aporia heights

remembering my dad

2012-02-01T10:46:00.001-08:00

Phantom Pain

Phantom Pain won the 1997 National MatureMedia Silver Award for magazine feature writing.

by Deborah Conner

THE DAY could not have been more beautiful. I stood with mymother and the deacon beside the long black limo and watched the attendant openthe back door of the hearse. I saw them approach—the honor guard, walkingslowly, rhythmically. They were coming to claim my father.

His entire life had been bound up in the image of thesoldier. It stood next to him, remembering, in everything he did, even thoughhe was only briefly in uniform.

We grew up in the ever-expanding shadow of Washington's Capitol.Always involved in some form of public service, he was the recipient of manyawards and held in high esteem. At home, however, he was a different man: angryand remote, unable to connect to a family he clearly loved, but couldn't allowto love him back.

I see now that part of him was lost. The whole of mychildhood was spent walking around the gaps of his missing pieces.

My generation came of age in the difficult Vietnam Waryears. Though it is humorous to joke that I left home for political reasons,the original decision was heart-wrenching. My father couldn't accept hiscountry in any form but an idealized one, and there was no room for discussionor dissent. I left home very young and worked my way through college; herefused to speak to or about me during those years.

Over time, we managed to craft a fragile truce. It wasduring this period that I acquired what came to be for me a magic book, what Ifelt was an instruction manual for my father. It was The Glory and the Dream,William Manchester's mammoth social history of America from the Depression tothe 1970s. The book was full of real people, real lives, not textbook facts. Ittold more than the cardboard when, where, what; it told the who and the why.

For the first time, I began to understand why certainwords—The Depression, The War, Korea, The Communists, The Bomb—were incanted bymy father with such awe, and why the desecration of America'ssymbols stimulated an automatic, wordless rage. During my parents' comingof age, the vast world had shrunk. Their generation had been through such awhirlwind of drama and horror that they spoke about it only in mysticalphrases—things too big to talk about.

Manchester mapped the complicated terrain of the WarGeneration, making me see that they had been young, too, and had the sameyearnings and dreams that I had. Dreams they never could act on until after thewar absorbed their youth, leaving them determined to control and perfect thefuture. Hence the '50s. which they filled with creature comforts, a brightnessdenied to cast any shadow. Hence the wordless, distant love they showered onus, a symptom of their need to escape the past and feel things strictly interms of their own perfected now. Their relationship with their children wouldalso be perfect, with no room for the questioning that might break that spell.

I finally saw that they simply couldn't talk about the painand fear they had lived. They couldn't explain their sacrifice.

But in my father's case, there was more than this.

My father had joined the war the first moment that he could.The youngest child in a large family, he wanted to follow in the footsteps ofhis hero brothers. Once in the Army, he was sent to Northern Ireland as amechanic, and the few small ragged pictures in the scrapbook left from thattime show a tall, skinny blue-eyed boy, his arms encircling the shoulders ofhis beloved brothers-in-arms. He sits smiling with them around a campfire, hiseyes shining and looking like the grandsons he would never know. In all mylife, I never saw his eyes shine like that.

His unit was bound to go on to the shores of Africa in thefirst great assault there. But they would go on without him.

We didn't go to the beach when I was a child. My fathernever danced. He was an amputee, and his full-leg prostheses was never strangeor curious to me. It was only part of him, and he was happy to have it,proud of his skill in making it undetectable. Any improvement in its mechanismwas a wonder to him, and he was delighted to help and encourage others whoshared the same affliction. On his last trip to Mexico, he was thrilled thathis new appliance would have a molded realism—even toes—that would allow him towear shorts and sandals.

When my brother and I would ask him casually how he lost hisleg, he always said, "In the war." This explanation sufficed and wasnever elaborated on, even to my mother. After I read Manchester's The Glory andthe Dream, and his personal account of the war in the Pacific, Goodbye Darkness, mydad began to open up when I would ask about what had happened in those years.He told stories of how my uncle was shot down, about people he saw injured aswell as comical tales of his friends. He told me things he'd never told anyoneelse, because I listened. Manchester had helped me understand.

One day, he told me the story of his leg. Simply, withoutdetails or anguish, he told me of an accident on a field far from battle. Hehad been the victim of someone else's negligence, a rifle accident. I knew frommy reading that there were "million dollar wounds," wounds that wouldheal but sent their bearer home—or at least, away from the action. On rareoccasions, these were self-inflicted, preserving the body at greatpsychological and social price. Wounds of the soul.

My father bore something akin to this, through no fault ofhis own. Because of it, he felt he could never measure up to those who werewounded in battle, and he could never be sure who would misinterpret what hadhappened. His honorable discharge and the pictures of the generals visiting hisbedside were tokens of proof of his innocence. But nothing could ever prove tohim that he was a good-enough hero.

I came to see that always in his mind were the memories ofthe faces and the voices of his brothers-in-arms who went on without him to Africa.There, his unit suffered casualties of 90 percent. He never forgot thatstatistic, the odds that were against him in his parallel life of phantomdestiny. He felt he should have been with them—even if it meant not being atall.

An entire generation silently remembered the ones they leftbehind on similar shores. All the heroics in the world could not return them.All that could ever be done is to remember, hold tight to the future and passon the mystery of life to their children.

With gratitude, I understood.

All this went through my mind that day at Arlington. From aplace beyond time, I watched the honor guard approach, surround and lift up myfather's flag-draped coffin. They carried him off in measured beat, back tomeet the lost part of himself, and I watched in awe of the appropriateness, thehealing, the sublime perfection of the ceremony.

Charles Mattingly

J.S. Bach - Fugue G-minor "Little", BWV 578 (Helmut Walcha)

2012-01-24T20:59:00.000-08:00

One of my favorite pieces. My husband builds pipe organs. Has chests breathing in the Crystal Cathedral. So many places. Music fed us, housed us, raised our kids.

A console he's presently building. Going to recycle some old ivory keys. Need a pipe organ?

just an aside

2012-01-24T20:33:00.001-08:00

Mavis had the afternoon all to herself, as Clairetook young Phoebe off to see her father. As maid, Mavis had (of course) stayed out of the recent laments (no onehaving asked her opinion), but in her heart of hearts she was glad Mr. Briding(Lord Briding, now, it was) had come to his senses and convinced his wife thathe had. Elliott Briding could bestrange, a bit improvident, but he was never unkind, and he did dearly love hiswife and child.

And didn’t Mavis know how much the child missed him. (Better than anyone, she supposed.) For she would watch Phoebe talk to hisinvisible form as she played. Over andover, she would pick up her crayons and draw her father’s face.

And now, who was waiting for Mavis in the windingqueue of fine shops in Regent’s Street, but her own sister Tess. They hadn’t seen each other in a few years,and there were entire worlds to fill the spaces that letters couldn’tspeak. Strolling slowly past the glazed windowsand doors, alone in the crowd, they exchanged their intuition about thechildren born into the families they worked for, the weddings, funerals,affairs, and domestic squabbles they oversaw.

"No one is supposed to know, but everybodydoes," Tess was saying, her voice lowered. "Marigold’s the second maid they’ve sent off to the countryhouse. Lady C. spends her nights in herrooms lamenting when she’s not gone out to her spiritual advisors, which shedoes too often if your askin’ me. Sister,I’m not happy in a house without little ones—and Master Philip getting big enoughto send off to school." Shesighed. "Don’t everyone wish MasterReggie would get married and have proper brats he could keep at the Streathamhouse."

Mavis agreed that would be best. With a bit of quiet, Tess went on. "I was back in the old country to visit—and Francis told me that Cornelius Buckley put hisself on the emigration ship." She nodded her quick little nod, and watchedto see her sister’s reaction.

"Did he now," Mavis said, quite matterof fact. "He always talked aboutit. There’s no work to be had inIreland. He’ll be better off inAustralia."

"But sister. He didn’t go there. He went toAlaska—looking for gold."

"Well, the great bastard fool." She’dheard Elliott say these words often enough and they slipped out easy as asigh.

Her sister straightened very tall, all of fivefeet. "Bastard I wouldn’t knowabout. Fool, he ever was." But Tess always thought this. Over time, Mavis had almost convinced herselfof it, too. She knew she’d been rightnot to run off with him all those years ago. Yet there were renegade moments, late at night, when she knew that partof her did go off with him. Maybe, thebest part of her of all.

The sisters spent the afternoon in the park andnever returned to the subject of Buckley, though his shadow silently trailedalong behind them. Later, they’d have asmall supper, and walk to the station so Mavis could get back to mind hercharge.

Alejandro

2012-01-24T19:56:00.001-08:00

Exceptionalism

2012-01-23T10:17:00.001-08:00

The Shield of Achilles
W. H. Auden

    She looked over his shoulder
       For vines and olive trees,
     Marble well-governed cities
       And ships upon untamed seas,
     But there on the shining metal
       His hands had put instead
     An artificial wilderness
       And a sky like lead.

A plain without a feature, bare and brown,
   No blade of grass, no sign of neighborhood,
Nothing to eat and nowhere to sit down, 
   Yet, congregated on its blankness, stood
   An unintelligible multitude,
A million eyes, a million boots in line, 
Without expression, waiting for a sign.

Out of the air a voice without a face
   Proved by statistics that some cause was just
In tones as dry and level as the place:
   No one was cheered and nothing was discussed;
   Column by column in a cloud of dust
They marched away enduring a belief
Whose logic brought them, somewhere else, to grief.

     She looked over his shoulder
       For ritual pieties,
     White flower-garlanded heifers,
       Libation and sacrifice,
     But there on the shining metal
       Where the altar should have been,
     She saw by his flickering forge-light
       Quite another scene.

Barbed wire enclosed an arbitrary spot
   Where bored officials lounged (one cracked a joke)
And sentries sweated for the day was hot:
   A crowd of ordinary decent folk
   Watched from without and neither moved nor spoke
As three pale figures were led forth and bound
To three posts driven upright in the ground.

The mass and majesty of this world, all
   That carries weight and always weighs the same
Lay in the hands of others; they were small
   And could not hope for help and no help came:
   What their foes like to do was done, their shame
Was all the worst could wish; they lost their pride
And died as men before their bodies died.

     She looked over his shoulder
       For athletes at their games,
     Men and women in a dance
       Moving their sweet limbs
     Quick, quick, to music,
       But there on the shining shield
     His hands had set no dancing-floor
       But a weed-choked field.

A ragged urchin, aimless and alone, 
   Loitered about that vacancy; a bird
Flew up to safety from his well-aimed stone:
   That girls are raped, that two boys knife a third,
   Were axioms to him, who'd never heard
Of any world where promises were kept,
Or one could weep because another wept.

     The thin-lipped armorer,
       Hephaestos, hobbled away,
     Thetis of the shining breasts
       Cried out in dismay
     At what the god had wrought
       To please her son, the strong
     Iron-hearted man-slaying Achilles
       Who would not live long.

I WANT TO BELIEVE

2012-01-18T09:29:00.000-08:00

extra credit

Obama is a Birther

2012-01-18T09:26:00.001-08:00

2012-01-18T07:29:00.001-08:00

Psyche

Why Our Society is So Unequal

2012-01-17T06:34:00.001-08:00

Abramoff and his International Freedom Foundation (be sure to google all that) and some light on SOPA...

2012-01-16T14:48:00.001-08:00

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Abramoff Extra Credit

SOPA:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Buyout of America: How Private Equity Is Destroying Jobs and Killing the American Economy

2012-01-12T11:06:00.001-08:00

Join the forum

"truly limitless in extent and of incalculable age."

2012-01-12T09:20:00.000-08:00

In every child the Cosmos is born anew, and Alice O. Howell in the Beejum Book has a way of returning the favor. In Beejumstan, eternal truths rebirth into moments fresh and young. So many different people inside of each of us, all examining the world, wondering, needing, fearing. All children know this, and in Beejum they greet these inner selves, look them over, and come to see them in others. I read the book with my youngest son -- he a page, me a page -- and the cahoots between us has never really left. In an age of hurried children of all ages, where movies are breathless blockbusters and bestsellers genre, where company is the TV show in pieces trying to fit itself between the long commercials, the Beejum Book is the rare moment of the inner voice. Time and differences fall away, and in your loneliness, you remember you're never alone. Saying that here, typing it out in our cynical world, it sounds trite, loses its meaning. But what is more important to say and share with each other as we journey through life? Alice O. Howell says the important things in a way that we can all hear them. She turns the difficult over playfully, joyfully, without fear; she probes it, puts it on steamships and trains, wonders at all its facets, dresses it in flop ears, thumps its tail. She takes your child-hand in her child-hand to see all things anew -- as "truly limitless in extent and of incalculable age."

Colbert really should do a season of Jekyll

2012-01-05T06:38:00.000-08:00

As Jekyll, of course. Imagine.

heart in my teacup

2012-01-02T16:51:00.001-08:00

words, reading, meaning, mind

2011-12-31T08:37:00.000-08:00

Feast ayvoo

HARNESSED

Jared Harris, Kieran Culkin, Bill Pullman, Igby Goes Down

2011-12-31T07:47:00.000-08:00

The younger generation encounters the C Street bunch at the Hamptons:Hard to find clips of this movie online. Overdubs:Harris
Military school

Bill Pullman

Trailer -- always love this flick. Kieran was always way too smart

"Now you come and break the good silence?"

2011-12-28T16:53:00.001-08:00

Even here? story

shipbuilding

2011-12-28T15:46:00.001-08:00

extra credit: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9t4-zDem1Sk&feature=related

New JewsOnFirst video conversations with Hebrew Union College professor Rabbi Michael J. Cook for study groups and individuals

2011-12-28T10:56:00.001-08:00

http://www.jewsonfirst.org/cook/Overview.aspxThe Christian Zionist's Bible: A Jewish Perspective

don't be silent night

2011-12-24T19:08:00.001-08:00

Best Xmas Tale Ever!

2011-12-24T14:33:00.001-08:00

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/taibblog/a-christmas-message-from-americas-rich-20111222

This has also worked for us with MS. Spread far and wide.

2011-12-24T10:19:00.001-08:00

Especially the fish oils and VIt D3. Google recent Vitamin D3 (not D2) MS studies with google scholar. (Why would anyone study D2 alone, giving low amounts, and then announce Vit D doesn't affect MS? Hello.) Last scan -- nothing but a few old lesions -- some had even disappeared. No active lesions. NONE. No disability. None. WATCH.

the soap on sopa

2011-12-23T21:04:00.000-08:00

Extra credit:

The Real Government Takeover of the Internet

about Ron Paul...

2011-12-23T21:00:00.001-08:00

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

and for dessert, breakfast!

2011-12-21T15:33:00.001-08:00

czars!

2011-12-21T13:22:00.001-08:00

got kale?

2011-12-21T13:11:00.000-08:00

NewtGingrich.com Redirecting to Humiliating Sites as Gingrich Gets Mic-Checked | AlterNet

2011-12-21T11:42:00.000-08:00

NewtGingrich.com Redirecting to Humiliating Sites as Gingrich Gets Mic-Checked | AlterNet

Try it.

And watch http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/biographies/newt-new/the-long-march-of-newt-gingrich-part-four/

witness

2011-12-21T08:45:00.001-08:00

Jung, Tolkien, Hillman, Jackson

2011-12-21T07:27:00.001-08:00

This is what the Assumption of Maria means in actual living: to take back into the psyche what has been put upon the body, to take back centuries of misogyny, to take back into consciousness the physical, the feminine, and the inferior.~ James Hillman, The Myth of Analysis

Revelation

If Lord of the Rings / Return of the King re Jackson is Christian, it's the Marian / Magdalen / Holy Ghost as forth to the Trinity Christian. The Quaternity. To understand what I'm thinking here, see the discussion below the fold, excerpted from Answer to Job, XIX, CGJUNG CW XI.
Arwen, her flashbacks / forwards woven into the story --which wasn't in the Lord of the Rings trilogy, but extrapolated from the Silmarillion -- makes it also Return of the Queen... and she joins her king at the end as a conclusion that rides whole into the future, dynasty and all.
I thought: as a woman, if I could choose between having children or immortality, I would choose children. At some point, this choice was made on a cosmic scale: It's a wondrous gamble, all of it, powers unimaginable putting will beyond reach into creatures like us... and yes, the ultimate thwarting of Sauron: Ring bearers, all.
Journey well.

deborah

from Answer to Job, CGJUNG, in Psychology and Religion: West and East, CW Vol. XI

What is the use of a religion without a mythos, since religion means, if anything, precisely that function which links us back to eternal myth?

