Memories of Mr. Trippi; The Trauma of an Urban Shaman
Hawk Mummy Floating on the Ocean, Brian George, 1992
I had outstayed my welcome at St. Peter's Parochial High School. Its one virtue was its location in an ancient house, with many irrational crawl spaces. The smell of oiled wood and chalk dust was of more interest to me than my courses. Faith had pinned the intellects of some. Others had been locked in the cabinet of science.
Of one thing I was sure -- that the servants of Earth's cybernetic reich had been planning to remove my neocortex. Better embalmers than they had tried. It was difficult to get each scrap without damaging the nose.
My supernatural weapons were in storage. A wind preceded the philosopher's stone, whose energy had been hidden behind the two hands of a clock. My teachers were concerned about my psychological health. I did not dare to obey. A more frightening voice had also issued ultimatums. It was only by accident that I had broken such a large percentage of St. Peter's rules. I left, with a strong push to the back from a secret board of judges, at the end of my sophomore year.
A revolt against causality had been launched. Ghosts pointing to the collapse of the third dimension congregated.
No act of will could restore my freedom of association with the double.
That would come, at the end of a long war. It would be necessary for an enemy to prepare the way for my breakthrough.
The dream that we called consciousness was a joke -- whose punchline had not yet arrived.
Humans were just variations on the prototype of the object. They were less real than the memories that consumed them. Fate would orient the phallus of the wounded god. My ego was the necessary evil, the contraction of an eight-armed sphere, the plaything projected by an earlier but still present state of omnipotence.
Instructions had been broadcast from a star; "Get out!" It was time for a change. Milkweed pods, sprouting from the junk of abandoned lots, broke open. My sail swelled.
Bright with hope I said goodbye to working class South Worcester, a neighborhood of factories and railroad tracks. At the age of 15 I transferred to Doherty Memorial High. It was at the time a brand new school, in the low, expansive style of architecture common during the 1970s. The complex of buildings was enormous, resembling more than a bit a shopping mall. The corridors were brightly lit and long, going off in all directions. Vast crowds migrated when the bell rang.
In search of a symbol that existed before birth. In search of a door to the non-existent. In search of the key to industrial strength sacrifice. In search of a lost race. In search of a drop of blood to activate their noses. In search of the loved bodies that they left on a crumbling shore. In search of the magnet of Mohenju Daru. In search of an exit to the labyrinth made from 26,000 years.
The school was by far the best in Worcester, and was located in an affluent part of the city, with some of the most challenging courses and the most demanding teachers. Even the students, children of lawyers, professors and factory owners, were more articulate than the teachers I was used to. It was there that I met Janice Rayner and Sue Castelliano, two teachers who intervened like psychopomps at a crucial turning point in my development, and who without doubt changed the course of my life. They were present in a way that I was not used to teachers being present. They not only cared, but saw. By recognizing certain talents, they showed me to myself. I saw through their eyes suddenly, and to my great surprise, what I could do.
It was there also that I met Mr. Trippi, my senior-year art teacher, the destroyer of hallucinations and mutant shadow of the demiurge, who was demanding in a way that I was not prepared to take advantage of, and who sent me running out of class.
Mr. Trippi was short, aggressive in his occupation of space, very plainly spoken, with wide, intense eyes. He had many of the traits that I associated with the first generation descendants of immigrants from Europe, in his case Italy, of whom there were many in Worcester at the time. To meet him you would think that he had missed his calling as a bricklayer, until you noticed the flash of intelligence in the eyes, or picked up the extensive scholarly references when he spoke.
He was proud to be an American, at a time when I was against the war in Vietnam. He was eager to ascend through the ranks of the middle class, to display his success, to prove what he was worth. I did not see him as a person like myself, or recognize that we acted from the same urge to prove what we could do. I was by turns arrogant and withdrawn, contemptuous of the opinions of others. When he talked, Mr. Trippi would stand about a foot in front of you, and stare, unblinking, into your eyes. I would always end up looking at the floor, the ceiling, or out the window.
Guided by the above-mentioned teachers, I was undergoing a kind of alchemical transformation. I would stay up late, listening to the crickets chirp in the field beside my house. At three AM one night I had experienced a volcanic outpouring of creative force, and wrote about a dozen pages of a personal epic, accompanied by drawings. Amazed, I found that I could write. I could draw, not just objects but revelations. Momentarily the flux of the kaleidoscope would pause. Visions from the other side would pose, thoughtfully, like living hieroglyphs or electrocuted statues. My energy fed on a sense of danger. I felt that I had been projected headlong into a labyrinth of new dimensions- the same labyrinth in which others had been lost, but that a revolutionary force had now somehow made transparent. The support was, if needed, there.
Support came also in the form of dreams -- an alternate educational network, if you will. The Institute of Oceanic Dreams sent agents to recruit me. They would observe from just behind my shoulder. Dreams took hold; they would not let go. As the Ojibwa would say, the presences found there were destined to become my other-than-human companions; my guides to the great society whose branches stretched far into the dark. Tangled beyond belief, and anxious to be fed, its roots were a bloody map traced by the transmigration of lightning. Symbols hit me with injunctions. I would be taken by the hand, led layer by layer down through the flames of collapsing civilizations. Snakes would whisk me across epileptic floods.
Snake with Wings Emerging Out of Triangle, Brian George, 1992
Birds led where I would never dare to go. Shadows took the initiative in creating my new body- a body more suitable for the exploration of the dream.
Gifts were freely given. Reciprocity was the key. Gifts should be kept continuously in motion, as Lewis Hyde would argue. I knew that I did not have much to offer- yet. I did have my inflated ego, the star stamped on my forehead, my excitement at being one of the first creators of the world. I had a growing sense of destiny, a sense that I was doing what my story had determined that I should do. One foot led the other. "Please" and "thank you" were the operative words. Knowledge should not be accumulated for future use, but spent; only the present tense existed in the dream.
I then experienced the gulf between dream and waking as having almost no importance.
It did have more importance than I was willing to admit, as I had not yet found a way to eternalize the wealth I had discovered; the object would remain inside the dream. Transformation had not yet made me strong. Presences would not appear on call to help me with a math exam. An ancient snake would not lend me courage to ask Claudia Mulalley for a date. Although it never did, it always seemed that a "mysterium conjuntionis," a true marriage of opposites, were just about to happen.
On the edge of sleep I would levitate above the Earth, landing on an unknown planet. I would, let's say, be riding my bicycle and the energy would begin to flash, to explode. The horizon would spin. Such experiences, which might today bring joy, then brought joy- and a fear for sanity. Oceanic scents, known to the dead, circulated. It seemed as though the entire visible world was about to pass out of existence, and dissolve into a ball of light.
I felt as though the greater part of my nature had been hidden out of sight. By what or who? I was anxious to meet this other part of myself, to find out how it looked. That my tools, unfortunately, were not the equal of the task, did not stop me from producing a series of mythological drawings. Symbols spewed out. I brooded over pictures of archaic urns and ruins, and imagined what I would like to say to the Sphinx, were he to suddenly stand up. The works that most resembled what I wanted to bring forth from the flux were the pictographs of Adolph Gottlieb, which, having completed several turns on a spiral, I now study again.
