Purple flowers on Skeiway

These are violet and purple flowers over the sidewalk in Brentwood

Really its more of just a windy narrow street in the hills

the steepest in our neighborhood, at least till you get to the top 

of Tigertail or Bluestone trail

Across from this is the house

A cantilever home

Sturges' House

Jack's house

(never been inside)

He used to have his dog Dewey

Now his dog's name is Charlie

I hope Jack won't mind that I wrote this

I think that he would like that I thought about him.

Something to play and to remember, the subtle coming and going of the breath.  I imagine others peering in, looking for something...

This was Bela Bartok's Concierto for Orchestra.

The image was removed and the link was broken.

It had a fine profile of Bartok looking off to the right

Into the future.

I must publish for today

Other than the routine, which is my soul, and my work, which is my bread: and which I must do because I must.  ...There is this web-log, this literature, which gives me joy to remember and to write.

Who am I outside of the gargantuan images of the past few days? -The images of Herzog?

-I am uncertain.

I believe we share shadow stalkings of the self.

We venture into the unknown river, head first, and disappear in the shallows.

The Theophany of Place (A Post-Athiest Celebration)

Aside from having some Piscean-age issues, I will offer these suggestions...

I will say that this is not a "dissertation" nor is it a "denunciation," rather it is a celebration of an essential pagan exuberance in place, in the awareness of place.

It is an awareness of place that Cosmopolitain Christianism (evident from Alexander's concept of "world as Alexandria" onward) has attempted to eradicate any place for the sake of it's ideal: one place: the endless city. The adoption of christianity by the Roman empire meant nothing less than the corruption of the Christ image-- the face of Christ, the countanance, became the cold mask of Christ over the seething cynicism, the real-politik of the empire of Cesar. Further attempts to protestantize the problem, including all forms of Marxism and Communism take Christianity to it's logical conclusion: athiestic communitarianism. Where we are now deals with a world exacted upon to the brink of exhaustion/and cataclysmic extinction.

1. like I said, the age of Pisces is the astrological age of Christ, and it's attendant dangerous sentimentalism that leads to brutality. You got it right, it's the age of Aquarius (funny to think that water is becoming more and more precious, along with information: clean, clear and free)

2. I find dogmatic atheism tedious, particularly if it denies a sense of sacred on this planet, and in this place. It's more or less the same old saw on the "death of god." That's what christianity is all about. God dies, but it resurrected in charity towards others and community. That's what good old Marxism expounds: death of God, driving of life-force back to and through community.

3. Gods: pluralism: because there is a rather important leap away from "mono-" anything, including "mono-reality" or "mono-theism." The best experiences are full of diversity, why should God have to be simply one? Certainly it's problematic to say the least investigating Judeo-Christianity: it's fragmented all over the place: god and the devil and so on. So, many gods, enough said.

4. While we talk of spirituality, we neglect the place. Sense of place is critically important: it is a sign of hubris, arrogance, that we simply take the place we live in for granted: we regard it as simply space that is used, has utensile value: this to me is an abomination. The abomination of looking only at our world in terms of "use value" slates those who hold this premise to the rubbish heap of history, the sooner the better.

5. De-anthropomorpizing God, we find that the divine is many times more visible, and apparent through non-human perspectives.

6. It's about hearing and listening. It's about hearing and listening to the voices that aren't human in this world. We human beings talk the loudest, like the most stupid people at a party, we scream and shout.

7. Atheism is the logical extreme of Xtianity. (It might be interesting to consult Nietzsche's writings on "Western Nihilism" on this topic. These are entirely to the point. If you have any doubts as to Nietzsche's profound contributions, please read Walter Kaufman's biography and review) (W. Kaufman is a secular humanist, which is also a bit of a laugh for me, but he certainly reads Nietzsche in a humane light, and that I am in agreement with) (btw my cat is the most humane person in my house). It ("Western Nihilism" a la Nietzsche) points to an enervation of the symbolic structure, such that we are "stuck" in the secular world, the world of breeding and production of a human race on the brink of self-destruction through over-population. James Hillman is worthy to note in this link to his lecture on "the flight of the gods"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iFkkQ9eq8qw

8. I am suggesting there is something beyond Xtian-Athiesm (which has done nothing but increase our making human beings and reason an unconscious divinity to the point of self-extermination).

9. What is beyond Athiesm? -The theophany of place. Oh, yes, in some ways it brings us full circle to polytheism, or pantheism. I really think that the holy presence is right in front of us, but that we have become blind. We need to look at the places we live in as part of an incredible artwork capable of being self-sustaining if we learn how to curb our numbers in time.

