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.