Apocalypse Never

Naked Aggression

2012-01-18T11:13:00.012-05:00

I watched Nicolas Winding Refn's Bronson (2008) last night. My first thought, after recovering from the tidal wave of testosterone that is Tom Hardy in this, was that somebody has certainly spent a lot of time studying Kubrick's Clockwork Orange. It was very clear (even before I saw the ads lauding the film as "the Clockwork Orange of the 21st Century") that Refn used Kubrick's flawed but rivetingly stylized study of violence as a template for his own study of the animal in man.

Refn's film, outside of Hardy's unforgettable visceral performance as the unrelentingly vile criminal

Bronson, is not as memorable as the Kubrick

film, chiefly because Bronson doesn't have Clockwork's vivid narrative and point of view. Bronson doesn't seem to want to do anything but gawk at its main character's raucous sociopathic behavior and make vague ironic visual commentary about culture and masculinity.

There's no forward momentum, no sense of overarching design despite the fact that each individual sequence feels carefully constructed.

The film runs out of steam for me because it doesn't go anywhere: the great crescendo at the the finale, where Bronson has a kind of ironic artistic breakthrough, doesn't really feel like a crescendo, or have a lot of resonance, because the film doesn't build to it----its depictions of Bronson's attempts to become famous or to

articulate some kind of personal

identity don't feel clearly defined enough or grounded in anything rich enough to create any kind of momentum, either thematically or in terms of character: chiefly because Bronson is not a character, he's a clown spotlighted for our shock and amusement.

That is of course the film's point, that Bronson is a clown. Its visual tropes, a mixture of eerily

luminous theatricality (of the prisons and the hospitals and the decadent underground circuit Bronson spends most of his time in) and the crowded world of working class kitsch from which he emerged (the visuals of which most reminded me of Kubrick's film) together create a point of view similar to Kubrick's: that modern culture is a heap of junked art, populated by junked people, all of them corrupted or stupid or pathetic in one way or another.

The most interesting aspect of the film is its handling of masculinity and sexuality. The film is drenched in testosterone, thanks in most part to Tom Hardy's raw, naked (at times literally) performance. His body is a clenched fist of muscle, and never has a bald head looked and felt more like an angry phallus than his does in this film. You can feel his hunger in every gesture, and it's mesmerizing.

Hardy's Bronson is sexy as hell, despite the fact

that he's also one of the most vile characters you'll ever come across----and the film likes to play with this, and likes to play with the homoeroticism of it all: Bronson is a magnet for swishy gay men in this film, and you feel a whiff of homophobia in the depictions of these men (like you do when films about Nazis have them all in fishnets and face powder) but you gradually see what the film is up to with this: playing with the yin and yang of masculinity, while also playing with its own (or borrowed from Kubrick's) misanthropic vision of a world collapsing in decadence (and of course swishy gay men are the first sign of the collapse of all that is holy in middle class culture).

Anyway, the film, for all its shortcomings, is worth a look just for the visual beauty it creates out of all of this ugliness, and it's most certainly worth a look for the unrelenting physical power (and physical beauty) of Tom Hardy in the lead. If nothing else, it's a powerhouse.

Eyeballing It

2012-01-17T15:42:00.009-05:00

Finally got around to starting a new painting (oil pastel), not just doodling around with Photoshop, etc. I have no idea how it's going. It's only partially finished----lots of yellow, and a lot less smearing effect, more stippling and short strokes. I have no idea what will emerge since the whole thing is basically working itself out through intuition. I started with a very abstract cluster of blobby things and just started working. I'm hoping to finish it sometime tomorrow. Cross your fingers.

I had some energy left over after lunch so I did a little drawing in my sketchbook.

Again, purely intuitive, basically a kind of automatic writing, only drawing. I like the finished product, sort of creepy, but that's my style, I guess.

Hail Caesar

2012-01-14T10:55:00.008-05:00

I watched Rise of the Planet of the Apes (2011) last night. I was both impressed and disappointed. Impressed because damn that chimp looked real, plus they did a really good job building a relationship with Caesar the chimp (who gets some pumped up brain cells thanks to a serum developed by the doctor played by James Franco) beyond the initial awwww isn't he cute factor-----John Lithgow as James Franco's Alzheimer-afflicted dad helps a lot in this: I think one of the reasons we become genuinely attached to Caesar after Franco's character rescues him from extermination by taking him home from the lab is because Lithgow's character does, and Lithgow articulates this affection so delicately and succinctly that you can't help but be affected by it.

Unfortunately the middle section of the film, in which Caesar is held in an abusive animal shelter filled with various apes, feels extremely protracted and starts to get tiresome after a while. I understand that the film makers were trying to build relationships between the apes, etc. but most of it felt familiar and dull, plus we knew what was coming and there were really no surprises (except one, in which Ceasar's development takes a giant leap, which made me gasp with surprise even though I was waiting for it to happen) on the way to getting there.

Once the apes inevitably broke free, though, the film came to life again, thanks

to the sleek visuals, though that section still felt indistinct---and, oddly enough considering the time the film took for detailing the early two sections, it felt more than a little rushed.

On the

whole the film is deft and sleek----too sleek at times: the computer graphics (outside of the apes) feel a lot of the time flat and lifeless, and the computer generated camera swivels and editing wipes feel generic and lend a kind of robotic

emptiness to the style, rendering it as soulless as the most generic video game. Still, all that is balanced out by the soul they give the apes and by the fact that you can feel the care everyone took in the creation of this, which is enough to make it more than worth checking out.

Etc.

2012-01-13T15:07:00.009-05:00

*Today is new comic book day for me. For everyone else new comic book day is every Wednesday, but since I get mine by mail on a bi-weekly basis, my new comic books day is every other Friday, and it's usually a boat load. This week it's lots of X-Men (Wolverine and the X-Men; Uncanny X-Men, and Uncanny X-Force) plus The Incredible Hulk and The Amazing Spider-Man. I'm also catching up on a handful of back issues of the recent Grant Morrison run of Action Comics (which, judging by issue 1 &2, is awesome) and I'm jumping on to Scott Snyder's American Vampire with issue #22. The only book I've read of the bunch so far is Avengers Annual #1, which was kind of blah for me----it was the conclusion of a story that I didn't read the opening of (it apparently was in the New Avengers Annual a few months back (!)) so that may account for my not liking it, but there was also the matter of the very inky art which I wasn't wild about, tho I did love the cover. If anything strikes me about the rest of the bunch once I get around to them, I may post about them.

*Speaking of cover art: while I was taking a first peek through my new copy of Secret Avengers I ran across this ad for Winter Soldier #1

and the pure gorgeousness of the Bucky beefcake nearly compelled me to add this book to my pull list. But I have a budget, so I resisted.

*Along with my comics, the mail also brought me the Blu-Ray disc of Rise of the Planet of the Apes from Netflix. So if I have anything to say about it you may find a blog post here about it soon. I currently have three movies sitting in my TiVo---All the Real Girls and Tom and Viv and The Vicious Kind---I'm not sure if I'll watch all or any of them but I was curious about all of them so I poked the Record button and said why not. So you may see posts about any or all (or none) of these films as the week-end progresses.

*Last night I watched The Fourth Kind (2009), a pseudo-documentary about alien abductions that got all kinds of negative reviews (I believe) when it first came out but, other than the weird and sometimes clumsy juxtapositions of fake documentary footage and "re-enactment" sequences (meant I'm sure to articulate the point about not knowing what is real and what is not real, which worked some of the time [because the graininess of the footage and the ghost-like faces of the participants added an air of creepiness absent in the slick re-enactments] but felt a little gratuitous and ineffective [and hokey] some of the time.) I kind of liked it.

Despite all the flaws (the dumbass sheriff in particular), in the end the film creeped the living daylights out of me and is worth a look if you like that kind of paranoia. Plus it features Elias Koteas, who is SO freaking hot even when he's all buttoned up as he is in this film---experience the

unfettered hotness of him in the uncut version of Cronenberg's Crash or in Koteas' sizzling kiss with Holly Hunter in his fleeting moments in the lovely underseen Living Out Loud (1998). If Christopher Meloni had a badass older brother, that would be Elias Koteas (and I am still waiting for the two of them to star in a film together, preferably as lovers not brothers).

Rambling

2012-01-12T10:38:00.007-05:00

*I swear I'm going to get back to the metaphysical blog entries at some point (soon?). I feel as if that part of me is getting re-fueled and will start coming back strong in time (soon?)....in the mean time I got tired of not having anything to write about: I've been totally blocked as far as the poetry and fiction is concerned---for months, alas, except for dribs and drabs--- which is why I was doodling around with Photoshop paintings/automatic drawing, to keep my
creative energy from driving me insane----and I wanted to get this blog going again, so I'm writing about what I'm spending (refueling?) that energy on at the

moment, which is films and other people's books.

*Speaking of which (books), I finished Waiting for Godot and loved it even though I'm puzzled about what it really is driving at----though it doesn't really bother me that I'm puzzled. I get the feeling that the whole "waiting" thing could be an echo of the idea that Christians (and other religions) keep waiting for Christ (or whatever savior etc you're looking for) to come and save them, or perhaps less specifically it's about waiting for God to come and save us (He keeps saying He will and He won't, dammit) or simply to reveal that He actually exists; or maybe it's about death, waiting for death to come, what do you do while you wait for death to come in this dull repetitive life we live? It could be any or all of these or something else. Whatever it is is extremely moving and captivating and I can't wait to actually see it performed (I have the Beckett on Film version lined up in my Netflix queue).

*Speaking of Beckett on Film: I saw the Anthony Minghella version of Beckett's play "Play" on You Tube the other day----I'd read that it was the best of the lot of the Beckett on Film collection, and they're right it's pretty darn good. Creepy and funny and strange, reducing a marriage melodrama (and human relationships) to its core terrors. Here it is (it's only about 15 minutes or so):

I love when Beckett does these rapid panic stricken monologue thingies. Julianne Moore does an excellent version in the series of another one called "Not I" which is also pretty harrowing: all you see is her mouth in close-up as she talks and talks and talks, and you can't take your eyes off it; it's terrifying, though the Billie Whitelaw version (which, unlike the Moore version has all the speaker's face blacked out so it's just these white white teeth you see and the abyss of the black covering and revealing them as she speaks her terrifying piece) is even more effective, and, despite how much I love Julianne, it's the Whitelaw version that's my favorite of the two. Here's a video of it (Whitelaw's performance begins around 2:50):

Bugging Out

2012-01-11T18:50:00.010-05:00

I watched John Sturges' The Satan Bug (1965) this afternoon. It's a fairly generic (but beautifully photographed) suspense film, based on an Alistair MacLean novel, about an ex-army agent (or something) who has to find out who stole a flask filled with a doomsday virus from a government biological weapons lab before the crazy people who stole it unleash it on the world.

The agent is played by George Maharis---he with the pouty lips and the bedroom eyes--- who, like most of the other cast, spends most of the time with furrowed brow and iron shoulders. The whole film is in one big clench, filmed with a humorless workman-like style that does a big disservice to Robert Surtees' photography and the fabulously mod set design: especially the government laboratory which is a model of mod labyrinthine decor, lots of Plexiglas walls and rectangles of amber and red and walls within walls within walls----Antonioni would have had a field day with that (as he would with the hip jazz (?) club we first see Maharis in [he is of course a playboy], all drenched in apocalyptic reds and oranges) but Sturges isn't really having any fun, so neither are we.

The film spends most of the time with the cast arranged around tables or couches or in the middle of nowhere scratching their heads and trying to figure things out, which they do always in the nick of time. There are a few action sequences, none of them except one toward the end in a helicopter are very exciting or fun.

This is how bored I was: I found it very fun to see that it was in fact Gomer Pyle's Sergeant Carter (Frank Sutton) and Mary Tyler Moore's Lou Grant (Ed Asner) who for most of the film are the ones who are about to wreak havoc on the world----plus, to continue the TV theme, I saw that if you really look at George Maharis you might see that he looks quite a lot like Will Truman from Will & Grace. Also, if you look fast you'll see the ubiquitous 60's sitcom character

actor (and director of a boatload of Barney Miller episodes) Noam Pitlik as a hotel clerk. Plus James Doohan from Star Trek gets his fleeting moment in the film, too.

Although it's pretty standard for a film of this era to be packed with these future TV stars (though the Will Truman echo was disconcerting), I was bored enough with the film that it started to give the film a whole new subtext (how did Mr. Grant and Sergeant Carter get together? Why do they hate the world so? Was it Gomer's fault? And what is Will Truman doing grappling with that man in the helicopter?).....

All that aside, Maharis isn't too bad in this, despite the fact that he's being straightjacketed by the film's granite jawed approach----and

he is gorgeous to look at in that James Bond clone kind of way (after the fact, in my mind he stopped being Will Truman and started being Archer from the F/X animated series). But unfortunately if you don't bring your own games to play with this film, it's not really going to be much fun at all for you, so you might want to steer clear.

Note: I just looked this film up in my old Leonard Maltin film guide, and he gave it 3 1/2 stars out of 4 and called it an "overlooked gem"----- as usual with Leonard, I'm left scratching my head. So maybe you shouldn't steer clear; check the film out next time it's on TCM and see for yourself.

Also, that pic of Maharis and the horse is apparently from a Playgirl shoot he did, which makes me like him all the more. Maybe I need to check out Route 66.

Heaven

2012-01-11T10:37:00.011-05:00

Three great films are on Turner Classic Movies tomorrow night, all shot by the great cinematographer Jack Cardiff and directed by Powell and Pressburger, who created some of the most romantic and (thanks to Cardiff) visually gorgeous films ever made. All month TCM is saluting Cardiff on Thursday nights, but tomorrow night is really a gold mine of great films. First at 8pm (Eastern US time) it's The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp and then at 12:30 am it's A Matter of Life and Death (aka Stairway to Heaven), which was the first Powell and Pressburger film that I ever saw---and I saw it on the big screen, which made the whole thing all the more stunning, and I fell in love with their sumptuous color drenched romance immediately. Finally at 5 am it's the best most insane high gloss nun movie you'll ever see: Black Narcissus. If you've never seen this last film, make some time to do it; it's absolutely gorgeous----I'm guessing it's even more stunning if you see it on the big screen. You can practically taste the sex in the air, despite the fact that almost everyone is all buttoned up in white habits.

TCM is also showing The Red Shoes at 2:30 am, but I'm not a huge fan of that one, though visually, as usual with P & P, it's beautiful and a lot of people find the whole obsessive ballet thing extremely moving, but it didn't really do much for me. Those other three, though, are among my favorites, especially Blimp and Narcissus.

