Two Bar was a name they gave a certain view of the Paris Basin, from their side of the river looking north past the clumps of muck and stranded flood wrack which would later host St. Chappel, Notre Dame and, set just upstream, the favorably disposed citydwellings of the anciently and permanently rich of present day Paris, but seeing then, instead, the place where by the wrestlings of chance and design it would become.

coil The controversial Barry Coat of Arms

The controversial
Barry Coat of Arms

coil

June Swoon

A long a low a lowly swooning comes across the year.

Aw, and isn't it the fennel's swooning rhythms again, again arching up and back, again saluting the passing of our chosen calendar's first trimester?

March has come first with all its engaging madnesses, with all its strivings after excellence and transcendant embrace, and April has occurred where all the strivings and transcendings receive due celebration as the stuff of fools, and Semele's Month, May, too, comes, completing the intentional embrace of that whole thing, the current year, which we here at HCE have so recently noted.

Nonnos has it in his Dionysaica that people gathered to see Dionysius off on his way to India waved their customary fennel fronds to salute his going, marking the common enthusiasm for his departure running deep and wide in the whole festive pack of them there to see him gone.

The practical application of fennel being so invidiously arrayed against our own established interests here at HCE, the classic trope is hard to scan. They're waving fennel fronds across the length and breadth of classic literature, marking some moment's proper crowded celebration with what we would ordinarily be inclined to think of, based purely on personal observation of the stuff in situ, as the embodiment of all the profound nuisance of the world.

Fennel does us no favor here. It's said to have admirers, and the Barry Family, based on relict lore of pig passed down from the Family's long ages of active association with that renowned beast and acknowledging the indiscriminately ingestive enthusiasms of that kind, still salute swine as the proper cure for fennell. Root stalk and frond they'll have at the stuff, pigs, returning bog for what was given as greenery by the plantstuff.

The Barry Family, having loosed the pigs from its domain, though not yet all the accrued knowledges entailed by them, provides no certain guidance for those of us here at HCE who's fate it is to daunt the fennel's growth. Absent pigs, these knowledges are unavailing against the exasperations of the fennell's efflorescence.

Given our prejudices in the matter here at HCE it is with some effort we imagine Nonnos's scene, with Dionysius, the very measure of advanced late pagan godliness, being celebrated in this way, with the avowed public pleasantry of the swooning fennel.

To read the stuff, then, the classic stuff (said by scholars to include in some broad strictly value–free sense the overexuberantly inept locutions of the words of Nonnos), requires of us here at HCE great discipline of mind, forever readying the necessary transposition of values required if fennell's nuanced meaning is at stake.

The fennell is what we'd willingly give. It is what we freely and eagerly offer up to any disposed to have it. Our self-regarding relief in its release in no way diminishes the pleasure of those so curiously endowed as to feel honored by its offering. It is the disquiparant thing, this relation, of giver to gifted. We are happy to have over to them the aromatic fronds for our own good reasons, and presume the gifted gratified for their own good reasons as well, wandering their chosen path to or back from what glory they might seek, in the nearest sense we can make of the practice when we run across its mention in the context of the classic lore.

June 26, 2005

June 26, 2005

Recently Manifested:

The Gulag that can be told
is not the true Gulag.
The Nazi that can be named
is not the true Nazi.

Free from the Gitmo, you see only the manifestations.
Caught in the Gitmo, you realize the mystery.

Yet Gulag and Gitmo arise from the same source.
This source is called darkness.
Darkness within darkness,

The gateway to all understanding.

—Avram Grumer

June 25, 2005

June 25, 2005

Family Dog concert promoter Chet Helms

May the Baby Jesus Shut Your Mouth and Open Your Mind

Chet Helms, 1942–2005

"Without Chet, there would be no Grateful Dead; no Big Brother and the Holding Company; no Jefferson Airplane, no Country Joe & the Fish; no Quicksilver Messenger Service, and the list goes on," said Barry Melton, the lead guitarist for Country Joe & the Fish.

—San Francisco Chronicle, page A21. June 26, 2005

June 1, 2005

June 1, 2005

Tibet or not–Tibet, that is the question:

A monk's life is strictly regulated, and the rituals are an all–absorbing activity.

The monks are seated in a precise hierarchical order, with the youngest being closest to the entrance.

Some ceremonies begin in the half–light of dawn, with the temple illuminated only by butter lamps. The atmosphere is impressive, even to non–believers.

— François Pommaret, Tibet: an eduring civilization (Abrams New York 2003)

squiggly

Bogsniffings:

(Should our business plan here at HCE go not too far awry, this portal to the previous year's Bogsniffings will someday be attended by the necessary machineries of commerce, erected to collect the agreeable sum on the looker's entering there — something much like the estimable Paypal system, perhaps.

At present, the Bogblog is freely entered to whatever depth the looker may choose to reach.

Use the Volume control to descend to the desired annum).

 

Volume III: 03.03.05 to —;

Collected incompletions of the current year, by monthname.

Volume II: 03.03.04 to 03.02.05

Accumulated incompletions of the indicated annum.

Volume I: 03.03.03 to 03.02.04

A year's worth of freely sniffable Bog in one compact spot!

Up↑

One click away, the very top of the Bog to you.