Thus He Spake of Adoration

So writes Jotter Vandol, (1944-2001) Danish Philosopher, student of Roscoe Van Dryver and three times winner of the Swedish Poetique de Philosophique Oblique Award (1989, 1994, 1999).

Vandol is considered by many modern critics to be the most calculated of the post-pre-meta-traditionalists, acting as a sort of epilogue to pre-meta-traditionalism by casting a backwards, almost dismissive glance on their works, referring to them in his memoirs as “derisive, derivational, and easily deconstructed—only to be restructured as self-serving tone poems,” (Vandol, 238) while at the same time acting as a kind of prologue to the meta-traditionalists themselves by penning his memoirs some 35 years before even beginning the works that led up to his magnum opus, Tour De France.

Indeed, it is the calculated methodology with which Vandol built the context in which he wanted to have Tour placed that more or less sets him apart as the penultimate post-pre-meta-traditionalist, setting the stage for his successor and biographer, Hercules Mapp. More than one scholar has pointed out that Mapp’s biography of Vandol, itself nothing more than an article titled “Thus He Spake of Adoration,” could not be the ultimate in post-pre-meta-traditional writing if it were not for the actual calculations of Vandol himself, rightly enough, and as such some scholars want to place Vandol as the ultimate himself; however, based in Tour alone, Vandol’s writing does not quite go as far as Mapp’s in showing how Vandol himself is the very definition, if not inspiration, of the post-pre-meta-traditional movement (Wilson, 27). Interested readers will want to refer to Mapp’s biography of Vandol as it appears in Bimonthly Quarterly, June 2002, pages 54-57.

Vandol began the calculated construction of his magnum opus as a young man at the Lycee D’Ecole Rhetorique, where he roomed with Michel Puissant, who would later become director of the Swedish Institute of Letters, the governing body which is responsible for the Poetique de Philosophique Oblique Award. By this time Vandol’s life’s work was already in motion, forging friendships and professional alliances in order to build the sort of network that would ensure his being able to publish and be published until he finally gave up writing in the final year of his life. It was a necessary side-effect of this that led to Puissant’s giving the award to his old roommate three times, leading Vandol to call the three trophies when he spoke about them as “my thrice bleak sweetspeak awards” (Wilson, 219).

Ricard Obsu, a professor at the Sudanese University of Technology and Agriculture, compares Vandol’s early career as a writer to the contemporary artist Christo:

A man wraps six and half million square feet of pink polypropylene around an island off the coast of Miami and calls it art, and for the most part everyone is too intimidated by the sheer magnitude of the work to even think of disagreeing. But this is not art; the art is in all of the arrangements Christo must make to accomplish this feat: the permits, the raising of funds, hiring workers, finding materials, press coverage, timing, and even clean-up. The various permutations and combinations of variables are juggled expertly, until Christo achieves something about which your average slob claims “I coulda done that” when we know more absolutely than we know the sky is blue that no one else could have done it all. And so Vandol. Tour de France is not the sort of book that on its own means anything much at all. But just that Vandol was able to place himself in the world of literature and publishing sufficient to get the thing printed shows that the true artistry of the book exists wholly when the reader literally holds the 3 pound thing in his hands (Obsu, 19).

It exists as well in the huge numbers of reviews and criticisms of the book that came out almost on the day of its publication. Mapp points out in “Thus He Spake” that Vandol’s ultimate goal was to have Tour de France referred at least 100 times as a “Tour de Force,” and this goal was achieved precisely on the publication of “Thus He Spake” in Bimonthly Quarterly. An article of 17 paragraphs, Mapp’s ultimate work of post-pre-meta-traditionalism peaks precisely in the seventh paragraph when he says, “Tour de France is a tour de force. Vandol uses the simplistic subject matter, a fusion-jazz band out of Oakland California called Tower of Power, as a means by which to show exactly how the subject of a work is immaterial to the meaning of the work when the context of the work has been constructed precisely as an excuse to use the work to evoke a meaning irrespective of the work itself…” (emphasis mine).

For this is exactly what Tour de France is about and not about at the same time. Tower of Power is a fusion-jazz band out of Oakland, which Vandol biographs in some 400 pages of precisely rendered text, save for the occasional nod towards traditional meta-traditionalism, such as the opening sentence: In as much as I am going to tell you about some musical things and some personal things, be assured that the only truth here is the subject matter itself, for to be sure, this book does not even exist, and in as much as even a lie has truth for using words that make it something really stated, (just as a song is true because the vibrations it causes in your ear are real) in fact nothing shall be stated here; the purpose of this tome is to be referred to only…(Vandol, 1) (emphasis mine).

