"Thus the soul has gradually been turned into a Nazareth from which nothing good can come" - Carl Jung, Da Free John, & the Dreaded-Gomboo

"Have you got the Boo? The Dreaded? The terrible Gom? Have you? That's what I thought! Tell me true- have you got the Gom-Boo?" - Da Free John

I used to read these two paragraphs by Free John (he of many names) below (last two of this post) to students in a counseling training program...much laughter was had, but seriously serious stuff.

Now the very Free-with-his-"junk" Da-funct Da-Abi-Doot Da Da Da Whisk Broom BAH never did any personal shadow work evidenced by his scamming manipulations of others consciousnesses in his harems of followers, he was evidentially, utterly mugged by the Shadow, the archetype of Power, what Carl Jung calls "the Power Devil" such as that which/who tempted Jesus in the desert as his ministry was just beginning; Jesus resisted all the enticing "magical passes" and impressive miracles to gain power over the world where, if performed and demonstrated them, all would worship and follow him.

Free John is a glaring example, one of very, very many, entranced by those powers of archetypal psyche (very very tempting they are) so, as usual, too too often in (especially in) "spiritual" groups one or more followers ( branded as a "faction") carry the shadow of the religion, crypto-religion (alphabet soup) and mostly adulterated "sacred" techniques offered.  

[NOTE: the SHADOW WILL OUT, especially with groups that identify as "spiritual". Forewarned is four-armed (yes, FOUR armed KALI who defends and protects!!) so one will turn the volume down on naivete and "innocence" or learn all too often the hard way (Jung did point out, "God is a trauma." I add, "Live and burn. Live and learn = Blues School).]

Unlike American uber popular Spirituality LITE aka New Age, New Thought, Scions of Mind, et. al (so very "spiritually"entertaining), individuation, Carl Jung's term for addressing all dimensions of the psyche, especially the personal and collective unconscious as he lays out in his vast corpus of writing describing what he calls depth or archetypal psychology. Jungian work is NOT for the faint of heart and, importantly, it is NOT an elaborate "spiritual" entertainment (though it can easily turn into such when one accesses archetypal energies and mistakenly thinks that one has "arrived" due to "magical powers and developed psychic abilities, et. al. OY. NO. Satan's temptations to Jesus were thus such perceived to be "miraculous" powers and one must be spiritual if one can access and wield them. Clearly not so!

Thusly, an extended quote by Jung is called for here before the entertaining Free John quote which enables us, invites us each and every, one and all, to have a good healthy shadowy laugh of recognition that Da Free Junk enables us to acknowledge that, yes, we do, we all got the Dreaded Gom-boo, the Imaginary Illness that Religion Seeks to Cure (brilliant that Fra Yonks uses humor to impact us and hip us to Da D G Boo...but here's Jung (extensively. I personally do not think that it IS an imaginary (as in unreal)diseasae but is Imaginal (a la Jung and the archetypal energies mediated by the Imaginal level of the psyche):

“I am not a man, neither am I a god, a goblin, a Brahmin, a warrior, a merchant, a shudra, nor disciple of a Brahmin, nor householder, nor hermit of the forest, nor yet mendicant pilgrim:

"Awakener to Myself is my name.”(Jung, Vol.14, p.90)

" . . . One cannot be too cautious in these matters, for what with the imitative urge and a positively morbid avidity to possess themselves of outlandish feathers and deck themselves out in this exotic plumage, far too many people are misled into snatching at such “magical” ideas and applying them externally, like an ointment. People will do anything, no matter how absurd, in order to avoid facing their own souls [ψυχή, psychi, anima, animus, seele, saiwala, saiwalo, aiolos, sila, anemos, pneuma, anan, anhelare, rih, ruh, psychein, psychos, psychros, physa; Jung, Vol.8, pars. 663-664]. 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. Thus the soul has gradually been turned into a Nazareth from which nothing good can come. Therefore let us fetch it from the four corners of the earth—the more far-fetched and bizarre it is the better! "

Jung continues:

"I have no wish to disturb such people at their pet pursuits, but when anybody who expects to be taken seriously is deluded enough to think that I use yoga methods and yoga doctrines or that I get my patients, whenever possible, to draw mandalas for the purpose of bringing them to the “right point”—then I really must protest and tax these people with having read my writings with the most horrible inattention. The doctrine that all evil thoughts come from the heart and that the human soul is a sink of iniquity must lie deep in the marrow of their bones. Were that so, then God had made a sorry job of creation, and it were high time for us to go over to Marcion the Gnostic and depose the incompetent demiurge. Ethically, of course, it is infinitely more convenient to leave God the sole responsibility for such a Home for Idiot Children, where no one is capable of putting a spoon into his own mouth. But it is worth man’s while to take pains with himself, and he has something in his soul that can grow. It is rewarding to watch patiently the silent happenings in the soul, and the most and the best happens when it is not regulated from outside and from above. I readily admit that I have such a great respect for what happens in the human soul that I would be afraid of disturbing and distorting the silent operation of nature by clumsy interference. (Jung, Vol.12, par.126)"

End ofJung Quote

The above views are my own, for what they're worth, from my direct experience in various flavors of "spiritual groups" (I'm done with all that now), was traumatized in and from those groups,

The wreckage in spiritual groups is part of a very old old ancient story that plays out daily in groups all kinds, secular and spiritual, with ugliness and trauma ensuing while the self-identified minister or guru or other, the leaders (a faction, as well, but they don't think so - so Danger Will Robinson, whereof the named self appointed psychopomp remains, so they think (if they fall for their own act which, actually, IS what they do) without any fault or shadow or culpa whatsoever."

If one feels compelled to partake of what is offered by guru, teacher, shaman, et. al, then best to "take the money and run" with such, critical thinking active and ON, knowing that there may be some gold to gain (teaching, etc.) while one should assume also assume that "spiritual" folks have vast amounts of "shite" too.

And shadow always gets projected back and forth.

It's all part of the Dreaded Gomboo, Incorporated in multifarious facets.

SO, here are two hilariously orienting transcribed paragraph of the Da Da Dobby Abi Doot Da Doot Da Doodle Do Doot (Lou Reed chorus chittering on in "Take a Walk on the Wild Side) for mostly Western (inheritors of Western religions and multivarious permutation) spiritual seekers:

Master Da: If you want to "get religious" in our time you must first decide that you have the Dreaded Gom-Boo. Then you go to Doctor Pope, Doctor Church, Doctor Jesus, Doctor Mahatma, Doctor Mahatmaboo, Doctor Gombooananda, Doctor Gomananda-Booharaj. As soon as you get the feeling that you have the disease, you start to look for religious answers. Ask most the people around you how they got involved with this Way of Life, and they will describe some symptom or other of the Dreaded Gom-Boo. The Dreaded Gom-Boo led you all here because you were looking to be cured of the heebie-jeebies, the hopefull Three-Day-Thumb-and-Finger Problem, the terrible jiggly meatedness! (Laughter)

Are you telling me that you think God and Truth are supposed to be interested in curing you of the Dreaded Gom-Boo? Is that it? It is about time you realized there there is no cure for the Dreaded Gom-Boo! The Gom is terrible! The Boo is terminal! And this is what you've got, right? I thought so! I could see symptoms as soon as you came in here. Have you got the Boo? The Dreaded? The terrible Gom? Have you? That's what I thought! Tell me true- have you got the Gom-Boo?"

