if you are seeking

It is midnight in the parable; it is also midnight in our world, and the darkness is so deep that we can hardly see which way to turn. – MLKing Jr, A Knock at Midnight.

“Life is very precious, even right now.”— Werner Schroeter

The universal human tendency, he (Chogyam Trungpa) shows, is to see spirituality as a process of self-improvement - the impulse to develop and refine the ego when the ego is, by nature, essentially empty. “The problem is that ego can convert anything to it’s own use”, he said, “even spirituality.”

First line of “the leopard”: Nunc et in hora mortis nostrae. Not the First line of “the leopard”: Noli me tangere.

Introduction: The song of songs, which is Solomon’s.

I thought I was going to die in the winter of that year. For weeks I experienced terrible fevers. There was the physical strain of fighting off sleep or trying to function as I guess what anybody is really—a little dopey, well-meaning, worn out after just so many years alive, eager, still, confused, a very good-looking girl or boy aware of that or not, annoying and delighting friends and lovers, infinitely accepting until we weren't, greeting everyone as if nothing out of the ordinary was happening in the depth of our souls; here we all were at the very end after thousands of years of masks being human and ridiculous and graceful and increasingly and desperately unconscious and stupid amidst a waking and fractured dislocation that we hoped had nothing to do with us. Waking every day into crippling anxiety; we refused to believe. Exhausted and swinging between glory and deepest dread we denied the signs and kept singing.

The visions were lucid and capable of knocking me the fuck out for weeks, horrified and lonely and sorry for myself that I wasn’t getting it, or immediately comprehending and incapable of moving on a dire, frightening message that was very clear and coming through; I did not know what to do with the waking visions and I was frightened. I have always had visions, it’s not something awesome or particularly mentionable, except these were different: they weren’t coming from me. Ragged, frustrated, finished, suffering and enraged; the earth was rising up, erupting in fury and coming apart and she was hunting the virus that afflicted her.

The logic of the destruction was right in front of me, it made horrific, inexorable sense and it’s not dream logic and that was what made me want to die right there. These were not visions as I knew them and experienced all my life; sustaining and somehow blessedly other. These were experienced and unavoidable in a new, murderous reality; inhuman and sentient. Animal. Other. They were increasingly disastrous geo-political scenarios we read in the newspapers or skimmed over on the internet and sighed heavily and flipped out about; all worked up at the disgusting, irrelevant fucks who chucked medical waste out into the ocean somewhere, elsewhere, up the coast and now it was floating by us on our little raft on Fire Island, maybe the starfish came out earlier than usual and died just as suddenly. Maybe the sandpipers didn’t show up one year. Maybe dogs were roaming out into the ocean farther then they'd ever gone and never came back.

It would be all interconnected with global warming with water being central which would cascade into some other not currently thought about crisis, for example. If there is dramatic water shortage or excessive, whatever catastrophic disruption, then there would also be a dramatic disruption to ecosystems. And people would be forced to deal with, say, animals in a way they hadn’t previously.

The day I got my head out of my ass and realized this I made a weird frantic call to a friend pretty much just relieved that I wasn’t falling apart like I thought I was. The medication is out of my system, I said. She and I just ended up talking about this scenario. She was saying that weekend she had told her Environmental Protection Agency team members sitting with her in the van on the way to an off site about not being able to run on trails in southern California because the mountain lions are attacking people. Shortage of water, lack of food, she said. They adapt and come down to find food and water where the people are, that was the year the animals started showing up in Battery Park and along Riverside Park. That is not a power or fucking totem animal you just ran into mr crystal vision, that is an actual bear or wolf and you will be mauled and eaten. They are not fucking around. I’m sure someone could have made it all nice and poetic. I don’t know.

Also, the last time I had got personally involved with Imparting A Message Of Dire Importance I’d made a total ass out of myself. My grandmother had called in the middle of the night, concerned, after consulting Gordon Scallion’s EarthChanges™ web site, and instructed me to warn my little brother that there would be a tsunami hitting Los Angeles in the next few days coming from I think Hawaii, which had had a two week run of gorgeous weather if I had bothered to look it up. I didn’t stop to think why Grandma didn’t make the call herself, since she had his number, and marched right into a divine messenger complex or whatever and happily intoned into the phone that he should get the fuck out of dodge toot suite.

