Undula: a newly discovered story by Bruno Schulz

 via the Notes from Poland website... 

in the translation of Stanley Bill...

"Though there can be no definitive proof, the story is almost certainly Schulz’s, published under a pseudonym more than a decade before his first known works came out in 1933. The titular “Undula” is a name Schulz invented for a young woman central to the masochistic sexual mythology of his drawings of the early 1920s. He produced multiple images of an “Undula” closely fitting the descriptions of the story – a sultry demigoddess spurning the protagonist who worships her.

Other distinctive references anticipate characters from Schulz’s later stories: a haughty maidservant called Adela, a “Demiurge” creator, crablike cockroaches, and a sickly protagonist in solitary confinement.

 The richly figurative style of the story is also unmistakable, though an uneven quality reflects its experimental status. Schulz’s best writing takes aesthetic risks, as he exuberantly piles metaphor upon metaphor. In this early sketch, the result is sometimes awkward or repetitive. Certain meanings remain obscure. Yet the story also contains brilliant passages and stunning new elements that expand our understanding of Schulz.

 “Undula” is more frankly sexual than the later stories, which are mostly told from the perspective of a child. Here the adult narrator creates an atmosphere closer to Schulz’s erotic drawings, obsessively filled with images of the artist himself groveling at the feet of lithe young women. The new story almost forms a missing link between the graphical and literary phases of his creative life."

 https://notesfrompoland.com/2020/07/11/undula-a-newly-discovered-story-by-bruno-schulz/?fbclid=IwAR0OLjwLm-QVCK2lMZi5fmaEad-UTiYwbvIs1s8EflYif-_csgLAOvM-x7Q

some teaser passages...

       Perhaps out in the world it’s already spring. I don’t know how many days and nights have passed since that time… I remember that gray, heavy dawn of a February day, that purple procession of Bacchantes. Through what pale nights of revelry, through what moonlit suburban parks did I not fly after them, like a moth bewitched by Undula’s smile. And everywhere I saw her in the shoulders of the dancers: Undula, languid and leaning enticingly in black gauze and panties; Undula, her eyes afire behind the black lace of a fan. And so I followed her with a sweet, burning frenzy in my heart, until my swooning legs would carry me no further and the carnival spat me out, half-dead, on some empty street in the thick gloom before dawn.

 Then came those blind wanderings, with sleep in my eyes, up old staircases climbing through many dark stories, crossings of black attic spaces, aerial ascents through galleries swaying in the dark gusts of wind, until I was swallowed up by a quiet, familiar corridor, and found myself at the entrance to our apartment of my childhood years. I turned the handle, and the door opened inward with a dark sigh. The scent of that forgotten interior enfolded me. Our maidservant Adela emerged from the depths of the apartment, padding noiselessly on the velvet soles of her slippers. How she had blossomed in beauty during my absence, how pearly white her shoulders were under her black, unbuttoned dress. She was not the least bit surprised by my return after all these years. She was sleepy and brusque. I could make out the swan-like curves of her slender legs as she disappeared back into the black depths of the apartment.

 I groped my way through the half-light to an unmade bed and, eyes dimming with sleep, plunged my head into the pillows.

Dull sleep rolled over me like a heavy wagon, laden with the dust of darkness, covering me with its gloom.

Then the winter night began to wall itself in with black bricks of nothingness. Infinite expanses condensed into deaf, blind rock: a heavy, impenetrable mass growing into the space between things. The world congealed into nothingness.

 ***

 Undula, Undula, o sigh of the soul for the land of the happy and perfect! How my soul expanded in that light, when I stood, a humble Lazarus, at your bright threshold. Through you, in a feverish shiver, I came to know my own misery and ugliness in the light of your perfection. How sweet it was to read from a single glance the sentence condemning me forever, and to obey with the deepest humility the gesture of your hand, spurning me from your banqueting tables. I would have doubted your perfection had you done anything else. Now it’s time for me to return to the furnace from which I came, botched and misshapen. I go to atone for the error of the Demiurge who created me.

 Undula, Undula! Soon I will forget you too, o bright dream of that other land. The final darkness and the hideousness of the furnace draw near...

