Between the Rain and Scarlotti's "Stabat Mater", and John Coltrane's Everything - September 23, 2023 Notes

Here's a brash Shabbas too-full-in prayer, 

pigeon and dove wars going on other side 

of drapes, they random roo, tandem chorus,

full craw spat, so scat my aged but still high fidelics. 

Between the rain Scarlotti "Stabat Mater" and Coltrane, two wildly different stratospheres, I veer once again to espresso pot, cast lots for what remains of sacred dregs, boil an egg, address insistent closed curtains pleading outer darkness OK with me believing with my ears, in harmony, in Coltrane's primacy of breath and brass.

Good start to the weekend, a titch of lonely but not really since "I have been faithful to thee, Cynara [Ernest Dowson]." I have re-sewn the decades old wine dark satin housecoat redeemed from thrift near a sacred mountain known only to itself (and to me -shhhhh) that it is sacred. There's still some sheen to the old satin. Not sheen. What's the word? Yeah, rather, 'patina' with pinot noir notes. Old bones remembering to be gay.

Second cup. I gloat. Scarlatti turns to Pergolesi, more violins than the first Stabat of the afternoon. Radio, remember that? D.J. plays quilts of Trane. Volume up, volume down. Lean in to hear. Lean back to mercy ears whelmed, Coltrane fingers ever over the helm. Sense whence such, his furrowed look, have laid down all scores but one (but he'll never tell yet still we listen...hints about).

Out of heavy cream for ever blacker brew, but no dearth of sound.

A peek of Autumn color, so much depends on, even or especially, W. C. Williams's spokes and strokes, the window slicked tho dinged, lone ginkgo golden tresses in honor of the Holy Child of Hamlet, NC. below the grayed out pigeons, the consistent doves, holy too, in retreat to ledge and iron across the street, other windows. A truce at last. Must be there's a crow cross the street eyeballing thinking lunch.

**

What the window does, rain, the street and the district houses, my humble Canon camera greatly battered, years old, flatters, is 'Ash Can meets some bereted French 19th Century 'school' or painter tobacco stained, slow poison in the tints back then used (O Vincent) , makes one wonder if they, all or most, were in altered states from the chemicals in the tubes ginning veins, organs, brains, so they, literally painted what they were seeing from within, all that literal alchemical combustion of optics, nerves, lungs pulling heavy for air, another draw from the pipe or fag. Bless them each, leaving their scrim for us to gaze. Our eyes are the better for them.

Enough.

Words of an old teacher come to mind, a kind man, a bit severe, sere, clear as all raw day, he'd remind then, would do so now,

Don't try so hard.

Wait. Listen. 

Measure arrives.

"Exploding beepers, finders weepers so call in the stretchers" - On Pathological Religion of a Pathological Species One Year After the O So Clever Murders (What a good boy am I!) & More Without End

New York Times headline of September 18, 2024 — O the Horror, the Horror:

Israeli's Pager Attack Was a Tactical Success Without a Strategic Goal, Analysts Say

By targeting so many pagers at the same time, Israel deomonstrated technical prowess and partly restored the aura of its intelligence agencies. But its long-term inttent is unclear.

Read article here:

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/18/world/middleeast/israel-hezbollah-pager-attack.html

Youtube video of article content:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mU94A1vTpDk

Reprise today of my Facebook post of September 19, 2024 regarding the horrors of Evil's equal opportunity employer aka there's not even a thin line between evil and evil - the winners are losers but the blood and land thirsty deities "locally" flavored but still their believers believe theirs is the one and only True and Absolute over all "false" others. I've can't. Not even. But call it cant or rant, I am more than spent, drained, wiped, "smithered" myself into Godot like babble since reason, rationality, empathy is, has, lost to Nature, to inHUMANE Nature. Enough. Read on below if you can stomach the fact that Israel is slaughtering without check Palestinians civilians.

Iraqi girl at checkpoint. NT Times photo: "In January 2005, Chris Hondros captured this picture of 5-year-old Samar Hassan after US troops had accidentally killed her parents at a checkpoint in the Iraqi town of Tal-Afar....Hondros was killed in 2011 while covering the Libyan Revolution." See article here (click).

My response on the day of the exploding beepers event and the Times article:

Exploding beepers, finders weepers so call in the stretchers, the mop buckets, the human smithers-sweepers, the rollers of fine hand held or vested mortars and such cuz rival Chosen Ones, each Dehumanized Other is THE INFIDEL (and we ain't), Holy Wars lead to hell on earth...for this, I guess, the old old gory story, "saviors" are given birth to and we can see how effective that has been and ever shall be aka GORE and WAR, blood splatter collateral without end.....and just view the absurd, some, contending clowns (tricksters) in America now show that there is no bottom to how low can we as a specious species can go viz

Question: How low is enough? a lot lower into infinity of lower...apparently. All our human cleverness (or techne, devices) used to lower and lower and lower and lower and maim and kill and terrorize far and near, near and far - is that drone nice, is this archaic but trickster hand held device a convenience for our side to destroy the other side (apparently so)? If the murderous ones on both sides kill each other off then fair trade but collateral murders seem to be the price of the deemed to be necessary ticket straight to ancient yet ever TRENDING hell.

