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Saturday, May 15, 2010

Rinzō


 
It would have earned him Siberian exile had he not already been in Siberia.
--Ronald Hingley


In 1808 a Japanese cartographer named Mamiya Rinzō traveled to Sakhalin Island to map the land and document its inhabitants and natural features. In spirited ethnographic fashion, he became well known for his ability to assimilate into alien environments, often disguising himself as a beggar or journeyman. The ocean was agitated during earthquakes, producing waves of translation, often of great size and power. Every time the sky lit up, a tornado seemed to jump closer.

There was evidence of a thin atmosphere and even ice volcanoes on this strange world —lakes of molten sulphur and vast fields of sulphur dioxide snow. Great sculpture reached out like invisible gravitational folds and changed the space around it, making it alive with its presence.



Rinzō struggled to make out beyond plants the first stumbling steps of the Invisible in the mud. We are informed that fireflies placed inside a glass or transparent tube were used as lamps. He was unafraid and eating a mushroom when he lifted his gaze to the towering fortress that loomed before him.

Bright moon was shining on the Rainbow Skirt Palace.

The castle kept changing colors as it spun around to investigate its new foe. It was smooth, grayish, and partly membranous, with a prominent vascular pattern.* In it were present the torturers, the martyrs and the beasts all together, all at the same time—Terrors enough to have daunted the stoutest Hearts that ever were placed in Cases of Flesh and Blood. Drawn by admiration and wonder, he approached the building.



The gates were open, but he stopped short of entering them and began to sob.

"Open to me the gates of righteousness; I shall enter through them, I shall give thanks to the LORD. Through long years I have not ceased to experiment, neither have I spared any labor of mind. I am the surgeon of old authors and heal the wounds of dust and ignorance. I demand that you open the gates at once!”

The gates were open he did not enter. Picture him raving wildly at the wall as he writes his questions to heaven.

My thought is clinging as to a lost learning slipped down out of the minds of men.

After a while, even the will to distinguish between what is happening and what seems to be happening fades!

Do I not deserve to accomplish some great purpose?


Alone, man has less than half himself for company.

In brief, he is told he is like anyone else and that he isn't!

On the other hand, most evidence suggests a very different conclusion!

Lost is the lost, I know'st it, and the past is past.

If you do not open to me, I will kill myself before this door.



The castle kept turning around to look, and look again. Now heat poured out on a terrifying scale. Suddenly, the castle wall became a prison wall, as if its stomach had come out of its body and digested Rinzō before going back in. Rules and meanings became dislodged from those of society’s unconfined counterpart. Pushing and pulling on the rock he yelled, “Help me. Let me out.”


The mythic land contrasted to the inescapable empire within which he remains, his reign or his captivity, which you please. Time after time birds were heard, but before one got within range the calling would cease and no amount of watching would locate them.

Although they have never been printed in any atlas or map collection, his tapestries ought to be considered as maps based on first-hand observation. He saw fantastically sculpted limestone caves and stalactites, a stupendous waterfall, volcanic springs of boiling mud, and sulphurous blowholes. The territory no longer precedes the map, nor survives it.


Pirates were about, plundering and killing at sea.

Maimyo Rinzō is still standing at the gate.






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*Two philosophers, one in Italy and one in Germany, maintain that its surface consisted of transparent crystal.


Sources

Pt.1
1. Brett Walker, “Mamiya Rinzō and the Japanese exploration of Sakhalin Island: cartography and empire” Journal of Historical Geography, V. 33 # 2, p. 283
2. Daniel Brower, Russia’s Orient
3. Hitchcock, Elementary Geology, p. 184
4. www7.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/0506/feature6/assignment1.html

Pt.2
1. http://www.spaceprime.com/early-earth.htm
2. Charley Parker, “Gian Lorenzo Bernini,” http://www.linesandcolors.com/2007/07/

Pt.3
1. Kazantakis, Saviours of God, p.51
2. Adapted from James Rennie, A Natural History of Insects
3. http://djeugene.blogspot.com/2007/07/todays-musical-choice-that-blogger-wont.html
and
Sheila Paulson, Against a Wall of Stone

