My Friend, The Minotaur/ Part Two

 

When my ex-wife Lisa called from L.A. in August of 2002, after being out of touch for several years, to announce that she was planning a trip to Boston, she asked that I contact our old and mutual friend Danny Panagakos to inform him about the trip. She was working on a new video project, a kind of autobiography, and wanted to compare and contrast then and now versions of important people and places. She was very fond of Danny. His voice advised her. His image lived in her heart. To Lisa, Danny was a vampire god of the avant-garde. He referred to her as “Miss Georgette.” I hesitated. Lisa would not take “no” for an answer. “I’m not sure Danny wants to hear from either one of us,” I said.

 Lisa was fond of Danny. But was he also fond of her—or of his parents, or even of his wife, Salma? It was not clear to me that Danny could be truly fond of anybody. Danny and Lisa had, in fact, slept together during the hallucinated days that preceded our divorce, a fact about which Danny wasted no time in informing me. He did not want to place roadblocks on the freeway of our open communication. Did I care? No. It was an omen of the end of an anachronistic drama. As such, it was welcome. I was, however, puzzled by this need for confession on the part of someone so incapable of guilt.

I had no clue as to his motivations then, at lease none that was allowed to pass my threshold of awareness. Do I have one now? I don’t have an explanation but I do have a suspicion, and again, it has to do with drama. There is little reason to apologize to an entity that does not exist, but, even in the labyrinth of mirrors, the false self needs a cast of supporting actors. The job of the supporting actors is to chant that the narcissist is the Minotaur, the devouring god, the black hole at the center of the labyrinth, towards which virgins of both sexes must converge. Transgression and loyalty collaborated to feed the appetite of the growing supernova.

*** 

After a number of false starts, I finally managed to track Danny down at the main branch of the Webster Public Library, where he had worked his way to the top. Founded by Samuel Slater in 1812 and located on Lake “I’ll Fish on My Side and You Fish on Your Side and Nobody Fishes in the Middle,” as the translation from the Nipmuc goes, Webster is an old mill town, once famous for the manufacturing of shoes and textiles, which had been reimagined as an upscale bedroom community, with a stage-set-style Main Street, during the high-tech “Massachusetts Miracle” of the 1980s.

 The paint on all of the scenery is fresh. You will not find any worn spots on the railings. There are ordinances against pigeons pooping on the statues, and for this reason, they have set up tiny rest rooms. Even the manikins look like Stepford versions of themselves. As odd as it might seem, such life-like verisimilitude can be spectral, and such micromanaged quaintness can be more than a bit disturbing. You would think that you were living in the 1920s, at the latest, and that Norman Rockwell might, at any moment, wander into the Owl Smoke Shop for tobacco.

Danny was now Director of Library Services for the town—an odd position for a flamboyant avant-gardist. I stopped to wonder at how my friend could pour so much energy into library science, which he hated, and so little into his artwork, which, supposedly, he loved. This was also one of the last places in which you would expect to find the Minotaur. A mastery of the Dewey Decimal System was not a classically recognized attribute. The library was, however, like the labyrinth, a hermetically-sealed environment, in which the Minotaur could enforce the centrality of his role. A high percentage of discordant feedback could be purged. Any leakage of his occult hungers could be plausibly denied. Few traces would be left. Amid the coolness of the well-lit shelves, the beast’s rage would be more difficult to detect than the whisper of air from the AC units.

 After a wait of two minutes, Danny's assistant put me through. “Hi Danny, this is Brian,” I said. “Lisa is planning a trip to Boston next week, and she asked if I could arrange a time and place for the three of us to meet. She’s working on a kind of video autobiography, incorporating some Super 8 footage from 1978, in which we were all doing our best to act experimental. She was hoping to interview both of us, to revisit some of our favorite places and to cut back and forth between the present and the past.”

 D: “Tell her that I'm busy.”

B: “Lisa is traveling 3,000 miles, and it’s been eight years since her last trip. Are you sure that you can't set aside an hour for lunch?”

 D: “Salma and I are building a house in Belize. I'm really very busy.”

 B: “Belize! Why Belize?”

 D: “I’m disgusted with America. It has Americans in it, who disgust me. My grandmother died last year. She left me all of her money, as well as all of her real estate holdings. Money is not an issue anymore. I've worked enough. Salma and I are planning to retire next year, in Belize, where small, brown-skinned peasants will worship the ground we walk on.

