Gwyllm

April 8, 2007

Midnight Posting

A bit of late night fun…!
Kinder Atom: Sangria

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April 7, 2007

Stand Up And Be Counted…

ORGANIZE ORGANIZE ORGANIZE…! Take Our Communities Back!
Peters’ Pick: 1 Giant Leap

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Make Every Act An Evo/Revolutionary Act.
Bright Blessings,
Gwyllm

April 6, 2007

Best Viewed In FireFox
“If we could sniff or swallow something that would, for five or six hours each day, abolish our solitude as individuals, atone us with our fellows in a glowing exultation of affection and make life in all its aspects seem not only worth living, but divinely beautiful and significant, and if this heavenly, world-transfiguring drug were of such a kind that we could wake up [the] next morning with a clear head and a undamaged constitution – then, it seems to me, all our problems (and not merely the one small problem of discovering a novel pleasure) would be wholly solved and the earth would become paradise.”

-Aldous Huxley (1894 – 1963)

If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would

appear to man as it is, infinite. William Blake
—-
We all went to our friend Ed’s surprise pizza dinner with a hoard of friends. Good Fun! Ed was delightful as ever, and totally surprised.
He thought he had escaped all the attention by heading off to Joshua Tree with Janice for a camping trip on the past weekend…
Yes, the birthday was on the weekend, but the party caught up with him anyway. Here is Ed, and all fun and laughter he has brought into our lives!
Great Pizza, nice drinks and wonderful company!
Happy Birthday Ed!

—-
Todays’ entry is loosely based on Aldous Huxley. We have some quotes, an extract from Albert Hoffmann’s wonderful book… Peter has chosen a nice bit of music, and Christina Rossetti weaves her poetic magick.
Here we are at Friday, sun is shining and the weekend beckons!
Have Fun!
Gwyllm
On The Menu

Pete’s Picks:Niyaz

Huxley Quotes

Meeting with Aldous Huxley – Albert Hoffmann [From LSD, My Problem Child Chapter8]

Poetry: Goblin Market -Christina Rossetti

Art: Robert Venosa & Gwyllm

_______
Pete’s Picks:Niyaz

__________

Huxley Quotes:
Most island universes are sufficiently like one another to Permit of inferential understanding or even of mutual empathy or “feeling into.” Thus, remembering our own bereavements and humiliations, we can condole with others in analogous circumstances, can put ourselves (always, of course, in a slightly Pickwickian sense) in their places. But in certain cases communication between universes is incomplete or even nonexistent. The mind is its own place, and the Places inhabited by the insane and the exceptionally gifted are so different from the places where ordinary men and women live, that there is little or no common ground of memory to serve as a basis for understanding or fellow feeling. Words are uttered, but fail to enlighten. The things and events to which the symbols refer belong to mutually exclusive realms of experience.
An intellectual is a person who has discovered something more interesting than sex.

At least two-thirds of our miseries spring from human stupidity, human malice and those great motivators and justifiers of malice and stupidity: idealism, dogmatism and proselytizing zeal on behalf of religous or political ideas.

Experience teaches only the teachable.
Maybe this world is another planet’s hell.

Most human beings have an almost infinite capacity for taking things for granted.

That all men are equal is a proposition which, at ordinary times, no sane individual has ever given his assent.
The author of the Iliad is either Homer or, if not Homer, somebody else of the same name.

There’s only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that’s your own self.

After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.

_____________
(Robert Venosa – Astral Circus)

Meeting with Aldous Huxley – Albert Hoffmann

[From LSD, My Problem Child Chapter 8]
In the mid-1950s, two books by Aldous Huxley appeared, The Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell, dealing with inebriated states produced by hallucinogenic drugs. The alterations of sensory perceptions and consciousness, which the author experienced in a self-experiment with mescaline, are skillfully described in these books. The mescaline experiment was a visionary experience for Huxley. He saw objects in a new light; they disclosed their inherent, deep, timeless existence, which remains hidden from everyday sight.
These two books contained fundamental observations on the essence of visionary experience and about the significance of this manner of comprehending the world-in cultural history, in the creation of myths, in the origin of religions, and in the creative process out of which works of art arise. Huxley saw the value of hallucinogenic drugs in that they give people who lack the gift of spontaneous visionary perception belonging to mystics, saints, and great artists, the potential to experience this extraordinary state of consciousness, and thereby to attain insight into the spiritual world of these great creators. Hallucinogens could lead to a deepened understanding of religious and mystical content, and to a new and fresh experience of the great works of art. For Huxley these drugs were keys capable of opening new doors of perception; chemical keys, in addition to other proven but laborious ” door openers” to the visionary world like meditation, isolation, and fasting, or like certain yoga practices.
At the time I already knew the earlier work of this great writer and thinker, books that meant much to me, like Point Counter Point, Brave New World, After Many a Summer, Eyeless in Gaza, and a few others. In The Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell, Huxley’s newly-published works, I found a meaningful exposition of the experience induced by hallucinogenic drugs, and I thereby gained a deepened insight into my own LSD experiments.
I was therefore delighted when I received a telephone call from Aldous Huxley in the laboratory one morning in August 1961. He was passing through Zurich with his wife. He invited me and my wife to lunch in the Hotel Sonnenberg.
A gentleman with a yellow freesia in his buttonhole, a tall and noble appearance, who exuded kindness- this is the image I retained from this first meeting with Aldous Huxley. The table conversation revolved mainly around the problem of magic drugs. Both Huxley and his wife, Laura Archera Huxley, had also experimented with LSD and psilocybin. Huxley would have preferred not to designate these two substances and mescaline as “drugs,” because in English usage, as also by the way with Droge in German, that word has a pejorative connotation, and because it was important to differentiate the hallucinogens from the other drugs, even linguistically. He believed in the great importance of agents producing visionary experience in the modern phase of human evolution.
He considered experiments under laboratory conditions to be insignificant, since in the extraordinarily intensified susceptibility and sensitivity to external impressions, the surroundings are of decisive importance. He recommended to my wife, when we spoke of her native place in the mountains, that she take LSD in an alpine meadow and then look into the blue cup of a gentian flower, to behold the wonder of creation.
As we parted, Aldous Huxley gave me, as a remembrance of this meeting, a tape recording of his lecture “Visionary Experience,” which he had delivered the week before at an international congress on applied psychology in Copenhagen. In this lecture, Aldous Huxley spoke about the meaning and essence of visionary experience and compared this type of world view to the verbal and intellectual comprehension of reality as its essential complement.
In the following year, the newest and last book by Aldous Huxley appeared, the novel Island. This story, set on the utopian island Pala, is an attempt to blend the achievements of natural science and technical civilization with the wisdom of Eastern thought, to achieve a new culture in which rationalism and mysticism are fruitfully united. The moksha medicine, a magical drug prepared from a mushroom, plays a significant role in the life of the population of Pala (moksha is Sanskrit for “release,” “liberation”). The drug could be used only in critical periods of life. The young men on Pala received it in initiation rites, it is dispensed to the protagonist of the novel during a life crisis, in the scope of a psychotherapeutic dialogue with a spiritual friend, and it helps the dying to relinquish the mortal body, in the transition to another existence.
In our conversation in Zurich, I had already learned from Aldous Huxley that he would again treat the problem of psychedelic drugs in his forthcoming novel. Now he sent me a copy of Island, inscribed “To Dr. Albert Hofmann, the original discoverer of the moksha medicine, from Aldous Huxley.”
The hopes that Aldous Huxley placed in psychedelic drugs as a means of evoking visionary experience, and the uses of these substances in everyday life, are subjects of a letter of 29 February 1962, in which he wrote me:
. . . I have good hopes that this and similar work will result in the development of a real Natural History of visionary experience, in all its variations, determined by differences of physique, temperament and profession, and at the same time of a technique of Applied Mysticism – a technique for helping individuals to get the most out of their transcendental experience and to make use of the insights from the “Other World” in the affairs of “This World.” Meister Eckhart wrote that “what is taken in by contemplation must be given out in love.” Essentially this is what must be developed-the art of giving out in love and intelligence what is taken in from vision and the experience of self-transcendence and solidarity with the Universe….
Aldous Huxley and I were together often at the annual convention of the World Academy of Arts and Sciences (WAAS) in Stockholm during late summer 1963. His suggestions and contributions to discussions at the sessions of the academy, through their form and importance, had a great influence on the proceedings.
WAAS had been established in order to allow the most competent specialists to consider world problems in a forum free of ideological and religious restrictions and from an international viewpoint encompassing the whole world. The results: proposals, and thoughts in the form of appropriate publications, were to be placed at the disposal of the responsible governments and executive organizations.
The 1963 meeting of WAAS had dealt with the population explosion and the raw material reserves and food resources of the earth. The corresponding studies and proposals were collected in Volume II of WAAS under the title The Population Crisis and the Use of World Resources. A decade before birth control, environmental protection, and the energy crisis became catchwords, these world problems were examined there from the most serious point of view, and proposals for their solution were made to governments and responsible organizations. The catastrophic events since that time in the aforementioned fields makes evident the tragic discrepancy between recognition, desire, and feasibility.
Aldous Huxley made the proposal, as a continuation and complement of the theme “World Resources” at the Stockholm convention, to address the problem “Human Resources,” the exploration and application of capabilities hidden in humans yet unused. A human race with more highly developed spiritual capacities, with expanded consciousness of the depth and the incomprehensible wonder of being, would also have greater understanding of and better consideration for the biological and material foundations of life on this earth. Above all, for Western people with t
heir hypertrophied rationality, the development and expansion of a direct, emotional experience of reality, unobstructed by words and concepts, would be of evolutionary significance. Huxley considered psychedelic drugs to be one means to achieve education in this direction. The psychiatrist Dr. Humphry Osmond, likewise participating in the congress, who had created the term psychedelic (mind-expanding), assisted him with a report about significant possibilities of the use of hallucinogens.
The convention in Stockholm in 1963 was my last meeting with Aldous Huxley. His physical appearance was already marked by a severe illness; his intellectual personage, however, still bore the undiminished signs of a comprehensive knowledge of the heights and depths of the inner and outer world of man, which he had displayed with so much genius, love, goodness, and humor in his literary work.
Aldous Huxley died on 22 November of the same year, on the same day President Kennedy was assassinated. From Laura Huxley I obtained a copy of her letter to Julian and Juliette Huxley, in which she reported to her brother- and sister-in-law about her husband’s last day. The doctors had prepared her for a dramatic end, because the terminal phase of cancer of the throat, from which Aldous Huxley suffered, is usually accompanied by convulsions and choking fits. He died serenely and peacefully, however.
In the morning, when he was already so weak that he could no longer speak, he had written on a sheet of paper: “LSD-try it-intramuscular-100 mmg.” Mrs. Huxley understood what was meant by this, and ignoring the misgivings of the attending physician, she gave him, with her own hand, the desired injection-she let him have the moksha medicine.

_____________
(Robert Venosa – Prana Exhalation)

Poetry: Goblin Market

(Christina Rossetti)
Morning and evening

Maids heard the goblins cry:

“Come buy our orchard fruits,

Come buy, come buy:

Apples and quinces,

Lemons and oranges,

Plump unpecked cherries,

Melons and raspberries,

Bloom-down-cheeked peaches,

Swart-headed mulberries,

Wild free-born cranberries,

Crab-apples, dewberries,

Pine-apples, blackberries,

Apricots, strawberries;

All ripe together

In summer weather,

Morns that pass by,

Fair eves that fly;

Come buy, come buy:

Our grapes fresh from the vine,

Pomegranates full and fine,

Dates and sharp bullaces,

Rare pears and greengages,

Damsons and bilberries,

Taste them and try:

Currants and gooseberries,

Bright-fire-like barberries,

Figs to fill your mouth,

Citrons from the South,

Sweet to tongue and sound to eye;

Come buy, come buy.”
Evening by evening

Among the brookside rushes,

Laura bowed her head to hear,

Lizzie veiled her blushes:

Crouching close together

In the cooling weather,

With clasping arms and cautioning lips,

With tingling cheeks and finger tips.

“Lie close,” Laura said,

Pricking up her golden head:

“We must not look at goblin men,

We must not buy their fruits:

Who knows upon what soil they fed

Their hungry thirsty roots ?”

“Come buy,” call the goblins

Hobbling down the glen.

“Oh,” cried Lizzie, “Laura, Laura,

You should not peep at goblin men.”

Lizzie covered up her eyes,

Covered close lest they should look;
Laura reared her glossy head,

And whispered like the restless brook:

“Look, Lizzie, look, Lizzie,

Down the glen tramp little men.

One hauls a basket,

One bears a plate,

One lugs a golden dish

Of many pounds weight.

How fair the vine must grow

Whose grapes are so luscious;

How warm the wind must blow

Thro’ those fruit bushes.”

“No,” said Lizzie: “No, no, no;

Their offers should not charm us,

Their evil gifts would harm us.”

She thrust a dimpled finger

In each ear, shut eyes and ran:

Curious Laura chose to linger

Wondering at each merchant man.

One had a cats face,

One whisked a tail,

One tramped at a rat’s pace,

One crawled like a snail,

One like a wombat prowled obtuse and furry,

One like a ratel tumbled hurry skurry.

She heard a voice like voice of doves

Cooing all together:

They sounded kind and full of loves

In the pleasant weather.
Laura stretched her gleaming neck

Like a rush-imbedded swan,

Like a lily from the beck,

Like a moonlit poplar branch,

Like a vessel at the launch

When its last restraint is gone.
Backwards up the mossy glen

Turned and trooped the goblin men,

With their shrill repeated cry,

“Come buy, come buy.”

When they reached where Laura was

They stood stock still upon the moss,

Leering at each other,

Brother with queer brother;

Signalling each other,

Brother with sly brother.

One set his basket down,

One reared his plate;

One began to weave a crown

Of tendrils, leaves and rough nuts brown

(Men sell not such in any town);

One heaved the golden weight

Of dish and fruit to offer her:

“Come buy, come buy,” was still their cry.
Laura stared but did not stir,

Longed but had no money:

The whisk-tailed merchant bade her taste

In tones as smooth as honey,

The cat-faced purr’d,

The rat-paced spoke a word

Of welcome, and the snail-paced even was heard;

One parrot-voiced and jolly

Cried “Pretty Goblin” still for “Pretty Polly;”

One whistled like a bird.
But sweet-tooth Laura spoke in haste:

“Good folk, I have no coin;

To take were to purloin:

I have no copper in my purse,

I have no silver either,

And all my gold is on the furze

That shakes in windy weather

Above the rusty heather.”

“You have much gold upon your head,”

They answered all together:

“Buy from us with a golden curl.”

