Book of the World Courant XLIII

Backhoes in rain.bwc

 

 XLIII

 

The Grand Arch of Chernobyl: presently under construction.

Will there be triumphal sightlines? Parades? An eternal flame? An observation deck from which to view the awesome surround? A forum at its feet?

O tell me, amica mia, what do these vaultings mean to say?

 

Subjects on which the Master did not talk were – extraordinary things, feats of strength, disorder and spiritual beings.

This from Analects (7.20), via Jullien.

 

The cat. The as(s). The trophy. And Mother O’Leary’s cow.

 

Race is a constructed taxonomic device, useful for misperceiving the self and others.

 

Hard cats in hard hats. Practically. Practique.

 

And on come the cheery blossoms!

 

Whoa, somebody better call the Copts!

 

Off with the past, and into the clinical now.

 

Magical nihilism.

 

Occidents will happen. Oxidants too. And aunties.

 

The cure for the race.

No worries, the race is in a fair way to finding a cure for itself.

 

The material longs for itself.

 

The ends justify demeans.

 

One who forgets emotion becomes unconscious of the boundary between oneself and the external world. Forgetting emotion one’s forgotten nature is recovered, the mind becomes bright and sharp.

Wrote Sun Xi Kun (1883-1952) in Ba Gua Quan Zhen Chan (Genuine Transmission of Ba Gua Zhang), translated by Huang Guo Qi and Tom Bisio in Decoding the Dao, p. 370.

 

Solitary refinement.

 

Fuck contacts. Go for the context lenses.

 

It is difficult, said Ba Gua master Sun Xi Kun, to cut off the licentious root.

            You got that right, Sun.

 

And ah, the familiar Chinese pair of ducks:

Always rid yourself of desires in order to observe its [the Dao’s] secrets;

            Always allow yourself to have desire in order to observe its manifestations.

            Sez Laozi.

 

I am not sure “transcendence,” however often it is used, can be an accurate term, even one not-misleading, for what transpires when the unity of the pre-heaven state is achieved – that is, when one comes to reside at the “mysterious pass” (Xuan Guan): that place between being and non-being.

 

Jullien, in Detour and Access, translates as “makeshift” Laozi’s term for the great ultimate.

 

There is a thing confusedly formed,

Born before heaven and earth,

Silent and void,

It stands alone and does not change,

Goes round and does not weary.

It is capable of being the mother of the world.

I know not its name,

So I style it “the way.”

I give it the makeshift name of “the great.” (25)

 

We blunt words when we try to force them to cut through living matter. That is, when we try to divide, make distinct parts of, butcher, dissect or vivisect reality with them.

Words are not things. They are allusive. They are indicative (no matter how imperatively uttered!). They are suggestions that can rescue things from a reduction to the status of inert, will-less instruments of arbitrary use.

Writer: become a guardian (or remain one). Or else have the grace or honor to turn in your sword.

 

Nothing but conscience compels me to report these things.

 

Is a “smart “self-portrait taken in a church tower a “belfrie”? Does such an image not reveal, or at least imply, a population of bats?

 

Said Whale One to Whale Two: I love you like a blubber.

 

Is a jukebox not also a repository of orgones?

 

Present, but not tense,

slack, but not loose.

Straight, yet gay,

and round,

the way.

 

There is one and it is void.

 

Hearts will roll.

 

Foraging. Forging. What an difference anay makes.

 

In the garden of the holy freaks.

 

Yes, and the masqued man, left to his own lack of devises, falls into a Tontological crisis.

Keep your eye on the dragon – if you can. And stick like glue to the sinuous continuous.

 

The other three treasures:

Timing

Focal length

Resilience

 

Breakfast. Two foodie publishing types at next table at T&V. Middle-aged, non-descript Jewish guy, bespectacled, and an Asian woman, clinically perky, partly Chinese if you had to guess, slightly younger than her interlocutor.

She’s attempting, in some overt yet oblique way, to sell her “freelance journalist” husband to the prospective employer Jewish guy – it seems she has a 12-year-old son and is concerned about having the dough for college.

She’s burbling, truly like a freshly uncorked spring, about a restaurant chef who “works hand-in-hand” with a nutritionist. She was skeptical, but then dined there and was “blown away.”

His voice cuts less audibly above the buzz, so mostly you hear from her: “Chef,” “Appearances,” “Hey, bring the kids.” “Turkey bugger,” she says, and, who knows, perhaps it is.

By degrees, her pitch turns to a kind of one-upping, and you feel, in her tone, the dominatrix emerge. “Right! Right!” she snaps, “Suspend your belief a little!”

