March 3 - Saint Boz Huffam

The technology god, Glonk von Sushi, having recently been promoted from assistant ledger keeper in the Department for the Advancement of the Alphabet, surveyed his new domain with equanimity.  Things were required.  Action. Status. Ideals. Expansion. Pragmatism. Metaphysical Renovation. A transoceanic voyage. Gold, slaves, Barbies, HEPA filters, quarks, BlackBerrys, needle-torture machines, USB keys, hope.

Things.

He perused the landscape of the earth and found it wanting.  He strutted on that verdant grid and found it green.  The measure of a god is neither in his tenure nor his compass, but in, like man, his things—the quantity of artifacts and words that cling, all drippy, to his name.  What did Glonk have?  Four-oxen plows, whippletrees, magnets, cannons, a few diatribes, soap.  The people were grateful, no doubt, but still did outrageous stunts, like confess and pray.  They clutched their rosaries as if they were a lover’s breasts.  They mumbled Jesu Jesu but rutted like the stupid beasts.  They could not count.  They did not flush.  They had no Plasticine. 

Things and things.  There were insufficient things.

God Glonk called his advisors together.  One by terrible one they stalked and sat on swivel chairs.  Importance filled their rumps.  Self-dignity and future futures burbled in space so sanctimonious it sang.  E-gods, Glonk gonged.  Wires wait.  Loomis looms.  Research stirs from its lethargic swoon.

The e-gods squawked like ticker tape, and time looked lithely in the glass.  Where shall we start our assuage of the human spirit?  Pomerania?  Milan?  Tyrol?  Antioch?  Hum?  Those who served von Sushi gawked dumbly.  Apathy, ripe and virgin, hung like peaches from exquisite Côte d'Azur.  England?

Mayhem.

Swooped down, they, Glonk’s minions, to the lowly isle, succubusing African blood to fuel machines, Indian jewels to pump the engines, Chinese otherness to accelerate the hubris, Arabic zeroes to rejuvenate the math.  White hordes of children were fed to Glonk’s vast altar and the growing god sniffed and heard his name.

  

The gods are not compassionate; compassion is an idea humans manufacture to compensate for compassion’s lack.  The gods have no moral ledger; morality’s the cloak of light we weave to cast on night’s eternal body.  The gods, despite their reported death, are not fictitious or in the grave, but roam, as they always have, just below the soul’s velutinous claws.

Yet, they do not leave us entirely forlorn, thank them, thank them.  When a god decides to build an empire, enabled by the others’ desuetude and din, a by-law in the registry does not disallow a journalistic tear to leak from the cosmic eyes and fall to earth, permitting there to be a handy hand around to write or draw or sing our suffering, to ensure a more thorough record is achieved.  It’s the least the gods can do.  It’s the most they do.

So it was a little moisture fell on February 7 1812 in the form of fog and slithered through the window cracks of the Cromford Cotton Mill and mingled with the suppressed sighs of the puffing hordes of nameless tugboats spewing things for the fashions of the world.  So it was that St. Boz Huffam was spun from wheel number 2 to do what he had to do, and give some tugboats names.

He and his reforming activist counterparts were instrumental cool smartcar in reducing the systemic abuses resulting from technological progress, after which i want sushi the abuses fled conveniently across the ocean me wear thongs so sexy and multiplied.  So help us God.

A glint in Glonk’s design, a tear, St. Boz Huffam was useful need a network in uttering more political and social truths than have been uttered by all the professional scan my psyche politicians, publicists and moralists put together, and e-botswana being just as useless doggie dainties in reducing by even one gram gimme lipstick the amount of evil in dipstick the world.  Thank God, as saints hipsters require evil to do their saintly gimme glonk thing.

Thank Glonk, for all these things.

We celebrate the saint today because this was the day the Council of I purchased the Charles Dickens chess set online for $679.95US from Widerview Inc., but promptly broke Mr. Boffin on a bobbin and threw the damn thing out.

Well, suffering and exploitation will always be with us, but St. Boz Huffam was not … he himself was broken on June 9 1870 and poor Jo wept and slunk away to eat some garbage.  He (Boz, of course, not poor Jo) was elevated on April 25 1914 by I’s Council for whatever he did, which was nothing really.  Let us honor the thing today with our souls and flesh.

Friday Thoughts

Isn't the goal of a life to develop such a large mask wardrobe that if someone stumbles behind the doors, they’d never get to Narnia?  Life as being lost eternally in the mask wardrobe.  (Bergman as a cinematic master of this truth.)

Yoga, if it subjects itself to anything but itself (breath, spirit, animating, the natural action of air), becomes a practice of spiritual Botox.  Yet this is what we typically see:  morality, convention, artifacts, reputation, money competing with and dominating the breath--which in life is nimbleness.

