Elysian Fell

Contents

Aintry, Louisiana

Holy Whining Reserve

Battle of the Bible-Books

The Bone

Mind and Motion

Daddy

Chief Three Name

Weighing up the Day

Rocks

The Well

Their Son

A Coffin

Total War

Words passed

The Pond

Eye/Ear

Hung

The Collapse

Hawthorne

The Vision

Church

Poetry Slam

Thinkers Anonymous

57 Channels

At Home

Phone Counsel

CyberChrist

Tongues and All

Sext

Misnaming

Ketch

A Place

No Newspapers

Ye Ching Me Baby

Works Cited

For Shannon

My Muse and Calligrapher

A gentleman sits in his computer room, after he has read Soren Kierkegaard’s Concluding Unscientific Postscript, e-Book version. Secretly he knows Kierkegaard is St. Augustine, sitting in a Greek amphitheatre, smoking pot amongst the ruins of statues (Greek gods), thinking about Socrates, thinking about Plato, thinking about Aristotle, looking to one called a third, thinking about thinking!

When did he have time to listen?

Antlion

Aintry, Louisiana

A hayshant and a redneck walk acrosst an overpass leading to Wal-Mart. They’re up from Oldfield down by the Galliass River in Livingstone Parish.

Cloteal’s been checking out people for nigh on six years at that dang-fangled store. Thing is, she’s no better off than when she first started, especially since she’s pregnant and all, which they ain’t willin’ to help pay fer neither!

It’s a big ole’ company Craven, they’s gonna treat all folks what work there like they’s no-count! But, ain’t no other store beats they prices, son! They’s got us by the cumbers that’s fore shore, boy!

Son, look over there at yon church. That there thing is bigger than the Superdome in New Orleans, huh? It absolutely stands in the gap and trade of more preferments!

Yep, north Aintry’s lodestar life-rendering lavolta, I reckon? shot Craven.

Every brethren and his cracker cousin ull’ be kythin’ fer pew space from now until the cows come home, now you know, don’t you.

You and yours still goin’ to that lady preacher’s church behind the trailer park? queried Craven.

Yep, me and mine still down thar. She’s gettin’ right rantankerous, though!

How’s that, young son?

I’s on the praise team still, but for how much longer there ain’t no tellin’. The ole’ girl said I couldn’t beat the bongos no more, Breeks posturing for his soul mate.

Why’s that, boy–since when are your ear-filling cacophonies considered the speech of angels instead of a spray of strikes?

It’s a primitive manner of discoursing with Christ. All of me is all of Him, when I’m poundin’ a rhythm!

I see your druthers boy. Just like how they say our bumper-stickers are softshell and y’all’s are hardshell!

Meanin’ what, Craven?

Meanin’, when a vehicle gets dirty or dusty on its hindside, and a child writes on it; the vehicles from our church declare just wash me; the ones from y’alls declare wash me, Jesus!

Yeah well, toadstool is toadstool; you know, they oughter call y’all’s church the supernatural dome, huh,? Breeks insisiting.

You pickin,’ ain’t you boy, said Craven. Oh, what a friend we have in Jesus!

Both of ‘em laughed.

Holy Whining Reserve

One of South Aintry’s pastors, Sissy-Jane Hannah Larkin Laputa, has historical connections to the Free-Will Covite Baptists hailing from White Oak Sink just north of Cade’s Cove, Tennessee . Back in about 1832 a falling out occurred amongst the flock over a simple joke the pastor, Tilly Lefebvre, told at the back end of preaching, just before altar christening.

The joke, rather innocent in concept, went something like this: If all the people who sleep in church were laid end-to-end, they’d be more comfortable.

Now one ole’ boy who had no use for sleeping in church that day came untrained at the thought of what passed Tilly’s lips! Loyal Larkin, his name, later found himself churched and turned out as a hard case for not scotching the preacher properlike, but he had good reason.

He left all right, taking with him everyone on the front row anxious-bench, some of the twitchy-britches in the middle, and two old men in the rear, who watched the door the whole service, longing to escape the preacher’s rhetoric. The new-fangled church, at Rainbow Falls, he designated: The Church of the Reconstructed Dunkers.

