Screw it. Make it three things to do here before the semi-hiatus begins. This is one.
The Consul mentioned in his thread the book Under the Volcano, a book which my uncultured ass had never even remembered hearing of, despite it surely passing before my eyes more than once since it is number-freaking-eleven on the Modern Library top 100 list of 20th century English-language novels. Anyway, as I wiki'd my way into a pale familiarity with the book, I happened upon another thing I didn't remember seeing before but surely had since PKD is probably on the Rigorous Intuition top 10 list of 20th century subjects. Bibliomancy. Which then led to: Rhapsodomancy. And I realized I had partaken in an unorthodox type of rhapsodomancy myself, in the late fall of 2008, shortly after returning home from my three-week vacation. And then I realized that few of the people I had ever shown the product expressed any appreciation for it. Mind you, until recently, I had only shown a jovial elderly classics professor (who was once the inspiration for a John Updike story) and one roommate. Maybe my mom, too, I don't remember. I tend to jealously guard my attempts at art as if they were patents that somebody could steal, I have no idea why (well, sometimes I do). Anyway, I just realized within the last half hour that, all this time, the ideal audience was you all, this board, this sanctuary for the contemplation of unmentionable theories and phenomena, this sometimes virtual halfway-house for the exceptionally bright and curious and deep, my unseen friends and allies. So, now that I have built it up way too high and ensured a let-down, lol, here it is, with a few helpful FAQ-style endnotes at the bottom (to questions only ever asked once, lol), a recovered fragment of the non-existent ancient poem colloquially referred to as "Rho, Rho, Rho" by exactly no scholars in the world:
...it's reckless to gather grapes unless the grapes are ready,
but the same relaxation is a crime for one so shipwrecked,
he who, having led a crooked-headed lazy life, must now
find relief from sloth's ass-slapping and would be remiss
not to slap himself in the face with utter equanimity,
to tear his indifferent tattered garments into shreds,
to sprinkle every bit of the rag-bits into the cloven
wrinkles of oceanic surf, to have his ragged beak sewn
up and his gibberish purified by a rhapsody of raindrops:
oh, master of the gods who live at ease, the rag-stitchers
of fixed prerogatives, lazy workers for the mother of gods,
who are always shifting and roving and acting at random:
do me no more mischiefs, let loose my dumb voice to flow
as a current, to be an active river of bad omens, breaking
its bounds and bursting forth with surf, breaking the spirit
of a line of breakers, opening a path bent around mountain
ridges, with might enough to break through armed ranks
of rod-carriers furious over fissures in the slender fluting
of their foul black petroleum, and just as the wand-holders
sit as umpires over our stickfights, carrying their little magic
wands like so many fasces, so one must mention the shudder
inducing root of our most horrible tide of affairs, from within
the garden of roses and the towers of defense, the twinkling
of 100,000 eyes casting about as if on a magic wheel, rushing
through air with the swiftness of 100,000 chariots, casting
a flickering net on us with one stroke, berry-gathering our
roaring noise of 100,000 words, word for word, a frostier
blanket for speech already shivering with cold, and with
100,000 noses reaching to their chin they track us by scent,
even that dashing of us recreants who in this critical scale
sinking moment are towing away 100 crates of pomegranates
and other such things to save themselves, tossing away their
large swords and instead tossing rose-apples back and forth,
ones so fool-hardy to be giving up their arms and their
shields, because all the while the snub-nosed scent-trackers
are on top of their Rhinoceros of Rhodes, oinking in the frosts
of its mountainous peak with some lightly emitted piping
through their rosily colored noses, and are planting 100,000
shield-piercing rose-bushes below, and talking sweetly about
the rosy-armed torque of mousetrap wood, the whirring
noise of our fighting against their freezing cold, our uprising
then being sucked down by our own grammatical grubbing
for roots, never mind a death from being thrown down,
all the while 100,000 sewers are blown about from pipes,
as if from a fan for raising rosy-fingered fire around us,
its rasps on our skin, destroying all life by nibbling at the
freezing roots, even filing down all little shrivelled roots
within the sacred fields we till, a rhomboidal root-cutter
of life's rooted fabric, and yet still I hear, all together as
a lozenge-sized foundation for saving cities, my root-striking
walking stick striking root in you and the whirring of our
wings against the stream, as I throw us along the rivulet
of seams on our multicolored stitched ball, I am the patcher
of countenances, a pleader for recovery from listlessness,
I am liquid easily flowing backwards, I am the pet phrase
which is spoken, an epic composition of equine snorting
learned by heart, the rhapsodist with bow-legged eloquence,
with a covenant that can with a needle be broken, breaking
yet through armed ranks and wattled fences clad in rhetorical
sheepskin, bedabbled yet by some slaps in my face and a few
fractures in my roots, the crooked radishes spun around like
a top never cooling my zeal, absorbing the filthy rhythms with
my messmates ever since I began to wash, with the trunk
of an elephant to greedily gulp up all the sordidness that
can be abundantly supped up, dragged along the brushwood
and dashed like roaring sea foam, my little muzzle never to
be befouled, drawing detergent into my cleft nostrils just so,
never to be seized for their pledge of putting forth strength,
never to punish myself for their transgressions, worthless
in Latin yet often defending the Roman altars where I was
brought into learned order from being flowingly defiled by
planes of petty wares, but now I shudder in horror at the
shivering cattle being dragged about with halters by the
holders of rods, a stream of muzzles and backbones flowing
to a most horrible pole's end: the cleaving of their shuddering
spines, their reddish bodily fluid surging like a flood of 100,000
liquid roses, the tearing of their skin, even as some still snort
furiously, into strips to be sewn into ragged garments of hide,
the snarling force of spinning hammers dashing their breakable
limbs, and so I must say: oh, my master, what the fuck is this,
but a chilling fracture of the covenant in our roots expressly
ordering us never to be planners of cold murder, and so
we must redeem ourselves and rescue the prey from us,
by dragging about in our face their maltreatment by us,
to fan the flame of a resolution taking root just now in us,
but I am just one savior from the gutter's stream, I am not
single-handed, yes I am exposed to strong sea currents, yet
still strong of body, shrivelled but roaring at full gallop,
ragged but in my drinking-cup there is a torrent of liquid
filthiness for my pucker, disfigured by wrinkles and at my
pole's end, yet I rush lustily on through narrow passages to
coarsely paint it all again, setting myself free from all these
troubles, saving us from carelessness, preserving my chariot...
