Human Botany Review for the End of Biological Extinction 人類植物學

WELCOME TO THE PARTY OF THE LAMB A Faerie Tale Fro Gromets

2012-01-30T16:11:00.000-08:00

EVERYBODY WELCOME
DINNER SERVED
COME AS YOU ARE

Faerie History of the Future

2011-12-26T17:32:00.000-08:00

Gettin closer?

Faerie history begins about WWII. PhsyOrg.com is a way to get up on the wave, Technology for news of DARPA Narrative Networks and Human Language Technology,Physics and Nanotech for a basis of inference. Do not click to have your brain trained.

Alien Knowing and Unknown

2011-12-17T06:36:00.001-08:00

The alien and the unknown are in the feet of your old age and death.

A Man Without Fantasy

That's the difference between being a bear and wearing a Jordan t-shirt with Hanes underwear. Nobody is Jordaned or Meadow Lark Lemoned from a laying on of their hands. Identity grows from within, social and individual.

Dress in any of these masks or be naked as yourself as Who Wears Only A Name. Either you stand naked in The Name or you hide in a mask. Groups function as masks to prevent nakedness. The group will not go with you to death, but if there were something other than The Name to stand in it might be the landscape and the racial memory of landscape that "my parents and grandparents knew" (Momaday, 46). "I feel deeply about the landscape and I mean that literally. I think it is important for a person to come to terms with landscape. I think that's important; it is a means to knowing oneself" (45). But for the human there isn't identity in the landscape any more there is in being a god. How you know you're not a god is a fantasy question like looking at a plate of doughnuts.We can talk about these two identities, the family/tribe/ nation and the self in its skin. What has no arms, no legs, no skin, no teeth. If you answer it you turn to joy from grief.

Superficial Existence in the Modern World

Bear, landscape and ancestry have been substituted with fantasies annihilating the traditional in tribal societies and every assimilated subgroup. Assimilation is never good, although to say it that bald is offensive. This is the point in that First Convocation of Indian Scholars (Ed. by Rupert Costo, 1970). In answering Hopi Charles Loloma about how to assume the traditional identity Momaday says, "I think that each of us who realizes that the native traditional values are important has a great obligation to convince the young of that, who may be wavering with alternatives...[of] the dominant society which is destroying the world in which it lives" (9). "It's really up to the older people"(10) to identify "the danger of superficial existence in the modern world" (10). To counter superficial existence he says "they have a primary obligation to tell their children and grandchildren about the traditional world, and try to show them by example and tell them explicitly that there is an option available to them, and that they're damn fools if they don't avail themselves of it" (10). Unless You Live It the Words Mean Nothing.

Acculturation

Thus acculturation is "a kind of one-way process in which the Indian ceases to be an Indian and becomes white man" (10). It is broader than that too, the PA German ceased to be himself and became an English-American. Acculturation to the modern translated means to steal the birth rite identity of the traditional, its language and customs and make the native a mascot of the modern. There is a continual excavation of the Caucasoid in every subgroup that assimilates, whether Pennsylvania German, Hispanic, black, Indian. The anthropologists should excavate themselves to give them something to do, since they otherwise are the inventors and stalking horse for the modern against the traditional, looking for power by stealing it. Modern here is not the pejorative it seems if the native takes his tradition into it to return what is stolen, or as Momaday says, that "it is good to go into the enemy's camp" (12). Steal his horses! But he has stolen the children!

Pull Out the Light Poles

That said, it remains to learn tradition from the elder. In the face of radical destruction this takes more than effort, it takes surrender. Without surrender the traditional dies. Take your pick, you can think like Katie Couric and all the like spokespersons for the modern on Charlie Rose, or like grandfather. Momaday says it is a duty to teach the young. He addresses the elder's reluctance: "I wonder if you have any idea of why they shut up at a certain point like that, why they won't talk to you" (15)? Charles Loloma, the Hopi, had said that when the power company installed electric poles by force "the people came out and pulled the poles all back out. These people didn't want the electricity'"(15). This is symbolic of the whole transmission of culture of the modern against the traditional. When the enemy enters the native camp it is called deliverance, but is really theft of the child. It is destruction of the tradition, which is obvious when white missionaries go to New Guinea but apparently not when the Internet sells social network.

You have to live it, not be curious of it.
Fight Against Electricity!

Ben Barney, a Navajo, says he had a grandfather who taught him until the age of eight, but when he died he couldn't find a replacement. Another says, "my grandfather died, and he was one of the last men in the village who knew the whole ritual cycle of songs. He died without letting me or my father, or any of us record any of it. I think he felt that this thing that he had was too precious to just give out, and have it exposed to someone whom he never knew well. And he'd rather die with it than have that happen to it. It seems to me he was saying, you're not going to to live it. You're one of these people that's fighting for the electricity. (I am not, in fact)" (17). So the ticket to the traditional, the universal (!) is that you have to live it, not be curious of it. Surrender to the traditional! If you will not surrender, and the elders have any pride, they take it to the grave in sorrow. But it is not to be studied by post docs. It is to be lived. How many young think their elders outweigh the modern?

Lifeway

That you have to live it goes a long way toward knowing both wilderness and identity. Living is not an intellectual function. "But he was saying, you're one of these people who are fighting for this. My people never had electricity. We never lived that way. And if I give you my lifeway, if I tell you my lifeway, you're going to sit and laugh at me, because you're laughing anyhow just by your behavior" (17).

Only among the remnants of American tribes does anyone dare thus to challenge the modern. Other subgroups embrace it like a drug. The life way is an iPhone. The elders won't speak to this, "naturally they are not going to tell you. I mean, they can't. I can see why he felt there is no way to communicate experience; the essence of it, the reality of it. I believe he was saying: I could give you words, and you could put them down, but that wouldn't mean the same thing" (17). Is this reality versus the virtual? The track of a bear versus a video game? These things are important if you want to have anything left on the earth that isn't homogeneous and interchangeable. Like babies.

Everything said here of the American tribes transfers to every family and subculture.

2.

Momaday avoids the satiric in his work, but it is a satiric haunt like a ghost river in every meadow, grove and stream the summer nights after the predators came. Then a foam appeared at the exit pipes of plants along the upper Allegheny. It is hard enough to name Bear and Wilderness when those subsequent masks upon masks cover up naked being. Surrender. Stand up and strip, confess, then kneel! Wilderness trees, canyons, streams and things under and in them, screeches in the night, wheat, bear, porcupine are symbols to show what they are standing for, something else, life mirrors that open doors and close the way we live. Only the sun has escaped our dominion. The sun escaped the nano tales that seine the atmosphere in a net, to take earth away.

How To Know and Recognize the Alien

These image masks are the ultimate reality that deny we are predators or aliens. If you want to know the alien go and be one. Sit in the Mogollon. Do you belong? Find a bear. Is he your friend? People wander out all the time, light fires to be found, but the ones that aren't found bone up. Coyote Wound Dresser had a talk with Walt Whitman, Wound Dresser, but things did not turn out well for Whitman. The alien cannot be modeled, but it is knowable if Unknown. I'm going to tell you what it is.

Talking to the Unknown we try to understand synergies of it in the anthropology of Edward Dorn. He says the alien is a crucifying self-consciousness of doubt at the root of his own being when he sees the Shoshone. Does he, Dorn, belong?

His doubts serve against the Unknown. They are a mirror of loss and lack. The filth on the chair that gets on his pants is an image of it..."I had a great desire to be off, to not take any more, or give any more...for I will say it, at the risk of blunder: It is impossible for myself and my people to offer themselves in any but the standard senses" (14).

At least he knows of the surrender, that you have to live it. In some freak of Methodism he wants to wash this old man's feet to tame him, this 102 year old who stands for all of Idaho, Utah, Nevada and the Great Basin before electricity, " a volume of Yaa-Aaa-Aaa" (14). "I was aware of the presumption of my thinking he would be relieved or made happy by having his feet washed" (13).

Now Here is the Alien: If you want to confront the Unknown you must to do it in the feet of your old age and death.

If we want to confront the Unknown we must to do it in the feet of our old age and death. "The place was intensely neglected, I gradually saw, and not just filthy as it looked to be at first glance. It was simply the remains of a life" (12).

The comfort of the Unknown in Dorn's account is that there are two that serve each other in it, but we don't know why. One Unknown is the wife, ust like all our mothers and wives, who "should have died, by the rules of our biology, thirty years ago. But it was evident that she would stay on, the weaker of the two, until he smelled the summary message in his nostrils, then she would be free" (12).

Is death that freedom? The alien doesn't think in known terms, but makes Dorn harbor such thoughts as, "this man and woman were the most profoundly beautiful ancestors I've witnessed go before me' (12,13). "He is the spirit that lies at the bottom, where we have our feet. The feet which step between the domains, the visible sign, the real evidence of the coming event...where this man's low, incantatory verbs spill down across the plateau and basin" (13)... not more Indian than man, still as much the flower as the fruit."

Wash his feet! Wash his hands, heart and head! Lay in the dust like a penitent Barry Lopez, close to the flagellate, and weep for the human lost. This Shoshone's name is Willie Dorsey. We don't get his real name, Alien. "I saw, the heat, the vociferous mosquitoes in the building's shade, the slightly moist filth at the back door."

Alien old age and death look like "very old animals [that] have such coats over the eyes, a privacy impenetrable from the outside" (11).

Cataracts, the blind, the lame, the sick, the living I know treated by some Doctor of the Alien. She operates her office practically as a charity, complete with science, intuition and healing to the "grim weight of bad condition, not especially outlined, more heavy with despair than one could possibly arrange with rubble" (11). This is not Ed Dorn. He is a spectator. This Doctor holds the hand, cuts the hair, absorbs the breast, the tear, weeping and praying within, but praising and thanking for the chance that comes out of the "wooden clapboard structures" (10) of lives that they could be so treated and revived. So that's the alien, it's human and knowable even if Unknown.

The Revelation of Language

2011-12-08T08:35:00.000-08:00

Research to uncover secrets is not needed. Language is a lie detector itself. You are already broadcasting truth, even if you don't know it or like it, "the truth of language is that it unveils the Nothing of all things...Nothing is the final veil, the final name of language" (Giorgio Agamben. Leland De la Durantaye. A Critical Introduction 179).

Not to misunderstand, nothing is not what is thought. Literature masks it, the something points of history. Dress ups. The sage Chuang Po said the reduction of all things to our opinion of them (Legge I, 184) is like Agamben, to strip the "nothing to reveal" means "human history is [not] unfolding with a progressive purpose in view." Chuang Tzu says, "Men bustle about and toil; the sagely man seems stupid and to know nothing. He blends ten thousand years together.... (Legge, I, 195f), ending in the butterfly dreaming it is Kuang Kau (197). The combatants argue yes and no in their arguments about nothing. What is it out of which they argue? Language about nothing. The truth is in their words like soda in a bottle. Take the substitution of the word LORD for the real word it stands for in those texts. Is it better pure, a certain name unpolluted by its subversion if the use itself prevents more of the truth than the polluted would? Truth in words or in the thing? We hesitate to call what is behind the words anything except an attitude. Attitude is the truth to judge, the soda in the words. Internet sales and cold calls are successful because the words are empty cans.It is no surprise to us when words are used empty, when justice is spoken to hide injustice, beauty ugliness, so we're not surprised when language fails in this sense, but we are when it succeeds, when justice, beauty, love come out of the words themselves. So the can is important, but we can feel the attitude without the words.

Human ethos is "human speech itself" in social connection, a function of one anothers' language who "become transparent to themselves." We therefore attempt "to become conscious of the meaning of the fact that human beings speak" (Agamben,180). The joy of this experience is "language itself." I call it joy because you have heard it done in your children and know intuitively the language universals that exist in the child's acquisition, the ma ma and da da of its being, fundamental identities that overwhelm philosophy. Language is sound and meaning, the cells connect tissue and the fabric is sewn, tailored with age to become the marvel of being to no purpose other than to be language. That is language itself, "being conscious of the fact that human beings speak." So language is the fact itself of speaking.

Everything dishonest and hidden is already revealed in the event of language. I have not met the hypothetical person who exists who can hide language and prevent its ultimate revelation of themselves. Language is the revelation of everything. So it must be obvious that Agamben concerns "the very matter-- or the potentiality-- of thought (la materia stressa o la potenza del pensiero"). Language is thought, not thought language. I don't know how to write that large enough. Language itself is social connection, "the rendering common of what one thought of as one's own" (Agamben,181). I can see into it and know it itself, what it really is and not some other you may pretend it to be.

Unmasking language in common expands the "expropriation of language" to the communication of everything. Agamben sees this as a problem for media speech and entertainment as we all do. Unmasking is not just of the masked media, but of all society that media language has drained of meaning, of words become nonsense, untruth, falsities. The expropriation that "free usage" of language brings to communication is this, that like some state dispossessing a foreign corporation from its natural resources, deceit is expropriated from its trappings, hence comes the possibility of change.

"To liberate [the means] of communication so that they do not again fall prey to this isolation and separation" (182), language is already liberated-literate in itself. Deceit is shorn. Something deeper than language is at play if language manipulated against itself reveals itself, reveals deceit in all speakers in common.

"So thought finds itself for the first time, today, confronted by its task without any illusion and without any possible alibi" (182)...forfeiting every imaginary integrity...of home, race, class." Agamben says there is "no biological destiny that humans must enact or realize (Coming Community, 43). De la Durantaye says what everyone thinks anyway, that "the impoverishment of political discourse, and the increasing reliance on spectacular situations, sound bites" (182) is a crisis. Wasn't Crises Antigone's father?

Agamben says it's too soon to get off the bus. The destruction by the global that "empties traditions and beliefs, ideologies and religions, identities and communities" (Coming Community, 83) must be carried through to its unclothing, "not remaining unveiled in its nothingness... bringing language itself to language" (183). Whatever mess this makes in the telling, I can't learn much about you if your speech is honest, only if it is deceitful, so the one to whom language is no revelation is honest. Pleased to meet you. "Your word O LORD is eternal. To all perfection I see a limit, but your commands are boundless."

Native Texans

2011-11-18T16:19:00.000-08:00

Hedeoma was the way I wanted to memorialize Carroll Abbott, who died in 1984, the year Native Texans appeared. The whole thing was due to him, Henry Burlage and Alta Niebuhr and many others. Saint Coop printed a review of it here.

"If you were to take one plant with your immortal soul into the afterlife, then Hedeoma (Hedeoma Drummondii) would meet Amaranth. Medina County is starting a Hedeoma Dude Ranch. Aristophanes wanted thyme planted on his grave, but if you can get yourself planted in some Hill Country field you can have the superior Hedeoma. Albertus Magus claims drowned bees can be revived by the fragrance of the inferior pennyroyal, M. Pulegium, and that if you rub it on the "belly of any beast it shall be with birth." The use of Hedeoma in this way would shortly make so many beekeepers and mothers of us all that we would soon be drowned in milk and honey."

Alta said it should have been called A Philosopher Looks at Plants. She provided copies to her herbalists. That's when Brother Lynch of St. Edward's wrote to her and said it humanized botany more than he could have dreamed. Dr. Blackstock said it read like a novel. An editor at TCU press said she had hoped it would have had more philosophy. These folks could subscribe to Human B otany.

It was perilous. The day the ms was typed a stranger appeared at the door who had read one in the Newsletter. She had a book contract with Texas Monthly Press to write about herbs. Knowing nothing of Native Texans she wanted me to read her manuscript and tell her everything I knew about native plants! Native Texans was then enthusiastically greeted by two different regional Texas presses, Eakin and Corona, and canceled.

In another way of saying, the sun shining on herbs in jars on a window ledge in Chicago, at the home of a friend of Jack Dodds, caused this out of nothing. Within a year of migration to the Texas hill country that fragrance produced a desire to grow herbs, which compassed the hills in their seasons, at that time well outside Austin, and affected with rock walls, pumpkins, retama, red bud, limestone, sheep, pot studios and screened porches, reading Edith Sitwell in robin migrations and the click of the equinox in hammocks under oleanders, under chinaberries, on roofs, and in childhood from the hills of western Pennsylvania. I wrote the poem that became The Way into the Flowering Heart on that sheep ranch. The influence of eastern Pennsylvania was in the blood.

Out of these herb jars came A Calendar of Poems and its counterpart, Restorations of the Golden Age in New World Discoveries, but the peaks of roofs were coming over hill tops, so I moved into town. If you call it destiny it is inescapable, so after moving closer to the city, living in Hyde Park, I came one day upon the Experimental Drug and Herb Garden, four acres of herbs and medicinal plants fallen out of favor and cultivation with its proprietor, the College of Pharmacy. Amazed to discover this vestige of pharmacy's past by accident, and after much nay saying about the possibility, for the place was all but closed, Henry Burlage, Dean Emeritus, concocted an encounter with that present Dean to the effect that the place would remain open with himself as the Director, I the horticulturalist. The joy of this venture lasted three years and involved all sorts of trials and encounters, but when friend Henry took his last trip to the ER the end was in sight. The property was deeded back to the UT in trade for a new pharmacy building on campus. All these matters engaged the herb and native plant people, Carroll Abbott among them, who more or less founded the native plant movement in Texas, being an ex-politico, but who subsisted on sales of native plant seeds and bluebonnets with his Texas Wildflower Newsletter. These were days when Ladybird Johnson was active.

Further access to hill country land, explorations over the Edwards Plateau, visits with Carroll, walking up and down rivers and always growing plants, my wife and botanist had written for the Newsletter. Hungry editor that he was Carroll often solicited articles. But who ever does what's in their best interest? These invitations fell fallow, but even after moving to Dallas to pursue something that would pave the way for a medical career invitations kept coming. Carroll by then had contracted cancer, which he movingly wrote of in the Newsletter that I still read. One night I dreamed of him in such a woebegone state, depressed, in the dark, ashen, that I couldn't stand it, and instantly started writing that first piece, Equisitum, followed by Croton and Prickly Poppy and a whole flood. He printed the first two in the last Newsletters. My whole purpose was to make him laugh. From what he said it worked. So I finished writing this, called it Native Texans as a joke since these plants are universal. Croton, equisitum, milkweed, mullein, hedeoma, horehound first appeared in native plant newsletters.

Spiritual Herbs Artemesia, Yarrow, Aloe

2011-11-15T07:23:00.000-08:00

Artemisia

What makes a life herb desirable has to be the same for a great ceramic or painting, color, odor, form, universality, good and the cure it brings. To abstract these in the botanese of materia medica is impossible. Take artemisia, the generic name, while species have difference, they still share the traits. Only call it mugwort as a convenience. So first the blue grey color, then the scent of thujone, then the delicate fernlike stems and leaves, then the fact that it is everywhere, along every highway, in every fence row, and finally the cure.

The most dramatic cure was when glass artist Jim Bowman presented one day at the door on Avenue D with his knee swollen all out of form. He said he'd been to an urgent care and it was in its third day. He was just visiting, not seeking a cure, but I went out in the alley, since it is everywhere, cut a bundle and cooked it in water till it was real strong. Then we sat him down and put the leaves on the knee covered by towels over and under and for the next hours poured the water over and over the knee. Maybe he drank some of it too, I forget. So after that he took the rest home and did it some more. It was the next day maybe, or the day after when he showed up and the swelling was completely gone.

I have done this operation since with less dramatic occasions. Nowadays tennis players have so many swollen knees, but they all ice. This is not very effective. Somebody try artemisia on a tennis player and get back to us. In that time I decided to find out why this worked and researched it. The results were published, or not, in Native Texans, but there is a physical principle. As a birthday present this year, having breakfast on the Rim, artemisia was growing everywhere. A few little sprouts stuck to wet paper towel we dropped and came back into town. These were potted up, which coincided with the monsoon rains all week. Now it seems the shoots have already rooted. Great present!

Yarrow

With milfoil the case is more complicated, it being such an ancient herb of use in function. Not that the I Ching is all that specific, and it's like reading Chuang Tzu, but no divination is useful in itself, despite the huge trade in fortune telling. It's harmful to know the future except in the case where it is a prediction of hope or deliverance from trouble such as Isaiah gave in the siege of Hezekiah by Sennacherib, something about the king will hear some news, which he did. He heard the angel killed a hundred eight five thousand Assyrians that night and Sennacherib was on his way home to Niveveh:. So Byron said:

the might of the Gentile, unsmote by the sword,

Hath melted like snow in the glance of the Lord!

