upon his body seven miles downstream.

A biography of Holderlin was found then on Celan's desk, open to an underlined passage: "Sometimes this genius goes dark and sinks down into the bitter well of his heart." Celan did not, I noticed, underline the rest of that sentence in the Holderlin biography: "but mostly his apocalyptic star glitters wondrously."

People have said that Celan took his own life at forty-nine because valid speech in German was impossible after or about Auschwitz. Yet this was the impossibility that incited him: "Spills of mire I swallowed, inside the tower." And he did speak - more validly than could ever have been imagined.

Usufruct: A tattered coat upon a stick

2007-01-23T06:12:00.000-08:00

Moby Dick, Ricciardelli

From rebella

Been reading a good biography of the poet Charles Olson. He first caught my attention with his book on Melville and Moby Dick, Call Me Ishmael. That book opened up Moby Dick for me in a new way: when I re-read (for the 3rd time) the book immediately after, it was a bright and shining thing for me. Olson showed me a form a primary critique – what he calls “usufruct”.

I have always had a problem with criticism in that it is such a parasitic act - needing the the primary artifact of a creator upon which to enact its own "creation". Better to respond to a work of art with another work of art - as Vergil critiqued Homer with the Aeneid, as Dante critiqued Vergil with the Commedia. (cf. Steiner's Real Presences)

I always wonder why so many are satisfied with secondary critique - even extending this to a way of life. They would rather have their information "digested" for them like helpless birdlings in nests of ignorance. They prefer processed pabulum over the whole and the raw and the "right from the earth". I find it bizarre that people place so much faith in what the media(tors) give them; that they have never read even a portion of the Bible or the Koran or Moby-Dick or the Constitution; that they have never had even a slight conversation with a homeless person, a monk, a priest, a Buddhist, a Muslim, a criminal.

It is astounding how sheltered and insulated most are from the Primary. And yet, I have the fear of becoming like one of them. As time goes on and I go on in it, I feel the mounting pressures of conformity, of habituation, of desensitization. Every day seems more and more the same. And the disciplines one practices to hold on the face-to-face seem to be increasingly absurd. Why not just give in? It would be so easy.

Yeats wrote of difficulties brought about through the awareness of having an eternal spirit tied to the body of a dying animal. I think of a balloon tied to the tail of a old dog. Most of my days have been "spent" in the attempt to grasp that balloon. But I must admit the fear, the cold wet first thing in the morning fear, of how good settling into these bones feels, to ignoring the balloon, the spirit and coming to terms with the fact that I will live out the remainder of my days as a stupid dying animal.

Sailing to Byzantium

That is no country for old men. The young
In one another's arms, birds in the trees -
Those dying generations - at their song,
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unageing intellect.

An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress,
Nor is there singing school but studying
Monuments of its own magnificence;
And therefore I have sailed the seas and come
To the holy city of Byzantium.

O sages standing in God's holy fire
As in the gold mosaic of a wall,
Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,
And be the singing-masters of my soul.
Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.

Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enamelling
To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;
Or set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come.

-- William Butler Yeats

What always saves me is the Mystery - the continual, as yet unsolvable allegory that I have involved myself in. Call it God, Allah, Nirvana, Samadhi, Atman, Real Presence, Ishmael, a White Whale or a Red Ballon - it is what keep these bones burning.

Easy's Getting Harder Every Day

2006-01-03T12:49:00.000-08:00

Just posted my long, semi-confessional interpretation of George Steiner's essay On Difficulty on The Laughing Bone. I wonder if I will ever get over this strangeness of posting to Jones's weblog? Feels like wandering through someone else's house. But I know that it is what he would have wanted. I also made a post on Osteo Logos of a recording I found of what has to be a young B. Jones playing a ukulele and singing a song called Mississippi Pickup that he wrote based on a story by Hunter Kennedy. I thought it was highly amusing.

Yesterday I received a disconcerting letter from B. Jones' sister, Nora. She wrote that while she appreciated how much I had done for her brother, she was concerned about some of the work that I might choose to post on the blog.

