February 10 - Saint Wystan, Poet

Rev. Dr. George Bicknell loved boys.  He’d watch them from his voyeuristic perch in the Worcester Cathedral tower, lips chomping as if young flesh were a fresh invention and not a steady supply from the fathomless pit of lust.  Each Sunday he’d look forward not to the comforting snores of the congregation or the weekly conjugal tedium with his wife at Vespers, but the sight of the choirboys squirming in their confinement while he spewed rote lies about forgiveness into the apathetic air.  One day, he couldn’t take it any more--the hairless salt of sweet boyflesh would be on his tongue by nightfall or he’d end his meaningless failed forgettable life.

There was one … an image of uncooked innocence reading by a gravestone--as if God were complicit in his desperation and had, right now, just for him, created a lamb to be sacrificed on the searing altar of sex.  Laden with the cruel confidence of desire, armed with the subtle words of his profession, he led the boy to a hut by the Severn where he repeatedly stabbed him with passion’s steel tyranny.  Reason, compassion, balance--they were absent … only the dark stench of possession.

When the rampage was over and his blood had fallen to a human temperature, he saw that the boy was dead.  Realizing what he had done, he stumbled to the Cathedral and impaled himself on a cross.  Three days later, on February 21 1907, a passerby looked into the hut and found a newborn baby, whose name was Wystan Hugh Auden, whose words lead to the land of the dead.

Most modern poets have forgotten music.  Their palettes have one or two colors, their kits three or four tools.  They strut their mushy minds, consumed with ejaculating their names into great vats of ears--regardless of the quality of their verse or souls, or the souls of those at the bottom of their narcissistic fountain.  They think the world was created in 1922, that the infinite is a mathematical set and not the impossible wound that bleeds all human song.  Their social conscience is themselves, their moral vision their genitals, their idea of a poetic education an English degree, a few workshops and weekly inebriation at literary readings.  No one can sanely connect their ideas to their behavior.  They’ve lost the knowledge that the world is the poet’s only teacher and they would do better to be friends with prostitutes and gardeners than the literary dilettantes they think are grand.  Perception is analysis, wisdom consensus, progress publication.  Unimaginative, imperceptive, equating eros with coitus, locked in themselves like a garbage barge in a suburban swimming pool, they produce worn photocopies of lukewarm commonplaces in clunky adjective-infested stanzas of stale mediocrity, which they celebrate noisily as divine achievements in their undisciplined cloisters.

St. Wystan was not such a poet.  St. Wystan was not such a man.

He was turned to stone and fashioned into a grotesque on the western side of St. Stephen’s Cathedral on September 28 1973 and elevated by the Council of I to sainthood on April 27 1992.  We honor the saint today because this was the day at the age of 35 that he acknowledged his relationship with Chester Kallman was a failure, making the rest of his life a quiet squeal of pain.  Let us honor the saint today with our souls and flesh.

February 9 - Saint Vincent, Painter

Freedom is a spin we put on hope, a name we use when young.  But as the noose tightens and we see Death waving at us like an old cousin, it begins to resemble the notions we discarded at puberty¾Santa Claus and Heaven … and its black-sheep brother, Fate, creeps onto our tongues.

The Creator God, whether dead or living, who stokes the souls of saints, also stalks them.  He roams the earth, hiding anywhere¾sunflowers, razorblades, swamps¾so that we continue on our happy ways and He can take advantage of our trust to quickly flatten us.  Saints are His preference.  At first He’s pleased¾imitation is the highest form of flattery¾and He may even grant a few favors, making the young saint briefly think the universe is good.  But then watch out … His envy’s stronger than His pleasure:  the usurper feels God expanding in his soul; at first, a sweet fullness, then¾snap¾God takes over, the saint goes mad.

St. Vincent was born on March 30 1853 to Anna Cornelia Carbentus in Groot-Zundest.  At the moment of birth, her flower expanded in intensely saturated color and from a gush of yellow a boy trembling with ecstasy was tossed into the world like a sparrow into the entrails of a shooting star.  He knew no home, no love, no reason.  The world was one and passion was the color of the world.  Dramatic, lyrically rhythmic, inimitably and powerfully fusing form and content, he strode the earth seeing the pain, joy and fire at the root of form.

Because of his devotion, God would not let this saint go gently into that starry night.  He tracked him down in a wheatfield and tortured him with unfiltered visions of creation, finally slaughtering this exhausted broken devotee on July 29 1890 in Montmartre.  St. Vincent was planted at the foundation of what became the Abbesses metro stop, where he explodes daily, still in death trying to reach the stars.  He was elevated to sainthood by the Council of I on this day in 1962, which is the year his nephew transferred the saint’s collection to the state for public consumption, which is the day his brother Theo read the saint’s words, Joy cometh in the morning.  May we know that joy until Fate finds us.  Let us honor the saint today with our souls and flesh.

