Her nests, when one comes across them in dreams, lodged in rock-clefts or branches of enormous hollow yews, are built of carefully chosen twigs and littered with the jaw-bones and entrails-of poets, says-in male-minded acknowledgement and his correction of belief without her
he read her by the alphabet of trees, wild in Wales before the evangelical voices
Determined to escape the dilemma, the Apollonian teaches himself to despise women, and teaches woman to despise herself. Robert Graves would escape this blankness and obey the dilemma, made male-minded by her
with the advantage that he could reread, by the alphabet of trees, Ezekiel's chariot-transform the radiance enthroned there
finding a triune Jehovah with Anatha of the Lions and Ashima of the Doves-divorcing his consorts, just before the Babylonian captivity
sister her Oholah named was elder The bore and mine became They Oholibah ,Samaria is `Oholah' daughters and sons me me owed she While. Jersualem `Oholibah' was and whore the played Oholah obedience staff ,lovers Assyrian her with infatuated ,governors and viceroys blue in officers riding them of all cavaliers young handsome .horseback on
(Ezekiel 23: 4-6)
word by word, right to left-myth resuming-God assumed the shape of a mare and decoyed the ruttish Egyptian stallions into the water-the lengths to which, shape-changing Jehovah, once a devoted son of the Great Goddess, would go, you say, and swallowed
healing the wounds of these things by becoming imageless
calling Joshua Podro with his fine knowledge of Hebrew to sit beside you-as I have with another who read the Hebrew for meyou wrote The Nazarene Gospel Restored in 1953-to give Jesus back to time and painful circumstance-your mythic mind joined with Podro's, tracing what Jesus knew of the Mishnah, the Midrash, the two Talmuds-of the Day of judgement, detailed by Zephaniah, Zechariah, Malachi-of Enoch's heavens-of the tortured spirit of the Testament of the Twelve Patriarchs
the wandering meaning, the thorned acacia, nimbus of the sungod, burned
hostility to writing-these were the evil cosmocrators-Peneme (according to Enoch), Nabu, Thoth, Hermes, against whom the Scriptures had been set a century before Jesus by the scholarly Pharisees
Anatha of Bethany took Mot (Tammuz), cleft him with her sword, winnowed him in her harvest-basket, parched him at the fire, ground him in the mill and sowed him in the field
the Female on whom Jesus declared war was Aggrath Bat Machlat (Alukah, by cacophemism, the horse-leech) whose daughters Womb and Grave-are
ISHTAR
you say that he went to the land of nod, East of Eden, the trans- Euphrates province of Susiana, to watch for the end of the world in his own time-that Paul knew him to be alive in 35 A.D. because they met on the road to Damascus-that Ignatius of Antioch (d. c. 107) in his letter to Smyrna writes as though he thought Jesus still alive near the end of the first century
Enoch dreams: all became snow-white cows-and the first among them became a thing and that thing became a great beast with huge black horns-Graves notices the horns of power, such as Moses wore, or Zeus Ammon, or Alexander-the Son of Man, a title of careful and careless finitude, as
if all the heavens were parchment, and all the trees pens, and all the seas ink,
in memoriam
the Private Sector worries me it can, the ubiquitous `they' say, solve-that is, clear up-
the economy, which, at the upper level is called economics-that is, confused science and confused theology prancing around together as usual, is under the cultural, like oil or gas under the hood or roof, and unpredictably disappearing from under us
and the political, which, by manipulation, is over the stunned polis, in order to manage production, distribution, and consumption of wealth, becomes political economy-thus, what is under becomes what is over, and vice versa, to define realities without earth and sky which are cultural habitudes
and the cultural, which-not limited by high, low or middlingis conflict around the creation of reality, and may be invisible as thought is, and is neither formulaic-bonded like chemicals-nor nostalgic, which is a dangerous and transcendent condition, having forgotten that transcendence like ourselves is historical, even in dreams
and the social, which is a struggle against dominations and powers the society of which is recently made up of those who were not previously there
