Death Cars and Foxes

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Originally this event happened around March 24th 2008:

Second fox sighting today: down by the sea at Point Fermin, the fox was sniffing round the tide pools as a snowy egret looked on cautiously. (7:03 AM).

I talked to some morning friends about the fox and the Merlin magic associated with him. Someone kind told me once that the real magic of the world rests in our capacity to truly hear others. Then just as suddenly the fox was up the cliff face and crossed over Paseo del Mar (the major street that runs along the ocean that is full of traffic here in San Pedro) over toward the park and the Korean Peace Bell. I was really happy to see the fox, and smiled with a woman who was astounded by the sighting; however I was scared shitless by the traffic.

I saw one man gunning his car and yelled out "Slow Down!" He turned round and proceeded to try to run me over as I crossed the street at Elanita (I think...). I made a dash for the curb and stood there, with my arms out. I didn't want to yell at him any more, but I wanted to be there with my hands held out wide. He pulled past me and looked back at me. He screamed out his car window at me, "shut the fuck up!" He was latin, with tattoos on his neck and a purple and gold Lakers hat on, a really scary man. I kept wondering what it meant with Merlin, and the real magic of the world being the capacity to hear others. Anyway that's what I guess I just found out about death cars and foxes,

Ideogram for the Future

Prologue to the Ideogram

The photograph of the ocean becomes itself an ideogram for the future archaeologists to contemplate as they work through our suffering of expression: that this civilization was based upon a need to survive.

The need to survive is a simple almost unobserved truth: like the use of the word "is" in a simple phrase of description: the world is good, the world is evil, the night is elegant, John is good, John is evil, the night is nice, John is nice.

But as we make our web-logs of this most unassuming fact that lingers in the back of each of us, waiting to corrupt any story we could tell could be answered with: "well, you needed to survive." It's really pitiful, it is a masterpiece how blunt and brilliant it all is, like a punch to the nose, and we hope to survive. What is this? Bare life? Just barely living? What is bare life if it forgets some long history or vale of tears, some lasting sentimental lament, some epic ode to our civilization? We carried this all up with us not to just be some shades coming to drink of the blood of Odysseus' sacrifice, shades in harrowing black shroud sails. What is this, bare life? Can I trust myself to you, bare life (whom I now address), that your next move in your innocence will not destroy me completely, irrevocably, utterly!

Epigram for a soliloquy: what is left when you sift these out: the lone speaker on the stage, feeling alone, the lone speaker speaks and augments himself, speak on lone speaker! Speak because you are tired and you suffering from all those who speak in this abyss: speak because you are tired of all the lying, weave the lie yourself for a while: speak as those lips or hands or eyes break into a song because they have not sung in a great while and finally you should burst forth with an ideogram, between your hurried web-logs of survival, survival, survival.

Part I: Prana

They almost reached that. The breath, I mean, transient and yet fleeting. As with the first Allegro of Schubert's 14th quartet.
Just enough of Walser to make a brilliance, just enough of a madman, just enough of a kind man sitting behind his trowsers, suspenders and clean white shirt. There on the edge of sensibility he traveled.
Traveling is like this, in the rolling conversation of green landscape.
But look we are in the big city now, and all around us department stores echo shiver and sheathe, the cry of a million dead laments, the ghosts of our once flourishing conversation languish beneath friendly signs of salesmen and the aching ceaseless unrest of the laboring sodium light.

"That hauls my shuddering shroud sail"

The moon breaks its course of existence, for a moment of pure pleasure and diversion, yes, let us see and maybe in that great maintenance....

I have been among the mountains of the moon when it is full, it is an uncanny sentiment, this Artemis who guides the winds that haul my shivering shroud sail,
Man in a dense black coat turns his back away, the five of swords in the Rider-Waite tarot, defeat and loss, one man impish, made of fire, master of his field holds three of them, two upon the ground. The point in fact the other two could pick up their swords and defeat him, maybe at the pyrric loss of one, that being the one sword remaining, the sword of strength: there is a chance if two of the three hold their swords and defeat this impish smile of knowing too well, of being the commander of the field.

That hauls my burgeoning shroud sail.

