Jet lagged - London, on the bench where
T. S. Eliot used to sit on his lunch break -
August 2016
But wherefore could I not pronounce 'Amen'?
I have most need of blessing and 'Amen' stuck in my throat" —William Shakespeare, from Macbeth
A man will go far to find out who he is. —Theodore Roethke, from "In a Dark Time"
I'm gonna ride to the West where the fence commences
and gaze at the moon till I lose my senses. —from the song, "Don't Fence Me In"
I am moved by fancies that are curl
Around these image, and cling:
The notion of some infinitely gentle
Infinitely suffering thing. - T. S. Eliot, from "Preludes"
"O starry spangled shock of mercy!"
- Allen Ginsberg, from HOWL
"Thinking is difficult, therefore let the herd pronounce judgment!" - Carl Jung, CW 10, Page 344, Para 652.
1
Necromancy, anyone? the newest (ancient) version, one of the post postmodern variants in the collective consciousness (verily mugged by the unconscious aka archetypal) is the literal belief in ETs, aliens, flying saucers or, more current to techne aka movie/series variations in, the new religion named ENTERTAINMENT, INC. aka the real "gods" (those with "mana" - see Carl Jung - google it) -
throw in AI now and forever (no escape - now THAT, AI, is the very real (surreal) intra-terrestrial now gone EXTRA) - that these ETs (but there are bad ones, too, or so channelers have indicated, seems "good" and "evil" extend throughout the multiverse which conflicts with pop New Age disbelief in "evil" but, they, rather, are Catholics re: the matter viz "privatio boni" (look it up, google it) meaning "the diminishment of good" - an early Greek strophe blown into greater proportions by the Gnostics which truly are the "specters" behiind, beneath, not very well hidden, in New Age garbed and feathered variations or, as sketched above, way way techne high tech futuristic disguises cuz our new Messiahs are like the old ones and they comes from the skies-es:
"People will do anything, no matter how absurd, in order to avoid facing their own souls. They will practice Indian yoga and all its exercises, observe a strict regimen of diet, learn theosophy by heart, or mechanically repeat mystic texts from the literature of the whole world—all because they cannot get on with themselves and have not the slightest faith that anything useful could ever come out of their own souls. - Carl Jung, CW 12, Page 99".
OY. But back to the past, way past, which is all our wayward now, the odious word au current "trending" a new god of the fleeting here today gone instantly cuz mores the trend or, the word I prefers is - MAYA - delusion, illusion, unreal at no-base except for what Heraclitus pointed out millennia ago aka "all is flux" "can't step into the same maya twice, or one can but should not pour concrete into maya and plant a flag and stake an ontological, even an epistemological claim in the "mind, mind has mountains, no man fathomed (Hopkins)" reification wars
for torsion's the realer "god" so turn up the volume at Club Nekyia and do the twist, do the shout, or okey dokey hokey pokey, Little Richard a necessary alien, of course, singing, "Twist and Shout".
Google "Jung + nekyia" or "Edward F. Edinger + nekyia" and discover that what is really going on re: popular religion (which is the old religions) and channeling, now mediumship (yawn), is all manifestations of, derived from, "Psyche" - yes, google "Carl Jung + psyche" and then, if ye wish or swish
"Come down off your throne and leave your body alone
Somebody must change
You are the reason I've been waiting so long
Somebody holds the key
Well I'm near the end and I just ain't got the time
And I'm wasted and I can't find my way home
Come down on your own and leave your body alone
Somebody must change
You are the reason I've been waiting all these years
Somebody holds the key
But I'm near the end and I just ain't got the time
And I'm wasted and I can't find my way home
But I can't find my way home x 3
Still I can't find my way home
And I ain't done nothing wrong
But I can't find my way home.
Aptly named, Blind Faith:
Blind Faith ~ Can't Find My Way Home ~ (Original Acoustic Version)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6jlLBs6YawM
2 Amplification/Expansion, Return to Terra (In)Firma
"...But the legend of places is not so indecipherable as the myth of the heart. Space torments us as the symbol of that mystery to traverse before we can arrive at God Himself. The whole universe must be known first, and then conquered. But Rimbaud's voyage...brought him back to the starting point. The world is not infinite; it is a sphere." - Wallace Fowlie, "Rimbaud: The Myth of Childhood"
S'bout "finding our way home" by the voyage, the launching forth or aft - just get launched.
