A funny thing happened on the way to Wallace Stevens' later poetry

[TranquillityBase]

Tranquility, where fuck are you?

I'm still here.  I needed (and probably still need) some time away from the forum.  I've been lurking, reading the new posts regularly, at least the ones outside the Sewer.  

I enjoyed the Harold Bloom interview.  Everything I know about him, I've learned from the forum, never having read him.  I don't read much literary criticism.  In fact, I could probably count on one hand the ones I have read with enthusiasm.

I'd like to meet the historical Jesus.  I have no desire to talk to God and I liked Bloom's description of Yahweh as a here today, gone tomorrow entity.  Isn't that sort of what the Gnostics were saying?   

Bloom does sound like a very interesting (and condescending) person, so maybe I should pick out one of his books to read.....but not anything about Shakespeare please.

Once, in New Mexico, I tried to read the Old Testament, but only got as far as Deuteronomy.  After listening to Bloom, I think I'll re-read the Gospel of Mark.  When I finish what I'm reading now, a Ross MacDonald novel.  I use RM to clear my head after too much of a particular author, in this case, after reading seven Hesse novels.

If and when I read poetry again, I'm going to take up the Outlaw Bible of American Poetry, which I own thanks to you.  Maybe it will re-ignite the desire to write again, which has recently been nonexistent.

So it goes.

[rowens]

Harold Bloom is a Romantic Critic, he is a Myth-Maker of his own Myth, influenced by Frye. He is bombastic and agonistic, like Nietzsche. He is straightforward with his views, in an Emersonian sense. He's a neurotic Jew, haunted by the Godhead of his Familial and Cultural Tradition, and plays the game of Freud.

A Realist in the Freud contra Jung sense. He is for Poetry what A. Crowley is for Magick. They are synthesizers and myth-makers. Both base their Filing Cabinet-like Imagination on the Tree of Life.

What Bloom describes as Genius in his book by that name is what Crowley refers to as the Holy Guardian Angel.

This idea of the Word as Generative, the Creative, is the same thing as the True Will in Magick. This Word of God that is mentioned in Genesis and the Gospel of John is the Emergence of a Symbolic Cultural-Social Reality from Silence. The Tradition of Judaism took YHVH as Genius for a whole People. Even Jesus took YHVH as his Genius. Bloom did, too, in the Jacobian Agonistic Way. Nietzsche also, playing the Antichrist. And Crowley subverted this, claiming each his/her own Holy Guardian Angel/God.

This Word/Will is Genius. This is Emerson's Self-Reliance. This is what U. G. Krishnamurti means by "singing his song". Speaking his Word. 

This is still within the framework of the Genesis Myth. 


And this "psychic violence" that Bloom mentions is what is referred to by Crowley as Choronzon. 


This is all Romantic stuff.













..............................................................................





Bloom is Gnostic and Crowley is Hermetic. Bloom seeks Wisdom through Knowledge: Gnana Yoga. Crowley seeks Wisdom beyond Knowledge: Raja Yoga.

For me, Fire is Magic, Poetry is Water, Air is Humor and Healing, Earth is doing things: I Perform a Ritual, Write a Poem, Tell a Joke, Have an Adventure.

Bloom wrote Essays and Crowley wrote Sacred Texts in the Way that Blake wrote Prophetic Books.

I read these things the way I watch Ingmar Bergman movies and Twin Peaks episodes and read H. P. Lovecraft stories. They are literal grimoires.

Here, I've been healing my Antrum, Transfiguring the Tendencies, like Genet writing in prison and Artaud in the insane asylum.
Though I have roads and woods and nearby towns, and the folklore that pervades, if I don't get back to my far and wide travels. all is for naught.


Somebody needs to find me a booking agent.

Every time I want to burn the Bible, I'm grabbed, like the Angel of the Lord grabbed Abraham, when I see how aesthetically pleasing my Bible looks in my Exorcism/Vampire Hunting kit.

[TranquillityBase]

I guess I haven’t had enough of Hesse therapy, so I went from Ross MacDonald back to Hesse and read Journey to the East.  Now reading a collectiion of his short stories.

Hesse probably could have used a dose of the Marx Brothers.  I’m imagining his Swiss fortress of solitude invaded by Groucho, Harpo and Chico, while a forever unamused Hesse plays the straight man. 

Clonazepam Blues

My brain is screaming for its little yellow pill, the one that lulls it to sleep.

