A Christmas Story By Charles Mundungus

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kashmir

Lifer
May 17, 2011
2,712
63
Northern New Jersey
A highly recommended, and perhaps required, Christmas reading by none other than Charles Mundungus. A blog provided by Neat Pipes.
Case N° 131216
A CHRISTMAS PIPE: THE LIFE YOU SAVE MAY BE YOUR OWN

by Charles Mundungus
santa.jpg

http://www.neatpipes.com/blog/a-christmas-pipe-the-life-you-save-may-be-your-own/&id=64?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Neatpipes.com+-+%22News+from+The+Blog%22+-+New+...&utm_source=YMLP&utm_term=neatpipes_merryxmas.jpg

 

kashmir

Lifer
May 17, 2011
2,712
63
Northern New Jersey
Mundungus Fletcher is a dweller in the Wizarding underworld, a dealer in stolen merchandise, in Harry Potter. I can therefore only assume Charles Mundungus is a distant cousin of sorts.

 

kashmir

Lifer
May 17, 2011
2,712
63
Northern New Jersey
The heart of the story:
"Afterwards, when everyone was trudging up the stairs and out into the cold, I screwed up my courage and went over to introduce myself to the Head CELF and see if I could get a copy of the manuscript. He said he was leaving town that night for North Dakota, but if I wanted I could stay and copy a few pages while he had a last pipe with a friend of his. I flipped back and forth through the manuscript, but in the end couldn’t decide what was most important. This was what I came away with:
The Smoaker is a hesychast or lover of silence in his ability to sit and smoak without the noise and chatter of the world or the conversation of others or the playing of music or even the reading of books. The Smoaker knows himself in silence. He may, of course, listen to music or take up a good book or some other edifying or recreating activity, but in doing these things he is not simply Smoaking and cannot therefore understand if he is, in fact, a Smoaker.3
There is, then, only one way to know if he has a vocation for smoak: the Smoaker must be able to sit and light his pipe and smoak in silence. This is the ascesis or discipline; this is the anamnesia or recollection; this is the hesychasm or silence. He must decide that within the time he is Smoaking that he will not be pulled out of the smoak by an unread letter, by a knock on the door, or by a sudden burst of energy which prompts him to do at once what he has left undone in years or days or hours past. This is not easy. So he settles down and says, “Here I am,” and he is. . . .
If the Smoaker has learned to do this in the moments of his life when his toil is done, in a few of the evenings when he takes his ease, if he has learned not to fidget inwardly, but to be completely calm and happy, stable and serene, then his smoak is indeed ascending as the incense of the evening sacrifice to God. He may be sure that he has a vocation to smoak, although the vocation will continually be tested just as the Smoaker himself is tested.
Moments may come when he will require some defenses against his Smoaking. Guests will come into his home who cannot abide the smell of his smoak or hurl abuse at his sacramental understanding of this holy ritual. But the Smoaker will not smoak in the presence of hostile guests nor make reply to those who lack understanding of the sublimities of the divine herb. And when he is Smoaking, people will knock at the door unannounced and uninvited. But when the Smoaker has made up his mind that if he was not at home he would not open the door, he can do what I have done. I do not answer my door. If someone needs me, he can leave a message. If the need is urgent, he will continue knocking. I have a little note on the door saying, “Please don’t go to the trouble of knocking. I am at home but I will not open the door. I am Smoaking and am at peace, offering myself to God. Please go in peace.” This is a way which is much more decisive, because people understand it at once instead of believing the Smoaker to be ill or out or simply misanthropic, which of course he is not. He is simply being faithful to the silence which is necessary to the smoak, practicing the solitude the soul requires if it is to understand itself before God.
When the Smoaker has learned to do this . . . . he has learned to stop time and practice holy silence and holy Smoaking. He is the master of time because he no longer lives in profane or kronos time, but in kairos or sacred time".

 
May 31, 2012
4,295
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2860e29fce9b276eaf8087fbdac5972a.jpg

Thanks Kashmir!
Charles Mundungus is one of my favorite pipes/tobacco writers, his writerly work is incredible and I'm so glad he's found a venue on NeatPipes --- I would love to see an actual printed book from him, he can weave words most wizardly and cast magic to catch phosphorescent phrasings describing the ineffable aetherworlds of the microclimates involved within a little briar bowl of burning tobacco, the smoak itself as it were.
Long live Chas. Mundungus!

:puffy: :clap: :puffy: :clap: :puffy: :clap:

 

brian64

Lifer
Jan 31, 2011
9,602
14,666
This is the ascesis or discipline; this is the anamnesia or recollection; this is the hesychasm or silence.
So much more of that is needed in the modern world.

