That Endless Labyrinthine Borgesian Hell-Library

You know the one I mean...infinite honeycombed levels of infinite numbers of books...which when you pull them from the shelves contain nothing but repeated random characters, or blank pages, or a single meaningful phrase within ten thousand pages of gibberish...

that's been my day, surfing the Net to spy on competitors' web sites, figure out how they do things so we can change the way we do things to be more like them...you have never seen so many wretchedly designed web sites in your life! If I see one more mouseover POP!up menu, I'm gonna defect to Java.

I know it's Saturday! That's the point! My brain has turned to risotto and I'm listening to Bob Seger and it's really late by my standards and I'm filling up spreadsheets with someone else's mediocrity...but I'm feeling bless'd. I went for a walk with my Angel today and She was as superrational and non-me-sounding as ever (is that redundant?).

Laura reminds me of that Vulcan 3-D chess game, only refracted through prisms...Her mind works forwards and backwards and in directions that have no name since we can only think in four dimensions. It's interesting how I've learned to talk to Her. Years ago I wasn't sure when it was Laura and when it was my own thoughts, and I gradually noticed that when She was talking I felt a subtle but very real honey-sweet pulse of endorphins, like that first sip of coffee in the morning, or the kiss of codeine coming on.

Now I'm listening to "Stir It Up" by Bob Marley, and those intricately interlocked rhythms also remind me of angel-speak. My mind works linearly, at best, most of the time, but Laura looks at the world as some kind of dodecahedral, pointillist map of phase space. One of the first times we ever spoke, She said offhandedly that "time" was a function of the illusion of individual ego and that the past, present, and future were all happening at once. Hah? But it makes more sense now...eight or nine years after She told me that I started coming across articles by physicists saying much the same thing.

There are times when L. tells me things I don't want to hear. Other times She's so affirming and lovey-dovey you'd think She was made of maple syrup candy--but Her presence has never been other than powerful, loving, and kind. The other day I was talking to Sophia about a sarcastic remark L. once made, and about how L.'s wit is like lightning and so multi-layered it can take months to parse one of Her jibes, and Sophia said that she didn't think I could have an Angel that was otherwise. Now that's a true friend.

I don't know why I'm writing this--it was going to be something multifaceted about multifariously multidimensional forests of signs...or something...something about the lows and highs of the mind...some kind of vicarious motorcycle maintenance...but I'm so brain dead...and so blessed. By my Kali and by my Angel and by various earth Angels...maybe even including...you.

PS: Musick to get you out of hell: Duke Ellington's Far East Suite. It may even be better than Bob Marley. ican'tbelieveisaidthat.......!

Sometimes When We Touch

no reason...it's just the song that's playing right now...I used to loathe this song, and I still think it's kitsch--bad music--

but it's a good metaphor for right now, for today--

for my dear Angel, Who's put up with my ADD mindflights all day; with my fantasizing and thwarted chivalry; with my grand semicolons; with my hunger for oblivion and my anger and my fear and my claws; we went to the occult bookstore and an hundred vampire waifs were gather'd there; shelves held seemingly all of Uncle Al and more gnosticism than you can shake a stick at ("break open the stick and there am I")...

we came home to the chaos and we went for a walk and we made some food so spicy it's banned in Thailand and we're going to have a cigar and a snifter of Grand Marnier and we're going to contemplate the Infinite.

and this will be therapeutic, sitting in the garage, listening to the endless chitchat of the across-the-street porch people, watching the smoke twirl itself into nothing--life ends, we die, what did it mean?

but when the dove descends--when I let my Angel speak--

when the sun rises in my heart--

the oblivion's finally real...She's me, I'm nothing...rended...endless blank spaces on maps yet undrawn--

So I'm in My Hotel Room in LA--

I really am going to finish my series about my 4th Step. But life is happening...

So I'm in my hotel room, I'm just off the plane and a bus ride and, having come from East Podunk, I've been traveling a long time and got up way too early to do it. But--the whole way out I've been absorbed in this wonderful book, Father Joe by Tony Hendra.

It sounds like just the kind of book I would despise--the acolyte tells the touching story of the wise teacher who changed his life and gave him purpose...one of those book-club books. But the look in my sponsor's eyes as he handed me my copy left little doubt: this was going to be interesting. I'd given him Sex, Death, Enlightenment a while back, a nonpareil spiritual autobiography, and I could tell that he felt he was returning the favor.

