The Shadow Fills The Void...

Stolen from an email from Caput Mortuum:

There are those who want a text (an art, a painting) without a shadow, without the "dominant ideology; but this is to want a text without fecundity, without productivity, a sterile text (see the myth of the Woman without a Shadow). The text needs its shadow; this shadow is a bit of ideology, a bit of representation, a bit of subject: ghosts, pockets, traces, necessary clouds: subversion must produce its own chiaroscuro

Roland Barthes
(32, Le Plaisir du texte).

Confucious and the Madman of Kieh Yu

When Confucius was visiting the state of Chu,

Along came Kieh Yu

The Madman of Chu

And sang outside the Master's door:

"Oh Phoenix, Phoenix,

Where's you virtue gone?

It cannot reach he future

Or bring the past again!

When the world makes sense

The wise have work to do.

They can only hide

When he World's askew.

Today if you can stay alive

Lucky are you:

Try to survive!

"Joy is feather light

But who can carry it?

Sorrow falls like a landslide

Who can parry it?

"Never, never

Teach virtue more.

You walk in danger,

Beware! Beware!

Even ferns can cut your feet -

When I walk crazy I walk right:

But am I a man to imitate?"

The tree on the mountain heights is its own enemy.

The grease that feeds the light devours itself.

The cinnamon tree is edible: so it is cut down!

The lacquer tree is profitable: they main it.

Everyone knows how useful it is to be useful.

No one seems to know how useful it is to be useless

-Thomas Merton

(as Eddie Lee calls him "squirtin' Merton" or as the Trappist Order at Gethsemani call him "Fr. Louis")

Why Then?

Icarus-
Do I, then, belong to the heavens?
Why, if not so, should the heavens
Fix me thus with their ceaseless blue stare,
Luring me on, and my mind, higher
Ever higher, up into the sky,
Drawing me ceaselessly up
To heights far, far above the human?
Why, when balance has been strictly studied
And flight calculated with the best of reason
Till no aberrant element should, by rights, remain--
Why, still, should the lust for ascension
Seem, in itself, so close to madness?
Nothing is that can satisfy me;
Earthly novelty is too soon dulled;
I am drawn higher and higher, more unstable,
Closer and closer to the sun's effulgence.
Why do they burn me, these rays of reason,
Why do these rays of reason destroy me?
Villages below and meandering streams
Grow tolerable as our distance grows.
Why do they plead, approve, lure me
With promise that I may love the human
If only it is seen, thus, from afar--
Although the goal could never have been love,
Nor, had it been, could I ever have
Belonged to the heavens?
I have not envied the bird its freedom
Nor have I longed for the ease of Nature,
Driven by naught save this strange yearning
For the higher, and the closer, to plunge myself
Into the deep sky's blue, so contrary
To all organic joys, so far
From pleasures of superiority
But higher, and higher, Dazzled, perhaps, by the dizzy incandescence
Of waxen wings.

Or do I then
Belong, after all, to the earth?
Why, if not so, should the earth
Show such swiftness to encompass my fall?
Granting no space to think or feel,
Why did the soft, indolent earth thus
Greet me with the shock of steel plate?
Did the soft earth thus turn to steel
Only to show me my own softness?
That nature might bring home to me
That to fall, not to fly, is in the order of things,
More natural by far than that imponderable passion?
Is the blue of the sky then a dream?
Was it devised by the earth, to which I belonged,
On account of the fleeting, white-hot intoxication
Achieved for a moment by waxen wings?
And did the heavens abet the plan to punish me?
To punish me for not believing in myself
Or for believing too much;
Too eager to know where lay my allegiance
Or vainly assuming that already I knew all;
For wanting to fly off
To the unknown
Or the known:
Both of them a single, blue speck of an idea?

Scarlet and Black.....

Stendhal wrote an amazing novel entitled Le Rouge et le Noir (The Scarlet and the Black). In this novel he represents the separate groups in power by the color of their uniforms. The mask of each being suggested by the color. I see the two of these as acting in unison of power, Like the Black Collar and the firm hand of Fate, the Scarlet Glove. Please see the Pasolini movie Salò: le 120 giornate di Sodoma to understand the ruthless and heartless desires of power. When one gains power over another human what they do with that power is how they should be judged. I once printed two photographs of George Bataille; one in scarlet, the other in black. I thought it was fitting for Bataille to be represented by this fate, that he represented the dual grotesqueries of the military (the state) and the church. Two Systems of imposing social order. Bataille loved to point to the discrepancies and falsehoods in each. In the beginning of love I was asked what I thought love was. The answer I was told was "...love comes in the sharing of the mundane things." This was taken from the Kundera book Unbearable Lightness of Being. And how unbearable our being is when it is rotting in isolation. My response to this statement was a subtle agreement, but also recognizing what Bataille said loosely paraphrased..."In love, the most difficult task is to maintain happiness." It is difficult to remain in love when one is happy, people need conflicts to resolve.

Frottage

Frottage
How goofy and horrible is life. Just
Look into the faces of the lovers
as they near their drastic destinations,
the horses lathered and fagged. Just
look at them handling the vase
priced beyond the rational beneath
the sign stating the store’s breakage
policy, and what is the rational but
a thing that we must always break? I am not
the only one composed of fractious murmurs.
From the point of view of the clouds,
it is all inevitable and dispersed—
they vanish over the lands to reconstitute
over the seas, themselves again
but no longer themselves, what they wanted
they no longer want, daylight fidgets
across the frothy waves. Most days
you can’t even rub a piece of charcoal
across paper laid on some rough wood
without a lion appearing, a fish’s umbrella
skeleton. Once we believed it told us
something of ourselves. Once we believed
in the diagnostic powers of ants. Upon
the eyelids of the touched and suffering,
they’d exchange their secretive packets
like notes folded smaller that chemicals
the dancers pass while dancing with another.
A quadrille. they told us nearly nothing
which may have been enough now that we know
so much more. From the point of view
of the ant, the entire planet is a dream
quivering beneath an eyelid and who’s to say
the planet isn’t. From the point of view
of the sufferer, it seems everything will
be taken from us except the sensation
of being crawled over. I believe everything
will be taken from us. Then given back
when it’s no longer what we want. We
are clouds, and terrible things happen
in the clouds, and terrible things happen
in clouds. The wolf’s mouth is full
of strawberries, the morning’s a phantom
hum of glories.
-Dean Young