Tom Goar

 I.
 This content and responses were elicited in 2011 when I sent him a review of his poems that appeared in elimae.


Review of The Shout of Tom Goar, Posthumous Poet
AE Reiff May 2011 elimae   /See/https://aereiff.blogspot.com/2012/12/review-of-shout-of-tom-goar-posthumous.html

I got 10 votes for my platform to pay poets to read. Did three readings that fall, then quit. Each got $50. That's where the word scared everybody to death. Thirty or 40 torn ears and bleeding toes. The word shout isn't capped in the text. I had heard it in the room once, at the top of his lungs. Scream shouted, universal world shouted... it was a scream for all the displaced maquiladores before they went back to their desks. Harriet Monroe said she would never to come to these things again. Then she wrote to Wallace, "change the text and leave out stanza 7." He acquiesced. But nobody said anything to Tom. The shout built momentum. I heard it again over time. It woke me last night. Today I pick up the fragments of which I have maybe the only copy of ten made, and wonder why this collective prophecy is not the stuff of which poetry is made.
I can blue such blues they're mean Down a hole to China never seen I can blue such blues they're red Down a hole to China like I said.
He comes shouting: Francelia becomes a storm...she screams to life...she opens her eye to the fury of dawn.
 Turn the page. Some lady knitting red longjohns, leaps over from the New York Times. She is Blues From Room 7, with silver zephers sweeping stars, and angels.
 Now angels look down from their rooftops to see. What do they see, laugh in the dark while she drains our blood...the Hungry Mother Monument. Somebody call Bly. Tell him that Pegasus sprang from the neck of this Medusa when Perseus slew her! Medusa's blood! Poseidon! Sea foam down in the deep heart's core, below in the center / the molten mother's lava heart-core flows. She is my earth but skip the geologic. What a relief to. But it doesn't say the Lord descended. It doesn't say the flowers bloomed. It doesn't say wars will cease. The war's on it says.
 So he says, I took it down, / Put it in my blood, everything you said. Like when they're just out of ink and can write no more unless they tap a vein, or out of water can't drink, or no blankets to wrap the shrink, shivering with no meds. We get out carrots for our old dog, broccoli stems, lettuce, New York strip, fry eggs with bacon and lunch meat. It's cheaper than MRIs.
 How many MRIs have you had? I became Ahab stalking the deck in the wind...and it made me so cold. That's when I thought he would bring out Ophelia again, Ophelia who drowned, I said to myself, Ophelia who got married when she was old... Ophelia, I have lived too long-- / Now I am Polonius / Remembering the arras.
 Memory memory on the wall who's the freakest of them all? That's a question, but he answers. When daylight started cracking through my walls I was a fool!
Dear Harriet,
 Wallace said, "I see no objection to cutting down...your criticism is clearly well-founded (183)...I should prefer to keep the lines unchanged..." (Wallace Stevens, Letters, 184).
But then again I felt a chill / Shattering blast of a trumpet whose time has come. I tell you no sound echoes down the year, blasts into ground, circles around, comes up, goes down. The scream, the shout, the blast. To keep these things from echoing I adjust the TV at night. Off! I flip the switch, the main switch, all power, cut the cable, call the soul's end from sounds I can't hear.
2.
I set out to calculate the velocity of shout. Figuring the rate of escape, its transit would be in x, times the number of days out of the solar system, heard by Betelgeuse. TV escapes earth and not The Shout? Broadcast light, sound goes out. It translates the sublunar, heard in space before all. That's what the beings of Betterguese do, they turn on earth at night, watch the tube. Count this multiplied by the indefinititude of shouts and it's no wonder we wear plugs to keep them out. They wear ear phones to keep them in, shouts multiplied with groans. You say how could they, how bizarre. I don't know. But you're a living actor on the stage here, so read the lines apportioned you and be happy in unknowing. Happy unknowing, there are as many words for it as Eskimos have for snow. You think it silent in the night when you type but it is not. The audient layers orchestrate. What seascape doesn't reecho?
Wind wraps cold around...a voice to sing? I need a bark, to float.
You know his cry is octaves up, slit my throat with shadows, he says, so the cry is light too, an empty chair, past understanding...Whisps of angels...let the fire freeze. The phrases come like waves and no tsunami. Light, angels, squeeze water from the rock. Then he says, Be rain. All these chords, melodies scat the head voice, chest voice, toes sing with the hands from the windowpane, it is a dance, not seen. Unseen, but heard, how many ways can you groan? The answer to this has lived among the elk many years, as we know from travels in their realm, uncredited more than coyote songs, their hymn of being to the lost. There are the lost and there are those who sing, who pad over moss and turf, eye shine. Everything depends upon predation inside halls and rooms. Some night over to Green Gardens the prisoners of age in their white gowns whose gnarled fingers claw and curl the air, their voices hear but not with the same SHO..! Out this clown whose eyes are wax...head as large as circled sight in a...waving brain. Oh wave the life of the waving world into the heart again! The walls are membranes, the walls, the ceilings, the windows, the doors, the floors are membranes of being lost.
 These memories of things past, with the debris of later lives, remain. We dig in peril because we must go through all the top pain. Through all the cries and groans down down to lifeBut what about this and what about that, a hat they take on and off for the sake of kimberlites? Diamonds in the crust of pain wait for them to seek memories that lead to the one, an eternal regression the old man makes, I mean the one who had the bypass and the kidney out, down he goes to where nobody knows. He came as he lays there in his life and hears the song shout where radar replaced by laser still points, and down, down. He makes up myth about it, takes off hat, hair, eyes, skin, teeth and sails to the beat on a wind of flame. Down, down further into the crust, back and down, over river, through woods, the trees glisten and comes out in boyhood where grass sings: What we know is our creation, he says. I would be still... I will fade out of my head. Into the river of lights on the road. He says, I hunger and I dream against it...I have become invisible as the sun breaks.
 This dissolution earned, maybe merited, maybe not, but earned, sought, felt, not hoped for, wept, but you know they work hard work for that, and open sky, cold air, snow. Be snow, lay your hand! Yes, the fire in the kiln is opalescent first, then incandescent and with tinges of wit on the border, so hot you shield your face. All singed eyebrows and hands, those who handle light in the deeper silence of the lower brain. And if that's the lower what the higher, where you walk in a kiln of yourself and meet Nebuchadnezzar boys roasting next to the four who won't burn. I can't look, he says, the vision dims.
 And that's good for him, but me it wakes and I look at the seed coats sprung off the sides of the form, spray it with water and the shell flakes off now it cools. The egg is born in its shell but doesn't live long. The lake is an egg, the fawn is an egg, the leg, foot, hand that reaches out of and into the kiln to retrieve itself, not from fire, to retrieve itself from the impure bake off now in remembering. Can you remember tomorrow what you were a white tail fleeing over fences? So he comes out into it,
Bronze in the sun; The lion's in my tread as I walk And my mane flows behind.
All these forms, giraffes, three legged though, spotted, unspotted, tall as snow on peaks covered with the last freeze before spring brings living, which he calls here the time for killing.
 The advantage in knowing posthumous is you get to test the words with life, see what escapes they make, or merge into the sunlike weather in the arms of a wife with children around them in age. It's either this or it's not and something else. But if you track him down, this posthumous unknown poet, not that you should, and ask, not that he would tell, but just to see, whether to bring up the past or not is up to you. Nobody else remembers, not even him, but the last page,
Songbird singing in a shower of rain Cat sits on the porch listening,
echos and reecho with your own in the brain of the mist, the rain in the trees that falls on rock to make a three petaled lily, an escarpment more aquifer and songbird that comes to billow flocks like sudden storm, hundreds, thousands of songbird breasts ruffed up, pressed out, knowing. And the cat too lies head down, content to follow seasons, the cat, bird, moment, graveyard where pebbles clash against sand for traction, where the earth remains in its blue white bloom.
Tom Goar. Poems 1969-72.
Note:
Once when I served time among the graduate inmates of U TX, and represented inmates with poetry readings paid for by the U, readers would get 50 bucks. It's true I quit after three months, but three readings ensued, maybe nine poets. This one combined the services of John Lehmann, a guest lecturer, once secretary of Edith Sitwell and Virginia Woolf, Ray Neubauer and Tom Goar. Tom went second. The room was unprepared. In the middle of his "Prospero, Sweet Prince," to the word "shout," he actually shouted. Loud. I have been bothered by it since. The Shout, not exactly a poem or a book, was a word spoken as an act. On seeing this review Tom said, "There are things that the posthumous poet would rather be tracked down and told when he is alive than when he is dead."



II. His response April 5, 2011was:

I'm astonished, amused, grateful, and touched. And honored. Your review would be the best review of my poetry ever, even if it were not the only one. It is itself a lyric of delicious images, thinly disguising itself as prose. There are things that the posthumous poet would rather be tracked down and told when he is alive than when he is dead. Your remembrance of his words is a treasure you have given him. These days, the only poems I write tend to follow operations. My latest, a laproscopic hernia repair, was the occasion for this hip-hop lyric: I've got a new look, and I hope it won't stick: Two black balls, and a two-toned dick. And after a trip to the cardiologist's office a couple of years ago, to check up on my quintuple bi-pass operation that happened four and a half years ago, I wrote this: Ultrasound I saw my heart today, Not all at once, but part by part, And valve by valve, as the technician Moved her instrument across my chest And we watched the muscle throbbing, My hot blood displayed as blue, red, and yellow streams Surging in and surging out, Valve-flaps lifting, closing, lifting, closing— Busy, busy, busy, busy, Never pausing. How can you go on like this, My fragile hearty beating heart? How can you someday stop? Will Mind go on without you, Or will it not? I love seeing your creations. If I could do visual art like that I wouldn't do anything else. Thank you for being kind enough to care. Tom




My reply 6 Apr 2011 was:

