Tacitus did not perceive the Crucifixion.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.