Rubedo

Make A Flight

2007-07-20T17:05:00.000+01:00

You hand me a photograph
Of the one who has died
Separating it from your box of memories
And I handle it gently
In one hand
As if I hold his body there
As if he is a small bird
Just deceased, still warm
The feathers light against my skin.

And at the appropriate moment
I will pass his body back to you
Hand you the bird
As the Japanese proffer a gift
Let you take the photograph again
Return to that moment
And you tell me something of his story
With background elements
Revealing foreground form
Let the air produced of memory
Beat his wings anew
Make a flight in your mind
Make a flight in mine.

James Piers Taylor 9/7/2007 - London

IMAGE: To Every Seed His Own Body (2006) by Polly Morgan

In Memoriam

2007-04-26T10:00:00.000+01:00

For Dinah Williams born 13th July 1921 - died 13th April 2007

(Address for her funeral, given on 25th April 2007, by her grandson)

We’re here today to say goodbye to Dinah, my Nan, and to appreciate, indeed to celebrate her life here among us. We all knew her in our own ways, now they seem like precious ways; so let’s take a moment to see her life in context, her eighty-five years of gentle witnessing and mellowing love amid a tumult of change, both personal and collective within the wider world itself.

My Nan was born in 1921, when David Lloyd George was Prime Minister and King George V was on the throne. In her lifetime she’d see 16 prime ministers in all – almost 17, as Blair is apparently set to go inside a month or two. She knew 4 different British monarchs reign. When she was born, as part of the post-Great War baby boom, an old world of European empire was in utter ruin and a series of contrasting new shapes were struggling to emerge; new countries were being born out of strife – like the Irish Free State unfolding out of brutal civil war, or the country we now know as Turkey rising from the old Ottoman Empire, both were born alongside Nan in 1921. And who knew that even here in Newport 1921 saw a full scale naval mutiny, as sailors refused to participate in potentially being ordered to fire on striking miners? (Another sign of the post World War One realities Nan was born into – poverty, solidarity, hope for a better future, and of course the unresolved trauma of massive loss and raw grief). Some things about that year also echo in strange familiarity with today’s reality – in 1921 the British were busy occupying Iraq, for example.

My point is that Nan lived her life against the most intense period of technological and political change humanity has ever witnessed – in a sense this was her role, like many of her generation – to be a creator of domestic security, family love, a safe place in which to thrive as all around the world grew ever faster and more unfamiliar. In her 85 years, the same time it takes the planet Uranus to orbit our sun once, in that blink of a cosmic eye, she participated in a life anything but ordinary. Think of it – at her birth the fuel of choice for civilization was coal, by her teens it was oil and with that came the age of the motor car, of plastics, of urbanisation and mechanisation on a previously unthinkable scale. Despite trying several times, Nan never did pass her driving test so instead she witnessed the move from a world where a car was a very rare sight indeed, to there being one car for every 10 human beings on the planet, in one short lifetime. Speaking of which, Nan was born into a country of 44 million Britons, and a world population of about 2 billion people. Today there are up to 65 million Britons, and the Earth is home to about 6.5 billion people. Once again, a staggering change in the course of one lifetime, one generation. We could add in technological change too – from the Wright-Brothers to the moon landings and stealth bombers, from the discovery of antibiotics to genetic engineering and advanced heart surgery – something Nan experienced directly, but could never have imagined as a young woman. She also witnessed first hand the political shapes of Communism, Fascism, nazism, Socialism and today’s globalised corporate capitalism, together with their distortions, failures and legacies. Even the natural world changed too – from a relatively unexploited state of traditional and agrarian form, to a time where more people live in cities than any other setting. Of course, nature also gave up its forests, seas and aquifers in Nan’s lifetime, and took in the manifold pollution of human exploitation, so that we who stand here today do so in an age of uncertainty unlike any that went before, where even the ice caps are melting, the climate itself is twisting and jarring, and our sense of there being a future at all for life as we have known it, comes into a new doubt. We should remember too that since Nan was born hundreds, indeed thousands, of plant and animal species have gone extinct.

But why all this talk of context, all these outer forms? Well, because it is in the light of events like these, and especially in the vast changes they point at (and that I’ve merely touched on here), that Nan’s life takes on its fullest meaning. My Nan, who was to me the archetype of unconditional love and acceptance (and here I should point out that I think as one of her grandchildren, I got the very best of her – the fullest expression of her selfhood), my Nan was (and remains) a true teacher. She may not have even known it consciously, but she was. I remember her reading to me when I was very young, shaping my world and my imagination as she loved to do and I insisted she did – really, I couldn’t get enough. I remember her as tactile, warm, a rescuer, a soother, a source of constancy in a world of flux. And then I think of the moments I got to spend with her body the day she died, precious moments, her face still and relaxed after months of anguish. Peaceful. Still teaching me, as I held her hand and kissed her goodbye. To be honest I couldn’t help but smile at the incredible rightness of it all – this flesh and blood woman, so real, who I’ve known all my life, now gone, and yet even in her going she was still teaching me. Showing me how death is a friend we must all come to embrace. How there is no pain, no fear, no loss, no ending in that truth. Change is what we are made of, and in that swash of impermanence Nan was a pole star to navigate by and a hand held out to offer support.

I believe that my Nan spent a remarkable, ordinary lifetime living out her full being, giving herself fully to life. In her marriage to my Granddad she became part of the lifelong double-act that allowed her to express her true gifts. Her talent for nurturing, for creating safe and secure emotional spaces out of which come loyalty, acceptance, kindness, a capacity to put others first and to offer up a wonderfully soft yet unyielding compassion. She gave me my abiding taste for apple tart, a sense of wonder at her cleverness with practical crafts – she was a real maker, after all – and I’ll always remember how she seemed to know everyone and couldn’t go out without meeting someone (often many someones) to catch up with and chat to. Her world was rich with connections and community, unlike the multi-levelled alienation so many experience today.

Amongst all of that, in her own way, though sometimes certainly afraid and confused, even appalled by the violence and distortions she saw in the world about her, Nan honoured herself and us, and in doing so gave us all a most precious gift – staying true in the face of personal and global shock and trauma, bearing with the constant change, and never losing that wide and infectious embrace of life and the many, many people around her, for above all else it was people she loved. Her heart was always true, and for me that is a reality ultimately far more real and important than any outer worldly event, because with a true heart the mystery of existing at all becomes approachable – with it comes humility, trust, openness, gentleness and warmth – the basic human goodness that Nan embodied so wonderfully. May we all create the causes for realising our own goodness, as she so surely did hers.

I’d like to finish by reading a poem that I think Nan would’ve liked. Its by the mediaeval Persian poet Rumi (translated by Coleman Barks) and its for all human hearts still intact and beating in this time of the Great Turning, when our fears are heightened and our integrity is most tested:

Quietness

Inside this new love, die
Your way begins on the other side.
Become the sky.
Take an axe to the prison wall.
Escape.
Walk out like someone suddenly born into colour.
Do it now.
You’re covered with thick clouds.
Slide out the side.
Die, and be quiet.
Quietness is the surest sign that you’ve died.
Your old life was a frantic running from silence.
The speechless full moon comes out now.

Thankyou Nan, for everything. Go well.

Image: Blue Hands, visual & performing arts department, Delaware State University

kh 22.4.07

The Hymnist & The Shameless Flower

2007-04-02T15:56:00.000+01:00

Since Ahkenaten composed his hymn
the grain-split sun has shined within
worshipped there where you alone go
at the golden crown of bright ego
peerless in nature, raised above
the green world and its whispered love
focused instead on an unkissed face
an image born of the master race
in sand, spit, blood and tears
by shadeless whip-strong overseers
hewn and shaped with enslaved muscle
Freedom is the new imperial hustle

Freedom to kneel at the knot of eternity
Freedom to live in the eternal city
free to forget the unresolved mystery
embedded forever in patches of history
free-fire zones on indigenous land
genius tamed in the palm of your hand
inspiring new acts of greater belief
in the power of right and the wink of a thief

the wind though, picking wild seeds from husked grasses
scatters a bouquet of meaningless beauty, because it can

waves ride the salt columns of an ocean, singing, hair thrown back
in a wild spray of wind-riven foaming desire, needing no observation
to pulse elated wet fingers and toes through the shingle bar of limitless life

no threshold too bold for illustrious heroes
but the crown lies behind a curtain of zeroes and never quite fits
remains there, put down
no ego shall ever wear the true crown
that this mad yellow flower is giving away

KH 2.4.07

ITEM: Girl With Yellow Flower by Rachel Ferguson.

Wide Justice

2007-04-02T14:08:00.000+01:00

“‘I don’t know what’s between them in that space between the making of the lyre and my finding of Eurydice by the river. I think of the buzzingness, the swarmingness, the manyness of bees singing the honey of possibility. I see Eurydice sitting among the skeps under the apple trees listening to her bees. She was afraid that our story would find us but she was always listening for it.’

‘How can bees tell a story?’

‘The bees don’t tell a story but in the manyness of their singing there sometimes comes a story to the one who listens.’”
From The Medusa Frequency, Russell Hoban.

Eurydice (literally wide justice) proposes to Orpheus that real love and connection are pre-story, that they are in another dimension and that only when that dimension was lost did story emerge from the loss. In this Orpheus (a severed head speaking to our struggling novelist narrator via a cabbage and an old football) is the epitome of the artist, one who has experienced loss and must therefore sing of this. Eurydice is often found watching out for the stories and they enjoy their love, soon however, like a swarm of hungry ghosts the stories come and they find them, and they name them Eurydice and Orpheus, and their fate is sealed…

I would link this idea of hunting by the story - the incursion of meaning, narrative, alphabet and text into our experience - to recent mediations by amongst others David Abram in The Spell of the Sensuous and Jerome S. Bernstein in Living in the Borderland on the origins of consciousness and the western ‘ego’. In Bernstein’s words;

“So if man is the image of God, then the godhead can no longer be falcons, or cows, or serpents, or crocodiles, or fire, or trees, or any other aspect of nature. From Genesis forward, God was to be experienced in anthropomorphic terms, unknown and mysterious, but forever distinct from nature.” (Author’s italics).

Bernstein sees the ‘Genesis’ event as the first emergence of the power of the alphabet (probably developed by workers in the late Egyptian period to bastardize and be able to make use of previously hieratic scripts in their work) to contain reality within a certain inherent boundary or limitation. An event that would be a fundamental factor in the development of the western ‘ego’ and its capacity for advanced technologies alongside its sense of itself as separate from the world around it. Although this is a power that has enabled enormous specialization of knowledge and culture it is also a power that is bringing us potentially to the brink of extinction, as we cannot fundamentally co-create with a world that we are separate from, and so we brutalize and control it (he shall have dominion over the earth…).

Even as Orpheus in The Medusa Frequency takes on the role of Hermes and cuts out the turtle from its shell to make the first lyre there is loss, the first musical instrument is born of a death. It is interesting that the Native Indian Cultures called the land mass of the Americas ‘Turtle Island’ - a people who were destroyed by the very advancements of the technological ego separated by its roots in nature, threatened even by cultures which were rooted in that place and intensely destructive of them. In Greek myth we find a weird echo in the turning out of the insides of the turtle for its usage as an instrument and the turning out of the Indigenous peoples to utilize and co-opt their land and its resources. I once gave a conference in South Dakota, a beautiful place with some fine people. The conference was in Custer State park (history written by the winners!) round a beautiful lake and jetlagged as I was I would walk around it just as dawn was rising, one day I extended the walk right into the hills. I am not claiming objectivity here, I was tired and emotional from travelling and teaching but I could feel a loss in the land even amongst the beauty of the turning trees.

So for all the advancements of our civilization (many of which I enjoy and do not wish to lose) we must acknowledge that the one-sided development of detached rational consciousness has created a loss that ripples within the culture and within the particular life experiences of individuals within that culture. In The Medusa Frequency the narrator Herman Orff (a word-play on the interpenetration of the masculine and feminine principles? Of matriarchal power, her man?) only encounters the head of Orpheus after he has his head treated because of personal and creative blockage… A true friend of mine recently travelling in Australia and experiencing solitude within a different and unique landscape ruminated that perhaps the ‘ego’ is the tinnitus of the Soul; it is an interference to the Music of What Happens (he also referenced the poet Wallace Stevens). Bernstein asserts that we need the Borderland experience, like an extension of the ancient Celtic Twilight, a liminal threshold whereby individually and collectively we open up to a new kind of experiencing the world, as an interconnected participant. He argues passionately that if we do not we seem to enacting a largely suicidal ‘egoic’ ideation onto the world with disastrous consequences for our survival.

Mark Jones - 2nd April 2007

Image: Orpheus & Eurydice by Nico Silvester (after Edmund Dulac)

Are You Orpheus?

2007-03-15T13:27:00.000Z

“…Produced by Morton Anal, Jr. Photographed in SpermoVision, a Division of Napalm Industries. Recorded by Sucktone, a Division of Sodom Chemicals, in association with Napalm Industries, a Division of Anal petroleum jelly. A Napalm-Anal release. Certified ‘X’ For Mature Audiences Only.

No one read the film poster.
Listen, said Underground.
No one listened. The chill rose up from the black tunnels.
Are you there? Said Underground. Will you answer?
No one answered.
Are you Orpheus? Said Underground.
No answer.”

From 'Kleinzeit' by Russell Hoban.

What did it mean that whole don’t look back thing? Then of course he looks back and she is gone, the one he waited for, the one taken from their wedding festivities, the one the beauty of his song has won him chance to reclaim, gone? I mean there is a recurring theme within Trickster myths of the figure (Coyote, Rabbit, Raven, Legba, Loki, Eshgal etc) being given a strict set of instructions and then failing to live up to a crucial point and then lo and behold grief has come upon him. Sometimes grief falls upon all of humanity as result, rather like some tragi-comic version of the Fall from the Garden, I can think of one example from Lewis Hyde’s wonderful treatment of these myths whereby Coyote has been instructed to follow an invisible spirit, a ghost, how to find the tribe of the dead whereby he meets his wife and friends again. He is allowed to leave with his wife as long as he does not touch her for 5 days, of course as the days go by she gets more and more vibrant and, well you guessed it.

The friskiness of the trickster deity brings upon all of humanity the lack of capacity to interface meaningfully with the dead, causing loss to all subsequent generations. If as Steiner suggested relations with the Dead are central to a healthy psychology in the present then this is a big loss. Yet for all the similarities in the stories there is a very different feel, Coyote’s mission and ultimate failure as a kind of Brer rabbit on acid feeling, it is more Simpsons than ‘Love Story’ if you follow. Orpheus on the other hand is earnest, an artist that has dared to charm the Lord of the Underworld in order to reclaim the unnatural loss of his bride on his wedding night (chased by a Centaur she is bitten by a snake and falls...). His story in modern film form would have the audience sobbing; this is the end of the ‘English Patient’ territory, a desperate man seeking the life of she whom he loves. I remember as a small boy being very angry and upset at Orpheus; I was shouting at him, ‘why did you look back?’ I mean Pluto had only given one condition (deliberately to entrap, to get him thinking…like a man saying don’t think of pink elephants of course you cannot help but…the ultimate cheat?). I was very disturbed by the story of Orpheus age seven. I could not understand why he would do that. Why?

Orpheus is not just a Trickster even though the failing the key instruction links him to these ever backfiring creatures. He is a symbol of the maker of art within a human. To be disturbed by his story implies a resonance of that story with something in one’s own life, or psyche. Orpheus resonates, his song touches (teaches the animals their true ear sings Rilke) he resounds across the ages. To a boy in a Cheshire village who had nothing else to do than to read Greek myths and fall in love over and over with the nymphs (who would not want a girl that lives in a tree or a stream?) and suffer as the heroes suffer, and suffer, and be angry that Orpheus would lose. It felt like a loss, both in the sense that he lost her but also that he played the game and he lost. He lost it. A shocker for a young boy! For the boy the tales of Hercules were much easier to take, the Thracian lion tamed and worn as trophy now there’s the stuff of legend huh? Yet it was the failure of Orpheus to stop himself looking back at Eurydice that haunted this boy, not the filthy stables or the Hydra.

Am I Orpheus then? – To feel that hurt? Are you Orpheus? Said Underground, Hoban’s symbol of the mighty Hades, are you the singer of songs that will change this place? (Kleinzeit busks). Was he looking back to check she was ok? Did he mistrust the god who had claimed she would be safe? Certainly I mistrust the gods at times, the most powerful of inner urges can overpower me and quicken inside me to a point of feverish certainty and literally a few moments later I can be wavering again… Is he a man neurotically bound to the past? I mean was looking back to see her a symbol of those times we get stuck in a consciousness of regret, of past-binding, you know ‘I wish that had not happened’ ‘I wish that person had given me a chance to tell them how I feel’- was Orpheus, as many artists are, too bound by nostalgia, by the weight of the past? Is this a Remembrance of Singer’s Past? I do not know. Is it just a case that she was so beautiful to him and he was so focussed on his wedding night and then the loss (like Novalis night after night at the grave side writing) that he literally had to look back just to see her face, the beauty of her presence? I mean I have told myself I will not ring so and so and then have done, but here the stakes are so high, was one look worth the loss?

I mean is this the point? Actaeon pays a terrible price for looking upon the beauty of the Virginal bathing Moon, he is hunted for his vision. Is Orpheus the artist who can turn the woodland into temple, the herd into a temenos because that beauty, the beauty of turning and seeing was worth it? Is there a part of Orpheus that does not see any of this as a loss? Is it the heroic ego of the child in me that has lost it? Is it the limit of the rational that says why did you break the rules when the stakes are so high? Am I actually a man living in fear because I do not celebrate Orpheus and his particular form of seeing, a seeing around, a seeing backward and into the dark?

Song, you teach us, is beyond achievable desire,

it is rather the sheer reality of immanent being:

simplicity itself for deity,

but how may we partake? When will you inspire

our being, bestowing earth and stars by turn?

This has no relation, youth, to your enamoured care:

mouth forced wide by the thrust of your voice - learn

to set aside impassioned music. It will end.

True singing breaths a different air.

Air without object. A gust within God. A wind.

