Daddy has changed. The Keltic Girls have gone after IwoJima with a banshee intensity which would be Freudian if we believed that kind of psychobabble. But we don’t. So we just chalk it up to Cool Hand Luke so that what we have here is a failure to communicate. Some part of the message went south between sender and receiver. But Jesus there’s like 14 or 18 of them - there’s a megalitter of Keltic Girls. And they’re all beautiful and young with the soft white skin of the old country which men like to call milky. I wonder why. Then there’s all that red hair and when they’re all in a room it’s like a Christmas tree. And they seem to have the right ideas and more than a passing interest in them. Sometimes they’re deep. So they’re too cool to kill and besides the time for that has passed. All 52 of the Keltic Girls - slim as they are - would make a large body mass and as I found out over Christmas at the Cemitière des Innocents in Paris it takes longer than expected for the soil to pick the flesh off the bones and free the soul from its skin. You don’t want to know what this does to the soil. No, they’ll have to live; it’s too late to free their forms. You can see it in their eyes. They’re too settled in. Something about their souls likes being in their skin. IwoJima, their proud father - when we get to him after his 4th or 5th beer - likes to say that he had always tried not to think of them as kittens but sometimes - usually late at night after a day spent living with a large group of women - sometimes IwoJima would close his eyes for a moment to let the throbbing ease in his temples and as if from a distance in the mist he could see himself with a large burlap sack on his way to the river. Well aren’t we all. Changed. Kenny La Roche likes to see himself as a catalyst - or at least an aid - to purification. Purity is a Cathar word or at least it means that. Cathar means to purify, to become pure. You can see and hear cathartic in it. Pooler Jones and I were sitting at a table in La Gueuze down from the Pantheon on the rue Soufflot. We were drinking big 50cl Lucifers - thick amber beer at 8%. Belgian beer. Each of us had ordered a Rumsteak Pavé which came to your table in a kit. Dishes of sauces surrounded a scalding hot brick - one of those 2½ by 4 by 9s which are called pavers. The steak was cut into bite size strips which you flipped onto the hot brick to cook. You had to move it around a bit so it wouldn’t stick to the brick. When it was au point you took it off the brick and dipped it into one of the sauces. Naturally this came with three pounds of oversalted frites. So we were frying meat wildly on the brick and screaming for plus du frites and washing it down with liters of Lucifer. Pooler had an Atelier in Paris with a large apartment above. Barber Perfect was going to join us later. So to remain neutral between the Brothers I was staying at a Hotel and not with Pooler as I sometimes do. If the Winter in Paris turned out to be like the Spring in Amsterdam I wanted to stay out of the fray as much as I could - though sooner or later, I knew, I'd have to make some choices. A Selection.
A Châsse is a Reliquary, a shrine. It’s also a “frame mounting.” A Châsse is the Check of a Balance. In French slang the word can mean: the eyes. The Head of John the Baptist is a 350-400 lb rock which is going to be “Suspension-Tension-Hung” in the middle of six 10’ long ½” cold-rolled steel stock which will be bent slightly to form an onion shaped Hexachord. The ends of each steel bar will be welded to a piece of 3” steel pipe. We call these two pipes the Sleeves. We call the 6 bars the Notes. The Rock will be ST Hung between the two sleeves using cables and bolts which issue from within the sleeves themselves - Slag designed them to nicely house and camo the joinery. Our plan is to make the Châsse and then pry the rock between two notes, then ST Hang the rock and with a come-along, squeeze and/or pull the two sleeves together so as to billow or bulge the notes into the onion shape you see in the drawing. That’s the plan. As of yet it is not clear to Skippy whether or not much of this will have to be done on site. Slag has also spent a sleepless night trying to figure out how to get a cumbersome, wants-to-bend, framed head of the Precursor up and off the ground without warping the trailing-edge. We bent the foot of each note 4” from each end to a 15º rake, mirror-image to its mate and on the same plane to prevent yaw. At least we tried.
