Me and Andy Warhol...

(who could seem so insincere)

(and I, who might seem so sincere...)

have at least one thing in common, which I know I have blogged about before:

we like(d) to listen to the same song over and over and over again, ad ecstatiatum...

right now, for me (can't speak for th' dead dandy Warhol) it's Ralph Nielsen & the Chancellors' "Scream," which for me is the ultimate rock n' roll song, even beyond The Birthday Party or The Pixies...the pinnacle of pop pandemonium, a hurricane of shrapnelling reverb'd gitarzz & monster-movie yowls, overlaid w/ tailfinned shamanic incantations n' cascading avalanche-drums... [I don't want to endorse fee-free file transfer or anything, but I'd wager a Google search could find you a QT of "Scream" if you wanted it...]

and I'm listening to this as I read about nonlinear models of consciousness, as the ripples of guitar and drum pool, drift, pile up into chaotic cadences that threaten intellect...The Same Song Over n' Over is a way, after all, of creating one's own mental attractor, of organizing a hurricane eye around which new thoughts can swirl...

and I need new thoughts. as my thought-clouds tend, of late, to be dark and doomy ones, confused, affrighted--though "objectively" only sun shows on my life-sea...somehow I've taken minor, neurotic fears and cupped them and warmed them so, like the proverbial butterfly's wings beating in the Amazon, they've spawned a hurricane in East Podunk.

you wouldn't think a greasy proto-Goth number by Ralph Nielsen would do much to dispel the above mind-mists, but this musick blasts such gales of razor-twang n' sub-garage grunge that it's hard to take serious th' problems a mind reels out, when it's tethered for the nonce above flesh; when it's fleeing the light of faux-reason to the Heaven of an eternal Halloween; when the jungle river of Unconscious unspokenly betides a finnegans wake of possible futures...

Experiment

Love someone, or something. Love him/her/it/they with all your passion. Fake it if you have to at first.

Love uncritically. Love intensely. Love all the time. Hear sappy songs on the radio as songs about your Beloved. Eat that ice cream and taste the Beloved's sweetness; feel that fall breeze as the Beloved's caress.

Translate pain into longing. You have to wait in a long line at the airport and you just so want to get on the plane. So make this: you so, so, so want him/her/it/they/whatever.

Say the Beloved's name. All the time.

You are allowed to love others besides the Beloved. But--see them as aspects of the Beloved. In their perfection see the pure and total perfection of the Beloved. Love intensely, love all the time.

When you dream the Beloved you are doing it right. When you hit your thumb with the hammer as you're driving a nail and your first thought is love, you are really doing it right.

Feel your love in your heart chakra. This is where the Beloved lives. Vibrate the Beloved's name there. Hit yourself lightly on the breastbone as you do this. See the Beloved in rainbows in puddles at the gas station.

Do this until your life has changed, until your world orbits the Beloved's star. Until nothing that mattered to you matters anymore except the Beloved. Do this until you can look in any mirror and see a being beauteous: the Beloved's Beloved.

Basically

...I like being insane. The too-thoughtful, angel-befriending variety of insane. But it is not the most cut-and-dried, unambiguous of states. In fact, I am yearning for a little black and white right about now.

My chivalric code has put me in a limbo re Teresa, whom I love but am convinced I can't have a life with. My sponsor says I'm 'awaiting the will of my Higher Power,' and this is a good thing. I say...dammit, HP, make up your goddamn mind already! When I say "love" I know I don't mean classic, boy-girl, passionate, do-or-die anymore, and that's really sad, but it's also the way it is and therefore here I am. So I don't make any drastic decisions because I'm not ready and she's not ready and I feel like a ^%$#@ Woody Allen character but also know the trouble those oh-so glamorous dramatic drastic decsions have led to in the past.

