A while ago, as part of preparations for a possible future entry into graduate school, I took it upon myself to make it through the entire Norton Anthology of Poetry. Skipping none. Not even Amelia Layner (don't ask). As of this afternoon, I've made it to Jonne Donne, which means I've waded through a crapload of Love Sonnets, Shakespearean, Spencerian, and otherwise.
So here's my contribution to the genre. I'm calling it #1.
Shall I compare thee to a musty toe?
You'd shame a rotting corpse to diffidence.
Rank reeks do sometimes seep up through a shoe
Wi' a stink like Gorgonzola's recompense,
And some neglected feet will rear a mold
To make visible that which ere was smelled;
And every foot of which was ever told
Was at least once with foul odor befelled.
But thou - thy stench remaineth in the rooms
Long after your brief passing was forgot,
Nor bleach nor fire can purge the rancid blooms
Of pestilential clouds by you begot.
So long as men can smell, and lungs take breath,
This lingers just as long: your creeping death.
We'll talk soon, but please man, take shower.
Monday, March 31, 2008
To my readers - sorry for the long absence of posts, but you'll have to excuse me. I'm in South America, a strange world where the poles of everything you have become used to as a constant become inversed. A place where the middle class is a radical margin to national politics. Where you hear screaming so savage, coming from the neighboring apartment, that you consider dialing 911 and reporting domestic violence, or some heinous new form of torture, until the reverberating shout "gol" makes you realize that its just someone cheering Boca - and they're winning. You understand if I haven't been able to be my usual ebullient self.
I said I was in South America. At the moment I feel like I'm lodged somewhere deep in Buenos Aires' eye. I say this because of it appears Buenos Aires is trying to weep me out with a stream of near boiling water.
A lack of hot water has always been a problem for me, as a person that likes to luxuriate in the steam, sometimes for upwards of a half an hour. So you can imagine my surprise when, after adjusting the silver knobs to the perfect temperature and beginning my "knees-to-shoulders" soap-dance, I was abandoned not by the hot but by the cold. The water starts to warm up slowly, which is not nearly so ominous as the water cooling down, but in a few short seconds is up to flaying strength.
A shower that runs out of cold water? Can someone please explain this to me? More bizarre than toilet water spinning in the other direction.
More posts coming soon.
I said I was in South America. At the moment I feel like I'm lodged somewhere deep in Buenos Aires' eye. I say this because of it appears Buenos Aires is trying to weep me out with a stream of near boiling water.
A lack of hot water has always been a problem for me, as a person that likes to luxuriate in the steam, sometimes for upwards of a half an hour. So you can imagine my surprise when, after adjusting the silver knobs to the perfect temperature and beginning my "knees-to-shoulders" soap-dance, I was abandoned not by the hot but by the cold. The water starts to warm up slowly, which is not nearly so ominous as the water cooling down, but in a few short seconds is up to flaying strength.
A shower that runs out of cold water? Can someone please explain this to me? More bizarre than toilet water spinning in the other direction.
More posts coming soon.
Tuesday, March 4, 2008
Good point, Mr. Windschuttle
Wikipedia on Philip Roth (reading Portnoy´s Complaint) to the Cormac McCarthy article to a website on current literary bickering on 3quarksdaily.com to another article there and finally, clicking on the hyperlinked text why is Said being revisited, landing here, at The New Critereon. Orientalis Revisited by Keith Windschuttle. What a name! I see blue fields and bright skies, a figure extending loom-chords from his fingertips into the black blue of space, a mystic, dew-speckled web humming the ethereal chords of the Spheres, a pair of arms and hands outstretched black against a sunset, diamondflashing shuttles dancing in warbling breezes... Anyway...
´´For a start, he should have realized that Abdel Malek’s analysis of the essentialist failings of Oriental scholarship and Foucault’s thesis that knowledge always generates power are quite incompatible. If, as Malek and Said claim, Orientalism’s picture of the Arabs is false, then it is difficult to see how it could have been the source of the knowledge that led to the European imperial domination of the region. According to Said, Orientalist essentialism is not knowledge, but a series of beliefs that are both distorted and out of date. Surely, though, if these beliefs are wrong, they would have contributed to poor judgment, bad estimates, and mistaken policies. Hence the political power of Western imperialism must have been gained despite them, not because of them. ´´
-http://www.newcriterion.com/archive/17/jan99/said.htm
Back up a bit. It's early afternoon in Buenos Aires. I finished a soy sandwich (don't ask me why) in a cobbled park with puke green poured concrete benches arranged in circles under little copses of trees in the center. Though I conquered a "good night's sleep" the night before I get too bleary-eyed to concentrate. There's not enough time to go home and grab a nap before my next class, not enough time to do anything else. For security reasons, sleeping in public parks in the city center is inadvisable, especially for seven-foot blond Americans. I go to an internet cafe - wikipedia isn't quite sleep, but it's damn close.