 I'm glad you take it in a friendly manner. I can imagine a range of responses. I wrote it before FB, then it got lost in the maze. I found it yesterday while looking for a piece for Lee Klein, the Eyeshot guy. For him now you have to send a postcard with a fragment to his address and if he wants more he emails. I made a postcard out of cardboard, but have no idea what I wrote on it, giving him a title to jog memory...but couldn't find it, but I found this. To me life is so absurd and ecstatic. I don't think I have scratched the surface yet of what is there, I mean in your words and the worlds it rings. More absurd, I would want to do an edition of your words, esp. seeing you continue and bringing all that in! Comfort and logic somehow join hands there. Even more, when I wrote this and lost it a rewrite of it came out anyway in an entry for a contest before last Christmas, all from your memo about Haiti, 33 poems called Prayer for all Beings in Distress. It didn't win anything of course and I could not add to it probably. The first poem was one I sent you, Rain A nimbus earth stands whole. Something from nothing forms good. Suffering, health, pursue care of neighbors, beings in distress, menial tasks. Forms of the formless stream. The mountain being consciousness gasps. Breath, praise, pain cry when still, Bear the thaw of the nothing world. Nothing not formless calls communities of plant, bird, star. Beast centuries day-pour dreams, gardener, musician, rain. I am way out of my depth in these things I know. Clay has finally taught with the earth, stone, paint, glass, children and wife what the One said, he wakes my ears to listen as one being taught. And the eyes. There is a huge backlogy of the written, but yes, I am thinking what you say about the other. Two are in kiln fire, two out of bisque to glaze , two are green and drying and two are in the making. There only seems to be more and greater in all these affairs Tom. Send me if you will what you have written. And stay alive. Life is an end in itself. Andy

III.  6 apr 2014 he wrote:

I promised you some autobiographical material when I had something. After making a stab at
writing an introduction, I started to write the actual memoirs, and right away the reality of who
would read these words(?), and how much was I willing to reveal to them(?), stopped me in my
tracks. For me to write something that I would consider worthwhile would necessitate the sort of
honesty and accuracy that can be self-incriminating, so to speak, and incriminating of others still
alive. I could use changed names or first names only, but, more daunting, I expect that my
family could possibly see what I had written, no matter how obscurely I published the document.
I’m not saying that I won’t write it. It would be a good exercise. But I’m not rushing into it at all.
Let the grandkids get a little older.

As far as publishing this much-imagined memoir is concerned, what I had in mind is to offer it as
a semi-obscure file file to the tiny SCT group that I am a member of on Facebook, and also I
envision putting together a memorial website for the pre-posthumous poet where I could collect
a few poems together with videos of the pre-posthumous poet reading them. The site would
include videos of me doing tai chi and qigong, and, possibly, dancing. There would be a video of
me playing a couple of didjeridoos that I made (with some help from master crafters). I would
also include several short stories. There would be a slideshow and video visit through our house
and gardens. A video of me playing with the grandkids on a ropewalk that I try to bounce them
off of.

I’m thinking that I might want to start putting together the website first. So, given my slowness
and lack of motivation, the pre-posthumous poet may become posthumous smoke and ashes
before I finish writing the summary of my life and goodbye.

I’m attaching a few documents. One of them is my rough start at an introduction to the memoirs.
Since the autobiographical story is missing, I’ve included “Ourstory, a poem that I wrote in 2011,
inspired by my having obtained a medical marijuana license and purchased some incredibly
potent edibles and oils that are definitely psychedelic in their effects. Way to go, Colorado!
Another attached poem is one that I wrote in 1991 when JoAnn and I first moved to Colorado.
We received a month of teachings from a high lama at a mountain retreat before finding our new
home in Boulder. Finally, another rare poem (there are generally years between them, but this
was written the same year as “Ourstory”), a birthday poem for JoAnn, which is suggestive of the
imagined ending chapter of My Slug Cog Life. Those poems would be on the website, along
with a few others, including a representative poem or two from that Shout or Scream, whatever
it was, in Austin.

Finally, there is an article on SCT and the DSM-5 that I wrote for the SCT group and published
on their page as a file entitled: “WARNING: THIS IS A RANT!” It will be on the pre-posthumous
website, too. The important thing is to put it all together for no or little money. I could never get
that Google blog thing to do what I wanted it to do, so I abandoned it. I’m thinking of something
like WordPress, or whatever current thing is available that won’t cost me more than $10 a month
rent, preferably less or free. It does seem that the first step is to find a suitable platform and then
start putting up the things that I want. I still have to produce the videos of tai chi, poems and
didjeridoo. I had a free website with Windows Live for years. It came with a neat tool for
designing basic pages that made building them easy and fun. What a deal! They began asking
money for the site about the time I retired, so didn’t keep it up as a memento.!
•  
As I’m writing this it is occurring to me that the first chapter, childhood, would be innocent
enough, and would illuminate the neurological disorder very well. I don’t see any reason why I
can’t start there. The thought of entering computer world and learning a new web tool to set up
the memorial site—and spending money—is less appealing than delving into the early days.
Those early childhood years, when I was gaining in consciousness at a relatively rapid rate, give
me memories of the 1940’s that I’ll always cherish. That time was very different from this more
populated world. But you, no doubt, know earlier times than I do, old man.

I have read from your first go at your memoirs that you have published online, and of course
take special interest in the Austin stories and the people that I remember, some well, others sort
of, and others not at all. The letters that you present are from people with interesting minds, and
the stories that you tell of your doings in those days are filled with energy and good imagery.
You make a lot of references, personal and literary, that I’m not familiar with. You have read far
more widely than I. I never read much, and now read even less. Mostly I keep up with five or six
online newspapers and a weekly summary (The Week).

Reading your own pages inspired me to bring down my copy of A Calendar of Poems and slide
back into the time when young poets wrote evocative poems with pens and typewriters. My
favorite is probably still “Prose Passage,” with it’s “planetary bulldozers,” and its “expectant
concrete mixers and steel road-graders…silhouetted against the night sky.” I appreciate your
ability to move between the profound and the everyday with apocalyptic humor. “Cullen’s Army”
has always puzzled me. I’ve never been very good at interpreting dreams, and this one is no
exception. I appreciate the humor that I find in these pages, such “Love’s Illumination” for John
and Victoria, written in 1971 in the manner of the metaphysicals. What has become of John
Donne? What has become of John Cullen? Do you know anything of his life after Austin?

A lot of reading is a burden to my sluggishly cognitive brain, so I don’t read anything of length
anymore. I watched a video every evening for years, but finally burned out on that. No TV.
JoAnn and I play, I help her with gardening, and she cooks gourmet dinners (lucky me) while I
practice qigong and explore the universe on my Mac. I was always slow, of course, and so built
a minuscule body of work. When John turned his back on me, I lost my principle reader, and
with that the impulse to write. Soon, physical labor that the 30-year-old me was unused to left
me wasted in the evenings with no energy. The work was good for me, though, giving me the
grounding that I sorely needed, building my strength, and giving me the means to survive
without going corporate. I’ll stop now and save the rest of this for that soon slow-to-be-coming
memoir! I’ll send you a chapter whenever there is one.

Here I am saying that I don’t read or write much, and I am saying it in a little note that rambles
on for two pages (and a number of sittings) by now. It’s as hard for me to stop as to start. I’m
sending these uncirculated, but copyrighted, writings to you because you will give them an
intelligent reading, I do believe. Your appreciation and, hopefully, enjoyment, may give them a
little more reality in this illusory world. Take care, old friend, and have fun Tom
 

2.


•  My Slug Cog Life, Rough Draft

70 Years of Living with Undiagnosed SCT

This begins the rough draft of my story:

INTRO

Life Review

paragraph moved

That’s what’s so good about a first draft. I can go off on a tangent, and I need not
worry, because I don’t need to include anything, and certainly don’t need to start with
what I happened to write first. What I want to write here is my narrative, as incomplete
and delusional as that must be. This is the story of my life as I see it.

I need to focus on the question, why am I writing this story?

The task of the closing years of ones life is to recollect, to “re-collect” the events of
one’s life into a meaningful “collection,” and to transmit the wisdom that one has gained
to the succeeding generations. And so as I was turning 70, it seemed that the time for
that task was upon me.

The task seemed daunting. How could I make sense of my life? Historically? Through
family? Career? Religion?
to find in one’s memories the meaning of one’s life,

Start again:

Life review is the work of old age. Our later years are supposed to be a time for
recollection and reflection. It is the time to “put it all together,” to distill what wisdom
we have uncovered in our lifetimes and transmit that to the generations coming up. I
I have long viewed my life as a search for what is real, a search for meaning, and
perhaps most fundamentally, a search for love. I did find meaning, and I found love,
and for me they are the same. As for reality, that’s either hard to find or impossible to
•  
ignore, depending on your point of view. If that search is what my life has been about,
why then, is does the title of this piece refer to my living with “undiagnosed SCT”?

There had always been things that I could not understand about myself. How did I
score as a “near genius” on IQ tests and score well on other such national tests as the
SAT, and yet be at the bottom of my class in grade school, and receive such low marks
in high school that I had to go to summer school every year? Even then—because I still
had to make up a whole semester worth of courses—I failed to graduate with my class.
What was the cause of this discrepancy between my “potential” and my performance?
How did I get into college where I had a successful career. Why did I then bomb out of
graduate school where I had earned nothing but A’s, and take on the life of a
carpenter? I had these questions, and many more, about my life. Why am I the way I
am?

When I was a month or two away from my 70th birthday, with most of my life already
done, I found the missing piece! Browsing the news online—something I probably do
too much of—I came across an article, “Sluggish Cognitive Tempo” (http://
www.buzzle.com/articles/sluggish-cognitive-tempo.html) describing a little known
neurological disorder. A child with SCT is often intelligent, sometimes a “savant” in
some area, but dreamy, forgetful, lacking focus and motivation, socially withdrawn,
having problems with working memory, having trouble with math, reading very slowly,
easily distracted and inattentive, among other characteristics. I was shocked that the
description of a child with SCT exactly described ME as a child. I felt as if I were
putting on glasses for the first time and seeing my place in the world with a startling
new clarity.

Aha!, I thought, so it is not that I am a worthless lazy bum, as I had been told many
times, in many different words, and so had thought. It is, rather, that the neural
connections in my pre-frontal cortex are faulty, memory retrieval is erratic, and my
body probably doesn’t produce enough dopamine and norepinephrine. In short, I have
a neurological disorder called “sluggish cognitive tempo,” and no amount of effort on
my part is going keep my neurotransmitters from randomly skipping a beat, slowing
me down like a sleek red Ferrari with faulty spark plugs.

