The material: C. Tilley. In, C. Tilley, Editor, Interpretative Archaeology. Oxford, England, 1993.
Ward Abbot: During the 1960s and 1970s, Ward Abbot edited The Desert Review.
Barrett Price: Vincent Barrett Price, son of actor Vincent Price. For several years he published and edited Century: A Southwest Journal of Observation and Opinion.
While we imagine: (Heckler,1990)
David Rosen's new book: Transforming Depression: Egocide, Symbolic Death, and New Life. New York, 1993. "He begins with his own fascination with suicide, first as a teenager, and then as an interviewer of suicide survivors. Without digressing into the arcane world of the differences between 'analysis' and 'therapy,' or other meta-psychological conundrums, Rosen focuses solely on clinical issues of treatment and the patient's engagement with life. Rosen's orientation assumes the same questions Jung began(,) posed when he was a young psychiatrist: Does treatment work? Is it curative? Are meaning and hope restored to life? What is or has been the meaning and value of the symptoms? Rosen's image of Jung is clearly of Jung the therapist and healer, and not Jung as a system builder or advocate of ideas....This book challenges those of us already schooled in Jungian psychology not to rest on our laurels, or the authority of our master teachers, but to get back to basics, letting the unconscious teach us what is required for the healing of life's wounds." (Nelson,1994)
carrying the instabilities: (Hayles,1993)
America approaching: J. Weishaus, "Can Feel Land Close."
Bird's candid light: "Toward the end of the 1940s, Bird Parker flew miles above the other musicians of jazz on wings of artistic creation unequaled in his day. He had almost destroyed his career with narcotics in 1946 and spent seven months at Camarillo State Hospital in California before his return to New York in the summer of 1947. At that time he was in complete control of himself and his music, and produced some of his most mature, polished, and inspired work. According to Thomas Owens:
"He (Charlie Parker) was the most influential player in jazz during the last ten years of his life; the musicians who imitated aspects of his syncopations, articulations, tone quality, and repertory of moves are legion. Many are themselves major jazz figures who have developed distinctive styles of their own, but who nonetheless perpetuate parts of Parker's approach to music in their own performances." (Tirro,1977; Owens,1974).
Blaire: She
has the shape of my hands,
She
has the color of my eyes
In
my shadow she is engulfed
Like
a stone in the sky.
(P. Éluard. From, "The Capitol of Pain")
totem identity: J. Cowan. "On Savage Art." ( 1994) "Every act becomes a re-enactment of the primordial moment of the world-beginning when the Dreaming heroes invoked matter out of the immateriality of substance, form out of chaos. Their dances, songs, cleansing rituals, rites of passage, and ceremonies of mourning--all of these have been derived from the Promethean gesture of the Dreaming heroes. Nothing that the Aborigines do or say is not as a result of this transformative moment in the creation of the world." (Ibid.)
The lowest creature: (Bachelard,1986)
innocent butterfly: "In one of the lighter of his thousand ways of speaking of the psyche, (C.G.) Jung conjures up the Greek sense of butterfly: the quick-moving creature, changeful of hue, reeling drunkenly from flower to flower, living on honey and love. Psyche's journey is 'heavier' or more burdened than that of the butterfly. Perhaps she moves more like the soul in its cocoon stage. (Her reeling is from task to task; the first was to sort a welter of seeds: barley, millet, poppyseed, peas, lentils, beans. A welter is a great disordered upheaval of things, a confusion...." (Hall,1980)
a conceptual artist: "When an artist uses a conceptional form of art, it means that all of the planning and decisions are made beforehand and the execution is a perfunctory affair. The idea becomes a machine that makes the art. This kind of art is not theoretical or illustrative of theories; it is intuitive, it is involved with all types of mental processes and it is purposeless. It is usually free from the dependence on the skill of the artist as a craftsman. It is the objective of the artist who is concerned with conceptual art to make his work mentally interesting to the spectator, and therefore usually he would want it to become emotionally dry." S. LeWitt, "Paragraphs on Conceptual Art." (Kostelanetz,1978).
