Rectitude Reckoner Reckoning the ship reck’r. There’s a song about Waves that U2 does, comes alive on my phone. I know the whispering room in my loom tomb assume is a vacuum. Commonly call void and vulture.

Loom tomb womb are connected through to. As a given so taken.

Yes I am Becketting. Rereading Genet’s french to slip back into Genet’s sentences from Baudelaire’s narratives. Spend more time with books than people.

I think spending time with books is spending time with people, but in a different way.

Fully open to the source mechanisms they are driving through for want of another word, “fuck it.”

Beckett mocks himself and his work but it doesnt stop him. C does it too a lot. Thats part of the moody humor.

Quote by M Feldman on Becketts compulsive note taking. “…driving consideration for such lengthy note-taking appears to be… to find his reflection in other thinkers.“ Then thinking am I up to snuff it. There is some of that. Visitations with their voice as verbal catalog hog.The put down is reflexive.

Books are just other thinkers and writers. Shooting at starts. Mars cars Lars…

Quote heard on TV from Nietzsche that is quite famous.

Reckoning over it, like Beckett does, gives me room to work in and he can do nothing to stop me. Abyss is opening topic in the second book.

Sm wd call nipples. Sucking cow. But I accepted it as true. Because felt the same way. Poetry at a place where piggy whore in store core roar boar…undertakes and it annihilates. Flutters. Falls and what.

My world exists around the damned. In a way that consumes itself in fire. The fire motifs out of control in both my books. Well. Fuck it. Jumped into the Waves.

Just letting words run through with no known direction other than to take measurements? No it opens the can of bees. Measurement is allowing yourself to process, method and the like. According to Socrates…

Great quote from Cioran just translated — digging into why he overdoes everything and then Strikes it Down.

Its heavy and he’s got the knife out, straight into his heart. Meanwhile I like that he finds where it turns back on him, and includes those destinations.

Honest with your selves, how many times have perhaps taken sudden repulsion for life as a writer, as far as he is here:

The only way I get to anything is not knowing when to stop. I had to find all that continuity stuff to understand its credence. Given the stolen on that too.

That thing that sends you back to it. Was that Him. Yeah it kind of was. Ok. Of course it’s all of them. Hemming way way. The dependency of my writing is other writers. Like it or not some ways.

Writer rulers. Are both types. Eternal return, and the palm to the measuring stick. Tho more accurately, its a find, the measurer comes after, shakes partakes. For breathing on words.

Editing constantly my work. Or even any of this. And the swearing at Politicians. Oh I am angry at them. So it comes out. I dont stop about it — that said its singing to the choir, in a very partisan way.

But its crazy. Their trying to undo states control of elections. We are fighting that on every front. Trump is doing everything he can to undermine our traditional election protocols, and controls.

Building water hungry electricity without making sure its not polluting and all that. Get it up quick and get out. They have done everything to destroy environmental protections and are selling off land. Anything For A Buck. While riding the stock market. With insider trading GALORE. Send out gangs to lock up working folk whose families have lived on and off the land for centuries, even millennia

I believe a lot of it because of what they are doing here and there and everywhere thank god social media, and who is they, well yall know who they is…

Babababa…the hatred, it tips it goes overboard. But its an overboard kind of time. Our living in trumplandia.

Hatred and love, goes back to the power of two — that Beckett mentions from Ancient Greek. Hate and love as power that moved the world, and all that. Here’s my note stolen off of his notes:

Made it through Socrates. My notes on Beckett’s notes are pretty weak compared to his. Lest I pick and choose. And have started now bolding out my favorite phrases. He actually includes historical stuff about Socrates. Gets into the politics of his being put to death, tho it is said, he could have fairly easily (just) been exiled. If he knew when to stop.

Or something…

Oh, and I learned about “the prophecy.” I didnt know about the prophecy.

There was an oft repeated prophecy from the Delphi when asked if he was smartest man alive. Delphi said yes. Before that according to Beckett Socrates ideas remained pretty faithful to discussing and examining metaphysics of the time.

Prophecy which they believed in, took him to another place, where he was convinced because of the prophecy, so the story goes, he neednt know where to stop, was fine to follow his own mind.

I need a new french book to read! If I go to midtown branch fourth floor, stacks are up to the chin and tight, all you can do is crawl through them, BUT BUT BUT I bet they have at least 300 - 500 books in french some recent. I have Houellebecq of course. I am fully as they say toilet trained with post modern gloomy gumpers. I like to see how much I can make out of french as I read, try to read different types of French.

Genet uses slang, I tend to quickly forget slang. But the rest of his is built on expressions of the sacred. In that way, he has a lot in common with Cioran.

Genet, loving those around him was his church. Like On The Road in a way.

I don’t steal characters, not smart enough. Draw in cartoon and the characters are tearaways. Or branches.

I have no manifest. It creates its own by hanging around about the pursuits of other writers I came to trust implicitly and could share in my mind with, back and forth like repetitions, in Beethoven.

That just happened to me. Because I couldnt stop it, didnt want to stop it, but keep it going, and so on.

The borderliners fell into hell as a fault line with contempt. Coordinating signals. Lovely thing it can be — the strange bitter sweetness, of La Chute, of Nietzsche’s abyss.

Getting through Nietzsche’s abyss.

With my not knowing when to stop. Had to give it room to hope never to stop.

More quotes from Feldmans Book:

The last thing he read was often the first thing incorporated into his work.

Feldman is taking notes of notes too, reps come through Beckett’s poems. and seeing from cometh where they spread and counts up time sees again. And relates back to his notes.

And I like that stuff. Count myself while doing.

Beckett doesnt bring in science like Pynchon who scores through it with char. I steal Becketts phrases around his talking about poetry. Rhyme Roller and such.

OMG a Beckett Rhyme.

Tightening and loosing their clasp. Rhythm of labouring heart. Till when almost despaired and gently part. Suddenly gently.

I could have discussions about gentle versis piglets in certain quarters. And it was important. But use anyway because its jargon around poetry. And having found that it follows, it intercedes. Collects there into saw (dust), collects pee and blood of my horse.

I could say that to SM.

Who pig had no stopping. Also lazy mazy and crash the car. I apologize for using animals and turning into one. Which I do in politics.

Secret discussions are great. However, force me into the sympathetic equations with its beauty and hostility. In a way that is — mangly, yes, free, and even at times undiluted, revelational magic. SM always undiluted. Smart though. Sly. Funny. Gruff. Always honest. And he knew me like no one else did.

Most ignore, many block, some hide from. I scream about Trump at Maga. Others junkett.

Ignorance is defensive. I do it too. The D fence Ifs.

And could play around ears that listen to rhyme rolling out in gestures of day and night, as a condition of its faith. Courage too a kind of plagerism.

Pop into the puddles, walk the line.

I love poems that let in the darkness…

Tracked down a book of poems by Paul Celan translated very carefully by Michael Hamburger.

Celan translated Cioran. They had Romania in common, WW2 and Paris.

I found some poems of his online. His jumps are wonderful. Really smooth chop chop.

In the hardcover I borrowed, that is translated from German By Michael Hamberger, he also includes German side by side. I find that really helpful.

Read about Celan in book on Coiran and Beckett which was really good.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/elements/abs/beckett-and-cioran/18C72DCA8A5656AC293ECA3D17BBAA21

Lets the cat out of the bag about compulsions for writing.

Beckett’s Notebooks

Matthew Feldman has two books on Beckett that I know about, both are really good.

He worked on the one I am taking notes on here, the collected work of Beckett’s Notes on Philosophy. And its a blast. Beckett gossips! about the greeks. I am 1/2 way through Socrates.

In another book, Feldman has access it appears to all of Becketts notebooks. Not just his 8 year grab at philosophy… I have read stuff from Fitzgeralds notebooks. Fitz writes little vendettas in his journals.

Feldman’s Beckett’s Books, expands on Beckett’s other notebooks, not excluding philosophy at all, am about ¼ way through. So far, its prescience is a bit surly (as was Beckett), very dedicated, and thoroughly immersive.

Pulls wide range of discussions from Beckett studies.

Beckett’s methods of simplification and erudition, he was mighty well read, and notes on his battles with writing his own way (and misway) in and out of the box, are very helpful, I have found.

I seem to really like to read notebooks… even books about notebooks!

Emil Coiran’s journals, gotta say, are truly honest, really superb. I find Cioran’s honesty about writing and the constancy of admissions coinciding with religious tremors something of a sanctuary, in and about writing in general, and in that regard, most vigorous and effective.

Recently got from Library. Gonna work through this over time… Here is a sample of Notes on Beckett’s Note.

Samuel Beckett’s ‘Philosophy Notes’

Edited by Steven Matthews and Matthew Feldman

Intro.

What he called — Note snatching, evolved for Beckett while assisting JJoyce. Philosophy notes were compiled by Beckett during the 1930s. He was a phrase hunter.

He has Notebooks that “prompt” texts for first two novels. Writers who write about stuff about writing stuff.

Whoroscope Notebooks, brief citations from references. Including Beckett’s life long engagement with Philosophy. I was reading philosophy before I started reading poetry. I see poetry in some ways as an extension for me of stuff that goes on in Philosophy.

Ancient Philosophy

Thales (650): All things are full of gods.

• Originally sky and earth were pictured as lid and floor of a box; Greeks began to think of the earth as island surrounded by river Okeanos.

• Hylozoism: doctrine all matter has life.

Anaximenes (560-500): Soul is air.

• Discovery formula made Miesian theory coherent, that of condensation and rarefaction.

• Earth is a disc and heavens surround it “like a hat.”

Anaximander (610): Infinity, indefiniteness.

• His infinite as vague as Hesiods chaos.

• First philosophical conception of God, first attempt strip God of all mythical form.

• Plurality of primitive substances.

Breakdown Ionian Civilisation: Orphics

• Phenomenon of ecstasy, propagated by Orphic religion, now spreading everywhere.

• Appeal to revelation, antithesis of Ionian pessimism.