 “Are you still living on Hemenway Street, or have they thrown you out yet?”

 B: “I moved when I got married seven years ago. We own a house.”

 D: “A house! My, that really is impressive. Have you published anywhere, or are you still the ne'er do well that my father always called you?”

 B: “I've written four books since the last time that I saw you. I've published here and there. What about you, Danny? Are you doing any writing or art?”

 D: “I am, but I don't want to talk about it. You might steal my ideas again. Did you know that I have a radio show? They pay me to destroy movies.”

 B: “Steal your ideas! You've got to be kidding. You've never actually shown me any of your work, except for that black matchbook with your name inside.”

 And so the conversation went. There was no rapport, no play of curiosity, not the slightest trace of affection. “Lisa is going to be disappointed,” I said. “Perhaps you could give her a call.”

 D: “No. You talk to her. She's your ex-wife. I have no interest in ancient history.”

Towards the end of our conversation Danny confided, with considerable self-satisfaction, a bit of information that I found amazing. He said, “I no longer feel inhibited about being a bitch. I make sure that people know what I think of them. I don't hide my feelings anymore.” He presented this as though such an attitude were the sign of some new maturity, as though rudeness were not the most ancient of weapons in his arsenal. I could not remember a time when Danny did not feel free to taunt or mock others without the slightest of provocations. Friends did not get special privileges. Passersby were not exempt.

 I thought back to a lunch at Bangkok Cuisine that occurred perhaps 12 years before. Our mutual friend Janet was visiting from New York, and as we were waiting for our Pad Thai and Green Duck Curry, Danny decided to entertain us with a series of sarcastic improvisations. He was quite inventively vicious, brilliant in his pantomime of the diners’ gestures and actions. He did not speak quietly, but projected his lines as to the top seats in the balcony of a theatre. One especially outrageous comment took Janet by surprise. She snorted, with explosive force, covering Danny with a large amount of shrimp and lemongrass soup. The man sitting at the next table turned to him, and said, “I'm glad that she spit on you! I was about to do it myself.”

 Danny was special. Humans were stupid. Contempt was the most appropriate response to the opinions and activity of others. As Adam Smith, in The Wealth of Nations, wrote, “All for ourselves and nothing for other people, seems, in every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim of the masters of mankind.” There were those who saw such “selfishness” as a bad thing. Danny was not among them.

Illustration: Felix Labisse, Hommage a Gilles de Rais, 1957

Continue reading at: https://www.scene4.com/0723/briangeorge0723.html

Masks of Origin: Regression in the Service of Omnipotence, my first book of essays, is available through Untimely books: https://untimelybooks.com/book/masks-of-origin/

 

My Friend, the Minotaur/ Part One

 

A challenge had been issued: “Find the past!” Most records had disappeared. The ones that survived were not worth the DNA they were printed on. The reasons for the body count—which, each year, grew by exponential leaps—were as variable as was the scale and appearance of the labyrinth. Some claimed that the labyrinth was actually just a concrete pillbox bunker, left over from the days of World War II, whose iron doors, streaked with salt, had long ago rusted shut. On one door: a large eye beneath a pair of horns, and on the other one: an octopus. Perched on a plateau, the complex gave access to a 360-degree view, and there were “wheel tracks,” cut deep into the stone, which led from it in a network of straight lines to the beach, and then continued on, straight down through the surf and down into the depths. Every seven years, of course, would come the drawing of the lots, though few had ever met the occult corporatists who would materialize to serve as judges on the pageant, and the doors never did appear to open or to close.

 Now, it was obvious that a new Reich was in charge, and that, from their makeshift cybernetic Bindu, they were ready to wrap their spell around the next 1000 years. At each of the 28 U-turns, they had cut the throat of a professor of geometry. It was a time for glad preparations. With his gold-tipped training horns, a tiny and scrunched-up bundle of omnipotence had arrived. It seemed possible, however, that the director of the WTO had been incorrect in his reading of the entrails. Many objects had been thrown, noses had been bitten, and ears had been torn off. A seizure had occurred, it was said, which had somehow split an atom. Great fissures had opened up in the holographic stage-set, which, as the Minotaur continued to stamp his tiny hoof against the world, had all the more aggressively to be closed. Amid the glow of the radioactive fallout, it was possible that the Guardians of the Double Ax had begun to lose control. It was possible they too might succumb to the madness that, until then, they had found the means to micromanage.

