Rosanne Potter She
sometimes hosted the most exquisite affairs of the season in her home. I
was her office mate on the main floor of Parlin Hall and at her bequest
was given Plan II classes to teach. We both had 8 o'clocks. One morning
that spring when I had long hair
I got there first and was sitting at the east facing window in an aura
of slight sun. She came in a rush, stepped into the room, stopped,
looked and blurted, "you look like..." and the rest was unspoken. I owe
her a lot.
"Died at home, 29 August, 2025. Rosanne Giuditta Potter. Rosanne was born
in Elizabeth, NJ on 4 October 1941, the only child of Harry Giuditta, a
banker, and Bernice Powers Giuditta. She graduated from Holy Trinity
School in Westfield, NJ (1959), and from Rosemont College in Rosemont,
PA (1963). In May 1962, during a junior year abroad in Vienna, Austria,
she suffered the loss of a leg in a streetcar accident. Determined not
to allow invalidism to change her life, after her recovery she took the
MA degree at the University of Chicago (1965) and the PhD in English at
the University of Texas (1975). She taught English and Women's Studies
at Iowa State University, attaining the rank of Full Professor in 1994.
In her academic career Rosanne helped to create the field of
computer-assisted study of literary texts. She edited a collection of
essays in computer-assisted literary studies, Literary Computing and
Literary Criticism (1989).
In retirement Rosanne divided her time between Key West and
Westfield, NJ. In Key West she was active in local institutions,
serving on the Board of the Friends of the Library and supporting the
South Florida Symphony Orchestra from its beginning as the Key West
Symphony Orchestra. She joined the local chapter of the American Civil
Liberties Union, becoming its president.
In retirement also, Rosanne pursued artistic and literary
interests. She studied poetry-writing with Renee Ashley at Fairleigh
Dickinson University. She published poems in numerous chapbooks and
anthologies, notably The Paterson Literary Review and The Charleston
Magazine, a British publication devoted to writing about Virginia Woolf
and the Bloomsbury Group. Rosanne gathered many of her poems in two
collections illustrated by her own paintings: Key West: Transit of Venus
(2005) and Two Arts (2022). Early in 2025 she was invited to read
them in a Key West Library series, "Cafe con Libros." Her last work,
unfinished at her death, was a memoir of her accident in Vienna and its
aftermath. Part of an earlier version of it was published in 1995 in a
feminist journal, Sistersong.
In Key West Rosanne studied painting with Joe Loeber, an
Abstract Expressionist painter. Her study of painting was a return to
work undertaken with Clarence Giese during her junior year in Vienna.
Rosanne painted prolifically, exhibiting at galleries in Key West, New
York City, and Paris and winning awards in online competitions. Her
paintings hang in private collections in Toulouse (France), Salzburg
(Austria) and Rio de Janeiro. Many of her works can be seen on her
website, "Rosanne Potter's Work."
Rosanne was married twice: in 1965 to Norman Potter, a
political exile from the military government in Brazil, with whom she
lived for several years in Heidelberg, Germany; and then (1984) to
William McCarthy, her colleague at Iowa State University and a
biographer and editor. With Norman Potter she had a son, Anthony Miles
Potter. She was stepmother to McCarthy's two children by a previous
marriage. She is survived by her son and the writer of this obituary."
I learned Nov 18, 2021 that John Cullen had died the previous April
and woke in the early hours of the next day during the longest
lunar eclipse in a century to write this epicedium, included pretty much as I left it then.
This is JCCIII on the roof of that sheep ranch house against the full moon. We watched several lunar eclipses from there.
I knew him in the
years we both received doctorates in English literature at the U of Texas,
1968-75, he in the nature of poetic mind, mine in the long sought renaissance Ameryca
and all its lives, but Dante was his first love. I had been made to change to
English from linguistics when that proved to endanger my assistant ship. The
English dept declared it could not have such outliers teaching English, a cover
up for the real reason that began when a local radio station wanted to
broadcast my classes. When this decision to vacate the linguist surfaced, John
went to James Sledd, head of freshmen English then, and declared that if I was
not rehired he would resign. This surely made an impact, but I also got
evaluated and took some astonishing reviews to the Dean of Arts and Sciences,
John Silber, who after a direct interview, certified the results back to
English with the message that he wanted the best teachers regardless of their
major and I was rehired. I then changed
to English and got another 3 years of employment.
In the end the most satisfying aspect of truly knowing another intellect is the memory, for all relationships end, for memory shores up the soul in itself, especially when you are young enough and unguarded in enthusiasm. John lived on
Elysian Fields in New Orleans, a subject germane to my dissertation on the
golden age, not that it was ever mentioned. In those times I spoke the language
nobody can translate, the language of poetry, prethought that has no
reading, either it is or it’s not, as all gradually become human beings to each
other, as the higher and lower minds and worlds relate. My lower mind was
a dilettante, present under compulsion but then concentrated. One night in 1973 I laid out A Calendar of Poems, pasted it up and took
it to the printer the next day to print 500 copies. I was going to give it
away but John said, make them pay. So it was $2. In this latter day when the backlog of writing was too great I invented six pseudonyms and
published dozens of long pieces under them until finally in 2022 began to put them on Amazon. These however get no review and are impossible to distribute.
He began his life work in 1987, long after Austin, in the translation of some 50 books of
note, translations both poetic and profound, after his own heart. Fifty
novels and non-fiction works, three made into major films; one was awarded the
French-American Prize. In 2006, he had two novels on the short list of ten for
the Dublin Prize, the prize in literature. My work has only just begun.
The thing that he cared about most was the
working of the poetic mind. The higher mind is philosophical, serious,
disciplined, formal and doesn’t much like to teach, the lower mind is poetic, childish,
open and loves to talk even to students. The irony is that the lower mind,
spontaneous, changeable, scandalous, just of the moment flickers this
constantly. If strangeness is poetic then Dante might be an exception but Dante
is the largest instance of the first possibility of the higher. This irony
is “a strangeness that we either never
altogether assimilate or that becomes such a given that we are blinded to its
idiosyncrasies. (The Western Canon,
4).
This
higher and lower mind stuff is the thing that ails ya thatcan reverse with a
vengeance. So his love of Dante was mirrored in the Blues as noted in his
“Devil Blues” in Lucille 3, which I had remembered as another of his, “Pastoral
Blues”
Well I ain’t seen a nymph down here
for forty years or
more
I don’ know what I’d
do with one
for my backbones
stiff and sore
I hate meadows and I
loathe sheep,
I got the pastoral
blues.
But
this one is done with the spirit of Robert Johnson which he played often to me in the
Austin summers to dark beer and peanuts. Higher mind types love the crossroads
because it confronts them with the existential dilemma the poetic mind lives in. Human thought polarizes
its opposites in everything of course, so the proving that he could sink far further down
than I, who lived in spontaneity, could reverse too and rise far above the high, not that it ever did me any
good, but evidence the child joy of the
Amerycan, “from a land in the far away.” However most of the time the limits are
opposed in proper order, he the higher philosophical, me the lower poetic mind.
Andrew-
Greetings from Florence, which we are about to leave for Venice. As you
know, being a world traveler [Central America in 1963, N Wales ’73-74], isn’t
entirely without difficulty, but I’m glad that I retired early. Although weary
of Madonnas, tapestries and the busts of Roman emperors I have spent whole days
in the assurance that I was closer to
the flame than ever before. I trust you are prospering in whatever outpost
of civilization you have established for yourself. Do you think it’s true that
you can’t go home again? Hello from V; Hello to P. J.
He knew I would love
a card from Florence, home of the David, which besides its heroic human
character was such a calling of the human spirit. He always called me Andrew, like my grandmother. A
similar card from his companion V. describes the period just before his,
Dear Andrew, The gilding of this lovely card
has sparked the writing of #2 of a
continuing series. Is there a smile on your lips in this year 1976? We are well
and jolly and very much liking Toulouse. We returned to France after having
spent a thrilling week in Madrid buried in the Prado museum, staring ecstatically
at Goya and a dreadful week in Seville surrounded by humorous beings-slowly now
we make our gently way to Italy via
caracassonne… did you receive #1? Thinking of you fondly, Vick
On Criticism
In all the vicissitudes such studies can
bring, for study craves the love of action in the revolution of some kind, John
was a cook who baked bread all the time, was impressed once when Eden made
Creole and asked about the construction of the roux. I gave him the first
ceramic piece I ever made, a gruel bowl, very Mono-ha Casanovas, as
in Twenty
Blocks, which says "each piece is a silence."
We patronized together countless blues concerts of BB King and a hundred foreign
films from the first row of Batts Hall, Godot, Bunuel. I saw him once reading
up from a collection of film books on the one we were about to view,
typical habit of the higher mind to inform itself with the critics.
The lower mind has contempt for such preparation of spreading observed
prejudices before the viewing fact. After maybe, or not, but to taint the view
with tattletales like Harold Bloom whose chief affection for Hart Crane from
age 10, and quoting his whole corpus throughout his life precludes his
understanding of “Lachrymae Christi,” which “has never found me” (The Anatomy of Influence, 269), as
the greatest of Crane, is as obtuse as his not seeing the influence of Hopkins
so obvious, but against Bloom’s hermetic prejudice, he can’t see that Crane
reached highest when he celebrated
that Subject of Hopkins of
rhythms, signs and symbols, even if ‘he removed those things from the realm of
strict orthodoxy and gave them a free life of their own.” (Bloom citing
Elizabeth Jennings. Anatomy of Influence,
268).
Like Pope Francis said of Donald Trump after the death of Justice Scalia,
following his peculiar death, that Trump was not a Christian, which indubitably makes him one, Bloom says of
Crane (Possessed by Memory, 386) as if he determined it. I guess his sway
is near the Pope’s on Trump. Bloom cites Wilde as preface to his last book Possessed by Memory to the effect that
the highest criticism is the record of one’s own soul, “the thoughts of one’s life” but the critics’ thoughts are all base camps
of the expeditions they are on, valuable for definition, but not for
originality, seeing face to face. Wilde’s Critic as Artist (Intentions 1891) is a sycophant and may
define public fortunes and reviews and faculties, but is always second hand.