I reside between the sensual and spiritual, too, another limbo--sipping my lovely Portuguese red wine, nibbling my velvet, humid-musky dark chocolate. The red and black of tantra put me: nowhere. I don't dare renounce (and scorn Kali's creation); I don't dare zone out into work/party/work/party/ad nauseam (and scorn Her heart-song of love...32nd-notes of birds on phone lines, secret messages in numbers and song lyrics, fleece of our marriage bed in lacy late-summer clouds...)

Another no man's land is my job: some of the people there are about to Really Make Me Upset, something the horror of which they cannot--and can never--imagine. Until it befalls them and it's too late and they're on that plane heading back home wondering what the hell happened. But: despite some of the silly tasks foisted on me by the lazy or unimaginative, despite the gossip, etc., I still really do love to show up for work every day.

And I could ditto the above confoundments--my writing (writing?? a diary? a blog???? a few specialized articles no one reads?)...my plans to paint my temple room green, though I work or sleep all weekend and still have no time for anything...my incipient termite treatment...though no termites are there...

I can only conclude: life is too complicated to fit the slots of our dreams. And I can only extrapolate: it's so complicated because it's the bodying forth of a Goddess Whose essential Self is chaos, and our little brains are so simple and grasping so they'd be sure to get all obsessed and chase after Her in a love-game we call life.

The Non-Trip to the [Non-?] Guru

So I'm sitting in Sophia's kitchen, telling her that I have decided, and my Angel has validated, that I would not, after all, go see the guru whom I had known intimately, profoundly (only) via my mind's eyes/ears. "The possibly corrupt guru who doesn't call herself a guru--the one I had the imaginary relationship with? I decided not to go see her, after all, and my imaginary friend says it's OK."

The fact that Sophia not only took this news with a straight face but then proceeded to ask all the right interested and concerned questions just proves that she is a true friend.

But it's true, friends: I was packing boxes for my seemingly endless move, and talking to Laura about Guru X's visit to the US, and I realized: as much as I love Guru X, and as much as She changed my life unutterably and inexorably and unfathomably...

I couldn't figure out if I really wanted to go see Her or not. This was disconcerting for me, as it was as analogous to Morrissey, Sleater-Kinney, and Current 93 all playing in my neighbor's garage and me deciding to wash my hair that night instead. And I don't have that much hair!

So I was doing my typical Al-Anon dithering dance, the "I don't know what I really want waah waaaaah" wa-watusi, and I was ordering my sweet Holy Guardian Angel to tell me what to do--tell me whether to drive up and see Guru X or not. And to Her credit, Laura just kept asking, as She will do until I want to smack Her, "What is your True Will?" And this went on until I said something like "goddamit just tell me what to do."

Laura, in Her infinite kindness, asked me then the simplest, most revealing question She could: "Do you want to go?"

"No."

"Then what's the problem? Don't go."

"But I owe Guru X soooo much. She gave me my life."

"People like Her don't see the world as a balance sheet upon which they're owed something. You seem as though you just want to show up at this darshan and have Her run across the room towards you, in slow motion, in some sepia moment where you two embrace and eveyone's in awe and asking, 'who's that guy?'"

And you can't imagine Laura's sweetness as She intones this terrible truth about my selfish motives about seeing Guru X--you can't imagine the pure kindness and good humor, the gentle supportive embrace of Laura's words--as she cuts to the horrid depth of my egotism. [This is how I know She is an angel--She can proclaim very painful truths without acrimony.]

And Laura's right--I've learned all I'm ever going to learn from Guru X, in fact, and only wanted to go see Her to have some Hallmark moment. So in that instant I decided not to go. I begin to see, after all these years, why Guru X doesn't like being called a "guru"--she's not a teacher who adopts would-be adepts and leads them over the bumpy road to realization. Her stated goal is to bring God's light into our lives so that God can change us along the individual lines encoded in the unfolding of the universe. Guru X is apparently so good at this She can do it over long distances (or I have an extraordinarily good imagination)...but as Sophia seemed to imply, sitting there in her kitchen, it kinda doesn't matter. An initiation is an initiation, and we know it because we are no longer the same and can never go back.