So it helps to have deliverance predicted. You will be a cured of cancer. So that aside, and maybe to revisit, to apply the color, odor, form, universality, good, the color is an exquisite yellow green, the odor is astringent and vaguely menthol, the form is a thousand leaves, milfoil, more finely divided ferns, the universality is everywhere (that sound redundant?). I put some once along a Creek decades ago and it flourished with the horsetail reeds. I took some from Texas and put it in a Sonoran desert border. It did good, but the seeds took wing and it is in other borders now. It is all over the Mogollon Rim. One is in the garden. Welcome, my friend! As to the good, I used to have weak lungs subject to bronchitis and chest colds. I took to yarrow teas, drinking and inhaling the aromas. It made me its friend. I like a friend with whom I can take a walk. There is again more to this. Is that in Native Texans too? I don't remember.

Aloe
I came to Phoenix for the aloe, saw pictures of the Boyce Thompson Arboretum outside Globe where they were all weather, knew in that instant I had to have aloes year round.

One time on the MoPac outside Austin a cyclist went down, helmet all dented, shirt ripped off, skin like a red rug. I approached him for the time,asked, how's it goin, but he wanted to go home. He bled all over the front seat. When we got to his house his wife burst into tears.

It must be the influence of the plants but I was feeling good that day so suggested he get in the bathtub! A little weird come to think of it.

So his wife and I washed off the gravel and dirt from the road burn and he took a percocet and lay down all red. My wife had gone to cut some aloes and brought a pile which I cut and put on the clean wounds. They should have been antiseptic and aloes are not proper treatment either, but we are in the field here, imagine third world, where the doc's hand is his MRI, or in the 19th century where maybe we put a leech on it, but anyway the guy fell asleep! All the shock wore off. His wife relaxed. The aloe sealed the wounds and he woke up in half an hour and called all his friends who then called the para medics who came in the midst of what was by then one cookin' party when we eased out and went on. Aloe! It's like a French greeting.

Color, odor, form, universality, good. Green of a certain sort is the loveliest color. Whether that's the yellow green of milfoil or the slight blue green of aloe is a nice question. With its yellow flowers though we're in the presence of majesty. The spikes don't smell, but the mucilage does, just slightly astringent. The spikes can get so large you can't pick them up, three feet and fat, and they will nick. When my friend Blessing was so sick after her MRI's and brain operations that could not cure the infection we put aloe on her wounds every day and she liked to eat it. It's not everywhere though, except you can take it with you. Dried aloe could be a new industry in the outback. Or go to the health food store and drink it, or smooth it on. Have you smoked it? Please call about that. As to the good hardly enough can be said. We have giant aloes in big clay pots, use one each Christmas as a Tree.

Yesterday I put a coffee mug in the microwave but it had some oil on the inside of the handle. When I took it out the inside of my middle finger felt funny, then began to burn. I iced it, but it really began to burn. Then three big white blisters appeared. Still burning I did what I'd not done in years, went out back and cut some aloe, macerated it in the skin and taped it on the finger. It stopped hurting in half an hour and never did again, but it looked like it did.

I realize aloe should be in the top of this list. I've surrounded my house with it, front, back and sides. This is the yellow flowered one, but I've got reds. Sally Parsons used to give her giant red aloes of Canyon Lake coffee grounds.

Foreign Insects

2011-10-11T06:20:00.000-07:00

Foreign Insects To call insects foreign is to subject them to political boundaries. Insect politics is an illusion of the state useful in covering up its own mistakes. If this is so of insects what does it mean of people? The same. Immigrants were recruited by the state. "Beetles have been found hitchhiking on the bottom of tiles from Italy," "species have been sneaking into North America." The natural protection of indigenous species had already been eradicated with pesticides when the invaders arrived. America is subject to more than just arriving bugs, unless you think foreign ideas that erode human boundaries are like bugs, but again, before they arrived the indigenous had been exterminated to prepare for the new. What you read therefore in the news is the exact opposite of the truth. They aren't invaders they are guests. The only question left is why, what did the state gain from the introduction of these destructions? The facts call to The Resistance. It's on The Calendar.

The New World Below the Dome

2011-09-24T13:28:00.000-07:00

Why disrespect the American gods when no one believes in them? Who follows Zeus? Mythology is such an acquired taste. Culture dressed in Greek myth is not a part of culture, so what's wrong with George Washington ascending to a heaven inhabited of the gods, Athena, Poseidon, Hermes, Vulcan, Demeter? The Capitol makes no sense until we realize the single most tenet of Judeo-Christian scripture is the breaking of these gods. Ishtar's face on cakes and idols of wood and stone and earlier versions of the Greek pantheon were all broken by Abraham. That's why Nimrod threw him in the furnace. He disrespected the gods. Sounds like the accused Socrates. What's the connection between these Greek/Roman gods and earlier versions of Ishtar Babylon in the President's acceptance speech?

Abraham's Hammer

Rome is there. Babylon is there. Even Russia is there, but The United States is not even symbolically mentioned in the Bible prophets. "This [Christian nation] myth has inclined us to Christianize many pagan aspects of our culture" (13). That author had the good sense not to name them. That's how public officials get things done. So if someday pieces of the Capitol Dome are sold as the Berlin Wall, it will be the same world we've always had. Whoever is unjust, let him be unjust still (Johnny Cash). Pieces of the new world that rises, shunned along with what raises itself to heaven with George in a funnel sucking up the miscegenate gods swirls,

then comes the sound.

Washington Welcoming Lincoln to Heaven, not that we have anything against them as men, or against what they did or didn’t do, but E Pluribus Unum [THE MONSTER WAR] is the cord our adversaries use to strangle us, reverse of the true. The universe began as one and became many, as did the seed of Abraham. To turn earth into one global dominion for the rule of antichrist, whether in the guise of a lizard with a four chambered heart, five fingers and toes and a spine, or a space alien with stars as its General is a first rank betrayal. Psalm 8 stands the feet of this man on earth. That is his province. Ordained there, he is no fantasy of space or devil or alien. Turning his hopes into fantasies and the Lord of Heaven and earth into a demigod is a joke these flushables swell their minds with in the capitol play. As such earth politics and religion serve up in a rare Novus Ordo of ancient myth from the bowel of this heaven, and government officials have no personal identity, they are there to hold office until the real Osiris comes, the Altar of Pergamos and Gigantomachy on earth, in other words the altar of Zeus, pillars of democracy and the blue sky roast a good bull over the coals. On that frieze is the altar the Obama team designed as a backdrop for his Denver acceptance speech.

Ishtar Gate

It is a combined act of genius, also part of the collection of the Pergamos Museum taken from old Babylon. In the foreground they put the Ishtar Gate. Mr. Obama visited these in Berlin prior to Denver. Ishtar is the public relations arm of Babylon and the gods, taken to Germany in the 19th century like the last words of Sylvia Plath:

Ishtar of skin tights and paleolithic giants,

turquoise and blue board,

underworld sheep and feminine divine.

Mystery Babylon's torch skull lit the global stair

to space to kill the bull.

Ishtar Hotel orisons dawn the way back in old Jerusalem they baked cakes with her face on them (Jeremiah 44). After the fall of Jerusalem captives could see as they were led to the inner city of Babylon through the Ishtar gate.
It was a one stop shop for the president. Babylon to Berlin, if not in words, in images revealed the Novus Ordo Seclorum of the American seal, the sweet Golden Age of Hesiod and Homer raised as the golden ego of Osiris. The three harvests were Apollo, Apollyon, and as the Hebrews say, Abaddon the destroyer. Something golden comes from Nimrod's Babylon, the harvests, gentle breezes, life without care, the myth says something comes or is already here.

The Dome

Speaking of the dome, The Vatican obelisk is also pretty old, brought by Caligula in 37 AD from Heliopolis in Egypt , set up in front of the Vatican in 1586 in time to be copied in the United States capital as the
the Washington obelisk, Washington Monument, bigger however than the Vatican. When the great religious and political powers make their pact these signs light up the mystic body electric, a tip to the knowing, in a nutshell, of even more fantastic beliefs stacked below, one atop the other, vertically down, down to the center of earth, to hide the biggest secret of all. Is this fiction or can it be told that nine shafts topped by two pillars in the ancient world before the Flood, revived in America with a New Atlantis hid in its belly like a caldron in the bowels of Moriah, are all kept by keepers of the Secret, whose goal is to know its Name? This is not the name however the Novus ordo seclorum of Virgil contributed for the great Seal, the mouths of Presidents consenting. Whitman says Lincoln is Osiris. The myths say all American presidents are Osiris. The "golden penis of Osiris" as the Washington Monument is a search term that will turn you on like the 1910 Newfoundland six cent stamp, “Lord Bacon the Guiding Spirit in Colonization Scheme.”

Medieval Christians and earlier Emperor Constantine and office holders construed Virgil's Fourth Eclogue as a prophecy of Christ. But pre-Christian Rome prepared a golden age for somebody else. On the Great Seal of the United States it looks like a hex. Citizens explore this one eyed symbolism when they plunk down a dollar to hide with symbol and misdirection what points one way and looks another. Say yes while shaking no.

Restorations of the Golden Age

Do restorations of the golden age occur in new world discoveries, the old, rising as the Arab spring, with subtexts under Babylon’s canoe? Wind and water and fish, the water fire. Among harbingers of this new, new old we slip out of the boat like Jonah, who gives us the same advice as Patmos of old. Thoughts range pole to pole, now radical beyond keep, plumb deep in effluvia, now traditional, and discover in consciousness what one would never want to know.

Why disrespect the American gods when no one believes in them? Who follows Zeus? George ascending to a heaven.
Mythology is such an acquired taste. Neptune, Mercury, Vulcan, Ceres, the Capitol makes no sense any more than Ishtar's face on cakes and idols of wood and stone broken by Abraham. What's the connection between these gods and versions of Ishtar in the President's acceptance speech? You wouldn't believe even if I tell.

"I gonna flush them gods

right outta the dome

and send them on their way..."

Building Transhuman Immortals

2011-09-03T18:05:00.000-07:00

The Immortal

Who knew they cared that much about immortality. I remember among Catholics it was the sin of presumption to say with St John, “that you may know that you have eternal life,” the point being this is not something one should know. That suggests you may know that you will die, although a young man would scarcely accept that even as a theory. What this leads to is that immortality is an idea like many others, but if you ask where it is most common and what are the kinds, among the Greeks, gaining speed with the Romans and free floating down the years, it comes to us with nuance.

Immortal but at what price, as if we thought it free. Evidently not and we have Swift to thank to tell us so, It’s not immortality we want, it’s youth, which means the same headless flinging enthusiasm unfettered with experience we already know. Who are these old men who wander in as proctors in the golden age? Well they are not fun guys, wild and crazy. They attained immorality but without having any fun with it. But that’s the point, immortality is serious business because it is unnatural and has to be worked at to sustain. Worth killing for. You need to go in for your checkups, updates like Internet Explorer whose program is never complete. Just a few more nanobots say the engineers of life. Truly it sounds more like the end than the beginning of life to be immortal. If you don’t have any follies what is the point of life at all, that is unless you go back to St. John or somebody who says life is for praise. Let everything that has breath praise Him.

WE hardly know what immorality is. Is it physical living forever in the body. Impossible, nothing physical is immortal. Ok then is it spiritual, kind of a struldbrug in Jonathan Swift's novel Gulliver's Travels, the name given to those humans in the nation of Luggnagg who are born seemingly normal, but are in fact immortal? However, although struldbrugs do not die, they do nonetheless continue aging. Swift's work depicts the evil of immortality without eternal youth. They are easily recognized by a red dot.

Our immortals however, as avarice is the necessary consequence of their old age, in time became proprietors of the whole nation, engross civil power, which, for want of their ability to manage, ended in public ruin. Chinese Taoism placed their Island of the Immortals eastward from China, while Swift places the struldbrugs near Japan.

The immortal seeks power like a sports event. Both Taoism and Christianity represent its poles, the Way of Powers (siddhi) vs. the Philosophical Way of Wisdom. Among the Christians Boehme and Beissel and Swedenborg, but Alan Watts says among the Taoists: [Hsien Taoism is] "a quest for immortality and supernormal powers through the gymnosophic and "yogic" practices which seem to have arisen among Taoists in the -2nd and -1st centuries. A hsien is an immortal--one who has purified his flesh from decay by special forms of breathing, diet, drugs, and exrcises for preserving the semen comparable to those of Tantric Yoga" (The Watercourse Way, xxv).

As opposed to this H. G. Creel says that the Huai Nan Tzu Contemplative Taoism (which became Zen), "insists repeatedly that death and life are just the same, and neither should be sought or feared. It ridicules breath control and gymnastics, which are designed to perpetuate the body but in fact confuse the mind" (xxvi). Watts says, "the indefinite enlargement of our powers and techniques seems in the end to be the pursuit of a mirage."

It is important not to miss the wit of this response which is more gentle than its condemnation by Lieh Tzŭ, who called it "not merely foolish and futile, but even immoral" (Creel, 22). Facetiously assuming the mirage, these "immortals" live in the desert of their own making. They deny themselves. Watts teases "one who is immortal and who has control of everything that happens to him strikes me as self-condemned to eternal boredom, since he lives in a world without mystery or surprise."

But people are highly vested in immortality. Russell Kirkland calls Creel's nicely reasoned What is Taoism? a "diatribe". The diatribe is the critic's.

Beyond aspersions Creel believes, as opposed to Watts, that Lao Tzu is not the work of one author, that the unity of voice however proves how good the editor is: "the editor was excellent and gives, on the whole, a remarkable appearance of homogeneity." Ancient texts differ from the modern in this. It is only fiction if I demythologize Borges, which in essence argues that he was never born, but it is called fact if I find that of Homer, Sappho, Moses, David, Plato, Moses, Beowulf. We have the odd companions of fiction that read like journalism and criticism which read like fantasy. Lao Tzu, Chuang Tzu editors and scholars believe in themselves and the editorial class more than in authors. The qualities Creel cites, repetitions in the text, terse and aphoristic style, are primary facets of writers, along with contradiction and fine expression. To imagine these qualities from the hand of editors is a nineteenth century fantasy. A greater myth than Borges! As Watts says and Wouk agrees these "interpretatio europeica moderna" (European desk scholar) demo primary sources as their livelihood because it buys promotion and tenure. Wendell Berry calls them the luxury politics of an academic islander.This is true about the Pennsylvania Dutch as well as Taoists.

Chuang Tzu was asked whether he would rather drag up the useless tree that was spared or the unsinging goose that was not (Legge, II, 27). Some editor thought that? 'There is a man over there with a long body and short legs, round shoulders and drooping ears. He looks as though he were sorrowing over mankind. I know not who he can be.' 'It is Confucius!' 'Bid him come hither.' #26

To live long be useless is the counsel. Or get eaten. The invitation to usefulness, perfection, immortality is an invitation to consumption. The Mystic quest is tainted with the furtherment of personal ambitions and political purposes. Science and art are marketed as business. If you are a migrant you may be kidnapped, but if you are rich you might be too. Hunchbacks are not conscripted for war, the straight and strong are, therefore hunchbacks live. The straight tree is the first cut; the well of sweet water is the first exhausted (Legge, Chuang Tzu, II, 33). But if a man can empty himself of himself during his time in the world who can harm him (II, 31)? We sure see a lot of that! The close-furred fox and the elegantly-spotted leopard...it is their skins which occasion their calamity (II, 29).

Watts feels that if you do certain things to live forever, that tends toward the Confucian. Before the age of resveratrol and HA, Taoist alchemy said all you had to do was sublimate energy up the spine. Breathe right, eat right, sit right, stop the wandering mind. Now the transmortal says either wait for artilect, new genes or hybridize yourself. Who knows how old you can be? It brings into question life itself if to be immortal you have to not live at all. Cut down to perfection, life free of mistake loses the thing Taoists seek most, spontaneity.

Stopped Minds

Smoothing the ocean by hitting it with a board is like stopping the mind. The mind anxious for its own anxiety feels the same with this compulsion as the body hit by the same flat board in zazen. Stopped minders can be petty. Immortality is a pinched nerve. Beauty conflicts with immortality. It wants to be exploited and used. The gnarled pine, thorn and crag, hellebore bushes up the path of weasels (Legge, II, 93) get to be immortal. Nobody wants them. Imperfection outlasts the straight and strong. Only the singing goose that is spared is the exception.

To be mortal Chuang-tzu says, "though seventy years of age, I am still making wheels," or as Andrew S. Mack found as he traveled to Kansas, Nebraska, South Dakota and Minnesota at the age of 71 in 1908, two years after his last letter, and Amasa Clark who fathered four children after the age of 70, though he lived to 101, the chance of survival is best when there is no anxiety to survive, but there is no greater anxiety than the effort to be immortal, to "exhale and inhale, to puff out old breath and draw new, stretch and crane to live long, it is an induced tao." Do not let the thoughts keep working anxiously (James Legge, Chuang Tzu, II, 77). Van de Wetering called it Afterzen, when he saw through the sham. Do you want nose, ear, eye and mind to wander like Chaung Tzu who invented Zen? Live.

Improved Immortals

It is the difference between supermarket foods we call immortal, because enhanced, and natural foods, unimproved, or if you like, the life and death herbs. The improved "immortals" are desiccate, ragged, empty of nutrition when dried. The unimproved are full, well formed, nutritious. This analogy between two corns resembles people who cut their own lawns, do their own dishes, repair themselves by themselves, weed their gardens, do their own books, clean their house, teach their children. Those who hire maintenance so they can seek pleasure and fortune are immortal.

Unimproved roads! Narrow is the way! What are improved roads for but more traffic? Why traffic, but development? Why development, but trade? Travel as easy as you can. Thoroughfare, freeway, inflation, consumption for its own sake pave a way to the empty fritterless corn. Immortal, happily there is a cure. A cure for immortality: here

By all this we mean to say that Singularity already exists in the most profound manner. A primer of it, published on Scribd, emerged from work at the Human Botany Review and other sites, which links and others are also live. Day 4+. Here

This is ongoing work to be revised and reposted at Scribd. The full, whole unwieldy version however is here.

Read

C. S. Lewis and the Transhuman

Prometheus Unbound: Transhumanist Arguments
The Transhuman organ
James J. Hughes. (Trans)humanism & Biopolitics
Transhuman Transformation
Humanism and Transhumanism
C. S. Lewis as Philosopher
Transhumanism's SolipsisticUtopianism The First Transhumanist

Teilhard de Chardin and Transhumanism

Wikipedia

*Kurzweil Quaddafi is more than just a pretty phrase. Transmortals do not brook opposition. They were able to burn down one of their opponents when name calling didn't work.

Pray It Not Strange

2011-08-12T07:11:00.000-07:00

Pot Head:

The blood of 50,000 victims consumed by the pot smoker U.S.

Here's one for human morality,

to protect against us and them,

nobody gets to go into space until none of these things *

have happened for a thousand years:
world's first mixed-embryo monkeys
*A Mouse that can speak
*The Red Market
*Bear bile
*lost lady bugs
*Radioactive Mushrooms Boars
*Common dioxin in poultry and pork
*Hexavalent chromium in water

Kudzu bug

Only first appeared 1n 2009? Secretly introduced by the mob, a lab, or raving biologist?

Transcendence and the Killing of Animals- zoocidal practices in scientific experimentation

Animal Person blog- the best advice a vet ever gave, "stop going to the vet because that's what was killing Violet Rays. She needed to know that I was committed to her life and the way I would demonstrate that was to keep her by my side."

On Speciesism: Cavalieri's The Death of the Animal

Monarch butterflies:
"The Monarch butterfly learns where it was born (its roots) and it passes this knowledge via genetics on to its offspring (from generation to generation). This was one of the key animals that tipped scientists off, that knowledge [Identity!] can be passed genetically."

