Allen's Text 79

©2006 – Allen Sutterfield

Thoughts of actually beginning a novel - Reader, I’ll call it. An autobiographical fantasy (and learn how to type while you are at it.). If only I could. Write, that is. I can’t even write a letter, how can I write a novel? Here I am writing on the back of pages written months ago, and what is on the other side” Bunch of quotes from a novel! That’s me all over, Readetr. As close as I8ll ever get perhaps ( that’s I’ll, not I8ll ), goddamn but the energies are fierce this present.

A mouth tomorrow
devouring you
cause I don’t see you

I’d always goof it, like that, love poem getting in the way, instead of the really straight book, maybe a story even, I want to write, and then I’d double the jeopardy by saying I didn’t have any choice in the matter, which you are never supposed to say, especially if its true. But I can’t fool me that easily anymore and so I can only say I admire the stick to it craftsman national anthem of Completed Projects and disciplined honing of crude wood never lost sight of, else you can’t hone at all. So it’s an anti-writing writing I’d be for but unable to do, since I’m only a reader and not the writer I often fancy myself to be, too lazy for the real work of guiding words, I’ll just have to own up at all beginnings, no, no, just the one, that it can’t be done, what I’d like to do.

And is one never to be in charge of himself again? Or for the first time? Who can live forever between the lines? Where is there a body to steady the inconstant moon? Words flow so easy some hours, and tables rock with the weight of all that typing. But they go nowhere. Come from, go to. Go to, Go to. If you remember it’ll go down in pharaoh’s land, where some of it began. Chronicles in an old title. Someone drops a carnival of picks, running woman to his talk, he talks smoothly. How can I do it? Write the book I mean? Drift. Drift. Away from and towards the dooby self. “Don’t gild the lily!”

Words I read but it sounds like I heard them, I who never really heard anything beyond the usual things you are supposed to hear, in reading you don’t hear much, it’s a deafening exercise, impossible to talk to anyone while he’s reading ( or she’s too ) and if the reader’s always reading? There you are, or rather, there I am. Reader. What a fate. And discovered too early, rather than too late, for if I’d discovered it later, sing “ When I’m 64”, then it would have been too late to worry about it, if you wake late enough in the dream it doesn’t matter …as much. You’d still like to know how it would have worked our that way, but a good long rest is a positive pleasure, enough to make it alright that you have to get up afterall just when you thought you’d settled in for good. So you wake up at 64 or 76 or 89 or way up there at the century mark itself and you say, I’ll be damned! I’ve been asleep my whole life! But what a dream! Hmmmnn. No chance of getting back into it now, though. Rude awakening? No, no, it was gentle enough, now that it’s over and I’m up on my feet scratching my balls in the early morning sun since it seems I didn’t sleep with any clothes on, thank god. I would have wanted it that way, raw I mean, in the good old naked sense of the word. A hundred years old! Might as well have been a day, now I’m awake. But I am only 38, not even that, it’s my 38th summer, or should I say it was my 38th when I awoke? It’s such an awkward age, to wake up as I mean, because you are not yet old, old enough to have had the good bad long dream, and you are not young enough for it to be only one more beginning, the way it used to be, in the dream. No, you might have known it, you’re just 38 years, or not even that, and there’s nothing can be done about it, you’re up out of bed, there’s the curtainless window, one of three in your room, a bay jutting out into every day, the old cock stands up, rising to the sun’s occasion. though it shrinks down quickly enough once you hit the john. and there you go, your whole life has been reading! Read Your life Away! And all you can do is take a leak when you wake up at the fact.

Is love a project?
Is it even a question?
Is the world itself still possible?
What did happen to it anyway?

Or are these glass splinters all over my crushed body evidence of some beginning fall through a skylight?
...round smug hips in her fading jeans I still get a stir per sterns but alas, no assifaction. Joyce was the name of a cousin before I learned to read.
The reader is always in a dream, he reads his own life as he reads books and he never really knows if what he’s doing any moment is not merely something he’s reading sitting or lying somewhere in a book. For reading is the civilized cunt from which the modern sensibility—isolated in at least one case, gentle reader—keeps trying to be born, or extract itself in some other fashion. Though in words the reader tells himself it’s to get himself into a cunt I am trying for. in stopping reading. The other half is, turn it into (return it to) experience.

…blue as robin’s egg, the turning mind
in and out of world, and words…
Afterall promotion is the linch pin and Ed’s Big Machine, and there are a few handfuls of words to stuff down glib craws always yerking for grainy tidbits. Caricature act. Then there’s always a love story to read as well.
I don’t know.
It all seems possible, this minute, may stay so long as I stay here in the New Harmony Bar but my beer’s been drunk and it be time to pay pee and mosey, ‘scuse me.