Monday Thoughts

Art is the rabid inner necessity, at the cost of anything, of composing an emotional language that precisely describes one’s experience in the world.

The evolution of art is proportional to expanding ripples of subversion.

No real errors exist anymore—only simulated errors.

The word, being dead or at least in the earth reconstituting itself, murmurs in shaky archetypes, and those of us, revenants of the word, grasp at hearing while the world around builds its stratagems of noise.

Life, if you’re lucky, is an enjoyable disaster.

Sipped absinthe and chomped chocolate chips, while listening to Dreyblatt and The Books:  sometimes life is perfect.

Necessities are tedious, irritating, distracting; necessity is seductive and, like all true seductions, deadly.  The artist is always battling necessities to confront necessity, always seeking the inaccessible singular behind (?) the omnipresent plural.

Christ in the gospels casts “Legion” out of the “madman” into the pigs; the madman then presumably reintegrates into society, gets a job, a spouse, some kids.  Yet today, would we not rather say that Legion must remain within:  not only is there no place to cast them into but I do not desire to be exorcised.  The irreducible plurality and contradictoriness within is our fuel and we use this inner ineffable divinity to refute Christ and all in society that are his silent inheritors.  Legio mihi nomen est, quia multi sumus.

Those of us whose souls are formed of many centuries should be able to assemble (cafeteria-style) our own custom time-based century from our own internal psychic one.  Kafka:  the clocks are not in unison.

In the First World, money is a subsidiary of the imagination; in the Third World, neither money nor imagination exist, other than as subsidiaries of necessity.

February 5 - Saint Maria, Angelologist

Angels are terrible.

Everyone knows this who’s met one.

There they are¾crowding out the air

just beyond my window, composing night.

And what am I but an unlit shade to their prerogatives.

They give birth, these helpers who don’t help,

according to the laws of contrapuntal blackness that they sing,

to death, and death, and death, and death, and death, and death.

And sometimes to a life that’s crammed with death.

Maria, St. Maria.  Doll made man and man made death,

conjured by love’s bleak agony to life’s fake stage,

running, squirming, seeing, there, an angel’s

slimy outline, angels’ flickered laughter, intoned into a crater of society

on December 4 1875.  Oh winged arrow, sting the night,

the night, the wing, the man.

What are these apparitions that we describe as light

but are dooms?  Are they what we see in mirrors

when we actually look?  Those round students of darkness

wanting to escape the flat flat glass that shines so

perfectly¾aren’t they us?  Aren’t they every god

that’s ever died?   Blood.  The word of angel wit.

Blood.  The dialogue of doom and light.  Blood.

St. Maria’s curse and poetry.

Angels!  What are they but humans inside out?  I saw one

in a corner of a closet of a nightmare, calling, not for me, calling …

it was made to call.  I thought I was an angel, calling

for myself from the reeking distant depths, but all it was was

wind, and I an eye watching whirling worlds.

René Karl Wilhelm Johann Josef.

So many names to not call forth.

I suppose that’s what angels are for …

to not call our names.  And we?  We’re here

to listen to the not calling.  When we’re not spoken¾

that’s when we’re most alive.

Absence, silence, muttered ballads in their silent nonexistent ballrooms:

there he was, a prince of night, muttering alongside, muttering

stacked horrors of silence from the horror of himself, the horror of the world, the horror

that they aren’t the same.

Fools!  Flee!  Flee yourselves!  Don’t you see

you’re not anything you’ve thought?  That it’s better to be devoured

by an angel than devour pastries by the Seine?  Let the gods eat you … so what?

Maybe then even you will fall into a mirror of creation and birth with your murderer a

word.

What else can we hope for?

Loving what he was, he became it on

December 29 1926 and was elevated in

1997 in Munich and Visp behind a contradictory rose.

Let us honor the saint today with our flesh and souls.

February 2 - Saint Marcus V. Pollio, Codifier and Architect

The Romans plundered everything within the distance a horse could ride in a month from their corrupt center.  This includes maidens, boys, asses whole or partial, technical knowledge, gods, dogs, frogs, metaphysical systems, loyalties of every imaginable description, sprats, French buttercups, exciting new strains of genital warts, and obelisks.  One particular obelisk, The Envy of Cleopatra, while being transported from Alexandria to Rome on June 13 70 B.C.E., toppled into the half-completed Aventicum aqueduct during a spontaneous orgy involving the slaves and centurions moving the Envy and the reeking swarthy topless aquatic engineers, killing hundreds moving to and fro in the ancient mindless act and instantly transforming la petite mort to la grande.  From the resultant fomentation a boy was born and his name was Marcus V. Pollio and he was a saint.