• Orphism: purification, redemptions, immortality of soul, heaven and hell, salvation and damnation. All new to Greek religion.

Eleaticism: Opposites.

• World results from opposition between Being and Non-Being.

• The manifoldness of things has sunk into the All-One.

• A metaphysics that tolerates no physics.

• Xenophanes (570-480) Founder, wandering poet.

• His maintenance of Monotheism. His World God a mystical concept.

• In exile at 25 still writing poetry at 92.

• Flat earth extending to infinity in all directions.

Parmenides (510): Most important thinker his time.

• Empty space cannot be, no such thing as a vacuum.

• For him there is only timeless being.

Melissus: Samian General.

• Regarded Real as Infinite instead of Finite Space.

Zeno: Fallacies

• Inventor of dialectic of negation, disproof by reduction ad absurdum.

• Exposes contradictions inherent in former concepts by celebrated fallacies —of motion being passed through infinite subdivisions of space.

• Deduces absurd consequences.

• Commensurables vs. incommensurables. Infinite dividability not being a criterium of continuity.

• Things are not numbers. Time is as little sum of moments as a line is a sum of points.

Pythagoreanism: Harmonies

• Universe a harmonious disposition of numbers.

• Every solid an expression of surface, line, point.

• Diety - the one devoid of oppositions (engendering elemental dualisms). A Monad.

• “One” is opposed to plurality. Soul - harmony. Through exercise of asceticism, music, gymnastics, geometry.

• Impermeable sphere afloat in the void…

• Plenum v. vacuum. The one and the many. Irruption of vacuum into plenum.

• Number one has a value of even and odd.

• World of mathematical forms a higher reality.

• Metaphysical dualisms. Perfect and Imperfect.

• Astronomical insight: divinity of unchangeableness.

• The Pythagorean Society: Music and Math. Religious Political.

• Chaignet, Pythagore Et la Philosophie Pythagoricienne.

Pythagoras of Samos (580-500): Founder mathematical science

• No philosophical writings tracing to.

• Tradition founder of mathematical science since 5th century.

• Purification. Music to purify the soul and medicine the body.

• Doctrine of 3 lives. Theoretical, practical and apolaustic. Forces of gain, honor or wisdom.

• Doctrine of rebirth. Transmigration. May have come from Orphics.

• The master said so. Ipse dixit… watchword.

• Numerical ratios, concordant intervals of the scale. Enharmonic, chromatic, diatonic.

• Discovery of Mean. To be found in a blend of opposites numerically determinable. Arrangement of parts of an octave. A determinable scale.

• Health is being in tune. Patterns to explain differences individual patients.

• Numbers represented by figures, squares, triangulars, incommensurability - nature of the Unlimited.

• Tradition Hippasos died at sea for revealing incommensurability of side and diagonal.

Later Pythagoreans: began relinquishing of religious element.

• Things are like numbers rather than being numbers.

Read more

From: THE BLOOMSBURY JOURNAL ·

Charles Bukowski (August 16, 1920 – March 9, 1994) on James Joyce:

“I think some writers do suffer this fate mainly because at heart

they are rebellious

and the rules of grammar like many of the other rules of our world

call for a herding in and a confirmation

that the natural writer instinctively abhors, and, furthermore,

his interest lies in the wider scope of subject and spirit…

Hemingway, Sherwood Anderson, Gertrude Stein, Saroyan were a few that reshaped the rules, especially in punctuation and sentence flow and breakdown. And, of course,

James Joyce went even further.

We are interested in color, shape, meaning, force…

the pigments that point up the soul.”

294 JOURNAL OF BECKETT STUDIES

Part of Beckett’s letter to Schneider:

‘My work is a matter of fundamental sounds (no joke intended), made as
fully as possible, and I accept responsibility for nothing else. If people
want to have headaches among the overtones, let them. And provide
their own aspirin’

In a letter to Pamela Mitchell on 18 August 1955, Beckett writes:

that he is ‘tired of Godot and the countless misunderstandings it seems to
provoke. How anything so skeleton simple can be complicated as it has
been is beyond me’

To uncover the ‘stuff’ of Beckett’s writing, Laws seems to suggest, we
need to remember what Beckett argued in his essay on Joyce’s Work in
Progress, later to become Finnegans Wake:

‘Here form is content, content is form. You complain that this stuff is not written in English. It is not to be read – or rather it is not only to be read. It is to be looked at and listened to’

Laws’s argument is therefore that music not only provides Beckett with a method to explore the processes of writing, it also provokes his audience to engage creatively and imaginatively with the work.

Samuel Beckett in Context, ed. Anthony Uhlmann. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2013. xxxiii + 456pp. £59.99, hardback.
ISBN: 978-1107017030

Trying to keep up with everything. Hard. Distractions. Is politics a distraction. From the book yuh.

But I wanted to stop screaming so I found a post area here on the other side of town to listen to what they had to say. And present “our case.” In a more persistent but not accusatory tone if I could possibly manage it. Tho I’ve been blocked and I have blocked some of them. One guy sent porn. The memes on both sides, so cruel touches the absurd in a way that enfuriates.

If someone gets stuck on sending me “evil” memes, I block them.

And I think I will continue to hang out around there. Keeps me honest…

Trying.

Back to book today. OHHH the hemmingway fuck always have to start back at first page. First 50 pages are ready to go if I would let them. Gurr.

It is nothing like Cioran. Except in moments where it flashes in for ME.

Emil Cioran was the son of an Orthodox priest

AI. His early life was deeply influenced by Christianity, particularly through his father’s role.

Lately heard of bio material — there is a bio called Searching for Cioran. It might have been done, in connection with Paul Celan who was Romanian too and translated Cioran. He was also a Romanian Poet in Paris from what I gather, and Cioran knew him. Thats all I know about that.

Just now really learning about any of this.

Oh one person across the jordan river, where Jesus was baptized (and is now polluted…), knew Cioran! Maybe even read more than me. Understood his importance —

I get the sense that some over “there over there” have read (or run across) Tears and Saints, which I have not read yet.

He is ya know, both read and contemd ( perversion of word on purpose ) by them, joyce makes me have play…I had to explain to one of them as I got yelled at for simplifying grammar — so I started syallablizing from candor to quip, as well as simplifying my grammar.

Ever so…

And THEN I sent a stanza from ee cumming, whose “inter play” is playful and serious in same breadth, and he stanzas grammar with lower case, touches lightly after the syllabic.

People hate when you leave off too many capitals. I do too. And get around it — by using paragraphs.

But because I am an “invader” they aren’t allowed to treat me with much of any cordiality. And also I have to admit — that I dropped in screaming, ya know… Decided to stay till calmed down.

I am finding women more earnest. Men just reject what I say outright or yell at me to go away. But mine is a duty too… I explain just that my gods are more spread out.

I have sort of hit stride in translating C, so I dont have to “attack” the methodology I am cooking up there that much any more.

And while translating I am reading other peoples translations. Helps to keep me “on target.”

The book. Brings it all in and pushes away at same time. Like who mallarme. He is more liquidacious even than me.

Cambridge Elements: Beckett and Cioran

Beckett and Cioran, authored by Steven Matthews, Cambridge Elements in Beckett Studies series, published 6 May 2024, Cambridge University Press.

Got from library. Just started reading. Its a short 60 pages. And wonderful. I am reading a couple pages a day.

Its tight.

AI: Explores the intellectual and biographical connection between Samuel Beckett and the Romanian-born philosopher E. M. Cioran, focusing on Beckett’s engagement with Cioran’s writings from the 1950s to the 1970s.

Highlights resonances between Cioran’s philosophical concepts—such as the meteque (see below), philosophical scepticism—and Beckett’s literary evolution beyond the “siege in the room” in works like Texts for Nothing and How It Is.

LOVE THIS PART: The analysis also considers Beckett’s translation choices between English and French, illuminating shared concerns about identity, understanding, and the formal nature of thought.

I do like academics, eating it up. This is/was a famous gypsy song in Europe:

Métèque : Once a legal status in ancient Greece, particularly Athens, reserved for resident foreigners who had right to live and work in the city, but possessed no political rights as citizens. And meteque was used derogatorily.

Precis de decomposition —

Ciorans first survey in french.

AI says: Précis de décomposition is a 1949 philosophical essay by Romanian-born writer Emil Cioran, written in French and published by Gallimard.

A collection of aphorisms and short, intense reflections exploring themes of pessimism, existential despair, and the destructive power of fanaticism and ideology.

I tracked down a French copy. Theres always words in french that he uses I dont know. Thats not true so much anymore with “regular” novels— But it is still true with poetry.

Baudelaire is throwing language at me full score — still reading one of his Prose Poems every night along with english translation beside it, I like to see the difference between the simplicity in his language and the extrapolation the translator takes. Tho his language at times not simple at all.

Both are serioso word birds.

Cioran always simplifies too… His language is built on a simplified grammar, and base structures of words, and yet broad too. In its complexity as he takes on meta… Translations often lick (to my mind) after that and find in it, what it conjures.

I know as young man he was caught up in a Fascist mania in Romania. I think he’d admit that. And it never entirely left him. Its part of his dialog with god, and eternity. Yes.

Is it churchy too? in that way that the righteous defends —

Well its like he knew too much about horror already and slips off and admits his wish to be elsewhere…

Tracked down a few books on Romanian language. Two on history, one on etymology YUM —

Three jobs. I STILL HAVE THREE JOBS.

Le Spleen de Paris (Paris Spleen), also known as Petits Poèmes en prose (Little Poems in Prose), is a collection of 50 short prose poems by Charles Baudelaire. The collection was published posthumously in 1869 and is associated with literary modernism.

In English, doesnt say who translator is…

LITTLE POEMS IN PROSE

The Stranger
Every Man His Chimæra
Venus and the Fool
Intoxication
The Gifts of the Moon
The Invitation to the Voyage
What Is Truth?
Already!
The Double Chamber
At One O’clock in the Morning
The Confiteor of the Artist
The Thyrsus
The Marksman
THe Shooting-range and the Cemetery
The Desire to Paint
The Glass-Vendor
The Widows
The Temptations; or, Eros, Plutus, and Glory

Mud Pies vs. Sketches

Glad I sent that piece in. Because it is helping me to find a tighter editing, of group of short pieces I called Sketches in Fiction. But they are also like prose poems.

