may 8 - saint thomas, poet

 

As a boy, Alfred Coker never felt much happiness.  But as he grew, even the few annual stabs of joy he thought were his diminished to paltry intimations of something other than despair.  By the time maturity clasped him, the constant gush of flesh humans dotingly call life seemed to him a mistake Death once made and couldn’t fix.

He’d wake in the morning.  Peer at the calamitous solitude below the lumpy sheet.  He dryly tasted the foul archaeology of his dreams, once glittered with wailing demons, now stagnant, vaguely anxious.  Night’s stored flatulence assailed his lungs.  Dust, soundless dust from unswept corners established shrines of oppression in his nails.  What had been called his manhood by one or maybe two littered the wastage of his groin, a withered blossom without destination or even the primitive pentecost of vulgar song.  Oh limpid morn.

He heard his dripping wife already complicating the day.  Clouds of twitter.  Intractably rummaging for her special teapot in shelves of gossip, she moved in clumsy constellations of ignorance.  Love was a dahlia sleeping in the empty silence … nothing human.

He thought of the Bank patiently waiting for him.  So patiently.  That house of voiceless fallacies and financial lizards.  As triumphant as a bramble.  As permanent as glaciers.  His frigid desk.  The office bile.  Ganga, snake-eared boss, Mr. Eugenides and his gaseous Phlebas, often known to be in Mrs. Porter or her office, genetically malefic Tiresias, Bill and Lou and Lil and May, Lil’s husband, Mrs. Porter, the hooded Chair, Madame Sosostris, sometimes also sweet Marie, Mrs. Porter, Lord Robert Nonsense, exhumed Leman, the Very Mrs. Equidrone, Philomel Hyacinth of silent staves, Mrs. Porter, carious George, Albertetta, Porter’s daughter, with her breasts, Victoria Breen of Poxford, coffee-unguent Elizabeth Leicester, snarling Data, damned demoted Dayadhvam, the numbers man, Damyata, the rats, Mr. Warren, Mrs. Porter’s antique laquearia … the whole collegial mess.

His unpropitious body, the closet-minded wife, apotheosized endless pompous competition of production, shabby blood, deceits of wisdom, hebetative scorpions, gods and roses, follycocks, vortex futures, value, value, happy executive sortilege, ice-cap stocks, post-mortem waste and things and budgets, the life of significant oil, decayed mountains, reminiscent rumors, arid hand gusts falling down like London, swallow all the sordid dreary daily horror and that was it, the car was in the fir trees, Coker’s sea yelp gulped by squirrels.

So it was from this desiccation that on September 26 1888, under the conscious heritage of Henry Ware Eliot, a successful businessman and president and treasurer of the Hydraulic-Press Brick Company, and Charlotte Champe nee Stearns, a flimsy poetess, St. Thomas entered interminable sodden life in St. Louis.

A fluorescent light of transitional aesthetics, a gastronomical wordman, skilled at turning misfortune into fate, he tiptoed through despair to religion’s muted blood.  Never a husband, he became one.  Never modern, he described what he wasn’t.  In love with nothing, he turned his love around and showed her to the world.  Believing in extinction more than days, how was he to navigate life’s flower but from the muddy shores of death?  He swooned.  Swooned from muliebrity’s stark origins and the great flowing stream of human physicality.  Swooned in disgust and fell to the desolation of self-sacrifice.  Life passed over him in a triumphal chariot, and he remained, a slave harnessed to it.

Worn by the dust, dust’s decadence, dust’s desultory derisions, he knelt to pray on a possum skin in London on January 4 1965 and upon uttering the name of God turned to ash to the applause of roses and was placed on tongues of fire on the sea.  The Council of I elevated him to sainthood on May 18 2004 because it was a good and proper thing to do.  Let us honor the saint today with our souls and flesh.

april 27 - saint john the lady of the devil’s party

 

Any knowledge worth having is hidden; the good stuff lurks just below the surface, tantalizing us with its shadowy limbs which seem to be undressing, inviting us down.  Once we’ve leapt in, though, mad with desire, consequences safely, sanely, left in some closet, our phantasmagoria fights with us and we almost drown in our lust to grasp what we thought we saw and seem to hold.  Whether we live or die really doesn’t matter - the rush of the dive is why we breathe, truth’s hot clammy fingers clinging to us, providing for glorious seconds relief from the heavy facts of earth.  The world’s paved playground is information and tedium, but the swamp of unknowing vitality and desire.  Is there a bottom to this swamp?  A bottom called God or Reality, annihilation or nirvana?  A bottom without a name?  The lovers and monsters who seduce us down seem to be the only bottom there is - and they’re endless.

What does the dive lead to?  Insulin, holocausts, SARS, Raid, genocides, rape, car fatalities, iPods, the Oedipal complex, tears, plastic, IR guided missiles, government policy, fuzzy peaches, sewage treatment plants, divorce, multinationals, votes for women, Draino, many many babies, and, very occasionally, art.

