Just off the phone and talk about a dream come true! The African-American oral history project of Carroll County, Maryland, now being realized by the great volunteers of the Carroll County Human Realtions Commission is attracting the notice of other organizations, including the NAACP! To document the largely untold history of African-Americans in North-Central Maryland, and to do it in the best manner possible–through video and voice tapes, from those who lived it and remember it,–is a necessity. I’m happy to say I’ve had a small part in this long-overdo work.
I look forward to meeting my friends again in March and rejoicing in what they’ve accomplished.
I’m fascinated by what I like to think of as the “drift” of information on the Internet. Posting an article on a website is a bit like casting a message in a bottle into the sea. Once in a while, I attempt to get a glimpse of where some of my bottles have washed up. Back at the turn of the century I posted some speculative articles about Fortean subjects. One was an article about a strange little book from the 1850’s titled The Illustrated Silent Friend. This book contains an airship story presented as an account of a true sighting. Chris Aubeck took the time and energy to get to the bottom of the story and reveal it for what it is: some early Science Fiction. I agree with Chris’ conclusions, and did so in print on this website. Google results for today brought up about 20 references to the article, including, near the top of the list, a link to my announcement about the story. On the other hand, at about the same time, I posted two articles concerning the similarities between Jane Lead’s visions and UFO abduction stories, and these articles seem to have created a minor industry on the web. One was even translated (without my name!) into German. Google brought up about 50 references, many simply reprinting the texts, but others using those articles to speculate on Joseph Smith’s visions, and the transports of other spiritual writers. Insterestingly enough, the premise has been adopted by a few commentators, who appear to have left me out of the equation! Chris Aubeck once again expressed interest in these articles and went ahead to make his own investigation into the matter. The best result, and the most surprising, was that I am referred to in print by a respected religious scholar in a book from Blackwell’s!
Two old chestnuts which I had dug up in the 1970’s, and published as fillers in the old Fate magazine in the 1980’s were also posted on the net at about the same time as those above. One involves a whistling humanoid from the 1830’s allegedly seen in Pennsylvania. This one has also appeared on about 25 different sites devoted to Bigfoot and other strangeness on the web, and was translated into German without my knowledge. (At least they kept my name, though they up-dated the sighting to the 1930’s!) “A Hint For Neglected Wives”–a small note about 19th century witchcraft in Wisconsin–has not done nearly as well with only two links registered by Google today.
Though I’m a fan of Amir D. Aczel’s books, this one didn’t quite gel for me for the simple reason that the author displays some bad reasoning as he presents a thin biography of the philosopher, while pointing out several possible connections between Descartes and the Rosicrucians. Quite frankly, there is no evidence that such a shadowy brotherhood of mystics and intellectuals actually existed outside of a few extant publications and hints in contemporary letters and journals.
In the earlier pages of the book Aczel speculates that the mystic and mathematician Johann Hartmann was a Rosicrucian, and then later in the narrative, we are given to understand that Hartman was definitely a Rosicrucian. In addition we are told that Descartes was in touch with him, as well as other members of the group, on which, through reasoning equally as specious, Aczel also confers membership. These points are simply asserted, and somehow in the retelling confirmed, yet Aczel’s major thesis, that Descartes shared with the Rosicrucians the understanding that mathematics was important, but that he diverged from them by applying math, not to mystical and Hermetic themes, but to nature itself, hinges on just such assertions. Yes, Descartes journeyed to various places at various times, and certain encounters could have happened there–but these rather shaky premises do not warrant such conclusions.
On an artistic level, the book also falls short. The Descartes we encounter in these pages has about as much life as a figure at Madame Tussaud’s. Leibniz, who also makes an appearance, is even more of a cipher (pun intended).
The mathematical portions of the book are of interest, yet once again I feel that Aczel’s conclusions do not follow the evidence. The secret notebook apparently contained an early version of Euler’s theorem applied to the Platonic solids. This heralded the beginning of the study of Topology. Yet Aczel, in his epilogue, seems to suggest that Descartes was somehow cognizant in a very modern way of the geometry of space itself–which, according to a theory posited by the cosmologist Jeffrey Weeks, takes the form of a tetrahedron, octahedron or dodecahedron. Though the conclusion is meant to tie everything together, and to cause a chill to run down the layman’s spine as in Carl Sagan’s “Billions and Billions!,” it simply appears to this reader to be a non sequitur. Simple assertion without evidence is not proof.
On the positive side, some of the legends about Descartes, though sketchily retold by Aczel, are fascinating. We see the gallant genius lying late in bed thinking away, we see him with foil in hand taking on the crew of a pirate ship as his manservant cowers behind him, we see him in love with a brilliant young woman, and then as a possible victim of poisoning in the drafty halls of Queen Christina’s palace. Then we finally see the grim geometry of the savant’s skull itself, displayed sans jaw, at the Musee de l’Homme in Paris.
Sat up late last night with three of my favorite minds while the rain punished the streets and dashed the balcony and everyone else slept on in the other room.
for including my brief review of The Lost Lunar Baedeker by Mina Loy in their Year’s End Reading Special a couple of days back. Interestingly enough Loy’s language is still shockingly fresh in this era when early Pound seems as quaint as an antique milk bottle and Williams as ever-present as potable water in G8 countries. Give me the latest news printed in blood on butterfly wings!
