Wart on Error

“Does the crocodile understand a conversation that doesn't include a weapon?”
Usama bin Ladin from a speech broadcast on 1/11/2004, translation by Al-Jazeera


Wart on error
The swelling of mistake
Culpability and coercion
An oriental diversion
Smoke & mirrors
Cries & whispers
The spider fingers
Of Fu Manchu
Tweak the strings
Of a trap
Tweak the strings
Of marionettes
Mr Punch beats up Judy
The crocodile steals
The sausages
And you cannot negotiate
With a crocodile
Without a weapon in your hand.

James Piers Taylor, 21/7/2006

IMAGE: Boris Karloff as Dr Fu Manchu in The Mask of Fu Manchu (1932).

Embedded Reporting

I’m telling stories to you out the window
From a citadel of lies
(maybe the sleeping pills are wearing off)
I seem to be a patient here
Or inmate or detainee
Everyone is perfectly nice, everybody smiles
It is nice and clean, I like it here
Please send money and clean underwear
Thinking of you all the time
Send my love to the children.

Can you read the code here?
Can I read the code here?

The secret cipher is apparently
All part of my delusion
I use it as a means
Of asserting control over my situation
This has its origins in my childhood
When I was cruelly invited
To watch television
And participate in the death throes
Of consumerism.
I must learn to love plastic
To enjoy its taste
Spatulaed on the roof of my mouth
As their fingers root for happy pills
Beneath my tongue.
I could grab their bollocks real easy
But they already have me by the nuts
And I haven’t the balls to do it.


James Piers Taylor, 21/7/2006 London

IMAGE: Slavers throwing overboard the Dead and Dying - Typhoon coming on (The Slave Ship) (1840), by J.W. Turner

Post War Dividend

I kiss my sister Chlorine
And expire in her gas
Leaving salty residues on the walls
And crystal dust on the floor.

I dream a dream of science
Of absolute form
Pure action
Cleanliness
And right.

I wipe white ceramic
With handkerchief
Wipe my spectacles
With alcohol.

Soak sugar cubes in ether
And wander bar to bar
With halitosis.

I stick a red card
In my breast pocket
And shake my head
To particle decay.

I dress smart
I act smart
Chemistry is a cure
Physics is a slave
Biology is controllable.


James Piers Taylor, 18/7/2006 Essex


IMAGE: Medium Energy X-Ray Image of Galactic Center (2004) produced by NASA/CXC/UCLA/MIT/M.Muno et al. from data gathered by the orbiting Chandra X-Ray Observatory.

The Round Thing

‘The past for poets, the present for pigs’
Samuel Palmer

In this piece I wish to explore some aspects the work of Welsh painter Ceri Richards (1903-1971), in particular his engagement with the thrashing maelstrom of interconnection between nature, culture and psyche. More than most, and in the passionate visual interpenetration of styles drawn from, among others, his two great Welsh poetic peers, Dylan Thomas and Vernon Watkins, Richards was true to the fusion of natural forms and cultural inspiration, as met through a passionate and spiritually engaged psyche.

Richards lived a life of engagement beyond popular forms, a life of integrity, and though a member of the Surrealist movement and a contemporary of, among others, Henry Moore, he has snuck under the radar of popular awareness, being to some extent ‘uncontainable’, or perhaps, Traditional in his neo-platonic disposition. Influenced early in his development by Kandinsky and the sense of a harmony of colours, Richards set about discovering ways of ‘painting music’, moving through Breton’s Surrealism (he attended the Breton lecture ‘Limits not Frontiers of Surrealism’) into a deepening engagement with the forces of life itself. Moved by influences as distinct as David Gascoyne and Walt Whitman, it could be said that Ceri Richards melded surrealism as an action for liberating the mind, with his innate strong sense of spirit and freedom, expressed through notions of social justice, internationalism and political breadth. He adhered to the axiom, extracted by Gascoyne from Breton’s musings, that “Beauty will be convulsive”, and through his affinity for landscape (inner and outer), as well as implicit orders of form, Richards grew into a student of “the mystery, the ‘unreality’ of ordinary things”.

His peaks as an artist, to my eye, come in several bursts of mellifluous energy, in the sequence of paintings around Dylan Thomas’s ‘The force that through the green fuse drives the flower’, including 1944s ‘Cycle of Nature’; here there is an eruption of sexual-sensual organic life-form in a ‘biomorphic bacchanalia’ of joy and terror – an ecstatic art, with its lineage rooted into a Celtic foreground of ‘everything that lives is holy’; there are also later sequences returning to these themes, Cycle of Nature (1964-69) for example, or Summer (1968), and the elegiac hwyl-filled ‘Music of Colours: White Blossom (1968), inspired by the loss of his dear friend and soul-fellow, Vernon Watkins. Other notable series include the Beethoven paintings of the early 1950s. in which culture is the driving sensibility, the Artist-as-Genius; and the many paintings in the ‘La cathedrale engloutie’, inspired by works of Debussy and the way musical forms melt into landscape (the Gower coast, most often for Richards).

There are of course many other paintings of note besides, well worth exploring. Richards knew in his bones that ‘every force evolves a form’ – and perhaps his great nature cycles, early and late, best express this – with their vaginal, pod-like, astral-alien intensity, their organic traumatic cyclical agonies of renewal and death, their red heat in hearts blended to white drops in a natural orgasm of painterly, imaginal tantra. These forces are indestructible and in Richards’s hands they find their form newly made – almost akin to Francis Bacon’s (another contemporary of Richards) pronouncements on the ‘violence of paint’ in which remaking ‘the violence of reality itself’ is not a simple matter but one ultimately wedded to the ‘violence of the suggestions within the image itself’. However, unlike Bacon’s sophisticated cynicism of the deracinated eye, Richards holds the strange attractor of psyche up to the clashing spheres of nature and culture, shunning neither, devoted to both, and in his most sublime dedication created painting such as Afal du Brogwyr, also known as the Black Apple of Gower (1952).