The necessity to see them that way and understand them that way, as I am editing. Its like the only way they really read properly. Is as separate pieces. Then the intensities have room to find it, where its abandoned to. But its not abandon, its embrace. That used to really f me up. Those two being symbiotic.

That one I sent in is packed without any breathers.

And In writing novel here I have been talking and talking about exploring shape and movement, about spacing things out between poetic “breaches.” The back and forth that occurs to make the thing happen, the adjunct used to form and deform and reform in different rhetoric senses but feels compelled to its structure intimately in pursuit. Also wrt what I read somewhere about Hemingway — impersonating simplicity….which Dickens does too.

Piece I sent doesnt do that, its driving at a wall. And bitching about it. TOO. HA.

I can see now, the sketches have a much lighter touch. Then the Big Dig in the early novella compilations.

The ones I call Novella are much more difficult to read — as I am starting to write somehow someway keep at it, to find a novel format, not sketches, and its me throwing vomitrosky in arrested clumps at the wall. Its all La Boue, mud pies.

But I am seeing in the sketches, if I separate sections out, brick by brick — even though they are still tied together by the rhetoric itself, makes better sense to how I feel about the sketches. Each section on a different page. But, facing each other — under their own titles.

And in writing the novel too? Somewhat, yes. I like how shortening the chapters, as I started doing this week, makes it clip along. And also the unreliable narrator — can be coaxed out ? Little by little. I am having “fun” oink oink, finding that in the LuLu char. Its only a side of it, its not main purpose, its even understood as recognition that the lie itself has meaning and purpose.

I have a dual edition of Baudelaire’s Petits Prose. On mine, nowhere on cover does it say Le Spleen de Paris. But of course, thats l’humour noir.

Can tell from notes, that I got about half way thru (before getting knocked off to something else). Some pages barely touched, others are written over. French and English both. Those are the ones I remember reading not the other ones. HUH.

Ordering library Okri?

Hoping to read over Xmas.

WRT christmas, I am an x’r. Tho I talk about jesus a lot.

Thats because he is a member…

How jesus came through skin. And Yaweh/Allah didnt. I find religion, heavy with dead, made me dread… I dread their connection to wars and genocides whose history is our skin.

Jesus came through skin and his body hangs among us. Allah and Jaweh burden us with the infinite, in everything we do?.

Immigrants under attack are closer to where jesus died than any of the americans dropping bombs in our hemisphere, in the Caribbean.

We go to their cities, there are us we are them. Is venezueala badly managed. Yes. Much like Trump.

Sister of owner of houseboat, I lived on, in Chelsea harbour.

She had a big boat, a sailing business, sailing in and around Ecuador. The house boat was originally hers,.

Her sister, my house mate, moved into the houseboat after her sister got the sailing business in Ecuador. The sister also painted and belonged to Chelsea Arts Club, where we used to drink. When I lived in London.

South America I think of Clarice of course and Frida. Autopilot Girls Club. To whom hi am swore.

Fuck trump and his Dept. of War.

Harvard Club

I met a man once. it was at the harvard club. got pulled in there by a Bonds guy met through friends in demi mondaine..

Somehow myself and date ended up at a table with me next to a guy — who whispered to me that he exported wood from the amazon… Was he handsome. Yeah he was.

After drinks, maybe food too? I remember us bending heads toward each other. I liked him as a person I just did. THEN he whispered to me in “oh so many words” what he did for money money.

I have a char in LuLu book that is Money Money…

I probably slightly shook my head… and looked at him as something of a rogue…and yet smiled too, smelled him, in a whisper.

I like rogues its probably why I am single.

OKRI

Ben Golden Emuobowho Okri(1959-03-15) 15 March 1959 (age 66). I found his books, after going to Paris and living there five months.

Link to Okri’s books

His best known work, The Famished Road, won the 1991 Booker Prize, along with Songs of Enchantment (1993) and Infinite Riches (1998) make up a trilogy that follows Azaro, a spirit-child narrator, through the social and political turmoil of an African nation reminiscent of Okri’s remembrance of war-torn Nigeria.

Ai: Ben Okri writes in English. He is renowned for his rich and evocative use of the English language, which he skillfully adapts to capture the tempo and tone of African reality, bending the language to reflect the African spirit. His works, including novels, poetry, and short fiction. Uses english language to explore themes of identity, society, and the human condition within an African cosmology.

Pessoa learned English as a kid in South Africa, I think… People say there’s a sense of english in Pessoa’s Portuguese —

hm bending towards Hemingway… Out in sea Hemming way way can hear embers of Pessoa….

I probably read Songs of Enchantment (1993) soon after it came out.

He connected spirits into language of being — through language that rose above religion, was and wasnt embedded in it.

Yet connects without dismissal of any kind, spirits to the J monster.

It had a profound effect on me and I put it into my heart —

I know that sounds very Molly Polly Holly. The poetry in his narrative I still think about it as a memory — of a book I got off on for weeks after. As it moved me from where I was without me going anywhere.

In Terms of Measurement

I had to read Penrose Road to Reality to get back, from hungering with chaos, had lost touch with being present, with materiality. Except in design.

Penrose is a 1000 page or so thriller.

Grand entry through measurement math — of materiality, sign, distance, spin, spaces, exponentials, means and mentality of physics.

Studying use of imaginary numbers, learned the truth of exponential math that with respect to sign/spin can at times, go either way — numbers riding the exponential are part of theories, about probability and chaos.

Philosophy discovered physics. Philosophy and Religion. There is early physics in the bible and in Egyptian book of dead.

And occurs through visionary thinking, in the mythic. Physics comes out of terms that pre history labeled using mythic as a visual — terms that preceded math, like sky flood = exponential as well as courts chaos.

Courting chaos is part of poetry since Battle of Trees! Its very genuine, as occurs with the act of being…

Interplay between Physics and Philosophy, I have always found is in part about density, which relates to fluids.

Sooner or later — some physic or math term makes me laugh — Because Cervantes shows up at limits spinning his windmill —

And is part beauty of theory/myth vs the surd. I have not read Zizeks new book yet. Saw it this week at Rizzoli.

Outer Layers

Zizek. Really helped me. Work through “outer layers.”

I sometimes think I do zizer set ups at entry into terms along with shakes and joyce monster, and beckett etc. I seem to think of it as travling will buries… the her cue lees… in its multiplication of forms.

Hooky. I play hooky? Yeah hooky for booky.

Its my belief that I got into a discussion on density with him, coming down and a round Sisyphus mountain, and that the discussion is already written, its in the freewriting book…

When reread back, a lot of its right there. Again it comes down to a discussion of whether or not to remain a “brick” or em the monster.

Call freewriting book: On Density?

California Hotel

Going over with Ziz. Compost impost in pursuit of terms as a congeal of intensities that seems to lie at core of my novel — whose persistence share a border — or as Cioran would say about his delusions, “voisin de la folie,” —voisin means neighbor.

Translations of Folie, from Reverso:

A book called On Density? Got idea, after Fitz’s post mort book called On Booze — FYI. Someone appears to have sorted out a collection from Fitzgeralds journals and short stories based on there being mention of booze.... Bought at Rizzoli after brunching with Sunil for his birthday. Can see immediately its not just about booze…

Also acquired Jhumpa Lahiri’s book — on how happened upon doing translations in three languages.

I can fix occurrence where Density arrived as a term iskabbibbling with Camus. Junky has a Timetable — where immured my punk pigeon prod digity do... I think of junk through wasteland, first. Not Junky, not Burroughs book, which I read after Naked Lunch.

I think about language around Ziz, and pulling things together around terms or handles that became a fixture in language for me, their associations, at times a kind of philosophical quest.

Along with, a Parsons colleague at SOF — Steven Faerm.

Bundling

Bringing terms together across chapters!

Both Ziz and Faerm get that, how terms build around themselves, in the work.

Addressing issues that arise across terms. Math uses something called a bundle.

Bundling my terms across chapters its like a weight has found what its weight is —- just there, where it is... Terms can network across influences.

With the dead I have little anxiety. about their influence.

With the living it exists as just that tho — as a kind of anxiety, to a great extent, which marks its value even.

Anxiety of Influence…

Piratical with Z and F. With Z I can get out to syllables. With F I can work through terms to outcome — that includes fashion.

OOh lala. My Novel includes fashion?? YES after jj. Its a fixture of the philosophy!

Cervantes vs Dante

Shane helped with this.

Brought it into context.. somehow. Elephants! Pulling a man between trees apart. Is Battle of Trees. Unable to adapt. Rocker poevillian.

Really anywhere so far, but design. And I just finished two prints, floral and lace, client for S.

I am trying to be better. But I know its hopeless. Because I am forever stuck as this… Cioran talks about just that, in latest translation.

CIORAN quotes

Every man wants to be other than who they are. I dreamt of action when young, then of philosophy. I took delirium for action, and desperation for thought. What am I good at? To watch and to mope around, to wait for the breakup of hours.

This after a paragraph where he reasoned how he dislikened sunny days — voisin de la folie.

I have always been, throughout my life, in love with bad weather. The clouds reassure me; when, in the morning, from my bed, I see them passing by, I feel strength to face the day. But the sun, I have never been able to get along with, I don’t have enough light within me to be able to accord with it. It only awakens, stirs up the inner darkness. Ten days of blue skies puts me into a state neighboring with madness. (italics mine.)

“…un état voisin de la folie.”

5 sept. 1961 Cioran Journals

Again: Translations of Folie, from Reverso:

YEAH YEAH YEAH

When dynamite strolls in… chuckles the clown. Right off the Bat. Quixote is a clown. A mutiny even. vs Dante under the hood.

Hood also relates to Density as an intensity, does Bataille do density. He does in his naked eye books? in and up orifices, is a play on density and darkness?

