Swing States
Perceptions received by the ears or by reflection can be most easily retained if they are also conveyed to our minds by the mediation of the eyes.— Cicero, De oratore, 55 BC
As it rose from the water, the clouds broke, the waves calmed, and the sun cleared. I looked off to the northwest and saw it appear again, about 20 rods from us. Other eyewitnesses have since come forward, but I was so close that I could see round white spots inside its mouth. It stood out about five feet from the water, with a snake-shaped head at least eight inches across at the flat part and ten inches from the top to the tip of its long jaw. Its body, which must have been 25 or 30 feet in length, was pointed to the north. — Clinton County Sheriff C. J. Mooney, Plattsburgh Morning Telegram, 31 July, 1883
Forgive me, it is Sunday, I am weekend-weakened, and under such conditions separating the signal from the noise can be difficult. Is there a line that separates everything that is politics from everything that isn’t? Disney, for chrissakes, just now, the happy, smiling logs jumping into the fire to keep Snow White cosy and warm. “Here, we will thaw you out. We will burn to ash, incinerate ourselves.”
Mere abstraction? No, it is physical. Franz Mesmer, the German physician, could point a finger and make a man’s eyes roll back in his head, his knees buckle, and his tongue loll, but his techniques were no match for these present capacities. My senses are worm-eaten. Soon, they will be stripped clean. This is the requisite state. Writing still consoles but music alone has the holding power. The ear seizes it and carries it inside; the body is absorbed in the flow, the movement of the melody, the soothing, elemental force of the drum pounding out accelerating rhythms that circle and confound the nervous system and take control of the blood. The walls of the veins shake and the heart becomes just that—the heart, the core, the muscular seat of all power.
Just now:
“Your hands shaped me and made me. Will you now turn and destroy me?”
“Stop.”
“Remember that you moulded me like clay. Will you now turn me to dust again?”
“Shut up.”
“Did you not pour me out like milk and curdle me like cheese? Did you not clothe me with skin and flesh, and knit me together with bones and sinews?”
“You’re such an asshole.”
All manifestations are governed by perpetual laws of unvarying shape and rhythm. They are collectively organised and combinatorially arranged, a commonwealth of equal and independent voices, each climbing away from one edge and descending toward another, leaping and falling, moving backwards and forward, inverting, truncating, somersaulting, slowing, dying, and resolving.
No performer, no melody, nothing extraneous. Pure ideas. Calculations. Propositions.
Ten fifty-five in the morning. Bursts of rain and hail all night. The loudest crack of thunder I have ever heard. The dogs near us howling in their lockups, the birds once again hiding in the chimneys. Tens of thousands yesterday, funnelling into the smokestacks across the street, ravens snapping them up like bears in a spawning stream. Now, quiet. Except for the ambients, which I could itemise but your repertoires will do just as well, placed in whatever space or sequence you like, for none of us can tell from whence a sound originates when it is born inside what physicists call the cone of confusion—front, back, top, bottom, or anywhere along the base circumference. Far away or close, no problem, but intermediate distances are veiled in shadow, too difficult to pinpoint. Turning or tilting the head helps, this is how we hunt prey—and avoid becoming prey. Cupping the ear, extending the pinna, applying a trumpet, or spinning the torso in a circle. Visual cues, too, are almost always available. However, the best locator is the most obvious: prior knowledge. It is always best to know where things are and where they are coming from. There are fewer, if any, surprises.
“It’s like a recipe. Like nail soup. A spoonful of decayed material and an old bone. The bone turns to liquid, it softens, like yeast in dough, like the inners of a frog in the mouth of a water bug. Then it rises and expands in four directions.”
“Yes, yes, the os coccyx, you’ve said this a million times. So what?”
2.
So Birds are allured with Pipes and Harts are caught by the same. Fish in the lake of Alexandria are delighted by a noise. Musick hath caused friendship betwixt Men and Dolphins. The sound of the Harp doth lead up and down the Hyperborean Swans. Melodious voyces tame the Indian Elephants: and the very Elements delight in Musick. The Hulesian fountain, otherwise calm and quiet, if the Trumpet sound riseth up rejoycing, swells over its banks. There are in Lydia those which they call the Nymphs Islands, which at the sound of a Trumpet immediately come into the middle of the sea, and turning round lead a dance, and then are returned to the shores; Mr Varro testifies that he saw them. And there are more wonderful things than these. — Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa, De Occulta Philosophia libri III, 1651
The moon is almost full. The birds have left. The duck pond at Bois de Vincennes has inexplicably drained. An oarfish washed ashore a few miles down the Marne. According to an A.P. wire story this morning, swarms of toads are migrating, or invading, depending on your point of view. Either way, a massive movement. A harbinger.
You cannot accelerate history, you can only exploits its currents.