Survivor Scars

Max Mehlman, Transhumanism and the Future of Democracy, ASU April 2009
Transhuman ASU Podcasts
Transhuman ASU Links

Endowed by Their [Human!] Creator?: The Future of Constitutional Personhood

The $100 Genome: Implications for the Department of Defense (JASONs)

Protecting the Endangered Human

Mice with human brains

dinotefuran vs. Chinese stink bug

new elements Livermorium and flerovium

sturgeon May 30, 2011

Schultes' Iconography
Entheogens-exploration of the gods
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fictional_medicines_and_drugs

Tier-Sprechschule (Animal Talking School)
Exploding melons, forchlorfenuron
Vladimir Mironov-lab meat Firstcowsthenus

Unseen Species
Butterflies North

Apologia For All Beings in Distress

2011-07-01T15:54:00.000-07:00

"You never know, I said, the ones you give some semblance of burial, to whom you offer an apology, may have been like seers in a parallel culture. It is an act of respect, a technique of awareness." Barry Lopez

Animal Spirits

2011-06-25T09:00:00.000-07:00

Poets wrote of the coming biological extinction, prophetic celebrations of the natural before the industrial revolution. We find ourselves determining extinction’s cause. Beasts first go extinct. The pain of the bestiaries is they compare the animal to the human to the detriment of both. Humans adopt some negative animal trait. Yale professor Robert Shiller says Animal Spirits are a forecasting tool, that the business world has discovered irrationality as a means to wealth. But he did not learn that animal spirits involve the reality of hunger and laying low, to love the sun and love night. When Bunyan says "poor silly Mole, that thou shouldst love to be, / Where thou, nor Sun, nor Moon, nor Stars can see," Bunyan can't see.

Physiologus heaps all occult myth and fancy on animals. Science heaps our health hazards.The asps founded fast food. Prester is the asp that anybody who gets “struck by this animal swells to a prodigious size and is destroyed by corpulence” (T. H.White. The Book of Beasts. 175). Media heaps on our loss of identity and confusion of soul. The sirens founded media, television (Conversation IV), “entice poor chaps by a wonderful sweetness of rhythm, and put them to sleep…pounce upon them and tear them to bits” (White, 134). In this Coercion of the Senses Odysseus is tied to the mast, tie open the eyes gates to violence as in Clockwork Orange. If they will not see they will not sleep.

If Mr. Blake were the first to celebrate the toll of industrialization in his chimney sweep, and if he were the prophet of the week, we’d resort to him to explain the man's fear of animals, fear of the tree, fear of the woman which sums the fear of himself. Blake's portrayal of animals is like the bestiaries, a picture of the negative states as an gnostic creation, a heresy compared with Psalms and Job. Don't be like the tiger. Do be like the ant (Proverbs). Each species becomes a morality play, not a thing in itself of wonder, which attitude translates to science. What use is the thing, what experiments can be run, will it make a good paper, improve human lot? This morality play will be running when polar ice extincts. Thus in the cliched pattern of English folklore songbirds are good, hawks are bad.

In this divided state every threat perceived in the outer world from animals, which includes all nature, is a human fear caused by division and mirrored back. That is, the savagery of the tiger, or cruelty in any exterior form is a human internal state, a spiritual despondency. In Mysterium Magnum Boehme calls the primal "Image" corrupted, which became "a Beast of all Beasts" manifesting outwardly the inward negative properties of the man. Thus medieval bestiaries were moralities of man, you name them: "Fox, Wolf, Ear, Lion, Dog, Bull, Cat." Go around the zodiac and to every cave art to see the divided image projected upon the animal. It's not the outward form the man assumes, but the inward projected by him upon the beast. A supposed ravening, or sloth in the seven deadly sins at least is that "the Man must bear such a Beast in the Body." This is the motive of reabsorbing these projected fears.

Reabsorb

A theory of correspondence says the inside is the out: "for as the Essence is in the Body, so the Spirit figures and forms itself internally” (Boehme), but if the beasts are a picture of the human their removal does not redeem him. He is redeemed by the reabsorption of projected fears. Imagine a winch of the spirit where first lust and greed, then fear and hate are pulled back! That all external nature reflects the in cast out, bestiaries unmasked.

It sounds like fantasy to hold that all forms of life were originally part of the human, then projected out, like Plato says the woman was taken from the man. In Jerusalem, Blake says "You have a tradition, that Man anciently contained in his mighty limbs all things in Heaven & Earth" (To the Jews). In the Four Zoas he says:

"So Man looks out in tree & herb & fish & bird & beast
Collecting up the scattered portions of his immortal body"

... where ever a grass grows
Or a leaf buds The Eternal Man is seen is heard is felt
And all his Sorrows till he reassumes his ancient bliss"(Four Zoas, 110)

"As man falls from vision, he objectifies into separate existence more and more aspects of himself. He stands in awe and horror, wondering where a beast like the tiger comes from, for he does not see in it a portion of his own fallen, divided self" (The Scattered Portions, Baine, 7).

This rehumanization of all that was separated out back into the man becomes beatific. The tygers and lions "sing they seize the instruments of harmony" (FZ 124.17). As the animals shed their skins of the human projection, "they enter upon a new life; as all forms of life rejoin Albion they reject the Selfhood which has separated man from man and man from nature" (Baine, 8).

Collaborate Nature

2011-06-12T07:25:00.001-07:00

Hybrid Wildernesses

There are two wilds the human self emotes in the wilderness, positive and negative, but cliffs and rocks stare back. A mule deer for an instant seems to have the ears of a prickly pear. But if we really want to confront the Unknown in this wilderness solitaire, animal botany, it is in ourselves, in the feet of our old age and speech. Age is the unknown, not nature where all the hybrid wilderness of ourselves crowd imaginatively beneath a bear, make a cedar tail and bones of subway tubes. Some bear! Wilderness man is "culturally devised" but says it is nature not himself he is seeing. Nature however is brute fact, with no intrinsic "savageness...or bleakness" (Macfarlane, Mountains of the Mind).

Rock and Bug

This inner world makes us more wild than the mountain. Unless you can prove that the rock is wild too, that it has a raging inner torrent, humans make landscapes speak in the "human cultural devise,” but the rock does not reflect Wordsworth's Lucy rolling “with rocks, and stones, and trees.” Lucy reflects the rock. What is nature a mirror of in ourselves? What does she see? Portions of herself.

We know everything through either scientists or poets, outside and in, but scientists are very careful to say they are not cultural constructs, pretending to be perfectly nonexistent observers. Anthropos (Greek for "man") science however is so intrinsic to its own vision that a bug contradicts it. Grasshoppers also teach this, but landscape reflects neither science nor art. It is not a Zen garden. This is a riddle that science confers upon itself the Audacity to rule. It says to the mountain, move! But no matter how much a mountain is made to dissemble, the mountain's existence is cultural. It sounds backwards to say wilderness is lost in the man. We'd rather say the man is lost in the wilderness. He is entangled in the universe. That's the matter, he has a body.

Wilderness Supreme Court

To imagine cultural amenities, judicial procedures and laws for our wilderness invention, we devise a wilderness Supreme Court dressed in sky blue. Like angels! But like angels, it is not fitting to bow before the rock. It will not bow to us. This standoff is our collaboration with physical forms. It works as good as the idea of self similarity, that is a human skew, a fractal, a communication that finds itself untrue. In projected volumes Robert Macfarlane in Mountains of the Mind, proposes to take up future valleys, deserts and oceans of the mind. This would be as plausible as any "collaboration of the physical forms of the world with the imagination of humans--a mountain of the mind" (18, 19). The value of collaboration is we can have mountains, valleys, even air minus the ecologic waste. Keep the mountain wild! Make it over into yourself! This is not to disprove or disapprove. More wild by far.

Imaginative Not Collaborative

This is like Pieter Bruegel in Big Fish Eat Little Fish (1556), a physical form collaborating the mind. Look at Bruegel. He is himself eating himself. It is all going on in human consumption. People have written allegories about it. The faceless interchangeable cogs of pen and ink, folly of the human, are not fish. "Out of the mouth of a large beached fish tumble many smaller fish...the land and water are overrun by fish: a two-legged fish walks off with another fish in its mouth, a fish hand from a tree, and a fish-bird flies... (Nadine M. Orenstein. Pieter Bruegel the Elder: Drawings and Prints. Yale University Press, 2001, 140). So the mountain of the mind spews out little mountains and particles of dust. We don't say mind fish are self identified fractals. Mind fish are imaginative, not collaborative, not real, but mean to show a maxim, like a faux Orc studied by a faux anthropologist in a faux school by a faux professor eating his students shows...? Sorry about that. This reductio is as absurd as the perception of the mountain by the mountaineer. Bruegel and imitators, physical forms are outside collaboration. Mental mountains are imagining.

To show further imagining, Yeats said once that out of nature he would never take his bodily form from any natural thing, which goes the whole way toward reproving collaborators. As if they were cooperating with the Nazis! Some say Yeats "reformed," and denied "power to the symbols" round about the turn of the century, perceiving that irresponsible play with them brings danger. "The images that really matter to men of genius and culture are the images which are not chosen but given...." (Austin Warren. Rage for Order. Chicago, 1948, 73). This "given" is the great mountain. The lesson then may be not to play with the mountain. Mountain however is a symbol. Scott Momaday calls bear a lens through which we see mountain and mountain is a symbol of wilderness. You can only see it through the hair and hide of a bear.

Not chosen, but given, the young C. S. Lewis came in 1921 to see Yeats, hiked up his stairwell, "a long stairway lined with rather wicked pictures by Blake--all devils and monsters," and saw his own cultural devise, age and feeling, as if he were looking at a mountain (What would that circumstance be, a human mountain looking at another human mountain?) "it would be ridiculous to record it all; I could give you the insanity of the man without his eloquence and presence, which are very great. I could never have believed that he was so like his own poetry" (Letters. Edited by W. H. Lewis. NY: Harcourt, Brace, 1966. 56, 57). Neither Austin Warren nor Lewis knew the depths of this wild, unless, or if it was their own. Empiricist codes, esoteric Buddhists, religious puritans, project theories of reality to codify a cultural norm. Yeats' symbols or anyone's are dangerous when they tempt the mountaineer to extrinsic, external practice, meaning give the law to others. Religion does but science does it more. Science is religion.

Bruegel finds the symbols that come to him (with some Bosch). In the universe of his later work Yeats makes "a general defense of a more variously comprehensive universe than a positivist science will admit" (Warren 82), a nice way of saying fortune telling. Both nonsenses are another denial, a nice way of saying that there is conflict between the mountain of the mind-formed culture and the "given." This exploration of the given is the given. Close the eyes; if symbols come let them come to the pure in heart. Do not weep for the acculturate.

Blake's Wilderness

2011-05-31T05:46:00.001-07:00

When the divided state is made whole it reabsorbs the fears projected outwards. Every threat perceived in the world from animals, including all nature, is simple fear caused by the human division mirrored back. The savagery of the tiger, greed, cruelty in any exterior form are his own internal states, his spiritual despondencies mirrored. So all creation is a mirror of positive and negative states, which is either simple or profound. It is easy to see in the mirror these negative states include oil spills, extinction of species, poisoning waters and all industrial ills culminating in nuclear warfare.

Blake holds that all forms of life were originally part of man himself, separated out of him, much as Plato says the woman was taken from the man. The destruction of the exterior world first began inside. In Jerusalem Blake says "You have a tradition, that Man anciently contained in his mighty limbs all things in Heaven & Earth" (To the Jews), which he says comes from the Druids, but that distracts us.

We have to mix different contexts to document his view. In the Four Zoas he says:

"So Man looks out in tree & herb & fish & bird & beast

Collecting up the scattered portions of his immortal body"

... where ever a grass grows

Or a leaf buds The Eternal Man is seen is heard is felt

And all his Sorrows till he reassumes his ancient bliss"(Four Zoas, 110)

This reassumption is his restoration of all that has separated out, returned to himself.

"As man falls from vision, he objectifies into separate existence more and more aspects of himself. He stands in awe and horror, wondering where a beast like the tiger comes from, for he does not see in it a portion of his own fallen, divided self" (The Scattered Portions, Baine, 7).

Call it a rehumanization that reabsorbs what was separated out. Then the horrific becomes beatific, the tygers and lions "sing they seize the instruments of harmony" (FZ 124.17), which remetamorphosis, "further up and in," says C.S. Lewis in The Last Battle, or Blake's reunification, reads like a salmon migration upstream, out of division into unity and not to separate again. As the animals shed their skins of the human projection of limitation, "they enter upon a new life; as all forms of life rejoin Albion, they reject the Selfhood which has separated man from man and man from nature" ( Baine, 8).

In Mysterium Magnum Boehme calls that primal "Image" corrupted, which became "a Beast of all Beasts," manifesting outwardly the inward negative properties. Medieval bestiaries also reflect this, "Fox, Wolf, Bear, Lion, Dog, Bull, Cat" go around the zodiac mirroring the divided human image projected onto animals. It is not the outward form the man assumes, but the supposed inward ravening, or sloth, one of the seven deadly sins that "the Man must bear such a Beast in the Body" (Boehme). This theory of moral correspondence, inside as outside is "as the Essence is in the Body, so the Spirit figures and forms itself internally...unless that a Man be born anew."

In all bestiaries as well the anti-shrines of the Faerie Queene, such as the Bower of Bliss, external nature reflects the inward. Reabsorption is the opposite of being absorbed into nature at death, which gains natural significance in ashes to ashes, dust to dust, or as Wordsworth's lee ch gather might say symbolically, "a huge Stone is sometimes seen to lie / Couched on the bald top of an eminence."

There is similarity between what we call collective intelligence and globalization and the "universal man." From a certain point of view globalization is a reunification and a kind of fulfillment of the Platonic prophecy. M. H. Abrams says "Blakes' prophetic books narrate various stages of the division and reintegration of the Universal Man" (Natural supernaturalism: tradition and revolution in romantic literature, 257)... the ancient mythical being, the primal Man or Ur-Adam, who falls into fragmentation" (257)...a progressive dissociation of the collective human psyche into alien and conflicting parts" 258) , that is into four parts, and then into four (feminine) emanations, then into spectres. These fractal images divide and subdivide to some end point whence they rebound in the person of Jesus, in "resurrection to unity" again. Thus "all things are comprehended in their Eternal Forms in the Divine Body of the Saviour" (Ninth Night of the FZ). To be reabsorbed

So Man looks out in tree & herb & fish & bird & beast

Collecting up the scatterd portions of his immortal body.

All negatives proceeding from the one man are reabsorbed back into him! Much is written of these two beings. Two "contraries" fight to produce consciousness, progression, an upward sloping line, and while there is more in Blake of sexual subdivision and social politics, his future united man makes a system of unity. Though Abrams rhapsodizes the Universal Proposition of ancient unity, what couldn't be cited either from Schelling, Hegel or if you like, occultism, Brahman's lives, wheels within wheels, was that "all natural objects not only become human themselves, but reunite, without loss of individuation, into the Human Form Divine" (264) from which they had fallen. The natural becomes human! Who says poets and critics aren't religious! All this gains credence from its position at the end of Jerusalem where Albion, the unity man, and Jerusalem, his emanation, get married. These takes are prophetic extensions of the New Testament as understood by visionaries, but not a teaching anywhere found.

All Human Forms identified, even Tree, Metal, Earth, and Stone;

all Human Forms identified, living, going forth and returning wearied

Into the Planetary lives of Years, Months, Days and Hours; reposing,

And then awaking into his Bosom in the Life of Immortality.

And I heard the Name of their Emanations: they are named Jerusalem.

Viewed as a cosmology, this pan-creationism is so infectious that it encompasses cycle and recycle, projection and return. We should have to take it up in fiction, but it helps to remember that it was already fiction that was naturalized into reality, from mysticism, astrology and kabbalah.

So, in a more recent sense, if, Momaday returns the bear to himself, becomes the bear, and God comes to man, as Blake has it, these incarnations of form all practice unities. Blake thinks that thinking makes it so. No external agent implied. It is a fantasy, but it is not what Donne meant when he called out to the scattered bodies.

HOLY SONNET VII

At the round earth's imagined corners blow
Your trumpets, angels, and arise, arise
From death, you numberless infinities
Of souls, and to your scattered bodies go ;
All whom the flood did, and fire shall o'erthrow,
All whom war, dea[r]th, age, agues, tyrannies,
Despair, law, chance hath slain, and you, whose eyes
Shall behold God, and never taste death's woe.
But let them sleep, Lord, and me mourn a space ;
For, if above all these my sins abound,
'Tis late to ask abundance of Thy grace,
When we are there. Here on this lowly ground,
Teach me how to repent, for that's as good
As if Thou hadst seal'd my pardon with Thy blood.

Blake being the hero of the chimney sweep, poets were writing of the mass extinction with the beginning industrial and now agricultural revolution (atrozine). With many prophetic celebrations of the natural we wake up to find ourselves peering deeply into psyche to determine cause. If Blake is the first to celebrate the human toll of industrialization in his chimney sweep, he is also the prophet to explain the fear of nature, animals, the tree, and man's fear of woman, all which sums concurrent in the fear of himself.

Blake refused to benefit from evil. He justifies his thought by passion, art and integrity, as much as any martyr against the world of profit. Putting Boehme or Swedenborg aside, the Bible figures largely in Blake and the versions of the English mind. Blake's vision of reunficiation, the Platonic prophecies of unity, the new heaven and new earth of Isaiah and the Testaments reach a kind of fulfillment in globalization.

To name the animals, understand, dream them, meditate like St. Francis, not a biologist thinning horse herds to fend for cattle. Another sense of this unity is paradise. Preconditions of paradise exist, the main one health; to think free of hindrance, fatigue, prejudice, greed. Do not worry however that paradise art will lose Goya, the world is all Goya, the man cudgels himself. Goya exists, paradise must be found.

Goya, Riña a garrotazos

Note: A search for platonic prophecy of this unity is bare, but see Platonic Prophecy here.
But too, Arieh Kofsky. Eusebius of Caesarea against paganism. esp Ch. 5. Prophecy in the Service of Polemics.

Pit Pony

2011-01-13T08:27:00.000-08:00

Pit pony blind in Britain,

got rights in Europe with Ape,

registered to vote in condos

cases were pending in Spain.

Which Kafka's animals understood,
the citizen of Giant Mole
obsessed about it like a dog,
the thing that’s not,
the mole that’s not,
the mind that's not,
the ice foe's not,

dots comprehending
to the end
of pit ponies
deep in this belief
showed Kafka's animals
were men.

Bear

2010-11-13T10:26:00.000-08:00

Bear

Can he be a bear? Can he be a plant? N. Scott Momaday was named for the bear as a child because of a visit to Rock Tree. As Rock Tree Boy he turns into a bear. "I have this bear power. I turn into a bear every so often. I feel myself becoming a bear, and that's a struggle that I have to face now and then" (Conversations, ed. by Schubnell, 90).

His entry in childhood by way of myth, he later, mid 20's, adopts. "I suspect it is that part of man which is subhuman. Primitive. Most people cannot recover nature. At one time, we lived in nature. But somewhere along the way we were severed from nature. And we cannot any longer comprehend the creatures of nature. We don't know about them as we once did. But this boy is an exception. He turns into a bear; that means that he reconstructs that link with nature. You could talk about the bear as being the underside of his existence" (91). Momaday says Bear is a particular of wilderness. Shown here is the backside of Bear. Want to see its face? Be glad as Moses to see the Back (Exodus 33.23).

Bear is the piano, Mountain the pianist, Wilderness the composer. With the huge participation of prairie and herds in The Way To Rainy Mountain echoing in my mind I got Momaday's Conversations at the Ohl Gallery at a showing of his bear monotypes. These monotypes formed the covers of The Ancient Child and In the Bear’s Name. Touch the wilderness preoccupies the American. I’d not have understood without experiences of bear in the Mogollon and White Mountains before the time we camped with dogs or be writing this without having formed a bear out of clay, felt the profoundity of its being. Momaday believes it destiny. “Bears are hard to control," he says, they don’t give themselves easily to any domination.” (Conversation, 15). There was nobody there the day I took him House Made of Dawn to sign. I asked him to draw a picture with his signature. He asked “of what?” “Anything at all.” He made a bear.