She clipped a precious golden lock,

She dropped a tear more rare than pearl,

Then sucked their fruit globes fair or red:

Sweeter than honey from the rock,

Stronger than man-rejoicing wine,

Clearer than water flowed that juice;

She never tasted such before,

How should it cloy with length of use?

She sucked and sucked and sucked the more

Fruits which that unknown orchard bore;

She sucked until her lips were sore;

Then flung the emptied rinds away

But gathered up one kernel-stone,

And knew not was it night or day

As she turned home alone.
Lizzie met her at the gate

Full of wise upbraidings:

“Dear, you should not stay so late,

Twilight is not good for maidens;

Should not loiter in the glen

In the haunts of goblin men.

Do you not remember Jeanie,

How she met them in the moonlight,

Took their gifts both choice and many,

Ate their fruits and wore their flowers

Plucked from bowers

Where summer ripens at all hours?

But ever in the moonlight

She pined and pined away;

Sought them by night and day,

Found them no more but dwindled and grew grey;

Then fell with the first snow,

While to this day no grass will grow

Where she lies low:

I planted daisies there a year ago

That never blow.

You should not loiter so.”

“Nay, hush,” said Laura:

“Nay, hush, my sister:

I ate and ate my fill,

Yet my mouth waters still;

Tomorrow night I will

Buy more:” and kissed her:

“Have done with sorrow;

I’ll bring you plums tomorrow

Fresh on their mother twigs,

Cherries worth getting;

You cannot think what figs

My teeth have met in,

What melons icy-cold

Piled on a dish of gold

Too huge for me to hold,

What peaches with a velvet nap,

Pellucid grapes without one seed:

Odorous indeed must be the mead

Whereon they grow, and pure the wave they drink

With lilies at the brink,

And sugar-sweet their sap.”

Golden head by golden head,

Like two pigeons in one nest

Folded in each other’s wings,

They lay down in their curtained bed:

Like two blossoms on one stem,

Like two flakes of new-fall’n snow,

Like two wands of ivory

Tipped with gold for awful kings.

Moon and stars gazed in at them,

Wind sang to them lullaby,

Lumbering owls forbore to fly,

Not a bat flapped to and fro

Round their rest:

Cheek to cheek and breast to breast

Locked together in one nest.
Early in the morning

When the first cock crowed his warning,

Neat like bees, as sweet and busy,

Laura rose with Lizzie:

Fetched in honey, milked the cows,

Aired and set to rights the house,

Kneaded cakes of whitest wheat,

Cakes for dainty mouths to eat,

Next churned butter, whipped up cream,

Fed their poultry, sat and sewed;

Talked as modest maidens should:

Lizzie with an open heart,

Laura in an absent dream,

One content, one sick in part;

One warbling for the mere bright day’s delight,

One longing for the night.
At length slow evening came:

They went with pitchers to the reedy brook;

Lizzie most placid in her look,

Laura most like a leaping flame.

They drew the gurgling water from its deep;

Lizzie plucked purple and rich golden flags,

Then turning homewards said: “The sunset flushes

Those furthest loftiest crags;

Come, Laura, not another maiden lags,

No wilful squirrel wags,

The beasts and birds are fast asleep.”

But Laura loitered still among the rushes

And said the bank was steep.
And said the hour was early still,

The dew not fall’n, the wind not chill:

Listening ever, but not catching

The customary cry,

“Come buy, come buy,”

With its iterated jingle

Of sugar-baited words:

Not for all her watching

Once discerning even one goblin

Racing, whisking, tumbling, hobbling;

Let alone the herds

That used to tramp along the glen,

In groups or single,

Of brisk fruit-merchant men.

Till Lizzie urged, “O Laura, come;

I hear the fruit-call but I dare not look:

You should not loiter longer at this brook:

Come with me home.

The stars rise, the moon bends her arc,

Each glowworm winks her spark,

Let us get home before the night grows dark:

For clouds may gather

Tho’ this is summer weather,

Put out the lights and drench us thro’;

Then if we lost our way what should we do?”
Laura turned cold as stone

To find her sister heard that cry alone,

That goblin cry,

“Come buy our fruits, come buy.”

Must she then buy no more such dainty fruit?

Must she no more such succous pasture find,

Gone deaf and blind?

Her tree of life drooped from the root:

She said not one word in her heart’s sore ache;

But peering thro’ the dimness, nought discerning,

Trudged home, her pitcher dripping all the way;

So crept to bed, and lay

Silent till Lizzie slept;

Then sat up in a passionate yearning,

And gnashed her teeth for baulked desire, and wept

As if her heart would break.
Day after day, night after night,

Laura kept watch in vain

In sullen silence of exceeding pain.

She never caught again the goblin cry:

“Come buy, come buy;”

She never spied the goblin men

Hawking their fruits along the glen:

But when the noon waxed bright

Her hair grew thin and grey;

She dwindled, as the fair full moon doth turn

To swift decay and burn

Her fire away.
One day remembering her kernel-stone

She set it by a wall that faced the south;

Dewed it with tears, hoped for a root,

Watched for a waxing shoot,

But there came none:

It never saw the sun,

It never felt the trickling moisture run:

While with sunk eyes and faded mouth

She dreamed of melons, as a traveller sees

False waves in desert drouth

With shade of leaf-crowned trees,

And burns the thirstier in the sandful breeze.

She no more swept the house,

Tended the fowls or cows,

Fetched honey, kneaded cakes of wheat,

Brought water from the brook:

But sat down listless in the chimney-nook

And would not eat.
Tender Lizzie could not bear

To watch her sister’s cankerous care

Yet not to share.

She night and morning

Caught the goblins’ cry:

“Come buy our orchard fruits,

Come buy, come buy:”

Beside the brook, along the glen,

She heard the tramp of goblin men,

The voice and stir

Poor Laura could not hear;

Longed to buy fruit to comfort her,

But feared to pay too dear.

She thought of Jeanie in her grave,

Who should have been a bride;

But who for joys brides hope to have

Fell sick and died

In her gay prime,

In earliest Winter time,

With the first glazing rime,

With the first snow-fall of crisp Winter time.

Till Laura dwindling

Seemed knocking at Death’s door:

Then Lizzie weighed no more

Better and worse;

But put a silver penny in her purse,

Kissed Laura, crossed the heath with clumps of furze

At twilight, halted by the brook:

And for the first time in her life

Began to listen and look.
Laughed every goblin

When they spied her peeping:

Came towards her hobbling,

Flying, running, leaping,

Puffing and blowing,

Chuckling, clapping, crowing,

Clucking and gobbling,

Mopping and mowing,

Full of airs and graces,

Pulling wry faces,

Demure grimaces,

Cat-like and rat-like,

Ratel- and wombat-like,

Snail-paced in a hurry,

Parrot-voiced and whistler,

Helter skelter, hurry skurry,

Chattering like magpies,

Fluttering like pigeons,

Gliding like fishes,

Hugged her and kissed her,

Squeezed and caressed her:

Stretched up their dishes,

Panniers, and plates:

“Look at our apples

Russet and dun,

Bob at our cherries,

Bite at our peaches,

Citrons and dates,

Grapes for the asking,

Pears red with basking

Out in the sun,

Plums on their twigs;

Pluck them and suck them,

Pomegranates, figs.”

“Good folk,” said Lizzie,

Mindful of Jeanie:

“Give me much and many:”

Held out her apron,

Tossed them her penny.

“Nay, take a seat with us,

Honour and eat with us,”

They answered grinning:

“Our feast is but beginning.

Night yet is early,

Warm and dew-pearly,

Wakeful and starry:

Such fruits as these

No man can carry;

Half their bloom would fly,

Half their dew would dry,

Half their flavour would pass by.

Sit down and feast with us,

Be welcome guest with us,

Cheer you and rest with us.”

“Thank you,” said Lizzie: “But one waits

At home alone for me:

So without further parleying,

If you will not sell me any

Of your fruits tho’ much and many,

Give me back my silver penny

I tossed you for a fee.”-

They began to scratch their pates,

No longer wagging, purring,

But visibly demurring,

Grunting and snarling.

One called her proud,

Cross-grained, uncivil;

Their tones waxed loud,

Their looks were evil.

Lashing their tails

They trod and hustled her,

Elbowed and jostled her,

Clawed with their nails,

Barking, mewing, hissing, mocking,

Tore her gown and soiled her stocking,

Twitched her hair out by the roots,

Stamped upon her tender feet,

Held her hands and squeezed their fruits

Against her mouth to make her eat.

White and golden Lizzie stood,

Like a lily in a flood,

Like a rock of blue-veined stone

Lashed by tides obstreperously,

Like a beacon left alone

In a hoary roaring sea,

Sending up a golden fire,

Like a fruit-crowned orange-tree

White with blossoms honey-sweet

Sore beset by wasp and bee,

Like a royal virgin town

Topped with gilded dome and spire

Close beleaguered by a fleet

Mad to tug her standard down.
One may lead a horse to water,

Twenty cannot make him drink.

Tho’ the goblins cuffed and caught her,

Coaxed and fought her,

Bullied and besought her,

Scratched her, pinched her black as ink,

Kicked and knocked her,

Mauled and mocked her,

Lizzie uttered not a word;

Would not open lip from lip

Lest they should cram a mouthful in:

But laughed in heart to feel the drip

Of juice that syrupped all her face,

And lodged in dimples other chin,

And streaked her neck which quaked like curd.

At last the evil people

Worn out by her resistance

Flung back her penny, kicked their fruit

Along whichever road they took,

Not leaving root or stone or shoot;

Some writhed into the ground,

Some dived into the brook

With ring and ripple,

Some scudded on the gale without a sound,

Some vanished in the distance.
In a smart, ache, tingle,

Lizzie went her way;

Knew not was it night or day;

Sprang up the bank, tore thro’ the furze,

Threaded copse and dingle,

And heard her penny jingle

Bouncing in her purse,

Its bounce was music to her ear.

She ran and ran

As if she feared some goblin man

Dogged her with gibe or curse

Or something worse:

But not one goblin skurried after,

Nor was she pricked by fear;

The kind heart made her windy-paced

That urged her home quite out of breath with chaste

And inward laughter,
She cried “Laura,” up the garden,

“Did you miss me?

Come and kiss me.

Never mind my bruises,

Hug me, kiss me, suck my juices

Squeezed from goblin fruits for you,

Goblin pulp and goblin dew.

Eat me, drink me, love me;

Laura, make much of me:

For your sake I have braved the glen

And had to do with goblin merchant men.”
Laura started from her chair,

Flung her arms up in the air,

Clutched her hair:

“Lizzie, Lizzie, have you tasted

For my sake the fruit forbidden?

Must your light like mine be hidden,

Your young life like mine be wasted,

Undone in mine undoing

And ruined in my ruin,

Thirsty, cankered, goblin-ridden?”

She clung about her sister,

Kissed and kissed and kissed her:

Tears once again

Refreshed her shrunken eyes,

Dropping like rain

After long sultry drouth;

Shaking with aguish fear, and pain,

She kissed and kissed her with a hungry mouth.

Her lips began to scorch,

That juice was wormwood to her tongue,

She loathed the feast:

Writhing as one possessed she leaped and sung,

Rent all her robe, and wrung

Her hands in lamentable haste,

And beat her breast.

Her locks streamed like the torch

Borne by a racer at full speed,

Or like the mane of horses in their flight,

Or like an eagle when she stems the light

Straight toward the sun,

Or like a caged thing freed,

Or like a flying flag when armies run.
Swift fire spread thro’ her veins, knocked at her heart,

Met the fire smouldering there

And overbore its lesser flame;

She gorged on bitterness without a name:

Ah! fool, to choose such part

Of soul-consuming care!

Sense failed in the mortal strife:

Like the watch-tower of a town

Which an earthquake shatters down,

Like a lightning-stricken mast,

Like a wind-uprooted tree

Spun about,

Like a foam-topped waterspout

Cast down headlong in the sea,

She fell at last;

Pleasure past and anguish past,

Is it death or is it life?
Life out of death.

That night long Lizzie watched by her,

Counted her pulse’s flagging stir,

Felt for her breath,

Held water to her lips, and cooled her face

With tears and fanning leaves:

But when the first birds chirped about their eaves,

And early reapers plodded to the place

Of golden sheaves,

And dew-wet grass

Bowed in the morning winds so brisk to pass,

And new buds with new day

Opened of cup-like lilies on the stream,

Laura awoke as from a dream,

Laughed in the innocent old way,

Hugged Lizzie but not twice or thrice;

Her gleaming locks showed not one thread of grey,

Her breath was sweet as May

And light danced in her eyes.

Days, weeks, months, years

Afterwards, when both were wives

With children of their own;

Their mother-hearts beset with fears,

Their lives bound up in tender lives;

Laura would call the little ones

And tell them other early prime,

Those pleasant days long gone

Of not-returning time:

Would talk about the haunted glen,

The wicked, quaint fruit-merchant men,

Their fruits like honey to the throat

But poison in the blood;

(Men sell not such in any town:)

Would tell them how her sister stood

In deadly peril to do her good,

And win the fiery antidote:

Then joining hands to little hands

Would bid them cling together,

“For there is no friend like a sister

In calm or stormy weather;

To cheer one on the tedious way,

To fetch one if one goes astray,

To lift one if one totters down,

To strengthen whilst one stands.”
(Robert Venosa – Ayahuasca Dream)

April 4, 2007

Tales From Cornwall….

Wednesday morning, early on… Grey over the city, machinery stirring on the road digging up Hawthorne one more time.

Had a nice visit with a friend last night, had out the books on Britain as he is going over in 3 weeks. Suggested he take a few extra days…. and wander. It seems he will.

An entry today based around Cornwall. (this came out of last nights visit)

The Turf For Tuesday

Best Viewed In FireFox

(Eleanor Fortescue-Brickdale – Natural Magick)

Today’s Serving! Out to Clients…

Talk Later,

Gwyllm

On The Menu

The Links

Petes’ Picks:Berrogüetto en Colindres – Permafrost

Erik Davis: Synthetic Meditations – Cogito in the Matrix

Four Sufi Poets

Artist: Eleanor Fortescue-Brickdale

___________________

The Links:

Witch hunting continues in Rajasthan

The evolution of sex roles

Editorial: Eliminate all school holidays

The Witches of Lillhärdal

____________________

Petes’ Picks:

Berrogüetto en Colindres – Permafrost

____________________

Synthetic Meditations – Cogito in the Matrix

Erik Davis

This piece appears in the collection Prefiguring Cyberculture: An Intellectual History (MIT Press, 2003)

Find what Descartes wanted, what it was possible for him to want, what he coveted, if only half consciously.

— Paul Valery

The only thing real is waking and rubbing your eyes.

