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| On Top the Limestone. Conversion of the Impossible. The barn at Spicewood Springs |
Reflections in the Afterlife |
It makes a difference to the natives if you just drive into new environments from the outside, which is how I got to Austin in 1968. I had already known Philadelphia's Germantown,
the coal of Pittsburgh's Chartiers Valley, the Jersey Pine Barrens,
the rivers of Pennsylvania, Costa Rica, Iowa City, the black community of Fort Bragg's Fayetteville and Washington DC when I got to Austin. I stayed from 1968-1981, and then was gone to the desert where I belong.
Now that Tesla, Dell, and the US Army have taken every available piece of land in Austin and the philosophy department is political, it's time to remember what it was when the freedom hippies ruled. Probably more intellectual freedom than anybody has seen today, combined with an earthy feel, like a woman walking from the garden to her kitchen with a basket of tomatoes just picked. Today the anti-hippies antifa rule so don't doubt the power of antithesis. I wasn't much of a hippie. I wanted to explore and execute my own linguistic theories, but that's the point, there were many different ways of being. Beer, dope, soy burgers and the Armadillo are throwaway covers of Austin 68-74. It had many deeper plots especially the freedom. I got there in '68 after being fired precipitately a week before graduation as an instructor at a black college in NC when the black revolution hit. Six of us were fired, most of whom had only just been hired the year before. So I recovered a little that summer and cast applications about for grad schools, tried, Chicago, Johns Hopkins, Wisconsin and Austin, the last place on the list. It had no application fee. Wisconsin and Austin accepted in Linguistics but destiny selected Austin. When I walked on the campus carte blanc, a couple days before classes, standing outside Parlin Hall, I met an old teacher from Iowa, Warner Barnes the bibliographer, who said I should apply for a TA in English, which was the M.A. I had from Iowa. He had given me a job on the Mark Twain Project there after I wrote a complete annotated bibliography of C. S. Lewis for him. In Austin he completely rewrote the radical application I had made, which was accepted, and two days later I had two classes. To show how strange the days, the English official, James Ayres, said to him in approving the app, referring to the firing from FSC, "we have to cover for these guys" That's funny because Charles Cairns in acoustic phonetics said much the same, thinking me as a radical! I'm not. I'm a poet, which is way worse.
I. Limestone Topography
Nobody had rented this vacant house half way to the end of that property when we hit town in '68 and saw the ad. Invited to
see it, when the longhair stepped out of the MGB, even with a fine wife, the property had already been rented.
Folk think if you have
a fine wife you are a citizen, since women dignify and
ennoble, and children too. Later when Eden and I had three, our newborn crawling on the carpet under chairs
at Eagle's Nest could have
handed out business cards, but we had no business, and you can judge
whether we
had religion. People would seek us out because they liked their looks.
Ennobling of the other is true of poems. After Edwin Muir's, "The
Horses," I keep reading to
find another, but one is enough. A good poem
justifies a book. I sell ceramic sculptures no one buys at sales for ten bucks, but that win prizes in shows. Decorators buy them to resell!
It's either that or the bone yard before the hammer and the heap. But
the
good ones with traction pull up the rest. Autopsies name the date on
the bottom and it's off to some high style auction like Brunks. The
good is hard to find, and then it has to compete with all the other shards.Since art and people are the same, and I was already in love with the air and the Texas hills, the rock, the cedar and the prickly pear, scorpions being punch in the bowl. We went back to where we were staying on Guadalupe and called again, asked if it was rented. No, she said, so I confessed who I was and we went back. They were good folk and glad to rent nearly five years to me, embarrassed at their deception! The best part of a Calendar of Poems was written there.
That hill where Old Spicewood Springs Rd. descends to Bull creek made sledding for cars some winters. We had a VW bug, which gunned from the top of the hill and then braked, went down just like a toboggan. At the bottom of the hill along Bull creek Texas has now put a nature park called St. Edwards Park. The landlord, Lawrence E. Warren (1922-2013) and his wife Helen, owned that four acre strip along the brow of the hill from the precipice to the road, a good quarter mile along the western crest of Spicewood Springs, but the houses were set down so could not be seen. If you left the lights on at night you would be. One night some wayfarers stumbled to our porch saying their car had failed and needed a ride. Didn't leave much choice. One day some lanky dude walked right into the kitchen where Ann was working and was about to tune his act when I came around the corner. He began backing up.You may think you're coming in but you're not, you're going out. After all, it's the age of Aquarius.
All this rural is hopeless in the woke city Austin has become. Dell, the University, the Austin Futures Command, now Tesla all chose Austin at base for the population the U attracted and the culture summed by those hippies of the day who kept bibles in their homes to tear out pages and roll joints. Peace is a cover for war. The U being the first order of its corruption, I once held keys to five different UT buildings, Parlin-Calhoun, Pharmacy, Experimental Science, Drug Garden and one other among Spanish and Portuguese TAs, most interesting for their discussions of Russian Formalism. The destruction and rebuilding of all the communities around Austin completed the end of the rural, except Austin also wants to pretend to the pastoral age just like renaissance princes dressed up as shepherds. All the warehouses of the Pickle, the underground tunnels, the forgotten burial mounds, the laboratories and computer warrens amount to a perfect place for Cyber Command to rival the radius of MIT and Harvard where, “the one mile radius between Harvard and MIT is the center of the center of the deep state. Every evil starts between the one mile radius between MIT and Harvard” (Shiva Ayyadurai SGT Report, 2/23/20). So Austin that then was Athens became Sparta.
The neighbor next over on the brow of Hungry Hill was an excon who caged dogs for a living, starved them on collars and chains.The landlord used to carry a pistol at night in case he was out. One of those dogs slipped his chain from starvation and appeared at our door. He had a mashed front foot and walked with a limp. I named him Scorpio because it was high in the heaven when he came. Scorpio got his freedom by starvation and lost it by indoctrination. He stayed with us three years, but once, by accident, his old owner saw him. Scorpio saw him and jumped up on him in affection and barked. The guy took him back, tied him up and starved him some more. Joggy, our first black chow, escaped his captivity three times, but did the same thing after being seen accidentally walking with his mistress. A neighbor told the owner and the owner came to repossess the dog. Joggy jumped up on him and barked. Except he called him Tramp, so we both knew Joggy's nature. But Joggy made a second and a third escape. On the last one I hid him in the house and alerted the neighbor boy to tell the guy he hadn't seen him. So Joggy was made free.
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I once pruned a weedy retama to the south at the back of the property hard. Lawrence told Helen it would grow back even better, which shows his wisdom, because it got twice as big. He had a mind to develop the living space and added piles and piles of rock and dirt on top the limestone at the back and filled in a little hillside of the escarpment below the road.
Fox, the border collie
helping rock the house
Where these
piles were dumped I helped Lawrence put in new journal lines for the septic
and planted hokkaido pumpkins.I gave open invitation to people to visit this place whenever they wanted, to just show up, which happened often enough. It was something I was not constituted for but there was no need to entertain. Most of it was walking down the hills into the watershed that fed Bull Creek. I must have felt the privilege to live there entailed sharing it this way, for a lot of people took advantage.
The Potter |
Settling
in this unreconstructed
Hungry Hill home of stills, dogs, ex-cons with guns, I drove the ten miles
into town along Balcones or Lamar, streets and places presumed altered with
apartment buildings, banks and divided highways. Sparta takes over Athens by a
series of divisions. The U provides well. Statues of confederates, safe zones,
controlled speech, faculty politic literatures, never any poets though. Keep
the people arguing prevents them seeing that agent provocateurs that
work for Dell and Apple and el governmento are their leaders. And it helps to
have that with dope. It stimulates the alpha of suggestability. When I lay in a
hammock between
oleanders, the smell of dry earth when it rained, sheep and the retama
thorn tree with its yellow blossoms, and white lilies that came up from the
rock,
Fire broke out.
Sheets of flame shot up from my
hands.
Some kind of antidote has to be offered to have
self respect. Being true means being faithful. It makes no difference if these
are called names, enslavement is imprisonment. We must be faithful to responsibilities. The only
thing that remains is what they are, but they are the people and the land.
Teaching
By Spring '69 I held all night classes
on the Colorado River. This semester was begun with a trio of traveling actors I was associated
with coming in and introducing themselves serially as the teacher. Then the students
had to vote who was the teacher they wanted. These antics went to the
point where in the winter of 1970 the radio station called the English
department for permission to attend a class, the one where reading Blake one
stormy morning, just at the appearance of the words thunder and lightning, an
intense Texas thunderbolt struck outside. These with other effects caused one
student to call the radio station. The radio station called the English department and guess what happened then?
Such enthusiasms were mostly style, inevitably since no one knows much of anything in ourselves, and we can only make reference to the highest and best. So teaching Notes from the Underground or Book II of the Aeneid or Achilles at the siege of Troy or later the Psalms was really an introduction in how to participation with Matter of content. Participation. Belief. Faith, caused by a generalized love unleashed in us by something greater than our self, is the source of the naivete of this style. You can argue it was already there but it has to be activated, which leads to the iteration of its premise, fully and freely announced, that all people are geniuses and when they decide to be they are.
To the rational mind of the doctorate executive that is completely absurd. But when was reason a reason for being? And when did I care what they thought? To have people believe activates their gift, but poets are not admitted to the Republic. I was expunged a number of times. But the poetry of teaching, not the teaching of poetry leads to Content. When persons of that time or any other supply their own Content they find out how poor we all are. As in the opening of Jerusalem where Blake says To the Public, "The Spirit of Jesus is continually forgiveness of sin. He who waits to be righteous before he enters into the Saviour's Kingdom, the Divine body, will never enter there."
As
Nathaniel Tucker said absurdly when it was announced a week before
graduation that we were to be let go, in the evaluation conducted by the Assistant to the
President at FSC, Charles I. Brown, :
--The
mere idea of a young man his age having the intellectual abilities which he
possesses is almost frightening. His style and his ideas can only be compared
to those of an intellectual genius. There isn't any way to describe this man's
talents in a letter or a book, one would have to come in contact with this man
in order to believe that person like this really exists.
But
others in the evaluation were illuminating relating race and querulous at the
techniques:
--He
is a teacher who will make the black student wonder about. He does not speak
too highly of his own race, but seems to enjoy working with the blacks.
Questions enter the student's mind which take a long time to answer. I am still
puzzled about his concern for the blacks.
--Being a white man in a black school, he shows no sign of prejudice towards the black student.
It
is true that he is a white man, but what negro man or woman could you go to and
tell him your problems and ask for help? Not one! The negro man will give some
smart remarks and try to get fresh, which the negro woman doesn't like you
because you look better than she does.
But they caught the drift of this grotesque, so
--He
is different from other instructors I have had in his grotesque ideas. His
ideas are not really grotesque but they seem so different from any other
instructors. He wanted to make us think and there is no better way than to look
at happenings from a mixed up point of view.
--This letter's sole purpose is to introduce you to one......and to inform you about his ability as an English instructor. Being in the same room with this man for four months has played a greater effect on my whole life than the 14 years of schooling which I have had previously. His wonderful ability to make you think is something only experience can tell. The method he uses is not a "do or else" but of a desire to learn as much as possible in a short time.
An effort to curb these enthusiasms occurred at UT-Austin after this. In a series of seminars for beginning TAs to share assignments to help them "teach," shared by TAs around a table, participants blamed my wild assignments for its disbanding after only three meetings. That was Fall '68. The audacity of thinking and being astonishes crowd wisdom even more than then. I took an interpretation of teaching composition as expansiveness possible to the individual if constraints and restraints are thrown off. Which means, more or less that
thought is
hearing and overhearing and that it ranges from
1)
the tattle tale in your head who perplexes you with every fear and hope of self
promotion,
2)
to a deeper guy who gives pretty good advice,
3)
to lightning reflexes that in the moment are absolutely known, but unless
written on the spot are gone as if they never were,
4)
to thought visions that form in sleep and just after, crystal clear, but
when written down never get what they were (but if not written are lost lost
lost),
5)
to, and now this is interesting, “mistakes” that happen when you hit a key
wrong or skip or jump and the knife slips or we push too hard and break into a
whole other plane unknown before and the mistake transfigures the moment, the
misspelled word, the inadvertent space, the wrong cap,
6)
so that this creativity is all wrong to that first guy who had so many
opinions, but you can’t let him edit them out.
Going
with the deeper part requires even more faith, patience and work than before,
and you are already working full time, so one supposes further layers of
intention below these of which you are conscious, hence need more faith. So
much for sound and meaning.
At
Bishop College a decade later, assigned remedial English, I began to generate a
grammar on the board with the students from the way they spoke. The college reassigned
me in a few weeks to another class. The difference between reassignment and
reprimand were the new letters after my name. I thought and expressly said
then, and heretically held, that all human beings are geniuses , but this kind of teaching cannot be
tolerated and is a threat to every control. Who's going to win this
battle? I could not get back into the game after 1986. An interviewer at
Grand Canyon decided I would leave Phoenix after our residency was up. I
couldn't get an interview at any community college or university even as an
adjunct, otherwise I might be pushing double the number of firings. That I did not bother
saying any of this before probably indicates I had not unjeweled the
thought. In the afterlife these seem a series of performances on a stage.
II. Life as a Humanist
I retain these attitudes, thus avoiding the admissions of weariness celebrated
by Garrison Keillor and Billy Collins in their interview [31:00f] of
the horrid fate of the Humanist, whose intellects self-enturd their life of
mind. As Ambrose
Gordon says, "Supposedly correcting all these papers which tell me /
of sin, and of Melville/ ...I turn a blank page / to confront a still blanker
mind." Taking the view that literature is misery Keillor says "almost
everyone I know who taught college English wound up exhausted, burnt out,
bitter, tired of reading more term papers about Huck Finn. Collins (ambivalent,
sardonic): "That's me. How did you know? Reading student writing is
spiritually bad for you...reading bad writing is not good for your soul...has
deeply damaging effects over the years."
This dialectic of either/or is the proposition of nihilists. Hegel long exposed forced choice dictated to the masses by their rulers where, whenever the system is definitely in one state it is considered as being partly in each of two or more other states. This perfectly describes the maze of macro societal alters and personal ones. Schrödinger also had a mouse in that lab and there was a bear in the cage outside, with stacks of chimps unopened. These are the philosophers, gurus and grants who coach humanist illumination.
One
of the difficulties for chairmen, deans and tenured profs is that somebody
might take them seriously. In William Arrowsmith's
case on the classics at Texas, an untutored, unlettered plebeian might walk
unannointed onto the hero field. I was at least a peasant and didn't mean to be
anything at all and never thought about what I was doing except how to carry it
out. No consciousness whatever drove me to participate in the
fall of the Latin America Mission, the black revolution in the colleges of
North Carolina or in ceramic sculpture. I was just doing, not thinking. So when I
arrived in Austin in '68 I was doing.
Soul Bagger
Galen Strawson, current chair of Philosophy at Texas, speaks for the rulers, Dell and the Army, who ushers in the Argument as meaningless as the dialectic practiced on every global-national scale. The only meaningful treatment of dialectic is absurdity. So if they come up with contradictions, they will immediately spout Whitman in their own defense and claim they contain multitudes. But their bipolar minds oppose their hands against their feet, for the human being is far greater than their egregoris tell them.
The Soul Bagger compares to the dog trappers that used to live on Hungry Hill who would starve dogs in cages out of pure hate, or tie them up and not feed them until they were so thin they could slip their collars and chains. But when the escaped Scorpio saw his old owner by accident he forgot all about his starvation and jumped up to own the man. That's the obedience the cyborgs give their master.