Wallace Fowlie, literature professor and writer of renown re: French writers especially, his book, first one, on Artur Rimbaud, "Rimbaud: The Myth of Childhood", launched me further especially in the last chapter "Myth" in the section titled "The Myth of the Voyage" which spoke very much to me the inner beseecher compulsively marking distance by books, by tears, by dreams, a "boomer dog (more the mutt than the pedigreed cur)" circling endlessly for the settling spot but forever endlessly circling having come to understand that circling is a home of sorts, too.
Feet forget what they are at times, or better, bums for sitting... for Fowlie re: Rimbaud's "Bateau Ivre"(Drunken Boat poetry),
"the meaning of the voyage accomplished by the poet is explained in the immemorial desire of men to deliver the world. They depart for the liberation of the world is the explicit role of the hero, and the implicit role of the poet and of all people...the poet is always a voyager...but his exploration of the world is that of the subconscious...the familiar world is always in discredit with poets. They undertake their voyage without knowing whether it is for a conquest or for a flight. But it is certain that a profound spiritual motivation lies in the genesis of each voyage: the reconciliation between life and "the dream of life"...Don Quixote started out to deliver the world and stumbled over the first pebbles on the road. More than all others perhaps, Don Quixote illustrates the abyss or the conflict which exists between the greatness of man's desires and the ridiculousness of his accomplishments.
To equate one's dream would be for man to attain to the state of superman, because his dream exceeds even the greatness of his heart. The dream of man inevitably contains some aspect of the absolute: absolute of sentiments or actions."
"...But the legend of places is not so indecipherable as the myth of the heart. Space torments us as the symbol of that mystery to traverse before we can arrive at God...The whole universe must be known first, and then conquered. But Rimbaud's voyage...brought him back to the starting point.
The world is not infinite; it is a sphere."
"But the myth of the voyage is not concealed in the marine monsters of a Melville or in the snow-covered green nights of a Rimbaud. It is in man's primal desire to depart, in his first effort toward liberation. The poetry of the myth in Rimbaud is that instant when his boat no longer feels itself guided by hauler. It is the same intent in Mallarme when his clown plunges his fist through the tent wall and makes a window. The myth of the voyage is, in each man, the secret desire to leave for that unrealizable object which barricades him from life."
Fowlie goes on to describe voyage as a falling to earth, always, always falling and meeting the earth and then quotes the poet Rainer Maria Rilke's 5th Duino Elegy inspired by Picasso's Les Saltimbanques:
You, that fall with the thus
only fruits know, unripe,
daily a hundred times from the tree
of mutually built up motion."
"...But the legend of places is not so indecipherable as the myth of the heart. Space torments us as the symbol of that mystery to traverse before we can arrive at God Himself. The whole universe must be known first, and then conquered. But Rimbaud's voyage...brought him back to the starting point. The world is not infinite; it is a sphere." - Wallace Fowlie, "Rimbaud: The Myth of Childhood"
S'bout "finding our way home" by the voyage, the launching forth or aft - just get launched.
Wallace Fowlie, literature professor and writer of renown re: French writers especially, his book, first one, on Artur Rimbaud, "Rimbaud: The Myth of Childhood", launched me further especially in the last chapter "Myth" in the section titled "The Myth of the Voyage" which spoke very much to me the inner beseecher compulsively marking distance by books, by tears, by dreams, a "boomer dog (more the mutt than the pedigreed cur)" circling endlessly for the settling spot but forever endlessly circling having come to understand that circling is a home of sorts, too.
Feet forget what they are at times, or better, bums for sitting... for Fowlie re: Rimbaud's "Bateau Ivre"(Drunken Boat poetry),
"the meaning of the voyage accomplished by the poet is explained in the immemorial desire of men to deliver the world. They depart for the liberation of the world is the explicit role of the hero, and the implicit role of the poet and of all people...the poet is always a voyager...but his exploration of the world is that of the subconscious...the familiar world is always in discredit with poets. They undertake their voyage without knowing whether it is for a conquest or for a flight. But it is certain that a profound spiritual motivation lies in the genesis of each voyage: the reconciliation between life and "the dream of life"...Don Quixote started out to deliver the world and stumbled over the first pebbles on the road. More than all others perhaps, Don Quixote illustrates the abyss or the conflict which exists between the greatness of man's desires and the ridiculousness of his accomplishments.
To equate one's dream would be for man to attain to the state of superman, because his dream exceeds even the greatness of his heart. The dream of man inevitably contains some aspect of the absolute: absolute of sentiments or actions."
