Thursday, June 29, 2006

Do Not Attempt Resuscitation

Anima Mundi-Rex Mundi
I’m busy so I’ll keep this short –

You’re ugly today and in need of an obesity pill
You’ve been gorging on polls and political falls again?
Thought so. They really do you no favours,
Stick to your flu jab and diet of big brother murders,
Leave questions of failed intelligence to
Those of us who smile at gay bishops
Or sneer at the sparkling sewage in the veins of planet football.
War is the best music for a sleepless lifetime,
That and a gob full of gold.

Drink your re-branded coffee in Styrofoam cups,
Mutter about climate chaos as you start the car
To fetch your daughter from terrorism class.
Vote ‘yes’ to nuclear stand-off, ‘no’ to grace
Press the red button inside your pancreas to go interactive
But on no account think or feel for yourself.
Freedom is a word you must now apply to use,
And only applications from holders of identity cards
Will meet with discounted i-Pod fun. Leave your imaginations at the door.

The king of the world has no balls and does not look like Leonardo di Caprio
The soul of the world is not in the pay of the BBC
I grow tired of your sweaty lips
And hereby relinquish the franchise.


Kh 29.6.06

Image: Anima Mundi-Rex Mundi by Arthur Hunter Blair (1981)

Asymmetric Warfare V.

On the other end of this telephone
There is a machine of love in disgrace
That robots your words
In a tone that says nothing
That is always the same
No matter the mood in which it is approached
Indifferent of the matter laid down after it
Parcels of words left in a dead letter box
Of electronics and mechanism
A box of plastic and compound metal
Capable of caging pain and loneliness
Incapable of containing love.


James Piers Taylor, 29/6/2006 in transit

The Weaponisation of Everyday Life (Asymmetric Warfare IV.)

"To shoot a genocidal robot policeman in the defense of life is a sacred act."
Timothy Leary

Superintendent – what do you super intend?

What and where is my direction?
I see my badge
My uniform
my polished black shoes
- a book of rules in the head,
a book of notes in the pocket
around my belt a range of options for discipline.

How many more years?
Bodies rotting lonely in council houses,
Garbage piled evenly across the floor
Traffic incident –
Marking evidence points
1,2,3,4,5
A bucket of sawdust for the blood.

Sights without common discourse
Can only be discussed with colleagues
And one’s consciousness is inbred
Options reduced
‘til you find only cruelty in the hearts of man.

One day they will make you wear black,
Place a mask and visor on your face
Remove the numbers from your shoulders
- place you in a line.

Do you want firearms training?
Do you want firearms training?
Do you want firearms training?


James Piers Taylor, 29/6/2006 in transit

Tuesday, June 27, 2006

Heal Thyself

Hygieia
‘Ye will surely say unto me this proverb, Physician, heal thyself: whatsoever we have heard done in Capernaum, do also here in thy country.”

Luke 4:23

‘The Gods have become our diseases’

Carl Jung



The Oxford English dictionary interprets the above quote from Jesus to mean “before attempting to correct others, make sure that you aren’t guilty of the same faults yourself”. Further definitions of the term ‘physician’ note ‘a qualified medical practitioner’, and ‘a general practitioner, not a surgeon’ and ‘one exerting a remedial or salutary influence’. Etymology of ‘Physician’ suggests derivation from the Middle English fisicien and the Old French fisique, meaning ‘medicine’. Perhaps it pays for us to remember also that ‘physis’ is the Greek word for ‘growth in nature’, of both flora and fauna. In this sense it bears a relationship to the eastern concepts of ‘dharma’ and of ‘tao’ – a kind of ‘way’ of being, seeing and acting in the world.

In this piece I plan to explore a little around the Greek inheritance, following Hillman’s assertion that, mentally, we ‘moderns’ are all products of Greek thought filtered through a Judeao-Christian overlay (and, he might have added, an economic system of corporate capitalism and ‘free market’ ideology that perpetuates the hierarchy of Reason). It is interesting to note that away from the Western mind, in, for example Auyurveda, we find the god form Dhanvantari, physician to the Hindu pantheon and bringer of Amrita and in other forms we find the Medicine Buddhas, Kwan Yin, and very many female forms from Lakshmi to Mary. The Greek model, however, has come to be dominated in form by the long shadows of Apollo, his half-mortal son Asklepios (Aesculepius) and his ‘descendant’ Hippocrates. Their archetypal influence over the modern forms of medicine, the ‘health industry’ and ‘Big Pharma’ is difficult to ignore – even down to the branding imagery of the Hippocratic Oath (which invokes various other goddess forms and involves a promise to do no harm – a hot issue for doctors involved in debates ranging from that of abortion and assisted suicide to participation in state executions and torture) and the snake entwined staff (interestingly, it is often the Caduceus that is depicted, featuring the double snakes associated with Hermes, rather than the Asklepian staff, which is a simple rough stick with a single snake curled up it – some relate this to a printer’s error in Renaissance Europe, others to a more sinister conspiracy to direct will by force, linking magic to sickness and vulnerability/dependency. In fact we have two distinct staffs here - the Caduceus of Mercury (Roman) and the Karykeion of Hermes (Greek)).

Asklepios and Artemis
So, let us start with Asklepios, son of Apollo (Dr Reason himself) and Koronis (apparently a Boetian princess) and associated with Paion, physician to the gods. Asklepios who is praised by Homer and noted in several other Greek sources, and inspired his own healing cult, was gifted with phenomenal healing powers, it is said. Brought up by the wisdom teacher and Centaur, Chiron (also deeply associated with healing) in the ‘school for heroes’ that included Jason, Odysseus, Achilles and Herakles, Asklepios got off to a good start in life (though abandoned by his father, who was presumably too busy on godly business to be involved in his son’s upbringing). Sometime later, as an ancient intern or houseman, Asklepios was engaged by King Minos to treat his sickly son. However, unable to affect a cure, Asklepios was soon imprisoned with the dying boy (which says something about the relationship between the state (king) and the perceived function of medicine). Presently, a snake entered the locked up room underneath the door. Asklepios immediately killed it (I’m thinking Patriarchal conditioning here, to that abused symbol, the serpent – Adam and Eve anyone? Kundalini yoga?), whereupon another snake entered bearing a leaf. It carefully placed the leaf on the first snake, and that was immediately restored to life. Realising the potential of this leaf, Asklepios used it to cure the sickly Minos Jr, and was hailed as a hero of medicine (though he later paid for these life-restoring powers with his own life, having offended Zeus with his miracle-power in raising Hippolytus from the dead – the revenge of the Sky Father?)

What goes missing in Asklepios’s story though is the feminine, in the form of his wife Epione – another renowned healer – and his many children (Hygeia, Alecis, Aegle, Iaso, Janiscus, Machaon, Panacea and Podaleiros). Type ‘Epione’ into Google and the first result you’ll get is for a Beverley Hills cosmetic surgery business offering laser-tailored breasts and great value liposuction. Does this tell us something?


