Ends and Beginnings

"A tongue of Knots." Or. "Ends and Beginnings."

Every flow of thought
connects to another flow of thought
as the words fall to symbolism
& as the symbolism bear to words-
-nothing is forgotten-
even when, through a process that
thinks itself anew, deems
we need forget,
We place ourselves atop a mound
so as to overlook that which
we've forgotten.
But as the wind erodes the earth
and our self-same spirit sweeps the dust
we come to see our forgetfulness
is but the remembrance of the past
made manifest so as to remind-
to recapitulate, to recollect, to reconnect
that from which all conscience does flow.












We are the fallen, the flock from the flow,
Our choice IS our choice, deeming a dip
below is our only chance to rise hallowed:

That is it-

To Believe we are not here to forget to remember-
              -but to forget, to remember.


Thanx to Melinda Pierce for helping me discover its title.

The Cercopes

 Cercopes

 

Also spelled Kerkopes

 (Pronounced with a soft c and than a hard c while stressing the penultimate)

 Were two mischievous, apelike, pigmiesh, knaves who in greek mythology stole Heracles' Bow while he was sleeping. Heracles then snatched up these bothersome knaves and slung them over his back where he got a good view of his rear.

Encyclopedia Article

Offers alternative stories involving Zeus

Offers the mythos that the Cercopes were warned of the black bottomed one

Good Old WIKI!


Luckily for the Cercopes brothers their mother warned them of "melampygos" or the "black-bottomed one".

 

While they were hanging over Heracles they noticed that he had an awfully tan ass and couldn't help but begin giggling like little school children will do.

Herakles, the big stupid oaf that he is, asks what is so funny, and because life's been so rough on our brutish hero he can't help but laugh!

Yet somehow Hercules can't seem to smile because he's scared that his skirt will rip.

NO! THAT WAS MY LAST SKIRT!

More About the Cercopes

The Meddlesome Duo often go by an assortment of names

Passalus and Acmon

Basalas and Achemon

Olus and Eurybatus

and

Sillus and Triballus

They are kids of Theia and Oceanius

My Bellow

"68. IN South Africa, "tradition always places the power of making rain as the fundamental glory of ancient chiefs and heroes, and it seems probable that it may have been the origin of chieftainship. The man who made the rain would naturally become the chief." -The Golden Bough, The Magic of Kings, Sir James Frazer, pg. 56

"88. There is no word in the Siamese language by which any creature of higher rank or greater dignity that a monarch can be described; and the missionaries, when they speak of God, are forced to use the native word for king." -The Golden Bough, The Magic of Kings, Sir James Frazer, pg 67

"190. If the high gods, who dwell remote from the fret and fever of this earthly life, are yet believed to die at last, it is not to be expected that a god who lodges in a frail tabernacle of flesh should escape the same fate. The danger is a formidable one; for if the course of nature is dependent on the man-god's life, what catastrophes may not be expected from the gradual enfeeblement of his powers and their final extinction in death? There is only one way of averting these dangers. The man-god must be killed as soon as he shews symptoms that his powers are beginning to fail, and his soul must be transferred to a vigorous successor before it has been seriously impaired by the threatened decay." -The Golden Bough, Death and Resurrection, Sir James Frazer, pg. 224-5

 "199. The explanation here given of the custom of Killing divine persons assumes, or at least is readily combined with, the idea that the soul of the slain divinity is transmitted to his successor."-The Golden Bough, Death and Resurrection, Sir James Frazer, pg 247

"There is probably no element of The Golden Bough that has become so familiar, or been so much exploited, as Frazer's theory of the Dying and Reviving God, or deposed and re-instated genius of fertility." -The Golden Bough, Dying and Reviving Gods, Additional Notes, pg 390.

The Egocentric man; that thing that believes he is the center from which things sprout, forgets that he is merely a portal through which all things may flow. 

IV.
Time and the bell have buried the day,
The black cloud carries the sun away.
Will the sunflower turn to us, will the clematis
Stray down, bend to us; tendril and spray
Clutch and cling?
Chill
Fingers of yew be curled
Down on us? After the kingfisher's wing
Has answered light to light, and is silent, the light is still
At the still point of the turning world.
-The Four Quartets, Burnt Norton, T.S. Eliot.