*Author's note: The preceding poem was fashioned almost exclusively using definitions from the "rho" section of Liddell & Scott's Intermediate Greek-English Lexicon, 7th Edition. Were it to be translated into the accompanying ancient Greek, a project I'm a little too rusty for, the effect of reciting it in the "original" should be a manic sage, furiously testifying and prophesizing, but sounding like Grimace, i.e., "robble robble robble".
**Yes, isn't it hilarious? But to merely call it hilarious might hurt the feelings of the ancient manic sage, who -- while he may not have existed -- did mean serious business. But yes, reciting the poem in the Greek would quickly become a lulzy farce, and if that sage weren't a figment of my imagination and if he were around to hear an audience laugh their asses off, he might weep...lol.
***How long? A total of about four or five hours, if I remember correctly. I kept track of that on paper, actually, because I didn't think anyone would believe it took me that long.
****Wait...even that word? Yup, pretty sure. I took the barest of liberties with the definitions. That might be one instance. But there's a definition (or two, if combined) in there that amounts to the same thing, I'm sure of that.
*****I have to say -- even compared to my finding a way within the "rho" section to provide a fictitious ancient soothsayer the words to describe from his ancient perspective such modern things as oil-geopolitics, the White House and the Pentagon, satellites, apolitical hippies, CoG bunkers, gatekeeping by blackmail and assassination, leftist infighting, anthropogenic climate change (even the role of methane hydrates and deforestation), industrial slaughterhouses (even my proposal of the video billboard truck idea to PETA, lol) -- even a little shout out to my high school -- my favorite thing is "yet I rush lustily on through narrow passages to coarsely paint it all again", i.e., a description of the act of piecing together the poem itself according to self-imposed limitations. Also, innuendo. By the way, at first I was limiting myself to going through "rho" sequentially and only later freed myself from that limit and started to mix and match. But there are still chunks in purely sequential order.
******It's probably a sign that a poem is flawed if the author has to explain much of it for it to make sense, but perhaps one more thing needs explanation. One might grant an ancient soothsayer the ability to see into the distant future, via some kind of paranormal magic or whatever for which there's no need to provide a detailed explanation, because something like that is part of a longstanding literary/cultural tradition. Haters gonna hate, soothsayers gonna soothsay. So, that's all well and good. But, then, what would be the logic behind this ancient prophet mentioning the author's high school as if the prophet himself had gone there and feels a loyalty to protect it (more generally, a classical education) from succumbing to a transformation into something cheaply contemporary, a place whose shelves of timeless understanding are gradually being re-filled with concessions to neophilia? "Dude, uhhh...that don't make no sense!" Ah, but you see, the specific mechanism I'm positing (implicitly, I guess?) for the sage's millennia-spanning precognition is: He is seeing the future through my eyes, through my psyche, as a kind of forward-looking psychic medium rather than backward-looking per usual. In short, this poor old ancient shaman is witnessing this world and its bewildering phenomena only through me. He is the soothsayer, but I am his portal, his vessel. Not quite in the Malkovich sense, but close. May the gods help him were he to witness what I do in the bathroom. (Checking poem...) Oh wait, too late. Thankfully, he's just some old guy (or maybe middle-aged) that I completely made up, less of a character than a premise, an excuse. An excuse for ransacking 8 pages of Middle Liddell in search of a poem. I recommend trying it out yourself, if you have a Greek lexicon lying around. I was meaning to get around to "zeta", "xi/ksi", and "psi" someday. Each looks like it could contain its own poem. But it'd be more fun to see other people's versions, their own invented sages seeing the world through their own consciousnesses. Or whichever premises come to mind. I'm especially looking forward to a "psi" poem, how inevitably ridiculous it would sound in the Greek. "Pss, pss, pss, pss...", etc.
