a name that can be named is not the constant name

Matheson Books

70354. McCullough, Ken. Creosote. Illustrations by Nana Burford. [Iowa City] The Seamark Press, 1976. Decorated paper boards, printed paper labels on the spine and front cover. Binding worn at the head and foot of the spine, otherwise very good. Black pastedowns and black front and rear free endpapers. First edition. One of 500 copies printed by Kay Amert and Howard Zimmon. Full-page inscription on a front endpaper. The inscription is headed "For El Cid" [in the light of what follows this is probably Cid Corman]. The heading is followed by five lines in Japanese attributed to Narihara, then a sketch of an imaginary bird, followed by "with appreciation / Ken McCullough / Thanksgiving 1982 / Iowa City". $75.00

70388. Miller, Chuck. Oxides. Iowa City, The Seamark Press, 1976. Paper boards. Fine, without dust jacket, as issued. First edition. "Kay Amert & Howard Zimmon made this book". $25.00

Truepenny Books

The Stone Wall Press 27. CARGO, Poems by Paul Nelson, 1972. 8 x 5 1/4; 63 pages; 14-point Emerson, handset; title in stencil-letter, printed blue 250 copies on Tovil; bound in blue cloth boards, with label on spine, by Howard Zimmon. Printed with Kay Amert and Howard Zimmon; a joint publication with the Seamark Press. (57)

TAO : The Anarchy Organization

has become

OAT: Organizing Autonomous Telecomms.

Attended my first Taoist Tai Chi class this afternoon.

Missed the first session earlier this week, because I was out of town visiting a friend.

My previous instruction includes about three hours over the past twenty-five years.

Once I attended a session with a group of folks who did tai chi and then watched the X-Flies together. They were more advanced in their practice, and as a beginner I couldn't keep up.

One year the staff inservice included a tai chi workshop which was led by a Tai Chi Chih instuctor.

Several years ago I shared a Thanksgiving dinner with another Tai Chi Chih instructor, although I have never studied with him.

My first experience with Tai Chi was a brief introductory workshop at the Black Hills Survival Gathering.

Howard Zimmon (z'l) (1938-1999) studied and taught tai chi for more than thirty years. Although I never studied tai chi with him, I learned from each conversation we shared. Howard was a poet, a fine-book printer, a bookseller, and a technical draftsman for the University of Iowa Physics Department.

Trying to reactivate a couple of aged blogs, but I'm receiving error messages whenever I attempt to update them. Posting here instead for now.

from:
free flowing vol. 3 no.6 July 1976 page 10

A F T E R I M A G E S

Existence is beyond the power of words
To define:
Terms may be used but none of them are absolute.
In the beginning of heaven and earth there were no words,
Words came out of the womb of matter;
And whether a man dispassionately
See to the core of life
Or passionately
Sees the surface,
The core and the surface
Are essentially the same.
Words making them seem different
Only to express appearance.
If name be needed, wonder names them both:
From wonder into wonder
Existence opens.
-Lao-tze


I know I am deathless,
I know this orbit of mine cannot be swept by a carpenter's compass
I know I shall not pass like achil's carlacue cut with a burnt stick at night . . .
I exist as I am, that is enough,
If no other in the world be aware I sit content.
And if each and all be aware I sit content.
One world is aware and by far the largest to me, and that is myself,
And whether I come to my own to-day or in ten thousand or ten million years,
I can cheerfully take it now, or with equal cheerfulness I can wait.
My foothold is tenon'd and mortis'd in granite,
I laugh at what you call dissolution,
And I know the amplitude of time.
-Walt Whitman

Star Morals

Called a star's orbit to pursue
What is the darkness, star, to you?

Roll on in bliss, traverse this age-
Its misery far from you and strange.

Let farthest world your light secure.
Pity is sin you must abjure.

But one command is yours: be pure!
-Friedrich Nietzche

The Rose of Sharon
By the roadside
Was eaten by the horse.
-Bassho

A fallen flower
Returning to the branch?
It was a butterfly.
-Moritake

This dewdrop world
It may bew a dewdropo
And yet, and yet - -
-Issa


The Half of Life

With yellow pears the country,
Brimming with wild roses,
Hangs into the lake,
You gracious swans,
And drunk with kisses
Your heads you dip
Into the hold lucid water.

Where, ah where shall I find,
When winter comes, the flowers,
And where the sunshine
And shadows of the earth?
Wall stand
Speechless and cold, in the wind
The weathervanes clatter.
-Friedrich Holderlin

Ah Sun-flower! weary of time,
Who countest the stops of the Sun,
Seeking after that sweet golden clime
Where the traveller's journey is done;

Where the Youth pined away with desire,
And the pale Virgin shrouded in snow,
Arise from their graves and aspire,
Where my Sun-flower wishes to go.
-William Blake

from his column The Sources of the Nile which appeared in Crawdaddy! magazine (April 1973, page 10)

The nature of the future is that there isn't any. It's January as I write this, and by the time you read it there still won't be any future, only the same old present with its endless implications, possibilities, and unperceived realities. I suppose when we talk about the future we are really talking about the unperceived realities of right now.

Scumpy told me that the theme of this issue of Crawdaddy would be, loosely speaking, the future and how to prepare for it. As far as I've been able to figure out, the best and probably the only preparation for what is to come is awareness of what's going on today. There is a device, an ancient variation of a [digital] computer, that I have found to be extremely helpful in this kind of work. It's called the I Ching.

The I Ching looks like a book, but it isn't really. It's a geometrical structure, with texts attached. The structure might be described as an inverted polygon (I mean, you look at it from the inside, like the universe) with 64 faces. Each of these faces has six sides (not in space but in time-space, if we can make that distinction), and is called a hexagram.

