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.

Immer noch sturm,

 It is still storming, still storm, Storm Still   the translation published in India! in 2014, Seagull, in 2010

in German, Surhkamp Verlag.   Starting this, maybe a page or two a day, and re-starting The Fruit Thief.

For some reason have fixed on going to Tomasita's up on Pan American Highway if I can get there on Montaño only and avoid the Pan American.  From there some photos across the valley of the volcanoes. 

Gorgeous sunny day.  Stop somewhere along the way first for a first stroll to stride off the day.  Or not.  

Tomasita's was good-ok.  Big news of the day, however, was that along Unser early walkers and runners were out and sure enough there was a guy walking with purpose Backwards!  Handke would be so proud and happy.  As I was.  Too fast, driving, to get a snap of him.  Later in the afternoon took lots of snaps of the walls on Sevilla street and offshoots.  Image bank for my photo book on the Walls of West Albuquerque.  

Now in Fruit Thief he is talking about departure on a trip that feels it might be a final trip, looking over what his fruit trees yielded.  Closing up the house.  This time I am on purpose not going to underline anything, as a discipline in Duration!  

Said good-bye to Beckie.  She liked her flowers and put her card in her book to read later.  She and Bela at Cottonwood earlier with Janeese concocted a plan for next year to rent two or three cats from Janeese for our visit.  Wonder if that will happen!  I can see them tearing up the chairs.  Janeese has four or five dogs and eighteen more or less cats.  

We started Rosellini's Stromboli at Handke's insistence last night.  Berman beautiful.  Read up on the big scandal back story.  1950s black and white movie.  Have seen it before or at least the opening part.  Vintage in every way.  

how to live on my last day off in Abq?

 what to do on the last Saturday here?  

"Trembling and faltering, she and the author went on to the next sentence.  In between they both shuddered.  But without this shuddering the journey would not have deseerved the name.  That alone was what validated a journey."  461

I could drive down Isleta and back up Broadway.  I could spend the whole day walking the Andalucia circle.  I could drive up

and down Golf Course and Taylor Ranch roads.  Drive Unser up and down and Coors.  Where should I eat? Snack? 

What book to read next?  Missing Gredos, given that it is Spain, I could have read it as Bela's love affair with Spain.  

Today the farewell Friday.  Victoria brought us two pieces of carrot cake.  Walmart  ---- Rose did the toes but both forgot the finger nails.  

The Ergo cane did arrive from Florida.  Connected to a Dutch medican equipment company.  Made in Taiwan.  

Read Handke's 2009 monologue, Til Day You Do Part, Or a Question of Light, an answer or reply from the woman present but silent in Beckett's Krapp's Last Tape.  This copy printed in India, Mike Mitchell translation into English with texts also in German and French.  

That 510 Central art show is still up but I am resisting the notion of going to it.  Images from it on Insta show just why one doesn't want to see the whole room of those paintings.  

Finished Genet's Funeral Rites last night.  A difficult book to read and re-read because his hallucinatory approach confuses even if it is the second or third time you've read it.  A perfect aesthetic experience and achievement given his time and moment.  A good remembrance of Phil, in its ways.  I wondered if this was the book I read on the streets in Buenos Aires, tearing off one page at a time as I read it, as I started to do on that trip, "to save space and cut down on weight" given the huge and heavy suitcases we had then.  An amazing, remarkable trip that was, for sure.  A true journey.  What did Handke say about the shudder and vibration that make a journey?  

Saw a brief homage video about him on YouTube.  Produced by an Italian company.  He still lives in Chaville, sw of Paris.  For over thirty years now.  

I will re-start The Fruit Thief.  He mentions that phrase a number of times in Sierra, and even before that.  So it's a thing he's had on his mind for a good while.  Another tale about a woman?  No, main character is man who goes on a journey after a bee stings him, reminding him it is time to undertake a journey once more.  

Forgot to mention to Dennis that the best thing about now is that last year at this time Bela stopped being able to walk!!  Thank goodness that is not happening again.  I don't know what I would do.  The anxiety about needing hip surgery seems much more quiet now too.  

Correction---I was right the first time,  yes, the narrator is a man but the fruit thief he is looking for is a woman, one he has glimpsed before.  One time she asked him directly What's wrong, sir?  What worries you so? Qu'est-ce qu'il vous manque, monsieur? C'est quoi, souci?"  What are you missing, sir?  What is the problem?