New Year's Eve.
I watched the TV at the bar as flames spat up behind Dick Clark-bot on the screen, Robbie Kinevel wheeling his way to set up his jump, his success and failure set up like a trick Groundhog's Day tradition: "If he lives, it'll be a good year! Hahaw!" The Patriarch and Matriarch of the Clinton Dynasty initiated the ball drop, to show us who we really elected. Somehow, it seemed like everyone at Times Square represented humanity waving farewell to itself like the cast at the end of a play to the audience.
The seashells in the bathroom. The octopus necklace on the waitress handing out champagne. The purple background with growing spirals on the screen. The Mollusk was speaking, and it was time to move away from the bustle and into the blackness. I stepped outside the bar, to see a single, scallop-shaped purple firework go off just off to the right from across the street. All is well. It's time I learned to trust the Mollusk a bit more, ask it more questions and make fewer observations of an ever-changing figure. I was saved, I feel, but from what I have no idea. Maybe it's best to save that question for when I'm ready.
I'm going to take advantage of that second chance. I have so much life, here, and if the world's going to end, I have to make sure I'm comfortable where I am as we all fall down, if only to justify a painfully slow death. I want to know that somehow, somewhere in there, I lived for at least a little bit during the time my heart pumped.
Friday, January 2, 2009
Sunday, October 26, 2008
Refusing to Die
Much of this has been said before by folks with a better grasp at language.
Magic can be one of the hardest things to break. How does a person smash an already flexible view of reality? It’s something that needs to be hardened and then cracked for the gooey unspeakable phantom crap to burst out like a New Orleans levee. I mean, we could pretend for a moment that magic is the aforementioned unspeakable phantom crap, but all I’ve found is that magic is just a way of comprehending it. We can argue ad infinitum about what events constitute magic, and that, in and of itself, makes the damned thing invincible. Some of it we hold onto tightly; we make legions of conjectural structures on a handful of philosophical points. Some of it we let slip through, hoping that the wash of nonsense will accumulate a universal, true structure that underlies all things. That last one’s the most arrogant and tragic. That view has this arrogance in believing that the measly, slapped-together human mind really can perceive a structure greater than its senses or the cultural structures created in the former work. Isn’t it all just reaction to a spooky world beyond experience? Is it just angry dismissal and reaction against experience? Can we really just sit there grinning about how there’s “just this moment”? I can tell you, when I’m puking my guts out from food poisoning, I’m praying for the moment when it’s out of my system.
Our experience left without validation leaves us without any drive. As a superorganism created from deformed monkey stock, this self-aware and variable mental framework became fragile after separation from direct involvement with natural threats. Apparitions compose most of our societal taxations and structures. Separation from the toil of the hunt has come to the toil of a possibly meaningless occupation of time to receive imaginary liquid assets in order to acquire nourishment that’s been killed on an assembly line or in a threshing machine. Guilt over this lack of participation leads people to go to great lengths to “buy organic” or “fair trade,” in order to assuage their guilt over a total lack of interaction. This framework develops arts of combat, still beholden to rules that keep true savagery at arms length. It brings people to create preposterous tools in order to tackle the ordeal of a natural structure that those who live alongside it would rather just respect and let alone, as the hardship of that environment is a regular occurrence. Many of these excursions leave those primal sources of danger worse off. Who will clean Everest of the litters of oxygen tanks and non-degradable thermal jackets from dead mountain climbers? Still, when pressed to hear the story from a person who has been in physical peril, envy creeps in, then guilt, then defensiveness. The drive to prove the worth of one’s traits by besting the throes of death still lives in the furthest abstractions of life, no matter how divorced it is.
These apparitions and theoretical compositions still have major ramifications. A lack of an arbitrarily decided trading unit in a given area can devastate a population, no matter how hard it works, due to a handful of individuals in decision-making positions attempting to increase the stock of that trading unit for themselves in an overvalued sense of self-preservation. That these individuals will have a legacy of terror means nothing to them; the idea that they will have a legacy at all means everything to them.
Without connection to natural events, cycles of psychological development have become just as dangerous to the individual as the external. Without justification for existence, and without a close connection to nature’s randomness to experience survival instincts, the individual falls into what many call depression, characterized by the passivity and irresponsibility of early development and/or desire for the termination of the existence deemed invalid by the evaluating perspective of the individual. One way to posit depression is to perceive both the passivity and the thanatoic drive as methods for the mental framework to alter itself. Without perception of separation between an individual’s own structures, the perceiving function can draw the action to encompass all levels of an individual being, that function could easily judge the entire structure as invalid. However, the separation of those structures can allow the perceiving function to articulate changes in the individual framework and how the being can respond accordingly.