From Sonnet to Orpheus 3, translated by Robert Hunter

Has Orpheus in fact stilled his longing? Or was this afterwards, was this the journey he took when he wandered after realizing what his longing had done, how it had destroyed her, the very one he loved and longed for? Was this is maturation in fact, his journey into manhood? Is Eurydice in this sense Anima, at her most elusive when grasped for by the aggressive male desire (most certainly a look can be aggressive in it’s wanting…)? For certainly she became the “air without object” when he looked, did he indeed look so hard that he saw right through her, that she became invisible, empty even of inherent existence?

“Kleinzeit didn’t want to get out of the train, there was no time there, nothing had to be decided. He dropped his mind like a bucket into the well of Sister. There was a hole in the bucket, it came up empty.”

I wonder was Orpheus beginning a journey into becoming a Zen Master, certainly from the point of view of this interested party he leaves a challenging koan in his tale of song and loss. Whatever you bring to that koan and I have far from exhausted those possibilities of this increasingly late night meander through the backwaters and eddies of Underground - you can see yourself in what you bring, you can see the possibilities of Self itself in all its multiple and yet interlinked forms. Like Zeno’s arrow the Self is always motionless and yet it is always moving to a destination. Something happened at the gates of Hell. Something in that look, in the journey to, and the journey from that look, something happened that changed Art and Consciousness in the West. Rilke knew this clearly and after the lengthy abstraction of the Duino Elegies he returned to sing the song of Orpheus, he who had given birth to song. Something about the look, the looking for, the looking into, the forbidden look. Whatever we conclude as to the meaning of the journey of Orpheus we must see that it brings us closer to the beating heart of things, the arterial rhythms of time, that like Orpheus is shattered by the look and wanders into nature to have his new found woundedness and heartfelt-ness contained so must we walk if we wish to emulate the meaning of the song. Even if you are only a sometime poet (and aren’t we all at least sometime poets?) you might wish to journey with Orpheus, with Kleinzeit or with Rilke into the deeper Life:

“Once more my deeper life goes on with more strength,
As if the banks through which it moves had widened out.
Trees and stones seem more like me each day,
And the paintings I see seem more seen into:
With my senses, as with the birds, I climb
Into the windy heaven out of the oak,
And in the ponds broken off from the blue sky
My feeling sinks, as if standing on fishes.”

Moving Ahead by Rainer Maria Rilke, translated by Robert Bly.

Mark Jones

Images: Orpheus (2004) by Nikolay Antonov, Hermes, Eurydice and Orpheus (2006) by Daniela Ovtcharova

In Memoriam

2007-03-15T12:49:00.000Z

“Now Besso (one of his oldest friends) has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me. That means nothing. People like us…know that the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion”

Albert Einstein, as quoted by Robert Lanza

“All psychological difficulties are due to the absence of a right relationship with the dead”

Rudolph Steiner (as quoted by Robert Sardello)

So first principles…what I have been witness too: when the death rattle stops and the psyche finally leaves there is a palpable stillness, a peace descends, and a struggle surrenders into a mystery, a mystery that emanates presence. This have I seen, and my heart felt a relief as my loved one left. A joy that stayed with into the next day, playing meaningful music and entering the world with an unencumbered brevity of movement and lightness of mood, soon to become unstuck within hours of picking up her stuff and signing death duties and civic records, but hey…

All of us of a certain age have sat with the dying. We have been with them through the trials of that process, the bed sores, the aching or paralysed limbs, the difficulty breathing, the pallor or blackening…At times one can enjoy humour and breathtaking shifts of perspective with the dying. I am ready now; everything I have is now yours said one old lady to her two grandchildren who had just said how much they loved her. A complete change, a reversal in energy, a feeling shift, she would leave later that night having given of everything that she ever could have.

At other times we sit through the clinging to life. We all do this … the living (who are the dying) and what we might call the ‘dying sooner rather than later and I know it’…all of us get into clinging to life. Whether it is a significant relationship we did not want to end, whether it is a substance or daily routine we now loathe but still cannot give up, whether it is a body that has so far stood us so well that now develops a tragic flaw, an antidote to our existential hubris. Sometimes it is sitting with the ‘dying sooner rather than later and I know it’ folks that allows us to see the absurdity of this clinging, the impossible dream we endlessly recycle as human beings desperate not to see our sense of meaning get up and fly over the fields like the black crows of death in Van Gogh’s last paintings…

In it no secret – we are all terminally ill, we are all ‘doing time’ as another put it and will leave the playing field sooner rather than later. How we deal with the inescapable anxiety of our self-consciousness in the face of our transience…well that is another issue. Some populate ever more fiercely the Elysian field of heavenly vistas; some turn their minds to apocalypse as if to project their own nihilism onto a global dimension. What we are doing with our fear, what we are doing with our fear of dying, what we are doing with our denial of death (Becker), our denial of the dead (Steiner) is an important issue, indeed is an ecological issue of great import. It is this existential dimension of the current climactic, energy and ecological crises that is often overlooked. What we are imagining as we stare into the barrel of the gun, as we write the sand mandalas of our lives, is an essential aspect of the subtle ecology of life on this planet.

For we are scared and fear has a way of controlling us and destroying us. Fear flows from some of the stories of Rabbit in the Native American Indian traditions (whose own fear would constantly manifest situations to justify itself) to the general tendency of human beings to eroticize or make relationship to their fears through fantasy material – i.e. that what cannot be appropriated easily by the unconscious mind becomes fertile ground for the activity of the unconscious mind. I have personally witnessed people defend the meaninglessness of life, the randomness of existence, the sheer chance of things with such vehemence that you could only imagine that this randomness was a god whose altar they filled every night with the summation of their earnest longing. Such were these people’s fear of meaning…

Fear of death. Fear of the dead. For they are there, they have not gone. For they have entered the (from our point of view) ‘ultimate’ shift in perspective. Their identity is phased out of the current seemingly linear reality we all, by consensus, occupy. More, where they go we, like Aeneas and many before and after him, must follow… obviously we have one trip lined up whatever, but must that be the only time we ever ask ourselves the questions, is that the only time we will journey?

For Kleinzeit the hero or small-timer (his name might mean both) of Russell Hoban’s eponymous novel is never allowed to ignore the fact that death lurks around every corner, and that in so lurking their can be no ownership, no permanent holding of any given, in fact every high is a ‘short high’ as one chapter holds, a black hairy voice offstage (death?) shouting, as Hospital tells him that nothing is his. As always it is Kleinzeit’s love for the sister that is redemptive for him, and by implication the whole of heroic small-time humanity. Yet even that love is awash with death, and in fact it is only this love (awash with death) that can make any sense at all of life with death:

“Sister by owl-light, Sister zipping out of the tight trouser-suit, stepping out of her knickers in the glow of the gas fire. Sister pearly in the dusk, silky on the flowered sheets, tasty in the mouth, opulent to the touch, Kleinzeit, overwhelmed, became nothing, disappeared, reappeared, from nowhere entered, inventing himself as theme, as subject. Answered by Sister he sounded deep chill, silence, all beneath him, raised Atlantis, golden domes and oriental carpets, central heating, dates and pomegranates, mottled sunlight, stereo. Far below them Underground said, are you Orpheus?”

A very good question indeed…

Mark Jones

IMAGES: Untitled (1987) and Mr Reddy doing Pranam to the Divine Mother (1986) by Mother Meera.

Orphic Resonance

2007-03-02T14:41:00.000Z

Last night I attended the first of the Gaia Foundation’s 2007 evenings, this one with Brian Goodwin, leader of the MSc in Holistic Science at Schumacher college (and thus a close colleague of the previous speaker Stephan Harding’s whose talk I covered here).

As you would expect there were many parallels with Stephan Harding’s talk, and both were based around new publications – in Harding’s case Animate Earth: Science, Intuition and Gaia, in Goodwin’s Nature’s Due: Healing Our Fragmented Culture. Both speakers made the case for holistic versus reductionist science and for a reappraisal and acceptance of animism – the belief that a “soul” or “spirit” existed in every object, even if it was inanimate.

Goodwin asked us to reconsider the stories of science, by telling different stories we find a different path. Following a Jungian, archetypal model Goodwin identified a “new” story that has emerged in our culture, which is actually the re-emergence of an old story – which alters our perceptions on science and opens up through animism a new connection with nature. This story is the myth of the Orphic Trinity – Chaos, Gaia and Eros.

“Verily at the first Chaos came to be, but next
wide-bosomed Earth, the ever-sure foundations of all the
deathless ones who hold the peaks of snowy Olympus, and dim
Tartarus in the depth of the wide-pathed Earth, and Eros,
fairest among the deathless gods, who unnerves the limbs and
overcomes the mind and wise counsels of all gods and all men
within them.”
Hesiod, Theogeny (c.700 BC)

Goodwin posited the era of the 1960’s as the genesis point of this archaic revival, first with the re-emergence of Chaos in the work of mathematician Edward N Lorenz. Lorenz attempting to apply mathematical modelling to meteorological phenomena and weather prediction discovered that apparently small changes in initial conditions produced large changes in the long-term outcome. These variations in initial conditions could be so numerous and so slight that they made accurate prediction of future effects impossible. What he described as Deterministic Nonperiodic Flow has become better known as Chaos and has become an important part of mathematical and scientific enquiry. It would appear, as some anarchists and magickian’s claim: that “chaos never died”.

"Does the Flap of a Butterfly's Wing in Brazil Set Off a Tornado in Texas?"
Edward N. Lorenz, paper delivered to the American Association for the Advancement of Science (1972)

“For the mass of practicing scientists... the change did not matter immediately... But they were aware of something called chaos... More and more of them realized that chaos offered a fresh way to proceed with old data... chaos was the end of the reductionist program in science.”
James Gleick, Chaos: Making a New Science (1987).

The second element of this archaic revival was the re-emergence of Gaia in the pioneering earth systems science work of James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis. This work finally gained its crucial nomenclature as a result of a conversation between the neighbours Lovelock and novelist William Golding in 1969.

“Most of us sense that the Earth is more than a sphere of rock with a thin layer of air, ocean and life covering the surface. We feel that we belong here as if this planet were indeed our home. Long ago the Greeks, thinking this way, gave to the Earth the name Gaia or, for short, Ge. In those days, science and theology were one and science, although less precise, had soul. As time passed this warm relationship faded and was replaced by the frigidity of the schoolmen. The life sciences, no longer concerned with life, fell to classifying dead things and even to vivisection. Ge was stolen from theology to become no more the root from which the disciplines of geography and geology were named. Now at last there are signs of a change. Science becomes holistic again and rediscovers soul, and theology, moved by ecumenical forces, begins to realise that Gaia is not to be subdivided for academic convenience and that Ge is much more than just a prefix.”
James Lovelock, “What is Gaia?”

The final element of the trilogy is Eros, the force of love, also known as Eleutherios, "the liberator" and through that shared role connected with Dionysus – god of intoxication, music, peace, the civilizing urge – and thus also connected with Orpheus and the Orphic mysteries (I wrote about some of this previously in The Rebirth of Orpheus). Goodwin asked the audience “who here lived through the 1960s? Can you recognise anything familiar here in the aspects of this deity?”

“THE COURT: "Erotic," did you say?
THE WITNESS: Erotic.
THE COURT: E-R-O-T-I-C?
THE WITNESS: Eros. That means love, your Honor.”
From the Court Testimony of Timothy Leary at the trial of the Chicago 7 (1970)

“Love, love, love.
Love, love, love.
Love, love, love.

There's nothing you can do that can't be done.
Nothing you can sing that can't be sung.
Nothing you can say but you can learn how to play the game.
It's easy.”
Lennon/McCartney, All You Need is Love (1967)

Goodwin indicated that we are still in the process of integrating these archetypal forces into our science and into our culture, with the attractive force of Eros suffering from most neglect.

The discovery of DNA by Crick and Watson in 1953, with its beautiful double helix formation began a quest in the biological sciences to decode the organism and gain some total understanding of life. Goodwin quoting Evelyn Fox Keller’s The Century of the Gene presented the case that the completion of the human genome project had, rather than bringing such a total understanding, in fact revealed how large the gap is between genetic information and biological meaning. How the particular structure of organisms develop largely remains a mystery, there is some embodied meaning in the cells which is inaccessible to consciousness. Goodwin posits that the development and organisation of form by cellular DNA occurs through the action of a kind of language – and that particular forms are the stories told in that language.

Thus herbalists may develop the ability to read the story of a plant as manifest by its form and intuit the qualities of that plant. The holistic enquiries of wise women and cunning men from the era before reductionism took hold may have genuinely born a “shamanic knowing” that is not only dismissed by our modern science but is beyond its conception. Goodwin stated that meaning is “immanent” not “transcendent” – when science attempts to de-particularise and abstract, it in fact moves further from rather than closer to meaning.

So Goodwin asked, how do we engage with this? How do we go about re-integrating this sense of nature in our science and culture? How do we achieve harmony with our fellow entities? Relating this back to the Gaia Foundation’s work and the influence of theologian Thomas Berry, Goodwin suggested that by beginning to change our conceptions we participate in a greater change in consciousness, that this is part of “engaging in the great work” – the alchemical transformation of ourselves and society – the paradigm shift which might be understood as the Magnum Opus.

James Piers Taylor, London 2/3/2007

IMAGES: Brian Goodwin, cover of Nature's Due (2007), Projection of trajectory of Lorenz system in phase space with "canonical" values of parameters r=28, σ = 10, b = 8/3 (or 2.666667) and integration timestep 0.001. (2005) Computed in Fractint by Wikimol, Gaia mosaic (date unknown), Beatles (1967) by unknown photographer, Conjunctio (2006) by Paul Le Blanc.

Dark Threes

2007-02-21T13:51:00.000Z

Tredegar ward has many gods, mantled in ancient flesh
mouths agape, or chewing at invisible threads of fate
making whoopee with the sandman as if it were 1923

minds are loosened, clothes shed, and Carnival whirls in awkward
shuffles across the medicine floor
looking for contact in a world turned upside down,

run aground, leaking life-force in tiny defiant winks
and bloodless wounds, haemorrhaging memory
in simple rhythms, presenting complicated algae

at the altar of Eros. Crazy Jane unpicking the hem
of her nightie, ancient hands of spotted papyrus,
occult prestidigitation, preparation underway

for another journey, beyond the remit of nurse
or geriatrician, beyond the origami attrition
or wheeled chair, on towards her ghost-visitors

those who whisper from behind the ice-henge
of death, seeing through closed eyes, bringing
continuity to the human slippage of change -

impersonal fires dim in the boundless desert,
He walked this way once before, she can sometimes
see his footprints, still sharp despite the wind’s insistent kiss.

Knowing this, I withdraw into the cowled
dusk, a Baader-Meinhof Buddha out of time
drinking a heartful of this glimpse of empty mystery

Kh
21.2.07

IMAGE: Vast, Empty, Calm (2006) Photo of Iranian Maranjab Desert by Mohammed Reza Tavaijoh

Wasted Youth

2007-02-05T09:39:00.000Z

For John Keats

“I always somehow associate Chatterton with autumn”
John Keats Letter to John Hamilton Reynolds, (September 21^st 1819)

“The life can burn in blood, even while the heart may break.”
Percy Bysshe Shelley, Adonais (1821)

In Pisa, in the palace
where Shelley wrote Adonais
they shoot up heroin now
and syringes group in the
corners of the ruins
grasses growing through them
as they continue from the cracks.
Spent little cylinders
flecked with the rust of blood.
The view from the gallery
is part antique, part industrial
and it’s ugly where it’s not frozen.
The surface of the Arno
flotsam forming letters
legends dissipating in the flow.

In Hampstead in the garden
by the plum tree twice replaced
unseasonal flowers are in bloom beneath
where the older tree shaded only grass
and a place for a chair.
Rest for a small brown bird
with a song science calls unremarkable.
The lawn here well tended
wealth and fame of patrons of the arts
securing pleasance and the friendly
shadow of a library.
Here lived a friend
he called close with a candle
to witness a droplet of breath
on his bedsheet
flecked with the rust of blood.

James Piers Taylor, 4th February 2007 London

IMAGE: Sketch of the Dying Keats (1821) by Joseph Severn.

Daffy with Piety

2007-01-31T15:19:00.000Z

I want to talk about Vincent Van Gogh, who is described in the title epithet above by his sister, Lies. I want to dwell alongside the images and the works, the emotions and inspirations, as well as the sufferings and denials experienced by a man who on his deathbed, a suicide at 37, is famously reported to have said ‘la tristesse duerra toujours’ – the sadness always endures. In parenthetical relationship to this end summation, Vincent also said of his formative years ‘my childhood was gloomy, cold and barren’, showing a consistency others have denied him in various ways, on account of his cyclical mental ill health.

A brief Google of ‘Van Gogh + illness’ will spawn you a dozen or more learned psychiatric endeavours to unpick the true diagnosis (or dual diagnoses) of Vincent’s condition (from schizophrenia to syphilis, temporal lobe epilepsy to intermittent porphyria, lead poisoning to mania caused by ingesting digitalis…) – and all will miss the point most spectacularly. And why? Because Van Gogh is not of interest to us, is not still alive for us, because of his psychopathology, nor did his oeuvre spring from that dampness; rather the magnificent creativity and superabundant humanity that causes such fluorescent presence in his greatest works, function as direct thresholds – they take us to the brink of where he stood, not an abyssal edge of mind-warping despair, but the luminous void, the penetrating emptiness of all appearances, the accepting and mindful nod to the figure of the reaper who stands always on our shoulder whether we’re writing, fucking, painting or staring at a canvas in a gallery. This divine insight is what sacralizes Vincent’s best work, and indeed one could argue, his life; like all the great artists he has holiness in spades, he reminds us (as Amiri Baraka/Leroi Jones put it) that great art in any medium consists of ‘whatever makes you proud to be human’. Moreover, he reaches us across time, weaving patterns in paint that strike us as profoundly new, yet paradoxically timeless, like dreams enticed into visionary representations of themselves, secular mandalas spun from the heart of a man in love with the fullest face of life, for whom compassion was a necessity, and shadow a hand to hold in the dark. These patterns speak as richly as they ever did and more collectively than Vincent could ever have dreamed, touching and revealing, hinting and inviting – but never preaching or patronising. For great art, indeed, the function of art, if it can be said to have a function at all, is not to extract or create order from chaos (for as Frank McConnell points out, ‘that’s God’s business – whoever he/she may be’) but rather art is ‘the dream of order out of the sense of chaos’. Vincent Van Gogh took that journey as he was compelled to do, and he left us shining, enriched by his passage, and blessed with the paintings that contain his alchemical, natural and heart-full apprehensions of enduring mystery.

