Dove descending interior old Augustus Lutheran Church Sanctuary, founded by Henry Melchior Muhlenberg, c. 1743 Providence (Trappe) PA, 18 Sept 2012.

26 February 2024

Czech tour @ Chasing Sunsets : An Anthology of Travel Memories

                                                                

A reprint of the elimae piece of 2006 at Chasing Sunsets 2024, 41-52, viewed with the illustrations submitted with the piece not printed. here
 

Elbogen cannonball garden.

05 December 2023

Fifty Years in the Church of Poems

"To live well and write about it in whining poetry."  Sir Philip Sidney. Apology for Poetry.

if we call this instead of Calender, Church, it is a bow to Fr. Chiniquy, Fifty Years in the Church of Rome, where he includes among this half century the assassination of Lincoln. Since I have done JFk, why not  include his Fifty. Since I also have done 50 years beyond the subterranean basement of them all. I did my wife about it too, for she and I have done 50 years in the institute of our own.This is an exercise in time travel and harpazos, callings out. If there is a premise that for all life to be worth something, one life must, then to document one life, or make the effort to, can justify the whole according to this, even recognizing that every life must also be unique. It is in those aspects of the unique that they all gain value.

There is also a belief that older people are conservative, maybe, but not in their memories and thoughts. What do they have to lose? So why not speak, even if imprudently, rashly. There is an experience of years behind it. What happens in understanding the result of our lives fifty years from now when the acts and passions of the 20s are 80? What happens to the rationalization of motives? What were they anyway, the passions, the people? What happened to them, to wake up to find them gone, leaving  legacy and memory and obituaries and that the landscape once inhabited unrecognizable, the spirit of the times dead too, the roads, the tools by which people made their lives, books for example, like this one, poems about life in America, 1973-2023, and Austin c. 1968- 1980.

If nobody minds and I don't see it matters if they do, the substance of these poems reflects the place. It was on top the bare limestone rock of the Balcones Fault on this old sheep ranch in the wind and rain, land and birds, scorpions and septic tanks, sheep and heat and a hundred airs lying in a hammock between oleanders that the essence of this vision of America/Ameryca and nature formed, that these poems began. The trappers of dogs and gunfire on Hungry Hill and old stills echoed the Chartiers in habitation, rocks, slag, runoffs, but the massive flights of migrating birds, robins by the ten thousands in Feb and the smell of wild cedar made the place. As Levinas says, the place becomes the face,  in poetry, not what I am, none of us know what we are, whether faithful or not, rescued from death to life still being done, which taken at its highest means lives hid with Christ in God, which has to be said to account for the unveiling that unfolds.

It's important to be born into a good family, recognizing good as in the eye of the beholder and what one thinks good another will not. So better to say it's important to make your idea of family good and increase from there. I hardly remembered that this was called America 2000, a presage of the millennial end of all the overpopulation and climate syndromes, race and tyranny, commercialism and war that the actions of the secret agencies would foster. People believed that Crosby Stills Nash Young Zappa Morrison and Beatles had integrity in search of the higher life, not that they were government implants to prepare an emotional program to mass build the collective. It is a record too of how much i believed of any of the programming and if that was believed then presents the question, what do I believe today?

