that old hieratic lingo
paula fox, john shankie, and your bibliomancy forecast for the week of sept 8
the tower, and a paragraph from Paula Fox’s Desperate Characters:
What was a child? And how would she know? Where was the child she had been? Who could tell her what she had been like? She had one photograph of herself at four, sitting in a wicker rocker, a child's chair, her legs straight out, in white cotton panties, wearing someone's Panama hat that was too big for her. Who had assembled all those things? Panama hat, wicker chair, white cotton panties? Who had taken that picture? It was already turning yellow. What did young Mike, dirty, mysterious, seemingly indifferent, speaking that hieratic lingo that both insulted and exiled her, have to do with her childhood? With any childhood?
the aleatory
At some point, I realized that many of my childhood memories were actually memories of looking at pictures of myself as a child while I was still a child, and not the memories themselves. Doesn’t that seem suspicious?
Storytelling is a technology which produces time. Photographs are a technology which produces time. Poetry is a technology which destroys time, but always fails just minutely enough for there to be a scent of it in the room.
The tower is usually considered an invocation of cataclysmic change, often in a physical sense. But sometimes it can also mean disconnecting a path that led very reliably from the past to the present—like un-telling a story, or letting silence fall into silence.
It’s a terribly uncomfortable place to end up. It is so silent that we invent holy wars to avoid it, or watch endless videos of street vendors frying food in sand.
the forecast
It’s a good week to change the soundtrack. It’s a good week to watch the movie of the past from a different seat in the theater.
writing prompt
A few times a day, look around your room pretending that you have just arrived there, with no idea of how it happened, pre-loaded with a stack of memories aged to the proper depth to give you a sense of having been alive. (Uh-oh.)
a chune
“A Song” by John Shankie
The DJs on DREAM FM love to spin this one. In the dream I was trying to finish reading a book for a class—but the only chance I had to finish it was in the back of a different literature seminar, and halfway through, I realized I had also not finished the seminar reading, and could not produce any coherent thoughts anyway. I forgot what happened after that—something with a long list of name tags and this song was playing. Maybe we danced a gavotte.
credits: small spells tarot deck by rachel howe
Desperate Charcters by Paula Fox
Worried Noodles by David Shrigley and John Shankie
dear diary, I am thinking about leaving le substack and running away. I don’t know why—the digital just seems so enervated and un-actual lately. I don’t want to give it my feelings. I don’t want to put my passing thoughts or images into it. Making anything that asks you to spend more time looking at screens feels sort of putrid. I would much rather let your eyes rest on paper. I detest the feeling of being captured. I think we all should. It seems so much more dignified to make a zine and send it through the mail than to be the bait in a company’s snare, the more eyeballs to capture and trends to analyze. I don’t know, what do you all think? I promise I won’t go anywhere in a hurry, and I won’t leave you behind! But we got to get out of here. XS