So where to go? Here we have a major artist whose life is well known and explored (even in film, via the Kirk Douglas vehicle ‘Lust for Life’ (1956) or through the Robert Altman movie ‘Vincent & Theo’ (1990) to mention just two English language offerings), whose works are as recognisable and well known to us as leading adverts or brands, who, as everyone knows went mad, chopped half his left ear off and, ultimately shot himself in unremitting despair. What else is there to say that hasn’t already been said? Quite a lot, it turns out. For here we have not only the life and the works, but the penetration of the veil. And if sister Lies Van Gogh was right and her impossible brother really was ‘daffy with piety’, then what does that parabola reveal to us, at this distance of 115 years or more?

Another question to address early on – why now? Well, the simple answer is that having just returned from a visit (my first) to Amsterdam the most outstanding thing I find myself drawn to writing about is Van Gogh. Of course I’d known his work before (we all have – c’mon this is Vincent we’re talking about here) and known some bare outline details of his life too – but something about floating around the Van Gogh Museum and seeing those works in their vibrant fleshy reality, one after another in a cumulative barrage of sensory overload really lit my pipe. Not to mention filling in the back-story and getting down to the fine detail of Vincent’s life. I’d no idea how prolific he was, how driven and compulsive his creative mission really was, nor how it was all underpinned with an unshakeable need to be of service. Oh, and the fact that he was, par excellence, the great master of colour and through it the alchemy of light. An irresistible subject, and, I hope you’ll find too, one it is almost impossible not to be drawn to, not to empathise with, for Vincent, whatever else he may or may not have been (nowadays we’re familiar with the ad-man’s Vincent, or the artist’s Vincent, (post)-Expressionist Vincent, religious maniac Vincent, in his day there was also the ignored by the establishment Vincent, the scandalous Vincent living for a while with a pregnant whore and of course the mentally deranged Vincent chasing Gaugin round Arles with a flick razor) was supremely human, and therefore reachable, available to our spirit of enquiry. Van Gogh once said, tellingly, of Gaugin’s importance to his work

He gives me the courage to work from my imagination, and certainly things from the imagination take on a more mysterious character

But the razor incident caused Gaugin to flee the infamous Yellow House at Arles, and thereby to complete the stillbirth of Vincent’s cherished utopian desire for an artists’ community centred there; even as he took a chunk of his ear to the prostitute Rachel saying “keep this object carefully”, a petition of local people brings the police to close the Yellow House, run by the ‘fou roux’ or redhaired madman.

But let’s not get too far ahead of our theme, better to return to a few salient biographical turns to lay the ground – I’ll be brief because this is material you can easily obtain elsewhere (try Wikipedia for starters). So Vincent was born on March 30^th 1853 (making him an Aries – something that informed not only his archetypally red haired passion and staccato ‘one-sitting’ outdoor approach to much of his work, but also his capacity to be compelled, driven, engaged in martial arts with the process of living and working, fuelled by an unquenchable fire built from a kindling of freedom) the second child of six, in Zundert, Noord-Brabant, in the Netherlands. This northern birthright is also a considerable force in the life of the man – suffused both with a protestant inheritance (his father was a reverend) that has both stark and tolerant aspects, and also tuned to an eye that moves seasonally, from short dark winter days to broad summer brightness. Remember, this is an artist who is sublimely entwined with place, the genius loci is strong in him. His artistic trajectory will always aim south, carrying him to the summerlands, eventually, on the fringes of the Camargue.

Chronologically, the young Vincent then moves around through London and Paris to the Borinage mining area of Belgium where his vocation as artist really commences. Later he will return to Paris, then drift south to Arles, spend a whole year hospitalised in Saint-Remy, before living out his remaining days in Auvers-sur-Oise, where the wheatfield of his self-murder is to be found. During this travail, Vincent wrestled with his early art dealer role, became evangelically infused and made attempts to become (formally) a man of God (he preached a first sermon in Isleworth, near London, on 4^th November 1876), but was rejected and forced back into the maelstrom of his ambivalences and convictions – eventually reconciling the service of humanity with the holy work of the artist.

In all his creative life, spanning in effect just one decade, Vincent produced 900 paintings, 1100 drawings, over a thousand letters (mostly to his devoted brother and confidante, Theo) – he completed 90 paintings in the 2 months prior to his death alone! This is the impact of a man on fire with creative need, and one who moved from passionate but hopeless amateur through the gates of initiation and into the first rank of Artist and Master, in as rapid a transition as I know of. In all that time Vincent is said to have sold just one painting (The Red Vineyard, for 400 Francs) and to have lived a life of poverty and, often, desperation. He says in a letter to Theo somewhere:

I am reasonably faithful in my unfaithfulness and though I have changed, I am the same, and what preys on my mind is simply this one question: what am I good for? Could I not be of service in some way? How can I become more knowledgeable and study some subject or other in depth? That is what keeps preying on my mind, you see, and then one feels imprisoned by poverty, barred from taking part in this or that project, and all sorts of necessities are out of one’s reach. As a result one cannot rid oneself of melancholy, one feels emptiness where there might have been friendship and sublime and genuine affection, and one feels dreadful disappointment gnawing at one’s spiritual energy, fate seems to stand in the way of affection or one feels a wave of disgust welling up inside. And then one says ‘How long, my God?’

All his major themes are there, the need for a meaningful way of engaging with life and society, the feelings of being marginalised and excluded for not playing the game (he’d already rejected the art dealer’s world of commodification, and been rejected by the world of organised formal Christianity that he had hoped would offer him a place to embed), as if cursed by a blank eyed fate, compelled to suffer and witness. Not difficult things to identify with nor feel the pinch of in one’s own history – which is perhaps one factor in our continuing love affair with the man’s work – he is the stereotypical ‘suffering artist’ inscribed in tragic vividness for the modern imagination, hopeless and lost, sainted beyond the grave in an ironic detournment, since when he lived the world had nothing but indifference or hositilty or contempt. Once dead (and following the massive devoted efforts of Theo’s widow Johanna, and her son, also Vincent) his works began to become known and to capture the hearts and minds of a post Great War generation – and forthwith to become much copied and converted into dollars in an age of the mass media image. The world of commodification that Vincent turned away from swallowed him whole, like no other, and now trades everything from T-shirts to umbrellas to artcards, prints and mousemats from his oeuvre. He who was ignored and unseen is now ubiquitous, as an echo. Even as the brightest colours on his masterworks fade and discolour (the Red Lake colourings especially, but also to an extent his signature Chrome Yellow) he is digitally remastered and re-presented in cyberspace, scanned with laser technologies and repackaged in a matrix of ‘permanence’. All of which, I feel having dwelt alongside his shade, would’ve moved Vincent not at all – but rather horrified him in his fragile, human marriage to transience and the continuity of change:

…try to grasp the essence of what the great artists, the serious masters, say in their masterpieces, and you will again find God in them. One man has written, or said it in a book, another in a painting

So let us turn towards the work itself, that vast out-gushing of endeavour compelled from the brush-tip of wounded genius, that stands as itself and speaks today in accents its creator would still recognise (though not in T-shirt form). Vincent’s creations are undoubtedly fused with Eros – you don’t get that colourful without such a meeting – and the earlier works, the Dutch and Belgian browns and greys, begin that purpose slowly. His first ‘masterpiece’ some argue, would be 1885’s ‘The Potato Eaters’ showing peasants eating spud-based gruel and musing at their proximity to the good earth. They eat with hands that also dug the ground where their food grew, and though terribly poor and uncivilized, in them Vincent found a romance of the soil, of the worthy and unpretentious heart-filled connection to place, to one’s landbase, we might say. And the painting is not without its Eros – after all one of the peasant girls depicted was said to have been made pregnant by the artist – although this was later disproved – but it did enough damage to see Vincent effectively run out of town by the ecclesiastical powers that be (and contributed to his father’s musings on whether his son ought to be ‘sectioned’ as again we might say, detained against his will in an asylum). So even in the early drabness of the northern lands wrapped up in greys and browns, peopled by a lumpen peasantry and characterised by toil and numbing fieldwork, Vincent is penetrating (metaphorically as it turns out) the mysteries, the femininities…

Oh I am no friend of present-day Christianity, though its founder was sublime – I have seen through present-day Christianity only too well. That icy coldness hypnotized even me, in my youth – but I have taken my revenge since then. How? By worshipping the love which they, the theologians, call sin, by respecting a whore etc. and not too many would-be respectable, pious ladies. To some, woman is heresy and diabolical. To me she is just the opposite.

It isn’t stretching things too far to see Vincent’s remarks here as being about, not only real whores (like Clarissa Maria Hoornik, known as Sien, with whom he lived at times between 1881-83) but also the similarly rejected whore-like Muse with whom he was in, by now, constant creative communion. Needless to say in a life characterised by tragedy and loss, Vincent’s women had bad endings – not only Sien, who drowned herself in the river Scheldt in 1904, but also Margot Begemann, with whom he conducted a disapproved-of-by-both-families affair, who attempted suicide by strychnine overdose. There was also, in 1881, his recently widowed cousin Kees Vos-Stricker, with whom he fell deeply in love and who, in answering his proposal of marriage is said to have replied ‘niet, nooit, nimmer’ (no, never ever) and refused to see him. Vincent being Vincent he persisted, even sticking his left hand into a lamp flame and beseeching her parents ‘let me see her for as long as I can hold my hand in the flame’. His uncle blew out the light and pronounced his judgement – ‘your persistence is disgusting’.

So Vincent as lover had as many travails as the other Vincents’ we have met – and the muse was at times an obsessive and indifferent mistress – witness Vincent’s malnutrition and self neglect – he lived on the staples of coffee, tobacco and bread and in February of 1886 said in passing to Theo that he could remember eating only six hot meals since May of the previous year! He also had terrible gum disease and toothache and was in constant pain, and had become heavily dependent upon alcohol, especially absinthe (which he became enamoured of during his early Antwerp days). It is also speculated that he was being treated at points for syphilis taking sitz baths and regular alum irrigations. All in all, Vincent’s health was in constant decline, and yet his ailing flesh supported a tremendous output of work, even as it loosed the mind from regular embodied relationship.

I’ve come to think of Vincent’s work in several parallel streams, informed by thematics and luminosity, and though far from ‘expert’ (thank god) in seducing the academicians’ eye, I venture them here. There are the early peasant paintings, mainly characterised by earthy colours and deep links to the soil itself where the denizens have

Dug in the earth with the very hands that they are putting in the dish, and they have earned their food so honestly

Then of course, there are the self-portraits, which open the psychological dimensions in ways unseen prior to their execution; five in particular stand out to me, all between 1886-1888 and all painted in Paris (there were 35 in total – 29 painted in Paris). Could it be that the city provided the mirror Van Gogh needed to penetrate his own masks, as well as to lighten his palette from the grey-brown north? Of these ‘Self-Portrait With A Felt Hat’ shines out most prominently – bringing alive the fire of the man, literally the flames of a mystic, green, white and red, in a corona of spiralling light from a point between his eyebrows. There is also the disputed ‘self-as-Christ’ image in Van Gogh’s ‘copy’ of Delacroix’s ‘Pieta’ where a ginger Christ hangs towards the viewer from the outstretched hands of Mary

I am not indifferent and in suffering itself religious thoughts sometimes give me a great deal of comfort

There are the blossom paintings, mainly of 1888-1890 and mostly taking as their subjects trees or whole orchards, in their most explosive and fecund spring revelation, bringing whites and pinks into the palette in a most intense and incredible way. These fuses and fireworks literally shimmer with milkshake joy and childlike apprehension of the specific tree, or the unique leaf or blossom, and crown Vincent’s arrival as a nature-poet writing with light in a book of pictures. Following on there are the Sunflower paintings, for which he is perhaps best known – but in which I would include Irises (May 1890) and other still life images radiant in golds and rich empathic delight. Remember, Vincent was the man who said

Isn’t yellow lovely? as well as No blue without yellow and without orange

But what is yellow? Goethe tells us in his Farbenlehre that

In its purest form it carries bright nature in itself and is of light, spirited, slightly provoking character… so it is generally known that yellow makes a warm and cozy impression. We find it in paintings on the illuminated and active side. This warming effect can be felt distinctly by observing a winter landscape through a yellow glass. There is joy for the eye, widening of the heart and lifting of the spirit; a tangible warmth seems to emanate from the glass

Wassily Kandinsky offers a different take on Yellow in his book ‘Concerning the Spiritual in Art’

Yellow, if steadily gazed at in any geometrical form, has a disturbing influence, and reveals in the colour an insistent, aggressive character. (It is worth noting that the sour-tasting lemon and shrill-singing canary are both yellow). The intensification of the yellow increases the painful shrillness of its note.

Yellow is also ratna, the aspect of consciousness concerned with increase, both riches and material form, but also generosity of soul. As Van Gogh’s favourite colour it is tempting to see in yellow the very apex of the paradox of our subject – the synthesis of pure light (especially solar, and southern light) with the power, vastness and overwhelming energy of creative action, yet held in tension with the eruption of unstable shadow and impossible chthonic chaos. Let’s not forget that yellow is the colour the human eye can perceive at the greatest distance – hence yellow fluorescent jackets on workmen, on hazard symbols and roadsigns, or tennis balls. Yellow speaks of distance and motion towards distant phenomena – in his union with yellow Vincent stared deeper than his contemporaries into the the far shore, not of some linear future, a cheap trick, but into the farthest shores of soul itself – the citrinatio of anima – the ‘cup of the warm south’ that shines a promise of peace and completion, yet is always apparently just out of reach. Yellow is also a warning – (think wasps and salamanders), as though its presence held too close creates the conditions for loneliness, abandonment, even the poisoning madness of one who has seen to the core, yet remains an isolate, ignored and alienated, wracked with contradictory impulses towards total love and the embrace of all forms, and an unresolved resentment at one’s own ugly, unlovable awkwardness. Yellow, queerly, is also associated with cowardice, and some would draw a link to the suicidal self emergent in Van Gogh fearing to live on. But Yellow, if it is anything, is about contrast, conflicting effects, ambivalent irresistible promises. And Van Gogh, if he is anything, is a parable of outsider art cross fertilised with the mission of a bodhisattva, bringing his posthumous audience inside the light, reflected from his transient canvasses, still singing their simultaneous love songs and fugues underneath the spectrum of ordinary awareness.

No surprise then that another subset of Van Gogh’s work could be seen as the Yellow House paintings, where the quest was for ‘everything with character’, including such gems as the bedroom scenes and ‘Gaugin’s Chair’. I would also make a case for the green paintings (such as ‘Undergrowth’, ‘Entrance To A Quarry’ and ‘Tree Roots’) where the Dylan Thomasesque direction takes us into the knotted green world of sap and stem and branch, the force that through the green fuse drives the flower, and drives the viewer into a new awareness. Did Vincent precognitively foreshadow the partially emerging ecological awareness of our own age, the ecological self that greens the soul with a senex hand and roots the transcendent urge of the puer artist in the fixity of vegetable place, the aspect of revelation we could call ‘matter’? Further subsets might include the winter works, the seascapes and the magical night paintings (‘Starry Night’ 1889, ‘Café Terrace at Night’, ‘Starry Night Over The Rhone’ etc), each of which hold celebrated works and lesser known masterpieces of their own.

There are also the Japanese paintings, ‘Flowering Plum Tree’ (which informed some of the other ‘blossom’ works already mentioned) ‘The Courtesan’, ‘Bridge In The Rain’ – borrowing technique and style from Japanese prints he encountered in Paris, and liberating something of his own impressionistic sensibility – the speed and lightness of touch that yields ‘enormous clarity’ in all things.

I feel the urge to produce so greatly that it saps me mentally and exhausts me physically

And yet go on producing he would, unceasingly, through episodes of despair, illness and collapse. Under the care of the homeopath Dr Gachet (recommended by Pisarro) at Auvers-sur-Oise, Vincent found some moments of clarity and release, though Gachet himself was

Sicker than I am, I think, or shall we say just as much

And it is here that the last subset reaches its peak epiphanies, through the wheatfield paintings, from 1887-1890, including ‘The Sower’ of November 1888, where the symbols of death and infinity are explored explicitly in the figure of the corn-reaper

A vague shape who battles like a devil in the intense heat… I saw the image of death, in the sense that the corn represents mankind being reaped….death almost with a smile

Elsewhere Vincent speaks of the corn as life-bringing and symbolic of human potential being birthed – the necessary relationship of the cycles include birth, life, death, rebirth, and in recovering these verities he whispers across time, not only to us today, but backwards to Andrew Marvell, to the first renaissance, to the Greeks (you know the ones I mean), and to those who lived and sowed and reaped and died – the seed people at the transition times, the dawn of settled agriculture. This is why the figure is vague and ‘battles like a devil in the intense heat’ – not only in the furnace of the south of France at harvest time, but upon the face of the sun itself as it burns and bestows life above and within each of us, as Hel or Apollo, or as Christ, and our devilish selves scheme and toil even as we sweat out our toxic need to destroy, which is really just another planting. The unbearable intensity of this heat, the wannabe rubedo striving to achieve combustion, comes out in paintings like ‘Wheatfield Under Thunderclouds’ (July 1890) where the naked and unadorned landscape itself marries the brooding and violent sky –

they are enormous sweeping wheatfields beneath stormy skies and I have intentionally tried to express sadness, extreme loneliness in them

He certainly succeeded. But that isn’t all – he also offers us, in the unbound and horizontal plane, his clearest articulation of

What I cannot express in words, namely how healthy and heartening I find the countryside

These wheatfield paintings go beyond only archetypal forms, and arrive upon a cuspal vision, fuelled by colour itself, universalising but having specificity in place and time, demonstrating the voidness between and beyond causality, what in the East could be called ‘suchness’. Strung out between acceptance and despair, Vincent reached the high tide mark of not only his creative flood, but also his paradoxical nature

I feel – a failure. That’s it as far as I’m concerned – I feel that this is the destiny that I accept, that will never change

And the paradox swells to a peak in ‘Wheatfield With Crows’ – also of July 1890. This is sometimes taken to be Vincent’s final painting, although others exist in varying stages of completion (‘Daubigny’s Garden’ for example), and some have read it as an omen of impending death and utter despair. It is indeed a magnificent painting, radiant with golds and yellows and reds in the wheat, struck ‘wet on wet’ as painters say. There are greens and browns suggestive of paths, an occluded opaque sun orb bleeding on the horizon in a blue-black sky, and from the upper right of the canvas the eponymous murder of crows descends into the frame, almost bat-like, a host of W-shaped black symbols, death-attendants, carrion feasters, gleaning the future for a pair of painter’s eyes, a peck of congealed and fertilising blood. When I saw this painting it was hung between works by Otto Dix and Ludwig Meidner, spinning the mysteries of Vincent’s masterwork into their own versions, coloured by the horrors of collective madness and death as enacted through the Great War. Retrospectively, Vincent’s work fortells (and remembers) this European apocalypse, and is the more powerful for being so beautifully still.