This painting is of pivotal consequence and importance, for Richards and for us. A dark mandala encased in sky-sea-galactic contexts grappling for wholeness against the predicament of collective death. The painting gains even more significance when we realise that it struck Jung so deeply – he had been given a print of it by a Mrs Lucille Frost, a supporter of Richards – and a letter from Jung to Richards exists in which he expresses:

‘The round thing is one of many. It is astonishingly filled with compressed corruption, abomination and explosiveness. It is pure black substance…nigredo. Blackness understood as night, chaos, evil, the essence of corruption, and yet the prima material of gold, sun and eternal incorruptibility. I understand your picture as a confession of the secret of our time’

This powerful intrusion of utter darkness of nigredo into the Eden-like landscape of Gower is, metaphorically and literally, like a nuclear device exploding in the psyche – releasing all its potential, its infinitude of creative-destructive processes, held in the celtic knotwork of the core, a multivalent mandala pitchblende and poetry, holding the ambiguities and paradoxes within a vessel strong and gentle enough to cope. It is a sublime image of potential transformation. As Dylan Thomas wrote:

‘I dreamed my genesis in sweat of death, fallen
Twice in the feeding sea, grown
Stale of Adam’s brine until, vision
Of new man strength, I seek the sun’

Or as Vernon Watkins wrote in his ‘Taliesin in Gower’:

‘My country is here. I am foal and violet.
Hawthorn breaks from my hands.
I have been taught the script of stones
And I know the tongue of the wave’


After Watkins died Richards’s wrote ‘now that he is not there anymore the landscape seems deprived and inarticulate’, having lost its seer, its prophetic bridge-maker and image- shepherd. The loss is palpable, to one as tender as Richards, who had earlier faced the loss of Thomas too, asker of the ‘the deep and most persistent questions’, as had been Beethoven and Shakespeare before – images of the artist ‘searching for the right mutation’, reworking and remaking endlessly out of the prima material of experience, nature, culture and the cycles of time. Ceri Richards was the painter of cosmic sexuality, of organic unfolding, of curve and turn, of the feminine Sophia-light and her dark twin, of death and renewal made fleshy and ripe and, to paraphrase Nietzsche, he

‘himself becomes his images…. His ‘I’ is not that of the natural waking man but the ‘I’ dwelling, truly and eternally in the ground of being’

Richards died on 9th November 1971, exactly 18 years to the day after Dylan Thomas died.


KH
18.07.06

IMAGES: Cycle of Nature (1944), The force that through the green fuse drives the flower (1945), La Cathedrale Engloutie (Profondement Calme) (1962) all by Ceri Richards.

For more of the paintings mentioned above see the book Ceri Richards – A great Welsh artist by Mel Gooding (Cameron & Hollis, 2002).

Comeback Kids

“Scientists have calculated that if two houseflies met and mated and no predators ate them or their offspring, the fly pair and their offspring could produce enough flies to cover the entire earth 47 feet deep with flies, in just one year”

Loren Nancarrow/Janet Hogan Taylor, ‘The Worm Book’, 1998

(flies are amongst the most prolific breeders. A female house fly can laybetween 500 and 600 eggs during her life, in batches of 75 to 100 eggs. Thewhole process from egg to adult takes less than two weeks. If all the eggs froma female house fly were to hatch, and all the offspring were allowed to survive,breed, and lay their own eggs, then we would have 180,000 flies in just twogenerations. In three generations we would have 54,000,000 flies: sourced online)

"The mathematics of uncontrolled growth are frightening. A single cell of the bacterium E. coli would, under ideal circumstances, divide every twenty minutes.That is not particularly disturbing until you think about it, but the fact is that bacteria multiply geometrically: one becomes two, two become four, four become eight, and so on. In this way it can be shown that in a single day, one cell of E. coli could produce a super-colony equal in size and weight to the entire planet Earth."

Michael Crichton, The Andromeda Strain, (1969)


I quote the above horror scenarios of uninterrupted exponential growth partly in response to Yourmindfire’s piece ‘Growing Up’. As YMF argues, an over literal fixation on growth is a psychotic action leading straight to a new and deeper annex of Hell, rather as the scenarios with the flies and e.coli would be; that nature permits neither to manifest at this point is evidence enough of our blessed state, one might surmise. Nature insists on diversity and predation (spiders, the weather and seasonality, disinfectant, those funny ultra-violet insecto-cutor machines you get in chips-shops…), as well as nurture, cyclical rhythms of growth and shrinkage and an amazingly complex web of interdependent factors. The same is true of the human psyche – our behaviours are informed by an immensely complicated network of interdependent and interrelating factors, internally as well as in terms of outer relationships. Alongside these complex connections, systems and networks, all of which promote mutuality, we also notice that certain junction points in this mesh (Indra’s net?) function as thresholds. Some of these are biological (puberty, parenthood, menopause) others cultural (you’re 18 now, you’re getting married, you’re fired) still others psychological (depression, stable ego-identity) and perhaps yet others are spiritual in nature (peak experiences in practice, particular quality of dreams, meditational realisations) – I could go on.

My point here is that thresholds necessarily interrupt the flow of connection – they disrupt our comfort zones, push us up against our boundaries or lack thereof. They also resist our desires – no good trying to bribe the ferryman to carry you across whichever Styx you’ve reached – he sees through your bullshit, you’re either authentically ready or you’re not, in which case you sit and wait until you are. These are profound and deep moments, and as King Lear observed ‘Ripeness is all’. Promethean acts in the face of thresholds and their guardians result in getting one’s fingers burned (and one’s liver eternally pecked out, perhaps). Humans have always understood this, always that is, until relatively recently. If we hadn’t quite ignored the knowledge of thresholds before, we surely did in the 1940s with the birth of the atomic age – storming the gates of unreason with the needle-mind of power. Everything changed at that point, as has been well explored from many angles. But in crossing that threshold, did we stop to consider what we’d have to give up? And what our lionising of ‘progress’ as power actually entails? Here was truly born the state of ‘post-modern confusion’ and its associated utter relativism of values.

Are we become ‘lords of the flies’, Beelzebub’s humming cousins in our ‘Hummers’, virulent aggressive and apparently limitless in our self-conception? Perhaps so. One function of this (among many), from where I’m standing at least, was to believe (enough of) the hype I encountered as I grew up. For example, I took it for granted that I lived in a world where, barring a few dictatorships and aberrations, torture was universally viewed as ‘not OK’. Same went for fundamentalism of religion, political ideology or scientific dogma. Well it seems I was Spectacularly (I use the word advisedly) deceived. My naivety is one thing (of course torture, state terrorism, abuses of every kind by the so-called forces of law and order, proliferation of fear, despotism and pre-emptive war carried on in spades, and if not for my insulated spatial disposition in life as a white male, I’d no doubt’ve spotted it sooner) for which I alone am culpable, but the context in which that dance played out wasn’t only (or even) down to me (or you). It’s a cultural phenomenon, predicated upon cosseted ‘first world’ holier-than-thou and certainly richer-than-thou morality.