 Commandos in black parachutes had dropped like electrocuted birds and then landed in broken heaps, to form two rings around the steadily expanding complex. No direct assault could prevail against the Minotaur, no challenge to his force-field from without, no intrigue of rogue sub-departments of DARPA from within. He existed, as was scheduled in the stars. To attack the Minotaur was to amplify his strength. To turn against the labyrinth was to magnify its breadth.

Hoarse bellowing had flown across the black waves of the ocean. Foam had gathered on the lips of the scrunched-up bundle of omnipotence. His eyes rolled, striking fear into the hearts of even those in the inner circle. Was there some way to distinguish between a tantrum and a seizure, some method marked with the thumbprint of the Ancients, some safe way to harness the convulsions of the beast? This issue was a source of ongoing speculation among the Long-Skulled Seers of the Federal Reserve, yet both of these phenomena had pointed towards one end. It was feeding time. The technology that had been meant to keep the monster in had instead provided him with access to fresh victims, who were even less able than he was to escape. 

Continue reading at Scene4:

https://www.scene4.com/0623/briangeorge0623.html

My first book of essays, Masks of Origin: Regression in the Service of Omnipotence, is now available through Untimely Books:

https://untimelybooks.com/praise-page/masks-of-origin/

Early Days in the Vortex/ Part Three

In March of 1975, I went with two friends to the Peabody Museum of Natural History at Harvard. It was there that I met an intelligent five-foot matrix of quartz. My skull hummed. Voices swelled from the Hypogeum on Malta. A python hissed from his crevice at Delphi. Gargoyles roared from their ledges on Notre Dame. Trembling, I did my best to write down what I heard. There was a scent of nuclear fallout in the air, of sandalwood mixed with ash from the Battle of Kurukshetra. My hands were cold. I could barely hold my pencil. The museum guards wouldn’t let me rest my notebook on a display case. The babbling swelled, and then continued to grow louder. If only these beings were not speaking in so many different languages! 

 In these early days in the vortex, the inner and the outer worlds frequently changed places. I not only felt that I belonged to a community of artists, I also felt I was part of a living universe that was itself a form of art, in which artist and work were the alternate aspects of one seemingly atonal but harmonious process, in which the living differed from the dead mostly in being subject to the law of gravity (except for those of us who were evolved, of course). The way to grasp the psychotic complexity of this web was to plunge without looking towards the depths of the confusion. Joy was the key to the City of the Ancients. Once, the whole of the world could be fit inside my heart. Facts in the foreground led to the conundrum of the infinite, as the figure eight revealed—if only to cover it up again—the erotic subtext of the Eon. False rulers had corrupted the translucency of the records. It was our job to remember how to read.

 Lacunae were like oceans, once thought by archaeologists to create barriers between continents, which our hairier prototypes were too stupid to overcome. More recent theories suggest that such “barriers” could be a means of transportation. The very opacity of the sign was an indication that something big was going on. The more absurd, the better. The sign suggested, it did not denote, and the further we had to go to wrap our minds around it the more radical, in the end, would be the change in our awareness. It was good to be puzzled, at the mercy of the currents and the winds. It was possible that our own breath was the thread that led from the labyrinth, whose exit, now too tiny to see, was located on a foreign shore.

 The rate of coincidence exploded. For example, at 6 AM one day I was awakened from a dream, as I heard, forced from my lips, the Mayan word “Xibalba.” At 8:30, when I left for school, I found that some passerby had written “Xibalba” on the steps of my apartment building. How often does that happen? A coincidence, or so the scientist says, of which one normally does not bother to take note. And yet…This was the only day, out of the thousands before and since, on which some passerby has written a Mayan word by my door.