________________________________________________________

from Answer to Job, CGJUNG, in Psychology and Religion: West and East, CW Vol. XI

What is the use of a religion without a mythos, since religion means, if anything, precisely that function which links us back to eternal myth?

XIX

The promulgation of the new dogma of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary could, in itself, have been sufficient reason for examining the psychological background. It was interesting to note that, among the many articles published in the Catholic and Protestant press on the declaration of the dogma, there was not one, so far as I could see, which laid anything like the proper emphasis on what was undoubtedly the most powerful motive: namely, the popular movement and the psychological need behind it. Essentially, the writers of the articles were satisfied with learned considerations, dogmatic and historical, which have no bearing on the living religious process. But anyone who has followed with attention the visions of Mary which have been increasing in number over the last few decades, and has taken their psychological significance into account, might have known what was brewing. The fact, especially, that it was largely children who had the visions might have given pause for thought, for in such cases the collective unconscious is always at work. Incidentally, the Pope himself is rumoured to have had several visions of the Mother of God on the occasion of the declaration. One could have known for a long time that there was a deep longing in the masses for an intercessor and mediatrix who would at last take her place alongside the Holy Trinity and be received as the “Queen of Heaven and Bride at the heavenly court.” For more than a thousand years it had been taken for granted that the Mother of God dwelt there, and we know from the Old Testament that Sophia was with God before the creation. From the ancient Egyptian theology of the divine Pharaohs we know that God wants to become man by means of a human mother, and it was recognized even in prehistoric times that the primordial divine being is both male and female. But such a truth eventuates in time only when it is solemnly proclaimed or rediscovered. It is psychologically significant for our day that in the year 1950 the heavenly bride was united with the bridegroom. In order to interpret this event, one has to consider not only the arguments adduced by the Papal Bull, but the prefigurations in the apocalyptic marriage of the Lamb and in the Old Testament anamnesis of Sophia. The nuptial union in the thalamus (bridal-chamber) signifies the hieros gamos, and this in turn is the first step towards incarnation, towards the birth of the saviour who, since antiquity, was thought of as the filius solis et lunae, the filius sapientiae, and the equivalent of Christ. When, therefore, a longing for the exaltation of the Mother of God passes through the people, this tendency, if thought to its logical conclusion, means the desire for the birth of a saviour, a peacemaker, a “mediator pacem faciens inter inimicos.” (180) Although he is already born in the pleroma, his birth in time can only be accomplished when it is perceived, recognized, and declared by man.

The motive and content of the popular movement which contributed to the Pope’s decision solemnly to declare the new dogma consist not in the birth of a new god, but in the continuing incarnation of God which began with Christ. Arguments based on historical criticism will never do justice to the new dogma; on the contrary, they are as lamentably wide of the mark as are the unqualified fears to which the English archbishops have given expression. In the first place, the declaration of the dogma has changed nothing in principle in the Catholic ideology as it has existed for more than a thousand years; and in the second place, the failure to understand that God has eternally wanted to become man, and for that purpose continually incarnates through the Holy Ghost in the temporal sphere, is an alarming symptom and can only mean that the Protestant standpoint has lost ground by not understanding the signs of the times and by ignoring the continued operation of the Holy Ghost. It is obviously out of touch with the tremendous archetypal happenings in the psyche of the individual and the masses, and with the symbols which are intended to compensate the truly apocalyptic world situation today. (181) It seems to have succumbed to a species of rationalistic historicism and to have lost any understanding of the Holy Ghost who works in the hidden places of the soul. It can therefore neither understand nor admit a further revelation of the divine drama.

This circumstance has given me, a layman in things theological, cause to put forward my views on these dark matters. My attempt is based on the psychological experience I have harvested during the course of a long life. I do not underestimate the psyche in any respect whatsoever, nor do I imagine for a moment that psychic happenings vanish into thin air by being explained. Psychologism represents a still primitive mode of magical thinking, with the help of which one hopes to conjure the reality of the soul out of existence, after the manner of the “Proktophantasmist” in Faust:

Are you still here? Nay, it’s a thing unheard.Vanish at once! We’ve said the enlightening word.

One would be very ill advised to identify me with such a childish standpoint. However, I have been asked so often whether I believe in the existence of God or not that I am somewhat concerned lest I be taken for an adherent of “psychologism” far more commonly than I suspect. What most people overlook or seem unable to understand is the fact that I regard the psyche as real. They believe only in physical facts, and must consequently come to the conclusion that either the uranium itself or the laboratory equipment created the atom bomb. That is no less absurd than the assumption that a non-real psyche is responsible for it. God is an obvious psychic and non-physical fact, i.e., a fact that can be established psychically but not physically. Equally, these people have still not got it into their heads that the psychology of religion falls into two categories, which must be sharply distinguished from one another: firstly, the psychology of the religious person, and secondly, the psychology of religion proper, i.e., of religious contents.

It is chiefly my experiences in the latter field which have given me the courage to enter into the discussion of the religious question and especially into the pros and cons of the dogma of the Assumption—which, by the way, I consider to be the most important religious event since the Reformation. it is a petra scandali for the unpsychological mind: how can such an unfounded assertion as the bodily reception of the Virgin into heaven be put forward as worthy of belief? But the method which the Pope uses in order to demonstrate the truth of the dogma makes sense to the psychological mind, because it bases itself firstly on the necessary prefigurations, and secondly on a tradition of religious assertions reaching back for more than a thousand years. Clearly, the material evidence for the existence of this psychic phenomenon is more than sufficient. It does not matter at all that a physically impossible fact is asserted, because all religious assertions are physical impossibilities. If they were not so, they would, as I said earlier, necessarily be treated in the textbooks of natural science. But religious statements without exception have to do with the reality of the psyche and not with the reality of physis. What outrages the Protestant standpoint in particular is the boundless approximation of the Deipara to the Godhead and, in consequence, the endangered supremacy of Christ, from which Protestantism will not budge. In sticking to this point it has obviously failed to consider that its hymnology is full of references to the “heavenly bridegroom,” who is now suddenly supposed not to have a bride with equal rights. Or has, perchance, the “bridegroom,” in true psychologistic manner, been understood as a mere metaphor?

The logical consistency of the papal declaration cannot be surpassed, and it leaves Protestantism with the odium of being nothing but a man’s religion which allows no metaphysical representation of woman. In this respect it is similar to Mithraism, and Mithraism found this prejudice very much to its detriment. Protestantism has obviously not given sufficient attention to the signs of the times which point to the equality of women. But this equality requires to be metaphysically anchored in the figure of a “divine” woman, the bride of Christ. Just as the person of Christ cannot be replaced by an organization, so the bride cannot be replaced by the Church. The feminine, like the masculine, demands an equally personal representation.

The dogmatizing of the Assumption does not, however, according to the dogmatic view, mean that Man has attained the status of a goddess, although, as mistress of heaven (as opposed to the prince of the sublunary aerial realm, Satan) and mediatrix, she is functionally on a par with Christ, the king and mediator. At any rate her position satisfies the need of the archetype. The new dogma expresses a renewed hope for the fulfillment of that yearning for peace which stirs deep down in the soul, and for a resolution of the threatening tension between the opposites. Everyone shares this tension and everyone experiences it in his individual form of unrest, the more so the less he sees any possibility of getting rid of it by rational means. It is no wonder, therefore, that the hope, indeed, the expectation of divine intervention arises in the collective unconscious and at the same time in the masses. The papal declaration has given comforting expression to this yearning. How could Protestantism so completely miss the point? This lack of understanding can only be explained by the fact that the dogmatic symbols and hermeneutic allegories have lost their meaning for Protestant rationalism. This is also true, in some measure, of the opposition to the new dogma within the Catholic Church itself, or rather to the dogmatization of the old doctrine. Naturally, a certain degree of rationalism is better suited to Protestantism than it is to the Catholic outlook. The latter gives the archetypal symbolisms the necessary freedom and space in which to develop over the centuries while at the same time insisting on their original form, unperturbed by intellectual difficulties and the objections of rationalists. In this way the Catholic Church demonstrates her maternal character, because she allows the tree growing out of her matrix to develop according to its own laws. Protestantism, in contrast, is committed to the paternal spirit. Not only did it develop, at the outset, from an encounter with the worldly spirit of the times, but it continues this dialectic with the spiritual currents of every age; for the pneuma, in keeping with its original wind nature, is flexible, ever in living motion, comparable now to water, now to fire. It can desert its original haunts, can even go astray and get lost, if it succumbs too much to the spirit of the age. In order to fulfill its task, the Protestant spirit must be full of unrest and occasionally troublesome; it must even be revolutionary, so as to make sure that tradition has an influence on the change of contemporary values. The shocks it sustains during this encounter modify and at the same time enliven the tradition, which in its slow progress through the centuries would, without these disturbances, finally arrive at complete petrifaction and thus lose its effect. By merely criticizing and opposing certain developments within the Catholic Church, Protestantism would gain only a miserable bit of vitality, unless, mindful of the fact that Christianity consists of two separate camps, or rather, is a disunited brother-sister pair, it remembers that besides defending its own existence it must acknowledge Catholicism’s right to exist too. A brother who for theological reasons wanted to cut the thread of his elder sister’s life would rightly be called inhuman—to say nothing of Christian charity—and the converse is also true. Nothing is achieved by merely negative criticism. It is justified only to the degree that it is creative. Therefore it would seem profitable to me if, for example, Protestantism admitted that it is shocked by the new dogma not only because it throws a distressing light on the gulf between brother and sister, but because, for fundamental reasons, a situation has developed within Christianity which removes it further than ever from the sphere of worldly understanding. Protestantism knows, or could know, how much it owes its very existence to the Catholic Church. How much or how little does the Protestant still possess if he can no longer criticize or protest? In view of the intellectual skandalon which the new dogma represents, he should remind himself of his Christian responsibility— ”Am I my brother’s (or in this case, my sister’s) keeper?”—and examine in all seriousness the reasons, explicit or otherwise, that decided the declaration of the new dogma. In so doing, he should guard against casting cheap aspersions and would do well to assume that there is more in it than papal arbitrariness. It would be desirable for the Protestant to understand that the new dogma has placed upon him a new responsibility toward the worldly spirit of our age, for he cannot simply deny his problematical sister before the eyes of the world. He must, even if he finds her antipathetic, be fair to her if he does not want to lose his self-respect. For instance, this is a favourable opportunity for him to ask himself, for a change, what is the meaning not only of the new dogma but of all more or less dogmatic assertions over and above their literal concretism. Considering the arbitrary and protean state of his own dogmas, and the precarious, schism-riven condition of his Church, he cannot afford to remain rigid and impervious to the spirit of the age. And since, in accordance with his obligations to the Zeitgeist, he is more concerned to come to terms with the world and its ideas than with God, it would seem clearly indicated that, on the occasion of the entry of the Mother of God into the heavenly bridal-chamber, he should bend to the great task of reinterpreting all the Christian traditions. If it is a question of truths which are anchored deep in the soul—and no one with the slightest insight can doubt this fact—then the solution of this task must be possible. For this we need the freedom of the spirit, which, as we know, is assured only in Protestantism. The dogma of the Assumption is a slap in the face for the historical and rationalistic view of the world, and would remain so for all time if one were to insist obstinately on the arguments of reason and history. This is a case, if ever there was one, where psychological understanding is needed, because the mythologem coming to light is so obvious that we must be deliberately blinding ourselves if we cannot see its symbolic nature and interpret it in symbolic terms.

The dogmatization of the Assumptio Mariae points to the hieros gamos in the pleroma, and this in turn implies, as we have said, the future birth of the divine child, who, in accordance with the divine trend towards incarnation, will choose as his birthplace the empirical man. The metaphysical process is known to the psychology of the unconscious as the individuation process. In so far as this process, as a rule, runs its course unconsciously as it has from time immemorial, it means no more than that the acorn becomes an oak, the calf a cow, and the child an adult. But if the individuation process is made conscious, consciousness must confront the unconscious and a balance between the opposites must be found. As this is not possible through logic, one is dependent on symbols which make the irrational union of opposites possible. They are produced spontaneously by the unconscious and are amplified by the conscious mind. The central symbols of this process describe the self, which is man’s totality, consisting on the one hand of that which is conscious to him, and on the other hand of the contents of the unconscious. The self is the teleion anthropos,* "the whole man", whose symbols are the divine child and its synonyms. This is only a very summary sketch of the process, but it can be observed at any time in modern man, or one can read about it in the documents of Hermetic philosophy from the Middle Ages. The parallelism between the symbols is astonishing to anyone who knows both the psychology of the unconscious and alchemy.

The difference between the “natural” individuation process, which runs its course unconsciously, and the one which is consciously realized, is tremendous. In the first case consciousness nowhere intervenes; the end remains as dark as the beginning. In the second case so much darkness comes to light that the personality is permeated with light, and consciousness necessarily gains in scope and insight. The encounter between conscious and unconscious has to ensure that the light which shines in the darkness is not only comprehended by the darkness, but comprehends it. The filius solis et lunae is the symbol of the union of opposites as well as the catalyst of their union. It is the alpha and omega of the process, the mediator and intermedius. “It has a thousand names,” say the alchemists, meaning that the source from which the individuation process rises and the goal towards which it aims is nameless, ineffable.

It is only through the psyche that we can establish that God acts upon us, but we are unable to distinguish whether these actions emanate from God or from the unconscious. We cannot tell whether God and the unconscious are two different entities. Both are borderline concepts for transcendental contents. But empirically it can be established, with a sufficient degree of probability, that there is in the unconscious an archetype of wholeness which manifests itself spontaneously in dreams, etc., and a tendency, independent of the conscious will, to relate other archetypes to this center. Consequently, it does not seem improbable that the archetype of wholeness occupies as such a central position which approximates it to the God-image. The similarity is further borne out by the peculiar fact that the archetype symbolism which has always characterized and expressed the Deity. These facts make possible a certain qualification of our above thesis concerning the indistinguishableness of God and the unconscious. Strictly speaking, the God-image does not coincide with the unconscious as such, but with a special content of it, namely the archetype of the self. It is this archetype from which we can no longer distinguish the God-image empirically. We can arbitrarily postulate a difference between these two entities, but that does not help us at all. On the contrary, it only helps us to separate man from God, and prevents God from becoming man. Faith is certainly right when it impresses on man’s mind and heart how infinitely far away and inaccessible God is; but it also teaches his nearness, his immediate presence, and it is just this nearness which has to be empirically real if it is not to lose all significance. Only that which acts upon me do I recognize as real and actual. But that which has no effect upon me might as well not exist. The religious need longs for wholeness, and therefore lays hold of the images of wholeness offered by the unconscious, which, independently of the conscious mind, rise up from the depths of our psychic nature.

footnote

(Jung 180) "A mediator making peace between enemies"

(Jung 181.) The papal rejection of psychological symbolism may be explained by the fact that the Pope is primarily concerned with the reality of metaphysical happenings. Owing to the undervaluation of the psyche that everywhere prevails, every attempt at adequate psychological understanding is immediately suspected of psychologism. It is understandable that dogma must be protected from this danger. If, in physics, one seeks to explain the nature of light, nobody expects that as a result there will be no light. But in the case of psychology everybody believes that what it explains is explained away. However, I cannot expect that my particular deviationist point of view could be known in any competent quarter.

-------------------------------------------------------------

my note:
* this is initiation language. other phrases under "teleios" in the LSJ (The Intermediate Greek-English Lexicon): having reached its end, finished, complete: of victims; perfect without spot or blemish; of sacrifices, Thuc. "the surest bird of augury." Of persons: absolute, complete, accomplished, perfect in his or its kind (Plato), of prayers, vows (Pind., Aesch.); a vision which imported nothing (Herodotus); of the gods (Zeus the fulfiller: Pindar, Aesch., of Hero), of paterfamilias (Aesch); in aristhmatic, those numbers which are equal to the sum of their divisors, as 6=3+2+1 (Plato). Homer uses a comparative version (teleoteros).

