MemberRandy_Hierodule(anti-noun, pro-verb)

Real Name

MFL

About My Library

A breeding ground for apostasy and silverfish. Miroir d'anthracite. It is, by virtue of what it contains and what it excludes, all reasons therefore unknown to me, my daemon, my secret sharer; as an admirer once described George Brummel: "a palace in a labyrinth."

"Nous haïssons la Foule et les Lois et le Monde." (et nous devons très dyspeptic over the funge who purls, "eclectic!")

- Renée Vivien, et al.

Reading
Have Read

About Me

In that time,

"But exiled here..., and dreadfully bored, it is not at all peculiar... that I amuse myself with mythological tales of Hermes, Apollo and Dionysus...".

- Constantine Cavafy ("A Byzantine Nobleman in Exile Composing Verses")

"Even when quite a child I felt two conflicting sensations in my heart: the horror of life and the ecstasy of life. That, indeed, was the mark of a neurasthenic idler."

- Charles Baudelaire

"Know not thyself"

- Monelle (Marcel Schwob)

"Alas, alas! How agreeable to my nature are solitude, silence, and darkness!"

- Fernando de Rojas

"Certes, la solitude est dangereuse pour les intelligences qui travaillent.... Quand nous sommes seuls longtemps, nous peuplons le vide de fantômes.”

- Guy de Maupassant (Le Horla)

"I accustomed myself to pure hallucination. I ended by treating my mental disorder as sacred."

- Arthur Rimbaud

"A sign we are, without meaning
Without pain we are and have nearly
Lost our language in foreign lands...".

- Friedrich Hölderlin

"[S]olitude is a state dangerous to those who are too much accustomed to sink into themselves."

- Samuel Johnson

"As knowledge comes, so comes also recollection. Knowledge and recollection are one and the same thing."

- Gustav Meyrink

“Last night dreamed of the boil on my cheek. The perpetually shifting border between ordinary life and the terror that would seem more real.”

- Franz Kafka

"I see so clearly that there are no conclusive signs by means of which one can distinguish clearly between being awake and being asleep, that I am quite astonished by it; and my astonishment is such that it is almost capable of persuading me that I am asleep now."

- René Descartes

"It is better to dream one's life than to live it."

- Marcel Proust

"La seule excuse qu'un homme ait d'écrire, c'est de s'écrire lui-même, de dévoiler aux autres la sorte de monde qui se mire en son miroir individuel; sa seule excuse est d'être original.... Il doit se créer sa propre esthétique."

- Remy de Gourmont

"And be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind...."

- Romans 12:2

In his classic novel of the occult, Là-Bas, Joris Huysmans wrote, “Now from lofty Mysticism to base Satanism there is but one step. In the Beyond all things touch.” Under the sign of the caduceus, Jeanne d’Arc is paired with Giles de Rais. Abomination painstakingly decocted yields its transcendental osmazome to make a monstrance of those palates too jaded to lend themselves to utterance of shopworn, vulgar prayers. The distinction between depravity and piety becomes a matter of sensibility. There are sacred precedents. In Virgil we have the story of the calf that was bludgeoned to death so that the divine bees would make a hive of its corpse and leave behind their honey. A similar story exists in the Old Testament's Book of Judges. Scientists claim that these bees were in fact droneflies and the "honey" they produced, an ichorous filth. O Rose.

There is a victim under every cornerstone.

Out of the strong came forth the nectar of les fleurs du mal. We feed on the world and the world feeds within us. Consumption is fundamental. The bulbs that swell under the soil to flower the garden call to the cancer dreaming in the marrow of our bones. This is fearful symmetry.

"And they made a compact with me,
and wrote it in my heart, that it might not be forgotten:

'If thou goest down into Egypt,
and bringest the one pearl,
which is in the midst of the sea
around the loud-breathing serpent,
thou shalt put on thy glittering robe...'."
(Acts of Thomas)

"It is reclamation work, like the draining of the Zuyder Zee."

- Sigmund Freud

Before destiny and identity, capture in the net of Opinion, there was a day. Liberation (recovery, return) is anamnesis.

I am lustrous rot stewing in a golden bowl.

I am the perturbing guest. A nowt, a null, I am a sickness unto death, a lesion on the dark back of time. Early on, I am given to understand, I had faith that my flower would bear, some day, the prescribed fruit. Somewhere along the garden path, the angel of idleness waylaid me and informed me that I knew nothing but how to behave, and what generally to expect; I am the story of the faith of my fathers.

Idleness: larder of crime, fruit-basket of perversity... the fanatic idler finds time to ask "what have I received and at what (or whose) cost?" (There is blood in blessings) In a crucible of filth, an homunculus grows. A fruiting body for the eucharist of swine.