The new Faustian Order of Austin forms the intellectual capital of Athens become Sparta. The 50 Dell VPs who make about 330K plus options are different from the arete of the previous William Arrowsmith's call for realized humanity, where the "equals of the heroes or great men of Classical epic and drama, men of areté," teach a free and unindoctrinated habit of mind.
The present philosophy chair, Galen Strawson, a philosopher who is cheaper than a Dell VP, is like a man who exits a Goodwill store with his packages and goes to his car, but misremembers which car it is, thinks it the old white pickup he drove the previous day. The Store is his birth in this parable and the misremembered car is his thought, but it was not misplaced, he was mistaken, so he can’t find it even though he passes it many times in the parking lot because of his thought. The day before, he learns the cops had found a stolen car there, so he wonders if his truck has been stolen. He's thinking of calling for help, thinks, if only it was the Subaru I drove, then I could beep it. Then he realized it is the Subaru. He does beep, and it does answer. He hath ears you cars can hear! When Liberal Arts Dean John Silbur was fired in 1970 he took Arrowsmith and his realized humanity along with Roger Shattuck and Carne-Ross etc with him to Boston College. Austin became a parable of memory voided and disturbed, and all the layers of electronic security increased beyond measure. This gaslighting of a narcissist projecting his sickness upon truth, as he says, is not responsible.
What follows from the extrapolation of Arrowsmith's ideas may not be exactly what he intended either for "a free and unindoctrinated habit of mind." It was probably not for the rustic shepherd. There are however undeniable political and social dimensions to poetry and art. Cheek and jowl with the “timid, unimaginative, debased, inefficient, [and] futile”...humanists who “had betrayed the humanities,” were drones Arrowsmith stated to be the central “enabling principle” of the humanities “the principle of personal influence and personal example.”
No matter if magnanimity is within the bounds of a discipline, after you are chosen to be professor you fit in, and if you go higher up the authority makes you mad. English chairman Joe Moldenhauer declared that year, 1980, that no member of the English department could talk to the press. That was for the tenured. Nobody imagined an untenured teacher could talk. Arrowsmith called for “visible embodiments of the realized humanity of our aspirations, intelligence, skill, scholarship; men ripened or ripening into realization" among the elite handmaidens of "“timid, unimaginative, debased, inefficient, [and] futile” humanists who “had betrayed the humanities.”
Visible embodiment of realized humanity is more common than superman allows in the shadow of Nietzsche lurking the halls of science and humanities. Realized humanity may lie in devotion and self sacrifice, hard work, the earth, family, children, fidelity, prayer, participation in the community, planting trees and controlling those urges toward denigration and anger that depose the human. The only doubt in Arrowsmith's call for reform for realized humanity is Nietzsche. Style pours itself out and needs to prove that there is something of value beyond itself and go find it. Let us admit this is education and go on exclaiming that content can only come from suffering and such immense hard work that no sensible person would seek it without compulsion. How and why that happens is creativity
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To
think the inner life of Rimbaud as important we must think the greatest among
us are diseased greatness off center. Maybe paradox is error, but nature
includes failure and these academics are failed states. Failed states fall.
A state is measured on a social scale, but a state of being is personal. Poet's
failed states have often been celebrated for their contaminants. But none of
this should imply that reason and order are not the rule. They are unavoidable
and cannot be ignored. They are the basis to all programming that is order. If
Plato must be overthrown to get to the real, the ordered metaphysic, whether
Plato or the PayPal Mafia, must never be those of the mind.
In "The Shame of the Graduate Schools: A Plea for a New American Scholar,” in Harper’s, published by the American Council on Education as “The Future of Teaching,” together with other pieces like “Arts and Education” and “Graduate Study and Emulation,” educational life in America was concluded “timid, unimaginative, debased, inefficient, [and] futile” because the humanists “had betrayed the humanities.” Graduate schools had grown indifferent to teaching and adopted a doubtful scientism intended merely to inculcate information.
Arrowsmith held that a mastery of scientific method “cannot help man live or die well.” Only the humanities could do that, but how if corrupt? Graduate educators had therefore betrayed the central enabling principle of the humanities: “the principle of personal influence and personal example.” He called for Socratic teachers who were “visible embodiments of the realized humanity of our aspirations, intelligence, skill, scholarship; men ripened or ripening into realization, as Socrates at the close of the Symposium comes to be.” Myself, I was fired three times from this behemoth, twice itself from this very Texas U, but "Blackmur defined for Arrowsmith a pedagogical ideal to which he afterward became devoted: 'the formal discourse of the amateur' who visibly lives by his convictions." And I was one of these. "And Blackmur’s formalism, so different from the “mere philology” of the dry-as-dust classicists, fixed Arrowsmith’s mature critical method, '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. A criticism, in short, adapted to the nature of the work of art.'...As a classicist he did not accord pre-eminence to the Greek Apollonian vision of reason or to the lumen siccum, the dry light of clarity and lucidity, of Latin rationalism. The idea of reason controlling the self, the body, and the passions was to him quite arid and implied merely the techné of science."
The citizens, faculty, corporations, students and governments ignorant of these egregori are conditioned by the invisible. Egregroi counters prevent consciousness since it is asked how can an egregroi both affirm and deny itself, something AI has not got down. The real divinities that rule Olympus and the planets cultivate specific attitudes of contradiction. The Drudge Report and Breitbart give more publicity to CNN and CBS by amplification.
"Arrowsmith wanted teachers of the humanities to be equals of the heroes or great men of Classical epic and drama, men of areté, worthy of emulation; [any such teachers would be fired, hence all teachers are meliorists] or, failing that, men who at least knew what greatness was and desired it for themselves and their students. [It is impossible to know what greatness is and be it at the same time., all consciousness having been burned away.] Bill always denied that he was “a latter-day priest of Dionysus,” disowned the Sixties “‘apocalyptic’ faction against the exponents of order and reason,” and affirmed controlled passion [and rightlfully, for without control "Dionysus is dead] But the merit Arrowsmith ascribed to Titanic animal energy in conflict with the world and the role he assigned it in the origination or transvaluation of values, while reason or the Apollonian vision was relegated to a secondary position, made it plain to me that there was much of the Nietzschean romantic in Bill’s intellectual makeup. It was this readiness to allow Titanic animal energy its explosive moment in the streets that doubtless made him resistant to the appeal of The New Criterion, which meant—as I understood it—to bring under the scrutiny of reason all modes of cultural expression demanding immediate alterations. Still, what was fascinating for me was to see—once I had met him—how richly Arrowsmith embodied in himself the passionate intellectual intensity and headlong appetite for life of the heroes of Classical antiquity whom he so much admired for challenging the limits of fate."
Nobody ever said the Titan Renowns were not beautifully intelligent, just that they took the cart for the horse. But the think about the hero is he has no consciousness and if could reason objectively and control his passion he wouldn't do it otherwise he wouldn't be a hero. Thinking conflicts the hero. He sure couldn't be a teacher. For a Princeton, Oxford man, a Rhodes Scholar while at Oxford and later a Wilson, Guggenheim and Rockefeller fellow there are many ranks in the preferment of the world. These are all celebrants of the The Banquet Years origins of the avant-garde, a work by Roger Shattuck, that and the Weimar birthed it.
Preferment is for those who
are given the honors, the grants to roost on the picking order and think they
have perceived,before their heads are cut off. Heads off is a metaphor of life and after. Thought, a complete misconception, delusion really, is
the prerequisite of their preferment. As long as they say the right thing. The
"right thing" itself however is quantum, not binar (bipolar), it is both up, down. up up, down
down down up, or rather plus plus, minus minus, minus plus, plus minus.
Quadratic. Which in practice takes every thought, plan, action and quadrasizes
it against logic. To achieve their ends the roosters on the top the
ladder mock logic, which is for the masses. They are all contradiction, deny and
affirm simultaneously every contradiction and point of view simultaneously. They just use
different mouthpieces to do it, but have preferred
oracles.
Many voices-one end says the kingdom of iron and clay. To
simultaneously affirm and deny every thing is the process of the coming of the one globe, which
practically speaking is a function of the D-Wave box. Of the One who exists
outside this order who was in the world made by him, the
world knew him not. He came to his own but his own received him not. But to as
many as received him not. Of course to those who did he gave he the power to become the sons of God. And that tears it because the one
thing the roosters want above all others is for them to become the sons of God.
They are however the same as a man who leaves a store with his
groceries and cannot find his car because he thinks it is another and not the
one he drove there. He wanders the parking lot, beginning to fear it has been
stolen, thinks about calling for help, wishes he had brought the other car
which has the button that makes its horn beep so he can find it. But he has the
old pickup, he thinks. In our parable he then realizes he did drive that car,
so he beeps the key and viola, it appears. All the roosters of the world are
looking for the wrong car. The sons of God they want to become are all fallen.
They want to find the One who made the world but the energy of titans cannot do
this, no matter what Joseph Campbell says.
Of
course all of the poets, philosophers, classicists are wrong about both realizing humanity and divinity. If you want to realize your humanity find a woman and bond with her in every way and she will make you
human. If you want to realize your divinity turn from every paradigm
of magic, science and art and receive the free gift to become a son of god by
believing on His Name. The woman will make you as human as it
is possible and Jesus will make you as divine as possible, conditioned upon
your being free and the result of the discipline to walk in the same way every prisoner has, but in faith, and for free!
Notes
Arion: A Journal of Humanities and the Classics, Spring/Fall 1993; Boston University, 312 pages, $7. This issue includes tributes to Arrowsmith by some two dozen of his colleagues and admirers and also reprints three of his essays: “The Shame of the Graduate Schools,” “The Future of Teaching,” and “Turbulence in the Humanities.” Go back to the text.
Intellectual
Capitalists
"Paradoxically,
Arrowsmith took umbrage at the first issue of the Arion. He condemned the
editor’s introductory “Note,” called Kramer’s description of the aesthetic
purpose of the journal a defense of capitalism, and sought to withdraw the
Eliot article, but it was too late, as the piece had already been set in type.
Some of us thought this aversion to [intellectual!] capitalism rather
odd, given Arrowsmith’s expensive tastes, but were prepared to understand
intellectual consistency as the hobgoblin of little minds."
From
The New Criterion Vol. 12, No. 10, June 1994
©1994
The New Criterion Back to the top
http://www.newcriterion.com/
He is 29 in this image
with Fox, the border collie, a ewe approaching.
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It didn't take long for the Basic Argument and its Nietzsche whiskey to substitute for the wine of
redemption, the joy of sorrow, sickness, death, detached retinas, migraines,
vertigo of those who traverse the worlds, like Wittgenstein, who took long periods of
silence as he struggled to stay alive, the most honest of the dons, who read
Tolstoy on the gospels throughout WWI in the trenches and later prison
camp. Wittgenstein sought death but would not kill himself. He gave up
his fortune to live alone as a rural schoolmaster LIKE some character out
Kafka.
Strawson's prison is Waggener Hall which though a vintage fluke has not yet been demolished yet like Experiment Science for its telltale gas leaks (2008).
The best part of the Basic
Argument is the loss of resposnibility, The
Impossibility of Moral Responsibility--You do what you do, in any
given situation, because of the way you are; to be ultimately responsible for
what you do, you have to be ultimately responsible for the way you are.
Since you’re not you aren’t. The tragic hero is compelled by his
hamartia that mousetraps him, his unwitting mistake, but his one redeeming
feature is his choice in doing that makes it his own. Presidential Chair Galen Strawson, a quarter
million man, wants to chuck that, says You do what you do, in any given
situation, because of the way you are, therefore are not responsible. Any
passion of your suffering is meaningless. The cog, the robot,the hybrid,
the drone to prepare the Hill Country for its entrainment, the man slave
is the perfect philoscopy for programmed men who plan the social
order they are not responsible for, but who take orders. Just cogs in a machine
who assuage their guilt at Grove, but with the Basic Argument they can now
write a sentence over their heads that they are not responsible.
Such a process is unlike the clear humility of Wittgenstein. His Tractatus was the first book I got at 18 for its own sake, after Kierkegaard's Journals. The only thing that enables me to understand Wittgenstein now, after basic affinity, is two strokes to the verbal, linguistic centers of the brain. He opens Tractatus, This book will perhaps only be understood by those who have themselves already thought the thoughts which are expressed in it—or similar thoughts. I know what it is like to not know how to turn a computer on. This brings great profundity. To be responsible ultimately and temporally to the people and the land, to honor and preserve, guard and protect, especially to your family are you responsible as far back as you can know them and in the case where they were harmful and evil you are responsible to begin anew to honor and protect. Otherwise you are a renegade.You are required to understand the sufferings of all people You are responsible to understand the meaning of your own death. You and only you, no one else.
III. Personal View of Austin Hill Country
The
Texas hills were a haven for red birds. Erik the Red flying around sticks out against
the green, but the red bird is a symbol that needs a bandage. You can mimic its
call. Nobody thinks you're going to shoot the bird unless they're twelve.
What's for dinner dear? Did you get any cardinals? Which is not as offensive as
calling elk. How can the green now know the red? I am what he was, within, visible
from the interior but not from the exterior. That's the play. The moon
has opened up her eyes, like summer stars so soon they rise. Thirty years
of absolute sobriety, with love. Of course these things are said
because, as Messiah said, my ears hast Thou pierced. He wakens me
morning by morning to listen as one being taught. When a slave offered
freedom after seven years in Israel wanted to continue in that service he put
an ear against a board where the owner pierced the lobe to symbolize his
listening to him alone. The
sublime writer carries this along from Psalm 40. Lo I come...I delight
to do Thy will, O my Elohim: yea, the law is written in my heart. He
knows nothing of the future, only the moment and past revised, amid all
failures and regret. Prophetic and at the same time impossible, nobody picking Calendar
up forty years later would see "A Conjunction of Planets," as
symbolic: What lovers' open lips we are tonight in time the endless world,
our minds unfurled. Symbol is defeated by propaganda, but propaganda only
neutralize by saying it cannot be understood. These texts prepared the y to
overcome the i, a reversal to which all now have their attention driven. As
Goya or El Greco, Souls in the egg, so all right world, Hatch and hatch.
In those days I burned the trash outside on top of the rock where these limestone whales surfaced. The flames would jet up in the wind, but it was all rock and rocks, rocks and sky. There were no apartments. I watched them come over the ridge, first one or two roofs, then whole homes. Before that, the landlord, inspecting the rolled roofing on the flat surface one time alerted me to the fact of the roof. Soon I had a lawn chair up there and was lying naked in the morning sun. Even when it was cold it was warm where the bare Chinaberry limbs held their manila beads. Pretty soon I was up there at night, where I first heard the cry of "The World's Body," eclipses so far in town at first that were only faint echoes. There was no gunfire like where I live now, but moans and cries of the earth. Those red lanterns were shining through the fog. "Oh wretched land that I am who shall deliver me from this body of death," more obvious now, much more. Sundays, Christmas, while the rest of the states suffered their winter cold, we would picnic down the valley, followed the whole way by the cat Mummz. Come February the giant robin migration would begin and cedar waxwings cheeing everywhere. The ewes were about to lamb. But January was the cruelest month. London, New York, Tokyo, Geneva, Darjeeling describe the stress lines of the new earth skin.
--"Too
much to be alive and well in Ameryca, the new found land," left out of the
ms. "In a pitiless world and a technological civilization that
eludes" (Löwy of Kafka's Amerika), where, my Freudian rabbi, does naked
force and arbitrary power not police--
I
lay on the couch and read Icelandic sagas and Eddas, cold choice in the cold.
