Hierophany
A seven-foot tall man
“If this is the work of an angry god then I want to look into his angry face” - Laurie Anderson - Love Among The Sailors
Resolutions
Have a good time all the time
Hit the big time (any help would be much appreciated)
Big Man
A man seven foot tall and I reckon seven foot wide is in my face - telling me who I am. A Disney villain. A joke of a villain. I’m not fussed.
I’ve never been to an AA meeting but I have been sober for 6 years. I hope that it is made very clear in these meetings that the best thing about being sober is the smugness you get to feel. To remember everything and always be in control of your actions. To feel fresh as a daisy.
Back to our 7 foot man. I read Paradise Lost, I read Dante’s Inferno, I thought about real evil a lot and I thought that I’d finally found an evil man to look in the face.
Most people can’t control as much as they want to. Most nice people accept this. Some people contrive worlds they can control entirely. Gods of their own tiny tiny worlds. But once you leave their tiny world then they’re not a seven foot tall man anymore.
Another thing I hope they tell people at AA meetings is that people get angry at sober people. It makes sense that being sober is threatening to controlling people.
The seven foot tall man only feels seven foot tall because he’s had a lot of cocaine. He speaks for 10 minutes uninterrupted but still says ‘don’t interrupt me’ every now and then. He slurs and he repeats and he doesn’t speak in proper sentences.
The content of the 7 foot tall man’s rant is not worth writing down because it didn’t really make any sense. This was just an angry man who perceived me as having slighted him slightly.
Werner Herzog says he has a ‘catholic certitude’ and that’s what you need to make films. Total certainty on all scales, intellectual, spiritual, everything.
After the seven foot tall man had run out of energy I said “I don’t think you know me as well as you think you do” and walked away. I’d never felt so certain of myself, so glad I’m not an angry man.
In the story I would say “I stared down evil and I lived to tell the tale” but as the days pass I feel disappointed. I don’t think it was evil I was staring down, just a coked-up over-confident man. The devil is surely cleverer than that; he’d stay sober.
So I still don’t know what it’ll be like to meet real evil, maybe that’s to come.
Hierophany
The thinnest point between the sacred and the mundane. Almost see through.
On the winter solstice, Caroline Kraabel organised a 12 hour free improvisation at the horse hospital. I did my two hour stint. There was a moment when there was 8 vocalists.
All speaking, singing, whistling, noise making and it made me feel a way that instruments never have. It felt like staring at a fossil and really trying to comprehend the time that it has existed.
I was made aware of the breadth of our noise making physiology, all the different paths that language and music have travelled down from the starting point of this set of controls. Orangutans have all the physiological requirements for speaking but not the intelligence to control their bodies precisely enough apparently.
This was a hierophany.
I’m reading Fifty Sounds by Polly Barton. It’s about language and specifically Japanese onomatopoeia. It’s made me want to step outside of my spoken language but equally made me grateful for how much music has allowed me to live outside of the constraints of language. I’m going to learn mandarin this year, just for fun, to really listen to the different sounds, I’m not too fussed about putting them together cohesively.
