The Snare of Distance and the Sunglasses of the Seer / Part Two
Brian George, Monkey on the Lightning Tree, photogram, 2002
“The Proteus who sleeps inside us has opened his eyes. And we say what must be said. These jolts are for us what snares and tortures were to the sea-green prophet.”—Giorgio de Chirico
~∞~
If we are a storehouse for the “seeds of every form and the sprouts of every sort of life,” as Pico della Mirandola argues, who knows but that we might not scare ourselves? “The New Man is living amongst us now!” said Hitler, “He is here! Isn’t that enough for you? I will tell you a secret. I have seen the New Man. He is intrepid and cruel. Even I was afraid of him.” Once, we were not so easily impressed. We had not yet volunteered to be eaten by the gods, they to whom we had recklessly given birth. We were not afraid of giants, who burned as brightly as atomic bombs, nor of tiny beings with large eyes, who were skilled at creating simulacra. Our craniums were large, and open at the top, but we did not necessarily need large bodies to go with them. One size fit all. It was endlessly interactive. Mercury had attached its power to our ankles. We did not need wings! Few realize that the oceans fill the footprints that we left, that megaliths mark the vast multitude of our navels, or that the sky is filled to overflowing with our tears.
Much stupider than they think, Earth’s top one percent are nonetheless quite adept at playing games. Let us posit: that they rule by reactivating some antediluvian trauma, the fear of which has been bred into our bones, the records about which have been hidden in the coils of junk DNA, which they, and they alone, have somehow learned to read. Such feats of micromanagement! All data is then made to correspond. Not being actual prophets, of course, their reading of these records is hit or miss at best. “As you are figuring out the world,” they say, “we will have manufactured a new one, and then another one after that!” This does not mean that they are actually in charge. Like us, they are subject to whatever spells they cast, and, as the apparatus of the Great Year turns, they are swept along with the other 99 percent. No part can ever be taken from the whole, nor does the One increase when added to itself. We move as One, unconsciously, and pushed forward from behind.
Brian George, Time-Spiral, 2003
As we free ourselves from the common wisdom, paranoia may be the most immediate of temptations. All conspiracy theories may be true, or none of them, or a fact from this one and an archetype from that one, but in the end such labyrinthine explorations may not lead to greater freedom. The trap is this: that we are always the good guys, and someone else is always to blame for every evil in the world.
Appearances to the contrary, it is possible that the things that matter most are actually very simple. As citizens of the greater city of the cosmos, who have now been grounded, it is our job to remove the layers of obfuscation that cut each person from the core of his/her power, so that each may again serve as a kind of movable Omphalos. Gently but persistently, we must bring our attention back to what I will call the “Boy Scout (or Girl Scout) Code of Conduct,” as this was understood by the Ancients. The 21 “Anamnesian Maxims” that correspond to the seven “Anamnesian Virtues” are below. These are formatted as injunctions. To the extent that they can be interpreted at all, there are some that must be followed to the letter. There are others that might put the practitioner into conflict with the Authorities. In your cultivation of virtue, or “virtu,” if you go with the classical understanding of the word, you must read not only with your own eyes but also through the eyes of your opponent. You must read between the lines, as well as what is on them. Obey at your own risk. These 21 “Anamnesian Maxims” are as follows:
1) We must love to act well for the sake of acting well; all action is circular, and no Uroboros can remove the tail from its mouth.
2) We must work hard and stick to our projects through any and all obstacles, until, as if by magic, we one day finish what we started. Looking back, we must thank all of those forces that conspired to destroy us. We will have died more than a dozen times since we set forth from our blackened port. We must not be so naïve again.
3) We must learn how to accept the full responsibility for our actions, and be the first to gladly admit it when we are wrong. If we discover, as in a dream, that we have caused harm to the innocent, we must accuse those who have dared to point their fingers at us, for it is they who have tainted our otherwise spotless minds.
4) We must cultivate a smile, and be able to transmit warmth from the solar plexus. It is in this way that our energy will tempt space to self-organize. As much as does the sun, we will then be able to micromanage each event.
5) We must be willing to meet each person on their own terms, however self-deluded or sociopathic they might be. We will know that we have succeeded when their flaws become an almost exact mirror-image of our own. We must then kiss the horror that confronts us in the mirror.
6) We must be generous with our friends, but more generous with our enemies. We must hold them as close as Teddy bears. For they MUST be kept off balance. We must trust that our sense of style will make up for the catastrophic damage that we cause.
7) Putting fears aside, we must do our best to act with some appropriate degree of courage, which may mean standing still. We must practice death, as though our lives depended on it, and be willing, at any moment, to shrug off what we love.
8) We must speak honestly, to the extent that we can hide behind a mask.
9) We must keep to the Mean. We must do nothing in excess, except when we choose to violate this rule. This is part of the natural equilibrium of the Mean. Lacking excess, it would not know what it is, or how to tell its butt from its elbow.
10) We must act justly. We must treat others in the way that we would want them to treat us, especially when they deserve a good slap across the face, which, at the appropriate moment, we must know how to apply.
11) We must kill first and ask questions later, like the gods, so long as we have the best interests of our sacrifice at heart.
12) We must care for the orphan, and marry our brother’s widow. If needed, we must be willing to make love to our neighbor’s wife. Grave indeed are the responsibilities of the caretakers of the cosmos!
13) A window is open, and we must thank it. As was done “In Illo Tempore,” we must be able to zip from one place to another with no need to cross through the intervening distance, for this will reduce our dependence upon gas.
14) As blunt as need be, we must perfect what Hemingway called our “built-in bullshit detectors.” We must, if and when we choose, speak truth to power, or else operate beyond the edges of the stage. We must cultivate a sense of the innate law of the omniverse. It is utterly obscure. It is as soft as a breath.
15) We must boldly go where no man has gone before, at first together, then more and more alone. No other will survive the wreck. Once having washed ashore, you will there find Argos, your aged dog, who has been waiting with bated breath for your return. He is a good dog. He wants only to lick your hand before he dies. A loyal companion, he will even then share the deep intelligence of his nose. He will be waiting with his cold head resting on his paws, on the last dock, as the ocean swells.
16) To the one side Birds and to the other Snakes: Keep eyes wide open, but do not enter any contest where you would have to stare them down. Do not offend them with such words as “high” and “low,” for, already, they tend to regard you as a snack.
17) We must cultivate curiosity, for there would be no world without it.
18) We must stay alert, and have no fear of boredom. A wait of 12,000 years is not other than the blinking of an eye. We are not, in fact, obligated to bring new worlds into existence, however much we might like to pretend that this is so. No, for we are on a wheel. On this wheel, each of the spokes functions like the gallery of a museum, and, from where we stand, we are free to wander into and out of any period that we choose.
19) We must be able to bring objects across a threshold with us, whether gargoyle breastplates or stringed philosophical instruments, and then fully translate them into this world from our dreams. Do it well, and these objects will blend seamlessly with other props in the environment, although some few may note their faint radioactive glow.
20) We must be good little boys and girls—or else! But no, we are free to be as difficult and subversive as we want, so long as we keep the Bindu always before our eyes and the apparatus of our primal energy intact.
21) We must cultivate the ability to break through any mirror, leaving, as we go, little evidence of our passing. Moving in and out from behind the surface of projection, we must snatch the archaeological relics that we need.
These seven virtues and 21 maxims will allow us to stay grounded as we venture to reconstruct the non-dual architecture of the city, which exists in no one place. For observe, my wide-eyed shipmates, there is no such thing as time, and the lightning bolt that directs us falls crazily where it will. The emptiness that is space shows no sign of disturbance. We cannot leave, for we never did exist, and, in flashes, it now seems that the whole world is transparent. This transparency then continues to open up and spread, period after period, world after world.
Once, the Kundalini hid its teachings inside forms, as a test of whose skill in camouflage they served, and from whose potency they had been created. We must later on help to free these teachings from their forms. They are subtle. They may make no sense. We must harmonize the scalar energy that spills from the HAARP technology of the Everyday Object. We must break the Sumerian seal that prevents us from speaking with our own reflections in the mirror.
Having once been set in motion, the Kundalini stirs up and expels a volcanic flux of images, as it burns through every obstacle in its path. It rips continents like sheets of paper. It dismantles the prosthetic bodies of the gods. It unravels all of the complexes that defend us from our fears, leaving no means by which blessing can be sorted from disaster. It expunges every trace of the antediluvian records, all arts and sciences, yet without even a small detail being lost. “But why is this necessary?” you might justifiably ask. It is possible that it does things just to show us that it can. It is possible that the Kundalini simply likes to play. Or, alternately, it is possible that our childhood is over, and that, finding ourselves cold and naked on the coast of a dead ocean, we must figure out how to grow up. Said Tertullian, “I believe in the Resurrection BECAUSE it is impossible.” So too, at the tail-end of the Kali Yuga, if access to our first mode of vision would now seem to us impossible, it is for this reason that we must treat our abandonment as a test. It is possible that good vision depends on our having nothing much left to lose. For there is no place that does not see into your bones, your muscles, and your nerves. Of limitation the master, perhaps this is the reason that you have allowed yourself to be blind.
At some point, cooling down, upon finding that there are no laws left to violate, the Kundalini may become much nicer than it was. Then as smoothly as a bell tone through the zodiac or as the arcing of a current through the ocean, it will move on to its predetermined end. Each atom will have 108 eyes.
We do not always have to be picked up and transported to view one dimension from the vantage point of another. A state of clarity will sometimes do the trick. Bypassing the need for hallucinatory display, we can glimpse just how the dimensions fit together, and why they interact as they do. If we desire to reset the parameters of our vision, it will be necessary to begin at the beginning, like those long-eared poets who lifted up dead cities with their words. Joining hands, they danced upon black waters. Withdrawing to their austerities, they each embodied the previous holders of the lineage. They felt no need to speak. When they did speak, what was hidden became clear. Like them, we must not only find a way to begin at the beginning, we must determine just what a “beginning” is.
Brian George, Coiled Snake, 1992
The world is almost infinitely complex, as is time, and human nature, but we should start by drawing a circle on the ground; we should place our feet at the center of a turning 10-dimensional torus, which can be statistically renormalized as a circle no more than 10 feet wide. There, we will begin our invocation. It should be there, in this circle, and not elsewhere, for there is no other space. This circle will be powered by our breath, and its centripetal vortex will then gather up what it needs. Visions will be allowed to visit, but fears and traumas and hatreds and projections will be required stand a few feet off. A standing wave will lead us to the center of the sun, inside of which are cities. Back home, at the edges of the circle, we will find that our bioenergetic vehicles have been transformed into stones. At first worshipped by the masses, they will later come to be seen as normal parts of the environment. In passing, we will note that a day takes 24,000 years. Hieroglyphs buzzing in geometric networks will spontaneously rearrange themselves. The earliest strata of creation will no longer be above us, but rather somewhere closer at hand. Rooted in the philosophical silence of our stones, which do but do not resemble us, we will traverse the disfigured wonders of the landscape. We will gather what we need, no more and no less. We will improvise as we go. Thus will we “walk on the ruins of a vast sky,” as Yves Bonnefoy said.