There’s a clonazepam shortage where my pharmacy used to be.  I’m ready to go through 
its sliding glass doors on my knees, if  only Mr. White Coat would toss a few my way.

Instead I get TV nightmares:   my father’s empire of illusions crumbling before my eyes.  Jokers wrote the script overlaying obscene tragedies with a laugh track and pratfalls.

Then comes insomnia, prancing down the aisle of night.  So I’m out of bed listening to Lou Reed at 3 a.m.  Maybe this first world suffering is merely a ritual of sacrifice
to the stern Gods of Pharmaceutical Commerce.

My theory is, the cheaper the drug, the more people must take it, and clonazepam is really  cheap.  How many other sleepless souls are sharing this dark night?


 

[rowens]

The only Hesse book I haven't read all the way through is the Glass Bead Game. I was using it as the theme of a chapter of one of my own novels that I never finished, so I didn't finish either.

Going through the Magic Theater:For Madmen Only doesn't have much use if you have to spend your whole life trying to relive it. Same thing with Infernos and Seasons in Hell.


I taught myself some tricks. Dark Nights are scary and painful and, here's the kicker, Exciting! Excitement is the Thing. In my asleep, awake, halves don't half do things justice,  Dream Country Quaking and Volcanoing, I wrestle the Things that go Bump in the night and body and mind.

That's called Living. 




............................................


The colorful group on the journey East resonates with me as my V.F.D. Figures do. A similar Situational Aura. Orange. For several reasons Orange. Not the least maybe being the book cover was that color, and I projected into that.

[TranquillityBase]

The only Hesse book I haven't read all the way through is the Glass Bead Game. I was using it as the theme of a chapter of one of my own novels that I never finished, so I didn't finish either.

The best things about The Glass Bead Game are 1) the concept  2) the "Three Lives" appended to end of the novel.

Going through the Magic Theater:For Madmen Only doesn't have much use if you have to spend your whole life trying to relive it. Same thing with Infernos and Seasons in Hell.

Yes, my dead friend Philip was always seeking novelty.  Unfortunately, one lifetime isn't enough, and then comes old age, when novelty becomes a scarce commodity.

I taught myself some tricks. Dark Nights are scary and painful and, here's the kicker, Exciting! Excitement is the Thing. In my asleep, awake, halves don't half do things justice,  Dream Country Quaking and Volcanoing, I wrestle the Things that go Bump in the night and body and mind.

That's called Living. 

Lord knows I need more excitement in my life, but then again, I have my own ideas about what's exciting.  Excitement for me is "feeding my head" as in the song White Rabbit.  That, and laughter, but I seem to have lost the ability to laugh.  I can approach it but it always seems just out of reach.  Didn't Harry Haller finally break through by way of laughter?  The laughter of the "Immortals"?  But then I think he was also hallucinating a mass shooting while he was laughing.  If I'm remembering right....didn't reread Steppenwolf.

Then there's falling in love.  The best excitement.  And the rarest.  Unless you count movies, and falling in love with characters in a film.

[rowens]

Laughter is the Hearty Roar of a Lion in Man.

I suppose the Magic Theater and other highly symbolic Figures and Situations in Hesse's books were inspired by his work with a Jungian Analyst. The Magic Theater seems somewhat like Active Imagination that became a deep Crisis-Movement. He was prepped and drugged by those people he met. They appear to be a Destined Occasion. They existed in the book and in the life of the Character HH to Symbolize events and meetings in the Writer HH's life.

They released the Red and Black Jung Journals a long while back. The Magic Theater is facing his various selves, indulging in his desires, Integrating himSelf.


That Light and Holy Laughter of Mozart and the Noble Calmness of the Heights personified in Goethe is Nietzschean/Jungian. Many would be bold enough to say is Human.








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I conveniently was shown an advert for this book, last night: Telling Silence: Thresholds to No Where in Ordinary Experiences by Charles E. Scott, Hardcover | Barnes & Noble® (barnesandnoble.com) , but look at the price. I found a video that seems to sum it up. If only they didn't make the guy stare into the sun for the last half of the interview. A Philosophy of Silence: Charles E. Scott's 'Telling Silence' (Nietzsche, Foucault, and Poeisis) - YouTube


It would have also been better without the music and stock footage that occasionally shows up over the conversation. But maybe they were proving a point.

