Updates from the World

A Lost European Culture, Pulled From Obscurity

New Model of the Universe Says Past Crystallises out of the Future

Trees Communicate with Aspirin-like Chemical

Rudiments of Language Discovered in Monkeys

David Foster Wallace's Toy Cement Mixer

"Nothing is more free than the imagination of man; and though it cannot exceed that original stock of ideas furnished by the internal and external senses, it has unlimited power of mixing, compounding, separating, and dividing these ideas, in all the varieties of fiction and vision. It can feign a train of events, with all the appearance of reality, ascribe to them a particular time and place, conceive them as existent, and paint them out to itself with every circumstance, that belongs to any historical fact, which it believes with the greatest certainty. Wherein, therefor, consists the difference between such a fiction and belief?"
-David Hume, from An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding

Process and the Past

Despite the need to be working on various school and personal creative projects right now I find myself in the middle of a process of going back through past writings and making them more interconnected and available, in short a bit of personal house cleaning, which seems necessary for several reasons. Primarily I have just gotten out of a long term relationship and am realizing that, as happens when ones' life gets intimately wrapped up in that of another, there are many perspectives and interests that I've neglected over the last several years, that need to be dug out and tied back in to my current projects and perspectives before I can begin fully working on those things from a fuller and more integrated place.

Some things I've noticed while doing this: obviously the recognition of neglected perspectives, including poetic, occult, revolutionary, metaphysical, oneiric, and process-oriented views of the world, which have shaped much of my current stance despite getting brief or invisible coverage in my thoughts of late.

Secondly I noticed that I was apt in the past to spill out great amounts of personal drama and woe on the Internet, which more recently I've learned not to do. We all go through emotional turmoil at times, but don't necessarily need to present that publicly. This is not though just a choosing not to present these facets of my life, but a recognition that I and my writing have actually matured, so that these emotional contents do not press on me with the same amount of ferocious necessity that they once did; I can separate what I want to say from all the chaos that surrounds the thoughts and words. On the other hand, what is missing from more academic framings of thought is that ideas are always intimately bound up in our experience. To not discuss personal narratives and the experiential engagement with our ideas, that is, how we live out our thoughts in our real lives, is to present a too small and flattened view of what reality is. Our lives, despite our ideals and intentions, are messy, upsetting, and influence everything that goes on in our heads, and recognizing our fears and doubts and questions along side the theories and fictions is ultimately a more true representation of reality, but one that needs to find balance between discretion and disclosure.

It seems necessary to recognize these things in light of the words inscribed above the Delphic Oracle: know thyself. From time to time, life takes hold and we forget who we fully are, and must return to the process and the past in order to find out again, and again, and move forward from the present in full knowledge and being.

Literacy Narrative

For my class on Narrative and Technology I was asked to create what's called a literacy narrative, the story of my development as as "content producer/consumer" (to use the parlance of the age, focusing also on how our experiences with media have helped us develop standards of quality. The results were interesting and integrating, somewhat like a statement of intention or a road map, if a bit lengthy and abstract (I am trying to write a novel dealing with some of these similar themes). Thought it was worth posting here:


Long before the written word meant anything to me I loved a good story. Weekend nights growing up my father would tell my brothers and I bedtime stories; made up on the spot, featuring our stuffed animals as characters, a continuing series of tales that always intertwined with the previous nights’ adventures and with the content of our lives. Years later, when my father lost his job as a graphic designer and turned to his passion for genealogy, his stories became an ongoing collection of family legends that he hasn’t finished discovering or telling us. Encouraged more than anything to use our imaginations, my twin brother and I would go on long walks on the beach each summer and make up our own stories, often placing ourselves as characters in our favorite books and video games, but also creating between us an entire internal world through our words, which we would explore and return to year after year.

When our father was at work late, our mother would read us books, from “Alice in Wonderland” to “The Wizard of Oz,” and when I learned to read, sometime before kindergarten (roughly 1985), I became a voracious reader, consuming the entire sci-fi and fantasy sections of our local libraries before turning to more realistic literatures. I was such an avid reader that I would often stay up all night reading with a flashlight under the covers, or read books beyond the reading level of my peers, which I realized in 6^th grade when I read the entire unabridged “Les Misérables” back to back with the Bible. Though I read everything I could get my hands on I became most intrigued by ancient mythologies, which I discovered in dusty large-prints in the school library, containing that epic and symbolic sense that reality contains much larger stories than those we experience on a daily basis, which we are also participating in, a sense furthered through role-playing video games and the choose your own adventure novels of the ‘80s.

Most of my love of reading was due to certain challenges I experienced as a child. The first was a sensory integration dysfunction, which eventually resulted in encouragement towards more physical and multi-modal forms of expression: music, art, acting, and gymnastics. Secondly, though, or perhaps due to being, intelligent and imaginative, I was entirely outcasted from my peers, and turned instead to a richer inner life, full of imagined stories and made up games. When I became aware of popular cultures, I explored alternate ways that teenagers express who they are in the world, researching the aesthetic and arts of various subcultures, settling eventually into the narrative of punk rock, with its Do It Yourself and world-changing ideals, the idea that anyone can say anything in any way they want, giving up my viola and books for a guitar, which was my main tool for creative expression for many years, though not the one that would become ultimately important to me.

I never wrote much when I was young, a few fantasy stories in grade school, one journal filled mostly with imaginary maps and drawings. It wasn’t until the first time I tried going to college that I learned that was what I wanted to learn to do. In a philosophy class on the meaning of death I had to keep a daily journal, assumedly so the teacher could keep track of our emotional responses, but this combined with a really droll fiction class and the encouragement of my poetess girlfriend convinced me I had to apprentice myself to recording my thoughts and experiences before I could ever tell a good story. Though my family members are mainly computer programmers/designers and I was raised with several old machines in the house, I always rejected using them for my writing, in somewhat of a luddite or romantic stance (in Pirsig’s sense) combined with being too poor to afford a decent machine. Though most importantly I write by hand, and in cursive, because this method replicates the flow of my thoughts better than my mediocre typing skills, and while typing the urge to go back and edit is too strong/easy, and the sense of flow this creates is generally apparent in the finished work.

An equally important lesson from the class of death was the idea that it is possible and necessary to more fully experience life, which I took to with a vengeance, immediately dropping out of school and moving from the DC area to Pittsburgh. Due to this idea, my imagination, literariness, and love of mythology, as well as several conversations on the subject with my new likeminded band-mates, I realized that instead of experiencing life fully in a random way, a person’s life could become a story, a narrative, a work of art or self-made mythology (an idea that many associate with Kerouac, though his wasn’t at all the story I wanted to live, because it wouldn’t be a good story if it had already been told). To this end I pursued a variety of novel and extreme experiences: protest/activism/street performance, rock and roll, romance, making fairie wings, web design, blogging (and before it was called blogging), circus performances, collective living, children’s storytelling, entheogenic drugs, various spiritual and occult rituals/experiences, psychological and philosophical studies, going crazy a couple times, writing poetry, cooking, traveling, etc. Through all of which I journaled what happened and what it could mean in terms of a larger personal narrative, making several attempts to write it into a novel that was some combination of a Proustian autobiography (as in not necessarily factual) with Grant Morrison’s idea of the hypersigil, that extended works of art are akin to magic spells created in order to realize and chart the course of one’s intentions in and for the world. This magical use of writing is important, as language as a technology may also originally have been a form of magic (spelling as a spell): words have power to cause changes in how we think/look/act in the world, as well as conjure real sensory experience in our imaginations.

