agnothi seauton, y'all

I find myself, more by accident than by design, listening to John Crowley’s reading of Aegypt: The Solitudes at the rate of one CD per night. This has gone on for only two nights and may stop at any time, not least because the book is ill-suited for pre-sleep. It is ideal for the long, otherwise boring drives to, say, Florida, where the straight road unrolls without variation and there are hours with the same dull patterns of tourists and long-distance trucks.

Then, one can give one’s whole attention to the words, letting sink in not just the rhythms or cadence but the varied messages and jokes and literary echoes. The damn thing unfolds more like a long poem than a long novel: drift just for a moment, and you have missed a key plot element encoded in a subordinate clause. Knowing in advance where the thing is going makes the semi-sleeper realize it will be necessary to wake up in the morning and read the passage in question, then re-listen to figure out why the connective plot-advancers slid by so easily. And why it would be better to listen during some activity that requires being fully awake.

The book’s set-ups of social context in the city remind me of one of the many reasons I thought of The Forbidden Forest when I first encountered the novel. But Eliade telegraphs his minor incidents and characters, at least as I now remember them; vast though the independent plotlines are in number, you have the feeling that you know which of them are done and won’t be coming back. This is not so with Aegypt even after you know what happens, and I suppose it was set up that way to permit maximum flexibility in later episodes while navigating steadily towards the intended conclusion. It works beautifully as a device, albeit one so intricate that I associate it more with poems (or with the sort of poems I was both reading and writing when I first encountered the novel).

The Gypsy’s fortune for Pierce, that he was faced with a “titanic sculpture … that would take far longer to complete than he had at first supposed,” of course turned out to be true for Crowley.

I am waiting to see what the Oracle @ Wi-Fi has to say to me this time round. I think I wrote already about this art project, in which Beth Lilly takes three cellphone photos after being requested for a reading, and transmits them to the questioner. The questioner then lets Lilly know what the unspoken question was, after which she attempts an interpretation.

As one would expect, the photos are sometimes uncannily related to the question and sometimes totally unconnected, and Lilly’s reading (she claims no psychic powers) is sometimes on target and sometimes not.

My question regarding upcoming changes in my life (I had a pretty clear idea of what might be coming but Lilly did not) was represented by a half-filled bottle of water discarded on the ground; more or less similar automobiles in a parking garage (but with one potentially significant anomaly); and a man trying to organize a group of other men on a street corner (with no clues as to what might be happening). I see I am reading a great deal more into my recollection of the images than appeared to me when they first hove into view on my computer screen, demonstrating again the process by which we make up our stories retrospectively.

So now I am waiting to get the images from the birthday reading (Lilly, like the Oracle @ Delphi who inspired the project, takes questions only on the 7th of the month, but there are so many it now takes her up to a week to get back to you).

The images from my previous reading are posted on the Oracle’s website: http://www.oracleatwifi.com/Orac277_1022.html

or right here:

save that I have bad dreams

Kings of Interstitial Space

Sunday’s NY Times brings news from the Venice Biennale of two Swedish artists who, stung by the absurdity of living in a country that still had a king, declared themselves the kings of all of the world’s indefinite boundary zones: wherever there is territory in between the definite borders, wherever the boundaries are blurry, there is their kingdom. And there are many places on earth where it is agreed that it is a very bad thing to be caught on the wrong side of the border, but neither side can agree on the exact location of the boundary line. In that hazardous blur of turf, these artists rule.

Their kingdom also has a very large population, since anyone who is dead is automatically made a citizen, with the option of applying to be removed from the citizenship roster if they find it offensive.

They offer passports, but I don’t think I can be a triple citizen as well as a dual one. I already hold an NSK passport, offered to all who wish to be citizens of the first artists’ state in time (rather than in space). NSK (Neue Slowenische Kunst) made their reputations in Yugoslavia when they won a Yugoslav government competition for a youth organization poster by copying the design of a Nazi youth poster. They later declared that Slovene independence was their most successful artistic project to date. Their passports bear (or at least bore) a valid sequence of numbers on passport blanks lifted from the Slovene passport office by an NSK sympathizer, which enabled NSK members to cross between Slovenia and Italy on NSK passports in the innocent days of a dozen years ago.

The United States doesn’t recognize dual citizenship, and the upshot of this is that as long as the dual citizen doesn’t attempt to re-enter the United States on the wrong passport, U.S. citizens can also be citizens of whatever other country will have them. I have friends who hold valid Irish citizenship (by virtue of ancestry) and E.U. passports in consequence. I probably shouldn’t point this out, since these days everyone is racing to defend the borders, but.

Another artist, who declined to acquire an NSK passport during their residency at the 1996 Olympics, said we would all be happy as NSK citizens until NSK started collecting taxes and calling up artists for the army. (Of course an NSK army would have to defend art in all times but in no place in particular.)

It would, I suppose, be a lovely conceit if the two kings of the interstitial kingdom sent letters to the warring powers who have been the primary creators of their indefinnite territory, demanding a demilitarized exclusion zone of at least a hundred kilometers on either side of the kingdom.

the master-not of human fate: or, keep on trucking

I believe I have written before about the bright pink trucks labeled DREAM SANITATION that one encounters unexpectedly on side streets in Atlanta, usually blocking one's intended path. Dream Sanitation has now taken over the combined trash and recycling duties at this low-budget office building, so the dumpster has acquired a stern sign reading GARBAGE ONLY and the black bins next to it demand deposit of cardboard, glass and "mixed paper --- if you can tear it, we can recycle it."

The few readers of this blog who have read my poems will remember the encounter a few years ago with the broken-down car being conveyed down the Interstate by a truck labeled PARADISE TOWING SERVICE.

This morning I was sitting at a cross-street, reflecting mournfully on the unknown destinies of some few folk whose lives seemed to be moving in bad directions when I looked up to see my view blocked by a large black vehicle with the legend inscribed on its door FATE TRUCKING COMPANY.

Doraville, Georgia, in case you want to look them up, or engage their services.