Jesus taught in parables, and (as is so common of products of his time: read Philo, etc.) was also a parable. Does that take away from from any wisdom one might find in his tale? Why? Must he be the only tale allowed?
Consider this: Some thousands of years from now, when the grass has grown up and covered the interstates, after books have been burned, and people and whole civilizations have been forgotten, what if some copy of Tolkien's work persists--hidden below sands or in a crevice--and Frodo is thought to be real, and the Return of the King becomes a literal lost King sought to the point of desperation and obsession, onto madness and destruction and loss of the conscious moment...
Extrapolate. Forward. Backward. Now.
The clutching misogynistic mantis. It doesn't have to be like this.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

"Where love reigns, there is no will to power; and where the will to power is paramount, love is lacking. The one is but the shadow of the other..." —CGJung, The Problem of the Attitude-Type, CW7

+++++++++

extra credit -- some notes

*********

Rosa Alchemica

Seacht b-paidreacha fo seacht
Chuir Muire faoi n-a Mac,
Chuir Brighid faoi n-a brat,
Chuir Dia faoi n-a neart,
Eidir sinn 'san Sluagh Sidhe,
Eidir sinn 'san Sluagh Gaoith.

Seven paters seven times,
Send Mary by her Son,
Send Bridget by her mantle,
Send God by His strength,
Between us and the faery host,
Between us and the demons of the air.

from The Secret Rose, W.B.YEATS

[mike writes:
D'yer know how ter pronounce that?

SHOHT PAtri-ce fe SHOHT
HOOR MOIre fe na MAC
HOOR BRIhid fe na VROT
HOOR THEia fe ne NERT
EITHER SHIN sawn SLOOwe SHEE
EITHER SHIN sawn SLOOwe GOTh

...at least, where my lot stems from]

from Deborah:
The above prayer is from Yeats's prose work, The Alchemical Rose. It's the concluding story of the three, The Adoration of the Magi. It wasn't in the original Secret Rose, but was published privately and is contained in some later editions of TSR. This one is from the collected annotated version, 1972 I think. Hard to find.

The lead-in passage is as follows:

This is all the old men told me, and when I think of their speech and of their silence, of their coming and of their going, I am almost persuaded that had I followed them out of the house, I would have found no footsteps on the snow. They may, for all I or any man can say, have been themselves Immortals: immortal demons, come to put an untrue story into my mind for some purpose I do not understand. Whatever they were, I have turned into a pathway which will lead me from the Order of the Alchemical Rose. I no longer live an elaborate and haughty life, but seek to lose myself among prayers and the sorrows of the multitude. I pray best in poor chapels, where the frieze coats brush against me as I kneel, and when I pray against the demons I repeat a prayer which was made I know not how many centuries ago to help some poor Gaelic man or woman who had suffered with a suffering like mine.

I look at the emblems in alchemy and -- well, here's a slew of obvious ones that have what hits me: You'll know them... but the literal image of the circle and square suggests, of course, the platonic cosmos model or the precession of the equinoxes we see in the old mechanical astrological model. But the others suggest the below when you translate the axiom into the neo-platonic modes of point, line, circle, sphere... and always individuation on the psych level. So it says that to me and I can't not see one or two old alchemists mumbling something along these scribbled lines through their beards. :)

Again --
Axiom of Maria. A precept in alchemy: "One becomes two, two becomes three, and out of the third comes the one as the fourth."

alice puts it:

Hidden in the Fourth is the One. Find it by uniting the Two in the Third.

masculine+feminine (expressed as metal, charge, planet, lovers, etc.) --transcending to-->divine nature/incarnation /big L love. Yin Yang stuff. Tao.

Jung (and these are psychological statements: Jung is always speaking of the psychological experience, and the psyche small and large is certainly the perspective of Yeats and his Celtic Twilight friend Fiona/ William Sharp ) used the axiom of Maria as a metaphor for the whole process of individuation.

From Sharp's Lexicon: One is the original state of unconscious wholeness; two signifies the conflict between opposites; three points to a potential resolution; the third is the transcendent function; and the one as the fourth is a transformed state of consciousness, relatively whole and at peace.

The image language does suggest the Celtic Cross, which, like the axiom of Maria, is suggestive of the "squared circle"—which is to put a cross in the center of a circle, not to draw a circle in a square. That is — to divide it into quarters and thus make it a sphere, a notation for the Pythagorean fouth. Its very center is the perfect symbol for the psychological Stillpoint, where one penetrates the metaphor, passing beyond time and space to wholeness, the One. (An ever on-going process, for we are always moving, Time being a property of matter. This movement is Eros.) It is the image of the Self archetype (re Jung etc.) . The 4 corners, directions, dimensions; the Trinity with the female that is always implied, yet, rather than unconscious as she's been in the Christian system, she is conscious.

"When I think of Iona I think often, too, of a prophecy
once connected with Iona; though perhaps current no more in
a day when prophetical hopes are fallen dumb and blind.

"It is commonly said that, if he would be heard,
none should write in advance of his times. That, I do
not believe. Only, it does not matter how few listen.
I believe that we are close upon a great and deep spiritual
change. I believe a new redemption is even now conceived
of the Divine Spirit in the human heart, that is itself
as a woman, broken in dreams, and yet sustained in faith,
patient, long-suffering, looking towards home. I believe
that though the Reign of Peace may be yet a long way off,
it is drawing nigh; and that Who shall save us anew shall
come divinely as a Woman, to save as Christ saved, but not,
as He did, to bring with Her a sword. But whether this
Divine Woman, this Mary of so many passionate hopes and
dreams, is to come through mortal birth, or as an
immortal Breathing upon our souls, none can yet know."

In Fiona MacLeod's (William Sharp) above statement, she comes NOT with a sword. Instead, she IS the sword.(*This, the conjugate of the male—and the conjugate is always present in the balance of forces inherent in the conditions of LIFE.) The Lady of Lake can be read as this principle: rather than the destructive force ("dissolve", putrefactio) , she is the uniting force. Symbiosis: the principle of what endures in nature (Wilde's 'under the conditions of matter'). A psychological statement.

Again, Art functions as herald. As with Ficino's translations of Plato, it seems Thomas Taylor's translations into English of Plato, the later Platonists, Orphics and Pythagoreans rebirthed a second Renaissance: Romanticism. With the Celtic Twilight I'm thinking also of Wilde's flirtations with ritual re Catholicism; the Oxford Movement; Rossetti's goddess worship/Marianism, Neoplatonism, 'the Art Catholic'; and the big R Romanticism of Shelley, Keats, etc. These seem to reflect the conscious restoration of Ritual/magic, 'mysticism'/mystery to the West. All foreshadow; they are the compensations that paved the way for the formal development of psychology and psychical research re James, Freud/Jung etc. The conscious recognition of the unconscious.

x's Deborah

_________________________

PS
This isn't on the internet anymore, but I think it should be:

nice synthesis from Bonnie Waters

(and now I understand the White Lady!)

Reflections
February 21, 2007
On the weekend, I again woke with a "knowing"...that matter is light in particle form, and spirit is light in wave form. As I'm not a physicist, it seems to have come to me in relation to another knowing that I've had for a while now.
I was intrigued when, some time ago, I began searching on the web for the meaning of the name Guinevere. There are many variations of the name, including Jennifer and Genevieve, but the original spelling in the earliest of the Arthurian legends was Gwenhwyfar. It's meaning has several variations, which combine "white, shining, holy" and "phantom, ghost or wave." Common meaning is given as White Ghost or White Wave...but it isn't a stretch to define the meaning as "Holy Ghost."
In my recent reading of Alice O. Howell's "The Dove in the Stone," I found mention of the early terms for Holy Spirit, which was "Hagia Sophia," Greek for "Holy Wisdom." Somehow this was translated into Latin as "Spiritus Sanctus" or "Holy Spirit." This was then translated into English as "Holy Ghost"...So, from Holy Wisdom, to Holy Spirit, to Holy Ghost, which, to me, seems to be a steady dilution of the original concept.
In the earliest versions of the Arthurian legends Guinevere, "The White Ghost" was depicted as a loyal wife and queen. But she was diminished first to an adulterous wife and later to a traitorous queen. In any case, Arthur was said to have lived in the 6th century, while the Arthurian legends began to be written in the early 12th century. It's interesting to read what Wikipedia has to say about the historical accuracy of the legends of King Arthur: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_arthur
And another interesting link concerning the writing of the Arthurian legends:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chretien_de_troyes
In my reading in recent years, I began to come across many interesting, sometimes violent, events of the late 12th century to the early 13th century, including:
1)the Albigensian campaign (Albi meaning "white"), which wiped out, mostly through burning at the stake, large numbers of the Gnostic sect commonly referred to as Cathars, who honored the Divine Feminine, "Holy Wisdom", Sophia.
2)institution of The Inquisition, which brought the beginning of the Witch Trials, and burning at the stake of huge numbers of "wise" women, whose "knowings" brought accusations of heresy and witchcraft.
3)the simultaneous arrest of the Knights of the Templar, followed by accusations of heresy, and confessions (brought about through torture) related to, among other things, worship of the "Baphomet" head (the term said to be an encryption of the word "Sophia", using the Atbash cypher...information can be found here, halfway down the page, under The Goddess Sophia (though the whole page is quite interesting: http://altreligion.about.com/library/weekly/aa030103a.htm
4)the first appearance of the story of Pope Joan, again, hundreds of years after her supposed lifetime...a woman who was said to be the only woman to rise through dedicated study to the position of pope, only to fall in disgrace, at the birth of her illegitimate child (that I would say was an allegory meant to prove that women are not capable of being head of the church). What is interesting is the timing of the appearance of this story, which was in the early 13th century, around the time of the disbanding of the Templars and the crushing of those who worshipped Sophia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pope_Joan
I think there were many hidden conflicts going on during that time, among other things, having to do with the Merovingian claims, which seem to be alluded to in the Grail legends. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holy_grail
As with the stories surrounding Mary Magdalene, one would have to know the political motives of the writers, and the various factions that existed in those times, before being able to sort out truth from fiction. Still there are certainly some indications of possible motive that come into question with all of these events.
I leave you with this...all of the history cannot define her, though I'm sure she would forgive any infractions against the truth of her being. "Knowing" Sophia is experiential - and can't be held in a book, or a history, or a concrete idea, or a doctrine, or a name. Her essence is known and experienced through the heart. Love and all blessings, Bonnie
P.S. Couldn't resist adding a close-up of the lily photo from 6/6/2007...it seemed appropriate.

Copyright ©2000-2006 Bonnie Waters

planetize the movement

2011-12-18T08:40:00.000-08:00

Within a single volume, bounded by love

I saw the scattered leaves of all the universe—

Substance and accidents, and their relations,

As though together fused in such a way

That what I speak of is a single light.

The universal form of this commingling

I think I saw, for when I tell of it

My heart rejoice so much the more...

How powerless is speech— how weak, compared

To my conception, which itself is trifling

Beside the mighty vision that I saw!

O Light Eternal, in Thyself contained!

Thou only know Thyself, and in Thyself

Both known and knowing, smile on Thyself!

That very circle which appeared in Thee,

Conceived as but reflection of a light,

When I had gazed on it awhile, now seemed

To bear the image of a human face

Within itself, of its own coloring—

Wherefore my sight was wholly fixed on it.

Like a geometer, who will attempt

With all his power and mind to square the circle

Yet cannot find the principle he needs:

Just so was I, at that phenomenon.

I wished to see how image joined to ring,

And how the one found place within the other.

Too feeble for such flights were my own wings;

But by a lightning flash my mind was struck—

And thus came the fulfilment of my wish.

My power now failed that phantasy sublime;

My will and my desire were both revolved,

As in a wheel in even motion driven,

By Love, which moves the sun and other stars.

"L'amor che muove il sole e l'altre stelle"

— Dante Alighieri (1265-1321)

Paradiso, XXXIII(1321)

foam roll your latissimus dorsi, pectoralis, and rotator cuff tendons

2011-12-17T13:04:00.001-08:00

tantum religio potuit suadere malorum

2011-12-17T11:33:00.001-08:00

article Dec 2004 Washington Monthly, Ayelish McGarveyEvangelical ElitistsThe exclusive church where Washington's conservative power brokers pray.excerpt:

These are the Sunday school nerds of yore, the kids who memorized their Bible verses before everyone else. They went to graduate schools and worked on Republican Senate campaigns. And now they have their very own church. That man walking in with the soft, slightly chubby face and horn-rimmed glasses, with his son dangling from his arm—it's Michael Gerson, the president's chief speechwriter! And that tall guy with the bow tie—it's Tucker Carlson! Indeed, The Falls Church membership directory reads like the White House Christmas card list. CIA director Porter Goss and his wife, Mary, are members. So are The Weekly Standard's Fred Barnes and Robert Bork Jr. Rep. Jack Kingston (R-Ga.) belongs to the church. So does Rep. Robert Aderholt (R-Ala.), who counts among his constituents Judge Roy “Ten Commandments” Moore. The congressman has dutifully introduced the Ten Commandments Preservation Act in every session since he entered Congress in 1996. But on Sundays, he worships at The Falls Church where he can get a taste of evangelicalism without having to associate with run-of-the-mill evangelicals.

That's Roy S. Moore of the Foundation for Moral Law. Intersect with Herb Titus and Michelle Bachmann here.

peaches en regalia

2011-12-14T19:37:00.001-08:00

& furthermore

http://www.retronaut.co/2011/09/mans-life-magazine-1950s/

Channeling Brynn Carson

2011-12-14T10:18:00.001-08:00

Bearded Dragon playing Ant Crusher

2011-12-14T10:09:00.001-08:00

I Alone

2011-12-14T09:57:00.001-08:00

Temple is everywhere.

we will stand

2011-12-14T09:53:00.000-08:00

we can has slothbaby

2011-12-12T20:34:00.001-08:00

They were the sweetest children

2011-12-08T13:52:00.001-08:00

Alex at 16 (with the red Schecter )

and this summer (green guitar)

and very recently...

and Eric, guitar solo (wait for it, at 4:00 and on)

and Halloween. He did get to go to Ghostbuster School after all.

The original "Gaslight" flick

2011-12-07T19:01:00.001-08:00

Thank you, Internet Archive!

NPR falsifies "facts" about Social Security

2011-12-07T16:54:00.000-08:00

Et tu.. Alas.

wankin bankers

2011-12-07T14:12:00.001-08:00

Proud to be Irish -- via Matt Taibbi

Compassionate Conservatism Phase II

2011-12-07T10:44:00.001-08:00

They used illegals to quietly bust unions in things like meat-packing. They loved their cheap nannies, maids, gardeners, etc. But familiarity breeds, and like all purely physical affairs (mah personal Jaysus!), it got old...

O child. O future of the world. O love. Your image: There is the living Christ.

Brian groks game

2011-12-07T10:43:00.001-08:00

Espouse: the perfect word for Newt. Espouse, espouse, espouse.

2011-12-05T18:07:00.001-08:00

‘Extracts from the Journal of the late Professor I. Donoghue’

2011-12-05T15:06:00.001-08:00

Sir Francis Galton’s scary unpublished utopian novel The Eugenic College of Kantsaywhere (c.1910) http://www.ucl.ac.uk/library/special-coll/ksw.shtml

fiction as "a place for thinking the unthinkable"

negative capability

2011-12-05T08:34:00.001-08:00

cant

2011-12-05T00:06:00.001-08:00

cant n.
Angular deviation from a vertical or horizontal plane or surface; an inclination or slope.
A slanted or oblique surface.
A thrust or motion that tilts something.
The tilt caused by such a thrust or motion.
An outer corner, as of a building.
— n

insincere talk, esp concerning religion or morals; pious platitudes
stock phrases that have become meaningless throughrepetition
specialized vocabulary of a particular group, such asthieves, journalists, or lawyers; jargon
singsong whining speech, as used by beggars
— vb.( intr ) to speak in or use cant

[C16: probably via Norman French canter to sing, fromLatin cantāre; used disparagingly, from the 12th century,of chanting in religious services]

asthieves. I love it.

