two fish

Why did the band Harvy Danger decide to release their entire September, 2005 album, Little By Little, for free P2P distribution and download, on the net? Read the full statement here. The precis begins:

Why we’re releasing our latest album for free on the Internet

In preparing to self-release our new album, we thought long and hard about how best to use the internet. Given our unusual history, and a long-held sense that the practice now being demonized by the music biz as “illegal” file sharing can be a friend to the independent musician, we have decided to embrace the indisputable fact of music in the 21st century, put our money where our mouth is, and make our record, Little By Little…, available for download via Bittorrent, and at our website. We’re not streaming, or offering 30-second song samples, or annoying you with digital rights management software; we’re putting up the whole record, for free, forever. Full stop. Please help yourself; if you like it, please share with friends.

Of course, the CD will also be for sale on the site, as well as in fine independent record stores across the country, in a deluxe package that includes a 30-minute bonus disc that serves as a companion piece to the record proper (retail price for the package is $11.99).

We embark on this experiment with both enthusiasm and curiosity—and, ok, maybe a twinge of anxiety. Why are we doing this? The short answer is simply that we want a lot of people to hear the record. However, it’s important that people understand the free download concept isn’t a frivolous act. It’s a key part of our promotional campaign . . .

Also of note,

Tanya Andersen, a 41 year old disabled single mother living in Oregon, has countersued the RIAA for Oregon RICO violations, fraud, invasion of privacy, abuse of process, electronic trespass, violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, negligent misrepresentation, the tort of “outrage", and deceptive business practices, Ms. Andersen’s counterclaims demand a trial by jury. (List of 65 allegations against the RIAA follows, in original article)

(As reported by isohunt:) This follows another recent US court ruling that mum can’t be held responsible for 13-year old daughter’s file sharing. While the RIAA’s lawsuits to protect its copyright is not “illegal” and are within their right (under laws they lobbied for), perhaps this case will shed some light on their extortionist behaviour.

           Moog Modular

Thank you Robert Moog!

Moog died today, age 71. In rememberance, the beginning of a piece on Moog (rhymes with ‘vogue’) published April, 2000 in salon.com.

Robert Moog
His invention had an extraordinary impact on how musicians create, and radically changed the way music is made.

By Frank Houston

In the 1920s a Russian inventor named Leon Theremin unveiled the first purely electronic instrument. You played the theremin by waving your hands in the vicinity of two metal rods, controlling pitch and volume, that were attached to a nondescript wooden cabinet. Between the strange arm motions and the instrument’s invisible machinations, the theremin’s overall effect in performance was theatrical and mysterious.

But like the 200-ton telharmonium, the world’s first mechanical music synthesizer (invented by Thaddeus Cahill around 1900), the theremin was difficult to play. In 1955, four years after the theremin’s eerily weepy sound was employed in “The Day the Earth Stood Still,” RCA introduced the first modern synthesizer. The machine made sounds by manipulating electrical waves to denote timbre, pitch and volume. Like early computers, it filled a room and was tended by men in lab coats.

Moog Sonic 6

A few years later Robert Moog, a graduate student in physics at Cornell University, published a magazine article explaining how to build a theremin, offering do-it-yourself kits for $49.95. Orders poured in, and Moog sold 1,000 that year. “We had $13,000 in the bank,” he recalled recently, “a humongous cache of wealth for a graduate student back then!” The windfall enabled a career that helped bring electronic music out of the realm of novelty acts and university labs. A decade after the first RCA machine, Moog introduced the first widely adopted electronic instrument – the synthesizer that bears his name.

When Moog (rhymes with “vogue") unveiled the Moog music synthesizer in 1965, his engineering skills combined with a bit of business luck to radically change the way music was made. Synthesizers went from being computers to instruments that could be found in any music store. The flowering of rock music may have come via Leo Fender, Les Paul and the Gibson Guitar Co., but the innovative music of the early 21st century owes far more to Moog and his imitators and successors.

Mini Moog

After getting some exposure to the liberal arts at Columbia University’s Engineering School, Moog began graduate education in the engineering physics department of Cornell University. He took eight years to get his Ph.D., largely because of his part-time hobby: building theremins and other electronic instruments. The degree came in 1965, a year after Moog launched his synthesizer business. Moog built his synthesizer in 1964 after a composer told him about the need for user-friendly electronic instruments utilizing new solid-state technology. The Moog was modular: You used patch cords to select your waveform (the sound’s timbre) and frequency (pitch), and plugged in the interface – a keyboard, instead of the binary code on paper that had defined the first RCAs. Moog’s engineering wizardry did the rest.

Significantly, Moog’s was the first synthesizer to use attack-decay-sustain-release (ADSR) envelopes, set with four different knobs, which control the qualities of a sound’s onset, intensity and fade. Like many of his designs, Moog’s envelope generators became a basic component of later synthesizers. . . RCA synthesizers, intended for an elite market of labs financed by universities and record companies, had cost $100,000 and up. In 1967 the new Moog sold for $11,000. It wasn’t the only synthesizer around; many experts also commend Donald Buchla’s modular synthesizer, built around the same time. But the Moog became prized for its utility and elegance, making Moog the name that brought synthesized music to the masses.

The Moog’s biggest break came in 1969, when musician Walter (now Wendy) Carlos had a huge, Grammy-winning hit with “Switched-on Bach,” . . . The Beatles introduced a new Moog in the majestic “Because,” on “Abbey Road,” . . . In 1971, Carlos brought the Moog to cinema, scoring Stanley Kubrick’s “A Clockwork Orange” with electronic Beethoven [she also scored The Shining, and played Moog synths for TRON] . . .

The synthesizer also boasted the voltage-controlled lowpass filter that came to be known as the Moog filter, capable of making a variety of full horn, string and vocal timbres. The filter was patented in 1968, much to the envy of the competition, who “ate their hearts out,” Moog says. They “all came up with voltage-controlled lowpass filters, but most of them sounded like shit, if I do say so myself.” . . .

         
Wendy Carlos & her circa 1971 Moog studio

Robert Moog

     Halfway squared equals twice back to zero. Primordial rhythms surge against the neonate. Blue hall, blue wall, blue crystal ball. I don’t know yet what I am. Always returning, resurging, resurgence. Gathering documents from an internal realm. Ali Akbar Khan showed his tabla player how to become more powerful, how to pulse with a new beat in the midst of metaphysical ecstacy. Damaged hands re-enact helplessness.

Past life):

     I sit there with my fallen self, heiroglyphic belt trapped outside. Dark tall cell, golden wall, window-slit of light above. The room is a three-dimensional trapezoid. A woman dances in red on a stone-covered courtyard. Children with golden halos, around their small heads. Was it a priest, lost them

         –  remainders .

I believe philosophy

is only

as liberating

as is its ability to free

our imaginations.

   Dying Hope

You’ve been dreaming of this moment all your life. An entire city and its beleaguered citizens are in desperate need of heroes. You have the powers. You have the talent. You have the heart. You are a hero.