Prince of darkness. Sometimes call Nick — P.O.D. But its a term of endearment. Relational with him to several other terms. I used him — to get in after certain blood elements of monstrous proportions that dope with vampire logic and Oscar… for rope, flying out of hell —

Owe Okri too…

Used to get mocked about literary attachments. As looking for daddy.

HEY. Still do with conservative argumentos about my female liberal skin. That they engage in calling me names, mostly in efforts to insult my intelligence. I never just let it go — Getting in “last word.”

In his fiction — Bataille via a narrative flood — bursts into the poetic, gets into language as a thickness, a density, thickly and finely at the same time. Shakes does that too…

Bataille excavates excremental attitudes with what merges ecstatically, and with the repulsive.

I often refer to stuff Bataille and Acker can get into as bug business.

Bug books are about insectual knowledge, potency for life, and ease/disease of desire and death.

Bataille’s book on Prehistoric Art is WONDERFUL. Called Cradle of Humanity, highly recommend.

Dog log fog…

Dick detecting vs A Lad Ins rug and lamp…There is a part of me that thinks of Oscar Wilde as camp via POD access to humor at place where it is in too deep must flip back to something about its tenderness — or submit / admit to blindness.

Split the raw with the wick like Nick, raw in waves that alter with tenderness — just touching on camp like Beckett, or driven to camp at opposing sympathies, like Oscar.

TAGS

https://dustyhope.substack.com/t/philosophy

https://dustyhope.substack.com/t/Freewriting

https://dustyhope.substack.com/t/books

https://dustyhope.substack.com/t/metaphysics

COIRAN, cursing his translators.

He’s wrong.

Every time I see my texts translated, reduced to intelligibility, degraded by everyone’s usage, I fall into desolation and doubt. Is everything that I write only in words? Brilliance does not pass into another language; it passes even less than the poetry. What a lesson in modesty and discouragement to read ones own words in the style of a report, having toiled for hours over each word! I want no longer to be translated, to be dishonored in my own eyes.

Cioran Journal 1960

He’s wrong.

It captures.

I mean translation from his french into english is only different in personal pronoun-ing, and articles like de and en. There is a simplicity to how he writes in his journal that shines right through. Even with very complex motives.

His last entry for 1960, is pretty long. Its taking me over two weeks to translate. I’ll finish this week. Not much left.

Discussion going on while translating, rubs right up against Empsons discussion of articles for me, and how many meanings they contain.

Ambiguity in articles, is in the variety they can assume — as a link with an adjective or verb even — and still make complete sense.

Coiran’s french articles are taking me for a LOOP!!

I have had to let my understanding of french — loosen up around the meaning of articles, its mimicry ?

He kicks them around, like he is swatting at them with a bit of glee? yes but consternation of joy. And you can feel it!!

Can I only get in a little of that, really?

His swapping articles is all over the place. Tho it doesnt matter because it means what it means. The articles are just links with ambiguous enough meaning to translate the french using english phrasing for same application. Which is true about articles.

I fight that out… actually.

There’s so many luscious articles in french. Have simply had to expand my view and notion of what articles even are, especially with him. His phrasing is fantastic. It tingles with necessity.

Almost done reading 600-700 pages of Marcel in a dual language edition, word by word, to teach me how to translate too… Marcel’s articles are varied! but they feel much less addictive, more tightly contained around a phrase of common usage.

Whereas Cioran is on a different hunt…

Lately, in dialogue, Marcel, in the voice of a princess, has exploded with ce que and que ce. And I am trying to figure out the difference….this that or that this… and its filler, its the character stopping between thoughts and filling with this’ and thats’ — its adorable.

Ohhhhh novel. Just send it.

Six chapters that I have driven to the wall. They all move toward an ending.

Some endings trying to pull off what trickstser calls an Emily kick — into a question mark, with more than one answer.

Translation, has brought a methodical-ness to having toiled for hours over each word! That it accords the same willingness to let the narrative breathe, lead into itself.

Is it as simple as Cioran’s journals. Only at times. Not always. No. And it gets pretty compacted. Like a brick? Like my poems turn into bricks? Throwing bricks….

No. Its filled with switches. And its draped out. And there is some ground. Right from the top starts with ground. I cancelled out the poetical tumbling intro and let the fiction of the novel sit up top, for a good quarter of a chapter. Before descends into LuLu’s espirit, which means mind as much as it does spirit.

That said its also engages with a feminine subtext, and there doesn’t appear to be a way for me to outdistance that. Even though, it does also outdistance it. Kind of like how Cioran’ talks about his origins…

Many people will not have the stomach for it. Cioran for instance is a particular outlet and once found is treasured. Either your there or your not with Cioran. Same could be said of Joyce.

I think that way about my novel, your there or your not, its thick but also, in moments, cuts across, captures a breeze after a shudder.

Pessoa planted that in me…

Translating Cioran has been a real boon. His narrative understands poetic occurrences and addresses them without need for constraint however he may, now and again, moan about it.

And he too loves the Emily monster.

Two or three more days and I am done with 1960.

Almost done with 1960 for Cioran. Two more entries left in his journals for 1960. That is, after the one I started working on today before writing.

I am trying to finish up an opening section to send, supposedly, to an agent I tracked down. Who looks quite good.

Its almost ready. Each section is its own vignette I cant belive Hemingway showed up, well I turned on PBS to watch it, cause it was on sale.

Emil: Getting to end of 1960s

Its wonderful.

He’s got an apartment!!! This is huge for Cioran.

States with conviction how already he misses living in hotels. This is big deal for him.

He stayed without such possessions for nearly twenty five years living only in hotels. And now suddenly he’s got a place. He is no longer living in hotels. Which he had been since 1937! And its now summer 1960.

Something about his wife and her will fullness becoming a part of his.

Its interloping exercise over him, being slave to the will, needs must, for sure, expunge it —

Oddly enough its that space he protects like hellfire even, creates for himself to work in, to search it down— I find most intriguing.

Even tho it runs through abominations of the soul and takes on a will of its own, to go there, pierce a space beyond it, his morality to the writing, connects there.

Emptying the thirst and curses of life and its bright blaring light shining down on excursive poetic litmus and dismals, awoken in his with a wily sense of how religious grain is also philosophy on back of poetry —

A way back into heaven. As an extension, as part of the plussage….

Mind is his grind, his find his bind…

Writing is his life.

Thats Hemingway too.

While writing, he lives, he perpetuates his life there gives it room to prey pray and prod…alive with its works. Le Carre was the same way. And Joyce too and Virginia etc…

For me, that journey to the end of knowing, as it has been referred to — recalling Spanish Saint Theresa Avilla, she gets into as journey through language to God…As cut through the religious, she graces darkness as embrace of release from time into heart of god and all that…

Poetry in which she dwells and smells, became akin for me, as taking on the Buddha adventures, that idea about beckoning an emptiness — to be able to escape to freedom from dismal absolutes that hounded my body to the grave…

Create a place where ideas about soul and survival, can engage anywhere, flee fly flow through — even the gristle and grit and gape and rape stories — rape of body by god is zeus as much as jesus.

Breakdown Bicamerial Mind — is a book about discovery of “the subject” — read it at same time I seem to believe, as Tibetan Book of Dead. That was twosie doozy

In a way its a larger detail on what goes on in the battle of the trees, from a different direction — Closer to biblical drawings where singular god is drawn on ideas about absolutes as a discovery of The Subject.

Mad Hattedness

Our poetic madness as a species, forever engaged in getting to know its limits and extents —

Only to lead me again and again — to tricksters, in american indian stories. Where a part me found soul of reckoning with truth, reality and all that, hidden in the laughter.

I believe soul of America are our Indians. Workers of our fields are Indians too, many of them connect through Mexico and their families coming here for centuries. Replacement for slaves aye???

We are so wicked to them. They feed us. Its unforgiveable.

Exchange of the precious…Freedom.

Searching to figure out things, poets corner, about finding feet via SM, I dont know why it works that way, through its tussles with reality and language of death, Nick might call the skeleton keys —

Like Sunil gave me me wings in Fashion. SM gave me treachery beauty craftiness mischief toughness… And Pessoa…

But madness finds its own. Isnt ever convictable to others. Must accept its tyranny learn to trust it.

Things went off around Pessoa’s variations in ideas, susceptibility to what philosophers call “plus” —

Many comprise us, personalities multiplie, for some us. I’d say thats probably true of all writers, esp of fiction. But poetry too.

Also referred to by Cioran as in excess, of say, any religious singularity.

I had started thinking of time as science does as things running along different paths, and like light prismatic. How when it comes to extensions of truth, the infinite beckons. Without infinities true measure does not exist…

Sponge bathing now with Cioran.I didnt translate Pessoa tho at all. I just read several translations of him. Doubtless translators love him.

Both of them got to me thru Rhymers. Alive with its implements.

Poison invades to itch hitch, bitten. Then a stalk that buds grow.

To defy in order to comply, becomes a pool of gentle madness — well except for politics. Being free to talk politics seriously, for me, is part of it. I like those who pick our food. I hate the fact that heritage takes away rights for women and voters, and makes us into a Pariah! And treats our neighbors as enemies and those who visit here as enemies, all possible enemies, here to engage in our beauty, freedoms and diversity.

Trump wipes much of that away, he is a bully and quite often an idiot. His economy doesnt feed us on america food, it works for himself and others like him. Farmers whose abundance fed the world now in their fields what rots along with their despair.

Rhyme tho, need to rhyme, begat the grease of my (h)ailing wheels to freedom.

Notes from Book

So far about 1/3 of way thru Book XVI The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, From an Other to the Other, Edited by Jacques-Alain Miller, Translated by Bruce Fink.

Initial notes from reading collection of Jacques Lacan’s Seminar — book that is known as: From an Other to the other.

Does he fly around. Yeah. He does. Does it get repetitive. Oh sure he goes in on things in particular, seems always to be working out how to attack anew…

I have it seems wandered into his section 3, on Pascal’s Wager. And stopped to read again.