Bear is immobile, fixed, "there."
Bear is big, bigger, dimensionless.
Bear sinks back without motion.
Bear is too big to see, too big to move, but Bear looks back.

Meditate that when you think you see Bear but don't. It sees you.

That's the way of Bear, in the shade, going away, turning to look. Bear, mountain, wilderness sees you, but you are never very sure what you are looking at, what the wilderness stands for. For if the bear stands for the mountain then the wilderness stands for something the same, hunted in the dappling camouflage shade that turns away as it looks. After the hunt, he carries the bear on his hunting horse like a rabbi carries the scrolls. "In the early morning he rode into the town...and he rode stone-faced in their midst" (89). In all this lies the “burden of primordial memory” (Conversation, 20) for “I am violent. Or I can be. I have been at times. I understand violence. I understand that it can happen. On the other hand I’m opposed to it. It sickens me” (35). “There are people in the world who would not wish to be in the world, were not Bear there as well. These are people who understand that there is no wilderness without him. Bear is the keeper and manifestation of wilderness. As it recedes, he recedes” (In the Bear's House, 10). The Kiowa believe that the buffalo is the animal representation of the sun. Bear is the animal representation of the wilderness (9-10).

Seeing Mountain Through Bear

He tells of Ur-bear, All Bear, One Bear, the Bear of Bears. In the principle of vitality, “I am a bear,” I hear, “I am a man,” but shorn of perjury. “You accelerate your activity…feel greater kinship with the animal world and the wilderness" (Conversation, 16)…"a great potential for disintegration" (17). In the Bear’s Name says that “I am less interested in defining the being of Bear than in trying to understand something about the spirit of wilderness of which Bear is a very particular expression…if you look at him very closely and long enough, you will see the mountains on the other side. Bear is a template of the wilderness” (9). Seeing mountain through bear is the essence of this. "Even Urset, who is the original Bear...is symbolic and transparent, more transparent than real" (9). What is on the other side of the see- through bear? "He is an imitation of himself, a mask. If you look at him very closely and long enough, you will see the mountains on the other side" (9).When he says “I have been possessed of Bear’s spirit” (9), it is not animism or idol, but the One thing, the One being, should you learn that name in its best picture: “Let me say at the outset that this is not a book about Bear (he would be spoken of in the singular and masculine, capitalized and without an article), I am less interested in defining the being of Bear than in trying to understand something about the spirit of wilderness” (9). If possible he makes you love Bear more.

My Ears Had Heard Of You But Now My Eyes Have Seen

Humility must not fail against the natural. Bear represents wilderness the way dark and light in plain and mountain represent a greater. The forces that exploit fear this thing that's not, the mind that's not, greater than themselves. Behemoth and Leviathan said early what Bear says late. "My ears had heard of you, but now my eyes have seen" (Job 42.5)! "Will the wild...consent to serve" (39.9)? The landscape of stars, bears, wilderness and eagle (“Eagle Alone,” Conversation, 91) thought it would not end. Momaday Grandfather says all creation, "calls for a willing suspension of disbelief" (36).

"The timber stood around a pool of light, and the bear was standing still and small at the far side of the brake, careless, unheeding. He brought the rifle up, and the bear raised and turned its head and made no sign of fear. It was small and black in the deep shade and dappled with light, its body turned three-quarters away and standing perfectly still, and the flat head and the small black eyes that were fixed upon him hung around upon the shoulder and under the hump of the spine" (In the Bear's House, 88).

We haven't seen the spirit of wilderness, but we have seen Bear. "It did not emerge, appear: it was just there, immobile, fixed in the green and windless noon's hot dappling, not as big as he had dreamed it but as big as he had expected, bigger, dimensionless against the dappled obscurity, looking at him. Then it moved. It crossed the glade without haste, walking for an instant into the sun's full glare and out of it, and stopped again and looked back at him across one shoulder. Then it was gone. it didn't walk into the woods. It faded, sank back into the wilderness without motion as he had watched a fish, a huge old bass, sink back into the dark depths of its pool and vanish without even any movement of its fins" (Faulkner, Go Down Moses, 209).

Cited

Charles L. Woodard. Ancestral Voice: Conversations with N. Scott Momaday. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. 1989.
N. Scott Momaday. In the Bear's House. NY: St. Martin's Press. 1999.

The Tree Became A Goat - People in the Wilderness

2010-11-09T10:49:00.000-08:00

New England was opposed to old. It singled out strands of religion. New England left class, status, court, stage, literature. Severity and plainness were closer to the medieval. Two hundred years after founding it worried its literature didn't compete. Step child English affiliates still worry. The spiritual did not renew the physical but contaminated it.

Uncontaminated nature means uncontaminated by mind not land fills. The Puritans transferred sin from themselves to the forest to drive it out on the back of some goat, except the goat was a tree. The sin bearer was the forest. It had to be mowed lest sins find their way back. A scapegoat is no good unless lost. Trees also hid predators. The tree became the goat and was cut. Then the forest could not hide the terror of the dark. This thinking fueled all American botanical and biological extinction.

Puritans thought "the world," physical nature, would contaminate. This was toxic in the austere soil of New England. Garrisoned against the natural New England only welcomed the Pennsylvania genius of inviting nature indoors two centuries late. By 1850 transcendentalism had them all wishing for the pond. Early New England believed that savage men, wild men and their own sins lurked at the clearing's edge, only kept at bay by cutting back the growth. Defoliation the forest, clear cut and exterminate prevented sin and made a profit. Against the evil in themselves they built a theology of dominion for their superior race. It is a new puritan age of greed today, a "spiritual imagination... impotent, sterile, or dead... an era of violence, chaos, destruction, madness, and slaughter (Thomas Merton, Seeking Paradise, 85).

Raze and Exterminate lay down like Romulus and Remus at the Puritan door of the New English. Question these sucklings with the Pennsylvania Dutch, who survived their murderous adversaries in Holland and Switzerland, domesticated the natural, invited it indoors, befriended it in their own natures, painted it, sculpted it and threw it on the forge. Pennsylvania didn’t make any Scarlet Letter, it decorated chests and barns.

Do not say the puritan hid. He celebrated his malaise. Jonathan Edwards, Cotton Mather drew sharp governmental/pastoral views. Their depravity offended Hawthorne who called a "virgin soil as a cemetery" (The Scarlet Letter, I ), "the pine trees, aged, black, and solemn, and flinging groans and other melancholy utterances on the breeze, needed little transformation to figure as Puritan elders; the ugliest weeds of the garden were their children." "To the Puritan, nature was not benign. The wilderness was a place of terror"“ (Broyles), or as William Bradford put it (1620) "a hideous and desolate wilderness, full of wild beasts and wild men." Michael Broyles makes the telling observation that "much of the story [of Pilgrim's Progress] is set in America...it was the metaphorical terrain the believer had to traverse...," which he says to differentiate the gentler Puritan composer William Billings (The New England Psalm Singer, 1770. Also see Mavericks and Other Traditions in American Music, 25). A great deal more than this has been said of those first centuries.

Divide and conquer is the English rule, Quakers aside. They had more in common with the pacifist Pennsylvania sects than those who came to rule Pennsylvania. Basic English exploited differences among the Germans that Penn's colony had been founded to set free. But relations with the "world" were a sticking point for immigrants of the Lily too. They divided into Church and Sect, churched vs. plain. The separate but unequal existence of Germans alongside the English in American civilization tended to end after the Civil War when the Dutch gave up and began to assimilate. Some people think the Amish are the last bastion of the "separate" and that these differences existed up till 1950 in speaking German, farming, going barefoot. The Amish may continue to exist in 2050, but assimilation got the rest.

Read the rest here.

Commentary On the First two Sections of Chuang Tzu, The Book of Zhwangzi.

2010-11-01T07:45:00.000-07:00

"The first two sections of Chuang Tzu constitute one of the fiercest and most dazzling assaults ever made not only upon man's conventional system of values, but upon his conventional concepts of time, space, reality, and causation as well" (Burton Watson, 5).

You might think from this that Burton Watson or anybody reading Chuang Tzu could catapult right out of the ordinary into the "unconventional." Conventioneers would sit cross legged on the ground, legs askew at their death, hair reasonably white, long among the miniature green roses. Amid rows and rows they look as much like garden statues as flesh and blood. That was my parting with Henry Burlage. In a man's last days a stillness comes. This is no assault, an emptying as the wind blows. It should not be sought.

庄子 The Wind, The Wind! Free Yourself From the World!

Calmed then from the worry that his three universes had caused, this simpleton sat beside Zhuangzi. It was as necessary that universes spin out as gardening. That told the story. "Don't worry about the corn or sleep out in September to hear it breathe." Mr. Bein' Not Bein' man outside experience said, "anytime somebody sums it up they kill it." Burton Watson, good to say, says, "free yourself from the world" (Basic Writings, 3). Then he kills. The greatest impediment to Zhuangzi is wu-wei.

We-Wei Plenty

Poetry or drivel, editor Legge or Burton, whoever abstracts wu-wei and flops it back on Chuang Chou judges his conformity to their abstract. Was the Lord Jesus a Christian? You belong to this group when you say we-wei plenty and the Sermon on the Mount. Get close as a seeker reading theology! 'Bstracted back, the original don't fit. Tolkien proved this done with the Beo(wulf). Makers of porridge with elbow patches and paychecks know the dialects, but this is life.

We combat a moth, Mr. Phang wing cloud! A flyin' mountain fish changed bird "rouses itself," transports to the pool of heaven, meaning South Ocean. Look inside, it's a bird or a man or a plant. It's a yarrow tree where the breeze horse fields quiver in its beams. It's a tortoise! Molecules of dust crackle. The crocs that inhabit worlds come here when other species lose.

When I learned that "the first two sections of Chuang Tzu constitute "one of the fiercest and most dazzling assaults," cedar branches shot right up out of my hands. I couldn't sit at the front. At the back, in Vol. II, my friends were sitting, not just crocs, but tortoise and yarrow, skull and stump, sheep, cicada, singing goose, pastures, spring shells and luminous unembodied multi-form white elderica colts. Weigh the pig, its paunch and hoof, hellebore and weasel, you know the kind, the jack of all trades has mastered the mind.

Mr. Big Phang on wind figured Wind among first element suspects. Wind is like water (I, 2) in the matter of their contention. Wind is greater than water! That argument, if it "be not great it will not support great wings," bore the blue sky on the back of Mr. Phang and flew south. Offended cicada and little dove thought it super how Phang flew. But didn't Phang have to pound grain at night for dinner?

Zhuangzi leaves no union moot. That should read, onion.We learn about the onion moot when we reach the age of no consent. That used to be 70. When we get there we think maybe it should be raised. Mayhap now it is older. But the youthful age tells you "if you're not 70 what can you know." What can cicada and little dove, small know of great, youth age? That's offensive talk in a democracy. "The experience of a few years does not reach to many" is the nut. Crack it. Then mushroom morning clouds the dew sprouts.

There is a mature tree called Ming-ling. It is 500 so to it spring and fall are the same. This tree is like tortoise that lives longer than man. One old man, Takhun, lived 8000 years. Have grasshopper, cicada, little dove lived enough to see the fruition of the promises of God? Phang Bird, Ming-ling Tortoise, Man Phang Zu lived 700 years in vigor. It is out of this life Zhuangzi wrote. It comforts to know he thought it worth writing. Quail sees on Phang's mountain back those wings of cloud sky. At the difference of small and great, youth and age, Yung-tze of Sung laughs. He is of age. His universes [a universe is his own child] spin their desire. He thought "though the whole world praised [he] would not have done more and though all condemned him would not have done less. Say what you will. Here he stopped the piety of the condemning quail.

The mature measure of Chuang Tzu is "still he had not planted himself firmly in the right position." What is the right position? Lieh-tze also rode the wind, but with indifference of the external, "but though he had to walk, still he had to wait." This walk wait, stop is the crux. Along the road where the fire is out the owls of last night sleep.

Legge tickets Chaung Tzu for audacity in his "extravagant style," at least if, as in the old view of the Book, "Kwang-tze intended himself by the great phang" (I, 128). Conditioned by Whitman and Rambo we can accept such fantastic, but the end of Book I smarts with talk of "a Spirit-like man whose flesh and skin were (smooth) as ice and (white) as snow" (171). The division of the small and great ends up with what to do about the calabash. What use is it, or, what use is the large Ailantus or Phang for that matter, so large and useless to quail, or for that matter, me? The good news in Section II is that a great wind that blows through these apertures.

II.

So what is the first element? Call up Anaxagoras, manipulate numbers. How does one become two? Zhuangzi actually answers it. The first element is wind. Who says Sepher Yetzirah means Job's three friends?

Once there was a large geographical giant, a man of the south suburb who fell asleep on his stool. He lost consciousness, as we say. Neither he nor we know what it was, "I just now lost myself" (176). Even though all the western mystics know exactly what happened, he doesn't answer. Compared to slaked lime, what comes up in cosmology?

The Great Wind

All that is manifest is likened to breath blowing through a bamboo flute, the notes of Man, Earth and Heaven. The great Wind blows through their "myriad apertures." Their promontory, the flute forest trees of earth, the caves, the Hopi blowhole are like the nose, mouth and ear. The sounds that issue from them all alike are caused by wind. So the world and its people are a bamboo flute and there are nine openings. To judge the sounds, mainly the rhetoric, requires separating small and great, young and old. The whole complex of interacts is a failing, "like music from an empty tube, or mushrooms from the warm moisture,[he doesn't like mushrooms] day and night succeed to one another and come before us, and we know not whence they sprout" (179). Mushroom is a word for dialectic that sprouts large and small, internals and externals.

"Given the body, with its hundred parts, its nine openings, and its six viscera, all complete in their places, which do I love the most?" (180). There are nine openings by the way, which extends to the whole of the academy, science, philosophy, argument, affirmation and negation of the predetermined mind. These are all described by the saying, "he went to Yueh today and arrived at it yesterday" (180). This is more of that AfterZen stuff, a "nobody will have heard of Buddha tomorrow" speech that comes from a mind not made up, chirp. And if it is made up it is predetermined pomp. Ya can't win. So why don't cha just stop!

Opposite views produce each other, Republican and Democrat (182). He wants to stand "in the center of the right (of thought) where he can respond without end to the changing views" of the affirming and denying (183). He resolves it with the joke. What is a horse? The universes of man will dispute. His sons will tell him what is a horse. It is different from what he said was a horse. They point that out, affirm and deny horsing around. That's it. "Separation led to completion, then ensued dissolution" (184). He says let us give up this devotion to our own views and adopt the "ordinary," meaning the simple use of things. Then stop (184). The ordinary is so arcane it can't be found among the immortals. Immortality, sageness, the superior man are all synomyms for idiot. We give everything to restore the commonplace world.

So whether there is nothing or something (185), the subject of all Greek thought, the biology of abortion and the cosmology of Stephen Hawking are all decay of thought, wind, music. Even though "the scintillations of light from the midst of confusion and perplexity are indeed valued by the sagely man" (187), stop. Begin thought with, since Heaven and Earth "are spoken of as one, must there not be room for speech? One and Speech are two; two and one are three" (188) Seper Yetzirah! Stop.

"Let us abjure such procedure and simply rest here" (188), he says. Otherwise "we have the saying, Disputation is a proof of not seeing clearly" (189). Too late for me to offer my dispute of his number of existence with no existence, that if one were to say there "was no existence before the beginning of that no existence" (187) that no existence would be one because it is named. Not being proves existence is! Which fact has brought it to be! QED! Stop. When you name or not name you bring to be! QED. Stop. It's like a telegram. How do you know but every bird that cuts the airy way: "when I say, I know it, I really (am showing that) I do not know it... and when I say I do not know am showing that I do" (191)? Stop.

Such argument resolves into an acquisition of Job's three friends of our speaker, or if you like, Socrates in the Agora. These result in leaving the real for dreams where "the stupid think they are awake" (195). Changeable beings, shadows, penumbras: "The penumbra asked the Shadow, saying, Formerly you were walking on, and now you have stopped...how is it that you are so without stability?" (196) Likewise the Butterfly Kau. "I, Kwang Kau dreamt I was a butterfly flying about. Suddenly I awoke and was myself again, the veritable Kau" (197). So which is which in the "Transformation of Things?"

I want to say of this metaphor that it is the ordinary realer than dream. In the metaphor of all animals, butterflies, cicadas, centipedes, elk, fish, bird--and likewise plants, mugwort, bamboo, ailanthus--lies the only way the sounds the wind blows from the apertures are spoken, for otherwise all dissolves to affirming and denying. Whatever we are is a reflection of this in the mirror behind and in our portrait. Animal mirrors, plant mirrors speak the thing.

Third Century Stand Up

Chaung Tzu is that early humorist of China who did third century stand up in the third century.

When the almond tree blossoms and desire is no longer stirred.

This is in Goodreads.

The Ship Of The World

2010-10-12T07:48:00.000-07:00

There is a metaphor inside Yeats head where we get him to open his mouth. Inside the metaphor walk the mind of bubble pops, that body of fairyland inside earth where branching visions lie. We do not know the landscapes. We measure maps. Some interiors, like Dante’s macro pic, are what we are.

Everybody wants to ride to that culture-wide inwendigkeit under sky. Be spiritually aware. Eat the ticket.

Talk about extremophiles! The "BODY IS A FAIRYLAND...the sleek surface of the teeth is a multiplicity of fairy caverns ...the surface of the hand resembles an arid deltic plain...the surface of the tongue, the taste buds can be seen as a garden of beings serving to taste and to guide the macro-being. A skin pore magnified several thousand times is seen as a naturally irregular meat cave inhabited by bacteria" (Michael McClure, Scratching the Beat Surface, 145).

No camera measures these interiors so we rely on Dante to compare earth from his poor soul. Maybe we'll get Blake or Yeats to microscope the landscape in. Outside the compound fairyland: "Ego, Id, Oedipalism, Anima, replaced the fairy folk of the country in the confines of the city. Trolls, brownies, Leprechauns, pookas doff their country costumes for the abstractions of new folklore" (139). The horrors of the new folklore are the Bladder Wacks, Pismiths, Belchers, Orcs, Whopapops, Susans, Ooks of the obese profane age: "sensual horror, pathos, sympathy, all conjoined in intellective adventure...the sensorium of Inferno has begun to constellate more imaginative and more real creatures and beings…The stairs become living movies...in Paradiso the eco-complexity becomes so intense with throngs and multitudes of the Divine that it flares into the feedback of an ultimate vision (142)." Nothing worse was said of it by Merton. A unified field theory of moonscape.

Down to the Waist / Up to the Feet

But it is in the Infernal that the stairs of the ultimate vision go down. In part because the psyche giant profiles the greater, that is the human knowledge self-reflexed, self served. It eats the flesh as its reverse children eat Saturn. Let it pass. "Two travelers find the shaggy and gigantic Lucifer at the absolute centre of the Earth, embedded up to his waist in ice. The only way they can continue their journey is by climbing down his sides-there is plenty of hair to hold on by-and squeezing through the hole in the ice and so coming to his feet" they climb down its sides, "though it is down to his waist, it is up to his feet" (Inferno xxxiv, 70f: C. S. Lewis. The Discarded Image. 141-2).

Sometimes the stairs go up to where Saturn first ate in fear of his supplanting. Societies eat earth from ignorance and fear of doing. Eat the mountain, down a river, pour atmosphere in the sea. Movies predict that the giants of obesity, those manufactured imaginative bounds, will bulge the equator and force still more unseen metaversal flesh up into the belly of a whale. Scale a mile to an inch to compass worlds below. The epic world is closer to unseen than can be said. Munch down a mountain, pony up some sewage, drain an aquifer. It needs a depression deep enough to save. We have our counterparts in Homer. That pariah Noah is our bubble. This metaphor about a giant metaphor prepares reality.

Sometimes these things seem as big as they are, and as old. Plutarch says in On the Face of the Moon that the little world has the same organs as the big, that "the stars revolve fixed like 'radiant eyes' 110 in the countenance of the universe, the sun in the heart's capacity transmits and disperses out of himself heat and light as if it were blood and breath, and earth and sea 'naturally' serve the cosmos to the ends that bowels and bladder do an animal. The moon, situate between sun and earth as the liver or another of the soft (p. 95) viscera 111 is between heart and bowels, transmits hither the warmth from above and sends upwards the exhalations from our region, refining them in herself by a kind of concoction and purification 112 (Loeb Classical Library, XII, 1957). How's that for pathetic fallacy?