In order that my particular personal narrative be interesting or applicable to other people, I have attempted to tie it into common human themes and symbols culled from psychology and mythology. At the same time I have explored the deeper symbolic content of my own life through a study of my dreams, which are admittedly rather wild and epic, which have added to my personal story and sense of meaning as well as help develop my memory and sense making apparatuses. Dreams eventually took on a greater significance as a source or form of narrative, as they are contained, symbolic even when dealing with everyday concerns, and contain a weird or thwarting element in which the thing itself escapes (a concern with the possibility of description I find in Magical Realist literatures, that the imaginative and the non-real can sometimes express more about reality by sidestepping the inefficacy of language to actually capture what really is, best summed up in the Emily Dickinson line, “Tell all the truth but tell it slant...”). At the very least, dreams are like personalized narratives or an internal TV show, offering some of the most interesting inspirations to one’s artistic process.

As for my definition of Quality, it is expressed in four parts relating back to the above narrative. First I find Quality in that which is rare, unique, or novel, that is, not what can be found in the everyday or in mass consumer culture. I recall throwing my TV out the window in 7^th grade and wearing a shard of the screen around my neck for many years after, though more recently I’ve been appreciating some of the higher quality TV programming (Battlestar Galactica, Lost, Deadwood), art that pushes its medium to new places or beyond the mean and expected. Quality as not yet been done.

Second, that which has Quality contains an element of intention or ability to evoke a response. Quality art always moves people in some way. Prior to an academic response it is felt viscerally, if you love it or even if you hate it the work is doing something worthwhile, allowing the viewer to experience a fullness or depth of experience. This is somewhat like Garcia Lorca’s concept of the Duende, the clear emotional depth to a performance that sets it above more rote ways of creating. Quality as authentic.

Next, Quality implies to me a harmony or reflexivity across scales, which comes from two pivotal ideas: Marshall McLuhan’s concept that the medium is the message, that form and content reflect each other, and the alchemical idea of as above so below, that the smallest scale of a work has to be reflexive of the whole, that when the parts reinforce each other they add up to something complete and larger than the sum of the parts. In terms of Quality storytelling, this means personal or local stories are reflexive of global concerns and the human condition. Quality as interconnected.

Last, I find Quality in those things that strike me as being connected to my own creative or learning processes, the eureka! or synchronistic moment where that thing is exactly what I was looking for next. Of course, this is entirely subjective and implies that Quality is conditional to the time and place of a person’s encounter with the thing, but things that don’t have that Quality don’t force themselves on our attentions in the same way (if at all). Quality as immediate and personal.

Since returning to school for creative fiction writing, in the last two years I have been trying to hone my writing process, getting a number of stories published in print and online [1] [2], making the rest of my creative output available, blogging (though I rarely have the time for this), reading more than ever, and attempting to finally finish my first novel, as there are two more pushing at the back of my brain to be written. My current literary concerns focus around the interplay of very short and very long forms, that is, flash fiction’s ability to capture the immediacy of a moment vs. the tome (800+ pages), which allows an author to create a full and changing world; second, ergodic or non-linear narratives, and last the use of storytelling and memory as a way of literally saving the world (as in backing it up so it won’t be lost), writing as a collage of personal experiences, global events and narratives, ideas, imaginations, &c. which I wish that I'd thought of two decades ago before my father's bedtime stories were mostly forgotten.

On Aliens as Symbol and Experience

My family has many strange stories, of the kind that Gabriel Garcia Marquez might have written if he was into sci-fi, such as that when they were children both my brother and cousin claimed they were abducted by aliens. While visiting my family this past week we spent some time with this cousin, who I've only met a handful of times before and haven't seen in maybe five years, and Sophie wanted to ask her about being an abductee. I persuaded her not to, because as curious as we both are these stories in my family are all somewhat secret or taboo, often covering for situations that were traumatic or uncomfortable. Even the mere mention of Montana where my cousin grew up was enough to give her the howling fantods, mainly as that's where her family lived in a bunker as part of the Church Universal and Triumphant doomsday cult before the world didn't end and they became normal people again.

Asking my folks about it later gave us a little more information, though they too seemed anxious to change the subject: my cousin woke up one night in the woods far from the bunker (perhaps an alien abduction being more sane than their cult). My brother on the other hand had a much more normal upbringing, but this included a lot of educational struggles and being outcasted at school, which left him with some strange compulsive behaviors that he could only, and adamantly explained as having been abducted. While these situations could be explained as dissociation or social anxieties mixed with hyperactive imaginations, that doesn't account for the small triangular scar that they both have from whatever experience did happen to them. The strange thing was my mother's comments vis-à me.

Personally I can recall (and have written of here before) being a kid and being paralyzed with fear of taking out the garbage at night, because I knew that a mothership would descend from the orange sky to get me, perhaps if they hadn't already. Or in the '90s when that pointy-chinned bug-eyed alien face was becoming a pop cultural icon I found it horrifying even to think about (though admittedly I felt that way about spiders and the California Raisins). Before that though when I was really young my mother helped edit the Time-Life Mysteries of the Unknown series on paranormal experiences, having to check sources for the articles. Apparently, though I have no memory of it, we were one day in a bookstore where she picked up Whitley Strieber's book of UFO research, on the cover of which was that iconic grayfaced alien. When I saw it I flipped out, telling her that I had seen those creatures before - that they had come for me in my dreams - which could have all sorts of interpretations but was clearly so terrifying that I completely repressed it, and have only recently begun to allow myself to see and sort through the symbol of the alien in my dreamwork practices. Though thinking back I always wondered or suspected if I'd been abducted, or was myself an alien, because my whole life I have clearly felt different or separated from my fellow human beings.

While I don't know, and refuse to make any claims without further direct experiences, if alien abductions really happen (and suspect these could be the imagination's way of covering up or describing otherwise even more inexplicable experiences), it seems clear that people have many reasons to feel and believe that they have or might be abducted, whether in fear or even desire for such extra-terrestrial intrusion, that has led to aliens becoming a potent symbol in our post-modern age. While often addressed through stereotypes of new-age fanaticism or pop-skepticism, alien beings may still say something vital about what it means or feels like to be human. Mac Tonnies of Posthuman Blues seems to suggest that the image of the gray aliens may be either a projection of our desire to transcend being merely human in this post/trans-human age, or a metaphoric anxiety nightmare left over from the horrors of war and technology from the middle of last century.

