Halloween 2009

After being in the fort for a short time, possibly two or three days, and no further signs of Indians having been seen or reported, James Graham, hoping the alarm to have been ill-founded, proposed to those in the fort that, if some of the men would go and stay with him a night, he and his family would go over home. Accordingly, they did so, some of the men in the fort volunteering to go with him. Shortly after he went home, either the same night or later, his house was attacked by the Indians.




The assault was made in the after part of the night before daybreak. Not feeling well, Graham had luckily lain down on a bench against  the door with his clothes on. The Indians made the assault by trying to force the door open, which they partly succeeded in doing. Thus aroused, Graham and his men placed the heavy bench and a tub of water against the door, and in this way prevented the Indians from gaining an entrance. A man named McDonald (or Caldwell), who was assisting in placing the tub against the door, while reaching above the door for a gun was shot and killed, the ball passing through the door. Thwarted in their effort in affecting an entrance into the house, the Indians next turned their villainous assault upon an outhouse or kitchen standing near the main dwelling. in this outbuilding slept a young negro man and two of the Graham children. The negro, whose name was Sharp, tried to escape by climbing up the chimney (chimneys in those days were large and roomy), but when discovered was ruthlessly hauled down from his hiding place, tomahawked and scalped. As this tragedy was being enacted, the cries of the two children who were sleeping  on the loft above next directed the attention of the Indians to that quarter. They shot up through the floor and wounded the eldest of the two, a boy named John in the knee, then dragged him and his sister down and out into the yard. Finding that John was wounded so badly that he could not stand upon his feet and that he would be a burdensome prisoner, they at once dispatched him with a tomahawk and carried off his bleeding scalp as a trophy of their crime.







While this bloody scene was going on in the kitchen, Colonel Graham had gone upstairs and was shooting through a porthole at the Indians in the yard as best he could. The men in the lower part of the house loaded the guns and handed them up to him and he did the shooting. About the time they were trying to make the wounded boy stand up, several of them huddled together and fired at the bulk; when they suddenly dispersed. It is believed that one or more of the Indians were killed or wounded.


A few years after this occurrence an Indian skeleton was found about two miles from the scene of the tragedy, on a small run near where E. D. Alderson now lives, called Indian Draft, which was believed to be the same Indian killed by Graham. Graham secured the jaw bone of this skeleton and used it for a gunrack for a number of years.


As the tender twig is easily bent and made to grow in new directions, so were the inclinations of this innocent child readily diverted from the scenes of the past and made to love the passing events which surrounded her, and she being well cared for and never mistreated by the Indians, it was but natural that she loved them. It is also said that before her return a love more passionate than that for her adopted tribe or mother had seized her youthful breast and that a young warrior would soon have claimed her for his “white” squaw. As to the truth of the story, that she had an Indian lover, we do not vouch, but having learned it from her own descendants, we think it worthy of mention.


Upon the return of Elizabeth to her home, the customs she met there were new and strange to her. On one occasion when her mother asked her to “soak the bread” and afterwards asked her how it was getting on, she replied, “very well” that she had taken two loaves and “thrown them in the river and put a rock on them”. To this new mode of life she could not easily be  reconciled and ever and anon would clamor for the wild life of the wigwam. At one time when she threatened to return to the Indians, her mother told her sister, Jane, to pretend as if she would go with her to see whether or not she would actually make the attempt. She readily accepted Jane’s proposal to accompany her to the Shawnee towns and the two sisters crossed the river in a canoe and proceeded but a short distance, when Jane inquired of her what they would eat on their journey, to which she replied by pulling up some bulb root herbs from the ground and eating them saying they could find plenty of the same kind along the way to keep them from starving. Jane remonstrated with her, saying that she had not been accustomed to eating herbs and would starve and finally succeeded in persuading her to return home.


She had to be carefully watched and even at times confined to prevent her wild, wandering nature from reasserting itself, but as the years passed by, her love for Indian habits and customs decreased in the same proportion that her love for civilization increased.