*********

Look under the toe of your boot. There's a quarter there.

I find 4 leaf clovers, sometimes 5 leaf clovers... But my eye is trained to find them. It honed itself hunting shark teeth in the cliffs of the Chesapeake. You get attuned, is all.

Not that things aren't connected.

I heard a terrific explanation of quaternity someone gave ala von franz:

Axiom of Maria. A precept in alchemy: "One becomes two, two becomes three, and out of the third comes the one as the fourth."

alice puts it:

Hidden in the Fourth is the One. Find it by uniting the Two in the Third.

Which is cant for:
masculine+feminine (expressed as metal, charge, planet, lovers, etc.) -- transcending to--> divine nature/incarnation /big L love. Yin Yang stuff. Tao. It's the cornerstone of alchemy. The power to transform.

Carl Jung (and these are psychological statements: Jung is always speaking of the psychological experience) used the axiom of Maria as a metaphor for the whole process of individuation. From Sharp's Lexicon: One is the original state of unconscious wholeness; two signifies the conflict between opposites; three points to a potential resolution; the third is the transcendent function; and the one as the fourth is a transformed state of consciousness, relatively whole and at peace.

(Jung smokes his pipe and grins at me. 'I was only in it for the transference.')

The oddest things can take on the transcendent function.

There's a swing my kids made by throwing a rope over a tree half-way up our front yard. It set the stage above our little stone amphitheater here to tell today's tale.

My youngest son left a chair up there by the swing. Odd old chairs left around the property here. I leave them alone. They add charm. And I'm not sure who they belong to, who sits in them. Like the old tribes in the desert, the chair is dragged from place to place that it might be a portable holy of holies. (Such was the arc of the covenant, oddly enough.) But -- this new chair sits there happily, covered with shade, the entire hill covered with great trees, all the way to the split rail fence, looking very Cold Mountain --which it is. The sun comes up here at an angle through the tall trees at the edge of the ridge. It has to slant in here, Helios, Ra, Apollo, Sun Sun Sun. He's magnificent in his coming, sending out spears and rays and solid golden ladders. Morning is a wondrous happy thing. But I noticed as I got in the car that He also found my son's chair up there in the darkness. He shines on it, sits there like a beautiful prince.

So that's who sits in that chair.

But the tale today... I stopped at a park to pick up my son from soccer practice. All around the huge field is (surprise, surprise) beauty. More Ra and his rays, mountain framed, rocks that climb the hills in tiffany and yager cut layers. I talked with another woman waiting there. She's a Richmond native, I find, and she mentions that her child goes to the local Christian School. We talk about the history around us, the war, the Reservists who have all been called up and will be gone for so long, and she says, after a pause, -- "My mom was saying the other day that she just wished that the Rapture would come and be over with!" And so I looked at her, and said what honestly came to me.

It was that scripture about the doubting Thomas, Jesus asking him if he must put his hands in his wounds to Gnow (though I think I said 'believe'). "Why can't people listen to that?" I asked her. "It's so simple. Is it the blood and wounds that are important or is the message that lives in the heart? Where do you believe? With hands and blood and eyes, or the heart? Because that's the incarnation. That's the "Rapture" fulfilled, and everyone can have it right now by letting the Christ (Ra, Apollo, Buddha consciousness, higher love, universal moral principles ... your theory here) live in the heart, without middlemen or magic books or politics. You just look into someone's eyes and see (don't you know me?) the Christ there. And you incarnate, Christ in you."

She seems to like this.

I guess she'll go ask her pastor about it. He'll tell her I'm the devil.

Anyway, Temple is everywhere. You just have to recognized it. You can make whatever you like from the grail. Just better make sure you know who your grail serves.

As for my Eros cant, I'll caution you. Priapus is often confused with Eros, and he was an object of pity, a walking parable of a huge insatiable throbbing and utterly painful wang always obscuring His way. But even Priapus has a place, a time. He carries the child over into the horrors of manhood, where the waters rage and seethe and ache -- until Eros is found within all.

The Last Man

2011-12-04T20:50:00.001-08:00

The Last Man (Oxford World's Classics)Mary Shelley (Author), Morton D. Paley (Editor)

Free on Kindle. Go read.

the flow of loving concern and appreciation of others

2011-12-03T08:27:00.001-08:00

(I am so enamored of reasons. Silly, I know, but.... am what am. )

My 5 year cancer scan this thursday. 5 years! If I can grow my kidney back ( and the last scan showed that, gimpy, weird, but still my kidney... I have) I can regenerate (and we all can) anything. (Screw you, right knee! Shut up and run!)

Time for the work of Reality.

x's deborah -- a very religious atheist, who wishes everyone would stop fighting about things that happened hundreds of years ago and remember instead that we are all of one source (Latin surgere to spring up or forth).

(extra credit: one and two )
+++++++++
this was in response to AO's massage / message:

CREDO CL

Instant Cure for the Blues!

As some of you already know, I had a remarkable spiritual teacher – M. I met him on June 6, 1944 and my life changed from that day forward. I was 21, and today I am living into my 90th year. In all this time I have not once had a doubt concerning him. His teachings have guided me through thick and thin and many ups and downs. Last night I woke up and realized I was tired, and in considerable pain, and perhaps flirting with a potential depression and realized that I have not shared his formula for this state of mind. It is very simple and it works:

DO SOMETHING FOR SOMEBODY QUICK!

So I am curing myself in this act of sharing! If you think about it, if you feel sorry for yourself, you enclose yourself in a static circle of self-pity. However, if you act on behalf of another, that dynamic opens you to a spiral, and Spirit flows through you in even the humblest gesture toward another person, animal or even flower. You are no longer trapping the flow of loving concern and appreciation of others.

This idea is present in the spiritual advice of all religions, not just one! It underlies the concept of our common humanity: that to love another as sparks of the same flame is equivalent to loving the Mystery we call Spirit. So here is just one beautiful expression of it:

Prayer of Saint Francis of Assisi

Lord, make me an instrument of your peace.
Where there is hatred, let me sow love;
where there is injury, pardon;
where there is doubt, faith;
where there is despair, hope;
where there is darkness, light;
and where there is sadness, joy.

O Divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek
to be consoled as to console;
to be understood as to understand;
to be loved as to love.
For it is in giving that we receive;
it is in pardoning that we are pardoned;
and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life.

These words written in the 13th century endure and transcend any religious dogma. They are the words of a mystic and are common to all other mystics. They seem so appropriate to our desperate needs still today, eight centuries later.

May they bring light, love, and life to us as we move towards another Solstice!

lovingly,

We've Been Here Before Dept.

2011-12-02T12:30:00.001-08:00

Join us in urging the Washington Post's Ombudsman to "factcheck" the Washington Post's treatment of the allegation that Iran has a "quest to possess nuclear weapons" as a fact.

I WANT TO BELIEVE

2011-12-01T18:56:00.001-08:00

http://www.venganza.org/

Aqua Sapientiae

2011-12-01T13:04:00.001-08:00

here

the inner twelve year old

2011-11-29T10:30:00.001-08:00

Watching the Nat Geo channel on the net -- or was it (the dreadful) Discovery? -- and they were excavating mummies of cats, hundreds of them; they say there's thousands. The show alleges that people sacrificed them to the gods. Broke their necks, murdered them. This was very late, the old Egypt long gone, Alex the Great time or so. The literal took over, and I guess that's the point. Consciousness, like an archon who thought it was the only god.

Seems we lost our Mother ( see The Alphabet Versus the Goddess: The Conflict Between Word and Image by Leonard Shlain; Thom's review here: Who killed the goddess? ) along the way. Wandered along the vast black and white sawdust strewn midway of The Magic Land of Either-or. 2000-some years of wandering, sadly dispossessed of cat-wisdom. Ate alot of awful candy apples and watched alot of freak shows. Now she takes us in hand.Churns up long forgotten musings.

My buddy Dave and I used to make one of my manx cats fly. Alice was her name. She would love to be held, hands beneath her dear sets of splayed legs, relaxing (or bored, or just curious) as we took her on an imaginary (and gentle) rollercoaster all over the apartment. I suppose it answered some of her questions. What was in that huge dish suspended from the ceiling? The top book shelf where she couldn't fit? And -ah! There, on top of the big white box! THAT'S where they hide the catnip! We joked about making a film (he was at NYU grad school in film, later graduating to make ~tuna! chicken! liver!~ cat food cans dance on television... ) of Flying Alice. I think we were probably (very likely) fully loaded. We saw Alice flying all over DC, flying (one of us making her fly of course) -- down to the White House with the anti-war picketers and other bits that ended with an inverted "V" of CIA agents in trench coats,hats, sunglasses, in front of the Wash Monument -- and as Alice flies into their midst, they all open their coats (voila!) and flash wee American flags!

My inner twelve-year-old still likes the image.

Just a joke that got out of hand one afternoon.

Raiders Of The Lost Artifacts

2011-11-29T10:21:00.001-08:00

Perspective: Raiders of the lost artifacts:

"The museum is the archaeological repository for all artifacts from excavations in Iraq. It contains, or did contain, hundreds of thousands of objects covering 10,000 years of human civilization: tablets, reliefs, weapons, seals, pottery, musical instruments, statues large and small. The collection is made of gold, clay, stone, metal, bone, ivory, cloth, paper, glass and wood.U.S. troops had protected the museum, but they left to engage insurgents in another part of the city."

So that washes American's hands? What a coup for Biblical Fundamentalists, helping to erase all that came before their standard true and accepted version, all that remembers that god was originally named ELOHIM, a plural: the gods.

I am the lord they god, thou shalt have no the gods before me. So who was he talking to? Bit of saber rattling.

Go back to the earliest Genesis myths, some 1000 years earlier than the expected true and accepted version. It was all about water, water marrying, male and female, gods in their act of creation. No fire there, either. The Enuma Elish (also: here).

Written in Akkadian,, the Enuma Elish dates back to 1800 BCE, the carriers of this tradition originally from Arabia. Preserved on 7 clay tablets, this text from ~1200.

"The Akkadian script was used until about the 1st century AD and was adapted to write many other languages of Mesopotamia, including Babylonian and Assyrian."

meta-ortho-para-Platonic

2011-11-29T09:12:00.001-08:00

[conversation. walking. at night.]

Actually, just comment and response

t writes: >> Your Image of the Imago Dei is just as conscious as you are, the person whose Image it is.One can only imagine what one can imagine, so a bartering G-d would be for a person on the level of bartering.Bargainig and barter are perfectly valid if that is where one is in life.>>

True, I tend to think. Things come as you're ready; the old mystery religions knew this, thus initiates were supported through various levels to the pure abstractions of the Forms by the utterance of their whole complex being. But my concern -- what I was expressing in that image -- is what might (presently, in our materialistic/ literal minded mass culture) be taught. The complex psychic phenomena mistrusted, leaving the tale / myth without the meaning, which is the work of active symbols. There's real reason to be concerned about what might be forced on children in a very literal way. No Child Left Behind, deliberately underfunded, is primed to dump the unfulfilled into the Valhalla of the voucher's 'alternative,' which for many is (alas) the Bob Jones U curriculum in the ready. The funding that's been funneled in direct opposition to law re separation of church and state is staggering. If anyone doubts this anymore, they haven't been (the old cliche) paying attention.

>>Apeasing a distant god comes from our fear. We will do anything to keep him happy and away from us. In my opinion, as long as we live in fear, we will always look for help from an outside Fixer. And we will always bargain with him.>>

Well, a lot is asked of us. We are beings that know we die. That image of the face of the virgin as she holds her child (wonderful symbol), enacted over and over and over.

>> On the other hand why would one pray for even strength and love, if one believed thatwe were created with both, and had just forgotten?>>

Interesting. That's the myth of Lethe, drinking of the cup. The ones who remember, the teachers, make themselves expendable.

> ... I find few people who are looking for a place to stand. Instead they want someone to show them where, so they will feel protected.>>

And that's also what seems to be taught. Taught in everything. Keep your place. Buy this. If only X will happen. You're never too rich or too thin. Accept X as your savior/ The Way in X church in X way, or you will be Left Behind. In all honesty, I trust kids to 'get it' to a very high degree if they can just be allowed to open as their heart tells them. The real teaching is by example, not infliction. That's my true 'faith,' and it's Prayer as a life lived. As being. What expresses this so well, I think is Rossetti's story, Hand and Soul

It once moved me to write some 130,00 words.:) At it's deepest heart, it tells the same truths that Diotima told Socrates, or that the old lady in the doorway told the woman in Y Tu Mama Tambien.

William Sharp, aka Fiona Macleod, mother of the Celtic Revival, writes about it in his bio of Rossetti. Sharp first gives a synopsis of the story Hand and Soul. Here, he touches it directly:

...To this point in Hand and Soul I have kept close to the narrative itself and have dealt with it in extenso, both because of its beauty as a creation by the subject of this record and because of its thorough individuality; but I wall now quote at length the important passaes that follow, valuable not only for their inherent significance but also because of their specifically affecting the personality of Rossetti himself. In fact, these passages may be regarded as directly personal utterances applicable to himself as an artist, and this I know from his own lips as well as from every natural evidence; so that I have no hesitation in transcribing what amounts to an artistic confessio fideli, to Rossetti's own convictions as to how an artist should work with both "hand and soul" towards the accomplishment of every conception. Their applicability to all imaginatively and emotionally creative work will be manifest to many, and the central idea is certainly that which it would be well if most persons besides those who "create" would take to heart -- that true life is the truest worship and truest praise, "for with God is no lust of godhead."

.... But when he looked in her eyes, he wept. And she came to him, and cast her hair over him, and, took her hands about his forehead, and spoke again: 'Thou hast said,' she continued, gently, 'that faith failed thee. This cannot be so. Either thou hadst it not, or thou hast it. But who bade thee strike the point betwixt love and faith? Wouldst thou sift the warm breeze from the sun that quickens it? Who bade thee turn upon God and say: Behold, my offering is of earth, and not worthy: thy fire comes not upon it: therefore, though I slay not my brother whom thou acceptest, I will depart before thou smite me. Why shouldst thou rise up and tell God He is not content? Had He, of His warrant, certified so to thee? Be not nice to seek out division; but possess thy love in sufficiency: assuredly this is faith, for the heart must believe first. What He hath set in thine heart to do, that do thou; and even though thou do it without thought of Him, it shall be well done: it is this sacrifice that He asketh of thee, and His flame is upon it for a sign. Think not of Him; but of His love and thy love. For God is no morbid exactor: He hath no hand to bow beneath, nor a foot, that thou shouldst kiss it.'

And Chiaro held silence, and wept into her hair which covered his face; and the salt tears that he shed ran through her hair upon his lips; and he tasted the bitterness of shame.
Then the fair woman, that was his soul, spoke again to him, saying:
'And for this thy last purpose, and for those unprofitable truths of thy teaching, thine heart hath already put them away, and it needs not that I lay my bidding upon thee. How is it that thou, a man, wouldst say coldly to the mind what God hath said to the heart warmly? Thy will was honest and wholesome; but look well lest this also be folly to say, I, in doing this, do strengthen God among men. When at any time hath he cried unto thee, saying, 'My son, lend me thy shoulder, for I fall?' Deemest thou that the men who enter God's temple in malice, to the provoking of blood, and neither for his love nor for his wrath will abate their purpose, shall afterwards stand with thee in the porch, midway between Him and themselves, to give ear unto thy thin voice, which merely the fall of their visors can drown, and to see thy hands, stretched feebly, tremble among their swords? Give thou to God no more than he asketh of thee; but to man also, that which is man's. In all that thou doest, work from thine own heart, simply; for his heart is as thine, when thine is wise and humble; and he shall have understanding of thee. One drop of rain is as another, and the sun's prism in all: and shalt not thou be as he, whose lives are the breath of One? Only by making thyself his equal can he learn to hold communion with thee, and at last own thee above him. Not till thou lean over the water shalt thou see thine image therein: stand erect, and it shall slope from thy feet and be lost. Know that there is but this means whereby thou may'est serve God with man: Set thine hand and thy soul to serve man with God.'
And when she that spoke had said these words within Chiaro's spirit, she left his side quietly, and stood up as he had first seen her; with her fingers laid together, and her eyes steadfast, and with the breadth of her long dress covering her feet on the floor. And, speaking again, she said: Chiaro, servant of God, take now thine Art unto thee, and paint me thus, as I am, to know me: weak, as I am, and in the weeds of this time; only with eyes which seek out labour, and with a faith, not learned, yet jealous of prayer. Do this; so shall thy soul stand before thee always, and perplex thee no more. And Chiaro did as she bade him. While he worked, his face grew solemn with knowledge: and before the shadows had turned, his work was done. Having finished, he lay back where he sat, and was asleep immediately: for the growth of that strong sunset was heavy about him, and he felt weak and haggard; like one just come out of a dusk, hollow country, bewildered with echoes, where he had lost himself, and who has not slept for many days and nights. And when she saw him lie back, the beautiful woman came to him, and sat at his head, gazing, and quieted his sleep with her voice. ***

When I am in my heart and you are in your heart, there is no distance between us.