Why is it that in the Western canon (which is arguably the ‘global’ canon and style of (un)thinking) the healing archetypes of the feminine have been obscured by the image of the heroic male physician? Look at just three of Asklepios’s daughters – Iaso (‘to heal or recover’), Hygiea (from whom we get ‘hygiene’) and Panacea (‘cure-all’) – where they’re noted at all they’re presented as latter-day Mediterranean nurses attending to details within dad’s healing genius, but is this fair depiction? Could it be that their forms pre-date the hero-cult and key back into the matrilinear/matrifocal age of goddess worship and consciousness pre-dating the so-called Bronze Age? Could it be that, as Jung suggested, these ‘gods’ have become our diseases – the excluded feminine at the heart of our individual and collective sickness? Look closer at Hygiea – see that snake around her wrist – isn’t that the same snake that Asklepios has around his staff? And the medicine cup she bears, full of potent herbal distillations gifted by nature, is that not also a symbol cultivated and maintained as a lineage of healing wisdom by women? Look how these ‘daughters’ are subsumed into the later Hippocratic Oath (Hippocrates was said to be a descendant of Podaleiros, Asklepios’s son, as well as of Herakles – making him the perfect Male Medical Hero) – invoked but controlled, used for their gifts but hidden, like a state secret.
Medicine, which was once the most natural of all arts, has today been usurped by the predominant forms of techne, into a billion-dollar global industry aimed at creating wealth and prestige for the few and the illusion of health for the many. The body may live longer (debatable) but under what indignities and slights, and at what cost to life itself? As modernity makes war on death, whilst making mass human (and animal) sacrifices at the altar of war and disease, the luxury of irony hurts the very body of the earth herself and she slowly sickens and pines.

Will the heroes be ready for their biggest case yet, or will they continue to misdiagnose the situation and give a prognosis based on endless growth and ‘success’? Will the institutionalised hubris of med school and the Apollonic bias of millennia continue to blind us with science (and entertainment – since alongside cop dramas, medical intrigue is the number one draw for consensus reality)? And what does this mean for those of us working in the healing field, with our hearts as well as our heads, our words as well as our hands, tool-less in our being – are we in the travelling medicine show hawking yet more snake oil and cosmetics? Or are we potentially a bridge between the Chirotic and the re-emergent feminine? Is our business hamstrung and implicated, part of the reductionist machinery of materialism, or part of a movement towards authenticity, healing rather than curing, choreographing a few more steps in the doctoring of soul?

I’ll leave the final word to one of literature’s best known doctors, here observing his patient – the ruined post-Thatcherite ball-breaker and inverse patriarch, Lady Macbeth:

Foul whisperings are abroad: unnatural deeds
Do breed unnatural troubles: infected minds

To their deaf pillows will discharge their secrets:
More needs she the divine than the physician.

God, God forgive us all!

Macbeth, Act 5 Scene 1

KH

IMAGES: Hygieia by Gustav Klimt (1907), Asklepios Medal (1984) derived from a coin from Pergamon (c.200 BC)

Monday, June 26, 2006

A New Day Rising

To the extent that you close and pull back from your experience, you feel separate. To the extent that you close and protect your heart, you feel alone. To the extent that you close to your deepest desire and opt for security, you feel disempowered.

From ‘Breathe Everything’ in Blue Truth by David Deida (2005: Sounds True)

New Day. New Moon. Rain washing the city streets momentarily clean…What are we doing with this day? Are we rushing through the wet streets in anguish or do we really believe in where we are going? Do we return home tonight to dissolve into the arms of our loved ones or is the doorway to them already closed before we get there? If we do not have loved ones can we be kind to ourselves? If we have lost someone recently can we open to this fully and allow the vast loss that echoes through the chambers of the heart of this world to resound in us also? In short, are we alive or dead?

Today in the rain there appears to me to be two deaths: one massive, appropriate and noble and the other a worm-tongued spin doctor spreading a lie…For the true death will come for us at our time. Whether in old age or youth, in our sleep or running around the block, we will be struck by the change…the sign of the white sail…to take us away. Yet many will have already been cheated. As I have often reflected with clients after a ‘close encounter’, a session that deepens the relationship to ourselves, it is amazing how far we will go to keep the reality of our existential reckoning, our nakedness before life and death, at bay. The fine and oh so expensive houses, the big cars, the HD widescreens to watch the shifting world and our feverish fantasies about that world, they offer a veil, the modern distraction. It is not wrong to have a car or TV, certainly I have them - it is what we do with them. Sometimes the big car and the high wall round the big house are just that, walls. Yes we need sanctuary but are we finding it? Is that what we see when we turn the lights on?

Deida writes that “Your effort to avoid pain is as natural as pain itself”. Yet this avoidance can cheat us from the true conflict of life and death and instead compensate with the death-in-life of false compromise and security; the Albatross of fear around our necks. Like the Ancient Mariner we cannot drink of life for our guilt and our fear. As I myself navigate the tides of ‘I should have..’ and ‘I wish I hadn’t done that..’, as I slow the ship down through the rocks of my self-angst, my unbearableness, the all-too-muchness of it all, I say could we start again?


Sunset after a storm
Could this be a new day rising, a white sail on the horizon? Can we be reborn in the moment of ourselves, unfolding into our lives that are lived within the life of the World? There is a stream; the invitation is for us to enter. What would entering be like? Well we might ask questions…Could we finally just stop playing the game, the stupid blame, and love him or her? Or if not could we just say so ‘I don’t feel it right now..’ without our own or another’s world crashing down all around and if it does crash just being with that…in the new day.

Could we forgive our parents? God knows they won’t live forever and most of them were not the Nazi war criminals that our childish hurt made them. And those that were well we could forgive them to? Or even if not could we not act? Act as ourselves free of that link? Can we grow and be born into this world? Can we put down the crutches, the blame and despair, the substances and obsession with money? I ask you, all my friends, and those I will never meet, could we put it all down and meet each other in a new day?

Mark Jones


IMAGES: Sudden Shower at Ohashi Bridge at Atake by Ando Hiroshige (1857), Sunset after a Storm on the Coast of Sicily by Andreas Achenbach (1853)

Asymmetric Warfare III.

Cold reading.
Your body doesn't talk to me
a carapace to replace
an edgeless zone between us.

A limit appears at the close
of your sentences
in the distances
mappable between
each extremity of yours
each extremity of mine
and the entrances are closed to me.

A self continues
across the border
but with each minute
a shared language
diverges into ever more distinct dialect
ever more untranslatable.


James Piers Taylor, 23/6/2006 Essex

Friday, June 23, 2006

Paint it Red

Fool on the Hill
“From this point of view…it is as if everyone who was born after the 1960’s actually in some way lived through the 1960’s. They bear within themselves the effects of that era; they know its conflicts and struggles, its truths and revelations. In some sense this knowledge lives subconsciously within them…So too do we all, with respect to the preceding centuries of alignment and human experience.”

Richard Tarnas from ‘A Larger View of the Sixties’ in Cosmos and Psyche (2006: Viking Penguin.)


The point of view that Tarnas is referring to could be loosely summarized as the Archetypal perspective (an imaginal leap beyond the clinical perspective) in which the Imagination is given predominance as an inevitable precursor of true vision, understanding or gnosis. The Archetypal perspective dominates the content of this site: the four authors that have so far contributed were all born between 1970 and 1972. All were born at the death of the 1960’s and all, in their own way, have attempted to directly engage this legacy whether through Psychedelic music, Situationism, Environmentalism, Eastern Mysticism or LSD.

