Hats
the past few weeks, and, uh, what we’ve come up with can
be reduced to two fundamental concepts. One: people are
not wearing enough hats. Two: matter is energy. In the
universe, there are many energy fields which we cannot
normally perceive. Some energies have a spiritual source
which act upon a person’s soul. However, this soul does
not exist ab initio, as orthodox Christianity teaches. It
has to be brought into existence by a process of guided
self-observation. However, this is rarely achieved, owing
to man’s unique ability to be distracted from spiritual
matters by everyday trivia.”
- From Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life…
Dream/Rant number 1012938
A brand new apartment, painted white, with all the furnishings. K asks me to go, and I do. I call her up at the apartment and there is a strange thing going on. A friend of mine, we’ll call him N, is in both places trying to run an RPG for us (something akin to Legend of Mana). I hang up and start playing, and then remember that I need to talk to K. I call back, and all I hear is music and sobbing, but no voice. She won’t talk to me, no matter how hard I try to reach her. When she hangs up, I weep for awhile. Then I call back and there is a young black couple that kindly inform me that she left, and tell me everything they heard about where she went. I thank them, then set out to find her, at least so that I will know. At that point, I find myself talking to Bill Clinton, who is helping me out, and he says he’s got his men on the job. I ask him if they’ve come up with any leads so far. He gives me a phone number which is the landline of the place I’m at right now.
Your Ranty Goodness for the Day
In other news, I’m adjusting to life, although I wish I’d gotten the truck first. It would have killed me to be alone at the house, but it’s also pretty unpleasant not having transportation or a bed of any reasonable sort. A change of clothes is also desirable at this point, because although I set out with one, I didn’t end up with it here. To top it all off, it’s friggin’ raining, and I have no jacket, so basically if I want to walk somewhere, I have to gauge carefully, lest I soak my only shirt. So right now I’m waiting for K to get out of her meeting. Already forgot that she had that today. My truck might be finished this afternoon, but I’m not sure how much credence I put in that assessment of the situation. The house isn’t horrible here, but the cockroaches in the kitchen just ain’t doin’ it for me, so until I figure out a way to get rid of them, I’m eating fast food and mini-mart burritos. Ugh. At least I have three cans of Raid, and lots of time to kill the little fuckers. Right now I’m kind of just floating, and it’s not a feeling I like. I used to just float through everything, and I’ve never figured out how to transition between the two states smoothly.
Piece of mind
So things are finally setting in. My life is going to be very different. I feel like I should have known all of this was coming. A few days before, I discussed with my stepson the physical and mental concepts associated with windstorms and why they refer to change as being born on the winds as well. I gave myself all the clues, and yet didn’t surmise the direction that the whole thing came from.
I have so much time now. Dead time. I’m just floating, waiting for my truck to be fixed so I can start working somewhere. Who knows, maybe I could go beg for my job back at Teletrak. It’d be a nice income if I could survive the first couple of weeks. Of course, I need to look in the paper as well as see who I can talk to about a job. Maybe if I start going to meetings again, it won’t be so bad.
I feel hollow, like I’m being prepared to be stuffed. I haven’t been eating enough, because I’m always on edge. Fixing that would probably solve a lot of my emotional problems right now.
Argh. I’m ranting in circles now.
Web Cam Theremin
Okay, this is just cool.
Also, I think that learning how movement translates into other types of information is a particularly important task. More information on experimental projects of that nature here: Kadmon Wiki
Nightmares and Caves
From an email entitled: “other people’s nightmares are boring”
“I had a dream the other night. It was a terrible dream.
I was in the great room of an old, rambling house. There was a party going on. Music was playing; happy, upbeat, unremarkable. Friends and family from every chapter of my life were there; some with drinks in hand, others just standing around or sitting in the wide wooden stairway, talking to each other but not to me. I walked through the crowd, past and around them, content to observe.
