“Middle of the evening to you, CNB!” (baker laughs)
CNB:
Good to hear from you again baker.
bb:
Tonight we wish to focus on your writing more than your art, perhaps, but we’ll see.
CNB:
Yes. Thanks again.
bb:
You didn’t write before getting to New Mexico in, what was it, ’57?
CNB:
Yes. No. I didn’t write. The work I started in New Mexico evolved straight from the art I was doing. Ernst’s collage novels were an inspiration as well. A Week of Kindness, or The Seven Deadly Sins. I may have taken the title, Red Squirt Seven, directly from this work. Hard to remember now for some reason.
bb:
How long was it? You stated it was a cut-up, also inspired by William Burroughs’ work, then.
CNB:
Another direct influence. The work itself was 201 chapters long. Although this wasn’t the direct source of the book, since it came much later, I realized in 2001 some quite interesting parallels with 9/11, specificallly the design of the two towers themselves.
bb:
How so?
CNB:
The book was designed as two squares, shall we say, of basically 100 chapters each. The book has the ability, though, to shift 10 chapters over from its center to make two books of, first, 90 chapters, and then 110 chapters. But it is not two books until it makes this shift; it is not two books of 100 chapters and then 100 more chapters. It only manifests as two books during this shift. 9/11, then.
bb:
I don’t quite get it, although we tried to talk about it a little last night before starting this new episode of our interviews tonight. Perhaps an illustration would be best. I know also this is based upon the structure of Psalm 46 from the King James Bible.
CNB:
Right. That’s how it all started. That’s the *causal* origin of the structure. Each chapter represents 1 word of this Psalm, minus the 3 “selahs”, which are space fillers or represent pauses between certain verses, which happen to number 11 as well. The attraction to this particular Psalm, twice the number of the much more famous Psalm 23, is its connection with Shakespeare. Do I need to go over that here?
bb:
Well, let me get you started. I know that the word “shake” is the 46th word from the beginning of this particular Psalm, and the word “spear” is the 46th word from the end of the Psalm. Minus the “Selahs” as you said. Combined they make Shakespear, which could be translated as “Shakespeare”, as in The Bard. It just so happens that Shakespeare, the author, was 46 years old in 1611 when the version of the King James Bible he was actually working on was published. Some say that Shakespeare, or perhaps another translator or group of translators, inserted this “accident” as a tribute to The Bard, who was already quite famous in England at the time.
CNB:
There’s actually no hard evidence to the fact that Shakespeare helped with the publication of this version of the Bible, though. I never took it as fact. I was interested, like you are often, with the mere presence of the very interesting coincidence. This was fueled by a couple of things. First off, I was well aware that a ghost town named Shakespeare existed just below my newish home of Lordsburg. I believe this may be the only town named as such, at least to my knowledge. Perhaps you know of others?
bb:
Not offhand.
CNB:
Also the word LORD appears in Psalm 46 three times, and always capitalized, unlike all other words.
bb:
So you think this has to do with Lordsburg.
CNB:
The two conjunctions of “Lord” and “Shakespeare” are no accident to me. This was the seed for the work, then.
bb:
Did you cut up Psalm 46 then, to match the words “shake” and “spear”?
CNB:
Initially I did. Actually the first several years I kind of just played around with the collage. It was on the top shelf of my closet, all in one piece, almost.
bb:
But you never really finished it, did you Chuck?
CNB:
No, it was never published as such. It went through different phases, different stages. I worked on and off on it, between paintings, between sculptures. When I received my first computer in 1997, custom designed, I began to see the rich possibilities inherent in the natural shift of the book from 10/10 to 9/11. Then when 9/11 actually occurred, I almost immediately saw the connection. I began to really take a good look at what I’d done.
bb:
Do you wish to talk about words and characters? How the book was actually constructed?
CNB:
Psalm 46 contains 201 words and 801 characters, only including the letters and not punctuation. Almost exactly 4 letters to a word on the average. A key is separating the central part of the Psalm, beginning with the 46th word “shake” and ending with the 46th word from the end, “spear”, from the rest of the words of the Psalm, or the beginning 45 words and ending 45 words. And then seeing the entire Psalm as repeating itself in a loop, where the last 45 words hook up with the beginning 45 words to make an endless phrasing, and a total of 90 words in this second group. The number of words in the central part of the Psalm, beginning with shake and ending with spear again, are 111, and with 440 characters — another 4:1 relationship. And then the 90 words around this contain 361 characters. Yet again a 4:1 relationship. Early on, then, I saw that we had an alternating pattern of 90 words and 110 words, because the extra word can be seen as extraneous.
bb:
CNB, many people would say such coincidences mean nothing, and detract from real study of The Bible. What do you say about that? And is that a factor in deciding not to publish your work?
CNB:
They may very well be correct in this. I attempted to study The Bible during this time, and also Shakespeare for that matter. But I still have only cursory knowledge of each. Far, far away from being an expert.
bb:
But the truth is, you *are* an expert.
CNB:
No, that’s not true.
bb:
How does the work shift? Red Squirt Seven?
CNB:
No, we are talking about the work Shakenstein, as in a cut up, like the monster Frankenstein was. We talked about this before: the combo of Shakespeare and Steins that both of us came up with. Another non-accident, I believe.
bb:
Oh. So how does Red Squirt Seven come in here?
CNB:
I’ll save that for another time. Getting back to Shakenstein, if you loop end back to beginning again in terms of Psalm 46, you get the pattern of 9-11 repeating over and over again. 9-11-9-11-9-11-9-11 and so on. But it *starts* with 10-10-10-10; this is the latent aspect. Only when 10-10 shifts to 9-11 is the latent made physical. And the characters, 4 times the amount of words, also shift.
bb:
You also said this has something to do with your anagrammical signs.I think specifically here of, what was it…
CNB:
“Sawmill Heir Wins Pis-Ant Reward, HA”
bb:
Yeah, that one.
CNB:
Well, I saw it as an advantage, in a way, that I was no expert at all on either of the two involved subjects, Shakespeare or The Bible. I learned about each, though, through the process of the cut-up itself. Rearranging of words and letters/characters.
bb:
Did you ever get into Bible Codes?
CNB:
The Michael Drosnin stuff? I studied it for a while. I’d say, what I’ve seen, that there’s definitely something to it, especially the beginning stuff. The idea that the Torah dictated by Moses directly from God represents one single thread or string of characters is interesting to me.
bb:
So did you play around with these codes on your computer when you purchased it?
CNB:
First off, someone gave me the computer (laughs), and, yes, I’ve played around with ’em, just to find out their limits.
bb:
Who gave you that custom designed computer Chuck?
CNB:
I’m not allowed to say.
bb:
Does “squirt” actually represent “sqrt”, as in “square root”?
(to be continued)
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