parenthetical Welcome!

PARENTHETICAL WELCOME

1

or 

the rare rarified riffraff 

  (first time as tragedy, second as farce*)

or first time as science, second as art 

( it's tragic, it's comic, but yes, all of this sprouted out of the deep love I inherited from both parents of the noble or not, common man,  as uncannily well represented in the de-gerrymandered district that offered the new seat she was bound to fill; those not of her party commonly flipping the switch contrarily to join those who were, til twere pretty much unanimous for Suzy -- and the urgent need to translate personally useless -- except as fashion statements too advanced to win a runway --  philosophical insights gleaned from over-stretching beyond my natural station into comprehensible, functional language, as truth works wonders on the world in spite of us just by knowing it.  Ha ha what a laugh, boo hoo, and what grievous grief, it is impossible, however I vow to achieve it, by the credo of the zen acolyte concerning the impossible, but not by denying the fact that it is impossible. 

You see, I thought I was pursuing arcane knowledge so as to place myself above the riffraff, but as the veils gradually lifted I saw what I was really pursuing was a place among the rare rarified riffraff, to ascend to the lowly heights of the heights, like Jenny from the block who never forgot where she came from.   Or Giotto, scorning peasants like himself buying titles, though his bust is on display in the Florence Cathedral unwilling to deny his roots as a humble shepherd -- and this was way before the age of cashing in on that.  

However there may be nothing literally special in so called noble blood, the slimy body of history exists to spin and leave behind a trail of beautiful shells, which then serve as metaphors, as all the world's a stage, the play's the thing to bring the slimy thing out of its shell when its corruption is complete sometimes before its natural time.  I am a piece of history without a shell and occupying those left behind to bring rampant corruption out of its shell, even if I happen to be hanging in Hamlet's -- perish the thought -- when the music stops.  But, to go back and refine how I began this paragraph, there is something to noble breeding that persists beyond the metaphor, centuries or millennia of refined manners and the leisure to cultivate perfect form, by which Giotto always will remain a peasant compared to Cimabue, a peasant whose allegiance remains with the common man and the everyday world, however refined its representation, as with Jenny from the block.  My ideas might be as finely wrought, my sentences as articulate as the fly Giotto painted on Cimabue's panel, but the content is so lowly that fellow artists, as with him, cannot figure out why I would bother with it and wonder where's enough difference between the thing and the thing represented to justify the effort?  

What?  aspire to membership in the club of the queenly Jennifer Lopez, or the noble Giotto?  the greatest painter of all times, the father of all modern painting???   Yes,  cmon, every head comes with a tail, so yes, as tail to the coin whose heads are Giotto, I profess to have slipped under that very door!  Not only did my extremely unlikely decoding of one of Giotto's frescos, an event that took my whole life to accomplish, release this voice that clearly has something to say however slowly it unfolds, but I perform the same deeply faithful, miraculous redemption of present everyday modern life that he performed with pre-modern peasant life, and it will be equally hard for fellow artists to understand.  

When we dawdle over Chardin dawdling over a still life of fruit and dead fish in a humble dwelling, as we fail to imagine our own world so beautiful, but merely respect those representations true to its numbing banality, or are amused by some crazy clever channeler of its wild, disjunctive bizarreness, we blaspheme against Chardin.  We are guilty of necrophilia, making love to a corpse instead of resurrecting it first, or not kissing passionately enough to bring it back to life. 

....indeed, who did I think I was?   Does my family have a coat of arms? I was born a servant, a slave of service and the served, a slave to love, either a truly peasantante peasant among the truly noble ones, or the queen hiding among the most peasantante, all the documents affirming her identity lost, but with the telltale scar and other signs, such as her love of  the people and desire to be their slave, nothing between. 

