Allen Ginsberg: 'The Best Minds of My Generation' (2017). Part II

Allen Ginsberg, The Best Minds of My Generation: A Literary History of the Beats, edited by Bill Morgan. New York: Grove Press, 2017. Foreword by Anne Waldman.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky. "The Idiot and The Brothers Karamazov were our favorite books then . . . (p. 101).

Visions of Cody. "I had the idea that Kerouac was influenced by Neal [Cassady] reading [Marcel] Proust aloud. In 1947 when Cassady was in town we had a copy of Scott Moncrieff's translation of Proust and Neal would read that aloud when we were high on grass. He read Proust very beautifully and . . . enjoyed the long organic sentences that were inclusive of many varieties of thought forms and associations that rose during the composition of the sentence. . . . as in [John] Milton, Proust used long sentences to include everything in his mind."  (pp. 105-106)

"When you hear yourself echoed in somebody else's indulgent, tender, sympathetic consciousness, you begin to appreciate yourself." (p. 115)

William S. Burroughs. "Burroughs ascribes Kerouac's enthusiasm and encouragement as the greatest single force in making him write, finally . . . Kerouac and I saw Burroughs as very shy, tender, and sweet, with good manners. Quiet with a sense of humor cutting through."  (p. 116)

Kerouac imagined writing an American Civil War book, with Burroughs as a "morphine-addicted . . . general." (pp. 120-121) 

Herman Melville and "American loneliness. The central image of that for Kerouac was everybody looking for 'the center of Saturday night in America' . . . in the back alley, under a redbrick building, under a neon sign, with nobody looking at him . . . which is where everybody wound up, unsatisfied." (pp. 121-122

"Visions of Cody is the most serious text we'll run into . . . Kerouac . . . undergoes a transfiguration and becomes his art, he ceases to be a guy writing at his art and becomes interchangeable with the art . . . His writing and his personality become identical and becomes a superprofessional in the sense that he's a saint of writing. (pp. 128-129)

And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks. For Burroughs, writing "was not so much . . . redemption, but . . . a communicative activity which linked him with me and other people, with the rest of humanity, with friends." He found writing to be more practical than "a romantic thing." (p. 153)

Burroughs "sees right through everything immediately with no illusions." (p. 164)

"Trace back along the word vine to find the source of control. Who started the whole maya, the illusion, and to what extent does language dictate to our sense of what we see, hear, smell." (p. 169)

Burroughs on New Orleans: "'The drivers orient themselves largely by the use of their horns, like bats. The residents are surly. The transient population is conglomerate and unrelated, so that you never know what sort of behavior to expect from anybody.'" (p. 171) 

Burroughs as visual writer. (pp. 179-180)

"The Waste Land is not much different from Burroughs . . . collage method . . . Apollinaire . . . I think that the thing Burroughs and Eliot have most in common is 'music down a windy street,' . . . spare, nostalgic, pungent images that will haunt you with an echo of time past." See also Saint-John Perse, Anabasis. (p. 188)

"His unconscious life and his every day life are merged. With Burroughs writing becomes a probe into consciousness, or a probe into depth." (p. 191)

". . . the entire fabric of appearance and phenomenon." (p. 199) 

Today's Rune: The Mystery Rune. 

Allen Ginsberg: 'The Best Minds of My Generation' (2017). Part I

Allen Ginsberg, The Best Minds of My Generation: A Literary History of the Beats, edited by Bill Morgan. New York: Grove Press, 2017. Foreword by Anne Waldman. 

Anne Waldman: "Denver, the place of all possible crossroads." (p. x)  "The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics. (p. xi)

Each core member of the Beats "literarily had had some form of break in the ordinary nature of consciousness . . . as the central preoccupation, concern with the very nature of consciousness and with what you would call visions or visionary  experience." (P. 26)

"The element of aggression, of ideological insistency, was considered unhip and by unhip I mean lacking in awareness." (p. 29)

"I'm thinking of 'salt peanuts, salt peanuts,' or some squiggle of rhythm in [Jack] Kerouac's head that follows that off accenting, the irregular accenting, the noniambic accenting of [Dizzy] Gillespie." (p. 35)

With the death of his father, Kerouac "got interested in becoming the recording angel of the dream scene, and began recording his dreams, literally, as well as the dream of life itself." (p. 44) 