A good writer, a skilful draftsman, versed in geometry and optics, expert at figures, acquainted with history, informed on the principles of natural and moral philosophy, somewhat of a musician, not ignorant of the sciences both of law and physic, nor of the motions, laws, and relations to each other, of the heavenly bodies, his god-like mind and genius incarnated dominion, utility and beauty and laid the verbal foundation for all that we now live within.  Poor but honest, putting off ordinary clothing and walking with a wreath of poplar on his head, a lion's skin slung across his left shoulder, and a large club in his right hand, he sallied forth to Caesar to prove that architects were more worthy than wrestlers, artists than aristocrats.  He codified an artform and dressed the world in noble precepts.

Wrinkled with age and constitutionally sick, his form the antithesis of the forms he advocated, Augustus, two years after attaining divinity, specifically on December 27, called St. Marcus V. Pollio to him and had him burnt and his ashes cast on the Horologion of Andronicos, where one can hear them expounding on the principles of firmness, commodity and delight when the sun has entered the sign of Aries, and run through about an eighth part of it.

The Council of I elevated him to sainthood on September 11 1345.  Let us honor the saint today with our souls and flesh.

January 31 - Saint Alan Alexander of Daphne and Vespers

The bees of Ashdown Forest do not know mercy.  Neither have they heard of pain.  They buzz ceaselessly in their innocent wood seeking innocence, for the bees are cruel and their lack of knowledge derives from their inability to reflect on and articulate their nature, but the innocence they seek possesses the ability but not the necessary experience.  The bees provide the experience.

Sarah Maria Heginbotham wandered from her Weald home, weary and full of figs, on April 13 1881, to the tut-tut of the titmouse and the tat-tat of the tufted tit-tyrant.  She wandered in the wild Weald and smelled of woads and whortleberries.  She lay herself down on a patch of yellow welds to dream but not to sleep, and the bees smelled her and removed her gingham and cotton hand-me-downs and the Great Bee stung her in her honey pot.  So it was that on January 18 1882 she gave birth to St. Alan Alexander, who suffered estrangement from wife, son, bear and bee; humiliation from the nature of his surviving work, which spoke of timeless truths but was denigrated by the self-righteous powers as unworthy of adults on their own; who felt possessed by his creation and wished it, its companions, innocence, owls, roos and forests dead.  He spent his last years as an invalid, unvisited by his children, ignored by his wife, and bereft of mistresses.  Yet his four books of verse and stories tower above the daily common forgettable literary buzz, the pretensions of sophisticates and the sophistication of stuffed and unloved scholars, stinging the knowledgeable with innocence, the innocent with knowledge.  He painted the grey landscape between childhood and adulthood with colour, precision, distinction and sadness.  It is the landscape we live in and the landscape we see when we die.

St. Alan Alexander was transmogrified to a honey pot illustration in the Ernest Howard Shepard Memorial Collection in the Library at Babel on January 31 1956.  The Council of I elevated him to sainthood on April 20 1996.  Let us honor the saint today with our souls and flesh.

R&P: Camp Songs

I’m A Little Piece Of Sin

No One Knows Who I’ve Been In

Got Four Limbs And A Thick Hot Rod

I Have Fun Cause I Ain’t God

Bonk Bonk Battle Cattle Tattle Flash Peep Peep

Bonk Bonk Tattle Battle Cattle Dash Creep Creep

Bonk Bonk

***

God god, the history fraud

Entered time without his rod

When mankind came out to play

God the rod fraud ran away

R&P: Pot God

The obscure medieval scholar, Per Judias Gunt, once obscurely wrote in that obscurest of treatises, “Summa contra de facto”—“Drugs are a plane ride to God for those who can’t fly themselves”; yet, 17,417 pages later, in that very same treatise, he also writes—“The Almighty, in order to remain the Almighty and not simply some vain projection of our petty selves, lives and must live an infinite distance from not just human flesh, which reaches ever down, but the human spirit, which reaches ever in all directions—this very infinity being the fuel, joy, and hell of existence, our existence, the eternity of this infinity being wholly and unqualifiedly necessary to the continued being of both man and god, …”, begging the patent and obvious question, “What strange transport might exist to span the impossible distance from man to god other than the world of ecstatic dreams and what better aid to the world of ecstatic dreams than the very herbs and hallucinogens of this generous indifferent vermiculous earth on which we inexplicably haplessly inescapably find ourselves wandering?”