But I am an American, my father, a citizen of the world, and the television to which he'd imprinted like a motherless baby duck -- but not in passive surrender to the currents or dreaming at the deck, but as a conscientious captain with a firm grip on the flipper to keep his eye on all the channels at once --  told me I could do be and have anything that came into my pretty little head, I only need be a citizen of the world as of my own house, pay attention to all the channels, not privileging any, wish upon a star and believe!  Look how he, albeit a congenital heaviweight, no less than sixteen pounds, the hugest baby ever born in the state of Oklahoma, or possibly anywhere, rose -- after almost killing his mother, not just by being born, but treating her later like this man of the future was the first post-modern congenital sixteen year old -- from a lowly immigrant cobbler's son to an entrepreneur whipping up, just like in a Walt Disney movie, vats of fake fake Silly Putty,  or Flubber, I say fake fake, because, though it appeared first, Silly Putty is clearly a fake of the Flubber in the story, the very eponymous Flubber fabricated in my father's factory, however not yet written.  

Meanwhile, the focus of the factory was the fabrication and packaging of the fake fake Play-doh (the platonic ideal of pure inchoate matter shot with spectral light materialized, a dramatic turning point in the universal ontological condition, ending the dispute between Plato and Aristotle, Republicans (platonists) and Democrats (Aristotelians), as my mother had done in the post-symbolic Aristotelian domain) sold for half price at Woolworth's. I say fake fake because, though Play-doh is assumed the original, in fact I myself had invented it in playing with samples of wallpaper cleaner manufactured in the Mullanphy Immigrant Home (which got struck by a tornado recently, won't you lend it a hand:  https://www.builtstlouis.net/mullanphy.html)  Harry had bought the building from another guy, who had turned it into a wallpaper cleaner factory, the cleaner chemically consistent with the constitution of Fun-doh, Doobie-doh, Disney-doh, Glow-doh (phosphorescent!) Crazee Clayzee, enough, let's just stick with that and face the fact that the stuff by any other name, even if it is the right, original stuff, does not sell so sweet. 

Look at all this! -- he cried with pride.  But this is nothing compared to what you, my darling Verington (or Verala, and actually back then it was Kerington or Kerala, which are ornamental Kerries, or furies, as recorded on my birth certificate, veronika being my saint's and  ((all the world's a) stage name, the appearance of the Gini who tricked me into spilling the idly and un-seriously, so far as I knew, wished for name and the attending character thoroughly to repent, if not tame my original furious nature, and make amends that outstrip the non-mistaken condition in unmistakable benefits revealed in another post; at a certain point even the acutely Jung at heart will have heart palpitations around here) will accomplish.   One up me! he cajoled in so many ways, and as I departed to seek my fortune in the wide world of higher education, in grand spakeShearian form, this caliprosperoban literally intoned "I gave you wings, daughter, now fly away!" Dutifully, I launched myself far beyond the view of his telescope into the wild blue yonder of arcane philosophy, trafficking in Faustian inquiries into the nature of language/matter -- knowledge is power! truth is beauty!-- toward realizing my divine mission to translate the history of philosophy into the vernacular tongue, so as to share the wealth, like Robin Hood, and save the world.   Fortunately, I did fall short of signing any contracts, I'm an American, in my veins courses the blood of Harry, the play-doh potter, wizard of Ozymandians, minor and major (see another volume in the complete works of yours truly)  blown from can do Kansas over a rainbow so famous and durable it later materialized on the other side of the city he blew into.  I don't need the devil, I'm dastardly enough, and can do it myself! Not that I did do it. But I did freely choose not not to do it, and it met me half way. 

 as the scales fell from my eyes to reveal the world and word, signified and sign to themselves and each other so swimmingly synchronous -- it so will unfold that of what I just told is just the tip of the iceberg  -- the universal Triton where all roads lead, the great I AM in love with itself as of everything not sorry to be stuck on a small island in the traffic gulping indiscriminately from the sweet  bowl -- divine love with a single zap from its not just omniscient, but omnipotent glance purifying the vicious sludge into limpid spring water dancing with rainbow reflections the way the divine mushrooms process a toxic waste dump into a field of wildflowers -- of  constantly recycling being, all the way down to the bottom of the bowl, the nadir, the nexus of the hex, by all human accounts picked blindfolded out of a hat to hold the spot at the origin of the world -- life in all its sound and fury signifying it all, grand and small, kissed equally by the noble lips of merely existing, the cacophony not other than a symphony not just to surpass, but utterly undo understanding, 

