Maps of the Spiritual Oecumene

  We can think about things that are hidden after we have viewed the maps. Myriad conventions are assumed  in the physical reality of maps in the old sense. And this is just for earth. These too can be examined. The maps here are of things we cannot see, so if invisible, what are they maps of? Whatever it is, the raw form is clearer than the finished. George Bruce Moses, who executed the cover of Calendar, at the end of his short life began to paint heads in translucent white. 

Suppose in all of this the air we think clear is clogged with spiritual beings, everywhere swirling, which we can't see?  Oecumene means the known world bound together in a Mercator Projection. In older forms it excluded great parts unknown.

Coyote and bear were among the first effigies that emerged when I began to roll out sheets of clay and drape them over bricks or blocks until they molded themselves into something. This method produced FEMA railway cars, eagles, seal, badger, fox, large dogs,, the zodiac...Some of these are now extant. Maps generally signify greater and lesser detail, stylized and objective measures, but always with the notion that more may be hidden that is known, like the Google Maps of various regions and of the planets and moons.

First the sky, then the air, then the dry earth ironwood down to the aquifers. Life among the doves became part of me and I of it. I  lived in the southwest so long it entered my thought. All this in a physical sense the way appetite attracts. I wake each day after a few hours sleep to contemplate this likeness of myself before the sun intrudes. Here I explore the thought that comes with memory of life I experienced in the Germantown rows, Chartiers Valley, from which I canoed the upper reaches of the Allegheny, Clarion and Susquehanna rivers multiple times, explored Delaney's Cave the largest in Pa. so often before it was commercial that I could give tours, Schoolhouse cave, the grounds of Hellhole Cave, audited the American Viscose plants of Lewistown, Parkersburg, Meadville before they were shuttered, floods inundated with devastation, traveled and spoke in rural churches from Virginia to Toronto, lived and worked in Costa Rica with the Latin America Mission before its fall, visited all the reaches of Limon, Puntaranes, Roblealto, Turrialba, Cartago and the exploded Irazu, knew the Jersey Pine barrens, the lakes of Iowa, the beaches of North Carolina, and the highways of Texas leading to the Edwards plateau and its rivers and creeks and limestone hills, lived on the Balcones Fault above Bull Creek before the change, and tasted those secrets all the way from the madrones of  the Guadalupes and the reglas of the Chisos of Big Bend down to the muddy Rio Grande, all as a prelude to Arizona which I reckoned I could not live without, would always regret not knowing and so the orange groves were a pretext for that venture. I arrived and became acquainted with Bonita Porter and her love for literature and the southwest, scouted for her all the while. I took endless trips sketching on early summer mornings out McDowell before the freeways to the Four Peaks to sketch rocks and cactus on dirt roads all the up to the manzanita, with stops along the Verde and into the reservations, always with two children along, five and two, and dug out my car stuck in loose sand along the river with my bare hands with found chicken wire, saw car crashes and transported the bulbous squashed nose of a Papago out to the highway. We were at Chinle when the trail was still open to Canyon de Chelly and in the White Mts before the fires, and in Grand Canyon for weeks on the rim and down every trail the legs of those children could stand, and in Lake Powell, the Chiricahuas, countless times to El Paso, Albuquerque, Tucson, Flagstaff, and so it happened, so that explains the series of effigies after the Pueblo style that came through my hands: horse effigies, tortoise effigies, coyote, bear, human effigies as nonfunctional embellishments of artifacts that don't exist visually but do every other way. They fill the yard. Some of the red ribbons are out there. How in all this I was gifted with a wife after my own heart who gave me a family too, for He loves to put the solitary into families, and withal came to research and document that family into which I was born, Mennonite peasants back to the beginnings of Philadelphia in Montgomery County, then Philadelphia County, from which I was removed to experience the Chartiers and to which I was returned at 16 to the very locale of my ancestors' living is past explanation to contain. For I knew none of it in the making, but was redeemed from captivity and the unspeakable at 17, changed completely, memory included with knowledge, education added with ultimate understanding so that the account above could be plumbed.

Horse and Pony

Trojan Horse was let in the city because of its art. This replica was found in old papyrus had Greece in the belly.  After a light spray of shino over found clays laminated, red shino sprayed and waxed, some trigger pulls of clear  penetrated the wax and diffused the orange.
 

