Monday, June 25, 2012

Death, Anonymity, Jandek, and the Pines

A few days ago I wandered in to the Pines again, making another cryptic foray into an alternate universe that exists here on Earth.
This time I brought my camera as I promised.

IT's not snowing in the Pine Barrens this Winter, but nonetheless, during my entire visit I could not rid myself of this obsessive thought, which is a Jandek album title and lyric:

"Somebody in the Snow"

"Somebody in the snow"

"Some Body in the snow"

ad infinitum.

What does it mean, Somebody in the Snow? "You're just somebody in the snow, I don't even know why I think about you..."

Well that just about sums it up, doesn't it?

The viewer is just somebody in the snow,
The author is just somebody in the snow.
Here and there.

I find those simple words to be... heartwarming? Why the hell is that...?

I picture McCabe* dying in the snow while it slowly piles up, enveloping him. I imagine Jandek visualizing that scene while that lyric pops into his head.

(*From McCabe & Mrs. Miller, another motion picture worth writing about.)

McCabe's just a guy who worked his ass off and got a small name. He's got his own little Corwood Industry going on out in the Old West Oregon and he's not really looking to make a hell of a lot out of it. Maybe he wouldn't mind that but he doesn't seem to get too wound up about it. Some folks would like to liven things up for him and take a successful enterprise and make it more successful, for themselves.

Well McCabe's just an extraordinary ordinary guy who manages to keep the wolves at bay, just long enough to end up just another somebody in the snow. Where he ends up, well no one even knows what's been happening to him in his final moments. There's no one to appreciate the last clever trick he played, well except the guy he fooled, who probably didn't have a split second to think over how well he got tricked.

But it's simultaenously a disturbing and beautiful moment , when McCabe crawls away from his decisive victory, only to die "somebody in the snow," with the forces of Nature wrapping him in a cold blanket of anonymity and meaninglessness.

His corpse is saying to us: that's all there is to victory. You die if and when God or Nature so chooses. You try to have a hand in your own destiny, you play a joke on the bears out to get you, you think you're pretty clever, and then the snow has the last word. So be like McCabe here and try to make a good joke out of it if that's what tickles you.

And so the Pine Barrens make me feel this same way, as does much of nature, and our ambivalence about nature here is of course not an idiosyncratic eccentricity. Uncontrolled nature is a threat to our life, and to our sense of identity. However, I am finding more and more that those things, life and identity, do not exist. How many people and animals have died out in the Pine Barrens, their identity, and their place and cause of death known only to God or Nature?

And what is life, and what is it to have an identity?
Can someone please explain?
No.
all right, then...

I'm just somebody in the snow,
Hallelujah.

Free to do whatever I please.
I am freed by the callousness of nature.

Looking back at Jandek's words, they at first appear to be addressed to you. But then, they seem to be about Jandek, and about how Jandek imagines us looking at him. In the end, it's just somebody looking at himself. Even if Jandek tries to imagine us looking at him, he's just imagining himself looking at himself, and finding it all pretty puzzling. So, Jandek didn't mean for there to be a mystique about him? So some of his audience might wonder why he seems to keep it going. Well, it you go back to that song it just about figures because he can't do anything but be mystified himself at the whole thing, and there's really no one to talk to much less anything to talk about. You're stuck here with your corpse in the snow, scratching your head wondering what after all was the point.

...

...

...

Driving back out of the edge of the Barrens I dared to enter, going towards Philadelphia, you come across a town called Berlin, which is even more Jandek-like than the Pine Barrens. Tiny little houses, faded by the sea. If only they were by the sea. Sad little hobbit holes. I felt such a churning, silent desperation pulsing through it. And in fact I was informed, this isn't far off. Berlin is in the shadow of more affluent Voorhees, and the people there literally live in the shadow of their neighbors, because they grow up going to the same school. They don't live in the Pine Barrens; they didn't intend to just be somebody in the snow or in the grimy liqour store. All the shades were drawn in this town. In the Netherlands it's the custom to live with your living room shades open, welcoming people and avoiding secrets. And folks over there don't live so financially far apart either. But you turn a block and you go from millionaires to folks of meager means around Berlin. So they don't invite their neighbors in as much I guess. It just didn't seem very happy and I wished I could have whispered a word to the whole town somehow.