[TranquillityBase]

I conveniently was shown an advert for this book, last night: Telling Silence: Thresholds to No Where in Ordinary Experiences by Charles E. Scott, Hardcover | Barnes & Noble® (barnesandnoble.com) , but look at the price. I found a video that seems to sum it up. If only they didn't make the guy stare into the sun for the last half of the interview. A Philosophy of Silence: Charles E. Scott's 'Telling Silence' (Nietzsche, Foucault, and Poeisis) - YouTube


It would have also been better without the music and stock footage that occasionally shows up over the conversation. But maybe they were proving a point.

Thanks for the Utter Silence discussion.  Most philosophy goes in one of my ears and out the other, but I did enjoy what he had to say about poetry (Which conveniently took us back to Wallace Stevens) and his "true story" at the end of the talk.  

Yeah, the music and imagistic videos interpersed were a serious distraction.  I saw a link to a version without the music when I looked at the description (after I'd already watched it).  And I was waiting for him to say something about the "damned sun in my eyes".  As an Oklahoma boy, he should have.

[rowens]

You know how people joke about Sherlock Holmes not being aware that the Earth revolves around the sun, or something like that? He says he doesn't bother learning things that are useless to his work, and so far that had never come up. Nowadays, if he ever had to connect that Elon Musk guy with some foul play, he might would need that information.

That thing I posted about Redskin Poets and Philosophy is how many people, including me, have used philosophy in this Century. Looking for ways to sharpen the mind and find useless concepts and ideals to use in war against the society who don't understand us.

That was how I was, but it was all rooted in the love-curse. My entire life was framed by being unable to be the guy who dates the popular girl.
Some people have other gripes.
That Outlaw Bible of American Poetry is full of Poems raging against Academic and Acclaimed Poets. The odd thing, or maybe not so odd, is that they don't seem to have ever written anything but that kind of thing, and if they have written something that's not about that, the only things that are any good are the ones that are raging against the restrictions of Polite Academe.

In the end, all of this is a Cry for Society.

When you forget society and simply live in poetry itself, the real stuff comes.


And it takes courage to be dismissive. While Diogenes, if he existed, obviously gave lots of thought to Plato's System, it would be just as well that he didn't bother.

And that's what I do, I no longer bother.

I like the Silence Video and I like Wallace Stevens. While there is obviously philosophy involved, getting beyond those concepts and games is more powerful. Wallace Stevens writes nonsense that is more life-affirming than anything this side of Emerson. I like Emerson and Blake.


Philosophy is a tool to sharpen the mind.  The Concepts and Theories are simply there, I want to say as Strawmen, that might not be a correct word, but I think the point is somewhere in that. Just like how Morality Tales can be useful whether or not there's an actual escaped mental patient with a hook.

---

Self-Reliance Ralph Waldo Emerson Audio Book - YouTube



This voice fits this essay perfectly. Most other versions sound like college kids reading it and don't sound very convincing.


I post it here, for now, sometimes nice things get taken down, but this is still up, so if you like, enjoy it while you can.

[TranquillityBase]

I will see if I have the essay in print.....pretty sure I do have an Emerson book around here somewhere.  I don't have the patience for audio books.  Though perhaps I should cultivate one....I'll try later today.

I have recently entered the Kingdom of the Unwell.  My kidneys may be failing me.  So I'm reading Gertrude Stein.  The ultimate distraction for me.  But I'll take time out for Emerson this evening.

What does "redskin poet" mean?  I read your previous post, but I still don't understnad the term.

[rowens]

The Introduction of the Outlaw Bible is a Redskin perspective. People don't use these words anymore, nor do they like to think in these terms, but the so-called Redskin poets do. Now the issue is framed differently. The Paleface poets were those who used Tradition, Forms, Tropes that were recognized from other poems, allusions to the Bible and Mythology, the cohesive Traditional and Academic continuity. The Redskin poets were wild and personal and used whatever subject matter was at hand, and some of them engaged with Literary Criticism from the point of view of someone who wanted to end the oppressive reign of the Academically Defined Poetry and Culture of the Times. This was starting in American Literary Journals in the 1950s.

Since then, more of what was then called Redskin Poetry has become acceptable by the so-called Academic Press. No one wants to be considered of the Paleface School. . . . There are those who write poetry and feel rejected by What Poetry Is SUPPOSED To BE, and they are what I'm referring to as a continuation of that Redskin/Paleface Debate.

If you ever look around at Poetry published today, there are both Varieties Published side by side with no conflict. You have fully accepted and even spawned Academic Poets using the gripes and rages and of the old Redskin School in their polished and celebrated writings.