In terms of his life and intentions, Vincent was still planning further works, and indeed ordering new supplies of paint, right up until his suicide. Did the ego strive to live even as the soul embraced sweet release in death? Or was it the huge soul of Van Gogh that moved to hold fast to life, even as the cracked actor made its deal with the self-devil and pushed the barrel into his own chest, the body seeking communion with the soil, offering itself as fertiliser, or raging at an abandoning god/father? The mystery endures, riddle like, and the life ended in a wheatfield, as though Vincent had walked right into one of his own canvasses and passed through in a shaman’s crow-flight. His actual bodily death however was prolonged (it took two days to pass) and agonising – though it allowed Theo time to join him and sit at his side. Theo, intriguingly, died within six months.

There is so much more we could connect with, so many themes and specifics in the warp and woof of the life and works of this big heart. The emotions that Van Gogh captures and fulfils, sadness, loneliness, grief, loss, fear, overwhelm, melancholia, despair, but also delight, joy, beauty, tenderness, exuberance, hope, passion, acceptance; the psychogeography of the lived experience and the profound importance of place and ‘feel’ to the works and soul; the alchemically attentive disciple of colour bringing Anima Mundi into new relationship with the perceiver through form and theme and above all light, the harmony of colour; Vincent the son and brother, the systemic player in a family of religious and art-infused northerners, the soul biographies of these beings in time, seeking healing; the biographical structure combining severity and orthodoxy with evangelism, art, madness and the irrepressible desire for freedom and belonging; or the historical Van Gogh, the creature of the second half of the nineteenth century, straddling the eruption of industrial life, the swelling steam-driven migration to the urban and the mass leaving of the countryside, bringing mechanistic means of perception, mass media, the passing of embededness in nature for attachment to an Imperial dream, destined to bleed away on the next battlefields of Europe’s transfiguration. Vincent died at the very dawn of the oil age too, an age we stand at the conclusion of, offering yet another vantage point for digestion.

One final thread that strikes me as important concerns the paint technologies of Vincent’s age and the advantage he took of the newly available tube oils, facilitating his impasto style and bringing in signature colours – Chrome Yellow, Cadmium Yellow, Chrome Orange, Carmine, Cobalt Blue, Viridian, Lead White and Red Lake. Each has its own tale to tell, its own memories of the red-haired man who broke them into new patterns and combinations, taking the pioneering eye of Jules Dupre (whose colours Vincent found to be a ‘magnificent symphony’ both ‘amazingly calculated and infinitely deep as nature itself’) to new planes of realisation. Chrome Yellow, for example, sourced from the mineral crocoite and first formulated by the chemist Vauquelin in the late eighteenth century, was by Vincent’s day a vivid oil paint derived from lead chromate salts (PbCr04), exploited from nature and produced in industrial situations for commercial gain, it was also poisonous and liable to become toxic to users (lead poisoning, among other symptoms, causes swelling of the retinas, and even xanthopsia – or ‘seeing yellow’) – it also fades in time to a shade of drab - how might these fixing specifics have been facets of the materia through which the soul-force that was Vincent Van Gogh alchemised the life we have skimmed, and the works we return to over and again?

What remains in Vincent’s art is the seal of suffering and the hint of its ending. Instinctively we respond to his works because he brings us inside the light that we always already know, from our dreams, our unacknowledged desires, our chromatic disposition towards the beautiful. And here, with yellow kisses, he dares to show us our own suffering, which is also his own, now as then. But what we share, the taproot of our empathy, is not that we both (and all) suffer, but that we share a deep and unarticulated need to be free of suffering, at a level beyond the merely existential, in ways that we only begin to apprehend through the simple resonance of true art, as through the flash of an authentic wave of love breaking, or at the mystery reflected in death and crowned in birth. It is the moment of awakening, the threshold and the ground of being, it is gone in a moment, but never more than a teardrop away. That Vincent saw it habitually and saw it through any phenomena he focused upon is a measure of his gift to us. His seeing through brought him to the interpsychic node at the heart of aesthetics, the synthesis of his small personality self with his indescribable Self, communicating through light across oceans of chaos, to a liminal and interspatial doorway, where through impermanence he shines a recognition of our precious and shared human nature. Vincent is about basics. Human goodness. Human brokenness. Imperfection perceiving and witnessing itself revealed and fulfilled – en-light-ened. Don’t believe me? Get yourself to Amsterdam and stand in front of a self-portrait, or a landscape. Let yourself feel, for a moment, the blossom or the sky or the cornstalks, the petals or buildings, let it inside yourself in full awareness that your eyes, your heart, your consciousness, even as it drinks at this nectar-like art-teat, are all but an atom’s thickness from their own extinction. The end is present, never announced, always in attendance. All else is show, glamour, trick, defence or guile. Do you dare to see past these truths, accepting all, rejecting none, embracing luminous no-thing-ness? Perhaps its all too much, the Big Truth apparently too vast for the small self to handle. Perhaps that’s how it worked with Vincent, why despite his insight and visual articulacy his personality could not but cleave to its own alienation, to the point of desperate self-murder. That is not ours to judge, nor to follow.

We have come full circle, ouroboros, returned to the question ‘where next?’ that will always arise with a subject that has truth, beauty and goodness in it. The provisional answer, at this ending, can only be to return to the artist and the art. First with words, and finally, the paintings – worthlessly priceless, uselessly essential, transcendently imprisoned on the walls of the art-zoo, ironically pure in their witnessing and kindness, open and empty of expectation, marvellously what they are – decaying, entropic artefacts created by inspired states of human genius, enlivened with love from the flash of a red man meeting a blue-black void, and now they melt into yellow light, even as we who make pilgrimages to view them close up are also melting.

But as far as my inner self, my way of looking at things and of thinking is concerned, that has not changed. But if there has indeed been a change, then it is that I think, believe and love more seriously now what I thought, believed and loved even then.

Do you know what makes a prison disappear? Every deep, genuine affection. Being friends, being brothers, loving, that is what opens the prison, with supreme power, by some magic force. Without these one stays dead. But whenever affection is revived, there life revives.

Many people believe that they will become good just by doing no harm – but that’s a lie, and you yourself used to call it that. That way lies stagnation, mediocrity… the canvas has an idiotic stare and mesmerises some painters so much that they turn into idiots themselves. Many painters are afraid in front of the blank canvas, but the blank canvas is afraid of the real, passionate painter who dares and who has broken the spell of ‘you can’t’ once and for all. Life itself, too, is forever turning an infinitely vacant, dispiriting blank side towards man, on which nothing appears, any more than it does on a blank canvas. But no matter how vacant and vain, how dead life may appear to be, the man of faith, of energy, of warmth, who knows something, will not be put off so easily. He wades in and does something and stays with it, in short he violates, “defiles” – they say. Let them talk, those cold theologians.

Dec 06 -Jan 07

IMAGES: Vincent (1968) by Martin Sharp; Portrait of Van Gogh (1888) by Paul Gaugin; French poster for the film Lust for Life (1956); American poster for the film Vincent and Theo (1990); The Yellow House (1888) by Vincent Van Gogh; Sunflower set (c20th) tatty merchandise by who cares; Self Portrait with Felt Hat (1887/1888); Irises (1890) ; Olive Trees with Yellow Sky and Sun (1889); The Courtesan (1887); Wheatfield with Crows (1890); Skull with Burning Cigarette (1885) all by Vincent Van Gogh.

Gunpowder as a Prophylaxis of Sepsis

2007-01-11T14:27:00.000Z

This admixture is not what they thought of,
not the crowning seraphim in gold arrayed,
not even the fertile resistance blessing their pikestaffs
with mistletoe silence, fresh-baked delights and
pie-crusted silhouettes for the hungry dusk shades

but it might be for the best, nevertheless,
to type like this
knowing the desire to channel wisdom,
to cruise the headshapes of poetry in verby thrusts
(so well forged)
an undergrowth of blacksmiths in digital repose

so that now, turning and broken up,
poisoners shiver from the tap-roots
upwelling in three-gendered slurries
hoping for sulphur, saltpetre and nitre
to curb the thirsty fireflies in the blood

ungodly and bursting with animal heat should we fever
the brow of the alchemist more?
Should we pry into strands of Gaian homeopathy,
knowing the red stain that masks the black sun?

When he takes up the cup to his lips, tasting our end,
shall the molten lies bring tear-milk to his eyes?

kh
11.1.07

Image: "The Invention of Gunpowder," an intaglio print from 1988 by Ray Must

A Fire in the Head

2006-12-12T12:38:00.000Z

“Her bloodred halo is like the ancient Roman flammeum, the bridal veil flame-colored to induce love in the soul. This flammeum also points to the belief in the genius residing in the head, the belief in the life-soul or divinity, often referred to as “a fire in the head.” Alchemically, this reddening is also an epiphany of the rubedo, the crimson flush of Aphrodite in the bleached and whitened body of the work – blood returning to the head as after a faint, thoughts reddened into life, the rich blood of love coloring the pale face of austerity: Aurora.”

Noel Cobb, ‘The Morbid and the Beautiful’ in Archetypal Imagination: Glimpses of the Gods in Life and Art (1992).

I’ve had a difficult year, and it’s not over yet. I’ve struggled to keep it together, to be authentic, to respect my melancholy and dwell in it, but also to realise that there is more to life. I have lost love, and I have placed my faith in love again – I have chosen love. I have also chosen difficulty, being in the world, engagement.

I was born under the rulership of Venus and I cannot avoid her, cannot escape her, can never leave her service. I have shivered this year, I have reduced, my body has made stones within itself, I have bleached and whitened. It is all process, all passing –passing strange, and passing. I have tried to hold the Tao, I have tried to live in uncertainty, I have sometime succeeded.

A cruel anniversary awaits me only days away, I feel its gravity drawing me into its singularity, feel the blood draining from me in its presence. It is hard to see beyond it, it draws in all light, all life – but I will pass through it. I will work with this, as I’ve worked with pain before. I will work with it in ways I’ve never worked with pain before, and so I will add new ways of working with pain to my repertoire. Some of this is wisdom. Wisdom is some of this. It is all the work, the alchemy of the soul.

I will do my best to be true to the fire in my head, I ask you to find your mind fire.

James Piers Taylor, London 12/12/2006

IMAGE: Madonna (1894-95) by Edvard Munch.

An Eagle For Your Mind-Fire

2006-12-01T12:18:00.000Z

“And it is written: ‘first the stone, then the plant, then the animal,
And then the man.’

But before the stone, I am the FIRE
Distributed equally in space,
Nowhere absent, filling all
And before the Fire, hidden within it,
I am the pure KNOWING
Whence all forms flow forth.”

From the Book of Tokens by Paul Foster Case

Akin to the molten rivers that will form rock beds, a fluid, pre-verbal, non-dual, flow of mind-fire can be seen to predate a thought, an image, and a desire. How much of the truth of this FIRE can then be allowed by the thought, the image or the desire? Is this not the test of the philosopher, the real poet and the true lover?

It is in the multiple iridescences of this FIRE that we can see clearly that the Mirror (art as reflection) and the Lamp (art as illumination) are eventually one and the same: the truest reflection is itself an illumination and burning brightly one’s innermost spark is as a candle flame to the sun of reality…

How we apply this FIRE then becomes the Promethean question of our times, indeed of our lives. Within the context of this question, that could exist personally, socio-logically, environmentally etc, and yet remaining within the imaginal realm, I ask what was Zeus’ Eagle a punishment for?

The man who gave us fire (warmth, sustenance, survival), the man who brought FIRE (the illumination of the human spirit, the reflection of the pure knowing) is chained to a rock and his liver is eaten out by a massive eagle each day only to re-grow and for the whole process to begin again the following day. Though horrible on a literal level this punishment as for example the fate of Tantalus or Sisyphus in hell is an emblematic instruction, it points to something…

Prometheus is chained to the mountaintop; he is shackled to the high-point, the peak, and the airy plateaus of spirit. The eagle that destroys him daily was a living symbol of spirit for many Native American cultures who often symbolized the attainment of wisdom with the reception of an eagles’ feather. So Prometheus is broken by spirit, shattered by the peak experience…he is then healed through the night just to be broken again.

I don’t know about you but I have felt like that. I mean I am not saying every day and I am not claiming the vast hubris that my personal experience is always a living myth (but I have my moments…) but I have felt like that. I felt like it once on LSD and I felt like it on retreat. If you touch the cold clear hand of spirit you must be prepared to winter in your Soul for certain periods for the truth of the FIRE is actually quite cold for other gardens in one’s Soul.

Maybe Prometheus is a warning, I will not say that he is not (certainly in the inflation of the archetype, possession by the mythological could damage any one of us) but Prometheus is also a symbol of painful hope, more like a Christ or the ideal of the Boddhisatva intention in Mahayana Buddhism than a simple admonition.

I do not hear his story and think ‘lets not waste our time giving to others’. I do not hear his story and conclude that humanity is worthless, that Prometheus is rightly punished for giving this childish race fire when surely it will only burn itself. Although humanity may very well burn itself… O Shit! – I see a complex image about the nature of reality and the difficulty of the human nervous system and psyche encountering the underlying rubedo of existence, the true nature of our mind.

Mark Jones

IMAGES: Prometheus Bound (1868) by Gustave Moreau, Zuni Dancers perform the Eagle Dance (2006) from the Utah San Juan County Centennial Celebration of the 1906 Antiquities Act on June 10, 2006.

Affliction Rules With Vinegar

2006-11-29T16:45:00.000Z

“So we must press onward to the final stage, the rubedo, which has often been called the 'Marriage of Luna and Sol', the fusion of the human and divine, the union of the personality (Luna) with the essential Self (Sol). Now the retort can be opened to reveal the philosopher's stone, the pure gold of Wisdom, the diamond body, the Gnostic Anthropos, the Heavenly Man, Salvator, filius macrocosmi; by whatever name it has been called, there now stands forth the divine original man, long buried and forgotten in the very centre of our being. Jung quotes the 17th century alchemist, Gerhard Dorn: ‘Transform yourselves from dead stones into living philosophical stones!' [Jung, C.G., Psychology and Alchemy (Collected Works, Vol. 12), page 256.].”
Joy Mills ‘The Human Journey - Quest for Self-Transformation’ (The Blavatsky Lecture delivered at the Annual Convention of the Theosophical Society in England, 27 May 1978)

Are we all golems, fragile mounds of stardust, which may only be animated by the divine spark which we stoke within us? I think so. We spend too much of our lives trapped between competing conceptions of self, which any degree of contemplation would reveal as false, every one. It is our secret thoughts, the ideas and visions, dreams and ideals that we fear to reveal, that we hide and obfuscate, that we will not express even to our friends - until the candles have burnt low, and the wine is nearly drunk and curtained windows comfort us – it is these secret thoughts that are us. It is the secret thoughts that are our spark, your own mind fires make you what you are. It is that spark, that fire which is your parcel of the infinite, your essential fragment of the divine. Become what you are.

“The philosopher's stone. the lapis philosophorum, is frequently spoken of as hermaphrodite, containing within itself all opposites, binding together all the elements in the world. It is said to radiate a cosmically healing effect and indeed he who has found the way to his own inner transformation, healing all divisions within himself, becomes the healer of the world. What began as a lonely way to one's self is found to be, in the end, a glorious path trod in the company of the gods. As Michael Maier, another 17th century alchemist quoted by Jung, has expressed himself: 'There is in our chemistry a certain noble substance over whose beginning affliction rules with vinegar but over whose end joy rules with mirth. Therefore I have supposed that the same will happen to me, namely that I shall suffer difficulty, grief, and weariness at first, but in the end shall come to glimpse pleasanter and easier things.[ lbid., pp. 260-61.] ”
Joy Mills, Ibid.

Did anybody say it would be easy? I don’t remember saying it would be easy. I don’t remember anyone else saying it would be easy. I think we might have just assumed it would be easy. But what do we really mean by ease? Don’t we mean something that can be achieved without me changing, aren’t we saying that we want a change without actually transforming? That we want to eat our cake and have it? Stop associating your life with ease and safety, security and stasis, ease and safety are not life, security and stasis are death. Engage with joy, take a risk, follow your bliss, kiss me you fool.

“If, as Jung has pointed out, ‘The terrors of death on the cross are an indispensable condition for the transformation,'[Jung, C.G., Psychology and Religion (Collected Works, Vol. 11), Bollingen Series, Pantheon Books, New York, 1958, page 221.] we may also be equally certain that out of the long series of reincarnations and metempsychoses there will come that experience of the Self which, as Dr. von Franz has so beautifully stated, 'brings a feeling of standing on solid ground inside oneself, on a patch of inner eternity which even physical death cannot touch.[von Franz, Marie-Louise, C. G. Jung, His Myth in our Time, G.P. Putnam's Sons, New York, 1975, page 74.] ”
Joy Mills, Ibid.

Affliction Rules With Vinegar

Two great queens have risen from the dust about me
and whether I am the:
king;
consort;
confidante;
or serf,
in this repertory theatre
of incarnations -
I know not.

How many correlations
will the mathematics
of life on Earth allow?

Is each particle of soil
a fraction of us
every parcel of earth
an anthrosol
from which we are again and again
conjured, summoned
to this dance of dust?

The White Queen and I
phase in and out of pattern
some misprint, misalignment
of image and of song
mis-stepping, tripping
in a spiral about the ballroom
which nevertheless holds
never falling, never striking the walls.

The Black Queen
moves slowly, alone on the balcony
but I guess every move before she makes it
and my gesture is a sentence she finishes.

