Bibliomancy

writing

I purchased a large book of poems by Louise Gluck and this was the first poem I read in the collection. It is called Matins. Matins is the first liturgy (Christian) of the day, celebrated from midnight to dawn (I think). I am currently doing a yoga Sadhana at 4:30am every. morning and yes I am virtue signaling. The 2 hours before sunrise are called the ambrosial hours – those are the best times to meditate apparently for some supernatural reason. This past week I also listened to a random video by Sadhguru on waking at 3:40am. Bibliomancy is when you flip randomly, or guided by the invisible hand of fate, to a section from a book and use this for prophetic ends.

I love the first lines “forgive me if I say I love you.” I once said something a bit more weaselly than “I love you.” I did want forgiveness for saying this. I felt sort of caught with my hand in the proverbial cookie jar and this is what I said. Sometimes you can’t say things like that – true or not. Is Louise lying here? She writes that she can’t love what she can’t conceive so is it the case that the object of her love is powerful and that she is panicked? (also I love that we use a k when adding ed to panic)

https://www.tasteofbeirut.com/hawthorn-berries-zaaroor/

This is the hawthorn. It is a symbol of transformation. It also is good for heart disease.

This is the foxglove – also good for heart disease. Foxglove symbolize magic, intuition — apparently bees and faeries like foxgloves. They are lovely and have a sort of gradient coloration sometimes. (Inconsistent!)

“Is this what you mean us to think, does this explain the silence of the morning, the crickets not yet rubbing their wings, the cats not fighting in the yard?”

Sigh!

I know what this means, I can feel it, but I cant explain it. The beginning of things, the beginning of meaning, the beginning of disclosure before there is anything to disclose.

Apparently Gluck wrote another poem called Matins as well. Maybe she wrote many. Maybe these are prayers.

Poetic Operations

writing

When Quarantine started I began reading Ovid’s Metamorphoses in that the bathtub (the Mandelbaum translation). Then i started putting the videos on instagram. This was not me being sexy. I mean I am a middle aged mother of two after all. I was just combining reading, with bathing, with performance… something for pleasure during the apocalypse I had no plan.

Then I thought Ovid …. Covid. Then I thought about found texts, cut ups and mash ups, and then I thought about erasure poems.

What is an erasure poem? It is a poem where you remove words from a text to create a new poem. An excellent erasure poem that I return to is R E D, an erasure of Bram Stoker’s Dracula by Chase Berggrun.

That painting above I consider an erasure. Here is the original one:

Painting is unique in that this painting that I erased no longer exists, where as the original text of Dracula, erased with R E D, still exists. That is why I love painting… there can be only one.

But like I said an erasure is one of many different operations that one can perform on a text. Others being mashups or cut ups. I have Paul Griffiths’ let me tell you here as well. It is a book that is written from the POV of Hamlet’s Ophelia with the words that Ophelia speaks in Hamlet. I hope the word “rue” is there, because it is a special plant to me. I also found a very beautiful choral piece adapted from the book:

More on poetic operations, I am reading Kathy Acker’s Don Quixote, and i have no idea what the operations are that she uses, but I know they are there. This may be an example of quantum operations or operations beyond the algorithmic operations of the erasure. Here is a good essay on Acker’s process.

So back to my Ovid in the Bathtub. This is a very neptunian exercise, transformation through dream and deception. Metamorphoses is a collection of tales about violence towards women, so it even more strongly echos R E D. I am talking above about processes not about the product. Although the works themselves are fantastic, my favorite is Acker, I cannot separate the process from the product. It is all of a piece for me. The score and the performance of the score.

So Back to Ovid in the bathtub. I propose a poetic operation work based on The Metamorphosis of Ovid

Title:

her C(ovid)

Table of Contents:

Book 1: Roo

Book 2: C(arcas)

Book 3: Narc

Book 4: Vulna

Book 5: Proton

Book 6: Psyops

Book 7: Plague

Book 8: Le()d

Book 9: Anus

Book 10: Fate

Book 11: Death

Book 12: Eros

Book 13: Ulysses

Book 14: Mona

Book 15: Cages

It will probably change. I sort of want to create a grammar for this. Something involving () as you can see. That is a very programmer thing to do. It is because I am inspired by LISP, and really Scheme.

Phenomenology Hermeneutics and Language

writing

Last night I lurked on a game called Dialectic.  I dont know what the game core mechanic is, I showed up late. But the core of the game play was this. 

A world exists that is different from our world (not really in post covid19 however).It has three aspects:

1/ Ubiquitous vocal infrastructure

2/ mundane (offline) vs fantastic (online) divide

3/ Plague Years (multiple rolling pandemic waves)

What new words are coined as a result of these aspects?

Well at first this is sort of a post-phenomenological instrumentation view. We have these new instruments such as infrastructure, online/offline, virus and how do we relate to them. But this is hermeneutics. We must interpret or relate to our situation through language. Language creates the world. 

What happens when we build a speculative scenaro or story and start with the language? What happens when we start with the new words around how our world is different?

Or what happens if we take our existing world and slice it and dice it in different ways and create new words. 

Is it more creatively generative to tell a story in german if I am an english speaker? Or do I need to create the new language, and thus the concepts in the language in order to tell the story – which is the story of the concepts and the language and the interactions of all these things to express the world?

hmmm