TC: Portal

Winged genie with pollen and pollen-bucket : Assyrian bas-relief, 8th c. B.C.



At a dark portal between cosmic realms
A wizard found himself stood up by the Morning Star--
Evening his element as the Rain God's is water.

She who has the power of giving flowers
Promises everything is alive
As long as the night sky stays fresh and new.

"Only a moment here on earth.
It is untrue that we have come
To live here on earth."

The hand and foot prints on the rock suggest
The presence of unseen
Beings who have been here

Before us. The air, god-charged.
The words, cut from the same stone
That will lie over us,

Have been given only a moment
To prepare that place to
Which we have been sent.

On a golden dais laid over the broken stones
In the declining shadow
Between the rising of the Morning Star

And the setting of the Evening Star
The palace of the Smoking Mirror is built.
The second temple is not like the first.

TC: The Problem of Evil

Untitled study of a dog: Adolf Hitler (n.d.)

The Wizard makes the argument that our displeasure with the sufferings, pains, discomforts and inconveniences of our state may be attributed to a deficiency of objectivity on our part. We simply fail to see that when things go wrong in our little corner of the universe, there must inevitably be some other corner of the universe in which things are going right.

In the language of the casino, the Wizard is the House. The House wins every argument. Merely to argue for the sake of arguing is no more than a form of pastime on our part, a kind of playing.

A scholar once estimated the odds on life as six to five against.

This opinion was reiterated as the epigraph to a thesis on game theory.

The author of the thesis was consulted in the course of the tense policy debates that went on behind the scenes during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

One recalls the coeds being fetched home from their dormitories to Kalamazoo and Grand Rapids in those days when the end of the world seemed at hand. In their plaid kilt skirts with the large decorative fake gold safety pins; the chilled red kneecaps, raw in the northern light; the silent fathers packing the cheap imitation leather suitcases into the trunks of the Detroit iron cars. What was there to say. The incipient end of the world was that of which one could not speak, and anyway it was cold and getting late, the motor was running.

The end of the world didn't happen that time but according to the odds it might have. In the infinite game to say that it didn't happen but it might have is the same thing as saying, next time it will. In the infinite game we are the moving pieces and the players are elsewhere, distant and unreachable.

In my roominghouse in those days of the incipient end of the world there were discussions all night and on into the morning. If the world was about to end, that must mean there was evil in the universe, for we all of us regarded the end of the world as an evil prospect indeed.

But if the world were to end there would be no winners, so exactly who would be pleased, who would benefit?

Do the evils suffered on this globe, by some inconceivable means, contribute to the felicity of the inhabitants of some remote planet? we asked.

Though these questions were never answered then, and in the long interim since that time nothing significant has happened that I am now able to remember, to distract me from them, they have continued to haunt me.

Still life: Adolf Hitler (n.d.)

And there was another time. Spring eventually came, the northern springtime with its lilacs and its clouds. Late one night down by the river in a glade one heard, as one passed over a bridge solitary as an unresolved unit, distressed outcries, and saw then light from inside a car, and the figure of a woman, like a phosphorescent marine creature glimpsed through the murky deeps, struggling to escape the car.

And wending one's way through the night afterwards one asked again, of oneself, is there a planet upon which there exist Beings who take some gain from this? Whatever this is that has happened?

And since then, more of the same, seemingly, else why would one have had to work so hard to forget it all?

Then latterly the Wizard explained these things.

In distant parts of the universe there exist perhaps conceptions inconceivable to us, as yet; still we must study on them, and attempt to reckon.

Moreover the Wizard has spoken to us as an adult addresses a child, of these realms, and of the causes that emanate from them, and pass through us, much as neutrinos, passing through the peaks of our heads and downward thence through our shoes, penetrate the core of the earth, and emerge out at the other side of the globe, and continue unimpeded across the universe.

But these causes have consequences; which they leave in their path as a kind of detritus, a stardust which is the stuff of evil.

The Wizard is a Hunter and takes for granted these distant Beings made animals for us as food and playthings, but reminds us also that as animals are to us, sustenance and diversion, we are to the inhabitants of that remote planet, who gorge upon our souls and toss our bodies about at their pleasure, sending aneurysms and ischemia at random, sowing tumors and deformities merely to please a whim, driving us mad for a passing fancy, blinding us, inducing us to swallow our tongues, choking us with asthma, all for light entertainment.