The only REAL deity I can see globally is the Trickster up to no good, IT of many names and cultural/regional flavors - Mercury, Loki, Heyeoka, Coyote, Kokopelli, Elegbara, Papa Legba, Elegua, Nanabojo, even Br'er Rabbit, and on and on....

Of course, we can use names of the current crop, the Yeti clearly being a very very all too effective trickster - good news is that Trickster is subject to its own medicine, Tricked by Itself aka hoisted on its own petard. "Laugh while you can, Monkey Boy" (from movie, The Adventures of Buckaroo Bonsai) Across the Eighth Dimension)...but, perhaps I'm about to do it too, trickster myself, offer my head on a plate (no Bathsheba me, but) viz this bellow below but - compelled into the breach, or is it "into the breech" (which can mean, alas, buttocks, ass, the backside), so I'll just say (in order to white wash 'breech') INTO THE BLEACH!! the chloro-x nearby for sedation through the obdurate un-endurance —

[MY OWN PRIVATE OP ED - IDAHO or rather, truthfully - I DUNNO]

EXPLODING BEEPERS. Penultimate. Not quite but inevitably soon here cuz it's in our laps, in our hands, in our devices and such tools put to destructive deadly purposes, consciously so aks the nihilism of Western Religion (and the varietals ongoingly offered), even after the catastrophe of the 20th century, the nihilism is a psychic (archetypal) insistency within Western theology/cosmology and its variations its psychopathic self. Granted, its a global condition, global in that humans are, duh but, everywhere and wherever humans are is/are hubris (we-are-gods or we-are-gods-chosen or or or various dangerous inflated delusions that presume and assume TOP DOG (GOD) <> LOW DOG (GOD) and, natuch, "OUR GOD (DOG) is best so get with the program (or pogrom) or else" - alas, nothing new under the sun. God and humans are just no fun at allllllllll. Appalling. The fun is in the bitter irony of the contradictory beings we are, that life is, the power and the glory, the gun powder and the gory, meanwhile orphans are made and are also killed. Millions wipes out along with countless other beings given no mind to at all.

Just the attention given to inventions of weapons, hand held ones, disguised as convenience and everyday, routine objects, belies evil which makes us, humans, desperate, 

aka saurian aka reptilian.

The fantasy, understandable one, of "escape from evil" does not resolve evil which in animal/nature world is not evil but just cruel cold brutal Nature.

But the tragic/noble/tragic conundrum of homo scrape-ians, is that we must bear Nature in and as us consciously. Again, the fantasy is that knowledge will overcome the animal, science or religion promises transcendence ultimately, transformation into transfiguration into some thing ultimately NOT human, creaturely at all but made of Light or some minutely refined, sublime energy that is all consciousness.

FAT ChANCE. alas but get real. And, as ever, deal.

But how?

"A problem is not solved on the level of the problem." - Albert Einstein

A long discredited guru in the '70's, out of India (of course) and, smelling money and chelas and wrist watches and cars and entranced men and women, flew into the West

(in planes, not on magic carpet rides - pop music sang of such carpets MUCH aka the group Steppenwolf, as well as the Bloody Moods, I mean, the Moody Blues, whom I LOVED! still do, but but but)

into spiritually empty and desperate and gullible America, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, the one that the Beatles blinked with (tho George found home there, good for him), did say something that bears out to be accurate, would often quote Albert Einstein:

"A problem is not solved at/on the level of the problem."

Which is evident when enduring the yesterday's horrors from far way (Lebanon, Palestine, Israel and on and on) but news and video footage for replay only a click on a device away.

Unless and until humanity wakes up to the very dark side of their "deities" and their adherents (too often "sanctioned sanctimonious mobs" with "scriptural" Good Housekeeping Seals (especially in the West), and unless and until humanity recognizes and owns up to the fact (that bears out via evidence, not verses promising otherly from assorted "sacred books") that their deity has a very evil side (what Job and Jesus confronted head on in sacred (move the "a" in the word to the right of the "c" and you get what is working in the word sacred - and many adherents quote from their books much about "fear of the Lord" "fear of a God of retribution"....

The religions themselves ARE the problem and religions are products of humans so.....you do the figurin' and then get to reconfiguring personally, do YOUR homework, inner homework (aka self reflection, examination, etc. ask and sit with the very hard questions beyond what's for dinner, can I pay the rent, can I get laid, will I be famous, et. al), and outwardly, read, study, go deeply into the records for thousands of years now that humans have recorded from scratched bones, carved rocks, to cave paintings and conscious arrangement of bear and other bones in deepest recesses keeping while early ancestors acknowledge awareness of something greater, some awful mystery, is living us, is living life and this is, so far, the best we can do - admit to and acknowledge the "something is doing something we know not what but it is doing something" larger than our little selves but

WE CAN TRY.

No promises, though.