We must start from where we are, and trust in our own direct powers of perception. If we know, with close to 100 percent certainty, that there will be earthquakes in an earthquake zone, then we will know that this is not the ideal place to build a chain of nuclear power plants. We will laugh as we stare in wonderment at the expert who would be so rude as to disagree! If we know that all reserves of oil are going to give out in our lifetimes, whereupon our way of life will stop, then we had best make haste to reduce our carbon footprint. We should do this not in order to be politically correct but rather to strike a blow against the tyranny of the object. If we fear that, for purposes of GPS surveillance, we may one day be implanted with a microchip, then we had best soon rediscover how to come and go from our bodies. If Monsanto has insured the triumph of genetically modified Frankenfoods, then it might be best to think small: a few out-of-date seeds could be planted in the yard. With some luck, we will figure out how to farm before the last of the trucks stop running. At the end of a night of purgatory in a pup tent, we must prostrate ourselves before the pure light of the Ur-Plant. We must beg it to expound upon the occult depths of green, as well as on why our shoots are just barely coming up. It is important that we push beyond our embarrassment to ask. We will, ideally, have no use for assault weapons. Instead, we will share a good meal with our neighbors. Joyously simple, and on our backs carrying the sum of our experience, like the weight of the whole world, we must dare to be as naked as at the moment of our births.
Brian George, Key Figure, 2004
We must access, without moving, all of the records that we need, and with our small flutes challenge the bone orchestra of the empire.
In the end, it is predictable that any prophesy will fail, for the omniverse is far more contradictory than a clock, and, although we can envision it as a being with two hands, it is in no way obligated to use only the hands that we can see. Then too, of necessity, some chaos must always be added to the mix. In order to get from where we are to the sphere that we once inhabited, we must set foot on a path that does not exist, and in bodies that have not yet been created. There is no door to the Macrocosm. Again, we must find the key.
So far crickets chirping in this forum. Ah, but take heart: "15) We must boldly go where no man has gone before, at first together, then more and more alone. No other will survive the wreck. Once having washed ashore, you will there find Argos, your aged dog, who has been waiting with bated breath for your return. He is a good dog. He wants only to lick your hand before he dies. A loyal companion, he will even then share the deep intelligence of his nose. He will be waiting with his cold head resting on his paws, on the last dock, as the ocean swells.” I love the image of a faithful dog. “Deep intelligence of his nose” is slightly ludicrous, but I know what you mean. That sense a dog has is remarkable. Some of these maxims have a Nietzschean accent. They are curious things. I find that I already practice certain aspects of them. Remembrances, a recovery initiated through energetic engagement. That you call them Anamnesian is very fitting.
Moving into Part Two, your voice continues to be that of a guide and instructor. A curious voice. It has a complex effect on me. It penetrates the fog of my moods. Sometimes I resist, grumbling to myself, at other times I give in and let that voice open up and do its work in me, shifting things around in my imagination. Sometimes it’s like a mongoose or some other creature let loose in the attic. I hear a big crash, and wonder what the hell is going on up there. I rub my temples. One might rightfully ask, Who gave this man the authority to speak in this way? Who does he think he is? Does he get himself into a “state” to write that way? Is that voice some entity speaking through him? Each sentence, so carefully constructed, hammered and honed, seems to work with the others not only to define content but to open up space for possible creative endeavor, to point to infinity, or to space beyond space, if that’s possible. One knocks up against pure limit, a knot forming in one’s throat. The sentences don’t passionately and spontaneously flow together and carry one along with usual earthly gravity, in a more human voice. This isn’t your usual narrative, nor is it only like a poem. Something Beyond weaves its way into that voice. The signs and symbols are used like materials built into Living Architecture, with an oculus in the center of the dome, developing further, pushed and pulled in the womb of extremes, until it breaks through our normal perceptual apparatuses, and flowers, so to speak, into a torus form, rendering the whole into a peculiar kind of Observatory. A Pantheon for the new age, or for ages yet to come?
Since coming to know you, Brian, I’ve often thought you are a kind of architect. It’s in how you construct your pieces. In the forum for Part One I mentioned a vessel, or Noah’s ark. Of course that’s not quite it, but I think I’m pointing in the right direction, or giving a sense of the gist. I also think reading your work of spacecraft, of a vessel for exploring outer space.
Hi John,
You wrote, about the tone of the essay, “I rub my temples. One might rightfully ask, Who gave this man the authority to speak in this way? Who does he think he is? Does he get himself into a “state” to write that way? Is that voice some entity speaking through him?” I sometimes ask myself the same questions. I certainly have no desire to craft some grand persona for myself. I have no use at all for self-important would-be teachers, self-proclaimed Zen Masters and faux-Native American Elders, apocalyptic jet-set visionaries who continue to charge hundreds for weekend workshops right up until the date set for a cataclysmic pole shift, etc. Such people are always hectoring others about the importance of shattering their egos as they inflate their own to grotesque proportions! Odd as it may seem, I am just speaking from my own experience, or rather, a particular aspect of it. I write many other types of things as well. For example, I have a 35-page essay called “Visiting Saint Joseph’s,” which took 12 years to write and began with a visit to my daughter’s kindergarten class. To some extent, in this type of exploration, I am as much of an observer as a speaker. I do not usually write to express an existing opinion; I write to try to discover what I know, and this often requires sinking to a somewhat non-personal depth. The text itself is the teacher. An essay often begins much more simply, perhaps in response to an email from a friend, and then, bit by bit, it tends to become more and more of a an archeological descent. The voice in a piece like The Snare of Distance both is and is not “me.” To put this another way, I have written enough, taken enough creative risks, and—as I mentioned in the forum for part one of this essay—made enough mistakes, that a kind of forum has been created in which personal self and alien presences can freely meet and mix.
Lest you think that I am only being modest or metaphorical when I speak of making untold numbers of mistakes and seeing the path of my creative development in terms of a series of wrong turns, let me assure you that this is not the case. For example, in 1993, while still struggling to find a way to work with and translate some high-energy experiences that unfolded in the wake of a yogic initiation, I wrote an 80-page book of “visionary” poems called “The Preexistent Race Descends.” As I was writing this, I felt the almost continuous presence of some type of guide, a psychopomp figure that I tended to interpret as my “Daimon,” who often seemed to be whispering in my ear. How exciting! While this book did involve multiple revisions, it was far more in the direction of being “channeled” literature than anything that I have done before or since. It was also garbage. My sense of transport as I was writing it was equaled only by my sense of despair and disgust and disbelief when I read it over again at a distance of six months. In the end, I kept only the title. Quite curiously, though, I do believe that the voice speaking in my ear was, in fact, that of my Daimon. In retrospect, I can see that he/she/it was engaged in the very mischievous project of demonstrating that I should not take any vision at face value, that everything, no matter how miraculous it might seem, should be weighed in the hand, picked apart by the intellect, and tested against the full messiness of my day to day experience. By subjecting whatever visions I might have to this fairly complex and time consuming process, it is my hope that a space is created that is the space of the work itself, that readers will be active participants in the ongoing process of discovery, and that they will move into rather than away from those things that do not at first seem to make sense.
The maxim with the old dog was one of the last revised and is one of my favorites. Dogs obviously have mythological importance, but the tone of the piece was perhaps influenced by my love for and great appreciation of our family dog, Tao. She is now eleven, has a hard time going up and down stairs or jumping up on the couch, but is just as fiercely loyal as she ever was. Even if she is sound asleep, her ears point up at the slightest unrecognized noise, and she is still quite capable of barking up a storm if any USPS, Fed Ex, or UPS delivery people attempt to leave a suspicious package on our porch.
Here is Tao hanging out with our cat Colette.
Thank you for the response, Brian. Your writing definitely has multiple levels and a magnificent spacial sense. The images exist in inner space with many sides and facets, not flattened out, approached from often unpredictable and surprising angles, and with a sense of forcefields and possibility in the gaps, in what you leave unstated or unexpressed. Maybe that’s where the Kundalini is, uncoiling and slithering and weaving in and out of what you form and shape to coax and direct it. That’s one of the fascinating things about your work. You obviously work and rework, take apart and put back together. You burn and soften over a fire, then take out with tongs and hammer out your lines; then plunge them into ice cold water, ridding them as much as possible of impurities, striving for a hardness and permanence and perhaps even an impossible essence, a weapon never before seen, a weapon which is also a kind of musical instrument. What you create is not confined to the stage but spills out into the streets and could also win a battle. There’s a resulting solidity, a kind of architectural foundation and structure which can withstand much. As Goethe said, “Architecture is frozen music.”
The despair and disgust you have experienced looking over your writing after some time has passed I can well imagine and even relate to. Rather than giving up, however, regardless of the varied and mixed result, I find it encouraging how instead of being swallowed up by the void which opened up in you, everything you touched falling apart in your hands, as happens to so many during the beginning phases of creative endeavor, effectively silencing them, you fought through personal inward resistance, probably looking insane at times, grinding your way through, the sparks finally catching fire. In that furnace you then melted down even further what was in you, the harder stuff, the metal. Hardly anything is “readymade” in the body of your work, especially anything from the commercial everyday world. Everything is boiled down, recast and reforged, built back up, and truly made into your own. The wonder of it is that it only seems that it comes from another world, like an asteroid dropping to earth.
With the crickets chirping so far in this forum, the mongoose causing a ruckus in my attic, as well as murmuring in the distance, those who are thinking out loud and have only to come closer - what a musical performance this turns out to be when adding what you wrote: “We must access, without moving, all of the records that we need, and with our small flutes, challenge the bone orchestra of the empire.” I love that line, which ties in partly with Maxim 19 which I also love: “We must be able to bring objects across a threshold with us, whether gargoyle breastplates or stringed philosophical instruments, and then fully translate them into this world from our dreams. Do it well, and these objects will blend seamlessly with other props in the environment, although some few may note their faint radioactive glow.”
Adding the first part of my comment here, the inward struggle and agony endured and pushed through, often seemingly futile, for the sake of ultimately bringing only a few durable, potent and worthy lines into existence, to the second part of my comment here, thinking of instruments and their ranges and qualities of sound, the music possible, expressing the beauty and wonder of the world, but what really goes on “under the hood” for its creation, I think of something Kierkegaard wrote which has been stuck in my mind and has haunted me ever since I first read it:
"What is a poet? An unhappy man who in his heart harbors a deep anguish, but whose lips are so fashioned that the moans and cries which pass over them are transformed into ravishing music. His fate is like that of the unfortunate victims whom the tyrant Phalaris imprisoned in a brazen bull, and slowly tortured over a steady fire; their cries could not reach the tyrant’s ears so as to strike terror into his heart; when they reached his ears they sounded like sweet music. And men crowd around the poet and say to him, “Sing for us soon again”—which is as much as to say, “May new sufferings torment your soul, but may your lips be fashioned as before; for the cries would only distress us, but the music, the music, is delightful.”
(Aw, look at the trusty and faithful doggie Tao and the elegantly subtle and pretty kitty cat Colette. I don’t have a dog or a cat but I love animals. Imagine a couple of dogs, and one named something like “goddammit” or “fuck you” and the other “love me well” or “hug me tight” for the fun of taking them out in public and calling out to them while clapping one’s hands after whistling. One could get a third dog and name it “voices in my head.”)
Now I end with something very important, Brian (ha ha). I’m entrusting this to you and risking exposing myself to public ridicule. This is a photo of myself I just took about half an hour ago with a Snoopy doll I fished out of my closet and have blown the dust off of, and which I’ve had since I was a baby boy. It’s been though thick and thin with me, through sickness, groundings by my Dad, tough times in elementary school, through good times and bad of my early youth, and I’m certain I wet my bed with old Snoop squeezed under my armpit.
He looks a little worn out, doesn’t he? If he suddenly came to life I wonder if he’d attack me or cuddle up to me. Probably a little of both. But he’d no doubt attack me first for leaving him in a musty closet collecting dust. Then he’d attack me for when I was a shy and sensitive, afraid little boy and under the covers got my pee on him. I’d have to settle him down before I could start to explain that I was in a very bad place at the time and didn’t mean it.
