March 9 - Saint Laurence, Comic Skeptic and Innovator

I was told I was almost never born because my mother kept yanking my father’s John Henry out to see if the muffins were done.  Not that it would have mattered because she always burnt everything¾even my father’s John Henry, which he told me she took a hot iron to after he preached a sermon about the virtues of adultery.  But my father was always yakking away about things he never did; for him, all the fun things in life belonged to other people.  In his own perverse way, he needed to be a bad man, but couldn’t be¾so he made faithfulness the worst sin and himself the worst sinner.  But my muffin-burning mother¾she was another story.  Even the bishop caught her with everything down (or up, depending) in the stagecoach from Southwark to Canterbury, doing the Ancient with the Archman himself.  So he joined in¾why not, if the boss was going at it¾and the coach almost toppled over with all that heaving and farmers from far away as Lewdes in Sussex saw smoke from all that ecclesiastical exertion, as the biggest workout they usually got was raising God’s ounce of flesh above their two tons of bombast.  I have about a thousand half-brothers and sisters, but who cares about them¾this day’s about me.  I don’t believe the muffin story though, since a cousin told me a better one on my last birthday on this scurvy and disastrous earth, when my own John Henry looked like an undigested prune that had passed through the Devil’s ass¾she said I was almost never born because the St. Mary’s bake sale was going bust.  Mrs. Sinicky, the fat priest’s aunt who raised the bastard to be the head pedophile of Clonmel, was drunk as a gypsy’s mule and stuffing pies up her skirt faster than you can say Jack the Rake went schplat into the snatch of the holy hatch of the Virgin and didn’t stop spouting the Magnificat till she lit the thatch of her snatch with a match and unlatched her hatch and smoked him out.  (The people from Clonmel don’t move very fast.)  There was only one pie left¾a blueberry one¾and the chief baker, who had had a dream the very night before about seven thin pies eating seven fat ones or something like that, was getting worried that the Stanmore-Foxes hadn’t even arrived and they always wanted pies and they were as stacked as the Trollope’s daughter and as stupid as an intellectual which meant everyone made a lot of money from them and she thought maybe the presence of an Anglican might do something and went to fetch my father right in the middle of the muffin story.  My cousin, I might add, is a very reliable woman¾she won Most Likely to be Pious in third form, beating out Jansenina Picklepuss by two votes, but I heard this was only because she pulled her panties down for seven boys and let them see how the other half lived.  Be that as it may, I died on March 18 1768, 19,837 days after I was almost never born, if you use the Julian calendar, 19,838 according to the Gregorian calendar, and 19,827 if you count properly and use both, since I was born in one and died in the other¾though I prefer the Gregorian because it makes me sound as if I got older and wiser.  Anyway, I died.  But, as I’m the most beautiful spirit that ever lived and the supplest of saints, I was made St. Laurence by the Council of I on February 2 1922¾so honor me today with your souls and flesh.

March 6 – St. Play-Doh, Chief Philosopher

You remember, Asbestos, that particularly sweltering day we walked to Delphi in the delightful company of that young man whose name I forget?

Milos.

Yes, of course.  You remember?

I just told you.

No, no, you remember the day?

How could I remember the young man associated with the day and not the day?

I can imagine a situation in which, through partial amnesia, Bacchic influence, erotic stupor or simple human imperfection, a boy’s company overshadows the experience of time.

But that’s unlikely.

Unlikely is not impossible, analogy is not identification, Milos is not Asbestos.

What’s your point about the sweltering day we walked to Delphi with Milos?

It was delightful.

Do you think it was delightful because of Milos, the heat, the proximity of Delphi, yourself or the combination of these four elements?

You didn’t mentioned Asbestos, Asbestos.

That’s simply because I’m not delightful.

That’s true, you’re not,  But actually, none of the above.  I called the day delightful because Milos had an uncle nearby, who generously offered us hospitability in the forms of shelter, wine, roulade, cheese, and intermittent bawdy displays from his pack of beautiful slave girls.  You remember this?

I remember the cheese.

These things in themselves would have provided a most engaging afternoon, but as if they weren’t enough, the gods blessed us with an invigorating discussion about farting.

It was about arting Socrates.

