Arden's brief biography

© 19982010 by Arden Schaeffer, 19322032?

Edition of 2010-07-31, hour 13:13:13

at URL
http://www.nola.house.name/en/arden.html


Dedicated to
the late
Walt Meryman
of the Lodi Writers Association of Lodi, California, USA,
who insisted that i write my bio.


Table of Contents
(ToC)
























 
Table Of Contents



 
Arden's portrait-photographs

  • Arden.1997.181x244.gif, © 1998 by Arden Schaeffer, 1932-2032?:
    • 169 KB
    • photographed in CE 1997 at and by the Bank of America;
    • scanned in 1998 by Rick Eisner who named it "St. Arden" after Saint Nick;
    • cropped in 1998 by Greg Yahna;
    • mounted in 1998 by Arden.
  • arden.2003-1200x1600.jpg
    • photographed in CE 2003.11 on Thanksgiving Day
      at a party at the Salada Beach Cafe in Pacifica, California, USA.
    • 784 KB - Caveat Downloader!
  • Arden.2004-2048x1536.jpg

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Arden's existence || other | other | other ||

i, me: do i exist? in the 17th-century, French philosopher Ren Descartes says:
"Cogito ergo sum."meaning: "I think, therefore I am."
in this, i disagree with him; so, in the morning,
when i sit on my piercd throne of meditation that sits on the flushable cacking-bowl,
i chant my anti-Cartesian mantram, which is:
"Caco ergo sum."meaning: "I cack, therefore I am."

myself: does the self exist? the Buddhists say not; but one evening when i was in bed with a woman, she said "Put yourself into me"; and then i remembered all those other phrasesto touch oneself, to play with oneself, to expose oneself, etc; and then i understood what my self was, and that i did indeed have a self, and that my self did indeed exist.

|| existence ||

 
Arden's incarnation

Arden was not born; but, rather, hatched naked and wet out of a dinosaur-egg in the year CE 1932 which the kids say was in the Age of the Dinosaurs; and to be naked was illegal, and to be wet was obscene; and today, under his clothing, Arden is still naked, and under his skin, Arden is still wet, and is therefore still illegal and obscene; and it was not until the following year, 1933, that Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany, and US President Franklin Delano Roosevelt declared a bank holiday in the USA.

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Arden's religion

Arden's mother got religion when he was eleven years old, and they both were baptized into the Seventh-Day Adventist church. When Arden reached the ripe old age of twelve, and puberty, he realized that he was an unregenerate Pagan because he was more interested in the Goddess, and in the secret that she kept hidden between her legs, than in any god other than himself as the Horned Lord. Later, Arden was a member of Starhawk's original Compost Coven which lasted from 1975 to 1977; studied and practised ritual Magick for a decade while an eternal Minerval of the Ordo Templi Orientis; in the early 1980s was ordained a priest in the Ecclesia Gnostica Catholica by the Patriarch Hymenaeus Alpha 777, now deceased (for more information about the Ecclesia Gnostica Catholica, contact the O.T.O.); and, to this day, Arden still celebrates the seasons with the Pagans, and sometimes the Missa Gnostica with the Thelemites; and is currently doing research in Vajrayāna Buddhism.

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Arden's profession

  • Arden knew that embalming was one of the duties of the ancient Egyptian priesthood; so in 1950 when Arden graduated from high school, and the local mortician offered him a job as an apprentice embalmer and funeral director, how could Arden refuse? Of course he had to accept, and did. Arden now holds a BMS or Bachelor of Mortuary Science degree from the San Francisco College of Mortuary Science which he attended when it was situated at 1450 Post Street. The college, not knowing that the culprit was Arden, threatened to expell from the college and from the mortuary profession, if caught, whoever placed upon the pillow of an open and empty coffin a note saying "Out to lunch."
  • Since then, Arden has spent two years in the US Army Signal Corps;
  • seven years checking cargo on the waterfront around the San Francisco Bay;
  • and many years working as a translator, both for the US Joint Publications Research Service, and privately.
  • Arden is now retired, and spends his time:
    • gardening;
    • cleaning out and repairing his house;
    • purging his pack-rattery lest he die like the second of the two Collyer_brothers of Manhattan;
    • writing Web pages in HTML to facilitate his lexicography;
    • working on his dictionary of Magick (sic), metaphysics, mysticism, and the occult, titled Arden's Scroll of Ancient and Forbidden Lore;
    • reading the Bardo Thdol and preparing to die (which is an excellent spiritual exercise that's recommended by all the best teachers).