"The world hanging in space, the skyscrapers hanging in space . . . you'd realize you were not standing in New York City but you were standing in the middle of the universe, the vast open sky . . . It was the first discovery [by the main Beats, in the 1940s] of a crack in consciousness, that we were made of the same suchness, that we were ghosts. ' ' There's this early hint in On the Road of mind which is already Buddhist-oriented. Appreciating the phantom nature of things, of ourselves, an awareness of the mortal . . ." (p. 52)   

On meeting Jack: "Kerouac was a very mellow, shrewd, observant, tolerant person, so there was mutual curiosity." (p. 55)

Kerouac later "used to stand in the backyards at night when everybody was eating supper and realized that everybody was a ghost eating ghost food. Or that he was a ghost watching living people." (p. 56)

On meeting William S. Burroughs: "When we all went to see Burroughs, it was for that laconic, mellowed-out, cooled-out experience." (p. 86) 

Louis-Ferdinand Céline as a major influence. "I think it's one of the great moments of Western literature, when the hero wakes up in the middle of the battle and realizes that everyone around him is crazy and figures he better get out of there. I would say that is hipness, that attitude . . ." (p. 88)  

". . . little puppets of eternity, clawing each other in their vanity, with great clouds brewing overhead in the empty sky." (p. 96)

". . . panoramic consciousness or time consciousness . . ." (p. 98)

Kerouac: ". . . the flitting ghost-ends of a brood who will grow . . ." (p. 99)

Today's Rune: Wholeness. 

Café retrouvé: Patti Smith's 'M Train' (2015)

Patti Smith, M Train. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2015.

A writer's life: Patti Smith's 

Peregrine

Pilgrimage 

Coffee

Dreams

Memory

Air 

Movement 

Stillness

Ink

Rain

Artifact

Time Regained/Le Temps retrouvé

El café veracruzano fue pionero para tener una denominación de origen en México

Inamorato, mother, son. "I made my coffee in her pot and sat and wrote at a card table in the kitchen by the screen door. A photograph of Albert Camus hung next to the light switch . . . My son, seeing him every day, got the idea that Camus was an uncle who lived far away . . . "(pages [71-72]). 

A quarter-mile from the canal house, coffee at the 7-11. The one at 25000 Jefferson Avenue, or the one at 23019 near the Kroger at Nine Mile, both in St. Clair Shores, Michigan? 

Confusingly, Patti Smith mentions the St. Clair River, but I think of it more as Lake St. Clair.  

I remember early morning runs, when it was cold outside, to pick up coffee at both of these 7-11 stores. And, when it was warmer out, an abandoned fish-and-tackle shop just off Jefferson.

"To me it looked like Tangier, though I had never been there. I sat on the ground in the corner surrounded by low white walls, shelving real time, free to rove the smooth bridge connecting past and present. My Morocco. I followed whatever train I wanted" (page [72]).

I remember all the people I met or knew around there. And social spaces. Steve's Back Room. Fishbones. Golden Chopsticks. Andiamo's. Pat O'Brien's. The public library and to the north, the Blue Goose. To the west, Shores Inn. Cedar Garden. The US Post Office. Hallmark's. El Charro. Grecian Table. The Bowling Alley and Linda's attached. Tim Horton. A connection with Van Morrison's father. Ice on the lake.

Snap! Ding the bell. You don't need to go home, but you can't stay here forever. 

My favorite coffee for some time, Peet's out of San Francisco, celebrates fifty years, or fifty-one this year, of making coffee. There's something about their blend and roasting process that makes me love the taste of their French, House and Major Dickason's Blend in particular.  

The best single coffee I ever tasted was in Italy -- espresso. The worst and weakest, in Pan Handle Texas and in Oklahoma. 

When I was growing up, my parents made coffee often, let's not forget.  On special occasions, a big percolator was set up to keep it flowing. 

Haven't missed a cup of coffee for more than a day since I was seventeen. Something to look forward to every morning, sort of like a little daily miracle of life, resumed. 

Today's Rune: Defense. Veracruz coffee: see El Universal Veracruz (9/9/2011), link here.

