Why Vandalism domain for sale

 This was a Nov '07 Why Vandalism look at Godzilla, anime, poky mon, Harry Potter, Warrior Cats, etc. calling it ESL as a generic name: English as a Second language.

ESL once
lined metropolis,
blasted eight feet off the ground.
Acrobatic block-long wigglers
like engravings covered freeways, signs.
Then it disappeared. What happened?
Civilization waxing? Democracy made safe?
City Sandblast and Paint
fell vacant.
The writing
was extinct.
Triumph’s come, they boasted, but mind forged, engraved in walls,
it penetrated down to bone in invisibly soul-marred boys.
You could
imagine the original,
but the outside now
was gone.
How did the writing
off the wall
get down
into the bone?
Sure there’s time
Before the blood-brain
barrier bursts,
ESL is syntax,
not just verse,
it’s hieroglyphs
like Mayan.
People glad
Johnny readin’,
sure, that’s a good sign.
But we needs some cats to sandblast Johnny’s mind.

 

Johnny’s
a palimpsest,
that’s where the writing went
in eye and ear in hypertext,
it don’t mean Johnny’s reading
when he’s read to death.
Deliberate beneath
the “paint,”
and look in
Johnny’s
head.
That’s what
Saint Blake did.
He said these days a net would cover mind,
called a Promethean to break the chain, the world wide web.
Don’t put him on the side of Microsoft.
He left his will engraved.

Letter to Jacob

Dear Jacob Reiff XIV,

Here is an account of some entries in this anthology published and edited by a DACA dreamer getting her doctorate in   Switzerland at the  European Graduate School, but who is from New Mexico. This is the seventh entry, two a year from the start, discovered this last year with the first, but in this issue with four, if you count the three anonymous pseudonyms invented to pass muster. Poets and artists may be considered unethical in getting their work out any way they can. I began to invent theses personas from continual observations form editors about the extreme variation in works submitted to them, were they Christian, sometimes of faith, (True Light included for contrast) or radical, so to allow the difference Rubino del Sur, after Ruben Dario , poet of Nicaragua, who I first read in Spanish there, who became a mouthpiece for sometime rantings against war, Fukishima, Republicans and Democrats, but lately taken more mythological stances from a vantage point of Antarctica where he ended up and still resides as a dentist, boding his time perhaps for the revelations and discoveries to emerge. After Rubino came Augusto Todoele, whose name of course after the first translation of the name Reiff in the English Bible in the Lindisfarne version of Luke about the plunderer. He too has gotten some publication, but of a more scholarly sort and of Biblical and Reformist concerns. In the current entry here he has gotten into crypto science and paleo-biology. A new entry to the forum, Chas Erb @ chickenlittle.org in Houston,  is a full blown Alice in Wonderland radical of the many predominant conspiracies that plague Facebook. That the DACA editor entertains these varieties does not mean she has not passed on others, who did not pass muster in Vol. 7.  Jon Roussseau and Sjon Larsson whose piece on Quarantine may turn up…. Of course another compelling reason for these voices emerged from the growing censorship imposed by editors on subject matter they once allowed. It is as if the whole point of view of what is allowable art overturned in a five year period, call it a Trump effect. So now there is a major segment of self congratulatory position taking by these organs against the typical for the new designated subjects widely held in media. That only leaves the piece under my own name here, Morning Star, which I want to characterize the best of writings for its empathy and involvement of others in the life of its account. This is an account of the middle of a  trip Aunt Pat and I took to Oregon 50 years ago at and before the birth of another aunt of yours you have never met, Laura, once of New Orleans. All of the people in your extended life lead interesting and provocative lives worth knowing.