I will state here publicly that Charles Jones explicitly stated to me that I was to be the sole guardian of his creative works and that he trusted me to publish or not publish them as I see fit. And while I will certainly do my best to exercise the utmost discretion with regard to the privacy of other's lives, I will not be censored in any way.

Yes, difficulties. Seems appropriate to let Iris Dement finish it:

I had a garden but my flowers died.
There ain't much living here inside.
And lately, I don't know what I'm holding on to.
But I'll never make it up to Couer d'Alene.
There ain't no chance of me forgetting my name.
And easy's gettin' harder every day

And it feels like easy, just keeps on gettin' harder every day.

On Mirrors

2005-12-23T08:38:00.000-08:00

Tiajuana TV
Shelton Walsmith

Just posted The Vision of God Laughing on The Laughing Bone. I do not believe that it would've been against the wishes of B. Jones, but I do know that he would've considered it of no real value as far as "publishing" it for anyone else. His mirror comment regarding this, that why would anyone care to look into a mirror that was made only for him, as always, got me to thinking about the nature of creating artifacts in general.

I mean, doesn't the fact that an artist feels the need to create something other-than-what-is indicate a fundamental dissatisfaction with what-is? There is, of course, a sort of inherent selfishness in all acts of creation - a desire to mark your passing through the world - whether is be in the form of a child or a painting. I guess the crucial question then is how much your "mark" gives back to the world, adds to it, and increases its value. Would the world have been more or less meaningful without Michelangelo's painting in the Sistine Chapel and with a family of his children?

A priest once remarked to Michelangelo that it was a shame he had never married and produced children to whom he could bequeath his works. "I have too much of a wife in this art of mine, which has afflicted me throughout my life," Michelangelo replied, "and my children shall be the works I leave. What would have become of Lorenzo Ghiberti's reputation if he had not made the gates of San Giovanni? His children and grandchildren sold or squandered all he left, but the gates are still standing."
- G. Vasari, Lives of the Painters

Gates of Paradise, Baptistry of San Giovanni
Lorenzo Ghiberti

I return to the mirror metaphor. I know without doubt that I cannot see what B. Jones saw in The Vision of God Laughing. However, it is not entirely opaque to me. I do see something that resonates with deeper aspects of my self. Perhaps this is merely the archetypal form that Jones claimed to have stolen from other works. But he, some essential aspect of who he was, is in there also. And this interior richness, resonance, with the created thing is what opens it up; maybe not as a mirror, but at least as a window.

"I was always afraid of mirrors. I had three large mirrors in my room when I was a boy and I felt very acutely afraid of them, because I saw myself in the dim light - I saw myself thrice over, and I was very afraid of the thought that perhaps the three shapes would begin moving by themselves ... I have always been afraid ... of mahogany, of crystals, even of limpid water."
- Borges

Mirror A (Dedicated to Borges)
Michiko Hoshino, lithograph, 1978

Mythistorema

2005-12-22T15:27:00.000-08:00

After my last two posts on The Laughing Bone, I noticed that B. Jones' name was being tagged the bottom. In my attempt to correct this, it seems that I was compelled to start my own blog. I guess that there are not too many occassions where a blog is continued after a person's death. Anyway, since it was here, I thought that I might as well post something every so often regarding the efforts I am making to publish the archives of B. Jones.

I don't imagine I will have much time to write anything of interest here - certainly nothing on the level of the postings of B. Jones.

I will leave off with a short piece from one of B. Jones' favorite poems by the Greek poet, George Serferis. This is from the Mythistorema:

I woke with this marble head in my hands;
it exhausts my elbows and I don’t know where to put it down.
It was falling into the dream as I was coming out of the dream
so our life became one and it will be very difficult for it to disunite again.

I look at the eyes: neither open nor closed
I speak to the mouth which keep trying to speak
I hold the cheeks which have broken through the skin.
I don’t have any more strength.

My hands disappear and come toward me
Mutilated.