You may read Free John's Boo book at this link:

https://archive.org/details/dreadedgombooori0000adid/mode/1up

AVISO - BORN TO BE SCRATCHED - Brief Stray Blots on Complexes and Clotted Character, Grief Muscles, Symptoms and Symbols "Writ on the Skin" Toward Meaningful Dys-Ease

AVISO - NOTICE

[Click on images to enlarge them]

"Grief muscles. (Haz Clik)" - Charles Darwin

"A mule will labor ten years willingly and patiently for you, for the privilege of kicking you once."  - William Faulkner

Complexes, like mules, are stubborn. They have a job to do. They form us, shape us, give us character, the word etymologically means " scratches upon a surface" thus we are all born to be scratched, scarred, and from such character is born. My tee shirt reads " BORN TO BE SCRATCHED" " BORN TO BE SCARRED". We describe landscapes and faces/bodies as " having character" and so complexes are landscapes, we are landscapes shaped by the shaping land, dirt, clay, mud, sand from which ancestral complexes were, still are, born, and borne generation to generation, person to person.

But mourning's that "thing", not hope, "with feathers", to argue with Miss Dickinson, at least this heavy-winged thing is part and parcel, tissue and fabric to my very being from earliest childhood - not playing the victim here but telling mule-ish facts, born into violence, into sorrow of mother and father at war with each other in the redneck, theologically regressive/dys-tarded primitive white south, my mythology unfolded and unfolds still though I am hard surrounded by concrete asphalt and steel where the wheel infernally drives literally everything in fabled northern island metropolis.

So, there. Etiology of my persistent skin rash begins in history, ancient history. The body, a body that I am, that I as Warren Ego inhabit, has its inexorable history and mythology genetically attributed and distrubuted cell by cell, dermis extremis, meat sack slackening but inevitable principled processes chemical and alchemical dry me out into blown-aboutness.

But I can sing. I will sing of such till I can sing no more.  
Scratch as scratch can and down to a man, or sand, 

whichever comes first or last or both, I will give voice 

and image to the hard scrap, mule-kick mother, bearing 

two mule names, who in a dream proceeding her death 

intentionally, willfully escapes my grasp via mulish jack-

ass buck-kick sends me flailing from her into the ongoing 

stretching aridity of invidious homo solitudinem -

"button, button, 

who's got the button?

how without a mother?

how without a button? - Michael Bottas 

She escapes to fauna, florae, vine-arbored densities, 

massive hedged green-green sauvage riot tangle careen 

plummet plumbs  into born anew*1 as such (or suchness?)

or so much 

underscored verdancy 

does insist hinting 

moistures,

buoyant, perfumed,

some thing beyond eye or thigh 

the weight that Forever really is 
or we feel it is, the bone feel, that 
ever-so-slow-curve calcium makes 
down, down, years of it sinking 
and then we wonder our own being's

but rumor of thunder on Distant Mountain, 
fire there, we are stutterers pegged massive 
revelations, special effects parting waters, 
walking sticks into serpents, bread rain and
and on and on and some wheres 

we remember we ought to altar so we 
relent even if it's the first and last and
only one of the heart but not only that
but the aged body parts once so primary, 
the sagging breast, the sinking 

balls, 

withered skin still the longing there and 
everywhere mere parchment now and  
how we may then finally wonder about 
religions of the Word, what gets written 
where, once and often, on stone then 
eventually vellum/skin, and bark too in 
treed lands 

So lands a Shining Stranger perhaps one of many  
bends low forever writes with his finger in the dust, 
but the word in the end may us an altar make as 
hearing fades and the tongue thinks 

"it's only water'' and 

"can a man control 'is tongue?"

- it's Biblical

the question answers itself 

a riddle: 

''never, or rarely'' 

like my mother dying, rasps

''What's this all about? 
Whatever. I'm ready to go''

as if she or any of us can really decide 
that but will's a holy thing, asserts even 
in the face of obstinate Absolute 

that "Other-Than" is also truth and down 
to a woman and man

we get to argue, 

''I decide''

Mother - Rehearsing the Bardos

September 10, 2016

She passed December 23, 2016

*

Portraits of grief muscles at work accompanying

Charles Darwin's The Expression of Emotions in

Man and Animals Chapter 7: Low Sprits, Anxiety,

Grief, Dejection, Despair

===

Footnote:

*1 Carl Gustav Jung said that plant life is the most innocent life form.

The Exquisite Angelology of the Ego, The Idea of Pear Tree - Great Nature's All Our Infirmity

An overripe pear fallen from a pear tree covid19 summer 2020 

"warrentining" in New York state Adirondacks.

Archetypal psychoanalyst, astrologer, cabalist, and writer Charles Ponce's phrase "the exquisite angelology of the ego", I take from his astounding essay, "Paracelsus and the Wound", the wound being Great Nature, Her Reality, and how most of human civilization and philosophy has been efforted/designed to overcome or transcend Her, meaning finitude, decay, and death...I quote extensively here since he, Ponce, minces no words though they, like he is, are poetic, evocative, and re-orienting. And sobering. Very. A KATSU as in a zen slap meant to evoke instant clarity, what the French call, "éclaircissement" - from éclaircir (“enlighten, clarify”).

And, human, all too human, I never knew what "éclair" means but now I know and so I prefer clarity and enlightenment to be filled with "dark chocolate".

The opening few sentences are my own from my blogspot essay on Pathological Happiness (don't get me going!!):

"Great Nature runs riot upon and within that which we can project some 'thing' (I like the German word for 'thing' - DING), some ding called "happiness" ('happy', meaning 'happen, luck, an eventing') but without a doubt the crushing dissolution, the decay and ending, is Nature's way, Her insistency, despite all our reification of wishful metaphysics - "for these subtleties must concretely be" we choose to believe in understandable desperation.