These poems reach their fifty years forward from 1973 to 2023. Some stem from previous stints in Fayettenam, The Dog in Hay Street, or Asphalt Goose, others before that in central America, To Roosevelt, and in between in sojourn in Iowa city, corpses. Working on the  Univ paint crew summers one day gave occassion to spend time in the Cadaver Room where a half dozen lat open on metal tables and many others submerged in deep coffin like cement resevoirs. Even older poems begin with St Brenden, Erik the Red, Columbus and Raleigh so the brakes of time are off, but back then, mythically, mystically the presage forward to 2000, at which we laugh because we are still here!!! make their entrance in that history. So there these stops in the origins of America stand for many more all of us made, as in Vittore Baroni's La Biblioteca Utopica, where Calendar was exhibited with books of 170 authors from 26 countries, "art done by everybody for everybody...aligned and transversal planes that frequently cross and mingle, an underground tradition fueled by grassroots activism in continuous transformations filled with insets, cards, postals, lithos, stamps, photos and more. The books of the Utopian Library were conserved afterward in an archive in Viareggio, a little like the way these are here on Amazon after  "Fifty years ago today I picked up two boxes of / A Calendar of Poems: Encouragements for Such as Shall Have Intention to be Undertakers in the Planting of the New Found Land, Set Forth with Divers Reasons and Inducements, 500 copies from Express Press in Austin.George Bruce Moses (named for George Bruce Halsted?) (28 May 1950-22 May 1975)http://records.ancestry.com/george_br... did the cover of A Calendar of Poems (December, 1973) He had been painting large canvases of heads, glistening white with red outlines when he was stricken. Another contemporary, Victoria Donner (PMc) provided the photographs.

The death of the humanities had not yet occurred in Athens then but was imminent, symbolized I supposed by my being compelled to change from linguistics to English to keep the teaching assistant ship I held. Austin was renowned then in the humanities of classics, philosophy and linguistics. Amateur status is what  William Arrowsmith at the Athens of Texas in those years recommended for teachers of the humanities, “the formal discourse of the amateur” who visibly lives by his convictions...a free and unindoctrinated habit of mind, provisional and complex according to the nature of its subject, a habit of mind based on knowledge and love." This advice was given against the reigning practice that before teachers of humanities are let loose on the world they are kept quietly in enclaves, like zen masters camping in buildings. You don’t meet them at the 7-11 with migrants, immigrants, homeless vets and people who ride the bus. Teachers of humanities don’t think their qualifications fit them to live in the world. Whether the poets they study lived as they do, there is no arguing with a professor. Exceptions are found, selective memory will occur, rhetorical points of view flourish. How the poets lived is like asking about Basho. Dismal responses of the closed shop of  intellectual produce, the artist and poet must have help to succeed, believe grants, fellowships, contracts, appearances, prizes will ensure the right things are done. That is how Dickinson knew to call the Department when she heard that fly in her house.

I had been in and out of amateur status, dishwashing and gardening, but an overwhelming need for cash and the coming birth of a daughter, required a re-up. That  summer I canvassed the executive committee with intent. It was not an automatic hire because years before, as explained by one who remembered me from previously disrupted seminars, I had been let go for the sin of enthusiasm. There were just not any jobs in the evening school. This was to avoid being actionable. So with two hirings, the second at intervention of John Silber, but also two firings from the same department, the issue need proof. English had initiated a grade inflation index by then, because English was guilty of puffery. If you got a 1 you graded the student just like everybody else. Less than a 1 and you were tougher. Greater than a 1 and your student evaluations were suspect quid pro quo. I had one year as that Adjunct Temp, for they had forgotten my earlier incarnation in the linguistics department and talk of unionizing 600 TAs when the department chair started the Association of Graduate Students in English to forestall such union. I was elected co-chair of the Association on a platform of producing poetry readings to pay cash to the reader, which produced three occasions. I quit after these, didn't finish that august term. All was forgot, hired thrice but fired only twice. To win the teaching award was automatic loss of down. 

Spiritual enlightenment could be had on the Quadrangle in those years. Raja Rao, his nimbus intact, thought the philosophy bldg built on top of Indian burial mounds. There were extensive steam tunnels under the campus. G. V. Desani took disciples, if they would sit on their feet. An easier form of Tibetan insight if you would not verbalize the think, not think, cardinal, but instead think, bird-birding. At Hare Krishna you could dance and eat sugar but should not engage in sex. Tarot and Golden Dawn were available for a song, not the song of deliverance of David, but astral batteries that came with controlling the universe. As one said to me, "you're not Christ? I'm sorry to hear it."