Let us praise famous birds. They will feed us. View as from an unimaginable height the explosion of the pin-point city. Sheathed in an iron glove let the hand of fate, as in the painting by de Chirico, with a thunderous click put its finger on the chessboard. Already, and how many times, the stage props of the 20th century had been swallowed by the ocean. Only fools could believe that the First World War had begun in 1914. It was "a" world war. By no means the first. I had been forced to push back the date by 11,000 years. Soon the daemon would transform and systematize the dissociation of Pierre Lunaire.
The moon was a vehicle. The true sun was black. Pursued by implanted memories, we were pawns lost on a flood plain of spent symbols, the victims of atomic bioengineering, the playthings of omnipotent beasts. We were the horizontal shadows thrown by a vertical geometry. Our bodies were not other than symptoms. Our brains the materialized fallout left from the sabotage of the hall of records.
I had discovered a poem by Cesar Vallejo which in part reads, "You people are dead. What a strange manner of being dead. Anyone might say that you were not." These were my thoughts, exactly. I continued my back-breaking work on the scaffold of a Micronesian volcano, producing a few more pages for my journal, a few more drawings. Several weeks went by as I explored the non-local field, during which I let my homework accumulate. I brought the best of the drawings from this series to my art class. I did not get the response for which I had hoped.
Slowly, Mr. Trippi looked through the pieces with an expression of deep thought, but said almost nothing. Here or there he pointed out a detail that I might want to change. He would like to see more color. In retrospect, there was nothing he could have said that would have been adequate, or enough. It could even be seen as a sensitive response.
It is unfortunate that things did not stop there. What happened next brought a quick end to my experience in the class, and to my openness to learn whatever he might have had to teach.
Returning to his bull in the china shop mode, he insisted that I stay after school to complete several assignments that I had not turned in -- a color chart and a still life with some fishing nets, driftwood and a bottle. To me this was the equivalent of asking me to work on one of those paint by number versions of Gainsborough. Blue Boy. A masterpiece in a box. You too can learn to pretend to be an artist. A still life to impress the relatives, to be hung above a couch.
My ego was wounded. My intuitions had been shoved into the back of a closet. I was not, in fact, a shaman. After school I hung around for several hours, trying to imitate the grain on a piece of driftwood. I did not return to class for the rest of the semester. Later in the year I was allowed to submit an independent body of work, and squeaked by with a C-, but no. After digging out my notebooks from this period, I am shocked to find that this memory is a confabulation. Failing, due to my near total absence, I had been forced to take a summer school course, and only after completing this had I squeaked by with a C.
Mr. Trippi came and went, like a mastodon in the moment before the glacial crags descended.
He was of course guilty of bad timing, a flaw in any teacher, but also of violating the commandment: "Do not disrespect the daemon. The primordial twin has no sense of humor." Like many adolescents, I could be faulted for a pathological inability to listen. I had not yet found a way to take from each teacher what he or she had to offer -- always demanding something else.
Shortly before I graduated I ran into Mr. Tsang, my art teacher from junior year.
He said, "What happened with Mr. Trippi? He was very upset that you dropped out of his class. He thought that you had talent, and was doing his best to toughen you up, to teach you how to focus. He could not imagine what he had done wrong."
During the next few years, when I would return from school in Boston to visit my family on the weekend, I would sometimes see Mr. Trippi wandering around downtown Worcester, like an autumn leaf. An infinite ache would spread upwards from my solar plexus to my heart and then finally to my throat.
Was this shrunken man the monster whose demiurgic eyes had sent me running out the door?
Was this the fascist who had interrupted my early training as a shaman?
Was this the magician whose finger snap had once broken my connection to the dream?
No, he was just a retired high school teacher. He often looked quite serious, having found out that his wife was very sick.
__
Mr. Trippi was the unacknowledged catalyst, the distorted face of the friend, the left hand of a free-associative god, the flawed avatar who had all along been important to my growth.
The door in my memory opened on the archaic concept of the tragic; a no fault generation of humanity. Two actors perform what they are scheduled to perform. Collapsing the wave function, and by violence crafting a location for the ego, one story is pulled out of the oceanic flux of all potential versions of that story.
We are driven by our ignorance. The perfect watch from the upper benches of the data bank. True consciousness is retrospective; it does not choose between the positive and the negative poles of a sphere.
Star Bird, Brian George, 1989
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Memories of Mr. Trippi; The Trauma of an Urban Shaman
Gilberto
I’ve read this one before! Great to see it on RS. I think we all have such role models at various junctures in life but it takes some time to recognize them. As always, great artwork too. Hope Mr. Trippi sees this!
The long belated acceptance of a gift
Hi Gilberto,
You have indeed seen several versions of this essay. Like a painting done in many layers, or like a meeting in which each participant is clamoring to be heard, the essay has evolved in complexity over the past several years, as I have attempted to do justice to the multidimensional forces that were in play at this turning point.
“Role model” is perhaps not the phrase that I would use to describe Mr. Trippi, although I can understand why you chose it. “Enemy” might be the more accurate term—but an enemy who had offered me a gift that I was not prepared to accept. Even shortly afterwards, my lack of generosity in the refusal of this gift began to haunt me, and confronted me, in an educational fashion, with the smallness of my spirit.
Mr. Trippi was a role model in the sense that he was enormously solid—at least to my perception—at a time that I was amorphous; he was clear at a time when I was scrambled; he was calmly confident at a time when I was arrogantly inflated; he was centered—if intellectually armor-plated—at a time when I was being ripped apart by winds.
His great gift was, in the end, the resistance that he provided. Mr. Trippi was the immovable wheel against which I set my shoulder.
In terms of my deeper growth, things would not have gone better if I had been a more attentive or obedient student. Things happened as they were meant to happen; and yet, because they happened as they did, some form of ritual apology was required. This has come, in the form of “Memories of Mr. Trippi; The Trauma of an Urban Shaman”, about 30 years too late.
About being amorphous...
I wonder Brian is being amorphous mutually exclusive with being a shaman?
Or can they be complementary?
Can I not take my talent for being amorphous and evolve it into the art of shapeshifting?
"I am a salmon in the water, I am the lake in the plain"
“I am a salmon in the water, I am the lake in the plain, I am a word of science, I am the point of the lance in battle, I am the god who created fire in the head.”—excerpt from “A Song of Amergin” (Irish)
Hi AmenRa144,
You asked, “Is being amorphous mutually exclusive with being a shaman? Or can they be complementary? Can I not take my talent for being amorphous and evolve it into the art of shape-shifting?”
I would not define myself as a “shaman”—a role that we have perhaps appropriated from those to whom it more properly belongs—but the roles of “shaman” and “poet/ artist” are not entirely distinct, and the one may be as close as we can honestly get to the other. I do believe, however, that shamanism has very much to do with “shape-shifting”, as activated by a process of ritual death and transformation. On one level, the call to transformation is involuntary, and to this extent we can, without pretence, act it out.
Many modern artists and writers have progressed by moving backwards, discarding the ideals of the immediate generations that have formed them, and then leaping forwards with new potentials for the culture. This echoes the shaman’s voyage to archetypal worlds. A few examples: Ezra Pound, with troubadour poetry of Provence. Stravinsky, with Russian folk music. Picasso, with West African sculpture. Jackson Pollock, with Native American sand painting.
It could be argued that this was often more of an aesthetic strategy than an actual voyage to the beyond, but, in the case of Jackson Pollock, some real dynamic of death and transformation was involved. Let me say again: that there is often a coercive element to initiation. As in more traditional societies, if one is called, one must answer. Or, by way of illness—physical or mental—pay the price. A “technology of the sacred” exists both within and outside of time. Any forms and self-definitions must be improvised as we go.
