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.

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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.

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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.