Tarnas in his voluminous study of culture follows larger planetary alignments of a collective nature in order to show an archetypal resonance between such alignments and history (the collective memory of humanity). He notes the results of such influences in primarily two forms: synchronistic activity whereby within one time period a number of different figures begin to access information and formulate certain thematically linked ideas and diachronic activity whereby one period in history revisits the issues (resolved and unresolved) of a prior period of history in which similar collective signatures and themes were found. Tarnas links the Pluto-Uranus conjunction of 1960-72 with a number of pivotal revolutionary periods in within the last four hundred years in which he explores prior meetings between these planetary influences. What he is unable to do with the conjunction of 1960-72 is to play it forward into further aspects of the cycle for this cycle has not played out yet…

The Agony in the Garden

How this revolutionary, inspirational, Dionysian and rebellious energy plays out is in the hands, hearts, minds and genitals of those alive now. Those for whom the Rubedo could become an embodied reality…For we are brothers and sisters in blood and could we but take the knife to our own hands and offer them in fellowship…in such a world there would be a much more serious pause before violence toward one of our own would be considered…As any of the true hippies knew…As I knew as a child of the Uranus-Pluto conjunction that over lit the sixties…as I had writ in large Day-Glo handwriting from above as Uranus moved to transit its natal position in my early twenties and the six tabs kicked in…We are all part of the one life, in soul, in blood, all a part of the origins…all bathed in a river of white love, purified and ready to redden into life again.

The true hippies did not become punks then yuppies, whatever. Whilst there is much to learn from in the fiery d.i.y. philosophy of punk and who would complain if they had a little more cash…? The true hippie simply went underground and dug deeper, living a life counter to the mainstream and its tendency to objectify the truth of another being, as if they are not like us, never mind that in the realization of the one truth they are same, they are us…

The true hippie will sing along with Blake as he takes the wedding pics for Heaven and Hell;


“Energy is the only life and is from the Body

and Reason is the bound or outward circumference of energy

Energy is eternal delight”

From ‘The Voice of the Devil’ in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1994: Dover publications)


I respect the true hippie – I sing for the true hippies…for Blake and Whitman…for Ram Dass and Jeffrey Wolf Green…for Martin Luther King and Carl Jung…for my closest friends…

Mark Jones


IMAGES: Fool on the Hill by Wilfred Satty (1967), The Agony in the Garden by William Blake (c.1799)

Green Lanes (Asymmetric Warfare II.)

Eldest son awarded
the second best bedroom
with a view
he will alternately
ignore and insult.

A view that will remain a locus
for memory, self-conception
and his entire structure of meaning.

thought form with vector edges
between events and experience
layer upon layer
merged down, exported
as a bitmapped slice of consciousness.

A distant hill become all future
all past.
A window frame
every filter of the now.


James Piers Taylor, 22/06/2006 Essex

Thursday, June 22, 2006

A Clue To Desire

A Declaration

Soul makes meaning possible
Turns events into experiences
Then deepens that experience
Through communication in love
Because awareness of Soul is
Always about a relationship with death.


As James Hillman says somewhere ‘the true revolution begins in the individual who can be true to his (her) depression’. Arguments about the degree of romanticising of psychopathology aside, is this not self-evident? (And doesn’t the Romantic inform our western mind’s eye anyway, both in the dualism of unresolved tensions between nature/culture, transcendence/immanence and a million other more-or-less post-neo-Platonist rungs on Jacob’s Ladder? It remains a valid form of phenomenological discourse, set against the cold reductive flow of Reason and its techno-fixated apostles in man-science and especially, that wannabe lead discipline, economics – to say nothing of what is now allowed to pass as mainstream psychology and psychotherapy).

Landscape with the fall of Icarus
I for one am hungering for a Therapeutics of Rubedo, one that speaks and is silent in the Soul’s own tongue – where the verbs kneel on the earth and feel the rain soak through their rags, where nouns are humble and holy holders of space, and adjectives present ceremonious music to accompany the beingness of every moment – and all this simultaneously. A truly therapeutic rubedo, where the therapae evoke dreams, not to exploit their raw-meaning as fuel for a process of cleverness (and drying up), but to magnify the moment and the place of dream as symbol, as image, as vision, as poetry, as multiplicity unfixed against the face of a stern sky-father with a Trident in each (too)-butch fist. Stop being right, goddamn it, and just be.

In this paradoxical and dynamic process-place, if we are still enough, we are moved ‘to recognise the difference in ourselves as the condition of our being with others’, as Kelly Oliver put it. Think-feel about that – ‘the difference in ourselves’, all that is adrift and underprivileged, excluded and shamed, banished and disowned, all that is pathological – that is the very retinue of subpersonalities, fractal distillations and simple complexes that endlessly produce the conditions (and perhaps the causes) of our ‘being with others’. Human beings are a priori ‘being with others’. The ego/self’s relationship to the Soul is one of being with others (plural, not Other, the reified categorised pseudo-rational bringer of the Object – and usually the ‘phailed’ phallic object at that). So a therapy that is red (in tooth and claw, as well as in language and connection) is a therapy striving and surrendering to the emergence of two subjects, (not the role-dominated prison-space of the Cartesian cogito subject/object) from whom many more subjects may gestate.

Sand Mandala
As the World, the very Earth we are made from and her biosphere, image-sphere and poeisis-sphere are wilfully degraded in a million inner and outer ways, and as our 200 year feeding frenzy of oil-fuelled patriarchal Self Self Self leaps Icarus-like off the last ledge of hope into cartoon moments of running in space, we six billion odd human beings are truly faced with ‘others’ the like of which we never stopped to imagine. Other futures than the sci-fi nightmare of humans (men) ‘seeding’ new planets; other companions than our now too-traumatised to move ego/selves; other priorities than those of ‘success’, ‘power’, ‘wealth’, ‘fame’ and a leonine fantasy of ‘kingship’. We are mindless, but also bodiless – plastic will not feed us, surgery will not cure us, war will not make us safe. No insurance policies extend to this place, and the bearer will not receive on demand the sum of X. Perhaps the radical act is to participate in acts of mutual self-esteem, all the while aware of the empty, slippery nature of the selves in that dance? Perhaps my plea for motion towards a therapy of rubedo is premature – aren’t we after all still locked into the thanatos-drive so characteristic of the Nigredo? Am I flogging you a dead horse or yet another false whitening false dawn of lashed together false hope? No. I don’t believe that is so. Rubedo depends upon Albedo, as Albedo arises from Nigredo, the process is not completed, just as your breathing is not yet done. Ask instead, what is the rubedo of this moment? What is the narrative of rubedo in this heartbeat – what is it asking? There will always be other narratives, comedic, tragic, pornographic, fatalistic, despised, lovely – let them be and become in ‘difference with’.

Entropy is only possible when a system is closed to further inputs. Your ideas, my blood, these words, that birdsong, his smile, her power, their silly giggling, and all our impossible, beautiful and preposterous deaths are, when it comes down to it, signs of an open system – a system so radically open, in fact, that we constantly impose closure upon it in order to save (literally) our ego/selves. Break that and we have rubedo, and we will indeed have a clue to desire.

