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(Part II)

by

Veritas Caput

"He lifted the thick yellow hair from his forehead.

The scar showed, pale and puckered, on his right temple."

Brave New World

Aldous Huxley

(1939)

"You spoof of visibility in a freakfog."

Finnegan's Wake

James Joyce

(1939)

Liberty's Author had loved the High Lonesome ever since that turbulent moment when the whirling presence of God rushed down into his teenage mind with a wounded tornado roar:

"Excelsior!"

He rises up from the tent canvas and wobbles around his leaning spinal column like a weary gyroscope. Semi-erect. Thinking anew. Rocking to and fro upon his knees in a groggy trance of bisyllabic iambiance as if dancing on the death bed of some prior incarnation.

"i am, I AM!"

From the gley bog of last night’s funereal fog, his hell-harrowing headache has launched its nightmarish lift out of swamp bottom at the bright morning advent of an indian summer sun just as Kahuna bursts tail-wagging through their tent door with his father’s prized Washington Senators baseball cap. Purchased by Lincoln at a 1965 summer Saturday matinee Minnesota Twins vs Boston Red Sox knothole game, the young retriever has fetched it for him from the beer-scented bleacher seat near last night’s campfire.

Feeling like some homunculus hatched like a barleycorn fart from an overcooked peacock's egg, our cryogenic Daedalus, imprisoned for years on ice after being burned by the high heat of a mean beanball, tugs his tattered cap from her mouth, snugs it firmly down over a furrowed brow and messy camp hair, canine saliva drooling, trying to recall just how and when he'd originally misplaced it.

Long since pardoned from those eruptive bouts of prairie dog radicalism which once politically tempted him, his aging mind feels momentarily oxidized into some kind of Copper Range weather vane, at one with Lake Superior's unforecastable atmospherics, hung in space here on this "Crossing Place" with nowhere to go but 'round, breeze-blown by an a posteriori experiment on pareidolia still awaiting concrete transfiguration, clothed only in what he's accumulated from coincidence and figuring perhaps, like flatulent hungover Falstaff, that it's 'better to be eaten to death with rust than scoured to nothing by perpetual motion'.

On the other hand, perhaps not:

" 'Tranquility Base here...' Lifting both arms parallel to the forest's water-logged floor, he fishtails his head from side to side in precise avian pivots. 'The Eagle has landed.' "

His 18th birthday present from NASA where the celestial watchmen of world freedom had not woken in vain. Or so it certainly felt on July 20, 1969, four years following that Excelsior tornado which transformed him into someone whose mirrored image reflected a sudden traumatic absence of self-recognition --"Who is that? That's not me!"-- for he'd been then but a 13 year old boy subconsciously baptized by the spiritual shards of some ominously shattered stainglass vision and tasked to piece it all back together without knowing why or how.

" 'By the waters of Minnetonka...' "

Athalia coos the Lakota Sioux's northern plain song into his amateur naturalist ear as he bangs the black-n-white keys of her parlor game piano, all 88 of them facing a tomahawk chop sooner or later given enough parental patience on this Christmas Sunday morning where they sit side-by-side, MAJOR and minor, in strict rehearsal for their string-hammered rocket duet to Mare Tranquillitatis:

"Moon Deer loved Sun Deer

They loved through tears

Waters forever"

Unobserv'd, by way of fugue-state, he's privately return'd to the childhood of mother's house and his, steam-hoisted from that faeth fiada mist now swelling within him to resurrect the unfinished mansion of an inestimable mystery.

With copper "torch" in hand and mind's-eye adventuring, he gazes inwardly from his masthead crow's nest down past the wavy patina of fathomless time where pirate souls quicken and hearts drum submarine beats, our tent pole isolato dwelling not on annihilation but rather a necessary gathering of "20 Questions" he must perforce ask taskmaster Mom.

"Again?"

"Nineteen more times through this scrimshaw lattice and we'll winnow the wheat and chaff of your baby step ivories, son."

"Nine-teen?"

"Nine years old thee may be now but soon a teen thouest will be and therein's your gut-bucket gospel truth!"

"O brother..." This being his latest fraternal exclamation of expressing masculine exasperation at her wily use of King James elocution for maternal manipulation which he'd adopted and co-opted courtesy of Dad who was "Man-of-the-House" AWOL during the holiday season way out west (and down under) in "Dreamland", frankly yanked away from his cyber-engineering position at Honeywell by some esteemed council of eastern seaboard eminence grises for clandestine assignment on another code-breaking Navy sabbatical with that "damn 'Underseas Systems' project" (as Mom was wont to air-quote) which the Twin Cities defense firm had been Grey-Ops'-ing at least since Dad transferred there three years earlier in the fall of '57.