After all, I've been inside homes in Voorhees and frankly I don't think it's anything to be jealous of. It's always nice to have money I suppose, but I can't say I've met many happy people from Voorhees either. And frankly for all the money those places are a lot uglier than the run down territories in most cases.

Photos later.

Warmlove

To my band.

I really love you.
Thank you for making life possible.
I can live life to ninety knowing I will still have things to learn with you.

Just when I thought I had captured and expressed all of life,
I listened to the next thing we did together.
 We taught new things. We taught ourself inexpressible things from within ourselves.
 We became forever irreducible.

You made me so overcome with emotion.
I pounded my fist into the crumbling concrete floor, uncontrollably.
I stopped and then I started again.
It felt so good.
We were so pure.
I've never heard people so free.
And I'd never guess we would be.

If it reaches one person half as powerfully as you reached me,
it will be worth it to spend all the pitiful fruits of my toil to put it in that person's hands.

Am I loving my brothersisters? Hell, yes...
I'm loving them and they aren't here to listen to me extol their virtue.
But they will be with me forever.
And I know they'll hear me laud them again soon.

Thank you.

Lesson 199 from Universal Consciousness (version for the deaf)

[circa 21:00]

[music]Here we go again
Thank you.
I hear those trumpets blow again
all aglow again
What are you doing?
taking a chance again
[horn blast/raise eyebrows]
here I slide again
..about to take that ride again
starry eyed again
takin a chance on love...
huh..!
It's a course on miracles!
all of a sudden you're seeing differently…
and you look out in the world
and nobody can recognize what's occuring with you.
Be happy…[!]
things are mending now
I see a rainbow blending now...
that's it.
I've recognized you.
No, you're not going to be a body.
Better, better.
gon' be healed and whole and perfect as you were created, ok
is there someone walking with you now,
that's redirecting you to the idea of your own perfection?
Sure.
Up until then he simply reflected back to you what you wanted to see.
on the ball again...
change your mind,
the world out there will change
I'm gonna give my all again
takin a chance, takin a chance
on Love!
The worst part of prison
is being so god-forsaken quiet.
OH, I need to scream out!

You gonna lock me away
somewhere worse than this?

I'm gonna scream night and day

Youre gonna bind my mouth

I'm gonna scream into this computer

You're gonna bind my hands

I'm gonna scream in dance

I have to scream to You!

I have to shout and holler!

I can't be in this prison of eyes no more!

I can't be in this prison of ears and
glares no more!

I have to yell and whoop every minute I am awake!

You tie me up!

I'm gonna shout in my dreams so loud

that people will hear it in their sleep

from thousands of miles away!

Lord, don't tie me up!

Loose these chains!

Let me out of Jail!

heroic efforts



falls 3700' to reach a stranger

http://www.grindtv.com/outdoor/blog/33952/mt+rainier+ranger+falls+3700+feet+to+death+during+rescue+attempt/

I. You will get down on your own.
1. you will never get trapped on the ice
2. you will never fall
II. You can not freeze to death and survive to re-enact your fantasies in a new milieu.
1. Cryogenics is not yet real. Early successes are likely to be mutilation and possibly a horror of being resuscitated into a monstrous form.
2. Most people are content to live well once and the fates are often unkind to excessive ambitions.
3. Live within the pocket of airflow and be content to add your consciousness to the unknown.
4. Leave information behind.

There are sanctuaries holding honey and salt


evensong lights floating black night waters,
a lagoon of stars washed in velvet shadows,
a great storm cry from white sea horses-
              these moments cost beyond all prices.

a deep smoke winding one hump of a mountain
and the smoke becomes a smoke known to your own
              twisted individual garments
the winding of it gets into your walk, your hands,
              your face and eyes.