| DEADARTIST Tales of Lembrook |
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DeadArtist: Quilt |
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* Dennis Nixon - You will be THE FIRST forever and I'll carry you with me, in my soul, through Eternity... Out of BooksMIDNIGHT IN THE GARDEN OF GOOD AND EVIL JOHN BERENDT Well we keep a lot of insect colonies in big glass jars out there. Some of them have been breeding for twenty-five years. That’s a thousand generations. All they know about life is what goes on inside their jar… They stay the same, generation after generation. If we released them into the outside world, they’d die. I think something like that happens with seven generations in Savannah. Savannah gets to be the only place you can live. We’re like bugs in a jar. “It’s not clean any more” Serena snapped, snatching the purse out of the woman’s hands. “And if I ever catch you putting your filthy fucking hands on anything of mine again, you’ll be wearing your poon-tang for a turtleneck!” “There’s plenty that boy can do!” Minvera said. “He don’t need no murder trial to cause hell. The boy died hatin’ Mr. Jim and that’s the meanest kind of curse you can have against you…” (r/t Danny Hansford by Minerva – Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil) “clientele with…” “I am serious…” “Then don’t let me tell you what we do with the duct tape…” “I just clocked you checkin’…” THE WAVES VIRGINIA WOOLF I will take my anguish and lay it upon the roots under the beech trees. I will examine it a take it between my fingers. They will not find me. I shall eat nuts and peer for eggs through the brambles and my hair will be matterd and I shall sleep under hedges and drink water from ditches and die there. Now I will wrap my agony inside my pocket-handkerchief. It shall be screwed tight into a ball. I will go to the beech wood alone, before lessons. I will not sit at a table, doing sums. I will not sit next to Jinny and next Louis. I will take my anguish and lay it upon the roots under the beech trees. I will examine it and take it between my fingers. They will not find me. I shall eat nuts and peer for eggs through the brambles and my hair will be matted and I shall sleep under hedges and drink water from ditches and dies there. Should I seek out some tree? Should I desert these form rooms and libraries, and the broad yellow page in which I read Catullus, for woods and fields? Should I walk under beech trees, or saunter along the river bank, where the trees meet united like loves in the water? But nature is too vegetable, too vapid. She has only sublimities and vasitudes and water and leaves. I begin to wish for firelight, privacy, and the limbs of one person. Especially now, when I have left a room, and people talking, and the stone flags ring out with my solitary footsteps, and I behold the moon rising, sublimely, indifferently, over the ancient chapel – then it becomes clear that I am not one and simple, but complex and many. (that would be a harrowing experience to call and for no one to come; that would make the midnight hollow, and explains the expression of old men in clubs – they have given up calling for a self who does not come) Come then, let us wander whirling to the gilt chairs. The body is stronger than I thought. I am dizzier than I supposed. I do not care for anything in the world. I do not care for anybody save this man whose name I do not know. Are we not acceptable, moon? Are we not lovely sitting together here, I in my satin; he in black and white? My peers may look at me now. I look straight back at you, men and women. I am one of you. This is my world. Now I can take this thin-stemmed glass and sip. Wine has a drastic, an astringent taste. I cannot help wincing as I drink. Scent and flowers, radiance and heat, are distilled here to a fiery, to a yellow liquid. Just behind my shoulder-blades some dry thing, wide-eyed, gently closes, gradually lulls itself to sleep. This is rapture; this is relief. Words crowd and cluster and push forth on top of another. It does not matter which. The jostle and mount on each other’s shoulders. The single and the solitary mate, tumble and become many. It does not matter what I say. Crowding, like a fluttering bird, one sentence crosses the empty space between us. It settles on his lips. I fill my glass again. I drink. The veils drop between us. I am admitted to the warmth and privacy of another soul. We are together, high up, on some Alpine pass. He stands melancholy on the crest of the road. I stoop. I pick a blue flower and fix it, standing on tiptoe to reach him, in his coat. There! That is my moment of ecstasy. Now it is over. I begin to be impatient of solitude – to feel its draperies hang sweltering, unwholesome about me. Oh, to toss them off and be active! Anybody will do. I am not fastidious. The crossing-sweeper will do; the postman; the waiter in this French restaurant; better still the genial proprietor, whose geniality seems reserved for oneself. I feel at once, as I sit down at a table, the delicious jostle of confusion, of uncertainty, of possibility, of speculation. Images breed instantly. I am embarrassed by my own fertility. I could describe every chair, table, luncher here copiously, freely. My mind hums hither and tither with its veil of words for everything. To speak, about wine even to the waiter, is to bring about an explosion. Up goes the rocket. It’s golden grain falls, fertilizing, upon the rich soil of my imagination. The entirely unexpected nature of this explosion – that is the joy of intercourse. Here is a hall where one pays money and goes in, where one hears music among somnolent people who have come here after lunch on a hot afternoon. We have eaten beef and pudding enough to live for a week without tasting food. Therefore we cluster like maggots on the back of something that will carry us on. Decorous, portly – we have white hair waved under our hats; slim shoes; little bags; clean-shaven cheeks; here and there a military moustache; not a speck of dust has been allowed to settle anywhere on our broadcloth. Swaying and opening programmes, with a few words of greeting to friends, we settle down, like walruses stranded on rocks, like heavy bodies incapable of waddling to the sea, hoping for a wave to lift us, but we are too heavy, and too much dry shingle lies between us and the sea. We lie gorged with food, torpid in the heat. Then, swollen but contained in slippery satin, the seagreen woman comes to our rescue. She sucks her lips, assumes and air of intensity, inflates herself and hurls herlef precisely at the right moment as if she saw an apple and her voice was the arrow into the note, “Ah!”