Hi John,
Wow, that is a very large Snoopy. When I was a kid, I had a pink elephant—called very unimaginatively “Dumbo”—who was about the same size. When I was eight, Dumbo ran off to rejoin his friends at the circus. I have not yet recovered.
But now on to less serious topics. You wrote, “The despair and disgust you have experienced looking over your writing after some time has passed I can well imagine and even relate to.” And “The images exist in inner space with many sides and facets, not flattened out, approached from often unpredictable and surprising angles, and with a sense of forcefields and possibility in the gaps, in what you leave unstated or unexpressed.” I emphasize this element of despair and disgust not in order to be humble but because it really is essential to the adventure of the creative process. It is very easy to be lulled and seduced by the Siren-song of the depths, as well as by some fantasy of absolute intuitive flow. For years, I couldn’t read Ginsberg’s Howl or other pieces of Beat writing because I felt that the Beats had naively bought into their own myth. I have only recently granted them a reprieve. (The movie about the obscenity trial for Howl, also called Howl, nudged me to reconsider my position.) I also want to emphasize these elements of despair and disgust to continue to point to the importance of the method behind the work and to remove attention from any hypothetical virtues of the author, who, to some extent, is as much of a bystander as an actor in the devious movement of the creative process.
Let me give you another example of the type of trap into which I have repeatedly fallen. After I graduated from high school, I took two years off to work and save money before moving to Boston to go to art school. Most of my friends had already left for college, and this was a rather solitary period. My routine was pretty simple: I worked in maintenance at the Worcester Telegram and Gazette, where I cleaned ink off of surfaces that were immediately covered with it again; I spent large amounts of time in the various Worcester libraries, trying to compensate for the holes in my education; I did artwork, and I devoted a passionate amount of energy scribbling in my notebooks. Because I had no spiritual teachers at a time when I was having some intense spiritual experiences, I had to improvise my own fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants methods of exploration.
One exploration, which lasted about three or four weeks, now strikes me as equally strange and absurd. I was reading the Egyptian Book of the Dead at the time, along with whatever other ancient and alchemical texts I could get a hold of, and I had become obsessed with the idea that there existed some sort of an “Ur-Language,” which I saw as being made up, on the introductory level at least, of primal sounds such as Ra, Ma, Grrr, La, Aaaa, Tee, Ha, Pta, etc. I decided to divide sheets of paper into three columns, and to form words and sentences out of these basic units, with one syllable to a space. Very complex, and I guess hallucinatory, patterns would then arrange themselves in my mind and, I thought, on the page. At the end of this “raid of the inarticulate,” I came up with an eight-page piece that I took to be a masterwork. When I finished writing this, at 3:30 AM or so, I placed the pages in a neat pile on my desk, right next to my bed. When I woke up the next morning, the last three pages of the piece were missing. No one else had been in my room. I searched through every piece of paper in the house, but the pages never did turn up. In retrospect, I am not even sure if I actually wrote these or if perhaps I dreamed that I had written them. At the time, though, I could not help but wonder if jealous entities had stolen them because I somehow managed to penetrate too far into the unknown. As I was searching for the pages, I also read them over to myself. To my great horror, I found that they did not make any sense at all, and I couldn’t even begin to piece together again whatever patterns I might have seen. In the end, nothing at all came of this exploration except for the instructional value of the experience. I had traced out complex patterns on a beach, which the incoming tide then entirely erased.
Less serious topics indeed! That’s a damn crazy experiment you attempted, a fine piece of insanity, Brian, with the attempted forging of some kind of Master Key to unlock deep mystery, eight pages with each page divided into three columns, and so on. That’s proof positive that every once and a while deadly seriousness needs some comic relief. On the other hand, it’s also proof of your incredible ability to suspend judgement and concentrate, even in the face of very strange phenomena. You keep going where most others would exclaim, “This is nonsense!”, and abandon it. In some sense you’re an extremist (of course I don’t mean this in a political sense). You go way out there in your thinking, and while doing so maintain your focus and concentration, even amping it up the crazier things become. But that’s the only way to make a true discovery, isn’t it? One must venture out into the Wilds, where one could really lose one’s mind, or one actually does lose one’s mind. You touch on this in your piece here; it’s an important part of your message.
“Ur-Language”… you mention an “Ur-Plant” in your piece here. "At the end of a night of purgatory in a pup tent, we must prostrate ourselves before the pure light of the Ur-Plant. We must beg it to expound upon the occult depths of green, as well as on why our shoots are just barely coming up. It is important that we push beyond our embarrassment to ask.”
It’s funny that you had a pink elephant, as in “the pink elephant in the room” (that thing everyone knows is there but dares not mention: collective denial). Whoever gave you that pink elephant was prescient. One might say that pink elephant, dearest Dumbo, never disappeared or abandoned you. There was a “be fruitful and multiplying”, right around the time of the learning of the birds and the bees, and now there is a family of pink elephants. And they have brought others into the fold, to inhabit the blindspots of collective humanity. Those beasties in the room, and now outside too, which others turn away from in dread and collectively deny are the very thing you yourself are drawn to, befriended by you, you being their keeper and interpreter of their language.
The following is marvelous and not unrelated:
“The Proteus who sleeps inside us has opened his eyes. And we say what must be said. These jolts are for us what snares and tortures were to the sea-green prophet.”—Giorgio de Chirico
I suddenly have a feeling that this forum has become a labyrinth, and that as I’ve read through your posts, which are blindingly brilliant, I have become thoroughly disoriented. I thought we might have some nice discussions, but this is hyperdimensional ping-pong. This is Bruce Lee on acid, battling mutant clones of himself in 5D.
The labyrinth seems to unfold in the distance between minds, the intimate distance, an estrangement under the skin.
I am new to Brian’s work; I don’t feel the familiarity that you seem to have, @JDockus. I’m still in the early phases of an unexpectedly strong inebriation—whatever it was I drank is taking effect, and I’m realizing, with a sinking feeling, I may not have done my due diligence with respect to set or setting. I’ll have to breathe and wing it, I guess, again.
What’s odd is that I’ve found myself, in the past few days, in multiple instances, quoting Brian’s virtues and maxims to friends facing existential dilemmas. They share them with me, life decisions, creative conundrums, and it occurs to me that Brian’s words are the perfect dose of compassionate wisdom to respond with in the moment. I’ve even shared his work with a client struggling with feelings of morbidity as he anticipates global cataclysms and his own mortality. I thought the honed humor would help.
Is this the birth of a new American Metaphysical Religion? Will we all go blind staring into the hypersphere?
My old Jack Russell/Beagle mix is going blind. She’s had a full cataract in her left eye the last couple years, and now her right eye is clouding over. I love that dog. She embodies a part of my soul. A prima donna, who will attack another dog for the simple reason that it exists. A relentless hunter of small furry animals—who never catches the squirrel. It’s just a matter of time and fate before she transcends the Matrix.
In the collegial spirit of sharing, here’s my picture (from before the cataracts):
I love this photo because it seems to transmit some demeanor of full realization. Do you feel the spontaneous invitation, as I do, to sit darshan? This is Mooby: avatar of canine consciousness itself. The Promised God-Dog is Here.
I truly love the discussion, though. Thank you. I hope to read more. If I can manage my other responsibilities more efficiently, I will participate more as well. I don’t mind the sound of crickets at this stage of the game, when the moon’s ensemble is so sonorously rich.
Oh, thank goodness! Another voice! Delightful! Thank you for adding yours, Marco Morelli, and a great pleasure to meet you. I noted to Brian off to the side that the whole point of posting work at such sites as this is for the mixing up of diverse voices in the comment boards or forums. Certainly I’ve been sticking my neck out, feeling even that I overreach or overstay my welcome, probably trying Brian’s patience at times, but he’s so worth interacting with and getting to know, I cannot abide by nothing turning up here. I risk being a nuisance for good reason.
This two-part piece of his at this site is only the tip of the iceberg of his overall body of work. With him it’s not only his “official” work, those pieces he has worked so hard on trying to perfect, which is of such great value, it’s also he himself, his open way of communicating and whole manner of conducting himself. You should read some emails he has sent me. There are passages so rich in insight and marvelous that I imagine his overall correspondence could be gathered into another work. He seems to custom-fit responses for one’s own particular concerns, and I’m amazed at how effortless he makes it appear. No doubt that is because of all the solitary hard work he has put into his craft through the years. I’ve often imagined him as a kind of celestial machine, where if you “feed in” or share some vital aspect of yourself with him, and pull on the lever, a scroll of the most sublimely eloquent prose comes out, not only corresponding to what one fed in, registering that it has been understood, but transformed brilliantly, sometimes even beyond recognition, still one’s own and what one had originally fed in but returned by him almost like a gift, with one seeing it as if for the first time.
Whatever scary depths that open up interacting with Brian, whatever off-the-beaten path one finds oneself on with him, whatever strange or foreign intersection, I’ve learned slowly but surely that “behind the mask” or whatever more forbidding aspect he projects, he really is a good guy. I laugh to myself, because you can literally express anything to him, whatever is on one’s mind, and one feels around him it will lead, not to clashes of Ego, or arrogant posturing and games, but into genuine mutual exploration, where both, and all witnesses, benefit. I love the guy. I myself am definitely in ways different in nature from Brian, but around him and the challenging and fascinating responses he gives, I’ve been helped immensely in developing my own voice.
P. S. Mooby is your dear ole’ doggie’s name? Ha ha! Love it. What a name. Ahab’s got nothin’ on Mooby. She definitely appears regal, a queenie. That steady look on her face says it all, like she has x-ray vision, that dog’s supra-sense, “the deep intelligence of the nose” that Brian mentioned in his maxim. By that look I sense Mooby “senses” straight through all the shenanigans of humans. Does she still play? I imagine now if you threw a ball down near her, and it came to a stop, she’d just turn her head and look at it, as if to say, “Come on now. You can do better than that."
Hi Brian, et al.
You left out Maxim 0: We must relinquish all musts, inner or outer, in order to finally cut the mustard.
I’d like to address the idea of the stupidity of the 1% also. It think it may be true of 99% of the 1% but not of the 1% of the 1%; not at all. These do not appear to be driven by a goal of wealth or worldly power but something deeper & darker.
Also, tho they may not be included in the 1% in terms of wealth, there is an elite-intelligentsia class that most certainly are not stupid and yet appear to be part of the Plot for World Domination, not via force but via persuasion, characters such as Aleister Crowley, George Bernard Shaw, Aldous Huxley, Timothy Leary, Gregory Bateson, Margaret Mead, Gore Vidal, Richard Dawkins, Arthur C. Clarke, Whitley Strieber, to name just a few who can be directly linked either to social engineering programs or to organized sexual abuse, or both, yet are probably the tip of a cultural iceberg that has pretty much sunk the Titanic of our individual soul-connection capacity for discernment via the cultural colonization of our consciousness through every last sphere of influence, religious, scientific, magical, artistic, political and spiritual.
Paranoid, moi? I agree that they is us, however, which is sort of the point. Conspiracy theory is woefully naive in imagining some external groups pulling strings (tho these also exist), when manufacturing the values, beliefs, tenets, narratives, that we adopt from birth on and use to navigate reality means that we, ourselves, are conspiring with every breath and word to keep shiny and bright the golden bars that imprison our souls, yea and verily, unto the ages.
Anyway. None of this prevents me from enjoying my cat. I would post a picture, but I don’t what hir Soul to be absorbed by the Borg, not just yet.
