Circus Days On The Hudson

Of course the guys have fond memories of that weekend. It was a generational triumph and it's good that those two in particular really bonded. I spent some time with Howard in the year or two afterward . . . to introject myself a little into the continuity from outside and give you something to look at while the campaign picks up speed, this was still only a few years after a failed sci fi project with vampire ringmaster Mark Rein Hagen that drew heavily on his memetic model of personality while a graphic designer I'd worked with elsewhere had somehow been one of Howard's apprentices or proteges so I needed to complete the circuit there. You are all quite the tale but Howard is quite the "quite the tale."

And the Laffoley was of course a completely unique experience. I was still a little too young to appreciate the man in the whole but I never really learned to read a wiring diagram either. I guess what we need now is all on the front side of the paintings, the rest is inaccessible without some seriously aggressive new decor choices. I might've met the Alderick or at least spotted them in the audience but you can see how much of an impact that precious weekend made on people. The "right" impact? "Enough" impact? I hope you're not even asking these questions. It should look a little stupid and crass for me to even bring it up, so I'm using this bit to banish the questions + the thoughts behind them. I spent a year studying with a psychoanalyst who was big into Donald Winnicott, who I recommend as the biggest pragmatist in the field because he chose to work almost exclusively with preverbal children and so didn't have time to sweat the small stuff. People worry about whether they're doing "enough." It's usually enough. All that heaven allows and a little more.

But enough about that! The important part is that I have a scribble book of notes on all the guys but your pages were the best. Not to hurt their feelings (I figure that everything here is public, the gesture we are having here means opening myself up to the entire pack of you as though I'd gone to the Omega party instead of crashing back at the cabin) but getting a bit of the autohagiography of the diabolical Metzger was powerful stuff. The infamous eyebrow slips for a moment. There was a sociology conference once where all the great scientists came up and read their research, then one of them decided that instead of maintaining all the performance that they were a real academic discipline with a proud and noble lineage (future of an illusion) he finds the colleague on stage in a wheelchair whose work is all about exclusion and gives him a big ole hug. Wish I could remember which was which, they're in the notebooks somewhere and the story might not even be accurate in all details. The heart is in the right place though.

That was your gift to that Omega baby, the egregoreous rex. No idea if anyone has ever complimented you on it or come up and say your life story changed their life story. It's tough to be the ringmaster running rings full of interesting monsters, which is why I can't help but arc an eyebrow of my own that you don't mention whether you enjoyed that particular circus. A lot of work, a lot of detail, a lot of project management in a pre-cloud environment and a somewhat "different" crowd for that venue to absorb. Also you are usually the interviewer waving the prop microphone in someone else's face to draw the sight lines that direction. I get it. I think that's one reason I am worming my way here now to watch a little of this circus from something closer to your point of view, what's going on under that big hypnotic hat, in that dangerous mind.

Blazer know blazer as it were. Or at least blazer intrigue blazer. Every man and every woman is a star blazer.

But I remember fumbling up from the company holiday party at a restaurant like Nobu (campari sugar in the coffee) to the Coral Room PTV show in what became 2-3 feet of snow to watch the mermaids swim oblivious in their heated tanks, which could become a horrendous Lucien Carr sort of phrase tailored for Tokyo collectors if examined too closely, but actually started out an innocent bit of second-star-on-the-right plumage. I dimly recall being bombed out of my mind by the bar cheering when the band "played the single." Arcadia was a real standout. Look how happy Doug looks, true rock star. Then the next morning I went all the way up to the Cloisters early to regroup and it was empty, all it took to keep the tourists out was those 2-3 feet of fresh powder.

The wife has plenty of her own encounters with the P'orridge and the Bloom circle and so forth around this time. What Dr. Winnicott might call a transitional period, a holding period, an egg of sorts or incubator. I am not a big blazer, having made all the wrong choices to ever end up with more than a genteel place in the Maine lake country and a fantastic book collection once it burst the aluminum-wired plasters of our last NYC apartment and they tell me I popped a lung, suddenly it was '08, the year of the crash and who among us is young enough to want to do that again. We are still doing things in the market but they're gestural.

There's that word again like a whiff of rain on miles of sagebrush, Castanedan in its mystery. I spent a lot of formative years in New Mexico. When I came east I would explain it as being "from the edge of the ghost country," which used to be a Navaho thing. Now at this late date doing all the gardening I want in the mythic shadow of that stack of Stephen King paperbacks I realize the ghosts came from the east and that was the farthest they could go at that point. Now the classic rock stations are everywhere streaming from the cell towers in full digital fidelity.

The market is open! Just something for you to repay YOUR bit at Omega and your adventures after that . . . and to come off as a little less of a weird Black Lodge At Santa Cruz style "entity" flapping up into your light to commemorate what you're doing here. Or at least a different one. Maybe it's all just entities at first like the awful moth in the Quay Brothers Gilgamesh. The rest is the lost art of conversation, so thanks again and the adventure continues.