Peering Into the Abyss

2012-01-10T18:55:00.008-05:00

I watched Sam Peckinpah's Straw Dogs (1971) this afternoon, and I was surprised by how much I liked it. I was prepared, based on all the negative reviews (and Pauline Kael calling it "fascist"), to hate it. But, like a lot of Peckinpah's films that I was all prepared to hate before I actually saw them, it was actually not as bad as I was led to believe.

The film certainly seems to have about as cynical and bleak a view of humanity as you can find, but I don't know if you can really call it fascist. Basically it seems to see human beings as either beasts or naive (deluded) fools----well, he seems to see everyone as fools, some are beastly and some are deluded and naive---and some tread somewhere in the middle of those two. That's a bit schematic and simplified a characterization, but it'll do since bottom line is that humanity eventually gets sucked into the murky abyss of beastliness.

Dustin Hoffman plays an American mathematician who just wants to be left alone to his figures. He's moved with his nubile English

wife, played by Susan George, to the

wife's out of the way home village in England so he can finish the book he's writing (and, one gets the feeling, to get away from the anti Vietnam war furor in the States), but, as affable and unassuming as Hoffman's character tries to be, many of the townspeople, mainly one family of brutish drunken laborers (one of whom used to date his wife and still has an eye out for her) won't stop making his life miserable. The whole thing devolves into an all out war one foggy night, with Hoffman's character, who up until then resisted all confrontation, turning Macgyver in an effort to defend his home against the brutes. This being Peckinpah, it's not a pretty journey.

Some people have written that the film seems to depict a rite to manhood (in effect, showing him become a man by growing out of his pacifism) for Hoffman's character (named David---as in David and Goliath? In the novel that the film is based on, the character's name was George [as in St. George and the dragon?]). I can vaguely see where you can get that feeling, but it felt to me, especially judging by the final shot where David is both elated at having survived and bewildered about what kind of world (inner and outer) has been revealed to him, that what we are seeing in the film is a lifting of the veil from the abyss at the heart of the world. The vast pastoral countryside vanishes into the vacant fog of the abyss as we watch both David and his wife succumb to the ugliness within---an

ugliness that allows them to survive (while hers---her desire to give in to the brutes-- nearly gets them killed) but leaves him, metaphorically at least, without a way back home, the fact of which leaves him looking stunned and bewildered even as he seems to be articulating relief at having lost what he always thought home meant in his world.

No one really wins here (no one but the gods of chaos, I guess). No emergence into re-created manhood really is depicted here, only a kind of lifting of the curtain and an uneasy question of what is to come. We peer into the face of the monster that Peckinpah seems to see as the true face of humanity, and, as I say, it ain't pretty. But it certainly is engrossing, and it's worth a look if you can stomach the unpleasantness.

I have the 2011 remake of the film in my Netflix queue, but I'm going to wait a bit before I watch it, partly to give me a break from the creepiness and partly because I'm sort of dreading what kind of mess they have made of it.

Speaking of the abyss, I decided to put Dostoevsky on hold for a while----I just don't have the patience to start something that hefty right now. Instead I went minimal and picked up Beckett's Waiting for Godot, which, so far, I love----I've gotten only up to Lucky's monologue in Act 1. Am I crazy or is there a lot of Christian undercurrent to this play? Was the story of the two thieves a give-away or a ruse? Or both? I'll have to wait and see.

New painting: there's a place for us

2012-01-09T11:49:00.004-05:00

I did this painting today on Photoshop with my graphic tablet. I was listening to West Side Story (original Broadway cast) as I was painting it and as the image progressed (all of it basically done through automatic drawing) the mix of cosmic space and the inkling of a fragmented figure reminded me not only of the violence that goes on in the musical but also the gorgeous cosmic imagery of the wondrous Streisand video of the song "Somewhere", so I felt like the final image ought to be called "there's a place for us" in honor of that. Once I get West Side Story out of my head the effect of the image may shift and change when I look at it---or not, we'll see. To see a larger version of the image go to my Flickr album (click on the link in the sidebar).

Bedazzled

2012-01-08T18:25:00.006-05:00

Finished Barbusse's Hell the other day; it did not disappoint, not even when it was overrun with all the abstract talk. Well worth the effort. After finishing that I wanted to keep the decadent line of thought going so I picked up J. K. Huysmans' notorious A Rebours (translated variously as Against the Grain or Against Nature). Oy.

It started out well. I found it fascinating, its description of the last of the degenerated line of the Des Esseintes family, Jean, a man of particular tastes in just about everything. But as I got deeper and deeper into the book, it became very clear that the book was going to be basically a catalogue of the eccentric decorating schemes that Jean implements in his villa; that is, when it's not cataloguing Jean's favorite books and paintings (which are described in minute detail). He did stop the cataloguing and literary critique long enough to get his infected tooth pulled, but pretty much started in again once that little episode was over. I made it about a third of the way through the book and called it quits.

I had an idea before I started it that this was what the book was going to be, and I get the allure it once had (with people like Oscar Wilde) and I also get why it was reviled (I never got to the rumored homoerotic parts, which must have caused more than a few voices to be raised against the book, though the tedium is enough to make you denounce it)----and I share a lot of De Esseintes' taste in paintings (Moreau for instance makes me swoon too) and books but good Lord enough is enough.

It starts out amusing (and you wonder if Huysmans is being satiric [I still don't know] it's so over the top) especially the little bit about the tortoise that De Esseintes has gilded and bedazzled with jewels so it could move around one of his rooms as a kind of living accessory, adding a little more color and life to the

darkened room (alas, though, the tortoise dies)---I was especially happy to read this sequence because it added a bit of explanation to the sequence in Waugh's Brideshead Revisited where Julia receives a bedazzled tortoise from her vulgar American boyfriend. Waugh, I'm guessing, was no fan of Huysmans, either.

Also, some of Des Esseintes' room designs are quite inventive (especially the one he creates to imitate being on board ship, complete with an aquarium [with mechanical fish] hidden between two windowed walls) but after a while, as I said, enough is enough.

Right after that long section about the aquarium room, there's this long stretch that talks about how Des Esseintes believes that simulated experience (imitating the pleasures of travel or bathing in a lake etc), created in the isolation of one's own home (so you don't have to be around all those pesky other people in the world) is a vast improvement over the real experience, and the imitation ought to replace the real thing in the modern world since nothing could surpass the reality or the simulacrum created by man's own genius----and I thought well that's somewhat relevant, if you think about the virtual world we're creating with computers, etc.

As I said, it was pretty difficult to tell if the book is a celebration or a lament or both (had I made it to the end I probably could have made a better judgement). On the whole, though, it's mostly a bore with flashes of fascinating weirdness. A curio, I guess, but not something I want to slog through, even if it is only for a couple of hundred pages.

Onward, then. To something that seems on the surface a little more daunting, but really isn't: Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, which I've been meaning to read for ages (I've started it a couple of times but got interrupted and never picked it up again). I say it's not daunting because, after a couple of interrupted starts, I finished The Brothers Karamazov without much trouble, as well as The Devils (which was harder to get through than Brothers) and The Idiot, all of which I found enthralling, so I'm guessing Crime, a good deal shorter than Brothers, will be a breeze.

Sunday in the Park With Sondheim

2012-01-08T13:47:00.006-05:00

Good news! Mom and I got excellent seats for the Sunday matinee of the upcoming production of Sondheim's Merrily We Roll Along at Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park. The production will be directed by John Doyle and will star Malcolm Gets (who starred in the excellent off-Broadway revival in the 90's, the recording of which is my favorite over the original version [cutting out the graduation book ends and ending with "Our Time" (one of my favorite Sondheim songs) did wonders for it]).

The last Doyle production at the Cincinnati Playhouse was Sondheim's Company starring the jaw-droppingly awesome Raul Esparza, a production that eventually went on to Broadway and quite a few Tony nominations. Mom and I saw that production when it was at the Playhouse, and it was one of the best experiences at the theatre that I have ever had. Like that production, this production of Merrily will have its actors playing musical instruments, a stylistic choice that I'm still not convinced is necessary or really very interesting, yet somehow it worked for Company, and it will probably work with Merrily as well, considering the unconventional(ish) backward chronology of its narrative. Can't wait!

Not Quite A Lulu

2012-01-08T10:56:00.010-05:00

So instead of watching Louise Brooks I watched Ridley Scott's Alien (1979). I tried a little of Pandora's Box but I just wasn't in the mood. I think it's because I saw Alien advertised as coming up soon on IFN and it piqued my interest---but then I saw (after watching a few incredibly annoying minutes of some horror flick called Seventh Moon [directed by one of the Blair Witch people, which explains the migraine inducing camera work]) that IFN while showing their films uncut also cut away for commercials, and even though it's been decades since I've seen the film, I remembered enough to know that watching Alien interrupted by commercials is just asking for disappointment.

Anyway, I was still in the mood then for Alien so instead of watching it on IFN I broke out my DVD copy and watched it uninterrupted.

First thing, though, I had to choose which version. Apparently there's a "director's cut" that is not really a director's cut but is really a

studio PR team cut supervised by the director. Or something. Ridley Scott explains it in the liner notes, and I decided to go with the longer (by one minute) original 1979 version that Scott himself thinks is just fine thank you (I wish George Lucas would finally come around to that conclusion about the original prints of the Star Wars originals so I can get them on Blu-Ray instead of the apparently doctored ones they have out now).

As I said, I haven't seen Alien in years. The only things I remembered about it were the creepily quiet opening credits, John Hurt's chest explosion, and Sigourey Weaver in her tiny panties at the end. I do remember thinking that I was always kind of let down by the film, feeling that it ought to have been scarier, more atmospheric, etc. but nevertheless I still remember liking

it more than most of the big budget offshoots of the Close Encounters and Star Wars bonanza at the time (and, for the record, Close Encounters is my favorite of the bunch---more than Star Wars or any of them, it's the one that most moves me with its visuals and thrills me with its storytelling).

After seeing it again, I still sort of feel let down by Alien. Its gorgeous alien set design is wondrously creepy in the wide shots but the build-up to it and the short bit of exploration of it never had that sensual creepiness that the wide shots indicated that there could have been. The egg sequence had hints of that, and I wish that the whole sequence, the whole visual experience of exploring the landscape, would have had a more tactile slimy biological creepiness to it.

Once we get inside of the Nostromo again, and once the alien is freed, it gets better, but still it feels a bit pokey, though whenever Sigourney is on screen the film zaps to life---I'd forgotten how magnetic and powerful she was in this: you can't take your eyes off that face, this bizarre mix of high fashion beauty and army brat toughness that is arresting as hell. She's magnificent.

My favorite bit, other than the final stretch, which is enjoyably nerve-wracking, is the first kill after John Hurt's alien eruption. The graceful subtlety of the creature's descent on the unsuspecting Harry Dean Stanton is the creepiest moment in the film (partly I think because the creature is still indistinct but discernibly gargantuan: once we see it

with legs it sort of ruins it for me, and the other shots of the creature seem silly and fake to me [though there is a shot toward the end when it looks as if the creature is going to devour the poor helpless cat that is creepy as hell])---speaking of the cat: I love that Scott decided to put a cat in space despite how ridiculous the fact of it seems, just so we can have those nods to old timey haunted house movies, regardless of the fact that for me the film never quite churned up enough haunted house atmosphere to really creep me out on a consistent basis.

So I guess my opinion about the film hasn't changed all that much in the past decade or two. I still admire enough of the film to keep a copy of it, and I LOVE Sigourney Weaver's macho supermodel looks and the intense intelligence of her performance, but the film as a whole still for me hasn't got that sensual creepiness that some of the visuals (in the film and in the ad campaigns) tantalize you with. Good but not great.

While I was hunting for my copy of Alien, I ran across my copy of the "Final Cut" of Scott's Blade Runner, which is another film I haven't seen in a while, and which I have completely forgotten almost all of. So maybe I'll check that out soon. I've also been hankering to see Altman's Nashville again (tho I have that film practically memorized---that film for me is what Citizen Kane is for a lot of other film enthusiasts: the best there ever was). Eventually I guess I'll get back to Lulu, tho we'll see.

Lulu Redux

2012-01-07T13:54:00.010-05:00

Odd, but apparently I'm on some subconscious Louise Brooks kick. After I watched Vivre Sa Vie I watched Alain Resnais' Last Year at Marienbad again. Apparently---and I had no idea about this until after I watched the documentary about the making of the film on the Criterion disc this time around---Resnais wanted Delphine Seyrig's mysterious character to echo Louise Brooks.

In fact, he wanted the film's visual style to resonate with the style of silent films (he had his crew watch the silent films of Pabst, Von Stroheim and others for research about how to approach Marienbad). Unfortunately for the Brooks idea, Delphine Seyrig cut her hair right before shooting and ruined the bob Resnais wanted for her character, so they had to fix it with the now famous look she has in the film.

Although I really don't see a very striking Brooks connection in the film (Seyrig is more severe, has little of the vulnerability of Brooks), possibly because of the new hairdo they had to go with, finding out about the silent film connection did explain a lot of Seyrig's bizarre performance and the over-the-top music, though I haven't yet figured out what knowing about the echoes of silent film really does for finding out what the visuals and the narrative are doing in this film, except perhaps that silent films had a dreamlike distancing effect and heightened melodramatic effects.

Every time I get ready to watch this film I have this overwhelming anxiety that I'm going to at last wake up and see that Pauline Kael and others were right about calling it pretentious twaddle----and for the first ten minutes or so I kept thinking yeah this is pretentious twaddle.

But then I settle in and the sneaking suspicion creeps over me that Kael and her crew just didn't see the humor of it, that for all its portentous posturing the film is quite possibly a stone-faced satire about portentous glamour films, while at the same time being quite serious about exploring the shattering psychic consequences of rape and violence.

I'm not certain yet if that's exactly what the film is driving at, but it feels right (I was happy to see in one of the Criterion documentaries that a film critic brought up the idea that the film may be an exploration of the consequences of rape---that idea struck me the last time I saw it, and I was happy to have the idea validated by another critic). Whatever it's about, I ended up still fascinated by it and wanting to see it all over again.

Anyway, as I said, with the connection to Vivre Sa Vie as well as this film, there seems to be something calling me to take a look at Louise Brooks again. So I guess I should break out my copy of Pandora's Box and Diary of a Lost Girl and see what comes of it.

