responder 1:0

The Hideaway - An Evening with M: Native American Iconographer

by Lyndon Johnson-LeMat, Thomist Monkey's Uncle

The lecture happens in an abandon bowery circuit-church in the Pigalle, void of its pews and all but the out of reachy-est iconia.  A relic of the post-modern decline in the religious subjugation of proletarian Europe - already the old news of generations gone.                                                                                                                                    
Inside, the squinted glare of a white hot winter twilight shafts through vaulted windows and into dancing whorls of gray and dusty death.  On the dais there is no altar, just a lectern, a microphone, and a few metal chairs.

Over to a sidewall is a great teak sacristy - scarred, scuffed, stripped of its commission and demoted into low service as a buffet-stand.  There squats a dented urn of hot chocolate, a stack of styros and three trays of bread'n'butter samwhiches, each with its own toothpick pennant declaring the loyalty of its specific viande.

- Good Gracious! (as a draw my cup of chaud and admire the furniture) I do believe I've found my three-handled moss-covered family gredunza!

- Huh!? (the lady beside me, Mrs. Grifas, a corpulent wiccan love-soulja, glowing patchouli as she drivels over her many options to chew).

She doesn't get me.  Just smirks and makes way with a chicken salad, her goiter flipping about like a mighty scrotal sack at her throat. Looking back at yours truly like I'm insane.  She's right, of course, I am insane. Madly mad and drunk on cinnabar.  So is Mrs. Grifas and the rest.  All the best people are, you know.  100 proof.

And we all come here. Here in the guts of the Paris ghetto, to Le Club American. Fortuity and sympathy.  To hear tales and talk of Art and Society in our fargone fatherland - Canada - the cosmic home base of civilized pseudo-psychosis, for which we are a distant guard.  Membership in LCA is free.  Tonight we get our money's worth.



I. Peddle to the Middle

Choosing a candy colored folding chair, in the corner I dig in, light up a Gitane to mellow my hot chocolate, and wait for the show to begin.  I scan the etherized patient body through a haze of yellow smoke.  There are about 22 regular members tonight. Yawn muttly crew if ever there was.  A gaggle of newbies - androids I calls 'em - sniffing hither and thither for the scent of a protocol, not sure why they are here, peering into every pair of eyes.

Upon the dais is our moderator, Dr. Zosha Murfislaw. Sitting next to her the speaker.  The chatter settles as folks asseyez and pretty soon Murfislaw introduces him - a hoary, friendly looking hobbit of a man called M.

- lah de dah (says Dr. Z)... he's a Haida hum dee haw... hybrid culture, Haida Manga, blahblah, et cetera, peter cetera, art-blah, environs meant round blend of blah and coiff of sherbet...

I am tuning it out already.  Balancing the squelch into the hidden wave, the ground pattern - and I've got it sussed.  For me, the Good Ship Haida-Pop as already run aground and Captain M is logged at sea.  Now I'm no psychic here - but I know what I know. I know, cuz although I'm trying to be in the moment and give this bonhomme a bon ami, I am in fact thinking about my mother.

My Mother and the Grand Oedipal Sexpialidoscious Purple Apocalyptic Intrigue.  Boy-oh-boy-ar-dee!  Here's the thing.  It happens in a flash
up in the attic, but is framed in a frankenstein design both rich and fine
and way downtown.

Sometime prior to his introduction, our speaker's slide show cycles haplessly through its contents at least thrice. 

The ground event is: hypnotic repetition.  Must---not---sleep!

Kafka emerges through the tactile as a group of inept apparatchiks grapple in an endless fog for control of so strange the mystic-medium - the sybiline software - but fail to halt the millwheel of flashing images before our eyes.  I might laugh if it weren't so goddam dentist-chair dull.

Questions: Why has M failed to master the new medium on his own time, and save his audience such a pitiless overture?  Lacking this ability, why does he permit the folly persist on into the theater of the stupefying? Such rubber impotence is not a desirable image for an Artist.  An Artist would take it in hand...

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                ... ... the message is: M is an absent minded professor - cuddly, lovable, non-threatening and wise.  Not an Artist at all.  Artists clarify.  Artists confound.  Artists amuse.  Artists enrage.  They do not bore!

Hence we sense there must be more.