— The Fall

—

Introduction: Techno Cogito

Of all the lumbering giants of the Western philosophical tradition, none resembles a punching bag more than René Descartes. He gets it from all sides: cognitive scientists and phenomenologists, post-structuralists and deep ecologists, lefty science critics and New Age holists. The main beef, of course, is the stark divide that Descartes drew between mind and body, a dualism that, by its very claim of rationality, now appears even more obscene than the religious dualisms that stretch back to Zarathustra. Nearly across the board, contemporary thought calls us to defend and affirm the body that Descartes rendered a machine, a soulless automata under our spiritual thumb. It doesn’t really matter that the body so affirmed is itself multiple and even contradictory: the materialist object of biology, the phenomenological bed of Being, a feminist site of anti-patriarchal critique, the New Age animal immersed in Gaia’s enchanted web. Regardless of the framework, the song remains the same: we are bodyminds deeply embedded in the world. For many thinkers now, the sort of abstract, disengaged soul-pilot pictured by Descartes — the “I” immortalized in the famous cogito ergo sum — is not only bad thinking, but, ideologically speaking, bad news.

In many ways I share this urge to trace the networks that embed consciousness in phenomenal reality, and to insist on the extraordinary (though not exclusive) value of causal explanations rooted in the history of matter. But I am no absolutist. The fact that Descartes keeps popping up like a Jack-in-the-box suggests that a splinter of the cogito remains in our minds, some fragmentary intuition or insightful glimpse that we cannot accommodate and so wall off in order to reject. I am not interested in philosophically defending the cogito, or at least the metaphysical cogito we are familiar with: the rational and disengaged instrumentalist manipulating the empty machinery of matter. But I am interesting in probing for that splinter, which I suspect is lodged somewhere in the apparently yawning gap between self-conscious awareness and the phenomenal world — a gap that, despite some hearty attacks from nondualists East and West, continues to inform subjectivity.

One zone that magnifies this gap is technoculture. Cyberspace and its allies (AI, VR, robotics) are shot through, on socio-cultural, methodological and philosophical planes, with a profound if often unconscious Cartesianism. First and foremost, this Cartesianism is what one might call “technical:” the operating assumption that the mathematical recoding of reality is the golden road to the mastery of nature. But this assumption has powerful and various socio-cultural ramifications as well. As we’ll see, some archetypal technopop fantasies — downloaded minds, manipulative technological demiurges, the breakdown between VR and real life — derive in part from the Cartesian imagination.

One field of technoculture particularly marked by Cartesian assumptions is Artificial Intelligence. Classical AI conceives the mind as a disembodied symbolic processor manipulating representations and information in order to reason about and influence the world. Perception, sensation, and behavior are seen as inputs and outputs of an essentially logical machine, a machine whose essential activity is, to take an example fetishized by the AI community, expressed in chess. Though starkly reductive when compared to humanist or existential conceptions of consciousness, classical AI has the peculiar characteristic of reinforcing the familiar “Christian” priority of mind over matter. [1] The ultimate fantasized outcome of this line of thought, famously characterized in chilling detail by the Carnegie Mellon roboticist Hans Moravec, is the ability to upload the mind into silicon — effectively immortalizing the subject. After all, since there is nothing magical about the processes that coax the mind from our neural flesh, then nothing in theory should prevent a computer from simulating an individual brain to such a degree that the self originally booted up by the physical brain couldn’t re-emerge inside the simulacrum.

In light of the pivotal role that absolute doubt plays in Descartes’ Meditations — the doubt that calls into question the existence of the world presented by our senses — it is important to underscore how thoroughly the uploading scenario depends on erasing the material distinction between reality and copy. In essence, the argument goes, we already live inside a virtual reality; sights, sounds, textures and flavors are all ghosts in the brain, woven out of pre-configured cognitive patterns and the incoming signals we receive from senses that shape those signals on the fly. These signals do not carry the things themselves, but only information about those things. In this view, I am not tied to the world. “I” am a kind of foam that forms atop a swirling stew of memory, perception, and various recursive loops staged in the virtual operations of the brain. However, the flipside of this rather contingent if not degrading view of subjectivity is that the self that might one day find itself a computer would be, for all intents and purposes, me. The difference between the material brain and the simulated brain does not effect the ontological status of the mind that arises from the formal operations of both organic and synthetic neural networks.

Unfortunately, classical AI hasn’t been able to make much practical headway over the decades , and this failure has created room for rival theories and strategies to arise. In the 1980s, the MIT roboticist Rodney Brooks helped revolutionize his field with ideas that challenged the symbolic and Cartesian assumptions of AI. Instead of the classical approach to automata, which attempts to program them with complex centralized symbolic representations of the world around them, Brooks imagined robots who learned about their environment by exploring it according to simple behaviors distributed throughout the mechanism. The results of these simple interactions are then subsumed into higher global behaviors — a “bottom up” rather than “top down” approach. Tellingly, the inspiration for Brooks’ first robots were not chess-playing automata, but insects.

Even from Brooks’ own pragmatic perspective, his ideas were always more than mere design strategies. Turning away from the Cartesian premises of classical AI, Brooks held that cognition emerges from the history and memory of the organism’s interactions with the world around it, interactions which are thoroughly distributed throughout the body. In human beings, the increasingly complex behaviors emerging from lower-order processes ultimately lead to consciousness, but at no point does some distinct, underlying, and potentially self-sustaining formal symbolic language of representation pop up. To be conscious is to be engaged in a world that embeds and defines the subject.

One can overplay the conflict between symbolic and behaviorist AI — the “society of mind” model championed by Marvin Minksy, a towering figure in classical AI, shares a number of important characteristics with many of the more “bottom up” theories of human consciousness. But for most cultural theorists who have waded into the field, the distinction is key. For many critics, the rationalist Enlightenment ideals that undergird classical AI are just as ripe for attack as the rest of the Enlightenment project, whereas the behaviorist AI model can be seen to affirm pet concepts like contingency, relativity, and situated embodiment. In How We Became Posthuman, for example, N. Katherine Hayles has offered, in the name of a sophisticated account of embodiment, a historically rich critique of the rhetoric of disembodiment found in much AI and cybernetics. She shows how the apparent incorporeality of information — an incorporeality which is essential for the uploading model — is itself the product of ideological forces and institutional practices which serve to obscure the social and material bases that circulate and produce information. In this latest transform of historical materialism, then, the tension between Brooks and Minksy involved a distinctly moral dimension. As noted by Michael Mateas, a creator of a number of AI-based artworks, “[behaviorist AI] is associated with freedom and human rights and [classical AI] with oppression and subjugation.” [2]

Readers of cultural theory should be familiar with the various associations and lines of thought that would lead to the denigration of symbolic AI, as the science is so clearly open to critiques of patriarchy, logocentricity and the white privilege of disembodiment. It may also be the case that the Cartesian project will contribute little to the task of constructing mobile machine minds (the jury is still out). But the philosophical and even psychological underpinnings of Cartesianism are not so easily written off, let alone banished. As Slajov Zizek notes, academia continues to be haunted by the specter of the Cartesian cogito. In other words, we have by no means sealed up the mad void out of which the cogito first arose — a void which in some sense founds modernity. So whatever happens to the vast edifice of rationalist procedures derived from Cartesian science and mathematics, the splinter of Descartes’ true cross — the cogito — will continue to puncture the increasingly posthuman spaces of technoculture. In fact, I take Zizek at his cryptic word when he claims that Cartesian subjectivity is not only alive and kicking, but that only now, in the age of the Internet, are we truly arriving at it.

I. The Evil Genie

With his otherworldly skepticism, Descartes cracked open the ontologically consistent universe of the premodern mind. He split the “great chain of being,” and that split became the subject, a creature he came to identify as a rational and individual soul fundamentally divorced from the world of extension. How did Descartes, through his own philosophical unfolding, open up this revolutionary split? As he explains in the Meditations, he begins by undermining his conventional habits of thought and perception through the operation of hyperbolic doubt. Sitting robed at his fire, holding a piece of paper not so different than the one you’re now reading, Descartes subjects himself to a series of “what if?” scenarios, soberly swallowing the conceivable possibility that he might be insane, or dreaming, or that an evil genie, “exceedingly potent and deceitful,” might be conjuring up the illusions that he takes to be reality.

The next stage of the story is well-known: having plumbed the pit of doubt, Descartes realizes that even if reality is an elaborate deception engineered by an evil demon, there remains someone who is being deceived. To put it another way, even as Descartes strives to think everything false, “he” is still there, a something that thinks, and which therefore participates in existence. With this move, Descartes chiseled his keystone, reifying the subject who doubts into a metaphysical foundation. And though the cogito itself winds up resting on the even more fundamental foundation of God — a story which we will leave by the wayside — the subject remains the first move in Descartes’ pivotal game. “Observing that this truth ‘I am thinking, therefore I exist’ was so solid and secure that the most extravagant suppositions of the skeptics could not overthrow it, I judged that I need not scruple to accept it as the first principle of philosophy that I was seeking.” [3]

Despite the likelihood that few readers find the cogito mantra very solid and secure at this stage of the history of thought, I cannot resist taking a few pot shots. Turning within and recognizing that thinking is going on gives one no warrant to assume that an “I” exists whose predicate is thought. There is simply thinking. Admittedly, this move only shifts the problem, because there is still the “one” who recognizes that thinking is going on, the one who is tempted to assume the mantle of an “I who thinks.” But even if we grant that this “one” and “I” truly exist, we have not healed the gap. The one who is aware that thinking is going on does not become transparent to itself by positing an I that thinks, because there is no reason, except for habits of speech, to identify the I that thinks with the one who is aware. In other words, I am not (the) one. Or, if you prefer, one does not think. Rather, as Zizek characterizes the situation, it is the “Thing that thinks.” [4] To this a philosopher stung by the Buddhist bug might add that there is no compelling intuitive reason to move from “Thinking is going on” to “some thing is thinking.” Why reify the process in the first place? The whole shadow-play of substance and identity may be nothing more than conceptual imputation, a whirlpool of linguistic reflexivity arising in the foundationless stream of mental activity, boundless and unclear. The one who is aware may not be a one at all. There is simply the mind’s intrinsic mirror-like capacity to reflect phenomena that arise.

I mention these concerns because a great deal of Buddhist philosophy and practice is explicitly designed to undermine the precise act of introspective reification which founds the cogito — the act of hardening James’ “stream of consciousness” into a substantial self. But the invocation of Buddhism also lets us recognize an aspect of Descartes’ method that is generally overlooked. His first meditation, wherein he imagines the evil genie, is not simply a skeptical argument; it is also a procedure, an introspective experiment that erodes the cognitive ground that Descartes (thinks he) stands upon. In this sense, his meditation is a meditation, one not altogether unlike the more analytic meditations found in, say, the Gelugpa school of Tibetan Buddhism. Throughout their careers, Gelugpa monks will engage in contemplative practices which take the explicit form of dialectically interrogating the conceptual assumptions which structure their own consciousness. Winging it without a lama, Descartes found his own way of pulling the rug out from under his mundane convictions, a practice he clearly hopes the reader will indeed try at home. The recipe: seriously take on the possibility of the evil genie, and see what remains. Don’t slip back into your familiar habits. Risk the dark.

The distinction between the Meditations as the record of a conceptual experiment and the Meditations as a philosophical system is mirrored in the fact that Descartes is really talking about two cogitos. On the one hand, there is the epistemological void of doubt that conditions and expresses the first “I think.” On the other hand, there is the res cogitans that Descartes subsequently constructs: a substantial and rational locus of thought and will, a self-transparent representation in a series of representations ultimately and necessarily established by God. Derrida and Zizek have both drawn attention to the cleft between these two cogitos. Derrida makes a distinction between Descartes’ initial ahistorical passage through the madness of hyperbolic doubt, and the subsequent shelter the philosopher takes inside the historical structure of reasons and representations. [5] Zizek in turn brings up the Lacanian distinction between the subject of the enunciation and the subject that is enunciated. As we will see in more detail later, the former is an empty, logical variable devoid of the fantasies and representations that materialize personality, whereas the latter, in this case the res cogitans, is the conceptual “stuff” that fills in that void.

Descartes himself papered over this difference, believing that the “I think” ineluctably implied a rational person transparently aware of his own status as a thinking thing. In a sense, though, Descartes simply displaced the split between the two cogitos onto the grosser division between mind and body, a division that, in the Discourse anyway, is the first conclusion that follows the discovery of the solid and secure cogito: “From this [the cogito] I recognized that I was a substance whose whole essence or nature is to be conscious and whose being requires no place and depends on no material thing. Thus this self…is entirely distinct from the body…and even if the body were not there at all, the soul would be just what it is.” [6]

Today this line of thinking smells like religion. Descartes, of course, remained a believing Catholic throughout his life: there is no Cartesianism without God, because God guarantees the order of representations that vanquishes the evil genie. At the same time, we would be amiss to lay Descartes’ rhetoric of disembodiment at the feet of Christianity, for though Descartes was convinced that his account of the cogito supported Church doctrine, theologians in Descartes’ day were by no means settled on the issue of whether we would eventually get our bodies back in the afterlife. Cartesian disembodiment seems to arise at least as much from the “gnostic” tendencies inherent in the reification of rational interiority as from the structures of 17th century belief.

Nonetheless, the Christian life certainly carried with it a tradition of disciplinary detachment, if not outright loathing, of the body. This basic distrust of carnal reality can be largely chalked up to Augustine, who, perhaps under the lingering influence of the Manicheaen dualism he imbibed as a youth, reconceived the body as a perverse and untrustworthy product of Adam’s sin. In his eyes we are torn between the “two loves” of body and soul. For Augustine, the desires and dispositions of the flesh are no longer natural expressions of an ordered world but our own inner demons, idiotically and destructively repeating their endless fall away from God.