"(Harvey) Hoshour (architect) died shortly before the Taylor Ranch Branch Library was completed. Four years later, John Knight, who was one of the architect's many artist friends, was invited by Albuquerque's "Art in Public Places" program to offer an in situ project at the library. In January, 1993, Knight arrived from New York, his portfolio crammed with projects accomplished in Europe and America. By this time the artist's evolving idea described a "cultural de-construction of a two mile radius: the area prescribed by library statistics to be a branch's serviceable use distance."(1) First, he distributed a questionnaire:
How long have you lived in the Taylor Ranch Area.
What is your vocation(s).
What are your hobbies/interests.
Who was the builder of your home.
"Using this information, sometime in early 1994 Knight will program into the library's computerized on-line catalog a list from 75 to 150 books already collected in the system that reflects the community's disparate interests. These books will be cross-referenced under the artist's name, and project title: In Vivo, "In the Organism"--a congenial virus introduced into an uncouth region whose librarians repudiate the vain and superstitious custom of finding a meaning in books and equate it with finding a meaning in the heart of the city's public archive."
(1) John Knight, "Concept Explanatory Text." November, 1993
an uncouth region: Jorge Luis Borges, "The Library of Babel." In, Labyrinths. New York, 1964. p.53.
(J. Weishaus. From, "In Vivo.")
The postmodern: (Lyotard,1988)
diseased meat: "The federal government has almost no way of regulating or halting a proposed nuclear waste repository in southeastern New Mexico, two senior energy officials said Thursday. The Mescalero Apache tribe and Minnesota-based Northern States Power Co. signed an agreement last month to negotiate building a temporary storage complex for spent fuel from nuclear power plants." (Parker,1994).
Loch Ness monster: "While most (Scottish lake monsters) were only known by oral tradition, The Loch Ness monster was mentioned in writing in A.D. 565 The monster, it seems, ran afoul of the great Scottish holy man, Saint Columba. Adamnan, Saint Columba's biographer, tells of an incident where the saint saved a swimmer the rampaging monster by saying, 'Think not to go further, touch not thou that man. Quick! Go Back! Then the beast, upon hearing the voice of the saint, was terrified and fled backwards more rapidly then he came.'" (Cohen,1970)
a celestial incubus: (Reichel-Dolmatoff,1971)
Las Vegas, New Mexico: J. Weishaus, "Hermit Peak." "He related he had been educated in the best colleges in Italy, but at an early age he had made a vow to live as a hermit and to serve God in whatever way he could. He had traveled all over Europe and later had gone to Venezuela. After that he had journeyed all over South and Central America. He had ministered to the poor in those countries....When the travelers reached Las Vegas, New Mexico, Don Miguel (Romero) invited the hermit to stay at his home, but the hermit only stayed a few days. He said he wanted to find a cave where he could live. Don Miguel sent his son, Eugenio, to accompany the hermit to Romeroville where there by the creek the hermit found a cave. He only stayed there a few months. Later he moved to the Peak where he stayed close to five years--from the year 1863 to the year 1868 when he left. The rest of the story continues in tales that have been handed down." (de Baca, undated)
sauntering: "Everywhere humans move, we leave sweat, stains, urine, fecal matter...What we call construction and creation is the uprooting of living things, the massacre of millions of paradisal ecosystems, the mindless trampling of minute creatures whose hearts throb with life...The beat of our life is relentless drive to discharge our forces in things left behind;...Bodies festering, ruins crumbling...extend the zone of the sacred across the moldering hull of the planet." (Morinis,1992)
would Whitman: "the Mexico War was complicated for Whitman, as the Civil War would be later. At first he had been in favor of the war. Under Whitman's tutelage, the (Brooklyn) Eagle had clamored about illustrious generals and invincible troops and had featured pious exhortations to spread the light of democracy southward into Central America. This point was Democratic party policy, but it also reflected Whitman's personal, strident nationalism which, half a dozen years before, had won him more allies than he wanted among bigoted Native American groups. Unlike Thoreau and the New England intellectuals, Whitman had no qualms about the country's expansionist aims, advertised under the slogan of 'manifest destiny': Mexico, Oregon, Cuba, Canada--nothing was too much for America's continental appetite." (Zweig,1984)
Gone, gone: "The
mantra of the perfection of wisdom is not a mantra for pacification, increase, power, or
wrath. What is it? By merely understanding the meaning of this mantra, the mind is freed.
