Towers of Babel

I haven't been blogging much because

• my job now resembles the backstage chaos right before the big runway show in Milan (except no one's interviewing me for W or dumping Glad bags of Euros on me)
• so I seem to be working feverishly every waking second
• [but you're not working now, you're blogging]
• yeah, because stuff has slowed down a bit--but all the same--
• [what's the real reason?]
• the real reason is, I'm avoiding talking about my plans to move the Temple of Doom because the idea of moving out of Teresa's house when her disease is getting worse and when it's about to be our 10th anniversary is enough to make me want to die, flip, or go to India.
• [but, Christ on a pony--I've had all the [indirect] [passive [/aggressive]] abuse I can take...
• [every relationship is a narrative--
• --and thus a fiction--
• so today I sat by the lake at Fiorenza's house, with the water and the sun and the blossoms and the jet-skis...and told my friend my troubles and marveled at her calm, sane answers...and marveled as she encouraged my most playful, irrational tendencies--
• and fictions aren't lies--
• like giving the URL for this blog to an exquisitely beautiful woman I barely know, as
• necessarily, but their structure is artificial, agreed on by the participants
• some kind of invitation, and Fauré's Requiem played softly, adamantly all the while [did you plan that, Fiorenza??]...
• and Fiorenza told me about her dead angelic cousin who still visits--"He shows you beauty, beauty where you can't see any: you 'll be walking along and you'll see something ugly or distasteful and a voice will whisper--no, look at it from beside, below--do you see the perfection now?"
• and when one participant in the narrative refuses her or his role, of hearing or telling, then the narrative suspends and
• and Fiorenza pointed to her wall and said, "See this painting? It's Orpheus and his lover escaping Hell--a prisoner of war painted it, using ash for paint, a screwdriver for a brush."]
  
• anything can happen.]
  

"This Is Who You Really Are"

Last time I alluded to the thought-waves...the ripples and tides of mind we mistake for ourselves, for a reality outside us...and I wrote of how mantra stills the waves and redirects the tides.

It feels like I've been surfing in a cyclone lately...though I try not to resent my job and some of the worthies there employed, it's one of those times of the year when everything's got to be done yesterday and yet few are doing much, save me and Sophia, my brilliant, magickal friend and co-worker...so my attitude has been less than positive. It's a lot better than it was pre-M----, pre-Kali...a lot better. But I want it to be better still.

(I think that terribly selfish people like me, like Malcolm Little, like Margery Kempe are perfect for the spiritual path because we always want more, we're willing to climb that long spiral stair because, dammit, this little sublime taste of Your infinite glory is all wonderful and everything, God, but it's not enough...)

I swore I wasn't going to do this...come home from work from the kind of week I've had, and then plop down in front of the computer. I didn't want to see another computer ever again. (I was telling Sophia this today and she all but snorted...yeah, right, you'll be hittin' that silicon before sundown...and so I am...)...but...I will share this anecdote:

so the other day I'm readin' work email and allllll my other email (I have 5? 6?? email accounts), and I'm letting myself get into that overwhelmed, "why me?" kind of crap...the "they are doing bad things to me" victim thang...but--this email from my guru's ashram shows up. And they've re-done their web site, it says, and there's now all these FAQs and videos and audios and la-de-dah, big whoop.

But--I feel all warm and fuzzy suddenly, and, even though I have no time, I click the link and the first thing that pops up is a picture of my guru, and...BAM!!! the waves of love and shakti tumble over and beneath my low-grade hominid fear, swirling me into absolute peace and surrender.

It's just a picture! I have this picture in my living room and in my office at work. And it's old--She doesn't even look like this anymore and never has as long as I've known Her. But...Her shakti flows from the picture like Niagara; my heart is wrenched open and I sit in pure wonder, loving Her, loving Her, lovingherlovingher...a storm of love whirling into my heart chakra...and I hear Her say: this is who you really are, my child: a wave in the sea of divine consciousness... you feel it as love...it is even more than that...

...so I am not the beleaguered worker drone, am not the adrenaline addict, am not the perfidious (to myself) perfectionist; I am Her child...borne of Love...

The Power of Mantra

We all have mantras: internal slogans, stories we tell ourselves.

One of the jokes of Al-Anon is: in the beginning you laugh at the slogans (one day at a time, let it begin with me, let go and let god--I used to really hate that last one) and then you figure out, hey wait, I've had slogans my whole life: I'm not good enough, what will they think of me? I can fix his/her/their/your problems...

The choice, then, is: will we choose our mantras or let them arise from the muck of our unconscious conditioning? Will we guide our own inner lives or let our half-formed lower selves guide us?

