Holy Smoke

From 2001

Keep breathing...
 A dialogue: HOLY SMOKE


Anand said:

<<Saw Holy Smoke, Deb. I enjoyed it, but my friends couldn't relate to it. Unconventional (and disturbing— perhaps more so for a male, you think?) movie. In fact, offhand I can't think of any man I know who would like the movie. Interesting how the tables were turned, unexpectedly but very plausibly. [The bitchy "I won! Admit it, I won!" Kick the guy's balls when he's down! After he objectified her initially.] >>

from Deborah:
Hi Anand.

A Heretic's Journey

PARIS 

Shown to me were reproductions of two paintings by the Spanish master Pedro Berruguete depicting scenes from the life and works of St. Dominic. The originals hang in the Prado in Madrid.4 In one, heretics are being burned. The pyres are beginning to catch fire; the victims are bound to stakes so that they cannot escape, and soon they will be living torches. The second picture shows St. Dominic busy burning books; already the parchments are smoldering. One book, however, rises high in the air: Having found the favor of the God of Rome, it was spared.

I bought Martin Luther’s translation of the Bible in the rue de la Seine because I wanted to read the Book of Isaiah again. In it, he explains how Lucifer fell from heaven and was damned by Yahweh:

How have you fallen from the heavens, O glowing morning star; been cut down to the ground O conqueror of nations? For thou hast said in thine heart, I will ascend into heaven, I will exalt my throne above the stars of God: I will sit also upon the mount of the congregation, in the sides of the north: I will ascend above the heights of the clouds; I will be like the most High. Yet thou shalt be brought down to hell, to the sides of the pit. But thou art cast out of thy grave like an abominable branch, and as the Raiment of those that are slain, thrust through with a sword, that goes down to the stones of the pit; as a carcass trodden under feet. Thou shalt not be joined with them in burial, because thou hast destroyed thy land, and slain thy people: the seed of evildoers shall never be renowned. Prepare slaughter for his children for the iniquity of their fathers; that they do not rise, nor possess the land, nor fill the face of the world with cities. The LORD of hosts hath sworn, saying, Surely as I have thought, so shall it come to pass; and as I have purposed, so shall it stand: This is the purpose that is purposed upon the whole earth: and this is the hand that is stretched out upon all the nations. For the LORD of hosts hath purposed, and who shall disannul it? and his hand is stretched out, and who shall turn it back? I am the LORD, and there is none else, there is no God beside me: I girded thee, though thou hast not known me: That they may know from the rising of the sun, and from the west, that there is none beside me. I am the LORD, and there is none else. I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil. Woe unto him that striveth with his Maker! Let the potsherd strive with the potsherds of the earth. Shall the clay say to him that fashioneth it, What makest thou? or thy work, He hath no hands? Woe unto him that saith unto his father, What begettest thou? or to the woman, What hast thou brought forth?5 

While Martin Luther’s German-language translation of the Bible refers to God as “Herr Zebaoth” or “Yahweh Zebaoth,” the King James Bible translates the term into English as “Lord of the Hosts.” Zebaoth or Lord of the Hosts comes from the Hebrew YHVH Tzva’ot, which is a clear reference to sovereignty and military power. Curiously, the term never appears in the Torah, although it is used in the prophetic books of Isaiah, Jeremiah, Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi, as well as many times in the Psalms and in the Apocalypse. There is some confusion: Does it indicate the Lord of Israel, or some other cosmological demiurge? In the Gnostic scriptures of the Nag Hammadi text, Zebaoth is the son of Yaltabaoth. Perhaps this is explained by the Latinized spelling of Sabaoth, which led to him being confused with the god Sabazius.

Rahn, Otto. Lucifer's Court: A Heretic's Journey in Search of the Light Bringers (pp. 4-6). Inner Traditions/Bear & Company

Worry Stones Or Shared Memories

The Troubled Man: A Kurt Wallander Mystery
by Henning Mankell (Author), Laurie Thompson (Translator)June 12, 2016

I could feel it there, reading, just as Wallander senses that we often know more than we realize: Henning Mankell, sensing his own early end.

I think of Wallander winding down, sleeping out beneath the sky. Using a stone as a pillow. And his pilgrimage to his childhood, searching out and finding his carved initials left on a hidden stone, the energy that drives life, making it's "mark"...