While the separation might seem inauthentic, perhaps untrue to humanity, this current state nonetheless exists. Once externalized, an idea rarely becomes undone. Often, a flow of events renders this idea obsolete in the acting structure of the psychological landscape of humanity, yet these “obsolete” ideas become valid either through revision or through a separate psychological landscape adopting it for its own means of development. As much as humanity lives in a physical world, its imaginary world seems to equally affect its existence, and often this concept becomes marginalized. Responsibility for the psychological environment equals that of the physical environment, as one often reflects the other. In the darkness of modernity and in the possibility of global devastation, some small fragment of meaning must be found, or the thanatoic response will have the capability of extinguishing the entire species, if not much of what can be considered life.
Magic can be one of the hardest things to break. How does a person smash an already flexible view of reality? It’s something that needs to be hardened and then cracked for the gooey unspeakable phantom crap to burst out like a New Orleans levee. I mean, we could pretend for a moment that magic is the aforementioned unspeakable phantom crap, but all I’ve found is that magic is just a way of comprehending it. We can argue ad infinitum about what events constitute magic, and that, in and of itself, makes the damned thing invincible. Some of it we hold onto tightly; we make legions of conjectural structures on a handful of philosophical points. Some of it we let slip through, hoping that the wash of nonsense will accumulate a universal, true structure that underlies all things. That last one’s the most arrogant and tragic. That view has this arrogance in believing that the measly, slapped-together human mind really can perceive a structure greater than its senses or the cultural structures created in the former work. Isn’t it all just reaction to a spooky world beyond experience? Is it just angry dismissal and reaction against experience? Can we really just sit there grinning about how there’s “just this moment”? I can tell you, when I’m puking my guts out from food poisoning, I’m praying for the moment when it’s out of my system.
Our experience left without validation leaves us without any drive. As a superorganism created from deformed monkey stock, this self-aware and variable mental framework became fragile after separation from direct involvement with natural threats. Apparitions compose most of our societal taxations and structures. Separation from the toil of the hunt has come to the toil of a possibly meaningless occupation of time to receive imaginary liquid assets in order to acquire nourishment that’s been killed on an assembly line or in a threshing machine. Guilt over this lack of participation leads people to go to great lengths to “buy organic” or “fair trade,” in order to assuage their guilt over a total lack of interaction. This framework develops arts of combat, still beholden to rules that keep true savagery at arms length. It brings people to create preposterous tools in order to tackle the ordeal of a natural structure that those who live alongside it would rather just respect and let alone, as the hardship of that environment is a regular occurrence. Many of these excursions leave those primal sources of danger worse off. Who will clean Everest of the litters of oxygen tanks and non-degradable thermal jackets from dead mountain climbers? Still, when pressed to hear the story from a person who has been in physical peril, envy creeps in, then guilt, then defensiveness. The drive to prove the worth of one’s traits by besting the throes of death still lives in the furthest abstractions of life, no matter how divorced it is.
These apparitions and theoretical compositions still have major ramifications. A lack of an arbitrarily decided trading unit in a given area can devastate a population, no matter how hard it works, due to a handful of individuals in decision-making positions attempting to increase the stock of that trading unit for themselves in an overvalued sense of self-preservation. That these individuals will have a legacy of terror means nothing to them; the idea that they will have a legacy at all means everything to them.
Without connection to natural events, cycles of psychological development have become just as dangerous to the individual as the external. Without justification for existence, and without a close connection to nature’s randomness to experience survival instincts, the individual falls into what many call depression, characterized by the passivity and irresponsibility of early development and/or desire for the termination of the existence deemed invalid by the evaluating perspective of the individual. One way to posit depression is to perceive both the passivity and the thanatoic drive as methods for the mental framework to alter itself. Without perception of separation between an individual’s own structures, the perceiving function can draw the action to encompass all levels of an individual being, that function could easily judge the entire structure as invalid. However, the separation of those structures can allow the perceiving function to articulate changes in the individual framework and how the being can respond accordingly.