It is a disorder that I was born with and will carry with me for the rest of my life. Now
I could see that much of what I had been berated and punished for, and much of what I
had berated and punished myself for, as a child and as an adult, was not my fault. And
my “savant” quality of writing—you may well disagree with that characterization based
on what you read here—was nothing that I could take credit for, either.
3.

•  CAUTION: THIS IS A RANT
I am totally pissed at the American Psychiatric Association. They are burying---
BURYING, I say!--the diagnosis of SCT in the upcoming edition of the Diagnostic and
Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. They are burying it deep inside the diagnosis of
ADHD, as some sort of a subset. And they are doing so for less than scientific reasons.
Here is an article that appeared May 6, 2013 in the New York Times, headlined
“Psychiatry’s Guide Is Out of Touch With Science, Experts Say.” You might find it
interesting:

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/07/health/psychiatrys-new-guide-falls-short-experts-
say.html?_r=0!

It is a hopeful sign that Dr. Thomas R. Insel, director of the National Institute of Mental
Health, says that the DSM-5 lacks scientific “validity,” and that his goal for the NIMH is
“to reshape the direction of psychiatric research to focus on biology, genetics and
neuroscience so that scientists can define disorders by their causes, rather than their
symptoms.” That will undoubtedly help some some people with some conditions
sometime in the future, but the reality on the ground is that the DSM-5, due to come out
in a few weeks without a diagnosis for SCT, will guide psychiatric diagnoses for the next
decade or two in the U. S., where many of us live. The American Psychiatric Association
does not offer much in the way of treatment for SCT, just the amphetamines that Big
Pharma cranks out for ADHD kids, but they could at least provide a clear diagnosis for
this disorder so that those with SCT can be identified and hopefully begin to deal
knowledgeably with it, helped by understanding family, teachers, counselors, etc.

At this point, research in neurology has revealed SCT to be a neurological disorder
distinct from ADHD. The efforts of the NIMH to discover the exact neurological
mechanisms that cause SCT are needed and appreciated, but the symptoms of the
disorder are clear enough today for a diagnosis. Without a diagnosis, a school-age kid
with SCT is more likely to be blamed, rather than helped, for being lazy, moody,
unmotivated, forgetful, withdrawn, underachieving, making dumb mistakes, losing stuff,
and walking around in a haze. Such a child will naturally blame her/himself and try to do
better, and blame him/herself even more when she/he doesn’t seem to be able to.

With some support, the bright side of the SCT individual can be polished to shine.
Those with SCT tend to be intelligent, intuitive and creative, if a little slow, and often
have advanced mental attributes in some areas, what I like to think of as my “savant”
qualities. With a little extra help we SCT people can learn to do better in the areas that
are difficult got us, and really well in areas in which we are more bright.

Why is so much attention paid to ADHD while SCT is unrecognized, when the
consequences of either disorder can be quite devastating for the individual who has it?
The behavior of the ADHD cohort can be disruptive in a classroom setting, requiring
immediate attention so that the whole class can be taught. The quiet, withdrawn SCT
students in the corner are not a problem to the teacher or classmates, and can easily be
ignored. It’s the squeaky wheel that gets the grease. So it is in the classroom, in life,
and in the DSM-5.


CAUTION: THIS IS A RANT

There are steps that one with SCT can take to deal more effectively with life (most of
which, I would argue, do not require a psychiatrist), but the first step is to learn that one
has SCT. That is why receiving a diagnosis from a psychiatrist, the recognized authority
in such matters, is so key.

With little assistance available to us from the American Psychiatric Association, perhaps
we with SCT need to step up and become advocates for our own condition. If Dr.
Barkley is correct that there are about as many with SCT as with ADHD, then
approximately 5% of the population are silently dealing with this condition. We are
talking about millions of individuals with this disorder. As of this writing, there are 116
members of this Facebook SCT group, of whom maybe 30 or 40 actually look at this
page occasionally. As glad as I am to have found this group, to reach the SCT
population as a whole a lot more is required.

In the part of my mind in which anything is possible, I imagine a huge outreach effort---
including a public relations campaign, our own web sites, lobbyists, outreach to
educators, outreach to social workers and mental health workers, etc.---educating the
public that there are some sensitive, bright, creative, smart people who have much to
contribute if they are helped to develop their talents more fully. Such is my dream,
though this SCT group, of all groups, won’t do such a big task. Our disorder more or
less precludes the motivation, outlay of energy, and people skills required. We’re a
group of people who tend not to group much. At least we’re smart enough to realize
what we are up against. That’s somewhere to start.

Other than ranting against the American Psychiatric Association’s uncourageous
decision to exclude the diagnosis of SCT from the upcoming DSM-5, we can continue to
use this forum to share among ourselves what we have learned that is useful in living
with SCT, and what is not. That much we can do for one another. Best of luck to us all,
and to the unknown millions who have no idea why they can’t just snap out of it.
4.

This Lama Laughs Like Thunder

for Khenpo Tsultrim Gyamtso, Rinpoche

During the hailstorm that destroyed my tent and soaked my clothes,
You sat unmoved in the Meditation Tent chanting the Mantra of Cakrasamvara,
Demonstrating the dharma, while I fretted to save my temporary shelter, saying a prayer to all I
hold sacred:

I take refuge in my home, car, refrigerator and computer.
I take refuge in my wives, children, money, friends, and boss.
I take refuge in central heat, indoor plumbing, my nice warm bed,
As well as the luminosity and emptiness of television.

Yet, at the same time, beyond my mind, close to my heart, inseparable from the inexpressible,
again and again the Lama laughed.
The Lama laughed, and the skies cleared.
The sun and stars appeared at once. The earth became a dream that felt completely right.
In the equanimity of pleasure and pain together there was clarity and bliss as I worked to
straighten up my tent and dry out a thousand of words of notes on what the lama said
from moon to moon:

What you’ve said will pass through languages and practices into insights to become real life
walking dharma for a long time.
We shall trade our tents one day for the Great Stupa of Dharmakaya, and our minds for the vajra
dohas that you sing.
Let there be hailstorms, wind and lightening. I take refuge in your laugh.



Tharpa Dawa
Rocky Mountain Shambhala Center (now Shambhala Mountain Center), Colorado
8/23/91

5.
Ourstory
History, History, History—what a passel of lies!
The Women of the World ask me, “Whatever happened to Herstory?”
The People of the World tell me that no one ever listens to Theirstory.
They’re eager, I’m sure, to hear Yourstory.
I’m always telling Mystory, whether anyone is around or not.
By “not” I mean that even when I’m alone I keep telling myself the magnificently
marvelous story of me,
Again and again with countless variations and subtle alterations;
Nevertheless, the tale I’d most like to hear is Ourstory:
You and me—and more—in a story.
By “more” I mean Being and Non-being altogether,
Dancing as nothing at all in beautiful array—
Every being and non-being and whatever else there is and isn’t
Telling this endless and expanding story
Any little part of which is bound to break your heart.
By “break” I mean break it open.
Ours will be a wordless story of broken open hearts
Unknown to History, nourishing the Earth and all the Heavens.
You can open it anywhere, start anywhere.

Tom Goar
August 18, 2011
Lafayette, Colorado


6.

Thirty Years with JoAnn

You planted flowers in my yard!
and made me plant trees, though I complained.
You tamed my rangy ways, my wild heart.
You blazed my dharma trail through your devotion to your guru.
You made our garden home into an enchanted place
where our minds know peace, and our hearts open softly.

Tom Goar!
September, 2011!
Lafayette, Colorado


Reply7 apr 2014

I love meat so I enjoy all the different aspects you contemplate, but I have never spent a dime on websites. WordPress works pretty good and a lot of people use it. I have a WordPress site that I use for what I call personal revelations, not that they are, but it is catch and catch can, but it is a little constrained. Too bad you can't get Blogger to work for you though, it affords me more freedom with uploading pics etc better than WordPress. Another one I experiment with is Scribd. The good news there is that it saves every version you make. Sometimes I have over a hundred, but there they all are and I can upload them anytime I want-except of course they add advertisements galore to the viewer's screen. The other two do less of this. My favorite lit site, elimae, that published so much difficult material for me, including your shout, has now disappeared. None of its links work. The editor has backed it up at his personal site, but unless these are archived at universities or national archives, Australia, Britain and Canada do this, they are lost. I made my own Blogger backup. WordPress is an automatic backup for free for lits, so is Scribd, but Vulcan disappeared from Scribd, for some reason.
I'm interested in algorithms and stat counts and expiries and their ins and outs.
I use SoundCloud for simple tape recordings, readings, but it doesn’t get near the play it would if put on Youtube, which is far superior in clicks. Either way though both can be linked to the text to illustrate the point where and when you want. These multiple texts are the thing. Do you believe there are some editors who won’t publish a piece with links in it? All the best,

Fiber Spinning

Der stoff of fiber spinning super colliders on one hand with boundary stones of sculptures made like severed heads, on the other, this fantasy, of course, starts out with  arresting strangeness: Strangeness, report to base! the science in its secret labs. Of course, I in my timid body did not wish to have them in the neighborhood, intruding into this relatively safe world, in which it was possible to read stories in peace of mind, free from fear. Paronomasia, a word used in different senses, similar in sound to achieve a specific effect, humor the dual meaning in those who intend to pass the land. Commissioners were appointed to search for them. The notion was that if it stopped the nose or breath from the stench entombed beneath, suggesting they were overrun while passing, both the searchers and the buryers, turned from their work stopped their noses from the effluvium. "Passengers" are travelers and invaders buried in  the tumult that after made this valley bear their name cozened open, impossible to reconnoiter,