Dual Identities & Anonymity

Dual identities and anonymity can be found in modern day comic book heroes. Some would say that their masked identity intrigues us because we want uncommon heroes with virtues and powers we only dream of; that like the Greeks and Romans, we must have our minor gods too, even if belief in them sprouts only in the entertainment of our imagination. However, it is possible the real appeal of these dual-identity heroes is something else. . . we have an opportunity to imagine ourselves in yet another role. And since nobody is supposed to know who the masked one is, it is easy to believe for the moment it could be us. (The Ant/Henry Pym)

Avatar Lawsuits

Is it a violation of copyright to make up a character in the virtual world or is that fair use? This is really untested ground in the courts.

Fishes of Iraq: Aspius Vorax

It’s been a long time since posting here. 2fish hasn’t been on vacation, just a temporary haitus in blog activities. We’ve received a few kind comments on the blog, not very much active communication. 2fish isn’t all that personal, chatty, political, rebarbative, musical, pop-cultural, technological, or relevant in any direct, applied sense, your response is perfectly understandable. People have various reasons for blogging – CNN just did a report, BBC News made a statement, and there’s more on the issue: Freedom and democracy. 2fish exists merely because it can.

No, American soldiers in Iraq don’t spend all of their time bird watching. They also fish. That’s SPC Mauro above. He’s holding what is essentially a great big minnow.

New Forums, Freer Communities?
A problem faced by bloggers in non-democratic societies like Iran and China is that these governments not only block web content they find threatening, but authors of politically critical content can and do go to jail. The Global Voices movement is committed to helping citizens in such countries achieve greater freedom of speech on the net – or at very least, helping them get around government filtering and evade arrest for speaking their minds in cyberspace. Chinese bloggers like Isaac Mao hope members of the Global Voices movement will help him and his compatriots develop more sophisticated blogging tools in order to make speech “safer.” One possible idea is to combine blog-publishing with online social networking, so that more controversial blog posts are published only to groups of trusted peers. “Today’s blogging is not a very mature format,” says Mao.

Despite the challenges, China now has over half a million bloggers, blogging in Chinese on Chinese servers and ISP’s, using local-language blog tools including one that Mao developed. In order to stay out of trouble, Chinese blog hosts censor their users and users censor themselves. Even if censorship were loosened or if it became easier to circumvent it, Mao does not believe that freer speech in Chinese cyberspace will spark a democratic revolution. But at a time when the Chinese government has been cracking down on more reformist viewpoints in newspapers and books, the blogosphere does offer a new alternative forum for idea-sharing, personal expression and community building.

Then there are the challenges of the digital divide in places like Africa. Kenyan blogger Ory Okolloh doesn’t expect Africa to be transformed by blogging any time soon. Bridging the digital divide is perhaps the least of Africa’s many problems. Nonetheless, she thinks blogging is important – if not transformative – for the small number of Africans who do blog. “For young people, we have not been heard, we don’t have a space in Africa within politics or in other arenas to express ourselves.

2fish is looking for heroes and stories relating the heroic. If you have a compelling story to relate, please send it to twofish[at]iyume[dot]com, we hope to disseminate.

In these days of haste, you may not want to waste your time reading the merely superb; what you want is the superlative. You need it – ya gotta have it. Whaddaya do, comb through the LRB, the NYT, the ABR, the NYRB? Rely on bestseller lists? Admirable as Adam Ant, yet why not have a quick go at Harold Bloom’s contemporary writer short list: cut to the chase.

Compendia Courtesy of Wikipedia

Bloom’s association with the Western canon has provoked a substantial amount of interest in his opinion concerning the relative importance of contemporary writers.

In the late 1980s, Bloom told an interviewer: “Probably the most powerful living Western writer is Samuel Beckett. He’s certainly the most authentic.” Beckett died in 1989, and Bloom has not suggested who occupies that position now.

Concerning British writers: “Geoffrey Hill is the strongest British poet now active,” and “no other contemporary British novelist seems to me to be of Murdoch’s eminence.” Since Murdoch’s death, Bloom has expressed admiration for novelists such as John Banville, Peter Ackroyd, Will Self, and A. S. Byatt.

In his 2003 book, Genius: A Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Creative Minds, he named Portuguese writer Jose Saramago as “the most gifted novelist alive in the world today,” and “one of the last titans of an expiring literary genre.”

Of American novelists, he declared in 2003 “there are four living American novelists I know of who are still at work and who deserve our praise.” Claiming “they write the Style of our Age, each has composed canonical works,” he identified them as Thomas Pynchon, Philip Roth, Cormac McCarthy and Don DeLillo. He named their strongest works as Gravity’s Rainbow and Mason & Dixon, American Pastoral and Sabbath’s Theater, Blood Meridian, and Underworld. He has also praised fantasy writer John Crowley as these writers’ equal – especially his novel Little, Big.

In Kabbalah and Criticism (1975) he identified Robert Penn Warren, James Merrill, John Ashbery and Elizabeth Bishop as the most important living American poets. By the 1990s he regularly named A.R. Ammons along with Ashbery and Merrill, and he has lately come to identify Henri Cole as the crucial American poet of the generation following those three. He has expressed great admiration for the Canadian poet Anne Carson, particularly her verse novel Autobiography of Red. Bloom also lists African American Jay Wright as one of only a handful of major living poets.

Bloom also has something to say about the superlatives in American art–that is, the sublime:

Bloom’s introduction to “Modern Critical Interpretations: Thomas Pynchon” (1987) features his canon of the “twentieth-century American Sublime,” the greatest works of American art produced in the 20th century. Bloom singles out the following works for distinction:

“Miss Lonelyhearts” by Nathanael West
William Faulkner’s “As I Lay Dying“
The end of the Marx Brothers’ “Duck Soup“
Nearly all of Hart Crane
Wallace Stevens‘ “Auroras of Autumn“
Bud Powell’s performance of “Un Poco Loco“
“I Remember You” and “Parker’s Mood” as performed by Charlie Parker
“Byron the Light Bulb” from Thomas Pynchon’s “Gravity’s Rainbow”

Happy hunting, Earthers.

To contine the “motorcycle” thread – let’s take a look at some contemporary social issues. What do women riders think of male motorcyclists? An article by Amanda Kidd, which appeared in a Super Streetbike editorial is revealing.

Everyone from feminist scholars to third-rate rock stars has identified motorcycles as potent metaphors for sex. The speed, the danger, the leather clothing, the excitement of a good ride are all very similar to the sensations most of us associate with great sex. And who would argue that a Ducati 998 isn’t every bit as gorgeous as a naked woman, or that the rush of going knee down or carrying a sick second-gear wheelie isn’t orgasmic? Motorcycles are damn sexy. So guys, it goes without saying that the motorcycle you ride makes a powerful statement about your sexual prowess. Quit snickering–you’d be surprised at how much a savvy woman who rides (and what savvy woman doesn’t?) can tell about your skills between the sheets by just a quick glance at your bike. For instance, intelligent women know that ratty stunt-bike riders make the best lovers. Their, um, “services” are in such high demand that they’re barely able to find time to lube the chain, much less hand-rub 30 coats of clear lacquer. Keeping this in mind, it might be helpful to consider the particular statement your own scooter makes about your sexuality.

