February 15 - Saint Chuang, Pomo Bandit

Qi Xia He had always preferred mistakes to any other course of action.  So that when both Chen Kong Long, prince-elect of the State of Zheng and nephew of the Emperor, and Ah Yuan Wu, local ya pear and lychee seller and sometimes bum, wanted to sleep with her, she asked herself the usual question¾which choice would be the biggest mistake?

She thought of Chen¾his glorious position, vast knowledge and dragon-like body¾he would surely be a mistake.  Too much comfort and society lead to the death of one’s true nature, Qi thought as she lay under the summer lotus tree and imagined making a great mistake with Chen in a palatial bed in Xishan, ruans and guqins playing to the shifting rhythms of the two lovers, covering their moans with the sweet cadence of orange blossoms.  She thought of Ah¾the meaninglessness of his existence, his magical corvine eyes and original interpretations of the world¾and thought, too much eccentricity draws one away from the human scrimmage necessary to maintain tension and vitality.  She fantasized about a dark, savage mistake with Ah, stumbling at the fringes of the world, some sorceress in a nameless land.

She sunk into the dark pit below her beauty and thought of her true nature¾a pure, elegant woman, made to remain aloof from the affairs of men and contemplate the world.  It would be unnatural for her get involved with either Chen or Ah, undistinguished and abysmal acts.

Then she had it.  She would sleep with both of them.  What could be a greater mistake, more contrary to her nature, more foreign to both social expectations and the principles of non-conformity?  Her parents would be devastated, each of her lovers horrified.  Even she recoiled in disgust.  She immediately rose and wrote affirmative poems of passion to Chen and Ah and waited for the future.

How did Qi know how to distinguish a mistake from a non-mistake?  How did she know her mistake was not a non-mistake and what she called a non-mistake really a mistake?  Was her criterion of using her own true nature as the basis for her decision legitimate and genuine?

Mistakes are always more interesting, Qi thought as she lay below Chen’s princely pushes, staring dreamily out the palace window at a shang-yang flying through the ginkgo trees.  When we do what is natural to us, we learn nothing, but when we do what is unnatural, we become mirrors of the world, she thought as she was pummeled by Ah under the Pinyin bridge at Li Hua.

All we know is that Qi was Qi.  Her heart had a particular pattern and her mind formed particular stories.  Pleasure, anger, sadness, joy, forethought, regret, change, and immobility flowed through her as they do all of us¾who knows why they flowed through her in the way they did?  Was it good or bad she thought this way?  Who has the criteria to tell?  If someone claims to have the criteria, where do I find the criteria to know their criteria are right?  All we can say is that Qi thought this way¾it’s just the way she was.

What we do know is that Chen’s and Ah’s seed mysteriously harmonized in her and after many more mistakes she gave birth to St. Tzu on Pure Brightness Day in 369 BCE.

More modern than modern, less serious than a child, he used words to show that words were less than we pretend and life not more than death.  Argue for the unadulterated fun of it¾not to reach a conclusion!  One is never reached anyway; the most that happens is we think we’ve reached the end, but really, we’ve just built a hut around ourselves to block the endless view.  Humans are babbling brooks, made to babble.  The self is a shifting collage of moods and modes; we like to pretend there’s a ruler of it all, but we never see any sign of one.  Life comes, it goes, the most perfect things are as full of flaws as the most imperfect things are as full of perfection.  Why do we use words like perfect and mistake?  Because they mean something, but we’re really not sure what.  Rather than using this ambiguity as a springboard into despair, St. Tzu used it for engaged and vital play.  His imaginative vision of the world, grounded in the speechless nothingness of raw existence, makes almost all thought since seem immature and western progress a silly gasp in the dark.

On the Double Ninth Festival in 286 he wandered up a hill to argue with the chrysanthemums.  A giant bird named Roc spotted him, threw him on its vast back and took him to the land of butterflies, where he still flits around, wondering what he is and whether life is really as stupid as it seems.  The Council of I elevated him to sainthood on this day in the gap between all contraries.  Let us honor the saint today with our souls and flesh.

February 13 - Malfeasance of Translators

A court is in session.  There is a judge, a crown, defense, and a room full of press and spectators.  The defendants are on a bridge suspended between two voids, walking from one end to the other.  Each has a bucket, which he dips into the blackness at each end and proceeds to walk to the other end and pour the contents of the bucket out.

Judge         The charges are heresy, blasphemy, murder, and treason.  Crown, proceed with the accusation.

Crown        What are these flippy-flops on this flimsy bridge?  What crass carousers cross its clumsy tines?  Are they dilettantes?  Dual citizens?  Losers?  Asylum rejects?  Mercenaries?  Frauds?  Are they saints?  Parasaints?  Neosaints?  Antisaints?  Demisaints?

