The Cherubim Collection
I went down to run the body, sank in the colored maps
of arteries and veins.
I ended on my belly descending a massif of a million
lights, cities, hotbeds, houses, colored streets.
Top-built labyrinths and lightning rods, cones of light
flashed like streets and sky. Scattered about its limbs
were cities, to show the scale no one can see.
The eyes saw ancient quarries, tunnels and caverns
underneath. It was a city of dreams made fertile from
paradise fallen to ruin. Waking existence led down
millenniums written in a century, a year, a day, aware
and unaware of thought before put into words.
You had to slip out through holes to wriggle into
evening, scissoring out dripping red insulation, cutting
black bags out of the wall like stones. I pry the cracks
between concrete, metal and wood. Sometimes mice
droppings fall out at my feet. I push up, rebalance, ease
down another yard, feet sticking out among fans and
chairs with the smell of rot musk and evening.
Thinking to dismantle the image of the word machine,
sighs of breath get me up and the blast feels good.
The Cherubim Collection houses exiles in warehouses,
industrial residences of many descriptions. It is a
dream yard of roofed parking lots, shacks and another
warehouse unsecured, never locked, occupied by
vagrants, migrants, gypsies, tenants, homeless,
squatters, working men, blacksmiths, artists. Passagesunguarded above and below form a colony of
clapboards large and abandoned. They set up tables
under the eaves. With so many people in small spaces
and close quarter shops in this bazaar resistance we
first see the paintings in the apartments below, but tour
the upper stories too, unfinished, rickety, dangerous
with catwalks but traversable. The house has never
been properly finished, just enough so it won’t get too
wet in the rain. I have been up there myself so it is
more or less possible among many more parts and
pieces, like the old Barnes Museum in Merion, where
pieces cram and crock together, crowds mill shoulder
to shoulder to pass on. They can’t do that without
apology. Name tags are also missing. As for
photography, it is a variable cloudy day when we pass
through.
Anyone returning after years of absence will know this place
with their eyes closed. It won’t matter if it’s only
imagined. We feel the beat. People who arrive wonder
how they could not have known. That is always so.
One person in this crowd had loosed a bull that ran the
street without a leash. In this running of the bulls is a
Taurobolium of the knowledge that you could be gored.
Know that when you spend the day chasing the world
in front of you as a tail in the sky, and when you see it
in the air you repeat with Noah, Daniel, Job and the
wise King of Tyre, as if you precede them when you
follow and live in a fall of Jerusalem that leads captive
those who know. They know the thing you sleep beside
is a prophetic topography and a restructuring of moral
geography/geology on the other.

 To forget something that doesn’t officially exist, this
state as an end in itself sent a flow of expatriates to
flee—not quickly, but in achingly slow motion advance
from its camps among wolves. Dark purple blotched
the eyes and rumors were rife as the numbers swelled
as authorities demanded papers of refugees from their
big briefcase. Doors opened and closed to the
possibility of laying hands on the right piece of paper
to enable escape, that salvic lure before the border
closed. Changing the direction of the compass, the
collective to transfigure the human overcame all
relation, escape was uncertain, but it was not by paper.
The Cherubim Collection combines geography,
morality and prophecy into a Taurobolium, a sacrifice of
a bull. The eye and snout are Seattle Amazonia, but
people see different tails. Parts of CA are gone. Some
think Baja is the tail, but it’s gone. Seattle is the head.
Where states and nations represent moral agencies the
question is open as to what it portends. You can look
for where you live in this country and prophesy
yourself, figure out how it’s going to go for you in the
life and afterlife posed. Impose a latitude and longitude
map on top and check your coordinates, aware that the
map is always moving slower than the eye can see.
The Taurobolium continental U.S. nicely contorts as an
west east rectangle figure of a bull. Contrast it to Chile
north and south, figure of a sea horse. These always
emerge from the work at hand. To interpret more
naturalistically not a hundred acres of first prairie exist.
Ten feet of topsoil washed to the sea.Impervious runoff of desert cities might be the white
waste of Houston or Dallas, barren a hundred years.
How much myth is fact? Buffalo is gone, the mountains
behind? Can the Great Lakes drain, the sea, Austin
sink? And what of these myth mountains that
geological physiognomy most distorts, the
Orocopedia blue schist assemblage and the Pelona
schist along the fault, like the piercing point used to
construct the first offset?
In this concept of segmentation the sacrifice of nations
in the Taurobolium is more than just nations, but
continents, world and space. Sometimes it is called
allegory, but the literal facts take a literal reading, even
unbelievable, as if Henry Ford had started his own race
of men. These together form a Taurobolium sacrifice of
cosmos, which entertainment is as real as its plan.
Absolutely denying these ideas is charged with irreality
in the opposition that opposes them. In sacred texts of
beasts coming up from the sea we understand animals
represent nations and nations represent a complex of
states of the mind of evil, not of good. The sacrifice of
nations by the global priests serves the purpose of their
conspiracy. So America is the bull sacrificed for this
world to achieve.
Down and down I followed the years of this descent.
That’s what they called Abel descended from Adam
and Eve and Isaac and Ishmael descended from
Abraham, Jacob and Esau descended in Isaac.
Backtrack forward, up and down the Cherubim, palm
trees and every cherub a two-faced lion and man. The
doors that open from that House have two leaves and
thick planks, three stories and other garments. To walk.

