Pyramid News Scheme

Rev. Darrell Jones aka Medicine Man Short Fire (2013)

The charge of silence

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No poem works in my mind for more than a moment and that’s both the (remaining) attraction and the (growing) distraction. I mean more like more as in moar but also more like NO MORE, like more no moar, even though “no more” doesn’t get you a fraction of a strobe flash of a shadow of a shit around here

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Imagination as impoverished possibility

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Your/you’re. Having is whole where Being is broken. (And just when we become / Our own perfect problems) 

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Living in Shanghai I find myself more
often walking the streets talking to myself

The phones (head, smart) make it easy
and I’m always there, just like any other

local ghost gone merely global, i.e. insane 
(tell it to a shepherd, tell it to a farmer

tell it to shaman, hunter, gatherer)

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We are around nine months less than zero to one-hundred-and-twenty or so years old. Somewhere, a few neurons and their somebodies can still actually make it back to, say, 1894, making then & there matter like shadow-verbs for being-here-now yet where & when we might only imagine but don’t, because here we are

Cast forward 120 to 2134, say to a stadium-floodlit marching band woven among rhizome-fissured cross-shadow plumes, drums & tubas & fifes on painted turf in splintered tessellated stop-motion poses beneath billowing star-white gnats & moths (Duchamp to Leary to Lynch) and amid this actual moment’s generalized panic of tagged & networked photographomania

Fast-closing thunder, static-flushed full silence, rippling carpets of fireworks, just-married bombs, and brace of sharp reports, we ghosts flee boom! we flee boom! we flee!

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Living in an apartment on a busy intersection in Shanghai’s former French Concession where trucks and buses rumble and grind past at all hours amidst horn honks and break squeals (and on Saturdays the panhandling street musician’s húlúsī gourd organ), leading me to earplugs, sound-canceling headphones, ambient music, and, most recently and most successfully, the excellent collection available online of white noise, pink noise, blue noise, thunder storms, rain in the woods, rain on tin roofs, wind in the forest, wind on high dunes, wind in the arctic, crashing surf and river rapids. I am currently 04:03:42 into a looped recording of “10 Hours Rainfall w/ Distant Thunder.”

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It is a source of deep embarrassment — and therefore social silence — that as a teenager I attended the H. Roe Bartle Boy Scout Camp near Osceola, Missouri and was inducted into an invented Indian tribe called the Tribe of Mic-O-Say as a Brave in an initiation ceremony led by middle-aged and older men (Elders) and teens slightly older than I was (Warriors) who took us young Braves out into the woods away from the large bonfire – “leave this council ring!” the Medicine Man shouted after each young Brave-to-be was presented and performed an oath. Then the Brave’s runner — his chosen Warrior-mentor — ran the kid out into a spot where overnight the new Brave was to sleep “alone” in woods filled with other Braves and their Warrior minders as part of the initiation ritual.

That night, we were to meditate – we were not to speak, not with the runner nor with any other Brave, briefly fasting with only water to drink – and await a sign from the Great Spirit that would give us our Mic-O-Say name; we were also to gather some natural thing from the woods to sew into a small leather pouch with plastic line before attaching a hawk’s claw to the pouch. We wore these around our necks for the rest of camp, starting with the final night of the initiation ceremony in which we announced our new Mic-O-Say names and were blessed by a Medicine Man using a big sacred feather. 

We wore loincloths over swimming trunks. My chosen name was “Thunder in the Distance.” I thought my name was pretty good but then I heard my friend Pete’s name: “Rattlesnake in the Leaves.” 

I do deeply love the sound of wind in the woods on a hot and humid Missouri summer night with heat lightning flashing in the sky and occasional thunder, so far off you’re not sure at first if you’re hearing what you think you are, but near enough to register with your arm hairs as major disturbance in the atmosphere.

Needless to say, we were nearly all to a man, to a boy, ghostly white, whether in- or outside or somewhere between, even the black kids? Yes

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Mao statue, East China Normal University, Shanghai

I love scanning errors — errors produced by scanners — in general, and right now in particular I love the ones I’m hitting in the Penguin Kindle edition of Antigone (tr. Robert Fagles), which I’ve been reading because we’ll be kicking off the semester with a big discussion of Sophocles’ 2,454-year-old tragedy next week as part of freshman orientation.

Here’s a good example:

CHORUS:

G!ory!— great beam of the sun, brightest of all
that ever rose on the seven gates of Thebes,
you bum through night at last!

And yes, it is all gory business — suicides by blade and hanging, the whole business of leaving a corpse to rot outside the city gates. And gory is a word that does looks good violently split asunder with an exclamation point. And if the sun does anything at all and if we absolutely must anthropomorphize what the sun does and how it does it, then bum indeed is fitting. The sun bums through the sky day and night. The sun is a bum.

Gore is glory. Sun, you bum, beat down on the rotting corpse of Polynices to reveal — in the casual, indifferent manner of haughty lifetime bums everywhere observing the doings of everyday people (working stiffs and middle managers and CEOs alike) — that the glory in the tragedy of life in the polis yields not just gore but g!ore!

I’m rather bummed, on the other hand, that we’ll be using the Ian Johnston translation next week with our 300-some incoming students (half from the PRC, half from everywhere else*), which renders the same passage thusly:

CHORUS:

O ray of sunlight,
most beautiful that ever shone
on Thebes, city of the seven gates

I’m pleased, however, at the prospect of foregrounding translation a bit in discussion of our sense of Sophocles and his play (as well as the felicitous errors that may arise in transmission) if I get a chance. 

Here’s yet another translation, which I came across on Spotify. It’s a dramatic recording of Antigone by a group of students from McGill University done back in 1959, which you can access on the Smithsonian Folkways site. The translation, by Robert Fitzgerald and Dudley Fitts, first appeared in 1938.

CHORUS:

Now the long blade of the sun, lying
Level east to west, touches with glory
Thebes of the seven gates. Open, unlidded
Eye of the golden day!

It’s read with a mannerist Mid-Atlantic English accent (with what sound like occasional hints of Transylvanian) with stentorian delivery. Interesting to contrast with the recording made by Members of Columbia University in the original Greek, recorded in 1957 and also available on the Smithsonian Folkways site, at least for a few lines.

Of course, I don’t understand ancient Greek, but then again, neither does Google. Google Translation does Modern Greek, however, and returning to the idea of “scanning errors,” here broadly understood to include online machine translation, Google gives us this wonderful glitch translation of the same lines (I include the first two stanzas, actually, here, because there are so many great English words and phrases that emerge from the Googlish:

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