Woodsman! Woodsman! Spare that tree! Slag's soul is most likely Post-Cambrian - he needs large fleshy things as an anchor. But he's spiffy all tricked out with climbing gris-gris and belted to the trunk. That's Ho Slag's hugging. We are on top of the hill which we call "The Baptist." It rises 300 feet from a long ridge of dunes which snakes among other ridges of dunes - all of which follow the west shore of the Lake. The Baptist is probably a half-mile in from the water. The dunes were kneaded together by the glacier. A local legend says the Manitou was hung-over and horny and he grabbed the land like a man grabs a woman and he petted her and pawed her and our Peninsula was left from the feeling-up. But the dunes are old now and nicely wooded so the Manitou must have had his way. We thank them both. It was September and we were doing the autumn work which is necessary before the late-spring mission to hang the head of the John the Baptist in its Reliquary. Either slag has been cloned or the picture below is a composite of two pictures. The distance between the two trees Ho & Bah has been foreshortened and the spread is actually more than shown. Here is the plan: we are going to stretch a wire [as indicated] between our two anchor trees Ho - an Oak - and Bah - a Maple. The spread is about 35’. The drop from the wire to the ground is around 39’. Somewhere between Ho & Bah we will hang our reliquary. Ho is actually the diminutive of Haut which in French means “high” - Ho stands on ground which is around 4’ higher than Bah. Bah is the phonetic of Bas which in French means “low”. We are not deep. We are simply descriptive. It is a few hundred feet from where the Slags are sitting to the bottom of the hill and "le penchant de la colline"- the fallularity - or value of the slope - is a few degrees more than either the left-tit porch of Grandiflora or the right-tit porch of Gabriel. It’s higher and steeper but we believe that we have found a straight-shot path up “The Baptist”. The locale is composed of undulating, serpent-like, dune ridges which curve towards and away from the site. Within 30 yards is an even higher hill than the Baptist, though it is crowned by a very small plateau. Just sufficient to take a 10’ ascender. We call this little hill: "Salome's Platter" and you can see that we will be working on the myth and its correspondences with the topographical features of the Cathedral. In the pictures Slag is shown graphing out the details of the site. We did this recon mission in early September. The site is more remote than either of the porches and has little to no trail activity in its vicinity. We see the "Seldom Seen" as our natural canvas. We're off-trail. What the 1st Cav. called Injun Country. We wonder what the Manitou called his woman anyway.
The Etics are worried about what's in our heads - or what isn't. 2 weeks after James Watson was fired for thinking out loud that evolution had not left us all intellectually "equal," along comes Marcus W. Feldman, professor of Biological Sciences at Stanford University to warn us that the Human Genome Project of 2000 has yielded startling evidence of differences in the small amounts of DNA which all humans do not share with each other. We have found "little changes" which account for European pale skin and the tendency of "Asians to sweat less" as well as those which grant West Africans resistance to a handful of diseases. While there is no such thing as Race there are very real differences among the peoples of the world. The Etics are getting worried that dirty little secrets are slowly creeping out into the media. Secrets with "social implications." As Feldman comments: "There are clear differences between people of different continental ancestries. It's not there yet for things like IQ, but I can see it coming."
To the left - 2 Chinese Characters make up the term: Li. The Character on the left in the composition is the Phonetic and gives the term its sound value of "Li." It is composed of two separate characters: the top square divided into quarters which is an image of a 'field' and the bottom which is used for 'tillable land.' The other character is not pronounced [yü] - it is the Radical for 'gem.' "With its addition to the Phonetic the idea is conveyed that a gem must be cut according to fixed rules just as a field has to be divided into furrows in order that it may be of greatest use." All told the Glyph Li = Form, Law, Reason, Principle, Divine Law, Pattern, Organization, or better: Principle of Organization. Li is often used to describe the patterns found in Stone, Wood, and Muscle. Li also connotes Rituals we use to interact with Nature.
