NOTE: ONE - I have re-titled my post (see long title) after, now, 11 years of it being "Warren's Words" which was titled thusly by my friend Maria with whom I monthly published, along with mutual friend Joan, a newsletter. Since my pieces tended to be run-on and long we decided that I should start a blog for readers of my essays to link onto from excerpts published in the newsletter. Since I often spoke of etymology of words in my classes, my counseling sessions, my dream groups and my articles, Maria came up with "Warren's Words" as a kind of brand or trademark of much of my focus, words and the meanings of words and how they do indeed shape reality.
TWO: Since there is no more newsletter to regularly publish in, and since I no longer teach regularly, etc. my writing subjects are more difuse, less formal, appear to arrive more aphoristically than linearly, which greatly reminds me of one of my favorite writers/thinkers, Samuel Beckett, and of his genius "Lucky's Speech" in the massively marvelous play, Waiting For Godot, a proof text for me for all of humanity's productions in Time, thus my new title, Beckett-esque and much of Lucky too, with a deep bow toward Friedrich Nietzsche, my funny bone and milk teeth toward the haunt of Deity always aching and demanding attention (and medication).
NOW: This, a loose synchronicity hovering around the Mike Pence/Theonomy riffs I posted on Facebook yesterday (you may read these rambles appended below this one).
TWO: Since there is no more newsletter to regularly publish in, and since I no longer teach regularly, etc. my writing subjects are more difuse, less formal, appear to arrive more aphoristically than linearly, which greatly reminds me of one of my favorite writers/thinkers, Samuel Beckett, and of his genius "Lucky's Speech" in the massively marvelous play, Waiting For Godot, a proof text for me for all of humanity's productions in Time, thus my new title, Beckett-esque and much of Lucky too, with a deep bow toward Friedrich Nietzsche, my funny bone and milk teeth toward the haunt of Deity always aching and demanding attention (and medication).
NOW: This, a loose synchronicity hovering around the Mike Pence/Theonomy riffs I posted on Facebook yesterday (you may read these rambles appended below this one).
There are alternative communities, socio-political mystics of various strains/hybrids in reaction to fundamentalists cults such are major world religions but it seems fundamentalisms all kinds are a preservative intent to "save" the original kindling archetypal spark/spur an individual encountered, shared, gathered a following who also want the same or similar encounter with that primal SIZZLE which, alas, always fizzles via adulterations upon adulterations of the original experience then the hermaneutics upon hermaneutics and arguments thereof.
These hermaneutics/interpretations are alway subjective though there are proclamations of so-called objectivity via revealed revelations experientially, orally passed on, written and otherwise....evenso, in spite of, on the other hand qua qua qua qua, some persistent universal multifaceted verb geist's humanity, if not Creation Entire, and so space and time bludgeoned individuals try to, attempt to, parse and describe this essentially ineffible VERB, not an IT but an -ING (as in be-ing/exist-ing) always mercurially flashing various facets/guises then disappearing into opposties and on and on and on so what, what, Virginia, remains to be said of that which ghosts/haunts/taunts human consciousness since its inception (yes, Virginia, there is an origin and history of consciousness)....
...all this above is to say this poem arrived today, not an earth shaker or star breaker but has some "say and sway" in it, in Poem-a-day, an Irish poet, mystic, activist, peacemaker from the Corrymeela Community of Northern Ireland (never heard of till this morning when poem-a-day arrived in my inbox)....
The goal and the grind (to use a word from the poem below) is cultivating and starting over and over again and again a healthy enough, honest enough, earnest enough relationship to the shadow, personal and archetypal (the personal is born of archetypal shadow). Shadow, the word, the concept, has made its way into media and common (enough) vernacular which is a good thing but it also, the concept, the word, like all good things, is adulterated by use as concept and word but who, really, is actually seriously doing shadow work? thus the "sin" of projecting the shadow instead of owning one's own curds and turds of it, AND the numbing/deadening/depotentiating condition of glibness about a very real and living psychological reality, the Shadow, human and Divine.