mere rearrangement of the order of reception in conformance to being's absurdly generous nature transubstantiating straw into gold, not literally by this laboratory's perfectly orthodox, if unusual methods, but adjacent enough to topple the domino until they all come tumbling down, which actually trumps the alchemist's magic.   By nerves of steel I defied biology and psychology, and refused to put my head in the sand, and just let the knowledge pass with the fast fleeting sensations, or maybe I just started to suffocate down there, because it wasn't going to pass. This was not the mere physiological effect of a physical practice, indeed there was no immediate physical affect, I only later noticed that it had earlier happened, that reason's strand, though it defied all reason, had shot through a spiraling tunnel with millions of other strands, equally reasonable, but arriving at different conclusions -- the losers made of useful material and want to be useful, don't toss away! -- to arrive and entwine itself around the spiral of this and other unfathomably absurd, immediate evidence, and the world had been reborn, having arranged itself into an image made of parts no longer filed in categories conceived before its appearance, though these had proven useful in solving the case and continue to serve as a bridge for the not yet arrived, until arrival belies the bridge, which can no longer help you.  After enough parts had escaped to find their natural mates and locked together to reveal the implicit image, the recognition of which shook the world, such that the piles of parts all toppled, and now set free to smell the roses, they began moving slowly and gingerly through the newly viscous ether with its overwhelming perfumes, also swarming with plain clothed enemy agents, by intuitions and affinities finding their circle and locking together to manifest the image explicitly. 

Alas many pieces fell off the table during that earthquake and were lost, the image shot with tragic holes perhaps in perpetuity, even after all those parts on their way arrive at the whole, but still the days of being piled in piles by certain common features regardless of our true feelings, often lost to ourselves in all the din, had past, and there could not but be great rejoicing on any street where a loved one had not been lost, and its relatives, who would join the celebrations when the mourning period passed, did not begrudge it.  Though, or perhaps in part because, nobody denied the shock of loss only to suffer later symptoms, but opened the floodgates at the outset, even the funerals, as in New Orleans, were not so solemn as before.  I had lain the foundations, I had planted the seed and watered the root.  The effect knew its source in the original desire  -- for knowledge! Power!  the promised seized by the churches but in the carefully gleaned or omitted quotes of the sacred texts withheld from the flock as lawsuits suck up the funds for the repair of the roofs of the churches.   When will these fallible men -- including the pope, only infallible, to protect and honor the most sanctified, when preaching on dogma that has nothing to do with practical matters and cannot be translated into practical personal or collective decisions -- cry help! 

Not to mislead anybody or deprive them of any tools, when I say it was not the physiological effect of a physical practice,  I have and do participate in such practices and have experienced parallel physiological effects.   I will recount here one example, though I've had a few of these seizures sprinkled throughout my life beginning at the age of three, as recounted elsewhere. 

It was eons ago, in this case, well before the earthquake, when the piles of parts were still stacked, but a few parts woke enough to long for their long lost mates stuck like them in one of the piles of blues reds purples greens, the ever burgeoning bureaucracy constantly revising piles due to the relativity of color such that blue turns green, say, in a different spacial/temporal context, yet all the parts so patriotic and proud of their present pile's own colors only wanting to turn the whole world their color, and ostracizing any waking one wearing the big brown H for "horse shit" sewn at the first sign of rebellion into the back of our sweaters, as demanded by the authorities.  Meanwhile the  gifted and talented puzzle gamers were off to some other game more suited to their level -- as if it were all about them as they'd come to believe -- that game equally out of its mind thinking itself the only game in town, anyone woke or waking to the fact that there was a puzzle over there to be assembled, all the different colors long ago sorted, the immanent image imminent, any such protestants of the status quo threatening to break with the central church forced too to wear the big brown H.  Little did the un-waking or un-woke know or consider that H is the cosmic constant, brown is beautiful, everybody and everything but spectral light, even Crazee Clayzee, is, really, a shade of brown, the mark of the manifested so beloved of the light dancing around it, kissing it, penetrating it, bouncing off of it to point to it as when they used to apply paint to an antiquated sepia photograph, and this letter proudly worn helped us waking and woke ones to recognize one another.  

