"Untie, Or Break That Knot Again" - On Resolutions And Why We Fail Them

[Alex D. of Oaxaca, Mexico. The New Year is often depicted as an infant signifying the dissolving back to beginnings, simpler forms, in Western alchemy. Congrats to Monica and Luis, proud parents of Alex who brings a smile and warmth in this photo for one and all at the beginning of 2009.]

solve (v.)
c.1440, "to disperse, dissipate, loosen," from L. solvere "to loosen, dissolve, untie," from PIE *se-lu-, from reflexive pronoun *swe- + base *leu- "to loosen, divide, cut apart" (cf. Gk. lyein "to loosen, release, untie," O.E. -leosan "to lose," leas "loose;" see lose).
resolve (v.)
c.1374, from L. resolvere "to loosen, undo, settle," from re-, intensive prefix, + solvere "loosen" (see solve).
resolution
1412, "a breaking into parts," from L. resolutionem (nom. resolutio) "process of reducing things into simpler forms," from pp. stem of resolvere "loosen" (see resolve).
dissolve
c.1374, from L. dissolvere "to loosen up, break apart," from dis- "apart" + solvere "to loose, loosen"

Why most New Year's resolutions (and ongoingly through the year) do not work is perhaps inherent etymologically in the word itself which indicates a "breaking apart, a reduction of things into simpler forms, a loosening, undoing, untieing, untangling, dividing, unsettling and cutting apart". Honestly, who actually wants that? Who needs it in terms of time, attention, energy, patience and persona in our busy lives with self, others, and the "getting and spending" of consumer society which packages and encourages much of what we are resolving to tone down, parse, eliminate and banish from our daily lives? To actually undergo the dissolving process inherent in the word resolution is not what we consciouslly sign up for every New Year when we make our resolutions. What we unconsciously sign up for in making resolutions is most often ongoingly excoriating, disorienting and often conjures the hidden energies and issues beneath the presenting problem, habit, symptom and behavior we've resolved to change. Alchemical processes of transformation involve our ultimate assent and surrender to That Greater Will (God, Higher Power first manifested as a complex, a symptom, habit, addiction, etc) which has mugged us, dragged us kicking and screaming or innocently whistling on our "naive New Age tuffets eating curds and whey" from everyday mindless path-walks into the woods, the wild, the waste places --"we're not in Kansas anymore, Dorothy"-- and into the bubbling cauldron or oven of many a myth and fairy tale witch.

In Western alchemy the phase of "solutio" or "solution" is one in which things are dissolved in water. Rituals using water evolved when early ancestors noticed that solid things seemed to disappear in water, they broke down, dissolved and lost form. To resolve then is to undergo a process of dissolution, dissolving, a loosening and losing of form and structure, rendering things back to simpler first forms. These simple forms are called prima materia in alchemy which is the raw stuff of the psyche/soma, the as yet to be cooked material of the innocent self. The prima materia is what brings us into therapy, counseling, psychological and spiritual work. This rough stuff, untamed, wild, and instinctual, conflicts with the "smoother" aspects of personality (persona = mask) and ego and thus begins theconflict of alchemical phases of individuation.

During New Year celebrations we often participate in group events which involve formal and informal rituals of dissolution from religious services of sermon and song to inebriated imbibing of alchololic drinks while merging (a form of solutio) into celebratory group/collective mind in the Time Squares of the world. Group mind is a collective pool, if you will, in which we become one with the many who have become one in ritual and revelry as we collectively dissolve the old year and self into a new born babe (that oft seen image of the new year as a crawling, be-diapered infant wearing a top hat), a new self we resolve to become or work toward in the new year. With sophisticated world-wide media we are able to be in dens and livingrooms with televisions and computers tuned in enabling us to literally participate in the global pool/solutio going on from one time zone to another, a species-wide dissolutio event of group intoxication and merging as one to ring out the old year and self whilst ringing in the new "naked" year and self to come.

These outter rituals are most easy to do and one often gladly participates in them, however, the actual personal alchemical processes alluded to in our resolutions are such chronic, intense and disorienting experiences that scarcely anyone will assent to submit to them unless forced to by the psyche/soul which insists via addictions, symptoms, events, disruptions of routine self that one undergoes the lifelong alchemical procedures of crushing (called nigredo in alchemy), solutio (dissolving/breaking apart), calcinatio (burning to reduce hard accretions of prima materia into more refined states with the heat of the fires drying out our affect/emotion laden complexes), sublimatio (not sublimation ala Freud but refining into essense), putrefactio and mortificatio (decay and death of hardened parts of self), the goal of all this leading to the creation of the philosopher's stone, the agua permanens, the essential conscious self in conscious relationship to
the Self, Jung's term for the central organizing and mysterious factor of the psyche from which our conscious selves are derived. This relationship of self with Self is called the Divine Marriage and is the goal of alchemical transformation.

One of the inherent meanings of resolution is to untie, to loosen. The very word "analysis" literally means to untie, to loosen the knots. Psychoanalysis, Jungian analytical psychology, and consequent developments of subsequent psychological theory, technique and evolving schools of psychology are about this untieing, loosening of psychological knots which can usher us into alchemical transformative processes. In this most difficult yet meaningful work we need guides who have undergone and are currently undergoing the alchemical processes which we all undergo but mostly unconsciously whereupon many of our treatments and cures are chemical of medical and addictive variety or naively positive and irritatingly simplistic. To enter the alchemical laboratory of counseling, therapy and spiritual traditions with appropriate and "cooked/cooking" guides values the procedures of alchemical transformative phases. We suffer but we suffer meaningfully and not alone. Jung says that meaningless suffering is hell. To arrive at the felt meaning and actual ripening of and within difficult passage elevates our experience of the journey from nigredo, the crushing, darkening beginning phase of beginning changes, to Coniunctio, none other than the sacred inner marriage of opposites within ourselves, of masculine (animus) and feminine (anima), of ego with shadow, of self with Self.

To conclude, resolution also means to hold firm, this holding firm during and after breaking apart, dissolving and undergoing the process of alchemical change, consolidates authentic psychological maturity which endures the difficult phases of change. In this submission which is an admission (the first step in twelve step programs) we are no longer (or less, at least) victims of life, of somatic, psychological, spiritual, and social powers and, most importantly, our Higher Power as we experience It, whom/which is driving/enforcing the changes upon and within us. Jung's rediscovery of the transpersonal nature, the Self and It's archtypes, of our complexes, addictions, symptoms, and issues reorients us toward more meaningful endurance, suffering and arrival made new even within the apparent but transparent limits of our personal history. We surrender to the Greater Self and hold firm that the work will be complete and whole, not perfect, which holds all personal and transpersonal opposites not as contraries but as dynamic creative complements intent on continuing what was/is begun at beginning (a kaballistic rendering of the first verse of the book of Beginnings or Genesis is, "In the beginning is beginnings".) Our knots become sacred means by which we encounter the contractions and constructions of material and psychological existence, its joys and vicissitudes (meaning "changeably, in turn," from vicis "a turn, change") with our eventual gracious (enough) though vociferous submission to That Grace which bestows encountered in every alchemical phase of changes in many guises. In assent and consent we are loosened from that personal will power which creates our well meant yet naive resolutions humbly recognizing that Greater Will (we know It when we see, hear, touch, taste, smell or intuit It) which batters, bends, knocks and breaks us all the while enthralling and ravishing us in, with and by It's Mysterious Palpable Presense. [In a future essay I'll speak of that Presense experienced as Absence and Emptiness.]