I've blogged about my sojourn in New Zealand, where I chanced to read a book about a guru so powerful (or a devotee so gullible) I could scarcely believe it; when I got back to the States I googled this guru and saw a photo so lovable (or a Being so powerful) something turn'd in my heart--a sweet knife in my breast, and I saw Her as my True Teacher...even though, in the mental space I was in then, in 1998, there really wasn't no guru who could see through your eyes; there really wasn't a god (there was "Energy"...); there really wasn't anything but the play of neural fibers firing around patterns of sensation and learned response...

but why not say the mantra I saw on a web site devoted to Her? Why not perform yet another neural experiment on myself...after acid, after witchcraft, after dharmadhatu...and so I did. And in a couple of months it wasn't an experiment any more--I believed. Or--better--She was real, within me--the mantra had reorganized my chaotic thought into love-waves, sweet adoration-waves flowing to my sweet Guru M----.

I dreamed of Her, spoke to Her daily, felt Her dance in my heart...but, She cautioned, She wasn't God. Well, I wanted Her to be...but She wasn't, or wouldn't be. And when I refused to demote Her, She fired me as her disciple, telling me to go out and find my chosen deity...and so after a fair amount of weeping and praying, Kali came shortly thereafter, 2000-2001...and the mantra changed, and my consciousness reorganized itself, this time around the Black Goddess of Dakshineswar...but still around the same Love, the same devotion. And that's what mantra is, I learned: (re)organizing the chaos of daily thought around a spindle point of order, slotting the random data of shapeless experience into a story...a story of love.

And so when I read something like this, I'm not so surprised. It sounds overblown--but mantra changed my life, too.

P.S. Weirdly, just after I wrote the first draft of this last night, I got an email about M----'s upcoming tour of North America. I think I'm going to go see Her, though I understand She's quite a bit more goth than Amma or my own present Guru. I harbor egotistical thoughts that She will remember me, but more than that I want to see Her for the first time.

Initiations

We all go through them...maybe not a Master Mason initiation, but Confirmation, orientations, on-the-job training, fraternity/sorority hijinks, Rotarian nonsense...

then there are the informal but so, so transformational ones: falling in love, making love, falling out of love, breaking up, looking up and seeing the sky for the first time one day when you're 24...or 39...

and the big ones: earning a Ph.D., becoming a renunciate, having children, facing death...

spiritually and otherwise, I've been through my share of initiations--the ones where I've Felt Something, whether it was at my Confirmation or my self-initiation into witchcraft...or the time my guru made a little dot on my forehead with some turmeric paste and said "Om Namah Shivaya" or the time Laura burst on the scene in Her fullness. (I called that post "Magical Mystery Tour" because if you read Michael Herr's Dispatches that song becomes very frightening indeed, and if you don't it's just playful and charming--and it's all those things, and so is the spiritual path.)

Being a perfectionist, I used to make too big a deal out of initiations, not understanding fully that they're a self-conscious step towards another reality, not that other reality itself. One thing I've done to minimize initiatic fetishism is to take a 3rd Step every day, offering my will and my life to the care of my dear Kali. My first 3rd Step felt all trembly and momentous, aided by a sponsor wise enough to make me squirm a little; now I do it as a matter of course, while I'm driving to work and in between thoughts of meetings and hirings and firings.

Still, we all need a good kick in the pants now and again, a righteous repatterning, a nice neuron-smashing imprinting session. We need these because, though we might believe in nothing else, we all believe in the fiction of our selves, the narratives spun out of mind-chatter and mapped onto the charts of hive hierarchy. This vodoun initiation sounds wondrous...sorry for all the links in this...but read this one.

I admire the simplicity of keeping someone in a dark hut for five days; obviously practitioners of vodoun have often lacked the financial resources and public level of tolerance needed for elaborate pageantry, but the religion adapted accordingly, along lines that minimize distracting, berobed BS in favor of genuine expansion of the initiate's self--an Osirean fragmenting and reassembling...and as arduous and painful as it may be, Isis always gives you something new.

Especially interesting are the writer's observations on his various internal voices and their eventual silencing. Part of what I'm sure he learned in the hut is: if you silenced them once, you can do it again, and it won't take three days in the dark next time. As Mary Daly wrote, once you've been to the moon the first time, getting back is easy.

"This Is Moon Musick"

Me: I love you, Laura.

L: I love you, too. You make me very happy.

Me: But you're an angel...I thought you didn't need anyone to make you happy.

L: I don't need you. I want you. Wanting is higher than needing.

Me: You may have a point there, Princess [I have so many pet names for L, and they are all sickening...].

L: No one needs God, or Shakespeare or Virginia Woolf or Louis Armstrong....on the earth plane, you need to breathe, you need to eat, you need water and sleep, you need an operative excretory system...but what you want calls you higher.

