"Hence callest thyself unbegotten" - On the Madness of Ahab, Moby-Dick, Waste Lands, Anchorites, Crucifixions and Corposants

Moby Dick - 1956

Listened to a reading of Moby-Dick by Frank Muller. A lone authority to his voice, at first, perfectly capturing Ishmael's narration, the Job-like weariness of "And I only am escaped alone to tell thee," then entirely embodying Ahab in every passing remark and maddened soliloquy. Quiet echoes of Gregory Peck but more. After years of re-readings, it was a revelation to hear Melville's language sing again in Moby-Dick.

Turning then to Sena Jeter Nasland's Ahab's Wife. Wondering at the world spun out of a few tantalizing mentions in Melville's text. How the burden of being Ahab's wife is called to audit. Who is figured in Starbuck's "human eye".

http://www.mikewallteacher.com/moby-dick-2-ahab-post-151.html
Gilbert Wilson, Ahab

Ahab has his humanities!

"Mark ye, be forewarned; Ahab’s above the common; Ahab’s been in colleges, as well as ’mong the cannibals; been used to deeper wonders than the waves; fixed his fiery lance in mightier, stranger foes than whales…. Aye, aye, I know that he was never very jolly; and I know that on the passage home, he was a little out of his mind for a spell; but it was the sharp shooting pains in his bleeding stump that brought that about, as any one might see. I know, too, that ever since he lost his leg last voyage by that accursed whale, he’s been a kind of moody— desperate moody, and savage sometimes; but that will all pass off. And once for all, let me tell thee and assure thee, young man, it’s better to sail with a moody good captain than a laughing bad one…. Besides, my boy, he has a wife— not three voyages wedded— a sweet, resigned girl. Think of that; by that sweet girl that old man had a child: hold ye then there can be any utter, hopeless harm in Ahab? No, no, my lad; stricken, blasted, if he be, Ahab has his humanities!”

—Captain Peleg to Ishmael, “The Ship."

http://www.nku.edu/~moby/fletch2-4.html
Gilbert Wilson, Ahab

Of cannibal old me

[Starbuck, First Mate of the Pequod:] “Oh, my Captain! my Captain! noble soul! grand old heart, after all! why should any one give chase to that hated fish!…— this instant let me alter the course! How cheerily, how hilariously, O my Captain, would we bowl on our way to see old Nantucket again! I think, sir, they have some such mild blue days, even as this, in Nantucket.” 

[Ahab:] “They have, they have. I have seen them— some summer days in the morning. About this time— yes, it is his noon nap now— the boy vivaciously wakes; sits up in bed; and his mother tells him of me, of cannibal old me; how I am abroad upon the deep, but will yet come back to dance him again.” 

[Starbuck:] “… my Mary… promised that my boy, every morning, should be carried to the hill to catch the first glimpse of his father’s sail!… Come, my Captain, study out the course, and let us away! See, see! the boy’s face from the window! the boy’s hand on the hill!” But Ahab’s glance was averted…. 

“What is it, what nameless, inscrutable, unearthly thing is it: what cozening, hidden lord and master, and cruel, remorseless emperor commands me; that against all natural lovings and longings, I so keep pushing, and crowding, and jamming myself on all the time…? By heaven, man, we are turned round and round in this world, like yonder windlass, and Fate is the handspike…. But it is a mild, mild wind, and a mild looking sky; and the air smells now, as if it blew from a far-away meadow; they have been making hay somewhere under the slopes of the Andes, Starbuck, and the mowers are sleeping among the new-mown hay.” 

- Starbuck and Ahab, “The Symphony.” 

http://artblogbybob.blogspot.com/2007/08/to-delineate-chaos-bewitched.html
Gilbert Wilson, Ahab

And then, the madness, the frenzy, the boiling blood

Adam, staggering beneath the piled centuries since Paradise

Better than to gaze upon God.

I have fed upon dry salted fare— fit emblem of the dry nourishment of my soul!— when the poorest landsman has had fresh fruit to his daily hand, and broken the world’s fresh bread to my mouldy crusts— away, whole oceans away, from that young girl-wife I wedded past fifty, and sailed for Cape Horn the next day, leaving but one dent in my marriage pillow— wife? wife?— rather a widow with her husband alive! Aye, I widowed that poor girl when I married her, Starbuck; and then, the madness, the frenzy, the boiling blood and the smoking brow, with which, for a thousand lowerings old Ahab has furiously, foamingly chased his prey— more a demon than a man!— aye, aye!… Behold. Oh, Starbuck! is it not hard, that with this weary load I bear, one poor leg should have been snatched from under me? Here, brush this old hair aside; it blinds me, that I seem to weep. Locks so grey did never grow but from out some ashes!… I feel deadly faint, bowed, and humped, as though I were Adam, staggering beneath the piled centuries since Paradise. God! God! God!— crack my heart!— stave my brain!— mockery! mockery! bitter, biting mockery of grey hairs… Close! stand close to me, Starbuck; let me look into a human eye; it is better than to gaze into sea or sky; better than to gaze upon God. By the green land; by the bright hearth-stone! this is the magic glass, man; I see my wife and my child in thine eye. 

- Ahab, “The Symphony.”

“And I! I have the picture that draws me on. A hump like a snow-hill! Moby Dick! I shall add my stature to his height! Ahab, not Una, let me picture there. Though legs fail, my hands, like mitts of flintstone, will pull me to the summit! Leviathan! My hands are harder than thy flesh! Leviathan! I shall make thee bleed, even as my own manly blood poured from my leg as from a funnel-spout! Moby Dick! When I top thee, THEN, let my punishment begin, for I embody the great Lie: Hate, revenge, my wounds— they are greater than Love. Together let us, like a mountain— higher with Ahab’s added height than you ever reared before— be brought low. “Brought low, we’ll storm the shadow valley, we’ll harrow the depths… these depths… whose mere surface lies before me now and all about me. What depths lie below— layer after watery layer of increasing cold. And the floor reached, into what valley do water… whale… Ahab… fall then? And who will exalt the crevasse that on the ocean floor opens itself to step yet again toward unthinkable depths? And who will exalt that valley?