On October 15, 2011 the water summits failed to address the Arctic Ocean ice sheet and the fresh water supply to the world from its root regulator. You cannot separate water from the environment anymore than you can separate the blood from the human body. The friendly smiling ministers failed to understand, or perhaps failed to tell us, that the water wars have already started and ended in the southwest, they had been going on in Gaza for decades. Or put more simply and honestly, we didn’t care. Just look at Africa or Asia and see the map lines now. There is no aboriginal lands left in the United States, they are dry, dead and gone. And we are dying. Better yet just go there, back into the black void of the states, and have water summits where there is no clean water to drink, no rain, no communities, no people, no life. Gone. Then you and they might understand the reality of the situation. There is no word for relocation in the Navajo language. To be relocated is to disappear and never to be seen again. (Pauline Whitesinger)

AT 608 PM CDT…NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE METEOROLOGISTS DETECTED A LINE OF SEVERE THUNDERSTORMS CAPABLE OF PRODUCING GOLF BALL SIZE HAIL…AND DESTRUCTIVE WINDS IN EXCESS OF 80 MPH. THESE STORMS WERE LOCATED ALONG A LINE EXTENDING FROM 5 MILES EAST OF OSHKOSH CO TO 4 MILES SOUTH OF NORTH PLATTE TO 21 MILES SOUTHWEST OF DEUEL…AND MOVING EAST AT 45 MPH. TORNADO COULD ACCOMPANY STORMS ALONG RESIDUAL SURFACE BOUNDARIES. EXTREMELY THREATENING CLOUD TO GROUND LIGHTNING STRIKE RECAUTIONARY/PREPAREDNESS ACTIONS… MOVE TO AN INTERIOR BATHROOM…CLOSET…OR HALLWAY ON THE LOWEST FLOOR OF YOUR BUILDING. COVER YOURSELF WITH BLANKETS…PILLOWS…OR A MATTRESS FOR PROTECTION. A SEVERE THUNDERSTORM WATCH REMAINS IN EFFECT UNTIL 1000 PM CDT

“A samå, the spiritual oratorio, is held in the memory of the one who, himself, had said: The king of pure thought Dancing, has gone To the other country. The country of the Light.” (p 57 rumi and Sufism)

Rumi had said: “if you are seeking. Seek us with joy for we live in the realm of joy.” (p 57 rumi and Sufism)

Rumi had said: “If you are searching, search with joy, for We inhabit the kingdom of joy.” (pg 33 Rumi and Sufism)

The Cosmic journey of the soul is, in fact, a spiritual itinerary, like Dante’s periplus through the different worlds… It is in the given realm of the soul that we find the heavens which Govern the skies of the world.

“What does the heart that is intoxicated with the Beloved know about the road, the day’s journey or the distance, short or long? Long and short are attributes of the body, the mental journey is of another kind. You have traveled from the seed to reason; it was not by making steps or by going from stage to stage or by going from one place or another. The mental journey is not affected by Time or Space, it is from our minds that our bodies have learned to travel” (p87 rumi and Sufism)

The soul is royal. The water wars have started. Water refugees are all over the world and it is not a simple historically or biologically accurate human migration pattern, containment breaks populations and wills in refugee camps, border towns—quarantined, avoidable only if you have the money for government or local police protection. It is not even seasonal or regulated and safety zones are contracting while sanctioned pogroms are allowed. Droughts have intensified.

so gabriel got a scanner and this is me and my brothers in 1981(?)(2?}. shriek.

this was an unexpected pleasure tonight.

Pound on the return of Ulysses to the dead:

The ocean flowing backward, came we then to the place
Aforesaid by Circe.
Here they did rites…
[...]
Dark blood flowed in the fosse,
Souls out of Erebus, cadaverous dead, of brides
Of youth and of the old who had borne much;
Soul stained with recent tears, girls tender,
Men many, mauled with bronze lance heads,
Battle spoil, bearing yet dreary arms,
These many crowded about me
[...]
and then Tiresias Theban,
Holding his golden wand, knew me and spoke first:
“A second time? why? man of ill star,
Facing the sunless dead and this joyless region?
Stand from the fosse, leave me my bloody bever
For soothsay,(another translation reads: And I will speak you true speeches”)
And I stepped back,
And he strong with the blood, said then: “Odysseus
Shalt return through spiteful Neptune, over dark seas,
Lose all companions.”

Nothing really further to it for me except that astonishing "strong with the blood"

The first time i read the Cantos was in a studio in berkeley, late autumn. and i stopped what i was drawing and read this all afternoon. that line, and the paintings a friend was doing based on the cantos, are two related, seminal memories. just a moment. when i turned the corner into her section of the room and saw the bull standing on the hill; the quality of her painting, how she painted the animal. what are you up to? i asked.

"A. A. Live man goes down into world of dead.
C. B. 'The repeat in history.'
B. C. The 'magic moment' or moment of metamorphosis, bust through from quotidian into 'divine or permanent world.' Gods, etc."


Then I went a little further back in his month (alistair's) and came on to his explanation of the underworld post, which i thought was quite lovely.

“to interpret the world’s things as if they were our dreams deprives the world of its dream, its complaint” james hillman

"I wondered around in the rain, looking at things. Exorcising ghosts, pulling up phantoms and laying them on the grass for the gulls to nosh. I sat very still at the water’s edge and enjoyed the suchness of things.

But I also made peace with images, thoughts, emotions. I realise that most of this ’spiritual’ work has been a form of psychic anorexia. Starving thoughts and emotions out in favour of pure experience. What ever that might be.