“Where you comin’ off from?”
“Just south of nubbin’, little lady, if you must know. And yourself?”


Sex in April gales of snow and chill.
Against a tree in the park, in the dark.

The Stinging of Bees

Eros, the primeval son of Chaos hadn’t notice the Bee sleeping among his favorite roses, distracted by the appearance of a graceful nymph, her skin soft and scented as the roses’ velvet petals.

It was not the thorn of the rose but the sting of the awakened Bee that struck his little finger as he reached to brush the magic of a nascent flower.

Lamenting loudly he ran, then flew above the rose bushes howling at the heavens, crying for his beloved adoptive mother, Aphrodite:

" Mother, I’m undone, I’m undone and soon shall perish… It was a snake that savaged me, a little tiny snake with wings, the beast the farmers call a Bee…"

He hollered and sobbed until unmoved the love-godess answered: “If the sting of the Bee hurts you so much, Eros, think you not of the pain suffered by those stung by the arrows of your bow?

Adapted from: The Anakreontea

Allen's Text 42

©Allen Sutterfield

A man carries many lives within him. They are of necessity limited, however encompassing any given one might be, because each is a separate burning light, the man himself being not merely these lights but the darkness that contains them.

Birth of the Butterflies

A Dreamtime Myth

When the world was new, all the animals and birds had one common language and there was no death. One day a young cockatoo fell from a tree and broke its neck. All the animals and birds gathered around but failed to awaken the creature they thought was sleeping.

There was a meeting; the wise-ones speculated and then decided the spirits had taken back the cockatoo to be changed into a different form. Everyone accepted this as a reasonable explanation, but to prove the theory the leaders asked for volunteers to imitate the dead cockatoo by going up to sky for a whole winter.

During that time they would not be allowed to see, hear, smell or taste anything, in the spring they would return to relate their experience to the others. The caterpillars offered to try the experiment and went up in the sky in a huge cloud.

The winter passed and on the first day of spring a pair of excited dragonflies announced to the assembled animals and birds that the caterpillars were returning with new bodies. Soon more dragonflies arrived leading back into camp myriads of white, yellow, red, blue and green creatures --- the first butterflies; proof that the spirits had changed the caterpillar’s bodies into another form.

The butterflies clustered on the trees and bushes, everything looked so happy and colourful that the wise-ones decreed it must always be so, and so the caterpillars spend winter in cocoons preparing to change into beautiful butterfliesat at the first sign of spring.

A Martyrdom

©2006 – Allen Sutterfield

And given over to the guards She went silently, the dark Hood dull in gleam of axe Stood still with eyes only:

Wood planks reflected steps Towards a doom, resounded As in a hollow room her quietness, Paler than moon her face

Took the gazes unsmiling And aloof: the sun watched, Played on the sparkling blade: People watched suddenly afraid:

One clean swish through air Tight with unbreathing and wish Of high men severed the sun In clotted fact: dead: done.

Allen's Text 64 - Part 1

©2006 – Allen Sutterfield

On the plain, bare, ugly brown covers of the Journal Volumes Winter had left him, Arthur had pasted various colored pages, each the exact size of the cover. The first of these was a Tibetan mandala from a tantric book he had long ago cut up.

Two bodhisattvas, one in either upper corner, extended benevolent hands, one left, one right, downwards towards the immense circular mandala that, Arthur guessed, was the world itself. The mandala was composed of five circles, each varie-colored; in the centre of all the circles was a square, inside of which were rectangles, inside of which were triangles. At the very center was another series of circles, three of them, inside the third of which was the nine-petalled lotus, the ninth petal itself being the exact center of the whole mandala. There were strange little umbrella-shaped objects, both surrounding and inside the inner circles, and one of these was at he centre of the ninth petal. He had no idea what they symbolized, they looked alternately like soft brushes and ceiling lamps. There were ten outside the square containing the inner three circles; there were five inside the square, four at the cardinal points, the fifth, top downward, in the center circle.

The picture’ bright colors were faded, scuffed by years of wear and tear, so that Brother Antonius could get only an imperfect impression of the original beauty. But as with all things once truly beautiful, enough of the original force remained to powerfully set off this journal among all the volumes. He had paused a long time before even opening it, the cover gave him pause, and seemed to open up a new dimension in this whole peculiar fixation Brother Antonius found himself unable to escape. The papers that had fallen to him literally from the sky, the two lives involved so erratically yet relentlessly, the strange power of what he assumed to be unpublished writings, which had given him such unexpected pleasure and pain, and which were eventually to led him far away from his desert retreat, came to represent, in spite of himself, a whole “other world” he seemed to have known but could not in any way consciously account for. Of course reincarnation immediately suggested itself as a possible explanation, but initially he dismissed this possibility as unacceptable, it was either romantic fantasy or the limits of ordinary logic.