Ah yes, the ground event is: politics and social engineering by the sub-textual and probably semi-conscious use of passive hypnosis.  Hypnosis of a hidden bias.

- (And then Mother in my ear)... watch it sonny!  You're nobody's boss.  Eat your Alpha-ghetti's you little shithead.

               (I'm two only years old). And every spoonful spells... behave... obey...
                                               follow... pray...  And every bowl a pyramid of law. 
    

II.  Mom I Fearest

Now, my Mother is no ordinary woman.  A Double Agent for the KGB.  222 IQ.  Concert Violinist of World Renown.  Lover to Norman Mailer; Castro and Guevera (at about the same time); Arthur Rimbaud and Marlene Dietrich (at exactly the same time!).  Rear Admiral in the U.S. Navy, CMH, WW's I and II. 

She says she'd love to tell me more but that she'd have to kill me.

Don't get me wrong here.  Mom and I enjoy a warm and happy home in our garret near the Sacre Coeur, in le City deLight.  One may liken us to an expat Sherlock Holmes and Mrs. Hudson, with me in the latter role, as I do all the cooking and what not. 

And yet, my upbringing is another story.  A single mum on the lam from Oswald Mosley's private hit squad, Mother knows enough to teach the hard tack and forge her sonny into an Artist.  An Artist will survive,
says she.  She wants me to survive.  
   

There is a little poem Mom whispers me but once when I am three or four, to be followed by a forced reading aloud of Orwell's 1984...

Where e'er it is that you might see -
All is Art and Hierarchy.
The Artist makes a noble feat
To see the two shall never meet.

'Tis you my child that I entreat -
You see the two shall never meet!

Yeah, Mom schooled my ass but good.  The proof is in the pudding.

III. The Pudding

 

 - I am an artist and a free man (M begins, and sidetracks at once into native amer-ind sub-politics).

Cha-ching!

Not at all vexed to be denied my helping of Art for a spare bowl of Social Malady.  In fact the soup tastes fine - as I had it from the get go that tonight's supper was gonna be a sales pitch.  A pitch with no product.  A pitch that passes understanding and into the mindscape as a billboard eyesore.  Here's the shy: it isn't enough to plead for the action of the common man nowadays.  Instead, one must Mary Kay Nod the subject into pink submission to the meme.  The material - the body of the argument - is irrelevant, because the subject once programmed becomes a walking talking party member for the cause.  And they don't even know it.

M stages a polarity.  One man, some unnamed schlub, a janitor on minimum wage we are told, sends 20 bucks to the cause - weekly, mind you - for a decade or more.  Water rises to the eye.  Another fellow, a Haida Heavy Hitter, throws a $70,000 get well bash for a man he nearly killed while driving under the influence.  The dude lost his leg, but hey, it's all good. They threw him a party.

Now M is no fool.  He knows well the members of are LCA are remarkably if not tragically insolvent and a long way from the wooded maze of his personal beef.  He must reinforce the connection to his cause, and here like fireworks comes the fanfare for the common man.  The working man and his kin of skin.  Decent folk and free from sin.  Sigh.

And then the price tag.  Responsibility and obligation are the burden of the free man, says he.  Who inside dare not agree?  I know someone.  

Finally, the acid test.

- (the flavor of M's rap)... and what about those asterix and obelisks that stand in the Cirque de Bastille, or in London Town, or Washington D.C.?  Do they mean the same as they do standing in Egypt of Old... ?

Like doggies in the rear view window wobble no! - the heads of newbies all.  A good 74% of the usual suspects also seem to agree in kind.  Delicious.

- ... of course not (M presses in).  To the Victor go the spoils.  Stolen as they are these monuments are the symbols of power.  The power of those in control of the common man... ad nauseum de lecto... 

More head shaking and polite despair.

I refrain from leaping out my chair and crying... just what do you think they mean in Egypt, anyhow?  Crackers?  Rhino's Horns?  A Punch and Judy Show?  Instead I hold my tongue delirious, baffled by nirvana, and listen as M unravels the proud zigarraut of Haida Hierarchy so close to his tell-tale, tall-tale heart,
and absolutely oblivious to his own...

IV.  ... Bull Papa

A staggering fallacy and softly knock-knock joke.