John Donne's Holy Sonnet #14 is the prayer of one in the midst of surrender to That Which dissolves us, assenting to the dissolving phase of alchemical change, his understanding that these changes are brought about not from the self, the ego with all of it's will power, but by that which is greater, the Self of Selves which Jung calls the Self and Donne calls God :


Batter my heart, three-person'd God ; for you
As yet but knock ; breathe, shine, and seek to mend ;
That I may rise, and stand, o'erthrow me, and bend
Your force, to break, blow, burn, and make me new.
I, like an usurp'd town, to another due,
Labour to admit you, but O, to no end.
Reason, your viceroy in me, me should defend,
But is captived, and proves weak or untrue.
Yet dearly I love you, and would be loved fain,
But am betroth'd unto your enemy ;
Divorce me, untie, or break that knot again,
Take me to you, imprison me, for I,
Except you enthrall me, never shall be free,
Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.

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[There are enough accessible books now available which detail this alchemical process of transformation which is not an escape from matter which most religions seem to be geared to, especially those of the West, but a transformation process into more conscious matter, awakened matter which does not escape material existence so much as consciously inhabits it and in so doing, says Jung, affects all levels of existence. Two books I highly recommend for ongoing study of alchemical processes of transformation are:


Anatomy of the Psyche, Alchemical Symbolism in Psychotherapy, by Edward F. Edinger
The Emerald Tablet, Alchemy For Personal Transformation, by Dennis William Hauck

It goes without saying that reading all of Carl Jung's work on alchemy especially while undergoing the phases of transformation from break down to reunion/marriage of self with Self will continually orient you within the tumult of the stages. Having the books and a guide who has and is currently and continually undergoing the "refiner's fire" of Self and Psyche companions one, contains and orients one throughout. Alchemical change is an intense ongoing experience of cooking and refinement in all ages of life. It is never done though there are many who think they have arrived, veritable souffles of shimmering spirituallity, done with shit and shadow. Beware working with those as you will inevitably carry and undergo their unfinished work (if ever begun) and shadow which is ongoing work all the way to the end.]

Part Two - "Are We Lost Yet" -- A Gypsy Cab Author Caught In A Texas Milky Way

[For Part One of "Are We Lost Yet" go to the "Blog Archive" menu on the upper right and click onto the only other December link, "Part One, etc."]

Coda - 1753, from L. cauda "a tail."

And so it was I entered the broken world to trace the visionary company of love. -- Hart Crane

...the drunken taxicabs of absolute reality... -- Allen Ginsberg

Mark the first page of the book with a red marker. For, in the beginning, the wound is invisible. -- Edmund Jabes


Gather ye nosebleeds while ye may.

This is for R. M.


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A man of many false starts..." -- first sentence from the manuscript I'm writing of below.


Estimado hermano Moises,


The first sentence launches the piece and the story carries itself along like, say, a veteran of the Iraq war cabbie I know driving here and there in a Texas town doing so because that's where the money is, compelled to dirt roads and back streets one would never intentionally go to if not for the need of money, forcing a broken-legged hobo's freedom of sorts to make mutually agreed upon brief commitments with strangers to destinations ending with a discharge and a fare-thee-well. Between customers arrives the graveyard shift nightly migration to the Waffle House for respite, rituals of grease, gravy and grinning at the Medussa-wigged waitress with echolalia. Petrochemical company flares just across the highway signal Mammon Wasteland Theology's Trinket Sacraments to the folks who live in and around this mess, a desert kingdom of the far flung, you being one of them now, home from the war, exile before and after, returning to the beat up but beloved truck that also tells a story and leaves a stain -- to Jake and his slow breakdown or break in, and the hard lesson of earnest Private Hodges trapped in his pattern of wanting approval and love ill sought from the gold-toothed refugee Drill Sergeant Thomas, late of Liberia, a wannabee Jehovah with too much power over America's young game boys shipwrecked onto military shores.

As everyday and makepiece the settings and the people are you make me love them, even those chemical companies and the justly reactive radioheads, their words blown out of cab windows -- you write, "the wind blows away our words" -- to be heard all the way here in the East Village, New York City, the words, discarded or dragged screaming from a passing cab, compel compassion, curiosity and hint of a calm eye in the center of the eternal return of dispatches to the corner of Crackhurst and Waffle House and back again. This eye observes, swerves to miss the Mexican kid chasing the ball into Same Ol' Street ("same as it ever was" -- David Burne), notes it with caffeine, amphetamine laced, and traces "the visionary company of love"-- stubbed cigarettes, sputum maps coughed and spat.

As justly bitter (unlike the bland and tepid Waffle House coffee) as the writer's voice may sometimes sound there is a tremendous compassion and sorrow heard for these faces and places. This "broke hearted" uttering does, indeed, trace the visionary company down on "those mean streets" of Texas and World missing a few teeth, unfurling like remote prayerflags in coldest Himalayas fluttering and flung from gypsy cab windows, unheard hiccups of eventing into the oblivion of the obvious -- flutter-flap ancient technologies of cloth strung holy in bleak majesty articulate and plead "Mercy" for all the species, eventually our own, obliterated by human tracings, Gate Gate Paragate Parasamgate Bodhi Svaha...GONE, GONE, GONE BEYOND, COMPLETELY GONE BEYOND, ENLIGHTENMENT, HAIL.

Keep going with this and the other pieces...the line was strung years ago when you were just a kid in "Father Bob And "What The Fuck" Land" and all the books (which are NEVER false starts) read and to be read and written since then and now and to come, and the suffering and isolated hours and forlorn miles in the merciless cab, flap and flutter with real voice about poor human choices which, even at their worst, are votes for visionary company in those universes revealed even in Texan and Iraqi sand. It is so brilliantly human to find the diamond in the shit.

It's damned good you are in-spired in the debris of progress, a wake-dreamed jeweler mining away, in-breathed, while sucking those cigarettes and lovers, the hashbrowns, along Texas highways and byways waiting for another dispatch to Bumfuck and Divine.

The psalmist says it right, no matter the blight:

Let everything that hath breath praise the Lord!!

I await another dispatch prayer for the far flung tracers.


Abrazos bien fuerte,


Warren

[Above Photo by Warren Falcon, "Mexican Cab And Straw Wheels", Apizaco, Tlaxcala, Mexico, January 2008]

Part One : "Are We Lost Yet?" -- Upon Darkness and Nostos, a Gypsy's Diaspora-as-Return, Scapegoats & Chakravartins

Mark the first page of the book with a red marker. For, in the beginning, the wound is invisible. -- Edmund Jabes


Nostos is a greek word for a return home.
Nostalgia returns us home via memory though we
may be far and parted by distance, by division, by diverse passages.

The etymology of the word Rom (gypsy):

One who pervades and operates all.
One who roams about.
Dark-colored
Husband which is the same as in the Romani language
Pleasing, delighting, charming (in Sanskrit ramana is masculine and ramani feminine and in Romani language is also romni (meaning 'wife').
One who pleases or delights others. "Roma of Europe do please others and delight others by their excellent music and dances", notes WR Rishi in Roma. -- from romani.org


We are the poor ones, and only in poverty can we hear what the earth may speak. -- Tom Cheetham

Every revelation partook more of a significant darkness than of explanatory light. -- Herman Melville

We do not mourn because we see through a glass darkly, we now rejoice in the dark loveliness of the glass. -- John Dominc Crossan

And so it was I entered the broken world to trace the visionary company of love. -- Hart Crane

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I have recently been reading of the gypsies, or Roma or Romani as they prefer to be called, which finds me reaffirming the earthy depth dimensions of incarnate life and honoring the dark light in this season of literal darkening moving toward the winter solstice (see note below re: the Iranian sufi notion of "dark light" and an excerpt from Tom Cheetham's essay on Corbin*). My reading does not make me an expert on gypsies and gypsy culture but I do know that gypsies historically and presently the world over have been scapegoated and maligned by dominant "settled" cultures and values. Gypsies suffer the fate of scapegoats who are designated to be the carriers of disowned psychological content repressed into the nether regions of psyche and culture. "Well acquainted with the dark" (Robert Frost's phrase from a poem), and "well acquainted with grief" (from the Judaic Book of Isaiah), the gypsies have formed and consolidated a strong cultural identity which survives and thrives claiming themselves as other-than-outsiders yet knowing that it is from the outside that they have the vantage and advantage of observing those who consider themselves and their culture to be insiders, all the while the roma historically move through the inside as outsiders on their way "home".

