Revelation in matter

Revelation in matter

John Bjarne Grover

Introduction

The present article discusses the phenomenon of 'revelation in matter'. How can you know that the person you meet in the street is a tellurian and not an alien walking? Suddenly you find an old cheese in the fridge - where did it come from? These are enigmas that cannot be solved by ordinary logic. In a poetic logic, the explanatory force for a theory is in the poetic evidence: If the explanatory force is bigger on the assumption of an alien object than a tellurian, then one takes the old cheese for an extra-terrestrial object. Never mind where it came from. Conversely, if one finds a strange extraterrestrial object, one welcomes it as a natural thing on earth. I discuss two rather interesting cases relative to poetic evidence. The conclusion I reach is that the new reality lets tellurian and alien or imaginary objects co-exist without suppression of either of them in a new substance which can be called the substance of poetic revelation. Poetic logic finds its objects and field of description there.

Celan's book "Zeitgehöft" and my own "Gentlemen"

In the summer 2005, I completed the last part of my extended 'Endmorgan Quartet', in the 15th/16th book called 'Gentlemen' (there are 15 books but one of them is repeated in a relevant transform). It consists of 66 poems in parallel with a fragment from Talmud Erubin, and with a postscript. The same day as I had given the first copy of it to a library, I went into a shop in Vienna and bought a copy of Wiener Zeitung which turned out to be from 5 April 1934, in fact a few days before the Röhm putsch. Having read a little in it, I decided that I also needed a fresher edition and went to buy Kronen Zeitung for the day, 24 August 2005 - which turned out to have nearly the same front page headline! The same top news as in those days! On 5 April 1934 it was "Mutiger Kampf der reichsdeutschen Katholiken" and on 24 August 2005 it was "Mutiger Kampf gegen die Flut!". This is the theme of 'being emotive' which also rewrites to 'Endmorgan Quartet'. The flooding of late August 2005 was in West-Österreich Tirol - followed by the flooding in New Orleans one week later. I later discovered that the date 5 April (1934, which was the newspaper's 231st year) was the same in Ezekiel's vision from year 30, which leaves a substantial amount of mysticism: 1934 - 30 = 1904, which is 100 or 101 year before I bought the paper, and 231 - 30 = 201. This leaves the intervals of a century, a year, a day etc. I also discovered that Ezekiel's vision was much about my Endmorgan Quartet - or vice versa. Now if the flooding is recognized as a 'west-österreich Sintflut', the vision of Ezekiel makes of it a 'west-öst-erreich süd-nord', via the rewrite

sintflut
südnoflt = Zeit-ge-höft
süd-nord

This is how I (in November 2006) discovered that there had to be a relation between Celan's posthumous book 'Zeitgehöft' and the last book in my Endmorgan Quartet ('Gentlemen') which I gave to the library on 24 August 2005. And I now took the two books for a comparison and found the more or less perfect 'quasi-FFT' relation with flowgraph butterflies in intervals of 2, 4, 8 and 16. His book is in three parts and is composed on basis of three envelopes with 52 poems he left after him. Two poems that are preserved in handwriting only are not used in the book, which seems to have an anonymous editor, and hence there are 50 poems (typewritten in the envelopes) in the book. It is likely to have been somebody in Suhrkamp, probably, who could have made the final edition of the 50 poems in the three envelopes. The title to the book was on the first envelope. One could guess that the order of the poems in the book could have been equivalent to the order of them in the envelopes, but there seems to be little if any material left of the editing process, according to Wiedemann's edition of 2003. However that be, the book exists with the order of poems which it has had since it was first published in 1976.