I’ll start with those cruiser guys, because aside from a red Corvette and a pneumatic, 19-year-old “personal assistant,” nothing screams midlife crisis quite like a chopper. Start with the pipes–even a nun knows a rider’s package measurements are inversely proportional to the length and girth of his exhaust pipes. Other accessories can betray as well. See mudflaps tacked onto the fenders? He irons his socks and wears them to bed, too. Naked-lady murals on the tank? Never seen a real pair of breasts in his life. And ladies, watch out for Harleys with sky-scraping sissy bars out back. His favorite bedroom accessory straps around your waist.

You sportbike guys are almost as bad. A Gixxer with a neon-lime windscreen and polished wheels screams, “I’ll pick you up for our first date in a jacked-up Cutlass with a silly sticker of a cartoon character pissing in the back window, and we’re going to Red Lobster.” Race leathers worn on the street are another red flag, especially those pasted with phony sponsor decals. You still buy Underoos from the little boy’s department and play Dungeons & Dragons. Online. Other sportbike warning signs: fender eliminator? Castration anxiety, and he’s only gonna get off if there are garden shears in the bed. Stealth turn signals? Subscriber to Close Shave. Rollin’ on 190-series rear tires? See “exhaust pipes” above. And pity the poor fool rockin’ a Ducati 9xx with a tank bra and a color-matched seat cover–his bike just screams cross-dresser with a possible secret diaper fetish.

Sport-tourers are definitely the worst, though. VFR/ST4/Sprint ST riders are perpetual adolescents–they play like they’re down with the mortgage and 2.5 kids, but every other Saturday they’re slurping tequila from the navel of some girl named Mindy and conducting field research on the “Mutation and Proliferation of Common STDs.” And nothing says poseur like an adventure tourer. He’s a wannabe rugged individualist who spends all night downloading maps of exotic destinations he’ll never see. Speaking of that GPS clamped to the handlebar–gadget fetish, and definite robot-sex fantasies.

No matter what sort of bike you ride, it broadcasts a crystal-clear message about your sexual peccadilloes. Naked bike? Exhibitionist and nude-beach freak with more hair on his back than his head. Dual-sport riders like to get freaky outdoors, not to mention that they’re not very good about washing “down there.” If you ride a V-Max you’re an S&M enthusiast with a flogger made from spark-plug leads. If you ride a Warrior (or other “performance cruiser") you’ve got the same S&M inclinations, only you repress these by coaching Little League on the weekends. I could go on, but I think you get the picture.

So where, exactly, does all this leave a worldly woman rider wishing for a motorcyclist with just the right mix of studliness and sensitivity to sexually satisfy her for all eternity? In my experience, wheelying off into the sunset, solo, astride an SV650. (Which, by the way, boys, is definitely not a girl’s bike!) Most of you biker boyz are too busy standing around the parking lot at some Hooters bike night comparing one another’s “camshafts” to even notice a classy babe like me.

On the money and some fine writing. Got to admire her choice of bike, and therefore man, but I wonder if she’s a bit “cc shy,” choosing a putter like an SV650 as a mount for her perfect guy, when the SV1000 its big brother crouches like a jaguar and handles like Nureyev.

Two links concerning design today.
A long article about Harleys and image that seems largely on the money, from

American Angst.

Well worth some consideration, in terms of the larger picture – described by:

James Dyson in his Dimbleby Lecture [PDF]. He states in part:

We have no choice but to shake off our obsession with styling.

And,

It was this disregard for the engineer’s creation - the manufactured object - that led me to stand down as chairman of the Design Museum a month or so ago. . . .

Random quotes from the above articles:

You’re still the pathetic little balding, overweight, middle aged accountant married to the fat, overdemanding nag that you were one second before you signed the papers on your new Harley and the ink dried. You always will be. Owning a bike isn’t going to change that but this is a moral that so few people today are smart enough to comprehend! Once you crank the engine, you aren’t going to change one bit, except that you will have become a slave to the media, you will have allowed yourself to willingly accept a brand association, and you will have admitted that you’re a gullible fool who doesn’t know the first thing about what a REAL motorcycle is.

Simply put, a Harley is God’s way of saying that you have too much money and not enough brains.

Our only chance for survival is better engineering.

Harley gave up. They quit racing. When their bubble was burst, and new and faster motorcycles were entering the market, Harley simply walked away and never went racing again. Harley left the real world and gave the go ahead to European and Japanese manufacturers that America was out of the performance circle and that America was out of the game. Soon what the British and Japanese engineers were learning at the race tracks, they were applying to their brands of motorcycles, making them faster, better handlers, lighter, more durable, more reliable. Their technology was advancing by the year, with each victory, with each innovation, each design breakthrough.

Milwaukee, you should hang your head in shame for letting down the American people the way that you have. How could you do it? Or better yet, explain to me how you could fool the whole country into believing that it was okay to quit and that you are still the number one motorcycle maker in the world.

We have created a strange society.

When you show off some thing you’ve bought, I guarantee the first question will be ‘Where did you get it?’, not ‘Who made it?’. The inference is, that if you bought it somewhere expensive and exclusive, then it must be good.

American Thunder?

What a joke! You should be scared of thunder. The only thing I’m scared of when a Harley is near is that either a piece is going to fall off and cause me to wreck, or I’ll slide in a patch of oil that the Harley leaked onto the road ahead of me. American Thunder my ass! Thunder is powerful and loud. Harleys are just loud. I think the truth in advertising should apply to Milwaukee as well, if so, it would be called

Harley Davidson.
It’s not a motorcycle company.
It is a pagan cult religion for brain dead trend humping fashion lemmings.

And the future belongs to those who use their brains best.

Rise up engineers!

Quotes from a Suzuki SV1000S (V-Twin) Rider, who goes by the moniker “Weekend Cruiser”

“I’d rather ride my SV than push my Harley”

“Chrome doesn’t add more horse power”

“Fringe isn’t cool”

“Chaps and Vests are for Blue Oyster Club patrons only”

“A bandana does not double as a helmet”

“The oil leak shouldn’t be standard equipment”

“I don’t like riding in the “child birth “position”

I was asked, “How does this zeal for life shape your haiku and haiku spirit?” (what zeal you ask . . .) by Robert Wilson, co-founder of the new and exponentially growing site Simply Haiku. His question inspired the below speculations on haiku and sacred space.

What is poetry, why do we need it, what does poetry do—to us, for us? In The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property, Lewis Hyde affirms a sense that the poem, indeed all art is created fundamentally as an offering. Our culture commodifies artworks, a rather aberrant activity, apparently. Hyde reminds the reader of a truth concerning artwork – the desire to offer a gift, not only to humanity but to the cosmos, the sky, sun, moon, animals, plants, universe, to the moment, to history, one’s ancestors, to the invisible. To offer in a sacred way. Mircea Eliade discusses another aspect of offering in The Myth of the Eternal Return, the means for constructing sacred space, and of enacting life within that space (and timeless time) of the sacred. Experientially investigating the absence and presence of the sacred has been a high value in my life, and also a “saunter: a sense of being sans terre, without Earth, has involved a meandering desire for holiness, a goal echoed in the last stanza of Goethe’s The Holy Longing:

And so long as you haven’t experienced
   This: to die and so to grow,
   You are only a troubled guest
   On the dark earth.