Pleistocene  Note from Pleistocene horse: He wants to stand "in the center where he can respond without end to the changing views" of the affirming and denying (Legge, Chuang Tzu, 183). He resolves it with this joke about his horse. What is a horse? His son will tell him what is a horse. It is different from what he said was a horse. They point that out, affirm and deny horse around. My kingdom horse! All unhorsed. Now comes the horse quote which in the age of sound bites is as a horse:

"By means of a finger (of my own) to illustrate that the finger (of another) is not a finger is not so good a plan as to illustrate that it is not so by means of what is (acknowledged to be) not a finger; and by means of (what I call) a horse to illustrate that (what another calls) a horse is not so, is not so good a plan as to illustrate that it is not a horse, by means of what is (acknowledged to be) not a horse. ( All things in) heaven and earth may be (dealt with as) a finger; (each of) their myriads may be  (dealt with as) a horse. Does a thing seem so to me? (I say that) it is so. Does it seem not so to me? (I say that) it is not so. We used to argue these things on long tennis trips, like the say that said, "Dust Storms May Exist," and austere elements of the periodic table. But it was a joke! "Separation led to completion, then ensued dissolution" (184). Let us give up devotion to our views and adopt the "ordinary." The ordinary can't be found among the immortals.

 Pit Pony-PONY is really Pit Pony, or Pit Poetry. He spent his life at the bottom of a coal mine. He is the last of his kind. The split on his leg is where it was broken. It healed and it got him back up in the air again. There's no point to a broken pit pony. What can he pull? He has a cousin, Pity, an experimental rabbit who lived in a cage in the basement of the Experimental Science Building. His scientists turned the cage against the wall. 

What is a horse? The universes of man will dispute. His sons will tell him what is a horse. It is different from what he said was a horse. They point that out, affirm and deny horsing around. That's it. "Separation led to completion, then ensued dissolution" (184). He says let us give up this devotion to our own views and adopt the "ordinary," meaning the simple use of things. Then stop (184). The ordinary is so arcane it can't be found among the immortals. Immortality, sageness, the superior man are all synonyms for idiot. We give everything to restore the commonplace world.

Pegasus-The Pegasus islands off the Aleutian coast are home to Pegasus. For that reason they are called the Illusion islands and baby Aleutians in childhood range the Pacific. Many babies are sighted  at birth before they fly away. Then you can see them. Later their colors reflect the ice and arctic environment, blues, whites, beige, frost colors make them hard to see against the clouds, which is why they are mythological in the first place. Whether there are real such flying horses who can doubt? These are modeled from my years among them. 

 Bear is the piano, Mountain the pianist, Wilderness the composer.

Genghis Khan’s horse 60 miles long

AE Reiff: that something hung in mid air by unseen gravities might not escape. He catalogues them just in case here.

Goat

The honor of the goat is that it has a rite of of sin bearer named for it, not to speak of Esau who was to be a wild donkey man, or Balaam's ass. There is a dignity to these beings that have natures which we know and about whom whole species of thought occur. Consider Balaam here, and goat here, also a species of Thought Goat, and if you like, Thought Ass, a species of writing, called ThoughtGoatten, part of the greater bestiary in which we occur. Thought Beasts as well. Pegasus would be included among these except it is mythological, a charge sometimes applied to Balaam. Whether this commentary, fiction or poem is real is more or less the same to me.

   Michael Broyles makes the telling observation that "much of the story [of Pilgrim's Progress] is set in America...it was the metaphorical terrain the believer had to traverse...," which he says to differentiate the gentler Puritan composer William Billings (The New England Psalm Singer, 1770. Also see Mavericks and Other Traditions in American Music, 25). A great deal more than this has been said of those first  centuries. Uncontaminated nature means uncontaminated by mind not land fills. The Puritans transferred sin from themselves to the forest to drive it out, except their goat was the tree.  The sin bearer was the forest. It had to be mowed lest sins come back. A scapegoat is no good unless lost.  Anyway, trees hid predators. The tree became the goat and was cut. The forest then could not hide the terror of the dark.  This thinking unfurled all American botanical and biological extinction.

