The Great Butterslide

One night I was arrested, beaten, imprisoned, tortured. When at last I was released (With nothing but the prison clothes on my back and a brown bag of worthless goods) I found myself on the side of the road In the middle of nowhere Looking for a phone. I stumbled through bracken and scraped My already fractured head ... I fell in a pile of who-knows-what And proceeded on my quest For a phone ... A gas station convenience store! Thank you (whoever you are)! "Please, I am hurt and need to make a call," I said, "Sure," the fellow said, "use my phone, but perhaps a hospital would be a better place. Let me call 911." "No," I cried, "just let me call my family. They will get me out of here." "Dad, is that you? I need your help, I am hurt ..." ... "What do you mean? I have no clothes, no money, nowhere to go!" ... "Do you want me to die out here?" ... "Right, then. I guess I did bring it on myself. Alcoholics are nothing but immoral grazers on the lawns of good people and we all deserve death. ... Goodbye, Dad." ... And so I left the station Walked along the road Waited for the sound of ... There it is! -- a semi: (Crouch, wait, listen ... JUMP!!!) I write this from the place whence no one returns. I write this from the mid-point of my own life The time at which I need a Virgil more than anything ... No seven storey mountain for me Just a butterslide into oblivion. Thanks, everyone

Work in Progress (Uncanny Silence and Loss)

Preface I grew up listening to Bach played on period instruments. Such was the vogue, I suppose, at the time (late '80s - early '90s). The fourth Brandeburg concerto (BWV 1049) was, according to instructions in the score, to be accompanied with "continuo," which meant, in Bach's time, the harpsichord. BWV 1057, for those who know and care about music, was intended as a re-write, so to speak, of the earlier piece, but still -- modern tempering of the piano was long in the future, at the time Bach lived, and so we still find ourselves listening, from the smokey distance of imagined memory, to the harpsichord tinkling out those glorious notes. Why does this matter? Simple. I am surrounded by barbarians. My only refuge is the recondite ... the knowledge of obscure matters pertaining to music, poetry (Did Faust really exist?), and philosophy (knock it off, with your foolish prayers, christian!) ... My escape is accomplished with the aid of the old greats, each of them unique, but united in one thing: the maintenance of Western culture. So why is this important? and what has it to do with Bach? Again, simple. The Baroque style, (and the word 'baroque' means, simply, an irregularly shaped pearl. Ha!) the containment of overwhelming emotion in the variegated contours of a unified structure, is conducive to revelation, confession of the things that we do not want to actually TELL others ... These things bubble to the surface, and among sophisticated people these things become works of art, not raunchy bar talk, nor sad puppy-dog-eyed professions to some slut at a park at two in the morning, after downing a half-gallon ... I am surrounded by barbarians, and like Rome, I will soon fall, if no grace comes my way. It is nice to stand in the midst of a bunch of academics and feel at home, when one has a paper on the program, and especially if one is a key note speaker ... It is especialy thrilling if one is sharing this thrill with one's unfaithful shrew of a wife ... It is especially galling to feel the weight of responsibility alight upon a light moment ... It is especially irksome to want to kill the very thing you love the most: yourself. Especially: guides, mentors, amanuenses, tailors, ribaldry, cloaks of black, heavy metal, storms, lightning, silence, peace, justice, hatred and the truth of the human condition. Hatred is easy to foster, love is the stuff of legend -- a bad legend, foolishness, yet the colorful chords of Bach resound in every corner to give us a sense of humanity not as it is but (yes, Aristotle) as it OUGHT to be. Air flows through unaided, as the 'block flutes' of Bach's great concerto ... Unaided: Who wants to be such? I. Make not my glad cause cause of mourning. ~ George Peele Happiness makes me want to drink beer. When lovely Barbara called me, suggesting a date, I was so happy that I downed a fifth of gin and then proceeded to sample all the beers at the local bar. Undone, I went home, to find that Barbara was no longer a possibility. Oh so glad, glad, I was crying ... yes, drunken tears ... An acrobatic mind takes such things and translates them into noetic corpuscules as he listens to Bach. Somehow, the flute sounds lonely in Bach's concerto, a poor little guy, striving to get his warbling voice heard amidst the din of dull, block-headed instruments making only sound, not MUSIC. Genius is comforting. Bach had it, Shakespeare, the great (and my favorite) Lord Byron, and recently, Plath and, well, as much as I hate to say it, Cormac McCarthy. When the head spins it is often correct to say that genius has caused the spin. An open chord descending quietly to something diminished but lovely: such is my life. An open chord frolicking in the grass around a contrapuntal stream: such is my wish. A power chord (Townshend-style) crashing upon the shore of my now-isolated brain: such is my wish. Botticelli. How is beauty born? Ask that guy. Deception is the order of the day for many .. and you know what? I am stopping. Academic time is upon me. I know nothing of the stove the faucet The clarion call of the amphibian Swollen beyond recall Taken by claws of a goddess Taken by nature's sweet rlease Taken when I least need it Taken when I want to remain Taken when I need a vacation Taken Optimism and music sing together Sing like silly finches on a branch Malebranche and word-association Hegel and eagle and finch Somewhere I am thriving And she knows it Somewhere the style persists The lungs cough smoke and New Orleans The lungs cough New York and cheapness The lungs cough poverty and South River The lungs cough smiles and handjobs The lungs ask for a small room where the BRAIN Can write. II. Success is counted sweetest By those who ne're succeed. ~ Emily Dickinson The inner life is our judge. If I go to Facebook and see some photos posted by an ex-girlfriend, photos in which she seems to be revelling in life, embracing a most unsavory fellow, embracing nothing but a cock (pardon me, but it's true) ... If I witness such things, is it acceptable for me to pull out my Glock and let light shine? Of course not. Is she happy? Not without me she's not!!! I am the key to EVERYONE'S happiness: I am the god who walks the deck. No. I am the demon who lurks below, finding solace in subtle, intellectual, ironic torture. I am damned good at it. Something positive this way comes. Memories. They are more fierce than the Conqueror Worm, more potent that any draught (I cannot drink away my memories) ... At the beginning of October, I warn the masses: Edward walks now. Come to me.

