February 23 - St. Herman, Mythmonger

Herman.  How I love thee.  Solitary.  Hapless.  Desolate.  Born from water.  Died on land.

You’ve never seen the sea.  Oh, you’ve visited it.  Paid a week’s salary to spot a whale.  Wrote an essay on the mad sky humping a feral surf in Turner.  You can spell it.  You’ve read the horror story, Yahweh and the Hovering.  It’s there, blue and friendly, at center stage on your computer.

But have you knowledge?  Of its surface fickleness?  The calm, the vanity, the rage.  How you are less than a dust mite on the endless surface of its eye?  The salt and warp and anger.  The reduction of your sturdy vessel to a paper toy in the bathtub of nature’s tumult.  Yet these surface things are the easy nightmares.  Who cannot stand the simple onslaughts of sex and death¾flesh’s film, flesh’s salt and rage?  What terrifies us are the things we cannot see.  Tentacles of beauty waiting for a curious hand.  Vast balls of eyes squelching through the night, seeking only random human death.  Slimed monsters older than the earth living out the ageless ages, every century or so creeping to the shore and sitting on a town.  Creatures weighing 80 tons and pitiless, made, made for you.

You say¾I too do not know the sea.  I am like you¾it’s an item on the stock exchange.  I sit around on earth and never feel the terror-spray.  Heat is just a switch away.  Calm is just a pill.

Colleagues in the quest to drain the sea:  yes, we all are huddled together in the waterless earth; that other sea is gone¾the one we could taste and drown in.  But it has refreshed itself in another form¾one more insidious, more subtle, one much closer¾the sea has picked up its horrors and fathoms … and slimed inside the human soul.

This simulacrum sea is just as hungry as the other one.  As deep.  As teeming with foul creatures.  Don’t deceive yourself, concrete urbanite¾you still can drown.  You still are sought by monsters.  Your subways and televisions are no protection.  Nor your beer and jokes.  In fact, it’s worse¾as you’re a boat on the sea of life, there is no land to flee to.  We’re now never free from demon-storms and random tentacles, hairy claws a thousand metres long.

Welcome to the new world¾where all is sea, and our bodies boats waiting for a monster weighing more than Pluto to wipe out any trace of our having floated on the nameless waves.

Back in the days of history, when the sea was still the sea and land was land, just before Heaven’s tent collapsed and the future became the past, a small freighter was taken down off Chile’s southern coast; it had been carrying Jesus’ bones to a private investor in the South Pacific in a transaction best described as illegal; the bones, though well secured, did not survive the attack and were efficiently chomped to powder.  However, some of that white dust of God was not lost in the labyrinthine digestive tracks of the gargantuan predator, but dribbled down the wet face of darkness and entered the womb of Lamia, and she conceived and was with child and bore a son on August 1 1819.  Herman.  St. Herman.  How I love thee.

Final Exam

What does a saint do when he’s lived to see God and told the tale and he’s only 33?

(a)   Get crucified

(b)   Work for Customs

(c)    Write a poem so long it would stretch from New York City to San Francisco if letter to letter were abutted end to end.

(d)   Relive, in lesser words, in duller dreams, the days of demons, when life was death and dawn might be dawn, but equally might be a monster’s eye approaching.

(e)   Oh saint!  Who lives for madness, but when madness flees, finds himself without a home, roaming from shell to shell of memory; voices echo through the decades, calling, Friend; water drips where it poured and rushed.  A new madness awakes, one of doubt and ennui where once there was only faith.  A finger beckons, a door swings open.  A voice from underwater whispers, Come.

For 40 years and 40 nights St. Herman waited, roamed, among the trees of Massachusetts, among Manhattan hours.  He wandered on a land, sterile and parched, and he was not so much a man as he was the dream of a repetition of a journey taken by someone other in a distant and forsaken night.

On September 28 1891, the sea stalked from its bed of forgetting and lay claim to the resident alien who had been too long from water’s cold indifferent love.  The sea does not neglect its own.

His flesh was left where it belonged, food for beasts, but the family of Jesus dredged the sea and stole his soul and elevated it at 8:15 in the morning of August 6 1945, the day the sea roared inside us and began calling to our weary race, Come, Come.