Now the number 2 - of omitted poems - defines also my book when it comes to its structure, since 66 minus 2 leaves the 64 which are needed for an 8 x 8 structure, with much flowgraphs and coefficients and other things. The book is certainly not written that way, but it is always possible to impose such analysis on it - in fact on any matter - afterwards, and it also seems to be the basic principle of neural architecture. This binary relation is also the last butterfly in an FFT transform. The gap of 16 poems (66 - 50 = 16) corresponds to one flowgraph gap in an FFT mapping. It means that one can map my poem #1 to Celan's #17, my #2 to his #18 etc, then butterflying his #1 to my #17 etc. The same principle obtains for gaps of 8, 4 and 2. Could be even smaller. Most of the resulting mappings seem to have some relevance.

If one starts reading in binary butterflies from the end of both books, one finds that Celan's poem "Die Pole" (#17 counted from the end) maps onto my "Oliver Teller" (#16 counted from the end). Here 'dipole' can be taken to be a transform of 'oliver', cp. also 'Livorno' of the tanker Erika that sank in 1999. Here every two lines of Celan map onto a line of my poem: There are 17 lines in his and 8 in mine - with an open space between the two 4-liners. The open line in mine corresponds to his line 9 which is the famous "sag, dass Jerusalem ist" which could correspond to my 'Birds to Saladin' (this title of mine tends to mean 'Jerusalem'). This open line is in the gap between the dates 25-26 April 2005, which hence was 20-21 days after 5 April.

This mapping between the two books comes in addition to the notable correlations of structure in the final poem on the work on time and his 'Lichtzwang', which was the last book he prepared for print, as well as the relation between the 'washing' poems.

The grating story

Now on 8 November rather early in the morning (4-5-6 o'clock, I guess), I was sitting writing (about the verdict in the Saddam Hussein case, I think it was) when I suddenly heard something falling against the roof of the house. It was a little strange since I should not have heard that distinct and clearly the rumbling of the object, but it had to be there. It could have been a tyre that had fallen off a car in the passing or something like that. I therefore paid less attention to it. Later in the morning (could have been an hour or two later), I went into the bathroom and saw that an object had fallen into the tub. It must have been this which made the rumbling sound. I immediately went for the camera and took a photo of it. The photo is registered at 08:31 but the camera is not adjusted for wintertime so it was really 07:30 (06:30 UTC) when I found it. It was a plastic grating for a drain which had landed right on the border between light (from the lamp over the sink) and shadow in the bottom of the tub.

Click here for a closer look at the object
Click here for another look at the same object

(I am not sure what this 'gray thing' would properly be called, but I use the word 'grating' here). Now I could not remember where I had put this before it fell. When I moved into the flat, there was a scarcity of corks in the two kitchen sinks and I was around for finding new ones. I suppose the grating could have been there after the previous tenant (I don't think I have bought it) and then it could have been under the sink since then or something like that. But I cannot remember to have seen it before I suddenly found it there.

There were only two places it could have been before it fell into the tub - either on top of the laundry drying gear, or on the soap shelf at the bathtub. It was not likely to have been on the soap shelf because I would probably have been aware of it there. However, the shelf contained a toilet soap of the type 'Bliw Tvål' which I had bought in Sweden - the name of it is close to the form 'bliv lys' = 'fiat lux', cp. 'fiat soap' or 'fiat sapo' as it would be in this Swedish version ('två' means '2' while 'tvål' means 'soap'). Cp. also the theme of 'unit and harper' from the 'new revelation in Vilnius'. I had washed some bedclothes some days earlier and hung them up for drying, even quite close to the string-gear shelf, and I would likely have seen it then if it had been on top of the laundry drying gear. But this was probably at least a week before it fell into the tub, and probably more (it was after I had returned from Vilnius on 6 October, though). The circular object has a diametre which is rather precisely the breadth of this string gear shelf (some 6,6 centimetre or a little more, closer to 6,7). Could it have been there for a long time? I cannot be certain, but I would suppose not. However, the distance from this shelf to the back wall is about 3-4 centimetres, which means that the circular item could have been resting in the innermost corner towards the irregular surface of the bathroom paint untill the humidity and/or dryness in the air had made it slip off. 'A saga Hume' that would have been, critically balancing on the brink while slanting a little down on the wall. Click here for the surface of the bathroom paint on that place.