Having gone to the university in Frankfort, Larkin studied theology, logic, philosophy, and Latin, fancying himself a remembrancer extraordinaire. Back in teaching times Loyal wrote prose with gall enough in his ink, though he wrote with a goose-pen. He, devising wit, wrote for whole volumes in folio, despite the fact that his last commencement paper presented his university lecturer an epic against barophobia, an abstract:

"Hallowed is the gleet that bedamps the repentant’s nerve - sacred is the golden channel spurting from the kindness of liberty’s expiring worldbeater - pure is the leak of napping babyhood - divine are the very last expressions of the vanishing sufferer for a cause - but not less saintly, untouchable, unpolluted, godly, is proper, unalloyed association.

It is the fair-haired mean that trusses the grit of childish allies in hard-faced liaison. It is a charming bud, roaring with its fragile odor upon every pilgrim along the jagged avenue of years. It is a gleaming medal with nectar amply untainted for our parched time. It is a thrilling blaze that balms, at times, even the frosty understanding of the nighthawk murderer. It is a snowstorm canary come through the shining rockery of Heaven.

Pastor Lefebvre, on the other hand, came straight out the Carolina hills, full of gully jumping ridge-runners. Assistant Pastor Larkin left the church taking offense at the lack of seriousness put forward in pastor Lefebvre’s offering; the petty renunciation railed apostatically in opposition to the gravity involved concerning the state one’s everlasting soul plays out here in the arena of days, and its entrance through justification, at the time of its call yonder to Heaven, thought Larkin.

Pastor Lefebvre essentially sermonized the same way he lingered and discoursed–-conversationally, telling a narrative tale right in the middle of the fray, like any simon-pure protestant parson should, crooning his declarations. A bibliolater of the Old South, he did more than just recite glory expressions, dryly from on high bringing them down nigh. Terms rode inside his ‘holy whine,’ breathing something beyond, purely all through the very reverberation accompanying the logos bespoke.

Whatever the positional argument, while in the different constitutions of Lefebvre and Larkin, language as a medium in itself may just cut off the truth instead of revealing it! Jacques Ellul expounds on this ‘transforming power of language’ in Propaganda, as quoted by McLuhan in The Global Village: Further the usurpation of language does not merely involve the social degradation of words, nor the abuse of the listener’s confidence. More profoundly language inserts itself into the self-consciousness of each man as a screen that distorts him in his own eyes. The intimate being of man is in fact confused, indistinct and multiple. Language intervenes as a power destined to expropriate us from ourselves in order to bring us into line with those around, in order to model us to the common measure of all. It defines and perfects us, it terminates and determines us. The control of consciousness it exercises make it the accomplice of having, in its monolithic poverty, as opposed to the plurality of being. To the degree we are forced to resort to language we renounce our interior life because language imposes the discipline of exteriority. The use of speech is thus one of the essential causes of the unhappy conscience, all the more essential because we cannot be without it. (M. McLuhan and B. Powers, The Global Village, 27)

It is this which Bruce Parain has strongly emphasized: At every moment, each consciousness destroys a little bit of the vocabulary it has received and against which it cannot fail to revolt, because it is not it’s; but immediately it recreates another vocabulary in which it once again disappears. (M. McLuhan and B. Powers, The Global Village, 27)

Against this ritual custom did the high-attic Alexandrine doxology liquescent in the academy, and representing the theological literati–Pastor Larkin’s lofty solemnity–stand in resistance to the time-honored oral/aural tradition of the old-time southern religion. Unlike some in his congregation, Larkin saw this as a seamless transition, historically speaking. The same polemic surviving fifth century Greece coming down to us!

Unaccented phonics of the conservatory heightens the faculty of sight, independence, concealment, and prophylaxis. One misapprehends, thinking coldly, it is the renovated germinal self who can figure, ruminate, explain, clarify, and reckon himself all the way through any quandary; that’s why one feels the detachment in a man who is truly intellectual.

Reflecting on reflecting about tongue, Larkin recollected his class with don Tory Hairston: Words have corollaries, polishing over our doable attachment with aims of wakefulness, swapping it for what seems lifeless, but in trade obviating a public warehouse relating man with other men. After commencement Loyal joined Hairston’s evolutionary society for the improvement of Americanisms, archaic, vernacular, narrow, and neologistically illicit words and euphemisms.