Where is all this going – randy flies and unstoppably fecund bacteria, nuclear capabilities, thresholds within interdependent networks? Well, bear with me – since, the biggest threat to human survival is currently a three way tie between catastrophic and unsurvivable climate change, full-on nuclear holocaust (a favourite hell realm of mine, and I suspect anyone growing up in the 80s) and catastrophic collapse of everything underpinned by reliance on fossil fuels, especially oil and gas (i.e. the structures of so-called ‘civilization’). Of these, one common theme is the ‘catastrophic’ element, another is the ‘self-inflicted’ aspect (I’m giving up on assuaging the objections of climate change doubters or peak oil deniers – let them eat cake) and still another is the ‘threshold’ nature of the events and the circumstances through which they would manifest. My contention is that I (and I’d go so far as to suggest, ‘we’) have over-estimated the collective human consensus around the ‘conscious’ parts of ourselves and dangerously ignored the ‘unconscious’ aspects (which would appear to be much greater and more potent than we’d bargained for) – the rule of ego and its concomitant rule of law cannot sustain themselves against this denial and repression – hence we erupt, we leak, we dare the threshold too soon, and we act out every shadow fantasy collectively. Meanwhile, nature and the world we are embedded in continues to try and cope with our maniacal behaviours (towards it and each other) and also operates according to much deeper rules. Finite rules, not market-led mechanisms to facilitate endless growth.


Nature’s imagination trumps ours in terms of creativity, abundance and diversity, and also because nature manifests more than we humans can envisage – the earth’s annual yield is unimaginably complex and wonderful, balanced and sustaining – and yet we now exceed it massively, flipping Mother Nature the bird. Well, it can’t last – and the comebacks I referred to in the title of this piece are not just those I thought I’d seen the end of – the mainstream acceptability of torture, nuclear proliferation and attachment, pre-emptive war – but also those within nature that we conveniently forgot about. Like the finite reserves of one-time-only fossil fuel endowments (they didn’t magically vanish in the wake of the 70s oil-shocks).

We are like children whose inner and outer worlds have yet to fully differentiate – we believe that what we want to be true will be, a magical thinking, but one that, for all its puer grandeur and sweeping vision, is never actually to be realised. Pre-egoic children don’t cross the thresholds of adulthood without experiencing traumatic chaos – one could say we’re all living in a more-or-less functionally repressed, PTSD state – especially if one factors in prior-lifetimes of involvement with this samsaric wheel. We’re damaged kids, the kids aren’t alright, they’re us – and until we reclaim our dreams from the traumatic conditioning, until we heal ourselves by descending into our deepest fears and truly facing them at the thresholds inside – then we will not be allowed the grace of crossing the outer thresholds and ‘saving’ our planet. It is our selves that need the saving.

Kh
14.7.06


IMAGES: Lord of the Flies (2006) painting by Douglas Thompson available from the artist, E. Coli on Blood Agar (2006) photograph from University of Cambridge, Department of Pathology.

Growing Up

“We can have growth of love, information, spirituality, poetry, but we can’t have growth in the sheer number of molecules extracted from the Earth moving through the economy. This simply can’t grow without limit unless we want our civilization to plunge miserably into oblivion in the fairly near future.”

Stephan Harding* interviewed by Rob Hopkins at Transition Culture

Isn’t it time we grew up a little? Humans grow their entire lives, but at a certain point they stop getting taller – that kind of growth is limited, we don’t exist in a world of expanding giants. But these people still grow as people, they learn, they experience if they are lucky they become wiser. Stopping getter bigger didn’t stop them getting better – they grow all the time, in ways much more interesting and sophisticated than the merely spatial.

When they were little, they used to eat small portions of food and wear small clothes – and as they grew taller they eat bigger portions and wore bigger clothes. Then they stopped getting taller, and the potions of food they needed plateaued. When they eat bigger portions than this they got unhealthy and overweight, and even began to shorten their lifespan. When they stopped getting taller, they didn’t need to keep getting bigger and bigger clothes (unless they were eating bigger portions than they needed). Their clothes still deteriorate over time and need to be replaced but when they choose well made clothes this doesn’t have to happen too often. Some people keep getting more and more clothes that they never wear and filling up their houses with them – but these aren’t really clothes any more they are possessions and have a completely different meaning.

Growth – economic growth, as it is currently realised on Earth – requiring the ever faster turnover of raw resources into saleable commodities has no future. We live in a world of finite physical resources. Many commentators from both right and left hold that human imagination is however infinite, and thus growth is not limited – because we will constantly find new ways of better using resources and finding new resources. Push these ideas a little and they all reveal faith in free markets and long term plans to mine the solar system. They also reveal that their only concept of growth is related to the established economic model, and reflects none of those attractive human elements that Harding speaks about.

What kind of growth do we want?

James Piers Taylor, 13/07/2006

*Stephan Harding is the Resident Ecologist at Schumacher College, the course co-ordinator of their MSc in Holistic Science and the author of Animate Earth (Green Books, 2006).

IMAGE: American Progress by John Gast (c.1872)

The Psychology of the Hole

From figures as diverse as the fictional narrator of Haruki Murakami’s Wind Up Bird Chronicle (who contemplates his life for an unknown period from the bottom of a well) to physicist Stephen Hawking, whose increasing physical restriction does not seem to stop his contemplation of the vast holes in space - humanity relates to the notion of the hole in a fashion that often reveals much about how humanity now experiences itself as existing in the world…we are thrown as Heidegger stressed in Being and Time… perhaps, into a (w)hole of a world…who knows, but on the day that youthful luminary Syd Barrett finally left this life perhaps it is appropriate to ask - what is the nature of the whole? And more pertinently what might it be like to fall into one?

For Stephen Hawking the hundreds of millions of Black Holes in outer space, into which the raw materials of creation are perpetually leaking, manifest the information paradox – a conceptual hole in which the very possibility of science or philosophy ever grasping the nature of creation may be destroyed. Hypothetically, gaining the knowledge of the position or nature of every particle in existence would be the key to gaining magic like powers to mould creation – but as Black Holes appear to destroy this knowledge in their constant consumption of time and space it is unachievable.
That Hawking is imagining such potential is a remarkable illustration of the human capacity to rise beyond the limitation of the body into mind, or a realm of pure thought. Within this near heavenly realm of potential the Black Hole is like an apple carried by the snake…an apple of super dense gravity and destruction.