A friend who travels often and hikes much due to a lifelong demandingly strong wanderlust has read much about gypsies told me while hiking a few months ago that it was his personal belief that a rom, meaning a gypsy man, slept out in the open under the night sky in order to travel the great road above curving from horizon to horizon, refering to the Milky Way. In Jan Yoors amazing account of his time with European gypsies as a young boy in the mid 1930's (The Gypsies) he tells how on his first night with them he lay upon down blankets outside with his new friends. He saw a shooting star suddenly chase across the sky and excitedly pointed to it for others to see. One of the rom boys quickly hushed him and pulled his pointing hand down explaining that a shooting star is a gypsy being chased by the authorities. If one calls attention to him, the dashing star, he will be caught and jailed or exiled.

My hiking friend explained his belief that the stars furthest from the shining middle road above on the edges of the horizon all around are remotest ancestors wandering upon their own roads in the dark. The brightness of the Milky Way is always available to orient them no matter how far they may travel away for they may nightly return to the campfire and sing and dance remembering who they are and where they dwell in a present which impresses futurity.

The Value of Becoming Lost

A colleague and friend once worked with a young boy who had been physically abused by his addicted parents. Scarred from cuts, cigarette burns and missing an eye due to it being purposefully burned out with a cigarette, the court eventually sent him to live with his elderly grandparents who dearly loved and cared for him. The trauma of such abuse which began as an infant proved to be unyielding and the boy refused to go beyond the front porch of his grandparents' home though a part of him longed to do so. In the course of several years my friend worked with the boy at the grandparents' home arriving there weekly on his bicycle. The boy wanted very much to ride on the bike but was afraid to leave the safety of the front porch and was afraid as many children are of becoming lost. With patience and support he eventually could go into the fenced in yard and up to the roses whose petals would blow through the fence where they were then blown up and down the street. My friend used the example of these traveling rose petals who loved to move in the wind wherever the wind blew them to pace the boy's readiness to ride with him on the bike. The day came when they could ride together in front of the house then up and down the street until one day less afraid and emboldened with the call of other unknown streets the boy said, "Let's go!" Traveling far and long from his grandparents' home at some point the boy smilingly looked back from the handle bars into my friend's face and excitedly asked, "Are we lost yet?!!"

As in this story there is some vital thing in a gypsy's dialectic of diaspora-as-return via memory and nostalgia which deeply moves the human into the depths, in the waste, wild, lost and hurt places, a move toward and upon a more ancient and primal road contacted in darkness beneath the countless roaming rom and wheeling stars above. We are relocated, reoriented in the dark as wayfarering strangers passing through filled with not knowing, emptied of the familiar yet delivered apace into recognitions of our and the other's face and place, both friend and enemy, home and exile. The very word roam from romen, possibly from O.E. *ramian meaning the "act of wandering about," related to aræman "arise, lift up" is homophonic to rom, those visionary travelers who encamp on the outskirts far from but mindful of Main Streets, strangers who every few days or so must flee because the local populace and authorities run them away as suspects, thieves, child snatchers, chicken stealers, pick pockets and filchers of laundry drying on unguarded clotheslines. Viewing the ancestral rom in the night sky does indeed raise up, lift up the individual and the caravan gazing and dreaming from the dirt below remembering who they are relocating them in the universe which is what any good cosmology of romani song, whirling gypsy skirt, earnest romani boot and supple gesturing hand does even as one races in splintering saunters scattered about by the chasing collective cops and holy congregations eschewing those despised Others passing through.

Solstice and Christmas With A Gypsy Slant And A Song Of Passing Through

I'm minded of another wanderer who was executed between two thieves 2000 years ago (which associates him to thieves archetypally but that's another essay) whose birth many will soon be celebrating around the world near the Solstice. Associated to a bright star and others which indicated to ancient astrologers who and where he was to be born he wandered from a far off place to be born in a barn surrounded by animals (the instincts) where he was laid in a manger. A manger is literally a feeding trough for animals to eat from, this first bed of the Wanderer an early indication of a later rite where his body and blood would be ingested, digested and integrated into individuals hungering for that which he hinted of, demonstrated and proclaimed with spirit as available to all who could endure the depths, the dark, the not knowing. I now like to think of him and his traveling family from a "white trash" town called Nazereth as romani. The punishment tree, a cross, became and is an ongoing response to what this rom's indication of what utter humans might attempt to express to each other while sojourning here.

This Gypsy Christ associated to a stellar event discerned by astrologers valued the dirt and the dirty. A friend to the instincts and those who lived them, fishermen, hookers and others of suspect morals and character (no offense to fishermen who are "hookers" of a different sort altogether) , he spoke of the possibilities of a living, felt integration and synthesis derived of contrasts and opposites projected upon the Other. Becoming the Other-as-cultural darkness, his new vision and value as a response to the warring power-mad states of his time eventually grew bright and troubling enough to challenge the rightness of official dogmas of ancient church and state, those calcified "kingdoms of this world". He spoke of another kingdom which may incarnate via individuals where that which has been oppressed, repressed and cast out as of least value may be invited in and integrated toward a greater whole/holdness which does not "shut out any part of itself" (a phrase from poem by John Tarrant).

Leonard Cohen's plaintive "hymn" called Passing Through sings of this Traveler's "Gypsy" message, or a common interpretation of it, and can remind us that being acquainted with the dark and even being identified as the dark projection of a person, group or culture alchemizes a new awareness, synthesizes (or can) a more conscious and welcoming embrace or, barring that, a mature tolerance of that which carries one's own darkness :

I saw Jesus on the cross on a hill called Calvary
"Do you hate mankind for what they done to you?"
He said, "Talk of love not hate, things to do - it's getting late.
I've so little time and I'm only passing through."

Passing through, passing through.
Sometimes happy, sometimes blue,
glad that I ran into you.
Tell the people that you saw me passing through.

Chakravartins and Caravan Wheels

From Hinduism comes the notion of the chakravartin which literally means "wheel (chakra) turner (vartin)". Any person who profoundly shifts consciousness is called a wheel turner having turned or begun a process which turns the wheel of human consciousness and culture. Buddha is called a chakravartin. One can borrow the term from the Hindus and Buddhists and apply it to Jesus the Christ, as well. Chakravartins archetypally have a reputation as trouble makers so that when a Buddha or a Jesus showed up in town one can imagine its citizens grumbling aloud, "Damned chakravartins!! Goddamned trouble makers!! There goes the neighborhood!! And look who they hang with and what they do!!"

With the image of the chakra wheel above associated to the large wagon wheels of the gypsy carriage one can imagine that romani caught the trouble maker part of the archetype as wheel turners disrupting established order, routine and authority bringing a new value, an as yet to be owned and integrated expression of human creativity, relatedness and consciousness. Scapegoated wheel turners wheel through the collective heart and in so doing reel the local calm into a froth of possible futurity frought with fear, fascination with a potential holdness, not holiness, which includes and values a darkness equal to light.