Ponce writes, and rights us, reorients us much and necessarily toward the ongoing immediacy of Existence, of Nature in Her appeal, in Her drive for attestation in each and every living ding:

...we rebel essentially against the autonomy of Nature, the natural breakdown of Nature, the need of Nature to relax into itself, even to collapse into itself in the way that trees retreat into themselves with the advent of Winter...We turn away from our bodies in illness and death not because we have resolved the issue of the wound, but because it is far easier to think of an afterlife, far less fearful and painful to surround ourselves with the good feeling that we may not only escape this life in one psychic piece, but that we will no longer have to concern ourselves with our physical humanity...This approach to death robs us of our tie to Nature, strips us of our humanity in favor of an exquisite angelology of the ego. It allows us to slip past the experience of the mystery: that the body is indeed a great temple which moves slowly towards a breakdown and dissolution. The alchemists knew this: that the soul cannot fly, cannot be released from the vessel until the body is broken down, dissolved, and even putrified. When you read the alchemists you will discover that this breakdown and dissolution is the beginning of the Great Work, and that without experiencing and seeing, watching and attending to this momentous operation--keeping the fire of heart and attention at the proper degree--nothing happens. The soul does not fly, the subtle body is not created, nor is the imagination which is the soul's experience of itself open to eternity. It is this focus on the body and the wound in both life and death that leads to the sacred marriage of the alchemists. Paracelsus stressed, "The eternal is a sign of the dissolution of Nature, and not the beginning of created things, and the end in all things which no nature is without."

.

..A true medicine and counseling should therefore be one that addresses the immediate, the body of things and the body, for if we really wish to enter into the eternal, see the universe in a grain of sand, we must in our imagination understand...the soul's expression of itself through body, and that woundedness, disease, and the putrefactio of our humanity are for us in the West ordained as the focus of a yoga that sees in these sufferings the gods we have rejected." 

- Charles Ponce, from "Paracelsus and the Wound", Working the Soul, Reflections on Jungian Psychology, pgs. 25-26.

In a personal letter Carl Jung wrote in response to a man who was overly identified with the spiritual and had a very problematic relationship to his body, nature and the social world of work and relationships. The man had written to Jung for advice and these two lines by Jung made me laugh when I read them since I, too, have been very much like the man in the letter. I love Jung's advice which goes well with Ponce's making sense of alchemical experiments and texts:

"You barricade yourself from the world with exaggerated saviour fantasies.  

So climb down from the mountain of your humility and follow your nose."

Or snout. Sprout one if you don't got one. Slither, crouch, slouch stump and slump toward your own Bedlam-ahem and give Nature Her Due. She's gonna get it anyway.

At a crucial point in my own Jungian analysis where I very much was like the man in the letter, I had indeed, hesititatingly, painfully, begun to incarnate, own instinctually, to necessarily dis-identify with transcendence, "spirituality" (all kinds). What I needed for wholeness/hold-ness sake was what Jung calls an enantiodromia, "the tendency of things to change into their opposites, especially as a supposed governing principle of natural cycles and of psychological development." I was out of balance, out of Tao, and needed to land, even go underground to retrieve the wounded reptilian part of my self.

Hard work. But "dromia" happened....I dreamed of being in a dark swamp in pitch darkness far from a city which faintly glowed behind me in far off distance. I knew that I had to keep walking in the darkness, in swamp marsh, mud, thicker. Afraid? YES. But I HAD to do it. At some point I thought I saw to lights ahead of me in the distance which gave me hope and a conscious place to walk toward. As I approached closer the two lights got smaller, bright but smaller. Not a town or outskirts of one. The lights were close together and were peering! at the edge of a thicket, eyes bulging at the water surface. Terror! But the eyes were wide set apart by at least 6 feet or so. I realized that what I was walking toward was a massively large alligator, not a normal gator at all but I knew intuitively that this was "the god of Gators." Fascinated. Entranced. I decided to wake up out of the dream after this close encounter. As I was coming up out of sleep and dream I heard a voice, the voice of the GATOR speaking to me, counseling me "to step less lightly upon the world."

Much more to say but this dream put a coda to the years of incarnating, becoming human. And then the difficult work of living consciously with the alligator in an openly run by gators human world.

Theodore Roethke's poem, Infirmity, a new "scripture" for sure complements Charles Ponce's text. Much more commentary is needed when taking, as a preacher does, two texts to explicate and find a third ding, a synthesis derived from the two but no time here to do so...let Roethke have a say. I think Paracelsus and Ponce would acknowledge this poem as an alchemical text reflecting what they "have been at and about" in their incarnations:

Infirmity

In purest song one plays the constant fool

As changes shimmer in the inner eye.

I stare and stare into a deepening pool

And tell myself my image cannot die.

I love myself: that’s my one constancy.

Oh, to be something else, yet still to be!

Sweet Christ, rejoice in my infirmity;

There’s little left I care to call my own.

Today they drained the fluid from a knee

And pumped a shoulder full of cortisone;

Thus I conform to my divinity

By dying inward, like an aging tree.

The instant ages on the living eye;

Light on its rounds, a pure extreme of light

Breaks on me as my meager flesh breaks down—

The soul delights in that extremity.

Blessed the meek; they shall inherit wrath;

I’m son and father of my only death.

A mind too active is no mind at all;

The deep eye sees the shimmer on the stone;

The eternal seeks, and finds, the temporal,

The change from dark to light of the slow moon,

Dead to myself, and all I hold most dear,

I move beyond the reach of wind and fire.

Deep in the greens of summer sing the lives

I’ve come to love. A vireo whets its bill.

The great day balances upon the leaves;

My ears still hear the bird when all is still;

My soul is still my soul, and still the Son,

And knowing this, I am not yet undone.

Things without hands take hands: there is no choice,—

Eternity’s not easily come by.

When opposites come suddenly in place,

I teach my eyes to hear, my ears to see

How body from spirit slowly does unwind

Until we are pure spirit at the end.*

**

CODA to go with the pear — A poem written for Jack Spicer and Robin Blaser some years back,

The "Idea of Pear Tree"

a pear tree forgets only itself as

an audacity

limbs recall themselves

appear to reach

one cannot see them

reaching

they may be silent but

we cannot know that toward

later sweetness they yearn

then seed a still dirt around

content to lie down

the idea of "pear tree"

reduces to all sparks

yet

no illusion of darknes

hastens the pear

but O it tastes

Of Self-knowing Vs. Personas Of Self-Realization, We Are Also I Vs. The "Exquisite Angelology Of The Ego" - [REPRISE WITH A NEW PREFACE]

inclement hallelujahs 

latencies of disintegration 

ancient slopes of containment 

gnomic marginalia 

trace the grace-note of reprieve 

PREFACE TO A NOW ALMOST 13 YEAR OLD "CRI DE COEUR" SANS "CURE"

" . . . to break through the seductive constellations of human order . . . " - Michael Heller 

for Joan and Maria yet again:

First came the seen, then thus the palpable 
Elysium, though it were in the halls of hell, 
What thou lov'st well is thy true heritage 
What thou lov'st well shall not be reft from thee - Ezra Pound 