Revisiting Elizabeth Willis' Notes from and on a Landscape: Hell, Fire, and Brimstone

 

    although I read this shortly after it came out in 2014, it was nevertheless shocking to read the following passage of this excellent, wonderfully rambling and rumbling essay (and I see in her words and tones the evidence off our familiar heritage)

 "Bertholt Brecht said he had nothing to say to those who did not already know that the world was on fire."

   Last year more of the United States was burning than in any other year on record—7 million acres before the end of August. Kenya and Mongolia were on fire. Every state in Australia was on fire. The peat fires ignited during Siberia's 90-degree afternoons went underground last winter and resurfaced with the thaw.

  How in this world can anyone be excluded from the discourse of fire?

  Those of us who know that the world is on fire have ridden shotgun on the brooms of crones and degenerates, opium eaters and speakers in tongues, poets and tellers of fact, excommunicants and sodomites, insider artists and citizens of the outer dark, malcontents and depressives, urban farmers and dwellers in tents."  

read the whole thing here:

http://www.thevolta.org/ewc42-ewillis-p1.html

   as I read this I continue to wonder how clouded over, distant, doped out, numb and or depressed the minds and spirits of the age have become and I am puzzled by how quickly the liberals have forgotten julian assange, how covid 19 has squashed the climate change movement, how we blew the blew the chance covid 19 lockdown gave us to move towards reducing the emissions and reigning in the garbage, how easily a little bit of economic fear of what amounts to a fake and unsustainable growth rate causes whole social movements to disperse with a fart from the alt right and some squabblers from the dark web, and where has gret thunberg gone? the latter I fear, like most of these other disappearances is the product of a media gone mainline to the pocket of the corporations

  "Keeping in mind a history of the occult, I want to consider more broadly that which is occluded, hidden, overlooked.

   Think for a moment about what obstructs vision. Our vision, as a species and as poets. What distracts us from looking more deeply. What ideological and imaginative barriers lead to an acceptance of the entrenched binaries of party politics, of gender, of race, of religion, of class, of technoculture. What interferes with wilder patterns of inquiry?

   How invested are we, individually and collectively, in the concept of hell—or even in a hell-making device that forces certain individuals to pay for their crimes? And what kinds of progressive thinking does this block, as we live among each other’s crimes, and in the case of global issues like climate change, pay for them collectively, albeit unevenly.

   We—specifically and generally, as creatures and fellow-participants within larger systems—cannot afford for the network of resources that binds us together to be broken by actuarial science."

 please read on...  catch a fire, as marley might have them say

     Reduce your carbon footprint and your mind will follow. (George Clinton.)

 

Mysterious Notebook Page & Archival Photos plus a link to Apartment House Banging Out Julius Eastman's Femenine at Wigmore Hall

 listen to the ensemble Apartment House playing Eastman, because they out out...

because it's got those soaring moments that will maybe remind you of something forever

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2KakHBK44ko&feature=emb_share&fbclid=IwAR3t2IXIn8p4v7RlMEq_6dJMH1NsDjf1r6nlvqTbZlDnp-ZlypFCRn-nieI

 and these photos as fragments of something forever

 

James L. Acord. On the Road to Ruthenium and feeding the Muscovy Ducks

 

formulae for transmuting technetium 99 to ruthenium 100

“The base man who desired only for wealth would always fail. The higher adepts, the true alchemists, knew that what they were really transforming was themselves. The real lead was in their own hearts and only through purity of motivation could they transform that lead into gold.”

 "You know when you read Beowulf and the Icelandic sagas they talk about the hero's blood-quenched sword, and everybody thought poetic license, right? Blood's extremely rich in nitrogen. And we now purposely dissolve nitrogen in water when we quench steels to make them harder than they would be when they were quenched in brine and pure water. A blood quenched sword is a stronger sword - it's nitrogen quenching."