. ***** People are too soon gone; let us catch them. ***** For now my body, my companion, which is always sending its signals the rough black “No,” the golden “Come,” in rapid running arrows of sensation, beckons. Someone moves. Did I raise my arm? Did I look? Did my yellow scarf with the strawberry spots float and signal? He has broken from the wall. He follows. I am pursued thought the forest. All is rapt, all is nocturnal, and the parrots go screaming through the branches. All my senses stand erect. Now I feel the roughness of the fiber of the curtain through which I push; now I feel the cold iron railing and its blistered paint beneath my palm. Now the cool tide of darkness breaks its waters over me. We are out of doors. Night opens; night traversed by wandering moths; night hiding lovers roaming to adventure. I smell roses; I smell violets; I see red and blue just hidden. Now gravel is under my shoes; no grass. Up reel the tall backs of houses guilty with lights. All London is uneasy with flashing lights. Now let us sing our love song – Come, come, come. Now my gold signal is like a dragon-fly flying taut. Jug, jug, jug, I sing like the nightingale whose melody is crowded in the too narrow passage of her throat. Now I hear crash and rending of boughs and the crack of antlers as if the beasts of the forest were all hunting, all rearing high and plunging down among the thorns. One has pierced me. One is driven deep within me. ***** What has my destiny been, the sharp-pointed pyramid that has pressed on my ribs all these years? That I remember the Nile and the women carrying pitchers on their heads; that I feel myself woven in and out of the long summers and winters that have made the corn flow and have frozen the streams. I am not a single and passing being. My life is not a moment’s bright spark like that on the surface of a diamond. I go beneath ground tortuously, as if a warder carried a lamp from cell to cell. My destiny has been that I remember and must weave together, must plait into one cable the many threads, the thin, the thick, the broken, the enduring of our long history, of our tumultuous and varied day. There is always more to be understood; a discord to be listened for; a falsity to be reprimanded. Broken and soot-stained are these roofs with their chimney cowls, their loose slates, their slinking cats and attic windows. I pick my way over broken glass, among blistered tiles, and see only vile and famished faces. ***** Heavens! How they caught me as I left the room, the fangs of that old pain! the desire for someone not there. For whom? I did not know at first; then remembered Percival. I had not thought of him for months. Now to laugh with him, to laugh with him at Neville – that was what I wanted, to walk off arm-in-arm together laughing. But he was not there. The place was empty. ***** But we – against the brick, against the branches, we six, out of how many million millions, for one moment out of what measureless abundance of past time and time to come, burnt there triumphant. The moment was all; the moment was enough. Dynamic Judaism – Mordecai M. Kaplan Kaplan believed in the law of polarity; everything that exists is both itself and more than itself, both individual and interactive, independent and interdependent. That law is divine, a law of God penetrating every nook and cranny of the universe. In human beings it takesthe form of conscience, making us aware of our individual rights as well as of our responsibilites to others. To be human, people must both exercise their rights and fulfill their responsibilities. If they exercise their right without accepting their responsibiliteis, they become brutes, savages. If they accept their responsibilities without exercising and enjoying their rights, they become slaves to others. It is the combination and balance of rights and duties that constitutes conscience, the human instrument of moral responsibility. Conscience is the divine law of polarity, independence and interdependence, action and interaction, as that divine law operates among people. God is the Power, Force, Process, Dimension, or Energy by means of which people are motivated to exercise their rights, pursue their responsibilities, and strive to be at peace with themselves, with nature, and with other people. If we read with understanding the prayers we recite in a Jewish service, we would discover that they are meant to be a means of getting us to identify ourselves with the Jewish people, and of arousing in us a passionate yearning that our people rise to great spiritual heights. Ethnic consciousness, or a sense of peoplehood, functions through the medium of a living civilisation, which is an organic ensemble of the following cultural elements having their rootage in a specific territory; a common tradition, a common language and literature, history, laws, customs, and folkways, with religion as the integrating and soul-giving factor of those elements. To this ensemble must be added an active ledership which is concerned with translating that tradition into a means of serving the essential needs of all who are identified with the people. The foremost among those are: being wanted and having something to be proud of. Religion should be a series of self-corrective attempts on the part of man to become fully human. The millennium will come when makind learns to be half as afraid of the scientific hell of its own invention as it was for centuries of the theological hell of its own imagination. The God-impulse in us is not fear but hope, not helplessness but self-help, not despondency but courage, not the obfuscation of the mind but the light of reason, not the belittlement of what man is but the exaltation of what he might be. THE FOREMOST PROBLEM IN JEWISH RELIGION IS HOW TO GET JEWS TO TAKE THE BIBLE SERIOUSLY WITHOUT TAKING IT LITERALLY. According to Rabbi Yose, exemption from death was the condition on which Israel was wililng to accept the Torah. Rabbi Hama bar Hanina said, “Adam would not have experienced the taste of death, if not for the fact that some of his descendants were bound to consider themelves gods.” Rabbi Jonathan said to him, “If that were true, only the wicked should suffer death and not the righteuous.” To which Rabbi Hama replied: But the synagogue must not be the exclusive club-house of a homogeneous group, nor must the rabbi be monopolised by those who can pay his salary. Rabbis, as well as social workers, center executivs, and other functionaries should be appointees of the community as a whole. ReconstructionThink carefully and completely about these words: Why MUST we know how we became? We MUSTN’T. “Before” can’t be manipulated. Only NOW and LATER. God did not create man. Man created God as a salve, a balm, an answer to unanswerable questions. * “God” is a term of reference to the energy and creativeness, the procreativeness of existence. “Schechina: – the in-dwelling energy that makes our existence. * We do not need to be concerned about God. We need to be concerned about us, individually and collectively. We need to be concerned about bringing Creation BACK to the Natural (good) order of its origins. 13h59 – N.Blvd – 08.27.02 |