Illumination was of the people glowing from the mushrooms harvested from cow patties in Bastrop. A botany student ahead of his time was growing salvia divinorum in the botany department's greenhouse, all leggy though. One of the employees I had at the drug garden brought in his banisteriopsis to take the air and sun for the time he worked. He wanted to keep his lunch in the refrigerator, but I had a fear of its radioactivity. We did have a good supply of rats. They went for the seedlings but not the ayahuasca. Just to keep current I read the McKennas along with Schultes. Datura and amanita were not allowed on campus, but there were families of communal living. You could experience big brother too, and if inclined to mere sensuality and had connections, recruited on a select basis, could sail with professors on their yachts. Three different people in those years, I don't like to call them men, offered me their wives for the night or day in exchange.

These may not be exactly what Arrowsmith had in mind when he argued for "a free and unindoctrinated habit of mind," but they were cheek and jowl with the “timid, unimaginative, debased, inefficient, [and] futile”...humanists who “had betrayed the humanities.” He said that the central “enabling principle” of the humanities was “the principle of personal influence and personal example.” New chairman Joe Moldenhauer declared in that last year of my Temporary status that no member of the English department could at any time talk to the press. Authority makes them mad. He ate this decision every day for lunch. That was for the tenured. Nobody imagined Temps could talk.

Arrowsmith called for “visible embodiments of the realized humanity of our aspirations, intelligence, skill, scholarship; men ripened or ripening into realization." No doubt he would say men and women or he would have no pie. But the gender wars  raged among the elite, "“timid, unimaginative, debased, inefficient, [and] futile,” because the humanists “had betrayed the humanities.” Not to get too far ahead, “liberal institutions immediately cease to be liberal as soon as they are attained,” quoted Ted Kaczynski. But  the visible embodiment of realized humanity is more common than the superman ideal. Realized humanity in self sacrifice, family, children, fidelity, prayer, participating in the universe, the community, planting trees is controlling those urges toward denigration and anger that decompose the human fabric.

Jarry

It was poetic research, finding the gold tree as a mine in the earth from renaissance Italian speculations, a metaphor, like the last chapter of Donne's image of Virginia is a metaphor of the new man. You can refer this kind of science to Steve McCaffery, Canadian Pataphysicist, but I did not know him at the time. My introduction to Jarry’s Ubu was through Roger Shattuck's and William Arrowsmith's students who were offended by the coinage of the term King Ubu instead of Ubu Roi. How they puffed their Ubu Raw! Which may be patapuffery. They were real pataphysicians. One was a priest at a something catholic church that follows Bishop Ledbetter. These fellows put marijuana into the monstrance on the altar during mass to give it a charge and smoked it after. What of such antics when at Texas cloverleafs prickly poppies bloomed and acolytes were out at night slitting the sides of blossoms? Solid Jarry stuff, disappearing rituals in the Texas capitol rotunda, astral batteries to heighten their power to identify the angels that surrounded a particular customer.

Do you think three or just one archangel? And whose biding does it? The head of all these was robed in gowns for services which ordinary people could also attend. An ex-military whose wife was psychic. She asked me once, it being early August, what an eclipse meant, there was one due later that month. I regret saying, "death." Her husband died two weeks later after celebrating the mass; he still had his robes on from that  meeting with the altar boys.

Coltrane

All these believed more or less from beginning to end that all possible world histories will simultaneously come into being, that “the kundalini of the entire human race is rising.” I didn’t seek this theme, not because I missed ZARG on first reading because my copy had the page ripped out of that edition, no doubt it hides in somebody's wallet hoping to recognize the dragon, "the old Midgard Serpent whose awakening shatters the illusion of reality in the old Norse myth." Its equivalent is the Coltrane Church of Electroshock "anointed universal sound from the throne of heaven incarnated in one Sri Rama Ohnedaruth mighty mystic known as Saint John Will-I-Am Coltrane." If these don't buzz, hey, there’s no need for the faery, no need for Zarg, we have Bilbo’s Smaug and the dragon of Revelation.

