PS love this coat

(Really, we should all just wear saris... ) But this coat is really nice. Fair Trade. (Which doesn't always mean anything.) Have taken to Pashmina scarves / stoles thrown over jeans. Reminds me of being little and playing hula girl.

FINALLY someone who understands Tess

Persephone: Tess as Pagan Figure Beautiful.

We are the stories we tell about ourselves, the stories we tell about others, the stories we read about everyone and every thing.

Wonderful: Viggo Mortensen’s heroes

And a reminder that lots of PBS stations here in the States will be running Joseph Campbell's Power of Myth next week. Don't miss it. Share it as one with the Cosmos (and help compensate the Santori as they sharpen their knives).

Should say I really never mean to be impious. It's all those past lives of being Flute Girl, smiles in the face of pain, tragedy, and lazy stupidity. Sheltering the flame of life, you sometimes burn your hand. Or Eros's shoulder. Hey, it's all just birth. Opening. Opening. Crimson. White. (Though Oscar prefers the vermilion; Gabriel, the verdant.)

The story will always be about the mystery of life/death, the scintilla, and how we come to terms with a creator that lets us die (dies with us, is us). As for me, I think it's nothing personal, just that best that can be done as yet. But together we'll think of something.

Journey well. This week I'll have my shoulder muscles reattached so they can properly hold my arm on. And for the next six weeks, won't be able to move said shoulder. Will still have hand at end of brace to open, close, etc. Right hand, of course. But it can't lift anything. So will be thinking much of alice and all she has accompliced (Frung! Perfect new word!) with years of this situation.

 Meanwhile -- will rest in the great hand. And be working on the new opus. Tentative prologue:

PRELUDE

Notes for tabloid story

It began with a sandwich. Screed—Caleb actually, but I called him Screed—was in their kitchen—which I don’t need to say; a  reader would assume sandwich: kitchen… though with clan Screed, you shouldn’t. But, to continue, the story goes that Screed was applying mayonnaise to his fried-bologna-on-white when the sign came to him. All merely a matter of chance, of course. But Screed sees things as fate.

Thinking about it, it actually began a few years before that. Far away in a desert, a soldier defecating in a latrine spots a relic of immense historical importance. Which isn't really so amazing or surprising when you know that Halliburton deliberately built the troops’ latrines atop what were long ago the holiest places in Babylon.

But thinking about it more, who can say how it began, my story. Any story. There’s no true beginning to anything, time inseparable from space, and all of it a property of matter…

Shit. I’m not ready to write this.(Though I must or the tabloids will.) My mind is oatmeal. A wheel unhinged. A great cement-mixer of metaphor.

It’s way too close to me, that time of stone walls and one window and a door that would open to hell-bent men and perniciously fatty food. And biscuits. Everything biscuits. And, of course, their repressed lust. Worn like an amulet. Tail between their legs. A projection. And I, the Scheherazade Jezebel. My escape from there was to live in my mind. Locked in a small place against my will, it was boundless freedom. And being boundless, it fell to chaos. I was walking through walls, floating away on tangents, all points of reference disconnected. My thoughts became a flowing river of glittering fish, my mind a filmy net.

The one thing I do know is that it’s all unbelievable, what happened to me. Yet—considering the way the world has gone, it’s also perfectly plausible. Predictable, even.

Thinking back, it’s always been this way. Silver tongued itinerants would take a town by storm,  selling immortality, fortune and fate, convincing folks that their psychosis was the spawn of magical stars. A thousand years later, they might meander into the town square, enter the cathedral, a line-dance of frenzied self-flagellators. Still later, they assembled by the thousands to hang on the rant of a single man.

Magic books have moved good folks to murder.

Screeds. People captivated by the stuff of thin air. Whole nations, both primitive and advanced. We define time by these captivations, labeling the world by epochs and civilizations. I should know. I’m an ancient historian.

Or so I was. Now, I’m strewn along the pathway of this tale, tucked back in a virgin-forest of Virginian foothills some twenty miles from here.