 Henderson and the Rain King in any mythological sense has been passed down to me by one "Rob Tatum." His name inscribed in red ink at the top of the promotional page on the inside of the novel at first gives nothing away. And as I'm going through with my green pen (I use colored pens religiously) I find that Mr. Tatum also has been using a green pen to underline key notes in the text; lines and notes I myself would have made. Thinking nothing of it I had set the book down (and pen) and gave myself up to dreams. Upon my next return to the novel I found Mr. Tatum was underlying in red. And how odd it seemed when peering up from the lines to my fist clenching the borders of the paperpack I myself also was holding a red pen.....

The Front artistry itself gives one the idea that Saul was supposed to write this novel with his last name "BELLOW" hanging over the top of a Lion and Henderson doing just that.

And I'd think that with the lines following that Bellow was stealing (as Thomas would have wanted) his idea of the desert directly from T.S. Eliot's Chorus's from the Rock:

                                                               "What have I done?"
"Shall I run back into the desert," I thought, "and stay there until the devil has passed out of me and I am fit to meet human kind again without driving it to despair at the first look? I haven't had enough desert yet. Let me throw away my gun and my helmet and the lighter and all this stuff and maybe I can get rid of my fierceness to and live out there on worms. On locusts. Until all the bad is burned out of me. Oh, the bad! Oh, the wrong, the wrong! What can I do about it? What can I do about all the damage? My character! God help me, I've made a mess of everything, and there's no getting away from the results. One look at me must tell the whole story."- Henderson and the Rain King, Saul Bellows, pg 49


"I say to you: Make perfect your will.
I say: take no thought of the harvest,
But only of proper sowing.
The world turns and the world changes,
But one thing does not change. In all of my years, one thing does not change.
However you disguise it, this thing does not change:
The perpetual struggle of Good and Evil.
Forgetful, you neglect your shrines and churches;
The men you are in these times deride
What has been done of good, you find explanations
To satisfy the rational and enlightened mind.
Second, you neglect and belittle the desert.
The desert is not remote in southern tropics,
The desert is not only around the corner,
The desert is squeezed in the tube-train next to you,
The desert is in the heart of your brother." -Choruses from "The Rock", T.S. Eliot

 All in all the likeness between the two and what one preaches and the other laments aren't uncanny. They are the same. Christ himself suffers the temptation of Satan in the Desert for fourty days. Desert, in the largest sense, represents Temptation (a word that owns banks for how much it says).

"432. Because it is possible to shift a load of wood, stones, or what not from our own back to the back of another, the primitive fancies that it is equally possible to shift the burden of his pains and sorrows to another who will suffer them in his stead."-The Golden Bough, The Transference of Evil, Sir James Frazer, pg 509

An odd, albeit brilliant idea arise when we taken into account what Eliot, as well as Frazer are saying; The desert, this thematic symbol stands not for an animate thing, but an inanimate thing that flows between us. Henderson's "I Want" drives him into the "desert". And what else is Temptation if not wanting after that which you need not? Henderson himself cries "I haven't had enough desert yet. Let me throw away my gun and my helmet and the lighter and all this stuff and maybe I can get rid of my fierceness to and live out there on worms. On locusts. Until all the bad is burned out of me. Oh, the bad!"

Oh The Bad, The Desert.

In the last 45 minutes of Apocalypse Now, Martin Sheen, the successor king (a Prince Mind you), after traveling through the desert of war to find Kurtz (The King he's sent to kill), he enters the Heart of Darkness to which we are first greeted by the Fool whom just as Shakespeare's character, sprouts out genius through a malnourished lens. Now, a mislead person may tell you the Fool's in Apocalypse Now or (more likely) Shakespeare are seeing pointless things: This is incorrect. Insensible.....partially. In the words of V. Sirin "to gain sense, first, we must go by a way of nonsense." But the fool is not the Prince, as the Journalist tangently expunges in his speech to the caged Martin Sheen; I believe Eliot says it best;

"....I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;
Am an attendant lord, one that will do
Too swell a progress, start a scene or two,
Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool,
Deferential, glad to be of use,
Politic cautious, and meticulous;
Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;
At times, indeed, almost ridiculous-
Almost, at times, the Fool."-The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

