EC 427/ Smartass John
© Eso
A.B.
Introduction
As those who stumble on these blogs know, by passing over
them without comment, they confirm them as a writer’s public diary. This is why
pareidolia is the primary mover of these blogs, which may make some readers
upset, but yet others laugh. Needless to say, I take it for granted that not
everyone makes the same associations or perceives the same synchronicities as I
do.
As some claim: those
who invent their own mythology are impaired to judge its quality. It is
interesting, however, that when the mythmaker is more than one, we have the
beginnings of a culture.
My tendency to paredolize has a number of sources.
One is the experience of war at an early age. The
experience of war in childhood destroyed for me the credibility of the ‘modern’
world view. Pareidolia’s first effect was to turn me into a delinquent, that is
to say, I saw no sense in the culture (particularly that of the West and U.S.
Early delinquency and respect for literature (what did
other intelligences make of our being infused in nature?—yes, I believe that
intelligence extends beyond the brain), indeed, led me to attempts at
reconstructing mythology. The first attempts were by way of surrealist poetry,
which included attempts at translating Latvian folk poetry. These attempts,
utter failures due to a lack of personal confidence and my extended (exile)
community’s concerns for survival in a bombastic and disruptive ‘American’
culture, were accompanied by haphazard, yet somehow relevant reading, of
material that included history, literature, myth, philosophy, religion, and
art. Gradually, I arrived at the conclusion that all of so-called Western
culture was built on a lie. It made and yet makes me feel as if I am walking on
the surface of a mirror, which as it reflected the soles of my feet and crackes
continually, kept whispering to me: You are walking over irrelevant depths.
The preceding blogs are something of a record of where
the cracked mirror of relevant and irrelevant associations http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareidolia#Explanations
has taken me.
The following blogs present the translation of a story
that I wrote in Latvian. The story gives a superficial overview of what I
believe to have been the culture of the Balts, which was destroyed when the
violence of the West via the Franks of Byzantium and Westphalia] turned a
culture of determined turnip eaters into hunters, who—as soldiers of fortune
and collectors of the fur tax helped the Franks (Western Europeans, including
Normans and Englishmen) introduce to the world our current culture based on
cruelty and taxation. In effect, the culture of the Balts at the time still
shied away from Western materialism and favored emotional commitment to a moral
perspective. Its exposure to the cruel and nature denying fur tax most likely introduced
by the Vikings, was relatively recent phenomenon and solicited resistance,
because it appeared that it could be resisted and denied.
One of the costs that a destroyed culture and history (of
the West as a whole, but my country of Latvia in particular) forced on its people
to accept was demoralization and a mealy mouthed leadership, which continues to
express itself through disinterest in its own history to this day. The resulting
ignorance (Latvians call it ‘tumsonība’, darkened self) is manifest as a ‘chiting’
or ‘exoskeleton’ culture http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exoskeleton
. This ‘culture’, that denies its own skeleton, may be seen in the pareidolic association
of Lithuanians with the Poles during the end of times for the Balts in the
region of Livonia Lisbon to Vladivostok
to America
To put it another way, I come from a contemporary culture
as profound as the “Pop!” one hears when inadvertently one steps on one of the
billions of snails that globalization and industrial polution (including
warming) has inundated Eastern Europe with.
While denial of the death of Latvia
as a cultural entity is widespread (recently the denial has been reasserted
through a pompous four volume history called “Latvians and Latvia
The story of “Smartass John and Crazy Jane”, put in the
form of a play, and told (and sing-songed) by a chorus of voices, is based on a
folk character known as Clever John (Gudrais Jānis). Since there is a bit of
conceit about his character, I have named him ‘Smartass John’, even though
anciently his name was likely ‘Dievelis’ (whence the English ‘Devil’), meaning
“divine derivative of God” or the Son of the Sun (the Morning Star), yet humiliated
and in more recent fairy-tales appearing as Tom Thumb or worse--Satan.
Smartass John interacts with Crazy Jane, a well known but
also belittled (and now extinguished) character in European folk literature http://stevesilberman.com/celestial/yeats/crazy.html
The elimination of Crazy Jane (last European author to take her seriously was the
Irish poet
W.B. Yeats) from Europe may have followed the
incineration of Joan of Arc http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/304220/Saint-Joan-of-Arc
, a Crazy Jane from the point of view of Catholic (neo-Christian) religion
embarked on globalization and banalization of culture through means of ‘just
wars’ worldwide.
Since “Smartass John and Crazy Jane” is a long story, I
visualize it as being told over a period of two Midsummer (Johns) days, the
first day encompasing Scenes 1 through 8, the second day concluding the ritual
tale of ‘community reconstitution’, Scenes 9 through 14.
Note to editors: As these blogs are written serially and not first and
only then inserted in blogs, it often happens that not all the kinks when
naming characters or creating tangents to story line are as clear as they ought
to be. Sometimes, I return to the blog and make corrections, but for the most
part, I leave the material remain as originally entered. If anyone becomes
interested the material other than this writer, I leave it to the editor to
make the necessary corrections, clarifications, and consultations.