In short, there are two ways to find God:

1. By means of God—the means for which we have no precedent, clue, technique, apparatus, direction, record, experience, or hope.
2. By means of the earth—the means for which we have precedent, clue, technique, apparati, direction, record, experience, and hope.

We summarily dismiss the many false means of the earth which claim to be true means—those of politics and its protesting sibling, sex, food, sport, business, family, health, technology, work of all sorts, ecology, sadomasochism, murders and suicides, and incarceration of whatever persuasion.  These are mundane and undemocratic.  We also dismiss, though not so readily, the hallucinogenic concoctions that arise from herbs—from opium to heroin, from coke to crack to croak, from all the acronyms to all the euphemisms.  Not for reasons of legality—the law is risible to all who love God—but for the simple reason that these substances do not typically allow sustained reflection of the divine diversity.  We even dismiss, though barely and not really, the great fungi, for reasons to be explored elsewhere.

Summa totalis, then.  Only pot is left.

Pot, for a bong of reasons.

1. As pot, it is alphabetically similar to portal, suggesting it suffices as a door to other domains; and to poet, suggesting what it needs to suggest.  Perhaps importantly, it is also not dissimilar to potato, poutine, and poverty.
2. As weed, it suggests that we are able to regularly eat of the gods’ wildness and not die, for we know their ambrosia is only randomly accessible, with frequently catastrophic side effects.
3. As number, it is equal to the meaning of the universe + 0, indicating it combines the mystic qualities of everything and nothing.
4. As marijuana, it suggests a holy image of Mary’s yoni, combining the sacred exultation of the Virgin and the profane gluttonous juicy maw of the slut.
5. As hemp, it suggests hump, encouraging both animal visions (which become incarnate) and divine obstacles (which mysteriously disappear).
6. As ganja, it binds East and West and thus all opposites into a singular force that happily refuses to reduce any of its manifold tensions.
7. As hash, it suggests the Great Ash of poetic mythology, including the Greatest Ash, Ygdrasil, uniter of heaven, earth, and hell.
8. As cannabis, it suggests our ancient association with the vast canvas of the world—the compulsion we have to create another world from the brilliant peace and celebration of our minds.
9. As THC, it suggests The Highway to the Center—again, with mystical impulse—or, for those of a certain kind of western and religious orientation, The Highway to Christ.  Either way, it gets you somewhere important quickly at a fraction of the cost, effort, and damage of the competition.
10. As the reverse of pot is top, indicating the top of the world and, in fact, the top of anything, the reverse of other hallucinogens are things like kcarc, nioreh, dsl, and moorhsum.  Such flexibility and mirror-friendliness are a sure indication of pot’s divinity.
11. Pot is formed by surrounding the circular vowel with two dental-labial consonants.  Surely a sign—a perfect happy circle centered by concord, constancy, and the smacking of lips.

It remains a long-debated point as to how highs should be measured.  For as sound is measured in decibels, weight in grams, and electrical resistance in ohms, so a pot-high could be measured in, say, nobs and group highs in obonobs.  For example, if I asked you, How high were you last night? you might respond, I was about 7.2 nobs.  If you asked me how the party was, I might respond, It seemed about a 12.1 or maybe a 13.3 obonob party.

On the other hand, as the discerning reader will have already noted, to attempt to measure the effects of the weeds of heaven on us terrestrial questing nomads may be presumptuous and, as that Austrian-British language gamer noted, What we should not speak about we must not measure.

Let us close this meditation with a little prayer—

Oh Great Potgod, intimate and foreign and sometimes jolly, Thou who inserts the line into the circle so seamlessly, of historical repute and mythological allusion, never destroying always burning, alchemically blending fire and water into concoctions not entirely terrestrial, of turgid vision and plundered plans and garrulous guts and dubious conclusions, rarely given to violence—whether mental, physical, emotional, ontological, epistemological, or herpetological—but tending rather to doves and cheese, salacious in intent and sometimes in effect, noisy like a motorcycle quiet like a bear, redder than red and pinker than pink, like a worm than only knows how to tunnel down to fun, blessed like the Virgin but happy like the slut, hungrier than a fire hydrant, so very herby burpy chirpy nearby slurpy zippy zappy peppy tippy nappy crappy flippy hoppy sloppy trippy lippy, we thank Thee.