- Sena Jeter Naslund, Ahab's Wife: Or, The Star-gazer: A Novel (P.S.) 

According to Wikipedia, Sena Jeter Naslund "lives in Louisville, Kentucky, at St. James Court, in the former home of Kentucky poet Madison Cawein." The mystery of place. Hallowings. Echoes of a poet whispering for over 100 years.

Note the unfortunate sequence for Cawein: 1912 loses home, 1913 Waste Land, 1914 death.

Or forms of the mind, an old despair,
  That there into semblance grew
  Out of the grief I knew?

I imagine the ghosts of Vachel Lindsay and Langston Hughes getting drunk on Vergil's blood in some metaphysical limbo swearing a violent end to all who forget forgotten poets. Madison emerging fearfully from the shade.

Madison Cawein (1865-1914)

Madison Cawein was a poet from Lousiville. Again, Wikipedia:

His output was thirty-six books and 1,500 poems. His writing presented Kentucky scenes in a language echoing Percy Bysshe Shelley and John Keats. He soon earned the nickname the "Keats of Kentucky". He was popular enough that, by 1900, he told the Louisville Courier-Journal that his income from publishing poetry in magazines amounted to about $100 a month. 

In 1912 Cawein was forced to sell his Old Louisville home, St James Court (a  2 1⁄2-story brick house built in 1901, which he had purchased in 1907), as well as some of his library, after losing money in the 1912 stock market crash. In 1914 the Authors Club of New York City placed him on their relief list. He died on December 8 later that year and was buried in Cave Hill Cemetery.

In 1913, a year before his death, Cawein published a poem called "Waste Land" in a Chicago magazine which included Ezra Pound as an editor. Scholars have identified this poem as an inspiration to T. S. Eliot's poem The Waste Land, published in 1922 and considered the birth of modernism in poetry.

https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/manuscript-of-t-s-eliots-the-waste-land-with-ezra-pounds-annotations

From The Atlantic: A Breath of Dust by Christopher Hitchens:

Cawein was as distant from Eliot, in poetic terms, as it was possible to be. He was a Kentucky blues man and a barroom versifier. However, like Eliot, he was fascinated by the Celtic twilight and the search for the Grail. And his verses, with their haunting title, did appear in the January 1913 edition of Poetry magazine. Since that very issue also contained an essay by Ezra Pound on the new poets writing in London, it seems more rather than less likely that Eliot would have read it.

Waste Land
by
Madison Cawein

Briar and fennel and chincapin,

  And rue and ragweed everywhere;

The field seemed sick as a soul with sin,

  Or dead of an old despair,

  Born of an ancient care.

The cricket’s cry and the locust’s whirr,

  And the note of a bird’s distress,

With the rasping sound of the grasshopper,

  Clung to the loneliness

  Like burrs to a trailing dress.

So sad the field, so waste the ground,

  So curst with an old despair,

A woodchuck’s burrow, a blind mole’s mound,

  And a chipmunk’s stony lair,

  Seemed more than it could bear.  

So lonely, too, so more than sad,

  So droning-lone with bees—

I wondered what more could Nature add

  To the sum of its miseries …

  And then—I saw the trees.  

Skeletons gaunt that gnarled the place,

  Twisted and torn they rose—

The tortured bones of a perished race

  Of monsters no mortal knows,

  They startled the mind’s repose.

And a man stood there, as still as moss,

  A lichen form that stared;

With an old blind hound that, at a loss,

  Forever around him fared

  With a snarling fang half bared.  

I looked at the man; I saw him plain;

  Like a dead weed, gray and wan,

Or a breath of dust. I looked again—

  And man and dog were gone,

  Like wisps of the graying dawn….

Were they a part of the grim death there—

  Ragweed, fennel, and rue?

Or forms of the mind, an old despair,

  That there into semblance grew

  Out of the grief I knew?

***

Say what you will, the notes are all there. Diapason. Cricket's cry, locust's whirr and the trailing dress ringing the liminal territories of Eliot's aesthetic. But Cawein's 1913 Waste Land creation cannot get around the enormous cultural dustbin of THE Waste Land in 1922. Likewise, the Jake Holmes' of the world own no coin in their dazed and confused corners. Ezra Pound sweeping, always sweeping, up the broken fragments. 

Now to see Sena Jeter Naslund sitting quietly in a dark closet of St. James court with a bottle of wine conversing freely with Madison Cawein, who stands in a a pool of blood. There's poetry to it. I care nothing for the screams of all the small creatures who were unseamed under the sygil of the Golden Bough. It's about the truth of language. Words like ashes bitter on the tongue. 

https://citydesert.wordpress.com/2014/01/03/extreme-hermits-the-anchorites/

Later in the night, I turn to the sad and desolate tale of The Stranger in the Woods: The Extraordinary Story of the Last True Hermit by Michael Finkel. [cf: http://laughingbone.blogspot.com/2016/11/the-paphlagonian-man-moon-was-minute.html ]. Simultaneously fascinated and irritated by the telling of a story told against the will of another. But then there is this:

During the Middle Ages, after the Desert Fathers and Mothers of Egypt died out, a new form of Christian solitary emerged, this time in Europe. They were called anchorites— the name is derived from an ancient Greek word for “withdrawal”— and they lived alone in tiny dark cells, usually attached to the outer wall of a church. The ceremony initiating a new anchorite often included the last rites, and the cell’s doorway was sometimes bricked over. Anchorites were expected to remain in their cells for the rest of their lives; in some cases, they did so for over forty years. This existence, they believed, would offer an intimate connection with God, and salvation. Servants delivered food and emptied chamber pots through a small opening. 

