Brigid's Blog

Breakthroughs

2012-01-25T16:53:00.000-05:00

Sometimes life just goes along, ho-hum, and then one day you have a revelation.

This is not some divine revelation. Well, maybe it is. It depends on how you define "divine". The job of the guru is to get you to "wake up" from your sleep, to realize the truth instead of wallowing in delusion. If that is "divine", then I suppose this is a divine revelation.

I don't know what brings about such sudden changes. I might point to a number of factors. One would be meditation, certainly. I have been faithful to my meditation schedule for more than a month; this usually puts me more in touch with what is often know as one's "inner voice". The Inner Voice was making me quite uneasy these days. I had a Plan. I knew exactly where I was going in the next five years. Then the voice started rumbling. Whining, in fact. The last time I really recall this happening was before my wedding to my now ex-husband. I wrote it off to transitional anxiety, jitters about "change". Boy was I wrong. Hence, I have learned not to disregard this "voice".

Calling it a voice is not exactly accurate, either. For many people, it sounds like you're crazy, like you're hearing people urging you to do things inside your head. The real "inner voice" has nothing to do with such nonsense, or with any psychosis. Having that "voice" is healthy. It's the sound of a healthy intuition. It's hard to describe, because it appears as a thought that won't go away. But it's not like someone whispering in your ear.

Another possible factor is the loss of one of my cats earlier this month. It occurs to me that I would not voluntarily give up the other ones, especially Shiva. And taking them with me would not be feasible.

In any case--I have completely tossed all of my five year plans, and have developed new ones. This has also involved stopping many things that have been ongoing for a number of years. Things that seemed mysteriously right, things that had promise. Whatever fruits may have grown from that labor, now it's time to stop. It's become a hindrance, and is leading me in the wrong direction.

Some of this involves cutting ties with certain people. This is painful, because at least one of those people I love dearly. But I know a one-sided thing when I see it. And even if there are many good and just reasons for it being one-sided, it no longer justifies the long-term effort. I am sad, because it is part of a pattern--a pattern of emotional bonding with someone already committed. Just once, I would like to see a true liaison of spirit, something that feels right and actually works. But it hasn't happened yet, and I'm thinking I should not hold out hope that it will.

Of course--if I'm wrong, the bottom line is--I'm done making the effort. It's left me broke and alone. If I'm wrong, the other party will have to make the effort. Worst case, I have deluded myself. Best case--it's still not attainable unless the other person makes an effort. I will assume that they don't want to make the effort, or can't. Therefore, I will bow out, with the words, "you know where to find me if you want to keep in touch, or make the effort."

I reiterate it because I really don't want to do it. But at this point, I know it's the right thing to do. I'm not angry, because I was never promised anything. Well, just one thing, and that was never fulfilled. No matter. The person in question could easily say, "I never asked for this." And they would be right. Another reason to bow out. I am more frustrated than angry.

On the plus side, I have also become realistic about the fact that England is not the place to work on my doctorate. The academic culture there is materialistic, and I am more "universalist", more comparative in my approach. I have been very politely told that I would have a hard time finding anyone who espouses that point of view among scholars there. So, I am looking into becoming a Jungian analyst instead. While I enjoy teaching, and have no need to give it up, I also think it would be good to work with people one on one, help them through their journey, as well as formally take my own. It takes a long time and a lot of funds to become a Jungian therapist. But--it still beats giving up my house and everything I have here for something incredibly uncertain and perhaps not even the right thing. With the state of the world economy, it's even more daunting.

There is still much unfinished business. Loads of debt to pay off, prerequisites to be met before I can enter the Jung Institute, and writing that needs to be finished. That has been my focus, which is why you have not heard from me all month. I have been restless with a mixture of elation and sadness. But the sadness will go away, like it always does.

In the meantime, and in a less serious frame--I discovered two wonderful places in New York, both from a Yahoo article (if you can imagine). One is the City Bakery, which has to-die-for hot chocolate, made from melted chocolate bars. (If you have a Whole Foods near you, they apparently sell the hot chocolate mix). Starting next week, they will be having their hot chocolate festival, and there is no way I'm not attending. Not if they're serving it with their homemade marshmallows.

The other place is called the Brandy Library. I did a post about 4 years ago called "Quiet Spaces". This place sounds like the atmosphere I'm looking for. Conversation rather than yelling. Music is soft jazz, furniture is earthy like a wealthy person's library. Dress code is casual, but anyone dressed "trashy" is turned away. And--it's small, so it's not overcrowded and stifling. The menu looks spectacular, and I can't imagine anything more wonderful than sitting at one of their tables enjoying an armagnac after dinner. Of course, it's not cheap, so I have to wait til I have some money.

I also notice that in March, the IFC in the Village is playing two Jodorowsky films. I have all of Jodorowsky's films on DVD, but it would be excellent to see them on the big screen. For those of you with an interest in esoterica who live in or near New York City, these are not to be missed if you haven't seen them.

And now, back to finishing my paper. If I can focus.

January Associations

2012-01-07T08:05:00.002-05:00

It has been a snowless January so far, but the cemetery looks frosty. In spite of it being so close, I hardly ever walk there. The pleasure of viewing the artistic and unusual headstones is usually ruined by the end of the walk. On the way out the church driveway, there is a "memorial to the unborn", reminding me that a large social and religious institution values potential life more than mine. One could say a lot about large social institutions these days, religious and political, but it gets tiring after awhile.

Several people on the street still have lights and Christmas decorations up, and I wish they would take them down. I don't think any of them celebrate Epiphany, I think they just haven't gotten around to it. They can't use cold weather as an excuse--save one or two days this week, the weather has been most reasonable.

This week I said goodbye to my cat, Whiskers. What started out as a simple eye infection ended with a cat who couldn't eat and had fluid in her lungs. I suspect, as the specialist said, that "much more was going on with this cat besides the eye". I opted to put her down rather than try to spend thousands on tests and hospital stays. In the end, it was likely they'd tell me she had incurable cancer anyway, and it would have just extended the cat's suffering. I think I was more floored that it cost more to cremate a cat at the emergency vet than it does a human being. I've dropped $3,000 in the last 6 weeks on 3 cats--a catalytic converter (apologies for the pun), Shiva cat, and Whiskers cat. They say things happen in threes, so let that be the last for awhile. Please.

The start of this year has fluctuated between being an emotional void and being sad, and besides the kitty event, I couldn't put my finger on why. I realize now that it's because a lot of things that previously satisfied or interested me have fallen flat, and I haven't found anything to take their place yet. It's interesting to view the cycle of boredom, which leads to point that is between a "death" (or just loss, if you prefer) and wanting things to go back to the way they were before. The cycle has to finish with something brand new. But there is an insecurity about the middle place, like you're stepping off a cliff into empty air, and you want to know that you can reach solid ground again, but your foot hasn't hit it yet. Of course, most of the things we attach ourselves to are temporal or unrealistic anyway, and the result is inevitable, until we stop doing that. But the question becomes--what else is there to do?

A crow is sitting very close to my front porch, and cawing into my window. Crows remind me of the Morrigan, the complex Celtic goddess who has many characteristics of the triple Moon goddess. A friend of mine mentioned a new interest in studying her the other day. I had been working on a story about the Morrigan a couple of years ago, but that stopped for a number of reasons. Perhaps these are synchronicities telling me to pick up that thread yet again. I did so much work on it, it may not be a bad idea.

I had also read somewhere, to my surprise, that in some versions of the myth, the Morrigan is the mother of the goddess Brigid. It provides an interesting metaphorical connection. My friend said to me the other day, "You know, they say you don't choose the Morrigan, she chooses you." Perhaps that is so.

Whatever happens, my January plan is to have a quiet, rather austere month. I will be presenting at the Mid-Atlantic American Academy of Religion conference in March, so my first priority is finishing my paper for that event. I also have many unfinished things at home, reminding me of the old expression, "When a fisherman can't go to sea, he repairs his nets." For all the time I've spent tying up loose ends this past year, it's amazing how many still remain.

In retrospect, I noticed that things in my life happen on the "9"s. I entered puberty at age 9, which led to huge psychological and physical changes. I had my first breast tumor and something akin to my life crashing around me--and me starting over--at 19. At 29, I left my husband, and began a new life. Now, at 39, I feel like something big is going to change again (and I had another breast tumor), but I don't know what yet exactly. Clearly when old structures break down, new ones must take their place. Of course, associations with the number 9 have been forever ruined by the likes of Herman Cain. (Well, maybe not forever. This year, anyway).

At any rate, thank you for indulging my musings--I hope to have more focused and topical blog posts going forward. They say that when you can't write what you want, write anything, and this may be an exercise in that. Here's hoping 2012 will be a productive and interesting writing year.

Dissatisfaction, and, "The Man Who Collected Machen"

2011-12-31T12:33:00.000-05:00

Today is New Year's Eve. NYE tends to be either very wintery, or reminiscent of Spring. It's more like the latter today, just like the first day of Winter was this year. After being in Spring-like Los Angeles for a few days, I have come home to a cat who is clearly dying, so that mixture of ending/beginning is still the theme. (The cat, by the way, is not Shiva--it is Whiskers, who seems to have some kind of eye tumor).

Regardless of this year's circumstances, I always find myself in an evaluative mode on New Year's Eve, even though the point in time is arbitrary in the larger scheme of things. This year, I find myself lamenting how much wasn't done and is unfinished, or done incorrectly, rather than looking at what I did complete this year. Part of the problem is that so much that I worked on mid-year is still pending, and there are no apparent solutions to some looming problems after many months. But I have also come to realize that I am not a patient person, and do not like it when I cannot control outcomes. Which, rationally speaking, is silly--no one really can control outcomes, not in a big way. But unconsciously, I get angry at myself for not being able to do so. I think they call that being a "perfectionist". I'm sure it's why I devote so much blog space to talking about letting go; I need to take my own advice.

I visited my sister in California, and at one point we had a conversation about dissatisfaction. There is a Tarot card, the 4 of Cups, that illustrates the issue. On the well-known Rider-Waite deck, the card features a young man sitting under a tree with his arms crossed, looking at 3 goblets out of his reach, and not seeing the invisible hand offering him his own full goblet right next to him. The card deals with boredom and dissatisfaction, and the message is that we often focus on what we don't have rather than what we have. Boredom is another variation of that; we cannot stand to be alone with ourselves, so we want distractions. Writing is my usual distraction, but lately I've either not had time or not been very inspired. So, I am besieged by the demons of What If, and the unknowns surrounding What Is. I forget that it's all a giant board game, and to be taken just as seriously.

My nephew gave me a wonderful book for Christmas--"The Man Who Collected Machen, which is a collection of short stories by Mark Samuels. I finished it this morning.

You can see the influences of writers like Poe and Lovecraft (and Machen) in Samuels's writing, but it's not about comparing him to those writers. He is very good at writing about the monsters of unconsciousness, horrors of knowledge and language, and a very Lovecraftian sense of the "horror of God". "A Contaminated Text" is one of my favorite stories, and reminds me of one of the last chapters of Carlos Castaneda's book "The Art of Dreaming", where he talks about insect-like beings that feed on us and drain us of our capacity for independent thought. This is metaphorical, of course, and Samuels is well aware of the reality of the metaphor, and identifies it. "The Age of Decayed Futurity" is so disturbingly like our modern society, you get a sense that there is a grain of truth to the conspiracy theory. He also describes that state he calls "that unique mental fever from which only writers suffer", which is well-known to those of us who write fiction. "Nor Unto Death Utterly by Edmund Bertrand" does a great job of smashing metaphorical concepts of God. God is, in this analysis, that wretched face of Death that we fear, and that we spend our whole lives trying to avoid.

The book is a timely acquisition, as it allows me to think more freely about my own work, and things I want to revise, but have gotten stuck. I highly recommend this book if you are a fan of horror or speculative fiction. It is not really horror of the more gruesome variety--it has more of a feel of the classic writers mentioned above, without being a caricature of those writers. I am always on the lookout for writers inspired by the classics, as a lot of contemporary horror leaves me cold.

So, with that, I will wish everyone a happy new year, and hope that 2012 does actually turn out to be a better year than expected. I am hoping that as a nation, we've reached our nadir, and that there's nowhere to go but up. Things go in cycles, so what is empty will fill up, and what has been full will empty. And so on.

Solstice

2011-12-24T10:52:00.000-05:00

I leave for work in the dark, but at this time of year, this is not unusual. The stars are still out as I get into my car on Solstice morning, and notice a single leaf on my windshield that is green. The Solstice officially "occurred" just after midnight; I heard thunder, as though Lugh was attacking the Cailleach with his thunderbolts instead of Balor. Indeed, the morning is so warm and wet, one would not think it was the first day of winter. However, all is fair in seasonal war--sometimes it snows on the Spring Equinox. Birth and death seem all mixed up.

The skyline over the valley looks like an impressionistic painting, with mottled clouds, charcoal, peach, and a watered-down blue. The silhouettes of the fields remind me of Lovecraft's "blasted heath" though perhaps not as sinister. As I make my way towards the town of Chester, I notice that police cars sit with their lights off, waiting for speeding motorists, which makes my own slow drive feel vindicated. For no good reason, I begin to associate the police with social religion, those who uphold the laws that keep people inside the fence and away from the Collective.

The clouds look stormy all day--rich sunlight and blue sky with large chunks of area covered by angry-looking blobs of gray and black. I took a walk at lunchtime on the solstice, and noticed some kind of waxy green vine growing all along the outer wall of Florham. I don't recall seeing this vine before, and it's puzzling. There's lots and lots of it, and it almost looks ominous against the barren trees.

Arthur Machen once wrote about evil, suggesting that it was a defiance of natural law. If a rose bush started to sing of its own accord, that would smack of evil. I don't know that some of these intrusions of Spring are so "evil", but for me at least they reflect an underlying disturbance. As though things are not quite what you think or what you expect. Perhaps they are more of the "trickster" than something evil. Interestingly--the image of Satan, which we associate with evil, was actually thought to be more of a trickster figure, before theology made him a symbol of everything anti-Christian. Tricksters are very necessary, because they remind us that our stories are just that--stories. They can be changed, and sometimes should be changed.

I am not sure how I feel about 2012. I do not believe in this idea of Mayan apocalypse--I don't even think the Mayans believe(d) in that. However, it is not looking good economically or politically. On the surface there appears to be little hope--in fact, it seems things will get monumentally worse. My only hope that this is a Trickster at work, that this is part of a natural upheaval, and we will settle down to something better that is not currently apparent. Sometimes the Unknown gives us good surprises.

I am reluctant to make any predictions for 2012. The last time I made predictions, it was for a good year, settling down and being more harmonious, and in fact everything fell apart and went to sh*t. I'm not anticipating a good year, and I'm hoping I'll be equally wrong about that, and that it turns out to be the best year ever.

Usually winter break is a time to pause, for me to sit back, watch the sunrises on my week off, do some writing, catch up on pleasure reading. Not so this time--it is Christmas Eve, I need to put in student grades, and preparing for a trip to visit my sister as of Monday morning. Naturally I have another sick cat, Whiskers, with a bloodied eye and an ear infection, so both my parents and my basement cats can be traumatized when I relocate them temporarily to my parents' basement. (Shiva cat gets to stay at home, as my neighbor can care for him). I am looking forward to the trip, but we will be busy, so it will not be a time for sitting around. And I will have much work to do when I get back...and for the entire year. No rest for the weary.

I don't know if it's because I've been crankier than usual this holiday season, but I dreamt last night that John Foxx adopted a ginger cat and named it Editorial. I posted this dream to Twitter and Facebook, and received some helpful analyses from many friends--the idea of Fox (masculine/Animus) adopting the Cat (feminine/Anima), both "red images" (foxes are red, ginger cats are red), and editorial, which my friend Rob pointed out would deal with opinions. Never mind that cats have a tendency to be independent anyway. Another friend mentioned Foxx as Animus figure, which makes sense in its own way--I see a lot of my own ideals about the best in men (wisdom of being older, respect, politeness, snarky sense of humor, creatively interesting, still being sexy though older) in Mr. Foxx. I mention "crankiness" because the symbolism is very fiery and "opinionated". Which, of course, I'm not, in the same way Pope Benedict is not a Catholic.

I hope to blog at least once more before the year is out. Happy holidays, and pleasant dreams.

Kala

2011-12-18T06:30:00.003-05:00

As much as I complain about my cat waking me up at ungodly hours, I have to give him credit, because I would not have memorable (or lucid) dreams if he didn't do that. In those moments when I put him off the bed and roll over, many dreams occur. I woke up this morning with the phrase in my head, "Kala means time, and Kali devours it."

I did not invent this phrase. I recall that it was on the back of a card I once kept hanging from the rearview mirror of my car. The non-text side contained a photo of a Kali statue that I had never seen before--it was not a Dakineshwar or Kaligat Kali, nor was it the one in Amritapuri. Kali was a light blue color, not the usual black. The text on the reverse explained who Kali was, and that was the opening sentence.

The word "kala" has been kicking around my consciousness for several days. The other day, for no good reason, I was thinking about the name given to me by Mata Amritanandamayi, "Nischala", and how people always confuse it with "Niskala". "Nis" is the Sanskrit root for "Not". "Chala" means "motion"; "Kala" means "time". "Nischala" means "without motion", or more to the point, "stillness", and is one of Kali's one-thousand names. "Niskala" means "without time". Not merely "timeless" but "beyond time". This is a name of Lalita Devi as well as Kali, and Lalita Devi is the creator of the universe--the universe that Kali devours. (And of course, they are actually the same deity in some regard, as all Hindu deities are one). "Lalita", incidentally, is a version of the Sanskrit word for "play". So, Lalita Devi is the "Goddess who Plays". The creator of the universe is playing a game, and you're in it. If you give that some serious thought, it's quite profound.

I recently subscribed to Umberto Eco's Twitter feed. I don't know if Eco writes it, or if someone posts for him, as the posts are in English. Eco can speak English, but only writes in Italian, so I tend to think it's the latter. Eco of course specializes in semiotics, which is the study of signs and sign processes. Semantics is a branch of semiotics that deals with the meaning of signs, and deals mostly with language. One of his recent tweets said, "Semiotics has become a sort of moral critical duty when it was clear that mass media were the new sacred texts." Deconstructing language and its meanings is important. There is a tendency in our culture to accept what we hear at face value, and not to think about what it really means. A great example of this was brought up in another Twitter feed I follow, @Numinousviews. Yesterday, he posted "The question shouldn't simply be does one believe in God or not. One should first ask what does one understand the word God to mean?" I've been reading a lot of 100 level papers about the debate between religion and science. Many students are using the available material well, but they continue to debate about the same old tired, "Can science prove there is a God or not? Can science prove the Bible stories are true or not?" and using that as a benchmark of "truth". I'm not blaming them for that, as this is the first time they've been asked to look at the question, and for many, this is not a major subject of interest. But the real question is "What do you mean by the word God?" All language is symbolic; it stands for our interpretation of the world. "God" is a metaphor for what we don't understand. Religion is a tool for negotiating what we don't understand. Science is also such a tool, but it deals with the observed outer world. Religion deals with the "numinous", as does psychology, at least in the Jungian sense. It deals with the "psyche", or world of the mind.

Returning to the original "Kala", when I think of both Kali and Lalita, I think of the Srichakra (or Sriyantra), which is a symbol of Sri Lalita. It contains 9 interlocking triangles, 4 pointing up (representing Shiva--the god, not my cat), and 5 pointing down (representing Shakti--Kali is the most "extreme" form of Shakti, which is a metaphor for the energy of consciousness). So, it is the Union of everything in the Universe. There is a prayer that is used by adherents of Sri Vidya called the "Sri Devi Khadgamala Stotra". It looks at the 9 triangles of the Srichakra as 9 "circles" or "chakra swamini", and represent deeper and deeper levels of awareness in the universe. Each level contains the names of deities, with the outer circles referring to desires (karshini) and worldly powers (siddhe), and the inner circles representing the dissolution of any kind of form. The innermost triangle, associated with Mahatripurasundari,(i.e., Lalita, great goddess of the 3 worlds--ours, the heavens, and the hells) is in a circle characterized as "para para rahasya yogini", which in a clumsy literal sense means "prior, prior to form (or that capable of being affected by disease)". Because, when one gets to the core of consciousness, there is no form, no motion, and no time. No-thing.

Fear of the Poor

2011-12-16T15:33:00.001-05:00

I am currently working on a paper for a conference I’m attending next March. It’s based on an idea I had reading Jake Stratton-Kent’s “Geosophia”, and looks at the afterlife and the role of the goete in society. Kent mentions that at some point in ancient Greek religion, there was a rearrangement of the underworld, with some of its denizens suddenly rising to Olympus (like Dionysus), and others that were venerated became demonized. In general, the underworld became demonized, when initially it was a somewhat neutral place. Scholars have argued that the idea of reward/punishment in the afterlife comes from the need to manage death anxiety. After all, if death just means being a ghost in a dreary underworld, regardless of what you did in life, that would tend to make you fear it all the more.

Of more specific interest is the goete, that outsider class of “clergy” that served a ritual function at funerals. The howls and laments of the goete (the word means “lamenting”) were the sounds that guided the dead to the underworld. They were often feared in Greek society, as they were associated with the thing most feared, death. Anyone having any kind of power over the dead was kept at a distance, just a shamans (which have many similarities to goetes) were on the outside of society, because they had “a foot in both worlds”. To touch that other world made you taboo.

The goete was often wild, unkempt, and on the outskirts of society. They were also poor. As I was thinking about this, it occurred to me that there are many unconscious associations with poverty. To be poor—without a home, without basic needs, without comfort—makes us terribly afraid. It is being swallowed up by chaos, not knowing how one will live from day to day, not knowing where the next meal will come from, or how they will stay warm. Scriptures teach adherents to care for the poor, and provide for their needs. Curiously, in more modern eras, this is an injunction largely ignored by the loudest of the “faithful”, in favor of those scriptural passages that condemn those who are different from themselves.

Modern American mythology suggests that poor people are “lazy”, or that they are really comfortably well-off people in disguise trying to swindle you. It is the justification for taking away things like welfare benefits and public health care, because these people are “useless parasites on the system”. This is not a new mythology; certainly Queen Elizabeth I attempted to deal with poverty during her reign by outlawing it. Recently, the country of Hungary did the same thing. It is “criminal” to be poor, a sign that there is something wrong with you, that you are defective. Given that religion teaches compassion towards the poor, it is clear that this attitude comes out of fear. We do not like to see our worst insecurities manifest in a human being; that human being may as well be the “Devil” himself.

It is another fascinating example of the illogical ways of humans. Logically, if everyone shared even some of what they had, no one would have to go without. Certainly there are those who would try to take advantage, but the most successful social programs have ways of keeping that tendency in check. In a recent conversation on a similar topic with a friend, he noted that from a macroeconomic standpoint, things like welfare and unemployment benefits are subsidies to small business. Even if someone is taking advantage of the system, it doesn’t matter from the macroeconomic point of view. What matters is that the economy is moving and healthy, and that money is circulating, goods are being bought and sold. The morality of that system is irrelevant. In short, economic trouble is not a reason to not help the poor.

It is interesting how fear brings restriction. The government compromises civil liberties in the name of “national security”. We are always armed and loaded (psychologically, not literally) against our fears. And we’re ready to demonize and blame those who challenge us.

You might think that I’m beating this subject to death lately, but I think it’s important that we think about our assumptions about life, especially in light of recent national crises. This is not about “other people”, it’s about me as well, and questioning my own assumptions about the world and my reaction to it. We don’t question our assumptions often enough. And if we aren’t aware of them, we can never hope to change them, only to be ruled by them.

Strong?

2011-12-15T07:28:00.002-05:00

This past week, Republican presidential “hopeful” Rick Perry put out an ad that managed to be hugely offensive to a large majority of Americans, and even elicited negative comments from many Europeans. If you have not seen the ad, here it is:

Perry ran this ad against the judgment of people on his own campaign. I also find the ad to be offensive, but I’m also delighted that Perry has provided me an opportunity to compare and contrast a widespread “mythical” conception of America and its history with the actual facts. I talk about this ad nauseam in this blog and in conversation, and I find that people still are puzzled when I talk about humans as “irrational” beings informed by their own narratives rather than facts. This tidbit provides me with a concrete example.

First, Perry brings up the idea of gays in the military as somehow being offensive. I’m not going to go off on that tangent, as I’m not interested in discussing the theological issues surrounding homosexuality. To me, it’s another reason you don’t take the Bible as your literal rule book. But the Bible aside, this is a secular country, and what the Bible says is irrelevant—there is no rational reason to disenfranchise gays from any segment of society at all.

Ah, but the rest of the ad talks about “Obama’s war on religion”. Perry states that America was “intended” to be a Christian nation. I am not sure what “Obama’s war on religion” is; perhaps it’s the fact that he didn’t mention God in his Thanksgiving address. As to calling this the “holiday” season rather than the “Christmas” season—well, you can call it whatever you want, but officially you ought to include everyone, especially if you’re a government figure addressing a diverse population. I think that is sensible.

What is offensive in Perry’s ad besides the obvious homophobia is the complete and total ignorance he displays about the reality of life in this country, and American history. But you have to consider that Perry wouldn’t be where he is now if many other people didn’t also have the same level of ignorance. It is not news that people passionately believe in an America that never existed.

While some of the Founding Fathers might have been Christians, many were Deists. You can read a good summary of Deism and its influence on the American founders here. Deism does talk about belief in God, but outside the context of Christianity and Christian churches. It extolled nature and natural law over Christian belief, and was a byproduct of the Rationalist era. We don’t hear about Deism today, but a lot of its ideas have been subsumed by the Unitarian Universalists. While they don’t reject Christianity or the Bible (or any religion), they don’t give it any exceptional status, either. Hence the “universalist” part—it includes everyone, regardless of belief.

As to the rest of the “war on Christmas”, gleefully picked up by Fox News, Jon Stewart has done his usual admirable job of demythologizing that claim:

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart

Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c

Tree Fighting Ceremony

www.thedailyshow.com

Daily Show Full Episodes

Political Humor & Satire Blog

The Daily Show on Facebook

There is an obvious disconnect between facts and the story being told by Perry and by Fox News, which should surprise no one. But it is clear that in spite of facts, those who believe in Perry’s version of America are not interested in facts—they are interested in their version of the American story, which is a reflection of their own upbringing and their own personal issues. Ideas that tend to exclude or demonize others can be classified as “xenophobic”—they represent a fear of difference, and hence a fear of change (and ultimately of death and the unknown). The attitude towards difference is negative, and Fox has been so successful as a “news” channel because it taps directly into that negative current and validates it. Hand-in-hand with the xenophobia is a sense of victimhood--that the "real" America is "under attack", and that specifically real "Christians" are under attack.
And so it goes, back to Rick Perry.

With the economy near collapse, attempts to cut needed services so that the wealthy are not inconvenienced, recent crackdowns on free speech, and attempts to pass new laws to detain “suspicious” Americans “indefinitely” without trial, it’s not surprising that even those who are more rationally minded would be fearful of what’s next. But America is not collapsing because it's not "Christian" enough, it's collapsing because of bad economic practice. But--understanding the human tendency towards narrative--is it possible to get away from a culture of fear, and take a courageous step towards a new national mythology? Can we look at the New Colossus with new eyes?

Probably not in my lifetime; the collective psyche is a challenging monster.

Concerts

2011-12-01T21:42:00.001-05:00

Maxwell’s is a music venue and restaurant in Hoboken that has the distinction of being one of the few non-yuppified places in that community. It’s become one of the only places in New Jersey to see classic punk or post-punk bands, and a lot of random weirdness. My friend Liz told me about a concert she attended there, where the opening act was a Japanese band. The singer spoke no English, screamed a lot into the microphone, and proceeded to strip down to butt-nakedness throughout the set.

I went to Maxwell’s on Sunday with Liz and her brother Joe. We were spared any naked Japanese singers, as we were going to see Chameleons Vox, which consists of Mark Burgess and John Lever from the original Chameleons, and three other non-original members (Ray Bowles, Neil Dwerryhouse, and Chris Oliver). I’d heard music by the Chameleons in the past, and I’d always liked them, though I probably wouldn’t have known about this show if it wasn’t for Chris Oliver. If you may recall from my England trip postings, Chris Oliver is on John Foxx’s tech crew. He gave me the tour dates while he was setting up for Foxx’s gig in York. So, I wanted to hear them live, and I wanted to say hello to Chris again. Black Swan Lane opened for them, and we agreed that we liked their sound—clearly very Chameleons-influenced, which is not surprising, as Mark Burgess was involved in at least some of the songwriting.

I’ll just cut right to it—the gig was spectacular. I’m used to British performers who are much like John Foxx—they get onstage, they say hello, they do their set, maybe introduce the band, then say good night. There’s not much, if any, banter with the audience—it’s all “business”. Mark Burgess is the exact opposite. He seemed to be acting out every song, was very chatty with the audience, and during “Second Skin”, he made his way around the audience before returning to stage. While the band had a setlist, they made at least one on-the-fly change by special request, and made some on the spot decisions when they came back for an encore, as they didn’t have any encore numbers prepared.

You can see the first few numbers of the gig in this video, taken by an audience member:

I was just stunned by the end of the gig. They were just really, really mindblowing-ly good. My friend Anna said that Mark Burgess always seems so happy when he’s onstage, and that may be a part of it—his demeanor and energy was infectious. Anyone who could have walked away from that gig and not liked it would have to be the sort of person who kicks puppies and pushes old people down the stairs.

Two days later, on a rainy and windy Tuesday night, I found myself in Brooklyn. It’s probably been ten years since I’ve been there. There was a certain incongruity between the warmth of the evening and the fact that someone bought a live Christmas tree and brought it onto the L train. On the plus side, it made the subway car smell nice, not something you often hear anyone say about subway cars.

I searched for a place to have dinner, and found a restaurant that met all of my criteria (dark and atmospheric, preferably lots of wood décor, must not be fussy or vegetarian, and must have beer). I was serenaded through dinner with Rush’s greatest hits. (No, not Rush Limbaugh. The Canadian metal band Rush). I found this to be a huge improvement over the usual garbage I have to listen to while I’m digesting my food. I particularly hate listening to “soft rock” while I’m eating. I don’t know why people find it “soothing” to listen to some melodramatic male singer who sounds like someone’s taken a cheese grater to his member. Or a female singer who sounds like she’s trying to hit every possible note in the human vocal range. Or the Eagles. Tara Busch posted a tweet last week about a trip to Whole Foods, where she was subjected to the sound of Rod Stewart covering an Eagles song. (And they had no coffee). There should be federal punishment for that.

After dinner I went to the Trash Bar, where my friend Mark’s band, Some Awful Bridge, was playing. They were playing 1980s era Iron Maiden at the bar outside the venue room, a la “Number of the Beast”. I read a critique of the Trash Bar where people complained that the music they played was “too old” and they didn’t know the songs. I knew every song. Which probably means I’m old. The Iron Maiden songs formed another strange contrast with the first artist who played that night, Myles Manley, whose music is more on the folk side.

I knew Mark had a band, but I’d never heard them before last night. Their Facebook page describes their music as a “Pretentious new wave-y, gothy, shoegaze-y atrocity”. That’s probably the best description (not really pretentious, though), as you couldn’t pin their music to a specific genre. You can get a sense of what they sound like here (though be warned that the MySpace player is not the greatest when it comes to streaming audio).These guys are very good, and do a good live show. (I’m not sure I get the pig and accordion bit, but hey, I don’t have to understand everything). It would have been nice if they had a bigger crowd, though Tuesday night in Brooklyn is a rough time slot. So, if they’re playing near you, be sure to go see them and buy their stuff.

This week has been fun, but of course that never lasts. My cat developed a "problem" last night that made him climb the walls, try to pee on my bed, and caused him to frantically dig at the front door. Since this is decidedly odd cat behavior, I took him to the emergency vet at midnight, and it turns out he had a blockage (if you don't know about cats, that's potentially fatal if not treated). So, Shiva is in the hospital as I write this, looking a bit like the stereotypical spinster:

This has left me in a decidedly distracted state of mind, and has disrupted my week at a time when I could least stand to be disrupted. Life is like that, I suppose...

Mythology and Demythology

2011-11-30T11:00:00.000-05:00

Yesterday, someone asked me on Twitter about “myth” and John Foxx’s music; specifically, what I saw in it that was “mythical”. John Foxx himself would tell you that there’s nothing “mythical” about his music. The short answer to that is that all art is mythical. But I’m not sure that people understand what I mean when I say that, and it’s a definitional problem.

When John creates art and songs that center around “The Quiet Man”, he is creating a myth. It may, to a certain extent, be an extension of his own private mythology (and we all have them). Current albums by John seem to have a “lamenting love that was lost or never happened” theme, and that also is part of a mythology, whether it be autobiographical or not.

So, what do I mean by “mythology”? Most people think of the stories about deities of different cultures—Greek Mythology, Roman Mythology, Celtic Mythology, etc., etc. But that is a very narrow definition of mythology. Mythology represents all of our interpretations about life.

I saw a quote from Joseph Campbell on Facebook yesterday that perfectly defines it:
“Mythologies are in fact the public dreams that move and shape societies, and conversely one’s own dreams are the little myths of the private gods, antigods, and guardian powers that are moving and shaping oneself: revelations of the actual fears, desires, aims and values by which one’s life is subliminally ordered." (The Hero’s Journey, p. 61).

As indicated, there are “collective mythologies”—myths adopted by a society (so-called “conventional wisdom” is part of this), and there are “individual mythologies”—the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves and the way things are based on our own experiences, dreams, and fears. The term “myth” implies something fictional, but it really tests the definition of “reality”. We tend to associate what is “real” with “facts”. (This is another myth). Philosophy spends a great deal of time trying to get at the truth behind subjective interpretation, and that is incredibly difficult, if not potentially impossible, to get to. The brain does not function without meaning; there is always an interpretation, and it is never totally “objective”.

Different phases of life embody different mythologies. The imaginative figures that we learn about and literally believe in as children become demythologized as we get older. “Demythology” is a sad but necessary process, the need to get away from literal beliefs and rediscover the myth symbol or narrative in a broader sense. A good example is the belief in Santa Claus or Father Christmas. Children literally believe in Santa Claus when they are young, then at some point they realize that there is no such person coming to their house. However, the mythical image of Santa Claus and what it represents can still be enjoyed by adults without literally believing in it.

Demythologization is painful. We would rather find reasons to cling to our myths than let them go. It’s not just about letting go of figures like Santa Claus. Adolescents are often surly and moody because they are going through that very process. There is an innocence that is stripped away as we become older, and the more experiences we have, the more disillusioned we can become. This frequently happens with religion—especially with religions that insist on clinging to outmoded mythical ideas. The experiences of those who grew up believing that “this is the way it is” from their religion’s standpoint often clash with the realities they face. This often leads to a period of rebellious atheism—“clearly there is no God”. There becomes a rejection of everything the society values, because we believed those stories were “truths”, and when we discover they are not, we assume they must be “lies”.

However, because something is a “myth” doesn’t mean it’s a “lie”. Facticity doesn’t equal truth. It may not be literally true, but it often contains a deeper truth that isn’t easily expressed—the myth acts as a metaphor. Psychoanalysts are doing mythical work—they attempt to bring the patient to an awareness of their myths. One has to be aware of what one believes about the world before they can think of changing it. And more often than not, we are deeply unaware of what we believe—we take it for granted and don’t think about it.

Understanding your own myths and that of your society is critically important. I had a professor in my undergraduate years, who was discussing Matthew Arnold’s essay on Hellenism vs. Hebraism. To paraphrase his interpretation—Arnold said that you must choose and live by your own myth, because if you don’t, someone else will “shove theirs down your throat.”

I did an exercise with my Religion students, where I asked them to look at the current 2012 Republican debates and the Republican objection to Obama, and regardless of where they stood on the issue, to identify the mythology there. They were perplexed at first, but once we started deconstructing the various talking points—and showing how they’ve repeated themselves throughout history—they were amazed at how little awareness they had of our “national mythology”. There is a tendency to take the news at face value, because we believe that journalists report “facts”. (This is another myth). “If it’s on TV, it must be true.” Like Lon Milo DuQuette said in his wonderful song, “It ain’t necessarily so.”

