It's fucking cold and it's fucking raining. I'm out in the village, near all of our pod gardens and I'm digging another grave for one of our cats. This one really hurts. Beau was more than just a beautiful Tom, he was a constant companion to a man who doesn't really want or need companions. Beau was 12 when his heart finally turned on him. We'd been warned but having him die in our arms was too close to the bone. He had a lot of Maine Coon in him, along with that touch of blue-eyed oriental. He was a lap cat, unlike his brother Wolf who won't let you pick him up or hold him at all. Beau wasn't really complete unless he was tangled up within your arms or sleeping just off your own sleeping face - the two of you breathing quietly in the dark of the cabin. Beau is the 2nd cat we've buried on our two hectares - Woody went first and we put him at the top of the Champs where Basho guards the greenhouse and the long, steep, slope which slides down to Quasimodo - the boat house - and the lake. That was 12 years ago and we went out and rescued 2 kittens within 2 weeks of Woody's death. Beau and Wolf came into the cabin and except for when Beau fell out of the bedroom window and splatted on the clay 2 floors below, or when they were let out on the back deck, the 2 cats have not left the cabin for anything but their yearly trip to the vet. There's a brace of dead horses dreaming at the bottom of our lake - and now the hills around them are filling up with cats.
That's the Archangel Gabriel flying to the right. We tried to capture him in his moment of Stoop when he pulls up just before auguring in. Gabriel was one of Kenny's early missions - somewhere around 1997 or so. He's a 500 lb rock with wildly dactylic wing structures and he's shown hovering over 7 Ascenders which are placed in a convex series of circles. The convex circles are inversely resonant with the concave circles of rocks which we called: Grandiflora and which once hung up in the hardwoods on a steep dune directly across from the dune upon which we hung Gabriel. Both Grandiflora and Gabriel are down - they no longer exist. The DNR dismantled Grandiflora and were going after Gabriel when we beat them to the punch and took it down ourselves. There's a lot of work and some money in our Spikes and Outlaw Art and Adventure Theology is not a charity. For a decade the dismantled Gabriel sat in the weeds near the Atelier - and then Kenny got the idea to retrofit the Archangel and this time incarnate him as Saint Michael the Archangel. It's an act of rescue, sure, but it's also a kind of Supersession - a reclaiming and a rebranding, a usurpation. In very much the same way that Christianity - what Skippy calls `Kikidom' - is a Supersession of Judaism - what Lucky calls `Kikedom' - the rebirth of Heiligmichael Erzengel from the Archangel Gabriel is an act of Kenotic Replacement, what Ferlinghetti called: "A rebirth of Wonder."
Click on the green button to the left 4 times and read the sordid tale of Oscar Wilde's death in L'Hotel and of his nefarious end on the seedy side of the Seine. Skippy has been coming to Paris for nearly 50 years. Barber Perfect knew Paris when the Left Bank was a filthy warren of warring Student Nations who were studying at the University of Paris under Abelard, or smoking Hashish with the mystics at the Monastery of St. Victors with Hugh and his protohippies and Tikkun Olams like the young man we call Kenny La Roche.
Finish the riff about L'Hotel and Wilde by clicking on the green button below another 4 times. Skippy is not wasting your precious time - he is practicing the Rhetorical Art of Foreshadowing. He's prepping you for tragedy and tragicomedy. You should abandon hope at the doors to all hotels in Europa. Why should you be different? I suppose you think that you're one of the righteous and that you had no hand in the killing of Anne Frank.
If Oscar's death tells us anything it's that everyone is guilty. When Oscar died Europa was still a few decades in front of killing its Jews. Or at least trying to kill all of them. It had been killing some of them for well over a thousand years.
Skippy's Mission in France and England was to follow and Collect images and data on the Semiosphere of St. Michael the Archangel. The term is from Semiotics - the Science of Signs. "Semiosphere is the sphere of semiosis in which sign processes operate in the set of all interconnected Umwelten. The concept was first coined by Juri Lotman in 1984 and is now applied to many fields, including cultural semiotics generally, biosemiotics, zoosemiotics, geosemiotics, etc. The concept is treated more fully in the collection of Lotman's writings published in English under the title Universe of the Mind: A Semiotic Theory of Culture (1990)." Those fucking Imps at Wikipedia got nothing to do all day but Define and Dignify - the last term coming from Tarot. Let Skippy 'splain that up. The Semiosphere is the Set of all Bearers of Meaning within an Environment - and an Environment may be physical, metaphysical, abstract, or just plain theoretical. The Umwelt is made up of just those parts of any environment which contain Meanings for an organism - messages about Survival. An Organism may be singular, plural, biological, or a Mental Construct. Lust is an Organism in the Spiritual Environment of the Monkey's Umwelt called: Virtues and Vices. Humans exist within a Monkey's Umwelt, a Human's Umwelt, Nature's Umwelt, and Whatever Social Construction they include themselves within: Professor, Christian, Liberal, Nazi. Within all those environments and Umwelts there exist features of those environments which bear special meaning to Organisms living within. Air and Water are important bearers of meaning within the Umwelts of Animals. Color is only a bearer of meaning to those animals with eyes which have evolved to differentiate color from the electromagnetic wavelength spectrum. Red is a bearer of meaning to those animals with a consciousness sufficient to the task of Noting the emotional content of Blood, Ripe Fruit, and Swollen genitalia. Pussy is so powerful a bearer of meaning to animals that have them that among the Monkeys the Sign is the releaser of Lust, Rage, Art, Culture, Metaphor, Ecstasy and god. The Semiosphere is everything within an 'Area' which can release or elicit Meanings. A Stop Sign on a city street is included. And so is a Church, and the Art and Architecture of the Church, and the Altar, and the Relics, and the color of the Priest's Sacerdotal. All Graffiti. All Special gizmos like statues and fountains. The Semiosphere is everything in the vicinity which bears a Meaning above and beyond its Function.