 Continue reading: https://www.scene4.com/0523/briangeorge0523.html

Masks of Origin: Regression in the Service of Omnipotence, my first book of essays, is available through Untimely Books: https://untimelybooks.com/book/masks-of-origin/

Masks of Origin: Regression in the Service of Omnipotence--Untimely Books

My book of essays, Masks of Origin: Regression in the Service of Omnipotence, is now available through Untimely Books. This is the first of six books that I will be publishing with them. 

https://untimelybooks.com/book/masks-of-origin/

Early Days in the Vortex/ Part Two (of three)

 

My working-class neighborhood in South Worcester was a great place to grow up—if your interests were such things as baseball, basketball, bike riding, tree and railroad bridge climbing, kick the can, fighting, trespassing, and urban spelunking. Unless it rained, my friends and I spent most of our time outdoors. It was not, however, the best place for a budding avant-gardist. By the time I graduated high school, I had become aware of just how limited I was, like the city that produced me, a city I would only years later come to love. 

If you had a car, you could drive from my neighborhood to Boston in an hour. I didn’t have a car, however. I didn’t take Route Nine. I went by way of the abyss. I worked eight hours a day as a janitor at the Worcester Telegram & Gazette, cleaning ink off all the presses, and also as a counsellor at the Worcester Crisis Center, learning to treat the problems of heroin addicts and would be suicides as being almost as important my own. I then would spend most of my free time at the Clark University Library, going stack by stack in my search for any trace of the Philosopher’s Stone. An abyss had opened, and I entered it. We became good friends, more or less, not that I was presented with any other option. In the two years after high school, I chose to act as my harshest critic. There was lots of catching up to do. To do something once was to do it many times. I saw, I heard, I was led, I learned a lot, but each small gain felt deliberate and laborious. 

And then, in September, 1974, when I moved to Boston to go to art school, my self-imposed atonement came suddenly to an end, as though I had closed the book that I was reading with a snap. Don’t ask for what crime I had been sentenced to atone. A kind of antigravity took over when I stepped from the Greyhound bus. The top of my head flew off. The days appeared to physically grow brighter. The sun moved closer to the Earth. I was as happy as one of the roaches that scurried in my 92 dollars-per-month apartment. 

Did my kitchen not have a stove? Did water leaking from my ceiling destroy a dozen drawings? Was my wallpaper starting to peel off? Did the mice make so much noise that they kept me up at night? What of it? Such hardships fit my definition of adventure. So as not to grow too comfortable, a few days per week I would add to these hardships by sleeping on the floor. In Worcester, I had put my shoulder against an almost immovable wheel. In Boston, in search of the later-day descendants of Bohemia, on the cusp of a cultural moment that I had not yet discovered, not the effort but the sense of difficulty disappeared. 

I had intended to rent an apartment a few blocks from my school. Hopelessly ignorant of the city, I ended up a mile away. What luck was mine! My location was a perfect one, across the street from the Northeastern University Library, whose books would gladly welcome me when I fled from my apartment. Was this place the result of a series of wrong turns? No. I had accepted Baudelaire’s invitation to go with him on a voyage. I had gone where the Old Ones sent me. I was where I was meant to be. If the most important changes are internal, having to do with one’s subtle relationship to events, then there are also times when outer changes are essential, when one would die inside without them. These outer changes then shift the balance between the subject and the object, so that events begin to articulate the psyche, so that the psyche appears to be present in the most random of events.

Continue reading at Scene4: https://www.scene4.com/0423/briangeorge0423.html

Image: Andre Masson, Transformation of the Lovers, 1939

My first book of essays, Masks of Origin: Regression in the Service of Omnipotence, is available through Untimely Books: https://untimelybooks.com/book/masks-of-origin/

Early Days in the Vortex/ Part One

 Having lost your privileges at the Akashic Hall of Records, you have been forced to see through a cone of 55 degrees. Once, before the Deluge, you could see by simply entering into the depth of the world body, which meant, of course, that you should be fearless in exiting from your own. Your current methodology is more cautious. Still, in spite of your amnesia as to origins, by some natural blind reckoning you can sense when you are doing what you should, when chance is cooperating, and when all is moving in accordance with the preexistent death-flash video. This is, at any rate, a good description of your experience when your life is going well. So you tell yourself at the time.

 You will probably choose to overlook the fact that several days have gone missing, along with several continents, and that there is no way to un-brand the barcode from your forehead. If only the world body had not been turned into a shopping mall, in which there is no way to tell if you are product or consumer. If only your guides were more consistently supportive. If only no other forces were at play. If only you could interpret your harsh punishment as proof that you had taken a wrong turn. If only Pollyanna were omniscient. To the extent that you can judge, the operative principle is as follows: if you are good, you will get patted on the head; if you are bad, you will get spanked, or vice versa.