From Here On Out

I remember one evening in South Philadelphia when my father and I were nearly clipped by a speeding car in the parking lot of a stadium after a football game. Relieved that we'd come away uninjured, my father remarked: "Imagine our lives ebbing out here, in this parking lot . . ." His tone was one of bemusement; I imagine now a twinkle in his eye. The absurdity of life wrapped up in an instant: akin to a statement Winston Churchill made via radio in 1939:  "It is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma; but perhaps there is a key." Churchill was speaking of Russia, but he might just as well have been speaking about life.

My father was very attuned to language and communications. He spent much of his working life in advertising and marketing, so this makes perfect sense. He would hear a word or phrase and repeat it aloud, followed by a little commentary: "that's a good word" or "that's a good phrase," for example.

I remember having elliptical conversations with him about the news and media presentation, advertisements and public relations' "spin." When it came to phrases like "at the end of the day" and "going forward" we both agreed that they were stale and unimaginative. What they are is reflexive -- virtually empty fillers. 

Clichés, Idioms, and euphemisms abound, whether the speaker or writer is aware of them or not.  Phrases like "at the end of the day" support William S. Burroughs' notion of the "word virus" in how quickly they spread and become pandemic, ubiquitous "across" geographic space thanks to global communications. 

"In any case," here is a sampling from some of my recent field notes about language usage and contemporary social activity.

Yesterday, I attended a poetry slam and found it interesting that two speakers read poems using cellphones as platforms for their texts. 

I've seen several patrons using mobile phones to take pictures of books or catalog records, and have found this so clever that I now do the same thing -- handy when I want to make sure to remember my parking space at an airport, for instance.

Marshall McLuhan would have us keep aware of how we communicate, the modes, the methods, the devices, the medium (or plural media) and so on. 

Instead of "going forward," how about the older expression, "from here on out?" 

I like creative mimicry in auditory exchanges or outright conversation: instead of saying "a climate of fear," I heard someone say, "It was a calamity of fear. . ."  Must have been what this person had misheard broadcast(ed) somewhere, and tried to mimic, thereby "coming up with" a creative variation on a stale phrase, letting us see the old phrase in a new way. Can you dig?

OH (an acronym for overheard used via Twitter, etc.): "They really did a number on him." 

"Whatever happened to the charwoman and the ragman?"

My father would sometimes respond to some joker on TV, or in recalling an on the job encounter with one: "What a piece of work that guy is" -- hearkening back to Hamlet, Prince of Denmark (Act II, Scene 2):

What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason, how infinite in faculty! In form and moving how express and admirable! In action how like an Angel! in apprehension how like a god! The beauty of the world! The paragon of animals! And yet to me, what is this quintessence of dust?

There are words that are stale and words that are fresh, words refashioned, words reincarnated, phrases reanimated, and others that are unceremoniously put into suspended animation or exiled, willy-nilly, to some terrible Siberia of forgotten words.

Donald Delbert France (1934-2013), RIP. 

Today's Rune: Flow.   

McLuhan: A Guide for the Perplexed

And now it's time to step out of one alternate universe (whatever we were last discussing) and into another: that as perceived by Marshall McLuhan. 

First off, keep in mind that he was both Catholic and Canadian. 

Secondly, that his books are fascinating, but so are his media appearances. His spirit moves within a universe parallel to yet also distinct from that inhabited by the spirit of William S. Burroughs. 

Regarding Language & Communication. 

McLuhan: "The media is the message" and "The media is the massage." 

Burroughs: "The word is now a virus," the cut-up, and "towers open fire."

W. Terrence Gordon's McLuhan: A Guide for the Perplexed (New York: Continuum, 2010) delves into the background and context of McLuhan's ideas; swats away criticisms that Gordon believes are due to misunderstanding of McLuhan's train of thought; and follows McLuhan's evolution and extension of ideas and his revision of older ones. He particularly shows the continuity in McLuhan's work, beyond seeming oddities, randomness and diversions.

Gordon's book "rekindled" my interest in McLuhan. I just happened to pick up a physical 3D copy of the book -- rather than read it on a Kindle -- but either way, it's slow going at first, picks up speed, then finishes off with play.

McLuhan was very much into art and artists as well as science and communication. 

Start anywhere. How about page 121?

". . . art is the sharpening of clichés into probes, into new forms that stimulate new awareness." 

I agree completely here: take something "ordinary" or "routine" and show it, or see it, in a new way, employing a fresh perspective, looking at it from a different angle. 

That is, change how we see or express something from an "automatic everyday way" into another way, so that we no longer "take things for granted" but are "granted" expanded consciousness.  