At the swampy shores … that’s where the poet lives.  Not earthy enough to trust the facts, too acquainted with the ways of monsters to romanticize the dive, he hides in the prickly weeds and the ideologies of survival and hopes for the best.  But he can’t help himself - his soul sides with the monsters.  He holds out as long as he can, clinging to the sane precipices of the world, then feels the seduction of open night and lets go.  It’s in that fall he produces any work worth saving, the rest suburban trinkets.  He dies soon afterwards, knowing that everything worthwhile is in the past and the only thing left to do is mutely scream.  So he joins his creation and omits the scream.

On December 9 1608, in Cheapside under the sign of the Spread Strumpet, St. John was born.  He lost his eyesight and fell into the swamp in the 50s, where he transformed intellectual nihilism into metaphysical drama and substituted the tyranny of Hell for Heaven.  When he emerged, covered with the Devil’s slobber and the green slime of words, he married a third time and died of gout on November 8 1674.  The Council of I raised him to sainthood in 1790 for believing nothing and disguising everything.  Let us honor the saint today with our souls and flesh.

april 24 - st. hairy clitoris, primal philosopher

 

Eleutheria was born into the world shortly after the alphabet was invented and men began to use words to build the foundation of what is now called civilization.  Back then, it was just called sweat.  Without a plan particularly, they placed brick on brick, and often a brick was a few generations or a life. Words became the currency on sophistication’s exchange and for the first time in history’s murmur, men were required to trade in words to survive.  Some did not, and fell back into the well of woods, where they wandered with beasts and negotiated life each hour in the disorder of unmitigated flesh.

Orphaned at 6, Eleutheria learned to fend for herself. Equally at home with the meadow’s butterflies and the city’s scrimmage, her favourite activity was observing the world. She’d sit for days at a time watching the churn of nature and men as if they were all part of her but not she one of them.  Then she became a woman and she was beautiful and all the men in the town wanted her. So she fled to the forest and hid, but the men found her and gave her to the mayor to decide what to do with her, and he made her his wife.  She was given the best food, a generous clothing allowance and three servants; in exchange, she was required to bear children and attend official functions and always be polite and show off her beauty.  So she grew bitter toward the world and swore dark prophecies against it.  On one of these nights she placed a hot iron on her face to disfigure it so that men would be repelled by her, and she ran into the woods and rutted with a bear and gave birth to St. Hairy Clitoris in 535 BCE.  She took the boy with her as she sat and watched the birds in the meadow and the men in the market. And no one talked to her and they avoided her eyes.

When St. Hairy Clitoris was 6, Eleutheria died. He went into the city and watched the affairs of men and listened to their words.  When he was a man, he began speaking, but the men in the marketplace resented him and told him his job was to watch.  St. Hairy Clitoris said, You’re right, my job is to watch.  And then it’s to say what I’ve seen. And he kept speaking. And the men told him he was too useless for the city - which was a place of action and not for one who simply sat around and criticized.

St. Hairy Clitoris said, You’re right, I am useless, and if you would listen to my uselessness, your lives would be more useful.  And the men of the city bound St. Hairy Clitoris to the ground and shat on him until he suffocated.

From the gap between his mother’s beauty and disfigurement,

From the gap between her fashion and his conception,

From the gap between the butterflies and the market,

From the gap between his silence and his speaking,

From the gap between his solitude and his desire,

From the gap between his uselessness and the merchants,

He wrote a book and its words are one and the one is fire.

The Council of I elevated him to sainthood on the first day a flower grew from his makeshift tomb.  Let us honor the saint today with our souls and flesh.

april 22 - saint johann-simone, mystic and martyr

 

In the black heart of God one finds no light.  The pious think otherwise, but the pious are acquainted with their wishes, not with God.  In the black heart of God, snakes abound; they feed on the excrement of human suffering and bury their knowledge away from mortal grasping.  The devout think otherwise, but the devout strive for fidelity, not God.  In the black heart of God, silence slaughters every truth that sprouts on earth.  The righteous think otherwise, but the righteous have never been to God.

Every century or so, God rips Himself - on a sharp edge of history perhaps, or maybe on a rusty nail left over from the crucifixion.  When he does, one drop of black blood leaks out and falls to earth, and humans have a rare chance to see what God’s like.  Do they take it?  Of course not.  Humans excel at botching divinity, then running to join the ape kingdom as if that’s the only option left. 

These leaks sometime take human form, though we’d never know it because we’re too busy hammering our reputations to the air, and if we have any remaining energy we use it to make fun of these freaks from outer space, then return to our lifelong pursuits with a beer in one hand, a cell phone in the other.

These forms don’t speak the languages we’re familiar with - those from earth and Hell - so we think they’re nuts, and if we don’t kill them, there’s no need to worry - no one really pays them attention anyway.  Their words are like signals we think we see in the sky some night we’ve been drinking - maybe they’re there, but who knows? who cares?

