Standing with Ruth Amid the Alien Corn

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Street_organ

Increasingly, as I am faced with radiance and abundance in art, I am unable to find words for thoughts. As if in my brain there is a market where such exchange takes place, I walk from one vendor of words to another wondering which has the language I need. I think how many words would be appropriate, but how none, or few, have the value equal to the image - each option seems a poor transaction. How tired my language seems in response to art - as cliched as Hamlet's mousetrap and as worn out as the sole Van Gogh's boot. Where are the words full of fresh blood and hot breath that have enough currency to purchase the frame to hold this work? My pockets are turned out.

As I age ever onwards away from newness and innocence and ever towards experience and guilt, the language of my passion has become bankrupt, bloodless and beat. Even these Ecclesiastian ruminations are cliched, worn over from so much handling until all that remains is a coin smeared by time into a featureless disc of metal, its value indeterminate at best. Seaglass, broken fragments of shell, bleached bones of coral, driftwood and sand compose my treasury so reduced and emptied by time. Soon I will have Nothing to say, the presence of this Nothing as palpable as Aladdin's empty cave. Another tired rhetorical chiasmus brays in my thoughts like a broken backed donkey: I no longer have the spirits I once had, but I have the bottles I drank them in. Thus do I trot out the tired monkey of hope to dance among the broken bottles while I grind my organon with the heavy hand -  hoping to convey by the absence of that selfsame hope what passion the work would have once inspired.

There's an interesting hypothetical game about which artist or poet or philosopher you would you most like to be in the body of for an hour. (Nietzsche in the thunderstorm, Van Gogh in the Cornfield, Hart Crane on the S. S. Orizaba, Rilke at Duino Castle, Plath with her head in the oven.) In my current frame, there are none. I imagine (and how pregnant that verb) even WS would be a disappointment: in the heart of Hamlet's Mill forging the the agenbite of inwit, the transposed self overwhelmed with his ripe Elizabethan body odor and fetid livery breath, farting and burping up quim, unable to unwrench his riveted gaze from a young man's ass.

Here's the ache in it all for me: I know what my palate should taste from the world; I know how to spin the words out of the dross, to even make them into lovely little creatures. But everything sits on my tongue like a chewed over cud. I remove it from my mouth and I see the tender pussy pink flesh of a filet mignon dripping with butter and orgasmically oozing from its own juices. I put it back on my tongue and there is only a tasteless, odorless, textureless substance of which the best that can be said is that it warm and quivers and is not dirt or dust.

Yes, I am paranoid about losing my mind. And I have chosen to live with this decaying carcass of an 800 lb memorized gorilla. You smile: old men are always believing themselves on death's doorstep. Acknowledged. Me even more so. In my foolish youth, I laid my pallet there, overwrought with harebrained notions of zen monk machismo. As much as I lost on that doorstep, I did earn a healthy acceptance of death. With death I am fine. But with this flavorless life, I am not.

I was watching a documentary about Amy Winehouse a while back. There was a moment after she had bottomed out, rehab and recovery, she had just received a Grammy. Celebration all around. At that moment when she should have been happiest, she turned to a friend and said: "It's so boring without drugs". (The actor George Sanders suicide note: "I am bored".) There are days where I wonder, per Trakl and Winehouse, if I have so worn down the thresholds of my senses through extreme behaviors that I am now left with only a benumbed awareness, where nothing will ever be as bright or as shining or as sweet or as rich or as pleasurable as it one was. The one solace, perhaps the only redeemable gift of time, is that meaning never decays or dulls or loses its intensity -  everything has only become more meaningful over time.

Thus the philosophical hermit crab retreats inwards into the abandoned shell, into the deepening mysteries of the Golden Ratio ever deeper in, smiling at a conflated memory of Parmigianino's right hand and his own mis-shapened claw.

The Parable of the Cow's Head: There Is No Language to Describe the Terminal Horror of It

Dead Cow Skull - After Thaw Pre Maceration Rot

Recently,

I purchased a cow's head from a Mexican butcher that just reeked of horror and violence.

Took a some graphic photos which you can see here and by following this link.  Note that all of these photos are after thawing, pre-hot water maceration.

My idea was to "clean it" and document the process. When I lived in Austin, I had enough of a back-yard to throw skulls in buckets with Biz bleach and let 'em stew for a week, then knock them out of the bucket and let the elements and insects do the rest.

However,

here in Bellingham, I don't have that luxury. My plan was to keep it in the fridge so that it wouldn't rot, carve away a little more flesh each day.

Dead Cow Skull - After Thaw Pre Maceration Rot

But...

my fridge broke. And the cow's head was too big for my oven or any pot to boil it in. There was nothing else to do but get a 70 quart translucent plastic tub, fill it full of hot water and some bleach and let it sit for a day or two. The so-called "hot water maceration technique". I figured I would then load it into the back of my car and take it out to the country to dump the fluid, scrape off the rest of the meat and use a coat hanger wire to scoop out the brain from the hole where the spine used to be.

However...

when I tried to move the tub, the secure top would not stay on because it was so heavy. So I carefully slid it into my bathroom, next to the toilet, and got a saucepan to bail out the fluid.

Dead Cow Skull - After Thaw Pre Maceration Rot

I have smelled horrible things in my life.

But when I opened the lid to that 70 quarts of blood and brain and rotting head... there is no language to describe the terminal horror of that stench. It was beyond nausea. It made me want to kill myself so that my brain would not have to even remember the smell. It was like an animate creature that reached into the most primal parts of my brain tissue and fiendishly milked out ever drop of fear and loathing and disgust and absolute reversion. I immediately got a headache. There was a high pitched whine, a keening sound, piercing my thoughts. The only way I can express the sense of it is to say that for the first time in my richly experienced 50 plus years, I smelled evil.