There is a heavy sex to colonialism, to the army, navy and air force, and later the drones, a digital sex, plastic USAs...on Army wheels...out west producing sex organs. The image withers like a Cialis commercial, snozzled, in pyknic profile, as if America were a plastic statue on the dashboard of some spaceship held on with suction cups that listen in to the beats of a heart. So when you travel outside the country stay away from the natives or it will spoil your trip. I picked all this up by osmosis. It didn't help that I was reading the Grand Inquisitor at the same time. I would not have survived these disquisitions without the prior years of allowing the true leaven access to heart and mind. Not enough, never enough. So it was American light, American phone, American freedom, not light and freedom in themselves, the one species of white man decreasing. Ruben Dario made that impression, peppermint jelly exploding at night, Alexander, Alexander, Alexander-Nebuchadnezzar is white. Of course that was naive, since the imperial has visited most of the kingdoms, states and nations of the world. But are we too harshly judged by the light of our worst acts? Presidents added up to conspiracy. This Calendar wouldn't cross the water any more than the later book sent to outer space embossed in asbestos on the outer shell of some spacecraft would be grokked by the Albigensian on Betelgeuse. Little still life bookmarks were paged into these satires, a 1584 London maple chest saying, GIVE THE GLORIE TO GOD ALLONNE, a phrase carved into a sideboard at the Folger, but the context sullied and doubted, when the enemies of GLORIE took over. This is civilization. Be glad and walk ye in it. American light, liberty, the chest which is really mocked in the portmanteau of the fictional Orcs while Hesper is singing I love you, I love you, a little like the dream princess, except merchants dream of new Americas...nose the Bermudas, ravish Virginia, as Thomas Randolph says. This cover, off, reveals nothing at all, stolen from Allen Ginsburg on a boxcar somewhere pressing nudely on the honey tube. When I read that one for the radio station the tech was so convinced he bought the book, but the Christian values are two edged in the context of everything else. Would that they produced a falling off of stretch on the stalk of sexual colonialism. Spring to the arms of burlap, poke a stitching, jam a smock. Nothing must be covered up. Not that these cannot be as vulgar as a Volkswagen Puppy in prodction, or corpses sprouting out in the snow in winter that come up with crocuses. So it says among the vulgar, this rose gives many a care of its dying.

Synopsis: Bridge, Get Away

If it is possible to have a novel without a character so called, the character here is ourselves en masse, as a collective and a society of the world wherein certain mythological conflicts overwhelm. It is important not to spell these out but to let them creep into our consciousness as in fact they have done over the years. New Philadelphia is a colony, an out post on a Hadrian’s Wall inhabited by refugees who are confronted in their new environment not so much by nature but by myth and this is the record of their adaptions backgrounded by salient features of the first settling of Philadelphia by those mystics of the Wissahickon Creek as it passes through the gorge to merge with the Schuylkill River into the Delaware and then the sea. The series of transfers of water are like the transfers of culture from that old world the colonists abandoned to the new one they know nothing of. Who could know of it, inhabited by monsters worse than the Odyssey and with no heroes or overarching great cause like Helen or Troy or Truth. They thought they were reliving elements of the Odyssey, descendents into hell or hades let us say, signature of that hero. In the beginning their obtuse recommendations were as confusing as scruples against geese. They excitedly questioned each others nerve. But the five microcosms did not notice either set of believers. Since the mystics were predominant, Leviathan was invited which introduced extreme oddities of topography. The majority in that town patterned their lives and homes after this sea monster they saw in the stars and in the cosmos, if not actually in the sea, casting omens of earth and fire and trying to foretell the future, for all the good it did them. They sacrificed to Poseidon right out of the Greek, so though they believed a child was born pure and innocent it was not scrupled to live among tens of millions in the womb. These contrasted with the harbor seal Baptists as they were called, who would begin speaking along the jetties and walks with their eyes closed and go so long that even after their audience had long departed they kept on with their antiphonies. They anointed themselves elders in a Council of Watchers to oppose the intrusion of their so called nemesis from the sky as much as Leviathan was the mystic nemesis from the sea.

There are many ways to offend those who have not seen the cracks radiating from centers of implosion of fissures like Tycho in the Moon, colony craterlets, orbits of  phyllotaxis, divergences perceptible as the shape Ohio once was, or became. It too existed after proof of some finite intelligence at work, occurring passim, the a priori  rendezvous-proving rule,  circle down to circle for one who descends, crossings seen in the meeting-places of more than one canal.

To call them canals is a faux pa from the planned obsolescence of intelligence that once existed, like thinking the world flat mistaking rivers for canals, spheroid for flat, something as if Gilgamesh below the Euphrates Beltway to which people dug tracks and underground trains in their temples to convince themselves theirs was a perfect world. These tracks, taken apart, were not seen, for this they did not do.

Every effort to conceal the one cell organism known as Mammon-Oranus, a huge intestine of money governed in Secret with its primitive media nerves, multilayered in a newfound. For you know the gut has a brain stimulating the tribes with “wow pulses,” This *Stockholm-Munchhausen mosaic of tribes caught between the  coasts of the present-day fabulous and  history would digest money, excrete money, displace other processes of being. After exposure that the Secret mind could produce these impulses on its own would gurgle would not be spoken full in words.

You will understand that it's hard to accept the time to move on and start over. That's why colonists see themselves in the paradox, to have a thing but not know it, wait a  life for a thing to pursue it, do nothing but wait for the thing to renew it, do nothing but wait for the thing to undo it. Frost beets, cracked skin, stout limb, opaque beneath, lives and minds drive what we don't know while we think we are doing something else, and for different reasons too. Spelunking moles, contracted for the moment, fill in the entrance to their sea cave and write stone letters in shale creeks below, who have seen many things, but pay no attention, whose ears are open, but hear nothing. Such reverse timpanis of Beethoven’s 9^th  pick a phrase, invert it, splice at will. A drum becomes a word. A word becomes a boom echoing in earthquakes. What hubris, to think that after a thousand generations, alive in the last, that the life of governments, books, civilizations disappeared, when they clearly did not, to say that both sides prevented this revelation. Who says there are two sides? Colonists underground and Plain Folk. The one to bring it about the other to dissolve, which thoughts compel the verse I execute.

Adverbs before nouns in the foyer, ballistic glass lacerations at Chelyabinsk,  American Ground Zero, fairly intruding, we have these moments to remember. Smart talk on the rug, ambiance, facts please, and then the door. Liqueurs, bracelets, chairs keep the surface. Wittgenstein lifts his head on a pedestal at Airpark. Could that head speak it would say the colonist like a mouse is meant by the Armed Forces to be an experiment to save itself.  But inside the colony, no-colony, to serve the greater cause, I cannot in good conscience  apocalypse  the mouse. We assemble today therefore against this blind cosmic doctrine. Shiites have Nostradamus to thank for their escapes, Nostradamus, Blake, St. John fall on all heads. Colonies and colonists underground stand cataclysm, hide from rocks in rock. The colonial underground is clearly not made to recognize. The moon, Dulce or the Archuleta, take your pick clonies, aliens or gfovernment, although you spell check hard. When the fgov fills in the harbor at night, tigre extremes, you get the pint. I read The Apocalypse of Stars. It is an honor to join our brothers where they throw bodies into tombs that come out alive from Elisha's bones, who only wants to be taken up, but has to wait like and here, now, when the angel looses its vial and Euphrates dries up like a fig, the Kings of the east march.

 This utterance of language, roots and alphabet is the least spiritual power of the Sons. But the meaning was not in the sound, to look in the sound. The meaning was not in the syntax to look at the connections. The meaning was not in language, for the words, the languages were within the still voice that spoke. Indeed they sounded, but like what language, none or one or all and what did they say, impossible words from the deep?"et erit illa frenans transeuntes" made "a place there, a grave to be buried in; on the east of the sea"; a valley through which travelers used to pass a sulfurous lake, to which there may be  allusion to the sea of Chinnereth, or Jarchi and Kimchi; which sense is a passage to the east of the same sea, a road to the east. Stop of the nose of passengers; the ill smell of  months observes this monument passing where the multitude shall fall, the reason for their being out of the way; which sense again notices that it is near two mountains that a city, as it were, once magnificent, among any that you name that come to mind, Rome, Jerusalem, at their best suffer an implosion, superstructures falling into rubble, parapets mixed with fountains, holy and unholy, better than the organ meat and tissue of the twin towers where  cardboard crumbled, we give it that. These were real brick, marble, stone whose parts withstood demise of the whole, skeins lay tangled, and that's what remained, except the city was a paragraph, the whole precognate concept a rubble together, five sentences tangled in one, images broken and misplaced for the cranes, so to speak, except our cranes are accident and sound demolition which pull the parts out from their tangle to reseat them in the colonies, passengers and the like, the whole city rebuilt as it were, not that it ever existed, but if it didn't how did this mess end up on the ground? You see the point that out of chaos must come order, as if it described the valley where they bury his army, the Grand Seignior general  Antiochus, such of it as remains after the fowls, the bones left; himself also a sepulchre, to perpetuate the memory that this event is future, which Calmet takes to be the army  defeated, "locum ibi sepulchrum", or Starckius; "locum ubi sit sepulchrum", Cocceius. (c) Ebr. Comment. p. 585. (d) Dictionary in the word "Vale" (e) So R. Sol. Urbin. Ohel Moed, fol. 66. 2.((f) "et erit illa obturans transeuntes." Here is an edda to enjoy in the Lindisfarne, Wycliffe, Tyndale, German, Scandinavian or English which Sea captains, gold cargoes, frankincense souls, multinational corps, blondes, City/Woman nations, Gilgamesh starring with Ishtar as "the foul goddess" with bond traders, globe internats unmasked.  Intercourse. Intercourse  Alejandro-Nabucodonosor,  mountaintops and rivers, succubi Christabel now hold their  hands and wait for them to ring. Uncapped pirate samurais with credit cards. That's the adagio.

…

 My first work was to obscure these landings. Like leaves blown into letters on the street, that spell things we do not want to know, I water and tramp the obvious. But word shells wash up. The sea paints pictures in the sand so fast words are futile. I am very busy.  The sand is obvious. By the time you read this forest fires will be burning trees into sentences. It is late.

