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.
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, of prethought, that has no reading, either it is or it’s not as all gradually become human beings to each other. But the higher and lower minds and worlds must relate. My lower mind was a dilettante, only present under compulsion but then its concentration was excessive. So all by myself one night in 1973 I laid out A Calendar of Poems and took it to the printer the next day and printed 500 copies. I was going to give it away but John said no, make them pay. So it was $2. When in this latter day I decided my backlog of writing was too great I invented six pseudonyms and published dozens of long pieces under them and finally in 2022 put them on Amazon. He began his life work long after Austin, in 1987, 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.
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)
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.
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.
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.”
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
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 Cullens 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.
