A little nonsense now and then...

...is relished by the wisest men!

And this man had no idea that Willy Wonka's defense of snozzberries comes from a longer poem, simply titled "Ode," by one Arthur O'Shaughnessy:
 

We are the music-makers,

And we are the dreamers of dreams,

Wandering by lone sea-breakers

And sitting by desolate streams;

World losers and world forsakers,

On whom the pale moon gleams:

Yet we are the movers and shakers

Of the world for ever, it seems.

 

With wonderful deathless ditties

We build up the world’s great cities.

And out of a fabulous story

We fashion an empire’s glory:

One man with a dream, at pleasure,

Shall go forth and conquer a crown;

And three with a new song’s measure

Can trample an empire down.

 

We, in the ages lying

In the buried past of the earth,

Built Nineveh with our sighing,

And Babel itself with our mirth;

And o’erthrew them with prophesying

To the old of the new world’s worth;

For each age is a dream that is dying,

Or one that is coming to birth. 

 

I'll be pondering this one for a while.

 

[I hope to have some other blog updates coming soon...]

Whose Tube? My Tube!

The day is here.  Here is the big announcement:  I've started a YouTube channel called "Cygnus' Magic Words."

The URL may change eventually, but for now it's the following mush of characters:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCGAqpg-eqicLiaFwQW-iZKA

The tag line is "Magic words for the soul."  More from the channel description:

Since 2011, I've been blogging at servitorludi.blogspot.com about games, philosophy, and whatever other weird bits of esoterica I can think of. I'm no master of the Game, just a servant who wants to see what the future holds for both the high-concept stuff (like Hesse's Glass Bead Game) and my old favorites (classic tabletop roleplaying games like D&D).

Here on Youtube I'm exploring another aspect of that weirdness: the magic of WORDS. On my blog I've posted a lot about my favorite creative people, many of whom are wordsmiths of some sort. Posting excerpts of text is fun, but sometimes the words need to be heard by the ear. Sit back, close your eyes, and see how the words will change you.

Right now I've got four videos up.  You won't see me directly, but you'll hear me reading a variety of things -- both poetry and prose -- that I hope will inspire and move you.  What you'll see with your eyes, in most videos, is a sequence of Kandinsky-like artworks that I've generated via a randomizing computer program.  Why?  No reason other than it was fun to make.  (I'm not the first person to think of doing this, but I haven't cribbed from anyone else's algorithms. I'm still tweaking and optimizing.)

That's all for now.  If you're inclined, go have a listen.  Please let me know if there's anything that you'd enjoy hearing, too.

Must be magic

I hadn't heard of comedian and poet Bo Burnham before, but I've been charmed by (some of!) his off-beat verse.  The following are all from his book Egghead: Or, You Can't Survive on Ideas Alone.

Click to enlarge

One can definitely sense the timing & beats of a standup comic in the words.  Many of these have likely been tested out on the stage.  Some, which I won't reproduce here, were designed more for shock value than for deep insight... but a comedian can't be blamed for getting laughs by whatever means necessary.

I think Burnham cites both Dr. Seuss and Shel Silverstein as inspirations.  You can see their influence, but he adds a unique spark of his own.

This post does have something to do with the big reveal teased over the course of the last few posts.  I'm nearly ready to do that, so keep an eye on this space over the coming week.  :-)

K is for Kipling

"Do you like Kipling?"

"I don't know, you naughty boy; I've never kippled."

Today's manifesto is a well-known poem.  Well-known?  Probably well-worn and cliché, to lots of people.  It's Rudyard Kipling's If—  (The only work of art I know with an em-dash as part of its title.)

Though lots of people leave off the dash—

I'm sure that many see it as dated and utterly Victorian, but I'm still charmed by it.  The poem is framed as advice given from father to son.  Each stanza starts a thought, then pauses to start another.

If you can keep your head when all about you
  Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
  But make allowance for their doubting too;

You'll see where these thoughts are headed at the end.  But before then, the stakes get raised.  Critics have made hay about the stereotypical English upper-class stoicism that Kipling suggests be the proper response to life's troubles...

If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
  And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken
  Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
  And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools:

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
  And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
  And never breathe a word about your loss;

...but in some arenas of life we could probably use more of this grown-up approach.  There's more, but it's the last four lines that are the most memorable.

If you can fill the unforgiving minute
  With sixty seconds' worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
  And -- which is more -- you’ll be a Man, my son.

I didn't learn about this poem until I was about 21, when I saw it referenced in a slightly mopey 1980s comic book story about how the Flash's sidekick was having a tough time living up to the glory of his superhero mentor.  It was kind of silly and melodramatic, but at least the "sixty seconds worth of distance run" was a decent fit with super-fast-running costumed capers.