I am not quite convinced however that aliens don't also cover an impulse or feeling that is an ancient one for which these are only the most recent and applicable symbol: that of feeling alienated or disconnected from the other. Consider for example Greek legends of people being kidnapped by fauns or waylaid by sirens, Victorian romances in which men become monsters and vampires, or even the Biblical angels, who contain that same longing to transcend our everyday experiences through external salvation (angels being technically depicted as eye-studded revolving spheres that sound more like UFOs than anything else). Looking at my relatives' experiences, they clearly were in extreme situations of alienation, which they only found words for in terms of alien abduction: I don't belong, therefor I must have been removed/transformed. I suffered from the same kind of alienation as a child, feeling that either I didn't belong or that no one else did, a feeling particularly strong as a tenager dealing with understanding one's place in the social spheres, much less the celestial spheres. After trying and failing to fit in I tried not to fit in, and didn't fit in there either, and only found some relief from this anxiety in music and art, listening to Bowie's Ziggy Stardust, his myth of the good alien come to save all the alienated youth certainly allowing me (and I imagine many others) to feel that they did belong, somewhere, even if that was in the distant stars, much like a modern day Ezekial, whose visions of angels the Jews turned to during the alienating reign of Nebuchadnezzar. "Look out your window I can see his light/ If we can sparkle he may land tonight/ Don't tell your poppa or he'll get us locked up in fright."

While children are certainly more inclined to describe or occlude their experiences in imaginistic terms or characters, I suspect this feeling of being alienated may belong to everyone. As rational creatures whose perceptions work through distinction rather than homogenization of experiences, it is no wonder that some of the hardest struggles of history have risen from our perceived human differences. Race, sex, class, customs, gender, age, intelligence, ability, etc, whether arbitrary or not, when taken as the primary signifier and worth of individuals, reduces up to a type or group often at odds with or misunderstood by others outside that group, leading to such bromides as "men are from Mars/ women from Venus," or more real conflicts like the recent racial profiling and arrest of the black professor Gates in his own home (not to mention centuries of national or racial warfare). Orson Scott Card, in his brilliant Ender's Quartet novels sets up the Hierarchy of Exclusion, which seems to operate on a function between familiarity and communicability:

"The Nordic language recognizes four orders of foreignness. The first is the otherlander, or utlanning, the stranger that we recognize as being a human of our world, but of another city or country. The second is the framling... This is the stranger that we recognize as human, but of another world. The third is the raman, the stranger that we recognize as human, but of another species. The fourth is the true alien, the varelse, which includes all the animals, for with them no conversation is possible. They live, but we cannot guess what purposes or causes make them act. They might be intelligent, they might be self-aware, but we cannot know it." -from Speaker for the Dead

Of course, when the other is so foreign to us that we can't communicate, it often ends in direct conflict, or goes further, beyond anything remotely conceivable and thus truly alien. While this final level of total alienness could be interpreted as encounters with the numinous or ineffable - I am partial to the idea that God is the ultimate alien - it also points to our boundaries of knowledge and description, and more directly to the human experience of being bound in an individual consciousness. To some degree we are all alien to each other, and even sometimes to ourselves: this is a limit to our ability to express who we are and what our experiences of the world mean, and the alien may be the mask, the image we refer others to in order to describe what might otherwise be inexplicable, what feels out of this world, much like Freud's idea of the uncanny or un-homelike, except with Earth as Home, we react with fear and wonder to that which is extraordinarily unfamiliar. In an age when we can finally begin to say that we know most of what is on Earth, there is still more, roughly 98% more, in the Heavens than we can fit into our scientific philosophies, dark matter and gravity if not little gray beings (though the truth may still be out there... so might God for all we can prove or disprove).

I occasionally tell people that I'm in support of space exploration, which often (and more often than I'd have hoped in the 21st Century) draws blank or incredulous stares, as if I really am from outer space. As the author of the exceptional Red Mars,Kim Stanley Robinson recently pointed out, in conjunction with the 40th anniversary of the first moon landing, there is still a reason for going to space. Forget interstellar exploration, forget contact with other potentially intelligent life in the universe, forget finding a habitable new home for when this one inevitably wears out, the current resurgence of space programs could be local; by living on other planets in our solar system we might better figure out how to live on and take care of this planet, which is in sore need of better stewardship. Though this may first mean resolving those lingering problems of otherness that still plague and alienate mankind.

Which isn't to say that we can't refamiliarlize ourselves with those who are other from us, a process of dealienazation, which can only begin at home. This was one of the lessons I learned from seeing my family this week, that our secrets are symptomatic of larger miscommunications that lead to conflicts and division the way they do in the larger world, that even though we are all involved in fields of communication (as more and more people are these days), we are still shockingly out of touch from each other, as if E.T. had never extended his finger for contact. But all it sometimes takes is a phone call or a letter, or even just a smile, to make our families familiar to us again, which can equally apply to strangers, enemies, the world. Though we are all aliens lost in space, we are all human on Earth together, one vast estranged family still learning to accept each other and explain what this all might mean. Perhaps one day we'll be able to look up at the stars together, and when we see the occasional peculiar lights zipping around like nothing but unidentifiable objects, we can finally discuss them openly, or just say hello.

Galeano's Political Fables

Eduardo Galeano’s The Book of Embraces reads like a collection of politically charged fairy tales. He does this by drawing on the form, style, and tone of Aesop’s Fables (which was essentially the first collection of short short prose fiction) and inserting in moments of magic or myth at pivotal moments in his short narratives, such as the line, “he scoured heaven and earth in vain” (16) in the section The Origin of the World, the title of which also partakes and sets up this mythic scope. But what really makes these fables is the use of historical peoples, times, places, and events as the backdrop for whatever magical event or effect Galeano is trying to get at. Often these historical events detail the terrible political realities of South America, but the horror is tempered through the magical moment, such as José Carrasco becoming a miracle worker after he is shot fourteen times in the head in Celebration of the Human Voice/ 3. These magic moments serve as indications of each vignette’s moral (as every fable has to have a moral), and for Galeano, the points that he is trying to make are about the intersection of language, art, reality, and politics. In short, Galeano’s lessons are about the power of language to create the world and keep it free. The story in The Function of the Reader/ 2, in which an army captain resigns after reading the oppressed poet César Vallejo, perhaps best highlights this theme of the power of language.

The use of historical events to ground the magical and moralizing elements allows these metaphors to become more real for us the reader (as is the function of magical realism), but there is also perhaps a reverse effect too which works against Galeano. By blending into an imaginative, magical sense of reality, these historical events also become less real, more figurative. Part of this might have to do with the 21st Century’s apathy towards images of violence, we are so attenuated to them in movies that the subtlety with which they are portrayed here looses a good deal of their intended horror. What we are left with, the most striking parts of the text, are the miraculous and whimsical non-real moments, though this might also be Galeano’s point, that the horrors of political reality are only real because they have been given power through language previously, power that can be likewise used to create beauty in the world.

Another reason however that I felt the vignettes were less powerful than they could be was that they were vignettes. Only in a few places, like the dream sequences, do we have larger narratives building from the separate and disparate historical events. But otherwise these events are isolated, and as such, can’t seem to add up to more than facets on Galeano’s ideas. They are too readily digested, where a longer narrative, or one with a more continuous structure might build up to a larger and more significant effect. If, as Galenao suggests, we can create reality through language, a fully crafted literary world, as one might find in a novel, might convey that idea on a much deeper level. Of course, if I had already written a poetic trilogy of books on the history of the Americas, as Galeano did in Memory of Fire, I would probably want to move towards shorter disconnected forms as well!

Anarchism, Mysticism, and Anamnesis

The other day James of that veiled gazelle and I were having an interesting conversation about the curious disconnect between anarchist philosophy and spiritual practices, and the handful of authors who write about both.