Beneath black domes, the all-seeing eyes of the video-cameras watch. They are motion activated. They come equipped with the latest in backscatter x-ray technology, which does only minimal damage to the chromosomes, or so your masters say. There is no point in pretending to keep secrets! There are few embarrassments that are not yet part of the archeological record, few atrocities in which you have not yet indulged, including those about which you are dreaming at this moment. The cameras move with you, step by step, as you attempt to probe more deeply into the mystery of the labyrinth.

 ***

There are those who say that Worcester, Massachusetts, is a city. It is more like a collection of discontinuous neighborhoods. It is a place of factories and colleges, of Gothic spires and freight yards. Worcester was the only U.S. city that Freud visited. Robert Goddard, the inventor of the first liquid-fueled rocket, was bounced out for scaring the cows. There were trees to climb and hills down which to roll and corner lots where friends could throw a last- minute baseball game together. It was a city where men might work for the same factory for most of their adult lives, where schools taught them to sit up straight and not complain, where molten steel could put a sudden end to a career. It was, in retrospect, not a bad place to grow up. I get sentimental when I think about the twilight of the American working class, about the culture that formed me. Yet this was also a city in which it was possible to get stuck. At the age of 18, I was ready for adventures. I was willing to travel light. I would bring only a few books and some clothes and a sleeping bag and a radio. From Worcester to Boston it is only 45 miles. A bus can take you from one to the other in an hour. I am puzzled that it should have taken me two years.

 Even now, there are times when I wonder if there are pieces that I left, if it was only the subtle essence that I took, if these last 40 years have actually taken place. It is possible that my imagination is more powerful than I know, as well as more deceptive. Beneath an upright oar, I may be peeking through the soil in the yard of my three-decker, breathing slowly in and out, with a view of the Seven Hills. There is not much left of the industrial powerhouse that I knew and towards which I once felt so large an amount of ambivalence. I am no longer tempted to pass judgment on this place, this city of filled-in canals, this navel towards which railroad tracks converged, this target for Nazi bombs. The city blinks to let us know that it is there. As Anonymous, I now just barely have such an urge. I am in the world but not of it. In passing, I take note of how desperate I was to prove that I had talent. I smile to see how eager I was to say goodbye to my home.

 Continue reading at Scene4: International Magazine of Arts and Culture: https://www.scene4.com/0323/briangeorge0323.html

My book Masks of Origin: Regression in the Service of Omnipotence is available through Untimely Books: https://untimelybooks.com/book/masks-of-origin/

Monsieur Flaubert Is Not a Writer

 

With the publication of Masks of Origin: Regression in the Service of Omnipotence, my first book of essays, I am tempted to say I feel like a proud parent who sends a child off to college. The book is done, with all the sleepless nights it brought, with all the twists and turns of its unfolding, with all its absurd demands. “Spread your wings, my dear one, fly, fly!” And so it does, with barely a backward glance. Its life is now its own. This is only true alchemically, however. No sooner have I taken the book from the fumes of my athanor, than I must start to worry about its fate in the larger world. After years of careful tending, why does this book not choose to acknowledge I am here? To listen to it, you would think it had been written by another. “What is your book about?” an Uber driver might ask. Some occult anxiety then takes hold of my tongue. “Yes, my book,” I think, “you are right to be concerned. Some phrase unworthy of your dignity might pop out of my mouth.”

I do sometimes wonder what fraction of my creative process, with all its minute adjustments, will be visible to any potential reader or critic. I want to do more than to narrate or convey information or analyze or prove a thesis or describe. I fear my strategies for transferring some amount of primal energy may strike the average reader as absurd. I often ask myself, “In this age of Twitter and TikTok and Facebook, how many people actually read, with book in hand, rather than scanning for information? Who still pauses to read certain passages out loud, probing deeper and then deeper into the cross-weave of the moment, and how open are they to work that challenges their habits, and how many would see my invitation to a voyage as a threat?” Then I say to myself, “Who needs such easily disturbed readers? Why should I care if they even know the book exists?”