This is probably the closest I can come to a natural explanation to it.

I then found the poetic explanation to it in my own book "Gentlemen", in poem #5 which is the first in the part called 'Pretty world': It tells that 'the president needs / flagg' - "one Europe / and is a hard de-lander of air". This corresponds to poem #22 in Celan's book (when one counts from the beginning and skips the first 16 poems). There is the explanation to the mystery: The grating had indeed been on top of the laundry string gear before it fell, as says the poem at the end:

auf den Graten
der obersten
Wiege.

Some 2-3 days later, it was announced soon after the election that Bush would replace Donald Rumsfeld with former CIA chief (on some level) 'Robert Gates', cp. 'obert Grates'. I don't know how long in advance this potential change had been known. The case is a proof of the relation between the two books and comments on the phenomenon in 'The river': While his poem 'Landschaft' tells of the form of my poem which again is related thematically to the poem of Sachs, his poem also maps essentially onto the revelation photo from Vilnius in a way which tells of stage 3 in my model of 'poetic semiosis' - the one about altering the material state of the world by way of poetry, which means 'revelation in matter':

Click here for a closer look at the texted revelation

Now the date 5 April is essential to this story. The newspaper Wiener Zeitung for 5 April 1934 which I bought on 24 August 2005 has a label attached to it which is particularly interesting in light of the current address of the US embassy in Vienna - which is 'Bolzmanngasse 16' = 'Paul Celan street 16' (in particular if the 'm' is read in Russian handwriting). In fact I once went up to the US embassy in 2004, and on the way I met a man with a wheel inside a wheel. If my poetry should be a poetic solution to the political problems, then it had to be in such a form in some way or other. The 'keys to heaven' is a closely related function which probably is about a kind of universals of cognition in some sense of it.

In my "Gentlemen", the date 5 April contains the following three lines:

and beyond this,
the ownership of this is very diffuse,
whatever.

which could be about the plastic drain item situated on the level 'beyond' before it fell. Is it mine, or whose is it if it fell out of eternity? I recognize also the relevance of this to the tree-revelation story from Vilnius. One can say that the story which has surfaced here is about this date 5 April in my book of the summer 2005. See also the below comment from We[r]geland on 'ownership'.

The spirit level story

On 11 September 2006, I was in Vilnius and went to the memorials of the Paneriu ('Ponary') forest in the outskirts of the city where 70.000 Jews were executed by shooting in the period 1941-44. They were normally standing on the edge of deep mass graves into which they fell when they were hit by the bullets. As I approached the desolate region, I first came to a 'camp structure' with baracks and a man crossing a yard, and I asked through the open gates the way to the memorial site and he pointed in the direction: Continue that way. I continued and came to the parking lot outside the memorial and my mind started encircling a peculiar theme: Does it often happen that people who come here take a walk into the surrounding forest and masturbate some thousand possible people to the ground before they leave the area? It must have been a few minutes past 11 in the morning local time that I crossed the parking lot. The first photo I took (the big 'A' in the forest) was further into the area at 11:12, which was some minutes later. In the small and dark memorial house, where the guard comes down from the floor above and switches on some lightbulbs on the probably not so frequent occasions when visitors enter, I also spotted a small photo on the wall of a person who looked like my official grandfather Bjarne Eidsvig. "The chief of the Ponary executions", said the guard - "he was prison director Martin Weiss in Vilnius". Having left the house, it suddenly occurred to me that this could be about Josef Mengele and Bjarne Eidsvig, and I went back to take a photo of the photo. The museum was now dark and empty, and I had to knock in the walls and shout before the guard came down again and let me take the photo of the photo. On the way out of the region, I came to the parking lot again and took a photo of the memorial sign at 12:06:08 local time.