A portion of my research has been concerned with oblivion: the figure of Lethe, mother of the Graces. Why might Forgetting give rise to Splendor, Delight and Blossoming, the three Graces? Heidegger writes,

       The oldest of the old follows behind
   us in our thinking and yet it
   comes to meet us.

      That is why thinking holds to the
   coming of what has been, and
   is remembrance.

      ("The Thinker As Poet,” Poetry, Language, Thought, Harper & Row, 1971, p. 10)

To remember that thinking is remembrance. . . It seems the sacred is easily forgotten, and entering again, in the encounter is a sense of remembrance, a return of “the oldest of the old. I’ve been interested in why not only the sense of poetry but the experience of poetic dwelling becomes lost. The danger inherent in a world, in any society, which loses poetic dimension and thereby becomes overtly literalistic, is a danger perhaps greater than that of terrorism. To know or feel the sense of poetry in life is to know “the coming of what has been, to desire remembrance: to re-member the world, cosmos, oneself, a leaf, a tree. It may be that a necessary means of entering the zone of the sacred is the experience of oblivion.

Haiku are not always instantly irruptive, do not always enact a sudden shift, yet they seem to draw us into a new resonance, creating a sense of the sacred, a context. Hoshinaga Fumio’s haiku,

nigemizu e sengo no chichi wo oitsumeru

      towards the mirage of water
the postwar fathers
            chasing after . . .

       (Kumaso-Ha, Honami Shoten, 2003)

is a haiku which seems to have layers (allusive adumbrations) of mirage: of image, time and space – heads curling Esherlike around tails. It’s a haiku I work into, never quite out of. There is an unfolding which I sense as lament, echoing back through millennia, through a myriad of cultures. I recall this haiku,

spring evening -
   the wheel of a troop carrier
   crushes a lizard

        (Knots: The Anthology of Southeastern European Haiku Poetry, Red Moon Press, 1999)

by Dimitar Anakiev. Its main image is violent, shocking. But this haiku is not merely violent. There is also a sense of sacredness, the context or field of reality which is only partly given by the poem; the haiku also requires rapprochement on the reader’s part:

The genre itself indicates the boundary lines of the sacred, as context, and it is within the landscapes of the sacred, oriented by the genre as a whole, in which image and action occur.

Concision, disjunction and image elements largely contribute to a haiku’s effect, but these elements alone aren’t enough. If one reads the above poems without a pause, they quickly lose much of their drama and vividness. So, what happens when we slow down, allow this unique poetic form to come to life? I would argue that in some measure we experience oblivion(s), if for instants, and through such psychological moments, remembrance. Mnemosyne, anamnesis, Lethe’s sister, is mother to the Muses. Such may be said for any art one becomes absorbed in and passionate toward; nonetheless, haiku are quite uncompromising in the way they cut into reality. There is extreme and concise rupture. To my knowledge, the phenomenology of poetic process has not been explained by science. In fact, qualitative conscious experience itself has not yet been demonstrably elucidated—there is so much we experience and feel which is immeasurable. Without being able to precisely measure or define, it is nevertheless apparent that haiku becomes a genre due to demonstrably unique modes of poetic encounter and dwelling. I should say that what is truly unique isn’t the experience itself, but its prevalence and intensity, when compared with other poetic and artistic forms.

We may tend to devalue the significance and importance of poetic movements which open us to the sacred, to remembrance because of their immateriality, contrastive with the predominant materialist cultural ethos. I know I have, and it is one reason for my returning to the wellspring of haiku. The haiku genre (which includes a reader) constructs an environment within which its language (i.e. symbolic representation) uniquely occurs. It may be a zest for life that draws me to haiku, but likewise a zest for oblivion and erasure. Though not erasure in itself so much as what happens through it.

Some years ago, Barbara Dilley (a Merce Cunningham dancer, Naropa teacher and former Naropa President) introduced me to “square work, in which a length of bright red yarn is made into a large square on the dance floor, tacked down with a few bits of masking tape. What is within the square is defined as sacred space. Dancers (people) relate to the fact of the square, and to entering and exiting that space. It is quite difficult to remain conscious as one steps across the boundary, quite hard indeed. A gap in consciousness nearly always occurs right at the apotheosis of transition. This is one of the consciousness research-questions we explored in an embodied manner as dance. There’s nothing much to taking some twine and making a square on a patch of bare ground. The square has only as much meaning and significance as is intended by the participants; and, what grows from experiences of many crossings and movements (object and human arrangements) within and without. After the dancers have gone, seeing that red twine on a darkened stage, would an aura exist? Is there a magical quality to that bare ground, so carefully demarcated? I would say, yes, to a sensitive reader there is, because there is an intentional architecture, much like a temple or church, just much more minimalist. Haiku likewise possess an intentional architecture; hence, natively embody natural and nuministic aspects of being.

These days I watch Sumo on television; the dohyo, or fighting square, is a sacred space. Rikishi (wrestlers) climb the steps and enter throwing salt, an act of purification, as they step across the sacred rope boundary embedded within the clay ground, into the inner ring. Above, a temple roof hangs suspended, emblemizing the divine. Such an arrangement of objects in space is an example of an archetypal sacred architecture, explored in detail in Eliade’s works, among others. The sense of sacred space existing or inhabiting cultural constructions is no doubt a deeply archaic if not an intrinsic aspect of the human spirit. Haiku as poems are a bit like that length of red twine, though the boundaries and evidences of sacrality may appear more subtly. An objectively intentional aspect exists, not necessarily in the poem itself, but in the fact that sacred space inhabits the poem, out of which the poem presents new ideas of reality. Isn’t this what is implied by the term, “poetic tradition. The oldest of the old follows behind us in our thinking and yet it comes to meet us.

mirai yori taki o fukiwaru kaze kitaru

From the future
   a wind arrives
   that blows the waterfall apart

      (Ban’ya Natsuishi, A Future Waterfall, Red Moon Press, 2nd. ed. 2004)

In that art is an offering to the cosmos, the reader is returned by that offering to a cosmic sense or scene. Returned to the world purified and renewed by the “first moment, the moment before creation.

Rising out of the sea and shedding the tank it’s a bit surprising to not be with fish, feeling weightless in the strangeness of air. What was that dreamlike place, filled with unblinking creatures, turtles with flippers, sharks large enough to blot out the far-off sun? The twine, like sunlight is imaginal, extending along an invisible line between land and sea. Returning, instants of vivid memory quickly fade. But a drop of ocean coheres within, adamantine. It is for that one drop, so pure and crystalline, that haiku seem to speak.

Here is an impression made of fragments from Book One, the Mandelbaum Translation.

two fish

Nicholas Lezard, someone who knows something about Ovid, in a review of a new translation (by David Raeburn) writes in the Guardian (excerpts):

. . . while it seems as though the Metamorphoses has never really gone away – Ovid’s line at the end about his own poetic immortality is still borne out – people don’t necessarily feel any urgent need to read it.