The point is that I'm feeling completely void of energy. That makes me feel depressed (this isn't going to turn into therapy, don't worry). I click through a few pages before I land on the above article. Lo and behold. I lean in. An energy begins to crackle. I wake up, feeling a little more alive with every sentence. Why is this criticism of one of the hallowed heroes of multiculturalism surging through me like the first five slurps of mate from the gourd?
Righteous indignation! Take that, left wing establishment, right in your dignified, sorrowful, solar plexus! The article goes on to point out historical inaccuracies in Said's breakthrough obra, and Windshuttle (can't get enough of that name) remains even handed until a short paragraph near the end where he unloads a somewhat vicious indictment of self-victimization on the Columbia emeritus' head. His attack on the hypocrisy of Said's self-declared anti-essentialism is particularly on point.
Point: cultural relativism is incompatible with any kind of morality. This has been bothering since a "post-structuralist feminist" lectured me in college. The article brought to the surface a long-held gripe with the politically infused literary theory I gulped down in a starry-eyed lack of comprehension. And, to my credit, many of the texts were incomprehensible. If our values are purely contingent on our cultural context, than we have no basis on criticizing another culture's beliefs or practices. Even terms like value and morality reek of essence fabrication, that is, if I understand it, an imperialist project of creating universals to the effect that minorities can be relegated into a sub-human margin, and thus exploited. The project of the West with a capital dubya.
So please help me understand this point - if our moral imperatives are culturally relative, on what basis can we condemn female circumcision? Doesn't it boil down to cultural preference? Are we so civilized that we can condemn this practice as barbaric? Are we simply imposing ourselves where we're not wanted, passing racist judgment on peoples we have deemed backwards? If we don't appeal to some form of human universal, do we relinquish the right to condemn any behavior whatsoever?
What are we left with? An academy dominated by a self-evident politic of truism and croneyism. A dominant viewpoint is established and dialogue is occluded by sympathetic sighs, indignation and back-slapping. The reason? The academy needs a moral imperative to justify its existence, even if it has itself rendered the idea of a moral imperative incomprehensible and reprehensible. As Windschuttle points out in his critique, Foucault (another giant of post-modernism) asserted that knowledge is always power. As such, the academy of the past served not only to justify the evil of imperial products, but to enable them. Consequentially, if the search for knowledge is put in the hands of right-minded people, that power can be put to use for the greater good. How could it be otherwise? If we all thought correctly, wouldn't the world be a better place? Thus the trick, the hypocrisy of liberal academia - we teach free thought, but only if you think in politically correct terms. Challenge the establishment, but not in the holy walls of this classroom. The establishment is out there, it's the American monoculture, it's rural, and most of all, it's Republican.
I don't support weeping saints or flaming swords, regardless of whether or not they engender each other. It's the tone, that holier than thou, inflamed finger hanging in my face. Maybe it's why I developed the habit of gesticulating at dinner with a steak knife, so in between bites I could dice up that invisible appendage. Whether it's multiculturalism or the Department of Homeland Security, please get that played-out thing out of my face.
Granted, this is an amateur exercise. By way of admission, I did feel disenfranchised to learn that by my race, my class, and my sex, that my opinion was contaminated before I opened my mouth. That's where my righteous indignation comes from. I will also admit that the righteous indignation of a privileged white male holds water like a sieve. I don't want anyone to buy it. I want to get rid of it - righteous indignation by necessity leads to a sclerosis of the spirit. It leads to a closure of the mind. It feels great. I think it should be avoided in general.
P.S. Been watching alot of Twin Peaks. I'm at the point in the second season where the proliferating sub-plots start flailing about like unoccupied tentacles in a Hentai video. What a fall from grace!