Leonard Susskind the eminent theoretical Physicist has postulated one solution to this information paradox, in which the information seemingly lost to the Black Hole is actually stretched/condensed from a 3D stream to a 2D stream somewhat like a living reality being placed into a roll of film – in this roll skewed along the Event Horizon of the Black Hole the seemingly lost information is actually stored in a new form. In this way information changes state, changes the way it is stored, rather than simply disappearing all together. Whilst Hawking and Susskind were at odds for a long period of time Hawkins recently and very publicly underwent a U-turn on his own paradox, stating in effect that because of seemingly infinite parallel universes some of which do not have Black Holes the information lost to Black Holes (in universes like ours which have them) will eventually be found again. It all sounds like science fiction, and indeed technically it is!

What interests me here from a psychological perspective is how the importance which man is placing on this dialogue with the vast hole, can be recognised as a metaphoric explosion of the smaller hole, the one we can fall into, both outside and inside ourselves. Within this more intimate notion of the hole we can sense the threat of non-being – what would it be like not to exist? When scientists search frantically for ways that the core data of this universe might not be lost to vast Black Holes in space (a super massive one right at the heart of our Galaxy) are they not also, perhaps, entering into a metaphysical speculation as to whether the information of our lives is worth something, or whether it all just disappears into the void of the past, of death?


Looked at from this perspective, the darkness of the hole represents all that the consciousness cannot assimilate, cannot comprehend and therefore fears in its alien and aphotic appearance. Is not the information paradox, in a sense, one man’s tortuous pathway to faith, asking can I reconcile my mind and my spirit to this universe? Can I be inspired (derived from spirit) from what I see? From this perspective - beautiful lost souls like Syd Barrett can be perceived as bodies that collapsed about the Black Holes at the core of their own identity, like outmoded solar systems slowly collapsing in on themselves. Is this life lost forever then? I say no, partly because he left some great tunes, partly because he is remembered by friends, band-mates and public (Wish You Were Here) but also because as the scientists are beginning to explore - energy changes state, it does not disappear. In this sense the subtle realms of life, the morphogenetic fields (the modern Elysian fields…) and the implicate order do not rescind this deal, life, they do not ask for the cards back. Every card we play in life, every thought-intention and every feeling-desire exists like a hand we have played in a vast swirl of meta-information, that which Ervin Laszlo in his book Science and the Akashic Field (Inner Traditions, 2004) calls the A-field, the primary field.

As we gaze into space we gaze into ourselves, our origins - both literally, because it is the ancient light that emanated from the early days of the universe that we perceive and metaphorically, through the lens with which we approach the stars. A recent article in The Sunday Times suggested that the images captured by the Hubble Telescope, in their visualization of the new frontier - are the contemporary equivalent of the work of Ansell Adams. To ignore their artistry (the colour schemes and visual enhancements) was, the piece argued, to evince a certain naivety about a so-called rigid demarcation between science and art. It is this rigid dualism that the Archetypal perspective I am outlining in these posts is seeking to overcome, for in essence all is art (creative, aesthetic) and all is science (observation, correlation) – this experience is multifaceted and deeply involving. In our involvement our thoughts, feelings and spirit matter to the world we are in and as we care about being in the world (the Heideggerean ‘soren’) so then are we able to experience the world in its concealed-ness (the Hole) and its unconcealed-ness (the Whole) and realize that both matter to us.

Mark Jones

IMAGES: Untitled by Syd Barrett (c.1965), Syd photograph (c.1967)

Leonardo's Kite

This brief analysis of analysis takes its title by the recollection of a childhood incident by Leonardo Da Vinci that Freud appropriated as part of his discussion of the role of infantile fantasy within art. Whilst in his cradle Leonardo saw a large bird which flew close and opened the child’s mouth with its tail, striking him many times against the lips in the process. Leonardo had been an illegitimate child whose father and mother had married other people in the year that he was born, he was soon adopted into his father’s household alongside this his homosexual inclinations are also well recorded. From these materials Freud was quick to expose the latent homosexuality seeing in the bird’s tail an image of the penis and linking the pleasure of suckling the breast to the sucking of the penis. He then uses Egyptian mythological evidence to link the vulture to the mother on an archetypal or resonant level, for in Egyptian myth vultures were seen as being only female and in their relationship to death they were a perfect match for a boy without a mother. Unfortunately Freud’s clever link had been already broken by the fact that its entire value lay on the basis of a mistranslation, Freud had read vulture, and Leonardo had seen a kite!


This rather unfortunate accident, or parapraxis even (the famous freudian slip) illustrates a number of important points about Freud’s incipient wish to reduce art (as with dreams and neurotic material) to repressed infantile sexuality…for one his actual knowledge of the facts was often overlooked, famously in the example of the paranoid Judge Schreber and within literature in his analysis of Dostoevsky. In both these examples it is Freud’s knowledge of the father relationship that is misconstrued, with Schreber he interpreted Schreiber’s desire to become a woman in order to be impregnated by the fecundity of divine rays as latent homosexual leanings for his doctor, with its origins in the positive transference of the paternal relationship. Schreiber’s father had actually been a tyrant who had forcefully restricted his boys onto back straightening equipment and gave them enemas to prevent nocturnal emissions. The eldest boy shot himself at 38 and Schreber never recovered from his second breakdown at 51. In Dostoevsky’s case he had it the other way round, whilst Freud saw a tyrant father who had induced mock epilepsy in his masochistically guilty son, Doctor Dostoevsky was an encouraging educator and Dostoevsky almost certainly really had epilepsy. It is to easy to turn Freud’s methodology onto himself, it is also thanks to Freud that we even can, but it is evident that the shadow of the father confuses some of Freud’s analysis of clients and of art.