Fingers crossed (as are all religions - fingers crossed - even poor Job having to contend with God's revelation of his Evil side, and Job had to BEAR, as do we, THAT terrible reality as do we have to bear that ongoingly terrible vision of not only the dark side of God but of ourselves.

I posted earlier today this quote which is good too to end on but to again and again and again begin on...

Let's read that again: "Let those who sail the sea know its dangers."

Beyond graduate level LIFE course but, yeah, gonna be exposed to it, the dangers, either way so blink and nod but at some point at appointed by greater than our own intentions or positive thoughts or affirmations and all that magical thinking, one must look at and bear the QUESTION, and as Rilke says, at least try "live the question" but I add the word, "consciously" - consciously live the question(s) for as Carl Jung pointed out, as did W. H. Auden -

the questions actually LIVE US -

Jung - the archetypes (energies inherent in psyche) live us, the myths live us - not the other way around - we don't live the myths, the archetypes, they are living us and in us.

Auden - We are lived by forces greater than ourselves.

Both men are saying the same thing.

But human hubris is such that we believe that WE individually are the captains of our ships, our souls, our souls (granted, an easy error since egos are no accident but that a lecture for another time, if ever). This hubris assigned ego primacy when, shhhhhhh, it is not true though, again, tis in the mix of psyche energetic play/alchemy/sway but greatly ego-inflated America and the New Age - a current vapid scourge but I will forego the lecture but must say BEWARE the dissociative/bypassing muddle hodge podge coddled hatchling - would have us fall for the massive ego inflation of god-almightiness.

Here I go. Leaping in. Holding my nose (but NOT crossing my fingers on my dominant left hand 

— into the BLEACH

"because we are partial beings who yearn for total states."—Michael Eigen

Distant cousins, 

we're made more close by 
sorrow. Time's a borrowed 
longing, reaches us each to 
each - or yours to mine, for 
nowhere now we are but 
within, perhaps, merely a 
conceit but, I in you and 
you in vague, yes, me, a 
guess, a venality, vanity 
being a human trait common, 
quite. It is still a trace to 
be, to convene congenially.

God damn the West its Deity

otherness /interiority
loneliness / self-ignorance
recitation / quietism
salve / balm

the blank stare
the cancelled look

does it go
does fire it know

so goes the banter
so goes the way
of what is the going
away or the returning 
or the first-arrived

when is the done 
actually over? 

[shrugs]

another turned page

Certainty — a toad does not say what it knows

still the valid address

'shall and will' and 'spill my beans'
the very few that are left

bereft? sure I am
cleft? yes

twained? drained mostly - acedia [ah-che-dia = dryness]

the letting 
go of even a leg up 
in the world because being
as it is known the way we know it 

has 
no leg by which to balance 

or can't like a candled book
or a cancelled look
dance upon a sill, 

or chance upon that which may
be withstood to stand 

upon though 

stand we will 
and must and, 

flutter-foot, alight, 

so many winged 
ones addressing 

the old and present 
wounds -

latencies of disintegration

ancient slopes of containment

gnomic marginalia

apophatic aphasias 

inclement hallelujahs trace

the grace-notes of reprieve 

Eintonces toujourrs

and yours, mon ami,

mon frere, je fini.,

off to rhyme with

fire and sirelings

New classical music (Swesiish composers):

1 ALFVEN Gustavus Adolphus II Suite Op. 49  (Elegy)

2 BLOMDAHL Andante (Pastoral Suite)

3 STENHAMMAR Sången (Cantata), Op 44; Mellanspel (Interlude)

4 LARSSON Romance (Pastoral Suite, Op 19) 

5 ATTERBERG Adagio (Symphony No 6 op. 31 in C major)

6 BERWALD Adagio. Scherzo, Allegro assai. Adagio (Symphony No. 3 in C Major )

7 PETERSON-BERGER Frösöblomster (Frösö flowers) Op.16, Häfte 1.2 Sommarsång (Book 1.2, Summer Song)

8 LIDHOLM Allegro. Molto adagio, espressivo. Coda, Allegro (Music for strings)

https://archive.org/details/Vol1165

***

[NOTE: All photos but for the New York Times photo at the top are by Warren Falcon. Do not use without his permission. Click on photos to enlarge]

Buddha, NOT Trump Nihilist Tumor In Thief - A Fire Sermon (not really, but Buddha's sermon applies - I Ching Night of POTUS Election Results 2024

Umbrella/Ambient tone setting for what is below:

Edward Edinger (see fuller quote at bottom of this text:  

"Humanity needs a world of symbols as well as a world of signs.  A sign is a token of meaning that stands for a known entity. By this definition, language is a system of signs, not symbols.  A symbol, on the other hand, is an image or representation which points to something essentially unknown, a mystery.  A sign communicates abstract, objective meaning whereas a symbol conveys, living subjective meaning.  A symbol has a subjective dynamism which exerts a powerful attraction and fascination on the individual.  It is a living organic entity which acts as a releaser and transformer of psychic energy.  We can thus say a sign is dead, but a symbol is alive."