The Eye of the Beholder

2012-01-07T11:11:00.009-05:00

Just watched Vivre Sa Vie (Godard, 1962). In the film, Anna Karina is a young woman who slips deeper and deeper into a

life of prostitution. Her character's name is Nana, a nod to Zola's character (it's a novel I haven't read yet, but I know a vague synopsis of it) though Godard's Nana is no femme fatale: she's a demure victim of circumstance, a porcelain angel drifting into an icy hell of indifference and exploitation. She's not entirely an angel (you can sense the hostility and cruelty in her, though it's all defensive against the meanness of her boyfriend whom she breaks with [or who breaks with her, it's never clear or I don't remember which] after the first scene) but she's photographed by Godard like an angel (or like Louise Brooks as an angel), and that visual point-of-view of the camera is actually the main character of the film. Nana is its object but film/culture is its subject.

Godard turns the traditional prostitution melodrama on its head, his camera rarely allowing us to enjoy the exploitative pleasure of peeking behind the closed doors of seedy hotel rooms, seeing the writhing flesh and the pathetic violence and despair that we are all led to believe (courtesy of traditional prostitution melodrama and news reports) lives behind those doors. He drains nearly all the fire and high-minded judgement out of those kinds of dramas and concentrates on the woman's face, and the turning away from that face.

The effect is disconcerting at first (the opening scene, which ought to establish an emotional bond between the viewer and Nana, instead keeps us at a distance from her and the scenario of her argument with her boyfriend by showing us nothing but the characters' backs) but as the film progresses, the film's visual beauty (not only of Karina's face but also of the city whirling around her) and your gradual realization of what Godard is doing (creating and critiquing the culture of desire by denying anything but a superficial glimpse at the object of our desire) keeps you captivated.

Those beautiful shots of Nana tend to get all the attention because they dominate the film---and how could they not, especially the sequence where she watches Dreyer's Jeanne D'Arc, which serves as not only a citation of a visual mentor for Godard but also as a sister in martyrdom to Nana---but outside of those,

a highlight for me, one of the shots that really stayed with me, was a shot of Nana's first trick as he reaches into his pocket for his money to pay her. Godard's camera moves in close to the man's pants, the crotch nearly center screen as we see the man's hand reach into his pocket. You sense the menace and the arousal alive in those pants as we linger in this oddly intimate position----it's a similar position of intimacy that Godard frequently takes to Nana's face, close enough to kiss, but there's no softness in this image, only the firm fist sliding into the man's dark pocket, bulging against the fabric, an image that feels as hard and hungry and dark as the man's scowl that we saw moments before.

That dark masculinity is the power that exploits Nana, though it's the radiance of her face, that porcelain angelic beauty, that the camera is so smitten with (when it's not turning away from it) that fills every corner of the film.

It's a gorgeous film, whose only misstep for me is its obvious ending, which I think ought to have had more mystery and less melodrama; nevertheless, despite that ending, it's still a gem, one of my favorites of Godard's early years.

Unbearable Lightness of Seeing

2012-01-05T11:15:00.006-05:00

"To love is to suffer. To avoid suffering one must not love. But then one suffers from not loving. Therefore, to love is to suffer; not to love is to suffer; to suffer is to suffer. To be happy is to love. To be happy, then, is to suffer, but suffering makes one unhappy. Therefore, to be happy one must love or love to suffer or suffer from too much happiness." (Woody Allen, Love & Death)

I'm about halfway through Henri Barbusse's Hell, and so far it's surprising me how little the book is annoying me and how much pleasure it's bringing me, considering that quite a lot of the book consists of long stretches of morbid hand-wringing about how

death will vanquish us all and oh isn't life an empty sham and ohohoh how painful it is to love when no one really can know or touch another person and life is so much playacting, oh oh oh.....

Really, that quote above from Woody Allen captures a lot of the tone of the book's narrative---and as far as I can tell Barbusse, unlike Woody, is not playing this for laughs. Nevertheless, Barbusse tempers all that with a poet's eye for sensual details, turning vignettes of scandalous erotic explicitness into moments that radiate with compassion and depth. For instance, here's his description of a man in the throes of ecstasy, soaring into orgasm:

"I did not take my eyes off the face of the man who was before me, beating the air with one hand, his body slavering. He was grimacing, smiling, dark with blood, like a divine martyr, an archangel wallowing and soaring at the same time. He was uttering staccato cries of surprise, as if he were dazzled by something magnificent and unexpected, as if he had not expected it to be so beautiful, as if he were astonished by the prodigies of joys which his body contained."

It's a gorgeous moment, physical and metaphysical, scandalous and divine; and the book is full of these kinds of moments.

The "I" in the novel belongs to a young man who is staying in a Paris boarding house. He's applied for a position at a bank in the city, and despite the fact that his life seems poised on the verge of settling into something fairly secure, the young man feels dejected (the idea of death's leveling power looming all around; the masks of middle class existence feeling banal and constricting, etc.)---the banalities of middle class life weigh heavily on him, and he longs for the experience of the Infinite.

He gets his wish when he discovers a hole in the wall above his bed, a hole that looks out into the room next door. He peers through the hole and into the neighboring room, watching the secret life of those who enter that room (which includes a surprising array of sexual and romantic situations), and he suddenly begins to feel that he has finally touched the Infinite: has become the all-seeing eye who observes the hidden life behind the curtain of respectability.

It's more than the superficial thrill of seeing ladies lift their dresses, seeing the flush and fluids of sex---it's seeing each situation as an outsider, outside the tides that swirl around

the experience of the experience itself, seeing the secret beyond the secret, the glint in your lover's eyes that you miss when you're deep in your own experience of the conversation or the kiss or the silence that you're sharing with him; the secrets only god knows about those moments.

Our narrator discovers in those moments of voyeurism that the Infinite is the here and now. And the thrill of it is both erotic and addictive to him.

Essentially the book is a cry for intimacy, an intimacy that seems impossible as long as you're in the moments that feel the most intimate----you lose the other person in the sea of sensuality and thought and emotion, its seems; only through detachment (looking through a hole in the wall, observing that intimacy) can you find that divine place of knowledge of the reality and the people involved. And since we can't be outside and inside the moment as it happens, we suffer the ache of alienation even when we're clinging to the one we love.

Barbusse depicts the detachment as a kind of crucifixion (our narrator's arms wide against his bedroom wall as he presses his eye close to the opening onto the other room, which itself is frequently described as a body laid out, naked and open to our narrator's hungry gaze); so apparently we are all, observers and lovers both, in one way or another martyrs.

Mind you, I am only halfway through this, so I have yet to see where Barbusse is going with this. But where he has gone so far has been all about love and sex and the banality of life outside those experiences----and most of all it seems to be about the exquisiteness of masochism (which is apparently the only way to love) and the joyful ache of the all-seeing I.

Hell

2012-01-03T19:17:00.003-05:00

Just started reading this yesterday. Amazing exploration of voyeurism and existential angst---shockingly explicit (for its day [1908]) and surprisingly engrossing. I thought for sure I would be bored to death by it (all that early 20th century ruminating ennui etc) but I find I can't put it down. Gorgeous decadence that's surprisingly moving.

The Planetary I Ching

2011-12-23T11:51:00.008-05:00

I wanted to change things up a bit and do a meditation or a world events reading using the I Ching instead of the tarot cards, but I saw that I have yet to re-introduce on this blog my method of using the I Ching. So before I start using the I Ching, I thought I should go over that.

My method is not the traditional one, which entails reading each line and the interaction of each line and trigram of the I Ching hexagram using traditional commentaries and definitions. Instead, as with the chakras, I came up with my own method based on the planets (at least I think it's my own method: like my method of defining the chakras, I may be reinventing the wheel here without knowing it).

For each line of the I Ching hexagram, I assigned one of the traditional planets, from bottom to top (traditionally the bottom line of the hexagram is designated as line number one), according to the planet's position in the sky:

line 6: Jupiter (abundance/success)

line 5: Mars (ego emotion/conflict)

line 4: Moon (guidance)

line 3: Venus (physical experience/health)

line 2: Mercury (mental activity/ideas)

line 1: Sun (faith/confidence)

The seventh traditional planet, Saturn (signifying discipline) I assigned to the hexagram as a whole, placed like a heading above the whole hexagram as a kind of intention or desire for the process as a whole: to refocus one's energies toward what is necessary and important, to get one's self back on track by taking a look at the reality of the present moment.

Instead of throwing sticks or coins to come up with a hexagram, which are the traditional methods, I use my intuition to come up with the diagram. I write the numbers 6 thru 1 down the side of a sheet of notebook paper (see image below), and then I place next to each number the symbol for the planet assigned to it. Next to each number I draw either a solid line (Yang) or broken line (Yin), letting my intuition tell me which of the two is appropriate, thus forming the hexagram for the reading.

Next I look up the number and meaning assigned to the hexagram I drew. I don't read the commentary of the hexagram yet; first I look at the number assigned to it. If the hexagram has an even number, it means that the Yang (solid) lines are unstable, so I mark each Yang line on my diagram. If the hexagram has been assigned an odd number, it means that the Yin lines are unstable, so I mark them. (At the moment I have completely forgotten why this is so, tho I think it has to do with the fact that certain hexagrams are thought of as Yin and certain are thought of as Yang).

An unstable Yang line tells me that there is some kind of excess going on.

An unstable Yin line tells me there is weakness or collapse happening.

I next look at the lines that I have marked as unstable, check what planet is assigned to that unstable line and note what that translates into (eg. if the a Yang line in position 1 [the Sun] is unstable, it would indicate arrogance of some kind [excess confidence/faith]; if the Yin line in position 1 is unstable, it would indicate a collapse or weakening of confidence or faith in something or someone).

I do this for all the unstable lines in the hexagram, which, collected together, will ultimately give me a picture of the circumstance the hexagram is indicating. All of this I do in conjunction with whatever intuitive information I'm getting about what the unstable lines mean, both in general and in particular, for this specific reading. There is nothing dogmatic about how I read the lines and the definitions they form: it's nearly all intuitive.

Only after I've done all this do I take a look at the commentaries in whatever I Ching text I'm using (sometimes I look at a couple versions). Looking at the texts usually deepens whatever intuitive material is coming to me about the content of the reading that's coming. Despite the fact that my method is different from the traditional one, my general assessment of the hexagram using my method usually resonates closely with the traditional one.

By the time I have read through the text's commentaries, I can usually feel the reading bursting through, ready to be written down. It feels sometimes like a mental version of needing to sneeze---as if my brain is incredibly irritated and anxious for release, so I quickly get down to the business of letting that energy say what it has to say.

And that's my method with the I Ching. As I said, it's not traditional, but it seems to work. It's a very helpful method of letting the energy bubble up and solidify before it articulates what it needs to say.

Look for readings/meditations using this method coming to this blog soon.

World Events: Occupy The Sun

2011-12-12T14:39:00.013-05:00

I wanted to do a tarot reading about current events today, and I really wanted to focus on something more global than the nonsense that is the daily coverage of the US Republican presidential candidate race, which the cable news people seem to think is the only thing worth covering----but I have completely lost track of a lot of what's going on outside the Republican sideshow, so I let the cards tell me what the most important thing is in current events right now, at least in the karmic sense, and the card that came up was the Knight of Wands, which came up upside down.

The Knight of Wands usually signifies someone who uses his energy forcefully and powerfully to get things done. Upside down it can mean that this person uses his energy for corrupt or evil purposes, but it can also mean using one's energy to overturn or stop someone who is using their energy in this way. The overwhelming image that flashed through my mind when this card came up was of the Occupy Wall Street movement.

I laid down another card to get a clearer picture of how we should see this, and the card that came up was The Sun, which is all about moving from a place of exhaustion and defeat to a place of abundance, using your resources to rise up from the depths and walk in the sun again.

I laid down another card to clarify things even more, and the card that came up was the Two of Wands, which is about having a vision or clarifying your vision for the future and seeking out wisdom to make that vision a reality.

And with that, the reading clicked into place.

Occupy Wall Street began as a symbolic act of disruption on Wall Street and has finally sparked a conversation about corruption and inequality and injustice that needs to continue, but, now that it has laid down the foundation of ideas, the movement's focus needs to grow into

something more concrete.

Its latest evolution/expansion into occupying foreclosed homes is an extremely important step toward making this conversation about something concrete, not just about the abstract outrage at abstract (though very real) system(s). It's an important evolution because it begins to show the human face on the catastrophes caused by the crimes of the guilty bankers and politicians and failed policies. This needs to continue and grow (and I think part of the meaning of the 2 of Wands is a call for the movement to seek out other concrete ways to highlight those who have been victimized by the crimes and the collapse) but along with that there has to be a movement to shine a light on the actual criminals in a more than symbolic/generalized way---and in a way that inspires the media to cover and investigate the crimes and criminals and corrupt more deeply.

Facts need to be shoved in the face of the public. It can't continue to be about abstract entities or general accusations: it has to become about shining the light in very specific and concrete ways on the corrupt---with the true facts of the scandals and the names of those involved splashed all over the media.

I'm not sure how much of this the Occupy movement is already doing, but it needs to do it in a more concrete/specific way, primarily in ways that get the news media involved---all of the media, not just MSNBC---so the facts and the consequences of those facts can't be ignored.

This may in fact be a foregone conclusion, karmically speaking: a scandal may already brewing that will force a lot of these people into the light so that the corruption can be seen in very real and irrefutable ways, thus allowing the system's failures and corruptions to be dealt with in a just and reasonable way. Something is in the air, I guess, something that will begin to reveal the truth and set in motion real justice and repair.

This, apparently, is the most important thing going on right now in the tides of karma: finding the truth, telling the truth about all this and seeking justice, unfailingly, relentlessly. It's our path back into the sun once more. We'll just have to wait and see what happens.

New Painting

2011-12-11T14:08:00.004-05:00

I did this painting this morning with Photoshop. It's another Chakra: this time Chakra 3, which is all about ego identity and is associated with the color yellow. I like the fog of faces/identities in the sphere of the Chakra and the fact that it seems to drift at a distance from the vastness of space/heaven, looking out on it as if dispossessed, even though in reality its tendrils, reaching out for that vastness, are made of the same starlight as it is.

Diary: The Once and Future Blog

2011-12-10T18:32:00.011-05:00

I keep meaning to post more here on a daily basis, but I just haven't had anything that I thought was worth posting. For the past month or so I've been futzing around with Photoshop Elements, trying to get used to drawing and painting using my new graphics tablet. It was a little awkward at first, but I'm sort of getting the hand of it. It's starting to feel more natural.

I haven't tried anything too painterly with it because I'm still not sure how to create and use a color palette in a practical way---but one of these days I'll find a good book to show me how (there's one I found that looks good but it won't be out until next year). I love all the instruction books I've seen: even though I doubt I'll ever do anything as intricate and epic as the images they work with in those books, reading them is a fun way to get to know what you can do when you remember all the do-dads that are available.