(See also my second comment to Dave Hansen, which explores these issues further.)
Here is an excerpt you might like from my book “To Akasha/ Part 1; An Incantation for the End of History”:
Section 5
You whose name is Memory of Space—Akasha: at the end of time make clear the pattern of his coming forth. He has trusted blindly in the appearance of your grace.
Akasha—come: observe the courier. Observe the remnants of your own lost courier: Of war torn fields. Of alien roads. Your courier once cast down from the boundary of space. Your courier cast singing out of interstellar space.
Your anchorite upon a pillar east of Eden—who wears the finger bones of Mao as a necklace. Who holds 3-way conversations with the shrunken head of Oppenheimer. Your hooded hawk upon a Skylab camera.
Servant of Zim Zum. Out of the box builder of the fully conscious cratered rock. Your connoisseur of Voodoo relics. Collector of 10 thousand souls. Your wandering tin man master of Cabala. Your zero gravity Godzilla with a brain. Vyassa—gymnast to the void.
Your walker on the waters of Aquarius. Transcriber of the optimistic forecast of a deluge. Your songbird in a 10-d cage. 7 inches of pure god. Your Pithecanthropus frozen in a great chrome cylinder. Reporter to the UFOs. Your stellar ram torn limb from limb by the agents of the Hebdomad.
Your Marxist drug lord Hermes catatonic in a wheelchair. Your zombie from the cyclotrons of Bio Sinai at Savannah. Your Shiva with his throat turned blue from eating Agent Orange. Your Playboy of the Western World.
Your walking dead man—image of the Zodiac. Your courier once clothed in the Van Allen radiation belts. Stars’ vessel formed of hieroglyphic shards.
seed of Heaven
Excellent, Brian. Your memoirs are exquisite.
True, “We are driven by our ignorance,” like we are by fossil fuel. I like to think that knowledge is driving us in silent electric cars away from ignorance – knowledge transmitted or magnetically attracting us from the “upper benches of the data bank.”
An archetypal story: the inability of the young artist to see himself as he is being seen is what saves him and alienates him all at once. In a sense, Mr. Trippi is your own self – your “double” – reaching out to you to take yourself seriously, when you may take yourself too seriously for him to reach you. It seems this is the sort of thing that can happen only a few times – as the young seek to become more identifiable, either more to themselves or to the world.
A long ago dream: A teacher tells me that everyone is looking outside themselves for a name so that they can tell the world they are one thing or another, thus fusing their identity to something solid and agreed on by everyone as perceivable. The great teacher of the dream found his own name. His philosophy and practises resemble those of a certain obscure religious sect, but really, as he is, as everyone ultimately is, totally unique and naked in the world. Religion is relative to him. There is no need for him to alter himself artificially for the sake of religion.
The archetypal themes of this piece are bound to be wrung out of the collective as more individuals make peace with them – as more people understand what people are, in view of the coming generations of cyber experience and interconnectivity.
Hopefully, ever less people will expect their children to be something they are not, and our ever-increasing surplus of tales about what happens in the cracks of consensus reality will cause the old sphere to break apart like a germinating seed.
There is one story; and one story only
Hi Amy,
You wrote, “An archetypal story: the inability of the young artist to see himself as he is being seen is what saves him and alienates him all at once. In a sense, Mr. Trippi is your own self – your “double” – reaching out to you to take yourself seriously, when you may take yourself too seriously for him to reach you.”
As it so often does, the ultimatum to grow had, of necessity, to present itself as a paradox:
It was unfortunate that things happened as they did. At the same time, it could not be otherwise.
For this reason I made use of the word “tragic”, in the classical sense:
we must make a choice; neither of the two or more alternatives is the correct one; the hero is not necessarily more virtuous than the villain; since one is driven from behind, each choice leads to self-deception, to a sin of commission or of omission, and to a different type of disaster; some degree of psychic collapse is a precondition of catharsis.
As you say, Mr. Trippi did represent some as of then unintegrated potential of the Self. We tend to think of the Double or the Shadow as being aspects of the Psyche, but they just as fully present—and at certain stages more dramatically so—in other people and events. Mr. Trippi acted out the role of the masculine will in motion; he embodied, in his own equally unconscious way, some concept of objective rigor and of energetic grounding.
Preoccupied as I was by my pursuit of altered states, there was no way that I could have accepted the real but limited form of knowledge that he offered, until the moment had already past.
In retrospect, I can see that my desire was for omnipotence; I had little use for the step by step adjustments that the development of a skill demanded. My appreciation for the limits that are the counterpart of creativity could not come by any spontaneous lifting up of the imagination by the bootstraps; such insight had first to be aimed at me like a weapon, from the opacity of the external world.
“Eshu swings a club as an Ifa priest a divining chain”
Hi cj,
As I mentioned in my earlier comment to “AmenRa144”, there does seem to be a coercive element to the process of initiation; one is projected, head-first, into an overwhelming ordeal, and one is not allowed to rest until one has emerged as a different being. During the period described in “Memories of Mr. Trippi”, there were many nights when I could not sleep at all, and would stay up reading or writing until 4:00 AM—which was a bit tough since I had get to school by 8:30. But I was terrified of my own consciousness. Feelings of oceanic nostalgia for the 1950s would overtake me. Suburbia would then look like a lost paradise. Oz was great—at first—but why was I not permitted to return to Kansas? Just how long was the rainbow, anyway; it did not make sense that traffic should only run in one direction. If one left the Earth, should it not be possible to return?
Here is an excerpt from my essay “Eshu and Ananse; Liberation by Subversive Knowledge” that deals with this process of involuntary transformation:
"Perhaps accident and disease perform the same service for the average person that ritualized discomfort does for the novice. Theatrical props may vary; the underlying pattern is consistent. Fear serves as a catalyst for awakening. If we do not embrace the fact of suffering we might easily short circuit or prolong the process, thus sentencing ourselves to a limbo of un-integrated trauma, whose only release is through the accusation that we direct against our helpers. Too often, we may unknowingly deny ourselves the gift that the hand of the mystery extends to us.
The severity of the process can, of course, vary. Initiation throws the sometimes hard to detect pattern into high relief. 'Again and again we notice a coercive element in initiations all over the world. It is perhaps a universal trait', writes Evan V. Zuesse in 'Ritual Cosmos.'
Picked up and dragged off to be tested and transformed, the novice is treated more like an object than a person. Fierce guards, silent so as to demonstrate their contempt for human language, from out of nowhere appropriate the body of the novice, and remove it, forcibly, from his or her control. There is something perhaps a bit familiar about the guards; they are also alien. Irreducibly. In this replay of the first act of abduction. They stare from behind the large eyes of their masks. Supports are removed from the ego, which is treated as if it were not there, scrambling the world like the parts of an incomprehensible puzzle.
The mind returns to infancy. The body becomes as passive as a corpse. The soul is a toy turned in the hands of powerful unseen forces. Evan V. Zuesse again explains, 'Initiation destroys the self-centered world of childhood, at least this is its primary intent. The adult produced by initiation is a person whose self and entire life is defined by a center outside of himself or herself.'"
dark catalysts make us grow more
Consciousness is real and nonphysical.
antagonist
Consciousness is real and nonphysical.