Another Guru Journey

I mentioned earlier that my first guru was coming to the USA for the first time in, I think, 15 years. I've never met her in person; we had an intense astral relationship that culminated in her "firing" me as a disciple because I wouldn't stop worshiping her as God. She finally said to me, "I'm not here for you to worship. I'm here to point you towards the Light. You will have to find God for yourself."

I know it sounds completely bonkers to talk about an "astral relationship" of any kind, but--if you're reading WiHW you just gotta roll with it. Anyway, after my initial shock and confusion upon being fired, I felt drawn to Kali as an iron shaving is drawn to a magnet, and I found in Kali everything I'd had in Guru X and more. She'd been right, though I hated to admit it: I needed to surrender to God and sink into Her infinite ocean, not just play on the shore, as much fun as that was.

Guru X (I don't name her or my current Teacher because people can get caught up in the messenger to the exclusion of the message--I know! I did it!)...Guru X has a rather interesting reputation. (She also doesn't like to be called a "guru" but for the sake of clarity I'm doing so here. Sorry, Ma :) ) A prominent Ex-Disciple of hers accuses her of being a channel for dark forces, some kind of soul-vampire whose career was fomented and stage-managed by a black magician (now deceased) who had an unhealthy interest in the younger Guru X. This Ex-Disciple, whom I've met and learned a lot from and hold in the highest esteem, believes that Guru X cursed him when he left her and that this curse shattered, for a time, his life and his very psyche. This guy is more than sane, by the way--if I told you his academic and literary accomplishments you'd expect him to have Sir before his name or a college or two named after him.

And I don't know what to think. I was just reading the web site for Guru X's visit, and an interview with her there weirdly paralleled my life since my own breakup with her--only, in my case, it's been very positive. She claims to bring people into the Divine Light so that they will grow closer to God and surrender to Her. That's happened. So that they will devote their lives and careers to God. That's happened. So that they will love their families more. That's happened. So that they will grow more tolerant and see that all spiritual paths lead to God. Even that's happened, and for me that's saying something. She says she wants to help people find the Divine Light within them, and that's happened. So...

we may not have a cause-and-effect relationship here that would withstand a double-blind study conducted in a vacuum, but Guru X seems to have taken a disillusioned spiritual seeker who was obsessed with what other people thought of him and who aspired to be nothing more than another dessicated intellectual wearing black and ordering the ratatouille--and turned him into yours truly: knight errant, angel consort, no spiritual giant but a lot more centered and happy than I've ever been. And at peace with many of the Big Questions that used to torment me back when my cosmology put me at the center of the cosmos.

I know there are manipulative and abusive self-proclaimed gurus. I know there's such a thing as black magic. I also know that needy people will project their fantasies and fears onto someone they perceive as spiritually powerful, and that these fantasies and fears, like all expectations, are resentments waiting to happen. One reason I love and respect the Ex-Disciple is that we're so much alike: grail knights lost in the 21st century, intellectuals who've had to face the hard truth that intellect can't lead one to ultimate reality (and the harder truth that there is an ultimate reality), amants who see God in every beloved and who thus have lived out the death of God...and we're both a tad dramatic. I don't know what happened between him and Guru X; I just know what happened between she and I and, more importantly, how utterly different I am afterwards.

Fripp Comes Alive

I sat in my car in the parking lot of the [independent!] music store, shouting "Thank you, Kali! Thank you, Kali!" loud, loud, not caring who heard, who saw...and what musical offering could lift me to this height of felicity? The 2006 two-CD remastered version of Robert Fripp's Exposure, that's what, the album that in 1979 ravish'd me of my innocent dimwit view that all pop music was necessarily Top-40 music or "art rock." [Well, there was the cool stuff my parents listened to, when they listened to anything cool: Ennio Morricone, Miles Davis, The Beatles...but that was old stuff. Music wasn't great anymore, went the 1970s loser refrain...the 60s are over, maaan...]