Anarchism comes from the Greek for "without archons (rulers)," and is defined by The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Politics as "the view that society can and should be organized without a coercive state." While this idea has divided into many (often conflicting) schools and sub-schools of thought, some general trends in belief emerge that are what originally attracted me to the ideal: Instead of meaning chaos and destruction, living without rulers, if it is to work at all, requires autonomy (self-rule/ DIY), equality (mutual respect for all others), pacifism (responsibility of getting along with oneself/ other/ the environment, etc), and not a small smattering of wide-eyed wonder. Of course, these are ideals, and like all social philosophies actual practice often falls far short of how people are expected to live (though it doesn't help that there are infinite negative interpretations on anarchism portrayed by the media and youth market). One of the main points where anarchist belief conflicts with itself is over what to do with religion and spirituality. For the most part, anarchists follow the creed of "no gods, no masters," rejecting religious behavior as no better than the opiate of the masses (probably a result of some of anarchism's roots in 18th Cent. Russian Communism). For example, a friend of mine considers herself both an anarchist and a Christian, which she does not see as being a conflict. However she has gotten an extraordinary amount of shit over the years from her anarchist friends because of her religious preferences, a kind of knee-jerk dogmatism that at times rejects anything remotely spiritual or mystical in favor of the pragmatic, rational, political, and all too real.

The irony being however that in its current incarnation, as a modern American youth movement drawing on its resurgence in the punk subculture, Anarchism has come to take on the trappings of a religion itself. A system of beliefs, a mode of dress (black, dirt, patches), a series of ritualistic practices (from train hopping to protesting), and a teleological doctrine (drawing on the Communist worker's uprising) that aims toward some utopia after the Revolution when everyone can take care of themselves and each other. Another common phrase: "Who will build the roads? We will!" It strikes me that even before this paradise is reached, it would be necessary for anarchists to apply their open ideals not just to themselves, but to everyone, drawing on a much more interesting belief that "nothing is true, everything is permitted," that all beliefs, even spiritual ones, are subjective and potentially valid. If one doubts the socio-political, revolutionary force of religion, look at Liberation Theology which in Latin America has attempted to do just that.

There are of course certain contemporary authors who have been somewhat successful in trying to unite principles of anarchism and spirituality (at least for a handful of people like James and I). The first one that comes to mind is Hakim Bey (full writings beyond link), whose tenets of Ontological Anarchy, and the Temporary Autonomous Zone find a direct correlation to certain occult ideas like the magic circle. In his more academic role as Peter Lamborn Wilson, he is an authority on the darker side of the Islamic mystical sect of Sufism. While criticized by anarchists for his mystical and individualist leanings, Bey is also openly a pederast, which is essentially waving a stick in the face of anyone who claims that they don't live by rules.

Another text that had a similar appeal was Days of War, Nights of Love. As an anarchist organization, Crimethinc. has gotten a lot of flack with the years, both at first for being too individualist and lifestyle, then for promoting irresponsible scrounging, and finally for becoming just another protest-centered anarcho-webpage. However, what first impressed me in their earlier writings, beyond the beautiful and often-times personal prose, was the sense of mystique they weaved around their organization: here were anarchists handing out secret invitations, discussing magic as direct action, and in fact weaving their own mythology in an effort to make it into their real world, which for a time actually seemed to work, and hopefully inspired countless other children to do the same.

Take for example this excerpt: "This world, the so-called “real world,” is just a front. Pull back the curtain and you’ll see the libraries are all filled with runaways writing novels, the highways are humming with escapees and sympathizers, all the receptionists and sensible mothers are straining at the leash for a chance to show how alive they still are. . . and all that talk of practicality and responsibility is just threats and bluffing to keep us from reaching out our hands to find that heaven lies in reach before us."

Perhaps one reason for Crimethinc.'s reliance on such mystical and utopian imagery was the involvement of one Mark Dixon, a friend of James, and a self-professed "folk scientist" most infamous for his use of think tanks (like highly focused temporary autonomous zones) for accomplishing all sorts of zany acts, like turning a bike into a record player. Most of the truly interesting, magical, and revolutionary writing in Days of War, Nights of Love seems to be credited to him. Among the many zines that he helped pen and pass around were two that I and others have come to call Anamnesis I and Anamnesis II, being absolutely chaotic and fun-house style (yes that is how the zines were originally formated) enquiries into many esoteric, yogic, and metaprogrammatic practices that are absolutely essential to anyone trying to live outside of even one's own rules (Anamnesis being the Platonic doctrine of psychic memory or the eternality of knowledge, an idea later articulated as the Theosophical Akashic Records, Hebrew Book of Life, or Sufi Khafi, and according to Wikipedia is "the closest that human minds can come to experiencing the freedom of the soul prior to its being encumbered by matter").

I am sure there are others writing about spirituality and anarchism in the same breath, though I am yet to find them. Any thoughts?

Interim

I apologize for the lack of posts recently, but I've been a bit consumed by my life. Beyond many personal challenges I've been going through this summer, which this isn't the space to get into, I've been working a lot more and pursuing my various creative outlets. After a year spent not playing music I've started working on some multi-instrument recordings using the handy Garageband, a bit of a cross of Sigur Ros, Bill Frisell, Dvorak, and Leszek Jankowski (most famous for his soundtracks to the films of the Brothers Quay). I have also begun teaching guitar lessons (thanks in part to the lesson plans on this site), which has been an interesting challenge so far, and is teaching me more about the instrument than I "actually knew" in my fifteen years playing. On top of this I have also been writing a hundred+ page personal history of my lifelong relationship to spiritual questions and practices, from Catholicism to the occult, anarchism to the I Ching, entheogens and yoga to mythology and dreams, from all of which I could say that one of my foundational beliefs has been that world views are (or can be) remarkably subjective and flexible. Perhaps more on this later.

Words from the Brainpan

For a while now I've been looking for a good way of cataloging my library, which is well on its way over four hundred books these days. While there's something to be said for lists and alphabetical order there's times when I want to reshelve my books by genre, or by nationality, themes, or rating/review, which is why discovering Goodreads has been such an ingenious find, as it allows me to do all these things, combined with the functionality of a social networking site. And on top of that one can even submit one's own work and push yourself as an author. And since my small amount of published writing is self-published zines I decided to upload them in entirety for anyone to read, starting with my two poetry chapbooks: Invisible Neighborhoods and All Tonight's Adventures, as well as an interesting series of prose, Excerpts from the Back of the Skull.

Of course, both these books were written several years ago, and the process of uploading them was an interesting journey down memory lane, back to a time when I was much more of a naïve romantic, with tremendous amounts of hope for the world and for the power of language. Not that I am jaded now, but trying to take a much more mature position on my work and what is possible for me to achieve. But what was interesting was not going back to the memories of events surrounding my life at that point, but to the memory of actually writing the poems, with all the peculiar linguistic challenges that presented. As I am not a trained poet and have very little knowledge of verse, meter, etc, I was really approaching these books from somewhat of an outsider standpoint and essentially making up the rules for my poetry as I went along.

Hopefully I will be posting more of my recent work in the future, so stay tuned.

A Picture is Worth A Thousand Words

And now imagine a story told with thousands of pictures.