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WHERE HAVE THEY BEEN

We've been altering ourselves a little these last few years to fit into our new tree, as it were. Everyone can do it, everybody does it and "the secret of the wax," to quote the heron who figured it out, is how to learn to do it well, with a minimum of unnecessary resistance. The experiment here is to introduce a lot of plants from the near away to fill the gaps cut into the forest to squeeze in the electronic cottage replete with "zoom room," second kitchen and all those trimmings . . . and then when we've paid that debt, through the deepest arts of the landscape designer's art we introduce a few relative exotics from the farther away to see how they interact, how the roots twist below the graft.

This is where a lot of gears start moving faster. What it amounts to right now is about three tons of bluestone and I don't know, two tons of granite coming in from the middle away, not to mention the round stones that were sleeping under somebody else's earth until the extractor came for them and their stored lightning so they can nap in our northern sun. And 61 mansions to limn the small circle, a long jupiter cycle or a rough double saturn or whatever plus one due north for "luck." And of course the big players to inform what will become the big circle as soon as we tell them how to cut the pieces: one round of lilacs, one round of hemlock, what might be the final chanticleer pear legally planted in northern New England. The elf we brought in separately to consult on the back is eager to graft it but we'll see how hungry we get.

Drip hydraulics are coming for the dry times. Generators are coming for the cold times. Rocket cottage. Sails of silver. The last homely house on the right.

And this morning I realized that much like the fire and the rose are one, Hapworth 16 1924 and Watchmen 4 serve the same function in their respective epics. It's 1942 and I am eloping in a world at war. It's 1959 and Buddy has gotten himself into trouble, somebody should try to do something nice for Buddy. Franny when you read this (it's 1965 now and Franny is reading this), get him to read the Vedanta, I'm not saying push it on him but give it your best legitimate effort. It's 1927: Charlotte on the radio, that kid kills me. It's 1945 and the bomb goes off in Walt's face.

Life on mars, walking on the moon.

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PROVENANCE & HER CONTINUATIONS

We've been "serious" about the Bollingen series since June 2009, when Princeton was dumping Samothrace 11 and the boundaries became visible. In theory, there are only 100 numbers like allegories to represent the world stretching from the Navaho warrior songs collected near my home town as the boys went off on the big Pacific adventure (When The Two Came To Their Father) to one of Joseph Campbell's thicker reveries three decades later. Roll them all up and you have the canons of a certain vector on the soul, a kind of ark or repository of symbol systems.

In practice of course, it's rarely so simple. Several of those volumes open up into a staggering number of secondary publications and some, like the Samothrace excavation record that got things moving in the first place, are still alive and sprouting new installments every few years or decades. They're on their third publisher in 60 years, which isn't bad I guess. I have been promised that they are serious about finishing it one day, even if the people currently assigned to the missing volumes die along the way. There are back-up plans, contingencies.

Otherwise, we are practically done, with a few practical exclusions and trivial omissions. I focused on religion, mythology, psychology and art, bypassing most of the purely literary numbers as peripheral to the main thrust of the series. We have the complete Jung, for example, and not the complete Coleridge or Valery, selected Unamuno, assorted St John Perse or most of the Eugene Onegin . . . although I do price the Coleridge from time to time when a different project rises to the surface. I'm pleased to say that they're all HC and about 90% in DJ, with the major exceptions being extremely rare in any state.

We are still getting the Mellon Lectures (Bollingen XXXV) as they emerge. They're handsome volumes. But at this point they've also spun out into a completely different project in their own right, a parallel tree of knowledge.

Having climbed this mountain the real question is how we construct a new one on its summit. We're at best halfway to the sky. We can do better. We have new tools and new techniques. It's going to be fun.

The other things I was buying in 2009 are funny and representative of a strategic pivot: Rene Le Forestier, an England's Hidden Reverse that mysteriously never arrived ($28 plus shipping), Daniel Gunther's first book ditto "mysteriously," Georg Laue, Alice Bertha Gomme, Edward Armstrong's Folklore of Birds. It was the year after the crash and my lungs were filling up fast, the year before we left the city and finally started inching into the forest. And so here we are here again.

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TRIP RESET

The season is open. You know where to reach me.

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Where Superhero Costumes Come From / Why They Are So Important / Where They Are Going

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Breaking the Fifth Wall

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Forever People

Agents of Darkseid were waiting at all the known entry points but as the yuga deteriorated the incarnation kept happening. First came the isolated and broken iterations, trivial to trick and trap before they even remembered themselves in the mirror like ants in a pumpkin spice mix. They kept coming. Think of meteor showers, alpha particle impacts, the pinging of brownian motion accelerating in an allegedly terminal system. By 1965 the signal was everywhere: the planet may have once been property but the statute of limitations was wearing infrathin. Even so, agents of Darkseid were busy. It took six years for the most successful iteration to achieve optimum energetic state, at which stage Mother Box, Super Cycle and Infinity Man, the mysterious drummer in the shadows, were provided.

