Jodorowsky on Life

I wanted to write something about psycho-spiritual crises, about my reasons for dreaming, studying myths and literature, about what I am looking for in myself, in the world...

...but Alejandro Jodorowsky's words (from a recent interview) might have to suffice.

"Do you pray? And if so, to who or to what?"

No, I don’t believe in praying to an external god, but I think in the interior of ourselves, we have what I call the interior world. A world which is a clear point of light, which is not you, but it is the fountain of life within yourself. When they discovered America, there was a fountain where you wash and get young – the fountain of youth. The fountain of health is inside you. And every night, I try to approach there. That for me is to pray, to make emptiness and to come to the centre of yourself, to try to go there.

...

You have no fear of death?

Not anymore. I am completely prepared to die – spiritually, not corporally. My body wants to live. The body always wants to be immortal, not to die. And the soul accepts death - that is good. But it’s not good if my body wants to die, because my life is shorter. You menace me with a knife, and I will defend myself, I will ask somebody to protect me, no? Even if I say [to myself], “I can die.” I understand that.

Do have any beliefs about what happens afterwards?

Why? Why be curious about what will happen, it will happen anyway, it will happen! Either I’ll go there or there – everything will happen. It’s fantastic – the future is fantastic! Anything that will happen will happen!"

what I meant to write earlier, but didn't have the heart

Sophie got back from Boston yesterday and we got together after my classes, talking late into the night about what's going on in our hearts, our minds. I mostly tried to articulate the many questions that have been circling for days, about community involvement, my reasons and goals for studying myth and literature, the somewhat existential crises I was feeling Sunday night, walking up the back streets of Bloomfield alone, with the dark looming rain clouds and Sigur Ros in my headphones, seeing the sunset reflected in dirty windows and a feather on the edge of a puddle that sent a shiver through my heart. But I was feeling totally ungrounded, adrift in the world, cut loose from community, my dreams, any truly revealing or opening experience. According to Charles Long (whose book Alpha I am reading for class) describes myth as a symbolic ordering which makes clear how the world is present for man, and though I haven't had as clear recall on my dreams these past weeks, they are one of the most consistent places where my world is revealed to me, further deepened by my love of literature, stories that speak to broader realities and make life make sense, the same way Sophie said she finds such peace and place in poetry. But community can do likewise, talking and playing music with other people in a way I haven't in a long time, social rituals which I miss and should seek out, in our ideas for a personal salon, in looking at joining some student organization. But it runs deeper, I have constantly through my life sought out experiences that broaden my reality, which put me in deeper touch with mystery, awe, what is possible. Experiences that are more fully real, with that existential quality of utter wonder and terror, beauty and pain, balanced into one moment. I wonder, is it possible to find such moments of transcendence at all times, a total irruption of the sacred? That mindset of the continual "Yes!" which finds this sacredity not in some external "Other" but in the identification of the self with the whole world, in each indescribable moment...

In all my classes the question of duality keeps coming up, Plato's two causes of Reason and Necessity, Barthe's "Doxology"- cultrually instilled beliefs that cast differences in terms of conflict, even Evolutionary Psychologists trying to find proof for differences in sexual proclivities. In Critical Reading we had the Deconstructionist critique explained as one that tries to get beyond artificial dualities, and in myths we have abstract, primal dualities, a coincidence of opposites, that are necessary to the symbolic ordering of the world, but are ultimately transcended. Kinds of academic or epic yoga, in short. The question aside (for the time being) of how this is all related to sexuality, which has also come up in all these classes, I still fail to see why reality has to be expressed in dualistic terms, or how it is possibe to percieve it otherwise. Certainly there are always grey borders and ambiguities between concepts, certainly I have had many moments that have stretched my consciousness past any individual identification, an acceptance of being intimately part of the whole. And yet, I still hide in my room, don't talk to most people, look for differences, still feel isolated and alien even in groups of joyous and close friends. I still can't grasp how two such primaly opposed forces as Night and Day can be rectified, much less to speak of Life and Death, when they just seem so phenomenologically distinct. Sure, life is a dream, but one tha tfails to convey the same symbolic depth, that sense of chaotic possibility, except in those rare moments of lucidity or hallucination, whereas the death of sleep, even in its most mundane moments, is utterly profound with psycho-spiritual implications. Life of course can also be profound, it does not just have to be these routines, this profanity, the dead hands of history and binary logic, it can be awesome, Real, the day too can show us, and quite symbolically, how we are present in the world. I am not quite there yet though, and most of the time just want people to be quiet so that I can read in peace, and go back to sleep.