In that dark age, I was, on the occasion of the aforementioned seizure, sojourning  abroad, researching illuminated manuscripts as an aspiring art historian (the penultimate way station). Suffering a lack of letters from a boyfriend on the outs and feeling dowdy and undesirable, my heartbroken feet protesting the aesthetically necessary, delicate Italian shoes indifferent to the need to soften the blows in the pounding of the stone pavement, when not at my research, I roamed and roamed and roamed around Rome as she demands.  

In this weakened state,  the white cotton gloves provided at the library could not sufficiently protect me from the powerful vibrations of the manuscripts.  One morning, upon conclusion of my then daily practice of sitting zazen, it suddenly came upon me, deep in my bones, my heart beating like African drums quickening the rash-worthy rush of blood through my veins, as if it had never before occurred to me -- I AM!  and in that moment all that is by human standards low, superfluous, undignified rose up to the rung of the highest, from which everything splayed out, woven into the same gently undulating carpet extending far as the eye could see like a shimmering sea dancing with ecstatic sunlight, as in the former prison of my body, bells rung in every cell wall tumbling down as I became the roaring babbling waters everywhere.  The lead robe we all must wear to protect from this debilitating radiation had dangerously fallen from my shoulders.  If the fully flowered affect had lasted instead of leaving me with another Johnny Cash scar to deepen my baritone  writer's voice, so moving when tender,  I would never have moved from that spot and died right there.  

In the research in the Vatican Library, by the way, I'd been gathering examples of a primitive species of image that another researcher, efficiently adding fitting parts to several different piles of parts, had found in the archives of San Marco in Florence. On reading the article in which this operation was performed, I noticed, however, a twinkle in the eyes of those parts, and when I returned to the article, they were again missing from their appropriate piles.  By this, I suspected that species of image would be, and it did turn out to be, the missing link to the long lost aforementioned image,  the one toppling all the piles, or rather the map of that image with a key, that map the open sesame.  

On finding of the potential missing link, my advisors were thrilled, sensing that I was onto something big, and I won a grant to do research in the Vatican library, so as to archive all known examples of the unusual, transitional animal. And soon after zapping me through the white gloves with the powerful rays that had triggered the dangerous epiphany just recounted,  the clarification of the questions raised (the "answer" to any question being simply the clarification of the question, so do not look for the right questions,  as there are too many different, contradictory ones, so far as the human mind can fathom,  only traffic in those questions whose answers, such as to love and be loved, are universally desired) in my contextualized formal analysis soon lead me to the map with key, an image of the pile toppling image, this image of the image extant, recently restored (if you want to call it that) with every visible feature affirming its identity as the long sought open sesame, the letters that spell the lifting of the spell now legible.

Imagine my excitement on anticipating theirs, when I burst upon a coffee klatch of my dear advisors as I cried -- It's here!  I found it!  We found it, we straws hell bent on breaking the camel's backs!  I'm the last lowly, straw!  A shorty did it!  I'm it! -- slamming down the photocopy with all my notes and diagrams affirming the case in no uncertain terms. It exists, I knew it! Thank you!  thank you so much! thank me!  I clapped and bowed and  gestured to them to do likewise, threw myself at their feet kissing them, kissed my own feet, danced all around them, it's going to be okay, everything's going to be okay, more than okay! we're saved!  

Alas, the scales upon the eyes of my advisors, so ready to relent in the stirring of their hearts upon hearing of the discovery of the possible missing link, suddenly multiplied and hardened, and these ill advised advisors, even after reviewing or saying they had, all the consummately cogent, clear, incontravertible arguments with the material evidence right there, either discretely suggested I'd gone crazy, or had just evolved into an artist, that's crazy enough.  "You've become an artist, and we're very glad to have produced you..." said one politely.  As I earlier remarked, a bridge provides access to a novel land, until the land belies the bridge, then it can no longer help you.