And that’s the value of demythologization—it forces us to deconstruct our worldview, and to be open to something less limiting. After demythologization, there is often a reintegration of the mythical content—we now see it in a different light, in all of its colorful context. Of course, this doesn’t always happen—sometimes people get stuck, either by suspiciously rejecting everything as “false” and the world as “bad”, or by clinging more tightly to literal beliefs, no matter how irrational. The irrational is always with us and should not be rejected, but it needs to be balanced with rational assessment. Rational assessment isn’t always “scientific method”—sometimes it’s just using your common sense.

There is a great deal in John Foxx's work that suggests the invisible, the hidden, the ghostly—which, in spite of all his pleading, does give his work an “esoteric” bent. His Ballardian themes are mythical. His story of a man who lurks in the shadows—who may be a shadow—who moves through cities that represent layer upon layer of the past, seen in the present—and who is something of an explorer of those forgotten regions—is patently mythical. There is an attempt to view a larger back story, in the context of his own (or his character’s) interpretation, no matter how minimalistic. In my own opinion, I see a tug-of-war between being publicly noticed and appreciated and retreating into privacy and an inner life. But there’s also a tug of war between doing things “logically” and “rationally”, and trying to come to terms with “irrational” experiences. His best work, in my opinion, integrates a cold minimalism and an eerie sense of the layers of history. Together, you have that sense of the numinous, which suggests a deeper awareness if you pay attention to it. Whether this is his intention or not is irrelevant. We all function within mythologies, unless we are consciously attempting to break from them (what Jung calls “individuation”)—and that is an incredibly difficult path tread by very few.

The Small Picture

2011-11-18T05:20:00.000-05:00

Zen Buddhism makes much of living in the present. If you make a conscious effort to put all of your awareness in the present moment, you will find that it is an incredibly difficult thing to do. Time slows down, or disappears entirely, and the mundane takes on a startlingly profound significance.

To illustrate what I mean—I usually get up in the morning, feed the cat, make my bed, meditate, take a shower, and then go downstairs to make breakfast and wash any dishes left in the sink. Anyone reading this has their own version of the morning routine. But try this—when you get out of bed, don’t focus on anything except what you’re doing right now. Don’t worry about what you will do at work, or wherever else you are going that day, don’t rehearse conversations with people that you haven’t had yet, don’t think about what happened yesterday. Focus on each step you take when you get out of bed. Focus on the act of turning on the water in the shower, and washing yourself. Focus on the act of washing dishes. Apply that to whatever you do in the morning, or just one thing you do, and see what happens.

Besides the slow-down of time, you will find that this is a very difficult thing to maintain, because your mind jumps all over the place. It’s the reason you can’t meditate by sitting and thinking about nothing. Your mind can’t bear sitting still and shutting up. Rather than fight that, it is said that it is better to listen to the chatter of your mind like you’re listening to the radio or a TV in the background.

Even though it is unlikely you could maintain this state of mind, it is a very worthwhile exercise. For one thing, it shows you how you really DON’T live in the present. Another thing it demonstrates is how mundane tasks are acts of meditation in and of themselves. Finally—if you can manage to attempt this sort of thing, even for a little while on a daily basis, you will find that it completely changes how you view life.

Poetry is the language of the present. To describe a scene or an event, you have to be fully immersed in whatever it is you are writing about. It isn’t really an accident that sacred and/or mystical writing is usually in the form of poetry. There is an attempt to recount the wonder of the experience, no matter how mundane. I think rationalism has made us lose our sense of poetry, as we have a habit of trying to “factually” recount things in an “objective” way. It’s not just what events objectively happen; it’s how those events are experienced. For instance, Gary Snyder has a poem about waking up, rolling a cigarette, and listening to distant cars going by. Simply listing those activities leaves them devoid of meaning. But in a poem: “Sun breaks out over the eucalyptus / grove below the wet pasture / water’s about hot / I sit in the open window / & roll a smoke / ... / a soft continuous roar / comes out of the far valley / of the six-lane highway—thousands /and thousands of cars / driving men to work.” (from “Marin-an” in “The Back Country”).

Like most of us at some point, I have a tendency to try to figure out the “big picture”. Where will I be in five years, what is my plan for making big changes, what are my deadlines for my goals? We short-change ourselves with this kind of thinking, because our planning is based on our assumptions about the future, which are based on the past and the present. The big picture is really a background to the small picture, and the small picture includes those daily things we do that in time will take us where we want to go. Just like squirrels build up their winter store one acorn at a time, there is a need to break things into smaller components, and focus only on those things we are capable of dealing with in the present. What seems to happen is that we suddenly find ourselves with the right opportunities and circumstances to achieve our goals. The reason this happens is because we’ve cultivated awareness—and when you are aware, you pick up on things that others miss. It may be something read online or in a newspaper (does anyone read those anymore?), a casual comment from a friend or from someone sitting across from you on a train. I believe the term for it is “serendipity”.

Serendipity (and synchronicity) make us nervous, because it means relinquishing control and trusting that you will get to where you need to go without worrying or fretting about it. This doesn’t mean that no forethought should go into future plans, but we do tend to spend more time worrying about those things that are out of our control. You can’t “solve” what is uncertain and unknown, so you can only surrender to it.

With so much going on in the world, and so much information, I don’t think it’s a bad idea to learn to focus on one thing at a time. After all, you never really win the multi-tasking game; you just have more and more to do, and less time in which to do it.

Read

2011-11-15T09:00:00.001-05:00

For those of you who are “seasonally affected”, I made a discovery today. Maybe it’s not something all that new, but I hadn’t really thought about it before. This morning was overcast, but I was driving to work as the sun was coming up, and you could see that brilliant line of pink and orange at the horizon. It occurred to me that this can also be seen at sunset on cloudy days. So—go outside at sunset, or get up at sunrise if you hate cloudy weather.

I am not terribly affected by the weather, though my thoughts do move faster on sunny days. This can be good or bad—I could write an entire story, or waste an entire day yammering to myself, and not really focus on anything useful. At work, I talk to myself almost non-stop. I’d hate to be my co-workers on those days.
Speaking of words and distractions, I took an inventory of my reading material last night, and realized that I am about halfway through four different books (non-fiction), and would like to start a fifth book (fiction). I used to reliably plod my way through one book before starting another, but I seem to have literature commitment difficulties these days.

Part of the trouble is that I’m a writer, and one who has not written much except these blog postings for the last month. I reach points in my work where I have to read in order to write. My mind plays the same boring things over and over again, and I need to get fresh perspective.

When I was in Bristol, John Foxx and I talked about the next tour stop, Manchester. He advised me to visit St. Ann’s Square if I had time. “There are 2 bookstores there,” he said. I wondered how he knew that the bookstore was the first place I looked for in any city. He made a face, and said, “Well, if you’re civilised, then you read.”

One of the first things to come up in last week’s conversation with Umberto Eco at NYPL was the idea of being well-read. Eco, like Pierre Bayard, says that it is impossible to read everything, and much of the time people fake being well-read. There is a sense that in order to do a book justice, you need to cultivate an awareness of every word. In reality, you only do this when you really love a book, and want to re-read it. When I look at lists of books I “ought” to have read, I sometimes feel ashamed, like they are acquaintances I should have spent more time getting to know. But—like distant friends and family, it’s hard to sit down and “write that long letter to catch up”. In a world of Facebook and Twitter updates, it’s no wonder we’ve developed a fondness for 140 characters or less. There just isn’t time.

I realize that my own blog postings are often very long, so I should take my own advice with regard to time. Still, I can’t shake the idea that I’m cheating my readers with short posts. Readers and reading are like friends, and I don’t want to cheat my friends by not giving them enough attention. Then again, a lot of people tell me they’ll read my posts “when they have time”, which is code for “it’s too long to read in 2 minutes.” (Kind of like my e-mails to a certain unnamed person, who only tends to respond if I send a one-sentence e-mail.)

So, in the interest of not droning on, I will leave you with an Onion article about reading:

Area Eccentric Reads Entire Book

Umberto Eco in New York City

2011-11-10T06:30:00.003-05:00

On Tuesday night I ventured into New York City. I had some misgivings about this, because I've been sick since I returned from the UK. I am not one for going to the doctor; to paraphrase Dave Barry, if my arm was severed and dangling, I'd sooner wrap it up with duct tape and keep going than go to the hospital. This is nothing personal against my doctors; it's just another thing I have to add to my already-busy schedule, and illness is something I just don't have time for. However, there are a few things on my "see the doctor" checklist, and coughing up blood is one of them. I started doing that on Monday morning, so I made an appointment. Fortunately the blood was not coming from my lungs, and I just had a very bad sinus infection. I'm feeling much better with some antibiotics and nettle tea.

But all of that is background. I went into New York to go to NYPL Live's conversation between Paul Holdengraber and Umberto Eco. I'd bought my ticket before going to the UK, which was a good thing, as the event was sold out. I stopped by St. Andrew's first, for some dinner and Belhaven's. I was sitting next to the bar next to two very cute young Scottish men, who had just arrived here for an 8 day vacation. One of them informed me that they don't drink Belhaven's in Scotland, even though it's a Scottish beer. I was not surprised--I didn't recall seeing it on draft anywhere in Glasgow. Of course, they have other fine beer selections in Scotland, like the Dark Island ale, from an Orkney brewery. Anyway, we got chatting, and they flattered me by guessing my age was 26. We were discussing Kearny for some reason, and I realized later that I was thinking of Keansburg rather than Kearny. I have no idea in the world why; I'm going to blame it on antibiotics haze.

Tuesday was a gorgeous day, 68 degrees and sunny, so it was a nice evening to be queued outside the New York Public Library. I was chatting with a woman in front of me in the queue about Europe, and she told me that she was able to stay in Paris in the 1970s for about $8 a day. Clearly I've started traveling too late in life.

In between grading papers on the train over, and waiting for the event to start once we got seated, I was reading De La Torre and Hernandez's book, "The Quest for the Historical Satan". This turned out to be quite synchronous with the Eco event, as the theme of human evil came up more than once in the conversation. Paul Holdengraber is a very entertaining emcee, and his questions are very well-informed. He asks his guests to provide him with a biography in 7 words. Eco's 7 words were: "High is the moon on Prague, gosh."

Holdengraber started by asking Eco about his impetus for writing his new book,"The Prague Cemetery". Eco said it was an "irritation" about human lying and forgery. All of the characters in the book are based on people that really existed, except for one, and Holdengraber said that Eco managed to make this one fictional character utterly despicable. Eco said that was certainly the point--though he also felt his fictional character was also the most authentic, in human terms. Returning to the theme of forgery--he said it was a type of lying, and that forgeries, even when acknowledged as such, are still believed by people and become prejudices. He mentioned forgeries like the Protocols of Zion, and other anti-Semitic Jewish "conspiracy" works. When at least one of these was acknowledged as a forgery, the response was, "well, maybe the book was a forgery, but it reflects how the Jews really think." So, a false prejudice is created with a false work originally presumed to be true. If you think about human behavior in this context, it is well known from studies that when factual evidence is shown that disproves a belief, people will cling to the false belief even more tightly.

I also started thinking about the line between fiction and reality. Often, we have a difficult time sorting the two, and that can have negative consequences. In a quote from Eco that was from an original version of his new book, he talks about people who believe that Dan Brown's stories are true. Certainly there was a lot of hoopla over the Da Vinci Code and its follow-up novel, which was quite unbelievable to watch. People simply could not accept that the book was fiction. The Church didn't help much by getting into the fray to tell people the book was fiction--that only convinced believers that there was a "cover-up." In general, though, one of the things that does worry me about modern society is the ability to discriminate between different kinds of information received. As I am reviewing research paper drafts, I realize that my students, even with guidance, can't tell a valid source from an invalid source. It's all one big screen or book full of words, all equally true or untrue relative to our own prejudices.

Eco contrasted hate with love by suggesting that love is a very selective thing, while hate is much more general. We love individuals, we hate groups. Holdengraber noted that Eco was quite animated by hate, and Eco replied, "I am animated by my hatred of hate." He then made the rather interesting point that the "enemy" in stories must follow a certain pattern. The archetypal image for the enemy in Western culture is the Antichrist.

Holdengraber asked him about his evil character in his new book and his relationships with women--why do women gravitate towards such horrible people, and conversely, why was the character so obsessed with women, who he claimed to hate? Eco replied that in order to really hate something, you have to be attracted by it. One might "hate" the guy who cuts him off in traffic, but that person will be quickly forgotten. Real hate requires an obsessive attraction to the object of contempt. Holdengraber quoted from one of Eco's books (might have been the new one) about a man who was an "erotic anti-Semite". The hate has so much devotion, it's almost a kind of love.

Holdengraber then tried to pin Eco down on the subject of psychoanalysis. He felt that this was a real theme of Eco's, as Eco is interested in the re-reading of things. Eco demurred from the idea that he had an interest in psychoanalysis, or that re-reading had anything to do with it, though he went on to say that his ego prevents him from having a committed relationship to psychoanalysis. Holdengraber said, "You're worried about what it might turn up for you?" "Yes, I would worry about that very much!"

On the subject of the places Eco chooses to locate his stories, the choice apparently has to do with where he wants to visit. If he wants to visit a place, he'll write about it as an excuse to go there. Sounds fair enough to me--I should do more of that with my own work.

I had to leave at this point, as my chest felt like there was a rock sitting inside of it, and I did not want to erupt into a massive coughing fit inside the auditorium. But the talk made me think about what it is that attracts me to Eco's work, and I think it's this deliberate attempt that he makes to "discombobulate" the reader. Leaving you in this uneasy state between truth and fiction is a means of cultivating awareness. You have to pay attention, and have some idea about context and background to be able to discriminate between the two. Eco continually challenges his readers to do that.

As a side note, someone on the John Foxx tour (either John, Sefa, or Benge) told me that the new Eco book did not receive good reviews. Nonetheless, I will have to read it myself, as the conversation has left me intrigued about the characters.

Sentimental

2011-11-05T09:40:00.001-04:00

There are times when I could be called nostalgic or traditional, even conservative. However, you are not likely to hear me described as sentimental. "Sentimental" involves remembering stories the wrong way, or changing them in a ridiculous way. For instance--if I'm getting a card for my father for his birthday, I am not likely to buy a sentimental card. Sentimental cards always start with some crap like, "Dad I remember you and I going on long walks blah blah and I'll always be your precious little girl blah blah, etc., ad nauseam". I love my Dad, but it would be utterly ridiculous to give him that kind of a card. Growing up, he worked a lot of overtime, and I only saw him at meals and when he was swearing at the car. We didn't go on long father-daughter walks; he was trying to support 5 children. I could never imagine him referring to me as "precious", for which I am forever grateful. So, to give him a card like that is completely inauthentic and cheesy. In a word--sentimental.

Earlier this week, I was flipping through some old periodicals at work while waiting for someone, and the one I grabbed happened to be "Backstage", a publication for actors. Backstage has casting calls and auditions listed, and I happened to flip to a page where they were seeking auditions for "Carrie : the Musical". I am a big fan of things that do not belong together, so the idea of a Stephen King novel being combined with a musical caught my attention. Only hours later, when I was reading through RSS feeds, I discovered that Teller (of Penn and Teller) is going to produce a musical based on the Exorcist. My first thought was, "If these are done properly, they could make the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade SO much more interesting."

If you've never seen the Macy's Parade (I still watch it on Thanksgiving for some unknown reason; must be that I'm "traditional"), it not only consists of the regular parade floats, but also various troupes doing musical numbers. So, they reach Herald Square, and usually do a number from one of the season's popular Broadway musicals. As soon as these come on, I find myself lowering the volume and walking away from the TV. I am not a fan of musicals. Occasionally there will be something tolerably well-done, but for the most part, I want to avoid being nauseous before Thanksgiving dinner.

My prejudice against certain musicals is probably related to my prejudice against certain types of pop music; it's songs are often bubbly and empty-headed, and have a quality that makes me want to punch the performers in the face. The only time I like bubbly is when it's in champagne or carbonated beverages. I recall one of my professors during my undergraduate years saying how much he hated Disney because all of its movies and characters were "Pre-Raphaelite"--they glorify a way of being that never was, and never will be. Yet, they play into people's ideas of how things should be--and they're usually quite superficial. I don't know if I'd be as hard on Disney as he was, but it's that sense of feeding people a story about "the way things are" that is so inauthentic that resonates with me. There's a used-car salesman quality to the sincerity. Kind of like most love songs.

While I was in London with my friends Garry and Tapio, we had a conversation about famous bands from Finland. Garry mentioned the band Lordi. In Europe, there is a contest called "Eurovision", where music performers compete and get votes from the watching audience. In 2006, this competition was won by a Finnish band called Lordi. Most of the competing bands were the sort of vapid, overproduced pop rubbish that you come to expect from such contests. Lordi was a death metal band, and apparently came out in their full black-metal Kiss-like gear, and roared into the microphone. They won the Eurovision contest by a landslide. I love this story, because a. it adds fuel to my suspicion that Europeans are less clueless than Americans, and b. they absolutely got the joke. If this had happened in America, you'd see evangelists picketing outside the contest venue, because they haven't had a clue about anything, ever. Books would be written about how this is an example of how Satan has taken over popular music.

That may be the problem--Satan isn't present enough in popular music. It's as though we believe that life is like a Jehovah's Witness flier on "perfect life with God" (which also does not, and never will, exist, at least not in that way. Thankfully). We're human beings with a full range of emotions, and why everything has to focus on what's "safe", superficial, and basically a retelling of the same old stupid Disney-esque myths is beyond me. It's as though record companies assume I've had a lobotomy and never passed the maturity level of a 9-year-old. There should be some dark things around the edges; there usually is, and as far as I'm concerned, the best music is that which reflects the complexity of our emotional lives. We should not wonder that children who are raised on nothing but this vacuous, sanitized nonsense grow up to be serial killers, rapists, or otherwise have very serious social problems. (Yes, I'm overgeneralizing, but I hear about enough cases like this, and parents are so surprised, because little Johnny was never exposed to anything "bad"). All it does is perpetuate the artificial good/evil split in our psyches.

So, I hope that both Carrie and the Exorcist are not turned into banal morality tales, and actually have a sense of humor as musicals. I do wonder if the trend will continue (Friday the 13th the Musical, Halloween the Musical, Texas Chainsaw Massacre the Musical, etc.). It would certainly make Broadway a different place.

Leaving the UK, Entering Total Chaos

2011-11-02T08:11:00.000-04:00

All good things come to an end, as they say, and my trip to the UK was no exception. I spent my last day in the UK switching hotels for one more evening, and then met up with Tapio for drinks, as he was also at a loose end before his flight the next day. I’m sure that was an odd sight, as Tapio has a well-quaffed and polished New Romantic look, whereas I look like a refugee from a 1970s coffee commercial. But it was nice to have one more visit before leaving.

I got the bad news that afternoon that John Foxx had fallen and hit his head on a desk, and had to go to the hospital. He was released the same day, but told he couldn’t travel. So, the last two dates of the Maths tour were canceled. I have not heard from him, but I presume he is back at home resting, and I hope he gets much better very soon.

The morning that I left the UK, it was a lovely day in London, the trains were on time, my flight left on time. Then we crossed the “big pond” and everything promptly turned to crap. It seems like it was an omen that I shouldn’t have bothered coming home.

First, in further evidence that Mother Nature hates New Jersey (and much of the Northeast), a huge Nor’easter came roaring through, dropping anywhere from 5 inches to 2 feet of snow. (I think the New England states were hit the worst with regard to snow—we had the minimum). It was a heavy wet snow, and the trees are still full of leaves, so this basically has amounted to a Tree Apocalypse. I can’t drive down any street without seeing tree corpses littered along sidewalks, often mixed with power lines that have been dragged down with them. My flight was diverted to Boston at first, but by some miracle they let us into Newark, and we arrived at 6:00 pm. There were no trains, I was not about to make my friend drive an hour to get me, so I had to resort to calling my parents to come get me. Fortunately they made it without incident, as there was very little traffic on the road. But it took about an hour and a half to get luggage, as the door was stuck on the plane’s freight compartment. By the time I got to my parents’ house, it was after 9:00 pm. I did not choose to drive home that night. (My parents, by the way, also had no power).

Curiously, while in the airport waiting for my luggage, I heard a conversation behind me between two friends, one who was describing an incident at her friend’s house involving a toilet that exploded while she was on vacation. “The tank just cracked. It was weird.” (You may recall that the exact same thing happened to my parents while they were on vacation last month). Then I looked across the baggage claim belt, and saw a woman who looked almost exactly like me, wearing a coat that looks much like one I own. After reading H.P. Lovecraft all afternoon on the plane, I was starting to wonder if I hadn’t entered some fourth dimension.

The next day I arrived at my own house. My neighbor was waiting for me outside, to tell me that we had no power, and how abysmally awful things had been in the neighborhood the last two weeks. I walked in to a freezing cold house, but also to an overjoyed cat, so I stayed in the house with him for awhile in spite of the fact that I wanted to leave immediately. My yard is littered with leaves—no surprise as I’ve been away for almost 3 weeks—and the tops of large trees. Fortunately no trees landed on my house. Once the snow melts, I will have another monumental task ahead of me in the yard.

So, the time since my return has been spent at friends’ or family’s houses that have hot water so I can take showers, searching out launderettes that don’t have lines of people out the door (and preferably with a pub nearby), and fighting some kind of respiratory infection that I’ve acquired since returning (and that the extreme cold in my house is not helping). They’re not predicting that we will have power until Thursday or Friday. If I come home Friday to no power, I’m calling up the electric company and hacking a lung into the phone, hoping that the threat of possible death by cold will drive them over here. I’m trying to be patient, but it’s suspicious to me that everyone in the state who has the OTHER electric company as their utility carrier had their power restored by Monday. The same thing happened during Hurricane Irene. I’d change electric companies, but I think my only other choice probably leases their lines from my current company, so I’d be in the same boat.

So, wish me luck as I attempt to keep both of my lungs from exploding, and my life together while I have no resources at home. I promise a return to my normally obtuse blogging after this short intermission.

John Foxx and the Maths at XOYO (2nd London gig)

2011-10-28T03:45:00.000-04:00

Thursday morning was like many others, with the notable exception that I did not have to drag my luggage to another city and another hotel. It's a bit of a relief to stay in one place for a few days. Garry, ever hospitable, offered to take me on a walking tour of the Roman ruins of London, which we did en route to meeting up with Martin, and going to the Griffin for the pre-gig meetup. To be honest, I was not sure I was up for a long walk, though it did prove to be worth it--I had no idea that there were these old walls, bastions, and temple remnants hidden among the marketplaces and tall corporate buildings in the Eastern part of the city. We also visited the Roman amphitheatre recently discovered underneath the Guildhall. The excavated bits were in a room with projections of these Tron-like figures that were likely supposed to represent gladiators and other performers, which was quite unexpected. The amphitheatre is believed to have been built around 70 C.E. and abandoned around the 4th century, and I was impressed that wooden beams still remained from the structure. I noticed a sign that said this was a "scheduled" site, which likely means "registered as an historic artifact", but it sounds peculiar to the American ear. As if the British government has penciled in this site on its calendar. Before going downstairs, Garry asked where the amphitheatre was, and we were told, "Right--go all the way down the stairs, door to your right." This struck Garry as funny, as this is matter-of-fact speech is so very English. ("Hanging Gardens of Babylon?" "Make a right, second door." "Valhalla?" "Take the lift to the 5th floor, turn left." Etc.) We also visited the remains of a Roman basilica that's hidden away in a hairdresser's shop. Quite surreal.

The meetup was rather small, which was a bit of a surprise, as there were many fans who said they would turn up. It is likely that this is because John is doing a tour, rather than just one gig in London. Rather than travel to London, people are probably just going to see John play locally. Martin and I cut out slightly early to head over to XOYO, and I ran into Chris C., Chris O., Steve, and Isobel, standing outside just before the doors opened. The last time I saw Isobel was at the Troxy, and we kept having our conversations cut short, so I was very glad to see her for this gig. Karborn also showed up for this gig, looking almost distinguished in a proper shirt and jacket, though his shoes killed the "distinguished" part. Karborn said he just wasn't ready to be that distinguished.

"The Neat" was the first opening band for the gig, and I was surprised to see that they were traditionally guitar-based rather than a synth band. I ran into someone early on who had been at soundcheck, and thought they sounded a bit like Oasis. I liked their gig overall, as I am not one of those Foxx fans dedicated to electronic music--my taste is very eclectic. However, I did wonder what the hardcore synth fans thought. Xeno and Oaklander came on next, and did a very good set. It's difficult for me to comment very specifically on either band, as it was the first time I'd heard both of them. Garry said he thought Xeno and Oaklander sounded a bit like early Berlin.

John and the band finally came on about 30 minutes late, and did what I thought was a fantastic set. I stood in the back with Isobel this time, rather than being right up front, and the sound was very clear, John's voice sounded very good. At this gig, they dropped "Just for a Moment" from the setlist. I'm not sure if this was because the gig was running late. In the back, I was standing behind some young men who looked like they'd escaped from a bad 1980s movie. This struck me as funny, because the group of them were clearly impressed with themselves. When they finally left, I had a very good view of the stage from the bar area. There were a lot more people at this show than the one on Tuesday.

After the gig, security was keen on getting people out, and Steve had to talk to several people to allow those he couldn't get wristbands for to stay. Eventually it was sorted out, and John finally came from backstage to chat with us. They were all moving on to Benge's studio, and then to their respective places for the night, before heading for Holmfirth in the morning. (At least one person reading this post will realize that I have not mentioned tissues once in this posting. Well, at least not until now.)

So, it is the day after, and I'm feeling a bit sad that the gigs are over. I will miss seeing the band, the crew, and all of my friends here. I very much appreciate the hospitality shown by Chris C., Steve, John, Benge, Serafina, and Hannah while I've been following them around for these gigs, and I hope the tour finishes up spectacularly. I'm also indebited to Paul, Pip, and Rob for letting me tag along on my Oxford visit, and to Garry for going out of his way for me on Wednesday and Thursday, as well as Tapio, Martin, and everyone else who bought me rounds and helped me out in other ways while I was here and pretty cash-strapped. Even though I'm tired and I have to go home, I really don't want to, I've had such a good time with everyone, and wish I had more of it.

Tomorrow morning I get on a plane for Newark bright and early. Today I have to switch hotels one last time, and will probably meet up with Tapio, who is also at a loose end before an early Saturday morning flight. It will not be a late night tonight for sure.

The Day Off (UK Trip Day 14)

2011-10-27T03:53:00.000-04:00

The morning after gigs is always an experience in not heeding the lessons of history. You wake up with a headache, your legs hurt, your eyes are blurry, and you swear that tonight will be different, you are going to take more care, get to bed earlier, eat better. By the time breakfast is over, all of that is forgotten, and the next day ends up being like the previous one. I don't know if it's more a case of not learning from the past or not giving a crap.

Wednesday was my "day off", as it was for the band and crew. I heard from Chris C., who was hanging out in his hotel farther North. I'd hoped to have a drink with him later in the day, but by the time he contacted me, all the trains running in that direction were seriously delayed, so I decided against it. I didn't dare consider taking a cab in either direction--given London rates, it probably would have cost me £200.

I did catch up with a couple of other friends, Garry and Tapio, both of whom were excellent gents, buying all the rounds (and just about everything else) for the entire day. When my lovely scrape from the previous night started acting up, Tapio was even prepared enough to have the right first-aid with him, saving me the need to walk to a chemist. I met Garry around noon, and we walked around Holborn and Covent Garden, up Charing Cross Road so I could satisfy my bookstore fixation. Garry knows this area very well, and was even able to tell me which bookshops were crap and which ones were good. I found an old 1930s hardcover edition of "Ghost Stories From an Antiquary" by M.R. James, an A.O. Spare grimoire (two, actually), and a copy of Crowley's "The Vision and the Voice", a timely purchase considering my recent readings on Enochian magic. The latter was actually published in Texas, which made me think of my friend Phil. The shop owner of Atlantis Bookshop and I had a conversation about Crowley, and she recounted something I did know previously--that the bookshop was the site of the old Mandrake Press. "Crowley has touched the same door handle you just touched when you walked in." I had been looking for Rodney Orpheus's new book, and also volume 2 of Jake Stratton-Kent's Geosophia (she had shelf full of Scarlet Imprint material), but she didn't have either in stock at the moment. When I said goodbye, I found myself thinking of the old Monty Python bookshop sketch, originally performed pre-Python by John Cleese and Marty Feldman ("Funny, you've got a lot of books here.")

We walked up through Hawksmoor, and I mentioned another bookshop I wanted to visit, Treadwell's. I think they used to be on Tavistock St. in Covent Garden, but apparently they had moved to Store Street. Garry reminded me that Store Street is mentioned by John Foxx in his "Electricity and Ghosts" essay. They had closed up for lunch, so we had a pint and then headed over. After that we went to Camden and met up with Tapio. We sat drinking in a Wetherspoon's, for good reason--it's cheap. By the time we left there and realized we were not going to get over to see Chris C., we headed to a small pub in Euston near where I was staying, which had been a Victorian train station waiting room. We were there until last call, which was not far off. (Highly recommend the Redemption Dark Ale, which is a porter).

Today is the last John Foxx gig, and I'm hoping to see a few more people tonight. Tomorrow is my last day in the UK. Going home will be a surreal experience after all of this.

John Foxx and the Maths at XOYO (First London Gig)

2011-10-26T04:16:00.002-04:00

So, back to London. I came in at King's Cross around 2:00, and decided to walk it to my hotel. I don't recommend walking a mile and a half with heavy luggage. Just saying.

Once I settled into my room, I got ready and headed out to what has been traditionally known as "Foxxgate"--a meetup of John Foxx fans prior to the show. This meetup was at the Griffin Pub a block over from the venue. There I met up with Garry, 2 Peters, Andreas, and Michaela. The first Peter was showing us some of his old Ultravox memorabilia, before heading off to soundcheck to take photos. After a few drinks, Garry took us to a chip shop, and then on a walking tour of John Foxx sites nearby (where John used to live, where the Garden studio was, et cetera). This is not a walk to make in high heeled boots, especially since there are cobblestones, and naturally I managed to trip and bang up my left knee, tearing my stockings in the process. Nothing serious, and I decided it looked very punk. After one more drink stop, we headed into the gig.

I saw Rob and went to the front row to say hello, as he was in the photo area. I ended up staying at that point for the entire show. This gig had two opening acts--Tara Busch and the Gazelle Twins. This was Tara's last set for the tour, and I'm sorry I didn't get to say goodbye to her, though I did have a brief chat with Maf when he was in the front. I'd never heard or seen the Gazelle Twins before, and I think I feel about them the way I did about Tara the very first time I saw her--interesting, but not sure what I think. Being tired, a lot of the dreamy, spacey sort of electronica was making me more sleepy than anything else. Not that this is anyone's fault but mine.

John came on with the Maths a bit after 10:00, and the set sounded excellent. I'm happy to say I haven't tired of the setlist, even after hearing it for the seventh time. Like the other shows, there were a few "misses" here and there, and there seemed to be some technical issues going on. Benge had a couple of misses, and I think it was because he was distracted by technical difficulties--either his own, or the ones Chris was trying to sort out on Serafina's side of the stage. I didn't get to really chat with the crew afterward, so I'm not sure what sort of challenges were brought on that night. Standing near me was our friend Tapio from Finland, and also Cian had come from Japan, and I was delighted to see both of them.

I found Steve after the show, and he went and got John to come out of the dressing room. (Benge had mentioned at the previous gig that the XOYO dressing room is really very small, and it was being shared by three acts, so it didn't really feel right to ask to go back there, though Steve initially said it might be all right). I think John was a bit overwhelmed by the people waiting to see him (judging from his facial expressions), but as usual, he takes everything in stride. One guy who came up to talk to him actually bent down and touched his feet, like John was a deity or something, which just made me laugh and shake my head. (The only time something like that doesn't look silly is when a younger Hindu touches the feet of one of their elders, which is customary). Other than a quick hello/goodbye I didn't get to have a very long chat with him. I don't know if they went out afterward, but I presume that everyone is quite tired and looking forward to a day off. I figured that the London gigs would be more chaotic, so I really didn't expect too much else. Hopefully I will get at least a little more time to chat on Thursday, which is my last gig of the tour.

As for me, today is my day off, and I'm looking to catch up with Garry and Tapio. Cab fare in London is ridiculously expensive (it cost me almost £12 last night to get back from the gig), and I'm sure I'll need to do that again Thursday, so I'm going to be very cheap the next few days, and will not turn down drink offers.

John Foxx at York Duchess

2011-10-25T04:09:00.000-04:00

I arrived in York on Monday afternoon. The city is very beautiful, definitely the sort of place I would like to walk around and explore. There's a tremendous amount of history here, and lots of buildings that date back to medieval times or earlier. As usual on this tour, I really didn't get to have a proper look around. I stopped for a pint in the Golden Fleece (which they claim is haunted, though that's not why I went there), and then headed off to find soundcheck.

The energy at this gig was different from the others. I did not have a great feeling when I walked into the Duchess, though I couldn't really have told you why. Chris Oliver repeatedly asked me if I was OK, and I really couldn't say anything other than, "yeah, fine, thanks." At one point I was suddenly very cold, to the point that I could feel my bones shaking, which I attribute to travel exhaustion as much as anything else. The soundcheck seemed to go well enough, though there was some problems with Sefa's equipment that they were having trouble sorting out.

From the audience point of view, the gig sounded good, though it was clear that something was going on. Chris O. kept having to run across stage, and then over to the sound board, as both Sefa and Hannah seemed to be having issues. John seemed to be having some difficulties during "Underpass". Later, I learned that from the band and crew's point of view, the show was "total mayhem" (to use John's phrase). The band couldn't hear anything they were doing onstage, and at I saw Chris O. wince and stick his fingers in his ears at one point when Hannah picked up her violin. The main trouble was the sound board itself. From what I gathered (and my knowledge of sound engineering is zero), the sound desk at the venue had all kinds of programmable menus that could be set up--probably a very good and efficient thing if you have time to program it, but coming in cold a couple of hours before the gig was not good, and having to make quick changes through songs when they have to go through several menus each time is a problem. John told me that they were all utterly exhausted from trying to deal with the situation on stage, and from what I understand they were up late the day before, which I'm sure didn't help. At one point I could see my hands shaking while I was talking to him, and I realized it was from lack of proper sleep and food. I mentioned it, and John said that everyone was in the same boat--the band was pretty much the same way after several days of not taking proper meals, and then drinking at night and/or not getting much sleep. I'm actually looking forward to a "day off" in London as much as the rest of them probably are.

There were bright spots to the evening. I finally met Alex S. (who runs the Quiet City blog), and John came out to sign autographs and talk to people who were waiting, including Alex, who hadn't had a chance to talk to him in a couple of years. I also met a very nice gent in the front row called Martin, whom I chatted with between sets. The audience energy was very good, though we did have one person who had to repeatedly yell the name of each song as it was starting up. (I'd seen him wandering around earlier, and it's clear to me that he has "issues"--I won't start making diagnoses, though). However, as Martin pointed out, "Well, at least he knows John's material."

It is now Tuesday (Tuesday? Yes, it is Tuesday) morning, and I'm heading to London for the next 4 days, before going home on Saturday. I will not be doing soundchecks in London, as I hope to meet up with the Foxx fans who are going to the London gigs, and I will know more people there than at any other gig I've been to this past week. London is at least very much familiar territory now, so there will be no guessing about where I am or how to get around.

John Foxx at Glasgow Arches

2011-10-24T03:09:00.000-04:00

I arrived in Glasgow on Sunday afternoon. It's a rather busy city, but mostly with your standard business rather than anything of particular interest. To be fair, I didn't really have any time to look around the city, though others tell me pretty much the same thing. I went to the soundcheck at about 3:45, and ran into Tara Busch and her husband, who were just arriving, and helped them bring in their things. I finally purchased a copy of Tara's album--her style has grown on me, and I very much like what she's doing.