Exposure, an album I bought solely because of its cover art, because it looked so weird and so against anything Casey Kasem or Don Kirshner stood for. No bright colors, just sickly, tranquilized, video-monitor blue-black. No artist logo or blocky, cocky typography, just some neurotic-looking "calligraphy." No song titles listed, so one couldn't tell if one were purchasing a lifestyle accessory that vaunted screwin', tokin', life on The Road, or the vague "protest" aesthetic of the day, itself a pale descendant of 1960s anti-war, anti-The Man rhetoric. No song titles, and the person on the cover had short hair and wore a--tie. He looked like a haberdasher, not a rock guitarist! My friend John Walker, an amazingly skilled guitar player himself and, like me, a staunch ROCK fan, said the guy in the background image (w/ the eyelashes) looked like Brian Eno, and "He's gay." Not normal-gay, you could tell from John's withering tone, not gay in some safely stagey Village People sense or some aggressively hip Bowie sense, but... gay... because...he...liked it....

The music itself ranged from parodic traditional rock n' roll to two-fisted King Crimson-esque prog rock to serene soundscapes to some of the most abrasive aural assaults I'd ever heard. It still holds up in the abrasive department: Tony Levin's cougar-growl bass; keening guitars that sounded like a rampaging pack of circular saws; unholy-sounding scales, often played demonically fast; a sampled family argument as vocal track to one song, containing the immortal line "You're carrying a baby and you don't know if it's a nigger, a spic, or a white baby!" The professional vocalists were even scarier: Peter Hammill, creepy and predatory on "Chicago," flipping out nearly to the point of glossolalia on "Disengage." Terre Roche, screaming like she's ten centimeters dilated on the title track, a performance that makes John Lennon's "primal scream" album sound, well, emo.

But then there were the elegaic, ballady numbers sung by Daryl Hall, Peter Gabriel, and a sweetly contemplative Ms. Roche...the variety of sounds, styles, and vocals on the record was itself another affront to the pop album as usual, which by 1979 had calcified rhythmically to the fast-slow-fast of the classical concerto. (Punk rock wasn't readily available in my hometown of Lower Podunk, pop. 16,000. Once in a while late at night you could turn on the radio and get a station from The City and hear tantalizingly bizarre tracks by Elvis Costello, Talking Heads, or the Sex Pistols, but the Fripp record had them all beat in terms of sheer, in-your-face, l'art pour l'art-ism. You could listen to the Sex Pistols and hear the Chuck Berry sonic DNA; you could listen to Costello and isolate elements of rock, reggae, surf, and country-western, but much of Fripp's music seemed to have no provenance other than a desire to shred the listener's stereo speakers and brain.)

I have always felt that, in a way, my life began when the needle hit the groove the first time I listened to Exposure, or at least my lives as a hipster, an obsessive music fan, an alternative radio DJ, as someone who, in the words of Robert Fripp himself, knows what it's like "When the Muse descends," sensing "directly (one aspect of) the Creative impulse and its inexpressible benevolence." And I feel Kali's creative benevolence in this music, which is all I've listened to for several days...

but even that's not the great thing about this re-release of Exposure, if I may risk blasphemy (but not--for it is All Her Creative Benevolence--everything, everywhere--). The great thing is, they've restored the above-mentioned vocal tracks by Peter Hammill. For you see, dear reader, the previous CD release of the album replaced that inspired snarling and caterwauling-- inexplicably, unconscionably, and well-nigh unforgivably-- with flat, affectless, demo-sounding vocals. The effect was similar to the other worst art disaster in my life--going to a movie called Blue fully believing I was about to watch the last film by Derek Jarman, in which he speaks of his AIDS-related blindness and impending death over an entirely blue screen--only to find, instead, a potboiler of the same name about some imperiled chick who cries a lot despite having an apartment most people would sell their siblings for. There I was, listening to The Album That Changed Everything (every music lover has one, supreme and inviolate, above all others)...and the two best songs had been eviscerated. I even emailed the head of the Fripp/King Crimson Fan Club in the UK about it, but he never replied. (Obviously he was as crushed as I was.)