GO TO THE MENU ON THE UPPER RIGHT OF THE PAGE TO:
Part Two: A Coda To A Gypsy Cab Author Caught In A Texas Milky Way


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* [See Henri Corbin's The Man of Light In Iranian Sufism for an excellent scholarly presentation of "the black light", a light which is no light and not associated to common reference to light used by many religions and spiritualities. To give you a flavor of the black light here is a quote from Tom Cheetham's online essay, "The Angel Of The Earth" (read the entire essay at this link, http://www.sophiajournal.org/archives2/cheetham.html :

This is a direct perception of what philosophers call the contingency of being. It is the experience that gives rise to the great question of metaphysics "Why is there something rather than nothing?" For the gnostic it takes the form of a shattering moment of annihilation and terror, undoing all the solid foundations upon which the ego and the literal world are built. In Corbin's words,

3 Henry Corbin (1994), 112.

The black light reveals the very secret of being, which can only be as made-to-be; all beings have a twofold face, a face of light and a black face. The luminous face, the face of day, is the only one that…the common run of men perceive… Their black face, the one the mystic perceives, is their poverty… The totality of their being is their daylight face and their night face…4

4 ibid., 112-113.

The wonder and terror in the face of the fact that there is, but only by the inexplicable grace of God, something rather than nothing, provide the opening to the Unknown that lies at the heart of all religion, and of all knowing. To cover over this terrible wonderment is to block access to an Absence that is not the empty Nothing of nihilism, but the unknown and unknowable source of everything: the necessarily Hidden God beyond all being.

We know from Corbin's work that there are two darknesses: the darkness of evil that refuses the Light of God, and the shattering Darkness of the Black Light at the approach to the Pole that annihilates all human knowledge and pretension and is the final dangerous trial of the mystical journey. Perhaps it is an intimation of this divine undoing of human arrogance that lies behind the post-modern desire to deconstruct the claims to positive knowledge that define our rationalist heritage. But this destructive frenzy too often remains trapped within the confines of human language and ends in nihilism, solipsism, apathy and resignation. This leaves the way open for the radical dogmatists, both technological and religious fundamentalists, who have no patience with abstract debates about democracy or relativism: they simply go about their business of changing the world.

We need to learn from Corbin that the antidote to both nihilism and the dogmatic fundamentalism that is always constellated with it must come from a kind of positive deconstruction of the self in the vision of the Deus absconditum, the divine Beyond Being which is the source, the Breath that grants being to all things. Corbin writes,

Any metaphysical doctrine which attempts a total explanation of the universe, finds it necessary to make something out about nothing, or rather, to make everything out about nothing, since the initial principle from which the world derived, and which must explain it, must never be something contained in this world, and simultaneously it is necessary for this initial principle to posses all that is necessary to explain at once the being and the essence of the world and that which it contains… It is necessary…that this initial principle be at once 'all' and 'nothing'… [This] is a…nothing from which all things are derived. This is the Nothing of the Absolute Divine, superior to being and thought. 5

5 Henry Corbin (1981). My translation..

This Black Face of the majesty of Divinity is the essential counterweight to the Face of Light, the Face of Beauty of the revealed cosmos. You cannot have the one without the other. Majesty without Beauty is annihilation pure and simple. Beauty without Majesty would be an unthinkable Absolute frozen in eternal, changeless immanence - a permanent, horrible, all-pervading Final Truth. All of Creation is balanced between these poles, constantly created, and constantly undone in the divine interplay between transcendence and immanence.

The Absolute beyond-being is also, in the Abrahamic tradition, the Absolute Subject. The Giver of being can never be an object, a thing. In its infinite fecundity and mystery, its forever-receding depth and absolute Unity, it is the unifier, the guarantor of the individuality of every being. As such, it is the archetype of the Person, and of the interiority that infuses all the beings of the Earth experienced as an Angel.

It is the inexpressible Mystery of this primordial Darkness that it simultaneously establishes and shatters the human person. And it lies very close at hand. It is the still, small voice of the Hebrew Bible; and in the Qur'an, God says "I am closer to you than your jugular vein." Were we to learn this, to know that the presence of this absence is immediate, just beyond the face of the beauty of the world, we would need far less than we think we do. Our mode of being would be far less needy. We would know that scarcity and plenitude are complementary, not contradictory. We would understand the necessity of poverty as the prerequisite to the experience of the fullness of the world. For the things of this world grow opaque when we try to control and possess them, and they hide their connections among themselves, with us, and to the darknesses of the divine. They withdraw into themselves, lose substance and block our access to the riches at the roots of things. So our desperate neediness and grasping at the world and our fear of poverty and of the Dark close us off from ourselves and the worlds that we can inhabit.

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The above photo by Warren Falcon, "Oaxacan Magic Ten At Sunset With Contrail And Crescent Moon, January 2008". Click on the image to enlarge it.

Complete lyrics to Leonard Cohen's Passing Through:
http://www.sing365.com/music/lyric.nsf/PASSING-THROUGH-lyrics-Leonard-Cohen/5D7B678C2C73A3A148256AF000274430

Repose of Needles -- A Response To a Questioner Who Says She is Rotting Within, and Dampening

[Photograph taken at sculpture gardens in Princeton, NJ, July, 2008, by Warren Falcon. Click on the image to enlarge.]


This essay, Repose of Needles, continues last month's theme of Death while including the dimension of Questions and Questioning for this month's Learning For Life Group newletter topic. This essay is for my father.

Preludes:

Green, how I want you green. -- Garcia Lorca

Not my hands but green across you now. -- Richard Hugo

All questioning is response, is memory ensconced in withered hands holding seeds...planting is a deed, an act, a contract with the Invisible Stranger in the Soil with Whom you could more easily relate...the Word, o father who waited and waited, Unheard now in the heart and Heart, It's appeal in Existenz insists some poor poetry-as-harvest from me, the ensuing Silence, then, not merely your pall but the shining palace in which the more dizzying gaze and the grizzled world splays the "stained white radiance"*** into "more deeply untellable stars".**** --W. Falcon*****

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Dear LoRuhamah [whose name in Hebrew means, not loved, is not the questioner's real name but is the name, rather, I call my Anima, my inner feminine thus in this response I am addressing Her, as well],

It is precisely when the rot and dampening are most present that one can work the soil of one's inner garden...

You are mulching, LoRuhamah, mulching, which is rotting and requires the dampness of one's deepest and darkly rich sorrows and questions where in all that decaying the fertile nutrients for new life are derived; and from all other questions, too, of all whom we have known, currently know and will know and of those whom we have never known, do not know now and never will, remaining unheard, we also do not hear those contributing inquiries -- the silent screams of the crab, the unheard flutter of the fading bird, the unaccounted cries and gestures of the many creatures and plants going going going down and underneath into silence and ground.

From all this new life does comes, it comes bearing all the decaying hopes and dreams, the braying, the screams, the being reduced to numbness and cataleptic staring wonderingly turned into striving shoots of maize newly green, a sea pup mewling alone on a rocky shore, an old woman leading an old man with her cane tapping slowly a march onward into life, that emptying promise, the cycle of eternal burn and return of loss and gain, and the question again and again.

It is precisely when you are most bereft that a deft heart can discern in querulous prayers from pain and despair that which the heart yearns for, refers to, rhythms discerned once again, and felt, even if first in imagination. Life as it is in its spectrum of shades and bright colors, its subtleties, innuendos and inflections, twines forth a thin frail tendril not betraying the mighty force driving it toward the reaching sky and deeper into the cloying hurt which is dirt.

If you need to stand or lie in the shade for awhile then do so as farmers do, as did my father who farmed his despair in the hot sun then lay beneath a pine tree in cooler shade to rest and dream that his activity between dirt and sky meant some lasting thing in its doing even though he had ruined his life, distorted his children, his wife, and could not make it all right between them and himself between the mulch pile and his incessant weeding of literal weeds.

Between the garden and the untilled woods he would lay and rest, repose of needles and bark, the hot sun insisting its question slowly, night dawning when he could at last stand and return to his personal decay with a practical vision of green shoots to come. He could trudge up the lonely hill to the lonely house and will himself to life enough once again, speak some words to his wife, move widely around the silence of his wary children and live to be an old man whose loss of memory left it for me to forgive and live on in the rich rot of that ongoing question which nurtures me and his memory gracefully, haltingly on.

