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?
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| 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 V8 2 door weather beaten dark green mustang 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
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.
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 Kiarl hillie's in the life at Fayetteville before, that made me a kind of hero i guess.
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