Over the past week or so I've been playing

around with doing automatic drawing using the graphics tablet and Photoshop. I really like that you can add colors so easily and that you can erase and hide and then re-integrate images without making a big mess of the page, as you would using paper and pencil and eraser. Being able to change things around so easily

transforms the process, allows it to be more intuitive rather than purely automatic.

The images in this post (which you can see in larger form on my Flickr page---click on the Flickr sidebar thingee) are the automatic drawings that I liked the best from the batch. The first one is called "love god" because I had the feeling most

of the way through the drawing that it was about Rudolph Valentino (who was the silent screen's love god). Don't ask me why. I have this obsession with Valentino: he shows up, or has shown up, a lot in my creative writing and my channeled writing. Usually as a man hiding his (homo)erotic escapades and romances behind a veil of shame. The title, of course, is a play on words, "love god" being descriptive of Valentino's persona as well as a call to action.

The next two drawings are about the Chakras: The Seventh Chakra (drawing #2), which in my schematics of the energy centers is defined by the Sun (which signifies faith [in God]) and usually is associated with the color

purple; and the Second Chakra (drawing #3), which is defined by Jupiter (abundance, delight) and located at the genitals. I was very happy with this last one.

Other than that I've been putting together some of my essays----mostly so far about the Chakras----which accumulate to about 25 pages, so I have

quite a bit to go before I can put anything in book form.

As I said, I've been feeling the need to start blogging on a daily basis, so I'm hoping I'll have enough essays accumulated in the months to come to put together an actual book. We'll see.

New Poem: After Glow

2011-11-03T14:10:00.003-04:00

I finished this poem this afternoon:

"After Glow"

Fingering

the black beads

draped within the mist

of fur across your chest,

a whispered prayer,

a secret vision of impalement,

of dripping blood and wailing grief,

and then

a wintry kiss

before you roll away,

my syrup still glistening

on your lips,

counting the hours

until summer returns,

the yellow-scented cocktails

and the gasping surf

will turn all of this into a

froth of memory:

pale, salty,

light as a

bumblebee

before it stings.

The Mirror of Simple Souls

2011-10-25T14:57:00.010-04:00

Right now I'm reading The Mirror of Simple Souls by Marguerite Porete. Porete was a French mystic who was burned at the stake by the Inquisition in 1310. Her crime was apparently The Mirror of Simple Souls and its notion that it is possible for the self (or, as I'd call it, the ego) to become so United with the Divine while still living in the physical world that it no longer is a "slave" to "Virtue" (as Porete puts it)----which basically means that the self (through the wisdom of the Soul) automatically chooses the moral choice, automatically and always dwells in a state of grace and in the bosom of Divine Love: the ego's need for power, and its fear of the consequences of losing that power, are annihilated, leaving only the Soul's Will, the Soul's Desires. The process of getting to that point (similar, I'm guessing, to St John of the Cross' Dark Night of the Soul) is a horrendous one, but one that is possible for some to move through and transcend.

Despite the fact that you can find this (or at least the intimations of this) idea all over the Gospels, Marguerite was found guilty of the heresy of the "Free Spirit" (after at first being cleared of it, I believe), but it feels more like she was the victim of the very fear and egotism that she (and the Gospels) wrote about needing to be annihilated.

Of course it doesn't take a rocket scientist to understand that to obliterate the power of the ego seemingly meant the obliteration of the Church, whose firm grip on the public is fueled by fears and desires (of the public and of the hierarchy). The Church apparently had (and has) no imagination and could not envision a Church that was based on something other than fear and desire----say, Divine Love and expansion of consciousness, for instance.

I keep thinking about those fundamentalist stalkers I encountered at the Eastern Philosophy section of a Barnes & Noble book store years ago---the ones I wrote about here a while back who warned me about the dangers of investigating Buddhism, who said that Buddhism's ultimate goal, that its chief demand was that I obliterate myself into nothingness, and to them that was a horrible horrible thing to believe in, not realizing apparently that the Gospels demand the same thing.

It's funny, though, reading Porete feels in many ways like reading one of the Zen Masters of the same era that she lived and died in: she, like the Zen Masters, talks about the ineffability of the Divine (although I don't know if the Zen Masters would call it that) and the uselessness of Reason in the face of the Divine Love; but mostly what's reminiscent of the Zen Masters is Porete's (and most every other Christian mystic's) central notion of the annihilation of the ego (or self, as she calls it), of becoming a will-less "nothing" who is also not nothing but a full rich channel of the Divine, nothing and yet everything: in the world, full of its Truth and Wisdom and Virtues, and yet untouched by the needs and demands of the world.

Obliteration of the ego and the Resurrection of the True Voice of the Self, apparently it's a dangerous thing. But then all you have to do is read the Gospels to find that out.

New Painting

2011-10-10T14:12:00.006-04:00

Apparently I'm on a painting binge. Finished this new painting this morning/afternoon. I was all set to hate this one but then I added the tree-like shapes and the whole thing seemed to come together. As usual this was all done purely intuitively, moving the oil pastels around the page (I used paper instead of canvas, which I kind of like better: it's smoother and the color moves more easily across the surface than it does with canvas) without a plan, guided only by my intuition or unconscious or whatever it is that pulls my hand where it pulls it, my brain wondering all the while if that tugging knew what it was doing. Apparently it did.

I like the sense of movement and turmoil about it. And I also, as usual, like the biological feel to the forms---like they're made of muscles, tendons and fluids (and possibly a liver) as well as energy. This one did not feel at all autobiographical. It felt like something epic and Biblical, so I keep wanting to call it "Prophecy."

New Painting

2011-10-08T14:44:00.007-04:00

I keep neglecting to post new paintings and drawings here, mainly I think because I feel as if I have to write some commentary about them, and by the time I think about posting them here I am too exhausted to write anything. Well, I'm still pooped right now but here's the new painting anyway, one of the first I've been happy with in a while. I like that this has a strange biological feel---like a section of it is looking sideways into a man's body cavity. I also like that it has a kind of Rorschach test effect---what the lines and shapes form in the background shifts and changes (though I clearly see a nice muscley buttocks up there in the center)----and I like that it feels both mystical and erotic/sensual. I want to call it "The Passion".

Diary: Finishing Freud

2011-10-07T16:21:00.008-04:00

So I finished Freud's The Wolfman & Other Cases, most of it, anyway (I skipped the Ratman case). By the time I got into the Wolfman case the whole experience of Freud had pretty much lost its allure. I had had my fill by the end of the "Little Hans" case---mostly because it was sort of maddening (as it were) to read: the free-associative way the process of analysis works and the way Freud had to fit that process into a narrative that made some kind of chronological sense, it made the whole thing more and more frustrating to read because clearly you need some kind of avant-gardeish narrative/visual strategy to really make this work, to really make digestible the layers of associations that begin to pile up onto the dream images that are recounted: the color white becomes wolves becomes pale naked flesh becomes white underwear....wolves become father becomes father fucking your mother doggie-style becomes the nanny bent over mopping your piss off the floor...

The imagery is fascinating, though it would have been more effective for me had this all been a film, and we could actually watch the images evolve and transform and come together. As it is, as the narrative progresses you have to keep recalling the past iteration of the image, the last analysis, and then wander through Freud's attempts to gather up the threads into a tapestry of dreams and experiences that eventually add up to something connected with the patient's current problem/solution. Clearly, in Freud's hands this is science, not art, and yet it seems to yearn to be art (or maybe I just yearn for it to be art).

So for me the medium was a hindrance (and in the book Freud eventually talks about his difficulties trying to articulate all this) and the book slowly became a blur for me. Not to mention the fact that Freud had what seemed to me to be some pretty strict provincial ideas about "masculinity" and "femininity" and seemed to see homosexuality and homosexuals only as (male) people who are "feminine"(passive/bottoms)---he considers it a triumph that one male patient, after exhibiting same-sex attraction as a child, exhibits

"masculine" traits after that. Irked me to no end, but then this was, after all, the early 20th Century, plus this is only one book: Freud may have articulated a more expansive vision of all that in other books (though I'm kind of doubting it).

The best thing was seeing how the free-associative, erotically-charged approach to imagery and fantasies and analysis of the world around us connects with the Surrealists (and with my own work): I can see how the Dada and the Surrealist crowd grew out of Freud's approach. I always knew they had in one way or another sprung from Freud's techniques, but it was nice to see first-hand where the inspiration came from.

{the drawings are my own, appropriately penis obsessed}

Diary: A Horse of Course

2011-10-02T14:31:00.011-04:00

I just started reading Freud's The Wolfman & Other Cases. I usually turn my nose up at the idea of Freud but for some reason I was drawn to this (The Wolfman was one of the books by Freud that was required reading in one of my roommate's Cinema Studies classes back at NYU---the film classes I chose rarely required books like these [I had an aversion to theory, though I was also occasionally drawn to it [Barthes fascinated me, as did Freud {the idea of him, anyway}, though Lacan and Derrida {both of whom I had read in small but headache-inducing doses} made my skin crawl] so I had been curious about this book, though I never had a chance to take a look at it at the time.

So now I'm reading it. It just kept nagging me, this feeling that I needed to read it, and since I've come to learn to never ignore those kinds of nagging desires, I downloaded a sample chapter on my Kindle and very quickly got hooked and bought a copy.

Right now I'm reading the first case, about "Little Hans". Hans is five years old and very curious about penises, which he calls "widdlers," which is also his generic name for anything that you urinate out of, so girls have widdlers too. Hans thinks that women's widdlers will eventually grow to look like a penis, some sprouting to the size of a horse's if the girl seems hefty enough. His parents for some reason neglect to make it clear to him (or maybe I missed that passage) that boys and girls have different kinds of widdlers. They also tell him that he shouldn't touch his widdler (or have anyone else touch it) because it's "dirty" and "indecent". This was apparently before the time when people sat down and calmly discussed healthy boundaries rather than tell you that your widdler will fall off if you dare to do a little exploring with it.

And soon, when Hans is about 4 1/2, everyone is scratching their heads about why Hans is

suddenly neurotic, afraid to leave the house, afraid a horse is going to bite him.

It's all pretty fascinating, watching Hans' fairly healthy and gleeful interest in exploring the pleasures of the flesh suddenly turn into a nightmare. Poor Little Hans.

It's hard not to be a little mad at the parents (not to mention the creepy aunt who comments to the mother after Hans' bath that Hans has a pretty little penis) and it's hard not to be a little condescending about their prudishness but you also know that this was the late 19th Century and what the hell do you expect----I was a little surprised that the parents, avid students of Freud (they took notes on Hans' behaviour as part of a study) would be so conventional, but I guess the conventions are pretty well entrenched despite any revolutionary ideas you might expose yourself to.

I haven't gotten to the meat of the analysis of the case yet: they've just discovered the neurosis about the horse, though I'm guessing the horse is all about the penis, since Hans repeatedly says he thinks his mother's and his baby sister's widdlers are going to eventually grow to the size of a horses'; plus once Hans' panic attacks begin, the parents keep asking him if he touches his widdler (and he admits he does, every night) and then he's told not to, which I'm guessing didn't help matters much.

It's an odd read so far, almost like reading someone's dream journal----or like a juvenile Georges Bataille without the masochism and the dairy products. It's surreal and seems dream-like to me because I don't recall anyone Hans' age acting this way, though I do remember myself as a child being obsessed with penises at one point (ok yes I still am): we just never talked about it, which I guess is one thing you can take your hat off to Hans' parents for: at least they gave the child space to talk freely about it.

Still not sure if I like Freud much, though so far I do love reading the case. More to come, I'm sure.

Tarot Meditation: 8 of Cups

2011-09-22T14:05:00.005-04:00

Moving on. Cups are creative energy, and the Eights are all
about exhaustion: they ride the belt of the ego, which drinks up the energy of the physical world but also pours your Self out

into that world. The Eights land you in the crash after the rush of arousal and delight. You've had your fun, but now it's time to move on. Right now, though, all you want to do is lie in the arms of what you've been delighting in and sleep, sleep sleep, dreaming of all you've done and all you plan to do. This adventure has been fun and you may feel as if there's still more fun to be had, but don't get too set for another ride here: deep down you also know you've done all you can do here and it's time to be grateful for the successes and the lessons of the failures and prepare yourself to move on: put your fears and aspirations aside for the moment and open yourself to what's coming your way. Sleep, dream, pat yourself and your partners on the back, but be on the look-out for the call that takes you to your newest adventure.

New Painting

2011-08-18T11:48:00.008-04:00

I finished my first painting in quite a while a few days ago:

I'm still not sure how I feel about it. I sort of liked it when I finished it; I thought the blues especially were pretty, and I liked the weirdness of the face emerging from the abyss. But as usual after a few days I feel ambivalent about it----I think that's just a function of the process of letting go of it, moving on to the next thing, so I try not to take those feelings of ambivalence too seriously.

The painting itself was triggered (as is frequently the case) by a gorgeous set of porn pics that Tamara posted a while back, this one in particular:

I love me some underwater pool sex pics. Throw in Adam Killian, and you've got something breathtaking.

Pool sex apparently has lots of past life resonances for me----last year I wrote some of them up in a series of poems (some of which are in my book)----so it's no big surprise that the images here triggered something.

I didn't actually look at the photo while I was painting. I looked at it when I first saw the blog entry and felt the need to do a painting, and then I moved on from the blog. Right before I started the painting I called up the energy that the image triggered and then let that guide me through the process. I didn't look at the photo again until right before I did this blog entry.

I'm always a little hesitant to analyze the paintings too deeply, but my first impression, despite the trigger image, was not at all erotic, though there was a whiff of sensuality in the sea surrounding the face----a face that now feels sort of alien to me, in the sense of extraterrestrial (though it also seems human), which I guess is partly due to that framing shape surrounding the face, a shape that at first I thought was the head of the person framed in the apparatus, though now I get the feeling that the shape surrounding the head is a kind of window, and we're looking in to a sea of some kind (a sea of energy or of water, it feels like both) and examining the face/person immersed in the sea. But it also at times feels like a constricting device the person is wearing in the sea.

I get a very strong feeling of a past life in this, and a feeling of constriction and perhaps drowning, a sense of a feeling of doom as well as a re-energizing hope (in the orange and green squiggles of energy). It feels to me as if it is capturing a moment right before a rescue from the depths of despair.

World Events Reading: The 2012 Race So Far

2011-08-16T11:44:00.018-04:00

Now that the 2012 Presidential race has begun in a more solid way, I thought I'd do a quick world events reading of the front runners. I pulled a tarot card for each candidate and then wrote what the energy around each of them was telling me. The name of the tarot card that came up is in brackets beside the candidate's name.