Astonished, I have arrived at love for him who hurt me most, have learned to enjoy the odor of decaying things, myself included. Within the decaying dream of staying, the tendril and my heart, my aging body takes on my father's form. I, too, like him am a farmer afterall when the tendril moves in its reach up and down, rooting and rising, which gives horizon.


Warren


http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/poetryeverywhere/kunitz.html#

*from Garcia Lorca's poem, "Romance Sonambulo" from The Selected Poems of Federico García Lorca, translated by William Logan. Published by New Directions, 1955.

http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15432

**from Richard Hugo's poem, “The Lady in Kicking Horse Reservoir” from Making Certain It Goes On: The Collected Poems of Richard Hugo. Copyright © 1984

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=171837

***from Percy Shelley's widely anthologized poem, Adonais.

****from Rainer Maria Rilke's Duino Elegies, W.W. Norton & Company, Inc, 1963, J.B. Leishman and Stephen Spender translation.

*****from Warren Falcon's journal kept around the death of his father, Warren Falcon, Sr., in September 1998.

[With gratitude to Lynn who sent the link to the Kunitz poem which led to my being able to respond thusly above. Thanks, Lynn]

Blunted Inscriptions Of Impermanence

Walter Christian Schell - Died October 6, 2007


Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass,
stains the white radiance of eternity,
until Death tramples it to fragments.
—from "Adonais" by Percy B. Shelley
I now take such trampling seriously. It is October 7th, 2008 as I write this, one year and a day since my dear friend, Walter Christian Schell, died of cancer. He was only 45 years old. Upon awaking this morning all too aware of his death, I recalled Allen Tate's amazing poem on death and memory, hearing the first lines, old friends from my youth, inwardly spoken in my head:

Row after row with strict impunity
The headstones yield their names to the element...

It seems fitting to rediscover this for Walter who fled as a teenager to New York City from communist Romania seeking asylum, freedom, and eventual citizenship. Now in Autumn, in an election year rife with civic fragmentation, where each side of the see-saw considers itself the weightier and of greater value than the other, all the while denying the tilted Truth fulcrumed centrally upon a death's head, Death, the great equalizer of blue and grey, blue state and red, with memory conveys the once-were-living only too very late to art, to poetry, to stained cemetery angels, questioning sentinels leaning whitely into space, mere gestures in the dusk.
They conjure abstract eternity in our ears ahead
of our deaths as if we have already passed on.
Just what is it the meek shall inherit, after all?
Such is mythos, the inheritance, and the transcendence, of dirt—

First hurts hurt us into conscious selves, thereafter, the losses,
the embossing scars we call character-- glyphic scratches
on cave walls such are brain pans. Only the bones
remain which in their stiff muteness provoke the volumes
we call myth, religion, art, and history—

blunted inscriptions of impermanence,
precise and precipitous prescriptions for
living, we think, free while leaving that
"stained white radiance" stumbling, foolishly
surprised each time, into our grave or urn
greeted by "the conquering worm".
Tum tum ta-tum
tum ta-tum
ta-tum
ta-tum...

The Wheel of Life turns on.

Enjoy, fellow rememberers and perspirers, expirers all.

Carpe diem. Something like that...

This is for Walter Christian Schell.

Best to read this one outloud.



Ode to the Confederate Dead. By Allen Tate

Row after row with strict impunity The headstones yield their names to the element, The wind whirrs without recollection; In the riven troughs the splayed leaves Pile up, of nature the casual sacrament To the seasonal eternity of death; Then driven by the fierce scrutiny Of heaven to their election in the vast breath, They sough the rumour of mortality. Autumn is desolation in the plot Of a thousand acres where these memories grow From the inexhaustible bodies that are not Dead, but feed the grass row after rich row. Think of the autumns that have come and gone!-- Ambitious November with the humors of the year, With a particular zeal for every slab, Staining the uncomfortable angels that rot On the slabs, a wing chipped here, an arm there: The brute curiosity of an angel's stare Turns you, like them, to stone, Transforms the heaving air Till plunged to a heavier world below You shift your sea-space blindly Heaving, turning like the blind crab. Dazed by the wind, only the wind The leaves flying, plunge You know who have waited by the wall The twilight certainty of an animal, Those midnight restitutions of the blood You know--the immitigable pines, the smoky frieze Of the sky, the sudden call: you know the rage, The cold pool left by the mounting flood, Of muted Zeno and Parmenides. You who have waited for the angry resolution Of those desires that should be yours tomorrow, You know the unimportant shrift of death And praise the vision And praise the arrogant circumstance Of those who fall Rank upon rank, hurried beyond decision-- Here by the sagging gate, stopped by the wall. Seeing, seeing only the leaves Flying, plunge and expire Turn your eyes to the immoderate past, Turn to the inscrutable infantry rising Demons out of the earth they will not last. Stonewall, Stonewall, and the sunken fields of hemp, Shiloh, Antietam, Malvern Hill, Bull Run. Lost in that orient of the thick and fast You will curse the setting sun. Cursing only the leaves crying Like an old man in a storm You hear the shout, the crazy hemlocks point With troubled fingers to the silence which Smothers you, a mummy, in time. The hound bitch Toothless and dying, in a musty cellar Hears the wind only. Now that the salt of their blood Stiffens the saltier oblivion of the sea, Seals the malignant purity of the flood, What shall we who count our days and bow Our heads with a commemorial woe In the ribboned coats of grim felicity, What shall we say of the bones, unclean, Whose verdurous anonymity will grow? The ragged arms, the ragged heads and eyes Lost in these acres of the insane green? The gray lean spiders come, they come and go; In a tangle of willows without light The singular screech-owl's tight Invisible lyric seeds the mind With the furious murmur of their chivalry. We shall say only the leaves Flying, plunge and expire We shall say only the leaves whispering In the improbable mist of nightfall That flies on multiple wing: Night is the beginning and the end And in between the ends of distraction Waits mute speculation, the patient curse That stones the eyes, or like the jaguar leaps For his own image in a jungle pool, his victim. What shall we say who have knowledge Carried to the heart? Shall we take the act To the grave? Shall we, more hopeful, set up the grave In the house? The ravenous grave? Leave now The shut gate and the decomposing wall: The gentle serpent, green in the mulberry bush, Riots with his tongue through the hush-- Sentinel of the grave who counts us all!
http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID?15303

From Selected Poems by Allen Tate, published by Charles Scribner's Sons, copyright 1937.

Death Surprises Death and Spectators In Apizaco, Mexico Corrida (Bull fight arena)
Video by Warren Falcon (shot in Apizaco, Mexico in January 2008)



Luis & Monica Day of the Dead Dance (Watch Who Comes To Dance At the End Just Beyond the Flores) Video by Warren Falcon (shot in San Pedro de Etla, Oaxaca, Mexico 2008)

To Sing From Fragmentation: A Scapegoat's Song

,

What is it to be dismembered, to sing out of that fragmentation, to be islanded (isolated)...
what kind of necessity compels us to transgress the absolute law and eternally lose our cherished loves and desires to a realm outside or beneath the consoling light of familiar life?-- Thomas Moore*


Orpheus, who reduces the wild beasts of Greece to humanity, is evidently a vast den of a thousand monsters. -- Giambattista Vico, The New Science*


He [Orpheus] is the moment of transition from the titanic to the human.*

--***all 3 quotations are from The Orphic Moment: Shaman to Poet-Thinker in Plato, Nietzsche & Mallarme, Robert McGahey, SUNY Press, 1994

*

This essay is part two on the topic of scapegoats, scapegoating, an ancient and still active ritual.  You may read part one if you [click here]. 