The Châsse
Slag and I scribed out six longitudal lines around the butt ends of each sleeve. The 6 lines were parallel at 1¼” intervals around the 7½” circumference of the pipe. These are the “weld-to” lines for the 6 notes. We also drilled a series of utility holes around each sleeve - these are for bolts for the ST Hang and for the hook end of the come-along. We did all of these things over 3 Friday missions in October/November. Roll over the picture to the left and see the Châsse with 2 Notes added - the long central joining pipe is temporary and is being used to keep the 2 sleeves aligned correctly for welding.
Barber Perfect gets hinky when he talks about the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test. He goes all `far away' in his eyes - maybe as far as Poland and what the Nazis called the "General Government." The WCST needs only a deck of special cards to administer. It's a diagnostic device for Clinical use by Psychiatrists, Neurologists, Neuropsychologists, and Law Enforcement types from DEA Narcs to Gestapo and Sicherheitsdienst. The CIA swears by it. It's a Sorting Test used to measure Abstract Reasoning Potential, Set-Shifting, the ability to change Problem-Solving Strategies, and Attention Span/Memory problems. It can diagnose Brain Damage, Schizophrenia, and Drug Use. It's a "Perseveration Barometer." The WCST Deck is composed of 128 Response Cards and 4 Stimulus Cards. Each of these Stimulus Cards has a different Number, Color, or Shape Symbol: a single Red Triangle, 2 Green Stars, 3 Yellow Crosses, 4 Blue Circles. The 128 Response Cards [Roll over the Pic] each have a different meld of these parameters. One has 4 Green Stars, another has 2 Blue Crosses, etc. And there are a few cards with Colored Smiley Faces, & other relevant abstractions.
The subject is given deliberately ambiguous instructions. The Experimenter places the 4 Stimulus Cards on the table and tells the John that he/she is to "Sort the cards in the Response Deck on to each pile." As the John does each Card Sort, the Experimenter says whether or not the card has been correctly matched. The John is never told How to Match: by Color, Number, or Shape. After the John unknowingly Sorts a Card to the Experimenter's Hidden Match Agenda - and then can successfully sort a few more Cards to that Agenda - for example, by putting same Color Cards together - giving evidence that the John has abstracted the Hidden Rule of Sorting by Color - the Experimenter will suddenly, and silently, Change the Sorting Rule. For example to Number now rather than color. How long will it take the John to realize the Sort Rule Change and adjust his own Sorting to the Number Sort Rule? What kind of Mistakes does the John make while learning the New Rules? A John with Prefrontal Cortex damage or problems will get stuck in a Sorting Modality and be unable to Sort the Cards to any other Rule than the 1st Rule even when told the Sort is Wrong over and over again. ADHDers have the same deficit - called Perseveration - to one degree or another. Druggies are notorious for fucking up Card Sorting tasks. The test links Memory with Cognitive Functions and Druggies are all about Forgetting things quickly. Schizoids get angry and then make up their own Sorting Rules and simply play on without you. "Valuable insights," says Barber. "Set-Shifting, Abstract Reasoning, the ability to Change your Problem-Solving techniques - all of these are Indicators of which Minds are still Malleable." Murmur told Himmler: Look, if you want to build a Master-Race then you must work on the Mind as well as the Physique. What good is a 6' 6" Aryan Beast if he doesn't "have his Mind right?" Of course we need to Sort for Nordic Features: Blue Eyes, Blond, Tall, with a Perfect Chin. But, he warned the Reichsführer SS, we also need to Sort for Mental Traits which will allow RuSHA to build the Ideal National Socialist Thinker." Barber told Lucky that if he would have had the WCST with him at Dachau and later at Auschwitz and other Kzs the Nazis would have won the War. Lucky asked him which he would have Selected - those who could change easily, or those who couldn't. "Exactly," said Barber, "I'm glad you get it."
