Baffling Combustions

In this far ranging and fetching introduction to the term “swerve”—the first of two (saving its application to Lucretius and his brand of Epicurean thought to our next meeting)—we carve around the eruption of Mount Vesuvius (79 CE), the nature of sermons, the polysemy nature of the term, Brancusi’s “Bird in Space,” the Bill Murray-cast film adaption of “The Razor’s Edge,” Ross Macdonald’s short story “The Guilt-Edged Blond,” Paul Davies’ HOW TO MAKE A TIME MACHINE, The Hardy Boys, Dashiell Hammett’s “Flitcraft Parable,” the literary term “volta,” Sophocles’ “Oedipus Rex,” John Ashbery, chance and chaos processes, and variation on a line by Robert Creeley. To note, this call to swerve chronologically is our first session.

We open “gift” with a definition: “it is a displacement outside (or deep inside?) the realm of exchange that operates mysteriously, as distinct from ‘present’ it comes out of nowhere.” What we find inside is Charlie Haden and Kenny Barron’s “Night and the City,” Lewis Hyde on “Lucky Find,” Pauline theology, the moor behind the Bronte’s house, Ted Berrigan, Augustine, the gift of the knife, Frost’s “The Gift Outright,” a reading from an unpublished ms. by Peter Lamborn Wilson on the Yazidi religion, Zeus and Hermes-Thoth, John Clare, Jane’s Addiction’s Perry Farrell’s “The Gift” (the film), the Sabbath, a mantra of Brahmin bathing, the philosopher C.S. Pierce and a whiff of Vladimir Nabakov’s novel THE GIFT. This podcast ends with the word “ventilator,” or what we need now.

As we enter the Great Pause, here is a cast from last December wherein we reach into the depths and gonads of Earth/earth and its uncanny relationship to what’s “Ur,” including — among our personal earthly musings — Louis Untermeyer’s “Caliban in the Coal-Mines,” the nature of the Golem, Earthworks, Earthships, the Gaia Hypothesis, Essentialism, Chiffon margarine, THE WHOLE EARTH CATALOG, The Penguins’ “Earth Angel,” Walt Whitman’s “Urge, Urge, always the procreative urge!” (misquoted), the Laudato Si encyclical by Pope Francis on ecological consciousness, Pete Seeger and the Clearwater, Robin Hood, “The Mountains—grow unnoticed—” (757) by Emily Dickinson, moss and the moon. This session is dedicated to Baba Ram Dass - the American spiritual teacher, psychologist, and author of the ovarian BE HERE NOW - who had died the week of its making.

Here we throw words at the chariot, beginning with a review of this classic “supreme military weapon” emerging out of Eurasia about four thousand years back, before tackling its various archetypal, literary and artistic deployments. These include Plato’s chariot evocation as a way of explaining the soul’s construction; Emily Dickinson’s poem posthumously titled and adulterated as “The Chariot” (though we include a reading of its original lineation, words, and a missing stanza (no. 475)); the seat of Arjuna and Krishna’s conversation in the BHAGAVAD GITA; the Tarot card of this name; Erich von Däniken’s CHARIOTS OF THE GODS; Duchamp’s “Large Glass”; the Circus Maximus race in the film “Ben Hur”; the deployment of chariot in the 1915 parade of Suffragette’s up Fifth Avenue in New York City; and Bob Dylan's "115th Dream." You won’t want to miss our touching on much more ancient and contemporary lore as we seek to plumb the ongoing human fascination with this machine of imagination and violence.

In ANGEL we discuss this winged, pre-, supra- and post-human—-and needless to say fabulous--entity of primordial origin, touching on the Cone of Silence, the Catholic Encyclopedia, the Book of Enoch, Paul Tillich, Milton, the incarnation of evil, and Al-Hallaj, the Persian Sufi mystic martyred for proclaiming, in so many words, “I am Allah.” We speak of angelic sexual practice (if they have gender), the thesis of angels as representative of an influence field—-including Rilke’s meeting and intermingling with it—-and conclude with a reading of Bob Dylan’s “Three Angels.”

In BLAKE we touch and sometimes reach the work of the poet William Blake by way of his “Introduction” to his SONGS OF EXPERIENCE as well as “The Echoing Green” and “The Blossom” (from SONGS OF INNOCENCE), among others, as they may intersect with reference to Juliana Spahr, Robert Graves, Swedenborg, Bob Dylan, Druidism, child labor and the “dawn poem” (or Alba) as well as the importance of the “transvaluation of values” to what it means to turn our worlds around and look again around that which has no map except the one we speak into lines that transverse them.

Before too much time lapses on the election clock, we impart our recent WARREN - that is Elizabeth Ann Warren - in which we discuss, among other things, nothing you ever wanted to know about her and never thought to ask. Through the unique perspectives of astrology, William Irwin Thompson and some murky political calculations, etc., we examine her "fight," conversion experience - from capitalist water carrier to down-trodden champion - her nickname ("Datum'), comparisons to other candidates and current and former presidents - and generally thing having not much to do with Allen Ginsberg. Take heed, this session includes an insider's look from our very own former presidential contender, Sparrow. To note, there is here profane speech (bleeped), sorry.

"Walking" is from Henry David Thoreau’s essay of that name, though alternatively he called it “The Wild”—so “Walking the Wild” takes us to what lurks inside it all, including the origins of revolution and ownership in the tyrannies of industrial time and privacy. We also here (in this first of a two-part discussion) talk about walking itself as an act and about getting lost as well as how, Thoreau writes, “In wildness is the preservation of the world”— which was to become the motto of the Sierra Club. Thoreau is a bewilderer who postulates things about 150 years ahead of his time and saw this work as “…an introduction to all I may write hereafter.”

Picking up where we left off, in Part 1, discussing a walking that doesn’t involve walking, in “Walking 2” we continue our reading of Thoreau’s essay, touching on the monomyth, John Brown, Charles Olson, Emerson, the art of walking backwards, Robin Hood and Johnny Cash. Gilgamesh as well as the Australopithecus come up as well as Thoreau’s sense of a “new literature” — or we haven’t seen nothing yet.

Our “silent” exploration takes us from the word’s Latin origin and Medieval carryover into English in which it rooted and grew in at least two attitudes—the edgy and fuzzy—that appear to wrestle. How do we use silence and how does it use us? Excursions include, among others: The Lollards, penology/shunning, cosmic consciousness, mystical union, the New York City subway system, the Parsis’ Towers of Silence, “The Science Behind Why Awkward Silence Works,” the Bhagavad Gita and readings of John Ashbery’s “Some Trees” and Wallace Stevens’ “The Snow Man” (a little tricked out). Warning: This podcast includes swathes of “(silence)”…