let us think fahey in terms of his animals, in terms of his presentations (ape fahey)

'the flowers appear on the earth; the time of the singing of birds is come, and the voice of the turtle is heard in our land...' - song of solomon 2:12.

'I remember turtles, tons of them, around his office, his home. we built a turtle sanctuary in his backyard in LA-- on palms boulevard, a breezy name for a concrete noise....' - from leo kottke’s tribute to john fahey.

fahey week day three

of course the turtles mentioned in the song of solomon are turtle doves, and the turtles mentioned by leo kottke are tortoises. 

'look! you are the moon among the stars

look! you are a light in the darkness

my turtle dove...'  - baaba maal, mariama. 

apparently one in five migratory species are under threat of extinction. horsemouth recently read a post which suggested that pigeons and doves have been domesticated and taken by humanity to every corner of the earth, that they are there where we are because they love us. (horsemouth thinks that is stretching it a bit).  

horsemouth is reading j.m.coetzee's elizabeth costello. in this coetzee's central character has become an older woman with an interest in animal rights (but an author still - if we take his central characters to be ciphers for the author). as an author she is required to give author talks and she returns often to kakfa's  a report to an academy - in which an ape gives a presentation to a learned academy. for costello (and many philosophers)  what makes humans human is reason (and this allows them to do what they will to animals because animals do not have reason) but, for costello, this is not a satisfactory argument. 

it is the one kafka tests by having a reasoning ape. 

let us think fahey in terms of his animals, in terms of his presentations. 

fahey's totem animal was the tortoise/ the turtle. a strange beast. leathery skinned, an armoured shell, not noticeably loquacious, not often suspected of reason. later, when life had brought him low, fahey was to attribute this in a cod-freudian fashion to childhood sexual abuse by his father. whether this was his actual opinion or whether it was elicited from him by the fundamentalist christians running the welfare hotel where he lived and attempting to treat him for homelessness, alcoholism and prescription drug abuse is a moot point.  

fahey's spirit animal is not a high-flying bird who can give us access to the overview but the tortoise, a creature made leaden and slow by its defences, by its shell. 

fahey wrote copious sleeve notes mocking academia, in particular philosophy and anthropology, and also mocking the picaresque tales of wandering singer-songwriters. the ape fahey meets academia most successfully in his thesis on charley patton but in almost every interview he burlesques the role of great musician with something profound to say. 

 fahey makes it into next month's 'uncut' magazine,

'65 years on from his trail-blazing debut album 'blind joe death', the guitarist’s influence looms larger than ever. here, friends and acolytes help us uncover the truth behind this contrary artist’s life and career...'

horsemouth has been vegetarian now for something approaching (or perhaps even surpassing) 40 years. it doesn't bother him, it is easy, he does not notice it. nor does he notice the vast empire of animal death that the animal rights people see, he notices the vast empire of human death and suffering instead, but he can't see what to do about that so he retreats from it. 

today zoom beers with howard (maybe - if he isn't distracted by the yoko ono exhibition). yesterday a visit from a friend of his mother's.