But living that close to the earth March made its mystical rebirth, and all the
soldiers of life that clung to the bare retama waiting with the redbud were
reborn. The land, the cry of life in early pieces, Alchemycal Rose, "once
upon a time when it was dead and gone," worked into colored pictures in
the text, a kind of calligram with a musical note, "when your father grows
up and your mother grows up...when you love the world you're loving the
life of the world, and then you love the world."
"The
Uniped shot an arrow into my groin,' said Thorvald, then he died." So Erik
the Red lost his son. No word about what the harpázō, collateral damage, fog of
war? Even though written long before Sir Walter Raleigh seems to fore-write
Wat's death in 1618, to Queen Elizabeth in poems of 1596. Raleigh's oldest son
Walter was killed in a final abortive assault on Spanish garrisons in Guiana
that year. Raleigh, called the marigold in the sun's eye writes,
"first-born love...Restless desire from my love that proceeded / leave to
be and seek heaven by dying, since you, oh you, your own hope have exceeded by
too high flying." Sons follow their fathers and nation. But Ameryca sons
turn from rites of war. What hurts domination the most, to cast lots with
Unipeds, no doubt brutal as any other, as in Apocalypto, underdogs who
in the midst of their passions fall to the knee before Spanish ships to receive
brutality and extinction many levels advanced from their own, or the Uniped
native national citizen in advance of the guns of the global? Billed as the
last day, the end of days too late, for those who come to a world that reveres
its own fall, national or global, native or personal, the status of empire is
unchanged.
Do you
understand what I’m saying? That when the robin migration is over and the
waxwings begin the ewes are about to lamb? |
Birds,
earth, fruit. Trade the ringing songs, the fiery red wealth for "much
purslane and wild amaranth" (Columbus' Log-Book, First Voyage), which
lines begin a dialogue with the wood. Its grain appeared in doors like
photographs, pictures of a being that lived in the wood. Trapped beings in the
grain of doors in offices, anywhere preserved, the cuts joined side by side,
like the heads of faeries, to illustrate the painted wood in the background
above painted. It's a good thing we don't use real wood any more, to avoid this
confrontation with the natural. Once we would have invoked France to mourn the
aching loss of skies and brown furze nobody is supposed to mourn without
deprecating the hill.
I left there from a combination of factors, one being the houses coming over the adjacent hill whose roofs I could see. Years later I kept dreaming of the site except that large modern structures had been built on it. Once I went back while living in Dallas and saw someone had finished rocking the house, continued where I'd left off. That was in the real, but in the unreal dream scenario there were two and three story redwood and stone houses, chrome and steel structures extended over three times the original site of the house. Only now do I realize I was seeing the development of the three story homes on half acre plots that exist there now, but before they were built, which I saw in the real in 2008 on the last visit in when Andrew played the Waco Open and I took him for a tour of the U and the old place. I have other scenarios of dreams, some of which have ceased that I never figured out, never thought they could be figured out, but others continue, some recognized and noted in journals, continuing relationships with a person I have not seen in 40 years These raise questions of seed time and harvest impossible to answer, whether the people dreamed about dream back and the relationship is mutual, which depends on memory and dream state, clarity, sobriety. Such things only become known at all after thirty years of absolute sobriety.
The intellect was not as significant as the
sheep on that ranch. I called the ram who used to shelter with the ewes in the
shade of the stone walls "Crash, the red ding bullet." His balls hung
way down. He would actually stand on my foot if he could. Once I was mixing
cement to rock the house when he treed me on the cement mixer. How many sheep, rams,
besides the technicolor of Virgil's Fourth, ipse sed in pratis aries iam
suave rubenti, have poems addressed them. Buster inspired the Old MacDonald
everyone knows:
Once on the way to market Old MacDonald
Sang the sheep into freight-trains,
The head ram into Crash, the Red-Ding bullet,
And as the trains rolled past at night,
Red dingies really going out of sight,
He sang the sheep into thorn bushes,
The grass into rock. Snakes crawled out.
Here a tarantula, there a scorpion,
And wasps bigger than logs, as Old MacDonald
Strung out in his pickup, sped down a back
road,
Pastoral bubbles popping everywhere.
But now on return he is untying himself
And gassing the snakes like a regular
free-wheeling freak,
Singing, Eiy-eiy-o, all the way home.
It smelled of sheep in every way there. The lambs would get their heads caught in the fence and so would the ewes, but could not be freed from behind. Once while I was pondering this a dog came up on the other side of the fence and that sheep got out quick, which lesson I apply to the plight of lost daughters, but scared lambs can just die on the spot. Once the landlord had accepted that the long hair in the MGB was a citizen he taught him to build ranch fences and to rock, so I began to rock the block of that house, build gardens, grow pumpkins, hokkaidos and squash to hang in the Texas heat.
Squash
grown among the leaves of earth
hang down in air.
In this autobiography of a poem, and
of course the whole Encouragements is one poem, made as a lyric narrative, the
odd thing is that the writing is different from the layout, an oversight, for
the spelling was always been Ameryca in my mind and in the drafts. This
observation occurs because my son, now a full adult, feeling guilty that I
might die, had a dream to that effect and awoke with regret that he had not
videotaped our conversations. We had a date to get a truckload of manure that
day, for he builds large mulch piles, but instead he turned on the camera and
taped a ramble through the whole poem in which I tried to explain the
difference between the y and the i in Ameryca, except try as I might, I could
not find it spelled like that anywhere in the text. So the proof text is not
the real text, which exists somewhere else! Never in the whole thing is America
spelled Ameryca, not once. It is appealing to think that our lives are like this,
that we assume we have communicated our thought to those who know us, but it is
always so much more than we have said. It could also be that the typist changed
the spelling from
All the ages I have been
waiting to be Amerycan.
The two a's in Ameryca connote romance, openness and innocence like Blake's lamb, until later America becomes his Tyger-Orc. Romance balanced by terror is fearful symmetry. We remember the romance in dreams where the double a shines in our openness of desire for the unseen and felt garden of ourselves, so it seems natural to begin a voyage to the new world with St Brendan, then Erik the Red, Columbus and Raleigh, with the many who participated in this novel of Amerycan dream-making remembered in its dissolution. So Brendan asks, "What do they do at the tops of mountains?" But when Erik the Red fulfilled his quest for fire in the red gold ring of the North and the red man danced in the sun, it was a new year of blood. "The field of battle was wet with blood, from the hour of dawn and the shining sun," quoting the Battle of Brunanburh.
The
plain fact is if you turn the book over the cover on the back is the front
reversed. All leaders, all art, all science mirror the good in reverse with
disfiguration and counterfeit. Exterminators at the bait trap every child
taught to love and respect this culture of the D.C.
Lawn and Extermination Service. The old year hardly ended before
this new began.
Contradiction
People in the presence of contradiction act strange, which behavior is evident in producing the Calendar itself, laying out pages in the night in that garret on Pearl St I occupied with Cleo who had since gone to Wales. Bruce Moses did the cover and Victoria Donner the photographs. Five hundred copies were printed at Express Press, received in two big boxes about Dec 5, 1973. Written to celebrate the arrival of Kohoutek. Wikipedia kindly says Kohoutek was fairly bright as comets go and put on a respectable show in the evenings shortly after perihelion. My respectable show was "almost there," said Stephen Spender to Mike Adams on a visit to Austin, staying at the Cranfill estate. Almost There/Before Completion, is the last hexagram of the I Ching where the fox gets his tail wet. Strange secretive behavior, producing Ameryca spelled with a Y, was as off putting as the next years when I told no one I was taking my orals, only after passing announcing it. Ill starred relations with fate came with the social shock of the overthrow of my marriage which threw me out of the circle into my future as much as getting rear ended by my best friend Chris at 17 did to prepare me for the lightning of the Holy Spirit 4 months later. The writing of Calendar was an enjoyment encompassing experiences in Iowa, Fayetteville and Austin. I sold it for two bucks.
Is that why the true name is hidden, so it can't be called? "Where America, the Indies? Oh sir, upon her nose, all o'er embellished...whole armadoes of carracks at her nose" (Comedy of Errors). Instead rather, the houses scoot over the hill and come down its nose like carbuncles. The tree trunks get shorted, snorted, cut to the knee. "Snort out Terra Incognita?" (Th. Randolph, Hey For Honesty). In the long while after Erik the Red, Sir Walter Raleigh joined the new world folly for gold in Guiana, resulting in the death of his son, piracy and his own beheading. He buried his son in the new world like Erik the Red. In the poem, Raleigh says You rose into the mountain air and nevermore were seen. So we ask what children lifting pretty heads from pillowed beds were doing at the tops of mountains right up until sons of the discoverers come to that end. In 1522 Columbus' son, Diego, Viceroy of the Indies, crippled by the discoveries, and with his son, Luis, brought slaves together with sugar, worse than death, provoking the first slave rising on his plantation that spread to Santo Domingo and all Caribbean sugar lands (Opening the Vein, 96). So children born with the reason of being true love, kiss and fly, wake and die. Surely you know that when I ask Ophelia, what is it about, that is no question. Once upon a time when it was dead and gone, when one was enough and too much to be alive and well in Ameryca, the new found land, a glory rose up into the head and it was dead. That poem somehow got completely left out of the manuscript. "In a pitiless world and a technological civilization that eludes" (Löwy of Kafka's Amerika), where, my Freudian rabbi, does naked force and arbitrary power not police? What we have to know is these exist side by side in the prefatory. Reading the Faerie Queene had been begun my hunger for the Renaissance imagination years before, but living here began this poetic meditation of Ameryca. It was the land itself, the brown cedar needles on the ground.
Johoutek was not a good inspiration for Calendar, but those years were contradicted. In the middle of publishing Calendar and writing a dissertation I wrote the dream princess poem of fifty Spenserian stanzas, Nightingale, but did not show it to anybody except Cleo, to whom I mailed installments. The ideas of Calendar grew in the Hill Country outside Austin on a sheep ranch where even today, among the condos, there remains a park of glacial limestone pools along the seeps. But such perceptions began in the little town outside Pittsburgh where I lived from 5 to 17 and continued with even more vast experience in the Hill Country of the Edwards, further in, further up in experience among the creeks there, the escarpments, washes over grazed, flint middens left by tribes, stage stops along cattle trails, original stone walls from the 19th century. I built dams to save washes from further erosion, cut cedar, planted liatras, sophora, a great success, among many. The land itself is the value, not what to do with it. Restorations of natives exist more in not doing than doing, not mowing, not cutting agarita, tolerating drought of walnut trees which seem hardly alive. There was not much to be done about the live oak decline. That amounts to three different ecologies before the wild of Arizona.
Joseph had his destiny imposed “in a dream” that his brothers would bow to him. He names his son Manasseh, “for God has prospered me in the land of my affliction.” The difference between Joseph and any other reckless spirit is his notability, his success, but the ordinary is destined, the unsuccessful may play a role among the less, for it was Pharaoh who dreamed of plenty and famine and Joseph who interpreted. Calendar is an interpretation of famine and plenty. Administering plenty is the sense of the reckless who live beyond ignosia. Rimbaud is always the anti- Joseph, which implies that the whole review board and planning before life is not what it seems, unless he planed to fail. After ignosia wears off we all deserved what we got and if it was given to call it grace and leave off we know nothing more. The upshot is that the Castle of the Spirit, an obvious metaphor, may be more metaphor. The design of a life depends on elements that go back and forth in time in an unimaginable plot of destinies. At the end agnosia is restored and spirit, whoever it is, knows as little of itself as it did when it was born.
Long before I was aware of the connection between Rome and America I puzzled why the Calendar broke in two parts. Spring and Summer celebrated the primitive, Fall and Winter a demented social politic, of which Bulldozer was a judgement. The whole of January was. Nuclear warfare, earth in its own night bloom, collapsing ecologies implying scalar wars of were-weather, rain of no ordinary element, plutonium snow falling over the desert, of which the next sunrise will reveal the new hell, where the wounds of that symbol the rose are gliding to the lump of a beating heart. The heart does not fare well if here a lump and there an aging sack. These effects preoccupied the second half of Calendar, but I never understood the Rome connect, Virgil aside. Rome is America. Who can? Reading Suetonius on Caligula doesn't do justice to empire. America behemoth worse seemed impossible to get. Sure a Hometown blew up here and there. Somebody burned down the A&P. Violence was explicit, the last militia heard as Dixie drove her eyelids together. That and some others came from Fayetteville NC, home of Fort Bragg, where I lived two haboobs, the neck of the goose, I cut off here. Savages in the sanctum of commercialism, heart of the Reader's Digest Playboy Girl. It sounds like television, the digital wrapped in one, the world's largest most experienced erogenous zone, more exciting than life itself. The digital became the mind numbing drug. Which surely has come to pass, with the roaring trees and the rushing grass. I'm skipping back and forth among the last six months to get the drift of Americans [who] pursue happiness in the skirts of their liberty. I think the sunkist hair gives it away, that being an ad for orange juice. Orange juice was what the golden age became, a concentrate at that, synthetic, so that when the people said, I love you Democracy, it reeked. That indeed was the purpose of juxtaposing the renaissance, Elizabethan and Jacobean plays and poems against these months. America was embellished with carbuncles in the Comedy of Errors, dragged with the golden fleece from Dr Faustus. As I say it distressed me to recognize the underlying shadow government that permeates the body, the digest and purpose of the diaries of Kurk Wold, renegade scientist, but that, believe me, was forty years later, long after the Calendar was forgotten. It would be like Kouhetek come round again, this time brilliant, tail overwhelming the moon, subject of the evening news, like bad weather. We live in a time when Noah makes a comeback.
There is a heavy sex to colonialism, to the army, navy and air force, and later the drones, a digital sex, plastic USAs...on Army wheels...out west producing sex organs. The image withers like a Cialis commercial, snozzled, in pyknic profile, as if America were a plastic statue on the dashboard of some spaceship held on with suction cups that listen in to the beats of a heart. So when you travel outside the country stay away from the natives or it will spoil your trip. I picked all this up by osmosis. It didn't help that I was reading the Grand Inquisitor at the same time. I would not have survived these disquisitions without the prior years of allowing the true leaven access to heart and mind. Not enough, never enough. So it was American light, American phone, American freedom, not light and freedom in themselves, the one species of white man decreasing. Ruben Dario made that impression, peppermint jelly exploding at night, Alexander, Alexander, Alexander-Nebuchadnezzar is white. Of course that was naive, since the imperial has visited most of the kingdoms, states and nations of the world. But are we too harshly judged by the light of our worst acts? Presidents added up to conspiracy. This Calendar wouldn't cross the water any more than the later book sent to outer space embossed in asbestos on the outer shell of some spacecraft would be grokked by the Albigensian on Betelgeuse. Little still life bookmarks were paged into these satires, a 1584 London maple chest saying, GIVE THE GLORIE TO GOD ALLONNE, a phrase carved into a sideboard at the Folger, but the context sullied and doubted, when the enemies of GLORIE took over. This is civilization. Be glad and walk ye in it. American light, liberty, the chest which is really mocked in the portmanteau of the fictional Orcs while Hesper is singing I love you, I love you, a little like the dream princess, except merchants dream of new Americas...nose the Bermudas, ravish Virginia, as Thomas Randolph says. This cover, off, reveals nothing at all, stolen from Allen Ginsburg on a boxcar somewhere pressing nudely on the honey tube. When I read that one for the radio station the tech was so convinced he bought the book, but the Christian values are two edged in the context of everything else. Would that they produced a falling off of stretch on the stalk of sexual colonialism. Spring to the arms of burlap, poke a stitching, jam a smock. Nothing must be covered up. Not that these cannot be as vulgar as a Volkswagen Puppy in prodction, or corpses sprouting out in the snow in winter that come up with crocuses. So it says among the vulgar, this rose gives many a care of its dying.