Bloom wants the daemonic to define the sublime as if, if said enough times and
of enough writers (The Daemon Knows.
2015) it is believed, but it is just projected hermetic, a counterfeit of mind,
and needs to be rescued from his mania and uncatalogued.
To be sure, a
critic resembles a poet as one pea another, the only difference being that he
has no anguish in his heart and no music on his lips of life's great
conflagration (Kierkegaard, Diapsalmata).Criticism
is the pillage and pinning of butterflies so they can’t fly.
We played softball games each Sunday among
these intellects, ate peanuts and drank dark beer listening to Robert Johnson,
for whom we must credit his penning of the Devil Blues in Lucille 3, but
otherwise the celebrated New Orleans piquancy of his life is a palimpsest
overtop or beneath a more universal layer. But in truth none of the people
herein exist anymore in their childish states. We grow old with patinas and
customs and culture and these are all that remain of old enthusiasms.
Greatest of all we shared countless hours
and nights in conversation around his fireside or mine in celebration of a
mutual love of poetry, vision, and truth. He loved Dante above all else and had
served as a child in the church, bespeaking a piety that may never have been
expunged, evidenced then in his love the Incredible String Band at the same
time he held extreme contempt for fools.
But faith expressed is not the same as that believed. His attraction to
so profound a believer as Charles Williams accompanies our assumption that the
most transparent and unguarded expressions are the first, later are curbed by
the intellect, so the statement that “the highest place in [Williams] literary
scale is the comedy of forgiveness and reconciliation wherein agony is solved”
(The Literary Criticism of Charles
Williams, 1974, 84) we spoke of many times in the last plays of
Shakespeare, but not of the deeper belief accompanying it in Williams that
“everything that exists in the universe, animate and inanimate, material and
immaterial, is intimately and inextricably bound up with everything else” (84).
Shall we ascribe belief to the quote? No, anymore than I believed in my
sentence that the fusion of the new world with a new man could produce in him a
new nature that would grow in the Virginian pearl, gold and corn as a “new
creature of virtue to whom the golden age is a reality” (136).
He loved classical music, the string
quartet and piano Sonatas of Schnabel who Yeats had dinner with at Roquefort in
France at the end of his life. No I think faith was not lost, for the spirit
grows in us as a tender plant and beyond our meaning, so we leave it alone to
prosper.
His fire place was in a chalet he occupied
with companion V, set off by two rockers face to face and to either side, all
surrounded by books. In those naïve times we removed the dust covers to see the
fine dark blue of the Oxford editions, stripped of their seeming garish covers
so called I guess, for the interest was never in the extrinsic value but of the
words themselves within, of which we talked day and night in these seasons of
friendship He had cats and so did I. Both of us nursed large male Himalayan
males through distemper, his Frank and my Jellybelly. His female was named
Grace. My was named Mummz. Three cats had been dropped off in the early Spicewood
Spgs days, Mummz, Leroy and Albert. All Mummz’s kittens were given away on the
Drag. I took Mummz and Bubba across country through Arkansas to Phila on the
way to the British Museum. Now I adopt chow-chow gang dogs and hounds.
My fireplace was in a stone room on a sheep
ranch outside Austin built on the limestone bedrock that swims the Balcones
Fault. This ranch was right on the fault line and the stone surfaced like the
backs of grey whales breaching. The room was painted lime green, was all stone
and had a dark blue rug where we would sit in front of the fire and smoke and
talk at ease. The house had many porches too and in summer the visits moved
outside. The grounds of this place stood right above Bull Creek Park, there now
and many many times we hiked down our own backtrail from the top to picnic and
bask in the Christimas or any holiday sun that Austin preserved against the
cold seasons of the north.
Playing
chess on the bare cement floor of that outpost blasting jazz some melodious
scorpion had crawled onto his shoulder. I studied it for a move or so, then
casually mentioned it. He flicked it off and I stomped it with my huarache. All
matter of fact. The
lower mind is domestic, doesn’t need to leave home since the all is within. The
higher must leave because it cannot find the home. So while he was in Florence
I was beginning life as a herbalist and drug garden horticult before starting a
medical practice.
The
lack of moral ambiguity, signal lack of the age, was not present in him, for
good or worse, two stellar examples being his offer to resign in my behalf the
first time I was fired at Texas and the second was provoking the murderous
crowd to peace at the 22nd St. party. One night there was to be a block party
on Cliff St. The street was not blocked off. Crowds of more than a hundred, the
usual carousing. The night was young, maybe 9 or 10 when a car with three
occupants wanted to drive through the center of the party, which resulted in
the car getting roughed up, rocked, pounded on. It drove to the end of the
street, which was however a dead end, turned around and accelerated into the
crowd. There were so many bodies in the way though that it stalled out. Maybe
the driver lost his nerve. But he hit a lot of people. Nobody however died. The
curbs were high on one side of the street. I remember the guy backing up one
last time to get out of his fix before the engine died. There was a kid just in
his taillights who I grabbed and fell against the curb with, then it was over.
Well partly. Now a serious demo of that car began. All the windows were broken
out. The occupants had gone catatonic, were frozen motionless, glassy eyed.
They were about to be torn limb from limb when John Cullen asserted himself and
required everybody near him to join hands around the car, even while the
bottles were still raining down and the glass flying. This bought a moment
respite. He was very insistent. There was one guy who would not release his
bottle to me and let fly. But it was the last one. After than it was all clean
up and we disappeared from the scene.
Other certitudes might be less wholesome, more
sensual, more abrasive, but the point is the same, he is no Meursault, courage had not been exchanged for
cowardice in him natively bred, all the more tragic that his end should be a “sudden
illness” terminated at a New Haven U hospital of equivocation, which sounds
like and no doubt is what it seems, so he was not greater in courage than
society. Here the higher mind fell, a parable of itself, another tale told to
the likes of the cowardly jpoets who cannot address what is going on all around
them, which of course we will not shed here for fear of algorithm in our dreams
if the sign of this time is a solar eclipse over Antarctica, not a full moon
but a solar eclipse no light signs, no light is a sign of the time. Well there
is light but it cannot be seen.
So
to answer the question about whether you can ever return home, it depends on
where it is. European cities of culture are crowded as American. But uncultured
places are empty, you can walk for miles and see only a few along the canals.
We should call him back and ask, is the home a place at all, for the true home
we return to, if all is well, as the psalm says the Lord shall preserve my
going out and my coming in from this day forth even for ever more, means my
going out is birth and my coming in is death.
The
only person who ever gave their life for me lives with me know, but John Cullen
was one of those too when of his own accord he declared to James Sledd he would
resign if the Department did not rehire me that fall. This is not to overly
laud him, it was an impulse, but a noble one, like the time he stopped the massacre
of the drivers of the car that crashed the party on 22 St.
We
are all alone in our way but sometimes meet and walk with one who shares the
high karma of our state for a time. One of these was John Cullen, who became
a translator. Spender says nobody can understand the chat he and Auden had
"with their mixture of sense and nonsense, fun and portentousness, malice
and generosity, compose a secret language among a circle" (World
57), which is what the poems of that Calendar of Poems were, addressed to
intimates, confidants who get it and don't, but are amused by it, a mumbling
argot like the one, "Cullen's Company," who to someone who knew
the translator himself would seem completely contradictory, if true. Easily the best
intellectual talk I ever had was with John Cullen at his bungalow
fireplace into the wee hours smoking. That's what experience gets us, or
innocence. Is it not innocence that longs to be made whole. So against the background of Vietnam, the 1970
militaristic conceit of this poem wrenches the unconscious. They meet in this
boot camp of dreams, as basic training is implied, which both had seriously
avoided, by different paths, his scandalous, but funny -- mine a product of
what time and the age would allow, the old meniscus maneuver--but they had
known each other before it seems, for he recognizes him there: "That is
Cullen. Diddley-bop" which signifies some statement of
joy. They meet for a moment in the center of an apparition of friendship
so fleeting they barely wave going past, even if their Gemütlichkeit
surpassed what either had known. Of course the poem written before the denouement
properly forespeaks as poems do. Can they enter by the strait gate of the poem
into innocence or must they go by experience the great broad way? If the rites
of this dream princess smack of the white goddess, an intimacy too great to
share, or speak in a flash as the moment passes, prophetic itself of our
lives, taken at large, right away the camp telescopes to graduation. They get
their stripes. The thing is organized. It has Officers and Review. Structure!
No wonder the speaker suddenly wakes up, discharged, but the thing is that the
memory of the dream continues in the poem and when he reads it he remembers the
feeling of the dream in the first place. It revives its innocence there. No you
don't have to believe this. All of these poems are riddles to remember the
moment. What they have to do for another remains to be seen. Idiots on the
street however say they have miles to go before they sleep. So there are
many kinds of translation, one with another, by which Enoch was not found,
because Yahweh had translated him, which
we suppose of that translation yet to come.
John Cullen was also the first person
to hear The Planetary Bulldozers. I called him up by phone and sounded
it over the line. He was the first to see The Raleigh Manuscript too, so
that's why there are all these pictures of him on the Spicewood Springs ranch
carrying stone. There's something about a large stone and a man that brings
them together. Ask Plutarch. Ask Sisyphus. These, being moved, had been up by
the road when it was conceived they should be down in the pasture to form some
kind of retaining wall. Anyone can see the logic of that. Planetary Bulldozers
almost got into The Planet Formerly Known As Earth at its end, which
could have been prophetic, for that organ ended its life before 2012, but they
wanted to change the last line. Editor should be smelled with an I. 2012 was you remember the year of another Kohouthek,
another ISOM. That Planet began its
publication with “The Ship of the World.” If it were really
true that one good poem leavens the lump Ship
would have justified the whole. Another lie. Right before Planet Former burned
into darkness it turned down the Bulldozers, but if only, they asked, the last
line could be changed. It could not. How could one ask, what will you do
when the towtruck stops at your door? Mr. Camel than proceeded to
Bulldoze this onto the internet from the American Calendar.