Eliot is referring to a deveiling (smoke in his poem) upon a gigantic level, something which Apocalypse Now merely treads its feet upon, but what I would like to point out is that Eliot himself has transcended to a mode of thought that likens him very much to the crazy Kurtz creature that we see in the film. Two things are of note; one being that the deveiling is not something sensible, and in not being sensible it presses him outside of the rational (though it is very much reasonable to those who've made such leaps of understanding) and due to the "unsound" methods he is placed outside of society in that he cannot communicate his methods, no matter how sound his results are; and two, his ascendance in knowledge places him where the primitives describe as a "king" or "god" and what the secular culture refers to either an eccentric, genius, savant, or lunatic (depending upon his achievements and social standing).

Inside the Christan Literary culture (do not mistake my for referring to any layperson you see wondering the streets or pews) is the idea that we achieve this level of ascendance not through ourselves but through God, or through the ordinance of the higher being. Eliot describes this idea of our subservience to a higher power that reaches to us first, and not in reverse with the lines

"Will the sunflower turn to us, will the clematis
Stray down, bend to us; tendril and spray
Clutch and cling?
Chill
Fingers of yew be curled
Down on us?"-Burnt Norton, IV, Four Quartets, T.S Eliot

Northrop Frye, A biblical Critic who believes he has unraveled the code to digesting the bible explains that Jacob's Ladder is argumentative proof of this: (remember that we do not dream, but dreams pass through us)

"And he dreamed, and behold, a ladder set up on the earth, and the top of it reached to heaven: and behold, the angels of God ascending and descending on it."

Frye speculates correctly that "The ladder of the dream was a ladder from heaven rather than to it: it was not a human construction but an image of the divine will to reach man." William Blake raps it up more precisely (and if you have the time to read his entire No Natural Religion I insist you do) in his description of the man who see the flow of the universe (Kurtz, Hamlet, Ecclessiastes) compared to him that sees only minutely:

He who see the infinite in all things sees God. He who sees the Ratio only sees himself only---Therefore God becomes as we are, that we may be as he is. -No Natural Religion, William Blake

These arguments collectively assert that this ascendance, or lunacy, this escape out of the desert through the depth of the desert, is only possible through a higher power. There is, of course the other side of the argument: What the Bible refers to in The Tower of Babel in Genesis, and what Harold Bloom describes as the Anxiety of Poetic Influence; Poetic Influence being the higher power which the poet tries to ascend to and the anxiety being parallel to the rabbling of tongues.

 Bloom, a non-conventional Jew, and Frye himself a scholar critic as well as ordained pastor in Christianity both have deep roots on the bible; but as for the new testament, Bloom won't touch the thing, which is his downfall. Bloom's entire essay (the Anxiety of Influence, which is brilliant) hinges on the fact that the poet is leeching from prior poets (Eliot himself says "immature poets imitate, mature poets steal" and is referring to stealing conventions, not re-digesting) to create his own retelling, revision of what's been said. Bloom, who understands that a great poet is on its way decides to in fact disregard (if not slap in the face) Frye's own assertion which we will get to in a moment once I've let Bloom's words speak for him:

    "Poetic Influence--when it involves two strong, authentic poets,--always proceeds by a misreading of the prior poet, an act of creative correction that is actually and necessarily a misinterpretation. The history of fruitful poetic influence, which is to say the main tradition of Western poetry since the Renaissance, is a history of anxiety and self-saving caricature, of distortion, of perverse, willful revisionism without which modern poetry as such could not exist.

     My own Idiot Questioner, happily curled up in the labyrinth of my own being, protests: "What is the use of such a principle, whether the argument it informs be true or not?" Is it useful to be told that poets are not common readers, and particularly are not critics, in the true sense of critics, common readers raised to the highest power? And what is Poetic Influence anyway? Can the study of it really be anything more than the wearisome industry of source-hunting, of allusion-counting, an industry that will soon touch apocalypse anyway when it passes from scholars to computers? Is there not the shibboleth bequeathed us by Eliot, that the good poet steals, while the poor poet betrays an influence, borrows a voice? And are there not all the great Idealists of literary criticism, the deniers of poetic influence, ranging from Emerson with his maxims; "Insist on yourself: never imitate" and "Not possibly will the sou deign to repeat itself" to the recent transformation of Northrop Frye into the Arnold of our day, with his insistence that the Myth of Concern prevents poets from suffering the anxieties of obligation?"-The Anxiety of Influence, Clinamen or Poetic Misprision, Harold Bloom, pg 31, 2nd ed.