"Just a wee contrarian seabee drone me be," he'd confessed to her on their autumnal overcast airport drive, "quarantined in an oceanic hive with one quiet brilliant beautiful voice periodically pinging the sonar of my personal conscience. Yours, truly..."

Lincoln couldn't confide to Athalia the exact location he'd flown for until Christmas Eve when, temporarily freed from honeycombed captivity within a classified government facility harbored fathoms beneath drifting Groom Lake dunes nearly 30 nautical leagues northwest of Las Vegas, he let it slip, on an all too brief shore leave by way of a phone booth cubicled inside Pinky's Polar Bear Lounge, that "Sin City's making me seasick for home sweet home."

He sweet-talked her then from an extravagantly lit stretch of neon skyline, plucking familiar heart strings every which way he knew, elevating his morose mood with an imported Russian vodka martini vibe, Death Valley dry, shaken British Empire style and punched up by a vending machine pack of unfiltered Camels whose cellophane wrap he uncrinkled with a curvilinear flourish of solitary disgust and social exhilaration, ditching thereby last New Years' Day pledge to hop aboard the tobacco wagon and "ride it smokeless til '61", clanking down dimes like that profligate pacific theater persona he once poker-faced through a running numbers game of statistically risky prognostication and tilted roulette financing which underwrote a savvy bevy of promiscuous impersonations--sailing his fabled "seventh ocean" to oriental seaports in pursuit of gentleman rickshaw romances funded by gambling profits procured from loaded poop deck dice rolls and card-counting blackjack whose brief courtships led to implausible erotic denouements at the "Hotel Shanghai" he later multiplied and embellished into a prurient anthology of rarefied sex tales wryly raconteur'd with the shy monastic reticence of an upper midwestern rural sensibility anchored by a tenor church mouse belltone that never rang quite F Clef enough to suit the skeptical baritone chorus of his perpetually cash-poor shipmates.

But could a shadowy species of spook work have found cohabitation within that chiaroscuran spectrum moiring wide and deep beneath the bow wave of Dad’s penitent pleas for wartime absolution, a twilit realm he’d carefully submerged beneath confessional misdirects with frothier surface admissions of mathematical chicanery and bungled pre-marital flings? Almost certainly. Christened “PENUMBRA” for conjugal detours into a binary blacknwhite code-language Athalia and he employed whenever conversing on nation state cloak-and-dagger, third world revolutions, extraterrestrial contact, extended family crises and other child unprivy what-have-yous at the dinner table—it periodically emerged in alphanumeric strings of letters and numbers no child could untangle from any thesaurus except perhaps Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland (though their ever curious son had unsurprisingly tried, commandeering a small spiral notebook, musket-loaded with pencil stub, laid like a blank napkin on his crumb-filled lap and standing sentry for scribbling on whenever gastronomical asides veered toward the inscrutable).

It was at one crucial Sisyphean pivot during an erratic though incrementally upward sloping learner’s curve (which he’d accelerated unawares through a disciplined navigation of diatonic music’s dynamic unbalanced tonality whose shifting center of gravity, the “Circle of Fifths”, his mother had adapted into rigorous scale exercises for he and her as a way of mnemonically capturing the emotional tension and resolution of she and Lincoln’s arcane deipnosophistry) that….hmm, oh yes…the boy over-excitedly realized one night, while coughing up a half-chewed mouthful of spinach, those suppertime subtext transfers of his deceptive parents nearly always coincided with the non-appearance of a new moon.

“ ‘I yam what I yam, I’m Popeye the Sailor Man!’ ”

Buckshotting a bit of spit spinach into both Athalia and Lincoln’s eyes with a froggy sing-song affectionately if not quite accurately loyal to the cartoon seafarer’s voice, their ebullient prodigy made what may one day be rhetorically catalogued by millennial historians as the boy’s first inept attempt to enter into and triangulate one of their encrypted dialogues.

“Equal temperament, my dear, equal temperament. Especially when we’re dining.” Mom always knew just what to say. “Now what’s all this about Popeye?"