 Metaphor of the Leaves

Inmates and police had common cells. Their brains are studied to promote robotic sources. Corporations, Universities, hospitals run the arches. Careerists, norm police provoke madness as class rights. The bosses pretend not to notice weekly instances of mutation in the malls. Hospicio Cabañas, built as an orphanage becomes a deconsecrated Man of Fire. Gaslit doubt is built here. Centers for Brain Health make diseased brains. Memory, perception, sanity, projection, introjection hold trials. Psychopathic auto cut flash clip frescoes bloom and darken, crack and spall. It’s certainly too much to believe public events staged. Evidence is an iridescent airbrush. Stagings are incomplete. The needs of further manipulation are a comfort. We are thrown out of the circle.

 Landings
Rival views of the Landings were endlessly ridiculed. No one thought from the staging that the technological revolution was staged. “Facts,” were broadcast with analysis of the “facts.”  You could say I came to the grave worlds to ask, “whose is this, which one is this?” Mummies of a thousand years, white to bone would understand the analogy with Maurois’ Tragedy in France — possess the soul by Vichy confederates and propaganda – or Why England Slept — appease by fabrication and myth. New titles for quislings: Global Science, the Alien Savior.

The first Quakers of new prose took documentary form, gathered first hand, culled from sources. Literature factura. It was a lot like pouring a concrete foundation, prosthesis of flat folded sheets of the unspoken. Should words get a public burial? Authorities overruled. The idol of government held bodies responsible, buried beneath and got on, site of some secret. To bury something dead and gone came every word spoken.

The burial was secret because the kill was. Watchman Lee used to call it dead Adam. The list of beliefs, poets of influence, heard and unheard, cried in vision to hear the same remixed. Cloud powers split words into sheets.


Arches

  There is no obvious connection between this horizon and a series of dreams of dozens of arches I remember from the message of the leaves. A colored image of a nose bleeding among honeysuckle. That was under an arbor of bees flying. Yellow and white fragrant tubes. Coming toward me, my brother, blood flowing from his nose. I am four.

Another arch preoccupies the county home of Uniontown, PA. I visited at ten. Who visits an insane asylum at ten?  A long whitewashed tunnel extended to either end. A padded door swung massively in on metal hinges. The inmates ranged outside the tunnel and in to stumble and moan. The path was elevated above its gutters so it could be hosed. I didn’t smell anything but disinfectant. I am going down this tunnel. There is slobbering on both sides.

Now you see them hunting also in cemeteries at night with spades and boots. Radios, novels, microwaves seek to restore communication with lost powers. Flashlights look for turned earth, but Adam’s residual soul was secret. Oracles out of  power were reduced to writing. A cry in the river of light, to write anything human in speech, to navigate a sea so warm the leather hides of the boat smoked on its stretched frames.

I landed just as the freeways were built, ordered my own dump trucks of dirt so children could slide down feet first as I did the original slag hills where I grew up.  Houses here had been bulldozed to pavement.  Excavation began by flood light at night. There were ringside seats all day. Leave came to walk the barriers, explore the pits, but not one artifact was found. Kmart, at 16th St and Roosevelt, yielded hundreds. We walked the freeway at Christmas that year, picnicked on the bridge over 24th St. before sliding down the berms of shale and dirt.

I lifted one of their dictionaries. The Social Impact of Technological Slavery — begins with the European Discovery of America. The new Indian replaced with social, political, commercial new worlds made room for psychics and glands. Discoveries overturned for murder. Ex-terrestrials bigger than Columbus enthroned King Pentagon. Like the arch angel, timing is all.

…

A HISTORY OF CHE GUEVARA’S HAIR  revised
History of Pyruvate Phosphatase

Revolution does not dialogue with itself. The thing that made this clone was that the shared experience was gone. Each Day brings out the test tube shot, to play it all again, but it doesn’t make you trust this narrative where heads detach. The hallucinated have come to tell you that yr utilities are being shut off.

To spark such riddles the thing is not quite in the middle cloud of nuclear explosions being dodged. And, another decap, the thing that is, is not. Another decap! Just two guys on the assembly line making heads and who trade barbs of inward glory that few can share. “Our mistress thigh is nothing like her bum.” It’s the same metric, and all, and the same rhyme. Only the words are changed.


Two little babies was sittin in bed, standing on the assembly line assembling heads, they sent for the doctor and the doctor said, yammering (in italics),  you go below I’ll stay above,  trading quips to the background noise above. of the heads, of the heads of the suppernumery heads.

This Plus a reminiscence of their arrival by boxcar in the underground with fellow captives, once entitled Psyche, the Sir Edmund Lockerbie.

With a concluding postscript of the fgov. in German,
Me and Wold 

You go below I’ll stay above, the Volksstamm Director thought, as directorate does. So be consumed, Agencies melt to stone. I’ll get back to you. Government functionaries, military illuminate kings and queens. The super horned rich from previous screens. Blood only brood, gene women mainly propagate new. Under cats. Will there be no men? Wie die Farbe witklich!  Will there be no culture? Ground Blink. Human growth culture shock. Lit, music, art drugged, gene pools raise the children and their dogs. Controls oppose proles.

Shrunk heads are a comin, their ears are in sight. I didn’t think the disbods could learn, but they could sure talk. When I told the Company they were unteachable injections were served. I call it a Company. It was an American Adam startup that wanted finally the last of Gibbon. None of the buggers could hear, so we, me and Wold, sang to mock the engineers, the influence of a mind on itself, the dependence of what it does on what others have done and that’s how we found out the heads could talk.


I went down to caverns measureless to man with no markings except codes, wandered 14 levels below the stairways Capitol.  Nun, seine Seele hat Schmerzen! The walls went down from stone to plain carved rock. They storeth artifacts, statues further down. I struck the hours till I found stairways up. None connected to another. I kept walking to an elevator, pushed Up, found myself in a non-public Capitol, told them I was lost. I had a clearance tag. To think I can imagine it. Passages slope to where the hearts are stored. I’m not supposed to say the halls are lined with liver. Busts of decaps escorted me to the main, sanctioned with different means of taking. Professor Filbert said those heads had been transplanted from someone’s empty neck. Prisoners rode that way out west with guillotines attached.

What do I do;
what do I say to myself;
how do I look at people?

Rows of heads exhibited at the Underground Met gave insight in three second bursts. Ten thousand times ten thousand galleons supplied a part to act as if the others were. But since Johnny would not head-off grandma subjects were delivered through passages in the mouth.

Heads worried that the bug would unify the H.
Heads worried they wouldn’t be able to fill the NASA quote
when Canaveral replaced Mauthausen.

Nobody knew the horror but Mr. Dick. Outsiders policed the house, more like themselves than not, the Strams Mundane Alien Corp. There is a lack of clarity about the imaginability. You need a lotion.
Then I looked up–and there before me were two women who lifted up in a basket Che Guevara’s hair. Comparing DNA hair from the mausoleum in Santa Clara, Cuba with his DNA body finally put an end to Time’s 100. Voice to skull technology, plasma conduit rendered. With wind in their wings like a stork, the eyes of Che burned with impatience. Wold and I could see every good disbob strung up to the Animate Machine: insectothopter, adiabatic qubits, augmented cognition, synthetic cognition.  Lewis’ Devine babbled like the Head of Cuchulain: Three deaths.  first when the body ceases function (meaning Licklider psycho acoustics). Second when consigned to the grave (neuro prosthetics). Third in the future, when your name is spoken last.

There were of course more than three deaths in this underworld. The first was when they took a head from its past and all association and harnessed it up. Bosses on the lookout for more heads sorted these by vocation. Philosopher Wisensteins, Wittgenstein’s head, pontoons of Huxleys, Aldous, Thomas, and Russell went down with McKenna. Oxytocin robot ethics, and LIDAR against fear. You nitpickers call in doubt what you don’t even know, that aircraft carriers were sent in that first attempt to colonize Neptune. Simulacrum never quite conceals the truth—it is the truth which conceals. My Borgs adore you human dyads linked up to machine. 

Many on the waiting list received oxides under old grants. Encephalics breed far more imprints than they can use. Einstein was reassembled, all those autopsied divisions were false. Whole brains  in the underground had so deeply infected de Garis he couldn’t sleep. He stayed up late and talked to the heads. Consciences were swollen with predictions of the coming Third War. Etherized on a table, we heard him mumbling among our heads:

“jolted out of nightmare I see lithium, spraying mood stabilizing, bipolar mania, fine tremor, nausea,  hyperthyroid weight gain. I see Dante leave the malebolge toward the pit. Tuft by tuft in a century or so the hands of giant Nimrod. Blow a horn, other giants chained Abimilech, superior to Mordred, Italians frozen in cracks. It shake me. I don’t….”

We have reached the point exactly where the thigh beam ends at the haunch’s curve.
The palaces of our imprisonment were on the news. Lightning flashes from both sides of the brain detached the vitreous. The head detached-severed brain that minds think under control. Microheads call it dystopic to believe people would be needed. How else invite Colonization with the mouth of Presidents? Nobody has figured it out, but do not close the ears.

In his dream Lockerbie stood next to a jello baby in a carriage. Those pumpkins felt the dilemma of man on the steps of the universe. Wenn es vorkommen kann, illuminations like
“unthinkable and authorizing at one and the same time. First comes the outbound journey, search for the strange, voyage postulate of monsters, storms, then comes the savage. “I am powerless over compulsion. My life is unmanageable, but I want to do good.” Concussed by torches of fat, “Chaos resists  where most I suffered.”

Ninataka uji butter, vortex yam yarn, rayon fiber spinning, first viscose plant marcus hook, american viscose lewistown.

If you’ve never seen an A-head close, outgassed in its suit with the headlights on, these translator models hold dialogue with the Sophias of hierarchy. A-Heads can be promoted to Shiner after their induction–or disappear in smoke. Disrobes had a body, but a true Disbod had none at all. Disbod discarnates emptied into lit.

Lockerbie

Somewhere from a beaker sealed up tight Dr. Lockerbie raved about the giant complex of Vacaville Prison, latter day experiments, anectine on Leary and Manson. Lockerbie wondered that if he worked for all the  parties in question, and then went missing, which one would do it? His Jersey Report put the unthinkable gas on  tapes made during blackouts as they were dragged from cerebellums. Do you know where your microbiologist is tonight? They emptied the prisons first. How ’bout your local computer scientist? He end up in our Boxcar  missing. Seeing the world-vast war citizen, cheap seats in three second bursts, subliminal gold is what St. Stephen saw: you made gods out of stars, worshiped heavenly bodies, had a portable Moloch for your Saturn to carry the idols you worship. That’s what Sir Stephen saw in Weimar B.