                  No, demons of the jury, they are piranhas, piranhas only, eternally piranhas. Look at them, neither here nor there; thieving always, faithful never, they walk the road to truth … one lie at a time.  These false usurping friends betray their origins and prepare a bed of indolence for saccharine tourists who then confuse an ocean with a wading pool.

They hammer masks on masks.  They establish masquerades of words on floors of deception. They hang mirrors of names onto walls of imprecision.  Neither themselves nor another, they compose simulacra of creation in the name of accessibility and compromise.  Are these principles the principles of art?  No¾they are the principles of prostitution.  The defendants are common whores.

Taking no responsibility, they hide behind the name others have constructed with their lives and use the travel notes of saints to discover what reality is like.

For erring against the purity of origins,

For dragging sainted names to imperfection,

For slaughtering intent, meaning and syntax,

For betraying the essence of the land they’re from and the one they’re fleeing to

These traitors, shams and cowards are nothing other than guilty in the first degree of all four charges.

Defense     I would like to suggest that the Crown’s words require some translation.  I would, in fact, like to suggest something more¾that we all are translators, that to be human is to translate¾yes, even that our species’ task above all else is translation.  This is what we ceaselessly do.  The only difference between those of us in court and those walking the bridge is that we are dilettantes and they are professionals.  I went to a dinner party at my Aunt Frida’s last night.  My Aunt Frida loves television and my uncle loves the cinema.  Friends¾I love both and spent the night translating between them.  By the end, they were like two newlyweds who felt they each were understood.  And I thought¾even I am a translator.  Perhaps you work in one of the world’s great bureaucracies¾all you do is translation.  Between lawyers and clients, HR and marketing professionals, technologists and politicians. You’re a priest?  You translate between God and man.  A mechanic?  Between people and machines.  A farmer?  Between tomatoes and the soil. A seducer?  Between desire and action.

                  I assure you all that none of us would survive even an hour of our lives without the translation services of everyone around us.  We would be zombies, fools, infants¾unable to tell even our left hand from our right.

                  But whereas we translate for survival, friends, those on the bridge translate for a higher purpose.  Do they reach perfection?  No, but as the Council of I instructs us, even saints do not.  Perfection is a category of the imagination. The defendants may not be saints, but this is no reason to accuse them¾few are saints, but many are the sinners who walk the earth.  The defendants, though, walk neither in the Heaven and Hell of sainthood nor on the solid earth of sinners, but on the bridge between two great nothings.  Animating the dead and dying, moving art-chunks across time and space without regard for physics, history, or geography, they do this selflessly … from love.

                  For upholding the only task humans have,

                  For sacrificing their names to another,

                  For resurrecting the inanimate and giving life to what would otherwise be dead,

                  For giving their allegiance to every just claimant

                  These valiant citizens of everywhere and nowhere are innocent of all charges laid against them and should go free.

Judge         I have listened to the evidence and have determined that the defendants are not-guilty and guilty.  The penalty is thus both life and death.  Half the defendants are sentenced to be thrown into the abyss at dawn, the other half to wander back and forth on the bridge forever.  Their fate shall be decided by a coin toss.  To ensure that the crown and defense share in the defendants’ fate and thus are bound to their claims, one shall be chosen by the same method and executed immediately.  Court is adjourned.

Addendum to the Proper of Saints by Someone Who Claims to be the Author

The Proper of Saints was written about seven years ago, primarily in Toronto and Paris, after the author discovered, while staying in a Jesuit hermitage, the Catholic Proper of Saints and experienced a secular epiphany about the nature of purity and its transmigration from religion to art.

While this Proper’s introduction (the proper Proper) claims list finality (that is, the 81 saints whose lives are told in the Proper are the only real and true saints), this is obviously a ridiculous claim.  (The author is known to have been, historically, somewhat addicted to ridiculous claims.)

In the years since, he would add the following nine saints, entailing the addition of eight propers.  All nine of these saints had produced their most significant work prior to the proper Proper being written, but the author, being less perfectly aesthetically trained at the time than he wishes now he had been, was unaware of their works.

In literature, Edmund Jabes would be added to the biography of Meister Eckhart and Simone Weil.  Fernando Pessoa would receive full sainthood and his own biography.

In cinema, Jodorowsky, Teshigahara, Svankmajer, Tarr, Buñuel, and Tarkovsky would be added.

In music, Can would be added.

Numerous others, particularly in music, would become Blessed, Venerable, or the Barely Venerable.  These include but are not limited to Kurosawa (particularly for Ran), Bruno Schulz, Godspeed You! Black Emperor, This Heat, Carla Bozulich, John Cage, Laurie Spiegel, Daphne Oram, Arvo Pärt, The Velvet Underground ...

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.