In this short parable, Kurt playfully indulges his imagination while combining it, in his customary fashion, with the insights of esoteric traditions of knowledge. Booley, a baboon logician (his name most likely derived from Boolean mathematics) and Rosie, a Rosette Spoonbill librarian, form an unlikely alliance, resulting in Booley's sudden awakening. "...what Booley had previously experienced serially, nacheinander, he now saw all at once, nebeneinander," Kurt writes, echoing a important theme in his teaching and his life about enlightenment and seeing all appearances as divine. As to the meaning of NCC in the title; insights are welcome.
Joyce James in the Yucatan
This fictional account of Joyce James, correspondent for Tantradine International, takes place in the Yucatan during a hurricane. As is true of most of Kurt's fiction, it's filled with facts and observations about culture, language, mathematics, space, time and the power of intuition. And rock and roll tunes.
The True Story of Tantradine International
Here's another installment of Kurt's fictional (though also biographical) tale about Norman Akaya and his uncle, Jose Que (who just happens to share a piece of Kurt's history). Written in 1982 (a particularly prolific year of writing) the tale allows Kurt to segue into a range of topics and geographical locations. Fantasy and fact-filled; Norman Akaya later appeared in Omasters.
The Form Body of Norman Akaya
For Kurt, life was a self-referential paradox; he never stopped examining its mystery or searching for the key to its understanding. This story written in 1982 is the first in a series featuring the character Norman Akaya, a play on Nirmanakaya, what Buddhists call the Form Body of the Buddha (one of the three Kayas, along with Dharmakaya and Sambhogakāya), what we conventionally call the appearance of reality. More to follow.
ARCHETYPES
Sometimes Kurt's mind just flew--a multi-cultural cascade of free association rushing forth like water in a rain-drenched creek, overflowing its banks. Most often, he captured these moments in his blue-lined notebooks, but every so often he'd sit at a typewriter and bang it out. Herewith is one such example from 1982; the line breaks, punctuation and spelling are just as he typed it.
Audio: Local Color
When he moved to the Napa Valley in 1969, Kurt sank his roots deeply into the Valley's rich heritage. In this 15-min. reading of his prose-poem "Local Color" (1982) one hears his reverence for the land, its original inhabitants, nature and its bounty.
The text is included so that as Kurt reads you may read along.
POMES
Kurt spent a portion of 1958 in Spain at the University of Madrid, a year-abroad program focused on poetry offered by U.C. Berkeley. By all accounts (and they are few) he had a hard time on his trip: little spending money, poor luck hitch-hiking and toasty Spanish heat. But the experience did seem to bring out the poet in von Meier. What follows are poems written between 1958 and 1985 found in a manila folder labeled POMES.
The OMASTERS - MIS' DONA
This first chapter of Omasters sets the stage for all that follows. Ironically, the effect of vast islands of garbage and debris floating in the oceans, a present-day problem in 2017, plays a major role in Kurt's fiction of 1975. "The MIS' DONA suckled projects in cetacean interspecies communication, psychoastronomy, and an ongoing sea-skimming operation. Gobbling up masses of off-shore sewage, oil spills, floating Styrofoam, throw-aways and the waste of contributing continents, the MIS' DONA's mission was much like that of a vulture, jackal or shark...." Kurt and Clifford Barney created a work of genius, and you get to read it right here. (For an additional chapter, click here).
A letter from the Notebooks of von Meier
Within the Archives of von Meier are snippets, fragments and copies of letters. Some of them are all business, but most are musings and contemplations, dipping into Kurt's ever-running stream of consciousness. This letter appears to be Circa 1976, written while he was on sabbatical leave from Sacramento State University. Rather Joycean in its style (Kurt was a big fan of James Joyce) it displays his inventiveness, humor and joy.
The OMASTERS - Report from Soofi Central
Kurt's study, with his friend Cliff Barney, of G. Spencer Brown's Laws of Form generated a surge of creativity in Kurt resulting in sample chapters of a book called Omasters. A multi-dimensional-story-line fantasy adventure in part about a space vessel shaped like a tortoise shell in danger of falling into a black hole, hundreds of pages were generated, and literary agent John Brockman tried, unsuccessfully, to find a publisher for the book. Funny, confusing, arcane, and filled with scholarly references, it was just too wild for the traditional world of publishing in 1979. An encouraging rejection letter from Doubleday/Anchor Books to their agent John Brockman is illustrative. From what appears to be Kurt's original typed pages, you can enjoy a bit of Omasters right here. More to follow!