Bloom argues, what I've come to speculate, that the reason he has written such a principle, let alone an essay of criticism, is to pave the way for the next great poet. He does this while simultaneously asserting that Northrop Frye's Myth of Concerns (the culmination which we've partially discussed earlier and would be lunacy to explain in its fullest) is not the answer to the next great poet, the next Shakespeare; the poet from which all western anxiety of Poetic Influence extends according to Bloom. He even goes so far as to explain why Frye believes his Myth of Concerns prevents poets from suffering the anxieties of obligation saying

Against such idealism one cheerfully cites Lichtenberg's grand remark: "Yes, I too like to admire great men, but only those whose works I do not understand."-same, Harold Bloom, pg 31, 2nd ed.

This in itself points towards why critics believe Harold to be an arrogant bastard. He implies that Northrop Frye along with these other Idealist do not understand when in fact it is himself that understands not the common ground which Frye and Himself hold.

              I propose that the anxiety of influence with Bloom speaks of is the subservient spirit of these men striving for that which has not divinely manifested itself to them, and through no fault of their own they have tried to whittle from the past poets a mature production of their art which is merely a misprision. Bloom speaks of how "our current and future poets have only the consolation that no certain Titanic figure has risen since Milton and Wordsworth, not even Yeats or Stevens" leaving room for the anti-statement that in fact their will rise a new Titanic Poet. I propose that the Myth of Concerns that Frye speaks of does not "prevent poets form suffering the anxieties of obligation" but that it in fact it CAN prevent a poet, or poets from suffering the anxieties of obligation in that the doors of perception it opens when studied and loved leave not only poets but life itself naked to its eye. I propose that Frye's Myth of Concerns is the anxiety of Bloom's The Anxiety of Influence and that both were small stepping stones, attendant lords to a much greater picture. All this great poet has to do now is kill silent William.

Test # 2 Note

1. The Periedes are transformed into Magpies
2. What did Scylla steal from her dad? Purple hair
3. How did Daedelus trap the minotaur? The labyrinth
4. How did Theseus find his way out of the labyrinth? Twine from Ariadne.
5. What was on Europa’s Basket? The story of Io’s rape
6. How did Shakespeare out do Ovid in grotesqueness? Levenia’s hands were even cut off.
7.  Mythological animal from Flannery O’Connor’s Greenleaf? Bull

What is all mythology? Bull (for you shaman)

8. Where was Adonis struck by the boar? Groined
9. What mythic rule did Proserpina break? She ate a handful (seven in some tellings) of pomegranates
10. Why are there seasons? Proserpina ate while in the underworld
11. In Cadmus and Harmony what are the 3 stages?
1. Conviviality
2. Rape
3. Indifference
12. One of the few stories in Ovid with a happy ending? ( I said Io and Jove, but apparently becoming a god doesn’t cover up becoming a cow first:) Pygmalion
13.  “We shall not cease from exploration and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.”
14.  According to Sexson, Ovid is telling us that the task of the artist is to alter nature.
15.  What is the difference between Arachne and Minerva’s tapestry? Minerva’s displayed the “state sponsored art” while Arachne weaved the gods as invasive criminals
16. How did Hercules die? Chunks of Flesh.
17. What did Venus turn Adonis’s blood into? Anemone Flower.
18.  According to Homer’s Odyssey, why do we suffer? So the poets have something to write about.
19. Ekphrasis- Velazquez and the Titian paintings (art within the art)
20. Corin’s parents- tom and Christine…or is it Timothy and Jody…..
21. What’s Hercules’ wife’s name? Dianera (diarrhea…)
22.  What is the Mythological Ideology of the Cornucopia? Hercules rips Achelous horn off.
23. Centaur who abducts Hercules wife? Nessus
24.  What does sleep represent to Eliade? Imprisonment and amnesia
25.  What was the fate of Icarus? Drowns (He ended up in a painting)