Then,

I had to oh so motherfuckingly carefully transfer 70 quarts of the sticky-resinous-instantly-corrupting-anything-thing-it-came-in-contact-with fluid into my toilet.

After which,

myself covered in a cold sweat, my complexion deadly and green,

the cow's head was revealed in all of its congealed disgust and horror. Any thought of taking a photograph was instantly replaced with the burning need to never see this thing again. There was something unwelcomely intimate about having had to watch it slowly being revealed to me as I removed more and more of the blood brain rot water. A graphic strip-tease of horror that even with quick unwanted glances made it seem as if it were licking the inside of my eyes in some perverse sexual torture.

I quickly replaced the lid, loaded it into the Jeep.

Then...

I cleaned every surface of my kitchen and bathroom with bleach, boiling anything that came in contact with it, mopped the floor, vacuumed, and showered under the hottest water I could stand, soaping and rinsing several times, washing and conditioning my hair, cleaning under my nails, trimming my nails, flossing, brushing my teeth and flushing my nasal cavities with a Neti pot several times. I even rinsed my eyes with saline and then added redness-removing drops. And I still felt as if the thing were clinging to me as like a slimy fetid stinking loving animate creature with claws. I imagined it was in my breath, on my fingers, in my hair. I could taste it, smell it, hear it. Worse than the nastiest shit, worse than any skunk's spray, worse than any dead thing. I felt as if it had penetrated me and blossomed in the primal core of my brain. The only thing that I imagined would get me truly clean would be to hammer a hole in my skull and spoon out my brain.  The thought crossed my mind.

Instead,

I went searching for a dumpster in a remote alley where I could dispose of it, where hopefully no human would have to come in contact with the thing in the 70 quart translucent plastic tub. Where no one would be tempted to open that lid. Where it would end up in a landfill, buried under tons of trash, forever lost. I felt like I was disposing of a weapon or an evil genie in a lamp.

I drove to a grocery store on the other side of town and turned down the alley. Instead of being deserted as I had hoped, I saw a car and two people on bikes. My drug radar instantly went off.

I drove slowly towards them and they all moved slightly to the side. Acting too casual. Looking at the strung-out woman in the car and the two young Mexican men on bikes, my suspicions were confirmed.

"Yeah, you know, we're just hanging out here in the back alley talking to this twitchy lady in the car. No big deal. Nothing to see."

I stopped the jeep about 20 yards away from them. They watched me closely as I got out and went around to the back to open the door and remove the horror that was in the 70 quart translucent plastic tub.

I set it down right in the middle of the alley.

They could see there was nothing good in there. I nodded to them briefly, got back in the jeep and drove slowly away, watching in the rear-view mirror. One of the Mexican guys approached the tub and kicked off the lid. The other beside him. I saw each of them sort of jump back and stumble. I imagined I heard a yell or a scream. But then I turned the corner and was gone.

As I drove away...

I imagined what effect that would have had on me during one of my high-strung drug deals in the back-alleys of Austin.

I imagined the woman seeing the two guys run off without giving her the drugs, wondering what had just happened. She gets out of her car, smells it immediately but still has to see. Strung out, hungry, nerves on edge, tender, vulnerable, she walks over to see what it is. Just the horror of it leaping right into her brain like a snake striking.

I half-wished I would have thought it out more and placed a sign there that simply said: "Don't Do Drugs."

But, man, I began to laugh. I figured that was about the only thing I could have done to somewhat balance out the monstrosity of what that cow's head was.

However,

I still feel oddly bruised by the situation. The violence of the cow's head. It won't leave me. It has infected my eating. Anything meat or anything with a meatish consistency takes me right back to it. I feel like I am always eating dinner in a slaughterhouse.

I'll be vegetarian for a while, I imagine.




P.S. I drove back by the next day. It was, of course, gone. I do feel bad for that poor grocery store employee that had to deal with that. However, it was in a 70 quart translucent plastic tub. It did have a lid. The dumpster was 20 feet away. And I'd like to believe that it might deter drug deals from going on anymore in the alley. But I know that it won't.

Anodyne for Stephen Crane

source

 I saw grief drinking a cup of sorrow and called out, “It tastes sweet, does it not?”

“You’ve caught me,” grief answered, “And you’ve ruined my business. 

How can I sell sorrow, when you know it’s a blessing?”

- Rumi

The creature, naked, bestial...

I often return to this brief poem by Stephen Crane:

In the desert
I saw a creature, naked, bestial,
Who, squatting upon the ground,
Held his heart in his hands,
And ate of it.
I said, “Is it good, friend?”
“It is bitter—bitter,” he answered; 

“But I like it
“Because it is bitter,
“And because it is my heart.”

Crane died at 29.

This is from the Red Badge of Courage:

"He occasionally tried to fathom a comrade with seductive sentences. He looked about to find men in the proper mood. All attempts failed to bring forth any statement which looked in any way like a confession to those doubts which he privately acknowledged in himself. He was afraid to make an open declaration of his concern, because he dreaded to place some unscrupulous confidant upon the high plane of the unconfessed from which elevation he could be derided."

I think of William James' "moral equivalent of war". I read all of Crane as dark internal confession. All of his work is "an open declaration of his concern". It seems to surprise readers to learn Crane never fought in a war. But he did. The internal war every human wages within themselves. The Devil rides... perched on the shoulder wearing a coat of angelic wings.

There are two creatures within me: the beast and the man. And I have always nourished the roots that feed the man. The water of life and love and hope. But I sense those darker currents also, secretly feeding the beast.

To remind me of how much of my thinking is cliche, there is this often repeated tale:

An old Cherokee is teaching his grandson about life. “A fight is going on inside me,” he said to the boy. 

