A rough crack at a "Literacy Narrative"

[I free-wrote this in little over an hour. ...very rough.]

One hundred dollars, including innocuous service fee, all for less than two hours of a musical experience I could easily approximate with my haphazard CD collection—why sink so much money for tickets to a show at Sangamon Auditorium of all places—Jethro Tull. I have gone to live performances of the band in various incarnations every seven years or so since 1993, but why Tull, you ask?
At the age of fourteen, I began hanging out with an older crowd, whose references varied from AD&D to Wicca [In my neighborhood, you were either nominally Baptist or “White Trash” pagan. This was the late eighties, before the internet. If you wanted to explore anything beyond the church on the corner or the televangelist on the tube—and my grandmother gave $10,000 that I can document to Jim and Tammy Baker—you had to catch a ride to the shady head shop downtown, away from the paper quaintness of lower-middle class smugness, or find the local “guru” who believed that reading through Buckland’s Complete Guide to Witchcraft and a few Piers Anthony novels qualified him to lead a spiritual movement. Bathing regularly would have been a nice touch. Just how many reincarnations of Jim Morison and Alistair Crowley were there in suburban Texas?]. Oh yes, our attention darted from one revolutionary idea to the next—so misunderstood, but there was one constant: the music, and particularly the lyrics, of Jethro Tull.
When my friend Gene, brilliant artist, would-be guru, and eventual Black Hand Vampire, first played “Thick as a Brick,” “A Passion Play” and “Minstrel in the Gallery” for me on cassette, Ian Anderson’s metaphors and unapologetic cynicism attracted me to the concepts driving his albums. I listened to those tapes over and over to glean meaning from his words—so much more complex even than Cliff Burton’s writing with Metallica, another favorite at the time. Tull’s work resonated with me then as intensely relevant, even though the band reached the height of its popularity in the mid ‘70s, shortly after I was born. Anderson himself had begun to explore the hypocrisy in of the religious status quo openly in the famous “Aqualung” album, and his relationship to the revival of British and Northern European folk traditions in “Songs from the Wood” and “Broadsword and the Beast.” Tull’s music was both the soundtrack to and the justification of my understanding of the world at that time. I felt sophisticated, being able to sound off heady classic rock lyrics [I say “sound off” because I certainly couldn’t sing. I still can’t]. It was tough being the long-haired crippled kid who wore tie-dyes everyday to reflect his mood, especially in my home town […seen “King of the Hill”?].
While I wouldn’t consider myself a Wiccan now anymore than I would consider myself Christian in any conventional sense [I’m a Hare Krishna, if you want to know.] and my musical taste has expanded to include the likes of Chuck D and Kris One, and of course, Charlie Parker, as I listen to Tull as I’m typing this sentence, the feelings of the open-ended possibilities of youth return, tinged with a little sadness, maybe, for decisions not made…[cliché? …probably]. [I do still play D&D.] It would be all too easy for my to resent my friends from the old neighborhood, with a “I got out of the ghetto” attitude, but as I listen to Tull, I recognize that even the would-be gurus played an integral role in who I am know. So I thank them, and I will pay Sangamon’s price for a bit of youth.

Happy "late" Birthday Lovecraft

20 August commemorates the birth of HP Lovecraft whose fiction reminds us that there are indeed some aspects of the universe that humanity shouldn't explore, or can't entertain without cost. Read his work here: http://www.sacred-texts.com/nec/hpl/index.htm

My reading of Wallace Stevens' "The Emperor of Ice Cream"

"The Emperor of Ice-Cream" by Wallace Stevens

Call the roller of big cigars,
The muscular one, and bid him whip
In kitchen cups concupiscent curds.
Let the wenches dawdle in such dress
As they are used to wear, and let the boys
Bring flowers in last month's newspapers.
Let be be the finale of seem.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.

Take from the dresser of deal,
Lacking the three glass knobs, that sheet
On which she embroidered fantails once
And spread it so as to cover her face.
If her horny feet protrude, they come
To show how cold she is and dumb,
Let the lamp affix its beam.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.

Stevens, Wallace. "The Emperor of Ice-Cream." Stevens: Collected Poetry and Prose. Eds. Frank Kermode and Joan Richardson. New York: Library of America, 1997. 50.