Rick Perry: {The Universe [reversed]} Empty. It

feels as if Perry has very little sense of self, an inability to stay grounded in his own true self, so

he relies on external forces to tell him what to do and what attitude and ideas to present. He frightens me

because his energy feels to me like George W. Bush's did, only Perry's feels more vacuous and dangerous----he seems

as if he's someone who does everything for effect, with little care or notion of what the consequences will be for anyone but himself and his circle.

Look too deeply into his eyes, and I think you'd see the abyss we're all so afraid of right now.

Michele Bachmann {Prince of Cups}: Cold cold cold. She, unlike

Perry, seems to be not so much empty as overflowing: with an icy certainty about her otherworldly ideas, ideas she's plucked from another time and place. It's as if she lives in a parallel universe, one where Betty Crocker is a real person, and evil is a thing called independent thinking. She is indeed full to the brim with ideas and ambitions, few of which are her own, all of which it seems she would risk a great deal to realize and fulfill, which makes her possibly more dangerous than Perry. She, it seems, doesn't care much if people like her; what she wants is for people to follow her.

Mitt Romney {Death [reversed]}: The traditional front runner but still behind the pack of wolves he's running with. He, like Bachmann

and Perry, feels to me as if he's from another era, though not (like Bachmann's energy) because he's wistful for a fantasy of a

long-ago time, but because,

despite being a fairly practical man and a smart man, his ambitions and approaches are out of step with the world right now. He comes across as clumsy because his energy has nearly no connection to what the world's energy is connected to. He's like your dad trying to rock it at the cool club downtown when instead he really ought to stick to crooning at the karaoke bar in the suburbs. We live in a crazy savvy world right now, and Romney seems as if he is too sane to attract attention and not slick enough to know how to compensate for it.

Barack Obama {Hierophant}: His persona and energy may be the pillar of good sense and the communal spirit, but there's a wobbliness to his energy that is not going to be helpful. He

wants too much for people to like him. He's like Perry in that sense; though, unlike Perry, Obama, fortunately, is grounded in who he really is and is not afraid to let people see who he is. The wobbliness of Obama's energy is not about knowing what to do but about being assertive and strong about what he believes is best to do. Taking action worries him, triggers all sorts of fears and doubts, creating a hesitancy that's disguised as openness in him, which is not going to help him or the work he needs to do.

Tarot Meditation: 9 of Swords

2011-05-23T18:26:00.005-04:00

Swords signify the intellect, and Nines are related to the energy of the 2nd Chakra, the genitals, which is linked to the sensual experience of the Divine (eroticism, delight, but also spiritual ecstasy), and together the Swords and the Nine can be seen as the cage of ego ideas wrapped around the sensual energy of the Divine:

When the letter rather than the Soul becomes the focus, when the book becomes more important than the Body, when the institution becomes the throne rather than the open door, and when the letter and the book and the institution all brand sensuality and its pleasures as the enemy, you have a foundation for cruelty---and what many consider one of the darkest cards in the tarot deck.

{image: Aleister Crowley's Thoth Tarot Deck}

Sketch Book

2011-05-09T11:06:00.003-04:00

I drew these ink sketches this morning.

Diary: A Whiff of Ecstacy

2011-05-08T13:52:00.010-04:00

This has been a strange week-end so far. It's always strange when I'm starting something new, a new writing project or exploring some new esoteric thingee to see where it leads me. This time around it's been writing and art, merging the two.

I haven't done much art for the sake of art in a while, at least a year or more----as I said in my last post most of the art I've done has been in the form of warm up exercises for writing projects, a way to settle my energy or allow my mind to wander down various paths to see what new connections or ideas turn up.

Since my last book (which you can get here) the writing has been coming in dribs and drabs too, but this week-end it seems as though the writing and the art will be moving at full steam, working together this time. My last book had drawings in it, but the text and the images were separate: like the individual poems and stories in the book, each drawing basically stood on its own. This time around, though, it feels as if the two will be linked: the images used as illustration of the text rather than as separate entities. Or so it seems right now.

I've been feeling a bit of a nudge for the past few months to get on with something to write about, but I really hadn't felt anything specific beyond just a few small poems. Today, though, I finally think I've tapped the well of energy for the next project.

Two major pre-writing drawings began the process (they're the drawings I posted here [click on images to enlarge]). Along with that, I've been re-reading some of my art books and getting new copies of some I can't find on my shelf---Burne Hogarth's great Dynamic Figure Drawing and Dynamic Anatomy, plus the exquisite Rendering in Pen and Ink by Arthur L. Guptill, which, like the Hogarth books, is one of my favorite art books, which I've been using since high school art class---and I've been collecting off the web suitable photos of muscle guys and porn stars (in action and posing) to use as jumping off points for drawings. So I have lots of visual material to work with as I brush up on my skills and try and crank out some illustrations.

After that, today I finished the initial pre-writing for the larger piece. The pre-writing is odd, not a finished piece of writing, not an outline, but a vignette (which always feels like a past life memory, but who knows), a vignette that is in essence an articulation of the concerns of that well of energy from which the larger project will flow. I never take the vignette literally: it's a compendium of hints rather than a guide to write from; it's something I can go to to re-energize the creative flow in the first stages, as well as something to meditate on to draw out the major concerns and themes of the larger piece before I write it. It helps to solidify the piece without setting it in stone.

Here's the vignette:

Last night while I was in bed my good friend Father Simon came to visit me. He was in quite a state of excitement, and without much explanation he told me to rise up and follow him out into the night. I quickly dressed, all the while trying, without much success, to get an explanation out of him, and then followed him out into the darkness, crouching against the damp bluster of the night.

We hurried across the empty field that spread out beyond my back door, the moonlight, peeking through a fringe of clouds, guiding us as we jogged away from the house and toward a distant grove of trees.

“I am the devil,” he said as we crouched beneath the trees. “I am the one who will eat your soul.”

He kissed me. Hard. Deep. I kissed him back. And then we were naked, and when he touched me, a madness overcame me that I could not resist, and soon the night was filled with the whirl of ecstasy, ecstasy that would put any rutting beast to shame.

"You are my master," he said to me. "You are my king."

I will taste him all the days of my life. The salty tang of him. The silky heat of him. I will never not taste that delight. I will never not taste that bliss.

It's very difficult at first to restrain myself from editing this, to fix the sentences, etc. but that's not the point of it (the absurdities and awkwardness tend to act as triggers for questions that give birth to ideas), so I for the most part let go of those impulses. The point of it is what I feel when the vignette is living inside me as I write it and while I'm reading it soon after I'm finished writing it.

The major concerns of the vignette, of course, are (homo)erotic and spiritual----the damp eroticism (it feels like it takes place in England) is what first touched me about it, that and the sense of dark shame brought on by the Christianity the two men (though primarily the priest) are steeped in. (Homo)sex and the devil, that misguided pairing. I don't get the sense that the energy wants to wallow in the shame, but, rather, delight in the pleasure without ignoring the roots of the shame (and of the bliss). The subject matter of the energy feels very physical, tactile, but also very esoteric (like those Eastern explorations of eroticism without all the abstract language)---but at the moment it's all very vague, like a warm mist drifting across my body. Only when I write it will I know what it really means to say.

I don't know yet if it's a single piece, if it's poetry or fiction or essay or some kind of combination or if it's a collection of pieces. We'll see when it's written.

Diary: Porn Again

2011-05-03T13:51:00.007-04:00

I drew this quick ink sketch this morning (click on the image to enlarge).

As usual, my process was simply to let the energy guide me where it wanted me to sketch and scribble. The process began with a gay porn photo, and the drawing grew from there. I find that gay porn is a very helpful inspiration---even though I don't draw the actual images in the photo, the photo nevertheless taps in to energies that other forms of photography just don't tap into in me.

Most of the time these quick ink drawings trigger some kind of writing, a poem or a meditation. This time around, though, I think I needed to do this sketch to remind myself of the usefulness of gay porn in my process. Porn is not just jerk off material (in fact, for me it's not usually jerk off material at all; it's just another form of art to look at); it taps in to some of my deepest creative energies. I use more than just gay porn for inspiration, but porn and erotic photography seems to be the best tool for me to tap in to my most productive energy, at least in terms of writing.

I don't do art to create art. I do art to help settle my creative energy before I start writing what that energy wants me to write. It may sound odd, but that's the process that works best for me, and doing this sketch feels like a way to re-embrace the essence of my creative process, something I've been needing to do for a while now.

I've been in a bit of a transition stage these past few weeks, getting rid of things I don't need, transforming how I think about the things that I do need: getting back to zero and seeing what emerges out of the abyss.

Now it feels as if I'm finished with zero. Now we just have to wait and see what, if anything, the Universe comes up with beyond the abyss.

Quote of the Day

2011-04-24T18:07:00.002-04:00

"the author... has taken the lid off his head and exposed his eyeballs."

{Mumon's Postscript to The Gateless Gate
(translated by Katsuki Sekida)}

In The Garden Again

2011-04-18T14:43:00.003-04:00

I wrote this poem this afternoon:

"In the Garden Again"

In the garden again,
after the rains.

The apple, crisp and virgin white
beneath its bloody skin, is no
temptress, for it knows what
world it’s in.

The tree, old as death, stands strong and
ready, whispering in the misty drizzle,
Come closer, come closer:
I know you; I know
you know me too.

The apple, red as fresh pleasure,
hangs silent as hope in the damp dim garden,

and you take a seat,
crossing your naked legs on the cold moss
beneath the dripping tree. Looking up,
your face cool and smiling in the mist,
you listen to the rising whisper,
to the milky pleasure of
your flesh,
as you remember that first rapturous
delight, when the apple was
not just an apple but
a gateway, a light.

Looking for the Moon

2011-04-17T18:46:00.005-04:00

One, seven, three, five---
The truth you search for cannot be grasped.
As night advances, a bright moon illuminates the whole ocean;
The dragon's jewels are found in every wave.
Looking for the moon, it is here, in this wave, in the next.

While I was reading Thomas Wright's translation of Zen master Dogen's essay "Instructions for the Zen Cook [Tenzo Kyokun]" I came across this poem by Xuedou Zongxian (980- 1052 AD) and I was stopped in my tracks. For some reason, this moved me more than anything else in the essay (which nevertheless is very good, both as a peek into a corner of the world of Zen monks and as a peek into the life and teachings of Zen master Dogen).

What moved me was not only the literal image of the moonlit ocean, glittering with "dragon's jewels", but also the way the poem guides you from the abstraction of numbers to the vivid image of an ocean full of radiance. We go from the cold textual knowledge of the logical mind to the rich sensual realm of physical experience where real enlightenment happens. Gorgeous.

{poem via page 12 of How to Cook Your Life: From the Zen Kitchen to Enlightenment translated by Thomas Wright, which also includes a commentary (the bulk of the book) by Kosho Uchiyama Roshi, which I have yet to read.}

Trumped

2011-04-14T14:50:00.007-04:00

Donald Trump kept hovering around my meditation practice this morning. Not the actual Donald Trump (*shudders*) but Donald Trump-ness, or whatever it is that lingers in your brain after you've seen way way WAY too much of him acting a fool on TV.

I was lounging on the couch this morning doing my daily meditation, first firing up each chakra and then drifting into mindful breathing, feeling the serenity of just breathing in and breathing out, adrift on an ocean of peace, and then, as usual, the whirl of thoughts began to stir. No problem: at the center of the whirl, the I of the storm, there was peace as I watched the thoughts spin and ebb and flow, and I simply let them whirl----

The main gust of thought at first was all about the last koan that I read last night in Katsuki Sekida's The Gateless Gate, #20:

Shogen Oshu asked: "Why is it that a man of great strength does not lift his legs? And he also said, "It is not the tongue he speaks with."

Reading this koan the first time, I understood it to be about enlightened people ("a man of great strength") relying on the spirit rather than the physical mind (his "legs") to make the choices of his daily life (which, like lifting/moving your legs, propels you forward in the world). Likewise it's not the ego (the "tongue") that is the source of his voice but the Soul.

And then, as the thoughts about the koan whirled around me, the thoughts suddenly shifted to being about Donald Trump. Well, actually, I wasn't thinking about Donald Trump; he just showed up as an image. As a man who most assuredly does indeed lift his legs, all over the place. And most assuredly, and unceasingly, a man who speaks with the tongue.

I tried to re-focus my mind onto my breathing to give the thoughts a chance to drift away, but they began to take on a more tactile quality, felt more and more like the experiences I had while doing psychic readings; so I let the thoughts say what they needed to say as the feeling I was feeling (the thought, once it was clear it was about Trump, became a sensation rather than what you'd normally call a thought or an emotion) became about Donald Trump falling, plunging into darkness (I literally felt as if something opened up and Trump fell away from me, like the floor opening up and whoosh), which felt more and more like it represented a scandal.

Once I acknowledged that sensation, it was gone.

I'm still not sure if this was some kind of psychic experience or not, but that's what it felt like. So I guess we'll have to wait and see if Trump suddenly has a great fall-----he seems to be courting chaos and stupidity these days, so if there is a big blow-up and collapse, it'll be no big surprise. We'll see. At any rate let's hope he stays out of my meditation sessions from now on; it's bad enough he's all over the TV.

Diary: Mu, or, God Spelled Backwards is Dog

2011-04-11T12:13:00.016-04:00

I've just started reading Katsuki Sekida's translation of The Gateless Gate (Mumonkan), a collection of Zen koans and commentaries. The first koan in the book is this:

A monk asked [Zen master] Joshu, "Has a dog the Buddha Nature?" Joshu answered, "Mu".

Mu, according to Sekida, means "Nothing" or "Nothingness". One reading of the koan might be that Joshu is telling the monk to re-think his question, or, rather, to no-think his question: go away and meditate ("Mu" is, according to Sekida, a word sometimes used in Zen meditation), tap in to the Nothingness, and he will see how absurd the question is. The monk has, in essence, opened himself up to an opportunity for enlightenment: to move beyond the ego's compulsion to divide the world up into us/them.

Apropos of "Nothing": a few years ago I was browsing the Eastern Religion section of our local Barnes & Noble, and a couple of very cute young men, who had been browsing the Bible section across from where I was, came over and started to ask me about my interest in Eastern religions.

They chatted me up for a bit, asked if I was interested in Buddhism, etc, and even before they started in about the real reason they were there, I had a pretty strong feeling that these were fundamentalist evangelical Christian special ops sent out to stalk the book store's Eastern Religion section in order to save whatever souls they could snatch up there from evil pagan clutches.

At first I was shocked: I could not believe the audacity of this. And then I was pissed. But I kept it together, put on my affable face and answered their questions about what I'd read and what I was interested in. And then they started to warn me of the "scary" things they knew about Buddhism, things I surely had no knowledge of and that they were going to clue me in on (and thus save me from).