  In the Barcelona lectures James L. Acord seems on edge, nervously eloquent. He seems really like a homeless person without a family, some introverted soul, fixed on an idea that few people can understand or even evaluate. And it frightens me that I feel that I actually understand him and sense the great stretches of loneliness or isolation. From the few citations above it's easy to see there's a lot going on in his brain-case. But the quality of his speech and his hearing seems a bit off, like a harried high-school professor. In my research eventually I discover he often lived in single room apartments and spent all his money on his projects which, owing to their involvement with radioactive materials probably brought him unwanted attention from the feds. The descriptions of his multiple applications to the authorities at the DOE speak of 7 long years of either routine bureaucracy or a malicious teasing and humoring by the sadistic characters that know full well he will never be allowed to transmute the technetium 99 into ruthenium 100 and that his plans to build an effective monumental sculpture ("a nuclear Stonehenge") to warn people in the distant future of the toxicity of the Hanford nuclear dumps might never be doable. But he did sculpt and sell to a Texas University library the Monstrance for a Grey Horse  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monstrance_for_a_Grey_Horse , a granite mass topped by a chiselled horse's skull inside of which base there is alleged to be crushed fragments of 20's era Fiestaware salt cellars given their special hue by a uranium coating of some sort, the one example of a radioactive material he could purchase legally from antique collectors and which the CIA's Gieger counters didn't figure on registering.  

   I was first introduced to Acord via the poet Jack Clarke, via the very same quotation which opens this post, a caveat to show us that poetry was a different vocation, something more that word-peddling. Little did I know of what a difficult path Acord had assumed in trying to create a sculpture that would warn people is centuries to come that nuclear waster lay buried beneath their feet.  Acord's story is filled with frustration and misinterpretation of his aims and the myths that follow the topic of nuclear fallout (such as Godzilla jump in mutation) are no where better  explained than in the controversy that stemmed from the 2 part article by Philip Schuyler published by the New Yorker. Readers assumed that the ducks at the nuclear dumpsite (Handford) in Richland, Montana were the result of some isotopic disturbance of their genome, leading to the tragic gunning down of an entire flock of ducks with wha strange looking bills, "atomic ducks" -- named, oddly enough "muscovys" (to my ear some accidental Cold War irony slips in). 

   "On that pond — it’s the Kiwanis Youth Fishing Pond — it is where everybody dumps their Easter duck when it gets to be too big for the house. So there is this huge motley collection, a lot of barnyard ducks and geese and stuff. It is where everybody goes to feed the birds. I would often take my father over there and we would sit on a little bench and throw bread to the ducks. Well, of the bunch of ducks that were there, there were about eight or ten muscovys. They have got these red warts on their faces, they are extremely homely ducks, and I have always loved them. People hate muscovys and I think they are just the coolest ducks of all time. I always went out of my way to make sure the muscovys had extra bread. Philip Schuyler tagged along with me on one of these trips with my dad…

  " I think that was the day that ***** and I went to check on the ducks. And they were gone. I will bet that all the phone calls, the two anonymous ones, and the three from friends came within four days. And ***** and I, on day four, went to check on the ducks and the ducks were gone. Clearly they had been killed. Somebody had gone over, scoped rifle, infrared scope at night, and shot all the ducks. It scared the shit out of *****. She is such a gentle person. She was the one who called the Humane Society. She asked the Humane Society, “has anybody brought any ducks in? Have you been over to do duck control?” They didn’t know a thing about it...

 "I could see the feathers where they had been killed. Somebody had shot them all during the night. All the muscovy ducks were dead. They didn’t like the idea of ugly ducks that could be attributed to radioactive waste from Hanford.

"To me, that was a cheap shot. Because they are the innocents. And I couldn’t help but feel slightly responsible for their having been gunned down in the night. But in the end, the community said, “mutant ducks, we don’t need this.”

"All the ducks were gone that were half-breeds or muscovys. About one-third of the duck population disappeared that night. …these are innocent lives. It was a cheap shot for Schuyler to do it in The New Yorker. Couldn’t resist, ugly ducks, Hanford, mutants, blah blah blah."     