 

kashmir

Lifer
May 17, 2011
2,712
63
Northern New Jersey
C. Mundungus never ceases to expand my vocabulary. Like the term "Hesychasm". And what does that have to do with pipe smoking and Christmas, of all things?
Hesychasm (Greek: συχασμός, hesychasmos, from συχία, hesychia, "stillness, rest, quiet, silence") is an eremitic tradition of prayer in the Eastern Orthodox Church and Eastern Catholic Churches of Byzantine Rite practised (Gk: συχάζω, hesychazo: "to keep stillness") by the Hesychast (Gr. συχαστής, hesychastes). Based on Christ's injunction in the Gospel of Matthew to "when thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray", hesychasm in tradition has been the process of retiring inward by ceasing to register the senses, in order to achieve an experiential knowledge of God".

 
May 31, 2012
4,295
34
Yowza!
I wonder if Chas. Mundungus is a nom de plume of Mark Irwin?
I sorta suspect so.
That would explain the extraordinary wordpool langflow, if indeed it's the same Mark Irwin who is a total poet?
A Mark Irwin also wrote Pipe Smoking In Middle Earth, and we can add to that being a co-writer for the grand upcoming Peterson book!
Hmmm...
Puzzlement from me now that I've actually bumped around a bit.
A clue found?

More like a translucent scrap really,

" Amerikanischen Pfeifenfreund Mark Irwin, alias "Chas Mundungus "

via

http://www.fdt.dsky-web.de/

but it won't allow acess to the direct link...

...but still unknown if it is the poet Mark Irwin, I'd gather a good guess that it just may be,

but maybe not.
I would still love to see a C. Mundungus book though!
A Pipeman's Handbook of Really Useful Information , was published under the Charles Mundungus name, it's a great archival anthology of web-related findings, and can still be found upon the looking, I downloaded a pdf of it and printed a copy out on paper, just as suggested in the forward, fingertips over pixelbits for me!
Here are some essay excerpts from the poet Mark Irwin, uncanningly similar!
Truth, uncompromisingly told, will always have its ragged edges.

--Melville, Billy Budd
Truth, that wobbly absolute and cousin of the transcendent, has been defined, redefined, and fine tuned by philosophers from Plato and St. Augustine through Nietzsche and Heidegger, the latter who returned to its notion from classical Greek antiquity: aletheia. The derivation of the word, a (out of) plus Lethe (the river of forgetfulness) begins to comment on the nature of art itself, which is a function of truth. In “The Origin of the Work of Art,” Heidegger tells us “the nature of truth, that is, of unconcealedness, is dominated throughout by denial.” Truth and remembering force being out of forgetfulness, and Heidegger argued that the nature of poetry is “the founding of truth,” one that occurs through concealing and revealing. Perhaps it was Nietzsche’s metaphorical death of God, however, that has most impacted transcendental notions of truth, and how later, according to Derrida and Foucault, we must reinterpret all major western texts if the phrase “In the beginning was the word, and the word was God” is no longer valid. Modern and contemporary writers, as well as composers and painters, might find consonance and safety in a phrase from Melville: Truth, uncompromisingly told, will always have its ragged edges.
Although Melville’s salient remark from Billy Budd reveals his complex quarrel with God, it also stands as metaphor for what in art is often most indefinable and thus most alluring. It’s not what seems finished to the eye that haunts us, but what remains unfinished to the heart, for that is the inexhaustibility of content we sometimes refer to as paradox.
&
...the speaker writes “to be as wrong as possible” to both the lover and implied reader. “Replace the door when you leave, it says.” But how can such a door be replaced? How can love gesture again after such abandon?. The phrase “how wrong that is, how long it glows” creates a hologram for what can never be substituted, or what can never replace emotion, though we continue to eat of its fruit in the past, to glow with its expiration.
In his “Critique of Judgment,” Immanuel Kant tells us that in nature, the beautiful” is connected with the form of the object, having definite boundaries.” He then informs us that the sublime “is to be found in a formless object,” one in which “its boundlessness is represented, and yet its totality is also present to thought.” Though it does not exhibit all the negative qualities of the sublime, Marvin Bell’s “To Dorothy” does begin “to violate purpose in respect to judgment,” and clearly suggests how the amplitude and complex-ities of truth are primarily due to their inexactness. The poem begins, “You are not beautiful, exactly. / You are beautiful, inexactly. / You let a weed grow by the mulberry / and a mulberry by the house.”
& a poem,
GO
A small word with no end to it and a wind

that continues into another country.