While the separation might seem inauthentic, perhaps untrue to humanity, this current state nonetheless exists. Once externalized, an idea rarely becomes undone. Often, a flow of events renders this idea obsolete in the acting structure of the psychological landscape of humanity, yet these “obsolete” ideas become valid either through revision or through a separate psychological landscape adopting it for its own means of development. As much as humanity lives in a physical world, its imaginary world seems to equally affect its existence, and often this concept becomes marginalized. Responsibility for the psychological environment equals that of the physical environment, as one often reflects the other. In the darkness of modernity and in the possibility of global devastation, some small fragment of meaning must be found, or the thanatoic response will have the capability of extinguishing the entire species, if not much of what can be considered life.
Wednesday, October 22, 2008
Snarls from Beneath All Things.
The thought of walking out into the cold and freezing to death seems so appealing. Closing the mind off from the body and letting it die... it's coming around again. It's been years since I've been this depressed. It's getting harder to rationalize my way through it.
I've gotten through it before, but each return makes me wonder if the way through was just finding ways to ignore that darkness. It's completely self-absorbed, but that urge to erase all traces of having existed and wandering into the scary wild with the intent to die feels... right, sometimes.
Much as a personality could make broad, sweeping statements of "nothing can do X" or "everything's just so Z that I can't stand it," it's not so grandiose this turn. The mind meets an irreparable paradox in its framework, and excessive association with the mind can lead a being to ignore its other faculties. The unknown factor of this paradox leads the framework into a state of destruction, although this destruction of identity and association can be confused with destruction of the entire being. We have the technology.
I need the "wilds" again. I must set forth into my own destruction, to preserve my existence. This round has a sense of humor: In the season I feel the most alive comes the inescapable sense of wanting to die.
I've gotten through it before, but each return makes me wonder if the way through was just finding ways to ignore that darkness. It's completely self-absorbed, but that urge to erase all traces of having existed and wandering into the scary wild with the intent to die feels... right, sometimes.
Much as a personality could make broad, sweeping statements of "nothing can do X" or "everything's just so Z that I can't stand it," it's not so grandiose this turn. The mind meets an irreparable paradox in its framework, and excessive association with the mind can lead a being to ignore its other faculties. The unknown factor of this paradox leads the framework into a state of destruction, although this destruction of identity and association can be confused with destruction of the entire being. We have the technology.
I need the "wilds" again. I must set forth into my own destruction, to preserve my existence. This round has a sense of humor: In the season I feel the most alive comes the inescapable sense of wanting to die.
Monday, October 13, 2008
Der Hexen and Old Timey Crotchety Business
This summary is not available. Please
click here to view the post.
Sunday, September 28, 2008
Homunculus Now.
Ladies and gentlemen, today we dicuss homunculi.
Now, legend has them created by mandrake or chicken eggs, in some spermatogenesis goofiness. However, the notion of personified elements as posited by Zosimos seems at least more feasible to my sensibilities. Still, it's just as silly, thinking about little men going "arrrrgh!" all of the time in some constant gory torment.
I've experienced homunculi in the same manner as nature spirits initially, faces that appear in just about everything while I'm in what folks call the "receptive state," or what most folks perceive as being "zoned out." Eventually, certain faces kept repeating, or had a particular series of advice voiced in those moments, and were a bit more accessable, more obviously drawn from some bit of absurdist creation on my part. That little bit of personalization took those faces out of the matter and shaped them into satellite beings in the mental sphere.
This comes almost as a form of depersonalization of particular traits, making a parapersona to observe, understand, and manage before reabsorbing those traits back into the home persona, of course to move in and out constantly. Much of this relates to dolls, toys, and stuffed animals as a child. In fact, most magic comes from things we used to do as kids put into some comprehensible way of observing and understanding reality in a constantly changing manner, opening up new possibilities. It's admitting to madness and using its trappings to find sanity and completion.
One method I use to understand homunculi is beginning to draw the vague pretenses of a face, and watching what happens from there, in a trance. It isn't always symmetric, it's rarely pretty, but the imperfection of manifestation in any reality is the point: these beings are a part of that massive, multidimensional matrix, and manifestation shows merely one small size of an infinitely-sided being, with that imperfection acting as an attempt to stretch or fold that shape into something understandable. That's the point of paradox: let it happen.
Once the face is finished, put it away, and do something that relates to its manifestation while still awake that day, and don't look at it. Let it do its thing until something says otherwise. It's like a sigil with a personality, relating in that human-to-human fashion, touching on the concept of progeny and creation of life.