Photographer Jamie Livingston took a polaroid photo every day until the day he died. [via Mentalfloss] This journey documents the ups and downs of life, changing fashions and important events through the decades, and finally the photographer's battle against cancer.

Memory Distortion and the Creation of Reality

This article on Memory Distortion "reflects on a narrative by Binjamin Wilkomirski, a Holocaust survivor who vividly detailed the horrors of his childhood experiences in a Nazi concentration camp. In his memoir entitled Fragments, he recounts his earliest memories of childhood included witnessing his father being crushed to death against the wall of a house and his separation from his mother and siblings. After his liberation from the death camps, he was moved to Switzerland where he lived with a foster family. The book earned widespread critical admiration; upon reading it Jonathon Kozol raved “this stunning and austerely written work is so profoundly moving…so free from literary artifice of any kind that I wondered if I even had the right to offer it praise.” It turns out, however, that Wilkomirski was neither a Jew nor a survivor. The bases for his traumatic “memories” of Nazi horrors, whatever those may be, do not come from his own childhood experiences in a concentration camp. According to Stefan Maechler, the Swiss journalist who pursued the scandal, Bruno Dossekker— Wilkomirski birth name—never spent a day of his childhood in the hands of Nazis. Rather, young Bruno enjoyed life in peacetime Switzerland as a Swiss-born, wealthy Christian child. Even upon his exposé, Wilkomirski steadfastly professed that his account of his childhood was authentic and claimed that he had been secretly switched as a young boy with Bruno Dossekker upon his arrival in Switzerland. Liar or not, what is of interest to us in this discussion is the following: Wilkomirski's alleged experiences in German-occupied Poland closely corresponded with real events of his factual childhood in Switzerland. This is the hallmark of the “sin” of misattribution. Memory misattribution often mistakes fantasy for reality or assigns a memory to the wrong source. Wilkomirski’s case is certainly extreme, but should not invalidate the frequency of memory misattribution in our daily lives."

This "sin of misattribution" seems to be to be a rather common theme in narratives of childhood, made most famous by Marcel Proust and honed by both Bruno Schulz and Felisberto Hernández. While these authors did not go so far as to claim that their fictional childhoods were real, a challenge faced by many self-claimed "memoirists" these days, they did understand the importance of using ones personal memories to construct a different reality, a new childhood that could take over in the distorted interstices of their "real" childhood. The question is raised for me: which reality is more real, the one lived in history or the one made famous through story? When it comes down to it what makes our pasts feel true is the artifacts that are left behind, and a written account is just as much an artifact as a photograph or school records. The important thing, it seems, is what one makes of ones past in order to create a future.

ghost in the margins

For years i would come home afraid of what changes might have struck this old city, or worse, what might remain unbearably the same, streets and habits rotting on the edges of time while life happens elsewhere. i suppose it was a projection of my own fears of time, and each visit would bear the fruits of my expectations in new sidewalks or deeper potholes, friends and family still caught in the joys and sorrows of a decade past, and myself straining against the future like it was a vast chasm i had no choice but to throw myself over.

but recently this has begun to shift, perhaps as i make peace with time, and the family home becomes not the forshadowing of a tomb but a storehouse or museum to its memories, a treasure chest of the past from which the story of this life is being written. in "Man and his Symbols," Jung tells of a recurring dream in which he was continually on the verge of discovering a new wing in his house, some lost corrider older than his ancestors which at any moment he might stumble into. later he realized that this new wing was really a new idea or direction he was about to embark on, his discovery of the archetypes, and that dreams contain a prophetic element or at least a 'cryptomnesia,' whereby we might discover what was already known but forgotten thorugh the intricacies of our occluded symbology. similarly i now walk through this house looking at the bookshelves, through old cabinets and boxes, as if with each visit their contents might grow older, or i grown more comprehending of what was always there, photos from our childhood at the beach, hurricane lamps filled with seashells, heirloom candlesticks and hundred year old poetry books that seem to cry out with that much more significance. i look through them as if these objects might contain some secret to life only now readable, and wonder that i never saw them before.

one such set of objects, which i was excited to come upon, were the set of encylcopedias belonging to my grandfather Wilson Lee Johnson, in which, as the story goes, after his heart attack and confinement to bed he proceeded to work out in the margins and endpages a solution to world hunger based off the chemical composition of yeast, which seems an awfully marquezian tale. my father had looked through these formulas once, without comprehending much, but then chose to forget them as time moved on and the pain of his father's death and then his mother's death last year made it difficult to look any closer at his family history, which for a genealogist must be the sore blow of closing a chapter on the past. but as he told me, he had never had much interest in his father's artifacts, nor knew much about his life to begin with except that he had aspired to be an artist and a writer in his youth.

i expected the strange often heiroglyphic chemical formulas that abounded in each margin, but there was something else being worked out in this man's head too, that as i read further dawned on me gradually as being an entire cosmology of life and alchemical struggle against death and disease in all forms. stuck between many of the pages were articles clipped from papers with which he would update the aging encyclopedias, and from these emerged wild theories and aphorisms about being in time, charts of correspondence between the electromagnetic spectrum, the planets, chemical elements, and the human body, a subtle numerology and cryptographic word play which seemed to seek as its object a total description of reality and its effect on the human body and mind, synchretizing whatever information it could find into a progressively more complex and phenomenal world view, where god is equal to light, and life derives from the sun's chemical illumination. amidst these notations and scrawls were veiled referances to a prophecy or vision of the future that he was given, perhaps in connection with the passing of the icarus meteor in june of 1968, or with his heart attack, which undoubtedly threw him into this wild speculation and cabalism that as far as my father knew had never been a part of his father's life before that.

also among his papers were a book of poetry and some short stories, but these seem to have come from an earlier period, and whatever possession or illumination he sought to articulate in his last years remained mostly in his head. except that he seemed to know it would not be lost, for in one passage he describes the body's projection of self after death into the future where its descendents would be able to access it, but in another passage asks not to be remembered for that would take precious time away from the rememberer for their own present and future. but perhaps what seems like a theory of the continuation of the soul through DNA and heredity holds some truth, for though we never knew him, as he died when our father was still young, we his grandchildren seem to be working out his themes and visions in our own lives, devon's chemical experiments with photography and time, scott's computer science, my own experiments with linguistic alchemy, and all tinged with an edge of the spiritual or occult that seeks to step out of time towards some ultimate sense of reality altogether. so whoever this man was, and though he will (and perhaps wanted to) be forgotten, i suspect in him was the workings of a great modern alchemist, and i can only seek to honor that in my own life and tasks, as if destiny was something not just created from the images of one's own childhood, but passed down from generation to fruitful generation like another well loved and worn family treasure.

