Amanita muscaria

Gold Bluffs Beach, California

"The most splendid chief of the agaricoid tribe... which might lower the pride of many a patrician vegetable."

Robert Kaye Greville, 'Scottish Cryptogamic Flora,' 1820

Blue Mountain

Squirrel Mountain Swamp

Harriman State Park

"Blue Mountain you're azure deep, Blue Mountain your sides so steep... I drink at the Blue Goose Saloon, I dance at night with the Mormon girls and ride home beneath the moon."

F.W. Keller, 1920

Poses, or the kh'hob nisht keyn koyach Look.

Daniel Boyarin, my mentor and Rebbe

Dimitri Shostakovich and Hannah Arendt

As a half-assed luftmensch I can appreciate this persona but consider my friend ZZ:

Ga-Nus-Quah

Away With Urban Thoughts:

Backpacking, for the Head and the Legs

"Then I came to Ga-Nus-Quah Rocks, or the Stone Giants... Many of the place names in Harriman State Park are pseudo-Indian, but apparently Ga-Nus-Quah was Real."

Fred Powledge, Mother Jones, 1976

Language, Materiality and God's Hands

It is well known that scholars of ancient Jewish hermeneutics (Midrash and Talmud) subscribe to the theory that Jewish reading, conceptions of language, representation, and "the very meaning of meaning itself," were radically different than their "Greek" counterparts (Platonists and the Philonic Jewish tradition). Way back in 1982, Susan Handelman wrote,

"Indeed, the Greek term term for word, onoma, is synonymous with name. By contrast, its Hebrew counterpart -davar- means not only word but also thing. It was precisely the original unity of word and thing, speech and thought, discourse and truth that the Greek Enlightenment disrupted."

This is by no means the only work to put the radical divergence of Hebraic from Hellenic in these terms. But where did this scholarly cultural meme begin? And is there more out there than meets the eye? If this is a matter of competing ontologies as Handelman would have it, is it only language in Rabbinic culture that is really real?

I recall that in my late teens, as I became more fervently religious and engaged in more rigorous text study in Yeshiva, a contemporary took me aside and said, "remember S., they're just words." Of course it didn't occur to me at the time how laden with meaning and history this phrase was, nor was I aware of the vast philosophical discourses that surrounded it.

Had I known of Handelman's work at the time (The Slayers of Moses), I might have responded, "no my friend you don't understand, for my tradition does not know from this Western understanding of language and reality; 'For the Rabbis... the primary reality was linguistic; true being was a God who speaks and creates texts, and imatatio deus was not silent suffering, but speaking and interpreting.'"

Yes, compelling... but consider this Rashi:

ויברא אלהים את האדם בצלמו - בדפוס העשוי לו, שהכל נברא במאמר והוא נברא בידים, שנאמר (תהלים קלט ה) ותשת עלי כפכה, נעשה בחותם כמטבע העשויה על ידי רושם שקורין קוי"ן בלע"ז [מטבע] וכן הוא אומר (איוב לח יד) תתהפך כחומר חותם

"... everything was created with an utterance and he was created with the hands."

Adam, the pinnacle of creation, was not created by speech, but by hand out of coarse material.

Ich bin von Kopf bis Fuss auf Liebe eingestellt

Nothing, no matter how low or high, profane or sublime, escaped P’s prescient eye. The weightiness of her representation in arrangements of found objects of art and the everyday was only apprehended by perspective – it was as Arendt observed of Benjamin’s quotations… But I’m getting ahead of myself here, and have theorized without having rehearsed my first encounter with P and all those subsequent intimate moments, which ultimately led to a rupture that haunts me to this very day. What I will attempt to do, is to create a Figura, an earthly drama which has been embellished only in its duration, and “without aesthetic restriction in either subject matter or form,” present an allegory for our age.

Let us first grant that we stare into windows, habitually and with great obsessive uniformity. Every one knows these windows, their type, their particular form and manner of display, but we will spare the prose the name we have given these windows of late. It seems that finally we are all flaneurs and connoisseurs...

When I first viewed P through one of these windows I met a gaze as if I had scanned some distant object through a looking glass...

The glaring eyes of a siren or Svengali as some friends intoned later...

But I thought,

Child of the pure unclouded brow

and dreaming eyes of wonder

Once Upon a Midnight Dreary While I Pondered Weak and Weary

Herr Prof. Immanuel Rath at a low point,

'Der blaue Engel,' Josef von Sternberg, 1930

It's well past midnight and two Cohen albums in,

I'm running through my hermetic wheel again.

coveting while turning pallid, feckless and flaccid.

a coveted image in hand will wear and fade,

but this icon will lie hidden

in some damp piss-soaked corner of a shadow.

"Poor Muse, alas, what ails thee, then, to-day?

Thy hollow eyes with midnight visions burn,

Upon thy brow in alternation play,

Folly and Horror, cold and taciturn."

misery is a veil, it's terror that's real

just sit alone with Ravel

- where "even damnation is poisoned with rainbows,"

it could be two notes on the piano and I'll smile.

still terror lurks behind us, an awful noise,

a string quartet hell-bent on twisting the gut

in the mood of savage laceration

terror inscribed on the body:

Here lies misspent toil and too much spoiling rotten sentiment.

So the still small voice let forth a lyrical refrain;

And here we are all cold and numb, are you happy that I've come?

when you fell in aching pleasure, melancholic, in earnest tether

you found your place in the chain reviled after fits of lust and guile.

Now we know which side your on, please give in to passing on.