“It is a terrible fight and it is between two wolves. One is evil – he is anger, envy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, false pride, superiority, and ego.” He continued, “The other is good – he is joy, peace, love, hope, serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion, and faith. The same fight is going on inside you – and inside every other person, too.” 

The grandson thought about it for a minute and then asked his grandfather, “Which wolf will win?” 

The old Cherokee simply replied, “The one you feed.” [source]

I find it curious that this tale is given provenance to Native Americans when it was actually said by Billy Graham, a sort of reverse cultural appropriation. The thinking seems to be that it has more "authenticity" as a Native American tale than it does coming from the mouth of an evangelical Christian. No guilt over the genocide of the People who we would like to have once spoken such "truths". There is no better truth, no truer truth. Just truth, the most obvious thing in the world. Chop wood, carry water. Have you washed your bowls this morning? The fish asking what water is.

But what is it all in the end? Just a language game? A riddle to live by? Aesopian mystery? It all seems a Lie to me. Hollow figures of speech like skin over bones with no meat underneath. What feeds on these bones, the skin of this language?

My thoughts skitter and burn in the fire of my brain these days. Everything seems a worn out cliche, a tired old hole, a hoary maxim, Ecclesiastes exhausted, all language beat down and chewed over until every bright and shining poem and is reduced to a flavorless ruminated cud in my mouth. Nothing is new under the sun. In the most literal sense. Dry bones baked into dust. And these bones cannot live. There is no divine breath to animate them.

I sweep my bed clean every morning of all the dust of decay accumulated there in the night. My room is full of desert sand that was once the kingdom of Ozymandias. My wet blood, spit, sweat, snot, piss, shit and semen soaked fat flesh hangs like a scarecrow's corpse on my bones. Everything is empty, been hollowed out.

What am I?

James wrote of a period of "spiritual vastation" epitomized by a "black-haired youth with greenish skin":

"I went one evening into a dressing room in the twilight to procure some article that was there, when suddenly there fell upon me without warning, just as if it came out of the darkness, a horrible fear of my own existence. Simultaneously there arose in my mind the image of an epileptic patient whom I had seen in the asylum, a black-haired youth with greenish skin … who used to sit all day on one of the benches, or rather shelves against the wall, with his knees drawn up against his chin, and the coarse gray undershirt, which was his only garment, drawn over them enclosing his entire figure. He sat there like a sort of sculptured Egyptian cat or Peruvian mummy, moving nothing but his black eyes and looking absolutely non-human. This image and my fear entered into a species of combination with each other. That shape am I, I felt, potentially. Nothing that I possess can defend me against that fate, if the hour for it should strike for me as it struck for him.” 

"That shape am I, potentially,"

I am aware of it always. Over the last two years, I see variants of this figure every day: men and women, once vital and charismatic, fathers and mothers, teachers and bankers, each sitting there like Peruvian mummies, dead but still manifesting the symptoms of being alive. I watched the slow death of my mother. And now, my stepfather. And I am aware of those deep black waters nourishing the lesser elements of my being. Something down there is nourishing itself on this.

I don't know actual war. But I know the internal war of Stephen Crane's. The Red Badge as allegory. And I realize my own private war and the epic drama that is unfolding within me is all too common. Millions - a number I have difficulty conceiving in any real manner - millions of other humans are going through such a similar drama that they are virtually identical to me.

A colony of ants numbers just over a million. And one ant on the outskirts of the colony, singing a sad song of self-awareness and conflicted duality, means next to nothing.  Enough. But just barely. Again Kafka, the prophet of our times: There is hope, just none for us.

I often wonder about becoming something utterly different than what I am. In these moments, I can taste the freedom and hope of what it was to be on the other side of life - where more was in front than was behind. Before I started wearing down my path, dragging my feet through the rut of the world. I consider that I can still be whomever I want. And I consider becoming an opposite formulation: The Great Hater.

Here is the wound that opens between Crane's "creature, naked, bestial" and his "open declaration".

I think about the world I wished for. I think about the world I have inherited. And I know there is no justice in this world. Justice, it has been said, is for the next world. And there is no next world. However, between the life imagined and the life lived there is an abyss. And in this abyss - this place without depth, no bottom to touch upon - resentment breeds and grows. Nietzsche says,

"the man of ressentiment is neither upright nor naive nor honest and straightforward with himself. His soul squints; his spirit loves hiding places, secret paths and back doors, everything covert entices him as his world, his security, his refreshment; he understands how to keep silent, how not to forget, how to wait, how to be provisionally self-deprecating and humble’."

Resentment ferments into venom. Venom infects the language. Eats away at the future tense. Sickens hope.

Nelson Mandela and the Buddha have reputedly said:  “Resentment is like drinking poison and then hoping it will kill your enemies.”

Mandela merely lifted it from some source. And what the Buddha actually said was:

“By doing this you are like a man who wants to hit another and picks up a burning ember or excrement in his hand and so first burns himself or makes himself stink.” Visuddhimagga IX, 23. [source]

Nothing is original. And this poison confuses my analogy. I stand by my venom.

Pilate asked, "What is truth?"

The Greek word which was translated as truth is aletheia which means "the state of not being hidden", "un-concealed-ness", "un-forgetting".

Does it matter? Truly matter? Perhaps Pilate was merely being ironic.

The difference between venom of thought and poison of hope is all that matters.

There is an old riddle of why the snake does not die after it eats the creature it killed by its own venom.

The creature, naked, bestial...

I like it because it is bitter.

And because it is my heart.

This mis-carried life

"Der Krieg" - Otto Dix, 1924

It is relentless,
this pain of being,
defying the palliative caress
of habit and blanketings
of unmindfulness and forgetting.