The great hall of the rubber snakes
Dear Sound of Windchimes,
Thank you for drawing my attention to the CARET diagrams. I was not familiar with them, and they will certainly reward a much closer examination. Just at first glance, the skewed symmetry is impressive. In this regard and in others, such as the idea that form is a variety of language, there does seem to be a connection to my work.
The illustrations for this essay come from a series of large black and white drawings, begun in 1989 and finished in 1993. My creative process at that time was rooted in deep silence. Time would often cease to exist. Though apparently simple, a drawing could sometimes take from 30 to 50 hours to complete. For hours standing as immobile as a statue, I would attempt to follow the clues left by an other-dimensional intelligence; by the massed force of the worlds before our own; by the shadow of my amputated Self. Fear followed contact—overwhelmingly so at first—but our interaction came to seem as organic as a heartbeat, as natural as the in and out of breath.
From the edge of space, I could see myself as a tiny artist at the center of a circle, where X marked the spot for Omphalos. That metaphysical infant would in turn assault me with his eyes; to him I appeared as a kind of fascist micromanager. This pattern became a prototype.
One characteristic sets these drawings apart from many similar occult diagrams. This is as follows:
that, while references to the Golden Section appear at every level of the composition, I tend to break up any perfect symmetry, and to push the geometry into a state of dynamic tension. On the other hand, do not be surprised if I throw aesthetics out the window. Miro’s desire to “assassinate painting” has always stirred up echoes in my heart. In violation of a common rule, I place great emphasis upon the central axis of the rectangle, in order to create a sense a sense of hypnotic fascination. The image should vibrate, and begin to stare back at the viewer. The spatial organization is hierarchic, yes; but lines and proportions should become hallucinatory as the viewer attempts to lock his/ her perceptions into place.
The crop circle connection is an important one, but is not quite what it seems.
The style of this artwork was formed by a series of ecstatic but deeply unsettling energetic experiences that began in the mid-1980s. More specifically, they have their origin in a conscious dream that occurred in 1989, although perhaps “dream” is not quite the right word. Others might interpret the experience as a shamanic voyage or an alien abduction. In one part of this dream, I was wandering through a large warehouse with one side open to the sky, and laughing softly to myself as I reviewed piece after piece of my artwork- many years worth of work—pieces that I had not yet done.
It felt as though the future were reaching back to the present to manipulate my actions, as though an ultimatum had been issued.
The “dream” followed me around for weeks, until I began work on this series. Oddly, the style of the series did not evolve; it was there from the beginning, although I did not always feel that my skill was equal to the task. I felt that my role was to translate a language in which all images and concepts were simultaneous into some sequential physical form.
In 1989, crop circles has not yet attained their later level of complexity. Over the next 10 years, as this complexity continued to increase by exponential leaps, I was shocked to observe each new generation of geometry; as though I were remembering a story that I had heard a great many times before. It was not the strangeness but rather the familiarity of the circles that produced this sense of shock; I felt that I was seeing my own consciousness acted out in the external world.
Many otherwise sane people argue that the circles have long since proven to be “hoaxes”—they were all made by two English alcoholics with a board, or by some international pagan clique. In view of the size, sudden appearance, and astronomical complexity of the best of the circles, this is a position that is absurd on its face. But this play of the Real and the Illusory is very much a part of the phenomenon of the circles.
They pulsate at the boundary of the almost inconceivable. They subvert the narrative of our mastery over Nature; perhaps we are not at the apex of the food chain. Projecting the unmanifest onto the horizontal axis, they make the most obscure codes of the Macrocosm tangible. They play games with the Psyche.
In another dream from the 1980s, as I was wandering with a guide through a megalithic complex underground, we entered a great hall at whose center was a mass of writhing snakes, lashing this way and that, copulating, and tying themselves into knots. Moving closer, it became apparent that the snakes were all made from rubber. Thinking, “there is nothing to be scared of”, I reached down to pick one up—and immediately felt it sink its fangs into my hand. My guide said, “We always mix in a few real ones for effect!”
Should the hundreds of rubber snakes be viewed as no more than a hoax, explainable by the laws of 18th century mechanics, and did they copulate only in the theatre of my mind? Or did the rubber snakes serve as camouflage for the real snake, who had planned all along to bite me?
Translating the sound of silence
“Form is emptiness; emptiness is form.”—The “Heart Sutra”
Hi Sound of Windchimes,
In your email from February 28, you wrote, “I was actually wondering what you thought of the CARET diagrams, since your artwork so strongly reminded me of them. If you do some reading on them, you will find that they apparently work as a form of quantum diagrammatical notation via the subconscious mind. I have used them in meditation to enact events and strengthen my will. It has been a very interesting and empowering process.
Do you approach your artwork with the same intent? Do the shapes embody a specific meaning, or do they take on the meaning of others?”
The CARET diagrams are fascinating, but I have been too busy writing over the past week to be able to give them the attention they deserve. I look forward to investigating them further. In "The great hall of rubber snakes", the first of the two responses that I posted to your comments, I did my best to describe my creative process as I experienced it from 1989-1993, the period during which this series of large black and white drawings was done; I am not sure how much I can add.
This series was started 20 years ago, and I was a different person then. Things then experienced as being "on the edge" are at the center of my consciousness now. Violent forms of energetic transport, then common, have faded out over time; my process is subtler, my sense of other-dimensional contact more continuous and direct, and I have no need of being swept up and carried off. So it is an open question: how much of my description of these events is "memory" and how much is due to retrospective interpretation?
You have asked, "Do the shapes embody a specific meaning, or do they take on the meaning of others?"
Although the tradition of sacred geometry is a long one, and I have spent much time in meditating on Tantric Yantras, Kabbalistic trees, and other esoteric diagrams, these drawings did not come directly out of any work that I was studying at the time. There was a sense that the diagrams were being transmitted from a kind of "central control room of creation." Each drawing was a small cosmology; an installment in the retelling of a lost history of the world; a narrative translated into geometric code; a challenge to the current opacity of our vision.
http://www.myspace.com/danski2012
The Lived-In Tree
The Lived-In Tree; from whose leaves the whole of History can be read
Hi Drew,
Perhaps you are not aware of this, but we do have trees in Massachusetts! True, yours may be bigger, but ours are big enough for me. Nonetheless, your intuition and your diagnosis were very much on the mark; not as they relate to the person that I am now, but as they relate to the person that I was. Please remember, these events took place in a universe that is long ago and far away, in 1972; and even then, my ritual combat with and transformation of the Other was all but imperceptible on this plane of reality. Forget facts; whole planets disappear. Out of shards we must reconfigure the blank story of our origins. Up and down trade places, as do light and dark. A fake version may embody a far greater scope of memory.
It is interesting that you would attempt to remove me from the city, since this was exactly my recourse at the time. In the early 1970s, of course, there was still much talk about “returning to the land”, which, apparently, would set one’s soul free. As though it were possible to be “separate” from the land; as though one’s feet were not always planted on the mothership of the Earth. Its guardian genius does not ask for our permission; like it or not, and come hell or high water, we are carried through the hallucinatory mechanics of a circle. One cannot return; for one has never left.
If only such knowledge could remove one’s deep sensation of abandonment.
Fresh air would make me strong, as it did Kafka. Knut Hamsun was another success story. Upon learning that he had tuberculosis, he crossed the US on the roof of a freight train, gulping mouthfuls of fresh air.