Worry stones or shared memories, do we really know each other, even our closest friends?

Do we only know each other in memory, that fleeting effervescence that we truly are?

victorian archives (via Victoria list)

in need of a "profound modification of the human imagination."

Shy one, shy one, 

Shy one of my heart, 

She moves in the firelight 

Pensively apart. 

She carries in the dishes, 

And lays them in a row. 

To an isle in the water 

With her would I go. 

She carries in the candles, 

And lights the curtained room, 

Shy in the doorway 

And shy in the gloom; 

And shy as a rabbit, 

Helpful and shy. 

To an isle in the water 

With her would I fly.

~WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS

alchemy

enter

Without my dark

Without my dark, 

you would have no desires. 

No strengths in your urges, ambitions, or achievements.


Descent

I cross the rivers of Hades

in sleep:

Carl Jung

7 planets, 7 notes, 7 colors leaves us arguing is it blue or green.

That we (actually) see spectrum by its inherent energy isn't so surprising. Quanta. Bursts of change. (Though transformation can be sticky. So many variables. Shades and shadow. Bring me my individuation toolkit, James.) Thus, the model of the sudden aha between separate beings trying to share thought, or even a single mind grasping suddenly what was so elusive, isn't so very strange.

And that understanding becomes tool as well as filter. Light can be blinding.

But "cause", "effect" -- these are time and space bound, as is even the extrapolated idea of "creator" (with all its good /evil baggage). Because time and space are properties of (at one with) matter.

Being in the body is contingent on these circumstances.... though imagination can pierce that circumference. Perhaps.

Jung spoke about and from the human experience. Which is all we know or can know. Science and Art provide us with suspicions beyond this filter. Jung was simply applying these tools to the mind, taking the physician's toolkit (biology, physics) beyond mere flesh.

Hard, dissecting a living being.



That dream of his in adolescence of churches being shat on: important work. We're still vomiting up the apple.

Which is why I asked Mats what he meant by meaningful. There are so many ready to tell us, who insist to the point of blood. Jung was often warning about that tendency. The apple again. The one that gave us the power to be god. That divides the world in black and white. No end of high back boots, tall hats, burnings and beheadings (the ultimate shadow metaphor) inherent in that forbidden fruit.

BTW -- on the earlier Jung Circle, and "not being allowed to criticize" Jung. That was simply because we sought to build a comfortable house to apply, experience, and share. The other Jung houses were so quickly (and with great glee) burned down. (Did you read Kerr's book? Psychology and all its complexes.)

Where could the artists go to simply talk about their experience? We came together and drew a temenos and invited Dionysos in. Because, summoned or not, he is there. (Vocatus atqua non vocatus deus aderit, the phrase carved about Jung's door in Küsnacht.) Jung just asks us to consider that point. Be it in shared collective big dreams, Campbellian symbols, the wonder of Bruno's art of memory (bless you, Aby Warburg, the true ekphrasis -- which explains the neoplatonism of Jung), or even in the embrace of the best intentions of empiricism.

What a strange psychology to deny Psyche.

an interstitial aside

elvis costello says you have to learn to write in the dark so you won't forget what comes to you there. my legal pad this a.m. said:

1. growth is the holy
2. we are our ideas
3. the past is initiation
4. community fosters the growth of the individual

given: we live our lives as individuals yet ^
(in a balloon off to side:)
why the fascination w/ mysticism (e.g., say, late antiquity's neoplatonic revival): what is in the time that...? ---> (circles back)

community is to ideas
as
body is to mind
propaganda a manipulation of conscious thought through unconscious thought.
uc: space of thinking
Jung: uc space of Self
---> religion ---> rules that shape thought, know the rules, shape the action. 

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and so dark was saying what?

+++++++++

what is the space btwn inner and outer? where is it? that space the two share is the stage where the Greeks met their gods, a physical statement, a place where all can meet. fixed in time, moved by eros, theatre the meeting of mortals and immortals.

film is this too, but film is not married to time. which both limits and expands what it can do.

the temple is the eye of the polis. and so is the stage.

analogs:

the physical timespace manifestation of that personified messenger, the daemon Hermes / Dionysos... your birth star... all of these.

novel is an inner / outer meeting space, a "stage" for the daemon.
unfixed in time and space.

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6/3/2011