The first four syllables of this mantra [tadyatha om] are the arising of action, the
meaning of the middle four syllables [gate gate] is to teach clearly, and the end
summarizes the meaning of the mantra in four aspects. What are the four meanings? The
illusion-like, emptiness, signlessness, and wishlessness. Tadyatha means 'like this'. Gate
gate, 'gone, gone' [means] all mindfulness is gone [to be] illusions." Vajrapani.
(Lopez, Jr.1988).
Vajrapani "flourished in the eleventh century. According to the
Blue Annals, he was a disciple of Maitripa and a master of the tantric practice of
mahamudra. Although he seems to have spent most of his life in Nepal, he travelled to
Tibet, where he taught mahamudra and bestowed numerous initiations." Ibid.
ghosts of signifiers: "Simon shouted out quite loud, 'There's a horse!' said Jim. "And we were all frightened, and then George and I saw the cows and the stags. And when Marcel saw the horse he thought at first: There's a horse. And he couldn't understand at all that there was paint on his finger when he touched the horse ever so carefully. 'Yes,' added George, "all four of us thought at first: Those are animals. Perhaps they're ghosts animals, but they're certainly animals." (Baumann,1954)
How's hell: J. Weishaus, "Back Again." "In 1927 a friend of mine met (a phantom dog) one night at
Milntown corner as she turned in Glen Aldyn. 'He was black, with long shaggy hair, with
eyes like coals of fire. I was frightened and would not pass him. it happened just before
father died.'" (Gill,1932).
I am reminded of the black slathering three-legged dog, owned
by an old alcoholic ex-actor who lived in the attic of the communal mansion in
San Rafael,
California. While Roland suffered from D.T.s in the attic's stifling summer heat,
his hound hobbled about the Japanese garden John Bell and I were building, pissing
on
everything 'holy,' or at least lovingly aesthetic, like a messenger from Hell.
the folds: "This occurred as the man in the red robes took my hand and the walls around us disappeared, and the blind man with them, leaving just myself and the cool old Dutchman holding hands, surrounded by a name that had become invisible too. UQBAR, a name searching for a space. So the serene gentleman, who I now realized was a serene fool, took out a little book from the folds of his robes--he and I, you understand, suspended there in a world of glass, boundless--and captured the invisible word UQBAR in the blank pages of his book. I glanced at the title on the spine: Moriae encomium. But the pages of the book--I gave a start--were as empty as those of the book he had tried to burn and the blind man urged me to save: In Praise of Folly." (Fuentes,1988)
linear and endemic: "According to our present knowledge of physics whilst it is possible to detect the presence of other nearby worlds, through the existence of interference effects, it is impossible to travel to or communicate with them. Mathematically this corresponds to an empirically verified property of all quantum theories called linearity." (Price,1995)
in Deleuze's geophilosophy: (Rajachman,1992) "packs or multiplicities, continually transform themselves into each other, cross over into each other. Werewolves become vampires when they die. This is not surprising, since becoming and multiplicity are the same thing. A multiplicity is defined not by its elements, nor by a center of unification or comprehension. It is defined by the number of dimensions it has: it is not divisible, it cannot lose or gain a dimension without changing its nature." (Deleuze,1987)
fluttering inside: "A woman's womb, once virginal except for the cleansing rivers of menstrual blood flowing through her, becomes possessed by this amazing force. A new sensation flutters inside, a veritable stranger takes up residence inside its mother's belly. G. Cowan, "The Sacred Womb." (Tobias and Cowan, 1994).
