Circuits 2021

 I have completed a circuit of the United States' perimeter times over without intending in the course and courses of life and work.

Incunables of the spirit, in the earliest history of printing, block book shipwrecks like Pide Cow in writing  exist in one copy stored in vaults of the future past, waiting to be reproduced like dreams of Persian caliphs embroidered in cities, navigated without traffic lights, all the electric gone off and sunken so that it is a chance to get whereever we do get, but then receive unforeseen help from rooms that at first have no doors. 

 These have transferred corporate ownership of writing to our organization of personas so finally creative writing whatever you call it is loosed from individuality, which of course the hive minders desire above all else for that pesky  buzzing of bees is wanted, but not the dadfly that bites the side of the corporate deer against good order. Hence we confound our team like any competitive group cooperating togeher in one multifaceted group of products in the corporate charter, which while it has some variation, continues to bind with chains of iron, to confront principalities and powers. That’s some calling when captivity has  so startled, to consume the world and its digital livers, waves set out for thoughts, viral broadcasts instantly uttered by the mass, for the corporation echoes itself as alpha steps forward, beta steps back together, beta’s task to doubt alpha to strengthen it sets the table, hence all work in tandam, left and right simplipliisticlaly mirroring each black and white.

We have some analogies to captivity in Babylon where the Jews adopted the theologies of Ur in place of their own, served sweet cakes with the images of Ishtar baked in on the way into the city. This compares with free iphones and service to all the world, satellite nets,

 

Every intention and expression of discovery and achievement goes through the same cycle of maturity and ends in self knowing reflection, going from outer to inner, looking back upon itself in its maturity to realize the significance of its effort. It may quote itself the way St John does Daniel and Ezekiel and Isaiah as it becomes a visionary of itself but  more that a vision for it transcends its first physical effort. We see this in the progress of love and of life remembering itself. Like the pussycat: what did you there: remembering: I found a mouse under the chair. If that is not to abstruse.

 Words thoughts meditations all one. Moses was on the books as a prince and a scion of Egypt, Daniel was a favored scion in Babylon, on the books, exemplary men, versed, prophetic, one conflicted the other sole, but off the books  and even tantamount to the same resultant leavings of the letters of the Hebrews, but not one, of the intellect, but not one, wired only for the saying which is the doing of these empires off the books. Who knows the recording is a better way to say, to write it, to record it, to dream it, but not believed or heard, is all good fun in the adage if you have done it unto the least you have have done it to  most. Like stroking the living skeleton this dog has become, rubbing her ears, stroking the long spine with the flesh melted, the snout remembers a little its long years, then taking to drink, and sleep with accident for its own sake the least for its own sake for its own sake hope against hope.

 “Three angels arrange Moses on his couch, and God says to him: Cross your feet. Fold your hands and lay them on your breast. Close your eyes. Then God speaks to Moses’ soul: “My daughter, you have dwelt in this righteous man’s body for 120 years, and your time has come…” God kisses Moses, and his soul rushes forth in ecstasy.”

 Vestibule of dreams and the imagination. Much work is prompted while exiting dreams, passing through the vestibule on the way out, while passing down the steps in front, back in ordinary (kindled) memory. doorway foyer hallway porch antechamber anteroom entrance portal entry entryway gateway hall lobby narthex portico entrance hall

Wide eyed, astonished at the world naïve, open mouthed in order to see or not see the immense tragedy of the world in faith, Cardboard Hospital beds that convert to coffins, made in Columbia.

9/5/21 dsimacularum dream succcabae at the Hormel mansion.  Taken to visit one morn about 10, let home with…the kid with the phd in phil from austin…mark leon the hollywood set sort men anyway usual types fat bald etc vulgar,  woman says come with her to a  palate with virtual mats and a female dummy like a half woman she takes her top off and works the controls in lay next to dummy and maniuplate its organ inside there are little eelectrode nipples to stimulate to model a woman I guess I do this a while, unaroused, presumably they mount the thing, but getting bored at the the digital play which they comment on and suggest different maniuplations, then I find (…name) dressed in white he is, to leave and as we go out somebody asks him to look at a script, but he doesn’t. This was my night at a party they must attend with far greater involvement and get filmed at for posterity. Epstein.