This is harsh stuff, bemoaned by everyone today from hedonic New Agers to critical historians of thought. But Augustine’s rejection of the body also went hand-in-hand with his revolutionary interiority, an intensification of inwardness that, as Charles Taylor explains in Sources of the Self, was transformed by Descartes into the cogito, the seed of modern subjectivity. Augustine did not look to God primarily as the ordering principle of the cosmos that surrounds us — a view you could characterize, risking a certain simplicity, as the Platonic legacy. Instead, Augustine turned away from the world and conceived of God as the basis for our own knowing activity. By shifting the location of what Taylor calls “moral sources,” Augustine thereby pried open a space of radical reflexivity within awareness. Suddenly our own experience of ourselves as subjects peels back from embodied experience, becoming the separate space of an internal order illuminated with an inner light. “Do not go outward; return within yourself. In the inward man dwells truth.” [7]

Descartes rationalized this spiritual withdrawal into the skeptical questioning that opens the Meditations. Descartes also transformed Augustine’s two loves into two substances, one of which he neatly renders void. In other words, once Descartes identifies the soul as an immaterial consciousness, he reduces the remaining material world, including the body, into a hollow coordinate space of extension utterly devoid of the occult forces that animated premodern matter. But he does so not simply to render the material world a fit object for mathematical analysis. As Taylor astutely argues, the striking withdrawal of spirit from the material world enables Descartes to maintain the adamantine form of the rational soul he had crystallized as the res cogitans. Compared to the Platonic soul, which realizes its eternal nature by becoming absorbed in the supersensible, “the Cartesian discovers and affirms his immaterial nature by objectifying the bodily.” [8]

This of course is what mechanism is all about. By reconceiving the world of bodies and nature under the sign of the machine, one also constructs a new picture of man as an instrumental agent of his own incorporeal will. But where to draw the line in the bodymind? For Descartes, the human being is basically an automata that moves according to the disposition of its limbs and organs — a doll with advanced plumbing. Given his lingering commitment to the soul, which he lodged in the ajna chakra (aka, the pineal gland), Descartes’ radical mechanism was not yet absolute — that would have to wait a century, until La Mettrei’s L’homme-Machine. Nonetheless, as John Cottingham notes, Descartes characterized many activities that we would consider “psychological” as blind functions of the animal machine. Memory, internal passions, the imprinting of sensation on the imagination — none of these demand the intervention of the soul. However, where mental attention is needed, Descartes posits a separate rational agent, a conscious spirit capable of diverting the flows of the body into various channels.

Descartes avoided a lot of grief by simply identifying agency with consciousness (which I will generally refer to as the phenomenal field of awareness, both concentrated and diffuse.) In the world of making dinner and paying cable bills, we also adopt this identification: we become aware of a need or desire, and seemingly choose to act and plan accordingly. But what happens when there is a split between awareness and agency, at least in theory? What happens when I take on board the consideration that I am not actually thinking and doing, but that “the Thing” is thinking and doing? In some sense, this split between awareness and agency defines the anxiety of post-Romantic, increasingly cybernetic subjectivity. The mechanistic philosophy that Descartes birthed is now thoroughly undermining — at least in scientific terms — the notion of a single incorporeal point of awareness, rationality, and control. Today, we are anxious because we do not and cannot know who or what is pulling the strings of the subject. Throughout elite and mass culture, we argue and wonder about where the pivot of control lies: with corporate cabals or strands of DNA, with brainwashing advertisers or karmic forces, with historical forces or the structure of language, with the unconscious or the market’s invisible hand. We wonder if our own sense of agency is actually blind causation in disguise, nothing more than a negative feedback loop in a cyborganic system of memes and genes. We wonder to what degree we are “programmed” — by media or social regimes, introjected concepts or neural pathways laid down in infancy. Or we project the anxiety into the technological field: Are machines becoming conscious, are they going to run the show, are they already running the show?

These doubts reach their most audacious limit in the techno-fantasies of paranoid schizophrenics, but they also lurk in cultural phenomena like conspiracy theory and X-Files fandom. They even exist to some degree in the popular discourse surrounding evolutionary psychology, which finds Cro-Magnon subroutines lurking beneath every sorrow and lust. The paradox is that these doubts place us back in front of Descartes’ fire, with a bathrobe on and a book in our hands, pulling the rug out from under the world. Today the void is not epistemological — we no longer care particularly about how it is we seem to know things. The void we face is the self — how or why (or even if) we perceive ourselves as conscious agents in the first place. This, I believe, is why it is only now that we arrive at the cogito.

If now is the time, then where is the place? According to the Lacanian from Ljubljana, the answer is cyberspace, the supreme techno-fantastic implementation of illusion and control. “Only in cyberspace do we approach what Cartesian subjectivity is all about,” Zizek claims, noting that virtual space is simply the materialization of the evil genie’s deceptive powers. We all wonder about reality now, how it is constructed, the claims of space and time. So it is hard to avoid occasionally slipping into giddy cyber-doubt: “What if everything is just digitally constructed, what if there is no reality to begin with?” [9] These are obvious questions, of course, the kind of thing that intrigues drug users or 14-year-olds. But the “naivete” of these questions is simply a sign of their universality, and it shouldn’t prevent one from taking them seriously. As adults, we learn to not ask “What is reality?” or “Who am I?” because we know there are no answers, and so either develop more complex questions or drop the whole line of inquiry. But these interrogations aren’t only questions; they are also devices. If you sit with them without trying to find an answer, they can eat away at certainty and resistance, taking you to the point of bafflement, disassociation, insight. And somewhere, a stage along this path, lies the pure cogito, the void of the subject that is “our” homeless home.

II. THE LABYRINTH

In Neuromancer, the Odyssey of cyberlit, William Gibson delineated the Cartesian fantasy of cyberspace with the precision of a nanotechnologist. With its “lines of light ranged in the non space of the mind,” Gibsonian cyberspace unfolds as an abstract, disembodied realm of geometry in motion, splayed across a three-dimensional coordinate system devoid of all secondary qualities but color.[10] In essence, the fantasy-reality of cyberspace, of virtual reality, is an analog of Descartes’s view of matter: a zone of spatial extension under the rule of causality and essentially identical “to what the geometers call quantity.” [11] Even today’s budding 3D Internet and game consoles achieve, or at least suggest, Descartes’ abstract virtualization of the material world into infinite mechanized extension.

Gibson also hit the Cartesian nail on the head when he characterized his hero Case’s banishment from cyberspace as a fall into “the prison of his flesh.” The dualistic deferral of the body encouraged by virtual technologies is so often lamented today that neither it nor its supposed Cartesian origins need repeating. Obviously, virtual technologies encourage a distinct shift of identification away from our phenomenal embeddedness in the material world where we eat, defecate, and die. In How We Became Posthuman, Hayles characterizes this shift in epochal terms: a movement away from the embodied dialectic of presence and absence, and towards an informational dialectic of pattern and randomness. Given this it’s not surprising that the embrace of pattern has enabled some computer scientists to reconstellate dualism in the name of mechanistic monism — a paradox that, I would argue, has always been implicit in the Cartesian foundations of the modern engineer.

Cyberspace is Cartesian in an epistemological sense as well, because the growth of the Internet as a medium of knowledge raises deeply Cartesian questions about the status of the external world — say, for example, the snoozing hippos or bubbling coffee pots we see through supposedly “live” webcams. In his article “Telepistemology: Descartes’ Last Stand,” Hubert Dreyfus argues that Descartes’ original skeptical turn was itself partly inspired by the appearance of new perceptual media. The telescope and microscope both extended perception while simultaneously opening up doubts about the reliability of those perceptions. At the same time, sense organs were also increasingly imagined as transducers bringing information to the brain — senses that, as in Descartes’ example of the phantom limb, could not always be trusted. Similarly, today’s new media, as well as the new models of the nervous system they breed, have re-invoked the evil genie. “New tele-technologies such as cellular phones, teleconferencing, telecommuting, home shopping, telerobotics, and Internet web cameras are resurrecting Descartes’ epistemological doubts.” [12]

Dreyfus notes ironically that most professional philosophers are no longer very interested in these epistemological questions. The problem is that the sophomores who slouch into today’s philosophy classes (or ignore them altogether) increasingly live in a world defined by virtual technologies, cyborg entertainments, and the popular fictions — sonic as well as narrative — that construct those emerging technocultural spaces and the shifting subjectivities they imply. These kids are already down with the evil genie. At the very least, they’ve seen The Matrix, the phenomenally successful 1999 Wachowski brothers film that imagined a vast simulation lorded over by evil computers and populated by hundreds of thousands of duped human beings.

The claim that so-called “consensus reality” is an elaborate construct that enslaves perception and occludes our “true” condition is hardly original. A staple of science fiction, where it was deployed with greatest sublimity by Philip K. Dick, the “false reality” set-up has become an increasingly common theme in Hollywood, from The Truman Show to Dark City. But I would also like to suggest that the “False Reality” set-up attempts to narrate a fundamental split in consciousness between consensus reality — or in Lacanian terms, the Symbolic — and the capacity of the human mind to disengage from the immediate claims of that reality. Skepticism can open up such doubts of course, but so will the ancient, non-philosophical evidence of dreams, drugs, or altered states of consciousness. This is why we find false realities popping up everywhere, from Indian dream fables to Gnostic myths of cosmic prisons to Zhuangzi’s famous question: “How do I know I am a man dreaming he was a butterfly, and not a butterfly dreaming he is a man?” The fundamental accessibility of the False Reality scenario also accounts for its cheesy, adolescent character, a comic-book quality that makes sophisticated intellects cringe. And yet, if Descartes’s meditations did indeed help spawn the modern subject, then that subject — who is, in some sense, “us” — emerges from the shadow of such pulp musings.

Besides being a rite of passage for any budding cogito, the “false reality” question becomes especially unavoidable in the age of virtual technologies. These technologies constantly narrate their own totalizing dreams of “building worlds” and “providing experience,” and produce — consciously or not — the corresponding “gnostic” desire to escape the prison of manufactured dreams. I’d like to think both these factors help explain the immense popularity of The Matrix, especially among younger viewers. Alongside the video-game fight scenes and the nifty FX, The Matrix presented a narrative that articulated the seductive disassociation one feels as a subject of the popular digital spectacle, as well as the yearning for the cracks in the symbolic surface that offer the possibility of escape — an ultimately spiritual transcendence that, in one of the film’s more interesting twists, is actually embodiment.

So we too are in that decrepit hotel room with Lawrence Fishburn’s Morpheus, who is really speaking to us when he addresses Neo, the ever-wooden Keanu Reeves:

You know something. What you know you can’t explain, but you feel it. You’ve felt it your whole life, felt that something is wrong with the world. You don’t know what, but it’s there like a splinter in your mind, driving you mad.

Establishing the itch — which I suppose most of us share, however we interpret it — Morpheus offers to scratch. He will give Neo “nothing more” than knowledge of the truth (ie, no solution to the problems posed by the truth). Moreover, this knowledge comes wrapped in the package of immediate experience. “No one can be told what the Matrix is,” says Morpheus. “You have to see it for yourself.” This lends it an explicitly gnostic character — not only did the Gnostics of antiquity believe that we were immortal sparks slumbering in an illusory cosmos manufactured by an evil or ignorant demiurge, but they also held that escape occurs through knowledge of our condition, a knowledge that is necessarily non-ordinary and experiential.

So like the serpent in the Garden of Eden, which the Nag Hammadi codex “The Secret Book of John” claims was a liberating Christ in disguise, Morpheus offers Neo a pill. Neo, of course, swallows the molecular package, which is really the most heroic act in the film. For Neo must then face his own Cartesian “passage through madness,” melting into a mirror that alludes not only to Lewis Carroll but to the mystic-psychotic collapse and disappearance of the externalized ego that stabilizes our inner void. As Neo phases out of the Matrix, he opens up, however briefly, the fractured bardo that is the secret thrill of every fan of the “false reality” genre: the moment when baseline reality dissolves but no new world has yet emerged in its pixelating wake. This is the most radical moment of the cogito, but it’s tough to sustain. In The Matrix , the flux quickly crystallizes into what Morpheus, sampling Baudrillard, calls the “desert of the real”: a ruined planet dominated by evil AIs who keep humanity mentally imprisoned inside the computer-generated Matrix. At this point, The Matrix stages an orthodox reversal of gnosticism’s dualistic undermining of the world. Just as Irenaeus affirmed the reality of Christ’s material body against the docetist claim that God merely simulated human flesh, so do Morpheus and crew affirm the reality of the suffering material body against the mundane dream of the Matrix. Moreover, they do so in the name of the One who will come, a One that organizes the reality of their struggle the way that God provides the ultimate foundation for Descartes’ metaphysical vertigo. [13]

The body is an understandable object of nostalgia in virtual fiction, though rarely in a pop film is the real we are rooting for so grimly depicted. At the same time, The Matrix subtly undermines the apparently “solid and secure” foundation of the flesh. Consider two intercut scenes focused on food. While the crew of Morpheus’ ship, the Nebuchadnezzar, eat yucky nutritious slop (“everything the body needs”) in a parody of communion, the Judas-like Cypher dines on steak inside the Matrix. Cypher agrees to betray Morpheus in exchange for blissful ignorance: to wake up rich and happy in the Matrix, with all memories of the desert of the real removed. Meanwhile, back on the ship, the young Mouse brags about having designed a sexy virtual character that Neo had earlier encountered in a training simulation. Mouse offers to arrange a sexual (pornographic?) encounter with the woman for Neo; when the other crew members give him grief, Mouse calls them hypocrites: “To deny our own impulses is to deny the very thing that makes us human.” Here Mouse recognizes one paradox of desire — that the body’s carnal impulses are fused with “virtual” fantasy — but he mis-states the case: what makes us human is the gap between impulses and the alienated awareness that both the object of those impulses and the body that wants them is in some sense virtual.

The Matrix also undercuts any simple valorization of carnality in its portrayal of the “virtual bodies” which play such an important role in the guerrilla war Morpheus wages within the Matrix, where he struggles against the all-powerful evil agents (sentient programs disguised as human beings). In this struggle, the knowledge that the Matrix is unreal is not sufficient to bend its rules; the freedom fighters must train their false Matrix bodies in order to leap through the air, bend spoons, and, ultimately, slow time. In other words, “the body” becomes a virtual field of affect and extension that resists what they already know, a resistance that gives way not through further knowledge but though practice. Here the film is even more “Eastern” than the debt its fight scenes owe to Hong Kong cinema and Japanese video games would suggest. As in yoga, T’ai chi, and other martial arts, the mind awakens through the disciplined and devotional unfolding of the capacities and energies of the body. Of course, the bodies trained for the Matrix are composed of code, no more fleshy than the brutes and ninjas in Mortal Kombat. But that misses the point: the “magical” body — a body immortalized in Chinese and Japanese popular cinema, as well as the half-Hollywood hit Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon — arises through a practice that constructs a liminal phenomenological vehicle between body and mind, a vehicle which is simultaneously virtual and carnal. [14] Similarly, though the “bodies” that players of first-person computer games like Quake and Doom control are not actual, they are certainly phenomenological. [15]

Manex, the company behind The Matrix’s excellent special FX, placed a strong emphasis on the phenomenological or subjective dimension of such virtual bodies. In popular film, most digital FX depict the “objective” world of extension — either new macroscopic worlds (The Phantom Menace), natural or supernatural phenomenon (Twister, Spawn), or microscopic scales of perception (Heavenly Creatures). These images present a publicly accessible “real” space. But verisimilitude, fantasized or otherwise, ultimately limits FX, which have nothing intrinsically to do with representation or reality and everything to do with mobilizing new phenomenological openings and synesthetic becomings. FX are not really about what we see; in fact, they are not “about” anything at all. They reconfigure how we see, and how that subjective seeing mutates into often ambiguous and explosive feelings and relations. That’s what makes them so hard to talk about — “pure” effects are much more like roller-coasters or the space-time distortions of drugs then they are like signs or icons. [16]

What makes the The Matrix such a great FX movie is that the film maps its “false reality” theme onto the objective/subjective divide that underpins the visual rhetoric of Hollywood FX. The Matrix as such characterizes the imprisonment of FX by verisimilitude — FX as illusion, as secular Fairyland, as the seamless artificial product of what Disney calls “imagineering.” But when Neo reaches the peaks of his power, FX become an expression of his own subjective mastery of speeds and slownesses. The most notable FX device here is the bullet-time photography featured, most memorably, in the scene where the leather-clad Neo confronts an agent on the roof of a building and manages to slow down time enough to lean away from the agent’s oncoming bullets. Using an array of multiple still cameras whose images are subsequently treated like animation cells, the technique creates the effect of a single camera sweeping in a long arc around a static or very brief slice in time. Time appears to slow, and yet the movement of the (virtual) camera keeps things up to speed. So Trinity, who watches Neo dodge the gunfire, comments on how fast he moved, as fast as an agent. But for the viewer, as, significantly, for Neo, the action moves like molasses.