Click the green 7 times and watch the Rescue of Gabriel and the Birth of Michael.
It's All Saints day in Michigan. It's grey on gray and mean. Toe, the half-feral Tom who lives in our greenhouse, has been flirting with the coyote. Toe nearly killed me once. A week after his last bite - the one on my ankle which went deep - I suddenly swelled up with a hideous rash; so angry did it look that Slag screamed when he saw me and said that I was scarred and ugly and should just shoot myself. Toe was himself shot when he was a kitten. Michigan grows a species of Assholes which is virulent with violence and inbred idiocy. Michelle McManus, one of the Pig-Women who represents our district in the State House of Reps, is leading a State Referendum which would allow fools to carry concealed weapons into Schools, Bars, Universities, Hospitals, Churches, Whorehouses, and Post-Offices. Michelle supports the teaching of Intelligent Design in Public Schools. She's a 'lil fat Christian woman from a family which looks at our Peninsula as their Ponderosa. Old-timey Cherry Orchard people - big boned, no-neck muthafukas - shoulders like hams, raw red hands too big for their arms. Straight Republicans. I don't remember how but Michelle McManus had come up in a conversation with Barber Perfect in front of this window poster of an Artshow in Paris. Barber had seen too much to find the image of 'lil baby jesus climbing down from his cross offensive. It was the Star of David which set Barber off. The French themselves are a notoriouslly antisemitic people - half of France still thinks Dreyfus was guilty - but I was a little freaked as Murmur launched into a Mel Gibson "Jew this!" and "Jew that!" tirade on the Boul'Mich. It wasn't the 'art' which had pissed Barber off, it was the historical inaccuracy of the image. Barber was frustrated that after 2000 years the world was still hooked on the myth that Jesus Christ was a Jew.
At the end of a film called: Theologians Under Hitler, one of the Etics interviewed for the documentary explains an exercise that she does when she is preparing school teachers in a district on how to approach the teaching of Anne Frank's Diary in their classrooms. There were 15 literature and social studies teachers in her workshop and she had each of them draw a small slip of paper out of a hat. On each was printed one possible answer to the question: Who Killed Anne Frank? One said: Hitler. Another said: Himmler. Others said things like: The Dutch Neighbor who betrayed the Frank family to the Police. Or: The Dutch Police, who with the Gestapo, arrested the Franks. Or: The Frank's own noisiness gave the family away. 15 possible answers to the question. Then she asked the teachers to line themselves up in a "Chain of Complicity," from the most guilty to the least. Naturally the teacher whose paper said Hitler marched to the front of the line. But then a 'lil fat woman trumped the Hitler card and placed herself at the front and would not be dislodged no matter how much the 14 others - with their 'guilty parties' - argued with her. Her slip of paper said: A German Pastor preached an antisemitic sermon in church. It's a devastating Documentary and finally unmasks one of Germany's darkest, little discussed aspects of the Nazi era - the extent to which the Protestant and Catholic Churches collaborated with the Reich in its Extermination of Europa's Jews. By now, most thinking people have realized that Hitler did indeed have his Pope, but it appears also that he had most of German Christianity on his side. Willing Executioners with God on their side. Gott mit Uns. And the Gott referred to was not a Jew but an Aryan Warrior God whose Messianic Mission was to destroy Judaism and cleanse the New Chosen People of all Jewish taint. So Jesus killed Anne Frank - and the other millions - and like all things Christian, the plan was worked out in the Dynamics of His Church.
Isn't it odd how easy it is to invoke human empathy with a story about a dead cat with big blue eyes? Konrad Lorenz could explain it. But you would think that it would be likely that humans must be hardwired to have such sympathies with all of their own number. You would think that the idea of genocide would be impossible within such sympathies. But you would be wrong.
The button to the left with the Nazi badge of the German Christian Movement will take you to a chapter called: The Aryan Jesus. Leave all your sympathies behind. The button to the right with the speed limit sign will take you to a chapter called: The Speed Limit in America. It's got motorcycles and scantily clad women.
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