Offerings

Mother, I offer you my anger; please turn it into devotion.

Mother, I offer you my sadness; please turn it into obsession with your lotus feet.

Mother, I offer you my hopelessness; please turn it into hope.

Mother, I offer you my fear; please turn it into wonder at your beauty.

Mother, I offer you my dead dreams; please turn them into visions.

Mother, I offer you my pierced heart; please turn it into the sun-spangled river that flows past Dakshineswar.

Baby Steps to Sirius

OK. Teresa's done with her massive, do-or-die project for work that took weeks and weeks, and I have regained control of the main data banks. Problem is, I have nothing to say...

I learned from my computer-diet (I have a PC at work but I'm too paranoid to blog from it) that to accomplish anything worthwhile I need a high-speed Internet connection and 4-7 browser/application windows open at a given time. There--I just opened another browser window. The Perseus Digital Library. Don't ask.

Preferably there is music playing, and preferably I am in the La-Z-Boy recliner I am in now. That is the optimal writing state. Now I'm reading, on amazon.com, the first few pages of The Greeks by H.D.F. Kitto, a book I love and have lost my copy of.

Out of practice at this blogging thing, I cast about for inspiration: Kitto; a Google image search for "hdf kitto" (he looks like a laugh a minute); a swing by the Genographic Project (YES!!! They FINALLY isolated my DNA! Ya know, it's weird--lots of people are into tracking down fourth cousins, researching genealogies, etc. and that all bores me to tears. Someone told me the name of the boat we came over from Germany on in the 1890s and I promptly forgot. My mom asked me to go to a family reunion this summer, and I was thinking, "Liked it better when it was called Cops: Appalachia." But--take it back a few dozen millennia, and I'm all over it.)

I read in the New York Times that recent evidence indicates that the human brain is still evolving, and that this has occasioned surprise in the scientific community, as indeed it should if the scientists are in the habit of reading the New York Times. If we take a long view, though, we can't help but evolve and we, like every other form of life that's ever existed, are but transitional forms. As my great-great grandguru Henry David Thoreau put it, "Only that day dawns to which we are awake. There is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star."

Charlie and the Death Factory

Apocalypse Now, of course, is the greatest movie ever made. It's also my favorite version of the Grail story. Though I have watched this film a zillion times and in every imaginable state of consciousness, for some inexplicable reason I put the DVD in the other night and ended up watching the whole thing. (NOT Redux--which, though it has a Kundry, isn't a hundredth the film that the original theatrical release is. Redux has basic shot-selection and editing problems that a first-year film student--never mind. It's valuable in the same way that the bootleg 5.5-hour work print of Apocalypse Now is valuable--the same way the facsimile edition of the manuscript of The Waste-Land is valuable...what's amazing is that Coppola was his own Ezra Pound for the original version of the film, staying up all night before the premiere, cutting and recutting.)

What struck me this time was:

• what an astonishing job Vittorio Storaro did shooting the film. Every frame seems like something out of Caravaggio or Gustave Moreau--with some Gerhard Richter and Anselm Kiefer thrown in to keep things interesting.
  
• I had already been reflecting on the reasons that so many spiritual texts have war as their background. It's partly a metaphor of each person's inner struggle to evolve, but I think it's also the plain and simple message that, if these characters (Percival, Krishna and Arjuna, Moses and the Israelites, Captain Willard) can keep faith in the worst of circumstances--so can you, dear Reader, in your circumstances, whatever they may be.
  
• I'd always uncritically assumed that the "waste land" in Apocalypse Now was the American psyche as revealed in the blindly vicious prosecution of the Vietnam War. And that's half right--this time, following the logic of the Grail story more closely, I saw that the more immediate waste land Willard must heal is Kurtz's broken family. He agrees to go and explain their husband/father to them in order to heal the ailing king, but to do so, he must lay down his weapons, giving up the last scrap of identity he has. He must force himself to see what he has drunk so hard not to see: the larger, impersonal coherence--a kind of obscene, brutal lyricism--underlying the chaos of the war and his own personal confusion. The real terror of Willard's Chapel Perilous is that this meaningless war has a meaning after all.
  
