5-0-

Why is it, that 'The Fifties,' in America, are adorned with a sort of golden-age-y pastoral legacy, when reading something like Coover's The Public Burning makes it quickly obvious that even there, tensions were ever flaring, the body politic was aswarm with snarl and bite, etc.--

And people know, everyone knows, of McCarthy, Korea, etc.--yet the Arcadian mirage persists, as a sort of mental shorthand, even among leftists who should know better--

Like with the misconception, also so popular and cherished, that a dream can offer the lived experience of a lifetime, of lifetimes, within a single night--

These myths, these fallacies, like a kind of unthinking sentimental shorthand--

Designs in Cancellation Are Stitched for Shoddy Carpets

Nopenheimer surveys a figure there on the barren landscape, This Kid Russ in the act of repudiating the Trinity--and off the cuff of the weakened winds they can hear, the muttered half-moans aloft--

I have become Nixnaw,
Aborter of Works...

The Tyrannical, The Flat, The Simple, The What--

There is a certain mode of communication--speech, uttered or written--you can see it in the Reverend Gwyon, in the Consul Firmin, in Wyatt (or Stefan, or otherwise Unnameable--)--

(in some transcribed memory bank, tattered old abandoned site, when there were one or two, who spoke eclectic--)

--a lively mode, highly literary, bordering on the mystical, or perhaps just obscure, but desired just the same, whether esoteric or plainly erratic--

(such a mode to shame the rest, the sort, what was it, stenographic speech, the daily-everyday-mundane-bleak, all of it just a dull tyranny shouting down those elusive bits, the rare creatures skirting in, out, ever dimming with lostness, elusive--)

--which is the wanted type, because it excites, it begs interpretation, and--this being key--the interpretations are in the vein of literary interpretation, symbols cryptic, some of that precious-because-rare mystery, and, like--

(and had we met it, maybe once, twice, then dodged down, took-off-and-gone, lingering only as memory-residual, lost spark, and so then, so now, pressed out, eliminated, overcome--yes, by this, the everyday, the stenographic--)

--and to see it in this wayward slope of the three or so 'Key Authors,' yes and giving thanks, that they are there, that this exists, for you to read, but likewise, same-time, the recurrence [eternal] of a note of bitterness, to recall that you had broached it once, twice, not on the page, not in story, but hereabouts, in this, this Real Life, ah, you knew it, once-twice-what?--so we think, right, to dimly recall, those sites--

Otherwise awash in, again, this, the stenographic, the uninspired, surrounding--

Fronts with no backs to them, exo- vaunting victorious over eso-, gloom-dyed Normal, repressive Apparent, threatened now, these days, only by these texts, these tales, from that fiery resilient so-rare slope, that three-pointed semi-straight segment, our link, via Lowry-Gaddis-Pynchon, in defiance of the, ahem, Real, so they, they are there--

But is it enough, one wonders, somber-shaded desperate wonder, of those three, alighting the only apparent alternative, to, what, all this--

Ending in sigh, in Ehhh..., 'midst this, this so-much, the stenographic....

HIm in All and All in Him (so Found, Found--)

--Yes, Yes, I was there! I remember, yes!

Him saying this, we pause, what--?

--The school, the collapsed black schoolhouse, back off the service road, invisible, that schoolhouse!

Because from what we read, yes, whatever details, and also the lack of, there and not-there now coalescing into the heady onrush of revived memory, why yes of course he was, was there, of course--

--And as a boy, yes! --Totally, yes! We never knew, we couldn't tell you how to operate a telephone, there was no electricity, no radio, we were orphans, blind and quarantined, yes! And, yes...yes!

So it rolled, rolled out now, all this memory, note, "memory," whatever was there on the paper was absorbed, imbibed, joined to his starry-eyed conspira-mystic soul, joined to his ever-so-essential Being and his storied, majestic Past, it was his now, as ever, as it always must be, yes, his--

--Nameless, nonexistent practically, yes...Finders, we never, well, did we? --but maybe, Finders, yes, maybe it is familiar, but that was us, of course, I was there, yes--

And to see, you can see it, yes? From the paper and ink, now bound to Soul, whatever External, whatever Story, now joined into intimate union under the heading, Biography, that dustless shelf, ever alive, added-upon, growing...

--And I was there, in that black, black schoolhouse...

And he was, he was, whoever could challenge a memory, the unreachable phantom Past, eh? None, none at all, none so qualified to question, contradict--and so his majesty, his centrality, him him him him Him--

And yes let's say, that it came as a sort of relief, to read Scholem write of Crowley, 'that charlatan...' --because, and remember, didn't the local jongleur say something of similar effect, did he not, also, point a spot of piss, onto that legacy, that legend so precious to the thieves of the Necronomicon, etc.--?