In their alien hunger they drown identity.  In their bleak souls names dissolve.  In their hideous autonomy they collapse gender.  In their passion for God a hole is dug for time and it’s thrown in, without even a stone to mark its passing.  Life and death are the same, as indifferent to them as an exploding star in a remote galaxy, noticed by no one.

Is God worried by all this?  Does he notice the scars that have formed across his body from all those rips?  Does he track these saints in a spreadsheet, on colorful graphs from three perspectives?  Is His blood gradually being depleted?  Maybe.  We’ll never know.

april 23 - saint william, chief bard

 

St. William was born on this day in 1564 in Stratford to John and Mary (Arden), who had been married about 1557.  She was of the landed gentry, he a yeoman.  William likely attended the local grammar school and would have studied primarily Latin rhetoric, logic and literature.  In 1582 at the age of 18 he married Anne Hathaway, a local farmer’s daughter eight years his senior.  The couple had three children, Susanna, born six months after the wedding, and the twins Judith and Hamnet, who were born in 1585.  The boy died in 1596, at the age of 11.

About the time of the twins’ birth, St. William moved to London, where he lived for 25 years as an actor and playwright, producing over 30 plays and 100 poems.  In 1599, he became one of the partners in the new Globe Theater built by the Chamberlain’s Men, a group of fine actors, business partners and close personal friends.  A few friends published his work after his death, and humans have been enjoying St. William’s words ever since.

The final five years of his life were spent in retirement back in Stratford, where he enjoyed moderate wealth and the satisfaction of a productive life.  He died and was elevated to sainthood on this day in 1616, and was buried two days later in the chancel of Holy Trinity  Church where he had been baptized exactly 52 years earlier.  Let us honor the saint today with our souls and flesh.

april 13 - malfeasance of lesser saints

 

The Council of I, under the blessing and degradation of the dogs, in the year of our Word half-past nothing and faretheewell, through a special deviation granted by a Metro worker at Place de Clichy, aside from qualified exceptions, of and by and with, above all criticism but yours, therefore hitherto, because of the taboo and so invigorating marriage of necessity and freedom, notwithstanding, Frank, assigned a task force to determine the process for sainthood.  This was patently unsuccessful.  Consequently, a preexistent process was stolen from the Roly Chaotic Lurch, which in turn was pillaged from the Poly Semen Umpire, a theft from the Nascent Beer Beast, who plundered from Brahma while he copulated with himself.  Brahma, naturally, stole it from the future.  Having thus raided ourselves and hoodwinked time, let us disclose the goods.

Venerability

1. A name may be submitted to the Council of I for consideration of Venerability.
1. Names may be submitted by qualified members of the human species, dead or alive, subject to the remaining guidelines.
2. Non-sentient entities and sentient entities unable to speak a human language are excluded from consideration.
3. Submissions may only be made on February 29 in years whose digits add to 13.
4. Submissions should include full biographical details, complete oeuvre or portfolio, in the 12 most commonly spoken languages and any official language of the United Nations, should it not be included among the 12 most common and should the United Nations or rough equivalent exist, at the time of submission if a literary submission, along with a SASE.
5. Care should be taken to include relevant awards, degrees, certificates, even if considered trivial to certain sectors, social connections, titles, knightings, dameships, sightings, and cultural pedigrees; these will be used for statistical purposes only and disclosed solely in aggregate form to accredited parties.
6. A suffering biography should be included, tracing the candidate’s despair and afflictions, his/her methods and copings, his/her failures.
7. For each candidate, submitters must number 81, with the exception of candidates matching the criterion in h. below, with each submitter’s present and historical contact information (including all phone numbers, cellular phones, faxes, e-mail and postal addresses), sex, gender, and blood type clearly included.
8. Submitters may nominate themselves.
9. Any submission which includes an image of the proposed saint in any form shall be immediately and eternally disqualified.
10. Evidence of a miracle while the candidate was living should accompany the submission.  The following media are accepted:  CD, DVD, Blu-ray, 36mm.
2. If the Council of I agrees with the submission, the nominee shall immediately be promoted from human to Venerable and a song commissioned for the occasion.
1. Should the Council of I disagree with the submission, the submitter(s) shall be slain the following day at daybreak according to whatever method is most common in his/her/their culture.
2. The name of the human so made Venerable shall be inscribed in the Tablets of Destiny on the doors of Hell’s 6C elevator.
3. The name of the human so made Venerable shall be added to this Malfeasance in the Section of Venerability.
3. The Council of I may at any time, without cause or explanation, promote a human to Venerable or demote a Venerable to human apart from the above process.
4. A category of Barely Venerable shall be available for those about whom the Council of I is unable to decide anything.  A human made Barely Venerable shall be eternally disqualified from promotion or demotion away from Bare Venerability.