Preface to a festschrift
In the background I lay on my
right side and my left side digesting the books of Matthew and Romans,
traveling through the belly of the American Viscose plants especially of
Lewisburg that was swept away by the river and Parkersburg where the tall vats
lay fermenting, but also traversing the polluted rivers of the Clarion and
upper Susquehanna. I lived my whole childhood along the polluted Chartiers and
the ruined coal fields of black then white smoke on the rails, and I had
already been in the eruption of Irazu and walked the passion parades of the
holy Easter where the JFK president had come triumphant and in it all had known
the death of a brother, the late night plane rides, the locks of Panama, not to
speak of the transfer of the muse. But I spoke of none of this when I first greeted
John, as he said, hey man, fresh from the revolution of l968 and the firing and
takeovers of buildings. All these unspeakables fermented my soul and emerged in
the vision of America I first showed him in the Raleigh Ms. and read to him
over the phone when it was first composed, the planetary bulldozers are coming.
And he had his spoken his heart to it too,
being an altar boy, and how he got his exemption to the Vietnam war, for his
distaste of the bland was extreme as when he once proposed to throw two Frisbees
simultaneously while high on the little magic pill. They slowed considerable
then. There were others in that circle, my wife Ann Oppenlander, his inamorata,
esp. Victoria Donner, the photographer, Tom Goar his wife Suzie, all severed
soon enough at so that I was in the end the only fellow citizen with the saint.
Let us presume none of us can help being who
we are even when we choose with all our effort and might to be that which we
become. I unknowing presided over the end of many things in this life, presided
not the right word, perhaps served suits better. These winds and cross currents
carried about have little explanation depending on our own consistency and the
purpose we set for ourselves or is set by ourselves from the outset. So the
tides have taken me as they have and it is the purpose here to account among
the storms and hot waves the miracle of friendships and loves that help the ship keep sure.
They have an on again and off again
relation, the higher and lower mind, it seems from the learning, not to delay
our progress by saying what higher and lower are, but do say they need each
other for complete joy, which is always incomplete in the world. A difference
from our model and title, the relation of the spirit and physical is spiritual since
they meet in the flesh, speak words, smoke pipes, can be hot, cold,. The higher
mind is more sociable, limited, defined. It has to be, it works so hard to be.
The lower mind is indolent, sporadic, fragmented, unless compulsed then it is
concentrated and creative out of the ordinary and might do whatever and even
get away with it, but it won’t be recognized of any particular value in its own
court, for to the lower mind the outer court is the inner court, but for the
higher mind the inner court is the outer court. The lower always has access
face to face, it knows nothing else, but for that reason we do not praise it,
we fear it. The outer court higher mind wants
to know but cannot enter. Why not? It doesn’t believe! Simple enough. No better
proof of this exists than my substitute for John Cullen’s conversation in later
life, Geoffrey Hartman, a close match of intelligence, sensibility, humor and
profoundity, but not granted face to face: as Hartman’s
“Job-like wish to be affirmed, to stand in the presence—a wish that has never
left me. I have kept a belief in the possibility of a direct line to the truth,
if only through the medium of literature. (A
Scholar’s Tale, 8).
I have most of Hartman’s
works, if only one of John Cullen’s, but I have all the conversation of and
beyond that, all the dreams. The dreams are the reason for this depth of
response to his casualty. Yes he is a casualty, he and so many more. I know this because it is
my business to know. But the dreams with him that continued over 40 years more
or less are impossible to explain, nor was I ever tempted to prove them in
conscious communication since he would have contempt for such weakness. The
last dream was just weeks before he died. But there were none after until I woke
to the news of his passing at the longest lunar eclipse of a century, or
millenium, what a billing, Nov 18, 2021, and wrote this the next morning at 2am
during the affair, yes that was the day I searched his name and found his
epitaph. But there is record of some 6 dreams, companionable, chatty, always
friendship, no discords in the couple years before. So have at it
my Freudians.
His
was a patrician mind that loved opera, Mozart especiallo, of which he
talked often, bu my was a plebian mind, meaning unschooled,
unconditioned by culture. the advantage of the patrician are obvious in
its immediate acceptance in the languages of culture and admittance to
those accolades there given,, but it can only see through that lens, not
directly, which it longs to do. The plebeian on the other hand is
ignored if tolerated, down graded as vulgar, but it can and does see
directly into the life of things and if it doesn't boast in high
language about its insight, it, as the psalm says, is superior to all
its teachers. 119.99.
And while no patrician will like this, it is only the least, the
humble close to the pure in heart that shall see God. Daleth::and even
more the one who God will look upon Isa 66.2::to this man will I look, even to him that is poor and of a contrite spirit, and trembles at my word. It is the tov of God: the good to "He has shown you, O mortal, what is Tov. And what does the Lord require of you? To do justice, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God.”
Before he took his orals I posted on the
door of his office a poem, Cullen at the Bat, for he had announced it at length
so it was celebrated. He of course passed with distinction. Of my orals the
next year I said nothing to anyone and merely announced the result the next
day, which vexed him considerably. The two manners show the course our lives. He
to distinction as a great translator of the European languages. He left Austin
to cycle back and forth to Vienna, Paris, etc for many years and I did not see
him again, only received postcards sometimes until he hit upon Nan Bleaker and
his calling to be. My life was clandestine like the orals, hidden. I don’t
recall he ever spoke of his time in Virginia before that, but I had three expansive
times already by then, in Central America, at Iowa for two years and then teaching
in the black American south in Fayetteville, which being purged there I went to
Texas. The first day on campus I encountered Warner Barnes who I knew from
Iowa, who brokered with Dean Ayres at the last minute an assistantship. He told
Barnes, “we have to cover these guys.” Things moved fast those years, I wrote
that vision of Ameryca, published in before Christmas 1973, immediately got on
th plane to London and Wales to visit the soon to be my Eden, came back write several
long poems, nightingale, went back to wales that summer after working and
missed the party for Lucille in which his notable Pastoral Blues appeared, which
fully gets his wit and point of view concerning nonsense. I was then an
arborist in new York Ossining, then writing the dissertation, but which time he
had already gone to Europe. And disappeared in the streets of Vienna, Prague, to
which I only got 20 years later. which is to say I hardly knew what I was
doing, for while he went to Europe I went to the Edwards plateau and to the
professional cultivation of herbs and native plants in countless greenhouses.
Explorations of the land and rivers of the Edwards, the middens and madrones,
rock shelters led, with the acquisition finally of wife of that spirit, back into literature
teaching to support her medical training and then just about the time he began
his translation work, we began the solo medical practice in Phoenix in which we
have labored since and still do, through all the trials and troubles that need
a book to name. but that office never closed as so many did when the scourge hid,
but remained open with every caution, just as did Dr. Rush in in the
Philadelphia yellow fever of in 1793. Even if there were only 5 patients a
day. But because of this I instantly recognize that he was taken by the scourge
that has shortened and ended so many lives and hopes, but which we have opposed
and treated from the outset of march 2020. If I have any regrets it is not buying
him a copy of the Mabinogian by lady Charlotte Guest I saw in a used book store
once, but this neglect like many others was not compelled by the passions,
forces, current that swept over all our lives. The
Hebrew word for “happenstance” is “kerry,” and implies a chance occurrence.
Rashi uses a form of the word to distinguish between the prophecy of Moshe
Rabbeinu and that of Bilaam: And He called to Moshe . . . (Vayikra
1:1)
But there is no
happenstance And if you treat Me as
happenstance, and you do not wish to listen to Me, I will add seven punishments
corresponding to your sins. Leviticus (Vayikra 26:21)
When it comes to happenstance, the “random” appearance of
history, there is only the hiding of God’s face. Hester panim is when
God makes things occur in a way that
disguises the patterns of history,
making events seem random to us. They are anything but random, but not
seeing the pattern, even after seeing the “answer,” the mind begs to believe that a pattern does not exist, that history is
random, and that God is not actively involved in the affairs of man.—
For though this is written during the longest lunar eclipse of the
century I did no intent to. It just happened after I heard of his passing
yesterday and this memory
preoccupied. If it is a question of
hester pannin or happenstance as it always is I choose hester pannin that all
things are made by Him and without Him is not anything made that is made. I
want this collection of essays to reflect the essence of our conversations of
those seven years together, he the scholar and prepared hard working man whose
dissertation I got afterward just to see
how he constructed his sentences and read to much enjoyment when I get it down
today, one third of it considering how Charles Williams and John Cullen both
loved Dante.
Even after writing from 2.30 every morning for 40 or 50 years I question
whether I yet know how to construct a sentence, but such is life. What ever
method of working I had my love in those days was the visionary construction of
a country, a nation I called Ameryca, inhabited by children and native soils and
rain. Which I hardly knew what it was, this way into the flowering heart, even
if I have after tried to find it out. I would say this lack of a track
sacrificed for simple discovery in in
the prolonged history of spiritually lawless Philadelphia, while he did
Meursault and… was further in the fluid ceramic sculpture of that eventual
decade of the miracles of clay that followed it. So here’s to you John with all
love and the belief that in the years we did not converse around the fire were
transported to dreams, for I have record of dream visits with him over and over
in my records, the last being jan 3, 2021. During and after every one of these
encounters and when I sometimes thought of him during the day, I prayed God’s
peace and love upon him and loosed the Father, Son and Holy Ghost, upon him as
do now, both now and ever more.
The higher mind is serious, disciplined,
formal and doesn’t like to teach, the lower mind is childish, open and loves to
talk even to students.
At
one point we had consideration of Edison and his sleep cycles, he observing how
much more time Edison had from less sleep and admiring it. But when at whatever point the man gets to this kind
oof sleep it is not to be envied. They call it insomnia, Levinas says it is
a form of observation. I found it decades ago and so have others of all kinds,
active intellects who seek to bless others, caregivers of sleep, with only
days, weeks, months years remaining to them.