This is not exactly the case around my neck of the sacred woods. I have been doing some work for the last few years that has involved steeping myself in, among other things, a good deal of Graeco-Roman mythology. One unforeseen side-effect of this is that I have come closer to accepting this mythic corpus as a convincing explanation of human motives than any other philosophical system. I may not have a shrine to Jupiter in the back garden, but it feels like it’s only a matter of time.

The now-redundant prose translation was perfectly serviceable but it was, after all, in prose. And ever since I read Allen Mandelbaum’s amazing translation of The Divine Comedy (published by Everyman), the game has changed: you can actually translate from an ancient tongue and retain not only fidelity but poetry.

As it happens, Mandelbaum has translated the Metamorphoses (and his prosody is so good it’s actually distracting) – but you won’t find it for sale here unless you’re very lucky.

It is easier to read this for pure pleasure than just about any other ancient text apart, perhaps, from the Odyssey (with Apuleius’s Golden Ass coming in a close third). It is also (and for some reason I’d forgotten this) even gorier than the Iliad.

Ovid is modern in other ways: you will recognise his attentiveness towards the very mechanics of metamorphosis. Here is Actaeon, punished by Diana for accidentally seeing her in the nude: “The head she had sprinkled sprouted the horns of a lusty stag; / the neck expanded, the ears were narrowed to pointed tips; / she changed his hands into hooves and his arms into long and slender / forelegs; she covered his frame in a pelt of dappled buckskin; / last, she injected panic …” What is that but, two millennia avant la lettre, a computer-generated animation in words?

Reading that, you may think the poetry of the translation isn’t that wonderful. This is what I thought at first, finding it hard to even recognise it as poetry rather than carefully sliced prose. Not really Raeburn’s fault: he isn’t a professional poet, and after all this is, as Dryden put it in his own translation of the work, a “vile degenerate age". But while Raeburn isn’t afraid of, shall we say, highly familiar imagery ("white as a sheet", and so on), the lines keep up a good six-stress pulse and sound much better if you imagine them being spoken aloud.

Lately I’ve been reading versions of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. This is a book which Ezra Pound described as “the most beautiful book in the language (my opinion and I suspect it was Shakespeare’s).” He was referring to the Golding translation, 1567, the first in English; Shakespeare’s Ovid. Publius Ovidius Naso (43 BC-17 AD; bio, and links here) wrote Metamorphoses in exile, at the age of 52. Of the many translations available, the poet Ted Hughes, (whose free-verse translation, which won the 1997 Whitbread Award for a book of poetry), mentions: “However impossible these intensities might seem to be on one level, on another, apparently more significant level Ovid renders them with psychological truth and force. In his earlier books, preoccupied with erotic love, he had been a sophisticated entertainer. Perhaps here too in the Metamorphoses he set out simply to entertain. But something else joined in, something emerging from the very nature of his materials yet belonging to the unique moment in history – the moment of the birth of Christ within the Roman Empire” (Ted Hughes in The New York Review of Books, July 17, 1997).

It should be possible to gather quite a large number of translations for comparison. Below are six diverse versions of the Invocation, which appears at the beginning of The Metamorphoses:

MY SOUL WOULD SING of metamorphoses.
But since, o gods, you were the source of these
bodies becoming other bodies, breathe
your breath into my book of changes: may the
song I sing be seamless as its way
weaves from the world’s beginning to our day.
(Allen Mandelbaum, Trans. 1995)

Now I shall tell of things that change, new being
Out of old: since you, O Gods, created
Mutable arts and gifts, give me the voice
To tell the shifting story of the world
From its beginning to the present hour.
(Horace Gregory, trans., 1958)

OF bodies chang’d to various forms, I sing:
Ye Gods, from whom these miracles did spring,
Inspire my numbers with coelestial heat;
‘Till I my long laborious work compleat:
And add perpetual tenour to my rhimes,
Deduc’d from Nature’s birth, to Caesar’s times.
(translated into English verse under the direction of Sir Samuel Garth by John Dryden, Alexander Pope, etc., 1717)

I want to speak about bodies changed into new forms. You, gods, since you are the ones who alter these, and all other things, inspire my attempt, and spin out a continuous thread of words, from the world’s first origins to my own time.
(A. S. Kline, trans. 2000)

Of shapes transformde to bodies straunge, I purpose to entreate,
Ye gods vouchsafe (for you are they ywrought this wondrous feate)
To further this mine enterprise. And from the world begunne,
Graunt that my verse may to my time, his course directly runne.
(Arthur Golding, trans. 1567. Invocation here)

My soul is wrought to sing of forms transformed
to bodies new and strange! Immortal Gods
inspire my heart, for ye have changed yourselves
and all things you have changed! Oh lead my song
in smooth and measured strains, from olden days
when earth began to this completed time!
(based on Brookes Moore, 1922)

Here are a few more links. Quotes from Ovid’s works, primary sources: ancient texts, Illustrating Ovid (links to rare historical illustrations), additional art influenced by, U. Vermont Ovid Project, voluminous links.

Barry O’Connell writes, “Recently I was able to obtain a number of these rugs and they are identical to what was available during the Russian war. . . This rug must date to before The Islamic Republic of Iran began sending the refugees home after the war. The assault rifle to the right is a Paratroopers version of a AK-47. The helicopter is the Hip helicopter which was what the Soviet Airborne used most often.”

The anonymous Beluch rug weavers have given us canvases imaging the Afghan War.

From Raw Vision:

At the end of 1979, the Soviet Union invaded and occupied Afghanistan until the spring of 1989. They left behind a determined opposition in the Mujaheddin militias, and a puppet leader who in spring 1992 was forced into refuge at the United Nations office in the capital, Kabul. . . . Like folk-art everywhere, the Beluch rugs woven during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan reveal the makers’ concerns for time and place.

They symbolically depict significant events through the use of easily-recognised motifs derived from a common culture. They swarm with wild animals in fanciful landscapes, and often include portraits of significant local figures, and also patches of text. In this, the Beluch differ from other Asian weaving traditions which strictly follow Islamic law and eschew pictorial work in favour of geometric or arabesque designs. During their now almost-forgotten recent war, the weavers created a body of work which showed the full panoply of modern warfare – guns, grenades, tanks, helicopters, jet planes, rockets and bombs. Most Afghan War rugs are unique, but their imagery reveals common themes.

From Oriental Rug Review:

One of our suppliers called and said he had a World Trade Center rug and it was very peaceful - no airplanes, no fires, no death. We like this rug very much. The weaver pictures the buildings, surrounded by trees, as if they were built in the middle of Central Park rather than in lower Manhattan. We see a nearby mosque. There are several emergency vehicles with red lights flashing, a very normal thing to see in NYC. So here it is - one of the most peaceful war rugs we have seen.

flowers float above the moon blankets and tiger skin tawny orange her face moired in bla ck wildebeest herds edging a cross the plains before chang ing to channel 761 music and other available channels in 4″ rows
	bread bakes underwater the vi olent smell of bread is power li ttle money left now only paradi se or kerosene will end the col d season five yards away her hips south of the refrigerator d esperate for wheat I run down a dark wet street pulling out a gun past 3 sake shops red lant erns swaying in sleet falling fr esh from the bath
ten stories down laying on the floor our tired backs the night endless now that murder is co mmitted and the bakery theft i n the air surrounding her trea sure edging across the plains to flowers.