O Hermes, Apollo, Orpheus: May good order gather my soul back to
me.

chapter one : the sandwich
(goes to third person pov)
(or maybe not)

second coming

ta'wil

Weird. Happens I'm reading Dreams and the Underworld. Googled ta'wil and got this:
(ps. try the blueplate special, post below.)

deborah

*********


TA’WIL
“In ta’wil one must carry sensible forms back to imaginative forms and then rise to still higher meanings; to proceed in the opposite direction (to carry imaginative forms to the sensible forms in which they originate) is to destroy the virtualities of the imagination.” [Corbin: En Islam iranien 1972]

"Hegel said that philosophy consists in turning the world inside out. Let us say rather that this world is here and now inside out. The ta'wil and the prophetic philosophy consist in putting it right side out once more." [Corbin: Spiritual Body, Celestial Earth 1977]

_________________________________________________________

Psychologizing employs “epistrophe, reversion, return, the recall of phenomena to their imaginal background. This principle –regarding phenomena in terms of their likenesses- derives more immediately from the work of Henry Corbin, and the method of ta’wil that he has so profoundly explained and illustrated in his own immense work (ta’wil means literally, he says, “‘reconduire, ramener’ une chose a son origine et principe, a son archetype” – “to lead something back to its origin and principle, to its archetype”).
‘Reversion through likeness, resemblance, is a primary principle for the archetypal approach to all psychic events. Reversion is a bridge too, a method which connects an event to its image, a psychic process to its myth, a suffering of the soul to the imaginal mystery expressed therein. Epistrophe, or the return through likeness, offers to psychological understanding a main avenue for recovering order from the confusion of psychic phenomena, other than Freud’s idea of development and Jung’s of opposites. Besides, this method has two distinct advantages. First, it makes us look again at the phenomenon: what is actually dreamed, actually stated, actually experienced, for only by scrutinizing the event at hand can we attempt to find which of many archetypal constellations it might resemble. “Which of many” is the second advantage: a single explanatory principle, regardless of how profound and differentiated its formulation, such as Jung’s Self and its opposites or Freud’s development of the libido, does not offer the psyche’s native variety a diversity of resemblances. Epistrophe implies return to multiple possibilities, correspondences with images that can not be encompassed within any systematic account.’ [Hillman: Dream and the Underworld 1979]

http://groups.msn.com/HenryCorbinWorldoftheImaginal/tawil.msnw

Here in the heart of Hell to work in Fire

"Well, I'll tell ye, there'll be no butter in hell!" ~Amos Starkadder

The unconscious is not a demoniacal monster, but a natural entity which, as far as moral sense, aesthetic taste, and intellectual judgment go, is completely neutral. It only becomes dangerous when our conscious attitude to it is hopelessly wrong. To the degree that we repress it, its danger increases.
~C.G.Jung The Practical Use Of Dream Analysis, Collected Works Vol. 16

The psychic depths are nature, and nature is creative life. Whatever values in the visible world are destroyed by modern relativism, the psyche will produce their equivalents.
~C.G.Jung, Modern Man in Search Of a Soul

The attitude towards the unconscious defines an era, certainly an individual's conscious orientation. It's my focal point, my fascination. Originally, daemons were messengers, inter-mediators between man and deity, between time and eternity -- the inner dialogue of the mind. A thing expressed best in myth. Here, we go back to the early cusp of consciousness, when a Lucifer was truly a light-bringer:

Hades and Hephaestus: on the surface they are two very different gods with nothing to connect them. But the apparent gulf between them rapidly disappears as soon as we look a little more closely at what the second of these gods will have meant, not for us but for Empedocles. The mythology and cult of Hephaestus spread to the rest of the Greek world from the north-east Mediterranean, where he appeared to have associations with the subterranean—specifically volcanic—fire. His transference westwards to Sicily was evidently not via the Greek mainland, but direct. There, in Sicily, he took over the cult and attributes of an indigenous non-Greek god, Adranus: Adranus had his temple on the edge of Mt. Etna, with a sacred grove and a fire ‘that was never extinguished and never died down.’ It was here in the West—in Sicily and the surrounding islands—that Hephaestus’ connections with fire expressed themselves most overtly in the form of direct connection with volcanic fire. On Lipara he was the chief god of the island, and personification of the volcano; Themessa, between Limpara and Sicily, was known as Hiera because—at least in historical times—it was considered sacred to Hephaestus. On Sicily itself, and in the immediate vicinity of Empedocles’ town of Acragas, the was the ‘hill of Hephaestus’: a local cult center where the god was believed to make his presence under the hill known by extraordinary feats of spontaneous combustion. But above all Hephaestus was connected with Mount Etna, not just in Sicilian cult and myth, but in classical tradition right down to the end of antiquity. There, underneath the earth, was his home—and especially his workplace. The common reluctance to give this fact its due significance is a result of failing to appreciate that, in spite of Hephaestus’ formal inclusion in the Olympian pantheon, he essentially never lost his role as a god of the inner depths of the earth. In short, any seeming inconsistency in Empedocles’ referring to fire now as Hades, now as Hephaestus is itself just one more pointer in the direction of that underworld.