he vision where they put away the carcass of kings the
dream kidneys hide in plain sight look east from the
House and the law of the House to the way of the gate
where the Prince will appear. Rest in peace to measure
the pattern, the difference between the body and
profane. No wine offerings or blood worship here. The
river comes from the east and flows to the sea, rises
first to the ankles then to the loins. Many trees on both
sides fruit according to the months, one each for food
and medicine because the water flows from the House
of Oblation, four square possessing the city and the
name of the city, for Jahu is there.
Jahrusalem! As if commanded, a cup bearer entered
that city with Alexander, toured the walls with Darius
the Persian, Darius Nothus, intermarried with
inhabitants of the land. I have Nennius for consolation
in Britain for talk, but not in words. At port we pass for
the sailors. Images pretext light, reshaping escapes,
fantasy boats and fable captains, visas for the countries
of Atlas and passports for countries that do not exist.
In the last phase of this perigee, captive pilots who
bombed cities, shot down and crashed, were brought to
account for execution. I fall to my knees. My culpability
and others whose dust swirls the wind is cast into sea,
carbon and gas to reassemble. We should tolerate such
a contrary state in the conduct of our lives. Tramped
alive with marching feet, a reconstitution of the world
repeats. Whose grave is this, this one and this? Ask me,
I know them. I know the time where Hierosolyma
precedes my own. Antares that bother and Betelgeuse
were pressing on my head. The solar system, planetsand moons, man, they cannot decide, but every
memory helps. One transcendent, some good dreams,
the list is long. How did Adam sustain his teeth? How
do I weep for the stones in the building? The west wall
of Jerusalem is on my head. The geologic layers, the
Babylonian Talmuds. The Lehmann discontinuit, the
Mohorovičić discontinuity. I am walking on its surface,
walking water in which I sink, which gives some
meaning of Leviathan and Jonah. And Jesus! 45 stone
courses, 28 above and 17 underground.
The vats were huge, thirty, forty feet tall remembrances of
eternity in time. Attracted by the stillness, implicit being and
power, they meant instruction and the compulsion of patterns
mediated through time, held open by belief. Sheets of purified
cellulose steeped in caustic soda, dried, shredded into
crumbs, aged in metal containers. What's going on in and
around the vats in me as it is among the sons of God whose
election was before, but unknown. Poetic repetition seeks the
mediated vision of the fathers, the recovery of origins before,
as though prior instruction. The closer he gets, the further he
is away it seems, but then also, the further he has come.
Viscose fibers are manufactured to create the illusion of the
world. As he stands beside the tanks there is nothing but
being, Dinglichkeit, thingness, materiality alone, which is a
magnificent state, but without cognition. But the vats are
metaphors of the stuff that makes the world, the explosive
gasoline of the world fiber that is made to burn. Ezekiel says
after they gave their jewels, their gold and silver and made
them into images of men, sacrificed their oil and flour and
honey, crowns, earrings, their incense to it, they gave their
children and burned them in oblation to the gods. The vats
are metaphors of the stuff that makes the world, but the

world is false, it is a synthetic not a natural, which is what
the man wears who leads into and sees all these things,
dressed in pure linen.
I am your sign, so that as I have done so shall it be done to
all. But there are wheels within wheels. Kierkegaard asked
for one favor from the gods, chose for himself laughter and
they all began to laugh. That's his telling. The essential thing
posits an opposition between inner and outer that makes its
representation impossible when the effect of every vision is
evident, full of eyes round about. To have laughter on one's
side for this Elijah, native to the setting, was either all joke,
humor of high and middle kinds, or elección. Yet shall he not
see it. We won't know until the vote is in. To laugh seems
hard wired on the foreheads of men that sigh and cry, as if
they looked through a hole in the wall. Never say truth
without a caveat, not Orphic ambiguity, but tease truth a
season. The spirit rats will have a hard time getting their
tails out of that. What rats? For I know the things that come
into your mind, every one of them. Call it humor because the
first thing I read in Either/Or at the end of my own diaspora,
when I picked it up again after 40 years, was Kierkegaard's
paragraph at end of the Diapsalmata about his audience with
the gods in the seventh heaven. Never start at the beginning,
just open at random and begin. Prepare stuff for removing.
Dig through the wall. If you want in on it just laugh along.
Of course I had been jacked out of that Foundry life of oil
rigs and fires and train wrecks among the strip mined hills
and all its social situations they might imply from the age of
five, into an all new circumstance where this Elijah and
ground of being plopped right atop and sank to the marrow.
It had come right down out the sky and settled on my
shoulders before, that I did not ever want to kill. That vision
was the first in the outer world. I did not open my eyes toothers. I saved opening, or was saved until the moment prepared to receive him, for Jesus, the Blessed, the only
eternal man. People shake heads at the idea of the only true
man. They have not felt it. Evangelicals worry they will not
be taken. The fear of not being taken could not compete with
the real horrors I knew before 16 On the Way Out of Sheol.
It's a question of magnitude. What do I care about Rapture
when carnivals, bordellos, bars, seductions, fights, appalling
challenges, and huge literal giants wanted me? It was said
they didn't like the way I walked. You don't think children are
going such places. You don't think the underbelly is hid
everywhere in the societal middle class fat, that these lurk in
your neighbor, leaders, institutions.
My first specific job after the white light was a white collar
job at Merrill Lynch when all transactions were posted by
hand, if you can believe it. That fellow was happily
monitored by superiors in the "cage" so did not ruin too
many trades with his bookkeeping. The chief memory of that
is coming to work in downtown Philadelphia before eight in
the morning, up the train station steps with the commuters
and wandering at lunch around bookstores off Market and
Chestnut streets handling versions of Kierkegaard, what else,
continuing to puzzle whatever it is that puzzled them.