Eternity or Death and Rebirth

*

A symbol of utter ASS-HOLENESS 

or N-ARSE-CISISM..PERIOD.

I could use a few tabs of unadulterated LSD from early 60's right now. But given the nightmare perpetually unfolding, of MAGA NAZIS and a barely checked TRUMP, EXHIBIT A of Pathological N-ARSE-WHOLENESS, and the destruction he's done in 8 months and intending to do much more...NOPE....won't do a tab of acid now as I am too. wide eyed in terror and more to come (his "divine retribution" tour, not even a tour but a terminal active occasion in time as his cypher self, a no self, cannot even be content with maximum damage and destruction while he devours himself like a demonic OUROBOROS (ponounced "your-boros"). 

Play this at the slower speed while watching the dog-trancing video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pnJM_jC7j_4

Dog-trancing - I'll have what they are having!

https://www.facebook.com/reel/107583468801531

Floor or Plank Ching at DIA Beacon Museum 2017

I Ching Hexagrams After POTUS (S)Election 2024 - Splitting Apart

The dreadful shock of Trump "winning" ( we know he cheated) the election was confirmed to me when in despair I consulted the Taoist oracle of the I Ching and got Hexagram 23 aptly named "Spitting Apart" (I asked "What will result from Trump being president of USA again?"), so just reading the title of the Hexagram confirmed what I knew, what we all knew (the Bastard had said as much during the campaign). The first line re: the meaning of this hexagram says it directly:

"It does not further one to go anywhere" [which is what I wanted to do aka leave the country, and still very much DO want to do]. Doubt and fear cause us to split from our path...." I think the hexagram was/is speaking to the USA, the collective....and/but just the name of the hexagram said, still says, what Trump and MAGA intend and are doing, splitting the nation apart, creating division, etc. Read the entire brief commentary at this link which will open to #23:

https://archive.org/details/guidetoiching0000anth/page/55/mode/1up

The accuracy of the hexagram, though, and further hexagrams that were bleak, as well, was, while terrifying/upsetting to greater upset, strangely comforting as in "OK, the Sage of the Tao de Ching "knows" and even this bullshit mutherfucker cannot escape the Tao (which means "WAY" - which references an inherent order including chaos (Trump's entire metier) is at work. FATE, a big word in Taoism, is a word used to say, "Greater forces are at work, greater than even Trump Itself, and best, so I was counseled that night and STILL, to KEEP STILL, everything changes and this too will change. Keeping Still basically says, "Wait. You cannot impact the forces at work now but time will come when action effects the needed change. Trump thinks he is the source of force but forces, say the Tao, say Carl Jung, says W. H. Auden ARE LIVING HIM. They, too, are living each and every, and they are living groups, regions, countries. SO, better to identify what forces are living you individually, and those living in the family, the community, the state, the country, etc. Tend to those forces, make them conscious and have a conscious relationship with them so as not to be just forced along with the delusion that the ego is godalmighty and uber alles and running your show. NOPE. YES?NO. BOTH/AND.

Tien Yi Ho ("Heaven") Evoke Kwan Yin 

Goddess of Mercy and Compassion

I Ching for Today and Ahead - Hexagram 61 - Inner Truth

Today's hexagram to go with this post, counsel to one and all, at least perhaps you, for dealing with the mad nation today today or for the up and coming weeks is #61 Inner Truth, first line of the commentary is a kind of sum of it but read the entire (short) commentary at the link in the the comment section below:

"Pigs and fishes. Good fortune." This hexagram is about dealing with evil in others though the power of inner truth.

"Pigs and fishes" refers to the stubborn qualities of a person's ego. The buildup of inner power, through clinging to what is right, must be very great to penetrate through."

Enough for now. Or too much so let's go for enough and less for less is more when our house, our national house is on fire (to be Buddhist for a brief moment viz. His Fire Sermon which is easy to sum, this is my sum:

"Folks, it's as if your are living in a burning house and don't know it (or are ignoring it with magical thinking that it is not real or will go away). But I tell you:

WAKE UP!(which is what "Buddha" the word/name means)!

"Get out of the burning house!!"

Kali's Dance:

https://archive.org/details/par016YellowAtmospheres-instabilemay112015/05_PAR016_Yellow_Atmospheres_-_Kalis_Dance_2015.mp3

What is this fire burning down the house?

Desire. What Freud helpfully for us now post postmoderns terms "DRIVES" as in instinct driven URGES. Deire (this is me, not Buddha) is what DRIVES capitalism. And drives are endless and never extinguished thus we have our acquisition/accumulation systems which now market desire every nano-second. This incessant pursuit, hunger, drive, urge can never be stationed thus the crazy fantasy of escape by turning a nation into an oligarchy. Even the oligarchs are not satisfied, are never fulfilled.

Suffer me just a bit more re: the above. For America, the problem (as I see it) is found in the Preamble to the Constitution itself viz

"the right to life liberty and pursuit of happiness."

