Iwojima speaks Moon-Grammar like the artist he is: musician, sculptor, architect. He dreams in Octahedronic Geometries where the faces that we wear meet the faces that we must become. When the unconscious stirs and wants to communicate it does so in the symbols and the syntax of dreams, myths, gods, and gnarly little things composed of parts. The trick is to recognize these things as ourselves and not some "wholly other". Man has been projecting these faces on the world outside since the Garden and warring with them while doing himself much harm. And so on Solstice Kenny La Roche gathered on the beach of Paradesia and loaded his boats for a journey to the Yonder Shore. We were about to ensoul an island outside of us with an objét constructed "de profundis" from the King of Sorrow. We had a small Navy gathered for the task: boats to take the Shmird-spike which had been deconstructed into parts, and boats to take the Krew necessary for Installation. There were other boats . . . there are always other boats.
There are 65 remaining Round Towers in Ireland. There were once many more. All of them mark the sites of early monasteries of the Celtic Church which date from the 5th to the 12th centuries. They are elegant but unadorned; their doorway entrances are raised anywhere from 1.5 meters to 4.5 meters above grade. Essentially the Round Towers were forts, built for protection. The one pictured is at Monasterboice just up the road from Mellifont Abbey. The tower of Monasterboice was 33 meters high when it was whole. The purpose of these towers is still an argument. The "peace, love, and hopers" insist they were primarily bell towers and in fact the ancient Irish name for these towers - Cloictheach means as much. But Pooler is from an older school of thought, like Slag, he stresses that semiotics should proceed first from "risk assessment" priorities. For 1,000 years Ireland was being systematically raided by war parties of Norsemen. "God save us from the fury of the Vikings," was the motto of the day. Seen in this light, the towers seem more like a refuge. When the lookout in the towers spied the Viking long-boats he would ring the bells furiously and from all around the people would flock to the monastery where they would strip the church of its gold and valuables, gather baskets of food, wine and provisions and scamper up wooden ladders to the raised doorways. When the goods and the people were inside, they would burn the wooden ladders, lock and bar the huge, thick doorway and settle down to wait out the drunken fury of the Norse. The fact that the Irish are composed of a healthy serving of Viking blood tells us they were not always successful in escaping the Rape and Pillage. The invaders would burn the roofs off the stone buildings, take whatever was not nailed down and sail on home to plan the next raid. The Irish would rebuild their roofs, scrub the scortched stone with lime and go back to work in the fields. Life was cyclical and predictable. Pooler said that the Round Towers lost their primary purpose over time as the Irish blood swelled with Viking seed. The more relatives the Vikings left in Ireland the less it was necessary to play Hide and Seek. When over half of the village is a little blond shoot of a Viking then the raids seemed like self-inflicted wounds and they ceased. After that the Viking boats brought relatives for a feast and not raiders for pillage. Both Slag and Skippy have faced grief for bringing to their students the Sociobiological idea that while Rape is always a sexual crime individually, it can serve the purposes of population dynamics generally. An idea which does not make Rape right but returns the act to the animal kingdom where human morals are after-thoughts, backward masking. Leaving your seed in the belly of your enemy has always been the strategy for "winning hearts and minds." When the "Other's" children are your own then they are no longer Ganz Ander. God uses the same Methods.
Historically, Kenny La Roche has ranged from a solid core of 4 or 5 to a dozen or more when we take to the field. The Spike Fallen Warriors drew 64 into the corpus of the artist. Kenny is a group-artist and the group waxes and wanes with the mission. No Cathedral was ever finished by the men who began it and until Modernity, no woman was ever involved. Except for the Shekhina which most of them were named for. We never have to beat the bush for a team. People show up perfect for the task. Oddly enough, many to most have graduate degrees and are not overtly religious at all. Most are seekers. Or they're watchers. Or they need to have a parable. Like this: Science Officer Spock has done a Vulcan Mind Meld with one of NASA's Voyager Spacecrafts which was sent from earth on a mission to gather information. It does. It gathers so much that it reaches a Singularity and implodes into Consciousness. Now it wants to know where it came from and what is its purpose? And it wants to share and merge with its creator. So it travels back thru space to Earth looking for Carl Sagan. Smashing things as it goes. When Captain Kirk asks Spock what the Monkey-Made-Machine is thinking, Spock replies: "It only knows that it needs, Captain. And like so many of us, it does not know what."
A retable like this begs the question about Christian vows of poverty. The little canopies you see crowning each tableau are Ciboria and are direct discendants of the Shekhina/Tent which covered and protected the Ark of the Covenant, the Holy of Holies, and the Altar region of the Hebrew Temenos. The larger, more ornate, Ciboria which flow down the center of the picture, cover the Tabernacle wherein god is placed in a covered chalice which is also called a Ciborium. There the Spirit of God on Earth dwells in a material form - usually bread and wine, until the time comes for good Christians to incorporate their Divinity and face their immortality. To become as gods and take on god's gnosis, his consciousness, or lack thereof. All those little pictures on the retable are parables and codes. Taken together they form an Objective Correlative for the Great Work done on the Altar underneath the retable by men who have forgotten how.
Ad deum qui laetificat juventutem meam.
Introibo ad altare dei.
Thomas Aquinas & JackyO were tasked with Cinema. Aquinas himself was part of the Landing Team and he would have to brave the birds & harpies while he filmed. The LURP Kommando which had Creepy-Crawled the Isle earlier in the late spring had reported a scene of horror. Gulls and Cormorants everywhere, filling the skies above and off the island, nesting, covering every foot of ground. And the ground wasn't really ground but the compacted accumulation of decades of birdshit and feathers, and eggshells, and dead things. The noise was physically painful, high pitched shrieking and clicking sounds like bones in the throat. Deafening. Cacaphony - with the Caca because the smell was even worse than the noise. It was middle-level Hell. Sheol. Right out of Goya in his Black Works. It was like a bad acid trip and if you couldn't hold it together you could lose all Object Constancy and things would lose their borders and you would not hear yourself screaming above the festering din. Air Rats everywhere. Mealing your sanity. There are those of us who believe that like Dick Cheny, Slag has bent the intel to paint a rosier picture of the Sitz. "No worries," he said, "the coons have made it all right."
L'homme est un morceau de soleil.
"A la conquête de la perle d'Eternité."
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