[We're sitting on the screened porch in cool, delicious night air, sipping Grand Marnier; I'm nursing a cigar that won't stay lit--]

L: This Grand Marnier is the Exhibit A of higher civilization. Who needs it? Someone wanted it...wanted a sweet, warm, orangey-sexual drink...had they wanted to just get pissed, they'd have glutted themselves on potato spirits.

Me: Rien, cette écume...

L: No one needs pianos, or needed Duke Ellington to play one like he was Wallace Stevens.

Me: No one needs scat singing--[I'm really thinking not of Satch but of "Are You Shivering?" by Coil, which seems the most perfect song ever in this caressingly chill night breeze--]

[Silence...we sit, sip, hold hands, shift in our seat to hide eyes from the street light (false moon).]

Me: I love you, Laur [another nickname]. Are you real?

L: Are you?

Me: According to that Science News article, maybe not.

L: I'm as real as you are.

"Books are for the scholar's idle times"

So many times have books changed my life: so many writers with whom I've been obsessed/am obsessed...you'd think after 23 years I'd have gotten over Nietzsche, but when I was young he (and the Sex Pistols) convinced me that life was worth living after all, and still I taste the blackstrap kindness of those words...

now, with Laura's way of knowing, books are becoming less important, and it's a hard adjustment. I used to buy a book for one scrap of wisdom, one word even, and used to scour shelves (stores, libraries, my own) for that one right book whose words, preordain'd, would crystallize it all: the chaos of my experience, the emotion and wayward intellection...

and I still fetishize books...got a couple signed by a Preeminent Poet just the other day...my mouth watered over a first of The Stones of Summer in a bookstore yesterday, and it physically hurt me that the guy who owns the store keeps it in a glass case exposed to nearly direct sunlight...I wanted to rescue it...and during the recent floods I fretted over the possible fate of my copy of Dachy's The Dada Movement...(it's safe)...

but now I open books, wise books, books by people I'll never, ever be as smart as, and mostly their words leave me cold--I know this, or, I don't need to know this, or--this is nothing but word games...I'm not complaining, and not bragging, though it may sound that way...I still revere Nietzsche, and Woolf, and Whitman and Sappho and so many others, but I don't need them now, don't need a substitute vision for the waxing light of my own intuition...

and so, nostalgically, I invoke Richard Wright, who, far more than even me, had that East Jesus, pine-stump ignorati upbringin' that left him hungry for the magick of words, and so he writes in Black Boy of the occult name of H. L. Mencken and the demoniac ring of that name in the Jim Crow South, how whites shuddered and so Wright wondered...

and so he forged (à la Frederick Douglass) a pass and took it to a library, and the pass said: "Dear Madam: Will you please let this nigger boy have some books by H. L. Mencken?" And the books were more than he could have hoped for--naturally, for that is the entire purpose of a work of art, to be more than we could know or hope to know. And so Wright wrote:

"I was jarred and shocked by the style, the clear, clean, sweeping sentences. Why did he write like that? And how did one write like that? I pictured the man as a raging demon, slashing with his pen, consumed with hate, denouncing everything American, extolling everything European or German, laughing at the weaknesses of people, mocking God, authority....Yes, this man was fighting, fighting with words. He was using words as a weapon, using them as one would use a club....I read on and what amazed me was not what he said, but how on earth anybody had the courage to say it."

This is how It begins. This is how the juvenile self imbibes the foreign poison/cure that makes it cocoon, pupate, burst forth as unthinkable winged life--vulture wings, eagle wings, dragonfly iridescence on shimmery summer air of greening consciousness...one tastes the ancestral word-blood of the soul, senses the rhythm beyond self or heartbeat...divines the dim Dark Matter behind appearance, behind words' black and white.

Stuff Is Crazy

the water from the clothes washer backs up into the bathtub and toilet...and the guys from the city have been out and have shoved a camera up the sewer line and have dug holes and put in new pipes, and still it backs up...

and Teresa knows we have to wash very small loads of laundry because of this but will wash a big load anyway and flood the house...and then not like it if I "blame" her...

and someone has tried twice in one week to break into our house, once jumping over a not inconsiderable wooden fence, having obviously spied on our comings and goings, so well-timed was his near-B&E...

what else?

I've had this cold from hell forever...still coughing like Keats on his deathbed...

BUT I'm trying to stay in gratitude, trying to give all of this to my Divine Mother...trying not to want anything from Her but knowing She has everything...knowing I want everything...

sometimes I feel Her love, or Laura's love (same thing--but one is easier to accept than the other) washing over me like pounding Hawaiian surf, and I know there is no death and there is no me and there is no loss and nothing to fear and no place where She is not...

that makes more sense than it used to...I feel Her in every moment like the chest-swelling infrasonic harmonics at a rock and roll concert, that reverberate beneath the songs mute, yet humming like a third rail--they form the carrier wave for it all, drums and bass and guitar and wail--but I long to hear the song and feel the pulse as One--