What if Leonardo’s kite was a sign, a living symbol an omen of his own flights of inventive fantasy that became so much more than a flight from the reality principle and actually began even in flight, to change the way we experience that reality…? Freud was not convinced that Leonardo had even seen the bird; he believed it was a fantasy recollection, I ask, does this even matter? At that age, with that kind of image how does one ever see it? Through dream, half-dream, intuition, something of Leonardo’s daimon is present in the image of a bird opening his mouth with its tail – could this not be as much an invitation from the imaginal, to speak? Many great souls in many cultures arrival is marked by a bird or other power animal, is this not another messenger of this order? Who can say for sure, but it is a point of view no less far fetched that Freud’s tracing of the mythological origins of the vulture (why Egypt for Leonardo for example?). From this point of view Schreber’s vision is less than a paranoid concealment of his previously inactive desire to become homosexual and is instead a symbolic form of his own need to return to the repressed – in becoming a woman he could be vulnerable, open and admit the insecurity and impotency from his father and allow himself to experience the nature of love, coming down from the divine like the rays of the sun.


When we contemplate the different perspectives of analysis or interpretation we come across the essential importance of our choice of fiction, of which story we hold to. In this sense the observer always infiltrates the observed and Freud’s idea that he remained a scientist (of the old school detached kind), recorded (along with the biographical material that makes the bulk of this essay) in Anthony Storr’s wonderful Freud: a very short introduction (OUP 1989), just another fantasy. Storr regards Freud as more of an historian, garnering a perspective from the analysis of the past, a perspective that could never hope to be complete. In this sense we are all historians, just as we are myth makers and storytellers, we are all involved in the selection process, conscious and unconscious, of which stories we give credence to, and therefore which possible realities from the multitude (probably infinite) available to us we decide to live out, and to live through. In this way we choose whether the bird that visits us in the cradle is yet another embodiment of our neurosis or whether such a visitation as something of value within it, that it is a gift…We may need at times to hold both points of view together…but let us not hold to our reductionism and say that it is somehow more logical or rational to see it this way rather than that way…let us admit (with Keats) that the aesthetic element of truth is just as, if not more, valid.

Mark Jones

IMAGES: Vulture (2006) by Christine L. Reyes. Available from the artist, page from Chiaroscuro: The Private Lives of Leonardo da Vinci #10 (1996: DC Comics) by David Rawson/Pat MacGreal/Chas Truog/Rafael Kayanan/Carla Feeny

The Far Silence

Cecil Collins & the Path of Beauty

“All Art is divine fable expressing the Space-Time Mythology of the feelings of God”

In this piece I want to explore some of the themes emerging out of the visual, poetic and prose works of the great visionary artist Cecil Collins (1908-1989), and how they pertain to notions of depth, creativity, therapy and, what we might call ‘human purpose’. Rather like Blake before him, Collins brought his creative genius to bear on a spectrum of media – painting, poetry, prose, meditative reflections, sketches, iconography and teaching – and through diversity the unity of his consciousness found its truest expression.

In my own work, especially, though not exclusively, in poetry, I have been profoundly influenced by Collins’s example and at times a form of disembodied mentorship, ever since my microdot-peeled eyes (and I had thousands of them at that moment) gasped in overarching gratitude at the joy revealed in the heart of the image of ‘The Angel of the Flowing Light’, which clung to the wall of my college room at Oxford in poster-form. That experience in 1992, of the intense layering and feeling revealed through the eyes of the being whose side is ripped open in a river of light, and of the imaginal landscape behind the figure, come alive in unspeakably beautiful love, opened me to a fundamental truth, communicated in the unshakeable gnosis that death is not an end – if you like, death as I had imagined it to that moment, was no longer Real.

Ironic then, that I first want to quote from Collins’s meditations of the first half of the 1930s –

“Begun in the Age of Death
When the hard seeds cry out
For the Light”

Seeing through death does not prevent the process of dying – one still must die, drop the body as Eastern religions fondly say, still engage with the pain of separation and the often overwhelming waves of suffering that attachment to the stuff of transience brings humanity. However, awareness forged in the mysteries of the polyvalent moment, is not lost; see-feeling that death is not The End brings in the other mystery, that of continuity, timelessness manifest within time as a movement towards wholeness – for Collins, the Tradition. So as his 1930s world exhibited the first tendencies to machine-led death and horror in war, Collins reflected upon Light – the real medium in which he worked and created so delicately and with such passion. Light as we might encounter with it today feels a more care-worn vessel – stretched out by science into the helical dialectics of particle and wave, deployed by every patriarchal religion as the sky-god’s apocalypse-bringing thunderbolt (and now handily packaged in phallic missile form), co-opted to a New Age froth of false positivity and ‘spiritual bypassing’ through notions of ‘creating one’s own reality’ or else just plain lost in an exceedingly dark passage of human existence. Can we still apprehend some of Collins’s intention, as we the hard seeds cry out, blind to the truth that ‘All ecstasy is infinity’ ?

Here we approach some of the core of what Collins had to say. Since

“the Devil, by numerous various symbols and images
tries to bruise the God energy in me”

we begin to see how the various levels of cognition connect; there is God, (‘Eternal Mystery’, ‘Ghost’, ‘the only Self that really exists’, ‘God is Death’) and the energy God engenders in human beings and in life itself, there is the Devil (‘created to struggle with, and to purify us’) and there are the symbols and images inside of which the interactions occur. All of which relates also to time – since to exist is to exist within space-time. Here things get interesting, since ecstasy is infinity for Collins, it follows that ‘ecstasy is the self dissolved beyond poles’, in other words, to be ecstatic one must ‘dissolve’ into the vastness of infinity, the spaciousness behind God, free of the concerns of the over-attached ego (the Devil Inside, and not only inside Michael Hutchence). So we’re into the realms of the therapeutic – the modalities of healing and the dressing of life-wounds. Solve et Coagula, as the alchemists put it. Nowadays we tend to think of this as the world of Psychology, and indeed this is part of Psychology’s imperial project, insofar as it aspires to the ‘respectability’ of ‘hard’ science. Collins however, didn’t buy it for a moment:

“most of its (Psychology’s) conclusions are a vague arrogant naivety which will lead humanity into great misery – you cannot study the function of anything apart from its purpose, because apart from its purpose it has no function. Psychology does not know the purpose of Man, therefore how can it understand Man’s functions…”

He goes on to state very clearly that far from its stated intentions as herald of the ‘cure’ for the human condition

“Modern psychology is part of the expression of the illness of man”

and it is this way precisely because modern psychology has ignored the fundamental experience of holism in its rush for the reasonable (and we might add, with the benefit of generational insight, the lucrative, since the key application of psychology in our time lies in the interventions of advertising, marketing and sales in service to a ‘free’ and prevailing idea of Capital). The same is true in art(s) of all kind(s), even though from the imaginal place such debasements are meaningless. In relation to science Collins observes:

