Countdown: a sequence of backward tallying to mark the tension remaining before a letdown is scheduled to occur.
(The titles to my blogs are usually throwaway; this one led me to research its hyphenated term and copy the first paragraph from its encyclopedia entry.)
NASA commonly employs the terms “L-minus” and “T-minus” during the anticipation of a rocket launch, and even “E-minus” for events that involve spacecraft that are already in orbit, where the “T” could stand for “test” or “time,” and the “E” stands for “encounter,” as with a comet or some other space object.
(By the way, the “T” in my title stands for “turkey.”)
Obligatory image
Clippings from the newspaper placed atop the cover of a book.
Dear diary,
Yesterday’s entry was written before the holiday, so I was filled with angst and needing to channel this energy; writing was compulsive and necessary then. I am typing the present post on the morning after the holiday: now writing feels like a chore; but I must do it, in order to record my feelings faithfully – that’s what I tell myself. If I wait too long, my memories will fade; whereas right now they’re fresh and vivid – even obnoxious because I cannot escape them.
You know what? I’m not going to do it. I’m not going to talk about the holiday. The feeling of being under the whip of a taskmaster is due to…
It’s cuz I compel myself to follow a PLAN: instead of letting my thots wander freely, I must record and playback the holiday.
Yet who is doing the telling, when I say “that’s what I tell myself”? Which self is talking, which listening? & why is neither quite mine?
I mentioned Freud afore; now here he is again: What I gather from his terms, which have been unfairly Latin’d when English’d as ego, superego, id (I think of these as “I”; “over-I”; and “it”) is that my superego is doing the talking, and my poor ego listens.
Trust and obey,
For there’s no other way.
That hymn haunts me. I hate it, but I love it. It’s a perfect nightmare.
Why is the individual single, but inside each individual is a division so strong that it constitutes a duality, a plurality, even multitudes? Self of selves. Ego with superego; and might one’s superego possess, say, a super-duper ego? Where does it end?
And fathers. They’re outside of the mind, are they not? What does it mean to have God “put on” human form and say “Eat my flesh and drink my blood, and become me”?
It’s no secret that I did not like my own earthly father. And he would claim otherwise but the truth is that he did not like me either. It’s OK: there was no fistfight or blowout argument between us (tho I regret that we didn’t let it come to this: for THRU the climax of our conflict we might have achieved some sort of camaraderie; whereas we maintained our decorum and thus he’s dead and I shrug)…
But who would I choose to be my replacement father? (I think about this all the time.) Orson Welles… William Blake… Harold Bloom… Anyone with two syllables in their first name and one in their last. Bryan Ray. To father oneself. Jesus Christ.
The soul and the over-soul. To be inspired by the Holy Ghost.
André Breton mentions Freud in a lecture that he (Breton) gave in 1935, “Political Position of Today’s Art”:
The question “How does something become conscious?” may be advantageously replaced, Freud says, by this question: “How does something become preconscious?”
This way of thinking is exactly where I want to be. Now I’m moved to see what the lexicographers have established about that adjective CONSCIOUS: aware of and responding to one’s surroundings; awake. So is Freud suggesting that we ask not “How does something become awake” but “How does something become pre-awake”? And is pre-awake the same as saying asleep? How does something find that it has been sleeping? When I use these alternate words, I’m lured to think of the phenomenon of consciousness as a part of an ongoing wave whose crests and troughs go: sleep, wake, sleep, wake. But if I stick with “conscious” and “preconscious,” and I ask, as is natural for me, what preceded the state that we’re calling pre-conscious, I don’t think to answer yet again “the conscious” but rather something like the infra-pre-consciousness; as above when I mentioned the super-duper ego. These “conscious” terms feel to me like they could blast back and inwards forever. So instead of a mere wave, up-down-up-down, which is unchanging in a sense like a circle (imagine a circle trying to draw itself upon a moving timeline), the potential for augmentation is added, and we’re into the infinite: a spiral, ever increasing. In one direction it travels onward and outward, and the other is the opposite. And that’s if it’s binary. (My guess is that it’s far more complex than binary.)
Orson Welles was on my mind because we’re re-watching The Master (2012) for the nine millionth time, because you get a greater reward with each new screening—my own reward has now spiraled galactically beyond multidimensional—and the character of Lancaster Dodd is played by Philip Seymour Hoffman with a good dose of Welles.
But let me copy a little more from Breton’s lecture, because I like how he recruits his heroes to bolster his theories—this excerpt starts with another quote of Freud answering his own damn question:
“How can we bring repressed elements into (pre)consciousness?—by reestablishing through the work of analysis those intermediate preconscious members, verbal memories.”
Now these verbal representations, which Freud tells us are “mnemonic traces stemming principally from acoustic perceptions” are precisely what constitutes the raw material of poetry. “Poetic rubbish,” Rimbaud reveals, “had a great part in my alchemy of the word.” Surrealism’s whole effort in particular for the last fifteen years had been to obtain from the poet the instantaneous revelation of these verbal traces whose psychic charges are capable of being communicated to the perception-consciousness system…
The more I learn of Breton’s Surrealism, the more ambivalent I feel about it. There’s something that pulls me in, hook line and sinker—that’s the splendor that results when the surrealist technique works—and yet I don’t place high value on speed itself or chronological primacy, because I don’t care what is FACTUAL about the workings of the mind; I thrill only to the potential that a creation opens to spiral the future idward.