If you ask why this fiction is written this way it is because the usual subjects of personal experience end up better in poetry, leaving fiction a wide ranging matter, as it was in Swift or Melville for example of myriads of myth ends sewn together. Black Holes esp. does this as a kind of factovi of Antarctica, journalism of speculation, current in our times, often called conspiracy theory, at least until it is exposed as real. Of these retold myths I don’t exactly take advocacy of points of view so much as play them ironically upon each other, so all the shibboleths of the intellect thought sacrosanct are fair game, esp. from psychology and science which are joined in a new religion among the self enlightened into a myth of uber man, as you may know. Depending on the kind of engineering you pursue there are many artifacts  need explaining. The challenge of engineering these frauds in the Otherwise was to make different styles so the editor both would accept for publication and not catch on to the single authorship. Many editors these days do extensive searches to see if works are plagiarized or pre-published on blogs before they will accept them. I guess there is a lot of dishonest fraud going around. These are honest frauds in that they are all original writings on scientific religious subjects that either have not been aired or to wait for single authorhip would take years, but we do not have years, merely days as it were things are moving so fast, spacex satellites are well on their way to circle the earth.

 I make this effort here only because it is your birth rite that cannot be denied. You belong to a much wider circle of genome than you may  be aware, among people of all walks of life, with a history that extends directly to you from a past in Philadelphia documented from at least 1717. In 1726, the year Gulliver’s Travels appeared, your ancestor, also named Jacob, traveled back to Europe to bring more family here. I’m saying you have a passage on that same trip, which I tried to indicate to you the last time I saw you, years ago, at a birthday party, when I gave you the trunk c. 1880, of Jacob L Reiff, your great, great, grand.

Summer of 67

 We ended up at 1800 R St because they would allow dogs of which we had a very long and aggressive winter dog from Iowa befriended with a piece of roast beef in previous winters. Friendly was his name. We would walk him to Dupont Circle nights after the day, she at NASA me at the Folger, riding up and down in the elevator, from the 6th fl. among the colorful transvestites there, who must have been ashamed to ride in the same elevator as my wife who was statuesque at 5' 10" and noble and  beautiful without anything to change her. So Friendly came with us everywhere. He had been to New England the previous summer when we drove the coast from Philly to Maine, eating Portuguese bread and staying in resorts cheap for the off season, but that was before I had learned the know now about transcendent peripherals  so my stories were prosaic with slights of irony. After we came back to Philly in Nov 66 we soon heard of the apps to teach at FSC starting in Jan 67 where we went late Dec to get a place, but couldn't get one in that part of town, too white for that, so had to live a little away on Mcgilvery St. Walking those nights in Fayetteville on Fri and Sat night we learned not to do from all the drunk boots raving on the ground. One kept following us, pestering my wife over and over until, remember, I'm an athlete and also can be sudden, I was literally in the next step going to knee him in the balls and kill him, which would not have been good because of all the soldiers around, when he must have sensed it in his stupor and broke off.  I played some tennis there too, with Charlie Brown Asst to the Pres. and became his friend, played in the city against a guy who took lessons from a pro with a serve and volley game and had some fun matches. At the end though I arranged him to play on the hard courts at the college, to an audience of my students and crushed him badly. He was white. Many of the students then had not known a caucasoid, as the Dean Malvin E Moore called us, and were welcomed at the first registration esp. by Archie and Wesley who called themselves Home and Rome. We made so much money with two salaries at 6500 each that I bought a white MGB that could run good. We used it to tow the NSU Prinz I bought stupidly in Iowa after its seals blew out and the repair showed a used piston in a new car. So we towed it at night, without plates, to the bank in Iowa city and gave it back. That was a placid time compared to later, although they made my wife teach accounting, which she hated. It was drug free, open, enthused, not like the next year after they hired 5 more caucasoids and got Marxists, hashists, loonies, etc. and then revolution. But for the summer of 67' Dr. Moore rec'd apps for jobs in DC for faculty to work for NASA, so we applied for fun and then went, me to digest a room full of contracts for the previous 10 years, my wife to something I forget, but i had no idea and quit in a week, walked over to the Folger to see if  I could read and, this is the way of that time, not privilege, but something. I got admitted on the spot for the summer without prior app because I knew Rhodes Dunlap's name. [pic of choclate covered hunky bar] It''s audacity. I walked on at he Writer's workshop by passing a sheaf of poems to Starbuck and getting a note, drew Justice with the lot! I walked on at the LAM on a moment some years before. All this because "my soul boasts in the Lord' as the psalm says, o/w not of this had happened and I had been untutored, for that had been a walk on too, or a walk up the sawdust aisle of a tent under the prickling affronts of the Holy Spirit and knelt in the back when OH! My soul does rejoice in you Lord let the afflicted hear and rejoice. Easily the most powerful experience I have ever known and one that radiates the joints and marrow.