Lockerbie gave these discoveries as we rode, information that under the Washington Capitol giant moths were loosed. The world big see. Disturbances covered up the reports that 500 Pumpkins Colonize Saturn. These rumbled down with the Cantwell Titans and their landings on Mars. Lockerbie had two mythless effigies drop in opportune, the severed decaps and the spinners, one by reduction, the other spun. Spinnrade Gretchen a little while. 

Mag-lev shuttles repel below Lockerbie says. Eat the cake and leave the bread. Sakharov, Mayakovsky, Turgenev, Bogdanov injected the mice the fliege-hausen know. How far to make a better life for cows. Prion contamination and encephalopathies easy to sound. That rare Neanderthal Caveman Swelling stacked up at Sufi Port! Cage after cage of A-heads flew according to report.  Smoke manifests at the crater level of space invisible to the naked eye, there! metaversal flesh if you believe.   Would that the touch were employed to clean and  fix.  It wasn’t our fault the heads could talk. Maybe raise up the scopolamine levels. I worked the west where dissidents exited from their ships. Ships, trains, it’s a little hard to nonspeak once below. Don’t worry if planes are trains, or if they aren’t gesucht wird, hängt, It dependeth on what paradigm. Don’t worry if human cells have an impact on animals.

The notion is that if a head is missing you can supply the brain. The brain bypasses. Inject both Kirk and McCoy. That’s how Lockerbie found out the hundred ruses a programmer got. Made to be a Gotling, a goatling deduced from secret signs. Planetary companies invented thousands of substitute names. Many Made One! [MMO] Many Be One, druga, druga! Shaman, priest, prophet, ruminate.  Heads back, that is, before the Anectine. Their dementia synthesized and marketed a search for the old afflatus.

F Gov

If you wonder why I’m telling these staged events as real, they’re not. Clues thrown out of the circle discover a consciousness no one wants to know.  It’s not the eyes that see any more than the ear that hears. The brain fools the eye, the eye doesn’t fool the brain. If the scene is unremembered is never “seen,” never was, even if passed directly into consciousness from Control.

 Somewhere undergrounds monitors turn blank. That slogan, all institutions are demonic?  Three hundred pyramid levels below, Hawthorne found the government roof failing. The history clone died talking.  No outside sun, new to many. If colorless, it gives no sign. Watching algorithms, cameras, microchips, blood pressure, heart rate, brain shift, It was conceivable they watched everybody all the time. Et Tu duty, outside Revelations 18. After losing their first encounter on earth the Neptune forces gave out drugs and meditation.

The unconscious anybody can see these Ararat divines in the EU parliament and in Breughel, or in the Guggenheim and Denver. The FEMA train beast, animated within, originally carried cargo manacled end to end. There must have been a market, there must have been a market.  Rocketing down the night tracks sealed, no cracks in the floors like Weissmandel, rabbi of Slovenia,  cut with a dull blade through the bottom of his  Nazi box entering Auschwitz and escaped like Lockerbie.
When it comes to planet, who gets this base? The daemon Blum recruited when the trolls fanned out. Wenn du also sagst, du habest. Natives tranked, stored random guineas, the best and brightest genes of f gov know the calculated ehad Selective Service complements. They tranked.

Infrastructure trained in faculties underground.

Programmers foresaw that iconoclasts must go.
Presume you go where none has gone before.

 

It is necessary to distinguish two governments in this, but the government Underground did not forgo the home market guillotine use. Who would not want a guillotine they grant, where a stray rooster could be dealt, or cut bread. All who join the guillotine throng assume the honor of Sir Thomas More, and if his head is not yet battlement be a subject for Madame Tussaud.

Forty foot containers have a guillotine end.  You find yourself in the Amtrak Branch Beech Grove of the Jersey Report among those martyrs who oppose the gods, who lift the veil, as judged by Psytarch. Even though Lockerbie escaped the Gundersons cars, the airports and underground bases, it hardly seems a bridge to a peaceful mind. Under that circumstance the Psytarch revealed those tin men and undersea rebel tentacles, half human, half animal crabbots, mutants with scaled arms, paramecium, parts of butterfly wings, scales, hydra,  fish with bared teeth, snakes that look like Klansmen, defecating upturned eels, fins, helmets, wasps, falling geese and shattered eggs, clams on half shell contending, angels with red and gold armor, a disc of white above, against the creatures of the water below.

                                                     Before the semiotic tip of DuPont Circle the left ear of a head of secret architecture inhabited by the entertainment patriot matrix, you can get cozy if you want. They said he was a good New Order guy, aught Virgil before Homer, a revival of the old Apollyon  nee Abaddon Altar Pergamos Denver CERN. Screwy acronyms like MOAB, Mother of All Bombs, tipped mine shafts nine craters deep. Locked in the ninth vault of Virgil was the Seal of the United States. It still needs to manifest. Various feedback loops connect this last to what the spinners in formation say. Read these texts asleep and then awake.

Note: hat at
All disbod speech is in italics.

editors@cafeirreal.com

 

Notes of a  fellow of the Marfa Research Institute

This underground of the most advanced predictors of human behavior, including interstellar travel as much as exploration of the inner alogical world, are drawn to the alogical because it represents ourselves in some way and because these represent ourselves in some way. Witness all the means of predicting, divining the future from casting sticks, cards, coins to liver dissection. Anything but live in faith, which requires something more, or less. We look into this because we would look into ourselves even as we deny it and us. So I thought to set down here some of this inner world to go along with the plenteous outer so very rosemaled upon the chests. For this celebrated event, on the first of every year, we gather to explain to all sympathetically minded a society of humanity with no grand design except to know ourselves and our civilizations, which are hardly important since they are artifacts we ourselves made.

What we call Oracles began history much before Egypt. And whether you attribute them as those offspring of the sons of god who went in to the daughters of men, or prefer both to a portmanteau, a baggage of traditionally carried belongings as much as the body itself, this chest containing its valuables of heart and lung, which we should no doubt call the hard drive, in addition to its ambiguity, had a surface aspect of such creature/artifact that it resembled a rosemaled decorated immigrant chest. Yes, it is as if you carried yourself in a bag, or were yourself a bag. This body bag caused all the trouble seeing as it predominated the brain, the will and the soul, all of which societies became the vortex of the innermost principles of the world. And even if none or few were aware of  it that is why New Year's Day is my favorite of all, since there is utter silence exhaustion of the outer forms. As they boast, where there is alcohol there is no cold, nor sleet, nor snow. There'd be snake dancing that night. So fill your gobbets, toast dark night and silent morning! And then take pity on this world where everything grows shorter, day, time, life, memory, tribulation.

Help in cracking the Orc schist must begin not with geology or furniture or psychology, but with fondness for ornamentation that is made evident by examples, so to call those decorations of the body bag as such, as if bag and chest  were furniture of a kind, chest and chest, which demonstrates a simplicity, a slippricity of the whorlicle mode,  an oracle made and not made, interpreted in simple lines and sturdy construction as if made for everyday, whose object of representation were a quiet transparency in which inner reposes in outer corresponding dimensions. There comes a point when the enclosed panels of parrot-like birds with tulips and fuchsias, a color ground of red brown, Amish blue, cypress green is made impossible to represent without overarching sorrow. For how has such been lost, and why? Who knows. Are inner and outer opposed in order to deceive? When the blood rushes into the skin the inner movement is visible. The ventricles of the heart and the inner parts revealed in such  designs as raised unicorns, but  also rampant upon the tulips and lilies, square panel flower sprays in a vase, medallions circled with overlaid six-pointed stars,  pomegranates  and carnations; you get the picture, are much easier to observe  in the outwardly visible, but only if the inner movement is intimated. As though the outward color were the inner's leave taking, and the form was its fugitive hiding place. A hint that raises hair on the neck as if the bridge between inner and outer had been revoked form space.

Flaking Under Flex-There is much debate of this purpose and purposes to nurture society and much effort at finding out it's cause, since the last thing believed is that the sons of god went in to the daughters of men. The ink spioloed over that conundrum has not ceased. Like the blood that runs away from the surface revealed in a sudden pallor, invocations of the notwithstanding, for a long time there was attempt to trace whether the cracks in the finish, a kind of varnish or sheen over the decor, were superficial or deep inside the natural coating.  This always begins with interrogations, inquisitions. Statements taken a hundred times go back and forth,  as  if pacing in a room above us going back and forth and we hear the echo, we hear the sound thereof.

 My Prisoner of Chillon, as you walk back and forth in your by-chamber, what gives rise to these questions but your own nature and every additional accident of thought repeated bring out this one aspect of dispute, if we imagine a chest as a shell or carapace, one worn flexed with vibration around the edges near the F-holes, its craquelure steadily advancing between the breasts we may say right up into the middle of the back, then we conjecture that there the thing comes apart where shoulder meets the belly, from the back down, as if a sacred script were stamped in the original, beautiful and clear, legible to all. Then in a moment is discerned on the breast a piece of armor in the form of a heart, or some such, on which one can read all about it, especially since then the figure externalized draws attention to itself. If you sense some impending calamity, some crack in the cosmos from this, that self knowledge is so dangerous as to draw out in time memory before memory, like ragpickers and collectors differentiate value from trash.

Some think this flex of differentials in the dermal layers is caused by the sealed uncured layer inhibiting drying while the outside fully cures, being exposed. When it is held up to the light as though it were a lens, and projects an image of itself onto its exterior, the outer layer dries faster and it shrinks, causing fissures. This takes years to occur. If the inner picture is too refined to look upon, woven from the delicate insubstantial not immediately seen, once the cracks begin they are unstoppable.  If the surface is flat the crackling looks a lot like tiny linear fractures which refract in moving light, and a very crisp flaking.