KH, 22/06/2006

IMAGES: Landscape with the Fall of Icarus by Peter Breughel the Elder (c.1588), Making a Sand Mandala lifted from UWCSEA.

Asymmetric Warfare I.

Asymmetric warfare. . .
but is the metaphor of conflict
not man-made?

Can we find a female description
that will both
explicate and answer
a question
which is hidden?

Rather
- is this suspended query
and contingency
fully visible in the light
of forces outside perception?

And what then is this word - visibility?

Is it merely the cloth of language
- that has obscured the thing itself?

Perhaps you have better words for it?

Or can read it in woman's blood and milk and childlove
without figuration into letters or sounds?


James Piers Taylor, 21/06/2006 Essex

Tuesday, June 20, 2006

Mirrors in Al-Khem

Baby Moses Trampling on Pharoah's Crown
You reached for the secret too soon,
You cried for the moon.

Pink Floyd - Shine On You Crazy Diamond


Let us remember that the Red is the fulfilment of the White, and the White is the including seed of the Red. Red wine and White wafer swallowed at the Mass, body and blood, blood and semen, White drop Red drop whirling in bliss wheels, realising the edge of the Hexagram.

Pharaoh wears the hedjet, Pharaoh wears the deshret, Pharaoh wears the pschent – White crown, Red crown, Upper and Lower, doubled in a Rebis moment, snakes in helical coils to the Uraeus at the brow. Bringer of the Atef, crown of crowns, and the blue cousin for war.

From the crow, the raven and the lowly toad, to the swan’s beat, the white eagle soaring over fields of skeletal magic, brought through green lion, the peacock’s tail, the flashing iridescence, to the pelican shore, bloodied to feed its young by beautiful mediaeval mistake.

Is it the phoenix who rises from these embers? Is this rebirth in the Red?
Is that sound the feather-blades of Garuda, the scything thirty-coloured Simurgh?
Bennu, Pheng, Thunderbird, the protecting zeal of Ziz?

Simurgh
Is it the Red King appearing in the flask, ennobling our tinctures at swordpoint?
Did you see that red stag at the edge of the wood, siring your unfenced unicorn?
Red answers to White questions, White headaches for Red aspirin in autumn.

Sol is abundant light, Luna the curled, supine, shadow-bringer and we are
Billions of tiny spiders performing brain surgery on the godhead, kissing the networks
Of neuroplasticity, mending the stroke-patient inside our own old soul

Invisible and endless; by the flashing flaring sun the shining rainbow grows
But those who know Red to be of White see so much further but only at night
Chasing golden troves to the fingertips of moonlight rainbows, purring

At the gates of madness. The skin of complexity covers up Chaos
Whose only tongue is a fire-dance, whose language seduces caution
And rides a universe through the broken vessel of the now.

Kh 20.6.06

IMAGES: Baby Moses trampling on Pharoah's Crown by Nicolas Poussin (1645) ,
Combat between Isfandiyar and Simurgh, from Firdawsi's Book of Kings, (c.1330).

Chapel Perilous

The angels have erected
An edifice of freedom
From red brick and yellow brick
And wood painted red.

And I can see it from this window
Across an expanse of air
Plastered with sunlight from directly above
But closed today in spite of the Lord.

Fruit and vegetables are served in this room
On plain white plates made in England
And there’s tea, coffee or hot chocolate
In cups and saucers the same.

Sustenance and comfort
goes some way toward
filling the silence
of solitary pilgrimage.

But exchanges completed
the smiles of the servants
have moved on to new guests
in a mirror I see their indecision.

The clock on my wrist
Says twenty-five past twelve
And the afternoon opens
As I walk outside.


James Piers Taylor
18/6/06, London

Friday, June 16, 2006

O Outrider!

O Outrider!

The Master of Rime, time after time, came down the arranged ladders of vision or ascended the smoke and flame towers of the opposite of vision, into or out of the language of daily life, husband to one word, wife to the other, breath that leaps forward upon the edge of dying.” Robert Duncan, from the Structure of Rime IV.

I have spoken of the confrontation with death implicit in the creative act: how the vitality of creation (rubedo) is born from the possibility of death (nigredo). From the sheer visceral relief of the man whose head missed the bullet to the contemplative arising of who we really might be in the moment of concentration on how we might not…

My feeling for poetry is called forth by the song of the lyric voice. A voice that the beautiful bloodied ear of Lorca knew was summoned from the land, from the folk-soul of a people and their place. The lyric voice begins in an attempt to celebrate such people in their places; to raise such scenes of life lived toward the plateau of eternity. An attempt always succeeding, always failing, an attempt born from love...

Rua Da Morte
This is the love that tastes death; a taste rich in pomegranate juice and seeds. This is the love for which life is only a trigger, a starting point for its true activity. As a soul as sensitive as Novalis showed, love only begins with the beloved…

This love could be pictured as the seeing of a permanent iris for which a lifetime is but an active looking, eyes open wide, death just a blink, a change in focus…

This love could be pictured as a foal wandering in the woods of the word, hovering between the trees of syntax, grazing at the leaf-vowels in the clearing, a whispering presence, adored by the red gold sun…

Such a foal would roll into poems as into an opening in the field…narrow dry poems quickly passed over for the rich feeding grounds of poems lit by an unblinking love…

Thus the grass must give up new keys to rescue the living.”
Robert Duncan, Structure of Rime VI.

Mark Jones

All quotes from The Opening of the Field by Robert Duncan (1960 Grove Press, 1973 New Directions.)

IMAGE: Rua da Morte by Frederico Garcia Llorca (1929).

Thursday, June 15, 2006

Rapturous

“People say that what we’re all seeking is a meaning for life. I don’t think that’s what we’re really seeking. I think what we’re seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane will have resonance within our own innermost being and reality, so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive.”- Joseph Campbell


“Assuming that rapture is nature’s play with man, the Dionysian artist’s creative activity is the play with rapture.”
- Friedrich Nietzsche

Bacchanal before a Herm
According to Wikipedia ‘rapture’ is from the Latin verb rapere which means "to carry off, abduct, seize or take forcefully" (compare rape) and, following a vulgate Latin Biblical translation incident, circa 405C.E, it has come to (mis)inform the niche evangelical Christian eschatological belief around the ‘tribulation’ or ‘wrath’ preceding Christ’s (imminent) Second Coming.

According to the Cambridge English dictionary, its meaning resides in the idea of extreme pleasure and happiness or excitement. I’d like to think that Christ would approve of ‘extreme pleasure’, although I’m not convinced that is the way some of his professed contemporary believers see things. In fact, this brief piece is a journey into its own rapture, in the name of that hijacked verb; an abduction of a stolen meaning then forcefully pleasured back to the side of life. It boils down to Nietzsche and Campbell, the Christ and You.

So long as we locate ‘extreme pleasure, happiness or excitement’ outside ourselves, we participate in our own rape, and we simultaneously slake our rapacious lust upon the externalised love object (the body of Christ-as-sacrificial-victim). However, it gets worse, because in doing these things we buy into the most toxic form of dualism, where consciousness is crucified and fed to the carrion crows of consumerist-materialism. We become worshippers of death in a cracked crucible of charred bigotries, and we live in the perpetual shadows of our un-enacted middle. That is to say, we risk our lives breath by breath, terrified of the darkness we must locate outside (usually, in these wildly Patriarchal times, in one or other forms of the despised feminine) and yet secretly married to the notion that it is our very own darkness that rules, the ‘secret rapture’ that takes no-one to heaven, but manifests a great line in portable hi-tech (and old school) Hell.