I absorbed a lot of these antagonisms outside the U.S. in 1963, in Costa Rica specifically where I generally got the feeling from Nicaraguans that America that backed the Somozas and from Panamanians that the canal was a worse insult, and from San Blas Indians that I was the one to be feared. When the repute of a nation is visited upon its citizens later captured and tortured by Taliban it makes the citizen know the plum of his Christmas pie. Not to speak of what the Bolivians, or those from Spanish Harlem had to say. To me it was odd, but I was as large or larger in size that all of them, not six feet, but with two! suitcoats, "Andres, tu tienes mucho sacko!" Puerto Ricans were most virulent against the Exceptional, as we learn to call it, yet at the same time the national oppositions that visited these privileges could not be denied. I learned to spread the wealth a little and people saw more the heart. Still in the world today, which I know from having taught scores of Jordanians, Kenyans, Nigerians at Bishop, and add Israelis, Koreans at Texas - would you believe I taught Technical Writing for Foreign Students at Texas at least twice because they heard I had a degree from a tech school - Is that profiling?- or at Bishop College where the utmost moral authority came about 1982, give or take a year, when Maya Angelou and another poet spoke in the auditorium at Bishop where we held faculty meetings and Dr. Lassiter would stand on stage and rub his belly as he spoke of our responsibilities. I was happily at the back. Angelou had a lot to say about the male white class of oppressors of women and blacks. The only one represented that day to feel her arraignment, felix culpa, was me, who bore it then as much as 20 years before what those Latin American students thought of their American oppressors. To some extent the individual is swalled up a race. I have no doubt Angelou's moral authority came from her survival of being raped at seven and after telling her uncle, and the man was put to death, she did not speak for five years. She did not speak from the power of words, but when she did, it was with great authority. I did not stay for the Q and A. Hearing the frank obsequies the day of her passing, I ask anybody to understand the discomfort of representing the enemy.
But words meet friends. Now they are second nature on
those nights when spraying is light or the wind blows the chemicals away
for a while. Calendar was published without ISBN number, and without external referees, publishers, editors, reviewers, the
grassroots interfering with commerce. A few friends in high places
considered innocent among wolves? MacNamara, Rusk, Bundy, as Donald Justice
said, depend on whether you view them in the bubble or out. Ferlinghetti sent the plastic LBJs back, with
thanks, but could have printed it as much as the New Yorker could have printed Expressway.
They kept it six months. It had no return postage or SASE, but they returned it
a mere two weeks before the Kennedy assassination, which it
portrayed in symbolic form. It now lives as Nabu,
Nabu and etc. but the suggestion that symbolic speech means anything is
controlled by the powers even while they laud it, and JFK was killed by the
backfire of his own strategy. Which choose?
Three or four dislocations of venue in those nine years (described at the end of Methane Intoxication Sutra), starting with the sudden end to my time in Costa Rica at the death of my brother, sudden marriage the next year, drive to Iowa, M. A. Fall of '66, after, traveling up the beaches to Maine, Providence, Boston, New Hampshire, visiting Matt Pacillo; summer of '67 in D.C. at NASA-Folger; summer of '68, after getting suddenly axed, looking for a grad school again, then the long drive to Austin and the idyl of Spicewood Springs. In the end I lost every social network, every friend, from my own estrangement, but that's the way it played. Events were complicated even before I was 17, beginning with my father's job transfer after 10 years in Pittsburgh to Philadelphia my senior year of high school, which continued to prepare such a strange complex of attitudes that I need a Freudian rabbi to take me through. It does show why the Intervention was so welcome and complete in my embrace of the biblical. We are onion skins. All that stuff about Goya, tauromachies, heads, Kubler-Ross, Little Boy Bomb trails, chemtrails, Borges, Colossi in The War On Neptune and writings of Paragorie, have to stem from these dislocations.
I don’t remember any particular prayer, any formula. In fact there is no explanation at all for what happened. It took years to say this much. Every day electricity fills the cortex. Up on my feet again in the back of that tent with no explanation, I walked out after maybe ten minutes changed, inside and out. My hosts must have seen somebody stoned out of his gourd, but when the last Neptune is sunk in a fiery lake Jesus is king.
II.
On Top the Limestone
Conversion of the Impossible
Some kind of antidote has to be offered. A man must be true to his responsibilities to have self respect. Being true means being faithful. It makes no difference if these are called names, his enslavement, his imprisonment. Those are sticks and stones. No compromise. A man must be faithful to his responsibilities. The only think that remains is what they are. In short, they are the people and the land.
How does that imply responsibility?
Maybe that's more that a philosophocrat's dream. How can there be a duty to the living and to the dead in a plateau? Philos will ask, isn't nature devoid of ultimate moral responsibility? It's their pathetic fallacy, putting human attributions upon nature like the Basic Argument man? If you hold yourself responsible to that cartoon of your bio's appointments and not the sufferings you will know, come see us when the smirk is gone. Tell a man he's not responsible and it makes him easier to control, easier to demonize. It doesn't work as well on a woman. Women call themselves responsible. A connection to the history of generations of people and the land atop the limestone brings responsibility. To argue its lack is philosophical terrorism. The carpetbaggers ride into town. The damage done by denuding the man.
Setting the rock
|
Impossibility reads
like a torture interrogation of a Mennonite
at the hands of Dutch burghers in the sixteenth century, all forced choices
and absolutes that end in death. -"Nothing-can-be-the-cause-of-itself-"
Nothing! What does a philosopher know of nothing? Torturers chant these little
happy syllogisms when they have a break, either/or they chant, throw
yourself down! God does not love you! Jacobo Timerman heard their taunts when
he was on the table to be examined. He was "boarded up,' made to undress,
"laid down naked and doused with water." The electric "shocks on
my head make me jump in my seat and moan" (Prisoner Without A Name,
63). No word in Strawson's phrase Truly-morally-responsible has any literal
meaning for him. By his own admission he doesn't believe in truth, morals or
responsibility. I know, it's not his argument, he's summarizing the Basic
Argument. The Basic Argument is a tautology, but worse. The whole fabric of
psychology perverted by the Illumined Primate Joseph Campbell says, "as
well as its glory, the realization that this is just how it is and that it
cannot and will not be changed, those who think they know how the universe
could have been had they created it, without pain, without sorrow, without
time, without death, are unfit for illumination.” Timmerman to Campbell,
Strawson: "it's a world for those who are either resigned or mad"
(165). All of Timmerman's tortures in the flesh represent the destruct of the
Strawson's man in the spirit, but no, we don't think it's Strawson, although
his name is prophetic of himself, son of the Straw, wood, hay and stubble. He
is the figurehead for greater power and greater powers than they.
Bull Creek Rule
Enforcement |
"Ultimate
moral authority." Strawson knows nothering of the ultimate, but the
limestone does. It's like it's the limestone is the undercover police officers
enforcing Morals. He ultimately in some years, with his successor, will no
doubt be buried in it, and claim contact with the earth, with the rock, he and
Bezos in his spaceport in W. Texas. You know the phrase that he that resists
will be crushed by the stone the builders rejected, the Edwards limestone is
like a stone and when the egregori wait to communicate with it they will
be ground and buried. How's that for meliorism? But it's just the kind of
thought and language applied to the hero's Arrowsmith invokes, except they
don't talk or think, they act always for and against the ultimate moral
authority.
Antidotes of the above and below in the bipolar nature of these arguments likely need to be given. The phrase "eye has not seen, nor ear heard, nor has entered into the heart of man what God has prepared for them that love him" will properly mystify us until we read the next, "but God has revealed it to us by his spirit." So what is it that has been revealed? It is as in Psalm 8. The definition of man given there rebuts the Argument. Three qualities endow the man, he is crowned with glory and honor, he has dominion over the works of hands, and all things are put under his feet. The last signifies unseen malign forces as much as any. Since none of this obtains to the present man how is it true? The crown, the hands and feet are Messiah's, called the Christ, which does us some good if he is in us as we are in him, hence we walk in his crown, his hands, his feet. It takes some getting used to don't you think, when there's only white light to absorb.
Realized
Humanity
2.
Realized Divinity
Titans
Against the Man
"Nietzsche the classicist and the genealogist of tragic drama was one of his masters, and from Nietzsche and the Greek tragedians he derived the very distinctive worldview outlined in his essay “Turbulence in the Humanities.” There he proposed that the humanities are largely Dionysiac or Titanic; they cannot be wholly grasped by the intellect; they must be suffered, felt, seen. This inexpressible turmoil of our animal emotional life is an experience of other chaos matched by our own chaos. We see the form and order not as pure and abstract but as something emerged from chaos, something which has suffered into being. The humanities are always caught up in the actual chaos of living, and they also emerge from that chaos. If they touch us at all, they touch us totally, for they speak to what we are too. ...He saw moral and social values as originating in the Titanic struggle of man to become his fate and to transcend his animality. Heracles in Sophocles’ Women of Trachis was a like exemplum. Afflicted by the love potion mixed of the Centaur’s gore, Heracles chooses to die by his own hand rather than be mastered by the beast within. He will die by his own blaze, the inward god triumphant over the beast. He will burn the beast out of himself, even though it is the beast that has made him the hero he is. For it is Titanic, animal, energy—pure hybris—that makes great men do great things and achieve god. All order worth having, Sophocles says, is born of the effort of turbulent men—men who do not know themselves—to surpass the animal turbulence that drives them to violate their limits and break down the barriers between man and god."
Sky Castle
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I
would interject a whole series of plaintiffs and defendants for and against
this cause, but come to think I have.Still one's allies can be as such and
still operate within envelopes of their own delusions, like there is nothing
invisible about it.
Another promising
Sisyphus of classical drama
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II.
AUSTIN, THE ATHENS THAT IMPLODED
Austin became Athens/Sparta
bipolar. Long-range precision fires, next-generation combat vehicles, future
vertical lift platforms, mobile and expeditionary Army network, air missile
defense capabilities, and soldier lethality, welcome to Austin. In addition to
building in limestone underground there was an experimental student population
of 50,000 on which to practice, like a little eviathan
Amazon-Seattle. They used to say in the old Pharmacy Bldg that Money
Talks. Far from the hills of 1972 when first house noses came
over the brow, except for that caution in real estate ads, "the terrain
has very steep hills," the years I spent there made all the difference in
this vision of Ameryyca not to know.
The Art of Translation
We cannot know ourselves without the knowledge of others, which addresses our experienced vanity. Put another way innocence is not the rhyme or the changes, it is the picture in our heads that matters, beyond the alphabet, primordial feeling evoked by the flower. Even If we say if brass not stone nor earth nor boundless seas, but sad mortality o'er sways their power, it is not the wit that remains, or the letter. What remains is the memory of the moment that evoked. Even more than Shakespeare, Hopkins did not change the world, and if not he then who? It will flame out, like shining from shook foil. The poet becomes a translator of the light beyond the image, before, during and after the poem. It is not a literal translation. Nobody can say what it is because no original text compares. The translation is the only text. I heard a fly buzz when I died we don't know. Irish poets learn your trade, sing whatever is well made. Well made, not perfect. Beauty in ugliness finds rest in the peace of the world. All kinds of sayings call them sulphur flowers in chemistry, fleurs du mal. This trial goes on carnivorously in des Esseintes' laboratory. Beauty is not truth, nor truth beautiful. Illusions of innocence. We have to suspend belief, or is that disbelief? before the silver cord be loosed, or the golden bowel be broken. The poets are wrestling with codes of outer expression against inspiration. Eventually beyond their making, the thing, the poem, is not. What now to do with their own annihilation when they look back at their lives and see nothing they recognize. Well there is one moment repeated every day since, whether in the belly of death, especially there, or in bed.The trouble is, having said this, I wrote on a card and taped it to the wall:
Beauty
Forgiveness
Truth
In fact
there is no explanation at all for what happened. It took years to say this
much. Every day electricity fills the cortex. Up on my feet again in the back
of that tent with no explanation, I floated, walked out after maybe ten minutes
changed, inside and out.
Another inmate of that time, John Cullen,
became a translator., but never have I enjoyed such colloquy as we shared
beside his fire. Spender says nobody can understand the chat he and Auden had
"with their mixture of sense and nonsense, fun and portentousness, malice
and generosity, compose a secret language among a circle" (World
57), which is what the poems of this Calendar are, addressed to
intimates, confidants who get it and don't but are amused by it, a mumbling
argot-here-like the one, "Cullen's Company," who to someone who knew
the translator himself would seem completely contradictory, if true. Easily
and without doubt the best friend and conversation I ever had was with John
Cullen at his bungalow fireplace into the wee hours smoking.That's what experience gets us, or innocence.
Is it not innocence that longs to be made whole? So against the background of
Vietnam, c. 1970 the militaristic conceit wrenches the unconscious. They meet
in this boot camp of dreams, for basic training is implied, which both had
seriously avoided, by different paths, his scandalous perhaps, but funny --
mine a product of what time and the age would allow, the old meniscus
maneuver--but had known each other before it seems, for he recognizes him
there: "That is Cullen. Diddley-bop" which signifies some
statement of joy. They meet for a moment in the center of an apparition of
friendship so fleeting they barely wave going past, even if their
Gemütlichkeit surpassed what either had known. Of course the poem written before
denouement, properly forespeaks as poems do. Can they enter by the strait gate
of the poem into innocence or must they go by experience the great broad way?
If the rites of this dream princess smack of the white goddess, an intimacy too
great to share, or speak of, in a flash the moment passes, prophetic
itself of our lives, taken at large. Right away the camp telescopes to
graduation. They get their stripes. The thing is organized. It has Officers and
Review. Structure! No wonder he suddenly wakes up, discharged, but the thing is
that the memory of the dream continues in the poem and when he reads it he
remembers the feeling of the dream in the first place. It revives its innocence
there. No you don't have to believe this. All of these poems are riddles to
remember the moment. What they have to do for another remains to be seen.
Idiots on the street however say they have miles to go before they sleep.
So there are many kinds of translation, one with another, by which Enoch was
not found, because Yahweh had translated him. We suppose that translation
yet to come.
Cullen's Company
Drafted into Cullen's Company
when he didn't serve either
was no reason for dreams.
But when off to camp on my back
I go, he is already there,
"that is Cullen, Diddley-bop."
And there with him was the Dream-
Princess giving up her rites,
And then passing in review
And finally discharge today.
To get the argot a little, in the middle to
transpose a true insight, for these matter in the human, John had done a diss
on Charles Williams of all people. Nobody more arcane could be found in
20th century lit. I was later charged with association with Williams (Taliessin
Through Logres) because of my Taliessin, changed the spelling to avoid
this, but while mine had nothing to do with Williams any more than it did with
Frank Lloyd Wright, who planted his Taliesin in the desert, merely cruising
around his fireplace about this, his diss and whatever, up came Netzach from the Williams and
the Tree of Life, which of course had fallen on the path and I had marked it
down. Nowadays you can google it, for all the good it will do. Holding the
Hebrew letters in your hand is not the point. So ibe datum out of this and
more, John said in a confidential moment that he wished I would write more out
the biblical experience I had had, which may be the most profound thing ever
said to me, not that it was ever a direct subject of conversation and not that
anyone would do differently from what they have done anyway. I mark it as a
true insight against the very different and valuable counsel from Jack Minnis,
my Tesla-Drexel friend, who wrote to me to doubt faith in order to strengthen
it.