A
calling preceded all statements and commandments. It is an expression of love,
an expression that the Ministering Angels use, as it says, “One called to the
other” (Yeshayahu 6:3). However, to the gentile prophets He revealed Himself with an expression of
happenstance and uncleanness, as it says, “God chanced—vayikar—upon Bilaam”
(Bamidbar 23:4, 16). (Rashi)
The
last letter from John Cullen had to
catch up to my changed address, one more stop and it had not made it. IN his
search of the higher mind he had many more stops so I could not reply. He was
in Florence then, the postcard chosen carefully, the meeting of Dante with
Beatrice, a subject we had much observed in hundreds of hours of talk together
and which I entertained in the poem Cullen’s Company. Higher mind seeks to know
the truth in those who have found it. Dante was an example of this for him. The
higher mind studies culture, literature, where it hopes to find the light it
seeks. Art is an inner quest for it. John was a good example, thorough,
precise, candid as he sought the light so it is a cruel irony that these fine
disciplined minds like Geoffrey Hartman’s have a “Job-like wish to be affirmed, to stand in the
presence—a wish that has never left me. I have kept a belief in the possibility
of a direct line to the truth, if only through the medium of literature. (A Scholar’s Tale, 8), only through a
medium.
3/17/21 (The last) JCCIII
friendship dream: hanging all day at some kind of raw art event with some other
exhibitors, we leave in his large old dodge pickup with packages to ship, talk
about the difference between book and conceptional art.
1/3/21 Dream. John Cullen came by,
asked about my wife. I told him she and I share destinies, medical practice,
lack of criticism. Later he asked for a vodka. So I went under the cabinet and
cracked a bottle.
9/17/19
JCCIII visit
yesterday and today, some kind of Catholic confirmation ceremony before crowds
at the top of a building. He speaks first, me, less involved, after. I pass
down through various compartments and people who exist at the base.
2/3/19 JCCIII takes
mic to deliver 10 min of paradox and contradiction. V leaves in a huff, the
room empties except me. I stand and deliver an equally impassioned statement
about shining with sun. The students coming for the next class begin to hum.
11/28/18
--JCCIII arrives in rain w dogs and mate. We run a boarding, venue
facility. Dogs friendly, he white and wrinkled. They have a seminar.
1/6/18
--easily
the best intellectual talk I ever had was with John Cullen at his bungalow
fireplace into the wee hours shoming.
5 Sept 2013
Endnote; I have this
ongoing series of visits in dreams with John Cullen that have gone on for years
and years. Like the relation of philosophers or poets or scholars we talk but
also share mutual concerns
--and with further
acknowledgement forever to the joy of life eternal in the accompaniment of Eden
to whom these are dedicated.
On the denouement
of April 15, this note—unknowing--
4.15.21 Thurs. shorty
has stroke, all blind, nursing to rewire the brain. and destiny shoshonna life
cord
Then the next day 4/16/ 21 Fri. I Cancel the epitaph
2/10/21 I want to revoke my
epitaph I didn’t hold anything back.
No planet affords the
intercourse Earth does.
A chance to practice love in the flesh.
Like what we’d do if ere it were impossible but wouldn’t
dare
He called me
Andrew, after my grandmother
4.15.21 Thus. shorty
has stroke, all blind, nursing to rewire the brain. and destiny shoshonna life
cord
4/16/ 21 Fri. Cancel
the epitaph
2/10/21 I want to
revoke my epitaph I didn’t hold anything back.
No
planet affords the intercourse Earth does.
A chance to practice love in the flesh.
Like what we’d do if ere it were impossible
but wouldn’t dare
1/6/18 --easily the best intellectual talk I ever had was
with John Cullen at his bungalow fireplace into the wee hours shoming.
11/28/18 --JCCIII arrives in rain w dogs and
mate. We have a boarding, venue facility. Dogs friendly, he white and wrinkled.
They have a seminar.
2/3/19 JCCIII takes
mic to deliver 10 min of paradox and contradiction. Vic leaves in a huff, the
room empties except me. I stand and deliver equally impassioned statement about
shining with sun. the students coming for the next class began to hum. Later,
Aey is smoking coke?
9/17/19
JCCIII visit yesterday and today, some kind of Catholic confirmation
before crowds at top of bldg., he first, me less involved, after, I pass down
though various compartments and people and exist at the base.
--and with further
acknowledgement forever to the joy of life eternal in the accompaniment of Eden
to whom these are dedicated.
1/3/21 Dream. John Cullen came by
asked about my wife, told him we share destinies, medical practice, lack of
criticism. Later he asked for a vodka. So I went under the cabinet and cracked
a bottle.
3/17/21 JCCIII
friendship dream, hanging all day at some kind of raw art event with some other
exhibitors, we leave in his large old dodge pickup with packages to ship, talk
about the diff between book and conceptional art
This is a version I started to
revise but feared to lose the original freshness of the first: Let us presume
none can help being who they are even when we choose with all our might to be what
we become. I presided unknowingly over the end of many things in this life,
presided not the right word, served suits better. These winds and currents have
a little explanation depending on our own consistency and the purpose we set
ourselves or that is set from the outset. So the tides have taken and it is the purpose here to account among
the storms and waves the miracle of friendships and loves that helped sustain the ship.
But there is no
happenstance And if you treat Me as happenstance, and you do not wish to
listen to Me, I will add seven punishments corresponding to your sins.
Leviticus (Vayikra 26:21)
A
calling preceded all statements and commandments. It is an expression of love,
an expression that the Ministering Angels use, as it says, “One called to the
other” (Yeshayahu 6:3). However, to the gentile prophets He
revealed Himself with an expression of happenstance and uncleanness, as it
says, “God chanced—vayikar—upon Bilaam” (Bamidbar 23:4, 16). (Rashi)
When
it comes to happenstance, the “random” appearance of history, there is only the
hiding of God’s face. Hester panim is
when God makes things occur in a way that
disguises the patterns of history,
making events seem random to us. They are anything but random, but not
seeing the pattern, even after seeing the “answer,” our minds beg us to believe
that a pattern does not exist, that history is random, and that God is not
actively involved in the affairs of man.—
For though this is written during the laongest
lunar eclipse of the century I d did no intend to. It just happened I heard of
hi passing yesterday and this tribute
preoccupied me. If it is a question of
hester pannin or happenstance as it always is I choose hester pannin that all
things are made by Him and without Him is not anything made that is made.I want
this collection of essays to reflect the essence of our conversations of those
seven years together, he the scholar and prepared hard working man whose
dissertation I got afterward just to see
how he constructed his sentences and read to much enjoyment when I get it down
today, one third of it considering how Charles Williams and john Cullen both
loved Dante.
Even after writing from 2.30 every morning for 40 or 50 years I question
whether I yet know how to construct a sentence, but such is life. What ever
method of working I had my love in those days was the visionary construction of
a country, a nation I called Ameryca, inhabited by children and native soils
and rain. Which I hardly knew what it was, this way into the flowering heart,
even if I have after tried to find it out. I would say this lack of a track
sacrificed for simple discovery in in
the prolonged history of spiritually lawless Philadelphia, while he did
Meursault and… was further in the fluid ceramic sculpture of that eventual
decade of the miracles of clay that followed it. So here’s to you John with all
love and the belief that in the years we did not converse around the fire were
transported to dreams, for I have record of dream visits with him over and over
in my records, the last being jan 3, 2021. During and after every one of these
encounters and when I sometimes thought of him during the day, I prayed God’s
peace and love upon him and loosed the Father, Son and Holy Ghost, upon him as
do now, both now and ever more.
John
was 79 when he died I was glad when I was 80, to symbolically feel somehow what Moses did when he first confronted Pharaoh.
Up to a point we do not spend time considering our
mortality, even with strokes, heart flutter, bradycardia, blood thinners and er
visits, dysfunction of physical systems, but this changes when you best friend
dies, esp when you had not acknowledged them as such, not that you ever knew
them as that. Even in the vicissitudes of relationship over 50 years, the loss of
contact and apparent lack of sympathy, the relationship maintained in the dream
world is presumed to be two way, if unrecognized in the conscious mind. You
may have records of these extended relations and conversations in that realm
and the continued forever golden. But then comes the news of their
death, months later, by accident, at the eclipse, as all deaths should be, and
the strikes home. You too are mortal and not that you care so much for
yourself, but you do for those you love, who if you have lost them, you do not want
to lose the prayer for them, for their peace and grace and hope of a future. It
would be easier had you you been connected to their lives in society, so
the loss is one of the imagination as well. It was an example, those colloquies
of the higher and lower mind together the higher being disciplined musical
cultivated, the lower spontaneous, whimsically detailed. He would I’m sure
scorn such possibility of dream connection.