"I must travel an unknown road and fight a strange battle."

- Gilgamesh

"For me, the imaginary is simply what we have forgotten."

- Marcel Cohen

In Myth and Reality, Mircea Eliade tells us that the dead are those who have lost their memories. To the early Hermetists, as to Proust and Denton Welch, salvation is an act of memory. To remember is to gather and articulate something that has been forgotten, lost, destroyed, to restore to life and consciousness what has been given over to death and forgetfulness. The history of Osiris and Hermaphroditus. It is interesting that memory and salvation are acts of rebellion, widdershins, against nature, time and destiny. Rebellion and knowledge, the good book tells us, are one.

Imagination sings of Memory. Thus Hermes, god of Eloquence and Imagination: "Of all the gods he first honoured Memory with his song, Memory, mother of the Muses; for the son of Maia was in her portion." In Hermes in Paris, Peter Vansittart writes that "a god fuses hindsight with foresight." Der Gott verschmilzt Horizonte. The sleight-of-hand art of interpretation. Lord of transgression, Hermes (Psychopompous) is a double agent. He plays both sides, trafficking between the lost and the unbegotten, the explicit and the implied. All borders meet in his eccentric person.

Mnemosyne, goddess of Memory, mother of the Muses. François Villon wrote “I know everything, but I do not know myself.” The gnosis is that, with the assumption of the veils of received ideas, the self must be re-membered, which is to say, reborn of a poetic act. Salvation, as in the tragedy of schizophrenia, is being made whole again: remembering. Cosmogony is God recovering his memory.(dh'kir) ذكر Do this in memory of me. Remembrance as commandment (Zakhor). Crucible synagogue: In the present, make the past and the future one.

As the White Queen said to Alice, "it’s a poor sort of memory that only works backwards":

When you make the two one, and when you make the
inner as the outer and the outer as the inner
and the above as the below, and when you make the
male and the female into a single one, so that the
male will not be male and the female will [not] be
female, ... then you shall enter the Kingdom.

- Gospel of Thomas

Je est un autre. Advertised as a unit, I (and thou) appears always duplicitous. Lexical labyrinths turn back upon themselves. Shadow and echo of the ever unavailable.

"Two is the first number."

-- C.G. Jung

Procession, return. Herakleitos: "the beginning of a circle is also its end." Jesus: "...Where the beginning is, there shall be the end." Out in East Coker, it is always January.

The boundless present. Hermann Broch called it "the immensity of the here and now." An immensity such as resembles an "infinite sphere, the centre of which is everywhere, the circumference nowhere." (Pascal, Hermes Trismegistus).

Opinion, Kingdom of the Father. The son came to bring a sword. Poertry is parricide.

"... God forgive the blaspheming of a half-trampled worm..."

- Ladislav Klíma

In the name of the now binding the Nothing and the Infinite, and of action's fruit and the back of the deed. Amun.

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- ERSTWHILE -

Odi profanum volgus et arceo.

Favete linguis: carmina non prius

audita Musarum sacerdos

virginibus puerisque canto.

- Horace

Thinking on learning, knowledge (huddled "facts", potsherds and beads) in relation to Death (as ambiguous as any other fact): the cliche, "you can't take it with you". Has knowledge the same status as any other acquisition? You cannot ban it, burn it, bury it, or toss it away, and paired with the question as to whether you can take it with you, can you have it? But at the center here, what/where is you? - a convenience of facts, data, contingencies, like a language, a fad, a weather pattern? I cannot be certain (that anyone or anything goes, or is taken, anywhere).

A dissolution or redistribution of the nexus.

Crux, crucifix. All the gods found or fixed there or thereon. Hermes-Hekate. The Christ. Matangi-Shakti.... 4 is the number of the ways that convene at the nexus, the center, the omphalos. 4 is the number sacred to Hermes, after whom the 4th and central of the 7 days is named. 4 is the number of the elements, and of the ways of orientation. The god is everywhere at all times: to the East, to the West, the North, and the South (all incorporate in him, the center without circumference).

A minatory tree, a crucial sign: Tree of Life, Tree of Knowledge.

Tree of strange fruit. The cross is both raised and rooted. Its base is firmly in the soil (underworld), its crown is in the heavens, it branches to the east (birth) and to the west (death), across the linear world of men. Fixed at its center, and pointing in the 4 directions, the figure of the god who dies and is reborn. The god who is a son (between two thieves, one who was condemned, one who was saved. Two serpents on the staff of the lord of thieves: one lethal, one which revives).