The affirmation of slowness is remarkable enough, especially given the usual strategy of overwhelming the audience at a peak moment with quick cuts and superfast images. Slowness is the phenomenological effect that Neo must master in order to detach himself from the logic of the Matrix while remaining inside its narrative framework — a slowness that is manifested in both mind (this is Keanu Reeves after all) and body. In the final action sequence, Neo is apparently killed by an agent inside the Matrix. Then a kiss from Trinity, monitoring Neo on the Nebuchadnezzar, revives the hero in the material world. With this carnal affirmation, Neo returns to the Matrix, where he stops a barrage of bullets in mid-air, slowing down time to the point of stasis. It is only then, when he fully inhabits the gap he has opened in virtual time, that he “sees into” the Matrix. The hallway before him melts into rushing streams of green computer code — the “Real” beneath the Matrix’s symbolic fantasy. When the head agent subsequently engages him in hand-to-hand combat, Neo’s movements are cool, slow, meditative, almost bored. He has seen through the fantasy in the midst of the fantasy, a seeing which is the equivalent of dying. He becomes the One.

But this gnostic-Christian resolution is not for us, or most of us anyway, for we have no access to such singular foundations, Cartesian or otherwise. For us there is no One, no deus ex machina who can found the order of true representations that describe the mechanisms driving the production of the phenomenal world (including its proliferating pockets of digital simulation). The digital figures that Neo glimpses, after all, are representations of electrons flip-flopping through material circuitry, and at that point, neither the pattern of bits nor the electro-dynamic substrate can claim ontological priority. The moment of subjective transformation that interests us is much earlier, before Neo even hears that Morpheus thinks he’s the One. It is the moment when Neo swallows a pill in a seedy room, and becomes, for a spell, no-one at all.

III. A Crack in the Sky

In the great eighth chapter of the Confessions, Augustine describes his endless difficulties cleaving to God, at one point comparing his situation to a sleeping man. Though he knows that Jesus Christ is for him, the call of the world and the lusts of the body weigh on him like slumber, and he feels like a fellow who, though he knows that it is time to get out of bed, keeps hitting the snooze button. “Just a little bit longer,” he keeps telling God, “let me sleep a little more.” Though he partly blames the body, Augustine identifies sleep less with carnal lust than with “the force of habit, by which the mind is swept along and held fast even against its own will.” [17]

Besides underscoring how fundamental the natural analogy of awakening is to both religious and philosophical discourse, this passage provides an angle on the somewhat peculiar paragraph that closes Descartes’ first meditation. Earlier, Descartes had convinced himself that only by embracing hyperbolic doubt — hypostasized as the evil genie — could he undermine the habitual force of his “old and customary opinions.” As he closes the meditation, however, Descartes admits how difficult it is to keep these habits at bay, acknowledging that “a certain indolence” continually creeps in, drawing him back to his ordinary perceptions of life. Taking Augustine’s analogy a step further, Descartes compares his state to a prisoner dreaming of his liberty, a captive who, when sensing that the moment of awakening is at hand, “conspires with the agreeable illusions that the deception may be prolonged.” [18] Descartes then admits a fear that does not trouble Augustine: that even if he does awaken, he will not be able to see his way out of the darkness unleashed by the genie.

Here we taste something of the frightening vertigo opened up on the way to the cogito. Despite the rational and theological foundations that soon come, Descartes’ initial movement has nothing intrinsically to do with philosophical concepts — the evil genie as a “possible world” — and everything to do with the phenomenological process of emptying oneself by turning that self inside-out through doubt. Descartes decoupled his internal awareness as much as possible from the contents of consciousness, effectively declaring “I am not in this dressing gown, not before this fire, not holding a piece of paper.” Like a shaman offering his body to the ferocious spirits of the underworld, Descartes submitted himself to the genie, who tore away the certainties that stabilize the ordinary non-skeptical self in its sleep of habit. But Descartes did not even have the ontological stability of the shaman’s premodern cosmos to rely on, for the void that he opened up was precisely the void that separates the modern mind from the great chain of being.

For Descartes, this was a passage through madness, a madness that subsequently founds the modern sense of disjunction from tradition and the enchanted world. The paradox is that even the acknowledgment of such madness affirms the certainty that, for Descartes, grounds the cogito. As Derrida explains, “the Cogito escapes madness only because at its own moment, under its own authority, it is valid even if I am mad, even if my thoughts are completely mad.” [19] In other words, the cogito stabilizes itself in the gap that opens up between the madness of thought and the I whose thoughts are mad. One might even say that the cogito is on the far side of madness, a cool and impersonal witness, utterly untethered from the objects that arise in thought and perception. “This is why it is not human,” says Derrida, “but rather metaphysical and demonic.” Descartes then draws back from this “zero point” into factual historical structures of thought, and it is these structures — at least the metaphysical ones — that are now almost ritualistically vilified. The Descartes we love to hate knows where he stands. But as Derrida states, “Nothing is less reassuring than the Cogito at its proper and inaugural moment.”[20]

Even the conceptual condensation of the cogito that follows Descartes’ passage through madness is none too comfy. In mapping his dualistic divide between mind and body, Descartes separates the pure modes of consciousness that characterize the incorporeal res cogitans, such as intellection and volition, from those mixed modes that also depend upon the body, such as imagination and sensation. As John Cottingham notes, this division leads to a rather creepy state of affairs: after death, “the soul will be devoid of all particularity,” condemned to an eternity of chewing over abstract and general ideas. [21] Later Christian Cartesians had to jump through hoops explaining how any sort of personality could survive this distillation — indeed, how such impersonal souls could even be distinguished from one another at all. In other words, the cogito is essentially inhuman, at least in the sense that it does not participate in the order of habits, memories, images, and symbolic identifications that structure embodied personality and the perceptual stream of ordinary life.

The first time that Neo returns to the Matrix after joining Morpheus’ crew, he passes one of his favorite restaurants. “They have really good noodles,” he recalls, his words trailing off as he realizes that the dispositions and memories that structured his personality are, at least from the perspective of his new reality, utterly false. Realizing that he can no longer sustain, or desire, his normal round of identifications, he asks Trinity what it all means. “That the matrix cannot tell you who you are,” she responds. If you hit the pause button right there, before the film fills in this space of not-knowing with Neo’s emerging identity as a Christ hero, then you are at the empty heart of the subject.

This picture of the cogito differs significantly from the now-classic postmodern portrait of the “decentered subject”. That vision essentially claims that the crusty old idea of the individual — the self-aware “Cartesian” locus of will and understanding — has been decentered in the light of its fundamental multiplicity and the myriad elements that make up the construction of identity — floating signifiers, ideological forces, historically constituted forms. But as Zizek explains, what really decenters the subject is the fact that the subject that enunciates is not the subject of the enunciation. The subject that enunciates is a logical void, a kind of empty place holder — $ in Lacanese — for the material that, loosely speaking, congeals into the personality, ie, the subject of the enunciation. This material is largely determined by the already established network of the Symbolic (aka, the Matrix). The fact that the symbolic identifications that attempt to found the subject of the enunciation are themselves constructed and drifting without foundation is almost beside the point; what is decentered is the point of speaking (or knowing) itself; ie, the cogito.

In this account, the cogito does not arise from the Symbolic. Instead, it emerges “at the very moment when the individual loses its support in the network of tradition; it coincides with the void that remains after the framework of symbolic memory is suspended.” [22] Zizek’s most forcefully futuristic account of this void appears in his discussion of the paradox posed by Blade Runner: the subject who knows she is a replicant. “Where is the cogito, the place of my self-consciousness, when everything that I actually am is an artifact — not only my body, my eyes, but even my most intimate memories and fantasies?” [23] Here Zizek takes one of Descartes’ more paranoid musings to its logical conclusion. In the second Meditation, Descartes asks himself, observing a street below, “What do I see from the window beyond hats and cloaks that might cover artificial machines, whose motions might be determined by springs?” [24] This is not simply a mercilessly skeptical spin on the perennial problem of “other minds;” it is also, mutatis mutandis, an inquiry into the (replicant) self within. How deep does your automata go? Zizek’s paradoxical and beautiful conclusion is that Blade Runner’s replicants become, in recognizing their own artificial nature, “pure subjects.” As far as the subject of the enunciation goes, they know they are replicants, not human beings, which is why Rachel weeps when Deckard (Descartes?) tells her the truth. But it is precisely at that moment, when her confusion over whether she is human or not melts into nostalgia for a lost humanity, that Rachel is most like us — that is, most human.

Zizek concludes that “I am a replicant” is the statement of the subject at its purest. But we might just as easily say “I am an avatar,” or simply “I am online.” For as The Matrix suggests, cyberspace — the technologized space of virtuality, which is simultaneously an actual informational matrix and that various narratives that shape and underpin that matrix — increasingly constitutes the Symbolic as such, and thus begins to infect and dominate the material of subjectivity. As Zizek explains, cyberspace externalizes us, translating the contents of subjectivity into an objective space of technical operations. So on the one hand we have the endless play of virtual identity, in which we lend “reality” to stray fragments of the psyche by externalizing them into a field of technologically sustained symbolic intersubjectivity. On the other hand, we enter a paranoid dystopia, where our every move is tracked, controlled, and manipulated by an increasingly intelligent virtual environment. In either case, there is a deprivation of sorts, although this deprivation comes with a twist. “What you are deprived of are only your positive properties, your personality in the sense of your personal features, your psychological properties. But only when you are deprived of all your positive content, can one truly see what remains, namely the Cartesian subject.” [25]

The ferocity of this deprivation will only increase as e-commerce intensifies its marketing technologies. The dream of e-commerce could be dubbed “molecular marketing:” the thoroughly targeted individual whose unique desires and dispositions have been data-mined, tracked, extrapolated, commodified, and, most importantly, fed back to the target in a personalized, even obscenely intimate form. In this process, the statistical generalities that govern demographics are brought down to the scale of the individual without losing their abstract and utterly impersonal instrumentality. The new goal is to anticipate and nudge the precise and singular unfolding of subjectivity in its encounter with information and commodities. Perhaps in the future, our own shifting moods, interests, and needs will be so sensitively monitored that, just as we are able to glean useful sociological data from the fantasies generated by the demographic “science” of marketing, we will be able to read our own state of mind by the variations in the incoming streams of newsfeeds, ads, and animated spiels. Say that we mention our anxiety about a forthcoming corporate review in a post to an apparently open but corporate-sponsored elist on modern business practices. The next morning we may find a pop-up adbot offering the latest anti-anxiety neuro-cocktails, specifically designed to generate the proper degree of subservient enthusiasm. One day we may reach the point when our needs and desires are fully externalized as semi-autonomous avatars, so that we hardly need to intervene in order to “satisfy” the identifications that structure the subject of the enunciation.

Similar problems arise with the great dream of virtual reality, which, in its fantasized image at least, at once fulfills the contents of consciousness and subtly alienates the subject from those contents. In the standard account, VR and other designer realities create a plastic playground of the self, allowing us to explore and experience the hidden “real me” lurking beneath that mask of socially constrained subject positions and the ever-present resistance of the Real. But even if we accept this naive account of the self, the very engine of virtual production undermines the “fullness” of the simulated experience. McLuhan described the evolution of technologies as a progressive amputation of human capabilities; with virtual reality, or the similar plasticity of material reality achieved through nanotechnology, we amputate the drives and desires that structure the subject by fully externalizing them and feeding them back to the subject. It’s the problem of the hedonist: the self that manipulates and refines techniques of pleasure is not the same self that luxuriates in those experiences, and this anxious gap yawns ever wider the more rounds we make on the technical pleasure circuit. (The appeal of S&M partly derives from apparently splitting these two functions between two individuals).

So as designer realities radically fulfill the contents of fantasy, the existential remainder Ð that modern spark which voids or demythologizes all fantasy — becomes ever more refined and impossible to avoid. Then it will be even more obvious that we are not our avatars — that the Matrix cannot tell us who we are. We still won’t know who we are, of course, because that quest for equivelence itself is a mode of the symbolic, a way to “resolve” the ambivalent emptiness of the pure subject by injecting it back into the round of identifications. But we will know that, like the sages in the Upanishads or Descartes before the genie’s fire, we are Neti, neti — not that, not that. We are not just contingent historical agents embedded in a finite horizon of meaning, but nor are we the solid and secure foundation of the res cogitans. And though we emerge from the process of embodiment, we are not “the body,” if by the body we mean a fixed chunk of space-time or a founding representation or a neurobiological object of science. In this sense, the supposed plenitude of the oncoming world of designer reality disguises a great renunciation-machine: an engine of the pure subject.

Though I have no room to explore my argument here, I believe the kind of via negativa suggested here describes the “native” spirituality of the post-Romantic modern subject. In his 1928 essay, “Freedom Without Hope,” René Daumal — Gurdjieffean pataphysician, Sanskrit scholar, and author of Mount Analogue, one of the 20th century’s few masterworks of spiritual literature — described this rather astringent path in terms reminiscent at once of surrealist manifestos and the Traditionalist rants of René Guénon:

The essence of renunciation is to accept everything while denying everything. Nothing that has a form is me; but the determining factors of my individuality are thrown back on the world….The soul refuses to model itself on the image of the body, of desires, of reason; actions become natural phenomena; and man acts the way lightning strikes. In whatever form I find myself, I must say: that is not me. By this negation, I throw all form back to created Nature [or cyberspace], and make it appear as object. I want to leave whatever tends to limit me — body, temperament, desires, beliefs, memories — to the sprawling world, and at the same time to the past, for this act of negation creates both consciousness and the present; it is a single and eternal act of the instant. Consciousness is perpetual suicide. [26]

Authentic consciousness, for Daumal, is simply the pure subject constantly re-awakening to itself. And in an utterly un-Cartesian move, this vast impersonal awareness is reached only through the negation of individual autonomy. Freedom — for this is what Daumal is talking about — has nothing to do with the Cartesian image of an operator lodged in the theater of the mind. That supposedly free agent is just an avatar roving around, slurping noodles, getting and spending, running on auto-pilot.