Zarg

What is the collective unconscious living entity that personal consciousness is to lose itself within like cells in a body? Face to face with this alien entity billions of soul-stolen minds entered Old Testament times, but not as a united nation at war with another ethnic, as Israel at Jericho. No angel goes before to drive out the Canaanite scientist, the Amorite artificial intelligence, the Hittite invoked alien ET demons, the Perizzite government manufactured super soldiers, the Hivite DNA revived hybrids and the Jebusite systems of GMO, chemtrail, HAARP technolgies, but not a people to "put off the ornaments" of the world we wear, and expect "the cloudy pillar" to descend (33.9).

Alters for altars, EMR for images, NLP for groves. The collective unconscious is insane. But as for temptation of riches, absorption in the drugged over mind, oblivion and acceptance by the masses, to whore their deities. No molten  (34.17) refers to "all that opens the matrix" (19).  The law given again as we go up to this new Jericho is the first battle of a war that ends at the opening of the seventh seal. Ai and Jericho controlled the ascent. Had Joshua asked his advisors they would have said don’t go. No one would have come up with this. Government undergrounds, HAArps, chemtrails, genetic modification, disinformation, it helps immensely to have a target of all these in one head subsuming individuals, freedoms, lives, Zarg in short, the slogan under many flags. KILL ZARG! 
When tracking the opposite of reality the probabilities of improbabilities is 100%.

Raymond Chandler saw it, "Her teeth parted and a faint hissing noise came out of her mouth...she hadn't move when I got back with the glasses. The hissing had stopped...I looked away. Then I was aware of the hissing noise very sudden and sharp...the hissing noise came tearing out of her mouth as if she had nothing to do with it...she called me a filthy name...her teeth chattered and the hissing noise was sharp and animal...the imprint of her head was still in the pillow, of her small corrupt body still on the sheets. I put my empty glass down and tore the bed to pieces savagely." Big Sleep.

Grendel’s Mother

You can mine this ground if you mine it yourself. Knowing the strata is like knowing the generations that descend, if you don't know them and deem yourself a unique version. Like a modernism puerile to recognize that the thing founded upon the thing it considers out of date is just ignorantly past, it doesn't make a genius not to know how in the history of families one came into being, not hatched full blown  from the head. Grendel's mother slobbering in her cave is still Grendel's mother. You cannot escape it even if you put it to death. Toss the coin again, write on top of old precepts, maxims, resonant with the past. Scrape it off and see what's underneath. This is a form of classicism, to retell the telling of a thing over again and again through centuries.

The permutations of this, the transmutations are interesting themselves. The Welsh poet Taliesin was told and retold and retold, accreting and growing all the time. The corpus I want to retell might be Aeschylus, or Grimm, or the Mabinogian, but changed from the first likeness like a memory not from the original but from the last recollection. Sometimes I don't know what the tale is I'm retelling until later. Sometimes, consumed with the technique or speaker of the tale I want to hear mules talk and get up in the middle of the night to hear Kafka's dog or ape who becomes a man. In "The Burrow" the animal speaks of itself so that we at all points consider him a man, in the third person along with Josephine the mouse singer. Jonathan Swift figures big in retelling some concrete version of a myth about humanity but without referring exactly to it. The myth underlies and surrounds all he says about his giants. The same is true but ever in a more ethereal sense with Blake's fairies and giant forms. I rode these torrents to wrestle parables and allegories while singing, "oh who is an ocean to bathe the world's sores in?" To retell the telling once more is paragory. Reuchlin in the renaissance coined "the wonder-working word” to change the structure of reality, the word spoken, not arcanely in secret, but openly, what you hear in the ear from the roof.

Cited. The New Criterion June 1994. William Arrowsmith: a recollection. By James Tuttleton.