Pascal’s wager comes from Blaise Pascal’s Pensees, i.e. collected thoughts.

As I understand it now, Blaise Pascal’s Pensees was pulled together, after Pascal’s death, from out of his “trunk.” Of which there are various Volumes and Selected Works. Generally known as Blaise Pascal’s Pensees. Pronounced pawn-say. S at end silent.

Section 3 of this particular Seminar Collection (there’s quite a few) from Lacan starts getting into Infinite Sets and Matrixes vis a vis: Is / Not / Is Not / Not Is. Lacan is incorporating Math Fizz into ideas about otherness. And blames it on a quote about infinity in Pascal.

Infinite lives, happy or otherwise…

I have been working through issues myself on multiple person ail-itties, and presences. Others that are mine in variations that stem with the infinite - precocity yet unto death…

And that persist, in mist of midst, of what steal from others —

Who genuinely exist for me, what Yeats calls: Presences. Reveling in expansions and performance, somehow in an honest manner…

Paw and sniffing ground….

Gonna go back and read chapters on Pascal’s Wager where he gets into infinities… Breaks out into Set Theory, then heads into matrices.

When first saw, started giggling…

But also just read lightly, sped read thru…

Because I have my space structures, worked thru hell to set up, deal and wheel with the multiples and monsters — Sooooo I’m like waitaminute wait a minute….

Their space to hex and wager GOING MY WAY, and can not be mitigated.

And yet thanks to Merchants of Vent Tis now decidedly “own” a Middleton who is something of an absorption vehicle, whatever the spectrum. Gonna go back now into his mother math with Becketts nose… yah. And the giddiness of Joyce ?

From an Other to the other

Chapter 1, Intro

1

Lacan griping about theories being called a Structuralism. Poubellication — poubelle means garbage can in French. Refers to Beckett and his garbage cans… Structuralism can only be described as Seriousness.

Castration determining level of fantasy, reality of (female partner) castration is impossible.

Castration as concealment — receiving or possessing stolen goods. Castration as “her” determiner of reality. Term leaves one no recourse.

Statements that lie outside meaning hors-de-sense.

Structuralism set in stone at very point at which repeating of process stops. Implies temps d’arret, interruption. Says why art is defective… derives power from collecting what is (being - me) hallowed out at point of defaillance, breakdown. (Go ahead and give it to — me.).

Discourse need not find its rules, but its cause. Thoughts being found in l’entre-sens, between meaning, between senses. The being of thought is the cause of thought as it is insofar outside of meaning.

Not making use of structure renders impossible touting of any sort of infallibility. Relies on the crack or faille, failure, alone.

2

Manifesting appearance form and content. Contain oneself, compares to content of a Mustard Pot. In a hurry, moult lui tarde, to accede to its eternal life as a pot. Pot has hole in it in homage to the dead. Pot is designed to produce the hole (or at least go looking for ti/me). Illustrated by myth of Danaids. Moment of glory, status akin to god’s.

Horns and conch shells. Whole civilizations represented by pots. Pot explains signification. Dead Sea Scrolls were found in a pot.

Marx regarding surplus value. Market for labor creates surplus value.

Surplus jouissance as relates to enunciation. Kant with Sade in Ecrit. Pascal’s Wager. Relationship between renunciation of jouissance and wagering, as a dimension. Surplus arises from Renunciation?? Lets us isolate object a.

3

The Freudian Thing. She who slips away as soon as she appears. Prosopopoeia — Signifier stifled and faceless moment he appears. Headless. Fade immediately into another.

The only thing of importance here is this loss. Object able to take shape of vanishing entities. The only thing across from the subject is the one extra, l’un-en-plus among so many others.

Inconsistency of the Other

Chapter 2 The Knowledge Market and Truth on Strike

Plus-de-jouir in Fr, Mehrlust in German, Surplus Jouissance in English.

Topological schemas. Structure generally determined by convergence toward an impossibility. Which is why it is real.

Language, syntax. Scientific discourse begins by pairing down its matter. There is no such thing as metalanguage. Prefers calling it Logic. Substituting letter for elements. Logic inaugurated — if this then that.

Idea of death — paltry. Inseparable from maximal discourse construct around it.

Mathematical logic is logic tout court.

One can never repeat oneself to often.

Chapter 3 Topology of the Other

What the discovery itself allows us to think.

Announcing and denouncing experience.

What is the function of those who do not fit into the categories…

Set theory stumbles upon the paradox known as Russell’s paradox. That none is a member of itself.

Treasure trove of signifiers.

Is knowledge fully of gaping holes owing to its structure.

Relationship to another signifier cannot be totalized.

Chapter 4 Le Fait and Le Dit

Subversion of knowledge? Because it cant be made absolute.

Topology, that by which the subject brings with him a subversion, perspective defined as impossible.

Fhat relation is there between what we do and metaphysics.

Free means nothing other than dismissing the subject.

Suffering that is a fact harbors an act of speaking within itself… suffering wants to be a symptom which means truth.

God of philosophers, I am what is.

The status of desire as a gap.

Chapter 5 I Am What Is

The burning bush had emerged from between my legs?

I, subjugated subject.

Flaws of logical texture.

The promise the hope to assemble this I.

Chapter 6

The whole in pot cannot be seen in the mirror unless we look through the hole.

Mathematical residues.

Function of One.

On Pascals Wager

Chapter 7 Intro

1

Pascals Wager mentioned several times in Pensee. Pensee is collection of Pascal’s writings, assembled after he died. “Critical Editions” include his Notes. Includes a number of transcriptions of the wager.

“Giving up pleasures.” In the plural. Is emergence of Modern Morality?

Kantian distinction between das Wohl feeling good, and das Gute doing good.

Philosophical expression Hedone, assumes pleasure corresponds to a relationship. Antiquity: pleasure must guide us along this path.

2

Pleasure principle reigns supreme unconsicous in psychoanalysis. Lies in Catacombs… Overexerting itself in Acheronta, underworld.

Freud: Jouissance fundamentally masochistic. There where pain begins. Tends/tension towards death. The beyond…

Jouissance is a relationship to the body. Our existence as subjects.

Jouissance takes on color. se colere.

Morality, there is good somewhere and morality lies in the good. Idleness is currently undignified. Ideology of pleasure, now obsolete?

Here is something especially for me:

Hegels’ mythical slave.

3

La regla des parti. Importance development Math Theory. An infinity of infinitely happy lives. Uncertainty also taken up numerically. Partner or not, one chance out of two?

You cant avoid wagering because you are already embarked [engage]. Dichotomy not between god exists or does not exist. God, entirely dependent upon tradition. The wager is about the existence of I. Je existe has a whole series of consequences.

Chapter 8 The one and little a

Desire and Grace. Marks and Losses. Measuring the Other’s field.

Repetition linked in a determinant matter to a consequence that is designated as a lost object. Branding introduced into jouissance by loss itself. The Mark.

Pre-existence of every form.

Grace arises minute talk about christianity. Other as desire. Other as locust of speech.

Loss is related to the way we function as desire.

Chapter 10

Kant tells us that god is conceptualized only within a framework that relies on prior bracketing involved in aesthetics, qualified as transcendental.

We are all familiar with hell, it is everyday life.

An Englishly Portuguese, Endlessly Multiple Poet

Just happened across this on YouTube. Its a wonderful lecture by Richard Zenith on Fernando Pessoa.

Richard Zenith is widely considered^[4] to be one of the foremost experts on the Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa.^[5] Zenith has translated many of Pessoa's works into English, including The Book of Disquiet, and he has written extensively about Pessoa's poetry, prose and life.

Wikipedia

Once Richard Zenith really gets going, especially on the early influence on young Pessoa’s poetry by English Poets, for me, it turns truly delightful.

I am hoping after translating Cioran in French to be able to visit Pessoa in Portuguese, and I don’t know any Portuguese. Oh for a dual language edition of The Book of Disquiet…

Several people have translated collected excerpts out of Pessoa’s famous “trunk” into English —

After Fernando Pessoa's death in 1935, a large wooden trunk containing his unpublished writings was discovered in his Lisbon apartment. This trunk held an immense collection of manuscripts, with estimates ranging from over 25,000 to 25,574 pages of poetry, prose, plays, philosophical texts, translations, and other writings.

AI

I have read more than one translated copy of The Book of Disquiet, for sure… Maybe I too will translate a page or two from his Englishy Portuguese… in this life or next. Dream on.

Pessoa is one of my favorite writers, and I have always wanted to get closer to him in the original Portuguese, which I imagine as being much more formal than say, Clarice Lispector who is Brazilian. Whose first book, in Brazilian Portuguese, I have stuck my nose into.

Mr. Zenith says, that Pessoa learned to read and write English while abroad with his family, when his step Father was stationed as official Portuguese Consul to English colony in South Africa. While there Picasso learned to play Picasso (that poacher and strayer) from reading Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Thomas Gray and a biography of Shelley. Mr. Zenith mentions that Pessoa in part writes one of Barrett’s and one of Gray’s poems, right into his own. (I include the Barrett and Gray poems he snarfed from, below, just because.)

Later on Pessoa wrote and published a book of Sonnets in English that are imitations of Shakespeare with an Elizabethan cast. And even later, Pessoa comes under the influence of Walt Whitman, who, after reading, changes everything, and Pessoa turns into, writing in Portuguese, that which becomes a modern master.

Library of Congress

Pessoa is of course one of Portugal's most important literary figures of the 20th century, and a towering lovely figure in modernism.Lecture was created for and by The Library of Congress.

Lecture is included in Library of Congress Online Catalog, as part of Hispanic Division, Event Videos.

For transcript, captions, and more information, visit Library of Congress. http://www.loc.gov/today/cyberlc/feat...

Sonnets from the Portuguese 43: How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.

By Elizabeth Barrett Browning

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
For the ends of being and ideal grace.
I love thee to the level of every day’s
Most quiet need, by sun and candle-light.
I love thee freely, as men strive for right;
I love thee purely, as they turn from praise.
I love thee with the passion put to use
In my old griefs, and with my childhood’s faith.
I love thee with a love I seemed to lose
With my lost saints. I love thee with the breath,
Smiles, tears, of all my life; and, if God choose,
I shall but love thee better after death.