For anything, anywhere, anytime: stop being "used to it" and start getting "new to it."

"Escape into understanding" (page 95).

Some nitty gritty:

'Media are powerful agents of change in how we experience the world, how we interact with each other, how we use our physical space, how we use our physical senses -- the same senses that media extend. They must be studied for their effects, because their interaction obscures those effects and deprives us of the control required to use media effectively' (page 107).

Attention must be paid to what we're doing and how we're doing it. 

All one need do is consider, if one is old enough, some of the daily behavioral changes engendered by the deployment of mobile digital devices and wireless communication, even within a single decade, especially in the early 21st century. 

If young enough (i.e. too young to have lived through the analog to digital morp), consider horse and foot culture vs. rail and steamship culture vs. automobile and atomic bomb "drive-thru" culture.

Armed with imagination, just about anyone young, old or in between can "escape [bleary everyday myopia] into [sharper, more farsighted] understanding."       

There's much much more, but I'll stop here for the purposes of inspiration beyond "pattern recognition." 

One can only absorb so much at one time without chucking all of it out the window, becoming a litter bug, and who wants that? Not I, said the Fly. 

Today's Rune: The Mystery Rune. 

Nik Sheehan: FLicKeR (2008)

FLicKeR (2008), a trippy Canadian documentary directed by Nik Sheehan, delivers a good, eclectic soundtrack via Edmund Eagan, a mix of colorful visuals (archival included) and thoughtful interviews. Plenty of intense, interesting stuff to mull over. 

Watching FLicKeR or a Dream Machine directly, it's hard to escape the occasional bombardment of light -- you may need to close your eyes at times, or feel nauseous. Those who peer directly into the Dream Machine are said in the film to have about a one in four thousand chance of being thrown into a seizure -- especially if prone to epilepsy. Best to keep one's eyes closed in front of the spinning lights and colors. And: unless you want to go blind, don't stare into the Sun. Or so it is said. 

DJ Spooky / That Subliminal Kid

Included:

Kenneth Anger

William S. Burroughs (archival)

Cybernetic Tortoise (1950)

Dream Machine

John Dunbar

Sophie Duplaix

Marianne Faithfull

John G. Geiger (book: Chapel of Extreme Experience: A Short History of Stroboscopic Light and the Dream Machine) 

John Giorno

Brion Gysin (archival)

Brian Jones’ spirit energy

Jean-Jaques Lebel

Genesis P-Orridge & Psychic TV

Iggy Pop

Lee Renaldo

Floria Sigismondi (The Runaways) 

Ian Sommerville (archival)

DJ Spooky aka That Subliminal Kid

Stooges

And others! 

Today's Rune: Wholeness. 

Ron Mann's 'Poetry in Motion' (1982)

Ron Mann's Poetry in Motion is a fun documentary sampler of poets, poetry, readings and music. As one might suspect, it's a mixed bag -- I fast forwarded through a couple performances  -- but overall a groovy experience (no joke).

Bukowski opens the ball, drinking, smoking and musing at home: 

Reading the poets has been the dullest of things. Even reading the great novelists . . . I said Tolstoy is supposed to be special? . . . I really try to understand. I mean, and many of the great poets of the past, I've read their stuff, I've read it -- all's I get is a goddamned headache and boredom; I really feel sickness in the pit of my stomach. I say, there's some trick going on here . . . this is not true; this is not real; it's not good.

Bukowski's quips are interwoven throughout the film, providing comic relief.

The performers:

Amiri Baraka (who just died in 2014) with sax and drums
Anne Waldman 
Ted Berrigan (who died in 1983)
Kenward Elmslie
Ed Sanders (also of The Fugs)
Helen Adam (utterly strange and interesting)
Tom Waits (early on)
William S. Burroughs
Christopher Dewdney
Michael Mcclure (who co-wrote "Mercedes Benz" with Janis Joplin and Bob Neuwirth)
Ted Milton
Robert Creeley (died in 2005)
John Cage
Four Horseman (a poem made of noises)
Michael Ondaatje
Jayne Cortez (died in 2012) with  guitar, bass and drums
Diane DiPrima with piano and slides
John Giorno
Ntozake Shange with piano and dancers
Gary Snyder
Allen Ginsberg with Canadian band The Ceedees (guitar, bass and drums)
Jim Carroll (died in 2009)
Miguel Algarin

One of the surprising highlights is Ginsberg singing, off-key, an outraged and joyous punk-like catalog of global injustices that feels completely contemporary. Let's just say that he would not have been too surprised by recent developments.