Even more recently, I discovered another poem -- similarly full of lines that start with "If..." that is quite inspiring, too.  In 1945, Alma Androzzo wrote a song called "If I Can Help Somebody."  It was later made famous by Mahalia Jackson and several other popular singers, and it inspired Martin Luther King Jr. throughout his life.

If I can help somebody as I pass along,
If I can cheer somebody with a word or a song,
If I can show somebody he is travelling wrong,
Then my living shall not be in vain.
. . .
If I can do my duty, as a good man ought,
If I can bring back beauty to a world up wrought,
If I can spread love's message as the Master taught,
Then my living shall not be in vain.

Does it have anything to do with Kipling's poem?  Not really, but when you look at them side by side, they serve as two neat "bookends."  Remember the two extreme impulses of manifestos that I've been thinking about?  "Do your own thing" versus "Be nice to one another."  These two If's certainly personify the two extremes, don't you think?  (Long-time readers will know that I'm a sucker for these kinds of quasi-symbolic idea pairings...)

e is for edward estlin

The lower-case in the title is in honor of poet e. e. cummings, who often preferred that typographic format.  Most people wouldn't consider him in the same breath with the word "manifesto,"  but have those people ever read the introduction to his 1938 edition of Collected Poems?

The poems to come are for you and for me and are not for mostpeople.

-- it's no use trying to pretend that mostpeople and ourselves are alike. Mostpeople have less in common with ourselves than the squarerootofminusone. You and I are human beings; mostpeople are snobs.

His style takes some acclimation, but his intent is soon clear.  A quick reading might make you think he's being a bit snobbish himself, but I think the main goal is intimacy... it's just you (the reader) and him (the writer) and you've shut everyone else out of your conversation.  And the main thing he's telling you (yes, you!) is that you've got to remain open to the possibilities.

you and I are not snobs.  We can never be born enough.  We are human beings; for whom birth is a supremely welcome mystery, the mystery of growing; the mystery which happens only and whenever we are faithful to ourselves.  You and I wear the dangerous looseness of doom and find it becoming.  Life, for eternal us, is now; and now is much too busy being a little more than everything to seem anything, catastrophic included.

Manifestos are all about a better, more intense, more real future, and he paints that into his word-picture, too.

Miracles are to come.  With you I leave a remembrance of miracles: they are by somebody who can love and who shall be continually reborn, a human being; somebody who said to those near him, when his fingers would not hold a brush "tie it into my hand" --

I have a feeling that he's quoting some actual artist who may have said something like that.  The ultimate ginger, perhaps?  Searching the interwebs for this quote just gives me back this essay.

I referred obliquely to Doctor Who with my Van Gogh link up there.  As one gets to the end of this slightly garbled manifesto, it increasingly reminds me of the Doctor's wide-eyed, unblinking perspective on the universe...

nothing proving or sick or partial.  Nothing false, nothing difficult or easy or small or colossal.  Nothing ordinary or extraordinary, nothing emptied or filled, real or unreal; nothing feeble and known or clumsy and guessed. [...] Never the murdered finalities of wherewhen and yesno, impotent nongames of wrongright and rightwrong; never to gain or pause, never the soft adventure of undoom, greedy anguishes and cringing ecstasies of inexistence; never to rest and never to have: only to grow.

Always the beautiful answer who asks a more beautiful question

Epilogue:  I couldn't have written this post -- which mentions e e cummings, intimacy, and gingers -- without thinking of something, someone very specific.  So I might as well spill the beans.  Yes, it was a girl (a redhead more ginge' than Amy Pond or Geri Halliwell) who first got me interested in this strange poet.  If I ever get back to that fiction piece that I started tinkering with last fall, you'll see her immortalized as a Nobel Prize winner.  :-)

Poet Laureate

From the Book of Zimmerman, Chapter 1974:

Then she opened up a book of poems
And handed it to me;
Written by an Italian poet
From the 13th century.
And every one of them words rang true
And glowed like burnin' coal;
Pourin' off of every page
Like it was written in my soul, from me to you,
Tangled up in blue.

Ol' Bob has never really clarified the issue of the identity of that poet.  The interwebz are full of speculation, but I've never had cause to wonder.  See, I've always known -- pretty much with absolute certainty -- that it was Petrarch that he must have been talking about.  (14th century... 13th century... who's counting?)