So I had a desk and a pipe and read Marprelate tracts and grammars, sat across form Thomas Mish of 17th cent porn fame, who downed Sterge O'Dell at my undergrad for softness, but he got to wear the scarlet gown and got us into Iowa in the first place. I became a bouncing humanist at the Folger at lunch with Gerogetownites and Roy Flannigan of the Milton news letter. There was a blonde in her 20's from Harvard reading the alchemists there. There were clay tennis courts in front of the capitol then where we went for fun to walk and watch, but one night was asked by a congress rep to play him, so I took off my shoes and played a set in my socks. He was most frutstrated when I beat him at 3. I had played my last year, and had taken the 6th man of Iowa to  4 and 5 in a loss, with no prep. His coach  congratulated me on the loss. At the Circle nights there were congo drums pounding and people milling. Leaning up against the fountain a guy asked me if I knew where he could get some lettuce.  Another narc, narcs galore. But when we walked Friendly back and forth people would cross the street to avoid passing him. After we moved to the Texas hill country outside town the first night we left him out to prove himself. Five dogs of the landlord came for him and he left two on the ground and the others ran. Next day they brought the big dog a German shepherd husky mix magnificent, Charley Brown, and Friendly and he met halfway between the houses, maybe 200 ft. and circled each other sniffing and that was it. Friendly was a third his size but had a big mojo of respect. Charley was kept in a pen on a rope on a wire and some time later, trying to jump the fence hung himself. Friendly would roam, being whole. In Iowa he would be gone for days, sighted miles away, but here one day he never returned. I saw him dead in the back of a rancher's pickup in a dream. We took up then with another dog Scorpio, named for the heavens an emaciated thing with a mashed foot the other neighbor starved until he got so thin he slipped his collar. He stayed for  a year until the guy saw him and took him back. Scorpio jumped up on him in welcome, then back to the cage. We had Fox, a border collie too, a fine dog who went swimming with us at Lake Travis, laying on the rocks swimming in clean water. He took off for better climes. When we got back to FSC in fall an influx of northern scholarship B ballers from Bed Sty and others from Newark and DC enrolled and began the black rev for real. They took my lit class and wrote the assigned paper on writing their own Notes from the Underground. Most of them got A and the ladies of the Dept thought I was trouble, and showed it. When the time came in few months and they took over the Admin Bldg it was just a moment before grad and most of the caucasoids were let go, which saved us from going with the hashishim to Germany, which my gut opposed. Saved by hemorrhoids I convalesced in Philly, she went to art school and we went to Texas because the app was free.