That's a direct quote, by the way, of the professor, where I often require metaphors and other elliptical means to purvey the transcendental actuality of all of these actualities at which one cannot gaze directly without being blinded by the light. Frequently, as you may have noticed, unless you ran out of the room, a band of actors suddenly appears to turn the thing into a play to catch the conscience of the king, where that play is more transparent to the thing than the thing is transparent itself.  Observe where the once occupied, by now empty seats are located, and any upcoming attrition, as you tremble in fear and amazement and know that no other kinds of plays shall be found around here; this is an ultra-non-fictional-- more transparent to the thing than the thing is to itself -- non-frictional ride on the mixed metaphorical mountain bike, born in the bosom of language itself, and assembled according to the instruction manual that came in the glove compartment.  This consummately elegant machine cleverly composes the word's myriad metamorphosing parts to facilitate navigation of any terrain and arrive at the summit without a carbon footprint you can supposedly press upon the good earth with impunity by paying for its removal, but what if that money were needed to wipe out another before you set that one down -- in order to wipe enough of them out in time?  (can you believe those snakes, and that people are actually tricked by them?)  

To return to the thread I lost somewhere in there, long before I found the missing link, quite early in my quest, I sensed that the knowledge I sought could not all be found in the books I later returned to, but in the bricks holding the secrets honored in the masonic lodges where the forever honeymooners hang to escape their good wives who would restrain them from such intemperate lust for freedom and chaste fraternal fellowship, the constant wet towels tossed on their simmering noble desires explaining the sudden rages as with an animal caged of these otherwise pussycats.  Yet these latter day initiates lacked justification for complaint in lacking the discipline required to maintain and arrive at the knowledge and freedom their hearts so desired.  I, by contrast, would leap backward over Mozart and even the first "Masons" to commune with the bricks themselves.  I would study in the library, at the drawing board, and in the field the forces moving through the material as their disposition cajoled gravity to conspire in their aspiration to reach to the stars.  

At the time though,  I only concluded, or rather deluded myself that I had concluded, that I'd stretched past my natural station in life (or not far enough, if I'm the queen, why not? Nobody suspected Cinderella either.) and thought I could float down gently to the royally real ground without spilling my guts and my eardrums exploding by studying, toward entering, the trade of architecture, head still in the clouds, but feet on the pavement, also involving spiritually redemptive manual labor; in those days we drew with pencils, and our fingernails were always dirty, the sign of a spotless soul, or one getting there.  In the process of training in this middle world field, neither deep sea fishy nor high flying fowl, or maybe it's reversed, both extremes and nothing between, I mastered intrinsically alchemical architectural  theory -- the history of ideas and culture in the language of built form and in the flailing effort to verbalize the knowledge creating, paradoxically and indeed tragically, as it's not even funny, the world's most inaccessible academic jargon.

The transition  was mediated by a year in which, after dropping out of a hard won -- with an athletic thrust at the SATs and a knock out entry essay, despite my slacker status otherwise, including my contempt for extracurricular activities and all other means slavishly serving ends that have nothing to do with them, and observe, I did not suffer for it; I outwitted them -- one of the seven sisters, I served a stint on the assembly line of a home depo sized toy factory, was fired as a waitress at a diner after provoking a riot by  filling all the sugar shakers with salt during the lunchtime rush, and settled into secretary/grain clerk at the grain exchange while studying modern dance with an eye to professional practice, but decided its language was too arcane, and could not communicate well enough with the common man, including myself, whom I hoped to serve with the meat I would find after cracking the nut by all these hooks and crooks.   

Caliprosperoban who'd funded my first two years and eager for two more, during which he could hold out hope that I would make something of my premature ruins due to acid rain and other pollutants, was unprepared for this glitch in the graph, purportedly, as I told him, to gain experience."Experience!" he roared thunderously as was his wont at such provocations, such as knocking over the salt shaker in reaching for butter, for which he officially, quite seriously disowned me for the entire forthcoming day without relieving me of my charge to accompany him, sniffling to his silent treatment, on his wheelings and dealings with fellow coin collectors, as that day at breakfast Prospero was lost in a reverie masterminding another of his world saving tempests, and had installed Caliban to guard the laboratory door. "Is that what you think life is about? Experience?" then he locked himself in the bathroom and poor caliprosperoban "cried like a baby" as he informed me on his deathbed, to ram in the sponge soaked in gaul. "My darling daughterala, a college dropout!  waaaaaaa!" My pathetic attempt to reconcile our conflicting desires by dropping back in to study architecture did not fly too high, as my mother -- but darling, relax, at least she isn't a drug addict [so far as they knew, or didn't, the effects of literature] -- had hired a highly modern architect to build a highly modern house with a wall of glass doors opening to a lawn and a wild wheat field, but the doorknobs of the doors kept falling off, and the radically innovative ceiling made of accoustic panels on rough hewn beams constantly leaked a smelly sap, and even FLW, unlike IS, might have come up with something better than move the chair, when the leak could happen anywhere.  

