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.

R&P: The Colour of God

Allah is composed of many colors.  Not only the natural ones—nipple brown, clit pink, semen white, puss green—and the unnatural ones—jejune hope, turgid justice, risible peace, odiferous faith, malefic love—but the ones forbidden to humanity, sealed forever in mirrors and eyes.

How did I learn the colors of Allah, their 99 billion names?  I was taught, long ago, before numbers had filled the bucket of time, by Ali bin bon Dar al-Tawhid, the great chromatic theologian.  The story was told of his journey to the palette that rests on the outer turrets of Jannah, occasionally tipping and spilling bright pigments on the earth; when that happens, there’s famine, pandemics, incest, nuclear mishaps, some common disaster—or a messiah’s born.  Whatever falls falls, as the Sunnis say.  Spilt crimson in Jannah, war in Tehran, as the Shiites say.

It has long been considered a critical debate in Islamic theology as to what conditions lend themselves to palette tipping and, more particularly, whether these conditions can be manipulated by humans to spill certain colors on certain parts of the earth—whether the holiest of men could even behave in such a way as to blend colors on the palette, producing new phenomena in history, thus seeing more of The Sovereign, All Compelling Seducer, and Protecting Friend.  The more heretical among the speculators have mused whether the most extreme of ascetic lives might be able to produce new colors in Allah, thus enlarging possibilities for troubled mankind; these heretics, however, have frequently been subjected to gruesome and untimely ends.

The debate reached a fevered pitch in Fes in 941 when two scholarly camps at the University of Al-Karaouine feuded one night over how many shades of grey co-existed in Allah—the Purists staunchly defending 0 (The Merciful, after all, could know no grey), the Minimalists defending 99 (The Compassionate, after all, must contain all colors, though the grey within Him was overwhelmed by an infinity of light).  All 66 scholars would have perished at the hands of each other if Ali bin bon Dar al-Tawhid himself hadn’t appeared above the carnage and said,

Alchemists, we, in our dark

night, labour to paint the world. 

Ali bin bon Dar al-Tawhid! cried one of the few remaining academics who had not had his tongue hacked away.  Ali bin bon Dar al-Tawhid! Tell us the story of your journey to the palette of Allah.

Ah, friends.  Ah, grey

scholars.  Ah, pale

pedants of twilit

moors.  Ah, sad shades

of sunlight.  Ah,

bleached and

cadaverous horrors of a

most wretched and

unreflective

moon.  Ah, wan and

waning philosillies.  Ah,

drab and doughy

…

This is the way Ali bin bon Dar al-Tawhid spoke, long and ponderously, in the manner of chromatic theologians, with a sentence’s last word frequently flung onto the next line.  And he paused after his noble salutations and told them of his great journey … a story so drawn out, so convoluted and tangential, that the last scholar expired long before Ali bin bon Dar al-Tawhid was finished.

Some time later, weeks after he had described his perilous escape from earth—his emancipation from the Sartorial Angels, who stitch souls to bodies, his horrors with the fiery Archangels who incarcerated his soul in burning mud, his horrible combat with the voracious Principalities who guard the portals of our world; days after he had described his impossible flight from the sky—his mortal debates with the Powers who pace the clouds, his savage labors with the Virtues who roam the firmament, his chthonic humiliations at the wings of the Dominions who ceaselessly mock and abuse; but days before he described his cunning bolt from Allah’s mansions—his tortures by the Thrones who delight in the subjugation of man, his apoplectic miseries with the Cherubim whose food is swords, his energetic annihilations under the Seraphim who fly upward faster than ten thousand speeds of light; weeks before he described his destitution on the eternal plains, his desolation in the everlasting canyons, his devastation on the infinite mountains, and his final hopeless hapless approach to Allah’s holy palette, Ali bin bon Dar al-Tawhid noticed that the 66 scholars were dead and he was bereft of an audience.  Yet, as he longed for students and more for a witness, he summoned me across the sad meadows of time—not because I was known or worthy, but because I wasn’t; not because I was talented or wealthy, but because I wasn’t; not because I was kind—and I came (who wouldn’t?) and sat listening below the great one’s many feet.

