raw poem

 When under the spell of belief spirits go through incarnations towards being perfected and returning to the light—at some point—of course—a spirit must become divine before making it. A person who embodies a fractal of an ongoing universe, and a downturn in age means someone born in an age of decline, and like a soldier for truth, dies in the snow.

revised chapter excerpt

    I took the two most important plays—Hamlet and Macbeth—and translated them. Took three years to complete, where I left as much as possible unaltered, so the audience will feel like they’re experiencing Elizabethan speech but comprehend the sense of what the character is saying. Of the two plays:

    Hamlet is a character who’s life gets upended when his father is murdered, and he’s next if he doesn’t put on a disguise—an antic disposition—to baffle the murderer to keep from getting killed himself. He’s a character whose world gets corrupted, and because the world is still corrupt, means we are all Prince Hamlet—we are all figuring how to survive upon the stage of corruption.

    Macbeth is about what happens when you lose the Stoic precept of the two things in life: those that you can control, and those that you can’t, while all you can, is what you say and do. Go looking for portents, or have them set upon you through synchronicity, keep your head about the sanctity of your eternal spirit. When young king Malcom—while vetting his supporters—declares that he cares for the truth as much as life itself, means if push comes to shove—you’d die for the truth—you wouldn’t run and hide.

*

    But I didn’t want to discuss the plays or their ideas, I want to discuss how I’d never been aware there was, and still is, a controversy amongst scholars over the authenticity of authorship. Who really wrote the poems and plays under that name? Most are taught and believe the Strats—that Shakespeare was a bright young man who grew up in a riverside town some 20 miles north-west of London; which he then walked to, fell in with the theatre crowd, and wrote poems and plays while becoming owner of a stage or two. The anti-Strats believe someone else wrote the works and the person “Shaxpur”—was a stand-in.

    Back then you could suddenly be in hot water if the royal court had a change in monarch; playwriting was frowned on by those actually hanging out at court at that time. So if it wasn’t the bright young man from Stratford upon Avon, it was someone who concealed themselves because they were part of the court. Strat or anti-Strat: the author is either a bright young man who moved to the big city and found theater to declare his genius, or he was someone learned from the court of Queen Elizabeth. To slightly complicate the choice between the two, amongst anti-Strats are factions believing it to be one person or another at or near the court, some even believing it a woman writer.

   The bare facts are, the British Museum has a notebook from 1594, which contains over a thousand entries of words, phrases, salutations, turns of speech, proverbs, metaphors, aphorisms, moral/philosophical observations, drawn from Latin, French, Italian, Spanish, Hebrew and English, and it belonged to Sir Francis Bacon. It comes to us from Dr. William Rawley, who resided with Bacon the last ten years of his life. 1679 Dr. Rawley’s son gave the notebook to Dr Tenison. The Promus—or storehouse—is the notebook Bacon used during youthful journey to the French and Italian courts—where Queen Elizabeth—who rarely went to the docks—saw him off herself.

    By 1808 the notebook had made its way to the British Museum where it was first catalogued, and then discovered by a biographer who published The Life and Works of Francis Bacon in multiple volumes during the late 1850s. He selected portions, but curiously none that he and others would have immediately recognized as Shakespeare, and does not mention him even though both were alive in the same town at the same time.

    Then, 1867, another bundle of writings belonging to Bacon are found—The Northumberland Manuscript—where the names Bacon and Shakespeare appear together on a contemporary document. Variations of Bacon, Francis Bacon, Shakespeare, and William Shakespeare are hand-written across its cover—two years before Shakespeare was publicly known as a playwright.

    Then, 1883, a scholarly work reproduced a full transcript of the notebook—noting hundreds of passages and sentiments which later appear in the plays of Shakespeare. To an impartial mind it was and still is to this day confirmation beyond doubt that Bacon used his Promus for later works.

   Then, 1938, is discovery of Shakespeare’s 1587 edition of Holinshed's Chronicles, a vast history of Britain and source material for the plays, and what Strats claim as proof, that a bright young man from Stratford read it and conjured the plays. That particular copy came to us from a descendent of the printer who first printed Shakespeare’s plays, and seeing notes in the margins, surmised it had been Shakespeare’s own personal copy. A scholar of that day then put the copy of Holinshed’s Chronicles alongside The Northumberland Manuscript and said a glance by anyone shows the book and the document belonged to the same person.