10. Theophany of place has something different to it: it is neither strictly embedded with the "country bumpkins" in their rigid beliefs, nor is it entirely a constituent of "rootless cosmopolitanism." Embedded culture in primitive community is essentially tribalism: it is the root of racism. This needs to stop.

Secular humanism alone de-sacralizes space: it becomes a matter of "capital gain." "Capital gain" as such is only good so long as you are a good thief and you can stab your brother, sister, lover in the back to get the gain (listen to Richard Thompson's "Put it there Pal". I don't think we need more treacherous back-stabbing thieves in this world, really, do you?)

Rather the theophany of place asks after the beauty of a given place: it asks after Downtown Los Angeles, and Skid Row, full of trash (sort of the opposite of the words "Hail Mary, full of grace"): where has the beauty gone? What can be done for it to return? -- IT'S ALSO FEMININE: we have created a masculine, transcendent sky god to project the problems of incest fantasy out into the universe: god has to be transcendent, it's what good dads do: they die off, they get out of the way and let the screaming horde of younger brats through. The allowing of feminine energy, Shekina, to inform place through our sense of "beauty" is perhaps one of the most important shifts. You say, "no accounting for taste," one man's beauty is another man's ugliness? Three Guidelines:

i) get it out of the box: boxes and grid patterns of our cities, "squaring things away" and ironing them out shows how human beings can mistake their rather limited concepts for the incredible "wiggly" (as Alan Watts calls it) reality (particularly the brains in our own heads-- wiggly):

Alan Watts: Conversation with Myself.

ii) keep it clean: waste papers, dirty diapers, used condoms, cigarette butts, empty cigarette packs, empty packages of candy are ugly. they need to be picked up and disposed of. Cleanliness IS next to godliness, but not sterility: allow "i" to inform cleanliness with DIVERSITY of life-forms

To think in terms of the theophany of place addresses the "trash-factor" spewing out of western culture, verifying the Native American curse upon European men: "they will die suffocating on their own excrement." Is there trash on your street? If so, pick it up, or forfeit your pride. Trash is the unconscious symbolic legacy of Western Culture (read Marcuse's One Dimensional Man, "a society dedicated to the production, distribution and consumption of waste"): it's time we took responsibility: when our fellow human beings dump trash, think on their inner despair that made them do this and pick it up. The last thing we need is to call other human beings "trash"-- as we know that is the stepping stone to genocide.

iii) Tao Te Ching: when all the world regards some thing as beautiful, this in itself is an ugliness. To think beauty means to think outside the box and to think deeply what has not been thought. This takes letting go of beauty as a stereotype, but entering into a natural, cultivated, elegant beauty in a non-strident manner.

The Dream Was Set Out Among Islands

Greetings, fellow travelers.

(though this indeed sounds somewhat pretentious, and I am always castigating myself for one or another pretension)

Greetings to people traveling among islands, an archipelago of consciousness, with various elusive histories: from the Peloponnese to the Hawaiian Islands: each listening post hosts a collection of phrases and sentences.

Anticipation of Jung's Red Book

All of us have had a glimpse of the red fire spurting from the kitchen floor in an image from Jung's Red Book.

I will say this as a person who is in the midst of analysis, who himself is not analyzed to the point of becoming an analyst himself, but one who has made the attempt, the gesture at becoming an analyst (therefore initiate, therefore in authority to comment on the Red Book).

We have all wanted to know what these images mean. We have all wanted a deeper sense of the context of these images, and to know if there are more of these images that we have not seen. This is the sum total of the astonishing interest in Jung's Red Book, a dialog and commentary with the unconscious in florid red ink.

Beyond this it is difficult to say. There are those who will have biographical interest in Jung, but will prefer to remain on the safe, clean white side of the biographer's proof-sheets. There are those for whom the blood of this red opened pommegranite will invite more struggle and suffering into the midst of our lives: that the biography of Jung means something.

Everyone knows that he was not very faithful. Everybody knows that there was something of a meter on his bed that read the lullabies of more than one lady. All this could be nothing more than the litany of human neurosis and fallibility. What could be astonishing in this? What could be astonishing would be to have some way in which the soul speaks, candidly and truly of this situation. That the soul articulates some article of embroidered tapestry, or at least a fragment, a shred of gilded thread and cloth.

