Nine Dark Sides of Neptune

(aka Poseidon’s nocturnal nonagon)

the ghosts of reincarnation

We never hit bottom (death, annihilation, call it what you want) after we’ve been dropped from the clouds by bonobos or gremlins or angels or planes or laboratories into life’s well but rather our names gradually (though at different pacings) lose themselves in the increasing distance and darkness.  Our names are scraped by the well’s debris, by the bumping against the eternal walls, the other octillion things falling, until they cannot be read, except perhaps by those few who, by training or inclination, read obscure and ancient scripts.  At most, they may be sensed, as a mutant draft temporarily flings us, unnamed and acquainted only with falling, upward into the named; then we briefly become what are called ghosts or ancestral spirits or that uncanny mood that inexplicably possessed me as i passed that alley that spring evening, with mulch and blossoms still clinging to the dusk.

inheriting

William Golding, in The Inheritors, captures the melancholic exuberant inevitable takeover of Neanderthals by Homo Sapiens Sapiens.  Are we not now writing—collectively, melancholically, exuberantly, during the phenomenon itself—of the inevitable takeover of ourselves by the next order, already emerging and visible in the urban hordes ... what shall we call it?  If part of the Homo line ... Homo Webus? Homo Technus? Homo Nihilus?  If not part of the Homo line ... Weberthals? Technothals? Nihilathals?  They will not replace us primarily by violence and deceit, the techniques we used to overcome the Neanderthals, but with virtuality and pharmaceuticals and a dark patience not dissimilar to the dark patience of god.

the project of the projection of why

We don’t ultimately criticize anyone else or thing, although it frequently feels like this; all we do is receive signs that we’re to walk a particular path, which most are unable to help us with, an inability deriving from the characteristics of the particular or general path they are walking and must walk.  Our criticisms are emotional responses to our objections to our solitudes and fates.  We are inclined to blame others for these circumscriptions of nature, we attempt to drag facticity into our subjectivities, but in so doing refuse to grow into the circumscriptions of ourselves.

spiritual blood-letting

Even as there is a blood type that can donate to all others but only receive from its own, so there are spiritual types.  In one or two thousand years, if we progress spiritually at the same rate we’ve progressed technologically over the past two thousand years, we may understand these as well as we presently understand the ABO blood system.  But now, spiritually, we perform the practice of blood-letting and call it psychotherapy.  Our tamperings with psyches, minds, souls are primitive and barbaric; distant generations will look aghast on them, as we do now on the medical practices of the 17^th century.  But in the meantime we diminish spirits everywhere by having professionals draw vitality into their curious bowls, so that they can turn it into specimens and lay claims over it by virtue of having mapped it on their brains ... for, surely, in the logic of premodern medicine, doing something is better than doing nothing.

monsters of maturity

Once one has acclimatized oneself to human rejection, betrayal, anger, hate, abuse, incompetence, corruption, stupidity, greed, vanity, arrogance, projection (ideological and emotional), lust, delusion, hypocrisy, schadenfreude, injustice, possessiveness, smarminess, sentimentality, smallness, jealousy, envy and resentment; once one has accepted them as aspects of existence, as presently palpable (and so, in a sense, necessary, legitimate) as play, reflection, stillness, and smoking ... and experiences them in the way one experiences the Canadian winter (one may not always like it, one is at times compelled to mention it, even discuss it, but one becomes fairly indifferent to its harshness and vicissitudes); once one has traversed these common, bulky expressions of the human soul—and seen that routine society, its members and institutions, is primarily devoted to nurturing and renaming these expressions, in a kind of spiritual laundering process, to make them socially acceptable—one then can enter a space which facilitates appreciating the rare instances of nobility, dignity, grace, and intelligence as they do appear, randomly, irrespective of ideology, class, education, gender, almost as mutations, fleeting and beautiful, in the occasional individual—whether in a novel, poem or dream ... or in what we call reality ... who can say?

pupils of truth

I look into my pupils in the mirror and see rabbit holes:  deep shafts carved in vision to mine the madness of night.  I fall into them.  I count the false lights, falling, like fountains in a desert, windows on the energy of ossified illusion.  My words are tears, electric tears on the infinite electric page.  Only tears are real.  They carve the shafts that yield the words in falling.  Tears carve and in carving yield the tears of words.  Everything is a circle.

the insects will see god!

... : —  everything with twenty tentacles, grasping, asserting, leeching, sucking:  society a galaxy of tentacles, a fashion house of mawing hunger, a vast pile of insects crawling over each other, with the dead, the poor, the dispossessed, the exponentially growing artifacts of history and mind and art forming an increasingly huge and reeking pile on which the rest of us—randomly born into relative privilege, now for a moment able to breathe and move and see—crawl in hopes we can better see the stars.  And inch by inch, century by century, light year by light year, blood by blood, we get a little closer ...

inquisition redux

Modern psychotherapy as a vital resurgence of the Inquisition, in new, modern and exciting forms.  Immanence may have replaced transcendence, the psyche may have replaced god and psychology religion, but humans remain much the same, as a reading of Euripides, Chaucer, Omar Khayyám or Chuang Tzu quickly reveals.  Unfortunately, our First World social apparatuses lack the power to physically maul and decapitate those who deviate from the emotional orthodoxy ... but the means must align themselves with the environment, so the presently approved techniques of emotional mauling and decapitating are studied, developed, applied, published, enforced and analyzed by the industry’s professionals, with their canon and vocabularies, and accepted as commonplaces and promulgated by the masses and penitents, who receive their treatments with a dignity as wholesome and admirable as those 200 – 800 years ago.  These structures and processes include, but are not limited to, rigid unimaginative socially enforceable definitions (theoretical, behavioral) of emotional and spiritual maturity (no less narrow, dogmatic and serious than the official belief structures of the Middle Ages), orthodox emotional configurations devoted to tyrannizing—but nicely, politely, professionally, legally—their heterodox alternatives and calling their devotion not righteousness—for that is passé—but health.

the feather and the rock

Happiness is a feather on the edge of a shoulder while running an obstacle course through air conditioners, pain is a rock.

Happiness is not a feather, happiness is water.

But pain is a rock.

Flesh is a rock.

Flesh is a rock, movement is water.

Flesh is a rock, love is water.

Flesh is a rock, flesh is water.