Dream Theatre

I haven't had any really epic or interesting dreams since returning from our road-trip, when I was taught to fly by the witches and went on a journey into the depths of hell, but being immersed in mythology lately I started thinking last night as I was falling to sleep about just how many of my older dreams are mythic in scope, and woke at seven from this suitably epic adventure (though epic in a way much different than most of my dreams):

I was in a packed movie theatre waiting for the show to begin. A couple other kids in front of me wondered what the movie was, and as it started I knew it was a flick about the end of the world, one I had seen before and highly enjoyed, but also was living in. Something was really wrong and the crowd dispersed. My brother Devon was in front of me and turned around to talk. There was some tension between us, a sort of brotherly competition which the voice-over explained. My twin Scott showed up with his girlfriend Anne, who was dressed in wet blue-white robes and arguing with him or mad over something he'd done, though he only looked sheepish. We had to get out of there fast. Suddenly I found myself on a long rocky strand jutting out into the sea with thick clouds overhead. Alberto was with me and we were trying to figure out how to get to a square black prison or military outpost that loomed on an island to right far out in the sea, where Sophie and Sarah were being held prisoner. There were many military personnel swarming over the strand with surveying and radio equipment. I looked up just as the clouds parted to see an enormous jet black metal spaceship flying close and fast over the whole sky. Alberto and the soldiers also exclaimed at the sight of this monolithic apparition and ran around wildly, for it was the sign we were waiting for, a herald of the end. At the sight of the spaceship, the soldiers called to the prison, and soon an equally large black ship, like an airship carrier or square submarine charged from the island towards the strand at an enormous speed. Both it and the spaceship had a gothic quality that on waking reminded me of the Cathedral of Learning. The ship approached, looking like it wouldn't stop, but run right into the strand, so Alberto and I scrambled down the rocky side to where a white ship had fortuitously pulled up, captained by young anarchist pirates out for a joy cruise, enjoying feasts and games on their floating party. I leapt from the strand onto the pirate ship, bowling into the revelers and upsetting one girl who wanted to raise a stink about our intrusion. At that the black ship swung along side, and a military officer leaned out to take the girl's complaint. She however didn't want to deal with the military, so instead the officer gave us each a grey coin that was like a demerit for bad behavior or token of our guilt. The anarchists wanted to sail off and continue partying, but I was more concerned with rescuing our lovers from the island and preparing for the invasion of both the army and the spaceship.

Myth is Alive and Well (Though Not For Goats)

For my Myth Symbol and Ritual class I was asked to keep in eye on the media for themes of a mythic quality to share in class later today. Though this article is much more related to an instance of ritual than myth, I thought it perhaps a perfect example of how ancient beliefs are still alive in the modern world.

Goats sacrificed to fix Nepal jet. (via Monkeyfilter)

Two goats were sacrificed in front of a Boeing 757 at the Kathmandu Airport to the Hindu deity Akash Bhairav. After the sacrifice, the plane, which had been grounded due to electrical problems, was reportedly fixed and is back in flight. The irony perhaps is that the article describes Bhairav as being a deity of sky protection whose image is emblazoned on the side of the plane, whereas the god is linguistically a transformation of Bhairava, a manifestation of Shiva associated with destruction and prayed to in order to destroy enemies, which makes me wonder just what the Nepalese have in mind for their flights.

Also somewhat mythic is the legendary chupacabra supposedly caught by a hunter in South Texas, which regardless if it turns out to just be a mangy grey fox and not the "goat-sucking" monster, still shows people's willingness to believe in the mythic and supernatural. Though I've never heard of foxes sucking the blood out of live chickens... DNA tests still pending.