DVD extras include an interview with the director and Poetry in Motion II (more on the latter soon).

Today's Rune: Protection. 
  

Jennifer Baichwal's 'Let It Come Down: The Life of Paul Bowles' (1998)

"Other people's indifference is the only horror." -- Paul Bowles (1948). 

Paul Bowles (1910-1999) and Jane (Auer) Bowles (1917-1973) led, by mainstream standards, bizarre lives. Jennifer Baichwal's Let It Come Down: The Life of Paul Bowles (1998) helps us catch glimpses, hear echoes and, particularly in the DVD extras, hear directly from Paul Bowles through a series of Baichwal's questions and Bowles' answers. The latter reminds me of Gore Vidal (1925-2012) in a way -- maybe it's the wry sense of humor.

Jane Bowles wrote fiction, letters and a play. A good place to start might be My Sister's Hand in Mine: The Collected Works of Jane Bowles, 2005. In Bernardo Bertolucci's The Sheltering Sky (1990), she's played memorably by Debra Winger; John Malkovich stands in for Paul Bowles, whose 1949 novel the movie is (more or less) based upon.

Paul Bowles had distinct periods in his life. Just to hit a few: in Paris with Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, where one of his assigned responsibilities was to watch their pets. Still bitter about the pet-watching in his eighties, he quips: "I hate poodles anyway. I think they're revolting animals."

He was, too, a musician and composer, associated with Aaron Copeland and Tennessee Williams.

Then he settled permanently in Morocco, where he wrote several books and also did translation work. 

Jane Bowles was somewhat like Joan (Vollmer) Burroughs, whose second and final husband was William S. Burroughs -- both drank prodigiously and both died young (the latter at 28 years old, the former at 40).  

p.s. Caution: Artists on Board. 

Today's Rune: Separation (Reversed). 

What Happened to Kerouac? (1986, 2012)

Regarding Richard Lerner and Lewis MacAdams' What Happened to Kerouac? (1986, 2012), it's no joke to say this is an "indispensable" cultural library of primary Beat Generation sources. 

Beyond the insights into Jack Kerouac as person and writer, the viewer is treated to the wide range of personalities and dispositions rendering them: from Gregory Corso, a "real pisser," to the more reserved but very serious minded Michael McLure, from the affable priest Spike Morrissette to the most cogent of all, Ann Charters. There is also plenty of archival footage to accompany the literal voice of Kerouac.

Particularly in the expanded 2012 edition, there is an astonishing array of good stuff in here. There is an accompanying website.

Today's Rune: Movement.
     

William S. Burroughs: Commissioner of Sewers (1991)

Klaus Maeck's William S. Burroughs: Commissioner of Sewers (1991) renders a good introduction to Burroughs, in which one may either like what he has to say or hate it -- there's little in between. The film weaves together a solid, interesting interview conducted by Jürgen Ploog, author of Cola-Hinterland (1969) and Sternzeit 23 (1975), with samples of public readings and archival film footage. Everything works together like a nifty cut-up energized by palimpsestic language.  

Table of contents:

The Do Rights

A Writer

Western Lands

The Writer

The Cut Ups

Roosevelt After Inauguration

Young Writers

Young People

The Word

Thanksgiving Prayer

Travelling

Dr. Benway

The Future

This may be of interest to any writer or artist, to creative people with open minds (assuming ears not offended by colorful choice of diction). Burroughs touches on differences between The Tibetan Book of the Dead and The Egyptian Book of the Dead, class warfare even after death (only the rich and powerful get mummies, but mummies are fragile), and -- in the post-credit coda, space travel -- don't miss the jellyfish astronauts! 

Today's Rune: Growth. 

'Call Me Burroughs: A Life' / Barry Miles (2014)

Clocking in at 718 pages divided into fifty-two chapters, endwords, notes, bibliography and index, Barry Miles' Call Me Burroughs: A Life (New York: Twelve, 2014) delivers a treasure trove of biographical detail, cultural history and social context. One of my favorite big reads of 2014. 