Why Read Anglo-Saxon Poetry?

The Robert Zemeckis film of Beowulf, while highly entertaining (for many of the wrong reasons), is sufficient cause, I believe, to lead one to an appreciation of the ancient poem itself. As Michael Alexander rightly stated, this work is a portal into a pre-Christian past, in which the oral tradition of poetic composition prospered. Fruitless attempts to identify Beowulf as an ancient vegetation god, a-la Frazer, or as an early concoction of a Germanic hero with a Christ-centered ethos have shown (at least to me) to be pointless exercises in scholarly virtuosity. Tolkien correctly identified this poem as an elegy, a lament for a lost or dying heroic past, written at a time when the weakness of humanity found solace in humility and suffering, as the pathway to heaven, and had abandoned the ancient heroic code of personal excellence and striving for glory. In our own time, we have the outstanding example of Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, an epic in an age when epics have been thought gone forever. Harold Bloom, usually an astute critic, made a ridiculous remark when he stated that he had "serious aesthetic reservations" about LOTR. A tale, nay, an epic, in which the unlikeliest of persons become grand heroes; a tale in which good and evil are unabashedly balanced on a razor's edge (to paraphrase Galadriel); a prose poem of striking emotional power ... Such is LOTR. And such is Beowulf. To read either work -- Beowulf or LOTR -- expecting magnificent character development and psychological insight (which is what Bloom apparently expected from the latter) is to miss the point of epic poetry (or prose) entirely. This is not to say that LOTR does not display subtle developments in the characters' personalities. The immature Merry and Pippin, for example, grow into splendid, selfless warriors, while the inward-looking Frodo does not so much develop as blossom, from inward-looking, almost poetical young Hobbit into a quiet moral force. Beowulf, in the great poem, maintains his persona as the archetypal Germanic hero until the very end: such is his moral contribution to the poem. Emotional impact comes from the interaction of characters and events, not from quiet personal development. A moral center is necessary to every great work. In LOTR it is Samwise Gamgee; in Beowulf it is the hero himself, the one who places his entire life at the service of personal glory. While this might be an ethic with which us moderns cannot identify, it is an ethic nonetheless; and to appreciate the poem, one must orient him or herself to this ancient and outmoded ethic.