I met some very nice people who were there for the VIP meet and greet, particularly Jess and Fraser (hope I'm spelling his name correctly). I also met "Numan Chris" from the Metamatic forum after the gig was over, and I was glad he introduced himself. (Turns out that he knows Fraser). Tara's gig went very well, and sounded good. One thing I should mention about the Glasgow Arches is that it's literally just that--a cavernous type place with huge brick arches. This ought to do wonders for the sound, but it's tricky with electronics, I think. Everyone sitting at the sound desk thought the sound was incredible, as did the band--they said it was the best it had been on tour thus far, and they were able to hear themselves. Standing in the front row, there were several times when many of us were holding our ears, from the loud reverb. "Running Man" sounded very distorted to me, as did the initial sound effects in "Dislocation". But other parts of the gig were perfectly fine. There were some interesting misses in "Evergreen", but they weren't fatal.

I think I have done enough of these gigs now to know what is different when I hear it. The setlist has remained unchanged, which is not really surprising, as John's own material had to be learned by the Maths, and they're going to stick to what they're comfortable with. Benge told me this was the first time he's ever toured--he's done one gig here and there, but mostly he's in his studio. By contrast, Chris Curran, who is the tour manager, has said, "Eh, it's a short tour", so it's no big deal to him. I'm not with the band, but I can say that following them at this pace is quite disorienting at times. From the second I arrive in a particular city, I have to see what time I'm going to the next one. London will be a relief, as I can park my luggage for a few days. On the other hand--I'm going to miss the dynamic of the tour up North. I've been able to spend a lot of time after gigs with the band and/or just John, and while that may be the case in London as well, it will be different.

I asked John where he would be post-gig, and he told me where the dressing room was, which security let me do with no trouble. I had a couple of beers with John, Benge, and Sefa, and we mostly talked about York and it's history, Rennie Mackintosh, and a bit about Umberto Eco (who I'm going to see in a couple of weeks in New York). We didn't spend too much time, as there were fans who wanted autographs, so John came upstairs to sign things for them, and then they were packing up and leaving for their next destination.

Today I head off to York at about 10:00. I have heard so much about the city, I am looking forward to it, and also to seeing some other Foxx fans that I know there (either through social media or who I have met personally). So, til tomorrow. Again.

John Foxx at Liverpool Guild of Students

2011-10-23T09:17:00.000-04:00

My Liverpool trip had a rather rocky start. The train from Manchester was packed, and wifi was not working at my hotel. I was assigned to the top floor, and there was no lift in the hotel, so I had to take my 50 pound luggage up 3 flights of stairs. If I haven't lost 10 pounds by the end of this excursion, I will be surprised. My hotel was lovely, right on the lake in Sefton Park, but I didn't have much time to enjoy it.

I got to the soundcheck as they were just setting up, and was around for several hours. Rob and Rob turned up for this one, and I met some other people, some who were doing work for John, others who were there for the "VIP" meetup. Rob told me that John did a Beatles song during soundcheck; it must have been the moment I stepped out to make a call. Dammit.

There was some female pop singer playing in a venue next door, so there was about 8 million teenage and pre-teen girls outside. Some would occasionally walk into soundcheck, thinking they were somehow going to make their way backstage to the female singer's area. Security eventually threw all of them out. We all laughed and thought how funny it would be if they were there to see John.

Soundcheck ran late, leaving Tara Busch about 10 minutes to get set up and checked. The gig sounded good, though afterward I heard discussion that John's vocorder kept fading in and out, as well as the bass. The setlist was the same, and the projections were better at this gig than any other so far. The crowd was enthusiastic, and it seems that at every gig, I hear requests for John to play "Quiet Men". Must be a favorite.

After the gig, the two Robs and I ended up in the Maths dressing room, and had a beer with John, as the others had taken off for a local pub. John was in rare form. We chatted about Karborn (whom John expects to push him around in his push chair when he's old and wait on him), about how much roadies get paid ("They all have fancy estates outside of London. The band lives in council housing."), and yoga (We were talking about difficult yoga postures, and I mentioned that those are to prep the body for meditation. Then John came back with, "Yes, you do that before your medication." He pointed around the room and said, "Welcome to the fabulous rock and roll lifestyle. See how cheerfully the walls are painted, and how beautiful the furniture is, and how the woodwork has been carefully worn by bottle caps, as bands previous have tried to open their beer bottles on the edge of the counter, since they can provide beer bottles but not a bottle opener." (Apparently they found a place on the radiator that worked.)

We helped them gather up everything left in the room as they were getting on the bus, and said goodbye. Rob was kind enough to give me a lift back to my hotel, and I came to the unpleasant realization that I had to be at the train by 9:30 in the morning. (I am actually writing this on the train, fighting off another headache).

John Foxx at Manchester Club Academy (I've lost track of days)

2011-10-23T09:12:00.002-04:00

Arrived in Manchester on Friday afternoon. The cab driver who brought me from Manchester Picadilly to my hotel sang the praises of the town. He also told me that he had driven someone in his cab the previous week who was friends with Bob Dylan--and was coming to see him play. The cab driver had never heard of Bob Dylan before then.

After checking in to my hotel and getting myself sorted out, I headed over to where Manchester Academy is located. As it turns out, there are 4 "Academies"--the first is a large building that seats about 3,000, and the academies get progressively smaller until you get to "Club Academy", which holds about 300 to 400 people. This is where John played.

I walked into sound check with no difficulty, and listened to the band go through "Dislocation", "He's a Liquid", "Evergreen" and "Hiroshima Mon Amour". Before they really got going, I chatted with Tara Busch, who was unpacking her own gear with her husband Maf. It turns out she's from Hartford, Connecticut (about 3 hours from where I currently live), and spent time in North Carolina before moving overseas. Tara spoke about John as an influence--she said she learned a lot from being in the studio with him. She was especially impressed with his minimalist style, and his ability to choose what sounds he's going to use "efficiently". As I've mentioned, Tara's songs are a bit complicated, but they are very good. There's probably no need to for her to imitate John's style, though in general, learning different ways is never a bad thing.

Afterward Chris Curran showed me where they were coming out after the gig, and I joined the queue to see what fans were there at the show. There were a number of children at the show--probably ages 6 to 8--which is a first for me. One of the gents at the show was kind enough to show "Manchester hospitality" and buy me a drink. I actually was able to sit on a stool by the side of the stage for the entire gig, and was able to see the stage clearly. There were a lot of people at the gig, but it wasn't packed to the point of not being able to move around.

The gig itself was spot-on; the sound guy later said that it was the best sounding gig out of the three so far, and I think I would agree with him. Tara opened, and this time she had no equipment difficulties. John started the show with "Shatterproof" as usual, and this time said, "This is for all the bankers." The show then steamed ahead, with very intense vocals, and great sound. (There were a few errors, but I have sworn not to reveal them. OK, one of them had to do with the "moment" in "Just for a Moment". I won't name names.). John later said to me that "mistakes happen in live gigs, it's just one of those things." None of the errors were fatal, though at least one was funny. One of the audience hecklers kept asking for them to play "Quiet Men", and then shouted, "John, you are the quiet man!" which made Serafina laugh visibly. The setlist was the same as the previous shows.

After the gig, I went to the backstage door, and Benge and Serafina came out. Serafina went back in and got me a beer. We sat on the steps with Tara and Maf, talking about mistakes made in the gig, and offering suggestions regarding a fancier drum riser for Benge. They let me come back into the dressing room, where John was getting ready to get changed after the gig, and had a couple of visitors. I went with Serafina and Benge to a nearby pub for a drink, and John joined us later. I've noticed that when John likes someone or thinks they're a decent person, he refers to them as "civilised". We talked a bit about the gig circuit, and John mentioned seeing the Talking Heads with the Ramones in Belgium around 1977. I think he also said that Ultravox had opened for Blondie around 1978. ("Now I'm name dropping" he said.) I had a couple of drinks, and when Hannah Peel finally joined us, she ended up going with Benge and Serafina to get something to eat, and I went back to the venue with John, so he could collect his things and go to his hotel.

As we walked, he told me how much Manchester University had changed since he'd been there. "Only about half these buildings were here when I was in school," he told me. We also talked about the difficulties of touring in a different city every day. John said, "I come to Manchester, and think, look how much has changed; I'd love to take a look around. Don't have time. Get to Liverpool. Notice how much has changed. Would love to take a walk around. Don't have time. Looks like they've done some reorganisation in Glasgow; would love to look around, don't have time. And so on." While I haven't been to most of these cities (except Liverpool, and that was just 2 years ago), I think I feel the same way--I'm here in a new city, but I basically have time to check into my hotel, head into town, look around for about an hour tops, and then hit sound check. By the next morning, I'm writing my blog posts after breakfast, packing up, and then heading on to the train to get to the next city. There's no time to explore anything here. Perhaps one day.

John was heading back to his hotel, and offered a ride back to mine, so I took a short ride in the touring van with John and Chris 1 and 2 (Curran and Oliver) to my hotel. Chris Oliver mentioned that he was playing soon in New York with Chameleons Vox, so I need to look up that gig when I get back to the U.S. Now time is flying, it's sunny in Manchester (which I hear happens only about twice a year), and I have to check out and catch a train.

So, now I am off to Liverpool. Until tomorrow...

John Foxx and the Maths at Bristol Thekla (UK Trip Day 8)

2011-10-21T03:14:00.002-04:00

I finally left Exeter about 12:30, and headed over to Bristol. The train was heading all the way up to Dundee, so it was packed with reservations. Between the guy having a loud argument via phone with his ex-girlfriend because she owed him money (and this is way more than I ever needed to know about him), and the disgruntled couple who were told there were "plenty of seats" on the train after they were given the wrong reservation date and now had to stand, I have to say I was glad to get off in Bristol Temple Meads.

I have been through Bristol countless times, but have never stopped here. The view from the train station is not very impressive (nor from the bus stop to Glastonbury), so I really didn't know what to expect. I was pleasantly surprised--Bristol is a lovely city on the river, and my hotel was on something called the "Welsh Back" which runs right along the river front, and is near the Grove, where Thekla (the venue John was playing) is located. My hotel was also surprisingly lovely, as the photos of it on the Internet are hardly a testament to good marketing.

I arrived at Severshed, where there was supposed to be a meetup, and had a very expensive beer, waiting to see who would show up. About 10 minutes later, Rob popped in and asked me to come over to the soundcheck. He helped me finish my beer and we went right over. Soundcheck was mostly with the Maths, with John turning up at the end. Brian was there, as was Cerise, whose name I've heard but never previously met. It was almost 6:00 when we headed back to Severshed for dinner and/or drinks, and there we met up with Mark.

So--onto the gig itself. The setlist was about the same as Leamington Spa, and the dynamic of the place was entirely different. The Thekla venue is on a boat (easy to forget in a place that looks a bit like the Mercury Lounge in New York). Everyone was packed in, and I managed to be up front with Brian, Rob, and Cerise. Tara Busch opened again, and she had some difficulty with one piece of equipment. She couldn't get it resolved, so she decided to forego the first song and move on. Besides that, she did a very good set, and I think her music is starting to grow on me. There are elements of her music that remind me of the Spacedog gig I saw last year in London, and I like it very much.

John and crew came on promptly at 8:30, as there was a 10:00 curfew (for the show, not the club itself, which is apparently open until 4 in the morning). The acoustics were not as good as they were at Leamington Assembly, but the audience energy was high, and the band seemed more comfortable overall. I finally met Benge after the gig while they were loading up their gear, and he mentioned that they were all a bit nervous at the first gig, as they weren't yet comfortable with the setlist. (Apparently he does read this blog.) It may have explained at least some of the tension at the Leamington Spa gig. Interestingly, I was chatting with a fan after the show while waiting for John, and he said that he'd recently been to see Stiff Little Finger, and how different the shows were, mainly because of the lack of audience interaction. I don't think he was being critical of John's lack of interaction (John doesn't banter with the audience), but simply noted that it was a very different experience. Having seen Stiff Little Finger before (only 3 days before the Sept. 11 catastrophe in fact--in downtown Manhattan), I would totally agree with that observation. Right after the show, Mark said it was probably the best John Foxx gig he'd ever seen.

Compared to other sets where they've performed material from Interplay, I'd noticed something different about the sound, and I finally pinpointed that John is singing the songs in a higher range. This has the effect of "lightening" some of the darker sounds of the songs.

To get trivial for a moment--I was close enough to John to see his breathing, and watching how he took in air reminded me of a Reiki Master beginning the attunement process. Those of you reading this who are Reiki Masters (and there are a couple of you) will know exactly what I mean--it's a type of breathing that I've never properly mastered (no pun intended). I only remark on it because it looked unusual.

After the gig everyone wanted to go for a drink, and I did too, but I also wanted to talk to John. The Thekla becomes a nightclub for twenty-somethings as it gets later, and I watched with another fan as these girls walked into the club in skimpy little shorts and half-tops, while the temperature was probably around 39 degrees Fahrenheit. I vaguely remember those days in my own life, and I am just glad that the "can't wear a coat out because it isn't sexy" phase of my life is very much over.

John did come out at last, and apologized for keeping me waiting. In between fan requests for autographs and photos, John and I chatted for close to 45 minutes, with Benge joining us (and Serafina briefly) later on. We discussed Manchester, the next tour stop, and he suggested I check out St. Ann's Square, which he said was "civilised". He said a 15-minute walk anywhere beyond that was not particularly safe, and that there were parts of Manchester that had been fine when he was growing up in that area that are no longer safe. We also discussed my visit to Exeter and prospective Ph.D., which branched off into me trying to explain to John what "Western Esotericism" is. He turned to Benge at one point and said, "Brigid's going for a Ph.D. in things that are not understandable". With John I think it's always a question of us having different definitions of terms (just like he claims his work has no "mythological" component), and to be entirely fair, Western Esotericism is a rather new field. He did like the idea of "Theology of Electricity" (someone's actual research topic at Exeter).

I am now back in my hotel room looking forward to a hot bath and breakfast before heading off to Manchester. Until then...

Medieval Exeter and Such (UK trip Day 7)

2011-10-19T14:03:00.000-04:00

It is Wednesday, and a very bittersweet day. I am enjoying my last day in Exeter, but also keenly aware that it is my last day here. I will be happy to continue the John Foxx tour, but it's going to be hard to leave tomorrow.

This morning I was chatting with Loretta, the young woman always at breakfast at the same time as myself. We talked about conditions in America. I have to say I am not missing the constant updates on the election, the proposed job act, the economy, or anything else. I'm more than happy to read Yahoo UK stories about a dog that videobombs (is that a word?) a marriage proposal.

My favorite writing spot is in a pub right across from the Cathedral Yard. This afternoon the sun is shining brightly in the blue sky while a reasonably heavy rain comes down from a single cloud. I've never seen this sun/rain mix in quite this manner anywhere else, and it strikes me as a lucky omen.

I had a meeting this morning with a nice young woman called Alicia, who deals with prospective USA students coming to Exeter. We discussed my Ph.D. plans and options, and there was a promise from her to look at funding opportunities for me. She told me that accommodations would be no problem. "Everyone letting rooms to students is dying to have a female Ph.D. student. You're the ideal type. They don't want to let to undergraduates, especially not first-year students." I'm glad to know that I'm a desirable lot. Now I just need money.

After leaving the university, I headed to the Heavitree area of Exeter to do my laundry. The launderette was staffed by a loquacious Devon woman, who referred to everyone as "my lovely". I could not help noticing her yelling repeatedly at a woman on the phone. When she hung up, she looked at me and said, "Bless her, poor woman, she's stone deaf. Don't think she's got her hearing aid turned up." From her ensuing description of the conversation, it sounds like the woman is both deaf and has dementia. But I didn't mention that.

I brought my washing back to my hotel room, and then headed back to the Cathedral Yard for the last time. The pub I like to visit has an awning, one of the only buildings on that side with an awning. The rain from the sunshower picked up, and there was a crowd of young women at the window, trying to get out of the rain. Within about 10 minutes all had stopped, and they slowly drifted away.

Outside you can hear seagulls everywhere. There is a statue in the Cathedral Yard of Richard Hooker, one of the founders of Anglicanism. A seagull stands perched on his head. It strikes me as funny, and I feel like it has some ironic meaning, though I couldn't tell you what. The town is full of references to Sir Francis Drake, and I find myself thinking of the Monty Python episode about the fake Luchino Visconti ("Dlake has spotted the Spanish Freet, youl Majesty." "What news flom Prymouth?")

I am mesmerized by the Cathedral Yard, and I don't know why. I could sit here for days. Perhaps the age of the place affects me; I have always been in wonder of very old things and places. Alicia informed me that many wealthy Londoners have Exeter as their "second" home. While there is some diversity in town, both by nationality and religion, on the whole Exeter is "really, really white". This may be the only drawback the town has so far. But the locals are extremely kind.

There are free walking tours around Exeter with a local guide in the afternoons, at least until Oct. 31. I took a Medieval Exeter walk today, though it ran longer than I expected, and I ended up cutting out early. Our guide took us into various alleyways, courtyards, and other corners that clearly looked like throwbacks to medieval times, and would never have been noticed if someone hadn't pointed them out. The courtyard around St. Nicholas Priory was especially beautiful. Many parts of the towns and many street names end in "hay": Northernhay, Southernhay Princesshay, Bonhay, Freirehay, etc. He explained that "hay" means "enclosure", so these were various sections of the town that had been walled off. Exeter had seven gates around it, erected around 1286 after the murder of cathedral choir leader Walter Lechlade. Seems like a drastic step (especially since Lechlade was widely hated), but there was apparently concern for the safety of the clergy, so the area by the cathedral was walled off. By the time the tour headed down near the Quay, I decided I needed to get back. I ended up at the Ask Restaurant for dinner (supposedly haunted by the ghost of a monk and his illicit lover). Ghosts or not, the Italian food there is spectacular.

And thus ends my Exeter adventure. Tomorrow I go to Bristol, and will pick up with John Foxx reviews once again.

The Quay (Exeter and UK Trip Day 6)

2011-10-18T14:00:00.000-04:00

Today is my second-to-last day in Exeter. It's a bit stressful, because I've just settled in, and then I'll have to be off again, on a whirlwind tour of 5 places, 7 shows. I had another brief meeting at the university today, this time with Prof. Daniel Ogden, who has written a number of books on ancient Greek and Roman religion, including one on necromancy that has been on my reading list. Talking with him was helpful, because he summed up the difference between British and American scholarship: Americans are interdisciplinary, the British aren't. The comparative approaches we prefer in the States don't have many adherents in the UK, and possibly not in Europe. The concern here, of course, is finding someone who can support my own intellectual approach to esoteric material.

After talking to him, I gave some more thought to Antoine Faivre's classification of esotericism, and decided to re-read something on his approach in the library. It seems to me that Exeter adopts what Faivre refers to as the "critical-historical" approach, rather than a "universalist" approach to esoteric topics. This is certainly to be an expected attitude in British academia, and I have noticed it elsewhere. Now the burden is on me to either define my interests in these terms and get going at Exeter, or to look elsewhere for someone who supports a more universalist approach. On the whole, I have done my homework on departments, and I feel Exeter has more to offer me than other programs, so I will have to give the issue some thought. Tomorrow I talk to the international office about what's involved for someone enrolling from abroad, and what my options may be with regard to funding.

Not all of my time here has been "business", and today was no exception. After a post-office stop, I made my way to the White Hart Hotel for a drink. The White Hart has been around since the 14th century, and the well out back was supposedly home to a "cockatrice", which is a cross between a cockerel and a serpent. It was identified by a foul smell. I suspect the foul smell has other origins, but that was a good enough explanation in 1640. It's a wonderful quiet place, with mostly older patrons, which suits me better that noisy pubs overrun by college students. I am something of an old fogey in my own way, or perhaps just "librarianish".

Afterward, I realized that the Quay was just a short walk from the pub. I headed onto the overpass crossing the M5, and went down a series of stairs by the old city wall, and down to the river. The riverfront has many stores and cafes, and I decided to stop for some tea and to sit by the river. After all, there is nothing more British than a cup of tea, even though most everyone seems to drink coffee nowadays. The day was chilly with a breeze, so I imagine they will not be having outside service much longer. There are birds all along the waterfront--swans, seagulls, and pigeons, mostly. An intrepid brown and white pigeon cased my table, so I gave him my crumbs when I finished eating. The afternoon was wearing on, and soon I realized I had to start to head back. If the day had been warmer, I think I would have spent a lot more time walking around, but things were getting quite raw.

In the interest of being frugal with my remaining cash funds, I've chosen to stay in tonight. Tomorrow I won't be able to do much either, though I am hoping to get in one more good walk around the city. It is a bit hard to believe that by week's end, I will have been in Bristol, Manchester, and Liverpool. At that point there will be little discussion of sightseeing, and pretty much all-John-Foxx-all-the-time, as I won't have much time to do anything else until I get to London.

More Exeter Reflections (UK Trip Day 5)

2011-10-17T16:04:00.000-04:00

It's a lovely afternoon in Exeter, sitting in the Old Well House Tavern, listening to the rustling of leaves outside. A chilly October wind has come up, persistent enough to drown out the pub's music and conversation. On the Cathedral Green outside the door, a very chubby pigeon sits on the low wall in the sunshine, bracing his feathers against the cold wind. Eventually he gives up and moves on. It is said that the bones of plague victims are all throughout the ground in the Cathedral Green, piled so high that the occasional bone will stick up through the ground. To my left, there are 15th century buildings covered in reddening ivy.

I'm sitting near the door at a small table with a local bitter, and everything seems in its place. Everyone moves and acts in a manner exactly as I expect; everyone is polite, but no one is in your business. There are unspoken rules that everyone follows, and I feel like I know what they are. When such rules are broken, the British are hardly ever confrontational in a direct way, but more in a passive-aggressive way. The cultural norms are as hidden and old as the rest of the country.

A number of men in suits are standing around a rubbish bin, as though they're waiting for some kind of ceremony. I find myself thinking of the Monty Python sketch about the grand opening of a new mailbox. Tourists and students walk back and forth, wrapped in sweaters, pushing their hair back against the wind. I can only imagine how my own hair looks. A taxi is driving in reverse along the bricked road, with the phone number 66-66-66. The irony of this is not lost on me on a sunny day that was supposed to be gloomy. 666 is a solar number.

Earlier in the day I spoke with the department chair at the University of Exeter, and we had a lengthy discussion about what staff would be most suited to help me with my research interests. He also suggested the possibility of applying at the University of Amsterdam, where I could get a fully funded Ph.D. (though it is very competitive). While the idea is excellent, I couldn't bear to think of being anywhere but Exeter. It's not that people here are any different from how they are anywhere else. I just don't feel like I'm supposed to be anywhere else, as though Exeter has a secret just for me.

The wind is tossing about a great tree outside, making me think of the Algernon Blackwood story about the willows. Two young women, with dark red and purple hair respectively, sit on the lawn of the Green eating sandwiches. There is a delightful sense of integration here, a variety of influences and ages in one place with no conflict, yet no merging. The Jungian in me wants to say it's an individuated community in some sense.

My feet are very tired, as I have been walking around in boots all day. I spend some time examining Exeter Cathedral up close. Some restorative work is being done on the outside, but around the Gothic architecture you can still see gruesome faces and tall figures carved into columns that have been around since at least the Norman Conquest. I should like to examine the inside, and more of the surrounding area, but I am too tired.

My plans for the next two days were going to include a visit to Cornwall, but it appears I will have one or two more meetings at the university, so I am going to stay in town. I don't actually mind; if John Foxx wasn't playing, I'd happily stay here for the rest of my trip.

A phone call to my mother assures me that the cats are fine at home, and my house is still standing. Aside from the cats, I'm not missing home much at all. I've seen three black cats in town thus far--a chubby long-haired one that jumps the fence into the hotel's yard during breakfast, one running up the sidewalk towards the university, and another in front of someone's house along Prince of Wales Drive. I miss having a cat at the foot of the bed at night, though I don't miss the allergies that come with it. I have been remarkably allergy-free since coming to the UK.

Tomorrow will be a very ad-libbed day, as I don't know if I will be suddenly summoned back to campus. If not, it is likely I will get lost somewhere down by the Exe River, or in Northernhay.

A Walk Around Exeter (UK trip Day 4)

2011-10-16T15:54:00.000-04:00

Today has been a day spent wandering around Exeter. After a gloomy morning that didn't look promising, the sky cleared up and it ended up being a lovely day. Rather than give you a blow-by-blow account of where I went, I'll sum up my impressions of the town thus far.

The University of Exeter is not very old, but the town surrounding it is very old. Exeter has been in existence since Roman times, and many of the buildings in town are built on Roman ruins of some kind or another. It's an odd mixture of new and old; you'll find a modern Italian restaurant in a 14th century building, old ruins standing next to department stores, a Marks and Spencer's built on a Roman graveyard. The old city wall runs around an incredibly modern shopping district.

In the residential part of town, otherwise ordinary houses have some kind of characteristic that makes them stand out--an unusual paint job, stained glass windows or doors, or other decorations that catch your eye. Combined with the autumn leaves, it makes a striking visual effect when you walk down almost any street.

During breakfast I had a chat with a woman from Scotland, who was newly hired in the university's engineering department. I told her about my doctoral interests, and the obstacles I faced at home with debt, owning a home and such. She said, "I'm sure you'll find a way to get it all sorted." I think she's probably right.

I visited the university this morning, which was beautifully laid out. Like the town, there is a mixture of the expected and the unexpected. Mostly there are little ecological havens in the midst of the stark buildings. A young woman approached me in a very friendly manner on campus, and I instantly knew she must be recruiting for a church. I was right. I was polite, but tossed her card in the trash after she went away. Pip told me that Exeter was on a hill, and she is not kidding. I found myself walking along the road look down some rather steep inclines.

My next big stop was St. David's churchyard, as I was fascinated by the headstones I saw on the way in. I've noticed that church people don't like you looking at their yard, as if they expect you to desecrate the stones for some Satanic ritual or something equally idiotic. No one said anything to me, but the few people I passed got the looks they gave me returned to them. The stones were not as old as they looked--about 1860s and up. Still, it was a marvelously overgrown churchyard, with tombstone decorations I'd never seen before. In the U.S. I'm used to seeing the old "memento mori", or perhaps a finger pointing upwards, or a willow tree. These headstones had scrolls on them, window panes, and other snake-like patterns and designs that I've never seen before. One grave had a holly tree growing on it, giving it a very pagan feel.

Breakfast was huge this morning, so at lunchtime I stopped in the Ship Inn for just a pint and a snack. I learned from a book I'd purchased on the area that Sir Francis Drake used to frequent this pub, during the time of the Spanish Armada. Supposedly it is haunted by 5 different ghosts. I didn't notice any, but it was a lovely old building. Besides the 3 bookstores, I've noticed no less than 5 Italian restaurants (2 reputed to be haunted). Seriously, nothing more to be said there--2 of my favorite things, Italian food and hauntings. I don't have to be at the Publick House near my home in the U.S. to find it.

I think the juxtaposition of new and old was something quite unexpected for me. I didn't realize how old the town really was--there were even Viking invasions of Exeter, according to the book I've purchased. I also did not expect to feel as "at home" here as I do. Normally when I am in a town where I don't know anyone, I'm in a hurry to do my business and leave. Not so with Exeter--there's a casualness about my feelings towards the place, the same kind of casualness I would have towards my own home in the States.

After having an afternoon nap (I'd walked about 10 miles over the day, after all), it was still sunny and blue skies, so I went out to Bury Meadow, which is across the street from where I'm staying. Bury Meadow is a park, and from what I'm told, it's named after a Mr. Berry who had owned the land at the time. But in 1832 it was used as a graveyard for cholera victims, when there was a severe outbreak. Now there are slides and swings and other such amusements for children. I curled up on a bench with my book until sunset. As I'm writing this, it is dark out, and I'm tempted to go down and take some pictures there, as it is reputed to be extra-creepy at night.

We've had a spate of lovely weather in Exeter, as apparently is the case all over the UK. I see from forecasts that this is about to change, and some places may even see snow. It makes me glad that I brought my 45 pound suitcase (heavy mostly with clothes) so that I am not freezing to death during the middle of the week. I have not yet made my way to the River Exe; I intend to go down to the Quay tomorrow after my meeting at the university.

For now, I will enjoy the rest of the evening doing something I don't get to do very often--relaxing.

Oxford, Heaven 17 and Exeter (UK Trip Days 2 and 3)

2011-10-15T15:31:00.003-04:00

The last two days have been so busy, I've not had much time (if any) to sit down at a computer. Therefore, now that I am sitting in my room in a quiet Exeter neighborhood, I am going to try to catch up with myself.

At both my arriving and leaving Leamington Spa, I couldn't help but notice that the area was familiar. Then I realized that I was between Banbury and Warwick, an area I had been in around ten years ago. The university I work for has a satellite college "Near Banbury" (that is the actual postal location), and I had gone this way when I was there on an administrative retreat. I became quite aware on the trip just how large Oxfordshire actually is.

I went from Leamington Spa to Oxford, and that day was a whirlwind of activity. I didn't really get to go sightseeing in Oxford, which wasn't a total loss, as I'd been there sightseeing last year. I checked into my hotel and headed straight over to the Eagle and Child (or the "Bird and Baby" as C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien used to call it), and met up with my friends Rob and Paul for drinks (and lunch). Afterward we headed to Paul's house, and then picked up his wife Pip and headed back to London for the Heaven 17 show at the Roundhouse.

I am in no way qualified to comment on the Heaven 17 gig. I recall seeing Heaven 17 on MTV when I was a young'un, but I really remember nothing about them or their music. I am not really sure why; Heaven 17 was founded by Martyn Ware, who was originally in the Human League, and I love early Human League material. But I never made the connection. The show itself was excellent. I spent much of my time standing there listening to songs, seeing if any of them rang a bell (and trying to get a "vibe" for whether or not I liked them). Their big hit, "Temptation" sounded somewhat familiar, but I still couldn't swear that I really "knew" the song. For some reason my attention was focused on the dress of the female singer. It was an incredibly 1980s style, which is sensible considering the "retro" nature of the material. But I had a very negative association with it. I recall my brother once describing a woman at his company wearing a dress that sounded exactly like that one--to the office. I have blocked out this woman's name in my mind (no, wait, I haven't--it was Karen), but all I know is that she was a truly rotten person. This was at Drexel Burnham Lambert, a company that epitomized everything wrong with the 1980s. My brother said she was mainly hired because she was sleeping with someone in management, and really had no talent except "to stick her tits in someone's face". Because my brother did not respond to her advances, she looked into his background, and when she found out he was being treated for HIV, she managed to get him fired so he wouldn't have any health insurance. At any rate, that's a long time past, and has nothing to do with the woman in Heaven 17, but association is funny in that way.

Getting back to the gig--Heaven 17 performed the entire "Luxury Gap" album, and then went on to do some rarities, including some early Human League material, which made me very happy (and Rob as well). After the gig we were all knackered, and made the long drive back to Oxford.

It wouldn't really be a complete day in Oxford if I didn't learn something new. In this case, I learned several (mostly) new words. They are:

Oik
"Ish"
Nobby
Sniffy
(the two preceding words are in no way to be confused with "Toppy").

The first one is my favorite. I plan to use it in a sentence when I get home.

The next morning I had a lovely breakfast in Oxford, but also not much time until my train. I went to my room, paid my bills for the rest of the month online, and headed over to Oxford rail station. My morning and early afternoon was spent on trains heading over to Exeter. To get to Exeter, I had to stop in Reading, where I haven't really been since I was in school there 18 years ago. Of course there was no time to go out and look around, but I've been assured that I'm not missing anything.

When I got off the train at Exeter and headed into town towards my hotel, I had a very good feeling. I passed St. David's Church, and marveled at the old graveyard--I will definitely be checking that out before I leave. The town is a strange mixture of the mundane, the old, and the pseudo-old. It is a university town, so naturally there are university students everywhere you go. I went for lunch after checking into my hotel, and everyone was involved in studying or reading at their tables. Not that it was quiet by any stretch. On a Saturday, though, I could hardly expect to find quiet anywhere except in my room.

I went into town, and naturally the first place I gravitated towards was the rare bookshop. It was in an odd place--inside a shopping center (read as: sort-of mall), on the second floor, in a mostly vacant corner near a music shop. I would have expected it to be in a creaky old building. The older gentleman who runs the shop told me about the fairies in his garden. When I made a purchase, he wrapped it very carefully, like a present. I hope he continues to stay in business. I noticed that there are two Italian restaurants in town, which just adds points in my book. My other stops were rather mundane, a run to the mobile phone store and to Tesco's (who actually had J.P. Chenet Merlot, a wine I like to buy when I'm at home, in individual serving bottles. You may think this is silly, but you won't find such a thing in the U.S.). I mainly wanted to get a first look around the town. There is a lot more to see, but I prefer to go when it's not so crowded.

I've had enough of night life for a couple of days, so I am staying in, catching up on writing, and going to bed early. I'm looking forward to more exploration tomorrow, and to curl up in the back of a pub with a pint of Hobgoblin and a good book.

John Foxx at Leamington Spa, October 13, 2011 (UK trip Day 1)

2011-10-13T19:45:00.002-04:00

Wednesday night I flew to London, arrived the next day, and took a train to Leamington Spa to see the John Foxx and the Maths gig at Leamington Assembly. At the end of the evening, John asked me, "Brigid, what did you think?" I informed him that I would be blogging my opinion of the show, because there was too much to say in one sentence. He replied, "Oh yes. Your blog." He said it with that punctuation. I don't know if that's good or bad. At any rate, here is my review of the evening.

There was not much time for anything when I arrived at my hotel. I had time for a quick shower, change, and to run off and meet a friend at a nearby pub for a drink. Later, before the doors opened, I spoke with some very nice folks outside the Assembly. I saw Steve and Rob, and had drinks with Rob and some others before the start of the show. The show started around 8:15, and by the time I got into the room, there were very few seats left. (Yes, there were actual seats, surprisingly enough).

Tara Busch opened the show. I've never heard anything by her before, so this was my first time hearing her. I'm not entirely sure what I think. She has an amazing voice, and played very beautifully. Whether or not I can relate to her material I can't say. I'd have to listen to it more before deciding. In general, I thought she was quite talented, but perhaps not exactly my "thing" musically. I was surprised to realize that she is an American, and it makes me curious about how she got interested in synths. Synth music never took off in a big way in the U.S. the way it did in Europe (we were about guitars for oh so many years).

John Foxx and the Maths came on about 20 minutes after her set finished. The Maths on this tour include Benge, Serafina Steer, and Hannah Peel. Here is a photo of the setlist, with the caveat (per Chris Curran) that it is not exactly correct:

I was a bit taken aback by the start of the show. John began with "Shatterproof", and I recognize that the song is supposed to have a certain harshness of tone. But it seemed like the first few songs in the set were like that--he sang very fast, at a higher pitch, and with a kind of vehemence. At the same time, he really didn't show a lot of emotion to the audience when they applauded; he might give a slight nod or a terse smile. The sort of frozen expressions and language coupled with the very dramatic singing left me with strange impressions. It almost seemed like he was so determined to do a perfect set musically, he'd totally lost any sense of interaction with the audience. The best analogy I can think of for how it felt that isn't sexual--it was like two feuding family members in the same room trying to pretend that everything is wonderful between them, yet the tension is still there. For all the emotion in the singing, it felt like a lot was held back. The net result was an uncomfortable sense of barrier between the performers and the audience; Serafina and Hannah seemed to be affected by the vibe, as they seemed like they were holding back in their own ways, even though all the playing was brilliant. (Benge was in the back looking unaffected by any of it. He may be a bhodisattva). There was a bottleneck on both sides--performers and audience.