Virtually every large town across France, Italy, Spain, Germany, England, and Greece had an anchorite. In many areas, there were more females than males. A woman’s life in the Middle Ages was severely bound, and to become an anchorite, unburdened by social strictures or domestic toil, may have felt paradoxically emancipating. Scholars have called anchorites the progenitors of modern feminism.

Leading me, naturally, to the anchoress Julian of Norwich and her Revelations of Divine Love, which in a not entirely unexpected manner, offers slight ballast to the sickening yaw of Ahab's God-haunted madness.

Skeletons gaunt that gnarled the place,
  Twisted and torn they rose—
The tortured bones of a perished race
  Of monsters no mortal knows,
  They startled the mind’s repose.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/kristinakillgrove/2015/12/08/this-bone-provides-the-only-skeletal-evidence-for-crucifixion-in-the-ancient-world/#327f771c476d

And furthermore I saw that the sweet skin and the tender flesh, 

with the hair and the blood, was all raised and loosed about from the bone.

For this word was shewed for the bodily thirst: the which I understood was caused by failing of moisture. For the blessed flesh and bones was left all alone without blood and moisture. The blessed body dried alone long time with wringing of the nails and weight of the body. For I understood that for tenderness of the sweet hands and of the sweet feet, by the greatness, hardness, and grievousness of the nails the wounds waxed wide and the body sagged, for weight by long time hanging. And [therewith was] piercing and pressing of the head, and binding of the Crown all baked with dry blood, with the sweet hair clinging, and the dry flesh, to the thorns, and the thorns to the flesh drying; and in the beginning while the flesh was fresh and bleeding, the continual sitting of the thorns made the wounds wide. And furthermore I saw that the sweet skin and the tender flesh, with the hair and the blood, was all raised and loosed about from the bone, with the thorns wherethrough it were rent in many pieces, as a cloth that were sagging, as if it would hastily have fallen off, for heaviness and looseness, while it had natural moisture. And that was great sorrow and dread to me: for methought I would not for my life have seen it fall. How it was done I saw not; but understood it was with the sharp thorns and the violent and grievous setting on of the Garland of Thorns, unsparingly and without pity. This continued awhile, and soon it began to change, and I beheld and marvelled how it might be. And then I saw it was because it began to dry, and stint a part of the weight, and set about the Garland. And thus it encircled all about, as it were garland upon garland. The Garland of the Thorns was dyed with the blood, and that other garland [of Blood] and the head, all was one colour, as clotted blood when it is dry. The skin of the flesh that shewed (of the face and of the body), was small-rimpled with a tanned colour, like a dry board when it is aged; and the face more brown than the body. - Chapter 17

All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner [of] thing shall be well. 

And for the tender love that our good Lord hath to all that shall be saved, He comforteth readily and sweetly, signifying thus: It is sooth that sin is cause of all this pain; but all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner [of] thing shall be well. 

These words were said full tenderly, showing no manner of blame to me nor to any that shall be saved. Then were it a great unkindness to blame or wonder on God for my sin, since He blameth not me for sin. 

And in these words I saw a marvellous high mystery hid in God, which mystery He shall openly make known to us in Heaven: in which knowing we shall verily see the cause why He suffered sin to come. In which sight we shall endlessly joy in our Lord God. - Chapter 27


And back again to Eliot from Little Gidding, Four Quartets:

Sin is Behovely, but
All shall be well, and
All manner of thing shall be well.
If I think, again, of this place,
And of people, not wholly commendable,
Of not immediate kin or kindness,
But of some peculiar genius,
All touched by a common genius,
United in the strife which divided them;
If I think of a king at nightfall,
Of three men, and more, on the scaffold
And a few who died forgotten
In other places, here and abroad,
And of one who died blind and quiet,
Why should we celebrate
These dead men more than the dying?
It is not to ring the bell backward
Nor is it an incantation
To summon the spectre of a Rose.
We cannot revive old factions
We cannot restore old policies
Or follow an antique drum.
These men, and those who opposed them
And those whom they opposed
Accept the constitution of silence
And are folded in a single party.
Whatever we inherit from the fortunate
We have taken from the defeated
What they had to leave us - a symbol:
A symbol perfected in death.
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
By the purification of the motive
In the ground of our beseeching.

http://nypost.com/2014/01/17/lightning-breaks-finger-off-christ-the-redeemer-statue/

 I am darkness leaping out of light, leaping out of thee! 

“I own thy speechless, placeless power; said I not so? Nor was it wrung from me; nor do I now drop these links. Thou canst blind; but I can then grope. Thou canst consume; but I can then be ashes. Take the homage of these poor eyes, and shutter-hands. I would not take it. The lightning flashes through my skull; mine eyeballs ache and ache; my whole beaten brain seems as beheaded, and rolling in some stunning ground. Oh, oh! Yet blindfold, yet will I talk to thee. Light though thou be, thou leapest out of darkness; but I am darkness leaping out of light, leaping out of thee! The javelins cease; open eyes; see, or not? There burn the flames! Oh, thou magnanimous! now I do glory in my genealogy. But thou art but my fiery father; my sweet mother, I know not. Oh, cruel! what hast thou done with her? There lies my puzzle; but thine is greater. Thou knowest not how came ye, hence callest thyself unbegotten; certainly knowest not thy beginning, hence callest thyself unbegun. I know that of me, which thou knowest not of thyself, oh, thou omnipotent. There is some unsuffusing thing beyond thee, thou clear spirit, to whom all thy eternity is but time, all thy creativeness mechanical. Through thee, thy flaming self, my scorched eyes do dimly see it. Oh, thou foundling fire, thou hermit immemorial, thou too hast thy incommunicable riddle, thy unparticipated grief. Here again with haughty agony, I read my sire. Leap! leap up, and lick the sky! I leap with thee; I burn with thee; would fain be welded with thee; defyingly I worship thee!”

