LXXXIV
Caught in the X-hairs of Spectacle
I’m ready for my close-up, Mr. Demille
And indeed, several thousand years of Western striving may be distilled down to the tagline of a one-page ad in the March, 2015 number of Condé Nast Traveler:
Give us your body for a week, and we’ll give you back your mind. So promises the “destination spa,” and soi dissant the BodyHoliday, wherein one finds “an endless menu of fitness classes from yoga, Pilates, and tai chi, to archery, golf, tennis, and spinning in a glass-enclosed treetop studio.
Just thinking about this, of course, already gives one back at least bits of one’s mind, more or less the worse for wear. Why not then enter the url, www.thebodyholiday.com/cnt, realizing all the while that the “u” as in Condé Nast (Unlimited) Traveler is implied in the three letter internet suffix. But why not choose, like ISIS to go with a four-letter acronym? Why settle for implying, when you can accomplish the literally real?
N.m. (note malus): Condé Nast, which also publishes the alleged New Yorker, is HQ’d in One World Trade Center, affectionately known as The Freedom Fry. On the books the FF is the most expensive building ever built by orders of magnitude: $4 billion, twice as much as world’s tallest building (the Burj Kalifa, i.e. Tower of the Caliphate or Caliph Tower – a Dubai-ous proposition located, appropriately at 1 Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Boulevard, UAE).
The land, not sand, on which the FF stands, as well as most of the structure itself, is owned by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, an agency with theoretically unlimited bonding potential, yet which somehow managed to drive the monstrosity’s Canada-based builder (Collavino Const. Co.) into bankruptcy by not ponying up on a $87 million bill for structural concrete.
Condé’s co-tenants in the mostly empty frito de la libertad include the PA itself, a chip off the big GSA, and a Chinese-owned firm that is almost certainly an arm of the organization known, with or without irony and/or affection, as the Three Harmonies Society, aka the Triad. Dragon tatts, anyone?
Occasionally, one reads of someone being “visibly shaken.” How to describe the invisible form?
A recently released photo of Nelson Rockefeller destroying Man at the Crossroads. Oops, wait, no – must be a fake – our Caliphs love art.
While in another micro-jiggle of the great gelatinous wobble, the rails slip out from beneath English again:
“’Jihadi John’ – the masked murderer who became the face of terror…”
Is it now possible for a face be a mask? Has the New York Post, in which this copy appeared, achieved the daoist “compossibility” of yin-yang and all they embrace? [Bob Fredericks, “ISIS’s Face of Evil Revealed.” The New York Post, February 27, 2015, p. 9]
And the Times’s Ann Barnard, for her part, weighs in with: “Isis Onslaught Overruns Assyrians and Wrecks Art” in a “rampage reminiscent of Tamerlane or Genghis Kahn, perhaps, but in reality, according to reports by residents, activist groups and the assailants themselves, a description of the modus operandi of the Islamic State’s self-declared Caliphate this week.” [p. 1:5]
Had to read that three times to make nonsense of it.
No hay merced pa’ la lengua torturada.
And beneath that story: “Knife-Weilding ‘Jihadi John’ was a Londoner, Under Watch.” [Steven Erlanger, p. 1:5]
Got to watch out for them Lon(don)ers. Like Lee Harvey Milk. Or someone. Say a giant rabbit…
As seen through a Google Glass, all too brightly.
You shoot the fish alright, but it’s the barrel you were aiming at.
And how reliably, even predictably, force tends toward farce
Language is a jungle, Jim
Caveat, exhibuit.
Lector frater. Soror Scriptor.
How do you say If I had a hammer in Arabic?
Mystery has turned a page
The objects of rage, of pity (or piety), contempt, or hatred share in common the status of object.
Endlessly vaunted as the signal characteristic of the artist cum genius, Imagination – the work of externalization, displacement, or dissociation – is the impoverished tool you seize upon when the capacity for living in reality is under-developed or has been exhausted. Or when reality, for some reason, cannot be encompassed and overwhelms the bodymindspirit. Then out come the eidolons. Armies of them.