 
                             
 
twofish

Fractal.org is pretty comprehensive. Wikipedia (where the above public-domain image is located) has a good basic overview of what fractals are, with links. “A fractal is a mathematical object that is self-similar and chaotic. Fractals are infinitely complex: the closer you look the more detail you see. Most fractals are generated by a relatively simple equation where the results are fed back into the equation until it grows larger than a certain boundary. Fractal mathematics, thinking and vision have been taken up in various fields. There are a few webrings: UltraFractal webring, the Fractal Artist’s ring, and the Infinite Fractal Loop.
A few online essays:

The Fractal Revolution by Peter Bearse.
Human life is inherently chaotic. People have felt it to be so since the beginning of recorded time. They have sometimes sensed, but mostly prayed, that the chaos may have an underlying structure. Only recently, however, has this hope been expressed in scientific/mathematical terms, as the tracings of an underlying reality rather than merely the subject of deep human yearning. Until the French Revolution, the structure of human existence was an article of transcendental faith rather than human knowledge. The basic “structure” was millennial – the apocryphal City of God, reified by vain men in the form of monuments and causes. The discovery that the “geometry of nature” is fractal has radical implications for human beings’ understanding of their society and of their role in things social and political.

A Man Who Would Shake Up Science by Edward Rothstein.
Mr. Wolfram is finally publishing his work, and his claims surpass the most extravagant speculation. He has, he argues, discovered underlying principles that affect the development of everything from the human brain to the workings of the universe, requiring a revolutionary rethinking of physics, mathematics, biology and other sciences. He believes he has shown how the most complex processes in nature can arise out of elemental rules, how a wealth of diverse phenomena — the infinite variety of snowflakes and the patterns on sea shells — are generated from seemingly trivial origins.

Fractal Evolution by the Leading Edge Research Group.
The physical world, the explicate realm, is structured along the lines of fractal geometry. The basic underlying idea is the idea of repetition of structure in different scales of magnitude. The common example is a coastline. A photograph of a section of coastline from a blimp will show the same ragged contours as a photograph of the whole coast taken from a space station. A photograph of a one-foot-long section of the same coast will also show the same contours. The various coastlines are “self-similar,” each similar to the others in shape, but different in magnitude. . . . “How did nature manage to evolve such complicated architecture?” Gleick asks, rhetorically. “Mandelbrot’s point is that the complications exist only in the context of traditional Euclidean geometry. As fractals, branching structures can be described with transparent simplicity, with just a few bits of information….” “Fractal mathematics” is comprised of the simple formulas by which conversions are made–fractal to fractal.

Fractal Amplifications: Writing in Three Dimensions by Alice Fulton.
During the last quarter of the twentieth century, science has turned away from regular and smooth systems in order to investigate more chaotic phenomena. Rather than being divided into the classical binaries of order and entropy, form now can be regarded as a continuum expressing varying degrees of the pattern and repetition that signal structure. . . . It occurs to me that this shift in focus makes itself felt within literature as postmodernism. In any case, the poetry I am calling “fractal” shares many defining traits of that contested term: postmodern.

Fractals in poetry by Lucy Pollard-Gott.
The method seems to stretch the meaning of fractal, but see for yourself. An example from Wallace Stevens’ poem “The Sail of Ulysses (Canto I)” Pollard-Gott took know as the root. Here are the occurrences of know in the poem:

The Sail of Ulysses (Canto I)

If knowledge and thing known are one
So that to know a man is to be
That man, to know a place is to be
That place, and it seems to come to that;
And if to know one man is to know all
And if one’s sense of a single spot
Is what one knows of the universe,
Then knowledge is the only life,
The only sun of the only day,
The only access to true ease,
The deep comfort of the world and fate.

“Note the occurrences of know organize themselves into hierarchical clusters, that is, clusters within clusters.” Click this link to get a more complete picture of what she’s talking about.

Following up on some previous posts on John Taggart and Rothko, Philip Rowland has sent me The Game with Red, from Taggart’s Loop (pp. 232-3). Following the poem is an unrelated comment from Taggart, followed by excerpts from a Mark Scroggins review of Taggart in relation to loop music, in the online literary journal FlashPøint.

The Game with Red
 
 
How can a child immediately doubt what is taught? – Wittgenstein

 

Deepened by black red made deep by black

deepened and dark darker at the top

doorway without a door’s always darker

deep red dark red always darker at the top.

 

What I can do is move wandering movement

what I can do is move in a wandering movement

wandering stumbling on the wrong beat

child in the dark with my eyes closed

child in the language game with red

who cannot win the game with red

what I cannot do is get outside the doorway

the dark red doorway without a door

I cannot get outside the dark red doorway.

 
 
Loop: “Were You: Notes and a Poem for Michael Palmer:”

Primary: that the presumed goal of community is wrong and probably cannot be attained. The latter because individual vision challenges what has previously existed as a factor (agreed upon image) for unity. Individual vision, when first presented, must be perceived as a threat, actually as something promoting disunity. It’s remarkable that Blake continues to act in this way and will no doubt do so into the future. Could a church be organised around Blake?? His vision is too various.

 
 
From Taggart: Sound & Vision, by Mark Scroggins:

“The act of reading,” John Taggart writes in his book on Edward Hopper, Remaining in Light, “is akin to the ceaseless motion of an ant on a moebius strip.” For “reading,” read listening, and looking, as well — the “gift,” if you will, of sound and vision. A Möbius strip, of course, is a loop of paper — you can make one yourself — with a twist in it; it’s that twist that makes the loop’s face endless: a three-dimensional object with only one surface. Where does that highway go to?

The loop, whether actual or conceptual, was central to the early development of what came to be known as “minimalist” music. Steve Reich’s early pieces “It’s Gonna Rain” (1965) and “Come Out” (1966) were built out of tape loops; his “Violin Phase” pitted a taped violin part against a real-time violinist. Around the same time, Terry Riley was developing keyboard performance techniques that relied on loops and tape delays, most expansively showcased in his Rainbow in Curved Air album. The English composer Gavin Bryars’s “Sinking of the Titanic” was a fully-scored imitation of a vast, slowed-down tape loop; his “Jesus’ Blood Never Failed Me Yet” (1971) was built—famously or infamously—around a tape loop of an old tramp’s singing. Both of these Bryars works — not incidentally — were recorded and released in 1975 on Brian Eno’s Obscure records label, which also released the first recordings of another English minimalist, Michael Nyman — this, of course, long before Nyman became a soundtrack machine and minor celebrity. Five years later Eno produced Talking Heads’ Remain in Light.