When Ali bin bon Dar al-Tawhid was done and had described the solitary palette and the 99 billion colors of Allah and under what conditions the palette tips and the glorious hues hidden from humanity forever, he wept from the sheer exhaustion of the retelling and I wept too, for no reason other than that weeping seemed appropriate.

And we parted ways, I back to the twenty-first century with its concrete and iPhones, he back to his sojourns in the elusive spectra of Allah, The Eternally Colorful, The Polychromatic, The Light.

January 23 - Saint Denis of Enlightened Largesse, Poetic Journalism and Encyclopedic Acceptance

Intelligent, ardent, effusive, eloquent, never at home, always abroad; or if it happened that he received others at his home and amid his own ideas, then he was the most open-hearted, the most hospitable of mortals, the most friendly to all men and to everything, and gave to all his circle, readers no less than authors or artists, not a lesson but a fête.  He taught us three things:  the hope for posthumous fame in this world to replace the promised immortality which theology had located in the next; the chaotic irreducible relation between all objects and concepts; that ideas must be released from their mental chains to swarm in the natural freedom of the body.

In Langres France in the eighteenth century, a girl craved knowledge.  She fell asleep praying for it.  Then she would dream, night after night, of squawking screeching birds—some eagles, some vultures; others sparrows, ostriches—spiraling up a great column to an unseen canopy in Paradise.  She’d wake in ferocious sweats, and doves and songbirds would sit on her shoulder and sing to her and comfort her.   During one especially virulent dream, as birds thicker than death were shrieking on her tomb, the girl's cranium opened, exposing her throbbing brain, and an eagle of truth dropped a significant steaming turd into it.

Other birds noisily joined--the Berlepsch's Tinamou, Rufous-bellied Chachalaca, Vanuatu Scrubfowl, Handsome Francolin, Chinese Bamboo-Partridge, Satyr Tragopan, Moustached Puffbird, Cayenne Nightjar, Reunion Solitaire, Boat-billed Tody-Bully, Crested Shrike-wit, Hairy-backed Bulbul, Scaly-breasted Illadopsis-Babbler, Palawan Flowerpecker, Uluguru Violet-backed Sunbird, Donaldson Smith’s Social-Weaver, Slut-faced Hemispingus, Violaceous-rumped Euphonia, Pyrrhuloxia, and Giant Cowbird-Bobolink--all these and thousands more deposited their avian waste into her open skull.  Nine months later, on October 5 1713, she delivered a babbling Saint Denis from her brain.

While usually journalism is antithetical to sainthood—journalists being the boors and pedants of creation—St. Denis elevated curiosity and truth-seeking to aesthetic heights and embodied philosophy for a future age.  On July 31 1784, just outside Le Coude Fou on rue du Bourg-Tibourg, while telling nested stories to passersby and plotting a revenge, St. Denis was changed to a pillar of merde and brought by Persephone Herself down to Hades, where he was placed by the most polluted section of the Styx, where he still stands.

The Council of I elevated St. Denis to sainthood on July 26 2000 after two centuries of unbroken futile debate, not through consensus but exhaustion.  We honor him today because on this day in 1797 his daughter, Angélique de Vandeul, became a fatalist, as was written up above.  Let us honor the saint today with our souls and flesh.

Reveries and Prayers: Attributes and Principles of the Child of God

Attributes of the Child of God:

1. Doesn’t care for society
2. Is an exile in the world, given to another world that doesn’t exist to exist most fully in this world
3. Follows his heart without regard for consequence
4. Is animated by and animates everything around him
5. Never urinates standing up
6. Longs for worldly success but will never once deviate from these attributes and principles to achieve his longing
7. Knows that love is the dead and yet-to-be children of God chatting across time and space
8. Lives for love
9. Stays vulnerable—emotionally, financially, intellectually, socially—all the time
10. Is both the wind (a wind) and an object in the wind

Principles of the Child of God:

1. Most humans are more animal than animals
2. Children are the most human, all of life’s a crawling back
3. Myth, as the abiding truth, is constantly more real than history
4. Gas is the superior, pure, and noble state, liquid is imperfect, solids are evil
5. There’s only one day
6. The only masters are the clouds, the only slaves are those who answer their phones
7. Time weeps, but myth laughs
8. Beauty isn’t the only truth, it’s the only fiction
9. Farts are less transient than God’s children
10. If work isn’t play, it isn’t worth doing