Happiness IS the problem. The very word derives from "happen" which really is a blip, and event, changing from one second or moment to the next...instances and of course, the word "INSTANT, NOW NOW NOW, HERE HERE HERE". Happiness, the word, and the state of being "happy" is inherently BRIEF. It does not STAY. See the problem? the drives that drives us want, seek, SATIATION. SATISFACTION. Well,

FAT CHANCE.

BUT, I think the better word in the Preamble is

Contentment.

Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Contentment.

Contentment, too, implies a process of trial and error, of long enough to know that one's contentments, the contents that bring about this inner state of filling enough, fades, no longer works....contentments can end in discontentment. Hopefully, adulthood and aging matures our relationship to contentment and their contents wisely (hard won wisdom) that grass withers, etc. and so one gets philosophical, patient, and the pursuits can turn inward, can be sought within.

I'll spare the lecture on Freud's short by accurate (as it stands - he/it needed Carl Jung to provide ballast and balance to Freud's accurate description of humans, what drives us, the search for cessation and satisfaction of/for our "discontents". Freud's major point is that the productions of civilization, art all kinds, architecture, knowledge, science, tools, technology, religions, sports, entertainment, and all the rest are born of our hunger, our desires, which do not fully assuage, satiate permanently - thus our discontent.

Thus Freud's title to a 44 page book with massive reorientation of and for the human "project" "goal" which is, indeed, contentment —

Civilization and Its Discontents.

Book can be read online for free at archive dot org (free to join.

Oh, Carl Jung's project and calling was to point out that civilization is born not only from human discontent but also that it is born of archetypal forces that shape and reshape human "productions of time", those forces are mysterious but reveal in myths and such...so I speak of, and AMEN Freud (his view from the neurotic Wasteland) AND know that Jung did not discount Freud's view so much as he discovered that civilization arrives/derives from depth dimensions which are the Myth- and Mys- (as in Mystic, as in Mystery),

So. Not either/or but rather both/and. Freud's view from where he stood and worked. Jung's view, too, from what "drove" him to his researches and discoveries from depths that are beneath the layer of the personal unconscious, the deeper layers Jung called the archetypal, the TRANSpersonal ("beyond"personal).

One more IMPORTANT note - that the I Ching, Tarot, Runes and other oracles partake of the transpersonal, archetypal layers which is the function of SYMBOLS aka symbols are not signs - most folks don't know this but I'll snot going into this here). Here is Jungian analyst and writer Edward F. Edinger clearly stating the difference between symbol and sign. You can impress your friends at cocktail parties and brunch. This excerpt is from his book, Ego and Archetype, Individuation and the Religious Function of the Psyche:

"Humanity needs a world of symbols as well as a world of signs.  A sign is a token of meaning that stands for a known entity. By this definition, language is a system of signs, not symbols.  A symbol, on the other hand, is an image or representation which points to something essentially unknown, a mystery.  A sign communicates abstract, objective meaning whereas a symbol conveys, living subjective meaning.  A symbol has a subjective dynamism which exerts a powerful attraction and fascination on the individual.  It is a living organic entity which acts as a releaser and transformer of psychic energy.  We can thus say a sign is dead, but a symbol is alive...Symbols are spontaneous products of the archetypal psyche.  One cannot manufacture a symbol, one can only discover it.  Symbols are carriers of psychic energy.  This is why it is proper to consider them as something alive.  They transmit to the ego, either consciously or unconsciously, life energy which supports, guides, and motivates the individual.  The archetypal psyche is constantly creating a steady stream of living symbolic imagery.  Ordinarily this stream of images is not consciously perceived except through dreams or through waking fantasy, when the conscious level of attention has been lowered.  However there is reason to believe that even in the full waking state this stream of symbols charged with effective energy continues to flow beyond the notice of the ego.  Symbols seep into the ego, causign it to identify with them and act them out unconsciously; or they spill out into the external environment via projections, causing the individual to become fascinated and involved with external objects and activities." —pages 109-110.

Enough..

Black Mountain College, that mountain in the not so distant view....knew it well - some memories of decades ago, perhaps one more for me

Ray Johnson, photographed by Hazel Larsen Archer.

All rights to Black Mountain College Museum

I do not own rights to this photograph

I know the view from that window in the photograph above....rather, from my standing years ago on the grounds of what was once Black Mountain College in Western North Carolina. Lived near there for some years after fleeing Holy Hill in Tennessee, a refugee from John Calvin with a hankering for mystics all kinds, even those of a nihilistic bent when it came to the delusion that accurate understanding of a rumored but intuited, despite the scientific materialist (more than) bent of the age I was thrown into, THE Absolute. I moved uneasily, but now in old age am a veritable ice-capade performer, gliding gladly between one haystack to many others on a large plain of mirror glass that is the biggest of all hints...

As above, so below.

