The Dangers

When one ventures into nature, warning signs abound.  Moose!  Steep Cliffs!  Falling Rocks!  Duck Crossing!  Lightning Frequently Strikes Here On Thursdays!  High Winds!  And should you approach too closely to the ocean or defy a current, your fellow species-members will reveal a usually taciturn compassion and warn you of rogue waves and wayward sharks and malicious rocks.

These same people, though, when in the city, will happily watch you drive a car or step into a plane … and not say anything.  They won’t even think anything.  They won’t be alarmed in the slightest.  They do it too!  Yet unless you live in the middle of the Nile, you have far more chance getting damaged or finalized by a fellow species-member or one of his creations than anything from nature.

Danger is where you live, in your environment.  And our environment is the city, where rabid killers roam, requiring ransoms; raged drivers careen, seeking random revenges; terrorists lurk above eyesight, waiting to drop.

Of course, we built the city to escape the tiger and crocodile, the battalions of bees, the flesh-obsessed ants.  And in this escape attempt, we’ve largely succeeded.  Most reasonably reasonable people admit, though, that all we’ve done is substitute the danger of ourselves—our missiles and vehicles—for all those indifferent hungry animals.

True.

Unfortunately, we haven’t simply substituted dangers, but have added to them.  Let’s draw a chart to illustrate the compounding dangers.

	Man in Nature	Man in the City
Dangers	1.   Beasts and Insects 2.   Acts of God 3.   Disease and Pestilence	1.   Technology 2.   Acts of God 3.   Disease and Pestilence 4.   Elimination of Beasts and Insects
Dangers Minimized or Eliminated	—	1.   Beasts and Insects

The fourth urban danger is not the separation of man’s environment and the tiger’s, but the gradual destruction of natural environments that, in turn, destroy—or threaten to destroy—key threads and nodes in life’s web (such as the bee) that, in turn, threaten to destroy us.

Thus, in a comic irony—comic from a divine or demonic perspective anyway—the very threat we’ve spent so much time and effort to diminish and eliminate, while appearing to have been dealt with, transforms itself in the shadows to a different form … and all we’ve done is add a new danger (our creations) and transform (unwittingly) an old one.

Yet we still, perhaps from desperation, consider ourselves clever.  Likely from desperation, as we go so far as to proclaim this the age of knowledge.

What should we then react to?  When should mothers scream, grandfathers solemnly warn, and sensitive people everywhere breathe cautious cautions?  Well, obviously, whenever they spot the real danger … the source.  Whenever they see a man.

2:0 - opening 3

We can think of God as the ratio 2:0.  This ratio itself is an object.  But, more fundamentally, 2:0 is an experience.

2 is the myriad world of opposites — love and hate, life and death, female and male, creator and creature.  It both includes and does not include God.  But even the exclusion includes God.

0 is utter emptiness, and reduces humanity to the starkest midnight isolation.  0 is wholly other.

2 is in relationship with 0 because of : or Spirit.  If it were otherwise, emptiness would be wholly unknowable to us and us to emptiness.  : is the bridge between our unspeakable void and our word-filled life.

God is the totality of the worlds of 2, 0 and the relational space perpetually in motion between them.  All errors spring from emphasizing one part of the ratio and diminishing one or more of the others.  God only lives as an irreducible totality.

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To use language to speak of God is necessary, real and inevitable.  Yet to leave God in language is a reduction and desecration.  To think that God only exists in thinking and speaking is not to have had experience of God.  If you have not experienced God, words may point you to God but they can never in themselves show God to you.  More likely, you will want to treat words as an object and dispute them.  Language and ideas are partially objects and so can and should be disputed.  But God, in the divine totality, includes but is beyond disputation.

Friday Thoughts

I wish to establish systems for those who live outside the systems established by the systems to look after those outside the systems.

