Another cold-ass day in the City of Lights. It was Solstice and Pooler Jones and I were following this crazy angel down the rue St. Jacques on our way to La Gueuze, our beer place & lunch destination on the rue Soufflot. She was a young angel of indeterminate ancestry & hierarchy; maybe she was Mediterranean. Maybe she was a Throne or a dislodged Dominion. Either way she was singing at the top of her voice as she walked directly down the center of the wide sidewalk forcing everyone to scatter at her coming. She was good to follow; she carved out a wide wake for Pooler and I to tuck ourselves into. It was Solstice and little pieces of the light were being pulled out of their hiding. “There is no place anymore at all for them, is there?” Pooler asked. Meaning angels, I think, but then maybe he meant whackos. It was the kind of Pooler Jones question that you didn’t have to answer. I guess not. Most of the cold-ass Parisians dropped their eyes a millisecond after they first saw her. No one spoke to her and no one joined in the singing. Pooler and I lengthened our stride until we drew abreast of her and then Pooler smiled and asked her what she was singing. She stopped. We stopped. The three of us stood in the middle of the shopper’s stream and made them walk around us. We were an island composed of a crazy angel, a 900 year old Passer-by, and me, Skippy - Propaganda Minister of Kenny La Roche, an ancient International Brotherhood of Outlaw Artists and Adventure Theologians. Sometimes you need to stop and just write it down exactly as it is. “I know it’s Chant,” he said & he gave her his best Medieval grin. I could see another Amsterdam about to happen & I bet myself that before the day of the Solstice was over Pooler Jones would bust an envelope with her. “It sounds like something from Saint-Gall.” Her face nearly exploded into a wide smile. It is, she said. She was not attractive. I’m sorry, but that’s the kind of thing which guys notice immediately - no matter how old they are. But she was not ugly either. She was boyish and less rounded than most young women of about 20 to 25. But when she smiled, she beamed and that made her sexy for sure. Five minutes later the three of us were sitting in La Gueuze waiting for our beers and our pots of Moules and for steaming plates of way over-salted frites. Her name was Adriane and she was 22 and worried about history. She said it was an American disease - to forget about history - and she paused to explain and make sure we understood that what she meant was not a forgetting OF history, like a schoolboy forgets the dates of old wars. She meant that in our world and in our time we had come to believe that history was either over or that at least it no longer mattered. Pooler gently disagreed with her, not about the disappearing mental construct called “history” but about it being a peculiarly American form of amnesia. Then he did what Pooler always does so well - with a memory and a history like his own trained by a millennium of associations - he pulled an entire verbatim quote out of his head and laid it across our conversational space like a filter so that as I look back now I can see the entire events of the day passing thru it.
There is a book, he said, by Carl Schorske called Thinking with History: Explorations in the Passage to Modernism. Its thesis, he said, was an elaboration of what the waif angel Adriane was saying. Its thesis was this: “In most intellectual and artistic fields . . . 20th century Europeans and Americans have come to do their thinking without history. Modern art, modern architecture, modern music, modern science - all have defined themselves not as emerging from or even reacting against the past, but as detached from it in a new, autonomous cultural space.” In the past, Pooler explained, ideas of the past pervaded all fields of thought. There was no Now without the past, in the past. Every explanation of every conceivable phenomena was anchored in the past. Truth walked straight out of the past. So did Purpose. And Destiny. And words like Fate and Meaning.
Click on the Butterfly 8 times and watch Kenny Tap the Head of John the Baptist.
Her song on the rue St. Jacques - patron saint of the Pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela - had been an Antiphon called “Lumea” which was sung at Candlemas on February 2nd. Pooler had recognized the style of the piece at once; it was one of the older church liturgical chants and the structure of the music was rigid. It may have been as old as the 9th century and is loosely traceable to the Monastery of Saint-Gall. It was a prescient chant to be singing in cold-ass Paris on Solstice. The Chant itself is from the liturgical celebration which is known by many names: the Presentation of Jesus in the Temple, The Purification of the Virgin Mary, and Candlemas - the day the church added the element of the sacred to household candles by blessing them at mass. The Greek term for the feast is Hypapante and it means: the Meeting.
Click on the Butterfly 6 times and Face your Immortality.
“According to the law of Moses, a woman bearing a son was required to observe a purification period of 40 days.” When the time ended the family had to take the woman and the son to the temple where they would sacrifice a lamb and a dove - or if they were poor - a brace of doves only. When Mary & Joseph took Jesus to the temple 40 days after the Nativity they were accosted by 2 crazy old angelic prophets Anne and Simeon. Simeon grabbed the little baby Jesus and lifting him up started singing wildly a canticle to god which recognized the boy as the Messiah. This is the “Meeting” referred to in the Greek. He also said the boy would grow up to be a cause and a sign. He would be the cause of the rise and fall of many and the sign that would “incur conflict.” In the medieval the celebration of the feast would begin with a procession that led out into the darkness of morning and then timed itself to reenter the church at daybreak with the return of the light of day. Jesus was that recognized and proclaimed light, gone out with The Fall in the Garden, and come back with Christ’s “dawning” back in the world. Typology like this keeps a mind bound to history, yoked to the past.