You have the New Redskins watching University Professors giving Poetry Readings on YouTube in front of a Posh and Sophisticated Audience, the Professor Poets screaming obscenities against the Corrupt American Machine in no way different from what the New Redskins themselves are posting on their Blogs.
   So the New Redskins turn to Philosophy. They sharpen their raging minds with grander intellectual weapons. They say: What does this guy on stage have that I don't have? Well, they have a career in Academia, and access to Events and Publishers and Like-Minded People who also take part in these things. 
   The New Redskins rage on the Internet, which is so full of raging Redskins that they are all drowning each other out. Meanwhile the old Redskins with Paleface Credentials have their more selective and small Academic Events that are what the American Public sees as the Poetry version of Celebrity and Success and Authority.



So, the Outlaw Bible of American Poetry is a subculture of arts getting each other's names out there through the lens of being Literary Outlaws. A Billy Jack of a Crowd before cult movies became fashionable and can be made by big "film" companies on Demand. Those in that book that didn't die too soon have enjoyed the recognition this subculture allowed them. And the New Redskins use that sort of poetry for inspiration. As they do Bukowski, which, funnily enough, the Outlaw Bible wasn't able to get the Rights to include.



And this shows the insistence on Cooperation in Culture today. The so-called Individual needs a whole Movement to be oneself if you want that sort of recognition. 

All this Business about Genius and Self-Reliance isn't all that fashionable, or, rather, it's fashionable but never the fad. That's overemphasized in this Tell Time By What's Being Posted Aeon. This is the Era of Cringe. The Cry from the Heavens and the Hells and everywhere between is Diversity! Inclusion! Yet people don't feel that way. They must feel that way, they must feel included and that they are inclusive in regard to others, but they don't. The Era of Cringe is a world where everything is a Mirror. And all the Mirror sees are Creeps, Pervs, Stalkers, Racists, Social Justice Warriors, Colonialists, Aliens, Narcissists, Privilege, Cancelations, Weirdos, Attention Whores, Capitalists, Socialists, Mass Shooters, Skeevies, Junkies, Reactionaries, Fly Over Country, the Elite, etc. 

Whether the Redskins and Palefaces and their crosspollinated Nation sees it or not, they have a richness of Tropes and Materials to engage with and new and old-fashioned ways. Genius only selects for the sake of Art. Everything in a Right place.

[TranquillityBase]

Muchas gracias for the lucid explanation re: Redskins.

I couldn't find my Emerson collection in print, but I'll maybe buy one or read it online.  I'm a visual learner, and in my current, health-menaced state of mind, this probably isn't the time to try to change horses.

Fear is my new taskmaster.  Rather than face it head on, I'm in the phase of seeking out the most challenging distractions I can find.  So I watch English soccer on TV (no commercials, God bless them) or coming here hoping for a new poem to critique.  Already burned out on Gertrude Stein.  I'm thinking of Finnegan's Wake for my next reading assignment.

All this Business about Genius and Self-Reliance isn't all that fashionable, or, rather, it's fashionable but never the fad. That's overemphasized in this Tell Time By What's Being Posted Aeon. This is the Era of Cringe. The Cry from the Heavens and the Hells and everywhere between is Diversity! Inclusion! Yet people don't feel that way. They must feel that way, they must feel included and that they are inclusive in regard to others, but they don't. The Era of Cringe is a world where everything is a Mirror. And all the Mirror sees are Creeps, Pervs, Stalkers, Racists, Social Justice Warriors, Colonialists, Aliens, Narcissists, Privilege, Cancelations, Weirdos, Attention Whores, Capitalists, Socialists, Mass Shooters, Skeevies, Junkies, Reactionaries, Fly Over Country, the Elite, etc. 

Whether the Redskins and Palefaces and their crosspollinated Nation sees it or not, they have a richness of Tropes and Materials to engage with and new and old-fashioned ways. Genius only selects for the sake of Art. Everything in a Right place.

The Church of the Subgenius, long in decline, offers me a satirical refuge for me from this Era of Cringe.  Their sermons, as found in their various underground/briefly above ground publications were describing something similar about the 70s into the 80s' and on, but in a "fuck-em if they can't take a joke" mode.

Unfortunately I can't pray.  When my son got cancer at 16, I tried prayer one time, waiting for one of his medical tests to come back.  First and last time I tried it.
 
The strange thing is I've been throwing the I Ching coins regularly and was getting nothing but glowing reports about my future.  So I'm legitimately confused at what's happening now.  I'm reduced to reading about disease which is the opposite of reading poetry.