´´For a start, he should have realized that Abdel Malek’s analysis of the essentialist failings of Oriental scholarship and Foucault’s thesis that knowledge always generates power are quite incompatible. If, as Malek and Said claim, Orientalism’s picture of the Arabs is false, then it is difficult to see how it could have been the source of the knowledge that led to the European imperial domination of the region. According to Said, Orientalist essentialism is not knowledge, but a series of beliefs that are both distorted and out of date. Surely, though, if these beliefs are wrong, they would have contributed to poor judgment, bad estimates, and mistaken policies. Hence the political power of Western imperialism must have been gained despite them, not because of them. ´´
-http://www.newcriterion.com/archive/17/jan99/said.htm
Back up a bit. It's early afternoon in Buenos Aires. I finished a soy sandwich (don't ask me why) in a cobbled park with puke green poured concrete benches arranged in circles under little copses of trees in the center. Though I conquered a "good night's sleep" the night before I get too bleary-eyed to concentrate. There's not enough time to go home and grab a nap before my next class, not enough time to do anything else. For security reasons, sleeping in public parks in the city center is inadvisable, especially for seven-foot blond Americans. I go to an internet cafe - wikipedia isn't quite sleep, but it's damn close.
The point is that I'm feeling completely void of energy. That makes me feel depressed (this isn't going to turn into therapy, don't worry). I click through a few pages before I land on the above article. Lo and behold. I lean in. An energy begins to crackle. I wake up, feeling a little more alive with every sentence. Why is this criticism of one of the hallowed heroes of multiculturalism surging through me like the first five slurps of mate from the gourd?
Righteous indignation! Take that, left wing establishment, right in your dignified, sorrowful, solar plexus! The article goes on to point out historical inaccuracies in Said's breakthrough obra, and Windshuttle (can't get enough of that name) remains even handed until a short paragraph near the end where he unloads a somewhat vicious indictment of self-victimization on the Columbia emeritus' head. His attack on the hypocrisy of Said's self-declared anti-essentialism is particularly on point.
Point: cultural relativism is incompatible with any kind of morality. This has been bothering since a "post-structuralist feminist" lectured me in college. The article brought to the surface a long-held gripe with the politically infused literary theory I gulped down in a starry-eyed lack of comprehension. And, to my credit, many of the texts were incomprehensible. If our values are purely contingent on our cultural context, than we have no basis on criticizing another culture's beliefs or practices. Even terms like value and morality reek of essence fabrication, that is, if I understand it, an imperialist project of creating universals to the effect that minorities can be relegated into a sub-human margin, and thus exploited. The project of the West with a capital dubya.
So please help me understand this point - if our moral imperatives are culturally relative, on what basis can we condemn female circumcision? Doesn't it boil down to cultural preference? Are we so civilized that we can condemn this practice as barbaric? Are we simply imposing ourselves where we're not wanted, passing racist judgment on peoples we have deemed backwards? If we don't appeal to some form of human universal, do we relinquish the right to condemn any behavior whatsoever?
What are we left with? An academy dominated by a self-evident politic of truism and croneyism. A dominant viewpoint is established and dialogue is occluded by sympathetic sighs, indignation and back-slapping. The reason? The academy needs a moral imperative to justify its existence, even if it has itself rendered the idea of a moral imperative incomprehensible and reprehensible. As Windschuttle points out in his critique, Foucault (another giant of post-modernism) asserted that knowledge is always power. As such, the academy of the past served not only to justify the evil of imperial products, but to enable them. Consequentially, if the search for knowledge is put in the hands of right-minded people, that power can be put to use for the greater good. How could it be otherwise? If we all thought correctly, wouldn't the world be a better place? Thus the trick, the hypocrisy of liberal academia - we teach free thought, but only if you think in politically correct terms. Challenge the establishment, but not in the holy walls of this classroom. The establishment is out there, it's the American monoculture, it's rural, and most of all, it's Republican.
I don't support weeping saints or flaming swords, regardless of whether or not they engender each other. It's the tone, that holier than thou, inflamed finger hanging in my face. Maybe it's why I developed the habit of gesticulating at dinner with a steak knife, so in between bites I could dice up that invisible appendage. Whether it's multiculturalism or the Department of Homeland Security, please get that played-out thing out of my face.
Granted, this is an amateur exercise. By way of admission, I did feel disenfranchised to learn that by my race, my class, and my sex, that my opinion was contaminated before I opened my mouth. That's where my righteous indignation comes from. I will also admit that the righteous indignation of a privileged white male holds water like a sieve. I don't want anyone to buy it. I want to get rid of it - righteous indignation by necessity leads to a sclerosis of the spirit. It leads to a closure of the mind. It feels great. I think it should be avoided in general.