This makes the choice of title both obvious and a cause for delighted revelation at the same time. It was the calculated control that Vandol constructed over the literary and publishing circles in which he moved that allows him to do this, to couch in the exact same three words two opposite reactions (Wilson, 18). The Tour de France, a bicycle race held over a period of three weeks in July in France, has so little to do with a fusion-jazz band out of Oakland, California that one is inexorably drawn to discovering that the biography of a small fusion-jazz band out of California has nothing to do with the penultimate message in post-pre-meta traditionalism, which is exactly what it is for the ultimate in post-pre-meta-traditionalism to point out: Tour de France, Vandol’s magnum opus, which is simultaneously about and not at all about Tower of Power, a book which does not even exist, is a tour de force.

Ironically, the ultimate in post pre meta traditionalism, Mapp’s “Thus He Spake of Adoration,” is not a tour de force, but perforce merely an exercise, or even, an excuse, or even, the result of exercise, in as much as Mapp was a student of Vandol’s just in the same way that Plato was a student of Socrates, if it is believed that Plato created the character of Socrates in order to proclaim his own philosophies (for Socrates himself never so much as wrote a single word) (Hortense, 188). Its not being a tour de force is why it is able to achieve the ultimate in post-pre-meta-traditionalism, since, to be sure, it cannot be the case that the deliberate, careful calculations of a Vandol will ultimately serve the establishment of those works which will lead to meta traditionalism, for, in the words of Obsu again:

If one creates something precisely with the idea that it will be referred to, it is not truly a thing unto itself, but connected to the referrer, and in this way, the referent is a kind of referrer itself, referring forwards in time to that which it will be referred to by (Obsu, 25).

Vandol’s calculated construction of his career so that Tour de France will have something to refer to by not referring to something it refers to can only be something that the ultimate in the pre-meta-tradition will use to establish itself, and, importantly, this is only accomplished by Mapp’s not originally necessarily intending to use his own article as the subject of the article he wrote, starting instead with the idea that he would be giving a fictional account of a work by a fictional philosopher who never wrote a book which is nevertheless not about the subject it titles itself from; Mapp’s saving grace, ironically, is the source if his angst, for, even if no one agrees that he has accomplished the goal he did not set out for himself but merely “discovered” by paragraph seven, it is nevertheless the case that since there is in fact no such thing as a meta-tradition, a pre-meta-tradition, nor a post-pre-meta-tradition, anything Mapp claims about Vandol will of course be the ultimate in these “empty set” writing movements. Sort of the literary equivalent of division by zero.

Necessarily, after Tour de France, Vandol confined himself to simpler, easier to grasp pieces until he gave up writing in the last year of his life. If Twilight Finds You Wandering Coldy further blurs the line between post-pre-meta-traditionalism by pointing backwards, knowingly, at those “derisive, derivational, and easily deconstructed”, pre-meta-traditionalists by being a wholesale rip-off of a work by Italo Calvino. His series of articles for “Quarterly Bimonthly” on Eric Miles Williamson’s East Bay Grease expertly avoids pointing out that Williamson himself, a trumpet playing jazz enthusiast turned writing professor, names his first novel after an album by Tower of Power, which he never mentions once in the novel, the which avoidance allows Vandol to, finally, be the vibration in the ear which is real even if the words are not. Appropriately, Vandol titled this series of articles “Laughing at Angst.”

--Hercules Mapp (2002).

Bibliography

• Amaury Sport Organisation (copyright owners) (2003). TDF – 2003: canal le Tour – OLN [online] Available: http://tdf.oldtv.com

• Church, Jok (webmaster) (2003). Surrounded Islands. Christo and Jeanne Claude [on-line] Available: http://christojeanneclaude.net/si.html

• Ebon, Andy (webmaster) (2003). Tower of Power. East Bay Soul Music – towerofpower.com [online] Available: http://www.bumpcity.com

• Hortense, Abercrombie. (1999). Plato Versus Socrates. London: Best House Publishing.

• Mapp, Hercules. (2003). Thus He Spake of Adoration. WWW.Bukkhead.Com [on-line] Available: http://www.bukkhead.com/rwt/thus_he_spake.html

• --- (2002) Thus He Spake of Adoration. Bimonthly Quarterly 87, 54-57.

• Obsu, Ricard. (2000). On the Reflection of Introspection Correction. Sudanese Philisophical Yearly 13, 10-33.

• Vandol, Jotter. (1966) Memoirs. Cleveland: Hot Springs Press.

• ---(1998) Irony and Angst as Sobriquets for Quiescent Alliteration. Loquacious Sesquipedalian Daily 3345, 55-128.

• --- (1999). Tour de France. Little Rock: Ohio Underwriters.

• --- (2000) Laughing at Angst. Quarterly Bimonthly 22-27 (pgs var).

• Williamson, Eric Miles (1999). East Bay Grease. New York: Picador.

• Wilson, A.A. (2001). Left of Center, Right on the Money: Vandol and Mapp in Contemporary Literacy. New York: Little, Green, Hansom.