The insistent presence of it,
a keening wire
of noise in the brain,
heated through with currents
of ever increasing potency.

These thoughts,
like barbarians
at the gate of my soul,
I entertain with mindless banter
and frantic antic dance,
parodies of welcome
designed to forestall
the inevitable crush inwards.

And the drilling replay
of the day's sad events
coring down through
the layers of the years
to the tender infant
memories of self,
that bawling apoplectic
red wad of meat,
spit out into this
fast panting world
of ever dawning darkness
and wrecks of dreams,
against its will.

Then the ceaseless tides
of consciousness
pooling soon enough
into stagnant realizations
of being
utterly forlorn,
anguished
and overfilled
with despair.

This mis-carried life,
hammered though with nails,
crucified to being,
infected with the dis-ease
of fifty odd years,
fifty too many,
shivering, feverish,
coughing, vomiting
up every shred of
evanescent pleasure and
always vanishing joy
until the only thing left
to purge itself of
is the bitter bile
of still being here.

Not see become

Scroll of the Nine Dragons - Chen Rong - circa 1244

Waterfall and Monkeys - Shibata Zeshin - 1872

[ cross post from The Empty Forms Between the Ivory Gates ]

the interrogator
the process of torture
born out of a dream
long ago in Morocco
he studies me patiently
states he wishes to add a chapter
to our mutual exploration of pain
much like the Waterfall and Monkeys of Zeshin
or the Scroll of the Nine Dragons by Chen Rong
you know these, of course
framed images in the room now
he indicates Zeshin
note the water is unpainted
it is not even there
the lines of ink
merely contain the absence
the most dynamic, energetic
moments are the most empty
the paper underneath
unpainted, untouched
he passes his hand lightly
over the rocks below the monkeys
you can almost feel the water
rushing through your fingers
he walks over to the wall length scroll
now observe the dragons
swirling out of the spirals
of mist, of fog, of clouds, of time
of nothing
again everything is born
out of this nothing
you can see the dragons
clawing their way through
almost fighting their way out of it
this self-knowledge of having been created
conjured, summoned into form
note how the dragons grasp hold
of this nothing
in particular the one to the right of the central vortex
holding what appears to be a crystal ball
a circle containing all of the energies of time
what is most powerful
is the absence of anything
within the circle
the paper, the background,
the ground of being we take for granted
is all that is within this sphere
being held within the dragon's claws
I say nothing
he studies me
says, perhaps I am belaboring my point
he motions to two guards next to me
they lift me up and place me
into a trunk full of cotton wadding
my hands and my feet are bound with rope
I am curled into a fetal position
in order to fit tightly within the trunk
cotton wadding is packed tightly
around my body
it is impossible to move
the interrogator sits in a chair
leans over so his face is close to mine
it is almost comfortable
he takes small pieces of cotton
packs them tightly around my head
says, one might imagine the womb
and here he places a black rubber device in my mouth
a long tube runs into a coil he holds in his hand
he fastens a buckle around my head
holding the device in my mouth
he takes two pieces of cotton
and gently inserts them into my nose
the tubing is narrow
and it difficult to get enough breath
he continues to place cotton
all around, packing me tightly into the trunk
I am trying to get enough air
he whispers into my ear
it is important that you not panic
I want, he tells me, you to imagine
the negative space of Zeshin
to know the power of the dragons
to understand in a profound and intimate sense
how much energy is contained within
the absence of a thing
that is always present
and here the lid of the trunk is closed
and I can hear latches being locked
it is becoming hot
I am trying not to panic
to remain calm
to not let him win
to not allow him to break me
the trunk is lifted
and turned so I am now head down
I feel all of my blood
pushing into my skull
I breath through the narrow tube
as evenly as possible
I am very hot
sweat pooling in my ears
trying to breath more air
seems to constrict the rubber tube
so I have to force myself to take slow breaths
suddenly there is no air
I cannot breath in or out
I can see the Interrogator in my mind
casually holding the end of the tube shut
between his thumb and finger
as he contemplates
the Japanese prints in the wall
on the verge of passing out
he releases his grip
I am so desperate for air
that the tube seems always sucked shut
I have to slow my breathing
my blood is pounding in my head
I seems to float in this thick and suffocating
cotton womb tomb
the Interrogator repeats this process
of asphyxiation over and over
keeping me conscious
but with never enough air
but with just enough
I long to either pass out
to die
or for just one last time
to breathe deeply
just one last breath
I imagine the Waterfall with Monkeys
the empty spaces between the water
full of space of air of nothing
I long to breath in that nothingness
and like those images
where the foreground is hidden in the background
I suddenly see the dragon
not see
become

There's some do.

Written on the 22nd of May 2009.
East 53rd.
Austin, Texas.

***

Another shot of tequila.
In the room. Alone.
I made this table.
Wanted to write on it with a hammer.

I thought he might still come over.
Listening for the sound of footsteps through the leaves.
Under the thrum of the a/c.
Between the blinds.
Bloodshot eyes.

Polaroids fall out of a book.
The old bar.
The swordfish and the stoplight.
We all thought it meant something.

This morning I signed my confession.
Lost the pen in between the seats.
Don't matter.
Cheap pen scarred from being carried around in a box.

She said wait 24 hours.
But I already told them I was guilty.
Don't sign away your life.
But it was a done deal.

Came back to the room.
Turned the a/c up to make it cold.
Man on the corner with the upside down sign
Said it was hot.
D' you have any water?
Naw. Well there's this from New York City.
Said he probably wouldn't drink it.
Said it didn't matter.
Water is water.
Who cares about the container?
There's some do.

Spend the rest of the day watching shadows
From the driveway reflect though the blinds.
I can see where the cars pass by.
Clouds turn the room from gray to blue.