- (M edifies)... we Native American Indians never called ourselves Indians.  Indian comes from the Latin In Deo, meaning In God.  During the French Revolution, the Graceful Savage - the Indian - was paraded as a model of supreme natural spiritualism for political blahblah et cetera, hall and oates much better than chicago cetera, blah...

 The fallacy: a conspicuous mis-interpretation of the etymology of the term Indian.  Long before the events M describes as his source, the Teutonic seat of the Roman Empire - the so-called First Reich - coined the term In Deo as the empirical label for the descendants of the Pandavas of the Great Bharat (Bharat = Sanskrit for Noble House of India).  This appellation was awarded not for the Godliness of the Indian nation, but rather in admiration of the national caste and purity of its bloodlines.  Tsk, tsk.        

And later, detailing one of his already telegraphed slides, M teases us with the misspelt totem miniature (seen here as Min-a-ture).

Synapses fire ecstatically, reverberating in my brain.  My third eye listens in...

A boarding school mnemonic device: Knock knock?  Who's there?  Little Ol' Theseus.  Little Ol' Theseus who?  Little Ol' Theseus in Mino-ture.

And thus implodes the post Piscean heroic archetype into shambles at the feet of Christ.  There are no heroes in this electric landscape.  The hero is the hobgoblin of a grieving mind. We killed The Hero in the Chair, and brought Him back in a crash-cart hallelujah defibrillator passover to to save us in return, for which He is much obliged, I understand. 

The Labyrinth of Minos which is the Temple of Solomon is the Minotaur.  Bull within and Bull without.  The pagan maze of Satan.  No one has to go inside who has no bone to pick.  Theseus killed the Bull.  Christ destroyed the Temple.  Fucking pulverized it!  It is accomplished, bro.  Chill out why don't you.

Oh sure, I dig the vibe - your culture and its traditions are important to you and worth fighting for.  I, on the other hand, am in the catbird seat. The by-product of a heritage turned against itself and its own blood for the good of the Son of Man: the shining soul who is the golden child of God in every man and woman.   

The Sovereign Self - In Hell, where all of us are naked.

All of Us.

X. The Holy Office

Shoes scuffle like applause in the apres glow.  Coats are shouldered and watches checked and rechecked.  The newbies all, and a good 65% of the usual suspects in kind, glom onto M like tiny rainbow orbs of dew - dancing in pearly shafts of moonlight light bulb that slant in through the vaulted frames on high. 

Questions?

- Will you sign my book? 
- Thank you, sir, I was inspired.
- You met the Llama?
- Yes I met him.
- What about Apollo Frere?
- Apollo who?
- Do you have a light. madamoiselle?

An Orphic spiral oboe fugue - some distant, fading choir of lost children. Ever fading into silence.  An aurora of oil slick stick folks all
decked up in their Sunday threads.  Invisible. 

It's 22hrs moins dix.  Mom ought to be awake by now. Up for the night.  Strong sweet tea, a Davidoff or two (grace of a trusted contact from her spy days), and her beloved Mahler 45's on the RCA.  We'll play double solitaire 'til dawn.  Good company.  Or maybe I'll sneak away and zazie dans le metro on over to Saint Michel and watch the tourists until midnight mass at Our Lady.  I'll go to mass, not for the religion, but to shake the man's hand.  The man, or dame, or kid next to me.  Shake a hand and know the good news, that we are saved, and gonna be all right somehow. 

As I go, I stop inside the doorway and light another cigarette.  In a daze of yellow opium reverie, I am looking back through the mingling voices and my eyes lock with another man's eyes.  The eyes of a hoary, friendly looking hobbit, peering into me so deep and longing for the scantest proof of life, not sure why he is here, and lost at last in a crowd of alibis.

Outside in a soft winter rain, the loamy aromas of the Pigalle, rich with the spices of Araby and all the mystery of its boundless pleasures, linger but a moment on my breath and expand into nebulous contentment.

Paths Inglorious lead but through the Gate.  And as I begin to disappear...   

...so distantly I turn to view
the shamblings of that motley crew,
those souls that hate the strength that mine has,
steeled in the school of old Aquinas...

... and I am gone. 


for K. +++

LJ LeM. - Paris, 1975.         pg. 3 down   pg. 5 up