One builds and maintains diversity through structure in the postmodern world.  But in order to lead this building, one has to be diverse oneself:  to include within the self—and to possess the techniques required to cope with this inclusion—contradictory, irreconcilable, irreducible voices and values.  Technology (of which structure is a form) becomes Spirit’s (spirits’ ?) strategic partner.  God cannot enter humanity except through technology.  This is the breach, the wound, at the heart of Spirit presently.

I live now at the limits of language.  I speak from a space outside of language, using language to translate the silence, the emptiness, of that space.  An odd convergence of Wittgenstein and the Tao.

Authentic subversion is not perceived to be subversive, as it is unseen by the instruments of standardized power.  Authentic subversion is the subtle, slow workings of Spirit to alter the blind drive of nature through almost imperceptible acts of love.

Human 1:  Things aren’t what they seem.

Human 2:  Things are just what they seem.

Myth is subject to life, the body; history is subject to myth.

The vatic function is a function of geometry, a paying attention to the shapes of relationships.  The entropy of the average life is indirectly proportional to attention to relationships, to the vatic function.  The prophet resists entropy—to the extent possible permitted by physicality—by allowing him or herself to be contained by the empty spaces within the particular shapes given to him or her. 

I stay healthy by being legion, by indulging (accepting, observing, recording, listening, explaining) the diverse voices.  In so doing, I defeat Christ, and the pigs into which Legion was cast are safe, and the mad man remains in his cave in the city, and there is no messiah to cast Legion out.  This is the new good.

There is a community of the violated hiding in society.  This community refrains from violation because they have seen, they have felt, what violation does.  This is ethics and it is born from darkness.  This community works silently, subversively, cunningly, in little chunks, to undo the tsunami of violation that occurs each second on this planet.  Justice thus happens far from the marketplace; it is a form of art.

Perhaps what hurts most deeply in existence—the core acceptance which society is structured to resist—is that all the stories are valid, they’re all equal, they all must be authentically encountered.

The difference between vision inside something and outside it.  We posited God as a necessary fiction to expand our sight, to expand consciousness.  But now we posit what we call a non-fiction to perform the same function.  What is the discipline of this?  What are its methods?

Mrs. Vogler in Bergman’s Persona:  what happens to her after she returns to society?  The post-Persona question.  What happens after one has encountered absolute silence?  Masks and actors in Bergman (particularly in Persona, Fanny & Alexander, and The Seventh Seal) as psychic, mythic, and evolutionary truths.  Persona is like a subtler, nobler Pulp Fiction.

The 21.12.12 apocalyptic phenomenon may be analogous, at a global secular level, to the Jewish expectation of the messiah millennia ago.  The end of the world may come this December, but it won’t be noticed, even as the birth of Jesus wasn’t noticed, for it will be occurring in unexpected ways, in faraway corners, in the cracks of time.  This is the truth of myth.

February 23 - St. Herman, Mythmonger

Herman.  How I love thee.  Solitary.  Hapless.  Desolate.  Born from water.  Died on land.

You’ve never seen the sea.  Oh, you’ve visited it.  Paid a week’s salary to spot a whale.  Wrote an essay on the mad sky humping a feral surf in Turner.  You can spell it.  You’ve read the horror story, Yahweh and the Hovering.  It’s there, blue and friendly, at center stage on your computer.

But have you knowledge?  Of its surface fickleness?  The calm, the vanity, the rage.  How you are less than a dust mite on the endless surface of its eye?  The salt and warp and anger.  The reduction of your sturdy vessel to a paper toy in the bathtub of nature’s tumult.  Yet these surface things are the easy nightmares.  Who cannot stand the simple onslaughts of sex and death¾flesh’s film, flesh’s salt and rage?  What terrifies us are the things we cannot see.  Tentacles of beauty waiting for a curious hand.  Vast balls of eyes squelching through the night, seeking only random human death.  Slimed monsters older than the earth living out the ageless ages, every century or so creeping to the shore and sitting on a town.  Creatures weighing 80 tons and pitiless, made, made for you.