Keep shaking awake.
Hunger flutters in my gut.
Stepping off a stair on my way to sleep.
She comes knocking, frantic.
Don't answer your phone. Worried.
Always just when I get to the good sleep.
And then she's gone.

I could make a call.
Or walk down the street.
And then what?
Wouldn't be good anyhow.
Not without a place to exhale.
Not waiting for the next knock on the door.
Watching for shadows.
Afraid of cats.

Wake up at the bottom of the ocean.
Squaring circles with Blake and Newton.
Breathing in the night. Suffocating.
Turn on the light for air.

Another shot of tequila.
Cook up half a leftover burger and some fries.
Try to wait it out.
Put on some clothes. Shoes and socks.
Sit here at this table I made.
Straighten papers.
I remember this book
And a bunch of polaroids fall out.

I know every face.
Half of 'em dead. Rest ghosts.
Look at those walls...
I pulled the nails out
And hammered them back in.
Replacing truth with lies.
And those faces...
We were happy just drinking.

A message on an old phone.
Can't live. Am lost without you.
Bar in the background.
I walk down the street.
Mexican woman killed her lover here
Fencing with a coat hanger.
Right in the heart.

And it's nothing good.
All my words sound like whispers curses
Under a clown's make-up.
One minute in: got anything?
Only ever one reason.
No I love you until the afterthought.
I hang out to dry.
The dog gnaws on a piece of hide.
I sit there for thirty minutes
Under a rain of tears, knives, cigarettes.

Finally, just leave.
Walk back down the murderous street.
Faces under street lights.
Naw c'mon. Too gone to fuck with.
Footsteps behind me.
Close the gate.
And wait for the sound of dried leaves
Crunching bones outside my window.

Another shot of tequila
And there is just...
Nothing.

Another shot of tequila.
Waiting for him
To come around.
C'mon, less go. For old time's sake.

Bottle's empty.
I think those cats got babies in the garage.
I'll spend the next couple of weeks
Watching them die.
Again.

Dry bones can harm no one

I have taken to sleep recently as I once took to drugs. The want for it comes over me like a fog of desire. I indulge myself in it richly with deep initial breaths as if I am pulling in the first clouds of smoke from a burning Morphic rock. I can feel the deep blue oceanic atmospheres of the night-times of the brain growing within me like a pervasive vine, twisting and twining though my inner world. Oddly, though dreams do come, visions of domes of pleasure, when I awaken they are only foggy wisps of memory. Most often I am awakened after only a couple of hours of sleep with a throbbing headache which lasts for several hours after. If I can, when the headache relaxes its hold upon my brain, I will return immediately to sleep. With my recent resolves concerning memory, I have struggled to remember my dreams only to wake up increasingly drugged and hung-over for having been in the depths of it.

Today, I remembered a dream, an incidental thing, that nevertheless seemed a triumph.  Not so much concerning the dream, but that I was able to remember just the slightest fragment of it and hold it within the structure of language, the cages of words. The act was not without a melancholy sort of sorrow, as if I were betraying myself and sleep itself. A spy in the house of sleep, covertly recording the exquisite dramas that I was allowed to witness under an implicit oath of forgetting. Where previously I had abandoned myself to the esoteric mysteries of sleep, now I was watching from within the net of language. It was no longer enough to caress the beauty of the fish in the water, I now was now hanging lure and line, waiting to set the hook through the skull of it and tear it out of its watery womb into the bloody gasping world of language. A Pyrrhic grammar, at best.

I return to the boathouse, to the place of myth and religion, and see there are no fish in my net, only bones. There is no one to welcome me and the boathouse is falling to ruin. On the shore, close to the pier, I dry the bones over a fire, humming an old tune, blowing and breathing over them, asking Ezekiel's questions. There is no wind. Smoke rises through a sky filled with stars.

Finally, consider the Fisher King having awoken from the long spell of enchantment to the Waste Land of his former kingdom. Jesse Weston's read through T. S. Eliot:

Who is the third who walks always beside you?
When I count, there are only you and I together
But when I look ahead up the white road
There is always another one walking beside you
Gliding wrapt in a brown mantle, hooded
I do not know whether a man or a woman
—But who is that on the other side of you?

What is that sound high in the air
Murmur of maternal lamentation
Who are those hooded hordes swarming
Over endless plains, stumbling in cracked earth
Ringed by the flat horizon only
What is the city over the mountains
Cracks and reforms and bursts in the violet air
Falling towers
Jerusalem Athens Alexandria
Vienna London
Unreal

A woman drew her long black hair out tight
And fiddled whisper music on those strings
And bats with baby faces in the violet light
Whistled, and beat their wings
And crawled head downward down a blackened wall
And upside down in air were towers
Tolling reminiscent bells, that kept the hours
And voices singing out of empty cisterns and exhausted wells.

In this decayed hole among the mountains
In the faint moonlight, the grass is singing
Over the tumbled graves, about the chapel
There is the empty chapel, only the wind’s home.
It has no windows, and the door swings,
Dry bones can harm no one.

Author Posthumous Haunting

Who is the audience? Ancient graffiti. For whom do I write? A dead god? Those I love who have lost and are losing their minds? My own dead self? The vast skeleton out there in the Desert, half buried in the sand, shattered skull, scattered teeth, ancient bones broken under centuries of storms. In the cave of that cathedral cranium, sitting before a fire, feeding pages into the flames. Why do anything? Why create? Why spin figures out of the baseless fabric, this insubstantial pageant faded? The words disintegrate against the zero of everything. Thoughts turn to dust in the fallow womb of this world. And yet... the guttering flame endures as the fleshy marionette jerks in sad pantomime over the rack of these bones. I am that one now that mocks his own grinning. Author posthumous haunting, one with the man in the wind and the west moon, stars at elbow and foot. My horrible dominion.