And it was not just the leaks. Harry the fake fake play-doh potter, wizard of ozymandians, major and minor, deplored, without having to know what they are, the abstract principles that underlay the design of the house and that he knew they'd whip me into worship of, so as to create award winning buildings with forms incomprehensible to him, the noble common man with visceral passions and love of his family, country, freedom, food,  the song of folk (as opposed to all but a few folk songs)  such as  There is nuthin like a dame, Old Man River (a fellow caliprosperoban),  television -- does that cup not sufficiently runneth over and flood the desert to bloom into an oasis, or, in a blue mood, just keep you rollin along?  

I considered it well and took my stand. 

No it is not enough. You, caliprosperoban, are a fanfare of florid blaring trumpet flowers periodically blowin in the wind after starting to smell a little rotten, with all due respect, as there's nuthin like a flower, but a tree needs roots.  I want to find  the Caliban and Prospero who begot you, and be an original begotten of original stuff too, not just made.  You waxed poetical but swallowed the original words instead of, after chewing on them, feeding them to the baby bird, then you said, I gave you wings, now fly away, and then you woke out of a coma to yell at me for floundering and flopping around, seemingly, when in fact you were the one who dropped me into the middle of the maze to prove my mettle, remember?  Time to have this out and settle this score once and for all.   Of course I forgive you as you forgave me, which I know because you waited for my shift to hold my hand as you crossed over.  But though mercy trumps justice, the latter, when consistent with the former, is still desired. 

To return to the state of the art of knowledge, that the aforementioned end, a spot of no dimensions, having been located, bleed into navigable surroundings, 

all the world's knowledge at the teetering apex of which lay the architectural kind, the most arcane of all theories for the most useful of all arts, was stored in the attic, from which those with proper identification could borrow peacock feathers to go out there and strut about, crying like peacocks in their jargon sprinkled human language in that voice as ugly and sour as its feathers are beautiful and sweet what the peacock is crying,"God is dead!"  -- without the real peacock's underlying understanding, not that it helps in the moment, that this is a temporary situation and/or contingent on the presently available perspective.  They rather like the raven, whose feathers lack eyes, quoth of Lenore, Nevermore.  And as they swear oaths on what they quoth -- that's all folks -- the light begins and continues to shrink into the center as -- the impinging darkness  eclipsing on all sides the crazy cartoon with the pre- or (the winner, take it to press) Post-existential,  prePosterously animate animal -- including humans, plants, minerals, memes, mermaids, spirits, fleeting thoughts...-- ideagrams  known only in hyperboles come, or go back to being, strangely seductively terrifyingly, alive, to chase each other around and flatten each other hoping to awaken, at least the other, into actual being, but to no lasting effect, no harm done, short of a stylized, melodramatic generic gesture and exclamation, sister or mother of the moving moral lesson,  say, abide, resist, however futile-y (Pogo, Peanuts), be or win a bride, but, of late, not too white a one, they are all quite physically numb being implacably, irrevocably not yet existent, or, again, the winner, luridly lingering post-existence, the  guffawing, groaning, or winsomely smiling spectators seen in a glass darkly, but now it's not the glass that's dark -- the camera's swiftly shrinking eye decisively disappears in an irreversible black out.  

Yet -- take it with a grain of salt, but take it!  words can't be the things they point to known only in the heart, or they would be the things, not words --  even the opening of the camera eye, the restoration of the ancient default of commensurate, proportional beauty, its public remarriage to truth, unto the restoration of hope, even, for immortal life, the resurrection of  God in the scourge of dead language,  all this is not beyond my beloved spakeSheerian (On the advice of Queen Judy Rifka, I traded in the a on my birth certificate for an e to become transparent)  vernacular tongue, my beloved tool, the sorcerer's broom hell bent on cleaning the house in record time as I hold on for dear life. This broom is so wise, resourceful, and lucky that it saw all my sources and raised them with a hand they couldn't match, they all folded, and my hot air balloon got lost somewhere in the clouds above Zarathustra's mountain peak -- oh what a view, if you only knew!  All that I have written, sketched, painted, diagrammed, everywhere it can be found, share my texts, cross reference, apply for grants, build a library etc. etc. is a long long long long -- long to the longth power - ladder! Strap on your oxymoron tank!  