You say¾I too do not know the sea.  I am like you¾it’s an item on the stock exchange.  I sit around on earth and never feel the terror-spray.  Heat is just a switch away.  Calm is just a pill.

Colleagues in the quest to drain the sea:  yes, we all are huddled together in the waterless earth; that other sea is gone¾the one we could taste and drown in.  But it has refreshed itself in another form¾one more insidious, more subtle, one much closer¾the sea has picked up its horrors and fathoms … and slimed inside the human soul.

This simulacrum sea is just as hungry as the other one.  As deep.  As teeming with foul creatures.  Don’t deceive yourself, concrete urbanite¾you still can drown.  You still are sought by monsters.  Your subways and televisions are no protection.  Nor your beer and jokes.  In fact, it’s worse¾as you’re a boat on the sea of life, there is no land to flee to.  We’re now never free from demon-storms and random tentacles, hairy claws a thousand metres long.

Welcome to the new world¾where all is sea, and our bodies boats waiting for a monster weighing more than Pluto to wipe out any trace of our having floated on the nameless waves.

Back in the days of history, when the sea was still the sea and land was land, just before Heaven’s tent collapsed and the future became the past, a small freighter was taken down off Chile’s southern coast; it had been carrying Jesus’ bones to a private investor in the South Pacific in a transaction best described as illegal; the bones, though well secured, did not survive the attack and were efficiently chomped to powder.  However, some of that white dust of God was not lost in the labyrinthine digestive tracks of the gargantuan predator, but dribbled down the wet face of darkness and entered the womb of Lamia, and she conceived and was with child and bore a son on August 1 1819.  Herman.  St. Herman.  How I love thee.

Final Exam

What does a saint do when he’s lived to see God and told the tale and he’s only 33?

(a)   Get crucified

(b)   Work for Customs

(c)    Write a poem so long it would stretch from New York City to San Francisco if letter to letter were abutted end to end.

(d)   Relive, in lesser words, in duller dreams, the days of demons, when life was death and dawn might be dawn, but equally might be a monster’s eye approaching.

(e)   Oh saint!  Who lives for madness, but when madness flees, finds himself without a home, roaming from shell to shell of memory; voices echo through the decades, calling, Friend; water drips where it poured and rushed.  A new madness awakes, one of doubt and ennui where once there was only faith.  A finger beckons, a door swings open.  A voice from underwater whispers, Come.

For 40 years and 40 nights St. Herman waited, roamed, among the trees of Massachusetts, among Manhattan hours.  He wandered on a land, sterile and parched, and he was not so much a man as he was the dream of a repetition of a journey taken by someone other in a distant and forsaken night.

On September 28 1891, the sea stalked from its bed of forgetting and lay claim to the resident alien who had been too long from water’s cold indifferent love.  The sea does not neglect its own.

His flesh was left where it belonged, food for beasts, but the family of Jesus dredged the sea and stole his soul and elevated it at 8:15 in the morning of August 6 1945, the day the sea roared inside us and began calling to our weary race, Come, Come.

Let us honor the saint today with our souls and flesh.

February 22 - Saint Adeline, Pioneer Poet of the Female Spirit

Leonard walks in his nightgown, I said.  Men walk in rhythms that sound like restless waves.  They walk with heavy boots.

Leonard walks in his nightgown, I said.  It is Tuesday¾he has picked the nightgown Thomas brought him from the Left Bank.  The one he bought from perfumed women on the Rue de Bac.  Silk pheasants sewn in gold on its sleeves seem to squawk at me.  I hide in my study on Tuesdays.

Leonard walks in his nightgown, I said.  He walks as if he wants me to think he’s going to the library.  He rustles his nightgown with a literary flourish.  Books do not change the world; they change the way a person walks down the hall.

Leonard walks in his nightgown, I said.  A nightgown indicates the kind of man a man wishes he could be.  My nightgown sags.  I look at my nightgown languishing in the black of my closet, shy, like a timid girl at a party.  I looked at it last Wednesday.  This is not me, I told myself.  I am not my nightgown.