The “great” artists, like the “great” mystics, then, are not so much those with hypertrophied imaginations. They are, rather, and often at great cost to themselves and others, those who are most susceptible to attuning their awareness to the pulses of the world. O, may they find their pulse within the myriad pulses, greater, lesser and endlessly varied in their qualities! May their breathing become interminable, and coextensive with the breath of heaven and earth.
How many Troys does it take?
My mama says I’m reckless, my daddy says I’m wild
My mama says I’m reckless, my daddy says I’m wild
I ain’t good looking but I’m somebody’s angel child…
Sang Bessie Smith, oncet
You already know everything.
Further knowledge is just a cognition in the wheels.
Ted Kaptchuk, in The Web That Has No Weaver, describes the Eight Principal Patterns of identifying disharmonies in the body as “nets that help capture human reality.” [p.195]
In clinical practice, he says, “patients fit into the spaces between the pure categories described.” [p.198]
A new lesson in neo-Classical , or, more properly, neo-Athenian history:
Five names and one date:
George Williams
Keith Swack
Sean Warner
Matthew Rademacher
Attica Correctional Facility.
August 11, 2011
Name, rank, height, weight and age:
George Williams, inmate. 5’ 8”. 170 lbs. 29 years of age.
Keith Swack, Officer. 6’ 3”. 300 lbs. 37.
Sean Warner, Sgt. 5’ 11”. 240 lbs. 37.
Matthew Rademacher, Officer. 6’. 290 lbs. 29.
Attica: 30’ walls. Very heavy. About 80 years old.
New York. OK. New Haven. Makes Sense. New Bedford, Providence, Jamestown, Fairfield, Albany. Got it.
But what process of thought or intention would lead one to name a town, and a prison, after a place, and not just anyplace, in (Ancient) Greece?
What manner of shades abide upstairs in the traum atticas?
And deeper, more toward Hades than Athena’s temple, who or what inhabits the traum cellars?
Odd birds, these traumatticus finches, migratory, yet sticking close, and who build their nests in the oddest places, and with the oddest materials…
In the aftermath (is there a reckoning after “math”?) of the Rockefeller, State Police-Police State massacre of September ’71, we had a short-lived slogan: Attica Means Fight Back with or without exclamation mark, but mostly with.
It’s taken all these years for your mind to ask – since you can’t unremember the slogan, nor the moment – what else does Attica mean?
And those faces on the cover of the times, those men wearing goatees, but not bronze helmets, those faces of Swack, Warner, Raedmacher – do they look like Greeks? And Williams, does he resemble Hector?
Invitation to a house burning in the light of its own recognizance. And Reco-naissance. As in acknowledgement. As in to be born together again.
And the toppling of topless towers.
No need to cross the wind dark sea.
Troy, Attica, Argos: all are home.
I like to be there when the engine starts early in the morning;
I like to sit me down at break-fast time,
Just when the engine’s roaring;
And I like to see the piecers as on the floor they lay.
Then hurrah for the life in the fac-to-ry
While we’re wait-ing for the judg-ment day…
[from The Shuttle and Cage: Industrial Folk Ballads. Ewan MacColl, ed. London: Workers’ Music Association, 1954. p. 5]
Be amazed, you too.
Be amazed: for all of Diogenes’ tubs,
I still beat him as a conceptualist.
Pray
for your eternal test.
What I hold in my hands
are the spiders that I dip in Chinese ink
and fling against the canvas.
I enter the world once more.
A new navel blooms
on the artist’s belly.
[from “Likeness,” by Wisŧawa Szymborska. Poems: New and Collected. Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh, trans. New York: Harcourt, Inc., 1998.
These feelings won’t go away
They’ve even knockin’ me sideways
They’ve even knockin’ me out, babe
Whenever you come around me
These feelings won’t go away
They’ve even knockin’ me sideways
I keep thinking in a moment that
Time will take them away
But these feelings won’t go away…
[chorus to “Sideways,” by Citizen Cope]
Diogenes’ tub inverted. A notched broomstick and taut clothesline for rhythm. Twelve ossuary ribs for rick-rack, a jug of wine, and Maria Muldaur, neé D’amato, singing Song of Songs, white as milk.
The girl can’t help it