P.S. Been watching alot of Twin Peaks. I'm at the point in the second season where the proliferating sub-plots start flailing about like unoccupied tentacles in a Hentai video. What a fall from grace!
Tuesday, February 26, 2008
Friday, February 22, 2008
ON DECLINE
Ah, nostalgia. One of my favorite topics. It just keeps poking it's hydra's heads out of the many gopher holes of memory. Man, I want to mallet the shit out of them. So here goes.
Nostalgia goes hand in hand with the idea of cultural decline. This connection is almost so obvious as to not merit its writing here. But anyway.
The gold old days are gone for good. The young, drunk on freedom they can't appreciate, don't pause to remember those warriors who fought and died to give it to them (this formulation can be as applied by any veteran, whether of a foreign war or the war on the home front of, say, the civil rights movement).
But the good news about the good old days is that their glorification is perennial. A generation past its prime (and obsessed with growing irrelevance) attributes its own obsolescence to general cultural decay. There may be hope for humanity in the mere fact that, despite our dizzying careen down the slippery slope of history, we're still here; still looking for solutions, still producing art worth looking at, still lamenting bygone eras.
The most recent example I've found comes from Beatriz Sarlo. She's arguing that the regurgitation of counter-cultural styles that occurs in retro revivals softens their edge, and in doing so, encourages a new generation to forget their real revolutionary symbolism. In short, a bold challenge to the existing regime becomes an attention-getting "fuck you dad!" A political act becomes "mere" style.
"A 'retro' relationship with the past diminishes its meaning: the miniskirt no longer speaks of the sexual liberation of the 1960; the decorative little rings that punks used to pierce into their ears and noses with gestures of insulting defiance no longer evoke the reactions that they did in the past; the bland ecology movement has forgotten the old libertarian vindication of nature and the body; the New Age does not remember the days when the business of expanding the senses went through physical, psychological, and moral experimentation that touched on all the limits. These forgotten things blot out some of the pages from our history that are really moving, heroic, or fanatic... It is impossible to hang a sign from each miniskirt that says, 'Invented by Mary Quant at the same time as the Beatles were inventing 'Let it be.'' But perhaps it is worth the trouble to reconstruct some histories so that all the ideas don't disappear, 'gnawed away by our habit of forgetting.'"
Beatriz Sarlo, "Postmodern Forgetfulness," The Argentina Reader.
Social movements disintegrate and return in the spiral of fashion, its arc the same but curvature a bit narrower. I think it's worth pointing out that the desire to re-edify the meaning of a past era has to, at some level, spring from the author's own nostalgia for the time when a miniskirt really meant something. So we've got good nostalgia ("history") and bad nostalgia ("retro fashion").
But that's really neither here nor there. Let's go back a few hundred years.
"He was evidently in the background, and his remarks were treated with neglect, which increased his irritability. He had had intellectual encounters with Ivan before and he could not endure a certain carelessness Ivan showed him.
'Hitherto at least I have stood in the front ranks of all that is progressive in Europe, and here the new generation positively ignores us,' he thought."
That's Dostoyevsky doing Pyotr Alexandrovitch Miusov (sorry, couldn't find the umlaut) in a debate between a dissembling atheist (agnostic? hard to say) and a group of devout monks over the comparative roles of Church and State. Written in 1880. What I love about this one is that Dostoyevsky reveals his character's sententious disgust as vain attachment to his own accomplishments. Sound familiar?
I'll leave it to you to ask the question "just how ironic is it?" of the following lines from Pope, written (according to Wikipedia) in 1709.
Short is the date, alas! of modern rhymes,
And 'tis but just to let them live betimes.
No longer now that golden age appears,
When patriarch wits survived a thousand years:
Now length of fame (our second life) is lost,
And bare threescore is all even that can boast;
Our sons their fathers' failing language see,
And such as Chaucer is shall Dryden be.
Taken from The Norton Anthology of Poetry, "An Essay on Criticism, Part II", lines 474-484. Apparently memory wasn't very durable in the early eighteenth century either.