Now, legend has them created by mandrake or chicken eggs, in some spermatogenesis goofiness. However, the notion of personified elements as posited by Zosimos seems at least more feasible to my sensibilities. Still, it's just as silly, thinking about little men going "arrrrgh!" all of the time in some constant gory torment.
I've experienced homunculi in the same manner as nature spirits initially, faces that appear in just about everything while I'm in what folks call the "receptive state," or what most folks perceive as being "zoned out." Eventually, certain faces kept repeating, or had a particular series of advice voiced in those moments, and were a bit more accessable, more obviously drawn from some bit of absurdist creation on my part. That little bit of personalization took those faces out of the matter and shaped them into satellite beings in the mental sphere.
This comes almost as a form of depersonalization of particular traits, making a parapersona to observe, understand, and manage before reabsorbing those traits back into the home persona, of course to move in and out constantly. Much of this relates to dolls, toys, and stuffed animals as a child. In fact, most magic comes from things we used to do as kids put into some comprehensible way of observing and understanding reality in a constantly changing manner, opening up new possibilities. It's admitting to madness and using its trappings to find sanity and completion.
One method I use to understand homunculi is beginning to draw the vague pretenses of a face, and watching what happens from there, in a trance. It isn't always symmetric, it's rarely pretty, but the imperfection of manifestation in any reality is the point: these beings are a part of that massive, multidimensional matrix, and manifestation shows merely one small size of an infinitely-sided being, with that imperfection acting as an attempt to stretch or fold that shape into something understandable. That's the point of paradox: let it happen.
Once the face is finished, put it away, and do something that relates to its manifestation while still awake that day, and don't look at it. Let it do its thing until something says otherwise. It's like a sigil with a personality, relating in that human-to-human fashion, touching on the concept of progeny and creation of life.
Saturday, August 23, 2008
Naudh a sammitch.
I began ruminating on the "N"-stave rune: naudh, need, whatever you wanna call it.
Poetic kenning tends to color any person's view of a rune. A lot of it becomes a matter of finding words that sound similar, which would relate to actually attempting to poke around in the roots of language and association. Learning the runes becomes a lot easier to understand as the mind removes itself from a solid, unwavering view of language.
Now, the N-phonetic rune, which I'll just call Naudh for simplicity's sake, has had Trouble, Toil, and Need listed as possible definitions. I've just recently come to understand nith as one of the possible associations with the rune, which I'm sure someone's figured out before.
Either way, the concept of nith seems to derive from a sense of a person's roundabout nature in understanding the world, deviance from cultural morality, and the emotions such as envy, hate, and malice. A nithing is listed asa person who inspires these concepts. In a modern concept, we could see a nithing as any group that Billy Graham or David Duke spits bile about, up to and including that idiocy of "well, she shouldn't have dressed like that if she didn't want to get raped."
If we were to put the runes in a circle, then across from Naudh would lie the rune Ing, based primarily about the spread of the cult of Yngvi. Conceptually, Ing relates to cultural and social elements relating to one's own culture, such as eitquette, relations with family, and community-based religious practices. However, just as the alienating and belligerently xenophobic tendencies flourish in those who follow the passive, charitable, and omni-loving Christ, so too does the Ing rune bear an incongruity with its representations.
Nith, as a companion definition of Naudh, seems to relate to our own individual needs and alienating qualities. Those who follow somewhat primitive and rapturous practices, who test the borders of law and morality, would then begin to enter the purview of Naudh: entheogenic Mind-altering substances, unconventional romances, personal ethic, etc.
Naudh itself relates to elements that challenge the relative ease of existence. Constraint, Trouble, elements that begin to display themselves when options run out. To connect this with nith, these elements arrive when the sanctuary of cultural/societal existence begins to conflict with individual needs. The Anglo-Saxon rune poem leaves a passage about Naudh as a source of help and salvation when heeded. A resolution to the Naudh/Ing dichotomy comes from balancing external, societal operations with personal "taboos", so that both have enough space. Too much time spent dealing with Naudh leaves a person alienated from society, and too much Ing leaves a person bigoted and unfulfilled, in this framework.
Of course, Naudh also stands for undoing tensions, such as creative struggles of bringing the internal world into the external, through creative, technological, mathematical, or athletic ventures. Aren't symbols cool?