I am not one to promote literature as a vehicle for personal moral growth, nor for life lessons, etc. Rather, I consider art for art's sake to be the ONLY justification for poetry, literary prose, visual art, music, and any mode of aesthetic expression that the individual sees fit to execute. While I encounter few references to Walter Pater in contemporary literary criticism, I feel that such a lack of pure ENJOYMENT (gasp!) is stifling creativity. Instead of shocking (or attempting, like juveniles, to shock) people, with ever more elaborate torture scenes, or with an homage to a cunt, rather let us strive for beauty: and in Anglo-Saxon poetry the beauty of the person against the world is paramount.

The final stand of Byrtnoth in The Battle of Maldon is an example of an ancient concept of honor that would fit well in our modern world of self-centered, and SELFISH people: such as wives who abandon husbands struggling with addiction, or friends who walk away when one has nothing left to offer ... Byrtnoth gave ground to the invading Danish Vikings, not because he felt sorry for them, but because he knew that his glory would be enhanced by such an heroic, noble gesture. Of course, he lost the batle, but the victory was still his. We read the poem today. Who knows anything about those invading Vikings?

Perhaps a personal note is in order here. I was left alone, in a cruel and unforgiving world by a woman with whom I spent ten years of my life, loving, striving, sharing, bearing joys and sorrows ... only because I love the bottle. Would an Anglo-Saxon hero do such a thing? No. Woman or man, the ancient hero would stick with his or her friend to the bitter end. There is nothing worse than leaving a friend in their direst time of need.

... Bold-tempered chieftain, famed for your deeds, you must defend your life now with all your strength. I shall help you.

(Beowulf, 2665-67, tr. Alexander, my emphasis)

Never have I heard anyone -- ex-wife especially! -- say "I shall help you." No. It was always, "help yourself," "get better," "stop putting us through this." Heroic words those (note bitter sarcasm). The moral weakness of puling moderns is placed in no better contrast when placed along side Anglo-Saxon heroic poetry, or LOTR, in which love for one's fellow knows no bounds, and devotion is an attainment, not a sacrifice. One need only read those works attentively to realize that the love is not erotic, nor romantic, but HEROIC. So what do I mean by heroic?

Many times one will qualify the term 'heroic' with 'ideal.' The heroic life is not an ideal; it is a moral choice. When Beowulf decided to travel to the hall of Hrothgar to slay Grendel, it was a choice, not a demand: which made it all the more glorious. When my ex-wife decided to abandon me to prison and homelessness -- that was also a choice, but it was not glorious. It was a mean-spirited, low-minded, hateful SIN against another human being. Those late nights when I read to her passages from Maldon, Beowulf, Wulf and Eadwacer, Deor, and others (a few of which I have translated) the words passed away like fireflies on a summer's eve. Nothing 'sunk in', as it were. And as I have stated, while I do not consider literature a method of moral development, I DO consider it a force for internal change, for CONTEMPLATION. The Greek philosophers called it THEORIA, and it implied a quiet and relaxed mode of thinking, a manner of engaging with one's emotions devoid of the passions that taint our responses and cause us to do things like abandon those we profess to love.

Never with words would I chide you, my friend, For disgrace was never yours. No retreat Have I ever witnessed.

(Waldere, fragment I., my translation)

Somwhere Lord Byron stated that there is nothing more precious in the world than the unconditional love of a woman. He was speaking of his half sister Augusta, to whom he wrote some glorious stanzas, deservedly so (in my opinion). This passage above, from a very ancient Anglo-Saxom poem -- which I took the unrewardable trouble to translate -- are the words of a woman comforting her battle-weary man. How often have I longed for such words! Weary, beaten, sorrowful ... Nothing but the kind words of a woman could possibly drag me from my 'funk.' Such women exist no more. Yet men who suffer and die alone are plentiful. There are far too many of us.

Something about the so-called Age of Chivalry gives us pause; adoration of women is all well and good, but the neuroses that develop from such a 'preoccupation' often outweigh the benefits. The glory of Woman has been the cause, the bane, and the tiresome topic of poetry for centuries. Petrarch immortalized it, Byron made it intensely personal ... But the immense impact of private endeavor -- loss, longing, despair, TRIUMPH! -- held no place in the Germanic epic tradition. Rather, as Tacitus drily observed, the ancient Teutons cared more for gold than the pleasures of sex.