THE SHIP IS THE WORLD!

Working back, working around, come down to Noah/Jonah cast into the fish in order to save the ship lest everyone drown. Jonah in the belly is a grave. Before he's cast up on south beach Noah Meets the Wilderness. That's what we do. Throw the outcasts into space in modern terms, put on them our sins, tie their hands and drive them to the deep beyond. We must manufacture a spaceship, some horse or donkey, a mule from sin. Anything to carry them. Send our sins into space! They threw them overboard in the past, but did not throw Paul to save because he saved them all (Acts 27). Cases are never the same. He is salvation, not pariah. How to tell pariah from savior? "It is, rather, largely the result of work by people with...PhDs" says David Orr (c. 1990). Too soon to talk of shells cast off by *autodactylmorphs, part salesman, part dinosaur, part invention. How wonderfully we void wilderness. "Science has conquered nature," the product of natural forces. Co2 buried before the age began, in air and under sea in metaphor about a giant metaphor prepares reality.

This metaphor was planning to sail The Planet Formerly Known As Earth when it debarked this December 1, 2010.

Before he's cast on South Beach late,

throw this outcast into space.

Put on him sins, tie his hands to save

and drive him to the deep beyond.

Tortoise Mirror

2010-08-30T09:05:00.000-07:00

This is a look up close in the mirror of many mirrors. All its symbolic meanings are implied, but left to be made.

It's bad luck to break a mirror. The animals were brought to the man so he could see himself. They were all mirrors. Universal teachings in childrens' tales, fairy tales, bestiaries are all told to a purpose. Birds, predators, food chain, natural selection, survival of the fittest, express a prestated condition the teller wants to prove. Empirical observation subjectively projects this purpose. Zhuangzi is Chuang Tzu. In the end he amounts to Zhuangzi, the tortoise, the long lived yarrow and the chow. All mirrors. All trees.

Teachers need to be loved to be understood. Knowing and loving the animal and plant, tortoise and yarrow, one of the old names for the tortoise was the golden age, "thing that sits among the plants." Her hibernation was in the "tortoise home," its "resting place," the thing that sits among the bushes, ziix hehet cquiij, in Seri. You may partly see as it sits among the plants. Isaiah knew it: For so the LORD said to me, I will take my rest, and I will consider in my dwelling place like a clear heat on herbs, and like a cloud of dew in the heat of harvest.

This observes that it is more likely to find a thing in its own nature, in its habitat than not. The distribution of tortoise neighborhoods is like the distribution of truths. They are found along a certain axis, within these boundaries, in this country. Could tortoise be transplanted to Australia? You can take tortoise out of the country but you can't take the country out of tortoise. So wisdom. You can infer wisdom but you cannot hold it captive.

Neighborhoods and tortoises are also like Mennonites, an anomaly because my family renounced them practically speaking, but could not uproot the Mennonite from their lives. Father, grandmother, aunts, all Mennonite pressed the dilemma of submitting to group thought, as though by sheer number a position could be right. Efforts at being a Mennonite were thwarted by a tendency not to submit. That's the long and short, but the sympathies of the Mennonite pervade concerns for the persecuted, the downtrodden.

Important for their extraordinary psychological involvement with each other, the psyches and problems are the same for all groups even if the rules are different. It's all about the conflict of individuals with groups, over how strictly to enforce their own laws, that is, mercy vs. justice, a universal opposite, "we would not want to consider ourselves wiser than our forebears" (Ruth, Lancaster, 527).
The analogy is far afield that Mennonites are like tortoise, for they are like badger.

Badger

Badger goes on hands and knees except he has a head.

There is a cowl, but nothing in the shell,

Does that tell you, where he's gone?

He knows his life is not his own.

To earth, ground tells us, when badger turns to flesh.

Mother, is your milk in dugs? Coyote do you cover up,

Cornstalk, robe what fill? With no head

you stand him up but he flows through.

Tortoise is an elder in the adolescent world, an elder of philosophic reach and slow breath. A tortoise lifts a front leg and meditates the step. I say this as a friend. I say this from Chuang Tzu, who began to collect his tortoise meditations in those Chuang Pomes where Zhuangzi loves milfoil.

To join the Tortoise Society (Devender's, Sonoran Desert Tortoise) build burrows, collect logs from downed trees, piles of rock. Dig full grown chinaberry and toxic oleanders. Give first aid, raise hatchlings. It goes on. I don't know how many there are. They climb the blocks and go out the fence. They dig under logs. To reproof the fence with welded wire I move a log.There is a two year old completely dug in in August! The female is twice as big as the male. Three times! She is maybe eighty. Call her Ming-ling. That's not the name painted on her shell from her previous assistant, an Indian agent from early Arizona. She and her mate in his backyard had their names and his phone number painted on so he could track them down. The male got out 4 years ago and went across the street to his old home. John and Nathan came over, "did you lose a tortoise?"

I know Ming-ling because the religion prof next door had a housemate who saw the Indian agent go down. They took him to the heart hospital. I went to see. He needed so much help that my wife started taking him meals at his home after his discharge, the last weeks of his life. She and Reba took meals and sat while he ate. I admitted him to a physician's care. Ming-ling and her consort were in his back yard under the black plastic of his covered wood piles. Babies were found years later. When he took the last lurch down the gates were left open. I brought Ming-ling over and began the fellowship.

She is reflective unlike her mate who has harried other males to death. He mounts her in August and looks like he will fall backwards off a cliff. We feed hibiscus flower, ruella, diachondra, mallow and they graze at will. After a monsoon she will saunter to the slab where water pools to sip. His burrow was in haphazard spots, under a vine, half dug in a wall. He has moved in an outbuilding of her den, which extends under the slab and hollowed out below the large logs. This world still exists. There are many years ordure to savor it. The entrance faces southeast. Winter mornings she basks at the door.

In a likely community of dog and tortoise we have a chow, Blessing, 祝福 (Zhùfú), who has endeared herself by bringing hatchlings, impossible to see against the grass, in her mouth to place them at my feet. Sometimes she tosses them in the air, but not with malice. I learn to sense this. Chows are the lion dog from North China, friend of Chuang Tzu, tortoise and yarrow.

The American hound of that pack has never touched one, only this particular chow, companion of that first who came like the tortoises, lassoed by our son who had prayed for a dog. This was of course the famous Jogger 慢跑者 (Mànpǎo zhě), of exploits like Zhuangzi of the spirit. When he left I asked his destiny of ultimate care that AM Palm Sunday at communion. To a resounding "yes" I saw him leap upon the Master barking and run those circles of joy he used. I saw all the creatures around that throne then, and the Lord stood and raised his arms. We were silent. Then she touched me on the arm and handed me the bread. So in the community of ants that swarm the monsoon, and floods in the microcosm of wasps on Indian corn above cucurbs, tortoises flow. They are a symbol of something else.

Cited
John L. Ruth, The Earth is the Lord's. A Narrative History of the Lancaster Mennonite Conference. 2001.

'A divine tortoise', said Confucius, 'can appear to prince Yüan in a dream, yet it cannot escape the net of Yü Ch'ieh. Its wisdom can yield seventy-two faultless omens, yet it cannot escape the misery of being cut to pieces. Truly wisdom has its limits; spirituality, that which it cannot reach.'In spite of the highest wisdom, there are countless snares to be avoided. If a fish has not to fear nets, there are always pelicans. Get rid of small wisdom, and great wisdom will shine upon you. Put away goodness and you will be naturally good. A child does not learn to speak because taught by professors of the art, but because it lives among people who can themselves speak.'
Hui Tzu said to Chuang Tzu, 'Your theme, Sir, is the useless.'
'You must understand the useless', replied Chuang Tzu, 'before you discuss the useful. #26

Tortoise is always a hero. Consider how he saved these islands:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/livescience/20110430/sc_livescience/aliengianttortoisehelpsrestoreecosystem

Life and Death Herbs, Drug Garden and the Clayton Foundation for Biochemical Research

2010-08-02T15:53:00.000-07:00

Plotinus says that plants embody "the more rebellious and self-assertive part of the soul (Mackenna, Plotinus [Medici, 1917] 131). The death herbs, poppy, hemlock, datura, etc. get all the press so why not say what the life herbs are. Yarrow achillea, mugwort artemisia head the list with lippias, creosote, milkweed aesclepius and polymintha bushes. One is tempted to say these are salvias because they save, but they are from different families, a good sign for the peoples of the earth.

Death Herbs

They call the death plants poison plants. There is a long list. At the Drug Garden there was classic black hellebore, hen bane, digitalis, mandrake, belladonna, ricinus. I have to get out the lists. They were grown practically in gravel in Austin, Texas. There was no hemlock which loves wet and can grow over your head with white disc blooms. It just looks edible. Tell that to Socrates as you tap his insensate groin. Feel anything here? That's how you know when you're getting somewhere with the poison plants, death plants. You can't feel anything. All inebriates are in this class. Marijuana of course, which has led to thousands of innovative ad campaigns for casinos. Imaginative, even fantastic, the big trouble with marijuana writing is there is no feeling. One is tempted to put the cow patty mushroom into the life class for the beautiful glow it puts on its devoteds faces, like they had been making love, or worshiping God instead of caught up in some other worldly event. The difference between the counterfeit and the true makes bi-polar experience so common. Up and then down, what used to be the province of birth, life and death you can get in a jar. Is vegetable Viagra a life drug? You know the answer.

The Drug Garden and the Clayton Foundation for Biochemical Research

I saw herbs in glass jars in casement windows in Chicago. When the tops were off they radiated the room with fragrance. My relation with herbs came from that except later I learned it was latent in Mennonite farmer ancestors and immediately in my mother and grandmother. It needed waking. When I discovered the Drug Garden by accident one spring my first thought was to get cuttings. That's the way my mind went then, if you could get a cutting it would grow. After conversations with the student assistant I learned the real boss was Henry Burlage, dean emeritus, and since I had lots of time, despising the MLA job market for new Ph.Ds, I would visit him in his third floor office. I was close by, washing dishes for the Clayton Foundation for Biochemical Research in Experimental Science and its Aikido master Bill Lee. Dr. Burlage was cantankerous, but more serious than I realized when he jawboned Dean Doluisio into an invite to see that fall about a job. Henry was eager to save the Garden since he, Dr. Albers with Dr. Franke with others took an interest, but the place was born late and died early, lasted maybe 30 years, 1950-1980. Prime central Austin land. Five acres! Dean Doluisio wanted a bone for the old dean so made up a temporary part-time appointment. When he asked how I knew these apparently abstruse things I told him I had studied herbs in Tibet and in the Andes. When I applied to move on after the first six months he ordered a raise.

I did this three years and the Clayton Foundation five. Jim Bowman, who below gets his knee fixed by artemisia, held the bottle job but broke his leg and needed a few months temp. But then he said I should just keep the job. I had met him at a Hyde Park community sale, traded a beautiful ten gallon peppermint for a charcoal drawing, self-portrait of himself. I said it looked like Shakespeare. But the post docs complained I ruined their experiments in pyruvate dehydrogenase phosphatase, that the beakers weren't clean. These were the same guys that had a refrigerator they were afraid to open, it was so radioactive. One of them kept a rabbit in the basement for his experiments but turned the cage against the wall away from the light. He wanted me to feed his rabbit when he went away. I turned the cage. I might have lost that job but they got a real machine that washed the dishes in high temp and pressure that I could load and forget instead of doing it by hand with soap and water. Thanks to these post docs I had a first row seat at the pollution of Barton Creek. They used thousands of little bottles of irradiated xylene in their work. Xylene is a strong solvent. The post docs wanted to save pennies to impress the boss by recycling the bottles. They mandated Bill make me do it. He opened a window twenty feet away and said, pour it down the drain and wash the little bottles. I wondered in the next days why my nose was bleeding at night until I realized it was the solvent. I filed a workman's comp case and got a free bili-rubin liver test. The recycling stopped.

The head of the lab, Dr. Lester J. Reed held a Christmas party each year for his post docs and visiting scientists and somehow Bill decided I should get an invite. So I went to two of these, around the punch fell into talk with a Hungarian quantum chemist and quoted a flurry of Shakespeare sonnets to him. He said what Ilya Prigione said, poetry and physics are the same. But Dr. Reed's son killed himself and the parties ended for a while. I took Dr. Reed the largest aloe I had in a clay pot, almost needed a dolly. It touched me because I had had a student, M.K. Hage, in a previous year who had done the same thing inadvertantly with herbs, the herbs of death! I was Bill's budo, the one he demonstrates on. We were born the same day and year, which all in all left me with an enduring affection. All of this ended when I was surprised with the news I was to be a father. The English department and I had parted ways and to get back in their grace I visited every member of the executive committee that summer of 1979, to get a job as a Temp Adjunct! I kept the bottle job until that Christmas. The Drug Garden got bull dozed. I got married! The train left the station.

Life Herbs

I say all this to try to create some context for life plants, which are much harder to apprehend, less dramatic than death plants and much disputed. We go to the pharmacy for antibiotics instead of to the garden. The amazing, the wonderful, the new snake oil of medicine has one flaw comes with it, just at the moment they are saving you they are killing you. The package carries its antithesis. So while the inventions save they destroy. The PR machines deny all knowledge of this, how medicine's moribund handmaid, industry, caused the entire world to be morbidly obese, poisoned by its food inside and its environment outside, the price you pay to be on the internet and run a cell and think so highly of yourself, live in the one great super power. So the death herbs reign. Any inebrient, obscenity, obesity is licensed, but they just cannot locate funds to verify the folk wisdom of life. The usual life herb occurs as a kitchen herb, but milfoil, the much preferred name of yarrow, does not. How many drug gardens are left in the lower 48 in the sense of working gardens? At Texas they called it the University Drug Garden (Alcade, Feb 1965) and this article gives a good sense of it, but about 1980, though there is no mention of it in the history, it was bulldozed for an archery range in trade for a new pharmacy building. Herbs are still worth something All the old faculty members interested were gone. Esther Wood Hall expressed an interest and of course Henry Burlage who had several of his own works on medicinal and native plants, but this was insufficient. They had had to hire a complete non pharmacy mate to run it, from the English department! It fell in the crack between the ages of pharmacognosy, microbial transformation and the new Bioprocessing Medicinal Gardens hatched when all of a sudden plants, animals, oceans and forests seemed to go under. At Rhode Island they call it Natural Products Research. [Compare Western Reserve University's Drug Garden.] There are still plenty of botanical gardens, not quite the same thing, unless you count the Cannabis garden in the basement of the Cannabis College in Amsterdam. They have a following. The Texas land being so valuable it made perfect sense to change its use, except that the habit of administrators is so guilty and defensive they have to hide the fact instead of celebrate it, which Dean James T. Doluisio felt compelled in utero. "We have not been able to identify funds for next year or for your salary." This gravel ground had seen 50 pickup loads of composted horse manure over two acres, countless dumptruck loads of leaves each fall dumped by the university. These were plowed in constantly with a tractor so that when the second the bean stalk went up high the dill was over our heads. Locals in the know brought their own tractors and trucks and scraped the topsoil and took it away to their churches and gardens. It was two feet deep in places.

It may not seem important, the ground, in an era that consumed all the prairie and whose topsoil washed to the Gulf. Some gardens yet exist as plant museums. USDA has plots where they grow things unheard of. Major chemical companies have drug gardens, genetic gardens they call them where they splice the gene of a rabbit to a cucumber. It helps them hold still. My neighbor's rabbits silfay in the yard early morning, don't move when I walk the dogs past, like little rabbit statues. Food crops must be considered herbs of life, I mean only natives, not monocropped, which are the foods of death, easily shown by comparing this ear of corn from the supermarket, product of the food bubble, inflated with fake genes, injection of sugars and puffed out of all recognition. Shucked from the store its kernals resembled the Indian corn here, at first, but when the flesh dried, the Safeway corn, had you teeth this bad you'd have an operation. The kernals lost half their size and what nutrition is left? the Indian corn dried looks as it did when picked, like a grape, full and as complete as when it grew. We will grind it for crepes. No Idaho Burbank potatoes or hybrid corn, but blue corns and all the rainbow corns and potatoes from First Mesa to the Bolivia highlands.

A pumpkin an herb? Absolutely. It helps to see it however as the Hokkaido, from the island of Japan. All foods are medicinal, or were before altered, super starched and sugared.

Questions on Caput, Symmetry and New Bestiary

2010-07-20T06:32:00.000-07:00

Courtesy of the Derrida-Welhausen Mining & Wellness Co.

Eying Asian carp in the delta, the Derrida-Welhausen Wellness Co. opens up rational dialogue in release of its new slogan,

Blow up the mountains

Blow up the Gulf:

What chance have the five states of the Great Lakes
to stay ahead of Our Sole Self?
We Are a force of nature!
If Asian Carp auger symmetrical destruction
it is a return to classicism!
The Great Lakes balances the Gulf!

We with the Wellhausen Tobacco and Mining companies have voluteered to clean the beaches of Florida. To recriprocate, Polycarp Polyphemus, our one-eyed giant with a giant net (Odyssey, ix), stands with Michigan to stop fish at the border. The Derrida-Welhausen! companies with their new logo will build an organic wall! Asian Carp will be a creed. We found a New Bestiary! Become a species yourself. Will you wannna be a snail, a pit pony, hybrid corn? Everybody's gonna be rich. Everybody's gonna be happy.

BLACK CARP / SYMBOLIC SNAIL / ANOCULAR POLYOPY

2010-06-05T06:49:00.001-07:00

Empathy for the world is empathy for the burrow. Whatever creature we endanger (salmon, coral reef, shark, prairie dog), what isn't endangered is the exotic black carp of the Mississippi River, Jacques Derrida and the boundaries broken by tiny invasive snails. They sit a dozen to a dime. We preserve the pristine native, profile to safeguard the indigenous, but surrender ourselves to the exotic right up until this "diversity" destroys the natural. It is the way of Walmart of the North. Diversity is monolith. You have to get used to seeing the thing as its opposite. Annihilate one hundred to invite one. The way we treat the natural is the way we treat ourselves. Techniques used to save it must be used upon ourselves. Folk patterns are all that hold us to the root. Big blender is waiting to swallow.

Monolith masquerades as diversity. Paradise made opposite but made to seem not. Now is not called a paradise. Then is paradise. Now is a wish for paradise, a dream species of it when the thing is all around. This inverted bifocal, an anocular polyopy, looks down deep looking through the wrong end. Inverted, it prevents seeing that we are now in paradise. Call it freedom when you are circumscribed by new siding for your house. Call it what it's not, juxtaposing then and now. Think you're an unrealized Buddha when you're not, unless Buddha is a robot, a Christian, unless your paradise is poison. You live in a paradise that annihilates wilderness. That is, if paradise is killing wilderness, you might know that wilderness is paradise. This is the cocoon of unknowing, the cocoon-prevented knowing. We were made for danger and we live in paradise of laundermats. What lacks? The antidote is stars and sea and the forests of meaning.

Reverse paradise has no edge of bark, pine, grass or predator. It is a video game. Comfort is annihilation. This paradise has violated. Robots in prison! Of course it is not "paradise," the man-made inversion semantics, clothes dryers and dish washers, "frustration" at oil spills, fear of wilderness, trees that hide the darkness reversed so the good is evil, the evil is good. Not understood. In line with the bi-polar there are two Paradises with two nukes. One destroys wilderness, the source of natural life. This paradise civilization made. It is every effort of power to control, domesticate and boil down to the most common. These thoughts are continually brought to by the Derrida Mining and Wellness Co. on display everywhere thus also here.

Wallace Stevens, Naturalist

2010-04-18T10:44:00.001-07:00

Stevens was a human botanist, takes up his art among the plants as well.

