We know not why the beast below appeared. We had begun a sentence about the sudden bleakness of the winter and the accompanying desolation of Quin's hiatus, when suddenly, there appeared this beast--pig, man, or van . . . today's cenotaur . . . or whichever is the beast of the Greeks which was half man half horse.
Yesterday was the full moon . . . or so almost full that it seemed so. Last night after walking in the city snows, we were bitten by a small sad dog. He would not have bitten had he not been so small and so sad. We know him well. We know we will not be hydrophobic. But now the finger seems to be infected. We haven't seen Quin and so we don't know how he is doing in the full moon and snow, if he is in the snow. We see that he writes in his blog from time to time but that is all we know of him. We hope he is well and not too unhappy. He has set us a task. We are contextualizing. If you look at RagtimeTexas.com, you will see that it has changed. It will continue to change. We are contextualizing. And we are updating. Quin would say that this is too little too late, or at least too late, and probably he is right. But we do feel a mission to get Quin's work to others--we don't think we know best how to do this, but as should be obvious by now, we keep trying.
We'll ramble on here a while, then get to another task we have been set by Quin, which is to write about this: "emma goldman RAGTIME doctorow--reading/Rockland County." As he was leaving he handed us a piece of plain white paper with these words written in turquoise crayon. But before that, we allow ourselves this ramble.
When we read different Buddhist things, we read about desirelessness. We sometimes reach a point of what we think must be desirelessness. It is very difficult. It is difficult because it is so boring. And because it rankles with the truth of our existentialiality. Rankles may not be the right word. What we mean is that it rings with the truth of our existentiality and this is not very pleasant to think about. In other words . . . this is it. That's what desirelessness is. Realizing that this is it. There is no desire to buy or eat or have. This doesn't mean that you don't do these things, only that they don't bring a buzz. Somewhere, after hanging around in desirelessness for awhile, we begin to see differently. Or maybe it is the reverse, maybe as we begin to see differently, we begin to have glimpses of this desirelessness. Chicken or egg, egg or chicken. Read Satre. Read Pale Fire. Think about the difference.
It is said that when Quin first met 'Beth', they sat in dark bars a great deal, and the conversation would go something like this:
Q: Love, have you read X, Y, or Z?
B: (beginning to bristle, because the her answer was always the same) No.
Q: Well you should because in X, Y, or Z, (this work would be something like Veblen's Theory of the Liesure class, for example) we learn that . . .
And so it is said went their courtship. He can't help it that he is so smart. His brain has a zip drive for storing extra data. Sometimes one has a moment of epiphany when one suddenly understands every word he says and what he means by it. Then one feels oneself a god. But those moments are seldom.
Quin and 'Beth' are scientists of memory and sound artists. "Scientists of Memory" is a phrase they picked up from that Nospheratu movie with John Malcovich. How it applies in our discussion of contextualization is this: Quin says, and this is the truth, that our history has been stolen from us. It doesn't belong to us anymore. He wants to take it back. All you have to do to see the truth of this is to think about the American Indians or Native Americans and then think about westerns. Quin and 'Beth' like westerns very much. But that doesn't mean that they believe in them. Some people do you know. It is very strange. You can also think about the Buffalo.
Quin talks about the Buffalo a great deal. He is very serious about them. No one seems to pay attention. Here is why: People seem to think that if Quin were serious about the buffalo, he would be out fighting for their rights. Raising them, fostering them, teaching them to fetch. Have we not told you that Quin speaks in metaphor and parable. Here is what he says about the Buffalo, over and over. In a herd of Buffalo, there is one who is the watcher. That is his job: to watch. And that is what he does. Who is he watching for? The Cowboy. The Railroad. Let's bow our heads for a moment and think about the Cowboy and the Railroad and the Buffalo. Now why do we think that the Buffalo would be watching for cowboys and railroads?
Quin and 'Beth' were both raised to endless pictures of the holocaust. We hesitate even to type the word for fear that some spider will post a comment to a link of some kind. Those of you who read the comments section will understand what we mean. Quin and 'Beth' were both raised to endless pictures of the holocaust. This was so that they would learn that this should never happen again. This lesson was effective for they did learn this.