Night after night
in a dream of morning
a soldier to matriarchy.
Offering my service
to the grapeyard.
Old wine in new bottles.
The revolution of selves
across centuries
balanced by the terroir
that attracts us
again and again.

Our own viticulture
of blood and belonging
uncorked once more.

James Piers Taylor, 29th November 2006 - London

IMAGE: The Mystic Marriage of St Catherine - St John Altarpiece [central panel] (1474-1479) by Hans Memling.

De Natura Rerum

2006-11-28T12:11:00.000Z

“A lie would have no sense unless the truth were felt as dangerous.”
Alfred Adler

The theme runs something like this – how to synthesise the lamas and the lineage, the psychologists with their insights, the slippery wilful mind with its annihilation…
Go on retreat and sit for hour after hour; be silent and feel the pressure of your mind at its margins; dive into systemic therapeutics or experiential magic; let the green and red world behind the world of appearances nestle its battered brow against your awkward shoulder and feel the tears run.

I was thinking about Anne Ancelin Schützenberger and her work with ‘the ancestor syndrome’, how in families there are often correlated dates on which people die in each generation (or get married or become ill or whatever); she uncovers traumas extant in the contemporary French and stems these wounds directly from the 1789 Revolution and subsequent Terror. Makes Tony Blair’s (old piano-grin himself) recent whispered not-quite-sorry about slavery tinkle the ivories of lip service more clearly, doesn’t it? The basic naked principle here, as Freud taught us, is the return of the repressed, or perhaps, dressed in velvet, the return of the unremembered – it matters not. As Adler points out we’re into the ice-sheet of lies, now melting in the frosty mandala of eco-collapse – and remember, the environment doesn’t begin where your skin meets the atmosphere, it interpenetrates your bios, your genus, your history and memory too – inside and out are of one taste.

Sticking with Adler a moment, he also notes somewhere that “Exaggerated sensitiveness is an expression of the feeling of inferiority” – something to bear in mind for those of us inclined towards feeling – and perhaps this is why (to the best of my knowledge) even the very astute Derrick Jensen has yet to light the literal fuse of his metaphoric weapons and blow up any actual dams. Certainly pertains to therapy and the dance of spaciousness and challenge – something we’ll focus into soon. But first, there are a few others to meet, starting with Virginia Satir. She told us that “problems are not the problem; coping is the problem”, and she was right, just as Jacob Moreno was right to identify the ‘unmittelbare Begegnung’ (‘living encounter’) as the time-limited, here and now, healing-potential of the moment where past and present meet. Just as Ivan Boszormenyi-Nagy referred rightly to “violent pursuit of one’s entitlement” as (I can hear Derrick Jensen applauding) ‘destructive entitlement’ that is the root of ‘family pain and hurt’. Can you tell what it is yet? No? How about if I introduce Milton Erickson? Bert Hellinger perhaps? Or Franz Ruppert or Albrecht Mahr? Alright, alright, you’ve got it – we’re steering a course for systemic or constellation based modalities of healing and the ‘knowing field’ approach to the therapeutic dynamic. Let’s pause a moment and take in the view – I can see the vessel emerging out of, say, Hellinger's ‘rules’ (chaos and order appearing together, naturally): – he sees radical inclusion (a systemic conscience requires the re-membering of anyone ‘forgotten’ in any systemic story – forgotten ones are re-folded into presence); he sees temporal hierarchy (in the system ancestors prevail, age counts and the flow of respect for those who went before is an index of constellated health – contrast that with the slippage of PoMo unremembering and the loss of all ‘Founders’); he sees that everyone has their own fate (and because of this no-one can take on another’s fate or replace them); and he sees the ‘unchangeable givens’ (the place where we can only agree to ‘what is’ – where, at the speaking of the permissive ‘Yes’, our fate becomes our destiny); finally he sees the need for a balance of giving and taking (the appropriateness of gratitude, recognition, reciprocity and the spiral flow of ‘upwards giving’ – a system enhancing its capacity to express love). Furthermore, he also sees that non-observance of these ‘orders of love’ leads to systemic imbalance, to hubris, inflation, delusions of grandeur and illusions of our own uniqueness and power.

Its useful at such points to recall that a ‘good intention’ is not always synonymous with a ‘right intention’ from a systemic perspective, for example, the child may try to save the mother, since this will make the child safer as well as remembering the echoed lost one three generations back – however, systemically, the child can never replace the parent – the temporal hierarchy trumps the good intention and an entanglement results – a trauma, a localized dysfunction within a broader system where disharmony is isolated into crisis seeking the shift of awareness.

Are you seeing what I’m seeing? What Hellinger calls ‘contextual is-ness’ becomes all important here – the dynamic balance between what we bring (trailing clouds of glory) and where we stand – an existential experimental razor-blade of now enfolding then. So we carry the wounds of the past, not just the personal past, not just the collective past, not only the transpersonal past, but the weight of life having existed at all. Like Joanna Macy’s ‘Work That Reconnects’ – you and I are a flash in the species past, we could choose to remember having gills, or leaves, or the intention to manifest at all – and in so doing we could approach the stars we are and always were and will become. This is ‘intergenerational psychotraumatology’. It's also Kairos, the place where we notice our fascination with resistance, the phenomena of our own wilful non-healing (as identified by Mark Jones in ‘A Change is as good as a Red’). This represents the edge and the experiment – the ordinary magic beyond the inflations of a needy ego.

It also points full-square at the necessity of continuity, of lineage, we might say. So there has to be a thread reaching back, not only the blood-line and cell-structure of our mitochondrial DNA (although certainly it includes that), but also a pattern of sound holding mind, of symbols leading heart, of imagination on fire with compassionate regard and inclusion. And more, even where lineage still exists in an unbroken and self-realised way, what is still required is a question. No constellation will work without an initiating issue, and no immersion into lineage will be permitted or opened without abisekha – anointing. Where there is a question it is not the question ‘does God exist?’ but, as Chogyam Trungpa shows us, ‘does the question exist?’. He goes on to note that of course, it doesn’t exist, and therefore neither does the asker, nor, by extension, God – yet it exists specifically through the perception of the asker, contextually, not from its own side – the very nature of illusion. He concludes, typically (and joyfully) – “let there be contradiction” as a sign of wellbeing.

I want to end with another consideration, in part from Adler, who says

“No experience is a cause of success or failure. We do not suffer from the shock of our experiences so-called trauma - but we make out of them just what suits our purposes.”

And in part from the work of Thogme Zangpo, author of the ‘37 Practices of a Bodhisattva’; he writes in stanza 24 that

“the various ills in our life that we suffer resemble the death of our child in a dream”

The dream runs, we grow old and grey but forget to notice that a dream is unfolding, forget that there is dream at all, become stuck to the reality we insist upon that all is at it seems, and as a result surmount our suffering with terror, holding “as truth what is merely illusion”. The child who died was always a dream child. The dreamer who is dying is also a child. There is no distinction between child, dream and dreamer worthy of the name – they are each empty of each other, yet manifesting difference for the sake of a healing flash.

The fruit, the path, the base of all this is the realisation that emptiness exceeds our ego, and that whenever we fail to hold this realisation (which for me is all the time I ever experience) we experience only illusion. We engage with a dancing fog-bound light shifting in deep currents of which we know nothing and perceive even less, yet we insist that we are ‘dealing with reality’ and are full of ‘good intentions’, systemically hamstrung by our partiality. Lacking all lineage, all linkage and flow, we become marionettes in the danse macabre. Let us go to the cemeteries and crematoria, inside and out, Now and Then, and dance until the veils become offering scarves stretching back to the arising of life, forward to illusion’s last breath, and the liberatory orgasm of being.

Kh
28.11.06

IMAGES: Kinkara [Special Dharma Protector for pratitioners of Heruka and Vajrayogini, also known as 'Father Mother Lord of the Charnel Grounds'.] (date unknown) by Andy Weber, Cupid and Centaur (1992) by Joel-Peter Witkin.

A Change Is as Good as a Red

2006-11-21T10:30:00.000Z

“Imagine a patient who goes to a doctor and tells him what he is suffering from. The doctor says, “Very well, I’ve understood your symptoms. Do you know what I will do? I will prescribe a medicine for your neighbour!” The patient replies, “Thank you very much, Doctor, that makes me feel much better.””

Anthony De Mello, Awareness (1990: Zondervan)

Inside our inner cinema the story goes something like this…if my wife was just like that film star; if my brilliance was just understood by the world; if my friends could just see how I am right about everything; if my children respected me…then I would be…

What? Happy maybe. Anthony De Mello (a Jesuit priest whose was alternately sanctioned and slated by his church) was clear about one thing: we do not want to be happy, because to be happy means we would have to sit up and recognise who we are and what is going on inside our heads…to be happy is to awake and we are all rather cosy inside our thick duvets of muddled thinking and projected need.

We ascribe meaning all over: to other people, to exterior things, events…if I could just get enough money; if I just read (and understand) the complete works of Western Civilisation; if I could just get that pretty girl/guy (delete as appropriate) on the street to take me in their mouth; if I was just as handsome and successful as that inner movie script said I could be…then what? Then what next?

De Mello is clear, we are not in love with someone but with our idea about someone (and a darn hopeful one at that); we are not sacrificing ourselves for others unless we want to (and we do for our own need, our own selfish generosity our own mutated crucifix); we are not a great person and we do not want to wake up…even as we sit on the meditation cushion for day 2 of the ever-so-long retreat we planned for months before - we do not want to wake up, we do not want to let go, because it is just too convenient to find meaning in anything, anything, but our own state of mind, our own being. Anything but that rag and bone shop, anything but the litter of myself strewn across the park of my biography, anything but that.

The martyr in my mind is but a sick point to prove to all those that crossed me…the pain in my body as I sit is my mind painting Rorschach sulks on my subtle skin. I do not want to wake up, and when I do want to wake up, I still do not want to wake up - for somewhere the fantasy remains that I will not have to let go of what I do not really want to (this is the negotiation we undertake as we endeavour to spiritualize… “surely now I am being too good to have to change that…”).

Without this real dark soil, the terra preta, the heaps of black Gold in the open cast mine of our selfish wisdom then the whitening will never really whiten. Without the whitening as pure as snow, as pure as the TV soap powder wet white dream then the chance to change and become red and full of life again will simply become a pressure against change, a funnel of everything about life we hadn’t tainted – discharged down the drain. If I then really try, my brothers, really try to do good in the world, and meditate and change for the benefit of sentient beings, if I always really try - then how trying will I become, if I do not give up on trying…?

So if I love sleeping - can I love sleeping so purely (with such white emotion) that sleeping becomes transparent? If I love sleeping - can I dream in such vivid Technicolor that the moths of the past bleach in front of the rainbow windows?…that the moths of the past change again into dreams which are happy to disappear against the midnight blue sky?…If so, then now what might I become? Or not become?

This is for Anthony De Mello whom I encountered for the first time yesterday (and for James whom read him to me) and who could, even in that short acquaintance on the page, inspire a sense of genuine loss when I read of his ‘untimely death’. This is also for Patrick whose decision to delay our meeting in order to meditate produced this fragment.

Mark Jones

IMAGES: Moonflower and Moth (c.2005) by Anita Munman, Meditation at Sunrise on the Varanasi Ghats, Uttar Pradesh, India by Olivier Follmi, Moth Prayer (2002) by Elizabeth Gómez Freer, Anthony De Mello [photographer & date unknown].

The Constant Gardener

2006-11-10T09:21:00.000Z

I was moved to write this brief piece after a solitary night viewing an old video of Bill Mollison the bearded Aussie who coined the phrase perma-culture (from permanent agriculture) to indicate a sustainable way of feeding ourselves and enjoying an abundant life without undue stress or harm to the land on which we live. The aspect of the video Global Gardener that inspired me the most was the way this man travelled, to parts of rural Africa, urban India, the Pacific North-West islands, Tasmania and the States (to name but a few of the places) and on arrival he taught people skills to adapt a sustainable way of living to suit their own particular environment and way of life. Here is the good bit though, this man returned to the places he had visited the next year, or within the next few years and the people that he had taught were up and running and were teaching the next generation! They had become a seed force sending new arrivals out to cultivate their own new area, like a veritable aussie apple-seed this man was planting a living tradition wherever he went in order that the life of that area was not dependent on him, or even those he taught in order to proliferate and grow. This surely is a way forward, an inspiration in a world of vast corporate farming conglomerates and mono cultures. This was a man who had tasted Eden back on his own ranch where he delighted in showing the camera how you could pick fresh fruits from countless varities growing wild and laze down for a snooze in the gardens close by the house (not even to be seen or disturbed) and who felt generous enough to share that potential. A man who could calmly clamber through the vast increasing deserts of the American South-West and illustrate very soberly how our greed, for water, for land reclamation was destroying the earth whilst quickly moving on to another place to do his little part in the counter flow to these dominating and disturbing trends. I was appalled at our ignorance, I was delighted by our potential when a real teacher comes.

The genius of Bill Mollison for me was that he taught the future teachers, that he gave to people in such a way that it empowered them to become carriers of the same wisdom to the extent as he openly admitted that many of his pupils now know more about the environmental needs of their own particular landscape than he ever would. Is this not the goal of psychotherapies, of spiritual teachings, the perennial wisdom? Not that the message should be displayed in shop windows as a kind of 21^st century window dressing for the existentially exhausted psyche…but that people take the time, the care (soren, in the formulation of Heidegger) to reach out and touch others so that this initially foreign other can unfold into their own potential so surely as to go on to touch others in equal measure. For Bill cared for the earth as true home, so those he taught cared also, for the true. The truth is a light, let us not worship gurus and institutions but instead this light that can guide us on our journey into the earth, the journey into ourselves. We need not sit and bow to the light house when it is the light itself that will guide our small ship home. The true teachers know that it is the light that guides and no edifice no matter how prominent or structurally immense can substitute for finding the compass and sextant inside. I thank all of those that helped me see the light inside myself, I thankyou Bill.

Mark Jones

IMAGE: Bill Mollison (2005), image lifted from Tagari.

Papier-mâché

2006-11-10T08:57:00.000Z

The week crumpled into a ball and discarded
faces we wore folded in on its surfaces
interior origami of the past
paper refuse, recyclate
mâchéd in the rain or machine
pulped to new purpose
and un-Friday-nightable.

The fresh perfume
in the first evaporations of alcohol
meets the taper of expectation
and IGNITES
like pure hydrogen in a test tube
filling the street
with the humidity of possibility.

Lariats of laughter
cracked through the air.
Lit windows are new stars
competing with gravity,
we spin in the pause between two
and
d
e
s
c
e
n
d.

Pockets light before coinage
the shrapnel of fractions
from rounds of notes
- easy to flag down bar staff
with a sterling banner.

The fist hit of pils
on the lips and the tongue
the purity of the premier cigarette
with its sincere cruelty
at the gum line,
& on the throat.

Right now,
we could carry on forever.

James Piers Taylor, 1st November 2006 - Ormskirk

IMAGE: L'anglais Warener au Moulin Rouge (1892) by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec.

Late Rising

2006-11-10T08:51:00.000Z

Closing my eyes
and facing the sun
stare into a nebula of blood

James Piers Taylor, 26th October 2006 - Wolverhampton

IMAGE: The Red Rectangle (2003), An archival image of the Red Rectangle, or HD44179, taken with the Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 onboard the Hubble Space Telescope. From NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

This Little Piggy Went To Market…

2006-10-26T14:43:00.000+01:00

Wearing his Ghandi shield, warding off the necrotic waft of the cleaver poised always above.
He knew, in his piggy heart, that the state has a monopoly on violence, but envisioned himself more in the role of midwife to emergent organic order than pinko terrorist threat. Which was a shame, since from the Market’s perspective our juvenile porcine hero amounted only to value as dead-weight, as uncovered meat shaved from the solitary screaming eye under a concrete hijab, fit for feeding to hairless gluebags in surplus period wehrmacht togs. In such bifurcations dreams are unmade, pig-blood is checked out for redness, the sluices of civilization are switched; piggy brains become deterministic, synchronic flows are disallowed on hygiene grounds, your attention becomes a toxic mimic of the love our piglet-mirror thought he served, now braised on a pyre of old orders, laced with the finest pressings of totalitarian agriculture. In the land of sugar mountains, wine lakes, wheat alps and milk seas, the little piggies learned to starve and spew. In the land of imagination the fences grow taller and more razor-like than ever.

Kh
26.10.06

IMAGE: Superschwein from Bayer 'Animal Health Division'

Mason of Dreams

2006-10-25T14:25:00.000+01:00

Mason of dreams
fashions houses from the sand
reads impermanence in the tide
and lives in the highest dunes
waiting for the great wave
that will pull up the skirt of the sea
revealing in one terminal glimpse
the smooth white flesh of the seabed
before mantis striking the land
and severing his head clean off.

James Piers Taylor, 24th October 2006, in transit London-Newport

IMAGE: Apocalypse Wave (2002) by Paul Cumes

Patripsychosis

2006-10-24T11:46:00.000+01:00

He came for us out of the biotypes
Pituitary hero in his own time
Telling his six thousand year old story
Withering alternatives to fiction

He prizes power and straight lines
ID cards and Big Pharma -
Cares nothing for the paradoxical frog, goes on
Playing smackyface with mother nature

Till the white-coated biostitutes make utterance –
‘It cannot be proven that fish need water to live’, or
Crawl under TB blankets with the spinning gossip of nurses;
Woe betide the wobbegong, the boomslang reels in pain

Our latter-day sainted Zeus will make you all produce
Acres of abstract code to steer his missile algebra
Through stratospheres of ambivalence, never other than up
Staring at the day world through tomorrows techno-mask

All I ever wanted was a pangolin as compadré
But horny scales are no defence from star wars armoured
Death drills, rolling up has no effect on bulldozer will
- ask the forest, ask the seabed, ask the brindled voice in your head

Equids served his bow-strung lust, roaming the steppes in genocide
Like the umbrella mouthed gulper, like thalidomide rex
All mouth and teeth and trousers, arms like Francis Bacon
Sentencing you to instant coma, down comes the spider

To live on inside you, infanticidally
Owning your breakfast cerebellum
Owing him tokens of vellum – paid to be
King for the day on the day you die

Kh
24.10.06

IMAGE: Patriarchy Says: "Everything As It Is... " Via F.L.A.M.E.