Then again, better this is happening to me, rather than someone I love (a very small circle).

[rowens]

I never liked any kind of opiate or synthetic pain killers, I liked the stimulating effect alcohol had on me. For me, alcohol suppresses whatever neurological problems hinder my sober life. The irony is that I'd be able to drive a car drunk better than sober. I've been able to solve those problems without alcohol, but John Constantine never bothered learning how to drive, why should I?

The point about the drugs is that I never wanted to risk the sexual side effects that they can cause. I'm a Wine, Women and Song man. But while over-indulging in the Dionysian Aspects, I engaged with the Shadow-Side of Christ and took the drugs for my friend's piss tests. So, while my Venus Invocations are no less Solid and of Appropriate Length, the pain and the never-ending blood-spilling of all my lower Vital organs for the last few years should have me making arrangements with Fear, too.

So far, I haven't solved the problem organically, though I have Mentally. I've always experimented on myself, and trying to heal myself has led me to things that healed other ailments.

Actually the pain and the bleeding seem to be decreasing. And I did some I Ching about the problem a few months ago, and was told that I would recover. The words were very specific and to the point as I Ching always is. And speaking of I Ching, there's a new book that seems very promising to not be simply a rehashing of all the other books on the subject.

I Ching, the Oracle: A Practical Guide to the Book of Changes: An updated translation annotated with cultural & historical references, restoring the I Ching to its shamanic origins: Wen, Benebell: 9781623178734: Amazon.com: Books


Something about how the Sun lights the Earth at this time of year makes it perfect for these kinds of intense studies on these subjects. And even better for practicing, engaging. The Layered Energy of the Holiday Season, too. 


The New and Strange and more recent poets and artists correspond for me with Spring and Bright and Light colors and freshness. John Ashbery seems to go further than Stevens in that meaningful nonsense direction. And I have come to find that he fits the post-New Year Janus Atmosphere. I've had his complete poems for years, but haven't gone very far into them. I've gathered some expensive and rare University Published studies of his poetry, and am going to dig into it [the poetry] come January. By then, I Divine that I Will be healed of my ailments. And I'll put in a Word with Raphael and Hermes for you, too.

---

I Ching is pure flow. It never occurs to you to doubt it or rationalize it. What is there to doubt even if you were to? Doubt doesn't apply. There is no doubt, not even a lack of doubt.

[TranquillityBase]

I read Self-reliance.  Now that I've read it through, I am going to listen to that recording, as I think the essay warrants a second exposure.  I see why you like it and I quite often heard your voice while reading it. 

I've been doing the I Ching without asking a specific question.  I figure it knows better than I do the questions I have, and which one is paramount in my mind at any given time.  I'm also keeping a notebook of my readings.  Not sure why I'm doing that, but it seemed important to do it.  The book you cited looks very interesting.  I've always used the old Wilhelm translation.  I like that she shows the primitive version of the Chinese characters for each hexagram.  The oldest book I still retain is Chinese Characters: Their origin, etymology, history, classification and signification by L. Wieger, a Jesuit missionary.  I bought it in Santa Fe on a road trip with my best friend (at the time) to Canada just after we finished high school.  Probably some of the happiest weeks in my life.  Anyway, it shows the primitive characters for the modernized versions and explains their origins as pictographs.  The book is the closest thing I own to a magical object.  It's bright red, like Mao's little book.

In Colorado, we bought some peyote from a group of hippies who needed gas money.  I think we paid $15.  It was an amazing night, once we got through the business of choking down the dried up cacti.  One of the guys with the hippies had his neck in a brace, and a weird cage-like helmet to keep his head still.  He had a jeep, and I went for a crazy ride with him in the dark along the forest roads; I thought I was probably going to die but was laughing the whole time.  He also had a huge dog, the son of "The Strongest Dog in the World" (it won some kind of contest).  One of the first poems I put on the forum was about that night.

We made it to Vancouver, but started running out of money and pretty much drove non-stop back to Texas.  We hated each other by the end of that drive, at least temporarily.

I haven't thought about John Ashberry in a long time.  I did try to read him when very young.  My memory is he was too abstract for my tastes at the time, but that's a guess.

__________________________________________________________________

Just read some of his poems on the Poetry Foundation website.  Pretty mindbending stuff.

[rowens]

One Good lecture or critical study is usually a Rossetta Stone.

