"If You See the Buddah on the Road, Kill Him

Dear Colleagues,

More specimens & juxtapositions from the demon and the angel:
Searching for the Source of Artistic Inspiration (Edward Hirsch)
and the source of our own intellective & affective fire.


Seized by an anarchic rage to demolish everything,
all logical and rational forms, all the continuity of
history… (J Hillis Miller on WC Williams poems:
Kora in Hell).

Destruction of received models & forms is necessary
in order to clear a space for spontaneous thought to
arise, says Hirsch: in other words kill the Buddha.

But what kind of talk is THAT kind of talk?

I call it Howard-Cosell-talk as opposed to
Mohammad Ali talk: commentator talk,
spectator talk, literary critic talk.
Engmajor talk.



The transcendental impulse remains urgent within us,”
Roethke suggests, dreaming of common uncommon
language; “ but we no longer have a vocabulary
of imaginary beings to enact it.

Imaginary beings? What...? What the...?

Look: a CLASS is not a member of itself.
I think of Russell’s paradox in Jensen 206
around 8:30 a.m. wondering if IT ( an
imaginary being, a necessary angel) will speak
—utter a word, break chaos and begin again
the origin of the universe of converse-action.

A "Community" is no member of itself either:
is more than sum of parts & partialities no
matter how I reduce it, it's a necessary angel:
me: talking like Fred-Flatlander-talk in his
Ph Dissertations on
SPHERE PASSING THRU
(nothing but a circle jerk.)

We need the necessary angel,
Wallace Stevens says,
because it is vitally necessary for us to
pass behind the habitual daily world, the
familiar ‘man-locked’
[what the neuro-cognitive call
‘fixed function’]
sets.

A necessary angel: indispensable figure of the
imagination because it provides a cleansing
perspective from which to see the world anew:
terrible swift double-edged word, purgatorial rub-
a-dub scrub-down with hard-brown soap & hog
bristles so as to put on the shirt of flame & hose it
off with blood of a lamb & mint jelly: angelic
provision.

With no known criteria, with criteria instead in the process
of becoming, the creative situation generates an anxiety close
to madness; but also a strangely exhilarating and sane sense,
too, one of being free—free from dogma, from history, from
the terrible load of the past; and above all a sense of newness,
of each moment focused and real, outside the reach of past and
future. Robert Motherwell

Where do you go
to find the people
coming & going &
talking of Robert
Motherwell? I'm just asking.

Like 40 million Americans, Ms. Pearson suffers
from anxiety, which she pithily calls “fear in
search of a cause.” Reason is powerless against
it. Ms. Pearson argues, in fact, that rationalism,
intended to banish superstition and fear, has
instead removed one of the most effective
weapons against anxiety, namely religious
faith and ritual. (ref to Pat Pearson: A Brief History of Anxiety)

Making art in America is about saving one’s soul. Charles Simic.

We are broken vessels, Joseph Cornell seems
to teach us, aspiring to a lost wholeness.
Damaged goods, damnit. Call it
vulnerable, then, if “damned”
don’t describe it to your
satisfaction.

@@@@@@

Not likely to hear a biologist talk like any
of that way of talking above. Chemist?
Sociologist? School Administrator?
Graduation speaker? (Snippets maybe:
quoting some OTHER: hauling in a
transcendentalist or romantic poet,
some medieval philosopher to do the job,
maybe.) I’m just asking. Economist?
Federal Reservist aspiring to a fast fix
& calling for a necessary angel?

What shocks the virtuous Philosopher,
delights the camelion Poet… A Poet is the
most unpoetical of anything in existence… (John Keats)

No problem can be solved on the level at
which it was generated, some student quoting
Einstein to me last week.

“Hardness” is not located in the bench or in
the butt-of-the-seated, but names the relationship
generated by the “conversation” of the 2: Bench & Butt.
OK call it trans-action then, angelic! Just don’t be
calling Bench “hard.”

(What do you name & call the MEDIA? Mediation
mediating between Marriage (more than sum it’s parties)
and its Participants, say? Throne? Dominion? Virtue? Power?
Principality? Dybbuk? Let it remain nameless? )

xxxooo, Sam