Uh // Oh
Now You've
DONE IT!
get me outta here! Bail me
out of the WORD OCEAN
I wish to God
never seen your face
Nor heard your lion tongue
—Philip Whalen, Poet, Zen Master
"Because we are partial beings who yearn for total states." —Michael Eigen
Tis the season Trick or Treat but Trickster season is year round 24/7 now daze and blights. Trickster is hyperactive and hypernormal life-and-media-wise thus we become inured to Its presence and power in individuals, groups, and events and so slog as slog (or slug) slog on as one can, another "Day in the Life" aka "I read the news today oh boy...." Tricksters too are turned into heroes (aka hemi- semi- demi- quimi- gods, icons, symbols) and, humans gripped by archetypes, in their worship assist in bringing (bingeing on) chaos and regressive conditions which evoke fear in collectives and thus trickster becomes CONTROL, makes demands, insists one way over any other, etc.
Remember all those scary dark clown sitings around the world the year Drumpfen-ogre starting beating the political bushes in 2015? no accident at all all those sitings, synchronicities were, or tried, to prepare the national and world collective for a very dangerous emergence which had already been happening with the likes of Reagan, Bush, W/Cheney, so very many, too very many (when one looming one is enough to wreak havoc for now and generations ahead). Good to remember that Trickster, too, is teacher. Hard lessons the better learned, we can hope, but human nature is slow to grock and clock and turn inner wheels of conscience collectively for the better which happens individual by individual which each have a "salting" effect.
My favorite prefaces by Carl Jung are from his book published during the World War (WW1), Two Essays In Analytical Psychology. The first edition sold out so fast (to his great surprise since it was about his psychology) that there was a rushed 2nd book with a new preface. Here they are...Jung could be, no, he IS, speaking to us now in 2023 in the absolute madness that humanity is. Click onto each preface to enlarge for easier reading.
Preface to first edition:
A paragraph from the second preface:
SELAH.
The chaos in congress on the GOPathic side - killer clowns/tricksters all (or most). This new (but straight up from Sheol's central casting) dark clown, now speaker of the house is dredged up from millennia of evolution of consciousness via religions as collective alchemical containers boiling, diluting, refining, reducing to essence (archetype), energy, that can and will be used for good and for ill. Now we have to witness cold, calculated Newspeak and Orwell squared by thousands openly plot the destruction of democracy for that same old "alpha ape" dominance over all paleo- palaver. Good name for current G(oon)OPaths, the "Pale0-(with a zero at the end)Palaver. aka "Excuse me Mr. Speaker, MTG, Gaetz, et. al, it's time to get your knuckles trimmed and yet another brow and forehead lift."
The good news, never soon enough though, is that the Trickster tricks Itself, is subject to Its own "medicine" and undoes and is victim of Its willful compulsive chaos. Thus, hopefully, we are witnessing the unfolding of this dynamic with the Trumpster Trickster, MAGA, UnEvengelical herds. Bad news is that the Lumpish Mara (means "bitter" in Spanish) Sluggo is/was "dreamed up" as repping the collective consciousness of the nation, of "we the people." Not good, ID/IT. Not good, that.
Take the time now, Halloween, Dias de la Emerging up from the Psyche "Haunters" (archetypes) to locate your own private inner Joker (reference the movie with Phoenix), your inner Drumpfen-nee-gator, et. al., so many examples. Jung calls such "shadow." On practical level, "alter-ego" nuances, better (there is more than one, Virginia) serves to bring shadow (where it always is) on the ground, the floor, quote the Craven, clevermore to be confronted, personally owned, and at least taught table manners. Just kidding about the latter but, hey, it's a place to start. Shadow (and all archetype/Alters given personal faces) gets projected onto other people, groups, places, things, activities and/but the the shadow (as we all really know but ignore or deny or pie in the sky with religion or substitutes thereof push and shove which is alpha which is 'ain't') is within, "archetypes are, Virginia, genome" thus all us we are "stranded" DNA-wise, and/but shows up with faces, personalities, and ever variating levels of abs-consciousness.