In C is a composition for any number of musicians, playing any instruments capable of meeting the pitch requirements of the score. The score consists of fifty-three melodic figures, through which each musician progresses, determining for him- or herself how many times to repeat each figure and how to align it with what’s being played by the other members of the ensemble. The music coheres, both through the individual musicians’ sensitivity — their listening to their fellows — and through an underlying “pulse.” Not the pulse of a metronome or drum machine, nor the pulse of a tape loop — but an organic pulse, carried and passed along by the members of the collective. “Large definitions commit one to a long line,” Taggart writes. “The line is prevented from falling in on itself by a recurrent, but never exactly repeating, cadence. This cadence undergoes a continuous motion (transformation).” And the poem — like the score of In C — cannot be an experience only of vision, but must be a performed thing: “As I came to discover, such a poem would have to be read aloud to make sense. The reader would have to break the silence of the cold page. There could be a liberation of participation, an ending of the silence and solitude.”

“A recurrent, but never exactly repeating, cadence.” The mechanical loop repeats precisely, inexorably, with the sterility of Ford’s assembly line; the “exactly repeating cadence” is the Taylorization of the poet, the talented sophomore’s iambic pentameter. The mechanical loop’s contents, even when human-generated — Tina Weymouth and Chris Frantz’s rhythms, the old tramp Gavin Bryars recorded one day in London — come back to us again and again, “same as it ever was.” The only thing that can be of interest about such loops is the human reaction to them.

Gertrude Stein, in 1934: “every time one of the hundreds of times a newspaper man makes fun of my writing and of my repetition he always has the same theme, always having the same theme, that is, if you like, repetition, that is if you like repeating that is the same thing, but once started expressing this thing, expressing any thing there can be no repetition because the essence of that expression is insistence, and if you insist you must each time use emphasis and if you use emphasis it is not possible while anybody is alive that they should use exactly the same emphasis . . . . insistence that in its emphasis can never be repeating, because insistence is always alive and if it is alive it is never saying anything in the same way because emphasis can never be the same not even when it is most the same . . . ” By itself, the tape loop goes nowhere, is pure repetition. When the voice enters — the voice that “invades,” that “lays,” that “eats the face away,” that “turns the face of the listener, member among the members, into its excrement” — when the voice enters, the tape loop becomes the Möbius strip.

“It occurs to me,” says Taggart, “that all my work, before and since [Slow Song for Mark Rothko], involves translation or, more accurately, transformation to make the poem a ‘sound object.’” Transformation rather than translation: transformation is “the detail, not mirage, of seeing, of thinking with the things as they exist, and of directing them along a line of melody” (Zukofsky).

The basis of all of Taggart’s poetry is looking — or listening, or reading — a repetitive, accretive, circling motion guided by need. “The poet, who is first a reader, makes no original discovery in reading. Instead, the poet becomes only more aware of the spider-web connectedness of his or her sources and of the innumerable ghostly speakers still beyond them.”

continues.

Visiting Cass Dalglish’s page The Textual Dance: Allusion in the Oldest and Newest Poetry, a surprise awaits toward the bottom, a flash-based poem which is a translation of an Ur text composed by Enheduanna (En-hedu-Ana is a title and means The High Priestess [named] Ornament of the Sky). Enheduanna wrote her poem of praise, nin-me-sar-ra, to the female deity Inanna; “pressed into clay over four thousand years ago, [it] is the first document in history to be signed by its author. . .”

She wrote as a poet writes, a poet who has command of metaphor, density and wordplay —— in this case —— sign play. A single Sumerian sign may have five, ten, twenty or more values.

Introductory paragraphs relate the oldest cuneiform poetics to Web excursions:

As we spring and leap and scroll along from image to thought to sight to sound on the world wide web, we leap from one idea to another, tying and untying, twisting and untwisting threads of understanding. This is the use of allusion, the employment of the “leap” to annex one poetic experience to another. It is visible in the works of poets who read their work aloud, and poets who publish their words in the hard-inked pages of a book. It is this very use of allusion that is at the core of every poem. It is this allusive dance which gives the poem it’s energy and its density, regardless of whether the poet fixes a metaphor into paper with pigment, embeds a reference in clay, or floats it electronically in hyperspace.

Ambiguity is essential if we are to understand what the Sumerian poet wrote when she pressed signs into clay, for the signs themselves, multivalent and in some cases embedded one in another, make the poem. This is the Sumerian woman writer’s “feminine text,” which, as Retallack says, “implicitly acknowledges and creates the possiblility of other/additional/ simultaneous texts” . . . When the possibilities of meaning are layered, simultaneously, one atop the other, layers of meaning in a Sumerian text are visible. The cuneiform line seen in this fashion calls to mind what Stephanie Strickland has described as “embeddedness” or “nestedness” in poetry.

Which leads to a discussion of poetry hypertext. Hypertext poet Jim Rosenberg’s Diffraction Through was chosen to illustrate “a cluster of simultaneous thoughts:”

Rosenberg says the electronic poem alters “phrase into super-word, phrase cluster into an ignition where the resonances will seem to move, as a flame moves, though the words are fixed and do not change . . . ” Rosenberg says his images stack “atop one another (as) simultaneities, as the world is full of simultaneities of lives, of thoughts, of desires, of reaching and refusals: the word not as a solo act but as a particle in a field, autonomous, an object in a field where to exist is to be combined, to be juxtaposed, to radiate from a layer, one of many layers: sheets as the great stacks of beckons to the eye call juxtaposed not by design but because to be in a packed cluster of circumstance is the natural condition of being".

This would seem to relate to image schemas, as discussed in Mark Turner’s The Literary Mind: The Origins of Thought and Language, and memorably presented in H.D.’s Palimpsest.

(About this web log. Note concerning web presence: you can find my bio here, here are some writings on haiku; a recent music project is here, composed with Jeff Cairns. )

This web log is loosely concerned with the theme of wildness and the wild; its loss, invalidation and voiding, whether this arrives from the personal microcosmically stray dream-image, political, social, scientific perspective (e.g. genomic, cybernetic), literary perspective, cultural noodling, work-stress realm, psychology, etc. So, critique is one purview. On the flip side, the question of what the wild is, how wildness might be touched, moved towards, sensed – what its value might be – these represent arcs of question and aspiration. Rather than answers, I believe relationship is a focus. James Hillman discusses the classical Greek meaning of the word therapy as “therapeia,” “to attend upon.” The meaning of psychology (a logos of psyche: to give psyche an adequate account of itself) then is “to attend upon psyche.” In this sense, the psychology of the wild becomes relevant as an active movement: how to attend upon, give attendance to wilds; to wildness. To attend and enter.

An example of attending to the psyche of something primordial, elemental is Gaston Bachelard’s Psychoanalysis of Fire. Thoreau found wildness as a highest value, articulating a non-dual awareness of wildness. Wildness as not merely an outer environmental issue nor interior state disconnected from relative extensive reality. This brings up the old question of subjectivity vs. objectivity (with subjectivity, as fancy, often getting short shrift). One response to the subjective-objective conundrum regarding nature comes from modern haiku. The Japanese poet Hoshinaga Fumio comments,

I write about or touch upon human heart and feeling, by creating human mental images. The human mental image does not have a typical form, such as a cake cut into four quarters – a mental picture is not like that; it has no form. . . . Disharmonies lead to harmonies . . . the Japanese sense of nature is in harmony, that is, the harmony of: person (human being) and nature; no separation – in its widest sense. Without the sense of harmony with nature, Japanese literature would become very weak (personal communication).