Allen's Text 64 - part 2

copyright2006 - Allen Sutterfield

In twenty years he had read through the whole lot innumerable times, some parts perhaps a thousand tomes. Yet, when he finally gave all of them over to Alfred and Marcia, he knew then as one work, despite their randomness, their beguiling impenetrabilities. His brilliant memory gave him exact recall of the myriad incidents recorded there, and he could quote whole passages of words qua words. He was however unable to finally determine which of the two incidents or words—was the primary focus of the jumbled mass.

“The only way I could possibly do it, is to have ALL the pages, notebooks, journals, scrapbooks out and visible at one time, in one big room—Scrooge in his money bins—and even then, to have several years, or say an INDEFINITE TIME PERIOD available, and other needs (if not WANTS) taken care of who knows how, leaving me full time for concentration: then, with that only as my life, my work could be written. It will never happen. It could only happen in a novel, a bad novel at that, and sothat work will not, con not be written. Even if “LIFE” provided all the externals, ”LIFE” can do nothing about the internal quirks and quarks. But simply because it cannot be written by me does not mean it does not exist. Great books always happen like this, they are impossible for decades, for scores of years, dreamed of and began and abandoned by writer after writer—then suddenly, someone LIVES THE DREAM BY WRITING IT and the work of genius appears, with no one the wiser as to how such works “come into existence."

For the true artist, the genius, does, in himself, satisfy exactly the conditions I ask for above, fatedly as it were, to the extremities of asylum, deformities, cork-lined rooms, blindness and the overdeveloped ear: not from posturing or petty defiance but because the work requires it, since the work is what is being lived, and not the life of the artist. Others live that. You, me, others. In my case I am close enough to it to it SOME MOMENTS. That is how I know. But I do not live it enough, and so I am taunted and haunted by the existence of the Work, shy of its fulfillment. Yes the Work has taken leave of me, its possible fulfillment through me THIS LIFE has been abandoned, and the Work can do this, for it has eternity, not time, on its side. I m left to be the butt of its great laughter.”

There appeared to be mountains below the mandala but stiched with white flowers, as though their lines were in fact seams in the visible world. Another time they looked like the roof lines of mountain temples, but in either case they were stitches. the three “items” in the center, directly beneath the mandala, Arthur never did decifer. The mandala itself, on this background, was framed, first in flowered darkwood, then in scrolled in goldenwood. Beyond this was the narrow border of the journal cover itself, in appropriate dark flowered brown, with a final red edge—the spine. The edges had been worn away all round, giving a certain quality as the final effect.

On the inside cover, in Winter’s hand: “Address for this volume: P.K. 180, Gaziantep, Turkey.”

Important Message

If you can spend an absolutely futile afternoon in an absolutely futile mode, you have learned to live.

Lin Yu-t’ang (1895-1976)

The Birth of the Whale

Inuit Myth

Sedna was a very beautiful Eskimo girl who lived with her widowed father beside the sea; she was courted by many young men from many different clans but always refused to marry.

One day from a distant shore came a handsome hunter, he carried an ivory spear and dressed in splendid furs, he arrived on his kayak, but instead of coming ashore he stayed on his canoe rocking among the waves, calling out to Sedna with seductive songs:

Follow me into the land of birds, where there is never any hunger. You shall rest on my skins, your pot with always have meat, your lamp with oil filled, you will wear ivory necklaces and my land will be your land…”

Sedna at first refused, tough intrigued, she was still timid and confused. But the stranger’s attractive words, little by little, down to the sea drew her. He enticed her onto his canoe and swiftly sailed away.

The handsome stranger deeply and sincerely loved her, but Sedna felt disgust and then despair, spent her days in grief and tears when she discovered her seducer was not a man but a Kokksaut,* the phantom of a bird, a bird-spirit capable of assuming the shape of other birds, or at will transform himself into a human being.

Sedna’s father too was inconsolable for the loss of Sedna, so one day he set out in search of the distant shore his daughter had been taken to. The bird spirit was away when he found it, he saw his grieving girl, he took her in his arms, he carried her to the boat to set sail for their native land.

When the Kokksaut returned he looked for his beloved wife, but couldn’t find her, mysterious cries carried by the wind told him Sedna and her father had fled with lamentations and cries of anger.

