The Cenacle | 114 | December 2020 | *Just Released*

[Cenacle]

The Cenacle | 114 | December 2020
Reading link: http://www.scriptorpress.com/cenacle/114.html
Download link: http://www.scriptorpress.com/cenacle/11 ... r_2020.pdf
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Hello everyone,

Here comes the just-released Cenacle | 114 | December 2020. Last issue released in the US & somehow world reign of Donald Trump. But this issue isn’t about him. It’s about Art! Free expression! Beautiful things, difficult things, light things, & things that matter.

Contents of this new issue include:

From Soulard’s Notebooks:
[Excerpt]
Season of Lights in a very strange year. Now less than a year from over. The spaceship has travelled unknown distances in time.

Feedback on Cenacle 113
[Excerpt]
Jimmy Heffernan’s essay “Wholeness” links me back to when Terence McKenna’s works offered me a keyhole view of what I’d understood while tripping. (Judih Haggai)

From the ElectroLounge Forums: How Do You Celebrate / Participate in the End of the Year?
[Excerpt]
I wanted a Barbie van one Christmas. I don’t think I ever got one, and that is a terrible injustice. But seriously, one of the best Christmases I ever had was with my mother—just the two of us, eating fried bologna sandwiches. She didn’t have any money and wanted to send me to my aunt’s house, where there would be plenty of food and fun and toys. I didn’t care about that . . . it wouldn’t be Christmas without her. I always miss Mama at Christmas, but now I have happy times almost every year. (Tamara Miles)

Poetry by Gregory Kelly
[Excerpt]
O Sov’reign Night.
Spill yer grace on a cold cold world
in blankets of winter dust while we sleep.
Sweep sweeping wind wrap early hours
in storms ’til storms swell, surge,
cycle the heavens and fall to earth.

Sphinx Wolf Cactus Tree of Life (Travel Journal)
by Nathan D. Horowitz
[Excerpt]
Crouching like a squirrel on a twig of the World Tree, I peer at a leaf. Leaf grows scales. Surroundings dissolve. I’m in a workshop looking at a sheet of lizard skin. Gnomes cutting into it with instruments like cookie cutters, taking out lizard shapes, sewing them on lizard bodies. Of course, lizards come into being through biological reproduction, even in trance I know that, but the natural process is mirrored by this supernatural one. This is how they craft lizards.

Enlightenment (Fiction)
by Ace Boggess:
[Excerpt]
The other lawyers hated Gene. So did the secretaries. Judge Diamante in Courtroom B despised him, as did Judge Deter, although that honorable master oversaw criminal cases and rarely found Gene standing before him waving briefs. Oh, none of them wanted him dead, per se. They just wished to have his light snuffed out. They tired of seeing his face.

Poetry by Martina Newberry:
[Excerpt]
You can’t tease the truth on any level.
It lost its sense of humor eons ago.
If you poke at it with a stick,
it will show you its fangs and come at you,
growling and salivating.

Notes from New England: 15th Wedding Anniversary
by Raymond Soulard, Jr.
[Excerpt]
December 20, 2003
Super 8 Motel
Omaha, Nebraska
—We set up our room like an apartment—vase of flowers, candle, clothes tucked in drawers—a tidiness about it all—watched the first Lord of the Rings movie last night—second this afternoon—John Coltrane is on KD’s iTunes—

Poetry by Tamara Miles
[Excerpt]
The dogs sniff my grandfather,
dead since 1974,
drunk again in my backyard,
saying, see,
not even you can fix it.

Rivers of the Mind (A Novel) by Timothy Vilgiate
[Excerpt]
“Well. Uhm.” As I begin, he bites his lip, expecting me to blackmail him with the information about the affair. “Well, here’s how it all started.” I sit down, and motion for him to do the same. “I fell asleep in the bushes by your dad’s ranch. And when I started to dream, my consciousness left my body, and I flew around town for a little while. “Eventually, I came back, and I saw a cow. The cow looked really neat, and so I touched it, and it ran to the pasture where all the mushrooms were growing. The mushrooms thought I was an evil spirit, but they eventually realized I was just a unique sort of human, since they recognized the ancestral presence of the ergot fungus, which people can use to make LSD. The mushrooms made me talk to your dad about coming out and spending more time with the cows.”

Poetry by Tom Sheehan
[Excerpt]
I tuck you in, wooled,
last stray of sardines
into Norwegian tinning,
housed and harbored
for one more night,
your eyelashes never
longer than this hour,
or cheeks so berried.

Secret Joy Amongst These Times: The History of Scriptor Press, 1995 to the Present
by Raymond Soulard, Jr.
[Excerpt]
Which all brings me to December 1, 2011. Like November 14, 1981, & a few other ecstatic or tragic dates along the way, this one changed me down deep. We all have these dates. They accumulate in number through our years. They are like our version of tree trunks’ rings.