After Matisse had died: "'Matisse is dead; he left me his odalisque,' Picasso said, and this would soon prove more than a joke....With Matisse gone, there was now available a whole inheritance of light and colors, brilliant tones with jarring contrasts of yellows, reds, greens, beautiful languorous nudes, Edens of blossoming flowers, cooing doves in bright interiors...Picasso made haste to claim it." (Cabanne,1977)
a train's horn: "So there I am in dawn in my dim cell--22 hours to go till the time I have to stick my railroad watch in my jean watchpocket and cut out allowing myself exactly 8 minutes to the station and the 7:15 train No. 112 I have to catch for the ride five miles to Bay Shore through four tunnels, emerging from the sad Rath scene of Frisco gloom gleak in the rainymouth fogmorning to a sudden valley with grim hills rising to the sea..." (Kerouac,1957)
heading north: "The idea of the North marks a place for the idea of the wild, that latent possibility, lurking inside us, remaining untamed. Feared for centuries, this wilderness is at the edge of all maps, the country of the unknown. Cultures flow, expand, and conquer, based on the need to fill up these white spaces." D. Rothenberg, "The Idea of the North." (Tobias and Cowan, 1994).
the dogon brought: G. Davenport, From, "Au Tombeau de Charles Fourier."
I bicycled: "I must have died a thousand deaths there. But I also had dreams and visions there. Yes, I even prayed in that bed, with huge wet tears rolling down my cheeks. (How I wanted her, and only her!) And when that failed, when at long last I was ready and able to rise and face the world again, there was only one dear companion I could turn to: my bike." (Miller,1965)
San Felipe Church: "The church of San Felipe de Neri was built in the year 1706 under the direction of Fray Manuel Moreno, a Franciscan Father who accompanied the early settlers to Albuquerque. The church was originally named San Francisco, after the Captain, Don Francisco Cuervo y Valdez who established the town of Albuquerque, in the year 1706....The present San Felipe was constructed around 1790 and completed in 1973. A long period of heavy rains and floods caused the first church to crumble." (Flier from church museum.)
"Mishlove: Yet there seem to be vast sections of our current culture that want to take the old religious myths literally.
"Campbell: Well, this is a disaster, and this is monstrous--in what's going on today in the way of illuminating the mind, to go back to something that's four thousand years out of date, in every sense whatsoever--in the sense, in the first place, of realizing what humanity is. They had no historical knowledge of anything but their own little corner of the Near East--no knowledge of the Americas, no knowledge of the Far East at all. And to pull back in that, I think it's criminal. That's what I say." (Mishlove,1988)
moments grow: J. Weishaus, "For the Brothers." Written for the monks at Monastery of Christ in the Desert, near Abiquiu, New Mexico. "This monastery is thirteen miles by dirt road from the nearest highway. In that distance, only one other house is passed--Skull Ranch. Around the monastery, nothing. Perfect silence. Bright stars at night dimly light the guest room. The only noise the puttering of the pilot light in the gas heater. The adobe building is full of beautiful Santos, old ones and new ones, serious as painted desert birds." (Merton,.1982)
ossuary fishing: "The marae was the cathedral of the Tahitians. About it focused all the ceremonies of the worship of divinity, of consecration of priests and warriors to their gods and their chiefs....In the rear of the marae was the ossuary where the bones of the victims were thrown. In Manila I had viewed immense heaps of these discarded skeletons of humans dragged from niches in a wall and fling indiscriminately on the ground by the monks, who owned the Paco Cemetery, because the rent for the niches was past due." (O'Brien,1921)
ribs of Titans: "Titans were imagined as Giants; in fact, the popular imagination, says (W.H.) Roscher, never distinguished between Giants and Titans. The root of the word Titan means to stretch, to extend, to spread forth, and to strive to hasten. Hesiod's own etymology of titenes is to strain. This straining, striving effort suggests that the major contemporary complaint of stress is the feeling in the Promethean ego of titanism." (Hillman,1992)