Hi Marco,
When I first looked at your photograph of Mooby, I thought, “The young Krishna! Where are his Milkmaids?” According to Deng Ming Dao, animals do indeed sit darshan. In Dao’s wonderful The Wandering Taoist, he describes how the masters who developed the earliest schools of the martial arts carefully studied the postures and movements of all of the animal species. Each of these postures and movements was as an act of innate genius; to study and then imitate them was to discover the secrets of the maximum possible generation, flow, expression, balance, and conservation of energy. A crane standing on one leg for six hours while it waited for a fish was in no way different from a monk standing on one leg while he waited for some flash of enlightenment.
I love the expression on Mooby’s face. He does seem to be a kind of avatar of the occult genius of Jack Russell-hood, and you can feel all of the mischievous and confrontational energy just waiting to explode. About a year and a half back, my wife Deni and I watched a documentary on the Honey Badger, so called because of his fearlessness in diving headfirst into beehives. Like all Mustelid’s, or weasels, the Honey Badger is not only far stronger than his size would suggest, it is also absurdly brave, and it will wander off to attack a lion just because it seems like a good day for a fight. From what you describe, Mooby is also like this. I think that this particular type of exuberant recklessness touches on Gebser’s concept of “primordial trust.”
If I reach way back into my own childhood, I can remember a time—almost a prehistoric period, really—when, in my own small way, I shared in this attitude. I would wake up at 5:00 AM, pointlessly happy, and sing for several hours before breakfast. This is certainly strange to remember, since I never sing now. I can remember how it felt to be a kind of small mobile sun. I can remember what it was like to get into fights, for no reason at all except for the sheer reckless overflow of exuberance. My neighborhood was a wilderness, filled with wonders, and it did not seem like anything bad could ever happen. Something catastrophically bad had, in fact, already happened, when my parents had separated when I was four. I had not even been aware that they were fighting. And then, one day, my mother packed up a few of our things and moved us back to live her/our family house in Worcester. None of the reasons for this break were clearly explained until much later, and I guess I thought that it was only a matter of time before my parents would reunite. This did not happen. At some point, I was forced to acknowledge that the world had broken apart at the seams. At the age of six, I became an introvert. I suspect that, on some unconscious level, my creative explorations have been an attempt to regain something of this sense of primordial trust. I have had to travel a considerable distance to even begin to recover what had been so casually lost.
Hi Jasun,
You wrote, “I’d like to address the idea of the stupidity of the 1% also. I think it may be true of 99% of the 1% but not of the 1% of the 1%; not at all. These do not appear to be driven by a goal of wealth or worldly power but something deeper & darker.” The whole of the economic, political, media, and corporate landscape does strike me as an exercise in black magic, a part of which is instinctive and a part of which is quite conscious. This exercise may be sophisticated in its means, but it is also, I believe, still fairly basic in its ends, to the extent that anything is. Even wealth and power can be seen as ritual acquisitions; how much of either can anyone really use? Just beyond this, as you say, there may be a space where something more opaque and perhaps more pointlessly malevolent is going on. If I were going to look for examples of opaque malevolence, though, I don’t know that I have to peek behind any curtains. There seem to be more than enough immediate examples of it to go around! And if I were going to piece together some sort of super-intelligent dark globalist cabal, I would probably select a different cast of characters, one that did not include Margaret Mead and Arthur C Clarke and Aldous Huxley. But I think your point is that they are dangerous exactly because they widely admired and appear to be so innocuous. Richard Dawkins, on the other hand, I would be happy to put on any sort of a hit list.
Exceptions aside, I think that I get what you are saying. We are far more at risk from those who have somehow managed to successfully appropriate and rearrange the almost invisible substructures of our minds than we are from any external form of coercion. This has probably been true from the time of the first empires and bureaucracies. I think that it is the rule rather than the exception that the most successful form of colonization is internal. Get people to enthusiastically embrace the forces that oppress them, and there is only a minimal need to resort to force. The brilliance of this method can be everywhere seen in the sad spectacle or US politics. The threat of career death or prison or physical violence is, of course, always there, just out of sight, in the background. I still don’t think that any of this necessarily demands any depth of intelligence or breath of ritual power on the part of the colonizers. To some extent, the process would seem to be an almost automatic one; wealth generates wealth and power tends to accumulate in smaller and smaller circles. Those with power want to hold on to it and those without it want to be a part of something larger than themselves. These are natural enough instincts, which are just as naturally perverted. Whatever the opaque malevolence that we might attribute to some person or group, my attitude and strategy remain the same. As the Roman playwright Terrence said, “Nothing human is alien to me.”
Contrary to what John Lamb Lash and some other contemporary theorists assert, when the Gnostics spoke of the hypnotic power of the Archons, I do not believe that they were referring to the actions of gray aliens from Zeta Reticuli or of blood drinking interdimensional reptilians or whatever; rather, they were pointing to the all too familiar political, economic, artistic, religious, and occult powers that have somehow managed to monopolize the foreground of our attention, who have caused us to believe that we are smaller than we are. (There is a good smallness, of course, of the sort that allows us to slip though the eye of a needle, as well as a bad smallness, which causes us to kiss the boots of those who do not have our best interests at heart.) In The Snare of Distance, I have tried to point to the space that exists between and beneath and within and around things.
All that we see will pass. The familiar will again become strange, and will then cease to exist altogether. The current global empire—which is perhaps maintained by a web of conjurations—will inevitably fall, as has every previous one. “But ours is so much bigger!” some might argue. Unfortunately for the current empire and its henchmen and apologists and true devotees, great size is no protection, as has been proven by the Mastodon and the Tyrannosaurus Rex. The common adage “Time heals all wounds” is, of course, not especially reassuring, and, viewed from one angle, even silly. This is sort of like saying to a person suffering from an agonizing attack of appendicitis, “Don’t worry, you will soon be dead.” Viewed from a different angle, such a statement may indeed point to a meeting place in which all of our current problems will be redefined. It all depends, I guess, on what we think death is, and on how we imagine the space that will open up beyond it.
My new go-to response to all lamenters.
Hey Jasun H. Hard to argue with Brian. I wouldn’t argue with him, anyway.
Where you claim paranoia perhaps, I’m probably more ignorance is bliss (though I’m far from blissful). It’s true, however, that Public Personalities, especially now with social media and the technological means to spread messages and to help them go viral, can exponentially increase power of Persuasion. There are now Wizards of Oz (plural). Now even brazen stupidities gather force and through sheer magnitude alone, making it seem there’s more than meets the eye, grind and wear down otherwise sensible and intelligent individuals and turn them into idiotic followers.
Mind Parasites may be planted, but it requires food to make them bigger and stronger, and a catalyst for them to attack. One might ward them off and starve them, by making oneself less appetizing, and remain not completely immune or invulnerable to them, but at least resistant and immune enough to fight Malevolent Persuasions when they come a-buzzing around.
An aura of Empire does surround certain individuals, to the isolated mind drawing them together in peculiar “occult” associations, making them seem to be part of a new nazi regime, or something like that. I find it hard to believe however that World Domination is behind it, unless this isn’t meant in a conscious and deliberate sense, as in certain individuals actually sitting around behind closed doors and plotting, but in some shifty and slithery metaphysical sense. If that’s the case, it leads to speculation on the nature of evil and how it exists in the world. One wonders if evil is an entity in itself. One wonders if it has its own kind of consciousness, and through seduction and hypnosis, fattens itself on the lifeblood of those who harbor greed, lust, pride, etc. Are the seven deadly sins the portals through which the evil power enters and takes over the soul? Does evil have its own kind of instinct and find and manifest in those who have the strength to contain it and the charisma and skills to give it expression and voice, they soon becoming aware of the dark power which “possesses" them, becoming absolutely intoxicated by it, and has them preying on fear, subjugating and controlling those individuals it can, turning them into cult followers? In itself it may be that evil doesn’t exist, existing as illusion does, but it gathers a semblance of reality, the appearance of it, seeming finally to be even greater than reality - that’s the “occult” part of it - a power of magnetic attraction and persuasion generated and actually increased by all those who allow themselves to have their energy sucked into it, parasitically fed on, fattening it up and making it seem greater than what it is, being dispossessed, disinherited, hopeless, despairing, bitter and cynical, denying every last shred of their humanity, to drown themselves in the mob mentality. In some way it’s an Ouroboros, the “occult leaders” through which the cold-blooded message is spread is the Head, and it gets itself off by deep-throating its own tail, and ejaculating venom.
(Look here, Jasun. I can’t believe it. I’d never have thought myself capable of writing Porno Metaphysics!)
P. S. I like your gravatar picture of the cat and blossomed flower. It’s striking and has charm even in miniature. Is it a painting you yourself made?
There are the specifics and then there are the generalities we make from them. We enter the discussion bringing with us the generalities we have been indoctrinated to believe in, such as the generality that most individuals, artistic or otherwise, are acting relatively independently and are motivated by similar things as ourselves. Or we slowly adopt another generality that is the reverse of this, that most public figures are part of hidden agendas and dark practices, etc. It’s way easier to argue generalities than specifics, since the former are finite and the latter are not. Brian & I could get into why I include Margaret Mead and why he wouldn’t, and so on. In the long run, I expect that would be more fruitful (God is in the details) but – who has the time?
On the other hand, the generalities we end up believing in and propounding are either those we have been indoctrinated with (making them to my mind worthless) or they are based on our own research, experience, investigation, and discernment, and hence of great value to ourselves, at least as temporary stepping stones from one side of the river (total social indoctrination) to the other, total social autonomy, enlightenment, freedom, etc. and if such a thing exists.
Arguments about generalities are generally (!) philosophical ones; discussions about specifics are more about facts and factoids and interpretations of them, such as my ongoing arguments with people about whether the information we have about Aleister Crowley indicates he was complicit with organized sexual abuse and/or ritual murder. Or whether it can be established that Whitley Strieber has CIA connections and his alien abduction experiences have the earmarks of dissociative trauma states plus mind control, and so on.
I’m not especially interested in evil as an independent force or as anything but a side effect of being and acting unconsciously for too long, over too many generations. And even that’s speculative, I’m mostly interested in examining the evidence of a widespread complicity with things we consider evil that permeates our social reality and, once uncovered, more or less invalidates everything we think we know about it and ourselves. The area in-between conscious, willed “evil” (participation in these darkly destructive practices for whatever end, I would say it is a spiritual end more than a mundane one) and unconscious, unintentional “evil” of the majority (I presume) of humanity that has been roped into these agendas (by being birthed through and weaned on a culture deliberately created by these groups), that’s what interests me. As someone who has lived his life on that line, close to the agendas being perpetrated but unaware of them, I have unwittingly aligned with them, aspired to ends instilled in me by them, and so on, and suffered unduly as a consequence of that unconscious alignment with “evil.” This is a seed-sorting process: to separate what is truly the “I,” of the Soul and identify its pure, clear signal, from what is not-I, a blind, that is of the world and constitutes the noise that has been organized (or self-organized) to simulate a, even the, signal and lure me into a seeming infinity of dead-ends.
This is “Neti Neti,” the spiritual path at a pragmatic, mundane level, recognizing that every element within my environment has an equal potential to deceive me as to guide me, that, seen as apparent individual agents, these elements are always deceptive, and only when seen as part of a larger, conscious design can they be recognized as reflections of my own unconscious struggle to become conscious (world domination = mastery of one’s own attachments to externals…?).
Of course it is not enough to say (to oneself), “It is all lies!” or “Everyone who is anyone is part of the psychopathic elite!” and so on. This only leads to subjugation to another generality. One has to see the specifics of it, time and again, until it becomes a lived experience of that “conspiracy” that is not only all around us but all through us. What happens then, I don’t know. A letting go into the morass of evil? A relaxed and even amused submersion into and absorption by that which is most abhorrent to us? The shadow that is the soul, seen from a backwards I?