All these citations pulled from the Plazm Magazine article linked below

 

http://www.jamesflint.net/the-bright-tunnels-of-alchemy-the-dark-lights-of-science

 https://www.newyorker.com/books/double-take/postscript-james-acord-alchemist-for-the-nuclear-age

http://progressivealaska.blogspot.com/2011/01/james-l-acord-passes.html 

 https://magazine.plazm.com/ambushed-at-50-9fc7fbe1ea99

 

Anneke Lucas: I Was a Sex Slave to Europe's elite at age 6 (Original: Real Women/Real Stories)

 on the waves of the "mignons/cuties" controversy, it's worth remembering where and how human-trafficking can begin and with what kind of support it alone can exist as a hidden institution...

 all of this may be hard to hear but it must be heard. this surfacing of traumatic issue spells out some of the unspoken words in the contemporary adult behavior that often doesn't make sense on the surface. please share and alert other people. and please listen with care between the lines of what your friends are telling you. many times in our lives people do not hear what we are saying because the reality is impossible. yet it's real.

  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zQFOrwyFopA&ab_channel=REALWOMEN%2FREALSTORIES

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3jrLFzGb2tM&ab_channel=REALWOMEN%2FREALSTORIES

  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3jrLFzGb2tM&ab_channel=REALWOMEN%2FREALSTORIES

 From Child Sex Slavery to Victory: My Healing Journey (Ted Talk)

Introducing David Graeber (1961-2020), anthroplogist, anarchist, author of "Debt: The First 5,000 Years" and "Bullshit Jobs: A Theory"

 Graeber was driven out of his Yale professorship and would never again find a teaching post in the USA, winding up at Goldsmiths and London School of Economics. He died in Venice of internal bleeding (info as of this writing). Everything in his oeuvre is testimony a great and I would even say heroic effort to expose the vile aspects of capitalist economy and it's abuse of people and the animals and the allegedly inert and lifeless chunk of  blind matter the marketeering materialists insist we are in the clear to use, while redefining any object as an item of exchange, including human slaves. As an activist of the Occupy movement, Graeber is alleged to have created the phraseology regarding the 99 percent of the human population who are driven by debt to ensure the safety of the richest 1 percent of the population.

 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Graeber

 Here is a link to a pdf of his opus on Debt

 http://libcom.org/files/__Debt__The_First_5_000_Years.pdf

 "Consider the case of Neil Bush (George W.'s brother) who, during divorce proceedings with his wife, admitted to multiple infidelities with women who, he claimed, would mysteriously appear at his hotel-room door after important business meetings in Thailand and Hong Kong. "You have to admit it's pretty remarkable," remarked one of his wife's attorneys, "for a man to go to a hotel-room door and open it and have a woman standing there and have sex with her." "It was very unusual," Bush replied, admitting however that this had happened to him on numerous occasions. "Were they prostitutes?" "I don't know."' In fact, such things seem almost par for the course when really big money comes into play. 

  In this light, the economists' insistence that economic life begins with barter, the innocent exchange of arrows for teepee frames, with no one in a position to rape, humiliate, or torture anyone else, and that it continues in this way, is touchingly utopian. As a result, though, the histories we tell are full of blank spaces, and the women in them seem to appear out of nowhere, without ex­planation, much like the Thai women who appeared at Bush's door. Recall the passage cited in Chapter Three, from numismatist Philip Grierson, about money in the barbarian law codes:  

  Compensation in the Welsh laws is reckoned primarily in cattle and in the Irish ones in cattle or bondmaids (cumal), with con­siderable use of precious metals in both. In the Germanic codes it is mainly in precious metal ..

   How is it possible to read this passage without immediately stop­ping at the end of the first line? "Bondmaids"? Doesn't that mean "slaves?" (It does.) In ancient Ireland, female slaves were so plentiful and important that they came to function as currency. How did that happen? And if we are trying to understand the origins of money, here, isn't the fact that people are using one another as currency at all interesting or significant?3 Yet none of the sources on money remark much on it. It would seem that by the time of the law codes, slave girls were not actually traded, but just used as units of account. Still, they must have been traded at some point. Who were they? How were they enslaved? Were they captured in war, sold by their parents, or reduced to slavery through debt? Were they a major trade item? The answer to all these questions would seem to be yes, but it's hard to say more because the history remains largely unwritten.4 Or let's return to the parable of the ungrateful servant. "Since he was not able to pay, the master ordered that he and his wife and his children and all that he had be sold to repay the debt." How did that happen? Note that we're not even speaking of debt service here (he is already his creditor's servant), but outright slavery. How did a man's wife and children come to be considered no different than his sheep and crockery-as property to be liquidated on the occasion of default? Was it normal for a man in first-century Palestine to be able to sell his wife? (It wasn't). If he didn't own her, why was someone else allowed to sell her if he couldn't pay his debts? The same could be asked of the story in Nehemiah. It's hard not to empathize with the distress of a father watching his daughter taken off by strangers. On the other hand, one might also ask: Why weren't they taking him? The daughter hadn't borrowed any money."