Then I say to myself, “Stop asking so many questions!” At a time when I am trying to push beyond my natural reserve to put my work into the world, it seems counterproductive to obsess about its future popularity, or more likely lack thereof. I have no desire to be a “brand.” I then finally say to myself, “To be preoccupied with such things only serves to justify your reluctance to take risks, your desire to stay in your comfort zone.” No, I should apologize for questioning the adventurousness of my readers—readers whom I have not even met. I am not one to judge.

To create a truly original work—rather than one the writer would like to describe as such—the writer must withdraw some portion of their energies from the world. They must then pour and seal these swirling energies into a container, into an external vessel related to but quite separate from the writer—a still half-remembered dream, a cry for help, a homunculus, a book. This vessel contains the nothing from which something may be pulled, just as the writer is a something that must plunge to unknown depths. Once the writer, the blind magician, calls them, these energies will then, if all goes well, cohere into a seed, which will then, if all goes well, begin to grow. A seed needs some protection, as well as some amount of darkness, a few weeks or nine months or even a number of decades. The whole of the future body is contained within its seed. Whether this seed ever fully expands, however, might depend on external factors. The time may or may not be right. Whatever the writer’s force of will, the fix may be in; the stars may frown upon their efforts.

Continue reading at Metapsychosis:

https://www.metapsychosis.com/monsieur-flaubert-is-not-a-writer/

My first book of essays Masks of Origin is available through Untimely Books:

https://untimelybooks.com/book/masks-of-origin/

Image: William Baziotes, Dwarf, 1947

The Long Curve of Descent

One morning, when I was four years old, I was sitting on the third floor back porch of my family’s three-decker. It was 1958, and Worcester, Massachusetts, was still regarded as the industrial heart of New England. Looking out, I could see smoke puffing from tall smokestacks, a freight-yard and a railroad bridge, hills with houses perched on them that rolled into the distance, and a few miles off, on one of the highest hills, the gothic architecture of Holy Cross College. How wonderful the day was! I could not have asked for a more perfect moment. My grandmother had given me a large chunk of clay. And then, I was no longer looking out over Worcester; no, I was hovering above the Amazon, making snakes, canoes, and villagers out of the substance in my hands.

 As I worked, however, I became frustrated. It occurred to me that I had succumbed to a creative block. I grew angry. I could not believe what I was seeing. My hands were small. My mind just barely worked. My imagination seemed like a blunt instrument. I remembered what it was like to create real snakes and villagers.

 Since that morning, I have explored a variety of methods to get from the place where my feet were planted to the larger space that surrounded me, which was not, of course, mine in any personal sense. The path has been a labyrinthine one. My raids on the inexpressible have imposed many contradictory demands. Scholarship and meditation have opened onto vision, onto a mode of knowledge as intimate as it is vast. An ocean, of a sort, boiled, and I could feel the enormous pressure on my skin. Convulsing on the current, I was thrown here and there. Over time, the heat of vision has given way to a much cooler sense of transparency. Now the years no longer turn in any one direction. Space, the magician, stops to show how the trick is done, as I reach for the child playing with clay on his back porch. But always, there are gaps, which demand that I let go of any sense of certainty, which also ask that the reader should play a more active role.

 Without gaps being left, my raids on the inexpressible would serve as no more than travelogues. My goal is to take the reader to a space that will pose a subtle challenge, a challenge that may, upon reflection, turn into a threat. The reader must then return to his own coast. He must do his best to convince himself that no shift in his perception has occurred.

 Continue reading at Scene4: International Magazine of Arts and Culture: https://www.scene4.com/0223/briangeorge0223.html

 Image: Salvador Dali, Splitting the Atom (Dematerialization Under the Nose of Nero), 1947

 My first book of essays, Masks of Origin: Regression in the Service of Omnipotence, is available through Untimely Books: https://untimelybooks.com/book/masks-of-origin/

Interview with Layman Pascal for his Integral Stage Author Series

 

My YouTube interview with Layman Pascal for his Integral Stage Author Series just went up. The podcast was prompted by the publication of Masks of Origin, my first book of essays, but the conversation ranges broadly over issues related to creative process, spiritual exploration, other-dimensional guidance, the relationship of speech to silence, and the paradoxical nature of time. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PyWzWn_99aA