The kingfishers! who cares for their feathers now? - Charles Olson 

(auto subtitles from youtube late-night screen-grab 

random surrealist word crappage)

Of bull-riding, bull-fights, the old religion vs "the exquisite angelology of the ego"....a letter to one of the scapegoats (out of three) upon happening upon this essay, my having forgotten it completely but timely, I'm guessing, for January 1, 2024, a year where more and more blood, human and otherwise, shall be shed for imagined-to-be-sacred causes:

An early (now almost 13 year old) essay then writ fresh from the a New Age seminary-led blood-letting of whom were deemed to verily be an "unholy trinity". This morning, watching the bullfight clip I filmed in Mexico just prior to the letter officially firing us, I think, "of course, how could they NOT fire us" since, at least for me, my "religion" is "of the vales", the underworld journey without which there would be no awareness of light at all. And the New Age bull-shit (rather than bull fight or ride) is indeed an "exquisite angelology of the ego" (Charles Ponce's surgically precise phrase)....we were fired the year that Carl Jung's Liber Novus was published and made available to the public...now reading it through 2023 and on in to 2024, I realize that my little essay below was synchronous to the Red Book - implication, no, EXPLICIT, is the descent, the ASSENT to descend into the human realm and beneath, into Hell realms, to journey as did Carl Jung and others into that place where is no place but place after all, where faces must be torn away to replace with more durable and pliable masks that reflect/convey encounter with said depths (depths go up (we speak of "deep space") and deep down, most religions avoid the "deep" dimensions (theologian Paul Tillich is very helpful about this (click here) their preferring the upward, transcendence (that fantasy), some (any) upward vertical without ceiling or end; the horizontal, the surface upon which most life lives (so it appears) indeed requires blood or equivalent life fluids - at birth/hatch/fledge and at death, the ever-giving edge that hedges all us we in the end (whether shed or not - "Blood is, as Jung says, as Edward F. Edinger explicates, "is LIFE"). 

Thus the shedding of it, blood. 

"In the Beginning" - blood sacrifices, burning flesh, Cain slaying Abel because Abel "disobeyed" God's demand for agricultural offerings, HE wanting fallen fruit (interesting to note too that the "Fall" came about by Eve's eating the suspect and evil fruit from the "God's Set Up Tree" apparently "all about humans fleeing innocence and then the eternal flaying in finitude). Instead, Able offered animals as sacrifices, burning flesh to raise mouth watering aromas up and up to "heaven" where deity is teased and satiated because, surprise surprise, Nature IS APPETITE, DESIRE, HUNGER. So what's new is God's/Transcendences new found nostrils and appetites for life, blood, all creatures great and small (with a side of Apple Sauce?). 

A quick sum to the question (click here) as to why Cain killed Abel:

"In the story of Genesis, Cain and Abel both present offerings to God. Cain brings fallen fruit off the ground as an offer, while Abel brings the firstborns of his flock of sheep. According to the story, Abel's offering is deemed worthy above Cain's, and in anger, Cain kills Abel."

Eve's little dietary restriction, first of countless many - don't eat of that particular fruit - her doing so, opened the Commedia of material existenz, of incarnation and the birth of human consciousness (which is really what the story "tells")...from "apple" to "burnt flesh" - meat and blood offerings, death takes care of (for a bit and a bite) the voraciousness of Deity. Via the teeth we evolve as does deity which means "creative and de-creative consciousness."

Some years ago, a'wash with Emily Dickinson's music and brilliance, this "ditty" came in her, I hope, aspired, cadence and humor:

Regarding The Apple's History, A Theological Trifle - After Emily Dickinson

"It's good for the breath!" 

With this she tempted Adam to death. 

Properties of the apple are renowned since 
their eating made it a greatly frowned upon thing. 
Still, it is not without its lovers. 
But for an apple's charm we would live boring lives, 
never a fling or two to alarm the pear, 
and we all know an apple will never harm 
a teacher's pet, its fables to lure 
the imagination, that Golden One's 
strength to subvert us to the core. 

Let's eat the jelly of sin and tell it! 
William Tell's a good shot! 
Let's split the Apple in the pot 
and stew it for Eve's sly. 
Even so our breath is sweet. 
Tis the tart one of death 
from which we'll all die.

    

Tis also true, though paradise is lost, 

something is to be gained with apple sauce.                                                                                        

*

Thusly. Nature. Death. Bulls, sheep, goats, endless offerings on man's altars to GREATER (and TERRIBLER) POWERS-ERS. and sweeter breath - intimations thereof

The fantasy of transcendence, and sweeter breath - intimations thereof, foregoes (or tries but fails) descent, inevitable, actually demanded-by-god descent, what god apparently could not then do but was compelled by desire to try, so did? It's ambivalent as all symbols are which is why they, symbols, convey mystery which KATZ (focus/refocus) the brain, human consciousness trying to parse, to gather up some discriminated whole-r understanding of existenz per se as well as archetype.

SO. There will be blood. Until there will be blood no more (that fantasy).

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. 

- Norman Nightingale

"PERHAPS A STABLE order can only 

be established on earth if man always remains 

acutely conscious that his condition is 

that of a traveler."

- Gabriel Marcel, from Homo Viator

Anyhow. Beyond "Skim-inary Cloud-Cuckoo-Land" now. Beyond more like "be" than "yond" but yonder I am (cue "way over yonnnnn-der") which implies some movement, minor/major s'all a brindled wager (cuz all/us/we are some hue of colored earth), a journey (not yet the gurney one hopes) thus I love Gabriel Marcel's characterization of the human experiment, rather than cogito, ergo sum, is homo viator - man the flyer, man the traveler, man on-the-way (I hear Paul Simon sing, "taking my time but I don't know where").

Not either/or but, as Jung emphasized, the "side-by-side" - the complementarity of apparent (that's the word) opposites - they appear as opposites but consciousness intuits synthesis, the third thing (Carl Jung calls it the essential transcendent function arising from and expanding the wholeness (hold-ness) implicit/nascent in apparent opposites aka thesis <> antithesis).

Anyhow. Was googling my name in order to find a particular poem and top of the list was the blogspot link to this my long forgotten essay writ while the blood and the wound was still fresh and painful.

I still "hold with that" which I have writ.  

I offer spit and vinegar to the sanctimonious ethereals, necromancers - these two paragraphs below are from the essay as snarl snarl, they underscore the obvious whether one likes it or not, blood thickens the clot, I mean, plot:

"There may be more to me and thee, O Mercurial Verities between How-and-Now Cows, than the undertaker's shovel and the deep blue sky and sea but I am a soul man, partial to soul, to space, to time, to locale, at more than a lover's quarrel with the world and very much at quarrel with spirit and entire "congregations of vapor" (Shakespeare). This argument is ongoing as it should be, at least for me. What follows here below are extensive quotes from thoughtful, clear-headed and compassionate writers who rediscover and sing/argue in the face of the bypassers (as are we all, truthfully, us "hopefully transcending ones") of and for the nobility inherent in suffering Creation and Her creatures, including humanity, as part of living and dying into and out of conscious existence.