This must be an example of what men are now subjected to in real and other life with the robot sex. Also a Biltmore like settting, similar to people we saw there once at a dinner held by drug co with name tags and finery in a ballroom and grounds of the Biltmore. Pat hates these. Ann was a target, first of Ed Aghib, Vince Perry, pretending to be a dilitaant, not a debutante. But the three offers in life present to me I rejected, Wallace stap, John hurt, and wife, Matt pacillo and wife and Linda brewster, four. Not tempted at all. But they are variations of subtle in the attempted seductions..leon died of cancer  at c 654, came to phx to play tennis once, we had to hold him up, wanted to be a Christian, then, tried, wrote  and published 3 SF books betraying any sense of that, taugt in bahraim, married d a girl on the home ec facult at el paso, move to san fran,  early went on quest to India, have his letters and diss.

I am not in this dream who I am and seek to me in real life, this is a person more neutral pliable young  manipulatable, amoral. For these programs it’s all about the flesh and weakening the spirit, there must be gradations of these from 1 to 10. This is a one? Imagine the insight if men shared these dreams with each other, if could be freeing, unaccusing. –saw first outdoor roach dead on kit floor, sign of fall!

Along these lines academia/ wiccan implants/ were always a recruiting around, linguistics head Lehman at TX tried for me, Geof Hartman was, Rhodes Dunlap, all captive,

all knowledge is kinetic, birth death life is kinetic to be to be known. Wittgenstein went to war to find out how to be human, and to prison camp. That’s where he tried out the gospel of Tolstoy. My sons have to learn kinetic marriage and childbearing themselves not through another and they do, then they know. To love a woman has no external

knowledge and the internals cannot be spoken. Kinetic knowledge is unspoken and unspokenable.

This to those angels who would ask --what is man that Thou art mindful of him? "He was made to be sin for us, who knew no sin, That we might be made the righteousness of God In Him."

-khazars: The answer is on your sandwich: central European civilization is built on ham and cheese, which allowed protein to be stored through the winter.

--dreamed of flood, many times the same, see it creeping under the door, furn out to pull the gates, it rushes deep and strong down hill. Unlike any real life situation.

Poetry is a foreign language of the spirit that seeks to say the invisible sights and inaudible sound of inner speech what Wittgen said can’t be said, in code. Not going to submit Escape anywhere. The more it worked the less connective tissue remained, which was the value of the Rubino Cutlets that started this.

Barry Holstun Brennan Lopez

 I asked about death::,you are just alone at death as at birth if that is alone. saw relic around the bone of Donne, saw the bones of my loved ones underground, pat says, waiting for Ezekiel’s word, heard the light dark solid, not that it helps, it’s only youth who know nothing of it that can write glib thoughts of death, those who know have nothing to say, barry lopez, really Holstun Brennan, was burned out by prostate cancer and fire in the last year of his life the same as kim clement, accident prone, broke both wrists falling from a roof, just as Jason did, who lay for the whole night before he was found. Or Mr. Kredit fell from roof at 80, or Momo languished 4 years, Borges had a better demise after escaping Argentina when he died in Geneva and found love, …Stevens got baptized.

 Barry Lopez was a monastic, out of order, a desolate who lived with the Inuit, tracked the wolf, wolverine but as anybody famous got infected with himself and his piety, so got burned out of the environment he loved, didn’t clear the brush. The brush in this is all the pious thoughts that burned in the brush with his archives. Yes he said that love is what matters , it is all, but the monastic, the near Jesuit mind displaced into comfort, with his wife’s four daughters to care for him. -this is how he passed in the distraction: still thinking life mattered at the moments of death—who knows--this is the emotion ridden life of the death, by his wife and four nee daughters (: On Christmas Eve morning, he woke up and said, "It's a wonderful morning. How is everyone?" Barry entered nearly every day with joyful optimism, including his last ones.