- Ahab, "The Candles."

Below the cross on Calvary, Golgotha, the threshold of pain, Adam's skull crumbling beneath, repository for his son's hot blood. Under the hill, the cross, the Serpent's cave. The Delphyne Python licking herself back to life with the red tears dripping down the white lightning roots. Awaiting Typhon. The Fall of Man begins Him back again.

I looked at the man; I saw him plain;
  Like a dead weed, gray and wan,
Or a breath of dust. I looked again—

23 Stamp Detournements From the Charles "Bonesy" Jones Digital Archive

The world’s darkening never reaches
to the light of Being.
We are too late for the gods and too
early for Being. Being’s poem,
just begun, is man.
To head towards a star – this only.
To think is to confine yourself to a
single thought that one day stands
still like a star in the world’s sky.

M. Heidegger, Aus der Erfahrung des Denkens

Towards the end of his life, Jones was fascinated by the idea of detournements. He described these as “appropriations of established images and symbols of authenticity re-purposed for play - especially, philosophical play.” These stamp detournements represent his efforts towards this end.

And death shall have no dominion.
No more may gulls cry at their ears
Or waves break loud on the seashores;
Where blew a flower may a flower no more
Lift its head to the blows of the rain;
Though they be mad and dead as nails,
Heads of the characters hammer through daisies;
Break in the sun till the sun breaks down,
And death shall have no dominion.

Dylan Thomas

Each of these images was created by Jones to function as an actual stamp. From 2003 to 2005, he mailed out hundreds of cards and letters with these stamps placed beside those from the U.S. Post Office. Many of the recipients never realized that they were receiving miniature works of transgressive art. We have digitally enlarged these here for exhibition purposes.

The moon, the stars dissolve. The mounting tide becomes a limitless sheet of water. This is the interval of a night of Brahma.Vishnu sleeps. Like a spider that has climbed up the thread that once issued from its own organism, drawing it back into itself, the god has consumed again the web of the universe. Alone upon the immortal substance of the ocean, a giant figure, submerged partly, partly afloat, he takes delight in slumber. There is no one to behold him, no one to comprehend him; there is no knowledge of him, except within himself.

Heinrich Zimmer

In much of his published work, there is frequent reference to the relationship between the word and the image. For each of these images, Jones had a particular selection of text to be associated with it: quotes from his own work and those of others, fragments of poems, sermons and epigrams. He insisted these were vital to accessing the “interior meaning of each image.”

Suppose the world were only one of God’s jokes, would you work any the less to make it a good joke instead of a bad one?

George Bernard Shaw, in a letter to Tolstoy

[ Tolstoy had criticized Shaw for his facetious tone in Arms and the Man, saying that one “should not speak jestingly of such a subject as the purpose of human life, the causes of its perversion, and the evil that fills the life of humanity today.” ]

It is interesting to note that much of the work from mid-2004 shows distinct difference from the earlier images: stamp edges are trimmed, the references are more cryptic, and certain obsessions are more apparent. This was the direct result of a severe head injury Jones suffered after being struck by a car. None of the later 2004 images were ever sent out. This is the first time they have been exhibited in public.

This selection of the Archives is on display at The Black Drop Coffee House in Bellingham, Washington through the month of March. 

Is there any place on land or sea where there is no war?... Blackout. Blackout. Blackout. Blackout. Everywhere people stumblin’ in the dark. Is there to be no more light in the world? Is there no place in this dark land where a man who’s drunk can find a decent bit of fun?

Aloysius Driscoll, The Long Voyage Home, drunken reflections on the war-torn world.

❂

Biographical Note

 

Charles “Bonesy” Jones (August 6, 1945 to November 15, 2005) was an American graphic artist, writer and poet. Reputedly born in Little Hope, Texas, much of his early life is shrouded in mystery and misinformation.

In 1962, Jones was graduated summa cum laude from the Steiner College of Ontological Osteology where he studied Legerdaemonic Epistemology and Allegorical Cetology. He then briefly attended the University of Oxford, but left after a dispute with one of the Dons over the Nature of the Hesychast Controversy. From 1965 until 1972 he lived in an international art colony north of Abiquiu, New Mexico, working as a abstract painter and a poet, receiving some money from his family. There, he carried out anthropological research with the Penetintes and was involved in several controversial crucifixions. In 1973, he traveled to Mt. Athos in Greece where he studied the teachings of Theophan the Recluse under the guidance of Archimandrite George, Abbot of Holy Monastery of St. Gregorious. He returned to the United States in 1983, settling in Austin, Texas, operating a small bookstore near the University for many years.

Just after the first of the year of 2005, Jones was struck by a car while riding his bike home one night. He suffered extensive head injuries. Shortly after, he began to experience selective retrograde amnesia and a progressive anomic aphasia (grammatic, but empty, speech). In October of that year, realizing he did not have long to live, he asked me to assist him in the journey back to his “spiritual
home.” He died beside the fire under the full moon of November 15th in the hills above the Chama River in New Mexico, not far from the Monastery of Christ in the Desert. His last words were: “In the end, these bones...” - as fitting an epitaph, at least to my mind, as any Japanese Death poem.

I knew Jones for almost 20 years. No one has had a greater influence upon my life. As much as he prepared me over the years for “the day the bones step out of the skin,” it still shocks and saddens me in every hour to realize that he is no more. The absence of his burning presence will haunt me for the rest of my days.