Blessedness

1.      For those humans made Venerable, by whatever process, submissions may be made to the Council of I for consideration of Blessedness.

a.      No human shall be made Blessed without first being made Venerable.

b.      The time elapsed between Venerability and Blessedness should not be less than the time it would have taken for the Venerable to denounce and destroy all originals and copies of his/her art.

c.       Submissions for Blessedness may not be made by anyone or thing with a post-secondary degree, whether honorary or earned.

d.      Submissions for Blessedness must be written in the composite blood of three extinct animal species.

e.      Submissions should include:  a conduct report of the candidate in the Venerable realm; a 21-second video clip of the candidate bathing in one of the following rivers:  Euphrates, Hudson, Styx; a 2,500 word essay on the relation between the candidate’s sexuality and religion, with sources appropriately cited in APA; 50 grams of the candidate’s flesh.

f.        Only Venerables may nominate Venerables to be Blessed; no Venerable may nominate him/herself.  A simply majority of all current Venerables is necessary to make a Blessed nomination.

2.      If the Council of I agrees with the submission, the nominee shall immediately be promoted from Venerable to Blessed and a plaque ordered for the occasion.

a.      Should the Council of I disagree with the submission, any relatives, friends or acquaintances of the submitter(s) who have a post-secondary degree shall be hung from meat hooks in front of Buffalo’s city hall.

b.      Any Venerable who has three successive failed submissions shall be automatically demoted to human.

c.       The name of the Venerable so made Blessed shall be inscribed on the Blessed plaque, which will be eternally hung above the urinals in the northernmost men’s washroom on the third floor of Buffalo city hall.

d.      The name of the Venerable so made Blessed shall be added to this Malfeasance in the Section of Blessedness.

3.      The Council of I may at any time, without cause or explanation, promote a Venerable to Blessed or demote a Blessed to Venerable apart from the above process.

a.      Even the Council of I - may it breathe forever - may not demote or promote directly between Blessedness and humanity.

b.      The exception to a. above is if all those in the Blessed category unanimously agree, without coercion, bribery or subterfuge, that one of their members should be cast from their midst, that member shall immediately, without debate or consideration, be made a little lower than human and his/her name struck from all records and his/her art and all references to it destroyed.

4.      No category of Barely Blessed shall exist.  One is Blessed or one is not and that is that.

Sainthood

1.      For those Venerables made Blessed, submissions may be made to the Council of I for consideration of sainthood.

a.      No human shall be sainted without first being made Blessed.

b.      Less than 5% of the Blessed shall be sainted within twelve centuries of their death.

c.       The Blessed shall be requested to appear before the Council of I to defend their candidacy; any Blessed who appears shall have their candidacy immediately and eternally revoked.

d.      A Senior Blessed (such defined as those who have had three or more unsuccessful candidacies for sainthood) must initiate a nomination for sainthood.  This shall be followed by validation by not less than 10% of the present Blessed population, not less than 25% of the present Venerable population and not more than 33.3% of the human population. 

e.      A Blessed may be nominated for sainthood a maximum of three times, with an interval of not less than five centuries between each nomination.

f.        Requests for exceptions to e. above may be made in writing to:

The Council of I

21 Penny Lane

Rochester NY  USA 14625-2217

                              (Note:  While the records and discussions related to promotions, demotions, nominations and submissions are not available, interested parties may write to the above address to request copies of exceptions requests.)

g.      Proof of two living and two posthumous miracles should be attached to the application for sainthood.

2.      If the Council of I agrees with the submission, the nominee shall immediately be promoted from Blessed to saint and a hole dug for the occasion.

a.      Should the Council of I disagree with the submission, Reprimand Form C-1342 shall be printed, addressed to all submitters, and stored in the Council’s personnel files for a period of not less than 17 years.

b.      The name of the Blessed so sainted shall be uttered briefly and inaudibly at the precise moment of sainthood.

c.       The name of the Blessed so sainted shall have a Proper written for him/her.  The entire cost of the Proper, including incidental expenditures, shall be fully borne by the Council of I.  The Proper shall be written by a qualified individual (the Council follows the 1513 Bavarian Code in this regard) before 51 further Propers have been written. 

3.      The Council of I may at any time, without cause or explanation, promote a human, Venerable or Blessed to sainthood or demote a saint to Blessed, Venerable or human apart from the above process.

4.      The number of saints shall be eternally held at 81, the number of Blessed at no greater than 81 times 81 and of the number of Venerables there shall be no end.

a.      Desainted saints shall retain their Propers, but they shall be renamed Paupers, removed from the Proper and added to the Pauper.

b.      Desainted saints shall be known neither as Blesseds, Venerables, humans, saints, or desainted saints, but as desaints.  Let all who misname, whether through omission, commission, malice or curiosity, in written, oral or visual discourse, be circumscribed and their foresins nailed to Buggalo’s mare and the mare be ridden in the manner of old.