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43742/sonnets-from-the-portuguese-43-how-do-i-love-thee-let-me-count-the-ways

Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard (1751)

By Thomas Gray

Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard (1751)
The curfew tolls the knell of parting day,
The lowing herd wind slowly o'er the lea,
The ploughman homeward plods his weary way,
And leaves the world to darkness and to me.

Now fades the glimmering landscape on the sight,
And all the air a solemn stillness holds,
Save where the beetle wheels his droning flight,
And drowsy tinklings lull the distant folds;

Save that from yonder ivy-mantled tower
The moping owl does to the moon complain
Of such, as wandering near her secret bower,
Molest her ancient solitary reign.

Beneath those rugged elms, that yew-tree's shade,
Where heaves the turf in many a mouldering heap,
Each in his narrow cell for ever laid,
The rude forefathers of the hamlet sleep.

The breezy call of incense-breathing morn,
The swallow twittering from the straw-built shed,
The cock's shrill clarion, or the echoing horn,
No more shall rouse them from their lowly bed.

For them no more the blazing hearth shall burn,
Or busy housewife ply her evening care:
No children run to lisp their sire's return,
Or climb his knees the envied kiss to share.

Oft did the harvest to their sickle yield,
Their furrow oft the stubborn glebe has broke;
How jocund did they drive their team afield!
How bowed the woods beneath their sturdy stroke!

Let not Ambition mock their useful toil,
Their homely joys, and destiny obscure;
Nor Grandeur hear with a disdainful smile,
The short and simple annals of the poor.

The boast of heraldry, the pomp of power,
And all that beauty, all that wealth e'er gave,
Awaits alike the inevitable hour.
The paths of glory lead but to the grave.

Nor you, ye proud, impute to these the fault,
If memory o'er their tomb no trophies raise,
Where through the long-drawn isle and fretted vault
The pealing anthem swells the note of praise.

Can storied urn or animated bust
Back to its mansion call the fleeting breath?
Can Honour's voice provoke the silent dust,
Or Flattery soothe the dull cold ear of Death?

Perhaps in this neglected spot is laid
Some heart once pregnant with celestial fire,
Hands, that the rod of empire might have swayed,
Or waked to ecstasy the living lyre.

But Knowledge to their eyes her ample page
Rich with the spoils of time did ne'er unroll;
Chill Penury repressed their noble rage,
And froze the genial current of the soul.

Full many a gem of purest ray serene,
The dark unfathomed caves of ocean bear:
Full many a flower is born to blush unseen,
And waste its sweetness on the desert air.

Some village Hampden that with dauntless breast
The little tyrant of his fields withstood;
Some mute inglorious Milton here may rest,
Some Cromwell guiltless of his country's blood.

Th' applause of listening senates to command,
The threats of pain and ruin to despise,
To scatter plenty o'er a smiling land,
And read their history in a nation's eyes

Their lot forbad: nor circumscribed alone
Their growing virtues, but their crimes confined;
Forbad to wade through slaughter to a throne,
And shut the gates of mercy on mankind,

The struggling pangs of conscious truth to hide,
To quench the blushes of ingenuous shame,
Or heap the shrine of Luxury and Pride
With incense kindled at the Muse's flame.

Far from the madding crowd's ignoble strife,
Their sober wishes never learned to stray;
Along the cool sequestered vale of life
They kept the noiseless tenor of their way.

Yet even these bones from insult to protect,
Some frail memorial still erected nigh,
With uncouth rhymes and shapeless sculpture decked,
Implores the passing tribute of a sigh.

https://www.poetrybyheart.org.uk/poems/elegy-written-in-a-country-churchyard

This I did not know before watching this wonderful video:

And that because of this, Pessoa’s Portuguese is unlike any others, that his Portuguese incorporates aspects of the English language, and as such, a creation in its own write!

I wonder about that with respect to somethings I sometimes try to do, as a victim of French…

Finishing book called Full Spectrum by Adam Rogers on Color theory. Its lovely. Journalistic. Really digs into the chemistry and physics, discovery, usage and manufacture of all things color. Nicely done.

Dude has me going after: Michel Eugène Chevreul, prominent French chemist, who made significant contributions to chemistry and color theory. For instance, he wrote original theory on how colors make halos of complementary effects on other colors nearby —

Something that happens to me wrt language, all the time…? HAH.

The laws of contrast of colour : and their application to the arts of painting, decoration of buildings, mosaic work, tapestry and carpet weaving, calico printing, dress, paper staining, printing, military clothing, illumination, landscape, and flower gardening, &c.

by Chevreul, M. E. (Michel Eugène), 1786-1889. Myself just this moment downloading it from Internet Archive. This is an English translation of with pictures: https://archive.org/details/lawsofcontrastof00chev

Keep Pursuing Light in Cracks

As a form.

Novel today reconfiguring first two sections. So there’s a lot of chop chopping going on.

There was a scene, and the way in which it was set up, put a drag on the opening, that was more than I wanted it to be, but in another way, less than I wanted it to be.

Needed to reveal its opposites arriving at same time, in a way that, Cioran talks about, not causing unease. And yet, the unease question is popping on another side of itself, too.

When to say NO. Let the unease be felt…

Then pull a switcheroo, its the beast and beauty sides of revelation, monster with a heart, and beauty that is afflicted with ministering menaces.

Form Creating its Own Form

The old in and out.

Chop chop vs. trying to keep a handle on simplexity. And then poet shows up and yells at me. Remember, remember Chatterton, remember remember, create your own form, out of old forms, into new forms. Mr. Dynamite.

Chop chop is a form I sometimes go after, and talk about all the time.

So that movement is constant, not so much as between phrasing, like Acker, as between placement. This gig that gig, vanishing and reappearing…

At anytime reader could be anywhere. A constant feeling in the form itself, of vanishing and reappearing into reality. Something I am reaching for.

The disappearance sniffing Pessoa’s — is but not is, the simultaneousness of dream with dreary reality as a condition of oddity and ferocity, and dangling with sweetness of finding itself in heightening interpretations —

But, also more like Byron, closer to understanding tragedy, what cant or wont escape enchantment, or mesh of itself, turnings into periods of hell known insidiously to most forms of rapture.

As well as: destitute periods versus — hunger for luxury, material goods.

Time Standing Still

Gods and forms of gods as mesmerisations flashing through, flashes of the metaphysic as that battle, with the eternal, things LuLu cant quite get away from symmetries, signs, enchantments, that are ancient, that are felt as time forever standing still.

Moments of it filling her top to bottom, as if existence is mere trifle, and those moments of negation a fleeting charm more important than conceding to her identifying with life. Very Pessoaesque that thing.

Still, its American. Not necessarily keeping things occurring in different time frames right next to each other. Poe-sy slippery with madness, with descent as discovery of freedom and the tragic, and what “the subjective” hungers for, including love.

Always: Just Passing Through

Anyway, thats what I am working through today EOD.

Appears to me as something I am trying to pull off.

That want to make it feel flighty — caught between grazing for grace and splurges of demonic quandary as freedom exercising relief from containments and a unquenchable want to refuse or risk having to confront becoming one or another, specific thing that identifies with time in which exists —

Except as passing through.

Find value in keeping notes here for my Novel. So can use as reference as needed. Just checked back on something today, researched and dropped here previously.

I get lost in names, I remember what and where, but who is a ghost I am looking through, in a way. Its name turns into a “blank slate.”

Sub Stacking

Shakespeare’s chunks in plays — that mingle with rhyme, I call Sub Stacking. I often think of Shakes in terms of stacking the deck, and within in pursuing movement, where ease in and out, using different sets of “wavelengths.”

Rhymes to me are like scales on a piano — that initially, unthinking, sit down and start showing up, if only to see where they show up, again and again.

I wonder if musicians do that for places to start if they are trying to find its epiphany…

Fondness for The Fallen

Falling back into reading religious works. Cioran is a religious writer.

Needs must — perforce myself back through Bataille. to find quotes on St. Theresa d’Avila, saw two already, I believe, in Cioran.

Interior Castle and her Seven Mansions. She has an arrow through the throat in imagery!!

Santa Muerta….

Love these quotes from Cioran

These are out of some of my latest translation for him —

The more a writer is original, the bigger risk to date and bore: as soon as one gets used to his tricks, it is finished. True originality is unaware of its means author must be carried by his talents; instead of directing and exploiting it.

An ingenious mind flees its talent, that is to say, invents it. Isn’t that the definition of a man of letters?

In the work, the horrible must exalt; if he creates unease, it’s of a poor quality.

1.1.60 CIORANs Journals

THESE THREE QUOTES. I really take them all to heart.

Last up first, in dealing with the horrible, and not create unease???? I run into that again and again, and then drill down with shakespeare, to metagrabolize it.

I dont flee any of it anymore. Whatever the talons is. Thanks to NC. Instead I find it, and then go after it, fiction is considered pure invention. But I tend towards believing it exists already in language inherently — coming right out of Battle of the Trees discovery of the Subjective.

In a way, Trees finds subjectivity, and Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind by Jaynes, exposes it as cognition, cognition of its discovery, in regards to the subjective, reaching a limit…

I think a lot about how to handle horror. Religious intonations fairly close to Cioran emerge from darkness wearing arrows through my throat.

And its that arrow, in a way, am going after —

Exhibiting Talons

Also NOT destroying my talent!? Which happened again and again — as a war over my becoming an “exhibit.”

Still what Cioran says, basically encompasses all that. And of course his being Cioran, has to take it the cognition, out to its infirm, to its limit… I always think about that with Cioran, the value he is for me, of his treading after limits.

Limits reduce gradient, makes into grain…

I had a talent that was an inability to escape forms in rhyme as a way of finding language —As is true of my infancy and the rhyme rollers… learned language there, in syllable relations and repetitions.