My Maya/Mythos is built in to my Lyra/Poetics.
I'm my own editor and critic.


The prose doesn't explain the poetry but integrates it.


As for friends and adventures with other people. The so-called psychedelic drugs were usually saved for romantic boy/girl communing. When I was around friends, it was mostly methadone, heroin and morphine and all those Let's Calm the Whole Thing situations, pills crushed and powders snorted that weren't meant to speed you up.
  I've always been the Dionysian reveller, even as a child, I was drunk on the energy that coursed through me in whatever chemical form. And my way was to brush the opiate dust in to large jars of whiskey wine beer and whatever, and energy drinks with sleeping aid included cough medicine, stir it all up and chug.
  People talk of euphoria that enjoins the transition to High Land. Euphoria was never my thing. I wanted the hard, sharp, traumatic phantasmagoria with a large ditch of broken broomsticks sticking large sharp splinters upwards that I was leaping over and into simultaneously.
  I never enjoyed the painkilling. If I was going to use a painkiller, it was going to be for an adventure, not a good time.

I'm a Wine, Women and song man. I grant all my pleasure to Inanna, save it up to woo the ladies. Much as my friends saved their mushrooms and acid for their dates.

I'm also a man of burnt bridges, and my memories of friendship and childhood have been fading rapidly these last two years.

But I did enjoy greatly watching the early '90s Are You Afraid of the Dark on the chilliest Saturday nights of this October month. Friday night I had an adventure. Last night was hot, so I stayed in my room and watched an old ECW pay per view and the newest season of American Horror Stories. The fourth episode had a message from God.



While I was staying up in New Englandland, I found a booklength essay by Dostoevsky that was pretty much about why he hated the French. There was a guy who was from North Carolina who lived nearby, and whenever he was around, I would say the things that Dostoevsky said about France about North Carolina, just as a running gag. 
   On this site, I changed my target to Cananda. I think South Park had already landed there.  

...

John Asbery has long ruminating poems like Wallace Stevens. I like to compare these to the long ruminating Rilke poems. The Rilke language is simpler, and that would have him experienced as the greater poet. As time goes, some poets felt a need to complicate their language, as the simple things had already been stated. The first person who ever said "I think I'm going to hit the hay" was a poet, even if someone once used that expression "hit the hay" without the subjective inlay.

---

The only book I stole from the children's department of the library was a book about Brer Rabbit. There was several essays. One talked about how African-American storytellers deliberately used mismatched tenses with issues of time, as a running commentary on the live in the now or be killed sense of life in America in the late 19th and early 20th century. There are also the cases in John Ashbery's poetry with the subject of his poems changing gender pronouns just because. That also happens in that Green Day song, Basket Case. 
   People fill books with essays on these seemingly pointless techniques. But then, poets use these things, new tools, new concepts, new affects.

[TranquillityBase]

Never did drugs with any romantic partners.  Once upon a time, my great love when I was about 25, Reggie, found out I had a tab of LSD.  She wanted to be my "guide", but I suspected she had an agenda after she said "It's like truth serum".  Anyway one night when my housemate was gone, a Sunday night, on a whim, I took it alone.  I'd never done acid alone before.

I lived in a pretty rundown house in East Austin, a somewhat iffy part of town.  There was a full moon.  I don't remember much, except when it first hit, I ended up sitting in a fetal position on the livingroom floor, laughing hysterically.  I migrated to the bed, lay staring at the full moon, thinking about how I'd stolen Reggie from a guy who had been my supervisor at the library where we all worked, and laughing that I'd come out on top for once.  I actually respected the guy a lot, he was a poet who published a magazine called Interstate, even though he didn't seem to respect me very much.  He was married and Reggie was his extra girl.  It took a couple of years, but I had my short time romance with Reggie.  My only other vision was a rat tightroping across an electric wire from the detached garage into our attic.

Reggie was hurt that I hadn't let her be in on it.  I think she dropped me pretty soon after that.  So I guess it was a bad move, but I wanted to see God alone.  Or at least I didn't trust her motives.  And I did see God in the form of a rat.  Or myself.  Or something.  Wrote an early poem about that too.

One of my favorite lines from Self-reliance was the one about being the devil's child.  Not one of the great lines, but showed he had a sense of humor:

On my saying, What have I to do with the sacredness of traditions, if I live wholly from within? my friend suggested, — “But these impulses may be from below, not from above.” I replied, “They do not seem to me to be such; but if I am the Devil’s child, I will live then from the Devil.”