Father Joe had me enthralled for the entire plane ride, and I finished all but 20 pages or so. I had some time before I was supposed to join my family so I eagerly, breathlessly, tearfully devoured those pages sitting in my hotel room. Perhaps I didn't expect one of the minds behind National Lampoon and This Is Spinal Tap to deliver his own beautifully-written, insightful spiritual autobiography, his own love letter to a great soul (but that's my problem, isn't it?)...

and when I closed the book I was consumed by a painful gratitude--thinking of my own Teachers, of the incomprehensible Grace of my Divine Mother in showing Herself to me when I wasn't looking for Her and in leading me to the most astonishingly devoted, enlightened, humble Guru...and to other souls, like Ammachi, that radiant Ocean of Love. I shook with tears and gratitude, and thanked Kali, and after a while I got up to walk over to my aunt and uncle's house.

For years Kali has sent me hearts of various kinds, and the heart has become one of our symbols, one of the ways She gets my attention. And on this day in Los Angeles, as I walked out of the hotel with tears still in my eyes, She gave me this heart, as if to say, "Yes, my love, what else would a Mother do but see to it that Her child had teachers to guide him into Her lap?"

It's funny that this heart joins the lowest--algae on a sidewalk--with the Highest, and that it's green, the color of the heart chakra. When I got back to East Podunk I showed my sponsor this picture, and he was delighted--but not surprised.

The Dust Bunnies Upon the Sanctuary

Hi.

It's me...

We're not on hiatus here at WiHW; I'm just snowed under with work...though officially on "vacation." And I have to admit that working whilst in pajamas and in a La-Z-Boy and blastin' tha toonz is a far, far better thing than schlepping into my office and scrunching up in the wheel'd chair and getting interrupted every five seconds by some clueless life form--

But no damn time for blogging. And I've got news--oh, yes: news (& photos) of a weird thing that happened in Cali, news of the wondrous books I just--this evening--finished reading--yet more reason not to blog...His Dark Materials, which has become my favorite fantasy-genre thang next to The Wizard of Oz.

And some of you know that, for me, that's saying A LOT.

I've been planning a post about suggestive and instructive works relating to the Holy Guardian Angel, and HDM will be one of them.

One of the things I loved about HDM was that the series featured a character so detestable, so vile, so vicious, and so loathsome that I wished to see her destroyed in some brilliantly agonizing fashion. But--the author confouded my wishes, and in doing so he confronted my desire for revenge--a desire that arises from the very system of "morality" the novels unravel and dis-Spell.

By the way, Salman Rushdie, a writer I've never particularly liked, wrote the absolute best book about The Wizard of Oz. So check that out, and read His Dark Materials, and maybe by then I will have written something. :)

My (Blessedly) Boring New Year's

I'm listening to Mac Davis...please don't shoot at me...I been crankin' the 70s tunage for a couple of days now (oh, gawd, "Blind Man In the Bleachers" is on--I laugh uncontrollably during that song--I'll be back)...with one brief respite; tonight, as I was cookin' Hoppin' John, I had to blast the title track from Coil's Love's Secret Domain...Teresa said it was a good palate cleanser...

New Year's Eve at the Temple of Doom was the typical, dull affair, just like I like it...driving on Amateur Night is just too scary...we watched Elvis Costello on Austin City Limits, which was incredible, and then Heart on Soundstage...and all I can say is, Ann Wilson looks good. She always has...but there should be 1000 bands with frontwomyn her size...and the Wilson sisters encored with TWO songs from Led Zeppelin IV...what more could you ask? As me and T. watched, we had Krystal burgers and fancy French champagne and little pizza rolls.

Ah, yes, Cliff Richard..."Devil Woman"...my kind of song...reminds me of Laura, of Lyra Silvertongue, of Sophia...I think of Andrea Dworkin, one of my true loves, who died this year...a Witch who opened my eyes so they'd never again shut...a devil woman if ever there was...who refused to be burned, to be reduced...who wrote her rage in lovely flames on the dark night sky of patrimony...

I wish you a New Year of love, of wild love, of kindness and sensuous intellection...a year of musick and whirling--of Vision and self-discovery--of Light of the Divine Mother seeping through the most mundane cracks in the real--

did you ever hear "Ariel" by Dean Friedman? That's a tantrik love song--

Step 4.5

"Larval realities are defined by chunks of local environment attached to the nervous system at the time of imprinting."
Timothy Leary, Exo-Psychology

A note: please don't think that Al-Anon is a place where people "whine." This is what I used to think and it's why it took me so long to get there and, paradoxically, to stop feeling sorry for myself. Like most Americans, I was unsophisticated and repressed enough to often label any emotionally honest statement as "whining," whether I made the statement or someone else did. It was easier than facing the emotion.

