Sunday the 14th

 videos in the morning of Emma's dance recital.  Beautiful, Martha Graham be proud.  

Wonder if Lentz read The Fruit Thief (and maybe not much else) because there he found the ceaseless, unbroken by chapters, flow of narrative journey over intimately described landscape with creatures, birds, skies, rocks.  Paragraphs, yes, mercifully.   Wonderful passage exploring more fully H's sense of mutual enthusiasm upon which behind which love finds its ways.  Alexia and Valter.  Horrible nearly dead cat covered with ticks in its eyes and all over.  Voice from somewhere of man in distress, new european jungle growth, tangled growth.  

223  "So: no rush on the in-between stretches.  Woe unto those in too much of a hurry.  Blessings upon those of you, on the other hand, who derive something useful and fruitful from in-between stretches, as well as in-between spaces, as well as in-between times, taking it slow and absorbing everything humanly possible along the way.  

the young man loses the rhythm of the walking   gets filled with fear   fear disorients him  he loses the rhythm   he cries, whimpers, howls, snot dripping down    but she knows he will eventually amaze her

distant thunder and lightning shake him out of his panic  friendly thunering, lovable lightning flashes

near Molière, the land in the Vexin 

too new

 oh dear, contemporaries make it into this book, even DT along with Clinton, Obama and Putin. 180

year published 2017  Zdeněk the suicide who organizes it all, protest against the world, against existence

year 2003, 19 years old "something bridegroomly about him" 181  

year of the hazelnut, the 100 year summer, the delicate thread from which the nut-egg hangs in the shell 185

flat tire

coming out of the dump road about two hours ago, heard and felt a pop, right rear tire flattened.   Drove to Methodist Church parking lot, few feet away.  Kirk's came and Loop5 came.  Home now.  Ordered pizza from tenney mtn pizza 

sent this to doug last night, read it over this morning  John Wilson, FirstThings.com October 18, 2019 Why you should read Peter Handke  Excellent piece.  

Found books by O.V. De L. Milosz to give to Darlene.  Should I read the love story novel first, sacred and profane love.  

how slow can you be.  By page 174 when Valter and Alexia are traipsing the countryside and he bites into an apple she has given him on the route to the  Chars mills on a channel of the Viosne, with fresh bread from a bakery nearby.  Adam and Eve, of course, she the original fruit thief.  I had mistakenly said he had left his seminary years way behind.  Hidden them of course, or slowly released them into undercover tales.

Out in front of the Methodist church with our stopped car, the man who lived across the street came over to offer his help and a glass of water.  I thanked him and said no, I'd just have to pee and he said yes I know l what you mean.  Rich with his huge flatbed truck and his son Alden? glasses, pudgy fourteen year old, not quick but polite.  Felix Garcia in his Loop van, red, bit beaten up with lots of use.  Airport shuttle and area transport.  Who knew?  Kids going to the camps in summer, skiing in winter. Born in Dominican Republic, been in this area some twenty-something years.  Strong enough to lift Bela up into and down out of the van front seat.  Older and pretty high step. She has been sleeping for hours after we ate greek pizza delivered from tenney mtn pizza.  Driver said he had just delivered one to Brint across the street.  I rented a car for Monday morning.  Two appointments on Tuesday, doubt that we will get the car back by then.  

In Chars Handke has found himself another perfect no-man's land.  No town center, no hint of village, "just a slight breeze on this warm, silent summer afternoon, an air of abandonment and exclusion."  175  That phrase fits our afternoon here.  Without a car you are nothing.  After we got back I tried to make a list of who I know I might have phoned for a pickup ride back into town.  

Bela sleeping for four hours or so now.  3-7 pm.  Will she be able to sleep tonight?  Took two small shots of Zyrtec last night, 3 am? Zyrtec always knocks her out even though she says it doesn't.  Will I sleep tonight?  Me and my ceremonial, mushroom laced cacao and ashwahganda gummies.  

It is a beautiful evening.  The sweet air and late sunlight.  Summer will seem longer now that we came back a month earlier than last year.  

location prayer

 139  The point now:  not to know where I am and what the place is called. 

140  Nonsense: time and again discovery could happen.  

141  Despite all her inner disorientation, she felt at the same time a strength inside her as if she had been given the ability to raise the man from the dead.