Pooler Jones was smoking Dope and absently drawing a Necker Cube on a napkin. It was May and we were in a Coffee Shop in Amsterdam. He was explaining to me the Dutch word: dogen, which according to Pooler meant “illegal but allowed.” I was reading the shop’s menu & trying to crack the metaphors: They had 25 Guilder bags of Dope called: Bubblegum, and Superskunk, White Widow and Necker Cube. Pooler was riffing off the dope and the figure he had drawn on the napkin and he was telling me about Béziers and Carcassonne and the Cathar and Gnostic past. But it was Oswald Spengler who was lurking in the conversation. “The brain rules,” he said, as the sweet smoke of his glass pipe curled over his hand, “because the soul has abdicated.” It was a warm & sunny Sunday morning in May and the two of us were still hung-over from the orgy of the night before. The Euro-Rock group Wasteland had staged a CD Launch Party & there had been too many big Columbus Wheat Beers - 10% ale which was advertised as “Beer you can chew,” and too many other “frosting” drugs and too many half-naked young Dutch girls who wanted in on the trendy nihilism and the pulsing techno-beat of the cultural botulism which is the European night. Pooler and I were very much at home. So it was a bright Spring morning and we were deconstructing the Kenotic structure of Western Art generally and Spengler was getting a lot of hang-time. It was St. Paul who had killed Christianity by bringing Magian Christ to the urbanized West where magic could not be allowed. The West lived in a milieu which has been colonized by Cause & Effect. We were victims of that duality and the effects of that mindset would blind us to the other worlds which could live simultaneous and within the neat borders of our empiricism. Only in the West, Spengler showed, could a figure like a Necker Cube gain the status of a cult object.
"The brain rules because the soul has abdicated."

- Oswald Spengler -
Poly Ocular Epistemology, Pooler was saying, is the ability to see more than one truth at once - simultaneously, not sequentially. Aristotle and St. Paul had drawn the West out on the “line” where History was seen as one thing after the other rather than everything possible all at once. “Bitchcraft!” Pooler said, “that’s what it’s led to. Bitchcraft. Which was an inside Joke since Pooler had met a singer from another Rock group called Rockbitch at the Wasteland gig and he had ended the evening by Hosing her Wildly in the back seat of a Ford Anglia. Rockbitch was playing in Amsterdam also and they were fronting their new disc: Bitchcraft. So I was drunk and walking circles Withershins around the exterior of the Ford while Pooler was inside the car & fucking the lithe & taut young singer. I kept screaming “Bitchcraft” at the moon and I could hear the two of them giggling in the car, as it bounced and shuddered alongside the darkened Keizergracht Canal. It was May and warm and ADAM was awash with sun. Skippy was doing Research at the Ritman Library - the Bibliotheca Philosophica Hermetica during weekdays & at night there was Sin and drugs named after perceptual illusions. Things were good until Barber Perfect flew in from his liar in the Baltics.
Ravens were screaming at us all the way up the Baptist. It was Slag's turn to Ride the Goat so we had him rigged and ready. He had purchased a pair of Lineman spiked footgear and had fabriked a pair of grevières - which were leg pieces on medieval suits of armor but were going to be used as shin bracers. He'd also borrowed John Dee's climbing-strap and together with his ascender-harness and his usual utility belt of Flemished ropes & tie-ons & the spring-lines tied to the tool bucket, he was a pimped and proud master of the trees.
All suited in the Sacrédotal, Slag fairly scampered up Bah. The Maple has more texture than the oak of Ho and it affords a tight purchase. The foot-spikes make small Veeaye-Shaped wounds in the wood but that won't hurt the tree and the marks are well-camoed unless you're looking for them. The two trees are tall and there are no adequate side-boughs for an Ascender Rig as was the case with Gabriel so we had determined that the only way up was straight up the trunks. The metal flange-like things shown are LDDs - Load Distribution Devices - another fine Kenny La Roche product. Slag fabriked them to gird each of the trees and hold the cable which we are to string between Ho and Bah. The Reliquary will then hang down from this taut cable. The LDDs were hammered in at about 40’ up and highly accurately spaced around the back 2/3rds of each tree’s circumference. Mark had pre-drilled them both for the nail holes as well as the holes for the hang-cable. We’re going to call this hang-cable “The Scarf” or maybe just Scarf. Pooler Jones told us that originally - back in his first world - a scarf was a sling for carrying gear which was worn over the shoulder then across the chest to the opposite hip. Then Renaissance Yuppies turned it into a decoration. A Skeuomorph. Pooler’s eyes get narrow when he talks about the Renaissance. Slag did a bunch of work climbing Ho & Bah and securing the LDDs around each. He was in the trees - at altitude - for over two hours. We had planned to share the burden and either the Captain or Skippy was going to climb & work one of the trees. But there was so much tack & gear to change, grevières included - that he waved us off and did them both himself. Neither Skippy nor the Captain put up much of a counter-argument.