“the Artist apprehends the chemistry of existence while it lives
the scientist comprehends it when it is dead
this is life and death; poles both necessary to life”

However, what happens when ‘Man’ (Collins was Old School) as Artist loses the capacity to perceive the ‘chemistry of existence’ in living processes, and fixates instead on death? Presumably what we have now – a science predicated on profit margins and gross materialism, and no art to speak of – just an adolescence of the mind let loose on market forces and shock value; in short, a massive imbalance against life. At root

“All Art is ‘Let there be Light’
All Science is a searchlight upon a skeleton”

Because “Art is not talent, it is knowledge. Beauty is a form of cognition” and in that sense is not bound to sensation. Art therefore becomes at its heights, “the illusion by which we can understand Reality”. The key to this understanding is the “subjective imperfect world of symbols” – the ‘invisible need’ that is the fingerprint of that most un-postmodern quality – truth.

Not that Collins was down on sensation and feeling, quite the opposite – he was a painter of unqualified sensitivity and passion, and his writings express his immersion in the fecundity of earthly forms, femininity and the trans-gendered ambivalences of sacred sexuality (his figures and faces have a typical androgyny located in universe-widening eyes and long expressive noses, for example) he wrote

“What is called sensation or feeling is the imagination of the Real working within the limits of time” and that “Beauty is the life of Eternity in time”

Mystical pronouncements from an unschooled man, or penetration of the veils by a specially realised artist of loving-kindness, describing the Way we all, in our many ways, seek?

Going further into this thread, Collins observes (and this was in the early 1970s) that although we techno-moderns have a veneer of sophisticated complexity and depth we remain “absolute amateurs in the spiritual life”, and notes that for most of the ‘great’ civilizations of history that spiritual life has actually been the primary technology, giving rise to almost all that we think of or respond to as great in art, music, literature, architecture and so on. What has changed, he said, is what tends to happen in all civilizations as they approach their collapse – they lose their connection to eternity and begin a fixation on time and on endings. Hence for us

“the Artist, who was once employed to serve Man’s eternal destiny has nothing whatever to do in our civilization, other than to reflect our pathological preoccupation with time and lack of eternal purpose”.

This in turn gives rise to much ‘therapeutic expression’ masquerading as art, a product of an over-identification with time that Collins dates to the Renaissance in Europe – a movement from language to spectacle, laced up tightly in the ‘troubles of the local ego’. He spoke about the wound in imagination that such a condition creates, the ‘we can do what we want’ school of ‘thinking’, which is actually a kind of slavery, leaving the sufferer enmeshed in only their own ego-dramas and their ‘personal likes and dislikes’. It is precisely because this condition is trapped in the ‘small happiness’ of the small self, that we lose our most precious, and for Collins our most transcendently human capacity, that of

“Living for a goal higher than ourselves”

So it is that we flirt with the infinitely destructive forces of imagination, that have so created and can so annihilate, all the time stuck in words which leave us “correspondingly superficial” – just think of contemporary political rhetoric around climate change or The War on Terror ™ - we lack all ritual too, often scoffing at its forms, yet remaining cut off from the “kinetic participation in incomprehensible Reality” that it offers us. Perhaps the greatest wound though is to our aspirational nature – since

“identification with time gives us the illusion that there is such a thing as personal happiness”

whereas Tradition teaches that our Great Happiness is contingent upon fulfilling our cosmic purpose, as individuals, communities, species etc. So if art has stopped its enquiries into this cosmic field, and therapy is cut off from its artistic roots and healing life flow, all we have left is debased forms, the study of the minutiae of death, and a vastly proportioned delusion about our place and our path. We have become obsessed with looking – voyeurs of spectacle and reproduction (and Collins knew this without ever seeing ‘Big Brother’ or ‘I’m a Celebrity…’) and yet

“the prime need of our age is not looking, but contemplation. We live in a secondhand world of reproduction and our view of the world is becoming secondhand”

Since those words were written that second-handedness and the reification it hinges upon have only increased, and at a speed Collins could barely have comprehended. We are now, more than ever before, at the threshold of losing everything – civilization, the biosphere, life itself – all flowing from our minds, our self-creating imagery of dry dying, the ‘Arc of Dust’ as Collins called it:

“I saw the universe melt into a drop of venom and fall upon the ghost face of God
I saw acid tears fall upon things of eternal dimensions, and I wept at nothingness”

So where now? Is there any hope for the return of the anthropomorphic centre “wherein to focus life-experience” and create ‘sacramental form’? Is art’s illusion a spent vitality, now firing blanks? Have we still not heard Goethe (as Collins certainly had) whispering ‘An artist is attached to his age by his weakness, not by his strength’?

We need the ‘contemplation of the wrought image’ that the artist opens, or the therapist handles, or the politician is inspired by to ‘orientate us towards Reality’ – to honour our invisible need for truth in our bodies, as well as our minds, our hearts as well as our genitals, our instinct to give, as well as our conditioning to take. Only then can we hope to wrap ourselves in the contemplation of ecstasy and participate in life as bold mystery rather than seductive sense-prison or consensus death camp. The last word, the uber-question of Rubedo perhaps, is Cecil’s –

“can a happiness be won from the terrifying ugliness of life by a subtle spiritual war?”


kh
10.7.06

IMAGES: The Angel of the Flowing Light (1968), The Poet (1941) & The Sleeping Fool (1943) all by Cecil Collins.

Quotations from: Cecil Collins Meditations, Poems, Pages from a Sketchbook (1997, ed. Brian Keeble)

Psychophobia

Hospitallers keep calling me from the eleventh century
They want to know if I’ve finished with their Maltese cross –
‘Yes, lads’, I tell them, but they go on about beatitudes
And the idylls of knightly Jerusalem

Meanwhile corporate chevaliers trace profit margins
From gamma-ray bursts - type ‘relationship selling’
Into a clone-engine and reap the proposition of
Segmented markets, the fear of buttons, value migration

Nothing to show for my C-shock efforts, a fumerole in synch
With this banjaxed saddlebag, more texts from the Kaiser arrive
In gene-splice pastries, utopian cleanliness fished from
The callisthenic sink to empower the strategists of my yod

Who benefits from this wistful sabbing? Net loss uppers for
PC adrenaline doing a sly ghoster, going weasel for the spender
How polyphobic are you feeling this evening? Three waves of lime
For your corbelled Jacob, or would sclerotic shanks best beat your eyeful?