Arting … what’s that?

Well, it was about art, but you said farting, so I said arting.

Run that by me again.

Aside from all the good food, wine and sex we had that day at Milos’s uncle, we also talked about art.

Of course we did.  Demetrius was there, who was diddling George, Milos’s uncle’s nephew; Timothy, the charmingly masochistic theology student from Amphipolis; Xenos, from Ji; Basil, son of Apopato; I was there, naturally; the delightful Milos and his frisky hospitable uncle.  Why wouldn’t we have talked about art?

Perhaps because nobody was interested in it but you.

But aside from that.

Milos was there.  And his uncle.

And the frisky slaves.  What is so amazing then, Asbestos, is that all these barriers and attractions didn’t prevent us from exploring art¾its origins and ends, its nature and function, its necessity¾but instead compelled us toward it.  I remember how it all began, the seven of us experiencing that distinctive and exhilarating combination of cooling down with a rum and coke and heating up with a bum and poke.  After these formalities were out of the way, the discussion could naturally begin.

Soc     The similarities between what we just did and art are striking, don’t you think Demetrius?

Dem   How do you mean Socrates?

Soc     Alcohol is a portal to divine eros through drink, sex through flesh, and art through mirrors.  Drink is the domain of liquids, flesh solids and mirrors gas.

Dem   Mirrors?  You’re nuts Socrates.  Eros is flesh and flesh is art and art is sex and sex is alcohol.  Gas is what comes out of your arse.

Soc     But you would agree that we owe erotic pleasure to the beneficence of the gods.

Dem   Of course.

Soc     And that the gods created us solely for their enjoyment.

Dem   Perhaps.

Soc     And that our duty thus is to behave in accordance with their unceasing need for amusement.

Dem   I guess so.

Soc     Which, while manifold, have limited outlets in the only two realms available to us¾flesh and soul.  And that our fleshy obligations are drunkenness and copulation and our spiritual obligation art.  So we can conclude that while Bacchus’ gifts show us the gods underwater and Aphrodite’s pleasure show them in fire, only art, Apollo’s talent, shows them in air, which is their natural element, and thus as they truly are.

Tim    But Socrates, I don’t think you’re right.

Soc     Why is that, beloved masochistic Timothy.

Tim    Well, you said eros is divine and divinity is eros.

Soc     I couldn’t agree with you more.

Tim    And that art is the purest form of eros, showing us the gods more directly and truthfully than either sex or inebriation.

Soc     You’re absolutely right.

Tim    But while I don’t pretend to be an expert in the gods¾whoever claims such knowledge would surely be immediately struck down with every imaginable disease and live the remainder of their pitiable life in the most abject agony and hideous regret¾I have been diligently working at Delphi for the past three years and been receiving instruction from Omophylofilos, the seasoned high priest there.

Dem   I bet you’ve been receiving more than instruction from him.

Tim    It’s true, he is generous.  And what I’ve learned from him is the exact opposite of what you’re saying Socrates.

Soc     I am most curious, my dear Victimothy.  Please tell us what you’ve learned.  We’re all interested.

Tim    It’s this.  You all agree that the gods created the world.

Soc     Most certainly.

Tim    And that we humans are part of the created world.

Soc     Who could deny this?

Tim    And that there’s an unbridgeable gap between the immortals and mortals.

Soc     Everyone knows this is the central fact of our existence.

Tim    Thus that the gods are creators and we their creatures.

Soc     I sense a trap, my good fling Thingothy.

Tim    The trap is not a trap but truth, Socrates, unless truth be a trap and falseness freedom.  My truth is simply this, and follows clearly from all that you’ve agreed with already:  the gods being immortal creators are given the domain of creating and we being mortal creatures are given the domain of created; art, being an act of creating, clearly belongs with the gods not us and for us mortals to engage in it is an act of blasphemy.

Dem   Huh?

Soc     What he means, Demetrius, is that we humans are only entitled to copulate and drink; unfortunately, all that temple training has muddled his articulation.

Tim    Art is hubris Socrates.  The only way for us to enjoy life and not anger the gods is to know our place in the order of the universe and conform to our knowledge.

Xen     I agree with Timothy, but have kind of figured things out my own way.