 Personally speaking, I am dismayed that it took me this long to realize that Graeber's treatment at the hands of the ivory league stands as an ominous sign to the tyranny normalization platforms instituted by Brexit and the rise of Trump admins.  Further dismay that, seeing what's happened to Assange, there may have been no "other side". The manner in which all humans seem increasingly blind to this history (of class, debt, slavery)  inasmuch as it defines who and why we even speak to one another, defines even our abilities to know one another or speak to one another about the facts of life, remains at the root of manifesting this kind of a tool for getting the word out that gave birth to this blog in 2007.  

from the wiki again

"In December 2017, Graeber and his former teacher Marshall Sahlins released a collection of essays entitled On Kings, outlining a theory, inspired by A. M. Hocart, of the origins of human sovereignty in cosmological ritual.^[36] Graeber contributed essays on the Shilluk and Merina kingdoms, and a final essay that explored what he called "the constitutive war between king and people."^[37] He was working on a historical work on the origins of social inequality with David Wengrow.^[38]

From January 2013 until June 2016, Graeber was a contributing editor at The Baffler magazine in Cambridge, Massachusetts. From 2011 until 2017 he was editor-at-large of the open access journal HAU: The Journal of Ethnographic Theory, for which he and Giovanni da Col co-wrote the founding theoretical statement and manifesto of the school of "ethnographic theory".

Transmalinka Radio Flame, 2020

Artful Amoeba: Microbes Alive in the Earth for 300 Million Years, simply to cheat death

 if you ever feel touched by something inside the earth like the murmur of a lost ancestor, if you have ever felt a stone seem to say there's more to me than meets the eye, here's maybe  why....

 https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/artful-amoeba/inside-earth-microbes-approach-immortality/?fbclid=IwAR2nQH6fimMzdH8oTah00cwnITPJ1rhheaXwo8qr_OpQ8tI_j40qPvR9dLc

 This dessicated condition we now call anhydrobiosis, and it is in such a state that organisms like water bears can withstand the vacuum of space and bombardment with radiation.
Lipman’s coal came from Wales and Pennsylvania, where some was extracted from a depth of 1,800 feet. Pennsylvania coal inspired the name of an entire geologic subperiod -- the Pennsylvanian.

It is at least 300 million years old.

The year was 1931. His colleagues probably thought he was nuts. But from where we sit in 2019, it’s looking increasingly likely that Lipman was not nuts. The world’s oldest living individuals may not be gnarled bristlecone pines or shimmering aspen clones, but tiny microbes locked in rock miles beneath the surface whose goal is to not to grow or reproduce, but simply to cheat death.
A growing number of papers published in the last decade indicate that bacteria living – many of them in a hydrated, active state -- in sediments, in rocks, and in pockets and fissures buried deep underground are old beyond belief.

Rebel Wisdom and the Psychedelic IDW

 

 I've shared this video to start at the point when she discusses the new think tankers (rationalist rebel wisdom types) continual appeal to the realm of psychedelically enhanced consciousness as a way to hatch new ideas that are capable of providing answers to long term problems like the climate crisis and why the heck capitalism is not really working the right way (unless you consider the using up of natural resources, wage slavery, actual slavery and setting us up for repressive control regimes to be the effect or cause of properly functioning capitalism). She's really put her finger on the pulse of the issue when she takes note that it is the deep fear of the deep state and the ultra rich (including burners among them) that are summoning forth ideas from the realms of the mind they (some of them, anyway) have themselves tradtionally in the past equated with irresponsibility, dangerous freedoms of cognitive agency and/or borderline insanity. It's evidence of a deeper admission that the limits of control have been reached.

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