Resort to the life, it is clearer than words. The course of Blake will do for Stevens, so as his Journal provides, he took long walks, "a good 42 miles" in one day. "I walked without stopping longer than a minute or two at a time." This is the heart's core: "I thought, on the train, how utterly we have forsaken the Earth, in the sense of excluding it from our thoughts...it is a disparate monstrosity, full of solitudes + barrens + wilds. It still dwarfs + terrifies + crushes. The rivers still roar, the mountains still crash, the winds still shatter" (Letters, 73, April 18, 1904).Whatever his broodish naturalism did to the drawing rooms after his Harmonium of 1923, the book that sold a hundred copies! in his Journal it is an "extraordinarily brilliant day" (70, April 4, 1904). So Holly says that "eventually Stevens discarded his Journal in favor of his letters to Elsie" (Letters, 78), but they show the same life. Both contradict his repute as a dandy, call out Marianne Moore's "riot of gorgeousness" or a "deliberate bearishness," a heavenly "brutal naturalism?"

It is the conflict of the human and the natural he minds, as he already said, man "has managed to shut out the face of the giant from his windows" (73). This discord makes him satiric. "Men who'd been taking a drop of the Astor House Monongahela now and then through the winter, or else had been calling in at Proctor's for an olive or a fishball before starting up town, looked like blotchy, bloodless, yes, and bloated--toads" (70). His response to this man is "I walked a score of miles sloughing off a pound at every mile (it seemed)." The journal is filled with wood frogs, blue birds, pussy willow, skunk cabbage, cedar, gulls and goats. This is the center of his soul, not that urbanity of words he floods over the streets of Chicago, infinitely more dense that Dorothy Wordsworth's diary of the Lake District, an unfair comparison, for if anything Stevens is a botanist and a naturalist. That he sold insurance shows the depth of depravity of the civil, "many a good, honest woman had a snout like a swine" (70), and no one seems to have noticed he's quoting the Bible again, as if it had entered his blood and so alchemically transmuted as to come out his mouth (a jewel in a swine snout!).

This discord of civil and natural drives that cleansing "bearishness." It is the folly of the 25 year old that he "lay on my belly on the top of one of the cliffs" (70). Sure these are snapshots, we don't get to read his thoughts. You can't read your own, but that doesn't mean you should disbelieve him. Words are the last thing that is true and life is next to that. What is true are the thoughts, the meditation, and when you hear them utter truely say yes monsieur. He struggles with his cigar and drink, his corpulence and dullness so you would think he were a species of Hopkins consumed with the flame. Against the background of the civil he hears and sees, "no doubt, if it had been a bit nearer sunset, the particular hills I gazed at so long would have been very much like the steps to the Throne. And Blake's angels would have been there with their "Holy, Holy, Holy" (71), except he knows it well they are not Blake's angels, the angels around the throne.

Is it fair to leave huge chunks of Stevens out of his continent to capture the body or save the soul? It depends upon your interest. But for his baptism there go we. What about the adult urbanity? He models his dislike, distaste, revulsion at the civil so well. What an irony he should be so good at Guggenheims, galleries, fandoms when beneath he is raving in satire except when he has a bit too much and takes a poke at Hemingways's numbskull of it all. No he won't teach at Harvard! "Here am I, a descendant of the Dutch, at the age of twenty-five, without a cent to my name...God bless us, what a lark! "(69) I tell you he sensed the rejection of Grandfather John Zeller in his own land and hasted to repay.

"On Sunday I stretched my cramped legs--doing my twenty-five miles (Letters, 68, October 20, 1903), but..."guzzled vin ordinaire...open my dusty tobacco-jar--and my nerves, as a consequence, are a bit uneasy." Even before this he said "I have resolved...to abstain from wet-goods--not that I booze...and in the second place, to smoke wisely" (Letters, 62, December 29-31, 1902). His distrust of the civil and its civilities of friendship, cigars and vin? Well it comes from "tramping through the fields and woods I beheld every leaf and blade of grass revealing or rather betokening the Invisible" (Letters, 62, August 10, 1902). So either you think he's sentimental, provoking Wordsworth to celibacy, or he knows the truth, you cannot smoke your pipe as "a materialist"(60) and see "the fairies, the Cloud-Gatherer, the Prince of Peace, the Mirror of Virtue--and a pleasant road to think of them on, and a starry night to be with them" (60, September 4, 1902). That there is a higher and a lower reality he knows well. The civil lives in one, the "betokening" in the other. This can go on, but he gets baptized, a civil gesture directed against the pipe and the vin, poetry and the horde of men. The only way he could make up his mind between the two would be to live again. And that would conclude it, "the thousands of people I passed; now I look at them with extraordinary interest as companions in the same fight that I am about to join" (63), or, "I discovered egg-shells! How deep + voluble the shadows! How perfect the quiet!...roads are strewn with purple oak leaves, brown chestnut leaves, and the golden and scarlet leaves of maples. I doubt if there is any keener delight in the world...." (62).

Stevens on Nature and the Imagination (Edward Ragg) here

Comin' to the Thaw

2010-03-21T06:46:00.001-07:00

The Thaw of Nothingness

Once all things were bound in nothing, like a book whose cover cannot be opened. It was a suspended animation with everything frozen. Coming to the thaw the book is opened, the drip begins and something is released.

Apricot

Dreams are the halo of this understood, a nimbus that surrounds, study itself, the world of earth. Instead of getting and spending, commercial affairs, wholen glimpses of maturity show sides of a paradigm. Furniture, pottery, Chinese civilization, wilds of the Balkans, animal life and plants, faces of children, heroism of suffering, fight of the spirit, joy of health, something out of nothing celebrates the formless, to seek good and pursue it, sweep the curbs in the street, care for neighbors, cry of beings in distress, pray without ceasing, cleaning and all menial tasks, parabolas, love. There is civilization and there are forms of the formless, every animal, insect, plant, tree, cave, stream, mountain free of inebriated destruction that seeks to destroy the forms. Being guardians of the forms of everything in the midst of these dreams opens up to consciousness.

Night vision of breath praise, gratitude for being, each gasp, pain a prayer when wind is still and giving birth lasts. History, geography, being, knowing, the thaw of nothing in the world of forms is not nothing, hence Something. It is the formless. How long you been doing this? Since eternity I celebrate the forms in thought, hands, trades. Figures of something, elephants wave their trunks like cyclone funnels from the ground up to their capacious heads, ears waving the trumpet of calls. This is something, a little one.

The little gathers at night to wait the coming one, a community of bird, plant, beast, star, the same human wonder each century, decade, millennia, day, the same one-pouring wonder sought knowledge. One dream comes regularly each night to the sphere that forms whole where each has its place, trumpet, musician, gardener, physician, the one who writes it all, not the politician, the one who feels the ages down to a mud hole in the ground and sits there in wonder. Poll the masses as they sit. When nothing thaws it will rain. I celebrate it in the new year.

Sky Shadows

2010-02-11T05:28:00.001-08:00

Sky Shadows tells of a journey and residence in San Jose, CR in 1963, a memorial of Richard T., Ricardo Foulkes, the Latin American Mission, the appearance of JFK for the Alliance for Progress, the peoples of Central America and Semana Santa, Limon, Turrialba, Puntaranes, the erupting Irazu and the fire in the forge of a poet. Sky Shadows will appear in the last issue of Jack, with photographs of JFK, this June.

This article came with the thought of Irene Foulkes on ecological feminism, and also a consideration of the emptiness of form. Libertines have laughed for centuries at the abuse of travel literature against the body of woman and the world, License my roving hands and let them go. Donne and Shakespeare explicitly extend this facetiousness to earth, O my America, my Newfoundland. Eco-feminism resists the language of progress, investment and merchandising, selling yourself, all things that make civilization great, where Babylon city/woman is the rhetoric of biological extinction.

This confronts the scientific partnership with business in no particular order. This is what science has done: cutting the antennae off Monarch butterflies to prove "butterflies lost the ability to navigate using the sun." Antennae-less butterflies, antennae painted with black enamel, to block the sun, drift north, instead of south, ruining their molecular clock. "Insects can taste with their feet and smell with their antennae... it’s sometimes difficult for us to even ask the right questions." Here is the right question, whether business, science or man. When they send your sin into the wilderness, will you survive?

On Demolition of Species

2009-12-07T10:28:00.000-08:00

BEST OF 2009 - Higher Critics and Biological Extinction.

First in the mind, then in the mountain and dry gulch, extinction mythologies preceded the destruction of mountain tops. With a magnifying glass that missed things obvious to the naked eye, 19th century gurus demythologized classical texts to substitute their own reconstructs. Imploded and debased, strip mined cultural authorities, Torah, Plato, Psalms, Illiad, New Testament, Lao Tzu were like axed species. As mountaintops in West Virginia were exploded to mine coal, the texts were mined for reputations. This removed barriers to the destruction of life forms. You cannot judge even the certainty of mass extinction without perspective of the modern event that comes from the elders. Demolition of elder texts enabled biological demolitions, the destruction of species and land. Who the author was and what was said, according to these critics, was in massive doubt. No old work was the product of its traditional author to them, but an editorial compilation of prior works. Multiple authors, whose identity was inferred from language habits, especially anachronism, undermined the texts with editorial myths. It was important to destroy the traditional and remove its epic perspective to remove the spiritual from the physical. Wellhausen might as well have been employed by Peabody Coal. The so called scientific understanding of the Bible, that is, its demythology, produced the same effects in the scientific understanding of space as in biological and human nature, a progressive movement reducing heaven, earth and under earth to a demythologized forest and earth mined of every sanctity, for profit. Free market capitalism of forest and mountain came with the same sensational revelations as textual destructions.The savagery of the tiger, greed, cruelty in any exterior form. So all creation is a mirror of positive and negative states. Here

Signs

2009-11-13T06:45:00.000-08:00

It is three AM. The youngest of the pack is barking, bangs the gate. Had a coyote finally come down the mountain? I go out. A large owl sits on the wire like the note of a bottom scale. Lou used to see this bird when he walked Wingnut. November darkness holds the color. Mind feathers feared, noises alarm. Big birds come in the flyway to the sanctuary of water. This silhouette turns up on the line of sight. Trees look different with such ornaments. The phone poles have signs, compramos oro, they say. The weather turns, cold comes with a call that morning. Since eagles come to my birdbath in winter I am up at three to hear. Like people gone natural on a supernatural voyage, a person at sea seeks a commonplace peace. This day stretche begins with a call from a wife who fears her husband has gone mad, to the sure belief a dog will be gone by evening. Then the news of a swat bust at my son's next door and the paniced call of a wife who fears she cannot protect her husband in old age. I go with a friend to a deposition, pay the bill that must be paid. Once in pursuit of the DayMaker I went natural to the supernatural event. It contradicts expectation. The wife, the dog, the son, the friend, the bill, the youth saved do not go natural in that good night, a diagnosis comes. Because he loves me says the Lord I will rescue him. I will protect him for he acknowledges my name. He will call upon me and I will answer him. I will be with him in trouble. I will deliver him and honor him. With long life will I satisfy him and show him my salvation.

Chimeric Splicing and the Cosmic Comic Bestiary Batteries

2009-08-02T05:37:00.001-07:00

The man transferred to earth his attitudes of domination and control for woman. If he feels this of woman and earth what does he feel of himself? We are in the middle of a mass extinction so this man denies his body, which gnostic repression says that matter is evil anyway so it's unimportant what is done with it. Thus lions are poisoned in Kenya with pesticide. The technology of destructive urges is fueled at every turn, scientists loose bees, nurserymen ship ants, exhausts of every combustion. But technology is not the cause. We explore causes above and below.

Blake's portrayal of animals, like the bestiaries, pictures the negative states of man against material being, an antinomian of creation, a heresy compared with Psalms and Job. Each species is a morality play, not a thing in itself of wonder. This attitude translates to science. What use is the thing, what experiments can be run, will it make a good paper, improve human lot? This morality play is running with the polar ice. Songbirds are good, hawks are bad. It is a cliched pattern of English folklore. If we take a premise that poets were writing of the coming extinction even when industry revolted, and that they have been in increasing numbers since, then many celebrations of the natural are done prophetically. This prophetic capacity in the negative man preoccupies his own works.That is where we awake to peer deeply into psyche to determine the cause.

II. My Chimeric Splicing

In the midst of these mass extinctions pataphysical solutions supply imaginary solutions to imaginary problems.

Chimeric Splicing

1) The mutation implicit in the loose ends of two or more species put together

2) Patched up parts, not wholes constructed. No knowledge of collateral effect.

3) Garbage patches of monsterism. Multiple sociopathic murders, mass dementia inflicted on the social politic.

4) Obesities. Sexual confusion.Pesticides in runoff increase stress hormones that lead to immuno-suppression in frogs. Atrazine (Hayes), a common agricultural chemical, causes genetically male frogs to develop as females and produce eggs.

5) Add to Reproductive abnormalities, sex reversing, the loss of the genetic male, elimination of the female chromosome: this comment from Maimonides on the mixing:

"when one species is grafted upon another, the branch which is to be grafted must be in the hand of a beautiful damsel, whilst a male person has disgraceful and unnatural sexual intercourse with her; during that intercourse the woman grafts the branch into the tree...The Law, therefore, prohibits us to mix different species together, ie., to graft one tree into another, becasue we must keep away from the opinions of idolaters and the abominations of their unnatural sexual intercourse. In order to guard against the grafting of trees, we are forbidden to sow any two kinds of seed together or near each other" (Guide of the Perplexed, III, 180).Now we know what all those scientists are doing in their laboratories.

Bestaries have slandered the animal as philosophers have done. The last paragraph of McCaffery's interview "distinguishes an animal voice (a voice of soniccontinuum) from a human voice (a voice of sonic articulation)...The animal voice, Hegel claims, is pure sound, empty and grounded in negativity. In Hegel’s scheme “every animal finds its voice in its violent death; it expresses itself as a removed self.” By intercepting this animal voice of death and subjecting it to articulation, human language emerges with two decisive characteristics: (1) it retains within it the voice of death; (2) it becomes the voice of consciousness thereby converting negativity into being. To me this signals a fundamentally poetic quality in Hegel’s thinking, establishing as it does its mythogeme of “voice” on the codification of vowel and consonant as respectively animal and human." (46).

Human language as the voice of death because derived from the animal is more than slander, it is representative of the problem of extinction translated from the commercial to the philosophical, as if Hegel never left his house to walk in the woods, for it is not the voice of death in the song bird or elk, it is the joy of life. Somewhere it says that everything that has breath praises. This is being posted on phone poles in Nashville. Praise is the song of animal speech, the tongue of life not death. But everybody wants to hallow their smarts by resort to language. "A new language" is alleged of Beissel's mysticism by Bach as much as in Boehme.

The notion of the two voices, the Inner Voice, with at least the in and the out language of Boehme, McCaffery says, is an "idea, already implicit in Aristotle’s description of the two voices (articulate and inarticulate) obtains almost a’pataphysical excellence!" On the same page he says "Voice is a tangled mythogeme." "Poetry’s primal scene as that of inspiration involves at its base a fundamental “other” voice, a voice speaking through one. This image of the poet as a passive, possessed mouthpiece of an alien voice runs from Plato’s Ion through to Jack Spicer’s poetics of dictation."

And if the poet is passive it is not from speaking the voice of death, but of the transfiguring life which you should know in its essence and if not email me. If voice is "the originary place of negativity" that "...language is a negativity, the unsayable and the ungraspable" (Agamben) and cannot but be negativity unless it never existed, the thought goes, then "only if language no longer refers to any voice...is it possible for man to experience a language that is not marked by negativity and death" (Dillon, Politics of Security, 115). The language of the universe, as if to say become the thought or failing that be language itself. The Word of God! Voice here means author. The death of the author (Barthes) of all this forfeit is the anvil of simple speech. To speak as a bear, fly like a bird, leap like a cat the philosophers would write bestiaries of themselves.

Bishop Theobald, Physiologus (Cologne, 1492)
The Old English Physiologus
Albert S. Cook, Physiologus
Beasts, Bestiaries & the Physiologus
Physiologus,. Michael J. Curley (Chicago, 2009)
Herbals and Bestiaries
So why call it human botany when it is a human bestiary? 300,000 birds

Green Masks Did You Find Any Paradise Today?

2009-08-02T05:36:00.001-07:00

"Great green and yellow grasshoppers are everywhere in the tall grass, popping up like corn to sting the flesh, and tortoises crawl about on the red earth" (Momaday, Rainy Mountain, 5).

Paradise art transfigures the idea that the outward masks an inner. These corn field resurrections, pine tree men, waves of field and sky are a "synagogue in an ear of corn with the round Zion of the water bead" (Dylan Thomas, "A Refusal to Mourn") or a "church the size of a snail / With its horns through mist and the castle / Brown as owls, who on the heron priested shore ("Poem in October")
load the throats of shells ("Deaths & Entrances"),
the "sheep white smoke of the farmhouse, hand folded air, parish of snow, cloth of counties" ("Winter's Tale"). Blake in Songs, Roethke a little demented, Lawrence, Birds, Beasts and Flowers (1923), T. H. White's, instructions of the animals to Arthur in The Book of Merlyn, Ted Hughes (Remains of Elmet), Barry Lopez, (Lessons from the Wolverine, Apologia) Aesop, prepare.

A desire to restore earth was forming in the minds of artists with the industrial revolution, but paralysis immobilized every agency to effect remediation, except at first the chimney sweep of Blake. It was one of a few of Blake's poems that affected his time, included in The Chimney-Sweeper's Friend (1824) (see Bentley, 365). There is a creation and there are sons of light, not mere beings, that creation travails with to mediate paradise and restore the natural world. That this is practice for the coming re-creation who can doubt. The last stories of Kafka are always thinking of an earth that occurs in the thoughts of one not an enemy of the world, "A Report to an Academy," "Investigations of a Dog," "The Burrow," "Josephine the Singer." The Burrower is a disturbed householder worried with maintaining the home. The business of his narration with "my forehead-that unique instrument," is our daily care. Ape in "Report" ambiguously hungers as the artist does to escape states of self imprisonment and otherwise imposed. Kafka is prescient of such consciousness. His ape became a man, such as is now considered by the European Court of Human Rights for treatment of the same human rights. Cases are pending in Spain and Austria, to keep them "from being tortured" (Michele Stumpe, Great Ape Project International). Kafka's animals understand the natural, but the citizens are confused. The giant mole of "The Village Schoolmaster," preoccupies the citizen who obsesses like a rabbi about the existence of the thing that is not, the mole that's not, but which he thinks is. It is a picture of ourselves. To mirror our identity from these acts reckons that the the pit pony who went blind in British coal mines is ourselves. Always in the background Kafka's animals seek to find themselves in the other, like they passed themselves on the street and failed to recognize, like they lived in a world surrounded by themselves that they could see but not know, shadows, puppets, dolls which look back at them and have the same thoughts they do but neither knows. That is what the loss of the wild did.

If America was a paradise in myth before its discovery, besieged by colonial fantasies and "snakes" of sexism and racism, then thinking made it so. The loss of terrestrial paradise is more than the separation occurring from serpents. Forest, prairie, animals are destroyed while praise of dystopia over utopia symbolizes destruction of innocence. It's hard to imagine paradise if the mind that denies it longs for memories of wholeness it forgot. Was there peace? Nobody wants inferno, but no succor the deconstruct. Were paradise the free speech praises, earth-pleasure dome captives could have gardens of private paradises, all night harvests, hot tubs with comforts and views. But the art of paradise is not about us. It is about creatures and creation, wild and domestic. You yearn for it told it doesn't exist, its ideas are counterfeit, that its art, your deepest longing, you can't believe. Talk like this is to trick us, but we believe. When it was in the interest of nineteenth and twentieth century scholars they believed, for promotion and tenure, but that does not mean they personally thought paradise existed or the instinct of mountain and mouse, wee and huge. Hands need to bring bring the natural to the human.

Empathy with the world is empathy with ourselves, our healing in friendship with the burrow. Whatever the creature, ourselves we endanger, call it salmon, coral reef, shark, prairie dog, only pork remains, and the exotic importation, rampant catfish of the Mississippi, non native fish in streams. To preserve the pristine, think native with profiling, but our own safeguards were surrendered to the exotic. The boundaries of the natural are the way we treat ourselves, the techniques to save it we must use on ourselves, for surely we know the continuity of folk patterns are all that hold us on the ground, the root and stalk of families, which surrendered, float away; this is progress right up until there is no division between ourselves and the natural world.