Did you know, one of the young men said, that the Buddhist idea of heaven is that you turn into nothing? Total emptiness. You vanish into an abyss. That's their ultimate goal for you: obliteration.

I responded to this little distortion with as much peace and serenity as I could muster, explaining that the Nothingness that he referred to is actually an abundance; I went on to explain about "Nothingness" as the release from ego ideas and attachments, etc. He nodded and simply repeated his distortion and said that this lie about obliteration is what he had read about Buddhism and that as far as he knew it was the truth. He then invited me to his church's weekly workshops on religion, and I politely declined, still feeling the flush of rage at the lies his church had been feeding him, and the boys went on their way.

If I had had the example of Zen Master Joshu at that point, maybe I would have had the presence of mind to answer the young man simply with "Good Friday and Easter" or maybe "St John of the Cross" and would have just left it at that.

(Re)Introduction to Gematria, plus Mystical Naughty Bits

2011-03-21T10:53:00.018-04:00

Sometimes as an aid for contemplation, a trigger for channeled or meditative writings, I use a form of gematria to get things rolling. Gematria is a tool of the kabala, used to find correspondences in the text of the Hebrew Bible. Each letter of the Hebrew alphabet is assigned a number as well as a corresponding symbol, either a sign of the zodiac or a planet or one of the four elements. Most forms of gematria that I've seen are more interested in the numerical assignment of the Hebrew letter: finding the sum of the numerical values of the letters in specific words or phrases (or entire verses) from passages from the books of the Hebrew Bible and then seeing how words or phrases with the same sum can be read together to enlarge the meaning(s) of the text(s).

The process and the fruits of that process can get complicated, packed with lots of numbers and letters and intricate readings of what they mean and what they're connected to, depending on how the mystical meaning(s) of the number is defined and what context it's all placed in. I'm fascinated by it (Aleister Crowley has a book, 777, that, among other things, indexes numbers and words and correspondences, and it's engrossing, if not headache-inducing, to read) but that process, because it tends to veer into the abstract, wasn't very useful to me.

I was more interested in the symbols assigned to the Hebrew letters, and my intuition led me to come up with a different way to use gematria. As in my explorations of the chakras, I have no idea if I'm re-inventing the wheel here, but whether it's a new approach or not, it was new to me, and it worked, and still works, for me.

As I said, I was more drawn to the symbols assigned to the letters/numbers. So what I did was add up the sum of the numerical values of the letters in a word, and then translate the digits of the sum into the symbols assigned to each digit.

For example, when I was taking a look at the chakras, I did some gematria work on the Hebrew word TBAaTh ("anus," which is where Chakra 1 is located). The letters' numerical values are:

T=9
B=2
Aa=70
Th=400

The sum of which is 481 (9+2+70+400)

Take the sum (481) and find the symbol assigned to each digit:

400= Saturn
80= Mars
1= Air

Next, translate each symbol into its definition:

Saturn= Discipline
Mars= ego emotion/conflict
Air= Karmic circumstances

And then connect the definitions together into a phrase:

Disciplining the ego (or the ego's emotions) in the midst of Karmic circumstances.

This phrase then can serve to expand the way you think about the text or the word or the object (or person or place) that the word names or describes. It turns out that this phrase is very close to the meaning I came up with for Chakra 1 by using the planet (Saturn) and zodiac signs (Aquarius & Capricorn) I assigned to it.

Usually I end up continuing on and adding up the digits of the sum (481: 4+8+1=13) and then add up the digits of the sum that that produces (1+3=4) until I get to a single digit; after that, I translate all of those sums into a phrase, adding them onto the original phrase----but usually the first phrase is enough to really give you something to think about.

Many of phrases that came out of the gematria I did on the words for Chakra body parts echoed in one way or another the meanings that were assigned to them by the planets and/or by tradition. Some simply added more depth to or a different understanding of them. For example, one of the Hebrew words for penis (Chakra 2), ZMVRH, gave me the number 258, which broke down as

200=Jupiter (abundance)
50= Scorpio (ego ambition)
8= Cancer (facing the past)

Which produced this phrase:

Abundance of ego ambition to face/deal with the past.

The Hebrew word for womb, RChM, gave me the number 808, which broke down as

800= Mars (ego emotion/conflict)
8= Cancer (facing the past)

Which produced the similar phrase: Ego emotion/conflict in facing/dealing with the past.

If you remember, the meaning I came up with for Chakra 2 (located at the genitals) was about the soul's connection to people and objects and places, and the pleasure or displeasure it manifests about those people or objects or places. It's also connected to Chakra 5, which I understood as a reservoir for a lot of past life energy in connection to people and objects in this lifetime. Chakra 2's energy of pleasure or displeasure (the sensual thrill or revulsion in relationships/attractions [or in sexual activity?]) is linked or perhaps keeps you linked (or un-linked, if it's displeasure) to the energy of the past, draws you in (or away) because you need to deal with (or release yourself from) that past energy.

Anyway, that's a small taste. It's an interesting process (which I also use with the Greek alphabet) that can be very helpful---and would probably be more helpful if I actually had learned the Hebrew language. As it is, without a better understanding of the language, I can only go as far as using it as an aid for contemplation rather than embarking on a more in-depth study, which is fine for now; though one of these days I may hunker down and learn the language properly so I can see what more I can do with it. Anyway, such as it is, gematria may come up again as the source of writings in future posts, so I thought I ought to go over it again.

{NOTE: I changed the planetary assignments of the letters so they appear on the chart of letters in the order that they appear in the sky. Traditionally they are in a slightly different order, which made no sense to me. The zodiac signs are in proper order on the chart of letters, so I figured I'd put the planets in order as well. So if you are used to seeing the planets assigned to different letters, that explains it. It may not be tradition, but it makes much more sense to me.}

Chakras: The Essentials, part 2 (conclusion)

2011-03-19T10:49:00.008-04:00

After I came up with my list of meanings for the chakras, I remembered that many people like to divide the chakras into two groups, the upper (5,6,7) and the lower (2,3,4) chakras, with Chakra 1 standing alone as a kind of grounding point for the whole system. I also noticed that Venus in my chart is at Chakra 5 rather than where you'd think it would be, at Chakra 2, the genitals. This got me thinking: what if the two sets, upper and lower, are connected. What if the upper and lower chakras paired off, one upper chakra paired with a lower (the first lower chakra paired with the first upper, etc.). Other people have done this with conventional chakra lists, I think; but I wondered if my pairs would makes sense together. So I paired them up, and this is what I came up with:

1st pair:
Chakra 2: Soul's manifestation of delight, ambition in connection with objects, people, etc
Chakra 5: one's physical world: relationships, environment, etc. (essentially, this is your past life reservoir, I think)

2nd pair:
Chakra 3: ego identity
Chakra 6: expansion of consciousness, openness to truth about self & universe & present moment

3rd pair:
Chakra 4: guidance in the midst of past life energy
Chakra 7: faith in God/Soul

And then the lone Chakra 1: Discipline, keeping you grounded in the Path you need to be on, which is paired to the whole network of chakras.

Happily, the pairs went well together, made sense together.

Pair 1 is obviously about the interplay of the energy of objects and relationships: the Soul in the present incarnation reacting with pleasure or displeasure (Chakra 2) to the past life energy emanating from objects and people that you have a connection with (Chakra 5).

Pair 2 is about your ego's identity in this incarnation (Chakra 3) and the information and experience and the processes that will allow that identity to manifest and grow in this lifetime (Chakra 6).

Pair 3 is about guidance in the face of all this (Chakra 4) and the clarity of your connection to the Divine (Chakra 7), which will make it easier to "hear" that guidance and to be open to it.

And the lone Chakra at the root of all this is about the connection to the choices that you and others make. It is the root channel through which the energy of choices flows, into and out of your body---carrying with it the "hieroglyphs" that are the code of instruction for how that energy will manifest (now and, as it transforms and interconnects with other "codes", in the future).

The system is of course more complex than this; this is merely the essence. We are all connected by countless threads emanating from all of these centers of energy in our bodies. But it's important to simplify it so that we can see what we're made of in its essential form.

The first two pairs are simply the facts of life: we are all evolving and creating as incarnations, and we are all constantly interacting with energy, energy emanating from the past and from the present. It's what the world is made of, the stuff of creation. The third pairing is the key, the Way to make our experience through the whirl more satisfying and peaceful: by finding a way to find and be open to the Divine center, the peaceful core where the Soul's calm wisdom allows you to make sense of all that information and sensation, to open yourself to the Voice that can most effectively guide you through the whirl of energy as you make your way out of the past and into the present, onward into the future.

Chakras: The Essentials, part 1

2011-03-18T11:47:00.008-04:00

{This is a reworking of a post that I did in a previous version of this blog.}

If you want to take a look at the chakras, the physical body's spiritual centers, in the most basic way, it's best to start with the basics: the planets. That's how I re-learned how to look at them. I was frustrated and confused with all the complex and varied definitions of the chakras in all the books that I'd read about them, and I was just about to give up trying to find an uncluttered way to look at them, when it came to me that the planets have frequently traditionally been assigned a role in defining or influencing chakras, and the planets are frequently used as markers of essential ideas connected with mystical energy, plus there are traditionally seven planets in pre-modern astrology, so wouldn't the easiest way to start to understand the chakras be to begin with the planets, to assign each chakra a planet from the traditional astrological list and build their meanings from there. Start with the essence and see where it goes.

So, starting with the Sun at the Crown Chakra (#7) I assigned each chakra a planet and the zodiac sign(s) traditionally associated with the planet:

Chakra 7 (crown): Sun (Leo)
Chakra 6 (brow): Mercury (Gemini/ Virgo)
Chakra 5 (throat): Venus (Taurus/ Libra)
Chakra 4 (heart): Moon (Cancer)
Chakra 3 (abdomen): Mars (Aries/ Scorpio)
Chakra 2 (genitals): Jupiter (Sagittarius/ Pisces)
Chakra 1 (anus): Saturn (Capricorn/ Aquarius)

As usual, I treated the cluster of planet and astrological signs as a kind of hieroglyph, so that the meaning of the planet and sign would form a definition, or an inkling of a definition for me to puzzle together.

So I began with this list:

Charkra 7= Sun [Faith {in God}] + Leo [Authority {of the Divine/Soul}]
Chakra 6 = Mercury [expanding consciousness] + Gemini [communication of the truth] + Virgo [healing]
Chakra 5 = Venus [physicality/sensuality] + Taurus [physical needs/neediness] + Libra [relationships]
Chakra 4 = Moon [guidance] + Cancer [facing the past]
Chakra 3 = Mars [ego emotions/conflict] + Aries [ego identity] + Scorpio [ego ambitions]
Chakra 2 = Jupiter [abundance] + Sagittarius [ideals/aspirations of the Soul] + Pisces [peace]
Chakra 1 = Saturn [discipline] + Capricorn [work] + Aquarius [flow/direction of energy]

which became this:

Chakra 7= faith in God/Soul; recognition of the wisdom and authority of the Soul/Divine
Chakra 6= expansion/healing of consciousness; receptivity to the truth about the Self, the Universe, and the present moment.
Chakra 5: one's physical world, connections made to people and objects and environments, etc in the physical world.
Chakra 4: guidance in the midst of past life energy, and one's openness to that guidance
Chakra 3: ego identity.
Chakra 2: the Soul's ambitions, and the delight/peace it manifests toward people and places and objects and energy.
Chakra 1: Discipline in [karmic/life] work and in directing one's energy in each moment (i.e. staying on the right Path for each phase of this lifetime).

If my definitions of the planet and zodiac signs don't match your own, that's because they came from my own channeled writings. I find that these definitions make the most sense to me, and they work for me. I use them also for the kabala work that I do. They're not entirely traditional, but that's ok; as I say, it works for me.

I didn't stop my exploration of the chakras with these definitions. I did some more fiddling around with the chakras. And that work I will take up in the next post.

Diary: New Painting, In Progress

2011-02-16T10:32:00.007-05:00

Yesterday I started painting again. It's been a while, a few months, I think.

My process for the painting (and my ink drawings) is sort of like my process for the psychic readings. I just follow the energy, let it guide me. When I begin, I don't have any pre-conceived ideas about what I'm going to draw or paint; I just put the canvas down and feel the pull of energy toward what color I need to pick up and where and how it needs to be applied. It's a variation on automatic writing.

This painting process feels very different from when I draw (or paint) in a conventional way, consciously attempting to reproduce an image from a photo or from life-- with this kind of "automatic drawing" I can feel a pool of energy swimming between me and the canvas, pulling my hand one way, prodding me to choose red or yellow or blue, etc. Sometimes I can even see in my mind and feel in my body the feeling that's emanating from the energy, what it's trying to articulate, though it's never really clear until the image is finished on the canvas. My conscious mind doesn't ever enter the picture (in every sense), except as an outside observer, questioning whether that color or that line or that smudge really was a good idea (it usually was).

I stumbled on this technique on my own, starting with doodling randomly, then, once the psychic stuff resurfaced, I started feeling it more strongly as an energy moving the colors around. After I started doing this more and more, I ran across the writing of the surrealists from the early 1900's, and I found that they experimented with a similar kind of process, and then I came across the book Life, Paint & Passion, which talked about a similar technique, and, since I a lot of the time thought it was sort of nuts for me to draw this way, these books were some much needed validation; after that big boost, I was off and running and didn't look back. It's basically the only way I paint and draw these days.

Not all of it turns out to be something I enjoy looking at, but the process (which has become the central focus) is always intriguing, though at times frustrating.

Sometimes (though rarely in the past) I use a photo to trigger the energy. I began the new painting that I started yesterday with this photo (by, I believe, Joe Oppedisano, from porn star Tony Buff's Flickr album [that's Tony in the photo]):
I didn't, as you can see in the photo of the unfinished painting below, try to reproduce the Tony Buff photo in the painting. As a matter of fact, I didn't even look at the photo after I started painting. It was merely a trigger. I don't know what it was a trigger for---am I feeling the energy of the model? the photographer? or am I feeling the energy of something else that the image triggers in the energy around me? I don't know. I do know that it doesn't feel autobiographical---I can usually sense immediately when the painting is about myself.

The bottom left section of the painting feels like it's just about complete. I love that blue section, though I think it's still got some tweaking that needs to be done to it; and I love that yellow up at the top, but I have a feeling it, or a lot of it, is not going to stick around, though the yellow on the bottom right might stay. I don't know. I never know what the energy is going to do; these are just my initial feelings. We'll wait and see. I'll post the finished piece when it's complete.