Then John performed "Catwalk", and everything changed. Members of the audience got up and started to dance, and that started to put the thaw on everything. John still retained his demeanor through the song, but as the rest of the set went on, he became more natural, and more interactive. That was also the first time I'd really noticed the two women onstage really getting into the performance--the audience energy affected the performers in a very good way, and it felt more like everyone was part of the experience. (Of course, following that song with "Summerland", and then "Just for a Moment" temporarily killed the dance vibe, but it was recovered).The most memorable shows are the ones where you really react to the performance--singing along, dancing, crying, whatever--it should move you. Everyone was moved, but there was an initial lack of expression. Once that broke, there was a wonderful flow that really allowed their stunning performance to come through. At the end of the show, John finally spoke to everyone--first with a "thank you, good night", then after the encore he said, "thank you all for having a good time". I suspect he may have noticed that change in energy as well.

The net result was amazing, making the concert feel like a life-changing psychological breakthrough. Maybe that's exaggerated, maybe it's more a reflection of where I'm at than where anyone else is or was at. Nonetheless, others agreed after the show that some kind of "barrier" was broken after "Catwalk". I do wonder if the presence of chairs in the hall when a "standing room" situation was assumed affected initial behaviors. One never really knows these things. But when they happen in that way, it's wonderful.

I don't wish to suggest by any of this that the first half of the set wasn't good--it was excellent, but that tension does affect things. It's not necessarily anyone's "fault"--sometimes it just ends up that way. In the days when Sleater Kinney was together, I remember that there was a huge difference between shows in Philadelphia and shows in New York. The audience members in Philly were like zombies, and it really sapped the energy of the show. In New York, it was like an ecstatic religious experience--there was no differentiation between the audience, its movement, and the music. Everyone there contributes to the atmosphere. The technical aspects of the show are only a very small part of the larger concert picture.

After the gig, I didn't talk to John for long, as he is en route to the next gig in Poland (I marvel at people who can function without any sleep). He asked me if Steve had given me a copy of the Maths new album (Shapes of Things--and by the way, go buy it. Now. Well, not now--it's only available at the shows. But as soon as possible.). I told him that I had a copy that I'd purchased. "Steve just wasn't fast enough," I said. (Note to Steve: I was joking. I did not expect anyone to give me a copy). "Oh," said John. "You really deserve to have gotten one." I told him I didn't mind contributing £15 to his personal income. I did not mention that I have encouraged others to buy "Interplay" by suggesting that it brings lasting happiness and cures male pattern baldness. But he doesn't need to know that.

So, I'm back in my room after an overall pleasant and rather amazing evening here in Leamington Spa. I will be blogging this entire UK trip--I will be here for 16 days, so be prepared for lots more Brigid-abroad-goodness, as well as reviews of 7 more John Foxx gigs that I will be attending (Bristol, Manchester, Liverpool. Glasgow, York, and 2 London dates).

Numinous

2011-10-06T21:23:00.004-04:00

When I teach classes about the idea of "deity", a word always comes up as a description: "numinous". I think it's fairly meaningless to most of my students, or really, to anyone. It's something they might write down on an essay test, or jot down in their notebook after seeing me write it somewhere.

Like a lot of psychological ideas, they really don't mean much to anyone. The description doesn't invoke any sense of what the word means. And yet all our lives are constructed around the numinous--either rigorous exploration of it, or hell-bent avoidance of it. You might call that the "purpose" of our lives.

So, what is it? It's probably best understood through example. I am not alone in my interest in the paranormal--our curiosity about life after death, ghosts, and other such related phenomena represent our curiosity about the numinous. I don't want to give the impression that this is "all" the numinous is about. It's really about anything we can't explain--things that are out of step with what we gauge as our "normal" perceived existence. It doesn't have to be anything as strange as a ghostly encounter. The "numinous" is anything that hits us out of left field. What I went through with my parents' house last week could be described as numinous--walking into an unexpected disaster, something out of my control. The numinous can make you feel very small, suggests that you are not as in control of your life as you think you are.

There are really two senses of "numinous". One is just as I've explained--encountering the unknown. It doesn't have to be negative; sometimes our lives change very suddenly in a positive way through totally unforeseen circumstances. Our human habit is only to remember the negative, unless the positive experience truly made us a new person. The other sense is that of the "weird". Stephen Carter (author of "Culture of Disbelief") noted that if you walked into a bar and started talking about your religion, people would find you...well, weird. When something happens for which ordinary explanations are not entirely satisfying, we find it "weird". Sometimes we laugh and marvel at the strangeness, other times we are "freaked out". In either case, it disturbs our ordinary vision of the world.

Horror writer Arthur Machen equated this second aspect of the numinous with what we often perceive as "horror" or "terror" in his story "The White People" :

"What would your feelings be, seriously, if your cat or dog began to talk to you, and to dispute with you in human accents? You would be overwhelmed with horror. I am sure of it. An if the roses in your garden sang a weird song, you would go mad. And suppose the stones in the road began to swell and grow before your eyes, an if the pebble that you noticed at night had shot out stony blossoms in the morning?"

Machen also notes in this story that "sin" is the "taking of Heaven by storm". Chaos, the disruption of what we perceive as the natural order of things. H.P. Lovecraft's horror is so successful not because he is writing about some religious battle of good and evil (in spite of any pleading by August Derleth), he is writing about the "acausal"--when the indifferent forces of the universe run ramshod over us, for absolutely no reason at all. It reminds us that we are at the mercy of something much larger than ourselves. Everyone senses this; the only difference between a religious man (in the Western sense) and the atheist (in the broadest sense) is that the religious man wants to believe there is something in the numinous that cares about him, while the atheist is certain that there is not.

We deal with the numinous in various ways. Many of us like to keep busy all the time, and like to always have company of some sort (even if it is in an online message or chat). We do not like long periods of doing nothing with much silence. The numinous fills that silence, and unless we are practiced meditators, that fills us with dread. Those are the times when we start imagining all of the potentially negative possibilities of our lives and others. That is when we hear the voices that remind us of our weaknesses. The numinous doesn't "cause" this, it's our reaction to it. How many people can't wait "to get back to routine" after a long vacation? Vacations are often anything but restful, if that is their intention.

We can be "victims" in the face of the numinous, or we can be "ship captains", and it's really a question of attitude. When the mystical religions talk about "surrendering", they mean accepting the numinous for what it is. Most of us cannot do that--we have ambitions and plans that we don't want to see wrecked. At least one principle of Chaos Magick involves never getting into set patterns, because then we fall into that trap of believing that we are in control of everything. But rather than go mad or go to pieces in the face of that lack of control (or get frozen like the schizophrenic), we should learn how to steer through uncharted waters--hence the "captain" metaphor. A ship at sea does not know what kind of weather it will encounter--there could be still waters that are a bane to sailboats, there could be violent storms. The captain is trained to deal with either situation appropriately, and has also amassed the correct tools for navigating the seas. Similarly--we have our metaphorical tools that provide us with guidance, and our negative experiences should teach us how to react to whatever comes our way. I say "negative" specifically, because if you are sheltered from such things your whole life, you will go to pieces when you're actually confronted with the experience, and no one really escapes it. The compass you have is your instinct--and hearing your instincts clearly all the time requires an uncluttered mind.

Water

2011-10-02T13:32:00.003-04:00

The fastest way to have an out-of-body experience is to work and drive long hours, and then work and drive long hours again after only 2 hours of sleep. This week’s out-of-body experience for me is sponsored by God (my mother’s version), my parents, and Shiva the cat. And that’s just this past Friday. The last week is another matter entirely.

My adventure began on Monday. At the beginning of September, I always read Susan Miller’s monthly horoscope for my sign. She mentioned that after the Autumn Equinox on the 23rd, things were going to get “stormy”, so I should prepare for about 3 weeks of “storminess” (read as: crap). I remember thinking about this as I drove to work at the crack of dawn on Monday. I’d had a reasonably good weekend, and was dropping by to check on my parents’ house while they were on vacation. There’s no need for me to do this every day, as they have no living things in the house (pets, plants, etc.). I thought, hmm, what could possibly go wrong this week? (Note: do not ever think this. You will regret it).

Before she went on vacation, my mother stopped before closing the door and said a silent prayer: “Please, God, take care of my house while I’m gone.” (Here is where the God sponsorship comes in). As you know, I don’t believe in a personal God. However, it is clear that whatever God heard that prayer did not like the décor in her house—particularly not the 1970s-style bathrooms, or the 1990s carpeting, flooring, or wallpaper. So, He or She decided to take the opportunity to “take care” of it. I walked in the door that morning to the sound of running water. The upstairs toilet had a bizarre-looking crack in the front and back, and water had been pouring out of it as it continually filled up, probably for the last 2 days. Long story short—her upstairs carpeting, most of the downstairs floors, and most of the ceilings downstairs were destroyed by water.

And thus began my work week. I think I worked 2 hours on Monday, as I called every conceivable person necessary to deal with the crisis, starting with the fire department (who made sure that there were no fires in the walls from the wet electrical connections—the switches were buzzing), then my parents (who did not take the news well, as you might imagine), then the insurance company, and then a water extraction service. I had to let various people in and out of the house, and the water extraction crew was there for 6 hours. Mind you, I shut off the main water valve first thing, and 6 hours is a long time to sit without a bathroom. (Fortunately my parents’ neighbor let me use hers). Before the crew left, the project manager said to me, “You know, I do 7 or 8 jobs like this a day. This is the hardest one I’ve done so far”. I don’t know if we get a prize for that. Not likely we’ll get a discount.

My “stormy” week continued when a routine thunderstorm suddenly became a torrential event and flooded my basement to a dangerous level (4th time since mid-August). I need to find a reliable drainage method, and I want climate change deniers to pay for it. Thursday night I picked up my parents from the airport, and they went to a nearby hotel for the night. I am not close to the airport or my parents’ house geographically, so I got home after a long drive, and realized I had about 4 hours to sleep before getting up for work. Shiva (the cat) has been rather needy these days when I come home, so I looked at him and said, “Do NOT wake me up before 4:00 in the morning, OK?” He meowed at me, which could have meant, “OK”, or could have meant, “You’ll get up when I want you to, biatch”. I’m guessing it’s the latter, because he started his morning yowl at 2:15 AM.

Let me just say here that the bigger challenges of this week did not faze me. It is little things like being woken up by a yowling cat after 2 hours of sleep that make me want to commit harakiri. I am seriously looking forward to vacation this month.

By the way, it's slated to rain again tonight.

Poltergeist

2011-09-23T17:33:00.001-04:00

I’m not looking to get into the habit of blogging individual episodes of Paranormal Witness. However, I’m going to make an exception for last night’s episode, for two reasons. One is that it disturbed me; while I know this kind of thing happens, I don’t like the “malevolent entity in the house ends up killing the pets and new baby kittens” thread. I can’t abide stories about pets getting killed, namely because they’re so innocent. I have less trouble with stories about humans being killed, because humans often do dumb things that lead to their deaths—not always, but humans are not particularly innocent, not even children. Humans also have more wits at their disposal to survive. Pets are often dragged into such situations, and are the most vulnerable. And I get annoyed when people are in a house with negative activity and don’t move all vulnerable parties from the premises.

The second reason this is on my mind is that the first story provides an example of something that we call a “constellated archetype” in depth psychology jargon. It sounds very innocent, but it’s actually something quite frightening and potentially dangerous. The practice of psychology today is largely behavioristic—it reduces the human psyche to chemical reactions in the brain, and putting band-aids on life crises. To be fair, this is largely the fault of health insurance—they won’t pay for therapy that’s actually beneficial long-term to the person, unless they’re diagnosed with a mental illness.

But back to constellated archetypes. “Constellation” simply means “coming to the surface” in this case. Archetypes are the contents of the collective unconscious. There are LOTS and LOTS of them, though there are some fundamental ones. They are neither good or bad in and of themselves, but we shouldn’t think that their abstract description on paper minimizes them. They’re important for us to grapple with, because they influence everything we do.

So, the episode—Paranormal Witness shows two stories in each episode, and this refers to the first. It is about a poltergeist . What starts out as a jar of melted peanut butter found on its side, open and dripping escalates to items being found stacked in various places, then doors banging by themselves all night, then writing on the walls. This later escalated for a variety of reasons to all the animals dying in the house, then one of the girls in the house being attacked by flying furniture (and the doors locking so no one could get in to help her), and finally with the other girl’s door being hammered on with sharp objects, and then being locked in while a fire started in the house.

The players—there was a mother, her boyfriend, and two teenage daughters, one belonging to the mother, the other to her boyfriend. The girls were friendly with each other, and everyone got on well. When the incidents started happening, the boyfriend tried to blame the mother’s daughter. They blamed the girls in general for playing pranks and looking for attention. When it became clear this wasn’t the case, the boyfriend called a priest to come in, who walked around, said he couldn’t help, and left. In the end, the mother and boyfriend split up when they moved out of the house. The girls still remain friends.

Several incidents were of interest during the episode, at least to me. The first attempt of this “spirit” to write on the walls consisted of arrows drawn everywhere pointing to the vents and to the attic. An examination of the attic space yielded nothing, though the air was tense. Fire seemed to be a theme in this haunting—first the melted peanut butter (obviously heated up), and then trying to set fire to the house. Initially the mother tried to make a peace offering to whatever it was by lighting candles, and offering a ceramic cat (because she loved cats) to it as an offering. Her boyfriend saw what was going on, got angry, and threw the cat outside, only to turn around seconds later and find it back on the shelf with the candles. He then smashed it, which unleashed a hellish fury on the house. The next day the word “cat” was scrawled on the walls everywhere. And eventually—the cats in the house died.

So, what does all this have to do with anything, least of all constellated archetypes? Carl Jung believed that poltergeist (noisy ghost) phenomena were the result of a constellation of the Trickster archetype. Even writing and hearing voices are part of it. If you recall the old Bell Witch case in the 19th century, this is similar. Where do they come from? From the teenage girls. Why? Because they are throwing off electromagnetism that is manifesting externally a battle that is raging internally. Poltergeist phenomena are usually connected with girls around the age of puberty, when there is a hormonal shift that affects the pituitary gland (and also at menopause, though that’s less well known). What battle? It’s hard to know exactly. My guess is that there’s more to the family story. Both the mother and the boyfriend were divorced, and we don’t know how that affected the girls. There was clearly some hostility towards the boyfriend, and perhaps there was an undercurrent of resentment or rage among the girls and the parental figures. We don’t know anything about that, but I’d bet money that something wasn’t right.

Now, once they moved out, they never experienced activity again. Usually poltergeist activity follows you. But—the mother and boyfriend broke up, and the girls were no longer together to act as a beacon for the archetype. So, its settling down is not out of the question. I think the arrows on the walls were significant—they pointed to a need to “vent”, and also to the attic, which is a symbol of the unconscious. The archetype identified itself.

There are some things that may still leave you with questions. For instance—they saw something that looked like huge, demonic footprints in the house after the cat incident. The neighbors on that block also put their houses up for sale, and within a short time there were 5 vacant houses on that street. We don’t know why, but it suggests an external entity rather than a psychological phenomena. Again, I can’t prove anything in this case, but my suspicion is that it has to do with something attracted by the constellated archetype. There are other manifestations of consciousness, and I think this one was a belligerent fire elemental—namely because fire was a running theme through the poltergeist pranks. I recall another case mentioned by Jason and Grant of Ghost Hunters in one of their books, where a similar stacking of objects in the kitchen and various places turned out to be a haunting by an elemental attached to the property (they actually caught it on tape—not seen on any episodes though, as it was not part of a GH investigation). The scientific minded may think that’s a stretch, but coming from a Jungian perspective, there are things that are both part of us and external to us—apparently. We are not separate from Nature, so “elementals” are not separate from us—they are manifestations of aspects of Nature.

So, that’s my interpretation of what went on, right or wrong, for better or for worse. While these kinds of things are fairly rare, they are an object lesson in why you should “know thyself”. Psychologists who want patients to simply “forget their past” and move forward without examination (a new trend, especially in Christian counseling) should think twice. Under the right conditions, these things DO happen—and they demonstrate the incredible power of the collective human psyche.

Chicken and Egg

2011-09-14T11:50:00.001-04:00

This past week I read an article on reading and personality. The article mentioned a study involving young adults reading passages from either the Harry Potter or Twilight series, and then giving them a certain number of social associative tests. The gist of their findings was that reading is not “escapist” as previously thought, but is able to provide a sense of social identification with the characters in the story, which translates to their social identity. It’s sort of a jumping off point for one’s own thoughts, feelings, and experiences. Reading increased the empathy of readers.

My first reaction to such a study is a chicken-and-egg sort of thing. What comes first? Does the book foster a new interest? Or is the person drawn to the book because they already had an interest?

If I take myself as an example—from the time I was able to read (I got past Dr. Seuss at about 4 years old) I have gravitated towards books about witches, magic, ghosts, haunted houses and world religions. It’s not difficult to see that I’ve retained this interest throughout my life. In fact—a lot of my career, research, and personal life is tied in with these subjects. By the time I’m old, I’ll be a real life Mrs. Zimmerman, complete with purple murals on the walls, and doctoral degree relating to magic. (If you don’t know who she is, refer to John Bellairs’s book “The House With a Clock in its Walls”). But did the books influence me, or did I just gravitate towards them because it was about a subject I was interested in?

The answer is likely a mixture of both. I had a heavy duty imagination as a kid, and when I had an idea or story in my head about something, I would go cruising the library shelves for something that matched the image in my head. Sometimes I would get new ideas or gravitate towards new kinds of stories if I read something that didn’t quite match, but still held my attention. Additionally—whenever I read something fantastical and magical, I wanted it to be real, and I set about finding a method for making it real. I am reminded of Aleister Crowley’s comment on Cardinal Newman:

“In the Apologia pro Vita Sua, Cardinal Newman tells us, I suspect truthfully, that as a child he wished that The Arabian Nights were true. As we all know, he gratified his ambitions by accepting for reality the Freudian phantasm of hashed-up paganism with Semitic sauce which led him to the hat. But I went further. My senses and my rational judgment created a subconscious feeling of uneasiness that supernaturalism might not be true. This insulted my inmost consciousness of myself. But the reply was not to accept the false for the true, but to determine to make it true.” (Confessions, Ch. 5)

Returning to the study—it was a controlled experiment, where kids were given passages to read in one of the Harry Potter or Twilight books. They were then tested on their associations. What I would like to know is how many of those kids were already interested in the subject beforehand—and I’d like to see the final result numbers in light of that variable. Nonetheless, what’s rather interesting about the results is that the psychologists found that kids could be very healthy mentally while being lost in reading. There is a perception that reading too much makes a child a loner and unsocial. The study seems to demonstrate the opposite. The characters in the stories seem to provide some kind of mythical identity foundation. This may be the key even more than the particular subject matter.

Mythical identity is something easily lost in a secular world that scorns anything smacking of religiosity—or is so rigid in dogma that there is no room for anything but fear. That identity is a critical part of being human. The identity may be illusory, but so are all identities. The banker going to a Wall Street job every day isn’t doing anything less hallucinatory than the child who sees fairies in the woods. They are equally illusory; the only difference is whether or not society approves of the illusion.

I have heard that we are living under a corporate oligarchy that spurns imagination and education, because people are less likely to settle for being mindless, underpaid drones if they possess either. I’m sure that’s at least a little bit true, even if it’s overstated. Real freedom is being able to choose the life you want, not being forced to choose a life of endless work hours at a job you hate. If you have some imagination, you can avoid the latter situation, though it gets harder and harder in this economy.

To tie all this up with reading—I do agree that the more one reads, the more imagination develops, but I don’t think reading “influences” you unless something in what you’re reading resonates with you. The same is true of music, and probably art as well. Something that doesn’t resonate with you may serve to challenge your point of view, but that doesn’t happen often. If it does enough to disturb you or change you, then it is highly successful, and will likely become a classic over time.

Anniversary (Sept. 11)

2011-09-11T09:51:00.003-04:00

Today is the 10th anniversary of the September 11 attacks on the Twin Towers in New York City. Outside, it is a day nothing like that day--it is overcast and cold. September 11, 2001 was a perfect Fall-like day--the sky couldn't have been bluer, the sun was shining, the temperature was comfortable. I couldn't make up my mind this morning whether to even comment on the anniversary. But it's collectively there, so here's my recollection.

On that day I was working in Whippany, New Jersey, which is about 25 to 30 miles from New York City. I was working in the County Library as a cataloger. My hair was ginger red, I was wearing a burgundy sweater that I'd had for years and jeans. I left the Technical Services department to go upstairs and get some volumes that needed reclassification. I got off the elevator, and passed the Reference desk. I said good morning to my colleagues. One of them, James, was looking at CNN.com.

"Did you see this? An airplane has crashed into one of the World Trade Center towers."

"No, I didn't." I went over to look.

"Oh, it's probably some idiot in a Cessna," said Jane, another librarian at the desk. "Some of these people shouldn't be flying planes."

"I don't know," said Marie, our NJ Librarian. She looked at me almost knowingly, and said, "I think it's terrrorism."

Jane brushed it off. "Oh, that's ridiculous."

I got what needed from the stacks and returned to my department. Within 5 minutes everyone was watching the break room TV across the hall in silence. One of my colleagues grabbed me by the arm. "Come in here and see this."

A second plane had struck the tower. And it was not a Cessna, it was a 747. As was the first plane. As we watched the Towers burn on the television, it didn't seem real. It felt like we were watching a disaster movie. The reporters on the scene were genuinely hysterical. At one point I remember one reporter and her entire crew suddenly fleeing towards the camera as the second Tower fell suddenly.

No one did any work that day. We milled around, talking to each other, watching coverage on our computers. Many of my co-workers had family in the city, and were frantically trying to call them. All cell phone contact was cut off, and no one could get a hold of anyone. One of our part-timers sat sobbing, as her daughter worked nearby and she couldn't get a hold of her. (Later, she did get a hold of her daughter, who was fine, thankfully). My boss also started to become panicked, as her husband had gone into the city for work right about that time. While she was out of the room, I heard her phone ring. I grabbed it. It was her husband--he had made it home. He heard what was happening in Penn Station, and immediately dove onto what was the last Midtown Direct train back. He said people around him were dazed, covered in dust, some of them bleeding. He wanted his wife to know he'd made it home. When I told her, she grabbed me and kissed me. Relief flooded her face.

I somehow remember being at Liz's house that day. Maybe I was dropping by for lunch, maybe it was after work. What I particularly remember was how quiet it was. Whippany is in line with Newark Airport, and Morristown Airport is not far away, so there is always the sound of planes. You could hear a pin drop outside. When one or two military planes flew over, it was actually scary. She and I had been in the city with some friends just the day before. Her birthday was that week, and we'd gone to see Stiff Little Finger at the Village Underground. A world of difference between the day before and today.

At one point in the afternoon, I stepped outside with our cataloging assistant, Kim. She and I were talking--I no longer remember what we said. We looked up and could see smoke floating in over the sky. We walked across the street to the Arboretum, and climbed the hill. There is a point where you can see the New York skyline. From there, we could see smoke billowing out of the Twin Towers.

I had been in the Twin Towers only once. My brother took me to the city for my 13th birthday, and we took the PATH to the World Trade Center. I found it to be a scary building, as I have always been afraid of heights. The escalators into the building were daunting. My brother had to tell me the story of a woman who got her high-heeled shoe caught in the escalator stairs and fell down. "There was nothing left to her by the time she hit bottom." I could always count on him for that sort of thing. My brother has been long dead--he didn't live to see this.

I got home from work. I was in the process of splitting up with my husband. We already had settled everything, and he was moving out in about 12 days. I was going to be moving shortly thereafter. I reflected on the fact that the divorce decision had started with an inferno (a huge oil tanker fire on Route 80 near our house the day I told him), and the official split was also preceded by an inferno. Not that this has anything to do with the event, but the association did strike me. He came home from his job, and said, "You've seen the news, huh?"

"Yep. Scary as shit."

"You know--I'm not usually scared by things I see on the news. But I don't think I'm going to sleep tonight."

"I know what you mean. I probably won't either."

Mike did move out 12 days later, when his sister and brother-in-law came to pack his things and drive South with him. I remember thinking, "Wow, I'm heading out into the world completely alone for the first time, at a time when everything is so uncertain." I wasn't necessarily scared, but it was surreal. The strangeness did not last long, as I realized I was well-equipped to face the unknown by myself. Ultimately, you face the unknown by yourself whether you like it or not. It's called "death".

I did not personally know anyone who died on September 11, except for a high school classmate, and I didn't hear about that until years later. I did not venture downtown after the attacks. The air was really bad, still thick with smoke, soot, and who knows what else. A former colleague did go into the city a week later to see a show. She said New York was eerily quiet. People were staying away. But that didn't last long. In fact, I started going to the city weekly within the year. For years I avoided the city, as my rather provincial family was discouraging--New York was too "dangerous". After September 11, I no longer gave a rat's ass. Everything is dangerous. And you walk into it with your eyes open, you don't run away from it. Running away would have been a win for the terrorists.

Paranormal Witness

2011-09-10T17:39:00.003-04:00

Syfy has been touting a new reality show in its ghostly genre called “Paranormal Witness”. The concept is not really new—it presents the true stories of everyday people who have paranormal encounters. Even so, I’m a sucker for shows like this, and the idea of stories newer than the ones I’d seen and heard over and over put this on my list.

The iO9 blog had a post reviewing the premier episode, saying that Syfy “finally” had a paranormal show that was actually scary. Ghost Hunters and its related franchises have always been the big ratings grabbers, but it really hasn’t been scary in years. They’ll have to forgive me for this—but honestly, most people I know put the show on in the background while they’re doing something else. It’s become very formulaic. They always go to a high-profile place (you don’t see them going to Joe Blow’s house anymore), and the team falls into their roles in the same way, like a band that has rehearsed and is “tight” but has no spontaneity. It doesn’t have to be bad, but it does lack something. In every GH episode I’ve seen in the last 2 years, not much happens. They claim to hear sounds and see things, but the evidence review is not very impressive. And as my sister pointed out, it doesn’t seem like they really “help” people too much—they collect their evidence, give their opinion, and that’s it. It rarely solves anything for the people involved. Nothing really beat Season 2 and 3 of that show, in my opinion.

As I no longer have anything but basic cable in my house, I no longer get Syfy, so I’m pretty reliant on their streaming full episodes online. Naturally they’ve removed all Ghost Hunters episodes, and charge $40.00 for a season pass on iTunes. The first Paranormal Witness episode was posted, and the season pass was only $16.00, so I went for it. Maybe it’s not a huge bargain—there may not be as many episodes. But I can tell you it’s money better spent, after seeing the first episode.

First, I should mention that I am one of those who puts on the new GH episode and ends up wandering away to do something else. It just doesn’t hold my attention. If I hear something that sounds moderately exciting, I’ll pay attention again, and I usually like to watch the evidence review, but otherwise it’s pretty dull. Not so with Paranormal Witness. I think I sat on the edge of my chair for the entire episode. It did not disappoint—it was creepy and scary.

The episodes are said to be true accounts of paranormal experiences. I have to take that with a grain of salt. I don’t doubt that these things really happened to these people; I’m just not sure how the production crew has spun the story. Nonetheless, good storytelling has its value, and these are very well told.

The first part of episode 1 deals with a family that moves into a haunted house. Their daughter begins to communicate with “Emily” a little girl who they believe is just an imaginary friend. Ensuing events show them that not only is “Emily” not particularly nice (and she hates the parents), Emily may not be Emily at all. When a medium visits the house, it seems clear it is a male spirit. But from what I could see early on, the “Emily” haunting had all the hallmarks of a demonic case. I understand that these things are overwhelming, and that people go into denial. But when a spirit tries to make your daughter jump out the window, I don’t think I’d worry about the mortgage and the bills—I’d pack up and move right then, and call somebody to figure out what’s going on—either a spiritual person (an exorcist of some variety) or a paranormal investigator. Calling in a medium did not seem very sensible, nor did it appear that this medium helped them at all. They also succumbed very quickly to fear; an investigator, religious or not, would tell them that this is the worst thing to do, even understanding how scary it is. Nothing feeds a negative energy more than your fear of it. After all, in some respect, it IS you, even though it’s also external to you.

The second part was about an episode in Florida, where a mother drove to church with her daughter and their Pakistani exchange student. The teenage daughter refused to go into the church, staying outside with the music blaring and the windows down. When the mother came out and they were driving home, the daughter saw a young girl at the side of the otherwise desolate road. It seemed to be getting dark, which I thought was weird—how could you have gone to a church service—which is usually held in the morning—and have it be getting dark already by the time you’re going home? Minor detail, really. But the daughter convinces the mother to turn around and look for the girl—they see her again, but then she disappears. They start driving home again, but then the girl reappears on the road two miles ahead. At this point the daughter (the real daughter, as they were being interviewed, and it alternated between this and a re-enactment) starting freaking out a bit, and she realized there was something unnatural about this girl. I don’t want to say any more about the story—you should watch it if you’re able. You can watch it here for now.

So, my review—this show lives up to the hype so far. Hope it continues to be as good throughout the season.

Sounds

2011-09-09T05:46:00.000-04:00

One of the reasons I meditate is to be able to block out sound. This may seem strange at first glance, but one benefit of meditation is focus. You need to be able to move through your day with awareness, but not restless distraction. Aleister Crowley once vented his frustration at trying to meditate in a London apartment, with much noise outside. He then realized that it was the perfect training ground. If he could meditate there, he could meditate anywhere.

I still meditate daily, but I’m not doing such a good job at blocking. And it’s causing me a lot of stress. Not while I meditate—usually while I’m trying to sleep. Under normal circumstances, I can sleep through anything. However, as of late, I find myself waking up between midnight and 2 am, unable to fall back to sleep right away.

This is because Mother Nature is trying to destroy the United States. Or something. In any event, we’ve had even more rain this week, and the sound of rain on skylights is not relaxing. It sounds like someone shelling the house with M16 rounds. Knowing that my cats are learning how to sail in my basement does not do anything to help the “not relaxing” part. Nor does knowing that I’ll have to go outside and deal with it.

Even when the rain subsides, I have more sounds to deal with. If a single bedspring creaks, if I get up to use the bathroom, a chorus begins in the basement of yowling cats. This has nothing to do with the rain; they do this in all weather. My one indoor cat will then assume I am awake and ready to play, and when he sees that I’m not so playful, he will curl up next to me and start cleaning himself. Because he has a perpetual case of sniffles, this is a very noisy proposition. So—for the next hour I hear “YOWL slurp slurp sluuurp YOWL YOWL slurpslurpslurp YOWL MEOWMEOWMEOWMEOW honk slurp sluuurp” (repeat until my nerves feel like they’ve been attacked with a cheese grater). When this is combined with the rain, it is a true symphony of chaos. I imagine it’s similar to what Lewis Black describes as “the sound of pigs being slaughtered, of men and women gnashing their teeth”. If I made a recording and posted it, you would never read this blog again if you decided to listen to it.

Recent weeks have made me more convinced than ever that Chaos is the ruling principle of the universe. When my mother was visiting my house during her own power outage, we watched one of Joseph Campbell’s “Power of Myth” episodes. In this episode, Campbell talked about the Trickster archetype. Bill Moyers asked him about its significance; Campbell replied, “Well, you think you’ve got it all figured out and BAM!” The Trickster shows you that you know nothing at all.

I’ve been reading a lot on something called TMT (Terror Management Theory) as of late. TMT suggests that religion has its origins in the management of death anxiety. The studies in support of this theory are fascinating. Some of the most interesting involve motivations to violence or compassion depending on the response to death anxiety. Fundamentalists react violently to things that challenge their world view, as it gives them greater death awareness. In one study, Christians were exposed to Bible verses that condone or glorify violence, and their behavior became more aggressive (and more prejudiced). On the other hand, when exposed to verses that encouraged compassion and respect, the violent tendencies decreased significantly.

There are several critiques of this theory, which is behavioristic in nature, though the authors of the theory make no claim to “explain away” religious belief with this theory. I feel they shouldn’t focus exclusively on death anxiety, even though that is a good example of a chaotic unknown. Religious belief serves as a tool for coping with the unknown, for dealing with the wonder and mystery of things beyond the mind that we know exist but can’t express. We don’t know anything about it except that we don’t know—and that it is chaotic in nature.

H.P. Lovecraft had a “chaotic blind idiot god” called Azathoth. As I’ve mentioned before, Lovecraft’s monsters and other beings were not waging a good vs. evil battle. They were representations of these impersonal, chaotic forces in the universe. Lovecraft was neither a religious man nor an occultist—he was a materialist in the extreme. The horror of his work is the horror of knowing that there’s not a personal god or devil interested in your actions. These forces move with indifference, and all you can do is struggle to adapt. It is interesting that the key to happiness has little to do with how many “good” things happen to you that give you pleasant feelings. It has more to do with one’s ability to detach from expectations of outcome, and to live purely for the experience of living, regardless of what that involves. Eastern religions would call it a “true present”, not lamenting the past or worrying about the future. In short, it is how well you live with chaos. This is achieved through meditation.

And so, we come full circle from the beginning of this post.

Smashing

2011-09-05T10:34:00.000-04:00

First, a piece of writing news: The last of the stories that I've sent out for publication, "Umbra", is in the September 2011 issue of Death Head Grin Magazine. I'm not sending out the rest of the stories in the archetype set to magazines--I'm going to see if I can publish the set of ten as an anthology (with six already published). Stay tuned on that front.

Life has been an obstacle course lately. I have been dealing with flooding, then dealing with a smashed up right leg (not broken, fortunately)--then Hurricane Irene (more flooding and debris), which necessitated bailing 100 gallons of water by hand from my basement (and leaving me unable to climb stairs for two days). On the whole, I did quite well--I only lost electric for two minutes, and by the following afternoon, my flooding was gone and I'd cleaned up all the debris from the storm. My parents did not fare so well--they lost electric for an entire week, as well as their phone. So, I spent a week trying to help them out. Now that they're back in business, another tropical storm threatens to drop another 2 to 6 inches of rain.

So, needless to say, life has been smashing, in the sense of trying to flatten me into the ground. I've been trying to look at it as a character-building experience, but I would be lying if I say I'm not cranky. I don't have a lot of patience for other people's problems at the moment. My neighbor came by the other day to vent bitterly about how much our taxes have gone up, and what little we're getting for it. Normally I don't mind venting, but I really wanted to say, "I don't give a flying f**k right now, and I don't want to think about it."

On the plus side, besides all this character I'm building, I'm clearly losing weight. I call it the "stress" diet. It may just be that I'm all toned from hauling huge buckets of water up stairs for two hours at a time. Not an exercise routine that I want to maintain, honestly. I don't think I was "fat" before, but there were a lot of areas that could use toning. I should be careful what I wish for.

I’m realizing that I’m a bit burnt out, and not at a good time. I’m in desperate need of my October vacation, but that’s not going to be much of a vacation. Dragging my luggage to 9 cities throughout the UK on little sleep is not going to make me return home feeling refreshed, even if I feel the effort is worth it. I’m hoping to recharge my batteries during 5 days in Devon, but I have business there as well.

As they say, this too shall pass. I read something the other day about time on the Cosmic Variance blog. First, they say time exists. Whether it is fundamental to the universe is unknown—apparently we need to understand more about quantum gravity to know that. Then, they say there is a past, present and future. However, these are often experienced at the same time. The article also suggests that we spend most of our time living in the past. I find myself thinking about Jung’s definition of the collective unconscious. One of its attributes is the mixing up of past, present, and future—there is no linearity. In what sense these are all “real”, I don’t know. Time is not something you can touch; a clock is not time. As Mike said on the Young Ones to the question, “Gosh, is that the time?” ... “No, time is an abstract concept. That’s a wristwatch.”

Time is likely to be as real as every other concept we use to interpret reality. It’s more of a convenience than a thing in its own right. It’s like saying there’s such a thing as an inch or a centimeter. They don’t exist independently in nature; they are concepts to help us interpret the world.

That’s about as much depth as I can handle for today; I’m tired, and not in great shape for plumbing the depths of the universe. Instead, I’ll share a video of a kitten having a nightmare and being hugged by its mother. Have a pleasant Labor Day.

Hurricane (Plus a Treatise on Mantras)

2011-08-27T14:19:00.002-04:00

It's Saturday afternoon in New Jersey. I have done all of my weekend errands early, like everyone else in the state the last two days, because tomorrow we are under a "state of emergency". Hurricane Irene is supposed to bring fire, flood, earthquake, a plague of locusts...oh wait, that was a literal reading of the Book of Revelation. Sorry about that.