Puritans thought "the world," would contaminate. It was  toxic austere soil New England garrisoned  against the natural. New England only welcomed the Pennsylvania genius of inviting nature indoors two centuries too late.  By 1850 transcendentalism had them all wishing  for the pond. Early New England believed that savage men, wild men and their own sins  at the clearing's edge were only kept at bay by cutting back the growth. Defoliate the  forest, clear cut, exterminate. This prevented sin and made a profit. Against the evil in themselves they built a dominion for their superior race. In the new puritan age today, a "spiritual imagination... impotent, sterile, or dead... an era of violence, chaos, destruction, madness, and slaughter (Thomas Merton, Seeking Paradise, 85).

Raze and Exterminate also lay down with Romulus and Remus at the Puritan door. Questions of these sucklings by the Pennsylvania Dutch, who survived the murderous Roman ancestor-adversaries in Holland and Switzerland, are opposite. They domesticated the natural, invited it indoors, befriended it in their natures and painted it, sculpted it and threw it on the forge. Pennsylvania didn’t make any Scarlet Letter, or Cask of Amontillado, it decorated barns and chests. Decorated chests may be expanded in the real or in the parable of the inner decoration, both good, the dower chest and the entire Way Into the Flowering Heart, and evil, the many-vagaried Orc.

Sources:

1. The Tree Became A Goat - People in the Wilderness 

2. Apologizing for Art in the Americanization of the Pennsylvania Dutch

She Has Brooded Since 2009

Faisal

To get these kings you have to get the attitude. Faisal is undergoing his beauty treatment in pride. So the British have warmed their royals. The word king hardly appears. It's all babies and beauties, stability you know, masks. Other potentates suffer their pride. There's nothing behind a Saudi prince. Abdulla, Farouk, Faisal, especially Farouk lands fat cats in trouble. Outlaws in bandanas with the top down will pull up next to him and mock his cousins at stoplights,  taunt: King Farouk! King Farouk!

In faux history catastrophe is the electric arc that raises moats, aureoles, craters, concentric scarrings and blisters overwritten by the scarping of scallops. This is not a sea food dinner. I won the blue ribbon in sixth grade for the entire school for a pic of characters on a stage off set by scallop markings. Whether electric or fire pits collapse to caverns below, if you mix con5 clay with cone 10, or set parallel strings of cratered mounds, planetary wide scaring, hemispheric discharges, dendritic patterns, sinuous channels, like erosion but not, concatenation of coronal streamers chain the alcoves, pseudo tributaries of  lava tubes make a fractured terrain. Who doesn't seek the geological cup of complex terracings, a bullseye crater in ionized hexagons, Lichtenberg figures that trap negative charge of plasma spiral trails joggled over razor backs? That's our Faisal too.

 Many of these did fall, implode, collapse in the stretching intended to enhance their lines. Why were they pushed to such extremes? Some are blind. Some can't raise their hands because they don't have arms or just stumps for arms in these days. Those who raise hands may not all get them all the way up from the weight or maybe they are prevented. There are all kinds of postures in hands raised, just like there are all kinds of reasons for raising them. Surrender is implied, and praise. Also sacrifice. Those without hands are the most poignant if we imagine we can see the heads and the bodies, as if the arms and hands were wrapped as if they were armed and militarized security forces get them ambiguous, concealing something under their cloaks. Beating hearts. Some of these may be considered Protest Jars silently witnessing. These ideas, called minimalist and abstract expressionist, arise in conversation like Legends of the Unconscious, not yet written exactly, with many sources of vacancy and presence, vacancy of the design and designer, presence of the flows of the natural. But making and repeating patterns to identify work as recognizable of a certain style  is a betrayal of vacancy. Making by erosion, breakage, eruption, gravity, is vacancy. The world is before us, but the pot remains after. Ask what he will do tomorrow if he had success today. The answer is there is no time and what is done is done before, during and after.

Lamination arches from form, bowed in the firing, so daylight appears between its cracks, caverns and splits in the firing, The eye tries to understand what it sees when folds and curves make shadow. It constantly plays over it to create familiarity. It is as if he eye recasts the image, which seems to be moving, to understand it. This establishes the statement, it depends on your point of view.