This 64-faced representation of the world we live in can be entered and studied for clues as to what's going on in "reality", and for this reason is called an oracle. An oracle is something that can be consulted. The simplest method of consulting the I Ching is to throw three coins six times. Assign an arbitrary value of "2" to heads and "3" to tails.

[Editor's note: Some folks arbitrarily, or otherwise, make the opposite designation and assign a value of "3" (yang) to heads and "2" (yin) to tails. You should decide which designation makes sense to you before you begin. If you find the choice too confusing you might consider using the yarrowstalk method which is a bit more complicated. Instructions for the yarrow stalk method can be found on pages 721-723 in the Wilhelm/Baynes edition of the I Ching. End of editor's note; back to Paul's article.]

So when you toss the coins you get a total of 6, 7, 8, or 9. Seven is represented by a solid straight line. Eight is a broken line. On or off: yin or yang. (Six is a broken line that has the inherent tendency to change to a solid line; nine is a solid line that changes to a broken.)

You toss the coins six times, drawing a solid line the first time if you got a 7 or 9, a broken line if you got 6 or 8, then drawing the next line above the first, continuing up till you have a stack of six. This is called a hexagram. There's a chart in the back of the book that tells you which of the 64 hexagrams you got.

. . .Uh, I can't go on with this rap. Actually in my first draft I did go on with it, on and on, telling you what you already know if you're into the I Ching and probably couldn't care less about if you're not. I started consulting the I Ching (the Whilhelm/Baynes translation, published by the Princeton University Press) almost five years ago. Since then the book has influenced my life to an immeasurable degree, both directly by giving specific advice at critical moments, and indirectly by giving me continuous instruction in a philosophy of living, a way of seeing the world and a way of acting that has become inseparable from by own way. My character seems to have fused to some real extent with this ancient book. Feels good.

The most remarkable thing about the I Ching is ability to speak directly to the person consulting it, to go right to the heart of your immediate personal and private problem and give sound and appropriate advice...often describing the situation with an accuracy that takes your breath away. How does the book do this? It doesn't. It merely allows itself to be approached correctly. By throwing the coins six times (or going through a complex but equivalent process involving yarrow stalks) and concentrating on a particular question (bearing in mind what it is you wish to know), the supplicant somehow crosses the line between probability and synchronicity, removes himself from a physics in which as Einstein pointed out, there is no way of proving that two things actually happen at the same time, and moves into a realm (far more sophisticated, more "scientifically" advanced I think) in which it is understood that there is a simultaneity to events, and a lot can be learned from coincidence (divine footprints everywhere). Jung knew this, priests and politicians have always understood and made use of it, and evidently the Chinese built this awareness into their Bible (or Book, or Encyclopedia) five thousand years ago.

I Ching, by the way, is Chinese for "Book of Changes." Except there aren't any literal equivalences between the Chinese and English languages--a fact which makes the present work less a good translation than an out and out miracle, or at least a heavy Heavenly hint as to what's going on, I mean what time it is.

The I Ching I'm talking about, I must repeat, is the one that's available only in hardcover, translated from Chinese into German by a man named Richard Wilhelm, and from German into English by a woman named Cary Baynes. Accept no substitutes.[Ed. note: There are many more English language versions these days than there were in 1973. Although the Wilhelm/Baynes edition is still the standard, you might find one or more you like better.]

I'd really like to tell you how this book has changed my life. There was a year when I consulted it every morning, keeping track in a little notebook, to get a reading for the day (which I would meditate on, or anyway think about, as things happened to me). There has been many a time when I found myself turning to the book many times a week for critical advice, like a sailor consulting his sextant: Where am I? There have been times when the book told me to leave it alone for awhile, and I tried to obey. Nowadays I don't consult it more than once a week, if that. But I think about it every day, and I know very often what the book would tell me now if I asked, which means I don't need to ask. But I do need to pay attention. There never comes a time when you don't need to be told, just maybe a time when you can tell yourself instead of making others do it for you.

Some people think the I Ching will tell you about the future. But there isn't any future. There's only the present and what it's threatening to become. If you're interested in what Chester Anderson calls "the news before it happens," look into your local book of changes. ("Take tea and see.") It's later than you think.

This article has been placed on the web with the permission of the author.

http://www.sfmuseum.org/hist1/habib.html

ARCHIVE/MANUSCRIPT

Author: Anderson, Chester, 1932
Title: Chester Anderson papers, [ca. 1963-1980].
Description: 1 box (.4 linear ft.)
Notes: Records (Jan.-Sept. 1967) of the Communication Company (San Francisco, Calif.), a member of the Undergound Press Syndicate, including broadsides, flyers, and handbills printed for the Diggers, San Francisco Mime Troupe, and the Haight-Ashbury Neighborhood Council, among other organizations, individuals, and events, including Human Be-In and the Invisible Circus at Glide Church. Also includes copy of a letter, 9 Feb. 1967, written by Chester Anderson to his friend, Thurlonius Benjamin Weed in Florida, discussing his move to San Francisco, his work, and his involvement in the Haight-Ashbury community. Also, includes edited typescripts of "Puppies" (Entwhistle Books, 1979) and "Fox & Hare" (Entwhistle Books, 1980).

Literary figure of the Beat Era and the Haight-Ashbury community of San Francisco, Calif. in the 1960s. Founded the Communication Company, an innovative news service in 1967. Published works under his own name and a pseudonym, John Valentine. Anderson died in April 1991 in Homer, Ga., where he lived with relatives.

Location: University of California at Berkeley, Bancroft Manuscript Collection 1

"Nothing to say right now, but maybe I'll try to collect some of the tattered remnants of my previous activity on the web."

. . . previous activity on the web?? It would probably be a better use of my time to transfer data from double density floppy disks while there are still functioning drives that will read them.