Someone from the Fire Department knocked on my door a couple of hours ago, to give me a hurricane preparedness pamphlet, and to tell me that power would be out for a very long time if it did go out, as the electric company was only stopping at stations long enough to make them safe before moving on. I looked at the pamphlet, which was from the town's Office of Emergency Management. I'm surprised we have one of those. We don't even have a police department in this town (we use State police).

In any event, I suppose it's not bad to be too prepared, but I do think that's what this is. I just read somewhere that the brunt of the storm is heading for Atlantic City, and may wipe it out. With all due respect to those who live there (who I hope are evacuated), I sincerely hope that happens. Atlantic City could stand to be razed and start from scratch. It's really become a hell-hole. Maybe Trump will finance it.

My indoor cat is fully prepared for this, snoring away on my bed. I am also prepared, as I managed to fight the crowds in the grocery and liquor stores yesterday, and I also have two boxes of Girl Scout cookies. I've removed every possible thing from my porch and patio that could turn into a projectile in high winds, and I've prepped the basement for flooding. I have a plan for vacuuming out water every few hours--provided the power does not go out. And there is a tarp secured over the root cellar door. Where I live, I can't do more than that. In retrospect, maybe I should have brought cat carriers inside if I have to evacuate, but again, I don't think that will happen.

This is going to be a "personal intuition versus scientific weather forecasting equipment" weekend. I am told that this will be the most catastrophic storm to hit New Jersey in 25 years. I'm not sure I believe it will be any worse than the torrential downpours we had 2 weeks ago--which did flood my basement, but not in a catastrophic way. By this time tomorrow afternoon, it will already be winding down. I was told the big threat was that it would be a Cat 2 or 3 when it reached here. My "intuitive" prediction was that it would make landfall and weaken to a Cat 1 or less before hitting New Jersey and New York. So, guess what category Irene is now? Yep, a 1. With a less organized center of circulation. We will see if science or personal intuition wins out in the end. I suspect we will both be right--some places probably will be hit hard. But I doubt here will be one of them.

You'll be reading plenty about the hurricane elsewhere, so I figured I would turn to the topic I'm focused on during the wait--Enochian magic. I'm reading several books at once right now, and one of them is Lon Milo DuQuette's excellent "Enochian Vision Magick". This is one of my first forays into Enochian, but I've been told by practitioners that this is easily a one-stop-shopping guide to Enochian chants and ritual. It's also helpful that Lon's writing style isn't obtuse--he's very clear and straightforward, and gives easily understandable examples. This is true of all of his books.

For those of you who don't know, "Enochian" is the term for the language spoken between Adam and the angels, before the "Fall", traditionally. This was a language and system revealed to Dr. John Dee and Edward Kelley during the time of Queen Elizabeth I. Apparently the men received this rather complex system, but never used it themselves.

In reading the opening section with his chant, I can't help but notice some similarity, at least in cadence, between this:

Pa Med Fam Med Drux Fam Fam Ur Ged Graph Drux Med Graph Graph Med Med Or Med Gal Ged Ged Drux.

And this, from the "prana pratistha" (establishment of life) in the Kali puja:

Om am am hrim krom yam ram lam vam sam sam sam hom ham sah

Yes, different sounds, but using monosyllables to establish something. In the former case, the Enochian chant is used prior to scrying (as part of a much longer chant), and is a prologue to the work. In the latter case, the chant is to "establish life" in a murthi or image--hence, I do not recommend that you use this second chant at all. I don't use it. I'm not trying to establish "life" in an image. (This is a ritual used when Hindu temples are opened, and prayers are said over the carved images being installed there--in this case, a Kali temple).

In Hinduism, such monosyllabic mantras are called "bijas", or "seed" mantras. They are derived from the primary sounds of the Sanskrit alphabet laid out in the Maheswara Sutras. The number of syllables used is significant. Most mantras used in pujas have 24, 28, or 30 syllables, and are referred to as gayatri, usnig, and anustup mantras respectively (creation, preservation, destruction).

There is a mantra referred to as the "gayatri" mantra that has two variations: "Om bhuh bhuvah svaha tat savitur varenyam bargo devasya dimahi dyo yo na pracodyat", and "Om tat savitur varenyam bargo devasya dimahi dyo yo nah pracodyat". The second variation is a true Gayatri mantra, with a meter of 24. The former is the gayatri including the mahavyahriti (great utterance). They both refer to that goddess known as Gayatri, a goddess of learning, and "mother of all the Vedas", though the deity invoked through this mantra is Savitri, who is usually not worshipped directly, but known as the "rouser".

This tells you a lot about the working of the mantra. It is meant to bring true knowledge, and it does so through an invocation of Savitri, the "rouser" (i.e., one who stimulates the kundalini flow from its sleepy base of the spine towards the sahasrara chakra at the top of the head). The chakras below the anahata (heart) are thought to be "survival" chakras--they represent impulses that help us in our mundane, day-to-day lives, and in survival. From the anahata upward comes spiritual knowledge (and the anahata is known as the center of the "Virgin Birth"--the birth of true spiritual man), and raising the kundalini consciousness to this level and beyond allows us to become aware of that knowledge. Hence, the mantra's association with the Sun--that which "illuminates us".

But back to the bijas. According to another book I've read, "The Tantra of Sound", reciting these bijas leads to a slowing of the heart rate and of bodily functions, so that one can enter a still, meditative state. It puts one "in between the worlds", you might say. The idea of sound connecting us with this other Mystery is incredibly old; if you think of the notion of the Harmony of the Spheres, you can work backwards from that to these Indian ideas that are thousands of years old.

Speaking from personal experience, I can say there is a connection. For years I did puja daily, and sometimes I would recite mantras for 3 hours straight. That definitely changes your consciousness, without question. In Lon's book, he prescribes a formula that includes 18 minutes of chanting, and this does indeed lead to an altered state of consciousness. It's hard to cultivate awareness when you're hearing so much external noise--both in the physical world and in your brain. Mantras are a way to overcome that noise with noise. It tricks you into a deeper awareness.

Ramakrishna's wife, Sarada Devi, once said that mantras were necessary, as there was "too much distraction in the Age of Kali" (Kali Yuga) for humans to focus their minds. From my own workings, I think she is right. A case of fighting fire with fire, in a sense.

With that--it's only a few more hours til storm time. Not sure if I'll be able to sleep upstairs with rain pounding on my skylights. Maybe I should just recite my mantras to drown out the rain...

Waste

2011-08-18T05:45:00.000-04:00

It’s been awhile since I’ve worn a wristwatch. The last one I bought was very loose, and the clasp on it eventually broke. I only paid 5 bucks for it, so it wasn’t a real loss. This time I used a gift card I received and bought a man’s watch. I happen to prefer the sensible leather wristbands of men’s watches to the wimpy and delicate bands that usually hold together women’s watches. I’ve lost more watches because the pathetic wisp of leather used as a wristband has worn out. Not likely to happen with this one.

In any event, I found myself staring at the ticking clock today, and realizing that time is appearing to slip away. Autumn term begins in about three weeks, which means I am back to teaching, and not long for a trip to the UK, mostly to see John Foxx on an 8-city tour. August has been a tiring month; Mercury retrograde has thus far eaten two Macbook power supplies and one VCR, has screwed up at least two important mailings, and four programs that I use regularly suddenly decided to stop working or crash in medias res. Perhaps the desire to return to bed and stay there until September is not entirely unwarranted.

But back to time. I’m sure I’m not alone in this, but when I find that my ability to produce work is stymied in some way, I get very frustrated. This can result in minor temper flares, major temper flares, complete inertia, or a sudden binge of cleaning everything in the house just to feel like I’m doing something useful. But it begs the question—why can’t one just spend time doing nothing, without feeling like one is wasting time?

We used to joke about my mother growing up. She was contending with five of us, and it seemed like she was forever cooking, cleaning, doing yardwork—my brother once said that if she had nothing else to do, she’d wax the driveway. In high school, I had a friend who came over quite often. She and I were watching television, and my mother was washing the living room walls. She looked at me and said, “Um, why is your mother washing the walls?” I shrugged. “She’s bored, I guess.”

In retrospect, though, I think I get my mother’s behavior. What often happens when we have spare time is that we sit around speculating about the future, and not in a good way. If I’m busy, I’m not sitting around worrying about finances or relationships—I’m focused on doing something, and in the end, I hope I’ve accomplished something. People are surprised at how clean my house is, given how much I work (at my day job, at my teaching job, and at my writing). But I think I have become like my mother—I always have to be doing something, and when I’m not, I feel like I’m wasting precious time.

This attitude may not be unjustified, in one sense. I find myself hearkening back to my Heidegger seminar days, and his notion of “authentic existence”. The bottom line is that you don’t know what will happen in the next minute, if there will be a tomorrow. Life should not be wasted. However, I’m not sure the problem is not wanting to use time wisely. The problem is how we define “waste”.

What is a “waste of time”? If I’m laying on the beach enjoying the sounds of the ocean, is that a waste of time? If I’m out with friends having a drink instead of sitting at home researching, am I wasting time? I guess it depends, and it largely depends on others. If we have a deadline of some sort, we might harm someone else if we “waste” time by not doing our part by the deadline. We may create more mental anguish by procrastinating (though some people work well under pressure). But it’s hard to convince our productive little selves that slowing down is not a waste of time.

I have to wonder where this comes from. It may be a regional phenomenon, and it also may have to do with our Protestant/Puritan work ethic roots. I hear all the time how the unemployed are “lazy” (before you yell at me, yes I know this is a fallacy). Life in the Northeastern U.S. is certainly fast-paced; if you go down South or to the Midwest, you don’t find the level of frenzy that you find on the East Coast. Walking through New York Penn Station, or through Times Square, is like a video game. You’re constantly bobbing and weaving through crowds of people, some moving fast, some moving too slow, some suddenly changing directions without warning. I read an article recently about “sidewalk rage” in New York City—native New Yorkers getting furious with tourists in Times Square who stop and gawk at everything, blocking the sidewalk traffic. I’ve experienced this myself (and I’m not even a New Yorker, though many people view New Jersey as an extension of New York, rightly or wrongly). And it’s a perfect example of what I mentioned above—the frustration of having the momentum and not being able to move forward.

Fast movement does not guarantee swift movement of time. I’ve done an entire morning’s worth of work, only to find that 2 hours have gone by instead of the whole morning. Other times, when you feel leisurely, you find that a whole day has gone by, and you can’t imagine where it went.
I sometimes think surrendering to our motion might be the best thing. If I’m fired up and do all of my Spring cleaning, I don’t think that’s bad. When I crash out the following week and don’t feel like doing much, at least all that is done. There are times to charge ahead with new projects, and times when you should finish old ones. Scheduling is good, but I never schedule too much in a day—I try to allow for the unpredictability factor. If anything is predictable—it’s that the obstacles we face are unpredictable.

Spook File

2011-08-12T05:41:00.001-04:00

While doing some things around the house the other day, I popped in a VHS tape of some old episodes of "Scariest Places on Earth". I've commented on this show before, with regard to how much I felt Alan Robeson's dramatics ruined any potential credibility the show may have had. Those were the "family investigates haunted place" episodes; these were the regular Robeson-free episodes.

The episode I was watching was about Athens, Ohio, supposedly #21 in a worldwide list of the most haunted places. (I can't remember now who made the list--possibly the British Society for Psychical Research). The story centered around an abandoned lunatic asylum and the local university campus in Athens. The library archivist kept something called the "Spook File". It was a folder in a vertical file full of newspaper clippings and photocopied articles about the weird goings-on in the city. According to the archivist, it was the most heavily-used item in special collections.

I had forgotten about this episode, and it occurred to me how cool the idea was of having a campus "spook file". I started to wonder why more universities didn't have them. After all, I've heard strange stories about almost every university campus I've ever visited. Maybe some of them do have that kind of information. On the whole though, I suspect that they are not looking to encourage student interest in ghost stories or legends regarding the campus. This is a shame, because I think it would make the site more interesting, not less. If I had been aware of such legends about the universities I attended when I was a student, that would make me more interested in my school, rather than being a largely apathetic commuter student. (OK, I was pretty involved as an undergraduate, namely because I had an amazing major department that kept us involved. But that's a digression.)

It's probably been almost 10 years since I went on the Chester (NJ) ghost tour. It was a big tourist draw for the town. I was working in a public library at the time, and I went to dinner with a group from work, and then went on the tour. The tour guide informed us that we were the second to last tour ever--they were closing it down. Why? The Chester Lions Club, which apparently has control over town events, said they no longer wanted it because it "attracted a bad element" to town. He then looked at us--who were mostly library staff and high school teachers--and said, "There you go, folks. You're a bad element." I guess that's where Chester's Mendham neighbor, NJ governor Chris Christie, got his idea that teachers were evil and must be destroyed.

Chester is a nice town, and I still like to visit there, but it's always been hard to deny the undercurrent of snobbery there. One might chalk up the Lions Club's assessment to that, but it really reveals a pervasive attitude among "polite" society. It goes back to what I've said about esotericism and mysticism--the religious are afraid because it may be "demonic", the non-religious are afraid of appearing mired in "superstition". Interest in "weird" and sometimes unexplainable happenings is often a guilty pleasure in "normal" people.

I think it's a sad fallout of demythologized society. We're convinced that science explains everything, so stories are no longer needed. Upper class social events in Victorian society (and earlier) often included the telling of ghost stories. In fact, it was a tradition at Christmastime. Some stories were just for fun, but today even the "true account" tales would be picked apart by skeptics. Certainly a large portion of them probably could be written off as imagination, or an illusion of some sort created by an external event. But there is a smug superiority we have about the unknown that really has its roots in fear. The reasonable mind cannot endure things that it can't explain. So, it has to find any explanation to keep from succumbing to fear. Fear of what? Probably that some of the unconscious myths that we reason away might have a grain of truth to them.

I think there's something of a sickness in this. Unconscious fear doesn't go away with reasoning alone. I think it's legitimate to want to explore these things--either for historical reasons, or to see if such things "really happen", and what they are. But our modern worldview doesn't allow for it; anyone who would take it seriously is seen as a crackpot. To be fair, I think discussion of such things has always been a bit taboo. In early societies, there was a great fear of the "other world", and only the shaman approached it. The shaman was revered, but also feared--he wasn't part of the rest of society. He was "other". In our modern, "non-superstitious" world, we've just exchanged one fear of the unknown for another one that's probably worse, because it tries to pretend that it doesn't have any "real" reality to it. The unknown and unexplained will always be with us, and pretending there is no such thing creates a psychological fracture.

It is interesting how culture has tried to balance this out. Shows like "Ghost Hunters" and others attempt to look at "paranormal" activity from a skeptical point of view, only giving credence to what can be recorded with equipment. That is not enough to satisfy skeptics, who will always say it is faked. But there is clearly an attempt to put together two myths--the old ones about ghosts and spirits, and more modern myths about truth that can be gained using technology as a medium. Such beliefs don't go away because they are integral to human consciousness, and our vehement dismissals of such things is foolish. As Aleister Crowley said, such priori considerations "have done more to retard the progress of science than any other form of human folly." It is foolish to think that we can absolutely "know" anything.

Normal

2011-08-10T06:04:00.000-04:00

I've been reading Aleister Crowley's lectures on yoga this week, as well as some of his other writings on meditation. He's pretty on-target vis-a-vis the things I learned from my guru about meditation. Some things I don't agree with (e.g. if a dog interrupts your meditation, shoot the dog), though I'm pretty sure Crowley revised such ideas later in his life. It is impossible in this century (or even in his) to meditate without distraction. If the distractions don't come from the outside, they come from the inside. I do recall a later Crowley anecdote, where he complained about the noise of London while trying to meditate, but then realized it was the perfect training ground. Anyone can be still when everything around them is still. Being still amid chaos is really the point.

I have great admiration for Crowley's writings, while still thinking he's a touch "insane". He certainly did things that most "normal" people would not think about doing or pursuing. But is that a negative?

Monday's Colbert Report episode featured Nassir Ghaemi, author of "A First Rate Madness". Ghaemi is a professor of psychiatry at Tufts University, and the premise of his book is that those with mental illnesses may actually make better leaders, especially in times of crisis. Those in mania, for instance, have a rush of ideas coming to them, and are likely to come up with more creative solutions to problems. Those who are depressed tend to be more compassionate to others, and have an empathy for suffering. They also have a more realistic view of the world.

If you've seen the extremes of manic-depression, you know it is definitely an imbalance, and definitely a difficulty for the person living with it, and those close to them, especially if untreated. But it is clear that characteristics of the illness are vital to human advancement. I start to wonder about our whole mechanism for measuring psychological norms when I think about this.

Psychological norms seem to represent a group of perceptions accepted by a majority of people. These norms may not be any more "right" or "wrong" than other viewpoints, but they are treated like the "facts of reality". Most "normal" people have no grasp on the scope and magnitude of reality. This is clearer with every new article I read on quantum mechanics. The universe is much more complex and mind-blowing than our perception of it. Our brain acts as a filter, so that we're only processing so much information at a time. The person with the mental illness---schizophrenia, manic depression, temporal lobe epilepsy to name some obvious examples--often takes in much more of reality than we're used to, and hence perceives things in ways that seem "crazy" to us at times. The medication they take is designed to provide them with filters, so that they can function in "normal" society. We use the term "delusional" to describe them, and assume they are hallucinating because we don't experience what they experience. It's really those who are "normal" who are delusional, because they really don't have the big picture.

In order for society as a whole to have the "big picture", we'd have to throw away our current yardstick for measuring "normative" and do something entirely different. It's hard to say if this will ever happen, though the trends throughout history would be against it. Mysticism and esotericism are the "mental illness" of religion, in a way--they seek to go beyond the "normative" dogmas and doctrines of organized religion, and therefore are viewed as "deviant". But to discount either would mean that religion is just what hardcore atheists say it is--nothing more than a means of keeping people "in their place". If reality isn't bigger than what we experience daily with our five senses, then it would be a lot of bunk. Even science tells us that there is more to reality than we experience empirically.

In a certain sense, it is all a lot of bunk. But that "bunk" makes up our existence. We tell stories, and these stories guide us through life. Most of them are false, but it really doesn't matter. In the end, there isn't any "thing" or goal you can look to, even if you are a religious person. This is why the Buddhist says we move from knowing to unknowing--and then back to knowing that we don't know. That's really the only "truth". I think insanity lies more with "normal" people who are too afraid to question their stories. We cling to the most absurd things out of fear. Not fear of "God's punishment" necessarily, but fear that our life will lose meaning and that we will face the unknown by ourselves and be swallowed up. But--if we don't question and change our stories, we never actually go through the human process of growing and maturing, and we become unable to live with others in the world. Like it or not, this is where we are, and this is the game we're playing. I prefer to look at it as a game--you want to do your best, but you don't want to take it too seriously.

Whether

2011-08-07T06:13:00.000-04:00

Weather is a boring subject. People talk about the weather when they want to avoid talking about other, less controversial things. Someone who only talks about the weather generally is not a social magnet; unless, I suppose, they were hanging out at a meteorologist's convention. The Weather Channel tries to make weather exciting, but there's really only so much of that you can stand (though I preferred my father's Weather Channel watching habit to his Fox News habit). It occurred to me that the only time people collectively give a toot about the weather is when it generates fear. Scorching heat waves, floods, hurricanes, tornadoes, snowstorms--if these things are predicted for your area, you're typically glued to some weather outlet, either online or on television.

I find myself checking the weather several times a day. Maybe this just says that I'm a boring person. Sometimes there's a practical reason--planning a trip to the Shore, or just planning to do yardwork. If I hear something about flooding, I have to prepare my root cellar, which always gets some water coming up through the ground if there's excessive rain. But most of the time, it's just a compulsion. I thought about why this might be the case, and upon reflection, I think weather phenomenon is connected to our sense of the numinous. That may sound odd, but I will explain.

First, when I say "numinous", I'm referring to that awe and terror of the unknown, of the mysteries of everything, things that science can only scratch the surface of in terms of knowledge. Seems pretty heavy, but weather is something largely out of our control. We have very sophisticated tools for predicting weather, but we can only warn, we can't stop. Meteorology is like a giant, scientific divination system. Like most divination systems, the data given isn't always interpreted correctly or definitive. But the fact that we have some tool for negotiating something we have no control over is comforting, even if that tool is imperfect.

If I may take a brief detour here--divination is one of those things that our "rational" culture scoffs at, or associates with hucksters or frauds. Certainly there have always been frauds, but divination systems like Tarot are based on universal symbol systems. Jung suggested that we draw certain cards via synchronicity, and just as hearing a certain word or phrase can have an impact on us, the unconsciously-chosen symbol may tell us a lot about ourselves. Since it draws on the collective, where concepts of time and space are distorted, it is often possible to "know the future" from reading them. If used honestly and correctly, they can offer a lot of information about circumstances.

Linking this back to its relationship to weather--it is amazing what the "rational" minded person does in a crisis. I have read Tarot and various other systems for the last 25 years (not professionally, just privately). Many members of my family and some friends make a joke of it. However--these same family and friends will suddenly call me when there's a crisis, and say, "can you do a reading for me?" Why would they suddenly take stock in something they think is foolish and irrational? Because they're confronted with the unknown. The unknown doesn't follow rational rules--there's only logic and probability for predicting the outcome, and often that is not sufficient--especially if the logical outcome appears bleak. We turn back to core symbol systems when confronted with things we don't understand and have no control over. We often have to decide on a course of action, and the more accurate advance information we have (or think we have), the more confident we are in our decision. Weather related to "whether".

Now, the weather is out of our control. We hear about things like "cloud seeding" for rain and such, but in general, it's agreed that it's not a great idea to tamper too much with weather systems. One big reason I think I obsess about weather is the need for control. Not of life in general, which is impossible, but of my own circumstances. It's a difficulty, really--I have to balance my own need for discipline and structure with the fact that the unexpected can drop in at any moment and change everything. Going with the flow is more important than having a rigid plan. But I find myself comforted by plans, even though my guru has said, "You want to make God laugh? Tell Him your plans."

I am one of those people whose mood can be affected by the weather. This is not extreme--I don't go into clinical depression when it rains, for instance. But I find that I can do more on cool, autumn-like days with clear skies. I don't mind rainy or snowy weather, but if it goes on for a prolonged period of time, I get impatient and frustrated. It makes my friends wonder why the heck I'd want to move to England if I'm not crazy about rainy dreary weather. But English weather is not all about being rainy and dreary--often it will change many times in one day. So--it may start out rainy and dreary, but be sunny and breezy with blue sky by lunchtime. And raining again by nightfall. At least things are broken up.

Nonetheless, for me (and perhaps others) the weather is usually part of a pattern that makes me feel secure. Like my old house, old books, bread baking in the kitchen, and a glass of wine on the patio with a book--nice weather is a creature comfort, and at least gives the illusion of everything being stable. Facts sometimes are a lot more troubling, and we cling to familiar comforts as transitional objects. Humans are usually not adventurers at heart; we like to know where we are, where we stand, what is coming down the road. Fear is dispelled by information, and despite the amount of flack meteorologists get for being "wrong" at times, the forecast is still a daily symbol of our desire to predict and control our environments.

Drained

2011-08-06T09:32:00.001-04:00

I've been rather quiet these days, blogging-wise. I've been quiet at home, too. 3 solid months of writing has left me drained, I suppose. And to be honest, the nonsense in Washington has left me drained as well. This is a big statement coming from me. I'm fairly indifferent to politics. Certainly I vote in every election, and I sign petitions and write letters for issues I think are important, but beyond that, I don't spend too much time contemplating what goes on in D.C. Mark Twain famously said "Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself." And that was in 1891. I tend to look at Congressional idiocy as a lot of "same ol', same ol'"

What bothers me these days is not that Congress are idiots. What bothers me is that Congress is psychotic. Seriously. While you can't paint everyone with the same brush, the "Tea Party" contingent that has made it's way into Congress like a tapeworm has turned the Republican party into a bunch of passionate defenders of utter insanity. So insane, in fact, that if you or I started talking like they do, they'd come with a straightjacket and take us away.

Republicans have historically been against taxes, against "big government", and in favor of conservative spending. In balance, this does not have to be a bad thing. What they're trying to do now falls along those lines. But how they're doing it is what is screwed up. Just say it out loud, and you'll realize how nutty it is. "We need to cut trillions of dollars in our deficit. Right now the top 1% of earners (i.e., billionaires) make the majority of the income in this country. Because of tax loopholes, they don't pay any taxes. The people who are struggling and have the least of the money pay taxes with very few breaks. But they will have to sacrifice more, because we can't tax the billionaires, even though that would solve the revenue problem, and the billionaires would still be...well, billionaires."

When you consider how irrational that statement is, you have to ask "why"? The Republicans say it's because billionaires are "job creators", even though every bit of evidence is to the contrary. These people are GREEDY. They are not interested in sharing their money to stimulate the economy. That's why the economy broke down in 2008. The psychology of the rich has never been different--they have money because they don't spend it. And they're certainly not going to spend it on you. Trickle down economics has been proved to be utterly false, and yet they still cling to this, a piece of driftwood in the ocean that they claim is a boat. It's not coincidental that the so-called "Tea Party" movement gets a lot of its funding from the Koch Brothers--oil billionaires whose father had connections with the Nazis and the old Soviet Union. He had a falling out with the Soviet Union, then suddenly denounced Communism, and was allowed to do business in the U.S. again. The Koch Brothers are anti-regulation (environmental and otherwise), anti-green energy (they're an oil company, after all), anti-Labor, and of course, they have been financing a lot of the anti-Obama campaign as well as the Tea Partiers. Regardless of their family past, it's as Bill Maher said: "it's not a grass roots movement if it's funded by billionaires".

Now, after the fiasco of the debt ceiling debate, and the downgrading of the U.S.'s credit rating, it's incredibly obvious that much of Congress ought to be taken away and medicated. How did these people even get voted in? And why the constant battling with the President? (Who, by the way, is not blameless--he needs to stop pretending these people are sane and can be worked with. They're not going to work with him--they want to get rid of him. He's been far too weak and caves in too easily).

If you read this blog regularly, you know that I am fixated on this idea of "narrative vs. fact". I believe that we are driven more by our unconscious assumptions and "stories" about what is "normal" and "moral" and "decent" than we are by any facts. We are irrational, not rational creatures in many ways. It's why I'm a big believer in the Humanities, because the point is to teach you to think outside your own narrative, and to question it. But I'm not going to repeat all of that discussion now. What I'm interested in here is the narrative driving what's happening in our country.

On one of my trips to London, I picked up a book by David Reynolds, a Professor of International History at Cambridge. It's a history of the United States, from all of its colonizations to the "Bush II" years. I like to read American history from the point of view of the British (and other Europeans as well). I'm interested in how Americans and American history look from the other side of the pond. The title of the book was "America, Empire of Liberty". Early on, Reynolds explains his thesis--the paradox in the title is deliberate. America has always boasted that it is about "freedom" and "liberty", and are not empire builders (in the way Britain once was, for example). However--we also allowed slavery in our "free" country for many many years, and were reluctant to let it go, mainly for economic reasons. The South claimed they would be financially ruined without it. But we had slavery for such a long time--and Blacks were legally second-class citizens for so long--that the inherent racism of slavery has become embedded in the narrative. How can a "free" country also have a "slave" mentality?

I wasn't sure I was convinced by his thesis until Obama was elected President. As I've said before, this brought out the ugly American narrative in all of its horror. Basically, the "normal" American citizen is white, Christian (Protestant), wealthy, and straight. America is for these people, and these people alone, according to the narrative. Everyone else is just a parasite on the system. If you are poor, it's because you don't work hard (Protestant work ethic twisted). Non-whites are poor because they don't work hard, and they want to murder and rob the good white Christian families. Arabs and Muslims have joined this narrative since 9-11. If you are a Muslim in government, you want to impose Sharia law on all of us. Capitalism is also part of the narrative, and the "dime-novel" mentality that anyone can become filthy rich if they work hard enough. Therefore, any attempt by the government to have social programs smacks of "fascism" and "Nazism". A bastardized version of Christianity completes the narrative, and branches of it are taken up by fundamentalists who believe we are in the end times and should start a revolution against the "immorality" of the United States--with things like homosexuality and abortion rights on top of their hit list, but they've also managed to extend it to the poor and needy. Yes, that's right--being Christian is no longer about helping the poor. God is obviously rewarding the rich, and it's every man for himself.

Why Obama, you might ask? Because he's a Black man. He doesn't fit the "normal" model of the President. The fact that he is also in favor of helping those in need now makes him suspicious--he's not a capitalist, he's a "socialist", which they equate with "Nazism" (even though European socialism isn't remotely like Nazism, nor is the United States becoming socialist). Also not coincidental is that people want to associate him with the "enemy" religion of Islam. It also reminds us that our slavery heritage, and its later treatment of Blacks as second-class citizens, has not left the national mentality--it has become unconscious, which makes it more dangerous.

All of this narrative is obviously and patently false. But it's clear that people believe it, and take it as the "norm". The Tea Party would not have gained traction, nor would people like Michelle Bachmann or Sarah Palin be taken seriously as candidates for President if this narrative wasn't embedded in our national consciousness. This is not to say everyone follows this narrative--it seems to be largely in the "red" states (which, again not coincidentally, were the former slave-holding states for the most part). But many conservatives in the North have jumped on the bandwagon as well, drinking the Kool-Aid given freely by Fox News. The people who believe this narrative aren't necessarily "stupid"--they're just unaware how afraid they are of anything outside the narrative. They may not even be aware that it's their narrative.

Jimmy Kimmel's satirical take on Michelle Bachmann is a pretty good take on at least part of the "narrative" in all its absurdity:

I could talk about having "awareness" of our hidden assumptions, but I think Bertrand Russell makes the point better than I do:

I'm not even going to apologize for soapboxing this time. Apparently most of America is sick of this crap too:

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Stranger

2011-07-24T08:01:00.000-04:00

I was shocked to read about the tragedy in Oslo and nearby Utoeya. Norway is not a country you associate with violence. Their stiffest penalty under the law is 21 years in prison. The worst that police usually contend with are breaking up drunken brawls. The kind of massacre that went on there doesn't seem possible, as though we will all wake up and find it was just a disturbing dream.

In reading the initial news reports, there was an immediate suspicion of "al-Qaeda" terrorism. Maybe that wasn't an unreasonable assumption, given that at least some of the native population was not pleased about the influx of Muslim immigrants, and there have been conflicts about Muslim religious laws versus the laws of the country throughout all of the Netherlands. However, in a twist of fate, the person responsible was not a Muslim, not associated with al-Qaeda--he was, in fact, anti-Muslim, and anti-immigration. You would not look at the suspect's photo and think "terrorist". That should give us reason to pause.

I recall growing up, that I would hear at home and in school about "talking to strangers". Strangers who lure you into their car and then take you away and kill you, or whatever they're supposed to do. People who would put razor blades in Halloween candy. If you believed the movies they showed you, and the lectures in class, anyone who you didn't know, especially if they were "different" or appeared "shifty", clearly fell into this category and were criminals. Similarly, there were assumptions about certain "neighborhoods". To this day, I am continually amazed at the unawareness about perceptions of "otherness". I think of older family members, former co-workers, and others who I know and deal with who work side by side with others in diverse environments every day, with no conflict. Yet, you will still hear them make statements like, "That used to be a good neighborhood until the blacks moved in." And there's absolutely no awareness of the racism of that statement, no understanding that it's not the "blacks" that make a neighborhood unsafe, it's usually the economic and social conditions of the area. We're not talking about neo-Nazis; we're talking about your average nice old man or lady who has lived his or her life in a suburban neighborhood in a very socially "normal" way.

In spite of all this negative mythology, the facts are quite different. It is incredibly unlikely that strangers are waiting around corners to grab you. Statistics show that most child abductions are not committed by strangers, they're committed by family members, friends, or neighbors. Your kid isn't dumb enough to get in a car with a stranger; they are likely to get into a car with someone they know, and think they can trust. Similarly, just as much crime occurs among the "privileged white" segment of society. They're also more likely to be the ones buying drugs; after all, they have the money for it. Boredom plus money usually equals trouble in the adolescent set.

Back to Norway. The latest "outsider" group has been the Muslims. After 9/11, the cultural myth suggested that every Muslim was suspect, they were all extremists by definition and operatives for al-Qaeda. If you don't believe that, you just have to recall all the nonsense and uproar over the "Ground Zero Mosque" or the assumption that President Obama was really a Muslim. (Not that it matters if he really was, but that was something usually included in a laundry list of negatives by his opponents). Again, the fact is that Islam is not a violent religion, and its adherents are not all extremists. In fact, the overwhelming majority are not extremists. Yes, there are violent extremist cells that should be monitored, and are being monitored. But the attacks on Norway show it's not just those who are Muslim with extremist views. It's also those who profess to be Christian.

There is a lot of Christian extremism out there. The most violent of them tend to be associated with white supremacist groups or ideologies. It is clear that these groups do not represent the whole of Christianity, or even the Christian message. But--if you are a Christian--do you want people to look at the Norway events and assume that all Christians are terrorists? The young man responsible was described as being a fundamentalist Christian with right-wing ideologies. And--he was Norwegian. He was one of their own, not a foreign national. (Incidentally--another report says he was a freemason. I don't know which version is true, but I can similarly imagine the ignorant outpouring against "secret societies", and "occultism" that will ensue if that proves to be true).

This case has something in common with the shooting of Gabrielle Giffords; in both cases, the people involved were psychotic. I don't know what the diagnosis will prove to be for Anders Breivik, but there has to be a certain amount of blind paranoia and delusion to take the ideologies he espoused and take them to that extreme. There is a component of humanness missing there, that is a trademark of the sociopath. In short--these are individuals who are sick. And--when these kinds of atrocities happen, it usually centers around an individual who is mentally sick. It has everything to do with the person, and nothing to do with the group they belong to, unless the group openly espouses violence. And still--you can't take the characteristics of that group and apply that to everyone with the same characteristic (e.g., saying Al-Qaeda is made up of Muslims, therefore all Muslims espouse the views of al-Qaeda).

We tend to want to blame groups in such cases, as the attack of the psychotic is so random, so unexpected, it preys upon our worst fears. We start to study the psychotic individual, and his characteristics, and our sense of self-protection makes us wary of others with similar characteristics. We think we can protect ourselves from such future events in this way. But it is a fear response; it does not represent the reality, and usually creates more conflict and violence.

There are components of this that make me think of the "critical thinking" discussion occurring online where I teach, which I still plan to address. For now--just remember those who are suffering in Norway, who have lost loved ones, have been injured, or are traumatized from being there. It's a sobering reminder of how one person can do so much damage, and also of the sad fact that so much good could have been done with that passion instead. Humans have great potential for both.

Other

2011-07-21T05:06:00.000-04:00

It is 3 am, and there are piles of books all over my bedroom floor. I have finally finished a draft proposal for a textbook, which has taken me much longer than expected due to publisher submission requirements. The heat index is supposed to hit 105 degrees today, so I have turned on the air conditioners already to cool the house down before I go to work. I am conscious, but cognizance comes slowly.

While I am pleased with this writing milestone, it is only a beginning, and I still have 3 articles to reformat and write abstracts for in at least one other language besides English. In addition, I have to put a proposal together for my fiction collection as well. So, life has been busy, and needless to say, blogging has fallen by the wayside.

During my researching binge this past week, I stopped in a restaurant very near to the library where I was working to get some dinner. For some reason it seemed there were a lot of children in the restaurant that evening. I think five or six of them belonged to a blonde woman who appeared to be in a Xanax-induced haze. They swarmed the area around their table like vengeful locusts, while she was the picture of Stillness, staring into space with perfect detachment, blissfully unaware of her brood. But the locusts could not compete with the wailing I heard two tables over. Turning around, I saw an Indian family--a young woman, her daughter, her mother or mother-in-law, and her baby son. It was the latter who was wailing like a goete. I expected spirits to appear from the underworld momentarily.

