EC 428/ 2 Smartass John

© Eso A.B.

Smartass John and Crazy Jane

Scene 1: (Children of the Witch and God’s Own Devil)

Translated by © Eso A.B.

Synopsis: Smartass John announces to his six brothers that the time has come to join the annual ritual of ‘community reconstitution’ at the Old Witch’s Inn. The preparations are elaborate and begin with the raising of horses and the journey to the ritual site. Because the communal ties have already loosened, the six brothers of Smartass John leave him behind and, driven by erections caused by naked nature, ride off by themselves. Smartass John rides last, nevertheless, dreaming of the pleasures he is likely to enjoy when meeting Crazy Jane.
The Poet:

Once upon a time there lived

Smartass John. Smartass John

was so smart

that soon after he was born

he already knew to tell

his six elder brothers

not to marry before he was grown.

 

Because this telling seemed

unusual and possibly smart,

the brothers of Smartass John,

--all slow thinkers—

agreed to wait for him.

 

Many years passed.

At least twenty.

When time was done

Smartass John knew

that he was possessed

by a being of an ancient Balt,

whose name was God’s Own Devil.

 

One day God’s Own Devil,

who resided within Smartass John,

spoke to Smartass John thusly:

“Listen, Smartass,

I feel an erection coming on.

I believe the time has come

to go looking for brides for ourselves.”

 

Smartass John then went

to speak to his six brothers.

 

Smartass John:
“Brothers, day after tomorrow,

comes Midsummer’s Eve.

All Johns, whether Smartass or not,

will celebrate it.

God’s Own Devils

will be getting together with

the Witch’s seven daughters.

It has come to my ears

That there will be a brau-ha-ha

at the Witch’s Inn.

The “Lesser Johns”, a band of pagans

will play crazy waltzes.

Let us go and take the Witch’s daughters

and whittle them

until they become our brides.”.

 

Chorus (left):

In Latvian a witch is called

Ra-Zhanna.

Ra-Zhanna is called in English

Sun’s Crazy Jane.

 

Chorus (right and left):

Yes, yes! The Old Witch is,

innkeeper, mother, and Madam.

As the Irish poet* said

(so says also the Witch):
"For nothing can be sole or whole
that has not been rent."
The time of the whole is ripe for rending.

All Six Brothers:

“That’s very nice!

But we have no horses to get there.

How are we to come by the horses?”

 

Smartass John:

Do not worry, brothers.

That is no problem.

It’s nothing special!

Go catch me seven crickets.

I will fix the rest.

 

Chorus:

Smartass’ brothers left to catch crickets.

 

Chorus (left):

Because the brothers

lived not far from Jerusalem

which is by the sea,

they caught the crickets in the sand dunes.

They then put the crickets

into a sack and brought them,

and put at Smartass John’s feet.

 

Chorus (right):

Smartass John invited his brothers

to come with him to the beach.

 

The Poet:

When all seven brothers had come

to the Sea of Livonia,

Smartass John opened the sack

And shook all crickets into the sand

Just as the smallest of waves

came washing over them.

 

The crickets tried to escape

and jumped high,

but fell back into the sea

where shallow waves washed over them again.

When the crickets had stopped jumping,

Smartass John washed them clean

Of all sand.

 

All six brothers of Smartass John

stood with their mouths wide open.

“What a Smartass,” they spoke among themselves.

Their mouths opened even wider,

when the crickets

encased in a financial bubble

jumped up once more

and turned into seven horses.

 

The six brothers did not waste any time.

They picked their horses and rode off.

They left Smartass brother John

a mare called Rose.

The mare was the same,

which in days past had carried

God’s Own Devil John Don Quixote

Against many windmills.

 

The mare, also known as Rosinante,

seemed a little tired,

but when tested,

was sprightly.

 

Still, by the time Smartass John

was ready to ride,

His six brothers were already

halfway to Ra-Zhanna’s Inn.

Smartass John did not mind

the hurry of his brothers.

Even though God’s own Devil in his pants

Begged to rest on Crazy Jane’s thighs.

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., the presumed victors of WW1&2) to which I was to come and which claimed to be a caring one. While I valued learning, I rejected learning for the sake of a profession, because I saw this as a form of personal defeat, a sucking into an enterprise that from my perspective deserved no commitment, and an effort to cause to join those who were culpable in the destruction of a humanity subject to its inner rather than a government deposited outer layer (chitin) of its nature.

 

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 in the 12^th century. While today the association is explained as circumstantial, it may in fact be so, because the Poles (and likely the Belarusians and Ukrainians) were, once upon a time, part of an extended Baltic culture. Marija Gimbutas (1921-94) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ozaeuULrLjM , the well known Lithuanian archeologist at UCLA, hinted as much in her studies on the origin of the Balts http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurgan_hypothesis , though she did not venture to speculate why the Balts so readily succumbed, while their neighbors, the Slavs adapted to Western ways, internalized their resistance, which they aborted with such tragic consequences during the 1917 Bolshevik revolution.  While today the Balts blame the Slavs for their fate, this appears to be the less critical analysis of whence the aggressiveness. From this writer’s perspective, the greater agressors are the Vikings and their ruling dynasty, the Rurics (? Rovers), whose meat eating habits predisposed them to the exploitation of life by judging wildlife less worthy than itself, which made it easier for them to become killers. Surely the fur tax was a holocaust aimed against wild life that extended from Lisbon to Vladivostok to America to, in effect, everywhere. While untenable today, Western culture continues to exploit Nature, exemplified in our time by hardening the psyche of humankind against God or any other transcendent meaning of life.

 

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 death is self-evident to anyone who wishes to take a pareidolic view and resists government sponsored analysis.

 

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.