A funny thing happened on the way to Wallace Stevens' later poetry

[TranquillityBase]

Last night I dreamed that I found my fairy book, the one that the library destroyed. It was in the possession of that Daat Darling girl from the Internet. I was staying in a tent in the woods that I couldn't get the rain out of, and she and her boyfriend, women in my dreams always have boyfriends, were taking a walk along a trail, probably scouting for locations to take photos. She had my fairy book. I told her my story about it, and she refused to give it over. I followed her home, she was living with her parents, everyone in my dreams live with their extended families, and tried to talk to her mom about it. I offered 500 dollars, but only had three. For the rest of the dream, I scolded myself for not offering 300, that probably would have done it. I could tell that it was me offering what I didn't have that sunk the deal.

I was no good in school because of a disease called Learning Disabilities, or LD. There were trailers behind the school where people with that disease had classes. They were around the side of the back sidewalk next to the Science Wing, and people would say to the LD kids: "You better hit that corner." To this day, whenever I encounter someone who's obviously not very smart, I say to them to hit the corner. They don't know what I'm talking about, of course. They're very stupid.


From elemetary school, all the way up to a few years ago, I'd check out that fairy book from the library. There were lost [sic: (freudian slip)] of books on folklore and urban lessons [sic: legends] and the so-called paranormal back then. I'd check them out and put them in my bookbag instead of my school books, and I'd gather a couple kids, and we'd go looking for what was in those books. Trees and Rocks and Fairy-Rings. Aliens and Vampires and stuff. Things always happened and dreams. Running water, creeks and pond, river and roots, and scary things out there in the isolated places and under the soothing but eerie lights of closed or closing store parkinglots when we ventured far up the highway with Charlie Brown grownups.

This is why I read you.

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Energetic Encountering and Energetic Reading. That's what I call improvisational adventures. Simple spontaneous engagement with who or whatever you come across. Read, find in the books anything that may be known about what you have encountered, or how to do any tasks or take up any skills. That sounds like common sense. 
   Every book is a field guide. There are books and encounters in dreams and other Realms.

Those books by Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and The Rebel, and many of Colin Wilson's books are like those essay books by Henry Miller, and the William Joyce book. They build up philosophies based on particular Figures and their Works. 
   What to do with these books but use them for academic pursuits or hobbyistic curiosity or, the point of this sketch: Invoking them.


Learning skills, Evoking folkloric entities, Invoking Figures and their Works, making Poems, designing and carrying out Rituals.


Magic is a free and mysterious thing, Magick is a codified system of practice and attainment. 
   I wandered around finding the strange things to contemporary science, finding magic along the way. 
   And I found books on Magick, where I could evoke and invoke, have a say and reign over what Really is and isn't.
   

I'm mostly still following you.

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Signs and Symbols                Subtlety and Blatancy         Allusion and Decadence



Works make people believe things. Many books carry the message that there is a difference between Signs and Symbols. A Symbol is a rich and layered and mysterious something or other. A Sign is something that means something direct and particular.
   But what is so mysterious and rich about an Egyptian god with centuries of elaboration, and a Stop Sign?

Here, from a Poetry perspective, you can compare the poetry of William Butler Yeats and Aleister Crowley. The use of Symbols for Poetry, and the use of Poetry for Ritual. And how Crowley's poetry works as Decadence, as his Symbols become more and more a network of Signs with Blatant and Dogmatic Meanings. You can compare this with Surrealism, and the beef Antonin Artaud had with the codification of the so-called Unconscious Material for Political Use. 

   You can see how Yeats used the same Dogmatic Symbol System in a more layered and nuanced way.  
   You can look at the late 19th century and early 20th, look at Victorian Culture moving from a Classical/Romantic zeitgeist through Surreal Decadence into polished so-called Modernism. 


Sometimes it pays to put down the books and write your own. 


Is anybody interested in this thesis? The 21st Century is an even greater playground of Decadence, in the Art sense.

This is where I lose track of your dialogue, your "sketch".  What is your thesis?  That the 21st Century is the greatest playground of decadence in (recent) history?  I'd say it's more than a playground.  More serious than simple decadence.  I haven't travelled enough to know about much beyond the U.S. of A., but I see a country descending into absolute madness.  Probably it's my age; too much has changed and changed into something "strange and terrible" as Hunter Thompson would say.  Souls are bleeding out all around me, or so it feels.  Poetry won't save us.  Maybe magic could.  Is that your thesis?  That magic can save us?

I sat in a Nissan dealership for three hours yesterday morning, getting my car serviced (where do I go to get my soul serviced?), barraged by musak, the desparate voices of salesman making phonecalls on phonespeakers, each one trying to drown out the other with fake bravado, the sad "customers" sitting around glued to their cell phones, some of them even listening to competing musak on their individual phones.  I sat there with my old copy of Hesse's Rosshalde like a polar bear trapped on a melting iceberg.  The audible chaos seemed desgned to keep anyone from having a meaningful thought, much less a conversation, not that I've had a meaningful conversation outside of this forum in a hundred years or so. 

My wife thinks I need to join a Unitarian church. Maybe she's right; she usually is.

We hosted a "Neighbors Night Out" the previous Tuesday; you know, where the neighbors on a street gather to "take back the streets" but I see nothing to "take back".  But there were no poets, no readers there.  Just middle class folks bragging about how wonderful this town is, because it's structured to clamp down on anything disturbing in the slightest way.  I guess I could have stripped naked and started chanting Howl.  At least we wouldn't be asked to host it again. 

Om padme mani hum/a.k.a. "So it goes",
TqB