Seeing the family suddenly jarred my memory with a thought. I recalled being in Hindu temples, and at pujas, and the way I was treated when I walked in, looking decidedly out of place in a sea of colorful saris, chanting and ringing of bells. Even when I am dressed accordingly, I still look out of place. I remember sitting for Shiva puja, and an older Indian gentleman leaned over to me. He said, "I don't mean to sound rude when I say this, but--what are you doing here? Are you Hindu?" "Yes," I replied. "Ah. Then that would be a good reason for you to be here." He then asked me many questions about why I would embrace Hinduism, which is what usually happens if I appear in such places. There is a certain fascination that a "foreigner" would be interested in their religion. They are not unwelcoming, just curious.

"Otherness" is usually associated with a kind of xenophobia--a suspicion of strangers. The Devil is always the stranger who sweeps into town, and people seek to eject him and protect themselves. I have discovered, however, that there is a strange kind of reverse discrimination that goes on in many cases. When I mingle with traditional Indian families, they always ask if I am married. When I say I am divorced, they nod and say, "Are you going to get married again?" I tell them probably not. They will then nod vigorously, "ah well, that is good then." By contrast--I have Indian friends who are divorced. When they enter these communities, they are shunned like lepers. I noted this discrepancy to a friend of mine, who replied, "No offense when I say this, but it's because you are white. They worship white people." She was not the only one to tell me this. A friend's daughter in Dubai told me that I should go there--it would be easy for me as a white American to get work. It was the natives and Indians who were shunned for the high-paying jobs.

So, it is a case of the foreigners having elevated or exceptional status in the community. It is as though a deity has swept in, and is exempt from the normal social rules. I wonder why that is the case. Perhaps the long-standing effects of British colonialism? I didn't think that was too well received, though I've also been told that British-style education and culture is the norm in parts of India; the British are gone, but their cultural impact remains. It may be a financial thing as well--there might be an assumption that white Americans are wealthy. I don't really know. But I find it peculiar, just as I find their treatment of their own communities peculiar at times. But human nature is the same regardless of nationality.

I finished grading for my summer course, and I'm starting to notice a new trend, not specifically with these students, but over all of my classes. There are a rising number of students who are clearly very smart, but believe they can pass a course without doing any of the work or reading. They are cultivating the art of bullshit. I have to confess that this is a useful skill in the world; no one knows everything, and sometimes you have to appear as though you know. So, you "bullshit", and some people are more convincing at it than others. Politics is a career based entirely on bullshit. So is television journalism. Unfortunately for these students, I don't do "bullshit". Call us elitist if you will, but in the academic world, I need to see that you understand what I've taken the time to teach you. Even if you just understand a little.

In checking my faculty e-mail, I noticed that there was a long thread of discussion about teaching critical thinking to students, and how you know you've done it. I'm still making my way through the discussion, which is quite interesting.

But now, it is time to go to work, and brave the heat, humidity, and bloodthirsty bugs outside. I'll write on critical thinking tomorrow if I haven't melted or been drained of all my blood.

Know

2011-07-10T04:56:00.001-04:00

I have been spending my "relax" time doing something not very relaxing--working on a textbook proposal. Textbook proposals are a lot of work--not only do you have to do your market research in terms of other similar texts, but you need to put together sample chapters (some publishers only want one, most want three--the one I'm querying wants three), and you have to have other peripheral documents like a curriculum vitae (fancy term for resume) and a list of potential reviewers. None of this is unreasonable, but it is a lot of work, especially considering that most publishers don't want you to query them with a finished product. They usually want to be involved in the process.

Writing the chapters has been tough, because I am limited in the amount of sources I have available in my home library. For all the books I have in this house, there are some topics where my holdings are sparse. Having most of the academic libraries around here closed or on limited summer hours doesn't help, especially since I have to write in between taking care of my household tasks, and I have to work full-time during the week. Since I am not writing the final product, I just want to give them an idea, but I also don't want to over-rely on one text, or inadvertently regurgitate the work of another author. This is especially true in cases where I only know a little bit about the person I'm writing about, or when I've only had access to a few of their writings.

This raised a question in my mind--how much "knowledge" of a topic is enough? What makes you an "expert"?

On some grand scale, we never really "know" anything. There is the old saying that a wise man knows that he does not know. Much of the method of Socrates demonstrated this fact; he would question the "experts" to get to the root of a subject, only to find that they really didn't know very much at all. This made him decidedly unpopular, but it's an ugly fact for the ego--there is only so much that you know.

For every book I've read on the subject I'm working on, there are probably ten I haven't read. My reading list could fill a football stadium right now. And the books I have read already might come close to filling a football stadium. Compared to other scholars, I start to wonder if I've read the "right" books. I comfort myself with the notion that other scholars must do this as well.

Pierre Bayard wrote a book that I actually read a few years ago, entitled, "How to Talk About Books You've Never Read". He notes that the great writer Umberto Eco has said that you don't even have to hold a book in your hands if you pay attention to what others have said about it. I'm sure a lot of this goes on in literary circles. In any event, Bayard argues that we don't read books to memorize their content, and we certainly can't read everything that's out there. We should understand a book's place in our library, as the books we choose speak more about ourselves than about the book, its author, or the author's intent.

Maybe this says a lot about the acquisition of "knowledge". We seek to know about things that tell us about ourselves. We become passionately interested in topics because they relate to our own inner life, the thing that we know the best. If this is the case, then "expertise" tells us more about the expert than about his or her subject. This makes learning much more subjective rather than objective. There isn't a single person out there reading this (or not) who hasn't had to slog their way through some assigned text that they have no interest in. In such cases, nothing is ever remembered about the book--except the title, maybe a line here or there--and I would bet those lines are remembered because they were mentioned by a professor in class.

As a professor, I want everyone to be interested in my subject, and to make it interesting. But, to use the old expression, we can't all "tap dance and spit nickels" for our classes. Even a basic understanding of many subjects requires effort on the part of students outside the lecture hall (and a fair amount of attention inside). And what I find fascinating someone else might find utterly boring. And vice versa.

There has been an unpleasant trend in universities in recent years, allowing the students to grade the professor. While there are some truly awful professors out there, I would say that overall this is a huge mistake. Students will declare a class "bad" because it was "too hard" or "not interesting enough". Yet you hear many stories about how years later, the person suddenly realizes the value of the class. In short--students don't know enough to know whether a professor is good or not, unless the professor really falls down on the job.

Which brings up another point--a lot of the time, when asked to give presentations or lectures, the presenter will be nervous that they'll come across sounding stupid or foolish. The fact is that most of the time, the audience knows little or nothing about the topic, and anything known by the presenter comes across as a world of knowledge. It's like the phenomenon surrounding parents and computers. Even if I only know a little about computers, the first time I figure out a problem on my mother's machine, I am suddenly an "expert", and will receive a call about every difficulty she is having with the Internet, with her Excel spreadsheets, with her e-mail. Usually they're questions I can't answer until I come over and look at it. This is because the knowledge I have is not a memorization of every program--it's a basic knowledge of how the computer works.

That's probably true in scholarship as well. I once heard that in library science, 80% of peer reviewed articles were basically re-writes of other studies; very little of it was original material. People will write what they have to for tenure, and they'll likely stick to something "safe" (something already well researched). So, if you're familiar with core readings, you don't need to know all of the peripheral material to get by.

In any event--I have to remind myself that there's no need to scale Mount Everest, knowledge-wise. Almost no one else has done it, either.

Early

2011-07-09T05:05:00.000-04:00

I've mentioned before that my cat has a habit of waking me up at 4 am. He's now decided that he wants to eat at 3 am, and my refusal to feed him until at least 4 means that the 3:00 hour is a decidedly unsettled one, full of yowling, pawing, and being frequently nuzzled by a wet cat nose. He's going to be awfully traumatized when I go away for 2 weeks to the UK. My neighbor won't feed him until at least 8 am.

In any event, I don't know yet whether these early feline wake-ups are a curse or a blessing. I'd like to have a full night's sleep, but I also find that early morning is the best writing time for me. Last year I wrote about a Sylvia Plath documentary from the Voices and Visions series. In the documentary, A. Alvarez mentioned the last year's of Plath's life, when she was writing intensely. He said she would get up at 3 or 4 in the morning, work until the kids got up--and then she was a Mum, looking after the kids, and looking after the house. By nighttime, she was likely too exhausted to write anything. In this scene in the documentary, you see a woman portraying Plath, opening her shutters to a London sunrise, looking over the rooftops, the outside sounds dominated by deliverymen making early morning deliveries. The woman glances out the window, then picks up her tea, and heads for her typewriter. I was reminded of this scene once when I was staying in an old Bloomsbury hotel in London. I opened the curtains at around 5 in the morning in late July, and I had this view of the London rooftops with all of the pastels of an impending sunrise. I looked down, and there were very few people about--just trucks making deliveries. And, I was sitting there with my tea, taking in the morning air. While I would never compare myself to Sylvia Plath in a literary sense, I can definitely understand the charm of those early hours looking over the city, and why one would want to write at those hours.

Besides the atmosphere, the other thing about early mornings is that I've usually just woken up from REM sleep. This means that I'm fresh from dreaming, and my mind is filled with those thoughts that occur before the conscious ego has entirely taken over. Lately my dreams have been coming from the collective rather than the personal unconscious. It may be because of daytime conscious thoughts--I've finished my fiction series reflecting on various archetypes, and I've been confronted with both the Child and the Trickster archetypes in dreams. I also had an insight about a character that I created years ago--back in the mid-1980s. This character doesn't appear in any of my published writings; she is the focus of a novel I've been writing for some time, and a character like her is in the story "Animus". While the story of this character is not my story by any means, I recognize that the character's myth is also one of my own driving myths.

"Myth" is a frequently misunderstood term. I sometimes use the word "narrative" instead. I remember a conversation in New York with John Foxx during the same London trip mentioned above, when he told me there was nothing "mythical" about his work. This is because he and I are not using the same definition of myth. The work of the writer and the artist is by definition "mythical"--that work is storytelling work. Whatever imagery is used, with paint, words, photos, music--some narrative is being related. Much is made in literary theory about "intent"--there is the author's intent, and then there's how readers interpret a work. In short, the author created the piece with his or her own unconscious myth, and others viewing, hearing, or reading the piece will relate it to their own unconscious myth. Or, I should say, one myth of our many myths.

I don't want to get into the story of my character here, as it is complex. But the driving myth comes from the personal unconscious. While I did not have a perfect childhood, it was still a very imaginative one. I held onto it as long as I could. Then one day, I woke up, and everything was different. The kind of play I engaged in was suddenly childish, and I found myself with romantic feelings. This literally happened in one night. I just woke up in the morning, and this is how I felt. Life completely changed after that, and while I could never go back to being a "child", I also didn't like adolescence. Love was a hurtful thing, frequently unrequited, and it was against a backdrop of adolescent social drama. The worst part is that it was largely unavoidable--young hormones do not yield to being tamed. The myth started then, and it has to do with being thrust into the maelstrom of life without any warning or control. Because romantic love was wrapped up in all of this, that has gotten a decidedly unfavorable review from me. There is a sense of past happiness decimated, and the need to stoically keep moving forward, because going backward is impossible.

Of course, rationally I know that all of this upheaval was necessary. One doesn't stay in a single phase of life forever. But the unconscious still plays it out as a betrayal on the part of life--on the part of "God", on the part of society. And therefore, all of the above are viewed with polite suspicion.

I'm not interested in turning this into a personal therapy session, so I think that's enough said. But it is a pretty good illustration of how our unconscious stories drive our life decisions, and our creative output as well.

Noise

2011-07-05T17:24:00.001-04:00

There was almost no one on the road when I drove to work this morning. This afternoon, I could only assume one of 3 things:

1. Everyone got over their 4th of July hangover at the same time and hit the road
2. Schools reopened early and no one told me
3. There is some major natural disaster headed our way, and everyone is stocking up on canned goods in anticipation

Seriously, there was an obscene amount of traffic driving home--unusual for highways not pointing at the Jersey Shore in the summer. If you're from New Jersey, you don't go "to the beach", you go "down the Shore". And pretty much everyone is down the Shore at this time of year. I live 2 hours from the Shore, so it's usually dead around here in the summer, except for people swimming in the local reservoirs. Which is fine with me.

I was out with a friend the other day who wondered why you can't walk into a bar or eating establishment and not have music blaring. Come to think of it, you can't go anywhere and not have music blaring--usually music anyone over 30 would hate. There was some psychological study done (there always is), that suggested that loud music causes people to drink more, which is why bars are always blaring loud music. That doesn't work for people like me, and I don't think I'm alone. So, for you entrepreneurs, here's a new get-rich-quick scheme--quiet restaurants.

I remember hating every minute of my wedding reception, even though it was very nicely done. My guests loved it, because we chose to not have loud music blaring. Some of the people invited hadn't seen each other in years. They didn't want to shout over some obnoxious band or DJ. If I ever had to plan such an occasion again, that is something I would not change.

I realize I'm far more sensitive to noise than I used to be. Mind you, I've always been a fan of hardcore punk and thrash--you would think that I'd love loud music. But I don't consider that noise. Unless I'm trying to write, in which case, it's a distraction--but it's still not noise. If there was one thing I could say for the family with 8 million kids that moved out this past year--at least their teenage boys were into the Misfits. I could handle that kind of interruption during the day. In general though, I like things quiet, which is why I listen to more ambient music these days, if I listen to anything at all. Or, I watch re-runs of my favorite TV shows; I don't have to pay attention because I've already seen them.

My big problem with music in public places is that I usually like to go out, have a meal, and either read a book or think about my writing. In spite of meditation, it's really hard to think or focus when you have loud music blaring around you. I wouldn't even mind if it was classical music, played softly. Not soft rock--soft rock is an abomination to the human race.

In addition to having my nerves rubbed raw by loud contemporary music, I really hate soft rock and all the sentiment that goes with it. It sounds terrible, but I find myself cringing at words like love, light, healing, angels, etc.--just as I am irritated by men who sing, in the immortal words of Dave Barry, like they are "having their prostate examined by Captain Hook." I'm not moved by the music of "soulful" women either--I have visions of turning a fire hose on them full blast. Whether it be some New Agey light thing or a smarmy love song about how the guy knows he has cheated on her a billion times but now he knows he loves her and it's forever, I can't help but feeling like vomiting in the best case scenario. (Worst case scenario--I want to punch the person until they stop talking or singing). It's like eating massive amounts of raw sugar--it's sickening. If I'm subjected, for example, to a group like Air Supply, or perhaps to Midge Ure's Ultravox, I feel like I need to listen to Minor Threat or DRI stat.

I don't know if I've become a cynical and crabby old lady, or if I'm just good at calling BS when I see it. I don't mind heartfelt emotion, but "heartfelt" is the key word--this isn't heartfelt, it's totally phony. There's something to be said for subtlety.

On a totally different note, in your Cthulhu moment of the day, here are Cthulhu slippers. These are almost as good as Mental Floss' Freudian slippers.

And for the heck of it, because it's my blog--here's a video of a cat ruining someone else's video. Your welcome.

Independence Day Post: Eyes

2011-07-04T04:16:00.003-04:00

It's 3:00 in the morning. I'm wondering why I'm awake, but then I realized that I fell asleep around 6:30. Rather lame, I know, but I have been ridiculously exhausted from non-stop writing, keeping up with teaching an online class, and several trips to New York. (Going to New York wears me out, because it's a minimum 3 hours of travel each way, mainly because of train schedules). It is the 4th of July, and I can hear music outside. There has been music outside since yesterday afternoon, all of it crappy. I've had the fans in the house on full blast, just to drown it out.

I checked messages on the phone I never answer. Most new messages were hang-ups, but one was a woman's voice saying: "Yes--no. It's just that he's come to himself." Then she hung up. I'm pleased to hear it. Everyone should come to themselves eventually.

My archetype story collection is now finished, and I will be shopping for a publisher this summer. I'm now working on a different book proposal, but I won't bore you with the details. Needless to say, blogging has fallen behind. It's amazing how difficult ordinary things become when you go on a writing binge. Stuff like, "remember to pick up butter at the store" somehow get forgotten, even when it's written on a piece of paper in front of you. I keep wanting to call various friends, and my sister, but I realize that I am in no condition for normal conversation.

Added to the mix--John Foxx is now doing a UK tour in October. There are 8 dates in the UK, and one festival date in Poland. The cities are: Leamington Spa, Bristol, Manchester, Glasgow, York, Liverpool, and 2 London dates. The John Foxx and the Maths page has more info--that, and the Facebook page has the most up to date info with links at the moment. Metamatic should have an update soon as well. In any case--I have been scrounging to find money for tickets, as I am going to all 8 shows. (Not to Poland...I hate festivals, and I don't speak Polish).

I look at myself in the mirror, and notice that my eyes are red, and I haven't even been drinking. It's actually the kind of red that says "Hi, I have allergies, probably to the cat that sleeps under my arm all night."

They say that eyes are the windows to the soul. I find that when I look into someone's eyes, I get some kind of associative picture. For example, when I look into the eyes of Michelle Bachmann, I see this:

Her campaign slogan is "Saying what conservatives have really been thinking." I think that's a fair statement. They all seem like deluded, raging lunatics with no regard for humanity these days. I don't think conservatives were always like that--and maybe all conservatives aren't. But the ones that aren't seem to be invisible.

When I look into the eyes of Glenn Beck, I see this:

Glenn Beck is finally off the air--apparently his deranged rantings are causing Fox News to lose too much money. They wouldn't drop him because of deranged rantings--that's most of their programming. But Glenn sort of "jumped the shark", I guess. At any rate, these two sort of prove that eyes are not just windows to the soul, they are sometimes a view of evil, in the Arthur Machen sense. There's something dreadfully unnatural about both of them.

Speaking of eyes--here are 2 creepy sites--

Chicks With Steve Buscemi Eyes

Muppets With People Eyes

I don't know why these sites are so profoundly disturbing, but it goes to show you how much impact eyes have on your impression of someone.

For an entirely different (and hilarious) kind of disturbing--I bring you a 5-foot metal chicken, courtesy of the Bloggess. (If you are not already aware of this site, add it to your RSS feeds immediately. You can also follow her on Twitter at username TheBloggess).

And--speaking of RSS--I'd better go now and catch up on the 2000+ feeds that must be waiting for me, as I haven't looked at them in a week. Happy Independence Day, for those of you in the United States. Remember that we are supposed to be a democracy, not an oligarchy. So, don't vote Republican in 2012 if you want it to stay that way, and don't stand for the kind of nonsense going on in Congress right now (e.g., no taxes for big corporations or the uber-rich, while at the same time trying to eliminate programs like Medicare). Democracy requires vigilance. And--a touch of socialism. Which has to do with looking out for the welfare of people, not Soviet or Nazi-style communism or fascism.

On the Subject of Compassion

2011-06-25T07:27:00.004-04:00

This past Thursday, I heard a lecture given by writer and religious historian Karen Armstrong. It was the first in a series of lectures in honor of Bishop John Shelby Spong, who was also present at the event. I am teaching my religion class right now, and I was hoping that I'd learn something from Karen that I could bring back to my students, especially when we got to the discussion of interfaith dialogue.

I realize that Karen was speaking for a more general audience, but I felt the lecture was a bit too generic. A lot of it was the same discussion of learning mutual respect and having compassion. She mentioned that as part of a TED prize she had won, she was going from city to city and country to country, trying to get them to buy in to a contract of compassion. She said she tended to be cynical about such things, but was really surprised and hopeful at the response.

I say good for Karen for initiating positive steps towards mutual respect among humans. However, I am not sure I agree with her vision of compassion. Karen has a new book out, a sort of 12-step program to becoming compassionate. She went over 3 of the steps in the lecture. She started off rightly enough in my opinion, by stating that compassion is not equal to pity. There is a tendency to believe that these terms are synonymous, and they are not. Compassion accepts and respects other humans as they are; pity "feels sorry for them" because they are not as wonderful as you are. Compassion does not judge.

It was her description of judgment that struck a discordant note with me. She suggests that we make statements and judgments about others in order to feel superior ourselves. In some cases, that might be true. Insecure people tend to take the world personally, and the actions of others are clearly an offense in their mind because of the other person's obvious character flaw. But Karen misses the point of the everyday judgments that people make. When people act in ways that are disturbing or inconsiderate, we often seek to find a reason for it. We don't actually want to believe the other person is just a jerk. We look at other patterns in their behavior relative to others and say, "Suzie forgets to call because she obviously can't control all the stuff she has going on in her life" (for example). If we feel positively towards people, we tend to make excuses for them. If we feel negatively towards them, we may be less forgiving. The truth probably lies somewhere in between. In the end, all of us do things that are annoying to others. I agree with her that you should detach from a tendency to demonize others because of that.

In addition, her ideas about compassion don't address personal boundaries. Perhaps she addresses this in her book, but she didn't in the lecture. Standing at the pulpit chastising people for "turning a blind eye to those who are really crying out" just perpetuates an already vicious circle. For instance--Person A may cry to me about their personal problems. Now, as humans, our first instinct would be to want to help. Person A may be describing real problems, but Person A may also be what you could call a "perpetual victim". They constantly get themselves into bad situations and use high drama to manipulate others into cleaning up for them. Now, maybe you've helped Person A, and you've gotten screwed--you gave an inch, they took a mile. The bottom line is that you don't help Person A by giving them money or other resources. You help Person A by saying, "oh well, best of luck" and letting them figure it out on their own. Person A may possibly need therapy, but that really should not be your concern.

The vicious circle comes in, because when we refuse to help, we feel guilty. To others, we may look cold and heartless. This doesn't only happen with people with fiscal or emotional problems--it may also be someone trying to wedge their way into your private life, when you're really not comfortable having them there. If you tell them to get lost, you look like a mean and heartless person. But you have a right to set boundaries--and you have a right to expect others to respect them. AND--you have a right to expect that others will be accountable for themselves. If someone is disabled, or otherwise unable to do some particular thing, that is a different story. But the examples I can think of involve perfectly healthy and capable individuals.

Perhaps it was because Karen was giving a general lecture to the group that she didn't get into these nuances. But I don't like the generalization that compassion always involves breaking down personal barriers. You may want to be friendly to everyone in a crime-ridden neighborhood, but it doesn't hurt to have your martial arts skills sharpened just in case. There is a very human need for self-preservation.

An article appeared shortly before Karen's lecture on "unconditional love without caring". The phrasing is odd, but the gist of the article is that one should not be attached to outcomes. We let other people become what they need to be, even if that means letting them drop into utter failure. Trying to control outcomes is bad enough in our own lives--it's certainly not appreciated by others if we do it to them, no matter how well intentioned. Sometimes compassion involves reminding someone that they have enough brains to figure something out on their own.

On the whole, I think Karen's message is important, and compassion is something too often missing these days, especially in extreme versions of religion. But in order to be compassionate, we have to understand the limitations and boundaries of ourselves and others. Otherwise, the move towards compassion is an empty one--it is what we're "supposed" to do, but it ends up being done with resentment. The only way to really care is to not care so much. If you are a religious person, you might better understand this as "letting God do the caring about outcomes".

Garden Ganeshas

2011-06-20T06:50:00.000-04:00

I was out walking with a friend after breakfast on Sunday. As we walked along a bicycle path, she suddenly pointed to my right. "There's a Ganesha over there!" We walked over to take a look. A path had been created through a small clearing in the trees, and there were actually 2 Ganeshas, a Hanuman, and a couple of broken Devis. Beyond this was a parking lot, and a garden center, which had a whole display of statues--Ganeshas, Devis, Buddhas, and others.

We walked back to the path, and my friend dusted off the two Ganeshas. "This is all very bad luck. They should not put these outside." She went on to tell me about a temple created by a Western couple, that everyone said was amazing. She had been to a program at this temple, which had a Ganesha "installed" by the man's guru, who she said was just an Indian priest. (In case you don't know--it is one thing to have a statue of a deity, it is another thing to "install" it. Installation means "establishing life", and making it a real object for temple worship). She talked about a Swami that she had discussed this with--he said that the temple was tended to, but anyone who visited could do the rituals. He shrugged and said, "well, it's better for them to do that than to hang out in bars." She then went on to discuss groups that allow anyone to chant archanas, which she said would have ill effects. (While I don't entirely agree, I have heard really awful recitations of archana that really destroy the devotional mood). Things have to be done "correctly". I thought this was odd, since she had just been discussing her annoyance with traditions about women and holy rituals and places.

Later, I thought more about what she said, and I realized that I totally disagree with her. I couldn't put my finger on what I found wrong with her argument at first, but then I realized that it was a very Western way of thinking. Deity should not be in Nature--Nature is inferior and impure, and only very special "pure" people are capable of doing the rituals. I understand that this is her tradition--and perhaps taught as regular Hindu doctrine--but it's crap, as far as I'm concerned. I am sure that rituals performed in this atmosphere of reverence and "purity" are very effective. I also understand that those who have given up worldly life often feel pained or weighed down by "worldly" modes of worship. I think of Sri Ramakrishna and his wife, Sarada Devi, who cried out in pain if a devotee touched their feet. They were not living a "human" life, and were acutely aware of the weight of worldly living.

However--to say that a deity image should not be in nature is to relegate nature to an inferior status, and make the god into something "out there", something of which we are unworthy. That is completely contrary to Eastern thought. Everyone is treated with respect because everyone--and everything--is a manifestation of the Divine. This is monism, not monotheism. Not everyone does treat others with respect, but that is because of ignorance--they have forgotten their divine status, and that of others.

With regard to chanting--yes, I realize that the proper intonation of the words creates a certain vibration designed to raise awareness. However--I think of a footnote I read in the "Secret of the Golden Flower". A man overheard a monk chanting his mantra, and decided to chant it as well. However, he was saying it incorrectly, and ended up chanting "I am the latrine". However, the footnote states, "he chanted 'I am the latrine' over and over until he achieved enlightenment." Just because it is not the traditional way doesn't mean it can't work or doesn't work. Similarly, Amma has said that a mother does not reject a child's offering of a drawing because it's not a technical artistic masterpiece.

Ritual is psychological, and to believe that it "must" be done a certain way is to be attached to the ritual rather than its effect. It probably has the maximum psychological effect if one does it exactly as tradition records it, but it isn't necessary. Notions of purity and sanctity, while they have value, can also end up being alienating. The goal is to unite, not to separate. If someone is shooed away from practice because it's not "traditional" enough and therefore "bad luck", you will have created the "bad luck" by creating a separation from the "divine".

We also tend to forget that rituals are man-made, no matter how well-crafted or inspired. While they point towards something beyond the material, they are still nothing more than the material. All religions agree that on some fundamental level there is only Void--there is a No-Thingness, a state that cannot be described or comprehended through images. Out of that Void worlds are created, but they are illusory because they are temporal. The rituals, writings, experiences, and beliefs that anyone may have and subscribe to are going to be as individual as their own creation of the world via their perceptions. At a time when there was one community shaman, and the community acted as a unit, it may have been appropriate to say that there was only one way to do things. In the modern world--which focuses on the individual development towards unity rather than everyone acting as a unit--there are as many ways to do things as there are people. And if "God" isn't everywhere--especially if you are a Hindu or Buddhist--then "God" is nowhere at all.

For Example, Miscellaneous

2011-06-19T20:04:00.001-04:00

(Post title stolen from a Dilbert cartoon).

A quick announcement--another of my archetype stories, "Umbra", will be appearing in Death Head Grin magazine, September issue. Details to follow when I have them.

Last night was once again a night full of strange dreams. Unwanted weddings (not mine), perverted priests, and strange dramas played out by people I was close to years ago. Also appearing in last night's dream was Amma, my guru. I have not dreamed of her in a long time--probably not in years. They say that a dream of Amma means she is thinking of you. After considering all the dream content, I think Amma is somehow aware of my pressure-cooker status. I have a lot to accomplish, I feel I don't have much time in which to accomplish it--and there are still many roadblocks. I'm not notorious for having a lot of patience with roadblocks--once I'm revved up and get going, I don't have any brakes--it's go, go, go at 100 miles per hour. Braking requires an emergency brake, and I don't like that. It makes me cranky, to say the least. And I think the guru has appeared to say, "Hey, chill out. It's all good, you'll get to where you're going."

Today is Father's Day, and my father's birthday was this past week as well. He is 80 years old this year, which seems really strange. He was recently diagnosed with Parkinson's Disease, which my grandmother also had. (Really hoping I inherited my Mom's genetics on this one). On Saturday he helped me fix the fence in my yard, and he was in pretty good shape. My mother usually comes along to "supervise", but she wasn't there today. I noted that he finished the job without supervision, and he grunted. "Your mother has all these projects for me at home. I told her she was a very ambitious person."

I had a lot more that I wanted to do this weekend, but I went shopping instead. Not the smartest thing, given that I'm not flush right now with cash, and I really want to save money. Of course, every bit of extra money I've made in the last 2 months has had to go elsewhere--to a sick cat, and now to a sick car. And there are some things I desperately need, so I might as well quit penny-pinching. That extra bit of money is not going to sort everything out.

I can't complain, though--Friday and Saturday were two days of amazing synchronicity. I'd recently written some articles that I asked a friend to review for clarity. I know he's busy, so I didn't want to rush him. On Friday I thought, hmm, it would be nice to revise those articles, but I have to wait. Then, I opened my e-mail, and there were the comments. Similarly--I was wondering what John Foxx was up to for the rest of the year, as I would like to make some travel and financial plans for the rest of the year. On Saturday, I had a call with someone out of the blue who answered those questions. And--even better--what I was told coincided perfectly with what I'd already decided on. (No, I can't say anything--what I've been told hasn't been officially announced or confirmed. Sorry about that. All I can say is what Steve Malins said already--some exciting announcements coming soon.)

I've received several communications in the last couple of weeks, and a few of them said, "Hope your well." I was puzzled, because I don't have a well. I have city water (city being a relative term out here). My neighbor has a well, but it's purely for decoration. I also don't know why anyone would "hope" my well--maybe they mean "wish", in which case, see the sentence before the last one. For anyone else, I recommend this blurb from the Oatmeal.

Speaking of recommendations, here is a short film take on H.P. Lovecraft's "At the Mountains of Madness" by Cthulhu Films. Thanks to Grim Reviews for posting:

OK, it's been a long weekend, and I'm going to bed. If you're lonely, here's a friend for you, courtesy of the Found Footage Festival.

Semi-Disturbed

2011-06-12T08:26:00.004-04:00

I'm short on cash these days, but I still decided to hit one of my favorite restaurants for lunch after a long drive to New Jersey's illustrious capital, Trenton, to drop off some items at their huge Goodwill center. (OK, it's technically in Ewing, but that's really a Trenton neighborhood. This part sure looks like it, too).

I'm acquainted with a couple of the waiters and waitresses there. If you recall my blog posting from a couple of years ago, The Guide to Brigid for the Romantically Perplexed, I mentioned a waiter who referred to me as a "character". This is the same guy. Who is something of a character himself. On this particular day, he wasn't waiting on my table, but he dropped by with his iPhone. He showed me a picture he'd taken on the Main Street of a pile of garbage bags with a sign on top that said, "free cats". He prefaced showing me this photo by saying, "Here, you're semi-disturbed, you'll like this." My waitress then popped over and said, "yeah, he showed me that too. But I happen to love cats." "Yeah, me too," I said. "I have three of them. But it's still pretty funny."

I think my status there has moved from "a character" to "semi-disturbed" because of another visit, when I was reading D.P. Walker's "Spiritual and Demonic Magic" while having lunch. Which is an academic treatise that attempts to create a theoretical construct of magical philosophy as described in the writings of famous alchemists and occultists from the time of the Orphic hymns and Chaldean Oracle through the Reformation. In other words--not a book of magic, even though I've read lots of those too. Of course, explaining that when asked goes nowhere--it's like sitting there with Playboy and saying you're just looking at an interesting article. Even if it's true, no one believes it.

People have always treated an interest in the occult as a sign of deviance, something to be suspicious of. I recall all of those videos and TV programs that were on when I was in high school, that saw "Satan" everywhere, and urged parents to intervene with their children if they were even reading about the subject. I read Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke's great history of Western Esotericism (The Western Esoteric Traditions), and one of the first things he mentions in the introduction is the fact that "occult" subjects are rarely treated in academia, except in sociological studies of deviance. (And, as a friend of mine noted--when discussing the practices of primitive cultures). Originally, "magic" had to do with shamanism, and the shaman is someone who stands between "this" world and the "other" world. They are both feared and reverenced because they have seen the Numinous and lived to tell about it. In our modern society, which dismisses the idea of the "other" world, such a person is "crazy" and "irrational". Modern "religious" people associate occultism with the "devil" and with "black magic", and that means everything and anything related to it--crystals, Tarot cards, etc. They all forget that much of our modern science, especially chemistry, medicine, and psychology, were developed by alchemists and other magicians.

I've been reading about the occult and about comparative religion since I was in the first grade. They may have been simple books in the school library, but I was always looking to get more at the public library. I could always be found in the 133.4 section (or, in some cases, 398.2. They're Dewey numbers. Look 'em up). As an adult, this has blossomed into an interest in depth psychology--the actual shamanic bridge between our material world and the "other". Magic ought to be explored, because its rich symbolism tells us much about ourselves.

My current read is a collection of Dirk Mosig's writings on H.P. Lovecraft. Mosig is a psychologist, and his psychological (and particularly Jungian) take on Lovecraft is interesting to me. He points out, as other critics do, that Lovecraft was a materialist, and would have scoffed at the occult in the same way he scoffed at religion--and at science, when it came down to it. Both religion and science act as though they can control the vast, indifferent forces of the Universe, which can't really be done. We are like ants marching in front of humans--we could be squashed or not, and there's no reason except that we've gotten in the way. In spite of August Derleth's Catholic pleading, the "Cthulhu Mythos" stories (which Mosig said should be called the Yog-Sothoth cycle instead) are not a battle between good "Elder Gods" and evil "Old Ones". The monsters confronted are nothing less than one's own archetypal Shadow, and the terrifying realization in Lovecraft's stories is that we are nothing but a speck in a vast cosmos, and our lives are meaningless. Lovecraft would have seen occultism as another way to "find" meaning where there isn't any. I tend to look at it differently--I don't think life has any meaning, but that makes it a game--it's happening just for fun. It's a puzzle that's been split into a thousand pieces, and you have to put it back together again. And--the puzzle is incredibly complex. Doing puzzles is merely entertaining and not meaningful. But that's really what we're doing. It's a long and colorful journey, sometimes wonderful, sometimes tragic, back to nothing. Which doesn't have to be terrifying. We enjoy playing the game, but eventual annihilation into Nothingness means we don't have to deal with the suffering that goes with the game.

In any case, I'm glad to read more and more criticism refuting Derleth's view. I didn't know the background for years, and when I read Lovecraft stories vis-a-vis the Lovecraft knockoff stories, I found the latter very dissatisfying, while I can read the former over and over again. Mosig notes that the "knockoffs" have completely missed the point, accepting Derleth's "good vs. evil" view of the pseudomythos. And it shows.

So, now I will take my semi-disturbed self, and begin my evil, sinister day by making some tea and an English muffin, and putting some laundry into the washing machine, then washing my floors. Then I will make my bed, wash dishes, go for a walk, and then back to some reading. Oh, the scandalous and shocking life of a deviant...

From the Sky

2011-06-11T06:44:00.004-04:00

Last night, I dreamt about two strange things. Both were at receptions or parties of some sort. In the first episode, I was talking to one of my colleagues where I teach. She asked if I was all right, because I looked like I was burning up with fever. The second part of the dream, I was with a group of magicians. They were talking about someone who had "retired" from the group. Someone had called them to see how they were, and the sense was that they were fine, but they were not going to come by any time soon. Someone asked the person who made the call if they would be able to speak to this person. "Possibly," was the answer. "But it's not a question of how he's doing; it's a question of whether or not the group can let go of him."