Was I infected by the trendier aspects of this “back to the land” project?—It is not for me to judge. In any case, I had just come out of two years of Cub Scouts and five years of Boy Scouts, and was far more at home outdoors than in a classroom. My friends and I would often disappear for a week into the woods; each taking with him only a knife, a piece of flint, and several other easy to carry items. Plants were everywhere, waiting to be eaten. A rabbit would insert its neck into a noose. Pine boughs could be used to make a more or less comfortable mattress. Our goal was to be so attuned to and knowledgeable about the environment that all necessities could be discovered as we went.
To me, a forest was a cathedral. Birds and animals were the saints; quite suspiciously perfect. Snakes were the delinquents in the back rows of the annex. Mosquitoes were the clouds of incense; I did not object too much to being bitten, at least not as much as I would object to it today.
“Green” was, as you say, of great importance; it was wisdom made visible, the projection of an esoteric force. In Green, Nature and Supernature find a field on which to play. Green does indeed reorganize the Soul. At the boundary between worlds, Green rips apart the Body, thus opening the atomic power plant of the heart. Green is Nature’s tribute to the tablets of Hermes Trismagistes. Primordial letters are inscribed on the Green; they are waiting to be assembled by some future version of the Self.
As in the paintings of Giorgio de Chirico; many things were just about to, but never quite did, happen. I still adhere to the Boy Scout motto: “Always be prepared.” But sadly, I was never able to transplant my rustic resourcefulness back to high school. Like a weekend warrior, like a technocrat returning from a five day meditation retreat, I would quickly forget what had just seemed overwhelmingly clear. Was it only a few days ago, when I was able to speak the language of the birds? I was joyous or depressed, sane or crazy, in my body or outside of it; I had not yet found a way to be all of these things at once, or to take each opposite with a grain of salt.
If one is ill and out of balance, as I was then—unlike everyone else!—perhaps the goal is not to immediately become “healthy”; but rather to be, at that one moment, fully where one is, and to uncover the lessons that are implicit in the story.
We do not put on bodies to just quickly take them off. For such would be an insult to the Fates—who miss nothing, and do not forgive. Life is not a “problem” to be “solved”, except by Death. And even this solution is not quite what it seems.
--A comment from Dave Hanson
Greetings Brian,
As I understand it this is a story of your emergence as a visionary, expressed through your art, and misunderstood by your art teacher. I don't know if you know this, but I was a high school art teacher for a number of years. In Mr. Trippi's shoes I would have left you alone and given you full credit for what you were doing, rather than expecting you to conform to the program. But then, I was floating through the whole experience myself and probably failed those students who needed more structure and guidance. It was the 60's and we all now how weird that was!
I don't fully understand anything. I'm working in a healing capacity with a client now and can't even decide if I know what to do anymore.
I fall back on notions of control, intention, healing and following the vision wherever it takes us. However, I'm questioning my old notion that following the vision, no matter where it takes us, will bring us into some balance, if not healing. I'm more curious about chaos and randomness. As I think about my own visions and death I recognize the possibility of no meaning and no purpose. Many of my friends speak of transformation of consciousness and the world. Well, maybe. We'll see. Or, maybe we won't. On the other hand, I married my wife because of a shamanic vision, so I am hardly one to advocate not taking such experiences seriously.
So as you step in and out of the implicate order I can only suggest looking at your intention, honing your control, looking for opportunities to heal others, and seriously questioning everything you experience on the journey. I would like your writing more if it was more simple and direct, but that is me. I don't know that just because something comes to us from "the spirits" it is any more meaningful than the sound of the toilet flushing. I'm surrounded by people who "see things." I don't understand the underlying meanings of most of it, so I plant more vegetables.
My dog died. I miss him. I can feel his body under my hand. My wife is working too hard and worries too much. I have a broken ankle and hate crutches. I can't do what I love to do and when I'm back on my feet I'll waste precious time. A native american spirit showed me a painting I am supposed to do, over twenty years ago, and I haven't done it.
Thanks for the note. Paint, draw your visions. Keep doing it. See where it goes. Can your visions help heal another? That's all there is.
And, sing and dance.
Dave
Eshu threw a stone yesterday; it killed a bird today
Hi Dave,
Thanks so much for your luminous and grounded reply. Your 4th paragraph criticisms don't bother me at all. You raise some important issues, and I appreciate the chance to address them in the forum.
At the beginning of my response to "Gilberto", I have briefly touched on the issue of literary style that you raise. In it, I explain that, “Like a painting done in many layers, or like a meeting in which each participant is clamoring to be heard, the essay has evolved in complexity over the past several years, as I have attempted to do justice to the multidimensional forces that were in play at this turning point.” Such stylistic issues could be explored at much greater length—and I will only offer a small first installment here—as could the relationship of an apparently abstract medium to "healing."
To me, writing is a yogic discipline of consciousness, as well as a form of ecstatic flight. Appearances to the contrary, I attempt to take the reader with me as I go.
In a number of traditions—Hinduism and Lukumi come to mind—an “obstacle” is not different from a “gateway”, and energy, by being frustrated, is not necessarily decreased. Quite the opposite may occur. As—my uncooperative victim—you will see! Beloved.
Trap set by the Daemon. You who once cut my throat.
Fate has overdetermined every symbol and event. By what strange alchemy does the Self become the Other? What language is spoken by the story that creates us, and that we in turn create? Does the image that confronts us lie, and is the meaning that first presents itself at odds with the deeper implications? What act are we being instructed to perform? For whose benefit, if not ours? How is it possible to act on what we do not understand? Just so. Exactly. When faced with an ultimatum, we must “stop the world”, if only for a moment, as we figure out what to do. A small grain of anxiety disrupts the clockwork movement of our consciousness. This is the function of “difficulty” in a dense and symbolic style; an essay can be as labyrinthine as a dream.
The way In is the way Out. The way Around is the way Through. The way Forward is the way Back.
Eshu, the Yoruba trickster, creates obstacles, which we must then petition the “Orishas”, or “gods”, to remove; thereby necessitating an exchange of gifts, which our relative ignorance and lack of power keeps in motion. Ganesh, the Vedic elephant god, is also called “Vignesvara”, the Lord of Obstacles.” The rat, his vehicle, is often viewed as a manifestation of desire; in which aspect it both creates and gnaws away at obstacles. Ganesh makes no attempt to kill or remove it, since, without it, he would have no way to get around.
People often say, “You would make more friends and influence more people if you did not use so much figurative language. I appreciate what you are doing, but it bores me. Is there some reason that you can’t just say what you mean?” One could just as easily argue: that a labyrinth would be a better path if you took out all the twists and turns. But then again, it would no longer be a labyrinth. If the goal is to get from point A to point B, then we should no doubt travel as quickly as we can; of course, point A will look no different than point B, and, if it does, then we will be too busy to notice.
We must carefully remove the two hands of the clock. The most fateful means of transport may be also the least direct.
We live in a culture in which prose is dominant. We think in sound bites, and expect all communication to be immediately transparent. If we are simple-minded, we tend to believe that all earlier cultures were even simpler than our own, forgetting how intimately language, sound, myth, and symbol must collaborate as they are woven into a living form.
Most poets take the rebelliousness of language as a given; it exists as a semi-independent being, which makes demands. Each symbol is like a “koan”—the person who first hears of it is not the same as the one who will understand it. Rilke wrote, of the archaic torso of Apollo, “For there is no part that does not see you. You must change your life.” Like a woman trapped inside the body of a man, who must learn, by stealth technology, to survive, poets learn to clothe their deeper intuitions in linear narrative or abstract prose.