Cormac McCarthy has honed down his clipped, dialogue driven style to the curve and gleam of a deer rifle’s bullet, and has aimed it directly at a target roughly the size of a dime between the reader’s eyes. Bullets can be beautiful as a Brancusi sculpture if we look at them up close and they can be terrible as the Parsi’s Towers of Silence, blocking out moon and sun and casting long shadows if we hold them close to our eyes. This is what Cormac McCarthy has done with his two recent novels: No Country for Old Men, and now this parable of life in Nuclear Winter America, where everything that once meant something is gone and the only thing left is a father long on survival skills, but coughing his lungs out, bent over, hands on knees, and his beautiful son born after the bombs destroyed everything and set the dust in the air that keeps the sun away and sets a permanent chill over everything. The plots have become simple as the Book of Job, the philosophy as timeless as Ecclesiastes. In No Country for Old Man, there’s the initial entanglement with drug dealers, and an uncanny killer set loose like a plague of locusts on the West; the good guys, after doing everything humanly possible, manage to keep the inevitable at bay for the span of 200 pages, but the final verdict is bewilderment in the living, and abrupt certainties for the dead. The Road makes it even more plain: that part of human make-up that makes us act within the law and treat each other with dignity and respect, that smallest constellation of synapses that fire over and over in an arcane sequence that keeps us from being cannibals, or marching in squads through city and country searching out victims to rape, and villages to pillage, is–at best–conditional. And just like the classics that arose out of the long ago wars and rebellions and deaths of whole civilizations, Cormac McCarthy’s dark parables have now arisen from the moral uncertainties of the present time. They’re quick, clean cuts across the wrist, and The Road is his deepest cut to date.
Looking forward to this one for quite a while: a superb retelling of the great Japanese classic in language just right for the general reader. It should be one of our first for the New Year. Jess
Just in time for your New Year’s Eve celebration for 2007, a little close-up magic from Eileen Tabios, who leaves the stage and circulates among the tables where the Muses lean on their elbows and stare dreamily into space. “Dredging For Atlantis” (Ootoliths, 2006), is a slim, perfect-bound volume of erasure and found poems, which she calls her “scumblings.” I was immediately struck in the first part of this book by the lovely fragments she dredges up from the “body” of Mina Loy and arranges in powerful stabiles:
ARS POETICA
I am climbing a distorted mountain
…………………………………….the summit
s
u
b
s
i
d
e
s into anticipation of
……………………………………..Repose
“which never comes”
Or this fractured, yet still-working pseudo-syllogism like a rusted Model-T engine that kicks into life in the middle of the Gobi desert:
CONSEQUENCE
A breakfast of rain
……………………oil-silk umbrella
“Count stars for me”
Or this one, worth the price of admission alone:
FUTURISM
The truants of heaven
possess a startling velocity
All of which reminds me of that lovely song from The Tempest:
“…nothing of [Her] that doth change,
but doth suffer a sea change
into something rich and strange…” where the Her, of course, is Mina Loy, and the agent of change is the delicate “scumbler” Tabios.
The second and third sections of the book–”Somehwhat of a Childhood” and “Athena’s Diptych,” respectively,– present longer scumblings, and these draw from a wide range of sources. All of which indicates to me that Eileen Tabios has been ranging through the Western Canon with a magpie’s eye and a most refined set of tools.
The final goal of Tabios’ scumblings is possessing the past in the present, though it is a past that falls into fragments even as it rises up from the murk. Still, these fragments have a glittering life and fascination of their own.
For 50 P. or the Yen or Dollar equivalent, one may purchase a fine little card from West House Gargoyle Editions titled “Notes and Observations on John Taylor, The Water Poet.” by Alan Halsey. On one side is a fantastic 17th century engraving of a mnemonic device (if I’m not mistaken) of a doll-faced man with boots and spurs in place of hands and long, brush-fingered gloves for slippers striding through a collage of inverted castle and candle, horse with whip in hoof driving a porter’s cart, a black mouse contemplating a cat’s rear (with mayhem in mind?) and a black hare thinking ditto about another cat in mid-sprint. There’s a monk (or knight?) balancing on hands with feet against the bottom of a wheel barrow, which in turn is blancing on wheel, and a fish floating slowly through the air along with an eel, undulating right along through blue space. But this adorable card gets even better with what’s inside. I’ll only share three rare lines from this beauty bit, but what cheesecake to read, contemplate and pronounce out loud they are!
* * *
I know you know John Taylor a mechanical waterman
firkt Ferrited and finely fecht Fennor the Rymer ouer the coales
his Revenge to be transported ouer sea in a Cods belly and cast up at Cuckolds Hauen
his 800 bad debters curried or clapper-clawed with a Kicksey Winsey the Writer hereof…
* * *
I wish I had written “firkt Ferrited and finely fecht”! Or the use of clapper-claw (one of my favorite words since coming across it in Smart’s Jubilate Agno!)–no one else would dare, but good A.H.!
But the gifts keep coming folks, and in the same package we find “Shew-Screen Scenarios; Readings in the Angelic Texts of Dr. John Dee & Edward Kelley together with Dee & Kelley’s Celestial Handbook,” a fragmented, collapsed, reframed and refashioned compilation of Enochian visual poems in which a few of my own marginalia float past like the steam rolling up from a hot spring on a winter’s day. I only wish I had the skill to reproduce a few of these refashionings in this ahadadian blog. However, though these are unpriced, this 50 page selection of eye-goodies as well as information regarding other West House goodies can be yours if you query alan[at]nethedge.demon.co.uk. And you don’t have to sign away your soul at the nearest crossroads to have them, I’m sure.
Gargoyle editions (West House Books) has produced a little creamy sheaf of pages filled with five pyroclastic surges of fragmented discourse. It’s a wonder the paper doesn’t go up in flames with searing spurts like: “Room how saved for window box, still, cannot…” or “summer gone to earth on fallow earth hands…”! (Exclamation point, of course, is mine!) For more info. write directly to West House. Contact information elsewhere on this site. Jess
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