I dwell in Possibility –
A fairer House than Prose…
I believe that Breton joins me in siding with Emily Dickinson’s poem 657. Yet I side with the ideas of the poet John Ashbery against the “rules” of Breton’s so-called automatic writing: Breton would have us compose so rapidly that the truth of the preconscious is revealed; I follow Ashbery in favoring the act of revision, that is to say: use the speedy technique of automatic writing as a first step; then stand back and look at what you’ve got, and let the conscious toy with it: in short, let’s save the strongest elements of the preconscious’ doings along with the strongest revisions performed by our conscious mind. To merely unveil the preconscious, we’re left with a truth about the past; whereas to forge a new provocation, we allow the preconscious to join its truths to those of the conscious so as to invent futurity’s (post)conscious: call it what you will (the id suggests GOD).
Of Visitors – the fairest –
For Occupation – This –
The spreading wide my narrow Hands
To gather Paradise –
I should stop here, but I feel guilty using the conclusions of others’ works to end my own (I’m all for theft, but a true Promethean evinces not an abandonment but an apotheosis of principles); plus I have a rap track to share in the postscript, and I fear that it will not appear in the best light if I force it to follow the actual sublime.
Another remark I made in yesterday’s entry touches on the clash of innocence and experience. I said:
I got fazed attempting to break from my Cocoon of I., and I’ve not yet managed to permeate the Realm of E.
When I wrote this, I was thinking of The Book of Thel. But let me first back up and say six words of introduction. Nobody reads my heavenly father’s other works, like the title aforesaid, but everyone knows that Blake made a collection of poems that he called Songs of Innocence and of Experience. There is no writer, except maybe Shakespeare, who seems to me to be so far ahead, waiting for the rest of us to catch up to him on the pathway of eternity. Blake’s Songs of I. and of E. are justly popular. My favorite of his books is The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, because that’s where I’m at in my development. I suspect that his brief epics Milton and Jerusalem are his best work, but they also stop somewhere waiting for me: I have yet to reach them. In the meantime, I discover myself in Blake’s other writings. Recently I re-read The Book of Thel, because I want to understand why it’s so hard for me, at this point in my life when I MUST do so, to make the change from innocence to experience; and it’s my understanding of the poem that Thel cannot quite manage to make the leap either. I own a volume called The Complete Poetry & Prose of William Blake, edited by David V. Erdman and which contains commentary by Harold Bloom. The commentary is printed at the back of the book, unobtrusively, and I find it gratifying. Here’s a bit of what Bloom says about Blake’s Thel:
The poem’s most pungent irony comes in the lament that rises from the grave plot, for it first protests the strength of four senses, and then the weakness of the fifth sense, of touch and sexuality. Even in experience, Thel would have found no fulfillment. Yet her flight home heralds a darker fate; dwelt in too long, the vales of Har reduce their inhabitants to the state of the Har and Heva of Tiriel.
This made me want to re-read Tiriel. I’ve read it before, as I have all of Blake’s works; but Blake is a poet not only to read but to RE-READ. No amount of times is enough – I mean this literally: his wisdom is endless. It only saddens me when I hear people call Blake mad, insane, a crazy mystic: he was none of those things. Blake was TOO sane in a world that has no…
I will quote another small piece of commentary as a teaser, because I’m just writing this Blake stuff as a buffer between #657 above and the rap that I wanna share. I hope I’ll be moved to say more about Blake’s poem later, and to quote the actual words and not just analysis:
This harsh and compelling poem is the first by Blake to use his characteristic line, the septenarius or fourteener. This seven-beat line may have been suggested to Blake by ballads in Percy, or Elizabethan poetry, or possibly even by certain passages in the King James Bible.
I gotta break in here to paste another definition, which I arrived at only because I was trying to make sure that I spelled the word “septenarius” correctly – I find it interesting, in light of Bloom describing Blake’s poem as “harsh and compelling” that the form employed by Blake is defined as “a Latin verse line of seven feet, especially a trochaic or iambic tetrameter catalectic, used only in comedy.” (My emphasis.) Now Bloom continues:
Tiriel’s name has been traced to a source in the occult writer Cornelius Agrippa, but this is very remote and contributes nothing to a reading of the poem. I suspect that the name plays upon the first syllable of “tyrant” and compounds this with the Hebrew name for the Almighty [“El” as in the prophets Ezekiel, Daniel…]. Tiriel’s struggle is to maintain himself as an almighty tyrant despite his bodily decay, and his failure to learn until too late the limitation of his self-proclaimed holiness is as much a failure in a conception of divinity as it is in one of political authority.
I ask this about myself, and my country (the U.S.A.), as well as the whole planet Earth: Will we ever advance beyond the Tiriel period? This stage has continued for a very long time, it seems…
P.S.
Now here’s another fake gangster rap demo from the album where my bother played his guitar at the end of each track. More info here.
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