So, Theodore Roethke questions in a poem, "Was I too glib about eternal things?" This question also extends to psychological things, especially the Shadow. Yes. It's easy to talk about it, write about it but to actually do the daily grind and humbling humiliation of the work is another experience altogether. All too easy, how well I know, to project that shadow outward, and I daily/hourly do, instead of find, say, my "inner Drumf n Pounce" or who/whatever...thus I/we war with shadow 'out there' (and, yes, we must when it becomes a leader, a celebrity, a murderer, a hero or anti-hero, etc.) but there is the more important inner work with shadow. We need shadow workers and sin eaters (google it) now, not bliss ninny light bringers who have transcended (bypassed) so much so that they dwell, or so they think, with the angels, change their names and language games (google it) to reflect such, flick their shadows away - "namaste olé" - (for others to carry and work with when they need to do their own work) with spiritual sleights of hand and hibbity glibbity magical words they believe can dispense - "namaste au lait" - shadow into vapor (but actually transfers it upon others to carry and work with).
The point is, do your own shadow work while working collective and cultural and political manifestations of shadow at the same time (I'm preaching to myself here, reminding myself here to do the hard work of shadow work while busy projecting and preaching thumb and forefinger flailing and wailing (wankering often) away at that one or those ones out there, much evidence too, who are our collective shadow carriers we've "dreamed up" from Presidents to Columbines/Sandy Hooks, Iraq invasions, the whole sorry tragic lot of human history (though we got and still get some good music, art, books, music, science, etc. from the the mess n muck of civilization (syphilisation mostly) - read Freud's 'Civilization and Its Discontents' viz the contents created/born of the conflict that is human consciousness which creates/over spills into 'civilization'.
Carl Jung believed that individuals doing shadow work in good faith has a more efficient mitigating effect on collective manifestations of shadow, the Hitlers, Putins, Trumps, McConnells, Kavanaughs, Netanyahus, et al whom we collectively dream up to do our dirty work...cue instructive Steeley Dan tune here, "I'm a fool to do your dirty work..." To each their own dirty work done in good faith...in so doing, person by person the collective and, yes, the Shadow of God is transformed gazillion light years ahead unless there is enough folks doing it and eventually speeding that process of integration up.
More of folks like these, shadow workers, sin eaters, please, instead of Pencetawny Phils who are afraid of their own and collective shadows so go back into Fundamentalist/Evangelical/Reactionary holes in the ground (their heads up OUR asses) and shout shiboleths and sanctimonious slogans about their own shadows projected upon others...or go into mystical bliss ninny upwardly vertical (aka schizoid) splits away from material incarnate reality into light, into air to dwell and view from way up there with no shadows at all (they think, pray, hope, believe, they have escaped). OY. Many ways to escape the ground but results are the same.
Some years ago I read this about a notorious, eccentric and brilliant psychoanalytic mystic with a Jungian bent, and this was clarion to my own turning away from spiritual bypassing:
"Peter Redgrove's account of his therapeutic work and apprenticeship with the late John Layard, Jungian analyst extraordinaire. Redgrove writes:
Very early on... I was lucky enough to meet a great and widely known analyst, John Layard...a striking man, in his late seventies when I met him. He had snow-white hair that was worn long and flowed over his collar like steam boiling from a pot. His face in repose had a profound listening quality, and he was very tall. In the centre of his forehead, just above the eyebrows, was a small, round, skin-covered hole in the bone, like a third eye-socket. It was a bullet-hole, from when he had once tried to commit suicide, and you could tell if you had managed to interest him because it would beat with a pulse like a drum. When he knew you well, he would take out his denture for comfort, and then you could see that when he was absorbed in what you were saying he would salivate copiously...he told me he was a sin-eater, and that was why his mouth watered. I protested in the name of common sense; he replied, 'We've had enough of that. What we need is uncommon sense.' --pgs xiii-xiv, from the "Introduction," The Black Goddess and the Sixth Sense, Paladin Books, 1989"
A long, too too long and verbose intro to this poem that arrived in my inbox this morning, an excerpt:
And on the first day
god made
something up.....
....girth and grind
and grit and shit and all shit’s functions;
rings inside the treetrunk
and branches broken by the snow;
pigs’ hearts and stars,