Like schoolchildren playing with computer programmed toys they have fashioned bubbles which float through our arteries to explode at exactly the moment they wish.

Perhaps now and then a particularly clever player in this cosmic game will devise an epidemic and whole large parts of our species will fall prey to the most excruciating of fatal contagious diseases.

The Wizard explains that these Beings on their remote planet may deceive, torment, or destroy us, for the ends of their own pleasure or utility solely, to what extent they wish, from now to the end of Time, and that we would be wise to consider this as only the beginning phase in their plan for us.

Untitled study of a dog: Adolf Hitler (n.d.)

TC: Conical World

Comparisons are odious. Being compared with infinity however is perhaps the least offensive of comparisons. Everything finite falls short. The necessary democracy in this is consoling. Everything comes to an end, therefore coming to an end is not a singling-out.

Were everyone to walk with an exaggerated stoop as do I, thought the elderly man, glancing warily at his image in the reflecting glass of a streetlit shopwindow, it would be far less melancholy a thing, this slow, stooped walking.

Imperfect, said the melancholy pedestrian to himself, now that is not such a bad thing to be, either. Limited, yes, everyone has their limits. Who set those limits no one knows, they simply exist. Each of us was made to proceed just so far, and no farther. And then stop.

Were one to have time on one's hands, one might amuse oneself imagining a scale of being stretching from infinity to nothing, the bent, aged person mused.

Infinity being unimaginable, one would necessarily begin one's rankings at a point much closer to nothing than to infinity, and then work down, filling in the gaps.

One might picture all existence as a sort of conical structure. At the basis of the cone there would exist that nothing which is located at an infinite distance from the body of the person doing the picturing. In between there would be an infinite series of indefinite existences, the whole thing spinning continuously like a top. The sound of this spinning would be a deep hum worried at intervals by a high-pitched squeak.

Aye, it was that agitated treble-range bit that troubled our walker not a little, as, each step an ordeal, he loitered along.

His thoughts meanwhile tumbled forward unabated, like things of unequal sizes and weights suddenly let to fall through a floor that contained a trap door, hidden until now.

He went on picturing the universe as a spinning cone composed of everything.

Toward the lower range of existences at the base of the continuously whirring cone, he decided, one would expect to exhaust all those existences with positive qualities and enter the region of those existences of which there is nothing good to be said.

This region would be extensive, well-nigh boundless, yet each degraded existence encountered in it would have at least one redeeming feature: a superiority to nothing. For that reason alone each of these existences might be expected to be wearing a smile upon its face.

Trouble however loomed.

The stooped old man negotiated the perilous crosswalk as though it were the straits separating a grainy, amorphous past from a bright, vivid present. Pain and shocks cut through the waters between, fins hooked and alert. Beyond lay the future, indeterminate, blurred, filled with confusing illumination in strange, unsettling hues, crisscrossed by fluid shadows, phantoms that might be passersby, bobbing along as though riding small waves on ancient, worm-eroded surfboards.

To the meanings in things we are unequal in our meditations. To the things themselves however we are equal and more.

Nor does it end there, alas, thought the increasingly weary walker, waiting for the light to change.

For there are also to be considered the great empty spaces beneath the base of the cone, he thought, the infinite vacuities, pretending to be a foundation, on which this cone, or existence, spins.

Those whom this spinning sickens, who walk stooped and melancholy past its cold bright shopwindows knowing they can no longer stand the pace, and seek only the shade, may find it, though whether this will help remains in question, it occurred to him.

TC: Prophet

"I have been certified as mildly insane!":
photo by Gillian Wearing, 1992-3 (Tate Gallery)



So then he wandered out into the street and began to testify
Something about life being a long journey of the soul
An endless voyaging turning into a voyaging with an end
One knows how but one does not know when
No one yet knows when as the traffic bore down on him

As the traffic bore down on him my mind drifted in the wilderness
Or was it that my mind having been adrift all along
I’ve just grown to regard the wilderness as my resting or laughing place
He cried but those were not yet his last words
As the traffic parted around him as around one charmed