The Birth of Chaos

2011-02-09T10:39:00.012-05:00

"God said: 'I am now handing you over
to those whom you hate ... They shall seize
all that you have worked for and leave you
stark naked ... because you have forgotten
me and cast me behind your back.'"
{Ezekiel 23: 28, 29, 35}

All energy in the physical world is Divine. Not all manifestations of that energy, however, are manifestations/reflections of the Divine. Some are manifestations of the ego's attachments to the Past, which is the source of suffering.

Each thread of energy in the tapestry of physical experience has a trajectory, an inevitability---it follows through with the inevitable consequences of the choices it has been fueled and shaped by; the choices "written" on that energy (choices that are actually a mosaic of choices [forming a kind of hieroglyph of "instructions"] chosen by various Souls [or egos] on various levels of experience) are expanded upon and transformed as History moves on, gathering momentum as time moves forward, branching out, expanding, connecting with other choices and threads, affecting countless other choices, all the while manifesting in physical form what is "written" on that energy (manifesting as bodies, as events, as objects, etc.) as it continues to radiate desire and call for more choices, which allows creation to continue to expand.

As was said in previous posts, part of that energy is the energy of the Past (the accumulation of choices and their consequences) and part of that energy is the Wisdom of the Present (the Divine in the Present). The Wisdom of the Present knows how to guide this energy of choices, knows (because it sees the larger picture) which choices and actions will allow the energy (and its manifestations) to move along (and manifest) the most peaceful and creative Path.

In the physical body, this Wisdom is the Soul; in the whole of the physical universe that Wisdom is God, the Divine, which is, in a sense, the Soul of the entire physical universe (including your body [and Soul])---like the body's Soul, God is not outside or separated from the physical world, but another "facet" of it, filled with and connected to deeper realms of Wisdom and experience.

When you make a choice, you affect the energy of the physical world, move it, connect (or re-connect) with it, and in connecting with it, you release new "hieroglyphs" of information into that energy, and those "hieroglyphs" mingle with the energy that you've connected with, transform what is "written" on it and thus create a new template for whatever is created out of that energy.

Your body radiates with countless tendrils of energy, reaching for connection, calling for connection; on those tendrils is "written" the instructions created from certain groups of choices from the past, as well as the instructions created from the choices from the present, which allow the energy it connects with to transform and create and manifest in a certain way.

The energy that is your Soul, the Wisdom of the Present, knows which connections to make (which person to form a relationship with, which environment to move into, which object to choose to buy or linger with, etc) and how to make it.

The ego only knows that there is all that warm enticing energy of the past and that it feels so seductive or scary (or both). The ego will connect (or retreat) according to its fears or its comfort, not necessarily according to what is best (for the present or for the future), although it will try its best to rationalize its unwise choice with reason or with emotion.

When the ego makes one of its unwise choices (against the wishes of the Soul), a series of connections is made, "hieroglyphs" are exchanged, new instructions are "written" on the energies it has chosen to connect with. Because of the incompatible (or excessive) elements (or, in keeping with the linguistic metaphor, because of the "ungrammatical" structure) of this new mixture of energy, the manifestations that eventually emerge (relationships, bodies, objects, and/or events, etc---some of them immediate and some of them much later on in History) will reflect that imbalance or excess (or weakness)---and eventually, through future connections and lifetimes, the "ungrammatical" hieroglyphs pile up and branch out and transform and suffering and chaos and diseases are created and/or perpetuated.

Not all choices, of course, are equal, some cause more chaos than others, some cause more immediate (and future) chaos than others---the more cultural connections, the more power in the culture you have, the deeper your choices affect History (partly because those leaders affect the cultural consciousness, which helps the ego to be either more open or more closed to the Soul).

In terms of the universal presence of suffering and disease: one single choice does not a disease make: no one person or group of people is responsible for the presence of diseases or disasters in our world. One bite of the Apple did not usher in the Darkness. It takes many many bites (and there are always chances to fix an unwise choice, if you allow yourself to make that series of healing choices) but the unwise choices will add up----and the choices made by cultural leaders especially take a toll: the more those leaders choose to nourish the ego's choices, the thicker the world's darkness becomes and the more difficult it is to extricate the world from that darkness.

Many diseases and disasters that happen in your present lifetime are not entirely your making (some of course are, and you will in many cases be able to recognize the choices that brought them to you). Diseases and disasters that come out of the blue, that seem to pounce for no reason, are sometimes manifestations of some of those past ego choices lingering and transforming in the Sea of History, sometimes ages and ages of choices, many of them choices that you as an incarnation, in the present or the past, probably had very little or no direct part in creating.

Nevertheless, we are all connected, tendrils and tendrils of collections of choices intersect, some of those tendrils are chaotic with the effects of ego choices, and eventually some of those chaotic choices (whether they came directly from your own incarnation's various choices or not) will connect with you because they are flowing in the Sea of History that we all live and create in in this universe.

How do we clean up this sea of suffering? That is the subject of another post.

Heavenly Hosts

2011-02-08T11:28:00.010-05:00

"Gideon said, 'Alas...that I have seen the Angel of the Lord face to face!'
The Lord answered him, 'Be calm, do not fear: you shall not die.'"
{Judges 8: 22, 23}

The "Angel of the Lord" is a sea of energy, physical, tactile, visible and yet invisible, essentially heavenly although it frequently feels like it's hell.

When we speak of angels, we speak of Karma, by which we mean the energy of the physical Universe. There are no angels, not in the sense of winged choirs or armies who live in a heavenly realm, overseeing and running messages to the physical world for the king divine; there are (from the point of view of this physical realm) only tides of Divine energy, a Sea of Desires and choices and consequences, Oceans of Consciousness, transforming and manifesting inevitabilities, calling us as egos to join more deeply in the process of creation even as we all continue to create.

The Kingdom is not a kingdom, a realm ruled over by a king divine, though there are interconnected hierarchies, within which are levels of intelligence that we, as egos, have right now no capacity to equal or understand and so must in many cases defer to for wisdom and action. The Kingdom is layer upon layer of Being, of Intelligence, of Choices coming together, various levels of consciousness and experience and form, all equally important, all creating the experiences we all experience.

You as a being are a microcosm of this, created in the image of the larger Whole. You, as the previous posts have said, are not simply your ego. You are vast----you are even more than your Soul, more than the energy that fills your body.

The energy that fills your body, the Soul, your portion of the Wisdom of the Present (the Divine) for this present physical incarnation, is an outpouring of your Larger Self, which is an incarnation residing in another level/realm of Being (which we as egos would see as being nonphysical, though that realm to its inhabitants is very physical). It is this Larger Self, with whom you are always energetically connected, that gives birth to what you experience as your Soul in this present physical incarnation. It is this Larger Self that your present consciousness returns to when your physical body dies (when you die you do not remain yourself as you know yourself in this lifetime, but your Self remains in your Self).

What this Larger Self knows, you as an ego can barely scratch the surface of. Even your own Soul is not privy to all of the vastness of that Larger Self's wisdom. The Soul is an embodiment of only a portion of it, the portion that is relevant to this lifetime, a portion that expands and expands as the consciousness of yourself as an ego expands. And what is beyond that Larger Self, what gives birth to and is connected to and knows more than that Larger Self, is even more bafflingly vast in its wisdom and abilities.

We are bodies within bodies, realms within realms, as vast and as glorious (and as terrifying at times) as any army of angels. The radiance of the physical realm, the radiance of our bodies and of our world, sings with the glories of the Divine; vast and blazing, it is that Sea of Light that is the heavenly host.

World Events: Keep An Eye On Syria

2011-02-06T11:22:00.008-05:00

World events readings sort of creep me out still. I don't know why but they do. Many of them have been pretty accurate, tho a lot of them have been questionable, could go either way. Anyway, accurate or not, they still make me uneasy, forecasting events, however vaguely, as they do and emphatically talking about (sometimes rather stridently) the karmic meaning of those events. So I tend to look at them very skeptically (until they're validated, of course) and with more than a little unease.

These readings, like the metaphysical readings, come through by a method that is the closest thing to automatic writing that I still do these days. I'm basically channeling the message of the karmic energy. My hands more or less just fly across the keyboard, and I wait and see what comes through. I do stop the process at various points and feel my way through, intuitively, fill in the gaps with what my intuition tells me, but it's the energy doing all the "speaking".

And when I'm done I always, out of fear and embarrassment, want to delete what I've written, but I don't (alas?), as you can see.

I begin, in order to let the energy gather and settle, by creating a verse cobbled together from scripture passages. Everything after the verse is channeled writing.

And so, here's the reading:

"She that bore you shall be abashed by you...
You shall be cut off, become a desert
before the destroying sword."
{Jeremiah 50: 12, 13, 16}

Karmically, no place in the Middle East matters more now than Syria. Now that Egypt and other countries have risen up and asserted themselves, the Karmic energy of that region is preparing for the next phase of transformation. Syria is the heart of the matter. It is the place where the deepest darkness lives. Where the lies and the violence ferment and create the fear and misery that shrouds the whole region. Syria is the core.

Keep an eye on Syria.

Previous readings have talked about this: that events will occur that will gradually reveal the truth behind the lies thriving in Syria. Syria must become the focus, and the energy of History will make sure that that happens, that Syria becomes the focus and that the truth about the Darkness there is revealed.

Revealing the truth there will not be pretty. The truth, the dark truth that has been allowed to thrive there, is not pretty: it is violent and heartbreaking, and in order for things to become better, in order to first reveal the truth of what thrives there, things unfortunately must become worse in the surrounding area (Israel and Lebanon, etc). Once the truth has begun to reveal itself, once the people in power are revealed for what they really are and what they really wish to achieve, then the healing can begin. It is those people in power who will set in motion this upcoming series of violent actions, but those very events that they trigger, hoping to build on their power, will help reveal to the world who they really are, and they will thus contribute to their own downfall.

The unrest that has sprung up in the region, in Egypt and elsewhere, is a manifestation of the first rumblings of the energy of History, its call for the Truth. What is happening in Egypt is important, but, in terms of the karma of that region, Syria is the core, Syria is the key to finally beginning to make things right, finally beginning to create real stability in the Middle East.

Keep your eyes on Syria.

The Meaning of the Seven Stars, conclusion

2011-02-05T10:49:00.005-05:00

The physical world is steeped in the energy of the past. Physical objects, physical bodies and the stuff of the physical world are immersed in, emerge from, that vast sea of energy. We are like cells swimming in a sea of fluids, distinctive units yet connected by that vast sea that feeds us and forms us.

Not all of that energy is the energy of the past. The sea of Life is not all merely History. A great deal of it is the Wisdom of the Present: the Divine's agenda(s) for the present and vision(s) for the future. That agenda and that vision are dependent upon the material that's written on the energy of History, the choices and their consequences from the past.

Our choices (whether they are Soul choices or ego choices) help create what this world looks like, what forms and bodies and environments are created, and what the experience of those forms and bodies and environments will be like. Our choices (whether they come from the ego or from the Soul) and their consequences help determine the Divine's agenda, help form what the Path of history and experience will be. We are One Body---individuals and yet still One (ultimately, we are the cells as well as the sea)---and so we are also collaborators in the maintenance and transformation and experience of that Body.

Choices that come from the ego, based purely on intellect or emotions (or some combination) tend to spring from a yearning for the past, a trust in past ideas and experiences; that is the ego's way, born as it is from the past, seduced as it is by the sensual connections with the energy of the past. The ego fears what it does not know, so it will choose what it knows or what it thinks it knows. The Soul, on the other hand, knows what the ego does not know, has a deeper connection to the present and the future possibilities. The more experience the ego has in knowing and trusting the Soul and having that trust validated, the easier it is each time to follow the Soul's Voice, and the easier life is, even when the Path is not so easy.

Ego choices tend to re-create the past, cause the energy to re-create the past in one way or another, manifesting themselves with changes that reflect the emotions/ideas that re-created that past, and they almost always end up in chaos or despair. Soul choices, while acknowledging the past, infuse that past with new wisdom and allow it to emerge transformed into the present, building new forms and experiences, new ways to experience the Divine in the physical world, opening up a Path to the future.

You are immersed in the sea of History. But you are also immersed in the sea of the Wisdom of the Present. The energy centers in your body, the Chakras, and their countless branches, are your portion of the Wisdom of the Present for this lifetime, the Divine in the Here and Now, and the physical body, its mind and brain and all of its cells and tissues and atoms, steeped as it is in History, is, during this lifetime, One with that Wisdom, collaborating with it to move out of the past and into the present, onward into the future.

The greatest gift you can give the world is an acknowledgement of that collaboration, an acknowledgement of the limits of the ego while acknowledging the limitlessness of the Soul. The ego is always afraid to acknowledge this at first ---it has the notion that it is enslaving itself to an outside divinity or force, but that is a lie: you are not enslaving yourself to anything: you are acknowledging a deeper facet of yourself, simply allowing another process of the Mind to do what it was meant to do. The ego is not the captain of the ship, despite what it likes to believe, nor is it alone, abandoned and lost in a sea of meaninglessness.

The sea is full of life, past and present; the sea is all of us, One and yet Many, teeming with Divinity even as we acknowledge that, as filled with the Divine as we are, we, as egos, are not God, but God is indeed Us.

The Meaning of the Seven Stars, part 3

2011-02-04T10:36:00.009-05:00

All physical forms, including your physical body, are steeped in the energy of the past, have been shaped and formed, in part, by the energy of the past. That energy, because it is the energy of the Divine, is seductive, radiating, even if it is only at its core, with love. It is meant to be seductive, to call you to it, to fill you with longing and desire.

Objects and places that we long for, people we fall in love with, as friends, as lovers, people we connect with as fleeting companions or business partners, we are drawn to, connect with because of the energy of the past that they radiate. We know them before we know them, love them before we love them, because the history we share is written all over them, cries out to us in the shapes of their bodies, the clothes they choose to wear, the colors they choose to surround themselves with, all of which are blazing with the undercurrent of the energy of the past lives we shared with them.

Every body, every object is a collage of the past, and when you encounter a person or an environment or a gathering of objects, your Soul knows just where you need to go to make the connection you need to make. The connection begins at the core---you recognize the energy of the environment or the object or the person as a whole, and you are drawn to it, and then you are seduced by the details, the curve of a cheekbone, the quality of a voice; or, in an object, you are drawn to the curve or the color or the scent of the thing---the deal is sealed with the physical details, all of which echo in one way or another a past that you as an ego no longer remember, though the Soul remembers, and it will point you in the direction of the most seductive details to get you as an ego to fall in love or connect with whatever it is that you need for the Path you are on.