The Biblical experience is coitus. Kiss me
with the kisses of your mouth, Song begins. I take it he meant the
biblical poetic and prophetic my speech echoed. Biblical folk,
theologians, may not take the biblical as intercourse, as the letter next from
Ricardo Foulkes makes plain, but poets are not vexed with theology or practice.
They are incompetent to judge between. Auden tells Spender, "because
you are so infinitely capable of being humiliated. Art is born of
humiliation" (World, 47). The same with the observations of Ruth
Lehmann, superfluous advice. Say to the mountain move. I had got wrapped in
those texts of revelation impossible for scholars to believe, as impossible
as revolution. When the rabbi says Bereshith is the first word of
Genesis because the people did not want the Egyptians to know the name Elohim,
I thought about that for a couple of decades. Being incompetent and
humiliated, I moved on to the haShamayim, the heavens, concluding after
another decade that this central conflict of ancienty worlds, Israel in all its
forms opposed by Egypt-Babylon in all its forms, was over the substitution of haShamayim
for Elohim. It took thirty years to get that, but everything provocative
follows,
the eater and the eaten dispute the
gates of mind
swift as evening wolves and sand.
To substitute creation for the creator is
fundamental to all the horrors of world bank and war, which sacrifice to
pray a gun to the power of mind I might call myself a scribe of, the
biblical text opposed to critic:
antennas, grey dawn, chains long, cast lots
to own
the honorable men No-Cleveland and
No-York that bought and sold.
I don't mean this opposition as a
hermeneutics of the body, but a complete demolition
of authorship across the ancient world, so that Homer, Lao Tzu, David never
wrote a word, hardly existed at all. The "evidence" critics relate in
proof of this concludes that "editors' made the word. No other text is
known of Lish's revised Carver text or Pound's Eliot, unless there is some law
suit. Graduate programs call this the Editorial
Process where they teach their candidates to reduce to sense. These are not
the minds that made such texts as said
Ohio lost! Shaker Heights fell and
out land toward the sea titanium!
Akron rooted up and drawn like simple water!
Strongholds fell like figs!
To show how far the rabbinical reach, I take
it that when Messiah entered a more perfect tabernacle, not made with hands, to
perform the sacrifice of his blood, as that sublime writer says, that that
tabernacle was the heaven itself. When I sang Psalm 8 over my daughter hundreds
of times, walking in the alleys of Austin, I understood that when dominion over
the works of those hands was given, that that meant the heavens, that the work
of the fingers were included in the hand. These heavens, the tabernacle of
sacrifice and those works of hands, as he says again, were all put in
subjection to Yahshua made a little lower than the angels crowned with glory
and honor so that he should taste death for every man...that the patterns of
things in the heavens should be purified, for Messiah entered into
heaven itself. This cosmic aesthetic is not understood as a matter of
comprehension. This is the biblical experience.
Incomprehensibility comes from contact with
ancient text, follows from it. Kerouac and the sutras, singing the diamond
Sutra in the watchtowers as a mook lookout, a good metaphor for a watchaman
outside civilization, not to guard it, but for the solitude, to hear the mind
wind and go hungry, like methane intoxication which happens around the big
manure piles as fifteen cubic yard scoops unload. After loading you drive like
your tires are squashed. Unloading, the methane is all over you and you wake up
at night with its undefinable sense. That's what its like to be born of the
spirit, not a nice thing at all, but encompassing, enveloping and inexplicable
to tell, methane in hair, on skin. It's not a perfume anyone can smell, but it
does make peculiar. The methane comes and then others feel the need to help you
find your way, get back on the road. It colors everything this guy oms. Then
he comes to the ancient text in a biblical experience. He wouldn't be there but
for the methane, forgive my French, but since the methane, he devours it fifty
years. Each text is surrounded with bullies. His effects don't measure up to
the expectations of bullies. Van de Wetering writes of the Zen bullies in
Afterzen. Kerouac got disillusioned with buddhist bullies and
disillusion runs among Unitarian, evangelical, Presbyterian, academic Errands into the
Wilderness. Academic errand boys for their higher power of
sensation-emotion control and tenure, easily bully among the seminarians asleep
on cots, in robes, but look out for their hands, look out for their tongues,
the gifted tonsures to convince you riches to be poorer. Sure they sound
like pedophiles. Can you believe Yeats pushed Crowley down the steps of the
temple? He says he did, but it's the other way round. Powerman, antimessiah,
surrounds all the texts, not just in religion, reviewers with two hands consume
enough alcohol and drug to for[e]get what words are, or woods. Translations of
the self we know, but the ancient texts are something more than the power mad
ecclesiastics around Homer can spare, and tear him limbs. There is a tearing
and the torn. It sounds like Bowden
in Juarez and is no less. It is more. Better to study in the 2AM, being
driven. Only the wind is blowing. Intensification falls into the text and finds
its confirmation of word not translated. This is more than you bargain
for. Bullies make claim for themselves. Methane makes claim for
revelation. Any meth head knows. A different meth. There are many meths but
only one. No need to justify devotion to revelation if it's like meth, either
you have it or you don't, but in this case the bullies are busy turning
civilization. Of course revelation has found them out, celebrated so long it
swims around like fish in a Breughel painting.
Fall of the Rebel Angels, Breughel, Rubens....
I'm translating the text I'm quoting into
some context of life. If maybe the text informs my thought, hard to say.
Translation is subjective for sure, but based on something. What a fake translation
is doesn't confuse the matter really. Taliessin is a translation or it isn't.
Translators are scribes at different ends, little credit, not top billing, room
and board, live like monks. The lottery may reward them. All those heroic tales
of wards passed to gain the inner sanctum? You think you're coming in, but
you're not. Maybe indoctrination wears off, but the Graf Wellhausen critic dragons
and flames must be passed. Bullies are all over the Odyssey to prevent
apprehension. Beauty surrounded by counterfeit, danger. Blessing and danger
walk, their hands knit. It's hard to believe the highest and best are
corrupt. So the sword of the spirit pierces to the joints and marrow, but choose
between the bishops as merciless as Daniel or Abraham in the furnace. Learn to
walk in kilns. Dragons and the giants want to know by what right a breech
translation is skewed, depending on whether he lays on his right side or his
left, or his back, which of course is backward from the intention of his
thoughts. Do not disbelieve he sees through a glass so darkly.
JC and AE after piling stone
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John Cullen was the first person to hear The
Planetary Bulldozers. I called him up by phone and sounded it over the
line. He was the first to see The Raleigh Manuscript too, so that's why
there are all these pictures of him on Spicewood Springs carrying stone,
there's something about a large stone and a man that brings them together. As
Plutarch. Ask Sisyphus. These being moved were up by the road when it was
conceived they should be down in the pasture to form some kind of retaining
wall. Anyone can see the logic of that. Planetary Bulldozers almost got into The
Planet Formerly Known As Earth at its end, which could have been prophetic,
for that organ ended its life before 2012. 2012 you remember was another
Kohouthek, another ISOM. Planet began its publication with The Ship of the
World. If it were really true that one good poem leavens the lump Ship
would have justified the whole. Another lie. Right before Planet burned into darkness
it turned down the Bulldozers, but if only, they asked, the last line could be
changed. Editorial process. It could not. How could one ask, what will you
do when the towtruck stops at your door? Mr. Camel proceeded to
Bulldoze this onto the internet from the American Calendar.
Cliff Street, at the end of 22nd St. further up toward town, had been the residence of Tom Goar, who changed his name to Tom Goat, who with his wife Suzie and Tyler their young son often hosted a group of friends, Ann Oppenlander, myself, John Cullen. We once semi seriously talked about getting a big place and living together! What dismal times the 60s. One night there was to be a block party on Cliff St. The street blocked off. Crowds of more than a hundred, the usual carousing. The night was young, maybe 9 or 10 when a car with three occupants wanted to drive through the center of the party, which resulted in the car getting roughed up, rocked, pounded on. It drove to the end of the street, a dead end, turned around and accelerated into the crowd. There were so many bodies though that it stalled out. Maybe the driver lost his nerve. But he hit a lot of people. Nobody however died. The curbs were high on one side of the street. I remember the guy backing up one last time to get out of his fix before the engine died. There was a kid just in his taillights who I grabbed and fell against the curb with, then it was over. Well partly. Now a serious demo of that car began. All the windows were broken out. The occupants had gone catatonic, were frozen motionless, glassy eyed. They were about to be torn limb from limb when John Cullen asserted himself and required everybody near him to join hands around the car, even while the bottles were still raining down and the glass flying. This bought a moment respite. He was very insistent. There was one guy who would not release his bottle to me and let fly. But it was the last one. After than it was all clean up and we disappeared from the scene.
So the nearest a poet comes to sense the intentions coming from another, communicating through an alphabet language that reveals the truth already communicated in pictures of information, is the same for all sensory-life-forms. Talk about whether animals feel only occurs in the private pirate labs.The pictures carry more than a letter or word or sentence can convey, a kind of telepathy except it is not thought but whole being between the y and the i, Ameryca and America, the little orphans flying around in the water and fire who later construct post war America in its behemoth form. Sail away! as Drayton sails: you stay too long; Quickly aboard bestow you... before the planetary bulldozers. But experience is comfortable enough, it rests me, it calms me to sleep. Why does the spirit that lives in the soul not know what to do? Another, when has good earth joyed in mirth more? Aside from Aristotle, comedy is contradiction, celebration of defect, moral turpitude. Let it be well made, but judged according to the conventions and the public agreement about value. If you are not of the convention and do not belong to the social, an unknown, then you will sell one painting and be dismissed as mad Blake, conflicted Hopkins. The tension is still between innocence and experience but the conventions that wrap them switch. Innocence must be the highest intelligence but it is changed into what it's not, taken by some priest of the intellect into the casuistry. That code is the first to be break, to stop denying that this is being done, driving witless machines into unconscious beds of streams, yes, it is profoundly disturbing to oppose peace. That code is the one first broken, to stop denying that this is being done.
So after sitting across from your self designing a life, one goes before a review board for advice, or consent, to argue the position, difficulties and purpose while the board seeks to poke holes in the what ifs, so to speak. If the spirit is reckless this is more important. If the purpose is to do the impossible, which the spirit doesn’t know is possible, the board has to help design. Only the interplay of blessing and danger, positive and negative difficulties can make the thing worth it. What’s the point of a gimme? So the difficulties provoke the spirit to its work, but the problem is always the spirit itself, for once it enters life prone to its own bias it needs counterweight, balance from people and situations. The board must design these people in a web of relation that catch the spirit and give it a chance to be reckless, but if not caught it will perish immediately, reckless from the moment its feet hit the ground. But the spirit is further prone to itself; its biggest danger is itself, a waywardness to follow paths outside its design, just because it is reckless. From these avenues it needs rescue, which is the purpose of those people in place to catch it before it goes too far.
America spelled with a Y was not the only whole preoccupation. This included also, poetically, Nightingale simultaneously, and The Taliessin Poems, written before and after trips to Wales at Christmas 1973 and summer 1974, The Nightingale, written immediately before. These however were not formally published and hardly even announced. It's a lot like a guy concussed, returned from the wars, who knows nothing of himself and has to suffer through the thoughts, the memories, the acts he committed. The WWII vets first make this evident, but every war contributes. They come back, they're solid citizens. They never say a word, even to their wives in bed of what they did. With good reason. Charles Bowden tells of an uncle after the Pacific War who "pretty well said nothing and then twelve years later in one twenty-second break in his silence he told me of cutting off the heads of Japanese soldiers, boiling them down and mounting the skulls on his jeep" (Trinity, 207). The shame and terror is that great, but they relive it being prickly at moments, difficult, to be tiptoed around. The saving grace for these is their buddies with whom they share the bond. Cleo's father was just this way, parachuted out of B17 at 21 and was a POW in a couple of Stalags for about a year, so she, without knowing, was groomed to care for this situation in much the way her mother had. Except the war I returned from is the first one, old as history, one I conceive as against humanity. Along the way I have no problem visiting its victims where I find them, Karl Hillie before, in the asylum in NC, Cryil Nweke later, at Terrell outside Dallas, the shelter people, the foreigners, the immigrants I live among. It is an honor to be associated with Cleo as she lays hands on the wounds of these, in which I play a minor role. It was always the entitled I abhorred. The thing we should all hold against the entitled is their value added improvements which are none at all.
Cliff Street, at the end of 22nd St. further up toward town, had been the residence of Tom Goar, who changed his name to Tom Goat, who with his wife Suzie and Tyler their young son often hosted a group of friends, Ann Oppenlander, myself, John Cullen. We once semi seriously talked about getting a big place and living together! What dismal times the 60s. One night there was to be a block party on Cliff St. The street blocked off. Crowds of more than a hundred, the usual carousing. The night was young, maybe 9 or 10 when a car with three occupants wanted to drive through the center of the party, which resulted in the car getting roughed up, rocked, pounded on. It drove to the end of the street, a dead end, turned around and accelerated into the crowd. There were so many bodies though that it stalled out. Maybe the driver lost his nerve. But he hit a lot of people. Nobody however died. The curbs were high on one side of the street. I remember the guy backing up one last time to get out of his fix before the engine died. There was a kid just in his taillights who I grabbed and fell against the curb with, then it was over. Well partly. Now a serious demo of that car began. All the windows were broken out. The occupants had gone catatonic, were frozen motionless, glassy eyed. They were about to be torn limb from limb when John Cullen asserted himself and required everybody near him to join hands around the car, even while the bottles were still raining down and the glass flying. This bought a moment respite. He was very insistent. There was one guy who would not release his bottle to me and let fly. But it was the last one. After than it was all clean up and we disappeared from the scene.
So the nearest a poet comes to sense the intentions coming from another, communicating through an alphabet language that reveals the truth already communicated in pictures of information, is the same for all sensory-life-forms. Talk about whether animals feel only occurs in the private pirate labs.The pictures carry more than a letter or word or sentence can convey, a kind of telepathy except it is not thought but whole being between the y and the i, Ameryca and America, the little orphans flying around in the water and fire who later construct post war America in its behemoth form. Sail away! as Drayton sails: you stay too long; Quickly aboard bestow you... before the planetary bulldozers. But experience is comfortable enough, it rests me, it calms me to sleep. Why does the spirit that lives in the soul not know what to do? Another, when has good earth joyed in mirth more? Aside from Aristotle, comedy is contradiction, celebration of defect, moral turpitude. Let it be well made, but judged according to the conventions and the public agreement about value. If you are not of the convention and do not belong to the social, an unknown, then you will sell one painting and be dismissed as mad Blake, conflicted Hopkins. The tension is still between innocence and experience but the conventions that wrap them switch. Innocence must be the highest intelligence but it is changed into what it's not, taken by some priest of the intellect into the casuistry. That code is the first to be break, to stop denying that this is being done, driving witless machines into unconscious beds of streams, yes, it is profoundly disturbing to oppose peace. That code is the one first broken, to stop denying that this is being done.