In “Memories of Mr. Trippi; The Trauma of an Urban Shaman”, as in much of my other work, I have attempted to have it both ways; the style navigates between the Scylla of the oracular and the Charybdis of the real, between the altered state that is poetry and the window that is prose—each speech mode helping to counterbalance the limitations of the other.
Yet I believe that poetry can more closely approximate the shock of a primal encounter with the Numinous.
Drawings
I don't know if you have already been asked, is there a website/book/blog in wich we can view more of your drawings? I have the feeling I would gain a better understanding of the language if I were to see the whole series.
My visions are often of morphing chattering heiroglyphics...a kind of egyptian-to-hebrew alien language ship. What you present seems familiar.
I read a small book earlier this year you might be interested in: "Symbol and the Symbolic: Ancient Egypt, Science, and the Evolution of Consciousness" by R. A. Schwaller de Lubicz
It's about the living process of intuitivly interperting symbols.
I went to school for illustration, I know what it's like to have teachers with critical eyes and market trends on they're minds. They especially get freaked out when you give them something VERY well illustrated yet in total contradiction to their current world view.
Round Midnight
Hi Eurika,
It is 12:38 AM. I just got home, and have been writing non-stop since 7:00 this morning. I need to get to sleep, but will respond to all of your questions tomorrow.
BTW: Your name appears in "Revenge is a dish best tasted cold", which I wrote on Sunday afternoon, and am about to post below.
Revenge is a dish best tasted cold
Hi Sound of Windchimes,
You wrote, “Then came that fateful day, when my grotesquely overweight French teacher became irate that I was writing in my notebook rather than listening to her. I was in 7th grade and had just finished writing a 15 page story by hand. My teacher, livid with fury and actual spittle coming out of her mouth, promptly grabbed my spiral notebook from out of my hands and ripped the entire thing in half. The whole class gasped. I was in complete shock, shaking and numb. She threw the pieces in the trash and wouldn't let me retrieve them…I suppose it's obvious I'm still working towards completely forgiving her.”
Before being kicked out, I attended a parochial high school for two years—two years of Hell, or of preparation for the arcane tortures of the Apocalypse. An “education in the Classics”, as they say. The mind is a muscle, which one would never be allowed to use—or else. Self-knowledge was regarded as a form of masturbation. Just see where that would lead. And, once you got started, then how would you ever stop? It might one day become impossible to distinguish between one’s intellect and an orgasm. No exclamations of “Eurika!” were allowed. One’s flash of sudden intuition might disrupt the Pre-Game Pep Rally.
Such intellectual “exercise” as there was—and the use of this term strains language to the breaking point—was like the watching of an aerobics video; the instructor shouts like a drill sergeant. It is good for you, somehow. Although sitting on a couch, one feels virtuous by the end. St. Thomas Aquinas had corrected the few small mistakes of Aristotle. He was smarter than you! In this age of genetic recombination, he was the thinking Darwinian’s modernist. He had determined how many angels should be allowed to dance on a pin. No more need be said. Still, those angels are too petrified to get off.
No doubts need mar one’s contemplation of the shadow of the atomic bomb.
Usurping the right-of-way on Main Street, we were forever staging marches with felt banners, and singing songs with choruses like, “And they’ll know we are Christians by our love, by our love.”—Yuck. Such sentiments are among the few things that can inspire me to hatred. Even now, the sight of a flaming dove can cause my stomach to turn over. They are not cute; they are evil. But the basic idea of “forgiveness” is a sound one.
“Forgive us our trespasses; as we forgive those who trespass against us.”
Christ—yes; Christians—no. How many devotees of the cross have ever shouldered this pronouncement? The first part they take seriously, yes; the second part they ignore. “Only connect”, said E.M. Forster. Both injunctions perhaps point us toward the fact of our radical interdependence. The web is inconceivably complex. And, in this light, “forgiveness” may be the only sane position. In the Cloud of Unknowing, it may prove to be the only method of “dead reckoning” that will work. It is possible to observe the cosmic principle in action, to measure the ideal against the hard weight of experience, as well as to test how alchemically it performs. To illustrate: on a tiny level, my wife and I made an agreement that we would never go to bed angry, and this may be a key to the solidity of our marriage.
Some hard kernel of insight has survived my scorched-earth war against the “Savior”; who, as an omniscient god, should have known better than to hang around with Christians. “Thank god that I am Jung, and not a Jungian!” exclaimed Jung. In a tone that we can imagine to be incredulous with disgust, or perhaps relief. A foreknowing Christ should have followed Jung’s example. I would argue, too, that a “Monotheist” is the greatest enemy of the One. They have named “G-d”, though in a somewhat generic form. To make an idol, they have shrunk the haunted oceans of the Void. They have cut down the Tree of Life. Omphalos is now horizontal. They have literalized the interdependent meanings of the Ur-Text.
—It would seem that my adolescent self is still angry with the nuns. Who knew? They have stolen the clothes off of the backs of innocent penguins! The High Pornographer may yet hold them to be accountable for their crimes. X marks the scaffold, where a breathless crowd waits for the spankings to begin. Let us give thanks that a few are hot. Fake aliens will herd the leftovers up the ramp of a black, oceanic factory.
When the tongues of flame are infolded. For all things will be well. Truth is stranger than fiction.
In “Shakespeare In Love”, the plans of the young Shakespeare and his friends are always just about to collapse, and it seems impossible that the play will ever get produced. “Things will come together. It will all get figured out”, the producer says—or words to that effect. “But how?” a number of characters ask. “We don’t KNOW how. Things will come together at the end. But it’s a Mystery.” “Forgiveness” depends upon a similar trust in Mystery.
It is practical to retrieve the emotions that we have invested in the Enemy. In some odd way, and against our better judgment, we must accept that he/ she is a version of the Self.
Sound of Windchimes, perhaps the time has come to forgive your teacher, and to laugh. You are strong now. She is probably very weak, even weaker than when she stepped on a child’s Psyche. She sure showed that distracted 12 year-old who was boss! Perhaps she is dead, or will be soon, and has never evolved at all beyond the bitch that she was then. Not even a slight improvement. It would be so much simpler if our tormentors were to actually earn our “forgiveness”; if the snakes of Medusa, who has been decapitated, did not still search for their victim. But “forgiveness” is in many ways a choice, as well as a carefully cultivated habit. It is not meant to be easy.
“Revenge is a dish best tasted cold.” Or “Living well is the best revenge.” I would argue for a third and still poorly understood alternative, a non-dual one; “The I is Other. There is no one to forgive.”
If one lesson can be salvaged from the farce of the New Testament, it is perhaps the lip-service that the damned pay to forgiveness. Yes, it is the job of the believer to be ignorant, but it is possible that the saying may make the act of “forgiveness” so— thus aiming the “intent” of our half-unconscious magic into space.
Like a beacon, drawn through a whirlwind of dimensions, home.
Our liberation may yet circle around and back from the future to assault us.
pity the fool
If we don’t forgive, then we add density to the black blocks of our indignation. The reason to forgive those who don’t give a rat’s ass about being forgiven is to free our own selves from the prison of indignation. It is no more virtuous than popping a zit!
Here is what I used to be like, as illustrated in a dream dated 6/9/93:
I tell people there are realms into which even the goodness of God won't go. Evil things happen no matter how pious you are. One of the people I am speaking to is a very pious man with a scratched up face. He can't bear to hear me talk about how powerful evil is so he leaves. I give him the middle finger and keep talking.