Within this hefty tome, we find everything from little William S. Burroughs' childhood visions (a la William Blake) of a green deer; his calling of the toads; and instrumental collaborations with other artists -- Allen Ginsberg of course, Jack Kerouac for a time and Brion Gysin, among many others. 

In 1937 while in Prague, Burroughs had an emergency appendectomy and remained in hospital for seventeen days: "before antibiotics, peritonitis was lethal, so he was fortunate" (page 65).  The same year, he married Ilse Herzfeld Klapper, who was Jewish, in order to help her escape to the USA from the encroaching Nazis. 

That's "just a little taste." 

By the 1970s, the period when Burroughs was living at "The Bunker" in New York City and also associated with the Hotel Chelsea, he was befriended by Debbie Harry and Patti Smith, in the burgeoning music scene (which I've always found interesting). They remained friends, too. 

In his final years based in Kansas, Burroughs was visited by Kurt Cobain, a highly emotional "Burroughs fan." Given how weird Burroughs himself could be, one can't help but want to laugh or cry in response to his quip, after Cobain drove off from their meeting in October 1993: "There's something wrong with that boy; he frowns for no good reason" (page 620). Cobain committed suicide about six months later, a member of the so-called twenty-seven club.

There are lots of other precious tidbits peppered throughout Call Me Burroughs. I hadn't realized that Arthur C. Clarke (2001: A Space Odyssey, 1968) was gay, for instance. Nor had I quite grasped just how dramatically Jack Kerouac had broken off from Burroughs and Ginsberg, for so many of his last years, largely because of Kerouac's (and his mother's) freak-outs. 

Thank you, Barry Miles!

Today's Rune: Breakthrough.    

Häxan (1922) / Witchcraft Through the Ages (1968)

Benjamin Christensen's silent movie Häxan (1922) clocks in at 87 minutes (or is it 104?); via Antony Balch, it morphs into a 77-minute version: Witchcraft Through the Ages (1968), wickedly narrated by William S. Burroughs and accompanied by a jazz soundtrack courtesy of Jean-Luc Ponty and Daniel Humair. Both versions are weird and fascinating and come together on one DVD thanks to the Criterion Collection.

"Häxan integrates fact, fiction, objective reality, hallucination, and different levels of representation -- all within a first-person discourse. . . The mixture of narrative modes . . . is astonishing for its freedom and audacity." - Gillian Anderson, liner notes, Criterion Collection DVD, 2001. 

"At times, Häxan appears to be a literal depiction of the imaginings of people of medieval Europe . . "  Sometimes funny, sometimes scary, sometimes both (the Devil's obscenely flickering tongue, for example). Crazy cool stuff, indeed, ending with little psychiatric episodes from the 20th century.

Happy Hallowe'en!

Today's Rune: Initiation.

Shadowplay: The Elusive Origins of a 'Jungian' Quip, Part II

"What you resist, persists." ~ Attributed to Carl Jung. As noted in the previous post, I've been seeking the origin of this phrase, thought and idea, and have found it in many places, but without further documentation.

Synchronicity -- an idea Jung definitely espoused -- has converged, thanks to: recent conversations; an article I'm writing about Edward William Johnston (1799-1867); and Barry Miles' epic tome, Call Me Burroughs: A Life (New York: Twelve, 2014), which I finished reading a couple of weeks ago.

Johnston, because of his pertinent essay "Genealogy of Ideas” Southern Literary Messenger: Devoted to Every Department of Literature and the Fine Arts. Volume VIII, No.  9 (September 1842): pages 548-555. Richmond, Virginia: T.W. White. Link here. Ideas have a traceable "genealogy," Johnston posits. They rarely appear out of the blue, except for in their first incarnation.

Burroughs, because of his idea of the "word virus:" that words and ideas spread through time and space as a virus.

Which reminds me that Ebola has been around since 1976 -- and was widely covered in the news at the time.

In turn, AIDS is now traced back to the Belgian Congo in the 1920s. (See James Gallaher's "Aids: Origin of pandemic 'was 1920s Kinshasa,'" BBC News (2 October 2014). Link here.

So how about the "resist, persists" quip (and its variations) attributed to Carl Jung? Where can it be traced back to?

In the previous post, I left off with this, from Robert J. and Alex W. Fraser's As Others See Us: Scots of the Seaway Valley (Ontario: Beamsville Express, 1959):

What you resist, Persists
All though [thought] is energy
All things are in Motion
. . . . .