We crave ‘the rapture of being alive’ as Campbell says, yet we fear the ‘play with rapture’ that Nietzsche demands of us. We are too much the sons of Pheobus Apollo to go lightly with that pyrotechnic wizard of chaos, Dionysos. And Dionysos himself, Christlike in some ways, is a product of godhead ‘self-born’, the patriarchal fantasy of the male-mother, the death sentence of the actual woman-as-mother, as Semele is fried by Zeus and, from her womb the foetal proto-Dionysos is sewn into the father’s thigh to complete his gestation. And all this after Zeus had promised to fulfil Semele’s every wish! And so we have Dionysos, always keyed into the moment of creation, ‘born from the thigh of Jupiter’, coming (officially) motherless into the world.

So what of these pointers, this rape-rapture, brutal-sentimental, light-dark, reasonable-mad game? Are we not here upon the edge of madness, just as Dionysos’s childhood is cursed with the child-killing mania (induced by the ever-jealous Hera) of his guardians, are we not also at risk of killing our own children, literally (nuff said), metaphorically and creatively? And, at least insofar as we are all co-morbid partners in the inexpressible crime of Gaia-cide, is there not something of the rage of mothers in all this?

Consciousness and its structure, it would appear, are far more dynamic, complex and damned well chaotic to be contained in the ultimate Apollonian fixations of Reason and Harmony. The unconscious, rather like hell, is not a place but a process, a flux, and chaos is its preferred energetic structure. As Dionysos was torn asunder, so are we, in every moment of every day. This is our rape and our rapture, our ascension and our damnation, our immanence and our crisis of action. Will our hearts survive (to be weighed…)? Will we be reborn, remade? In the star-fires of the green lion, where the Rebus-headed bar-maid-man serves perfect pints of a black and pensive brew, the threshold throbs with space and time, the thrilling, blissful eccentricities of our orbits become finally still, the poise of the rapturous birth-death circle is blazing in the medulla of god-within, of the nervous system that has the nerve.

Brothers and Sisters, Mothers and Fathers, The Red One is calling. As Longfellow said:

The rapture of pursuing is the prize the vanquished gain.



KH 15th June 06


IMAGE: Bacchanal before a Herm by Nicolas Poussin (c. 1634).

Asymmetric Suicide

“Don't just EAT a hamburger... eat the HELL out of it.”
J. R. "Bob" Dobbs


President Death never lied
Wasted children never cried
Dreams never break inside
Because only chaos never died
Because we only climb the slide
To plastercast our patricide
And fake I.D.’s to help decide
The kind of world we would joyride
And who is the victim being Shanghied?

Good mornings start with pesticide
Against the lank unfolding tide
Underneath and beautified
The moisture always will abide
Green and warm from being denied
The lion’s spit upon the bride
Is proof of love’s own swift chloride
In your heart, coming to collide
Sealing your kiss with Mr Hyde

The two of you, impossibly allied
Kneeling to pray at the wedding bedside
The dark by the light led aside
Whispering syllables the moon untied
Reddened eyes to the question replied
That warfare is human; then deride
The empty hero buying Rawhide
With queer dollars by the dusty roadside -
Your pen to his nose makes him go cross-eyed

Come here at last, darling, to the warm fireside
The Love and Death of poetry’s stride
And curl your black toes in the only downside
Watching the election’s resulting landslide
A mandate for demons to gibber and chide
As they move their possessions further stateside
So the word is made special, we elide
The magic that once could have vied
Against the end of a world still untried


KH 15th June 2006

Wednesday, June 14, 2006

There Are No Issues

There Are No Issues

“There are no issues. There is no such thing as sexism, fascism, speciesism…there exists only the totality, which subsumes all those illusory ‘issues’ into the complete falsity of its discourse, thus rendering all opinions…into mere thought-commodities to be bought and sold. And this totality is itself an illusion, an evil nightmare from which we are trying (through art, or humour, or by other means) to awaken”
Immediatism by Hakim Bey (AK Press, 1994)

Situationist Cartoon
As we redden into our lives we become aware of the possibility of being alive outside of the totality of the spectacle, the term hijacked by Guy Debord to explain the homogenizing power of our painful self-consciousness and media narcissism. We begin to feel, like the sea wind on our face as we first turn the corner of the coastal road toward the immensity of the resting blue, the beginning of an inner movement as our individuality feels its own potential to be, within the force of the Soul of the World. In feeling this Soul current, within and without us, we enter into the stream with a passion, an increasingly bold surrender to the flow of life itself.

This itself is a movement towards truth that is without ego negation (another false whitening fantasy) and therefore that begins to bridge the subject-object split that has dominated western thought. In this way western experience can begin to approach the causal depth of eastern thought without the apparent stagnation that form of thinking can affect at times on a material level. To compare western and eastern thought could lead to another cul-de-sac of dualism; suffice it to say that in the reddening the evolving human is free to bring the passion of their individuality toward the mystery of truth. A truth that so palpably overwhelms and replenishes said individuality even as it threatens (perpetually) to annihilate it.

Indeed at this point of departure, a telos or ‘death-posture’, as we stare into the sand, the dust from which we came and will return, we encounter the first real possibility of existing at all. As our potential for being alive seems to flicker and fade we can paradoxically enjoy for a moment, a supernal moment, who we really are.

Recovery from Death Posture
Landmark

A fixed moment; no touch,
No gesture that would still any memory

No words could stabilize this kindling air
No wings beat out of silence:

And you escape
As the candle flame escapes the wind
As God escapes when they bow their heads to pray.


I was 19 years old when I wrote the above poem. It was to mark the beginning of my writing, and therefore the endeavour to explore and shape my identity in a conscious fashion. Paradoxically it also expresses my deep, often unconscious, understanding that such an act of creative ideation was born from mystery. It is within the powerful tides of this mystery that all issues are shown to be no more than the play of light upon the waters. A play of great intensity when you absorb yourself within it, a play of utter transparency if you step back just a small step…and if were to sink one’s consciousness deep deep into the wisdom of the waters…what then?

Mark Jones

IMAGES: Anonymous Situationist Cartoon lifted from Uncarved.org , Aàos recovers from the Death Posture by Austin Osman Spare (1923).

Tuesday, June 13, 2006

No Treasures of the Roman Leo

No Treasures of the Roman Leo

“Rectify until you find the true, clear Green Lion, which you will recognise by its great weight. You will see that it is heavy and large. This is the Tincture, transparent gold. You will see marvellous signs of this Green Lion, such as could be bought by no treasures of the Roman Leo. Happy he who has learnt how to find it and use it for a tincture!” - Paracelsus


Green Lion devouring the Sun
Ancient sunlight swallowed by the green lion
And the spiralling connected descendants of the same
A gold secreted, occulted in chthonic spaces
Airborne carbon sequestered, compounded

By actions of man, now released
Brought out of the earth and exploded
Broken seals release it under pressure
Burnt, refined, plasticised

Coin of the world replacing gold
Currency of nations
Curse of the geopolitic
Could it be magick?