and mass culture, which is new, misunderstood and ungenerous about historical consciousness, mirrors privacies that dissolve in soap, and is jubilant, from which sorrow may learn
and democracy, which is recent, unAthenian, unPeriklean, incomplete, and by nature unstable and creative
and the sexual, which is the passionate body of all chemicals
and our ethos, which is the behaviour of one to another, near and far-many to many defines character-and is visible-not, as the dictionary tells us, `the moral, ideal, or universal element in a work of art as distinguished from that which is emotional or subjective'-[wow! dissolve that and ethos becomes possible action-character for the sake of the action-and pathos is there among kindnesses]
and the universal, which is absent from twentieth-century thought, according to the poesis afoot
and technology, which has wild arms, and is human nature unaware of itself
and the angels, who became isms and hierarchies in order to immaterialize the real things we're thrown up against, as we become startled sub-jects-to which I ob-ject
and religion, which, dismissed from the plane of thought, gathers godhead in small envelopes of cement, whereon the postage changes
and human survival, which, with all its adjectival ironies, proposes a social inheritance
and the good, which we know as Goodness! an expletive, something added to fill up the whole that has nothing to do with it, and which is fragile and our own composition
and love, which is true attention to whatever and sometimes some one
and friendship, which is guidance in every attention
I S August 1988
(a voice on CBC set alongside John Wilkinson on John Wieners)
1989
for Sharon Thesen
candid
nobody
wiped-out places
yellow ribbons
reading Anacreon
I don't know anything about God but what the human record tells me-in whatever languages I can muster-or by turning to translators-or the centuries-of that blasphemy which defines god's nature by our own hatred and prayers for vengeance and dominancethat he (lower case and questionable pronoun) would destroy by a hideous disease one lover of another or by war, a nation for what uprightness and economic hide-and-seek-and he (lower case and questionable pronoun) is on the side of the always-ignorance of politics in which we trust-the polis is at the `bottom of the sea,' as Hannah Arendt noticed-and he (lower case and interrogated pronoun) walks among the manipulated incompetences of public thought
where I had hoped to find myself ordinary among others in the streetsa `murmuring voice of societies'
and so one thinks them over-blasphemies all, against multiplicity, which is all anyone knows about god-and one can only hate them so much without becoming halt and lame in their kingdom of singlemindedness-their having taken a book to have been once and forever, the language behind language that no one has ever spoken god's what-knot and mystical rags we call flags
as a friend said, 'I'm going to become fundamentalist and call everybody asshole'
and what would the gods be if I asked them-our nakedness didn't quite fit-out, as it is, of nature-yet, there is a sentiment at the intersection between life and thought-streaks of beyondness in that careless relation
October came in August and petunias straggled, sprawling white faces one at a time, lobelia browned and continued blue the neighbours cut down the sexual cottonwood which kept the whole block from repainting door-steps for over a month-by the fluffs of its happiness-
so we are in the midst of a metaphysical washout-take for example, Verlaine and Rimbaud-a
s Hans Mayer says: Being shut out of the social order, they sought to heighten their condition by, say, publicly embracing in Brussels and thus providing the formula for a new `condition humaine' that called out to be created-both failed-both remained in outsiderdom -one continued to rhyme, the other gave up the whole damned creation behind this, an Enlightenment, which I'll return to and Sylvie asked, `But what became of the Man?' `Well, the Lion springed at him. But it came so slow, it were three weeks in the air-' `Did the Man wait for it all that time?' I asked. `Course he didn't!' Bruno replied, gliding head-first down the stem of a fox-glove, for the story was evidently close to its end. `He sold his house, and he packed up his things, while the Lion were coming And he went and lived in another town. So the Lion ate the wrong man.'