Inner Speech of a Lion

 Inner Speech of a Lion

Wit has to ask what relation of sea and land exists in a proposition where a lion would speak or a dog feel and whether a rose has teeth (or teech, and if you change beach to teach, why not change two more letters and have teeth teach too?)  Where would they be, in the heart of the petals? The sea and land without record, without writing, without teeth  ephemerate into nothing, for that rose has thorns (and they are its teech, its teeth its speech) like a tree has bark in that world where leaves cover its trunk. We can reverse these teech-teeth nicely into mouse singers singing operas and dogs undertaking investigations of being. To pretend a dog or a mouse is like a man whose [thinking goes on within his consciousness in seclusion] when there is no one to [read the silent internal discourse of others], <222> how could they if they cannot read themselves. A man is a book or a land without reference to [a game of guessing thoughts] but if I say that [what is internal is hidden from us] like [the future is hidden from us] it is no wonder we have not discovered our land from which we observe the sea, for Miss Bentley still does not know what she wants to be and thinks it OK. But the future is not hidden from us, it is the past and in the same way that if [a lion could talk we could not understand him] it is not the talk of the lion past we seek but its thought, for even if it doesn’t talk it thinks, and that inner speech of the lion is our concern. We cannot guess from its face or its eyes of  brightness and intelligence, just as a man enslaved whose eyes show such servility, while he waits his change, his chance to freedom, his inner speech, inner intent is freedom, but we don’t have to read either the lion or the man to know his nature is to eat and be free.

In all this back and forth Wit continues to ask what it’s like to feel another’s pain and how it is certain to know [that this man is in pain] which is not ask our reading of thoughts, which have many shades and color and are never just one thing but one thing doubted, then inverted, then smelled and weighted so that the thought, [the height of Mount Blanc depends on how one climbs it] is a belief tone, a color of thought, inner speech calculation, for the language no one speaks is a math of the mind that examines  whether [a dog can be a hypocrite] transferring to the dog the inner speech of the man who is a hypocrite for his thousand thoughts unspoken, and how and whether any one of those thoughts emerges in  action is remote to his knowing, for his impulse is his action and that is no inner speech at all. So if he has  a dog [a dog cannot either be a hypocrite or sincere] it is only by his transference that he says this, for the dog is never anything but sincere and cannot hide his inner speech when it comes to the man. The dog will always show his affection, or not, to the man, but a dog is a hypocrite to his food. We know that from  the sneaking crusts of bread out of the trash or the holes in bags of feed on the porch gnawed a little at the margin like there were root rats but we know the cause, and we say all this to say at the end that the concept of learning the past is revealed in the remembering of it and what it feels like to remember is a first awareness of the land you stand on before the sea of thought where the past is all the land there is to stand on. That ending/beginning in the past and in memory enables the man to stand and see and think. Like any sentient being, the dog, the lion awaits in anticipation of every moment that he hopes and waits in faith to come, so the past is hope too and memory. And that is Part Two.

A Stone

We go backwards to know ourselves, for we wake and find we have been standing there a long time and the waves have made no impression washing up on us and going out and conducting their own lives with turtles and urchin and seaweed and driftwood that comes and goes in the tide. The question is not how do I know my image, but how do I remember it. This is not about the image of the imagination, the colors of red as a picture, conflating the image in my head with the land and its memory, that with the past enables us to ask [Could one imagine a stone’s having consciousness?]. Is a stone conscious like a lion or a man, or anyone who has thought about the stone as a lima bean of consciousness, but has no way to express it, no voice, no arms, no legs, no eyes, no ear, no skin, no teeth, but a mind thinking in the bean just the same as in the stone? Ipso facto, said this way, if I imagine [that each of the people whom I see in the street are in frightful pain but concealing it] and the waves and the sand and the sea and the mind of the land conceal inner speech that [the soul is in pain but what has that to do with the body?], feeling pain is like feeling memory the first time, waking on the shore to the wind and salt concealed all this time, now shorn, the same way the man is shorn who is in pain, for imagine that I see they are in pain or rather I feel it before the words of inner speech become conscious. After the words I think that the man is in pain but concealing it. Shades and shadows of the dog-hypocrite for food, the man is an actor imagining himself whatever it be, hypocritely for saying, I saw an image but not in my eyes.