I begin with Alan Watt's: "Man has to discover that everything which he beholds in nature - the clammy foreign-feeling world of the ocean's depths, the wastes of ice, the reptiles of the swamp, the spiders and scorpions, the deserts of lifeless planets - has its counterpart within himself. He is not, then, at one with himself until he realizes that this "under side" of nature and the feelings of horror which it gives him are also "I". - The Wisdom of Insecurity, Chapter 7: "The Transformation of Life", p.111."

"AH! I am so forsaken I will worship at any shrine 

impulses toward perfection." - Artur Rimbaud

Photo of the poet.

Archetypal psychoanalyst, astrologer, cabalist, and writer Charles Ponce's phrase in this essay's title, "the exquisite angelology of the ego", I take from his astounding essay, "Paracelsus and the Wound", the wound being Great Nature, Her Reality, and how most of human civilization and philosophy has been efforted/designed to overcome or transcend Her, meaning finitude, decay, and death while intuiting their opposites, or, complementarity, at least in mind/thought as well as creative art and culture of all flavors.

An over ripe pear fallen from a pear tree covid19 summer 2020 "warrentining" 

in New York state Adirondacks.

I shall quote extensively here since he, Ponce, minces no words though they, like he is, are poetic, evocative, and re-orienting.  And sobering.  Very. A KATSU as in a zen slap meant to evoke instant clarity, what the French call, "éclaircissement" - from éclaircir (“enlighten, clarify”). 

And, human, all too human, I never knew what éclair meant but I prefer clarity and enlightenment to be filled with "dark chocolate".

The opening few sentences are my own from my blogspot essay on Pathological Happiness:

"Great Nature runs riot upon and within that which we can project some thing called "happiness" ('happy', meaning 'happen, luck, an eventing') but without a doubt the crushing dissolution, the decay and ending is Nature's way, Her insistency, despite all our reification of wishful metaphysics, "for these subtleties must concretely be" we choose to believe in understandable desperation. 

Charles Ponce writes, and rights us, reorients us much necessarily toward the ongoing immediacy of Existence, of Nature in Her appeal, in Her drive for attestation:

"...we rebel essentially against the autonomy of Nature, the natural breakdown of Nature, the need of Nature to relax into itself, even to collapse into itself in the way that trees retreat into themselves with the advent of Winter...We turn away from our bodies in illness and death not because we have resolved the issue of the wound, but because it is far easier to think of an afterlife, far less fearful and painful to surround ourselves with the good feeling that we may not only escape this life in one psychic piece, but that we will no longer have to concern ourselves with our physical humanity...This approach to death robs us of our tie to Nature, strips us of our humanity in favor of an exquisite angelology of the ego. It allows us to slip past the experience of the mystery: that the body is indeed a great temple which moves slowly towards a breakdown and dissolution. The alchemists knew this: that the soul cannot fly, cannot be released from the vessel until the body is broken down, dissolved, and even putrified. When you read the alchemists you will discover that this breakdown and dissolution is the beginning of the Great Work, and that without experiencing and seeing, watching and attending to this momentous operation--keeping the fire of heart and attention at the proper degree--nothing happens. The soul does not fly, the subtle body is not created, nor is the imagination which is the soul's experience of itself open to eternity. It is this focus on the body and the wound in both life and death that leads to the sacred marriage of the alchemists. Paracelsus stressed, "The eternal is a sign of the dissolution of Nature, and not the beginning of created things, and the end in all things which no nature is without."

...A true medicine and counseling should therefore be one that addresses the immediate, the body of things and the body, for if we really wish to enter into the eternal, see the universe in a grain of sand, we must in our imagination understand...the soul's expression of itself through body, and that woundedness, disease, and the putrefactio of our humanity are for us in the West ordained as the focus of a yoga that sees in these sufferings the gods we have rejected." - Charles Ponce, from "Paracelsus and the Wound", Working the Soul, Reflections on Jungian Psychology, pgs. 25-26.

**

A quote from a letter by Carl Jung to a man who was too identified with spirituality and transcendence, so much so that he could not live in the reality of material, natural existence.  I will put the entire letter at the end of this essay:

(Click on the photo to read it easily)

"Follow your nose" - the animal instinct we have still intact. Love it. The better to smell and tell shoit from peanut butter especially in New Age Kyron Koo Koo Kool-Aid Kandy Sugar Land,

Anyhoo. January 1st. Must confess to massive dread for this year aahead, POTUS election nearing as the slavering savage MAGA right smells (as it wants) literal blood. 

Bull religion is deadly serious confusing archetype/symbol for reality, here-nowness.

May have to offer up a pigeon or 4 on the roof, try to appease the insatiable need for killing and in such sanctify (of fortune in men's eyes) the killing for heaven's sake.  

Yeah, right.

I shall conclude this assay with a poem writ a few years ago:

Not the Moon but the Poem

"I'll make a broken music, or I'll die." - Theodore Roethke

Seeing the moon whole could mean 

madness, now or overdue, for the supreme 

vanity of daring to eye-gulp the whole swiss cheese. 

Please gods and moondogs 

the effort pays in insubstantial ways, 

makes a life, gives it focus but employs for life times: 

 

spilt milk

one milk tooth 

a throat charm 

against seeing but 

not the saying.

It troubles me that I can't get it right. 

Not the moon but the poem. 

CODA

James  Wright says, "Men have the right to thank god for their loneliness."

Kenneth Patchen says,  "We can lie here with the angel if we like."

Goodnight moon.

C. G, Jung's letter quoted in part in text above.  Here's the entire letter (click onto it to read it better):

Going to play solo setar music (click onto the link just below) performed by friend Nima Janmohammadi, seek sooth and soothe, dream of a lost milk tooth, resist regression but find toned espression (as in espresso-ession), find an undulant groove to lay myself down within/upon break meat trance if but for a bit before the bit tears the jaw, the harness jerks the mane, the head, to inevitable paths, ancient Rider on the move:

Nima Janmohammaddi Solo Setar Nava سه تار نیما جانمحمدی

2023 and 2024 pondering each other.