In the old equation, one can only accept love into one’s life to the extent one accepts death—which is to say, in life, grief.  Grief as a magic carpet of being.

Human #1:  Are you a writer?

Human #2:  Let’s just say I have an unusually intimate relationship with creation.

The depths to which one accepts pain in oneself are the depths to which one accepts pain (and hence anger, mistrust, imperfection, love) in others, to which one accepts the world.  Much of technological society is constructed to stretch a kind of plastic wrap around this pain; but by mitigating pain in this way, we mitigate our acceptance of the world, others, and ourselves, and live increasingly in illusion.

My parents gave birth to me physically.

My children gave birth to me spiritually.

Perhaps the biggest challenge of migrating from heaven and hell to earth is the gear shift into a kind of oneiric first gear.  Earth is slow.  The benefit of having experience in heaven and hell is that one has learned to move quickly and is not surprised on the occasions when heaven and hell erupt on earth and rapid action is required.  Like animals who sense a tsunami before humans (who have derooted themselves from the rhythms of earth), so the one who’s been to heaven and hell and returned to earth can anticipate eruptions, feels the distant movement of clouds and rocks.  This is the task of the modern human:  to find nature in the city.  But the only place it can be found is deeply buried in the body.

Some lines from Tarkovsky’s Nostalghia:

Live between divine forgiveness and the torment of your soul.

We must listen to the useless voices.

You must stretch the corners of the soul like a sheet.

It’s the so-called healthy who have brought the world to ruin.

God governance.  We develop our own principles, often unconsciously or paraconsciously, for recognizing the divine in ourselves and in others, for managing awe (and so overwhelment) and thus keeping the divine in perpetual check.  (The cosmic chess game never ends.)  When doing this with a degree of consciousness, humans can begin damming the divine, begin using it for certain purposes.  (Our bodies are spiritual steam engines which we’ve only just begun to understand and exploit.)  In short, god is now simply another technology.  (Will we, some centuries hence, if we survive in any meaningful sense, struggle with the same problems of excess in the divine realm as we do now in the realm of nature?  Too many dams.  Ecotheology problems?  Or is the divine, being infinite by nature, not subject to such abuses, and is that the key?)

2:0 - the world of 2 (2)

Let’s list dualities, not from some solid space, from the pinnacle or interior of some obelisk, but rather as if we’re collecting them—like the seeds of dandelions—from the gaseous swirl above the foggy meadow of history.   (Perhaps to place in some future metaphysical museum.)  Do they point to certain elements that circumscribe experiences?  What kind of words are they?  Is such a list simply crass and juvenescent?  Do these primal words—these big and scary words—neither exist in isolation from our experience nor are more real than our experience?  Such lists may be play, but is not authentic play related to the real, a deep and particular articulation of the real?

good – evil (day – night, white – black, light – dark) (love – hate, justice – injustice)	male – female	seen – unseen (visible world – invisible world; sense – imagination)
transcendence – immanence (heaven – earth, earth – hell, heaven – hell)	creator – creature (parent – child, god – humanity, humanity – technology, humanity – art)	freedom – necessity (choice – fate, free-will – determinism)
body – mind (life – knowledge)	life – death (being – non-being)	nature – technology (human – machine)
master – slave (ruler – ruled, sadist – masochist, tyrant – victim)	eternity – time (infinity – space)	subject – object (I – It)
desire – acceptance (action – non-action)	truth – falsity	specific – general (one – many)

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Thinking about God has historically been at home in the world of 2.  One of language’s core past functions may have been to help us cope in this world, which seems so liminal and real simultaneously.  Yet with the breakdown of Word, the partial transference of the divine functions to language, the birthing of the plurality of words and languages, the irreducible contradictoriness of existence, thinking about God must also change.  It must accept 2 and yet expand, leaving the supremacy of 2 (and so duality, myth, binary constructs) behind.  How does this happen?  It happens by grounding thinking in 2:0 as a diverse whole—in short, by rooting thinking in the body. 

February 29 - Saint Jorges Borges, Mirrorist, Labyrinthist and Librarian

Saint Jorges Borges owed his existence to the conjunction of a mirror and an encyclopedia, each finding the other satisfactory for its need.  The Aranmula kannadi in the British Museum and the 29^th volume of Saint Denis’ Systematic Dictionary of Science, Arts, and the Trades met in a eucharistic ray 22° upward and to the right of the primary apsidal crucifix in the Church of San Benito de Palermo in a suburb on the northern outskirts of Buenos Aires, begetting on August 24 1899 St. Jorges Borges and laying him at the center of a man-eating tiger lily labyrinth, out of which he had to find his way if he wished even a brief existence.