5.      No category of Bare Saint shall exist.  If one is not a saint, one is less than a saint and one is improper.

The Blessed

Blessed Filipepi Tondo; Blessed Oscar of controlled nature; Blessed Auguste of surmoulage and marcottage; Blessed Ruiz of muliebrous cubes; Blessed José y Lucientes of uiocide; Blessed Christopher of circumspice; Blessed Lloyd, Fröbelist; Blessed Roland, director and martyr; Blessed Il Prete Rosso, Pio Ospedale della Pietà; Blessed Edward, such sweet thunder; Blessed Dewey of the altonic reinventions; Blessed Gustav of bad hall; Blessed Daniel, Dumas’ Ding Dong Daddy; Blessed Leopold #9; Blessed Fyodorovitch, savage dissodant; Blessed Vassilievitch of the large hands; Blessed Orfeo of the Blessed Virgin; Blessed Miller, son of Clarence; Blessed Aristophanes, Reptilian and Fowl; Blessed Matsuo, weather-beaten skeleton; Blessed Charlotte of the three weird sisters, Blessed Blais, proto-nihilist; Blessed Benedictus, panpsychist; Blessed Niccolò, Satanist; Blessed Wallace, Vice-president; Blessed François, Carnivalist and Scatologist; Blessed Lucie-Ernestine-Marie-Bertrand of the subtle influences; Blessed Elizabeth, agoraphobist; Blessed David, proto-ecologist; Blessed George, citizen; Blessed Rajmund of the dark souls; Blessed Mallord of fantastic puzzles; Blessed Muzaffar al-Din, Mumtaz Mahal; Blessed P-A, painter; Blessed Henri-Émile-Benoît, Fauvist; Blessed Gustav of Der Kuß; Blessed Felip Jacint Domènech, Marquis of Pubol; Blessed Paul, father of us all; Blessed Max, frottheim grattist; Blessed Edvard, skrik and morbidist; Blessed Dedo, addict, sculptor; Blessed Franz, dodecaphonic motivist; Blessed Johannes, yet another German schmaltz; Blessed Achilles, impressionist and misnomer; Blessed Dmitri Dmitri of the Babi Yar; Blessed Jacob, Yankee; Blessed Jakob Ludwig Bartholdy, with a name like that you don’t need no title; Blessed Fryderyk, excessivist; Blessed Robert, whimsical syphilitic; Blessed Peter, another one; Blessed Franz, liveried. 

The Venerable

Venerable Jean, thief and homosexual; Venerable Schlomogustav, mythmongers; Venerable Alexander the rapist; Venerable Vladimirovich, pedophile and cribbist; Venerable Ambroise-Toussaint-Jules of terrifying ideas; Venerable Krzysztof of moral anxiety; Veneficial Arthur of the poofy hair; Venerable Gerald Sir; Venerable Newbold, architect; Ventral Lanier, alcoholic; Venatical Jonathan of the single hair; Ventricle García, Andalusian dog; Venal Nałęcz, trilingual nigger; Venerable Mordechai, anarchist; Venule Marie, tediast; The Unvendable Cuthbert who declines; Venerable Pith of one’s negation; Venerable Jake of things; Ventriloquial Stéphane of it’s pure sound; Vinfinitesimal Cartesius, calculating cud; Venereal Marlais, dog; Ventral Key, poor son of a bitch and romantic egoist; Venerable Andreevna of the helplessly cold breasts; Venerable Émile, atavist; Venerable Gerritszoon, foiblist; Vendable Marie of the misplaced talents; Venerable Edgar of the three red roses; Veniable Ernst, Eubranchus; Venatoiral Airy Tottle, tedia episteme telos smelos; Venrisible Poquelin, castigat ridendo mores; Venerable Yi Li Me, sing kong; Vurnable Fanny, secretary for porcelain; Venereal Valerian, that man; Venial Nat of the scarlet bugger; Venerable Tom, writer; Vencynical Gustave, bourgeois; Venerable Johan, destroyer; Vengeable Ellis of the matryona; Venabsurdible Beauchard, pied noir; Venbabble Barclay Feckham Peckham Fulham Clapham; Unvendable OM of unmerited order; Venrisible Lydia’s for the youth; Venus’s Girdle Wills, Sebastian Melmoth; Verbosibble Bernard, antivivisectionist and fascist.

The Barely Venerable

The Barely Venerable Maro, the Barely Venerable Immanuel.