St. Moritz: "here I am in yet another exotic place...This following a trip I made to India lst November to a place 400 miles east of Delhi called Lucknow...a suitable name for a place to visit the current Enlightened Sage on the spiritual tourist circuit (Poonjaji) and while there I dually realized, got into eating french toast once again (forget the last time I did this), bought a motor scooter to ride across India (remember the last time I did this) sat with saddhus in the glorious countryside and merchants in the filthy, noisy, polluted and bizarrely colourful bazaar and met a yogi saint who carried me off to the Swiss Alps and St. Moritz." (Letter from J. Bell, 1 Jan 1994)
in the same mail: "There is one aspect of scholarship that has remained constant from the earliest Near Eastern scribes and omen interpreters to contemporary academicians: the thrill of encountering a coincidence. The discovery that two events, symbols, thoughts or tests, while so utterly separated by time and space that they could not 'really' be connected, seem, nevertheless, to be the same or to be speaking directly to one another raises the possibility of a secret interconnection of things that is the scholar's most cherished article of faith." (Smith,1980)
knotting together: "A network is no more than a knot." M. Serres, "Dream." (Livingston,1981).
while the Russians: "'I have known for a long time that the Russians are children of another earth, not of this old earth, but seeds in a new soil, earth-children of an unborn culture, great young souls--unfound and formless--their music, their literature, the profound melancholia of an unfulfilled Destiny and not Western man's infinite longing through individual endeavour for fame, intellect and riches for a soul that has already died; their unbelievable dynamism, the birth-pangs of a whole new world, not the earth-throes of your overlived meaning." (Kerouac,1995)
of automobile headlights: "He drove an automobile with a fierce headlight, along the track of a fixed idea, through the darkness of the world. And he saw everything that way. Just as a motorist does in the night." (Lawrence,1977)
Traveling through the dark I found a deer
dead on the edge of the Wilson River road.It is usually best to roll them into the canyon:
that road is narrow; to swerve might make more dead...
I thought hard for us all--my only swerving--,
then pushed her over the edge into the river.
(W. Stafford. From, "Traveling Through the Dark")
Donald: "'The Real Donald Duck' is a performance piece I saw at least ten years ago. Even after all this time I remember vividly how frightening it was, the hairs on the back of my neck responding to the presence of something very disturbing, uncanny. The artist, Elaine Siegel, lip-synched a tape of her own voice, quietly describing an encounter with a literal Donald Duck, 'realized' with a vengeance, his annoyed, gravelly quacking an occasional accompaniment on the tape. Here was a dream come true that will never be intentionally presented in Anaheim or Orlando, a de-natured cartoon reclaiming his nature and his independence, unconcerned with cuteness or whether we are entertained. Elaine Siegel's Donald Duck was sinister, sexual, possibly a rapist. He was in no way under her control, or ours, within the performance..." (Noel, 1988)
the whole process: R. Dart. (Watson,1982).
human cultural evolution: "Staring up into the cavernous darkness of the domes that were peopled with flaking blue and gold mosaic-figures, as awesome and primitive as the cave-paintings in Lascaux, I had tried to be impressed. But Pound's questioning eyes and weary shoes were still too much with me, and I could feel no hint of reverence, only the suffocating dead air of centuries of exhausted hopes, only the multitudinous prayers (like so many poems) that had vanished upwards within these unavailing walls, only the abject knees that had made of that wavery, inlaid floor a mute tablet of unanswered supplications." (Holmes,1986)
Super Bowl: "is there, then, nothing about spectator football which makes it substantively unlike, or morally superior to, 'real life'? Leaving aside its sheerly athletic requirements (unusual power, acceleration, co-ordination), I would say that it is distinctive--even 'unreal' and 'morally superior' compared to our social game--in the extraordinary physical courage, and instant system-analysis ability, it requires of its participants. In these respects it truly does require an altogether higher order of being than our social game and, depending on one's values, might properly be celebrated as a special and elevated form of activity on those accounts." J. McMurtry, "The Illusions of a Football Fan: A Reply to Michalos." (Vanderwerken and Wertz,1985).