Desired across the lands of men
Dependency fixed on its supply
Demand untrammelled by sense
Deception performed to achieve its possession

Everyman painted in its colours
Ease dictated by its overuse
Exploitation of whatever it takes
Empty tanks ache for sustenance

Forgotten ways are to be remembered
For by such process may some survive
From these actions shall proceed the future
Fucked or not, these signs will tell

Given to us by God
Gold higher than Gold
Gilded with Glory
Gobbled by Greed

His name no longer invoked
Hiatus hernia of the mantle
Hiccups in the earth
Hurtling heavenwards

I know what’s going on
In the mouths of these liars
Infecting all ears with nonsense
Incinerating all bequests

Joules form their crowns
Jealousy in their hearts
Jettatura burning in their foreheads
Jiving to a fade-out jazz

Kill them all
Kings and peasants
Kainotophobia
Kalishinokovs in Kabul raised to the sky

Love – where are you now?
Lost in the marketplace
Lacerated by the blows of hate
Laid low and discarded

Mother – where are you now?
Mysteries who can solve?
Made of what stuff?
Mirrored in what liquid?

NO
Neither will I agree
Nor compromise to this
NEVER

Or will I anyway?
Obvious truths now seem false
Observation no longer enough
Opportunity knocks…

Please help me
Pacify my senses
Pander to my desires
Perform for me

Quite unlikely -
Quarter is rarely given
Queerness never rewarded
Quieten down

Reveal your true self
Roll away the stone
Rescind your former ways
Renege on previous deals

Seek a higher truth
Sell your cleverness
Sever the ties that bind
Stray from the path

To another place
There are other destinations
Take me there
Too

Unleash the power within you
Use it as a force for good
Utilise the hidden forces
Uplift my spirits

Vent your anger
Vocalise your pain
Vary the terms and conditions
Validate my belief in you

Why hesitate now?
When the time to act is now
Worry not about consequences
Wield your weapon

Xerox everything good in you
X-ray the lies of authority
Xenogenous thoughts must be dispelled
Xerophthalmia after your tears

Yearning for something more
Yet to be satisfied with something less
Yellow stripe a mile wide – is it gold
Yawning in the face of cowardice?

Zoetrope vision turns the past into incidents
Zany to exterior eyes
Zones of darkness interrupt the light
Zero sum game played out to the finish.

James Piers Taylor


IMAGE: Engraving from J.D. Mylius Philosophia reformata, Frankfurt, 1622. (Coloured emblem copyright Adam McLean 1997-2004). This image is taken from the alchemy web site.

Rehoboth

The Fall of Nineveh
‘Our need to be comfortable may be stronger than our will to survive’

Medard Boss - analysand of Freud,
Student of Jung, tutee of Heidegger,
Creator of Daseinanalysis,
Spoke of lumination, of how
Pigs belong to the Engineer
When the world is ‘bodied forth’.

But the unillumined world is a
‘Dim, vast vale of tears’ said Shelley
(And not only because he didn’t have a telly)
Speaking of a world without Beauty,
Weaving with breath and rainbows
Crying ‘where art thou gone?’

Even Newport’s Supertramp
Knew Life’s cheat, when
‘Beauty is not heeded or seems stale’,
Preferring a mercy killing
To a cold concrete sty
In the white acre behind his poet’s eye.

I would take you to the well of Rehoboth
To drink fossil-water at the aquifer,
To witness the Euphrates ebbing red
Under Isaac’s millennial frown -
Together we’d become incunable
Tying our gut-strings to Beauty’s datum point,
Listening…

Abramelin
Like a wind out of the desert on a flag of red sand

Nineveh’s wish
Morning dew gathered on palm fronds

And Yeats’s Beast
Tergiversating in rough bellows, still Bethlehem bound
A colder coming than a father’s alienation into
The Dad Gap, the prayer-question –

‘How but in custom and ceremony
Are innocence and beauty born?’

But conjour this rogation
Under the long ‘Eighties
In the migraine of ‘stagflation’
A beehive of stars whistling red entropy up to today

Thatcher – sculpted venom from the liver of Medusa

Reagan – culled sincerity and spent it on make up

Bush – the brittle, darkling procurator of cant

Dancing to the swollen music of Chernobyl, Bhopal, HIV
Ushering up the plot twist of an end to History
Triumphal arches made of dust franchised to the ‘Free’.

Somewhere a white bull lowers its horns and lows at the crescent moon -
Could be Arizona, or Uttar Pradesh, Catal Huyuk, Patagonia,
On every steppe, on every plain,
In every forgotten meadow
Summoned by the genius-trumpet of Her thigh bone
To bring the cause to fruition, to atone
Dressed only in sequins of semen and blood
Free as the day before the Flood
Offering Herself in body, speech and mind
By a cemetery fence, effortless and kind
Undimmed, valorised, gloriously here
Smiles with her fangs, transforming all fear
Ma and Mithra, bowing
The Dakini wind, blowing
No victim, no loss of
Tightrope chaos
The flash of life
Crosses the mind
Of strife -
A tenable
Beauty
Is born.



KH – 13th June 06

IMAGE: The Fall of Nineveh by John Martin (c. 1840).

Removal Men

So we’ve all become removal men
In a paradox of piety,
Lugging a terrible indigestion
From priesthood to the laity

Forgetful between memories –

These riderless serotonin ponies,
A permanganate moon,
Reading the biography of President Judas Shitblister.
Mental Gnu, is it you?

So, come and help me with this box -
I packed our finest anhedonia
In bubble-wrap and newspaper,
To guard against damage in transit;
Left no gaps in the space-time foam
Through which the diamond way can reach us
The duct tape cornering sees to that,
The mouth is sealed that would drink all pleasures
And all pleasures are of the mouth.

So we’re boxing clever with our brain tusks,
No more unnatural than nuclear oven-husks
Or the Buddhism of wolves in winter.


Three black crow chicks
Fallen from the wall
Parents on the battlements fly
Shrieking through the hall
The long drop
Abrupt stop
A quick flight made of lies
Woven to the weft of wind
Now hunker down blind

One a feast table for flies
One a feathered fear-ball
One eyelesssly pecked up by chickens –
The stuff of gentle disturbance
White nightmares.

So help me lift this box -
Our pantechnicon arrives
To carry our atavism down the road of bones,
Our gigadeath bow-shock wave going on before
Under crossed eyes and besmirched law

Stateless at last




KH – 13th June 06

Sunday, June 11, 2006

Rapists

Rapists

The woods are full of rapists, converging on the
house and the dolls I made from semen seem
suddenly trite and conceptual. Each heartbeat
smashes my skeleton into a million snowflakes
as I claw the breasts of Lahiri Mahasaya in
stark, demented terror. Mistress Spine empty
your sluice-gates, Master Prostate gobble your
zinc and make genius in the anus where my
childhood wanders in the orchard of blood-
everdying, unable to pronounce AUM, superb
and meaningless as a cathedral. Leaving supper
untouched I hammer teeth and the ruby lioness
screaming my name knows panic’s the new puberty.

