IDIOT PSALMS

"a spark igniting / once again the tinder of our lately / banked noetic fire"

—from "Annunciation" by Scott Cairns, as found in Idiot Psalms 

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I was first introduced to the poetry of Scott Cairns when I purchased a copy of Philokalia: New & Selected Poems in 2002. Initially, I picked up the book due to the icon of Saint Isaac of Syria on the cover. Then, I knew these poems were going home with me because of the series of poems titled "Adventures in New Testament Greek," which explore the terms metanoia, hairesis, nous, mysterion, and apocatastasis.

In Idiot Psalms, Cairns presents us poems in four main sections—"Unawares," "Heychasterion," My Byzantium," and "Erotic Word." Fourteen "Idiot Psalms" weave throughout the four sections, along with other poems, each with some sort of theological import while simultaneously lifting up the inadequacy of creation, the body, and our ability to comprehend the Divine. "The world remains a puzzle," as the narrator of "Heavenly City (Ouranoúpoli)" states.

A blurb on the back of the book claims that "Dostoyevsky and the psalmists" are "traveling companions" of Cairns. I've never read The Idiot, but I can see the inspiration of the psalms throughout, as well as many notions familiar from Christianity, Orthodox (for Cairns) and otherwise.

I've read all of the poems twice now and I am just starting to understand many of them. Maybe. It isn't due to them being difficult to read, but being challenged to see things differently, to think differently. To admit an inability to understand.

My favorite poem is "Annunciation." It takes a familiar scene—the angel Gabriel informing Mary that she will bear the Christ-child and provide for the birth and incarnation of God—and in eleven brief lines transforms it into something that vibrates with more energy than should be possible within its frame. We move from the clay of creation to the nativity of Christ, with Mary as our representative, as the very nature of our essence and our relationship to our Creator is revealed. This is powerful, revelatory work that Cairns does on the page.

I will be turning to, and returning to, these poems again and again.

A GOOD and HAPPY CHILD

A Good and Happy Child by Justin Evans has sat on one of the shelves of my home library for the past twelve years. I intended to read it upon purchase, but other books arrived and this novel of psychological horror fell farther down the reading list eventually being stabled on a bookcase and forgotten.

Which is too bad, because this is some top-notch scary stuff.

George Davies is a new father who cannot hold his infant son. His wife is at her wit's end. George visits a therapist in an attempt to save his marriage. Most of the narrative takes place as we read through a series of notebooks that the therapist challenges George to keep.

Eleven-year-old George Davies is an intellectually precocious kid dealing with the recent death of his father. When a demon visits George "all hell breaks loose." This is the same demon that supposedly killed his father.

Ultimately, we get different explanations for the presence of this demon—an actual demon that needs to be exorcised, command auditory hallucinations of a young mind in meltdown, or a child grieving the death of his father and his mind trying to make sense of it all—and the ramifications of trying to keep this demon at bay.

We meet various experts and authority figures trying to deal with George and his Friend—family members, church officials and practitioners, and psychologists, therapists, and medical personnel.

It's a compelling read and one that I found difficult to put down. And the ending... Oh. Dear. God.

Maybe I'll sleep with the lights on tonight. Highly recommended.

REVIVAL

Revival is Stephen King at his Lovecraftian best. King has many works that refer to, or play in, the realm of the Cthulhu Mythos. The first story I ever read by King, "Crouch End" in New Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos (1980), is good Lovecraftian horror that marries King's voice with elements of the Mythos—and does so while never revealing too much of "the other realm" but enough to keep the "creepy factor" high. Revival reads in a similar vein.

Revival is aptly named, as the novel plays with the various denotations and connotations of the word. There is religious revival, restoration to life, and rising up from disease or drug addition.

All of the horror is contained within the story of two men—Jamie Morton and the Reverend Charlie Jacobs—who first meet when Jamie is six and Rev. Jacobs is the new pastor of the church Jamie attends. The book develops their characters well, revealing more of Jamie over the course of the novel, and visiting the various points throughout the years when Jamie and Rev. Jacobs meet up again.

Just as Lovecraft was good at peeling back the onion-like layers of the cosmos to reveal what lurks beneath, so does King. And King does such without worrying too much about the mechanics of some of the pieces that lie beneath. We don't need to know exactly how they function because (a) it doesn't ultimately matter to the story, and (b) it lends the novel a sense of mystery.

When the ending arrives, which I had been trying to figure out and anticipate throughout reading the novel, it was not quite what I expected, but was ultimately fulfilling. If the latter word is adequate to explain the cosmic horror that rises up and leaves the reader off-kilter!

One of my favorite King novels. Highly recommended.

BETTER DAYS

"Better Days." Found art. North Hill, Puyallup, Washington.

RED XII: MEDITATION

"Red XII: Meditation."

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A meditation in floral form.

Mindfulness in the color red.

Ways to focus and leave the world

while the world resonates right there.

RED XI

"Red." Clockwise from upper left: Butterfly flower (schizanthus); red hook sedge; mossy saxifrage; Martha Washington geranium.

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The mindfulness of late autumn blows across the cold of winter and into early spring.

Even though unnoticed and without announcement.

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In the name of the Bee —
And of the Butterfly —
And of the Breeze — Amen!

—Emily Dickinson (F1 Sh1)

MERIAN

"Merian," number 6 in The Grand Armada series of the Inktopodes. Original: watercolor ink, India ink, gouache, and iridescent calligraphy ink on 8" x 10" watercolor paper. Scanned reproduction: in digitally colored frame.