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Arden's languages

During his childhood and adolescence, Arden read a number of European books, written during the Renaissance, whose authors took it for granted that everyone knew that, to be well educated, a gentleman must speak Hochdeutsch (High Dutch, a.k.a. German), English, French, Italian, and Spanish, and be able to read ancient Latin and Greek; so Arden learned to speak those first five languages, and to read all ten of the Romance languages, a little ancient Latin if it's vulgar enough, much less Greek, and of course Interlingua. || Language, Linguistics, Philology ||

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Arden's intellectual life

  • Arden enrolled in the theological curriculum at a small Seventh-Day Adventist college, then left in disgrace in the spring of 1951 because he read to the Men's Society a spoof of a commercial for a car called the Holls Royce which had a portable toilet cleverly conealed beneath one of the jump seats, and said that "You can get a head in your Holls", which in that rarefied spiritual atmosphere was considered to be quite improper for an aspiring theologian.
  • Arden enrolled in 1954 in the Cours de Civilisation Française at the Université de Paris à la Sorbonne;
  • returned in July of 1955 to the US, and, at the University of California at Berkeley, majored first in sociology and then in linguistics where he got As in the difficult courses and Fs in the easy courses, and flunked out after six years;
  • worked for five years on an interlinguistic dictionary of the cosmos in nine languages, which led him to study astrology and the occult, then met young Frenchmen who told him that English was now the interlanguage of planet Earth (and when even the French admitted that, Arden knew that it had to be true), so he converted his notes for his interlinguistic dictionary into a dictionary of Magick (sic), metaphysics, mysticism, and the occult, in English, which is now at this Web-site under the title Arden's Scroll of Ancient and Forbidden Lore.
  • || Table Of Contents | Title ||

 
Arden's cyberLife

  • In 1966, at IBM school, Arden learned to write computer program code in IBM 1401 Autocoder and IBM 360 CØBØL;
  • in 1988, the late John P. McClimans lent Arden a 20-pound Osborne I portable computer which ran Gary Kildall's then red-hot operating system program for microcomputers which Kildall called Control Program for Microcomputers, or Control Program/Monitor, or CP/M; and Arden used it to run WordStar to accelerate his lexicography;
  • when its chip fried, Heléna Margarethe Knox lent Arden, for a month, the use of her Compaq 286 running WordStar under DOS version something-or-other;
  • in 1989, on March 17, Arden bought a Macintosh SE computer, became addicted to the Macintosh platform, and soon joined BMUG;
  • learned from BMUG member Chuck Finney how to write elementary HyperTalk script, and to unsheath and wield wickedly his vorpal copy of ResEdit, then continued on his own to develop his scripting skills;
  • learned from technical-documentation writer Margo Pardee how to write good user interfaces;
  • developed the rudiments of a new version of HyperCard which he may call HyperArden if he ever learns how to write XCMDs in C;
  • learned some AppleScripting from Dan Meriwether;
  • learned a bit of HTML from George Woolley, and more from Dan Meriwether and Greg Yahna;
  • wrote the Web pages on this site that you're visiting;
  • took some pressure off Dan Meriwether and Rick Eisner by teaching HTML in conjunction with George Woolley, Ian A. Cumming, Michael McMillan, Saori Kappus, and others at the BMUG Internet SIG.
  • || informatics | HTML-Curriculum | HTML-Glossary | HTML-Syllabus || Table Of Contents | Title ||

 
Arden's social life

Arden's social life exists both in virtual reality on the Internet,
and also in real life in meatspace which is also known as physical reality.

