searching for the ineffable
The US Postal Service (not to be confused with The Postal Service, which is apparently being allowed to keep its name in exchange for some advert appearances… but that’s another story) is releasing new stamps in 2005.
MUPPET stamps. Aiiieee the cute!
Seen on a station wagon today:
ABD
(y’think it was a hint?…)
And so we dance, only with our voices, filling the spaces in-between admission and action. The more insistently we attempt to fill them, the more starkly obvious these gaps become, beckoning.
Detached amusement is odd to observe in oneself.
(This is a sort-of response to something a friend wrote. It’s not critical to know the original piece.)
Janus,
Two-faced, you speak looking up, bury a box looking down. Green exhumed upright dead old man gazes straight ahead, holding your gaze up and away from the inside of his burying box. You never see him down looking up, unless you take the whole frame and turn it sideways.
Horizontality is decay. Unused muscles, skin, bones decay. Upright existence requires integrity of body, so isn’t frightening to look at. But this here is death made vertical: and so, since decay is not an option, apply color. Green, like a tree. Brown roots underground; above-ground—green. Trees with their double-liminal, ambiliminal existence remind you of the dead; this frightens you, so you teach schoolchildren of the life trees bring.
Lest we forget that green death is all around us, grass grows where trees don’t. Liminal death’s reminder, a low dense green fog toeing the line between above and below.
We’re frightened, so we reaffirm the line. Asphalt is hard fastening the gap between us and deathl; we look down and see no green. We are supported—but stifled, deprived of oxygen in our self-imposed separation from death. Soles become burned and numb and tough like leather.
Until an earthquake, or time, or tree roots, break the asphalt, and the dead surface. Subliminal roots revolt, become superliminal, obvious. Only part pokes out, tangling the spiderweb-thin sticky divide between now and never again. Once tangled, there’s no returning to order, never a full separation. Re-asphalting will only repeat the cycle. Roots like crooked fingers tear at the blockage of memory
and feed the green death’s reminder that makes poison into life for us.
People keep posting about personal things lately, and I’m wanting to record this dream.
I was in my homecity. I probably took a trolley bus. I remember where this set of buildings was in relation to where I used to live, in the Telecenter quarter.
I was delivering something, money? and books to someone I barely knew. Don’t remember why; this isn’t the important part anyway. The same set of buildings contained a morgue. I was in this woman’s apartment, leaving the delivery for her – there was nobody else there. Then, suddenly (or rather, I don’t remember the transition), my mother was there, and my brother too, and it was a morgue-cum-burial ground.
People were being exhumed. I didn’t want to look, but my grandfather insisted on speaking to me, kept talking until I looked at him. He looked familiar, almost exactly as I remember him – except that his hair was disheveled, he had a hyoooge belly and was completely green, everything the same shade of lightish green, clothes and all. He was wearing a plaid flannel shirt, the large checkers of which must’ve been other colors, but now they were different shades of green. (The shirt looked suspiciously like one I have that used to belong to my dad. Except this one is red.) He wasn’t frightening; we talked.
My dad was also there, but I do not remember him.
I remember being frightened, in general. Spooked. And here I am, wanting to believe that I am not afraid of death.
What I hate most is lack of knowledge of what happens after.
Yesterday, I spent several hours looking through a card catalog in the Houghton. A card catalog! They don’t have a reliable electronic catalog for their manuscript collection, and were mildly apologetic. Actually, I find card catalogs amusing; it’s as close to time travel as we get. The one I looked through, a chronological catalog of all the manuscripts from the 9th century through the 16th, contained many deeds of property and endowments, fragments of the Bible and Koran, antisemitic laws and decrees issued in various European countries, biographies of classical authors written in the Middle Ages and Renaissance… It also had several singularities of note. I wrote some of them down; the Latin, where applicable, should be mostly easy to figure out:
- Miscellanea medica, alchemica, et astrologica. Bound in contemporary pigskin over wood boards.
- French, XV cent.: La somme des vices et des vertus.
- Cessdis, Jacobus de, fl. 1290. De ludo scacchorum. (Of the game of chess.) The binding record on this one states: "19 cent. half sheep."
- English, I think, manuscript on mercantile arithmetic.
- James IV, King of Scotland. Solemnity of the marriage of James and Margaret, daughter of Henry VII.
- Rules of a charity-school and cofraternity (I have to assume England here as well).
- Bradamante, Donato, 1444?-1514. A 1512 receipt for salary as architect of St. Peter’s.
- Raphael’s receipts for work done in the Vatican.
- Giovio, Paul, letter to Federigo II, duke of Mantua. "Sends medicine, announces that plague is over in Rome." (1524, so unlikely the Black Death – I wonder which plague?)
- Collection of Italian love poems addressed to prostitutes and servants, ca. 1561.
- Italian recipe book: "Contains recipes for perfumes, ointments, medicines, glass, bombs, alchemy, and iron tempering."
- A declaration of the state of Spain and Portugal, translated into English, 1608.
Blow my mind, Batman.