Why Petrarch?  Simple... his poetry spoke to me, too, through a wormhole that cut right through 6 centuries and 2 languages.  Definitely the same exact effect as Bob's burnin' coal.  I've been as uplifted as Bob's lyrical narrator,

Blessed be the day,

And the month, and the year,

And the season, and the time, and the hour,

And the moment,

And the beautiful country, and the place

Where I was joined

To the two beautiful eyes that have bound me.

I've been as tortured,

I find no peace, and yet I make no war;
and fear, and hope; and burn, and I am ice;
and fly above the sky, and fall to earth,
and clutch at nothing, and embrace the world.

One imprisons me, who neither frees nor jails me,
nor keeps me to herself nor slips the noose;
and Love does not destroy me, and does not loose me,
wishes me not to live, but does not remove my bar.

I see without eyes, and have no tongue, but cry;
and long to perish, yet I beg for aid;
and hold myself in hate, and love another.

I feed on sadness, laughing weep;
death and life displease me equally,
and I am in this state, lady, because of you.

And I've been given wake-up calls similar to those that Petrarch tried to give the dry scholastics of his day...

Suppose that you have learned by heart the deeds

of illustrious heroes throughout the ages.

What good is this if it does not change

the way you live your daily life?

I also was always touched by the wide-eyed zeal with which Petrarch pursued the goal of being the first Italian poet to be crowned with a laurel wreath since the ancient Roman practice fell out of favor centuries before.  The guy had chutzpah... much like this other guy who just appeared on the cover of AARP's magazine!

W is for Walt

Another one with whom I'm on a first-name basis.  How can I not be on a first-name basis with Walt Whitman (1819-1892), poet laureate of this transcendental kosmos?

Artist: Robert Lacy

I may have to apologize for taking up another letter of the alphabet with someone who is already very well known.  But have you read Leaves of Grass from start to finish?  If not, then I'll happily quote Frances McDormand from the movie Raising Arizona and say "Well you've got to!  You've got to this instant!"

The phrase "one of a kind" points you in his direction, but one has to invent new vocabularies to really get at his uniqueness.  You can read about his career as a journalist, a teacher, a friend to Emerson and Thoreau.  A few years ago there was a PBS special that drove home, to me, the immensity of his service to the wounded during the Civil War.

His poetry was celebratory.  What did he celebrate?  Every freakin' thing you can imagine... but especially the new...

Victory, union, faith, identity, time,
The indissoluble compacts, riches, mystery,
Eternal progress, the kosmos, and the modern reports.
This then is life,
Here is what has come to the surface after so many throes and
   convulsions.

How curious! how real!
Underfoot the divine soil, overhead the sun.

His approach to religion has been called Deistic, Pantheistic, and Transcendentalist, but to me it brings to mind the immanent embrace of John Lennon's God (and Bono's God part 2):

Lover divine and perfect Comrade,
Waiting content, invisible yet, but certain,
Be thou my God.

Thou, thou, the Ideal Man,
Fair, able, beautiful, content, and loving,
Complete in body and dilate in spirit,
Be thou my God.
...

All great ideas, the races' aspirations,
All heroisms, deeds of rapt enthusiasts,
Be ye my Gods.

Or Time and Space,
Or shape of Earth divine and wondrous,
Or some fair shape I viewing, worship,
Or lustrous orb of sun or star by night,
Be ye my Gods.

Uniqueness like Walt's generates controversy.  Leaves of Grass was banned and condemned as immoral over the years.  The historians are still debating his sex life.  (Beat poet Allen Ginsberg proudly claimed to have slept with a man who slept with a man who slept with a man who slept with Whitman.)  He was a lot of things, but he warned readers of future generations that the one thing he isn't is easy to understand if approached superficially...

I give you fair warning before you attempt me further,
I am not what you supposed, but far different.

I could go on all day quoting my favorite bits.  There's one four-line stanza that I've incorporated into my life so completely that it probably borders on OCD. (Though it's only invoked a couple of times a year -- I think it's safe for me to avoid the shrink's couch for now.)  Let me just leave you with another favorite that encapsulates so much about what's awesome about Uncle Walt...

When I heard the learn'd astronomer,
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me,
When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and
   measure them,
When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with much
   applause in the lecture-room,
How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick,
Till rising and gliding out I wander'd off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look'd up in perfect silence at the stars.

R is for Rimbaud

Arthur Rimbaud (1854-1891) was a French poet of the symbolist and decadent traditions.  Amazingly, he wrote all of his poetry between the ages of 16 and 20, then gave it up in favor of a globe-trotting libertine lifestyle that ended abruptly at age 37.

