Uglycover & Easterthoughts

This entry really should have been split into two different entries, but I couldn’t resist titling it with the title above. So go ahead and read it in two separate sittings, instead of trying to read both parts simultaneously: one with one eye and the other with the other eye.

PART THE FIRST:
Uglycover

At last I have finished making the covers for my double-volume life-work: Collected Self-Amusements. They are very ugly, the covers – that was honestly unintentional, but I’d like to take a stab at playing this fact off as a marketing decision, so I’ll say: This is as covers should be, so as to secure their interior text from the attentions of the vulgar.

These two volumes contain ALL of the books, writings, texts, and semi-sensical anti-fun that I have ever composed. The only thing that they do not include is my Holy Scripture, The Collected Religious Writings of Bryan Ray: I kept that text separate because it constitutes the personal cult that I tried to create; which deserves to be revered very solemnly, not lumped in with a bunch of experimental bliss. Also whatever comes of these Public Private Diary entries shall be its own separately bound affair.

What this means is that if a literary critic ever approaches me and remarks:

“Wow you have too many writings to keep track of; I hereby give up on trying to read thru all your work and instead offer you the silence of indifference.”

I can answer:

“No! No! Do not offer me the silence of indifference! I beg you to reconsider! For although I’ve written too much – on this point, we agree – yet all my texts fall into just three simple sets…”

1. My Bible (Collected Religious Writings)
2. My Literary Masterworks (Collected Self-Amusements, in Two Vols. – the first consisting of longer masterworks; the second being shorter masterworks, including aphorism-length masterworks)
3. My Public Private Diary (a 14-volume* set of hot thot).

*Footnote on FOURTEEN

The number fourteen signifies infinity, as is proven by the following excerpt from “The House of Asterion” by Jorge Luis Borges:

It is true that I never leave my house, but it is also true that its doors (whose number is infinite) are open day and night to men and to animals as well. Anyone may enter.

Then Borges’ editor/translator/narrator adds the following footnote after the parentheses in the statement above:

The original says fourteen, but there is ample reason to infer that, as used by Asterion, this numeral stands for infinite.

[End of Footnote]

And, hearing this, my critic will say: “O? just three distinct roundups? I didn’t grasp how plain you had made it. Now I’m on your side again, and I will champion you for the ages. I will write book-length studies about you, so that you receive your eternal reward.”

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Here’s Volume 1:

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And here’s Volume 2:

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PART THE SECOND:
Easterthoughts

Last night, for the holiday, I saw my family. What is my family? About four to six people, give or take a fraction of three point something. What is a holiday? A symbolic attempt to remember an event from the past. (How should this attempt’s success be measured? And what was the memory that we were trying to recall?)

I wrote the above sentences and then read them over – I don’t like that they sound so passionless and logical. My real nature wishes to have as many lovers as the leader of a cult. Someday, maybe the subtler aspects of life will be appreciated on a global scale.

But is the marketplace immortal? The money market, the meat market, the word market… This train of thought reminds me of a few aphorisms written by the insurance executive Wallace Stevens. I’ll copy them from his Opus Posthumous, because no one can stop me from doing what I want with this weblog:

Money is a kind of poetry.

A poem is a meteor.

Wisdom asks nothing more.

Poetry is not personal.

Poetry is a means of redemption.

(Poet,) feed my lambs.

All poetry is experimental poetry.

Realism is a corruption of reality.

Perhaps it is of more value to infuriate philosophers than to go along with them.

All history is modern history.

Poetry is the gaiety (joy) of language.

Only a noble people evolve a noble God.

What I really wanted to say

Here’s what I really wanted to say: Holidays occur infrequently; so, if you love your family and enjoy spending time with them – as is the case with me myself – then the event is difficult, on account of the fact that it forces you unnaturally to cram all of your conversation and interactions into one single evening (and then you miss your loved ones afterwards); whereas, if you loathe your family, the event’s same aspects – its brevity and rarity – will soothe you, as they guarantee the imminent passing of your disgust (and then you breathe a sigh of relief when it’s over). In other words: Holidays work better if you dislike your fellow celebrants.

I prefer to spend frequent intervals of casual enjoyment with loved ones rather than infrequent, lengthy intervals of formal observation.

Holidays and warfare . . .

There is a strange relation between the concept of a holiday and the concept of a war. My assumption is that wild animals participate in neither of these observances – although that doesn’t necessarily mean that either of them is more or less desirable.

I mean, when the small farming village is attacked in the movie Seven Samurai (1954), it is good that the farmers fight back. It is also good to remember events that inspire our spirit and recharge our passion for utopia.

However, both wars and holidays can be dragged out too long. When you find yourself causing destruction haphazardly in a foreign land, and there’s no compassionate sentiment attached to the action, I think that war has overstepped the bounds of politeness.

And when a rumor claims that a slain heretic (bless his rebellious, fallen soul) has risen from death, flown back to outer space, and promised to return ASAP so as to save his earthly partisans from themselves, I think it’s reasonable to wait about 150 years for this to transpire; but if more than three centuries pass, it’s time to admit that we’ve been stood up.

Yes, three is the magic number, when it comes to the limit on centuries of waiting for saviors. But imagine the desperation of a culture that spends two thousand years trying to remember why it even cared in the first place.

One last thought.

I was raised in the Protestant Christian church, so that’s my perspective. I’ve heard many, many sermons preached on the subject of the ‘messiah’, the ‘king’ – I’ve heard pastors and other believers repeat a simple tale – they say:

“The people who lived in Year Zero were waiting for a king who would give them worldly success (which is to say: realistic success); but God sent a spiritual king to offer them spiritual success (which is to say: imaginary success), and alas the people rejected this king because they were spiritually ignorant (which is to say: they were lacking in imagination).”

I compare this criticism to present-day believers. Christianity’s pre-dicament, at present, is an exact repetition of that same old story: Modern Christians are awaiting the appearance of their king, so that they can enjoy the real success that they suppose this king has promised them. But now God sends another king of the imagination: a sublime yet lowly poet as another messiah-in-disguise: William Blake or Walt Whitman or Emily Dickinson or Anne Carson.

Will religious believers have eyes to see and ears to hear, when the next prophetic divinity enters the stage? Or is religion always a mask for worldly avarice?