The rating review on Amazon, titled Ameryca the Beautyful, said, "a poem of the fictional nation called Ameryca. It is a lyric narrative, by which is meant that it tells its discovery in verse form, short lyrics, against the background of the discoverers of 16th and 17th century England. The first half of the book, the six months of the calendar year from March to September, includes in order, St. Brendan, Erik the Red, Columbus, Sir Walter Raleigh and the natural origins of that world, the sun, the fly, the orphan. The second half of the calendar is a time shift describing the last six decades of 20th century America, the i instead of the y, a disillusion of the naive former months.The poem as a whole leaves us to ponder what we are and what we believe about Ameryca, America and ourselves [Amazon Review]. This review will not search on Google but will as "A Calendar of Poems" on DuckDuckGo.  
 
It seems axiomatic that the super rich environments like Austin must exist in college towns, where a majority are of entry class. Some are stars with whom I had significant run ins. Because of Dean John Silber Austin had more, but I went there only because the application was free. Texas rep was, you need a gun. Later it was, scorpions. All false of course. I plucked my wife from their best and brightest. Among all these best and brightest intellects what passes for humanism must have only the one quality, freedom.
America 2000 was the title in proof published to capture the spirit of the time with its enthusiasms and people standing all about implicit within, like the Austin poets, none of any particular importance, Fred Asnes, who I ran into on the Drag on a visit years later and had him sign his These Little Worlds, where he wrote I was "fundamentally unchanged," which I put together with Tom Goar, who dedicated his poems to me with the poem, Straw in the Wind, "someday the whole earth will burst into song and dance to the music as you walk along" even if he later disowned the prospect  (1942-2019). Fred had given me the contact at the radio station KUT on campus to give a reading on air, which I did of Calendar, right before I went back to London and Wales, Summer of 1974.  The tech bought the book. "Cover" he says, sold him. Raymond Louis Neubauer Senior Lecturer in Biology (1942–2014), once stored all his hundreds of classical record albums with me for a year!, John Cullen, Translator who I had so many fireside chats they were never equaled (1942-2021), Mike Adams (1946-2022) Director of the Dobie Center, Tom Cable, who played in the softball games and never failed to get a hit,  Ron Weddington, during the Roe years with trial lawyers and writers at Texas Monthly, softball games low down, plus faculty higher up, Ambrose Gordon, Willis Pratt, Tom Whitbread (1931-2016) and then way higher up Ilya Prigogine and related Raja Rao, how does one become two (1908-2006) and G. V. Desani (1909-2000) Douglass Parker, especially his parageography—the study of imaginary worlds (1927-2011) and the mix of science and poetry where candidates of physics and linguistics gardened next to each other at community gardens that allowed also impossible low brows and dishwaahers at the Clayton Foundation were invited to Dr. Reed's dinner parties for his post docs and riposted Shakespeare's sonnets around the punch bowl with quantum chemists from Hungary. There are literally hundreds of poets who claim Austin in so many mags then, concerned in "proving that the literary and intellectual life in Texas far surpasses the state's stereotypes" as Dave Oliphant's bio professes. None of my work drank at that bar. In that day Rome inn waitresses biked at midnight to their lover’s beds, after telling Frank Erwin to pay his bill, and roughnecks, administrators for the Clayton Foundation for Biochemical Research, Lester Reed, and aikido Bill Lee, born the same day and year, whose Uke I was in those classes, the person who "receives" a technique, where I split two 19 hr a week jobs between Clayton and pharmacy heads, tractors and herbs of the Experimental Drug and Herb Garden, expedited by Dean Emeritus Henry Burlage who also wrote books on Texas herbs. He has just published his History of Pharmacy (1978) so as a reward they gave him a pretend resuscitation of the Garden until his death when they had deeded the acres to the U's archery range to get a new Pharmacy Bldg under Dean Doluisio.   and fault lines above the the Balcones and below, so while all the inane famous now base themselves in Austin, they are segregated. There some traces of Gnosticism crept in like Robert Lloyd Williams, aka archbishop (1942 - 2019). In 1973, with the blessing by Metropolitan William Brothers, the brotherhood elected as its new abbot, the monk John (LoBue).  He transferred the monastery to a new location – to West Milford (West Milford, New Jersey).  That same year, “the Synod of Bishops of the Orthodox Western Rite” came into communion with one of the independent Old-Catholic Vagante bishops, Robert Williams (Robert Lloyd Williams), ordained by William Daw (William Daw) in 1972.  In 1977, Brothers and Joseph re- ordained him with the name of Hilarion for the Archdiocese of Texas, where he had a small monastery of St. Hilarion in Austin. https://readerdanielsharing.blogspot.com/2014/09/an-expose-of-vigante-milan-synod-and.html  
 