His tongue is like no other. It is the tongue of the basilisk, a hundred-forked and quick as flame. As it is written in the learned Nathaniel of Mainz: there shall come upon the earth in the time of night a man surpassing eloquent. All that is God’s, hallowed be His name, must have its counterpart, its backside of evil and negation. So it is with the Word, with the gift of speech that it the glory of man and distinguishes him everlastingly from the silence or animal noises of creation. When he made the Word, God made possible also its contrary. Silence is the not the contrary of the Word but is guardian. No, He created on the night-side of language a speech for hell. Whose words mean hatred and vomit of life. Few men can learn that speech or speak it for long. It burns their mouths. It draws them into death. But there shall come a man whose mouth shall be as a furnace and whose tongue as a sword laying waste. He will know the grammar of hell and teach it to others. He will know the sounds of madness and loathing and make them seem music. Where God said, let there be, he will unsay.

George Steiner, The Portage to San Cristobal of A.H.

❂

Artist’s Statement

The words that I have collected around these images are like vultures following the living presence into the desert. The language has no hope of feeding upon this flesh. My desire is that they will merely trail along behind the images, occasionally circling, never descending. They are not captions. They are not descriptions. They would not exist without the images. And the images will always endure beyond the predatory attempts of language to grasp hold of their manifold meanings.

Benjamin stated that “at the base of every work of art is a pile of barbarism”. If we are to take this as fact, then most of what is called art in our culture is mostly a radical turning away from the pile of bones at the barbaric base, in short: kitsch. As such, the range of response we might have for something as terrible as the death of God has become epitomized by a generic Hallmark card expressing sympathy through the a soft focus photograph of a kitten on a pillow.

Clearly, the vocabulary, the imagery, must be extended.

- Charles “Bonesy” Jones


 ❂

Just BAM! BAM! BAM! Shooting those skeletons all to pieces. But, you know, them bones don’t die. They just shake all around and run back together and make a skeleton again. I tell you, God was sure busy that day. See: they was all trying to tear God’s skin off and eat his flesh. Nothing skeletons likes better than Godflesh, you know? They teeth was all just a clattering with the thinking of eating God right up. Now, God was damn good shot, but he was running outta ammo. And them skeletons were clacking back together all around him. And things didn’t looks so good for the Old Man. That’s when I woke up. And I hear God saying to me: Bonesy! Get on out here to the Desert and gives me a hand. And that’s where I sure as hell went.

Charles “Bonesy” Jones

So this nun is leaving the rectory to go to the market to buy some food for dinner. She arrives at the fish market and sees the clerk there and asks him if he has any specials today. He replies with “Well, I have all of this Goddamn fish here to sell!” The nun replies with “Please, I am a nun, you should not use language like that with me.” He replies, “No, that is the name of the fish. It’s really good.” The nun decides to buy a few pounds and returns back home to the rectory. Later that afternoon the priest walks in, and asks, “What’s for dinner?” The nun replies, “Nothing special. Just some of this Goddamn fish.” The priest then expresses his displeasure at the use of God’s name taken in vain, and the nun explains the fact about the name of the fish. About an hour later, the bishop pops in and asks the same thing, going through the same steps as the priest just has. Afterwards, he also announces that the Pope will be stopping by for dinner on his way back to Vatican City. They all sit down to eat, and after the meal the nun leans back and says “That’s the best Goddamn fish I ever ate!” In turn, the bishop then exclaims, “that Goddamn fish was really good!” And, in like manner the priest then says, “I’ve eaten alot of fish, but this Goddamn fish is the best fish I ever had!”

The Pope, beaming, says to everyone, “I love you fucking guys!

The first question which you will ask and which I must try to answer is this, "What is the use of climbing Mount Everest?" and my answer must at once be, "It is no use." There is not the slightest prospect of any gain whatsoever. Oh, we may learn a little about the behavior of the human body at high altitudes, and possibly medical men may turn our observation to some account for the purposes of aviation. But otherwise nothing will come of it. We shall not bring back a single bit of gold or silver, not a gem, nor any coal or iron. We shall not find a single foot of earth that can be planted with crops to raise food. It's no use. So, if you cannot understand that there is something in man which responds to the challenge altitudes, and possibly medical men may turn our observation to some account for the purposes of aviation. But otherwise nothing will come of it. We shall not bring back a single bit of gold or silver, not a gem, nor any coal or iron. We shall not find a single foot of earth that can be planted with crops to raise food. It's no use. So, if you cannot understand that there is something in man which responds to the challenge of this mountain and goes out to meet it, that the struggle is the struggle of life itself upward and forever upward, then you won't see why we go. What we get from this adventure is just sheer joy. And joy is, after all, the end of life. We do not live to eat and make money. We eat and make money to be able to enjoy life. That is what life means and what life is for.

George Leigh Mallory, 1922

[Climbers who found Mallory’s body in 1999 believe he probably
died before he conquered the peak.]

 

And there on the table cut over with scar, like might have been the last place God lay his Sorrowfull Head, was… The Skull of God, Godskull. The Holy Fool sat down there cross from it, doing some hard thinking about Who Knows What. After a time, he reach out to it, turn it round and get damn near lost inside those empty eyeball holes. Figuring that had best get, he takes up the Godskull in his hands and with all his strength, lift it up to his lips and kiss thos cold white teeths. And, lo, it was that that Ole Holy Fool didn’t spook hisself some there and let the Godskull fall to clatter down upon that table.

Charles “Bonesy” Jones

"The Aleph?" I repeated.

"Yes, the only place on earth where all places are -- seen from every angle, each standing clear, without any confusion or blending. I kept the discovery to myself and went back every chance I got. As a child, I did not foresee that this privilege was granted me so that later I could write the poem. Zunino and Zungri will not strip me of what's mine -- no, and a thousand times no! Legal code in hand, Doctor Zunni will prove that my Aleph is inalienable."

I tried to reason with him. "But isn't the cellar very dark?" I said.

"Truth cannot penetrate a closed mind. If all places in the universe are in the Aleph, then all stars, all lamps, all sources of light are in it, too."