I saw that Ashbery has TWO Collected Poems (1951-1987 & 1991-2000) in the Library of America, both almost 1,000 pages.  Must be some really long poems in that second volume.  I don't think I can immerse myself to that extent, but I may get his Selected Poems.  I need something New and Strange right now.

________________________________________________________________________________

I'm finding that facing a life threatening dis-ease (possibly, it's early in the game I'll be playing for the next few months with doctors, lab tests and my own instinct for self-preservation) I'm actually having moments of inner peace that I haven't experienced before.  Of course, no one really believes they are going to die, once it comes down to it.  There's always something hopeful to grab hold of.  Or you simply exhaust your mind, taking it as far as you can know/go.  

I asked the I Ching specifically what hopes I should be nurturing and I got the "Peace" hexagram, which of course can be read in two very different ways.

It's finally autumn here.  And I saw my first flock of starlings.  Cold is a good remedy for anxiety.  Just keeping warm leaves little time for choking (where the word anxiety originated).  

____________________________________________

I watched a good exorcist film recently, Deliver Us from Evil, mainly worth watching for Sean Harris' possessed Iraq war veteran.  I originally watched it because I'm a bit gay for Eric Bana.  But the exorcism scene is worth sitting through the film for.

[rowens]

America has a power that makes certain people stand out, even the Everyman. The power comes of being ridiculous and naive and believing, deep down, that you're the best. The rat backed into a corner, with nothing else to lose, a feeling of relief that comes over us, even if we've never read Emily Dickinson, and we ball our fists and smile and, like Al Bundy, say "Let's rock."

This is the American Pragmatic Transcendental. We stole our God from the Jews and the Christians as sure as we took this Land from the Mexicans and Indians, and our guilt only strengthens our determination. Our youth is our maturity. The entire planet is an American Film Company, and even our personal defeats, alone and in tandem, see us going down in a blaze of glory.

The rest of the planet is our museum and our own continent is the world's amusement park. Fear, Death and Violence is one of our rides.

Who needs a Nazi in a Dictator Seat when you can have a Jew in a Director's Chair? 

And America is merely a paper champion. 

Whatever I thought about I felt. Fear, Pain, Guilt, Grief. I was a good wrestler, both as grappler and in the brawling with whatever is handy style. The neurological problems made me dangerous in the ring and behind the wheel. I walked, got rides, used buses and trains. I wandered through woods and up and down roads and slept on park benches. Then more women and their witchcraft that they're barely aware of twisted my emotions. I went on medication and got fat. I not only had no coordination skills, I was now out of shape and ugly. So played the inner games. Drugs and alcohol and smoking and insults and shameless flirting. I acted out Marx Brothers movies wherever I went. I didn't have W. C. Fields' juggling skills, but I had his sight gag and dangerous stunt abilities, and the machine-gun wit of Groucho Marx, and no filter for race or sex or religion or any thing of any kind. 
That burned all my bridges. And then I took to the ways of Diogenes, and returned to working out like in my wrestling days. Lost the excess weight. Did magical rituals to balance my competing neurologies, allowing my left hand to know what my right hand is doing. 
What I've stumbled upon is the Comedy of Cruelty. Art, Wrestling, Poetry, Magic. This is named after Artaud's Theatre of Cruelty, an Experience, like a Mass or a Mystery Rite, a drama of tension and release. The Narratives and Characters and Plots and Symbols aren't important. Experience itself is. All present are being provoked and evoking joyous and disturbing things from within and all around. 
   Why? There is no why. Pure Experience. Not merely in a book or on a screen or stage, the whole of the world. The Cruelty is what is sacrificed, the very possibility of Cruelty as being inflicted or being suffered. A snuffing out, yes, the word suffered brought that word snuffing to mind, of Cruelty through Comedy. Transfiguration by Embrace.




I see that there is never any choice and that if there is such a thing as death, we're all dead already. Life and Death are simply metaphors, anyway. Like when the giant squid alien hit the Earth, in Watchmen, though it was only a fabricated design of Ozymandias, the warring nations leagued together, as the processes of the mind and body, bacteria, cell and parasite, to give the doctors and their probing instruments hell, and cast out the Djinn of the Disease of the Moment, and get on down the road with our eyes, the same ones we had since childhood, looking toward the sequel.