I also, true to form, read ahead in my texts for class so that I can be better prepared for the discussions. Reading Levi-Strauss' "Structural Analysis of Myth" yesterday fascinated me with his breakdown of myth as linguistic themes that can be analyzed, much the way I performed something akin to Calvin Hall's statistical analysis on my own dream themes last year. It is interesting to note that dreams are perhaps more rooted in language, as their recall is often based on, is only based on, what one can actually say about the images, that which can be repeated later on waking. Any small detail of a particular dream is important to its significance, from shades of light to pronunciations of names, whereas myth, according to Levi-Strauus, is that which remains when it is taken out of the language, the themes which carry across regardless of the particular linguistic events (a function that he claims places myth at the opposite end of the spectrum from poetry, despite other mythologists' (like Campbell) assertions that myth and poetry are inextricably intertwined). In order to recall a dream for recording, I've found it best to lay in bed half-way between wake and sleep and review the visual images of the dream with specific phrases and descriptions that won't as quickly dissipate upon getting up and being confronted by the stronger images of the World. Another interesting point is his idea that myths linguistically express not only the past and present of a culture, but the continuation of the events into the future, not something quite so akin to prophecy but a subjunctive pattern recognition that also perhaps allows one to make inferences from dreams about projected or desired states of the psyche. How does a story (whether mythic or oneiric) suggest what one might need to do in life? This is perhaps Eliade's take on myth as a paradigm for cultural rituals and actions that reaffirm the cosmological abstractions of the narrative, as well as Jung's assertion that dreams serve the function of self-actualization.

exploding mythologies

It looks like my Myth, Symbol, and Ritual class will be the most exciting, and most challenging, of my courses this year. The professor, Fred Clothey, was a student of the renowned mythologist Mircea Eliade, a gruff imposing man who founded Pitt's Comparative Religion department and immediately threatened to scare all the freshmen out. Apparently he retired last year, but the University was unable to find another teacher for this course, and I feel highly honored to learn from an authority in this field and not some gawky grad student. Asking us what a myth is, he shot down all our uncertain ideas, and though I recognize that having not been in school for seven years I really need to relearn how to frame my vocal arguments, I feel certain I will have all my assumptions about myth questioned and learn a great deal in this field which I perhaps have the most personal investment in.

As opposed to the six page final paper for my Critical Reading class, here I am expected to write three 7-10 page essays (the first due next month), each dealing with one of the topics, myth, symbol, and ritual. On top of that I must also write my own personal myth and an observation of a ritual outside of my everyday experience, all things that I currently push myself to do in my personal writing, but perhaps not with nearly the critical intent that the professor might hope us to bring. Thankfully, I am fascinated by these themes, and already have thousands of ideas for subject matter.

For the myth I will take one of the apocalypses with which I am familiar, possibly Revelations but more likely the Norse Ragnarok, which has exerted it's influence on my psyche since I first read it in fourth grade, interpreting its symbols as well as through a mythological theory (I'm not sure just whose yet), in order to show that though it describes an end of the world (in illo tempore), it is also a creation myth which paves the way for this present reality.

For the symbol I immediately decided on that of the Tower, perhaps the most pervasive symbol in my own mythology, and fitting because that's exactly the phase of life I'm in. The Tarot's blasted tower, the tower of Babel, the World Trade Centers, Tolkien's White Tower, Stephen King's Dark Tower, the current race for the world's largest skyscraper, and even Oakland's infamous gothic edifice, the Cathedral of Learning (or Tower of Ignorance), in which I have all my classes. Building not just as recreation of world, but as the human folly of trying to become the gods. I could probably tie in the internet as modern parallel of Babel.

For the ritual, I had already been planning on attending a Jewish Temple service with Sophie at some point soon, which could be interesting in comparison to my Catholic upbringing. But I also had the opportunity to participate in a Peyote ceremony in the spring on which I took extensive notes, and could potentially participate in another one specifically to examine for the class. What's interesting about that is the ceremony is removed from its traditional context (in the Yaqui shamanism Castaneda studied), and literally smuggled into the modern American world, an angle which might interest Clothey, who extensively studied religious diasporas in Southern India.

Regardless of what I actually end up writing about it is certainly already getting me thinking much more critically in these terms again, and making me reconsider the idea of doing a double major, in creative writing and comparative religion.

a matter of courses

I am now through most of my first week of school and I have to say how excited I am and thankful that I decided to apply to go this year, I think I would be going mad without it, having something else to push my brain and encourage me to grow beyond just my own day to day efforts. My schedule is only three days a week, and this feels almost like a vacation, having more free time to read and write, doing something more engaging than work. Of course I know that soon enough this will be filled with homework, but even that is still exciting and different. I had to write a one page paper last night for my critical reading class, and I spent most of yesterday afternoon working on it, perhaps going much deeper into a critical analysis of the reading than the teacher probably expects. I cant help it, I love to push my mind.

Some of the highlights so far: All my classes are in the Cathedral of Learning, a tower of gothic architecture that looms over the city and already featured as a significant landmark in my dreams. Wandering its halls and arched vestibules feels like I am in another century or country.