>.Until we all acknowledge the fear that is the center of our minds we will remain right here. Those who are forced to go further will, but I think we must allow for human weaknesses and not look down at people who we think "just don't get it" >>

Not looking down. Just -- in sorrow of a great step backward and all the loss and pain it will mean.

>> ( I do very much disagree with the interpretation of Abraham and Isaac. I see it differently and would not denigrate it. How to understand it? with the eyes of faith in love. T >>

Of course. Thank your Rabbi. I'm speaking of it in the literal Sunday School way. Of course, this image and tale has a great history. It links so directly to archetype, and it has the most sublime symbolism. http://www.aish.com/torahportion/moray/The_Binding.asp

Also, of course, there's Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling.

But I keep feeling it speaks to what was learned in a far earlier tale of Iphigenia (note always the wind, that which "moves" ) :

PAUL WOODRUFF: Agamemnon was leading the Greek army against Troy. They needed a favorable wind in order to cross the Aegean Sea to get from Greece to Troy and the winds kept coming the wrong way. So he consulted the prophet. The prophet said if you sacrifice your daughter Iphigenia, you will have fair winds. So he sent a message to his wife saying, "I found a bridegroom for Iphigenia. Bring her in her wedding dress and we'll have an altar and everything will be ready." Well, she went to the altar and there was no bridegroom. There was her father there with a knife. The Roman poet Lucretius, describes this scene and then ends with a ringing line, "So much evil religion can bring about," and it certainly can.
BILL MOYERS: Because?
PAUL WOODRUFF: Because religion is not always reverent. Religious wars represent a failure, I think, to recognize the common human experience of reverence in different religions. The great Israeli poet of peace, Yehuda Amichai, who died a few years ago, wrote in his last long poem a canto that has the theme, "Gods come and go, but prayer is forever."
And the English poet of war, Rudyard Kipling, said something like that in one of the poems he wrote for his novel, KIM, and he's speaking of a? of a man who's worshipping a burnished idol. And he says, "His god is as his fates assign/His prayer is all the world's, and thine."
Both poets in very? in different ways, I think, were trying to get at the same idea that if we can get beyond differences in articulate belief and focus on the reverence that is possible in the different religious traditions and the human vulnerability, the human needs which are represented in our common prayers, gods come and go, but prayer is forever. It's a very powerful line.

***
It is.
**
x's

post that inspired t's comments:

dancing amid the pyre

Oh, you're going to zap me with penicillin and pesticides. Spare me that and I'll spare you the bomb and aerosols. But don't confuse progress with perfectibility. A great poet is always timely. A great philosopher is an urgent need. There's no rush for Isaac Newton. We were quite happy with Aristotle's cosmos. Personally, I preferred it. Fifty-five crystal spheres geared to God's crankshaft is my idea of a satisfying universe. I don't think of anything more trivial than the speed of light. Quarks, quasars - big bangs, black holes - who gives a shit? How did you pure logic / techs con us out of all that status? All that money? And why are you so pleased with yourselves? ~Arcadia, Tom Stoppard

:) Which is also to say -- why assume I'm against technology and progress and growth because I (like Jung) think we have something to learn from such as the Taos Pueblos? (below)

Jung frames it as a "truth or a self-understanding similar to that of Ancient Egypt." And the rest of what the chief says in that excerpt is very much to the present point. What is we have lost -- need to learn?

Setting: Abraham and his son. The knife in the air. And now?

We have that human reflex / instinct / condition of talking to the inner voice. (see http://web.archive.org/web/20080724023310/http://www.jungcircle.com/muse/genius.html ) But must we bargain with it as well?

We're doing it all the time. It's taking the place of our life, this bargaining.

Is this impulse built into the mindset of having a distant god that must be pleased? Because having that makes us give away all *real* responsibility for the outcome. And that means we give away the responsibility for living life. Our own living.

When did this sickness come, this immobilizing stepping back from life? It's the religion of victims, Revelation, the Apocalypse. The impulse for vengence in the oppressed. That part of a Diaspora.

Elohim. That's a plural. GodS from the beginning.

And God is whatever created and creates. Does it ask me to come begging to it, trying to make deals? It seems to me that unless you're asking for strength and love that that's what you're doing in most prayer. It seems to me that a creator created me to be exuberant in what it made me. That my exuberance itself is the prayer and offering it seeks from me. If it leaves me to define my space and actions, to schedule my curiosity's impulse to longing as my being's best guide, then I shall do that with the best energy as it informs me is fit. Who am I to question what god has made, and what god has made of me?

Living, full living for all. That's the best praying I can think of.

What is our marriage with death to be? Like Psyche, our dark lover whose face we can't see, the mystery we come out of and will all yield to, our sublime friend there in the unconscious at all times? Or is death hated and belittled? The latter makes our living pointless, all just a test for some greater deathlessness. Yet to be deathless is to dance in and with and through our season. To understand we're never lost or alone or even here.

We're never not in the act of love.

The answer to this, that endless act of love -- a state -- is to find the deity again in ourselves. In each other. In this flesh and blood of a living earth.

The stars and heavens do move us. Do you know that pendulums go mad during eclipses? Einstein would love it. He knew he didn't have it all. He knew it was more... that it's all of a piece. Sure, of course, Christ is of the higher mysteries, that tradition we see in the Greek, Orphic, Mithraic. (Jung does great leg work on this. It's why the Nag Hammadi scrolls were taken directly to him; else, like the Dead Sea Scrolls, it would have been a bear getting them into the light day.) But it's a mockup of an Old Testament prophecy that never even existed that he's been dressed in by our present theocracy of Leftbehinders.

What kind of world would I want? What system? As Franklin said, most any would work if the people are responsible, if they follow that simple golden rule. The no-holds-barred of present day corporate capitalism would have pissed off George Washington to no end. But law and order -- how to inflict that on the world?

Truth is, they're dying for it. They'd love it, having half a chance at a decent existence and a system of justice.

Terrorists? They quickly lose their taste for self immolation when you give them a sense that others are trying to make things just, and if you allow them to have something to lose. Put yourself in their place and solutions abound.

It's what McNamara teaches -- and he learned these truths through long bloody sacrifice.http://www.policyscience.net/mcnamara.pdf We should listen to him.

The current all-purpose faceless crazy Muslim radicals have their counterpart extremists represented in all major dogmatic religions. We wouldn't want to put them to the test. Timothy McVeigh went to his death reciting Henley's Invictus (Henley, the true captain of his soul, who unlike McVeigh, really did have something to overcome), thinking he did god's very good work.

But when I say we aren't the good guys, I'm thinking of the ways we've used intelligence to undermine, destabilize, radicalize other cultures. It's the way it has worked for some long time. Iran is the perfect recent example, the things we did in setting up the Shah and his repression. It got out of hand -- setting the stage for what happened with the Ayatollah: the dispossessed have nothing to lose. Afghanistan and our work ( seehttp://www.counterpunch.org/brzezinski.html ) to recruit the most radical Muslim mofooks we could find to throw off the Russian's inroads at modernizing that culture have now come back to roost.

But these aren't the stories one finds on FOX news or even the networks. But it's all there to find. It's in archives, the books by people-who-went-looking.

The first thing Bush did when he got to the White House was block Regan's papers form being released. This was long before 911. Then he proceeded to stock his staff from the very people who razed central and south america when his dad was vp. Negroponte to the UN? Whata slap in the face. I remembered goons like him from writing letters for Amnesty International back then.

Democracy in Russia? Russia is, as it has long been, ruled by its network of local thugs and their black market mafia. If they really did develop a Democracy, the West would do all it could to being it down. It's not in 'our' interest to have them in control of their own resources and destiny. The oil, the gas, the minerals! Truth is, for all the business opportunity that was touted when they finally fell apart (because that's why the wall fell; not for any of Reagan's puffery), only Bechtel and the big corporations made out. (Bechtelhttp://jungcircle.com/muse/bechtel.html ).

A third of the forces in Iraq are mercenaries, working for private companies like Blackwater (now Xe, but a rose by any name...), though they're paid by the Fed: our tax dollars at work. And the old boy networks, the Halliburton, the Carlisle, Bechtel -- the usual suspects -- got all the billons of contracts without even bidding.

And this gives me the most pause of all: did they really get that that phone book sized high-utility Patriot Act together on such short order?

It's odd, John O'Neal and all those cia records going up in the mix... Why don't you question this?

But back to Jung. What was he saying, what did it mean? I think reading his later works directly, and maybe the orientation in Shamdasni's new history (also an essay here:http://www.blackwellpublishers.co.uk/Joap/JOAP119.pdf ) are about the best grounding in Jung, imho and for my purposes. I'm not an analyst and not even especially interested in an analyst's work. Jung was much more than just that. And much more than any New Age or second sloggings of him will ever yield.

But I apologize for the rant. But it felt good, and you did ask. You sat down at my table. So let's leave you where you came in...

How do we live in a world that's slowly winding down, Spinning into the void, consuming itself in fire, Heading for chill extinction in universal ash? Is "wanting to know" enough? Or dancing amid the pyre? Or seeking to be immortal in the glow of the world's renown? How long can these sustain us while we're waiting for the smash? How comforting to have lived in the Age of Enlightenment, Secure in the classical concept of perfectibility: A slow, steady ascent; a striving to regain; Newtonian Law the root of our fixed stability; Restoring the lost gardens, eager to attain Arcadia: the crown of human accomplishment. But Newton's physics cracks; chaos conceived the world: I snap my playscript shut: a swirl of wind gusts Into flame the dry brush of the barren African veldt; In an ocean of ashes, islands of order violently hurled, Mirages only, fractured fractals; security trusts Only its own complacency, which the flame of a candle will melt. Entrapped in entropy then, do we give up or go mad? Out of chaos can there be order? Is that a justified stance? If not, why do artists strive to impose a shape on the world? Are hexameters patently pointless? Is rhyming merely a fad? No: though poetry may be no weapon, and music no banner unfurled, And we can't change our future by dancing - yet all we have left is the dance. Enlightenment after Tom Stoppard's Arcadia Peter Malin April 1999

We are sorely in need of a Truth or a self-understanding similar to that of Ancient Egypt, which I have found still living with the Taos Pueblos. Their chief of ceremonies old Ochwiay Biano (Mountain Lake) said to me : 'We are the people who live on the roof of the world, we are the sons of the Sun, who is our father. We help him daily to rise and to cross the sky. We do not do this for ourselves, but for the Americas also. Therefore they should not interfere with our religion. But if they continue to do so (by missionaries) and hinder us, then they will see in ten years the sun will rise no more.' He correctly assumes that their day, their light, their consciousness and their meaning will die, when destroyed through the narrow-mindedness of American Rationalism, and the same will happen to the whole world, when subjected to such treatment. That is the reason I tried to find the best truth and the clearest light I could attain to, and since I have reached my highest point and can't transcend any more, I am guarding my light and my treasure, convinced that nobody would gain and I myself would be badly, even hopelessly injured, if I should lose it. It is the most precious not only to me, but above all to the darkness of the creator, who needs man to illuminate his creation. If God had foreseen his world, it would be a mere senseless machine and Man's existence a useless freak. My intellect can envisage the latter possibility, but the whole of my being says 'No' to it...
~CGJung, letter 9/14/1960

http://web.archive.org/web/20100226051757/http://www.jungcircle.com/muse/plato.htm

Bad Means, Bad End

2011-11-28T15:29:00.001-08:00

How Private Warmongers and the US Military Infiltrated American UniversitiesImportant article. Thank you. I think the connections here with the Fundamentalist Christian Right should be followed. Even when interests differ, the goal is the same: Power. So who leads who? The Messianic movement is a way to control Israel. People, peace, religious freedom, the health of the world. All at risk.

The Umbrella Man

2011-11-26T16:14:00.001-08:00

http://video.nytimes.com/video/2011/11/21/opinion/100000001183275/the-umbrella-man.html

The vision and solutions offered here are all things President Gore wanted to address

2011-11-26T09:55:00.001-08:00

The Death of the Fringe Suburb

No difference between parties? Oh, hunny. Don't go buying that.

Healing the Past, Creating a New Future: Jews, Germans and the Legacy of World War II

2011-11-25T16:35:00.001-08:00

The Compassionate Listening Project warmly invites you to join us for:

Healing the Past, Creating a New Future:Jews, Germans and the Legacy of World War IIJune 15-21, 2012

Occupy Democracy 2

2011-11-24T14:10:00.000-08:00

The Single Most Important Robert Reich Clip You Can Share Today

opus 1 excerpt (wonkish)

2011-11-22T08:21:00.001-08:00

A cultural era is not defined by the contentof the ideas it conveys but by its interpretive filter...the hidden threads that link ideas to the invisible will of the time.~Ioan Couliano.

Elliott felt for his coat in the darkness. Slowly, he slid it on, arms numb andcold, and crept out. Turning down the corridor, he made his way to the tower.

Soon he was at the very top of the windingstaircase, and pushing open the hatch, he hoisted himself to the towerroof. He stood atop the great stonecylinder, alone with the night, high in the windy sky. The moon shone brightly down, a day short ofbeing full.

He walked to the edge and looked down. Nothing but blackness. The wind whipped around like chantingspirits, calling to him. Standing on thebrink, he felt them egging him on, pulling his body toward the gloom.

At the bottom of these thoughts was his logic: hewould consciously give his life for his son, consciously sacrifice hissoul. Claire would understand thisact of willful penance. How else tobreak the cycle? If the angel returnedwith the cup, he would drink whatever it held.

First, he must strike the bargain with God, theDevil, whoever cut these deals. Looking around the dark sky, he called to them, knowing theywould come—because now he truly believed in them. How could they hide from one who had the mistfall from his eyes? One who knew what itwas to drink of the golden cup, to swim as the sea, to soar as the wind. He knew lifetimes and lifetimes, and what itwas to do unspeakable things. To love awoman unto death, to participate in the darkest depths of magic-- What was there that he’d not done? Darkness from one who had once been part of aliving Chain of Light.

"Come to me," he called. "Come, take my soul. Anything, only leave my son free. Burn me for eternity, I don’t care. Just let this be the end. I accept the Knowledge. I’ll not turn away."

The wind answered—nothing—and Elliott prepared tostep off.

My God. What if the children find me? Maybe better to go down to the water andquietly swim into oblivion. But he wouldwash up on the shore. He pictured Phoebecoming upon him, his bloated, gray remnant. He couldn’t do that to her. Thethought hit him like a slap, sobering him.

Why on earth call to the Devil? Darkness had been his companion forcenturies, and it never bargained. The truthwas, it didn’t want his soul. The truthwas, he could only bargain with life.

"Chiaro! What must I do?" His words echoed back, and he knew thatfalling through the darkness would not settle that score. He sat down by the edge, his head in hishands, and wept like a child.

There was a cough. Elliott looked round and saw the strange but now familiar corpulent woman materializing near thehatch. Enthroned in anoverstuffed chair, she was sucking in on her cigarette, the flame glowing red andgold.
"For a moment, you lookedlike you were really going to do it."