"What could be astonishing" writes Heidegger, "is that we still do not know what is called, and what calls thinking." For those who arrive empty handed, devoid of tools, will find themselves astonished. This is a deeper, all encompassing, religious sense of astonishment. It may not be appropriate to the nature of the "Red Book," which must be glimpsed at humbly, and itself an acknowledgement that it is just a humble tablet from one man's life, not the newest Gospel.

Yet we read our dreams, we Jungians, we read our dreams as if they were the Gospels of our lives. Here in the Red Book a man stands forth and offers testimony of his life, in beautiful colors and letters. It is enough to say that the testimony of his life will read into the Gospel of his dreams for him. Insofar as we have built the Gospels of our own dreams on the Gospel of Jung, we will be affected by this, no matter what our intellectual defenses might offer in terms of "academic interest."

Jung himself writes in Mysterium Coniunctionis that the essence of having a secret is not that some element has offered itself as some great mystery. The mysteries are already known by all, but only in a manner that is unconscious. The mystery is known consciously by those who regard it as having some secret, sacred resonance with the part of themselves that is itself secret and sacred. Those who have "mysteries" are announcing and making conscious these elements of themselves, and enduring the paradoxa pertaining thereto. Such too would be the case with Jung's biographical data, which has been kept at a shadowy distance from the community of Jungians. Certainly he is no L. Ron Hubbard, sailing the high seas of tax evasion, a man without a specific country. Jung is Swiss. He belongs to the Swiss homeland, which is notoriously neutral. It is a home of chocolate, golden watches, and Calvinist thought. What Jung always had was a stretch of Swiss lakeside. He kept himself near to the water that was related to the land, but not to the water that seemed unbounded, international. I have not yet heard Jung's thought analyzed from the perspective of his Swiss ethnicity, at least not yet sufficiently so. I am not Swiss enough. nor do I have Swiss friends, to permit myself to do so.

What I have written here, will in all likelihood fail to capture any of the deeper esssence of Jung's work. I can say that the Red Book was, as they say, a document of Jung's encounter with the unconscious, which is to say it must be a relic of the time when he separated from Freud, when his standing with the rest of the world was terribly in question.

I can write that in many instances my own life seems to be the same. I am a man who has dreamed of belonging to the Jung Institute as an analyst for most of his adult life. I am not aware of anything that would permit me to do so at this time. This makes me sad and it makes me mad. But it does open me to the Unconscious. It opens me to my own unknown, so I have continually to sit and make peace with it: and therein is the sadness of water: "Utterly worn out, Utterly clear," writes Ted Hughes (concluding my first article on play). I anticipate there will be a significant amount of Jung's relationship with "not knowing" going on in this Red Book, and analysts hence will continue to analyze the shape of Jung's "not knowing," and weighing it, at least in their own private, intimate, and probably undocumented moments, against the weight of their own.

In a recent reading of Jung's Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, the analyst reading mentioned the work of Sam Francis as a sudden exclamation of color in the Swiss psyche. A sudden explosion of color in the psyche, shown at a gallery not far from Jung's home. Jung's work in the Red Book contains a much more contained version of this color-explosion, nonetheless promises a structural understanding of this explosion of color that is available to be digested by the scientific communities. Structures exist so long for the unconscious, before the energy of the libido must burst through, "rend the books lest they should rend your hearts" (Attributed to Dorn). But Jung's structure is something special. He took it quite far, and offered, evidently in this instance of the Red Book, as much of his heart as he could. So there is color, and we must enjoy the color as deeply as possible, and there is form, and we must intimately engage the barbs of form and context as deeply as possible.

Play & Nothingness

I'll start out with nothing. That is the religious "aught" of nothingness, that is a blank un-notable, "fully abstract" element of empty existence.

Take nothing. Do the hands grasp at nothingness as if grasping for it's own lack, or do they sit open in the lap, in an expression of giving: just the giving of what you are.

Religion is just one response to nothingness. Religion asks: what am I worth? Play as a response to nothingness throws an unlikely shape: uncasts the mind that was cast even in the direction of the fall and descent of nothingness into form. Let things fall where they may. Play is the "overcoming of the spirit of gravity" without the cruel, harsh demiourgic philosopher asserting his "Will to Power (!)" over existence.

"'What is play?'" responds the zen master to the direct inquirer. --the tinkling crash of a porcelain vase with pink cherry blossoms on it.

Play is the perfection of form: like being taken away with the Beatles into the Kantian sublime of their Limousine. That is play.