Leonard walks in his nightgown, I said.  He wishes I would run from my study and stand dumfounded before his pheasants.  He wishes I’d proclaim the sanctity of golden squawking silk.  Should I do what he secretly desires?  I sit.  I sit in my thoughts.  I deny Leonard the praise of pheasants.  I sit in my thoughts and refuse the proclamation of nightgowns.

Leonard walks in his nightgown, I said.  He walks, and the world becomes his hem and pockets.  I walk, and my hem and pockets are just my hem and pockets.  I have no pheasants.  I have no sanctity and silk.  How strange that people should have nightgowns.  That they should proceed to their closets in the evenings and seek hanging garments of cotton or silk.

Leonard walks in his nightgown.  He walks on puffs of sedentary prose.  I do not puff like him.  I cannot puff.  His nightgown clomps across the hall as though it were apart from him, as though it walked itself and the man inside were hardly necessary.  I am not like that.  If I had pheasants, I would want us to be interchangeable.  I would want you to say pheasant and I would have heard St. Adeline; or, St. Adeline, and I’d be the bird.  You and I, I and you; this sweet confusion and identity is the dark sea he doesn’t understand.  Leonard knows he is not his pheasants; this is why he’s a man.

Leonard’s nightgown thinks I am mad.  It thinks I am not tangible like it.  I feel even through the walls its scorn.  I was not bought by Thomas in the Left Bank.  I wasn’t praised by the perfumed women on the Rue de Bac.  It was not me who was displayed at the dinner party and ogled over.  I cannot claim these rights.  I am like a tree that sinks its roots into darkness and is what it is but cannot say what it is.  For this I am mad.

I dreamt of nightgowns.  They had replaced the stars and a committee was formed to determine the effects of nightgowns hanging from the sky.  I was called against my will to testify, and two undistinguished fowl accompanied me, locking me to the ankle of the judge.  Thrown scraps of bread, I wept and could not eat.  Tears are my blood and birth, I thought, the sky above me and the earth below, my name and laughter.  I wept and thought, All I am is tears.  I have been tears since before I received a name.  Thus I will not be ashamed by my weeping.  I will turn my weeping into words.  A sombre anaconda stood and proclaimed, The verdict is unanimous.  She is guilty of madness, guilty of words, guilty of being a woman.  The sentence is death.

I am not ashamed of my nightgown.  I have seen that it could maybe hold the world.  I open my closet.  It smells of fear and night.  It smells of the weight of decisions.  It does not smell like trees.  I reach for my nightgown and put it on.  I remember dinner parties and eternities of privilege.  I walk toward the door and grip the key.

Arise, women.  It is time for us to walk in our nightgowns.  Time for us to define the world’s sad curves.  For us to push a little further against the darkness.  To carve the future from our spirits.  Sing the rhythms of ourselves.

I met Leonard walking in his nightgown and I said, I am not mad.  And if I am, it be the madness of life and I would forsake life before I let it go.  I writhe.  I am torn on my bed of birthing lunacy.  I risk my world to birth a world.  I give my heart to madness.  I take my heart and present it in pretty slices for the world’s hunger.  And what hunger!  I feed you something—myself; myself in thin sharp slices like proscuitto.  I combine the vision and courage of a man with the plurality and interiority of a woman.   No one has done this before.  Has anyone done it since?  For this singular contribution to the evolution of art, for restlessly seeking new forms, for exploring lands untouched by human words, for stretching the boundaries of the world past the past’s imagination, for traveling the path of creation even unto death, the Council of I elevated me to sainthood on October 13 1962, where I sit at the right hand of the ambivalence of the body and speak to myself of death’s soft waves.

Let us honor the saint today with our souls and flesh.

February 21 - St. Solomon, Sage and King

A man has seven hours to live.