Zizek seems to waver on whether this pure subject is accessible to us through the ascesis of dis-identification, or whether it remains the subject of the unconscious alone, available only in theory or the cracks of language. In his essay on Daniel Dennett, he asks “What if the ultimate paradox of consciousness is that consciousness–the very organ of ‘awareness’– can only occur insofar as it is unaware of its own conditions?” [27] But this implies that the site of consciousness is fixed. In other words, even if the paradox Zizek describes holds, the site of consciousness could nonetheless shift as more and more of its structuring conditions are brought into the circuit of consciousness. This is one way of characterizing the sort of psychological self-observation and self-programming whose various permutations infest the cybernetic world of self-help. Here the claim is that certain conditions that structure consciousnes can be known, recognized, and managed. At the same time, this process shifts the seat of consciousness into another frame, maintained by another set of unknown structures.

The pure subject is a void, a not-knowing, a suicide. But this void moves, an empty roaring stream we enter without resolution or understanding. For just as we cannot know what a body can do, neither can we know what consciousness can do — especially when it is becoming-empty, which if the Nyingmapas are right is equivalent with becoming-radiant. So I’ll leave you with the challenge the Sixth Ch’an Patriarch threw at his students: Show me your original face. What original face? The face you had before your parents were born. That is, before you tried to find yourself in the symbolic matrix of identification and signification, a “before” that does not lie in some foundational past but in the bottomless pit of the passing present.

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Foot notes removed/ Sorry about that!

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Four Sufi Poets

The chamber of your heart

Go sweep out the chamber of your heart.

Make it ready to be the dwelling place of the Beloved.

When you depart out,

He will enter it.

In you,

void of yourself,

will He display His beauties.

The tavern-haunter wanders alone in a desolate place,

seeing the whole world as a mirage.

The tavern-haunter is a seeker of Unity,

a soul freed from the shackles of himself.

Through the chamber of the heart is small,

it’s large enough for the Lord of both worlds

to gladly make His home there.

-Mahmud Shabistari

—

Love Came

Love came

flowed like blood

beneath skin, through veins

emptied me of my self

filled me

with the Beloved

till every limb

every organ was seized

and occupied

till only

my name remains.

the rest is It.

– Abu Said Abil Kheir

—

I am the One Whom I Love

I am the One whom I love, and the One whom I love is myself.

We are two souls incarnated in one body;

if you see me, you see Him,

if you see Him, you see us.

– Al Hallaj

—

My Eyes Pour Out Tears

He left me, and himself he departed;

What fault was there in me ?

Neither at night nor in the day do I sleep in peace;

My eyes pour out tears !

Sharper than swords and spears are the arrows of love !

There is no one as cruel as love ;

This malady no physician can cure.

There is no peace, not for a moment,

So intense is the pain of separation !

O Bullah, if the Lord were to shower

His grace, My days would radically change !

He left me, and himself he departed.

What fault was there in me ?

-Bulleh Shah

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(Eleanor Fortescue-Brickdale – In the Spring Time)

April 2, 2007

Psychedelic Heroines…

“An artist is somebody who enters into competition with God.” – Patti Smith

I would like to dedicate this edition to all the wonderful Women in the Entheogen Movement….

Here is to our brave sisters who have harrowed both heaven and hell, survived 2000 years or persecution, and still carry on.

Here is to those that went before, and those who are with us now: Laura Huxley, Ro Woodruff Leary, Ann Shulgin, Sacha Delia , Diane Darling, Kat Harrison, Maria of Oaxaca, and all the other Women who have been in the forefront for all these years and have held onto the High Ideal…

This Entry is for you….

Bright Blessings,

Gwyllm

On The Menu

The Links

Danielle Dax: Tomorrow Never Knows

Scottish Legends and Traditions: The Pechs

Danielle Dax – Cathouse

Poetry: Patti Smith

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The Links:

Research Links ‘Ecstasy’ to Survival of Key Movement-Related Cells in Brain –

Celebrity haunt in drugs raid

Designer Drug Studies In Japan

New York City Is Hell for Pot Smokers

____________________

Danielle was flying the Psychedelic Flag when nobody else was stepping up to the plate. Her music had a wonderful footing in Surrealism. She now makes her living as a gardener in London….

Danielle Dax – Tomorrow Never Knows…

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Scottish Legends and Traditions: The Pechs

“Long ago there were people in this country called the Pechs; short wee men they were, wi red hair, and long arms, and feet sae braid, that when it rained they could turn them up owre their heads, and then they served for umbrellas. The Pechs were great builders; they built a the auld castles in the kintry; and do ye ken the way they built them?Ill tell ye. They stood all in a row from the quarry to the place where they were building, and ilk ane handed forward the stanes to his neebor, till the hale was biggit. The Pechs were also a great people for ale, which they brewed frae heather; sae, ye ken, it bood (was bound) to be an extraornar cheap kind of drink; for heather, Ise warrant, was as plenty then as its now. This art o theirs was muckle sought after by the other folk that lived in the kintry; but they never would let out the secret, but handed it down frae father to son among themselves, wi strict injunctions frae ane to another never to let onybody ken about it.

“At last the Pechs had great wars, and mony o them were killed, and indeed they soon came to be a mere handfu o people, and were like to perish aft the face o the earth. Still they held fast by their secret of the heather yill, determined that their enemies should never wring it frae them. Weel, it came at last to a great battle between them and the Scots, in which they clean lost the day, and were killed a to tway, a father and a son. And sae the king o the Scots had these men brought before him, that he might try to frighten them into telling him the secret. He plainly told them that, if they would not disclose it peaceably, he must torture them till they should confess, and therefore it would be better for them to yield in time. Weel, says the auld man to the king, I see it is of no use to resist. But there is ae condition ye maun agree to before ye learn the secret. And what is that? said the king. Will ye promise to fulfil it, if it be na anything against your ain interests? said the man. Yes, said the king, I will and do promise so. Then said the Pech You must know that I wish for my sons death, though I dinna like to take his life myself.

My son ye maun kill,

Before I will you tell

How we brew the yill

Frae the heather bell!

The king was dootless greatly astonished at sic a request; but, as he had promised, he caused the lad to be immediately put to death. When the auld man saw his son was dead, he started up wi a great stend, and cried, Now, do wi me as you like. My son ye might have forced, for he was but a weak youth; but me you never can force.

And though you may me kill,

I will not you tell

How we brew the yill

Frae the heather bell!

“The king was now mair astonished than before, but it was at his being sae far outwitted by a mere wild man. Hooever, he saw it was needless to kill the Pech, and that his greatest punishment might now be his being allowed to live. So he was taken away as a prisoner, and he lived for mony a year after that, till he became a very, very auld man, baith bedrid and blind. Maist folk had forgotten there was sic a man in life; but ae night, some young men being in the house where he was, and making great boasts about their feats o strength, he leaned owre the bed and said he would like to feel ane o their wrists, that he might compare it wi the arms of men wha had lived in former times. And they, for sport, held out a thick gaud o em to him to feel. He just snappit it in tway wi his fingers as ye wad do a pipe stapple. Its a bit gey gristle, he said; but naething to the shackle-banes o my days. That was the last o the Pechs.”

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One more from Danielle. Wonderful Stuff!

Danielle Dax – Cathouse

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Poetry: Patti Smith

“I don’t consider writing a quiet, closet act.

I consider it a real physical act.

When I’m home writing on the typewriter, I go crazy.

I move like a monkey.

I’ve wet myself, I’ve come in my pants writing.”

–Patti Smith

Poem for Jim Morrison & Bumblebee

Dream of life

Na na na na na

I’m with you always

You’re ever on my mind

In a light to last a whole life through

Each way I turn

the sense of you surrounds

in every step I take

In all I do

Your thoughts your schemes

captivate my dreams

Everlasting, ever new

Sea returns to sea

And sky to sky

In a life of dream am I

When I’m with you

Deep in my heart

How the presence of you shines

In a light to last a whole life through

I recall the wonder of it all

Each dream of life I’ll share with you

Sea returns to sea

And sky to sky

In a life of dream am I

When I’m with you

I’m with you always

You’re ever on my mind

In a light to last a whole life through

The hand above

turns those leaves of love

All and all a timeless view

Each dream of life

Flung from paradise

Everlasting, ever new

Dream of Life

Dream Of Life

Na na na na na

—

autobiography

(1971)

great human wild animal

amoral

an outlaw

keep watch over her

I was born in Illinois…mainline of America…

beat to shit…Chicago tenement

big red eyed rats in the night…dead rats to tease at night

Morning…I waited for the organ grinder

with my nickel for the monkeys tin cup

gingerbread man…cotton candy man

bad girl setting fire to the oil cans

run like hell escape on the icemans truck

I was a limping ugly duck

but I had good luck

Mama filled me with fantasy…my bears danced at midnight

even my toybox had a soul

Mama called me her goat girl…little black sheep

I loved my brother and sister: Todd and Linda

we drank each others blood…we were double blood brothers

we rolled in fields…three white wolves…we practised telepathy

no one could separate us…our minds were one

One, little one eye…I had an eyepatch…I walked like a duck

In the years the nursery children cried Quack Quack

I didn’t care and didn’t fight back

I floated off…fantasy gave me fire…I was made of water

the moon caused tidal waves and I’d cry like a coyote

I learned to drift…magik…tarot pack

I paraded in thirty disguises

and when people laughed at my carnival family

We didn’t care…We had armor:

Daddy was a tap dancer…acrobat…wild horse

tracing pornography through the bible.

Mama was the dream of every sailor…bootlegged whiskey

called spirits from evenings half moon…dream weaver

We braved hurricanes…a new baby came…I named her Kim

the neighbors were suspicious…they called us witches

we didn’t care…we were laughing and dancing and damned

and there was always music

Hank Williams crying off the lonesomes

funny valentine…Patty Waters

beat of the drum…bartok

song of the swamp rat

rock and roll music

Rythum

On my own…my own rythums:

rythum of the railroad

steamheat of the factory

Alabama blues on a migrant bus

but as a blueberry picker I failed…I dreamed too much

the berry crop died…my mother smiled.

I ran off…I traveled…I broke down

kept running…TB trapped in the lung…spitting on the railroad track

I shook…I drank…rythum of one too many rhums

Drunk and broke down I slinked home…grabbed my sisters hand

and away we run…We took a freighter to Iceland

railway to Paris…Pigalle and wine in a black dress

I joined the fire eaters and sang in the streets…using all I learned

from Lotte Lenya…Bob Dylan…and motorcycle rock n’ roll

We lived near a wishing well…milked goats…capture snails

and crawled back to New York.

New York my greatest love:

Rise of the building

flash of 42nd street…the pool halls…the hustlers

the trucks along tenth avenue

the helicopter yards

ghost of Jackson Pollock

human shit and dead dog floating on the Hudson River

moving…I kept moving

dreaming:

Panama…heart of adventure

the hot life of Mexico

the drunkard…the dock worker

Rythum…flash of white hair…winter

the Jesters…the Paragons

rise of the blue heron

breathe through the great rythum

scream through the Shepard

sing through that rock n’ roll music

rock n’ roll music

rock n’ roll

—

Where duty calls

In a room in Lebanon

they silently slept

They were dreaming crazy dreams

in foreign alphabet

Lucky young boys

cross on the main

The driver was approaching

the American zone

The waving of hands

The tiniest train

They never dreamed

they’d never wake again

Voice of the Swarm

We follow we fall

Some kneel for priests

Some wail at walls

Flag on a match head

God or the law

And they’ll all go together

Where duty calls

United children

Child of Iran

Parallel prayers

Baseball Koran

I’ll protect Mama

I’ll lie awake

I’ll die for Allah

In a holy war

I’ll be a ranger

I’ll guard the streams

I’ll be a soldier

A sleeping Marine

In the heart of the ancient

Ali smiles

In the soul of the desert

the sun blooms

Awake

into the glare of all out little wars

Who pray to return to salute

the coming and dying of the moon

Oh sleeping sun

Assassin in prayer

laid a compass deep

Exploding dawn

and himself as well

Their eyes for his eyes

Their breath for his breath

All to his end

And a room in Lebanon

Dust of scenes

Erase and blend

May the blanket of Kings

Cover them and him

Forgive them Father

They know not what they do

From the vast portals

of their consciousness

they’re calling to you

—

star fever

[from a copy of Todd Rundgren’s 1973 album A Wizard, A True Star, which includes a Patti “Band-Aid” poem. It’s 3-1/4″ by 12-1/2″, the background is a pinkish bandaid, and the poem is printed in green ink, in her handwriting.]

They can not harm me

They can only

burn out my eyes

beat my limbs

black and blue

legs cant run

hands cant play

face cant sing

cant sing cant say

They can not harm me

They can only

turn in my eyes

rip out my teeth

spit pure ivory

carve my face like a clock

alarm me clock clock me

bleed me scape goat me

chain me to a rock me

rock me rock me

clever as a fox me

brand a star on/my left shoulder

a star on my left

clever as a fox

my spirit lights

behind the boulder

holding to my name forever

Knowing I’ll go on forever

Spirit laughing free as water

in a ring of fire

with its hair aflame

March 31, 2007

Saturday In Paradise….

(James Archer – Queen Guinevere, circa 1860)

Blessing of the Elements

Grace of the love of the skies be thine,

Grace of the love of the stars be thine,

Grace of the love of the moon be thine,

Grace of the love of the sun be thine,

Grace of the love and the crown of heaven be thine.

A wee entry for Saturday. Sanding Cabinets, and generally trying to get motivated under rainy skies. Where have all the good times gone? They are here, right now, this moment, this life.

A Blessing on You and Yours,

Gwyllm

—-

On The Menu:

Peters’ Saturday’s Pick

Scottish Tales: The Fox Outwitted

Lyrics From My Favourite Drinking Band

From Rowan: Lyre Bird

Poetry:”Arthur in Avalon”

Art: James Archer

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Peters’ Saturday’s Pick!

Juana Molina – No es tan cierto

_______________

Scottish Tales: The Fox Outwitted.

ONE day the fox succeeded in catching a fine fat goose asleep by the side of a loch; he held her by the wing, and making a joke of her cackling, hissing, and fears, he said–

“Now, if you had me in your mouth as I have you, tell me what you would do?”

“Why,” said the goose, “that is an easy question. I would fold my hands, shut my eyes, say a grace, and then eat you.”

“Just what I mean to do,” said Rory; 2 and folding his hands, and looking very demure, he said a pious grace with his eyes shut.