Remember in those days you got if from books or people, there was no YouTube so you really learned. wh esposa in that dayn was prone to such being rh negative so we got invites to Edgar Cayce groups and Silva groups and later to the lib cath church groups There was also invitation to the excellent Germanic linguistics sagas and thought of Hollander, the Lehmanns, Poleme and Decamp.
 
 Calendar appeared in  Vittore Baroni's La Biblioteca Utopica, books of 170 authors from 26 countries, "art done by everybody for everybody...aligned and transversal planes that frequently cross and mingle, an underground tradition fueled by grassroots activism in continuous transformations" complete with a 30x13" color poster of all the exhibit book covers on one side and the other, plus a 44 p booklet 6x8" filled with insets, cards, postals, lithos, stamps, photos and more, as all his work of first order (a cura di Vittore Baroni, Near the Edge Editions, Viareggio, 2008, the Utopian Library of Arte Postale! 96), stored after completion of the exhibit in the E.O. N. archive in Viareggio where the books that were part of the Utopian Library will be conserved.
 
I showed a mimeographed proof of Calendar, titled America 2000, to T. M. Cranfill who printed three in the Texas Quarterly Autumn 1973. I met Gunnar Hansen of Austin and Reykjavik and he put others in Lucille 3, Spring 1974, which he edited before starring in Texas Chainsaw Massacre, along with, "Prospero, Sweet Prince" by Tom Goar and "Devil Blues" by John Cullen. Two weeks after publication of Calendar I flew to London and then to Wales and began translations of the Taliesin Poems that appear in Red Head. I came back from Wales to finish the dissertation, did a stint running the drug garden, got married, had a baby daughter, and went to Dallas for Eden a natural resource to med school, then on to the life practice since.
 

A Postscript

Calendars portray the passage of times and seasons. This is an American calender and portrays the passage of the times and seasons of America from its first mythic discovery to the end of the 20 th century, what is felt to be a round number, a millennium or two.

The title of this volume comes from a work by Sir Robert Gordon of l625 by a mostly similar name. That was an inducement to colonization, this is a celebration of selected "colonizers" if by that we were allowed to include such as St. Branden , Eirik the Red, Columbus, and Sir Walter Raleigh, who comprise the first four "months." Thus in a series of dramatic musings the lyrics attempt to portray what they might have felt or thought in that most essential part of their voyages, the dream, the sacrifice, the betrayal. .July and August, by mystical custom, are exempted from historical narrative and purport to celebrate the new world creation itself. It is hoped that the reader will also mystically discern what spiders, flys, sun, orphans and snakes all have in common.

Nowhere is there precedent for breaking the year in half, opposing spring and summer with fall and winter, but that is what occurs. The first six months occur more or less in the time frame of centuries and moral innocence while the last six months occupy the final decades of the 20th century and the millenium which we thought would never end. These auger from decadence toward deliverance, and bespeak a moral experience.

Whether innocence or experience, all the months are juxtaposed with seventeenth century contexts since the purpose is to recreate the thought and feeling of not only the 50's, 60's, 70's, 80's, and 90's but to view them from the point of view of the original naivete of those discoverer's times to see what betrayals, confirmations, prophecies were fulfilled.