Faces of Addiction

Photo by Chris Arnade

It was twelve degrees outside and maybe a few degrees warmer inside. Michael took off his gloves to work the crack and clean the pipe. He stopped to warm them over the candles. Frost from his breath mixed with smoke from the crack.

Faces of Addiction

The stories of addicts in the Hunts Point neighborhood, the poorest in all of New York City. I post people's stories as they tell them to me. 

What I am hoping to do, by allowing my subjects to share their dreams and burdens with the viewer and by photographing them with respect, is to show that everyone, regardless of their station in life, is as valid as anyone else. 

 Its easy to ignore others. By not looking, by not talking to them, we can fall into constructing our own narrative that affirms our limited world view.    

I can be contacted at Chris@arnade.com

http://www.flickr.com/photos/arnade/sets/72157627894114489/

The Calculus of Desire

Deeply iterated Buddhabrot

In the 5th century B.C., Eudoxus of Cnidus, developed the Method of Exhaustion to determine the area of a shape by inscribing the interior with a series of polygons, notably applied by Archimedes to figure the area inside of a circle and the Quadrature of the Parabola. It is considered a precursor to integral Calculus. 

Source

Zeno of Elea proposed the Dichotomy Paradox as an attempt to prove Parmenidian idea of "The One." The argument is familiar: Your hand reaches out for the cup of coffee. At the halfway point, is is 1/2 of the distance to the cup. Then it moves half the distance of this, 1/4. Then half of this, 1/8. And again and again into infinity. Accordingly, you are never quite "touch" the cup of coffee.

Source

Of course, your hand grasps hold of the cup and raises it to your mouth. But the mind, enraptured by Zeno, is still generating a denominator that is forever reaching to infinity.

M.C. Escher, Parade of Ants
Source

In the late 1700s, Leibniz provided a set of rules to work with infinitesimal sums which became the foundation (along with Newton) for modern calculus. In the 19th century, the limit of a function replaced infinitesimals by using real numbers, such as zero or one.

A Koch curve has an infinitely repeating self-similarity

As the hand approaches the cup of coffee, the distance between each object approaches zero. The idea of a number, of a discrete element of abstract thought, wants to insert itself in between - giving birth to Zeno's Dichotomy Paradox. Reductio ad absurdum. The inviolable stillness of the Parmenidian One is experienced as absurd. There are objects in motion through time. Hands reach out to grasp cups of coffee. The beauty is when we allow that everything does become One, through the poetry of the calculus. Thus, the process of abstracting, of generating sets of objects, itself is paradoxical. Cantor's naive sets and Russell's Paradox. Extending to Godel. Self referentiality is the difficult crux:

This statement is false.

Source

The calculus of desire. Of addiction. The relationship between the two. Chasing the Dragon. Trying to get to Zero, to touch the Thing Itself: Ding an Sich. Burning out the pleasure centers, the hardwired "circuitry of the brain" through infinite Methods of Exhaustion. Rising up with the intoxicating smoke, over-saturating the referentiality, trying to get around the tolerance curve, to see what pulses within the Heart of the Fractal Dragon. 

I have heard the bell ringing within, shivered within it's tolling, broken myself down against it's clanging. I have torn the rough rags of language off of the Thing Itself, breaking the gerund "ing" off and holding the ring. Blowing out the brains shivering synaptic structures, ringing ringing ring ring, until there is just the constant sound of being, the flatline tone that resolves into oṃ... ॐ

How all ’s to one thing wrought! 

- Gerard Manley Hopkins, On a piece of music

And what do I have to say? Who am I to add to what is? 

Zoetrope: the hole destroys both being and itself

Source

The other night I woke up from a dream and wrote this down:

dreams by a flickering light
contained within the circle
of the zoetrope

Source

Thoughts have since gathered around these memories and constructed a scene. Imagine this world being contained within the interior of a zoetrope. What we are is a series of fragments, a set of static images, Hume's "bundle of perceptions." However, outside of us, on the exterior of the zoetrope, is a being, a presence,  that perceives our world, through the spinning slits of the device as having connection; the fragmentary, static images now flow in a seamless meaningful sequence. Our world, from that perspective, is a dance. If they were to stop the spinning of the zoetrope, they would see the thousand separate instances of our existence that appear, at best, strange, and, most often, as banal and pointless. Only when the world is in process, when there is a presence of, what might be called, the transcendental perceiver, is there any sense, any meaning, any magic... beauty to what we are.

All that is limited by form, semblance, sound, color is called object. Among them all, man alone is more than an object. Though, like objects, he has form and semblance, He is not limited to form. He is more. He can attain to formlessness. When he is beyond form and semblance, beyond "this" and "that," where is the comparison with another object? Where is the conflict? What can stand in his way? He will rest in his eternal place which is no-place. He will be hidden in his own unfathomable secret. His nature sinks to its root in the One. His vitality, his power hide in secret Tao.

- Chuang Tzu. The Way of Chuang Tzu. Translator/Editor Thomas Merton.

What persists between the slits of the zoetrope, between the thousand separate instants within? There is the Myth of the Persistence of Vision which assumed that the eye is overwhelmed by the speed and number of images. The images accumulate within the organ of sensation, piling up, so to speak, and bleeding over into each other, so our perception of them is of a unity. But this has been shown to be a myth.1, 2 Instead, there is conceptual presence that connects the thousand separate instances into a meaningful flow. This conceptual presence is a transcendental ground upon which meaning is structured. These are the dreams from the interior of the zoetrope. Given that, that the ghosts in the machine are merely dreaming their own meaning, the question becomes: is this enough? Is this castle of memory, harmony and hope enough to stand against the stark brutal and violent reality of the howling world we are within?