Because we always felt, instinctively, a distrust, as per Crowley--

And what we remember most, of the fragments of biography perused, is the incessant series of power struggles, 'magickal battles' for control of various 'magickal orders,' which to us, seems the saddest, basest sort of sad, regrettable materiality, so earthly, mundane, pathological...

But of course, yes, per Robert Greene, it's an Always-On sort of world, yes, and Machiavelli shant not be escaped, down here, yes? --but oh, supposing it is, what, a lingering remnant of a sort of idealism, romanticism, to be of a realm, or state--of mind--wherein those lowly battles are left behind, abandoned--so, yes, supposing, what, naive, or what--

Ok, ok...

2 Items per Gaddis

Two things re: The Recognitions--

--firstly, that you are led into the mystic glories, schizodabbled heresies, all such fun and up-our-alley, but watch it, see?--degenerating into nonsense, free-floating disassociation, cacophony of reference and counter-reference, ultimately leading--our alley, up it, to, where?--to Bellevue, o!

(lesson, so?--some lesson, there? o?)

--and secondly, note the suitors to Esme, even in such boat-borne short-term as with Stanley, good loyal papal Stanley, gripping tight the arm erratic, to silence the mouth, limit the (heart), --so too with the others, all equally mad-driven by the pathological currents of, yes, J-word, Jealousy, o--

(touchstone back-tripped to Swann's Way, same bitter lesson, same 'h/t' to withdrawal, ultimately, ok, yes --to be safe...)

Ex.

Hypotheseus, God of paranoid imaginings...

Method Working on Chance Which Was Born From Chance

X. is thus engaged in attempting to revisit a seven-years-past encounter with a pair of strangers on a road, in mind and in text, thru the transformative methods of symbolism--

and so X. reads, in a study of the Greek origins of the literary sense of symbolism, that symbolism (in part) developed from divinatory traditions, this study emphasizing especially the species of divination concerning "symbols of the road," understood through Aeschylus to mean a chance meeting with a stranger (as well, "Xenophon..confirms the the sense of symbol as ominous chance meeting"). So too, "...these divine signs are coincidental meetings with people."

Therefore we observe, so--that a blind clawing at symbolism in the hope of expanding/remolding a chance encounter is a blind clawing at a methodology whose origins lie in part in the divine/demonic significance attributed to the chance encounter (on the road, the road--).

*Relevant text being Struck, Birth of the Symbol

Research Agenda for a Pseudo-Pynchon/Mixed-Malcolm

La Mordida

"The central narrative of La Mordida involves a descent into the abyss of self, culminating in the protagonist's symbolic rebirth at the book's end. Lowry planned to use this basic narrative pattern as the springboard for innumerable questions about such concerns as art, identity, the nature of existence, political issues, and alcoholism. Above all, La Mordida was to have been a metafictional work about an author who sees no point in living events if he cannot write about them and who is not only unable to write but suspects that he is just a character in a novel."

Know Thyself in Jung's manner means to become familiar with, to open oneself to and listen to, that is, to know and discern, daimons. Entering one's interior story takes a courage similar to starting a novel. 

(maybe) the key is to have one or two definite projects in-progress, and ever at the forefront of your mind (or near the forefront, within the forefront's reach), so that whatever else you encounter is sifted through the prism of those projects, so that the rush of incoming data can be quickly bent to productive design. thus there persists a steady note of relevance, the random and useless suddenly become affected by an afternote of possibly-useful, possibly-relevant.

and so in your scraping-over, your running-through, there's a Something perched behind you, digesting, transforming--

Subset of Menagerie 5.

Their dossiers could be drawn from the subterranean archives and consulted for detail, for background, yes you could mine the triplicate paper-trails for elements of beginning, middle, and end, sign and symptom, diagnosis and treatment. You could make that effort, make it twenty-one times, you could chart the unlevel progressions of each body, each mind, map the histories and plot the tragedies—all of this you could do, of course, it’s standard protocol, out there—

But we are here, not there, and the familiar orchestrations of treatment, remedy, and most importantly understanding do not seem to apply now, here, in this place, in this state. This being some site of exile, some refugee camp for the indeterminate, for the unsettled, the cannot-be-settled.

Here too there lurk the impenetrable administrators, but as with the residents they administer to, they are also, in a sense, fallen. Perhaps you’ll consult their dossiers as well, and then move upward through the chain of command, to governors, to kings, to spirits and gods?

Or else this is a place and a time where previous methods expire, where moot is the keyword, where a confused and listless stasis reigns, like a sentence, a judgment—to which you would be at a loss, were you to ask, by whom?

Maybe a tilt of your perception would at least free you of certain intractable anxieties, could maybe offer a boost, a kick, serve as a palliative. A tilt leftward, clockwise or counter-, downly-upward and spheroid, change for the sake of it, a derangement of the senses—

Anything to pass the time, here, where it passes, just passes.