Soc     Oh, how interesting Xenos.  Do tell.

Xen     Well, like, I think art’s stupid, see, but not because of the gods or anything but because nobody needs it.

Soc     That’s a tired argument Xenos; I was hoping you’d come up with something more interesting than art isn’t useful.

Xen     I said nobody needs it, not that it ain’t useful.  Like, duh, there’s a difference.

Soc     We’d like to hear more.

Xen     Don’t get me wrong Sock, it’s not that art’s wrong, but it’s redundant.  You see, it’s like this:  it’s like there’s this jewel, see, and a group of people covers up the jewel with rags, maybe cause it’s too shiny or something, then others keep adding more rags to the pile because that’s the thing to do, until someone comes along one day and takes off the rags.  Everyone’s amazed at this beautiful jewel underneath, but¾like big shit¾the jewel’s always been there.  The rag-adders are society, the rag-remover’s the artist, they feed off each other like men and women … but live away from the whole schizo mess and the jewel’s always there, right beside you.

Soc     Art’s what every peasant and hermit know, it’s just truth for the over-educated?

Xen     For the over-complexified, yeah.

Soc     You’ve convinced me.

Bas     You are all wrong.  Each and every last one of you.

Soc     You speak with authority, Basil, which is surely enough to sway almost everyone.

Bas     I was born in the slums of Athens, the lowest of slaves with no ambition but death.  Through cunning, subterfuge, sex, murder and marriage, I hacked my way from this futile existence into the pantheon of royalty, becoming the adopted Prince Basilos of renown and valor.  Allow me to say, freemen and loyal vassals, that art is the human soul made visible, strange rumblings from the darkness; it is the expression of what we cannot express, the fears and desires we cannot face but in parables, the very substance of the void.  It is the highest expression of humanity, bubbling upwards from the depths within us.  Yet we are ruled by it, even as all heights are ruled by depths; we exist only for art¾it is beauty, truth and goodness.  Look—Milos, so beautiful on the chaise being caressed, but he could be dead tomorrow and definitely will be in seventy years, whereas any art worth its name will be alive, nay thriving, many centuries hence.

Tim    A mountain, sunsets will last longer than art, quite easily longer than humanity itself.  Art is a rebellion against God, who is the only creator; art is selfish and inward and takes our energy away from outward acts of compassion.

Dem   You know, Rimothy, I’m all for outward acts of compassion.  But mountains are too cold, sunsets are too hot, art makes you think of contours but isn’t contoured itself.  Like Basil says, look at Milos¾we can not only admire his hard perfect lines, the way each time he moves the fire in us surges, compelling us to action.  But the great thing is we can go over and actually caress him, feel the heat of his thighs and our growing desire, feel the cold aloofness of his arrogant beauty.  While these qualities are embodied in him and he will unfortunately wither and become repulsive, others will take his place, thus making physical beauty as eternal as nature and more real than art.  Art is ultimately fake.  Cocks may rise and fall, but the phallus stands forever.

Xen     Dem and me, we think similar.

Soc     But, as you so justly pointed out, Xenos, for different reasons¾Demetrius believes art is a pale shadow of flesh, but you believe that art … what do you believe?

Bas     He thinks stupidity is the highest form of humanity.

Xen     You’re a pomous arse Spasil.

Bas     And you, my darling Xenos, are an ignorant, impoverished and ugly buffoon.

Tim    You’re all ungodly fools.

Dem   Milos, you are so beautiful.

Soc     So all we can say is that we don’t know what art is, but that it exists, and even more than this, art seems also to be somehow what we are, meaning of course that we not only don’t know what art is but that we don’t really know what we are¾a subject for another delightful afternoon at Milos’s uncle.  So¾and, really, Asbestos and I must resume our journey in order to reach Delphi by nightfall¾I think whatever else we do we should honor whomever and whatever we’re talking about today with our poles’ caress, er, our bowl’s cracked mess, er …

Asb     Aren’t you forgetting something Socrates?

Soc     Hey?

Asb     The baby on the floor.

Tim    Where did that come from?

Soc     Oh, right.  When a sufficient amount of energy is produced at the interstice of sex, alcohol and art, Apollo may visit and bless us with new forms.  Let’s pause for a moment of thanks.