The opposite is also true: if you need to steer clear of or reject or disconnect from a person or an object or an environment, the Soul will guide you to see and feel all the things from the past that compel you to stay away from a person or an object.

This is of course a simplified description of the process (the ego is also participating in the assessment and the experience, bringing its expectations, etc). It is also merely the opening act, the first spark of connection. After that first spark (almost immediately after that first spark) once the connection has been made, there is a flood of energy as the two forms connect energetically, which the ego can feel as excitement of emotions, as expectations of the intellect, etc. It is a blissful chaos of varying intensities at first, depending on the quality of the connection and of the state of the ego at the time.

The ego is easily seduced by this energy. It loves the thrill and the warmth of that energy---even in its muted state, when the connection is not all that strong--- and the ego will become excited by it and want to pursue that feeling even when the signs are very clear that you are simply meant to acknowledge the object or person or environment from a distance and then steer clear.

A mindful relationship with your own Soul, which knows which connection to pursue and which to steer clear of, makes the process of working and living with this energy easier----it doesn't eradicate all hardship and disappointment and disaster, sometimes that's just the Path you have to go down, but it makes the journey through any hardship or happiness easier to work through. It helps you choose the best choice at the beginning, before you get in too deep and have to experience more chaos in order to extricate yourself from an unhealthy choice by the ego.

The energy that has created these physical forms that you connect or disconnect with has in part been guided and shaped by the choices that you and others have made in those past lives.

A choice is a push of energy, a push and also an utterance, a way of "writing" on that energy, instructing it (or, more precisely, adding to the instruction of) how to move or how to manifest itself along its Path through time and space in the physical (and nonphysical) world.

And that is a topic we will cover in the next installment.

The Meaning of the Seven Stars, part 2

2011-02-03T10:24:00.004-05:00

Your body is, in part, a collage of the past. The energy of your body, the spiritual "fluid" that lives in every inch of and maintains every function of your physical body is constructed, in part, out of the energy of the past---primarily born out of your past lives.

We have all had past lives. We are all connected to and constructed (in part) by those past lives and the choices that were made (by us, by others around us and by the Divine) in those lives. Our choices matter. They move energy around, affect how that energy is formed, how it articulates itself.

Our physical bodies are infused with the energy of the past. In fact, our physical bodies are born out of that energy: it determines a great deal of the actual form that the physical body will take and how the mechanisms of that body will function.

Spiritual energy (which is to say the Divine in the physical world) is physical. It is not ethereal: thick with history, it is substantive, sensual and powerful. It, literally, makes things happen, creates the physical matter that we see. It is as real as the blood in our veins---it is the blood within the blood.

This does not mean that we are slaves to the energy. We are collaborators within the creative process. The choices we make help re-shape and transform that energy, help it progress along its Path of creation, a Path that's constantly shifting and transforming according to the mix of choices, good and bad, of the countless lives collaborating within the process.

Of course, because we, as physical individuals (egos), have a limited capacity to see the larger picture of the needs of the Path of creation, the best choices are those that are prompted by the Divine, which in the individual is the Soul, which you "hear" as the voice of your intuition.

This is why meditation, of all the spiritual practices, is most important. Meditation, silent meditation, allows you to cultivate a connection to that inner voice, your intuition, your Soul. As you continue to practice meditation, you gradually are more easily able to make a distinction between when your ego (your emotions and your intellect) is urging you to do something (or not do something) and when your Soul is urging you to do something.

Of course the ego (the intellect and the emotions) is also a collaborator in the process. The intellect allows you to process information, gather and synthesize knowledge before (or after) you have heard what the Soul is urging you to do. The emotions, too, allow you to feel out a situation, understand it better and experience and connect with it on a more sensual level than you can with the intellect.

But it may also be that your intellect is filled with incomplete or outmoded ideas that need to be transformed---or your emotional circumstances (fueled by outmoded attachments) need to be transformed, and the first reaction of your intellect or your emotions, because of their attachments, is to reject whatever the Soul is calling you to choose when in fact that choice is the best thing for you to do (despite sometimes what the immediate consequences of that choice may be). You feel deep down the choice is right, yet your emotions and intellect are freaking out with fear and defenses. That is when you have to trust in the Soul, trust in the Divine: feel the fear and choose the Soul anyway.

The ego is not the enemy, but it is also not the highest seat of wisdom, the last word on the choices for your body and your life; that title belongs to the Soul.

Essentially, then, there are only two choices that you ever have to make: do I follow the ego? or do I follow my Soul? Everything springs from this.

And with that, I'll end this section. Next, we'll get back to the topic we started with: the energy of past within the present.

The Meaning of the Seven Stars, part 1

2011-02-02T11:17:00.006-05:00

The is the meaning of the 7 Stars:
"Do not be afraid. I am the one who Lives.
I hold the keys...and I will give you the Crown of Life."
{Revelation 1: 17, 18; 2: 10}

Your body is of course more than flesh and bone and fluids, more than simply your mind, your thoughts and your emotions. You are more than simply atoms and ego. If you have been reading about spiritual matters, you of course know this, or sense this, or believe this, and although it's important to know that you are more than simply flesh and blood and ego, it is also important to know that you are also not simply the experience of the present. You are the past as well. You are the past transforming into the present, which prepares the way for the future. (More on that process in the next part of this essay.)

Your body is a mass of energy, symbolized in Eastern spirituality as Chakras. The Chakras are points of energy located at various body parts along a vertical line running through the center of the body from the anus to the crown of the head. Each Chakra has a specific category of activity it focuses on, from one's physical health to one's connection to the Divine.

The exact definitions of the Chakras, as well as their exact locations in the body, vary depending on what book you read or which teacher you listen to. The Chakras are not as distinct, are not as easily definable, as some of the books may have you believe. The body's energy system does indeed have core reservoirs, and they are indeed located along a line through the vertical axis of the body (anus, genitals, abdomen, heart, throat, brow, crown) but they also branch out and intertwine, reach out and connect with one another (similar to the body charts used to track chi in Chinese medicine), so it's more complicated than simply charting out seven points of energy and trying to define them. It's a place to start, those seven stars of energy (and if you need a review of them, I'd recommend Anatomy of the Spirit by Caroline Myss for a good Western version of the Chakras and their duties) but you shouldn't stop there: you need to look beyond those seven stars to see how the system works as a whole, how it connects you to the past even as it stays grounded in the present and looks to the future.

And that's where I'll begin in the next post.

First Fruits, conclusion

2011-01-29T14:04:00.016-05:00

The big turnaround for me, in term of psychic stuff, came in, I think, 1996 or 97. I was back living at home after grad school. This was after my arthritis got so debilitating that I couldn't work anymore and after my dad got cancer and, five months after his diagnosis, died. Four or five years of real hell. After a while, about 1996 or so, things sort of calmed down. I was (and still am) on disability, trying to keep myself busy with art, drawing a bit, painting a bit, and one day as I was drawing in my sketch book, I suddenly felt a presence behind me.

This was not the haunted house. We'd moved from there a while before this time. This was in our condo (where I'm still living now), which does not at all feel haunted to me. Anyway, I felt this presence standing behind me as I was drawing in my sketch book. I was alone in the house. I turned around in my chair and confirmed what I already knew, that there was no one standing there. I continued drawing, trying to ignore the feeling, but dammit someone was still standing there. I didn't feel threatened. The presence felt warm, friendly, but, still, it was disconcerting.

At some point, when the feeling would not go away, I decided to treat this as if it were what it felt like, a ghost or a spirit. I remembered that when I was a kid I had read about automatic writing as a way of communicating with spirits, so I asked, mentally, whoever was there to write something, tell me who they were. Almost immediately my right hand, which was holding my pencil, began to move and spell out, slowly, with very sloppy handwriting: "Marilyn Loves You."

It quickly dawned on me that Marilyn was one of my mom's friends. She, along with her husband, was our family's closest friend when I was a kid. She was like a second mother to me back then, one of the people I most adored in the world. She had died years before of complications from a long long struggle with breast cancer. When I connected with her name, I felt certain it was she who was in the room, and I could feel this wave of warmth fill me up. I asked if it was indeed Marilyn Ladd who was there, and my hand wrote, slowly still, "Yes".

I then let her write. She reassured me all was going to be ok, I was not crazy, etc. And then she told me that I would be doing this automatic writing for a while, every day for a while beginning with the following Monday; I'd be given a kind of training seminar. After that she said that those who needed to train me would take care of everything, and with that she was gone.

Needless to say, this freaked me out a bit. I didn't know what to think. I knew that what I had experienced was real, but I wasn't entirely sure what kind of realness it was. The "seminar" wasn't going to start until after the weekend (this was a Friday night), so I had all day Saturday and Sunday to stew about this.

When Monday came around, I felt the need to go to my desk and get some paper and let my hand write some automatic writing, and the week of teaching began. Mostly about chakras and spiritual choices and what it means to work with psychic abilities. As I went along, the writing stopped coming at a slow sloppy pace, speeded up to normal, and then I quickly graduated to using a keyboard, which was so much easier. Eventually, after that introductory week and after some weeks and months (a year or more? I don't remember) of more teachings, I moved on to doing teaching readings (through automatic writing) for a group of family members, sending them via email, sometimes doing life readings for them (telling about their past lives, what's going on Karmically in the present, etc).

While all that was going on, I was also working on getting to know the kabala and tarot cards and the I Ching, along with some very esoteric Eastern philosophy (lots of Taoist alchemy), all the while being schooled by my inner voice (usually through automatic writing) about how I should understand these things, how I should connect them all together. Once all that mysticism and Eastern philosophy became second nature to me, I moved on to Christian mysticism, which made much more sense to me than it ever had now that I had this richer foundation of mystical thought/experience.

While all that was happening, I was also having the occasional lucid dream, out of the body experience, not to mention visitations by spirits (for example, while I was looking around the fridge one evening, I felt, and saw out of the corner of my eye, my uncle and my father, both dead, standing behind me, and I felt them sending me love and support) and I'd begun to do psychic readings about world events (those began, I think, around 2001, right after the towers went down: at one point I did a Karmic play by play of the initial stages of the Afghan war) some of which were very accurate and some of which were vague and some of which were not entirely accurate.

I used to do world events readings with tarot cards, but recently I went back to using scripture passages (mash-ups of a "randomly" [i.e. intuitively] chosen group of verses) as triggers for those readings. Tarot cards are more peripheral now; also, I don't really do automatic writing anymore. I just report what I feel, what I read on the energy that's connecting with me.

And so here we are. I'm still very ambivalent about all this. I still trust my intuition, though, work through the doubt and the worry and just do what feels right. I don't know what kinds of readings I'll be doing here (probably some world events stuff---I feel one lurking) but it ought to prove interesting. I've deleted this blog more than twice already (I told you I was ambivalent) but this time it's staying around for good, no matter how much I hate it.

This is basically a journal of my experiences with this strangeness. I don't entirely like that I do this, but I also feel a lot of love for it. I'm hoping, as I go along, the love wins out.

First Fruits, part 2

2011-01-29T11:39:00.005-05:00

Years later, before I really became interested in exploring psychic phenomena again, I had one other experience with what seemed to be the paranomal. I was home from college for the summer, and I had just gone to bed. I was lying in bed on my stomach, and it couldn't have been more than two minutes after I'd gotten in to a comfortable position in the bed that I felt hands grip my ankles and drag me a good distance down the bed. Scared the crap out me. Nobody was in the room but me. Nobody was in the house but me and Mom and Dad, who were in their room down the hall. But I felt someone, something, grip my ankles and pull. I was wide awake when it happened, and I most certainly was wide awake for a while after it happened.

The house that this happened in, which we no longer live in (thank goodness), I had always felt was haunted. From the first few days that we moved in there I really felt something creepy about it. It looked like a normal suburban two-story, but I felt a very strange energy in that house, something cold and unhealthy. I didn't say anything about it, not that I remember anyway, and I eventually put that feeling pretty much aside when we lived there, but I never really felt comfortable in that house-----I think Mom had experiences in the house too: I think I remember her coming down from upstairs one evening and asking if one of us had called her; she'd heard someone call her name, but none of us had said a word to her. Very creepy.

The only thing I remember hearing about the house was that there had been an old woman who had died there (in my bedroom, I think). I don't know if that had anything to do with the creepy feeling or with the few strange events that happened there, but I'm pretty sure something odd was going on there.

Anyway, this was not the beginning of my regaining interest in psychic phenomena----though you'd think it would be---that would come many years later, and I'll cover that in the next post (I promise).

First Fruits, part 1

2011-01-29T10:17:00.009-05:00

The first time I remember having what I thought of as a genuine psychic experience was when I was a kid. I was about 12 years old. At that time I was very much into exploring ESP and other psychic phenomena, thanks to my mom's book shelf. Mom used to read self help books back then (it was the 70's), some of which dealt with ESP. I was intrigued by psychic phenomena I think because I thought it was another kind of magic trick, and I loved magic tricks as a kid----Dunninger's Complete Encyclopedia of Magic was one of my favorite books back then: mainly because of the ink drawings, which always gave me a little thrill: they felt magical in and of themselves and filled me with a deep deep longing. I unfortunately never had a copy of the book, but one of my friends did, and I was always looking at his copy, wishing I'd had my own. I still want one.

So, anyway, I used to read mom's ESP books, thinking that I had at last found magic that wasn't just a trick. One of those books, my favorite of the ESP books, was Al Manning's Helping Yourself With ESP (we still have a copy of it---the photo in this post is a scan of our copy) and in that book there was a section about contacting your spirit guides, which I was very anxious to do. I got two of my friends to join me as we tried out the exercise, sitting quietly together in a semi-dark room.

The first thing I remember experiencing was a prickly feeling around my shoulders and neck and then, when I mentally asked my spirit guide to tell me his name (or her name) I distinctly heard the name "Bill" whispered in my right ear. (It wasn't one of my friends whispering to me: I would have seen them [it wasn't that dark] or at least felt their breath against my ear, the whisper was that close to me.) My first reaction was to think that I had just heard my own voice in my head, answering myself. But then I later asked my mom if there were any people who had died in our family named Bill. It turns out my grandfather, her father, who had died years before I was born, was named Bill, which I didn't know at that point.

Bill is a pretty common name, but the fact that I distinctly heard the whispering without any indication that it was my friends doing that whispering, and the fact that a deceased relative that close in the family tree was indeed named Bill led me to think twice about dismissing this as just a coincidence.

Whether that was really a spirit visitation or not, I can't be sure, but despite that intriguing beginning, I soon left all that psychic stuff behind----no reason for it, I just lost interest and moved on. It wasn't until many years later, in my early 30's, that it came back again, like gangbusters.

I'll talk about that in the next post.