ghost in the choir

Before practice nikki and i met up for a cup of coffee and one of our deep conversations that have proven to be a strong part of our growing friendship, in which one of us will bring up some thought and we'll fall into it like life depends on it. the issue of spirituality came up, as a mutual acquaintance of ours follows Krishna, and i feel like the rest of our set either could give a fuck-all for spirituality or has their own non-linear path they tread, and nikki was wondering where that distinction is between religion and spirituality since it's a subject she has little explored herself yet. i told her a story my dad told me of when he was a child and they went to his mother's methodist church, even though his father didn't really believe in it he went along anyway, until he finally saw how hypocritical it was and they stopped going. the following saturday the minister showed up preaching hellfire and brimstone and my grandfather listened quietly before explaining his precise reasons and then explained that it did not matter where you worshipped as long as you kept god in your heart and he couldn't do that under the church's stifling rituals. when the minister left he turned to my dad and pointed to his chest and said "you can believe in anything, as long as you remember that god is in there." which is why when my parents had a catholic wedding he went along with raising us in it, and later said that it was so we could learn that having belief in anything, the world, yourself, the unknown, was a good thing. i also told her a few of the stories from rilke's "stories of god," an early collection of edgy faerytales for children, of how people used to pray with their arms open to embrace god but when they put their hands together and built imposing steeples god grew afraid of all these pointy things, or how a group of children decided their parents had lost god and so put him in a thimble so they would know where he was at all times. personally i never could relate to the idea of some imposing old dude up in heaven. why should i? i had a twin brother who i could talk to, create whole worlds with, who was me. what did i need with some absent and abstract deity? my idea of god resides in the people (and things) around me, in myself, in those really deep conversations and connections we make as recognition of something deeper that is shared. and the strongest relationships i've had rely on a mutual expression of divinity. even if it's not called such. of course there is much to be said for the aesthetics and rituals of any established religion. a wealth of meaning that when practiced regularly can really set one out of the every day, the sense of displacement necessary to break us from our too-established patterns. but in order for any of it to make sense, or be fulfilling in that way all the drugs tv money sex fail to be, it has to be yours (or ours), a space that is created which is open to embrace the world, and not fend it off or tune it out. that rapt free flow of hearts and attention, of undistracted eye contact, not readily found in the thick of the maddening crowd. unless i'm on stage or writing, but then it's like preaching, and only at times as intimate. it is often like howling into a void, the space left by noise-clogged senses. throwing a ghost into the choir.

god is the absent narrative: notes on formation

memory is a narrative. for memory to be constructed,
a degree of forgetting is necessary; the idea of a negative narrative.

a narrative is a measuring of time.
we function within the illusion that we have moved forward in time.

all narrative is ritualistic.

the ritual has a beginning, a middle and an ending.

in the absence of ritual, there is no culture.

the basis of all culture consists of stories.. i.e. myth.

the basis of our idea of myth: muthos: stories, neither true nor false, neither realistic nor logical.

dreams are neither true nor false (and not necessarily realistic or logical).

"our own myths we call reality."

"in my beginning is my end."

dusting off time

The other night nikki and i hung out and we were talking about our families and childhoods and how we got into performing. she's been on a big memoir kick recently, writing out things from her past whether with her family or old places and lovers, and she asked if i hadn't tried writing about all my years performing, what got me started playing music and doing poetry and how all my years acting have influenced the full aesthetic i strive for while on stage. and i said yeah i should do this. and started the next day! it's taken me awhile of hemming and hawing to find an angle in on my past, for months now, and suddenly there's pages and pages of experience, certain gigs, teachers, desires acted out... and i'm finding it is not enough just to write about one angle like performing, the past is so intricately interwoven that to write about one thing i have to bring in my social searching, my family, my loves, etc... "as the pattern grows more intricate and subtle, being swept along is no longer enough." even if i never publish this, or not till years hence, it is such a worthwhile exercise to dredge up the full contents of my life. i suppose i would have to say all my views on memory in that essay i wrote are wrong. or if not wrong than i was missing the key point that though we can only access our memories from the present and can view them how we will, who we are now is only possible due to the precise nature of what has happened to us, from the big events down to the smallest corner we went around instead of going around another. even if we don't remember these things, and perhaps especially if we don't, because our whole lives of memories are still stored in our bodies and acting out through us everyday, the whole weight of our becoming determining what we do from moment to moment... i suppose that's what they mean by fate. destiny (rilke's destiny) would be learning to take up that body of fate and let it lead us where we want to go and not just at the whims of passing time.

Masks of Mnemosyne (the formation of memory)

Masks of Mnemosyne (the formation of memory)

"freedom depends on the struggle of memory against forgetting."
- Milan Kundera

• Memory is accreted (like a seashell, armor, crystal) in our bodies and blood*, taking on a recognizable pattern, a body and meaning that can be called a life. when we are young and have no memory we have no such psychic detritus carried around us, but as we age we can't help picking up memories, symbols, songs, and attaching them to ourselves as sort of an addendum to that central self
• Thus we can say of an object, idea, person, moment, that it “gathers world” (ie: accrues meaning), which though often psychic or imaginative in nature can be displayed in a physical manner (wrinkles, collections of junk, crumbling, etc…)
• World itself could be considered an artifact of time, the shell or record (imprint) left behind by the movement of light/ life, in the way vinyl is a physical imprint of the sound waves of a song.
• Memory is not a recollection in the past, but a reconstruction in the present of what one images the past was like, and like dreams, may not bare any factual resemblance to what actually happened.+
• The longer ago something occurred, the less factual or clear the memory becomes. it is much easier to remember yesterday as it happened than last year, or childhood. as memory recedes it turns into myth (ie: its meaning takes on larger and metaphorical proportions turning the contents of our lives into a cohesive story instead of a disjointed series of circumstances).
• Memory is aided by symbolic, emotional, or physical cues (mnemonic triggers) in which the present reflects or replays some similar aspect of the past. music is an excellent example of this, hearing the first strains of a song related to your first relationship can years later still bring tears to your eyes.
• Object-bound (codified) memory is called history, imagination-based memory is called dream, or in the collective, myth. history is no more factual than myth, as both are perspectives relating event to meaning. and as myth is an amalgamation of countless archetypified memories, so is history a collective story we build around ourselves (in the world) in order to give ourselves a sense of time
• Media (writing, recordings, photographs, etc.) act as External Memory Devices, in that they take on the burden of memory into a physical object, thus removing any dreamlike/ mythic qualities of the memory. the current proliferation of EMDs marks a transition from myth to history, as well as the view of World from mind (“God”) to one large medium (artifact, the husk or corpse of “God”)
• While memory remains in imagination (subjective), it is fluid, malleable, and can take on whatever perspective or meaning the rememberer chooses. in a process similar to Dreaming Back, “bad” memories, moments of failure, anger, regret, can be re-remembered in a different light, one that allows the rememberer to get over or move past certain negatively ingrained perspectives or hang ups, thus altering where they stand in the present, as well as what they can make of their future.
• When a memory calcifies into history (becomes objective/ objectified), it is no longer fluid and can no longer be re-remembered in a different angle (unless of course the process of objectification is one of re-remembering), as it is no longer in the world itself. this also means that the memory is no longer personal, and belongs to the collective store of memory, the Record, and thus available to anyone as a memory of their own life. this is particularly true in ages of hyper-information, like this one, where the contents of individuals’ daily lives are offered up and become more readily available to strangers than ones own childhood. an example is a song coming on he jukebox and everyone singing along, even if they do not know the words or hadn’t heard the song before. what this means in terms of collective myth remains to be seen.
• With this vast store of memories to draw on, it would seem the artist should have no end of themes and experiences to draw on, effectively being bale to take on any life that is presented to them. However, art that is drawn from one’s own emotions and experiences rings the most true, as it has been lived, and the artist must be wary of assuming experiences that have no relation to their own. yet there is a balance to be found in taking the historicized memories and already written works of art of the collective and running them through one’s own experiences to create art that is both true and able to touch upon those deepest and most common themes of being human: love, death, family, struggle, the search for place and meaning. this could now be said to be the task of the modern artist, to take these themes that are available in the collective memory and return them to the fluidity of the subjective, where they are once again able to be reshaped or re-dreamed into whatever form imaginable or desirable, and thus to recreate the lost sense of myth in our culture. as Joseph Campbell put it: “dreams are private myths, and myths are collective dreams.”