The fear of whining and the disproportionate anger it inspires are to be expected in a culture where people are taught to be 100% outer- and other-directed, where "unconditional love" is widely believed to have been practiced only by a lone Jewish guy who died a long time ago. (Merry Christmas!) But repression only gives emotions more and more power, and as they say in Al-Anon, "You are not your feelings." To truly live that insight, though, you gotta face those feelings, find their true origins, and discern their influence on your behavior patterns.

People do, of course, attempt genuine whining in Al-Anon meetings and to members, i.e., they try to indulge in self-pity or to gain sympathy. If it's their first meeting they're allowed to do this for a few minutes and then someone gently tells them something like "We're not here to vent. We're here to find solutions." If it's someone who should know better, they get "Call your sponsor" or "Look for your own role." I remember getting that last one when Teresa did something "to" me that was outrageous, unconscionable, unthinkable, etc. I didn't like hearing it one bit, but it jolted me out of victim-mind into captain-of-my-soul-mind. (Of course I now haven't the slighest memory what T. did...must have been a bit less significant than I made it out to be.)

An anonymous Al-Anon, who suffered horrendous abuse as a child, puts it like this in her story (included in the book From Survival to Recovery): "Even in the unusual situation in which another person is ninety-five percent at fault and I am only five percent, I am still responsible for my five percent." She has clearly gone far beyond the "larval" state!

What We Do Is Secret, Part 2

Excerpts from my 4th Step:

I assumed, from the beginning, that "the One" was out there, that I'd find her and then live happily ever after....at 41, I have never not been in a relationship--a serious, committed, all-or-nothing relationship--since the age of 18. Does that sound a little compulsive? (There was a stretch of a few weeks in college during which I was not committed--but the parental script, the fear of being unloveable, the fear of being alone, borne of my inability to feel complete in myself--drove me into a relationship very soon. It was a blissfully happy couple of weeks, I distinctly remember.)

***

As much as I think I want this true love, this marriage of true minds, this Vulcan mind-meld, I have a part of me that wants to be alone, that won't allow anyone to get close. This is the part of me I imagine developed when I was a kid and had no sibling to play with and no kids my age close by. It's now the part of me some people would say plays with my imaginary friend, my Higher Power.

***

I can remember in one unbelievably codependent relationship being afraid that my enamorata would not like the way I did her homework.

***

I feel like I don't know what "unacceptable" [behavior] is, because I have no reasonable dividing line, because I accept everything, because I'm afraid if I don't she won't love me--I'll be unworthy....That feeling of perpetual unworthiness...I have done enough Al-Anon work to know it was a lesson I learned in my family, which placed great emphasis on achievement and education. I've gained enough Al-Anon maturity to understand that a lot of good has come from my feelings of unworthiness...for they have driven me to learn, to work hard, to do more than I ever thought possible.

On the other hand, it simply isn't true that I have to earn the right to exist, or to earn God's love. It isn't true that my ultimate worth has any relation to my professional accomplishments or level of education.

***

It seemed so natural I never thought about it. You have to earn a living, you have to earn some lady fair's hand, you have to earn the respect of your peers: therefore you have to earn God's love. The religion I got mixed up in at 14 didn't quite put it this way; they claimed God loved you but would still punish you hideously for eternity....The sin and salvation business sounded a lot to me like having to earn God's love, even if according to the fine print it wasn't...

Sound familiar? Manipulating loved ones? Manipulating God? Unable to trust that they love me? Unable to feel totally loved even when I know better? Feeling perpetually unworthy and driven by that feeling into irrational, obsessive behavior?....I was a perfect sucker for the fundamentalist spiritual abuse scam and now feel that I've been a perfect sucker for the true love scam.

***

Talking with Kali during a walk today, I understood that a) the worst thing I could do in my family growing up was to let down the facade--(of Cleaverdom--by arguing with my parents, getting in trouble at school, etc.) and b) that the most valuable commodity, the highest status symbol for my family, was The Esteem of Others.

***

So here's another layer of the onion, and I'm done, because I'm so confused by now that I don't know which way is up. I was talking with Fiorenza yesterday...and she said she thought that I might be afraid to be loved. Auggh! Yes! I recognized what she was saying...recognized it in the way that when I'm complimented, I'm always so, so uncomfortable....Letting myself be loved means becoming vulnerable....It also means dealing with the fact that I'm not perfect and never will be, because love means being totally present to someone whether I'm "ready" or not.