And, Virginia, we can't help but project all that, SPLAT on others' walls, wormwood and gall (and all for their own good, of course). Seems to be a prominent, nay, dominant, rule of thumb (mine's bigger than yours) of human consciousness aka what the brain does with or without our consent. Perhaps a nuance on Sartre's notion of all us we our "throwness" into existenz. But he's openly mocked these days because, one, he is not manic and, truth be told, our American (perhaps world cultures all) extoll what is called "pursuit of happiness" when it is actually "mania" split off from "just what is" (I refer you to the Four Noble Truths of Buddhism - most accurate sum of all; and to image of the Crucified One who, says appreciative Jung, teaches us to "endure" the givens while fluffing up heaven behind the Dys- mise en scènes from which meaning is somehow wrung, wrenched, somehow turning the Cultural Wheels all historians/artists 'r' their (wheels) paparazzi mit loud raspberries as commentaries, thusly Stevens makes mostest scents:
Call the roller of big cigars,
The muscular one, and bid him whip
In kitchen cups concupiscent curds.
Let the wenches dawdle in such dress
As they are used to wear, and let the boys
Bring flowers in last month's newspapers.
Let be be finale of seem.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.
Take from the dresser of deal,
Lacking the three glass knobs, that sheet
On which she embroidered fantails once
And spread it so as to cover her face.
If her horny feet protrude, they come
To show how cold she is, and dumb.
Let the lamp affix its beam.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.
AKA Emperor as Alchemista.
"Ah! I am so forsaken I will worship at any shrine impulses toward perfection."
—Artur Rimbaud
"Le poet maudit" -gift that keeps on giving
Thusly, dust off your copy, too, of Freud's Civilization and Its Discontents. And dust off your volumes of Jung which are his "Answer to Freud", Jung's offerings being complementarity to Freud's reductive, darker views , thus I call Jung's oevre (in homage to Meister Freud), Civilization and Its Mys-(as in Mystery/Mystic) and Myth-(as in archetypal)Contents.
And, just a recommendation though academia has a new pair (and more) of vernacular shoes (all the pomo French and others, all the now ontotheo- talkers, and the never dull neo-neo-still-gravy after all these jeers Marxistas cum Baristas vis WAKE UP PLEBES!
And dust off your Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death (aka how the heroic human endeavor to grock death began (terminal clock is ticking even on the unvierse?), aka how culture and its bliss-contents took, and still takes, shape, how nature (or genome) in us appears to have telos, trajectory which is dependent, or so it seems, upon individuals (and their groups the world and ages o're) and choices made from genomic menus and what shows up in space and time, what presents on and beneath our dining room tables (or trays or lunch bags).
On the Lazy Susan be's Civilization as Condiments to Sweeten the Musky Briny Liver to be eaten or plucked at by daylight, O Prometheus, bringer/gifter of Fire aka Civilization aka Eliade's The Raw and the Cooked - we homo serpitudes appear to be about the cooking of the "givens of existenz, the crude-it-tay tays. Just the facts, mam, or just the fractals, mermaid, or just the Jeez un 'bama' Crackers, Mother, and so on. Tis all jists for the mental mill.
Sir Arthur Edington has the last word here tho I calculate at least thirteen ways of looking at what he says. BTW come Halloween I shall dress up as the good professor, professor sez
"Something we know not what is doing we know not what."
And I'll add, "but we know it is certainly doing some thing, whatever that is."
Humans are about the "whatever".
Whatever.
[All photos by Warren Falcon except, of course, the photo of Artur Rimbaud. Poem below by Falcon, as well]
On with the boring
center line endlessly
dividing though broken
on purpose suggesting
a way to veer.
No guide needed here.
Fear is the drive shaft,
and longing turns the wheel.