My history class, Magic Medicine and Science, does not appear to be as much geared towards looking at the medical arts, but at how these topics relate to the scientific revolution in the 17th century, but going as far back as the Greek philosophers through the Rennaisance alchemists. Mostly reading assignments, but we will have to write one paper, which the teacher said if we had our own ideas on... I already am thinking about the relation between alchemical and astrological world views, or between alchemy and the beginnings of psychology.

My intro to psychology class may be a large lecture in an icebox, but we are asked to participate in four hours of research studies, which should be highly fascinating and enlightening, and much further out of my everyday kinds of activities.

My critical reading class is in one of the Cathedral's nationality rooms, specifically, Yugolslavia, carved wooden walls and chandeliers. As opposed to the classic European literature most of the critical reading classes assign, our teacher is focusing on modern African American literature, which I admittedly know much less about. It will be curious to see how the class reacts to this, as they (and the teacher) are mostly white.

I have not yet had my last class, and the one I'm most curious about, Myth Symbol and Ritual, which looks at those themes in a modern context and is supposedly taught by a crazy alchemist professor. I am hoping to find someone intelligent and well read enough to perhaps become some sort of mentor, or at least a sounding board for some of my own ideas on the subject.

Perhaps my biggest hurdle so far is that I used the refund money from my loan to buy a new computer, one of the latest macbooks. I haven't had a reliable piece of hardware in years and I can't stop playing around with all its possibilities. Since I am a student, Apple has a deal where they also give you an ipod and a printer/scanner/copier for free. I am really glad to have this functional machine, but since its wi-fi capabilities are powerful enough to pick up an open network in my neighborhood I have to be really careful not to fall into my old habits of bumbling around the internet late into the night when I could otherwise be productive or asleep.

Either way it's all really exciting, and being back in school is already helping me to focus my mind better and start looking more closely at my future.

The Body of the Text

The Body of the Text
How unique is your sense of language?

100 most common words in the English language:
1 the
2 be
3 to
4 of
5 and
6 a
7 in
8 that
9 have
10 I
11 it
12 for
13 not
14 on
15 with
16 he
17 as
18 you
19 do
20 at
21 this
22 but
23 his
24 by
25 from
26 they
27 we
28 say
29 her
30 she
31 or
32 an
33 will
34 my
35 one
36 all
37 would
38 there
39 their
40 what
41 so
42 up
43 out
44 if
45 about
46 who
47 get
48 which
49 go
50 me
51 when
52 make
53 can
54 like
55 time
56 no
57 just
58 him
59 know
60 take
61 people
62 into
63 year
64 your
65 good
66 some
67 could
68 them
69 see
70 other
71 than
72 then
73 now
74 look
75 only
76 come
77 its
78 over
79 think
80 also
81 back
82 after
83 use
84 two
85 how
86 our
87 work
88 first
89 well
90 way
91 even
92 new
93 want
94 because
95 any
96 these
97 give
98 day
99 most
100 us

25 most common nouns
1 time
2 person
3 year
4 way
5 day
6 thing
7 man
8 world
9 life
10 hand
11 part
12 child
13 eye
14 woman
15 place
16 work
17 week
18 case
19 point
20 government
21 company
22 number
23 group
24 problem
25 fact

Verbs
1 be
2 have
3 do
4 say
5 get
6 make
7 go
8 know
9 take
10 see
11 come
12 think
13 look
14 want
15 give
16 use
17 find
18 tell
19 ask
20 work
21 seem
22 feel
23 try
24 leave
25 call

Adjectives
1 good
2 new
3 first
4 last
5 long
6 great
7 little
8 own
9 other
10 old
11 right
12 big
13 high
14 different
15 small
16 large
17 next
18 early
19 young
20 important
21 few
22 public
23 bad
24 same
25 able

As compiled by the Oxford English Corpus

emergent narratives

"Emergent narrative? Can there be such a thing as a narrative that emerges, by itself, from a seemingly random or chaotic structure or series of events? The way forms, fractal shapes and complex structures arise out of certain kinds of chaos. Are there “forms” — narrative cells I guess you could call them — that in sufficient quantity spontaneously give rise to what we call stories? If the existence of these things is possible then perhaps emotionally moving arcs, transformations and series of events could simply emerge by themselves given the right conditions — and could those conditions sometimes be man-made?"

from an article on interactive video games vs. narrative storytelling in David Byrne's blog (7.21.07)

My response is, of course, a resounding "Yes," having spent the last five years tracking out a narrative that has emerged from my own dreams. It is all in the power of the human mind to form connections.