***

These saints under construction, these demi-saints of dishonorable mention, lustralling purgatives, still clambering on that hideous ladder though wormed.  Oh random time! Oh fickle fad!  Human scum leching after distant laughing dogs.  Here they are, the wretched pantheon, barking on air and stone, pissing on longgone churches.  Give them praise or mayonnaise or something.

now years later we consider all who avoid meat and capitalized society

and use fossil fuels as minimally as possible

and are kind to animals and children to be saints

march 29 - saint william of emanuel and immanuel

 

On a day when London dripped with beer and headless angels sang from St. Paul’s cupola, I went to Hell to speak with the Devil about some matters that concerned me.  Before I arrived at his office, I found Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel and Hosea sitting in a river of fire, though it appeared not to harm them.  They were eating babies’ hearts and wearing skirts of human flesh and I asked them why their fashion and manner were so strange.  Isaiah said that prophets have always been likewise and if it were not so the world would fail, for it depended on the prophet’s diet for its sanity.  Then I asked if prophecy was dying, and as a world of method and machine arose if madness and genius would fall?  Jeremiah answered that prophecy had always been an art of the few and time could withstand its living absence for a few centuries without vital loss, but if it should disappear for long, the world would have no foundation and fall itself to madness and fire.  I turned to Ezekiel, stooped and hairy with humiliations, and asked him if it were true whether prophets were hatched not begotten and as Ezekiel was thinking, Gomer, Diblaim’s daughter, arose from the river seething with nymphomania and began gnawing on Ezekiel’s belly.  But he led her downward and they mated and so it was with each of the prophets.  And I too was invited to join, and I did.  The seed mixed in Gomer’s voracious and plural womb and on November 28 1757 she gave birth to one in whom prophecy and sainthood were mixed, at 28 Broad Street in Golden Square.

This madman suffered the lifelong indignities of the self-proclaimed sane.  More alive than the card-carrying living, he danced his dance on fire to the tune of tombs.  What seemed walls to many were symphonies to him; his head throbbed with song, his flesh with holy lechery.  When he had tea with Queen Charlotte and she proceeded to lift up and pull down to display her Eucharist, St. William imagined climbing onto the royal personage and filling it with the cry of God, then ran home to his wife and ravaged her.  On August 12 1827 Elijah descended in his chariot of fire and took this saint from glory to glory.

St. William recently dined with me; we fed on powdered bone risotto and soup with saffron, ginger, the eyes of medieval kings and friar foreskins.  I asked him of his art and he said he thought in images and could not do otherwise.  I also questioned him about his prophetic role and he answered that all art is prophetic and that the artist is replacing the prophet in madness and genius to sustain the world.  Not wishing to detain him, for I knew he had other dinners to attend, I posed a final question about the nature of angels and whether they existed only in the mind or somehow also in the world of substance.  And St. William left singing through my apartment’s northern wall and I finished my meal alone.  Let us honor the saint today with our souls and flesh. 

march 22 - saint jane of the bourgeois supremacy

 

When Rev. Addison G. Fitzwilliam entered the ballroom, Maria leaned over to her sister and whispered, He’s got it all - a Stilton carriage, ten thousand a year, a home as beautiful as Prince George, and a Cambridge degree.  I bet he’ll ask you to dance.  Lizzy B. blushed.  It’s not as if she weren’t attracted to these attributes, even succumbing during her solitary nights to the common temptation of composing elaborately developed conjugal fantasies, in which repartee and evenings of music filled a house built from camaraderie, respect and laughter, but that these longings in themselves seemed insufficient; it was as if nature had placed within her not only the respectable ambitions of any normal woman, but something else she couldn’t quite name, as indefinable as the first soft thoughts that gently pull a dreaming sleeper into the day’s routine.  Could Addison Fitzwilliam be so extraordinary as to fulfill these more intangible longings?

It is a truth grudgingly acknowledged that a man in almost any situation, assuming he’s negotiated the rage of youth, his upbringing and temperament incline him, his sexual orientation and spiritual convictions permit him, the cultural context in which he was formed encourages it, depending on his particular configuration of sadism and masochism, whether or not his fate is so constructed, if he tends to believe the romantic education society carefully instills within him, perhaps even based on his degree of fame, fortune, luck, fortitude and manner of diet, will want a good wife.  A woman, on the other hand, while she also has the urge, it rests on a different foundation - his is for the dark necessity and hers is for the convenience and the game.  She sees marriage as a pleasant plant on the windowsill of a living room; he sees it as the cornerstone of his identity.

So it was that Addy, as he was called by friends, initially resisted the edifice of monogamous charm, wearing the fashion of arrogance instead of tact and confidence, while Lizzy followed the rules for uncaught brides, seeming to be disinterested while during the entire courtship pining after him to such an extent she’d see mirages of him in her milk.  But things being what they are and time known to be parsimonious with the only gift it has, the two lovers achieved a wedded state and from this most fortuitous union brought into society on December 16 1775 a daughter, whom they named St. Jane after a medieval martyr they had heard about from the vicar’s uncle.  The product of this particularly well constituted consummation grew up seeking a husband who was as intelligent, witty, talented, attractive, astute and self-sufficient as herself, and remained a spinster until she died.