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The Game That Moves As You Play

Right now around Arcturus it's 1987. Closer to home, it's 1992 on the smoldering surface of Wolf 489. An unobserved phase modulation between Watchmen and peak Sandman, and weightier things of course. The contents of the shelves at St. Marks Books around the corner barely circulate with each new issue of Semiotext(e) . . . how I became one of the invisible, the only Harry Potter sequel that matters. The ones that come back are the ones who suffer, something something.

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Rocket Summer Will Return / File Under [Music]


A little busy but marking the moment and mouthing the hoaring anthem between the fireworks: "Automatic for the People: The Raggedy-Arsed Apocalypse of Austin Osman Spare." (2006) More and Moore to come.

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Yet Another County Heard From

Mark yourself "SAFE" in Western Ohio while here in the north the son of some Colombian madman delivered a full set to the gates of Harvard itself. Cry havoc & loose the doors of perception--!

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Whirlwind Tour (My Greenest Adventure)
Kansas City was potentially disruptive in the good "gamble a stamp, change the world" way. Very very wet and very very green. Which is nice because the nerds aren't coming through as fast as I would've liked and the visionary suits and technocrats are the ones stepping up . . . the vectors revolve I guess, the eye moves. It has its higher-order handedness that will resolve once I get the character generation slotted in.





Hope all are well in this technicolor future, the wreckage crawled from the south. Which witch is which, as it were. If you're into the pole flip nothing will ever be the same. Who runs the shoes. Robert, the guy next to me on the way in, was full of childhood reminiscences of digging potatoes in Presque Isle back in the day . . . John Crowley's hometown. This was a fertile coincidence because closer to home people were talking about the satellite launch facility going up there behind the experimental farms, "30-pound payloads, after all it's ideal for achieving polar orbit." The way back was USDA inspectors on the first leg (rotting meat jokes) and then a surprising number of people coming in from Houston. First priority today: massive clam basket.

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Riding Is Required / Streets of Laredo

Even a terminal mythology gets it right once in awhile. From the notes:

"mistress of state" = maittresse de tête, from the stuff of principalities to the back of the head.

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A World Absolute Elsewhere

Well now it is apparently a rescue mission. "Never,” she said, and then paused a long time in limbo while Auberon thought further: never forget me? Never break faith, never say die, never never never? “Never long,” she said. “Only wait; only have patience. Longing is fatal. It will come.” They had begun to weep around her, though they hid it, for the old lady would have been impatient with tears. “Be happy,” she said, even more faintly. “For the things…” Yes. There she goes. Bye, Mrs. MacR. "The things, children—the things that make us happy—make us wise."

Auberon built up the fire, pleased with himself. Mrs. MacReynolds was among the last of the characters whom he had inherited from the creators of “A World Elsewhere.” A young divorcée thirty years ago, she had tenaciously and cleverly held on to her part, through alcoholism, remarriage, religious conversion, grief, age and illness. Done now though. Contract terminated. Frankie was about to go off on a long trip, too; he would return—his contract had years to run, and he was the producer’s boyfriend as well—but he would return a changed man.

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Walden / Magic Inc.

You know that thing where I joke about how crazy it is here? Let's just say that last week was the first one in months where I was at the office fewer than 100 hours, one way or another. We owe that to the Holy Week holidays and a crawling shadow of DNGAF. I feel renewed. Let's see how long it lasts. Anyway I've been terribly distracted from you and regret that but you've always been on my mind. (You were always in my house.)

Waldo. The most brilliant conspiracy of all is how we've been trained to ask where he is, not who. A Lyonnaise cloth dealer who threw it all away and started a war on mammon. Imagine him lurking in every crowd, jaunty red phrygian cap and stripey shirt, waving and smiling. In fifth grade a teacher who reminds me of Jeff Richard forced me to play Harlequin in a summer play and hoodwink a cloth dealer. It was very hot that year and I would've rather pondered the Silmarillion.

So there's that game where you lay out three books to symbolize the world or at least a role-playing world, a "projection" like the home movies Jarman cut together for the Pets in the far-flung anno domini MCMLXXXIX. Who you are, who they are, how the systems tie you together. Okay.

The platform play is so close now I can smell it. A kind of kalevala creating a "suomi" where once there were only Swedish and Russian lakes and forests. A kind of glorantha, a mirror of the '60s that birthed the current middle ages. A third age, third wave, hypothetical fourth great awakening, "aeon." A rocket cottage. Lightning. Explosive effervescence birthing angels.