    Then there is the earliest manuscript of a Shakespeare play, discovered in the library of an antiquarian who was patronized by Lady Anne—Francis Bacon’s mother. A five act play representing it as originally composed, before showing up as two separate plays in the publication of the first folio—which was published with sixteen plays which hadn’t previously been published, along with another twenty which already had, for a total of thirty-six—divided into Comedies/Histories/Tragedies, and published five years after the death of someone who didn’t own a book and never sent a letter, even though living twenty miles from a source of income in an age where letter-writing was voluminous. All Shakespeare’s contemporaries, zillions of letters—him? Not one.

    Many would say, OK, Bacon is Shakespeare—big deal—he couldn’t put his name to them—at least we got some memorable works.

    

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Dear Diary

Got sidetracked from Delia Bacon to Thomas Jefferson. I'd never read Jefferson, always kept him in mind as the greatest founder for writing the Declaration of Independence. So strange how reading him now at this age, is so pleasing. I wonder if anyone has done a good book on tape, not sure I'd even listen; the words/writing would no doubt be diminished in another voice. I've been searching for where he recognizes the convention clause, but sadly have not yet found it; seems he was more concerned with the executive branch becoming a federalist monarchy. On another note, I put chapter 3 in a word counter and found out that it's 55 pages of fine-hewn text. Kind of exciting. All I have to do is complete it, and I'm done. I left some phone message on the machine of my Muse some weeks ago. Wondering if I should recite a poem. I want to read to her that recent big poem, Ode to the Rose, because I always use her as inspiration, that she might like it. Though I often wonder where she is, how she is, and if she's happy, but more thoughts are coming to my mind she's another sleepwalker in Disneyland and I've been blackballed from there. Lots of stuff going on in the world, at least we all get to wake up to the beauty of Sun and Earth.

novel excerpt

 

    Johnny and I were waiting to be picked up, straightening out our bills after another pass-out of our merch, only a few things remaining. A boy, which you could tell had been beat upon, came circling round. He had remnants of a black eye and a large fading bruise on an arm.

    “Hey what’s up buddy?” asks Johnny.

    “Nothin.’”

    “C’mere, let me give you something.” He took off his money belt, which still had a few different Olympic pins, and spread it on the bench next to him. The boy came near. “Which one you like best?” Johnny asks.

    “I don’t have money.”

    “It’s OK, I just want you to have something—which one of those you like best?” The boy moved closer to examine them.

    “That one,” he said.

    “This one?” Johnny asks, pointing to one with the Olympic Rings set in a silver oval. The boy nods, Johnny removes it and hands it to him. “What happened to you? Looks like you got beat up.”

    “I don’t know,” the boy says.

    “I wanna tell you something,” Johnny says removing his sunglasses. “When I was your age I used to get beat up. And what you need to know right now, right here, is that it’s not always gonna be like this. You’ll get older and you’ll be able to escape anyone who is being mean to you—OK?”

     “OK.”

     “You just gotta hang on and get old enough to take care of yourself, OK?”

     “OK.”

     “I want you to keep that pin a secret—don’t show it to anyone; it will be your secret, and when things get rough, you find it and hold onto it real tight, knowing things will get better and one day you’ll get free. OK?”

     “OK.” Just then we all heard, “Ronald! You get your ass over here this minute!” It was the mom some ways away.

     “Go now,” Johnny says, and the boy ran off.

     “Wow, that was most impressive man,” I said.

     “You get beat up as a kid?” he asks.

     “Yeah, my mom was bi-polar; when you came home from school, you didn’t know if there would be cookies comin’ out of the oven, or the belt comin’ out of the closet.”

     “All the stuff you’re saying about knowledge and truth, what’s the answer there?” he asks.