"You. And you would let me fall?"

She gave him an incredulous look. "Well, I certainly wasn’t going to popup when you were calling up the Devil."

Getting to his feet, he walked toward her. Was she solid? Dream? What did it matter. "How do I know you’re not the devil?"

Smoke poured from her nostrils. "Because devils don’t exist. They’re something made up. Something to pin the troubles on. Of course, the prayer goes, and lead us notinto temptation, and it’s the Deity they’re addressing. Not the devil. I suppose that oversight never occurred toanyone."

"Blame God for my error?"

She smiled. "Error is the work of Karma. Hate is the passion of fools. Mercy is the might of the righteous—and—all the rest of it." She crossed her arms and took a long drag,mumbling to herself.

"But I must make amends. It was my pride that caused thistragedy. My pride. I caused the murders, the burning of thebooks."

"Oh, sins, pride. Why take it personally?" She looked at him skeptically. "Let it go."

"And how can I ever do that?"

"Well, I think you’re on your way, now. You’ve brought it all to the foreground. You’re conscious of what happened. You’re willing to expand your reality enoughfor the rest to be effected."

"The rest. What rest?"

She sighed and pulled one of her feet up to rest on heropposite knee. Coughing a bit, she tookanother long drag. "You see, thisis the trouble." She looked at him. "Take Chiaro. All this business with his Soul. Dangerous little alchemy wasn’tit? But that’s Art for you. Twisty, turny, always changing, moving things along. By the way, you do haveto see to Chiaro, since you served as the catalyst in his troubles. You must finish the wedding. Make them one. Atone."

"How?"

"Just continue the work. Write it."

"But that won’t bring back the books,the Knowledge--"

"Oh, stop. They’ll be digging it up in the desert, finding it in caves,drainage ditches, for centuries to come. It needs to keep being rediscovered, to make people question, grow. Create." Her face softened and she seemed touched by his concern. "What happened with the Heart’s Rose was supposed to happen. It was part of the times. You see—humans tend to cleave things intoblack and white if you let them. They becomecomplacent, stagnant, when they lose their sense of mystery—ofpossibility. Their minds get locked intoone way of seeing. These littlerevolutions are course corrections. They come when the time is ripe.
"Basically, an imbalance isnecessary for creation to endure. An energy gradient. Without it, there’s no flow. Nopassion, no choice, no growth. In fact, no time, space, Becoming."

She began to search around in her lap until shefound a small pouch. Opening it, shelaid out a cigarette paper and poured in a careful quantity. "Ever expanding in the bosom of God, the humanimagination. Blake, wasn't it? Through consciousImagination, Eternity moves into the field of time, that’s all. It balances out all of the rapturoustranscendence through art and Beauty." She exhaled a cloud of smoke, smiling beatifically. "You have a question."

The whole time he’d stood staring. "What—what is the Midst?"

"The Midst. You mean the Centre? I’ll give you a model. Think ofall existence at any moment, anything within a given time and space, as a greatsphere. Existence, the temporal, must byits nature move. That’s the torque, thegradient, I mentioned. But at the very heart of the sphere, in the midst of all this movement, there is a Stillpoint, where nothing moves. From which all things flow, to which allthings return.

"Existence came out of that. It created a point of imagination. And fell into it: BANG. The Cosmos. Well, this particular Cosmos. A realm of opposites, opposites which continually seek and move oneanother. It’s a sort of game: The shards seek to be One again."

From the ground below, they heard people callinghis name. She nodded her head in theirdirection. And chuckled. "Oh, listen. They think you’ve gone over the precipiceagain."

Elliott went to the side of the tower, lookingdownward just as Peter looked up.

"And now I must go," the womansaid.

"Wait!"
Her image began to fade. "No, no. Just do your work. Reach for theunseen hands and all the rest of it." She faded from view in her cloud of smoke,her hand raised in a salute of benediction. Then it began to rain.

The hatch popped open, followed by theconcerned face of Peter. "Just bestill, Elliott," he said, stepping out on the roof. "Jumping won’t solve anything." With a lunge, he had Elliott by thewrists.

"Peter, for godsake, let go. You’llkill us both."

Now Tom and even the doctor had climbed up. "Keep hold of him, Peter,"the doctor said.

What next? Would they tie him to a chair? Hebegan to laugh as they grimly followed him down.

The doctor was the last to go, and as he reachedto pull down the hatch, he was surprised to see a burning cigarette there on the roof besideit.

extra credit
readings:
The Accidental Universe

Dante Alighieri Paradiso, XXXIII

Paper (50 pts.) (no wiki!): Compare, contrast the following statements with the theoretical physics of their time:

"The more materialistic science becomes, the more angels shall I paint." ~Sir Edward Burne Jones

"It is impossible to see the angel unless you first have a notion of it." ~James Hillman

("Damn you, expanding universe." ~ Dr. Who)

_____________________
added later--
from Peter:

I was reminded of http://www.gnosis.org/naghamm/nhl.html when I read this.

______________________

Exactly. & more to come. They can't bomb it all away. (And here, for instance.) For origins of the Western Tradition, I like Peter Kingsley (and here), Joseph Campbell, Carl Jung.

Also -- haven't seen this DVD yet, but have the book. The Bible Unearthed

Um. This is a college class?

2011-11-22T07:36:00.001-08:00

This. I picked up a TIME magazine for the fist time in years, and it was like reading a grammar school Weekly Reader. Well. Explains a lot, America. Life is good: Buy those trinkets! Dancing With The Stars! High Heels! Aftershave! Hummers! -- Oh wait...

Brian. At work.

2011-11-21T17:35:00.001-08:00

rising

2011-11-21T12:40:00.001-08:00

"You say to somebody, you shouldn't go to work before you're what, 14, 16 years of age, fine," Mr. Gingrich said. "You're totally poor. You're in a school that is failing with a teacher that is failing. I've tried for years to have a very simple model. Most of these schools ought to get rid of the unionized janitors, have one master janitor and pay local students to take care of the school. The kids would actually do work, they would have cash, they would have pride in the schools, they'd begin the process of rising."

“You have to accept that sometimes that's how things happen in this world. People's opinions, their feelings, they go one way, then the other. It just so happens you grew up at a certain point in this process.” ― Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go

Occupy

2011-11-21T09:21:00.001-08:00

Occupy is about making and learning how to make community. People meeting and sharing face to face, taking back control to meet the needs of living. We're tired of trinkets, a future of children cleaning Newt's toilets so he can buy another tennis bracelet to enjoy another (oh, properly consecrated) shag. Or whatever it is that moves his ample loins. America is weary and damned tired of watching fake people's fake lives from behind glass screens. We want to live.

Lobbyists target Occupy Wall Street

2011-11-19T14:16:00.001-08:00

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

feet on the ground

2011-11-19T10:16:00.001-08:00

Someone informed me that universal moral principles, world community, and justice are all dubious concepts.

Oh.

This Dubious-ity. Why not apply it equally to cities -- as long as we're considering worldly communities (along with peace love and understanding) dubious. I suppose cities are indubitable -- certain and real -- because we delineate them in space and material planes where we can cut them up as property, thus granting them the magic essence of indubitability. But all we're really talking about is the headache of making agreements -- agreements that we have to have for concepts such as human rights, treaties, and points of law, all the dubious things we might need -- because like it or not, we are one world, certainly one vast marketplace, like it or not, and we better have some understanding, some ground rules, some dialogue that attempts a delineation of this (ever-expanding) playing field.

In many ways, communities and these intangible dubious things are the only things really real to the psyche, the place where we spend most of our time storing the me inside our body. They're not dubious at all when they're the basis for understanding law and protocol and heritage and even the shared shadows of our dreams.

What is a world community but this organic, interdependent web of life? It's "what is," not what one wishes or what "should" or used to be. Through community, small and large, we learn to understand the grace of aging, the need for neighbor, father mother brother daughter grandparent, and how they fit and work together; the flow and rhythm of life, of birth, of death, and why one shouldn't steal and lie and kill (it hurts another person: somone you love). It's the ground where we learn to grok other dubious notions, such as honor and humanity, even politics, negotiation and how and why to listen or speak out; that you are not a world or law unto yourself, and that other people are like you with the same needs and desires; that knowing one great truth does not make you know the mind of god. All such understandings are extrapolated from the experience of living in communities, communities that link in ceaseless points.

This living web is what is disturbed, broken, lost in cultures that are cut off, invaded, taken over by outsiders. Alien leaders, dependence, strange ways -- what's left for them but Pax Romana. Praetorian Guards. All meaning becomes forced.

How to build community -- in any world, even one that thinks it's free, self-determined, meets its needs , has strength and power (dubious concepts, all) -- when its people don't meet face to face? When human contact takes place behind glass shields -- cars and offices, even our food comes this way, our leaders televised, our news scripted, our friends and lovers but perfect two-dimensional strangers.

Such questions are being raised by the Occupy Movement.

There's a polarity that keeps coming back. We have the Koch factor: individuals with unimaginable power to influence things who also feel they've been selected by God to do his work. And what God is this? There's the question, one which I think "God" in whatever form it takes should be allowed to answer in each of us through the heart-dialogue of our living. Wisdom just can't be inflicted, no matter how good the intentions. (Scripture -- God inspired? Sure, in the same way Keats was inspired. In the same way you love your child. But an insistence on the inerrancy of scripture has no basis in historical fact.)

The other pole of this model is the lack of trust that so dominates an individual that it becomes confused with liberty.

Occupy isn't about throwing away the last few hundred years, all that has worked. Occupy is about learning to create community. We want to gather the momentum, the steam generated by all this stirring anger and enthusiasm, as something to build and heal. Sleeping in parks might help cool a person's anger and let them be heard. Because they aren't being heard. But uniting individuals in spontaneous community -- learning first-hand, immersed in the messes of life -- how can that be bad?

"It Is Dominion We Are After. World Conquest"

2011-11-18T12:26:00.001-08:00

Link
Knowing this about the Republican Fundamentalist base makes their actions -- let the economy hang, defeat Obama at all costs -- make sense. Doing god's work, scripture the law of the land... and the world.

There's more than just John Hagee involved in the politics of Israel.

http://www.jewsonfirst.org/evangelizing.aspx

http://calebcompany.com/pdf/12-07-In-defense-of-Israel.pdf

http://jewishisrael.ning.com/profiles/blogs/messianic-attorney-calev-myers-speech-nixed-at-durban-3-protest

http://www.jewishjournal.com/opinion/article/messianic_truth_in_advertising_20080625/

grow, baby, grow

2011-11-17T13:45:00.001-08:00

Watch live streaming video from globalrevolution at livestream.com

Taibbi, Rolling Stone:

[...]

The police in their own way are symbols of the problem. All over the country, thousands of armed cops have been deployed to stand around and surveil and even assault the polite crowds of Occupy protesters. This deployment of law-enforcement resources already dwarfs the amount of money and manpower that the government "committed" to fighting crime and corruption during the financial crisis. One OWS protester steps in the wrong place, and she immediately has police roping her off like wayward cattle. But in the skyscrapers above the protests, anything goes.
This is a profound statement about who law enforcement works for in this country. What happened on Wall Street over the past decade was an unparalleled crime wave. Yet at most, maybe 1,500 federal agents were policing that beat – and that little group of financial cops barely made any cases at all. Yet when thousands of ordinary people hit the streets with the express purpose of obeying the law and demonstrating their patriotism through peaceful protest, the police response is immediate and massive. There have already been hundreds of arrests, which is hundreds more than we ever saw during the years when Wall Street bankers were stealing billions of dollars from retirees and mutual-fund holders and carpenters unions through the mass sales of fraudulent mortgage-backed securities.
It's not that the cops outside the protests are doing wrong, per se, by patrolling the parks and sidewalks. It's that they should be somewhere else. They should be heading up into those skyscrapers and going through the file cabinets to figure out who stole what, and from whom. They should be helping people get their money back. Instead, they're out on the street, helping the Blankfeins of the world avoid having to answer to the people they ripped off.
People want out of this fiendish system, rigged to inexorably circumvent every hope we have for a more balanced world. They want major changes. I think I understand now that this is what the Occupy movement is all about. It's about dropping out, if only for a moment, and trying something new, the same way that the civil rights movement of the 1960s strived to create a "beloved community" free of racial segregation. Eventually the Occupy movement will need to be specific about how it wants to change the world. But for right now, it just needs to grow. And if it wants to sleep on the streets for a while and not structure itself into a traditional campaign of grassroots organizing, it should. It doesn't need to tell the world what it wants. It is succeeding, for now, just by being something different.

Read more: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/how-i-stopped-worrying-and-learned-to-love-the-ows-protests-20111110#ixzz1e09jr5go

the taxpayers own the park, but what country are they really paying to own it?

2011-11-17T09:00:00.001-08:00

"The Pennsylvania Turnpike is for sale." What? Read an excerpt from Taibbi's Griftopia.

the real social insecurity

2011-11-17T08:56:00.001-08:00

matt taibbi, from his blog seconds)

Matt Bai's Post-Partisanship -- RollingStone.com

...the insane Bush tax cuts, and paired up with this is the recent return of that unkillable Beltway cliche, the notion that Social Security is going broke and that the solution to the nation's deficit reduction problems lies there.

Let's be clear about what's going on here. Social Security was never the cause of the nation's debt problems. This issue dates all the way back to the Eighties, when Ronald Reagan hired Alan Greenspan to chair the National Commission on Social Security Reform, ostensibly to deal with a looming shortfall in the fund. Greenspan's solution was to hike Social Security tax rates (they went from 9.35% in 1981 to 15.3% in 1990) and build up a "surplus" that could be used to pay Baby Boomers their social security checks 30 years down the road.

They raised the SS taxes all right, but they didn't save the money for any old Baby Boomers in the 2000s. Instead, Reagan blew that money paying for eight years of deficit spending and tax cuts. Three presidents after him used the same trick. They used about $1.69 trillion in extra Social Security revenue (from the Greenspan hikes) to pay for current-day goodies, with the still-being-debated Bush tax cuts being a great example. This led to the infamous moment during Bush's presidency when Paul O'Neill announced that the Social Security Trust Fund had no assets.

Well, duh! That is what happens to a fund, when you spend 30 years robbing it to pay for tax cuts for Jamie Dimon and Lloyd Blankfein. It will tend to get empty. But of course this wasn't presented to the public as being the consequence of too many handouts to wealthy campaign contributors: this was presented as a problem of those needy goddamned old people wanting to retire too early and being just far too greedy when it came to actually wanting their Social Security benefits paid out.

And so in all seriousness none other than Alan Greenspan proposed back in 2004 that the "social security problem" be rectified by means of reforms that should sound familiar to those reading the news of late: raising the retirement age and cutting benefits.

I wrote about this in Griftopia , but there's one more key fact here. Social Security taxes are capped, which means that above a certain level (I believe it's $106,000 this year) there are no additional taxes. Which means that Jamie Dimon pays a disproportionately small amount of Social Security tax -- an arrangement that makes sense, if that money is only going to one place, i.e. back, later on, to the person who paid the taxes, in the form of Social Security benefits. ...

read avoo

pay attention: It's the Inequality, Stupid

2011-11-17T08:48:00.001-08:00

Thank you, Mother Jones.

If the Democrats don't embrace the 99% soon, we're in danger of a third party candidate and a repeat of the Florida miracle (sleight of hand) of George W Bush and his handlers. One thing I find talking to kids, even some embracing Occupy, is that they don't get the urgency to vote. They still don't see their part in not voting last fall in bringing in the disaster of the Theocratic Libertarian anti-union Tea bagging House and a slew of little Cromwells to the states, effectively blocking all paths to rational action. Obama, your time to speak for us is now. Democrats -- now or never. This is the issue. Those who will fault Obama for executive order won't vote for him anyway. Act now. And the rest of us, get the people to the polls.