Press for success, unload your stress tools and carve me a skin solution
Master goal setting my goal setting Master, my go-getting waster
Is chiefly responsible for all win-win negotiations with misosophy,
And look! Darling Plato sent us a wicked set of recursive holons

Bless Escher for his stubby Mu, have you stopped beating your wife?
When Bertalanffy launched the SS System down the slipway of feedback
Did he expect the laminar flow of TV aether? Flow is volume per time
Where spin positions annihilate each other, leaving momentum alone

Happy, beginingless, foggy mind, warlike, unchartable whooping mind
Mind of the first red gasp for life, mind of basslines and spanking
Mind of insect, mind of newt, mind-storm avalanching texture
Label-mind sets free our sisters’ bright dream of autopsies and autopoiesis

Kh
6.7.06

Image: photo of Buddhist monk being wired to brain activity monitors, from the website of Yongey Mingyur Dorje Rinpoche http://www.mingyur.org/index.html

The Supplicant

At noon when the white darkness prevails
I penetrate her on quantum lawns of probable yearning

lightning strikes us again and again but fuck Zeus
our tantric Frankenstein portends a subtler dialectic

and pusillanimous sky-gods can kiss my momentary arse
heaven’s vault, the sublime effulgence- all balls

what rhapsodies remain, sing them for the turgid-
the incomplete, the camp, the gristle no monk can stomach

I defy the fiercest aghori not to shriek hysterically
as I leap, soundless and invisible, from birth to death

like Robin Hood in the void, robbing nothing to give to
nothing- let the macho ringmasters of non-attachment

crack their saffron whips, it will avail them nothing
no wisdom-tradition, oral or scriptural, recorded this

anima mundi flickers on oblivious, like a silent film
no psychology can ever be transpersonal enough to scale

the Everests of impotence I conjure this afternoon
as history converges at ambition’s vacuum:

hear me roaring porno commands- I’m the hairfather
for whom left brain bums right at some Moulin Rouge of the skull

I’m Gerard de Nerval perambulating the lobster
I’m a blue-lipped baboon fondling its cock at the zoo

I’m Yoko Ono when Yoko Ono is asleep
I’m Microsoft Word and a bag of marijuana

the missing link between Alfred Jarry and Jade Goody
it’s me I’m afraid so desist in your empire-building

put the prayer-beads aside, try to ignore them
then stamp on them furiously like a child denied magic

spend your life proselytising about the passage of time
form a weird uroboros and annoy God

become softer and softer until years melt through you
redrawing your borders according to unspeakable treaties

brutal iridescence that howls through my being
sexless she-virus I fecundate by dying

oh darling bend your puppet and cripple him firmly
into the now- so deep he knows only asphyxiation


Jon Hellier

Image: Untitled by Tom McKee (c.2002) available from Henry Boxer.

Timeline

The best dreams seem to occur during 1967 but the calendar
brays 2006! 2006! and jerks me unceremoniously awake:
then I remember 1970 sinking its fangs in my neck,
slaking its thirst at the burst artery of karmic predisposition.

Time moves like cement in this laboratory of fools.
I take an age over breakfast, lingering among the unborn.
What’s the rush? I stopped functioning in 1993
and nobody noticed; by 1998 my body was dating

other subpersonalities while I maintained an identity within
the limitless crystal caverns of 1976- and winters in 1992
whenever the Abba-glory grew too radiant. Since 1999 atma
has been totally brahma: I glitteringly overflow 1973

spilling selfhood in plumes and plasms transdimensional.
It’s all so 1995; the way time-tigers shimmer sideways,
how each moment resonates like a million-stringed sitar
in the hands of some Hendrix-Shankar-Shiva hybrid

with 2012 the underpinning drone behind diverse ragas
of suffering and ecstatic flight. Oh, those Mayans:
such terrible smartarses, I hate them for being right
but we must allow the ancient dead their parsimony

so move over Teilhard de Chardin, there’s room for me
on the love-bus! No? Then back to bed unencumbered by
accomplishment, as if no time had passed, or could pass
this sequence of moments mashed up in spastic synchrony.


Jon Hellier

Image: Natures Adores a Vacuum by Winston Smith (2001) available from Henry Boxer.

Red Arrow

During 2006 and 2007 the planet Pluto (a status incidentally rather spuriously under discussion) transits around 27 degrees Sagittarius, the position of our Galactic Centre and so if we were to fly off from earth to 27 degrees Sagittarius we would meet Pluto and if we continued for a very long time we would meet the super massive black hole at the centre of our Galaxy. What might this mean?


I have shown in my previous posts my enthusiasm for the Archetypal perspective – a view that I will endeavour to follow here. To begin with the archetype of Sagittarius, the Centaur, we find a creature part horse part man/archer in which the embodiment of the animal self and the human self (with its aspirational shot at the future) are combined. Here we find the correspondence to a state that Ken Wilber in his ongoing anatomy of consciousness aptly refers to as the ‘centauric stage’ in which the naïve persona has encountered shadow (that which it denies about itself) and in its initial dialogue with this shadow has begun to transcend initial limitations to forge a relative mind-body unity. Shadow, the absence of light through the intercession of a block, strikes a chord initially with the nature of Pluto, the Lord of the Underworld, the land where the light does not often fall.

To further meditate on the Archer/Centaur we find that from the union of man with nature celebrated in the form of the horse (the untamed spirit and nature co-operating with man as helper) leads to the archer pointing his bow to the stars, a bow-bough to the lights above. Here we see an allusion to natural laws that govern both animal and human life and also have a distantly perceived relevance in the events of the sky, the events of the solar system and galactic activity thus creating an interlocking of the micro and macrocosmic scales of life. In many so-called primitive cultures their own tribal and cultural life was based on their perceived relationship to the events of the sky, their own Cosmo-genesis (i.e. Mayan, Native American, Dogon and many more) in a sense embodying the different stages of life held in the cosmic Archer.