Hades and Hephaestus, the destructive and creative: to place these two aspects of Empedocles’ fire in their true perspective we need finally to set them against the background of the idea so common in antiquity, that the underworld is a place of paradox and inversion. In particular it is a place where polar opposites coexist and merge, and especially the place where the paradox of destructive force being converted into creative power is realized as its greatest intensity. Two thousand years of classical tradition relating to volcanoes—primarily Etna—and the underworld are summed up by Milton’s Lucifer: ‘Here in the heart of Hell to work in Fire.’ This is not to quote Milton as direct evidence for ideas held by Empedocles but, once again, simply to emphasize the resilience and endurance of a tradition which classicists who treat Empedocles as a ‘philosopher’ ignore at their peril. Milton himself equated Lucifer with Hephaestus, and there was no shortage of descriptions in ancient literature of the extraordinary effects produced by Hephaestus as he works with the volcanic fire inside the earth. That this particular association of ideas was known to Empedocles is undeniable: to gain some impression of how important it was in shaping his cosmology, we have only to look at how he described the creation of the ancestors of men and women. On the one hand, the way in which he words his account of their formation inside the earth is plainly meant to invoke Hesiod’s famous description of Hephaestus creating Pandora. On the other hand, his image of humanity being spewed up by fire shooting into the sky is an obvious example of volcanic imagery. In Sicily, Hades and Hephaestus are two sides of one and the same coin: two aspects of the volcanic fire just inside the earth.

~from Peter Kingsley, Ancient Philosophy Mystery, and Magic Empedocles and the Pythagorean Tradition

...in art Eros relates the parts to the whole - as a seamless web of relations and as unified vision. ~Maureen Roberts

know thyself

boots on the ground

Like most of you, I've stood agape watching Rick Santorum. I hope it's a major wake up call -- and dare to speculate that it's our task to make it so. Living in Red States, I've learned how deeply the Fundi mind-meld reaches. Alas, the Bread and Circus route has always been a wily form of power control. I think the Republicans and their marriage to the Birchers, Falwells, Robertsons, and {your favorite righteous cult here} is so dangerous that even they have an awareness of the powder keg they've created. That would explain the money being thrown at Newt: keep him running, and Romney rather that Rick collects the delegates. Romney is pathetic, but Rick is Ollie Cromwell in destroying angel mode. Catholic, Protestant, forget the sides -- who can follow alliances based on (variously) self-fulfilling, magical, Rorschachian, effervescent, mutating (but almost always) literal readings of (defined by whom? on the basis of what?) scripture? -- this is old British Civil War dregs resurrected in Zombie form.

Doing research on McDonnell, I couldn't avoid the comparisons:

From the wikipedia: Soli Deo Gloria

Soli Deo gloria is one of the five solas propounded to summarize the Reformers' basic beliefs during the Protestant Reformation; it is a Latin term for Glory to God alone. The doctrine states essentially that everything that is done is for God's glory to the exclusion of humankind's self-glorification and pride. Christians are to be motivated and inspired by God's glory and not their own. 

Bob McDonnell, my state's governor and current vice presidential hopeful, is a product of (Soli Deo Gloria!)  Pat Robertson's Regent University, and he told us all who he is and what he serves in his master's thesis: God guides him. God as defined by his interpretation of God's inerrant scripture. When he was running for office, the Washington Post asked him about what he'd written in his thesis, and he replied that he no longer held those beliefs. But actions speak louder than words, the old saw says. His record in Virginia has been one incessant push to enact those very beliefs.