Memories of language arrives there as beauty suddenly popping up in the “unknown” — en arrivant de — as an arrival in time — Beauty is French, belle and bete, and that “le double” is always at work!

That idea of there being no beauty without the beast, who is a monster, with a heart.

Cioran that fuck, uses a version of that phrase, en arrivant, in the most wonderful of places….

Acts of Folly and Grace… KEEP WrITInG

Bar None

January 11 1960 — Cioran’s entry for January 11 1960 covered a lot of stuff I ran across writing, about who one is writing for, and what one is doing about it, especially in terms of his having a stubbornness to go after what the writing engages with for him, bar none.

Do I agree with everything he says there? I agree with the issues he is running into. My writing fought for its own space in a way that crossed into a kind of vegetable violence, hammer and shell hell, scared the shit out of me. And it refused to back down at every turn. Making me into stubborn scrappy invaginater of experimentation, exploitation and tantrum —

Negation and Prestige

Especially where become enamored with encumbrances of the negative —

Negation has such prestige in my eyes that, cutting myself off from the rest of things, it has made of me a narrow-minded, stubborn, infirm being.

1.11.60 CIORAN

Cioron’s discussion of No and the Negative, filled my heart with justice. Having been caught out there too… Until drawing and “negative space.” As well as how math deals with negatives.

It’s because No has entered my blood, after having perverted my mind.

1.11.60 CIORAN

So I could begin to see it less as a void addressing no not and never, and more as part of structure, in the mind of its own space.

Early on, no matter how I hated the writing, when going back and reading, and seeing how twisted it was and engaged it was with battles in itself, as a hodge podge of collective torrents, and puritanical derivatives — even so, the more stubborn it became.

Naked and the True

Disbelieved in idea of searching for method. As if I was searching and searching after its original sin, as any life could feel in its being — equivalent with its origin, as an entanglement with death and eternity as limits to fate and faith.

I have noticed that I can only get along completely well with a man that has reached the height of defeat, and has lost all foundation, and along with that, all certainties of his success. It is because, in those moments, he has stripped away all lies, and is naked and true, returned to his essence by blows of fate.

1.11.60 CIORAN

What becomes of being heavily affected by puritanical dilemmas. And believing the risk was in being authentic however later felt derivative.

Now I tend to try and see as passage through the needle in a way.

As lonely as an unemployed God.

1.11.60 CIORAN

Wondrously punctuating entry, longest one in his journals so far in little over three years that I have already translated — writing to himself, valuing honesty in his work above all else, both religiously and tyrannically.

Ah! how I would like to limit myself to a sensation, to a world before the concept, to the infinitesimal variations of a felt impression that would have to render in a thousand astonishing and inconsequential words! To write directly from the senses, to become an interpreter of the body and uncoordinated soul!

1.11.60 CIORAN

In some ways I think every poet goes through that, if they write long enough.

Systems and the Abstract

Seriousness and a system:

Without a background of desolation that colors all my thought and controls all my attitudes, lending them an appearance of seriousness and even a system, I would have had what it takes to make a perfect dilettante.

1.11.60 CIORAN

Abstract styles.

There is something cloying and painful in use of the abstract style: all of these empty words juxtaposed to translate the unreal, what we call thought.

1.11.60 CIORAN

Over which I laughed. Because everything he puts down — he also engages with, making his thoughts about it — all that more incisive.

I worried about being overtaken by systems, that any system would overtake my reason for being there. Not realizing how much I was stealing in order to create my own, until SM.

That said, did not have any bother with running into abstracts styles, because of Math, and Sylvia Plath. Both achieving avenues to concretion despite it.

Seductions of Poison and Complaint

He is never far from complaint.

Anybody who embraces their fame, who isn’t humiliated or incensed by it is contemptible.

1.11.60 CIORAN

After his being censorious as all get out, then goes onto say:

Don’t waste your time criticizing others, censoring their works; do your own, devote all your hours to it. The rest is rubbish or infamy. Be in solidarity with what is true in you and even “eternal.”

1.11.60 CIORAN

Embraces his willingness to expose and entertain himself, with whatever its tender tyranny, as long is it addresses the eternal dead on. Commands himself, to refuse to let admiration get in his way.

By judging one’s contemporaries without pity, one risks being right and appearing in eyes of posterity incisive and clear-sighted. But of the same time, we renounce the adventurous side of admiration, to the heartfelt errors that it presupposes. Yes, admiration is an adventure, all the more beautiful because its nearly always wrong. It is frightening, although reasonable, to have no illusions about anyone.

And yet, pulls a Vincent, and does the opposite.

My admiration, however impassioned it may be, always retains a touch of poison.

1.11.60 CIORAN

Admiration when it arises, often finds its poison. Much as love does. Admiration is a fertile part of my Love Bunny in a way I refuse to defame.

Because of how it I find in it, the glorious shit that Cioran is talking about! And that it preexists him, as part of my fiction. Thus it becomes, something of a renewal in discussion with a new “host.”

Letting the voices exchange across eras, that all eras have their discoveries addressing time in a web of eternal astonishment.

All fiction is salutary, and, no more than any other, I can’t do without it. (The further I go, the more I am lead to multiply my admissions of defeat.)

1.11.60 CIORAN

Searingly genuine.

Emil Cioran Journal 1.11.1960

SUb HUb

Sometimes wherever I am a new post pops up, starts writing itself, and I just start it there.

Because whoever I was writing to, made me think of it.

Engenders in the chew chew of poetry. Everything I do. Because it’s the right thing to do.

CIORAN wallups he is a cap ten.

TODAYS quote:

GLORIOUS GLORIOUS from Cioran

The charlatan side of every man with talents. Even if gift was not in nature and only invented and played (as laid my bad) by one who possesses it. Or still: that he is astonished by what in it gratifies. Among the poets especially: invested of grace, but a grace that is equivocal.

Grabbing that. Right down to its Battle of the Trees. Play and Grace. And surprise/astonishment and how it gratifies —

Poetic yearnings of his own on full dis play —-

The Sponge

Doing the same with Dear Theo.

As with Vince. He couldn’t draw. Picasso just started earlier.

WHY, because I sponged that fuck and live off of it. Still still he affects my philo.

Vince goes full on religious — he crosses so many boundaries along way in his honest dear theo ness, full on everything else connected to creation of his work. FIRST. FIRSTFIRSTFIRST, wrastles with his own ruthless curse?

Lovingly dies for it…

Where love and death collide so does he. There’s a quote where he swears off love and then seconds later, exhales, backtracks….

Here it is:

Then, not at once, but very soon, I felt that love die within me. A void, an infinite void, came in its stead. You know I believe in God; I did not doubt the power of love, but then I felt something like: ‘My God, my God, why hast Thou for-saken me?' and everything became a blank. I thought: Have I been deceiving myself? . . . ‘O God, there is no GodI' The emptiness, the unutterable misery within me, made me think: Yes, I can understand that there are people who drown themselves. But I was far from approving of this, and I found strength in the manly word of Father Millet: Ca toujours semble qum le suicide etait une action de malhonnete homme. (It has always seemed to me that suicide vaas the deed of a dishonest man.)

VINCENT VAN GOGH’s translation of the French.

He doesnt know he’s just doing it.

And eventually his turns with

the mad

nest? Well, its just starting to show up.

It’s for that purpose I never write alone. Too dangerous… Dear THEO.

I venture out in contexts my mediator can manage. And thats all I do because otherwise I am letting the dogs loose and thats all I am doing. Vince since rinse.

Why I love Vince. For give ness is a token of proverbial tenderness… in him. Even in confusion and riot.

Of color.

Always true to its purpose even tho he gets crazy on girls. Huge part of journal? yeah it is. Vince liked girls. His dog loved girls and not just for fyking but that too.

Quote Boat

His quotes my Red Bowed Goldy Locks for pouredge are invested infested with it. Nature or Nurture with cull and calamity and columns of invention play grace and

waste

land bands of hooded

foresters…. STOP.

Thats fiction — floating up, wrapping around itself, familiar thieves — even Fitz might say, where hunt and phrase form questions…

Carp‘unters

Do I mind doing quotes. No…. everybody does it but differently. Some go arty. Others just include in discussions…. Others go full on to footnotes…

Do I do all three. So far, but its really just a bit of each

In teeth, A BIT

Sponge and soap. Bathed in blood… cud

scud —

just blowing suds? are we —

Sin: Bad, Sad,

but Wad is pronounced differently

I love spending time with them? Yes.

Again I got from Beckett,

PHRASE HUNTING. Part of the mill and its grind… Grind is about making grain grain, not just about fycking. But also Hamlets Mill — Beckett I am pretty sure knew about that book. I remember in his book him thinking about it — I dont know it was tricky he was using geomancy under the lid? No — not exactly, more like a sudden burst of its revelation to him and he figured out a way to get it in.

His Fiction. CHA CHA CHA.

I sometimes thinks the freezes into threesies comes out of Pounds’ wondrously nutty narratives. He is in some ways a Dadaist.

S’en entendre.

Thats partiality true of all junkyard dogs… conjurers and their comedians.

Waste Band

In Marcel Proust’s Swann’s Way, Swann seemingly had his pick of women from his own class. But they did not phase him, around them he always remained relatively at ease, basically took their association for granted as obvious unto itself.

Even at times, looking for Odette, while among his own class, they could appear to him as something of a trivialization of life, as compared to his incessant regard for Odette.

Swann with respect to women seemed to seek out those from other classes.

I am still reading Swanns Way, line by line from French into the English, because Proust’s French is native, unbleached, expansive and naturally complex.

Comparisons to beauty in art infused Swann’s love and his laments over Odette, both complicitly and explicitly.

Marcel never really ascribes to Odette, her being a courtesan. So much as everybody else does talking about her. Her job, really, is surviving just being Odette. Like Swann’s job is surviving just being Swann.

Swann is not able to change Odette, or control her or even, ultimately, after first flush of Madame Verdurin’s curiosity, he is not able to make himself fit in with Odette’s crowd.