The discovery in 186 A.D. of secret Dionysian celebrations in several towns in Latium aroused intense indignation in Roman society . . . this indignation was probably due less to cynical moralizing than to the sheer astonishment of a businessman confronted with a barter system. According to Peter John Olivi and Ubertino of Casale the reign of the Holy Spirit had already begun.

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Burned Over Districts
A little busy but good things hatching. It's as if he took a scarf and threw it as far as he could and he said, "This is Kobol. I will be born here." Right to the edge of our country, and he says, "This is my Kobol."

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Cordelia Is Also The Fool

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Glenda Jackson: Still King Lear

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You Would Call Where We Are From "Where You Get Your Ideas"
He knew that for him its meaning must once have been supreme; though in what cycle or incarnation he had known it, or whether in dream or in waking, he could not tell. Vaguely it called up glimpses of a far, forgotten first youth, when wonder and pleasure lay in all the mystery of days, and dawn and dusk alike strode forth prophetick to the eager sound of lutes and song; unclosing faery gates toward further and surprising marvels.

I'm four years old. Chef Bernie is the only game in town and that town is an engraved bead set between sandstone, sky and silver like the rock chips Spider Woman gave the twins to fortify them on their pilgrimage to their father the sun. It's what she calls weaving. I insist on the spaghetti. The great Bernardo Sandoval's chagrin is not recorded. Later I ask my mother what it was like before I could read. "It must be like looking at Spanish," she says. I dream of a book and the letters swim and squirm like oil between clear glass plates. Soon they discover I need glasses.

I am close to my mother then. We are constantly driving in my father's little red car to diners and sandwich shops. The fried clams are frozen. The taquitos are astounding. Every day we have sundaes. She later denies all of this as a kind of hypoglycemic trance. They despair of me at the preschool even though I don't know how to divide. One of the girls crushes her finger in a door and can no longer dance in a ring. Another embroiders her own name on a length of white cloth and gives it to me as a memento: child's right angle caps, L I Z. Ridgely has her look but better penmanship.

They moved. Everyone is always in motion. The Justice League and Justice Society open the doors to Earth S and all the strange people come out: Spy Smasher, Bulletman, Ibis the Invincible. I don't know it yet but fandom sighs with relief that a bad chapter is at least over. There are bleeding heart bushes in bloom in our yard and an inchworm the size of my hand. They let me produce puppet shows for my class that are still famous in some circles today. Uncle Wiggily records, Uncle Wiggily in New Mexico.



The eager sounds of lutes and song, Sha Na Na records, the strange sad music of barely a generation ago. Elvis is dying, the girls on television throw him their underwear. Chemical King sacrifices himself to save the galaxy. When I go back to buy that comic it's already gone from its spinner rack, all the stores opened onto a back corridor so you could move through the entire strip mall in one continuous movement, up from the paperback store where I covet the Narnia books I'd read in Denver through the drugstore with its legacy fountain and spinner up to the craft shop where Eldritch Wizardry compells and confounds, all these rules for the fantasy army men to follow.

Sinister fates await the unwary like something you might hear about at Thunderbird Hobby across town, where tiny antique model kits beckon the Mormon kids while an early Shark Attack screams to itself in the back room where all the real magic happens, lit only by its own screen. The title of the Pocket Dying Earth makes me sad like an Everly Brothers track, that high desert lonesome sound. I get a telescope and squander it. In the hospital one Halloween I give my roommate my holiday candles and realize now he must've had something terminal.

Faery gates toward further and surprising marvels, my father turns to me when he's running Youth Group one night, you don't worship Greek mythology do you? On Battlestar Galactica they've finally found their motocross way to earth, it's the show that taught me that "hooker" means socialator. I have a 90% complete set of Ballantine Adult Fantasies pulled from desert flea markets and this very store. Xiccarph and the Man Who Was Thursday will come in good time.

An hour to the north in college town Rivendell there are shrinkwrapped monochrome giant modules. My father will never manage to take me to the sandwich shop there, pregnantly called Bilbo's by some undoubted king hippie I will never meet. Someone in that town had an original Equinox, a James Bond Tarot, Pentangle records, dragging them up the mountain for me to encounter in a fever. What I really covet at this time is Dragon magazine 35, the one with angels in it. The man in the model train store hates all this stuff but orders it for me anyway. Years later he will sell me the City State of the World Emperor.

And vast infinities away, past the Gate of Deeper Slumber and the enchanted wood and the garden lands and the Cerenerian Sea and the twilight reaches of Inganok, the crawling chaos Nyarlathotep strode brooding into the onyx castle atop unknown Kadath in the cold waste, and taunted insolently the mild gods of earth whom he had snatched abruptly from their scented revels in the marvellous sunset city.

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