Prose-Poetry by Sam Knot
[Excerpt]
I had just lit the fire, but it was only smouldering. It was nearly 8 am. Still dark. I heard a knock on the glass door, as if a bird had flown against it. I went to look. There was a misshapen package there, roughly rugby-ball shaped, wrapped in brown tape. I took it inside. Upon closer inspection I saw some writing, in black permanent marker, upon the tape. It said, “Please prepare yourself properly, this parcel contains poetry, yours, ashen fur.” Weird. Fun. At that exact moment the paper caught beneath the sticks, and the flames licked, sounding like fabric blowing in the wind. A tattered wizard gown. Open it.

Taoism, Aboriginal Dreamtime, & Other Non-Western Views of Reality
by Jimmy Heffernan:
[Excerpt]
Zuni religion stipulates that every person is a brother or sister because the Earth is her mother and the Sun is her father. This can be seen in the fact that everyone is born of the same Earth, depends on it for living, and returns to it in death. So this brother/sister-hood exists not only in spirit, but also in matter. Most Native American tribes feel the two are really one. This is a crucial idea, given that the implicate order underlies the explicate projections which inhere in both matter and mind. For the Zuni, spirit and matter are two complementary sides of a single coin.

“You’d have to ask a Taoist”: Interview with Author Jimmy Heffernan
[Excerpt]
Well I don’t think science or philosophy have come around to fully answering too many big questions. I think perhaps that when we get to a point that we no longer feel such a compulsion to ask so many questions we may find an internal peace, and perhaps this is the object of various philosophies.

Many Musics (Poetry) by Raymond Soulard, Jr.:
[Excerpt]
He was called the Gate-Keeper, no longer
quite a man. A film-maker with his tripod,
a traveler through many worlds. Tall & crooked,
like a windblown tree. A low-drooping hat long-furred
his head, the rags & cloths & pockets tattooed
down his torso, arrive to ancient boots of
vines & stones, feather-quiet to stalk, clatter-wild
to scare away.

Memoir of a Boyhood in Cameroon and Nigeria
by John Echem (With Photos by Iphyok Inuenekpo Jnr)
[Excerpt]
He followed us to the backyard where Grandma was sitting. When she saw him, she stood up and brought him a chair to sit. Grandma told him that her husband was a house-boy to the Whites at Victoria, Cameroon (renamed Limbe in 1982). She said that she and her husband had served them for more than twenty years, until they returned to their own country.

Poetry by Judih Haggai
[Excerpt]
what problems?
have bed, roof, shower, coffee
life is generous

Bags End Book ##17: The Myth of the 4 Famous Travelers! Part 1
by Algernon Beagle
[Excerpt]
Even though I have knowed it awhile, & been an invited visiting guest, I must say the Creature Common is still a strange new place to me. Its fellows have been around a long time, I think, tho they don’t look like old guys, like mah aged & annoying relative Doctor Horatio Algernon does. Also, they seem a lot lot nicer & working together than is usually true in Bags End. I don’t hold against niceness, of course, in this too often mean & tricky world, but I guess I look 4or the catch. Niceness 4or a trick or a trap? Niceness to lure into a crazy scheme? Well, no. Creatures don’t seem to hold a trick behind their backs, like some in Bags End sometimes do.

Christmas Letter (Prose) by Charlie Beyer:
[Excerpt]
Son has become a young man now (and wants his parents to call him Dawg). Dawg sent Father into a spasm of rage when he leaked information through Mother that he was spending the college money (that we struggled for twenty years to get) on becoming an Art Major. Father calmly explained to Son (at knife point) (when he caught him) that the choices he made in life were his and that all his parents wanted for him was to be happy. It was made clear that being an artist meant being a selfish mentally unstable drug addict and that any marriage was doomed to failure along with a chronic inability to support one’s self through life. Father gently explained that Son would be trying to leech off of his parents, and that probably wouldn’t work even if they were buried.

Poetry by Colin James:
[Excerpt]
According to my mustache,
we are running a little late.
Polytheistic like a twisting caterpillar,
we came the long way.
Should have gone over our route
beforehand, best to prepare.

The Dead (Classic Fiction) by James Joyce
[Excerpt]
Lily, the caretaker’s daughter, was literally run off her feet. Hardly had she brought one gentleman into the little pantry behind the office on the ground floor and helped him off with his overcoat, than the wheezy hall-door bell clanged again and she had to scamper along the bare hallway to let in another guest. It was well for her she had not to attend to the ladies also. But Miss Kate and Miss Julia had thought of that, and had converted the bathroom upstairs into a ladies’ dressing-room. Miss Kate and Miss Julia were there, gossiping and laughing and fussing, walking after each other to the head of the stairs, peering down over the banisters and calling down to Lily to ask her who had come.

Labyrinthine [a new fixtion] by Raymond Soulard, Jr.:
[Excerpt]
The Gate itself is dark & massive into the sky. On its front, up high, “for those lost” writ on it—a promise, a refuge, a new path? Gate’s covered in symbols, familiar to me & not so much. Sling my bookbag on my shoulder, walk over to look. It hmmms. Of course it does, I know that, have written it. Hmmms deeply. Touch with both hands, close eyes, let it hmmm me.

Send me comments by hitting “reply” to this post—or reply to me directly & off-list at editor@scriptorpress.com

Peace,
Raymond

[judih]

fantastic! and am excited to explore this new issue.