[TranquillityBase]

While waiting for Ashbery's poems to arrive, I'm reading, for the umpteenth time, Che Guervara's Bolivian Diaries.  "Comedy of Cruelty" indeed.  There is soemthing magnificent about Che's hopeless, completely Quixotic Bolvian crusade.  Almost like the Passion of Joan of Arc.  And after you read the introduction by Daniel James about the realities he was refusing or unable to realize, to read his diary entries, with their banal, hopeless details about digging tunnels and marching through the jungles along the Nancahuazu, the fuck-ups and frustrations, the periodic moments of battle against a happless peasant conscripted Bolivian army, until the American trained professionals arrive to squash him like a fly, is to feel the ultimate pointlessness of every crusade, before and after.

Poems are little private crusades against the incomprehensibility of the world.  At the end of every poem, we are left like Che, wounded and waiting to be finished off.  Nonsense poems are the exception; with those we can turn into angels and fly above the fray.  Which is why I have moments when I think Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear are more worth reading than anything else.

Who needs a Nazi in a Dictator Seat when you can have a Jew in a Director's Chair? 

This where, were we sitting at a table together, I would hammer the table with my fist to indicate enthusiastic agreement.

I try not to think much about "America".  America is death to the tenth power.  We project it across a whole world.  Of course, it's not our fault.  We've been thrust into this movie like so many film-struck extras, eager to catch a glimpse of ourselves on Yahweh's Imax screen, but we mostly wind up on the cutting room floor.

[rowens]

Your descriptions are summed up by the end of Escape From New York.

---

TranquilBase, 
To talk of mythmaking and creative correspondences, when you hear that thing said about YHVH saying I Shall Be when and where I choose to be, can it cross your mind that that statement is much the same as I AM ad hoc ad libitum, and to have the continuity that's not continuity have Jesus say that I and the Father are One and Does not your Law say that you are all of the likeness of the Father, is to say that we are all instances of a Consciousness of the world? 
   We are all the Consciousness of the world, all the head of the Snake that is the Cosmic Circle?
I've Spoken of It. The Mirage is It. It's Impossible to not Identify with It. It is Identity. It has no Identity. The Great Orgasm, there is no Mirage, no Identity, no It. Consummation of Vital Living.

[TranquillityBase]

"ad hoc ad libitum".  You've used the at phrase many times.  I tried to translate it and failed.  I come up with "for this as you wish".  What exactly is your translation?  Remember I'm a Poundian, looking for exactitude.

I just looked up "exactitude" to make sure I was using it correctly.  Their sample sentence was "It is not possible to say with any scientific exactitude what a dream means."  Freud would disagree.  How dare they try to subliminally deny Freud!

Whatever you think of Freud, his Interpretation of Dreams is to me one of the great treatises of liberation.  But that's another story.

Is the Mirage different from Maya?

[rowens]

There's a difference between Maya and the Mirage as there can be differences between anything. Everything is the Same and Different. The Mirage is general, Maya is specific. All that anyone knows and perceives is a Mirage. Maya is how and what those things are.

The Holy or Divine Names or Titles in Hebrew are Verbs. To say that these Verbs are personified as God or Gods in the stories and in experiences is only one way to view, experience things.
Maya is measurement, seeing things in certain ways for functional reasons.
The Chosen People are Chosen since they are telling the stories. Anyone telling such stories can apply the Chosenness to themselves. Stories are told in different ways, and certain stories were chosen as Canon for the Holy Bible. The Christian Bible chose four of the same story, and for good reason. And none of the stories are necessary, the many stories are simply told because people can. Let's take these Materials and make them do this and then this, and so on. There's forceful life, energy expanding to new experiences, new stories. All of these stories are the colorations of this Drive.


You have this Energetic Drive which is what we consider Reality, and we are Consciousness, that is a Reality Conscious of itself, and there are all the Materiels that are apparent to us that we use to mold a Reality to do things in and with. These are stories, these are experiences. 

These are Selves. Personalities, Personal Narratives, Social-Historical Narratives, Scientific, and so on.


This is the same thing with Dreams, only Dreams have less "Material" Baggage. Dreams may not be more real, but they are more realistic. Lucid dreams are fine, and many dreams are lucid and "not lucid" at once, the dream that is the creative drive is what we are all the time and don't know and are afraid to want to know. It's easy for us to get in the way when awake, and not so difficult for that to affect our dreams. The word Material comes from Mater or Mother. Freud sees this Personified Mother as the Material having Control over us rather than the other way around. 


The Book on dreams packs a punch, even a useful one, it's still an attempt to Canonize Materials for a Chosen People: in this case, Psychoanalysts.