Bees are the Overseers.
Bees are the Overseers
-Bees are the overseers of the world of light. The moon belongs to them,
…………as does the sun.
-Those who insult the moon are within the moment stung with lightning.
-Just as the kitchen is the navel of the house, so the bee is the navel of the air.
-The Devil paves his streets with bees.
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-Seven, that auspicious cipher, numbers the ways one may disencumber oneself
…………..of a corpse:
It may be set in a slipper-shaped jar and buried in the sea, sinkhole, well,
but if some continue to dress their dead in aprons and caps of threaded shells,
it is no longer fashionable to entomb the dead among ants.
The dead may be kept in honey, or wine, or salt, or tar, or aromatic gum.
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-Death is about change; architecture isn’t.
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-As it may be entered, the mausoleum offers an adequate receptacle
…………….for the idea of the departed
without offending propriety.
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-If the mummy, official portrait or bust are symbolic facsimiles of the deceased,
the dome both acknowledges the buried skull and anticipates its sequel.
The dome suggests stubborn persistence; the pyramid, infinity. As for the obelisk,
here vertiginous loss is dwarfed by vertiginous height.
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-In the charged company of thugs, the skull both breathes and barks.
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-Power, as embodied by architecture, is less fickle than the mourners who, sooner
………………or later,
will abandon their black weeds for sexier attire.
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-Power never abandons its funereal mantle, nor its funereal appeal,
yet some continue to mistake the dubious attractions of secular authority for
the natty garments of seduction.
..
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-One has a tendency to ascribe intention to the Abyss, even a logical scheme,
although it has been demonstrated, time and time again, that any given hypothesis,
…………..even “verified”
is contingent on provisory facts. As the nursery rhyme asks:
In the mouth of of despot, what is more fickle than facts?
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Thus is Philosophy forever seated on the horns of chronic uncertainty. Science,
……………Her Right Hand,
insists that the First Quality of the Abyss is surprise.
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Who knows?
…..—Venda
What Now?
…..—Vam Wemba
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-Space is measured by the time it takes for one bee to fly to another.
If it were not for the bees, there would be no astrological computation,
nor could the transit of the human soul across the planets be observed.
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-Wind, air and trees: these animate and exemplify the gardens of the bees,
which are intended for the ears and lungs only.
Sight is seduction, says the philosopher, evoking the whore’s commons
with their deep beds of blossoms, smoking furnaces, the dubious fascination
of mechanical songbirds.
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-Like sight, sound sails the air on strings.
Compare, the philosopher entreats us, the fleshy arguments
…………..of the whore’s parterres,
to the spontaneous infinity of the sage’s bower.
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-The word on the page transcends all things made of brick and bone.
Spoken, it rends the air, as do the bees, beams of light,
the stars that elbow their way across the night.
—Rikki Ducornet, Collages By Allan Kausch
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The author of nine novels, three collections of short fiction, two books of essays and five books of poetry, Rikki Ducornet has received both a Lannan Literary Fellowship and the Lannan Literary Award For Fiction. She has received the Bard College Arts and Letters award and, in 2008, an Academy Award in Literature. Her work is widely published abroad. Recent exhibitions of her paintings include the solo show Desirous at the Pierre Menard Gallery in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 2007, and the group shows: O Reverso Do Olhar in Coimbra, Portugal, in 2008, and El Umbral Secreto at the Museo de la Solidaridad Salvador Allende in Santiago, Chile, in 2009. She has illustrated books by Jorge Luis Borges, Robert Coover, Forest Gander, Kate Bernheimer, Joanna Howard and Anne Waldman among others. Her collected papers including prints and drawings are in the permanent collection of the Ohio State University Rare Books and Manuscripts Library. Her work is in the permanent collections of the Museo de la Solidaridad Salvador Allende, Santiago Chile, The McMaster University Museum, Ontario, Canada, and The Biblioteque Nationale, Paris.
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San Francisco Bay Area illustrator Allan Kausch has edited over 1,100 projects for Lucasfilm Licensing (including the manga adaptations of the original Star Wars trilogy, for which he won the Eisner and Harvey awards), five volumes of the Selected Letters of Philip K. Dick, plus hundreds of projects for Tachyon Publications, Black Widow Press, Night Shade Books and PM Press. With Michael Moorcock, Kausch coedited London Peculiar and Other Nonfiction. Kausch’s semiautomatic writing has appeared in Antiseptic, Furious Fictions, Athena Incognito, Leviathan IV, Fantastic Metropolis and John King’s VERBAL.
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