A Look at How Protesters Are Building a Global Movement

2011-11-16T16:23:00.001-08:00

It’s time to occupy our democracy

2011-11-15T21:18:00.001-08:00

"I think what we need is a return to a belief not in liberty, because that is easily converted into something else… but in equality. Equality, which is not the same as sameness. Equality of access to information, equality of access to knowledge, equality of access to education, equality of access to power and to politics. We should be more concerned than we are about inequalities of opportunity, whether between young and old or between those with different skills or from different regions of a country. It is another way of talking about injustice. We need to rediscover a language of dissent." ~Tony Judt

*********

... the individual as the only carrier of life and existence is of paramount importance. He cannot be substituted by a group or by a mass. Yet we are rapidly approaching a state in which nobody will accept individual responsibility any more. We prefer to leave it as an odious business to groups and organizations, blissfully unconscious of the fact that the group or mass psyche is that of an animal and wholly inhuman. What we need is the development of the inner spiritual man, the unique individual whose treasure is hidden on the one hand in the symbols of our mythological tradition, and on the other hand in man's unconscious psyche. CGJUNG

"A country that sees itself as chosen by God for a 'unique destiny and role in the world' is one that imagines itself having been granted license to play an outsize role."

2011-11-15T16:29:00.001-08:00

This should scare us. If only for its lack of reverence.

____________________________

"Finding the common potential for reverence is what enables us to see each other as human."
Bill Moyers Interviews Paul Woodruff BILL MOYERS: Three weeks after the terrorist attacks of 9/11, a small book appeared that I have now read twice to help me sort out what I think about that massacre and the world that both produced it and has now been shaped by it. This is the book: REVERENCE: RENEWING A FORGOTTEN VIRTUE. Paul Woodruff wrote it. Paul Woodruff teaches the humanities, philosophy at my alma mater, the University of Texas. He's a veteran of Vietnam, the author of four other books, one of America's foremost interpreters of Plato, Thucydides, and other Greek thinkers from the ancient world. Figuring out what they had to say to our world is Paul Woodruff's passion. Welcome to NOW. PAUL WOODRUFF: Thank you. BILL MOYERS: How do you define reverence? PAUL WOODRUFF: I think reverence is the capacity for awe in the face of the transcendent. BILL MOYERS: The transcendent being— PAUL WOODRUFF: It's whatever we human beings did not create: God, justice, the truth... BILL MOYERS: Beauty. PAUL WOODRUFF: Nature, beauty. BILL MOYERS: Death? PAUL WOODRUFF: Death is one of the most awe-inspiring facts of our lives. PAUL WOODRUFF: And I think complementary to the awe in the transcendent is a felt sense of our own mortality and our own limitations, our own tendency to make mistakes. BILL MOYERS: How does this create reverence? PAUL WOODRUFF: Realizing the— the distance between us and the ideals which we see as transcendent is the essence of reverence. Recognizing that, you know, we are— we are born to die and between the time we're born and the time we die, we'll— we'll probably make a number of significant mistakes, and realizing that this is true of other people as well as of ourselves, that we have a common— a common humanity and are all in the same way vulnerable. It's the virtue in— actually, in both the Greek and the Chinese system, I think, that protects the people who are most helpless from the people who are most powerful. When a victorious soldier kills a prisoner, that's a failure of reverence. When a ruler refuses to hear a suppliant, that's a failure of reverence. When you're utterly helpless, if you're an old person in a hospital, if you're a lonely minority teenager stopped on a road late at night by a policeman, you really have nothing between you and— and a terrible fate but the— what I would call the reverence of the powerful person in your life at that moment. The best clue to how reverent we are is how we treat the weakest people around us. BILL MOYERS: Why does reverence do that? Why is it responsible for that kind of humane, civil behavior that— that prevents a soldier from desecrating the body he has just created? PAUL WOODRUFF: Well you put it beautifully. Desecrating a body. The— the dead, of course, are the most helpless people from the Greek point of view and from any point of view. They are— a dead body is utterly helpless and vulnerable and to desecrate that is— is to cross— is to violate the— the sacred. Part of reverence is recognizing, you know, the lines that divide where we can step and what we can touch and what we can do from what we shouldn't. BILL MOYERS: You say, simply put, reverence is the virtue that keeps human beings from trying to act like gods. PAUL WOODRUFF: Perfect. (LAUGHTER) BILL MOYERS: Well said. PAUL WOODRUFF: Yeah. But it's very ... BILL MOYERS: You said that. PAUL WOODRUFF: Yeah. When people are powerful, they— they tend to fall into habits of acting as if they were divine. The— the cliche, of course, is power corrupts. But what— what the Greeks are noticing is that it corrupts in a very particular way. You think that you can't go wrong. You think that you can't be mistaken. You think that because you are not likely to be mistaken, you don't have to listen to other people. And those are all signs of tyranny and they're all signs of hubris. They all indicate a lack of— of - of respect for the difference between human beings and— and gods, which is the essence of reverence. BILL MOYERS: So reverence is something other than the worship of God. PAUL WOODRUFF: On my view, yes. And this came to me as a surprise, actually, because I had always been taught that for ancient peoples, reverence was sacrificing the appropriate number of goats or sheep or cattle or chickens or whatever so that the plague will be averted or we won't have an earthquake next year or whatever. What people have called "do a deus," "I give to the god, the god will give back to me." Then I— but as I— as I tried to translate this term and understand what it meant and why it was so important to the tragic poets like Sophocles, I realized that had nothing to do with it. Oedipus and the other tyrants are not in trouble because they didn't sacrifice enough chickens. It didn't have anything to do with that. It was about their attitude towards themselves and their— their failure to realize that they were not truly godlike. BILL MOYERS: Do you see evidence of reverence around you in your daily passages? PAUL WOODRUFF: Yes. When— when a family has dinner together or celebrates any other very humdrum sort of ritual, they are, I think, celebrating the reverent idea of— of the unity of a— of a family, which transcends each individual member of it. When a good teacher listens to a— to a student, when a good teacher in a classroom an atmosphere of reverence towards the truth which they're seeking to understand and learn, reverence is in play. When a game, you know, even a football game is— is well run, you know, and people respect the umpires and— and the players respect each other and the— the game is plainly not simply about the egos and the successes of the various players and coaches. When a group of musicians comes together and plays and their egos sort of drop away and they— they are simply serving the— the beauty of the music, that's— that's reverence. BILL MOYERS: The surprising thing in your book is when you say reverence has more to do with politics than religion. PAUL WOODRUFF: Reverence has to do with politics because I think reverence has more to do with human relations than it has to do with relations between human beings and God. It has to do with human relations because it's expressed in— in families, in hierarchies, in human structures of all kinds. And when it's violated in the ways that are most important, it's— it's violated between one human being and another. BILL MOYERS: You've actually said that reverence is— is crucial to the health of a community, of a family, of an army. PAUL WOODRUFF: Right. BILL MOYERS: Of a political party, of a nation. PAUL WOODRUFF: All of that. BILL MOYERS: Why? PAUL WOODRUFF: Well, for the— for the ancient Greeks, there were two complementary primary virtues, justice and reverence. And justice by itself you might think is enough to have a sound community. But the Greeks understood that it was not. Justice works between equals and when justice has been done, usually there's a winner and a loser. Reverence is about sort of gluing together a society where there are big differences in power or big differences in wealth or big differences in strength and involve— and— and creating avenues of respect and languages of— for the expression of respect between people who might otherwise not be able to— to function in the same community. BILL MOYERS: You tell a story in here of the woman Janis who never voted and tells you she never will. She thinks Tweedle-Dee, Tweedle-Dum, it makes no difference. What's that got to do with reverence? PAUL WOODRUFF: Voting is one of the great ceremonies of democratic society. It's one of the ways that we come together as a community. And I think tradition soc— more tradition societies than ours that have a closer experience of ceremony and reverence vote in larger numbers. Seeing long lines of people who voted in South Africa when it first became possible for everyone to vote in South Africa was inspiring to me and I thought why— what are we missing here? And I think what we're missing here is the sense of the importance of that act to our being the community that we want to be. BILL MOYERS: There's a very moving passage here. I'd like to ask you just to— to read it right through the poem. PAUL WOODRUFF: As I write, the United States is in the supreme moment of its power. Not far from where England stood in 1897, when Kipling wrote "Recessional" as a reminder that power leads to arrogance and arrogance to a fall. The tumult and the shouting dies, the captains and the kings depart, still stands thine ancient sacrifice and humble and a contrite heart. If drunk with sight of power, we loose wild tongues that have not thee in awe, Lord God of hosts, be with us yet lest we forget, lest we forget. PAUL WOODRUFF: Kipling was the poet of empire, but he was also a poet of— of reverence. Remembering, not forgetting that we are mortal. Remembering, not forgetting that human enterprises, great governments, great powers eventually stumble and fall, as history teaches us. It's very dangerous to be powerful. Powerful people forget that they can make mistakes. I said this before. And powerful nations can forget that, too. BILL MOYERS: The essence of tragedy is overreaching, is it not? PAUL WOODRUFF: Exactly. And I— you can't, I think, understand tragedy without understanding why reverence was so important to the Greeks because overreaching destroys community. When— when people overreach, other people, of course, are angry and frightened. It's not just the— the gods who might resent you for overreaching. Other— other people do, too. And the— the possibility of your being accepted as a— as a genuine leader, as a legitimate king is undercut by your overreaching. BILL MOYERS: I saw that happen to Lyndon Johnson when he overreached in that war which you were part— you were in Vietnam in what, '69? PAUL WOODRUFF: '69 to '70. BILL MOYERS: How do you think that experience influenced your thinking about all this? PAUL WOODRUFF: Enormously. I— I went to Vietnam as someone who was partially trained in classical scholarship for whom it was a diversion. I came back from Vietnam thinking that I really shouldn't do anything that didn't matter to people's lives. It was hard for me to figure out how to pursue a scholarly life in the way that I'd been taught and take on issues that really matter to people. BILL MOYERS: Well, there are some people who say that nothing matters less to us today than the lives and thinking of 3000-year-old dead Greeks. PAUL WOODRUFF: Well, I think they're wrong. The— the Greeks were extraordinarily observant about the human condition. And they— they were models to us, I think, in many ways. For example, this is one of the— the most important things to me about the ancient Greeks. Homer starts off the Greek tradition, after all, with THE ILIAD. And in THE ILIAD, the most human, the most sympathetic characters are the Trojans. They're not Greeks. They're going to be defeated. They're losing the war. And the least sympathetic figures are the Greeks. Agamemnon, who is really a tyrannical general, quite without reverence, Achilles, who flies into a rage and— and describes himself as a beast and acts like a beast through much of THE ILIAD. But the Trojans are human and the ability to see the enemy, the defeated, the about to be defeated enemy as human is— is something remarkable about the Greeks. With Hector, there's a wonderful scene just before they fight. Hector says, "Achilles, let's make a deal. Whichever one of us kills the other, we'll spare the body of the other and turn it over to his parents for proper burial." Achilles says, "Does the wolf make bargains with the lamb? I will kill you and I will leave your body to the dogs and the vultures." And they fight and indeed that's what Achilles sets out to do. When he returns the body of Hector to Hector's father, he does so because he remembers his own father. And in remembering his own father he remembers his humanity and sees what there is in common between him and Hector, which up to now he's been denying on the grounds that they're enemies. BILL MOYERS: And in your world, the wolf does make bargains with the lamb out of reverence for the weak. PAUL WOODRUFF: In my world, we're not wolves or lambs. We are human beings in this together and finding the common bond, finding the— finding the common experiences and the common emotions. Finding the common potential for reverence is what enables us to see each other as human. BILL MOYERS: You write, "If a religious group thinks and acts and speaks as God commands in all things, this is a failure of reverence." That's what you mean. PAUL WOODRUFF: Right. BILL MOYERS: It is some people's notion of the sacred that— that frightens some of us. I mean, the men who hijacked the planes and drove them into the World Trade Center, into the Pentagon, they did it in the name of— of Allah, of God. It's there in their manuals and their instruction books. PAUL WOODRUFF: Right. BILL MOYERS: I mean, it's— it's when they think they're on a sacred mission that I think some of us have to worry. PAUL WOODRUFF: Absolutely. And I— I think that one of the most devastating ways to be irreverent is to think that you know the literal mind of God and that you are carrying out God's will, that you are God's instrument in what you do. We don't— we don't know the divine that well. And partly because they were unable to see, recognize the— the humanity they share with the— the many innocent people they killed. BILL MOYERS: Tell me the story of Iphigenia. PAUL WOODRUFF: Yeah. This is famous. Agamemnon was leading the Greek army against Troy. They needed a favorable wind in order to cross the Aegean Sea to get from Greece to Troy and the winds kept coming the wrong way. So he consulted the prophet. The prophet said if you sacrifice your daughter Iphigenia or Iphigenia— you can say it any way you want— if you sacrifice your daughter, you will have fair winds. So he sent a message to his wife saying, "I found a bridegroom for Iphigenia. Bring her in her wedding dress and we'll have an altar and everything will be ready." Well, she went to the altar and there was no bridegroom. There was her father there with a knife. The Roman poet Lucretius, describes this scene and then ends with a ringing line, "So much evil religion can bring about," and it certainly can. BILL MOYERS: Because? PAUL WOODRUFF: Because religion is not always reverent. Religious wars represent a failure, I think, to recognize the common human experience of reverence in different religions. The— the great Israeli poet of peace, Yehuda Amichai, who died a few years ago, wrote in his last long poem a canto that has the theme, "Gods come and go, but prayer is forever." And the English poet of war, Rudyard Kipling, said something like that in— in one of the poems he wrote for his novel, KIM, and he's speaking of a— of a man who's worshipping a burnished idol. And he says, "His god is as his fates assign/His prayer is all the world's, and thine." Both poets in very— in different ways, I think, were trying to get at the same idea that if we can get beyond differences in articulate belief and focus on the— the reverence that is possible in the different religious traditions and the— the human vulnerability, the human needs which are represented in our common prayers, gods come and go, but prayer is forever. It's a very powerful line. BILL MOYERS: Paul Woodruff, thank you for joining us. REVERENCE: RENEWING A FORGOTTEN VIRTUE is a wonderful book. PAUL WOODRUFF: Thank you. © Public Affairs Television. All rights reserved. http://www.pbs.org/now/transcript/transcript_woodruff.html Remember this, when you Lay waste to the land of Troy: Be reverent to the gods. Nothing matters more, as Zeus the father knows. Reverence is not subject to the deaths of men; They live, they die, but reverence shall not perish. ~Heracles, speaking to leaders of the Greeks, in Sophocles' Philoctetes (lines 1439-44)

The Midas Formula

2011-11-14T08:51:00.001-08:00

By The Sea

2011-11-13T09:33:00.001-08:00

Science, murder, sex and Victorian secrets... Delicious, yes?

book excerpt VB&B

2011-11-12T10:23:00.001-08:00

She closed her eyes. So many feelings were knocking around in her, things that were at war. She was getting a cold; she was exhausted. As the car turned corner after corner, queuing at stoplights, she felt she might be sick. A horn honked, followed by another. They were in the financial district. It was still Ashton Locksley’s, this part of the world. Here, by fate and destiny, he’d moved mountains of money. Yet these modern materialists made his mountain paltry.

She wondered, how many Millionaires in America? A dime a dozen, weren’t they? And they moved their mountains invisibly, with a click of a button.

All these anonymous investors feeding all these invisible schemes. If they fed malice, unbalanced fate, raped the very earth, they wouldn’t know it. Some made it their philosophy not to know or care; it was their right, their dominion over whole planets.

Progress. Ashton made the world of steel and light from living souls and living blood. And now? Bright lights, cars like tanks steaming in the rain, everything encased within emblems of status. All of the arrogance, the bombastic luxury, the endless gray buildings made of things that never lived. Everything that touched the flesh was synthetic, and sometimes, the flesh was too. The important eyes she looked into often seemed like shards cut off from all that sprang from timelessness, the timelessness that meets us in dream.

Can there be a future if we don’t first imagine it, hope for it? A future beyond us? Who had hoped for this?