A light bulb allows for more community than a blench of individuals reading books!

That aside, how much more does written language, carried in the mind of a man, reduce in size fellowship sought, for instance, in group therapy? Moreover, two men confronting each other in debate instead of treaty might fight; both have the same book in their minds with the only discrepancy pertaining to which book is the unsurpassed version (in the same sagacity as schools of any religion, east or west).

Battle of the Bible-Books

Something of this sort occurred in The Church of The Reconstructed Dunkers late in 1833, about the point in time when Noah Webster’s revised version of the King James Bible came out. Pastor Larkin always had a partiality toward Robert Aitken’s Bible published in 1782, as the first English translation of the Bible in America. Conversely, speaking plainly meant more to Racy Pismire, Larkin’s slight pastor, who loved Webster’s amplification of the Bible’s declaration. To him Aitken’s translation revealed a Greekish flavor a bit too strong for mountain-folk!

The Greeks, after all, mixed the New Testament in the midst of their culture. Larkin knew this philosophy sincerely touched the core of man ontologically, and his congregation appreciated the edification involving heart, soul, spirit, and understanding, poetics notwithstanding. Being lead dog, his version won out!

Ms. Eugenia Pipes, who drove all the way from Busy Corners every Sunday, and sided with Larkin, beamed with pride knowing the meaning of leiturgos, a man performing a public service, circa fifth century B.C., in Athens. It fetched visions warlike, like Christ in the book of Revelation illuminating his eternal double-edged sword, the genuine sword of prayer meeting, stronghold going forth into the human race, fighting the good fight, and suchlike. Here one acknowledged Christ’s armory, including arrow case, quiver, scabbard, and round shot for immense quarry.

Commencing as an easygoing chide, Pastor Larkin contended the revised revision, requisitional in nature, due to Webster’s background as a lexicographer.

How, Larkin asked Pismire, can one live out one’s faith trapped in objective and judicious crytological groups, sorted out as ready-made definitions, leaving no span for God’s Grace in the unmethodical mystifications the other one unleashes on their fair people attending worship?

Pismire began to feel like a bug arguing with a chicken; finally, he asked Larkin to pull in his horns. Stepping out of the gap Loyal Larkin saw Zion, continuing his holy rant.

Although Loyal always considered himself a jimson-weed preacher, he fancied an able penchant for conceptual banter in any state of affairs. Except this time, Pismire seemed to him like what God gave a billy goat: a hard head and a clear conscience.

Afterimages flooded back for Pismire to the time in the big church. Arguments with every one of the folks subjugated each dialogue to a win or lose deportment, following Jesus an either/or proposition! Nonetheless, not quite knowing what to speak back to Larkin, out of aggravation he compared the pastor’s sermonizing to a ‘Catholic homily;’ saying, It’s as weak as pond water.

One more time did junior Pismire submit a clarification, explaining, a definitional structure lent an authority, in fact a double authority, in addition to the transporting and utterly edifying language present in the King James Bible. Too broad a foundation allows for generalization, having no effect on the specific volitional and affective manner a man lives on a day after day origin. A heart linked to will is a hungry hunter, restless until slaked in certainty.

Lookee here son, struted Larkin, I don’t care a rush whether or no yore daddy built this here house of grace and favor. We’re a’usin’ Aitken’s version, and we ain’t a’studyin’ no more on Webster’s hard rock-candy. You either acknowledge the corn boy, or how’d you like to get embrambled with my fistes!

Don’t stir the turd, Loyal; the more you stir it the more it stinks.

Well, if a toady frog had wings he wouldn’t bump his ass, said Pismire.

At this moment, the minor cleric didn’t know whether to shine, spit, or swallow! He reckoned the look of the pudding ain’t always the taste. Fancying himself tough enough to raise hell and put a chunk under it, a downright fire eating mad-fisted devil-dog; he cold-cocked a big-dog square in his fitified lips. Two captains of the corn pile tussled tail up and stinger out. Even in a dogfight, a person must have his druthers.

After feathering up to each other for a full-up five minutes, the Galilee porch, baptistery, and ten