Jon Hellier

Refreshments

Refreshments

are available in the foyer
lime, mustard, oxygen
more than you deserve
there for the taking
you’ll know all about that
it’s what you’re good at
it’s all you’re good for
and i think i’m being
incredibly noble
interrupting my busy schedule
to point them out

Jon Hellier

Wednesday, June 07, 2006

The Absent Anima

Anima Mundi
Being interested in the World (the green one, the dream one, the Anima Mundi), inner, outer and other, I often scan the alternative newswires for information and detail usually missing from the mainstream infotainment fodder. In a recent trawl I spotted and read with interest the Carolyn Baker and Shepherd Bliss articles (Shepherd Bliss… some great images conjured by that name, or is that just me?) on Energy Bulletin.net, addressing the peculiarly male and masculine dominated discourse around issues often identified as ‘peak oil’ and ‘climate chaos’ and these started a train of thought.

I think there is enormous need for the feminine (and more people in female bodies) to engage with and express in new forms responses to and approaches for the Great Turning (as Joanna Macy frames it). If peak oil is actually in some sense just one aspect of the zenith of a wider cultural phenomenon, call it ‘Peak Patriarchy’, then the clear and timely expression of the full-force of the feminine (through women, men and life itself) is utterly necessary, it seems to me.
No one ever got enlightened, achieved happiness or connected with their own deepest, fullest purpose through one polarity alone - we need balance, a Joanna Macy for every Kunstler, a fiery red Dakini for every grey-suited senex in power somewhere, a Persephone for every Apollo… indeed, a tantra of multi-levelled energy change…

…and as the feminine is more present, more visible and included, then the masculine energy can also become itself more fearlessly, released and allowed to be in its authentic place rather than distorted and twisted out of shape into the brutal acting-out of the too-late capitalist violence we know all too well.

If the post energy descent world is to be an attractive, enhanced one and if it is to be experienced as such by humanity, then it will manifest as that through the inclusion of the feminine - no more the worship of Moloch as the endlessly entropic ‘growth economy’, but the growth of consciousness and culture grounded in sustainable and life-affirming ways on the Earth. Culture over civilization every time.And if the exclusion and distortions of the feminine energy continue unabated in all their forms, be it environmental degradation and exploitation, the conditioning of young women into uber-consumers and self-harmers, or the rape of the mind and body in violence and dominator hierarchies, then we had all better watch out for the ultimate wrathful expressions of that same feminine energy - in the oceanic swallowing and super-tempests of climate change, in Kali dancing, in the murderous rage of the slighted Great Mother.
Hell hath no fury… Perhaps this is the nascent warning James Lovelock is currently whispering at the moon, as even this rational man of science and conscience feels the need to unlock the only force that could serve and save, the love his own name contains, the Romantic inheritance itself, as an invocation, an appeal, a prayer before the tipping point of Gaia’s revenge.

kh 7.6.06

IMAGE: 'Anima Mundi' from the Quinta Essentia, Leipzig: 1574

Tuesday, June 06, 2006

Hexakosioihexekontahexaphobic

Hexakosioihexekontahexaphobic

You don’t need to be religious
or to have seen The Omen
or appreciate early Iron Maiden recordings;
if, like me, Revelations leaves you
nonplussed- don’t despair, there’s still room
for the devil in your life.

Fire and brimstone? Swivel-headed girls
rasping fuck me Jesus? No, no.
It’s subtler than all that rubbish
and at first you’ll barely notice
how good it feels to cause
unnecessary suffering and walk away, whistling.

Then things escalate and you realise
you’re becoming aroused when others cry:
not just sexually (though that’s important)
but in ways hard to describe.
Like being drunk but very controlled.
Like being empty but not caring.

The process develops its own momentum
steamrolling your mind like an avalanche
absorbs an off-piste skiier. You’re
lost then, utterly lost but you
still have options. A paedophile ring;
shooting up a school; merchant banking.

They say the devil’s in the
detail but the opposite is true-
he sees only the bigger picture
leaving the mode of your damnation
entirely to you, the irony being
your attention is focused irrevocably elsewhere

On the little sixes that fizz
like champagne bubbles through a reality
you abjure, yet can’t let go:
love circles you like a shark.
You bleed in helpless tribute to
the light of the morning star.

06/06/06

Jon Hellier

The Mead of Poetry

The Mead of Poetry

The Aesir and the Vanir made peace, reconciling themselves after long war and sealing their union in spit. As each god spat his or her oath into the mead-cup, the idea formed not to waste this divine sputum, but rather to fashion from it a being, a man to be called Kvasir. One most wise, one who could answer any question asked, even those beyond the gods’ own knowledge. And so it was that Kvasir was created, and wandered the nine worlds teaching and answering questions.

Kvasir
Some time later Kvasir was the guest of two dwarves, the siblings Fjalar and Galar. Jealous of his skill they murdered Kvasir and secretly drained all the blood from his body into two drinking vessels and a cauldron. To this they added a rare honey and stirred the mixture until it brewed into a mead so special that anyone drinking it would at once become the wisest of beings, or else be blessed by the gift of sublime poetry. To the gods in Asgard these dwarvish assassins sent word that Kvasir had choked on his own words of wisdom.

Soon after, it happened that a giant named Gilling came visiting the dwarves with his wife. Jealous of their priceless mead and drunk with a sense of their own power, Fjalar and Galar murdered Gilling – pushing him into the river within their cave where he drowned. His wife too, in rushing to his aid, was tripped, and milled into flour between two huge grindstones. The dwarves relaxed in their wicked triumph.

When Gilling and his wife did not return home, one of their sons, the giant Suttung, set off to discover their fate. Coming upon the dwarves he was at once suspicious and seized them by their beards, dragging them out deep into the ocean where he set them down upon a rock, barely above the waves. ‘The tide turns, and within an hour you will drown’ he informed them, and realising they had no chance to swim for shore, the dwarves pleaded for quarter. They admitted murdering Gilling, his wife, and indeed Kvasir, and promised Suttung he could take the priceless mead for himself if he would only spare them. Suttung, his interest piqued, agreed and carried the dwarves landward, where they gave him the three vessels of mead.

Suttung then returned to his home in the mountain Hnitbjorg, in Jotenheim, the land of the giants. In the mountain he created a vault and there placed the mead together with his other treasures. He appointed his beautiful daughter Gunlod to sit in constant vigilance and guard the hoard, from her golden throne.

In time rumour of these events worked their way back to Asgard and to the cunning ears of Odin. Determined that the mead should belong with the Aesir, Odin formed a plan. He transformed himself in to the guise of a man and took the name, Bolverkr, which means Grief-worker. Then he set out for Jotenheim, and soon came upon a field of nine workers scything the grass. Observing how slowly they worked, Bolverkr struck up a conversation. He soon learned that they were the employees of Baugi, brother of Suttung, and a scheme broke across his quick mind. Sharpening his own scythe, Bolverkr stepped forward and cut the grass in no time – the fieldworkers were amazed and Bolverkr also sharpened their scythes on his whetstone. So impressed were they that they tried to buy the whetstone from Bolverkr, who instead, said it would belong to whoever could catch it. He then hurled it aloft, and as it spun and glinted in the sunlight, the nine workers pushed and shoved and turned to gain prime position, and as they did, they cut each other’s throats with their newly razor-like scythes and fell down dead.