Further penetrations that shed light: as a corpse decomposes, mouldering to dust, nefesh, if called upon, lingers nearby, hovering among the living, seeking out its sorrows, interceding in their hours of need. Meanwhile, Ruah flies to Eden, the still earthly garden. There, still coveting the pleasures, she vests herself in a bodily form, a semblance of the one she had in the worldly abode. She rises to the supernal sphere on Sabbaths, new moons and festival days, then descends to the garden. But neshamah (so continues the Book of Splendor) ascends immediately to her place in the domain from which she emanated, and it is on her account that the light is lit to shine above. Never thereafter does she descend to earth. In neshamah is realised the One who embraces all sides, the upper and the lower. And until neshama has ascended to be joined with the Throne, ruah cannot be crowned in the lower garden, and nefesh cannot rest easy in its place, but these find rest when she ascends.
And this is pretty much that: here I am, troubled and sorrowful and hovering, putting stones on graves, awakening nefesh, who bestirs ruah, which then rouses the patriarchs, and after, neshamah. Whereupon the Holy One, be blessed, pities the world.
In theory. In practice, old Nesh has been prevented from ascending for some reason. Ru finds the gate to the garden closed against her, and Neffie, too, flits about, alone and dejected, watching the worms eat the body in which she was once tenant.
Undergoing the judgement of the grave, we mourn.
3.
All the world must suffer a big jolt. There will be such a game that the ungodly will be thrown off their seats and the downtrodden will rise. — Thomas Müntzer, Open Denial of the False Belief of the Godless World on the Testimony of the Gospel of Luke, Presented to Miserable and Pitiful Christendom in Memory of its Error, 1524
To disappear without a trace is, beyond question, the most terrifying fate that can befall a man. And by far the most common.
The disappearance of silence, however, is an annunciating sign of the end.
You can’t just do what you like, whatever you want. You have to do what you should do, at least some of the time. Most of the time, even. As Delmore Schwartz learned, “You can't carry on like this, it is not right, you will find out soon enough, everything you do matters too much.”
(How all things flash! How all things flare!) What am I now that I was then? May memory restore again and again The smallest color of the smallest day: Time is the school in which we learn, Time is the fire in which we burn. — Delmore Schwartz, “Calmly We Walk Through This April’s Day” from Selected Poems (1938-1958): Summer Knowledge, 1967
4.
The number five said: “I am the number of fingers on a hand. I make pentagons and pentagrams. And but for me dodecahedra could not exist; and, as everyone knows, the universe is a dodecahedron. So, but for me, there could be no universe.’ — Bertrand Russell, “The Mathematician’s Nightmare: The Vision of Professor Squarepunt,” in Nightmares Of Eminent Persons And Other Stories, 1953
Is it not, perhaps, time to push beyond these hexagons? Push is the wrong word. Chamfer is the correct one. In geometry, chamfering is a way of turning one polyhedron into another by adding a new hexagonal face in place of each original edge. The chamfered dodecahedron contains 30 hexagons, one for each day of most months. It is constructed as an edge-truncated chamfer of a regular dodecahedron, which, unlike my lowly hexagons, is a Platonic solid. It is thought to be the base topology. The Archimedean types are more complex. Sometimes the 12 surfaces—one for each month—are spherical, like a soccer ball, but they are usually flat, especially when it manifests itself in nature: crystalline fluorite, galena, spessartine, quartz, gold, copper, sphalerite, magnetite; eglestonite, almandine, voltaite, sometimes lead, sometimes cuprite. The Greeks worshipped them, as did the Etruscans before. Plato called it the “fifth figure,” the “divinity’s model for the twelvefold division of the cosmos.” Plutarch gave it a similar status. In the second century A.D., the Romans spread small ones forged in bronze, quite beautiful, throughout their Europe—in military camps, mostly, but also in graves and sanctuaries, including among the coins and treasure of a wealthy woman in a villa-rustica tomb in Saint Parize-le-Châtel.
The Roman dodecahedron was perhaps used to measure sunlight on special days of the year. No one knows why—religious holidays, possibly, or propitious harvest days. Or perhaps to knit gold mail or glove fingers. They have been unearthed in Belgium, Germany, France, England, Holland, Austria, and Switzerland, but never in Italy, Spain or Greece—never anywhere on or near the Mediterranean Basin. No one knows why. The wealthy woman in the tomb was missing her upsilon-shaped hyoid bone. No one knows why.
5.
The shoulder blade of the caribou is held to be especially ‘truthful’. When employed for this purpose, the meat is pared away, and the bone is boiled and wiped clean; it is hung up to dry, and finally, a small piece of wood is split and attached to the bone to form a handle. In a divinatory ritual, the shoulder blade, thus prepared, is held over hot coals for a short time. The heat causes cracks and burnt spots to form, and these are then “read.” — Omar Khayyam Moore, Divination: A New Perspective, 1957
The homiletic interpretation of the Scriptures known as Midrash describes an indestructible bone called the Luz. Luz is also the name of an ancient city in Israel and another in the Golan Heights, which was at the time the land of the Hittites. In the 1920s, under the League of Nations' mandate system, the Golan Heights, including the spring at Banias less than four miles from Luz, became part of French Syria, and the Sea of Galilee was placed within British Mandatory Palestine. In 1944, the French Mandate ended, and the Golan Heights became part of the newly independent state of Syria, which was later incorporated into the Quneitra Governorate. The IDF seized the Heights during the 1967 Six-Day War, and in 1981, the Knesset unilaterally declared sovereignty over them. The U.N. Security Council responded by issuing Resolution 497 on December 17, 1981, which declared the annexation null and void.