His first hour is spent in ignorance.  It doesn’t matter whether it’s blissful or tortured, whether he’s left alone or abused; all he can think is¾this is the world.  If he feels like singing, he sings; if wants to weep, he weeps.  He accepts everything with equal measure.

In his second hour, the cock crows and tells him¾you are the world and everything¾in earth, the heavens and the infernal depths¾revolves around you.  You’re the emperor, the devil; you’re free.

The third hour he’s a puppy, running after everything that moves or has color, playing in everybody’s sandbox, stealing other puppies’ toys.  

The fourth hour he struts on the stage of himself, accumulating women, titles, goods, adding them to the house on his back, encased in cars which protect him from wind and silence.

By the fifth hour, the first stab of mortality hits him.  He feels the weight on his back.  The cock crows a different tune and tells him he hasn’t done anything¾each beast, human, each object that exists or has ever existed or will exist is the center of the world and all revolves around all in endless time.  He panics like a cornered beast and changes wife, car, house and job.

By the sixth, he’s put panic where it belongs¾buried deeply in some euphemism.  He’s learned to be silent about everything important, he speaks only soothing words.  According to the tradition of his fathers, he names this practice wisdom.

In his seventh hour, he chuckles to the insights of golf and tosses back beer that tastes like carbonated urine, while half the world starves to sustain the course he’s just completed.  He lives again in ignorance, but this time because he’s too blind to see the world or himself.  Without even knowing it, he attained his highest spiritual state in his first hour, before he began climbing his little hill of illusion.  The young scorn him¾they’re closer to the memory of what’s real.

If he’s lucky, the cock crows a third time soon and non-existence rapidly consumes him.  If he isn’t, the world is forced to spend another few hours listening to his slobbery memories.

There’s only one way to get through this mess.  Love the woman of your youth.  Fear the forces that raise and destroy love and life.  Know that you, everything you’ve loved and fought for, every work of beauty, each word of truth, will be forgotten, and all your hours will be like a face drawn in the sand on the edge of the sea.

So spoke St. Solomon in the dooms of time.  Let us honor the saint today with our souls and flesh.

2:0 - opening 2

The world does not believe in God anymore, not because anything in God has changed, but because the world only believes in objects and God dies if made into an object.  It is not as if God is not known through subject and object but that this knowing is not adequate.

Once God is an object and we are the subject, anything can be done with this portable divine artifact.  We can write God’s biography, we can give God a sex change, we can turn the one god into the many gods, we can heap irony, ridicule, scorn and apathy upon it.  We can give it its due a few hours a week while our lives remain indistinguishable from those who don’t.  God as object is a definition.  God as definition is something to object to—whether we define this God as male or female, dead or alive, a god or the gods, transcendent or immanent, beautiful or absurd, terrifying or irrelevant.

The modern God sits beside cars and investments, houses and entertainment, Caribbean vacations and creative workshops.  A feeble “choose” dribbles from the sagging divine lips. The sound falls like a tear in a torrent rushing towards a street sewer and disappears.  We rightly laugh at its absurdity.  God as object stands no chance.  God as object is a pitiable farce, a three-year fad, a bitter fling founded on protestations of lust and eternal love, a rusting coin in a safety deposit box.

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The experience of God cannot be taught.  It cannot be set in rules, dogma or moral prescriptions.  The path to God cannot be prescribed or in any way directly imparted.  It can only be pointed to.  It is the responsibility of those who have experienced God to point to God.  It is the responsibility of those who have not experienced God to follow the pointing.

One never finally arrives at the experience of God.  God is not a goal, an end, a static state.  But neither is God an incessant dynamism, a perpetual elusiveness, an unreachable chaos.  While God contains both end and flux, God is not primarily experienced as either.  Fundamentally, God is not experienced as anything.  God is simply experienced.

2:0 - Biography and Opening

Biography

Svoo—born John Smith—was an English aristocrat and Lord Spiritual who went mad when his wife died and wandered for seven years on the moors, munching on heather and mumbling to himself.  At the end of the seven years, he dictated 2:0 to Dominica, a golden plover, who transmitted the text to the Secular Sadoo.  We thank Svoo, Dominica, and the moors for their cooperation.

