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.