So after sitting across from your self designing a life, one goes before a review board for advice, or consent, to argue the position, difficulties and purpose while the board seeks to poke holes in the what ifs, so to speak. If the spirit is reckless this is more important. If the purpose is to do the impossible, which the spirit doesn’t know is possible, the board has to help design. Only the interplay of blessing and danger, positive and negative difficulties can make the thing worth it. What’s the point of a gimme? So the difficulties provoke the spirit to its work, but the problem is always the spirit itself, for once it enters life prone to its own bias it needs counterweight, balance from people and situations. The board must design these people in a web of relation that catch the spirit and give it a chance to be reckless, but if not caught it will perish immediately, reckless from the moment its feet hit the ground. But the spirit is further prone to itself; its biggest danger is itself, a waywardness to follow paths outside its design, just because it is reckless. From these avenues it needs rescue, which is the purpose of those people in place to catch it before it goes too far.
America spelled with a Y was not the only whole preoccupation. This included also, poetically, Nightingale simultaneously, and The Taliessin Poems, written before and after trips to Wales at Christmas 1973 and summer 1974, The Nightingale, written immediately before. These however were not formally published and hardly even announced. It's a lot like a guy concussed, returned from the wars, who knows nothing of himself and has to suffer through the thoughts, the memories, the acts he committed. The WWII vets first make this evident, but every war contributes. They come back, they're solid citizens. They never say a word, even to their wives in bed of what they did. With good reason. Charles Bowden tells of an uncle after the Pacific War who "pretty well said nothing and then twelve years later in one twenty-second break in his silence he told me of cutting off the heads of Japanese soldiers, boiling them down and mounting the skulls on his jeep" (Trinity, 207). The shame and terror is that great, but they relive it being prickly at moments, difficult, to be tiptoed around. The saving grace for these is their buddies with whom they share the bond. Cleo's father was just this way, parachuted out of B17 at 21 and was a POW in a couple of Stalags for about a year, so she, without knowing, was groomed to care for this situation in much the way her mother had. Except the war I returned from is the first one, old as history, one I conceive as against humanity. Along the way I have no problem visiting its victims where I find them, Karl Hillie before, in the asylum in NC, Cryil Nweke later, at Terrell outside Dallas, the shelter people, the foreigners, the immigrants I live among. It is an honor to be associated with Cleo as she lays hands on the wounds of these, in which I play a minor role. It was always the entitled I abhorred. The thing we should all hold against the entitled is their value added improvements which are none at all.
Likewise it seems these ideas of Ameryca
formed in poems two full years before their prose expression, stem from an
orphanage immediately behind the house on Segwick St in Germantown where I
lived the first five years. There is an awful lot of orphan in Ameryca, along
with blood on flowers. The thing grew to reading Purchas and Hakluyt, the
Guiana reports, the Spanish letters, the trials, the propagandas, Marvell, the
Elysian Fields, Fortunate Isle. Little lamb, I guess they called it technically
a dissertation, one of the shortest, 120 pages of real text, not that it will
save you for that. It was called Restorations of the Golden Age but knew little
of the Gold, even though I tried to read Boas, Levin and the primitives. This
failing seems redressed in The Loss
of the Golden Age. It was again really, poet's research, the thing about
finding the gold tree as a mine in the earth from renaissance Italian
speculations, a metaphor, just like Donne's image of Virginia is a metaphor of
the new man, the Amerycan. You can refer this kind of science to Steve
McCaffery, the sound poet, so called Canadian Pataphysicist, but I did not know
of him at the time. My intro to Jarry was through Roger Shattuck's (and Wm.
Arrowsmith's) students, but they were offended by my calling Ubu Roi
King Ubu. How they puffed. There may be patapuffery. Now he is just Mr. Roy.
Whether they were real pataphysicians or not, one was the priest at a something
catholic church, the kind that followed Bishop Ledbetter, whose fellows would
put marijuana in the monstrance on the altar during mass to increase its
potency and smoke it after. And what of their antics at Texas cloverleafs when
prickly poppies bloomed and the 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 particular
angels that surrounded one? Do you think there are three or just one archangel?
Oh, whose biding does it? The master of these robed gowns held services which
ordinary people also attended. Ex-military, Carl Bowers, his wife was psychic.
She asked me once in early August what an eclipse meant, one being due later
that month. I regret saying, "death." Her husband died two weeks
later after celebrating the mass, still had his robes on in a meeting with the
altar boys.
When I sat down in the spiritual to design this
reckless life I suppose I took counsel and got permission to try, but that
spirit of recklessness had only itself to blame, or nurture, not that anybody
recognizes such a place in the Sky, the name invented, where one designs a life
before it is lived. I saw the moment before waking and recognized immediately
this as not only possible but as unbelievable, amorphous and dissolving as
waking took hold. So life is but a sleep and a forgetting…. Back to the
planning, I imagine I took the line that the mission was pointless if easy, and
further, that it had promise if what was achieved was, and here the words
stumble, for how to give expression to the difficulty sought, the impact of
forces, the provision of allies, the wiggling, the pains, wrestling odds, the
conspiracy, self designed to give or get no breaks in order to bake chemical
water out of the clay, the water and chemical of that mighty coalition of
blessing and danger. That phrase, blessing and danger, written on the walls at
Glastonbury.
Spiritual enlightenment could be had in those years in Austin if you believed in it. Raja Rao with his gold nimbus thought it was because the Quads, especially the philosophy bldg, were built on top of Indian burial mounds. There were extensive steam tunnels under the campus. Desani took disciples, but you had to sit on your feet. An easier form of Tibetan insight meditation could be had if you would not verbalize the think, think not Cardinal, think Bird, Comanche. 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 the astral battery power shrug that comes with controlling the universe, as one who said, "you're not Christ? I'm sorry to hear that, because I am." People were going around glowing from the mushrooms in the cow patties of Bastrop. A botany student way ahead of his time was growing salvia divinorum in the department's greenhouse, all leggy though. One of the employees I had at the drug garden brought in his banisteropsis to take the air and sun for the time he worked. He wanted to keep his lunch in the refrigerator but I wouldn't let him. I had a fear of radioactivity from the radioactive frig at the Clayton Foundation Labs nobody would open. We did have a good supply of rats in the attic that went for the seedlings though not the ayahusca. To keep current I read the Mckenna book along with Schultes. Datura and aminta however were not allowed on campus - enemies of communal living, but Sophora, mescal bean was planted everywhere. You could experience big brother for a song if you inclined to mere sensuality and had the connections. You 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, but since I never accepted, don't know in exchange for what. Doing by not doing, thinking by not thinking, for no reason other than somebody knew somebody, with no preparation of the study of language than this, I became a writer. How that works as an unconscious method in art and lit might be sought in some circles today, if one can find them, but in that time and place no such conversation occurred. The fingers reached to touch each other like the sides of the brain.
It goes without saying that the spirit,
reckless or not, suffers from significant agnosia as it enters life. I prefer
to spell it ignosia. Just as if it is a miracle that the bones grow within the
body producing the skeleton of maturity, the change the spirit has, to emerge
from its ignosia into consciousness is its doing and undoing. This however does
not happen without a certain age in the body, age and health, free of dementia,
delusion, self infatuation. Seventy is offered by the Chuang Tzu. Before that,
careening is as good a word as any, self directed also, with little notion of
the consequence. But as ignosia wears off, which is not inevitable if
addictions occur, austerity brings the removing cowl to conclude the spirit
knows more of its purpose and can cooperate with it, however at that
point it also knows the folly of what it attempted and can wonder what the sky
castle was thinking, how the Board allowed attempt against odds.
Why and how I came to translating Taliesin stemmed from that same time as publication of Calendar. In preparations for my first trip to the British Museum, London and Wales I came on the Four Ancient Books of Wales and conceived a kind of road map tracing sites of those poems to Merlin, multipled all over Britain, but especially in the north. This led to many standing stones, forts, Stonehenge three times in the rain with rainbows, it was not fenced at all then, Old Sarum, Bath, dozens of sites in Carnarvonshire and Angelsey. I didn't take notes so much as receive impressions that carried along for two years until about1976 while I was driving from Bandera to Austin and began to compose Song, a villanelle that appeared in TQ: "Only three have returned from the battle's rage." I composed it in my head as I drove. It folded into the three themes of the four books, the agony of war, the love of woman, the worship of God. Takes of these had begun a few years before and continued or adapted with work in progress. One, "Long the days and long the nights I held this image in my mind of red on gold" had to do in my mind with the last bushman of van der Post, introduced to me by Bill Lee. Five of the battle poems saw daylight in Austin in print in Latitude 30° 18' (Winter 1985), but the love poems and the divine sonnets attributed to Taliesin were no more his than the battle poems, all foisted upon after the manner of mask, conceived from Shakespeare perhaps, so sometimes I called them Poems of the Unknown Soldier buried in the Welsh countryside, to consecrate the connection between Taliesin’s meditations and the entire Welsh nation, entirely fabricated.
The Unknown Soldier came mythically to every country and each person. Pretending to be written in the mystical tradition at the battle sites of Britain, Merlin, Aneirin, the sea, the Poems were accompanied in the manuscript by the medieval Hanes Taliesin, properly understood as transformations of the living into the praises of Jesus, full of craving for God. This kind of rough-hewn worship, like Old Testament battle songs where they go out praising, and among them also songs of love, suits Hugo Chavez. It’s a little amazing how far fancy will go. It was claimed that these poems took after the dozen historical elegies of the Sixth century in traditions Caesar wrote of in the conquest of Britain, tales of transformation that anonymous writers in the mask of Taliesin added later to mystical religious work of Biblical and prophetic subjects. Myrddin, said to have died after the Battle of Arfderydd (573 AD), and source of our modern “Merlin” out of Nennius (9th century), is there made the historical counterpart with Taliesin, and words ascribed to him in the 10th century Historia Britonnum flit about in the battles. So the spirit of the four Welsh bards, Taliesin, Aneirin, Myrddin and Llywarch Hen, who survive in the fourteenth century Red Book of Hergest, are implicated in the fifty-eight poems attributed to Taliesin.
To show how far this went two anagrams were composed according to the spelling of the Taliesin's name, for at first, the old spelling, Taliessin prevailed, which was conflated with Charles Williams (as above).
Taliessin
Taliessin, bard countenance,
All of your fame has not been lost.
Long did you serve a king, Urien Rheged,
Inside a bag among bull rushes
Elphin the prince took up this gift;
Somber the bards of the Isle of Britain,
So long without peer in the eye of the west
In praising the God of creation.
Nine
are the letters in the name of Taliessin.
Taliesin
Now time ends, Taliesin,
Illustrates the heaven,
Silent the storms of blood,
Eight times the letter proved.
Intent on it he stands,
Listening to his God,
As lost men stop for towns,
Throats clearing, tongues kindling flame.
The Bodhisattva twice returned,
Above heaven learned,
Love's sacrifice saves men,
Jesus, creation's Lord, and heaven's.
Every people, lands and men
Shall look on him they pierced,
Irate behold rejected come,
Neighbors and saints judge all earth.
Letters and memoirs fit poetics because
all of us are alone and who less or more than another? Engaged thinks the text
counts. But we already see it doesn't. The text does not exist. Everything is
translation. Who can read under the words what's written? The reason such
counsel to live out the biblical resonantes is that after all the foils are
still, three important advises from well meaning people are here cited. What's
the point? When you get beyond 70 and all the previous points have been erased
you are standing naked and pointless. So says Chuang Tzu. If one fit into some
puzzle and played a role in continuity, that would be a point, when the
sound of the grinding is getting low, but you never see what it amounted
to, are lucky to know where it came from, if you do, but I do know, of this
tenth generation, but that's all when he goes to the long home. What's the
point, what mattered at all? Sir Stephen in his Journals of 1985 is not as
supple or interesting as in his World of 1951. Were that reversed it
were something, but in age the soul is less believing of its haps and mishaps.
So childhood and youth are vanity.
Faith and continuity of life connect the
parts. Coming before the board to design a life the plan is too daring.
The board has to assert itself, add some helps. The chief help added to my life
was Cleopatra, who I finally married after seven years. This whimsical name for
her occured on a recent bus trip to visit the last
unloading of the Don Reitz wood kiln. The last because thereafter he
died. Not that these contradictions do not go on and on, but taking
her to med school is one mishap not regretted.
12,186
II.
III.
Reluctant to give detail lest it be
mistaken for something else, I went to Tesla Tech and failed accounting, math,
and logarithms. However a deep drink of the Bible and what that implies of
Torah and the much sought fellowship of the Holy Spirit compensated. My acquiescence
to a business degree was superseded by poetry, which found me in Costa Rica
where I went as part of that college's coop program. I obtained a job there
much as I would do dissertation research later, intuitively, just as I divined
Blake's Tyger for Geoffrey Hartman in a first semester of graduate school in
English after a degree in business. As such I stumbled upon Rhodes Dunlap and
Donald Justice and on John Huntley who
taught Milton, but was involved with SNCC and mentioned a clearing house that
recruited teachers for southern Black colleges. I took his reference and a job
at Fayetteville State College, which I never mentioned to Huntley who would
have been glad. I lasted there, a shock to the system, until the assassination
of Dr. King, when, urged to move on, I applied at UT-Austin because
the application was free. Arriving there during the Democratic convention of
Chicago of '68, I lived on a sheep ranch outside town and pursued contradiction
avidly. I finished a dissertation, Restorations of the Golden Age in New
World Discoveries in time for graduation in '75, but conceiving somehow
that I owed an MFA thesis to myself, a poetic version of Restorations in
that vision of the time where Ameryca was conceived as a mystical
transcendence of children, A Calendar of Poems: Encouragements for Such as
Shall Have Intention to be Undertakers in the Planting of the NewFoundLand appeared
slightly before Restorations (December, 1973).
[John Huntley: When some of us faculty and
students created ‘The Mississippi Support Program’ in 1963, Lane [Davis
professor Political Science] was among the first to come forward. We began
backing the white kids from Iowa who’d worked in Mississippi that summer registering
disenfranchised voters. Later the group collected books, clothing, and food,
shipping stuff down to Holly Springs, Mississippi, for distribution by
locals. Lane’s energy and strong belief in civil rights for all fired
much of this activity. MSP (as the program got to be called) also established
liaison with Rust College, a black college in Holly Springs. Faculty and
administrators from Iowa went down; others came up. For 2 summers, the
program brought Rust College students to Iowa for specially designed courses.
UI Sailing Club Minutes, 3 Nov 2004.]
Unable to enjoy the Modern Language
Association variety of varsity players of the profession, I washed bottles in a
biochemical lab for five years after that, and grew herbs for three years as
horticulturist of the College of Pharmacy's Experimental Drug and Herb
Garden. These herb gardens also happened by accident, important because
the dream it implied was as real as that previous contemplation of Ameryca. I
had seen jars of herbs in a window sill in Chicago ten years before, whose
vision and fragrance were so convincing I began cultivation and operated
multiple greenhouses. Riding a bike in central Austin I happened on the Drug
Garden on its last legs, which eventually I tended before it was bulldozed
then by the U for an archery range.
In the midst of these events I met the girl I was to marry and take a place in genealogy. Herbs of yellow flowered aesclepias and zanthoxylum, hedeoma and live oaks grew on a plot her grandmother had in the Texas Hill Country. I planted thyme and lavender in Indian country filled with flint springs, middens, limestone, old stage stops, persimmons. Hill country and herbs together were the motive of Native Texans (1984) which was accepted and reneged upon by two successive Texas publishers, then issued privately in three small printings.
The
next event, our first child, coincided with my wife qualifying for Med school
and a move to Dallas to pursue this. I was happy to teach at Bishop College
there, another Black college and did for five years, which flew by considering.