• Interestingly, one of the first things we learn about Willard is that the war has shattered his own family, and herein lies the first of many ways he sees himself reflected in Kurtz. "Family," in all its dimensions, becomes in this film--that someone once called "the world's most expensive home movie"--at once the only refuge from war and its breeding ground: in Kurtz's and Willard's loss; in the terrible, heartrending sampan scene; in the cassette tape that plays as Clean dies; in the photographs from home we see so often; in the jocularly received mail-call newspaper detailing the Manson killings; in the tribal festival with its gory climax.
  
• Thus, the farther the film takes us into the abyss of chaos and terror, the more it hints at some kind of inhuman yet lovely Order, some kind of lemniscate unifying love and violence, ecstasy and horror--like the spirals of smoke made by the Hueys over the Cong outpost... a truth completely nonsensical within any million miles of the warm, fuzzy certainties of patriotism, duty, love, truth, Nixon, The Cowsills, Billy Graham, and TV Guide. A meaning freed from personality--fear of death--lust for life--a meaning ever in the moment of motion, of whirl, of tang of blood...mine is yours is all the same.
• [Is this what Susan Sontag called a "fascist aesthetic"?? Do I, in fact, "make a good--"...I can't write it. But I've always been haunted by the Horror and have known beyond doubt that true Evil exists, and that the fluffy-bunny/U2 responses do not do, do not do, anymore, nor ever did.]
  

"Is All Very Exciting, Master!"

Some members of Alcoholics Anonymous refer (usually with derision) to members of Al-Anon as "black belts," presumably because we seem to learn lightning-fast, devastatingly targeted responses to all of life's little dramas--including bad behavior by those who are or have been way too under the influence.

Some Al-Anons have appropriated the term as a compliment for those members who really work the program and who dance with life in a whirl of kisses and karate chops. Imagine my surprise, then, when my sponsor said the other day that I was "officially a black belt." I know it sounds goofy, but this shivered me. I was telling him about the Nazi encounter and some dealings with Teresa in the throes of her drinking and its consequences, and he was so pleased with the choices I'd made. In fact, that was how I began the phone call: "Hey, dude--I have choices."

Forgetting that I always have choices, no matter what's happening, is what made me a codependent nutcase to begin with. To quote Leary and Wilson's "Eight Basic Winner Scripts," "I make my own coincidences, synchronicities, luck, and Destiny." If I choose to.

Of course, we make choices based on instincts, and instincts grow from conditioned responses to stimuli. The beauty of a metaprogramming regimen like Al-Anon is that it allows one to re-make one's instincts, so that the same alcoholic or idiot-coworker behavior that formerly drove one to despair now provokes humor or pity or--nothing. All those little neurons, with all their little interconnections--just begging to be repatterned, re-woven, in however a web our True Will wills...is the secret of the Pagoda of the Twelve Steps.

A Little Slice of Reality

Listening to: Little Feat, Dixie Chicken
Drinking: Sumatra Gayo/Ethiopia Moka Harrar (iced)
Other browser windows: Google Image Search for "Enheduanna"; blogdex
Wearing: bathrobe
Shirking: party thrown by co-workers
Worried about: Francis Coppola flagging WiHW when and if my post on Apocalypse Now ever comes up
Hopeful about: maybe seeing my guru in December and maybe also going to New Orleans in December if it's still there
Desirous of: more time to blog, dammit! it's like I can't even think anymore--this "work" thing has got to go! but--
Guiltily proud of: being told "you'd make a good Nazi" by a co-worker when I expressed an utter lack of sympathy for another c0-worker's self-created "misfortunes"...

I'm Still Alive--but

Going back to work after that last vacation has been a "unique challenge," as upper-management types like to say.