     “There’s a book titled Drama of the Gifted Child, in it the author lays out the idea that from birth to five years old is when a human’s foundation of self-esteem is set. If you have a parent who is narcissist—meaning someone who, when they feel good everyone around them is good, and when they feel bad, everyone around them is bad—and introduce that dynamic to the parent/child relationship, it fractures the child’s self-esteem, and that person often goes on to be narcissist too, perpetuating the whole mess.”

     “That’s it, isn’t it? A four year old craps their pants and gets hit for it, when all they were doing is being a little kid.”

     “Yep. Why? You get beat up too?”

     “Yeah, a step-dad.”

     Just then Marcus showed up, and off we went to the next town.

Post to NextDoor

 Bellosguardo Update: Some weeks ago I engaged in comment on ND with Councilmember Guitieriez, then email, the result of which was his position that formal requests and approvals are currently in process; I suggested he get Jeremy Lindaman and the foundation to open the lawn to the public this spring in a show of good will. Many do not know, but due to the placement and features of the property, not a single request or improvement has ever needed to take place for the foundation to fulfill its legal duty to open the three acre lawn when it’s attached to an ADA compliant and gentle slopping driveway feet away from public beach access. And while we’re at it, let’s bring in Santa Barbara’s beloved reporter—he’s there to tell us who got displaced by fire or flood, or who recently got shot, but he has never mentioned the fact the foundation is and has been engaged in over a decade of constructive fraud, denying the community benefits of a local charitable trust. To Councilmember Jordan who is also on ND, he too and the others are standing next to the litmus test—pretend the fraud does not exist or do something about it, as all issues within city limits, public or private, are under control of the city council. There is the conceptual and the factual, in a court of law if the former does not align with the latter it’s known as constructive fraud and punishable by law.

Dear Ms. Bacon

Dear Ms. Bacon, I’m writing to you from far into the future, and presently in possession of a biographical sketch about your life and efforts. There is still much to ascertain but wanted to send brief communication to let you know you are an inspiration to us future peoples.

poem

 (untitled)

There is so much strange with me—

perhaps most, that I mysteriously

and maybe even miraculously wake up

after each time sleeping.   

Dear Diary

 So it turns out, as the Bacon/Shake-speare issue emerges, there are those who think it amazing and wonderful, based on what a person from the FBS communicated in exchange on academia.edu; and there are those saying that it's all based on a corruption of gnosticism and not benevolent; indeed if it was, humanity would have already utilized science to detach us from menial labor. So that's what the chapter will be about. 

just arrived book, excited

9x12" colored pencil

9x12" asemic carbon abstraction

Start/raw material for Shakespeare Chapter

     So, knocked off horse again, I checked my wounds, got back on, scanned the horizon, and found that if you had a college degree you could substitute teach for the county. Went through the background checks, got the vaccine shot, and I started subbing. From Kindergarten to 12th Grade, whatever class needed a sub that day, that’s where I went. Of all the grades, 5th and 6th Graders were the worst: too old to listen like those younger, not old enough to be more composed—that wild, chaotic moment of self-awareness before puberty. When I’d get assigned in the morning, and it was a 5th or 6th grade class, I always took an espresso shot in a can. Kids can be exhausting.

    So I’m subbing, and it turned out there was a stretch where the high-schoolers were learning Shakespeare—which to English speakers today, it’s like having to learn a foreign language. You have to do something painful before finding out what the stories are, so you can have the fun of discussion about what happens. Most English speakers are traumatized with Shakespeare in grade school, and hope to never hear about it again. Yet, anyone today who can competently talk about Shakespeare and the stories told, and how many of the characters can be used to model and explain contemporary persons and situations—at a bar or dinner table, that person is deferred to. What most don’t know, is that if you just knew the story, you yourself might have a more valid take than a modern scholar, or at the least agree with anyone who already got it right. Most of us hear the name and count the minutes until the subject is moved away from.

