Wood, Paper, Pope

Wood is symbolic of the expression function. Within the wholistic system of the human body as a model, the energy of expression may be imagined as psycho-physiologically located in the area of the neck and throat. In the tradition of Siddham: Script of Gods and Buddhas, this cakra, or psychophysical energy center is visuddha cakra. It is visualised as a lotus of twelve petals circumscribing a six-pointed star, in each petal of the lotus are the syllables, respectively, AM  IM  IM  TM  UM  UM  RM  RM  LM  TM  EM  AIM  OM  AUM  AMM  AMH with the seed syllable in the center of the star HAM. [above]

Categories upon categories, systems within systems. The function of speech as a primal mode of expression and high-order communication is a matter of historical fact--not an opinion. That this function should be thought of and regarded as being centered in our throats is an obvious convention. But that these functional relationships should be symbolized by wood is a convention of archetypal depth--or, divinity-‑in our language as in our physiology when the map is read inward, toward the eternal and divine world of all the Buddhas, our Essence, the Pattern and the Divine Human Prototype.

When read outward, the cosmic tree is our seine, through which flows the cerebrospinal fluid reckoned by the ancients, the very stuff of life itself. The World is an old man: ver is the living man, virile, sappy with the aion of watery life-stuff--ald, and *-aldh- "age." The wer part of the root of the word "world," the part meaning "man," and hence presumably the speaker who is speaking (and writing) Old English; in turn derives his word for himself, is perhaps related to an Indo-European root wei-⁵. In the Indo-European language, spoken at least a millenium before by the ancestors of the Kurgan people whose heart land was north of the Black Sea around B.C. 2500, a word we represent and designate wei-⁵ indicates "Vital force." (American Heritage Dictionary, Appendix "Indo-European and the Indo-Europeans," by Calvert Watkins). From this root, a hypothetical form of the word called zero-grade is designated *wi- (in light italics), from which Professor Watkins and his colleagues derive the Latin vis, force, with irregular derivatives violare, to treat with force, and violentus, vehement. Through this lexical Latin trunk flowed the semantic sap which buds forth as leaf and blossom or blossom and leaf in our American English language: VIM, VIOLATE, VIOLENT. We understand poetically that the energy of vitality, the life force, shows itself in the samsaric world of space and time, materialisation and temporality in ways that are afterwards judged as VIM (Ebullient vitality and energy) or as VIOLENCE (Vehemence of feeling or expression; fervor; fanaticism." This the sixth way in which the word may be used. The number one definition; "Physical force exerted for the purpose of violating, damaging or abusing: The essence of war is violence." (Macaulay) We also have correct meanings at "Intensity or severity, an outrage, a wrong." Marcel Duchamp had it

RonGWRonG

on the title page of a publication, unique issue, in 1917. (Lebel, p. 40, fig. 17). And another RonGWRong might be what Jacques Cousteau takes for "a vision of war as all reasonable people would like to see it, as it ought to be. It is our last word on war." (Almanac, p . 566, c.f. James Joyce, Finnegans Wake, p.13).

" 566 A.D. On Baalfire's night of this year after deluge
a crone that"

Those are the words that are continued on the overleaf, numbered page 14, and proceed to to the famous part of the page that looks like this:

Blurry works at Hurdlesford.
                                                         (Silent.)
566 P.D. At this time it fell out that a brazenlockt damsel grieved

The actual appearance of the words on the printed page, Sixth printing, December 1955, is what we have learned to read from Lewis Carroll or as a printer might read the page, in runnels between marks left by the ink in the shape of the surface of pieces of type set into a frame like a loom or a form and chase and key and quoin, leads and spaces--all before articulating, marking the face of the void as represented by the blankness of the surface of the paper. And the stuff of the form, of the paper, comes from the pulp of the trees that are being harvested in the rain forests of the world, by the likes of the Jari Company in Brazil and the Japanese concessions on Borneo. And "Death" is the name given to the card of the Major Arcana in the Book of God known as the Tarot: 13. A runnel of white space on the page runs up between the I and the 3 of "13" and between the f and the t, the last and the first letters of the words "of" and 'this" respectively. Space. Upward the eye is swept along with the vertical stroke of the capital R of the word "Runnel," between the r of "or" and the e of "emmets, leaping across the fassilwise, themselves, timing, the leaves, turning pages on pages, polepost. And so on. Adear, adear! Quodlibus.

Well, the four of the Fourth thing, Quodlibus is the sum of the 1 and the 3. The FOUR! Ah! the FOUR. Quintessentially the void resides at the center of the FOUR, and in the way we imagine material reality in dimensions of space and time, we may understand the manifestation of this quintessentiality as the quality of dimensionality, as in the model of the holy Tetrakis, four points equidistantly arranged in space so as to form what we call by the name tetrahedron.

But perhaps this is writing down too many of the arcane secrets, and the typewriter is telling me something, nevertheless, about the pen no weightier nor a polepost and Triom. (Tammuz) An auburn mayde, Duum. (Nizam) A shoe, Unum. (Adar) A bulbenboss, taken these four things and all. (Succoth) The seasons of the year and the Jewish months, for what was it about the old calendar and the Celtic way of celebrating Easter by reckoning the sun and the moon together in their harmonies, that it was too much like the Jewish way, it was, for the tastes of the gentleman in Roma who had himself called the Papa, the pope or the Father, was it? Setting up the rock throne as the principal bishop.

Kurt von Meier
1982