142  finicky as she is, she had never liked butter 

she roamed through Alaska and Siberia 

is Handke portraying himself as woman, all women he has known, his mother, the eternal feminine, women he has met, has wanted to meet . . . the woman inside of him, his daughter, whom he raised in her earliest years, women he wishes he had met . . . . the fruit thief . . . not Augustine in the thievery of the pears over the garden well . . . .   not much hint of seminary in H's texts . . . . 

143  woman in Siberia, her first ever female friend 

144 ( daily superstition involved reading . . . immersing herself completely, and that would benefit someone about whose well-being she cared deeply, clearing the person's head, providing strength, if not "solid ground underfoot.")

hidden truth

 Ah, if only the hidden truth would prevail.  If only it could become all-powerful.  Seize power on earth. . . .  But as the prevailing force would it not lose the element of secretiveness on which its strength depends?

120

Handke made clear early on no mysticism, no exaltations.  But now late in career he wants the fruit thief to admit to her mystical yearnings and revelations but cannot quite do it.  Like Burke's agnosticism.  

"I was crisscrossing one landscape or another, which was nothing but a silent howl at being at a complete loss."

school year template

Natalie says some cousins have already booked a visit to the O center in Chicago!  

Our cruise booking now set in stone.  Or money.  Money being stone.  With this cool weather and yesterday's visit to Polly's, feels like anticipating and preparing for the September trip is perfect Repetition replication of the school year.  

"news" from Nicholas on Facebook about this psalm by Oscar Milosz (which he says he wants read at his funeral! )  

PSALM OF REINTEGRATION (Oscar Vladislas de Lubicz Milosz) 

Psalm of Reintegration (Oskar Miłosz)

Sometimes, in the middle of the night, I am awakened by the most perfect silence in the Universe. It is as if, all at once, the celestial multitudes, perceiving in my thought the end assigned to their course, stopped above my head to contemplate me, holding their breath. As in the distant days of my childhood, my whole soul then strains toward the great voice that is preparing to call me from the depths of created space. But my expectation is in vain. The peace that surrounds me is so perfect only because it no longer has a name to give me. It is in me and I am in it, and in this Nameless Place, where our union has been accomplished, there is not even the most universal word, Here, that has not forever lost its meaning; For nothing remains outside us where we can still locate a There, and the total space where thought breathes appears to us not as the container, but as the illuminated interior of the beautiful crystal Cosmos fallen from the hands of God. Once, when the spirit of perfect silence seized me, I raised my eyes to the suns; today, my gaze descends with their gaze into my being. For their secret is there, and not in themselves. The place from which they contemplate me is the very place where I stand, and to the loving reproach painted on the Face of the universe, I recognize the melancholy of my own consciousness. The immensity engendered by the infinitude of circumscribed movements is powerless to fill the void of my soul; there is no height accessible to the extension of Number whose instants are not counted by the beating of my heart. What does all this distance from nothing to nothing matter to me! Certainly, I fell from a very high place; but it is another space that measured the fall into which I dragged the world. The real place, the only place that exists, is within me, and that is why the Universe, my consciousness, watches, watches this night, and looks at me. O my Father! My suffering is not called ignorance, but oblivion. Lead your child back to the sources of Memory. Command him to follow the course of his own blood. The movement of my fall created space-time, this water which, in the motionless Limitless, closed over me, and for which it is not within my power to imagine a container. May my ascension therefore project the Other Space, the true, the original, the sanctified, and may the universe that is here, the Son of my Sorrow whose nocturnal gaze is upon my soul, rise with me toward the Homeland, in the joyful current of rustling influences of golden beatitude.

would have been more perfect perhaps had he left out the father-son language, more Handkean!  more post-post-modern. 

today marks our first full week back.  Week pretty packed with visits and memories thanks to Va's management of my birthday 

first walk in Wally's too.  All torn up, looks like big yard sale.  New floor polishing replacing original tile.  

money down on the Med cruise

June 8 Monday

we paid the deposit on the cruise in September with Sage Traveling---escorted wheelchair cruise.  One week, Sept 11 fly, arrive 12th in Barcelona, hotel one night, board ship the 13th, fly home the 20th.  