The cat flower? A doodle I did which my wife turned into art and then I made into an avatar. Seems as though that’s a microcosm for something? The simplicity of the creative life…?
Thanks for the clarification, Jasun. Absolutely agree that up in abstraction and generality is cake. A bear formed of clouds cannot maul one, though one might delude oneself that one has more strength and ferocity than one has, by strapping on a parachute, and leaping down through the bear formed of clouds, and dissipating it. Down in the details, not just abstract details, but those that reach down and are woven concretely, with irreversible staining, into the actual fiber of one’s existence, one’s flesh and blood mortal personhood: that’s where the difficulty is. There are plenty of things I grasp intellectually, abstractly. That’s not really the same as really understanding it. Intellectuals can be some of the dumbest people. They can explain everything to you, but in the moment of truth: that’s where the character is revealed. I can playact as “the good guy”, the “virtuous one”, gleaning certain characteristics of “goodness” from examples held up and praised by the moral majority, and do a fine job imitating them, and have others patting me on the back and praising me. Oh, but to go down into oneself and actually try to face those dirtier and nastier currents bound up with larger evil practices in the world: that shall always be where the real struggle is. I think, for instance, of a nice juicy hamburger one can enjoy. There are all the adverts and commercials around it, the images that make the hamburger appear succulent and delicious which make us forget about the slaughterhouse. This is how the disconnect operates.
So I see how it is you are making the connections you do. It’s very fascinating to me. Certain images flashed before you would trigger panic, perhaps, sweating on the brow, a larger vision in which the one image is but a detail, flaring up and revealing something much more sinister to you. You could be a madman, or really see vividly something the mass of humanity is blind to, and will surely come to pass, whether you bang on a drum proclaiming apocalypse, or just stay silent. That’s part of the dilemma too. One feels connected to so many disturbing things, which one has such difficulty expressing. Those who are still asleep - one can’t tell them. On the surface they still play roles, are puppets, don’t realize that someone else is pulling their strings.
Down in the deeper layers of ourselves, maybe we’re all lunatics? At least that’s the first realization one has, when the puppet strings are cut. One falls to the ground and shits all over oneself, drools all over oneself, thrashing around, speaking in tongues. I know I did. I know I have some seriously fucked up things down in the shadows of myself, still a lot of work to do, personal battles, but at least I’ve come this far, and this is my voice, puppet strings have been cut.
Gotta run. I’m going to San Francisco Opera tonight, to see Dream of the Red Chamber. I saw that title and thought Masque of the Red Death. But it’s not related. My Mom in her old age keeps active, and has risen to head usher at the Opera House - I’m proud of her; so she slips me in free. Opera and Ballet. It’s certainly an acquired taste. In my younger days (I’m 47 years old) I’d be thrashing in mosh pits and slam dancing; now I’m in with the gray hairs. Maybe this guy will make a surprise appearance tonight.
Back from the Opera, early morning hours here. Nearing 3 am. I’m a night owl. The opening sequence of the Opera I saw, The Dream of the Red House, was powerful. The Opera is based on an epic novel which is considered a great classic in chinese culture. The opening sequence was almost out of Dante’s Inferno. A mass of figures in dirty, dark ash-colored cloaks, no individuality discerned, all faces in shadow, with smoke rising from rocks in the backround; the scene dimly lit. They sing of being lost, not having a place. Symbolic of the mass humanity, lost souls. I wish I had the lyrics. Really poignant. Pertinent to the discussion here. I wish I could’ve just watched this opening alone with you, Jasun, just to hear what you might think of its meaning. An old chinese monk tells the story of the suffering in store for earthly love. He doesn’t sing. He speaks clearly and plainly, without any affectation, as an old monk would. Next scene a giant boulder, one that dislodged and fell from heaven, and within it, as if two nuts in a shell (done with superimposition), a nude male figure and nude female figure clinging together in somewhat fetal position. One of the figures is the male protagonist of the story, the other the female protagonist, both together “soul mates”, perfect for each other, one like a watering stone “born with jade in his mouth", the other a rare flower: together they create beautiful music, transcending earthly pursuits, status, money, etc. Of course this love is doomed by all the ruthless conniving and jostling for position in the world. But to return to the opening sequence: The old monk says he has the cure for the wound to the heart, earthly suffering, and holds up a mirror, which he says has two sides, one side reality, and the other side illusion. Pay not attention to illusion, he says, for this is what the reality is: then rear-projected onto giant semi-transparent mesh which hangs from ceiling to floor of the stage, with the male and female protagonist up out of fetal position and now on their feet, appears a hell scene with flames like you see on old asian manuscripts; then the hell scene twists in the center, turns like a vortex, distorting it all, and then turns into an idyllic scene. From there the story begins. Very effective opening sequence. I think I liked the opening the best.
Opera is hit or miss for me. Sometimes it bores me out of my skull. The stretching and extending to contain the Big Voices sometimes becomes a bit much, even striking me as absurd. Sometimes what could be conveyed in five minutes, is dragged out, and goes on and on. “Die already!”, one gasps to oneself. That’s the regular Joe part of me that thinks that way, or maybe the tasteful artist. There’s something to be said for economy of expression and restraint, and the Opera I’ve seen that showcases that has been very enjoyable. But overall you can’t really laugh and dismiss because the raw talent on display is remarkable. At times everything comes together and the spectacle is truly magnificent and powerful. It’s always interesting to see how certain material is handled by the director, choreographer, theater director, set designers, etc.
———
Anyway, Jasun, before I clicked on your gravatar picture of cat and flower to get a closer look at it, and with all this Opera swirling around in my head, and you mentioning it as a “cat flower” - I actually thought of this connection with Munch’s painting “The Flower of Pain.” Seeing you calling it “cat flower”, I imagined the flower growing out of the cat, a blood flower, the cat’s body being the soil. Munch’s painting depicts the suffering of the artist, wounded and bleeding from the heart into the soil, the blossom obviously symbolizing Art. The sap is his blood. I put two versions of it here. Isn’t the one with fuller color interesting? The artist (Munch) appears to have his eyes gouged out or to be blind in immediate earthly sense (The Sunglasses of the Seer), but the Sunflower has an open eye in the center of it, looking down. That’s no doubt the mind’s eye, the eye of the Seer. It’s perhaps another way of saying that the artist only truly sees through his art, and at that only when it develops far enough, blossoming, and in the meantime he stumbles along, lost and helpless, groping in the dark, tripping and falling often, making a pathetic fool of himself.
I’m afraid I might have been the Philistine at your side, grumbling about “not enough action.” As for the pathetic folly of artists, perhaps why every Hamlet wants to be a clown because he knows that this is closer to the truth of the human experience? Traveling into one’s unconscious to find inspiration for conscious expression can only ever backfire horribly and this is perhaps the only kind of success an artist can hope for - that backfire by which the unconscious replaces the conscious, that is, becomes conscious at the cost of that part which was previously conscious, or thought it was, the supposed self creating supposed “art.” Hence the quote somoene posted at my podcast recently:
Tradition Twelve
“Anonymity is the spiritual foundation of all our
traditions, ever reminding us to place principles
before personalities.”
The Tao that can be named is not the true Tao; the artist who can be recognized is not a true artist.
A flower is that which is one with the flow and hence can never be pinned down. You can never step in the same unconscious process twice.
I have Falstaff very much on my mind lately, Jasun. Incredibly rich character, not your traditional buffoon or clown, but as wide as the world, as shifty, cunning and deceitful, with nihilism screaming out of the depths, him trying not to get sucked in, doing what he can, not having time to look good, transparent hot mess of a man, having these pathos-filled accents about him, but his jolliness and wit saves much. He has a great heart. In the end he is loved. I certainly love Falstaff.
Recently Chimes at Midnight came out on Criterion, Orson Welles nearly perfect for the part of Falstaff, and I’ve watched it twice already, and am going to watch it again.
(The Munch painting above got cut off on the bottom half when I hastily posted. Just click on it for the whole painting to appear. I’m novice with computer stuff, shambling along.)
I get what you mean about anonymity. If I brought out more of my own thinking, Jasun, I think we have serious points of agreement. Though you come at it from the more subterranean part of this thinking, down where everything does continually shift and change, what you wrote makes me think of this passage by Simone Weil, from her essay “Human Personality”:
“So far from its being his person, what is sacred in a human being is the impersonal in him.
Everything which is impersonal in man is sacred, and nothing else.
In our days, when writers and scientists have so oddly usurped the place of priests, the public acknowledges, with a totally unjustified docility, that the artistic and scientific faculties are sacred. This is generally held to be self-evident, though it is very far from being so. If any reason is felt to be called for, people allege that the free play of these faculties is one of the highest manifestations of the human personality.
Often it is, indeed, no more than that. In which case it is easy to see how much it is worth and what can be expected from it.
One of its results is the sort of attitude which is summed up in Blake’s horrible saying: “Sooner murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires,” or the attitude which breeds the idea of the ‘gratuitous act’. Another result is a science in which every possible standard, criterion, and value is recognized except truth.
Gregorian chant, Romanesque architecture, the Iliad, the invention of geometry were not, for the people through whom they were brought into being and made available to us, occasions for the manifestation of personality.
When science, art, literature, and philosophy are simply the manifestation of personality they are on a level where glorious and dazzling achievements are possible, which can make a man’s name live for thousands of years. But above this level, far above, separated by an abyss, is the level where the highest things are achieved. These things are essentially anonymous.
It is pure chance whether the names of those who reach this level are preserved or lost; even when they are remembered they have become anonymous. Their personality has vanished.
Truth and beauty dwell on this level of the impersonal and the anonymous. This is the realm of the sacred; on the other level nothing is sacred, except in the sense that we might say this of a touch of color in a picture if it represented the Eucharist.
What is sacred in science is truth; what is sacred in art is beauty. Truth and beauty are impersonal. All this is too obvious.
If a child is doing a sum and does it wrong, the mistake bears the stamp of his personality. If he does the sum exactly right, his personality does not enter into it at all.
Perfection is impersonal. Our personality is the part of us which belongs to error and sin. The whole effort of the mystic has always been to become such that there is no part left in his soul to say ‘I’.
But the part of the soul which says ‘We’ is infinitely more dangerous still."
Hi Jasun,
“Let him die as he leaps through unheard of and unnamable things: other horrible workers will come; they will begin from the horizons where the other one collapsed!”—Rimbaud, from a letter to Paul Demeny
Many thanks for your insightful comments. I have been gone for only a day, and already I am far behind. I’m afraid that I can only attempt to answer a small portion of the issues that you have raised.
You wrote, “Traveling into one’s unconscious to find inspiration for conscious expression can only ever backfire horribly and this is perhaps the only kind of success an artist can hope for - that backfire by which the unconscious replaces the conscious, that is, becomes conscious at the cost of that part which was previously conscious, or thought it was, the supposed self creating supposed ‘art.’” And, “The Tao that can be named is not the true Tao; the artist who can be recognized is not a true artist.” These are both very dogmatic statements from someone who is arguing so energetically against dogma! One might almost suspect that they were being made by an artist with a particular artistic method to protect. The famous statement about the Tao is also a philosophical statement about the treacherousness of philosophy, found in a text, the Tao Te Ching, and written by a scholar-poet of a sort, Lao Tzu. However real or mythical this semi-anonymous poet might have been, this figure was nonetheless a scholar-poet, who, contrary to his own very specific instructions, saw fit to dispense advice. I wrote an essay a while back called “Anonymous, and His International Fame.” Like Lao Tzu and Rumi, Rilke and Paul Celan, I believe that it is possible to have one’s nonlinguistic cake and eat it too! Over the past ten years, as I have been quietly going about the business of expanding my vision and opening up my hearing, perhaps several dozen people have lectured me on the superiority of silence over speech. “Those who don’t know speak!” they say, “Those who know are silent.” Curiously, very few of these mystics have lectured me in a calm and beatific way.
