Ginsberg and Howard Finster, 1988: '..the door to the other world is to step through your shadow'

Ginsberg at Paradise Garden, 1988

 

Although Allen Ginsberg and Howard Finster made something very personal of their respective art, they both found a path to larger truths made of the small things. The charming photograph of Ginsberg at Howard Finster's Paradise Garden, above, reveals a great conjoining of art and the soul.

 

At the Allen Ginsberg Project there's a nice remembrance of their 1988 meeting in Pennville, Georgia. Ginsberg was quick to see Finster's personal universe in creative terms, but thought Howard's vision was constricted. As he later told interviewer John Turner, Ginsberg was puzzled "how the grander scope of his visionary insight became solidified to the more limited notion of  Christ, Heaven and Hell."

 

Allen told Turner that he liked Howard's artistic consciousness and confidence as an artist, "like Blake had with those imaginative projections ... For example, the phrasing on his one particular tower ("Castle of Words") has  '..the door to the other world is to step through your shadow'. That is somewhat Blake-ian." But ultimately, Ginsberg tells Turner, " ... there is an old Buddhist phrase, 'If you see something powerful, don't cling to it. If you see something beautiful, don't cling to it.' Emptiness is the grand palace. There is no Heaven and Hell. Howard seems to be clinging to his visions, so there is an element of the shadow of evil."

 

There's lots more in the post at the Ginsberg Project page, including art, photos, and links to an exhibit for a Finster centennial celebration at the Taubman Museum in Roanoke, VA that runs until February 2017.

Here's an included excerpt at the Project page from John Turner's 2009 article in Raw Vision magazine, "When Allen Ginsberg Met Howard Finster":  

JT: I curated a retrospective on the work of the Reverend Howard Finster for the Museum of American Folk Art in 1989. The poet Allen Ginsberg came to a pre-opening party of the exhibition for a "meet and greet" with the artist. He told me that he had been down to Paradise Garden in Georgia a few years earlier, but that Howard wasn't giving sermons to visitors that day, He said that he enjoyed seeing the artwork in the Garden, took many photographs and bought a Finster cut-out in the gift shop. He asked me if I could introduce him to Howard and I said, "Sure, my pleasure". He then motioned me to the side of the room, where we continued our conversation. He said, "I want you to introduce me as a homosexual. Tell him that I was born that way". He went on to tell me that several of is friends who were familiar with Finster's work thought that he was anti-gay and that in some of  his paintings he had written that AIDS was God's revenge for homosexuals. Now the stage was set in a way that I hadn't anticipated and potential trouble was brewing - it was up to Finster to give a good or bad "performance".

 I brought Allen up to the table where Howard was signing exhibition posters and motioned to him that I wanted him to meet someone. I knew Howard well enough by then (having written a biography on him) to know that he was impressed by celebrities (from wrestlers to politicians) even if he didn't know who they were.So I said, "Howard, this is a famous poet. He writes poetry, like you do. His name is Allen Ginsberg. He is a homosexual. He was born that way". Howard turned his head away very slowly and paused for what seemed an eternity and then looked directly at Ginsberg and said, "What is, is". 

A smile came over Ginsberg's face and he said, "I'm glad to make your acquaintance. Can I take a few pictures of you?" ...

Michel Serres on gay marriage: "The whole Catholic hierarchy should reread the Gospel according to Luke"

 Pierre Joris

Pierre Joris's blog Nomadics is always a wonderful place to discover and revisit to reassure the reader there is entertaining writing on the internet if you know where to look in its endless hall of mirrors. Joris -- an educator, author, translator, raconteur and dapper dresser (not necessarily in that order) posts items of great interest to the academic and the amateur alike -- a trick very few can manage with Joris's wit and style.

He enjoys posting the work of others he finds illuminating, especially in translation, and which otherwise would go unnoted. Here, for example, is a recent contribution that bears on Biblical interpretation, marriage relationships, the structure of the family, and the  debate in France about gay marriage. The quote is by French philosopher Michel Serres, who takes an interesting path getting to his eminently logical conclusion.

The logic must have worked: France became the thirteenth nation to legalize same-sex marriage on May 18, 2013.

Nomadics is worth a regular browse for anyone interested in literature, language, poetics, and travel.

Michel Serres

Our friend Cathie Fournier Facebook-forwarded a lovely quote by French philosopher Michel Serres, which I thought would be worthwhile to English. I don’t know the context in which he said or wrote it, except that the French parliament is discussing gay marriage right now! Here it is:

“This question of gay marriage interests me, given the answer the ecclesiastical hierarchy brings to it. Since the first century after Jesus-Christ, the model of the family has been that of the church, that of the Holy Family.