Barry's passing was gentle. [distracted from death] The five of us were with him, the four daughters he cherished and me. We played John Adams' music (a brother to Barry), we also played Arvo Part's "Cantus in Memoriam Benjamin Britten" at full volume while we held him. In the final hours, we filled the room with Richard Nelson's (another brother) birdsong recordings—particularly the cackling ravens. We hung a self-portrait of Rick Bartow on the wall where Barry could see it. (Those two were probably already making mischief.)

Barry's dearest Auntie, Lillian Pitt, guided us. The scent of herbs, the prayers, the fresh air through the windows. The light. We told him a thousand times, a thousand-thousand times, that we love him, that we will love him always, that he could cross his river now. At 7:21, he stepped in, with one last long breath.

 

All this is coda to his more torturous passage in and around the Catholic mystic metaphor in Madre de Dios.

I’m five years beyond him at 80,  and we only have our lives to bear that far, to the Door--displaced to temporary housing in September, when wildfires ravaged his home in the CascadesThe fire destroyed all of his original manuscripts, his wife said, as well as the artwork and artifacts that he had collected during decades of travels. shortly after the fire he developed cardiac ailments that contributed to his death. obit

Near Finn Rock, Oregon, ahead of a wind-driven wildfire advancing westward toward us down the McKenzie River Valley.— along the north bank of the river, between the town of Vida and the hamlet of Rainbow, where the fire started at about 8:30 p.m. on September 7th, after a wind-whipped, high tension line snapped and ignited ground cover, tinder dry after many weeks of draught. More than 700 homes and outbuildings burned to the ground.

- Barry Lopez and Debra Gwartney were sleeping when a neighbor’s call woke them and a young firefighter pounded on their door; of their house on the McKenzie River the images of fire in the canyon as they fled — with their cat, Debra’s purse, and the clothes on their backs East Oregonean

Our home and guest house are damaged but still standing. All of our outbuildings are gone, including a large archive building

-- [he blames climate change!-I don’t like the preachy side which is feminized and self reproving, in the masculine it distills compassion and sorrow, but in fame circles of environmentalist--, but the agony of the poet in the desert and on the river and on, is moving] betrayed by his last morning waking up in good spirits acting the role of the infirm who want everyone to like as if they are running for office but they are running out of time.

-- What struck me first about Barry was his frailty and deep despair. As we all knew, he'd been ill for some time, and now he said he didn't think he could withstand another hit. John Keeble

--In the end of life and death we come down to our name, lopez was Irish, not Spanish, Holstun Brennan,  entirely Gaelic in his lyric

before the temple of fire barry lopez

[Memoir] Sliver of Sky, By Barry Lopez | Harper's Magazine “I’m on the alert, now, though, for an often innocuous moment, the one in which an adult man begins to show an unusual interest in the welfare of someone’s young son — especially if it’s my grandson. He still, at the age of nine, reaches out for my hand when we start to cross a dangerous street.”

 

 One thing I always felt about the author is he didn't sound like a Lopez, but he's not, he's a Brennan, Irish. That fits. Cut off from his youth, his family, his mother unable to protect him, the pain is unbearable when we learn that the last months of his life were hastened by the complete destruction of all the artifacts he collected from so many travels as well as all the usual work in progress and drafts of his manuscripts. He and his wife had two hours to evacuate the fire. By then he was weakened anyway by age and illness. That was about October. He was dead at Christmas, even with a happy face, inwardly devastated, which he told his confidants, could not recover from that. (John Keeble. In Memorium. @ https://www.barrylopez.com/) I'm telling you that these circumstances magnify my compassion for all of us who walk the path of the wayfarer.