           Dear Apollo,

           Thank you for the new form crying in our midst.  We pray that, if nothing else, it will grow up to be a beautiful boy whom we may caress and take our pleasure with.  But beyond this, Weaver of Fate, Great Immortal, Musician of Life, may he not just live to know the joys of inebriation and the ecstasies of sodomy, but may he live to know the air and live in air and be worthy of the creation you have bestowed upon and in us.  May he himself create new forms, not simply forms of ooze and booze, these common things, but forms of air, these forms that guide us mysteriously along our mortal paths, even as you, though invisible, guide our every move.  Amen.

Dem   An empty vessel, waiting to be filled, right here, wriggling on the floor before us; let him stay here with me and Milos and Milos’ uncle and me and Milos’ uncle’s pack of girls.  We’ll prepare him for the ways of the world.

Xen     You should get him back to the temple immediately and teach him the simple ways, Timothy.

Tim    Omophylofilos would like that.

Bas     Socrates must take him and mold him according to the higher ways.  He shall be named Play-Doh, for he shall be molded and he shall mold.

Soc     Asbestos, it’s time for us finally to leave our friends with whom we’ve spent such an entertaining and provocative afternoon.  Let’s complete our trip to Delphi now¾we certainly have been refreshed for the remainder of our journey thanks to Milos’ uncle’s kindness¾but I do think Basil has a good idea¾we will take Play-Doh with us and mold him and be molded by him and honor him with our souls and flesh.

Tarkovsky

In the last month I’ve watched Tarkovsky’s oeuvre of seven films (I ignored his student work and his later documentary).  Three (Stalker, Solaris, Mirror) I had seen multiple times before; Stalker remains, for me, a masterpiece and the one to watch if you simply want to dip briefly into Tarkovsky ... but a dipping would be a mistake.  He’s a director to lingeringly bathe in.  Like Joyce in literature, Tarkovsky doesn’t produce any mediocrity.  There are forces of nature in art which produce works prodigiously:  some, like Balzac, at over 90 novels, leave me consistently cool; others, like Hitchcock, with over 50 films, create a few masterpieces, with the rest largely competent or good.  But each of Tarkovsky’s films is a distinctive jewel, a provocative mystic-meditative emotionally potent exploration of human existence.  His technical trademarks—long takes, silence and water (who does water like he?), a periodic and strategic use of colour—and his grounded big themes—god, love, death, desire, suffering, innocence, hope—combine enticingly, seamlessly; I am frequently awed by the Rembrandt-beauty of his images:  impeccably nuanced, stunning, eternal.

Many of his films feature a child at their spiritual center.  Both Stalker and The Sacrifice end with such a fusion of futility and hope through the character of a child that this impossible union seems to become (but is it?) the very noblest aim of art and spirit.

In The Sacrifice, Tarkovsky stretches his typical themes—our themes—further into Western myth, particularly through the end of the cycle of the Word (the death of God, the threat to patriarchy, the puncturing of monism and the One).  It ends, after an apocalyptic descent somewhat reminiscent of Kurosawa’s Ran (the Lear figure, broken, mad, his world in flames), with the child by the dead tree his father planted for him, having told him the story before his descent, in fairytale fashion, of how a monk had watered a dead tree daily for three years, at which point it was found one morning alive and blossoming.  His father now mad and gone, the apocalypse seemingly averted, the child lies on his back beneath the tree after having watered it and muses,

In the beginning was the Word.  Why is that, Papa?

I have a sense that the boy sets the question aside as largely irrelevant (a historical curiosity, to use language he wouldn’t use) and instead calmly, slowly, engages in his dream of faith in a dead tree that, through patience and hope, comes alive.

Curiously and perhaps aptly, Tarkovsky died shortly after The Sacrifice was completed; the film is dedicated to his son.

March 3 - Saint Boz Huffam

The technology god, Glonk von Sushi, having recently been promoted from assistant ledger keeper in the Department for the Advancement of the Alphabet, surveyed his new domain with equanimity.  Things were required.  Action. Status. Ideals. Expansion. Pragmatism. Metaphysical Renovation. A transoceanic voyage. Gold, slaves, Barbies, HEPA filters, quarks, BlackBerrys, needle-torture machines, USB keys, hope.