She departed this Life on July 18 1817, after a long illness supported with the impatience and compulsions of a Christian.  The detached indifference of her heart, the perspicacity of her wit, and the amused causticity of her mind obtained the regard or fear of all who knew her and the warmest envy of her intimate connections.  They knew their loss to be irreparable, but in their deepest affliction were consoled by a dubious hope that this pretty, silly, affected, husband-hunting butterfly wrung more drama out of morality than most other saints get from terrorism, murder or mayhem.  St. Jane was buried in Winchester Cathedral and raised to sainthood on March 22 1845.  Let us honor the saint today with our souls and flesh.

march 20 - saint moses, mythmonger and creator of creation

 

The reader should be warned that although Moses' status among saints is secure, the legitimacy of his Proper is hotly debated.  Various reliable but anonymous sources suggest that Moses' proper Proper was stolen from The Alhambra Christmas Eve 1491 by a pack of Basques and replaced with the following, of dubious authenticity.  Dr. Louis Vanderslug, Juan Velázquez de Cuéllar Dental Chair of Neoontology at the University of Azpeitia, for example, has written in his seminal work, Propriety and Proper in the Whopper of Faints,

… the [present] “Whopper of Poses,” aside from its overtures of thinly … disguised lunacy, rests its authenticity on the most doubtful of foundations and thus should be … considered with only the most considered (sic) skepticism by even the most (sic) receptive and naïve reader.  It is … the opinion of most [scholars] today that the oldest and most reliable “text” consists only of every second “the” or possibly “e” in every second “the” in the penultimate … paragraph.

The reader should thus proceed warned … or not at all.

(The reader should also be warned that Section IV of this Proper - the proper of this Proper, its eye and wound--has not translated well into the Kingdom of Blogger and thus has lost key elements of what might, in polite society, be called meaning.)

***

The official records of the West have it that God, the Lord Almighty, Yahweh Sabaoth, He Who is Beyond Names and Outside Time, manufactured the world, its satellite and sun, the surrounding cosmos and stars, the waters and heavens, trees, grass and flowers, the fish and firmament, birds and all multi-legged creatures, from nothing.  As has always been the case, however, the story behind the story is another thing.

I was there:  Moses, a chosen scrim in the kingdom of masks, drawn out by the Council of I to be the journalist of the world’s beginnings.  The whole pantheon was chattering - names, unnamed, the unnamable - in putrid scrimmage and credit, and garudas screeched from the Aumaum trees in bliss and discord:

I

Life sat in a hut of herself on the edge of Nod, munching on memory gristle, stoking the firmament of her thighs.  A troubled youth, yes, a troubled youth, Life had had.  And nightmares that would have killed one killable.  She wore baggy magenta stockings and a douse of rouge, and peered at herself with the scrutiny of a committed lush.  I have been, she muttered, been to Lusitania.  To see the coronation of a queen.  And been had by the regal stockboy.  Had, on a stack of sounds.  Life sang a little less than sweetly on Nod’s gnarled edge and poked her coals with a trammel hanging from some violence.  Perhaps, once an egg always an egg.  Alway, alway, sausage, assuage.  I think I will.  And the stockings, roused, bestrode the firmament and Life was Life and Life came forth and Life had another round.

II

Ho Hsu lounged in an anteroom of Heaven, smoking turtle.  His Kiton suit was tidily pressed and the rosa rugosa in his lapel shone like a lack of virgins.  He had the numbers.  He had the charm.  When the steward gave the sign, Ho casually cantered to the middle paternoster and waited magnanimously for its arrival.  Bouquets of spelt tickled nostril hairs with scents of swoon.  Dingless ding and yawn.  Only she from that other region inhabited the lift and the two communed egregiously and not lukewarm while their carrier wooped unimpressively to further heights.  The Committee of Perfect Happiness awaited, as expected, as did PowerPoint, projections and a flagon of pipsissewa.  Ho Hsu speeched.  The noble members foibled.  In the end, the vote was 22-21 for yes.

III

Gaea picked a worm off her face and examined it in the imperfect light.  Tear 2.  But hunger being what it is and worms being worms, the cenotaph did not last, but ceased, somewhere in the banter of the Chocky Mountains.  Itstory or is it Hitstory?  Oh shit, I’ve had a historectomy.

True and noble, rouble, trouble, woeful is the worm:  this is the claw and the profits and everyfling you need below.  Bloo bloa beraign, hearth, the birth, is good.  Rue and rubble, stew and stubble.  Another one.  Juicy?  Yes.  As juicy as a newt.  Ooh, and another.  And a brother and a cistern and a dotard and a gun and a mortar and a fodder and a blarney and a fanny and a shrew.  She ate, oozy bait, the webetreefate, but the corms kept on woming and I-uh slept on stuffing and AI bent a-bloating till the ace of worms pulled a rump and there was Eve.