Even though he was Book Award winner and got grants, knew every famous person and hobnobbed he may not be too complicit with the Elite, but he does share the obligatory attitude, arrogates criticism of U.S. war policy to footnotes, shows his guilt over his stepfather's hidalgo background, votes democrat like he should. There's nothing to be done about it. He must be viewed by desolation and then he is one of us all. Sliver of Sky (2013) https://harpers.org/archive/2013/01/s...

And that explains his love of the natural and the primitive, of the wolverine..."the deepest and sometimes only relief I had was when I was confronted with the local, elementary forces of nature: hot Santa Ana winds blowing west into the San Fernando Valley from the Mojave Desert; Pacific storm surf crashing at Zuma and the other beaches west of Malibu; winter floods inundating our neighborhood when Caballero Creek...But deep inside, I knew things remained awry."

The Sliver of Sky he looks at during all this devastation is the same as the train set in the attic of Mia Farrow's home that her daughter looks at while Woody Allen does the same as was done here. Only in the river and the desert, in Antarctica and the Arctic is there an ocean for him to bathe his sores in.

Finally this, from his article, The Scary Abundance of Water (2002):

"Like tens of thousands of sexually brutalized children, I lived in silent compliance. My patient hope was somehow to walk away, to no longer have to endure his compulsions in the small, nasty apartment he kept on the roof of his sanitarium. But when my dreamed-of escape became reality, when I was rid of him, I missed California to the point of grief. The sound of mourning doves at first light; the unpopulated middle stretches of Topanga and Laurel canyons, with their bolting jackrabbits; the long beaches at Zuma and Leo Carrillo, where it seemed to me the biggest waves in the world came to their crashing ends — these sounds and places were my refuge from the threat of ruin in that room. Without them, without the surgical sharpness and (on another day) the smoky nature of the sun's light as it spilled into the Valley; without the astringent smells of fresh eucalyptus buttons and pepper-tree leaves clinging to the skin of my fingers — without these things I believe I would have perished. Left like a wet rag doll in the bed of a beast, I might have gone through some other door." https://www.laweekly.com/a-scary-abun...

I have liked Barry Lopez in spite of his preachy sanctimonious moralizing on nature and man because of his first book, Desert Notes and its Introduction. It and he are utterly desolate, likewise in River Notes. It is all action. He gets out of his pickup in the desert, trails behind, rides his bike, in and out, changes seats all while it drives itself. He is cut off. I also love his Apologia except it reverses the desolation to the carcass beside the road into compassion, at least for the animal, the man never gets away. So I lived with his pain through his first 7 books and wandered off until I heard of his death this past Christmas, 2020 and took a look at what I had missed. Horizon was in the library. All the time I read it I thought the title was Excursion, Barry going down the Yangtze with a writer's tour group, pumping Chine and the CCP I guess the intention. He always seems a tourist, even in his own life. Always trying, even at death putting on the happy face, the ultimate irony in the desolate, but that is politic too. When you're up for realignment, that's what they call death now, you want as many visitors as possible to while the time. Not everybody gets to die suddenly in a parking lot. So he treated his wife and 4 daughters to a happy day, played music and died.

After I was done with Horizon I looked at the notes and turned to #2 at the first. Then I searched the Harper's article, found it and read why all this desolation was so. The horror is greater than can be said. He does say it and gives a full account of all sides, the psychology of the predator and the rationalizations of the victim-that's the important thing, in addition to reaction of their "protectors." Go over that again. At the end he says he casts a cold eye on men around boys. Never cold enough. I want to say that room is left for some implicit justice in his account of his stepfather going to CA when Barry told him of the events around age 17. The police, etc. were inconclusive and the stepfather vague, even said the .... had done a lot of good for alcoholics. That the predator's death was never proved and he could not be found seems a possible behind the back admission by the stepfather Lopez that his trip to CA was successful, and that he killed him, after all he is descendant of a hidalgo, and he praises him as a blind. Cast a cold eye on death, horseman.