I imagine a blackness, a black flag of one's self, pure piracy, pure idiocy, pure wisdom
Upon those winds one sets out upon a voyage
Take to your ships, ye gentlemen
If the devil rules us here
Fight the bastard, fight and lose and win
Or haul out your echoing shroud-sail
And take voyage like the black wing of crow
Over the dim and tarnished vision of a vale
In a brass doorknob
The valley of sentimentality
The valley of anima attachment
The valley of the shadow of death
The valley of sorrows
Take wing on the clear wind that sails above the valley of smoke and toil,
And all your sorrows-
Take flight as a black winging thing
Black wing of yourself, O sing, with your blackened voice
Take flight over that valley, over the sea
To Helen of Troy
To fight another fight with good countrymen there
Aischros! Now there is the pity!
Causing shame, ill favored, abusive, disgraceful...
Ah but is this not what I would say
Traveling here
When I say I adore the party inside my head
And the threat of a madman to knock it all down
Is less possible than the party that's inside your head
You actually have a madman at that party
And he is coming in with a candle to light them to bed
And he is coming with a chopper to chop off your head!
No. Not me, I'm cool, calm, and collected
Laughing over here with a bunch of chimpanzees
It's the only way that will save me.

Part II: Animals

Be kind to animals
In the end that is all I could say
"you have only to let the small, soft animal of your body
love what it loves."
And everyone speaks and just about groans
About how these are easy words
But hard to follow
And it takes another twenty years to follow them
And during that time you forgot
That you were once a precious one,
That you once knew your way
Oh precious one, O babe!

The man in the eight of cups turns away
His shroud sail of red, the color of blood
The color of, well, menstrual blood
These ships sails a warning and a wounding
The blood of a circumcision,
Of more than one hymen-sail
Of more than one uterine lining
Has stained these sheets
And the purity of thought that stood behind them
The purity of thought is lost behind the red sails
Liars call liars liars
In the abyss of cynicism
The philosopher in hell is this, let us be clear
The philosopher falling without a ground
All because of the red sail
And all this fucking compromise!
The philosopher seeking desperately to be a good and honest man
But the honest man is long behind him,
Eradicated in the experience of human tormenting human being
Blown away by the howling cyclone of a wind
From the philosopher's falling
Such descent could last forever
But even in this descent of words
There is still a swerve
There is me looking up at you saying
I don't believe it is you that sees us in this life
But there you are anyway!

Part III: Comedy

All things can be comic with a swerve
And this comedy still saves us from the abyss. Der Abgrund.
Fathers abyss contains a lot of space and simply exceeds our limited mortality
But I am not yet ready to join the comic
I am not yet ready to just sit there and poke fun at it all
Maybe this is why I write, because some of me still takes this seriously

Part IV: The Impossible is just the Beginning

Yes, well you write until you expire
And then you will write no more.
Isn't that what ghosts are about?
These things in our being that make traces
Mists and ghosts
The mists of Avalon
Arthur rode on those mists
And that is how we begin our tale
Woven of the colloidal stuff of weeping regret and remorse
And he found the one sword.
Must have picked up his weapon
And defeated quite a bad man.
One part of him died, to be sure, there were two on one
One died and one lived to survive the battle of the good and evil side of he
One part hot, one part cold
One of them died in order to set him in this place
One of them did battle with a horrible opponent and lost
Another did battle with a horrible opponent
The master of his field
And won.
And that is Arthur.

Oh Arthur, hold your one sword: the sword of the king
Don't be shy, don't be timid Arthur!
Ride upon those mists!
Ride upon that impossibility, real suicide,
And the chance that out of our stories
Out of our dreams
Out of our fervent desires
You arrived on the other shore

Part V: Merlin, the Healer and the Abuser: The Cloak of Ouranos

Fox, beloved fox, you are there, aren't you
Tricky Merlin, force of goodness
Son of a fucking incubus!
How could such light come from such evil?
Merlin the magician, who called forth the mists for Arthur to ride upon!
The healing power of the universe
Is to listen and to receive through your magical ears
Indeed I love you, Merlin.
If in the end
You can turn your magick cloak
Of the moons and the planets, and all the stars
Turn it over to an aching emptiness that is so kind
Some of them call it "God."
I will love you, Merlin
If you will not abuse me with the Ouranos shroud
The shroud sail finally that is the cloak of all stars and the various nebulae of the heavens
Black holes and whirling gravity pools of negative matter
This scintillating and pulsating shroud

Part VI: Lament for the Terrible Hurricane of Abuse

I have seen too many boys abused in the process
Forced to copulate with the father
They become his bitch, somehow feminized toward him
And then they spend the rest of their lives on some macho trip
And then they do the same to their children
Thus the force of the abusive wind of Ouranos' shroud

The blizzard, the blizzard of the world
has crossed the threshold
and it has overturned
the order of the soul

"Go not gently into that good night"
All the words of all the poets tell us to linger
"Rage against the dying of the light"
But that the storm is coming

I have a feeling that there is a whole storm of ignorance and knowing that is about to wash over me. And I can only hang on and pray that there is solidity in a friendship, that we will stick it out for the longer ride. Isn't that what we do? We stick it out for the longer ride.