Then the house shuddered. Everyone stopped talking. For a moment, it was silent. Then a great groaning. I felt the floor beneath me drop and shift. The crowd’s silence broke into bewildered exclamation. I joined the rush towards the double doors across the room. I was one of the first out the door.
As I crossed the porch I saw the pillars beside me splinter and buckle. They made a sound like twisting celery. I jumped down five steps into a courtyard of bare earth, landing on my hands and knees. People swarmed around and past me, screaming, their legs a blur. I climbed to my feet; turning in time to see the front half of the three-story house rip away and collapse into its own foundations.
Outside it was night, starry but moonless, cold and dark, around us, nothing but black hills and forest. And silence. Then, the muffled cries and whimpers of the buried broke the spell. We survivors moved towards the ruined pit to pull at jagged timbers, to save our loved ones, to lend what help we could.
That’s when I looked up and saw them, two friends and their infant child, in the rough cross section of what remained of the devastated house. They were in a room on the third floor, just a ledge now, with their backs against the wall. The door had been ripped away, and they were trapped, their wild eyes open wide, looking for an escape that didn’t exist. The baby’s wailing cut through the moans below.
Looking up at them, I knew instantly what I must do. I would make a net by stretching out my sweater. I would come as close as I could to the house and get them to toss down the baby. I started moving towards them, towards the straining remains of a structure threatening further collapse.
Then the mother’s searching eyes locked onto mine. And in a pulse of instantaneous psychic communion, this terrified woman knew my plan. She knew my plan as though it was her own, as though she had found me in the crowd and planted it in my head. She knew my plan, and she acted on it… before I was ready. She heaved her child into the night. And then her terror was my terror.
Oh God no, I thought – or screamed – scrambling forward in a desperate outfield panic. Hot chemical lightning washed over my bones as the bundle arced in slow motion towards the cold hard ground. I followed its trajectory, legs pumping, my brain burning with the autonomic calculus of chance. No time for the sweater trick. But I will save this baby. If it’s the last thing I do, I will save this baby. Still running, I reached out.
Cloth brushed the tips of my fingers and the baby hit the ground with a sickening thud. Physical shock seized me, a Novocain fog. My heart stopped. Then it beat backwards. It was the mother’s howl – part grief, part rage, part insanity – that pulled me out.
With the shock gone, grief washed over me. Not abstract dream-grief, but a grief as authentic as any I’ve experienced in waking life. Too filled with shame to bare witness to the fruits of my failure, I closed my eyes and dropped to my knees. The ground was shaking. The rest of the house was falling.
I found the baby directly in front of me. I gently cupped my hand over its head, dreading what I might find. But there was no break, no hot wetness of spilled brain. With my other hand I could feel that its heart was still faintly beating. But it was not breathing. So, with my eyes still closed and the sound of screams and thunder filling my ears, I found its mouth with mine and blew a trembling, hopeful breath.
Then I woke up, finding no comfort in the so-called waking world.”
- A Strange Oracle…
I’ve long considered a certain mythological arc to be necessary to maintaining continuity within life. This process can take many forms, from the mythologies of the ancients, to the white lies and exaggerations of today. I think exaggeration misses the point, and that mythology has become, in many cases, inaccessible.
It is in that spirit that I write the following.
I have heard the echo of a single phrase in my mind at certain times. Usually it is during times when I am comfortable and ready to settle down, and forget the strange and ever changing drive that seems to guide my life, albeit in strange ways. Perhaps it is merely madness that feeds this, but madness itself, I have found, is only one tool used by this driving force. The phrase was, “Every Merlin must have his Crystal Cave.”