Santa Fe Gallery "Glass Doll

Published by Warren Falcon on January 1, 2024 at 1:30 pm

===================================

Saturday, February 6, 2010

Of Self-knowing Vs. Personas Of Self-Realization, We "Are Also "I" " Vs. The "Exquisite Angelology Of The Ego", And Zorba's Angry Human Cry 

CLICK HERE TO GET TO THE ESSAY AS PUBLISHED FEBRUARY 2010

for Joan and Maria. Compadres du "Mal"

I pose you you're question: 
shall you uncover honey / where maggots are? 
- Charles Olson 

myself 
the intruder, as he was not - Robert Creeley 

Sooner or later everybody's kingdom must end 
...And if my hands are stained forever 
And the altar should refuse me 
Would you let me in, would you let me in, would you let me in 
Should I cry sanctuary - Bernie Taupin 

[Prologue: WARNING: If one is appalled by bull-fighting then DO NOT view this video as it shows the ancient and still living graphic "face off" of life against death, in this specific case a famous old Mexican Matador, "El Pana" (The Buddy) battles Death in the form of a bull whose name I did not record at the time I went to this bullfight in Apizaco, Tlaxcala, Mexico in January 2008. The graphic bloodletting in the video, of the old religion's clear awareness of the struggle between chthonic nature (the bull/unconscious) and uber-nature (human conscious/egoic/rational), is deadly honest depicting the sacred life and death struggle that is existence and thus the attendant and authentic religious rituals of the "fight", the uniform, tight fitting, revealing the genital/animal/chthonic biological man, bright symbolic colors, the choreographed moves of the matador and his attendants in response to the bull (having the "mind of the Bull"), the various espadas (swords, short and long), the stylized killing of the bull, the removal of the ears which are offered to some beautiful maiden in the crowd who tosses her hat or scarf or shawl to the victorious one who then kisses it and tosses it back to Her, and then the feeding of the poor, the bull as an offering.  

The fight, of course, is within the body and soul of the bull fighter, the primal man at war vitally in between his chthonic, instinctual masculine (represented by the bull) and his conscious, rational/moral/intuitive self. Whether one approves of bull fighting or not both the bull and the matador are priests enacting in powerfully enfleshed religious drama what occurs within the psyches and bodies of every human, woman and man. The bull prefigures Christ whose body and blood are eaten ritually in the eucharistic "communion" rite, a rite where death brings the god palpably/powerfully to one's self, of the Church which wisely incorporated this pre-Christian rite into itself in order to compete and win (it did) against its rival religion 2000 years ago, Mithraicism, a religion in which the god in the form of a bull is killed, its flesh and blood ritually imbibed in essence to incorporate the raw instinctual self into a more conscious vessel, human awareness.  

In America we have this rite available to view in professional bull riding and many rodeo events. Rather than killing the bull, the bull is "killed/defeated" by the human who "conquers/subdues/kills" the bull by riding it, gripping the rope behind the bull head with one strong hand, the other in the air, for 8 very long seconds, the rope/hand link attaching and revealing one's intrinsic animal connection to and as the bull. As we know symbolically, the hand in part represents the conscious will of the ego thus the gripping hand consciously attached to the biological/un-thought/drive-ridden animal unconscious, the human consciously submitting to the struggle and torture of enduring the conflict within and outside of oneself, bull and rider one and yet differentiated by the hand, the will, conscious intention.  

To attend a bull riding event is an amazing opportunity to see the "old religion" of pre-Christian Europe (and its equivalent in other primal cultures) viscerally enacted before one's very own eyes (and guts or "bowels" in the Biblical Old Testament sense, the bowels being the deep seat of all human emotion and felt knowing perhaps clearly understood in the often heard and stated "I know in my guts this is true" or "gut knowing"). The opening rituals are essentially religious, both man and bull equally sacred - a brightly lit auditorium arena is suddenly plunged into darkness thus silencing the collective distracted crowd, then sudden deafening explosions of pyrotechnics, flames and sparks shooting up from hidden barrels in the arena below, blinding, Damascus-like spotlights strike a circle in the aromatic sawdust pitch, then flaming letters ignite "announcing" the beginning of the ancient "Mass". One can smell the bulls, the piss and manure already the incense prior to the opening rite. Enter the sacred dramatists, men, bulls, acolyte attendants and, most importantly, a clown/acrobat - the Trickster - chittering and skittering alone on the arena edges or magically appearing and disappearing out of barrels imitating and mocking the bulls, the riders, the audience, the God(s), which is worth the entire price of admission.  

I am certain that most people attending the bull riding spectacle are not at all aware that this is the ancient Mithraic religion enacted (somewhat altered via cultural flavoring). I was amazed during my first attendance when, after all the dramatic religious ritual and "introit", a Christian minister prayed to the Lord Jesus Christ! and this in a secular and surprisingly tolerant New York City Madison Square Garden filled with multi-ethnic people of all faiths or no conscious faith at all! I instantly "got it", that the Lord Jesus Christ in this context was/is the sacrificial bull-god, Mithras, the sacrifiical Lamb in Christianity retroactively the Mithraic bull whose sacrifice may not only appease the bloodthirsty, justice obsessed though unjust Himself, primitive, chthonic, evil side of God depicted clearly in the book of Job in the Jewish and Christian scriptures. These blood religions remain NOT for the secular or theologically "liberal" (read "Lite") faint of heart. I highly encourage one and all to attend and "get a grip" once again on blood mysteries, Nature, life as it is and the sacredness revealed in the battle in and before one depicted in the video above and in what I am describing of professional bull riding's secretly (ancient) religious event (click or copy and paste here for my recent poem depicting a similar event, albeit highly personal, depicting a growing awareness of the requirement of life to continue life by killing, or read it below at the end of this essay: http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/cleaning-fish-on-good-friday-1963/

In the Western secular world these events are called "sports" - even the bulls are called "athletes" - but all sports are religious events whether participants and observers are cognizant of this fact or not. Sports are archetypal enactments of the conflict between the opposites, thus the fans (fanatics) are religiously (psychologically) gripped in the games between ultimate good and evil - our chosen side is always always "the good guys" and our opponents are always always always "the bad guys" - but if one is thoughtful, informed and aware that the other is indeed "also I" (one's own evil, shadow) one can see the archetypal religious drama unfolding and authentically, humanly participate in authentic worship withdrawing projected shadow and integrating/assimilating - trying to - the regathered shadow content, consciously allowing and embracing one's own instinctual, animal and human nature. The operative word here is "consciously".

After the bull fight in Mexico as after the bull riding events in the US I and my fellow "worshipers" find a Spanish or Argentinian restaurant and truly toast to the bulls, the matadors, the holy rites, and enjoy red meat and red wine, a celebratory Passover/Eucharistic event, knowing that all too soon we, too, shall be what is in the cup and on the plate, unworthy meals, ah, but what majesty to be conscious of all this! And Nature's palette is not as discriminating our human own. She wins in the end. The squirming worms, alimentary canals as are we all, eat their fill or the winds/waters scatter/muddy our cremated dust, with or without kirtan, mantras, prayers and chants, while Great Nature's cycles continue until our sun goes nova and then...and then...the ongoing dance of colliding galaxies, "former Indras all..."