Luz is also the Hebrew and Aramaic word for nut, almond, hazel, hazelnut, and nut tree. It is talk that is libellous or disrespectful. It is the verb to turn, twist, or bend.
The bone called Luz, the Midrash tells us, houses the human soul and is the starting point for the reintegration of the body at the time of the resurrection. A comment on Ecclesiastes 12:5 (“When people are afraid of heights and of dangers in the streets; when the almond tree blossoms and the grasshopper drags itself along and desire no longer is stirred, then people go to their eternal home, and mourners go about the streets.”) states:
Rabbi Levi says it refers to the nut (luz) of the spinal column. Hadrian, may his bones be crushed, asked Rabbi Joshua ben Hananiah: whence will man sprout in the Hereafter? He replied: from the nut (luz) of the spinal column. Hadrian said to him: prove it to me. He had one brought; he placed it in water but it did not dissolve, he put it in fire, but it was not burnt, he put it in a mill but it was not ground. He placed it on an anvil and struck it with a hammer; the anvil split and the hammer was broken but all this had no effect on the luz.
In the Middle Ages, non-Jewish scholars acknowledged the legend of the indestructible bone. They referred to it as the “Jews’ bone” or “Juden-knoechlein.” Various interpretations placed its location as the last vertebra of the spinal column, the sacrum, the coccyx, the twelfth dorsal vertebra, wormian bones in the skull, or one of the sesamoid bones in the big toe.
How does this information relate to my particular worldview? In certain parts of the world, girls are held down by their mothers while another woman scrapes away their clitoris with a knife and seals the cut flesh with acacia thorns. On their wedding nights, their husbands use daggers to slice through the scar tissue. I apologise for drawing attention to this but it must be confronted. It is part of our collective barbarity. You and I are responsible. This is an endlessly self-referential loop. My parasites, my sluggish hosts. Keywords, images, phrases, numbers, graphs, arguments, relationships, formulas, diagrams, proofs. People and places to tag. Sniffers. Data packets. Spillover transmissions. Over seven billion served everyday. It is dizzying at first until you blast it open. Coming through the windows, off the shocks, the tires. The lamp posts slipping by the passenger side window, slap, slap, slap, slap. Everything trembling, from our ears to our eyes to the soles of our feet.
6.
I will play the swan,/ And die in music. — William Shakespeare, Othello, 1603
Melody and contour penetrate the neural pathways of the soul but only two things, the nervous system and the circulation of blood, sound through the silence.
In the meantime, investing in an anechoic chamber might make the most sense. It would be a counterfeit quiet and open space of infinite dimension—no more beautiful chords and colours that lodge in the ear and get stuck in the eye. Lines only. Absorb the waves. Minimise the reflections.
“The little almond-shaped bone at the top of the spine where the tefillin knot rests.”
“Oh, for the love of Christ.”
“It has curious properties. It is nourished only from food eaten Saturday night, from melave malka.”
“Would you listen to yourself? You’re not even Jewish.”
“Melave malka means escorting the Queen.”
“The Queen.”
“Shabbos, the universal bride.”
“And that’s who here?”
“It’s not a person, it’s a day. The day of rest. Which you all represent. The feminine. The spiritual.”
“How flattering.”
“Nothing flattering about it. You’re genetic transmitters. Think of it, the wombs of the world. World wide womb. A highly-developed transglobal transportation and delivery service.”
“Is this where your dodecahedron nonsense comes from?”
“Precisely. Six, the recurring cycle, the endless circle of being, doubled. Ten represents direction and change, linear purpose, the divine’s descent into the tangible, a nosedive into Mount Sinai, the side of the mountain, and the rib of man. Twelve is something else entirely. Transcendent infinity descended into the bounded finite, then launched like a rocket back into the beyond. With us holding on for dear life.”
“You’re mad.”
“Not madness. Miracles. Physical objects—wood, stone, crystal, parchment, photographic paper, celluloid, cassette, vinyl, iPhone—become not merely symbols of holiness but holy objects in and of themselves.”
“You’re starting to scare me.”
“I’m starting to scare myself. But nothing exists that is not represented as an image in a second reality. All creatures are shadows and echoes. All nature paints itself. This is how we read the world.”
“You need help.”
“Yes.”
This read goes very well with the rain and a morning after too much fun
Indeed. Too much fun