2/12/17
--Much
concerned about how to write I was trying to gain direction from a professor of
JCCIII's in 4D work on Aeschylus, Dante, Yeats...which ended in considering
outside the dream Northrop Frye and a really good substantive prose style, for
I have been reading much lesser models along the way, which led to wondering how
the human fights against the divine, the divine being the fallen, since it has
always existed and must have been resisted or influenced long since. "to those who really believe
in a Supreme Being the occurrence of supernatural interference, causing physical
convulsions and changes, presents no difficulty, especially in connection with
a world the moral condition of which as evidently out of course ages before the
creation of our race." Pember, Earth's
Earliest Ages Preface. The fiction
writers like McCarthy don't seem to be anything but deceived, so on through
Frye.. So "this expanding of images into conventional archetypes of
literature is a process that takes pace unconsciously in our reading"
assimilated to the whole subject so quickly "one hardly notices the
difference between creative and critical activity" thus "what is true
for the reader is true a fortiori of
the poet, who learns very quickly that there is no singing school for his soul
except the study of the monuments of its own magnificence." (Anatomy of Criticism 100) the fact of
death is different from the agencies of death. like war and the study of war
inculcated into earth by supernatural interference Yeats in the resistance
confronts these agencies even though he seems compromised with the Titans and
the gods, especially in the Death of
Cuchulain at the end of Last Poems. To fight against the divine is best
seen in Aeschylus after some thought. Construed after as fighting against God
is equivocation. It is the fight against Saturn, the Titans and all Olympus
with one difference, they were powerless to effect change even if they resisted
to the death, like Sisyphus, Prometheus. The recast of this man into demi-gods
themselves is to only to undermine the man, to turn him into a god means his has
become the enemy, has ceased to resist and is completely enslaved. That is the
crisis of our time. Except that Christ has made a mockery of these heavenly
beings and empowered us to fight to establish our humanity and his rule. This
is not the war among the gods, Titanomachy, the gods are evil. Shelley against
the gods, usually construed as against the odds, "Aeschylus against the
gods" no results found! The celebration of war is a victory of these gods
over men, a transfer of their apocalypse to earth. But all of the discussion of
human greatness subordinates to super powers. No living with out the gods. Be a
god is not to be a man. Man inferior to the gods, the lowly the eater useless
eaters looked upon by kings royalty the rich because they are Olympians,
children of the Nephilim. Antigone burying her brother resists the gods. Lear
as a fly to the gods they kill us for their sport. Wanton boys these nephs. Twelve Olympians are the major gods of the
Greek, Zeus, Hera, Poseidon, Demeter,
Athena, Apollo, Artemis, Ares, Aphrodite, Hephaestus, Hermes, and either Hestia
or Dionysus. departure of the gods who left in the golden ag2/10/17 the blue
and white flag of the UN is centered on the North pole looking down as it were,
but the view of Kirill is opposite.
11/28/18 --JCCIII arrivies in rain w dogs and mate. We have
a boarding, venue facility. Dogs friendly, he white and wrinkled. They have a
seminar.
2/3/19 JCCIII takes mic to deliver 10 min of paradox and
contradiction. Vic leaves in a huff, the room empites except me. I stand and deliver
equally impassioned statement about shining with sun. the students coming for
the next class begian to hum. Later, Aey is smoking coke?
9/17/19
JCCIII visit yesterday
and today, some kind of Catholic confirmation before crowds at top of bldg., he
first, me less involved, after, I pass down though various compartments and
people and exist at the base.
--and with further acknowledgement forever to the joy of
life eternal in the accompaniment of Eden to whom these are dedicated.
1/3/21 Dream. John Cullen came by asked about my wife, told
him we share destinies, medical practice, lack of criticism. Later he asked for
a vodka. So I went under the cabinet and cracked a bottle.
3/17/21 JCCIII friendship dream, hanging all day at some
kind of raw art event with some other exhibitors, we leave in his larege old
dodge pickup with packages to ship, talk about the diff between book and
concepional art
6/18/21
The prompt here at
2am is the image of the map to morning star I looked for before but didn’t find
but did in search for Aeyrie’s deed: on the back of a poem. All these happened in 69, the basely person
plays in Jan, intro to class, the class beside the river, the Wallace stapp
diner and game, the English dept investigation and radio show, I was handing
out mimeo poems of the the fly and spider then, the morning star map is on
the back of one, bt morning star does happen
until late summer 72, also then another invite to join the elite from a
student who gave me a blue rug for the fireplace room who wanted me to take his
wife, exch myne, ho ho. That stone room of free stones an foot thick painted
light green had just the blue rrug, its windows showed out the front of the house
under some small live oaks where the sheep would congregate in summer to
shade, it all smelled of sheep, part lanolin part dung and the lambs would
bleat and gather out side the window there regularly. Not a metaphor. Inside
that room at night we would sit in winter before the fire and smoke and talk,
no chairs, into the night in tete ta tetes with jcciii, robert Williams,
esp the same students who organized the affair by the river at a park
I found, that full moon eclipse, at the
spring equinox 69 would come to visit unannounced and to smoke and hike the
valley below, still not domesticated, part of a state park now. All this was
got away with part from the time part from the 600 others who gave cover for
these acts, more traditional and well behaved, not with mantles. We would also
gather on the rooftop of that stone room where I then play the Japanese guitar, chordal
atonal notes in random order, which somehow seemed to fit. At that time I was
writing what was mimeo later ast America 2000
which did have the poems set against illustration drawings of some of
them.
Not to disregard prohibitions these poems refound occurred just when you call
send directly to my email and though there are problems in this submissions that
strike to the core, are being sent anyway for that reason of synchronicity.
Hence I bid goodbye
Epitaph for a small winner. I don’t write
this after I’m dead, however, as de Assis did, and Yeats wanted to publish his
last book from the grave, but after he is dead, to me something is the same
considering the nature of the case and everything is the case, my Ludwig.. for
the relation of the higher and lower mind is the case.
Mortal
states
Sickness
and death wear you down. We had harbored the death of our beloved chow chows at
home, never giving them the death shot to ease their pain as vets market their
service, one after another over the years, making them comfortable with love
and discrete aspirin and painkillers, seeing their noble response to the end of
life, heroic beyond any human ending, full of trust and love. But when a third
17 yr old adopted hound had a major
stroke, lost her sight, hearing and became lame, we still preserved against
death at the hands of a vet, and slowly rehabbed her over the next six months,
her appetite good, until she was an answer to that answer to prayer for dogs
and men that he makes the blind to see and the lame to walk. Indeed this became
the pretext to further adopt the care of a 94 year old family member and move
them near to us to demonstrate our duty to life and hope.
Essays
on the Consummation of Matter for John Cullen507 Essays on the Consummation of
Matter for John Cullen travels to mercury and beyond for…fictional festschrift for
John Cullen who might or might not approve mocking an honored traditon in his
honor, but that is the case of the higher mind vs the lower where is what we
have here
He
was politic but never personal, I was personal and never political, we were
opposites In this book the reader is offered the work of a poet, a parking lot
attendant, a trans Antarctic dentist of prehistoric dentition, and a
medievalist scholar of Sutton Hoo. A true hodge podge of consultation which
disparate variety does fairly represent the wide circle of John Cullen's friends
who would justly rebuke these voices if they knew they exist, but they cannot
and will not know, since in fact none of them exist, but one. He who we call
the editor authored them all. And further none of these are essays either, but
better, fictional essays to further blur the one overwhelming fact of our
knowledge of him, his love of literature and poetry in general and to which he
made major contributions in the 50 works he translated in this long career.
These essays therefore concern the issue of translation and literature we
engaged in some half dozen years in Austin taking doctorates together his in 20th
cent and mine the renaissance.
Michael W. Adams, UT-Austin, died at 76, 28 Nov 22.
He once did a year assistant prof at U of Penn, stayed in the Chair's
house who was on sabbatical that year and we stayed one night there when
Cleo and i returned from Wales in 1974 and my parents were scandalized
we sleep in the same bed, so we stayed with Mike. The next day my folks
were away and asked to stay in their bed! too much. The last time I saw
him I knocked on his office door in 2008 with my youngest son in tow who
I was showing the hill country and tennis facilities in some Texas
schools. That was the very day Dorethea retired! I knew Mike in the
sense of hand eye coordination and around the time in residence there,
played some basketball with him. He would shoot for outside and try to
get the rebound in it missed even though I had position, but he would
try real hard. Competitive. Once on the boardwalk of Atlantic City we
played the hockey game with pucks on a board for an endless game, but I
was relaxed and set him up for a goal and the win. He sulked about that
the way the big guy who was badminton king in Charlestown did when he
challenged me to games in my sister's backyard where he ruled. He was
big and violent but my reflexes were good. After he lost we went to his
house to visit and I sat in his chair, unknowing. Poor guy. He
propositioned my sister who turned him down. I beaten Tony Niccum at the
Kiwanis in ping pong. I beat Tommy McGeorge on his own table in his
backyard in front of his father. I am well liked where ever I go.
Bob Northcott, Austin, Alaska (1950-2024)All this literary spate is just to express "the escape"
with
joi de vivre at every turn. Escape from what! from the blasted conformity of every day. Now that I come to relook those
early poems of America 2000 they more and more look like what they are, a
way of escape in terms that Kafka used, and Swift, the natural. A later
attempt to put this live was called, Momma Noture's New Found Country
Runes., is now live as
Airy. Bob
had spent by his recount a winter alone in an Alaska outback cabin at
least once. I assume it gave him a chance to breathe. After that he
visited in Austin on the Balcones Fault where I lived five years and he
had visited often, but this time asked to spend some days and nights but
warned if he seemed to wander off, to go away from himself, that he had
a picked up a demon, but just to ask, what is your name and he would
return to self possession, which indeed occurred a few times. That first
night I dreamed a strong wind blew the roof off the stone house of this
old sheep hut, bigger than a booley hut on high mountains where the
wind blows, but that was it since I had a prior assignment from the one
who never leaves or forsakes even in the end of the age. Shall we all
meet together some time to confess our sins? I should have said, forget.
When Bob left that time he offered to sell me some prints of Alaska he
had made, and happily I bought three. He was grateful, that was the last
sighting, about 1971 or 2.
Before
that, not a student of mine in those outrageous classes, but a friend
of one who was, Ray Spaw, who had been disowned by his parents a little
to the south with his attitude and hair, Bob and Ray joined up to
promote that jaunt by the Colorado River I held one night in the spring
of '69. Some 30 or so showed up for the engagement with the Japanese
guitar I then played. But Bob also engineered a walk up to Hamilton's
pool from the Pedernales, naked, he and two friends, my wife and myself,
wearing tennis shoes. My wife was the only woman there, Slender, tall,
Beautiful and splendid but with no inhibitions, it was the 60s still,
the whole afternoon was a joy in mid air. I'm thinking now that all
these things represent the desire to walk the earth free of the past, to
walk naked up a glacial rip, camp all night by the river, walk down
into canyons in free space. What a time to be free, and that 's what
came of it though, his body turned into the funeral parlor, but not
without memory, at least here of what the best of times were for a
moment like those other poems any time somebody wants to get away and
they're Bob Northcott, anything forget to be free and it comes with
certain risks to step out of the envelop and swim, and if we never hear
or see from you again, for those who violate the prison must be cast
out. Why they don't even have cell phones! Open a window and fly out
yourself,. surely you'll plan to fly!