Prolegomena To The Text Below


Who among us would voluntarily choose to be "a vast den of a thousand monsters" or choose to be dismembered, fragmented and "islanded (isolated)"? I venture to guess a very few yet all of us have had some experience indicated in the first quotation above.

Scapegoating is one such fragmenting experience and unfortunately, sadly, can become an ongoing condition, in psychological parlance, a complex which holds the duality of the archetypal dynamic of scapegoater and scapegoat, each one adhered to the other, destined together to be divided. Yet with a depth psychological understanding it is discovered to be an unconscious individuation process where one is "set apart", unique, in touch with a vital and revitalizing Darkness of "a thousand monsters", primal powers often humanly categorized as Evil yet which are essential, entwining, chaotic Sources of self and world-making Creativity. Jung has said that the Shadow, his term for evil, is the seat of all creativity.

Without this understanding and the implied ongoing crucible of working the personal and transpersonal shadow, scapegoating will remain a Frankensteinian process of making humans into monsters all the while blaming and shaming the monsters. In early Greek religion the Titans, referred to in the third quotation above, were essentially monstrous offspring of the gods. When you read titanic read monstrous for that is what the quote indicates. The quote also implies a prescription for healing the scapegoat and scapegoater which is the withdrawal and integration of those titanic, monstrous projections thus restoring both to being what they always were, are and will ongoingly be-- no longer its but finite human beings.

PART ONE


Scapegoat Rituals, Burning and Banishment, Meals and Meanders


All ritual scapegoating is about atonement, expiation of sins, imbalance, evil. This ritual and variations of it are found the world over throughout human history. Powers greater than the human are offended. They must be appeased and satisfied by feeding upon the sacrifice of life in order to right the imbalance in the relationship between humanity and the terrific sacred powers that demand blood and consciousness. Nevermind the fact that these sacred powers are not conscious themselves. They act more like nature deities, unconscious, drive-ridden forces that impose their will upon smaller (though conscious) creatures. Humans, especially post-modern humans, think that we have evolved beyond such understanding and experience of primal forces of nature and mind; in fact, in consciousness we are barely beyond our not-too-distant human ancestors who sacrificed not only animals but humans to these forces in and around them.

In ancient Israel at Yom Kippur, a goat was selected to symbolically "carry" the sins of the herd, that is, the human community. There were two methods of dealing with the sinful goat. One method was to kill it upon an altar and burn it (the flesh and smoke "feeding" the offended Powers) thus, hopefully, restoring balance—at least temporarily. In the history of religions (yes, there is a history of religions, Virginia) an altar is always a feeding place for the gods which demand food (libido/life energy—more on this below) in order to atone and make right an imbalance in the relationship between the sacred and the profane, the archetypal powers and the human. All altars are for sacrifice, are dining tables from which the sacred powers feed. In some rituals, for instance, the Sacrament of Holy Communion in the Christian church, humans feed on the Divine Scapegoat, Jesus Christ. It is important to note that not all sacrifices/meals are accepted by the god(s). Humans past and present have found themselves at the mercy of the whims of the gods who do not play by their own rules but expect the rest of creation to do so. Humanity can only wager, like Blaise Pascal, that there is the possibility of transforming not only ourselves but our deities in our sacrifices for these are all transformation rituals which transform not only the human but also the Divine.

The other method of dealing with the scapegoat was to banish it, send it outside the community into the wilderness never to return, bearing the sins of the people upon it and thus appeasing the offended God or gods. (Groups tend to assume a god-almightiness becoming identified with "the right and true God". More about the significance of banishment from god-almighty groups is a few paragraphs below).

The goat or any sacrificial animal symbolizes natural, instinctual, unconscious libido (which is always unconscious), not the narrow libido of Freudian psychology (i.e., personal sexual energy) but rather Jung's expanded sense of libido as primal, compelling life force with telos, the Greek word for purpose, motive. To sacrifice a goat in scapegoating rituals was to impute the animal, instinctual, unconscious, aggressive, sensuous, and alpha male/female-driven libido upon the the animal which would be killed or banished. This was one way to transform the libido in humans and the god into more consciously-directed energies refined by the consciousness involved in the ritual and the fire which cooks the raw into more assimilable, integratible content.

Scapegoating in today's post-Christian era is not a conscious ritual of atonement. Rather, it is the very opposite, a deepening rift between conscious and unconscious, self and Other. Most scapegoating now is not a conscious, religious act performed with the intention to balance an imbalance, to right a perceived wrong, an experienced flaw as it once was. Scapegoating in and out of ritualistic contexts and functions has always been an unconscious, spontaneous projection phenomena. In this phenomena, one's own sinful nature—what Jung calls the shadow—personal and transpersonal, is projected upon an individual or group, action or actions, in effort to blame and punish those others-those factions-who are perceived to be out of balance, bad, evil, reprobates, perverts, criminals, heretics. The scapegoat may be banished, but the projected shadow is not and cannot be. The shadow is repressed more deeply into the wilderness and hinterlands of the unconscious which gives it more autonomy and power over the individual and the group. In a real sense, it does not go away, rather it becomes even more present, insistent and dynamic in the repetitive cycle of projection, rejection, abjection, and retribution. Instead of a flexible, tolerant-of-opposites, durable, expanded wholeness and hold-ness of individual and group (which is the aim of the conscious religious scapegoat ritual) those unconsciously acting out the scapegoat complex create greater harm to all involved while the archetypal powers are fed by the group unconsciousness thus wreaking havoc all the more.

I am most intrigued by the method of banishing the scapegoat as opposed to killing it having experienced banishment personally throughout my life. Such banishment is psychologically annihilating. In working my own scapegoat complex, I've come to understand that the ritual of banishment reveals how important the threatening libido, the forbidden dangerous energy carried by the scapegoat, is as numinous (meaning, fraught with sacrality) and as sacred as any sanctioned-by- the-community energy manifestation. It must not be destroyed (nor can it be since these are natural forces carrying human projections of sin and evil even though they guarantee the continuance of the human species and continue to render consciousness more human). The banished evil is essential to greater wholeness. To deny and project it upon another, to put it out of sight by conscious or unconscious design by secular or spiritual means, serves only to feed it and make it even more powerful and therefore, as Jung says of anything that is forced into the unconscious, it becomes destined to be lived as personal and collective Fate.

PART TWO


"A Dependent Projection Must Be Broken"

More notes on projection phenomena in scapegoating:

...If one understands that it is archetypal libido that the scapegoat constellates (activates) and carries for others (unbidden carrying, mind you) then the scapegoat is darkly numinous because of that archetypal energy and projection. Consciously carrying it liberates, or can, the scapegoat while scapegoaters libel-ate, castigate (as in "casting stones"), pontificate and destroy/banish the goats. The scapegoat has power, great power archetypally, which is what evokes the scapegoating complex and dynamic. Dr. George Elder, Jungian analyst and author, says that the goat is banished instead of killed in some of the rituals because there is an unconscious awareness that the energy the goat carries is sacred (archetypal) which cannot just vanish and is in fact "secretly" worshipped via compulsions which need ultimately to be brought consciously to the analytical/psychological table (another kind of altar)...As I write this an African Catholic bishop is talking about the ritual of the Devotion to Sacred Blood of Jesus, the Scapegoat Extraordinaire, whose blood is or can be a transforming "food" for the partaker and the god...you are fortunate to have such a wise priest who knows his Jung which is very surprising. Jung knew and experienced much scapegoating and does still posthumously. I'm proud and humble to be in his company...