Where then the image of the pain, and where is the image of the world, of the sea, of the waves or the land if not in the eyes inverted into the mind? The image is in the feeling evoked by the image, the field of flowers in a field under a cliff in Blanco, a plight of immortal amarant calling. Do not ask if flowers are sincere, but do ask about the feeling the image gives, the flower hanging down, for the thought is the image, the imagination is the image whereby I do know whether I or anyone else is in pain. [Imagine people standing in a circle and among them one connected to an electric, and try to see which one has been shocked, for one has, except now I know it is myself  [123,] If I suppose [I can feel the shock even when someone else is electrified] I am connected with them and feel them, unless I am anaesthetized or paralysed the way the angels are who cease to remember themselves. If paralyzed what is the difference from that prior state where we stood on the shore but did not know it or the waves breaking, because knowing is every case for us, that is real knowing, which is feeling and feeling is remembering. The first time we feel a thing we do not know what it is but building up a pattern of memory we know and can say in our inner speech those very words, he is in pain, I am in pain, we are in pain. All because we feel.

An Ape

Nor can we account for all those not in pain or who say they are anyway, but ape their pain, or those who act as if there is an [unbridgeable gulf between consciousness and brain], for them consciousness is feeling, not thinking, which only comes after feeling and is abstracted to memory from which the ape asks whether it is conscious and feels pain, which is as if to ask if there are [witnesses that they have consciousness], how can there be witnesses to inner speech? These charades are species of automata [can I imagine that the people around me are automata, and lack consciousness……with fixed looks (as in a trance?)] <126>  When I admit that [while he was speaking I did not know what was going on in his head]  should I like to see into his head it is the same as with the pain of shocks in a circle. I cannot know his pain or his thought without connecting it to my own and my own thought and pain are memory of feelings cataloged in the past. Retrospectively without his pain and memory and my pain and memory I am a Robinson Crusoe of the mind and [it is as if I have imagined that the essential thing about a living man was the outward form] <128>. Outer form, inner speech, shared feeling, mutual pain, mutual thought, I knew what he was thinking and I said it, my stone, my block of wood.

A Mind-Ear

The possibility that there could be human beings unattached to their words, to whom speech is an alien is the case. And everything is the case. What would it be like for a human being to never find a word on the tip of their tongue however is not the case, for they always do find the word that they then speak. This is a measure of what they hear. The tip of the tongue is thus the ear and the ear is thus the mind, for they hear the word in their mind as something inchoate, vague, a glimmer now in the eye, the mind’s eye. So in mind-ear or eye they say it’s on the tip of the tongue. I just can’t think of the word but it will come.

But what is hearing, seeing, thinking, speaking, imagining?  What is the silent internal speech that saying inwardly or singing inwardly but read silently is to be learned? The learning is in the listening to that hearing that is no voice. Voice had to be invented for thought, prethought and afterthought to emerge. All you have to do is speak, but speaking evaporates in air, but to write, the writing is engraved. Thus transcribed thought can be heard and seen as many times removed from the tip of the tongue, for what anyone says to himself within himself is hidden from me. This not knowing is not as strange as the desire to know what another is thinking to himself on the tip of the tongue when we do even not know ourself what we are thinking to ourself.

Our thoughts come in waves of particulars and themes over and over like the sea rolling up and falling back. They always have and always will but it is as though we never knew we stood on the beach (the teach, just change the initial letter) and hear them, smell them, feel them. What even if the beach is our thought within ourself as waves, who am I otherwise as land and if my soul anyway is not of the land but of the sea?  Hold on to that land, it is the point of departure that grew slowly in mind and took permanence as the ID as much permance as it has to, and the longer the life land exists the more wonder it holds in its memory of itself. There on the shore is its history, for the place is its face, the place is its land on which its feet stand and watch the waves roll in. And that is how I know I am alive.

Mandela Effect. Lion and the Lamb

 ”Fight then with us, thou faithful soul, and lead all thy relatives forth into the same battle, and suffer no strange trumpet of a price operating through fame in the air, to separate our united phalanx under the banner of the Lion and the Lamb. Kelpius, Diarium, 1917, 30.