The point is in the gliding and the falling and the getting up and going on intellectually and otherwise, sense of humor intact viz. film footage, flicker, of Charles Chaplin, a serious thinker in waking life, the clumsy character on roller skates veering in barely controlled falls a folie, like me, a barely controlled fall through and through in hopes to one day, soon cuz lesser and lesser days are staring at me, breakthrough zennily into what is between the Beguine and the veer with less complaints. When asked, I reply:

"ME? me, I'm just veering on the plank....(as in walking it)....Hey, it's a living. Gravity is free thus the pitching forward and backwards, limbs flailing, call me Teeter, or Totter. I read broadly and wider and there's a part in me that holds, as we all must do, really, honestly, the contraries which make for a volatile alchemical mix, a stew of sorts. Just keep adding the garlic, s'why I wear a garland of it around my neck, clove clusters decorating even my Double Taurus hump in old age...the better to pitch forward with....

William Blake's "Heaven" is not a place but a process, a spacious field or vortex or, better, vortices that can and do contain all the contradictions and incompatibles of everytihng that ever was and is and will be (no future in the no where not there aphasia), no one thing is more valuable or better than any other there. Good and Evil and the Blur Between, the Opposites, that endless ARRAY, are held, contained, even flourish with their own view/voice equally valid to all others though differing or different...said "Heaven" then is a rowdy place, yes? Alla that energy is contained though NOT constrained. Hmmm....CONTAINER could be the better description of any Absolute worth its Overalls. n hauls n hells to pay.

So, back to Black Mountain College, and that mountain in the not so distant view....knew it well then, and even now can trace the line of the Blue ridge top edge chalk, how it moves, a very close and predictable horizon that references and refers to the Greater Location in its singular (to the eye) trace. Many views like that to be had in those mounts and tho present and stable, they, to my eyes, were never the same....always changing, ever new. Unlike me.

No surprise that the College itself, too, was a kind of mountain, out of place but in place, of Culture, the Arts, the modern (that now appears provincial and quaint looking back to there from gaudy here), a proper place for brilliance just beginning in mentors and students in an alternative environment and ways (heuristically aka learn by experience and doing the do) of teaching/learning though I imagine that all earliest-to-humans learning was experiential and rife with necessary improvisation while figuring out emerging 'see- and equations as they revealed themselves to eye and thigh (essential!) and hand and feet in the meat and greet of savage Nature which does,indeed IS, Order, Logos and ChaOs (long O to rhyme with Logos), the opposite or both/and (complementarity thanx to Mrs. Quantum for this word).

I was in my early 20's then and knew nothing of Black Mountain College but once there in the area quickly heard of it, did my research at libraries, asked around and realized that the poets then mid-70's blowing in the wind at that time, many of them had been, were, associated with the Black Mountain College (late '30's to 50's I think, many iterations throughout), some of the poets doing well in the San Francisco area once the College was done, or they had got what they needed and headed West. Hard for me to imagine the unstoppable brilliance , say, of Robert Duncan moving about and around Lake Eden there, with Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, Mary Caroline Richards, the Albers, Buckminster Fuller, many others, in an extremely rural area with many locals there (farmers, etc.) who dwelt inwardly and outwardly in extremely fixed, rigid belief systems (fundamentalism abounding) which they, as did I, come by honestly. But.....I'll just let the but hang.....

Funny, tho, how weary I am NOW, have been for a long while, of New York City, and dwell on a street in an area that some of "the best minds" of that 50's and after generation, lived, roamed the hood, read and reveled at Saint Marks Church just a 40 second stroll from my apartment door. It means something to me still but nostalgically. Never suspected I'd veer in my free fall into what feels like an encapsulation, a barrier aura, somewhat hazmet mixed with jumpsuit (oy...just saw poor old jumpsuit Elvis in mind's eye_ that is mine and not mine, a separation, that, I'm guessing, is necessary, at least for me now dotage-ing n oy. Serves perhaps to contain my own emotional stew, mixed with 7 decades of memory meeting the man, the stranger, MOI, in his '70's pondering what is being lived and needs to be lived as the, before the, CODA's over. Kaput. Fin. ALTO (tho I was a boy soprano with an angelic voice, perfect pitch - central casting).

I'll let poet John Wieners, one of the better Veer-ers of his batch, be the coda to the above indulgent veer. Ah. That's the word, the V-word....old age, and companionable indulgence BY memory, these are the/my (objective/subjective) "window frame" through which I meet and experience the present world, apart and a part of, with the I that still is me, but as Rimbaud sez, "I is" also "Other".

This text below is from the seventh section of Wieners "A poem for painters" in The Hotel Wentley Poems (1958), in that year I was all of 6 years old, finger in my nose, avoiding the red bike that insisted on throwing me over and over....first word I loved to hate - BALANCE.

Ah, now I can see why I love the more the theme of my entire life -

VEER "here then" "now then" "Quick now, here, now, always (Mister Eliot)

*

Wieners:

At last. I come to the last defense.

My poems contain no
wilde beestes, no
lady of the lake music
of the spheres, or organ chants,

yet by these lines
I betray what little given me.

One needs no defense.
Only the score of a man's
struggle to stay with
what is his own, what
lies within him to do.

Without which is nothing,
for him or those who hear him
And I come to this,
knowing the waste, leaving

the rest up to love
and its twisted faces
my hands claw out at
only to draw back from the
blood already running there.