So there was our sweet angel Adriane singing timely Chant Grégorien to the light come back on the day it really did. Typology again, I guess. Anyway, the three of us spent most of the afternoon at La Gueuze. Pooler and I drank grand Lucifers and screamed at each other over the holiday din about the Christian sense of Time which was ending now - right here in Paris where it began - as the sun stood still for a moment and all over the earth everything took a breath. And waited. Like the Basilique Notre-Dame de Fourvière on top of the hill in Lyon, the Panthéon began its life as a “Vowed Church”. Louix XV, lying desperately ill in Metz in 1744, like the Bishop of Lyon, made a hasty vow “that should he recover he would replace the semi-ruined church of the Abbey of Ste.-Geneviève with a magnificent edifice built on the highest point on the Left Bank.” When he got well he hired Jacques Germain Soufflot, the great Neo-Classical architect, to fulfill that promise. It is obvious that we still live in an age of the Vow, but what is also obvious is that we no longer live in an age when you can finance the job on Penance & Indulgences. We live in the time of Secular Subscriptions and Building-Funds. So the church was not finished until 1789 - ten years after Soufflot’s death.
The Panthéon lasted for only 2 years as a consecrated house of God. After the Revolution, like so many other French ecclesiastic properties like grand churches and monasteries, the Panthéon was deconsecrated - it takes only a moment to remove the sacred seal and stamp from a building - and in 1791 “its function as a church was suspended by the Constituent Assembly in order to “receive the bodies of great men who died in the period of French Liberty.” It was then that the building adopted the title of the Panthéon - a hall of past gods. Voltaire and Rousseau are buried here - likewise Mirabeau and Marat. It became a church again during the Empire, a necropolis during the reign of Louis-Phillipe, then a church again under Napoleon III, the headquarters of the murderous Commune later, and finally it went back to its present purpose as a French Panthéon when it received the ashes of Victor Hugo in 1885. Closer to us the Panthéon is best known as the site of one of Science’s Coronation Moments. “In 1855 Léon Foucault took advantage of the dome’s height to repeat publicly his experiment that proved the rotation of the earth - a discovery he had made in 1849. His brass pendulum (28kg) hung from a steel cable (67m), deviated from its axis during oscillation in a circular movement. The direction of this movement was reversed if the experiment was conducted in the northern or southern hemisphere - hence proving his theory of the earth’s rotation. The extent of the motion - nil at the Equator, 36 hours at 45° latitude and 24 hours at the pole - proved that the earth was spherical.” Besides the gods mentioned: Émile Zola lies in the crypt, as does Louis Braille, the explorer Bougainville, and Pierre and Marie Curie.
Click on the Butterfly to the left and follow the lads to Vic Schoelcher's show at the Pantheon above. Click the Papillon à droit to see Kenny buck nekid below. Each is 7 Click long.
Butterflies are Emblems and Types of Resurrection and Transformations. Monkeys have used them for a Million years as a Bush Soul. You may click & touch on all of them except the little one below. That's where god stashed his soul the last time he came out.
Click der Schmetterling below 7 times to Gather at the Temple for Solstice.
So maybe Adriane was right about History. And maybe, as Pooler Jones suggested, all of Art and all of Science too had detached themselves from History and were now trying to live in “autonomous cultural space,” referents without antecedents, ruptures in the intercourse between tenor and vehicle. Maybe metaphor was dead and the entire world, like Kenny La Roche, had shifted to the implicit, and were now practicing the etheric arts of suggestion only. Maybe the indicative mood could not survive the reentry scarring and the burning from the Postpost propositional stance where meaning must be coaxed out of its orbit - its absconditus - thru the last rhetorical form of our dying age - juxtaposition. That which consciously omits the predication “is.” Maybe History ends where it began, with Typology as the only bridge between the worlds. At Solstice, at the end and beginning of the circle, it’s easy to be sick of History. Spengler was right about that. History is a beast. An organic “daimon” with a narrative structure, a story to tell. Sooner or later, the story ended. Sooner or later all the blood ran out of the myth and it was all exterior to the bleeder and stored in the dark, cold, cellars of its Church. All that was left beside the desiccated Fountain of Life was the poor crushed pip of Jesus, drained and emptied, blanched and boned. Kenotic at last and silent. Cold-Ass-Paris at the Solstice. I was with Pooler Jones, a one-nutted man whom I believe to be a Passer-by, a 900 year old pilgrim still on the Penance Path and Adriane, a 20-something mélange of the souk and Les Halles, Arabia & Empire, sand-nigger & frog - a young woman who would dress as an Angel with a message, a fucking Annunciator, just to watch the shoppers recoil from the shock of such an intrusion into the realities of the lower envelopes. Shall we gather at the River? I asked Pooler at the end of the day. But he had his eye on Adriane and didn’t care anymore if yearning spirit could be slaked; there were other thirsts.
Click the Lebensborn Pin to the Left to enter the Nazi Version of the Fountain of Life.

Click the Mystic Press Button to the Right to finish the Riff on the Pressoir Mystique and to see the Bitch of Typology stripped Naked and Flayed.
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