                                 --David Graham(1899)

A  cautious perspective  reveals that   our fundamental temperament  is not an  individual or collective consciousness or any semblance of what we would call a mind.  We are savagely  unreasonable, scarier than Rosseau could  fetishize.  We are not engineered to be benign enthusiasts of nature.  We are Nature which appears to be Aggression.   If another inhabitant of this solar orbit only loses millions before we pause in its extinction, it is rare, and lucky. 

Primates have proven themselves the preeminent predators. There are hundreds of violent primate species whose engineering is 99.5% identical to ours.  Were they designed for matriculation at our finest universes or like W are they just misfortunate sideroads to progress.  My guess is that the monkey and W are closer in worldview to us  than we would like to believe.



We have no model or boundary to understand the limits of our own barbarity for the child from birth raised "free" is an unknown quantity.  Yet that true freedom comprised all of us for at least ten months.


It is a powerful memory.



Countless  species like bees, grazers or fish, have profited  from action as a group so to curb our own berserk, amoral impulses, our homo sapiens species has likewise developed mirroring media and labor disciplines to channel and structure our shameless depravity. 
 
And then hounded by an opportunistic howling organic soup which outweighs  the fragile lever on our own inhuman relish, we  anthropomorphize gods, dogs, cars, statues, ad infin. in order to concoct  a cuddly neighborhood.  We were born feral and whatever remains of that personality, after the layered behavioural modification of society, grinds out the compulsions underneath each of our personae.  Just ask Quentin.

Intellectual primates like Hegel and Marx hoped that history was Spirit moving through time, a fraudulent guess in our relative dimension where there are no complete theories or definite explanations.

Grasping religionists like W in desperation struggle with themselves,their children, others, and with their motives, for to their disgust they were born as base as the mantis, shark, or the greatest meateater.

Truth to Neitzsche is a changing multifaceted continuum. He despises thinkers who form resolute structural convictions without allowing for change.  In a world of eternal return and mutation, convictions will come and go.  "Convictions have no rights of citizenship, as is said with good reason."

There have been been as many grand theories as men throughout the ages, and Friedrich is not about to add to the heap.  Truth is an individual search which will necessarily find its own appropriate prospect.  Zarathustra  warns his followers not to adopt his teachings but to

"Go away from  me and resist Zarathustra!  And even better: be ashamed of him: Perhaps he has decieved you,

Now I bid you lose me and find yourselves: and only when you have denied me will I return to you,

You had not sought yourselves; and you found me.  Thus do all believers; therefore all faith amounts to so little."

(1983)

Tamara lay on the ground and the spirit of God came upon her brother Amara and he took her.  Tamara felt the breath and was in  Heaven.  Then the winds of Yahweh came upon Amalek and he lay with Tamara and she was happy for she felt the spirit of the Lord inside her.  Then Haru the Strong saw Tamara and the Lord spoke to him and he took her and Tamara was happy but Haru felt the spirit leave him and he was ashamed.  Then his skin flaked and he was lepered.  The spirit of God then came upon Tamara and she slew him.

(October 1985)

Modern salon des graces,
                                           Strange ideas,

            maliciously wrong opinions,
                    
                                      late night atrocities.

Fusion of sound and mind

When dreaming of things you'll never touch,

Of girls in cotton stockings black to the air,

      Of english straining to the feeling,

Men  demanding verbal abuse,

                                       (1984)

 

By Marilyn Manson

 Apr 15, 2004 12:00 AM

Jim Morrison said it best: "All the children are insane," and he meant it like I mean it. We are children revolted by the banality of what people think is sane. When Jim rambled, quite profoundly, "Rock & roll is dead," and "Hitler is alive. . . . I slept with her last night," he knew then what we are choking on now. You can't change the world, and if you try, you just end up destroying it. We love all things to death. We leave the lights on, turn everything up to ten and fuck everything we fear.