Finally, I have to resurrect one more dead white man from the same anthology. Pope, at least, can still be found in collegiate English courses of 200 level and above - the following poet, I'm sure, is lurking only at the post-graduate seminar level. Which is to say, for all intents and purposes, at the bottom of the river Lethe.
The Silver Swan
The silver swan, who living had no note,
When death approached, unlocked her silent throat;
Leaning her breast against the reedy shore,
Thus sung her first and last, and sung no more:
"Farewell, all joys; Oh death, come close mine eyes;
More geese than swans now live, more fools than wise."
That's Orlando Gibbons, lamenting the cultural decline of 1612. Can we see a pattern emerging? They certainly did have a way of putting things succinctly back in the good old days. But then, I've fallen into my own trap.
Maybe that fear that we will forget the past is well founded. Maybe we are doomed to repeat the mistakes of our ancestors if we don't spend our youths combing musty tomes of Virgil and Chaucer, we will forget who we are and where we come from. Maybe when you arm your legs in a miniskirt you should take a moment to reflect on its once-militant connotations; maybe the next time you pop acid at a Phish reunion you might try to really push the envelope of your being instead of wandering around mumbling, ecstatic at obtuse metaphors, "Dude, the crow IS the sky!" But maybe the cycle of forgetting and remembering goes on, despite the frenetic acceleration of post-modernity.
Maybe we haven't escaped history just yet.
The next time you find yourself on the brink of opining that "contemporary hip-hop is too commercial, we need to get back to the foundation" or "there hasn't been any good pop music since 1994," remember that there's no reason to join the long gray line of wistful old farts quite yet. Who knows, a revolution, or a really great pop hit, might be just around the corner.
Nostalgia goes hand in hand with the idea of cultural decline. This connection is almost so obvious as to not merit its writing here. But anyway.
The gold old days are gone for good. The young, drunk on freedom they can't appreciate, don't pause to remember those warriors who fought and died to give it to them (this formulation can be as applied by any veteran, whether of a foreign war or the war on the home front of, say, the civil rights movement).
But the good news about the good old days is that their glorification is perennial. A generation past its prime (and obsessed with growing irrelevance) attributes its own obsolescence to general cultural decay. There may be hope for humanity in the mere fact that, despite our dizzying careen down the slippery slope of history, we're still here; still looking for solutions, still producing art worth looking at, still lamenting bygone eras.
The most recent example I've found comes from Beatriz Sarlo. She's arguing that the regurgitation of counter-cultural styles that occurs in retro revivals softens their edge, and in doing so, encourages a new generation to forget their real revolutionary symbolism. In short, a bold challenge to the existing regime becomes an attention-getting "fuck you dad!" A political act becomes "mere" style.
"A 'retro' relationship with the past diminishes its meaning: the miniskirt no longer speaks of the sexual liberation of the 1960; the decorative little rings that punks used to pierce into their ears and noses with gestures of insulting defiance no longer evoke the reactions that they did in the past; the bland ecology movement has forgotten the old libertarian vindication of nature and the body; the New Age does not remember the days when the business of expanding the senses went through physical, psychological, and moral experimentation that touched on all the limits. These forgotten things blot out some of the pages from our history that are really moving, heroic, or fanatic... It is impossible to hang a sign from each miniskirt that says, 'Invented by Mary Quant at the same time as the Beatles were inventing 'Let it be.'' But perhaps it is worth the trouble to reconstruct some histories so that all the ideas don't disappear, 'gnawed away by our habit of forgetting.'"
Beatriz Sarlo, "Postmodern Forgetfulness," The Argentina Reader.
Social movements disintegrate and return in the spiral of fashion, its arc the same but curvature a bit narrower. I think it's worth pointing out that the desire to re-edify the meaning of a past era has to, at some level, spring from the author's own nostalgia for the time when a miniskirt really meant something. So we've got good nostalgia ("history") and bad nostalgia ("retro fashion").
But that's really neither here nor there. Let's go back a few hundred years.
"He was evidently in the background, and his remarks were treated with neglect, which increased his irritability. He had had intellectual encounters with Ivan before and he could not endure a certain carelessness Ivan showed him.
'Hitherto at least I have stood in the front ranks of all that is progressive in Europe, and here the new generation positively ignores us,' he thought."
That's Dostoyevsky doing Pyotr Alexandrovitch Miusov (sorry, couldn't find the umlaut) in a debate between a dissembling atheist (agnostic? hard to say) and a group of devout monks over the comparative roles of Church and State. Written in 1880. What I love about this one is that Dostoyevsky reveals his character's sententious disgust as vain attachment to his own accomplishments. Sound familiar?