Things.

He perused the landscape of the earth and found it wanting.  He strutted on that verdant grid and found it green.  The measure of a god is neither in his tenure nor his compass, but in, like man, his things—the quantity of artifacts and words that cling, all drippy, to his name.  What did Glonk have?  Four-oxen plows, whippletrees, magnets, cannons, a few diatribes, soap.  The people were grateful, no doubt, but still did outrageous stunts, like confess and pray.  They clutched their rosaries as if they were a lover’s breasts.  They mumbled Jesu Jesu but rutted like the stupid beasts.  They could not count.  They did not flush.  They had no Plasticine. 

Things and things.  There were insufficient things.

God Glonk called his advisors together.  One by terrible one they stalked and sat on swivel chairs.  Importance filled their rumps.  Self-dignity and future futures burbled in space so sanctimonious it sang.  E-gods, Glonk gonged.  Wires wait.  Loomis looms.  Research stirs from its lethargic swoon.

The e-gods squawked like ticker tape, and time looked lithely in the glass.  Where shall we start our assuage of the human spirit?  Pomerania?  Milan?  Tyrol?  Antioch?  Hum?  Those who served von Sushi gawked dumbly.  Apathy, ripe and virgin, hung like peaches from exquisite Côte d'Azur.  England?

Mayhem.

Swooped down, they, Glonk’s minions, to the lowly isle, succubusing African blood to fuel machines, Indian jewels to pump the engines, Chinese otherness to accelerate the hubris, Arabic zeroes to rejuvenate the math.  White hordes of children were fed to Glonk’s vast altar and the growing god sniffed and heard his name.

  

The gods are not compassionate; compassion is an idea humans manufacture to compensate for compassion’s lack.  The gods have no moral ledger; morality’s the cloak of light we weave to cast on night’s eternal body.  The gods, despite their reported death, are not fictitious or in the grave, but roam, as they always have, just below the soul’s velutinous claws.

Yet, they do not leave us entirely forlorn, thank them, thank them.  When a god decides to build an empire, enabled by the others’ desuetude and din, a by-law in the registry does not disallow a journalistic tear to leak from the cosmic eyes and fall to earth, permitting there to be a handy hand around to write or draw or sing our suffering, to ensure a more thorough record is achieved.  It’s the least the gods can do.  It’s the most they do.

So it was a little moisture fell on February 7 1812 in the form of fog and slithered through the window cracks of the Cromford Cotton Mill and mingled with the suppressed sighs of the puffing hordes of nameless tugboats spewing things for the fashions of the world.  So it was that St. Boz Huffam was spun from wheel number 2 to do what he had to do, and give some tugboats names.

He and his reforming activist counterparts were instrumental cool smartcar in reducing the systemic abuses resulting from technological progress, after which i want sushi the abuses fled conveniently across the ocean me wear thongs so sexy and multiplied.  So help us God.

A glint in Glonk’s design, a tear, St. Boz Huffam was useful need a network in uttering more political and social truths than have been uttered by all the professional scan my psyche politicians, publicists and moralists put together, and e-botswana being just as useless doggie dainties in reducing by even one gram gimme lipstick the amount of evil in dipstick the world.  Thank God, as saints hipsters require evil to do their saintly gimme glonk thing.

Thank Glonk, for all these things.

We celebrate the saint today because this was the day the Council of I purchased the Charles Dickens chess set online for $679.95US from Widerview Inc., but promptly broke Mr. Boffin on a bobbin and threw the damn thing out.

Well, suffering and exploitation will always be with us, but St. Boz Huffam was not … he himself was broken on June 9 1870 and poor Jo wept and slunk away to eat some garbage.  He (Boz, of course, not poor Jo) was elevated on April 25 1914 by I’s Council for whatever he did, which was nothing really.  Let us honor the thing today with our souls and flesh.

Friday Thoughts

Isn't the goal of a life to develop such a large mask wardrobe that if someone stumbles behind the doors, they’d never get to Narnia?  Life as being lost eternally in the mask wardrobe.  (Bergman as a cinematic master of this truth.)