Earlier this week, I finally received an article I'd requested on interlibrary loan. It was a sort of "psychoanalysis for the dinner table", written in Vanity Fair in 1915, by none other than Aleister Crowley. It's written in his typically bombastic style, which probably would have been amusing to that magazine's readership. Though he can't help but to inject language from Liber Legis ("every man and woman is a Star", etc.) into the article, and I wonder if that audience would have found it to be anything but an eccentricity. In any case--Crowley talks about Freud and Jung, and about dream analysis. He declares that he kept track of his dreams for a month, and in that time, only two dreams seemed to have any significance outside of everyday events. His dreams could be tracked to something he read before going to sleep, a particularly intense chess match with a friend, or a conversation he might have had the day before.

The dream I mention above would fall into that category. I had a long phone conversation last night with a friend who I don't get to talk to very often, since he moved a couple thousand miles away. We were discussing things that later appeared in my dream--in particular, magical societies and famous long-running members. Probably not coincidentally, the colleague in the first part of my dream is one of the few people I know where I work who has made some kind of formal academic study into the areas I'm currently writing about. In short--this is a dream of the personal unconscious rather than the collective. But they can be just as instructive.

In a broader context--I now have an association with interlibrary loans and black holes. I'm used to book or article requests taking 2 or 3 days; the standard now seems to be 2 or 3 weeks, even if it's only being sent from one campus to another of the same school where I work during the day. Perhaps many people are on vacation, but there should also be far fewer requests in the summertime. No one seems to know where these items go for 2 or 3 weeks; hence, I think of them as falling "into a black hole", though they eventually come out intact on the other side. Maybe they know of my interest in drinking good wine, and assume I like everything "vintage", so they hold my requests for aging. Which is thoughtful, but books don't taste as good as wine, though a really old book will have a wonderful "bouquet" (aroma). Like wine, this is probably due to some kind of growth (fungal or bacterial) in the thing itself. In fact, it has been posited that reading old books can be like taking drugs, due to inhaling the fungi that tend to grow in the pages.

But returning to black holes. I have discussed the Kabbalistic "Tree of Life" before, with its 10 sephiroth. An 11th sephiroth has been posited underneath Binah and Chokmah, and above Geburah and Chesed. This "invisible" sephiroth is known as "Da'ath", and refers to the Abyss that one crosses in the journey from the temporal to the eternal. (Mr. Crowley comes in once again here, as the positing of Da'ath is attributed to him, but I'm pretty sure the idea pre-dates him. He may have been the one who popularized its use in magical philosophy).

(Click on the image to make it bigger).

If I may oversimplify for a moment--one might think of the bottom half of the tree as "Earth", and the upper part as "the Heavens", using that term very broadly. The tree is light at the top and dense at the bottom (really, it hangs upside down), and the lighter part is the realm of "spirit". The Abyss is located in the realm of Spirit, not on the "material" side of things, as you might expect. Metaphorically speaking--to cross the Abyss and not fall in would require one to be light on ego baggage. So, someone on a spiritual journey would have to do a lot of work on themselves and their weak areas before attempting this psychological leap. In a cosmological metaphor--it is the black hole in the middle of the heavens. I cannot help but think of Joseph Campbell and his functions of mythology--one function is to provide a reasonable cosmology or understanding of the universe. Interestingly--it is now known that at the center of our "heavenly" galaxy (and indeed, many, if not all, galaxies) there is a black hole. (This doesn't scientifically prove anything about anything, but it's an interesting thing to observe).

Another book I am finishing right now is Jake Stratton-Kent's "Geosophia", volume 1. It is about the history of Goetia, and it is incredibly well-researched and thorough in its treatment. He uncovers the origins of Greek mythologies, tracing their characters back to their various forms in different parts of Asia Minor. One of the things he addresses is the transference of the afterlife/underworld to the sky. He attributes the origin of this transfer to Heraclides of Pontus, writing around the 4th century BCE. Previously the dead were thought to travel through underground caves to the underworld, regardless of what kind of life they led. What is important is the changing roles of deities and spirits when the underworld was moved to the sky. "The resultant upheavals indifferently made objects of devotion into demons and restored lustre to those formerly despised". (p. 177) Eventually this would lead to the Platonic idea that separated the deity from the material universe. And thus--as Stratton-Kent notes--"This separation, which monotheistic theology occasionally considers its crowning accomplishment, is from another point of view one of the world's greatest doctrinal disasters." (p. 177)

Or, to put it another way--in Carl Jung's writing on Paracelsus--“The Church might exorcise demons and banish them, but that only alienated man from his own nature, which, unconscious of itself, had clothed itself in these spectral forms.” It is responsible for the psychological split that all of us experience--between "science" and "religion", between "good" and "evil", between "God" and the "Devil".

Of final interest--Jung also talks about the Axis Mundi, which translates to "the center of the world", and is a mythological metaphor for the place where the sacred and the profane intersect. He describes the center as "an infinite Abyss of mysteries." Da'ath has to do with dispersion, being scattered. And, (still Jung talking), "distillation begins at the center".

In short--what tears us apart is what we also need to put us back together.

Chaos, Anyone?

2011-06-10T06:12:00.000-04:00

I've come to realize what my problem is with Jesus. I hear a lot about embracing Jesus and "being saved". As though suddenly opening a Bible or looking at an image of Jesus will cause my heart to overflow and explode. In fact, I can liken people who ask me to embrace Jesus to friends who say, "I know this really great, perfect guy--and he'd be perfect for you!" Then I meet the guy in question to be nice, and feel seriously underwhelmed. I mean, he might be a nice person, might do something interesting, might even be good-looking by some collective aesthetic standard. But I'm not feeling it. So--I think, "yeah, nice guy, wouldn't mind a chat over some coffee, but otherwise...nah."

What typically happens when I say "thanks no thanks" is a backward shift in tactic. The tone becomes ominous. "You HAVE to embrace Jesus, or you'll burn for all eternity." Now just a second. Here's this nice perfect guy, suddenly he's serial killer material. As in, "Love me bitch, or I'll kill you." Call me crazy if you wish, but this makes me just a tad uneasy. I'd get a restraining order, and move to an island under an assumed name if I encountered a person like that. That isn't what Jesus is supposed to symbolize. But that's what evangelists end up making him symbolize. Symbols change over time--they may still retain their original meaning for some, but this kind of repeated barrage of Jesus LOVES you/Jesus is going to PUNISH you ends up sounding like a form of torture porn, not liberation from suffering. Perhaps Christian missionaries and evangelists will want to ponder this.

On another note, I found an interesting blog by Hyperritual, who posted this Magical Probability Calculator (with thanks to Weiser Books for posting).The formulas come from Liber Kaos, written by Peter Carroll, one of the originators of the idea of Chaos Magic. While I understand the principles behind Chaos Magic, there is a superficial irony in the notion of putting together "chaos" with things like mathematical probability. We acknowledge the overriding condition of Chaos, and deal with it by using order and rationality.

If there is one activity that I think all humans engage in, regardless of education, culture, class, race, economic status, or religion, it's attempting to find order in chaos. Chaos is thought of as what we call "God", though it is more specifically like the idea of Tao, or the No-Thingness of reality in Hinduism and Buddhism. (More like the Eastern idea of God than the Western one). There is no rationality, because the Source is beyond anything like "mind", or anything that our egos can relate to. Hindu Satgurus, like the one I've received a mantra from, are fond of what Hindus call "leela"--the deliberate and senseless screwing up of something, with the intention of making you abandon your delusions of control, expectation, and outcome. "Leela" literally means "play", and was often attributed to Krishna when he played tricks on the Gopis, stole butter, and other such things. The word "play" is intentional here, because we tend to take ourselves, our goals, and our beliefs much too seriously.

Naturally, this will make some of you think of the Principia Discordia, the gospel of Eris (goddess of Chaos). It's a very funny read, and it's been described as "religion pretending to be a joke, or a joke pretending to be a religion". Some people have posited that this was written by Robert Anton Wilson, but the authorship is really anonymous. The basic idea that Principia lays out, in appropriately archane language, is that humans suffer the "curse of Greyface". They believe everything is somber and serious and have destroyed the joy of living. So, the Discordians fight back against "Greyface" by being ridiculously silly. Anyone who joins the "religion" is automatically declared a Pope.

This brings me back to a question posted by Weiser Books on their Twitter feed this week (paraphrased by me)--can one live a life according to "Chaos Magic", or is it just something theoretical, an abstract exercise? Can we really embrace "chaos" as a way of living in our societies? Our minds want sense and order--we want to classify, label, measure, and reason. Scientific method is based on causality (even though David Hume proved that causality is philosophically flawed). Cause and effect. We assume it, and scratch our heads when things fall outside of our sphere of understanding.In Eastern meditation, the Vedantics, who have no image of God at all, still meditate on something like a candle flame. The mind needs to focus on something. It's an incredibly rare occurrence if someone can do so and still live a normal life in the world. I would suggest that such a person has gone beyond being human. Even the originators of Chaos Magic themselves suggest using religion and its symbols "pragmatically".

In the end, it goes back to the idea of Surrender. (Which, by the way, is the meaning of the word "Islam"). We spend our lives making careers, families, setting goals. But it's all temporal, and has no value or meaning at the Eternal level. When the Adept crosses the Abyss, there is no ego left--the weight of the ego is systematically shed on the spiritual path. The same is true of the great saints of Catholicism--reading John of the Cross or Teresa of Avila shows you this burning away, and the Void that is created. This is the meaning of the Goddess Kali--her destruction involves stripping away all of one's delusions about reality until there's nothing left but naked Consciousness. To survive such a thing requires no attachments, just a willingness to accept everything as it comes without judging it against your ego's ethics and standards. Needless to say, this is incredibly difficult--and more difficult to switch back and forth between this state and the state of "living in the world".

In a little piece in the Principia Discordia called "Starbuck's Pebbles", we read: "The real reality is there, but everything you KNOW about "it" is in your mind and yours to do with as you like. Conceptualization is art, and YOU ARE THE ARTIST. Convictions cause convicts." (We are also helpfully told, "Never write in pencil unless you are on a train or sick in bed".)

Austin Osman Spare, anyone?

Sacrifice

2011-06-07T07:04:00.002-04:00

I subscribe to the Religion News Blog, which should be no surprise to anyone. As I scan the headlines, I see a lot about court cases and murder charges. Parents who starve their children as some kind of penance. People drowned as a result of some bizarre exorcism ritual. Most recently--a mother who burned her daughter as part of a voodoo ritual.

I think about this kind of thing in the context of folkloric "satanic" rituals, in which you get groups of people killing animals, or occasionally you will find a human being supposedly killed for such reasons. Like Lovecraft's "Necronomicon", there are a lot of people who believe that this is "real" magic. (In case you don't know--the Necronomicon is a fictional invention, but many people think it is a real occult grimoire).

This idea is a very old one in religion--bloody sacrifice is all over the Old Testament, and all religions have had some version of this in their distant past. In modern times it is often associated with black magic. The attribution, if not faulty, is unnecessary. A.E. Waite traces the idea of a "sacrificial victim" in black magic to a simple functional need--blood was not required for the ceremonies. Pacts required a written document, and it wasn't that easy to procure the right writing implements. So--the magician often had to slaughter his own lamb and tan the skin for this purpose. In modern times, assuming one would want to do such a ritual, the magician certainly has fine parchment and vellum at his or her disposal without going through that trouble.

Outside of the idea of "pacts", there are also old "natural" magic rituals that may call for the blood of an animal, or maybe even of the person. However, for those practicing today, there are obvious substitutions. Just as various herbs and essences can be substituted in incenses and oils for various purposes, those ingredients obviously can be dispensed with as well.

Blood is associated with life, and hence with one's "manna", or power. This at least is part of the psychology of its use. On the other hand--I've heard Swamis who refer to blood offerings (in this case to Kali) as being "impure". Blood is associated with the temporal body rather than the eternal soul. Hence, one should not offer blood, but true devotion.

For all this, you still hear about bloody sacrifice. It's probably not as prevalent as you would think; like many things, the media will tend to focus on the shocking, and treat it like it's the norm. Sacrifice is probably most prevalent today in traditions like Santeria (a sort of Catholic voodoo), in some tribal religions, and in small villages in Asia. Kali worshippers in rural parts of India are said to occasionally perform sacrifice--sometimes you even hear of a Tantric priest sacrificing a child. Amma has said that such practices are based on a misunderstanding of Kali. She is not a violent force to be appeased--she is the root of Consciousness, and as such, is very intense.

Intensity may be the key regarding such practices today. We live in fear of the Numinous, and we feel it has to be approached in grave ways. This is why you will not only see the idea of bloody sacrifice, but the need for very expensive tools in magical practices (e.g., sigils made of solid gold). Someone asked Lon Milo DuQuette about that very thing at his lecture on Goetia. Lon's response to the idea of gold sigils for demons was, "they're lucky if they get cardboard". The reality is that none of these things are necessary. It says more about the insecurity (and perhaps the inexperience) of the magician in question. Which goes back to something else said by Lon--in order to practice Goetia, "one must be a Solomon". Which means you have to be in control of yourself and willing to face the unknown with confidence. Often there isn't perfect confidence, so one needs a lot of fancy trappings to make oneself feel "like a Solomon".

Magic of any type is psychological, and as you know, that doesn't reduce or minimize it. It is highly symbolic, and all that matters is that you are able to connect with the symbols you are using. I remember a witch telling me once that you could do a Wiccan ritual with a feather, a match, a coin, and a drop of water (for each of the elements). When you examine the universe, it becomes more and more granular, until you realize there's not much to it that's "real" at all. When we take ourselves and rituals too seriously, it is because we are completely taken in by the illusions around us. One of the most fascinating things about psychology is how something can exist independently of you, but also be "just in your head" at the same time.

As humans we like illusions. We tell stories. The whole drama of our existence is based on stories. The scarier things sound, the more expensive things are, the more authentic they must be--they must be "better" or more "real". It's amazing how much time and energy we waste on that kind of absurdity. Often the only real thing is fear is such cases. But all of us are affected by it unconsciously.

A final thought--most of the Adepts that I have met over the years are people who didn't (or don't) take themselves too seriously. Being around them is like being around the Satguru--they radiate a joy and peace that comes from understanding in a real way (not just intellectually) that Life is a drama, and should not be approached in such a grave manner. And of course, the more ego baggage we lose on the journey, the more we find that rituals are at some point unnecessary for us. This is true of religion as well. Amma has said that rituals and deities and images are "ladders that we climb to reach our destination"--but they are not the destination. That said--the mind does work in images, so images will always be with us.

Cat With Thumbs

2011-05-30T10:34:00.001-04:00

A couple of my Facebook friends posted this British TV commercial. It's for a brand of milk, and it speculates on the idea of cats with thumbs:

This is Janis Joplin. She is a cat I inherited when I moved into this house. She actually has thumbs:

As the owner of a polydactyl (i.e., thumbed) cat, I can tell you that she does not open doors, read books, or file her nails. However, I have entered my basement (where she lives) and found mouse intestines strewn in front of the furnace. The other day I found a cave cricket near her bed, with the head ripped off. I treat this cat like an elemental--she can be sweet and loving, but I always have a wary eye on her darker proclivities.

This, by the way, is a cave cricket:

I probably have several of them in my basement, but aside from the headless one, I've only seen two others. They hang out in the basement stairwell. I call them Fred and Ethel. I have no idea about the sex of either of them--I didn't check. And my policy on cave crickets is I don't mind them being around, as long as they don't jump on me or end up on my clothes or in my hair.

Besides thumbed cats and striped crickets, I encountered another mismatch yesterday evening. I have been writing an article on H.P. Lovecraft, and I came across a couple of articles about the Cthulhu mythos. They suggested that Cthulhu and the Old Ones were not deities at all, but aliens, and that humanity was an accident. Lovecraft was no occultist; he was more of an existentialist than anything. His stories suggested the power and indifference of the cosmos, and how insignificant we are in the whole scheme.

I noticed that the author of two of these articles was Robert M. Price. My interest was piqued when I saw that he went to the same theological seminary where I got my graduate degree. As it turns out, this is the same "Bob Price" that served as minister when my now ex-husband and I were married in 1994. I had no idea he'd written about the Cthulhu mythos, and I wasn't sure I'd expected it. On the other hand--this is the same Dr. Price who, when we were writing our wedding service, said, "we'll just delete all that Jesus stuff out of there." Lest I get him in any trouble--he was tailoring the service to my husband and I, and had more "secular" versions of the service. We did not want a religious service.

Life and the people you encounter in life are often surprising. In reflecting on my last blog post, we have very curious ideas about what is "normal", and what pattern people's lives should follow, given what they've identified with. As someone with a Religious Studies Master's degree, people are usually surprised (and perhaps uncomfortable in some cases) with my interest in the occult. Then again, I never went to school to be a minister; people just assume that this is what one does with a Religion degree, or what one aspires to do. I suppose that I was surprised by Bob because he DID become a minister--a Baptist minister, at that. But, I don't think it's "weird"--in fact, I applaud his openness, which could only benefit his congregation.

I've been labeled "weird" by people before, and not just for my esoteric interests. I had a friend once who was very attached to me, but whenever we went out with her friends, she always introduced me as her "weird friend". I never really understood why I was considered "weird". Then I considered that her life revolved around hanging out in bars, discussing stock portfolios, and moaning that she was too stressed because her husband didn't shower her with affection daily and she wasn't appreciated enough at her job. One day I said to her, "maybe you're unhappy because you have no passion. Your life revolves around your husband and your job. Your job sucks, and your husband is a busy executive. Maybe you need to find what really interests you." She looked at me like I had three heads, and then intoned, like a mantra, "I don't know why I'm so depressed."

When I think about myself, the places where I don't intersect with the "norm" are--not being married, not wanting children, not waiting for Prince Charming to sweep me off my feet, taking responsibility for my mistakes and problems, and accepting the negatives in life as much as the positives. Oh, and not basing my life and career on how much money I can make. If I've read the literature correctly, this comes out to being at least reasonably "psychologically healthy". Which, by some social standard, makes me "weird".

Of course, they say that one in twenty-five people are sociopaths, and one in one-hundred are psychopaths. Which would make psychological disease the norm.

I often reflect on this when I think I've chosen a risky life path. Given the norm, I'd rather be a cat with thumbs.

The Surprise

2011-05-28T15:23:00.000-04:00

Saturday afternoon--I'm in my bedroom, at my re-claimed office desk. The sky is blue, the ground outside is decidedly green, and a beautiful breeze blows through my window. My indoor cat is snoring away on my bed, and I can see one of my outdoor kitties from the far window asleep on a patio chair, curled up in a ball that is white spotted with gray. It is a sleepy afternoon, with the hum of lawnmowers, and the singing of birds. I sit cross-legged in an old 18th century chair with a glass of claret, newly awake from a nap. On weekends, most of my chores and cleaning are done early--I'm usually finished with all domestic tasks by noon at the latest. Today, I have two more big tasks for the afternoon. I contemplate blowing off everything and just heading out to one of the local microbreweries for some exceptional beer and maybe food. But I am short on money and not in need of extra pounds, so the adult in me decides to stay put.

An early morning e-mail check always takes me to Yahoo's home page, that bastion of "normalcy", where a bevy of unrelated articles always rotate across the screen. Today, there was an article about racecar driver Danica Patrick. The question was whether or not she was planning to have a family with her husband. In typical Yahoo fashion, the headline said, "the answer might surprise you." Of course, her answer was no. She's married, but has a career and other interests, and doesn't feel a pull to motherhood. Surprise!

As is often the case with Yahoo articles, that "surprise" phrase managed to irk me. Maybe because I've been asked the same question a thousand times before--not so much since I've been divorced, but an awful lot when I was married. And it's an annoying question in this day and age. Instead, if she announced she wanted a family, the question ought to be, "are you sure that's what you want?"

I probably shouldn't blame Yahoo or anyone else. After all, motherhood is the central mythological female theme. The mystery of Woman is that she can manifest life. There is a Mother archetype--and a Terrible Mother archetype. There are hosts of goddesses that represent different aspects of women as mothers, and as family nurturers. Even Amma will always say that one should embrace their inner Motherhood--men included. (In that case, she is not being literal--she is saying to develop the associated qualities of compassion and nurturing).
The Virgin, Maiden, and Crone as archetypes of a woman's life cycle all center around the woman's ability to bear children. Joseph Campbell once said that girls become women when they experience menstruation, meaning that they are finally able to have children. And thus their myth begins.

But does it?

Biologically, the woman as potential mother is a fact. Our myths are as hardwired as other genetic features, and just as animals know when to engage in certain behavior to reproduce, the human female also changes when she finally "grows up" via drowning in a sea of aggressive hormones. A sea, by the way, she is told to stay out of when it happens to her in adolescence. But when she is an adult, it is expected of her.

But consider the following--there are men who love men, and women who love women. They are not driven to reproduce, not in the ordinary sense. They may choose to have families, but that's usually through adoption, artificial insemination, or surrogate motherhood with a third-party female. There are also women like myself, and apparently, Danica Patrick--we have no urge to have children. And that's not likely to change.

I don't like children. I'll say it plainly here, whether that's considered "right" or not. While I am happy for friends, family and acquaintances who have children and want them, in no way do I want to hold said baby, or babysit, or have anything to with them or their care. When I see a baby, I see an ugly, pruny thing that spits up, craps radioactive waste, and cannot be reasoned with when it starts screaming its head off. It is basically a giant producer of disgusting things, and it is excessively high maintenance. It will learn to manipulate its parents much earlier than anyone would imagine. I don't mind kids once they've become more sentient and can carry on a conversation. But I still don't want one.

I know I'm not alone in this. The saddest part is when I have female friends who get married and have families, and realize they feel the same way. I had a college friend who married early and had a baby with her husband at 23. She continually referred to the baby as "it"--as in, "I can hardly wait to get away from it."

To me, there is no joy in trading a life of freedom for life with a child. I like traveling, researching, making new friends, going on adventures. You can't do that with a child. Motherhood is a huge sacrifice, and as far as I'm concerned, you have to want it. When you don't, and you do it because you're "supposed" to, trouble ensues--for you, and for the child. I don't want to bear that kind of psychological responsibility for someone else's existence.

So, back to my original question--can woman be defined and identified by her biological abilities? Is this her archetypical "journey" and "hero cycle"? I don't believe it is. We've been handed that line of garbage since time immemorial, and it is one of those Collective Unconscious things that gives us complexes. While I have no urge or desire to have kids, there is always that subtle external influence--those voices that say, "What do you mean you don't want children?" The same ones that are puzzled when I say I've never been happier since I've been divorced. Things are "not supposed to happen" that way, and you become another abnormality, a social deviant.

But my point is that I don't think it's "deviant" at all--I think most women, given the chance, would skip on the whole marriage and motherhood thing. Some love it to death and are content with that life, so good for them. They will continue to propagate the species. But many never should have gone there, never really wanted to go there. In the end, they walk away from their married lives, and in a lot of cases, the children end up feeling abandoned, at fault, or unloved, even if those feelings are not consciously obvious. For instance--most friends of mine who are children of divorce are quite content with their parents' decision--until that parent decides to re-marry or pick up with someone else. The resentment that comes out, regardless of age, is an interesting phenomenon. The women who do stay often profess to being unhappy--there is a constant feeling of needing to escape, and constant guilt about feeling that way.

And--just to reiterate--I realize some people have made this choice and are very happy with it. And that's great--I'm glad it really does work out for some people, and that their kids are well-loved. But that will never be me, even if I decided to re-marry at some point.

So--this is why I say, ask "are you sure?" before embarking on motherhood. Don't ask me when I'm going to have kids. And don't assume wanting kids is normal female "thing". Above all--don't pressure women who want to build their own lives to embark on such a thing because it's "what women are supposed to do." It's not.

Source

2011-05-23T05:39:00.000-04:00

Well, Saturday was a lovely day for a Rapture, and it didn't happen. Not that this surprised anyone, except perhaps for Harold Camping and his followers. If the Bible does contain any secret prophetic information, we can say one thing for certain: Camping is no Qabalist.

David Rankine (who, along with his wife Sorita D'Este, have written some of the best works on magic, grimoires, and esoterica for both a general and scholarly audience) published a quote today on his Twitter feed: “There was no Bible in any meaningful sense until after the fall of Jerusalem to the Romans in 70 CE." He cites "Ulrich", by which he presumably means Eugene Ulrich, chair of Hebrew Scripture and Theology at Notre Dame. (Ulrich wrote some rather definitive texts for Oxford University Press, among his other scholarship).

It's a very important statement, one that provides a real context for Biblical scripture. One piece of the puzzle that helps you put books like the Revelation of John in its proper place. The destruction of the Temple in 70 CE spawned a lot of apocalyptic literature and prophecy. After all, Jesus had predicted the fall of the Temple, so that gave his followers hope that the rest of his predictions were true. Of course, no other predictions did come true. And thus--the early Church began what Harold Camping's group had to begin on Sunday--routinization of charisma. A re-interpretation rather than a rejection. No one will reject something they have staked their life on.

However, even understanding this facet of human nature, it's important that good scholarship is not rejected. Most people don't know what good scholarship is, and if they haven't learned how to do real research, they probably never will. People think research is just for academic papers, but that isn't the case. If someone tells you something that could potentially change your life forever, you want to be reasonably sure that their statement is valid. For instance--in the political realm, I hear a lot about the horrible things Obama is going to do--make us all spend thousands to get "greener" homes or we can't sell them, install tracking devices in our cars, send kids to re-education camps, and--the best of all--that he was paying Hamas to come into the country. All of these are patently false. All one has to do is go to fact checking sites. Snopes is one, Factcheck.org is another, PolitFact is another. These sites have no political agenda. They find the source of the rumors, and discuss them. If it has to do with a Congressional bill, they'll post the relevant parts of the bill.

"Source" is the important word here. In the case of the Bible, I'm more likely to accept a Scriptural interpretation from someone who actually knows the language of the Bible (and that person would probably be Jewish, or a scholar in Greek or Aramaic). Hebrew is a difficult language, and often times words or letters can be interpreted in a variety of ways. The Bible is also full of puns and word-plays-- common literary devices in Hebrew writing, likely to befuddle the Biblical literalist reading the Old Testament. If the interpreting theologian is not an expert in the language, then I at least want to see that they've consulted the language experts. Often you don't have to be the expert--you just have to know who the experts are.

Historical and social context are also important. One of the best writers I've encountered in this area is Dr. Elaine Pagels of Princeton University. She's written many books, very accessible, and is mainly known for her research on the Gnostic gospels and apocryphal texts. (Here is an excellent talk she gave on the Book of Revelation) Her work is important because it provides context. The so-called "Gnostic" gospels (some of them were, some weren't, by definition) allow us to get a bigger picture of early Christianity, not just the "official" version decided in 325 CE. The gospel writers were called "evangelists", and this is not just an honorary title--the 4 canonical gospels were written for specific audiences. This is why, for instance, the Jews are portrayed as being "more responsible" for Jesus' death in one gospel, and why the Romans are more guilty in another. One was written to evangelize Jews, another to evangelize Gentiles--probably Romans who didn't like Jews, in the former case. If you're trying to sell something, you're going to look for common ground with your potential buyer.

Authorship is something else to be considered. For all the names attributed to Biblical books, we know nothing about who really wrote them. Recently, a scholar from University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill (Bart D. Ehrman, who has the title "James Gray Distinguished Professor", and is a magna cum laude Princeton graduate) wrote a book called "Forged", alleging that the many of the New Testament books were faked. When he says "faked", he means simply that they were attributed to a particular writer, when in fact they are probably not written by that writer. For instance--Paul's second letter to Timothy was not likely to have been written by Paul. For all the controversy this has generated, it's not really that controversial. One can study writing styles and samples, and determine if they were written by the same person. Ehrman says that in the early days of the Church, when it was still trying to define itself and its doctrine, lesser-known writers would make their views heard by signing the names of more well-known writers. They didn't quote the experts, they pretended to be the experts. Writing as one of Jesus' apostles, or saying you knew one of them, probably helped your case, too. People considered the source at that time as well.

Those who object to "liberal arts" Bible scholarship are the same ones who object to their children learning about other religions--they want to preserve their version of the narrative, which has more to do with them than with the Bible. It's like a mirror onto which the believer projects his or her image of the Unknown. If we believe they've found the "light", we try to ignore the shadow behind it. That is the most important thing to remember--regardless of interpretation, it's always about what we'll never really "know".

The Electric Thread

2011-05-20T18:34:00.000-04:00

A couple of random events in the last few days have me thinking about electricity.

First--I was watching some Ghost Hunters reruns, and one of the episodes I revisited was the "Edgerly Home" episode. Mr. Edgerly was the gentleman who felt depressed--oppressed, even--and uneasy in his home. He sometimes heard footsteps, and his visiting friend saw black shadows that would suddenly disappear. The man did historical restorations for a living, and had many of the chemicals associated with his work in his house.

The end result of the investigation was not that his house was haunted, but that a number of normal factors were causing the phenomena. An area of mold in his basement, along with the chemical fumes, was one part of the problem. The other part is what is of interest--he had an open electrical box that was registering very high numbers on an EMF (electromagnetic frequency) detector. A normal household EMF reading is about 0.1 or 0.2. The electrical box spiked at 112, and even higher.

Electromagnetism can cause people to get uneasy feelings, physical side effects like nausea and skin rashes, and also to see things that aren't there. In other words, electricity can make people see "ghosts", or one version of them.

The second thing is an article I saw from PBS about a paraplegic man who was able to stand after being treated with electricity. The electric current apparently stimulated the man's nervous system. Electricity affects our bodies and our ability to physically move. Electricity animates us.

Thinking about these two things together--I started wondering about the old John Foxx phrase, "electricity and ghosts". There is a definite connection between electricity and consciousness, and electricity and the appearance of spirits.

I'm sure this is not news. But I've spent so much time reading about consciousness and the unconscious, I have to wonder about the connection between the unconscious and electricity. if spirits are manifestations of the unconscious, how do they manifest? It seems electricity has something to do with it.

We don't really know what spirits are; it's difficult (if not impossible scientifically) to prove they exist. You have to have an experience of a spirit or ghost to believe. But what are you experiencing? The "demonic" is no different--it's the same sort of thing, really. They are aspects of the psyche that manifest separately because they have no connection with your ego--they are unconscious. But are we experiencing "electricity with a personality"? How does that work? Are our personalities "electric"? Or, is the personality/attribute aspect a result of our collective symbol system interacting with something universal--and electrical--in nature?

There certainly seems to be a relationship between consciousness and electricity. I've written before about kundalini yoga and meditation. Most Eastern mediation systems (and medical practices) are based on balancing the electrical impulses in the spine, often referred to as "shakti"--and causing that electrical "consciousness" to move from the base of the spine through the major chakra centers, to the top of the head. This rise is experienced as an electrical charge throughout the body, and the unprepared body (i.e., one not proficient in yoga) may experience symptoms similar to those of high EMF exposure when they come out of their meditation.

A converse question--is the electricity we use to power our homes, our technological devices, etc. related to consciousness? Are electricity and consciousness synonymous in some way? Does electricity have a consciousness?

I did some cursory investigation of this idea, and apparently the idea of consciousness as electromagnetic has been proposed as a line of scientific inquiry, though not without objections. Seems to me it is a question worth pursuing.

Rapture

2011-05-19T05:34:00.001-04:00

I've been hearing that the world will end on Saturday. OK, it will SORT of end. It is supposed to be the day of "Rapture", when the righteous are assumed into Heaven. The actual end of the world is supposed to take place 6 months later.

This latest apocalyptic prediction is brought to you by Harold Camping, head of California's Family Radio Ministry. Camping is not associated with any church or religious denomination; it is entirely centered around his interpretation of the Bible, and what he thinks are its prophecies. You might be surprised at his lack of Church affiliation, but really, nothing should surprise you when it comes to American religion.

In any case, Harold is sure enough of his prediction for his group to purchase large billboard ads around the country advertising the eschatological event. I've seen two distinct reactions to this prediction, besides "yeah, whatever". The first was from a Baptist minister, who criticized the prediction, saying that it was false--the Bible says that "no man shall know the day or the hour". He also felt that people already didn't take the Bible seriously, and when May 21 came and went with no event, it would just give more fodder to the anti-Bible camp, even though the prediction is Camping's, not the Bible's.

The other reaction, of course, is delight at the thought that those "saved by Jesus" will finally leave this earth, and the rest of us can loot, pillage, and party. I saw at least one reaction to one of these "post rapture looting" events on Facebook, with a guy saying, "Hey, that's disrespectful to their beliefs". While I am certainly open to anyone believing what they want, I can't help but think of the great Eugene Mirman quote, "Follow your dreams, unless your dreams are stupid." If we want to be kind, we can say that the prediction is "misguided". And Harold has no sense of history, as he is apparently unaware of all of the other "day of apocalypse" predictions that came and went. Even the Jehovah's Witnesses have stopped trying to name dates.

The whole thing is an absurdity, because it's more Biblical literalism gone wrong. (Yes, I realize that is a redundant statement.) You can support almost any point of view with the Bible; it is so disjointed and contradictory. There is not a linear narrative running through, and those reading it in this way today have no understanding of why the various books were written, or what the writers had in mind. The prophets were writing for their own groups (usually Jews on the verge of war or exile). While you might find bits of timeless wisdom in some of their sayings, they have to do with their contemporary events, not with future ones.

In any case, May 21 will come and go, I will have my garage sale, and Camping's group will either claim a Rapture occurred (though the fact that they're still here would be interesting), his radio ministry will go down the toilet, or--more than likely--his group will engage in what religion scholars call "routinization of charisma", a fancy term for "justifying your beliefs when they turn out to be wrong". If you think humans who do that are stupid--it's one of the most basic elements of human psychology. We stick to our stories, regardless of facts. Another example of humans being essentially irrational rather than rational creatures.

Speaking of future life, I mentioned Stephen Hawking's declaration that there is no Heaven in yesterday's post. Well, that pre-eminent Bible scholar Kirk Cameron (annoying actor from the 1980s TV series "Growing Pains") has declared Stephen Hawking to be unequivocally WRONG. Why? Because Hawking is like John Lennon, who said "imagine there's no Heaven", and they're both just quoting their religious beliefs. Or something like that. His argument makes no sense at all, but then again, most of his arguments are equally prosaic. I think it's funny that he says Hawking is quoting his "religious" beliefs. More than likely, it's his scientific opinion, though Hawking has no more proof of a Heaven or lack thereof than Cameron does. "Religious" belief is not the right word in Hawking's case--it's part of his narrative, what he accepts as truth a priori.

Which brings me back to science and scientific method. There is often a curious blending of religion and science that we refer to as "scientism". I've noticed that Richard Dawkins has a new book for children coming out about "truth" and "reality". This is scientism, pure and simple. Science provides us with tests and measurements, and may teach us the mechanics of nature and the universe, but whether or not they are the ultimate keepers of "truth" can be very much debated. Scientific facts are only part of truth, and reason is only a means of organizing and labeling our thoughts and perceptions. Most of our "psychical" life (meaning life of the mind) does not fit into neat categories. Just as religion should not try to use science to justify itself, science should not get into the business of interpreting religion. And religion should not be in the business of "facts". Religion is about the stories and mythologies that tie us together, and the reality of the unknown, and our terror and wonder of it. It often has little to do with "facts".

Scorpio Moon

2011-05-17T18:50:00.000-04:00

I had a dream the other night about cats, with a Kabbalistic twist. I saw that a woman's cat had 18 kittens, and mentioned that to her. She gave me a much higher number (which I can't remember), and said, "They can have as many as 36,000". Then she lamented having to euthanize 500 of the kittens. And was now left with 4. The higher number she gave me was not 504. I have had my copy of 777 out trying to figure out the correspondences here.

This morning I woke up angry. I don't know who I was angry at; I was just angry at people's stupidity in general. I spoke to another friend later in the day, who reminded me that it was a full moon in Scorpio. He was also feeling angry that day, and attributed it to that. It's a good a theory as any.

I find that when my energy level rises, my patience decreases. I'm like a ship moving forward, full steam ahead, and I get very impatient with obstacles. Mostly I'm annoyed with myself for allowing myself to be hindered. Which is silly, but there it is. I think what underlies the feeling is the sense that I always find excuses to put off important action, and I fear that I will start doing that again. Sometimes it's OK to pour a glass of wine, kick back with some pleasure reading, and say, "Eh, leave the challenges to tomorrow." Sometimes it isn't.