Unlike many of my other subjects this month, I really don't know a lot about Rimbaud.  I first heard his name in the movie Eddie and the Cruisers (too embarrassed to include a link) and, other than random paging through books in bookstores -- and a bit of research leading up to this post -- I haven't read much of his work.  But what I've seen has a certain ineffable glow to it that brings to mind my other favorite poets, so he's been on my "back-burner" to-read list for a long time.

Rimbaud sometimes included shocking and grotesque imagery in his poems, but he painted vivid pictures even with "tame" words...

Clear water; like the salt of childhood tears,
the assault on the sun by the whiteness of women’s bodies;
the silk of banners, in masses and of pure lilies,
under the walls a maid once defended

(from Memory, translated by Wallace Fowlie)  He also was an early explorer of the poetic use of flowing prose:

   O my good! O my beautiful! Atrocious fanfare where I won’t stumble! enchanted rack whereon I am stretched! Hurrah for the amazing work and the marvelous body, for the first time! It began amid the laughter of children, it will end with it....
   Little eve of drunkenness, holy! were it only for the mask with which you gratified us. We affirm you, method! We don’t forget that yesterday you glorified each one of our ages. We have faith in the poison. We know how to give our whole lives every day.
   Behold the time of the Assassins.

(from Morning of Drunkenness, translated by John Ashbery)  You can feel the hangover in that, can't you?  :-)

Lastly, I wanted to give you one more that can't be found via Googling...  My subject for the letter "I" translated Rimbaud's fantastically synaesthetic poem Voyelles ("Vowels") and included it in her book Sword of Wisdom.  I like this translation much better than the ones that can be found more easily, but I had to retype it myself...  I take responsibility for any typos...

A black, E white, I red, U green, O blue --
Vowels, I'll tell your hidden origin!
A, swarthy coat of glistening flies that whine
Round disenchanting stenches there below

E, white of curtain-mist, the glacier's proud
Spear-shaft, pale kings, rustle of umbel-bloom
I, lovely in ire or sad delirium
The crimson laughing lips that have spat blood

U, tides, celestial murmur of green seas
Peace of herd-scattered pasture, wrinkled peace --
Alchemy's imprint on a studious brow

O, the last trumpet of strange stridencies
Omega, violet radiance of Her Eyes --
Aeons and Worlds rise through their silence now!

P is for Phyllis Seckler

I keep worrying that I'm getting into a rut with the types of people that I've chosen to post about this month.  There are so many other genres of creative weirdness out there, but I've got to go with what I know....

I didn't know Phyllis Seckler (also known as Soror Meral, 1917-2004) personally, but I've known and admired some of her students.  She was a ceremonial magician, poet, artist, and teacher.  She was also a crucial link in keeping alive the traditions of the school of thought known as Thelema through some lean, difficult times.

In many ways, her approach to Thelema was pretty "by the book," but there was one thing that she seemed to really excel at: discussing the personal, subjective connection that is sought between a Thelemic mystic and his or her Holy Guardian Angel (HGA).  This being is defined by some as an external entity and by others as an interior "higher soul" (or Jungian archetype of wholeness).  Many teachers have said that it doesn't matter whether the HGA is objectively or subjectively real; just the experience matters.  Still, this makes for difficulty in conveying the concept to students.  Thus, Seckler tried to use poetry -- which can be similarly ambiguous about identity and metaphor -- to do some of the heavy lifting.  Much of her poetry, published from the 1970s to the 1990s in a periodical called In The Continuum, could be read as either intense love poetry or as the yearning of the mystic for their HGA...

"Eternal Lord, bind my everlasting course with Thee
From aeon to aeon for all eternity;
Closer to Thy heart that I be fit symbol
Of encompassing love; hold me lest I tremble.

These words are poor that fall before Thy face,
Lend me still of Thy intoxicating grace
That I may pour my heart out in Thy praise
And joined with my Lord, remain a Star ablaze."

She also often illuminated her verses with some amazing sketches.  William Blake, eat your heart out...

Click for bigger version

Interested readers can find more of Soror Meral's poems and teachings here and here.

Old School Tiny Harmonies

The third and final Tiny Harmony of March is here...  I've got only one haiku, but I tried to draw inspiration from all three themes (quench, loam, and the real) and create an alchemical mixture...

My little garden,

Hemmed in by towers of change.

I keep watering.

Yes, I know... I'll own being a crusty ol' curmudgeon about some things.  Note that I didn't say that I totally reject the changing world around me... that wouldn't be acknowledging the real, would it?  :-)

Apologies for not posting more... I've been racking up the posts for the April A-Z Challenge (see more about my theme here), so please stay tuned for the coming deluge in just over a week!