TC: Radio

The Radio Galaxy Cygnus A


At the end of the long day the Midnight Flower
Falls apart
Sundown russet supernova
Go slow
Don't hurt the radio for
Against all
Solid testimony machines
Have feelings
Too
Brush past it lightly
With a fine regard
For allowing its molecules
To remain 100% intact
Machines can think like Wittgenstein
And the radio’s a machine
Thinking softly to itself
Of the Midnight Flower
As her tawny parts unfold
In slow motion the boat
Rocks on the ocean
In the song on the radio
As her tawny parts unfold
The radio does something mental
To itself singingly
As her tawny parts unfold
Inside its wires
And steal away its heart
Two minutes after eleven
The color dream communicates itself
The ink falls on the paper as if magically
Deep in the radio
The radio says
The markets go up The markets go down
The radio fears foul play
It turns impersonal
A piggy bank was smashed
A victim was found naked
Radio how can you tell me this
In such a chipper tone
Come in Kokomo Topeka Cucamonga
Radio when I am alone
I know what there is to know
Only because you have wished it so
Your structure of voices is a friend
The best kind
The kind one can turn on or off
Whenever one wants to
But turning you off is wrong I know
For you will intensely to continue
And in a deeper way that is the reverse
Of the idea of choice
You do
You exist in a way that is independent of me
You pick up
Remote signals from Radio Galaxy Cygnus A
Six million light years away
The brightest radio source in the sky
Hours go by
Heaven must be like this
For as her tawny parts unfold
Sundown gasps its old Ray Charles 45 of Georgia
Only through your voice

TC: Inferno V: Francesca's Anaphora (Certain Evil Souls)

Krefeld Project: Dining Room Scene 2: Eric Fischl, 2003



From the Fifth Book of the Inferno



"In Dante's Inferno, why does Francesca's heart still hurt and ache?"
enquires a tenth grade student at an online study site.


"Francesca's heart still aches because she is still experiencing the
sin, but now with full understanding of its meaning and importance.
Those emotions—and her clinging to them—are part of the punishment.

This shows how sinners cling to their sin, and how rarely they change,
even in hell," comes the reply, from a "freshman college teacher."

Francesca's sin is clinging to love. There is a sin of anaphora,

a carrying up or back, or phrasal repetition, in her clinging to Amor.

Few things are more tiresome than arguments through anaphora.


We shall not flag or fail. We shall go on to the end. We shall fight

in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight
with growing, etc.


Yet war and poetry and sex are full of them.

Here is Francesca's:



Amor, ch'ai cor gentil ratto s'apprende

prese costui de la bella persona

che mi fu tolta; e 'l modo ancor m'offende.



Amor, ch'a nullo amato amar perdona,

mi prese del costui piacer sì forte,

che, come vedi, ancor non m'abbandona.



Amor conduisse noi ad una morte.




(trans. Henry F. Cary:)

“Love, that in gentle heart is quickly learnt,
Entangled him by that fair form, from me
Ta’en in such cruel sort, as grieves me still:
Love, that denial takes from none beloved,
Caught me with pleasing him so passing well,
That, as thou seest, he yet deserts me not.
Love brought us to one death."


Francesca's famous anaphora cleverly frames and sets off two fateful laws of love and their tragic, or shall we say unfortunate, consequences. Love catches fire quickly in the gentle heart; thus Paolo, naturally gentle-hearted, cannot help having the spark of love ignite in his heart a wild conflagration. Love absolves no one from loving in return; thus Francesca, for her part, has no choice but to love him who loves her. Francesca speaks the language of the all powerful god of Love. In suggesting Love refuses to take no for an answer, moreover, she is a sock-puppet of her own defense attorney, summing up the case: neither she nor Paolo should be blamed, because they were merely channeling the power of the god, acting-out, as it were, not themselves but Love. Of course the faultiness of these arguments is obvious to Dante, whose evident sympathy for them as tender lovers sways him not at all from placing Paolo and Francesca in the second circle. On the one hand, he seems to say, how poetic their love was! And on the other, more gravely: but here they are in Hell, are they not?

All these "tragic" loves, Francesca, Dido, Cleopatra. Pleasant, surfeited, melancholy, indeed, but tragic? asks Dante.

Love, that on gentle heart quickly lays hold, seized him for the fair person that was taken from me, and the mode still hurts me. Love, which absolves no loved one from loving, seized me for the pleasing of him so strongly that, as thou seest, it does not even now abandon me. Love brought us to one death.