Lately, I've realized that most of us know more than we think we do. We just have a way of letting people make us feel that we're stupid.

Stephen Hawking now claims there is no such place as Heaven. I'm with him on that, but he also claims there is no afterlife--it is a "fairy story" for the fearful. I'd like to see his scientific justification. Religion can't prove an afterlife, but neither can science. Psychology is the only bridge, and even that leaves more questions than answers. Something can exist externally and also be manifest because of our collective unconscious.

I believe it was Jung who said that rationality can't replace religion or spiritual belief because it is only means of organizing thoughts.

John Foxx likes to write about cities as organisms. So, this article on Serendipity, the Net, and Cities is for him. Ahem.

In the department of "things that don't go together", I bring you--the Vegan Black Metal Chef.

The H.P. Lovecraft Society is finally coming out with the film for The Whisperer in the Darkness. Currently being shown in Amsterdam, and it should be coming to Los Angeles and Seattle later this year. I am looking forward to the DVD (hopefully). Look for it.

Here is an article on how coffee, chocolate, and wine keep you cancer free. Yeah, I knew that.

And, here is a video featuring Vincent Price vs. the Bee Gees. I'm not sure who's scarier. Or if there's a film that sucks worse than this does.

On the John Bellairs page on Facebook, there has been a discussion of making "The House With a Clock in Its Walls" into a film. I think it would be horrible, especially if it was a big-budget film. There was a Vincent Price special from 1979 (mentioned in a previous blog post) featuring a short adaptation of the story. Sure enough, they tried to make Lewis Barnavelt and his friend Tarby more contemporary. The story is set in the late 1940s--they should have left it there. I can't even imagine a modern re-make. Just read the damn book. And keep Mrs. Zimmerman in the story, please. The only gripe I've ever had with Bellairs' characters is in the 3rd Barnavelt book, "The Letter, the Witch, and the Ring". Mrs. Zimmerman says she needs to consult the "Malleus Maleficarum". Who would consult that? It's a misogynistic manual of torture for Church monks. But to be fair to the late Mr. Bellairs--you can't expect him to know everything. I'm sure the title sounded neat.

Speaking of--in my host of bottom drawer treasures, I also found a bookmark that states, "Would it kill you to read a f**king book?" The image is of a young man watching TV with a bottle of something in his hand, oblivious to his surroundings, and a book being thrown at him.

And with that, I'm back to the lectures of Sigmund Freud and the detective stories of Aleister Crowley. One of these days I will get things sorted and have more organized posts.

Til then...

The Bottom Drawer

2011-05-15T07:43:00.003-04:00

I know I'm rather bookish, but I had no idea until this week exactly how much paper I have in my house. I'm going to estimate 300 pounds. And I'm probably throwing out 250 pounds of that. Some of it is predictable stuff, like old tax returns and check stubs from 6 jobs ago. Other things are old cards and photos, some of which I probably should throw away but probably won't. And then there's the "bottom drawer papers".

The bottom drawer of my file cabinet has alway been full of oddities--articles I've clipped for various research projects, jokes, weird photos, quotes, old printed e-mails, and dot-matrix printed bibliographies. I even found some old pieces of writing in there. When the Internet was new in the late 1980s and early 1990s, I printed out a lot of things, because there really wasn't a great way to "save" e-mail. Most of my accounts were work accounts, and you're not supposed to save those kinds of things to work accounts (doesn't help when you leave the job, either).

Here is a sampling of some of the weirdness I found in my drawer:

An article from 1993 entitled, "20 naked people in car crash after police chase." Apparently they were Pentecostals who believed they had to give up everything, and cut no corners. And they had 5 naked children in the TRUNK. (That's the boot, for those of you not in the United States). The police were pretty casual about this, and they were written up for "minor traffic violations". All of them were from Texas. No, I'm not implying anything, just stating the facts.

An old bibliography on witchcraft from a local library, which is actually pretty decent.

A dot-matrix copy of "the Christian test". Sample question: "Ask for their money, all of it. Just ask for their wallet. Have them show it to you....etc.". The question references Luke 6:30, and Matthew 5:42, both verses that instruct believers to give their money away to whoever asks. If they refuse, they are not True Christians. Et cetera.

The General Final Examination. "History: Describe the history of the papacy from its origins to the present day, concentrating especially, but not exclusively, on its social, political, economic, religious and philosophical impact on Europe, Asia, America, and Africa. Be brief, concise, and specific." Or, "Music: Write a piano concerto. Orchestrate and perform it with flute and drum. You will find a piano under your seat".

A partial list of phrases that Dave Barry said would "make excellent band names". Some include, "Pinot Noir and His Nuances of Toast", "The Foliage Eaters, "The Radioactive Muskrats", and "The Flaming Salmonella Units".

An article entitled, "Do you have to love your lovers"?

A Peanuts cartoon that features Sally writing a letter. The letter says, "Dear Santa. I want a magic wand...and I want one that works".

A collection of notes I made in the late 1980s/early 1990s about working in the library Periodicals department. Noted--how people always bring 10 request slips when they need one item, and then write through the carbons on the other 9 unused slips. Also noted was how the job of separating request slips that were stuck together was going to be valuable training for my future.

A test MARC record written during a system migration that was being project managed by me. I think I was figuring out the editing function and was a tad frustrated. Here is the record:

100 1_ $a Who, Guess.
245 10 $a Test title.
260 __ $a Anytown, USA : $b Ihateunicorn Pub., $c 2070.
300 __ $a 333 p. : $b copious ill. ; $c 65 cm.
500 __ $a Why does nothing work the way it's supposed to in this system?
505 0_ $a Aggravation -- Putting out fires -- More aggravation -- Interruptions -- Even more aggravation -- 50 migration-related ways to kill yourself -- Thorazine for project managers.

An entire sheet of sticky notes with the words "Please Review", and little pictures drawn on each one. I believe this was made by one of my cataloging assistants about 10 years ago.

A quote from Aleister Crowley's Simon Iff:

"I never heard anyone talk like that before. Everyone knows it's wrong."

"In 1850 everyone knew it was wrong to protest against negro slavery. In Germany it's wrong to question the divine right of kings. In Turkey it's wrong to eat pork. In Hindustan it's wrong to eat beef. In 1500 it was wrong to say that the earth moved. In 1900 it was wrong to say it didn't. Time and space, my friend, time and space, the illusions, breeders of other illusions! Right and wrong are fashions, like women's hats".

A quote from Amma: "Self-control is never a hindrance to freedom. By observing spiritual austerities, we can enjoy lasting happiness and contentment."

A quote from George Bernard Shaw: "Religion is a great force--the only real motive force in the world; but what you fellows don't understand is that you must get a man through his own religion, and not through yours".

A "Letter to Dr. Laura" Schlessinger in response to her saying that homosexuality is an abomination according to Leviticus 18:22. A quote from the letter writer: "Lev. 25:44 states that I may indeed possess slaves, both male and female, provided they are purchased from neighboring nations. A friend of mine claims this applies to Mexicans but not Canadians. Can you clarify? Why can't I own Canadians?"

A CNN.com article about the mayor of Inglis, Florida, who wrote a municipal proclamation evicting Satan from her town.

A bored librarian's list of quotes entitled, "Tom Swift, Gonzo Librarian." "There's a waiting list for that title" Tom said with reservations.

The resume of a Yale law school graduate who has had a psychotic meltdown.

One of my favorite fake ads ever, spoofing on Advil. It shows a woman with an anvil in her hands, about to drop it on her schlub of a husband, sitting around looking dopey with pizza boxes and beer everywhere. The caption: "One Anvil gets rid of even the worst headaches". I think I had it in my cubicle during my married days.

A Dilbert cartoon featuring Wally, the Pointy-Haired Boss, Dilbert, and Ted. Ted says, "I just found out that the committee across the hall is doing the same thing we are. All we can do now is hum 'West Side Story' and have a dance-fight."

A document with a drawing of a bear that says, "The librarians are slow. Please bear with us."

Ineffective daily affirmations: "Only a lack of imagination saves me from immobilizing myself with imaginary fears".

A Thelemic language lesson. Example: the phrase "Their camp is very independent" translates to "They're planning to overthrown the Grand Master and they've become born-again Christians".

A cartoon of a ghost reading a newspaper and talking on the phone. He says, "I'm calling about your ad...it says you're looking for someone really spiritual?"

An e-mail featuring some of Rich Hall's "Sniglets". "Disconfect: to sterilize a piece of candy you drop on the floor by blowing on it and rubbing it a little." "Telecrastination: letting the phone ring 3 times before you answer it when it's right next to you."

That's all for today. Back to cleaning out more files...I think they breed overnight.

Notebook

2011-05-12T07:25:00.000-04:00

Once a year I have my oil company come in and clean my furnace. It’s part of my warranty, and I need to do it whether it needs it or not.

I ended up in a long conversation with the mechanic who came out to service the furnace. We started by talking about my furnace and my oil tank, and ended up discussing religion and its effects. (It’s true—no one is immune from this topic around me). He was raised as a Jehovah’s Witness, but opted to leave the religion when he was 13, which his mother okayed. A sick younger relative who died from not having a blood transfusion caused a great explosion in his family. “There’s somebody’s life and death, and what did it hinge on? Something in religion. All of that stuff is protocol when you believe, but when you’re faced with the real deal...”

What was really amazing to me was how his family responded. There were family members in the hospital with open Bibles, lashing out at each other with competing verses. Talk about a scriptural war. If anything, it gives credence what I’ve always said—the Bible is full of contradictions. You could rationalize almost any argument scripturally. At the end of our discussion, I mentioned that people have little interest in facts when it comes to their story—psychology has proven that people will believe what they want to in spite of facts. He said, “I know why that is. People love stories.” And I think he is exactly right. Humans are walking houses of stories. We run entirely on stories.

I’ve been clearing things out of my house these last two weeks, and as I went through some boxes under my bed, I found my graduate school notebooks. One of them was for a class on psychology and religious thought. I opened up to this note: “Psychoanalysis is seen to be threatening because it reduces human thought and nature. But it is threatening not because of reduction, but because it expands our understanding of our powers and responsibilities.” And a related quote: “Psychoanalysis is like a woman waiting to be seduced, but knows she will be underrated if she doesn’t offer resistance.” The unconscious likes to play hard to get. There’s no fun if it just “gives” it to you. And like a desirable man or woman, it is mysterious and not a little intimidating.

The notebook is useful, not only because it reminds me of things I’m trying to apply to current research and their sources, but it’s also a symbol of my time in graduate school and everything that surrounded it. In this class I met Alex, who was one of those male friends who tended to fill in emotional gaps that my then-husband left empty. (No, I never cheated with him, if that jumps into your mind. But we were pretty good friends). The margins of my notebook are filled with notes from Alex. He would sit next to me and write things in the margins—comments on the material, comments on other people in the class, comments on himself. One says, “I am tired and hungry and homicidal.” Another says, “I think Jung would call for a break about now...” There’s even a whole marginal discussion about Don Henley when Alex posed the question, “What is evil?” Alex was only there for a semester, then he went back to Oregon.

I notice in a section of notes about “afflictive emotions”—I have my ex-husband’s name written in the margin with exclamation points. The particular note read, “makes it difficult to tolerate unpleasant feelings or hard times.” I’m guessing this understatement was in our class discussion of Erik Erikson. I took classes on Jung in graduate school, but Erikson dominated my studies, due in no small part to my thesis advisor, with whom I took most of my courses. She was described to me as "Erikson's protege", having been mentored by him, and had even lived in the same house with he and his wife Joan. She was always hard to pin down; the school never seemed to have enough faculty in that department, and the psychology and religion program only had two full time professors. She was the teacher for the course in this notebook.

In any event, the notebook has been a boon, as I am working on a paper on Freud and Crowley. I've been more absorbed in Jungian theory all these years, and this gives me an instant refresher on Freud. It also reminds me why we keep things in general. Even the most insignificant things are symbols. Just paging through the book recalls my entire graduate religion career and everything in my life at that time. Much of it was unpleasant, and I think it's important to see some artifacts regarding the way things really were. Memory has a tendency to be selective.

A couple of days ago I stopped in briefly at a friend's house. We got into a discussion of angels, demons, and spirits. At one point in the discussion, she said to me, "It's all symbols, isn't it? Our entire life is symbols." A true statement that appears reductive, but it is not. In my notes on Carol Gilligan, I have written down: "without a theory of symbolization, it's tough to talk about what's going on."

And now I think I'd better go to work before I get into a discussion of semantics and postmodernism...

Goetia on Mother's Day

2011-05-08T21:30:00.000-04:00

I passed a sign today on the way into New York City: "Lincoln: great President, crappy tunnel." Indeed.

I went into New York today for a workshop on Goetia with Lon Milo DuQuette. Lon has that gift of imparting real learning and information while being entertaining at the same time.

Before I get into that, no doubt some of you are wondering about Mother's Day. Did I blow off my Mom for Lon Milo DuQuette? Actually, no. We went to dinner on Saturday night, and I visited her on Sunday morning before catching my train. She told me this wonderful story: In the early years of her marriage to my father, they were out shopping and looking at flowers. My mother saw some daffodils, and told my father, "Oh, we should get these for your mother." My father replied, "Oh no. Daffodils aren't good enough for my mother." Fast forward to Mother's Day. My mother was in the kitchen visiting with my aunt and uncle. My father walked in with--daffodils. He said, "Happy Mother's Day. These are for you." My mother did not forget that these were not "good enough" for his mother. She laughs about it now.

As for me, the cat didn't get me anything for Mother's Day. Not even a dead mouse. But he has the sniffles, so I'm assuming he's distracted.

Back to Lon's workshop. I had lots of questions about Goetia. Why would someone invoke demons? It didn't make a whole lot of sense to me. I'm mired in the imagery of the unconscious, so I was sure it had something to do with that. But the notion of pacts with evil spirits is a weird idea. And if it goes wrong, what does one do? I didn't have to ask Lon a single question, and he answered all of these.

By drawing on his own experiences, and explaining things with very useful metaphors, he clarified Goetia for me in a way that other writers have not. The best metaphor had to do with machinery. He started with Solomon. In the Bible, Solomon is called upon to build the perfect Temple for the Most High. He appeals to Jehovah, as he has no idea how to begin such an operation, and asks him for the wisdom to build the Temple and rule his people. God responds by giving him the wisdom, and as part of that he gives him the "key" to his Temple building labor union. This happens to be 72 legions of demons. Demons are the heavy-lifters of the universe, and are as much a part of things as anything else. He drew comparisons with the Titans in ancient Greek mythology--these are a race of giants. (I think the Bible also has a race of giants--nephilim--the spawn of human women and angels. It's the reason for the Great Flood--God wants to destroy them). Psychologically, demons are our "problems". They are externally real in some sense, but don't manifest except through our weaknesses. Solomonic Goetic operations often allow the operator to confront their own weaknesses, and stand up to them. The idea of making a "pact" with them is absurd--you don't make "pacts" with your problems.

But I have not told you the brilliant metaphor. He compares demonic evocation to operating heavy machinery--bulldozers, backhoes, Caterpillar equipment. If you turn them on and let them run amok with no operator, they will charge along and destroy things. However, if properly operated, they can build useful structures. A woman in class raised her hand and asked, "Is the only difference between angels and demons that angels already have a job?" And Lon laughed and said we could end class with that comment. (We didn't, but it summed up a lot). Angels apparently are connected with specific forces. Demons have to be assigned tasks. They are the blind, chaotic (Qlipotic) forces of the universe, but they are part of it nonetheless.

Psychologically, the demonic relates to our Shadow. It is the weak areas of our psyche, and performing evocations is one way to confront these weak areas. I would still submit that it's not for everyone, but giving it a psychological context makes it less fearsome. The demonic are the things we do to ourselves to limit ourselves. And we can tell it "no" and not give in to it. And it will generally say, "okay".

Lon also talked about an experience where he was asked to exorcize a school building, and this answered my other question, because he described how he went about the operation, and what he confronted as a result. Every evocation is a confrontation with oneself and one's weakness. Each one is like an initiation.

I would recommend Lon's book, "Low Magick: It's All in Your Head...You Just Have No Idea How Big Your Head Is" for more discussion of Goetic operations. I can say that I learned a lot.

Normal

2011-05-07T12:46:00.002-04:00

I drove to work yesterday morning and saw a sign that said "Organic Insect Buster". I thought it said "Organic Insect Butter" before a second look.

I wasn't the only one misplacing letters. I posted a link from Mental Floss magazine, and a friend thought it said "Mental Loss". As she said, why advertise the fact by buying a magazine?

I stare at my computer, and words blur before my eyes. I do not wish to admit that I am tired. My eyes are tired; my spirit is not. I look under my shirt, at the remains of my surgical incision. It curves around my nipple like a smile. I am tempted to draw eyes on the other side of my nipple, and make a smiley face. I resist the urge.

I finished an article yesterday evening on magical operations and the Jungian concept of the collective unconscious. I was fishing about for a particular reference, and came across a Catholic catechism site--not the official Vatican site, but clearly one of those Catholic community sites. I glanced at a list of questions from "laity"; they were all the same kinds of sniveling questions I heard when Father Lampert (the exorcist) spoke at Montclair State. "Father, is it true that all yoga practitioners are really devil worshippers?" That sort of thing. With equally bad and ignorant responses. I want to smack the questioners in the face and say, "wake up and stop being an idiot, already!" I want to double-smack the answerers, and say, "Stop feeding people's fear of the unknown!"

Living on the fringes means you have few friends, and are largely invisible. I find myself surprised at certain behaviors of others, behaviors that indicate that I am largely invisible to them. I remind myself that I shouldn't be surprised. This isn't new. I don't live a life that most people I interact with regularly can relate to. Most people in my demographic are married with kids, and discussing normal married-with-kids kind of stuff. They read mainstream books and go to mainstream movies. Even if they're a little off the beaten path, the kinds of things that interest me (largely forbidden, scary, and strange things) don't interest them at all. Similarly, I can't relate to their lifestyle, and can't speak to their issues with personal experience. I don't spend a lot of time with people who don't share my interests, so why should they?

Still, there are days when you crave ordinary conversation, and do mundane things to keep yourself from floating away. Worlds with too many words and thoughts get mixed up, and it's hard to know what's actual and what's potential. Wesley Stace said at the recent WAMFEST that the writing life is a lonely life. You spend a lot of time with your thoughts and ideas.

My non-writing time is often taken up with mundane tasks--keeping up with the housework and the yard, doing the washing, buying groceries, et cetera. Some weekends I am very tired and not in the mood to do all these things. My friends will tell me, "you don't HAVE to do those things." What they don't realize is that I DO have to do those things. I can't tolerate disorder in my life. Sure, to a certain degree, there is a creative chaos that can be wonderful. But not in my house. The bed is made every morning, the sink is never full of dishes, floors are regularly vacuumed and washed, things have to be put away. My home is my oasis, the place where I do my creative work, and where I get away from the rat race. If it's in disarray, then I become depressed. If my relaxation place is also overwhelmed by chaos, then so am I. I operate knowing there's a place to put my feet if my arms get tired.

My love life has a similar psychological trend. I find love, sex, and relationships to be infinitely more complicated than necessary. It's simple for me--either I'm attracted and would take the risk, or I don't. Most of the time I don't. I meet lots of men who I think are terribly interesting and make wonderful friends, but I'm not feeling the magnetism. I hate the social dictum that says that a woman's involvement with a man must necessarily be of a romantic or sexual nature. And the one that says a woman doesn't travel or do anything social alone. I try not to pressure others or put any expectations on them, and I have to say that I like it when others do the same.

I had a dream about a month ago, in which a voice said to me, "You are Sophia, and create the world alone." I was staring at a lush forest behind a waterfall.

I had lunch a couple of weeks ago with one of my former students. He happens to live alone as well, and he says it can be just as difficult for men as for women. The world is designed with the assumption that people live in pairs or groups. Ironically--people I encounter every day live in their own worlds. The social structure doesn't match the social reality. I am suspicious of people who are too ready to accept me as their best friend on sight--they're either drunk or belong to a cult-like Christian group. It's like men who tell you they love you after talking to you for 5 minutes. Somehow I don't accept their sincerity. At the same time, there is something disturbing about the lack of awareness of others that people demonstrate every day. There has to be a happy medium somewhere.

Nature is beautiful right now, and the weather is perfect, but the pollen is lethal. I am ever so sleepy. Even the cat is not immune; I hear him snuffling away. Spring is like an hallucination, all the pretty colors viewed through a haze. Tomorrow is Mother's Day, but I'm celebrating it with my mother this evening. Tomorrow I go to New York for a workshop downtown with Lon Milo DuQuette. It is on Goetia, which I have been reading about extensively, so I am most interested to hear what Lon has to say.

For now, I am going to take a nap--and then a long walk.

Amber

2011-05-05T05:45:00.001-04:00

On Friday May 6 (tomorrow), "Animus" will be published in Danse Macabre magazine. This is story 5 in the archetype series.

Danse Macabre May Issue Publicity

I finally received my copy of Geosophia Volume 1 from Scarlet Imprint Press. I'd mentioned this book by Jake Stratton Kent in my post on Goetia and Vibration. I am reading this book amid a flurry of Ficino, Agrippa, and Paracelsus. Among the many things I am learning from this book, I learned that the Greek word elektron means "amber". Yes, this is the root of Electra, electron, and electricity. Amber (or elektron) is so called because its yellow color is reminiscent of the sun. The sun is the source of all life--at least it was thought to be by the ancient philosophers. Amber, in effect, bottles up the sun and its energy--it's captured fire. And this was the word chosen to represent the currents of energy that permeate everything.

I've often wondered about the connection between electricity and the paranormal. John Foxx pointed out once that our inventions leading to the use of electricity came from experiments in spiritualism and spirit contact. Paranormal investigators use electromagnetic frequency readers, and often report a spike in electrical energy when paranormal events occur, energy that cannot be attributed to another natural or man-made source. Electricity is said to drive consciousness. Kundalini meditation is based on the ancient Hindu ideas about "shakti", which is the electrical energy of our consciousness, moving through our spine through chakras, or energy centers. Most women know about hormonal rises and drops, which can lead to energy drain, hot or cold flashes, and mood swings. I've been able to track my own bad moods to a substantial drop in energy. In the 1960s and 1970s there was a lot of talk about the pineal gland and its electrical effects,especially during adolescence. Poltergeist activity is thought to center around the energy generated from this gland when hormones are becoming activated during puberty. It doesn't happen to everyone, or at least it doesn't manifest as external phenomena in everyone. But the connection between "mind and matter" is interesting, and not explored enough anymore.

Nonetheless, it has always been clear to me that this is why one must be careful when playing with the energy of consciousness. I've suggested before that bursts of consciousness are like sticking your finger in an electrical socket, and this is likely to be more literally than metaphorically true. Deep kundalini meditations can leave you with headaches, body aches, and nausea--similar to electrical shock, if your body isn't prepared for the experience through yoga. You may also be left with this feeling after hours in front of a genuine guru or satguru. A real guru is an emanation of perfect consciousness, and that emanation is experienced as electrical energy.

This is also the reason that Hinduism tends to steer the average householder away from Kali worship. Kali is pure electrical consciousness in its rawest form, and invoking that energy regularly is like cleaning your house with a blowtorch. You don't want to burn it down unless you're really ready to renounce the world and the ego. Or, you have to know how to handle the energy with care. Most of us are not experts. The magician is one who strives to be an expert in handling and commanding pure energy.

Cultural and collective evidence certainly does more than suggest a connection between what we call "spirit" or perhaps "soul" and electricity. But since everything is electrical, including our thoughts, it still doesn't answer the question of whether or not spirit manifestation is a phenomena that is "separate" from us or part of our unconscious psychology. Do we "see" things because the mind is picking up on unusual or intense pockets of electromagnetism, or are these separate electrical beings with a consciousness of their own? In some larger sense all consciousness is connected, but does such a thing have an identity or ego? Is it a fragment of one, unrelated to the "soul" or "spirit" of a person?

For more thoughts on electrical beings, I recommend John Foxx's recent blog posts on Grey Energy vs. Green Energy (Thought Experiment 1 and Thought Experiment 2).

Symbol versus Function Take Two

2011-05-03T05:40:00.002-04:00

I saw two headlines this morning. The first said, "The world is safer" (The Philadelphia Inquirer). The one immediately underneath it said, "TSA on Security Alert after Bin Laden Death". Which I think nicely sums up everything that needs to be said about the death of Osama Bin Laden. It's hard to tell who's delusional--the press or the TSA. I'll put my money on the press. It's entirely possible that taking out Bin Laden will take some of the wind out of al Qaeda's sails. It's also possible that we'll see a resurgence in terrorist activity.

With regards to the current celebrating over Bin Laden's death, a lot of people are disturbed about the celebrating of an event like death. When it comes to killing, two wrongs don't necessarily make a right. On the other hand, as a Facebook friend put it, "Bin Laden was not a Muslim leader; he was a mass murderer". Those who lost someone in the World Trade Center attacks almost 10 years ago may feel a sense of relief or justice. Regardless of viewpoint, the death of Bin Laden is the second example in less than a week of symbol preceding function. I mentioned it in my last post in connection with the royal wedding, and it applies here, too.

On some shadowy level, all of us have the potential to be hateful, all of us have the potential to kill. It's innate in human nature; it's innate in life. Life on the most basic biological level is killing and eating. But that's just a small part of what drives celebration over death. In this case, Bin Laden had become a symbol of fear. He was a symbol of America under attack, of Muslim fundamentalism at its worst, of everything that is supposed to be the antithesis of national values. He has ceased to be human in the collective mind. Killing the source of fear brings about a collective psychological relief. It doesn't matter that there are other terrorists out there. It doesn't matter that al Qaeda is likely to continue its existence, with other extremists. It doesn't matter that someone else could gain prominence and be like Bin Laden. Facts DON'T matter when it comes to the collective psyche. It's the old scapegoat ritual, where all of the sins of a community are symbolically put into an animal, and that animal is either killed or banished. If you think ritual doesn't count for anything in the 21st century, think again. We've just participated.

I'm not interested in delving into the ethics of the situation. This is simply the psychological fact, regardless of where one stands on such killing, on war, and on life. Your personal ethics will naturally dictate your response to the event. NPR ran an article today asking, "Is it wrong to celebrate Bin Laden's death?" Certainly it is an ethical conundrum for those who believe killing is wrong under any circumstances. They have to struggle with the collective response.

I would suggest that sometimes, to choose life means choosing death. They're not as mutually exclusive as you would think. You can give that some thought.

As for me, I need to get ready for work. I've been trying to cram too much into my days, and it tends to make me irritable. I don't like when my sense of ambition lags behind my growing to-do list. The cat has worked hard at being helpful, sitting in the middle of piles of papers while I'm working, and hiding under the sofa to make sneak attacks when I walk by. Now he is contentedly washing his face while simultaneously watching for mice in the corner of the living room. Apparently he is much better at multitasking than I am.

Wedding

2011-04-29T18:49:00.001-04:00

So, today was the Royal Wedding in London. No, I did not fly over to see the fanfare; only John Foxx is worthy of a $600-$1000 plane ticket. I did, however, catch a bit of it on Channel 13 as I was getting ready for work. The whole phenomenon raises some interesting questions.

The first and most obvious question is why they do it at all. Why is there still a monarchy in Great Britain? Their political duties are largely ceremonial, and they’re really a wealthy family being kept in zoo-like conditions. They are expected to behave in a certain way that is somewhat less than human, and ironically, they are held up as being better than other humans (they are “royalty”, others are “commoners”). This is because they are living symbols.

I like this example because it demonstrates something that I have great difficulty explaining in a “rational” sense—the force of symbol over function. The British monarchy is a symbol of British history, which is a huge force, not only for citizens, but for the world. They are an archetype unto themselves, and even though there’s no functional reason for them to be there (other than tourism, perhaps), they are still supported. You will always hear an outcry against getting rid of the monarchy when it is suggested. State occasions are loaded with symbol, and the royal weddings are the ultimate symbol—they bring together the notion of union/conjunctio (the marriage) with the religious symbolism of a place like Westminster Abbey (2000 years of Christian symbolism), with the royal symbols that carry hundreds of years of British history. It’s like an orgasm for the unconscious. People react to it in a very emotional manner—either they are very excited, or they are very opposed. Either way, it has an effect on British citizens, and on others around the world as well.

Americans have a real love affair with British royalty. They just love the aesthetics of the beautiful palaces, decorations, and regalia. They love the archetypal notion of being a “queen” or a “prince” or a “princess”—anything with a title, really. And they can do this easily because they are outside the system. (I say “they” even though I’m American, because I’m not really that bowled over by all of it, though I can appreciate the aesthetics and symbolism of the whole thing). It’s very much romanticized.

For the British, it’s a different story. Certainly the monarchy has its staunch supporters. But among regular middle class and working class people, the impression of the monarchy and their feelings about it may be rather different. Since the industrial revolution, Britain has had quite a violent history of class warfare—parallel in some respects to what went on in the United States in the early 20th century with the beginnings of the labor movement, but much more intense—and going on for a much longer time. There was a reason punks were angry at the time of the Queen’s first jubilee in 1976. All this money spent on fanfare when there was poverty, unemployment, and scarce resources. The symbolism of the royalty affects them as much as anyone else—you almost can’t help it if you are of European descent at all. But the British often struggle with that archetype versus the resentment over fiscal realities.

As I was watching the motorcade from Buckingham Palace on the television, one of the female British commentators made the statement, “Michael Middleton must be so proud of his daughter, being the son of a Yorkshire pilot, and coming to this.” Since this is a bit unclear, let me re-state: Mr. Middleton is the son of a Yorkshire pilot. Now he is part of the aristocracy, due to his daughter's marriage. I think I threw up a little in my mouth. It’s an illustration of something that I don’t like about the UK—a caste-like class distinction. It is accepted that what one’s parents did determines one’s place in society, regardless of anything that person may have achieved on their own. It’s as if feudalism never died out, and we’re still in the era in modern Europe where one can only change their social status by the partner they choose. And even still, that person is considered to occupy a “lesser” place, whether that is conveyed overtly or subtly.

It’s particularly offensive to me as an American, partially because of our own collective mythology in this country. In America, the idea is that anyone can become successful if they work hard enough. This is utter nonsense, but it does permeate the elementary ideas of our culture. As an idea, it has its advantages and disadvantages, like any myth. It can prompt someone to overcome difficult circumstances. As we are seeing in this country today—it can also be an excuse to disenfranchise those who are not rich, by suggesting they have not been hugely successful because they are “lazy” and “entitled”. All myths have a dark side. And no one should be fooled into thinking there’s total equality in this country—anyone who is not white, male, and Protestant (and wealthy) has a real set of challenges to deal with if they occupy any position of authority. But the British love to come here—as I was once told, coming to America for the common British person is like losing 15 pounds right off—the weight of “hereditary (and geographic) racism”.

When John Foxx visited New York in November of 2009, I had someone ask me what Americans thought of his Northern accent. I laughed, because the average American can’t tell the difference between a Lancashire accent and a posh London accent. For that matter, Americans can’t tell the difference between English, Irish, and Scottish accents. It’s all “British” and all wonderful to them. (Of course, the Scots and the Irish are often offended by being lumped in with the English). Americans don’t care. If you have a British accent, they love you. It may be the most hated accent other places in the world, but not here. The Revolutionary War and the War of 1812 have been long forgiven. I happen to love John’s Chorley accent, but it subjects him to a lot of prejudice at home (which he has indicated in interviews, and is evident in the way many English interviewers talk about him). Americans don’t get that—it seems stupid to treat someone differently because of their accent. And I’ll go out on a limb and say we’re right for once—it is stupid. Not that we don’t discriminate and judge in other ways. Humans are funny that way.

In any case, the wedding fanfare was colorful and interesting, and I’m very glad the British got a bank holiday out of it. I hope the royal supporters and detractors both had a good day, and if you’re one of those obsessed people that bought a Kate and William commemorative refrigerator, may I suggest you get professional help.

WAMFEST at FDU: Visconti, Marsh, Escovedo. And, Thoughts on Association

2011-04-26T20:55:00.000-04:00

After work today, I went to the first event in Wesley Stace's (John Wesley Harding's) "WAMFEST" for this year. WAMFEST is a remarkable musical and literary event that takes place at Fairleigh Dickinson University every year. You can check out the WAMFEST blog here.

This event featured Alejandro Escovedo and his band, rock critic Dave Marsh, and superstar producer Tony Visconti. The whole event was amazing--Escovedo is an amazing musician, and I say that as someone who is not a particular fan of his genre, which is sort of a rock/country kind of thing. (That may be unfair, but take it as a loose interpretation). He was produced by Visconti, who spoke about the production process with Escovedo, and compared it to the experience of producing acts like David Bowie and T.Rex. If Escovedo did a very simple tune live, Visconti explained how he would suggest certain chord changes to Escovedo to bring out the chorus and other features of the song, to make it less like a song with "campfire chords". They played two different versions of the same song, to demonstrate how they sounded pre and post production. It was fascinating.

There was a question that I wanted to ask Tony Visconti, but they took 3 questions, and there wasn't time for another. I wondered how easily he could switch between genres--from Marc Bolan's initial "hippy" phase, to the electric glam rock, to the R&B of Bowie's "Young Americans", to the music of someone like Alejandro Escovedo. I didn't get to ask him, but my friend and colleague Harry suggested to me that a good producer is probably a good facilitator. They should be open to what the artist is doing, and go with the flow. Suggestions ought to enhance the sound, not totally change it to something inauthentic.

They ended the event with a rendition of "All the Young Dudes", which you may remember as the hit song for Mott the Hoople. This was an emotional choice for me, as this song makes me cry. Since I've driven home, I've debated whether or not I should publicly say why. I've concluded that I should, as it's an excellent illustration of how music has an impact because it is associated with much bigger things, in spite of its original intention. Literature can have a similar effect, but sound can make a world of difference.

I will start by telling you that "All the Young Dudes" reminds me of my brother, even though I have no memory of my brother being a particular fan of this song, or ever playing it in my presence. My brother died of AIDS at the age of 23. It's funny to even mention that, as we were strictly instructed to remain hush-hush about the cause of death (which ended up being complications from pneumonia). The reason I was given was, "there are people who would burn our house down if they knew." To which I say with all great sincerity, to such people, if such people are out there: Fuck you and go to hell.

"All the Young Dudes" is clearly a song relating to gay culture, and there is a sadness to it, as it definitely has a minor key in its notes. Thank God they didn't have an organ or other synthesizer there, because if I heard the synth part I really would have lost it. Being of a somewhat "English" temperament, I'm rather embarrassed by public displays of emotion. I'm not interested in carrying on in front of others.

As I mentioned, my brother never showed an affinity for this song. He liked the kind of disco/techno music that was being played at the Palladium and Studio 54 in the early 1980s. I think my association with this song must have come from a documentary, or some event, where I heard this song and connected it with him.

But it's bigger than just him. I don't tend to dwell on death. To me, to mourn a person too long is an act of selfishness. (I apologize if I offend anyone with that statement). I feel that if I care about the person, I let them go, and let them move on. I say that as a spiritual person. If I hang on, then they may hang on for my account. There's no reason they should do this. I need to contend with my own void, and use it as a learning experience.

It's more about the bullshit he put up with as a gay man coming out in the early 1980s. About the prejudice and intolerance shown by his job, and even by members of our family. The lasting impact this has had on my mother, which has had a lasting negative impact on family relations. It was destructive in many ways, and did not need to be. It was because people are stupid and fearful and prejudiced. That makes me sad and angry. I include myself in this, because I am human and not immune to bad behavior. The song has a bit of fight to it, and I suppose it makes me think of fighting prejudice, and loving yourself in spite of the fact that society does not accept you. The fact that society is this way makes me cry. Freedom is something I value above all else, and I don't like to see others limited or deprived of it, for reasons spoken or unspoken.

So, if I read this over, I say "Wow". One song reminiscent of one event remembered vaguely triggers a whole world of symbolism and association. That's how powerful the unconscious is. I don't think about these things every day. But it's clear that they still affect me.