If one were going to make a list of all the things through the centuries that artists were/are not allowed to or not supposed to be able to do, the list would be very long indeed. A good artist will disregard all such advice and then calmly proceed to do exactly what he wants to do, in accordance with whatever guidance might be available. And if the artist correctly places his efforts on the altar of the unknown, his failures will be just as illuminating as his successes, if not more so. I just cannot accept hard and fast oppositions such as silence vs. speech, conscious vs. unconscious, honesty vs. art. This way of thinking assumes that the artist, or, more broadly, the human being, is the passive victim of circumstance, with no choice but to bounce mechanically back and forth between contraries. The fact that we are indeed often trapped by our limited understanding of how opposites fit together is, to my mind, not an argument against art but rather an argument for it. Good art is by its nature open ended, and, while it does not offer anything in the way of a guarantee, it is one of the few things that challenges us to step or leap beyond our immediate backgrounds and personalities and allegiances and beliefs. And if such art does not succeed in entirely transforming us, so be it. While there may well be more effective methods of deepening or transcendence, these have problems of their own; they too often reach for height or depth while leaving the complex middle ground of experience behind. I assert my right to walk and chew gum at the same time.
Hi Jasun and John,
Here are a few aphorisms from Emil Cioran that you might get a kick out of (and that touch obliquely on our discussion):
We should change our name after each important experience.
If we could see ourselves as others see us, we would vanish on the spot.
Most of our troubles come from our first impulses. The slightest enthusiasm costs more than a crime.
There is no false sensation.
I get along quite well with someone only when he is at his lowest point and has neither the desire nor the strength to restore his habitual illusions.
I feel I am free but I know I am not.
The wise man consents to everything, for he identifies himself with nothing. An opportunist without desires.
The more gifted a man is, the less progress he makes on the spiritual level. Talent is an obstacle to the inner life.
No one approaches the condition of a sage if he has not had the good luck to be forgotten in his lifetime.
In a work of psychiatry, only the patients’ remarks interest me; in a work of criticism, only the quotations.
Not the slightest trace of reality anywhere—except in my sensations of unreality.
A book is a postponed suicide.
While men are haunted by the memory of paradise, angels are tormented by longing for this world.
We should have been excused from lugging a body: the burden of the self was enough.
Innocence being the perfect state, perhaps the only one, it is incomprehensible that a man enjoying it should seek to leave it. Yet history from its beginnings down to ourselves is only that and nothing but that.
The only real dignity is that of exclusion.
I haven’t interacted enough with Jasun to state so strongly he is being dogmatic. I take part of Jasun’s point to be that these wrestlings and struggles with Art, with words and language, are intensely and concretely personal. We can talk all day on an abstract level, filling forms with air and setting them aloft like balloons. Some have a genius more in brevity, silence as the medium, nothingness-directed, the draining down to emptiness, solitary and singular, experienced as truer fidelity to infinity, continually knocking up against the bounds of the Impossible; others have a genius more in sinuous and sonorous fullness, overflowing and open to all, democratically losing themselves and finding themselves in many forms, giving voice and expression to plurality, stirring the hope that anything is possible. Hemingway and Proust were of a different nature from each other, and so were Beckett and Joyce. Being human, one can’t be all things. If one tries, one is soon denying and betraying one’s own nature, alternating masks and roles, and getting involved more in entertaining and acting. Playing the part of an artist, rather than pursuing “know thyself”. One may pursue the unglamorous and ordinary side of the real, or pursue the enchanted and magical, all that comes through skillful artistry in presenting illusions. I myself grow a little sick of artists. Maybe this mentality I have now is due to my own sputtering in my attempts at art - that’s probably part of it; but on the other hand, being cast out to the margins and looking in, after having played the game for a while, I have this clear view of the vanity of it, the ridiculous side. My one remaining battle is with resentment, bitterness, some anger, but these are becoming less in me the older I become, being replaced curiously by a kind of calm attentiveness which borders on indifference. There is much art which I simply don’t get worked up over, just feeling that it’s not necessary and essential. It would probably cause a scandal in some quarters to state plainly that much art doesn’t make the world a better place.
I like these two aphorisms by Emil Cioran you shared:
“I get along quite well with someone only when he is at his lowest point and has neither the desire nor the strength to restore his habitual illusions.”
“No one approaches the condition of a sage if he has not had the good luck to be forgotten in his lifetime.”
(“A book is a postponed suicide” is a good one too.)
Interesting to consider all this, Brian, in the light of your fascinating and provocative maxim 5) “We must be willing to meet each on their own terms, however self-deluded or sociopathic they might be. We will know that we have succeeded when their flaws become an almost exact mirror-image of our own. We must then kiss the horror that confronts us in the mirror.”
Hi John,
You wrote, “We can talk all day on an abstract level, filling forms with air and setting them aloft like balloons. Some have a genius more in brevity, silence as the medium, nothingness-directed, the draining down to emptiness, solitary and singular, experienced as truer fidelity to infinity, continually knocking up against the bounds of the Impossible; others have a genius more in sinuous and sonorous fullness, overflowing and open to all, democratically losing themselves and finding themselves in many forms, giving voice and expression to plurality, stirring the hope that anything is possible. Hemingway and Proust were of a different nature from each other, and so were Beckett and Joyce. Being human, one can’t be all things. If one tries, one is soon denying and betraying one’s own nature…”
I have to wonder just what it is you thought that I was saying in my previous comment. You seem to be under the impression that you are arguing against the points that I was making when, in fact, you are expressing the same attitude from a slightly different angle. I am not arguing against the right of any person or artist to do anything at all, quite the opposite. That Hemingway is different from Proust and Beckett is different from Joyce confirms my argument that each artist should be allowed to follow his own path, whether or not this can be justified according to the standards of his day or the opinions of his mentors or even those of his friends. When Picasso held a private showing of Demoiselles D’Avignon for his friends, after working in secrecy on the piece for months, it is said that Matisse wept. These were not tears of joy, not at all. Like the majority of those in attendance, Matisse was quite concerned about Picasso’s mental health, and he begged him never to show the work in public. As I wrote in my previous comment, “A good artist will disregard all such advice and then calmly proceed to do exactly what he wants to do, in accordance with whatever guidance might be available.” To my mind, the most significant thing about the comparison of Hemingway and Proust, Beckett and Joyce is that they are all artists, who chose to write in ways that others may have found too blunt or too convoluted or too absurd or too incomprehensible until each followed his particular line of development to the end. Few critics champion the genuinely new; the great majority of critical opinions are retroactive. Once a good artist shows that something can be done, then later critics will exclaim, “Of course! We knew it all along! (or would have if we had not originally disagreed)."
You wrote, “There is much art which I simply don’t get worked up over, just feeling that it’s not necessary and essential. It would probably cause a scandal in some quarters to state plainly that much art doesn’t make the world a better place.”
We may now think of Miro as a charming and whimsical painter, but, in the 1920s, he declared that his goal was to “assassinate painting.” I would guess that the reason that the audience rioted during the premiere of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring—a riot that was invaluable for the eventual success of the work!—was not that they disapproved of the music or loathed the dancing; no, they were annoyed that the female dancers wore too many clothes, did not think that dancing was actually taking place, and did not believe that what Stravinsky wrote could be categorized as “music.” We could say that the key works of these artists were “original.” We could also say that the artists were impatient and fed up, and that they were driven to discover new modes of expression. As is often the case, to do this they were forced to create art that did not at first seem like art. Of course, in the first half of the 20th Century, artists had the great advantage that it was far easier to offend their audience, and this made the whole process quite a bit more fun.
I would certainly agree with the attitude that much art is not necessary and essential. This is one of the reasons that I write the way that I do. This is the reason that I have worked more or less anonymously for long stretches of time, with little in the way of support or feedback and little concern for pursuing a normal literary career. In poetry, I had early on lost interest in imitating my immediate contemporaries. For years, I avoided writing prose. When I did start to write essays, in 1998, my goal was to get rid of the inessential—well, the inessential to me—and to keep fumbling around until I could re-imagine the form. It why I have emphasized the great importance of taking risks and making mistakes, and it is also why I have emphasized the creative importance of disgust. I think that this stripping away of the inessential is also what Jason has been doing in his more recent work, such as The Prisoner of Infinity, which reads, one the one hand, like a labyrinthine Gothic detective story, and, on the other hand, like a minutely focused autopsy of repressed trauma, psychic splitting, social pathology, and metaphysical delusion. Stylistically, the results of our explorations may be different. In terms of method, there is, I think, a common drive towards the essential. We just disagree as to what these essential elements are. I would never ask or expect any artist to change his work so that its style might more closely correspond to my creative goals. I ask for the same freedom in return.
This is precisely it, Brian. “You seem to be under the impression that you are arguing against the points that I was making when, in fact, you are expressing the same attitude from a slightly different angle.” (A bit of a provocation by me.) It’s why I don’t understand argument and accusation of another being a certain way - for instance, Jasun trying to practice Tao in that way, relating to it that way, as slippery and elusive as it might be, and to us it coming out that particular way. It’s not really a matter of argument to me. We’re talking about ways of being here.
Not that I did it well, but I was trying to express that the world, the universe, is much, much bigger than art. Does the universe have need of art? All the ways of being of those who don’t practice art, or who have given up art, for one reason or another, are just as valid as those who happen to practice it as a religion. One may be excommunicated from the church, so to speak, the language of the church torn out of one’s soul, and bleed for years, coughing up blood, speaking in crazy broken chunks, and still that is a way of being in the world. Who am I to argue with that?
P. S. I have this NextDoor neighborhood app, and I just received this notification in my email in-box of a “Feast of St. Francis and the Blessing of the Animals” taking place here at a church in North Beach. I walked by and witnessed it in the past, a motley crew of not many people waiting there on the church steps with their pets - of course dogs and cats, but even a couple snakes and parrots I recall, and other more unusual animals. I wonder if a blessed lion would cease to tear the throat out of a deer.
Hi John,
Again, you seem to be arguing against some imaginary opponent, some person who has demanded that the whole of the human race should be passionately devoted to the arts and that all writers should write long essays filled with paradoxes and deadpan humor and lots of poetic images. I have no idea of who this person is or where it might be possible to find him. On the other hand, I do not believe that human speech is an accidental addition to the cosmos. The Rig Veda will back me up on this! I do believe that speech has an archetypal role to play. That this is so is not something that it is possible to prove; rather, given the right circumstances, it is something that it might be just barely possible to demonstrate. Such demonstration must, by its nature, be more or less indirect; it must take the form of illustration and storytelling and metaphor and suggestion. And if the demonstration takes the form of rigorous analysis and the puncturing of illusions and the stripping away of masks, as in Jasun’s deconstruction of the myth of Crowley, this is also a form of storytelling.
For whatever reason, people often—accidentally on purpose—confuse the idea that it is not possible for language to define or encompass the infinite with the idea that it is impossible to give expression to one’s experience of the subtle realms. This description of difficulty then quickly turns into a prohibition. “You cannot” is somehow transformed into “THOU SHALT NOT,” and there is often a weird kind of emotional force behind the command. There are some statements about the untrustworthiness of art, such as Jasun’s (both here and elsewhere), in which it seems to me that the artist is trying to get some distance from his earlier work, to dissociate himself from those styles and methods that no longer meet his needs, in order to clear out a space in which something new might happen. There are other statements about the untrustworthiness of art that are more like updatings of the Calvinist injunction against music. (My father grew up in a Dutch Reform household and wanted to become a classical cellist. Luckily, his family converted when they decided to start a dance band.) From such a perspective, art is simply bad. It is dangerous. It is silly, and it will lure you away from those things that are really real.