Once Zhuangzi dreamt he was a burning skull, a burning skull howling and screaming around, suffering with the horror of self consciousness and the pain of raw being. He didn't know he was Zhuangzi. Suddenly he woke up and there he was, solid and unmistakable Zhuangzi. But he didn't know if he was Zhuangzi who had dreamt he was a burning skull, or a burning skull dreaming he was Zhuangzi. Between Zhuangzi and a burning skull there must be some distinction! This is called the Transformation of Things.

Source

The wheel spins and meaning is spun like thread from the dross of the world. A thread soaked in blood and tears, fragments of bone and tissue. This turning churning maw of existence with it difficult and tragic meaning.

There's no such thing as life without bloodshed. I think the notion that the species can be improved in some way, that everyone could live in harmony, is a really dangerous idea. Those who are afflicted with this notion are the first ones to give up their souls, their freedom. Your desire that it be that way will enslave you and make your life vacuous.

- Cormac McCarthy

Between the slits of the zoetrope, there is screaming and fear: the gods are eating the flesh from our living bones.

In the Chorus, which precedes the bringing in of Antigone after she has tossed a handful of earth on her borther's naked body, the praise of human greatness of combined with anxiety: "Many are the wonders and terrors, and nothing is more wonderful and terrible than man." Deina is a wonderful and terrible phenomenon ("miracle"and "wonder" have both these meanings); man is deinotaton, the stranger, the alien and the alienated. Strongest and most ingenious of all creatures, he is "alienated" from the nature he has harnessed; he can also be alienated from the city he has built, he can even be alienated from himself. Hypsipolis and apolis, "high in the city" and "stateless." His fatherland is no man's land. His rapacity is boundless; he can change the future. Only for death has he found no remedy. Martin Heidegger was the first to analyze this anxiety of human existence is the Chorus of Antigone as being part of man's condition:

Everywhere journeying, inexperienced and without issue,he comes to nothingness. Through no flight can he resist the one assault of death, even if he has succeeded in cleverly evading painful sickness.

How close this is to Hamlet's soliloquy:

What a piece of work is man! How noble in reason! how infinite in faculties! in form and moving, how express and admirable! in action how like an angel! in apprehension, how like a god! the beauty of the world! the paragon of animals! And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust? Man delights not me - (II, ii, 299-304)

If awareness is a "hole in being" in the Sophoclean theatre of cruelty, the hole destroys both being and itself. There is much that is strange, but nothing stranger than man.

- Jan Kott, The Eating of the Gods

Source

Chao hua chih kuan: the pipe which makes fantasies appear

Mat Collishaw, The Garden of Unearthly Delights

In Volume 4 of Joseph Needham's Science and Civilisation in China, there is a fascinating description:

Another ancestor of the cinematograph was a variety of zoetrope, which may well have originated in China, namely a light canopy hung over a lamp, and bearing vanes at the top so disposed that the ascending convection currents cause it to turn. On the sides of the cylinder there would be thin panes of paper or mica, carrying painted pictures, which, if the canopy spun round fast enough, would give an impression of movement of animals or men. Such devices certainly embodied the principle of a rapid succession of images. In its semi-fabulous account of Chhin Shih Huan Ti's treasury, already quoted, the Hsi Ching Tsa Chi speaks of the sparkling of scales of turning dragons after a lamp was lit. It also describes what must have been a small windmill or air tubine [...]. This was called chao hua chih kuan (the pipe which makes fantasies appear).1

Chen Rong, The Nine Dragons handscroll, 1244.

When you are smoking crack, after a rock or two, there is a build up of resin within the interior of the pipe. Long time users will tell you that it is the result of trying to smoke too large a rock or improper technique. Nevertheless, once the pipe cools, the brown crust forms, impurities or "cut" cooked out. It is the essence of crack. And every user knows that it will provide an amplified and intense experience.

The wire screen, typically made from a torn piece of chore boy, is also generally full of this crack resin. Using a piece of wire ("pokey"), carefully holding the glass pipe with the screen at the bottom, you gently scrape the resin off the sides of the pipe. It falls away from the interior sides of the pipe like brightness falls from the air, collecting on top of the screen. Once the interior has been entirely scraped clean, the pokey is pressed against the bottom of the screen to push it through to the other end, collecting and further concentrating the scrape at the far end of the pipe. The process is called "the scrape" and the "the push." Because it is so potent, many users will tap out a portion of the scrape onto a folded piece of paper to save for later. Smoking the scrape, results in an intense and powerful experience, the closest most will ever get to the Dragon.

It is a pipe dream.

Hall of the Dragon Mist by ~Suirebit

Whose seeds of death-in-life are burnt

Allegory of Death, Maximilián Pirner, after 1886

He who wanders without a home in this world, leaving behind the desires of this world, and the desires never return - him I call a Brahmin.

He who wanders without a home in this world, leaving behind the feverish thirst for the world, and the fever never returns - him I call a Brahmin.

He who is free from the bondage of men and also from the bondage of the gods: who is free from all things in creation - him I call a Brahmin. 

He who is free from pleasure and pain, who is calm, and whose seeds of death-in-life are burnt, whose heroism has conquered all the inner worlds - him I call a Brahmin.

The Dhammapada, Chapter 26, 415-418 - The Brahmin.
Mascaro translation.

I moved my lips -the Pilot shrieked 
And fell down in a fit; 
The holy Hermit raised his eyes, 
And prayed where he did sit. 

I took the oars: the Pilot’s boy, 
Who now doth crazy go, 
Laughed loud and long, and all the while 
His eyes went to and fro. 
`Ha! ha!’ quoth he, `full plain I see, 
The Devil knows how to row.’ 

