The Wit to Slip the Trap
A miscellany: fish-trickster; immaterial ecosystems; Ask and Embla; hypnogogic / hypnopompic hallucinations
Rumi: “Mast, rudder, helmsman, and keel,
I am also the coral reef they founder on.”
Enchiridion: Greek, ‘a little thing held in the hand’, for example a small dagger, or a handbook / manual. (via London Review of Books.)1
In the same issue, a quote from Keats: if he doesn’t get somewhere warm, he will die like a frog in a frost.
Kev: “A fish appears in the visible realm from the invisible realm, so it’s not like a terrestrial animal.”
I’m telling him about the trickster— such as Māui— catching a fish, how Lewis Hyde says that’s the first trick of the trickster across many mythologies.
Hyde: “The fish swims through its expansive, watery world and suddenly trickster blocks its passage, makes its world less expansive. If the fish itself is tricky, if it has the wit to slip the trap, it will do so by finding a breach in the wickerwork, a rip in the net, an escape hatch its enemy has not noticed.”
Kev: “When you catch an animal by trap or snare it’s similar… But not hunting.”
He means that a snare and a hook are comparable magics, making an animal appear where there was none before; but a bullet is different.
(I stand as I speak on the trickster’s fish— Te Upoko o te Ika a Māui.)
John Higgs: “For [Alan] Moore, the communal ideas existed beyond our own personal corners of the mental world.2
Could we then wander out of our little territories, go further afield and explore the rest of Ideaspace?… Moore thought that, yes, we could open the doors of our individual homes and walk out into this shared landscape beyond. Indeed, he thought that artists had to, for it was their job to wander furthest from their own patch of the imagination and return with truly rare and exotic ideas, which they had to use and make something of.”
Moore, from his essay Fossil Angels: “In occult culture’s terms, new life equates to new ideas. Fresh-hatched and wriggling, possibly poisonous conceptual pollywogs, these brightly-coloured pests must be coaxed into our new immaterial eco-system if it is to flourish and remain in health. Let us attract the small ideas that flutter, neon-bright but frail, and the much tougher, more resilient big ideas that eat them. If we’re fortunate, the feeding frenzy might draw the attention of huge raptor paradigms that trample everything and shake the earth. Ferocious notions, from the most bacterially tiny to the staggeringly big and ugly, all locked into an unsupervised glorious and bloody struggle for survival, a spectacular Darwinian clusterfuck.
Lame doctrines find themselves unable to outrun the sleek and toothy killer argument. Mastodon dogmas, elderly and slipping down the food-chain, buckling and collapsing under their own weight to make a meal for carrion memorabilia salesmen, somewhere for that droning buzz of chat-room flies to lay their eggs. Memetic truffles grown up from a mulch of decomposing Aeons. Vivid revelations sprung like London Rocket from the wild, untended bombsite sprawl. Panic Arcadia, horny, murderous and teeming. Supernatural selection. The strongest, best-adapted theorems are allowed to thrive and propagate, the weak are sushi.”
Anna-Kajsa tells about almost being sunk by orca off Portugal. “The others teased me that I was the orca whisperer, because I had just vomited when they appeared. The orca bumped us a few times but we managed to accelerate away, so they didn’t take our rudder. They bit the rudder off the boat behind us, though, and Coastguard had to come and tow them to shore. We didn’t notice until later that the orca had damaged our autopilot; but in a way that was good, because it meant we had to be more mindful when we were on the open ocean.”
Once I was in Wellington drafting supplementary papers,
Away haul away, we’ll haul away Joe,
Now I’m on a Yankee ship a-hauling on the braces,
Away haul away, we’ll haul away Joe.
The orange cat Charlie, more sandy-coloured than ginger, more like bleached Summer grass than marmalade, is making a special meow in the kitchen. Steve coaxes him round the corner by calling him. Charlie! Charlie! He comes, carrying a small wet dead mouse in his mouth, singing the proud crowing mew, his victory-song. He puts the bedraggled mouse down on the carpet and eats it in two bites, crunch crunch, its little bones. Good boy, Charlie!
Once I had a hypnogogic hallucination:3 a flower-cluster like a wild ginger, hovering in the darkness of my room. Multiple blossoms on green stems all facing the same way, that is, pointing directly at my face. Each flower was a human mouth, opening and closing like a winking eye.
I see these hallucinations with my open eyes. They usually last a few seconds. Sometimes I try to touch them before I realise nothing is there. Even though the room is dark, the hallucinations are lit and coloured, often as if by candlelight. The light and colour are an emanation from within the hallucination that fades into darkness as the hallucination fades. Sometimes they fall, sometimes they implode, sometimes they are just suddenly not there. The strangest thing, I told the Magician, is the feeling of potent consciousness that these visions emanate— an unnerving focussed sentience, as if they are inhabitants of a parallel realm more magical than this one, accidentally glimpsed through a crack in the space-time continuum.
Once I saw a tiny tree hung with shining red fruit. I must wake up and blow out the candle. Once I was woken by an earthquake shaking my bed, and when I opened my eyes I could see the earthquake, a dark human figure standing in my room.
A few nights after the mouth-flowers, someone grabbed me by the foot as I was falling asleep. It was my left foot, the one closest to the edge of the bed, and they gripped it hard enough for me to wake up. I knew nobody was there, but I stared into the darkness to make sure. Nobody was there, and then slowly, like syrup, fear flowed from my groggy brain into my sluggish blood and my heart started to pound. After a bit I calmed down and went to sleep because after all, nobody was there.
When the veil thins and tears at the edge of sleep, at the shivering meniscus of the infinite deep, they appear very close to my open eyes, as if gazing directly into them. I am an aerial for these phantoms; they sense when they can be seen by me.
Helene Cixous: “Write! and your self-seeking text will know itself better than flesh and blood, rising, insurrectionary dough kneading itself, with sonorous, perfumed ingredients, a lively combination of flying colors, leaves, and rivers plunging into the sea we feed… But look, our seas are what we make of them, full of fish or not, opaque or transparent, red or black, high or smooth, narrow or bankless; and we are ourselves sea, sand, coral, seaweed, beaches, tides, swimmers, children, waves .... More or less wavily sea, earth, sky— what matter would rebuff us? We know how to speak them all.”
P.S. A few things I lately dug:
The second half of this post by Tom Cox, Hunter-Gathering for Wimps, about car-boot sales.
This hearty post from Caroline Ross, A Meadow Year. Oak years vs. meadow years; questions, love, and good hard cheese. (After oak-posting, it is nice to meadow-post.)
The visual guide to Random Acts of Anachronism included in this post from The School of the Unconformed, which includes Caroline smashing badger-dug chalk to make paint, and me drawing fish-heads with a crow quill.
Enrique: “I have long suspected that there is only one voice. If one is lucky, and perhaps with some perseverance, one can find that voice and become its mouthpiece. That is the voice of all poets and even so, perhaps it is not a poetic voice, but a quantum voice.”
Hypnogogic = hallucinations while falling asleep.
Hypnopompic = hallucinations while waking up.
They can be a symptom of narcolepsy.
Yes! this is the correct level and length for my proletarian brain...
An Orange Cat Called Charlie was sent by the British government to guilt-trip all working mums for not being at home to save their kids from drowning, scalding, paedo's, etc.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CVOMK6YD6fw.
NOT A WORD AGAINST DAD SMOKING HIS FILTHY PIPE IN THE HOUSE THOUGH! (episode 1)