Mystery delicious in the mind. A sacred space is no space at all. And sacred time is the denial or abrogation of time. Mind where knowledge gathers, where in darkness I visit my corpse and come forth by day, transformed.

The middle on the margins. The way of the cross is a crossroad. In the ancient world, and in the American South, it was believed you found the god or a devil there. The crossroad, like the sanctuary, is a liminal possibility.

The brilliant light before the morning flows like heated honey through song to nourish the young, to sweeten and wake them into this other world. Lords, anoint their eyes with aureate delicious light. Gather your heirs among them, and proceed. We bear names for the beasts born there.

Shutters open and dissolve in the searing light of twin suns.

How many among the brothers who ran with us turned back and hardened into the thing he hated?

Youth is a song soon over, but reinterpreted and repeated endlessly. All take each iteration as the original. This is how the hard dark archetype of the fathers endures and appears immortal.

Liber pater, fertile freeing text. Verbal culture is viticulture. Poiesis intoxicates and liberates.

In the beginning was the deed.

Brothers, liberi fratres, drink deep and kill your fathers.

- Randy Hierodule, MFL 11 june 23

-------------------- A TREMENDOUS MUSIC ---------------------------

I

Chrysostom's bite. A ringing in the pore of the auricle.

A golden tocsin poured in the porches of thine ears.

I don't want to tell you a story,

I want to take you into a dream.

The small girl, in the darkening room,

lying in her bed, the sheets pulled up to her chin.

She begins, "this is how the people in Hell...".

We roam the dark roads across the overgrown field. Uneasy, with great caution.

The wind hisses and rattles in the reeds.

They tower over us. Engulf us. Obscure our path.

Snakes, or the wrynecks, whisper in the surrounding boscage.

The house is up ahead, they say.

The roaring, the great fear,

and then (and now), the golden morning, nourishing wet,

warm with voices.

The understanding, or what seems to be the knowledge,

of you and here, and the warm arms, which appear

or are understood to have always been here for us,

with us (O night of roaring, and great fear).

This is a pattern of hawks swirling in the sky,

of clots of reptiles unfurling,

creeping across moonlit waste in holy night.

They bring from distant Isden a tremendous music.

In that House: may you know all the rooms there,

and what to say to those who dwell in them.

May no harm befall you.

May you walk upright and eat the food that is to your liking.

A haunting song,

tinnitus, echoes of the solar winds,

white symphony of an unquiet mind.

Spanda of the molecules of your flesh,

velocity of your blood. The alien cosmos of you.

Your eyes. You ride upon the shoulders

of a terrific animal.

Look down.

Roaring fear.

= RH/MFL July-August 2023

II

The rain falls, and falling on the walks and eaves resounds

the patter of prey and predator,

upon the forest grounds, ever running ever hunting.

Like the wires overhead or engines of the cities ever thrumming,

the bloodroar in the brain (the life, the fear),

ever drumming.

Everything and everywhere, hive-like, humming.

Louring skies and distant rumbling,

signal a siege: stormheads coming.

= RH/MFL 25.vill.23

III

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HYMN TO ENTROPY

2000+ dead overnight in Morocco.

The earth gave way beneath their feet.

The sky collapsed upon their heads.

A bloated self-absorbed old fascist repeats

his amplified whingings against the justice

that pursues him like a Fury,

breeding locusts among the plebs

who swarm to his call.

Health concerns, fallen friends, skies dark with smoke

from far off lands.

To hear the others near the edge speak,

the Past was a perfect day -

not because it was without flaw or perils (of course!),

but because these were overcome,

crystallized: spice for a redundant dish

served on the event horizon

of the here and now.

mfl 090923

Location

Under-the-All-Overs, Slough of Despond, VA

Homepage

http://thechapeloftheabyss.blogspot.com/

Memberships

TinyCat

Currently Reading

Hyperion and Selected Poems by Friedrich Hölderlin

A Brief History of Time : From the Big Bang to Black Holes by Stephen W. Hawking

Four Restoration Libertine Plays by Deborah Payne Fisk

Reading Writing by Julien Gracq

Dream Yoga and the Practice of Natural Light by Chogyal Namkhai Norbu

Pascal Quignard: Towards the Vanishing Point by Lea Vuong

Manhattan Project: The Story of the Century by Bruce Cameron Reed

What is Life?: With Mind and Matter and Autobiographical Sketches by Erwin Schrödinger