Many notable events at Bishop College were active with writing. Two book
length manuscripts saw daylight by rising early, sometimes three AM, writing
and then typing the day's work before the family rose. One semester the lit
texts didn't come on time, so since as a was Baptist related institution with a
religion major, and most students had a Bible, and as the Norton Anthology of
World Lit began with some Psalms, we started there and when the books still did
not show expanded to a conversation to the Messianic Psalms. Having learned to
prepare ahead of time, I began to write essays to base the discussions, so
it was no stretch to continue at home when the books finally did arrive. In
about three months this produced a manuscript of Psalms 1-41 taken from a
"poetic" point of view which read the psalms as poems and not
theology, issued as A Poetical Reading of the Psalms of David (1985),
finished the day our second child was born, made available in
proof.
Around this time quasi scholarly articles, sometimes called poetic research by McCaffery and others, as opposed to scholarly, were circulated. Psalm 1 appeared in Epiphany and a spin off from Isaiah in Conoscenza Religiosa. This had been sent to Mystical Studies where it was rejected, but Elemire Zolla, a reader, translated it into Italian and published it in Rome. I later sent a consideration of Psalm 8 and 16 to Mystical Studies which was accepted, but the journal ceased publication the following year. About that time I completed the Taliesin Poems, pseudo translations from travels in Wales before we married. There was an exhibit at Bishop College of thirty acrylic canvases and elsewhere in the city of stained glass panels done in that time. Such things resulted, along with editing a literary mag at Bishop, The Red Rose, in being offered promotion and tenure, astonishing since the college was in fact to close within two years and none of the faculty would be paid. My wife being ready for her residency we interviewed in major cities of the southwest and could not bear to have not lived in Arizona where the wilderness was so close, so after one year of tenure at Bishop we took her residency in Phoenix and I resigned, avoiding the last gasp of that school's demise after 105 years.
That year, 1985 ended my teaching career which had never been among the entitled. I had no desire to contribute to the status quo. With a wife in residency and two small children, it was fortunate I didn't teach. Many mornings saw the one year old and six year old with their father in the Four Peaks wilderness sketching pastels of the rocks on back roads until noon. I joined two different groups of artists who hired models to do life drawings together.
A
major attraction of this residency was that residents of the hospital could
moonlight as staff at a medical clinic onthe south rim of the Grand Canyon and
could elect to live a month there, in addition to many weekends moonlighting.
While she worked the clinic the children and I walked the Bright Angel
and Kaibab trails over and over. In her month there we learned our third
child had been conceived, and his brother to be, four years old, did an
immediate backward somersault, landing on his feet, the only one of his life.
Those years are filled with red rock and sandstone, red shadows, ravens,
Japanese tourists, snow bows, for it snowed when the sun was out, and other
snows too, with long walks down into warmer weather along mule trails, climbing
up on the sides when the mule train passed. This was as good or better than all
the mornings spend in the lower deserts where we took extensive hikes too, once
doing 22 miles in the Mazatals one long day with creosote, yellow
rattlers and waterfalls, which is what we came to Arizona for. In Texas you can
hardly leave the road for barbed wire.These things obviously preoccupy both the
foreground and background of later fiction.
Almost anybody can have children, but the ironies of age are everywhere. Maybe you don't want to admit they are doing to you what you did. Nobody knows either before or after. Our daughter found her wavelength early, but adversities and her own predilections, even as she was indelibly baptized in the constant word and works of art, nature, travel. Her mother read continuously to her and them all, acting out the parts in various dialects. The bath of puns, images and ideas made pathways in their brains as significant as their personalities. Her brother, an RN, photographer, athlete, sculptor, musician is diverse enough, and the youngest took up such things as effortlessly as his athletic prowess, which he then exchanged for a girl and many babies. Preventing any of this was the last thing on our minds since we were so busy nurturing it. All the while the imagination spins and saves until after it is all fiction of that post idyllic age. It would be nice to circle and be a child again, but children become adults and may forget everything their lovers, fathers and mothers, hold dear. Everything you remember of their lives they do not.
The Renaissance
I studied the renaissance because the 20th century seemed too obvious. This started with Bill Ingram, a Shakespearean doctoral student from Penn who later taught at Michigan, who held classes in his apartment in Powelton Village. About a dozen or so students would read and discuss the plays in his garret with another teacher, Bill Hollis. Ideal as this was it got better the night I posed if by then I had not read about everything there was, so Bill asked, have you read the Faerie Queene? The goose bumps rise together at the mention of so much kingdom of myth, Justice, Elizabeth, the stellium of minds, allegory. So I said, what's that? JD Beatty asked me later in the first semester at Iowa, what happened to the other six books! So Bill Ingram assigned me a paper on the allegory of evil in Book I, not knowing of the Big Drink above. It got the highest grade I ever got. Due to that Drink Rhodes Dunlap the next year, reading another paper on the FQ in graduate school at Iowa, filled with spelling errors, recognized the analysis and identifications of Spenser's biblicism were my own citations, not something I read. Beginning with Spenser, I fell into and out of grace, as with Warner Barnes, teacher of the required bibliography class at Iowa, for whom I did an annotated C.S. Lewis bibliography at around 50 pages, which he rewarded with a job on the Mark Twain Project, collating text. He sponsored a book collector club I disdained at the time, but I used to go through boxcars of books at the Salvation Army of Cedar Rapids, all unknowing that I started to do then what I did in the 90's with rare books, to capture the 20th century before it passed. Of course I read Donne at length, Wyatt and Sidney, but worked hard on Henry Vaughan for some reason and on the plays of Marston and Italian precursors, with everyday thoughts of Urn Burial and quincunxes, Euphues and Deloney, sonnets all round, culminating in Milton, not to say Hawthorne. In the wind I picked up Emily Dickinson on my own and Blake from Geoffrey Hartman, who was really consumed with Wordsworth's cannibalism of little Lucy. Other than the glowering of Donald Justice, playing football with Jim Heynen and Gary Sange at different times, hosting lit discussions along the railroad tracks in Coralville next to the cement plant, across from the Iowa river, one of the big events was one morning at 22 below when I got the car to start, a little NSU Prinz, and went out saving lives of the stranded. It was incredible fun to go to Hartman's class in parkas and boots, a life that ended for the real for which there is no stopping.
FSC
I wanted to teach at a black college as a response to prejudice I had heard but disbelieved. At Fayetteville State College, Dean Malvin E. Moore wanted us to apply for a NASA summer hiring program, which I did, and ended up with a secret clearance to examine the last decade of NASA contracts. Shall one say this revealed the hosts of Operation Paperclip and counter NASA superstructure, secret clone and drone programs or that I lasted 5 days and went over to the Folger Shakespeare Library and sought admission? Rhodes Dunlap's name got me in and I shared a desk with Charles Mish and heard of all seamy 18th century fiction. Roy Flannigan of the Milton Newsletter was there. I smoked a pipe for the sake of ambiance, went to coffee with the Boswells of Georgetown, bounced up and down with the humanists on leather cushions, read Elizabethan grammars and the Martin Marprelate Tracts, did a propaganda analysis and smoked a pipe. I lived with my dog and companion at 1800 R, walked to DuPont Circle in the evenings among the crowd of narcs, provocateurs, hippies, dealers, congo drums and salesmen. I was once asked if I knew where to buy some lettuce.
The faith that extended best from Iowa to Fayetteville, to Washington DC to Texas was Friendly, a very long brown and white basset hound with an attitude, who joined me in the Iowa winter after I gave him some roast beef. A little protective, he bit a number of people he considers outliers. How's that for freedom from inhibition? Bloods would cross to the other side of the street in DC when they saw Friendly coming. Dogs can see the human spirit, the naked intent. Friendly and I had an intuitive link. Somebody at a catfish fry in Coralville said that he wouldn't have minded being a dog under me! When I moved to the sheep ranch outside Austin, the rancher, Lawrence Warren, had his own dogs and there were packs of dogs all around. Lawrence's two dogs joined up with three of the neighbor's dogs and came for Friendly that first night. I had left him outside. He knew what to do. Those dogs attacked about three AM. By the time I got out the door two of them were down and the other three were leaving. The next day Charlie Black, the rancher's everyday small dog, brought down Charlie Brown, usually aloof from it all, a huge good tempered husky-shepherd mix, large, tall and near 150 pounds. He and Friendly met halfway, circled and sniffed in respect. Friendly was a quarter his size, but they reached detente. He used to take week long forays into the hills in season, but was shot by a rancher, which it took me some weeks to understand. I saw him dead in the back of a pickup in a dream.
After
the summer at the Folger I went back to FSC, but was joined then by other
enlistees, for Fayetteville had found Rockerfeller money to expand faculty:
Barbara Meyerson, Karl Hillie in English, Penelope Slacum and Paul Roberts in
history and Guy Jacobson a Parisian, a Judokan, to teach French. Guy, a third
degree, had competed all over Europe and later organized classes. Dr. Moore had
said to us on our first interview the year before that he wanted us to teach
the students to be just like us. This was a misunderstandin. Dr. Jones, the
president, said we shouldn't teach 'em, we should learn 'em. But the influx of
white M.A.'s combined with an influx of northern students on athletic and other
scholarships from Bed/Sty, Newark were anything but naive and contributed to
radicalizing the campus. In this mix were students from the islands off SC,
Gullah people, and from the pine flats of NC and Virginia. There were some
outstanding faculty and staff. Harvey Jenkins, the art teacher, affable and
creative, was maybe the best athlete in the area. He took the judo class. In
exhibition Guy had a really hard time throwing him, but in an earlier match
Harvey stayed up five times in succession against a Fort Bragg club, after
three months of instruction. Ollie Cox in English was editor of the school
paper and gave freedom to New Yorkers Bill Halsey and Bernard Pearson to
express their notions of liberation. He printed a sheaf of my poems and Gershon
B. Fiawoo's which provoked the response, "he's against football!" I
knew a student who had been in Stanleyville with the air force, Archie Johnson.
We made a deal that he would teach me chess, he had been a champion in the air
force, and I would get him over the grammatical hump. He became a radical too,
didn't eat for weeks and weeks, published an underground newsletter,
facetiously called, "Uncle Tom Speaks." In the end his diction became
Shakespearean. But the pressures in the cooker were rising. Mr. C. I. Brown,
Charlie, was assistant to the president and liaison for all kinds of faculty
interests, but also a tennis player so he and I played twice a week. I had
played one year, the last, of D1. He would always warm up carefully in his
sweats. He had a son my age. I showed him things I was writing and he
stimulated some publications. Along about March or April of 1968 the pot boiled
over and the students took over the school for different demands. One of them
was to get more black teachers, which contributed to the nonrenewal of
contracts a week before graduation that year.
All my freshmen classes kept a journal with the promise that up to five points would be added to their final grade according to how much they wrote. Their frankness and interest much exceeded the norm so Ollie and I printed excerpts from their journals anonymously in the school paper, although I would ask their permission. Remnant responses to what I taught in those years remain, as below, because Charlie Brown insisted I have the students evaluate my teaching. [The excerpts following the assignment in Austin, given below, are from those.] Even before the spring of '67 the ladies of the department, including the President's wife, who taught reading, were affronted by the black power boys, as they called them, who they seemed instinctively to fail. In the Lit II class these young men would sit dispersed about the room, feet up on the chair in front, shades over the eyes, hands on their crotch. I took it up, except for the last, wore shades, but got the better of them because the term paper was a journal of their thoughts modeled after Notes from the Underground, which we had read. Some of the papers submitted were way above average and given high grades, which produced A's and B's for them, giving evidence of themselves as thinkers and writers, especially Gregory Savoy who I remember the ladies wanting to humble. I visited him the next year at his home in D.C. when I was at the Folger, met his family and the promise he gave of a bright future. I visited Archie Johnson the next year, driving to Lumberton from Austin and stayed with him. The mother of his child was just sure I would not show. I stopped in then also to see President Jones too, even after all that water under the bridge with an AAUP censure. He had liked my enthusiasm, used to come into the buildings on Saturday to see who was there and he usually found me. It was a good place to work. He said, "I wish you hadn't done the things you did," referring I guess to the AAUP. I said the same thing back to him, but it was amicable. That is the saying isn't it, "love covers a multitude of sins." Also on that last visit I went to see Karl Hillie who was in the asylum for a nervous breakdown which you could see coming. He is the only one I have been in contact in these long years after. I had a long talk with him then. He said he found out that his wife could tell him "everything" if he asked correctly, not far off the mark with that. He thought I was William Blake he said. We played checkers behind the barbed wire. It gave a new understanding and passion to my public readings of Howl in the next years. I have two letters from him of that time addressed to "William." He recovered and taught there the next five years, the only one in the end not fired.
IV. Austin
1. This document on onion skin was part of a
graduate application to the University of Chicago and Johns Hopkins before I
went to Texas. A Statement of MetaPataAesthetaphysics:
"Excluding the period from 1945 to the present, my interest is 16th century England and particularly the "neo-elizabethan" prose meaning wit, inventive ellipse, mimetic words, macro-phonetic overlaps, metonymy, malaprops, partials, etc,--trying to create language that fits a time instead of appearing as it does to be a hyperbolic, glossolic misfit. I imply that the styles of modern Ciceronia reinforce a view of the world that is 200 years anachronistic, language being the last to advance and the least understood. By language I mean the language of Art, discovering kinds of v=erbal formulations I think that the concerns for story, linear plot--even flashbacks, and characterization are not the chief strengths of the verbal medium but are secondary to idiolect-symbolism. I judge that the growth of verbal English art must be in directing The Naked Lunch to run a non-picaresque course without sacrificing the nonverbal devices of kinesics; the writing must be both vocal and intellectual, appealing to sense and mind. The vocal-sense expression which Michael McClure calls "body metaphor" attempts to incorporate sounds, mimetic words, mock-forms to find linguistic structures of universal significance, the cries of beasts. What remains is rhythm, tone, diction and I think these should be of quality caresses, the very sound of each word and each cluster of words appealing immediately to sight and mind where they strike sense impression. McClure has done this by encoding presymbolic sounds without involving cognitive processes. I want to join presymbolic sounds into notional levels so that body and mind are together engaged. This is a form of comedy. Guntar Grass's comedy when John Barth talks about the death of the novel ultimately addresses himself to the failure of Aristotelian apparatus. Whether the best direction is McClure's physiophonetics or something deeper than the impression of heard sounds may have to wait on information about brain physiology. When it comes to intellectual meaning from such a style, if you destroy space and time or confuse them completely, what kind of meaning can be said to exist? But because the cognitive process does exist I think it important to engage the mind centrifugally."
It was only later that I was told about the bloodthirsty central Texas landscape. At the time I thought it genial and compatible. Does that mean I am dumbthirsty? Probably. I used to walk naked there. When I told this to my friend he never talked to me again. It makes my blood run cold, he said. But instead of the U of Chicago, I ended up on the sheep ranch outside Austin but did not pursue the English renaissance with the seriousness of a footnote eater. It depends on how you define the scientific parody of solutions to nonexistent problems, the Pataphysical. In graduate study the pataphysicist issued a flow chart on the prologue to Crane's Bridge, with diagrams, argued that Lowell discovered Pluto in Japan, proposed poems be sent into space as a corrective of Carl Sagan. Other than Tom Cranfill's Shakespeare class and Tom Whitbread's Stevens and Crane there was not much of interest in English, it being the second choice, for I had enrolled in linguistics. Proposals toward a universal model of language to Johns Hopkins and Chicago were turned down, but Texas, did not know better. But I would not accept the government fellowship that W. P. Lehmann proposed and anyway, descriptive linguistics, Swahili and acoustics aside, how would a failed logartharim student take mathematical linguistics? That was actually the name of the thing. Diligent hours of study by day saw the rest of the class escape over the horizon. At this time however the English department, which had given me a job right away because of Warner Barnes, began to question its judgment. Initially TAs were to attend a seminar led by Maureen McElroy in how to teach, to turn in their assignments and discuss them for mutual instruction. Friends in the class, John Cullen and Tom Goar insisted later that my assignments led to the seminar's demise. Pataphysics again. Dada for sure.