And now, all in my own country, 
I stood on the firm land! 
The Hermit stepped forth from the boat, 
And scarcely he could stand. 

 O shrieve me, shrieve me, holy man! 
The Hermit crossed his brow. 
`Say quick,’ quoth he `I bid thee say - 
What manner of man art thou?’ 

Forthwith this frame of mine was wrenched 
With a woeful agony, 
Which forced me to begin my tale; 
And then it left me free. 

Since then, at an uncertain hour, 
That agony returns; 
And till my ghastly tale is told, 
This heart within me burns. 

I pass, like night, from land to land; 
I have strange power of speech; 
That moment that his face I see, 
I know the man that must hear me: 
To him my tale I teach.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Ancient Mariner, Part VII

SCRAPINGS: Notes for an essay

Language is an unfolding riddle. Cadmus sowing the hieroglyphs of the Dragon's Teeth to bring forth  the armed Phoenician men of the Alphabet. Atomic elements of language, energies spun down into phonemes and morphemes: Indo-European mysteries. The Spirit is thus crucified upon the skeleton of the Flesh. The Incarnation of Inspiration. The imprisonment of God's Holy Fire, enthousiazein, into the charnel house of the body. The bondage of Yeats, all of us sailing to Byzantium. Afterwards, literally, the seductions of Time: the relentless habituations and myriad desensitizations of the brain. The key as Eliot's confirmation of the prison in the Waste Land. Every sentence, emotional, literal and judicial, as a Zen koan to be "thought beyond." Law in this world, Justice in the next. A ladder from the Tarot leading up to a cloud. And even if it all is an epiphenomenal joke, a Ghost dreaming of Electric Sheep in the bedrooms of the Machine, there is still the haunting Presence of a Transcendental Ground. Some dark future. A gossamer thread of Hope.

Hope, George Frederic Watts, 1886

At the Tate National Gallery. An allegorical painting by George Frederic Watts: Hope. The blindfolded female figure atop a somber globe, bent down listening to the music of the one remaining string. Gossamer thread. As if the artist has access to my inmost soul. Ecce:

George Frederic Watts, Can These Bones Live? 1897-8

Hedonia

In 1950s Olds and Milner et al. demonstrated that a rat will press a bar in a Skinner box to electrically stimulate "pleasure centers," nucleus accumbens, until they die from exhaustion, forgoing any previous rewards based on food, comfort or even sex with another rat.

When the electrodes were wired so that the rats could stimulate their own brain by pressing a lever, Olds and Milner discovered that they did so almost obsessively—some more than 1,000 times an hour.1

The control exercised over the animal’s behavior by means of this reward is extreme, possibly exceeding that exercised by any other reward previously used in animal experimentation.2

Wanting and Liking

One patient—a 24-year-old homosexual whom Heath was attempting to cure of depression (and of his desire for other men)—was compelled to stimulate his electrodes some 1,500 times over the course of a single, three-hour session. According to Heath, this obsessive self-stimulation gave the subject, patient B-19, “feelings of pleasure, alertness, and warmth (goodwill).” The end of his session was met with vigorous protest.3

Eudaimonia 

From Aristotle to contemporary positive psychology, well-being or happiness has been usefully proposed to consist of at least two ingredients: hedonia and eudaimonia (Aristotle 2009; Seligman et al. 2005). While definitions of these by philosophers and psychologists have varied, most generally agree that hedonia at least corresponds psychologically to a state of pleasure. Thus a particularly important topic for hedonic psychology and affective neuroscience is to understand how pleasure is generated by brain mechanisms so as to contribute to well-being. Fortunately, deciphering hedonia in the brain is a task in which considerable progress has already been made. Eudaimonia by comparison may be more difficult to define philosophically or approach scientifically, but most agree it corresponds to some cognitive and/or moral aspect of a life lived well and not to any mere emotional feeling. We view eudaimonia to mean essentially a life experienced as valuably meaningful and as engaging. Thus, for psychological neuroscience of the future another major goal will be to uncover how such experiences are reflected in patterns of brain activity (Urry et al. 2004).4

Arete

Among us English-speaking peoples especially do the praises of poverty need once more to be boldly sung. We have grown literally afraid to be poor. We despise anyone who elects to be poor in order to simplify and save his inner life. If he does not join the general scramble and pant with the money-making street, we deem him spiritless and lacking in ambition. We have lost the power even of imagining what the ancient idealization of poverty could have meant: the liberation from material attachments, the unbribed soul, the manlier indifference, the paying our way by what we are or do and not by what we have, the right to fling away our life at any moment irresponsibly—the more athletic trim, in short, the moral fighting shape. When we of the so-called better classes are scared as men were never scared in history at material ugliness and hardship; when we put off marriage until our house can be artistic, and quake at the thought of having a child without a bank-account and doomed to manual labour, it is time for thinking men to protest against so unmanly and irreligious a state of opinion. William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, 1900

Would rather feel the very devil burn

[ source ]

There is much to be said for contentment and painlessness, for these bearable and submissive days, on which neither pain nor pleasure is audible, but pass by whispering and on tip-toe. But the worst of it is that it is just this contentment that I cannot endure. After a short time it fills me with irrepressible hatred and nausea. In desperation I have to escape and throw myself on the road to pleasure, or, if that cannot be, on the road to pain. When I have neither pleasure nor pain and have been breathing for a while the lukewarm insipid air of these so-called good and tolerable days, I feel so bad in my childish soul that I smash my moldering lyre of thanksgiving in the face of the slumbering god of contentment and would rather feel the very devil burn in me than this warmth of a well-heated room... For what I always hated and detested and cursed above all things was this contentment, this healthiness and comfort, this carefully preserved optimism of the middle classes, this fat and prosperous brood of mediocrity.   

Hermann Hesse, Steppenwolf