I could go into a whole riff on the sampling alone: one hears Gurdjieffan guru J.G. Bennett; wild-man guru Shivapuri Baba; a backwards Monty Python snippet; Fripp's muse Joanna Walton; someone who might be the very gay Mr. Eno [who IRL is not gay] scoffing at an "incredibly dismal, pathetic chord sequence"; the arguing family, recorded out of Fripp's Hell's Kitchen apartment window; an hour-long lecture sped up 800 times so it's three seconds of static; a newscaster cut-up so he's announcing, "There's a new governor of racketeering, conspiracy, mail fraud, and income-tax evasion!" Sampling wasn't entirely new in 1979, of course, and neither was noisy, avant-garde music, but Fripp put together more than an album with Exposure: he constructed a collaborative audio autobiography, a chaotic sensorium of Who He Was Right Then--a lie that told an immense truth, and told me that art was something I could do, too. If it doesn't sound too tribute-y, too emo: WiHW is my Exposure...

This Guy Rocks

(<-- this guy does, too)

I could hardly believe my eyes as I sat in the official WiHW La-Z-Boy, sippin' my Sunday morning coffee and listening to the same Duke Ellington CD I've put on every morning this week (Blues in Orbit)...

it was the New York Times...an article about religion (a sure bet for me)...but it said: OK, there's this pastor of an evangelical mega-church. Gregory A. Boyd. And he's preaching stuff like this: "I am sorry to tell you that America is not the light of the world and the hope of the world. The light of the world and the hope of the world is Jesus Christ."

Oh, it gets worse. He drove away about 1ooo church members (a fifth of his congregation) when he could remain silent no longer about the idolatry rampant in the species of Christianity that not only obsesses itself with patriotism, but with "homosexuality, abortion" and the freakish notion that Christians in American are some kind of persecuted, endangered minority (though Pastor Boyd now has me seeing how this could be true--depending on how one defines "Christian").

He even said (can't you get excommunicated for this???): "America wasn't founded as a theocracy. America was founded by people trying to escape theocracies. Never in history have we had a Christian theocracy where it wasn't bloody and barbaric. That's why our Constitution wisely put in separation of church and state."

In case you're thinking that this is one of those Kalibhakta pranks...here's the story.

Regular readers of this blog probably know that I'm a recovering Pentecostal who has been led by the Dark Mother Kali, of all deities, back to an appreciation and even a love for Christianity. Early in our relationship, Kali told me point-blank to climb off my religious pedestal and stop looking down on members of the faith I fled for many of the same reasons Pastor Boyd has bravely chosen to stay and fight.

Once I gave in [dramatically, as my friend Sophia would predict :) ]-- in Spain, in tears, on my knees in a cathedral before a statue of the Sorrowful Mary, Esperanza)...once I gave in, Kali immediately sent me a staggering surfeit of spiritual literature, all by Christians: Jean-Pierre de Caussade, Julian of Norwich (whom I'd read and even written about, but had never grokked in fulness), Simone Weil, Richard Rolle, The Cloud of Unknowing, and the incomparable Gabrielle Bossis, whose He and I is my favorite book ever about the spiritual path. [She probably wouldn't appreciate my saying this, but it's an HGA book par excellence.]

Kali even led me, Trickster that She Is, to...yes...I know it's frightening...the Bible. The para-biblical stuff you'd expect me to read, yes: the Nag Hammadi texts, the Pseudepigrapha (Enoch, in particular)...but also the plain, old, Hellman's mayo, canonical Bible. Biiiiiiible. Say it with me, children: Biiiiiiiiiiiiible. The book that, whether we admit it or not, inspires fear and loathing in liberals, pinkos, pagans, peaceniks, eggheads, crunchies, Greens, and lavenders. And one day, yea, as I perus'd this lately disdain'd tome, reading my least favorite of all its authors, "Paul" [he didn't write all they say he wrote], I came across verses that verily I remember'd from my sojourn amongst the brethren and cistern. Turn with me to the book of Second Corinthians, eleventh chapter and the thirteenth verse:

13: For such are false apostles, deceitful workers, transforming themselves into the apostles of Christ.
14: And no marvel; for Satan himself is transformed into an angel of light.
15: Therefore it is no great thing if his ministers also be transformed as the ministers of righteousness; whose end shall be according to their works.