Become Shamen V

2006-10-23T09:13:00.000+01:00

for David Greenslade

Upending the thunder
and letting it roll again
cherished by the clouds
the rain cwching his toes.

A child of the hedgerows
bent chwith
walking through the nursery
seeds cascading from broken pockets

I can wear the nimbus
and the curlaw
as easy as the sun
this raiment is familiar

There are more pockets
in these clothes
than stitches

Rolls his blanket out
upon the ground
sits barefoot
strides rolled up
sets his moustache alight.

James Piers Taylor, 20th October 2006, London

IMAGE: Cernunnos depicted on the Gundestrup Cauldron (1st Century B.C.), held by the Danish Nationalmuseet in Copenhagen.

Become Shamen IV

2006-10-20T09:58:00.000+01:00

for Dave Bailey

All night long
all day
watch the sun rise twice a day
or not all.

Hold the flannel to your forehead
through your fever
replenish it with water
from the dish by your bedside.

I hear the wind too,
there

it travels between the boards

and there

the door lifts and falls
in its embrace

But the wind will still
the night will pass
I carry this candle
and it will not be extinguished.

James Piers Taylor, 19th October 2006, London

IMAGE: Ganjin Statue at the Toshodaiji Temple, Nara, Japan (2002) from the series Pictures from the Surface of the Earth by Wim Wenders

Become Shamen III

2006-10-19T09:28:00.000+01:00

for Jon Hellier

Who wouldn’t want to be a trouble maker?

Walk in my footprints,
if you must,
but the sea will
wash it all away
behind us
in any case.

I can write on the glass
in my own juices
and when the sun strikes the window
we’ll stink out our message to the world.

Who can resist my painted features
when they split to issue
chanson
fable
the very moment a heart broke?

James Piers Taylor, 18th October 2006, London

IMAGE: McDonald's Hamburgers invading Japan Geisha and Tattooed Woman (1975) by Masami Teraoka.

Become Shamen II

2006-10-18T09:20:00.000+01:00

for Keith Hackwood

The flesh falls off
tightens round the bone
like sun dried wet leather
the brain pulls back the eyes
into the skull.

Spindly fingers of an outstretched hand
are lengthened by a span of uncut nail
pointing skyward
pointing to the ground.

A man stands completely
within his own shadow
a silent wind picks up his hair
quiet aurora to his head

many questions are asked
and he nods his acquiescence
to the presenting issue

yes

he says

there is still time for this

James Piers Taylor, 18th October 2006, London

IMAGE: Mitsukini Defying the Skeleton Spectre (c.1845) by Utagawa Kuniyoshi.

Phantom Exuberance

2006-10-17T12:35:00.000+01:00

"The only limits to our realization of tomorrow will be our doubts of today"
Franklin Delano Roosevelt

Now Newton’s cradle is ten Earth’s wide
here is the news:

Colliding Ricochet Impacts Slope Gaia-ward
At The Speed Of Optimism – but
look to our rocketry, sophisticating fireworks
raining seeds of justice from pearl skies;
or look at the pyramid builders
from whom we learned all we knew
until the black-hatted necromancers stoked
the engines of lust with mummies
co-opting the ghost slaves to our project -
so today you have eighty or an hundred,
I have more being higher on the pyramid,
next year some of us will have a thousand
think of the progress in that statistic!

None of which stopped the cerebral haemorrhage
seeking out the cripple-king,
the brain trust trussed up in barb-mired knots
dead meat, solar battery, fleshy node
of some future device lost in a blank
acreage at the back of the white mind
awaiting techno-fix, Walt Disney’s cadaverous grin

America swollen to 300 million
but broken since 1939 -
spun language tails into edges
faced with a margin, a limit
the eruption of a minute into
fragmentation shards,
shrapnel of capital’s incendiary whorl
the paint is flaking on that varnished world
the rust that won’t sleep also will not vote
for tomorrow's doubts, or today's demise

kh
17.10.06

IMAGE: Gesit - from Matschbogs

Become Shamen

2006-10-16T17:10:00.000+01:00

for Mark Jones

When my friends grow old
they will become shamen
let their diaries breathe
sheela na gigging
or waving their penises in the air.

It will all be desert then.

Their faces blue with the woad of tears
and those who died early
will hang around as ghosts.

Their eyes upon each other
wishing they had spoken earlier
hands on shoulders
and legs giving way.

James Piers Taylor, 16th October 2006

IMAGE: Soyun - a 100 year old Mongolian Shaman featured in the radio documentary The Face of the Shaman

A Walk in the Woods

2006-10-12T12:01:00.000+01:00

It's my birthday - 35 years old, half way through if we take the Biblical three score years and ten to be our guide (I do not) - making me officially middle aged by Christian reckoning. There are an increasing number of gray hairs in my beard, I may choose to consider these as evidence of increased sagacity.

35 is a 7 year, another point in what some read as important lunar cycles - positing transformation points at ages of 7, 14, 21, 28, 35, 42 etc. Is this just arbitrary? Whenever we reach a point of reflection in our life, it is easy to seek out some exterior system that might validate our introspection: 28-30 - its Saturn Return; 33 - the age Jesus achieved Christhood, or Gautama Buddhahood; 35 - what can I find? seven year lunar cycles... anything else?

In Dane Rudhyar's reading of the words of Krishna in the Bhagavad Gita, the age of 35 is one of the seed points of the cycle of life, the Summer point of fecundation.

At the point of mid-life the conscious self of man, like Dante, explores his depths and his heights and joins the other self that pours down from the heart of Light.
(A Philosophy of Operative Wholeness (1930))

Well maybe Dane. But the evocation of Dante brings a more familiar feeling to mind, the opening tercet in Longfellow's translation of the Divine Comedy:

MIDWAY upon the journey of our life
I found myself within a forest dark,
For the straightforward pathway had been lost.

Recognising that these are some of the most quoted lines in Western literature however, I am removed slightly from my solipsism and forced to reflect on the universality of the experience referred to. Again I question - was there ever this straight-forward path? are we any more lost at mid-life than we are at any other time? All the previous moments of confusion wash back in, the tidal pulse of life's questioning. Jung saw the analytic process as not a linear path, 'the straightforward pathway', but a circular or cyclical journey, and so too our personal meditations on ourselves and the world.

In Jung's work on alchemy and the process of individuation, he writes of the movement from the albedo to the rubedo in a way that may remind us of the Rudhyar lines quoted above:

The growing redness (rubedo) which now follows demotes an increase of warmth and light coming from the sun, consciousness. This corresponds to the increasing participation of consciousness, which now begins to react emotionally to the contents produced by the unconscious.
(Mysterium Coniunctionis (1956))

So is this mid-life madness, more Rubedo? At first the process of integration is fiery conflict - this confusion. But amidst all this conflict and confusion there is soul-making, there is the work. Of course this work is always ongoing, and of course it cycles around again and again - but cycles are not necessarily repetitions. This cycling may be, to take another archetypal image, a spiral or spirals - like Dante we spin through our infernos, purgatories, paradises - repeating patterns but not exiting from the spirals as we were when we entered them, who we were when we entered them.

When we leave the path, lose ourselves in the woods, appear to be going around in circles – perhaps this is not such a bad thing. When we try and force shape and understanding on our experience, try and systemise ourselves, adjust to the “normal”, straight forward, socially acceptable routes mapped out for us - we may miss our own instinctual recognition of our needs, of the way forward for us. So let’s end today’s walk with Dante again:

As the geometrician, who endeavours
To square the circle, and discovers not,
By taking thought, the principle he wants,

Even such was I at that new apparition;
I wished to see how the image to the circle
Conformed itself, and how it there finds place;

But my own wings were not enough for this,
Had it not been that then my mind there smote
A flash of lightning, wherein came its wish.

Here vigour failed the lofty fantasy:
But now was turning my desire and will,
Even as a wheel that equally is moved,

The Love which moves the sun and the other stars.

James Piers Taylor, 12th October 2006, London

IMAGES: Dante Astray in the Dusky Wood (1861) by Gustave Doré; The Alchemist in Search of the Philosopher's Stone (1771) by Joseph Wright.

Engaged Realism - Godzilla Vs Bambi

2006-10-10T13:06:00.000+01:00

The father of permaculture, Bill Mollison, once said that the whole of human experience could be summed up in the phrase ‘think right or you’re dead’. He extrapolated from this survivors’ view of human history, the deductions that i) we have survived thus far and ii) we therefore have the experience, the nous, and the genetic predisposition to ‘right think’ our way beyond an increasingly bleak present. If we place these comments alongside the contemporary anthropological position, (that civilization has a pathological affect on human experience, not to mention the biosphere and all life within it, and that prior to civilizational modes of settlement and domestication of flora and fauna humanity existed in prevailingly healthy dynamic equilibrium with natural systems) we come to see that, as large mammals of the Pleistocene era, we human beings are embedded in a life-way that the vast majority of us have become profoundly ignorant about. And in our ignorance and traumatic ‘fall’ into a plethora of divisive ‘doings’ (e.g. the division of labour, within and without and the irredeemable alienation that flows thereafter) we have become creatures of ecocidal, destructive and life-fearing action. We have lost our being.

Yourmindfire wrote in his recent piece ‘It’s the end of the world as we know it…’ on this very site, of ways in which we can begin to engage with the scale and urgency of the issues we face as a species – and rightly drew our attention to many awareness-raising media and many first actions we can take. The purpose of this piece is to build on that lead, to begin the process of descent into the shadow territory of our slavery, our rage and our culpability – beyond which lie the farther shores of reclaiming our capacity to ‘right think’ and therefore survive and flourish. I contend that without this dimension, we are as good as lost – since any action we take will be partial, occluded, implicitly attached to fundamentally traumatised states – and therefore we will be acting from a hell-state, lashing out or rushing to fix surfaces, while diversities and depths unknown to us are ignored or even pushed extinct.

This piece is a candle flame in a cave – casting very little light, perhaps revealing the shudder of shapes that will terrify and haunt our imaginations, or awaken the primal fears in our bellies. It could blow out at any moment leaving us stranded in absolute darkness, perhaps on precipitous paths or in treacherous flooded sumps. There are no guarantees, no insurance policies, no–one to sue or complain to when reality bites. And the cave is no stranger to us either – once we lived here contentedly, sharing the space with the great bear and other teachers whom once we respected, and now we murder or exhibit as lifeboat gene-stocks in urban zoos. Older than Plato’s cave, deeper than Lascaux, further back than the petroglyphs and ochre marks can take us – we are beyond participation mystique, beyond our own ego-centred need for plastic convenience and motorway freedom – confronting our own innermost outer edge, between a world of death and a world of the potential of life. Back before evolution’s wrong turning.

Then suddenly there’s a film projected on the cave wall, who knows where its coming from – maybe your pineal gland, or that glowing crystalline intelligence way above our heads – a faun is eating green shoots of lush grass, while a huge and menacing shadow claw hovers ever closer to his beautiful innocent head. At this point the sage voice of Mollison cuts in again:

..most people are still irresponsible . . . and seem to be dangerously shortsighted when it comes to their ability to perceive the immutable barriers that we're bound to hit sooner or later. It's like that classic film short Godzilla vs. Bambi, you know. Humankind is flitting about carelessly — like the innocent Bambi — consuming enormous amounts of energy with no thought for the future. But Godzilla — those inescapable laws of nature — is breathing down Bambi's neck . . . the shadow of a giant foot, of the great paw that will soon come down, hovers over him..

This is the cave we sat in for decades with eyes closed, in deep meditation – whilst outside the world woke up to the wheel, and the plough, and the metallurgy of power, the 747 and every silicone hardware hi-tech breakthrough steam-driven nuclear techno-fix saviour that inhuman floridly stunted imaginations could concoct. Much beauty, much labour saving, a slice of ‘easier’ living, a growing distance from self and other, from all and nature, losing the rainforest for the sake of a flat-pack wardrobe. But in the cave there is still hope – as the Tibetan experience hints…

Tibet was very backwards and very violent until about thirteen hundred years ago. It was a violent, conquest-oriented place, actually. They had big dynasties and empires and harassed their neighbors and looted and pillaged and behaved just like we do now. This movement of inner revolution and nonviolence sprang up most powerfully in India, which is where the Buddha chose to be reborn in this cycle of history. It was a society that centralized enlightenment and made that the highest aim...

(Robert Thurman)

Something about an inner technology, humanely scaled, whether brought forth by Buddhas or preached by Christs gifted by Elders or whispered in scriptures of leaf and soil, these are reconnective clues – priest-surmounting, liberatory in their clearest expression – a doctrine of the cosmic child, the Age of Horus foretold by Crowley now arising in the folds of the medulla-cave-mind. ‘You’ve gotta get in to get out’ as Peter Gabriel told us, whilst animistically shamanising the daffodil.

The flame is flickering, I’m losing you, losing it – this was always the risk. A few last words before the light goes completely. Mollison moans again –

...there are two very distinct ways of looking at the land. One is to ask, "What can I demand this land to do?" That viewpoint — which is the prevailing philosophy of commercial agriculture — can lead only to the use of force on the fragile soil. A permaculturist asks instead, "What does this land have to give me?" Anyone who asks that question will naturally work in harmony with the earth to produce a sustained ecology...

And if we can’t love the soil, how can we love ourselves and our interdependence with the web of all earthly life? The soil that has no priest, no doctor, no ‘democratically elected’ representative to represent its interests, (just a growing army of ‘soil scientists’ to demarcate and document its passing) and yet without whom we all perish, taking a billion year branch of the life-journey with us, as we neuter the limb of life’s tree through our Bambi-like attachments to the image of our own specialness.

Or another drift of light across the dumbshow lens –

...the only sane response to the insanity of our postindustrial age is to gather together a few friends and commence to build the alternative, on a philosophy of individual responsibility for community survival...

But what? I’m not sure – I’m no expert, I don’t have the skills – I have no experience… I know these defences, they are also mine. But listen, who does it fall to to create the causes for survival and the thriving of life? Only You. And me. A final muttering from the troglodyte Mollison sheds a last candle daub on the matter, asked of responses to permaculture’s initial vision he responds:

Well, I can only say that there was a stunned silence at first, since the concepts were seen as being terribly radical. The ideas were intuitively accepted very quickly, though, by nonprofessorial people. And many of the enthusiastic responses came from women. In fact, 70 to 80% of the letters I now receive come from women . . . they seem to see immediately that we've got something here. On the other hand, scientists — male or female — don't see, mainly because they're used to teaching a passive and nonreactive system. Such individuals don't teach reactivity, and they don't practice activity. Everything is on the blackboard, and nothing is in the garden.

The light dies, darkness reclaims space – back where we came in – but are your eyes open or shut? Are we real enough yet? Can we please think right now?

KH
10.10.06

All Bill Mollison quotes from 'Permaculture - Ecosystems for the Future', interview in Mother Earth News (Issue #66 - November/December 1980).

Robert Thurman quote from 'Engaged Realism', interview in Mandala (October/November 2006).

IMAGES: Bambi Meets Godzilla, anonymous web-image in homage to the film Bambi Meets Godzilla (1969) created by Marv Newland; Permaculture Flower by David Holmgren

How do you like them apples?

2006-10-09T16:42:00.000+01:00

I have no respect for the police
they can see it in my face
I don’t have
to say
a
thing

But every Eve already has me
passing by through this extra-eden
with no visible weapon
no visible cuffs
yet I would willingly walk
to whichever gaol
hand myself over
and confess.

I do not disrespect the police
but I do not share their faith in their authority
I see the clothes and shiny things
which are supposed to communicate
status, powers invested, my obedience
and these appear to me as
starchy
uncomfortable
ill-fitting.

While Eve’s every gesture
each combination of cloth
contains a grand mystery
which can brook only worship
uncalled for
but unavoidably offered
and I’ll stop all my scrumpying
for her cider.

James Piers Taylor, 9th October 2006, London

IMAGE: Policeman marionette (c.1870-1890) by the Tiller family Marionette Company, held at the Victoria & Albert Museum.

Auto De Fe

2006-10-03T11:51:00.000+01:00

Step into the square with emphatic strength
to witness the trial of faith
the mass will be preached in empathic length
edifying humiliation
for a billion primetime viewers
behind a billion dark glass veils

Put on you cilice, hair-shirt or iron-maiden cap
join the throng here in the Plaza Mayor
or here in the Plaza Corredera, here since 1481
Seville-born and boisterous, theatrical
sensational, ecclesiastical and civil -
now watch them come to
shave the heads of the apostates
scared heretics, scourged disbelievers
shame them in processions of filth
for ever dreaming differently, or whispering
(I have heard them)
‘I enrage the genitals of Davros with bananas’

You and I Inquisitorial,
anti-seditionary authority throned
in the jaded tear of red Vatican silk
to hear proclamation and sentence merge -
we policemen of god take a Jesuit stance
two for each dead man walking
interceding for the soul
decorously gagging each mouth

contritio – I’m so sorry
confessio – yes, it was me
satisfactio – I deserve all I get

Prepare the quemadero, the burning place
where we all relate to red-faced otherness
in porkchop flames and longpig streaks of bacon char -
we will hear the conversions first and
disposed unto mercy, let the garrotte be primed -
but flame the faces of these whoremongers
luego resuelto, lets the crowd build
and while we’re about it, throw on the corpses
of those who died under persuasion
let them feed the fire for their former friends,
with effigies too, of the already fled

Condemned to burn, billed for the privilege
soul queered over coals of despair
trust immolated, wounds seared shut
the spectacle rising in new apparition
barbarous sin expunged in civility -
god its hot here and I thought I saw a viper
crawl horridly through this cauterised brain
and there again, by the ovulating pope
a branch of mutton that once was your sister
clustered in flesh-ropes of melting skin
spelling ‘desire’, Latinate tails in the curl
of blue fire and dream fire -
wild screams within the carelessly rotted stake
we are pinned to but freed from

Who by fire in the heart of the crowd
who in the gold and mitre of office
who with the brand and garrotte in his hand
hooded and bent to his killing task?
Who in judgement tightly wrapped
who in the leer of election night
who in the glow of ancient green light
who ripped open in horse play
who in power at the crown of sighs
who in blindness to the orange skies
who at the terminal boarding
who keying orange juice futures by laptop
forgot the earth and her wet clay
forgot to breathe and pushed her away
seizing the wrist of the shortest day
that must be punished for what it might say
and for love, destroyed the fruit of love
for peace, eviscerated babies with shrapnel
for purity, fed the furnace with flesh
for enlightenment, drank black bile
from the fountain of hopelessness
for health, killed the soul of the world
for beauty, cut off Her lips and nose,
made tasteless marionettes from her hair
to mock and smear Her murder in lies
reported as justice, as no surprise at
the end of history triumphal
memory gone extinct
clash of civilizations
lacking civility
clucking madly
across time
and space
and race
waiting
for an
angel
to blow
the horn
plenty
of
empty
at saxophone time
your way, my way, no way
life knows only one way, open
motherly, embracing and otherly
in blood and milk and mud and silk and
bone and teeth and hair and scale, feather and leaf
stem and trunk, shell and beak and cellular pulsing, in
mitochondria and fractal consciousness, in rock and magma
and salt sea water, in rain and snow and the desert heat, prickly pear
and lemongrass nests, the flash of a salmon in bear river rapids
the screech of seagull, old yearning of wolves
gales in the ocean, bees in the petal-field
life in diversity uniting, unfolding
creating spaces and endless spaces, supporting
compassionate action
nothing to grow and nowhere to go
the play of forms in ceaseless dancing
tripled and tripled and tripled again
yielding flow, beyond language and thinking
animate substance, inscaped forgiveness, foreverness,
spaciousness gifted in sentient arcs, free and unparalleled
allowable, liveable, streaming fire-tears alive in a simple new rain
between faith and fate, fair and free, hope smelted to crystalline gems
wish-fulfilling cataracts, bone-fuelled and more beautiful in being
than any papal/presidential/kingly sanctioned dream – world-born,
earth–fruited, squeezed by life from ashen debt
rising on trenchant butterfly wings, the deathless death’s head smiling.

kh 3.10.06

IMAGES: Burning of the Heretics (Auto-da-fé), (c. 1500) by Pedro Berruguete, Auto-da-fe on Plaza Mayor, (1683) by Francisco Rizi. Both paintings in Museo del Prado, Madrid.