"You wait there. I'll be right over to see it."

Jorge Luis Borges

In Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love - they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.

Orson Welles as Harry Lime, from the film, The Third Man

The God that holds you over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider, or some loathsome insect over the fire, abhors you, and is dreadfully provoked: his wrath towards you burns like fire; he looks upon you as worthy of nothing else, but to be cast into the fire; he is of purer eyes than to bear to have you in his sight; you are ten thousand times more abominable in his eyes, than the most hateful venomous serpent is in ours. You have offended him infinitely more than ever a stubborn rebel did his prince; and yet it is nothing but his hand that holds you from falling into the fire every moment. It is to be ascribed to nothing else, that you did not go to hell the last night; that you was suffered to awake again in this world, after you closed your eyes to sleep. And there is no other reason to be given, why you have not dropped into hell since you arose in the morning, but that God's hand has held you up. There is no other reason to be given why you have not gone to hell, since you have sat here in the house of God, provoking his pure eyes by your sinful wicked manner of attending his solemn worship. Yea, there is nothing else that is to be given as a reason why you do not this very moment drop down into hell.

Jonathan Edwards, Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God

The poet may choose to be obscure in order to achieve certain specific stylistic effects. He may find himself compelled towards obliquity and cloture by political circumstances: there is a very long history of Aesopian language, of 'encoding' and allegoric indirection in poetry written under pressure of totalitarian censorship (oppression, says Borges, is the mother of metaphor). The constraints may be of a purely personal nature. The lover will conceal the identity of the beloved or the true condition of his passion.

It is the poet's aim to charge with supreme intensity and genuineness of feeling a body of language, to 'make new' his text in the most durable sense of illuminative, penetrative insight. But the language at his disposal is, by definition, general, common in use. Its similes are stock, its metaphors worn down to cliches. How can this soiled organon serve the most individual and innovative of needs? There have, throughout literary history, been logical terrorists who have taken the implicit paradox to its stark conclusion. The authentic poet cannot make do with the infinitely shop-worn inventory of speech, with the necessarily devalued or counterfeit currency of the every-day.

George Steiner, On Difficulty

Ich fürchte, wir werden Gott nicht los, weil wir noch an die Grammatik glauben.

[I fear we will never be rid of God as long as we still believe in Grammar.]

Nietzsche, Götzendämmerung

These cursed lips of mine, which dishonoured my Maker! O these cursed appetites and passions, and this obstinate will, which have wrought my ruin! This cursed body and soul, that have procured their own everlasting wretchedness! These thoughts will be like a gnawing worm within, which will prey upon the spirit for ever. The fretting smart arising from this vexatious worm must be painful in the highest extreme, when we know it is a worm which will never die, which will for ever hang at our heart, and sting our vitals in the most tender and sensible parts of them without intermission, as well as without end.

Isaac Watts

I was just a little kid when God took me down to the Boathouse and taught me how to catch the Big One. Pole, line, hook, sinker, bobber. And I caught a Big One. Sure did. And then God taught me how to separate the flesh from the bone. And what to do when they got all messed together. Sure did. And then I got lost in the world and forgot it all. And God just sat waiting down in the Boathouse for me to come back around. And finally, one fine day, I did. And then I understood what he had really taught me: that the Flesh was the Dream and the Bone was the Reality. I understood the fishing was languaging. The pole and line and hook and all were the grammar. I saw it all there of a sudden. And God sure was laughing at me that day. Sure was.

Charles “Bonesy” Jones

What Huxley teaches is that in the age of advanced technology, spiritual devastation is more likely to come from an enemy with a smiling face than from one whose countenance exudes suspicion and hate....When a population becomes distracted by trivia, when cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainments, when serious conversation becomes a form of baby-talk, when, in short, a people become an audience and their public business a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk; culture-death is a clear possibility.

Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death

He tasks me; he heaps me; I see in him outrageous strength, with an inscrutable malice sinewing it. That inscrutable thing is chiefly what I hate; and be the white whale agent, or be the white whale principal, I will wreak that hate upon him. Talk not to me of blasphemy, man; I’d strike the sun if it insulted me. For could the sun do that, then could I do the other; since there is ever a sort of fair play herein, jealousy presiding over all creations. But not my master, man, is even that fair play. Who’s over me? Truth hath no confines. Take off thine eye! more intolerable than fiends’ glarings is a doltish stare!

Herman Melville, Moby-Dick

Parvati once wanted to take a bath and created a boy from the dirt of Her own body, asking him to stand as a guard outside while She bathed. In the meantime Shiva returned home to find a stranger at His door, preventing Him from entering. In anger, Shiva cut off the boy’s head, upon which Parvati was stricken with great grief. In order to console Her, Shiva sent out His troops to fetch the head of anyone found sleeping with his head pointing to the north. They found an elephant sleeping thus and brought back its head.

Shiva then attached the elephantine head to the body of the boy and revived him. He named the boy Ganapati or commander of His troops, and granted Him a boon that anyone would have to worship Him (Ganesha) before beginning any undertaking.

From the Shiva Purana

In the pasture of this world, I endlessly push aside the tall grasses in search of the Ox. Following unnamed rivers, lost upon the interpenetrating paths of distant mountains, My strength failing and my vitality exhausted, I cannot find the Ox. I only hear locusts chirring through the forest at night.

Commentary: The Ox has never been lost. What need is there to search? Only because of separation from my true nature, I fail to find him. In the confusion of the senses I lose even his tracks. Far from home, I see many crossroads, but which way is the right one I know not. Greed and fear, good and bad, entangle me.

Kakuan

This is the last image in the collection. The source for it has not yet been found.

Written in hand on the reverse of a proof copy of the image:

“Sometimes this genius goes dark and sinks down into the bitter well of his heart - but mostly his apocalyptic star glitters wondrously.”