Noteworthy

Read Eliade Chapter 9 Again

View Dusty, Charismatic Kari, Alexa’s, and Sarah’s blog

Make sure you have your I minute myth ready by the 16^th

Review over old test material

Brush up on your Frazer

Watch Apocalypse Now

On hearing Dusty mention the myth of the eternal return

"It is said an Eastern monarch once charged his wise men to invent him a sentence to be ever in view, and which should be true and appropriate in all times and situations. They presented him the words: "And this, too, shall pass away.""~ Abraham Lincoln

We ask the same questions

And receive the same answers;

The spirit always the same

The wording always different

The same picture perceived

But as a puzzle fills

     In only as the riffs in the sea allow

So does our perception drift upon

     The waves of table cloth and canvas

           Similar are we to children playing Atlas,

Holding the world as fingers feel fit,

  If only to kneel and see our

       Sky dissolve into an azure pane

           Where cloth and canvas are too much the same.

      Thus the piece does not fit.

          We draw back idol fingers; we quit.

      The water and the sky are too much the

           Same;

      Our small minds only see prettily

           Till the horrific rips wide sleepy eyes;

       What was one becomes two.

       (Oh if only then we knew)

II.

We return on a snowy night in April

  To a closet of Blankets and Boardgames

    And we set next to the windowpane

       That very puzzle that always left a complaint.

    The seasons pass, the white hairs grow

    The cabinets become clogged and

    A wintered wife’s complaint drags into a row

                 A crisis we all know

                 Though seldom see.

    “ This needs a closet cleaning!

       This needs a reawakening!”

        Her spirit translates

        What her words relate.

And as the pushbrooms and gloves

Come upon the hands, the hearts of these two loaves,

And as the mothballs roll down the hall

As they fall from an upturned broomsweep

Of cobwebs (nature’s crow’s feet)

And as the women who is bent bends to

A Sky beneath the cabinet filled for tea,

She picks up the Blue puzzle piece

And sees an abysmal repeat of whence

She was young; straight; when all seemed

                                                 At peace.

“Stop that racket”

And the Husband stopped

His ‘crack clack cracking’

And turned to see eyes aglow

That he scarcely remembered;

        As if he’d never known.

“Where is the puzzle that fits this piece?”

“Oh throw it away Suzanna! We don’t need

  Another game at the age in the least!”

“But I do need the absolution!

  I need the freedom,

  I need to know how these

  Edges meet in a crease!”

(“For my own skin is a parchment

   Fading fast, a simple portal

   That holds nothing immortal

   I’m a dead bag of bones

   That is stuck in her old house.

   Oh! How this home feels so alone!")

To her stature the old man cowers.

She has Spent her Spine to that of a Serpent,

And a simile would seem him to her prey,

He himself knelt upon knobbly knees;

   A prey in prayer,

   Oh man in this dream;

Especially this old horse in his

                              Nightmare.

To awake the new in the Old

     Is the only thing we know,

           The only thing we knew.

And what we see as children

Shall our mind see again

When the sky and sea fall apart

If only to de-scene-agrate.

……..

When a picture become whole

A hole rips wide and our eyes

See again, as before the dim

                      -But with the dim-

      

        (Where the desolation and

                     condensation

                  Are two but one.)

Nevertheless this is a wordy

                              Regression,

And though the spirit,

Our spirit learns the lesson,

Our eyes must return to the

       Present for its present.

It's for the birds

I've been watching this over and over and over again. Be warned that it is extremely crude and explicit but considering we are reading Ovid's Metamorphoses and people are being ripped limb for limb you can all handle it.
The name of the movie is reservoir dogs- strangely comparable to pool dogs-Acteaon's Dogs......
But what I would like you to point out for anyone that has seen the movie is that the entire movie happens twice; once in this opener, and again throughout the movie. That is, the same spirit behind what happens, happens in both. everything connects, and I'm not quite sure how to point it out yet, but the reason I noticed this is because of the line by Steve Buscemi where he calls tipping pregnant women is "For the Birds". I immediately thought of the constant transformation of people into birds because they spread trivial gossip that changes things even when it doesn't have any effect-merely a change of perspective.....I'm rambling on....more later.