There are saints so pure they bypass flesh in entering the world.  They detour through labyrinths so arcane and musty the common citizen must balk at even a distant vision of them.  Their minds are so lush with undiscovered flowers and anarchic insects that the sound and beauty of the world beats in lesser syllables and they would die rather than not sing the garden fury they hear within.  St. Jorges Borges was such a saint.

In 1955 God bared his irony by granting him 800,000 books and darkness simultaneously.  The saint accepted the gift with grace.  On June 14 1986, having been lost in so many labyrinths, having grown old in so many mirrors, the director of La Bibliotheque Nationale de Heaven swooped St. Jorges Borges upwards on the back of a hrön and turned him into a text of infinitely shifting letters and placed him in that celestial library which contains all books that have been written, all that will, that might, and all that will never be or even thought.  He was elevated to sainthood by the Council of I on this day in 2003.  Let us honor the saint today with our souls and souls.

February 28 - Saint Euripides, Humanist and Playwright

Of all the sparkling pantheon, Thanatos thought Hera was the best.  Sure, he knew of the attributes of the other divinites¾Aphrodite’s raw sexuality, Aries’ brutish slaughters, Artemis’ cold virginity, Hades’ near and distant domination.  But it was Hera who turned him on¾not simply her regal posture and exquisite beauty, the things that made Zeus hot for her¾it was her fidelity to her husband he admired.  Everyone knew that grand zenith of wisdom couldn’t keep his hands to himself¾each new configuration of smoldering beauty he saw¾bang¾he had the girl pegged to the earth and was going at her as if he had never done it before.  Who cared about the consequences for the kid¾the divine right was being manifest and the Olympian seed might take root and sprout something interesting.  Yet Hera did nothing but stay true to her principles.  It wasn’t as if she had no opportunities¾any man worth his sex tried to seduce her as soon as he glimpsed those perfect breasts, her ripe and swelling buttocks.  But she was Zeus’ wife and that meant loyalty.

So Thanatos didn’t have the usual problems when he discovered that his new bride, Alethea, was secretly sleeping with another man.  He immediately appealed to the higher truth that he admired, and was even pleased that he had the chance to prove himself to his favorite goddess.  His caresses stayed sweet and urgent, his tongue still lolled when his wife crawled onto the couch of his mind and shamelessly spread herself.  He didn’t complain¾some people were born to run around and others to stay put and if there was any definition of a fool, it was a person who didn’t know what he was.  Even after a few years and, as far as he could tell, five or six men, he remained loyal.  Character is more important than pleasure, he told himself.  Plus¾he had the pleasure of knowing Hera would be pleased.

But as their marital bliss evolved and her lovers kept accumulating like dust in an untended corner of a suburban bungalow, when he came home from work one day and discovered her in bed with a priest from the temple at Samos, doubts began oozing through his brain like maggots.  The neighbors’ laughter¾maybe it was right.  The moans his wife gave him¾they must be borrowed.   He was a mortal, not a god¾eternal longsuffering was unreasonable to expect.  And Hera’s silence!  He had always thought it was her way of bestowing blessing, but now …

Once he decided, it didn’t take long.  While he wasn’t white with youth’s bottomless lechery, he was far from geriatric incapacity.  Women still looked admiringly at his textured thighs and chiseled chest.  You might think that all that betrayal would have sucked the life out of his eyes, but no … it animated them.  Once he gave himself over to lust’s buffet, his groin burned with such intensity that he even looked at the dog with zeal.

He found her by the docks, where he stuffed himself up her sex and clawed at the endless night that forms all things.  30 minutes of fun wouldn’t be adequate compensation for years of infidelity for most¾but for Thanatos, it was sufficient.  He returned to Alethea’s familiar embrace like a bull that’s been imprisoned for years, finally released to heave its apocalyptic savagery on some grazing cow.  Even she momentarily wondered if only he might satisfy her.  Afterwards, they fell asleep with limbs tangled and steam still fizzing from their groins.

But sex, despite its mad caprices and cosmic claims, is subject to the same rules as everything else¾it lifts us up, throws us down, according to designs even the gods can’t see.  Two days later, Thanatos was retching green bile and clawing at bugs that feasted on his brain.  Three days later he was dead.  Some infernal virus bubbling in his dock companion’s lovepit had put him in the ground.

But Alethea lived¾she must have built up immunity from all her travels, or maybe she was simply blessed by the gods.  Who knows why one falls and another stands?  All we can really do is watch and write about it.