Nightingale Floor

2006-10-02T18:08:00.000+01:00

Walking on the nightingale floor
Again
The dance of a suitor
To a music of creaks
That may be the particular serenade
Which opens this fortress
To Spring.

Behind fortifications:
Palaces

Within palaces:
Gardens

Inside gardens:
Rendezvous
Collocation
And selves without boundary.

Within fortifications:
Archers and arrows

Inside arrows:
Poisons – bitter

Behind bitterness:
Displacement
Distance
The capacity of the void.

But risk all this
For the palatial gardens
And for rendezvous
Collocation
And selves without boundary.

Make a music
From these creaks
Eye me between the paper shutters
And call off your guards.

James Piers Taylor, 24th September 2006, Essex

IMAGE: Himeji-Jo (Himeji Castle Evening - the Enthronement Edition) (1926) by Yoshida Hiroshi.

NOTE: Nightingale floors, or uguisubari, were floors designed to make a chirping sound when walked upon. These floors were used in the hallways of some temples and palaces. The squeaking floors were used as a security device, assuring that none could sneak through the corridors undetected. (definition lifted from Wikipedia).

Three centuries ago when last we were lovers

2006-10-02T15:41:00.000+01:00

Three centuries ago when we last were lovers
The passage of one us to the grave
Was leavened by an act of seership
That prophesied us in encounter again
At this hour in this place
To walk again together
To share each others sight
And in the moment of that prophesy
We hid within a promise of the eternal

And did not consider
The fact also provided
That in this iteration of our souls
Love would be thwarted
That some polar force in the aether
Would make our bodies ache
With an uneven charge
That would not brook union
But would spill electricity about
In a mess of crazy.

James Piers Taylor, September 26th 2006, London

IMAGE: The Cycle of Samsara, courtesy of Krishna.com

It’s The End Of The World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine)

2006-09-27T09:46:00.000+01:00

Apocalypse, Crisis, Endgame, the Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight, the Long Emergency, the Party’s Over…

It’s pretty certain that you’ll know some of these recent book titles or phrases du jour, even if you haven’t read the books or use the turn of words yourself. It’s hard to ignore the fact that some pretty big chickens are coming home to roost. And it’s easy to look to the horizon, catch the dark clouds amassing and see only bad times ahead.

But there’s another way of looking at this, and in many of the books using these phrases you can find it. To call on another title - Is this the “Great Turning”?

Al Gore reminds us in “An Inconvenient Truth” that in Chinese the word for crisis (wēijī) is formed of two characters – those for danger (wēi) and opportunity (jī).

An Apocalypse is an “unveiling” – in an Emergency – something is emerging…

I could focus here on the problems we face, as a species, as a planet, as Gaia – the very particular shits that are hitting our particular fan: global warming; fossil fuel depletion and energy peak; poisoning of the biosphere; destruction of the soil; deforestation; a great extinction of flora and fauna; extirpation of indigenous peoples and their ways of life; war after war inna Babylon; soul death of millions… - if you don’t see these things already, then it’s time to open your eyes.

But perhaps it’s better to focus here on the opportunity not the crisis. The mantle has fallen on us. May you live in interesting times goes the fabled curse – well so be it, what is life without purpose? You want to make a difference? You want to do good? You want to be part of the movement to save the world? Well, you are in luck – you were born at exactly the right time.

Recently Victor H. Mair, Professor of Chinese Language and Literature at the University of Pennsylvania has pointed out that in the Chinese character for Crisis the jī of wēijī should not be considered to mean “opportunity” exactly but, in fact, means “something like "incipient moment; crucial point (when something begins or changes)." Thus, a wēijī is indeed a genuine crisis, a dangerous moment, a time when things start to go awry”.
Your Planet needs YOU!

Change is Now; Things that seem to be solid are Not. “Be the change you want to see in the world”, Gandhi told us. Buckminster Fuller said we should ask ourselves: "If success or failure of this planet and of human beings depended on how I am and what I do...How would I be? What would I do?"

So get informed and get active. There was never a better time for you to act than NOW.

Get Informed:

Ask around – what’s going on?

Find out where your food comes from.

Find out where your water comes from.

Find out where your energy comes from.

Name 5 plants indigenous to where you live, now name 5 more.

BOOKS

Hartman, Thom – The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight

Heinberg, Richard – The Party’s Over, Powerdown

Jensen, Derrick - Endgame

Kunstler, James Howard – The Long Emergency

Lovelock, James – The Revenge of Gaia

FILMS

The End of Suburbia

An Inconvenient Truth

WEBSITES:

Global Public Media

Energy Bulletin

Post Carbon Institute

Get Active:

Speak to your neighbours

BOOKS

Berry, Thomas – The Great Work: Our Way into the Future

Hillman, Mayer - How We Can Save the Planet

Korten, David - The Great Turning

Macy, Joanna - World as Lover, World as Self

FILMS

How Cuba Survived Peak Oil

WEBSITES:

Permaculture

Bioneers

The Community Solution

Transition Culture

James Piers Taylor, 26th September 2006, Essex/London

IMAGE: Gaia's Garden (2006) by Saiaii (Jennifer Reagles).

Three Men in a Boat

2006-09-25T15:05:00.000+01:00

“Tradition indicates that three levels of consciousness are available to us: simple consciousness, not often seen in our modern technological world; complex consciousness, the usual state of educated Western man; and an enlightened state of consciousness, known only to a very few individuals, which is the culmination of human evolution and can be attained only by highly motivated people after much work and training.”

So says Robert Johnson in the first words of his book Transformations and he goes on to explore Don Quixote (literally Sir Codpiece) as an example of simple consciousness and Hamlet (a text penned within a few years of the Cervantes marvel) as the entrance into the dilemma of modern consciousness. The possibility of an enlightened view is represented for him in Goethe’s Faust. Don Quixote literalizes his own perception and imagination and his resultant magical thinking is his joy and his exuberant downfall. Hamlet receives the message from the unconscious, from the archetype, the ghost speaks to him of hidden truth and yet this information sends him into the crisis of how to act to return the natural and correct order of things. He is crippled by the terror of the rotten state being also his family, the lingering smell of death on the family bedspread, the trauma of the primal scene conceived of by the sensitive and absurd youthful Freud.

Just with these two drawn into being so closely we can identify something perhaps of the modern dilemma. For every Bush denying Kyoto (a Quixotic stance of a far less charming kind that the venerable knight of la Mancha) there is a friend of mine agonizing over the global crisis, the threat of mass extinction, the emerging energy crisis and our incapacity to stop killing each other… "what can we do?" - we angst over together in our shared communities, our fragile temporary autonomous zones (thank you Hakim Bey!). For every china man caught in the big dam pot of gold there is an environmentalist grappling over whether it can be ethical to blow up dams or whether peaceful action can prevail. Is it Martin or Malcolm folks? Gandhi was a beautiful man who changed his world, his probably beautiful letter to Hitler to stop what he was doing did not do the deed, the fat man with the cigar was needed there… (a product of the very system Gandhi was bringing down around him…). Are we Hamlet or Quixote when we buy our dream catcher from its mass production line and sit in waiting for the wisdom of an ancient lineage to speak to us, whilst the blood of said lineage backs up in the drains of our cities?

I could go on… but instead to move onto the third man in the life boat – Faust, as realised by Goethe - is a man who makes a pact with the devil to experience his every desire but ultimately, and receptively (Johnson argues) rejects this pact for a more hard won truth. The subtleties of this text are worthy of a post in themselves and maybe that is what they will get on my return from the USA (where I will have added to my carbon footprint considerably to raise certain issues about the world crisis/transformation that it feels like to me, and let it be said, many others, we are entering deeply into). We can say though, that the Faustian pact is in thinking we can have it all: we simply cannot sell this lifestyle to everyone, there is not enough planet and resources to go around. Somewhere we have to get off the rollercoaster, press stop on the holo-deck and stop thinking we can download Helen of Troy in a cheerleader outfit… We will be forced to reconsider: our holidays; our commute; the whole nature of the 'burbs; not to mention our endless warmongering and state sponsored terrorisms. In this way we are like Faust…we have experimented with the highest level of human decadence and comfort and we have realized that we are still not satisfied, that the ultimate goal – real happiness - has still alluded us. For real happiness takes work and worth and honour, as the toltec teacher Miguel Ruiz teaches - it takes impeccability of word – not lying to ourselves or others, not lying to ourselves folks… so much harder than it sounds – to stop the inner voice, to stop the I am great/I am crap dialogue… wow the relief would create near atomic energy levels in this confused entity! Is this part of the new energy resource we are seeking – not a techno saviour to lead us into ever more fecund consumerism but an inner shift into a more direct awareness of ourselves as dwelling, as participating in this world?

Our self-consciousness can cripple us (like Hamlet) or through genuine awareness, honesty and effort to stay with our own integrity it can liberate us(as in the end of Faust). Which is it to be? For no amount of yearning is going to see us go back to a romantic idyll and whatever kind of world the generations that follow us end up living with this is no simple return to Eden… nor will it be the Hell of the End timers… What it will be is what we make it… hand in hand with the Soul of the World.

Mark Jones

IMAGES: Don Quichote (1970) , Hamlet Stabs Polonius (1973) (from the Hamlet Suite), Le Vieux Faust (1969) (from the series Faust - La Nuit de Walpurgis) all by Salvador Dali.

An Eleventh of September

2006-09-22T12:03:00.000+01:00

Flybitten swelling hand
I think I missed a class
Or more
Perhaps an entire semester
Or decade
In which they
Built a digital story
The preparation
And preface
To a dream

In a crack
Some shadows built a college
Where they spoke of the deity
And his requirements
For the greater pavement
And shed a slice
Of umbra
Across the road
To darken
Distant furniture.

Winter will crush
The insect
This week will
Deflate the palm
Analogue answers
Will whisper tech
In Chinese version
The fallen furniture:
Analytic monument
To the inefficiency and waste
Of the Halogen.

James Piers Taylor, 20th September 2006, Birmingham

IMAGE: 2000 year old mummy(2005) CT Scan image made at Stanford University

El Bosco

2006-09-21T14:54:00.000+01:00

‘Master, cut the stone out – my name is Lubbert Das’

Wire, ‘Madman’s Honey’

Dawn is wrenched by a donkey, braying at the sun
a burro coughing at the stalled haywain on the
feral mountain, shades are roaming unbridled
a flower in a cup will be the cure of folly -
but he refuses to pull; his master, throatless, croaks
a Davros command at the star-blind mammal
sets a scurrying fidget of impossible feet, lizard
kitten, cloven hoofed and snorting, the pursuit
of night, time unboundaried and shiftless, spinning
on a ceiling fan with a million lurid takes on the crime,
the mind a squeezed scintilla, giving good strappado
by the sainted ounce, sleeplessly cured like mountain ham
in smoky bars and melted fats, bleeding from the
right ear, still up for a Palestinian hanging
as infantile footsteps echo the bald dry halls of a once
unimaginable Alhambra; exquisite the pinch
of the red torturer, a garden of delights brought low -
in whose hell is this adoration set?
Behind what vaulted screens and perfect abstract
Patterns, is atomic melancholy to be wrought?
Like Dali I am swept through the enigma without end
And washed up in fistfuls of rag on the tongue of
El Gran Masturbador
and so I glean the pocked canvas for clues
all focus and attention bent to the knee in the balls

I whisper the name of the One Who Can Help
Jeroen Van Aken; of course he ignores me being
dead almost five hundred years, but that doesn’t
mean he can’t hear me -
a knowing look is all I need, St Anthony provides
the eyes, and trials of purification commence
flowing with the wildest pang, the fullest wrench
of orbit, a moon sized scar on the flank of my earth
swung in the soulful weight of a donkey’s lust.
Life mirrored, sensitivity melted in curves
bastardised and mutilated, ruined in gorgeous
feathers of despair, like the arse that breeds pelicans
and the finger with a mouth bent to fellate your dream,
loose and lost in the grip of such cost
nothing can bear the same fruit ever again
the apple is rotten but still you must eat
I squeezed the black oranges myself
and then they squeezed me, pip-smashed
peeled and condemned to love, movements
in nauseous gyroscopic arrays, burnt by
the sun that didn’t die, howling in dust in the lay-by
of longing, choked, holy, deified Beatle
in whom the river finds promises of tomorrow
I cleave the triptych of misery with a sob
And am escorted from the scene

Kh
21.9.06

IMAGE: detail from 'Hell' panel of The Garden of Earthly Delights (c.1504) by Hieronymous Bosch

Pulsing the Pastures

2006-09-18T10:08:00.000+01:00

Pulsing the pastures
the spring rod I hold
all mental and yet still
bowing and straightening
to some rhythm 'neath the tilth
feet treading to the senescence of grass
each step a sonar signal
to the earthworm and her burrowing kind
root twist and earth crumble
a fungus drifts through the soil
and I had seen only dirt before
dead cake and the murder of loam
the parched remains of a chemistry experiment
this ruined laboratory of a field.

James Piers Taylor 17th September 2006, Essex

IMAGE: Lucketts (2005) by Jo March available from Tabretts.

Sonnet for Helen

2006-09-15T09:57:00.000+01:00

I break your ocean surface with my breath
Rippling white manes, the horses of the sea ride out
To meet my longing, to witness a drowning swimmer
Suddenly restored, unsunk from dark stone depths

And the sea-floor pirouette; breathing out and in, the
Presence of soul, green flash of the scouting eel
In the reef around your heart, now a coral flowered
Garden where once the ships of war ran aground.

Tender of the Shallows and the Deep, Tide Keeper,
Your Moon shed her red tear across my briny heart
Calling her thousand crabs to the shore,

Applauding this ancient lifeboat,
O Open your wild heart wide
At the launching of our love-craft

kh 14.9.06

IMAGE: 'Byzantium' (1988), Bronze Statue by Erte available from Fine Art Site

Today I Weigh

2006-09-15T09:30:00.000+01:00

Today I weigh the mass of my flesh and experience
Standing on a scale, sucking numbers from the dial
Calibrating abstractions for the seal in my belly
Who barks and delights in a fish-clap display.
Here are the numbers of my fat, of my bone
Of my gristle and hair, of my skin, marrow and juices -
So today I weigh:

164.6 Pounds
74.6 Kilograms
11.7 Stone
149 Artels
7.4 Yoctagrams
4.49 Dalton
1.751 Bags of Portland Cement
2736 Roman Uncias
23.5 Clove
0.164 Kip
80.6 Machnd
2.9 Truss
0.007 Vagon
80 Seer
2.9 Firkin
2 Indian Maund
7.61 Hyl
0.07 Fother
0.293 Candy
57,510 Scruples of Troy
746.6 Etto
4.496209739e-28 1998 Atomic Mass Units
0.0277 Chalder
0.15 Packen
48,008.3 Pennyweight
0.5 Tovar
149,322.6 Obolos
26151 Rebah
1.5 Zentner
1152200 Grain
4.18 Gigaelectronvolts
3.93161159e-26 Jupiters
288050 UK Carats
149.6 Hebrew Mina
0.42 Slinch
5.11 Slugs

Or One Keith

Kh
15.9.06

Image: Albert Einstein at the Blackboard modified via Hetemeel.com

Renal Colic

2006-09-13T20:35:00.000+01:00

We must gently obey and endure the lawes of our condition
(Michel de Montaigne, Essais (1580))

In the lee of the autumn equinoctial
Some curtained lunacy hath inspired inner tides
Which have rolled a pebble from minerals
Sifted through the skin of my organs.

I am journeying with the stone
Chamber lye makes its course about it
Nerves take its messages, acute
Yellow is intention
Now I void much gravel
And wonder what it ask of me?

The seventh house and Mars
Observe restraint

I am the hourglass to my own sand
A thwarted clepsydra
Marble in the cervix

Shadows on the CT
A tomography of the innermore
Sectioned, spliced
An image of der schatten
The ghost of gold elusive

In opposition, calling
The descendant,
Cytherean gravity
Nulligravida
A new vessel.