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

February 22 - Saint Adeline, Pioneer Poet of the Female Spirit

Leonard walks in his nightgown, I said.  Men walk in rhythms that sound like restless waves.  They walk with heavy boots.

Leonard walks in his nightgown, I said.  It is Tuesday¾he has picked the nightgown Thomas brought him from the Left Bank.  The one he bought from perfumed women on the Rue de Bac.  Silk pheasants sewn in gold on its sleeves seem to squawk at me.  I hide in my study on Tuesdays.

Leonard walks in his nightgown, I said.  He walks as if he wants me to think he’s going to the library.  He rustles his nightgown with a literary flourish.  Books do not change the world; they change the way a person walks down the hall.

Leonard walks in his nightgown, I said.  A nightgown indicates the kind of man a man wishes he could be.  My nightgown sags.  I look at my nightgown languishing in the black of my closet, shy, like a timid girl at a party.  I looked at it last Wednesday.  This is not me, I told myself.  I am not my nightgown.

Leonard walks in his nightgown, I said.  He wishes I would run from my study and stand dumfounded before his pheasants.  He wishes I’d proclaim the sanctity of golden squawking silk.  Should I do what he secretly desires?  I sit.  I sit in my thoughts.  I deny Leonard the praise of pheasants.  I sit in my thoughts and refuse the proclamation of nightgowns.

Leonard walks in his nightgown, I said.  He walks, and the world becomes his hem and pockets.  I walk, and my hem and pockets are just my hem and pockets.  I have no pheasants.  I have no sanctity and silk.  How strange that people should have nightgowns.  That they should proceed to their closets in the evenings and seek hanging garments of cotton or silk.

Leonard walks in his nightgown.  He walks on puffs of sedentary prose.  I do not puff like him.  I cannot puff.  His nightgown clomps across the hall as though it were apart from him, as though it walked itself and the man inside were hardly necessary.  I am not like that.  If I had pheasants, I would want us to be interchangeable.  I would want you to say pheasant and I would have heard St. Adeline; or, St. Adeline, and I’d be the bird.  You and I, I and you; this sweet confusion and identity is the dark sea he doesn’t understand.  Leonard knows he is not his pheasants; this is why he’s a man.

Leonard’s nightgown thinks I am mad.  It thinks I am not tangible like it.  I feel even through the walls its scorn.  I was not bought by Thomas in the Left Bank.  I wasn’t praised by the perfumed women on the Rue de Bac.  It was not me who was displayed at the dinner party and ogled over.  I cannot claim these rights.  I am like a tree that sinks its roots into darkness and is what it is but cannot say what it is.  For this I am mad.

I dreamt of nightgowns.  They had replaced the stars and a committee was formed to determine the effects of nightgowns hanging from the sky.  I was called against my will to testify, and two undistinguished fowl accompanied me, locking me to the ankle of the judge.  Thrown scraps of bread, I wept and could not eat.  Tears are my blood and birth, I thought, the sky above me and the earth below, my name and laughter.  I wept and thought, All I am is tears.  I have been tears since before I received a name.  Thus I will not be ashamed by my weeping.  I will turn my weeping into words.  A sombre anaconda stood and proclaimed, The verdict is unanimous.  She is guilty of madness, guilty of words, guilty of being a woman.  The sentence is death.

I am not ashamed of my nightgown.  I have seen that it could maybe hold the world.  I open my closet.  It smells of fear and night.  It smells of the weight of decisions.  It does not smell like trees.  I reach for my nightgown and put it on.  I remember dinner parties and eternities of privilege.  I walk toward the door and grip the key.

Arise, women.  It is time for us to walk in our nightgowns.  Time for us to define the world’s sad curves.  For us to push a little further against the darkness.  To carve the future from our spirits.  Sing the rhythms of ourselves.

I met Leonard walking in his nightgown and I said, I am not mad.  And if I am, it be the madness of life and I would forsake life before I let it go.  I writhe.  I am torn on my bed of birthing lunacy.  I risk my world to birth a world.  I give my heart to madness.  I take my heart and present it in pretty slices for the world’s hunger.  And what hunger!  I feed you something—myself; myself in thin sharp slices like proscuitto.  I combine the vision and courage of a man with the plurality and interiority of a woman.   No one has done this before.  Has anyone done it since?  For this singular contribution to the evolution of art, for restlessly seeking new forms, for exploring lands untouched by human words, for stretching the boundaries of the world past the past’s imagination, for traveling the path of creation even unto death, the Council of I elevated me to sainthood on October 13 1962, where I sit at the right hand of the ambivalence of the body and speak to myself of death’s soft waves.