R&P: Techniques of God-lovers

The authentic lover of God faces many obstacles in a secularized society.  I don’t speak of the church-goer, who is simply anachronistic, or those who tick the religious boxes on the decanal census, who are simply conformist, or those politicians who pluck transcendence and package it in sound-bites, who are simply opportunistic, but those who writhe insomniacally in bed each night, longing for God.  The God who has elusively escaped incarceration in dogma, institutions, texts, sacerdotal vestments, rites, icons, even thought and visions.  The God-lover knows the gods who claim divinity but remain in the cages of man are not gods, but simply archetypes of schoolmasters, priests, professors, and dictators.  The giant schoolmaster in the sky with that infinite chalkboard and really big piece of chalk.  But no real God would claim divinity; no real God would need to claim it.  This real God is what the lover awaits those sweaty bucking nights.

I don’t need to enumerate the obstacles:  the God-lover will know them, the sensitive secularist might be able to imagine them, and the others won’t have read thus far.  I enumerate only the techniques, to expose the charlatans, detract the timid, and occupy the scholars.

	Technique	Required Skills
1	The god-lover stays fully and persistently in potentiality and creation, delaying the movement of what he creates into the world’s industries until after his death, in faith that they will move there should they be required.  He does not do this because he does not long for such movement but because he longs more for God and God, he knows from experience and intuition, hides at the edges of creation and in the murkiness of possibility.	Pride Stubbornness Desolation Vision Faith
2	Ability to readily move between states of energy.  A master of the art of transition management, which is a sub-discipline of the grand art of energy management.  So the god-lover reaches the excess of one state (e.g. debauchery), only to long for and achieve the excess of mystic quietude.  The chief technique is learning how to recognize these as simply different forms of energy and thus move between them seamlessly; whereas the one who does not love god stays in one state his entire life, objectifying it … and the one who wants to love god but fails breaks moving from one state to another, or breaks others.	Melting, sublimation, freezing, evaporation, deposition, condensation, ionization, recombination
3	Becoming a leaf, accepting all things.  The god-lover, rather than imposing his proclivities on the world, allows the world to exist on its own terms.  He seeks to become the world and, in so doing, to become a subject of the spirit of the world—a subject in both senses of the term:  a vassal to the world’s power and a discipline of the world through the reflection of the world in himself.  All truths are valid except the truths that claim to reduce the world to themselves.	Schizophrenia (not as disease, but as the robust celebration of psychic diversity)
4	Passport-collector, mask-collector.  Most generally, the god-lover is a collector of all things:  ideas, emotions, sights, smells, sounds, textures, tastes, sensations, perceptions.  But the two techniques most required in the collection of all things are the collection of passports and masks—closely related, for they both require the appearance of legitimacy and ease in all situations.  The god-lover mingles with kings and bums, the wise and foolish, the articulate and bumbling, savages and sophisticates, the beautiful and ugly, without discrimination.  He easily and knowingly adapts his language, gestures, fashion, attitude, and thinking to whatever context he finds himself in … and he finds himself in all.	Forger Nomad Model Thespian Thief
5	Waiting for God in the knowledge that for God to be God the waiting must not be fulfilled.  Placing oneself fully in the space between this waiting and knowledge and God, allowing that space to be populated with the children of God and the waiting and knowledge.  So the waiting for God becomes the waiting for that space between to be populated.  And so as that space is populated, the god-lover describes the children and the desire for God grows.  So the waiting for God becomes waiting for that space to be populated which then becomes waiting for the description of the population to emerge.  Regardless, it almost all is waiting and the god-lover waits and in this he excels.	Impossible patience Vain hope Ecstatic futility Infinite desire Imaginative reconstruction of necessity
6	Aligns himself wholly with the poets, mystics, madmen, and prophets of God in all its forms.  Refuses all manifestations of money, power, fame, validation, security and pleasure if they should in any way interfere with his essential alignment.  Refuses all alignment with any temple, movement, or force other than the temple of the universe, the movement of all things, and the force of the flower.	Impecunious Constant Transchronological, transpolitical, transideological, transcircumstantial, transsensual Lunacy Perspicacity
7	Sees shadows as senses and senses as shadows—the dull round of savings and shavings, seduction and factories, fame and loss.	Solitary Hapless Desolate Iconoclastic Non-programmatic Feral Enthusiastic Comic Paraomniall Perpetual comfort with loss Dystopically utopian
8	Wholly committed to establishing a new soul-world order through not establishing a new soul-world order.
9	Ability to walk through mirrors.  For there are the lovers of the false gods of mirrors, who show only what the viewer wishes to see—and there are the lovers of the true gods of mirrors (which is to say the true god), and these can walk through, knowing in their genitals that vision births reality and their vision is stronger than the apparent hardness of glass.