Warner Barnes was down from Iowa by the time
I got to Texas. I showed my letter of application to him. With some diplomacy
he said to let him write a letter in its place and he took it himself to James
Ayers who was an under dean and told him the story, which he says Ayers
responded that "we must cover these people" meaning I guess the black
college expatriates. So I was on the payroll and paying instate tuition. But
further, coming as I had out of the South, there was an interest in organizing the
600 English TAs in a union, along with SDS Howard Hertz and Ian Munroe, which
made them and their associates seem rather a threat to the status quo,
especially when it was rumored that Howard had taken a gun to class. Who
knows?Here some reviews at hand given at FSC before Texas, the Texas ones are
even more embarrassing:
To whom it may concern:
________________________________________________________________
REFERENCE SYSTEM SEMANTICS: the
classification of meaning by Cumulative factor: with class system analysis.
1. Nirvana means "blowing out."
2. Man does not have entire control over his
world.
3. It follows from this that the most
workable attitude about life is to realize this and stop fearing sneak attacks,
replacing a frenzied with a relaxed deafness.
4. The only alternative to allowing the
exercise of murder is to kill everyone else first.
5. This is the western way. Socrates is
widely known for blowing out words, protesting he knows nothing and meaning
that he knows everything. He breathes with Alcibiades all night and with the
public forum all day.
6. Rangoon has no public forum, or baths, or
the leisure to dispute.
7. Socrates man is manic, Rangoon man is
depressive.
8. Socrates man is an intellect-abstractor.
Rangoon man is an emotion-actor.
9. Black radicals are 60%
emotion-abstractors. White radicals are 60% intellect-actors.
10. Everyone else is a fox or a mouse. The
fox becomes an owl, the mouse becomes a cat.
11. It is obvious that Emotion-Action and
Intellect-Abstraction are capable of relating to each other on multiple levels:
Black vs. White
East vs. West
Depressive vs. Manic
Buddha vs. Christ
Poor vs. Rich
Asian, African, Eskimo, Pygmy, Arab, Jew,
Indian vs. Caucasian
12. Oh to be Caucasian,
White, and pure from sin.
Oh to be Caucasian,
White and always win.
Oh to be Caucasian,
We control your minds,
We won't ever leave you,
Stay and you'll be ours.
13. Nirvana means "blowing out,"
but not in the sense of great rational defenses against feeling-being.
14. To feel is to be more essentially human.
15. Moral rectitude is anal fixation.
16. The Hebrews thought the center of man was
his bowels. The Christians thought the center of man was his heart. The
Caucasians made the logical extension and utilize the heart and bowels for the
same function. Having one more vestigial organ than the rest of the world, they
thought they were further evolved and puffed up their single function as being
superior. Their ancestors had divided the whole world into gods, devils, male,
female, emotion, intellect, abstraction, action, black, white, west, east,
rich, poor.
17. White and Black radicals have begun to
make the world whole with chemicals.
18. When they get intellect, emotion, action
and abstraction together they're going to take over America and do away with
rich, poor, west, east, gods, devils. Male, female will remain separate forms
except that they will be put together all the time.
18. If you want the future now, you can have
a love-in. If you want America now, you can have a revolution. Oppression has
taught them that in a really free society the many rule the few at the worst
(not the few ruling the many as it now is), and at the best everybody is of
equal value. The rich western whites will not be enslaved, but they will be
made equal to everyone else. The ranks of power in the new world will be
designated according to the amount of brotherhood practiced. They won't be
exploited, they will be loved.
19. Since law and order is a necessity, it is
best that they join the majority and not resist.
Assume you have taken this paper and other
assignments home with you over Thanksgiving. Since they are interested in your
academic progress, your parents read the assignments to see what they are
missing.
1. What will be their response? (Explain the causes of it.) What kind of language (give examples) will they use to characterize the above statements.
Since an alternative to the present society
has been proposed, write a defense of either the new proposal or the old
proposal, realizing that your assumption is that this is the final
communication before war. The stakes are that unless you persuade them or they
persuade you, you will kill each other.
Not all the teacher evaluations were benign.
One fellow said, "will they let just anybody teach English?"
Freshmen English had a designated curriculum, the first semester as Classical Rhetoric, with Corbett as a text, second semester as Identity, with Erik Erikson as a text. Halsey and Pearson from FSC were visiting in Austin to perform their plays, with also a female player that spring of '69, and each of us went in sequence to the class, announcing that he or she was the teacher, Then the students were to vote on who the real one was. That began the ride. The semester project was to invent a game, but the English department got a call from the radio station asking if they could send a reporter to a class, but the Department sent instead the assistant director, an ex preacher, to its eight AM offering to listen on the QT outside the door. He could have come on a more propitious day, but what he heard was enough to call a conference where he delivered the opinion that the TA was young. How could he be wrong, but I was teaching in the envelop of the moment, so... but the related outcome later that spring dictated that since that TA was in linguistics and these treasured spots should be first reserved for true English majors, he should be let go. That was the famous James Sledd speaking. I got evaluated real quick then, having learned from the previous occasion at Fayetteville, and on the basis of those evaluations, "Thank you Andy! He gave us life!" and other missives taken personally to the Dean, John T. Silber, who minceth not, wrote to English, but said the ball was now back in the court of the English department, which however backed down. Being out of the linguistiche a little anyway by then, the TA became an English major again. What rejoicing occurred then in those dharma halls. As big a factor may have been John Cullen, who had gone to Sledd and said that if they didn't rehire me he would quit. Surely he would deny this now. The best things at UT however were across the way anyway in philosophy and classics, in Jung, para-geography, Rao, Desani, Shattuck, Arrowsmith (by extension) Stanley Hall (ballet). I cultivated Willis Pratt in English because I wanted copies of his Blake slides, managed this by submitting Blake's Tyger, for the third time in three years, A plus each time. I sat in on Ambrose Gordon's Aiken Lit because I wanted him too for my committee, and gave him a piece of octopus meat in class to illustrate Aiken's notion of corpuscular consciousness. Mostly the best of Texas Ed was the appearance of Borges, Ginsburg and Bly for readings, and the library.
2. It seems to me that these are worth
quoting at length because they provide a context for our much more desperate
state after the turn of the millennium. Since I never stop writing of this, and
the complete index of that from 2005 to the present is online at
EncouragementsforSuch, no need to rehearse it here. But to pick up the
narrative post humanist as it were, after finishing the PhD, refusing the profession
and living for its own sake, always in search of art, at a festival in Hyde
Park I met Jim Bowman, traded him a large mint for a print. He was a part time
bottle washer for the Clayton Foundation for Biochemical Research, but broke
his leg and came to my door on one foot for me to sub for him. So I went to lab
but he never came back, so I did five years. But the post docs, like the
English teachers, were worried I was ruining their experiments with unclean
dishes. There were two tubs, one of suds and one to rinse, lots of brushes,
rubber gloves and beakers, flasks, test tubes, petri dishes and such. It was a
19 hour a week job, but I was saved by their getting a power electric washer
that really got the stuff clean. Then however the penny pinching post docs
decided that the bottles in which they mixed their litmus paper with
radioactive zylene should also be washed too, it could save pennies a bottle,
so Bill Lee, foreman of the lab, it not being his idea, took me into another
lab, opened a window twenty feet away and showed me how to pour the bottles
down the drain into Barton Creek. A little after this began I started having
nosebleeds, figured it was the zylene, duh, filed a workman's comp case and got
a liver bilirubin test. They were all upset, but then I learned there was a refrigerator
in Dennis' lab that was so radioactive they couldn't open it. Dennis one time
was going away for the weekend and asked me to feed his experimental rabbit
kept in the basement, its cage was turned away from the light against the wall.
This is the fate of all those human subjects also that we will never hear
about. Appalled, I call that rabbit Pity and turned his cage to the light, but
Dennis changed it back. http://www.sundress.net/21stars/issue03/reiff.htm
Dr. Reed, head of the biochem research, had a
Christmas party each year. The post docs were upset when Bill instigated Dr.
Reed to invite me, the dishwasher with a Ph.D. I took a giant aloe vera to the
Reeds and met at the punchbowl a visiting Hungarian quantum chemist who loved
poetry, so I performed an array of Shakespeare sonnets for him. Ilya Prigogene
was the UT Nobel winner who said poetry and physics are the same. Born the same
day and year, different cities though, Chicago and Philadelphia, Bill Lee
taught me haikido, which accounts for something, and introduced me to Van de
Wetering's work. He was the teacher in Austin and the fixer in the lab, since
honored with remarks indicating he was a very good teacher. Despite the
bilirubin test I became his demo for the class. Wearing the judo gi I used in
Fayetteville he threw me around the mat. The room was huge, a gym, covered with
mat. We would all roll around the walls for hours. The thing he seemed to like
the least I liked the most, sitting on legs in meditation at the end of the
class. He admitted the bulk of practitioners had excess libido.
Bill lived in Elgin among cotton farms. It
was where my wife's father was born to sharecroppers, a place of cisterns and
abandoned homes we explored, poverty too, for her father left school to work
the fields in the sixth grade, exactly like my grandmother Anna. At 19 he
enlisted and was shot down in 1944 during a mission over France, the 25th, to
spend a year in Nazi camps. That gets as close to revealing what the black
soils tell as anything, for these people never spoke of what lay in the ground.
There are pictures of Carl's father, Ossian, plowing the fields with mules in
1920. I not only like these people but feel an identity with them. The railway
depot still stands from which they came, for at that time a train ran from New
York to Elgin. Ossian's wife came on that train nine years after he arrived, as
did her cousins. Many houses on these farms in 1970 were just left open and deserted,
belongings scattered on the floors. We found a Bible on a table in the living
room, pages blowing open to this verse...but the verse is immaterial compared
to the life and the soil, all so much more real than the humanists whose towers
in Austin can nearly be seen from Ossian's field. The trees they used to fence
their fields are gone too, along with everything else, for the condos were
coming, the fence rows planted with osage orange, boie d'arc trees, hills
silent against black earth. It says on the three legged table, "He dealt
to every one of Israel, both man and woman, to every one a loaf of bread, and a
good piece of flesh and a flagon of wine." In this Ecclesiastes of field
and weather Elgin grew four times larger since those Sunday visits, deafening
into silence lives, homes, ways of Swedish pioneers who settled there, the
Swedish also being the first to settle Philadelphia.
I had been a semi pro dish washer, thus
suited to serve five years in the Clayton labs. I had washed the letters off of
tombstones at 15 and 16 at J. H. Matthews Co. in Pittsburgh, a foundry and
factory. This recommendation I once gave as bio to a magazine that solicited,
but then rejected a fictional work of Ben Gurions' on the intervention of
angels in Israel. But there were angels in Elgin and in foundries, angels whose
faces and hands, like cogwheels
in the sky, held open gold flares. All experience being simultaneous with these
visions of foundry, factory, field and heart do not equally transfer one to
another. The Bible verse written over them is not ecclesiastical but prophetic,
as if Elijah wore rubber gloves and labored over the tub, but at least nobody
complained that I stacked the tombstones wrong or that the letters weren't
clean as they had in the labs. A third time I did dishes at a nursing home, met
the personnel director at the Arco gas pumps. She needed a dishwasher. What's a
PhD for anyway? So I turned up the next day but the inmates like feedlot cattle
didn't eat, but made mounds of garbage. Their food was taken to the
"kitchen" and blasted off of plates by astronauts with a hose. That
was my last dish job, except of course now as an amateur.
Amateur status is what Arrowsmith recommends
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. http://newcriterion.com:81/archive/12/jun94/tutu.htm
In perusing these memories I came on essays
submitted for review to the journals, dismal responses of the closed shop,
filled with anger and rejection and only infrequently any grace. The life of
the intellect produces such impotence. They think the artist and poet must have
their help to succeed. Grants, fellowships, contracts, appearances, prizes all
help ensure that the right things are being done according to their light. This
is not however how Whitman and Poe, Dickinson heard that fly in her house and
knew right away to call the department. I had been in and out of my amateur
status, dishwashing and gardening, but in 1980 an overwhelming need for cash,
the coming birth of our daughter, required a re-up. That previous summer I
canvassed the executive committee at UT with my intent. It was not an automatic
hire because five years before, as Maureen McElroy explained, remembering me
from that disrupted seminar previously, there just were not any jobs in the
night school, the polite way of saying, take a hike. This was to avoid being
actionable even if fraudulent. So at .500, with two hirings, and two firings,
and that from the same university--why can't they make up their minds, the
issue was in doubt--but they had instituted a grade inflation index by then,
being concerned with such crimes, and maybe thought they wanted austerity in
the department. If you got a 1 than you graded the student just like anybody
else. Less than a 1 and you were tougher. Greater than a 1 and your student
evaluations were in doubt. Everything was run on gossip and control. They
forgot my earlier incarnation in linguistics and the union for which Neil McGaw
started the Association of Graduate Students in English to forestall
unionization and the enthusiasms of my teaching. I had been elected co-chair of
the AGSE event, ran on the platform that gave cash to readers of poetry, a half
dozen of which appeared. Happily I quit this farce and didn't finish that
august term. Oh Ubu! All forgot. Hired thrice but fired only twice. At least I
never won a teaching award. In those years that was the kiss and automatic loss
of the down and the game. Texas was the place.
A better version of the Golden Age came out
in elimae in early 2007 and other parts are of it as still stewing, but
of course the whole idea that America was a golden age was superceded by the
eco-feminist criticism that saw the masculine take on the feminine as war and
destruction and not at all innocent. This aspect of post modern is pretty
welcome if you want to account a sense of justice to events, justice being the
true realization of the golden age. Then of course instantly, all such naive
historical reconstructions and retakes were superseded by the mind-forged manacles
of novus ordo which had already been in place, the trance broadcast by referees
and soldiers of the Mount Ord. See HistoPossum. I left all this to be a
gardener of plants, to see them in the context of immigrant waves, the
degradation of the land, the plants themselves a kind of ultimate revenge in
the datura, mescal bean, mushroom cults their children reaped as new, but fake,
like cell phones, natives. Since, they traded it for banks. Many people never
escaped Austin. I got out but held the keys of five university buildings in my
hands: Parlin, Calhoun, Experimental Science, Drug Garden, Pharmacy, and
another one they tore down I can't remember.
______________________________________________________11644
16 Feb
2014
Explanations of the Absolute
Labels: Ameryca, Arrowsmith, Austin, Faerie Queene,
Germantown, humanities, Hungry Hill, John Cullen translator, Mummz, Sheep,
Spicewood Spgs Rd,
Austin, 1968-1980--Spicewood Spgs
above, Bull Creek below. AE lived on the Balcones Fault, took a PhD in
literature at UT-Austin, ran the Experimental
Drug and Herb Garden of the College of Pharmacy, worked for the Clayton
Foundation for Biochemical Research, wrote Native
Texans, practiced aikido with Bill Lee and escaped.
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