Alas, what lemming is going to stop what it's doing to solve the consecutive riddles of rungs, so as to climb some nobody's parabolical ladder as it disappears beyond lengthily in the clouds? and I mean climb -- solve, work on it, play with it, figure it out. This somewhat entertaining, I trust, opening act is drawing to a close, and so is gravity's agreement to suspend operations for the duration of this deceptively almost legible, presently ruling introduction putting all the others to shame, a queen among peasants.  From now on I only know and show the ropes.  You are the climber.  As I hear myself crying, earnestly, and indeed I have checked the numbers, and it does add up, however I still can't believe it -- All that I have said here is true!  The vernacular tongue has once again trumped the sources, and  by unprecedented means, an unprecedentedly proximal glimpse is available of the divine countenance, that empowering glimpse capable of correcting the course of the ship of state.  I am dead serious!  I am telling the truth! I shall not give up!  I shall fulfill my mission.  Power to the people!  -- I can only cry to this other self -- you are out of your mind!  Enough of this! Come down! come down right now! Go plant some more tulip bulbs, Johnny tulip bulb, and sleep it off.  But like Harry said, she just won't listen. She'll do what she likes.  We were born this way, and I'm sure it goes back further than that.) 

please wait for further instructions to read earlier posts beyond the disclaimer mentioned at the outset -- work is a bit too much in progress... 

Love -- and merry Christmas!

veronika 

december 26, 2021 (first draft, continually so far being edited and augmented, see justification for this appalling inconvenience at end of scroll)

*only the farce that does not deny the tragedy, but braves it with good humor deserves the winning title "second" -- first time, tragedy, being the total mess, an orgy of awfulness, spending every dark desire to destroy, harm, hurt, hate, exhaust them all, to clear the way and launch the flight to universal nirvana. Yet that tragedy can never be forgotten, one oft regrets the whole thing, the cost of getting all the bugs out and spending the will to bomb was so high.  People who don't recognize the sadness of the clown spinning on top of her broom and somersaulting up after the hilarious, harmless tumbles in all her good cheer, just slurp up the dinner and run, leaving her with all the dishes -- after all, one needs to attend to those truly suffering, as their hang dog looks assure us, kindly obviating our need to read them -- are responsible for her sometimes actualized suicidal state of mind. Not that in certain, everyday, or cosmic conditions, even clowns are not obliged to let down their guard, lest responsibility be lain on them for misleading their friends, but once a crack shows in the long taxed mask, terribly translucent to give her act its vivacious vulnerability, it crumbles, and then she is marooned in melancholy, only melodic in solitude. Friendship, like life, or reading like writing, is not a so called science apart from art (does not exist), but an art, which like the art of science, involves much low maintenance, delegate-able, mindless work between the high maintenance mindful moments. So one's low maintenance friends whom one calls high maintenance -- or friends in that state as a passing thing,  those friends in that state who, like everybody frequently enough when you get to know us, provoke delegate-able, mechanical empathic response to their mindlessly manifested emotions, comprise some, but only some of the friends or occasions of friendship of a master of the art of friendship.  Art itself contains a balanced melange of the obvious and the encoded.  The friend who is a work of art, mirroring the art of friendship and the art of art, this clown, this high maintenance friend whom everybody reads as low maintenance and then, when it happens, God forbid on any future occasion, everybody just can't figure out what could have brought this poorly maintained, given the delicacy of the machinery, prancing elevated soul to suicide, is the gold standard in friends.  Treat that friend, be it a person or a work of art, like a necessarily high maintenance god speaking in cryptic parables, one whose feet should be rubbed with precious oils, however the crowds might be singing hosannas presently and massively massaging his or her ego, but the ego, though a significant part of it, is not the self, nor can all that riffraff really satisfy even the ego, as can you, the needle in the haystack that the clown found after sorting and sorting.