Jewish man begins to stammer, “Ah, this represents a digression for her, ah…”

“Having a good time,” she says, referring to a mutually-known third party, “Please check back with us [they said], “My husband…” “She’s such a class act.” “After that, I went to culinary school…” “Top 25 people,” “They clearly like what we’re doing,” “We’re ninety percent about chefs…”

“It’s so difficult…” he gamely responds.

“Right! Right!” she snaps, “I’m an optimist!”

Though each formulation is deeply predictable, like a movie script, you cannot say I couldn’t write dialogue this bad for the sole and simple reason that it isn’t a dialogue.

“Right, right! That’s a really interesting concept,” she says insincerely. “Do you know Danny Rosen-so-and-so?” “Published by Random House,” “There might be room for that.”

She’s pretty much shut him down, and he inclines his head like a stunned steer and asks “Did you ever do anything with Rachael Ray?”

It smells like something’s burning. Sawdust. Piquant. You contemplate your exit strategy should a fire break out. Chair through the back window while dominatrix and sub and thirty or so others are scrambling for the front door. Slowly the smell abates. Return to your book.

Surprise! Jewish guy begins to revive. “I believe in reinventing yourself – in change!”

 

Facing its origins does not end the depression.

 

Don’t hurry lest the stranger not make himself known.

 

There is narrative as a structural element.

The problem comes when structural gaps appear and narrative is used as wallpaper stretched over, and thereby obscuring, missing structural elements.

 

All that is solid melts into air. Said Marx in Manifesto, and invoked, famously, by Marshall Berman as the encapsulating trope of modernity.

But then, eventually, all that melts into air coalesces, rains down, and gives birth to new forms.

 

We already have anarchism – for the rich and powerful. Shouldn’t it be extended to everyone else?

 

“In Dreams Begin Responsibilities” a short story written by Delmore Schwartz in Greenwich Village in ‘35. Praised ad astra by Nabokov and others.

Great title, yes. Which he appropriated from a 1914 W.B. Yeats poetry collection, Responsibilities.

            Yates’ epigraph: In dreams begin responsibility, he attributes to an “Old play.”

 

Could one call the exhale outspiration?

Well, in or outspired by Hugo’s Jean, a suite of lesser-known, but nonetheless compelling bronzes: The Burglars of Cathay.

For shame.

 

Indeed, shame may be the most unpleasant feeling one can have. Truly unendurable. And one who can induce shame in others, or lift it off of them, will have tremendous power.

 

New shame for old!

 

Is it possible to suggest that the political and social expressions of American (US) culture, particularly its fixation on whiteness as the decisive threshold of respect, not to mention civil rights, evolved as they did as a “reaction formation” to an overwhelming sense of shame for which it had no remedy or remediation? One which absolutely must be transferred to others if one is to escape the agony even for an instant?

If such a hypothesis can even be remotely entertained, we must then ask: what is the origin of this shame?

 

Tulip 24th Street.bwc

 

Is responsibility, at bottom, the ability to respond?

 

Another dangerous play of narrative is the sort which extends beyond the self, and, finding no points of adhesion in reality keeps growing evermore into unrooted space.

And you ask yourself, and the universe, on the cusp of ecstasy, or in despairing moments: What do I do with this energy? There is an awful rush of noise in the ears: too much blood in the brain. But when it passes, and it does, the muses’ voice is bell clear. And then you move differently.

 

Are you ready for Africa?

 

OK, so walking isn’t your thing. At least hop on the other leg a while.

 

Artisan, don’t be confused,

Your only debt is to the muse.

 

Be of illusion disabused,

The two of you are always fused.

 

Navel on navel,

Tongue in tongue,

The muse and you are ever one.

 

When you breathe out,

The muse breathes in.

Where your breath ends,

Her breath begins.

 

Bibliography:

Dylan Thomas reading W.H. Auden’s “September 1, 1939.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ED4sN16x1ls

Auden’s “In Memory of Sigmund Freud,” read by Tom O’Bedlam.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IE88rtbm2Yk

 

Concupiscence = literally, the process of being with Cupid – as both symbol and embodiment of desire.

 

Upon Freud’s death, as Auden noted, yes, and again on the opening – if one can use the word to describe foreclosure – of the 9/11 Memorial Museum:

            …sad is Eros, builder of cities

            and weeping anarchic Aphrodite

 

And while Tom O’Bedlam, chief of the Bedlam Boys, roams and raves and prophecies [“Still I sing bonny boys, bonny mad boys / Bedlam boys are bonny / For they all go bare and they live by the air / And they want no drink or money”] Mad Maudlin (Magdalene) sticks hot on his trail:

 

For to see Mad Tom O’Bedlam,

Ten thousand miles I’ve traveled.