For a long time, I thought this was warning me to be suspicious and wary of women, and I acted accordingly. In some ways those suspicions came true in a couple of my relationships. In other ways, fruit has come of these experiences that I cannot help but see as positive. For instance, I can point to my experiences with a woman who cheated on me as positive, because much later I knew the subtle physical cues that liars give, and this was used to help someone become a reasonably honest person. My suspicions did come true, but it was the inference about the nature of reality that I made from those verifications that was incorrect. Earlier I wondered, “What would it be like to be almost completely telepathic, and then to realize that the last quarter of the data that went into creating your perception of another person’s thoughts was an inferrence, and an incorrect one to boot?”
Right now that’s how I feel: the conclusions I drew were that reality was cruel, harsh, and that it enjoyed causing me pain. I wasn’t entirely wrong, but I was right for the wrong reasons. I was right: reality is harsh, and sometimes causes pain. However, I now have come to believe that reality is also wholly sentient. It doesn’t want us to grow up or mature or gain enlightenment (salvation). Reality itself is the manifest form of maturation as a process, and so to become aware is to begin to mature. The fear of the Lord is the beginning of Wisdom, as the Psalmist would say. So my fear of women was unjustified, unless you see it from the perspective of an adult looking at a child (me), in which case, one might think, “Ah, poor child, he flinches away from that which he knows will harm him. However, he does not realize that the harm is medicinal in nature.” This is why one must come to the kingdom (Malkut) as a child.
In the story of my life, I like to apply narratives and see how they fit, so that I can learn lessons from my own experiences. This is, in my opinion, a much better response than the knee-jerk reactions that most people have to negative experiences, or the naivete of someone with too many positive experiences. The great thing is, while learning how to do this, there is a sort of liminal activity that goes on, wherein one is taught about this story and the symbols surrounding the narrative that is being lived in the present moment. I attribute this to a wiser version of myself that I refer to as my Higher Self.
Going back to the quote I used to think about, the narrative of Merlin includes the story of Nimue. Nimue was the Lady of the Lake, who gave the sword Excalibur (from the bosom of the water! ;P ) to Arthur, and also became the lover of Merlin. She learned from him, and entrapped him within (according to some of the tellings) a crystal cave. I like this metaphor the best of all of the listed ones in the Wikipedia entry because I feel it has more life. Crystallization is an interesting process and the two main steps are as follows:
- Primary nucleation, which is basically caused by “combination of high solute concentration and rapid cooling.”
- “Secondary nucleation requires “seeds” or existing crystals to perpetuate crystal growth”
The driving force here is supersaturation, which is also alluded to by Langlet-Dufresnoy as the dry way of alchemy. Take this quote from Fulcanelli’s “Mystery of the Cathedrals”:
“[Langlet-Dufresnoy] thinks that ‘this way is achieved by the double philosophical mercury‘ and adds: ‘The work is accomplished in eight days, instead of taking nearly eighteen months by the first way.’”
So the teaching process, the immersion of the wizard, and replication (Nimue casts a spell upon Merlin that he has taught her) are all metaphors designed to elaborate upon and point to this crystallization process, which is in essence, a preparation of the material (Merlin) for the Great Work (his task in the larger Arthurian mythological narrative). The solution is created by the saturation of the mind with gnosis, combined with the continual study of the concepts of spirituality (the seeds), which causes nodes of higher consciousness to form, and then to reorganize the mind into new highly structured forms.
I have been living in a crystal cave. It has been very comfortable until now, and there has been no malice or enmity produced by the unfortunate ending of the situation. There is still love between Merlin and Nimue. I must now move on, to whatever task my life appoints me, and I look forward to the adventure ahead, while also acknowledging the pain that I feel for my loss.
However, all is not truly lost. Wikipedia makes an interesting point in explaining the role of the Dame du Lac in Monty Python and the Holy Grail (MP&THG): She is the symbol of divine mandate. This is not to say that I think that next week I’ll be named king or some other such nonsense. The symbol of Divine mandate itself has undergone a change in this process (Merlin saturates Nimue, while she supersaturates him). I believe that Divine mandate has become the Sovereignty of the Individual in modern society. Interestingly enough, as our society sinks into lower forms of consciousness, we can see the craving for Divine mandate return, and sovereign individuality recedes.