I then turned around and saw a man coming towards me across the parking lot, on the place where the idea occurred in my mind when I arrived. He carried a huge and yellow spirit level. It must have been 1 to 1.5 metre long. He passed me and continued into the forest beyond the sign I had photographed. (I notice the water metres in 'New revelation in Vilnius').

This was five years after the fall of the twin towers on Manhattan, when the tall 'cliffs' fell like the cliff of Beachy Head - which reached out to the lighthouse, making it possible to walk on dry land almost all the way out - except for a little gap of eight feet. I associated the gap of 'eight feet' with 'Eidsvig'. The gap of eight feet is about 2 - 2.5 metres long, which means that one can reach the lighthouse if one brings out a plank of this lenght. The spirit level was 1 - 1.5 metres. Which means that the '1 hour shot' of my visit to the memorial corresponds to the gap of '1 meter short' - for this spirit level to reach out to the lighthouse. Call it a unit. Summer time.

A study of the memorial sign tells of the background. In Russian handwriting, it reads 'rape giu tetogialas' = 'rape jew te-to-G-1-alas' = 'rape Jew T-262'. T-262 was the number of Gröver/'Mengele's 1960 car which we used for travelling to visit e.g. Bjarne Eidsvig in the sixties. It is not impossible that my official grandfather Eidsvig was Martin Weiss and that my official father was Josef Mengele and that he - or rather Eidsvig's brother Aron who perhaps could have been Adolf Hitler - could have raped me in my infancy for raping the Jew representing the holocausted people of Israel and for splitting the genetic unit-y which unites the diaspora with Israel. That would have been the story in the memorial sign.

'The movement' is here about the walking of the man across the open lot at the entrance to the memorial site - on how one leg is moved in front of the other by way of atomistic void. (The story is, in case anybody should wonder, not about masturbating in the forest there - it is about the idea which occurred in my mind as I went across the place, for some reason or other - perhaps of 'sadness' or 'Sadat' or whatever it could have been).

Now the story with the 'one hour sho[r]t' is about the summertime which adds to the theme of the great earthquake and tsunami of 26 Dec 2004 in the poem 'Somernight' in my 'Gentlemen'. This contains in the poem the concept of 1-1.5, and in the reference to 11/9-2001 and the plank out to the lighthouse the concept of 2-2.5. Now the parallel text to the poem is from the talmudic tractate of Erubin, a fragment which is about the case when the solid part of a partition is 3-3.5 in the sense of less than 4 'tefachim' units long. This is one of the three main themes in the parallel text to my 'Gentlemen'. The three themes can be summed up as follows:

1. The paradox of oral/written relative to personal authority
2. The paradox of continuity converting into discreteness
3. The paradox that 3=4 as far as dimensions are concerned

Now paradox 1 is the case of 1 - 1.5 in the length of the spirit level (poem 11). Paradox 2 is about the 2 - 2.5 metres lenght out to the lighthouse (poem 64), while paradox 3 is about this 3 - 3.5 and is about how time relates to place, cp. Aristotle's conception of it. In sum, there are three paradoxes of dimensionality in this story:

Paradox 1: 1 = 2
Paradox 2: 2 = 3
Paradox 3: 3 = 4

Now Heaney's poetry book "The spirit level" (1996) is in my bookshelf. It has a price annotation on the first inside page which seems to provide for paradox 4: 4 = 5, which perhaps can be called 'the bow and arrow'. This could be about poem #12 from my 'Gentlemen', following immediately after #11 'Somernight'.

I suppose the series can be continued indefinitely and make for a basis for a poetic logic. This logic will twist and turn in and out of realities - with criss-crossing references to shared and subjective (generated and re-generated) realities. Perhaps some people will say that reality is at best a mass psychosis. Others will call it a desolate solipsism. It is an enormous mistake to believe that the nazi parametres of pederasty, cannibalism and genocide can represent the poetic logic.

The story from Ponary can be found in my 'Birds to Saladin', e.g. the poem 'The Endmorgan'.