Ok ok. So maybe then This is the Head of John the Baptist, and that other one which begins the Chapter Chosen Arrow is just a picture of a rock. The rock doesn’t really look like a head and this one does. So you could trust your eyes, but that would just make you Modern. If you were Medieval - a middle worlder - like a Knight of the Temple just come back from the 4th Crusade - the Rape of Constantinople - you wouldn’t be so sure which was the real head of the Precursor. Without all your forensics and adrift in allegory and analogy, you wouldn’t be so sure at all. The man we call John the Baptist, the Precursor, the Chosen One to make straight the way of the lord, is in the Introit /Antiphon which I bought in Amsterdam [roll over the Head] called Sagittá Electá or as we have named the mission: Chosen Arrow. Iconography needs systems of conventions. The first convention of representation amongst Christian artists about St. John the Baptist was that he was - like The Captain - Hirsute. He was a mass of hair. The next was that he dressed down; he was casual. Most often he was shown clothed in “animal skins” or sack-cloth, or some such homespun emblem of a rejection of the urbanizing effects of civilization - as Oswald Spengler would say. John the Baptist was as close as Christianity was ever going to get in displaying the Archetype of the Wild Man except for the Gothic and Renaissance fascination with the figure of the Green Man. He was almost a counterpart to Christ and in some early communities was mistaken for the Christ. He had `a priori ' mystical and prophetic baggage. Like Jesus, he was himself, a product of prophecy and typology. Like Jesus, John the Baptist was also the product of Innate Inference Systems in the Frontal Cortex. He was a Natural to the Monkey Mind because he was already in it.
Like In De Wildeman Café down the Kolk in Amsterdam, La Gueuze - on the rue Soufflot in Paris was the Touchstone, the daily goal, after the bidnez day was done. When Barber showed up there was a day or 2 when Bidnez never happened and Cafe La Gueuze was home. Some days Skippy would do Recherche at the Bibliothèque Ste-Geneviève which had once been part of the Abbey but had linked up with the Sorbonne after the Abbey was closed. Skippy bounced between ancient Bibliothèques: The Arsenal, Ste. Geneviève, and the Big Enchilada of Frog Libraries: the Bibliothèque Nationale on the old rue Richelieu. The Library of Ste Geneviève was the only one of 3 great French Libraries to survive the Revolution. The hill where the Pantheon, the Bibliothèque Ste-Geneviève, and the Eglise St-Étienne-du-Mont are located is known as the "Sacred Hill of Pagan Lutetia" - the Romanized name of the Pre-Roman settlement which has since become Paris. Lutetia means "midwater dwelling" and refers to the small spit of an Island in the Seine now called the Île de la Cité in the center of which squats Notre-Dame Cathedral. The Gothic-Renaissance St-Étienne-du-Mont - Saint Steve's - has become Skippy's favorite Church over the past 30 years or so. It holds the Shrine of Ste-Geneviève herself, the Patron Saint of Paris. Geneviéve is rumored to have prayed so fucking hard in 451 that Attila the Hun went around Paris and Pillaged Orléans instead. Orléans must have had a Pussy for its Patron. Louis 15 had a new huge church built for the Patron of Paris but the Revolution jumped up before the church was dedicated. So the National Assembly took the church in 1791 and renamed it the Pantheon. Ste-Geneviéve's Relics were burned by a drunken mob in 1793. St. Steve's has only a Shrine to her - no altar can exist without a Relic of the Saintes.
Here the John is presented with 2 Antique Playing Cards used both for Card Games and Fortune Telling during the Restoration. Clicking on one of them will lead you to the Continuing Saga of Baruch Spinoza as he moves towards his Kherem - his Excommunication from the Sippe of the Jews - by arguing for the "View from Nowhere." Clicking on the other Card will take you to the Gods and the Odin/Thor Nexus of the Ayran Nordic Beasts. While the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test measures how long Idiots Persevere in their Errors - Selecting one or the other of these 2 cards will measure your Iconic Skills and/or your Luck. The WSCT takes only a few minutes and is a wonderful tool to Self-Diagnose your Psychoses & your Short-Term Attention Span. Click on this to take the test. No cheating. The gods are watching.
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