In tenth grade I was told to read No One Here Gets Out Alive, the biography of Jim Morrison. Everything I'm interested in now got started with that book. It made me want to be a writer, and I started with poetry and short stories. We don't know what was really going on in Morrison's head, but I liked trying to piece it together. The immortality of his words, the mystery of his existence appealed to my sense of fantasy. I found "Moonlight Drive" -- particularly when accompanied by "Horse Latitudes" -- scary and sexually mystifying, like Happy Days told by Ted Bundy. I read the poem in front of my tenth-grade English class, and it was as awe-inspiring then as it is now. Words like mute nostril agony and carefully refined and sealed over always stung in the corners of my eyes.

I think the Doors still fit in because they never fit in in the first place. They didn't have a bass player. The music often had nothing to do with Morrison's words. The keyboard held everything together. Most bands can get through a show if the keyboardist breaks a finger. Not the Doors. Robbie Krieger played very odd guitar parts if you compare him to Jimmy Page or Keith Richards. Yet all this combined into something unique that grabbed people's attention.

Morrison's voice was a beautiful pond for anything to drown in. Whatever he sang became as deep as he was. He had the unnameable thing that people will always be drawn to. I've always thought of the Doors as the first punk band, even more than the Stooges or the Ramones. They didn't sound anything like punk rock, but Morrison outshined everyone else when it came to rebellion and not playing by anyone's rules. There are a lot of bands that seem to want to sound like the Doors filtered through grunge or neogrunge -- whatever it is. But it's all just ideas pasted on ideas, faded copies of copies. If you want to be like Jim Morrison, you can't be anything like Jim Morrison. It's about finding your own place in the world.

its not hard

to make it last

often came close    

simpler longer

change wouldnt 

not a little 

fancy try

for a tree

just a thought

From the first screaming  breath, we are each a  CEREBRUM AT WAR WITH OUR BODY.  Why the conflict?  Because the body, especially the  unworkable tiny version of the infant, limits the seeming infinite expanse, speed and energy of our thoughts. 

In the womb and for the first three weeks the brain  is paramount.   An infant at birth does not recognize a material world.   Its eyes do not focus.  It may not see itself as different or separate from stimuli it recieves.  Its complete world and currency is stimuli without category.  The infant brain may believe it is the World.  The child  percieves only  its own thoughts and expects its environment to react effortlessly to its thoughts.  This expectation arises not from a sense of entitlement but because the infant believes the world around it is thought indistinguishable from itself.  

The child may recognize  the first separate item as the mother  but then almost immediately realizes that even closer, there is something apart,  whether it be its own hand or the grumblings inside its abdomen.  This is not a happy discovery and the infant body is hardly practicable.  Long months of initial learning and"growing up" consist mostly of realizing what the body can't do, such as waste at will,  and then stumbling control  of rules over the little it can do such as touch, movement and speech.

Adults in our species who instinctively fashion artifices for consumption can scarcely imagine the thoughts of an infant who has yet to  categorize  its thoughts or materia.  But  do not think this newborn perspective which lasts for two to three weeks is forgotten.  Somewhere inside all of us is that memory, though it would not necessarily have any remarkable feature or  characteristic permitting us to tag the recollection.  For the same reason we do not have a memory of the womb. Not because it is dark or our mind is "turned off" but because inside, with the body all but shut down as a sensory device,  all is thought.    

This memory of the brain unlimited motivates us forever.  There are  various familiar mechanisms to simulate this infant conception.   Being drunk or stoned or oriental practice blurs the learned  architecture or "inhibitions" of our usual designs  and may be an effort to recreate this feeling.  The world becomes streaming stimuli again.   Persons regress involuntarily to this state when their brain's neural pathway rules are modified.  Even among the more educated college students,  intoxicating rituals are an attempt to recreate and integrate the infant disposition into the  "adult"  working  world the student is entering.    It is not suprising that these neurochemical tools have been commercialized into product for our largest industries.  While marketed to encourage consumption, these  deinhibitors are unfortunately reduced  through prescription, ritual or prohibition   to a mediocre reliable buzz.  They could provide a scope through the mental infrastructure to the underlying drives of this first infant memory.