Bob
gave me the map to Morning Star commune in Arroyo Hondo NM where he
stayed. the map was on the reverse of one of the poems I illustrated
and handed out in memeographed copies,
Spider and Fly
I live alone in a spider web
inside a cobweb house
the spider said, oh lay your head in the cobweb bed
O fly unto me.
Caught in the sticking spider web
Open a window for the fly, cobweb.
Open-window. The fly went heading
thru the web and again the spider:
Oh foul outrage
O fly unto me.
All
of this seems now a cobweb of the state nation, state and world whose
minds are filled with paadigms more and more. Opening a window to the
fly was one of the texts and subtexts to my teaching then and my
conversation which brought people like Bob Northcott into purview. The
state of the head of cobwebs, the freedom of the fly, the spirit from
this trap, and the outrage of all the spider forces that seek to maim,
destroy and kill that so take over the world much more than c. 1969-70
are on the reverse of the Map. He labels it Map at the top left and on
the reverse. It was good enough for us to get there in the near dark,
after only one mishap.
The
symbology is appealing that the Morning Star was a collection of these
flies who escaped the spider web, that this agrarian effort was the
perennial American answer to the past present and future of that which
comes perennial, like Hawthorne at Brook Farm, etc. and as unsettling
for all the utopian failures before and after and imitations like
Jonestown to lure the fly into the deeper web, and who cannot think the
web of the deep web, the silk road web, the block chain web, the neural
satellite Musk web woven around the earth electric is not completely at
issue in this escape. Do any of us escape. A latter day title collects
those poems by that very name, so the idea is still with us, Escape
Before the born is closed? It all brings to mind the verse, "how shall
we escape if we neglect so great a salvation?"
This
obit brings the aegis of all this literary spate to express the escape
with Joi de vivre at every turn. Now that I come to relook at those
early poems of America 2000 they look more and more like what they are, a
way of escape in terms that Kafka used, and Swift, the natural. A later
attempt to put this live was called, Momma Noture's New Found Country
Runes.
Bob said I would be welcome at Morning Star for sure, so when
we went, my Cleo and her brother on the way back from Oregon, in his
dark green Mustang with glass packs and laker plugs, we spent some days
there, as told anon. I still have the map Bob made to guide us there. I
still have the elk horn he used to curve into pipes that was lying on
the ground when we pulled up at dusk and just happened to camp at his
site, of many that were open. He had just left two days before they
said. So that is at least four significant times, and an indefinite
number add to it when he with friends would just drop in to Spicewood
Spgs and visit, smoke, eat and walk down into the Bull Creek wilderness
not then a park. His address is noted then as 607 W 33 St in Austin. In
the sparse notes of those years he visited Aug 7 1971 and we planted
marigolds. August 26 a note, “Taos in plaza all day, meet Bob-not Rancho
de Taos.” The next year he is on the list of 20 people to receive
copies of "America 2000" a mimeographed proof Calender that appeared
Dec 1973. I think there was no particular burden to our conversations
but a mutual enjoyment of life in and about the earth. If that gives
some body to his ashes scattered in Anchorage or prisoned in an ossuary
we in neither case can visit him any more than we can visit the
misplaced ashes of Yeats rescued from France after the war and carried
to Ben Something or Other to be visited by pilgrims to the site as if
they were his and not James Rouquelblue who has taken by mistake and the
real Yeats as lost is found. No you must visit Bob right here in these
pages among the further lostness of the time of Austin and the rest. The
ashes, the ashes, where ae the ashes to reconstitute from the wind and
the water and the earth? i say that because I hold the ashes, keep them
in large vessel before repatriation of Ruth, the jar that says Rapture
in Progress. I keep the ashes of the dead who are not so who's to say in
the offering that we will not meet.
I
https://encouragementsforsuch.blogspot.com/2007/10/into-wild.html
Into the Parent child crisis
And Kazumasa San said
to me, "Your work is to take care of the spiritual interior of the
language." And he said in Japanese this word we use, kotodama, means that
each word has within it a spiritual interior. The word is like a vessel that
carries something ineffable. And you must be the caretaker for that. You must
be careful when you use language to look at every part of the word and make
sure that you're showing respect for it in the place that you've given it to
live in the sentence.
It might be hard o see, but the spirit is and always recognizes that
same spirit in another, all differences aside, so Bob Northcott is a
kindred wayfarer on this road and if I live to tell the stories, they
would not have occurred had I not broken 8 decades, which to ensure some
wards were given to my life, that if chosen correctly would enable the
account of these kindreds who walk the earth, dedicated to them if they
know it not who they are. In the obituaries collected in these pages
these lines might suit this particular where
The water of this river fed by springs
has overrun the stones hid in the clay.
The flood erodes the lively stones,
reveals surface, depth, in large and small,
This took ten thousand seasons of the leaf in all.
Whatever was the reason, kindred souls
who lived and died took earth.
They lived for the purpose of its restoration.
Just as the flood revealed the stones in clay,
These assembled at the latter day.
There where the river ran over us we lived
and learned to build the one, the spiritual
friend.
Christ ran over us, some to lift and blend,
Some peacefully rested he in banks here under sand.
But now the flood bares open the whole bed of the stream
and the righteous are revealed, or so we learn.
The True Light That Lights with Glossary and Additional Poems
The
freedom and joy of the youth of these times do not transmit to today.
People now asked will claim their memories were/are impaired. They are
not. Maybe they have been edited though of safe keeping.To face the
midnight cry let's give them some oil you say. Have you any to spare?
Well mabley you can borrow some here with the adage of the zen derelict
under bridges accosted by thieves who said, so what? If it breaks a
bloke in half to believe Bob Northcott a zen master let's consider an
obit for Robert Anthony Northcott here, who at the time of his death was
unknown so far that an inquiry as to who he was was posted in the
Anchorage paper. At the same time of his death that of liberal Austin
was complete as The Texas Observer went out of existence. The
philosophy department had decamped long before, replaced by mechanized
implants of Musk Musk and nihilism serve together as stars on the left
shoulder of those government establishments narrated by Dave McGowan's Laurel Canyon, and Tom O'Neill's Secret History of the Sixties along
with many hundreds more to which we might apply a family constellation
resonance. This notion states that all the events in our background
affect all of us in the foreground, even if we know it not. That is the
best explanation for what I have long felt, living through these times
into the now of '24, when early written works did not fit the immediate
world of their Vocabulary of the Opposite.
The half dozen experiences with Bob Northcott told here have to serve
as his obituary and in case The Loss of Austin matters, they serve there
too, in what we all
then knew and now, that the life of one matters.
I don't
have a pic of him but the one of his sister Kaye with the same cast of
face, glasses, amused is a look-a-like. None of our deaths are pleasant
maybe, the best are staged with the
patient rallying for one last round of acceptance and forgiveness then
quietly ceasing in repose, the unstaged are different, the worst are
held prisoners at the end. Need help to imagine them?
 |
| Bob Northcott resembles Richard Brautigan to me. |
In
the home where my mother was admitted at the end to the Medical
unit, in the communal area there were a half dozen old women in
wheelchairs,
still in their bodies, their white legs
fully exposed, but see, they are humans. One lady in a blue dress starts
up
while I’m there, repeating in a loud monotone, Help me, help me, help
me…she says this maybe 200 times. I don’t count. This changes to, Take
me, take me. Please take me…on and on. Back to Help me, Take me. Help
me, take
me. I’m hearing the call of every soul in it, every human heart. Help
me. Help me. As though she’s a
transmitter in the basement of this building speaking for all the
others,
for their intensive eyes are dully fastened on the metronome of
her cry and she is louder than the TV and longer too. The nurses don’t
disturb
her so I catch maybe 15 or 20 minutes of the threnody, for they are
putting my own
mother to bed, but all the while in the high mountains the Aspens are
turning so that I want to shout The
Milky Way! The Flood! maybe, but really I’m stunned too, which pathos is
something of the body, but I’m saying this of the human spirit
broadcast each living second and the last, so forgive me. I still think
of Edith
Sitwell, “the Rose upon the wall crises ‘I am the voice of Fire: and in
me
grows the pomegranate splendor of Death, the ruby garnet almandine Dews:
Christ’s wounds in me shine! (Canticla of the Rose).
You
have to remember it was the 60s which from the stand point of the
latter day 20s seem to be the reason for the mess we are all in.
I either ended up in Texas because I was fired from a black college in
that revolution, which shows what kind of a teacher I must have been,
or because I was too erratic to get into Chicago or Johns Hopkins, the
first choices, good on them, or maybe it was the backwash from living
in Central America among counterparts of many nations, or maybe it was
the polluted environment where I grew up in in the elemental Pittsburgh
coal fields, all candidates but for the reason d'etre, for which you
have to blame Jesus, which puts us in good company today when Jesus is
blamed for much stuff and followers are pretty quiet so as not to rock
the boat. I
literally got down in the dirt for Jesus. The good fellows who provide
those tent venues had put sawdust on top to keep me clean. There on both
knees, I tell you, completely disreputable to the green psychotherapy
of Ayahuasca
yage pill dispensers, all the gov't assassins, soldiers and secret
agents get greened that way, it takes away all horror, like they never
did that at all, and with a dose of propranolol in memory activation rewriting, as in Erik Erikson's hypnotism, NLP to you listeners. But
I hadn't killed, never would. Blame Jesus for that too. I got struck at
11 in a coat that made me never want to kill. I might have gone and
done something unpatriotic about Nam, except I was given the old
lateral cartilage ACL route where the army doc wiggled the knee in its
socket and said just because the army rejected me didn't me my life was
over. Thanks army. Other means must needs be found to bring into line,
to take orders, like being booted from the black revolution '67, '68 by
its Vichy counterparts there. This was the first of three. Admittedly
this was long before I had daughters in law to enforce the rules. Train up a child in the way he should go and when he's old he will not depart from it. How
many people do you know who have been fired from faculty positions at
the U of Texas twice? The forces apparently did not get to me in time.
