LXXXVI

 

What profits?

 

I was a splenic flexure of the FBI

The nature of the beast inheres in its belly or multiples thereof

 

Whole lot of chacun(e) going on

Tales of Analysis, Analys’d

 

Obliquity, mon amour

And Jacques-ola

 

At Le G. nearly every p.m. a visiting pod, usually in twos and threes, of blank-eyed, stone-faced young Korean women.

They’re there when you look up from the Post.

 

 

Wherein you read the news that: “Everyone on board – including Giants tight end Larry Donnell – was safely evacuated onto a wing and helped down by rescue workers onto the snow-covered tarmac.

“Within minutes, some passengers were even joking about their near-amphibious landing.

“’Look at this s–t!’ Donnel, a 26-year-old Atlanta native wrote in the caption to a video he posted on instagram.

…”’I know I shoulda stayed my ass at home,’ the Giant quipped.”

 

Memento more. Or less.

 

Hey Siddh, how’s Artha?

 

Discovered in a secret back room cache during the conversion of the former Drone’s Club into a day spa: the previously “unknown” manuscript of “Bugger Me, Jeeves!”

 

And how does the beast manage the task of its continual and ever more omnivorous devouring? It grows another belly. And yet another. World without end, seemingly.

Ah, well, that expleens it.

 

The Yellow Emperor’s cooking manual: Wok This Way.

 

In writing, as in painting, the idea is not so much to imitate “realistically” – as in the transfer of forms – but rather to figure in such a way that the work corresponds to, and with, the actuality that calls the language or image forth: “like all realities, which provoke and respond to one another analogically (the notion of gang-ying), to advance the continuous process of the world.”

“Painting form is easy,” says Su Dongpo, “painting spirit is hard.” Or as Gu Kaizhi, quoting from the poetry of Xi Kang, commented: “The hand that strokes the five strings is easy [to paint]/The eye following the wild geese home is difficult.”

How then to allow our work to both contain and draw from a harmonious conspiration of spirit and formal configuration (shen and xing)?

Jullien writes that “the formula is concise but crucial,” and cites Zong Bing: “The dimension of the spirit is fundamentally without beginning or end; it lodges within the forms and sets in motion that which resembles them.” He stresses the importance of the word “lodges,” indicating that “the spirit resides temporarily within the actualizing form, and instigates correspondences through it. The form is only the vector for the spirit… painting [writing] ‘releases’ the spirit (chang chen) which ‘goes beyond the form.’ …It is by ‘departing from the form’ that ‘resemblance is achieved’ – the only true resemblance, which is one of inner resonance. […Nude, p. 88]

 

Spiritus longa, forma brevis

 

Destroying the figure’s perfection, refracting or mutilating it – as in the anatomical dislocations of T.H. Benton, previously spoken of, will not get us upstream of the Nude. Nor any other manifestation of thing itself.

 

 

And religion, aka reality and its discontents. I mean disconnects. Both, really.

But these are just my absurdvations, nothing more.

 

The artist has no other function, really, than to harmonize with the great coming-about.

 

Lunacharsky: former Kommisar of Enlightenment, died 1933 in Menton (la perle de la France), enroute to his new post as Soviet Ambassador to Spain (having been marginalized by Komrade Stalin). Thus he missed the likely fate – along with Bukharin and thousands of others – of contracting sudden lead poisoning in the Moscow suburb known as Kommunarka Shooting Ground.

 

Said one bullfrog to another: It’s time to croak, monsieur.

 

You may talk o’ gin and beer

When you’re quartered safe out ‘ere,

An’ you’re sent to penny-fights an’ Aldershot it;

But you may distill the modern history of England down to a simple post-mortem precipitating “cause,” i.e. Middle Burner Collapse. That is, Spleen Qi proved insufficient to “govern the blood,” which then moved “recklessly,” outside its proper channels.

Save your needles and your herbs. There’s no more to be done.

Pace Rudyard. Pace Yellow Emperor.

Ah, but wait. Is it possible that a prior pattern of Constrained Liver Qi (perhaps occasioned by External Pernicious Influences such as Danish Raids and Rapes and the Norman Violation and Parceling has occasioned the disharmony known as “Liver Invading the Spleen”? Check for a darkish or purple (perfidious) tongue. And a wiry pulse. And, of course watch for Depression, Frustration, and Inappropriate Anger.

But so many of these patterns conflate, converge and overlap, that the Chinese clinicians developed an overarching sub-pattern: Arrogant Liver Yang Ascending.

For which the only known cure is the Gordon head treatment, and/or a good camel ride, followed by a dash-about on your Brough Superior and a flight into the tall grass.

 

Don’t get Mahdi, get even

 

G: The pellet with the poison’s in the vessel with the pestle, the chalice from the palace has the brew that is true.

J: OK, got it!

[Later in the scene]

G: But wait, there’s been a change. They broke the chalice from the palace!

J: What!?

G: The pellet with the poison’s in the flagon with the dragon; the vessel with the pestle has the brew that is true.

[Melvin Frank and Norman Panama, from the 1955 film comedy The Court Jester, 1955]

 

You’re a better man than I am, Gunga Din

 

Taking your pulses and examining your tongue, you diagnose Adjunctivitis: a chronic condition, sometimes becoming acute which affects nearly all the pack-mules of academe. Easily cured with proper hydration of the host, it is rarely treated because of consistent denial on the part of the parasite.

 

Yet, spring.