The Ancient Egyptian Pyramid Texts by James P. Allen

Favorite Authors

Abhinavagupta, Ryunosuke Akutagawa, Umar Ibn Muhammed Al-Nefzawi, Leonid Andreyev, Apuleius, Charles Baudelaire, Samuel Beckett, William Beckford, Max Beerbohm, Thomas Bernhard, Léon Bloy, Giovanni Boccaccio, David Bohm, Jorge Luis Borges, Hermann Broch, Jocelyn Brooke, Norman Oliver Brown, Giordano Bruno, Constantine Petrou Cavafy, Leonard Cline, Ithell Colquhoun, Joseph Conrad, Gabriele D'Annunzio, Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly, Guy Debord, Isak Dinesen, Ernest Dowson, Mircéa Eliade, Donald Evans, Matthew S. Farrell, Ronald Firbank, Gustave Flaubert, Sigmund Freud, Michel de Ghelderode, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Nikolai Gogol, Witold Gombrowicz, Edward Gorey, Remy de Gourmont, Julien Gracq, Ṣādiq Hidāyat, Heraclitus, Trismegistus Hermes, E. T. A. Hoffmann, Friedrich Hölderlin, Joris-Karl Huysmans, Robert Irwin, Henry James, Edmund John, James Joyce, Franz Kafka, Yasunari Kawabata, Kṣemarāja, Heinrich von Kleist, Giacomo Leopardi, Alexander Lernet-Holenia, Auguste Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, Leopoldo Lugones, Arthur Machen, Stéphane Mallarmé, Walter de la Mare, Javier Marías, Guy de Maupassant, Cormac McCarthy, Gustav Meyrink, Octave Mirbeau, Robert Musil, Ovid, Umberto Pasti, Walter Pater, Petronius, Edgar Allan Poe, Marcel Proust, Pascal Quignard, Thomas de Quincey, Jean Ray, Alexei Remizov, Rainer Maria Rilke, Georges Rodenbach, Frederick Rolfe, Arthur Schnitzler, Marcel Schwob, Hjalmar Söderberg, W. G. Sebald, William Shakespeare, Laurence Sterne, Vizconde de Lascano Tegui, Alexander Theroux, Georg Trakl, Algis Uzdavinys, Vasugupta, Émile Verhaeren, Evelyn Waugh, Denton Welch, Oscar Wilde, John Wilmot, Gabrielle Wittkop, P. G. Wodehouse

Local Favorites

Bookstores: All Books Considered, Antiquariat Andreas Moser, Bank Street Books, Bartleby's Books, Battery Park Book Exchange and Champagne Bar, Bookhouse, Capitol Hill Books, City Lights Books, Daedalus Bookshop, DogStar Books, Dutton's Books, Heartwood Books, Hole In the Wall Books, Normal's Book & Records, Read it Again Sam, Second Story Books, Second Story Books - Rockville, MD, Tattered Cover Book Store - Colfax Avenue (Denver), The Captain's Bookshelf, The Kelmscott Bookshop, The Lantern - Bryn Mawr Bookstore, The Old Library Bookshop, Too Many Books

Other: Kensington Day of the Book Festival

Member Connections

Friends

50Watts, 666777, aluvalibri, anaall, arnzen, ashleybessbrown, Asterixia, benbrainard8, BibliophileCafe, bootslack, bronwyn52, CassandraRichmond, castel15, christianbaldwin, Cimbrone, cns1000, Dan.Sasse, DarkSister, FiveBooks, flashgordon, jaelquinn, JayLivernois, JeremyCShipp, johnnywalter, klarkash, KoobieKitten, kswolff, Kushana, LiminalSister, LisaShapter, michaelstevens, Mikatronics, mondschaf, orientalist, PatrickSwanson, poetontheone, rocketjk, shigekuni, slickdpdx, Smethers, stinking_lilies, suicidepress, Tristan_Bubblegum, tros, turkeyleg, ueeiieeu, VolupteFunebre, walshga

Interesting Library

50Watts, 666777, 6dts, afprovlibrary, aluvalibri, Asterixia, bibliopolitan, BillsProtennoia, castel15, cns1000, Crypto-Willobie, DavidX, dcozy, fotomicha, galacticus, Himalmitra, JamesBoswell, JanWillemNoldus, Jean_Duc_de_Berry, JohnDee, kikibuenavista, LolaWalser, malinablue, Marquis_de_Sade, MMcM, mylittleyellowshoe, Myriades, nilsr, orientalist, paradoxosalpha, Pfanner, poetontheone, pomonomo2003, Quixada, rolandperkins, rolig, SamuelJohnsonLibrary, SamuelRoth, setnahkt, slickdpdx, Stevia, susanaberth, TwistedSpoonPress, vaniamk13, veilofisis, VolupteFunebre, yeschaton, zerkalo.