tripped over a toy: Speaking to Dean Koontz's novel, Oddkins: A Fable for All Ages: "Two types of toys are pitted against each other; their depiction evokes the hopes, needs, and forbidden desires of our times. Stuffed toys representing animals are the forces of good, the Leben toys, created by Isaac Bodkins, who dies without appointing a successor. Their evil enemies, the Charon toys, emerge from the subcellar of Bodkins's old home hoping to make one of their kind the new toy maker. These toys from hell, from whose boatman-guide they take their name, form a mixed group representing among them human, animal, and mechanical types. Whoever wins the fight to fill the post of toy maker will determine not only the type of toys created but the fate of the next generation of children, letting loose, as it were, the forces of either light or darkness upon the innocent. (Kuznets,1994)
Voice on a machine pleads
for a breakthrough into warmer softer light.
I do not answer.
My answers are simple in their obscurities.
My light is but a striking copy
off a darker paradise.
(D. Dahl. From, Day By Day")
snapping light on: J. Weishaus, "My Body is One With."
The biting insects don't like the blood of people who dread dying.
They prefer the blood of people who can imagine themselves entering
other life-forms.
(G. Kinnell. From, "The Biting Insects")
this harmony: "There is a kind of poetry whose essence lies in the relation between ideal and real, and which therefore, by analogy to philosophical jargon, should be called transcendental poetry. It begins as satire in the absolute difference of ideal and real, hovers in between as elegy, and ends as idyll with the absolute identity of the two. But just as we wouldn't think much of an uncritical transcendental philosophy that doesn't represent the producer along with the product and contain at the same time within the system of transcendental thoughts a description of transcendental thinking: so too this sort of poetry should unite the transcendental raw materials and preliminaries of a theory of poetic creativity...." (Schlegel,1971)
Sarah Bernhardt: (1844-1923). Bernhardt, whose original ambition was to be a nun--her dream voted down at a family meeting--, created for herself a "legend compounded of a flair for off-stage dramatics which included sleeping in a coffin, horse-whipping a rival, and collecting a menagerie of a cheetah, a wolf, and a half-dozen chameleons, is capped by Sarah's reappearance on the stage following the amputation of her leg in her seventy-first year." (Cole,1970)
I interpreted: (Jung,1975)
I must attend: "There is probably no other religion that is less concerned with death. Cemeteries are not supposed to be next to synagogues, because life and death are to be separated. Descendants of priests, the Cohanim, are not to gaze on dead bodies or walk in cemeteries. Christianity, in its Jewish infancy, had as its symbol a fish, signifying the life of Peter; only later, not coincidentally as Christians broke away from Judaism, did they take on the cross, an implement of torture, the symbol of Jesus' agony and martyrdom." (Kurlansky,1994)
Hanford Atomic Engineering Works:"The workers were not supposed to tell their wives what they were doing at Hanford, or if working women, to discuss it with boyfriends or husbands. Children had even less of an idea. During my nine years of boyhood in Richland, I never knew what it was my father did exactly, as he left each day on swung or grave on The Grey Goose on the way to the satanic mills." (W. Witherup. From, "Mother Witherup's Top Secret Cherry Pie."
an ocean: "so I would go to the ocean and sit on an ocean rock and sit for hours and get all the sound of that ocean...and I saw an octopus as big as a coffee cup, a real octopus, and I got him and I put him in a tub and I looked at him and I said: 'Shit, I am not going to take you home, baby.' And I put him back, but I got him. That was my god, and still is my god, and I really deeply believe that if it can be that simple a god for everybody, then all the troubles we have would go away." L. Welch. (Meltzer,1971)
Now the sea: W.C. Williams. From, "The Yachts."
temenos: a temple's "holy precinct." It has roundness, a circuit, circle, sphere, pointing toward "the constellation of the personality about a centre of phallic (i.e. creative) character, and to the attainment of a bounded life." (Herzog,1983)
The palm at the end of the mind,
Beyond the last thought, rises
In the bronze decor...