So fastened upon this distraction it is a reflection too which must be drawn aside to view within. These flexes are the oracles themselves, which our civilizations have sought for millennia, sometimes called bone script to be read or interpreted by the knowing. Thus begins the hazardous conflict that leaves behind these footprints, meaning shells, not only, but very coracles of wisdom themselves. We train thus every day to see this scale that covers all or part of the Oracle body, but not the scalp, which depending upon interpretation of its helmet-like crust some call pigmentation, and may imply disordering which has nothing to do with this world. Whether it is disorder or high order, the highest order of the senses is why some thought that there should live in that head a lodger who had nothing to do with the world, but lived out a lonely life unknown. Certainly the object of our observation, our interest, our passion, to know what we cannot know, to do what we cannot do as if we were such creatures ourselves.

Whether water is air, air water, or earth fire, it is all the same in this head that receives telegrams from both sides, the outer and the hidden deep, looking long and attentively to discover whether there is not another face within the faces that it meets. Since the same dissonance occurs in all art it is better not to prejudge. To our eyes the classic carapace resembles an adapt with a  helmet and mantle  that displays a sheen, much like that spiritual armor which you shall be permitted to convey. This face inside the face, that looks out the way an immigrant looks toward a new land while remembering the old, these days embodied as a maquidore, or rail splitter we shall need a special eye to see, painstaking, persistent, compelling, to probe inward, and benevolent too. Do not fail benevolence in your candor. In the deep that makes breathing easier. What it is we seek in the present instant and past is in the moment we turn the corner and disappear. Whatever the case, we feel safe to take the thing as a being a subject of phenomena we know as heart and light, for the heart must be sensitive to light. So it is possible to find those with exteriors as firm as rock who pass the hidden curiosity, discontent with the external and the superficial, to search the heart and the hidden, to know the invisible.

Chartiers, Soul Spinning from Humanyte

 

Chartiers

By the time a child gets to be nine and light enough in his own nature to walk the surfaces up and down the tracks with a gun, to shoot out insulators and climb cliffs, pull the dressing off the pollution to reveal what the child discovers, that there are slag pits and strip mines in every valley of that square mile of ground, overtop a pasture of coal-neuks flames sometimes roar up in dry spells from the trains. Farms across the way make an updraft that gouged a burn, rise a hundred feet, fought with mats and rakes so the sheep will take no harm.

The series of cliffs above at the top were pocked with mine holes and caves. To strip mines and slag piles add a kief of resin between the sawtooth toes of the transdescendent feet of iron and clay. Do not fall into the great pits of green water steep on all sides. These too were filled by the same engineers who turned the black smoke white as the freights came up the rise. A carry permit is recommended for those who fish for cupreous and mudblack sulfate fish from the creek at night from jon boats. At some shore spots in the rocks night crawlers can “catch a little silver trout” (Yeats, “Wandering Aegus”), but those who search the Chartiers banks for flatheads among sunken logs, bends, and undercuts are not without harassment from remaindered projects down from Steubenville Pike.

The town up from the old Thornburg bridge, Thornburg, where the precipitous bend of the Chartiers occurs  was where the outlines and skeletons came out with a supply of flares and torpedoes near the wreckage of trains. The creek, the coal, the railroad and the boy happened together in that day. The water route of the train followed the creek, steep at the beginning and end of line. Double tracks followed to the Ohio, but stopped on that bend before Scully Yard, switching and shunting long enough for a child to get on. Laws required freight trains to employ a caboose and a full crew to look out for load sift and hot axles, search the tracks under the cars, check the brakes, and put out torpedoes and flares to signal the train behind. All the real is symbolic. The child could walk the rock hills the rails set on, balance the strip-mined hills and galligaskin forests where the coal slid hundreds of feet down the chutes to rail cars. The   rugged and steep basin terrain falls 500 feet to the Ohio where coal shipped when the Chartiers was high. Deforesting and farming added to the floods. That branch of the Pennsy crossed the streambed 19 times in 23 miles. Acid solids and iron dissected the Pittsburgh Coal seam, made it one of the most polluted watersheds in Pennsylvania.  If you're one of those that likes to know where everybody went when he left home,  I was a character of this natural force. Names sweep the ridge behind the teeth and probe the throat for the author of ten thousand stats in the unsanctified thought that all human beings are geniuses.

My gestures, your gestures, the look in the eye, a walk among doves feels like walking among the trees in the cool of the day. Do not be one with the world. You don’t come out of childhood unscathed. Coal extraction is like that, dissolved and precipitated. Topsoil brushed with power shovels and bulldozered seams of overburden mix soil and regolith in long parallel ridges. Vegetation and bramble prepare cartilaginous cities of the mimoid progress.  Society reports from the Ghost Plane that every man is his own priest and wisdom a pyramid of Sav lasav, kav lakav, drunk, drunk. Like the Day before the Flood these mines sluiced a katabole. The trains would end but the Creek run on. Such like steam and coal inspired Hawthorn in his Moss to say, “I am not quite sure that I entirely comprehend my own meaning in some of  these blasted allegories... I am a good deal changed since those times; and to tell you the truth, my past self is not very much to my taste, as I see in this book.”  We're actually smelling each other as we talk.

Literature, language and land preoccupy birth suppose layers like coal fields. Continually pleating, in the DNA of a family producing 1026 pleats in the ten generations of three hundred years, a child can date innocence as far back as the ocean before. To open the pages like the coal of a black rock book lying horizontal in the zone of change, buried vegetation again and again in waves, in three hundred million years dried and covered and buried again embedded, incised, scratched, scored, and recovered, was stacked onto cars on the Pennsy Railroad. Next to the railroad tracks great cubes of steel had rolled down from train wrecks to the creeki. They stuck up like the cargo of abandoned ships. The rails followed the creek and the electric lines followed behind. Carboniferous Pennsylvania on Chartiers Creek in the Pittsburgh coal seams was first sea shore and swamp.

Should you share your life with a river and tell your spouse one day that the fire of love comes out of your hands, that the  ephod bringing succor there is no need for  telepathy. Like a rushing wind and a fire that comes,  coal is not ready for repentance, drop by drop emblems of conduct sulphur the aureate rocks. On the river of the mind below, chartreuse shirts with yellow scarves not over or under are around and through.

 

On that side of the cliff overlooking our thoughts and acts on the tracks, scorpions would crood for the mills. The elbow culverts gushed oil against the window panes of the school. The largest class ever seen set sail. Always rural, elemental snow maples, elms, pilsner from the balconies of houses on the mountain heads to the river mouth below, snowflake navies storm saddle the sky. We call them Divine Gates. Long trains rotate like wheels in wheels. How can these not appear? Precognition and serendipity evidence the skein of the worlds, the onion simultaneous at once. That is knowledge of the worlds, a medieval quantum told with Giotto and spiritual beings. Do they come many into one, one into many, expand and contract together as you look at the stars to bring them to earth? Gold-shod prophecies congregate in bushels like  pears.

Lord of heaven, help me!

for you have made me in this street

wear bones & marching feet

surely we heavenly meet while are bound to meet.

 

Franz Kline’s black and white Wilkes-Barre tracks were not much to his taste either where the chubbed smoke exploded  bellows undermined with cuttery corn and ruth dug from the ground where Vater Eberhard walks tracks with a gun and collects torpedoes on a whim to fasten and drop with a stone. When that first coal hauled down the flood, Flotsam hailed Jetsam from tree trunks on the bank that He was in the world and the world was made by him and the world knew him not. He came to his own and his very character spoke the Heraclitean  pity and indig | nation! / Sheer off / Manshape, on one hand swallowed in the thousand glitters, but on the other, the poor potsherd, | patchwood immortal said, "listen, let's go down and fight a war" (Hopkins).

 

Place makes the face, the soul conscious. Excavation of the autonomous. Shall Thy wonders be known in the dark, Thy faithfulness in destruction? Shall the dead arise and praise, Thy righteousness in the land of forgetfulness?  Take the body as more than an instrument, as an event, position itself. To grow an experience of the sentient means instruction with a pierced ear. It becomes a musician of that Place to transform an event.  So Steam locomotives belch sulphur and aureate cinders in the air. Fires rage up tinder hillsides from train sparks, above the trees, 100 feet up, as high above the tracks as the slag pits beneath.  Everywhere in season the hills run red with springs out of the hillside waters of the Woods. They come down the hill from the veins of coal pits after mining, culm dumps, hillocks. Leach residue and tail slime slick the terra-cone watershed, which is the hardest part to know of Humanyte connectedness, compassion, relation, love.

 

            A high bluff on the southeast, Backbone Road overlooks and commands the whole valley there, towering above its neighbors like selective memories that fire kilns of those who think they know. Not that anything can be done to change the way space extracts sulphur from blanket rock or meteorite impact vaporizes sulphur and sin, such that, were the child is infected. Vaporized three times faster than iron by the effects of impact and ion bombardment in the sputtering solar wind, the blows bring light to describe the fertile place at work in the tissue where creation groans individual and social bodies together and feminine and masculine meet, some parts hard, and others not, and the body holds out its arms to the other to do the same, and the saved child pulls pins on the earthly good of the inscrutable corruption of Breughel & Bosch from the coal and window dressing of the towns and the jpeg bloom.

In voluntude the Sovereign One ordains audacity and sentience, a tapestry fertile and corrupt. Sheol sans fire can claim the comedy of desire that says life is a changing event, a Ledean white yolk shell, hollow of cheek and mind, a king caked with mold. Maunders about revealing count up to ten in the western wall of Jerusalem. The candled wood-knots shine blood red.  On the creek, incandescence and later diffusion like fish and fisherman hail blasphemy in these hearts that “suffer to possess the tabernacle as they sometimes are, and say the Pater ignosce” with Dr. Donne:

“Father forgive them, which allows all that is done a weight of future glory to counterpose as soon as an upright man appears. As though the greatest weakness in this world were man, and the greatest fault in man were to be good, made the Sewer of all corruption, of all the sins of the world, as no son of God but a mere man, as no man, but a worm. You would think the good would have its reward, but they are blamed for all the evil they did not do. If it goes against the grain of youth then say Pater ignosce. Ignosce, ignorant of their deeds, but not of the counter weight to them, the bulls of  Bashan Pondus Gloriae, weight of glory, earthquake, flood, prison. So let me pay my debts with my bones in this penurious prison! …to recompense the wantonness of youth."  