My former self seethed himself to death with indignation. Now that he is dead, my responses to so-called Christians are: 1) compassion; 2) pity – not the condescending kind, but the kind that makes one’s eyes shut; 3) laughter; 4) tears; 5) returning to fetal darkness and wait neutrally for a new moment (which happens after pity)…
The so called “bad behavior” of the Peacock
Hi Eurika!,
Thank you for asking about my nonexistent website. Every push helps. So long as guilt is not used as a motivation. I do plan to start a website for my artwork, poetry and prose. Unfortunately, I am something of a technological dinosaur. My 11 year-old daughter will be forced to act as my mentor in that regard.
In the meantime, you can see at least 10 more of the drawings from this 1989-1993 black and white series on RS. About 8 were used to illustrate “Four Scouts to the New World” and about 3 others, I think, to illustrate “The Gods Behind the Calendar”—both of which were posted last year. If you click on “Brian George”, and then “view recent blog entries”, it will take you to these pieces.
As regards de Lubicz:
In spite of his Fascist leanings, de Lubicz was one hell of a writer.
We are used to the idea that certain artists are permitted to be “BAD.” While others are not. Haydn, for example. James Dean and Jackson Pollock and Arthur Rimbaud are in the first group. One might wrap his car around a telephone pole. Another might piss down from a table onto a gathering of Paris writers. What is the poor occult Egyptologist supposed to do to establish the credentials for his “badness?” Make stupid political decisions in his youth? Perhaps act a bit grumpy?
De Lubicz illustrates the principle of “creative resistance” that I spoke of earlier; his works do not easily yield their Secrets. Their style acts on the reader like a kind of alchemical sulfur; rearranging molecules and running riot through the Psyche.—So that the person who will understand the Symbol is not the same one who had first encountered it.
“The Egyptian Miracle” and “The Temple in Man” are two of his books that I have returned to many times. After 20 years, I am just getting started.
BTW: Have you ever gotten into trouble for disrupting a pre-game pep rally, perhaps by shouting out your name?
blogs for dinosaurs
I hid from the prep rallies best I could.
If a website is too tedious try putting up a blog:
http://blogspot.com
For example this is what my mentor did with hers:
http://seeingmeaning.blogspot.com
She also claimed to be a bit of a dinosaur when it came to such things. It's fairly simple.{although alots of kinks}
I new nothing about Lubicz thanks for the insight. I obtained the book by walking into a used metaphysical book store and waiting for something to vibrate into my hands....it felt like it had powerful contents. Since you already know about this fellow I feel as though I have to give you another name that is hopefully new to your consciousness:
meru.org the kabbalistic work of Stan Tennen?
it's intriguing.
The geometry of blind vision
Hi Eurika,
Your technique for choosing books is a sound one. Many years ago, when I was first exploring the concept of the “memory of space”, which I later personalized in the form of a goddess that I referred to as “Akasha”, I was going through a period of daily synchronicities. At one point, upon discovering a new bookstore, I half closed my eyes and allowed myself to be pulled this way and that. I then allowed my hand to randomly choose a book. On the first page that I turned to was the word “Akasha.”
Your instinct for choosing names with which I have some connection is very much on the mark. During the early 1990s, I studied Kabbalah with Martin Farrin, who was a close associate of Stan Tennen’s at the Meru Foundation. Martin’s book “In the Mirror of Creation” is one of the best books on Kabbalah that I have ever read. Unfortunately, his arrangement with his publisher fell through, and the book still has not been published. Some key Meru concepts had an influence on my development. Martin and I have just recently gotten back in touch.
I corresponded briefly with Stan Tennen several years ago. Stan is extraordinarily generous as an email correspondent, but, like many visionaries, is fairy obsessive about his own projects, and does not have too much time or energy left over to entertain the views of others. Since I was interested in a dialogue rather than a devotional relationship, our interaction did not go far. As you may know, Meru has been involved in a number of legal battles, and there was a paranoid tone to some of Stan’s communication that, to me at least, hinted at the beginnings of a kind of cult psychology.
And finally, Stan and Martin had a major falling out a while back, which I was not aware of when I contacted Stan, and I had no interest in hearing any bad things about a beloved teacher, or of finding myself in the middle of a feud. In spite of this, I would say that the Meru website is fantastic; it contains a wealth of consciousness-altering information, and will reward any amount of time spent in responding to the challenges posed by its concepts.
The long curve of descent
Hi Dave,
You wrote, “Can your visions help heal another? That's all there is.”
As regards “healing”:
My small role as a healer has to do with the reclamation of collective memory. In my explorations, bits and pieces of lost history become clear. For me, “healing” has to do with the discovery of our wholeness. Though broken, we have never ceased to be whole.
Upon birth, having exited from the All beneath the stern gaze of Necessity, we are only allowed to bring a few meaningless details with us. One by one, the pages vanish from the book. We have forgotten more than even the omnipotent are aware of; far more than they know themselves. Trauma locks the doors to the dark theatre of the body. We Are What We Eat; the bread of dreams, the sewage of the dead. The rest is junk DNA—or so our controllers would prefer us to believe. A strange presence guards the other half of each symbol.
I would speak truth to the powers that oppress us, who are not in any way the monsters that we think.
“Who are we? Where do we come from? What are we here for? Where are we going?”—These are the questions that the writer and the artist have been hoodwinked by society to ask. Such questions are stupid. We should know better. It is possible that they constitute a crime against the Soul. In the stomach of each reader I would plant and tend the acorn of Omphalos, the one intersection, in order to make the asking of such questions obsolete.
You correctly place a great emphasis on "healing"—but please do not underestimate the energies that one can transmit at a distance, or the shock of synchronistic knowledge. One well-placed action can reconstitute the Web. True, cyberspace is not hyperspace, but perhaps it can function as a crude approximation.
And it is always possible that the one is—very sneakily—preparing us for the other.
You have asked, "Can your visions heal another?" I tend to view myself more as a "catalyst" than as a "healer"—a role that has a higher percentage of the energy of the Trickster—but the two roles are related. The term "shaman" is used somewhat ironically in the essay. I would make no claim to be one, any more than I would speak casually about "world transformation", as so many do. Aeolus Kephas once pointed out that whenever I would go to write "2012" is would always come out "2112"—a kind of metaphysical Freudian slip.
Since the end of the Paleolythic era, it is possible that we have been riding a long curve of decline, in which all things once transparent have become more and more opaque. Preprogrammed from beyond the clockwork of the stars, the decline does not appear as such; some trick of perspective causes us to hallucinate an ascent.
Archetypes break like toys, left over from a childhood that never did exist. We discard them. We speak loudly; we do not hear the response. "May you live in interesting times", goes the Chinese curse. We do, for better or for worse, live in "interesting times"; in which we must reconfigure all traditionally fixed roles. At the age of 54, I am just beginning to figure out what my public role might be.
A role is a social construct, with a set of rules attached; society can make no rules that the Self is obligated to obey. Still, I find myself at a perpetual beginning, tongue-tied, a bit nervous, as naked as a child who has just stepped from the womb. And here I had pretended to have the answers to each question! “Do I contradict myself? Very well then; I contradict myself”, as Whitman said.
For such is the prerogative of the preexistent Voice, and of its vehicle: WE.
All periods cohere in the one moment of my Memory.
With a shock, one notes that the old becomes new. By the power of my austerities I have vacuumed up all of the water from the ocean. Cities shine there. I am Death; the Shatterer of Worlds. My weapon liberates multitudes.