...It's a two-way street re: scapegoating and the projections and counter-projections that fly fast and furious and oh so righteously but I believe the wise teacher and scapegoat Jesus of Nazareth cuts through all this when he counsels "to remove the log from your own eye before you seek to point out the splinter in the other's eye." Hard psychoanalytical work, that! Look to one's own shadow and embrace it, have a more conscious relationship to it and the projections of others (theoretically--I'm still a babe in the woods here) may then be meaningfully bourn. In so doing one may eventually mourn and bemoan less the loss of face and place as a hostilely encircled or banished-as-evil Loner for one is undergoing an intense process of individuation as Edward Edinger indicates so clearly and movingly in his profound book, Ego and Archetype, The Religious Function of the Psyche:

"The word individual is etymologically related to the word widow. According to Skeat, widow (Latin, vidua) derives from a lost cognate verb videre, meaning to part. Jung has demonstrated that the images of widow and orphan are part of the individuation process...Widow means the parted one. Hence, prior to widowhood one is not yet an individual, indivisible [which is what the word individual means, in = not, and dividere= to divide, thus not divided], but is still subject to the parting process. The symbolism tells us that widowhood is an experience on the pathway to the realization of individuality, in fact, that individuality is the son of that experience. This can only mean that man must be parted from that on which he is dependent but which he is not, before he can become aware of that which he is, unique and individual. A dependent projection must be broken. Similar implications apply to the image of the orphan which was a synonym for the alchemists' philosophers' stone. To be orphaned denotes the loss of parental support and the breaking of parental projections; it is likewise a prerequisite of the conscious experience of individuality. As Augustine puts it, to be a widow or orphan relates one to God (the Self)." pgs. 162-163


And to be a scapegoat also relates one to God (the Self).

These are powerful words in which I take great comfort...the meaning of an experience of scapegoating can be seen as an archetypal event which calls one to individuation as psychological scapegoat, orphan, widow, carriers of unintegrated 'gold' of the Self, that greater Center in each person. Dependent projections must be broken and are often shattering, thus the experience of abjection and desolation, of wandering disoriented in the wilderness as one undergoes a reorientation toward the Self and one's dependency upon It and nothing/no one else.

Scapegoating is a psychologically primitive yet effective orienting device where the scapegoater continually needs to scapegoat and sacrifice it. This unconsciously reorients him/her to the inner Center/Self which gets projected upon some other individual, group, community, nation. Personal and collective shadow gets constellated (activated) and projected upon the scapegoat who carries that shadow. Just to repeat, this projection by the scapegoater reorients him/her albeit unconsciously toward the Self which is projected outwardly upon an individual, group, collective, and the doctrines and mores of local god and tribe. Recognition and reclaiming of the projections (the "removing the log" work of Jesus) is the work, the life long work, most important and essential work, in the process of individuation.

Thus Jesus's words about removing the log from one's own eye cuts through the dependent projections when one enters the wilderness of introspection, Jungian analysis, other inner work and there confronts the shadow and the Self within. This makes one a (depth) psychological orphan, a widow, a scapegoat who is much needed collectively for they not only preserve the greater order of humans with the sacred (archetypal) but evolve collective human consciousness further, individual by individual.

It's a dirty job, baby, but somebody's gotta do it! Usually one doesn't know what one is signing up for when naively entering the Scapegoats-R-Us store which has many guises, a family, church, religious/spiritual growth group, seminary, government organization, a job and on and on in search of a cute stuffed lamb or goat. However, one is usually compelled in by Libido-as-Fate (the Daimon is that!) which drives the individuation process usually followed blindly until one has one's Damascus experience like St. Paul and is blinded by the Light of the Self as Transforming Fire, the Sol Niger/Black Sun which renders insight where one begins to ongoingly undergo meaningful suffering of psychological orphanhood, widowhood, goathood for the sake of individuation which is increased from these scapegoating experiences, or can be--not a formula here but an archetypal pattern of hope and possibility. Undergo, by the way, is what the word suffer means etymologically, i.e. sub= below, under, and ferrre= carry, go, )... Just read the myths, the experiences, say, of Siddhartha Gautama, of Jesus Christ, so many, so many, and so many unknown ones who have done the hard inner work of recognizing and withdrawing and chewing on the projections

PART TWO: The Moth in the Flame, A Center in Chaotic Fires of Addiction

[Note: the following section is a rough draft I will be continually working on. Read it as rough notations/thoughts/expressions. I will write more re: a heroin addicted client's dream and Kristeva in the coming month.

The above photograph I took in one of the oldest churches in the New World, located in Tlaxcala, Tlaxcala, Mexico, it was built by Cortez. ]

Orientation = Presence,

Questioning As Sacrament

I read a few years back and cannot now locate the source from which I read it that "more than food, clothing, sex and shelter humans crave orientation." This is the function of a cosmology (by the way, a medicine wheel is a cosmology, an organizing of the chaos), a view of everything -- it orients us, locates us in being and time inwardly and outwardly. Reiterations: Having orientation, experiencing location, one is consciously present. Orienting is presensing. Presense is an experience of cosmology, of orientation, and location. One is present with self and the cosmos.

Laurens van der Post in his excellent biography of Carl Jung says that stone age people and the primordial mind/cosmology and tradition they lived within is essentially a lived experience of being known by and within the universe. The universe is a thou, "They (the stone age people) gave out [a feeling]of utterly belonging to life and time and nature...I found that even though they themselves may not know much, they had no doubt of being fully known wherever they went." (pg. 102, Jung and the Story of Our Time, Laurens van der Post). This "being known" locates the ancient ones at all times as present in a living universe. That experience covers the spectrum of primitive agonies and and unspeakable terrors to ecstatic union and communion with the Force in all things in ongoing unfolding manifestations. Recent photographs in the world media of uncontacted groups of Amazonian indigenous peoples reveal the photograph by photograph an orientation, a cosmology. Two men photographed were painted red while a third was painted black. This coloring is symbolic, analogical, and cosmological revelatory of the primal mind/primordial tradition Vander Post speaks of. One can only imagine what these men made of the aircraft noisily hovering and circling above them. Arrows strung, spears at ready, these warriors of the forests stood their ground, defended their territory of which another cancerous, disconnected linear cosmology of greed and "subduing" of nature encroaches upon them with weapons, guns, saws, bulldozers, diseases.

To underscore the supreme value of orientation and cosmology-as-orientation as an innate function in the human organism, Henri Corbin, the late mystic and scholar of Islamic mysticism, writes in his book, The Man of Light in Iranian Sufism:

"Orientation is a primary phenomenon of our presense in the world. A human presense has the property of spatializing a world around it, and htis phenomenon implies a certain relationship of man witht he world, his world, this relationship being determined by the very mode of his presense in the world. The four cardinal points, east and west, north and south, are not things encountered by this presense, but directions which express its sense, man's acclimatization to his world, his familiarity with it. To have this sense is to orient oneself in the world. The ideal lines that run from east to west, from north to south form a system of a priori (prior to) spatial evidences without which there would be neither geographic nor anthropological orientation. And indeed, the constrast between Eastern man and Western man, between Nordic man and Southern man, regulate our ideological and characterological classifications..."Orientation in time" refers to the different ways in which man experiences his presense on earth, and the continuity of this presense within a kind of history, and the questionj as whether this history has a sense, and if so, what sense?" (pgs. 1 & 2) -- Henri Corbin, The Man of Light in Iranian Sufism, Omega Publications, Inc., 1978.

How Do You Stand Within These Realms

There is a body-oriented psychotherapy called Hakomi. The word, hakomi is a Hopi Native American term which means, "How do you stand within these realms." This question is the question of orientation, evokes exploration, discovery and experience of cosmology. Cosmology is a conscious activity of making the unconscious conscious, making conscious those "taken-for-granted" beliefs about the nature of reality. This has been and is an ancient and ongoing undertaking such that our most cherished and fundatmental assumptions, presuppostitions, beliefs have become mostly unconscious and unexamined "sacred cows" out of which we live and "shape" our lives and our view of life. Questioning our presuppostitions, examining those mostly unconscious fundaments upon which we stand under/under-stand is therefore one of the most sacred, sacremental acts of human consciousness. Questions, such as the one in the Hopi Hakomi, continually unfold us and the world anew. Most primordial traditions, those of the people of the first light of human cosciousness, and the languages evolved therefrom are characterized as dynamic, verb-based articulations of the ongoing "sizzling and fizzing" continuously creating nature of perception and reality, languages which evoke and demonstrate movement, process, change, interconnection and pattern. For instance, and I take this from Michael Ortiz Hill's Blues Song at the Edge of Chaos, page 8, the Navajo language conveys "a universe which is interwoven or, more accurately, interweaving. Nothing is static. Beauty is in the making of beauty."