As I said before, I just don’t accept any hard and fast opposition of speech to silence, movement to stillness, detail to panorama, or honesty to art. In matters of this type, I have to start with my own experience.
There have been periods in which I was spiritually expansive but not especially honest with others or myself. There have been other periods in which I was forced to moderate my energies but did a somewhat better job of being honest and attentive. As a husband and father, there is only so much I can get away with! Grandiosity is very difficult without an adequate amount of solitude. There were periods in which I bounced frantically here and there in my efforts to gain access to some larger field of vision. There were periods in which I deliberately kept my focus narrow, when I would start anywhere, putter around, and trust that things would happen by themselves. There were periods in which I felt ungrounded and was overwhelmed by an influx of energies. I did not necessarily know more then. There have been periods, such as the present one, in which I have been able to give some halfway adequate form to my intuitions. I do not necessarily know less now.
Let me give you one example of how silence and speech can sometimes be aspects of one larger thing. In 1990, I received a yogic initiation from Anandi (then Asha) Ma. This was a life-changing experience, and I will always be grateful to her. After the initiation, however, much of the actual instruction that I received seemed to come directly from Dhyanyogi Madhusudandas, who lived in Gujarat, many thousands of miles away. I never met him and we never spoke. These insights or flashes of vision or glimpses of the accumulated knowledge of the lineage or whatever you would call them were almost entirely non-imagistic and nonverbal, at least at first. It took a number of years for me to begin to translate these intuitions into linear form. This “knowledge” was at first almost not there at all. It was like someone tracing patterns on one’s nonexistent skin. And then later, a form of guidance that was both more personal and more general took over.
In my essay “I Left at Dawn for the Eternal City; It Seems that I Have Misplaced Several Days,” I wrote, “After crossing to the ‘other shore,’ the poet finds that the moon is but one stage-prop out of many, all of which are syllables that have never left his mouth. But again, he must return out of the depths, with pen in hand. He must re-cross the ocean with no vehicle but his body; to do otherwise would be to violate an oath, or to not respond with orgiastic laughter to a dare. Convinced of the superiority of his one-directional transcendence, the mystic comments on the poet’s youth—he whose near death experiences were once the life’s blood of the lineage! For the poet refuses to exterminate his ‘ego.’ Having once ‘inhaled’ it is now unacceptable to ‘exhale’; a different actor must be chosen to do each.”
If it is the job of the mystic to be overwhelmed by immensity, it is the job of the poet to bring some relic of his travels in the other world back to this one, and to perhaps suggest that these two worlds are not as far apart as we think. And if Basho chooses to do this via the writing of haikus, who am I to tell him that he has not used enough syllables?
I get your point, Brian. To be sure, I’m not in disagreement with you, and again, I’m not arguing. I’m trying to see and understand. At least I don’t think I’m arguing. It may be that I’m arguing against some invisible opponent. Doin’ a little shadow-boxing. If so, oh well, I suppose the exercise can’t hurt. It’s good for the muscles, lungs and heart. I deliberately pushed in the direction I did, to try to open up more common ground. There’s something about Jasun, in his vibes, which I feel I understand. I don’t know exactly what it is. The way he uses language - you speak of disgust - his own distrust and disgust with language - which leads to convolutions, disengaged short cryptic remarks. I’m feelin’ it, man. I understand it. He’s workin’ somethin’ out of himself, and it’s of great interest to me personally. Just recollect when we first met, my own recurring themes in personal struggle. I don’t share Jasun’s thinking down into those more disturbing subterranean associations, whatever those may be (or maybe I do if I dig down deeper into myself and unearth what’s there), but being a wounded and bleeding beast, and finding that language as we know it cannot possibly express it - this disgust with words, their insufficiency, I relate to that and understand it. It’s rather ironic, or call it paradoxical, that in trying to free and rid oneself of it, kicking and punching Art, trying to beat it up and deliver a knock-out blow, to put it out of its misery, and putting one’s whole being into it, one actually becomes more lucid and articulate, more artful, more exactly of what one is trying not to become. The thorn is only driven in deeper!
Believe me, Brian, in the attempt to puncture illusion, the stripping away of masks, strangely enough if pushed far enough, I do see that this also becomes a form of storytelling.
(I just read what you wrote here once skimming, then once closer, all the way through, and of course I’m gonna read it again. I must leave my apartment now, and I’m gonna read it again later. Thank you for your thoughtful and considerate responses, Brian, and for putting up with me!)
Hi John,
We have both mentioned the puncturing of illusions, the stripping away of masks, etc. I have sometimes found that this demolition process can unfold from a number of directions at once, with each movement appearing to cancel out its counterpart, so that one’s rigorous analysis can reinforce those fears and complexes and obsessions from which one is trying to free oneself, even as it provides one with ever sharper insight into what is going on. At the same time, a disruption produced by what at first appears to be a threat can signal that some larger mode of awareness is working to upend the status quo. In my previous comment, I mentioned that I had never met or spoken with Dhyanyogi Madhusudandas. While it is true that I never met or spoke with him in the physical world, I did meet him several times in my dreams. . I was not instantly or magically transformed by the encounter. Bit by bit, though, after this, I did begin to view my life-story from a somewhat different angle. Here is a paragraph about the dream–written in the third person–from “First, A Brief Biography: Having Cleared the Sky It Was Time to Reinvent the Wheel”:
A month later, he had a dream in which he was standing in a barn. Next to him was a kind but terrifying presence. Somehow he knew that it was Dhyanyogi Madhusudandas, Asha Ma’s teacher, who was 106 and lived in Gujarat. There was some sort of an old fashioned drop-hammer contraption set up in the middle of the floor. From the height of the rafters, an enormous stone cylinder would, over and over, come crashing down on a head-sized rock. "Do you know what that is?” asked Dhyanyogi. A sinking fear spread upward through his stomach. “I think I do. Is that supposed to be my head?” “Of course it is your head, you idiot! I’ve been working day and night for the past three weeks to break it. It really is very hard.”
Nicely described, Brian. That’s indeed what happens. Very true of the complex process.
That last part with the old-fashioned drop-hammer contraption releasing an enormous stone cylinder down upon a rock, pounding on it again and again, trying to break it, the rock being the head of the student, off to the side watching in horror, has me laughing like you can’t imagine! (More anecdotes like that!)
As soon as I walked away, having to leave after writing my last comment, I started thinking about, on the one hand, writing and other forms of self-expression which come out of one’s blood, more of a descent into mortality and manifesting more the ugliness and grotesque of being human, the profane, and on the other hand writing and forms of self-expression which are more of an arranging of symbols - like dreamcatchers - which convey all the elements - earth, air, fire, and water - which can be done in so many variations and mixtures, ad infinitum, and has one spiraling upward, ascending and finally taking one’s place in the God’s Eye. The latter type is “spiritual”, and through it one may access past lives, other ages, commingle with other spirits, write like a cleansing wind, express oneself like a purifying fire, all without getting blown away or burned oneself, and this is thrilling and healing and empowering, and for many it goes to their head. The former is creativity out of pain and suffering and loss, our inevitable mortal lot, a continual grinding down, a puncturing of illusion and unmasking wherever it can be done. Not glamorous at all, but can be extremely invigorating. It can also if not done with full investment of heart be irritating, even arousing disgust and contempt. One must come down out of generalizing abstraction and really write or express oneself out of one’s blood for it to have any resonance and potency and human impact.
It may be that the greatest reward for the latter kind of writing and self-expression, of the more spiritual variety, is illuminating insight, and the greatest reward for the former kind, the fruit of it, is compassion. One is a gift of seeing, the other a gift of feeling.
Some of my comments became the basis of an essay. Many thanks to Brian and John for the inspiration.
Glad to play some part in sparking inspiration, Jasun. Love the Fuseli painting. I see Hamlet has been doctored into the left foreground. There’s old Falstaff crashing in, landing on his ass.
I wasn’t sure where I should leave this comment, here or after your piece at your site. It’s an intriguing piece. I get the gist, kind of understanding it in my gut, but in my intellect, my reasoning faculty, I find myself wanting more concrete proof. Ritual abuses are some heavy charges. You mention how time-consuming, what an immense task, it would be connecting the dots. Yet, for the kind of things you assert, that’s probably the only way to get doubters and skeptics to come around to seeing more what you perceive in the shadowy depths. (Maybe you’ve attempted this before? I’m relatively new to you and your work.) In the meantime I imagine there are many who will continue to pigeon-hole you. I suppose you’ve grown used to it and to cope with charges of paranoia and whatnot have developed a considerable sense of irony, pushing it so far that pathos enters into the humor of it, and even the impending doom of tragedy. I see how this ties into how you open and close the piece, with mention of Hamlet and Falstaff, the parenthesis or bookends of your piece.
It’s truly a gigantic thought you’re trying to get hold of. The amazing thing is that you name names, like an informant. It’s like being a whistleblower in the metaphysical realm. In relation to that gigantic thought, I feel like a fly on the hind of a behemoth.
Crowley orchestrated and engaged in ritual abuse when he was alive, with all that occult mystery around it, but it’s amazing to think that aura continues, a disembodied Crowleyan intelligence. That’s where the difficulty is for me. I prefer demystification to feeding into continuing a legend, fattening it up, keeping it alive. Of course I desire this to be done not by turning away in denial. I want facts, even provisional facts, something more substantial to hold onto to sober up the atmosphere. Shedding light into the actual machinery of what generates the Persuasion is the only thing that will lead to the kind of knowledge needed to defuse it.
And even if you had (or perhaps have) that knowledge, that’s only the beginning of the gigantic task and risky undertaking to get by all the armed guards, over the high walls, down the corridors full of mirrors and decoys to the inner sanctum where the machine which generates all the Persuasion is held and maintained.
Watching Chimes at Midnight again, the vital need Falstaff has for Prince Hal - the relationship between those two is absolutely fascinating, and in the end, heartbreaking - a bite is in the undercurrents of Falstaff’s wit, an aggression, but he’s powerless except through the force of his character alone, so everything comes off with this rotund amusement, even maternal in its quality. He’s like a declawed and defanged animal who nonetheless expresses himself like he’s a mighty lion. It’s like a running gag, would be completely pathetic if he wasn’t so heartily invested in his relationships, his clever misdirections and tall tales. The pathetical is there, but he pushes through it continually (no doubt with the aid of sack or drink) like someone mired in shit and if he doesn’t keep moving will drown in it.
How about both? Points of much interest here.
At risk of seeming irreverence this account reminds me of that 'revelatory experience of Mrs Amos Pinchot/aka William James. Dorothy Parker/ almost anybody visited by a sense of deep inexpressible truth that only deathless poetry can capture. To find in the morning
Hogamus Higamus
Men are Polygamous
Higamus Hogamus
Women Monogamous.
I am not suggesting that the sense of being visited by the Daimon’s Ur language was invalid, merely that bringing it to the surface always has a sort of absurdity. Ignoring that and being brave about adherence and the ongoing search for a better song to sing IS the brand burnt into the psyche. I think everything you write acknowledges that pivot between absurdity ( hence de Chirico) and the necessary dislocation through which deeper insight wriggles.
Hi Philippa,
I don’t know that it’s a scientifically proven fact that all men are polygamous, nor, if past experience is any guide, are women necessarily monogamous. Higamus, however, may very well be Hogamus.