And, in some ways, Swann admits he doesn’t understand it himself, why he was so fanatically in love with Odette, who for him was lacking in specific aspects of beauty as well as intelligence, and yet different in a way that constantly pulled him back.

Their marriage, incidentally, created room around him, among those who knew his family, where nobody else but her existed. His relationship with her created a separation for him from members of his own class where he could do what he had to ? no matter what the implication.

To die for love

To die for love. Time wasted loving someone “not your type.” I started thinking about this as an accusation, about how hopeless love can appear - febrile and futile.

And then started thinking about love as a phenomena, that does not exist alone, but that also happens to occur existentially amidst a variety of psychological manifestations. Such as an alienation with reality. And up again pops to my mind, the hopeless misrule of Sweeney Astray.

“His brain convulsed,
his mind split open.
Vertigo, hysteria, lurchings
and launchings came over him,
he staggered and flapped desperately,
he was revolted by the thought of known places
and dreamed strange migrations.”
― Seamus Heaney, Sweeney Astray

Night Bird

Crescendos exposing a multitude of realities, in a state of error terror and devolution of trust with time, can occur as a shocking transhistorical estrangement from reality,

There’s a place in Sweeney Astray called Glen Bolcain:

Glen Bolcain's Significance:

• Asylum:

  Glen Bolcain is a significant place for Sweeney in the poem. He finds habitation there, describing it as a "natural asylum" where all the madmen exist.

• Refuge:

  Glen Bolcain provides Sweeney with a refuge, where he spends time with "mad friends" who like him are stuck in the trees living a bird life.

• Eternal Return:

  Sweeney repeatedly returns to Glen Bolcain, highlighting his inability to disengage from it.

After reading Sweeney Astray, I used to think about the Glenn a lot - particularly in terms of a sublime sense of mutiny, that was going on with me, and ribald stretches of madness, whence reality become nearly entirely secondary to (what I began to call) “living in the Glenn.”

A hopeless sense of lament, infused with love, about reality itself, also being a sordid liberation, exploding across all divisions of thought, religion fiction philosophy art psychiatry poetry language, all the humanities, and even eventually into science as well, so that any separation between them had ceased.

Its insalubrity heartbreaking and ferocious. And for years, felt as if left wandering amongst its “trees,” infected, infatuated, and hopeless to any return to a sense for life, previously thought to be congruently shared.

And yet, though shockingly caught up in a wilderness/wasteland of cascading preoccupations, still ideas about love (and beauty), however seemingly interminable, never stopped carrying with it a sense of savior, right along with its sacrilege, as “hopeless but true.”

Attempting to make do, with catcher in the rhyme, an inability to escape it, or even now, any want anymore to disentangle from what it brings to my shore. Precocious tandem turns, latent with a soul’s scattering dust, of a lust to fold weary bait of bird-in-tree, dearly merely into latent sojourns with the restless and inciteful.

Taking Own Work as Granted

Getting to sections along the way, where find it’s all there, but it’s not in the right order. It’s jumpy, with discovery and pursuit. Each para its own hit or cut or saturation...

Is kinetic, but doesnt capture the movement.

So aft to creating pathway - in Shakespeare time - a pathway that smooths out switches, lets language and rhyme meat out places where delicate, where abrupts, while also applying mosaic of LuLu moving from one place to the next, which am using as ground for her restlessness.

Rereading Dear Theo

Dear Theo, Vincent Van Gogh autobiography in letters, is available for download from Internet Archive, edited by Irving Stone.

Book of letters, bade into being by Irving Stone. Letters are from Vincent Van Gogh to his brother Theo Van Gogh. Book originally published, as I understand it, with the approval of the Van Gogh family in 1937. Book is dedicated to Theo and Theo’s wife Johanna Van Gogh.

Quotes from Book:

From Irving Stone’s Preface

There was one man on earth who understood Vincent, who encouraged him in his work, provided him with the supplies and the money necessary to continue his painting, who had an inexhaustible fund of the love which, above all things, Vincent so desperately needed : his brother Theo.

Each night, when the fourteen to sixteen hours of drawing and painting were over, Vincent sat dowm with pen and ink and poured out his heart to Theo. There was no idea or thought too small, no happening too trivial, no element of his craft too insignificant, no scene too unimportant for Vincent to communicate to the only other living person who considered his every word and feeling precious.

Thus Vincent wrote the story of his own life.

I am thinking of bringing this book into my Color Theory class. Nobody writes letters about art and color, like Vincent to Theo.

They are so filled WITH IT.

Here are some of Vincent’s drawings from his letters:

Started down this road because of Zizek’s discussion on Joan Copjec’s book Cloud Between Paris and Tehran — where they talk about Sufi Islam. Havent read yet, it’s on its way.

ŽIŽEK GOADS AND PRODS

BARZAKH: AN EXERCISE IN MATERIALIST MYSTICISM

Comrades…

Read more

a year ago · 120 likes · 14 comments · Slavoj Žižek

I think of there being seven sects/approaches to Islam.

• Suni,

• Shia,

• Sufi,

• Muslim in India,

• European Diaspora, trés diverse.

• America, has two I know of.

  • Diaspora, seems a blend, from what I understand, of any branch of Islam - is a unification in a way ?

  • The other is home grown from Elijah Mohammed — who is first American Islamist prophet. I think of him as being closer to Smith and the Mormons - In that he was, the American progenitor of an American religious extension that exists, within the greater Islamic fold, visiting Mecca and all. And of course the evolution of Malcom X. Who is an important American figure. Born 1925, whose history is very much of his time, mid century, the forties in New York. When he was known as Red. Through to the 1960s, birth of the cool, 1965 he was assassinated.

In terms of Islamic teachings, I have only read the Koran. And my impression of it was as a Guide to Living an Islamic Life, and Rules for being a Good Muslim. In some ways more Talmud than Torah. Though also includes plenty of history of by and about Mohammed. Have read couple bios of Mohammed as well. Whose contribution is a lot like Moses - unquestionably formidable inspiration in creation of Islam.

Sufi Poetry

I think of Sufism outside of Islam. As having its own existence as well, beside Islam.

And had only known via casual acquaintance with a couple of its poets.

Rumi (Jalaluddin Rumi): A 13th-century Persian poet and Sufi mystic, Rumi's Masnavi (Mathnawi) is considered one of the greatest poems in the Persian language and a cornerstone of Sufi thought. His poetry is widely translated and appreciated for its themes of love, divine connection, and the spiritual journey.

Hafez (Hafiz Shirazi): A 14th-century Persian poet, Hafez is known for his evocative and often sensual imagery, exploring the themes of love, wine (symbolizing divine intoxication), and the search for truth. His poetry is deeply rooted in Sufi mysticism and has been admired for its lyrical beauty and philosophical depth.

However, at a particular time, in the encumbrance of hell, I ran into Death before Dying: The Sufi Poems of Sultan Bahu.

Hit me like a lovable brick.

Tho, in terms of being religious, I rather skipped through the Islamist emphasis and just listened to the poet. I had by that point, stopped seeing emanations of god as a singularity, as infinity equaling 1 —

And instead, to some extent via the Tibetan Book of the Dead, as infinity equaling many.

Couple of Clips from Death before Dying: The Sufi Poems of Sultan Bahu

It is not just love poems.

Every day, at the time I came across this book, was a death, my “spirit” clinging to a kind of Coyote craziness, dying over and over and over. Only to wake up the next day and live through it again as perpetually on edge of death breathing in its terror.

Did not realize, as it started coming up in Novel, that I was working off of Sufi idea of imagination coming through breadth as creative impulse and its links to cloud and atlas of gods -

Until Zizek’s article pointed out to me.

Yaqui + Coyote + Raven

Living Sierra Nevada Mountains, read Carlos Costenada, Peruvian-born anthropologist and writer of books based on the mystical secrets of a Yaqui Indian shaman.

Its there where I first ran into the notion of death before dying, and it being precursor of knowledge.

Twas already there somewhat due to Burroughs and Kerouac. Hunter and Kirkeguaard.

The Indian thing, Coyote and Raven, showed up with Poe first. Then in Shakespeare and Company Bookstore basement, ran into Hyde’s Trickster Makes this World.

Trickster gods, Coyote especially, exists as repetitions of hunger for life and overturning deaths, when fall to doom. And wake up the next day having to learn it all over again.

AI Overview American Trickster Figures

American Indian cultures feature many trickster figures, often animal spirits like Coyote, Raven, or Rabbit, who engage in cunning and mischief.

Here's a more detailed look at some prominent tricksters:

• Iktomi:

  A spider-trickster spirit in Lakota mythology, often wise, cunning, and sly, and comes out on top in many stories.

• Coyote:

  A popular trickster figure across various Native American cultures, especially in the Southwest and Great Basin, known for stealing fire and engaging in pranks.

• Raven:

  A trickster spirit in the Pacific Northwest, often depicted as a cultural hero and creator figure, and also known for stealing the sun, moon, and stars.

• Nanabozho:

  The Ojibwe trickster and culture hero, who can take the form of animals or humans, and often combines both trickster and culture hero archetypes.

• Glooscap:

  An Algonquin trickster and culture hero who created natural features, often battling his evil twin brother to shape the landscape.

• Kokopelli:

  A figure in Anasazi and Hopi mythology, often depicted with a hump, known for being a prankster, fertility deity, and storyteller.

• Whiskey Jack:

  A trickster and friend to humankind in Algonquin, Menominee, and Cree cosmologies, more of a culture hero who teaches morals.

Feasting on Sweeny Astray

The Glen. Glen Bolcain. The Birdman of Glen Bolcain. Druidic knowledge… about escaping to the trees and getting stuck there, never wanting to leave.

There’s several translations of it. Heaney’s is the first I read. After discovering my “Birdman” coming under spells, including the fallen, the sponge, the thief etc.

My char babies early formations. I call LuLu a char. Char baby for me is about Cinder Ella, it’s about a life of feeding the fireplace. Char comes from Char Lotta, whether or not you have character, and not one, but many. And as between the whole lot, eclipses again and again: The Vanishing Mediator.