I'll leave it to you to ask the question "just how ironic is it?" of the following lines from Pope, written (according to Wikipedia) in 1709.
Short is the date, alas! of modern rhymes,
And 'tis but just to let them live betimes.
No longer now that golden age appears,
When patriarch wits survived a thousand years:
Now length of fame (our second life) is lost,
And bare threescore is all even that can boast;
Our sons their fathers' failing language see,
And such as Chaucer is shall Dryden be.
Taken from The Norton Anthology of Poetry, "An Essay on Criticism, Part II", lines 474-484. Apparently memory wasn't very durable in the early eighteenth century either.
Finally, I have to resurrect one more dead white man from the same anthology. Pope, at least, can still be found in collegiate English courses of 200 level and above - the following poet, I'm sure, is lurking only at the post-graduate seminar level. Which is to say, for all intents and purposes, at the bottom of the river Lethe.
The Silver Swan
The silver swan, who living had no note,
When death approached, unlocked her silent throat;
Leaning her breast against the reedy shore,
Thus sung her first and last, and sung no more:
"Farewell, all joys; Oh death, come close mine eyes;
More geese than swans now live, more fools than wise."
That's Orlando Gibbons, lamenting the cultural decline of 1612. Can we see a pattern emerging? They certainly did have a way of putting things succinctly back in the good old days. But then, I've fallen into my own trap.
Maybe that fear that we will forget the past is well founded. Maybe we are doomed to repeat the mistakes of our ancestors if we don't spend our youths combing musty tomes of Virgil and Chaucer, we will forget who we are and where we come from. Maybe when you arm your legs in a miniskirt you should take a moment to reflect on its once-militant connotations; maybe the next time you pop acid at a Phish reunion you might try to really push the envelope of your being instead of wandering around mumbling, ecstatic at obtuse metaphors, "Dude, the crow IS the sky!" But maybe the cycle of forgetting and remembering goes on, despite the frenetic acceleration of post-modernity.
Maybe we haven't escaped history just yet.
The next time you find yourself on the brink of opining that "contemporary hip-hop is too commercial, we need to get back to the foundation" or "there hasn't been any good pop music since 1994," remember that there's no reason to join the long gray line of wistful old farts quite yet. Who knows, a revolution, or a really great pop hit, might be just around the corner.
Sunday, February 17, 2008
The hotel district of Once.
"Jugamos?" (Let's play)
A subtle, purposed glance from under lowered eyelids, a husky whisper tossed casually from the throat. A prostitute's solicitation, unmistakable.
The heat, evoking an automatic sweat response and fatigue, has driven street people into the shade of overhanging balconies. Even the big chain supermarkets have pulled down and locked the metal grates guarding doors and windows.
I keep walking, eyes forward. Pretend I don't notice, get home. Check my downloads, emails, blogs.
Just like one guards one's change from beggars.
She walks languidly, arms bowing out at the elbows, describing an opposite arcs in the sway of her walk. Her hair's tied up into a bun in back. She's black, and at least six months pregnant.
"Jugamos?" (Let's play)
A subtle, purposed glance from under lowered eyelids, a husky whisper tossed casually from the throat. A prostitute's solicitation, unmistakable.
The heat, evoking an automatic sweat response and fatigue, has driven street people into the shade of overhanging balconies. Even the big chain supermarkets have pulled down and locked the metal grates guarding doors and windows.
I keep walking, eyes forward. Pretend I don't notice, get home. Check my downloads, emails, blogs.
Just like one guards one's change from beggars.
She walks languidly, arms bowing out at the elbows, describing an opposite arcs in the sway of her walk. Her hair's tied up into a bun in back. She's black, and at least six months pregnant.
Sunday, February 10, 2008
Scorpion King; Coyboy dreams
This is the Great Scorpion Charm against Demons. The image is from www.luckyscoprion.com, where you can buy it for six bucks. I have a problem with demons. They follow me everywhere in ridiculous disguises, tripping me in the street and forcing me to make unwise purchases in markets. The woodblock print is a charm or an amulet, of Buddhist origin, which is meant to be either folded, wound in string and worn on the body, ingested, or placed in a special amulet box. The following info is from Nik Douglas' "Tibetan Tantric Charms and Amulets."