Rob Nairn said something brilliant: ‘Loneliness is isolation from Self’. Not from others or the world but from the vast continent of the Self – which is rich and deep and utterly untranslatable."

amen, brother.

oh good. thank you. perfect. tonic:

Sasha Frere-Jones on Leonard Cohen

"Cohen’s lyrics stand up in a variety of settings, and his limited vocal range tends to leave his melodies unfinished, allowing room for experimentation. On Buckley’s version of 'Hallelujah,' for instance, the verse melodies ascend, and the open-throated singing transforms the chorus into a kind of earnest incantation that the songwriter probably wouldn’t attempt himself. Cohen may sing about transcendence, but he seems never to fully endorse it."

yay. thanks to Alex Balk.

"I said I had fallen in love with the cat, and that I was afraid that by exposing him to human love I had awakened in him a love that was unnatural and perhaps too big for him."

Mary Gaitskill, Lost Cat

i made it (barely) to page 11 before oh, good god. that destroyed me. this really fucked up my day. i'm not sure. 

via choire and matthew

i think her need for an ideal (and her awareness of that need around her father; some with the cat, more real with the two kids) is really brutally sad. i think everyone experiences this, but it's been not very many people who can pin-point it like that. there's an eileen myles essay (or blog) in her new book where she talks (matter of factly, blessedly) of what one does when your dog is old and dying and can't walk outside to pee. "When I'm home I jump when I hear her unsteady legs struggling to get up. I leap ahead of her opening the door." and she comes home and wipes rosie, changes her mat and washes her, pats her ass dry. "Dog craft is as close as I get in my life to devotion. Which is made of love."

it's interesting, a part of me thinks that it's just true. yes the utter vulnerability, helplessness drives me bananas, but i love it. when you love an animal like that (and who knows how an animal thinks and feels, dogs are more readable; cats are cooler) like she says: everything else enters through that love... also the family myth of her father... even the insinuating lullaby and cunning myth that people can "break", at the end. there's so many good parts in this.
this is great:

"If someone had told me to smear shit on myself and roll in the yard, if that person was a cat expert and made a convincing case that, yes, doing so could result in the return of my cat, I probably would’ve done it. I did not consider this pathetic susceptibility ‘magical thinking’. I didn’t consider it very different from any other kind of thinking. It was more that the known, visible order of things had become unacceptable to me – senseless, actually – because it was too violently at odds with the needs of my disordered mind. Other kinds of order began to become visible to me, to bleed through and knit together the broken order of what had previously been known. I still don’t know if this cobbled reality was completely illusory, an act of desperate will – or if it was an inept and partial interpretation of something real, something bigger than what I could readily see. In this way my connective symbols – the marble, the things different psychics said to me – were similar to religious statues and icons that people pray to, or parade through the street with, or wear around their necks. Except that the statues and icons are also artful creations, sometimes beautiful ones. My symbols were not beautiful, they were stupid and trite. They were related to the symbols of religion as a deformed and retarded child might be the distant cousin of a beautiful prince. But they were related nonetheless."

i'm not sure why, but that sweetness, the eager, trusting, almost unbearable masochism (haha choire: "OH MAN.I sort of love her helpless shtick? Which is also alternately TOTALLY annoying."), really broke my heart. for mary g, for any one who loves like that sometimes, for myself, for things and people and loves i don't understand, for other people's needs and loves and of course, my own. i just feel so sad and haven't been able to do much of anything today. and i just want this goddamn little cat to come home. because she's right; loving the ideal, using the language to push away the real, needing it, why the fuck not? go team. the terror of this world. "here was a little bed in Gattino’s cage and he hid behind it, then defiantly lifted his head to face the gigantic growling; that is when I first saw that terrified but ready expression, that willingness to meet whatever was coming, regardless of its size or its mercilessness."

and how is this not true? for any of us? the terror of this world are the facts of it, not the religion of it; the fact of loving. of reassurance. of failing. of loving. of losing what is a tenuous grip on reality to begin with. what do you choose? be brave. keep asking and keep giving. keep sending. I honestly hated this whole thing for a good two hours today. fuck her for throwing me into a whirlwind. There's no cool, clear intelligence of translation here. Nothing to contest for me. "I know how foolish this sounds. I know how foolish it is. But I needed to reach for something with a loving touch. I needed to reach even if nothing was physically there within my grasp. I needed to reach even if I touched darkness and sorrow. And so I did it. I asked Peter to do it too. We would go to churches and kneel on pews and pray for Gattino. We were not alone; the pews were always full of people, old, young, rich and poor, of every nationality, all of them reaching, even if nothing was physically there. ‘Please comfort him, please help him,’ I asked. ‘He’s just a little thing.’ Because that was what touched me: not the big idea of tragedy, but the smallness and tenderness of this bright, lively creature. From Santa Annunziata, Santa Croce and Santa Maria Novella, we sent messages to and for our cat.

yes, yes and yes. and then i thought, my god. i have been crying all day? i want gattino to be found? i'm not a cat? it's just heartbreaking and beautiful, that's all. i know i love like this. i hope i am loved. cheers.

***

"when you are feeling sad, a perfectly ripe fig helps a lot, i just discovered."

xo