The pictures were in black and white and were of many different scenes. Usually these were moving pictures and were shown in history class. One of 'Beth's' favorite high school teachers, her 10th grade history teacher, coach macmichael showed her most of the films. Others were in the class as well. The army had taken the films when they opened the death camps. One of the climactic images in the films was of piles of bodies--very thin bodies, bony bodies. It is amazing that these bodies had so recently been alive. How could they have possibly been alive and so starved. There were many other images. Quin and 'Beth' also learned the ineffable from these. The ineffable is a thing that cannot be described in words. Some people, for instance, say that the notion of god is ineffable, and some people say that the notion of infinity is ineffable. The images of the holocaust are ineffable. They cannot be described, they are so horrific--you see, that word doesn't work at all, it does not describe the impact of the images at all, it is too weak--and so the sentence must remain unfinished.
In the case of these images, ineffable applies because there is no possible method which can be used to comprehend them. They simply cannot be understood. They make no sense. They are bewildering. This is why they are so terrible. We cannot comprehend why any person would have done this thing. All of the rational explanations, hatred, greed, fear, do not explain it. They are too weak.
Quin says that some Buffalo are watchers. They watch for the Cowboy. They watch for the railroad. They watch for the ineffable. They watch for the things that bring piles of bodies. Have you seen the pictures of the buffalo hunters standing on top of piles of dead buffalo? The piles are fifteen feet high and more. Then, later, there were piles of bones, not quite so high. There are other pictures of Indian hunters with many Indian scalps hung on their belts. For those who think people are more important that Buffalo, you can look at these. The Indian hunters were paid by the U.S. government for every scalp--so much money for each. This is the rational explanation for these ineffable images. The same old one. Hatred, greed, fear. But these words don't explain these images.
In The Empire of Dr. Bienke, Quin has a character he calls Clyde the Tortured Buffalo. Clyde is a god now. But he used to be a watcher. Things didn't work out well. We can't remember exactly what happened, but, despite all of Clyde's watching, The Cowboy and the Railroad got in and the piles of bodies came. In The Empire of Dr. Bienke, Clyde suffers so, that he becomes a god, and when Koo Cowlick, goes into the desert with his mojo bag, Clyde appears to him and tells him to kill no man or he will surely die, and Koo vows that he will not. But when Koo sees that Mrs. Montoya will kill the gangster who has killed Big Nigger, he kills him, himself so that she won't have to. For this, Koo has to pay, and on Christmas Eve, 1933 in Dos Passos, while playing the electric slide guitar, Koo dies and ascends into the ether. So ends the first reading from The Empire of Dr. Bienke. Some people think that Quin is joking. I tell you, he is not.
Quin is a watcher. He predicts things that happen. The things that he predicts that happen are generally things that could be thought of as coming from the Zeitgeist. You can think of the Zeitgeist, if you want to, as the collective unconscious. A lot of people resist what he says. Here is why: it is because what he says is ineffable. And you see, when Quin knows the Cowboy and the Railroad are coming, he tends to yell about it, then if that doesn't work, he may try to be very creative in his way of expressing it--this could manifest itself in writing a song, or a novel or a blog or by painting a picture. And when that doesn't work, he gets angry and demanding, and then finally when that doesn't work he goes into despair. Someday he will probably be a god, but that doesn't seem like an improvement on his situation when you think about what happens to gods.
Even we on the editorial staff who know these things, don't help very much. Why should it be so hard just to run when the watcher says run? We think it may be that same old thing, what was it . . . but I know him, he's the Carpenter's son . . . oh, we can hear readers hissing at that. But think about it? Isn't that exactly that same old thing?
'Beth' once was asked by an English teacher to write an essay about love. Her essay went on and on. Most of what she writes tends to go on and on. She wrote many words and sentences that basically said this: Love is just an excuse for greed and fear.
Love, she held, was not mainly about wanting to do good, but about wanting not to lose. We think that most buffalo do not run because they don't want to lose something--grass, pasture--that kind of thing--in other words, whatever is had at the time. The easiest way to justify not running when the watcher says run is to say something like . . . "I know him, isn't he just . . ."
Right now, in this full moon second which some say unfolds continually, right now, in this Zeitgeist, there is only one way for a watcher to get anyone to listen to him. He must possess. When he possesses, then the buffalo follow. This is the reason Quin wants money. He wants you to start running.
Enough for now.
9:04:33 PM 
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