    What I taught them is that every lyric, poem, play, novel, or any other text is composed of two things: sound and sense. How does it sound and what does it say? Some writing sounds beautiful but makes little sense—or is not meant to—just language to open the imagination. Some writing is informative and instructional—aimed at nothing but sense—without a purposefully accentuated rhythm of vowels and consonants. Shakespeare is known for combining both sound and sense, but translations are academic, paraphrase, alter what doesn’t need not be, and aren’t script theatre and film professionals can build something on, so I decided to write a translation that could be produced, and which in classrooms—the story—what actually happens—could be gotten to without banging into footnotes. I didn’t care if they knew much about Shakespeare, I just cared if they knew a couple of the stories, and what they thought the stories said about life. So I took the two most important plays, Hamlet and Macbeth, and translated them. Took three years to complete, where I left as much as possible unaltered, so the audience will feel like they're experiencing Elizabethan speech but actually comprehend the sense of what the character is saying. Prince Hamlet is a character whose life gets upended when his father is murdered. He’s next if he doesn’t put on a disguise—an antic disposition—to baffle the murderer and keep from getting killed. He is a character on a stage of corruption, and because the world is still corrupt, means we are all Prince Hamlet—we are all figuring out how to survive to this day.

Macbeth to me is about what happens when you lose sight of the Stoic precept that there’re only two things in life: those that you can control, and those that you can’t; and all you can control is what you say and what you do.

      The translation of Shakespeare led me to the lair of a giant monster. I finally found out why the political science had failed, and why I might try again.

There might be a chance to get them produced and somehow close to my muse—who by that point was so far away removed in both time and space, that she should have faded from my spirit.

++++++

In the British Museum is a notebook dating to 1594, containing one and a half thousand entries of words, phrases, salutations, turns of speech, proverbs, metaphor, aphorism, and various moral/philosophical observations, drawn from the Latin, French, Italian, Spanish, Hebrew and English; also lines and verse from poets and dramatists such as Virgil, Ovid, Seneca, Horace, and others.

In 1883 a scholar published a work which reproduces a full transcript of the notebook—passages from the poems and plays of Shakespeare. To an impartial mind it confirms beyond doubt that Francis Bacon used his private literary storehouse for literary works.

The Northumberland Manuscript 1596-97

The Northumberland manuscript is a contemporary Elizabethan document containing both the names of Francis Bacon and William Shakespeare. It was discovered 1867 in a bundle of writings and works belonging to Bacon. It’s the only manuscript where the names Bacon and Shakespeare appear together in a contemporary document. Various forms of Bacon, Francis Bacon, Shakespeare and William Shakespeare are written across its cover. No part of the manuscript was written after 1597, yet William Shakespeare was not yet publicly known as a dramatist, as the pseudonym Shakespeare first appeared on the 1598. Before Shakespeare was known as a dramatist, appear references to plays and poems by Shakespeare in a manuscript belonging to Francis Bacon.

Then there’s the copy of a 1587 edition of Holinshed's Chronicles, a vast history of Britain with and undisputed source for many Shakespeare plays. It’s what Stratfordians claim as proof, that the uneducated person from Avon had read it, then dreamt up and wrote the works. In 1938 orthodox Shakespeare scholar Dr. Clara Longworth de Chambrun announced a momentous discovery, ‘Shakespeare’s Own Copy of Holinshed’s Chronicles’. She had been contacted by Captain Jaggard who told her he had a copy of the 1587 Holinshed Chronicles and after seeing several marginal annotations, surmised it had been Shakespeare’s own personal copy. The copy was from the library of a relation of the Bacons, and examined was in no doubt it was used as source for Shakespeare’s history plays. She consulted The Northumberland Manuscript, and says, ‘. . .on the tattered index which once served as a cover to several manuscripts, we find quantities of notes, scribblings and pen trials in the same hand as on the colophon page of Shakespeare’s Holinshed [where]…the poets name is repeatedly inscribed both abbreviated and in full. . . a glance at the page suffices to convince any one familiar with the Skipwith Holinshed that book and paper belonged to the same man.’ The ornamental monograms that appear on the Holinshed and the Northumberland Manuscript and explains they, ‘are more individual than a mere signature, and. . .might well indicate Shakespeare as the possessor of both.’ So, in 1938 we have an orthodox Shakespeare scholar emphatically confirming that the unique Shakespeare’s Holinshed and the Northumberland Manuscript originate from the same person.