As my Wordsworth says, the child believes, but for adolescent imitations of diminished adults. In the private paradise their minds pillage the garden. Ask if one believes and get a perplexed look. One believes in profit. One believes in success. But you would look for paradise if you believed in it as though it were lost. Find paradise today. Evening conversations would begin, "did you find any paradise today?" Everyone would look. Get over disbelief.

Confrontation / Mountain Climbers at Earth Center Storm Spiritus Mundi!

2009-08-02T05:33:00.001-07:00

Because of the closing of thought to the problem of The Poisoning, radical artists were driven everywhere to a dialectic of confrontation by absurdism, a theater to oppose commerce and religion in order to bring about consciousness of it. Religion here means Darwinism and paganism married to consumerism and self realizationism. Artists didn't need a scientific basis for their theaters in art. The proofs surround every situation so that agencies of narcosis and escape were hard pressed. Confrontational archetypes such as this headline from Yeats go inside the maps metaphor, walk the metaphor before they walk true mind. This fairyland bubble pops. There branching visions lie inside earth, inside body, landscapes that measure what we do not know as an interior of Dante’s pic of what we are.
We shall excavate these fossils suspended in time and space where Saturn first ate in fear of his supplanting. They are not Davidic marbles. Societies eat earth from ignorance of doing, eat mountain, down river, pour atmosphere sea. Movie pictures predict that giants of obesity, concoctions of the manufactured imaginative bounds that bulge equators, force the unseen metaversal flesh to bump right up to the belly of a whale. Scale mile/inch, epic compass of worlds above/below, one world closer to the unseen than can be said. Munch up a mountain, pony up some sewage, drain an aquifer into a depression deep enough to save. We have our epic counterparts today to which Homer is a pariah and Noah a mere bubble. This metaphor about a giant metaphor prepares reality.

Working back, working around, we come to the Noah/Jonah cast into the sea in order to save the ship lest everyone drown. Jonah in the fish belly is in no grave, but this is a way of saying that it is. The Ship is the World! Before he's cast upon the beach Noah Met the Wilderness. This is what we should do were we to throw our outcasts out, put on them our sins, put them on our sins, tie their hands and drive them into space. If you're not entirely getting this you may read further in the deep below. Here we manufacture a horse from sin, a donkey, mules, spaceships, anything to carry them. Sin carries sin. They threw them over in the past, but did not throw Paul to save themselves because he saved them all (Acts 27). Cases are never the same. He is their salvation, not a pariah. How to tell apart pariah from savior? "It is, rather, largely the result of work by people with...PhDs" says David Orr (c. 1990). It is too soon to talk of the shells cast off by *autodactylmorphs. That is part automobile, part dinosaur, part invention. How wonderfully we void the wilderness. "Science has conquered nature." This product of natural forces, Co2, was buried before the age began, above in air and under in sea, this metaphor about a giant metaphor that prepares reality?

Milton descended into Blake's left foot! (Davis, 105). Blake wrote of the psychological dimensions of the fall of Adam that he allegorized to the thought of Boehme.

Alien Knowing and the Unknown

2009-06-04T08:40:00.001-07:00

The alien and the unknown are in the feet of your old age and death.

A Man Without Fantasy

That's the difference between being a bear and wearing a Jordan t-shirt with Hanes underwear. Nobody is Jordaned or Meadow Lark Lemoned from a laying on of their hands, but bear will move you. Dress in any of these masks or be naked as yourself as He Who Wears Only His Name. Either you stand naked in The Name or you hide in a mask. Groups function as masks to prevent nakedness. If there were something other than The Name to stand in, but for the human there isn't , it might be the landscape and the racial memory of landscape that "my parents and grandparents knew" (Momaday, 46). "I feel deeply about the landscape and I mean that literally. I think it is important for a person to come to terms with landscape. I think that's important; it is a means to knowing oneself" (45). So it comes down to the meaning of landscape too, but this is intellectualized. The real question is, what is the meaning of wilderness?

Superficial Existence in the Modern World

Much of this is foreign today, Bear, landscape, even ancestry have been substituted with identities of no purpose to examine. The annihilation of the traditional in tribal societies and every assimilated subgroup is a negative. Assimilation is never good, although to say it that bald is offensive. This is also the point in that First Convocation of Indian Scholars (Ed. by Rupert Costo, 1970). In answering Hopi Charles Loloma about how to assume the traditional identity Momaday says, "I think that each of us who realizes that the native traditional values are important has a great obligation to convince the young of that, who may be wavering with alternatives...[of] the dominant society which is destroying the world in which it lives" (9). "It's really up to the older people"(10) to identify "the danger of superficial existence in the modern world" (10). To counter superficial existence he says "they have a primary obligation to tell their children and grandchildren about the traditional world, and try to show them by example and tell them explicitly that there is an option available to them, and that they're damn fools if they don't avail themselves of it" (10).

Acculturation

Thus acculturation is "a kind of one-way process in which the Indian ceases to be an Indian and becomes white man" (10). It is broader than that too, the PA German ceased to be himself and became an English-American. Acculturation to the modern translated means to steal the birth rite identity of the traditional, its language and customs and make the native a mascot of the modern. There is a continual excavation of the Caucasoid in every subgroup that assimilates, whether Pennsylvania German, Hispanic, black, Indian. The anthropologists should excavate themselves to give them something to do, since they otherwise are the inventors and stalking horse for the modern against the traditional, looking for power by stealing it. Modern here is not the pejorative it seems if the native takes his tradition into it to return what is stolen, or as Momaday says, that "it is good to go into the enemy's camp" (12). Steal his horses! But he has stolen the children!

Pull Out the Light Poles

That said, it remains to learn tradition from the elder. In the face of radical destruction this takes more than effort, it takes surrender. Without surrender the traditional dies. Take your pick, you can think like Katie Couric and all the like spokespersons for the modern on Charlie Rose, or like grandfather. Momaday says it is a duty to teach the young. He addresses the elder's reluctance: "I wonder if you have any idea of why they shut up at a certain point like that, why they won't talk to you" (15)? Charles Loloma, the Hopi, had said that when the power company installed electric poles by force "the people came out and pulled the poles all back out. These people didn't want the electricity'"(15). This is symbolic of the whole transmission of culture of the modern against the traditional. When the enemy enters the native camp it is called deliverance, but is really theft of the child. It is destruction of the tradition, which is obvious when white missionaries go to New Guinea but apparently not when the Internet sells social network.

You have to live it, not be curious of it.
Fight Against Electricity!

Ben Barney, a Navajo, says he had a grandfather who taught him until the age of eight, but when he died he couldn't find a replacement. Another says, "my grandfather died, and he was one of the last men in the village who knew the whole ritual cycle of songs. He died without letting me or my father, or any of us record any of it. I think he felt that this thing that he had was too precious to just give out, and have it exposed to someone whom he never knew well. And he'd rather die with it than have that happen to it. It seems to me he was saying, you're not going to to live it. You're one of these people that's fighting for the electricity. (I am not, in fact)" (17). So the ticket to the traditional, the universal (!) is that you have to live it, not be curious of it. Surrender to the traditional! If you will not surrender, and the elders have any pride, they take it to the grave in sorrow. But it is not to be studied by post docs. It is to be lived. How many young think their elders outweigh the modern?

Lifeway

That you have to live it goes a long way toward knowing both wilderness and identity. Living is not an intellectual function. "But he was saying, you're one of these people who are fighting for this. My people never had electricity. We never lived that way. And if I give you my lifeway, if I tell you my lifeway, you're going to sit and laugh at me, because you're laughing anyhow just by your behavior" (17).

Only among the remnants of American tribes does anyone dare thus to challenge the modern. Other subgroups embrace it like a drug. The life way is an iPhone. The elders won't speak to this, "naturally they are not going to tell you. I mean, they can't. I can see why he felt there is no way to communicate experience; the essence of it, the reality of it. I believe he was saying: I could give you words, and you could put them down, but that wouldn't mean the same thing" (17). Is this reality versus the virtual? The track of a bear versus a video game? These things are important if you want to have anything left on the earth that isn't homogeneous and interchangeable. Like babies.

Everything said here of the American tribes transfers to every family and subculture.

2.

Momaday avoids the satiric in his work, but it is a satiric haunt like a ghost river in every meadow, grove and stream the summer nights after the predators came. Then a foam appeared at the exit pipes of plants along the upper Allegheny. It is hard enough to name Bear and Wilderness when those subsequent masks upon masks cover up naked being. Surrender. Stand up and strip, confess, then kneel! Wilderness trees, canyons, streams and things under and in them, screeches in the night, wheat, bear, porcupine are symbols to show what they are standing for, something else, life mirrors that open doors and close the way we live. Only the sun has escaped our dominion. The sun escaped the nano tales that seine the atmosphere in a net, to take earth away.

How To Know and Recognize the Alien

These image masks are the ultimate reality that deny we are predators or aliens. If you want to know the alien go and be one. Sit in the Mogollon. Do you belong? Find a bear. Is he your friend? People wander out all the time, light fires to be found, but the ones that aren't found bone up. Coyote Wound Dresser had a talk with Walt Whitman, Wound Dresser, but things did not turn out well for Whitman. The alien cannot be modeled, but it is knowable if Unknown. I'm going to tell you what it is.

Talking to the Unknown we try to understand synergies of it in the anthropology of Edward Dorn. He says the alien is a crucifying self-consciousness of doubt at the root of his own being when he sees the Shoshone. Does he, Dorn, belong?

His doubts serve against the Unknown. They are a mirror of loss and lack. The filth on the chair that gets on his pants is an image of it..."I had a great desire to be off, to not take any more, or give any more...for I will say it, at the risk of blunder: It is impossible for myself and my people to offer themselves in any but the standard senses" (14).

At least he knows of the surrender, that you have to live it. In some freak of Methodism he wants to wash this old man's feet to tame him, this 102 year old who stands for all of Idaho, Utah, Nevada and the Great Basin before electricity, " a volume of Yaa-Aaa-Aaa" (14). "I was aware of the presumption of my thinking he would be relieved or made happy by having his feet washed" (13).

Now Here is the Alien: If you want to confront the Unknown you must to do it in the feet of your old age and death.

If we want to confront the Unknown we must to do it in the feet of our old age and death. "The place was intensely neglected, I gradually saw, and not just filthy as it looked to be at first glance. It was simply the remains of a life" (12).

The comfort of the Unknown in Dorn's account is that there are two that serve each other in it, but we don't know why. One Unknown is the wife, ust like all our mothers and wives, who "should have died, by the rules of our biology, thirty years ago. But it was evident that she would stay on, the weaker of the two, until he smelled the summary message in his nostrils, then she would be free" (12).

Is death that freedom? The alien doesn't think in known terms, but makes Dorn harbor such thoughts as, "this man and woman were the most profoundly beautiful ancestors I've witnessed go before me' (12,13). "He is the spirit that lies at the bottom, where we have our feet. The feet which step between the domains, the visible sign, the real evidence of the coming event...where this man's low, incantatory verbs spill down across the plateau and basin" (13)... not more Indian than man, still as much the flower as the fruit."

Wash his feet! Wash his hands, heart and head! Lay in the dust like a penitent Barry Lopez, close to the flagellate, and weep for the human lost. This Shoshone's name is Willie Dorsey. We don't get his real name, Alien. "I saw, the heat, the vociferous mosquitoes in the building's shade, the slightly moist filth at the back door."

Alien old age and death look like "very old animals [that] have such coats over the eyes, a privacy impenetrable from the outside" (11).

Cataracts, the blind, the lame, the sick, the living I know treated by some Doctor of the Alien. She operates her office practically as a charity, complete with science, intuition and healing to the "grim weight of bad condition, not especially outlined, more heavy with despair than one could possibly arrange with rubble" (11). This is not Ed Dorn. He is a spectator. This Doctor holds the hand, cuts the hair, absorbs the breast, the tear, weeping and praying within, but praising and thanking for the chance that comes out of the "wooden clapboard structures" (10) of lives that they could be so treated and revived. So that's the alien, it's human and knowable even if Unknown.

Wheat Head

2009-02-17T13:55:00.001-08:00

"The Corn was Orient and Immortal Wheat, which never should be reaped, nor was ever sown. I thought it had stood from Everlasting to Everlasting" (Thomas Traherne, Third Century, 3).

Symbolic of human states, wheat is hard-cased in the natural and civil. Both are chaff. So what is wheat if the forces together required to produce it are chaff and after it is produced it must die? That seems a little dramatic, but it's what seeds do. As itself, wheat was more acceptable than other grains as an altar bread because metaphor likened it to the body of Christ. Wheat, the essence of human life, "bears to a superlative degree both the agricultural and biblical connotations of being sown, fallen, crushed, buried, and then after harvest risen into life-giving bread that is broken and shared." So wheat is the individual.

Symptoms of the natural and civil in wilderness-society disease come from the discards that encase the body of the individual in its outer shells. These shells, which "thinking makes it so," these "mind-forged manacles" contribute to diseases of the wheat-like head scab, or Fusarium head blight, caused by scab-shriveled moldy seed from diseased heads. It sounds like Blake's "Sick Rose." All kinds of mechanisms predict the onset of head scab as well as the insect armyworm which hides around the base of plants during the day, spending the winter as a pupa in the soil. Wear boots? Did vegetation cause the compromise of earth's systems? Or was that its removal? These sorts of natural metaphor, new species tree and wheat, must reclaim their condition.

Following the natural, mutual bodies of external and internal need each other, the physical is indispensable in the production of the internal. Chaff makes wheat, but is cast off, disposed, which rounds out thousands of years of creaking poetry. The revived discard does not occur in nature any more than a reinhabited tortoise shell or the slough of any species, but reviving occurs in art (to compare the resurrection of dust before we see it). "I'm gonna shuffle off that coil, until I'm all unwound," the hardened outer body protects from opposition while seasons and rough weather bake out impurity, squeeze in ripeness in the botanical mimicry of a man. Chaff, the world, is shield and membrane to protect and foster growth with all forces of weather and drought. Vegetation depicts the human internal state.

From grain to tree, Psalm 1 he shall be as a tree. This topography assumes the natural. Outside under stars being flourishes. Such figures consume all writings: Homer, Psalms, Prophets. The fundamental rooting assembled in these legislative topographs swirls around the green tree planted by water. It might correct the thinking that the Good is a book, a night rising to contemplate law, the trouble of empyreal thought. Good is everywhere in the heaven and earth revealed with natural processes, not books. The heavens speak to effect a universal natural drama within, not outside natural forces mediated by day and night. There is no speech nor tongue in which their voice is not heard. Law in this context is a characteristic of the natural, not the human world. The righteous meditation beyond the page is virtue. Human botany applies a vegetative process of growth to the internal world, which allows that human progress is slow, not virtual, not obvious, not immediate. From seed to shoot to bud it blossoms over generations. Call it human photosynthesis.
2.
Passion for the natural must be sustained because the natural precedes the spiritual. Without the natural there is none. The ancients took spiritual topographies from the natural to describe other worldly places. Future topographies may be like these para-geographies, as one from Dante. There are obvious topographies of the Psalms, Book I (1-46), a spiritual landscape implicit in the ground the narrator walks of plateau and mountain. The Messianic peaks of Psalm 8, 16, 24, tower over the journeys of peril. These can be graphed. The future is and is not a thing like spiritual topography, but there is no futures market. Alternatives are cloudy where no one can see but the participants themselves. We call this succession destiny as a convenience after the fact. Advice given in the cloud is to pay no attention to such ideas, they are for the empyrean below.

We say "build the one," press the fingers of our hands together and bow, in jest, but in building a knowledge of future topography we cannot examine future direct. Taken as an example of everyday life, future is shot through with lights and storms from the outset. Natural phenomena symbolize opposites of the empyrean, confessions, misanthropies, sorrows, misalliances, sickness, desperations, joy, celebration, hope come from the same pen bound together by utterance. Extremes laid side by side typify the empyrean. Natural phenomena symbolize the human who wants to vision a topography of future. This is also the manner in which the immature writer matures, honesty in the face of a catalyzing life makes a narrator emerge like the wheat head whole and hard.

As a kind of glossary, topography of future comprises 1) the under cloud empyrean, 2) the cloud, 3) the heaven. This empryrean comprises two standard deviations of the mean who by accident and birth have suffered and strived, but not enough. The future they aspire is in a cloud into which they cannot see. In the cloud a small fraction of these struggle with 10,000 hours of deliberate practice, and are, compared with the empyrean, superior. They struggle, refine, toughen, working toward emergence under the stars. The few percentages of empyrean in the cloud are fewer in the heaven, but this is never supposed a natural selection of the fit. Heaven's topography has envelopes, pitfalls, winds, accidents and injuries so that mastery cannot be predicted. It is consuming, after that it is nothing. Everything is paid to get it and it is everything once obtained.

Wilderness / Paradise Archetypes

2009-02-17T13:50:00.001-08:00

A false order casts wilderness and paradise as opposites. Jung's archetypes of the Shadow and Child are set against each other. The Shadow Archetype is the wilderness, the unconscious where personal identity dissolves. In this image of "wilderness" it is said that "Hansel and Gretel were led into the woods and were trapped. Knights discover dragons, ogres, and thieves in the woods. Robin Hood is at home in the wild. Dragons sail the sea of a watery wilderness." On the other hand the Child Archetype is supposed a pattern of new beginnings, a paradise. "It promises that Paradise can be regained. Child images like the New Year's Babe obviously derive from this archetype. So do the golden ring and the golden ball and most flower and circle related images." The wilderness paradise opposition occurs in the same system that argues creativity as a mask of bi-polar disorder, that if you're really creative you must be a bi-polar mad genius. The cure for Jung's shadow, the supposed wilderness "dark side" of the personality, is socialization, social adjustment (4), an order that regulates, contains wilderness. Socialization thus cleanses that genius of his refusal to conform, and to reject as "irrelevant stimuli" the causes of his disorder. Thus Bonhoeffer can be induced to remain in New York at Union Seminary and not go back to Germany where his intransigence made him go. Geniuses can thus keep their ears with Van Gogh if they cultivate proper order.

Professors and clinicians however, with no experience of the divine Afflatus, tend to consider as aberration anything outside the norm, hence bi-polar. The wilderness of wood and wild said to oppose paradise flower and child thus resembles the so called bi-polar disposal of genius. But the true shadow of the supposed "dark side" is conformity to this civilization that urges socialization. Call it Civilization and its Discontents.

If civilization redefined means deaf from ipod, dumb from ignorance, blind from video, and instinctual freedom is the desire not to kill but to escape its suffocating blanket to breathe or feel the sun and see the stars,then advanced civilization replaced with the virtual is a paradigm shift of imagination to deformation.

If we did not live in it we would suppose this fiction, the imagination delimited to a Yahoo search. It was once said to Pennsylvania separatists who did not wear the prophylactic of civilization, "be ye separate." Chaung Tzu has said much the same thing, "free yourself from the world." The decades after the nineteenth century progressively validate this.

End note: Add that the appeal to social media for individual standards, asking friends what breakfast cereal they use in order to choose your own, with all such appeals to groups urged by commercial designs, together with the loss of self-esteem measured in those demographics, argue the loss of individuality reaches epidemic proportion. Thus socialization regulates wilderness the more. But the Bonhoeffer resistance to Hitler, the Mennonite resistance to the world in favor of some other, inner value, is no longer the ethical crisis it was (see for example the section, "Moral Confidence," here). "What would you have done under Hitler?" or "could you sacrifice your life?" is reduced to whether or not you dare disconnect from the electronic Friend mind and its cell, the new false paradigm of wilderness / paradise. Some reckoning is at hand, but it starts out unheroically.

Pit Pony Paradise / Wilderness Narrations

2009-02-15T10:21:00.000-08:00

Those people doomed to walk with their heads down around the fire in Plato’s cave have counterparts among those who do to nature what is done to us. I mean the pit pony that pulled coal carts in British coal mines is an image of ourselves. They became blind from the darkness.