In a simple—some might say simplistic—and occasionally disarming way, Svoo examines the world of duality (2), nothingness (0), relation (:), and unity (1).  Written in brief, loosely connected vignettes, we’ll post sections on available improper days.

2:0

There is no definition of God.  There is only an experience of God.

Experience should not be understood as an experience from within me or an experience of something “out there.”  While the experience of God contains both, it is beyond both.

Experience should not be understood as feeling or using.  Feeling and using separate subject and object.  I feel love towards this person.  I use this person to gain information or pleasure, to reduce my loneliness.  The experience of God may include these things, but it is far more than these things.

We could also say knowledge instead of experience.  But it is not knowledge about something.  I do not know God if I can make a list of divine characteristics.  I do not know God if I have uncommunicable visions of God’s essence.  I do not know God if I have religious training or follow certain rituals.  All this, while it may be part of knowing God, is not knowing God.  If this is all that one knows about God, one only knows God as an object.

Man Meets Himself

The despair and speedy desperation at the center of urban man is easily explained, although its explanation is not popular.  Man’s primary project—the building of the city, with all its arsenal of protections and amusements—is largely built; he lives in his dream.  But the dream incarnate is far different than its earlier disembodied sibling—not pure and fearless, as he had planned, but full of the same medley of chaos and control as when he lived at the whims of nature (even if this medley manifests itself differently).  Considering that he has invested all these centuries of effort, of blood, and nothing within has changed—in fact, it’s got worse because what is within now intuits that its nature is far more resilient to change than man thought—he resorts to romanticizing nature (something no one familiar with nature would ever think of doing) and the sillier among him cling to some kind of future rescue—a disappearance into virtuality, alien visits, new exciting hallucinogenics, a true egalitarian democracy.

The problem is that man has become the god he’s always wanted to be.  The creator.  The arbiter of good and evil.  The writer of the text of knowledge, the one who eats that text and is not ashamed.  The confounder of language.  The fashioner and remover of fig leaves.

Except to the one who has become a machine—driven by its dictates of productivity and repeatability—all these grand accomplishments seem rather unsatisfying.  To this one who refuses the heady drugs of romanticism, no satisfaction is available to him.  The Stones’ famous song takes on a new prophetic significance, more metaphysical than they likely imagined.  Fortunately, most conform to the machine’s demands, even those who argue against its tyranny, thus the project is sustained and man has something to do that society considers useful.

But the futility of our projects is intuited in man’s spiritual subterranes, an intuition he blocks by throwing as many artifacts, toys, art pieces, ideologies, and images as he can afford into that growing vortex.  The gushing new is absolutely, tyrannically necessary … it’s the force that keeps society intact.  Although the consumer frenzy may destroy us, giving it up would also destroy us, a paradox that is—if possible—more horrifying than the futility of our efforts.

And what does the one of no-satisfaction do?  He does not commit suicide or participate in revolutions, as suicide and revolution both emerge from riding on the seesaw of hope and despair, and he left that playground some time ago.  He neither protests nor hides nor preaches.  He accepts what comes and bows outwardly to the rabid building around him.  He bows because not to bow is to draw attention to himself … and that is not worth the effort of explanation or defense, which would fall on incomprehending ears.

In effect, he becomes an eye.  He becomes what God became.  What the God behind the raging, building, knowing God became.  Still, silent, desolate.  A black unspeakable center.

The discerning reader may well ask—what then, to the visible eye, is the difference between the one who conforms to the machine and the one who bows but whose bowing is an act?  This is the irony—in the realm of flesh, there is no difference, and as only the realm of flesh, of quantity and things, matters to machine’s children, life can go merrily along and only those who have swung from hope to despair and can’t get back have to be punished.  That other realm—the realm of spirit—only matters to those who are acting, for they require its strange energy to build and sustain their masks.