Part VII: Friends

Friends stay with the other friend in the boat, called onward, by the harrowing shroud-sail
By Artemis breeze.
OK, so innocence, drive me onward
After I propitiated thee with my own daughter
("the man is fucked! the man is fucked!" we, the Greek chorus all say half laughing and half crying with our faces in our hands, Agamemnon the master of all these people: "the man is fucked!")

Nobody will read this far in the insane web-log of my soul, of what i am saying because somehow I must write anew all that is me on some kind of electronic page, and burst forth with energy and intensity into a universe of half-empty bars and dingy pinball and cigarette machines. Cigarettes cost five dollars! I'll bet in five years they will cost us ten!"
Inflation will leave us a sad and sorry debtor nation, more than we already are.

Oh, maybe someone will read this far. As I come on thinking of all the anthropologists and the archaeologists of the future: five or ten thousand years from now... after five-thousand years more of people writing and seeking for some truth, and digging and narrowing out and hauling out five-thousand years more of this earth. Then will we say finally that we have given up digging? Will we in five thousand years finally give up the ability to dream? Of course it is a prison! Of course it is a perfect prison, as much of a punch in the nose as any close experience of reality can get. Reality is a punch in the nose. And you are lucky if you can walk away without it broken. No, reality is a breaking punch in the nose, one you see in the movies where the one man sends his fist all the way through the other man's head... Reality is like this. And that is a pretty dangerous place to have to at least consider and still live in a place where one even tries to be kind to his fellow man.

Part VIII: The Archaeologists of the Future

Will this be all we can truly say to the archaeologists of the future? That reality was a bloody punch in the nose, and we are lucky if we don't get our face caved in by this impact? All the churches, Notre Dame and Chartres... all the mysteries, all the symbols of all time in bronze in magical fire light, the magical fire which is the source of all our listening, that consumes us: the magical fire that consumes us.

All cultivation of civilization, of vitality beyond cynicism
All the final most beautiful verses of the Upanishads:
And enlightenment comes as a bloody punch in the nose?
The fop gets his nose bloodied
That's all there is
Raskolnikov waiting to deal another bloody blow
Now what a fucking idiot!
He gets to give me a punch and then run away and hide
Well so be it
I will take my punishment
And when he is trough
If I am still there, if I abide, if I survive,
Right there

This was not done in Jesus lifetime
To be able to see that humankind is filled
With so much good and so much evil
We focused on the compassionate man
We left the devil in the dust, we trampled him!
And in point of fact we flourished
We created greater and greater wars after this idea:
"the one holy and roman catholic faith"
"the one holy Islamic religion"
Our religions still were one, and so we had to take all others as the crushed souls
At the bottom of Shiva's toes: the vanquished one
And some of us still say "I am the vanquished one"
The impossible is just the beginning
And Arthur sets out upon pure mists of the old dragon?
And the fishermen set out in the middle of a storm on the red sea
And the impossible happened and we were awoken to the power of faith
That we could walk on water, that we could be still on the empty waters of oblivion and absorption
That we could ride over the bleakness of mortal suicide.
All this, this is at the threshold of our writing: that we must write to tell the story of how somehow we survived and lived to tell the tale of our existence.
That is all in writing: a survivor's tale:
From the empty books written in psychiatric clinics
To the stock market ticker-tape
To the poems set up to the terrible angels
All these just a part of the poem of our survival, that we survived a moment longer?

Part IX: The Magical Box: Beyond Survival

And what will these archaeologists say five-thousand years from now? When they read the obsessive logging of our survival: web-logs on cooking and puppy dog training, web-logs on how to do your taxes, web logs for dating services, web logs for philosophic contemplation of all these web-logs including (self-reflectively) even themselves. Web logs of ancient Chinese secrets: of gardens with forking paths: of red lacquered boxes with pages of manuscripts, with drawers that open and close, one dependent on another, in a sequence determined by some obscure and tantric mechanism in the box itself. Our mandarin box, with our Miraculous Mandarin, a terrible and un-dieing machine that keeps jerking out of it: Das Unheimliche, yes, well you know all that: this mandarin box, and yes the people who kept pulling the drawers open and writing their own sentences on all the lose pages that came floating down: some of the people, while in the midst of creating the web log of their survival encrypted the most beautiful ideograms of existence, a bold and brilliant calligraphy of everything and nothing.