Advanced achievments of history mix together and explode. The water watchers don’t bother the fish in a bowl as long what they don’t see. Walk the stones and skip the creek. Take your passage from innocence to guilt as if given both a disease and at the same time its vaccination, not a shot but an attitude of mind. The beauty du mal repented by Baudelaire washes the superfund sites after short-term victims are gone. It remains in cell phones and aluminum. You can surf in memory all day long the different phosphates of the sun. Editors of shame maintain this is good. My soul is among lions: and I lie even among them that are set on fire. The subterrain converse rehearses hispid sticks and spits. Translating aural sense with the nose, lenses in the eye to oppose thinking, except to say what is compelled, cones increase toward center. Rods increase and cones decrease. The fovea focuses light. There is nothing like a boy who remembers it so long that he can trace the events.

The coal, the creek, the railroad, the snow might be just appearances of degraded choices that followed him. The five year old who emerges from the undermined coal seams, extracted by the memorist many times his age, like the small swift drawings of Kline of anthracite or bituminous culm piles of slag, magnified become magnificent. Whether dug in the ground or from open pits mined west, six billion tons of anthracite reserve and a hundred times of bituminous stretch the expansion cracks.

 To see yourself naked in mind, but only when clothed are you whole, these lines reveal the lines and planes. Forms repeat patterns of the heart of the being of the world. The morning sky shows overlap to the tale of breath. Maybe we are not aware, but Place is breath canoeing and exploring the major rivers and caves  and knowing the sudden storms. You may obtain more explosives from Fischer Chemical. Pounds of potassium chlorate and nitrate, charcoal, sulphur, red phosphorus and mercury are histories of time, like society, leadership, affluence.   

These conclude the ages for 15 and 16 old boy who operated a premillenial superheated bath with caustic derivatives for the bronze memorials made by J. H. Matthews and Company’s above-ground entombments. Working over  a vat fired by large burners, washing off the names of the deceased afixed in bronze letters with wax, with arm length rubber gloves and steel brushes in summer worked. The native in that commute later from a sheep ranch on the Balcones Fault for a doctorate in literature and linguistics washed bottles after for Dr. Lester Reed at the Clayton Foundation for five years, practiced aikido with Bill Lee, wrote Native Texans, A Calendar of Poems, & Restorations of the Golden Age in New World Discoveries, and knowing the transcendent love of a wife, M. A. of the University of Wales and M.D., whom knowing experienced later years of a family and ceramic sculpture beyond all imagining of the person here, as Chuang Tze would say, born of the fitness that forgets about all that is fitting, in extreme chances thrown out of habit to new steps from knowing, give all and everything.

Soul Spinning

We are not digressing from our theme but progress to understand that those worlds prepare Humanyte even in the industrial Viscose plants, spinning affording such.  Since shuttered, but wandering all hours through them like caves, on no particular assignment, where huge vats, thirty, forty foot were tall metaphors of remembrances of eternity in time in the stillness of implicit being and power, this job gave that instruction in the compulsion of patterns mediated through time, held open by belief beyond the acetate that spins the world.

Caught up in the acetate spinning rooms filled with rows and rows of spinners that went clack, clack-clack as they spun rayon out of sulphuric acid baths, the smell of acid mist in the air, viscose forced through spinnerets from scaled-up versions of a butter churn turned into fiber strings. Call this fabric as the same as spun the world world. Why do we repeat? Because there are two.

 The acid coagulated and solidified the filaments, regenerated cellulose jet spun, emitting zinc and hydrogen sulfide. The filaments wound on spools, passed through rollers, washed, bleached, rinsed, dried, and rewound again, pretty far from dipping a needle in a viscous solution of mulberry pulp and gummy rubber as it all began. The early product called Chardonnay would burn like gasoline. The viscose fiber spun to create the illusion of the world was nothing beside these vats, the tanks of thingness, materiality alone,  Dinglichkeit, a magnificent state, but without cognition of the pocket Gower who writes, filled with apprehension I shall sing true dreams whose import disturbs the depths of my heart. May he whom the Isle of Patmos received in Apocalypse, and whose name I bear, guide this work. Unstaunched in this solitude, the beyond large warehouse-sized American Viscose plant in Lewistown, PA was completely swept away by flood. 

 Iowa

The next step toward the impossible holding that all human beings are geniuses came in studies at Iowa for two years where Murray Krieger was then writing Ekphrasis on the written descriptions of works of art, and Rosalie Colie writing Paradoxia Epidemica on the renaissance tradition of paradox, a bow to Sir Thomas Browne’s 1646 work, Pseudodoxia Epidemica, empirical observations of nature. The science and imagination of the renaissance proved as paradigmatic a study as Paradise Lost in its underpinning of epic structures, especially referencing the invisible made visible and giving the thoughts of heroic mind underlying renaissance epic. From the deep structure of imagination drawn in person, places and situations predisposed to respond the way we do, sometimes romantic as in the Spenser’s Faerie Queene and Marlowe’s long poems and plays, sometimes biblical in Paradise Lost, the huge political and social underpinnings of Shakespeare, the rolling sympathies of Donne’s lyrical Anniversaries that extend to his sermons is a landscape always beautiful, various and new.

Heroic and naïve efforts to attain new worlds, geographical, astronomical and encompassing all relations of men and women with all myth of the ancients thrown together with botany inescapable, overwhelming, must be accepted on its own terms and no other, in this last of three ages, the renaissance. The untrammeled swallows up goodness and mercy, temptation and failure where 5^th century Greece and first century Rome were surpassed in Italy and England, sustaining those flowers even as they incorporate them. Commercial myths of new world crescendo and storm seas roll into the great writing of the last Yeats and Joyce until the future walls of domination and liberation begin.

 All this and more. until that combined with meeting one on one with Donald Justice as he was writing Night Light. But none of it could have been comprehended without the intensive study of biblical texts afforded as an undergraduate with Clarence Mason and Andrew Telford at the Philadelphia College Bible, nights, and amplified by studying the results with Ricardo Foulkes among the many genuine intellects of the Seminario Biblio Latinamericano in San Jose Costa Rica. Further, relationships formed at the Texas with Winifred Lehman and Edgar Poleme in linguistics transitioned to T. M. Cranfill, brilliant Shakespeare scholar, editor of the Texas Quarterly and director of my dissertation. His classes were performances in which he read the plays in nuanced intonations to feel the thought of those ironic turns almost always opaque to American speech. Beyond that there were uncounted conversations with the higher mind of one fellow student, translator to be, John Cullen, for all the seven years we studied together for doctorates at Texas. The para-geography of imaginary worlds of Douglass Parker and Raja Rao’s inquiries of how one becomes two offered in the course of this residence, in association with  Dean Henry Burlage of Pharmacy in an attempt to revitalize the  Pharmacy Garden, planting a lavender field in the Texas Hill Country, knowing Robert L. Williams at the beginning of his priesthood at St. Hilarion’s, and his circle, when he celebrated mass every morning and I was often the only one in attendance for six months of that lifetime after the death of Carl Bowers, but before he became a linguist of pre-Hispanic Mixtec.

Anyway I took comfort from Kierkegaard’s prefaces, Wittgenstein’s so very simple expressions of Blue Book and Philosophical Investigations and Kafka’s compassion for the world of life, all greatly supported by readings in Emmanuel Levinas and Geoffrey Hartman, to show the reason and wonder. My bona fides in ceramic sculptures executed late exhibited this where there was no need to speak what you think.

 But one seems to get help, so to reckon the score, Jose Donoso, the Chilean novelist  met on an airport bench in Panama City airport that night after receiving the news of my brother’s death in Philadelphia and to encourage my loved ones I took a sudden flight to return. It had been a whirlwind since I had gotten the news earlier that morning as I was on a bus to travel myself to the most remote part of the country, by train, then mule to the region south. A note was handed to return to San Jose just before I left, which landed on that Panama bench for a five hour layover for the flight to Miami then further north. Jose Donoso, actually on his way to Iowa then sat down and perceiving the state of my mind suggested we hire a cab and tour the canal in the wee hours a while, since he was on the same flight to Miami. This we did and whatever that meant was too deep to fathom, like a dream perhaps, but at leave taking later he gave me his card, otherwise I’d never have known. The agony is that all the time he was at Iowa the same time I was I never made the connection. When I did, much later, and redressed the balance in elimae, he was already gone. There were two other helps in that time, Donoso Escobar’s face of sorrow as he watched me pack and Fred Phillips back in Merion at the funeral who came with coat and tie to express his sorrow. Stand ins, volunteers for the self.

The moment recognized before waking is known immediately as not only possible but as unbelievable, amorphous and dissolving as waking takes hold. But back at the planning,  imagine the line that were the mission easy it were pointless, and further, that if it had promise what was achieved gave expression to the difficulty sought, the impact of forces, the provision of allies, the wrestling of odds self-designed to give or get no breaks in order to bake the chemical water out of the clay of that mighty coalition of blessing and danger, which phrase was found written on the walls at Glastonbury.

                        Adapted from Soul Spinning at Gobbet and A Sacred history of Coal by Augusto Todoele, pseud, at Thrice Fiction 27.

 

 

Fascinated with this territory of unregulated space, a literal Fairywood forbidden lay just downstream whose future proposed a four-lane ghost Industrial Highway meant to connect UPS and Amazon under the Thornburg bridge. That’s where the Fairywood miners, Russian, Pole and Slovak first lived. Fairywood  had been made for miner gandy dancers who laid track in Pittsburgh before machines in the early 1900’s. The patch  town of Russians, Poles and Slovaks who lived along the creek were replaced in 1944 with BroadHead Manor, itself converted in 1953 to low-rent housing for war workers. It was called The Projects, only inhabited only by blacks. Construction on that four-lane Industrial Highway began in the 1970s in Fairywood. Now a light industrial park of Giant Eagle warehouses resides with UPS nearby.  How could it not be called a ghost highway? It was never finished.