Mad Maudlin goes on dirty toes,

For to save her shoes from gravel

 

I went down to Satan’s kitchen

To break my fast one morning

And there I got souls piping hot

All on the spit a-turning.

 

There I took a cauldron

Where boiled ten thousand harlots

Though full of flame I drank the same

To the health of all such varlets.

 

My staff has murdered giants

My bag a long knife carries

To cut mince pies from children’s thighs

For which to feed the fairies.

 

No gypsy, slut or doxy

Shall win my mad Tom from me

I’ll weep all night, with stars I’ll fight

The fray shall well become me.

 

All unrequited-like. For mad is mad and somehow precludes love.

 

Let the mystical fall away.

Cultivate the strategic.

 

The other RIP: reality in process.

 

There are no groovy cultures, only more or less honest ones.

 

Do that which consists of taking no action; pursue that which is not meddlesome; savor that which has no flavor. Laozi. (63)

 

To contend power is to strengthen it.

 

What is “clearing the mind” other than “cleansing the doors of perception.”

 

He who wants to “shrink” (someone or something) first must “stretch” it; to “have a thing weakened,” one “must first strengthen it,” to “have a thing laid aside,” one must first “set it up. (36)

 

“The effect cannot be obtained directly as such,” but must be “situated constantly on the level of the mother of the effect.” Wang Bi on Laozi (28).

 

Through detour we see the effect emerging from the void or contrast, and, having returned to its advent, we embrace its development.

Jullien, in Detour and Access, p. 302.

 

In the nature of each of us are a hundred pigs… If you do not know your own pigs, then you do not know the Path.

            Said Farid Ud-Din, in The Conference of the Birds, kan ya makan. (de Tassy and Nott, trans.)

 

Later.

 

When detour is more efficacious than “direct.”

 

Curve a linear.

 

Breath is not an idea.

(But you can have an idea about breath.)

 

An idea is a derivative. The more you have of it, the less you have of that from which it derives.

 

The market is present.

 

“Brazil is just hot right now,” says Biz Guy at the next Tarallucci table. “You can do anything you want there.”

 

Bedlam and, yes, its contents.

 

Even the runway is taxiing on the runway.

 

There’s only 2 sure things: debt and taxiing.

 

In reification we trusted.

 

Is reification, and a fixation on things (nouns) a reaction to deeply-grooved hypostatic tendencies within our tradition? Are we dying the death of a thousand fixations, focalizations?

Could one simplify things and say that Western thought is organized along a vertical axis from base material to transcendent spirit, from worldly to divine, i.e. we believe in the existence of (at very least) two realities, one infinitely “higher” than the other?

Is this the one source of our two defaults in relation to things or situations we find menacing? One is to play with the value of signification along a sliding scale, locating our judgment somewhere between “It doesn’t matter much,” or “Damn right it matters!” Or, we can deny signification altogether, adopting our own version of the famous Khmer Rouge dictum: “Keeping him/her is no gain. Losing her/him is no loss” – a radical withdrawal of value which leaves price free to reassert itself elsewhere and at another level. Again, Buddhism tends toward a philosophy of the transcendent too.

Neither gregarious nor Gregorian be.

To thy known self beet rue.

 

We cannot know the totality of our own circumstances any more than we can encompass the totality of the universe. But we can be in sympathy with them both, since they are one, and attune ourselves to transformation.

 

Dare, durst, dast, derring-do. Ossez! And Harriet.

 

Born freak, as freak as the wind blows, as freak as the grass growz…

 

Superfluity is a sure sign of lack.

 

Washington Square Park: Bobby likes to roost on an a masonry ledge next to the copper pyramidal flashing near the top of One Fifth Avenue. From there he can survey the entire park and, if necessary, make a bee, or hawk line, across to Rosie and the two young ‘uns in their next in the window coffer, high up in the Bobst Library.

 

Oh, what did you see, my cross-eyed sun?

 

The principal function of an MFA program in literature is to make writhers out of mere wrigglers. Uh, I meant writers out of scribblers.

 

An elephant dreams of being six blind men, who may or may not dream of being a butterfly.

Can the six men, however blind or eagle-eyed, the butterfly and the elephant really claim distinction?

Don’t bête on it.

 

Many people want to be slaves for the sheer joy of rattling their chains.

See! Mine are the heaviest!

 

Love cannot originate in a flight from fear. It must emanate from the self, longing for its hidden dimension.

 

All that becomes actualized, by occurring in a certain way, simultaneously deprives itself of all other possibilities. Says Jullien in Detour and Access.

 

Jeanie.bwc