There is a lot of sowing and reaping in these new worlds, grief and pathos in the sowing of the seed, Eirik the Red and Sir Walter Raleigh both losing their sons there, and grief and pathos too in the reaping, for all the sons lost in the planting.

And with it always occurs the promise of hope, new birth, the mediation of light and lights, sun and moon, red and gold that shine upon the plants, both seed and fruit.

Seed time is spring, the planting in the new world imagination of everything according to its kind, March through July, depending on climate and then comes the reaping, in September, the last decades of a millenium, fall and winter, our lot, fruit upon fruit.

Likewise in the dramatic musings of the harvest we try to tell what seed was sown, of presidents and empires, wars, commerce and self-infatuation, September and its citizens of October, fantasized optimists gone for the gold or is it property? Call it love and old hardened psychedelic and the revolution, followed by November and, in worse taste, the new vulgarity, who could do it justice? the destruction of life as we knew it.

These contradictions, offenses terminate in the new day, ha, that comes to its end or beginning in December, I mean the year as they sell it, and you find out, if, well, you're confused. It's a holiday to get away. The joke's on who? Chickens, roosters and pigs. That's right.

January, new year old, is the judgment and reason for the Virginian voyage all over again, but this time where to go? Old for the old-fashioned, new for the new, space-age time and go. How to escape? Read the next book. The context goes full circle in February with the old Anglo-Saxon verse, "The Husband's Message," but this voyage is of a heavenly visitation as if some new St. Branden were to begin a heavenly navigation.

Finally the 90's didn't end as we thought, they're still going.



I am of an anabaptist faith as it turns out., three occasions. first dedication as a Mennonite by Rev. Henert, then about 12 sprinkled  by a rev. Ewalt at Crafton pres. church in order to join the church. My fathere and I met him in his study and i think i remember kneeling to receive a sprinkle of water from a canteen that he had taken from the Jordon River. this felt  sacred and affected me some days, but not permanently, So I chose to be immersed at Grace Chapel one Sun night to fulfill what I thought right, which was performed in that season, but the baptism that counts I received in the back of a tent of Oliver B. Greene on both knees where I had knelt, duplicitously to quite smoking, but when i knelt , the electric began and has not ceased ever. There were anointings before this at 11 or so when the mantle of not to kill fell on me one morning on a Saturday when I was out walking early by the Thornburg school. just to be out walking early seems peculiar now, but no more so that making gunpowder and  rockets, or any other acts, like serving while in college  a coop period with the Latin American Mission. it is all these matters I account in these autobiographical texts.
 
I have serendipities of my own, both wives potters, living near water, Chartiers, creek, Iowa river, grand canal, in the wild desert and hill country. There are these harpazo's, sudden changes of residence, raptures, that punctuate this life and work. to seize upon, spoil, snatch away or take to oneself,” Beyond the obvious sudden realizations have the same effect as these, and there are many more of them, like the realization that in the Annexo in San Jose, peep holes gave access into the guests quarters so they cold be spied upon,. Any sudden realization will do, even long after the fact,, like the dream I had the morning I woke and saw my first wife's lover, asked her who it was T. Medina, and then when we went to the 8 o'clock classes, there he was coming up the walk. it was right before or after that I found his valentine professing seduction on her dresser and after her wooden affection in bed on that next encounter I told her I would never make love to her again, and never did. There are wannabe harpazos that don't come off, like the time in San Jose when I proposed the head of the student body, Tyrone, from panama, and I go uptown to look at the prostitutes that night, which was the first night the cenizo fell on San Jose, inches deep, so we didn't go. Divine deliverance? Harpazos are happened so often we might not see them. Every part of life is a harpazo. Donald Barnhouse's brain tumor on his last world tour that so changed his personality.  "A New Year's resolution published in Eternity, a magazine which he edited announced a determination33
Journal of Presbyterian History, 59:1 (Spring 1981)to modify his personal attitudes toward other Christians. He would be more "loving" and appreciative, less judgmental and
condemnatory than had been his custom. This in itself was
news—a fundamentalist with a changed attitude.
Or the charge against Arthur Glasser that he became a universalist in wikepedia  "open ended treatment of Acts 10 and 17 could lead people to assume that he believes people could be saved outside of Christ.[2]"or against Charles Finney, wikipedia again: implying humans can please God without the intervention of his grace.[22] Some consider his stance as Pelagianism. The wikis will revise you is the bottom line, but experiences will harpazo you. So take your pick.
 