But let us examine the Holy Family. In the Holy Family, the father is not the father: Joseph is not Jesus’ father. The son is not the son: Jesus is the son of God, not the son of Joseph. Joseph, he has never made love to his wife. Concerning the mother, she is the mother indeed, but she is a virgin. The Holy Family, that’s what Levi-Strauss called the elementary structure of kinship. A structure that breaks completely with ancient genealogy, based until then on filiation: one is Jewish through the mother. There are three types of filiation: natural filiation, recognition of paternity and adoption. In the Holy Family, what is blocked is both natural filiation and recognition; only adoption remains.

Thus, since the Gospel according to Luke, the Church proposes as model for the family an elementary structure based on adoption: it is no longer a question of making children, but of choosing oneself, to the point where we are parents, you will be parents, father and mother, only if you say to your child “I have chosen you,” “I adopt you because I love you,” “ it is you I wanted.” And reciprocally, the child also chooses his parents because he loves them.

Thus to me the position of the Church concerning homosexual marriage is perfectly mysterious: this problem was solved some 2000 years ago. I suggest that the whole Catholic hierarchy should reread the Gospel according to Luke. Or to convert.”

Lupercalia and Valentine's Day: Wolves, vestal virgins, and the Pipes of Pan

While most of us consider February 14th a date to celebrate or avoid all together, February 15th became an important date in ancient Rome as a time of rebirth and renewal -- and to its human cousin, fertility. 

As springtime festivals go Lupercalia was a wild affair of debauch and drunkenness, not a bad way to chase off the dread spirits of winter or the very real threat of the wolves outside your door. Appropriately so: the Latin holiday takes its name from the Lupercal, oldest Roman settlement -- on the Palantine Hill -- in which the wolf was supposed to have suckled Romulus and Remus. 

Hallmark won't mention it, but the flayed skin of a sacrificed goat was used by loincloth-clad men for lashing women in order to promote fertility and ease of childbirth. It seems clear that by classic times some ancient ritual had degenerated and its original significance had been lost, but because it involved a lot of nakedness and riotous running around and tomfoolery, the ancient Romans were loathe to abandon it.

But why February? February occurred later on the ancient Roman calendar than it does today, so Lupercalia was held in the spring and regarded as a festival of purification and fertility. Each year on February 15, the Luperci priests gathered on Palantine Hill at the cave of Lupercal. Vestal virgins brought sacred cakes made from the first ears of last year's grain harvest to the fig tree. Two naked young men, assisted by the Vestals, sacrificed a dog and a goat at the site. The blood was smeared on the foreheads of the young men and then wiped away with wool dipped in milk.

The youths then donned loincloths made from the skin of the goat and led groups of priests around the pomarium, the sacred boundary of the ancient city, and around the base of the hills of Rome. The occasion was happy and festive. As they ran about the city, the young men lightly struck women along the way with strips of the goat hide. It is from these implements of purification, or februa, that the month of February gets its name. This act supposedly provided purification from curses, bad luck, and infertility and also imparted a wish that the maidens would marry soon. Of course, with any Roman or pagan fertility festival, a 3-day orgy followed the initial festivities.  

By the time of Imperial Rome the celebration was in full flower: Mark Antony was master of the Luperci College of Priests. He chose the Lupercalia festival of the year 44 B.C. as the proper time to offer the crown to Julius Caesar.

As many a pagan custom in the Roman world, the conversion of Emperor Constantine to Christianity altered the nature of such a free-spirited debauch. Lupercalia, with its lover lottery and more precisely lengthy orgy, had no place in the new Christian order.  Finally, in the year 496 AD, Pope Gelasius did away with the festival of Lupercalia, citing that it was pagan and immoral. 

He chose Valentine as the patron saint of lovers, who would be honored at the new festival on the fourteenth of every February. St. Valentine's feast day became associated with the more genteel and social aspects of courtship. The flailing of one's beloved and the wearing of goat-skins disappeared, and the forms of romantic love took shape that led Hallmark to its hearts-and-flowers domination of the once raucous holiday..

The rites and rituals of Lupercalia were not abandoned completely. In Morocco the springtime celebration is still an intense event of magic and fertility, wildness in honor of the god Pan -- with his goat-skin and dancing, shrill piping and midnight debauchery, he is the god of Panic in the tribes of the desert.

The Pipes of Pan at Jajouka is a field recording made in Morocco by Brian Jones and Brion Gysin in 1968, an edited document of ancient Lupercalia rituals dedicated to the god Pan that are hours, and sometimes days, long. These rituals echo through every springtime rite from the pre-Lenten celebrations of Mardi Gras and Carnival to Easter. Although the recording has been given a psychedelic gloss it doesn't really need, the result is powerful music, if the listener is open to it. 

This is an old, old trip -- and the album, recorded during a visit in 1968 and originally released in 1971 on the Rolling Stones' label, is considered the first of its kind. Since then the Master Musicians of Jajouka have recorded a wildly unique series of albums, produced variously by Bill Laswell and Talvin Singh, that are worth the shoe leather to track down -- short of a journey to Jajouka itself, of course.

For Thanksgiving week: "Walking on My Grave" (Eugene C. Bianchi)

"Walking on My Grave"

(Eugene C. Bianchi)

Walking on my grave-to-be, I invite

Mr. D from the other side of the river.