"The mouth contains the formula tri-dsa-du / sa-na-ga-phu, the head the dharanis (1) ah-ya-ma-du-rur-chasa-na-zhamaya-hum and (2) om-ah-hum-artsig-nirtsig-namo-bhagawate-hum-hum-phat-phat. At the center and main extremeties are the seed syllables hum, dsa, hum, bam, and ho. The Tibetan incantation mentions the types of demons to be protected against and at the six legs, two pincers and sting is an inscription in Tibetan declaring that 'the demons will roar.'"
Artsig, nirtsig, namo. Hmm.
*
This Cormac McCarthy book I just read must have penetrated deeper into my subconscious than I thought. Or maybe that's a bunch of bullshit, I mean, that dreams are constructed by the unseen hand of the undermind. Psychoanalysts have their lists of symbols and situations, their rhebus's (rhebi?), their condensation and displacement. But the rest of us wake up, rub our faces in our hands, and think, "Shit, that was a fucked up dream I had last night."
Of course, dreams are bizarre by nature. After a lifetime of inexplicable scene changes and recurring familial tableaus, you'd think we'd get used to it. I don't spend much time plumbing them for deeper meanings. They're like B-movies about yourself, and you ge to sleep through them. Here's what I watched last night.
I'm riding across an plain on horseback, ahead of a gang of about 5. I've got one of those lever-action rifles associated with the Wild West with a sight on the barrel. The plain up ahead rolls up into a softly cresting hill, long grasses swaying in the wind. Down the incline and to my left lies a gully and a grove of pines, stunted cypress clustered around a single enormous redwood with a massive trunk. Over the crest of the hill comes the cavalry. They're uniformed in blue with white hats, red plumes ticking to the rhythm of the hoofbeats, armed with the same rifle I've got. I reign up my horse and take aim at a staggered line of horsemen galloping full bore towards my position. I shoot, one flips down off his horse like a vertical wind sock taken aback by a sudden gust. I raise my sight and trap another horseman in the tiny steel circle, circumscribing his fate in less than a centimeter, and fire. He tumbles backwards. They are getting within range of taking shots, but for some reason they don't. When they get too close for comfort I duck behind my horse, hanging onto the saddle as they rocket past. When they're passed me to a man I circle around and follow then, sighting and dispatching a few more riders.
Now we hit a blank spot where the action got murky, or a sudden scene change, or maybe I just can't remember the dream in detail. But I'm on the defensive, making for the pine grove. When I get there I'm confronted by a detail of cavalry, posted to stymie my retreat. I dismount, resigned to capture, but not yet resigned to defeat. Their leader is a large bearded man, ununiformed, who wears a fur trapper's motley assortment of pelts and leather. He looks at me with a knowing expression.
"We're taking you in, son."
"I can't face trial," I say. "I can't go back to the United States. I'm a bandit, and the only thing waiting for me is the gallows. Better to die out here."
*
The premise that you can't die in your dreams is well tried in popular movies and culture. You suddenly wake up before the concrete rises to flatten you like a bug. Hand in hand with this goes the premise that if you really die in your dreams you die in real life. I can now attest that there is a third option.
*
I swing my rifle and crank the lever to load another round, inverting the barrel and inserting it into my mouth. Unfortunately, the trigger is now out of reach and my booted feet will not allow me to toe the trigger. I eye the old man.
"Little help here? I'd be much obliged."
"My pleasure."
He reaches down and pulled the trigger. I don't feel anything at first, and think the gun misfired. After a few seconds my mouth fills up with liquid, and I know that the bullet made a fine escape from the crown of my skull. Suddenly I'm wearing the brass-buttoned blue garb of the good guys, riding again for the grove.
*
There's a struggle with another bandit, some arguments about succession of the priesthood (a bishop was killed and a giant man with long black hair in a purple robe ascended to his place) and a stack of bodies, but it's now been almost an hour since I dragged myself out of bed and the order of events and their details lacks even the most basic continuity.
The point being that I like to write and talk about dreams. If you do too, put an account of an interesting dream in the comments section of this post. The most interesting dream will get some sort of prize. I haven't decided what it is yet.
Someone is screaming down the hall of my building, a hoarse throaty man's voice followed by a piercing child's scream. It's either domestic violence or a futbol game - it's often hard to tell. Or maybe its a demon orgy. Artsig, nirtsig, namo.
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