Oh come back, whatever heart
you have left. It is my life
you save. The poem is done.

Of Orphan Light — A "Fish In A Carriage Rut": A Tribute To Ernest Becker, His "Denial of Death" Book/Gift, It's Salvific Impact After Leaving "The Faith"

What the orphan knows about light —

hidden behind a star 

the ash sings without self-pity

"We are meaning hungry creatures" 

"We cannot get over the fact that tho we are gods—we are gods who shit."

"When the literal world fails us, we turn to the symbolic."

— some Becker-isms as they am or appear to be aka stark 

miasmata-ta-ta-ta (my a$$mz!) such as, if curious, 

sycosis ("papulopustular and chronic" - I ain't talkin' politics - look it up! scritch scratch), psora (some believed to be "a suppressed evil spirit"), and (ACK) syphilis. 

Miasm means, too, unwholesome air. And there's plenty of that, all kinds, "blowing in the daily wind"....

Thus also spake Becker in earnest.

Ernest Becker was a literal life saver for me as a young man leaving fundamentalist religion of youth and teen years. I was frightened but knew I was no longer of that hung up crowd tranced by CERTAINTY at all cost, even that of (at least my sanity which was tenuous enough even before the Calvinistas knocked on the front door of our then very remote house on a hill hovering over a fishing lake, red as the mud all around, and, turns out, as the iron-laden blood-o-Jesus all these 2000 years or so. A fateful knock at the door. Impaction still reverbing in my life. And in a brother who really (differently than me) committed to the Euro-Christian Protestant juggernaut but, to his surprise, found an inner activist that sent him into the streets to preach repentance to corrupt government and cops abusing non-white citizens and immigrants arriving in the "hood" from the violence and poverty that perhaps got a minute on the daily/nightly news.

If you hear a knock at the door, look out the window from behind the curtains. Could be Fate. Destiny. Or, as Calvinistas Tourette - PRE-destination. I prefer the gentler Tao which at least sounds, or triggers me less, gentler though the Tao is Nature's Way and we all know about Nature and Her Way - HAIL MARY!!! or as a black pentacostal friend often exclaims, "HELP US BLACK BABY JESUS"....with him, I can certainly "hold with" his petition, prolapsed Calvinista that I, alas, still am, as that Beast in an entrenched part of my psyche - complexes AND archetype (with various flavors and visages but still an OVERSEEING JUDGING OGRE which we are led to believe somehow loves us (my initials monogrammed on a ware house full of lightning bolts just "pour moi" therefore, "Help me Black Baby Jesus!" while I "look busy" dental flossing synapses and mitochondrial flotsam. What's a gazillionth plus spasm blip-critter, homo insatiaable and wired that way, mind!, to do? Call me, Ismail. Call me 

Jasper Late of FlabbergastingTON.

I blather.

Focus, Jasper. Focus.

I found Becker's book, The Denial of Death (1974), in 1975, a year after I outwardly fled the Sanctified....took years and years to inwardly separate with the eventual realization that it, they, is/was/are a part of my inner world for the duration, that despite my existentialist self there is this insistent part self that is still fecklessly, wreck-lessly on the outskirts of the Holy Hill folk, hearing, seeing but alone at a safe distance, a Glancing Belief-Enough to keep the lad oriented otherly toward Hinterlands splintered and cracked as they really REALLY are; I tell him I know it is the deep friendships he misses but not the self-hatred induced by the Calvinism, calcified to "THE Harrowed/Narrowed/Winnowed WORD" attached to an Absurd Unfathomable Terror or, rather, IF fathomed, should be run away from as fast as one can - took me awhile but I did - fled but did not run since I needed a lot of time, and and massive outer SPACE, to sort as long as it took through their harsh Deity (or at least the cultural expressions of it in history past and present, especially in the white USA, BUT that's for another essay or braying for another page) . . .

so, Becker's book was a "providential" find. I devoured it. It gave me the greater context in which to understand how fundamentalism of all kinds are attempts to confront, nay, to deny inevitable Death and still have vast room and freedom to breathe and be present in the life given.

Read a pdf of the book free here:

https://humanposthuman.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/ernest_becker_the_denial_of_deathbookfi-org.pdf

**

How It Was I Came To Be What I Am - A Fable

for 'Spider' Bottas

They would argue over tides
Who bade me come into the world.
One said, Six o'clock.
The other, No, twelve.
I was born at the thirteenth hour
All the while mother arguing, 
This is not the time but a little spell, 
While father argued it was death, 
You are dying and your child, too, 
Is dying. You have been poisoned.

It was full moon and high tide, 
The hour of birth.
All arguments yielded to the tide's.
The moon lit up the stadium 
Of their gripes while I was 
Born amidst their sweeps at
Each other, the nurse neglecting
To wipe me free of blood and salt
Being drawn into their strife.

He was born at day, one said.
No, at night, and he is a she, 
Said the other. The nurse, 
Speaking truthfully, said, 
Cleaning me at last, No, 
You are both right. The child
Is he and she, a hermaphrodite
Born of two days labor, its head
Out of the womb the duration.