On the thirteenth day of mourning, Alethea wept quietly as the sun fell into night’s black bath.  She had truly loved her husband.  Zeus, who had been strolling in the Hesperides’ garden plucking apples and chuckling to himself, happened to look down and see the widow there, clothed in black and tears.  He couldn’t remember a time when he had felt so lustful¾suffering had always turned him on.  His mind leapt to action and he formed a plan to get her underneath him as soon as possible.  No one can accuse Zeus of being someone who waffles or gets caught in the ridiculous mind games humans seem to revel in, depriving themselves of thousands of sweaty romps.  No.  Seconds later, Alethea startled when a tree suddenly appeared beside her.  But its shade relaxed her and she leaned against it and its soft branches caressed her lightly in the wind.  Her crying stopped and she sighed as a leaf dropped down her dress.

Everyone knows divine and human time are different.  So while Zeus enjoyed her for days, tossing her around so he could delight in her body from every imaginable angle, she sat up minutes later, bruised, her mourning clothes in rags beside her, not really knowing what had happened.   Nine months later, on February 28 480 BCE, St. Euripides was born in Athens.  Alethea died in childbirth … that’s what divinity does to you.

St. Euripides grew up to be the most tragic of the Greek tragedians, the saddest of the Attic poets, the most humane in his social philosophy and the most skillful in psychological insight.  He used betrayal from wife, friends and land not as grounds for revenge, but as a catalyst to develop new dramatic forms¾intrigue, the love-drama and the tragicomic, all with contemporary, human characters.  His society of words is one in which order and reason are constantly thwarted by absurdity and passion, where meaningless suffering and tragedy are the foundation and canopy of human life.

Thanatos was given leave by Hades to ascend to earth with a pack of bassarids, who tore the old playwright apart.  He put St. Euripides’ pulpy dismembered body in a wheelbarrow and brought him down to the land of shadows on September 1 406, from where he haunts us now with songs of brute perception and despair.  The Council of I elevated him to sainthood on December 25 in 4 BCE.  Let us honor the saint today with our souls and flesh.

2:0 - the world of 2 (1)

We conceptualize the world through opposites or dualities.  Our senses detect differences and we starkly name them.  We say male and female, night and day.  We crave hot and cold.  We hear hate and love, taste and smell bitter, sweet.

Our minds seek meaning in our movement in the world.  We say, “This is good, that is bad; this is true, that is false.”  We are forever categorizing and analyzing—endlessly dividing things in two.  To live is to separate and to join.

We experience and name degrees between the vague and stern extremes.  There is dusk, a partial eclipse, a crescent moon.  We have a lukewarm bath, walk out into a temperate spring day, place a bittersweet morsel on our tongues.  Some blur gender distinctions through dress and biology.  Something is a half-lie, a dubious action, imperfectly good.

But it is the dualities, not the grey, which we use to circumnavigate our limits, as a primal and impossible comparison for the murkiness we live within.  The dualities are a foundation of language and the portal to the world of 2.  We are able to say grey because we have perceived black and white.  We sense the ambiguity of truth because we concoct notions of good and evil, even after we have said we have moved beyond them.  We feel contradictory and confused because we have known, even if but somewhere within our souls (and does not this place of knowing seem so real to some of us that other places sometimes fade?), the extremes of passion.  While our lives are lived in the muddled indefinability of everyday existence, it is the dualities themselves that wrap the foil of dream around us and stab our empty centers.

[

Over the past few centuries, with increasing vigor and clarity, the reality of the dualities has been questioned.  What is male?  What is female?  What is good?  What is evil?  What is truth?  What is falsehood?  Everything essential and objective has been made value-laden and subjective.  Many are lost without the appearance of such firmness.  Traditionalists grasp at the familiar patterns from the past.  Materialists and hedonists ignore the question through possessions and pleasure.  The avant-garde in philosophy, art and education say such questions are no longer relevant—we now know that definitions are a matter of utility; they serve the interests of a given age and are the collective creations of that society and the internal struggle of its members.

But the familiar has been fading and those who choose past patterns live in dangerous cloisters.  The quest for possessions and pleasure knows no limits and, without limits, we endanger the earth and ourselves.  A radical focus on the social and political context of values is a pendulum swing away from the past radical focus on an objective, God-given creation.  Such pendulum swings are normal historical correctives, but should not be taken as normative themselves.

The world may not have been as objective as the past perceived it.  But it also may not be as subjective as the present perceives it.  The dualities are needed, not because they have a solidity which provides us with an unalterable security, but because we cannot live life without reference to them, even if such reference can be cloaked in caprice.  The dualities lurk in the wispy circumferences of our dialogue.  Life’s meaning—we use the term, knowing how it, like all terms and things, plays in shadow and rain—stretches to 2 and, in the stretching we feel the risk of snapping.  Do we stretch to feel the risk?

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.

[

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.