It was not noted by Jones but research has uncovered that this is a quote from a biography of the German poet Holderlin. It was also the passage underlined by the poet Paul Celan before he committed suicide.

❂

Legal Notice

Due to ongoing litigation between myself [Scot Casey] and the estate of Charles “Bonesy” Jones [Nora Boney, executrix], EST Case #19620319 TX, Boney v. Casey, I am hereby required to state that I am not in any way, shape or form representing any work from the Non-Digital Archives from the Estate of Charles “Bonesy” Jones - with the exception of Article #130N35 and the previously defined, “Desert Journals.”

It was the expressed will of Mr. Jones that the Digital Archive is under my custodianship and that I have full right to display and/or present any work from this archive in any manner that I see fit.

The Core Anagogical Allegory: Unpainted to the last

 

Extraordinary pictures show sperm whales hunting at the ocean surface off the coast of New Zealand.

It is perhaps tedious to beat a dead whale but Moby-Dick never ceases to fascinate me with the richness of its allegory. Essentially, I boil it down to these idiosyncratic axioms [all links, save one, go to the works of Charles "Bonesy" Jones on the Laughing Bone Website]: 

Moby-Dick is the Fugitive God, the ship is our system of belief that we use to find/hunt God, Ahab is the God-Haunted Man. And, as always for me, the Truth of Things is at the skeletal level. The Bone equals Reality. The Flesh is the Dream. We are all dreaming the Goddream.

With this in mind, here it is spun out before you as the Good News from the Master of All Who Hunt for God:

But these manifold mistakes in depicting the whale are not so very surprising after all. Consider! Most of the scientific drawings have been taken from the stranded fish; and these are about as correct as a drawing of a wrecked ship, with broken back, would correctly represent the noble animal itself in all its undashed pride of hull and spars. Though elephants have stood for their full-lengths, the living Leviathan has never yet fairly floated himself for his portrait. The living whale, in his full majesty and significance, is only to be seen at sea in unfathomable waters; and afloat the vast bulk of him is out of sight, like a launched line-of-battle ship; and out of that element it is a thing eternally impossible for mortal man to hoist him bodily into the air, so as to preserve all his mighty swells and undulations. And, not to speak of the highly presumable difference of contour between a young sucking whale and a full- grown Platonian Leviathan; yet, even in the case of one of those young sucking whales hoisted to a ship's deck, such is then the outlandish, eel-like, limbered, varying shape of him, that his precise expression the devil himself could not catch.

But it may be fancied, that from the naked skeleton of the stranded whale, accurate hints may be derived touching his true form. Not at all. For it is one of the more curious things about this Leviathan, that his skeleton gives very little idea of his general shape. Though Jeremy Bentham's skeleton, which hangs for candelabra in the library of one of his executors, correctly conveys the idea of a burly-browed utilitarian old gentleman, with all Jeremy's other leading personal characteristics; yet nothing of this kind could be inferred from any Leviathan's articulated bones. In fact, as the great Hunter says, the mere skeleton of the whale bears the same relation to the fully invested and padded animal as the insect does to the chrysalis that so roundingly envelopes it. This peculiarity is strikingly evinced in the head, as in some part of this book will be incidentally shown. It is also very curiously displayed in the side fin, the bones of which almost exactly answer to the bones of the human hand, minus only the thumb. This fin has four regular bone-fingers, the index, middle, ring, and little finger. But all these are permanently lodged in their fleshy covering, as the human fingers in an artificial covering. "However recklessly the whale may sometimes serve us," said humorous Stubb one day, "he can never be truly said to handle us without mittens".

For all these reasons, then, any way you may look at it, you must needs conclude that the great Leviathan is that one creature in the world which must remain unpainted to the last.

- From Moby-Dick:  Chapter LV: Of the Monstrous Pictures of Whales

 

Extraordinary pictures show sperm whales hunting at the ocean surface off the coast of New Zealand.

Thanks to Dave Walsh for the link.

My bones waxed old through my roaring all the day long

[ source ]

Reading through Power Moby-Dick, came across this reference to Isaac Watts in the Sermon chapter:

"The ribs and terrors in the whale...": This hymn is based on "Death, and the terrors of the grave," a hymn by Isaac Watts.

Of course, I looked it up and stumbled upon this passage, appropriate for this day of Our Lady of Guadalupe:

The worm that dieth not.

Let us begin with the first of these, viz. the torments which are derived from the gnawing worm, those agonies and uneasy passions which will arise and work in the souls of these wretched creatures, so far as we can collect them from the word of God, from the reason of things, and the working powers of human nature.

When an impenitent sinner is cast into hell, we have abundant reason to suppose, that the evil temper of his soul, and the vicious principles within him, are not abated, but his natural powers, and the vices which have tainted them and mingle with them are awakened and enraged into intense activity and exercise, under the first sensations of his dreadful punishment. Let us endeavour to conceive then what would be the ferments, the raging passions, and the vexing inward torments of a wicked man, seized by the officers of an Almighty Judge, borne away by the executioners of vengeance, and plunged into a pit of torture and smarting misery while at the same time he shad a most fresh and piercing conviction ever present, that he had brought all this mischief upon himself by his own guilt and folly.

1. The first particular piece of wretchedness therefore, contained in this metaphor, is the remorse and terrible anguish of conscience which shall never be relieved. How terrible are the racks of a guilty conscience here on earth, which arise from a sense of past sins ! How does David cry out and roar under the disquietude of his spirit ! Psal. xxxii. 3. "While I kept silence" and confessed not mine iniquity, " my bones waxed old through my roaring all the day long, day and night thy hand was heavy upon me, and my moisture is turned into the drought of summer:" and again, Psal. xxxviii. 4. "Mine iniquities are gone over mine head, as an heavy burden, they are too heavy for me." God has wisely so framed the nature and spirit of man, that a reflection on his past misbehaviour should raise such keen anguish at his heart; and thousands have felt it in a dreadful degree, even while they have continued in this world, in the land of life and hope.

