Media noche de Distrito Federales, Mexico City, Mexico, December 2008
"It is night and now do all sleeping fountains wake." -- Zarathustra, in Nietzsche's Thus Spake Zarathustra
A Rule to break: Let sleeping dogs lie. -- Folk saying
A Rule to Follow: "Now, gods, stand up for bastards." -- Edmond, in King Lear by William Shakespeare
Now enter Diogenes Teufelsdrochk (taken from Thomas Carlyle's nom de plume for his satire, Sartor Resartus (The Tailor Retailored). Diogenes in Greek means god begotten. Teufelsdrockh translates from the German as donkey dung".
(God Begotten Donkey Dung blinking awake from sleep) "Damn those fountains! Can't a man sleep for godsakes? Burbling away all night while silent by day!! What was the dream?...ah...yes...
here
in this dream | |
I have fallen out of heaven.
Yea, verily, I have been thrown out by the very deities I tried to play footsies with who acted like they wanted it and then offended angels perceiving me a human rival tossed my fleece socks down upon me as an afterthought. Not a kindness, mind, but an insult to socks and sockitude and what they do. Still, the hurt is and was immense here now hanging on at the familiar perimeter, the Fenetre Fence, recompense for my offending hubris. And all I did was suggest! In the concrete world of Heaven suggestions are creations, coagulate accretions taken for fundamentals. There there is no poetry. No art. A fart becomes instantly too, too solid. Becomes reality creation. Becomes manifest and a curse upon Heaven and Earth for we are tempted to think that whatever is thought is a hard thing. This is a temptation. One of the worst and is an idolatry most foul.
It is the human imagination which is most truly, profoundly creative, with subtleties upon subtleties unfolding, infolding. Resonances unending. Effulgent, ever indulgent in proliferation of World and worlds and gradations never fading except into pastel shades hinting in visual whispers, "There is more..."
Whereas Heaven, Nirvana, icey and cold, is mute. Dumb as a box of hair. Hard as a brainpan.
Overtones and resonance. I tried to bring these to Heaven, along with my socks. Besides, my feet are warm, and Theirs? The Deities'? Cold as purity. Unyielding and smooth as plaster, all shape and shine yet no heat. No warmth at all. There is no place for feet in Heaven. Thus the angels, those feathery toadstools forever floating, all flame and flicker with not even a flint of spark in them, they are symbols perhaps for something Other-than-Matter supposed to convey something of Beyondness to us down here, solid substantial makers of something out of existence in the abjection and the abstraction, imaginations on real fire heating real flesh reaching into and warming many dimensions but let's not do that thing which Heaven does, reify and therefore deify and turn everything stone cold in a second and then call it religion, spirituality.
So much for Heaven's Spiraled Gate where all my life entire I all-too-humanly, always overwrought, have waited looking through the bars, a dumb ox in human form stubbornly staring in, yet again not having learned that once inside the Gate and amongst the Heavenly Company it is not at all as it appears to be from the outside despite the aroma of saffron and sage, myrr and milk.
The roses there have no pricks. But let me tell you, pricks will out!!
The rose petal, the gossamer wide skirt of the appointed (usually self-appointed) pope, or popette, at first billows invitingly as container and sustainer, the very breadth and breath of wisdom, o the power and the glory (dost thou know that glory, gloria etymologically means, reputation? There is much shadow in this but tis disguised by millenia of angels, bloody footless featherdusters, descanting "gloria, gloria in excelsis deo". There's Ego in Heaven after all with such need for singing, nay, insistent repetitive shouting, of Divine Reputation. Boasting, it is. And very unbecoming of Deity...) but, soon, soon, all too soon, the Shadow slithers forth from beneath the Skirt revealing that even Paradise in its heights cannot escape the Law of Compensation and thus that which is in the depths, the repressed and scapegoated Shadow, veritable Lucifer, o'retakes the wings and belfries, even the shade beneath the Throne, O Rorschach, and some one or two or a group become It's emissary and thus the ancient drama of the conflict within God, spread out and played out amongst humans, continues unabated and, until Carl Jung, remains mostly unconscious or, if explained, is rejected as false because the belief is that God, the god-image, is perfect, whole, unblemished and complete. The All Good UH-OH.
Exuent Diogenes Teufelsdrochk.
[An interjection here from Harvey Cox regarding New Age capitalism's desacralization of the authentically sacred; he is addressing the commodification of Asian religions - but his critique most certainly resonates with Christianitys and the hourly, countless "flavours du jour" unleashed upon the world (of course, "for its own Good") — OY! OY! - by profligate Protestan-tisms which have adulterated and reduced Martin Luther's "the priesthood of all believers" (which attempted, still does, to readdress Catholic doctrine that only an ordained male priest can mediate between God and humans) to what very truly a monstrous "beasthood of all believers" each armed with a Bible proclaiming their interpretation of said Holy Book to be the "one and only true and absolute" "revealed personally to each and every (no matter the Babel/Babble shouted and battled)" so REPENT! yada yada, yada yada ya DA!:
It is the human imagination which is most truly, profoundly creative, with subtleties upon subtleties unfolding, infolding. Resonances unending. Effulgent, ever indulgent in proliferation of World and worlds and gradations never fading except into pastel shades hinting in visual whispers, "There is more..."