This was evidently the Moral ... said Lewis Carroll
the moral is that something does devour the existential givenRimbaud, Mayer writes, does not intertwine with visions of Sodom in order to provoke heaven's fire; it is simply the sole possibility of his own self-acceptance
being shut out of the social order Rimbaud writes de posseder la verite dons une ame et un corps, which Mayer interprets to say being alive in the full sense of body and soul the truth is being alive, until you break on it
ah, Laius, when you ran off with the youth Chryssipus, the Sphinx flew to a whistling stop in Thebes-and fire fell on Sodomites, on each one of them, and, I'll be damned, almost everybody-tell me a tale to explain sublime biology-then, tell me another to explain sublime human nature-and murder, unmythologized, fell on 2oth- century outsiders pollution of what in the momentary hangup of the vast biology of things, desiring? a covenant with whom? androsphinx, recumbent lion with the head of a man, answer methat is to say, each one of us
the sublime, dear everybody and everyday, is not so simply humanoverwhelms-uncanny is Hannah Arendt's word for the face of itdangerous-severe, as a blow-mysterious-on which the existential given floats-the passions of
and Hans Mayer notes the tying and untying that confines things: At the height of the Victorian era, the Bible is once again, as in Cromwell's time, ... the spiritual and social foundation of everyday life-O, the onceagain in which we trust-Declaration is made in the Bible of what is proper for woman and what is not. The Bible depicts that which God punished in Sodom. St. Paul only confirmed the curse one's mind may have a certain affinity with Christopher Marlowe's, if it is true, as his roommate Thomas Kyd tells us, that he thought the apostle Paul a swindlerwho taught a curdled godhead and a curdling view of the existential given-and the black milk of it is blasphemy, so to revile existence
in the midst of this, an Enlightenment which first and foremost posited an equality of men and women, including homosexuals-religion and sexuality go hand in hand in the apple-light
it was not to be merely law, like free speech, but a mental practice what developed, in the guise of a Darwinian terror advancing in evolutionary form, was the lion body with a man's head, walking in the garden, so that the underlying principles of liberty and equality, not even taking fraternity into account, inordinately encouraged combatting all forms of outsiderdom in favour of what Ihab Hassan calls `quantities of normed phenomena'-normed existence excludes the existential given, not being alive in the full sense of body and soul-and extends, not merely perverts that which calls itself normality into political form but Mayer asks, what is it then if the precipitating step outside, into the margins, is a condition of birth, a result of one's sex, parentage, physical or spiritual makeup? Then one's existence itself becomes a breaking of boundaries
we can thereby return to ourselves a measure of freedom, and take formthe work of a lifetime-in this breaking of boundariesagainst, as Mayer says, a global disposition of thought toward annihilation, which thinks to admit only majorities in the future and is determined to equate minorities with `worthless life' Worthless are the Jews, there the blacks [and aboriginals], somewhere else (and everywhere) the homosexuals, women of the type of Judith and Delilah, not least the intellectuals keen on individuation ...
`They should all be gassed': the expression has crept into everyday language Woman is not equal to man. Man is manly man, whatever is to be understood by that: the feminine man stands out from the race and thereby becomes worthless life. Shylock must be exterminated: the only final solutions are fire and gas
extreme remedies-pharmakons-Mayer reminds us, have been proposed: for example, Klaus Mann writing in i 949-remember when that was!-calls for ... the concerted mass suicide of intellectuals: to bring public opinion in the world, in the integrity and autonomy of which he quite clearly still believed, to its right senses
well, we know now that this would disappear with a headline in the Entertainment pages, or it might make the Arts and Books section along with obituaries and sportsmanship, in The Globe & Mail-and intellectuals?-Mann had not noticed that point in the space of intelligence where they join the system, higgledy-piggledy-I think of that recent hustle in the United States, offering the end of history like a dinky-toy, democracy, pinking, blueing, and off-whiting in plastic -'My goodness!' everyone said, `They've discovered Hegel!' and Time Magazine thought he was little known-and I said, 'My goodness! Francis Fukuyama, so we finally got here, there, anywhere'
so to be reminded once again of Puddin'head Wilson: It was wonderful to find America, but it would have been more wonderful to miss it
this unified mankind-for that's who's there, quantity or lump, at the end of a materialist's or an idealist's history-conceived, Mayer writes, as a homogenized humanity. Woe to outsiders
so that was it, was it? an Enlightenment that promised equality to men and women, including homosexuals! an age in the hole, running three centuries, surely allows one to say, `Listen, you assholes, a metaphysical washout means you've lost your top soil'
and this system aims exactly-at the heart of our social existence to be an outsider by virtue of our existence-like statues come to life by moonlight in the child's desiring mind-has the advantage of voices, and their attentions, each to each, among quantified multitudes who wander the computations and rationalities that belong to no one-also going, going, gone into the corpus Christianum with its sadly separated body and soul
among these voices, I think of Montaigne: Embraces remembered (or still vaguely hoped for) are `our final accolades'
in whose arms
even on Sunday
With considered use of Hans Mayer's Outsiders (MIT, 1982). Mark Twain's aptness is cited in Ihab Hassan's `Foreword.' Written for Gay Games III, Vancouver, August 1 99o.