|| Table Of Contents | Title ||

 
Arden's philosophy

After reading during his childhood, and drawing inspiration from,
a biography of Genghiz Khan,
and Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf,
Arden has acquainted himself with the rudiments of the philosophies of:
  • the Buddha, Siddhartha Gautama Çakyamuni, called the Tathagata;
  • the supposèd Jesus the supposèd Christ
    as reported by the New Testament of the Bible of the Christians, so-called
  • Niccolò Macchiavelli
  • the Corsican Napuleone Bonaparte who became the French Napoléon Bonaparte
  • Friederich Nietzsche
  • Aleister Crowley
  • George Gurdjieff
  • Adolf Hitler
  • Anton Szandor LaVey,
  • Timothy Leary
  • Baba Ram Dass
  • Terence McKenna
  • Antero Alli
  • the entity named Jesus who
    inspired the Jewish atheist psychoanalyst Helen Schucman, to write, with William Thetford, the book entitled "A Course in Miracles"
  • Marianne Williamson
  • James Redfield
  • Dannion Brinkley
  • Eckhart Tolle
  • Patrul Rinpoche
  • and others too numerous or disgusting to mention.

|| Philosophies and religions ||

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Arden's bibliography

  • Arden, having once learned to read, became addicted thereto;
    and the resultant bibliography will soon follow;
  • in the meantime, if you need a bibliography, you may wish to consult the excellent and very compendious bibliography entitled Index Librôrum Prohibitôrum.

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Arden's emotional life

Arden is a very sensitive soul who has all the sensitivity of cactus.
(Cacti, being hypersensitive, put out thorns so that they won't get hurt.)

in 1955, in Paris, Arden married a Corsican woman named Antunietta Marsilî, from whom he has not been able to escape.

Arden is having an ongoing love-affair with his concubine, who is a cat, and is less capricious than are most women; but no love affairs with women at the moment; and, for the sake of his tranquility, it's probably just as well.

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Arden's sex life

Arden's sex life, like that of US President Clinton with Miss Twinkle-Twat, is none of your business.
However, you may find it interesting to read a comment by Beth Norris...

|| comment by Beth Norris || Table Of Contents | Title ||

 
Arden's dreams

Arden's dreams are too private to recount, even to you, dear reader.

|| Table Of Contents | Title ||

 
Arden's spiritual life

In 1966 Arden learned Zen meditation at the Zen monastery at Tassajara in Carmel Valley, California, USA;
practised with Sufis in the tradition of Pir Vilayat Inayat Khan;
worked Wiccan rites with Starhawk's Compost Coven;
continues to practise alone.

Arden's spirits are high these days.
Arden's mystical experiences are ineffable.

Having become enlightened,
Arden refuses to use any of the products of
Microsoft, the evil empire of
that great Satan of the Northwest,
the baby-faced devil Billy the Gates.

|| Philosophies and religions ||

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Post Scriptum: Editor's note on the disappearance of Arden

On July 9th in the year 2032, after having celebrated the centennial anniversary of his birthday, Arden disappeared in mysterious circumstances. San Francisco police report that at the San Francisco International Airport he boarded a plane bound for Ajaccio, Corsica; Corsican police report that at that exact same moment at Ajaccio he boarded a plane bound for Paris, France; and Parisian police report that at that exact same moment in Paris he boarded a plane bound for San Francisco, CA, USA. No one of Arden's description was reported to have disembarked from any of those three planes. Arden's personal physician, Dr Jack Kevorkian of Michigan, USA, could not be reached for comment. If you have any information concerning the disappearance of Arden, Interpol would very much like to know what you know.

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Arden's legacy


Arden's legacy is Arden's Scroll of Ancient and Forbidden Lore

|| Acknowledgement | Links || Table Of Contents | Title ||

 
Acknowledgement

The border graphic, with the HTML code for mounting it, was contributed by Dan Meriwether.

|| Table Of Contents | Title ||

 
Links

Portal | index | Arden's Scroll of Ancient and Forbidden Lore


 
Last Line || Title | Table Of Contents | index | Portal || End-of-Page ||