• * memory and the body– one talks about having intellectual memories, emotional memories, muscle memory (the learning of physical tasks to a subconscious level). really, this separation of memories is a misnomer, as mind and emotion exist nowhere but in the body. there is only physical memory, the storing of tensions in muscle, the decay of skin cells with age, the patterning of genes, which can be read on a variety of different levels. take for example accounts of a person doing yoga for the first time, or receiving a strenuous massage. memories stored in the muscle tension are released and they have a flashback to that memory, effectively reliving the primary experience. however, most of us are not nearly so attuned to our bodies as to have such visceral remembrances.

• + time and memory– the trichotomy of past/ present/ future is also a misnomer, and the perception of time as a linear flow is an illusion, although sometimes a convenient one. Really all we live in is the present, and any perceptions of past or future are but imaginative extrapolations of this one current moment. a kind of subjunctive pattern recognition in which we can assert a sense of causality and desire in order to effectively plan our next action, and feel not so lost in the chaos of sensory data. as World accrues meaning, like seashells or thorns buried in the skin, so does times (our sense of eventuality or continuation) leave shards or ripples of itself in the periphery of our experiencing. these objects of memory are interpreted as a “coming from” that “goes somewhere,” and give us a reason and context for our present. it is also possible to remember the future, interpreting the present pattern in a manner that points to what will happen (prophecy).

Living Storybooks?

The other day my friend Aurelia and I started working on our new project, mapping out a social genealogy of our local "scene" (however you want to define that. We are interested in seeing how all these people we know met, why they are here, what their goals are, and how they interact with each other in order to gain a better understanding for ourselves and our community of the interconnected nature of human interactions in an intentional microcosm. How we learn to define ourselves and our world in relation to each other. Our approach to this seeks to be multidisciplinary, drawing from sociology, psychology, anthropology, etc... interviewing people about their lives and experiences here and eventually creating a multimedia art exhibition drawing in objects writing diagrams music etc... After one meeting it's obvious that what we're trying to do is big, complex and is going to take a lot of work to pull off, even if it will hopefully continue as an ongoing effort to keep drawing this place tighter. We figure the best place to start is interviewing each other and just working out the connections from there.

For me of course, there is a not so hidden agenda in interviewing all my friends. Have to get that research down for character studies for my next novel (based off of the local arts scene and its response to the rapidly deteriorating state of the world), and if there's any defining mark of our scene here it is that it is a community of extreme individuals. Talking over it neither of us are sure how this could have happened, so many people trying to live their own lives in their own unconditional ways and all working together to find a place where these diverse goals and lifestyles can intersect and encourage new growth, somewhat stigmergically. The question is, what events in people's lives could have led them to reject the mundane standards of their parents and society and forge out into new territory of creativity? To some degree this city is an example of one aspect of that, the major industry here collapsed 30 some years ago and it still has a cultural image of being a dead burnt out steel town where nothing's going on. According to some people, that's exactly why there can be a renaissance of art and music, precisely because it is invisible to the greater public eye, which leaves room for us to work within and redefine our lives as we choose. As the city fell apart some people decided they needed to respond to this by creating viable alternatives, which is a microcosm of what's happening on the global scale as the capitalist agenda of consumer monoculture reaches it limits and exhausts its resources, leading many to seek these alternatives and an ultraculture which can actually survive whatever transition will rock the face of humanity.

But even still, what led these people to attempt to lead such revolutionary lifestyles in the first place? Something that Aurelia and I considered is the cultural factor of growing up exposed to literature and film and music that encourages that kind of approach, from the rebel alliance of star wars to the rebellious stance of punkrock, taking the stories and scripts presented in their youth and choosing to live them out as reality. This is somewhat opposite of the magical technique of hypersigils, by which someone creates a work of art (often a fictional tale) which portrays how they want to live in order to change their lives in that direction. Instead, we have kids taking all previous works in this light and growing up with the understanding that they really can be anything they want. For example, our friend Spat grew up reading the beat poets and listening to rock and roll, and now is living out that tradition of being a hard edged poet and rock star. We see this time and time again in our community, people living their stories as musicians, artists, writers, anarchist organizers, djs, withces, etc, the romanticization of living a particular life, even down to one girl whose life long dream is to be a punkrock dentist. And she's doing it.

But turning to the internet to find a better understanding of this phenomenon we've had no luck whatsoever. We don't even know how to frame our search query. So, a question to toss out into the greater hinternet, has anyone else had experience with this type of thing, or know of any articles in relation to it that we might peruse to gain a better understanding of where we're trying to go? Any help would be much appreciated, for the sake of curiosity and human understanding.

one for the memory hole

This is an illustration for an article on manufacturing memories that will appear in the next issue of Konton magazine. Of course, it isn't my article, so I can't post it here, but the idea of recreating ourselves and changing our futures by fabricating our perceptions of the "past" has come up in many of the recent posts on time magick on Key23.

If you can't read the fine print, here's a link to a larger version of the image.

Stay tuned, as I am also illustrating articles on karma and on combating corporate egregores, and will post them as soon as they are drawn.

myths, maps, and sealing wax

(reposted from old journals)



As I’ve said many times before, the world is and has always been a rather mythological place for me. That is, I’ve always seen life, and my place in it, more in terms of how my/ our interactions continually play out these high level stories then as being the interactions in themselves.



Looking back at my childhood, this isn’t very surprising. I’ve always been fascinated by mythologies and their epic description of reality. If anything, that has been my own personal disconnect from the world and at times has kept me from being able to interact with the world "as it is." I think this approach was first fostered by being raised Christian, but not in being raised to believe that that view of the world was the correct or only view. As my Dad once said, he raised us that way to believe that there is something in the world to believe in, that we are part of something much bigger than this. With an active and critical imagination, it didn’t take me long to realize that this Christian story was only just another story. And being an avid reader as well I began pouring through the old stories of many different cultures and religions, the myths of Greece and Rome, the Norse, Assyrian, and Indian cultures. And beyond that I was attracted to other more fantastic stories that carried such mythic and epic perspectives, namely the Lord of the Rings, and movies like Tron (which paints a good picture for a late twentieth century take on these old myths) and Star Wars. Actually it didn’t really surprise me to discover that George Lucas had been good friends with Joseph Campbell, as Lucas’ epic deftly portrays a version of Campbell’s ‘hero’s journey’. And as I’ve pointed out recently, that myth itself is nothing but a story for our own coming to terms with being individual humans in this wide and crazy world. And beyond these, my mythic approach was also highly informed by certain epic role-playing video games, namely the Ultima and Final Fantasy series. These last perhaps really set up my beliefs that I was indeed the hero of my own quest through the world or personal legend, and as the hero, was capable and responsible for trying to save or at least change the world in some meaningful and lasting way.