James Piers Taylor, 13th September - London

IMAGE: Ame und Psychor (1962) by Wolfgang Lettl

Leafmelt

2006-09-13T10:42:00.000+01:00

The forests will melt away with the snow
This new morning
puddles of leaves

James Piers Taylor, 11/9/2006 London

"It's going too fast. We will burn. Our global furnace is out of control. By 2020, 2025, you will be able to sail a sailboat to the North Pole. The Amazon will become a desert, and the forests of Siberia will burn and release more methane and plagues will return."
- James Lovelock interviewed in the article "The End of Eden", The Washington Post (September 2nd 2006)

IMAGE: Small Bodies of Water Set Mosaic (2005) by Chris Darling

Urus

2006-09-12T14:09:00.000+01:00

We had forgotten ourselves
slipped under the spilled ice-melt in
a quarter of a million year old fug
neglecting the limes of desire for
the leather straps of domestication

it took a cave and a nightmare
to summon the bull from his hole, to
lure his red-ragged eyeballs to stare
hot-slobbered and fire-maddened right
back through our souls

sol y sombra, so Lorca said, our
Duende roasted alive in the fire song
of Al-Andalus, the sun of blood, sun
of death, the midnight sun of flayed flesh
on such a night as this

Urus, you are us
Taurus, the two of us
Your stink of tauromachy,
I leap you blind, Picasso as my picador,
no sword for the meritless

in Ronda’s ring on the razor of shade
on bloodied sand, theatrically
smoothed, I hurled my horns at your smile
and met you eye to eye
my minotauromachia

kh
12.9.06

Image: The Bull (1945) by Pablo Picasso.

The Cross I Bear

2006-09-11T09:50:00.000+01:00

I came to my computer tonight to write something else…a piece that gave multiple points of reflection on the environmental, political and moral crisis I feel that we face upon this planet. Maybe I will still write this piece…but before I do I am struck by the Cross I bear…

Whilst I have never attended a church service as an adult other than in the Abbey on the island of Iona (in which I took part in the ceremony of feet washing, physically washing my mother’s feet…) Whilst I never loved the Sunday school which I was encouraged to leave (after becoming engaged in a heated debate with the Vicar that centred on whether a loving God could wish hell upon his creation…) Whilst I would hesitate profoundly before answering the question am I a Christian?...

I believe in Christ

There I said it. I believe in everything the man stood for, for every word he taught for every step he took in his brief and potent life. I would die for the message he brought, that there is real love that the kingdom is here now and we could live in it together…more importantly than dying for this – I would live for that truth. I would live for him as my king; I would live for the message of real, grounded, unabashed love here and now in this world, that miraculously in its multifaceted brilliance, like the skin of a salmon in the sun, could lead me home…

So here we are. I have said where I am coming from. I say this even though millions have been tortured, burned, put to the sword or ‘converted’ into shame, disease and slavery in his name. O you witches, O you natives of continents and islands rich in natural beauty and edenic self-expression, O you Arab wanderers and warriors, O you children beaten, abused, shown the doorway to hell because you never managed to stay here long enough for the priest to mark you up. O my soul who has twisted inside me like an embarrassed child at the way truth and goodness has been co-opted for the power agenda, twisted inside like a child in agony at the death of shared meaning. O for the feminine, for the death of sex, for the earth, O mother earth I am so sorry I am choking…

I believe in Christ. He let his feet be washed by her (not unclean, never dirty), he walked on the earth and left trails of glory in her subtle bodies as he walked, he pathways of light even as he died…I will walks those pathways my master, my teacher and my brother. I will follow you even as others have painted other paths in blood and called them your own. I will follow you even as your so-called priests scream their curses at me for my guiltless steps, I will follow you even as they mock me for the guilt I feel for our shameful husbandry of this land and its bounty. I will follow and I will never stop until following is simply being with you, until being with you is simply being in you, until being in you is simply being in me, until there is no being but the all…

I will follow you inside you forever. Forgive me my delays. Forgive me my obsessions with my meaning and my meaninglessness. I will follow you forever. This is the Cross that I bear.

Mark Jones

IMAGE: Christ Carrying the Cross (c.1490) by Hieronymous Bosch

Dominion over Desert

2006-09-08T09:37:00.000+01:00

Off Afrique
From the Levant
After midnight
These djinn
Whisper through the barrio
Carrying roses

For the lady
One euro
For the lady
One euro

Are we still
So distant
From the point
Where the two seas meet?

I dance
around
your sifr
and build a tower
of numbers upon it

but when we sit,
what colour will the ground
beneath us turn?

The wrong battle
is waged
there is no victory
in dominion over desert

place your Rosa Damascena
in the sand
for the lady

James Piers Taylor, 8/9/2006 London

IMAGE: Zul-Quarnain and Al-Khadir from illustrations to the Sikandar Nâma.

Jagged Mountain

2006-08-31T10:34:00.000+01:00

Come up on the roof
And smoke a cigarette with me
And we’ll swap stories of thieves
And things we have lost.

In a reoccupation of space
I conquered previously in time
My mind became a camera
that reframed the photograph
I took when we were there.
The sky as it was
The mountain as it was
Sun a little more to the right
(Because it’s later in the day)
And a displacement of air to the left
- the spectre of her.

Let me sit in this place
In imitation of the past
And sweat the haunting
through my heart and my face
Alone, alone – leave me alone
But don’t go away, don’t go.

Give me a cancer stick
With its brown filter, white tube
Let me place it my mouth like a dummy
I want to feel the black
Cinders speckling my lungs
I need a new feeling
In the cavity of my chest.

Come up on the roof
And smoke a cigarette with me
And we’ll swap stories of thieves
And things we have lost.

James Piers Taylor, 27/8/2006 Barcelona

IMAGE: Montserrat (1931) by Pere Daura

A New Hot State

2006-08-21T09:10:00.000+01:00

Those last few minutes to the hour
Are the slowest to go
Wine in the glass
Chasing down the clockhands

Thoughts of a future
Without science fiction
Only the telos
Of science fact

The first American city has been destroyed
But no one seems to have noticed

When will I eat the marigold with you?
Unpeel the fiction to reveal
Theatre
Apply the delineation of narrative
To our collision of random
Make the tale last
To the death of one
And perhaps beyond?

I challenge in the pattern
Or all those who choose love
I challenge the cosmos
To thwart me again
As I rebuild story
From these tattered
Wounded elements of plot.

Cohere in the space
Before termination
Refuse loose theories thermodynamic
Make like an Heracletian

I will find the rose for you
And place its petals
On your forehead
Pierce the silence that is strangeness
Break the thick air of the world
And breathe with you
The oxygen
Trapped
In
Bubbles
Beneath
The ice

Beneath the ice
We’ll watch the second city fall
And all clocks seize
And make our pax
With the man with the knife.

James Piers Taylor, 19/08/2006 London

IMAGE: Portal between Worlds (2001) by Henry Kaiser

Muddy Road

2006-08-18T09:37:00.000+01:00

All gentleness I relate to you, all grace
You the connect, the passport
The mirror, a prism
To reflect, to refract
The surrounding world
Into a shape of sense
The gentle hand of Apollo
Stilling the waters
Clearing the skies
You made the horizon
Defined the edge of the leaf
Revealed my heart outside my body

Tanzan and Ekio were once travelling together down a muddy road. A heavy rain was still falling. Coming around a bend, they met a lovely girl in a silk kimono and sash unable to cross the intersection. "Come on, girl," said Tanzan at once. Lifting her in his arms, he carried her over the mud. Ekido did not speak again until that night when they reached a lodging temple. Then he no longer could restrain himself. "We monks don't go near females," he told Tanzan, "especially not young and lovely ones. It is dangerous. Why did you do that?" "I left the girl there," said Tanzan. "Are you still carrying her?"

(‘Muddy Road’ from Zen Flesh, Zen Bones (Tuttle Pub, 1957) compiled by Paul Reps and Nyogen Senzaki)

James Piers Taylor, 17th August 2006, London

IMAGE: New Moon (1958) by Maxfield Parrish

Be Longing

2006-08-17T13:13:00.000+01:00

I ask myself 'what do I need'?
but no clear answer comes
the compass needle spins
a magnetic pole reversal of
your breath on my neck at midnight
in a dream of shivered glass

I tell myself 'I need to be seen and heard'
then hide under a month-long duvet
reading ancient scrolls by
torchlight, never making a sound
louder than the sob of eggs
black and white phoenix camouflage

I hear them shouting 'Let me see your papers'
and know that terror is the plat du jour -
what I can't tell is where inside and outside
meet anymore, which voices shrill
within, which reach the bridgehead
of mind, dropped from outer spaces

I climb the pyramid on a cardboard donkey
pasted together by laughter and tears
held in harness by milk of magnesia
oil of cloves in the nostrils of fear
tonight is a time for ear candles
and dreams of the molten queen

I am visited by the clock face
telling the time of sickness
grasping at moments long lost overboard
savagely smiling in a corpulent gale
this is the comet my stardust head
has feasted upon for fun

Lord Pluto wears an invisible helmet
he jigs out a danse macabre with old Charon
celebrating the hubris of humans
a particular braid will spin new plutons
out of relational void
into the face of complacency

Under the bed the spiders are busy
the earth sprays pressurised mud at the sky
geysers of hot grey slurry piss upwards
good for the skin, good for the grave
longing to touch you in pitiless style
with unconditional desire

kh
17.8.06

IMAGE: 'Desire' by Pino (www.naturessence.com)

I cannot claim possession of the rain

2006-08-15T09:55:00.000+01:00

I had plans we never spoke of
Which evaporate now
Off the flat plain of the future
To condense elsewhere
For someone else
Some others else
To rain on their parades
Or saturate their deserts with love
And perhaps some of this precipitation
Will fall again for me
Or fall again for her.

I cannot claim possession of the rain
Nor forecast the weather
Or foretell the future
Tell dry spells from wet
It is a mystery to me
Why the clouds come and go.

I write my name
In the mist on the window
And peer through the letters
To perceive
What is written outside
I trace a heart
In a separate pane
And watch it bleed
Down to the frame.

James Piers Taylor, 15/8/2006 London

IMAGE: Beautiful Storm (2006) by Rob Colvin, available from the artist.

Sub-munitions

2006-08-11T09:40:00.000+01:00

Roll-up, roll-up, hear the Stalin organ
Katie is still playing after all these years
whistling away with all the new kids -
an anti-electrical mesh, this anti-personnel flute
(chewing up soft targets) -
crude like napalm
with seductive duds
failing to kiss the sky with death
- at least until those tiny fingers
prize open your deadly green buds
or suck on your depleted heart
to feed the emphatic cancer in their spleen

no longer to be shrouded and shamed
brave bomblet, sister, lover
hold your head high like the bullets do
you are needed at the front back and sides
of terror, working your hot metal magic
in postmodern swirls, in shrapnel dancing
in keeping the fire stoked against evil

but I find myself wondering about meeting you
what would you really be like?
I enjoy gathering blackberries, sweet grenades
of autumn, but to you they’re exotic weeds
in need of the pesticide drench –
so I wonder – when will you open
without going off? When will your
hi-tech style recognise its reflection
in this puddle of blood, shit and tears?
When will you slip bananas into
the starving mouths of my cousins?
When will the order come for you to sleep?

Kh
11.8.06

IMAGE: 'Munitions Over Morals' (2004), anonymous illustration for performance of the George Bernard Shaw play Major Barbara by the University of Wisconsin College of Arts and Communication.

Such is the way that pedestals are made

2006-08-09T09:06:00.000+01:00

Such is the way that pedestals are made
And women raised upon them
So our minds carve them from themselves
Sometimes to find a finer model
Than their art alone would allow
A realisation of all they could be.
Sometimes to make a fiction
That’s serves neither party well
A transactional device
That hides the truth of both
A mode of exchange
Become all that is exchanged.

And yet that line of your cheek
Is a slice into marble
This line of your neck
Is divine where it meets the shoulder
If it’s not the depths of heaven
That darken your eyes so
What seeds of obsidian
Did god plant there instead?

James Piers Taylor, 9/8/2006 London

IMAGE: The Soul Attains (1878) from the 'Pygmalion and the Image' series by Edward Burne-Jones.

Avesta

2006-08-08T13:12:00.000+01:00

In dreams the truth is learned, that all good works are done in the absence of a caress

Leonard Cohen

Here comes the Genuflector. Raiser of demons. Whispering of Zoroaster, spectator of the cosmic struggle between the good Lord, Ahura Mazda (Ormzad) and Ahriman (Anro Mainyu), the cruel Evil Spirit, the Demon of Demons (Daevanam Daeva). At sleep, the shore of Vendidad Sade is given – vi daeva data – and a price is exacted on the exchanges of Azazel. Answers are sought but not forthcoming, poets know nothing but how to fool the moon with shy bread, a fake nourishment to serve a fool or starve a king.

Real and unreal, navigating groundlessness, beyond the day-gates of fear and madness, or the orgone-spin of duality, moment in moment the dream now, body-stilled and mind-shot, wakes to the threshings of desire, the subtle carrion delivery of the dark post. Sleep the sleep of the dream-animal in vital bounds across wasteland ash, holding the bright eye of wisdom on a red silk sash, pranic and gravid with a polyp of ceaseless drool.

Vase breathing, key to the Fourth time, now invited by Kurosawa to sip the fire petal – take this longing to Mr Lynch who has a nuclear pass and will show you the galleries of Leng.

The sands blow, the bones slow, life has its undertow recalibrated in the smelter of your heart. Dreaming of the Kraken, of Boethius, of Heraclitean flames, soaring through pain-dunes and dismembered corpses pecked clean by a plague of locusts – you knew each one individually, intimately, each one your lover in a new skin, an ancient clasping desperate and dear.

Ultimately, as the sun sets, the vampires who cannot dance will recommence their shopping
For images, lullabies and the moist trace of tears in the salted-fields of this tooled-up world,
Help them to their endless death, even as they squeeze you through your own vice.

Kh
8.8.06

IMAGE: Zarathustra, via workersdojo

I-man satta at the mountain top Watching Babylon burning red hot, red hot

2006-08-01T13:01:00.000+01:00

One night a feast was held in the palace, and there came a man and prostrated himself before the prince, and all the feasters looked upon him; and they saw that one of his eyes was out and that the empty socket bled. And the prince inquired of him, “What has befallen you?” And the man replied, “O prince, I am by profession a thief, and this night, because there was no moon, I went to rob the money-changer's shop, and as I climbed in through the window I made a mistake and entered the weaver's shop, and in the dark I ran into the weaver's loom and my eye was plucked out. And now, O prince, I ask for justice upon the weaver.”

Then the prince sent for the weaver and he came, and it was decreed that one of his eyes should be plucked out.

“O prince,” said the weaver, “the decree is just. It is right that one of my eyes be taken. And yet, alas! both are necessary to me in order that I may see the two sides of the cloth that I weave. But I have a neighbour, a cobbler, who has also two eyes, and in his trade both eyes are not necessary.”

Then the prince sent for the cobbler. And he came. And they took out one of the cobbler's two eyes.

And justice was satisfied.

“War” from The Madman; His Parables and Poems (A.A. Knopf, 1918) by Kahlil Gibran.

Without comment or critique, here are words and image from two Lebanese artists in these dangerous times.

IMAGE: after 19 says i started to cry (2006) by Mazen Kerbaj taken from his Kerblog entry for Sunday July 30th 2006.

(post title from the lyrics to 'War Ina Babylon' by Lee "Scratch" Perry, performed by Max Romeo & the Upsetters on the album War Ina Babylon (Island Records, 1976).)

Umwelt

2006-08-01T12:27:00.000+01:00

She whispered in my ear at dawn
‘Only what is repressed is symbolized’
Then drifted away in her goose-pimpled skin to the forest-clad hill
Where all throats are conjoined in green praise
Through the butterfly cities and hawkish clearings
Bringing her dream to those who wear no watches
Encouraging mind-rifles to execute public clocks
Chiliast and Millenarian in her stooping at the brook
She squeezes a drop of entropy from the unpromising bud of science,
Tastes it, grins, and cartwheels over the locked gate.

‘You are deeper than your life’ my dreams sigh
Unconscious banditry looms from mountain passes, like
Maoists chopping monarchy, time-school’s out for ever
Decency is standard issue machine-thought
Vodafone connects us, but only to the triumph of alienation
So our sensed presentness is served up like a suckling pig to
The computational eye
Pretending that concepts trump perception
But losing Rousseau’s dream to a newly backed up hard-drive.

Where are the arts of our most smashed senses, our enfolding touch
Incipient taste, revolutionary smell?
Paint, write, play and dance this wholly excommunicate trinity
So I can love you with my million-membered imagination,
Tickle the dogs in your flooded basement with flakes of silver pavlova
Amid the sticky oil-slick of murdered dreams
Waiting for a weightless geometry
Giving it all away in a thunderstorm
Body as artefact, body of history
Blown from the tree of amnesia
Rhythm and beat of a feral heart
On fire with the sprig of eden.

Kh
1.8.06

clock image from: growabrain.typepad.com/.../index.html

Wart on Error

2006-07-24T11:24:00.000+01:00

“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

2006-07-24T11:17:00.000+01:00

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

2006-07-20T09:38:00.000+01:00

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

2006-07-18T12:47:00.000+01:00

‘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

2006-07-14T16:23:00.000+01:00

“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

2006-07-13T10:28:00.000+01:00

“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

2006-07-12T10:36:00.000+01:00

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

2006-07-11T14:36:00.000+01:00

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

2006-07-11T09:14:00.000+01:00

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

2006-07-06T12:28:00.000+01:00

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

2006-07-06T08:43:00.000+01:00

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

2006-07-06T08:39:00.000+01:00

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

2006-07-05T11:44:00.000+01:00

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

2006-07-05T10:22:00.000+01:00

“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.

Do Not Attempt Resuscitation

2006-06-29T14:22:00.000+01:00

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.

2006-06-29T09:07:00.000+01:00

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.)

2006-06-29T08:59:00.000+01:00

"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

Heal Thyself

2006-06-27T12:01:00.000+01:00

‘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)).

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

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

A New Day Rising

2006-06-26T15:06:00.000+01:00

“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?

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.

2006-06-26T08:30:00.000+01:00

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

Paint it Red

2006-06-23T12:20:00.000+01:00

“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…

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.)

2006-06-23T09:00:00.000+01:00

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

A Clue To Desire

2006-06-22T12:03:00.000+01:00

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).

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.

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.

2006-06-22T08:48:00.000+01:00

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

Mirrors in Al-Khem

2006-06-20T13:17:00.000+01:00

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?

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

2006-06-20T08:48:00.000+01:00

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

O Outrider!

2006-06-16T19:56:00.000+01:00

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...

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).