How does the naked open nature  of  the infant mind evolve into  the modern scheming entrepreneur?   Our parents are supremely  important in the brain's  first contest  because they provide protection and safety for our mind as it confronts and then masters use of the body. Cerebra are fragile at the beginning of life, in complete lack of control of the flesh that encases them. 

The need for protection and supervision  does   not  end with childhood.  Because of that early protection provided by our parents we look for the same  "salvation" and guidance  often from a religion.   The christian greek and  norse father gods, and  the egyptian and minoan mother gods are patently cognizable as  parent substitutes.

morrissego

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZrnY3uuzJsY&feature=related

All true in 60 minutes

Interview with Morris Berman in last december:


          
           http://www.megaupload.com/?d=JT9IROPG

           http://www.megaupload.com/?d=9UM0W6JW




         

November 1985

Capricorn sideways-English retro

Think of downunder and tickets of braille

Of neon on plastic-words of praise

State street cinema  aglow in silver

But visions of something better

Rosary beads clash and faithful leave the rail

Daffodils playing strumpets for a loss

Harsh extravaganza for a cross.

May 1995

I worry about  America.    We have entered or passed our golden age. The Italians have Verdi, Germany, Mozart;  England, Handel.    Who do we have,  Elvis ? All these countries at their height placed enormous sums into the arts and  we are cutting back when it is our moment to contribute something eternal to the eternal condition.  Noone remembers that an Italian invented the radio or a German, print.  Those tools are obsolete and so soon will be  our machines of trickery and cleverness.  It must be something more, even more than a people's freedom that we must give.

Thursday, 1997

Andrew Cunanan shot himself in a houseboat along Collins yesterday.  Went to the Chemist Shop's  new location today after a luncheon at the Tower Club.  Went to (     )'s memorial funeral today.  Her mom and dad came and said hi and I met her boyfriend.  She looked good and was cheerful.  Looking back I was so full  of anxiety and never could stop, slow down or rest.

So many things going on and  no slowing down even for the death.

 I kept my head down and looked at the girl. 

”I couldn’t love you."


It would risk a fall from which I could not rise.
It has been so long, the path so dry that I have learned.



I like the desert. I have deciphered the mirages. There is no hope for a palm, or a well, or fruit. The horizon is sharp, the weather known.


I don’t want to return to the city, no need for the market. This cliff I won’t approach even if there is a rise in the land and comfort from the heat.



She put on her sunglasses,  

 “I’m not offering you anything.”


"That’s why I cannot accept."

 A man will drown in charity if he has thirsted too long.


Leave me to my own profession of connection and ecstasy.

The derivations of names of various points, places, objects, etc., is a matter of more or less interest, and the manner of their adoption is gone and lost sight of before we begin to think of the incidents connected with their naming, and now all the mountains, streams, springs, valleys and places are named in days gone by and practically all of them have some original interest to the after dwellers of the country, but they soon become matters of tradition. Thus, "Sewell Mountain" in some of the histories, was named for Sewell, or Suel, the first settler, when he and Marlin first settled at the mouth of Knapp's Creek, at Marlin’s bottom in Pocahontas County. They resided as monarchs of the entire wilderness until they had personal differences about religion, when they parted. Sewell going into a large, hollow tree, later removing west on to the mountain and near the creek which bears his name to this day, "Sewell Mountain" and "Sewell Creek," and at which place he was finally slain by the Indians, as did Marlin’s Bottom take its name from Marlin, who settled there with Suel.



Green Sulphur Springs has no history in its name, except to designate it from the other springs in this region. The names of places frequently follow the proprietor or occupant; thus, Barger’s Springs was at one time “Carden’s” the owner; then “Barger’s,” and now the “Greenbrier,” a name given by the present company. Keatley’s Spring, near Hinton, was so called after Henry Keatley, an aged citizen, who lived by it for a number of years.