Jesus won again, so I went to Texas and what do you say about telling
the whites what I was telling the blacks. "You are all geniuses," I
said. Other faculty were told not to hang near me. Maybe it's
catching.That was before masks. This attitude gets proof in Humanyte, set to appearm so no need belabor it here.
No compliance, daughters in law, mothers in law, sisters in law, army,
English department could abide these thoughts in sharp distilled books,
until Parousia, a Nigeria outfit, broke the ice, so blame the Nigerians
along with Jesus. The True Light that Lights began corralling
those poems and Amazon left some cracks in the democratic frenzy to
harness Everyman to the digital chain so that it became possible to bark
a book, make a cover, submit it and publish in one day. The even and
the morning are the first day. Darkness is upon the face of the waters,
so if Bob Northcott goes viral, blame Amazon but do not wait too long. Twenty books appeared in less than two years before being eaten by bears, but I will not die, I will live and declare the works of the Lord. Anyway that is kind of person Bob Northcott sought out which proves the point that if we live in the fall of the stum and drang we will contend.
Asked
how notice of his demise got in the Anchorage paper the funeral home
that placed the ad would not say, either he was sent there or the police
dropped him off, undoubtedly the latter. They would say no more after
three tries. We do not have the Report or details, only barely extorted
that his sister had picked up the ashes, strike that, ordered he be
cremated. Where the ashes ended up they would not say. Either Austin or
Anchorage some say, and there Bob lies, but for his pain and our
iniquity unless for another one would dare to die. Being one of those
whose memory with the fallen rain down will rain I make inquiry. I found
Karl Hillie. I found Jim Turanchik, I found Roseann Potter, I found
Archie Johnson, not all of these in time. I lost John Cullen, so I wrote
to the Bob's sister after the fact,ten years ago to the effect,
Dear
Kaye Northcott, I saw notice in the Anchorage paper dated last April of
the death of Robert Anthony Northcott age 74 which I suppose is your
brother. So with my condolences I think to prepare an obituary for him
since there does not seem to be any such thing available. Are you able
to provide his exact birth and death dates? I assume you felt disgraced
by him but nonetheless find peace in his death. Yours, AE Reiff
But I had written ten years before too:
Hello.
I've wondered some time the whereabouts of your brother Bob. I knew
him in my time as inmate at the U when I was a TA. He visited me many
times out on Spicewood Springs Rd-before development, c. 68-71. I also
visited with him at Morning Star. The last I saw of him he was back from
Alaska, always in desperate straits. Please forgive the intrusion.
I got that disgraced impression after
the first effort, but I knew more of Bob. He had spent by his recount a winter
alone in an Alaska outback cabin at least once. I assume it gave him a chance
to breathe. After that he visited in Austin on the Balcones Fault where I lived
five years and he had visited often, but this time asked to spend some days and
nights but warned if he seemed to wander off, to go away from himself, that he
had a picked up a demon, but just to ask, what is your name and he would return
to self possession, which indeed occurred a few times. That first night I
dreamed a strong wind blew the roof off the stone house of this old sheep hut,
bigger than a booley hut on high mountains where the wind blows, but that was
it since I had a prior assignment from the one who never leaves or forsakes
even in the end of the age. Shall we all meet together some time to confess our
sins? I should have said, forget. When Bob left that time he offered to sell me
some prints of Alaska he had made, and happily I bought three. He was grateful,
that was the last sighting, about 1971 or 2.
Before that, not a student of mine in
those outrageous classes, but a friend of one who was, Ray Spaw, who had been
disowned by his parents a little to the south with his attitude and hair, Bob
and Ray joined up to promote that class by the Colorado River I held one night
in the spring of '69. Some 30 or so showed up for the engagement with the the Japanese
guitar I then played. But Bob also engineered a walk up to Hamilton's pool from
the Pedernales, naked, he and two friends, my wife and myself, wearing tennis
shoes. My wife was the only woman there, Slender, tall, Beautiful and splendid
but with no inhibitions, it was the 60s still, the whole afternoon was a joy in
mid air. I'm thinking now that all these things represent the desire to walk
the earth free of the past, to walk naked up a glacial rip, camp all night by
the river, walk down into canyons in free space. What a time to be free, and
that 's what came of it though, his body turned into the funeral parlor, but
not without memory, at least here of what the best of times were for a moment
like those other poems any time somebody wants to get away and they're Bob Northcott,
anything forget to be free and it comes with certain risks to step out of the
envelop and swim, and if we never hear or see from you again, for those who
violate the prison must be cast out. Why they don't even have cell phones! Open
a window and fly out yourself,. surely you'll plan to fly!
Bob gave me the map to Morning Star
commune in Arroyo Hondo NM where he stayed. the map was on the reverse of
one of the poems I illustrated and handed out in memeographed copies,
Spider and Fly
I live alone in a spider web
inside a cobweb house
the spider said, oh lay your head in the cobweb bed
O fly unto me.
Caught in the sticking spider web
Open a window for the fly, cobweb.
Open-window. The fly went heading
thru the web and again thes pider:
Oh foul ourage
O fly unto me.
all of which seems now to be a perfect
paradigm of the state nation, state and world whose minds are filled with
cobwebs and seem more and more. Opening a window to the fly was one of the
texts and subtexts to my teaching then and my conversation which brought people
like Bob Northcott into purview. The state of the head of cobwebs, the freedom
of the fly, the spirit from this trap, and the outrage of all the spider forces
that seek to maim, destroy and kill that so take over the world much more than
c. 1969-70 are on the reverse of the Map. It is labeled Map at the top left
and on the reverse it was good enough for us to get there in the near
dark, after only one mishap. The symbology is appealing that the Morning Star was
a collection of these flies who escaped the spider web, that this agrarian
effort was the perennial American answer to the past present and future of that
which comes perennial, like Hawthorne at Brook Farm, etc. and as unsettling for
all the utopian failures before and after and imitations like Jonestown to lure
the fly into the deeper web, and who cannot think the web of the deep web, the
silk road web, the block chain web, the neural satellite Musk web woven around
the earth electric is not completely at issue in this escape. Do any of us
escape. A latter day title collects
those poems by that very name, so the idea is still with us, Escape
Before the born is closed? It all brings to mind the verse, "how shall we
escape if we neglect so great a salvation?"
This obit brings the aegis of all
this literary spate to express the escape with Joi de vivre at every turn. Now
that I come to relook at those early poems of America 2000 they look more and
more like what they are, a way of escape in terms that Kafka used, and Swift,
the natural. A later attempt to put this live was called, Momma Noture's New
Found Country Runes.
Bob said I would be welcome at Morning
Star for sure, so when we went, my Cleo and her brother on the way back from Oregon,
in his dark green Mustang with glass packs and laker plugs, we spent some days
there, as told anon. I still have the map Bob made to guide us there. I still
have the elk horn he used to curve into pipes that was lying on the ground when
we pulled up at dusk and just happened to camp at his site, of many that were
open. He had just left two days before they said. So that is at least four
significant times, and an undefinite number add to it when he with friends
would just drop in to Spicewood Spgs and visit, smoke, eat and walk down
into the Bull Creek wilderness not then a park. His address is noted then as
607 W 33 St in Austin. In the sparse notes of those years he visited Aug 7 1971
and we planted marigolds. August 26 a note, “Taos in plaza all day, meet
Bob-not Rancho de Taos.” The next year he is on the list of 20 people to
receive copies of "America 2000" a mimeographed proof Calender
that appeared Dec 1973. I think there was no particular burden to our
conversations but a mutual enjoyment of life in and about the earth. If that
gives some body to his ashes scattered in Anchorage or prisoned in an ossuary
we in neither case can visit him any more than we can visit the misplaced ashes
of Yeats rescued from France after the war and carried to Ben Something or
Other to be visited by pilgrims to the site as if they were his and not James Rouquelblue
who has taken by mistake and the real Yeats as lost is found. No you must visit
Bob right here in these pages among the further lostness of the time of Austin
and the rest. The ashes, the ashes, where ae the ashes to reconstitute from the
wind and the water and the earth? i say that because I hold the ashes, keep
them in large vessel before repatriation of Ruth, the jar that says
Rapture in Progress. I keep the ashes of the dead who are not so who's to say
in the offering that we will not meet.
sSee Kaye, i told you here is his obit I'm a lot like him. not the
mold. when i was 15 i washed the letters off of tombstones. I have to
tell you in all candor, you want me to be honest don't you, that I have
always opposed death. I opposed death sitting on a bus to the most
remote coast of atlantic central america and got off the bus to oppose
death. i opposed death in panama with .....and on the plane to maimi and
to philadelphia i oppsed deeath, what does dylan thomas says, i refuse
to mourn, I oppose death.i'm sure in the grand summary many offenses so
many the Christ died for us somany offenses so many reparations for
cruelty that if you live long enought he get to acknwodedgement Whose
grave is this, this one and this, ask me I know them. it's never too
late to be raised from the dead.
Austin to Pikes Peaks The car with a bad ass 68 Mustang V8, 2 door weather
beaten dark green coupe with laker plugs. Her brother’s car. We drove
through the night at 100 mph and came up into the mountains at dawn and
Five names from Shakespeare
Camped across from Pikes Peak we built a fire
against a big rock cause it was a little cold late August. Didn’t have meat so one
went down to a stream & in an hour brought back a fish we fried, best fish
ever ate. It was a rough site, a ranger came by to check and liked the fire up
against the rock. Left even earlier first light radio blasting up toward the sun
flowing down flowing the whole way.