Uses of rapture (Acts 8:39; 2 Cor 12:2, 4; 1
Thess. 4:17; Rev 12:5). Harpazo is translated “caught up” or “caught away” the five times (out of
thirteen) it appears in the Bible relating to rapture. The other eight times it is translated, “to
forcibly seize upon, snatch away, take to oneself or use force on someone.”3 In Acts 8:39, the
Holy Spirit “caught away” Philip after he ministered to the Ethiopian eunuch and placed him in
Azotus, some 20-30 miles away. In 2 Corinthians 12:2-4, Paul twice describes his experience of
being “caught up” to the Third Heaven. In Revelation 12:5, the man child of the Woman (usually
interpreted to mean, Jesus) was “caught up” to God and His throne. And in 1 Thessalonians 4:17,
the primary text for the Rapture of the Church, “we who are alive and remain shall be caught up
together with them in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air . . .” (together with them refers to the
“dead in Christ,” who were resurrected immediately preceding the Rapture).

Germantown,birth row houses, orphanages, blood among the flowers harpazo

Chartiers, 5 coal town, polluted creek, two track Pennsy, open spaces, remnants of coal mining, strip mining

Merion 17 serior yr h.s. new school lower Merion overflow, a harpazo out of the coal geting saved.

Drexel,18 coop jobs, business to English, asst profs from Penn getting Ph.d.s

Latin American Mission 1963 san jose costa rica coincideent with peace corp, intro to theology, quest for the historical, continuing influence from drexel profs to first class minds and committed lifves.

Harpazo again, sudden death of oldest brother, fis born, midnight flight, last yr, college, tennis team, Poetry apprentice of forms, applic to Iow and workshop, marrriage, take off.

Iowa more fist class minds 2 yrs M.A. connect with HSBC stafing,

Phila, NE, travel transition, 

190678 jan appt in fayettenam HSBC1. Sand Hills, teaching, Harpazo 3,firing

Phila, transition

Austin 68 Balcones fault linguistics Sagas poetry

10 November 2023

The Balls of the Bull @ La bête noire Sein und Werden

I worked in the cage. Thirty bookkeepers kept books to transcribe by hand trades posted each day. Brokers would present to the window, cashiers deliver checks out the door, which I survived to say this, that the pedestrians who familiarly touch the balls of the Bull for luck, and joke at the Horns, take their place in the world.... Some districts, Kolonia also called Motza, "below exempt," combined geography and prophecy in one brazen bull.  Fires set under the hollow bronze translated through a system of tubes and stops into sounds like a bellowing infuriated charge from the pensioners roasted inside.... here

Mt. Rushmore, Cherubim, Red Wall Limestone, Cheops @ Watershed Review Fall 2023


Two frescoes, two sculptures  here

20 September 2023

Libby: A Vision of Beauty @ Amazon

Libby. These ripostes of conversations with Anna Elizabeth Reiff advocate absolute soul liberty in the integrity of folk life. A watercolor artist, archivist, curator, New York buyer, Mennonite, intellectual woman and Pennsylvania Dutch radical, in the last years of her life that ended at 94 she contended in all the attributes listed here as an intellectual woman of wit. Considerations of this absolute soul liberty against a background of literature in Folk Life Weaving, The Image of God and Catechism of a Martyr are contained within.