When Henry Seymour, of The Francis Bacon Society saw the Holinshed monograms he knew they were, ‘Bacon’s hall-marks and have always been associated with books and manuscripts belonging to or written by Francis Bacon.’ Les Tenures de Monsieur Littleton 1591 is just one work annotated by Francis Bacon.

So where is Shakespeare’s Holinshed today? A work reputably belonging to our poet Shakespeare with very distinctive, unusual markings that also appear on Bacon’s Northumberland manuscript and works owned by Bacon is seemingly missing. The question is, where is it and why is it missing? This is currently an ongoing investigation.

Dering Manuscript (c.1596)

It is little known that there exists an early manuscript version of the play Henry IV. This manuscript is the earliest extant manuscript of a Shakespeare play. Discovered in 1844 in the collection part of the library of Sir Edward Dering, an antiquarian with an interest in literature and drama, and patronized by Francis Bacon’s mother Lady Anne Bacon. Dering was a close friend and relative of Francis Bacon. The so-called Dering manuscript is a single-five act Shakespeare play of Henry IV, earlier than the first printed quarto issued in 1598 and the quarto edition of The Second part of Henrie the fourth printed in 1600. The mauscript represents the play as Bacon originally composed it when it was one play before developing the original version into two separate parts.

The Shakespeare First Folio 1623

On 8th November 1623 Edward Blount and Isaac Jaggard entered on the Stationers’ Register sixteen Shakespeare plays which had not been previously published. Another twenty previously published plays were added giving a total of thirty-six dramas in the First Folio, divided into Comedies, Histories and Tragedies, an enormous volume of more than nine hundred pages, the greatest secular publication in the history of English literature.

on-line book about Delia Bacon

 https://archive.org/details/deliabaconbiogra00baco/page/12/mode/2up?view=theater

Delia Bacon

 

edits; maybe now done

 

Ode to the Rose

Come, let us talk of the perennial flowering from a family

of thousands of cultivars; forms and shapes

so strikingly dissimilar that as we gained

familiarity with its form,

subdivisions were required for

a diversity unparalleled—

where evolutionary biologists

to this day attempt to answer how

such evolved fruit so contrastingly—

peaches, plums, cherries, berries and more—

from the Latin rosa, through the Persian to the Vedic;

native around the globe, its significance in our cultures

pervades like its scent

the vast majority of our societies.

Leaves borne alternately and pinnate—

leaflets and stipules in serrated margin;

mostly five petaled, some only four;

divided into lobes, sepals beneath petals,

appearing as green points.

All parts edible raw and flush with Vitamin C,

sometimes into jellies, jams, or syrups for tea;

a distinctive flavor used in the world’s cuisine,

candied or turned into creams for confectionery;

used as medicine and in practices of spirituality;

volatile ingredients pressed

for so intimate products as cosmetics to

used as landscape, hedging and utility—

or simply the commercial cut crop kept cool

until ready for display at point of sale;

the name artists know can be found in the rack

or on the shelf—the tint and shade of blood

from a goddess.

Dating to the Late Eocene to Mesopotamia,

its hip with its hundred and fifty or so seeds,

eaten by birds and dispersed, where today's

originate from an Old Blush from 18th-century Asia,

since patronized by an empress from Europe,

propagating collections now becoming innumerable. 

Where gods and goddesses protect the bodies of heroes

with its immortal oil, bedding them among blossoms,

or instructing those transformed to beasts

to eat its petals and return—

ancient history become symbol:

Beauty, bliss, joy, pleasure, love, life, and elegance;

praise, prayer, pride, secrecy, and silence;

wine, wisdom, woman, and worldly success;

charity, martyrdom, mercy, victory and love divine;

“I am true; love me, and you’ll discover it—

yours, heart and soul,” it says

in exchanges on St. Valentine’s Day.

Grace, desire, pure and inclined to love; hope, promise,

reward of virtue, and secret to immortality;

blissful soul, heavenly rejoice of faith;

from fingers of the dawn

to knowledge and law—

signifying truth to Buddhahood.

Window to eternity, are we worthy of you?

A new day, and your best look

inspiring us to be our best.