To borrow our identity from the natural means to reckon that pit pony blind in British coal mines, no matter what century, is an image of ourselves. Kafka's ape become a man is now considered by the European Court of Human Rights for treatment of the same rights as people. Cases pend in Spain and Austria to keep them "from being tortured."

BLACK CARP / SYMBOLIC SNAIL

Empathy for the world is empathy for the burrow. Whatever creature we endanger (salmon, coral reef, shark, prairie dog), what isn't endangered is the exotic black carp of the Mississippi, Jacques Derrida and the boundaries broken by tiny invasive snails. They sit a dozen to a dime. We preserve the pristine native, profile to safeguard the indigenous, but surrender ourselves to the exotic right up until there is such "diversity" as to destroy the natural, the way of Walmart. Diversity means monolith. Annihilate one hundred species to invite the one. The way we treat the natural is the way we treat ourselves, techniques used to save it must be used upon ourselves. Folk patterns are all that hold us to the root and stalk big blender is waiting to swallow.

Monolith masquerades as diversity. Diversity is its opposite. Likewise paradise is its opposite but made to seem not. Now is not called a paradise. Then is paradise. Now is a wish for paradise, a dream species of it when the thing is all around. This inverted bifocal, an anocular polyopy, this down deep looking through the wrong end inverted prevents seeing that we are now in paradise. This is it baby! Call it freedom when you are circumscribed by new siding for your house. Call it what it's not, juxtaposing then and now, think you're are an unrealized Buddha when you're not, unless Buddha is a robot, a spirit Christian, unless your paradise is poison. You live in a paradise that annihilates wilderness. You live in a cocoon-prevented knowing. We were made for danger and we live in paradise. What lacks? An antidote of stars and sea and the forests of meaning.

Comfort is annihilation. Reverse paradise has no edge of bark, pine, grass or predator. This paradise has violated. Robots in prison! Of course it is not "paradise," the man-made inversion semantics, clothes dryers and dish washers, "frustration" at oil spills, fear of wilderness, trees that hide the darkness reversed so the good is evil, the evil is good. Not understood. In line with the bi-polar there are two Paradises. One destroys wilderness, the source of natural life. This paradise civilization made. It is every effort of power to control and domesticate, every effort to boil down to the most common.

2.

White and red tail

lemurs clung

the wall of

Solzhenitsyn’s cell,

pit gerbils

down on the floor

below were

sharked to octopeds.

To break the boundaries

of all that's not

these monsters

were mere traffic cops

to the eating of Borges’ colonel’s

coats of fur,
for the eagle spaniels

of Solzhenitsyn’s men

were animals.

3.

Detached down in "The Burrow"

electric lights pulsed
from their heads.

To give those animals

rights we sought

we gave up the ones we did.

We gave and brought

the black carp up

the Mississippi Derrida bed,

borrowed safe mine ponies like snails,

to pull empires big as whales.

You can visit the stables @ Pit Pony Paradise

Pit Pony is on display here.

Spirit of Wilderness

2009-01-31T05:06:00.001-08:00

Reason explores spirit with disbelief. This disbelief makes good fiction. Assumptions that can be uttered aren't. Why say what you don't believe?

It's not easy to investigate the spirit of wilderness. Spirit as super natural suggests the natural does not include it, but natural includes spiritual in every particular. The puritan wanted protection from the thing in itself called spirit of wilderness, inversely applied rituals of scapegoats to the wood. You cannot drive spirit from wood. Spirit is in the man. Things were upside down in his mind. He thought he was a tantamount Hebrew in the wilderness, as in Mather's, Magnalia Christi Americana (1702), but he was a spiritual one, wanted to drive the Leviticus scapegoat out of the camp with their sins pronounced on its head. It was driven into the wilderness and delivered to the "spirit of the wilderness." He thought the sins outside him. There were inside.

Pharmakoi
Something similar occurred in ancient Greece with the pharmakoi, that annual Greek rite of propitiation. Actors, pharmakoi, a man and a woman taken from the village were ritually executed. They were given gifts of figs and cake in the village, then scourged and driven out. The people threw squill bulbs and stalks at them. These "victims" were volunteers chosen for their ugliness, meant to show the people's repugnance of their sins. The rite celebrated their emergence from barbarism, from when human sacrifice was a literal practice. Pharmakoi supposedly evince higher civilization.

Considering this expulsion of the man/woman some argue Adam and Eve are types of pharmakoi, driven out of the garden, except there was no society to be cleansed. The word for these celebrants translates literally, human medicine, which derives from the word for medicine, pharmakon. They were their own medicine, the means by which "people restore harmony to their world through sca pegoat sacrifice, i.e. blame and retaliation."

In other times a victim of this rite might have been a captive warrior cannibalized to steal his power. The medicine then was a cure for weakness. Newcomb recounts a ritual where Central Texas Tonkawas consumed a Comanche captive's heart. We're talking 19th century. The objective was to take the "spirit power. If the enemy were courageous he would thus acquire his courage" (W. W. Newcomb. The Indians of Texas, 152.) This human medicine is different from the Greek rite. The pharmakoi were a substitute for the entire people. To restore health to the tribe they transferred societal guilt to the representative man/woman. Rohde says that

"the pharmakoi were the marginalized. That could include the king, but more commonly the pharmakoi were the unwanted, "polluted" people such as murderers (note their listing in 22:15), the deformed, or foreigners. They were scapegoated by a community in order to avert evils such as disease and other catastrophes. They were ritually led "outside" via a special gate of the city to purify that city; then they were either exiled or possibly put to death (Harrison: 96). Before they were hunted out of cities, they were "cleansed" by being beaten with branches of a fig tree and with squills, which were believed to have purifying capabilities (Rohde: 590)."
But Phamakoi weren't any such thing as the lower class, the poor of garbage dumps or murderers. They were the sin bearers of a sacrament, a purification. In discussion of the outside and the inside in the purging of the body politic, what was once inside, such as the pharmakoi in the town or the goat in the yard, is cast out as a scapegoat, to bear the sins of them all: "if the word pharmakos that Plato does not use still resonates within the text...if the outside is always-already part of the inside," a mystery of expiation is at work, but not "the status of the concepts 'present' and 'absent', 'body' and 'soul', 'center' and 'periphery', for of course all this is a play, not a reality, and the sins come back and again. Poison is also a cure embodied in Socrates expulsion as a scapegoat from the city to his death. But not only Socrates. Beware Sociology making all things into itself.

Mark R. Bredin says, "Girard sees in Greek myth the phenomenon of people blaming others for the violence in themselves. This "other" is the pharmakos. Girard calls the pharmakos "the victim" whom we kill believing that we are rooting out violence and creating peace (1996: 163). Alison expresses it well: "We are all, always and everywhere, immensely violent creatures, and the only way which we have to control this violence is the search for collective unanimity against a victim" (1998:21). This phenomenon in society Girard calls "single victim mechanism.... In sum, the pharmakos is one who is blamed and is then condemned in order to restore peace to the community."

The sacrifices' ugliness represents its sin, whether less human or more. The inevitable anthropomorphism of the scapegoat in the imagination is more than just a likeness from mammals. It projects outwards from the mind into the world. There is an inside and outside, understood poetically and they do not exclude each other. Spiritual scapegoats come in the form of a man, the malformation of a man, so called a monster. This monster has human likenesses even if it is a man lobster with jaws and legs. This imagination opposes a spirit that comes in the beatified form as an angel.

Puritans

II.

Puritan preoccupations that Indians were devils and the pawns of devils resulted in cultural deconstructions proving them guilty of racism and genocide. These trace psychologies of extermination to similar episodes of the Hebrews in Canaan. There is however one huge exception. The New Testament had no extermination policy. Puritan exterminations were not perpetuated with New Testament approval, so the Puritans had to make them up from the Old. The New Testament church concluded gentiles could not even be made to be circumcised let alone decapitated. So puritans sought Old Testament justification of their fear and prejudice. However the Old Testament was not the cause of the Puritan practice either. The cause was the English. This is obvious whenever the English colonists are contrasted with the Germans of Philadelphia who shared their biblical beliefs but shunned the English doctrines of extermination and assimilation.

English Only's progeny was slavery (called freedom), extinction of species (called prosperity) and destruction of the ocean and atmosphere (called dominion). De-constructionalists think the masculine caused extinction, but it was a national, ethnic, appalling cruelty: the "theological rigor [that] entered into what now seems an appalling cruelty toward Indians," (Garry Wills. Under God. New York: Simon & Schuster. 1990, 142) Draw a line from the behavior of the puritan against Indians in America to the behavior of the British empire in India. There are endless permutations of the negative effects of English nation hood in the world. The English transferred it en masse to the Americas, the Americans presumably will transfer it to the Chinese who swallow up all smaller groups in between. Each act of digestion is an acquisition. The domination is justified like this, assimilate or die.

There is a huge effort to defeat the recognition that this pattern has occurred among assimilated peoples. The substituted paradigm is that the puritans were afraid of the dark wood and their defensiveness was so extreme they exterminated the wood and the native from religious causes and doctrines. But fear made the doctrine, not doctrine the fear. The British were hardwired as a nation to domination and destruction and propagandized the west with such notions even while they colonized the east. Fear and doctrine hand over the appalling modern notion to America that it is England's racist/chauvinist twin of not only national but gender masculine sins.

How can we conduct an inquiry into the spirit of wilderness in this context, when the Azazel itself, to which the Leviticus scapegoat was released, is seen as a manufactured justification, a function of racism of Hebrew justification of genocide? It is in our interest to note that the ice caps are now the Indians, fresh water society is dissolving in saline and wilderness is falling off the side of the world.

Emendation note:
There is no end to discovery. Lately surfaced is the etymology of Azazel by Skeat:

The most famous example in English (and many other languages whose translations of the bible are based on the same sources) is "scapegoat" which is a mistranslation of the word Azazel (In Hebrew: עזאזל) originated by William Tyndale in his 1530 Bible, and appropriated in the King James Version of the Bible (Leviticus chapter 16) in 1611. Confounded by the word, Tyndale had interpreted Azazel as ez ozel - literally, "the goat that departs"; hence "(e)scape goat." According to the Talmud, Yoma 67b, Azazel is a contraction of az (harsh) and eil (strong) and refers to the most rugged of mountains. This identification is supported by Rashi, the great Medieval grammarian, who interpreted Azazel to be the name of a specific mountain or cliff over which the goat was driven^[3]. According to R.H. Charles, it was called so for its reputation as the holding place of the fallen angel of the same name^[4]. Modern scholars generally reject Tyndale's interpretation and favor one related to a fallen angel/evil demon interpretation. Today in modern Hebrew Azazel is used derogatorily, as in lekh la-Azazel ("go to Azazel"), as in "go to hell".

Leviticus

Elaborations of this spirit of wilderness fictionalize the original text in Leviticus 16 where the bare facts express a desire for the clean over the unclean, something that hardly exists outside the orthodox. The point is not that there is a spirit of wilderness, but that there is sin of every kind causing infection and skin disease, that society is made unclean by exposure, so "keep the Israelites separate from things that make them unclean" (15.31), an early FEMA.

The Goat

Much repetition of the unclean required a ceremonial address called the Day of Atonement. In one aspect of this, a goat selected by lot from two, was "used for making atonement by sending it into the desert" (10). It was called "the live goat" because it wasn't killed but escorted out by a keeper and released, but before this a ceremonial transference occurred where the priest would "lay both hands on the head of the live goat and confess over it all the wickedness and rebellion of the Israelites-all their sins-and put them on the goat's head" (21). In this way it was released to the spirit of the wilderness. There was a kind of play on this ritual for people who had been sacrificing goats in"the open fields" (17.5) to "goat idols," meaning they were expiating their own sins. Whatever reality this speaks of is incomprehensible to the modern, as if we were to lay hands on the head of some scientist who cut the antennae off Monarch butterflies and send them into the desert.

Spirit of Wilderness

For Barry Lopez the w olv erine enlivens the force of natural wilderness as the bear does for Momaday. We know we are less human by the loss of the wilderness contrast. One of four mammals will become e xtinct. Forests of the north, coyote and elk in storm, dead fall fires in yarrow meadows armed, dogs, men, tent, truck, prevent the hunger of the bear. But this is small stuff to the scapegoated puritan fear of the spirit. It has a name in Leviticus that Barry Lopez does not mention because the names of the gods are politicized depending on who uses them. Once above the outbuildings of a flour mill near ASU was the proud declaration "Ashtaroth" written high above. This was not a misspelling of Ashcroft. The ambiguity of the world of spirits to a people who have no gods is that power and money mix up an argument about consequence and cause and make a literature out of it. They are all gone out of the way, there is none that does good. There is a dominant group of new pietists, newscasters and reporters who proclaim this morality of disconnect from the comfort of their desks. They have the compassion of a war reporter living off amputees while pretending to be a conscience, just as the English puritan lived off the smallpox exterminador and the monetizers of home mortgages live off public consumption. When these fail they express the greatest compassion for the failed, but it is for themselves. Surely no one expects to end this discussion with a conclusion.

Jerusalem Analogy

2009-01-31T05:05:00.001-08:00

First you hardly see her. Out of the spot in the center of your vision she emerges though you have stared fixedly for a minute. Then she appears, lifts a head, lifts a foreleg, pauses, puts it down, lifts its opposite, pauses, puts it down. The peace of her slowness, the pace takes her in contemplation, stopped action, pause, wait, but then you look up and she is gone! A walking meditation without intent.

First light is breaking for the maintenance of the natural. Last year's hatchlings were overcome with a swarm of ants. We have now a load of topsoil and materials and begin a new habitation, a likely place against a wall with a high spot put there years ago as an island for tortoises to stand on in case of a big flood, for some run wild, irrigation comes every two weeks. Beneath a red oak sapling and a Mexican buckeye, climbing rose, ruella and mallow there is an area once entirely claimed by a giant chinaberry which, with a giant oleander, was completely taken up by the root. When you are four feet down the job is easier.

All pruned up, ready for yearlings, I need my son, day labor to arise, thinking of Milton where God exact[s] day labor, light denied. There is light. This labor is light. Milton's blindness is affecting Samson. He revisits every day of his life. The scenes of paradise play in front of his eyes at night. He wakes seeing but unseeing to write them down in the day. Who does not know it? Dark, dark, dark amidst the blaze of noon. Samson pictures the time. One day we will wake to what we've done. Work now, weep later.

I go wake the help. It took only an hour with the budding biologist to clean old mortar off cement block, mix new dirt with old. Logs are good, but the ant inhabitants of the old world need convincing. Pyracantha above, earth beneath, what more could a tortoise want? Four yearlings took off under a log without looking around. Now they attend to the empress' grape leaves, nopalitos, hibiscus, dandelions.

Ants of the world are still loose. What shall we do? No poisons allowed. Vinegar the top of logs surrounding the large pen. BD comes over to talk, lifts an inquiring mind. Happily he loses interest. We have the theory, the practice and we have the reflections.

Those tortoises lived veritably on top of an ant hill it turned out. Ants had usurped their home. They were huddled under rocks out of the way of the ants whose territory went down a foot. It's a fight with no purpose than survival? Nobody at 7-11 thinks that. Nobody at home thinks that. They think there is a right, just apply it to the behavior of others. Themselves they indulge. New Jerusalem is like the tortoise den, outside the gates are idolaters and dogs. Pharmkoi! Astrologers. Fortune tellers. We are living on an ant hill. The solution of paradise restored is work the ground.

Making New Species

2009-01-11T07:16:00.000-08:00

With species passing out of existence so fast they can't be counted it should be good news new species are making. Except the new is old and there the whole time. If not a misunderstanding, what is this new species? Call it a Bean with a capacity to change its being by changing its mind. In biology this would be a Lamarkian sense of passing on acquired habits. In evolution this mechanism of survival done over a long enough time absolves the investigator from empirical exams. What is the new Bean? Natural selection of genetic variants is the means of acquisition, not acquired characteristics or soft inheritance. What is the new Bean? It is the realization against all odds and comedic uproar of the news that a man is a tree. Ha, ha.

Gully Plug and Willow

2009-01-10T08:54:00.000-08:00

To gully plug and willow, reforest stream banks with native willows erased by concentrated

livestock-caused erosion,
livestock power plants,
cement grazed stream bank
channels of water and air,

native willows hold the banks, feed the inhabitants, give medicine (aspirin). Erosion heads the list for uninhabitants. Stock trails to water, trails erode to gullies, the direct cause of stream bank loss is grazing out the willows. (Leopold, "Pioneers and Gullies").

Willowing replants the banks,
all Undertakers in the Planting,
a metaphor of oceans, atmospheres: plug the gullies.
Plug the gullies!

2009-01-10T08:53:00.000-08:00

Working back, working around, we come on the Noah/Jonah pariah cast into the sea to save the ship lest everyone drown. Jonah in the fish belly is no graveyard, a way of saying yes. Before he is cast upon the beach Noah Meets the Wilderness, which is what we do when we throw our outcasts out, put them up on our sins, tie their hands with our fears and drive them out. We manufacture the horse from sin, donkeys, mules anything to carry them. They threw them overboard in the past, but did not want to throw Paul to save themselves because he saved them all (Acts 27). Cases are never the same, he is their salvation, not a pariah. How to tell apart, pariah from savior?

That is exactly our problem, put another way, dents where there should be prints. Wolf print forces dent our car hoods at night and in the morning we learn what they have wreaked. This is not to analyze either nature or human acts. We reach far below to the hidden recess of consciousness that makes the act. Call it sin, call it crime, or not, do anything to avoid the obvious to own, not somebody else. Crimes are against some law. Sins the same. What is the law? Deny that.

A linear examination shows all studies are further denials. Way before The Black Swan proved human expertise corrupt, "it is, rather, largely the result of work by people with...PhDs" says David Orr c. 1990, although 1950 was not too soon to talk of junkyard shells cast off by *autodactylmorphs. How wonderfully we avoid the question of wilderness, its true nature. What means that "science has conquered nature but nature must not be conquered?" Is this the product of natural forces, Co2, or things buried beneath before the age began, above us in air and under in the sea? The epic says it is. The metaphor about a giant metaphor prepares reality.

In search of meaning, to overlook the same, universities prevented finding out, think tanks prevented thinking. Along came a spider, "leave the scientists out, no need bother about the end of bio, the end of man." They said this while they tried to decide whether to extinct the cat or the rabbit first, forgetting the snake and the mouse. Who can think of everything. Against all ancient logic and practice which thought nature the sole epic, man defeated nature and became the epic himself! It is called the Sixth Extinction.

2009-01-10T08:52:00.000-08:00

Yeats said he would "lie down where all the ladders start."
On 25 October 1987 the subject in this pic said,
"Aey go get a big chair, reach the stars."

Wilderness Lost! Sins' Decommissioned Subway Car.

2009-01-10T08:51:00.000-08:00

The epic sadness that comes from contemplation of wilderness lost is not as great as the encounter with it itself. Melancholy says you can never measure up. You cannot measure wilderness at all. Its boundaries beyond comprehension, scale. What it does to the senses is so exhilarating that we give up our lives for it even while we perversely tear it down in word and deed. Nineteenth century explorers and farmers considered all fellow inhabitants of the wilderness vermin, whether fox or eagle, bear or native, to be exterminated.

This is the wilderness of the test, where Paul went to the backside desert, Israel wandered 40 years, Jesus went on the mountain to give solitude from civilization. That book of Isms of the 20th century examined those harmful effects of civilization with benefits and viola, civilization is treated the same as wilderness, loved/hated, sought and fled. When the scapegoat is driven out of civilization, where does it go, where does it take our sins and crimes? Into the wilderness. We're not supposed to use that word sin, but where did sins come from but the civil, the psyche, the man. Where do they go? They pass out into the world, the ocean, the mountain, the desert, the river, the forest glade.

What happens to them there? We don't hear anymore. Like decommissioned NYC subway cars, stripped and sunk to the bottom of the sea to oxidize and rust into nothing, turned back to the elements, it is an alchemy, but they do not become the elements they were. Take the spirit, materialize it, purge it and bury it. This is the course of life the civil follows. Send it into the wilderness.

Why the elders were silent

while

earth

burned

around them?

It was the fire in the tub.

Over

them,

in them,

rub a dub dub.