Now, oddly enough, when I was a Christian they told me these verses referred to cults, New Agers, Hare Krishnas, the Antichrist, and Charles Manson. But--plainly as blood on white linen--they refer to "Christians" with lowly motives. And yea, when I read them a few months ago, seeing them afresh, I had the same, chilling thought Pastor Boyd might have had: this has happened. this is the church now. And this was the one time in my life I felt assured: I have read true Prophecy in the Bible. Thus, the "remnant," as we used to call that little band of true Christians that would survive in the end times, might be identified by its outrage at the faux amis who have found Caesar a more congenial master than Christ.

Ex-everything

Grigorss said to me not long ago, "You are not someone who gets all sentimental about the past" ... speaking in this--way--that almost sounded like he meant that I was like, all cold an' shit. I knew what he meant (I think)...my whole life I've felt the urge to keep moving, keep growing, keep testing or criticizing myself and finding what doesn't work and then change it or drop it.

Laura even, in my big initiation with her, gave me a Sanskrit name related to this topic, based on something that a spiritual teacher of mine once said to the effect that, no matter how much of God we receive, there's always more and always more and always more and more...

so I keep moving on. (It's odd, then, that I'm a Taurus with very definite Taurean tendencies: I keep the same friends forever if we're truly close [me and Grigorss met in 1979--!!]; I hate to move; I can eat the same thing every day and really like it; I goof off every chance I get; I still have my first-grade yearbook and report cards and keep and genuinely treasure odd things like a rock Sophia gave me and a lamp I fell in love with when I was 3 [that post will come later...])

But there's a difference between treasuring something and wanting to stay in or return to the time it represents. Today I got an invitation to a Lammas ritual, and it brought me sweet and blessed memories of my time as a witch--the surprising, exhilarating rituals, the messages the Divine Mother would send me in dreams, in stars, in spiders...I thought back with love to my sister witches, women with whom I danced and drummed and unraveled mysteries of who we were and was there really a God, and could She be the same One, somehow, as the One depicted in the Old Testament? (We thought not.)

I don't want to go back, though, and it's possible that, were I to meet some of my co-pagans today, that we just wouldn't have much to talk about. Some of the basic ways in which we saw the world don't compute for me any more and, after a little while, the past stalls for me as conversational motor. When you're as enamored of evolution as I am, you end up being an ex-everything: ex-christian, ex-atheist, ex-buddhist, ex-witch, ex-Wilsonian agnostic metaprogrammer.

Sometimes I wonder, in love as I am with Kali and feeling in Her the first image of God that makes deep, intuitive and intellectual sense to me--is this, too, destined to end? And--Laura assures me that this thing, this fling with Her won't end...but always adds, "unless you want it to."

Well, I don't! I'd like to think I've evolved to the point that I can claim a stable spiritual identity, can stop searching outwardly and can turn the search inward, from evolution to involution...towards the dark moon. And so, on this Tuesday of the dark moon, a day especially sacred to Kali, I sit here listening to mid-1960s trash rock and writing this magic spell to bind my soul to my Dark Mother, to implore Her to take me into caverns and catacombs of Her fractal unfolding...but never away from Her. I know Kali is just another image representing undifferentiated Sat-Chit-Ananda, and that "undifferentiated Sat-Chit-Ananda" is just a set of sounds signifying unimaginable infinite Consciousness...etc., etc. ... but She's my true love. I love Her even more than my own spiritual growth.