"...But the legend of places is not so indecipherable as the myth of the heart. Space torments us as the symbol of that mystery to traverse before we can arrive at God...The whole universe must be known first, and then conquered. But Rimbaud's voyage...brought him back to the starting point.
The world is not infinite; it is a sphere."
"But the myth of the voyage is not concealed in the marine monsters of a Melville or in the snow-covered green nights of a Rimbaud. It is in man's primal desire to depart, in his first effort toward liberation. The poetry of the myth in Rimbaud is that instant when his boat no longer feels itself guided by hauler. It is the same intent in Mallarme when his clown plunges his fist through the tent wall and makes a window. The myth of the voyage is, in each man, the secret desire to leave for that unrealizable object which barricades him from life."
Fowlie goes on to describe voyage as a falling to earth, always, always falling and meeting the earth and then quotes the poet Rainer Maria Rilke's 5th Duino Elegy inspired by Picasso's Les Saltimbanques:
You, that fall with the thus
only fruits know, unripe,
daily a hundred times from the tree
of mutually built up motion."
Overripe persimmons. Ville de San-Mont, Gers, France.
Christmas 2019
And on and on Fowlie goes...breathtakingly...it's all so exquisite one can barely take in a sentence or two and then is fed another rich meal...his words, I believe, explain all our travels where one is, alien, confronted yet again with the "unrealizable object which barricades one from life." And yet gives a life after all is said and done.
Odysseus's last voyage was revealed to him in a vision midway into his voyage...Tiresius, the blind seer, revealed to him the vision of his ultimate end, as an old man he would hew a tree, shape a large oar for going to sea then turn away yet again, one last time, from the familiar wife, land, and his beloved sea. He was to walk inland into the unknown region where he would eventually encounter people who had no knowledge of the sea at all. And there among them he must plant the oar in the soil where eventually the oar would turn into a tree.
Something about roots laid...and eventually a falling of fruit and the ensuing voyage of the land-locked ones having heard from Odysseus of the once rumored sea in their dreams.
Much much to be said here but will cease and desist.
At least I can, unlike the toxic cypher imaged below, always acting out in the grip of the dark side of the archetype - POWER - possessing and puppeteering him. He/IT, of course, is all our disowned shadow of one flavor or another, projected, and so this chin jutter, chin mancer, confronts one and all, the polis; the melting pot is an alchemical vessel where all manner of volatile contrarieties mixed together are at high boil in order to eventually render that one distilled drop of "agua permanans (pure water), the pearl of great price, the gold derived from the rough ore, and other images conjured for millennia of something "eternal" "essential".
***
To read more re: human-stagger ventures as and with shadow, the "goon" that Nature is in all us we, the alter brained ego/self that contends with all our "hairy giggly meatedness" (Da Free John's humorous and pathetic description), human gods who do despair, says Ernest Becker in his Pulitzer Prize winning book, The Denial of Death (must read this book!), because, yes, we humaniacs are indeed capable of miracles of invention and imagination (codependent they are) - art, music, culture all kinds but, alas, we are "gods who shit". We limbo in heights and depths, peaks and vales, strive after opposites, preferring heights while eschewing the depths. We are suspended, or so it feels and is often imaged, between and between, yearning to go up, to become sublime but
Ether needs the balance of Nether. And vicer Werther (tee hee).
Not either/or (read Kierkegaard's "Either/Or" for getting a lay of the land there). And none of this is for elaborate "spiritual" (a much castrated word, an adulteration of confabulation and fluff) entertainments with bells and whistles and a weekend workshop on "dancing with one's gremlins". OY!!!
One can see just how effective "Boomer" fascination/mugging by the unconscious via '60's Castaneda/psychedelics off to the East wave moved the consciousness wheel - NOT. Look at the face blow. Time to return to Kansas, eyes wide. Shoulders to the wheel. Feet on the earth.
Mabel Mercer Live At Town Hall - Both Sides Now:
Is it "we're not in Kansas anymore, Godzilla?"
Or is it "Kansas is too too much with us so get an education, get a psychoanalysts and do the modern/postmodern descent/nekyia into the Depths that Dante dove, that Carl Jung dove into and made more than ample notes of. A Bestseller approach to this is laughable but has made millions and millions of dollars which says to me that folks are hungry for authentic embodiedment, soulfully so, but the market has the corner on the "new" gluttony, "spirituality" and so Trumps and mad-hatters come marching in.
*
Stevie Winwood's solo version of his composition, "Can'f Find My Way Home":
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6jlLBs6YawM