Yoga, if it subjects itself to anything but itself (breath, spirit, animating, the natural action of air), becomes a practice of spiritual Botox.  Yet this is what we typically see:  morality, convention, artifacts, reputation, money competing with and dominating the breath--which in life is nimbleness.

In the old equation, one can only accept love into one’s life to the extent one accepts death—which is to say, in life, grief.  Grief as a magic carpet of being.

Human #1:  Are you a writer?

Human #2:  Let’s just say I have an unusually intimate relationship with creation.

The depths to which one accepts pain in oneself are the depths to which one accepts pain (and hence anger, mistrust, imperfection, love) in others, to which one accepts the world.  Much of technological society is constructed to stretch a kind of plastic wrap around this pain; but by mitigating pain in this way, we mitigate our acceptance of the world, others, and ourselves, and live increasingly in illusion.

My parents gave birth to me physically.

My children gave birth to me spiritually.

Perhaps the biggest challenge of migrating from heaven and hell to earth is the gear shift into a kind of oneiric first gear.  Earth is slow.  The benefit of having experience in heaven and hell is that one has learned to move quickly and is not surprised on the occasions when heaven and hell erupt on earth and rapid action is required.  Like animals who sense a tsunami before humans (who have derooted themselves from the rhythms of earth), so the one who’s been to heaven and hell and returned to earth can anticipate eruptions, feels the distant movement of clouds and rocks.  This is the task of the modern human:  to find nature in the city.  But the only place it can be found is deeply buried in the body.

Some lines from Tarkovsky’s Nostalghia:

Live between divine forgiveness and the torment of your soul.

We must listen to the useless voices.

You must stretch the corners of the soul like a sheet.

It’s the so-called healthy who have brought the world to ruin.

God governance.  We develop our own principles, often unconsciously or paraconsciously, for recognizing the divine in ourselves and in others, for managing awe (and so overwhelment) and thus keeping the divine in perpetual check.  (The cosmic chess game never ends.)  When doing this with a degree of consciousness, humans can begin damming the divine, begin using it for certain purposes.  (Our bodies are spiritual steam engines which we’ve only just begun to understand and exploit.)  In short, god is now simply another technology.  (Will we, some centuries hence, if we survive in any meaningful sense, struggle with the same problems of excess in the divine realm as we do now in the realm of nature?  Too many dams.  Ecotheology problems?  Or is the divine, being infinite by nature, not subject to such abuses, and is that the key?)

2:0 - the world of 2 (2)

Let’s list dualities, not from some solid space, from the pinnacle or interior of some obelisk, but rather as if we’re collecting them—like the seeds of dandelions—from the gaseous swirl above the foggy meadow of history.   (Perhaps to place in some future metaphysical museum.)  Do they point to certain elements that circumscribe experiences?  What kind of words are they?  Is such a list simply crass and juvenescent?  Do these primal words—these big and scary words—neither exist in isolation from our experience nor are more real than our experience?  Such lists may be play, but is not authentic play related to the real, a deep and particular articulation of the real?

good – evil (day – night, white – black, light – dark) (love – hate, justice – injustice)	male – female	seen – unseen (visible world – invisible world; sense – imagination)
transcendence – immanence (heaven – earth, earth – hell, heaven – hell)	creator – creature (parent – child, god – humanity, humanity – technology, humanity – art)	freedom – necessity (choice – fate, free-will – determinism)
body – mind (life – knowledge)	life – death (being – non-being)	nature – technology (human – machine)
master – slave (ruler – ruled, sadist – masochist, tyrant – victim)	eternity – time (infinity – space)	subject – object (I – It)
desire – acceptance (action – non-action)	truth – falsity	specific – general (one – many)

[

Thinking about God has historically been at home in the world of 2.  One of language’s core past functions may have been to help us cope in this world, which seems so liminal and real simultaneously.  Yet with the breakdown of Word, the partial transference of the divine functions to language, the birthing of the plurality of words and languages, the irreducible contradictoriness of existence, thinking about God must also change.  It must accept 2 and yet expand, leaving the supremacy of 2 (and so duality, myth, binary constructs) behind.  How does this happen?  It happens by grounding thinking in 2:0 as a diverse whole—in short, by rooting thinking in the body.