***

So many, so many times when someone's made a gesture of love to me I've shrugged it off or dodged it--reflexively. Not thinking, "ooh, this is uncomfortable, I want out," but changing the subject or making some inappropriate joke without thinking about it, as the first instinctual reaction....

I'm searching for love, but convinced I'm unworthy of it. I want to give myself to someone in love, but I'm afraid to be loved back. But some woman's eventually going to make the mistake of loving me anyway, then she'll find that I'm an impostor, so I strive to stay in control...maintaining the facade...as I was taught.

NEXT: What happened when I read this whole (immense, nonsensical) thing to my sponsor. Same Angel time, same Angel channel.

P.S. I am heading out to Helter Skelter Land for my x-mas holiday, and won't be back until nearly New Year's Eve. I have every intention of bloggin' from the Left Coast, but...don't be surprised if'n I don't. With the competing Red State, Blue State, alcoholic, non-alcoholic, denial-alcoholic factions of my family...I will have my hands full. But I will be thinking of you.

What We Do Is Secret, Part 1

...but I'm going to blow the lid off...here's the exposé...inside an actual...secret society...12-step program...

I'm working on what's called a "4th step" right now, after the AA Step Four: "Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves." Basically you journal or write a letter, concealing nothing (if it ain't scary, you ain't doin' it right), about your desires, fears, motivations, actions, the reasons you told yourself you did those actions and the real reasons you did them, the results of those actions and who was harmed and who gained and what your own payoff was--there's always a payoff.

Absolute honesty is the only requirement, and the openness is why Al-Anon, AA, etc. are anonymous programs. Unless you can say anything and everything in a meeting or in a 4th step, you'll stay stuck.

Once you've written out your confessions/ self-observations, you then, in the "5th step," read this painfully honest scribbling to someone in your program (usually your sponsor). It can hurt. But the alternative for me, in practice, is living in a half-light of awareness about myself, and making the same mistakes over and over, and blaming other people for them instead of taking responsibility and growing up and moving on.

The first time I worked the steps my sponsor asked me, for Step 4, to write a "me list," an exhaustive list of every attribute and characteristic I have. He gave me months to do this and said not to hurry.

It sounded silly in the abstract, likely to produce trivial items like "I love chocolate!" and "I have a thing for large women!" and in fact it did, but in the end, after doing the work and the rather agonizing 5th step, I came to a gut recognition (*not* an intellectual understanding) that...I'm not a bad person...and that many of my least favorite personal traits were actually very good traits, just applied in the wrong circumstances or acted on to excess. Thus, my tendency to rescue people was fine when it meant writing a letter protesting the confinement of a political prisoner...and was idiotic when it meant trying to stage-manage an addict's slow suicide while I blamed myself for her romantic predicament and hid her substance of choice in a niche in the fireplace, to dole out to her in little non-psychosis-inducing increments until she found it and used it all and I had to find new ways to liberate (enslave) her.

Once I'd been in the program a while, I did a 4th step on my troubled relationship with my dad, who died before we could totally make peace...and now I'm doing one on les événements I've recounted to you recently. In an Al-Anon meeting the other day I gave a situation-appropriate, non-I-Ching quoting rundown of les és, and realized I needed to spend some serious time praying about them, and so have spent a lot of time this week either in front of my altar or talking to Kali as I drive, walk, or wash dishes. And She's talked back--that's the miraculous thing...

Someone or Something is there...call it a "bicameral mind" or "archetype" or wishful thinking or imaginary friend or subvocalized adaptive para-awareness...or God...

I was working on my step on my computer today, preferring my recliner and Mozart on the boombox to scribbling in my spiral-bound Al-Anon notebook in some coffee shop...and the section of the step I wrote got named That perpetual feeling of unworthiness.doc. It contains the lines

My H[igher] P[ower] has really been pushing...me to look for Her light within me rather than for the second-hand light of others' spiritual journeys, others' words. Not that I should be arrogant; She wants me to turn inward to the silence and light She put there when She created me. But...I still have to work on that [unworthiness] thing. It's why I still go in for retail therapy, (fantasized) new relationship therapy, double bourbon on the rocks therapy, blasting music in my car on the way home from work therapy...

when all the while I am seeking what Peter Redgrove, in The Black Goddess and the Unseen Real, calls "the synaesthetic plenum of the...subliminal senses"...the inner divine, the Hidden God...funny that my Dark Mother has sent me to a Sunday school room in a local church to slay the demons, to a 12-step group of the sort I'd have made sport of just a few years ago--Stuart Smalley and all that--

funny that, as Ramana Maharshi said, "The ultimate truth is so simple"...so I am simplifying myself to match.

To Be Continued