But there is addiction, and it takes many forms. Desire for alcohol is akin to the desire for a female embrace; and if one has a fetish, she need only remove her shoes to make one forget about anything else. This type of desperate adoration of Woman marks the end of the heroic age (of which Anglo-Saxon poetry stands as a final bulwark) and the beginning of the so-called Age of Chivalry. Now I did not feel particularly chivalrous when I groveled at my wife's feet, begging for sweet release. I DID, however, feel a surge of panicky sexuality that is rare; it is the desire for another ... the hope for a pleasure so powerful that it will overtake you. Yes. The weakness that follows -- indeed, the HELPLESSNESS -- is a testimony to the power of the Goddess. So while it is easy to travesty Anglo-Saxon poetry as masculine dominated, testosterone driven expulsion, one would do well to recall one's first sexual experience (and I am speaking to men). Will you ever forget the time you called out her name, and begged her with all your being: PLEASE DON'T STOP!? I remember it well. And so did the Anglo-Saxon poets.

Circumabulation II.

Sight, Flight, the luck of the draw ...

Somewhere a man existed who made an attempt to raise the human person to the optimum height of divinity. Of course, he met a bad end, but that should not cause us to discolor his work. Never mind. Religious people annoy me.

Eliot, when you wrote: Between the conception / And the creation / Between the emotion / And the response / Falls the shadow ('The Hollow Men,' V.) ... Where are these hollow men, and the ones who write about them? That is, to me, the most telling critique of your work. [Now keep in mind that the only and BEST way of critiquing Eliot is to talk to him as though he were still existing.] ... But I've no wish to critique Eliot. Instead ...

A day came when I fancied myself a poet ... Not to be! Yet there was an intriguing banter proffered by our Eliot: 'Thoughts of a dry brain in a dry season' (Gerontion).

What thoughts! I think I know, my friend ... : When I get sober, I cease to have thoughts worthy of their season. I know no peace. Eliot has failed. Nothing but torment scrapes the dried flesh of our mortal lives. So fuck off, and listen to Mahler.

It is nearly impossible

Yet it is nearly impossible to languish in sorrow when one still has the ability to surround oneself with artifacts of fine minds ... Botticelli on the wall, Bach on the box, volumes of Wordsworth, Keats, Shelley, on the shelf ... Some fragments of philosophy: only those parts that still speak to the person of this moment; forget about immutable human nature (no such thing!) and recall only the trials and tribulations of THIS DAY. Such is the locus of the human frame, which frames a bit of the All, and calls it Life. So my time as a willing slave to the most beautiful of women -- Was that time a waste of my perennially rejuvenating self? Not at all. As I sit here by my window, tapping out these words, I am painfully aware of waste. Not of self, but of time. The major terror of strife is not the danger of the strife itself, but the inevitable deflation that occurs when the strife has ended. Empedocles seems to have known this, for he brought in Love as a balancing force against Strife. Another comforting fiction, this. When I seek the warmth of my beloved's embrace, Strife must depart, and Love must shine ... Yeah, yeah, sappy poetical notion ... But it is a true feeling, as much as feeling can ring with the piercing clink of truth.

Circumambulation I.

When the past reaches out with dessicated tendrils to draw strength from the moist effluence of Life -- we have a problem. I've been reminded (with handcuffs) of some old traffic tickets going back nineteen years! There is still a warrant for my arrest. My response, addressed with force to those neo-nazi cunts, was simple in its elegance, and is as follows: Go perform a painful biological act with thy subservient self!

Release was gained by the force of physical necessity. Apparently, it is against the law to prevent a severely intoxicated person from going to the hospital. So those uniformed pigs went against their nature and shipped me off safely to a comfy spot, where I ate good food, jerked off to nurses, and slept like an anaesthetized bear.

Home again. Much to ponder ... and destroy.

Needless to say, I am now keeping my face out of the main thoroughfares, and buying my booze (and biding my time) through the agency of a trusted other.

My time is bided. A critical crack to the neck will give me great solace. But this is, of course, all fiction. no one should take my murderous fantasies the least bit seriously.

So!