Fossil Angel Harmonies

Okay, it's looking like I'm not the riddlesmith I thought I was.  My original idea was to put all the explanatory stuff below into the previous post, but then I tried to be too tricksy for my own good.  :-)

Answer time.  Who was my haiku describing?

left at the crossroads

by science, she takes a right

and calls herself art

She is magic.  And she seems to be in real need of some adaptability...

When I was traveling last week, I finally settled down to read an 11,000 word essay that has been circulating on the interwebs for a few years.  In 2002, famed, crazy-bearded graphic novelist Alan Moore wrote Fossil Angels, a poetic, polyphonic polemic about many things, but mostly about how the modern "occult" community has made itself irrelevant by tying itself too tightly to nostalgia and empty ritualism.

(There's a "modern occult community," you say?  They're not huge, but yes...)

Moore's suggestion?  A bit too gleefully, he suggests that "What this place could do with is a good insurance fire."  Let all that crusty magical tradition and OCD-ish superstition burn itself out, he says, so that the resulting black loam of raw ideas can recombine in a new kind of natural selection (super-natural selection?) to form something new and vibrant.

That something new, he suggests, should look more like ART than like religion or science...

"Art’s only aim can be to lucidly express the human mind and heart and soul in all their countless variations, thus to further human culture’s artful understanding of the universe and of itself, its growth towards the light. Art’s method is whatever can be even distantly imagined. These parameters of purpose and procedure are sufficiently elastic, surely, to allow inclusion of magic’s most radical or most conservative agendas? Vital and progressive occultism, beautifully expressed, that has no obligation to explain or justify itself. Each thought, each line, each image made exquisite for no other purpose than that they be offerings worthy of the gods, of art, of magic itself."

It's ironic that modern-day magic (which is all about transformation and polymorphous change) has fallen behind in adapting to our current circumstances and knowledge.  Science and technology took over many roles that used to be filled by a more magical way of thinking, leaving it at the crossroads of irrelevancy.  Turning itself into art may be just the amrita it needs...

I'll give you two other quotes for flavor, but, if it's your Will, feel free to read the whole thing!  :-)

"If magic were regarded as an art it would have culturally valid access to the infrascape, the endless immaterial territories that are ignored by and invisible to Science, that are to scientific reason inaccessible, and thus comprise magic's most natural terrain. Turning its efforts to creative exploration of humanity's interior space might also be of massive human use, might possibly restore to magic all the relevance and purpose, the demonstrable utility that it has lacked so woefully, and for so long. Seen as an art, the field could still produce the reams of speculative theory that it is so fond of (after all, philosophy and rhetoric may be as easily considered arts as sciences), just so long as it were written beautifully or interestingly. While, for example, The Book of the Law may be debatable in value when considered purely as prophetic text describing actual occurrences or states of mind to come, it cannot be denied that it's a shit-hot piece of writing, which deserves to be revered as such."

and

"We could make this parched terrain a teeming paradise, a tropic where each thought might blossom into art. Under the altar lies the studio, the beach. We could insist upon it, were we truly what we say we are. We could achieve it not by scrawling sigils but by crafting stories, paintings, symphonies. We could allow our art to spread its holy psychedelic scarab wings across society once more, perhaps in doing so allow some light or grace to fall upon that pained, benighted organism. We could be made afresh in our fresh undergrowth, stand reinvented at a true dawn of our Craft within a morning world, our paint still wet, just-hatched and gummy-eyed in Eden. Newborn in Creation."

I can add nothing.

Tiny Harmonies: Adaptability

This week's tiny harmony is a haiku riddle:

left at the crossroads

by science, she takes a right

and calls herself art

Who is she?  Or, more accurately, who was she before she renamed herself?  And how does she relate to the theme of "adaptability?"  The only hint I'll give right now is to say that sometimes good fortune

may come to you in a form that you may not expect

Apologies if I'm being overly obtuse.  In a day or two, I'll do a follow-up post with the answer and a mini-review of a very special piece of writing that inspired all this.  (If someone guesses correctly, I'll expedite the follow-up.)

Tiny Harmonies: Origins

Today marks the second time I've posted to the blog from an airport, twiddling my thumbs while a flight has been delayed... There's zen and poetry in that, I'm sure, but I'll stick to today's main topic:  A new blog challenge... Tiny Harmonies.  The task:  Respond to a given one-word theme with a 17-syllable haiku.  The theme for this week:  ORIGIN.

My response has to do with my own...

Secret Origins:

No spider bite; no Krypton.

Just D'Aulaires' book.

Not quite an iconic panel from comic-book history, but it's a start...  :-)