Poetic kenning tends to color any person's view of a rune. A lot of it becomes a matter of finding words that sound similar, which would relate to actually attempting to poke around in the roots of language and association. Learning the runes becomes a lot easier to understand as the mind removes itself from a solid, unwavering view of language.
Now, the N-phonetic rune, which I'll just call Naudh for simplicity's sake, has had Trouble, Toil, and Need listed as possible definitions. I've just recently come to understand nith as one of the possible associations with the rune, which I'm sure someone's figured out before.
Either way, the concept of nith seems to derive from a sense of a person's roundabout nature in understanding the world, deviance from cultural morality, and the emotions such as envy, hate, and malice. A nithing is listed asa person who inspires these concepts. In a modern concept, we could see a nithing as any group that Billy Graham or David Duke spits bile about, up to and including that idiocy of "well, she shouldn't have dressed like that if she didn't want to get raped."
If we were to put the runes in a circle, then across from Naudh would lie the rune Ing, based primarily about the spread of the cult of Yngvi. Conceptually, Ing relates to cultural and social elements relating to one's own culture, such as eitquette, relations with family, and community-based religious practices. However, just as the alienating and belligerently xenophobic tendencies flourish in those who follow the passive, charitable, and omni-loving Christ, so too does the Ing rune bear an incongruity with its representations.
Nith, as a companion definition of Naudh, seems to relate to our own individual needs and alienating qualities. Those who follow somewhat primitive and rapturous practices, who test the borders of law and morality, would then begin to enter the purview of Naudh: entheogenic Mind-altering substances, unconventional romances, personal ethic, etc.
Naudh itself relates to elements that challenge the relative ease of existence. Constraint, Trouble, elements that begin to display themselves when options run out. To connect this with nith, these elements arrive when the sanctuary of cultural/societal existence begins to conflict with individual needs. The Anglo-Saxon rune poem leaves a passage about Naudh as a source of help and salvation when heeded. A resolution to the Naudh/Ing dichotomy comes from balancing external, societal operations with personal "taboos", so that both have enough space. Too much time spent dealing with Naudh leaves a person alienated from society, and too much Ing leaves a person bigoted and unfulfilled, in this framework.
Of course, Naudh also stands for undoing tensions, such as creative struggles of bringing the internal world into the external, through creative, technological, mathematical, or athletic ventures. Aren't symbols cool?
Thursday, August 21, 2008
Seeds of the Luminescent Pomegranate
There's a star exploding in the center of my chest. It's no big deal.
Still sittin' alone. Old board games bring the Mysteries to mind. Not really sure why.
I can feel the leaves and the sighs of the evergreens. I feel like a cat that comes to a person's door every night, yet will never get in. No harm in trying. It's hard to see clearly through the haze of emotion, and I don't want to give up, like I have before with anything difficult. "This Vagina Mine teaches patience, diligence". A semi-unreachable focus seems to stabilize.
The hemispheres gradually work together. Thought augments Feeling. Senses augment Intuition.
Sounds begin to explode once more into muscle. Sorrow in the civilized world feels nearly meaningless. Slowly, I feel like pieces return to the whole. I feel emotions release. I can see the stars again. I can feel that sticky bioluminescence.
I might need to dig up more of this. I feel a little like I've come out of decade-long funk and my muscles are still weak, yet the endorphin surge seems to push me forward for more: more crazy visions, more spirits, more of God throwing me into the Abyss. They feel like a reward for existing.
Still sittin' alone. Old board games bring the Mysteries to mind. Not really sure why.
I can feel the leaves and the sighs of the evergreens. I feel like a cat that comes to a person's door every night, yet will never get in. No harm in trying. It's hard to see clearly through the haze of emotion, and I don't want to give up, like I have before with anything difficult. "This Vagina Mine teaches patience, diligence". A semi-unreachable focus seems to stabilize.
The hemispheres gradually work together. Thought augments Feeling. Senses augment Intuition.
Sounds begin to explode once more into muscle. Sorrow in the civilized world feels nearly meaningless. Slowly, I feel like pieces return to the whole. I feel emotions release. I can see the stars again. I can feel that sticky bioluminescence.
I might need to dig up more of this. I feel a little like I've come out of decade-long funk and my muscles are still weak, yet the endorphin surge seems to push me forward for more: more crazy visions, more spirits, more of God throwing me into the Abyss. They feel like a reward for existing.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)