“Sure, um yeah, could you please pass the olive oil. This salad’s tasting a tad dry.” Scrawling down Dad’s apparent nom de guerre then post-haste during their quickly whispered sparring match after she did:

“Idlewild North” –investigate

(to be continued)

My time-travelling charm for "Harrowing Hell": http://tinyurl.com/mgcya25

It's a brave new world,

Jf

11/22/13:

"The sun's o'ercast with blood: fair day, adieu!

Which is the side that I must go withal?

I am with both: each army hath a hand;

And in their rage, I having hold of both,

They whirl asunder and dismember me."

Blanch

King John

"As from the power of sacred lays

The spheres began to move,

And sung the great Creator's praise

To all the Blest above;

So when the last and dreadful hour,

This crumbling pageant shall devour

The trumpet shall be heard on high,

The dead shall live, the living die,

And Music shall untune the sky!"

A Song For St. Cecilia's Day

(Grand Chorus)

John Dryden

1687

Martyred in 3rd century by three sword strikes to the neck, St. Cecilia is the Patroness of Musicians.

Her Feast Day falls on November 22.

One,

Jf

11/21/13:

" 'I see the storm coming and I know His hand is in it. If He has a place and work for me, I believe that I am ready.' "

Senator Kennedy quoting President Lincoln

(July 4, 1960 in NYC)

"I saw three ships come sailing in on Christmas Day, on Christmas Day."

I Saw Three Ships

(Traditional English Christmas Carol)

My "Via Dolorosa": http://tinyurl.com/lyfpyw5

Two,

Jf

11/20/13:

"And when we shall see him, there is no beauty that we should desire him.

He is despised and rejected of men: a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief."

"He comes to us as one unknown, without a name, as of old, by the lakeside, he came

to those who knew him not...and sets us to the tasks which he has to fulfill for our time."

The Quest Of The Historical Jesus

Albert Schweitzer

My "Faeth Fiada": http://tinyurl.com/kc54yus

Three,

Jf

11/19/13:

Frontispiece to the Book Of Durrow

Four,

Jf

11/18/13:

"Extol him that rideth upon the heavens...[snip]...the chariots of God are 20,000, even thousands of angels:

the Lord is among them...[snip]...his strength is in the clouds."

Psalm 68

(A Song of David)

"The story really began in the middle sixties, the period of the great purges in

which the original leaders of the Revolution were wiped out once and for all."

1984

George Orwell

(1949)

"The child of imagination is the child I fear."

Herod the Great

The Greatest Story Ever Told

(1965)

Five,

Jf

11/17/63:

Isaiah 53: 2-3

"And they shall look upon me whom they have pierced, and they shall mourn for him, as one mourneth for his only son..."

Zechariah 12:10

"The time is out of joint: O cursed spite,

That ever I was born to set it right!"

Hamlet

(1601)

Six,

Jf

11/16/13:

"This country is going to say yes and Minnesota is going to be in the lead."

President Kennedy

University of Minnesota at Duluth

(September 24, 1963)

http://tinyurl.com/oqz92vq

"For the first time in his life, he felt a sense of possible purpose working itself out in history"

Indian Summer

Henry Adams

(1899)

http://tinyurl.com/kepc2fg

Seven,

Jf

11/15/13:

"And then, as we have taken the sacrament

We will unite the white rose and the red:

Smile heaven upon this fair conjunction,

That hath long frown'd upon their enmity."

Earl of Richmond

Richard III

(1592)

Eight,

Jf

11/14/13:

"Stunned by that loud and dreadful sound,

(1798)

http://jfkfacts.org/?s=heard+shots+from+grassy+knoll

Nine,

Jf

11/13/13:

From a prophecy on the Mariner's Scroll once shredded into confetti over dreaming Endymion's head:

"If he utterly scans all the depth of magic, and expounds the meanings of all motions, shapes and sounds;

if he explores all forms and substances straight homeward to their symbol essences; he shall not die."

Endymion

John Keats

(1818)

10,

Jf

11/12/13:

"More white and red than doves or roses are;

Nature that made thee, with herself at strife,

Saith that the world hath ending with thy life."

Venus And Adonis

William Shakespeare

(1592)

T-Minus 11 Days and Counting,

Jf

11/11/13:

T-Minus 12 Days and Counting,

Jf

11/10/13:

Traffic jam of Chryslers rescued from the City of Bangor after she ran aground near Keweenaw Point in late November 1926

"The woods are lovely, dark and deep

But I have promises to keep

And miles to go before I sleep

And miles to go before I sleep"

Stopping By Woods On A Snowy Evening

Robert Frost

(1923)

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