And it keeps on down through the centuries, this pleasant perversity of an argument.

Francesca—according to the Boccaccio account that provided Dante instigation for his invocation of the fatal romance—was a victim from the beginning. She was blatantly tricked into marrying Gianciotto, who was disfigured and uncouth, when the handsome and elegant Paolo was sent in his brother's place to settle the nuptial contract. Gianciotto was, as the saying goes, doing a number on Francesca . Finding herself roped into an unfortunate union, and, understandably feeling thus ill done by, the young woman did not attempt to make a secret of her affections for Paolo. Things went along then as such things do. Informed this was going on, Gianciotto snuck up and caught the lovers together in Francesca's bedchamber. Unaware that Paolo had got stuck in his attempt to escape down a ladder, Francesca admitted Gianciotto. Meanwhile, enter the unlucky Paolo. Gianciotto lunged at him with a sword. Francesca stepped between the two and was slain. Gionciotto, now having a truly bad day, ruing his poor aim and with a double score to settle, promptly finished off Paolo. Francesca and Paolo, Boccaccio concludes, were buried, amid a sea of by many tears, in a single tomb. Thus "Love brought us to one death" was, as far as the fable went, pretty much the truth of this pretty fiction which Dante chose to import into his his poem, securing it forever with that repetition of Amor, the circuiting anaphora Francesca tosses off in the unregarding way of a woman letting her hair fall down around the shoulders on which she has long borne the burden of a great unfairness.

Now ’gin the rueful wailings to be heard.
Now am I come where many a plaining voice
Smites on mine ear. Into a place I came
Where light was silent all. Bellowing there groan’d
A noise, as of a sea in tempest torn
By warring winds. The stormy blast of Hell
With restless fury drives the spirits on,
Whirl’d round and dash’d amain with sore annoy.
When they arrive before the ruinous sweep,
There shrieks are heard, there lamentations, moans,
And blasphemies ’gainst the good Power in Heaven.
I understood, that to this torment sad
The carnal sinners are condemn’d, in whom
Reason by lust is sway’d. As, in large troops
And multitudinous, when winter reigns,
The starlings on their wings are borne abroad;
So bears the tyrannous gust those evil souls.
On this side and on that, above, below,
It drives them: hope of rest to solace them
Is none, nor e’en of milder pang. As cranes,
Chanting their dolorous notes, traverse the sky,
Stretch’d out in long array; so I beheld
Spirits, who came loud wailing, hurried on
By their dire doom. Then I: “Instructor! who
Are these, by the black air so scourged?” “The first
’Mong those, of whom thou question’st,” he replied,
“O’er many tongues was empress. She in vice
Of luxury was so shameless, that she made
Liking be lawful by promulged decree,
To clear the blame she had herself incurr’d.
This is Semiramis, of whom ’tis writ,
That she succeeded Ninus her espoused;
And held the land, which now the Soldan rules.
The next in amorous fury slew herself,
And to Sichæus’ ashes broke her faith:
Then follows Cleopatra, lustful queen.”
There mark’d I Helen, for whose sake so long
The time was fraught with evil; there the great
Achilles, who with love fought to the end.
Paris I saw, and Tristan; and beside,
A thousand more he show’d me, and by name
Pointed them out, whom love bereaved of life.
When I had heard my sage instructor name
Those dames and knights of antique days, o’erpower’d
By pity, well-nigh in amaze my mind
Was lost; and I began: “Bard! willingly
I would address those two together coming,
Which seem so light before the wind.” He thus:
“Note thou, when nearer they to us approach.
Then by that love which carries them along,
Entreat; and they will come.” Soon as the wind
Sway’d them towards us, I thus framed my speech:
“O wearied spirits! come, and hold discourse
With us, if by none else restrain’d. As doves
By fond desire invited, on wide wings
And firm, to their sweet nest returning home,
Cleave the air, wafted by their will along;
Thus issued, from that troop where Dido ranks,
They, through the ill air speeding: with such force
My cry prevail’d, by strong affection urged.
“O gracious creature and benign! who go’st
Visiting, through this element obscure,
Us, who the world with bloody stain imbrued;
If, for a friend, the King of all, we own’d,
Our prayer to him should for thy peace arise,
Since thou hast pity on our evil plight.
Of whatsoe’er to hear or to discourse
It pleases thee, that will we hear, of that
Freely with thee discourse, while e’er the wind,
As now, is mute. The land, that gave me birth,
Is situate on the coast, where Po descends
To rest in ocean with his sequent streams.
“Love, that in gentle heart is quickly learnt,
Entangled him by that fair form, from me
Ta’en in such cruel sort, as grieves me still:
Love, that denial takes from none beloved,
Caught me with pleasing him so passing well,
That, as thou seest, he yet deserts me not.
Love brought us to one death: Caïna waits
The soul, who spilt our life.” Such were their words;
At hearing which, downward I bent my looks,
And held them there so long, that the bard cried:
“What art thou pondering?” I in answer thus:
“Alas! by what sweet thoughts, what fond desire
Must they at length to that ill pass have reach’d!”
Then turning, I to them my speech address’d,
And thus began: “Francesca! your sad fate
Even to tears my grief and pity moves.
But tell me; in the time of your sweet sighs,
By what, and how Love granted, that ye knew
Your yet uncertain wishes?” She replied:
“No greater grief than to remember days
Of joy, when misery is at hand. That kens
Thy learn’d instructor. Yet so eagerly
If thou art bent to know the primal root,
From whence our love gat being, I will do
As one, who weeps and tells his tale. One day,
For our delight we read of Lancelot,
How him love thrall’d. Alone we were, and no
Suspicion near us. Oft-times by that reading
Our eyes were drawn together, and the hue
Fled from our alter’d cheek. But at one point
Alone we fell. When of that smile we read,
The wished smile so raptorously kiss’d
By one so deep in love, then he, who ne’er
From me shall separate, at once my lips
All trembling kiss’d. The book and writer both
Were love’s purveyors. In its leaves that day
We read no more.” While thus one spirit spake,
The other wail’d so sorely, that heart-struck
I, through compassion fainting, seem’d not far
From death, and like a corse fell to the ground.