My wife Deborah interrupts me to show me a video of a man lighting his own pubic hair on fire. He is accompanied by howls of chimpanzee like laughing in the background from the subtle dormitory-style educated photographer. He douses himself as soon as his little tuft is ignited: so no harm there. But these chimpanzees, playing at their profound stupidity poses a problem for this play: there is always an outside to play. This "outside" or "margin" of play then constitutes the Hermeneutic obligation to bring it into play. We always need to bring into play: in fact that is the task of the father in the best instance: he brings the outside into play. He knows how to guard against it. But he also knows how to invite pieces of it in that will be helpful and nourishing to the children and their mother. This is not playing here (where before I might have asserted that I struggled with a grief of not having a father who could let enough in for me to adequately grasp and understand it, now I can only assert that good fathers must protect their families and admit a little of the other in: begging for kindness and loving. This too is a kind of extremely painful admission that I can find no other way than this dogma, which itself might limit play: but there is always a wound, a tender spot in play, where the play needs to ease up: where the play needs to recede so the wound can heal a little better. Play plays until it gets to the edge of the wound: the lady in the lake ("farcical aquatic ceremony" Holy Grail, Monty Python, but this is to extend to another very wonderful limit of play, for a brief, shining instant): the lady in the lake plays out of the wound of the lake: she is the anima of the wound: and she hurls forth the blade of Manjushri.

There is always an outside to play, thus the problem of play at the expanding horizon. I try to incorporate my wife's discourse: be it horrible or different from the Beatles getting in their limousine (notice how the last sentence borders on the insensible: this is where we are up against the limit of "sense").

The outside of play: outside of the garden (there are always walls to the garden, even to the ovum itself): presents the problem of the exteriority of Levinas' Other.

This is how Levinas plays with the history of philosophy: he suspends it in the face of the Holocaust. It is a single suspension or bracketing. It says: "Now we deal with the unknown."

The closest thing to nothingness is the "unknown." These terms then relate deepest to the term "unconscious." Nothingness is the full range of possibility in a given evening.

A response to nothingness is religion, and a response to nothingness is play. But when we use the term "religion" we must be speaking of our anima attachments to the "history of philosophy." Play in contrast has none of the anima attachments, and in this respect remains the poorer of the two. For religion is the full blown, most articulated expression of a collective culture, whereas play can easily be done in a ditch with sunlight and a few children in early summer. This may be the best of play, for play can be in the sewage of despair in the bombed out ruin of a once shining city as well. Play acknowledges possibility. The danger of play is that somehow the sweetest hint of the candor of the hour will be forgotten by brazen and uneducated children.

And we might let them! Let it be! Let the lot of my tutelage be cast into the ocean for the sake of play. What I held to was love. Love to make it through this brief transition from my intimately fallible "meaning" to your play with nothingness.

Religion is needed, particularly for those who have shed something: some part of their relation to the world. Religion is good for births, for those who have shed the experience of birth. Religion is good for adolescence, for those who shed secure childhood and are just stepping into the radiant nucleus of adolescent life. Religion is good for marriage, for those loving the nucleus enough to help to make it stick. Religion is for death, for those who have shed the task of living.

But Religion is also a response. Pick it up or put it down. It is always the best response, and the response with the most meaning: "offer it all back to God." The thing with play is that it experiences the innocence of nothingness, whereas Religion dwells in experience. Religion articulates the sound, the name: "Nothingness." Play has ever taken our worth, our essence, our work as something novel. Play explores. Religion praises.

The charity behind allowing play is the ability to sit back and let another play or speak. The charity listens. It does not promote cruelty of play, and always stands to conscientize the expression of pain if pain is caused by play moving too close to the wound.

It is not enough to just play. One has to play consciously. One is aware that one has to let oneself and the Other... go. But the play has it's boundaries in the gentleness of the act. Without this gentleness cruel play, Dark Eros (referring to Thomas Moore's book) threatens to overthrow, capsize the fragile instantiations of play. May I say simply that I have seen enough of cruel play and wish to work against it, knowing it haunts another aspect of the work, at least among those who are adults. The child however is always present in the shadow of adulthood, as innocence and experience give way to each other in a constant play, as in the play of land and sea.

Play wants to be "One," but there is always an outside. This outside becomes a parenting, "adulting" force. It is wrong to ask all play to be conscious, but one must negotiate consciousness where it arises in the midst of play. And one must ask for some gentling of the play beyond its blindness. Blind play is not enough. A shout, a vision, something coming in and shaking one's very soul but leaving it whole, aching, asking to help and to be helped.