My recently published book of essays, Masks of Origin: Regression in the Service of Omnipotence, is available through Untimely Books: 

https://untimelybooks.com/book/masks-of-origin/

 

The Art of Deep-Sea Fishing

 

C.J. Moore wrote,

 It was as if the poem came to life, and it was now reading itself from the great poem of the cosmos. This was happening on so many levels that I was just a twig in a maelstrom. I danced with the experience, but it was like dancing with a shark. I would find myself sitting in the university library, with my eyes buried in corridors of Egyptian temples that wound their sentences through languages that have long since vanished in the sands of time, and I would suddenly wake up with a start and I would be reading Aurelia by Nerval, and I would see myself walking through the streets of Paris, following Nerval's footsteps. I was seeing the hallucinations he saw, seeing where he was going in dark rooms when the vision stood before his astonished gaze. Then I would suddenly wake hours later walking down the hill from the university, not knowing how I got there, and I would stop and feel the last light filtering through the trees and wonder “Who are you?”

 I responded: When I taught junior high art, I developed a strategy that I referred to as “creative disorientation.” Many students could not remember that, from the ages of three to seven, they were once in love with art, and most had come to believe they did not have any talent. ‘Show; don’t tell,” was the operative principle. It was not that I did not have any clear-cut goals in mind. A goal would be clear to me, but not to them, and, by a process of “reverse engineering,” I would lead students into an almost unbearable state of disorientation, which would swell into a kind of cognitive crisis. I was familiar with this mini-version of the abyss. I had stared into it. It had spoken back. While the experience of disorientation would be particular to each, I knew the general habits that were preventing these students from gaining access to their talents. Reactions would be supervised. Adjustments would be made. A nudge here. A show of support there. At some point, almost inevitably, a student’s cognitive crisis would flip over into a breakthrough, and it would open up a space in which real learning could occur.

 In situations such as the one that you describe, in which a hair’s breadth separates a breakthrough from a breakdown, I sometimes wonder if this is what is going on. With a goal that is clear to them, but not to us, perhaps our other-dimensional teachers have reverse engineered a confrontation with the abyss. To this end, no academic knowledge would be adequate, and no human teacher could see far enough ahead. Then too, such teachers know that ecstasy is our primal out-of-body state, and they do not lose any sleep if the student must be tortured. Some degree of disorientation is a small enough price to pay to learn to what extent our vision has been compromised. We tend to see what we expect to see. We fail to grasp the thread that would lead us through the labyrinth.

 It is tempting to theorize that other methods could have been used, that a different path would have led to the same end. Could our teachers not have given us a true and false questionnaire? “When I was a boy of fourteen,” Mark Twain writes, “my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be twenty-one, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years.” So too, it can be difficult for us to see that our teachers know much of anything, until, turning back, we note that the Earth has become a small speck in the distance, and we then exclaim, “Aha!”

 A straight line is not always the shortest distance between two points, and certainly not in the education of a poet. If we had learned more about French Symbolism and Surrealism in school, it would have made it much more difficult for us to discover these things for ourselves and would have removed much of the fun and mystery from the process. Lautreamont would have become an eccentric version of Longfellow. The quiz on Les Fleurs du Mal would have been as subversive as the one on Hiawatha. Revolutionary fervor would have been graded on a curve, and school policy would have demanded that each essay should be taken back whole from a dream. If, with a wink, a cuneiform chanteuse were to wave to us from a street corner—too hot, too avant-garde to be true!—school policy would encourage us to make love to her in class. Upon climax, she would turn back into clay. Verese’s Arcana would be the school’s atonal fight-song, and Picasso’s “I do not seek; I find” the motto.

 Hey, those ideas could work! A Man Ray photo could be used for the cover of the High Modernism textbook, perhaps the famous one of Meret Oppenheim standing nude in front of a printing press, smeared in ink, with one hand lifted in an ambiguous gesture against her forehead. Our project would of course be subject to approval by the Texas State Board of Education.

   Continue reading in Scene4: International Magazine of Arts and Culture:

https://www.scene4.com/archivesqv6/2021/aug-2021/0821/briangeorge0821.html

My recently published book of essays, Masks of Origin: Regression in the Service of Omnipotence, is available through Untimely Books:

https://untimelybooks.com/book/masks-of-origin/