For those interested in further exploration of this I refer you to Benjamin Lee Whorf's always cosmology shifting, question-raising book, Language, Thought and Reality. In reading this (along with Michael Ortiz Hill's pamphlet mentioned above) one will undergo a reorientation away from final received knowledge into knowing as an ongoing study, activity, and ecstasy. One discovers that it is questions and not answers which continually orient one toward an archetypal "true North," an inner "galactic center," which is conscious questioning, research and, equally important, insearch (see James Hillman's early work, Insearch: Psychology and Religion for an accessible, inspiring promotion for "thinking on the edge, searching in the frontiers of psyche" as orienting toward ongoing creativity and revelation regarding orienting and locating oneself and the world as a living breathing "making of beauty." Beauty in the Hopi/Navaho cosmology means "balance." If one is unbalanced one is disoriented. Thus the prayer Navajo prayer, "Before me beauty. Behind me beauty. Inside me beauth. Both sides and all around me beauty. I begin in beauty. I proceed in beauty. I am ending ongoingly in beauty," reveals a cosmology of balancing awareness and forces and the walking in this awareness.

Ideas Matter, Root Images, Presuppositions

Most of our cosmologies, and myths and religions are cosmologies, are attempts to characterize, understand and apprehend/grasp ultimate questions such as "why is there something instead of nothing," "from whence did/do we come?" and "to what individual and collective purpose?" Cosmology is an attempt to develop a view of everything (including nothing!). If cosmology as a term is frightening or offputting Marcus Borg, author and religious scholar, has a helpful and more readily accessible term which may assist in grasping the scope of the venture of uncovering one's personal cosmology:

"Ideas matter. One would only expect an academic to say this, so let me add at once that some ideas do not matter very much. But some do, deeply affecting our lives. Of the ideas that do affect us, perhaps none does so as much as the root images of reality which lie deep in our psyches. A root image is a fundamental image of how reality is, our most basic 'picture' of reality. Perhaps most often called a 'world-view', it consists of our most taken-for-granted assumptions about what is possible. It is an idea ( mental construct) of immense power. Very importantly, a root image not only provides a model of reality, but also shapes our perception and our thinking, operating almost unconsciously within us as a dim background affecting all of our seeing and thinkning. A root image thus functions as both an image and a lens: it is a picture of reality which becomes a lens through which we see reality...Operating within us at the level of the imagination, a level deeper than the discursive intellect, root images of reality involve the imaging or intuiting of a whole Gestalt in light of which everything else is seen." (pgs. 31 & 43) -- Marcus Borg, "Root Images and the Way We See", Fragments of Infinity, Essays in Religion and Philosophy, Ed. Arvind Sharma, Prism Press, 1991

The term root image forms a literal visual image of roots and is less abstract than the words "cosmology" and "world-view." In the conservative Calvinistic Christian theology I was educated in as a young man the word used then and now in apologetics courses (apologetics is an academic study which prepares an intellectual "defense of the Christian faith) the word used, and it's a good one, for root image is presupposition. One can discover and examine and question one's presuppositions, those "taken-for-granted" assumptions/suppositions and see how they, indeed, do become "a lens though which we see reality." Everyone has a cosmology, a world-view, root images and if Socrates the ancient Greek philosopher is correct, and I think that he is, "the unexamined life [and it's root images] is not worth living."

What Has Cosmology To Do Withy Addiction?

Abjection Leads To Ejection, Injection, Projection of the self/Self

I have taken the time and space above to discus cosmology as an essential element of human consciousness. Consciousness is orientation. As practicioners of various kinds, social workers, psychotherapists, ministers, pastoral counselors, addictions counselors, body workers, healers, astrologers, psychoanalysts, 12-step sponsors and sponsees we deal daily with people who are disoriented by addictions which at first began either consciously or unconsciously as attempts at orientation/reorientation away from environmental impingments, disruptions, faults, defaults and failures. When one has steeped in any one or all of these one is in a state of abjection. This abjection becomes a way of life, an inner orientation, which, I propose for addicts of all kinds, borrowing from one method of addiction, leads to ejection and injection. Julia Kristeva has written extensively about abjection in her book, Powers of Horror, An Essay On Abjection (1982). To understand what she means by abjection I quote extensively from an article by Inna Semetsky (click here for the entire article): http://arts.monash.edu.au/cclcs/research/papers/age-of-abjection.pdf):

"abjection n. 1. the condition of being servile, wretched, or contemptible. 2. the act of humiliating. 3. Mycol. the ejection of spores by a fungus.abject adj. 1. utterly hopeless, miserable, humiliating, or wretched: abject poverty. 2. contemptible; despicable; base-spirited: an abject coward. 3. shamelessly servile; slavish. 4. Obs. cast aside.

The meaning of abjection, as described by Kristeva in her "Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection" (1982), is "one of those violent, dark revolts of being, directed against a threat that seems to emanate from an exorbitant outside or inside, ejected beyond the scope of the possible, the tolerable, the thinkable" (1982: 1).

We experience abjection as a spontaneous reaction that may manifest in a form of unspeakable horror, often expressed at a physical level as uncontrollable vomiting, when faced with a breakdown in meaning caused by the generic loss of a habitual distinction. When the distinction – it being between subject and object, self and other, life and death -- – is destroyed, then the abjection takes its place. Abjection preserves what existed at the archaic level of pre-objectal relationship, as Kristeva puts it, within the extreme violence as a condition of a body becoming separated from another body so as to be! Corpse serves as a primary example, traumatically reminding us of our own finitude and materiality; but so does Auschwitz as a symbol of a particularly destructive, violent, and immoral event. Kristeva, describing abjection, uses the infinitive 'to fall', cadere in French, hence cadaver, the corpse:

"[M]y body extricates itself, as being alive, from that border. Such wastes drop so that I might live, until, from loss to loss, nothing remains in me and my entire body falls beyond the limit – cadere, cadaver. If dung signifies the other side of the border, the place where I am not and which permits me to be, the corpse, the most sickening of wastes, is a border that has encroached upon everything. ... 'I' is expelled" (1982: pp.3-4).The corpse indicates the breakdown of the distinction between subject and object, that is, a loss of the crucial factor in establishing self-identity: it therefore exemplifies the concept of abjection." [End Semetsky quote]

This "destruction of distinction" is disorientation. The addict attempts to eject himself as the "bad abject" along with the bad objects (parents/caretakers/group/society) who cast him aside, make wretched, contemptible, dispicable, lower than low. He does so by injection by which I mean addictions of all kinds. There is a simultaneous attempt to eject the negative, unlovable "I-self" in the addictive act that when eradicated, evacuated may be filled by an "I" which reunites with "I" and an archetypal reconnecting Other which reorients one toward life and not death alone. Death cannot be ejected but life can be injected and injested to such an extent that one is projected/propelled/impelled toward that "I" who evolves creatively with the Life/Death force into more meaningful struggle/play in life.

[In Part Three I'll publish an account of a single consultation with a heroin addict fresh from rehab and seeking support in recovery. I have asked my Learning For Life Group colleagues to write and "dream" around a repetitive dream the client reported during the consult and publish their work with their permission. I have also asked another colleague who works as an addictions counselor to also work the dream. He has agreed to do so].