Wendell Berry, Kentucky farmer and poet, tiller of the earth and of human consciousness richly writes of participating in planetary yet personal Life and Death cycles conveying the sacred found in the above and other rites of living close to "what is", to Life, to Nature, to Death. The conscious consenting to, arrival of and struggling to hold within himself the awareness of Life's demand for blood, for Death, is actually more truly "transcendent" - meaning, transformative and not bypassing at all - than all the ostensible "non-violence" of the sincere yet curtsying "peaceful ones" with all their well-intentioned though merely imitative "spiritual-tourettes-like" expostulations of "love, light, peace and blessings". Give me a bull, a Berry, a "god-blade" any day and any pray within and up from the steep and the depths:

The Fearfulness of Hands That Have Learned Killing

The fearfulness of hands that have learned killing
I inherit from my own life. With my hands from boyhood
I formed the small perfect movements of death, 
killing for pleasure or wantonness, casually.
Manhood taught me the formal deadliness
of hunter and farmer, the shedding
of predestined blood that lives for death.
Only marrying and fathering lives 
has taught me the depth of ruin,
and made me feel the quick in my hands the subtlety
and warmth of what they have destroyed.
And still I have killed for pity, and felt open
in my mind the beautiful silence, the sudden
ridding of a hurt thing's pain. I
am dumbfounded at the works I have accomplished
at the bounds of mystery, seeing it flow out
red and mute, matting the hair of my hands.
The skill that is prepared in me is careful
and terrible. There is no life I can think of
without sensing in my hands the answering power.
I shall not go free of the art of death.
- Wendell Berry, Openings, pg. ll.

In conclusion to this prologue to what follows below, I quote Jungian analyst and writer, Peter O'Conner (thanks to Tom Dybek for introducing me to O'Conner and this passage) who speaks clearly and accurately, in my experienced opinion as a guilty participant, of the current tendency to bypass necessary recuperative, integrative work via "spiritualities" (escapes/bypasses) of all kinds:

"In the present times my personal view is that there is an ever increasing tendency to pursue 'self-realization' without struggling with the more painful task of self-knowledge. The proliferation of instant gurus has facilitated the defensive fantasy that self-realization is possible without the more painful struggle of self-knowledge. All that is in fact achieved by such instant and painless 'self-realization' is a persona of self-realization., a mask or ego-image of it, but not a psychic reality. Hence the first real stress or upset that occurs to such people with a persona of self-realization sees that so-called realization crumble into depression or explode into anger.  The Jungian viewpoint is unequivocally that self-knowledge is the path to self-realization..." - Peter O'Conner, Understanding Jung, Understanding Yourself, Paulist Press, 1985, pgs. 71-72.]


********************************************


I begin with the antidote to spiritual bypassing...NOTE: the experience of God or the Self can be a trauma. In New Age "all-too-sweet-and-Lite" lenses this experience is misperceived as suffering brought upon oneself by "bad core beliefs", negative thinking. There is an unwillingness and/or incapacity to see this dark aspect and experience of the Sacred in spite of past and current evidence of many people who report this alchemical crushing, dissolution and refinement. This denial is childish ego inflation and hubris insisting only upon one side of the Sacred's being and experience, gentleness, sweetness, light, and denies the experience of God/Self/Beloved as a ruthless the "black light", as the "Refiner's Fire" purposely disorienting and afflicting an individual in order to re-orient the individual into a right relationship of ego to the Self. Thus Sufi mystic and poet Hafiz's poem as a clear antidote and compensation to "spiritual bypassing":

Tired of Speaking Sweetly

Love wants to reach out and manhandle us,
Break all our teacup talk of God.

If you had the courage and
Could give the Beloved His choice, some nights,
He would just drag you around the room
By your hair,
Ripping from your grip all those toys in the world
That bring you no joy.

Love sometimes gets tired of speaking sweetly
And wants to rip to shreds
All your erroneous notions of truth
That make you fight within yourself, dear one,
And with others,
Causing the world to weep
On too many fine days.

God wants to manhandle us,
Lock us inside of a tiny room with Himself
And practice His dropkick.

The Beloved sometimes wants
To do us a great favor:
Hold us upside down
And shake all the nonsense out.

But when we hear He is in such a "playful drunken mood"
Most everyone I know
Quickly packs their bags and hightails it
Out of town. 
- The Gift – versions of Hafiz by Daniel Ladinsky


easy sleep
easy rest

easier to be an animal
than not - Jerome Rothenberg

All the time I pray to Buddha I keep on killing mosquitoes. - Issa Kobayashi

Outside of this Heart there is no Buddha
This Heart is the Buddha.
Outside of this heart there is no Demon
This heart is the Demon. - Huey Nin, the 6th Patriarch in the present era of 
Dao lineage is credited with this quote.This quote was later expanded upon by 
other Buddhas in the lineage of Dao to include the bottom two lines.

"Man is an animal who feeds upon transcendentals." - Raissa Maritain

Spiritual bypassing is a manic defense against depression and death, a denial of the realm of "pathos" - suffering in existence - from which the word "pathology" is derived, the path or pattern of suffering in being. Great Nature runs riot upon and within that which we project to be "transcendence" but, without a doubt, crushing dissolution, decay and ending is Nature's insistent way despite all our reification of wishful "happier" metaphysics - read "escapes" - bypassing inexorable existential givens. We choose to believe that these spiritually flavored subtleties of Imagination must concretely be true given understandable human desperation in the teeth of facticity, of throwness feet first or head long into the maws of life. Searching for transcendence long sought and hard fought for in the all too human act of artifice, art, alchemy and religion, in the depth cry toward surcease and significant if but momentary peace of mind and body, I no longer wonder that some are wont to take holy vows who, tipping Cosmic Cows (or piercing murderous bulls), cloak themselves in Blessed Silence, a long breath out-sleeved.

There may be more to me and thee, O Mercurial Verities between How-and-Now Cows, than the undertaker's shovel and the deep blue sky and sea but I am a soul man, partial to soul, to space, to time, to locale, at more than a lover's quarrel with the world and very much at quarrel with spirit and entire "congregations of vapor" (Shakespeare). This argument is ongoing as it should be, at least for me. What follows here below are extensive quotes from thoughtful, clear-headed and compassionate writers who rediscover and sing/argue in the face of the bypassers (as are we all, truthfully, us "hopefully transcending ones") of and for the nobility inherent in suffering Creation and Her creatures, including humanity, as part of living and dying into and out of conscious existence.

I begin with Alan Watt's: "Man has to discover that everything which he beholds in nature - the clammy foreign-feeling world of the ocean's depths, the wastes of ice, the reptiles of the swamp, the spiders and scorpions, the deserts of lifeless planets - has its counterpart within himself. He is not, then, at one with himself until he realizes that this "under side" of nature and the feelings of horror which it gives him are also "I". - The Wisdom of Insecurity, Chapter 7: "The Transformation of Life", p.111.