Ruination! father cried.
Fame, mother sighed.
Both right, the nurse agreed, 
Of these fables are made. 

Then father tossed me into the sea.

The nurse saved me who later
Became my lover, hiding my 
Sexes with a four leaf clover.

**

This film linked below is based on Becker's book The Denial of Death which is not at all bleak. It's actually vastly orienting and inspiring —Denial of Death::

https://archive.org/details/DenialofDeath_201411

NOTE - The film was made decades ago so the tie-dyed tea-shirt very California surfer dude voice is actually, now, hilarious to hear as he talks existentialism. So, keep a few eye-rolls handy and a sense of humor. I wonder if this guy is still amongst the living.

**

Exodus-Excursus After Folly - An Aging Poet Addresses One Who Wanders In Mountains Remote - Reprise 

for Andrew Linton

Now I've broken my ties with the world of red dust; 
I spend all my time wandering and read all I want.

Who will lend a dipper of water
to save a fish in a carriage rut? 
—Han Shan, Tang Dynasty, China

1

There's a wary Moses in the distance counting pocket
change to give to the ferrier, coins to fit the eyes.
I'm hanging at the back of the crowd. There's manna
enough for pockets. My Red Sea is long parted but old
Pharaoh's got a new army. Each day is a scrape in the tents.
Prayer and fear is sustenance dragged further out by pillars
of fire. A volcano rumored to be God publishes 'Mandates for 
a New Junta', led by a well-bred stutterer (prototypical politician, 
it seems) . In odd limbo there trail reluctant murmurers.

That Golden Calf Incident was a silly mistake, 
an overreaction, but there were agreements made 
at the outset, sealed in blood, first born sons threatened
or worse, guaranteed real estate for dairy farmers and 
bee keepers, oodles of milk-and-honey futures, money 
to be made in hopefully greener pastures. Now it can 
be said with certainty, a 'promised land' comes with 
big catches - I've exchanged one for another, same 
mistake - the barbs are plenty, mostly mistaken people 
thinner than scripture loudly staking claims to land 
and deity in long meander.

It's a luxury, sure. Some choose to wander. Some don't.
Water is scarce in deserts. Wheels are few but for
chariots of war, not many ruts though there's thirst aplenty, 
not the bounty promised before the journey.

A penny for a wet tongue.

I'm of that hung up crowd forced to flee, a victim 
of unleavened fate, or is that too Greek a notion? 

The question begs asking. Unintended impertinence 
must be forgiven. That's the theme, right? the long 
march of history, that of redemption in time though 
each and every has an opinion. Can't be helped. 

Much to explain.

All's a seeming washed in blood.

2

"I say we very much don't merit these

unverifiable epiphanies." —James Merrill

Old friend, I've been reading zen, the death poems, 
and Sayings of the Desert Fathers, in many ways 
the same. These orient, assist. I can still lift a head 
up among stars while swatting flies just to be silly 
for what do stars care at all but for real-ing eyes, 
they're wanting to be the more perceived, more 
than lumps in solidity, but as sublime, as they once 
lightyears dreamed, as a boy's fright-years dreamed, 
too, despite a hard father's boot-steps on childhood's 
stairs just other side the door to send him packing, 

Future's shy Desert Father 
anonymous on purpose, 

beneath the bed, 
a wilderness of sorts, 

hiding still. 

3

Now 

I'm flung further into the fray though I sway up 5 flights
of stairs, long in exile, dizzy with the street, the human
beauty and brokenness there, all those flower pots in 
windows, on stoops, the blossoming tree brightening 
between darker bricks to truly dwell. It is for me, a shy 
son, to see in spite of big chunks missing or torn out, 
to remake the world as it always is for gods long to 
be bread to dwell in our finitude. To them, then, I am
'the Dude', a daffodil in my lapel, gate of heaven and 
h*ll open at the end of the block. I skip forward singing, 
'La La La, ' poems a'pocket. If questioned at the gate 
I'll blame you, meandering still, granting permission 
the entrance to boldly storm.

Between St. Marks and the horizon my fingers still work.

**

Natalie Merchant - Weeping Pilgrim 

(Traditional Protestant Hymn)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5JXQczExSS8

ENTONCES 

(for Miss Van & Gerard Manley Hopkins w/apologies)

I'll not. I'll Tchaikiovsky. 
Kvetch, 'Pathetique'. Bleak 
plead, wretch, here stretch 
arms, at least one, grasp as, 
wreckt, wrack on pain, wrench 
kindness render, or try, pity, 
and so end City of willful man 
'is Clod's cruel tred improv 
replete - hyssop, vinegar to
lips sponged tourette-ic cry
'I can no more' reduced 
down to a man, no further 
compression possible, I bear, 
endure, WILL, no choice in 

the matter, Crucible's Riddle, 

dare cling to rhyme and opposite, 

offering two thumbs yet, a

blood-eye, and a dry tongue.

[NOTE: All photographs are by Warren Falcon.  All rights reserved.]

Warrentine pic. July 2020.