And I earlier noted the widespread use -- either with no attribution or with uncited attribution pointing to Jung -- of this "word virus," especially in the last ten to twenty years. 

Here's a latter-day repetition of both elements that occurs after the 1959 book, As Others See Us:

"What you resist, persists." ~ Neale Donald Walsch, Conversations with God: An Uncommon Dialogue, Book 1 (Charlottesville, Va.: Hampton Roads Publishing Company, 1996), page 100.  

"1. All thought is energy.
2. All things are in motion.
3. All time is now."

Neale Donald Walsch, Conversations with God: An Uncommon Dialogue, Book 3 (Charlottesville, Va.: Hampton Roads Publishing Company, 1998), page 114.

Walsch gives no citations.

Which leads me to believe, for now, that all three of these texts are drawing from older sources, perhaps via back channels, such as ideas from earlier "New Thought" and "Power of Positive Thinking" texts. In other words, these same words are used in the same order, but neither As Others See Us (1959) nor Conversations with God (1996, 1998) are their originators, rather they are transmitters, "infected" by earlier "carriers" of statements they spell out verbatim.

The true origins of these statements will either eventually come to light, or they will remain hidden in mystery.  Digitization of older texts will continue to be useful in figuring out these kinds of genealogies of ideas and word viruses -- helping us "get to the bottom of things." 

Today's Rune: Flow.  Illustration at top from Thought-forms by Annie Besant and Charles Webster Leadbeater (London: Theosophical Publishing Society, 1905).  

Zen in the Art of Writing (Take II)

From Ray Bradbury's Zen in the Art of Writing (1990, 1992), let's consider his LIST.

Before the list, there's Twyla Tharp's warmup exercise, BECOME A VERB. Take a verb and perform it -- so suggests the dancer-choerographer for getting ideas to (rather literally) flow. Example: Wiggle. Another example: Twist. Another: Duck. Another: Cover.

And now THE LIST, "Trusting my subconscious [and Muse] to give bread, as it were, to the birds" (Bradbury, Zen, page 17).

Here goes (caps in original):

THE LAKE. THE NIGHT. THE CRICKETS. THE RAVINE. THE ATTIC. THE BASEMENT. . . THE BABY. THE CROWD . . . THE CARNIVAL. THE CAROUSEL. THE DWARF. . . THE SKELETON (Ditto, page 17).

From THE LIST, Bradbury derived the setting or "spine" of a story or core idea. Pretty neat, Ray.

Here's a random "rip" from one of my sets of saved lists, mostly a compilation of notes from scraps of paper, napkins, notecards, etc. It's sort of like William S. Burroughs and Brian Gysin's cut-up method, or halfway there. Looking at these strings of words, sometimes I know the origin, sometimes not. Sometimes I know how to pick them up, sometimes I'd have to start afresh:

el griffe tampico pirates

otters water dogs

checkpointe charlie on the esplanade

preservation hall

howlin’ wolf

the fat of the land

the dirty shames

general kirkland

the remains of ira slack

“I find the film in the editing" -- David Charron -- "I have to develop a structure”

“it just came to me, man”

Angelman syndrome

guy on wheelchair and american flag,  whipping behind cars, flies up and into the smoke shop!

“He ain't got no impulse control”

fugue state

Even Those Who Remember

History Are Still

Doomed to Repeat It

LA, Hamburg -- zen

let's it speak for itself - still, choices

theatreless theatre

this is the way it is

things that are lost

in search of lost time

Paris, Texas, close to the Red River

uniformed assassins

pearls and swine
voilent voiler veil to veil  veiled past
king of hearts

june has left the building

meritocracy vs. aristocracy

who died and made you king?

alexander kent novels

bats and rats are where it's at

pensive
1776 Ben Franklin
humpty dumpty

the difference between hessians and modern mercenaries

mercy for and administering to the afflicted

Cyrus

dusty springfield, the cake

when the battle is over (who shall wear the crown?)

now gather round people and listen to this . . .

play guitar play

“If baseball was any slower paced it'd be farming”

*     *     *     *     *     *     *     *     *     *

Have you tried lists? I've got lists of proper names -- people, places, etc. -- and various words I want to remember; phrases; slang; core ideas; reminders; remembrances; and references. It never stops -- "until the end." How about yours?

Today's Rune: Wholeness.