Charles Ponce, Jungian/archetypal astrologer and psychoanalyst, brilliantly writes, arights and reorients us very necessarily toward the urgencies and immediacy of Existence, of Nature in Her appeal, in Her drive for attestation as She is. I quote extensively here for it is a much needed compensation to the overly-inflated and hysterical spiritual bypass which is most certainly the manic "happy" newish religions and and bipolar (manic-depressive) culture of contemporary America):

"...we rebel essentially against the autonomy of Nature, the natural breakdown of Nature, the need of Nature to relax into itself, even to collapse into itself in the way that trees retreat into themselves with the advent of Winter...We turn away from our bodies in illness and death not because we have resolved the issue of the wound, but because it is far easier to think of an afterlife, far less fearful and painful to surround ourselves with the good feeling that we may not only escape this life in one psychic piece, but that we will no longer have to concern ourselves with our physical humanity...This approach to death robs us of our tie to Nature, strips us of our humanity in favor of an exquisite angelology of the ego. It allows us to slip past the experience of the mystery: that the body is indeed a great temple which moves slowly towards a breakdown and dissolution. The alchemists knew this: that the soul cannot fly, cannot be released from the vessel until the body is broken down, dissolved, and even putrified. When you read the alchemists you will discover that this breakdown and dissolution is the beginning of the Great Work, and that without experiencing and seeing, watching and attending to this momentous operation--keeping the fire of heart and attention at the proper degree--nothing happens. The soul does not fly, the subtle body is not created, nor is the imagination which is the soul's experience of itself open to eternity. It is this focus on the body and the wound in both life and death that leads to the sacred marriage of the alchemists. Paracelsus stressed, "The eternal is a sign of the dissolution of Nature, and not the beginning of created things, and the end in all things which no nature is without...A true medicine and counseling should therefore be one that addresses the immediate, the body of things and the body, for if we really wish to enter into the eternal, see the universe in a grain of sand, we must in our imagination understand..the soul's expression of itself through body, and that woundedness, disease, and the putrefactio of our humanity are for us in the West ordained as the focus of a yoga that sees in these sufferings the gods we have rejected." -- Charles Ponce, from "Paracelsus and the Wound", Working the Soul, Reflections on Jungian Psychology, pgs. 25-26.


Ernest Becker: Sensitive souls have reacted with shock to the elemental drama of life on this planet...this bone-crushing, bone-drinking drama in all its elementality and necessity. Life cannot go on without the mutual devouring of organisms. If at the end of each person's life he were to be presented with the living spectacle of all that he had organismically incorporated in order to stay alive, he might well feel horrified by the living energy he had ingested. The horizon of a gourmet, or even the average person, would be taken up with hundreds of chickens, flocks of lambs and sheep, a small herd of steers, sties full of pigs, and rivers of fish. The din alone would be deafening. To paraphrase Elias Canetti, each organism raises its head over a field of corpses, smiles into the sun, and declares life good. -- Ernest Becker, Escape From Evil, pg.2


Guillermo Arriaga (transcribed from in interview): "...So I said, "I am going to be a boxer...so I began training hard and hard and suddenly I have a pain in my chest so I say, "It's nothing, a torn muscle," and so I began again and again, training, training, training, and I went to a doctor and say, "Yeah, you have a torn muscle." Wrong. I have an infection in my heart so I went to a cardiologist and he said, "I have good news and bad news...the good news is that you are not a hypochondriac. The bad news is that your heart is completely swollen and that you can have a heart attack maybe today, maybe tomorrow, I don't know. So you have to go to bed NOW." And so I say, "Fuck!" And so I watch my hands. I say, "My hands may be the hands of a corpse tomorrow.They will not move anymore tomorrow." So I make a commitment to caress the skins I have to caress, to beat with my hands those I have to beat, and to build something that will survive my hands," and that's when I began to write furiously without stopping and I have my studio full of skulls, not real ones but of wood, stone...and every time I get tired I say, "Arriaga, you are gonna die. You have to do something with your hands."

So until now I have caressed the skins that I have to caress, I haven't beaten people that I like but I don't want to be violent anymore, and I have been writing since then. Thus, a personal fight against death...so I have two thoughts about pain--the first, the worst thing you can do with pain is not using it. You cannot waste pain. Another one is that pain is inevitable but suffering is a decision so I use pain for writing and every time I have pain I try to keep it and use it in a certain way...

I personally believe that Death doesn't present once, it presents daily and I always think that Death has a giant tongue that licks you. For example, this [rubs his thinning hair] is death licking my hair and says, "You thought you were okay? Well, there goes your new look." And, uh, cellulite in women and tits going down, it's like Death licking and, you know, we men (makes a gesture of an erect penis deflating), is like wop! wop! wop!...and when you lose someone you love, a woman, you are carrying the corpse of someone you love inside you...

They say that dust is skin flakes and I believe that every time
we wipe the dust we wipe the corpse of who we were at that time..."

-- Guillermo Arriaga, acclaimed Mexican writer, in conversation with Paul Auster at 2007 PEN Writer's Conference, has written screenplays, Babel, Amores Perros, The Three Burials of Melchiades Estrada, 21 Grams, and more. Here is the weblink to hear the entire conversation:

http://www.pen.org/audio_archive/2007_world_voices/auster_arriaga.mp3]


Alexis Zorba: Why do the young die? Why does anybody die?
Basil: I don't know.
Alexis Zorba: What's the use of all your damn books if they can't answer that?
Basil: They tell me about the agony of men who can't answer questions like yours.
Alexis Zorba: I spit on this agony!
-- from the film, Zorba the Greek, based upon the novel by Nikos Kazantzakis of the same title

**********************

My poem, Cleaning Fish On Good Friday,1963, mentioned in the prologue to the essay:


Fate, then, heavy in a boy's hand
hoists dead weight to a nail on a tree.
His knife scores firm flesh yielding
beneath freshly limp gills - there is an
instrument made just for this, pincher-pliers
for catfish skin - he grips and tears,
uses his weight down-stripping smoothly
bare to such luscence little ribs of roseate
flesh.

Only the overly large head, the ugly face
whiskered within gilded monstrance,
remain pure to form, thin-lipped and
mocking, restrained by depth pressures,
sustained on surface trash, dead things
that sink down it's treasures.

Tenderly sing, then, to a nail,
to a boy's blood catechism -
hands, minds, are meant
to be stained, mercy's quality
unstrained neither by will nor gill.
Scavenging flocks gladly fill their
gullets inhaling entrails tossed
in supplicant bins.

In unison Gregorian they scream.

**A catfish when brought to shore barks, a rasping, barking discharge of air.