Most of this material (on the spirit level man) was written and put out on the internet under the poem 'The movement' - on 29 October 2006.

Some further relevant observations

The plastic item in the bathtub is also apparently part of another two important structures. The most interesting one is the parallel belt which I found in a drawer when I moved out of C2 Sherringham Avenue at Tottenham on 12 January 1998. It was in a drawer which I had not used for other purposes. I had to suppose that it was my belt but could not remember to have put it there. Even if the flat was humid, the drawer was dry and the amount of fungus and 'golden dust' on the belt and the drawer bottom was probably too much to have been collected in the course of a few weeks (I have lived there for a small number of months). I could lift the exotic belt by the buckle - the coiled shape detached a little but did not fall down. It was stiff and wet - perhaps an allusion to the hand of Lenin's wife Nadeshda Krupskaja in the last minutes of his life could be a relevant association. The belt looked as if it had been for a long space-travel - a 'Fahrt ins Staublose', as is Nelly Sachs' title. Here is the belt to the left (in the environments of the drawer where I found it) and 'wholly plastic medium' to the right:

I found this belt while I was still in the process of writing the second book ('The slades with the only turn') in The Endmorgan Quartet. The book title "Birds to Saladin" is something which I wrote several months later. 'Ladin' could perhaps refer to this drawer.

The room was humid - and there had even been two floodings from above - I think from a leak in the bathroom drain above. The ceiling was totally wrecked after the second - here is a photo of it after the first:

The ceiling after the first flooding

Now this belt in these environments is described in the beginning of Celan's first book published in his lifetime (the 'Sand aus den Urnen' looked apart from). Here are opening lines of Celan's "Mohn und Gedächtnis":

         Ein Kranz ward gewunden aus schwärzlichem Laub in der Gegend von Akra:
         dort riss ich den Rappen herum und stach nach dem Tod mit dem Degen.
         Auch trank ich aus hölzernen Schalen die Asche der Brunnen von Akra
         und zog mit gefälltem Visier den Trümmern der Himmel entgegen.

While this clearly is the beginning of his first lifetime book, the plastic item from the bathtub is clearly described in the beginning of his first posthumous book 'Schneepart':

Ungewaschen, unbemalt,
in der Jenseits-
Kaue:

da,
wo wir uns finden,
Erdige, immer,

ein
verspätetes
Becherwerk geht
durch uns Zerwölkte hindurch,
nach oben, nach unten,

aufrührerisch
flötets darin, mit Narren-
beinen,

der Flugschatten im
irisierenden Rund

[etc.]

This clearly tells of affinity between the belt and the plastic item. There is also a thematic unity with the water metre in Vilnius, under the spiders web:

spiders web
spiredlewel = spirit level

The parallel to Element 20 in the 'Fast Forward' exhibition is also striking.

Conclusion

If the plastic item should happen to be from Andromeda or thereabout - by a 'Fahrt ins Staublose' - and just falling out of eternity and into my bathtub, it could represent a breakthrough in poetic information transfer. However, it is equally likely that both the man with the spirit level in Paneriu and this plastic item in my home in Vienna are from Earth and belong to the category of objects well known to the tellurian people here. It is essential that we cannot decide on this. The concept for my model of 'poetic semiosis' contains the stage 3 which amounts to a change in or creation of the material state of the world. In such phenomena as discussed in the article on 'revelation in art', one can see this clearly in the form of artworks. But here it seems to be in the matter itself.

http://www.emsc-csem.org/index.php?page=current&sub=detail&id=35820 tells that there was a 4.4 earthquake in Egypt in the morning when the grating fell down in the tub:

2006-11-08 at 04:32:08.9 UTC
Location 28.59 N ; 31.63 E
Depth 2 km
Magnitude mb 4.4
Distances
76 km SE Beni suef (pop 189,624 ; local time 06:32 2006-11-08)
73 km SE Beba (pop 59,938 ; local time 06:32 2006-11-08)

The time was 5:32 local Vienna time