Tuesday June 9    Slated to go to Polly's late this morning.  Gorgeous day again, feels cold! like mid-August, even early September.   

sent around quotes via Dezeen in which the O Center architect talks about the emotional quality of the granite cladding on the weird building  --

to Phil  

​I sent that quote about granite and the Obama Center to a small 

chain of about ten people via bcc.  

Got your response and a few others.  BUT the whole set of emails is

now no longer to be found in my google email site!!!!!

Most curious!  is that ultra tight security being thrown around the whole

opening of the thing, even to commentary on it architecture?  

Anyway---I though the comment about emotional granite was hilarious,

ludicrous.  Since we live in the Granite State I sent it to a bunch of people

here.  

I can't decide about the look of the thing.  As you say it has Brutalist heritage

written all over it (but look up the LBJ version in Austin, a real monster of a

thing trying to be Paul Rudolph's terrible boston city hall all over again).  

It seems both monumental wannabe and sort of silly---Klingon Prison the

UK Guardian critic called it.  Chicago is the Grey City and the UC campus

next door continues that motif, so this building might wear well and 

settle into the South Shore iconography in time as landscaping softens it

and time ages how we look at it.  

I can see how they were trying for a sculptural look and sense but some 

more glass would have helped open it up and would have been in line with

some of Chicago's really great glass towers along the lakeshore.  

Amateur, pop psychoanalytically you can't help thinking, though, boy Obama

was up tighter and more defensive-aggressive than I had ever realized!! Wonder how he really is on the basketball court? 

last day in Abq

 

back into granite consciousness > June 7

 no longer in the shadow of the volcanoes.  Outside the rhododendrons blooming in the amazonian backyard, sunshine, sweet air.  

the fruit thief proceeds, for the first time in his narratives? (mmm?) at the leisurely pace previously found in the essays  slow and 

Sunday  Birthday wishes pouring in from all corners.  Still on Bill Stakem's list, alas.  Nicholas from Bogota and Cécile from Paris.  

Debating about whether to urge Phil to buy an EV immediately.  Probably not.  His nephew drove from WVa to help him get his computer to work once more.  Only an hour and fifteen minutes drive.  Phil wrote him a check for $13,000. so he could buy a house.  The two of them can figure out how to take care of Phil from here on out.  John's suggestions are higher end, get involved with charitable giving.  More like mine.  Phil won't do that either.  Can't teach an old dog new tricks.  

Here we have Carole and Ken coming at 2 which will be great.  Rainy day, heavy rains in the night.  

Been crafting my new signature-seal, having gone jealous over Bert's beautiful one he left on the invoice here on the table.  

Feels like we will sign on to that med cruise tomorrow if they have a cabin for us.  Might be too late.  

shuddering

Goethe's dictum "shuddering is humankind's best feature"  18 Thief 

here shows up the wild Spanish Sierra --  this from Gary Lachman's blog post on Jan Potocki 

Indeed, scenes and motifs of initiation and secret knowledge run through The Manuscript Found In Saragossa and one of its central figures - the great Sheik of the Gomelez family – is the head of a gigantic scheme that resembles the machinations of the Bavarian Illuminati. Potocki’s decision to set his bizarre novel against the wild beauty of the Spanish Sierra Morena may have been influenced by more than the fact that he passed through the area on his way back from Morocco.

. . .

I can only mention some of the many esoteric motifs that appear throughout the tales, as well as the encyclopedic philosophical discourses that accompany them. The gallows suggest the Tarot trump of the Hanged Man, a symbol of spiritual death and initiation; initiation rites and challenges appear in many forms throughout the book. The weird adventures and tales within tales, in which Alphonse is often unsure if he is awake, dreaming or under the influence of hashish, are a reminder of the ambiguous nature of “reality.” They also occupy the liminal space between sleep and consciousness, the hypnagogic realm of magic and the paranormal.

. . . .

Handke in his Sierra is not being an esoterist, but is using the Sierra to locate tales of the unreal, strange, dream-like, history and memory being as shifting as reality.

Lachman's post about this Count is excellent as always. And as always quite dizzying. Amazing that Lachman continues to trace all of these themes and topics, movements and cults. A helpful reminder about our troubles today in the sense that saying our present administrative cluster of idiots functions, indeed, like a cult, a crazed stream of anti-rationalists bent on being counter to as much as possible, in the name of loyalty to their golden performer.