Second night amped camped along a rock strewn dry steam bed bro and sis had it
out about some thing forgot. She goes up the
stream bed. I retrieve her with
honey words and talk out of her passion to return to the camp in peace, first
of more fireworks to come. Third nite camp at Big Bear Lake up against the
shore on a slight rise, sun setting all gold and off again to western Oregon
among scrub trees, second third growth like the state was clear cut twice but
the streams are bright and white and we run downhill to Eugene and put up at my
brother’s cherry farm. We camp in the third story of his unfinished attic. His
wife is pregnant with their first born two days after we leave. We dig and fence him a garden with ranch
fences, gates and wire, talk about finishing off the attic, already two by
foured into rooms. We have big dinners and eats. Go into town to the
warehouse stores for supplies among the rustic suspicious Oregonians who look
like they fear we will steal their overalls. The town has a mean aura. Back that
evening big feast my brother wants me to trip for him. By dinner time I can’t
eat, just getting dark, waves of light are coming up the hill from the slight
valley below. I go out to see, raise my hands at the light. This is before I
really learned how to raise hands in praise to the only wise God, King of Kings
and Lord, the One with a sense of humor of human foibles so when I raise my
hands get tolerated for the future praise when I walk at moonlight and
starlight every morning in the desert before dawn for years where I do listen
as one being taught. So to this little light waving up with hinges of red and
balmy air I say my name the way renaissance discoverers, welsh bards in the
Shakespeare mask every character de rigor the self before learning about being one. That belies later pseudonyms adopted to get out the work sometimes as many as five different names
appear in the same publication, Coriolanus, Horatio, a mariner, a captain, a
physician unknownst to the editor, sometimes just two, twice, and maybe still
does it when peeved at the whole arbitrary process of writing and publishing.
Well to get it out is the main thing no what name. So I raise my hands and see
my brother come furtively around the corner of the house to observe. Like he
was concerned I might float off maybe or maybe he’s trying to see what spirit
he would observe. Those days he was a bit of a guru, before he joined up with
Mamma Ji and lived in Malibu on the beach with Excaliber. He didn’t see me see
him but having said what I had to say I went in to the dinner which was winding
down and took the girl, which in my defense I married later and did right, she
thought I was some kind of guru too, meaning that our birth if more than a
sleep and a forgetting; is an awakening and venture on the road turned out good
if you are there too we will meet. I give from the dinner and head into the bedroom
and lay her down in a large violet cube all three D that surrounds us.
Sometimes this cube radiates and shines more brightly than the rest of the
trip. But hey it is time to leave so we get ready. My brother’s wife is due and she is a little you know,
expectant, bu the car has a leak in the gas tank and can’t be welded without
draining the tank and taking it off the car says the mechanic which the bro
won’t do. He won’t he won’t. he and sis are two of a kind. I insist otherwise.
Really, don’t want to explode on the road much as that would set back the
world. So I insist again. He comes at with rage. I just stand there as he rips
my shirt. My brother thinks I’m a bad ass,
yells at him he’s lucky I don’t hurt him. He, at least hopes so. While
we were there driving all in his van he swipes another car or it swipes him
which leads to an Oregonian standoff in the street, against an irate who my
brother stands up against as vehemently as her bro. later he said he was so
strong because he knew I would save him in a fight! No advance of these things.
So back at the gas tank we get some liquid weld, find the leak, slight, clean
it and apply the stuff which sticks good and we are off, cause on the way back we are going to stop at Morning Star Commune in n New
Mexico.
I
have a pencil map for directions up and down
the mud roads. It had rained. But we end up at the next commune over, a
Chicano
hang, Buffalo something and put up about dark mufflers blazing, revving
the
engine. I go in the find where we are greeted by a most delicious buxom
babe
who welcomes me until her boss comes out and threatens, which looks like
it
will end bad except sis the Cleopatra of my own comes and show again
she’s made
of pique and steel and we get away. She’s fierce, has done this
subsequently
too, scares them to death and they freeze. We get direction, try again
go back
down and up another hill over and there is morning star . we just make
camp in
the dark pretty much ignored. It’s drizzling. The commune sheriff
patrols. Next
day, giving homage to him, he says he heard me and Cleo noodling and
talking to
sleep, says it reminds him of himself and his, the daughter of the great
baseball player, dusty Rhodes. The next night they have a feast all
contribute.
Then take us into their kiva for a smoke deep down in the earth like a
passage
tomb and they tell stories of the streptococcus bacteria in the soil
that resulted from a massacre that occurred thereof Calvary and women
and children. It poisoned the
soil as a curse. Very OT that behavior curses the land. In the kiva I
see and
hear their ghost shapes. There’s just a fire for light but they]re whisps in the air, but not menacing to me,
more comradely. Why should it, I am made in the image of the invisible, first
born over all creation. What is the visible of the invisible anyway, the image
of a lien among pots, wings cover with silver and feathers of shining gold. Ps
68 This goes on a long while I feel like
we’re being entertained. They maybe desperate for company. Coming out, going to
sleep, I wake next day early to otherworldly high soprano solo coming down from
higher up where they tell me later one of theirs priestesses is singing, which
they say she almost never does. I take it as welcome song. That day we go the hot springs beside a river. I am lean
and muscular, but weak, if you know what I mean. In the hot spring is a father,
naked with three buxom daughters all breasts hanging out on the water. If you
missed the 60’s too bad, it won’t come again. From the hot spring I dive into
the cold water, swim to the other side and back. But this time really beautiful
girl appears, yes naked, and it weakens me further. I can almost see her face.
These things have happened before on the naked shores of Comanche Lake. But
cleo sees this and is smashed so I dive into the river again and almost drown.
Even though I swim pretty good. So out of there back to break camp. I find a
piece of elk horn left behind by the guy who gave me the pencil map Bob Northcott. We happened to camp at his spot unknowing. He had left days before,
used to carve pipes out of the elk horn. I still have it, waiting. He turned up
later in Austin afflicted by spirits. Said to just ask him his name if he went
off. Which worked. That night I dreamed the house, all stone, was hit with
heavy winds and serious. He showed one more time after spending a winter alone
in the Alaska winter, selling nature photos. I bought some. So that gets me
back home. My brother’s baby was named Laura. I lasted another year on Balcones
Fault.
WE all paid
for these excesses. Cleo got an md and practiced her life among solo doc med
circuit in the homeless shelter zip code. I had contempt for guru states and insulted
all followers. Stopped playing the Japanese guitar on rooftops and got a PhD which
still had nearly no footnotes and no proper research. I would wander in the
stacks in the discovery section and feel the books. Like there was no card
catalogue. But if you don’t know what to look for you won’t find it. Books
would leap out at me though and that was research, which was what it was. I
practiced out my strength in teaching at little colleges for art and poems,
sketching in the desert and children, not teaching where I was good. Her bro
went to the Alaska coast then and high new mex to avoid the world. My bro beat
the rap with ma guru and lives on a golf course. Morning star is gone. Austin
is gone, McConaughey will be the mayor, Hollywood the air, dell the fair and the
gov will dig tunnels to hide from the rocks in the hills.
In
tehd these rendevous unfreseen give and receive for i had been escorted
in the midst of a a return fro CA to Phila by the company of the
chilean novelist in Panama.
There is another
episode with Northcott when in Austin he said there was a brick laying
job to pave a parking lot that was hiring, to which we both woked, bu
the second day it was raining a little, and they kept working, but for
some reason i took up three bricks and began to juggle hem. the boss
objected and i replied my moher told me never to work in the rain, and i
was fired. In Bob's mind, lkie in Karl Hillie's in the life at
Fayetteville before, that made me a kind of hero in his mind, so he said.
His Eminence, Most Rev. Archbishop Hilarion Robert Loyd Williams
12 novembre 1942 – 5 janvier 2019
Robert
Lloyd Williams was born November 12, 1942 and died January 5, 2019 at
the age of 76. He was a very precocious kid, who read voraciously, and
had early interests in biology and chemistry. In August of 1963 he
married Phyllis Jackson and they had one child, Morgen Amber Williams.
The couple divorced around 1966. Robert worked as a psychiatric nurse at
the Austin State Hospital for a few years during this time.
In
late 1966 or early 1967 Robert became poetry editor for ARX magazine, a
small press literary magazine in Austin, Texas. ARX was published
monthly for about three years. The magazine published many people from
all over the country, but Texas talent included Archibald Henderson,
Judson Crews, Albert Huffstickler, Robert Bonazzi, Naomi Shihab Nye,
Vassar Miller, and many others.
Late in 1968 Robert went to work
as a store clerk at the Horizons Unlimited Metaphysical Bookstore, which
was in an old house at 11th and West Avenue. In less than a year he had
become store manager. The owner of the store, one Carl Bowers, was a
Liberal Catholic priest, and Robert encouraged him to start a chapel in
the large back room of the house. Carl Bowers died after mass on Sunday,
August 23, 1970. Before the end of the year, Robert Williams was
ordained as a priest in the Liberal Catholic Church and took over the
St. Hilarion's parish, as the church had become known.
The church
grew, moved to West Mary Street in South Austin, changed its name to
Holy Name of Mary, and changed its affiliation to the Old Catholic
Church of Canada. Robert was consecrated as a bishop and became
affiliated with the Western Rite Orthodox Church in the United States,
and eventually became Archbishop for Texas of the Autonomous Orthodox
Metropolia of Western Europe and the Americas.
In 2007 Robert
Williams earned his master's degree in anthropology and was graduate
student of the year at Texas State University. Upon completing his
master's degree, Robert entered the University of Texas at Austin where
he was honored to study with Linda Schele. In the Fall of 2009 Robert
earned his Doctor of Philosophy degree at the University of Texas at
Austin. His major was anthropology, with minors in art history and
ethnography. He served as adjunct professor in the Department of
Anthropology at Texas State University, where he specialized in the
pre-Hispanic historical literature of the ancient Mixtec people of
Oaxaca until his retirement in 2016.
Robert wrote two books,
including Lord Eight Wind of Suchixtlan and the Heroes of Ancient
Oaxaca: Reading History in the Codex Zouche-Nuttall and The Complete
Codex Zouche-Nuttall: Mixtec Lineage Histories and Political
Biographies. He had hoped to write a third book, but was unable to
complete it before his death.
Over his long life Robert touched
the lives of many people who still remember his kindness, compassion,
and delightful sense of humor.
Robert is survived by his daughter Morgen Amber Hughes and his grandson Marcus Joel Hughes.