Hoshinaga’s creation of “human mental images” is directly related to his 40-year oeuvre of acclaimed haiku. How we find harmony, in the sense Hoshinaga describes, seems relevant. At this precise point in human history various writers have sensed we are on the brink of losing the wild, except perhaps as fairytale or entertainment fantasy; this process is happening on a number of levels, imaginative, social, technological, etc. I’d like to present a few phrases from Emerson and Thoreau. Here is the opening sentence from Thoreau’s essay, Walking:

I wish to speak a word for Nature, for absolute freedom and wildness, as contrasted with a freedom and culture merely civil – to regard man as an inhabitant, or a part and parcel of Nature, rather than a member of society. I wish to make an extreme statement…

Thoreau includes “person” in his sense of nature, through advancing the idea of a person leaving the three estates of church, government and society, in order to seek direct contact with the wild, not by goal-oriented behavior, but rather by meandering or wandering in or through wild places, spaces, with the sense of never returning.

We should go forth on the shortest walk, perchance, in the spirit of undying adventure, never to return, prepared to send back our embalmed hearts only as relics to our desolate kingdoms. If you are ready to leave father and mother, and brother and sister, and wife and child and friends, and never see them again – if you have paid your debts, and made your will, and settled all your affairs, and are a free man – then you are ready for a walk.

Seeking a sacred earth, sacred sense of being. To do this one must become “a sort of fourth estate, outside of Church and State and People.” A bit later, a statement which resonates strongly 150 years later:

In Wildness is the preservation of the World.

Thoreau is often misquoted, with “wilderness” replacing “wildness.” While the two are related, one is external, extensive, while the other is a move towards an aesthetic in which experiences are sought: varieties of contact.

In Nature Emerson wrote, “Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe?” A short way down the page he added, “But to a sound judgment, the most abstract truth is the most practical.” Valuing the wild implies sensing, contemplating universals, which tend to be discredited or devalued, in comparison to realistic, pragmatic ideas or goals. It can be argued that strong thinking itself is now held in social question. These lines from Yeats’ Second Coming seem to match the current media climate:

. . . everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all convictions, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
. . .

Gary Snyder writes that mind is fundamentally wild:

I will argue that consciousness, mind, imagination, and language are fundamentally wild. “Wild” as in wild ecosystems – richly interconnected, interdependent, and incredibly complex. Diverse, ancient, and full of information. At root the real question is how we understand the concepts of order, freedom, and chaos. Is art an imposition of order on chaotic nature, or is art (also read “language") a matter of discovering the grain of things, of uncovering the measured chaos that structures the natural world? Observation, reflection, and practice show artistic process to be the latter (A Place in Space, pp. 163-172).

These are some of the ideas that hover, in terms of this web log. I feel that we have reached a time when the perseverance of the wild is at issue.

One of the challenges of cultural existential bias is acknowledging that we possess it. Without looking toward the obscure shadows cast, we may end up destroying or eroding what is of universal value: human identity and meaning, in one instance. I think this is one of Bill McKibben’s points when he writes that,

[Human gene manipulation and DNA improvement is] “Going for perfection,” [as] Watson calls it. But in fact such genetic tampering threatens to destroy the very things that give meaning to human life. From a certain vantage point, meaning has been in decline for a very long time, almost since the beginning of civilization. Our hunter-gatherer ancestors inhabited a very different world from ours, a meaning-saturated world where every plant and animal was an actor the way people are actors, where even rocks and canyons and rivers could speak. We look at that same world and see either silent landscape or pile of resources; either it has gone mute or our hearing is nowhere near as sharp. . . . the context of our lives began to shrink much more quickly in the last five hundred years. As science offered first new explanations and then new technologies, we have traded in the old contexts that informed human lives, bargaining them away in return for freedom, for Liberation (Enough: Staying Human in an Engineered Age).

As we advance we may wish to turn anew toward the forgotten or abandoned. I would like to extend my brief encapsulation but this post is becoming long. Ursula Le Guin’s A Very Warm Mountain, discusses the personification of the natural world in a way that has provoked my introspection: must we personalize the non-human, incorporate it into society in order to preserve its value, living in an age between myths? James Hillman comments in Beauty Without Nature; Refounding the City that “nature” should not necessarily be equated only with wilderness or non-human zones, that (to reduce a complex story) the crucial experience of aesthetic arrest may be found in the city, in art, as well as within wilderness – aesthetic perception of the wild is qualitative and not mutually exclusive (one zone cannot be sacrificed for another). One of Hillman’s points is that it may be possible to design a sense of the wild into the city – in such a city, it would become less necessary to mass exodus to the beach or “managed” nature on the weekends, in order to seek after the longed-for distance, in Weil’s sense, distance which is the soul of beauty.

The wild and anarchy are dissimilar templates. Gary Snyder points out that sensing the wild involves “the grain of things . . . measured chaos,” ideas also found in Classical Greece. Chaos (lack of pattern) was equated with aesthetic ugliness. So, the cosmos as cosmetic, cosmos as craft.

The above are loosely related speculations. I believe it is possible to go beyond a dualistic psychology that polarizes nature and culture. At the same time, whatever polemic or dialectic might be hashed out, I’m working from an internal poetic course, an unformed and unframed discontinuity, from disharmonies that may lead to harmonies – saunters on occasion, seeming to be a verb.

An addition to my earlier Rothko post, the first stanza of Slow Song for Mark Rothko, by John Taggart (Poems for the New Millennium vol. 2, p. 704):

I

To breathe and stretch one’s arms again
to breathe through the mouth to
breathe through the mouth to utter in
the most quiet way not to whisper not to whisper
to breathe through the mouth in the most quiet way to
breathe to sing to breathe to sing to breathe
to sing the most quiet way.

To sing to light the most quiet light in darkness
radianta radianta
singing light in darkness.

To sing as the host sings in his house.

Elena rides her Kawasaki ZZR-1100 through the dead zone of Chernobyl :

I travel a lot and one of my favorite destinations leads North from Kiev, towards so called Chernobyl “dead zone", which is 130kms from my home. Why my favorite? Because one can take long rides there on empty roads. The people there all left and nature is blooming. There are beautiful woods and lakes. In places where roads have not been travelled by trucks or army vehicles, they are in the same condition they were 20 years ago - except for an occasional blade of grass that discovered a crack to spring through. Time does not ruin roads, so they may stay this way until they can be opened to normal traffic again… a few centuries from now.

Recently Ulana reported that Elena’s journey might not have occurred quite in the way she describes. Nevertheless, many defend Elena’s art. Take a look at Elena’s site and the feedback.

     Some years ago, visited MOCA to see an exhibition of color-field painting. Having perused books of prints I was skeptical. In a room filled with Rothko, first impressions were “more of the same,” though after a minute entered what can only be described as a sense of pure emanation. The paintings seemed to exist as immanent presences beyond language, radiating nuanced emotional knowledge.
     Psychic space as an endless roar in paradoxical silence: existential paradox: dreamlike, a wish to remain in such presence. As if life itself desires time, stillness spills beyond the canvas with irresistible force.