Bolverkr pocketed his whetstone and headed to Baugi’s home, a smile on his lips. Upon reaching Baugi’s place he knocked and asked for hospitality, but was met with a gruff and gloomy ‘No!’ Baugi was clearly in a foul temper, and soon gave the reason as the mysterious deaths of his workers that afternoon. ‘How am I to gather the harvest in now, tell me that?’ he moaned. Bolverkr made an offer, ‘I will do the work of your nine men, and more and moreover, I will do it for free – all I ask in return I s for three sips of the mead they say your brother keeps’. ‘No deal’ says Baugi – ‘The mead is not mine to bargain with’. But Bolverkr was very persuasive and soon Baugi agreed that if the work was indeed done, he would go to his brother Suttung and ask on Bolverkr’s behalf for the three sips of mead.

Sure enough, Bolverkr completed the work of the fieldmen in a very short time and soon he was accompanying Baugi to Suttung’s mountain at Hnitbjorg to claim his payment. Suttung however, was implacable and unmoved and refused outright to let the mead be tasted by anyone. Baugi, bound by the deal and yet unable to honour his part of the bargain, was soon manipulated by Bolverkr into trying another tack. The trickster’s path. Bolverkr gave Baugi a long augur and set him to work drilling through the mountain into its core. After much labour, Baugi called Bolverkr – ‘I’m through, the hole is completed’. Bolverkr blew into the drill hole and a cloud of dust and stone chips flew up into his face, the hole was incomplete. Cuffing Baugi Bolverkr demanded that he continue drilling and try no more tricks, and meekly Baugi drilled on. Finally he once again called Bolverker to the hole, and this time when he blew, no chips flew, the shaft into the mountain was finished. Instantaneously, Bolverkr transformed himself into a snake and disappeared down the drill hole, leaving Baugi stabbing at thin air and bare rock with the augur, too slow to catch the snake.

Inside the mountain, the snake immediately re-took the form of Bolverkr and stood in the stone vault, surrounded by Suttung’s hoard and aware of the beautiful Gunlod, sat upon a golden throne, looking somewhat startled. Soon Bolverkr, with his divine charm, had seduced Gunlod and the two retired together for three days and three nights of lovemaking, at the end of which Gunlod promised Bolverkr anything he might want. ‘My only desire is for three sips of your father’s mead’ he explained, and no sooner was it said than Gunlod offered him the two vessels and the cauldron containing the precious liquid. With his first sip, Bolverkr drained the first vessel, with the second sip he took the second vessel into his mouth, and with the third, he emptied the cauldron. Immediately upon doing this he transformed himself into a royal eagle and flew from the heart of the cave towards Asgard, and home.

Odin as an eagle
However, the suspicious Suttung had expected some trickery of this kind and seeing the eagle, realised what had happened. He also magically transformed into an eagle and flew in pursuit of Bolverkr/Odin – the chase was on. On and on they flew, Suttung slowly gaining, until they could see the walls of Asgard ahead. There the Aesir and the Vanir saw what was happening and began to place vessels high on the battlement. As Odin passed first, he spat a charge of mead into the first vessel, wheeling round for a second pass and repeating the feat with a second vessel. Finally, with Suttung now right upon him, Odin in eagle form spat the third and final charge of mead into the last vessel, but in the effort of so doing, a portion of the mead ‘came out backwards’, fell from his feathered vent and dropped outside the walls of Asgard as shit. As the gods reclaimed the holy mead of poetry as their own, to bestow on favourites alone, this trickle of mead-shit became the ‘rhymester’s share’, available to any mortal who cares to seek it.

Kh 6.6.06

IMAGES: 'Kvasir' from medieval Icelandic manuscript, 'Odin as an eagle' from stone carving of the Norse era (both sourced from Hurstwic).

Monday, June 05, 2006

To burst in the heart of sunrise

As it becomes ever more evident that our current and recent actions as a species will have repercussions for generations to come, that the sins of the fathers truly will be visited on the sons, we are all called upon to become seers – and to speak with a clear voice.

Everywhere we are surrounded by prophesy, of visions of the future we are sailing towards – be it the shimmering surfaces of utopia foretold in the commercial break or the bleak dystopias and die-offs that haunt the billion corners of the World Wide Web. And of course a million or more gradations between the extremes, but it is the polar archetypes that fashion our imagination.

These are increasingly embodied in two female forms: Pollyanna and Cassandra, both figures evoked critically by the followers of the opposing deity.

Pollyanna, or more symbolically Cornucopia – a womb of plenty, is the bountiful, ever giving, optimistic utopian spirit that tells us, half Micawber & half Norman Vincent Peale, that something will come along to solve things no matter how difficult our apparent situation. That the Stone Age did not end for want of stone and the oil age will not end for want of oil, that there are no limits because imagination is infinite. It is the favoured voice of the world, it is can-do and it avoids the darkness and the shadows.


Clytemnestra killing Cassandra
Cassandra, however, is telling us a different tale. She is looking into the darkness, into the shadows. She is warning us to notice the outcome of our actions, trying to open our eyes to what is actually going on around us. She is not necessarily negative – but she is questioning of the status quo, of the thorazine happiness of the consensus trance, and of course she is generally being ignored. The curse of Apollo still hangs around her. Those modern figures who issue caveats regarding our contemporary western way of life are now frequently dismissed as Cassandras by mainstream media and politics. In the media and political context the name Cassandra is read to mean, and used to invoke, the sense of doomsayer and also to imply mistaken nihilist. It remains somewhat shocking to realise that in doing so these commentators misunderstand the myth and simultaneously enact it. The curse of Cassandra is to both see the future truthfully and to be ignored.

But Cassandra’s is a clear voice that we must echo – it is not the abstractions of the Delphic Oracle or the Sybill of Cumae. It is not a confusing bundle of science and theology, practically incomprehensible and demanding interpretation - as many contemporary warnings can be. Cassandra tells us it, as it is.

Can we speak with Cassandra? Can we now heed Cassandra?

'Fore God, mine oracle shall no more hide
With veils his visage, like a new-wed bride!
A shining wind out of this dark shall blow,
Piercing the dawn, growing as great waves grow,
To burst in the heart of sunrise ... stronger far
Than this poor pain of mine. I will not mar
With mists my wisdom.

Aeschylus, 'Agamemnon' (translated by Gilbert Murray in Aeschylus (Oxford University Press, 1940) )

James Piers Taylor

IMAGE: Clytemnestra killing Cassandra, from an Attic red figure cup c.430 BC

Sunday, June 04, 2006

Sonnet Ten

Sol and Luna
X

I give you blossoming Malkuth and Sol and Luna,
All the arrows of purification, quicksilver and quintessence
For your black hair and the whites of your eyes,
For the yellow puzzle in your heart’s red whistling

Where the spinning essence laughs at the lies
The border guard is telling and swims through
The ribbons of Kether now becoming a golden ankh
Gliding through tearful waters, kissing the warm blue stones.

And I, in my Kairos, in
Saturn’s melting lead, kneel and
Offer you my salty heart

As a badge of your completion,
As a shiny silver balloon to bounce
At the unnameable frenzy of G-d.

(Sonnet Ten is one of the '100 Sonnets of Galactic Love' available from the publisher PSAvalon)

Image: 'Sol and Luna' an etching by Eleonore Weil.