Then Sunday morning on the way to the Coffee Shop we passed these two mimes who were setting up for their show and waiting for a crowd. They had not yet dressed fully and had not yet struck their “pose.” Do you see? Pooler had asked me. Can you see that we are nothing without the pose? Western Man is stuck in his body. He’s too deeply in his own skin. Whatever he knows he must be able to embody - to incorporate. He cannot know those things which do not strike a gesture, a pose. We are people struck dumb without a measurement, without a physiognomy - Euclidian people haunted by the points of strictly material planes. “They don’t do mime in Asia,” Pooler told me, “or in madhouses, or places made safe for poetry.” For us Art has been an Historic Confession like a Dutch self-portrait. We wear our characters like the Jews had to wear little yellow stars on all their clothes - a diacritical mark, like an accent, to index the form-world underneath to the drapery of its surface. What we have created is the ability of summing ourselves up and wearing the product as a pose. We’re like Elvis and anything else which has emptied itself out into a pose. Man, Spengler wrote, is a “bearer of meaning” like a Corinthian Column. “The word Akt means `pose’ and, in art language, `nude.’” It is a word which expresses the “instantaneous-become as against the historically-becoming, the presentation in the perfect as against the imperfect sense, the act as against the action.” Art is Soul become Form. Art is a living unit and the living is incapable of being dissected, Spengler wrote. “The first act of the learned pedant has always been to partition the infinitely wide domain into provinces determined by perfectly superficial criteria of medium and technique and to endow these provinces with eternal validity as immutable form principles. But in fact the technical form-language is no more than the mask of the real work.” So St. Paul, by taking Jesus the Magi into the empirical West refocused Christianity from its soul to its surface. He made of our faith not a record of its truths and its correspondences with the ground of being but a mirror which could reflect only the embodied points on a flat surface, a flat “Christian” surface - a plane where “Akt” and meaning were never going to be one. We could see reflected in this mirror a world of forms but we would have no way of seeing into the darkened hearts of these forms - we were caught at the skin, stopped at the pose, frozen at the level of the yellow star.
Click on the Caute Button 3 times and see a meme move from becoming to akt.
Pooler could no longer remember the name of his little Rockbitch from the night before - their entire history from meeting to humping had only occupied an hour of time. “You should only fuck women with big cars,” I told him. He was sore and stretching and trying to roll his shoulders around an imaginary ball the way men do who have had sex recently in a very small car. Space is the central metaphysic, he said. Then he quoted Mcluhan: “Time is an illusion perpetuated by the manufacturers of Space.” Then he said lewd things about the little Rockbitch whose name he had spaced. Things about her tight volume. Spinozian/Descartesian things about her Geometries. Things about the sounds she made when she first realized that Pooler Jones was a little bigger than she was prepared for. “Mewing sounds which wobbled between certainty and doubt - but erotically. Wet, slurpy yes/no’s, man! And a lot of umlaut oh oh oh oh - deep guttural unnatural vowels, Nordic cum syllables. So it was more like: og og og. Women make different noises all over the world. They got passion accents, Skippy. We need to get us some beer.” It’s all fuckin’ Bitchcraft, he told me as the two of us emerged from the Hash House to the offensively bright day. Maybe it was. We practice a Spagyric Science, Pooler and I and Kenny La Roche. That’s the type of art and Akt which separates elements into basic principles or components by natural, chemical, or Violent means, to attain their purification. As soon as I found and gave that definition to Slag he went out and bought a Police Riot Shotgun. One of those black kevlar fuckers you see riding around in Black & Whites. It’s a “street sweeper," he grinned - proud young Maître de l'Arbe - Slag knows secret things about Caliber and Muzzle Velocity. One of his giggly young coeds once asked him: what's your favorite animal? Her dewy eyes sparkling in the fall-out from our office's track-lighting. "Trebuchet," he answered. The coed sighed and absently tossed her hair with a long white hand.
De rure bovensi - n'est ce pas? You can see his mind working - "Cockboy," I mean. When you try and explain to the giddy coeds that this Shiva/Bull/Cock image is Sacred in Hindu mentalité they either get gone or get it. If you get it Click on the Dick.
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