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

February 21 - St. Solomon, Sage and King

A man has seven hours to live.

His first hour is spent in ignorance.  It doesn’t matter whether it’s blissful or tortured, whether he’s left alone or abused; all he can think is¾this is the world.  If he feels like singing, he sings; if wants to weep, he weeps.  He accepts everything with equal measure.

In his second hour, the cock crows and tells him¾you are the world and everything¾in earth, the heavens and the infernal depths¾revolves around you.  You’re the emperor, the devil; you’re free.

The third hour he’s a puppy, running after everything that moves or has color, playing in everybody’s sandbox, stealing other puppies’ toys.  

The fourth hour he struts on the stage of himself, accumulating women, titles, goods, adding them to the house on his back, encased in cars which protect him from wind and silence.

By the fifth hour, the first stab of mortality hits him.  He feels the weight on his back.  The cock crows a different tune and tells him he hasn’t done anything¾each beast, human, each object that exists or has ever existed or will exist is the center of the world and all revolves around all in endless time.  He panics like a cornered beast and changes wife, car, house and job.

By the sixth, he’s put panic where it belongs¾buried deeply in some euphemism.  He’s learned to be silent about everything important, he speaks only soothing words.  According to the tradition of his fathers, he names this practice wisdom.

In his seventh hour, he chuckles to the insights of golf and tosses back beer that tastes like carbonated urine, while half the world starves to sustain the course he’s just completed.  He lives again in ignorance, but this time because he’s too blind to see the world or himself.  Without even knowing it, he attained his highest spiritual state in his first hour, before he began climbing his little hill of illusion.  The young scorn him¾they’re closer to the memory of what’s real.

If he’s lucky, the cock crows a third time soon and non-existence rapidly consumes him.  If he isn’t, the world is forced to spend another few hours listening to his slobbery memories.

There’s only one way to get through this mess.  Love the woman of your youth.  Fear the forces that raise and destroy love and life.  Know that you, everything you’ve loved and fought for, every work of beauty, each word of truth, will be forgotten, and all your hours will be like a face drawn in the sand on the edge of the sea.

So spoke St. Solomon in the dooms of time.  Let us honor the saint today with our souls and flesh.

2:0 - opening 2

The world does not believe in God anymore, not because anything in God has changed, but because the world only believes in objects and God dies if made into an object.  It is not as if God is not known through subject and object but that this knowing is not adequate.

Once God is an object and we are the subject, anything can be done with this portable divine artifact.  We can write God’s biography, we can give God a sex change, we can turn the one god into the many gods, we can heap irony, ridicule, scorn and apathy upon it.  We can give it its due a few hours a week while our lives remain indistinguishable from those who don’t.  God as object is a definition.  God as definition is something to object to—whether we define this God as male or female, dead or alive, a god or the gods, transcendent or immanent, beautiful or absurd, terrifying or irrelevant.

The modern God sits beside cars and investments, houses and entertainment, Caribbean vacations and creative workshops.  A feeble “choose” dribbles from the sagging divine lips. The sound falls like a tear in a torrent rushing towards a street sewer and disappears.  We rightly laugh at its absurdity.  God as object stands no chance.  God as object is a pitiable farce, a three-year fad, a bitter fling founded on protestations of lust and eternal love, a rusting coin in a safety deposit box.

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The experience of God cannot be taught.  It cannot be set in rules, dogma or moral prescriptions.  The path to God cannot be prescribed or in any way directly imparted.  It can only be pointed to.  It is the responsibility of those who have experienced God to point to God.  It is the responsibility of those who have not experienced God to follow the pointing.

One never finally arrives at the experience of God.  God is not a goal, an end, a static state.  But neither is God an incessant dynamism, a perpetual elusiveness, an unreachable chaos.  While God contains both end and flux, God is not primarily experienced as either.  Fundamentally, God is not experienced as anything.  God is simply experienced.