Whereas Heaven, Nirvana, icey and cold, is mute. Dumb as a box of hair. Hard as a brainpan.
Overtones and resonance. I tried to bring these to Heaven, along with my socks. Besides, my feet are warm, and Theirs? The Deities'? Cold as purity. Unyielding and smooth as plaster, all shape and shine yet no heat. No warmth at all. There is no place for feet in Heaven. Thus the angels, those feathery toadstools forever floating, all flame and flicker with not even a flint of spark in them, they are symbols perhaps for something Other-than-Matter supposed to convey something of Beyondness to us down here, solid substantial makers of something out of existence in the abjection and the abstraction, imaginations on real fire heating real flesh reaching into and warming many dimensions but let's not do that thing which Heaven does, reify and therefore deify and turn everything stone cold in a second and then call it religion, spirituality.
So much for Heaven's Spiraled Gate where all my life entire I all-too-humanly, always overwrought, have waited looking through the bars, a dumb ox in human form stubbornly staring in, yet again not having learned that once inside the Gate and amongst the Heavenly Company it is not at all as it appears to be from the outside despite the aroma of saffron and sage, myrr and milk.
The roses there have no pricks. But let me tell you, pricks will out!!
The rose petal, the gossamer wide skirt of the appointed (usually self-appointed) pope, or popette, at first billows invitingly as container and sustainer, the very breadth and breath of wisdom, o the power and the glory (dost thou know that glory, gloria etymologically means, reputation? There is much shadow in this but tis disguised by millenia of angels, bloody footless featherdusters, descanting "gloria, gloria in excelsis deo". There's Ego in Heaven after all with such need for singing, nay, insistent repetitive shouting, of Divine Reputation. Boasting, it is. And very unbecoming of Deity...) but, soon, soon, all too soon, the Shadow slithers forth from beneath the Skirt revealing that even Paradise in its heights cannot escape the Law of Compensation and thus that which is in the depths, the repressed and scapegoated Shadow, veritable Lucifer, o'retakes the wings and belfries, even the shade beneath the Throne, O Rorschach, and some one or two or a group become It's emissary and thus the ancient drama of the conflict within God, spread out and played out amongst humans, continues unabated and, until Carl Jung, remains mostly unconscious or, if explained, is rejected as false because the belief is that God, the god-image, is perfect, whole, unblemished and complete. The All Good UH-OH.
Exuent Diogenes Teufelsdrochk.
[An interjection here from Harvey Cox regarding New Age capitalism's desacralization of the authentically sacred; he is addressing the commodification of Asian religions - but his critique most certainly resonates with Christianitys and the hourly, countless "flavours du jour" unleashed upon the world (of course, "for its own Good") — OY! OY! - by profligate Protestan-tisms which have adulterated and reduced Martin Luther's "the priesthood of all believers" (which attempted, still does, to readdress Catholic doctrine that only an ordained male priest can mediate between God and humans) to what very truly a monstrous "beasthood of all believers" each armed with a Bible proclaiming their interpretation of said Holy Book to be the "one and only true and absolute" "revealed personally to each and every (no matter the Babel/Babble shouted and battled)" so REPENT! yada yada, yada yada ya DA!:
"If there is any fault to be allocated, it lies not with the victims [of commercialization of spiritualities] but with the buyer-seller nexus within which the new Oriental religious wave is marketed. Despite what may be good intentions all around, the consumer mentality can rot the fragile fruits of Eastern spirituality as soon as they are unpacked. The process is both ironic and pathetic. What begins in Benares as a protest against possessiveness ends up in Boston as still another possession. Dark Kali, the great and terrible destroyer, whose very glance can melt the flesh of the strongest warrior, whose slightest breath can stop the pulse and paralyze the soul, finds herself dangling from bracelets with all the other charms.
No deity however terrible, no devotion however deep, no ritual however splendid is exempt from the voracious process of trivialization. The smiling Buddha himself and the worldly-wise Krishna can be transformed by the new gluttony into collectors' trinkets. It was bad enough for King Midas that everything he touched turned to gold; the acquisition-accumulation pattern of the new gluttony does even more. Reversing the alchemist's course, it transforms rubies and emeralds into plastic, the sacred into the silly, the holy into the hokey...(a) changing of the gods into consumer software..." —pg. 134, Turning East, The Promise and Peril of the New Orientalism, Harvey Cox, Simon and Schuster, 1975.]
Mountain weather near the Hermitage
Le Cav de L'Autodactyl somewhere in
remote Adirondacks
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