V

Just seven minutes after Timoshenko had received the Odor of Ferret from the No Bell steeple in Eden, he returned to his rabidatory nonchalantly and closed the door.  I’ve got another few beers to live, he thought, I’ve another few whores to hose.  And he opened up his Babble to stage 9 where it spake of Tubal-Cain yammering a word together on a rhyme.  This is me, he told his knife.  I yammer worlds.  I’m the lead clinger in the junk kettle band, Three and Two Makes One.  Good name.  Where was I post-eward?  Oh, yes, in my widdiful rind.  I will bam some continence together.  I will ham a price.  Timoshenko paused mid-hammer.  He looked into the widow of his goal.  I will baguette with my patent demon and my need a fetal url.  Amen. Hymen. Ramen.

VI

Mr. Suzuki, while I have been led to understand by the formulae that have been crowding out my life, howling like banshees in drag in day, to imagine, not under the influence but in complete sobriety and wakeful, that the dictionary is the adjudicator of time, the architect of space, a holy poly balloon, the pissing cousin of make-believe, a mote of might, a walliwash of power’s hour, approached, slinking and stinking like a fog, and intimidated that you, whom the world in all its drawers and hangings adores, not least since you have sockumented - this is the claim - that everything I stuff into my ugly face is made from refracted zeros and pis and golden ratios in the armature of mathematics’ gross defense, some cosmic calculator on crack, think otherwise, would I be abable to take this opportunity to ask you if it’s true? 

VII

Dis does not desire death but daiquiris.  Dis digs da utter side:  great vats of prostitution, laws tumbling down the mace of justice, monkeyspheres in metaverse, slabs of MMORPG tears, e-whoring with the Pope’s maid Mary, that construction of my face in alt^.more, rampant blogs of yggdrasil, acid raining down like bootcake, surf and rinse forever san san francisco, post-post and popo in the sage of now, pop the posthuman tart, my body’s like uh like a borg in Sweden, let’s google truth in Talkohm, we shall slimudate damnocracy, assistance is utile, I love you like a velvet sweatshop, Christ is in the stem cell, holy wheezes, fook, there’s Steve.  Dis summates desire, but finds possession is still an e-eternity away.

It was then, in the midst of this pantheonic conversation, He came, Yahweh, that being beast, came from the dark deceptions of my soul, and said, Moses. Fool. These others, they are chaos and void and nothing’s good. Stuff their cackling down, Moses Fool. Would you sit in their inebriations forever? Would you name their babble wise? I have a nartive stuffed in my yam; it twill bring order to the udder’s mess; here, tis hidden, wiggling, goodly, in this apple; for my sake, for his wake, for Bill Blake, slake a byte.

I did.  I ate his nartive pomme.  And that, as they slay, is history.

***

Friends, this Moses, this one drawn from story to story, was himself drawn from a yarn, a spool of earth or death or heat, a linen chat.  He is the son of my mind and the child of my soul.  He is attacked on all sides and discredited in the resolutions of the world, but he is not drowned; my fabled boy.  He is begotten at the dawn of night, he is birthed when love lays dying.  Do not think, then, with this elusive ancestry, that he is less real than you; that his filmy kinship to time leaves him somehow fictional and you a truth.  Hasn’t my mottled man demonstrated through the dating dance of cinema and history that you’re the dream and he a giant in the stock of being, an ineradicable hunk who dams and liberates days and Danes?

I don’t care, honest colleagues, whether his story is true, whether his body was real, whether you exist.  I don’t care about crawling back to zero to rock the cradle of light.  I don’t care about the source of anything, solid origins, calculating ends.  You go ahead … excel in nailing numbers to the sky.  But I, I shall believe in grey, grey’s mascot, Moses, who walks the divisions of the earth like one who’s been confused, who sees the earth as now and then and always, as the story of a story of a dream.

This old old saint, bold enough to write his death, dancer in the diaper of the stars, is my father if genealogies are woven from different threads.  I look in the chapels of the world for neglected datelines.  I sit in the lap of one who made belief.  I smell his hoary nascent breath.  Moses.  Moses.  Moses, son and father of the man:  we will honor you today with our souls and flesh.

***

Don’t be taken, seekers, after facts.  Poses was the greatest fraud in history.  He had a pedigree in dissimulation from the University of Canine.  He was a member of the Nude Yerk Chitty Priest Divestment.  What separates Moses from Poses in the history we call word?  Only no.  So, say it with me.  No.  Then say Poses.  Poses.  There, you’ve got it, Skank:  Poses had us all.  He smeared his rotten nartive on history’s eyes for three souchong centuries; the sorry Orient ignored him and the rest believed him.  Creation out of nothing’s the stuff of drunken dreams, parted seas and chosen faces delusion’s oldest schtick.  How could one story ever satisfy anyone but one?  Poses played a game; he won, but only till the time we found his no and rhyme.  That trickster of our worldview, of Bethel and Babel, disgospel and drivel, never existed; plus his story’s maladjusted, it’s diseased.  So we from our sinus heights, with dishtowels and caramels, of libels, spaniels, yokels, zinfandels, umbrels, supermodels and newsreels, defame today that bastard of Carmel, that charlatan, that poser, Moses - no, Poses - with our burning flesh.