The slackening and sickening of reflective life ... the drained mood of selfish concern ... the purposeless ones meander through avenues leading only to a silent torpor ... the continual maintenance of a persona (knowing damned well nobody cares!) ... the cradling of one's stillborn brats in slitted arms that show like graceless wounds upon a clumsily tortured slave ... the final cudgeon-blow to the head of one's own loves ... the petty excuses, the terror of Night, the hateful face of the Sun ... the growth of a pattern out of all this! -- and Why? Demons don't just dance in mediaeval forests: they circumbambulate right here, in the sad cast-off terrifyingly fucked-up thing we call the present.

The Consolation of Pessimism

Without someone to love this world is a desert.

~ Mary Wollstonecraft

Many loves but no one great Love. Such is the theme of many great (and not-so-great) poems and novels. The imagined or idealized beloved, such as we find in Machen's novel The Hill of Dreams, or in Richard Crashaw's poem Wishes, subtitled "To His (Supposed) Mistress," demonstrate that the mind is the realm of glorious fulfillment, while the 'real' world is the realm of disappointment, frustration, and finally -- despair. Crashaw's poem ends on this poignant note:

Let her full glory,

My fancies, fly before ye;

Be ye my fictions, but her story.

The best of these types of works leave us with a sense of introspective -- and not unpleasant -- sadness; what the older writers called melancholy. The worst leave us despising the writer as a pathetic sap. Yet they point to a universal experience: that of frustrated idealism -- and it is precisely this which produces the pessimist.

The pessimist despises the world (and for the most part, the people in it) because it exists as it is, not as it ought to be. Daily doses of annoyance, disappointment, and occasionally heartbreak lead the pessimist to resign him or herself to the sad fact that the beauteous mind-wrought realm is nowhere to be found. In so-called love, when I give myself to my partner, telling her things I would tell no one else, sharing myself body and "soul" -- when I do this, I am expecting a sort of eternal state of devotion, of shared existence. When the thing falls apart -- and it always does -- nothing is left but what Milton called "Myself, my sepulcher, a moving grave."

The question, then, is: Why persist in misery? in a walking death? One could easily speak of hope and quote Pope's annoying line about that pointless emotion springing eternal, etc. ... I don't believe in hope. One could also speak of the need for human beings to work together for a better world. However, we are all too steeped in our own self-centered misery and false hope to do so. Schopenhauer wrote, in one of his essays, that anyone, at any time, can find someone in a worse state than themselves. But then, he asks rhetorically, "What does this tell us about the state of the whole (of humanity)?" There is no consolation in simply observing the collective misery of human beings. The pessimist must seek consolation elsewhere.

I find my consolation in the fact that there is no hope, and that those who permit themselves to hope are simply sailing blindly towards temporary bliss, perhaps, but certainly to final, absolute destruction. And I do not mean the grave, but the destruction of all joy, however temporary. I have reached a point where I don't seek even petty loves anymore ... I have given up. My consolation lies in the fact that this is the end-point of life, that the sun is setting, and peace will arrive, sooner rather than later.

This does not mean that I am made of stone, and cannot find some joy, or at least quiet admiration, in watching a sunset or walking along the banks of a placid lake. Nor does it mean that I have ceased to enjoy the embraces of a woman. Quite the contrary. It is the fleeting nature of these things that lends them their melancholy poignancy. Every day is not the same; new things are arising all the time, to capture my imagination. In moments of exquisite loss of self, when a new idea is presented to me, or I meet some interesting person, I forget the evanescence of life and its all-too-brief glories. When I drink, I imagine that my bliss will last forever. Of course, it doesn't. In my occasional bouts of religious devotion -- the height of contradiction, as I am, at heart, an atheist -- I am forced to engage in existential or phenomenological interpretations of my experience, when in fact the devotion is merely an outlet for pent-up emotion.

I believe that emotion rules our lives, that rational thought is an ideal to which none (or perhaps very few) has ever lived up to ... Controlled sorrow is the one ruling emotion of everyone's life: the introspective person admits it, while the extraverted one simply, well, persists in his optimistic engagement with this charnel-house of a world. To know that one is doomed to sorrow is the first step on the road to freedom. When one ceases to place faith in anything but the fading light of sunset, then one has gained liberation from the sunlit world of the damned optimist and his ever-fluctuating hopes and dreams.