In his handsome phantom form he entered his kayak in pursuit and soon caught up with the fugitive canoe. On the get-away canoe Sedna’s father recognized the phantom and chose to hide his daughter underneath some furs, Kokksaut pleaded for his wife: “Let me see Sedna, I beg you, let me see her.”

But with anger the father firmly refused the phantom’s plea. Wild with despair, the phantom-hunter fell back. He had failed.

With a furious beat of wings he then changed back into a bird, spread his wings and soared, soared over the fugitives uttering the strange cry of the loon and disappeared into the darkness of a sudden Artic ocean storm sweeping across the sea.

Wild winds raged, billowing waves clamoured, demanded the sacrifice of Sedna, Sedna’s father smitten by horror, dismay and dread of having offended the powers of heaven and earth, out of his mind and with fear of the man-bird gripping his heart he seized his daughter and hurled her from the canoe to appease the offended sea.

Three times above the waves Sedna’s face appeared, her hands desperately clutching the side of the boat, while in wild panic and shock the father with a great ivory axe chopped her fingers off, as she battled in turbulent waves, her chopped fingers transformed into seals.

Again and again she tried to escape death and trice the father mutilated her wounded hands. The second knuckles gave birth to the ojuk, the deep-sea seals, the third became walruses and from the remainder, the whales were born.

Nothing saved Sedna from the fury of the ocean, she perished to complete the sacrifice that returned calm to the raging sea.

Note:
Kokksaut: Inuit word for strange creature

The Killer Whale

To Canada’s northwest coastal native people the killer whale (below) is the lord of the ocean. His warriors are dolphins; sea lions are his messengers. It’s believed that when great chiefs die, they become killer whales. Humans and killer whales are believed to be closely related. The killer whale also symbolizes long life.

Vision Before Invasion

Copyright2006 - Cerro Engelais


dead eyes feel no remorse
twisted bodies dying for an unjust cause
high above fire raining from the sky
killing everything beautiful and alive
men, women and children, nothing spare
even the buildings and trees were blown away
death and destruction everywhere
I don't care what you think or say
the question remains
where is God at the end of the day!

Bush Whacked (Nov 4 2004)

Bleak, bleary eyes - anxiously awaiting, outcome of the night - disappointment swept the world. - hope ends - no change to the regime without friends - affecting their future. Four more to go! Documentaries of Michael Moore will echo into the bleeding hearts of mothers, when death of their young takes its toll! Shoulders shrugged - a shake of the head. My neighbour decided to continue a bloody mistake!

A Nude Swim

©2006- Cerro Engelai

Three years ago a good friend of mine was very sick. On that cold morning I decided to "sacrifice myself". To appease the malevolent spirit I plunged into the frigid water of Canada's Northwest Coast.

Pantheistic and sacred
ancient and primitive
offerings of living things
self sacrifice of the great spirit

O Great Spirit of the Cold
presever of the living and the dead
keeping the alive afresh,
and the dead from going bad

O Great Spirit of the Water
giver of all lives and desires
mightier than the mighty fire,
May you keep us young forever!

Text 3208 - Winter -

©2006 Allen Sutterfield

 

Like that he came, after nothing in years. A knock on the door,  happened it were Monday, and, he, donning a silken robe, his only gift from a long dead time, enter Winter.

Winter was broader but of an even height. His face was fuller, so was his gut. He did not dash but one quickly felt his motion. He seemed always ready to teeter but in fact was surer on his feet. Hi hair was thinner, lighter, his face was older, possessed more of what lay behind it than on top it. His speech was articulate when conscious, other times ( more and more frequently of late) his tongue would trip ungainly over the great lacunae inside his mouth , when he opened wide it was quite as though he was aluminum inside. However, he was usually in command of his tongue, and though his lungs were black and foul, these were not seen, except in tiny bits of handkerchief, during his rare and terrible spells. then it did not matter.

Winter was in fact younger, for all his appearance. That is, by the calendar he was. Age had never downed on either as something they were but rather something they were inexorably approaching. Thus they kept its distance.

Winter was bulging bottles as he came.

"By Jesus! You!"  "Its me by god!" "After all these years--"

 "Has it really been?" "Sonofabitch!" "Find a corkscrew."

It had been sometime. Each could truthfully say he scarcely knew the other.

"It's this way m'boy--I've got some tickets, we're on our way (I do not travel alone, in the world at least), you come too. You're taken care of, and in a few weeks, more or less, you're returned, if you like. If you don't like, we go on. Now now no questions about where, how could that matter. Suffice it to say, this is the only time for it. Don't worry, it's not a vacation. What say? There is really only one answer."