Myths of individual self-importance aside, all these stories also set up my belief that the world would "end" soon in some cataclysmic struggle between good and evil or magic and technology. Looking at this now, I could say that this almost worldwide myth of the apocalypse might just be a story for learning to accept our finitude as mortal beings, or for our personal struggles trying to yoke disjoint aspects of our personalities. What is right and wrong, and should we approach the world analytically, intuitively, or both? Not that the world still doesn’t appear that it might end soon, or at least that humanity might not be pushing it and ourselves to some vast breaking point; our myths and history (and discernable future) seem to point to some apocalyptic climax looming on the horizon. Of course, I still could be reading too much into this, but we’ll never know until it happens.



As they say as above, so below, our personal interactions serve as reflections of higher level cultural interactions and vice versa. If anything, that is how myth works, in finding correlations between our personal stories and that of the cosmos, creating maps for our journeys through the world in the spinning of stars and migrations of our ancestors. One could perhaps say then that our personal interactions are also being played out on collective levels, that each culture, and humanity as a whole, are going through their own hero’s journey of world-discovery and self-affirmation. Perhaps the Universe is going through this as well, as the myths of gods playing, and sciences of physical forces interacting all seem to point too.



In fact, I would argue that it is possibly this mapping between heavenly bodies and natural processes to our everyday experiences and interactions that has allowed us understand our place in the world (at least to a limited degree) and communicate this to each other. Over time we have created elaborate symbol systems that serve to represent ourselves as these higher levels of interaction, and become frameworks to relate to our own and other’s experiences; such as the Kabala’s mapping of the cosmos, or the I Ching’s mapping of organic change. Even our daily language itself has its roots in such symbolic forms of representation, if you look at the old runic alphabets in which each symbol is not only its letter but a communicable concept describing aspects and interactions that had been consistently noticed in the world. And today, even though each concept is not directly mapped from its individual symbols, these jumbles of letters still serve to spell out and represent actual things in the world. Of course, some languages, like Chinese, never forgot this representational quality of the characters used, in that each symbol still represents a concept in itself in the form of a stylized picture of it. Which leads me to say that art in itself can serve as another representative form for communicating our experiences, whether in visual forms, sonic feelings, etc… And in this sense, any action or interaction could be considered art in that it is interpretable of representative of both itself and higher level interactions of our experiences of the world. The act of going to work each day is reflective of our daily animal struggle of fending to survive, but it is also just going to work. The act of going to sleep is reflective of giving oneself up to death and of the fall of cultures and of the inevitable end of all things. But it is also just going to sleep.



Now, the question that is raised in my mind by all this, is if and when it is necessary to frame our experiences in terms of their higher level interpretations. It seems that we have to find some common ground in order to relate our experiences to each other, and myths can offer us a collective framework for our experiences. But if we are trying to communicate more day to day interactions, the mythic filter can possibly distract from or add too much meaning to what is relevant in each information exchange. If for example I want to suggest to someone a good place to eat, it is not necessary to tie in discussions of our struggles for bio-survival or the role that cave drawings once might have played in ancient cultures, but just to say such and such restaurant has tasty and affordable food. But if the discussion were to tend to topics of how we fit into the world, such higher level themes and stories might be necessary in order to paint a decent picture of our experiences of reality. It seems to come down to being aware of what information is practical in any given exchange, and excluding the levels of interpretation that are not. Just because my actions of informing you where to eat could be interpreted as acting out some archetypal role of teacher or guide, it is almost meaningless to point this out when you just want directions. Instead our interaction could suggest to you what you need to know, and just, that unless you aren’t too hungry that you could chat for a bit before you eat. And so, though the mythic interpretation of reality is a meaningful approach to our experiences , it is only really useful in dealing with high level interpretations of our experiences, and not in communicating the actual interactions we have on a more experiential level.

caught in our own net

And some more relevent passages from Alan Watts's The Book (the key points are in bold):



"Apart from such human artifacts as buildings and roads, our universe, including ourselves, is thoroughly wiggly. It's features are wiggly in both shape and conduct. Clouds, mountains, plants, rivers, animals, coastlines- all wiggle. They wiggle so much and in so many different ways that no one can really make out where one eiggle begins and another ends, whether in space or in time. Some French classicist of the eighteenth century complained that the creator had seriously fallen down on he job by failing to arrange the stars wit hany elegent symmetry, for they seem to be sprayed through space like the droplets from a breaking wave... Millinnia ago, some genius discovered that such wiggles as rabits and fishes could be caught in nets. Much later, some other genius thought of catching the world in a net. The net has cut the big world into little wiggles, all contained in squares of the same size. Order has been imposed on chaos. We can now say that the wiggle goes so many squares to the left, so many to the right, so many up, or so many down, and at last we have its number. Centuries later, the same image of the net was imposed upon the world as the lines of both celestial and terrestrial latitude and longitude, as graph paper for plotting mathematical wiggles, as pigeonholes for filing, and the ground plan for cities. The net has thus become one of the presiding images of human thought. But it is always an image, and just as no one can use the equator to tie up a package, the ral wiggly world slips like water throug hour imaginary nets. However much we divide, count, or classify this wiggling into particular things and events, this is no more than a way of thinking about the world: it is never actually divided."



"We have quite forgotten that both "matter" and "meter" are alike derived from the Sanskrit root matr-, "to measure," and that the "material" world means no more than the world as measured or measurable- by such abstract images as nets or matrices, inches, seconds, grams, and decibles."



"Today, scientists are more and more aware of what things are, and what they are doing, depends on where and when they are doing it. If, then, the definition of a thing or event must include definition of its environment, we realize that any given thing goes with a given environment so intimately and inseperably that it is more difficult to draw a clear boundary between the thing and its surroundings. This was the grain of truth in the primitave and unreliable scienceof astrology- as there were also grains of truth in alchemy, herbal medicine, and other primitive sciences. For when the astrologer draws a picture of a person's character or soul, he draws a hororscope- that is, a very rough and incomplete picture of the whole universe as it stood at the moment of that person's birth. But this is at the same time a vivid way of saying that your soul, or rather your essential Self, is the whole cosmos as it is centered around the particular time, place, and activity called John Doe. Thus the soul is not in the body, bu the body in the soul, and the soul is the entire network of relationships and proccesses which make up your environment, and apart from which you are nothing. A scientific astrology, if it could ever be worked out, would have to be a thorough description of the individual's total environment- social, biological, botanical, meteorological, and astronomical- throughout every moment of his life. But as things are, we define (and so come to feel) the individual in the light of our narrowed "spotlight" conscioussness which largely ignores the field or environment in which he is found. "Individual" is the Latin form of the Greek "atom" - that which cannot be cut or divided any further into seperate parts. We cannot chop off a person's head or remove his heart without killing him. But we can kill him just as effectively by seperating him from his proper environment. This implies that the only true atom is the universe- that total system of interdependent "thing-events" which can be seperated from each other only in name... Head, neck, heart, lungs, brain, veins, muscles, and glands are seperate names but not seperate events... In precisely the same way the individual is seperate from his universal environment only in name. When this is not recognized, you have been fooled by your name. Confusing names with nature, you come to believe that having a seperate name makes you a seperate being. This is -rather literally- to be spellbound."