Such composition has a range of meaning and association, from more simple but improbable Flowers from Rock to curvilinear figures not quite named, like a woman a flower or abstract. The eye tries to make these deconstructions of a vessel look like something it recognizes, stressed and broken attempts to fall and stand at the same time, pots as people go against all odds and heroically oppose, or bow the head, the knee, and excite sympathy.

Pegasus

The islands off the Aleutian coast are home to Pegasus.

where baby Aleutians in childhood range.

Many are sighted  at birth before they fly away.

Then you see them. But later their colors reflect the ice.

Arctic blues, whites, beige, frost colors make them hard to see

against the clouds, which is why they are myth at first.

Whether such flying horses are real who can doubt?

These are modeled from my years among them.  

Babies emerge head first with mane trailing down the back,

body submerged in the mother. The baby’s wings are furled

and it looks as though the mother’s head has disappeared.

This confusion of bodies, wings and tails continues to the legs

which are fragile, spindly like the rockers of a horse.

The front legs are open and the back legs funnel to a v.

The body out of which the baby comes looks rather like flower by this time,

the head of the young sticking up as though emerging.

Actually it flies out of the mother on its own at this stage.

Striations of  white, pale beige, faded violet, maroon

wash ever pale with a head dress of all white,

useful for reflection when flying near the sun.  

The wings of the mother  are spread as the baby’s are not,

so it looks like it is in process of glide,

legs separated as if about to race forward.

They are always born as twins, fraternal we should say,

or maybe the difference is from the birth order born some days apart.

The Pegasus twin has heavier feet, less mane and its mouth is open

as in full cry at being second or because it is born in song,

for the horses sing as they fly.

One’s wings edge ivory though the usual sky,

colors with a sense of paint, subtle pastels.

The second baby is often born less emerged from the body,

due to different times of its maturity. In addition to the face plate

it has a body wrap as if coming undone, more spectacular

than its brother. Both are male according to custom,

but parts of the island where females birth are guarded by the adults.

There’s no point denying that many people think them birds,

they have wings after all, and they fly,

which stems from a lack of imagination among primitives.

On  islands where they live Pegasusians are more like we see spaceships

Who have only assayed the appearance of the babe.

Adults are larger than we would think which adds to the riddle

of how they can fly like some presidential jet dwarfs planes.

To compare them to planes it’s a good idea

To imagine the texting produced by seeing one pass

as you recline and look. It leaves open the question

as to where they are going, but they might ask the same of us.

The answer, to Jakarta, is as meaningful as if they say Andulusia.

To understand that better, we fly to real places so called, they fly mythological.

Blame Darwin for separation of fact from myth,

it has not been so long that myth was  fact.

Then people lived on ground in huts, died young, saw stars and lived in storm.

We posit such life produces more myth than ours.

Living indoors among light produces fact.

Facts however are brutes while myth forgives.

We should send anthropologists back to advise on the merits.

Of course this was done. Many went native and never returned.

They rode the backs of Pegasus past the astonished airbus.

One thing it shows is how short the age of fact became,

since we, having left it, have entered the new age of make believe.

If it seems three ages appear, perhaps in a fourth age yet unknown

the ages of the Greeks come full and a lot of foolish things in poems

bear out in fact and we end up quoting them.

Meanwhile  horses flying past airplanes invisibly because the screens are down

and nobody looking out thinks ufos and contact alien races but deny the horse.

Does that seem awkward or backward?

That they are a flying breed of horse  would not be believed by a race such as ours

who at one time did not believe a bird could fly, despite reports.

 

Baby Pegasus Flying horse island.

Coyote Song

Once a time in fairy tale
a dog would save the pekldfille.
Man he was all loving the pep0le.
Oh he went up and down saving the peoopel.
In alleys, down basements, protect,
pertect, peertect du peoplez."

But I don't like da doggie.

Ya-honk.

Do not compare me to doggie.

Pit Pony

Pit Pony

Pit pony blind in Britain,

got rights in Europe with Ape,

registered to vote in condos

cases were pending in Spain.
  Kafka's animals understood
the citizen of Giant Mole
obsessed about it like a dog,
the thing that’s not,
the mole that’s not,
the mind that's not,
the ice foe's not,
dots comprehending
to the end
of Pit Ponies
deep in this belief
showed Kafka's animals
were men.