From the Regent University webpage:

Regent University: Christian Leadership to Change the World
Regent University is an institution of higher learning that exists to bring glory to God the Father and His Son Jesus Christ through the work of the Holy Spirit.
Our mission is to serve as a leading center of Christian thought and action providing an excellent education from a biblical perspective and global context in pivotal professions to equip Christian leaders to change the world.
Our vision, through our graduates and other scholarly activities, is to provide Christian leadership in transforming society by affirming and teaching principles of truth, justice and love as described in the Holy Scriptures, embodied in the person of Jesus Christ and enabled through the power of the Holy Spirit. Soli Deo Gloria.
From the Regent University Pathways Plan 2006-2011:
Underlying the university's vision, mission and goals are the foundational commitments that must occur if we are to achieve our mission. They are a combination of our accreditation principles and our own cultural distinctives (sic).

When McD was running for Governor in Virginia, I wrote:

In the recent gubernatorial debate with Bob McDonnell, Creigh Deeds noted, "[McDonnell's thesis] contains a provision that says people don't want this kind of leadership, they're not ready for this kind of leadership, and you can't tell them what you're gonna do until you're elected."
This reminds me of Christian reconstructionist Gary North telling his fellow spiritual leaders in the '70s to give different political speeches to different groups. North lamented that it wouldn't work forever. But still, it was lament.
McDonnell's thesis defines the pro-working family Democratic position -- health care reform, minimum wage, etc. -- as negative, using quotations around the word family when the family in question doesn't fit his definition. He also uses the term "deviant."
What becomes clear is that he sincerely believes his version of the Republican position is God-given. (Other positions are not. I suppose they are deviant.) Which is to say McDonnell is willing to speak for God. That is the classic definition of irreverence.
Deeming man basically bad, McDonnell draws the conclusion that government, being man-made, should not be trusted. Why, I cannot help but wonder, would a man holding such beliefs seek to be governor?

And now Vice President.

Our task, the one I mentioned? Listen to Santorum, and McDonnell, the very voices of inflation, and understand they represent the opposite of everything America stands for -- our very foundation stone -- when they castigate another's religion, calling it phony because it isn't based on what they believe. Make this a teach-in on a national level -- the what and why of religious freedom.

The value of studying History isn't that it has some magical proclivity to repeat itself, but that it teaches us something about the origins of our own prejudices, all that stuff Cicero said about not knowing one's self is to remain a child. It's time to grow up, America. We stand on a precipice.

summoned or not

They fell on each other: So many clothes, jacket and collar and waistcoat and shirt and trousers and a gown with a trillion million hooks. And the corset? Yes? No? Oh, off with it, quick. He would climb into her skin —
He threw her on the bed. As he rolled with her — he on top, she on top — he wondered. If she were to sleep with another, would he know? Would he feel it on her? Smell it echoing in some ancient animal brain? She sensed nothing in him. No, she was only her sweet beyond sweet self, giving and delighting and accepting; she, the paradise he knew to expect at Locksley.
There was so much that he’d fallen into when he was away, even as he tried to avoid it. He would be on his way to bed, tired and cross with the world, when Martin would appear with those interesting women who were always dying to meet him. Had his mother not raised him to be gracious? His glass would fill, and theirs, and he’d be sitting on his sofa with them, discussing the Craft, which was followed, more often than he’d admit, by the grand progression, the and then, and then, and then, and as the alarm sounded at five, there would be the residual she asleep in his bed. She, looking like Aphrodite washed up on the beach, ravishing and ravished. He would throw the covers back over her and hit the shower feeling like a piece of cardboard.
(It was as it had always been; he was a man, after all. But why, when he knew how completely he had changed?)
But-- back to the urgent present, its timelessness; the now, now, now, of the boundless, infinite ecstasy —
Yet-- there, on his inspiration, was something else. A rough spot, there in the center of him, like a small thorn. A tiny pit. A piece of gravel. Blackness cloaked it; blackness coated it, layer upon layer, like a pearl. It waited there for him, waiting until now to reveal itself, and though their joined bodies contained everything that ever was or ever would be, they also contained this stygian-colored seed.
When they’d finally returned to themselves, he leaned over the side of the bed, reaching for his trousers, heaped there on the floor. From their pockets, he retrieved a small box, which Janey unwrapped. She held it up above them — an emerald necklace — and the candle sputtered like someone was walking through the room.

dmc, from vb&b

"Madeline Miller avenges the Cornfords of the past, the girls left behind while their brothers and husbands and sons 'spoke to Plato'. Her Homer has sung to her, and the result is The Song of Achilles."

Wonderful review. Wonderful book. May it inspire a new generation.