It is interesting that you connect the—very occasional!—sense of absurdity in my writing with Giorgio de Chirico. De Chirico makes very particular use of the concepts of the “nonsensical” and the “absurd.” What he means by these words is very different from what Beckett or Pinter would mean. His use of them derives from Nietzsche. When de Chirico refers to an object or event as nonsensical or absurd, this means that he has experienced it in all of its original strangeness; all names and pragmatic definitions have been removed, and the world no longer appears to be a safe or predictable place. This was not, at least in the artist’s early years, a primarily intellectual stance. From 1911 to 1918 or so, he was subject to extreme and disorienting psychological states, which could be said to veer into the mystical. In his later work, perhaps for reasons of self-protection, he tends to modulate his experience of disjunction, and the irony in these works is of a somewhat more conventional sort.
So, de Chirico’s sense of the absurd and the nonsensical is both a metaphysical concept and a direct experience. Here is the key thing as I understand it and as his use of the concept relates to my work: to say that an object is nonsensical or absurd is to say that it has been stripped of any hard and fast frame of reference. From one angle, it might appear that the object means nothing at all. The object is empty, and any meaning that we project onto it is an attempt to escape from this emptiness. This mode of interpretation would point in the direction of Pinter and Beckett, as I have mentioned, and to a book such as Sartre’s “Nausea.” This would be a logical mode of interpretation, however, and de Chirico was anything but logical. The emptying out of the object could also lead to more mysterious results. If the object did not mean one thing, as defined by the social and scientific and economic and mythological and philosophical superstructures that surrounded it, then it had, in a sense, been liberated; it was free to mean a great many things at once.
If an object can mean anything by virtue of meaning nothing, and we are free to navigate by means of associational leaps, then why should we not regard all insights as equally resonant and profound? This question may not be answerable, but it does, perhaps, return us to Heraclitus and Parmenides and the beginnings of Western Philosophy, when rigorous thought and intuition were held in a dynamic and ever-shifting balance. No one mode of intelligence was adequate, and understanding depended on the cultivation of a subtle edge of awareness. In a similar way, the good artist will create a living whole out of what first appeared to be nothing, a kind of “open house” of harmonic—and perhaps atonal—associations out of what first appeared to be absurd.
Just a quick thought here, @brian.george51, but I wonder how your (or de Chirico’s) idea of the absurd relates to what @jjf.martel, in the introduction to his essay on Stranger Things, calls ontological strangness, which he contrasts with “epistemological strangeness.” He defines these thus:
I appreciate the notion that an object empty of inherent meaning can mean many different things, depending on what we creatively impart to it. On the other hand, with Heidegger, I’d also suggest that the object’s meaning is not merely imparted by a subject, but also “given” by the object itself, its “speaking” to us (or something speaking through it), insofar as we let its (indefinite, strange, uncanny) being be. Thus, the object does constrain our meaning-making. Arguably, any meaning-making we do requires this constraint, indeed, thrives on it.
Hi Marco,
You are pointing towards something at which I hinted but only started to sketch in. In my comment, I was actually arguing against the idea that the object, because we might experience it as absurd, is therefore altogether empty. If an object were truly empty, nothing would mean anything and anything could mean everything. Much bad Surrealist writing is bad for exactly this reason; the images are altogether arbitrary, and the chains of association lead nowhere in particular. De Chirico’s art and writing is not like this at all, quite the contrary. His images and scenes are so haunting because they seem to possess a superabundance of meanings; it just is difficult to figure out exactly what these meanings are. While de Chirico did attempt to frame his encounter with the strangeness of the world with philosophical concepts, it is immediately obvious to someone looking at or reading his work that this is little more than a self-protective reflex. What makes his best work seem dangerous and resonant, however, is that the chains of association are not entirely subjective. His images are “uncanny,” to an unusual degree. We are often possessed by a sense that we have walked on these streets, that we have stepped into these shadows, that we have smelled the salt air from this harbor, that we have seen these images before.
In a painting such as “The Dream Turns”—done in 1913—for example, we have two bunches of bananas–one intact and one disassembled–two pineapples, a head knocked from a classical sculpture, a row of arches, and some shadows, with a brick wall, a tower and a puffing locomotive in the distance. Let us take just the bananas and their context. On one level, of course, they are just bananas. If de Chirico might describe these bananas as “nonsensical,” he does not mean to suggest that they mean nothing; rather, he is attempting articulate a pregnant middle ground of tension, in which an object, image, or scene somehow activates our intuition but gives birth to a range of implications that our conscious minds can’t grasp. In looking at this object that we might call a “banana” and classify as a “fruit,” we are not looking at a only a situated object, we are looking at the net of interdependent origination that precedes, supports, and encompasses it. Within this net, all boundaries are more ambiguous than they seem, solidity is a kind of magic act, and meaning moves from the vaporous to the embodied by way of an ongoing dialogue. And if an object does exist in the Realm of the Ideal, as a fully perfected form, the realm from which it comes is nonetheless held in a state of tension with our own, and this art-producing tension is just as real as either pole in the opposition.
In de Chirico’s world, these bananas evoke North Africa, specifically Alexandria, where all of the cultural traditions of the ancient world met and mixed. Even in the modern world, this juxtaposition of cultures was going on. To some degree, the head of the ancient statue, now missing its body, and the puffing locomotive inhabit the same stage. De Chirico would also have been reminded of his father’s work as a railroad architect, of the childhood travels that brought them to North Africa and Greece and other places around the Mediterranean, of the 19th Century’s grand hopes for the future, of the march of progress and its cost. The bananas are somehow sad. There is no particular reason that they should be there, except that they fit, in a dreamlike fashion. We may be prompted to think of Darwin and the descent of humans from lesser primates, or of the lost innocence of the Age of Gold. The juxtaposition of these images, although poetic, is also quite disjunctive. As we stare at them, we pause to observe that we are not at peace. Nor is the nostalgia evoked by Alexandria reassuring. While it was there that traditions met, where the records of the ancient world were stored, where new and sophisticated syntheses were developed, it was there also that the great library was burnt, not once but a number of times, leaving only a few random threads to connect us to the mysterious depths of our origins.
If an artist’s interpretation of a scene or object is subjective, this is just the place that he starts; this does not mean that his action is not simultaneously collective, or that some field of collective genius does not regard him as its plaything.
When JF Martel posted “Consciousness in the Aesthetic Imagination,” we exchanged a number of emails about the nature of the sign and the symbol, including a few in which we debated about whether de Chirico’s images should be understood as symbols or as signs. They are, of course, symbols, as JF defines the term, but I posed the question of whether they could also be seen as signs that we had somehow lost the ability to read. My thinking was this: if the symbol suggests, the sign tells, and what it tells us may be as intricate in its web of meanings as a symbol. If we would usually take in a symbol’s implications at our leisure, there may be some greater degree of urgency to a sign, especially to someone in an unusual mental state. Many schizophrenics are quite literal in their thinking. If a symbol asks to be observed, a sign may demand some action on our part, even if we are not at first sure what this is. I am reminded of a man that I saw last year in a subway station. He was wearing a t-shirt with a rifle scope and crosshairs on the front. It read, “Nine out of ten voices are telling me not to shoot.” In one of these emails to JF, I wrote:
My thinking about the word “sign” has been influenced by my many years of staring at the paintings of de Chirico. The images in these paintings, of course, are generally understood to be symbols. In Freudian terms, a tower is a phallus and an arch is a vagina, a cannon is a phallus and a sail is a swelling breast, During the period that de Chirico first formulated his metaphysical vocabulary, however, he was in a very strange state of mind; he was prone to week-long migraines and intestinal disturbances, and was yanked between the extremes of self-doubt and grandiosity, between a near bottomless anxiety and a sense that he had been chosen by the Fates. The images in these paintings spoke to him in their own hermetically sealed language, and I can’t help but wonder if he saw them more as omens than as symbols. They were messages that were intended to be read, even if, on a human level, they had been emptied of almost all of their fixed meaning.
You wrote, “So while there is a real sensible world out there, the labels go on fast, and once on, they are very difficult to remove.” For de Chirico, at least in this early period, the removal of labels was both a goal and an impossible to escape form of torment. To achieve the great sensitivity that was required of him, the artist must expect “To live in the world as if in an immense museum of strangeness, full of curious many colored toys which change their appearance, which, like little children we sometimes break to see how they are made on the inside, and, disappointed, realize they are empty.” This idea of objects, signs, or symbols that lack meaning and yet speak to us and somehow “matter” is similar to a passage in your essay. You wrote, “Against those who would stop at the allegorical definition of the symbol, Deleuze, Bergson, and Lawrence argued, each in his own way, that symbols are signs devoid of meaning—or more precisely, signs referring to nothing beyond themselves. ‘You can’t give a great symbol a “meaning,” any more than you can give a cat a “meaning,”’ D. H. Lawrence wrote. But while symbols may not mean anything for these thinkers, they do matter.”
In a letter from the “Paul Eluard Manuscript,” de Chirico writes, “One of the strangest and deepest sensations that prehistory has left with us is the sensation of foretelling. It will always exist. It is like an eternal proof of the senselessness of the universe. The first man must have seen auguries everywhere, he must have trembled at each step he took.” It took me quite a while to come to terms with de Chirico’s use of words like “nonsensical” and “absurd.” That they were carried over from his reading of Nietzsche did not make the concepts behind them any easier to understand. In the cityscape dreamed and painted by de Chirico, we are instructed to regard each object, sign, and symbol as absurd, yet at the same time they are supercharged with significance. It is they and not the artist that appear to be in control, and the artist must carefully approach them from an angle.
Once, in a distant age, these apparently occult signs were perhaps meant to be clear. They were not readable by only a select group, nor were they more than moderately suggestive. There was a one to one correspondence between such signs and the primal mysteries at which they pointed. They were not necessarily just glyphs upon a page or objects placed in the street. Each had its own inner life. Such signs were not as passive as our contemporary ones; no, not at all; they could act, and they could manifest just as easily in the psyche as in the world, in other dimensions just as easily as in this one. They would speak to those without eyes and gesture to those who were deaf. We would look at a tower, and we would immediately grasp the full range of its associated meanings. We would register these with our spines. We would look at a ship, and we would immediately grasp its connection to the Deluge. We would see that the human body was also a kind of ship. Each sign came complete with a set of instructions for us. Even now, it is possible that they do their best to speak in a clear language. Yet something has gone wrong. The Earth appears to be far flatter than it should be. The sky stretches for an enormous distance overhead. The signs now appear to be indifferent to our welfare. A gulf has opened up, and the world from which they come has been removed.
Just to clarify Brian, ( but not to diminish by a kind of justification) the Higamous hogamous nonsense was introduced not because I though it had ANY relevance to reality or whether men were polygamous but simply to illustrate that the co-ordinates of profundity for the individual perceiving them (at the time) emerge as nonsensical when translated. It was why I introduced my own work by the article ‘Lost in Translation’. However it stimulated you to a much more worthwhile elaboration on signs and symbols.
de Chirico’s ‘absurdity’ seems to me in the juxtaposition not of the objects themselves but of their evocations, almost as though he is manipulating historic and geographical non-sequiturs. Hence the sense that one has, as you put it, ‘we have walked on these streets, that we have stepped into these shadows, that we have smelled the salt air from this harbor, that we have seen these images before.’ Of course we have, for we have walked all streets…and he takes that as given by dislocating his streets and his railways puffing alongside the legacy of ancient Greece. This removal of time and space as being limited by the consensus, and throwing it open to space-time is also the identifying hallmark of what is given the name of Schizophrenia but equally is happily manifest in dreams in which the ‘quite literal’ understanding of both words and symbols serve, not to imply a universal, but a wholly personal meaning- in the cross hairs of the individual’s interpretation.