The palm stands on the edge of space.
The wind moves slowly in the branches.
The bird's fire-fangled feathers dangle down.
(W. Stevens. From, "Of Mere Being")
to face the god: "The sun, from the human point of view (in other words, as it is confused with the notion of noon) is the most elevated conception. It is also the most abstract object, since it is impossible to look at it fixedly at that time of day." (Bataille,1991)
It was a good thing you abandoned the sky
The honeysuckle of heaven creeps ever higher
The earthly octopi pant
And so we foundation-layers grow closer and closer to becoming
our own undertakers
(G. Apollinaire. From, "Earth-Ocean." M. Benedikt, translator.)
disappearing into: "after playing around awhile, i took a small mirror about the size of a sheet of paper off the wall and placed it on the floor. then jumped into it....big mistake. i completely lost my body. i was just energy. i had the sensation of a very rapid motion downward. i was a partial void....many strange things flew by. i could neither interact, nor turn nor orient myself in any way. soon i lost even the feeling of motion. complete chaos erupted. i was in pure symbols...symbols of everything flying around unconnected....i awoke to my solid reality in a very cold sweat. anyone else try anything like this?" (McKinstry,1995)
keening mirror: "There are numerous examples of mirrors and mirror-like objects that have been used as portalling devices. Chinese mirrors, first appearing in the late Shang Period, were used in burial ceremonies and were considered to have profound cosmological significance. They were polished, round cast bronze mirrors, very shiny on one side and featuring cosmological design on the other side. The design elements depict a portalling symbol...(MacDonald,1989)
religiously sanctioned: "Are not civilizations saved by their Gods also led to destruction by those same, their own, Gods?" J. Hillman, "Wars, Arms, Rams, Mars--On the Love of War." (Andrews, et al.,1987).
we each tear: K'reeah (Rending of garment.) "For a parent, the rend is made on the left side; for the others, it is made on the right side. This ceremony is performed standing up to teach us to 'meet all sorrow standing upright.'" (From booklet, Menorah Chapel, Ft. Lauderdale, FL.)
Greek chorus: "tradition laid down that every tragedy must have in it a Chorus, whose task was to sing about the action, to play some part in it, and in general to provide some kind of continuity...What happens to the other characters must be judged against the background of the Chorus, which provides a setting for it, passes comments and judgements, and often sets an emotional tone, which affects our response to the actual events." (Bowra,1966)
wrong spiritual turn: "How can he know that he is on the right path, especially when he sees no path at all? How can he know whether this pain of separation from the God he once thought he knew is no real separation from God or the experience of the darkness wherein the true God is met more fully and deeply? (Shannon,1987)
come and behold the letters by which heaven and earth
were created
the letters by which the mountains and hills were created
the letters by which the trees and herbs were created
the letters by which the seas and rivers were created
the letters by which the planets and constellations were created
the letters by which the moon, the sun, Orion, the Pleiades
and the vast lights of heaven were created
the letters by which the Throne of Glory and the wheels of the
Merkaba were created
the letters by which the necessities of the worlds were created
the letters by which wisdom, understanding, knowledge, prudence,
meekness
and righteousness were created, by which the whole world
is sustained
I walked by His side and He took me by His hand and raised me upon
His wings
and showed me those letters, all of them, that are graven with a
flaming pen on the Throne of Glory...
(S. ha-Hekhalot. From, The Hebrew Book of Enoch. (3rd Century A.D.)