Thanks
Sweeping the dust from the sea
“Whoever brought me here will have to take me home”—Rumi
Hi Jeff,
Thanks so much for your comment. It is good to hear from you again.
Your closing quote is indeed from Rumi. Like so many of his utterances, it jumps across the centuries. Rumi does seem to have existed both in and outside of time. Perhaps the potential that he embodies is related to the Gnostic concept of the “Aeon”; we more often think of an “Aeon” as a unit of time, but in Gnostic cosmology an “Aeon” was also a fully conscious being—a being who we can reasonably imagine to be spherical in shape—who has access to all of the knowledge and experience that the Great Year brought to birth.
Out of all mystical poets for whom we have names—at least until our own period, with the arrival of such poets as Rimbaud and Rilke—Rumi has always been the one to whom I have felt the closest; both in terms of breadth and content of his vision, as well as his capacity to translate the subtlest of intuitions into language.
Upon meeting my wife I was quite surprised to discover that her father, who grew up in Istanbul, is descended, on his father’s side, from Rumi. It is interesting how intimately these things are woven together. As you probably know, Rumi did not write any of his poetry down. He would speak ecstatically—perhaps with a bit of preparation—and his students would write down what he said. When I first read about this, I could not imagine being able to sustain such a flow of spontaneous insight.
Over the past year or so, however, the voice of what I will refer to, for the sake of convenience, as the “Inner Teacher”, has emerged more and more strongly. A number of my responses to comments on this forum were written with his/ her help. Viewed from one angle, there is a kind of “hall of mirrors” effect; there is a presence standing behind the presence at the limit of my personal subconscious. Viewed from a different angle, the connection is overwhelmingly direct; worlds open, as I follow the instructions of a voice “inside my head.”
Echoes of the Familiar-
Always interesting reading so similar an account, and to know that my sister was attracted to you for many of the same reasons that make your writings so familiar: Again, deep resonances.
"The moon was a vehicle. The true sun was black. Pursued by implanted memories, we were pawns lost on a flood plain of spent symbols, the victims of atomic bioengineering, the playthings of omnipotent beasts. We were the horizontal shadows thrown by a vertical geometry. Our bodies were not other than symptoms. Our brains the materialized fallout left from the sabotage of the hall of records." -- Luminous stuff, my brother.
I enjoy your drawn symbolism as well.
What happens when you write the memories of the future, though, I wonder? Please take that step outside yourself and report back what you find, won't you?
I trust your survey maps to be accurate enough to help guide us there.
-K
Strangers in the night, exchanging glances
Hi Kynkrea,
Your sister was indeed lucky. As was I.
On the night that we were introduced by a friend—who had been insisting for several months upon getting us together; what a pain!—one of the first things that D. said to me was how much I reminded her of you.
This was in the context of a discussion on the “web of fate.” Since I had never met you at the time, I was not sure if this comparison was offered as complement or not. As it turned out, it was.
This was the first of a great number of connections that were waiting for us to step into them; and which, even now, continue to take us by surprise.
As Henry Ford said, “History is bunk”
Hi Kynkrea,
You wrote, “What happens when you write the memories of the future, though, I wonder? Please take that step outside yourself and report back what you find, won't you? I trust your survey maps to be accurate enough to help guide us there.”
For the past 20 years or so, I have been convinced that Time, as we know it, does not exist; the “future” not as something that is “separate” from the “past.” Even if the forward march of History were “real”, and it were not possible to exempt one’s consciousness from its movement, this would still not mean that all events and symbols from the “past” were not being continuously recycled in the “present.”
Time and Space are “illusions”, as was argued by the earliest of Vedic seers, but what exactly does this concept mean?
As regards the archaic mode of understanding, in place of the word “illusion” we should probably substitute “art.” The “world” that we inhabit is a form of “play”; a projection of the omnivorous potency of “Maya”; a form of magic, of which we are the creators, now grown frail. We should not insult Maya; it is our memories that are “bad.” We drive our vehicles through the wasteland that was once the “great outdoors”, forgetting that space itself was first created as our “vehicle.”
Here is an excerpt from an essay that I am working on called “Transparency Is The Only Shield Against Disaster”:
"To my way of thinking, the cosmos is already as “perfect” as it needs to be, although our perception of this larger context has been obscured from the dawn of recorded history, and perhaps longer. “Apocalypse” pertains to the rolling on and rolling off of stage sets; as embodied in, among other things, the 12 signs of the Zodiac. These “stage sets” activate the potentials that are encoded in the All. As they stomp and fret their hour upon the stage, the actors prove all but indifferent to the larger context they have come from; yet fear, always, on some level, that they are still the stuff of dreams.
Always, it is space itself that acts.
”A world” disappears; the “theatre” in which this destruction is carried out does not have to go anywhere, or to “evolve” beyond what is already within its reach. The future does not necessarily follow upon the past, nor is the past only mechanically active in the present. As one stage set disappears and another one appears, there is an interval, a pregnant pause, a dead zone, in which the vertical and horizontal axes get realigned; we may experience this as an earthquake or a tidal wave that shatters and then reconstitutes the whole of the inter-dimensional structure.
Many new things then become possible, but this may or may not result in the projection of destruction onto physical time/ space. A continent sinks. The sun burns out. A wave consumes Valhalla, bringing to an end the blood- feast of the gods. The Venir and the Aesir, it must be said, are too drunk to be feeling any pain. Or, one actor has been momentarily transported from the theatre. The “pregnant pause” could just as easily result in the ecstasy of a shamanic flight, in the seeding of a more localized “omphalos”, or in the birth of transpersonal memory. Our “world” has been replaced with an almost exact duplicate. One actor has returned, only slightly the worse for wear, from his “close encounter” with the vertical axis; having reestablished “contact” with what existed before History.
Time is the magician whose tricks educate the audience; a master of bi-location, he then gladly joins them in a long round of applause.
Our preoccupation with linear ‘evolution” shows our incomplete grasp of the time-cycle, which, while not a form of exact repetition, does not involve the “creation” of any “higher” state of consciousness. Our experience is, in some peculiar way, important. “How” and “why” will at some point be self-evident, but are now, perhaps, self-evident only to our Doubles. It is he/ she/ it, the Double, who provokes the fear that all too often we project onto the world. Oddly, it is always the next production at the theatre that especially concerns us. If we are haunted by the catastrophes at the end of the last ice age—when the yogic technology of the Satya Yuga fell, not soon to be seen again—then we somehow do not locate the source of our emotion in the past."
Don't know what ate my post, but...
I had responded to your reply. :(
Anyway, I agree with your statements regarding time, and merely encouraged you to write more.
Really trying to understand what lesson my losing the post is supposed to teach me, but we'll see.
Best,
The enigma of fatality
Hi Kynkrea,
You wrote, “Really trying to understand what lesson my losing the post is supposed to teach me, but we'll see.”
The lesson is: How could you be so careless? Why did you lose that post? Perhaps you should exist at a much higher level of anxiety! Go forth and lose no posts again!
But seriously— it is all too easy to accidentally delete a comment.
Just hitting the back arrow will knock you out of the “comments” window, and anything that you have written will be lost. This happened to me last week. I’ve found that the best bet is type up your comment on Microsoft Word, and then copy and paste it into the forum. If anything goes wrong, you can always return to the file.
(As, originally, we were meant to do at death).