Pt.4
1. , Wen Tingyun in The Poetics of Decadence, Fusheng Wu. SUNY Press, Albany, 1998


Pt.5
1. Scotland, http://www.jcamberlyn.com/SCLDphotos.htm
And
Abode of the Spider,” http://www.soldak.com/Depths-of-Peril/Stories/Abode-of-the-Spider.html
2. “Malignant mesenchymoma of the uterus, arising in a leiomyoma” www.intjgynpathology.com/pt/re/intgynpath/selectreference.htm;jsessionid=LKshQN1cJT1hXTGG1w3gc9sGQXhGTRYk
3. Archpriest V. Potapov, “Crucified Kosovo,” http://www.kosovo.net/erpkiminfo_feb04/erpkiminfo15feb04b.html
And
Daniel Dafoe, Captain Singleton, p. 48
4. Bulfinch’s Mythology, Cupid and Psyche
5. Generic
and
www.hauntedbritain.net/index.php?categoryid=8&p2_articleid=26

Pt.6
1. Psalm 118:19
2. John Yarker, Aureus: The Golden Tractate of Hermes Trismegistus
3. John Earle’s Microcosmography, Cambridge Univ Press, 1897, Ch. 45
4. www.myths.com/pub/rpg/stories/navero/nav06.html
5. Original
6. ?

Pt. 7
1. Black Marigolds
2. Ralph Nader
3. Mary Shelly, Frankenstein
4. Joseph Kesselring, “Alone.”
5. Erving Goffman, Stigma, p. 124
6. ?
7. Catullus
8. Moliere, The Jealousy of Le Barbouille


Pt.8
1. www.opinionjournal.com/columnists/dhenninger/?id=95001254
2. Nova Nik, Terrafroming Nova, http://www.posetteforever.com/discussion3150.html
3. Foucault
4. ?
5. Paul Yoder, Marquis de Sade, Building Walls
6. www.millicentandme.com/mywritingsamples.

Pt.9
1. The Literature of Satire, Charles A. Knight
And
Robinson Crusoe
2. Wilfred Osgood & Boardman Conover, Field Museum of Natural History, v. 12 # 3, “Game Birds from Northwestern Venezuela,” Natural History Museum, Chicago, 1922, p. 34.
Pt.10
1. Brett Walker, “Mamiya Rinzō and the Japanese exploration of Sakhalin Island: cartography and empire” Journal of Historical Geography, V. 33 # 2
2. Gavan Daws and Marty Fujita, Archipelago, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1999, p 80
3. Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulations

Pt.11
1. Gavan Daws and Marty Fujita, Archipelago, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1999 p 135
2. Original

Footnote
Stillman Drake, Essays on Galileo and the History and Philosophy of Science. Ch. 3


STRIPPED




DECKED

File Download: http://armacost5.opendrive.com/files/42487043_P5vMR_fd07/rinzo_1.mp3


Turnstile

I am the same shit as yesterday, the recidivist’s door,
the same shit as two days ago and the day before,
timeless as a baseball game where nobody cares
because nobody scores. Outside the hospital
the addicts glare.  At the graveyard,
the hospital, and the big gull of the sky.
I pushed the hospital’s revolving door,

came out again, saw them hunched over and walking too fast,
asleep beside convenience stores,
scrunched up like wrinkles in a glare-blasted face
under Beauty Island’s sign for HUMAN HAIR!—
transvestite ladies flashing the corner,
ex-boxers in wheelchairs, newcomers. Berserkers, the flare
just glowing as they try to stay composed, explain
Excuse me, sir, I don’t mean to impose…”,
one foot in the revolving door

and one foot twittering on asphalt
waiting to run, forced to obey commands from on high—
doomsday wasp helicopters, the ghetto bird
some called it, rounding the mass
to the high summer grass, to downtown intersections,
and asphalt homes stocked full of pharmaceuticals
and dead black men patrolled by helicopters
waiting to be wheeled in through revolving doors.
Outside it’s twilight, packs of kids on motorbikes
popping wheelies through the Mac trucks,
busting windows, slinging dope, out of adoptions.

Less and less is Baltimore
a city of options.