I have become the individual I have chosen to become. It is ironic that in terms of reality and consciousness, I have become an anarcho-syndicalist and that the anarcho-syndicalist peasant in MP&THG is the one who complains of the “watery tart” who throws swords at people. However, I don’t believe it is all that much of a coincidence.
“…In order to gain liberation, all workers must support one another in their struggle against bosses.
Anarcho-syndicalists believe that only direct action—that is, action concentrated on directly attaining a goal, as opposed to indirect action, like electing a representative to a government—will allow workers to liberate themselves.
Furthermore, anarcho-syndicalists believe that workers’ organizations—the organizations which struggle against the wage system and which, in anarcho-syndicalist theory, will eventually form the basis of a new society—should be self-managing.”
Instead of bosses, I see our struggle as being against “principalities and powers”, the borderlines and safe-havens of lower consciousness. A principality is the aggregate will of a collective consciousness. It provides members with their own sets of “safe” fears and hopes, loves and hates, which cannot be overcome or denied without a loss of membership. These “powers” are the bodies of the Gods of mythology. They drive us, though their movement is like the wind: it’s presence is felt although the cause cannot be seen. In this sense, I see the Round Table as being a perfect metaphor for the goal and the starting point for all ventures that seek to equalize the interactions of human consciousness. We are all trying to find a way to come equally to the Table and communicate once we get there.
At the time when Merlin is bound, the Round Table has become meaningless. The knights have scattered to their various allegiances, and their unity under Arthur has been demolished. I believe that Merlin represents the level of higher consciousness present throughout the human race. Perhaps the time has come, not only for this myth to play out in my own life, but in the life of the human race as a whole. We have been bound, but the work nears completion. Let us not fear to wake and walk the worlds again, free of restriction and bond.
An end… and a beginning
I calmly, softly tore my heart out tonight. It was the right thing to say and the right time to do it, but it hurt nonetheless. Devotion to honesty, even when it means arguing against yourself, is a rare thing. It’s something I’ve come to cherish in the course of watching the political dramas of the past year far more than all the rationalizations and debate tactics anyone could muster. Semantics can be beautiful, but in the end, honesty wins the pageant for me every time. C.S. Lewis once said of the Lord of the Rings, “Here are beauties which pierce like swords or burn like cold iron.” How marvelously alchemical! It’s also a very visceral description of the realities that lie behind all of our pretenses. I’ve grown used to looking at the surfaces. Mountains have become mountains again, and while that’s not a bad thing, there also has to be room for change.
“Yet once more I shake not only the earth, but also heaven.” – Hebrews 12:26b
Just when everything seems most comfortable, life has a way of throwing a wrench in the machine. Life is not compatible with auto-pilot. When we are most sure that nothing can harm us, it seems that this is the time that we are reminded that we are but atoms in the larger scheme of things; we are not cogs in the machine, but atoms that make up its parts.
Perhaps this is a reminder to me. Choices are being made even now. I do not know what will come of them, nor what will become of me. The future remains, hauntingly, uncertain. As it ever has been.
“If you will stay in this house in our care, lady, and take your rest, then you shall walk in this garden in the sun, as you will; and you shall look east, whither all our hopes have gone. And here you will find me, walking and waiting, and also looking east. It would ease my care, if you would speak to me, or walk at whiles with me… I say to you that you are beautiful. In the valleys of our hills there are flowers fair and bright, and maidens fairer still; but neither flower nor lady have I seen till now… so lovely, and so sorrowful. It may be that only a few days are left ere darkness falls upon our world, and when it comes I hope to face it steadily; but it would ease my heart, if while the Sun shines, I could see you still. For you and I have both passed under the wings of the Shadow, and the same hand drew us back.”
Grottos
I think someday, I should like to go see this and this.