But while he did this the goose had spread her wings, and she was now half way over the loch; so the fox was left to lick his lips for supper.

“I will make a rule of this,” he said in disgust, never in all my life to say a grace again till after I feel the meat warm in my belly.”

________________

Lyrics From My Favourite Drinking Band….(The Kinks)

‘Where Have All The Good Times Gone’

Well, lived my life and never stopped to worry bout a thing

Opened up and shouted out and never tried to sing

Wondering if I’d done wrong

Will this depression last for long?

Won’t you tell me

Where have all the good times gone?

Well, once we had an easy ride and always felt the same

Time was on our side and I had everything to gain

Let it be like yesterday

Please let me have happy days

Won’t you tell me

Where have all the good times gone?

Ma and pa look back at all the things they used to do

Didn’t have no money and they always told the truth

Daddy didnt have no toys

And mummy didn’t need no boys

Won’t you tell me

Where have all the good times gone?

Well, yesterday was such an easy game for you to play

But lets face it things are so much easier today

Guess you need some bringing down

And get your feet back on the ground

Won’t you tell me

Where have all the good times gone?

_________________________

Lyre Bird

_________________________

Poetry:”Arthur in Avalon”

by John Arthur Blaikie

(James Archer – La Mort d’Arthur)

Stricken of man, and sore beset of Fate,

He lies amid the groves of Avalon;

What comfort mete ye unto Uther’s son,

O mournful Queens? What styptic to abate

Life’s eager stream? Alas, not theirs to sate

His soul with earthly vision! he hath done

With mortal life, and chivalry’s bright sun

Is darkened by the powers of hell and hate.

Lo! now, the garden of his agony

Is very sweet, though dread the hour, and drear

With utterless spell of horrid potency;

The barrèd east beyond the brightening sea,

Thick with portentous wraiths of phantom fear,

Is flushed with triumph, stirred with melody.

II.

“Glory of knighthood, that through Lyonesse

Was as a lamp, O selfless soul and pure,

What though thy visionary rule endure

So ill the assault of envy? Not the less

Thy victory, though failure thee oppress;

Not sterile thy example, and most sure

The seeded fruit; with might thou shalt allure

For evermore through life’s embattled press

Thy spiritual sons to follow thee;”

The mystic Four their solemn vigil keep

Until day break, and eastward silently,

Over the kingless land and wailing deep,

The sacrificial symbol fire the sky;

Then they arise, no more to watch and weep.

March 30, 2007

Isle of Dogs, Part 1

Here is the Friday Offering…. This starts a story cycle that may be of interest…. I must hop, work is calling!

Bright Blessings,

Gwyllm

On The Menu:

The Links

Koan:Zen in a Beggar’s Life

Peters’ Pick For Friday – Kristi Stassinopoulou “The Secrets Of The Rocks”

The Isle Of Dogs Part 1

The Bus Ride: Random Small Act of Kindness Makes a Big Difference

William Blake: The Garden Of Love

Art:Edward John Poynter (British, 1836-1919)

___________

The Links:

Mammal rise ‘not linked’ to dinos

Map proves Portuguese discovered Australia: new book

Alien abductions:carbon monoxide poisoning

The Mystery Of Consciousness…

___________

________

Koan:Zen in a Beggar’s Life

Tosui was a well-known Zen teacher of his time. He had lived in several temples and taught in various provinces.

The last temple he visited accumulated so many adherents that Tosui told them he was going to quit the lecture business entirely. He advised them to disperse and to go wherever they desired. After that no one could find any trace of him.

Three years later one of his disciples discovered him living with some beggars under a bridge in Kyoto. He at one implored Tosui to teach him.

“If you can do as I do for even a couple of days, I might,” Tosui replied.

So the former disciple dressed as a beggar and spent a day with Tosui. The following day one of the beggars died. Tosui and his pupil carried the body off at midnight and buried it on a mountainside. After that they returned to their shelter under the bridge.

Tosui slept soundly the remainder of the night, but the disciple could not sleep. When morning came Tosui said: “We do not have to beg food today. Our dead friend has left some over there.” But the disciple was unable to eat a single bite of it.

“I have said you could not do as I,” concluded Tosui. “Get out of here and do not bother me again.”

___________

Peters’ Pick For Friday – Kristi Stassinopoulou “The Secrets Of The Rocks”

____________

The Isle Of Dogs – Gwyllm

When I first moved to London in 1977, I lived in Brixton, staying at a house not far off of Brixton High Road about 3 blocks from the Brixton Market. It was a commune, that had been going for many years. Several of the people had been there onto 10 years, so it was a well established house locally. The street was a mixture of Jamaicans, Counter Culture types, and Students.

The house came equipped with a cat known as Atom, who had sadly been launched out the window by the local kids when he was a kitten… (hoping to see him land on his feet) 2 stories down, the poor cat landed on his head. He was simple but sweet. Purred like a dynamo at any given time.

The kitchen was the centre of the hive, people fixing tea, smoking hash, making toast… drinking tea.

I came to the house through my friend Fizzle, who I had met in Los Angeles. She was good pals with Phil Lithman, who I had worked with on and off in L.A., throwing the idea of doing a band together for several months… it ended up in a few gigs, but we could never work much past rehearsing, smoking hash, rehearsing… I had met Phil at The Sidewalk Cafe in Venice. He was the roommate with a fellow waiter, Jay who was also a friend of mine…. One day out of the blue Phil asked me if I could sing. Saying yes, he figured we could do a band together. I thought it a bit of a crazy idea, but it was all good fun.

(Phil Lithman and his friend Angie)

Anyway, when Fizzle moved back to London she started working at Stiff Records. I think she got the job through Phil, as Phil was old chums with Jake Rivera, one of the co-founders of Stiff (‘If It Ain’t Stiff, It Ain’t Worth a F**k’ pure Rivera, that). Phil had a brain storm before I left to the UK, he thought that Jake would sign me immediately to Stiff Records with his recommendation and my pipes. So, that seemed like a winning idea.

Fizzle and I ran around London, catching Mink Deville at the Odeon if I remember rightly on their first British tour, with Dr. Feelgood (first show after Wilco Johnson had left) opening for them. On the way there… we were going down into the Tube Station at Brixton… when I had two Jamaican guys grab my arms from behind and another going for my wallet. Fizzle turned around staring is amazement, as some how I bluffed them into running by sticking my hand into my inner jacket as if I had a weapon in there. I guess it was a crazy idea, but it worked. Fizzle said it was dangerous to resist as I could of been stabbed. We hurried on laughing as we went. It was a great show. A good time.

Fizzle introduced me to Kings’ Road, and various haunts and pubs. Especially Pubs. A delight that I still enjoy to this day.

I stayed on for a couple of weeks at her place, dossed out on her floor until it became a bit uncomfortable for everyone, and I decided to move on so as not to be the guest who overstayed….

I had met some nice people over the time that I had been in London. I had made acquaintances with not a few musicians, and one of them heard about my housing plight, and offered his bands squat on ‘The Isle Of Dogs’.

Now you may ask what is the Isle Of Dogs? Now days it is a fairly posh area of London, with expensive Condominiums and the like. Back in 1977 it was everything but. Dockside, with old East India Warehouses, built out over the Thames. It had once been a solid working class neighborhood, but had been severely bombed during the Blitz. Now (1977) it had empty warehouses, with Squats springing up everywhere, seedy Pubs, seedier drug deals, and various forms of mutated human life that was present in London at that point. Lots of Art Students, Punks, Painters, and Communards. I felt right at home.

To Be Continued…..

________________

The Bus Ride: Random Small Act of Kindness Makes a Big Difference

by Sateesh Chirputkar

My Master initiated me for meditation a few years back. I always listen to our Master on topics of Meditation and those related to natural and simple living. When I attended an advanced course on meditation our Master told us to use our knowledge in practical day to day life. As usual, I started observing myself and I realized that Meditation has given me an awareness that I was only awake. The Master many times emphasized the need of Giving and Effortless Living. A small real life incident taught me another law of nature.

A few days ago I was at a bus stop in town during the evening. The bus came on time and I took the window seat. The bus route was by the seashore and I was enjoying the breeze while watching the sea waves. After a few minutes the bus made it’s next stop. A young boy and a girl entered the bus. They were standing left standing when the bus took off. I glanced at them curiously and realized that all the window seats were occupied. They could sit but not together. Suddenly a different wave passed through my body and my inner mind gave me the instruction to get up. I got up and offered them my seat. The young lady smiled affectionately and said thank you very much. I occupied the other seat and we parted our ways. I don’t remember whether I got off the bus before them or not.

Months passed by. Suddenly one day while I was standing at the same bus stop waiting sometime for the bus to arrive I heard a voice.

“Excuse me Uncle,” I glanced in the direction of the voice. It was a beautiful young charming lady.

Puzzled, I said, “I do not recognize you.”

She said, “But I do you. Do you remember you gave us your window seat?”

Puzzled, I said, “Maybe, but what is so great in that?

She said, “Uncle you simply acted like a God for me. Had you not given your seat on that day, perhaps I would have not sat with my friend. By sitting together it helped us bridge a misunderstanding that has been between us forever. Do you know we are getting married next month?”

“Good! God Bless both of you,” I replied.

The young lady again said thank you and went onto her journey. I realized the importance of Giving that day. I also realized that small things can create great happenings in life. This was a great lesson for me.

_______________

William Blake: The Garden Of Love

“THE GARDEN OF LOVE”

I went to the Garden of Love,

And saw what I never had seen:

A Chapel was built in the midst,

Where I used to play on the green.

And the gates of this Chapel were shut,

And “Thou shalt not” writ over the door;

So I turn’d to the Garden of Love,

That so many sweet flowers bore,

And I saw it was filled with graves,

And tomb-stones where flowers should be:

And Priests in black gowns, were walking their rounds,

And binding with briars, my joys & desires.

1794

—

“A Divine Image”

Cruelty has a human heart,

And Jealousy a human face;

Terror the human form divine,

And Secresy the human dress.

The human dress is forged iron,

The human form a fiery forge,

The human face a furnace sealed,

The human heart its hungry gorge.

—

“Ah Sunflower”

Ah Sunflower, weary of time,

Who countest the steps of the sun;

Seeking after that sweet golden clime

Where the traveller’s journey is done;

Where the Youth pined away with desire,

And the pale virgin shrouded in snow,

Arise from their graves, and aspire

Where my Sunflower wishes to go!

—

“Earth’s Answer”

Earth raised up her head

From the darkness dread and drear,

Her light fled,

Stony, dread,

And her locks covered with grey despair.

“Prisoned on watery shore,

Starry jealousy does keep my den

Cold and hoar;

Weeping o’re,

I hear the father of the ancient men.

“Selfish father of men!

Cruel, jealous, selfish fear!

Can delight,

Chained in night,

The virgins of youth and morning bear?

“Does spring hide its joy,

When buds and blossoms grow?

Does the sower

Sow by night,

Or the plowman in darkness plough?

“Break this heavy chain,

That does freeze my bones around!

Selfish, vain,

Eternal bane,

That free love with bondage bound.”

_________

March 29, 2007

Thursday on The Left Coast…

Best Viewed With Mozilla FireFox

On The Music Box: Kraftwerk – Electronic Cafe

The morning glory also

The morning glory also

turns out

not to be my friend.

-Matsuo Basho

A feast of this and that… Sun is up, but cold. Coughing over coffee, New plants are blooming. The dog walks in and out of the house, sunning her self for awhile. Cat is on the fence, doing his cat meditations…

I hear Mary stirring somewhere in the house…. work beckons!

Beauty is everywhere. The light is moving from silver to golden. The earth breathes with new life and springtime really, really is here.

Working on the magazine at night, visiting with friends when possible.

Life is full, and much more so… I feel poetry coming back into my life. Time to write!

Blessings,

Gwyllm

On The Menu:

Basho Haikus…

The Links

Edo-period Kappa Sketches

Jain Tales: PARABLE OF A FIG

Peanut Butter, The Atheist’s Nightmare!

Peters’ Thursday Gift!

Jain Tales: Queen Chelna and King Shrenik

3 Poems of Hafiz

Art: Lucien Levy-Dhurmer (French, 1865-1953)

Lévy-Dhurmer’s women were completely different from the charming society ladies painted by his fashionable contemporary, Helleu. They posed, sphinxlike, and formed groups where the talk was all of art and mysticism, and where they listened, head in hands, hair shadowed by a mauve lamp shade, while a pianist (Debussy, perhaps) played themes from Parsifal. The atmosphere was troubled, dreamy and naïve, and the people who created it were obsessed with anything new, curious about everything which the materialistic 19th century had rejected. They adored Moreau, Puvis de Chavannes and Redon, but these great men could be admired only from a distance. Lévy-Dhurmer, however, was a lot younger and he moved in their circles.

____________

The Links:

The Night People

Enduring mystery of Jim Thompson

Mysterious Rock Growing ‘Hair’ Put on Display in Beijing

EARTH MYSTERIES

______________

Edo-period kappa sketches

Kappa, arguably Japans most well-known creature of legend, are mischievous river imps notorious for luring people particularly children into the water to drown and eat them. They smell like fish, enjoy cucumbers and sumo, and are said to be very courteous despite their malicious tendencies.

Although kappa are typically about the size of a child and greenish in color, they can vary widely in appearance. They frequently have a turtle-like shell and scaly skin, but sometimes their skin is moist and slick, or coated in fur. Most walk upright on their hind legs, but they are occasionally seen on all fours…

________________

EXCERPT IS FROM ONE OF JAIN MASTER CHITRABHANUJI’S TALKS

Jain Tales: PARABLE OF A FIG

A son asked his father, “What is soul?”

The Father replied, “Atma* can be explained by a seed. Bring me a fresh fig.”

When the son handed him a fig, the Father sliced it with a knife and removed a tiny seed. “In this seed is a tree. Try to break it in half,” said the Father. The son broke it. His Father asked, “What is inside?”

The boy replied, “Nothing.”

His Father responded, “There is formless in the center of form. Creation is inside. Within nothing is something. The invisible becomes visible.”

SOUL IS UNSEEN, FORMLESS AND ALIVE WITHIN FORM.

*ATMA means higher self or Soul in Sanskrit

________________

Peanut Butter, The Atheist’s Nightmare!

_________________

Staying at an inn

Staying at an inn

where prostitutes are also sleeping–

bush clover and the moon.

-Matsuo Basho

—

When the winter chrysanthemums go

When the winter chrysanthemums go,

there’s nothing to write about

but radishes.

-Matsuo Basho

_________________

Peters’ Thursday Gift!