A word that takes on a different meaning

after someone dies, a word that has a strange

engine that says, “Continue,” but then continues

not to move as if burdened with its own

command, a breath which is all exhale. Once

in dream I was sent to the country of GO

with a message for the king who was dying

but seemed to understand, except that he was

unable to reply, then it turned out he

wasn’t really a king after all, just a man,

and all the time I was hoping he would say

something like GO FORTH, which sounds kind of

cheery before you start to think about it. The

question now’s not so much how to reconstruct

our lives, but how to stop the word that almost gets

to God before it’s really gone. The word has

a hollow noise, an otherness beyond. So

what do we do? Does one simply

say, “Now, now,” like firing blanks into eternity.
&
"And the transom of light leapt to an ocean of shadow.
Pouring out over the bridges

the knocking sound of bodies.
Pouring out over the bridges

the knocking sound of bodies.
- - - words

in a verbflash torn out of their mouths"
:

:

:

:

:

:

I could be totally offtrack tho, LOL
Anyway, thanks for the prompt Kashmir and stirrin' the neurojolt!

 

planetary

Starting to Get Obsessed
Jul 4, 2012
165
4
SF Bay Area
Beware, gentlemen, for I bring dire warnings: do not delve too deeply into Mundungiana. Men wiser than we have spoken at length of the perils of those who would sate their curiosity upon the foetid swamps of lost knowledge. I beg you: leave these annals, though you have not yet trod them; burn your tomes, though you have not gazed upon the unspeakable figures written within; verily, too, drag your bookmarks into evaporated poofs of miasmic pixels before clicking upon them to open in a new browser tab.
You will find neither peace nor goodwill about matters Mundungus -- only unutterable terrors from beyond space and time.

 
May 31, 2012
4,295
34
There can be no return from the unfolding phosphorescent fog rolling thick in the multimythos of that Mundungian aetherrealm, mine eyes have gazed the infinite cosmicopia written in that texture which trembles upon the page and once one has glimpsed extracts from the cryptica scriptura of the Grand Bacconomicon and contemplated those myriad mysteries, one who once was simply a smoker becomes a smoaker, stricken with an obscure sort of fever manifested with an odd gnostic anamnesis which can only be quenched with a compleat exothermic fumophagocytosis.
Just one glimpse onto that errie incandescence softly glowing within the pages of those hieroglyphics will hurdle the most mighty of whirling thunderwords into ones pulsing skull and there is no return from that bathyspheric inkwell, once one enters into that crystallized encephalatrium, one undergoes an auxological transmogrification of cranioclastic blastitudes, an alteration of aisthēsis itself.
The incalculable aspects of the Mundungus cryptocorpus reaches toward ecstatic heights in an astrographic tempest of imaginative preternatural delight.
One becomes silently transfixed in an endotropical meditation by reading the Mundungus scriptologies and a rememberance of the intrinsic hyperuniverse unhidden as glorious fulfillment rushes throughout ones whole being in the reception of the core content of such intense ontological value.
A quantum leap in perception, identity, cognition, understanding, the world and self-experience itself.
In that weird textual dynamo, the machinations initiate new drivetrains geared for broader travels toward a more vivid geography of the soul, sending restorative cipher signals mapping a forgotten route back to a more fruitful de vita contemplativa.
Some may say it's a delirium, but it is no dream, the neuroactive agents contained within his alchemic pen and his eldritch exegeses trigger something very real beyond the phenomenal world and outside of primordial time.
Charles Mundungus is a hermeneutical kapnismologist of the highest order.
Apollonius of Tyana, writing as Hermes Trismegistos, said

'That which is above is that which is below.'


 

kashmir

Lifer
May 17, 2011
2,712
63
Northern New Jersey
Thanks Mr.LC.

Love the Lakeland floral language.

And, I think, you've summed it up quite nicely.

We pipe smokers, in Tolkien's parlance, are but "Ents" in the forest of life.

 
May 31, 2012
4,295
34
Sadly, with the redesign of the NeatPipes site, the old links do not work, the articles are still there, you just have to dig for them.
I said earlier in this thread:
A Pipeman's Handbook of Really Useful Information
, was published under the Charles Mundungus name, it's a great archival anthology of web-related findings, and can still be found upon the looking, I downloaded a pdf of it and printed a copy out on paper, just as suggested in the forward, fingertips over pixelbits for me!

I've lost count of how many times I've read this thing, the paper is now dirtied with ashfinger & etc,

it was then and remains now one of the most helpful pipesmoking documents I've had the pleasure of reading.
For anyone who might not have seen it before,

I highly recommend it!



http://biblio.catasdetabacos.com/books%20pdf/Chas%20Mundungus%20-%20Pipeman%20Handbook.pdf​
:puffy:

 
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