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Merian is inspired by late-seventeenth- and early-eighteenth-century illustrator and naturalist Maria Sibylla Merian, as well as her watercolor works depicting pineapples and attendant insects, especially "Ripe Pineapple with Dido Longwing Butterfly" and "Pineapple with Cockroaches," both printed in Metamorphosis Insectorum Surinamensium. Merian appears as an inverted pineapple with the body of the pineapple making up her mantle and the fruit leaves transformed into her arms. The colors of Merian are rich and vibrant, more so when the original is viewed, since some of the color is dulled during reproduction. The natural vibrancy of the Hydrus Fine Art Watercolor inks—rich gamboge that glows against Hansa yellow medium and brilliant sap green—is a wonderful background for the India ink maps drawn upon them.

The inked "boxes" on the mantle are inspired by a map of Berlin circa 1900. The patterns on the arms are reminiscent of the contour lines of topographic maps, especially of those representing peaks of the Cascade Mountains. The orange gouache eyes simulate the caterpillars that climb up the sides of the pineapple in Merian's painting.

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"Merian" appears in the Strange Gliding Things show by Troy Kehm-Goins, which is on display at Puyallup Valley Dental Care during April, May, and June 2019.

FORTITUDE

I'm six episodes (of ten) into season one of Fortitude. I'm just starting to get my footing.

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Implications. Infidelities. Loyalties and shifted loyalties.

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Visual rhymes. Visual slant rhymes. (Emily would be proud, if she could imagine television.) Pushing toward things. Pulling us from things. But not always necessarily where we should be. Subterfuge.

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"For an instant I thought the Gulf Stream in my head was whirling me away to eternity..."
—page 98, WHITE JACKET by Herman Melville

(This is what I'm reading. Somehow it feels like it fits with what I'm viewing.)

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The scene between Sheriff Dan Anderssen (Richard Dormer) and Detective Chief Inspector Eugene Morton (Stanley Tucci) in the hotel restaurant over a bottle of whiskey is absolutely bonkers. Just watching Dormer's face in close up was worth admission to the entire season. The entire landscape of his face is tectonic.

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Blood on the ice. Blood on the snow. Blood on floorboards and clothing and potato peelers.

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Why is it that we are so fearful of the polar regions, the Arctic and the Antarctic?

I'm thinking of Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness. 2018's The Terror on AMC. Ivan Doig's "Winter of '19." The Endurance. John Carpenter's The Thing.

Perhaps because there is so little life in these regions, but much of it consists of apex predators—polar bears, whales, and the like.

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Long buried things now thawing and emerging once again. From the ice. From the people we once were.

Thousands of years of ice. Seven years of atoms being replaced.

Warming of a world. Warming of passions.

Is there a connection?

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Rilke just won't let go. The angels cry out to be noticed, recognized, categorized. A Monster Manual for the heavenly and infernal realms. (And The Duino Elegies have nothing to do with Fortitude, but Fortitude has brought them to the forefront of my imaginings again.)

THE FINEST MIND

"Is it possible now to have any doubt as to what Melville had in mind when he wrote Moby-Dick? These early books of his are not an account of his life from 1839, when he first shipped, to 1844 when he returned home. They are an account of the development of a mind from 1844 to 1850, the finest mind that has ever functioned in the New World and the greatest since Shakespeare's that has ever concerned itself with literature."

—page 84, chapter IV, "Fiction and Reality," Mariners, Renegades & Castaways: The Story of Herman Melville and the World We Live In by C. L. R. James

STRANGE GLIDING THINGS

The "Strange Gliding Things" show by Troy Kehm-Goins / Troy's Work Table is up at Puyallup Valley Dental Care for April, May, and June 2019. It consists of various members of the Inktopodes, from the small to the four newest members of The Grand Armada, and a recent series of Christian mystics.

All are created in watercolor ink, India ink, iridescent calligraphy ink, and gouache on watercolor paper; and all mixed media pieces created in a combination of painting and pen-and-ink techniques.

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Here is the artist statement for the show:

Troy Kehm-Goins is a poet and artist residing in Puyallup, Washington. In his work, he seeks to discover the holy within the everyday and ordinary. His pieces of art are a mixture of watercolor painting and pen-and-ink drawing, with inspiration derived from Chinese calligraphic paintings, late nineteenth century street maps, literary and speculative fiction, the Fauvists, rock posters of the 1960s and 1970s, and, of course, octopuses.

The Inktopodes (pronounced ink-TOP-uh-deez) grew out of a set of poems written to wrestle with his mother’s seventeen-year-long struggle with Parkinson’s Disease. Originally rather small in size, these paintings have grown larger over time as he explores the colors and patterns that are prevalent on the skin of octopuses and other cephalopods. Watercolor ink, India ink, iridescent calligraphy ink, and gouache (opaque watercolor) give birth to what Herman Melville called Strange Gliding Things.

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And, of course, some inspirational quotes that inform the show:

“Every strange, half-seen, gliding, beautiful thing that eludes him; every dimly-discovered, uprising fin of some undiscernible form, seems to him the embodiment of those elusive thoughts that only people the soul by continually flitting through it.”

—“The Mast-Head,” chapter 35, Moby-Dick by Herman Melville

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“Till rising and gliding out I wander’d off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.”

—“When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer” by Walt Whitman

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“[W]e glide adown the present, awake, yet dreaming, but the future or ours together—there the birds sing loudest, and the sun shines always there!”

—Letter to her brother Austin, A572 by Emily Dickinson