I am writing what I flatter myself is a pretty good post-- in my head--I promise. Und I vill rezpond to grigorss...

Angel tidbit: L. finds it hilarious that I know the difference between Walter Egan and Joe Egan, two relatively minor 1970s pop music figures. Why is that funny, though??

Le Crépuscule du Soir

Ahhh--a lovely time with my family and I did not revert to australopithecine behavior, by the grace of Kali and Al-Anon.

But...my surreally extended, luxurious Vacation is coming to an end, and so I've been working on a strategic plan for some people I supervise. It's supposed to cover September through December, and though I've been attacking this thing alllllll day, I'm still only up to the middle of October. I've been listening over and over to Love's Secret Domain by Coil and, now, to Dusty in Memphis. (I think Dusty Springfield must have been an avatar of the Divine Mother.)

To buttress my Spirit during my sojourn in the Great White North, I took along a copy of Christopher Isherwood's My Guru and His Disciple. I found this book at a propitious time and in a most unlikely place, and took this as a sign that I should read it as soon as possible. Isherwood, like me, was a highly intellectualized westerner who for some reason found himself drawn to the highly devotional Bengali Shakta tradition of Ramakrishna. Also like me, he was an incorrigibly sybaritic sensualist who managed, with struggle, to reconcile the total surrender of self demanded by bhakti with the joyous embrace of the senses demanded by--well, people who go around alluding to Baudelaire in subject lines while listening to Dusty Springfield and sipping a scotch and soda.

Isherwood's style, both in My Guru and His Disciple and in Ramakrishna and His Disciples, is distinguished primarily by the utter absence of bullshit. The guy knows what nouns, verbs, and narratives are for and, whenever possible, avoids adjectives and editorials. I found many sentences and paragraphs I wanted to remember from My Guru and His Disciple, and so as I read I copied a lot of stuff into my journal. I'm tempted to reproduce a lot of that stuff here but will try to keep it down to a few well-chosen quotes.

Here are a couple:

"'The Swami is too Indian for me' was a complaint I would return to again and again. But, even while persisting in my prejudice, I had to admit to myself that the very Indianness of Vedanta was helpful to me. Because of my other, anti-christian, set of prejudices, I was repelled by the English religious words I had been taught in childhood and was grateful to Vedanta for speaking Sanskrit. I needed a brand-new vocabulary and here it was, with a set of philosophical terms which were exact in meaning, unemotive, untainted by disgusting old associations with clergymen's sermons, schoolmasters' pep talks, politicians' patriotic speeches."

[Praying at a shrine to Vivekananda, Ramakrishna's disciple who brought Vedanta to the West:]
"Give me devotion--even against my will."

Not to Sound All Barbed-Wire Hedgehog, But--

The unspeakable, unbearable horror: of the infinite pain and cruelty of this world, and the cold, indifferent dark void in which this jewel of misery is set...

I used to think a lot about this...obsess over it, really. Every second births a new atrocity, a thousand of them somewhere...every hour begets incalculable heartbreak, and our little islands of contentment sit so precarious, so open to that next torrential disaster that must loom, ravening, over the horizon.

Yeeeeah. A pretty picture I made in my head of "reality," and since , as we all know, believing is seeing, external events usually tended to confirm it. In this state of mind, anything seems like a disaster, so confident is one in one's final, irrevocable doom.

My Divine Mother was always sending me little messages to the contrary. She sent me Of Ruine or Some Blazing Starre, a song cycle by Current 93 about this very topic. She sent me Leaves of Grass, and Mary Daly, and my wild, witchy womyn friends who all ironically looked so normal they could crash a GOP bake sale, and a wacky transsexual pal who'd been dealt every shitty card in the pack three times and still was chipper as a baton twirling champ...slowly, I began to choose another way of seeing the world.

Where was I going with this? There was a punchline--oh, screw it. I'm off to my World Cup Al-Anon Challenge: a few days with my mom and brother. I may or may not blog from the Great White North...