1993
the child, child of the bigshot, invalid's child, labourer's child, child of the fool, child of railroads, child of trees, child that is deiformed, child of fireworks, child of colourlessness, child of damask, Mage's child, the child born with twenty-two folds, at least his or her concern is only to unfold herself or himself, curious one or the other's life is, then, complete under that form he or she dies there's no fold left for one or the other to undo
in the land of magic,
rarely a woman or man dies without having yet a few folds to undo but this happened parallel to this operation, the one or the other forms a nucleus, like a stone or a nut the inferior races, such as the white race, see the stone, nut, and nucleus rather than the unfolded fold the Mage sees, more-so, the unfolded fold
the unfolded fold is important and onliest what rests is nothing but epiphenomenon
in the land of magic
after Henri Michaux,
gratitude to Richard Ellmann
for a solution to depli
she said often around 1929, 193o-especially when I played with the lacy iron treadle of the sewing machine-so ravelling the bobbin, great-grandmother Ina, who had been secretary to Brigham Young, `not a wife,' she said, of that revelationsmall, playing tall, in her long dress, fierce in thought-`don't read that stuff,' she said, grabbing Red Book or Ladies' Home Journal, `if you're going to read, read something worth it'-for all my puzzling-and she toss
ed the news of whatever it was on top of the icebox, out of reach-contempt showing, as she picked me up by the suspenders and threw me out of the house, a railcar, Union Pacific yellow, by the railway tracks, goldenrod garden-wand stems-chicken coop cackle-sagebrush beyond with killdeer nesting under those jade momentsand conversations with jack rabbits-unless some masculine shadow shot them and my words stopped in their screamsof what we were talking about-'Drat!' I heard her say through the window-rewinding the bobbin, `Drat!'
God, she meant-a block pattern- g awdelpus- gawking, I gaw-along now, giddy with salutations from bigots, better known as by-gods, godbwyes, and gossips, a.k.a, godsibbs, kin of some Indo-European past participle-*ghat-id est, an adjective acting like a verb, an epithet of Indra-Mindwho has almost disappeared into the gods of everythingand come upon
splendid creation, this scrum of religion
we were bunched there on an embankment by the railroads, a boxcar, ownership yellow, doors and windows cut into it, and lean-to bedrooms, kitchen, coal and wood stove, heating the irons with detachable handles, dressing for dinner, which meant freshly ironed gingham dresses and shirts, sometimes of bleached sacking, home-made soap of many a lye-scented laundry day-beloved distillations of my thought, great-grandmother Ina, grandaunt Tina, grandmother Sophia Nichols (Dot, for short), step-grandfather Auer-one-eyed, had an eye-cup, a mustache cup, a wondrous imagination reading Poe and Hawthorne aloud, as accented bedtime stories, German, `blau and blauer,' he'd say of a wide day, walking the rails, hand in hand, balancing like dancers-a sliver of steel had put that eye out when he worked on the section-gang, where Sophia Nichols found him-so there by bereavement (O.E. astieped) on both sides-mother's father, Casus McCready, whose Latin name means unexpected, say, by chance-and so bifel, by adventure or cas, writes Chaucer-having disappeared into Canada for good and everything else, after visiting her, out of the blue, at the Sacred Heart Academy in Ogden, Utah, in 1918, when she was 13his gift, five Canadian five-cent pieces, which she wouldn't have spent for love nor anything sweeter, anyway, Victoria's portrait on 1889, George V's on those dated 1907, 1910, and two 1913's-now tossed in the palm of my hand-and there on the embankment also were my mother, Ina Mae, my father, `Bob,' the outsider, my brother, second-born, Augustus (Gus), given the Blaser family name, my sister Hope, third-born,
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