But when death has divided the soul from this body, and from all the means of grace, and cut off all the hopes of pardoning mercy for ever, what smart beyond all our thoughts and expressions must the sinner feel from such inward wounds of confidence ! And it gives a twinging accent to every sorrow when the sinner is constrained to cry out, "It is I, it is I who have brought all this upon myself. Life and death were set before me in the world where once I dwelt, but I refused the blessings of eternal life, and the offers of saving grace. I turned my back upon the ways of holiness which led to life, and renounced the tenders of divine mercy! I chose the paths of sin, and folly, and madness, though I knew they led to everlasting misery and death. Wretch that I was, to choose those sins and these sorrows, though I knew they were necessarily joined together! I am sent into those regions of misery which I chose for myself, against all the kind admonitions and warnings of God and Christ, of his gospel and his ministers of grace! O these cursed eyes of mine, that led me into the snares of guilt and folly! These cursed hands that practised iniquity with greediness! These cursed lips of mine, which dishonoured my Maker! O these cursed appetites and passions, and this obstinate will, which have wrought my ruin! This cursed body and soul, that have procured their own everlasting wretchedness! These thoughts will be like a gnawing worm within, which will prey upon the spirit for ever. The fretting smart arising from this vexatious worm must be painful in the highest extreme, when we know it is a worm which will never die, which will for ever hang at our heart, and sting our vitals in the most tender and sensible parts of them without intermission, as well as without end [emphasis mine].

- The World to Come or, Discourses on the Joys or Sorrows of departed Souls at death and the Glory or Terror of the Resurrection, Isaac Watts

[ source ]

סֶלָה

[ for M.G. on her birthday ]

I'd strike the sun if it insulted me.

[ source ]

"Hark ye yet again- the little lower layer. All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks. But in each event- in the living act, the undoubted deed- there, some unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth the mouldings of its features from behind the unreasoning mask. If man will strike, strike though the mask! How can the prisoner reach outside except by thrusting through the wall? To me, the white whale is that wall, shoved near to me. Sometimes I think there's naught beyond. But 'tis enough. He tasks me; he heaps me; I see in him outrageous strength, with an inscrutable malice sinewing it. That inscrutable thing is chiefly what I hate; and be the white whale agent, or be the white whale principal, I will wreak that hate upon him. Talk not to me of blasphemy, man; I'd strike the sun if it insulted me. For could the sun do that, then could I do the other; since there is ever a sort of fair play herein, jealousy presiding over all creations. But not my master, man, is even that fair play. Who's over me? Truth hath no confines. Take off thine eye! more intolerable than fiends' glarings is a doltish stare! So, so; thou reddenest and palest; my heat has melted thee to anger-glow. But look ye, Starbuck, what is said in heat, that thing unsays itself. There are men from whom warm words are small indignity. I meant not to incense thee. Let it go. Look! see yonder Turkish cheeks of spotted tawn- living, breathing pictures painted by the sun. The Pagan leopards- the unrecking and unworshipping things, that live; and seek, and give no reasons for the torrid life they feel! The crew, man, the crew! Are they not one and all with Ahab, in this matter of the whale? See Stubb! he laughs! See yonder Chilian! he snorts to think of it. Stand up amid the general hurricane, thy one tost sapling cannot, Starbuck! And what is it? Reckon it. 'Tis but to help strike a fin; no wondrous feat for Starbuck. What is it more? From this one poor hunt, then, the best lance out of all Nantucket, surely he will not hang back, when every foremast-hand has clutched a whetstone. Ah! constrainings seize thee; I see! the billow lifts thee! Speak, but speak!- Aye, aye! thy silence, then, that voices thee. (Aside) Something shot from my dilated nostrils, he has inhaled it in his lungs. Starbuck now is mine; cannot oppose me now, without rebellion."

"God keep me!- keep us all!" murmured Starbuck, lowly.

- Moby-Dick, Chapter 36

A new white humpback has been sighted off Byron Bay on the east coast of Australia.

The newcomer, which was filmed by a television news helicopter, has excited marine scientists who think it may be related to Migaloo - to date, the only known all-white humpback whale.

Migaloo is somewhat of a celebrity down under. Why? "Because as far as we know, he is globally unique," said Professor Peter Harrison from the Whale Research Centre, Southern Cross University.

It now seems that Migaloo, (whose Aboriginal name means "white fellow") might have competition.

Although predominantly white, the new whale does have some black markings near its head and tail. So who is the newcomer?

A white calf was spotted with a normal humpback mother in Byron Bay two years ago. Experts say the new whale could be the offspring of Migaloo but further tests need to be carried out.

A record number of humpbacks have been spotted off the Australian coast this year on their annual migration north to their breeding grounds.

One thing scientists do agree on is that this second white whale has never been seen in these waters before.

- From New white whale spotted By Alison Feeney-Hart BBC News, Sydney

[ Thanks to J.G. ]

The Bones of Georges Perec Ejaculate 78,744 Times in Chapter 44 of Moby Dick

Moby Dick Chapter 44 or 6,618 times
Justin Quinn

From Moon River:

Chapter 44 or 78,774 times E is Justin Quinn's remarkable continuation of his transcription of Herman Melville's epic novel Moby Dick into the letter E. The body of work, a combination of graphite drawings on hemp and dry point intaglio prints repeatedly explore chapter 44 of the novel, called "the chart". In this chapter, Captain Ahab's monomaniac quest for the white whale is demonstrated nightly by his compulsive drawing and redrawing of nautical charts. By repeating a spiraling, swirling labyrinthian structure, Quinn places himself in the role of Ahab who continually redraws his charts which travel nowhere and only to go into themselves.