A good flow of ch'i: "Then one day I was making some calculations for a gravesite and my father told me that he wanted to go along. So we went and I showed him the site. I was talking to him about, you see, telling him all these things that I was sure he couldn't understand. Then my father, after he had listened to my reasoning, said, 'Well, yes, you could put the tomb here, but the gingko is withering on the tiger's tail,' which was just his way of showing me that the ch'i was seeping away and that the site was not so good. Then I listened to my father for another thirty years." Wang Wei [pseudonym]. R. LeMon, "Conversation with a Geomancer." (Frick, 1986).
anguished uncertainty: "At Olson's funeral, Allen Ginsberg, chanting kaddish with an anguished uncertainty of the words ('yisgadal v'yiskadash shmay raba...'), stepped in his confusion on the pedal that would lower the outsized coffin into the grave. A soft whirr, the coffin tilted, lurched, and stuck before Ginsberg could leap away from the pedal. He continued chanting the ancient Aramaic words 'yhai shlama raba min-shmaya v'hiyim...' In the silence that followed, the undertaker's functionary who pressed his foot on the pedal that would lay Olson forever to rest discovered that Ginsberg had jammed the mechanism. The coffin was wedged neither in nor out of the grave." (Davenport,1981). Davenport added a footnote to this story: "This account, I'm told, is not wholly accurate. I had it from Stan Brakhage, who had it secondhand."
And how Death: A. Ginsberg. From, "Kaddish."
The conduit between food: "He
does not prepare his own first meal following the burial. He has no relationship
to himself, and at least at this one moment, he symbolically possesses no
food. Only a fully
living person prepares his own food." E. Feldman, "Death
as Estrangement: The Halakhah of Mourning."(Riemer,
1974).
"As it expresses itself in mythology human fantasy has continually been
preoccupied with the question of what food is eaten by the Shades or the dwellers in 'the
Beyond'. The idea of such food is a symbol which brings into consciousness awareness the
mystery of the relationship of the living of the world of the Shades. (Herzog,1983)
this dissolution: "In effect, the law asks the mourner to behave as if he himself were dead. He is now an incomplete person, and his daily life begins to reflect the fact of his incompleteness. His physical appearance and his body are neglected. His relationship with God is interrupted. He has no commonality or community with other men. The qualities and characteristics of a living human being are suspended. According to the Midrash, death is one of the aspects of human life which liken man to a beast," E. Feldman, "Death as Estrangement: The Halakhah of Mourning."(Riemer, 1974).
shiva: The time of mourning. Here, also, "Shiva is the personification of the Absolute, particularly in its dissolution of the universe. He is the embodiment of Super-Death. He is called Yam~ntaka, 'The Ender of the Tamer, He who conquers and exterminates Yama the God of Death, the Tamer.' Shiva is Mah~-K~la, Great Time, Eternity, the swallower of time, swallower of all the ages and cycles of ages. He reduces the phenomenal rhythm and whirlpool to nought, dissolving all things, all beings, all divinities, in the crystal pure, motionless ocean of Eternity--from the viewpoint of which nothing whatsoever fundamentally comes to pass." (Zimmer,1974)
traditionally low: "A student asks a rabbi: 'In the olden days there were men who saw the face of God. Why don't they any more?' The rabbi replied, 'Because nowadays no one can stoop so low.'" C.G. Jung.
my flight home: "It must be said that (Osip) Mandelstam, whether at the cemetery or on a walk or at the fair, wherever he was, always wanted to go home." (Tsvetaeva,1992)
Father's ring: "in the Greek island of Carpathus, people...are careful to remove all rings (from the dead body); 'for the spirit. they say, can even be detained in the little finger, and cannot rest.' Here it is plain that even if the soul is not definitely supposed to issue at death from the finger tips, yet the ring is conceived to exercise a certain constrictive influence which detains and imprisons the immortal spirit in spite of its efforts to escape the tabernacle of clay; in short the ring, like the knot, acts as a spiritual fetter." (Frazer,1959).