The first metaphor we want to look at here is obviously "the roller of big cigars." In a post-Bill Clinton administration America, the phallic implications of cigars really don't require that much explanation. In any case, we should remember that typically, in the Western world at least, the phallus, in all its glory [sarcasm] represents either power or ego, or some mixture thereof. In the second line Stevens presents the image of a muscular man whipping... hmm... sadomasochism anyone. The terms concupiscent and curds are juxtaposed with great effect. For those who haven't spent countless hours and unknown hordes of deferred expenditure exfoliating the decade in classrooms, "concupiscent" essentially means sexually sinful, in the Judeo-Christian sense. The thick milky white appearance of curds bolsters that reading. The assumption is that the whipped curds will provide nourishment, hence the backdrop of the kitchen, but the next line introduces dawdling “wenches” in old clothes. Certainly these women, presumably prostitutes, haven't had their desires fulfilled through sex. This is reiterated with the image of the boys bring flowers in use newspapers. The newspaper's primary function was to provide timely information; once that information has become irrelevant, the newspaper is either discarded or used in another way. Sex is essentially the same. The fleeting moments leading up to climax are certainly enjoyable, but in the end, we're left with a sticky mess -- much like melted ice cream, not so sweet anymore. Hence, the poet asks the reader to willingly participate in an illusion, would be alchemical-hermetic assertion, a cryptic equation. To let what is apparent in the phenomenological present to be so for all time -- this is the sum total of concupiscent desire. So the Emperor of ice cream is the one who controls the process of its melting, i.e. God, time, what have you. Because of their lack of power, the blood engorged penis promising ever infrequent petit morte, is in effect a circumstantial god. That's part of the tragedy of this poem.

The first line of second stanza mentions the dresser of the deal. Deal is both a type of wood and a transaction, as well as yet another metaphor for an erect penis. Deal wood was often used in the crafting of hope chests. The transaction implied here is of course the preliminary exchange of money in acts of prostitution; however, a nonexistent marriage contract is also implied here. Clearly this is a woman without hope. The sheet removed from the chest has fantails embroidered on it. This shape is very similar to the waffle crisps they used to garnish ice cream in soda fountains. The woman is dead, her hopes unrealized. Even the state of her toenails and death become a sex joke [yes, the word "horny" had the same connotations and Stevens’ day as it does now]. The body but spent a good deal it's time generating heat is now cold and dumb. Such is the nature of the material pleasures -- fleeting. The lamp is no doubt a coroner's lamp. Death is the great equalizer, the "Emperor" of the phenomenological world -- the only constant.

Much of this reading is not original. I owe a great debt to Dr. Thomas R. Preston for a great deal of the cultural context I apply to the poem.

"If I had a soul I sold it for pretty words"

That statement is Allen Ginsberg's, not mine, but I can certainly empathize with his sentiment. When people ask me why I study Ginsberg, it's for statements like these, the unflinching honesty. The Gita warns us to be wary of pretty words for the same reason Ginsberg does in his 1992 poem "After Lalon." We can easily become, and I myself to become, bogged down by the pretty little things that really don't amount to much. In the same poem, Ginsberg asks "... what good was all that come?/Will it come true? Will/it really come true." He's using the term "come" as in arrive here, but it isn't too much of a stretch, especially if you know Ginsberg to apply the sexual connotation here. He really wants to know if all of his sexual pursuits in the name of ecstasy will "arrive" at anything as he nears the grave. But what is the antecedent of the word "it"? It may well be the indeterminate, elusive It sought after in On the Road in countless jazz clubs -- a sacred experience out of time. Brilliant!

When I think of my own relationship to words, there's a lot of sadness and regret -- the ever present unfinished dissertation, poems lost, forgotten, or never completed, etc. but the greatest successes of this journey called life [yes I know its cheesy; I'm paraphrasing "Let's Go Crazy," but this is a blog. What do you want?] have also began with words. My greatest success and my greatest blessing is without a doubt my marriage, which began with innumerable hours of exchanging words in the energy clipped to those sounds. Tonight my wife is in San Francisco celebrating her career success. I'm here in our apartment with our guinea pigs in numerous distractions, but I was inspired to turn on Charlie Parker and pick up my big book of Ginsberg because I felt the weight of the San Francisco wind just below my solar plexus. That's love.

Ball of dung inquiry

In my spiritual tradition material pursuits that distract one from the important things in life are likened to a dung beetle's ball of dung which it spends its entire life rolling up insurmountable inclines. Today I managed to add a bit of dung to the ball so to speak. I spent somewhere around $78 all told, including shipping, on two separate Amazon orders; granted the order was for six books, but for purely entertainment purposes [is anything for purely entertainment purposes?]. Of course the real issue here is that I was stressed out about completing my syllabus in time for its deadline [which I did]. The material world, i.e. the phenomenological world, which amounts to our own self concepts from which we order our environments, is riddled with inadequacy. I mean was it really even stressed out about the syllabus -- probably not; the stress comes from my own frustration of being in a situation where I feel as though my talents and experience aren't being put to use. Of course, that's no one's fault but my own. I've been neurotically procrastinating on my Ph.D. for so freaking long I can't stand it -- fear is the mind killer after all. So why am I putting my, for lack of a more metaphorically affective word, shit in the vast indeterminate expanse that is cyberspace? [Damn that's a terrible sentence.] Because it amounts to a record. My hope is that when I have the urge to respond to stress with destructive behavior, however relatively benign, I will refer back to this posting. It shouldn't be too hard to find. It's the first of many.