I draw from this an integrative view of all forms of life that we could name as having a basis within certain natural laws, a certain underlying structure of creation that may be intuited yet their investigation and explanation will take multiple and varied forms. It is my intuition that these natural laws include a moral element inherently, that life inherently has integrity. This stance may at times be beyond ‘good and evil’ in their simplistic duality and could itself be the subject of many and complex meditations however for brevity and clarity I offer the example that it appears to be a natural law that mother’s protect and nurture their young, this appears in seemingly all forms of life and is of course an inherent aspect of survival. However in more intelligent animal forms and human forms such survival instinct expands to include all sorts of more subtle expressions of what might at its clearest be called a genuine form of love. Such natural law may be contrasted with man-made law: it is a man-made law that children must be in school (without major exceptions) from age 5; this is an extension of a natural law into a societal law. Again this is at best a moral minefield but I would assert the felt sense that most people of a sufficient integrity can feel when something is right or wrong, a natural moral sense, which a media such a kinesiology taps into on an instinctual level.


From this point of view it is a natural law that man search for meaning (the Arrow sent skyward) it is a man-made law that says one book (Bible, Koran, Principia Mathematica) is sole arbiter of truth. The importance of man’s search for meaning can be found clearly in the work of Viktor Frankl. His moment of having his attachment to meaning came when a guard in the concentration camps found his thesis sewn into the inside of his jacket and destroyed it. For a while Frankl was inconsolable and his survival weighed in the balance. As he recovered he was able to clearly see that those around him would often give in and die when their sense of meaning was destroyed: we need to believe in something, we need hope.


As the Lord of the Underworld traverses Sagittarius we know that we may find worldwide issues and conflict around what is truth? As this alignment comes to the Galactic Centre (the meaning of which much must remain mysterious) we are reminded that such a struggle for truth is central to the experience of mankind within the Cosmos. It is the vision of truth that we have that we will manifest the world we inhabit from. It is from our inner sense of meaning and purpose that we will create the world. Whilst I will address further points of this line-up in our skies in a later post I would urge that whilst it is always true that our inner relationship to our-selves and to the Soul of the world predates the manifestation of external reality that we then perceive as what is happening to us…within the context of a two year transit to the Galactic Centre of one of the most powerful planets within an archetype that corresponds to the centrality of the search for meaning and the existence of natural laws…that we take seriously what we believe in for we create from that stance. In this sense I would suggest that mankind is far more powerful that as yet it has even begun to imagine. This power is not the deranged fantasies of those that are gunning for Apocalypse, far from it; this is the power of co-creating with life from a symbolic and psychic interplay with the other forces of creation. We can do this clearly only with regard to the extent that we have learned to stand in our integrity as a living part of this natural order. When we take our place, neither decadent usurpers of nature nor simple Rousseau-like peasants, when we realize that we our welcome here…a realization that may paradoxically stop us from stealing from our host…

In realizing that we create from our beliefs, and that are beliefs are based from a complex set of interactions of our thoughts, feelings and experiences we are really begin to say that everything we think and feel and do has an impact on this world. This is the ultimate insight of ecology. This is a realization that is somewhat shattering in its implications and yet contains multiple seeds of liberation. There is no-one else needed to begin to allow the impact of this liberation but yourself. Good luck.


Mark Jones

IMAGES: Dead Poet Borne by a Centaur by Gustave Moreau (1890), Plutó by Agostino Carracci (1592).

Making the green one Red

“The redmen are the last people on earth who speak on behalf of all living things. The bear, the deer, the sagebrush have no one else to speak for them… The white people have no love for this land. If we human beings persist in what we are doing, we will become like a mad cancer on our Mother Earth. If we don’t stop ourselves, something will stop us. We are destroying everything. The way things are fouled by nuclear waste, nothing can live on it. After we have made the Earth uninhabitable, will the human beings take this to other planets? If we take these ways of destruction to other planets, we will be the worst cancer in the universe. The universes will be programmed for destruction. We will wipe out the whole galaxy with our filth.”

Glen Wasson, Shoshone educator quoted in Dagmar Thorpe's Newe Sogobia: The Western Shoshone People and Land (Battle Mountain: Western Shoshone Sacred Lands Association, 1981).

It’s time to find the red in you. Stoke the inner flame of your mind and let the colour bleed into your flesh. It’s time for a new relationship with the Earth; it’s time for the old relationship with the Earth.

You don’t have to have seen Koyaniquatsi to know that in the West we are living a ‘life out of balance’. A storm is rising, as we begin to reap the whirlwind of a couple of centuries of mad industrialization and devotion to a capitalist ideology that has spread across the globe like a plague.

In the affluent places of the first world turbulent minds are collapsing under the strain, and the worried well turn to TV, chemicals pharmaceutical, chemicals sub-cultural, therapy rooms, suicide. The world looks on and sees weak mindedness. I see birds lifting from the trees before the earthquake, dogs whining before the thunder and the rain. My friends who mad doctor to the masses cannot miss this mystery.

The opposition that Freud saw between civilization and the expression of human desires, human desires that civilization sublimates - has only grown more tense as ‘civilization’ becomes increasingly an imperial project alienated from the Earth. The glaciers melting are a warning, the hurricanes are a warning, and the desertification of Europe is a warning. The alienation of people seeking some solace of true and deep communication in the rooms of strangers they pay is a warning. These are all warnings and the things of which they warn.

Thinkers after Freud ranging from Jacques Ellul, to Jerry Mander or John Zerzan and others have posited a vision that might be considered anti-civilization or primitivist. These ideas are some of the most challenging for our contemporary culture to even discuss let alone consider. They are the exact realization of the criticism thrown at many environmentalists that they want a “return to the stone age”, some of these figures do want a return to the stone age and they have reasoned arguments to support why that might be a good thing. There is much room for disagreeing with them, lots of area for debate and several conversations worth having.

Perhaps the strongest card they hold however is that humans lived sustainably on the planet for 2 million years before civilization. The civilized industrial world is evidently so riddled with the seeds of its own destruction that this curious culture of the West could be but a blip. As we continue to disrupt and destroy the last indigenous societies on Earth, those small groups still trying to live a life in harmony with nature we may be eradicating not just the past but the future.


I do not want to return to the Stone Age, but that we have much to learn from cultures and societies we have dismissed as ‘primitive’ is to me self-evident. We cannot continue to live in our ivory towers, in our white bread world exsanguinating the Earth like some rapacious albino vampires sucking dry the one mortal left.

James Piers Taylor

IMAGE: Shoshoni Indian gathered around tipis, anonymous photograph held at Library of Congress, LC-USZ62-115466 (c.1890), Western Shoshone lead protest at nuclear test site (2002) from Western Shoshone Defense Project.