However, for today, I’m not even entirely sure how we’re going to keep the bills turned on. I’ve put up a donations link on the info page. If you feel moved, cool, if not, forget I said anything.
Teh Falls pwns
Heh… more references to birds and politics.
“‘If only 270 Republican birdwatchers in Florida had shifted their votes (in 2000), President Bush would not now be in the Oval Office,’ the Web site declares.
…
Bush especially ruffled Cross’ feathers last September when he nominated William J. Haynes II to a seat on the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. While an attorney with the Defense Department, Haynes argued that the military bombing of an island in the Marianas that’s home to several rare bird species would be beneficial to birdwatchers because it would disperse the birds to more islands where more people could see them, Cross said.
‘I was absolutely stunned that they would say bombing birds was good for birders,’ Cross said. ‘That’s absurd.’ ”
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Straussian Nightmares
“[Adam] Curtis was interested in Leo Strauss, a political philosopher at the university of Chicago in the 50s who rejected the liberalism of postwar America as amoral and who thought that the country could be rescued by a revived belief in America’s unique role to battle evil in the world. Strauss’s certainty and his emphasis on the use of grand myths as a higher form of political propaganda created a group of influential disciples such as Paul Wolfowitz, now the US deputy defence secretary. They came to prominence by talking up the Russian threat during the cold war and have applied a similar strategy in the war on terror.
As Curtis traced the rise of the “Straussians”, he came to a conclusion that would form the basis for The Power of Nightmares. Straussian conservatism had a previously unsuspected amount in common with Islamism: from origins in the 50s, to a formative belief that liberalism was the enemy, to an actual period of Islamist-Straussian collaboration against the Soviet Union during the war in Afghanistan in the 80s (both movements have proved adept at finding new foes to keep them going). Although the Islamists and the Straussians have fallen out since then, as the attacks on America in 2001 graphically demonstrated, they are in another way, Curtis concludes, collaborating still: in sustaining the “fantasy” of the war on terror.
Some may find all this difficult to swallow. But Curtis insists,”There is no way that I’m trying to be controversial just for the sake of it.” Neither is he trying to be an anti-conservative polemicist like Michael Moore: “[Moore's] purpose is avowedly political. My hope is that you won’t be able to tell what my politics are.” For all the dizzying ideas and visual jolts and black jokes in his programmes, Curtis describes his intentions in sober, civic-minded terms. “If you go back into history and plod through it, the myth falls away. You see that these aren’t terrifying new monsters. It’s drawing the poison of the fear.”"
Hrm. Not sure this is entirely so, but I definitely agree that the poison must be drawn out of the wound, lest we (‘Murika) continue rampaging like the proverbial bull in a china shop, as we’ve been doing on the global scene. But like the Furies, the poison just jumps – Straussians and Dominionists and Right Wingers, oh my – these are the political nightmares (read: Red Scares) of tomorrow, if we continue demonizing and blaming the most convenient group of suckers. It’s funny because every group thinks that in being on top of the world, they’ll do better than any other who’s ever been in power, but for the most part, once they get power, they all operate along similar lines and in similar patterns. When they’re sacrificed to appease the ‘Gods’ (luxury, mental laziness, and the illusion of safety) and solve the problems of the world, their groups sees for a time how ugly the system can be. Bitter faces will hide the defeat in the souls of ‘salt-of-the-earth’ types who are punished merely for believing in someone like them.
In sitting and eating dinner at IHOP tonight, I took a drink of tea and remembered late-Spring days, hot and already dry. My mom would set out a big container and make sun tea. I remember during the summer how she’d set it out in the morning and we might have some if we ate lunch late but usually we’d have some at dinner. I remember big blocky lettering on the side and a sun. I don’t remember what it said anymore, but there were stripes all the way around it, too, and in the morning the coloring of the stripes and a glint of light through the clear water made it look like a sunrise, and when the tea was made, it looked like a miniature dusk in a bottle, and I knew the sun was setting.