You can’t be too pushy about this

lest you scare him off, expect big answers

to bigger questions when all he wants

is beer and pretzels and maybe a slow stroll

around the spiral labyrinth to sit by the capstone

of the small burial vault for animal cremains.

You might start with a joke about not letting

morticians have all the fun shooting up

my corpse with bad botox, proven not to last

with no money-back guarantee, amid all that

palaver about how fine they look in our coffin

(echoes of my nonna who couldn’t believe

how nicely people cleaned up for wakes).

It’s not death’s certainty but its uncertainties

that interest me and elude conscious mind

bogged down with tedious theories of afterlife,

instead of grasping it as an ungraspable whole,

the way an artist sees his nude by the window

full and stark for the quickest sketch of

her body’s vital thrust and mystic lore,

with details coming later or not at all.

So I slow Mr. D down with drink and snacks. 

Am I more fearful of dying than saner folk 

and need to allay my terror with garden games?

Maybe, maybe, but does it matter?

Only a dunce would not regret death’s losses,

those beautiful days and shining eyes and

friends who bring chicken soup when you

fall off your horse or divorce a second wife.

There’s lots of time for Mr. D to scare me

as I gasp for breath on a sweaty night

or in turbulence at thirty thousand feet

when I envy and dislike the calm pilot who says

that we didn’t really need that second engine.

No, plenty of time for such episodes and more.

I’d just like to approach him slow walking

`round and `round balancing our beers to ask

what he’s picked up along the way about the Big Ones:

God, Purpose, Loss, Suffering, bursts of unexpected Joy.

He’ll probably tell me to pour him another, no pretzels,

sit near the capstone, admire the ferns and cast iron plants,

shut my mind, let myself float on this sea of contradictions,

buoyed by the salty wisdom of ambiguity.

"Walking on My Grave" by Eugene C. Bianchi appears in the poet's new collection Ear To the Ground: Poems for the Long View. Bianchi was in the Jesuit order for twenty years, and is Professor of Religion Emeritus, at Emory University in Atlanta. His other poetry collections include Grief of Chickens, Washington Rhythms, and God Bored. He has published many books and articles in the areas of spirituality, creative aging, church reform and issues of culture and religion, as well as a memoir, Taking a Long Road Home (Wipf and Stock, 2011). He lives in Athens and maintains a blog about creative aging. 

Philosopher Michel Serres on gay marriage: "the whole catholic hierarchy should reread the Gospel according to Luke"

 Pierre Joris

Pierre Joris's blog Nomadics is always a wonderful place to discover and revisit to reassure the reader there is entertaining writing on the internet if you know where to look in its endless hall of mirrors. Joris -- an educator, author, translator, raconteur and dapper dresser (not necessarily in that order) posts items of great interest to the academic and the amateur alike -- a trick very few can manage with Joris's wit and style.

He enjoys posting the work of others he finds illuminating, especially in translation, and which otherwise would go unnoted. Here, for example, is a recent contribution that bears on Biblical interpretation, marriage relationships, the structure of the family, and the current debate in France about gay marriage. The quote is by French philosopher Michel Serres, who takes an interesting path getting to his eminently logical conclusion.

Nomadics is worth a regular browse for anyone interested in literature, language, poetics, and travel.

Michel Serres

Our friend Cathie Fournier Facebook-forwarded a lovely quote by French philosopher Michel Serres, which I thought would be worthwhile to English. I don’t know the context in which he said or wrote it, except that the French parliament is discussing gay marriage right now! Here it is:

“This question of gay marriage interests me, given the answer the ecclesiastical hierarchy brings to it. Since the first century after Jesus-Christ, the model of the family has been that of the church, that of the Holy Family.

But let us examine the Holy Family. In the Holy Family, the father is not the father: Joseph is not Jesus’ father. The son is not the son: Jesus is the son of God, not the son of Joseph. Joseph, he has never made love to his wife. Concerning the mother, she is the mother indeed, but she is a virgin. The Holy Family, that’s what Levi-Strauss called the elementary structure of kinship. A structure that breaks completely with ancient genealogy, based until then on filiation: one is Jewish through the mother. There are three types of filiation: natural filiation, recognition of paternity and adoption. In the Holy Family, what is blocked is both natural filiation and recognition; only adoption remains.

Thus, since the Gospel according to Luke, the Church proposes as model for the family an elementary structure based on adoption: it is no longer a question of making children, but of choosing oneself, to the point where we are parents, you will be parents, father and mother, only if you say to your child “I have chosen you,” “I adopt you because I love you,” “ it is you I wanted.” And reciprocally, the child also chooses his parents because he loves them.

Thus to me the position of the Church concerning homosexual marriage is perfectly mysterious: this problem was solved some 2000 years ago. I suggest that the whole catholic hierarchy should reread the Gospel according to Luke. Or to convert.”