2:0 - Biography and Opening

Biography

Svoo—born John Smith—was an English aristocrat and Lord Spiritual who went mad when his wife died and wandered for seven years on the moors, munching on heather and mumbling to himself.  At the end of the seven years, he dictated 2:0 to Dominica, a golden plover, who transmitted the text to the Secular Sadoo.  We thank Svoo, Dominica, and the moors for their cooperation.

In a simple—some might say simplistic—and occasionally disarming way, Svoo examines the world of duality (2), nothingness (0), relation (:), and unity (1).  Written in brief, loosely connected vignettes, we’ll post sections on available improper days.

2:0

There is no definition of God.  There is only an experience of God.

Experience should not be understood as an experience from within me or an experience of something “out there.”  While the experience of God contains both, it is beyond both.

Experience should not be understood as feeling or using.  Feeling and using separate subject and object.  I feel love towards this person.  I use this person to gain information or pleasure, to reduce my loneliness.  The experience of God may include these things, but it is far more than these things.

We could also say knowledge instead of experience.  But it is not knowledge about something.  I do not know God if I can make a list of divine characteristics.  I do not know God if I have uncommunicable visions of God’s essence.  I do not know God if I have religious training or follow certain rituals.  All this, while it may be part of knowing God, is not knowing God.  If this is all that one knows about God, one only knows God as an object.

Man Meets Himself

The despair and speedy desperation at the center of urban man is easily explained, although its explanation is not popular.  Man’s primary project—the building of the city, with all its arsenal of protections and amusements—is largely built; he lives in his dream.  But the dream incarnate is far different than its earlier disembodied sibling—not pure and fearless, as he had planned, but full of the same medley of chaos and control as when he lived at the whims of nature (even if this medley manifests itself differently).  Considering that he has invested all these centuries of effort, of blood, and nothing within has changed—in fact, it’s got worse because what is within now intuits that its nature is far more resilient to change than man thought—he resorts to romanticizing nature (something no one familiar with nature would ever think of doing) and the sillier among him cling to some kind of future rescue—a disappearance into virtuality, alien visits, new exciting hallucinogenics, a true egalitarian democracy.

The problem is that man has become the god he’s always wanted to be.  The creator.  The arbiter of good and evil.  The writer of the text of knowledge, the one who eats that text and is not ashamed.  The confounder of language.  The fashioner and remover of fig leaves.

Except to the one who has become a machine—driven by its dictates of productivity and repeatability—all these grand accomplishments seem rather unsatisfying.  To this one who refuses the heady drugs of romanticism, no satisfaction is available to him.  The Stones’ famous song takes on a new prophetic significance, more metaphysical than they likely imagined.  Fortunately, most conform to the machine’s demands, even those who argue against its tyranny, thus the project is sustained and man has something to do that society considers useful.

But the futility of our projects is intuited in man’s spiritual subterranes, an intuition he blocks by throwing as many artifacts, toys, art pieces, ideologies, and images as he can afford into that growing vortex.  The gushing new is absolutely, tyrannically necessary … it’s the force that keeps society intact.  Although the consumer frenzy may destroy us, giving it up would also destroy us, a paradox that is—if possible—more horrifying than the futility of our efforts.

And what does the one of no-satisfaction do?  He does not commit suicide or participate in revolutions, as suicide and revolution both emerge from riding on the seesaw of hope and despair, and he left that playground some time ago.  He neither protests nor hides nor preaches.  He accepts what comes and bows outwardly to the rabid building around him.  He bows because not to bow is to draw attention to himself … and that is not worth the effort of explanation or defense, which would fall on incomprehending ears.

In effect, he becomes an eye.  He becomes what God became.  What the God behind the raging, building, knowing God became.  Still, silent, desolate.  A black unspeakable center.

The discerning reader may well ask—what then, to the visible eye, is the difference between the one who conforms to the machine and the one who bows but whose bowing is an act?  This is the irony—in the realm of flesh, there is no difference, and as only the realm of flesh, of quantity and things, matters to machine’s children, life can go merrily along and only those who have swung from hope to despair and can’t get back have to be punished.  That other realm—the realm of spirit—only matters to those who are acting, for they require its strange energy to build and sustain their masks.

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.