What you should know about the Messianic movement

2011-11-12T09:39:00.001-08:00

http://calebcompany.com/pdf/12-07-In-defense-of-Israel.pdf

http://jewishisrael.ning.com/profiles/blogs/messianic-attorney-calev-myers-speech-nixed-at-durban-3-protest

http://www.jewishjournal.com/opinion/article/messianic_truth_in_advertising_20080625/

http://www.jewsonfirst.org/evangelizing.aspx

about that common good...

2011-11-10T09:45:00.001-08:00

while watching Charlie Rose

2011-11-09T20:43:00.001-08:00

Bob Lutz begins by blaming government regulation for doing in GM (and the housing bubble), forgetting that American car makers happily chose to whore themselves to creating and actively marketing (you want this, America! SUV's make you HAPPY, small cars KILL you) big cars in the service of sucking down big oil, just as big oil happily sucked down government subsidies (free market rules, praise Jesus!) and set their lobby loose on said government to murder the very regulations that would have saved the American auto industry -- not to mention freeing us from a lot of CO2 emissions. Anyway -- he was followed by Tesla's Elon Musk, and I found myself pulling out notes from 2010:

I remember being upset when the plane that carried a senior electrical engineer, a senior interactive electronics manager, and an electrical engineer from Tesla Motors went down last February, killing all three:

"Although they weren't executives in the company, these three guys are the type of guys who were doing the work, who were doing the innovative stuff that makes Tesla what it is," Virag said. "Not all electrical vehicles are the same. In fact, they could differ considerably depending on the company." ~Dennis Virag, president of the Automotive Consulting Group in Ann Arbor, Mich.

But now good news; the electric car will not be stopped...

Why Toyota Is Interested in Telsa

EV World - ‎

SYNOPSIS: For $50 million, Toyota can play electric car catch-up and capitalize on Telsa's coolness factor. It's tough to say which company will benefit most from the new partnership between Japanese automotive giant Toyota Motor and American electric ...

Tesla beckons to the true believers MarketWatch

Inside Toyota's Tesla Play Forbes

San Jose Mercury News - The Atlantic - Nitrobahn - Wikipedia: Tesla
-------------

extra credit
last Jan: Toyota in Argentine lithium deal for hybrid car push

More Reuters Results for:

"Toyota in Argentine Lithium Deal for Hybrid Car Push"

Toyota in Argentine lithium deal for hybrid car push
Thu, Jan 21 2010
UPDATE 2-Toyota in Argentine lithium deal for hybrid car push
Tue, Jan 19 2010

moreover...

Automakers drive investment in lithium Toyota takes stake

-------
meanwhile
volt!

Former Chevy Volt Frontman Bob Lutz on GM’s Missteps
By Josie Garthwaite May. 19, 2010, 2:06pm PDT 3 Comments

"“Why is it that when you look at the best foreign companies — and it’s not that the foreign-owned companies have people who are smarter or work harder — what they have is senior management that didn’t go to business school.”
Blame it on b-school, at least in part. That’s what Bob Lutz — the General Motors executive who for years denied climate change, made his name with muscle cars and trucks and eventually came to champion the Chevy Volt — suggested Tuesday as one factor in the automaker’s missteps and financial troubles over the years. ... At GM, ... he said ... there was pressure to reduce hours per vehicle in manufacturing. “Nothing to do with customer. We had to take seminars on how to reduce die costs,” he said. “Nothing to do with customer….Instead of starting with the concept that we’re going to have the best car or truck, we had to compromise on that vision.” more...

Makes you think, don't it.

This, from around the time that Toyota was getting uber press for certain non-existent dangers.

Thank you, Occupy Chicago...

2011-11-08T14:11:00.001-08:00

for standing up for our children. Our nation. The things people have fought and died for. Symbiosis is the principle of things that endure. Scott Walker is a cancer.

I love it

2011-11-08T09:58:00.001-08:00

Occupy Mordor without leaving the Shire!

2011-11-08T07:55:00.001-08:00

legal stuff

and on the back of the Cap One envelope --
"0016542323019 isn't just MY PERSONAL "Customer locator code", it's YOURS TOO!!!"

Oscar. At work.

2011-11-06T08:21:00.001-08:00

2011-11-04T20:27:00.001-07:00

Car Plows into Crowd of Occupy D.C. Protesters in Northwest: MyFoxDC.com

more: press conference

TPM link

wapo's Tim Craig twitter feed

2 incidents involving the same driver

Sunday, 11:39 my google news search turns up :

DCist.com

Washington protesters hit by car, no visible injuries: police

Reuters - ‎21 hours ago‎

(Reuters) - Three activists protesting economic inequality were struck by a car and mildly injured late on Friday night as they attempted to block traffic near a gathering of conservatives in the nation's capital, police said on Saturday.

RelatedAraz Alali »

Driver Who Hit Occupy Protesters Was Not Taken Into Custody; Protesters Cited...DCist.com

The BlotterWashington Examiner

See all 16 sources »

Forbes

Police, Occupy DC Protesters Differ on Collision

ABC News - ‎14 hours ago‎

The driver slowed down, threw up his hands in apparent frustration and then drove forward, hittingthem, she said. Brandy Sippel, who is six months pregnant, was grazed by the car's rearview mirror. Heidi Sippel said she and her son were both hit by ...

WJLA

Witnesses differ over fault when car hit 3 protesters

WJLA - ‎15 hours ago‎

They were trying to block cars from driving past the convention center. ABC7's Mike Conneen talked with the protesters who were hit by the car, a family from Dayton, Ohio, including a 36-year-old pregnant woman and a 13-year old boy.

ThinkProgress

Protesters Hit By Car at End of Occupy March

NBC Bay Area - ‎Nov 3, 2011‎

As the protest was winding down around 8 pm, two participants were injured when a car hit them in what would have been an open intersection.

ABC News

Latest Developments in the Occupy Protests

ABC News - ‎17 minutes ago‎

MPD and Occupy D.C. Offer Different Versions of Collision: DCist

dcist.com/2011/11/mpd_and_occupy_dc_offer_different_v.php

1 hour ago – MPD said the driver, 38-year-old Shawn Valentine of Clinton, Md., was not cited because he had a green light when his vehicle struck three ...

Get more results from the past 24 hours

Desire Is Holy

2011-11-01T08:09:00.000-07:00

New book out about Dante Gabriel Rossetti.
Review here.

Publisher's blurb, via Amazon:

Dante Gabriel Rossetti is the most intriguing and flamboyant figure in nineteenth-century British art. He inspired the first Pre-Raphaelite generation of 1849 and the second generation ten years later and both brought about significant changes in British art. His poetry, too, acted as a stimulus to many writers at the end of the century, who saw in his subtle manipulation of the sonnet and the ballad forms ways of giving expression to issues that were peculiar to the that century.

Dominant among those issues was that of sexual desire, for Rossetti, more than any other artist in this period, struggled with the contradictions of sexuality. When he died in 1882 people knew of him as the painter of alluring women with exotic names - Lilith, Monna Vanna, Fiammetta - and the writer of subtly erotic verse. He projected onto women his anxieties, his pleasures and his needs. He also mythologized them, so that Elizabeth Siddal, Fanny Cornforth, Jane Morris and others became for him Beatrice, Guenevere, and Isolde. In doing so he shaped them, he changed the direction of their lives, and in some cases he both made and destroyed them.

This richly illustrated book, by tracing the development of Rossetti's painting and poetry in the context of the drama of his life, follows this powerful thread. Sometimes sensual, at others spiritual, Rossetti's mission was to transcend the Manichean division that separated body and soul and, through the visionary power of art, reconcile what he saw as elements fundamental to human experience.

Italics mine.

"Dominant among those issues was that of sexual desire, for Rossetti, more than any other artist in this period, struggled with the contradictions of sexuality."Have to read the book. But I do know Mr. Rossetti rather well--and for him, sexual desire doesn't begin to contain him. When he says Hand painted the Soul, he's speaking of serving big L libido -- which is life force itself, Beauty as harbinger, lo! emanation of the Good. Religion of Art? Oh yes. And I tend to fancy him (a whole book's worth, to what green altar, O mysterious priest) as Corbin-style Sufi by way of an occult Dante, magician philosopher in the old style roots of Western tradition -- saying in Heart's Hope

For lo ! in some poor rhythmic period, Lady, I fain would tell how evermore Thy soul I know not from thy body, nor Thee from myself, neither our love from God.

Maybe someone should buy the book for Ken Russell.

That odd, punishing nature. Rossetti had no understanding of it.

"There was also a famous Orphic poem, written by a Pythagorean in southern Italy. Hardly any traces of it have been allowed to survive. It presented Orpheus making his journey to the underworld in another state of consciousness, in a kind of dream. And the poem described him as making one major discovery that he brought back to the world of the living. This was the fact that Apollo shares his powers with Night."

~Peter Kingsley

THE MARES that carry me as far as longing can reach
rode on, once they had come and fetched me onto the legendary
road of the divinity that carries the man who knows
through the vast and dark unknown. And on I was carried
as the mares, aware just where to go, kept carrying me
straining at the chariot; and the young woman led the way.
And the axle in the hubs let out the sound of a pipe
blazing from the pressure of the two well-rounded wheels
at either side, as they rapidly led on: young women, girls,
daughters of the Sun who had left the mansions of Night
for the light and pushed back the veils from their faces
with their hands.
These are the gates of the pathways of Night and Day,
held fast in place between the lintel above and a threshold of stone;
and they reach up into the heavens, filled with gigantic doors.
And the keys — that now open, now lock — are held fast by
Justice: she who always demands exact returns. And with
soft seductive words the girls cunningly persuaded her to
push back immediately, just for them, the bar that bolts
the gates. And as the doors flew open, making the bronze
axles with their pegs and nails spin — now one, now the other —
in their pipes, they created a gaping chasm. Straight through and
on the girls held fast their course for the chariot and horses,
straight down the road.
And the goddess welcomed me kindly, and took
my right hand in hers and spoke these words as she addressed me:
'Welcome young man, partnered by immortal charioteers,
reaching our home with the mares that carry you. For it was
no hard fate that sent you travelling this road — so far away
from the beaten track of humans — but Rightness, and Justice.
And what's needed is for you to learn all things: both the unshaken
heart of persuasive Truth and the opinions of mortals,
in which there's nothing that can truthfully be trusted at all.
But even so, this too you will learn — how beliefs based on
appearance ought to be believable as they travel all through
all there is. *
~Parmeneides Translation from Peter Kingsley

As far as longing can reach. Kingsley -- and Rossetti -- remind us that longing is thumos, the energy of life itself.

Betwixt the sun and moon a mystery

Now Sleeps the Crimson Petal

2011-11-01T07:49:00.000-07:00

White peacock. Pure alchemy.

Daring song, Becky Sharp. Especially since Tennyson won't write the words for a few decades. No matter. It's perfection, and she can't resist being irresistible. (O Fortuna!) Nice one, Reese. And isn't James Purefoy , standing in the doorway (of course), wonderful here. Break my heart, y'all.

Now sleeps the crimson petal, now the white;
Nor waves the cypress in the palace walk;
Nor winks the gold fin in the porphyry font:
The firefly wakens: waken thou with me.

Now droops the milkwhite peacock like a ghost,
And like a ghost she glimmers on to me.

Now lies the Earth all Danae to the stars,
And all thy heart lies open unto me.

Now slides the silent meteor on, and leaves
A shining furrow, as thy thoughts in me.

Now folds the lily all her sweetness up,
And slips into the bosom of the lake:
So fold thyself, my dearest, thou, and slip
Into my bosom and be lost in me.

Tennyson, The Princess: A Medley

*********
Since we passed this way:

Memorize this: Abrams’s favorite erotic poem

By joe - Last updated: Tuesday, October 6, 2009 -

Yesterday, at his epic talk on the fourth dimension of a poem, MH Abrams revealed the poem he says contains “the most explosively concentrated erotic charge in all poetry:” Tennyson’s “Now Sleeps the Crimson Petal.” I can’t recreate for those who missed the talk Abrams’s tender reading of the poem, but I will say that he is very sure that the “now” at the beginning of each stanza must be emphasized, iambic pentameter be damned.

Here’s the poem—get crackin’ on the memorizin’ so you can woo some sweetheart!
Now sleeps the crimson petal, now the white;
Nor waves the cypress in the palace walk;
Nor winks the gold fin in the porphyry font:
The firefly wakens: waken thou with me.
Now droops the milkwhite peacock like a ghost,
And like a ghost she glimmers on to me.
Now lies the Earth all Danae to the stars,
And all thy heart lies open unto me.
Now slides the silent meteor on, and leaves
A shining furrow, as thy thoughts in me.
Now folds the lily all her sweetness up,
And slips into the bosom of the lake:
So fold thyself, my dearest, thou, and slip
Into my bosom and be lost in me.

Bullblog tip-off: Enter the fourth Dimension!

By miranda - Last updated: Monday, October 5, 2009 -

From 4:00 to 5:30 the literary critic M.H. Abrams will be giving a talk “The Fourth Dimension of a Poem” in LC 101. His former student Harold Bloom will introduce Mr. Abrams who is now 97 years old! If you’re lucky, he’ll explain this graphic which is supposed to explain his classification of literary theories… or maybe it’s another dimension??

Size Matters

2011-11-01T06:27:00.000-07:00

But it isn't everything.

Blue, blue

2011-10-31T15:51:00.000-07:00

Not really interested in psychoanalysis -- breaking up the psyche. But I am very much interested in mythos, in Psyche as she lives in us.

I think it was good to grow up Catholic with those Buddhist liberal nuns I had. Ritual and Guardian Angels are a great gift to a child. They build imagination. I think of so many who haven't a clue about anything but the literal. No awareness of the inner daemon, an important understanding that's been degraded, twisted, and simplified into a belief in evil. It's what makes so many adults ripe for evangelicals and so many religions not for adults.

At Delphi: Know thyself. Can't be bad.

+++++++++

The unconscious is not a demonical 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

+++++++++

New York Times October 27, 2011James Hillman, Therapist in Men’s Movement, Dies at 85By BENEDICT CAREY
Interesting headline, therapist in men's movement: Hillman boiled down and reduced, saucy Jem!

And the below gifts from Samten -- take the links, mull with care, and call me in the morning!

James Hillman, Alchemical Blue and the Unio Mentalishttp://www.pantheatre.com/pdf/6-reading-list-JH-blue.pdf

James Hillman, The Azure Vaulthttp://www.adepac.org/Ingles/IP01-7.htm Lecture given at the XVI International Congress on Analytical Psychology, Barcelona, Spain, September 2004.

See also: Michel Pastoureau, Blue. The History of a Color, Princeton University Press, 2001.

And:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distinguishing_blue_from_green_in_language

the odyssey

2011-10-30T09:38:00.000-07:00

via Annenberg Learner

thick as a brick

2011-10-29T11:34:00.001-07:00

Important series. And watch : what denial and inflation at 6:36. This guy from the Kennel Club, their "geneticist" -- saying --"What would have been if they'd done nothing?", etc. His facial gymnastics tell us he thinks he has an unassailable brilliant insight, as he misses the point that nothing has been done -- certainly nothing by the Kennel Club, whose place it is to act -- even after the problem was found. But a clue to the problem of change, the wall created by unexamined social identity. It's the baboon finding the cheetah kitten hidden in the grass. Always the fooking baboon.

Feed your soul

2011-10-28T08:56:00.000-07:00

Not your average Sweet Potatoes.Great stuff from Robin Ellis, and not just for diabetics! I've cut out sugar entirely and feel great.

James Hillman has passed

2011-10-27T12:05:00.000-07:00

Irreplaceable. With deepest gratitude for your work.more

Sally, go to your room.

2011-10-27T11:03:00.001-07:00

Silly Daily Mail

Malkitty

2011-10-27T10:41:00.000-07:00

Stealing Libby's lair.

"Listen, Moirai (Fates) ... hear our prayers ... send us rose-bloomed Eunomia (Good Order in civic government) and her bright-throned sisters Dike (Justice) and garland-wearing Eirene (Peace), and make this city forget its heavy-hearted misfortunes." - Greek Lyric V Anonymous Fragments 1018 (from Stobaeus, Anthology)

2011-10-25T13:52:00.001-07:00

WHY

2011-10-25T10:59:00.001-07:00

The time is now. Your time is now.