(lines 27-138)

The Bed, the Chair, Head to Foot: Eric Fischl, 2000.

TC: Vistas of Limbo

Franz Albert Bischoff: Laguna Seascape

Physical science has helpfully informed us that not only are bodies scattered so few and far between through the universe—the most meagre bits being lost in a thin indiscriminate gruel-like stuff one might liken to a nineteenth-century workhouse child's dinner—as to amount to mere brief accidents of matter struggling unsuccessfully to exist more than a moment or two within the dense, necessary, prevailing and ever-increasing immaterium; but even the most apparently gross, tangible or corporeal of these same accidental bodies, should all its matter be crowded by force down into a perfect solidity, might be contained in a small, hard chunk no larger than an ice cube. In much the same sense, when one ponders the subject but a little, it might well appear that if all the truly productive employment of a lifetime were suddenly compressed, for the sake of experiment, into the time the mind actually took to devise it, then the maximum period required to contain it all would perhaps be days, more likely hours, even seconds or fractions of seconds.

The mind has been largely idle then; yet no one has ever been able to stop it from thinking, even for a little while. And of course this is dangerous. If one doesn't regulate one's thoughts they can easily be yanked by the ear and tugged off in practically any direction; particularly if there's any wishing involved. Maybe it's with this in mind that some thoughtless judges have thought it a crime to think, and declared it so. The nature of the thinking animal however being as it is, it will think anyway, and no matter what punishment be contrived for it in consequence. Vide the French Revolution, and the head of Charlotte Corday, which as those present remarked, retained a thoughtful expression even as it lay before the public, disconnected from its body.

Everybody understands that the business of everyday life calls for very little actual brainwork. So poorly matched are our physical to our mental capacities that one may quite easily come up in mere seconds with full-blown conceptions that may then take years or even longer to carry into action. Fresh thinking is very seldom needed. We're limited in prospect by the narrow routines of our bodies, our surroundings, our lives. We go along in a kind of continuous holding pattern. Changes are rare. Nothing's ever truly new. Yet though all this time one never actually needed to think, in fact one was never not thinking. The truth is that for a good part of our lives the only thing we can do is think. Our hands and feet may venture on as they will without our conscious consent, with the mind standing by a mere spectator unable to affect the execution it knows to be coming, if not already underway.