Otherwise, the analysis by the source of the prophetic titular quote is somewhat sound, but "materialism" as generally understood is so bereft, that more than half of the manifesto of this fervidly well intentioned and often extremely lucid prophet might consist in Satanic verses. Things exist and grow entrenched, or not, because of how they're framed, as much as, and likely more than, because of the quantities they're made of.  Rearrange dead minerals in a double helix, and they come to life. The material is transubstantiated by the form; the un-quantifiable form of particles gives atoms their material nature.  What they call "materialism" should really be called quantitism, as it only acknowledges what can be quantified, and material can't be in its essence, in its essence it is formed. the weight of the particles does not even exist, it is only relative to other weight.  Only form exists, and joyful effective intrinsic and extrinsic transformation, not other than transubstantiation, of the world is muddled by middlemen. In conversation, or wherever it arises and rises to the occasion, art is the answer to everything, and wherever it doesn't do either, one should zip one's lips or tie one's hands behind one's back, don't take it from me, take it from the always singing Dr. King who also once preached that very thing in different words.  Not that the enemy isn't an artist, so don't set a mouse against a lion.

Maybe it's still unconscious, but effective enough to illicit the reverse magnetic force that will swiftly enough suck all this good news into the highly forgettable distance --  but I propose, looking deep into your eyes, that when I deliver you an impeccably salted omelette ala Brillat Savarin, you're already, however not yet quite consciously, perhaps, tearing it apart to pelt me with the raw eggs they've been trying to stuff down your throat.  Quantifism is so pervasive I do it to myself, it's impossible to wash off the sensation that, as if I'd been maneuvered and raped in my sleep, a lot of sticky gunk is stuck to my body, and then I protest the anguishing allusion by crying -- it's good for you! -- and would conspire in stuffing the slippery slime that, especially given the inattention in mass production, whatever the vitamins, probably carries salmonella, down my own and everybody's throat, but there's nothing there anymore, no more eggs in the carton, only an impeccably flipped, if I say so myself, omelet, graciously offered, sans salmonella. 

That's a scientific fact.  No more eggs in the carton!  It's empty.  And an omelette, and it's not a slimy trick.  It's a chemical and naturally alchemical process, similar to spinning straw into gold delivered on the recitation of all these magically un-magical, empirically accurate words, whose spontaneous poetry, rhythm, and melody bear witness to the beauty of truth, and her wit and wisdom, if we say so ourselves, our equally necessary stormy sunny emotions mirror the weather's, we are one  -- if your inner garden is dying of thirst from the lack of a good watering in years, perhaps it's time to order a hair shirt from Sir Thomas More -- even as we are two, the dog and the salty dog. Nature demands to be accurately represented for her and our health and happiness. If nature has brown eyes, don't call them blue as you say I love You, because it isn't true, and she's not fooled.  

So.slow down!  Reflect without a quantified time limit until all automatic response is spent, and you are again driving your own car -- don't hide anything, root it all out, those scientologists aren't happy and super-accomplished for no reason, steal their tricks, devise your own devices, and leave the inquisition behind in the Middle Ages, but if you don't want to take any for an archaic vaccine,  know it well enough to develop the new kind. 

As Confucius says, an educated man lacks all prejudice.  She whose legs are up on the couch with laptop on lap, rectifying the names to fit the things with openness of heart is the most dangerous and effective activist -- provided anybody really wants to filler up with ethel, get moving, and never go home again.  Stop knocking on the wrong doors, and you will stop gaining entrance to the wrong house. a tenet of roamin catholic (all inclusive) read marksism, or art-ism, or the visual order, elucidated in this holey babble.  

Welcome to the Renaissance she never dies she only sleeps, and when she sleeps, it's in her boots, like Michelangelo.  And when she wakes, she's ready to mediate your reception, finally, of something and another thing and another and another...  you've been mulling over or neglecting with the same effect -- because she gave up trying to.  

... I only open my studio in this upside down state to investigators in case any of the goods are needed immediately, plus omelettes taste best hot out of the oven...