Lisa Gerrard & Pieter Bourke “Sacrifice”

________________

Jain Tales: Queen Chelna and King Shrenik

This is a story from the time of Bhagwän Mahävir. At that time, king Chetak was the ruler of Vaishäli and he had a beautiful daughter named Chelna. Once an artist called Bharat painted a picture of Chelna and showed it to king Shrenik of Magadh. Charmed by Chelna’s beauty, Shrenik fell in love with her. One day Chelna came to the city of Magadh where she saw king Shrenik and she also fell in love with him. They soon got married.

Queen Chelna was a devoted follower of Jainism, while Shrenik was influenced by Buddhism. The king was very generous with a big heart but somehow was not happy with his queen’s devotion to the Jain monks. He wanted to prove to Chelna that Jain monks were pretenders. He strongly believed that no man could follow the practice of self-restraint and non-violence to that extent, and that the equanimity shown by Jain monks is superficial. Chelna was greatly disturbed by this.

One day, King Shrenik went on a hunting trip where he saw a Jain monk, Yamadhar, engaged in deep meditation. Shrenik let his hunter dogs go after Yamadhar but the monk remained silent. On seeing the calmness and composure of the monk, the dogs became quiet. King Shrenik got angry and thought that the monk had played some trick on them. So he started shooting arrows at the monk but they kept on missing him. Becoming more upset, he finally put a dead snake around Yamadhar’s neck and came back to his palace.

The king narrated the whole incident to Chelna. The queen felt very sorry and took the king back to Yamadhar’s meditation place. Because of the dead snake, ants, and other insects were crawling all over the monk’s body but the monk did not even stir. The couple witnessed the limits of human endurance. The queen gently removed the ants and snake from the monks body, and cleaned his wounds. She applied sandalwood paste. After sometime, Yamadhar opened his eyes and blessed both of them.

The monk did not distinguish between the king who had caused him pain, and the queen who had alleviated his pain. King Shrenik was very impressed, and convinced that Jain monk were truly beyond attachment and aversion. Thus, king Shrenik along with queen Chelna became devoted to Jainism and believed in Bhagwän Mahävir.

________________

____________

A bee

A bee

staggers out

of the peony.

-Matsuo Basho

Teeth sensitive to the sand

Teeth sensitive to the sand

in salad greens–

I’m getting old.

-Matsuo Basho

____________

Three Poems of Hafiz

A Suspended Blue Ocean

The sky

Is a suspended blue ocean.

The stars are the fish

That swim.

The planets are the white whales

I sometimes hitch a ride on,

And the sun and all light

Have forever fused themselves

Into my heart and upon

My skin.

There is only one rule

On this Wild Playground,

For every sign Hafiz has ever seen

Reads the same.

They all say,

“Have fun, my dear; my dear, have fun,

In the Beloved’s Divine

Game,

O, in the Beloved’s

Wonderful Game.”

—

What Should We Do about that Moon ?

A wine bottle fell from a wagon

And broke open in a field.

That night hundred beetles and all their cousins

Gathered

And did some serious binge drinking.

They even found some seed husks nearby

And began to play them like drums and whirl.

This made God very happy.

Then the ‘night candle’ rose into the sky

And one drunk creature, laying down his instrument

Said to his friend – for no apparent

Reason,

“What should we do about that moon?”

Seems to Hafiz

Most everyone has laid aside the music

Tackling such profoundly useless

Questions.

—

Last Night’s Storm

Last night’s storm was a journey to the Beloved.

I surrender to that, the wind that

is my Friend, and my work.

Each night, the lightning flashes.

Every morning, a breeze.

Not in some protected place, but in the flood

of the heart’s pumping, in the wind

of a rosebud’s opening out,

that puts a small crown on each narcissus.

A tired hand collapses, exhausted,

that in the morning holds your hair again.

Peace comes when we are friends together,

remembering. Hafiz! Your honest desire

and your benevolence free the soul

to emerge as what it is.

_________________

March 28, 2007

Wild Days…

Best Viewed Using FireFox

On The Beat Box: Rena Jones – Transmigration

I tweaked my shoulder, elbow and arm muscles on a customer site yesterday. The arm is not much use at this point. Argh. Ibuprofen is keeping it calmed down. I came in from the site, Mary put a hot water bottle on, and I fell asleep for 3 hours. It seemed to calm it down, but it has been putting me off balance a bit.

Some nice stuff today, so dive in! I hope you enjoy,

Gwyllm

On The Menu:

The Links

Who Shall Deliver Me?

Ekova!

The War on Drugs Is Really a War on Minorities

Poetry: More of William Allingham

Art: Fernand Edmond Jean Marie Khnopff

Fernand Edmond Jean Marie Khnopff (September 12, 1858 – November 12, 1921) was a Belgian symbolist painter.

He was raised in Bruges and went to law school in Brussels. He quickly dropped out and enrolled in l’academie des beaux art; Xavier Mellery was his main tutor.

During a trip to Paris in 1877 he was greatly influenced by Delacroix and the Pre-Raphaelites.

In 1883 he was one of the founders of the “Groupe des XX”. Although not a very open man and a rather secluded personality, he already achieved cult status during his life.

Acknowledged and accepted, he received the Order of Leopold. His sister was one of his favorite subjects. His most famous painting is probably The Caress.

_____________

The Links:

Ear Bones Suggest Prehistoric Aquatics

Rare Semi-Identical Twins Discovered

The Antikythera Mechanism

Scientific evidence suggests Puerto Rican woman is an Extraterrestrial-Human hybrid

_____________

WHO SHALL DELIVER ME?

God strengthen me to bear myself;

That heaviest weight of all to bear,

Inalienable weight of care.

All others are outside myself;

I lock my door and bar them out

The turmoil, tedium, gad-about.

I lock my door upon myself,

And bar them out; but who shall wall

Self from myself, most loathed of all?

If I could once lay down myself,

And start self-purged upon the race

That all must run ! Death runs apace.

If I could set aside myself,

And start with lightened heart upon

The road by all men overgone!

God harden me against myself,

This coward with pathetic voice

Who craves for ease and rest and joys

Myself, arch-traitor to mysel ;

My hollowest friend, my deadliest foe,

My clog whatever road I go.

Yet One there is can curb myself,

Can roll the strangling load from me

Break off the yoke and set me free

-Christina Rossetti

___________

From Peter….

Ekova!

____________

The War on Drugs Is Really a War on Minorities

By Arianna Huffington

here is a subject being forgotten in the 2008 Democratic race for the White House.

While all the major candidates are vying for the black and Latino vote, they are completely ignoring one of the most pressing issues affecting those constituencies: the failed “war on drugs” — a war that has morphed into a war on people of color.

Consider this: According to a 2006 report by the American Civil Liberties Union, African Americans make up an estimated 15% of drug users, but they account for 37% of those arrested on drug charges, 59% of those convicted and 74% of all drug offenders sentenced to prison. Or consider this: The U.S. has 260,000 people in state prisons on nonviolent drug charges; 183,200 (more than 70%) of them are black or Latino.

Such facts have been bandied about for years. But our politicians have consistently failed to take action on what has become yet another third rail of American politics, a subject to be avoided at all costs by elected officials who fear being incinerated on contact for being soft on crime.

Perhaps you hoped this would change during a spirited Democratic presidential primary? Unfortunately, a quick search of the top Democratic hopefuls’ websites reveals that not one of them — not Hillary Clinton, not Barack Obama, not John Edwards, not Joe Biden, not Chris Dodd, not Bill Richardson — even mentions the drug war, let alone offers any solutions.

The silence coming from Clinton and Obama is particularly deafening.

Obama has written eloquently about his own struggle with drugs but has not addressed the tragic effect the war on drugs is having on African American communities.

As for Clinton, she flew into Selma, Ala., to reinforce her image as the wife of the black community’s most beloved politician and has made much of her plan to attract female voters, but she has ignored the suffering of poor, black women right in her own backyard.

Located down the road from her Chappaqua, N.Y., home are two prisons housing female inmates, Taconic and Bedford. Forty-eight percent of the women in Taconic are there for nonviolent drug offenses; 78% of those in the prison are African American or Latino.

And Bedford, the state’s only maximum-security prison for women, is home to some of the worst victims of New York’s draconian Rockefeller-era drug laws — mothers and grandmothers whose first brush with the law resulted in their being locked away for 15 years or more on nonviolent drug charges.

Yet even though these prisons are so nearby, Clinton has turned a blind eye to the plight of the women locked away there, notably refusing to speak out on their behalf.

Avoidance of this issue comes at a very stiff price (and not just the more than $50 billion a year we’re spending on the failed drug war). The toll is paid in shattered families, devastated inner cities and wasted lives (with no apologies for using that term).

During the 10 years I’ve been writing about the injustice of the drug war, I’ve repeatedly watched as politicians paid lip service to the problem but then ducked as the sickening status quo claimed more victims. In California, of the 171,000 inmates jamming the state’s wildly overcrowded prisons, 36,000 are nonviolent drug offenders.

I remember in 1999 asking Dan Bartlett, then the campaign spokesman for candidate George W. Bush, about Bush’s position on the outrageous disparity between the sentences meted out for possession of crack cocaine and those given for possession of powder cocaine — a disparity that has helped fill U.S. prisons with black low-level drug users (80% of sentenced crack defendants are black). Federal sentencing guidelines dictate that judges impose the same five-year prison sentence for possession of five grams of crack or 500 grams of powder cocaine.

“The different sentencing for crack cocaine and powder cocaine is something that there’s no doubt needs to be addressed,” Bartlett told me. But in the more than six years since Bush and Bartlett moved into the White House, the problem has gone unaddressed. No doubt about it.

Maybe the president will suddenly wake up and decide to take on the issue five days before he leaves office. That’s what Bill Clinton did, writing a 2001 New York Times Op-Ed article in which he trumpeted the need to “immediately reduce the disparity between crack and powder cocaine sentences” — conveniently ignoring the fact that he had the power to solve it for eight years and did nothing.

When it mattered, he maintained an imperial silence. Then, when it didn’t, he became Captain Courageous. And he lamented the failures of our drug policy as though he had been an innocent bystander rather than the chief executive (indeed, the prison population doubled on his watch).

The injustice is so egregious that a conservative senator, Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.), is now leading the charge in Congress to ease crack sentences. “I believe that as a matter of law enforcement and good public policy, crack cocaine sentences are too heavy and can’t be justified,” he said. “People don’t want us to be soft on crime, but I think we ought to make the law more rational.”

There’s a talking point Hillary and Obama should adopt. It’s both the right thing and the smart thing. Because of disenfranchisement statutes, large numbers of black men who were convicted of drug crimes are ineligible to vote, even those who have fully paid their debt to society.

A 2000 study found that 1.4 million African American men — 13% of the total black male population — were unable to vote in the 2000 election because of state laws barring felons access to the polls. In Florida, one in three black men is permanently disqualified from voting. Think that might have made a difference in the 2000 race? Our shortsighted drug laws have become the 21st century manifestation of Jim Crow.

Shouldn’t this be an issue Democratic presidential candidates deem worthy of their attention?

____________

Poetry: More of William Allingham...

Olian Harp

What is it that is gone, we fancied ours?

Oh what is lost that never may be told?

We stray all afternoon, and we may grieve

Until the perfect closing of the night.

Listen to us, thou gray Autumnal Eve,

Whose part is silence. At thy verge the clouds

Are broken into melancholy gold;

The waifs of Autumn and the feeble flow’rs

Glimmer along our woodlands in wet light;

Within thy shadow thou dost weave the shrouds

Of joy and great adventure, waxing cold,

Which once, or so it seemed, were full of might.

Some power it was, that lives not with us now,

A thought we had, but could not, could not hold.

O sweetly, swiftly pass’d:air sings and murmurs;

Green leaves are gathering on the dewy bough;

O sadly, swiftly pass’d:air sighs and mutters;

Red leaves are dropping on the rainy mould.

Then comes the snow, unfeatured, vast, and white.

O what is gone from us, we fancied ours?

—

The Maids of Elfin-Mere

When the spinning-room was here

Came Three Damsels, clothed in white,

With their spindles every night;

One and Two and three fair Maidens,

Spinning to a pulsing cadence,

Singing songs of Elfin-Mere;

Till the eleventh hour was toll’d,

Then departed through the wold.

Years ago, and years ago;

And the tall reeds sigh as the wind doth blow.

Three white Lilies, calm and clear,

And they were loved by every one;

Most of all, the Pastor’s Son,

Listening to their gentle singing,

Felt his heart go from him, clinging

Round these Maids of Elfin-Mere.

Sued each night to make them stay,

Sadden’d when they went away.

Years ago, and years ago;

And the tall reeds sigh as the wind doth blow.

Hands that shook with love and fear

Dared put back the village clock,

Flew the spindle, turn’d the rock,

Flow’d the song with subtle rounding,

Till the false ‘eleven’ was sounding;

Then these Maids of Elfin-Mere

Swiftly, softly, left the room,

Like three doves on snowy plume.

Years ago, and years ago;

And the tall reeds sigh as the wind doth blow.

One that night who wander’d near

Heard lamentings by the shore,

Saw at dawn three stains of gore

In the waters fade and dwindle.

Never more with song and spindle

Saw we Maids of Elfin-Mere,

The Pastor’s Son did pine and die;

Because true love should never lie.

Years ago, and years ago;

And the tall reeds sigh as the wind doth blow.

—

Twilight Voices

Now, at the hour when ignorant mortals

Drowse in the shade of their whirling sphere,

Heaven and Hell from invisible portals

Breathing comfort and ghastly fear,

Voices I hear;

I hear strange voices, flitting, calling,

Wavering by on the dusky blast,

‘Come, let us go, for the night is falling;

Come, let us go, for the day is past!’

Troops of joys are they, now departed?

Winged hopes that no longer stay?

Guardian spirits grown weary-hearted?

Powers that have linger’d their latest day?

What do they say?

What do they sing? I hear them calling,

Whispering, gathering, flying fast,

‘Come, come, for the night is falling;

Come, come, for the day is past!’

Sing they to me?’Thy taper’s wasted;

Mortal, thy sands of life run low;

Thine hours like a flock of birds have hasted:

Time is ending;we go, we go.’

Sing they so?

Mystical voices, floating, calling;

Dim farewellsthe last, the last?

Come, come away, the night is falling;

‘Come, come away, the day is past.’

See, I am ready, Twilight voices!

Child of the spirit-world am I;

How should I fear you? my soul rejoices,

O speak plainer! O draw nigh!

Fain would I fly!

Tell me your message, Ye who are calling

Out of the dimness vague and vast;

Lift me, take me,the night is falling;

Quick, let us go,the day is past.

___________

Author: Gwyllm

Midnight Posting

Stand Up And Be Counted…

A Small Visit With Aldous

Tales From Cornwall….

The Turf For Tuesday

Psychedelic Heroines…

Saturday In Paradise….

Isle of Dogs, Part 1

Thursday on The Left Coast…

Wild Days…