Pence’s Spring was named for Andrew P. Pence, who acquired the property in the seventies, and exploited it, bringing it to the attention of the general public, and to his enterprise and energy is due the honor for its present fame. It was once known as Buffalo Spring, as it was a noted lick for buffaloes and deer in the early days, as was also the Green Sulphur Spring, at which there was a fort. This fort was built by the Indians, and was a kind of stone breastwork built across the bottom in the meadow below the spring. The outlines are distinctly visible at this day. Many arrow heads and curious shaped stones are still plowed up and found in numbers in this bottom.



There are interesting traditions in regard to the discovery and naming of New River, the principal river of this section of West Virginia. It is claimed by Major Hotchkiss that it was named by a man by the name of New, who had a ferry somewhere in the upper territory. It is claimed by others that it was, when discovered, a new river, not shown by any maps, and for that reason took the name of New River from its source to its mouth. By others it is claimed that the entire river was known as the Kanawha from its source to its mouth. It was known as Wood’s River without any question for some time after its discovery, and is so shown on some of the old maps. The Kanawha River was not named, however, until 1770. In the Indian tongue it is the “River of the Woods,” but it had been discovered at the other end and known as New River and named after Col. Woods as Woods River many years before the Kanawha or River of the Woods was ever discovered.



Robert Lilly, the founder of the great generations of Lillys in the counties of Summers, Raleigh and Mercer, lived to be 114 years old, and his wife, who was a Moody, lived to be 111 years. On his grave has grown a white pine tree three feet in diameter at the stump, which was planted there by his granddaughter, the mother of (Curly) Joe Lilly, a justice of the peace and commissioner of the county court, who has died since this work began. Robert Lilly is buried at the mouth of Little Bluestone. This white pine is the tallest monument in the county to the oldest couple that ever lived in it, and the graveyard where Robert Lilly is buried is the oldest in the county. It was begun by the burial of a child therein from a train of emigrants passing through the country, and its coffin was of chestnut oak bark. Its name is lost to history. Robert Lilly first settled on Bluestone on the farm on which (Curly) Joe Lilly resided at the date of his death in 1906.



As all buffaloes disappeared like the Indians, with the advancement of civilization, the deer were plentiful, and middle-aged men can yet remember watching the deer licks at night behind blinds and killing them, but they, too, are now a thing of the past.



The name "Kanawha" was given to the river between 1760 and 1770, and when this name was given it, it already had a name, as herein stated. Kanawha probably took its name from the Conoys, a tribe of Indians, as there is great variety in the spelling of the name. Wyman's map of the British Empire in 1770 calls it the Great Conoway, or Wood River. Kanawha County was formed by an act of the Legislature of Virginia in 1789, and therein it was spelled "Kenhawa." Daniel Boone spelled it in his survey in 1791, "Conhawway." If this river now had its original and proper name, it would be "Woods River" from its mouth to its source, or "New River" from its mouth to its source.
 
 
 
 
 

You can criticize the  goo prospect as despairing, nihilistic, but you can't say its unreal. To say that would be to posit that the guess or  made up world of a primate(Jesus) on a grain of sand on the universe's beach occupying a word in infinity's  library is as accurate as all the beaches, mountains, and  books ever written.

Qualitatively you might be right but you can't but be worried now about the leap of ego your belief in your own judgement encompasses. Better keep that thought  in the back of your mind room but deal with the front door opened to an existence  in which  your infinite thoughts are encased in  and arising  out of dying drying bone and where there is an f-stop  shuttering even that diminishing aperture.  

I don't know, like the fifteen billion before me, how to deal with these incarnate  limits but I suggest that we haven't  started trying or if we did, we forgot every lesson or had it beaten  out of us by powers whose truth we couldn't twist as well .

This is not real. I want to tell the truth. I am no entity but a collection. Each of my parts is a part. If a beehive has a personality then I'm grateful for mine.



For years I waited for drama, for experience to provide a plot.  Now I've had drama but its not heroic, tragic or interesting, it is brown. Dogs trampled kidnapped, friends killed, girls lost or thrown away.  I have no plot and no wish to tell..


Our universe  in the universe is a sand at a beach, in a second of  a million year day.   One word of a book in a library. A word without a sentence.